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Brazil was… a lot.
A lot of noise, rain and traffic and music in a language that still felt foreign in his beak, and a lot of colours, exploding out from every corner. A lot of space, too, and a lot of flying to cover the distance—which was fine, Blu was getting the hang of it, but he would be sore all over afterward, his muscles still unused to the motion. He would sleep under the star-strewn sky, another body sleeping beside him, and when day broke he would feel a familiar rhythm begin to move him, only to realise that he was no longer in Minnesota and no longer had a human to wake.
Despite everything, he couldn’t help but feel that he was still hers. He was Jewel’s, too, and his friends’, and Brazil’s, and his own, but it was different. All of it was still so new, loud and colourful and scary where Linda had never been. She’d been muted colours and the same pair of glasses across the better part of a decade, even as the paint had begun to chip. She’d been the same breakfast every day, secure in the knowledge of how much energy she would have, when she would be hungry again. She’d been so very comfortable, so safe and loving and certain in her devotion of continuing to care for him until they’d drop dead at the same time, her at eighty-one and Blu at sixty-nine.
He would always be hers in a way that no other could replicate, and he would always ache for her in a way no other could soothe, because where one part of him felt wonderfully, overwhelmingly full of new experiences, another part sat empty, like a box of memorabilia left to collect dust in the attic, and that didn’t feel fair. Not on Linda. Not on the person he’d known for fifteen years, who had grown up alongside him, who had shared nearly every second of her life with him.
From one moment to the next, Blu’s life had turned on its head, and now he was here, and Linda was not. The thought made him want to tear out his feathers, if only because some tiny, deeply rooted part of his brain thought it might make her come back. If he was hurt enough, surely Linda would know, because she had always been there to take care of him.
A flutter of wings, the light scrape of claws against wood. Jewel hopped down into the hollowed-out tree trunk that had become their nest, and Blu gave a miserable sort of trill, aiming for a greeting and landing somewhere in malaise. Shame, now, on top of it all. He was not quite as confident in the air as he’d have liked to be, and so Jewel was on gathering duty for now, collecting berries and nuts in the safety of her own skill, knowing that she would be gone in a second, should anything sneak up on her. In the meantime, Blu would fix up the nest, mostly barren as it still was. It was a good system. It worked.
Still, Blu could not fight the instinct to hide beneath his wings, a tortured little pile amidst sticks and blades of grass.
“Hey,” said Jewel, and a handful of nuts fell from her beak.
Handful, Blu repeated in his mind. Gosh.
“Hey, Blu, what’s wrong?”
He sank farther into the little tent his wings had made, even as he felt Jewel bend down to nudge at him. “I miss Linda,” he told her, followed by a dry laugh as he realised how absolutely insufficient those words were at summing it all up. He wasn’t sure he’d have found better ones, had he had the time and presence of mind to try.
Still, it seemed to get at least some of the meaning across. Jewel paused, frozen in her hunched position for a moment, before something in her eased, as if processing that he was not in any real danger. Just upset for no reason, and also every reason under the sun. Just inconsolable about something he couldn’t even name without dropping that name, the one person his life had revolved around for as long as he could remember, the only person who had mattered until—
Well, until.
“Look,” Jewel said, and Blu winced as he braced for annoyance in her voice before he realised that there was none. She nudged him again, tucking her beak under his wing, and he allowed her to move it out of the way, opening him up to her gaze. “Linda loves you, right?”
Blu blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “No, yeah, of course.” Because she did. There was a small, ugly part of him that wanted to argue with Jewel, or perhaps with himself, because surely if Linda truly loved him she wouldn’t have left him here, and she wouldn’t have brought him to Brazil in the first place, but—that wasn’t true. It was because she loved him that she’d brought him over. Repopulating was the primary concern, but they’d talked a lot in the days leading up to the trip—with understanding going only one way, but they’d talked nonetheless—and Blu had found that she also wanted him to—well, get out there. Out in the world. Out with his kind, just to see what it was like, and if he’d hated it she would’ve taken him right back.
But he hadn’t. He didn’t hate it here. Jewel met his eye, and Blu thought that she saw the realisation written across his face.
“She does,” Jewel told him. It must have been obvious, Blu thought, if someone who’d interacted with Linda for about two minutes total could see it. “And she’s never far away.”
Blu nodded. He supposed it was easy to forget that they weren’t separated forever. Her work at the sanctuary practically forced her to be present more often than not, and knowing her, it was by design. They’d both pushed themselves out of their comfort zones this past year.
Then again, Blu realised right as he thought this that this wasn’t quite it. He missed Linda, of course, but that wasn’t what’d upset him. Linda was there, an hour’s flight away at most.
“You can visit whenever you like,” Jewel went on, “and you can—”
“I miss home.”
Jewel stopped, and something small and tender tugged at Blu’s chest at the words. Linda was within reach, never far from him, just as she’d promised. She could serve him hot cocoa and let him climb the legs of her pants and talk to him for hours on end, but it would never be as it had been before everything, before Brazil, before a strange man had shown up at the bookstore at random, before Blu had grown into a version of himself that was better in every way, but still ached with growing pains that demanded something other than confidence.
Blu bowed his head, afraid to see what Jewel’s face was doing. He’d been doing so well. He’d been adapting so well—terrified at times, yes, but adapting anyway, because he’d found that a little force did go a long way sometimes. He’d learned to fly, and that alone was a high like no other, and he wanted to never stop, he finally understood what all the hype was about, and he loved it, but—
But somewhere in the core of him, he missed what he’d had. Even if it was better this way. Even if he knew he could never go back, that he would miss his new life too much if he tried. A part of him longed for two fingers to brush gently over his head, or for a forearm to present itself in practised routine, waiting for him to perch. A part of him missed long, boring days at the bookstore, passing the time by listening to Linda read out her favourite passages. A part of him wanted it back—not really, not with any meaningful gravity, but it dawned on him now that in all the chaos that had been his getting-acquainted with Brazil, he’d never allowed himself to grieve.
“Blu,” said Jewel softly, not mocking or condescending at all. Not like he was spoiled and silly and a pathetic excuse for a bird. Not like he’d never get used to it all, forever tied to his gilded cage of love and companionship. She nudged her head under his, a pleasant brush against the underside of his beak, and Blu felt some tension drain from him.
“I think,” he said, speaking before he’d really found the words, just to convince himself that there were words to begin with. “I think I miss being a pet.”
That word, tossed at his feet with derision for as long as he could remember. All around him, birds would struggle through the winter, some starving, some freezing, some delirious with the uncertainty of not knowing whether they’d make it to the next year, and meanwhile Blu would sit inside his heated home, sipping sugary drinks and chatting amiably with his human like she could understand him. Only when he’d seen what such miserable conditions could buy him had he learned to feel ashamed of that word; only when Jewel, still a stranger at the time, had said it with disbelief rather than envy had he understood what it truly meant.
Spoiled, yes, beyond all measure, and entirely unfairly. Doted on to the point where it was a miracle he hadn’t gotten fat. Oblivious to all the struggles that his kind faced out in the real world.
But, much more profoundly, missing out. Blu had been flightless for most of his life, and he had never thought to question it until Jewel had looked at him that way, not with mockery, but with pity. Like it was something to feel sorry for, poor little bird with the broken wings, never to be whole again.
He knew what he’d been missing now, and he was glad to have found it. But gosh, had it been easy to be taken care of.
“Of course you do,” Jewel said, making him perk up with surprise.
“You—what?”
“I can’t say I relate,” she said, “but being sheltered like that all your life—of course it’s a lot once you’re out.”
Blu felt the urge to argue with that, too, to say it had never been like that, but this, too, wasn’t said with judgement. Not anymore, not after their many long talks about it, their greatest difference, their broadest divide. She said sheltered, and she didn’t mean protected from harm while the rest of us fight to get by, a traitor to your species, no better than the humans that hunt us. She said out, and she didn’t mean free from that hellhole you’ve been living in, god, how did you manage it, isn’t this just so much better?
Blu had grown up in a bubble, and now that he was out, it was difficult not to miss it.
“Yeah,” he said, lost for more intelligent words. He hadn’t expected to be understood. He hadn’t even expected to not be laughed at. Jewel was gentler these days, at least when it came to him, but there were things so far out of her domain that encountering them for the first time was nothing short of ridiculous to her. “I guess if—if you were adopted by a human, maybe you’d like a lot of it, but you’d always miss your freedom.” He gave a wide gesture of his wing, encompassing the jungle at large. “‘Cause you grew up out here.”
It wasn’t a perfect comparison. Few birds would think of adoption as an improvement the way Blu thought of his life in the wild, and there was no hidden potential in a wild bird that would suddenly unfurl once they were tamed.
But Jewel seemed to catch his meaning, eyes soft with something Blu was not yet used to, but felt more and more like home every time he saw it. “Yeah,” she said. “I would. And it would never go away, because it’s in here.”
A brush of her wing over his chest, where his heart sat beating. Hurting, but beating. This past year, Blu had uncovered instincts he hadn’t known he had: the itch to fly after walking for too long; the temptation of new flavours, bright and luscious in the jungle; the drive to pick the shell off of pin feathers that were not his own, and the barrelful of meaning behind it. He was, at the end of the day, a bird like any other.
But not all instincts were written into him at birth, scrawled along the walls of his egg. Some of them he had grown into, because it had been adaptive for him. Because it had kept him alive, even if survival had never been a struggle. Brushing his beak with a toothbrush, just for the sake of sharing a routine; sleeping in a cage, content in the knowledge that he had all he needed; climbing around the house on strong feet, wings tucked close and unmoving.
Baby birds were often tossed out of the nest with the expectation that they would either learn to fly on the way down, or be deemed unfit for survival and left on the ground, assuming they survived the fall to begin with. No parent stayed with their fledgling into adulthood, and certainly not over fifteen years.
Linda had been neither mother nor mate nor friend to him, nor any other word he could think of. It was something else entirely, as inherent and as natural as flying. When she had opened his box and scooped him into her hands, they had both simply known, just as he had known, in the moment between one heartbeat and the next, the ocean rushing up to meet him while the wind whipped at his feathers, that flying was something he was made for after all.
He had left behind the only home he’d ever known, and it hurt. Blu closed his eyes, inhaling the scent of dried grass and warm earth and this new home he’d found, the home clad in blue feathers and bluer eyes, and it hurt, because it wasn’t a matter of preferring one over the other. Had he stayed with Linda, he would never have met Jewel, would never have known Brazil; and if he stayed here, he would never be a pet again, committed to the freedom he’d been so sure he didn’t need.
“Oh, man,” he said, sagging against Jewel. He’d often wished that he could cry like Linda did, spilling all his sorrow at once until it left his body and he felt better, but he couldn’t. Where Linda—where humans—could get it all out over half an hour, wash their face, and be done with it, he had to sit with it, feeling the shape of it behind his ribs, filling the hollows of his bones. And he had to live with it. And he had to just… move on regardless, because he had a life to live now, something that demanded his attention. Every so often, there would be a small, spotted egg poking him in the side when he woke up, unfertilised but heavy with meaning, the reminder of what would one day be his. There was time, Jewel told him, and no pressure at all, but it was waiting for him. This life he hadn’t known he wanted, that he could no longer imagine going without.
And all the while, Linda would stay with him. She would be in his dreams, flickering behind his eyes as he slept, and she would be at the sanctuary, waving in greeting with that huge smile on her face, and she would forever be who he was inclined to call for when something weighed on him, longing for a being much larger than himself to take him into their arms and make everything feel smaller than it seemed.
“I know,” said Jewel softly. She was the same size as him, and her wings fit around him differently than human hands, but Blu leaned into it regardless, burrowing his beak into her feathers until he brushed against skin. “I know, Blu.”
Maybe this would’ve been easier if he’d left home sooner. Maybe it would hardly have bothered him then, and he’d have been content to live on the seam between two worlds for a while, slowly but surely edging farther into one of them until he’d left the other behind completely. Or maybe it would’ve changed nothing at all, because those couple of years with Linda would still have happened, even if it’d been five instead of fifteen.
Maybe this was just the price of having loved someone, and the sacrifice required to start over with something new.
Blu heaved a deep sigh, willing his tension to ease. Maybe that was something he could live with. To love, and to let go, and to love anew because of it.