Three

Notes: Okay, this entire story idea was sparked by a thought-provoking doujinshi pic I ran across online a while back. I’ll see if I can find it and link to it in a later chapter. This story is old… It was the first multi-chapter fic I ever wrote, and it was going ten-chapters strong on FF.Net when it was deleted for content. Bastards… Anyway, I’ll retype and post periodically. Three arcs at one time; what the hell am I thinking??

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Saint Paul’s Cathedral was old, probably older than the city itself, and it was nestled comfortably into the cluster of archaic buildings that lined Central Avenue, deep within the bowels of New York. It was built of a gothic design, with billowing steeples, narrow stairs, and an enormous, stained-glass rose window. The marble steps were worn and lusterless, the cement of the roof weathered, though from atop the highest point of the single bell tower the view of Old Towne was extraordinary.

Quatre sat perched here as he often did, the crisp autumn air whipping around his thin, birdlike frame and tugging urgently at the boy’s straw-blonde hair and sea-green eyes slipped closed as the child basked in the warm glow of the November sun. The Arabian tipped his golden head back, outstretching his slender arms towards the heavens, and he stood easily to his feet. He loved the exhilaration of being this far above the interwoven lives below, the complex weave of interacting, intermingling existences; he relished the isolation, the exclusion, so different from the malicious rejection he normally faced while living amongst the people down there on the streets.

With a soft frown tugging at wine-dark, wine-sweet lips, the boy reached a hand back to run his fingers over his shoulder blade, over the hint of an abnormal bone growth there, beneath the pale skin.. His mother had always told him that he was different, but in a ‘special way.’ He was her angel, she said. He was her gift from God.

The frown twisted into a bitter smile, and the blue eyes became stormy-grey with pain. The only God he knew of a bea being which cursed him with the infernal ‘gift’ that he had discovered as a child. It was a gift which had cost him his childhood, his mother, and his chance at a normal life.

Freak.

Mutant.

Evolutionary fluke.

Demon.

Long, dark lashes trembled, but Quatre Winner had no tears left to cry. With an eerie calm, the boy reached a hand into the neck of his dark sweater, bypassing his tee shirt, groping about the skin of his bare chest until his fingers encountered the body-heated chain that hung around his neck, and he extracted the small jade crucifix that he habitually wore, the only remnant he had remaining of a shattered childhood, of a man that might have been.

The smooth green stone glinted serenely in the late afternoon sunlight, flashing broken promises and false hopes. The blonde shook his head sadly. How foolish he had been to trust in something he couldn’t see, something that in all probability and logic did not truly exist.

He pulled his switchblade from the pocket of his jeans and hit the knob on the side of the stainless steel contraption, and the blade sprang to attention, glistening with deadly intent. Blue eyes slid closed once more and Quatre cried out softly as he willed his burden forth as well, and the smooth flesh of his back split, a pair of magnificent ebony wings bounding from his shoulder blades, ropes of blood flying through the air to taint the pure white alabaster of the cathedral’s roof, cascading down his skin in thin rivulets to pool at his feet.

It hurt each and every time he brought them out, but he deserved the pain. Contracting familiar muscles, he drew the black feathered shrouds closer about his body, wielding the blade with young, expert hands as he began to slice through the tendon, bone, muscle, and satin jet-black feathers with glimmered a sickening indigo-blue in the sunlight.

Grinding his teeth together to keep from crying out again, Quatre slashed, the movements becoming increasingly frantic as he worked, until his fingers trembled, covered in gore, and the blade clattered from them, bouncing along the steep angle of the roof before falling to its ‘death’ on the concrete below. No pedestrians noticed the transgression, noticed the boy standing on the bell tower. Storm-riddled teal eyes took in the damage that he had inflicted upon himself, and a bittersweet smile stole across his soft lips.

Perfect. They were absolutely perfect: ragged, torn, bleeding, monstrous. These were the wings of a demon. Quatre willed the abused appendages back, concealed inside his body, and he glanced down at the sidewalk below. He smiled again, this time with a twisted sense of relief, and he took up the crucifix in his hand once more, the jade slipping about his fingers from the blood which coated them. With threstrest of movements he tipped his slight weight forward, plummeting rapidly towards the asphalt below.

In a graceless twist of flesh and bone, Quatre Winner’s pitiable life ended before the smiling gates of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

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TBC.