Chapter Text
The sky above the shopping district was the particular shade of blue that made Scar feel like the world had been freshly painted just for him. He was mid-whistle, hands clasped behind his back, mentally redesigning the roofline of his latest build for the fourth time that morning, when something fell out of it.
Not rain. Not an item drop. Not even one of Mumbo's ill-fated flying machines shedding components on the way down.
Something with wings.
The sound it made when it hit the ground was not a sound Scar would ever be able to fully un-hear. A wet, heavy crack, like green wood splitting, followed by the specific silence that meant whatever had fallen was not getting back up on its own. He was already moving before his brain had properly caught up, his walking stick forgotten, propelling himself forward with an urgency that sent a flare of pain up his already bad leg and which he ignored entirely.
It had come down in the gap between two of the market stalls, half-hidden behind a stack of decorative barrels that had toppled in the impact. Scar rounded the corner and stopped.
"Oh," he said, very quietly. "Oh, no."
The figure on the ground was small, crumpled in a way that suggested every joint in its body had briefly forgotten its purpose. Brown hair fanned out across the dirt. A face Scar didn't recognise, slack and pale, cheek pressed to the earth, eyes shut. And wings - great sprawling things that Scar had not been expecting, and what he was looking at was wrong in a way he couldn't immediately articulate, wrong the way a song played in the wrong key was wrong, wrong in his stomach before he could name it.
The feathers were gone. Or nearly gone. What remained was sparse and ragged, a scattering of muted reddish-brown quills clinging to bare, pinkish skin, like the last leaves on a tree at the end of a bad autumn. The wings themselves were sprawled at angles they should not have been at. One lay crumpled beneath Grian's body. The other was extended fully, bent at a joint midway along its length in a direction joints were not designed to bend.
Scar knelt down, which was not elegant given his leg, and pressed two fingers to the side of Grian's neck. The pulse there was fast and light, fluttery as a trapped bird. Alive. Definitely alive.
"Okay," Scar said, to himself, to the stranger, to the empty market stalls around him. "Okay, okay, okay." He took a breath. "X. I need X."
He gathered Grian up as carefully as he could, trying not to move the extended wing more than necessary, trying not to think about the sound it had made when it moved even a little. Grian was lighter than he expected. He did not wake up. His head lolled against Scar's shoulder and he made no sound at all, which Scar found more frightening than any noise could have been.
Scar had always moved fast when he needed to, bad leg or no. He moved fast now.
---
Xisuma looked up from his workbench when Scar came through the door, registered what Scar was carrying, and was on his feet before Scar had made it three steps inside.
"What happened."
"Fell," Scar said. "From the sky. I heard it, X, it was- can you just- tell me where to put him down, somewhere flat-"
"Here." Xisuma cleared the surface of the workbench with one arm, scattering tools and components across the floor without a second glance. "Carefully. Watch the-"
"I know, I know." Scar laid Grian down, keeping one hand under his head until it rested against the cleared surface. Up close and in better light, Grian's pallor was alarming. The skin around his closed eyes had a bruised, sunken quality. His lips were dry and slightly cracked.
Xisuma's visor was already scanning. His hands moved over the damaged wing without touching it, reading what he could remotely.
"The feathers," Scar said. "That's not- that's not normal, right? That's not how wings are supposed to look?"
"No." Xisuma's voice was careful. Controlled. "That is not how they are supposed to look." A pause. "Scar, did you see where he fell from? How high?"
Scar thought about the shape against that freshly-painted blue sky, the trajectory, the way it had been falling rather than gliding, falling with no attempt at correction. "High," he said. "Very high."
Xisuma looked at him over his shoulder, visor reflecting the room back in miniature. "I'm going to take him to my base. I have better equipment there." He was already moving, already picking Grian up himself, already heading for the door. "You should go home, Scar."
"I want to-"
"I know you do." Not unkind. "I'll let you know when there's something to know. Go home."
Scar stood in the empty workshop and listened to the sound of his own breathing for a moment. Then he retrieved his walking stick from where he'd apparently dropped it somewhere between the market stalls and the door, and he went home, and he did not sleep at all that night.
---
Grian woke up wrong.
Not slowly, not gently, not with the gradual reassembly of self that usually accompanied waking. He came back all at once, every sense arriving simultaneously and screaming. Light. Too much light. Smell- wrong smells, not his smells, nothing he recognised. Sound, nearby, something moving, something alive and close. Ceiling above him that was not his ceiling.
He was off the surface he'd been laid on before he was fully conscious, before he'd decided to move, some part of him that operated below the level of thought already in motion. His back hit the wall. His wings- a bolt of sensation so intense it nearly put him back down, a full-body flinch that rattled his teeth. His wings- his wings were wrong, something was wrong with them, and the room was wrong, and the smell was wrong, and there was someone in the doorway.
Grian's lips pulled back.
The figure in the doorway stopped moving. Raised both hands, slowly. The visor caught the light. "Easy," said a voice, filtered through a helmet's modulator. "Easy. You're safe. You're- you're all right. No one is going to hurt you-"
The sound that came out of Grian was not a word. It was something older than words. He pressed harder against the wall, feeling the solid stone at his back, cataloguing exits, cataloguing the distance between himself and the figure, calculating.
"Okay," Xisuma said. Still in that same low, careful register. "Okay. I'm going to step back." He did, moving slowly, keeping his hands visible. The door clicked shut begind him. Grian tracked him until he was no longer in the frame, listening, reading the sounds, waiting for the trick.
The trick didn't come. After a long time, the footsteps moved further away.
Grian stayed pressed against the wall until his legs ached from the position, reading the room, not letting himself look at his wings again because the first look had been enough. He looked instead at the space he was in, mapped it, memorised it. One door. Two windows, shuttered. Stone construction, well-built, no obvious weak points. The surface he'd been lying on- a bed, he thought distantly, a proper bed with linens- had a frame, had legs, had edges that could serve various purposes. There was a table. A chair. A small stack of items on the table that he recognised as food and water without the information fully penetrating to any level that felt like it mattered.
He didn't touch the food. He didn't touch the water. He didn't go back to the bed.
He paced.
---
Xisuma observed through the small barred observation window in the corridor, the one he'd installed for exactly this sort of situation, though he'd hoped never to have cause to use it. Through it he could see the room's occupant moving in tight, agitated circuits, arms drawn in, what remained of his wings carried high and rigid in a posture that communicated distress as clearly as any language. Every few passes he would stop, angle toward the door, still completely, then resume moving.
The food and water on the table had not been touched.
Xisuma had tried twice more to speak through the door. The first attempt had produced another of those not-quite-human sounds, a warning more felt than heard. The second had produced nothing at all, which was somehow worse.
He sent a brief message to Scar: The hybrid woke up. Working on it. He did not elaborate. He wasn't sure how to elaborate, and there was nothing useful Scar could do from a distance in any case.
Doc appeared in the corridor around midday, having received a rundown by both Scar and X. He stopped beside Xisuma and looked through the observation window without speaking for a moment.
"Hmm," said Doc.
"Yes," said Xisuma.
"Has he eaten."
"No."
"Drunk anything."
"No."
Another silence. Through the window, the small pacing figure completed another circuit, paused at the far wall, turned.
"His wings," Doc said.
"I know."
"That's not moulting."
"I know."
Doc folded his arms across his chest, the mechanical one making a faint pneumatic sound as it settled. Xisuma's responses seemed distant, automatic, it mildly worried Doc. "Any idea how long he's been like this? Before he fell, I mean."
Xisuma didn't answer that immediately, because the honest answer was no, and he had no way of knowing, and the not-knowing sat uncomfortably in his chest in a way he couldn't fully explain.
"I'm going to try going in," he said instead.
Doc looked at him with mild surprise. "He's been threatening everyone who comes near the door."
"I know."
"He tried to bite me through the door gap."
"I saw that too." Xisuma kept his eyes on the observation window. "He's been still for almost ten minutes. That's the longest he's been still since he woke up." He paused. "I'm going to try."
Doc stepped back, which Xisuma chose to interpret as concession rather than preparation to watch something go badly wrong.
He moved to the door. Set his hand on the handle. Through the observation window, the room was still, the figure against the far wall motionless, face angled slightly away. Xisuma opened the door.
---
In the fraction of a second it took Xisuma to process that the room was no longer still. That the figure against the far wall had ceased to be still approximately when the door handle had begun to turn. Grian was already moving.
Not toward him. Past him. Grian was a compact and efficient mover when he had reason to be, and he had reason to be now, ducking under Xisuma's outstretched arm with an agility that was frankly remarkable given the state he was in. One shoulder clipped the doorframe, producing a sharp inhale that might have been pain, and then he was in the corridor, bare feet on stone, already accelerating.
Xisuma turned. Started to shout after him.
Grian ran directly into Doc.
Doc was a large man. This was not always relevant information, but it was relevant now, because the impact of a running Grian against Doc's chest produced a brief moment of confusion and flailing from one party, and absolutely no movement whatsoever from the other. Doc's arms came around, reflexively, and held.
Grian reacted to being held the way a wild thing reacts to being caught. He twisted, writhed, found no give, and escalated. His teeth found Doc's forearm, the flesh one, and bit down with a single-minded intensity that suggested he was not particularly thinking about consequences.
"Ah, that's... that's painful" said Doc, in a tone of careful restraint. He did not let go.
Grian bit harder. His nails raked at Doc's arms, his shoulders, wherever he could reach. A sound came out of him that was partly a scream and partly something without a name in any language Xisuma knew. His feet scrabbled against the floor looking for purchase to push himself backward, found none.
"Ah," said Doc again. Still holding. There was blood now, soaking into his sleeve from where the teeth had found their mark, and more from the scratches, and Doc's expression was something carefully neutral, attentive, a man performing an experiment and recording the results. "X," he said, in a completely normal conversational volume, as though nothing in particular was happening, "I think I have him."
Xisuma crossed the corridor in three strides. "Don't let go."
"Was not planning to, this behaviour is unusual for an Avian NPC, even a hybrid, we need to understand what went wrong."
The struggling didn't stop. If anything, it intensified for a moment before exhaustion began to do the work that reason couldn't, the frantic energy spending itself against an obstacle that wouldn't yield, the sounds becoming less wild and more desperate. Grian was shaking. Xisuma could see it from where he stood, a full-body tremor that had nothing to do with temperature.
"We've got you," Xisuma said, keeping his voice as level as he could manage. "We've got you. It's all right."
Grian made a sound like something breaking. He did not stop struggling, but it was different now, less explosive, more the automatic movement of something that had run out of fight but not yet caught up to that fact.
Doc held on. His sleeve was thoroughly ruined. He appeared unbothered by this.
"X," he said quietly, over the top of Grian's head. "He needs to sleep."
"I'm aware."
"And water. Before sleep, probably."
"Yes. Thank you, Doc."
"You're going to need to be the one to take him. He might bite me again if I shift my grip and I think he's nearly out." Doc's voice was pragmatic, informational. "Also I am getting blood on him and that seems counterproductive."
It was, in fact, not so simple as taking him, because Grian fought that too, one last ragged attempt that produced more scratches across Xisuma's forearms before whatever reserves he'd been running on finally gave out entirely. He went heavy and still in stages, like a building settling, tension leaving him incrementally, hands finally uncurling from the fists they'd been making.
Xisuma held him up. Behind him, he heard Doc doing something practical with his injured arm, pragmatic noises that suggested bandaging rather than anything more urgent.
"Right," Xisuma said, to no one in particular, to the corridor, to the general situation. He adjusted his grip, took the full weight. Grian's head tipped forward against his chest. "Back to bed, then."
He carried him back through the door, back to the bed, laid him down again with the same care Scar had used hours ago and half the server away. This time, he pulled a chair to the doorway, to just outsidr the room, sat down in it, and stayed.
He did not leave when Grian's breathing evened out. He did not leave when the base went quiet around him. He watched the rise and fall of a too-thin chest, the occasional flinch and shudder that moved through the small sleeping form, and he thought about the bare wings, the bare wings, and the fact that whoever this NPC was, whatever had happened to them, they had not ended up here by accident.
He stayed.