Lucie

When Vinny and I finally returned to the house, which felt like it took a millennium, Caprice was outside Cian's door. "Well," she said as Vinny and I hurried towards her, Vinny unfazed from sprinting up the stairs, while I was trying to catch my breath. "He should be fine soon as he gets over his dignity and quits acting like a teenage girl."

I narrowed my eyes. "As a teenage girl I take offense from that."

Caprice smiled sweetly, but it was the kind of sweet that caused an upset stomach. "Oh, right. Don't worry, doll, you're different. Now, is there anything else you losers need me to do? I missed my appointment already, so thanks."

"He's alive, right?" asked Vinny. His hands were curling into fists and then uncurling again, a nervous gesture that I wondered if he'd had when he'd been alive. His eyes looked through Caprice, burning into the door. I felt as if he was trembling beside me. "Please tell me he's alive."

"If he was dead, you would no longer be wandering the earth, genius," remarked Caprice. She removed a lollipop from her purse, tore the wrapper away, and popped it in her mouth, speaking around it. "Did you forget about the deal the Order made with you two? Cian dies, you move on. That's how it works."

"Oh," Vinny replied. "Yeah."

With that, Caprice dropped a wink at us and sashayed down the hall and to the stairs, her only goodbye message a muffled, "Good luck."

A few moments later, the front door slammed shut behind her, echoing boldly into the high-ceilinged foyer. I turned to Vinny. "Where have your parents been this whole time? You'd think they'd be concerned..."

"Dad's probably at work. Mom's probably at some event, a fundraiser or a book club or something. Maybe even a baking class. Who knows with that woman," Vinny replied, then reached out a hand for the door to Cian's bedroom, hesitated, and brought it back. I looked up at him with a risen eyebrow, and his eyes met mine, the expression on his face kind. "You should go. He'll want to talk to you."

"But, Vinny, you're his brother--"

"Shh," he said, shaking his head at me. "I know. About you and Cian. It's obvious."

"What's obvious?"

He shot me a look that was both withering and suggestive, and I got the message.

"Go," Vinny said, voice more plaintive now. A string of my heart was plucked like the strings of a violin at Vinny's desperateness. "You can touch him, make contact with him, and I can't. I think this is a job for you to handle alone."

"I..."

He cocked his head at me, a silent order.

I said, "Fine," and opened the door, stepping inside.

When I closed myself inside Cian's room, I got the immediate sensation that could only come from being alone with him and knowing it--a pleasant prickling on the back of my neck, the thrum of my heart like hummingbird wings in my chest, the scent of him in my nostrils. Everything in the room was a bit of him: the posters, the unmade bed, the curtains fluttering in the afternoon wind. Everything was Cian and I felt it like a song in my blood.

He was at the front of the bed, legs dangling over the edge, toes brushing the floor. His eyes were fixed on the window in front of him, at the sunlight splitting his room into half shadow and half light. In fact, that's what he was himself: some parts of him lit up by infinitesimal shafts of light, highlighted rectangles of skin and crevices in the folds of his clothes, other parts of him untouched by such flame, hidden in the dark.

He was eerie and he was quiet and he was what I was afraid he would be: someone I didn't recognize.

Where was the smile on his face, where were the lyrics of a song floating past his lips, where was the ease of the way his hands touched my skin, the fearlessness in which he entrusted into everything?

"Cian," I said, because what else what I supposed to say?

There was a blanket around his shoulders, hiding his back from me. At the sound of my voice, he flinched and drew it up closer, looking at me. The inky color of his eyes from before had cleared, and now a cloudless sky stared back at me, healthy and comfortably normal. I felt myself exhale. "I'm fine," he said, but between the words there was the intermittent popping of his knuckles. "I'm...fine, Lucie. Really. Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

His eyes darted away. "Like I'm not me anymore."

"Don't act like that and then maybe I won't," I countered firmly, stepping further into the room. Cian's eyes blazed, but I wasn't sure if it was with anger.

A moment of silence passed before I realized he was holding something.

It was nestled in his palms, stark black against his pallid skin. It was a wispy object, like something created with meticulous upward brushstrokes: a feather. I bit my lip.

"They took my wings," Cian said. "They're gone. I don't...I don't know how to..."

He exhaled as if it hurt him to speak, his eyes fluttering shut.

I listened to the silence.

"Let me see," I told him, very softly. His eyes, moist with unshed tears, shot up to mine, and he shook his head. "Cian. Let me see."

"What is that going to do?" he demanded, teeth gritting. "It's just another set of scars to add to the collection, isn't it? More proof that I'm never going to stop messing up."

"If you're not messing up, you're not trying hard enough," I countered, and he hissed under his breath: no words, just a malignant sound, a frustrated ejection of air that said more than any language could.

I slid onto the bed, behind him. There were no words between us as I reached around his shoulders, feeling his delicate fingers brush against mine as I wrapped my hands in the cloth of his quilt. I could feel my pulse hammering in my chest, could hear Cian's breath and the fan and the birds outside. I thought of the crow in the graveyard, of the rose, of second chances.

The blanket fell.

Cian winced and buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking.

The skin of his back was still red and irritated, though the rash had cleared up. Beginning on either of his shoulder blades were long, ragged scars, arcing down towards the middle of his back, still open and red and pulsing, vivid and brutal reminders of what was once there and what would never be replaced. Despite myself, I exhaled a little, unable to imagine the pain he was in. Without my wings, I'm nothing...

"Does it hurt?" I asked, knowing it was a dumb question. I pulled the blanket back up around his shoulders, more relieved that I could no longer see the scars than I'd ever tell him. My arms slipped around his shoulders, and he breathed out, settling into my embrace.

"Not as much as it should. I'm numb all over. I don't...I don't know how to feel, Lucie..." The pain in his voice told me it was the truth.

His fingers reached up and held mine; his skin felt warm in my hands, comforting and sweet like home. "I'm scared," he admitted gruffly. "I'm scared, Lucie. I don't know how to be the person I was before I had wings. Those pictures in the trophy case? That kid that I was before? I don't know how to be him again. I'm in some in between land...I'm myself but yet I'm so far from who I'm used to being. And, in the end, I'm just so pissed. At Caprice, at the Order, at--"

"Me?"

He didn't hesitate to grip my hands more firmly, shaking his head. "No. Never. I could never hold a grudge against you, Lucie, never. But I just can't help feeling like I'm useless now."

His voice was like acid, his shoulders going rigid. "I'm just some kid with scars and a sixth sense. I'm nothing if I'm not an angel. I'm nothing if I don't have my wings."

I'm nothing if I don't have my wings.

I sighed, trying to calm the thundering beat of my heart. How could I make him understand? How could I make him understand that he was much more than nothing to me, much more than nothing to his little brother, much more than nothing to the world? Did losing his wings truly shatter his pride that much?

I slid out from behind him, though he was begrudging to let me go. I came around, facing him then, and, still seated on his bed's edge, he looked up at me, dark blue eyes shimmering. I stood so close to him that I could feel his body heat, could smell the sharp but sweet scent of his shampoo. His lips enchanted me. What I would give to kiss them again.

"Liar," I announced, slipping my hands into his. His bare chest heaved, still sheened in sweat. His face was pale as a result of his still recovering health, but it went paler at my words. "You don't see it, do you? You don't see that, angel or not, with or without wings, you're always going to be something to the people that are important. Your wings are not you, Cian. I...I fell...I fell in love with you for you, not for your wings."

I waited, my tongue feeling swollen and weird from uttering the word love. Cian's eyes widened, his fingers going slack in mine. He peered up into my face in disbelief. "W-What did you just say?"

I closed my eyes, felt tears staining my cheeks. "I love you."

Cian said nothing for a while. Then he said, voice as gelid as an icicle, "No, you don't. You're not that stupid, Lucie."

I opened my eyes, blinked at him. Stared. Blinked again. "I'm not that stupid? What are you saying? I've fallen for you, Cian. I don't care what you say. If I'm stupid to love you, then fine. I want to be an idiot and I want to be a dumbass and I want to have the lowest IQ in the world, as long as I get to love you and get to stay with you. So please, Cian, please don't push me away. I just want to belong to you."

"That's not how this works. You don't belong to anyone," he said after a beat. His eyes were like a telescope, searching my face for evidence of lies, of which he found none.

"Maybe not. But for God's sake, my heart's got your name written all over it."

He dropped his head, exhaling and rubbing his eyes. His thumb scrubbed over my knuckles, one by one, mountains and valleys, mountains and valleys. "Lucie..."

I lifted his chin in my hands, forcing his eyes to mine. He breathed my name again, like a prayer to the gods, the stars in his eyes like the ones envisioned in a work of art. Everything of him was art, something dreamed and complex and authentic and something that was imagined and something that was real. Cian was real, and I loved him. "How many times do I have to say it for you to believe it, huh? How many times do I have to tell you I love your smile and I love your eyes and I love how you cut your pancakes and how you sing Beatles songs and I love your hair, and, my God, I love your scars, all of them, because they're you, Cian, and I love you."

And, because I couldn't wait for him anymore, I scooted forward, framing his face with my hands and tipping his chin up, pressing my mouth to his. He exhaled in either desire or surprise or both, and returned the gesture, reaching out to pull me closer, my hips pressing against him. My hands roved over the terrain of his body, brushing the skin of his bare chest, his heart pulsating beneath his breastbone. His hair was like silk wound in my fingers, his tongue gently caressing my own, the taste of him exploding in my mouth. My tastebuds were on fire, and was so was my skin, alive with the sensation of his fingers exploring my lower back and my waist and my hair.

He stood up, and I craned my neck, reaching further at his increased height. Our lips separated, and I sighed, my cheeks red and flaming. The moment was just as intoxicating as I remembered it; my blood was humming with an electric current only Cian's kiss could initiate. "Say it again," he told me, all the breath gone out of his lungs but into his voice. "Just...I want to hear your voice. Say it again."

His fingers were tangled in the curls of my hair, calloused thumbs brushing drunkenly over the nape of my neck. I felt him with every inch of me. "I love you, Cian."

There was the slightest of smiles on his face as he pulled me to him again, almost lifting me off my feet with the strength of his embrace. He buried his face in my hair, hugging me closer and closer, hands fisting in my windbreaker. I felt his breath stir the tiny curls near my ear. "I'm sorry for what I said. I'm just scared," he admitted. "But I can't deny that something feels...right about this."

He hesitated a moment, letting out an exhale as if it was the first one he'd breathed in years. "I love you, too, Lucie," he told me, frowning for a second before his expression cleared, "and never doubt that I do."