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The rain always makes Goro’s wing-spots ache.
“Lousy weather.” The barkeep of Tavern Leblanc nods toward the door as Goro closes it behind him. “Can I get you something to warm you up?”
“Coffee. Any blend so long as it’s strong.” The words are forced, ground out in pain; Goro softens his tone. “Please.”
When the barkeep ducks down to retrieve a jar of beans, Goro discreetly rubs his shoulder. Pain trickles like poison from the severed bone-ends pressing into flesh.
So he settles his eyes and his anger on the barkeep: bespectacled, messy-haired, deceptively nondescript. Goro watches as he grinds the beans. His are nimble hands, fleeting of touch yet almost impossibly dexterous.
A thief’s hands, perhaps.
Goro takes a seat at the bar, clasping his hands in his lap so that they don’t wander to his back. Like the barkeep, Leblanc looks unimpressive, patchwork in a way that might be charming if Goro cared for such aesthetics. Its walls are asymmetric and asynchronous, the aged amber of maple stark where it seams against the ashy brown of new oak. There’s a leak pooling into a bucket on a booth’s tabletop. A radio spits static at the end of the bar.
“House blend.”
The barkeep sets a steaming mug on the counter. His eyes are sharp behind his glasses as he watches Goro take his first sip.
“It’s delicious,” Goro says. Somehow, it isn’t a lie. “May I know my barista’s name?”
The barkeep’s eyes crinkle as he smiles. “Ren. Glad you like it.”
Ren. Goro turns the name over in his mouth along with the coffee, savoring both. The bitterness of hatred only enhances the flavor. His back twinges, and he grits his teeth.
“Too strong?” There’s a smile in Ren’s voice, too. Goro swallows back the urge to snap back.
“Not at all.” There’s no bitterness that’s too strong for him. If Ren truly is the phantom thief Joker, he’ll learn that himself soon enough.
Goro finishes his coffee in silence. Ren fiddles with the dial on the radio until the signal comes back.
“This Sunday marks eight months since King Shido publicly disowned and dewinged his only son, Prince Goro, for the charge of aiding and abetting a criminal,” rumbles a man’s voice through shocks of static. “In response, King Shido has continued to enact increasingly hardline policies throughout the kingdom.”
Goro turns to the radio.
“It’s getting dangerous out there,” Ren comments, leaning over the counter. “Be careful on your way home.”
———
Even though there’s a storm outside, even though he’s alone on the inn’s second floor where no one can see him, Goro crawls to the windows and draws the curtains. Sweat crests his brow as he holds them shut between tightened, trembling fingers.
Eight months. Eight months since he was mutilated. He hates the reminder of it. He yanks on the curtains, arcing his back as pain burns down his shoulder blades, lips parted in a silent cry.
It’s Joker’s fault.
He loses track of time sitting there trembling on his knees. The room is almost barren, and there’s no furniture within reach that he can use to pull himself up. Eventually, he crawls to the standing mirror by the unmade bed. His face in its reflection is ashen. He struggles out of his tunic and angles his back toward the glass. His bandages are soaked with blood again.
Why won’t they heal?
He leans to the side just in time and vomits onto the floor.
———
It’s the afternoon lull when Goro returns to Leblanc. Ren isn’t even at the bar; Goro finds him with a mess of mechanical parts spread across the table of one of the booths. He isn’t wearing his glasses.
“Just a minute,” he calls over his shoulder, picking up a circuit board with his gloved fingers and scrutinizing it.
Goro feels his heart in his throat, a sickening sensation. “That’s quite the hobby,” he says, managing a veneer of courtesy.
He had long wondered why the jewels and precious metals from the automatons and mechanisms stolen from aristocrats never turned up on the black market. After narrowing down suspects to the young barkeep at Leblanc and learning of his true trade as a mechanist, the pieces came together; the jewels were of no use and too hot to fence, and the metals served a much more practical purpose.
Ren turns around, and there’s a trace of mischief in his smile. “Oh, it’s you. I never caught your name.”
“Crow,” Goro says a little too forcefully. “May I ask what you’re working on?”
He doesn’t particularly care and only half pays attention as Ren attempts to explain his device in layman’s terms. Beneath all his layers of shirt and coat and apron and capelet, there’s no way to tell if he’s concealing wings. Instead, Goro finds himself gazing at the muscles in Ren’s forearms, watching them expand and contract as he works. There’s something beautiful in the simplicity of it.
“Crow?”
Goro catches himself too late. “Yes?”
Ren laughs, sending shivers up Goro’s spine. “Come on. Let me show you my workshop in the attic.”
———
Goro dreams of the past.
It was under the cover of night when they met. Goro was in his nightgown in the palace gardens, a familiar haunt while in the throes of insomnia.
The thief with the dagger and the beautiful, bleeding bat wings could have killed him. Better yet, a prince’s ransom would feed him far more than the meager gathering of stolen fruits in his arms. But when they crossed paths in the midst of the thief’s botched escape, he stood frozen. Beneath the moonless sky, neither saw the other’s face, but the finery of Goro’s raiment could not have gone unnoticed.
“That way,” he had said, pointing. “There’s a blind spot where the guards don’t patrol.”
It was all he could do. Everyone needs to eat.
Somehow, the guards caught wind of Goro’s complicity in the thief’s escape. They informed Father. Then, in a spectacle not unlike a public execution, Father tore his wings out.
Goro wakes in a sheen of sweat, wing-spots blazing. Moonlight fractures into shards through the inn’s dirty window.
He hates Father. And he hates Joker, too—hate, hate, hate, hate.
———
It’s raining again.
Goro sits at Leblanc’s bar. He shouldn’t be here. He isn’t in the mood to look for evidence. He just wanted coffee.
Ren sets one on the counter before him alongside a steaming bowl of curry. Goro looks up.
“I didn’t order this.”
“On the house,” Ren says, and then, with a slight frown: “You look ragged. Have you eaten lately?”
“No,” Goro admits. “But I can pay.”
Ren waves him off. “You look hungry. It’s only natural that people would want to feed you.”
Goro feels his burdened heart flutter.
He hasn’t had much of an appetite lately, but he digs into the curry with gusto. It’s delicious. Of course it is.
Ren chuckles. “Slow down. It’s not going to run away.”
Then he bends forward over the bar and swipes his thumb along the corner of Goro’s mouth. “See the mess you’re making?”
Goro’s cheeks burn. He thinks it’s in humiliation, but the usual fury and resentment that accompany that emotion don’t manifest. Instead, his heart flutters fiercer than before, thin but resilient as dragonfly wings.
———
Goro knows he’s gotten too close when he finds himself folding up against Ren’s body in the quiet intimacy of the attic workshop.
It was Ren who invited him in, opening his arms like wings to offer up his sturdy chest. And Goro had been crying—a moment of weakness he let slip because his tension is wound so tight that he was bound to snap eventually.
Ren’s hands settle over his shoulders. The fingers are long and nimble, slightly calloused but meticulously maintained. They massage Goro’s collarbone, and he leans into it. Then they slip lower. Goro doesn’t even think about it until he feels them on his wing-spots, holding him there with a gentle pressure that makes them blaze like white fire.
He cries out. He finds his hands limp at his sides and raises them to shove Ren back. He’s on the verge of tears again as he shouts at Ren, blaming him for—something. He can’t remember. His mind is racing, and so is his heart. Ren looks shocked, even crestfallen, and he starts to apologize for presuming.
Is that what I accused him of? Goro wonders as he storms from the tavern. He feels humiliated. What was Ren thinking? What was he thinking?
It always rains in the kingdom, it seems, but at least this time, it masks his tears.
———
There’s blood on the floorboards and beneath Goro’s fingernails. He can’t remember what it’s doing there. He thinks he blacked out when he got back to the inn. The wood beneath him is drenched with rainwater. Rainwater and blood.
His wing-spots are alight with pain. He moans, touches his bare shoulder with one trembling hand, and scrapes a line down the jagged edge where the bone was shattered by cold steel. He can feel it, the phantom pain of hollow bones and crow feathers.
The knife at his knees is clean. And yet when he turns to the mirror, he sees where the bite of furious nails has blazoned his back with ribbons of color. His wounds will never heal. They can never heal—his back, his wings, his heart—
With a cry, he takes the knife into his hand and plunges it forward. Broken glass pelts his skin like iridescent raindrops.
———
When it comes down to it, Goro doesn’t even really try.
The knife hits the attic floor with a dull thud. His hands are grabbed and pinned behind him. He can feel Ren’s breath on his collarbone. It isn’t even labored, like he exerted himself. Everything about this, Goro thinks, was half-assed. He can’t even do revenge right.
Ren’s wings are leathery. They curl around both of them, a restraint that keeps Goro pressed against him. They’re bat wings—of course they are. Joker was a bat Winged.
“Just kill me already!” Goro’s voice is slipping. So is his sanity.
Instead, Ren releases him—almost; he folds back his wings and spins Goro around to face him, holding both his wrists with a ginger grip. If he cared to, Goro could break away easily.
“If you had wanted to kill me, you wouldn’t have been so sloppy.” Ren’s voice is even, unrattled, almost as if he’d expected this outcome. He even smiles when he adds, “Your Highness.”
Goro supposes he shouldn’t be surprised. “How long have you known?” he demands, but he’s too defeated to inject any real venom into the words.
“I’ve suspected it for some time. But I only confirmed it the other day when I touched your wing-spots.”
Goro grimaces, trying to jerk his hands back, but Ren tightens his hold.
“It worked out well for both of us, though,” he continues. He drops one of Goro’s arms and pulls him by the wrist toward the stairs. “You didn’t see it because you broke in through the attic.”
Goro stumbles after him. “What?”
But the answer is laid out before them on one of the tables. It’s the project Ren has been working on all this time. Now that it’s complete, Goro can see what it truly is. Unwillingly, his eyes fog over with tears.
“I’ve been working on them for months.” Ren lets go of Goro to run his hands along the sleek frame of a pair of mechanical wings. “I hoped to one day present them to the kind prince who was unjustly dewinged for sparing my life.”
He turns to Goro then, a half-smile on his lips. “So? What do you think?”
But Goro says nothing, too emotional to say anything at all.
———
The anesthetic wears off slowly.
Goro is still groggy when Ren urges him out of bed. There’s a red-headed girl who slips out of the workshop the moment she realizes he’s awake. A woman with bobbed black hair and a white coat checks his vitals. He vaguely recalls her name as Takemi.
Takemi and Ren help him to a stool. They’re holding something behind him—something attached to him. That wakes him up.
Wings.
Once she’s assured that he’s stable, Takemi excuses herself. Ren is already tinkering with the wings.
“They may feel a bit heavy at first, but once your neural pathways fully fuse to the artificial ones, you won’t notice a thing. These are made from the lightest-weight metals on the market—courtesy of our aristocratic friends and their silly automatons.”
Goro lifts his arm and is startled when the wing rises with it. He beats them in the air once, twice. He’s never forgotten how. His new wings respond exactly as they should, and he’s almost moved to tears again.
Ren circles around to his front and admires his work. “They look good on you, just like I said.”
Goro blushes. “What’s important is that they work.”
Ren grins. Then he holds out a hand. “Well? Care to take a test flight, Your Highness?”
Goro bristles. “No. I just got out of surgery.”
He brushes Ren’s hand aside, but Ren grabs his anyway with a laugh, pulling him to his feet; Goro places a palm on his chest to steady himself. “You’re right. Then how about some coffee and curry to celebrate?”
Goro lets Ren lead him down into Leblanc’s dining room. The wings are a little awkward, but they respond immediately when he folds them against his back, just like they should. The slightest clink of metal as they move reminds him:
This time, there’s nothing phantom about them.
