Work Text:
The belief in winged humans was somewhat controversial these days. The problem, as best as scholars of science and history could figure, was that they were so very rare because of the specific circumstances and actions surrounding their potential manifestation. To grow wings, one human had to, by their own actions and without meaningful assistance, single-handedly change the course of human history on a global scale. This in itself seemed a fairly straightforward condition, but the reality of it is that human achievements, by and large, are collaborative, be those achievements for better or worse. It is incredibly rare to do something on such a significant scale single-handedly.
There were cave paintings dated from around the start of the various agricultural revolutions that depicted single humans sprouting wings as they first planted seeds into the ground. The theory was that it was the first person in each area of the world to get the idea that spawned a geographical area’s agricultural revolution who grew wings, and that the rest was simply humans collaborating as they do best. There were fragmented reports from 11th century China of the first scholar to suggest variolation, whose name was long-since lost to time, who had grown their own pair of wings. Later efforts at variolation and vaccination were, by definition, built upon earlier work.
The industrial revolution, too, was largely collaborative. As human history started to reach an age where such things were recorded, our achievements, by nature, have become more collaborative. So wings passed largely into that blurry area between history and myth. Scientific and DNA studies seem to suggest that the gene for it was possible, but the method of its triggering was so very subjective, and there had simply been so many centuries since the last reported case of a winged human, that the topic was not generally explored as much as it might have been. There’s simply no way to genetically isolate and trigger a mutation that supposedly arises when someone single-handedly alters the course of history at the pivotal moment in which they accept their destiny (or in which their destiny comes to them).
Safe to say, Eva Stratt had read the stories- she was a history major after all. But it still surprised her when, upon the moment she agreed to lead the Petrova taskforce, a pair of wings emerged from her shoulder blades, the feathers knife-sharp and bloody, Petrova-line red. However, she didn’t show it; she simply mantled her new appendages elegantly around her shoulders and said “well then, we’d best get started” as the members of the UN’s secret vote stared at her in awestruck heavy silence.
_____
Eva Stratt’s wings had emerged gracefully. Ryland Grace’s wings emerged in a plywood box full of infrared light, accompanied by several thumping sounds, a series of panicked screeches, and the rustle of feathers as he nearly dropped his slide full of four (four!) astrophage cells. He couldn’t get much of a good look at the new appendages that had surprised him so thoroughly, but he could feel them. They must have been dark, but there were speckles of IR light shining that he could see through his jerry-rigged goggles, and a whirling, twisting line from one to the other.
They were strong- much stronger than his human arms or legs, and the door of the box-in-a-box suddenly burst open.
Ryland got a first-hand look at the unflappable Carl’s (which, maybe not the best word choice at the moment, considering…) face as his walkie-talkie hit the floor.
_______
Eva Stratt blinked into the camera of her tablet as Carl shakily held his own phone up to the enigma that was Ryland Grace. She hadn’t truly expected much from him, but now he was the only other human being on the planet with wings.
Her own, while vibrant, could theoretically be found on some bird species in nature. His…. could not. They were an inky, galaxy dark, and full of what she could only call twinkling, silver specks of actual light (they were emitting their own light- how? She’d even had Carl turn off the light to check. Dr. Grace himself just stood there, shell-shocked, clutching his container of the astrophage he’d apparently figured out how to breed, his glasses hanging from one ear as the wings flapped involuntarily and swept empty test tubes and beakers to the floor where they shattered, the speckles from his wings creating little rainbows of refractions off the newly-broken glass.
“Carl,” she eventually ordered, her voice steady despite her shock. “Bring me closer to the left one.”
And ohhhh… her eyes weren’t deceiving her. She wasn’t an astronomer, but she could have recognized the specific configuration of Tau Ceti anywhere now, even if it were drawn by the hand of a toddler in ketchup on a greasy diner tablecloth. So there was no mistaking that the strange dots of light in Dr. Ryland Grace’s new feathers formed the constellation on his left wing. She didn’t recognize the one on his right, but she had a feeling it would prove to be just as important.
“Holy fucking shit,” she whispered in English, startling Carl into dropping his phone. But he was sure that he still heard her when she demanded that Ryland Grace be brought into her presence immediately.
_______
Ryland hated flying. Which, he supposed, was kind of ironic now, considering the extra two limbs he still hadn’t fully processed having. He couldn’t process the irony either. He was too busy screaming his throat raw and hoping desperately that one of the handfuls of mystery pills he was tossing towards his mouth would actually land in the right place.
The wings flared out, decimating the flight jacket as soon as he’d stepped out of the hateful fighter jet. People he’d never met before were staring at him, and it hit him with a horror only somewhat muted by his ongoing shock that, as the only other person on the planet with wings besides Eva Stratt, he had effectively lost any and all of the anonymity that he so valued. He was no longer an everyman, and unless a lot of people started growing wings really freaking quickly, he never would be again.
______
Carl thought that Stratt carried the wings like she was born to them. Her wings were brilliant and pretty, but nothing you couldn’t expect to find on a particularly colorful bird. Grace, on the other hand, despite having wings that were gorgeous and sparkled with what may or may not be literal starlight, carried his new appendages with such an aura of confused haplessness that it was really more pathetic than anything, like a kitten found in a storm drain. He was trying to hunch in on himself, periodically making an aborted motion to hide his face with the wings before seeming to realize it would only make the wings themselves more obvious and returning them awkwardly to their hunched, defensive position over his shoulders. He’d hit Carl no fewer than three times during these attempts, and his apologies were as awkward and clumsy as the wings.
Stratt’s red feathers cut a stark contrast to her practical but drab clothing, settled easily and proudly, half-folded against her shoulders. She’d already had her entire wardrobe tailored to them, and Dr. Grace was still wearing the same silly science pun shirt he’d worn in the lab, now torn at the back. Stratt had tailors already working on a professional wardrobe for her new lead scientist (not that he was aware of either of those things, mind you), but in the meantime, this meeting was important enough that it would hardly matter. The scientists would only care about his accomplishments- and, inevitably, the curiosity that was his new limbs- and so Dr. Grace could stroll in shirtless and it likely wouldn’t make a lick of difference to them. Hell, he was surprisingly fit for a schoolteacher, so more than a few of them might even prefer it.
______
Ryland was trapped in a nightmare, he thought, tugging at his new feathers and trying to just wake up. Any minute now, a giggling 12-year-old would be blasting an obnoxious tiktok in his face as his 5th period laughed at him for falling asleep during his lunchbreak. He would wake up to the safety and comfort of a job he loved with the four typical limbs that he was supposed to have.
Unfortunately, pulling the feathers hurt, and he was still on an aircraft carrier in the middle of Einstein-knows where. Oh, and there was the scholar he’d called a staggering waste of carbon at the UNESCO conference nearly ten years ago now. Just great.
The man was staring at his wings, and they bristled defensively without his input, making the man startle backwards.
Fantastic, Ryland thought to himself. Making a fool of myself again.
The room was silent, staring at him and Stratt. He was trying to fool himself into thinking that they were staring at Stratt and he just happened to be there, but all the eyes aimed at the space directly behind his shoulders were kind of hard to argue against.
“This is Dr. Ryland Grace from the United States,” Eva Stratt announced into the pin-drop silence. “He figured out how to breed astrophage. Applause.”
Grace wished that he could melt into the floor. Heck, if there wasn’t a roof above his head, he’d even try his hand at flying just to be anywhere but here. His wings mantled around him without his permission, but hey, at least he could no longer see the stares. He could definitely still feel them though.
Stratt’s right wing was prodding at his left insistently, trying to get him to uncurl and face the panel of scientists. He shook his head just as insistently, not that she could see it.
“Dr. Grace, please tell them about your findings,” she sighed in exasperation while somehow making it still sound like a demand.
“Tell them to stop staring at me first,” he whispered. It was childish, but he was well past the point of caring at this point. He hadn’t slept in 36 hours, he was still nauseous from the fighter jet, and he was currently hiding behind two new body parts that he very much had not asked for.
“Alright everyone, close your eyes,” Stratt ordered. “Dr. Grace, please come out now.”
He peeked cautiously through his feathers. Everyone was, indeed, closing their eyes, so he reluctantly folded his wings back, although he still kept them perched defensively above his shoulders.
“How did you breed the astrophage?” someone asked, still with their eyes closed.
“Um, Carl and I made a mini-venus out of plywood and I put an IR light signal on one end and added some CO2, and then there was a fourth one all the sudden,” he croaked into the microphone. “Nothing special.”
“Is that when you grew the wings?” someone with a vaguely Nordic accent asked.
“Uh, yeah…” he mumbled.
“Speak properly,” Stratt whispered into his ear, followed by what she probably thought was an encouraging “keep going; you’re doing great.”
Ryland disagreed with that assessment on just about every level, but when the scarily competent lady tells you to keep talking, you keep talking.
Which is how he ended up saying ‘and then they were like ‘whoomp, there it is!’ in front of a room full of the world’s most-esteemed scientists, including the guy who roused his temper to the point of getting himself soundly ejected from academia. Which was actually the reason he eventually became a teacher, so he was actually pretty grateful for that in the long run, but still… principle of the thing and all that.
He was hiding behind his wings again, making Stratt speak into the microphone on his behalf, when Dr. Li repeated his punchline back to him and he perked up. The lights on his wings flared brightly for a moment, unseen by him but very noticeable to his audience, as he turned to Stratt and eagerly said ‘oh, I really like him!’
Stratt said ‘okay, I’ll put him on your team then’ and Dr. Li smiled in giddy satisfaction as the words caught up to Ryland.
“Wait, my what?”
“Welcome to the Petrova Task Force, Dr. Grace.”
______
A suicide mission. A suicide mission to Tau Ceti, of all places. Ryland looked at his left wing and gulped.
“Oh….” he said, blinking.
“And you’re going to breed the fuel,” Stratt replied, in case he was too shocked to fill in the blanks.
“I uh… I don’t know if I want to breed the fuel to send three people on a one-way trip to their deaths,” he protested, wings flaring out behind him. Stratt had to fight the urge to close her eyes against the flash of light.
“That is understandable, however, it is to save all of humanity, so I am asking you to make your peace with it.”
“It is for a long shot at the chance to save all of humanity, and the certainty of killing three people,” he corrected.
“Dr. Grace, you’re clearly meant to be here. You are the only other confirmed person on the planet to sprout wings in at least the last 3 centuries. And one of your wings bears the only constellation in our observable universe that is not dimming from the astrophage. Astrophage that you bred, and then promptly grew said wings. If that isn’t a clear sign from a higher power that you are meant to be here, then no such sign exists.”
“No such sign exists, and I am an atheist,” Dr. Grace responded instantly, a hint of temper in his voice. “Which, frankly, seems preferable to believing in a deity that would allow our sun to dim and all life on earth to die a slow death from freezing and starvation.”
“We are not going to argue theology at the moment,” Stratt replied. “But you are here, and you are part of this. The astronauts will all be volunteers, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That is one of literally thousands of things that I am worried about at the moment,” Dr. Grace declared, holding his stomach. “There has to be a better way to do this.”
“There is not,” Stratt told him bluntly. “But I appreciate your optimism. It will be quite useful on this project.”
“I am not feeling very optimistic,” he corrected her.
“Understandable. The sun is dying. But you’re clearly meant to fix it,” she continued, heedless of his interruption.
“That’s… uh, I think we have very different opinions on that statement.”
“Your wings say otherwise.” Stratt stared him down.
“My wings are a poorly documented, poorly understood scientific mutation. This isn’t literature, this is the end of the world as we know it, and you want me to breed the fuel to kill three astronauts just so we can go ‘see what’s up’.”
“This argument is finished. You are here and you will figure it out. I am sure once we choose the astronauts and you meet them, you will feel bolstered by their belief in this mission. We have many volunteers, and we’ll choose only the best,” Stratt replied.
“Oh great, so I get to meet the people I’m murdering,” he mumbled.
“Stop mumbling; it’s unseemly for someone in your position,” Stratt ordered.
“My position is a middle school teacher,” he half-sobbed back at her. She sighed and, deciding she’d earned the right by this point, whacked him over the head with her right wing. “Pull yourself together,” she ordered. “Don’t you want to save the world?”
“I’m not the right person to save the world.”
“You don’t get a choice. Let me put it this way- don’t you want to live? Don’t you want your students to live?”
“Well, of course…”
“Then you will do everything that you can. You told me yourself; you want to help earth if you can. You can. So you will.”
He blinked at her. He had no further argument that he could scrounge up that would stand against the apparently rock-solid face of this terrifyingly competent woman’s inexplicable faith in him. He nodded meekly.
“I’ll do my best.”
“I have no doubt. Now that that nonsense has been sorted, tell me- what constellation is on your right wing?”
Dr. Grace startled. He clearly had not actually had the time nor presence of mind to really look at it yet.
“Um, that’s 40 Eridani, I think… Does that mean anything to you?”
“Not yet, it doesn’t. Excuse me, I have to go requisition some astronomers,” the German replied, and Ryland blinked.
“Stratt, wait- is that just a fancy word for kidnap?” he called after her.
“They’ll get used to it,” she called back. “You did.”
“That is very much still up for debate!”
Stratt didn’t dignify him with a response, instead turning to Dr. Grace’s new head of security. “Carl, please get Doctor Grace a burger and then show him to his new cabin. I think he’s had enough excitement for the day.”
“I’m not a child,” he protested, running to catch up to her, nearly tripping over his own feet, and then preventing himself from face-planting by flapping his wings desperately.
“You could have fooled me, what with the flailing around like a fledgling bird that’s just fallen out of its nest. Get some sleep, Dr. Grace. You’ll be very busy come morning.”
Ryland stopped trying to keep up with Eva’s breakneck pace, and he craned his head to glare at his new wings.
“This is all your fault, you know,” he told them.
“I can show you to your room now, if you’re done anthrapomorphosizing your own body parts,” Carl offered.
“Not helping, Carl,” Dr. Grace replied tiredly.
“My job is to keep you from getting attacked. Nowhere in my contract does it say that I’m required not to make fun of you.”
“That… that’s actually helping…” Dr. Grace blinked at him, surprised by the slight recession of his oncoming crisis.
“You teach middle schoolers, so I figured it would. Sleep?”
“Fudge, yes.”
“Guess whatever you are is not nocturnal, then,” Carl replied, putting an arm around the scientist’s waist to support him as he swayed slightly on his feet.
“I hate that I thought that was funny,” the man muttered around a yawn.
“There there, little bird,” Carl soothed, patting his head.
“Oh no, you are not making that a thing.”
Carl was definitely going to make it a thing.