Liya snatched her hand back from the grey feathers so fast that she actually fell back into sitting on the floor. Yoshi knelt next to her anxiously.

"What is it??"

"H-h-" Liya swallowed, and then stammered in a rush, "It's h-him, it's h-his heart, but I c-can't l-look at it, it's like--a k-kaleidoscope, or somethin'--"

"That's what I've been telling him." Liya, unable to help a stray tear escaping, looked to see that Teige had raised his head from Hawk's. He kept his arms wrapped around the shifting jaws, though, kept them pressed to his chest. "Chin up and no tears yet, now," he told her. "We'll try again."

Hawk made as if to speak, but Teige ducked down again, pressing his horned head against Hawk's forehead, muttering, "I know. This first."

Liya looked around uncertainly. "But how do I--"

"I will walk you through." Helly settled down next to her with a crudely-formed hand gently on her shoulder, and indicated. "Sit up straight, Liya. You know how to do this now. It isn't like the last time."

Liya looked up into nir calm face, and then settled herself, putting her hands together and lighting her nerves once more. She could hear Teige whispering to Hawk, beneath Helly's words.

"Here's yer jaw, yeah? Start there."

Both of their voices faded gently into the background as Hawk and Liya listened quietly; everything they saw on the backs of their eyelids ran together into smudges of color and sensation, but instead of overwhelming them, they merely looked.

It will look chaotic as he shifts around. And it did--blood and muscles from the cellular level up, all off-register and moving, so that Liya could pin none of it down--

Don't try to make sense of it. Let him do that. So she didn't; she waited, while Hawk did.

The key to shapeshifting is a sense of self. Hawk tried to track the sensation of Teige's hand on wherever his jaw ought to be, and came up with incomplete flashes of other hands on his cheek, of pain in his mouth.

Rebuild your shape through how it feels to be in it. The sensations came a little clearer now--liquid running down his neck, something yanking at his throat, heat and cold in and on his face, his lips against someone else's, his own hands running through his hair--

Call to mind: as though waking,

How your skin feels to touch--the shape of himself, found by the echolocation of hands running over it--

How your muscles are to move--the stretch and flex of tendon and muscle, in his arms and hands and wings--

How your breath fills your lungs--and how deep the breath went into his chest, a liquid becoming the shape of its vessel.

The form of the muscle and veins came into further clarity. Just relax your vision; so Liya did, forcing the frown on her face to ease. As she did, the voices seemed to ease into one.

And let it come into | you got to let that come into

FOCUS

and then

it's easy.

So it was. It was just a cut on Hawk's shoulder. He knelt quietly next to her while she pressed her hands over it, closing it away in a flash of light. The shifting chaos had dropped away without even a hiss of static or a burst of shed feathers; the only remnant of it was a tear in Hawk's shirt.