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Ryland Grace knew he wasn’t the most fashionable guy in the world, but he had a style he was comfortable with- nerdy t-shirts and GCMS merch in his off time or the occasional Casual Friday, and second-hand suits for work. He got all his dress shirts from the sale rack at the department store in a size too big (because otherwise parents kept staring at his arms when they should be discussing their child’s progress during parent-teacher nights), and they were all in the cheap manufactured fiber blends, save for a few mid-range cotton ones that he saved for days when he woke up knowing he was already going to be overstimulated by the end of it and wanted to mitigate the damage a bit.
Safe to say that when he woke up and found himself buried in new clothes that had apparently been deposited on top of his sleeping form, what he found horrified him- sleek wool suit coats in blacks and midnight blues (which matched the shade of some of his feathers exactly, not quite black but still galaxy-sky dark, and he wondered if Stratt had somehow gotten a hold of one of his feathers for color matching). There were silk dress suits that looked like they cost at least a month of his rent in darks and neutrals, with the occasional silvery-white that matched the speckles of light that formed the constellations on his wings. Instead of his beloved yellow raincoat that made his students teasingly call him “Paddington Grace”, he had a sleek red trench coat. The pants fit him like a glove and clung, showing off the muscles in his legs in a way that made him feel entirely too exposed. There wasn’t a nerdy t-shirt in sight. He picked up his phone and dialled Stratt’s number.
“What the heck, Stratt?” he asked her, voice halfway to hysterical before she could even get out the clipped recitation of her last name that was her standard way of answering the phone. “I’m going to be in a lab, not on a runway.”
“Your new clothes are perfectly suited for a lab,” she replied, unruffled. “Nothing loose or hanging. The ties are just for any meetings you may need to attend on the mainland.”
Copernicus, he hadn’t even noticed the ties on the end of his bed.
“How much did you even spend on this- it’s such a waste of money!” he protested.
“I didn’t spend a red cent, Doctor Grace. You are one of only two humans on the planet- and the only man- with wings. Companies were frothing at the mouth for the chance to make you clothing. They were offering the taskforce money for a chance that you would be seen wearing their labels. The ones on your bed were the highest bidders.”
“A marketing opportunity. My clothes are a marketing opportunity now? Can’t anything just be mine anymore?” Grace wasn’t proud of the whimper that left him, but he couldn’t help it. “My own body is different now, and I can’t even pick my clothes?”
Stratt sighed into the phone but softened her tone slightly. “Dr. Grace, I understand that this is a big adjustment for you. If it really means that much to you, then I will have your old clothes altered and brought from your apartment, but I still expect you to wear your new ones in public.”
Ryland calmed down slightly and decided he could argue the case that his new lab didn’t count as ‘public’ once his beloved old shirts and school hoodies were brought to him safely and in a form he could actually pull over the wings. “Thank you,” he mumbled.
“I’ll see you in my office in 30 minutes, Doctor Grace. Get some breakfast first. I can tell you first hand that the wings increase your caloric needs.”
Oh, that was another thing about having two new limbs that were, until a few months ago, not even conclusively proven to be something that humans could have- very little reliable information about his new biology. Eva Stratt had a couple of months of a head start, and there were some speculative publications on Google Scholar about what could potentially be possible based on fragmented historical records and studies of some of the hypothesized parts of the human genome that could potentially contribute to the ability to manifest them, but mostly he was going in blind. If he thought a lab full of argon during first contact was bad, now he was quite literally a guinea pig… guinea bird? Whatever… he was not pleased about it.
He picked out the least expensive-looking clothing he could find in the lot- a plain white dress shirt and a pair of black pants that didn’t cling as tightly to his glutes as some of the others- and started getting dressed for the day. When he lifted one leg to put it through the pants, the wings flapped automatically to steady him, knocking over the glass of water on his nightstand.
“Fluffer nutter,” he muttered. These things were a nightmare for lab safety.
He looked at the ties and an idea formed.
Ten minutes later, he had jerry-rigged a harness to tie the wings to his back where they couldn’t cause trouble, feeling rather pleased with himself. The wings seemed less pleased about it, but he just cast a dirty look over his shoulder.
“You shut up about it,” he ordered them. “Behave.” Then he reluctantly opened the door to start his day.
_________
Dr. Ryland Grace walked into Eva Stratt’s office wearing some sort of neck-tie abomination crisscrossing over his torso, tying his wings down in a way that looked rather uncomfortable and made her own rustle sympathetically.
“Was zum Teufel?” she asked before she could stop herself.
Dr. Grace didn’t speak German, but he clearly understood the sentiment, at least, and he looked at her (not in the eyes, more towards her chin, but she hated eye contact herself and couldn’t fault him for it) with an expression that was a peculiar mix of sheepish and defiant.
“They’re a safety hazard,” he protested. “I can’t have them flapping around in the lab.”
That… made sense. She hadn’t had any trouble adjusting to her own, but she’d always had excellent coordination and spatial awareness. She’d done ballet as well as singing in the youth choir in her childhood and just generally had excellent control over her body. Grace, on the other hand, seemed like the sort who’d struggled with managing just the usual four limbs, and so she supposed she should have anticipated that he might have some trouble adjusting. She wasn’t a scientist, but she knew how important careful control over the environment in the lab was, and she cursed herself slightly for not planning for it.
“Apologies for the oversight, Doctor Grace. I’ll have something more suitable made for you by the end of the day.”
“Oh no, you don’t have to, uh…” He twiddled his thumbs, uncertain, his small bit of confidence gone. The wings flapped awkwardly, rustling in their formalwear prison.
“I clearly do. It is not an issue. Now, we’ve wasted enough time. Let’s go over your contract and the parameters of your position.”
_______
It was another hour before he could actually see the inside of his lab, and his new assistants stared at his wings as he entered, making him squirm. Carl helpfully glared at them, and they again busied themselves with setting out beakers and adjusting microscope settings.
Science, at least, was familiar and comfortable, and he busied himself with a list of experiments that he’d been ruminating on since he first looked at his three dots and wished there were enough to do the dozens of experiments he had sprung to his mind in rapid succession and already at least half-planned out. With his head buried in his microscope and a list of breeder schematics already waiting for his approval in his new Petrova Taskforce inbox, he could forget about or at least ignore the stares for a little while.
_____
Carl dragged him to lunch about six hours later, and his protests that he ‘wasn’t hungry’ weren’t exactly landing well when they could both hear his stomach growling.
“Holy crap,” he’d nearly moaned as soon as the first bite of his sandwich hit his tastebuds. It was just ham and cheese, alongside another cup of coffee, but it tasted so good. A few heads turned his way, and he reddened.
“I guess I was hungrier than he thought,” he replied in response to Carl’s raised eyebrow. “Stratt said that the wings made her hungrier, but I didn’t think they’d make food taste this much better.” The sandwich was gone in three bites, and Carl pulled another out of his pocket.
“You should unstrap your wings, man, that looks uncomfortable,” he told him. “Let’s get you out on deck for a minute so you can stretch.”
He did feel better once he’d wiggled out of the tie harness, giving his wings a big stretch that felt better than it had any right to. It must have shown on his face, because Carl looked faintly amused.
“You should take a few minutes and get in the air. It’ll be good for you. Even Stratt makes time for a 20 minute flight every few days or so,” Carl informed jim.
“I’m scared of heights,” Ryland mumbled. The admission was already embarrassing enough, but the sheer irony made it ten times worse now.
A look of surprise crossed the guard’s face and he actually barked a laugh, seemingly involuntarily.
“For real, man?”
“Yeah, so?” Ryland challenged, hunching his shoulders and wings defensively. “Plenty of people are scared of heights!”
“Those people can’t fly.”
“Hey, nobody asked me if I wanted these!” Grace defended himself. “They just showed up. And maybe falling to my death isn’t a physical danger anymore, but that’s not how the mind works! So no, I’m not going flying. I’ll find another form of exercise to keep the stupid things healthy.”
“You gotta fly, man. It’s what you’re meant to do,” Carl said, and his voice was oddly gentle. It reminded Ryland, oddly enough, of the one he used to talk to students when they were dealing with any one of the many emotional crises that came part and parcel with adolescence and puberty. He didn’t love the implication.
“Birds are meant to fly. I’m a genetic anomaly,” he argued.
“Don’t say that to Stratt; she’ll bite your head off,” Carl chuckled. “Seriously though, Dr. Grace. It’ll be fine. How about we come up here at night when it’s just the graveyard shift guards. I’ll send everyone away so it’s just us, and then you can just try going up a few feet at a time, okay? Stratt gets worse than usual if she doesn’t get her flight time in; I think it’s a mental health thing for winged people.”
“A sample size of one is not science, just speculation,” Grace informed him, but he knew he was beaten. His wings drooped as he conceded to Carl’s midnight ‘flying lessons’.
Heck, maybe if he practiced enough, he could get strong enough to pick the man up, flap high enough to scare him, and then drop him in the ocean. That sounded like a fair response to all the entertainment the man was getting at his expense.
_______
Flying… flying was actually pretty great. It had taken him a couple of false starts to get off the ground, but once he caught the first updraft, it was like the hit of dopamine that came with a new discovery or idea, one that consumed his brain so fully that he lost track of time, his commitments, and his body. The wind rustled against his dark feathers like it was welcoming him home, and the stars in the sky reached out to the stars in his wings like old friends. He whooped, delighted, and lost himself to the joy of it for a few moments.
And then he looked down, realized just how high up he’d gotten without paying attention, and panicked. He forgot what had been instinct mere seconds before and went careening into the ocean with a splash.
_____
They’d had to send out a lifeboat to collect him, and Carl reached out a hand to grab him, torn between amused and contrite. Grace shook out his wet feathers in the other man’s face, glaring.
“You look like a wet cat, and isn’t that ironic,” Carl replied, grumpily squeezing water out of his suit jacket.
“Don’t even start with me, you… you… you day old Walmart sheetcake! I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Ryland grumbled back, wet feathers puffing out angrily. “I can’t believe you’d betray me like this after we did science together!”
“I’ve got a hair dryer ready for when we’re back on board… is that enough of a peace offering?”
He received a whack to the side with a soaking wing as an answer.
_______
Eva Stratt stood up, checked the clock on her phone (3 am), stretched her arms over her head, and shook out her feathers. She needed to go for a flight- it had been three days already, and it had become as much of a basic need to her as sleep and food. She didn’t take nearly enough of any of them, but she knew she needed to at least give her body the bare minimum of care to allow her brain to do what needed to be done. She slipped out of her office.
She passed Dr. Grace in his lab, his face buried in a microscope, his wings strapped against his back with the new harness she’d commissioned. She knew it was made to be at least semi-comfortable when worn for long stretches of time, but even then, the security camera footage and his access badge both indicated that he’d been holed up in there for nearly 20 hours now. She knocked on the door.
“Come on,” she told him. “We both need to fly.”
“No,” he responded stubbornly, not looking up from his microscope.
“Yes,” she insisted. “Your poor wings need a break- you’re always strapping them tight against your back like you’re ashamed of them. It’s not right.”
“I’m not ashamed of them,” he sighed tiredly, finally looking up at her. “I just don’t understand why I have them, of all people. I’m not the kind of person who changes the world.”
“You don’t get to choose that,” Eva told him. “I didn’t either.”
His eyes widened in surprise. “You didn’t?”
“No,” she replied. “This job was not something I wanted. But when I was given the opportunity, I stepped up because I knew that I was the only one who could.”
“Surely there were other options if you really didn’t want to…” Dr. Grace put forth, but his voice was uncertain.
“There were no other options that I could trust to do the wrong things for the right reasons. I know this may come as a surprise to you, Dr. Grace, but I’m actually something of a bleeding heart. I’ve had to harden it to do what was necessary, but it’s still just as tender underneath, and that is what is needed for this project to succeed. There were others who would be cruel enough to make the hard decisions, and plenty of people who are kind enough to want to save humanity, but there was nobody else under consideration who was capable of making difficult and sometimes cruel decisions for selfless reasons. It’s altruism to the point of self-destruction on my end. On your end, it is curiosity to the point of bravery,” she told him.
“I’m not brave,” he denied immediately. She rolled her eyes.
“You came back. I let you go, and you came back, demanding to work on those dots because you wanted your students to have a future. I think you knew, on some level, that the sort of open-minded wonder with which you approach scientific discovery is largely lacking in the field. It’s why you left academia so spectacularly and ran to educate young people who were still wide-eyed and curious enough to see the world the way you do.” She crossed her arms, her wings elegantly half-folded in the narrow hallway.
“You told me the day we met that I ran away with my tail between my legs to teach children because they wouldn’t challenge me,” he reminded her.
“I was trying to get you to come with me, and appealing to your ego wasn’t working,” she defended.
“Well duh,” he scoffed. “I’ve been teaching middle schoolers for almost a decade. I have no ego left. I don’t understand why you think they would have been gassing me up,” he chuckled.
“The point is that I know you well enough now to know that you had pictured at least some of the consequences of that post-doctoral thesis before you ever went to UNESCO. I think you lost your temper and took it farther than you meant to, but you are the right person for this job precisely because of your willingness to challenge those norms,” she replied. “And then you cared enough to come back, partly for your students, and partly because you are simply incapable of leaving a scientific mystery unsolved. You are so relentlessly curious that you graduated high school at 16 and then sped through three degrees- one of which was a doctorate, in eight years.”
“None of this explains the wings,” he protested. “I’m just a guy.”
“The universe works in mysterious ways,” Stratt responded, shrugging. The wings moved along with her shoulders. “I know that that bothers you; the uncertainty of it all. And if the astrophage wasn’t taking up all of your attention, I’m sure you’d be experimenting on yourself like a lab rat until you figured it all out. But take it from a history major- not everything can be solved with hard science.”
“That is categorically false. If there’s anything we can’t solve with science; it’s only because we don’t have the right tools yet.”
“Agree to disagree. But I need to fly, and so do you. It’s going to start affecting your ability to function if you don’t. I’ll go with you this time.”
It was clear that he wasn’t getting out of this, so he decided that he’d follow her to the deck and, once she figured out how useless he was at it, she’d get frustrated and leave him behind to go back to his work.
She surprised him by taking his hand in hers.
“I won’t let you fall,” she promised, a look in her eyes that he hadn’t seen before. “You were made for this. You’ll see.”
________
They stayed low to the water at first, Stratt’s fingers laced in his like she promised, not letting go even as his face burned and her cheeks took on a light pink hue that was visible in the light of his wings. Ryland, learning from last time, stubbornly kept his eyes on the horizon of seemingly-endless blue sea and did not look down, and soon the brief feeling of euphoria that had overtaken him the first time snuck up again. He smiled despite himself, and even Stratt’s lips curved lightly upwards.
Despite the delight swooping in his stomach like the wind through his hair and feathers, he wasn’t quite brave enough to let go of her hand, and she didn’t push him. He knew that she probably preferred to go faster and higher, cutting through the air with the same ruthless efficiency that she did everything else, but she didn’t complain as they spent the next half hour slowly circling above the ship.
She only let go of his hand when they landed on the deck, her with a casual elegance and him with a stumble that had him flapping his wings to stay upright (and whacking Stratt on the side of her head by accident, knocking her hair loose from its clip and sending it cascading over her face). She ignored his apologies and pushed it back into place without comment.
“I told you you’d feel better,” she declared, not smugly or with any other intonation other than the conviction of someone stating an indisputable fact. “We will do this again the day after tomorrow. Get a snack and then go to bed, Doctor Grace. I will see you in the morning.”
20 hours was really nothing compared to the stints of sleeplessness that Ryland used to pull in grad school, but he thought it best to listen to her. As kind as she’d been tonight, she was right when she said that she had hardened herself to do her job, so he wasn’t foolish enough to disregard her orders.
And if she pocketed the single, sparkling feather that had come loose in her hair, neither of them mentioned it.