Rachel

There is no such thing as a night without dreams. Even in moments of purest exhaustion, her subconscious always seemed to manage a vision or two before her eyes would finally open. Sometimes they're beautiful, incredible, exciting. Sometimes they're disgusting and horrible and terrifying.

They are, of course, always about war.

They are bright lights in the sky and twisted, writhing bodies. Feathers and scales appearing on skin and warm air pulsing upward from a blacktop. They are grace and confidence and power. And they are pain, rage, nothingness. Helplessness and terror, elation and wonder.

And there are wings.

There didn't used to be wings in her nightmares. In her dreams, yes, of course, but now they're everywhere. Mixing in with the blood and the pain, a flicker of feathers - wingtips there, rust red tail on the corner of her gaze, gone when she tries to focus.

In her nightmares, there are morphs. Or rather, there are minds. The ant's single-minded control, stealing her identity and sense of purpose, a tiny cog in some massive and enormous machine. The mole's comfort buried alive in moist earth, digging for worms and slugs. The shrew's frenzied panic and insane lust for rotting flesh and maggots.

Those are the worst. They're present in her moments of fear and doubt. The rat, when it comes, is never her morph, its mind never haunts her. When it visits her dreams, it sits outside the small box she's trapped inside and taunts her.

Then the light breaks and it cowers before her, puny and weak and begs her to end the imprisonment she forced it into.

And there are wings, a flash of a tail, warm air billowing up beneath her, and she takes to the sky to avoid her pain, her fear, and the begging of the creature beneath her. Basks in the comfort of open air and a gentle voice in her head that doesn't speak often, so every word is a gift.

Sometimes. Sometimes that's how it ends.

Sometimes the air doesn't billow and the rat isn't left behind.

Sometimes she cowers on a dirty street in front of a rodent, tortured broken screams in her mind, begging pleading threatening ordering begging.

Sometimes an eye opens in the alleyway wall and red light bathes them both - and she trembles like the rat to be caught in its gaze.

The wings are gone and the air is cold and the light is suffocating and tonight, this very night, a voice says The world was counting on you.

And old man, shining faintly, just human enough to be obviously alien, answers her with You were a happy mistake.

The eye opens wide and she feels herself growing, canine teeth extending, fingernails lengthening to sharpened claws, muscle bulging in the harsh red light because You have potential.

The world was counting on you.

Did it know?

And with a snap, the light and the eye is gone with her strength and claws. A great beast rears up in the darkness and swipes at her head with an arm thick as a tree trunk.

<You fight well, human.>

And she feels the impact when it comes, the way it ripples past skin and muscle to shatter her spine at the neck, crushing her collar bone. The claws were secondary, unnecessary, raking her flesh with a harsh spray of blood, real blood, her blood.

Rachel the human's blood spills for the first time, raining over the cockpit of an alien battleship.

<Rachel,> in the darkness while the pain intensifies with her pulse, rolling waves of scarlet. <Rachel...>

"I love you."

Her eyes snap open, red light illuminating the ship, the viewscreen, the Earth below, and that powerful, alien laugh echoes in her mind through all the screams.

It's not clear which came first - the ragged, high-pitched screaming or the sudden jump in muscle that had her rocketing upward in bed. In the darkness, it doesn't really matter and she claps a hand over her mouth to stifle it before it alerts anyone. She's still making the noise, whimpering and pathetic against her palm, but even that isn't as bad as the cold sweat on her skin, the way she can't stop trembling, the way the sheets tangled around her legs make her think of damp earth and close walls and small cages. She's still whimpering when she starts tearing at them, legs kicking and hips twisting to free herself until she's teetering on the edge of the mattress, in danger of falling.

Then she does fall and the pain of it is a relief because the sheets stayed on top of the bed and she isn't there anymore.

Rachel breathes. But it's dark.

Dark like underground, dark like blind, enveloping, suffocating darkness.

She's on her feet a moment later, stumbling and banging into objects she can't recognize without the light and when she finds a door, she throws it open and doesn't recognize the dimly lit room she steps into but there are more doors and moonlight beyond so she throws those open, too, large doors that open out onto a balcony filled with snow.

The cold hits her like a speeding train, strangled cry in her throat and stumbling back into the couch. And it makes no sense because this is beyond cold, this is insane cold, and there are snow drifts outside and to get warm in the cold, she'd have to burrow down into the snow and close it up on top of her.

She stumbles back again, further into the room, away from the cold, the snow. Clear night, moonlight, illuminating the room around her and she recognizes it far, far too late.

Something flickers on the edge of her gaze and it's not feathers, it's a napkin from the bar downstairs that flutters to the floor.

Rachel stairs at it as if it's betrayed her and you know what? It has. It's not sentient, it's not familiar, it's not even red. But it's there, on what serves as her floor, reminding her of what she has now because of what she'll never have again.

And there's snow on the balcony-

Balcony. Four stories up.

She glances up. Twelve, fifteen feet to the ceiling? Maybe?

Twelve times four is forty-eight, fifteen times four is... sixty?

Forty-eight feet, sixty feet.

Falling through the air toward the trees and concentrating, faster faster.

Too big t-shirt torn off and thrown aside, draped over the couch and she stands there shivering, morphing top skin-tight as usual, fingers tucked into the waistband of the shorts she wore to sleep, eyes - blue, just blue, no light no red - on the snow, on the balcony rail, maybe two inches wide, four feet high.

Like a really thin vaulting horse.

The shorts drop, baggy cloth, the cold doesn't matter as she turns to the door that leads out to the hallway, her back to the snow. Then pivots on one foot, doorknob brushing her arm, toes splayed, balanced. One deep breath, just one.

Run.

Run, feet pound on soft carpet, then snow-covered cement.

Heels of the palms slam down onto the rail and the cold bites in and burns and she's already thinking red, red, red- no feathers.

Legs swing over in a graceful arc as her skin begins to itch in patches and it's not warm air that rushes to meet her, it's the kind of cold that knocks the breath right out as it flattens the lungs.

And she's falling.

Falling down, down, down.

Falling while little feather tattoos form on her skin.

Falling while her face pushes out, out, out, nose and lips turning hard and scaly and yellow.

Falling and her legs are pulled into her body, rough and cracked, toenails melting into long, curved talons.

The snow rushes up- no, she rushes down to meet it and there is a single, slow-stupid moment where she wonders what would happen if a girl without a heartbeat slammed head first into the ground.

Then she opens her wings.



A sound pierces the silence of the forest in the middle of the night. The bald eagle screams in a shrill, wavering cry, announcing itself.

Screams again and again as its wings beat down, a lonely shadow against the moon.