I only got into this series this year, reading through all the books in school. Currently I'm on the 4th book. Also I only read through the books once each and don't have them on hand to check for any inaccuracies. Right now I just got to the part today where Iggy learns about his new ability to feel colors and HAD to write a story about it, so if there is any misnomers then please don't hesitate to put corrections in a review or a private message and I'll be happy to update the story with them :D. Thanks and enjoy reading!
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Iggy lay in bed, contemplating. He was staring with his blank, blue eyes at the ceiling, though not really looking at it... not that he could. He touched his hair. Yellow. He touched his face. White. He sighed in relief. Good. His color-reading ability finally was back to normal after what seemed like ages. He drew in a deep breath, steadying himself again for the possibility of the reoccuring onslaught of colors that scrambled his brain for the last ten minutes. A look of concentration wrought his delicate face as he calmly touched his fingertips to the outside layer of his hair. "Yellow." He tentatively dipped his fingers farther into his tresses, slightly worried he would go too far at once with eagerness and screw up his pseudo vision again. The color immediately changed in the frontal lobes of his brain, not distinguishing the varying shades of his hair dye.
"Black." Iggy sighed silently, sad that he hasn't been making any progress in this endeavor for the whole night. "Come on Ig, you can do this..." He murmured, motivating himself quietly, voice barely above a whisper in the quiet bedroom. He grabbed a few strands of his hair with his thumb and index finger, starting from the crown of his hair follicles where he was blonde, then rubbed the strands between his fingers in a downward scrubbing motion toward the tips. He gasped, a multitude of nonexistent colors in his hair suddenly assaulting his sensory receptors in rapid-fire. Yellow, red, blue-green-purple-brown-orange-black-
Iggy suddenly sucked in wailing breaths, on the verge of hyperventilating. He dropped his hand on the pillow, palm-up and curled the side of his face into the pillow, panting sporadically. It felt like his nerve endings were crackling apart, like his DNA was...unraveling. His head pounded, small beads of sweat forming on his face and he felt as if he had a fever. He closed his eyes, concentrating on slowing his breathing, bangs messily falling across his face and clinging to his dampened forehead. Each time he raggedly breathed in, he thought about all the other times he attempted to do this today, wanting to see so bad that he kept forcing himself to get hurt. "Maybe I'm...pushing myself too hard," he jaggedly breathed. In, out. In... out. Slowly his stomach muscles started to unclench, and his vision blurred out back into nothingness. He lay there for a while, not moving to regain his strength, waiting until most of the sweat had evaporated off his body. This was maybe the fifth time he went through this tonight, but he didn't want to give up. He had something to prove to himself, but...
"I'm not making any progress. But, I do know another thing I could practice, instead."
He really did. Along with trying to master the ability to "see" multiple colors at once with his touch, he was also working on focusing on only one color, and getting a mental picture of that object; its outline. Iggy got to the point where he could touch the table in the living room and instantly see its whole shape when he would only touch a part of it. But that took at least a week to get down. For one, he didn't have much free time. After all, they were a flock of mutant bird kids who constantly had to deal with danger at a moment's notice. The other, they constantly lived in different places to ward off aforementioned danger, and every house was different- they each had a different layout, and different intricacies to memorize. He barely had time to relax before they had to move on to the next place. And even now, he was pushing himself to the limit, over and over, just to prove that he could rewire his brain to work in a different way to compensate for his lack of normal vision. He hated being disabled. He hated being a liability to the flock, feeling like dead weight. That awful scientist ter Borcht that berated each flock member's abilities while they were trapped in School, Redux was right in everything he said about him. It cut into his heart knowing that for once the enemy was correct. Was he really the weakest link?
"Right now, I don't care," Iggy muttered, eyelids fluttering open. His headache was waning, and he rotated his body to lay on his back again instead of his side. He unfolded his wings a bit so it wouldn't be as uncomfortable against his spine. Iggy rested there for a few minutes, waiting an ample amount of time so his brain wouldn't fry the next time he touched something. "Time to try something I know I can do." He brushed his fingertips gently across his neck. Bright pink. "I'm still burning up..." His eyes widened, a bit surprised. "Maybe I overdid it. Wow. I guess I have my limits." He used both hands now to feel around his neck, wherever he touched leaving a pink trail in his mind. He concentrated harder, feeling the outlines of the muscles in his neck slowly sticking into his brain. It was hard to keep up with it though; if he lost focus for just a second the whole outline would fade back into nothingness. He tried this a few more times, always seeming to get distracted by some vagrant thought in the back of his mind. "What the hell..." he cursed, not understanding why tonight was such an off night. He was able to make more progress than this a few nights ago when he thought about one of the flock members- their smiling face, urging him to continue...
"The motivation to do it, comes from them... I want to make them... proud of me," he whispered, believing what he found himself confessing out loud. He took a few deep breaths, trying to calm himself and block out all his irritation and thoughts. "Ok, let's do this..." He held his fingertips to different places on his neck all at once, feeling those areas light up in his ocular sketch pad, blank page scribbling the pink areas together like connecting dots. He slowly moved his whole palm down his throat, furrowing his brow as all this new information recorded itself into his mental picture. He strained to keep it from fading, his breathing quickening, but it wasn't easy. This may have been the hardest thing he's ever tried to do, and this coming from someone whose flock was almost beaten to death countless times, well...
Iggy groaned. It was so difficult, but he couldn't stop. He would stay up all night doing this, if he had to.