First, these methods are limited to systems.... 1960s flight research times.

[onceflewicarus]

Characters: Jay & Open
Date & Time: July 27th, afternoon.
Setting: The library. So sexy. :|
Summary: Jay, the great blue and black girl, probably should figure out why she passed out...
Rating: SFW?
Status: OPEN

Comments

[staticsnap]

Once, when he had been very small - maybe five or six, because he still had trouble remembering whether the bunny went around the tree or into the hole first when tying laces - Ben had found a bird's nest. It was the year that they had moved to the seventh floor of the apartment complex that he couldn't remember ever not living in. He didn't remember why, exactly; had it been the pipes? Ben knew there had been a problem with the water because on Sunday mornings, half-past ten when the sun had bled into the shabby rooms and demanded waking, Uncle Peter would stand over the kitchen sink with the coffee boiler in hand as the water ran, a weary and low anger look on his face as he waited for it to go clear. Had that been the same year

[onceflewicarus]

She jumped. Jay couldn't exactly help it- she may be able to mimic sounds, but by no means was she able to hear them better than anyone else. The pencil that was riding between her teeth flew out and she turned to face her shock. Both wings pinned themselves to her back- something that, while painful, a fact she was getting used to.

"Jesus Christ kid. You scared me." Jay whispered (after all, it was a library) and stood, only just slow enough not to tip over the chair.

"Didn't they teach you it wasn't nice to sneak up on someone?"

[staticsnap]

Ben gave a shrug as he came around the edge of the shelf, propping hip and shoulder against it's broad side. He seemed reluctant to come close, cautious as he would be around a spooked and wounded animal.

"Which they?" he asked, eyes following hers as she stood. "The same ones that taught you not to rest after getting hurt? Because they're not so good, it seems."

[onceflewicarus]

"It's not as bad as it looks." Jay assured the boy. She knew a Ben and Erik had 'saved' her, but she had yet to put a face to the name. So instead of thanking him (as she eventually intended) she did her best to down play it.

"I just fell a bit the other day." She poked a bruise on her arm experimentally. "See? They don't even hurt."

He looked young. Younger than even Jay- which meant he had to be... what. Fifteen? Sixteen? Barely old enough to have his voice breaking. Just a kid really. "What's it to you anyway?"

[staticsnap]

What was it to him? Was she kidding? Ben stared for a long moment at Jay trying to decide if he had misunderstood because he did that sometimes, missed out on a point or a punchline and had to backtrack and run through a conversation again and sift out meaning. There was no great harm in it but he wanted to make sure that the onus wasn't on him for this one, before he said anything further.

But no, she seemed perfectly serious. And it bothered him.

The boy walked over with a deliberate ease that he did not feel and put his hands on the table, supporting his weight as he leaned closer.

"You didn't just fall a bit," Ben said evenly, his eyes burning beneath his wildly static hair. "You fell a lot. You fell so much that you practically broke yourself into a hundred pieces. You fell so much that I thought you were dead."

Whatever Jay remembered, it clearly wasn't from the same day that Ben would never forget. Not if she thought it was such a small thing to dismiss.

[onceflewicarus]

"Oh. Ben."

And now she had a face.

"I'm so sorry I scared you." She walked around the table as if to hug him, stopping only long enough to gain his permission. "Hank told me what you did. Thank you Ben. Really."

What she remembered? It was clear up until about 1,450 feet or so. She remembers the air becoming thin, she remembers getting out of the up draft, she remembers falling briefly and blood. Jay remembered the blood. But after that? That next day of screaming and crying and begging for them to kill her? She only remembered moments, and none were so clear as to haunt her in her dreams, very much unlikely those who she had been screaming at.

[staticsnap]

"I wasn't scared," Ben insisted quietly, even as his arms looped around Jay with care; he didn't want to give cause for her hurting more. "I was... severely alarmed."

A patent lie because his terror had been palpable but the chances of her having been aware of that were slim to none. That was the one good thing about near-fatal injury.

As he pulled carefully back from Jay's embrace, Ben scrunched his face up. "Who's Jeb?"

[onceflewicarus]

"Jeb?" Jay flushed at the question, a blotchy appearance considering her rainbow of hues already present. "My little brother." She gave him a solid once-over when he was pulled away from her arms. Ben was on the shorter side, bowl-cut hair, big eyes and an awkward-ness about him? Yeah. It was reasonable to mistake the two if one was drunk or had taken a good bash to the head.

"I suppose you kind of look like him. He's probably younger than you though. Not much shorter though." She took a step back then, and reached up to tousle his hair good-naturally. "It's alright if you were scared though. I know Alex was, and Hank said that I looked pretty bad. But I'm better now. See?" She raised her hands up to show the lack of just about anything besides the discoloration which she couldn't hide if she tried. (Which she did.) "It's part of what makes me me."

She may have been treating him like if he was Jeb, minus the tighter hug and even more apologies for freaking him out. Ben was older than that, and at the Mansion to boot. He could

[staticsnap]

That made sense, then. Jay had been so out of it after colliding with the hard-packed ground that he'd worried she'd permanently done herself cerebral damage. That had been before Alex'd filled him in on her healing abilities, of course - and the boy wondered, then, just how far that gift extended. What type of wounds could she repair? Would she have been able to claw herself out of a coma, knit together the coraled lobes of the brain

[onceflewicarus]

"But I'm not an airplane." Jay countered, still smiling a little. "I'm a bird." She even gave her wings a few experimental flaps just to prove it. Not so much as to expand or knock over any of the bookshelves, just to prove her point. As she spoke, or well, whispered Jay did her very best not to let him pay attention to the fact that she was hurt, or immortal, or any of those annoying facts.

"But I called Erik Mom?" She paused, glancing out to the window for a moment. "Well I suppose they do look rather a lot alike, though he has better hair."

Changing the subject? Jay? Noooo. She would never do that.

[staticsnap]

"Even more important, then," Ben countered as a soft curl of displaced air ruffled his hair, sent over like a reassuring caress by the flapping of her wings. It would have been, too, if not for the way Jay's face tightened ever so slightly in discomfort at the movement. "Birds don't have reinforced skeletons

[onceflewicarus]

"You don't want me to fly by myself?" Jay asked, clarifying his request, no. demand with a kindly mocking tone. "Are you offering to go up with me?"

He looked so much like Alex at that moment, she would have sworn they were brothers. Hell, he even sounded like he was implying she fell on purpose just like Alex had. So instead of pushing him further, digging at him like only a big sister would (after all, he was not Jeb. He was not Jeb) she took a step back, and retrieved one of the notebooks.

Inside was a file and in that file was a stack of x-rays of various parts of her body, focusing the most on her wings. "Here. Come here- I want to show you something."

She spread the sheets out on the desk without his yes or no answer, and pointed to the image of her shattered left wing. "I'm hollow. These kinds of things will happen all the time. I just gotta figure out my limits."

[staticsnap]

The offer for a buddy pass on the Guthrie 747 was met with a look of pinned uncertainty. On the one hand, it kind of sounded awesome. On the other, she kind of had a terrible track record. Ben wanted neither to sound like an overeager beaver nor insult her so he wisely settled for remaining awkwardly quiet. It usually worked. People took one look at his wide eyes and waiting face and moved on

[onceflewicarus]

"I've been flying off and on since I was twelve Ben, I don't usually get hurt this bad." Jay explained, trying to calm his nerves away from the circus-idea. "I can hold my own up there most times."

She picked up another image, unconsciously moving that arm back and forth- just in case the healing hadn't fully taken yet. "What does copacetic mean?"

It would figure the kid would have a larger vocabulary than she, heck. He probably even understood the book she had been crawling through.

At the question about what happened, Jay shrugged her better shoulder. Hank had asked her, Erik had, as well as Alex. Each time her answer stayed the same- not for the sake of a rehearsed story, but because she just didn't know.

"Alex figures I ran out of air up there, and Hank tried to explain 'terminal velocity' to me... but what I'm guessing is that while I was up there? I stopped running into birds after a few hundred feet. I'm guessing me falling was why. I'm not some jet plane- and I can't pretend to be."

[staticsnap]

"It's like groovy. Mark Allen used to say it." Ben said with a shrug. "His older brother wrote for a newspaper and he went to California and spent three months living with a bunch of discharged Army guys and when he came back to Detroit he said he'd rather die than be stuck in a cage and then he left for the coast again which drove Mrs. Allen crazy. And anyway he was always saying it and so Mark started saying it and I went to school with Mark."

With that squared away Ben turned his attention to the films spread out on the table, hovering at Jay's side. He knew all too well the frustration of getting down to the bare-boned hows and whys of their powers, though Jay's current approach was more academic and less catastrophic. It was probably the sort of thing that he ought to be doing.

"What about a... a suit or something?" Ben's brow creased. "Like how Sean's wings work with his mutation to allow him to fly. You just need something that lets you fly higher."

[onceflewicarus]

"Have you ever been 10,000 feet up?" Jay asked, turning to face Ben a little more. "I think you'd like it, though I'm not sure how you'd fare up there. You can see the curve of the earth."

That last fact was something she had only just learned. An idea that she knew in theory but never in practice. It was- for a lack of a better word, amazing up there- cold. But amazing.

"I say this because. This house for example? It only goes 500 feet or so in the air, most places don't even go over a thousand or two. I'm not sure I'll ever need to go higher than 10,000. So I'm mostly concerned with just getting the strength to do it, and maybe the smarts to know when and where to stop." At the word 'strength' Jay flexed an arm with a cheeky smile. Due to her anatomy, already she had more definition than your average jock, and far more than a girl her age typically would. It wasn't that she lifted weights constantly, but when your body refuses to keep body fat? Other things show up.