PARADISE REGAIN'D \ daisyflight

[HAKU]

He has seen the beginning of these stars; rose from a waterlogged body to let his glowing soul form a warning. Daisyflight, too, saw this beginning- though bewildered, on the other end. Haku lives now twinkle-kissed, mist around his paws- his eyes weep starlight, not water, though they glow like a moonlit lagoon. He still hesitates, in death as he did life; that blockade that terrified him had not drained into the river with his life.

Still, he does not know everything about her. He had been watchful over moments, but when he had given his prophecy he did not know her bough would be plucked and burned, smoke rising to the night skies. Her tumult over being deputy, settling into Blazestar's council instead, was a choice he couldn't appraise without asking. And now she is here; Haku avoids her a little, still, as he did when they both walked the pine forest. Memories of practicing fighting before the battle that would take his life flash in his mind as he sees the patch-pelted warrior- of being aware of his steps, of his breaths, of how he held himself.

Loping over to where she sat, a silver breath snakes cold down his throat. "Daisyflight," he greets, star-dotted smile framing his words, though it is a small one. Closed-lipped, as his heart remains relatively shielded. Despite apprehension, he's glad for their paths to cross at last. "It's been a long time." He's not sure how to begin, really. Many aspects of the life she left behind, and the life she lives here... they are sad, undeniably, and he does not know how she feels about them.

\ @Daisyflight ​

[ PENNED BY PIN ]​

 

[Daisyflight]

"SUREFIRE, YEAH, THE SETTING SUN WANTS COMPANY"​

The frost that had chased life from the calico’s flesh had thawed, its needle precursor a mist-mellow memory. As open as Daisyflight had been in her last breaths to invite the stars into her being, the stellar voyage from the Shelter’s skies to the forests had not been easy. Knots of fear and scepticism were plucked apart by dazzling claws, long-gone experience revived to strip and soothe doubts. Even in her days of denial, she had been right- Starclan was staggering.

Alive, the molly spat at the undead. Thought them unnatural, malicious, and untenable. How could they be anything more? Spirits robbed of breath and warmth, clogged with the memory of their end- a killer, the forest, the world itself. A recipe for bitterness. However, questionable messengers not withstanding, their actions had chipped away at Daisyflight’s assumptions. They propped Blazestar up time and again and allowed her to watch over her family, more closely than she had been able to when corporeal.

Dimly, the starry warrior became aware of another presence beside her.

"It has." Her cadence rose and fell in odd emphasis, the words draw long as a dawn shadow, sighed. Gilded silver-sage eyes remained on the horizon line for a moment, before being cast at the tom. The stars fit him, in a morbid manner. "I saw you before- that day, though horror rather muddied my comprehension at the time." Twinkled laughter laced the admission.

"I never really knew you." A tail wrapped neatly across the calico’s paws, fringes stitched with celestial frill. "That lost opportunity was what I mourned most when you were gone, I think- death is strange." Now with all the time in the world at her clawtips, it was still hard to consider the topic too deeply. It still made her neck bristle. There was still a wrongness, an unfairness. But with her kits in sight, Daisyflight found it difficult to care.​

✿ ✿ ✿​

 

[HAKU]

He gazes at her, side-on, as she speaks. Their voices in this star-written plane hold an odd reverberance, as if the words themselves as well as their bodies glow in the night-light. Her words surprise him, and Haku finds he cannot look at her for very long. Moonstone-blues find the horizon, and wobble upon it for a few moments. "I can understand that," he says, voice resonant with an odd humour. It had been a strange state to be in on both sides, he can imagine.

It is odd to be spoken about like this; the idea of being mourned had never really crossed his mind. Before the Great Battle he had thought of nothing but repaying a debt, atoning for his sins- what he would leave behind was hardly a consideration. And he is surprised, now, to hear that Daisyflight had mourned any aspect of him, even if it had just been a lost possibility. A silver cobweb of breath, some semblance of a laugh, spins from his nose.

A deep breath claws through him, body moving with the inhalation. Firefly-light flicks from his pelt. "Made stranger by... this, I think," he hums, eyes flickering down to a snowy paw. Examining it, and the light that refracts from it... it is odd. He had never expected to remain, and to be remembered. He is not sure he can even face the possibility now, while it is his reality. "I am regretful," and his voice hitches, getting caught in his throat, as if catching on the liquid that had killed him. "That I never let anyone know me. Not well." It is not her fault she never knew him, after all. Then- even now- he had hardly been prepared to allow it.

"I'm regretful that I never let you know me." Haku looks at her only for a moment, before his eyes fall to the ground again. He watches his own paws sparkle- it reminds him of sunlight dancing off of the river. "We... we were a part of that colony for moons, but..." That lost opportunity that she had spoken of... it lingers, now, as his voice trails away.​

[ PENNED BY PIN ]​

 

[Daisyflight]

"SUREFIRE, YEAH, THE SETTING SUN WANTS COMPANY"​

She met his understanding with a cropped smile, the stale taste of blood still high in her mind. A diminutive strand of thought tried to imagine the scene from Haku’s perspective, slinking from nothingness in the swathe of violence and starless eyes. Deep discomfort wove a hasty barrier however, life long aversion needle-sewn into the molly’s wits. The notion was cut free. It was not her past, and never would be.

Instead, Daisyflight lent a scarred ear to the rest of the tom’s words. Death enforced a sort of patience, a rigid permanence that slowed the rap of her patchwork tail. It allowed Haku’s vulnerability to simmer where it might have once slid off. Light blooming along the pearl of his cheeks as he lowered his gaze. She knew it accented her own pelt similarly, and was quietly thankful that Starclan was an afterlife of brilliance and starglitter rather than the macabre. On the surface.

"Life is- was busy." Flint-fire catches on the calico’s whiskers, tone firm, deliberate. Daisyflight sought the eyes that shied away; pewter nose no longer aloft, an anchor amidst a sifting visage. Haku’s lament was not unfamiliar, though it rang in discordance. She had been known, feared the loss her family would feel in her absence- refused even to flit through nine lives. For a beat, the blue of Haku’s eyes took on another shade, weary, pale, kind. It was hard not to mourn. "You are forgiven, if you’ll hear it." The tease lacked teeth, half-smile stitched tight. He seemed to swim through sentiments so layered and old.

“Those moons are gone now. I was guilty of keeping cats at tails length too, but it was as it was. There were no prophecies for something so mundane." They had been forced to make decisions alone. Her kits had been borne of a tangle of such choices. Haku’s glimmering silhouette suggested he harshly doubted his own judgement. Daisyflight resisted the urge to tut- Haku was no monster, no Sootstar.

"However odd our circumstances are, we ought make the most of them. Or, I suppose, we don’t- we have the time to dwell in whatever mood takes our fancy." In a tempestuous twist of venom, smooth with an indulgent chuckle, she squinted at the constellations that underpinned phantom pines around them. The cats of the alleys who’d chased her from prey lacked the privilege. “Perhaps dwell happily for a little while first though, hm?" Silver smoked the space between them, tail aflare, before it sank into the mists. With it dropped Daisyflight’s gaze, her own words pricking her skin. ​

✿ ✿ ✿​