It was a lovely morning, the first day on the summer holiday, and he lay awake in bed watching the curtains flapping lazily in the warm breeze, the reflections from the lake below playing on the white ceiling, and smelling the scents of the cake being baked in the kitchen in the other end of the house.

He stretched his wings and yawned, wriggling deeper into bed. Any minute now his parents and his sister would come in through the door with the cake, and they would sing to him. 

He closed his eyes.

When he opened them there was darkness, with a confusion of orange and red lights, his ears were ringing. Where was he? He was falling! He tried to beat his wings but he was strapped in, half laying in... a pilot's seat! Now he remembered, something had struck... there had been an explosion... he was still falling! Then a unbelieavably loud crash. He hit his head on the canopy, hard.

He woke up in a hospital bed, with his dad sitting on the edge and some doctors standing around. "You okay, son?" asked his dad, gently stroking his head with a big, strong wing. "That was some fall you took." One of the doctors reassured him. "You've got a strong chick there, instead of a broken neck he just had a little concussion. We'll be keeping him here overnight and then he'll be home again."

Home.

He opened his eyes again. Back in the damn cockpit, head hurting like you wouldn't believe. He blinked some blood out of his eyes and tried to get the two images in his head to become one again. Most of the instrument lights were out, save for a panel indicating there was now no oil pressure and a blinking red light indicating that the generators were malfunctioning.

He was half choked by the harness, and it felt like his hip was pinned. He could see nothing but darkness outside the canopy, except the impressive crack he'd made with his beak explaining the bleeding and the pain. He suppressed an impulse to touch his forehead, nothing good would come out of that.

Still, there should be at least something visible outside? Then he remembered. The automatic blast shields would have closed. He fumbled with a talon and found the release catch, and pulled on it. There was a dull thump as the explosive bolts fired, and the shields, and then the canopy fell off and he could breathe fresh air again. Well, relatively fresh. He struggled with the release for the harness, and immediately fell out of the cockpit.

That's it, he had been hanging sideways all the time. Stupid!

He hit the ground wing first and could clearly hear the crack of bones before he continued to tumble and slide uncontrollably down a scree slope, squawking in pain and fear before he stopped on his back on a cold hard floor, panting and shivering from the pain and shock. His muscles were so weak he couldn't do anything but lie there and stare up at the sky.

On top of the pile of debris he had just slid down lay the wreckage of his war machine, a bipedal weapons platform equipped for fire support missions, and it had apparently plowed straight through a building as it fell. He was looking up at the sky through a gash that had cut through at least three stories of a house, the cellar of which he was apparently laying in. Above he could see sparks from severed power lines, and water was leaking out of a broken pipe, draining onto him. He hoped it wasn't sewage.

Outside the house the night sky was lit a dull red by fires, he could see flashes of explosions, the occasional tracer bullets, and sometimes rocket trails. His hearing was returning too, but the explosions and weapons fire sounded vaguely distant, as if half heard through a dream. He blinked, and blinked again. The floor wasn't all that cold, really, and not too hard. He could probably...

His body spasmed and his eyes opened wide. No. There was still something he needed to do. The seat in front of his still had the blast shields shut. He couldn't see well enough from this distance in the dark what was wrong, but he had to investigate.
His first impulse was to support himself on his left wing to get up, and it paid off in white-hot searing pain shooting through his chest from the broken shoulder. He screamed and fell back on the floor, panting. At least he hadn't passed out this time... he was pretty sure it wasn't healthy to pass out too often.

Trying again with only his right wing he managed to - very slowly and painfully - get on his knees. Supporting himself with his right wing and his tailfeathers he started to claw his way up toward the wrecked craft.

It felt like an eternity, the debris was loose and slid out from under him, causing him to slip several times, sometimes falling all the way back to the cellar floor, but he had to get back up there, he had to. And finally he did. Exhausted, he heaved himself up and leaned on the fuselage and just lay there for a while, panting.

It was quiet. Deathly quiet. Fearing what he might see he laboriously turned so he was facing the forward seat, that of his weapons officer.

Something, a structural beam or something, must have struck the blast shields on impact with the building. They were crumpled up like a paper and smashed inside the forward seat with incredible force. He couldn't resist a peek past them, he had to know. Inside was just a mess of blood and feathers, and tears mixed with vomit until his stomach was finally empty.

There was just one final thing he could do for his friend now. There was a hatch somewhere... with any luck he could still get at it. He clawed furiously at the debris under the fuselage until he could pry the lid open, and found the handle. His body trembled as he grasped the handle with a talon. First left fortyfive degrees, then out. Then right ninety degrees, then in, hard. He pushed the handle in and there was a dull thunk, and then the ticking started. What was the timer set for again? He couldn't remember. Shit shit shit.

He sat down on the scree slope and slid, hitting his broken wing what felt like an infinite amount of times on pieces of broken concrete as he repeated his slide down the slope into the basement below. Behind him he could hear hissing and then a loud FWOMPH as the light turned from dark blue to bright orange, searing heat singing his neck and the back of his head as the cockpit of the war machine above became a chemically fuelled funeral pyre for his friend.

"From the ashes..." he mumbled as he struggled to his feet and began to hobble away, doing his best to hold his left wing still with the right. Not that he believed in any of that stuff anymore. War either made you less religious or more. In his case, less.
The basement was a confusing mess of twisty passages, and in the darkness they were all the same, and he was feeling parched now. For a moment he thought to backtrack his steps to the crash site so he could drink from that severed pipe whatever it was, but he wouldn't be able to find his way back anyway. Of course, looking down, he realized he could always follow the blood trail...

He was bleeding out now, too? That was just great. His pilot suit was a torn and dirty mess and he could quite frankly not tell from where he was bleeding. He didn't care anymore, it wasn't like he could do anything but carry on anyway. He kept hobbling forward, having found a rather long and straight corridor now, and it seemed to be getting lighter...

Ahead of him, stairs! A narrow flight of stairs, the kind that leads out of cellars! And it was brighter at the top. He picked up the pace, although he was leaning more on the wall than standing upright by himself by now, and it was painfully slow. He could hardly lift his feet anymore, and suddenly he tripped and fell. Who the hell leaves a toy laying around in the middle of a war, he thought before his chin hit the lowest step of the stair.

He was with his girlfriend, they were in her parents' house. Her parents were away for the weekend and he and she had been drinking, watching movies. First comedies, then... other movies. They were on the couch, he was on top of her, their beaks touching, feathers intertwined, he was rubbing against her, grinding, she was shivering, he was, too... his body spasmed...

His body spasmed again, and he opened his eyes, looking up the cellar stairs with his neck in a very uncomfortable angle. Ow.

If his neck was broken it was over now, but if it wasn't he could still crawl. Remembering his left wing was still broken he tentatively reached the right one out. Yep. It hurt like hell, but he could still move it. And so help him, he would. He heaved himself up a bit and pushed with his talons, getting his chest up to the lowest step, and the head onto the one above.

A pause to stop screaming from the pain and catch his breath, then he repeated the process, one step further up. This time he needed more than twice as long to recover, but it wasn't like he had anything better to do. The important thing was to take his time and not slide back down.

It was nearly dawn by the time he had managed to get to the top of the stairs, only to come to an unsurmountable obstacle. The cellar door.

It was tall, impossibly tall from where he was laying, and heavy. He pushed on it with his wing, but in his weakened state there was nothing he could do. He pushed on it anyway. He banged on it. He screamed at it until he couldn't scream any longer, and then he cried. And then the door opened and he stared up into the muzzle of a gun. Looking past it he could see an enemy uniform. 

A metallic clack-chik of a gun being cocked, then a much louder sound. An oscillating buzzing that rose rapidly in pitch, and the world was torn apart into whiteness.

Instinctively he spread his wings and beat them to take off, away from the danger, and he flew. The pain was gone and the thirst and the fatigue was gone, and he felt stronger than ever, lighter than air, and he beat his wings and flew, and flew. He was impossibly high now, far above the war below, far below the billowing smoke and the explosions and noise. Further up than the clouds, even.

Looking below he could see the vast white masses of clouds below, and between he could glimpse oceans and continents. Lifting his gaze he could see the planet curve and the faint blue shimmer that was the edge of the atmosphere. Still his wings beat, stronger with every stroke. The coldness of space was invigorating, and the quiet was serene.
He flew on, and the sun started to appear above the horizon, and he realized now that was where he was heading, and he wasn't alone. There were thousands of others flying with him. Beside him, in front, behind, above and below, all heading toward the sun, all of them naked and perfect and beautiful in their natural plumages.

On his left was the soldier who had pointed a gun at him, but without his uniform he was just a beautiful strong male with pearlescent feathers that shimmered in the sun. Ahead he could see his weapons officer, he could recognize that silhouette anywhere. How beautiful he was.

He had never dared tell him what he felt for him, but now it didn't matter anymore. They were all going toward the sun, toward the biggest fire there was.

Far, far below on the surface of the planet, he would eventually be identified by the cracked and seared remains of his right wing primaries - the biggest bits of him that the explosion of the thermobaric grenade had left behind. He was buried with full ceremonies next to the equally charred remains of his weapons officer, but in the heart of the sun they were much, much closer.