Catch Me If You Can

The duo darted across the city, ducking and weaving through skyscrapers and concrete buildings like they were no obstacle. Occasionally, it seemed like the blonde would slow and take a reading from a yellow panel she would stop to conjure, but Hazuki had never heard of any magical girls created by La Luna who had such a power.

Just as Hazuki halted with the realisation he was right near his home, the blonde looked back and tilted her sunglasses towards him - exposing eyes the colour of chocolate - in acknowledgement.

"Here you go." The voice portrayed her as a girl his age - 17, give or take - and just as Toshifumi rattled open the door lock to let him in (he had, admittedly, made a racket despite trying to be stealthy), she turned to take off again, revealing a sliver of black hair in one of her blonde bangs.

Using the green-and-white striped awning of the door to boost him up, he leapt a few times to come eye-to-eye with her, his coat-tails flapping as he did so. "What are you trying to achieve?" He wanted to sound cool, but ended up sounded panicked instead.

"I've been told to monitor you by forces that can control your master, La Luna." Hazuki's face fell into a scowl - he didn't actually consider Luna to be his master, he just wished to fight for his beliefs - and he tried to bite back with a retort, but -"I know someone like you," the blonde added to cut off his words,"they can't ever keep their emotions under control and end up often," she smirked momentarily, her pretty young face warping in a twisted way that didn't suit it, "'exploding', if you will. Now, if you ever need me, call into the void for 'Irina' and I'll come." With that, Irina conjured a bright yellow staircase of panels into the sky and disappeared before Hazuki could make any sense of her cryptic words.
----
The internet was aflurry with the words of supposed "heroes".

"I don't get it, why are we still doing good deeds if La Luna is capable of such a form? They'd probably massacre us all with it," one chimed in.

"I guess it's because we're all just fighting for an invisible yet disjointed cause. Nobody agrees what it is," Toshifumi typed in clumsily. Just after he'd slept, his body had morphed back into his human form - La Luna's "annual reminder for what people need to leave behind in order to advance, gifted on the day magicians left their humanity behind" - and it was no easy matter keeping his human movements as accurate as they used to. For that matter, he'd completely outgrown the clothes of his initial transformation this time, leaving himself in shreds of white and beige that left him ironically shivering in the humid summer night.

"Hey, why do we follow La Luna anyway?" asked someone, just as Toshifumi began to dig for some replacement clothes in the boxes of hand me downs that had arrived from some other magicians.

"I guess it's because we were all transformed by Luna, and even if we didn't, we've all got them to blame anyway..." went another. The former swan shed the useless fabric scraps as his search finally proved fruitful.

"Hey, I've got an idea. Let's stage an uprising," a third finally added after a momentary pause.

Toshifumi glared at the screen, his mind and body frozen with those words as he repositioned himself on the sofa, phone glowing softly on the right armrest.

Certainly, it was piteous that a twenty year old who had been praised for his "free will" (by the very fox who'd turned him into a swan against said will, too) had been going along with his brother's wishes for the two years they'd severed relations with their parents and relied solely on bounties offered by magicians-for-hire and Luna's services.

As a series of small thuds on the walls heralded Hazuki's return, Toshifumi creaked open the door to hear the awning material screaming under the teen's weight as he used it as a launching pad.

That reckless Hazuki. Even the most hefty of the bounties couldn't fully repair the damage his younger brother had done to their tiny apartment with all his combat training and fighting.

That made Toshifumi wonder - where did his own interests lie in this? Was going against La Luna for his own sake better than doing his moral duty as Hazuki's guardian?

He thought back once more to how horrified he'd been to transform into a swan two years ago. How he'd had to learn to fly and act like a proper bird once Hazuki came home in that pure white magician getup of his - there had been a wide smile on the boy's face at the time, and yet Toshifumi had never seen his brother smile again after that.

He contemplated the idea of an uprising against La Luna again, looking at the crack of night sky from the sofa in the opposite corner to the door, before picking up his phone and managing a slow "I'm in" before sleep finally took hold of him.