AN: Chapter two! Glad everyone was on board with this. No plot yet but we're getting there.

Disclaimer: KND has never been mine and never will be but wait a minute

Wild Birds

Chapter 2: A Moment or Two


There is a boy sitting on the sidewalk in a brown sweatshirt.

Wait—maybe it's orange. Red? It's hard to concentrate when he keeps moving around.

Oh, maybe that's her.

Kuki blinks a few times and his colors settle.

Gold and orange and blue and black. No grey at all.

He looks up and frowns. She frowns back.

The boy pulls himself up from the ground, cursing, and looks her over again as he pulls up his hood.

Right; it's raining, finally - heavy, slow drops that slide into her hair, down her chin, and into the neck of her sweater. Kuki shivers.

"Oi, you okay?" he asks in an accent Kuki can't place.

"What?"

The boy, his face scrunched up with some emotion between confusion and disgust, gestures to his nose and pulls his brow forward in alarm.

Kuki lifts a hand to her own nose; it comes back bloody.

"Oh," she says. "Guess not." It actually really hurts, now that she's paying attention.

The newness of this morning is a bit distracting.

The boy sighs loudly, his sneakers scuffing the sidewalk as he steps toward her. "Are you high or something? Here." He hands her a rumpled tee shirt from his backpack. Kuki hesitates, wiping blood and rain from her mouth with her sleeve.

His sigh is closer to a scoff now. "It's clean, I swear, just—" He presses it against her face until Kuki takes it in her own hands. It smells like cheap detergent and clean boy.

"Okay then, Kuki?" he repeats.

Kuki meets his gaze. He's shorter than her, she realizes, but he knows her name so they must be in the same grade. She nods and thanks him.

He sighs again – this boy is constant noise, she isn't used to it—and slides his backpack back on. "I don't have an umbrella, sorry, but—you were going to school, right?"

Kuki nods.

Another sigh. "Fine, okay." He turns around to walk in the direction he came from, and Kuki has no choice but to follow.

She walks with the shirt held to her aching nose. The morning, so unlike others she's had, thunders with sound: the splish-splash of their feet and the pap-pap-pap of the rain. Under the cheap detergent and clean boy she smells wet concrete and the electricity gathering in the air. She's prepared for the sudden crash and snap of thunder and lightning as it shakes the sky, but the boy beside her jumps a mile.

"Jesus," he mutters, stuffing his hands in his pockets and glancing sideways at her. Kuki thinks he's the kind of person who reacts to things, who needs conversation and feedback in a way she's unaccustomed to.

"I've never been late to school before," she ventures, lifting the shirt from her mouth briefly to talk. The boy glances at her again.

"Yeah, well, you're going to be even later if you've got a broken nose," he replies. Kuki decides that reminding him it would be his fault if she does would be rude.

The boy rubs his forehead. "Think you fractured my cruddy skull."

Kuki bristles and lifts the shirt again. Screw rudeness. "You ran into me."

The boy turns his head around to glare at her. "You were the weirdo doing the running! I was walking and minding my own business!"

"So you're saying it's my fault?"

"It cruddy sure isn't mine!" He whips his head back around and straightens his hood against the pounding rain, body language screaming 'end of conversation'.

Kuki smiles behind the shirt.

Thunder cracks again in the sky, and the rain pulses down harder. Bullets, fat and heavy, pour from the clouds. The boy curses under his breath and speeds up his pace, Kuki automatically following.

"Come on, slowpoke!" the boy calls.

Steaming, Kuki quickens into a jog and overtakes him in a few strides of her long legs.

A noise of complaint squeaks over the rumble of the storm, and Kuki hears the boy's sneakers begin to pound harder against the sidewalk.

A burst of thrill sparks at the back of Kuki's neck. She breaks into a run.

"What the—you—!" He struggles to match her pace.

His shouted protests and muffled curses turn into laughter before long, and Kuki finds herself brushing away the cobwebs in her throat to giggle loudly as they race each other through the rain, splashing in all the puddles they find.

The school looms ahead and they sprint for the front doors, fighting for that last fifty feet. They slam into the wall beneath the overhang, laughing breathlessly.

"I totally won," the boy pants.

"No way!" Kuki protests, bent over with her hands on her knees. "I was ahead of you the whole time!" She straightens, grinning, and is startled.

For a moment, for just a fraction of a second, Kuki is thrown by the sight of the boy grinning at her from where he leans against the bricks. He looks…not wrong, exactly, but…off. His jaw is too square; his shoulders are too wide.

For a moment, she had expected to see someone much more… or less…

Someone younger.

Which is a strange thought to have at seventeen.

Kuki is suddenly aware of her aching nose again, the bloody shirt still clenched in her fist, and the rainwater that was soaked into her bra.

"Oh, um, here," she stumbles, holding out the sopping shirt.

"Woah, hey, I don't want that!"

"It's your shirt!"

"It's got your blood all over it! People are gonna think I murdered somebody!"

Kuki pushes forward to shove the shirt to his chest. "Just take it, you wuss!"

He lets out a disgusted noise, bringing his hands up to shove the material away. Instead, his hands encounter Kuki's, and the shirt is thrust into the limbo between them.

Their eyes meet for a moment.

Then a moment more.

Then another moment; or maybe it's all just one long, tense moment because how long is a single moment supposed to last, anyway?

Rain is dripping off his eyelashes. His eyes are green. Neither of them are quick to let go of the shirt they hold between them.

It's one long, very long, somehow very significant moment.

Then the bell rings.

They jolt apart and drop the shirt to the ground between them with a wet plop.

"Whoops, uh," the boy stoops to pick it up, fumbling for a moment with wringing it out. As eager as his eyes seemed before, they don't meet Kuki's now. His face is red. "We should…um…get to… uh, the thing…"

Kuki fumbles for the door behind her. "Uh, class?"

"Yeah, that one."

Kuki opens the door and they both blunder through, awkwardly bumping shoulders and making fleeting eye contact. At the intersecting hall, Kuki makes to go straight while the boy turns left.

"Uh, bye, I guess," he waves gawkily.

"Bye."

Kuki sets off down the hall. Everything blares out in high contrast. She can almost see the rut in the floor where she normally walks monotonously from class to class, in and out at the same pace, every day.

She crosses over that rut now and thinks she might start coming in from a different door every day. Just to shake things up.

Kuki has another thought, out of nowhere, just before she reaches AP Chem five minutes late.

Wallabee Beatles.


AN: Chapter 3 isn't finished yet, but I should have it by next Saturday. Please review!

Tickle that toast.