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Uranus’s eyes drifted past the messy sketchbook page balanced against the crook of his knee, crawling over the distant dotted stars painted all across the blackness around them. There weren’t more than a few spots where it seemed lacking, and those spots were hiding yet more stars behind them. It was… almost impossible to fathom.
Billions—trillions of stars around him, an innumerable amounts of planets.
And he’d been stuck with this life.
Sometimes he thought the universe made a game out of how to make him feel even worse every orbit.
Uranus ground his teeth together and forced his eyes back to his sketchbook, eyeing the mess of half-formed shapes and faces, remnants of his inability to identify what he wanted to sketch in reality. He found himself pausing on a single sketch in the upper right, a sweeping wing extended out like he hadn’t done for his since the years after his formation.
Since the collision. The collision that’d ruined them. Ruined him.
He wondered what they could have been if not for it. Something like Mercury’s, fluttering and flapping with his emotions?
(Uranus could feel the ghost of that feeling sometimes, when he was at his happiest, like the broken wings still wanted a chance to live. It always hurt somehow more than the grinding pain of the webbing injuries spread over them, over his entire body.)
A grand spread of white, the tiny speckles of cyan glinting in the sunlight? Something to make him feel as pretty as Saturn? To rival the grand, shining spread of the halo of rings above his head? Then again, perhaps in that imagined universe he’d still find some reason to be jealous of Saturn, because at his heart Uranus knew he was nothing but a mess of envy and un-granted wishes.
He’d never admit it aloud, but Uranus would give up every speck of rubble in his rings for a chance to heal his wings.
Sometimes he cursed the Universe, the Sun for not noticing, his fellow planets for what little gravitational contributions they’d had for making that planet draw in towards him; he cursed the planet itself even if it’d never truly woken, he cursed himself for not moving, for freezing still and terrified at the sight.
Or maybe he did move.
His memories of the collision were fragmented and half-gone, flickers appearing in his dreams and making the pain flare anew in his wings and every inch of bone in his body when he woke up. The only thing he did remember clearly enough was one thing he clung to most, evidence that the other planets had cared about him once—the rotating presence of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune at his side, the quiet whispers and murmurs he couldn’t understand but listened to nevertheless, letting it anchor him in an ocean of pain. He knew Saturn had tried to heal him, had exhausted himself deeply in the course of it (Uranus had seen the deep bags under his eyes, the duller shade of his golden hair and eyes, the pallor in his skin, and he’d known.) and still he’d been stuck with this.
This.
His top lip curled up in a tiny scowl as he slightly turned his head, eyeing the very edge of his curled up wing, the bent feathers and scarred edge. Uranus hadn’t let Neptune fix the feathers for him in… quite a long time. He’d rejected it with the excuse of a bad pain period, and then Neptune had slowly stopped asking, and then he’d disappeared for so long, and now… now they were a complete mess, feathers crooked and laid in uneven rows. It was probably bad for him to let them get that bad, but Uranus didn’t have the reach to get them himself, and he’d never ask his moons, and… he’d isolated himself enough.
Who else would want to help him?
No one, his mind told him, and you know it.
He did know it.
He never forgot it.
Thumb rubbing against the edge of his sketchbook, Uranus looked back down at it and stared at the extended, whole and unbroken wing. Maybe… maybe he should paint a full color version of it. If the universe couldn’t give him his wings, at least he could give himself something to dream about, something real to look at.
But it was bloody dumb for him to wish, because Uranus hadn’t managed to paint anything in weeks. Earthling weeks—which granted wasn’t much to his own scale of time—that seemed so long for someone who’d painted nearly as often as he could before this. He’d painted through episodes of pain, he’d painted through tears, he’d painted through anger and annoyance and every emotion he’d ever felt.
Now, every time he tried to lift his arm or do anything more than draw loose sketches, the ache in his right wing would crawl along the edge, an unsettling reminder that crept into his shoulder and then the base of his skull, and the lines would turn shaky enough for him to tear out the page and dematerialize it.
So many failures, and so little success.
Story of his life.
At least he was used to the pain by now, the dull ache the only companion that’d stuck with him since the moment he’d first felt it. Ironic that the one thing he’d wanted least was the one thing he could rely on always coming back. Since the collision—which he really couldn’t remember clearly, but knew had shattered something deep inside of irrevocably, had flipped his axis and left the wings he’d been so happy to have permanently damaged, essentially useless appendages.
Bloody hell, maybe he should just have them cut off.
Go up to Saturn, ask him to use his scythe—or perhaps Earth, since surely his Earthlings had invented some sort of weapon that’d do it best—to slice them right off, to rid himself of their useless weight. He tried to imagine the pure shock in Saturn’s expression if he’d asked that, the horror in his eyes, and that dissolved the whole scene and left him to close his sketchbook completely, dematerializing it and the pencil he’d been using.
But his mind was still stuck on his wings, turning them over and over in his thoughts, and so Uranus barely flexed them in false hope that perhaps it’d be a good day.
Nope.
They stung immediately, especially the right one that’d taken the brunt of the collision—that he knew he’d flung out in front of himself in an attempt to stop an unstoppable happening—and healed entirely wrong.
The bones within it were fused jagged and unnatural.
It looked ugly in a way that always drew sympathy he hated.
On good days it was a dull pressure in the back of his mind, like he constantly had someone stood behind him squeezing their fist tight at the joint.
On—On bad days, it felt like someone was constantly hitting him, like a miniature version of the collision on loop. On bad days he could barely move, barely do much more than stare at the stars and galaxies all around him and wish he was dead.
Today wasn’t either.
Somewhere in the middle, which was better than a bad day; if he used the Earthling scale of pain Jupiter had told him about—he wasn’t sure why? Being able to give a number to the pain level wouldn’t take it away—it was probably a six out of ten.
So not horrible. He could manage that.
Shifting his weight, he ignored the familiar spikes of discomfort from the measly flex, breathing through it the way Jupiter had taught him… so long ago. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Count the seconds. Count the stars. Focus on anything but the pain, Uranus. I know you can. His voice was a steady, comforting rumble in his memory, the words and instructions a momentary anchor.
One. Two. Three. Four. Exhale.
One. Two. Three. Four. Inhale.
The spike of pain finally died back down to the dull ache it’d been before, and Uranus let his hands fall limp into his lap, fingers hooking against each other and tugging. He was so bloody tired. Wiped out of all energy, of all… everything.
He just wanted it to end. He was tired of the pain, tired of waking up and immediately knowing if it was going to be a good day or a bad day, tired of giving up on his hobbies for the sake of an injury he’d earned billions of years ago. He was tired of pretending that he wasn’t tired. He was tired of having a body that felt like it was sewn together by thread that frayed more and more by the orbit, tired of the only thing the others knew about him being his angle.
He was more than that, wasn’t he?
His eyes prickled with tears that he blinked away as he remembered the comfort he’d been given in the first couple million or so years after the collision, when his body had been reconstituting itself into the broken one he had now.
Uranus wanted that company and comfort back. He wanted someone to save him, to see enough worth in him to stay by his side and want better for him.
He wanted—
He wanted more than he deserved. He wanted to sit with Jupiter and Saturn, to lean up against them and fall asleep knowing he wouldn’t wake up alone, to feel a warm hand on his shoulder, in his hair; anywhere to distract him from the pain.
He wanted Neptune to pop out of nowhere and distract him with a nonsensical joke. He wanted to feel the comfort of his gravity tugging at his, much stronger in a way that’d confused him but he’d grown used to. He wanted to hear his cousin’s bubbly voice saying something utterly ridiculous, like telling him that he could “Name all of his moons backwards! No, not mine, yours!” while Uranus rolled his eyes and fought a smile that always won.
Even now a faint smile tugged at his lips, dying as quickly as it was born.
He wished someone was here.
Not even his moons were, recently gone on one of their moon club visits… and considering the distance they had to traverse, they’d probably gone for a while.
But he was used to being alone, wasn’t he?
Uranus slowly twisted—careful not to ignite more pain—and reached back with his left hand, ignoring the slight grind of his shoulder as he laid his fingers against the leading edge of the wing, feeling against the bent and broken coverts. Beneath it, the structure felt as rough and wrong as it always did, the feathers cool and smooth in clear contrast to the aching warmth of the inflamed joint.
Please don’t get worse, he pleaded to it. I don’t think I can handle it.
His wing answered with a dull throb of pain.
Uranus just sighed and let his hand drop back into his lap, eyes sliding shut while he melted into the hold of his own gravity, keeping just enough weightlessness to not ignite another flare-up. He listened to the quiet void around him, the slight ringing in his ears that he could always hear and had since the collision.
He just regarded it as another painful side-effect, because he just never had enough.
Before long he was drifting in that half-asleep space, immersed in daydreams where he wasn’t alone, where he had everything he’d ever wanted, where nothing ever hurt him like the waking pain did.
And then—
A sudden feeling woke in the wrist joint of his wings, right where the most obvious break sat. It still looked undeniably wrong, the joint bare of feathers and with a visible knot like an asteroid shoved under the skin. It was where the familiar, grinding ache that promised a bad day started.
No, he whined soundlessly. Please.
But he regretted the plea when the grind suddenly changed, an alien sensation taking its place.
Uranus’s eyes snapped open at the feeling, and he forced his back straight despite the throb of pain it brought. He could still feel the grinding ache, but it was overwhelmed by a feeling like a fizzle in his bones, like ice-cold bubbles—even colder than him, the cold of space without a star—were blowing up inside of him, burrowing into his bones and popping in an endless cascade.
It reminded him of something he’d seen on Earth one of the few times he’d visited his surface—of when he’d popped a wine bottle in front of them and the liquid had rushed over the edges in a bubbly waterfall—but how could—how could that be happening in his bones? It felt wrong, it felt like a feather-light tickle and a deep burn at the same time, a hand slamming down against his shoulder and a finger tapping his skin, a build-up of pure wrongness that his brain couldn’t decide whether to interpret as cold or pressure or movement.
So it interpreted them as all of it.
“What the—?!” Uranus twisted in the void of his orbit, forgetting to keep his gravity in order as he sent himself spinning, his braid brushing gently against his cheek in a ticklish sensation very different to the fizzle in his wing. He batted it away and felt his core contract in on itself in fear he wouldn’t acknowledge. “That’s—that’s… new?” He tried for a casual tone and only sounded more terrified than he wanted.
The fizzing continued to build itself up, spreading from the joint it’d started in—a trail of cold, bubbly wrongness that followed the line of the old fracture exactly.
Was something—Had he done something?
Cold fear akin to the fizzling burned his core as he felt the fizzling only intensify, needles pricking him with uneven pressure as his wing ached, as it cramped and throbbed and gnawed at his ability to think. It felt like—stars, it almost felt like he was relieving the initial break, like the fizzing was using his own buried memories against him to play it in reverse, to heal it and break it and heal it and break it—
“Bloody hell,” he tried, breathy and lost. “What—?”
He tried to reach back with his hand—without the same care this time—and felt along the joint, registering the hard knot of scar tissue and the warmth it always carried. But nothing else, nothing to explain the burning fizz still growing.
It felt like his body was turning against him, and wasn’t that just great!
“It’s just a nerve thing,” he muttered to himself, wrapping his free arm around his middle in a tight self-hug. Did nerves even do that? “It’s just… you’ve been floating too long. Your wings were too stiff, and you made it worse earlier. It’s just a bloody cramp.”
But the words cracked, and his voice wavered.
He knew it wasn’t a cramp. He’d felt cramps before—the tightness and heat the seized his muscles and made him freeze, breathing through the pain.
This wasn’t a cramp.
It was a relentless, never-ending fizz that just kept growing, a pain inside the his very bones that he had no idea how to soothe.
Breathe, he remembered in Jupiter’s comforting voice, Count. In. Out. In. Out. You can outlast the pain. Just breathe.
One. Two. Three. Fizz. F-Four. Fizz. Fi-ive.
His counting shattered the moment the second sensation joined the first, not spread out but focused entirely on a single point in his wing. The base of one primary feather, the long and elegant ones—except this one was bare in some spots, the silhouette of the vanes oddly broken.
But it wasn’t the vanes causing the problem.
The single spot where the feather burst out of and anchored into the skin of his wing lit up in an agony Uranus almost thought he’d never felt before. It was so sharp and overwhelming he jerked his hand back from the joint like the wing itself had burned him, half-expecting to see a little supernova burning in his feathers.
It felt like someone had taken one of his arrows, thinned it, and let it grow hotter and hotter in the Sun’s heat, then stuck it inside his skin and was trying to shove the feather out of the follicle out from within—and then it reversed, like they were plucking the feather from the inside, and he stared with horror at the feather that was still attached, barely ruffled despite the piercing agony radiating from it.
A tiny, half-there word spilled out of him in a whine.
“W-Wha—?”
He fumbled through the feathers in search of whatever was causing it—his fingers drifted through the messy feathers, even detaching a few that’d been barely hanging on—and was only met with the feeling of his coverts, the smooth vanes and the subtle warmth of his own skin.
There was nothing on the wing.
There was nothing—
The agony kept burning.
“S-Star-rs,” he choked out, voice thin and high and desperate. “No, no, n-o!” Stop! He buried his thumb in against the bottom the feather and watched it dent underneath his finger, digging in deeper until he felt the throb of pain he expected, twisting it until he thought he’d pop the feather off. It kept throbbing.
But it was drowned under the piercing needle-like sensation under his skin.
All the throb did was tell him that what he felt was two entirely separate sensations, and that nothing he could do would help it. The realization made him feel pale and weak, drained of even more energy and helplessly terrified.
The arm around his waist dropped, his fingers brushing against the silver embroidery Saturn had added to the hem of his sweater impossibly long ago.
(See, he’d said, proudly presenting the new sweater in his direction, I made sure to even add a tiny little paintbrush in there. Isn’t it cu-ute!? Uranus had stared at the embroidery and felt oddly happy for once, accepting it and letting it immediately replace the plain one he’d been wearing. And look!
Saturn grabbed his hand and led his fingers down to brush against the embroidery.
Uranus had been glad he hadn’t looked up to see the furious blush he’d had.
When the pain gets bad, you can use these to ground yourself! He’d wiggled his fingers, the rings glittering on them. I use my lovely rings here, so smooth and nice to feel. I can count them, or I can just feel, and I know that’s real.
Smart, mate, he’d said, met with a brilliant smile that’d only made him feel warmer.)
Count them. He rubbed his fingers against the stars and spirals embroidered on the edge of his sweater, counting One. Two. Three. Four.
And then the needle buried under his skin twisted, and all of his senses forgot anything but the unbearable pain. He clapped his hand under his mouth to muffle the pained whimper that followed, desperate not to alert anyone.
(But didn’t he want their comfort?)
This didn’t feel anything like the pain he’d dealt with for centuries—not even on his worst day had he felt this sharp agony stabbing him over and over again. Surely it had to end soon, didn’t it? He needed it to end soon. He needed—
Uranus dropped to his knees in his orbit, losing control of his own legs the moment his wing felt like it’d twisted behind him.
Not just moved. Twisted.
Like someone had wrapped their hands around it and was trying to wrench it sideways, flex it the wrong way, break the bones again, shatter them worse than they already were—like gravity itself had turned against his wing in particular. The sensation felt so real, so vivid that his gut twisted, his core contracting in absolute terror as he nearly threw up from it.
He didn’t even know they could do that.
It felt like his bones were grinding against each other, the muscles within tearing even more than they already had with his collision, like the way they’d healed wrong—but healed—was being forced to break again. It was a deep, nauseating ache that swept him over, radiating outward from the joint through his entire body as his vision swam, teeth aching from how hard he ground them together.
It’s going to snap, his mind screamed at him, it’s going to break!
He twisted and tried to catch sight of the wing, catch sight of what was doing this to him, what sort of a force held a grudge against him when he already felt broken enough… and he was met with the same wing as always. It hung limp and still, feathers ruffled and wrong, damaged but not—
Not being touched at all. Not even moving.
But that had to be wrong, his brain insisted. It kept telling him that his wing was being folded in half the wrong way, that it was about to snap at the joint and break every bit of control he had left, that—
Uranus’s breath punched out of him in a raw, broken sound of confusion.
It hurt, it hurt, it hurt so bloody bad.
Hurthurthurthurthurthurthurthurthurthurthurthurthurthurthurt, his mind screamed at him, HURT! He swallowed back the sob that wanted to leave him and told himself that he could face this, that it was just pain and he’d dealt with pain for most of his life. Told himself that his wing looked fine, so surely that meant he was bloody fine.
He’d survived an impact with a planet the size of the biggest rocky planet, and as much as he sometimes wished he hadn’t, he’d not only survived but he’d healed, he’d lived. He’d proved to the others that he didn’t need help enough that they’d forgotten he was still one of them.
He was—fine.
Fine. Fine. Fine.
The pain flared higher.
Stars, no, he wasn’t fine.
He wasn’t fine at all.
Another sob broke through this time, his teeth grinding together hard enough that he thought they’d crack under the force and just add more pain to the miasma already taking over him.
(Neptune’s voice bubbled up in his thoughts, his mind’s last defense before he folded into the pain completely. When everything’s too much, I just think of my moons! I’m their planet, after all, he’d said cheerfully one day, while Uranus was in the midst of a very bad day and for once glad of Neptune’s distraction. So I count them, and I name them! Here, I’ll do it with yours. His voice gained a peppy quality as he sang each name in turn. Cordelia. Ophelia. Bianca. Cressida. Desdemona. Juliet. Portia. Rosalind. Cupid. Belinda. Perdita. Puck. Mab. Miranda. Ariel. Umbriel. Titania. Oberon. Francisco. Caliban. Stephano. Trinculo. Sycorax. Margaret. Prospero. Setebos. Ferdinand. (And S/2023 U 1, he added now, with a tiny laugh that broke off into a pained whine.) You’re their planet! They exist because of you.
Neptune had gently poked him in the chest, gentle enough to not bring him more pain. You’re the anchor. Let them be yours, too.)
He tried it on his own.
He tried so hard.
Cordelia. O-Ophelia. Bianca. Cressida. Already they were slipping through his fingers, like melting ice near the Sun. P-Portia? Puck. The twist intensified, the fizzing growing even stronger, and the list crumbled in his mind, his thoughts scattering enough to remember only the pain.
Please, he cried soundlessly. Please, someone. Anyone. Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn, please. His core felt like it was shattering. Help me. H-Help me.
But the endless emptiness and his own mind swallowed the pleas.
And no one came to save him, just like he knew to expect.
So he relied on himself. Stop it, he told himself, internal voice sharp and yet faltering. Stop it. It’s just your—your nerves misfiring, or something. The wing is fine. It’s fine. Look at it!
He looked at it.
He forced himself to see it like he never had before.
In the cold of his orbit and the dim light of the distant Sun, the damage laid bare.
The leading edge of the right wing was a topography of old trauma. The joint where the impact had landed hardest was visibly misaligned. The bones beneath the skin and feathers had healed in jagged, overlapping plates, like a shattered moon glued back together without all of the pieces. If he looked hard enough, he could see the ridges under the surface like asteroids buried underneath his skin, creating a landscape of lumps and hollows. The joint where it sat on his back sat at a slightly wrong angle, canting the entire wing downward by a few degree.
Even at rest it looked weary, defeated.
So reminiscent of himself.
The feathers weren’t any better; they grew in crooked at the impact sight, half bent at unnatural angles with vanes twisted and ruffled. Some had never laid flat no matter how many times he asked Neptune to fix them. Some were missing altogether to leave bald patches on his wings, gaps that had never quite grown back. The cyan speckles that dotted across it—that Neptune had once told him matched his eyes perfectly—were dull and clustered in points, making the feathers look more dirty and unkempt even more than they already did.
The rest of the feathers further from the impact site were still disheveled and uncared for with tiny bits of asteroid caught within; he could preen them himself, but he hadn’t the energy to in such a long time. He’d barely had the energy to draw.
Uranus felt tears gathering in the corners of his eyes as he stared at his wing and thought about how pretty it’d been once, how proud he’d been to have them.
And now he left them to rot in neglect.
That thought crumbled the moment the twist abruptly stepped up a notch like it was feeding on all of the damage and neglect he could see, his brain screaming at him that it was twisting, snapping, coming apart.
The twist branched out, going from a sideways wrench to a full twist and turn. Pure agony flared up within him, his core fluttering in panic and fear, and he nearly crumpled on the spot, keeping his eyes on his wings to remind himself that it was fine.
No, no, no! His brain didn’t think it was fine.
He felt the rotating twist intensify somehow more, and even as he stared at the completely still wing he felt the joint pop, his tendons stretching and ripping and tearing in a hot, wet burning. He felt his shattered bones breaking again, a splintering, grinding, white-hot spike of agony that exploded not just within his wing, but behind his eyes and all over his head.
It was a feeling he remembered, not only his mind but his body.
It was the impact taking place yet again, this time on a broken body that couldn’t take it again, and Uranus was sure he was bound to shatter to pieces, that his core would crumble and everything that made him would fall apart.
No, he pleaded, his core twisting and turning. His breath came in short, panicked gasps that never felt like enough. Please, please.
Jupiter. Saturn. Neptune! Anyone! His brain gave him a single second of relent—letting him imagine Jupiter’s hand gentle on his shoulder, the warmth of Saturn’s healing working through him and soothing his aches and pains even if not taking them away, imagined Neptune cuddled up beside him and chatting in a distracting blur about anything and everything.
Please, he whimpered. “P-Please.”
The empty Solar System around him didn’t answer.
And then his brain reminded him that was an empty hope, and that cascade of feeling wrenched away in favor of another blaze of agony, the phantom feeling of his wing twisted inward. He felt his tears finally break free, his cheeks wet with endless waves of them.
Extend the wing.
His brain shoved that thought into the forefront. Push it out. Extend it! The logic made sense to his pain-addled brain. His wing was being twisted inward by phantom feelings, so s-surely extending it outward would fix it. It had to. He just needed to stretch it out, end the agony coursing through him.
No, the back of his mind screamed. You can’t extend—
He threw his shoulders back and spread his wings.
The moment he did, his wings snapped open like they hadn’t in billions of years.
And both of them ignited with more pain, real pain that had him twisting in place, his fingers cramping and twitching, his spine arching as the sudden movement threw him backwards within his own orbit. But the movement wasn’t what he was focusing on.
He was focusing on the fact that the extension of his wings had pulled and yanked on knotted scar tissue that had healed entirely with his wings closed. That had never been pulled like this before, because he’d given up on extending his wings in the first billion years, when every attempt brought him brilliant pain. The misaligned bones pulled apart, the fractures grinding and grinding; and he felt his tendons popping and ripping in actuality this time, still accompanied by the fizzing static-y pain and the twisting joint that hadn’t dulled at all. It left his vision whiting out as he heaved and crumpled in place, barely remembering to use his own gravity to keep himself from flying out of his orbit.
His mind screamed.
And he followed, mouth opening against a ragged shriek of pain swallowed by the silence around him. His legs kicked uselessly like there was a physical thing on him he could push off to end it, his entire body convulsing as real and undeniable agony crashed over him in a way he hadn’t felt in billions of years.
If the universe wanted to kill him, he wished it’d do it already.
Instead of killing him, the universe let his pain mutate, let it grow endlessly as he stared emptily up at the stars and cried silently; his only sound was a series ragged, pained wheezes, a tinny whine following every minute or so.
Even that cut off when the electrical storm of sensation within him transformed, the icy-cold bubbles no longer popping but shattering, dragging ice cold shards against his bones, his muscles. He felt like he was being scoured from the inside out, every nerve in his wings firing up in new agony with the lacerations.
He couldn’t untangle the real from the imagined anymore.
It all felt real now.
At least the twisting had stopped. His wing wasn’t being—
The universe laughed at him. And the twist returned in a different form entirely, taking advantage of his extended wing and the real stress he’d put on the joints and muscles and bones, every bit of it aching.
And it pulled.
Uranus seized still as he felt the yank on his wing only grow stronger, as if gravity and space itself had thickened to form a grip around it, stretching his already-torn tendons and pulling the misaligned bones ever further. It felt like his wing was being slowly ripped off of him in an agonizing, slow tug that never ended.
He tried to scream, the sound catching in his throat as it yanked again.
No, no, no, no, no, his mind tripped over the repeated denial. Not my wings. His thought of going to Saturn and asking him to cut them off felt like bitter irony now. My wings! He wanted to keep them more than anything. Even broken and neglected and pain-wrought, they were his wings.
His.
Uranus scraped together all of his faltering strength and twisted his neck, outright ignoring the spike of pain it brought in favor of devouring the sight of his wing, relief flaring in his chest a bare second before it was snuffed out.
His wing was whole. Thank the stars.
It was spread wide behind him, backlit by the Sun’s distant light; it was the picture of damage, and yet… he could see the beauty in it, even as broken as it was. Even in the crooked, misaligned bones and missing patches of feathers. Even in how the feathers drooped rather than sitting sharply, the slumped angle the entire wing sat at. It was beautiful devastation.
It must have been… it must have been perfect, once.
More tears dripped down his already-wet cheeks, a choked sob pulling from him as he stared longer at the wing, gratefully registering that it was indeed still attached to him even as the phantom yanking kept going, as the felt the agonizing stretch on his back, like it was just about to rip it free, skin and all.
Uranus's back arched further, and his hands flew to his head, fingers digging into his scalp and pulling at his hair like he could physically yank the pain out of his skull. His legs drew up toward his chest, his whole body curling into a fetal position even as the wing remained stubbornly, agonizingly extended behind him. The shards of glass within him followed the extended length and pricked at every inch of his wing like a thousand arrows pushing up through his skin.
Please. Please. Someone. Anyone. Find me. Help me.
He’d take the bloody Sun at this point.
He was nothing but a planet spinning sideways in the dark of his orbit, screaming into an endless voice of space that had never once answered back. He imagined Jupiter's deep voice cutting through the static: "Breathe, Uranus. With me. In. Out. In. Out." He imagined Saturn's cool fingers on his brow: "It’s alright, Uranus. Just focus on what you can feel, okay? Feel the stars. Feel the little paintbrush!" He imagined Neptune's laughter, bright and bubbling: "Cordelia! Ophelia! Bianca! Come on, cousin, say it with me! You've got this!"
Nothing answered him but the endless pain.
He had to close his wing, he thought mindlessly. Close his wing. Un-extend it.
Uranus mostly un-twisted himself, barely staring at his wing enough to reach back with his left hand, stretching until he managed to grab a handful of the wing and dig his fingers into it. And suddenly his wing felt odd—oddly large in a way that didn’t match what he was seeing, what he was staring at. His fingers tightened in the mass of feathers to ground himself, nails scraping against already-stretched skin.
That’s not real, he told himself. That’s not real. Just close it.
His thoughts were hazy as he grabbed tighter and pulled, yanking his wing back towards him. His body folded inward and the only thing that kept him in place was the instinctive reaction of his own gravity, and the wing fought the movement with iron-rigid muscles. Uranus yanked, and yanked, and yanked against his own locked muscles until the extended wing started to fold in slowly.
The sensation of shards burrowing into him died down just a little, but that didn’t matter as the real injury on his wing screamed with every movement, the aggravated bones and muscles protesting yet another movement when they’d barely flexed or twitched in years and years. He felt scar tissue tear, but Uranus almost welcomed it… because at least he knew that was real.
It wasn’t the aching pain of the glass shards marching up and down his wings, the electrical storm in his head.
It was real.
And it was—
The pain died abruptly, gone the moment his wing folded entirely closed. Lucky for him, the opposite wing had somehow mirrored the right and closed without him needing to intervene, leaving his wings curled against his back like always. Uranus couldn’t believe the pain was really gone for a moment, his entire body aching from his reactions to the earlier pain; but suddenly the realization of everything he’d just felt collapsed in on him, and he let go of his wing and curled into a tight ball, breathing in ragged sobs as his already-wet face soaked his sleeves. His entire body felt like another wreckage of its own, the misfiring signals and agonizing pain still a burning memory in his core.
Please, he whispered again. Please. Please find me. I can’t—
His inner voice faltered.
I can’t do this alone.
His wing stayed folded, absent of the yanking or twisting he’d felt in it for so long, absent of—
Of anything at all. Uranus’s head forced up at that realization, his eyes widening as it filtered through his lingering terror and exhaustion. His breath was still hitching with every sob, but he carefully reached out towards his wing and the absolute lack of sensation while fear crept through him.
His fingers brushed against the edge of the wing.
He felt nothing but the smooth vanes of the feathers beneath his fingers.
The wing didn’t feed him any sensation at all, hanging behind him like dead weight, like all of the nerves within it had been burned and carved up, like the fizz had taken them with it.
The absence of pain was the most terrifying thing of all.
He had lived with that pain for so long that it had become a part of his identity—right along the sideways tilt, the crooked wings, his dull rings—part of him. They were the proof that he had survived something that should have destroyed him. They were the evidence that he was strong in some way, that he was still here, still whole, still Uranus. Now it felt like he was touching wings that belonged to someone else despite the fact that they were still attached to him. It felt… wrong. The left wing felt the exact same way when he twisted; despite taking a lesser attack than the right wing had, they were still fully numb against his back, so numb if he wasn’t touching them he’d think they didn’t exist. “Give them back. Give them back. Give them back,” he raggedly repeated to the universe, the words scraping through his throat. “Give them back!”
It felt like part of him had been erased. Or perhaps not erased, but scoured out of everything that had mattered, leaving him with the corpse. “Give them back,” he cried again, fingers shaking against his feathers. “I’ll take the bloody pain! Give them back!”
He was about to break out into more ragged sobs when an abrupt flicker of warmth woke at the very tip of his wing, at the bent feathers, spreading slowly along the wing and every newly-ruined part of it. It made his cracking lips spread into an aching smile.
“My wings,” he breathed out.
The same old aching pain he always felt returned, and for once Uranus welcomed it.
He wanted to feel that ache. He never wanted to lose it again.
The numbness receded more and more as the warmth crept further, creeping along both wings at the same time now, and Uranus kept twisting back and forth and ignoring his protesting spine to stare at each.
Thank you, he thought to the universe, even if you are a bloody asshole.
But then it didn’t stop. The heat just kept growing and growing and growing until Uranus’s fragile smile faltered and fell apart, until suddenly he had to strip out of his jacket as it went from warmth to burning to an absolute inferno within him, spreading from his wings to his entire body, catching everything within him. It felt like someone had stuck a star in him and set the supernova off, like he was burning from the inside out.
Bones, muscles, skin, feathers, even his hair—it overwhelmed and consumed every bit of him. Uranus opened his mouth and let out a soundless scream as his vision swept over with black and he lost sight of anything but darkness, lost awareness of anything but the burning inferno within him.
Breathe! One. Two—The fire consumed.
F-Find the pattern. Count the stars, the spirals—Uranus wasn’t even sure he had hands to move.
Names. Moons. Cordelia. Ophelia. Bianca. Cressida. Desdemona. J-Juliet. Mi-Miranda? — The names incinerated as the fire swept into his brain and every nerve in his body, flooding through his limbs with a vengeance. He felt like he was boiling not just inside but outside, like if he opened his eyes he’d find himself a charred corpse. He forgot his own name. He forgot everything but—
Watch out!
Painpainpainpainpainpainpainpainpain.
He was shattering apart, he was cracking and breaking, spinning sideways without reason; he felt himself break and heal wrong over and over again, the moment of impact repeating itself until his mind collapsed.
Please, he thought one final time.
There was no answer. For all he knew, he’d been abandoned. And he probably deserved it.
As abruptly as the shards and yanking had left him, the fire did. He found himself staring at his own shivering body, barely breathing as he registered how much his limbs each ached, even more than they had before. His entire body felt utterly limp and spent, a wreckage of exhausted nerves and trembling muscles.
Uranus knew if that happened again his own mind would break away to save him.
The same old throbbing ache was back in his wings, stronger and sharper with how the extension of his wings had ripped scar tissue and made bone grind against bone. He could hear a new sound with every breath, a wet, grinding click from his right wing with every rise and fall of his chest. Uranus knew that meant his pain was bound to get even worse soon, that he’d messed them up a second time.
So he just closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable next wave of pain, helpless to it all.