Dreamscape Birds
Acknowledgement: Inspired by "Dreamscape Fish" in the Azumanga Daioh fandom, and adapted to the Haibane Renmei fandom. Neither Azumanga Daioh nor Haibane Renmei are my property. They belong to Kiyohiko Azuma and Yoshitoshi ABe, respectively.
Timeline: Nowhere specific, place it anywhere you want. :)
A quiet morning in the town of Glie, in that special, blissful time, between dawn and wakefulness, a perfect time to greet the day or ponder alone, whichever you prefer.
Rakka stood on the second-floor balcony of Old Home, gazing out towards the walls. Out, to the horizon, such as it could be called a horizon—anyway, that was Kana's advice, and Rakka chose to follow it. Interesting that the one whose name meant "Falling" was afraid of heights...
...but Rakka's thoughts were drifting in a different direction today. She'd been living in Old Home for several days now, accompanying the other Haibane to their jobs and getting to know the other residents of Old Home. Her eyes drifted to the crows wheeling at the far end of the city, and she began to wonder what she and her...friends...would be like if they were birds.
Friends?
Yes, she told herself, they really are my friends.
But for some reason she could not shake the feeling that such friendships were, for her, a never-before-known comfort.
The crows continued to circle, out by the windmills.
Kana, she thought, would be a crow, easily. Crows are black, and Kana seemed like the type who would like black (though not excessively) just because it seemed "cool", not for any practical or aesthetic reason. That, and Kana's daily battles with the crows. Rakka wondered if Kana's aversion to the crows went deeper than the trash or even Kana's talk about "surviving on their own". Rakka had not known Kana for very long, but even Rakka had noticed that Kana had never actually landed a blow on any of those crows, though she was usually well within striking range. Nor had Kana applied her mechanical genius towards crow deterrents.
Next, Reki. Hikari had told Rakka, once, while Rakka was helping Hikari in the kitchen, that Reki was the one who had gotten the most excited at the news that Rakka's cocoon had appeared that day, to the extent of shooing away all the young ones, with her "scary-face". Reki was always taking on the role of tough-loving mother, one day pulling an all-nighter and cleaning Rakka's wings, the next day growling at the young ones to eat their carrots. The image of an eagle floated in Rakka's mind.
Hikari. She would make a nice grey parrot, Rakka mused. Grey parrots were not known for their looks, and neither was Hikari (sorry, Hikari), but grey parrots possessed resourcefulness and quite strong intelligence, as birds go. Grey parrots were always being shown up by owls in the known-for-intelligence department, but Rakka knew intuitively that Hikari would never let that stop her.
The small one...Kuu. In her mind, Rakka immediately pegged Kuu as an ostrich. Ostriches are large birds, and no one could deny that Kuu wanted to be big, or at least wanted to seem as big as the others. The only problem with that, though, was that an ostrich could run and run and run, but it would never fly.
There was one more Haibane remaining: Nemu. She posed the greatest challenge in this thought experiment, since in the time Rakka had known her, Nemu had spent much of that time sleeping. But then Rakka realized that, just because Nemu was never awake much in the daytime, did not mean she could not be awake in the nighttime, when all the others (with the possible exception of nightmare-walking Reki) would have long since gone to sleep. What birds are active at night? Rakka made a mental note to visit the town library and find out.
Rakka's first thought, after all this contemplation, was to tell her friends...yes...her friends...what she had come up with. But she knew that if she did, they would immediately ask Rakka what she considered herself. What kind of answer would she give? She considered that for some time, there on the balcony, until finally realizing that she could not truthfully answer her own question. Autobiography is the falsest testimony there is, and this little nut of a question could only blossom into its own fruit when involved with others.