love/hate letter l hunting, oneshot

[wolverinefang]

"TURNS OUT I'M PRETTY GOOD AT RUNNING MY MOUTH"​

/before flooding, mild blood, replies not required but u can if you u want to

Another day, another morning of flailing around by the river and bushes for a meal in a monotonous cycle. He's taken Clayfur's advice not to fish when it's so cold but it's disappointingly going a similar route. It's giving him time to think because it's so quiet and that's not nice. He doesn't like to think too deeply about anything. It's always been a rule of thumb to him as he'd had plenty of time to ponder all of the things too hard to ask as a sick child. He already climbed his Everest, far before there was any medicine cat to help him. No one has to know how worriedly he looked over each of his children for signs of a fever pelt or a sniffle inflicted by the harsh winter. Wolve realizes that he thinks too hard about when he messes up and thinks too hard. Like how having his family gives him no choice but to do better, but trampling the snow in this area over and over isn't going to do anything to encourage prey to come out. He needs to do what he did best back in Shadowclan: hang back and lay around.

He does for a long while and his ears flick and his body starts to feel heavy. Wolve's lids dull down, a lazy haze drifting through him when suddenly they snap back open at a slight movement along the riverbank. He lifts his chin from his paws, focusing in on a dirty pile of snow betraying the pure white of a rabbit's pelt. Wolve's eyes widen and he licks his chops, head barely budging from its tracking stance as he follows the critter against its imperfect camouflage. He slinks along, belly near grazing the ground with a silence undeserved of a cat his proportions. Some things will stay with him from Shadowclan whether he realizes it or not but in this case it's a blessing as he settles into a hunter's crouch near the embankment. The droll of the exposed parts of the melting river becomes white noise in his ears as he sizes up the overgrown rat retreating back toward the naked foliage. Wolve crawls forward, knowing that one wrong step set it bolting into an underground hole that he has no hope of reaching. He can't believe it but he's even wishing to Starclan to help him not screw this up, even after his swift loss of real faith in their abilities after Briarstar's death. Right on que, he steps on a piece of ice that shatters beneath his weight and the rabbit shoots forward. Typical fucking Starclan.

The new father refuses to give this up however and he pursues, channeling as much power as he can into his back legs to leap forward with all of his might. Both predator and prey slip in the snow almost amusingly for brief second before Wolve sends them in a spiraling snow flurry back toward the river. He can feel one of its large feet smack his shoulder but he ignores the pain and holds steady. Wolve throws his head back and out come his namesake, solid fangs like two jagged icicles from the roof of his mouth. He bites down with so much force that Wolve ends up headbutting a patch of ice along the river's edge with the force he puts into the killing blow. Just to make damn sure it doesn't get away. His body weight ends up pulling them both toward the edge of the river but his claws anchor into the ground. He'll go insane if he ends up in another ice bath. Relative silence overtakes the area but inside Wolverine is jumping for joy. His pupils grow and shrink in his firefly eyes as a testament and he chuckles to himself between tufts of rabbit fur. It's not a fish but it's progress.

Wolve looks like a wet black bear, spikes of hair defying the melting snow on his back to spike back up as he takes giant swills of air. He shakes the rabbit once more like a dog with its toy, just to make sure that it's long legs hang down limp. Satisfied, the tomcat drops the white bundle and cleans his mouth only to glower. He's realized there's consequences to slamming his face into the ground of course. His nose is raw and bruised, dripping blood down at his feet. He raises a paw to touch his nose and realizes how stupid that was quickly. "Ow..." Worse yet, he realizes that his own red has dappled over the rabbit. He blinks then hauls the rabbit up into his maw for the trek back to central camp. "Wehl, thas jus exfra flay-vor." He doesn't care if has to smash his way through a thousand sheets of ice, as long as his children are fed. By extension, Riverclan too.

BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH — ♤​

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