Finn rolled over on the pavement as he started to feel lightheaded. His eyes shifted restlessly in their sockets, watching as countless pedestrians stepped carelessly past his weakening form. They side-stepped, creeping around his huddled body as if he were vermin. He wanted to spit at them. He wanted to give them all something to really be afraid of.
He could feel his own blood soaking into his white downy wings as the feathers stuck to his skin. This wasn't the first time he had been attacked, but it could well be the last.
His kind weren't exactly accepted in society, but Finn wasn't exactly the type of person who cared. It had been required for of his people to cover their wings in public so as not to cause a disturbance. You could always tell a Numen by his floor-length government issued overcoat - the simultaneous disguise and earmark of an oppressed race. But you could always tell Finn by the towering snowy wings he flaunted, covered in diaphanous gossamer feathers.
Finn had once donned the disguise. He had once held shame. But after the death of his parents at the hands of those fucking bigots... He wasn't going to let himself die hiding what he was. Not like his family.
And now, he thought, it seemed that his boldness had bought him the same fate as his family.
A warmth crept up Finn's body as he continued to spill blood from the jagged twin knife wounds marring the ivory skin of his abdomen. He shuddered as he closed his eyes, an almost undetectable masochistic smile staining his lips.
He felt a hand on his shoulder as he slipped from consciousness.
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Eli crouched on the dark polished hardwood, observing the steady rise and fall of the man's chest in his bed with a watchful eye, as if it would stop at any moment. His drab National Numina Suppression Department linen coat, whose sleeves were still spattered and smeared with blood, pooled on the floor around him. His noble features were clouded with worry as he carefully oversaw the other man's well-being.
Suddenly, Eli saw the boy's sable lashes flutter on his cheeks.
"You're awake!" Eli beamed.
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Eli had found the young man crumpled beaten and bloody on the street. The sight of the boy's beautiful blood-soaked plumage was almost too much for his heart to take. He immediately checked for a pulse, his own heart quickening as he worked, pressing his fingers to the soft skin beneath the boy's jaw. Though faint, he could feel a slow, steady thump of a heart beneath his touch. Eli carefully gathered the battered and neglected fledgling in his arms and laid him gently across the dark leather seats in the rear of his car.
He drove like a madman back to his apartment. He couldn't have taken the boy to a hospital. Only a handful of hospitals and clinics in the entire country would give emergency treatment to a Numen, much less one who so blatantly defied the country's laws regarding their race. The boy would just have to count himself lucky - a fortunate player in some divine game of chance - that the man who happened upon his broken body was one of the very few Numina to have received some medical training.
The boy was hauled up several flights of stairs by Eli. Passersby stared in shock and horror at the sullied wings the inert young man dared to bare in public as they rushed past in a blur. Once inside, Eli laid the unconscious angel back on his kitchen table and began a careful and swift examination and treatment of his wounds. Much to his relief, the lacerations were not very deep and seemed to have avoided all internal organs, but he had lost a lot of blood and was still bleeding. He would have to close the wounds and hope his body was in good enough condition to recuperate fully. Eli's apartment wasn't exactly equipped to give a man a blood transfusion, but stitches - that, he could do.
Eli made a mad dash for his supply closet and fetched his suture kit, gauze, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol large enough to disinfect an entire hospital wing. He snapped on his latex gloves and got to work, gently cleaning the wounds and applying a small number of carefully placed sutures. He deposited a few large pads of gauze on the raw flesh and began to wrap a thick, stretchy bandage around the young man's waist. Eli took a step back to admire his quick handiwork.
The boy still looked rough, but really was a pretty one, even through the cuts and bruises. His soft and delicate features were frozen, nearly lifeless, on his ghostly pale face. His long dark lashes fanned out across his cheeks, as if attempting to hide the raw red road rash where the left side of his face had hit the pavement. His dark hair was of an unusual style, with the back and sides, up to his temples, shorn to less than an inch in length while top remained long enough to almost reach past his ears if he decided to comb it down rather than leave it natural and wild.
Smooth milk-white skin covered every inch of the body that was revealed to Eli, aside from his left arm. The thin limb was scattered with an assortment of colorful tattoos from shoulder to wrist, the largest of which being a sizable human heart wrapped in a banner on his upper arm. Eli leaned closer in an attempt to read the message written across the heart. Maybe something about a guy named Ben? The rest was incomprehensible as Eli failed to recognize the language. Though Eli didn't usually go for the tattooed look, he had to admit the boy's artwork was gorgeous - it suited him to a tee.
His massive white wings, still caked with dirt and blood, stretched the length of Eli's table as his lithe body lay limp. Eli would have to clean those wings. But not tonight. When he wakes up.
'If he wakes up,' Eli mumbled then immediately admonished himself for his brief foray into pessimism.
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"You're awake!" Eli beamed.
