“Oh - oh, God, I’m sorry!”
“Ow, shit, I think my nose is broken!”
“Yeah, it’s - oh God, it’s everywhere, let’s get you to the nurse.“
Rachel sees the whole thing happen out of the corner of her eye, the peripheral vision she’s trained herself to monitor. A volleyball flies wild and hits a girl in the face. There’s a nasty crack, and a small, wet flare of blood. The girl’s hands fly to her face as she cries out shrilly, and others race to her side in prey-animal defense.
Rachel doesn’t move. She freezes on the outskirts of the flurry of movement, adrenaline slamming through her veins. She tries to get her heart back under control, and makes herself stop flying through her list of battle morphs. This isn’t a crisis. Guns and blades and God-knows-what aren’t about to invade her school. It’s just gym class. It’s just a bloody nose.
All that blood, from a soft, round ball.
She looks up sharply, and sees Melissa standing next to her. For some reason, her attention isn’t on bloody-nose-girl, she’s staring at Rachel - who realizes that she’s been staring, unblinking, for what must have been an inappropriate amount of time.
She arranges her face into what she hopes is the appropriate mix of concern, fear, distress. Things she’s not really sure she knows how to feel anymore, at least not when she’s soft and vulnerable and not covered with fur or leathery armor or blades.
“Wow, that was really a nasty smack, huh?”
“Yeah. Probably looks worse than it is, though. Most bloody stuff does."
She thinks she can understand a little better, then, when Tobias says he has to remind himself about facial expressions. That he’s forgotten how to be a boy, in his learning how to be a hawk.
Rachel isn’t becoming a hawk.
She doesn’t know what she’s becoming, and she doesn’t know how she feels about that. Like the blood on the gymnasium floor, it’s just something she can look at clinically, before making herself breathe and move on.
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