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I'm your only friend
I'm not your only friend
But I'm a little glowing friend
But really I'm not actually your friend
But I am

( N A M E ) Icarus Edison Finch-Emberstatt
( N I C K N A M E S ) Icky
( A G E ) 17
( G E N D E R ) Male
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) District Ten


Blue canary in the outlet
By the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse
In your soul

( A P P E A R A N C E )

[justify]Smiling probably shouldn't come so easily to me. So many of the other kids that pass through this house, abandoned or orphaned (we all have our stories and they're never the kind children are supposed to learn so young), can't bring themselves to quirk the corners of their lips up, but my grin is wide and all-consuming. I just have a knack for it. My cheeks crumple into themselves whenever my mouth decides to split my expression in two and let my teeth out for a breath of fresh air (maybe it's that they're a little too big, but they get uncomfortable being cooped up too long), carving deep valleys and folds into my skin. These dimples must have been moon craters in their previous life and that could explain why they seem to appear on my face every time I look up at the sky, holding my arms out in hopes that raising them high enough might one day lift the rest of me with them. You see, if my smile was given to me by the man in the moon, it only makes sense that my mother was a bird whose arms could carry her all the way up past the clouds to meet him. She must have flown to such great heights and one of these days, so will I.

There is a daydreamer's determination within me — strong enough to make me believe that I was born with secret wings; that's why the world tried to use the tragedy of my mother's mind to hollow out my avian bones at such a young age — and my eyes don't know how to hide it away. They are tawny green and gilded golden with the promise of infinite possibilities. A doctor once told be me I was hawk-eyed (I thought he meant the color until he explained), that I could see twice as well as the average person, but I already knew that. My brother Mace acts so cruel sometimes that I'm sure we must literally see things differently, because everything looks brightbright and so clear to me that I can't help feeling untroubled too. Now and then, he gets mad at me for it, although I like to think he tries not to. It's just when I get so wrapped up in observing the world and forget about everything else I'm supposed to be responsible for doing that he turns sharp and gets that look in his eyes.

I wouldn't say that I'm forgetful, but sometimes I just let things go on accident. It's why my hair tends to grow long now that Ma is becoming senile less particular about us. It's a deep brown, which I'm glad for, because when I neglect to keep it clean, it usually looks rumpled and twisty instead of several shades of dirty like the blond boys around here when they go a couple days without bathing. Being raised on a farm will do that to you — cover your body with filth and then teach you how to pretend it's not there. After a full day's work sometimes I'm just too exhausted to care about the sweat and dust taking refuge in the cracks of my skin and by the time I wake up to a new day, there's no point in washing it away when my daily chores will just put it all right back. So I often rely on my tan to camouflage it and shrug off the looks people give me when it doesn't. Work isn't all bad for my appearance though, it has made me stronger than I usually feel, carving muscles that balance out the sweetness of my smiles and making me feel like maybe I'm not still the child people treat me as.[/justify]

Not to put too fine a point on it:
Say I'm the only bee
In your bonnet
Make a little birdhouse
In your soul

( P E R S O N A L I T Y )

[justify]Technically Cygnus is the youngest of us four Emberstatt brothers, but he knows so much that it often feels like he has lived longer than all of us put together. I'm not like that, I just don't have the mind to think so many thoughts at once. Sometimes people look at me like I'm two-years-old and don't think anything at all. Maybe I know less, but less isn't nothing, it's just not as much and I'm okay with that. Multitasking and higher learning may not be on my list of talents, however, there are things I'm good at; my skills and interests just don't seem to be as impressive to most people. Maybe that's why everyone seems to go a little easier on me, after throwing a dash of patronizing pity in my direction that they think I don't notice or perhaps they just don't care if I do — assigning me the simpler tasks around the home, like feeding the chickens as opposed to wrangling larger, more stubborn animals — even though I'm aware that I should be the obvious scapegoat and bullying target. It's undeniably true that I'm not as rugged or clever as my brothers, but their imaginations fall short of mine, perspectives tethered to details like logic and common sense.

It's not that I completely lack such attributes, I'm just very good at ignoring them. Being taught how something is true is quite different than having faith in it. While the part of me that went through school, learned facts, and can plainly see that there are no feathers physically growing from my body knows I'm not a bird, I don't really care much for its opinion, because I believe I am. My eyes are so good they can see straight through my skin to witness my soul and there are wings there. I swear, I am built to fly. I can't prove it yet, but someday when I jump from the top beam of a fence, I won't just be flapping my arms as I sink through the air — I'll soar up and discover what the sky is hiding that is so beautiful that being banished to the earth caused my mother to loose her mind. We are Finches after all, my mother and I, the clouds and the birdsongs of our brethren call out to us like siren hymns.

This is why birds and flight are perhaps the only things I have ever honestly been interested in studying, while everything else just feels like distraction. These are the secrets I want to know, the hidden pieces of me I need to uncover. When it comes to these matters, even Cygnus doesn't understand the knowledge I possess — the way the barbs of the feathers I collect can heal their own breaks beneath the simple brush of my fingertips or how the bones of a fledgling's skeleton are like a map of my personal potential. The other kids around here think I'm strange for picking up the dead birds I find, for refusing to let them rot into the soil and instead bringing them home, preserving them, and hanging them from the ceiling of my room or the trees in the yard. They don't understand that the ground isn't where these creatures belong, even in death, or how what I do is just the same as what we do with the hides of the cows we raise — skinning and tanning — only I go one step further and give them an afterlife, filling their empty bodies with wool and wire so their wings are always spread. In return, they teach me both about themselves and about my own self, inspiring the flying machines I draw and one day hope to fabricate.

Hastily scrawled across my bedroom walls and scratched into the kitchen tabletops — whatever surface I can immediately find to help me remember my fleeting ideas before I slip away into other thoughts — are the designs for these contraptions that could lift me up past the clouds or maybe even the moon, if only I had the means to build them. I've tried before, but they fall apart, tumbling to the ground before they've even left it. Mace gets so angry when he catches me drawing my plans on around the house; he only seems to like clean and useful things and I'm so often the antithesis. Ma doesn't notice care though, so I don't stop. Maybe I would if he were nice to Schroeder, but he doesn't understand why I keep such a "useless" bird as a pet, so I also refuse to attempt to comprehend his reasoning. I found Schroeder in a ditch last year — a young pigeon with a broken wing — and not only took care of him while he healed, but trained him to carry written messages for me after. Not only is he the opposite of useless, but he is as much a brother to me as Mace, Cygnus, or Oren. They can try to "set him free" as many times as they'd like, but this is his home as well and he knows it, returning to my bedroom window at the end of each and every day.[/justify]

I have a secret to tell
From my electrical well
It's a simple message
And I'm leaving out
The whistles and bells

( H I S T O R Y )

[justify]This wasn't always my home, but I can't call to mind those early days of my life when it wasn't. See, I don't know who my father is and my mother doesn't know who I am. I suppose there's something fair in that; we can't really be sad about things none of us are able to look back on. In any case, I was not born beneath this roof or to Ma, but into the cradle of my real mother's wings arms. They say she is forgetful, not like my own simple-minded distraction, but so forgetful that most days she couldn't recall she had a son — that she had me. That's why she wasn't allowed to keep me, even though she is still alive (her body is healthy, but her thoughts are unwell) and lives in town. My father couldn't wouldn't? take care me because he wasn't there, it was just her... and it still is. It has been years and years since I found out who she was (no one hid it from me, it's just that no one talked about it either and I had never asked, not until a woman at the market told me I had her eyes), but I've never spoken to her.

When the sky is blue and bright, she will often visit the local park to feed breadcrumbs to the pigeons that gather like hungry children at her feet. On those days, when I have the opportunity, I keep an eye out for her, lounging in the grass and watching the clouds roll by, attempting to decode them as if they know all the secrets of life, until she takes her perch on the bench across the way. From a distance, I look after her, making certain that her skin hasn't turned sallow, her eyes dim, or her smile (that is obviously the genesis of mine) wan. Although I have yet to summon the courage to approach her, Schroeder has no such reservations. Without hesitation, he flies to her as if instinctively aware that she is also family and in this way he bridges the gap between the two of us. Together my mother and I care for the same creature — my feathered sibling; her second son — and become closer for it, despite her lack of awareness. Maybe I'm living vicariously through him. It doesn't matter because these simple acts of nurture remind me that even though my mother can't remember why she loves me or even that I'm here to be loved, regardless of how I'm right in front of her, I know she still does.

I've never been lonely or felt like I was missing something by not growing up with her. Finding her gave me more; it never made me feel like life had stolen from me and left me with less. Instead, I have a mother and a Ma, along with more brothers and sisters than I'm able to count. Except for Mace, Cygnus, and Oren — the four of us are bound together by something stronger than blood and I don't think any of us would leave even if we were asked to — my other siblings come and go so quickly that it's sometimes hard to remember them all. Being raised in the community home has given me an excess of family, so much so that I almost feel spoiled on it, unworthy of the way my tragedy turned itself into a kind of blessing. Finch or Emberstatt, it would be impossible for me to disown one in favor of the other now. Strangers often tiptoe around my hesitant answer when they ask my last name, assuming that my uncertainty means it's a sore subject, not realizing that my reluctance is only because there's a part of me that feels ashamed of how it's not. I have been given more than any single person deserves and I'm not about to give any of it up. Rather, I plan to take to the sky and stake my claim on even more things I'm told should be beyond my reach.[/justify]

So the room must listen to me filibuster vigilantly
My name is blue canary
One note spelled l-i-t-e
My story's infinite like the Longiness Symphonette
It doesn't rest

( C O D E W O R D ) Odair
( F A C E C L A I M ) Jackson Rathbone

( C O M M E N T S / O T H E R )

[justify] Icarus' mother has Early-Onset Familial Alzheimer's Disease, so he's predisposed to having it as well. Mostly he's just kinda spacey, but this accounts for a little of that as well (it's just that no one knows it... yet).

Birdhouse In Your Soul by They Might Be Giants[/justify]

There's a picture opposite me of my primitive ancestry
Which stood on rocky shores
And kept the beaches shipwreck free
Though I respect that a lot, I'd be fired if that were my job
After killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts

( T H I N K I N G ) 3A4D5C
( S P E A K I N G ) 4D7888
( T E X T ) 788998
( O T H E R ) 92998D
( O T H E R S P E A K I N G ) 726958


Bluebird of friendliness like guardian angels
It's always near
(And while your at it
Leave the night light on inside
The birdhouse in your soul)