- Aug 4, 2022
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HUMBLE MY BONES WITH A CARDIAC
siltpaw | 07 months | female | she/her | physically easy | mentally easy | attack in bold #ddadaf
There is something wrong with her. She's known for days now. She sees it in those around her - in the way hunger drives them to madness, in the way emotions run high, in the way they're all tearing each other apart and coming together in unity all at once. She finds it in the way even granite comforts starlingheart despite his cruel tongue, in the way poppy's smile seems more strained, in the way pitchstar looks at them all. In the way bonejaw leaves them all behind.
She can feel it writhing beneath her pelt, buried deep beneath fur and skin and bones, coiling tightly like an adder waiting to strike. Its as much of a feeling as it is a lack of it - an aching emptiness where she thinks she's supposed to have a heart. She doesn't cry when she clanmates hurting, the way she thinks she should. She watches them from the corner of her gaze, simply observing. She feels nothing. Until she doesn't - until it's poppypaw's ribs she sees, until it's granitepaw's frown, until it's someone she cares about who's hurting.
And that feeling spits and sparks until it's a flare of heat, a flicker of wrongness she feels way deep down in her very soul. She doesn't understand it. Hasn't felt something like this since sparkkits death, this insatiable need to hurt. But there's no one to hurt - no threat to sink her teeth into, no one to make bleed, the only enemy the seasons themselves. Perhaps, has she believed in starclan, she'd be fighting them instead - but she only believes in what she can see and touch and taste and smell and feel. Believes only in brairstars death, in sandras abandonment, in the whispers that once followed her though shadowclan, in the feel of the earth beneath her paws and cold chill of the air against her pelt and blood on her tongue.
And so she does the only thing she knows how - she throws herself into her duties, hunting for hours until she finds even a single morsel to bring back to camp. Doesn't rest until she does. She sidles up to her friends - and isn't that a strange thought, she has friends now - and offers quiet words of comfort that never feel like enough. That make her feel like she is not enough. As though that might make up for all the bad, for all that they cannot have. As though it can quiet the monster tearing at her ribcage, begging to be set free.
Perhaps, she thinks as she stares out into the darkness - perhaps she is the monster. After all, are they not one and the same?