DOES THE DEVIL GET SCARED — COMFREYPAW

[hitch]

So. They survived rushing the bears, miraculously, though he can't say that he feels like a hero. Sabletuft's speech made him feel ridiculous, in all honesty, like they were standing with the sun at their backs in varying square-jawed poses instead of scared shitless. At least they didn't lose anyone in the resulting din, and Comfreypaw still has her mother, for all that she'd barely had Betonyfrost in the first place. His apprentice is safe for now, as are their kits and queens.

Until they're thrown into the next cross-clan battle and the cycle begins all over again.

"Looks like we made it, kid," he tells her, glancing down with a thin grin. She doesn't need her mentor losing himself in his head, not with lost time to account for. They should start with learning how to hunt first— because she'd asked, hadn't she?

Crouching down, he takes a breath to assure himself the air's still free of bear-stink. "You see that small rock over there? Pretend it's a frog. Why don't you show me how you think you'd catch it?"

/ @COMFREYPAW

I N F O R M A T I O N
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[COMFREYPAW]

The first moon of her apprenticeship had been a lost cause. As Rosemire had pointed out to her in the tunnel, there hadn’t been much hunting to be done while bears thrashed madly through their territory, trampling undergrowth and eating what they wanted before moving on. And she’d certainly not been one of the unlucky cats to go drive them out. The charcoal tabby looks earnestly up at the ghostly-pale figure of her mentor, her amber eyes clear and glowing for the first time in moons.

Training is a good distraction from all that brews inside of her, stormlike, tempestuous. “Right!” She chirps, and each time she speaks, it sounds a little less hollow. A little more genuine. “I’ll do my best… but I’ve not caught anything yet, ‘cept a leaf when I was in the nursery.” She flashes him a grin that she hopes is winsome before settling into an approximation of a hunter’s crouch.

As a kit, she’d practiced to the point of boredom. Her weight is on her hind legs, her forelegs crawling feather-soft against the bog grass. She does her best to walk lightly, but the crunch of pine needle under her paws is audible. Her tail whips behind her, kicking up debris and dusting her undercarriage with mud. With a gleeful pounce, Comfreypaw cups the stone between coal-striped paws, and she’s completely unaware of how faulty her crouch and approach had been.

// sorry this is so late lmao

✧ INFO.

•  
• 
  — comfreykit . comfreypaw
  — she/her, apprentice of shadowclan
  — bisexual ; single
  — short-haired charcoal tabby with amber eyes
  — “speech”, thoughts, attack
  — penned by Marquette
  — art by Meadowllark

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[hitch]

┌──═━┈━═──┐
────── R O S E M I R E ──────
└──═━┈━═──┘

"Everybody's gotta start somewhere," he says, her grin infectious enough that he can't help but to match it. Not for the first time, he's worried about this pairing-up of theirs. Comfreypaw seems like a good kid. Eager to please, like a lot of them are, but Rosemire can't really remember what it was like to be her age. A good teacher should have some sort of empathy from experience, but on good days, Rosemire feels like a patch of dirt that the sky forgot to water and the seeds forgot to rest. Just...nothin' there.

Ah, who's he kidding? He wouldn't want to see Comfreypaw trained by Smogmaw, or Sabletuft, or even Chilledstar. So since Roosterstrut wasn't available, Rosemire supposes he can do his best to emulate that good-natured kindness.

Comfreypaw crouches, and it's...a start. Not a bad one for someone who doesn't know how to hunt yet. She's a little loud and any awareness of her surroundings doesn't seem to kick in, abandoned as soon as she makes her leap. A lot of energy and enthusiasm. "That was a strong start," he comments lightly, stepping over to her side. "If that rock were a frog, though, it'd be hopping off into the bushes. It's important to be quiet, so what do you think you should do differently next time?"
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[COMFREYPAW]

Comfreypaw hops toward the rock, and though her paws cradle the ridged surface, Rosemire’s expression tells her she hadn’t perfected her pounce. She scrabbles to her paws, listening with one ear cocked and one lowered. He tells her it was a strong start, which causes something like distress to glow in golden eyes. “I failed, huh?” He confirms, though gently, stating the ‘frog’ would’ve hopped into the bushes had it been mobile.

“Different?” A pounce, to her, is a pounce. Breaking it down into multiple components has never crossed her mind, and now she puzzles it out. “Erm… was I too noisy?” A black-banded tail begins to flail against the ground. “Was it…” Her contemplation leaves the forest quiet, subdued, and it’s only a moment later that she’s noticing the one sound left between the two of them. Her tail, swishing noisily against the cedar bits scattered across the marsh.

“Oh!” She turns to stare at the betraying object, understanding dawning. “I… I have to keep my tail still?” When she says it aloud, it makes sense, but how does she do that? She turns to her mentor, smile small and querulous. “How do I…” She gestures helplessly. She can control it—it’s attached to her body, after all—but Comfreypaw had never realized just how expressive the appendage is. It moves without conscious control.

✧ INFO.

•  
• 
  — comfreykit . comfreypaw
  — she/her, apprentice of shadowclan
  — bisexual ; single
  — short-haired charcoal tabby with amber eyes
  — “speech”, thoughts, attack
  — penned by Marquette
  — art by Meadowllark

​

 

[hitch]

"I didn't say that," Rosemire interjects, because it feels so wrong to hear that word from her mouth. Failed has a finality to it, much like success does, as though there's nothing more to be done but move on— and worse still, it's set an itch into the back of his neck, uncomfortably taut. He doesn't want to examine why that might be, so he drops it and focuses instead on her verbal deliberation of what to change, nodding slowly as she puzzles it out.

It's a good sign. Rosemire's not the best teacher, and a student who can learn a bit more easily would make up for that. "Got it in one," he says approvingly, and he makes sure to smile given how hesitant her own is. Really, though, he's uh...not the best candidate to explain tails, given his own. "I can wiggle mine a little, but not like yours." He rubs his chin with his paw, thinking. "Can you think of your tail as...I dunno, a snake? It's got to stay low and slow when you're hunting, and you'll probably have to concentrate for it at first, but with practice, your body'll get used to it." Right, well. That could have been better advice. "Show me your crouch again, and this time try to make sure your tail's not up and moving."
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[COMFREYPAW]

Comfreypaw’s smile shrinks at Rosemire’s disagreement. “I didn’t say that,” the pale warrior tells her when she tells him she’d failed. He does not like that word, then. She’ll have to remember that for next time. She listens to his instruction intently, amber gaze traveling from his pinkish eyes to the stub of ivory where his tail should be. She wonders, fleetingly, if he’d been born without much of a tail, or if he’d lost it somehow, but it seems impolite to ask.

He asks her to think of her tail like a snake, and she turns to study the traitorous banded thing behind her. “I can try, but I can’t control snakes, either,” she points out with a giggle. He’s right though—she can recognize that, at least. The tail has to be thought of as separate somehow while she’s hunting or stalking.

The charcoal apprentice lowers herself to the earth again, this time trying to become present from her face to the tip of her tail. Comfreypaw’s ears are first, and she becomes aware of what they do when she isn’t paying attention. They flick, they twitch, they bend one way or the other to catch interesting noises in the marsh. Next is her face, her eyes—she is suddenly conscience of every movement of her eyelids, each blink. Her nose, too, and the silvery whiskers sprouting on either side of her muzzle. When she sinks to her paws, belly brushing the reeds, Comfreypaw works on stiffening the muscles from every part of her body all the way to the end of her—where her tail tip twitches.

She lifts it, as though she’s prancing about camp, and then wills herself to still it. When it lowers, it’s like the snake Rosemire had told her to consider it—albeit dead or asleep.

When she turns back to her mentor, her golden eyes glow with excitement. “I never realized how much my body does without me thinking about it,” she confesses, wonder bright in her voice. “Now I feel weird, though… I never noticed how much I blink!”

✧ INFO.

•  
• 
  — comfreykit . comfreypaw
  — she/her, apprentice of shadowclan
  — bisexual ; single
  — short-haired charcoal tabby with amber eyes
  — “speech”, thoughts, attack
  — penned by Marquette
  — art by Meadowllark

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