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Grian adjusted his sweater over his back to make room for his wings, cringing at the feeling of the wool going through the multicolored feathers... Hmm... No he thinks the wings are more purply today.
He wouldn't take the sweater off, he has a brand, and he can't just cut holes into it because then he'd be cold and it'd ruin a perfectly good sweater for wings that weren't even there.
...because they aren't. Because he's not an avian like False, or a shapeshifter like Hypno, or any other species with wings like half the other people on the server. No. He was a human. He might also be a parrot (and.. whatever caused his wings to sometimes be purple) but he was in a human body and no matter what he did he wouldn't ever have wings.
"Grian?" He blinks and turns around, Pearl is watching him from below the scaffolding he's standing on. Oh, right, he was building, wasn't he.
"One second!" He... Well usually he'd open up his elytra and glide down, but he left his elytra in one of the... Many shulkers he had laying about. So instead he climbs down, slowly. Pulling his wings tight against his back so as not to bump into any of the bamboo (not that they would do more than go through the stalks, because they were phantom wings, not real wings.)
"Yes...?" He asked his sister when he got to the bottom, Pearl wasn't his biological sister but he'd known her for most of his life, and she knew pretty much everything about him. Including the wings flared out behind him, as if soaking up the sun.
She couldn't see them either, no one could, not even Grian himself (if he focused enough sometimes, though, he could see his wings in his mind's eye. That's how he knew the colors of them sometimes, though most of the time they just felt different.)
Pearl looked at him, to his hands, and where his wings would be were they visible. Grian had refused to look at his hands, he could feel the bird scales and talons on his hands and if he looked it would break the illusion, it's why he always liked to wear black shoes. He could pretend his feet were talons when he couldn't see them.
His wings flapped again. He wanted to fly. To twist and turn in between branches and leaves. To screech and chirp and caw and- Grian blinks and shakes his head. Now is not a good time to have a shift. Sure, Pearl knows about it, and she's always been patient with him. But it's still rude if he's just zoned out while she's talking to him and- oops. Yeah. She's talking to him.
"-the dragon eggs! Have I told you about the dragon eggs yet! I'm sure you've seen them! They're everywhere!" Pearl's own wings, that if a luna moth, were flared out (as much as a moth's wings could be) as she spoke. Ah, yes, the eggs. The... Thousands of them spread across his base that Grian honestly hadn't cared about picking up yet. They cause him to crash from the server every time they fall more than half a block, and that paired with the intense shifts he's been feeling the past few days? He can only deal with a certain number of things before they get too much and that was one of them.
He nods along to Pearl's rant, absentmindedly going through his shulkers to find his elytra. Sometimes it would help the feeling of wings on his back, sometimes it wouldn't. He's hoping today it would help.
He walks back over to Pearl, clipping the elytra over his chest and (trying to) fold his wings under the elytra's wings. The moth hybrid had seemed to have stopped her ranting a few minutes ago, probably when she saw Grian thirty blocks away elbows deep in shulkers.
"Oh, wings?" She asks, seeing him glare at the space under the elytra. He can't see his wings anywhere but his mind's eye, but sometimes he can pretend he can see them with his real eyes and it helps... Somewhat.
Finally he gets his wings under the elytra and it... Helps. Not a whole lot, but it helps and that's better than nothing.
"Yeah, wings."
"Do you want help? How birdy are you feeling? I have some snacks at my base that are like birdseed if you want any." Pearl's wings flutter shut.
"That... That would be great." Pearl grabs his hand and drags walks him to her base.
Pearl won't ever understand what he's going through, not even an avian would. But she tries, and she tries the best she can. And that's more than Grian could ask for.