Message-ID: <17156eli$9811120531@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Archived-At: From: perigryn.removethis@earthlink.net (Rosemerry) Subject: Fear & Desire Pt 1 (M/F, sci fi, virgin) Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Path: qz!not-for-mail Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam Approved: X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded X-Story-Submission: X-Original-Message-Id: Notes: this one got a little long, and I got more interested in the character and story than in the sex (okay, this actually happens to me a lot ;)). I think it's worth the wait! For the record, phobias don't really work like this. It's just not that easy to get rid of them. Also, I don't really consider this story sci fi. But "fantasy" is a tricky word in this context. ;) Those who are under legal age or likely to be offended, please don't read this. Copyrights remain with me. Archiving is okay, if no money is made, with no alterations including credit and statements. Feedback would be appreciated. -------------------------------------- FEAR & DESIRE Cassie had her last relatively good day in mid-October. She loved her job; it was modest but she did it well, and the feeling of competence and cameraderie she got there was rare and heady wine for her. She was the third daughter of a rich businessman, an embarassment and a blot on the family escutcheon, having been born with neither ambition nor brainlessness. Her childhood seemed to her now like one long horror of expensive gifts and cold shoulders. Had she been capable, she would have become a spoiled brat, and gladly too; but it was not in her. Drifting unanchored through college and various attempts to marry her off, which she remembered as a revolving series of identical young men parading past her with identically unimaginative bouquets of flowers and identically enormous wallets, she had eventually foundered up here. Now, all but ignored by her money-sending father and unsure whether or how to mourn the death of her mother, Cassie had done the first two real things in her life. First, to feed her biggest hunger, she had taken the modest job as a cashier in a failing herbal essence shop downtown. And second, to answer her biggest fear, she had moved as close to it as possible: to this cozy apartment in the well-bred section of town, on the thirty-second floor. As she came home from work on her last relatively good day, after a twenty-minute drive spent musing on the astonishment of having no less than four people who knew her name and called her part of their team, she took the elevator up. Surrounded by mirrors, she looked at herself without comprehension or desire, invariably alone, until the bell dinged politely and she stepped out on the top floor. The top floor was hushed, quiet, breathy with air conditioning and subdued with ferns, just like the other thirty-one floors. She walked down the hallway, too well accustomed after eight weeks to feel uncomfortable in the silence, and came to her own door. Entering, she shed her coat, purse, shoes, earrings in a path through the entryway... past the living room couches... by the divan against the back wall until she was standing, as ready as she'd ever be, before the sliding glass door to the miniature balcony/deck outside. "Okay, Cassie," she said, hoping the sound of her voice would give her courage. "You know you can do this." She opened the door. Just that was frightening. The wind outside was no more than a gentle breeze at surface level. Here, it whistled with cheerful malice, its sounds waiting for her once the smooth glass door was out of the way. Cassie flinched, then pretended she hadn't. "Let's go," she told herself. Herself didn't follow instructions. There was nothing visible past the balcony's tall railing but city; most of it deathly far away. Was there the slightest trembling of the railway, or was it her heart? At last she forced herself to reach out and touch the walls on either side of the opening. That much accomplished, she was able to move her foot--not to lift it off the spotless carpeting, but to move it--to the metal grooves in which the sliding door ran. It quivered there, as she strained to put more and more weight on it, not looking for the moment when it became a step. When it was a step, irrevocably, she made an awkward scooching motion of her other foot, drawing it closer to the door. Outside, altitude waited, like a terrible monster preparing to pounce. Its name was DOWN and it was more fearsome than anything the earth had yet conceived. Even her father didn't scare her more, or so she'd prefer to think. Death didn't hold a candle. "Come on," she said to herself. Her voice was hoarse. "One more step. You can do it." The decision confronted her: take one quick step and be outside on the concrete, or move more slowly? The first would get this horror over with more quickly, but could invite panic. The other option was a slow and murderous terror. Either way, Down was out there. Waiting. She put her foot on the concrete. Her fingers gripped the sides of the doorway hard enough to turn them white. She let the foot rest there; that much of her was outside. There was no room in her mind for considerations of how silly she must look, one foot out, the rest of her inside as if she were being held back by some intruder. There was only fighting to keep that foot there. Once that battle was done, she'd consider putting another foot out. One thing at a time. But her nerve broke. Cassie shuddered back from the opening, hardly aware she was moving until she fetched up against the arm of the couch. She huddled against it and breathed for a few moments, turning her face into the harsh-smelling material of the upholstery. Finally she reached out her foot, now perfectly willing to obey her, and slid the glass door shut, closing out the sound of the hungry breeze outside. "Good job," she said to herself. "Last time you didn't even get a toe out the door. You'll be ready to walk out and look down in-- oh, say a year." She laughed shakily and rose to prepare a plain supper for herself. The storm that came to town that evening was no more blustery than usual; in October, the weather in the city was fierce. Thunder and lightning and chance of hail, the slick newsman had said that afternoon. Rain and high winds. Of course the winds would be higher at the tops of the skyscrapers, but the weatherman had neglected to mention this as always. "It does shudder a little when the wind blows hard, Miss," her landlord had told her, leaning back in his chair and eyeing her without the slightest concern for whether she took the apartment or the next rich father's daughter did. "It's designed to do that. Protects against earthquakes." At the time, Cassie had signed the contract against her own advice, telling herself she was crazy but unable to argue with the apparently causeless intent that gripped her. And she had found that it was perfectly true; the highest winds did sway the tower a little, and not ponderously but with a quiver, as if the supports of the structure were hard rubber. She had been able to get used to the silence of the corridors and the way there was almost never anyone in the elevator but her; but in eight weeks she hadn't been able to accustom herslf to what the storm did to her surroundings. As a result, the first thundercrack, splitting deafeningly and then rumbling off with a petulent grumble, tossed her out of bed like a pinched cat. She sat shivering and blanketwrapped, stark naked, on the living room couch with all the lights on. Every now and then the tower would just tremble a little, or in the worst gusts outright wag, and Cassie would wait for everything to come crashing down. It was an endless suspension of not-quite-terror, worse in its way than the vertigo-inducing test she forced on herself daily, and it took her strength little by little. She considered getting up to make cocoa at least; turning on the television. But if the electricity should go out, the sudden no-sound of the television would frighten her worst. As for cocoa, she wasn't budging from her spot in the exact center of the apartment for anything. Cassie bowed her head as the skyscraper waved solemnly in the air like an accusing finger, and buried her face in the blankets. She ruminated a little frantically on the irony of it all; as a child, even as a baby she had loved the brilliant searing starkness of lightning striking over her Minnesota hills, and the cleansing drench of rain that always followed. Now she huddled terrified, here in this apalling height by her own choice. At the moment it seemed incomprensible again, as it had when she'd done it. Over her tenure here, she had come to realize why she had done it. The defining fear of her life was her acrophobia, and some part of her, finally having lost her mother's protection and gotten away, however nominally, from her father's tyranny, had decided to cast loose this fetter too. That part of her had raised a tiny cheer when she had signed the contract, and again when she had forced herself to open the glass door for the first time; had egged her on as she had first stood before that opening and then forced herself to take the first step. She supposed that little voice that cheered was the best part of her. Thunder cracked like the whip of the world, and she flinched inside her huddle of blankets. Then another sound followed, one she had never heard before; a crunching smashing explosion that twitched her out of the nest of blankets like a sword rising from an unexpected sheath. Darkness greeted her; the lights had gone out, sometime while she was hiding her face in the blankets. In that instant, though there was no observer, she was lovely; her body alert and poised, her blue eyes wide; the crackling golden mass of her hair thrown haphazardly over her shoulders. There was no one to see. She identified the problem at once; some kind of tree had blown through the window and pushed its branches rudely into the room. But wait; there were no trees at thirty-two stories up. The broken glass everywhere was the glass of the sliding door that led to the balcony, and wind and rain scattered in like shards. Cassie went slowly to see what it was, careful not to bump into any furniture. Her bare skin goosebumped as she came close to the doorway. Dear god, it was some kind of bird! Enormous feathers, dirty gray in the slash of lightning, extended through the broken upper half of the sliding door. Cassie halted, staring in amazement. It was enormous, bigger than any bird she'd ever heard of. The feathers at the tip of the wing, the great leading edge, were as broad as her hand. It fluttered a little, and another flash showed her the redness of its blood sliding down the vanes of its feathers. She hadn't the least idea what to do for it, but getting it off the jagged points of glass seemed crucial, even if she tore it a little more. She would do that, and then call for help. She couldn't reach up high enough to free it without simply ripping it to shreds. Her dazed mind, stunned with cold and dark and vertigo, offered no solution. She wanted to walk around the problem, but the remains of the door were in her way. The mad thought occurred to her that if she could simply open the door she would be able to free the bird from the door so she could open it; but that wasn't helping at all. It seemed like twenty minutes had passed since the crash landing, though she knew better. How long till the bird must die of shock? She was on the verge of stamping her foot with frustration, perhaps going on to getting the hammer and smashing loose the rest of the door. But at that moment the bird made a sound: a low agonized moan of unbearable pain, held tightly in to avoid making the hurt worse. A very human sound. That changed everything. Electrified, she leaped backward a distance of two feet from a standing start and remembered that she was naked. There was a human being somehow tangled up with the bird; perhaps he had fallen somehow from the roof. She could not tell the sex of the individual, but it was clearly a person, and she was naked. She couldn't help this person in any way until she had clothes on; she simply wouldn't be able to think. She backpedaled a few more steps, shaking her head as if someone had insisted otherwise, and bumped up against the loveseat. Turning as if there were ghosts after her, she fled into her bedroom and frantically searched through the darkness for something to throw on. All she could find were socks or coats until she banged her head into the wall and saw brightly colored shooting stars for a moment. This cleared her head and she slowed down enough to remember which drawer held nightgowns, which occurred to her as the proper thinng to put on. It was night, after all. It now seemed that the bird or man or both must surely die; she had been horribly incompetent and dithering. Nearly wailing, she ran back out. This time without even considering it she grabbed a kitchen chair and dragged it through the thundering darkness to the broken glass door. Standing upon it, she was able to survey the situation better now that it was at shoulder level to her. She had utterly forgotten that she was higher than floor level; it slipped her mind as completely as her phone number as she stood there, rain drenching her by inches, and regarded the enormous bird wing that had intruded into her apartment. It was quite definitely a living wing, oversized but very birdlike, stuffed in through the hole in the upper half of the door. She looked outside and saw nothing but darkness and heaving gray feathers, and perhaps the pale flash of someone's limb, although that might have been her imagination. She could hear quite clearly, in the pauses in the thunder, the hoarse pained breathing of a human being. She whimpered and touched the feathers gingerly. The drenched pinions themselves were the chilly temperature of the rain; but when her fingers met blood it was startlingly, fiercely hot. Cassie forced herself to feel around the window carefully, tracing every inch of the damaged wing to see where it could best be lifted off the points of the glass and pushed back out onto the balcony. When her fingers closed weightlessly around the warm light tube of the leading edge, the whole wing jerked and then jerked to a stop, and there was a shrill screech of agony that she thought could well have come from some kind of bird. She hadn't hurt it herself; she had startled it with her touch into moving. She didn't know what to do; had she spoken it would no doubt have begun thrashing at once, like a taken pigeon. She would have to work fast before its fear of humans overcame its shock. She slid her fingers down the feathery wing, looking for the place where it bent and finding nothing. Everything that was wounded was the farther half of the wing, past the crucial joint. If she could get a bird doctor to come get it, it would probably survive. She found where it was trapped, the jagged edges of the glass driven into the sparse meat of its wing and then the wing pulled a little back to sink them in. She wouldn't be able to get away with just lifting; she would have to pull toward her first, lift then, and then guide it back out the window without snagging it again. She was weeping now; the thing was impossible. Had it remained utterly still, she might have done it. But shock or no shock, this operation was going to hurt, and the bird was going to thrash. Alone, she could not maneuver it this way. But she had no choice at all. She took firm hold of the wing, her hands outside the doorway and beaten by rain. Feathers pressed against her, trembling slightly. She held it for a moment, as if to ready it. "Okay," Cassie said desperately, more to quell her crying and quieten her breathing than anything else. "I'm going to pull this way and then lift up, and then slowly! we'll push this back out the window." She gulped. "Stay still," she sobbed, "please don't move." She closed her eyes for one second, a kind of momentary haven from the lightning and thunder and soaking rain, the bird's blood on her hand and the task ahead. Then she let it all come back and pulled the wing forward, toward her breasts. She felt it come loose from the glass at the same moment that the breathing down on the balcony caught and froze. The wing galvanized in her hand, almost humming with leashed power, but it did not thrash. She lifted up, ducking her head beneath the dripping feathers to see if it were totally free. Then came the tricky question of guiding the less than straight contraption of feathers and tendon back out the window. She had a moment of panic when she realized that its natural tendency should be to extend the hurt wing, to push back toward her in the wrong direction, but it was folding docilely and intricately; following her every move as if it knew the best thing for it and counted on her guidance. The breathing was coming faster below, nearly aspirated in a series of little shrieks. Hot blood curled over the ball of her thumb. It seemed to take hours. Finally the last of the enormous feathers were sliding past her face, moving of their own accord, as she was unable to hold onto them once the main body of the wing was out of the way. Now all she could see out there were gray feathers, brushing the remaining glass of the window. She climbed down hurriedly, bracing her hand momentarily on the back of the chair and getting blood and rain on it too, and opened the sliding glass door. It went out of the way with a horrible grinding crunching sound as glass slivers were crushed in the tracks, and then half the gray wing sagged into the room around her ankles. Cassie was in the act of turning to the phone when she suddenly whipped around and stared at the chair as if it were a snake. It looked innocently back at her, sitting by itself on the rapidly soaking carpet. I was standing on that, she realized dimly. The feathers slumping exhaustedly around her feet, shaking so violently they burred and buzzed against one another, recalled her to herself. She glanced at the balcony hurriedly, taking a startled step over the wingtip in that direction, suddenly sure that the creature was in its death throes and reminded that there was a human being involved somewhere. But now her vertigo was back full force; she couldn't make her feet move in that direction. The person under all that bird was sobbing, harshly, like an abandoned child. The sound, heard dimly through the rush of rain and the occasional petulant mutters of thunder, tore at her heart. Cassie forgot that she was going to call anyone. Locked in a struggle against her fears, she stood there trembling, soaked to the skin. The possibility that a gust of wind might snatch her right off the balcony if she went out there was real now, like a validation of her mind's panicky smokescreen images. And whatever creature or creatures were still alive out there, they might throw her right off into space. But she faced the intrusive rain and wind and took a step, her fists clenched at her sides. Another step brought her to the doorway, where her hands automatically rose to either side, bracing her as they had every day for eight weeks in her self tests. Now the exam had come, and she wasn't prepared; but it hardly mattered now, did it? The sting of glass cutting into the ball of her thumb made her pull her hands away. She inspected the cut briefly. There was a sigh and a motion from outside that made her look up. Then, as if it were no more difficult than climbing on a chair, she stepped between the trembling wing and the doorway, out onto the thirty- stories high balcony. The wind stroked her gleefully, promising, teasing. Her nightgown might as well have been tissue paper for all the warmth it brought; and she was not looking at a bird at all. The creature in front of her looked at first to be some enormous eagle without head or talons, thrown heedlessly across the naked body of a slender unconscious man. But the feathers were living, the pinions loose in his abandon, and the strong muscles that drove the wings were the muscles of his back. He sprawled on his belly, soaked, naked and bleeding, his head buried beneath the feathers of what were unmistakably his own wings. Her gaze seemed to stick where the broad shoulderblades of his back joined with lovely completeness to the arching beginnings of the wings. An angel, she thought, unable to put any other name to him. She didn't believe in God, much less His messengers, but one's disbelief falters at a time like this. She was seeing it, and the practical part of her told her that she'd better get him inside and warm before he died on her balcony, and figure out the God part later. This time she and her practical part agreed. And you can forget calling the police, it remarked sardonically as it dissolved back into the chaos she called a mind. She stepped over the outstretched wingtip with the soft blades of its feathers, as broad as her hand, and walked around the lifted, bent arch of the wing joint. Here, it took up so much room she had to scrape against the low wall that formed the perimeter of the tiny balcony. Her back pressed firmly against it, she edged around the wing, aware this time of the drop below, and consciously putting her fear at arm's length. Life or death, she chanted to herself breathlessly; this is life or death. Now she could reach his human body. When she laid her hands on his soaked shoulder, the entire assemblage of feathers and tendons shuddered and lifted, the damaged wing shying lower than the other, and the rain was suddenly cut off by the enormous fan of feathers above her as she jerked back. Her startled squeal mingled with a hoarse cry of anguish from the man, and he got his elbows underneath his arms and tried to lift his head. He failed at first, but Cassie swallowed her fear and her growing sense of triumph together and reached out her hands again. She cradled his head, feeling him try to help lift it, and as his long hair flopped damply back, she met the wide colorless stare of his eyes with a clear sense of never having been alive and free before this moment. She nearly laughed out loud. This bizarre sense of triumph stayed with her while she rested his head on her shoulder and got her arms underneath his to haul him. She knew at once that it would be impossible for her to get the wings through the doors. He wasn't heavy; in fact she lifted up and came to the balls of her feet with most of him dangling limply from her grasp. He was no easy lift, but certainly nowhere near as heavy as a grown man should be. "Help me," she choked, the rain falling on her face once more. "Come on... help me!" The arms that had been dangling down Cassie's back rose and wrapped themselves weakly around her shoulders. She felt him rest his weight more or less on his feet. But the most amazing thing was the wings... they folded and collapsed themselves in an economic motion until they stood only two feet up above his shoulders and ended just at his ankles. They formed a kind of shield behind him, the right one unable to fold completely and hanging loose at his side. Cassie couldn't see what she was doing, but at least he would fit through the doorway now. Somehow, the angel helping weakly and herself struggling mightily, they got the elbows of the wings through the doorway and ducked him in afterward. She draped him over the couch and went to draw the curtain to restrict the lightning and rain still desultorily intruding. Then, groping toward the angel in the darkness, Cassie fumbled her hand along the couch until it encountered feathers, which twitched startledly. His hoarse breathing was very loud in the comparative silence, and Cassie felt a kind of urgent sympathy. "I'm here," she said. "I'm going to help you. You're going to be okay." There was no answer, but she had heard the listening pause in his breathing and knew he had heard her. Of course, being an angel, he could speak English fine, she reasoned. He was either too hurt or too frightened to concentrate on communication right now. She turned her wide eyes momentarily to the curtains. Out there was the balcony; her greatest fear no longer. Tomorrow, when she had slept, she would walk out there, and look down over the edge, and wonder what there had ever been to fear. But not now. "My name's Cassie," she said softly, in tones she would have used to comfort a frightened child. "Cassie. Let's get you into bed. You're safe here, and when you can fly again I'll let you go." She remembered the trapped eyes of a barn owl she had seen at the zoo, the first time she had seen a raptor up close, and thought the angel's greatest horror must be the loss of his freedom to fly. When the zoo man had walked around the crowd of excited children with the bird, she had looked into its hating, waiting eyes and burst into tears; her father had bundled her off home and shook his head over her fears, saying again and again that the bird couldn't touch her. He had never understood. She glanced again at the sliding glass door's remains. The angel raised his head shakily to look at her, and for a moment she flinched, afraid his eyes would be the flat feral eyes of the barn owl. But his eyes were utterly human, colorless as water, lost and confused in this strange place. His lips seemed to form words, but his throat made no sound; as clear as a mirror she read him: where is the wind? Cassie's heart bled, and she swallowed her shyness before the beauty of his face and shoulders and helped him up again. "Come on," she said, "we'll get you in bed and warm and dry and then we'll see if you can eat anything I have." She realized how much she was thinking of him in bird terms. The enormous wings just changed everything. He draped his shivering arm around her shoulders and let her support him into the bedroom. She propped him against the wall, stripped the comforter and thin blanket off the bed, and turned just in time to catch him before he fell down again. For a moment her face was buried in feathers, which were already nearly dry and furnace-hot. Then he half-fell, half-walked the two steps to the bed and fell down on his chest. Reflexively the wings unfolded and rose, forming a wide, feathered canopy over him. From beneath it, he looked at her with his colorless eyes. She thought there was more awareness in them now, that he was coming out of his shock. Cassie made a placating, stay-there motion with her hands and turned into the bathroom. She left one towel for herself and brought the other three out for him. She draped one across his midsection and began drying him everywhere else with the other. The third she put underneath his head, since his hair was the wettest part of him. "There you are," she said when he was reasonably dry. She left the wings alone, hovering in the air above her. Then she went into the bathroom and half-closed the door. Drying herself and putting on a warm robe of blue velveteen seemed like the heaven she had never believed in. Then she felt more ready to confront the angel. He had thrown off the towel she had laid over him; his Greek- statue fineness was revealed. Cassie looked aside and found herself looking at his eyes. He seemed alert now, but very weary. The left wing was folded; the right half-folded and its wounded forepart stretched over the bed. Cassie held up the first aid kit from the bathroom and waited until his eyes registered it and then moved back to hers. There was no expression on his face; if his eyes had been closed she would have instinctively known him to be asleep. "This is to help you," she said. She felt foolish, not knowing how much he was understanding. Either she was talking to herself, or he would laugh at her. "I need you to hold still while I bandage the wing. I'm going to spray antiseptic on it, and then bandage it between the feathers. Then tape it so it'll stay." Cassie looked to him for some sign of comprehension, but there was nothing. The colorless eyes were fixed steadily on hers, as if her face were far more interesting than anything she might be saying. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Rosemerry perigryn@earthlink.net Each star now knows your name I've wished upon them all Each answer is the same: "Not 'til the heavens fall." http://home.earthlink.net/~perigryn/ -- +----------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `--------------+ | | | | Archive site +----------------------+--------------------+ Newsgroup FAQ | ----