private for the way i hurt // chance encounter

[spicepurr]

She lies. I have to get back, she tells her vigilmates, ears folded sheepishly. Orangestar will have her tend to her vigil another night, she knows. But Edenberry has already left with the sun, and as Spicepurr leaves camp... she doesn't follow her natural trail.

Her paws scale tall fences with ease, patter down gravel roadways and skitter between bouts of shadows and lights. The ribbon around her neck wards twolegs from handling her - already owned by another of their kind. She wonders, briefly, if they fear confrontation. If they're no different than dogs, fighting for dominance and territory. She supposes she could wait around to learn and watch, but the details of the upwalkers are of no true interest to her. The winding paths of the neighborhood hold her attention. She has to try. For Edenberry, for herself.

Spicepurr does not stop in her aimless wandering. Not until the sun begins to peak on the horizon and she realizes how late she's been out. Her dull gaze fits over her shoulder, a pitiful mewl escaping her with a breath. She won't make it back to SkyClan before sunhigh, anyways... she may as well find a place to rest. Maybe dream up a new lie to assuage any curious noses.

She passes through a garden littered with blooms and green grass, despite the shift of weather. In a secluded corner, beneath a bush, she rests her aching paws and her head atop them.​

 

[wolfpaw!]

It is a strange thing, to be removed from one's own life with so little effort. Wolfpaw had been a SkyClanner, and then she hadn't been anymore. She'd had a family, and then she hadn't. She'd had two eyes, and then she hadn't. There's a lot of giving and a lot of taking away in life, she thinks, but a whole life is quite a lot to take away, even if only in the metaphorical sense. She has no trees to climb, no birds or squirrels or shrews to hunt, no Figfeather to follow, no Howlfire or Coyotecrest or Hawkpaw or Blazingpaw to turn to.

It had been hell at first. Lonely, afraid, in the care of things she had been taught to fear despite so many SkyClanners' connections to them. Wolfpaw had been locked in a small room with so many strange things in it. A box of pebbly sand, a dish of dry kibble, soft and short-piled pelts of human construction. And the floor had been so cold, smooth and strange stone, and there hadn't been anywhere to hide when the twolegs came to try and pet her, their paws huge and strange and naked.

But she's gotten used to it in time. She still hesitates to let them touch her, still spends as much time in the caged outdoors as she can, but it will never be the same. The twolegs had taken her to a strange place where more twolegs poked and prodded her, and they had healed many of her scars to the best of their ability. Her vision had never recovered, but at least the damage was less obvious now — though her scars still web, old and white, up her forelimb and across her face, the right eye still cloudy. In a way, she is glad they failed. Without her scars, she fears she would not remember what it was like to be a warrior at all.

And stars, it has been so long, maybe she has forgotten. Wolfpaw — Edie now, she thinks, because that is what her twolegs call her — lounges in the screen-filtered sun, enjoying what autumn morning wind can reach her thick fur. And then she smells it: the pines. The scent that Howlfire and Orangeblossom had carried so proudly on their pelts, the scent that Blazestar had founded before he died, the scent of home, of SkyClan. It shoots through her, an electric shock. Her ears perk and swivel, despite the disconnect between smell and sound. Her amber gaze casts wildly through the yard outside her humble trapping. Wolfpaw leaps up the fuzzy platforms her twolegs have built into it, hoping to gain a better vantage point, and then she sees them — a cat napping beneath a bush in her very own yard.

"Hey!" No-longer-Wolfpaw yips, feathered tail spiking not out of aggression but pure excitement, unsure of what else to do with herself. "Are you... you're SkyClan, right? Hey! Over here!"

𝐈 𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐋𝐋 𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐌 𝐎𝐅 𝐎𝐑𝐆𝐎𝐍𝐎𝐍 ☾ 𝐈 𝐖𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐔𝐏 𝐂𝐑𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆

• 

• 
  
  — wolfkit . wolfpaw . edith
  — she / they ; lesbian ; kittypet
  — longhaired lilac torbie with piercing yellow eyes
  — "speech" ; thoughts
  — avatar by tropics; signature by pin
  — penned by meghan

 

[spicepurr]

Her eyes hold close for only a few long moments. Sleep tempts her almost too easily, yet noise rattles just beyond her instead. Spicepurr tries to write it off as rustling leaves or the busy sounds of the waking town - but there is something animalistic in the sound. She opens her eyes, tilting her gaze about the garden first, and then up; this is where she sees a cat marred by the unknown, their tone eager, nearly barking at her.

SkyClan, the tortoiseshell knows of SkyClan. Have cats this far into the twoleg territory heard of the Clans, then? It's a long, cursory moment where the cinnamon she-cat evaluates her choices before the other. Evidently, Wolfpaw is trapped by material the daylight warrior cannot place. And though the kittypet's tail lashes, it seems less out of anger and more... excitement? Spicepurr pulls herself from the nestled spot she had been in, eyes sweeping the space that separates them. There's no way to get closer, though intrigue begs Spicepurr to figure that out.

"Yeah - yeah, I am," she agrees to the other's hurried enthusiasm. Eventually, Spicepurr leaps to stand atop a platform, gritting her teeth as it teeters beneath her surprise weight. It's up, more fairly put, but not quite closer to the stranger. It's the best she can manage for now. "How do you - I mean, I've wandered so far..." she looks over her shoulder once, then checks the other side too, worried to see SkyClan's territory somehow appear behind her, before looking back to Wolfpaw. "Who are you?" She asks. Her tone is not tense, not necessarily, but surprise and confusion are each evident.​

 

[wolfpaw!]

Her heart thumps as Spicepurr rustles awake; as Spicepurr looks up at her; as Spicepurr leaps atop the glass-topped stand to not-quite meet her. Wolfpaw presses pink-padded paws to the mesh that traps her, as if she could break through it through sheer will alone — as if this time would be different from any other previous attempt. "Oh my stars!" comes her exasperated gasp. Relief travels through her in thick currents. It's enough to well tears into her good eye. She wipes them away with her scar-webbed forepaw. "Sorry, I just...."

Edie-not-Wolfpaw opens her eyes to blurred half-vision and finds Spicepurr again. Her remaining amber hue burns with an incredible weight; the weight of the world, the weight of two lives now placed upon a single set of shoulders. The other molly's cautious approach does not seem to phase her. All she can think about is her family — Howlfire, Coyotecrest, Hawkpaw, Blazingpaw.... They'd been such a close pack, and then. Wolfpaw-not-Edie shakes her head as if the thought is water she can dispel. Spicepurr is asking her questions, so she better answer fast, before she loses the girl's attention.

"'M Wolfpaw!" It comes as a bark, excitable and desperate. I'm Wolfpaw, so please get me out of here. "I— It's been almost three seasons now, when I... I was on a patrol with Howlfire, and then...." It had been new-leaf when the twoleg had snatched her away from her patrol, when she'd watched Howlfire tear back to camp with desperation in her wail. When her life had been ripped up from its roots and repotted. Wolfpaw's claws unsheathe against the mesh of her enclosure and drag, to no avail — whatever binds her here is too sharp for only one set of claws to destroy.

Defeated, she turns her amber half-gaze to Spicepurr again. They have taken on a chilling desperation, the beseeching of a child for its mother. "'M Howlfire's kit, and Blazingpaw and Hawkpaw're my littermates. Please, I... I wanna see 'em again."

𝐈 𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐋𝐋 𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐌 𝐎𝐅 𝐎𝐑𝐆𝐎𝐍𝐎𝐍 ☾ 𝐈 𝐖𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐔𝐏 𝐂𝐑𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆

• 

• 
  
  — wolfkit . wolfpaw . edith
  — she / they ; lesbian ; kittypet
  — longhaired lilac torbie with piercing yellow eyes
  — "speech" ; thoughts
  — avatar by tropics; signature by pin
  — penned by meghan

 

[spicepurr]

Spicepurr still holds her distance, balancing on the twoleg hardware and watching the other. Where her own caution is left beneath the rustling bush, her curiosity holds her in a too-tight embrace. Before this encounter, the warrior would not deem herself the sort to seek out information. Instead, it coils itself up and springs out, surprising her with the intrigue and allure it contains. Wolfpaw as the other deems herself... is that intrigue. She supposes there are signs - her wild fur hardly tamed by soft living, the ribbons of pain that wind around her foreleg and eat into her face. She's a wildcat trapped behind a twoleg's contraption. And she knows Howlfire - in fact, she's one of Howlfire's litter. Spicepurr had known abt a lost kitten, but did she ever think the stars would drag them together?

Three seasons, Wolfpaw says. It makes sense - she calls Hawkspine by his apprentice moniker, same with Blazingheart. Her maw opens with the want to correct the stranger and yet it closes with uncertainty, the pleading and begging coming to the forefront of her mind. She is not close with Blazingheart (in fact, she perceives the molly to be too ill tempered to drag all the way into the twoleg-place discretely.) But Hawkspine... She clenches her jaw, and that familiar itch beneath her ears begins. She could lie here and no longer deal with a mess that isn't hers - or she could be kind.

"Wolfpaw -" she tests the name on her tongue, as if its validity bears any weight on her future actions. The moniker comes quick but the words after trail, embroiled with insecurity and uncertainty. She presses forth. "- I... can't help you. Not alone. But - ... But I can bring them here." Them, she says, as if she would include a lead warrior and her mouthy daughter on a crusade such as this one. She'd risk her own head, given all that she's doing beneath their noses. "I'll come back in a few sunrises, Wolfpaw. I promise," but do you? She swallows uncomfortably and clenches her jaw.

"My name - I'm Spicepurr. Damn it to the stars if I do not return," whether it is a threat worth making, the she-cat offers it regardless.
​

 

[wolfpaw!]

Spicepurr takes it all in. Wolfpaw has to trust she takes it all in — has to trust that her tether to SkyClan is still enough to rope this stranger into freeing her. She scrutinizes each minute movement of the other's face muscles, as if she could scrape truth off of them with her eye alone and measure it in a scale; as if intent is not something so nebulous as a turn in the weather. She has no way of knowing if Spicepaw speaks true. All she has is a gnawing desperation, a thing that paces the cage of her ribs, eager for any out it can get.

Wolfpaw is not meant to be a solitary animal. She'd been born in a pack of cats more numerous than the toes on her paws, and then she'd been stolen. Stolen. Her twolegs had stolen her, and there was good in their hearts, maybe, but not the kind of good that she needs. She needs Spicepurr's good now — Spicepurr, the only hope she has. Spicepurr, who will bring her family here, who will free her in time. But not now.

The young torbie tries her damndest not to explode. She can't leave. She can't leave. Her tail has combusted into lilac and cream bristles; her claws worry into the soft carpet of her platform. "Please," she whispers, so desperate that she becomes nauseous. She's spent so long playing Clan here with the shadows on the wall; she's spent so long seeing her clanmates in memory only; she cannot stand to keep pretending any longer, but she has to. "I promise," Spicepurr says. But do you? Wolfpaw wonders.

Her eyes blow wide at uneven intervals. Her working pupil slits paper-thin. "Please. I'll wait for you." Wolfpaw would whisper her name like a prayer if it meant her rescue would come swiftly. And when Spicepurr leaves, she tries not to cry. Edie-now, Wolfpaw-once curls on the platform, amber gaze fixed on Spicepurr's disappearing silhouette.

𝐈 𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐋𝐋 𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐌 𝐎𝐅 𝐎𝐑𝐆𝐎𝐍𝐎𝐍 ☾ 𝐈 𝐖𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐔𝐏 𝐂𝐑𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆

• 

• 
  
  — wolfkit . wolfpaw . edith
  — she / they ; lesbian ; kittypet
  — longhaired lilac torbie with piercing yellow eyes
  — "speech" ; thoughts
  — avatar by tropics; signature by pin
  — penned by meghan