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Foresight asks to touch his wings.
The proposal comes as a shock to him but the titan says nothing more after his request. Very few have been graced with the honour to find refuge from the wind and snow in the titan’s abode, and Icarus is one of them. They sit sheltered away from the mouth of the cave, the burning fire giving off heat, and the listless shade feels like a fish out of water as he watches Prometheus’ face for any reaction at all.
“I— They’re nothing you haven’t seen already,” he says quickly, hating the way he trips over his words. He reaches for the wing on his right, avoiding the titan’s smoldering gaze. “I haven’t changed them at all since you’ve last seen me, and even then the augments wouldn’t have done too much—”
“And still I ask to see them,” he interrupts, firm where Icarus flounders. “You speak as if I do not know these things already.” His words are accompanied by a lilt in his voice that would suggest he finds the whole ordeal amusing.
Icarus chuckles to himself, shaking his head. Embarrassment threatens to eat him alive. “Right,” he says sheepishly, passing a hand through his hair. “In that case I’ll just—”
He shifts his legs so that he’s on one of his knees, and uses his hands to unfurl one of his wings. No need to go through the whole process in such an enclosure and, once he’s opened it far enough, the titan extends it the rest of the way. The first thing Icarus realizes is that, despite knowing it already, Prometheus was much bigger than he was. He dwarfs him even now, sitting across from him, his attention robbed. His fingers, the ones usually covered by his falconry glove, fan out across the material with a gentle care Icarus isn’t sure he deserves. Not from the Father of Mortalkind.
“It’s nothing to gawk at, My Lord,” he starts, moving to pull his wing out of the titan’s hold.
Prometheus looks up at him for the first time in a while, his hand tightening where he has the wing pinched between his fingers. “You are too humble,” Prometheus says coolly, returning to admiring his handiwork. “You are very skilled, Icarus.” He says his name with a drawl that makes him dizzy. “I knew this, of course, for the Agent of Change has told me of how you aid her when she ventures to the surface. But it is another thing entirely to see it myself, to have your careful craftsmanship in my hands. I knew that I would hold it, but it isn’t the same. Do you understand?”
Icarus feels his face warm, unsure of where to look or how to feel under his scrutiny.
He thinks, then, of Melinoë, of how he felt when he saw her again. Or how it felt to hear her speak, to speak with her, talking about the smallest, trivial, most pointless things if only to lengthen their time with each other. There wasn’t quite a word he could put on it to describe it, that truly conveyed the nature of this feeling, but Prometheus’ sincerity reminds him of himself, and so he nods after a little while, his skin flushed despite its pallor.
“I do, I think,” Icarus says finally, and Prometheus hums, running his fingers over the stitches one last time before he pulls his hands away. Icarus thinks of how gentle his hands were and wonders, minutely, how his touch might feel on his own skin.
He regrets his line of thought immediately, dusting off his clothes as he stands. The titan laughs at a joke he cannot hear but he knows, without a doubt, that he is the reason for his amusement.
“Go from here, Son of Daedalus,” Prometheus tells him, rising too, and Icarus lifts his head to meet his gaze.
The shade flies into the night without much argument, trying not to think of the sincerity in his eyes, the genuinity of his curiosity, and the titan’s hands.
FIN