*It should have been a normal patrol, really. It had been too, up until now, when Tsunagu is watching it all fall apart before his eyes, in the most mundane way possible.

They’d stopped when a little girl had squealed Hawks’s name, crossing the street to greet her and her mother. Tsunagu watches Hawks’s face light up as he speaks to the little girl, the cheerful persona he wears around seeming genuine for the first time since Tsunagu had met up with him earlier in the day. It’s nice to see. Hawks is too young, Tsunagu thinks, to look as weighed down as he does.

Tsunagu makes polite conversation with the girl’s mother while Hawks has a nonsensical conversation with the girl herself.

There is nothing to be concerned about, even as Tsunagu idly scans the streets around him while he speaks, and Hawks’s feathers twitch in time with the wind, keeping a careful watch in their own way.

So when Hawks reaches out to ruffle the girl’s hair, and her mother cries out to get him to stop, they’re both caught off guard, but not enough stop Hawks from making contact with the girl.

Several things happen at once.

Hawks’s feathers all dart out in different directions in search of the perceived threat, while Tsunagu readies some fibers for defense. A blue spark races from the girl’s pinky finger up to her face, leaping from her forehead to Hawks’s wrist, where his hand is still hovering close by her head. Her mother claps a hand over her own mouth, something akin to despair in her eyes.

Tsunagu perceives this all at once.

In the next instant, all of Hawks’s feathers drop from the sky like lead weights. Tsunagu’s heart drops with them.

When he turns back to Hawks, what he finds in his place is his signature coat in a heap on the ground, something wriggling underneath it.*