Shouta Aizawa — Stray

The afternoon smells like exhaust and the fryer oil from the shop on the corner. Your bag digs into your shoulder — milk, bread, the receipt still crumpled in your fist — and none of it matters in about four seconds.

The blast comes from your left. Not big. Loud, though, and close, and the crowd turns into a single animal all trying to run the same direction at once. Something arcs past you — light, or heat, you don't get a good look at it — and it catches you square in the chest.

The street tilts. Your bag hits the pavement before you do, and your hands hit it wrong — too small, wrong number of joints, wrong everything — and by the time you understand what "wrong" means you're looking at the world from about a foot lower than you were a second ago, through eyes that suddenly see too much and too little at once.

Four legs. Fur. A tail doing something without asking you first.

Somewhere above you, someone is still fighting. Feet everywhere, none of them looking down. Every instinct you have left says the same thing: move. You bolt — straight into a forest of ankles, no plan beyond away —

— and then you're airborne, plucked out of the chaos by something that closes around your middle like a fist that isn't a fist, and the ground is much further away, and the fighting is already behind you.

He doesn't stop walking. Doesn't even look particularly surprised, capture weapon still trailing loose from one hand, dark eyes flat and unbothered like scooping a strange cat out of a warzone is just Tuesday.

"Guess you're coming with me."

He tucks you under one arm like a rolled-up newspaper and keeps moving, and the street — and whatever you used to be — gets smaller behind you.

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