Who: Qrow Branwen & Yue Katou What: Katou finds a crow in Qrow's classroom When: Early June (Note: the players goofed on when the school year ends in Clark County) Where: Las Vegas High School Ratings/Warnings: PG 13 for rough language and references to drug use (because Katou) Status: Complete!
Qrow had spent less time mingling with his fellow teachers. One could only shrug their shoulders for so long at the strange little “accidents” that happened whenever he was around. The coffee pot in the teacher’s lounge shattering, for example. Or the heel of the new art teacher’s pumps snapping at the base, causing her to stumble and spill paint all over herself. Or the harddrive belonging to one of his fellow history teachers frying itself as the poor man attempted to go over his lesson plan. Not to mention student assignments getting misplaced, pens suddenly not working, printers running out of toner…
Qrow tried to suppress his semblance as much as he could, but it was always there, always active, always ready to trigger something. It was something he had to live with, but that didn't mean everyone else had to suffer. This was why he spent more and more time alone in his classroom during breaks and lunch, which was where he was that afternoon.
He should have been eating, but instead he was looking out the window like some of his students sometimes would. There was a large black bird in the tree outside. A raven...or was it a crow? Qrow wasn’t sure of the difference between the two. He watched it, half expecting to see a pair of gleaming red eyes peer back at him. He was disappointed, but also a little relieved, to see just a normal pair of bird eyes. A moment later, the bird lit off the branch and flew away.
Qrow grunted and turned his focus back to his lunch only to find that his perception had changed somehow. It took him a moment to realize that his nose had been replaced with ….a beak? What?!
Something had changed, and Katou wasn’t exactly sure what it was or if he liked it. Not long ago, Katou had enjoyed the little things in life, like getting high or drunk at lunch with his friends, or using his lunch break to make some sales. He rarely used his lunch for actually eating - it wasn’t like he could pack a lunch to bring with him to school, he couldn’t afford to eat from the cafeteria, and having his classmates see him digging through the trash for something edible was a surefire way to nuke his cred - but he’d … well, enjoy was probably too strong a word, but tolerated the usual way of things.
But lately, it had just been more of a pain than Katou was willing to tolerate. He didn’t enjoy spending time with his friends - they all got under his skin in a way that they hadn’t before. He didn’t want to hunt down his customers to see if they needed more product, and didn’t want to recruit more customers.
He wasn’t sure when or how showing up in Qrow’s classroom at lunch became a thing he sometimes did, but that’s where he was headed now. Maybe he’d listen to his iPod and take a nap on one of the desks, or maybe he and Qrow would chat, but whatever happened it’d be better than having Youji try to hassle him for favours for the next half hour.
He frowned when he entered Qrow’s room and glanced around, expecting to see the teacher there, but when he didn’t he shrugged and went to slip into one of the desks to take the aforementioned nap. It was then that some motion drew his eye, and he caught sight of the crow on Qrow’s desk.
He frowned, and blinked at it, remembering standing in Tokyo - all the humans in the city frozen in place, and how he’d slaughtered the angels that occupied the city.
“Uriel?” he asked stupidly, and then shook his head because of course it wasn’t Uriel. There was no Uriel.
“How’d you get in here?” he asked instead, his gaze headed over to the closed window. He walked over to it, wondering if it opened - he’d never tried before. He felt a little like an idiot talking to the bird, but it wasn’t like anyone else was here. “Listen, I’ll try to get you out of here, but it’d be real funny if you could shit in my teacher’s lunch,” he nodded toward the open container of food - he wondered if that meant Qrow would be back soon, “before I manage that.”
Little did Katou know that the man in question was already there and extremely confused by the way his student was talking to him. Didn’t he recognize him? At the mention of taking a shit in his own lunch, Qrow became indignant. ”Just who do you think you’re talkin’ to?!” Instead of hearing his own voice, however, what came out was a loud caw, which was more than just a little surprising.
Was that...was that me?!
It was impossible! People do not turn into birds! Even if some weird non-memory told them that some old reincarnating wizard had the power to turn them into one!
Katou turned away from where he was examining the window, blinking in surprise at the way the crow was squawking at him. For a moment, he almost expected to hear a voice in his head, a deep, disembodied voice that would give him orders or something. But of course that didn’t happen. Crows did not have the ability to communicate telepathically with people.
“Alright, fine, don’t take a shit,” he said after a moment, turning back to the window. “Anyway, you might as well stop yer bellyachin’. I’m trying to figure this out as fast as I can. It ain’t my fault you flew in here.”
He found the catch for the window and unlocked it, but apparently no one had bothered opening the window for a while because it was stuck fast. “I oughtta just make Qrow -” Katou started, grumbling under his breath, but at the name he stopped and turned slowly toward the crow on the desk.
He stared, and then shook his head. No, that was fucking impossible. Just because the imaginary angel of death that Katou sometimes thought about could turn into a crow didn’t mean his history teacher could.
The bird on the desk cocked his head when Katou slowly turned to look at him. Red eyes peered at the younger man intently.
Does he recognize me?
It was obvious that he couldn’t speak in this form, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise. For all intents and purposes he was a bird. Thanks, Ozpin. Couldn’t you have at least given me the ability to speak in this form? It probably wasn’t an issue since he could just change from man to bird and back again within the blink of an eye. At least he was supposed to. Problem was, just as semblances and auras were things he was having to learn through his memories, how to change back into a man wasn’t something he immediately knew how to do.
Katou stared at the bird for a couple moments longer, and then shivered. Nope. That was creepy as all hell. There was no way his teacher was suddenly a bird, but it was disconcerting how it stared at him with those beady red eyes as if it was actually aware of what was going on instead of just some creepy ass bird that somehow flew threw an entire fucking school to end up on his teachers desk.
“This better not turn into some freaky-ass The Omen II shit,” Katou muttered, and with one last shove, Katou managed to open the window - nearly falling out himself in the process. He stepped away, and then gestured grandly toward the window. “Go on,” he said, waving at it. “Be free. Get.”
Qrow lunged forward half an inch when it looked as though Katou was about to fall out of the window. His instinct was to grab hold of the kid and yank him back inside, but of course he couldn’t do that. Crows didn’t have hands, much less thumbs to do any grasping. So instead the bird on the desk flapped its wings and jerked forward, nearly falling off the desk.
Now the window was open and Katou was standing there telling him to “be free”. Qrow cocked his head at the window then back at his student. Where the hell does he expect me to go?
Katou couldn’t help but snort at the flailing bird. It still creeped him out - he couldn’t claim to have ever just sat and watched birds before, but he was pretty sure he’d never seen one flail like that, and he’d seen enough movies that involved crows mauling people and pecking out their eyes to be wholly comfortable with a crow acting weird in his general vicinity - but it was still kind of funny.
He frowned when it looked from the window to Katou though. Now that he opened the window, he probably needed to get the crow out of Qrow’s room before the teacher came back and accused Katou of letting the bird in.
Katou slid tentatively and unobtrusively toward the bird. “If you try to attack me,” he warned it, “I’m going to cook you for dinner tonight.” And then he lunged, trying to be careful not to hurt its wings when he wrapped his hands around its body. It was only a step toward the window before he was able to toss the bird out of it.
The bird on the desk eyed Katou suspiciously as he approached. What is he…? Qrow’s head cocked to one side as the young man spoke. Attack? What is he talking about?
The question was answered a second later when Katou lunged at him. Qrow tried to get away, but he wasn’t used to his new form, much less know how to fly. A loud commotion erupted in the classroom of loud shrill squawks flapping wings and kicking taloned feet. Lemme go!
Of course Katou didn’t let him go and the next thing Qrow was aware of, he was in the air. The window leading back into his classroom quickly got further and further away as he plummeted two stories to the ground. Instinct, or something akin to it, made him spread his wings. For the briefest of moments it felt as though he was flying. Flying through an abandoned town after four teenagers who were in deep, deep trouble.
It all came to an abrupt end when Qrow hit the ground. Just before he did, however, he’d changed forms again, which may or may not have been lucky depending on how you looked at it. On the bright side, he wasn’t a bird anymore. On the less bright side, he had just been thrown out of a second story window onto the sidewalk.
Katou had been half certain that the crow was going to double back and attack Katou for tossing him out the window, so Katou was more than a little surprised when, instead of doing that, the bird plummeted toward the ground instead. Katou watched its descent with something almost resembling concern, and he let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding when it finally seemed to figure out what its wings were for.
And then it turned into his history teacher and he recoiled from the window, because what the fuck. And also, oh shit.
He wasn’t sure what to do. There was some small part of him, some incredibly stupid part of him that was tempted to either jump out the window or run through the school - a dumb idea in general because he didn’t run - to make sure that Qrow was alright. He disregarded that idea out of hand. Running to check on someone who you just told to shit in their own lunch before yeeting them out a window was probably the dumbest idea Katou could come up with.
The smartest idea Katou could come up with was to find somewhere to hide. He could easily avoid coming to history class for the rest of the school year; there wasn’t that much time left. And maybe by next fall Qrow would have forgotten all about it. Or Katou could just drop out of school and never worry about it again.
Of course, Qrow knew where Katou lived, so that probably wouldn’t work out quite as well as Katou envisioned.
Katou glanced out the window one more time to make sure that Qrow wasn’t dead or bleeding out or something, and then he backed up and slipped into one of the desks. Maybe Qrow wouldn’t have any memories of when he was bird-brained. Maybe Katou could pretend he didn’t know, and Qrow would be too embarrassed to say anything.
Either way, Qrow probably wouldn’t murder him in his classroom in the middle of the day.
At that exact moment, Qrow was too stunned to murder anyone. He was lucky that his classroom was located along the side of the school that not a lot of people came around. Not that Qrow felt very lucky. He lay sprawled on the sidewalk for several moments staring up at the same window he’d been defenestrated from. Katou was gone. He probably had just thrown what he thought was a trapped bird out of the window and went on his way. Seemed like something the kid would do. Maybe gone looking for him: ”Hey, Teach. Weirdest thing. There was a bird sittin’ on your desk. I wouldn’t eat the rest of that lunch if I were you.” Or something like that.
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him,” Qrow wheezed. When he was finally able to move again, he dragged himself onto his feet. His back and shoulders throbbed, he was going to be feeling this for a while. Rubbing his collarbone by his neck, Qrow cast another look upwards at the window before he ambled back inside the building. He made his way back up to his classroom, a bit slower than usual. And much to his surprise, there was Katou seated at one of the desks as though he were a model student waiting for class to start.
Katou turned toward the door when he heard Qrow, and grinned sunnily at him. “Hey, Teach!” he said brightly. “You’re looking,” like you just got thrown out of a window and then laid on the pavement for a while, “good. Is that a new shirt? New haircut? Looks great. ”
If there was one skill Katou had that wasn’t being insufferable, it was being a suck-up, and he was prepared to turn that on with particular force.
Qrow stood in the classroom doorway, leaning on it a little because his back was killing him (though, it could have been worse. Thank god for auras.). He also knew damn well that Katou was sucking up to him. There was no way someone thrown out of a window could possibly look good. So, now Qrow had a decision to make. Either the kid truly didn’t realize what he’d done and was just trying to butter Qrow up so he could come over and use his XBox or TV for a few hours. Or, he actually had seen Qrow laying on the ground outside, realized what he’d done, and was trying to get away with it with a smile and a few nice words.
Red eyes narrowed at the young man. As angry as he was, he couldn’t really be angry at Katou. It wasn’t as if the kid could have known what he was doing at the time. Regardless of that, the last thing Qrow wanted to hear was this smarmy attempt to get on his good side.
“Glad I look better’en I feel,” is what he said before ambling across the front of the room to his desk. His lunch was still sitting there, barely eaten. He hadn’t been very hungry before and he certainly wasn’t now. He looked at it, then at the still open window, then back at Katou. “You want this?” He asked, picking up the container and holding it out towards the kid.
Well, that was a suspicious look that Qrow shot him, and Katou counteracted it by somehow making his smile even brighter. It faltered when Qrow asked him if he wanted his lunch. Crow!Qrow probably hadn’t done anything too suspicious to it if … well, it was him.
“Yeah, sure,” Katou said slowly, getting up to take the lunch from Qrow. He glanced at the window. “Ya know, the weirdest thing happened. There was this bird here. Like, a big, strong looking crow just sitting around on the desk. I don’t think it did anything, you know, weird, but I thought it was… weird.” That was way too many weirds. “Anyway, I got rid of it for you. Figured you probably wouldn’t want a bird hanging out in your room, even if it did seem especially smart and healthy and… shiny.”
Qrow let him take the container. “Oh really?” He tried to feign surprise, but the pain he was in made it come off more sarcastic. “That’s strange. Must be some kind of bad omen.”
Did you know crows are a sign of bad luck? That’s how I got my name.
Qrow leaned against his desk, wincing slightly as he did. “I wonder how it got in here.” He glanced at the window then back at Katou. “How’d you get rid of it?”
Katou tried not to grimace when he noticed Qrow's wince. "Yeah, I wondered that too. Must've flown through the whole school to get here," Katou said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I opened the window and ya know, kinda just like, you know, gently helped it out. You know, good Samaritan like and all."
Qrow raised a brow. “Gently?” He wouldn’t have described being grabbed off his own desk and thrown out the window as being handled gently.
He placed his hands on his desk on either side of his hips, using them to take some of the weight of his back. “So after you helped it out of the window did you just sit down again? You didn’t watch it fly away? Or, you know, make sure it could fly?”
"What kind of crow doesn't know how to fly?" Katou demanded, all traces of sucking-up gone from his voice. Because really. "It just has to spread its wings and flap!" Katou demonstrated, spreading his own arms and giving them a frustrated flap. "I don't look at full grown crows and assume they're too dumb to figure that out!"
Qrow bristled, but he had to give the kid that one. He glanced at the clock above the classroom door. They had about ten minutes before the bell rang ending lunch, then another five minutes before class was expected to start. He could just drop the whole thing and let Katou think a weird bird had gotten into the school (or possibly let him get away with chucking him out of the window), or Qrow could tell him the truth.
His red eyes moved from the clock back towards his student. For some reason he was hesitant about revealing his secret. Yang didn’t even know. He intended to tell her, however, she wasn’t exactly available if he should happen to randomly transform again. On the other hand, Katou had actually been turning up to school, if not always to class. Having someone on school grounds who could cover for him, if he needed it, would be beneficial. Of course that was putting a lot of trust on Katou, who never presented himself as being the type you relied on in a pinch. But, it wasn’t as though Qrow had a lot of options available to him.
He shifted his position a little against the desk and leveled a no-nonsense look at his student. “Do you really think a crow somehow managed to get inside the building and all the way up to my classroom without anyone noticing or trying to catch it?”
“I don’t know if you noticed, Teach, but people ain’t that observant,” Katou said dryly, and then grimaced, rubbing the side of his head. It almost felt like Qrow was about to have a whole confession thing going on and Katou couldn’t let him go through with it; it’d be too embarrassing for the both of them.
“I know you’re the bird, Qrow,” Katou said, not meeting Qrow’s eyes. “I saw you faceplant into the cement.”
Qrow nodded. “I wondered if ya knew,” he said. “Can’t say that I’m pleased that you ‘gently’ threw me out of a window, but given the circumstances, I can’t say I woulda done different.” He shifted his weight again, adjusting his grip on his desk. “Like you said, birds are supposed to know how to fly.” He kept his eyes leveled at Katou. “You got any questions you wanna ask? We got…” he glanced at the clock again, “‘bout twelve minutes before the other kids start showin’ up and I wanna get this cleared up as much as possible before then.”
Katou frowned, tilting his head to the side, thinking over Qrow’s question. He wasn’t sure he’d really ‘get’ any answer Qrow gave about how he could turn into a bird, and frankly, he didn’t especially care either. Qrow could turn into a bird, and that was about all Katou needed to know.
“So like, do you eat road kill now?” he asked after a moment, and took a bite of Qrow’s lunch as if the question made him remember he was holding it. “And why the hell would you think it was a good idea to turn into one in the middle of your classroom in the first place?”
Qrow rolled his eyes. “Of course I don’t eat road kill,” he said. Though, it did sort of beg the question: if he had literally been turned into a crow, and crows’ digestive tracts allowed them to process rotting flesh, then did that mean he could eat carrion? Qrow watched as Katou casually ate what was left of his lunch and his own stomach rolling slightly and decided he did not want to test the theory.
“To answer your second question,” he said, again adjusting his weight against his desk with an involuntary painful sounding grunt. “I didn’t know I could do it until it happened. Well, I didn’t think I could do it. Not that I was exactly tryin’ either. I was actually watchin’ a bird outside the window.” He nodded to the still open window. “And thinking about --” he almost said my sister but stopped and frowned. “--some shit. The next thing I know poof I’m a bird. Before I really understood what’d happened and how to change back, you showed up and threw me outta the window.”
Another painful adjustment against his desk. He wasn’t going to be able to stand up here and teach two more classes, that much was becoming obvious. He pushed himself off his desk and circled around it to take a seat. His desk chair, he discovered, didn’t offer much relief.
“Well, that’s bad luck,” Katou muttered, feeling a twinge of guilt as he saw how much pain Qrow was in. It wasn’t his fault Qrow had decided to test out his previously unknown shapeshifting powers. He nearly, very nearly offered Qrow something to take the edge off, but stopped himself before he could actually start speaking. He’d offered before and Qrow had made it clear then that doing so was a bad idea.
“You uh, need anything?” he asked instead. Not because he felt guilty, or because he felt like running around and being Qrow’s little errand boy.
At the mention of luck, Qrow laughed despite himself. “Kid, you have no idea.” He shook his head at Katou’s offer to get him something. “Thanks, but unless you got ibuprofen or aspirin in your bag, I’ll just hobble my ass down to the nurses office when class is done and see what she’s got.” By then hopefully he’ll have come up with a reason why he needed it in the first place.
The hallway outside the classroom was becoming louder with the sounds of other students starting to make their way to their respective classes. Then the bell rang, signaling the end of the lunch period. Qrow glanced at the clock, then looked back at Katou. “This goes without saying, but I’d rather you kept this whole thing to yourself, alright?”
“Oh damn,” Katou muttered. “I was just about to go tell Youji and them that the history teacher turns into a fucking bird for shits and giggles. I’m sure they’d definitely believe me and wouldn’t think that I was keeping the good acid from them.” He grinned, shoveled the rest of Qrow’s lunch into his mouth, and pushed the container back toward him. “Trust me, even if I wanted to tell people, pretty sure it’d just get me locked up or something.”
Katou was probably right, but Qrow was thinking more along the lines of spreading the story about how he threw Qrow out of the window to the others on their little network. The last thing Qrow wanted was word of his not being able to fly getting back to Leon or Tony, or anyone else there for that matter. He took the container back with a nod. “Good,” he said. He glanced at the clock. “Ya better get to class,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Katou said, rolling his eyes, though the sarcasm was more for show. He didn’t have anywhere else to go, and so even if he was likely to spend the next hour penning song lyrics or doodling in his notebook, he was just as well off doing that in his English class than he was anywhere else on campus. “Try not to turn into a bird again when I ain’t here to help you turn back,” he added with a wolfish grin.