camp I'M STILL HERE ☾ INTRO

[frogpaw]

Frogpaw wakes with an ache in his paws. A slow wince, an awkward stretch– it's morning and he does not wish to wake the apprentices that still sleep, so he confines his limbs to his nest. It's grown awkward for him already. A growth-spurt has left him out of place and gangly. Maybe he'll spend his morning fixing it? That would be the kindest thing for his poor limbs, but...no. There was too much to be done today. One more flex of his sore paws (nobody had warned him that being an apprentice would hurt so much) and he pulls himself out of the den, weaving carefully between tail and toe until dawnlight touches his still-sleeping eyes and makes him wince. Would Snake be up? Maybe they could get out of here again, go patrolling or practice fishing before the river got any worse?

Anything would be better than watching the way that some cats looked at his mentor. Like– like he was going to do something awful, like Frogpaw was something to be pitied for being mentored by such a cat. He's learned not to speak up on it, though. A few faces are starting to look at him the same way. Their own fault. Their own stupid, awful thoughtlessness. But he doesn't want trouble. Instead, he's going to prove himself. For Snakeblink. He'll show them. He will.

After breakfast.
He's starving.
Is he allowed to eat yet?

Rules rules rules. Even though he's hardly a new apprentice, it still feels as if he's tripping over himself at times trying to learn everything. Life had been easier as a kitten, when he didn't have to worry about anything and his mother fed him as he pleased. Looking an awful lot like some kind of criminal, a faintly guilty sheen to pale blue eyes, Frogpaw's too-big paws carry his body in a half-crouch towards the freshkill pile. He paws over a water vole. It's fine. Nobody will yell at you. Just eat it. He looks down at the vole. Limp. RiverClan's lifeblood for the coming months. The waters were cold, the birds were gone. Does he have a right to it? Will people think he's being selfish? Will Snakeblink?

With an aborted sigh and a shake of his head, eyes shut tight in disappointment with himself, Frogpaw rolls it back towards the pile.

ooc: idiot apprentice overthinks breakfast, more at nine.
— haven't set up his info yet, but frogpaw is a black smoke with low white and pale blue eyes. his ears are loosely curled, and he has extra toes on each paw.

EDIT TO ADD THAT HIS NAME HAS BEEN CHANGED TO FROGPAW!!​

 

[ashpaw!]

Big bright eyes blink in morning sun, leaf-bare chill only just starting to soak into her bones. Ashpaw's impromptu cuddle sessions are more welcome than ever these cold months; she wakes warmer than her less social peers, cuddled up to Willowroot or Beesong or, in last night's case, Minnowpaw—she doesn't fall asleep next to anybody but she sure does wake up with them. Sole benefit of the nightmares, maybe.

One frosted ginger paw stops the vole as it rolls. Ashpaw nudges the prey right back in Fogpaw's direction, so that it bumps the boy's paws—

(Paws that, she notes with momentary delight, are like hers. She doesn't comment on it but admires for a moment the sets of six and seven toes. She's never seen anybody with paws like hers!)

"Hi," she says. Fogpaw is like her, she thinks. He's... scared, and sad. She tilts her head, ginger ears pricked. "Let's share, okay?"

She doesn't wait for an answer, sitting down beside him and nudging the vole over. "I'm Ashpaw. I don't think we've talked much, huh? Your mentor is Snakeblink, right? He's awesome. He's kind of funny sometimes but cool."

The fact that this opinion might be... unique does not occur to her. Snakeblink could be kind of scary sometimes, but Ashpaw's scared of like, everyone. And Snakeblink is nice. Weirdly nice but still nice. Anyway...

"You gotta eat. For strength. It's important. Oh, um... can I come hunting with you today?" she finds herself whispering. "If you're going with Snakeblink?" Say yes, she prays with eyes squeezed shut, say yes and let me come before Pebbleskip wakes up. He's sleeping in today, thank... something.

Not that he'd be mean or anything, he just—might want her to do hard things. He always wants her to do hard things. And Ashpaw might be a little bit of a coward. I am like a kitten, she finds herself thinking more and more as the weeks wear on.

​

—— " i found gold in the wreckage "

✦ ooc ✦ character information ✦ recent events

• ooc text goes here
  
  
• - 6 month old orange tabby with green eyes
  - apprenticed to lead warrior willowroot
  - happy-go-lucky, mischievous, hardworking
  - very friendly, but defensive of riverclan!
  - "speech"
• - disclosed being physically and psychologically abused by Spiderfall, who was exiled & who then killed her best friend
  
  - temporarily apprenticed to npc pebbleskip due to willowroot moving into the nursery
  

 

[iciclefang]

╭── ⋅ ⋅ ── ✩ ── ⋅ ⋅ ──╮​

Iciclepaw trails behind Ashpaw, her expression neutral but for the frosty burn of her eyes. The quiet smoke-pelted apprentice sits with a vole between his forepaws, seemingly hesitant to take a bite. Hesitant, over the only prey in the pile during leaf-bare! It's not as though he hasn't worked hard to deserve it -- or so she imagines. Though Iciclepaw says nothing, initially, the ginger she-cat offers to share, asks to go hunting with Fogpaw, and Iciclepaw has to sigh. If Ashpaw wants to be friends with him, then she'll change her tune -- but only a little.

"Yes, share with her so we can move on. Looking at it for twenty moons isn't going to feed anyone." She flicks her tail tip. "If you're going to help refill that fresh-kill pile, you'll need your strength."

- ,,​

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edited bc i'm an idiot and did not realize this was rev's fogpaw who is a riverclan cat afgsfgsf

 

[Snakeblink]

Being a mentor is a... strange experience. A role alien to Snakeblink, so used to being responsible only for himself – answering to others but having none answer to him. The anxiety at being faced with an unknown situation is to be expected. Given time, he could hone into a killing edge and turn it against the problem, the way he has channeled his paranoia into vigilance and his unsociability into a covert eagerness to help. But he has no time. Frogpaw is his apprentice now. Snakeblink is liable to fail his education in a catastrophic manner now.

Mentorship means leaving your apprentice better than you found them, better than you are, but Snakeblink can barely figure out how to improve himself on a good day. What good is it knowing his own skills if he has no idea how to impart them? What's the point of being aware of his faults if he's helpless to avoid passing them down?

(He's afraid, more than anything, of staining Frogpaw somehow. His reputation sticks to him like tree sap to fur: he would have an easier time tearing some of himself off than getting rid of it without pain. He doesn't want his apprentice to suffer for it.)

He wants to do right by Frogpaw, but he's not sure he can, and that worries him.

That worry keeps him up at night – most things do, to be fair. Snakeblink paces through camp deep into the night, sometimes all the way until the pale light of leaf-bare dawn seeps into the darkness of night. He doesn't want Frogpaw to see his uncertainty, nor anyone else. Doesn't want to give the clan any reason to doubt his ability to do this. For all his fears, nothing scares him more than the thought of his apprentice being taken away, assigned to someone else. Someone better, more trustworthy.

He might fuck it up, fail to teach Frogpaw anything but how to have mistrustful whispers follow you everywhere you go. But Snakeblink loves his clan so much, would go to the end of the earth and bring down the stars for it – if he could just teach Frogpaw that much, then he thinks the young cat could become something truly special. Greater than the sum of his meager teachings. Perhaps that is worth the risk of failure.

This morning finds him pacing anyway. He cannot help himself: he's a restless thinker. Even when his breath leaves him in great plumes of fog and the cold before dawn chills him to the bones, he would rather walk up and down the camp, mulling over mediocre lesson plans, than stew in his disorganized thoughts in the faint warmth of the rapidly-emptying warrior's den.

He thinks he might be getting somewhere – they should get a little fishing done before the river freezes altogether, but he's not sure if he should risk sickness for the sake of getting Frogpaw used to the cold wet depth of the river while they're at it – when he catches sight of his apprentice. He stops in his tracks, watching from afar as the younger cat sneaks up to the fresh kill pile. His half-crouched posture, so familiar, fails to render him inconspicuous: his guilty face does more than yelling I'm doing something bad! aloud ever could. Did he learn it from Snakeblink, that low, quiet gait that he's come to find more comfortable than walking at his full height? Half of him is warmed at the possibility, despite the potential issues that come with conditioning the younger cat into adopting his most suspicious traits.

Now the question is this: what's Frogpaw looking so guilty for? Has he gone out to eat already, and is trying to sneak a second helping out of their paltry reserves? Snakeblink doesn't believe that's the case. He's been awake for long enough that he would have seen the younger cat walk by. Besides, Frogpaw pushes the vole back, looking dejected. An opportunistic glutton would not look so guilty committing his crime, nor give it up so easily. No, this is an adolescent suddenly faced with rules that he's so afraid to break he doesn't dare to find where the line lies. Choosing to go hungry rather than taking the risk of a misstep. It's a good instinct but poorly executed: better to know where the limit is than blindly cross it out of ignorance. Besides, service to the clan requires energy, and apprentices cannot go hungry with the same relative ease as grown warriors. Frogpaw ought to eat.

Ashpaw appears out of thin air to convince him to do just that before Snakeblink can.

For all that he's cut down on surveilling the ginger apprentice in favor of training his own, she still seems to be around an awful lot. He can never seem to find enough hours in the day to teach Frogpaw everything he would like to – why does Pebbleskip seem to leave her behind as often as not? Does he know some mentor secret Snakeblink isn't privy to, or is he not adequately picking up Willowroot's slack while she is indisposed? Something to look into, he thinks, creeping up to the two apprentices with his ears pricked to hear their words. He tamps down on his initial pleasure at Ashpaw's glowing review of his personality, though he can't help the way his whiskers twitch, halfway to a smile. It's kind of her to reassure Frogpaw, and her opinion means more to him than he expected it to. It's always nice to know he clears the bar that Spiderfall set so low. She's trailed by another apprentice – stars, that's one of Mudpelt's brood, isn't it? Her name eludes him. But her words, although spoken in an abrupt manner, are wise. As expected from Smokethroat's apprentice.

Clearing his throat to announce his presence, Snakeblink steps closer to his apprentice and inclines his head towards the vole, thin pupils watching him from the corner of his eye. ”She's right, Frogpaw. The days are only going to get colder and hungrier: do not hasten your fate when we still have food for you to eat.” He glances at the pile: he'll be going hungry himself, but that is nothing new. The emptiness in his belly is as familiar as an old friend.

Thinking back on the conversation – might there be a teaching moment in this? – he turns to Ashpaw next with a slight frown. ”Is your mentor not up yet?” There is no sleeping late in leaf-bare, but it doesn't seem Pebbleskip got that particular memo. ”If you don't think he'll miss you today, you are of course welcome to come along. You, too, seeing as Smokethroat is confined to the medicine den,” he adds to Mudpelt's as-of-yet unnamed (in his mind) daughter. The challenge inherent to dealing with three apprentices instead of his already-stressful one occurs to him and is quickly dismissed. Where there's a need, there's a way. ”I was thinking of going in search of thinly-frozen shallows upstream, to hunt for sleeping frogs.”

Although unappetizing, frogs sleeping away leaf-bare make for easy prey when one can find them, and breaking through thin ice to scoop comatose frogs out of the muck would double as cold resistance training for those apprentices living through their first cold moons.

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ooc. information.

• ooc: apprentice overthinking breakfast
  mentor overthinking teaching
  Anxiety
  
  
• — Snakeblink • he / him. 35 ☾, riverclan warrior
  — a sleek, skinny tabby with long ears and a scar over his right eye.
  — gay, not actually evil, penned by @Kangoo
  
  
  

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