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She remembers this.
Robin can recall the trembling dove in her hands, shining and fragile. She remembers the whisper of the garden plants, the feel of grass on her knees as she knelt down, gathering the fallen dove up.
She remembers, but- no. Memory implies a thing has passed, and this is very much real, very much present. She can feel the fragile curve of the dove’s wing, the thud of its tiny heartbeat through plush feathers.
And her brother stands behind her.
“Are we going to lock it up in a cage?” She asks, turning to him, apprehensive. “I want to see it fly freely in the sky.” But she knows it cannot fly- not now, not like this. She knows, too, what he is going to say.
“Without us, the bird would be too fragile to survive on its own.” Sunday tells her what she already knows. “Do you want it to die?”
“No,” Robin gasps. Her heartbeat quickens to match the little dove’s. “But-” we cannot just leave it. We cannot just lock it away and call that helping. Their previous conversations crowd the back of her mind, and- no. This is happening here, and now. They are children still, and the dove is alive in her hands, and Sunday is watching her closely, gauging her reaction. She knows what he is going to say.
He is silent for a long moment, studying her. There is something unfamiliar in her brother’s gaze.
“Then let’s take care of it together.” His voice is soft. “Until it can return to the sky.”
Wait.
Robin freezes.
That is not what he says. That is not what he has said before.
“Huh?” The sound slips out unbidden, a thoughtless question. She must have misheard.
Sunday’s smile is small, secret, like they are sharing an inside joke. They have shared countless jokes between them, but not this. Never about this.
(He looks so young, she realizes- happier, less careworn. But- she should not know what he will look like years from now. This is the present. Something chimes in her mind, unbidden.)
“Birds have wings because they are meant to fly.” He says it so simply. The sky is blue. Two and two is four. Birds have wings because they are supposed to fly. “Even if they may crash to the ground,” he continues, reflective, “they shouldn’t be trapped in a cage.”
Robin has stopped breathing, staring at him, hardly daring to hope.
She remembers now- their gentle disagreement about this, the fate of birds who cannot fly. How best to help something that cannot help itself. She looks at her brother and wants so badly to believe that he has come around to agree with her.
But-
“Birds belong to the sky.” Sunday’s expression is not right. “-so we should help them return there, right?”
Her brother would not say this.
(She wishes that he would.)
To say such things, and wear her brother’s face, smiling hopefully at her- with that gleam in his eye, as though he’s finally gotten it right-
Robin looks down at the trembling bird in her hands, and knows.
They are no longer children.
And this bird is already dead.
Tears spring to her eyes as she looks at this ‘brother,’ this version of Sunday who seems happier, more hopeful- who could not possibly be real. She so badly wishes it could be, but knows she cannot go on living in this illusion. This is not really Sunday. To willingly live in a lie would not be really her, Robin, either.
Somebody needs to stop him. For his sake, as much as all of Penacony's.
Robin takes a deep breath-
And wakes up.