InsaneJournal

The bird in the Kensington cage - Twitch City story
Title: The bird in the Kensington cage (3800 words)
Fandom: Twitch City (spoilers for s1)
Summary: Curtis's new feathers are kind of itchy.
Rating: Naughty words, no sex
Notes: For mrs_laugh_track and belmanoir, with affection. mrs_laugh_track beta read.


Curtis notices he's been kind of itchy when he reaches up to rub at his shoulderblades and realizes that he's been doing exactly that a whole lot, and also that it's not a zit or something. There's stuff stuck to his shoulders, and that's too weird to ignore. Hope's at work and their current roommate is deeply into yoga, and is probably tangled into some kind of pretzel. Nobody's there to make jokes about Curtis taking a shower like he never does it, which how would they know anyway? He doesn't mark it off on the Hygiene Wheel or anything.

He has to twist around to see his shoulders in the mirror, and even then it doesn't make any sense. There are scratch marks, both from him and from the time Lucky got scared by the concrete commercial and ran across the back of the couch. There are also scaly, weird black things stuck on him, or growing on him, or -- something.

Like Alien, except they're not eating him yet, and they're not coming out of his stomach.

It doesn't hurt or anything -- and it would probably take a year before any doctor would be willing to see him, even if he was willing to go to one -- so he puts on the cleanest shirt he can find and puts on the "My Mother = My Sister" episode of Rex Reilly.

Hope doesn't notice for another two days, which Curtis takes as a plus -- she does see him naked, twice, even, but he manages to finagle being the big spoon, plus while they're naked and she's awake, he's apparently pretty damn good at keeping her distracted.

She pets his shoulder idly in the morning, though, and then she shrieks like he's turning into a mouse instead of a bird. "Oh my god, Curtis! Are you okay?"

"They're just feathers," he says, because it's getting pretty obvious that that's all they are. Why he's got feathers, well, that's another question, but he hasn't got anyone to ask.

"Did you glue them there?" Hope plucks at one. Curtis winces and tries to pull away, but she grabs him by the shoulder. "No, I want to see it -- lie down."

"Oh, come on, it's nothing." He reaches for his shirt.

She takes this as some kind of cue to prove that getting out of the apartment, even if it's just to work at the corner store, gets her more exercise than t'ai chi in front of the TV. She can pin him down, no sweat. "No way." And he's not going to object when she tackles him onto the bed, apart from how she's running her fingers over his -- feathers -- and poking at them. "They're real. Wow. That is so weird."

"Sure they are." Curtis turns his head to watch her. She looks as intrigued as she does in the middle of sex or a really good movie, which is kind of flattering. Or would be, if she wasn't poking at the growths on his back.

Hope glares at him. "You're growing feathers. It's not like scabies or something. This is really, really strange."

"Yeah? Well, maybe everybody's got feathers except you, and you just never noticed."

She shakes her head and socks him in the arm. "Nathan didn't."

"God, don't bring him up." Curtis buries his face in the pillow.

"And anyway, there are plenty of people you've seen naked, even if was just on TV. You know this isn't normal!"

Curtis shrugs and feels the feathers shift weirdly against his back. They're about three inches long now and they kind of tickle. "What do you want me to do about it? I don't want to pluck them or something. What if it hurts?"

"Maybe they're some kind of cancer." Hope runs her fingers over the place where they come out of his skin. It feels like someone rubbing his cuticles -- not great, not terrible.

Curtis reaches back and pushes her hands away. "Nobody gets cancer of the shoulders, and even if they do it doesn't look like feathers." He sits up and puts his shirt on with as much dignity as he can muster. "So I have feathers. Does that gross you out?"

"Not really." Hope kisses him. "It just makes me worry about you. You should see somebody."

"Great idea. I'll check the phonebook under wingologists."

"Oh, Curtis, don't." Hope catches his wrists before he stands up and kisses him again. "I'll ask Newbie if he knows anybody with feathers. If anybody really does have them, he must know them."

"That's a tautology." Curtis gets up and finds his pants because Hope gets so upset when he goes to his bedroom in boxers, as if the yogi down the hall is that deaf and stupid. "I have feathers, now, and Craig knows me, so the answer is yes. Even if he doesn't know it yet."

"I meant anybody else." Hope sighs and cranes her neck around like she wants to stare at his back some more. "If they grow, you'll show me, right?"

"If I have to." Curtis picks up his bathrobe and backs out of her ex-closet.

There are three tiers of them the next day, sticking down his shoulders and upper back like pathetically stubby angel wings. The feathers are kind of pretty if you like that sort of thing, glossy and black. They look like they should be airbrushed on somebody's van. When Curtis tries to figure out how to move them, he can make them stand up or lie down, just a little. He fidgets with them while he's watching crappy commercials, for lack of anything better to do.

In the middle of a very special episode of some sitcom Curtis will never watch again unless there's nothing on, Newbie bursts into the living room with a huge stack of black and white newspapers and a bag of birdseed. "Are you the Antichrist?" he asks, and drops everything to make a little cross with his fingers.

"No." Curtis leans back against the couch, getting his feathers to lie down so it's not too uncomfortable, and tries to ignore him. One of the women on the sitcom has reasonably-sized breasts and wears a push-up bra.

Newbie gets between Curtis and the television. "Are you an angel?"

"You make a better door than a window." Curtis changes the channel around him. "And no, I'm not a angel."

"Well --" Newbie grabs his tabloids and holds them up one at a time. They're the Weekly Inquirer, with cover stories even Rex Reilly would reject. "I had a baby with Satan?"

"No."

"Michael the Archangel finds me parking places?"

"No, moron. My name isn't Michael."

"Cupid hit me with his arrow of love?"

Curtis throws a pillow at him even though the remote would hurt more. He doesn't trust Newbie with the remote. He might take it outside. "I'm not Cupid, either."

"Cupid, Curtis." Newbie tosses the tabloids toward the birdseed. "Can I see?"

"No!" Curtis leans back into the couch harder, though it's getting uncomfortable. He doesn't want to crush the feathers too hard. "I'm not stripping for you."

"Are you Elvis?"

Curtis stares at him, but Newbie has always been beyond the ken of mortal man, feathers or no feathers. "Why would Elvis have feathers?"

Newbie grins. "You don't think the King of Rock and Roll went to heaven?"

"Definitely not. I've seen 'Viva Las Vegas.'"

Newbie winces. "Ooh, right, yeah, he's got a lot to answer for, doesn't he." He shakes his head, hardly moving his lurid hair. "I still want to see your wings."

Curtis folds his arms. "Why?"

"I've never seen anybody with real wings before. It could be kind of cool."

Something about his hopeful expression makes Curtis relent. That, and the fact that adding feathers to Newbie's list of blackmail possibilties about him will be a drop in the bucket. "Fine," he says huffily, and gets up. He takes his bathrobe off, then his t-shirt.

"Wow." Newbie pokes at his feathers. "That's wild."

There's a scream from the hallway. The yogi roommate -- whose name is not Boo-Boo, though Curtis wishes it were -- faints dead away.

"Damn." Curtis hunches his shoulders and feels the feathers get puffed up. "We're going to need a new roommate."

Newbie tucks his hand under the feathers on Curtis's left side. It feels warm and kind of sticky. "You really are growing wings."

"I noticed." Curtis looks over his shoulder at Newbie. "Are you quite finished?"

"How big are they going to get?"

"This has never happened to me before. How should I know?"

"Huh." Newbie shrugs. "Have you called Rex Reilly yet?"

"No." Curtis shrugs and gets his feathers to lie flat. "I'm hungry. Growing feathers is hard work."

"You have to, though. Rex, man -- he'd love it." Newbie walks toward the kitchen and the phone.

"Hang on." Curtis stops him just before he steps over Downward Facing Dog man. "They're still growing. I'd rather wait and see."

"Five sets of feathers." Newbie nods. "Not like you could fly on them right now."

The concept of flying at all, in a plane or by himself, makes Curtis need to sit down in the hallway. "Just -- wait, all right?"

"Are you here already?" Hope calls up the stairs.

"Yeah," Newbie yells back. "Watch your step, though -- your wingless roommate passed out."

"Oh, no." Hope comes up the stairs with a heavy carton of barely-expired food. "What happened?"

"He saw my feathers and flipped out." Curtis thinks about getting up again, but he's afraid his knees are still wobbly. "He's probably leaving."

Hope frowns at Curtis like this was his idea, then gives Newbie the sad puppy dog eyes she usually saves for Curtis when she wants him to do actual housework. "Didn't you say you were looking for new roommates?"

"Oh, god." Curtis puts his head in his hands. "We tried that, and it was horrible." He can feel his feathers ruffling as he gets more irritated, and he hasn't put his shirt back on yet, so clearly that's when yoga-boy has to wake up.

He stares at Curtis and shouts, "You're a freak!"

"Takes one to know one. You can probably suck your own dick." Curtis shrugs. "If you're leaving, no refunds. And pack quickly."

Newbie watches the guy run into his room. "Can he really? That would be so cool."

"I never asked." Curtis tries to stand up and almost falls, but Hope catches him. "I'm going to go get dressed now."

Hope squeezes his arm. "As soon as you're on the couch, I'm going to go help Newbie pack."

Curtis glares at her. "Are you going to keep dropping hints about a threeway this time?"

"No!" Hope says.

At the same time, Newbie says, "Yes!"

Curtis rolls his eyes at both of them. "I'm missing Gilligan's Island for this? Fine, go, pack." When they get to the couch, he sprawls back and tweaks one of his feathers out of line. "Ow."

"Are you all right?" Hope asks.

"Yes." He sits forward. "It's just -- they're not built for leaning on."

She gives him a sympathetic look. "I'll be back really soon, okay?"

Curtis nods. "Just as long as Newbie brings his videos."

"Of course." Newbie gives him a double-barreled thumbs-up from the top of the stairs.

It takes an hour for the yogi to get out of the apartment and two days before Newbie has all his stuff in. By that point, Curtis has had to move an armchair so he can sit on it instead of the couch. The wings are down past his butt when he lets them hang and leaning on them is painful. The only clothing he owns that still fits his upper body is his robe, and even that won't close. He ends up putting it on backward for warmth and hunching his wings around himself.

When Hope and Newbie aren't there, he goes up into the attic and tries spreading them. They're almost as wide as he is tall, and it feels like a few good strokes would lift him off the floor. He doesn't want to try it, but the possibility is exciting just the same.

He can't sleep on his back anymore, and cowgirl position is totally out, which would probably make Hope grouchier if she didn't like petting his wings so much. Newbie says, "You don't snore so much anymore," and pats the top of his wing.

"We're still not having a threeway." Curtis spreads his wings a little for the physical impact.

It doesn't seem to work. Newbie whistles and looks past him at the stupid feathers. "It would be even cooler now, you know. More like a fourway."

"Swans can knock people out with their wings and they're a lot smaller than I am." Curtis feels his feathers ruffle all the way down to the backs of his knees by now.

Newbie holds up his hands. "Okay, okay, I haven't been jerking off thinking of your feathery parts a lot, sorry."

Curtis rolls his eyes and folds his wings back. "That's just disgusting."

"So when are you calling Rex?"

"Not yet."

When Curtis's wings get so large the bottom feathers are just above the floor when he's standing, Hope starts getting on his case in the middle of a rerun of Julia Child. "Are you exercising them?" she asks.

"Sure." Curtis wiggles the right one at her. "Just not when you're around. It's hard work." The hardest part is keeping himself on the floor while he does it while actually spending enough energy to feel like he doesn't have flabby wings or anything.

"Are you going to really use them?" Hope looks at him with an expression he's starting to hate. It's the "I only love you for your wings" expression, and she can stop using it right now.

"Really use them like how?" Curtis grimaces. "I don't really use my appendix, and no one complains that I've still got it."

Hope gives him one of her pouty looks. "Yeah, but everyone has an appendix. Nobody else has wings."

"Right, right, we're all unique snowflakes." Curtis readjusts the blanket over his knees. "I've never felt the need to actualize my potential any more than I already am."

"Oh. So you're not going to -- to fly." Hope walks over and strokes his wing the way she pets Lucky when she's in a bad mood -- absentmindedly, but gently.

"I can't very well fly in here, can I?" Curtis waves his hand at the apartment. "If I'd known this was coming, I'd have picked a place with cathedral ceilings."

Hope sighs and combs her fingers through his feathers. "Have you tried going outside since they started growing?"

"Oh, come on, Hope." Curtis flicks his wing away from her hand. "You're acting like you want me to throw myself out the window like some kind of baby bird."

"No, no." Hope reaches for him again and he takes a step away. "It just seems like you should give them a try."

"If you grew a penis, I wouldn't ask you to 'give it a try' for me."

Hope frowns. "I'm not going to suddenly grow a penis."

Curtis flutters his wings at her. "How do you know?"

"Just for the record," Newbie says from the kitchen, "I wasn't eavesdropping, but Hope, if you get a penis, I'll help you test-drive it."

She bites her lip and looks kind of uncomfortable. "Thanks. I think."

"Also," Newbie adds, "'grow a penis' is an anagram of 'Spiro Agnew.'"

Curtis rolls his eyes at Hope, who giggles. "Thank you for that thrilling anecdote," Curtis shouts back. "Stop listening to other people's conversations."

Newbie comes down the hall with a box of Fruity-O's and a bowl. "Don't have them in the living room with the TV muted, then."

The ensuing fight proves that Curtis can, in fact, knock someone out with his wings, even when he doesn't mean to, that Hope screaming doesn't alert any neighbors interested enough in the welfare of their fellow man enough to call the police, and that Newbie is just barely patient enough after regaining consciousness to lie still until Hope takes his pulse.

"I was going to hold out for mouth-to-mouth," he says as he sits up and Hope hugs him, "but I figured, I'm still breathing, my heart's still beating, plus I got a stiffie -- you're too smart for that, right?"

She takes this as much in stride as anything. Curtis turns the sound up on the television. "Stop malingering. There's a hockey fight on."

Three days later during a marathon of "I Love Lucy," the doorbell rings. Curtis yells, "Someone's at the door!" before he remembers that Newbie is stocking shelves somewhere and Hope is doing whatever it is her job is at the moment.

Curtis considers leaving the person to rot, but if he gets lucky and it's a Mormon or something, he can really fuck with their heads and pretend to be an angel. He shrugs on the extra-super-large robe Hope made for him out of a bedsheet and safety pins and goes downstairs, focusing on keeping his wings folded back. He opens the door a crack and nearly falls over at the sight of Rex Reilly. "Hello!" Rex says, as smarmily perfect as he ever is. "Are you the caged bird of Kensington Market?"

"No." Curtis backs away from the door, trying to get his wings behind it. This turns out to be a bad move; Rex follows him in, dragging a microphone and followed by a camera.

"Holy cats, you really do have wings." Rex raises his eyebrows. "Before we start rolling, I'm going to need to give those a tug."

Curtis stares at him. It sounds like at least a double entendre. "Why?"

"If they fall off while we're filming, it'll be embarrassing." Rex smiles. "Be a good sport and turn around."

"No!" Curtis starts backing up the stairs and trips over the trailing edge of one wing, falling back enough that he instinctively spreads them, ripping the makeshift robe to hell and barely catching himself before his pinions slam into both sides of the staircase.

"Shit!" Rex yells, and he and the cameraman stagger backward. "How'd you do that?"

"I don't know." Curtis turns and gets up the stairs as fast as he can.

Behind him, Rex says, "Are we still rolling? Great. Follow that bird."

Curtis takes refuge in front of the TV, which lets him know in Desi's voice that someone out there has some 'splainin to do. He agrees with it, but he turns off the set because he's never liked Lucy in the first place, let alone loved her, and Rex Reilly is crowding into his living room and onto the very couch where Curtis has personally sat to watch all of the episodes of his show at least three times. Some of Newbie's favorite episodes, he's seen at least ten. "I'm not a bird," Curtis says, and crosses his arms. He's not sure what the TV censors think about male nipples on TV, but he doesn't want his out there any more than they have to be. "I just started growing wings one day."

"Did you always want to fly?" Rex asks, pushing the microphone at him.

"No."

Rex frowns. "You know, Freud says dreams about flying are really dreams about sex. Does that mean you're some kind of walking sex god?"

Curtis can't keep his wings from ruffling at that one. "I doubt it. You'd have to ask my girlfriend."

"Your girlfriend, huh?" Rex waggles his eyebrows at the camera. "Do you take her flying?"

"I don't fly anywhere." Curtis flicks his wings back.

"Why not? Are you afraid of heights?"

It's been a long time since Curtis was any higher up than the second story of this building, but he doesn't remember any particular phobias about it. "No."

"Then why not?" Rex waves his hand toward the window. "Step out there and give us a good swoop."

Curtis glares at him. "You're trying to incite me to jump out the window. Isn't that illegal?"

Rex shrugs. "You can fly."

"You don't know that." Curtis spreads his wings, thinks, "Relax!" at them as hard as he can, and fights them back down. "Maybe I'd jump to my doom. On camera. How would you explain that away in court?"

"When was the last time you went outside during the day?" Rex asks, his voice taking a turn for the coddling that makes Curtis wary. "Your roommate said it's been years."

Curtis feels his hair try to ruffle as much as his feathers do. "My roommate is an idiot."

"But is he wrong, Curtis?" Rex clucks his tongue, his voice dripping with false sympathy. "You're the Birdman of Alcatraz, aren't you. Stuck in here -- afraid of the sky, where you really should be soaring."

"Why don't you jump out the window?" Curtis asks. He wraps his wings around himself before he really makes a decision to do it. "I'm done talking."

"There you have it," Rex says to the camera. "Canada's newest flightless bird, trapped in his own apartment by the fallen angels of his mind."

"Now that's just bad writing." Curtis spreads his wings fast enough that he knocks the microphone from Rex's hand and Rex has to fumble for it. "Go away."

Rex clucks his tongue. "We'll have to pad it out in the editing," he says to the cameraman. "At least we've got that interview with the roommate."

Curtis pulls his wings back and tries to remember what he did to knock Newbie out so he can do it again. "Get out. Now."

Something about the four meter wingspan gets Rex to back away quickly and get the hell out of the apartment, camera and all.

"I look great," Newbie says when Curtis watches the taped episode, "I have wings and I'm afraid to use them."

"You do," Hope says, and leans on Newbie on the couch until Curtis moves his wings enough to block the TV. "So do you," she adds. "Your feathers look really smooth."

Curtis sighs and folds his wings back. "I'm more concerned about my pectorals."

"Don't sweat it." Newbie reaches over and pats his wings. "All those workouts have really done a number on you."

"It's my favorite episode of Rex Reilly ever," Hope says.

Newbie grins at her. "I thought it was 'My Savior is Chocolate.'"

She smiles at Curtis. "It used to be, but I'm changing my vote."

Curtis watches Rex mocking him ineffectually and smiles. "I'm with you, Hope."

"Well --" Newbie sucks his teeth. "Until he finally believes me about those damn pixies on Bloor, I guess I'll have to agree with you guys."