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Ezra sat alone, looking out at the stars. His back still stung where he’d been attacked, but it was nothing compared to the emptiness of the sky without his family. He still had Admire, and he clung to that fact. His wings sat still against his back, the right side still feeling foreign and missing. He tried to stretch them, but he immediately stopped as he realized it only made the absence of the familiar weight tenfold worse.
He wanted nothing more than to sob and wail and cry, but that would do no good. If anything, it’d make Admire think he couldn’t handle himself. He, instead, resorted to literally staring off into space. He kept having the same memory over and over again, but it wasn’t his own.
He was young, only a kid, in a body that wasn’t the one that belonged to him. He had an older brother. Ezra didn’t know his name, but he knew that he meant a lot to him. He didn’t know exactly what he said to him, just that the words were warm, soft, and full of hope. His brother kneeled down and ruffled his hair. As his brother stood to leave, he scoffed without annoyance as he raised a hand to fix it. It all seemed so trivial, how he felt the need to fix something so miniscule as his hair when something he could never fix was about to happen.
Ezra could only guess where his brother had left to go. Maybe to work, or to get groceries, he didn’t know. But he knew that an hour later police came to his house, and told him his brother was gone.
The memory reinforced the idea that he could never let anything happen to Admire. Admire was all he had, even if he wasn’t all Admire had. Admire had the whole world. Ezra only had some of her. He lifted his bare wing so he could see it. Barren. Empty. Dead. Useless . He would never fly again, he would never be one with the stars. For all he cared, he was no better than those disgusting, vile animals who ruled the earth. Ezra had been a child of the stars, but now all that was left was a walking, nameless grave. A shell of what he used to be.
But it was okay, or at least it would be. He hated what had been made of him, but it wasn’t Admire who’d gone through it; he could live with that.