[Closed] Fly, pigeon fly, cross your windblown sky

[espigeonage]

Who: Thorir, Aaron, Julien
What: Let's find the prodigal pigeon and haul him back home
Where: Within the Neuschwanstein boundary; a mountainous place without that many people
When: This weekend


yes okay maybe the main reason I cut this was for the text.

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[espigeonage]

"You already know anything I could tell you." Anything he's willing to say. This is horrifying and hard, he's mourning who he was and what he's lost, he's afraid he won't be able to present the personality that suits anymore.

He just wants to hear it. "Okay. One more time. Why did you come out here? There's so much else you could be doing with your time. Why put this much into me?"

[elfstoned]

"You still don't know?" says Strider softly. "I don't think you understand what you mean to me, Julien." He steps forward and puts a hand on the side of Julien's feathery bird-face. "I came because I love you. I have loved you since the day you walked into my clinic, looking for work. Now, years later, I love you still." His eyes are warm, earnest, and affectionate, tempered with the slightest fear of rejection -- what if this comes between them? Julien has Isabela, after all, and this kind of confession coming at the end of a year-long rift in their friendship must be sudden.

"Perhaps I should have told you before you turned into a bird. However, my feelings have not changed."

[espigeonage]

"You... you can't mean that." His voice is shaking. He should pull away. "You can't love me. Not when I'm like this. Don't tease me like that!"

[elfstoned]

Julien isn't pulling away. Hope and the beginnings of joy flare up in his heart -- dampened by caution, of course, and by the knowledge that he could well be reading this wrong, but impossible to stifle.

He steps closer and brings his other hand up; he holds Julien's jaw in his palms, and his fingers slip into the feathers on the sides of Julien's face, brushing against the superheated skin underneath.

"Do you doubt me?" he murmurs, bringing their faces close, inches apart. "Would I tease, at a time like this?" His eyes meet Julien's, gazing deep; if Julien still needs convincing of Aaron's sincerity, he need look no further. There is no flinching, no flicker of doubt, nothing to betray a lie.

[espigeonage]

"I'm not even human anymore!" His eyes are wide-set enough that an inch closer and Aaron will be in a blind spot, that he's forced to cross his eyes to try and keep him in focus. "Can't you... find someone... Aaron..."

Something soft snaps, or unties, deep in his chest, and Julien's protests die in a rush of incredulous joy. He leans closer, lets Aaron pass out of the space he can focus on to try and press his forehead against his face. "You had to say this when I don't have goddamn lips anymore," he tries to grouse, because he doesn't, this hasn't taken anything from his awareness of all the things he can't do anymore.

[elfstoned]

He closes his eyes and presses their foreheads together, and breathes out all the tension of the last few years. His fingers sink deeper into Julien's feathers, and a smile he can't suppress crosses his face.

"I did find someone," he says, brushing the side of Julien's face with the back of his hand. He knows it's cheesy but is too deeply, deeply happy to care. He's sure that whatever happens, they can work it out.

"Shh," he says, stroking Julien's feathers like hair. "It's all right. Lips don't matter. I'm Aragorn. Sixty-year dry spells are nothing."

[espigeonage]

"Oh, Aaron." He manages to bat his outer eyelids. "You always say the most goddamn romantic things."

"Okay, cut! CUT!"

The camera shivers a little and loses focus. Feed switches to a less-than-steady handheld cam, through which you can see Victor Moransen pulling away, grinning, from the enormous animatronic costume that's being used for a lot of shots of Bird Julien. The costume continues moving, exaggerated now, swinging its head left and right.

The director takes off her baseball cap and rubs her forehead. "C'mon, guys, it's not that funny."

[elfstoned]

Victor Moransen gives the camera a sideways, sly glance, hooks a hand under the costume's chin, and plants a giant, sloppy kiss on the puppet's beak.

"We're going to take it from 'Okay, one more time,'" the director calls, clapping her hands. "Everyone back into places, please. I know it's April 1st but I'd like to be home before eleven tonight, thank you."

Victor uses the sleeve of his coat to buff up the costume's beak, and a stagehand is already brushing the feathers back into place.

[espigeonage]

"'Dry spell.' Awww, baby. You don't find me attractive?" Daniel Soga is off camera when he says that. As the crew sets up, the handheld swings to focus on him, and he ignores it, not made up and thus not looking that much like Julien ever had. Ever since January he only provides voice work, usually not from on-set, and footage for flashbacks, leaving him free for other pursuits. Which has him in a wheelchair for another few months. Oops.

[elfstoned]

"'Breeding with you would be counterproductive,'" Victor calls over his shoulder as he's shuffled back into place, referring to the video Daniel had found a few weeks ago. "'We have incompatible genitals, pigeon!'"

[espigeonage]

A rude gesture is made, and the feed cuts.