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From: perigryn.removethis@earthlink.net (Rosemerry)
Subject: Fear & Desire Pt 1 (M/F, sci fi, virgin)
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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/




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