Kieren was supposed to kill himself.
He had it all planned out, really. Go into the woods. Bring the knife his dad got him, leave behind the empty casket of his best friend (nothing more, not really, they'd never get a chance to be anything more now). He walks into his cave just in time to watch a bird turn into a boy.
The boy hears him come in. He turns to look at him, and his movements are strange, wrong. Kieren is frozen. He knows he hasn't been sleeping well and he knows that sometimes when he doesn't sleep he sees things that aren't there, but the visions have never been this vivid.
"Shit," whispers the birdboy.
Hallucinations aren't supposed to swear. Kieren's pretty positive of that fact.
"Hey, put down the knife and I'll explain everything, okay?" The boy walks towards him, hands outstretched like he's some cornered animal. He supposes he is. He'd forgotten about the knife in his hand. He's gripping it hard enough that he's sure he's leaving imprints in his skin.
"It's not for you," he says, because he doesn't know how to communicate with birds, and what else is he supposed to say?
"Right." The boy's right in his space now. Carefully, gently, he takes the knife from Kieren. Kieren remembers to breathe. The boy's eyes are sharp and he has a sad look on his face, like he knows what the knife was for and he's disappointed.
Kieren can add 'strange birdboy in the woods' to the list of people he's let down, then. That's just swell.
"How about, I forget about the knife thing, if you forget about the bird thing?" The boy asks, and it's such a ridiculous question that it breaks through the surprised trance Kieren had fallen into.
"You were a bird," he says, his voice sounding strained with disbelief. "I was just going to off myself. That's normal. You were a bird."
"Well, you're not wrong," says the bird. And then he pauses, his head tilting to the side, and he's not looking at Kieren anymore at all. He looks like he's listening to someone that only he can hear.
"Are you sure?" he says. And then "Okay! Okay. You're the allseeing, all powerful being, not me." He looks back at Kieren, and tries a smile.
It is, Kieren admits, a very nice smile.
"Would you believe me," he starts. "If I told you we were being invaded by aliens?"
Kieren doesn't, at first. But he comes around. And life sucks, and he still dreams about what would have happened if Tobias hadn't picked that cave to hide out in, but it's hard to be disappointed in the outcome, when he has the thermals under him. Everyone dies eventually, and if he's being honest with himself, fighting an invasion force will probably get him killed sooner rather than later, and that doesn't bother him. In kestrel morph, diving down in free fall, waiting for instinct to tell him when to snap his wings out with a screeching battle cry? That's something a little more special.
If that's what living looks like right now, he can stick around a little longer.