#pigeon!fred

[bh6-au-ideas]

Hummingbird Hiro flies differently to Pigeon Fred, as in, his wings have a different range of motion and everything, but Fred's still able to teach him a lot. Even if Hiro has been known to zone out sometimes mid-lesson. (He's exhausted and doesn't quite realise. He gets a LOT better at focusing after the Bay Incident because he actually got an hour's torpor. )

True,  but I don’t think ANY kind of bird flies like a hummingbird, but hey, close enough right? Besides, beggars can’t be choosers.

Maybe Tadashi ends up watching the sessions (and trying not to be super jealous because FLYING) and making sure he force-feeds Hiro gummy bears at regular intervals

[bh6-au-ideas]

Hummingbird Hiro: FRED NO sums it up, haha. And then he just leaves these magazines just lying around his room. And then Hiro finds them. Hiro's like 'EW NO FRED WHY DO YOU HAVE THIS THERE'S A SLUR' and Fred's just like 'it's really old Hiro it wasn't considered a slur back then' and Hiro's like 'this one pigeon-person looks like you' and Fred just stands there and then quietly says that that's because they're related. (Officially, they're not. )

Awww, but I can see Hiro and Fred bonding a lot in this AU because they both have wings and most other people don’t (and he’s a bit too afraid of Falcon!GoGo to hang around with her too often, she really likes swooping down on him and just carrying him off because she thinks it’s funny. Hiro is less amused)

Maybe that’s how Fred and Tadashi met, because they wouldn’t have met through school. Tadashi was looking for someone with wings, maybe to help Hiro learn how to fly because he couldn’t, and he found Fred. Or maybe Aunt Cass found Fred, and asked him to help because otherwise Tadashi was going to build himself robotic wings of his own so he could show Hiro how to fly, and would probably break his neck jumping off the roof in the process. She offers him all the baked goods he could want, and Fred naturally agrees.

But while he and Hiro bond over learning to fly, Fred and Tadashi end up becoming really good friends too. And then eventually Tadashi introduces Fred to the Nerd Lab crew and they all become a happy group of friends and EVERYTHING IS HAPPY

[bh6-au-ideas]

Hummingbird Hiro: It was Gogo, she noticed Fred was goofing around with one of the wheels of her maglev bike and spun him around a few times. He promptly walked into a wall, despite usually being able to navigate perfectly with his eyes closed in a familiar area like the lab. So she did the target test.

That’s hysterical. GoGo NO

[bh6-au-ideas]

Hummingbird Hiro: Hummingbirds do need to go torpid sometimes, although a few hours every few months is enough. Hiro, having not gone full torpid for years, is rather incoherent when he first meets the Nerd Herd. He wears makeup to hide the dark circles, but he keeps slipping into Japanese and forgetting words, both in the sense of accidentally leaving a word out of a sentence and in the sense of calling things by long placeholder names like 'two wheeled moving thing' for bike.

Fred has a perfect sense of direction unless you stick a magnet on his head. Then he merely has an amazing sense of direction. Also, bird people's feathers usually slightly stick up, like with real birds; depending on their mood and the temperature, they can go from having their feathers flattened against their body (looks odd) to fluffed up enough to appear to go up two shirt sizes (adorable).

I just want to see the situation where they figured out that sticking a magnet to Fred’s head messes with his sense of direction? Who’s idea was it? How bored were they? How did they test this theory? Was it GoGo? It was GoGo wasn’t it?

I bet the test was her grabbing Fred and throwing him out a window really fast and seeing if he could hit a target pad on the lawn below. Without the magnet, he smooshed against the target dead on, every time, but with the magnet he was off by like half a foot. And then she wrote down her results because SCIENCE.

[bh6-au-ideas]

Hummingbird Hiro AU: Winged people tend to get a lot of broken arms or legs, although their wing bones are VERY strong. Also, no, Fred would not bite people. Fred would be a really fancy pigeon breed, like, a Saxon Fairy Swallow or something. He's still obviously a pigeon, and none of the Nerd Herd are pigeon fanciers, so they just assume that he's just one of the many pigeon-people, who DO tend to be poor and can eat pretty much anything. And then someone sees a pigeon show.

Winged people are born with the wings and tail feathered, and by around 14ish the feathers have spread so there’s some on the back of the neck and mixed in with the hair, and some more on the chest and back. Arms and legs are never, ever feathered. Also, actually, Fred would NOT be a Saxon Field pigeon. He’d be a show racer type. The sort that looks relatively normal, but is actually both crazy expensive and able to find their way home from anywhere.Emancipation for winged people took place in different countries at different times, with the freest countries now freeing the wingeds earliest. (San Fransokyo had a bylaw that freed them well before the rest of the USA. )

Hmm, that could work. You’re right, pigeons are kind of EVERYWHERE. That could work. Also I can just picture Fred carrying around bags of bread crumbs and eating them, not because he actually likes them or anything, he just thinks it’s funny

Oh man, winged peoples needed emancipation? Hmmm, that seems a bit strange, considering humans typically thought of winged humans as good things (The goddesses Isis, Nike, many gods, angels, Valkyries), although I guess there’s bad winged things in myth too. Maybe they were kept as decoration? Especially if they’ve got as much feathers as that. CAN YOU IMAGINE A PARROT PERSON? THEY WOULD BE SO COLOURFUL AAAAH