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“Have you ever heard a mockingbird's call?”
Our story begins at the edge of a lake, where the hard stone of mountains clashes with unrelenting forest.
As the day wanes, white, grey, and black wings fly over a lake far below, and birds sing for the first time in a year. A boy smiles sadly, and his other half grins in anticipation.
Harmony’s wings flutter nervously and ever so slightly over the dewy grass of the clear morning. During his first time flying over the sea, he’d had an excuse to be wary of the different breezes and the way they shaped his flight, but it was at least his 5th time taking this test, and it’d been a year since he’d taken it the first time. His mother smooths his feathers and pats him on the head with her hand reassuringly, just failing to hide a touch of exasperation among her actions.
On Harmony’s right is his childhood friend, Pandora, a boy with grey plumage, a twinkle in his eye, and the unbridled optimism that only youth can give. Harmony reaches out a wing slowly and gave him a tap on his shining feathers just for reassurance before he tried to fly again. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, pushes his wings up and down again, and feels his feet leave the ground.
However, he can’t keep control for long, and he feels his wings flap too fast to keep control.
His wings move clumsily against the wind, and it seems like he is falling through his own body for a split second as he starts descending alarmingly fast. He takes another breath, and another, trying to calm down while his body tries to flap its wings faster and faster. He panics for a moment too long as he reaches the point of no return, and plummets closer and closer towards the ground as he finally clears the water into a grove of trees on an island. Pandora disappears from his view, and he feels impact everywhere as soil and rock alike dig forcefully into the bones above his primary and secondary feathers. It twists out of his control, and then he forgets his wings- he’s managed to land in a cave- and more rocks poke into his spine and shoulders.
The world turns cloudy, and the strong, cloudless blue of the sky above turns to a meager aquamarine as he tries to get up and collapses back onto the very solid rock floor.
He tries to call Pandora for help and comfort, but his voice fails, and the only thing that came out is a whispery groan that saps the last of his energy: his eyes can’t open anymore, it seems, and the world fades to a colour that he can’t see anymore.
As he wakes up, he can feel a cushiony warmth against his spine, and his eyes open to Pandora’s worried face looming over his. Harmony’s face heats up, never having had him so close to his face before, and the only thing in his mind is that he’s been found. He wasn’t alone, thank the gods, and of all the birds he could be nested with, it was with the one that cared for him truly.
“Darling, you’re finally awake!”
The bottled up Pandora that he knew had been put away for later, and Harmony can only remember a few times they’d been able to truly be themselves with each other. Beaming, Pandora hugged Harmony with a force neither of them knew to be possible.
“OH GOD, MY WINGS!”
Harmony screams in amused panic, genuine pain bubbling up. Smile fading, Pandora lifted himself up quickly and holds two hands up in a show of pacifism.
“Sorry, sorry,” Pandora exclaims- just before lowering himself grandly for another, slower, hug and then a light peck on the cheek.
Harmony doesn’t want to tell Pandora that he should probably go and get someone to help him. Despite his injuries, time spent with Pandora was precious to him, and he couldn’t bring himself to end it.
Within a day of landing, Pandora had managed to get a fire lit within the cave for warmth and cooked a delicious dinner of rabbit and hare. It’s juicy and tender, and the meat melts on his tongue. Harmony’s stomach fills up quickly, and once he’s finished cleaning himself with a leaf, he crawled- with attention to his injuries, of course- to Pandora, and let himself be wrapped in a wreath of warm feathers.
As the birds call across the night sky, and the stars revealed themselves in an intricate maze, Harmony closed his eyes, feeling the pain of his bodily injuries fade away, being replaced by another, stronger emotion: Love.