Chapter 1: First Reality Check

A long two months had gone by since that incident. But surprisingly, Phoenicis had suffered little during the course of the period. Everything had gone relatively well and stayed in order for the most part.

Well, Ulki thought darkly, that was how his supposed fellow attendant saw the whole thing, anyway. In his opinion, Janaff was being far too lenient with this predicament, seeing as how the young hawk had neglected most of what should have been his shared workload which now concerned kingly matters. Did he have any idea how hard and mind-boggling some of these things could be!?

...But of course, the hawk decided after a moment. That was the whole reason why Janaff was decisively avoiding this in the first place, after all.

Without grumbling out loud to himself, since it would not show appropriate class during a council meeting, Ulki continued endeavoring to absorb the information. But when he received the chance, Janaff was getting it. Contrary to what that irresponsible hawk argued, he could not listen to more than one thing at a time!

Before Ulki knew it, the discussion had resolved itself, and he was handed a document to look over. Briefly glancing at it, he merely decided that Janaff could read it instead. There was no point in deciphering what he considered illegible when Janaff could peruse it without even trying.

The older hawk had hardly delivered the document onto Janaff's desk when a tumultuous uproar erupted from the common hall.

"Get out! Get out, you disgusting, hideous creature!" The furious shriek gave company to continuous sounds of fragile shattering and peals of childish laughter.

Ulki pressed his lips into a thin line as he bolted down the corridor towards the hall. If it was Keer again, he'd... That child had finally turned nineteen last week and still didn't know how to behave!

Though his mother had passed away suddenly a month before, Keer hadn't seemed as sad or depressed as he was panicky and tense. He even insisted that a funeral need not be held. No one paid it any mind at the time, but now that Ulki thought about it, it was rather strange...

Reaching the vast room, Ulki noticed Janaff arriving as well and was secretly a bit glad, for the younger hawk's clan tended to have more family members. Janaff would have to be somewhat decent with little hatchlings, Ulki supposed. At any rate, he had better make sure before—too late, he cursed. An unidentifiable object had come hurtling through the double door entrance to the kitchens, tripping once with a low giggle but immediately melding itself to Janaff's leg.

"Hey, cut it out! Get off me! Stop—" Ulki gave a tired sigh for even bothering to get his hopes up; he knew he should have expected no less.

With a sudden start, the older hawk snapped to attention as the room became deathly silent. Echoes were left to slice through the air like mere whispers, the vibration of sound so faint it seemed as if the world had gone still. The focus of nearly all the common hall's occupants was centered upon the tiny, disheveled being that clung tightly to Janaff's pant leg.

Said hawk had gone pale, even trembling slightly with goose bumps rising all over his skin, Ulki noted, but who could blame him? In fact, he gave Janaff much credit for neither panicking nor screaming. Ashera knew how much that would hurt, the hawk thought sourly as he unconsciously touched his ears.

The small figure, on the other hand, was staring with its large eyes wide open. Not from fright, but from simple curiosity.

Slowly, the little being detached itself, but it grabbed a fistful of Janaff's glossy hair right then, much to his chagrin. Tugging none too gently on it, the being finally shattered the unearthly quiet with a surprisingly big, loud voice.

"You're going to play with me," it demanded, "because you're really pretty. You have to have a dolly to play with too! Don't you?"

A servant that had been hiding out in the background promptly fainted, while Ulki's own knees were threatening to give out from under him. Just from watching that atrocious human, even if it was an innocent young one, he realized Janaff was still his kin and of his blood. Even he didn't deserve this.

The younger hawk was near close to hyperventilating when a voice known too well rang clear. "Serrai!"

Turning at the sound of its name, Serrai instantly released Janaff's hair and skipped all the way over to the voice's owner, none other than Keer. At once a hawk stepped forward and accused, "How dare you bring the unmentionable into our territory!?" Several others chorused their agreement while Janaff could only nod mutely, still shaky from the sudden encounter.

"Why in the blazes would I!?" came the outraged cry in face of an altercation. "Never, ever, in a million years, would I take in a blasted human!"

Serrai suddenly looked ready to cry. Whispering to herself more than Keer, it was faint, but Ulki heard it and Janaff read her lip movements nonetheless. "Did I make Brother Keer sad again?"

"I'm not your brother!" Keer, caught up in his indignant fury, all but screamed at the child. A few tears escaped, but that quickly changed as Serrai's expression turned into a full-blown pout; she said nothing, however. As impressed as the laguz were at her somewhat obedience, many of them frowned at this. Since when had humans bothered to acknowledge them at all?

A child human, no less. Janaff estimated Serrai to be a little younger than Keer, most likely fifteen or sixteen. The hawk knew he was probably off by years in human terms, but he didn't care enough to try and guess Serrai's real age.

"That's enough," Ulki commanded. "Keer, I don't know how you managed to associate yourself with that...thing, but take it away for now." Keer shot him a scathing look, but Ulki ignored it as he went on, "It's just a child. Go play with it or something." The young hawk looked for the entire world as if he had been given the worst punishment a laguz could have. He complied nonetheless, however, as he swept Serrai into his arms and vanished.

All at once, a thunderous clamor arose with any attempt to quell it being hopelessly crushed. At a sudden loss as to what to do next, Ulki caught Janaff's eye, and the younger hawk affirmed it as they both struggled to exit.

Once away from the common hall, the two hawks quickly turned towards their shared quarters, locking the door upon arrival.

"What are we going to do with it!? If King Tibarn comes back and finds out," Janaff fretted in a panic, "we'll be roast hawk for dinner!"

Ulki suddenly had difficulty restraining the urge to bash his head repeatedly against a wall until this nightmare was over... But no, he reminded himself, this was all real, and now on top of running the country's affairs, he had a human to worry about. A human!

A hand waving in front of his face startled him as well as alerting him that he had lost focus. Glancing at Janaff, the older hawk was amused to witness the other's apparent uncertainty at finally experiencing this severe of a situation, where he would eventually need to, among all things, play his role.

Shifting from one foot to the other, Janaff produced a sheepish smile. The other hawk couldn't help but almost not believe his next words.

"Well... I haven't been attending to my duties lately, have I? I'd like to make it up to you...and everyone else, but mostly you—if you don't mind, and..." Janaff stuttered as he tried to arrive at something. Ulki wasn't surprised. But he did become suspicious when Janaff's eyes alighted excitedly.

"Oh wait, I know! You can just carry on as usual, and in exchange, I'll deal with the thing!"

It was a rather poor balance, they both knew, but Ulki grudgingly accepted nonetheless. Janaff had most likely given himself a task far more troublesome than he realized. Frankly, he couldn't care less, but if it negatively affected Phoenicis...

Of course, Janaff never even bothered to dwell upon the possibility as he promptly took his leave, overlooking a stray document that fluttered to the floor and under the desk.

Passing by the still noisy common hall and about to pop in to inform the others of his new task, a loose phrase swept past the hawk's ears and caused him to pause. "The only reasonable thing to do is make it a slave!" As a myriad of others affirmed their approval, Janaff quietly backtracked.

Making the human a slave was too low, even for him, who was always invoked with animosity when dealing with anything human. Many of his cousins had been sold into slavery, but he seemed to be born with luck. The young hawk's generation was set during a lull in the laguz slave craze, enough for him to have escaped.

Yes, he reasoned, if Ashera gave him at least that much love, would she not deem it fair for him to share his luck with another young one? Even if it was a... Janaff shuddered a bit and tried to will himself not to think upon it too much.

He began to wander outside, idly pondering if he could get the human to be on the laguz side instead. But if he did, there would be serious trouble. While benefiting its outlook on laguz, it would certainly be scorned by others of its kind.

Which was worse? Janaff couldn't decide.

Arriving at an unexpected destination, which just happened to be an old training playground situated near an extremely steep incline, the hawk gave a strained shout.

From his position, Keer whipped around to cast the older hawk a livid glower. Nonetheless, he was apparently unfazed and swiftly executed exactly what Janaff feared he would do. Keer's pale blue robe flashed, almost instantly followed by a shrill shriek that was neither hawk nor laguz. Janaff could only quiver listlessly in place as he witnessed Keer shove his human charge off balance and over the edge.

For a split second, Janaff's eyes suddenly misted over for some peculiar reason. He haphazardly wiped at them in annoyance to clear his vision, only then to discover Keer's speedy absence. "Brat."

Careful not to violently swear out loud—it was infuriatingly easy to try his patience, Janaff calmed himself and approached the sharp slope, cautiously taking a peek.

"Ashera..." The hawk ended up collapsing onto his back out of sheer relief. Not only had the human survived by somehow using the White Prince as a cushion, but the heron, being gentle by nature, didn't seem to think any worse of it. In fact, they looked to be amiable enough that Janaff automatically chose to tail Keer. The event had been so abrupt that he failed to comprehend very much of it.

His decision proved fruitless, however, when evening arrived without any rending signs of the little hawk.

Janaff frowned slightly as he returned from outside the Hall; this wasn't going to make things any easier. After grimly noting that there was still unmentionable talk floating around about the human, he decided to skip dinner and head straight for his chamber.

Upon nearing, Ulki suddenly loomed into view. "You have a visitor," was all he said, though with a stare that clearly expressed, 'Should I have trusted you after all?'

Yielding the most sarcastic smile he could muster, Janaff nonetheless nodded an affirmative, already theorizing who it was.

Sure enough, the nuisance was waiting for him cross-legged on his bed sheets with a stony expression on his young face. It was figuratively an eternity before anything began. Janaff unexpectedly found himself starting with, "Get off my bed, brat."

Keer merely snorted, but he complied despite the ever-present belligerence in his eyes. "Aren't you going to ask me why I deliberately pushed Serrai off?"

"Did you want something else?" the older hawk replied shortly. He could almost see the non-existent pout on the child's face at having been trapped so early on. "Isn't that why you're here?"

"...It's more than that." Keer grumbled. But it was quite a while before he hesitantly ventured forth. In a voice so mumbled that Janaff could barely decipher it, he quietly uttered, "I didn't mean to try and kill my sister..."

Wait, what? Janaff's head was already spinning. There was no way the two calling each other siblings was coincidence. In the first place, Keer would never...! Would he? "Back up," he ordered. "How did you get involved with it at all?"

"Serrai is not an object," was the reproachful response. "She's been treated like so by her own kind too. That's why Mother brought her home."

Janaff found himself catching his breath, all but yelling. "Your mother brought a human home!?"

"Shh!! Not so loud!" Keer's eyes darted around nervously as his frame tensed. "You know how Father was taken? Mother tried to go see him once. Only once, but when she came back, she had Serrai with her. She told me three-year old Serrai was my new sister and that she was a beorc—I was only fifteen then." The older hawk's face hardened at the usage of 'beorc.'

"When I entered the academy a month later, I got into a fight on the first day with...eh, someone about beorc, and that's how I found out that beorc are actually the humans who hate us. And they're...they're the ones who took Father away... Mother explained a lot after that.

"I've hidden her for three years since then. I recently told one of my best friends about her—I didn't know what to do anymore after Mother died. But he spit in my face and deserted me." Keer's voice had built a cold, frosty front, but it chipped and cracked at once. "Over the next few weeks, the entire academy must have heard because all of my other friends left me behind." Pausing, he unconsciously swallowed hard. "Serrai slowly took everything from me. Everything..."

Lowering his voice to a whisper, he spoke bitterly, "But I still can't hate her for it. What else can I say? Was I supposed to be able to control what would happen with my own two hands? This isn't something I can blame anyone for. Only Ashera knows why this has become..."

Stunned for the moment, Janaff queried equally as softly, "Why didn't you tell us sooner? I would have helped, you know."

The other narrowed his eyes immediately. "Yeah, right. You don't fool me. More like ship Serrai back to Begnion before anyone else found out." Janaff inwardly winced at the younger hawk's sharp insight; that was almost exactly what he had been thinking, but he still hadn't meant for it to come out like that.

"Except," Keer continued evenly, "that you're probably right. It would have been the better thing to do. Would you blame me, though, if I asked to go with her? I have to know that her real family will love her. If not, I will turn myself in as a slave, and that way I can keep an eye on her...and maybe see my father in the meantime."

Janaff's mouth opened, but no sound came out. He was certain that both of them had no doubts that Keer's father was long dead, and thus...

The child was doing this on purpose, dealing out a stark lie straight to his face, which not very many could. ...Then again, the primary thing all laguz recognized as children was family.