Without Wings
A DC Superheroes fanfiction adventure.
Read now at Archive Of Our Own. Or request a paperback copy at bonuspartsfic -at- gmail.com!
Paperback cover designed and illustrated by Ness / Bats in the Belfry Art. Follow Bats in the Belfry Art on Twitter and Instagram.
REJECT AI ART and hire real artists!
About The Book
This DC Comics universe fanfiction features Golden Eagle. Continuity is an amalgam of Hawkman and Hawkman-adjacent comics, plus my own headcanon.
Part of my “Lifetime Lovebirds” continuity.
Imprisoned. Conscripted. Taken as a battle prize and forced into sex slavery. The last few years have been *rough* for Golden Eagle. Now, stuck on a pirate ship at the edge of the galaxy, the once-upon-a-time Titan just wants to get home. But which home? There’s Thanagar, the world of his father, to which he promised he’d return but where everyone despises him for his half-blood heritage. There’s also Earth, his mother’s world, where he once had friends and a woman he loved, but where he committed his most shameful sin. Complicating matters is the alluring ship’s scientist for whom he’s started to feel a closeness yet who keeps pushing him away, and the deft, vibrant refugee who reminds him a bit too much of that great love of his past.
Torn between two worlds, two women, and a choice between honor and death, Golden Eagle’s life will be changed forever by the decision he makes.
Nobody said redemption would be easy.
What’s inside
Chapters
26
Sexual situations
Described
Violence
Graphic
Pages
331
Mature Themes
Reference to past sexual assault
Chapter 1: Derelict
The ceramic doors to the medical bay opened noiselessly, though in my head I always assigned them a swishing sound, the influence of watching too many sci-fi shows as a kid. As I walked into the room, the initial odor of antiseptic was quickly replaced by the rich, raw smell of brine and dimethyl sulfide, reminding me of Fiji’s Natadola Beach at sunrise. It came from Veranyi, standing tall and erect at the main console. Turning at my entrance, she fixed me with her black reflective gaze and said:
“Golden Eagle. You are early.”
I bumped up one shoulder. “There’s not much for me to do on this ship.” We hadn’t seen a real fight since we’d come back through the Source Wall into regular space, and a Thanagarian wingman was at his best when he could fight.
“I am certain Neex or Valda would be grateful for your assistance,” Veranyi told me.
Rummaging around in Engineering or through the ship’s armory stores sounded boring. “I’d rather hang out with you, to be honest.”
Veranyi gestured toward an examination cot. “Then let us proceed.”
I moved to the cot and shifted my weight onto it. She came over, her tentacle glide as smooth and silent as the doors sliding in their tracks. Despite the alienness of the tendrils growing from her head and those poking beneath the hem of her gown, I always felt safe with her. I don’t remember much of my mother, a human woman who’d died long ago back on Earth, but I imagined her to be like Veranyi. Veranyi felt like a mother to me. Maybe because she was always ready to help or heal, no matter the person or circumstance. Or maybe it was because of her breasts, which weighed heavily against my arm as she leaned over me. Her species might have evolved from something like a squid, but she was still stacked.
I forced my attention back to her face. Her oblong eyes peered close, and she asked, “May I take it off?”
While I knew she meant the protective plate over my eye, I had to push the more Oedipal thoughts from my head. She was a contact psychic, capable of divining thoughts and emotions with a touch, a skill that had garnered her the alias Hierophant. I pulled my mouth tight so I wouldn’t giggle and muttered, “Sure.”
Two of her head tentacles moved beyond the edges of my vision toward the left side of my face. One of the tentacles was curled around a sliver-width wedge that Veranyi slipped between the protective plate and my cheek, and she used her long fingers to break the plate’s adhesive seal to my skin.
I sucked a reflexive hiss.
She stopped. “Do you have pain?”
“No. It just feels like I should.” As she drew the plate away, I asked, “How much longer until it’s done?”
“Be still, and we shall see.” The second head tentacle swooped in, gripping a tiny flashlight. Beyond the glare of the beam, a twin version of her appeared in my vision. Not so separate as the last time she’d checked, though.
“You’re almost back to being one person,” I said.
“The double vision should resolve once the ocular nerves fully reconstruct themselves.” The light swung away, leaving me with the sight of her inky-black smile. “Save for some residual scar tissue around the original enucleation site, the regeneration is proceeding well. Your new eye should be fully functional within a few cycles.”
I turned my hand in front of my face. Since the battle with Carter that had ruptured my left eye, I hadn’t imagined ever having the sight of both returned. “Who says stem-cell tech is bad?”
Veranyi cocked her head. “Bad is a moral judgment. The application of science may be used for immoral purposes, but the science itself is free from such attributions.”
I blinked at her. “I was trying to be funny.”
She returned her head to its straight position. “Then you were unsuccessful.”
I pulled my lips together and shut up.
“Close your eye, please,” she said, returning to the task at hand.
I did as requested, and she replaced the protective plate. As the new adhesive took effect, I changed the subject to one more heartfelt: “I don’t know how to repay you.”
She drew herself up into six feet of chartreuse poise; seven, counting the bob of her head tentacles. “No repayment is necessary.”
“You’ve regrown my eye,” I said with emphasis. “That’s not nothing.”
“There was no benefit to withholding aid.” She moved away, to replace her equipment into one of the infirmary’s sliding drawers. “I had the means and the technology; you had the desire. We both had the time.”
I sat up, once again watching her movements with the depth perception of only one eye. An unexpected bashfulness made my torso muscles contract. “Well, it’s been a nice time. For me, anyway. For you, too, I hope?”
She looked halfway around at me, showing me her smooth profile. “Why would you hope that?”
“Because I like spending time with you.”
She turned fully. Looking into her enormous black eyes was like looking into an abyss. Except this abyss gazed also. When she spoke, her tone had shifted from tender to taut. “We are not sexually compatible.”
I showed her my palms and attempted a fast course correction. “I didn’t mean—! Veranyi…!”
“You use that name too freely,” she said, sounding as much sad as scolding. “I should not have shared it with you.”
The bottom fell out of my guts. She was the last friend I had in this galaxy, and I couldn’t lose her. I hopped from the cot. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to overstep any bounds. If it makes you feel better, I’ll stop; I promise.”
Her stare was silent and indecipherable. I considered trying to explain myself again, but I wasn’t sure what I could say that wouldn’t dig me into a deeper hole. In the next moment, it didn’t matter, as the comm system squawk box gave a click and Neex said:
“Hierophant?” The engineer’s voice, processed through layers of hull and circuitry from the ship’s core, always sounded tinny.
Veranyi kept her stare on me but said to the comm, “Yes?”
“Captain wants Golden Eagle on the bridge.”
I frowned. “Can it wait? I’m in the middle of something.”
The squawk box fell silent. When it crackled to life again, Gana’s sharp, insistent voice burst through the brief static.
“Listen here, wingman. When the captain of a ship says, ‘jump,’ you jump. Now, get your carcass up to the bridge, on the double.”
The box clicked off with a harsh snap. Veranyi clasped her hands in front of her. “You should not keep the captain waiting,” was all she said.
We weren’t finished, but she had a way of compelling me to do what she said. I took the transport lift to the main corridor of the ship, which, after a short and uneventful walk, led me onto Skitnik’s spacious bridge. Toragg sat at his helm controls, only glancing my way as I passed. I felt his focus follow me, still clinging as I walked up beside Gana, who stood in front of the bridge’s main viewscreen with her back to the rest of the room. Holding her attention on the viewer was a small, run-down light freighter floating a few kilometers off Skitnik’s prow.
I stopped to look, too. “What’s that?”
“It’s a ship,” Toragg said; from his tone, he probably wanted to add, moron.
“I can see that,” I said. “What’s it doing all the way out here?”
“That’s what we want to find out,” Gana said without looking my way. “Neex picked her up a few minutes ago.”
“But I can’t match make or markings to anything in my databases,” Neex put in from the nearest comm box. “I was hoping you might recognize her?”
On the viewer, Skitnik’s radar and scanner analyses tallied information in quick-moving scrolls. I shook my head. “She’s not from Thanagar, Rann, or New Tamaran.” And she definitely wasn’t from Earth; too compact and slick, despite the wear. “Have you tried hailing her?”
“We’re not idiots,” Toragg said.
“No answer,” Neex informed me with more diplomacy.
I shrugged and stated the obvious. “Then either nobody’s home, or they don’t want help.”
Gana drew a breath that straightened her back and shoulders. “It’s a manual check, then.” She turned to me at last, giving me a quick once-over. “Suit up.”
I shot her a gape. “For what?”
She arched one of her prominent brow ridges. “Are you saying you want to head into an unknown ship wearing just a onesuit?”
“No, I meant, why are we doing a walkover at all?”
“Because every ship’s got some cargo worth having.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said around a grimace. “We’ve been floating around the ass end of the galaxy for I don’t know how long – when you were supposed to be taking me home! – and now you want to make a detour to pull apart some clunker just because it’s piqued your curiosity?”
“Yes.” Gana lifted her chin to speak to the comm. “Neex, drop cloak. Get your claws into her and bring her up to the port side umbilical.” She smiled, showing a lot of semi-sharp teeth and a mercenary gleam in her eyes. “We’re going for a plunder.”
Deterring a bounty hunter from some potential loot is always a lost cause. So, less than twenty minutes later, I found myself standing in front of Skitnik’s umbilical hatch in my Golden Eagle armor and helmet. My mind wasn’t on boarding the derelict, though. While I listened to the sounds of resolving air pressure on the other side of the hatch, I watched the door at the far end of the corridor, the one to Veranyi’s medical suite.
She hadn’t broken silence since I’d left her to go to the bridge, at least not to me. It didn’t feel right to head into a potentially dangerous situation without saying something to her: goodbye or sorry or simply how much I valued her as a friend. Before I could work up the nerve to walk down there and knock on her door, I heard the clomp-clomp sound of mag-boots hitting the floor plates in a no-nonsense stride, signaling Gana’s approach.
She’d wriggled into a light-armor EVA suit, and one of the ship’s electric security batons dangled from her utility belt. Her suit wasn’t as flexible or as adaptive as my Nth metal armor, but nothing much was. Still, she came up next to me with her chest out and her chin up, as though adorned for battle. For a minute, she just stared ahead of her, so I did the same. Then, through the local comm channel shared between her EVA suit and my helmet, she muttered:
“Stay away from Hierophant.”
I turned to her. “Excuse me?”
Gana kept her focus front. “I know she’s one of those earnest, compassionate souls you aggressive males find so appealing, but she doesn’t need you. And it won’t matter soon, anyway.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Toragg’s found us a small sculptor planet, unclaimed, in the Ninkhirsag sector. Once we’ve cleared this derelict,” she said, nodding to the wall, “we’ll head out that way, finally settle down on a world of our own.”
The decisiveness in her tone made my voice crack. “But not me.”
She turned her face to mine. “I thought you wanted to go home?”
Her sneer stopped me cold. I did want to go home, though if I were more in the habit of being honest with myself, I might have been willing to admit that I wasn’t so eager as I’d once been to leave behind Skitnik’s raggedy but familiar company.
As if sensing my thoughts, Gana shook her head. “You’re not part of this crew, Golden Eagle. You never have been. I don’t know where you belong, but it’s not with us.”
I clenched my jaw as resentment and self-pity burned in my sinuses like twin stars. I didn’t dare give Gana the satisfaction of seeing any tenderer emotions, though, and pinched my brow into a glower. “That hasn’t stopped you from giving me orders all the time.”
She gave my axe a fast glance. “Having a homicidal psychopath on board comes in handy sometimes. But not in the long run. And not for the quiet existence the rest of us are looking for.”
Maybe I should have said I wanted a peaceful life, too: the chance to put down my axe for good and stretch out on a warm, sandy beach to the sound of rolling waves and gentle laughter blowing beside my ear. But then I heard my father’s voice, deep and commanding and – at the end – full of sorrow. Protect them, he’d said as he’d died in my arms, meaning the world and her people. I couldn’t turn my back on that.
I’d turned my back on too many things.
The hiss of equalizing pressure came to a stop, and Neex opened the passage in front of us. “Umbilical secure, Captain. She’s all yours.”
Beyond the hatch, the darkness of the derelict beckoned. Being the bigger and more capable fighter, I blinked away my errant emotions and moved into the point position as we walked inside.
Connected to Skitnik’s thrust, the ship had enough gravity to keep us from having to use boot maglocks. Even so, my stomach felt like it was rising into my chest cavity. A memory of deadly ambush – dulled but still in the back of my mind – tensed my muscles and kept me scanning my helmet’s internal head’s-up display for warnings. Everything scrolled by in dull gray, though, without alarm. Then I noticed the atmosphere scan.
“Scrubbers are still cycling air,” I said.
Gana grunted. “So?”
“Why keep life support running without thrust?”
“Maybe the engine’s broken.”
“Why no distress call, in that case?”
“Maybe it’s a trap,” she said, still unconcerned.
“That’s the last thing we need,” Neex grumbled across our comms.
Now, Gana snapped. “Since when did I become the captain of a bunch of yellow-bellies? Stiffen up,” she told me. “That should be C&C up ahead. We can access the ship’s manifesto from there, see if there’s anything worth pulling across.”
“You mean, stealing,” I said, showing a snarl for that yellow-belly accusation.
“It’s only stealing if the crew’s still alive. Otherwise, it’s salvage, and that’s fair game.”
“I could use some extra scrubbers,” Neex put in, and Gana gave me a knowing look.
I grimaced but resumed moving toward the fore. Nothing jumped out at us, and we didn’t trigger any alarms. The walls were broken every few meters by hatch seals that belonged to storage or crew bunks, but they looked like they hadn’t been opened in a long time. I paused by a seam and slid a finger across it. Gray particles came away, some of them sticking to my glove while others floated into the recycled air like dandelion puffs scattered on a breeze.
I looked around at Gana again. “I don’t like this.”
“You don’t like anything.”
“It could be dangerous.”
“It’s just dust.” She pushed her way around me to take the lead. “And we’re not going back without something to show for it.”
With her steady, determined stride, Gana made it to Control in less than a dozen heartbeats. She placed her hand on the access panel. There was no reaction, not even an activation light. Not totally unexpected, but a little disheartening for progress.
She stepped back from the hatch, glanced at my axe, then at me. “Time to make yourself useful.”
I shoved the blade of my axe into the center seam of the hatch. It took a concerted press of strength to force the edges of the door apart, but split they did, albeit with a teeth-clenching shriek of long-locked mechanics. With the seam broken, Gana braced her hands against one door and pushed while I pulled on the other, until there was just enough space for her to angle herself through. Even with my wings in closed position, I needed a significantly larger gap. By the time I’d gotten inside the Control chamber, Gana was already pushing buttons and tapping at panels.
Control was small, more the size of a cockpit than an operations center. A mass of monitors and close-access terminals, most of them dark, surrounded the pilot’s mounted gimbal seat in the middle of the room. In the seat, a corpse sat silent, whatever flesh it had possessed at one time all but disintegrated beneath its flight suit. At first glance, the remains could have been Earther or Thanagarian, except the fingers were too long, and the skull had a strange chitinous material covering the face.
“No marks on him,” I muttered as I examined the deflated but intact flight suit.
Gana kept on with whatever was commanding her focus; she barely seemed to notice the pilot. “Probably died in that chair.”
“I don’t recognize the physiology. Where do you think he’s from?”
“What do you care?”
I shot a glare at her back. “He stayed at his post through the end. The least we can do is give him a decent send-off.”
Gana snorted. “You and your battle code.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it! It’s just the considerate thing to do.” I frowned. “I’d want someone to do it for me.”
“Fine. Wrap the thing in ribbons before shoving it out an airlock or setting it on fire or whatever it is you think needs doing. Just don’t let it interfere with what we’re really here for.”
I made sure Gana heard my disgruntled exhalation as I rose from the body. “Aye, Captain.”
“That’s more like it.” She raised her hand for attention and, as I came to her shoulder, indicated a scroll of data in some language I didn’t recognize. My helmet’s built-in translators didn’t recognize it, either.
“These look like security codes,” she said, indicating the scroll with her finger. She moved her digit across the console to another data string. “And I’m betting these are location records.” She gave me her greedy smile again. “You know what that means, right?”
I didn’t share her glee. “You’ve found your jackpot?”
Gana clicked her cheek. “Don’t look so sour. I’ll let you have a piece, if there’s enough to go around.” Her grin turned terrible. “You can buy yourself something pretty to go with that new eye.”
“Consider my share payment for my transport home.” I hefted my axe. “So, where do you think this hidden treasure is?”
“Storage compartment on this level. Look for a symbol like two stars with a spear beside.” She pointed down the corridor. “It should be just past the umbilical lock, close to engine access.”
That sounded straightforward enough. I went back through the C&C doors and walked toward the aft of the ship. Gana came up behind me, and together our boot clicks made an irregular rhythm against the floor plates. I scanned the faint carvings next to each hatch seal, watching the symbols change. The smaller hatches had single symbol identifications, while the larger hatches farther along had identifications of two, then three, symbols.
“This one,” Gana declared from the opposite side of the corridor. She squatted in front of a long hatch with seams extending to the floor, next to which was scored that two-stars-and-a-spear symbol. Her hand brushed a corner of the hatch, and a small panel slid open, revealing a pad of manual access keys labeled with the same sort of symbolic code. She rubbed her hands together, muttered, “Here we go,” and tapped the keys in a particular sequence that her mercenary mind must have memorized.
I gripped my axe as mechanisms within the hull clanked and groaned. The hatch stuttered once against its seams before it rolled out into the corridor with its prize. As Gana leaned back in surprise, I bent forward the same. Within the hatch lay an amber shell like a cold-sleep capsule, and within that shell lay—
“A girl?” I wheezed in dismay, though upon closer inspection, she was no typical girl. Her skin was the blue of a cloudless sky, and while she had human proportions, her body was longer and leaner, like the corpse in C&C. Unlike her dead pilot kin, she didn’t wear any face covering, giving us clear view of her features. No scars or age wrinkles marred her skin; in fact, she possessed a smooth, flawless facial symmetry like I’d seen only once before. For a second, my mind flashed back to that other beautiful young woman of my past, the one with the eyes as blue as the clear ocean and the beaming smile that – at one time – shone just for me.
I reached out my hand. “Is she alive?”
“I don’t know,” Gana said, though when my fingers grazed the surface of the shell, the girl stirred in her artificial slumber.
Her eyes flickered open. They weren’t blue but gold, as gold as my wings, and they shimmered as if in a daze before sharpening into fast focus. Her lips parted. She drew a breath and screamed, and my brain exploded with light.
Mostly space opera. Some drama, some angst, a bit of romance.
About the author.
Mayumi Hirtzel has been writing stories since she was 5 years old. While she has turned to more original fiction over the last several years, fan fiction remains very much a part of her repertoire. She writes under the pseudonym bonusparts, and a small selection of her completed stories can be found online at Archive Of Our Own and Fanfiction.Net.
She lives in the United States with her family.
Mayumi Hirtzel