- Jun 7, 2023
- 244
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The tom did not often take the walk from Nursery to Medicine Den, there was little need, especially as he swore that remnants of the sick lay ruminating within its walls. There were three animals within his care now that could not afford to be ill, Sootspot himself could not afford to be ill, not when ashes from the fire still threatened his lungs. Still, his reasons for wishing to break that safety were of the upmost importance, a little expedient, but important all the same to the tom who stood everything to gain. Black paws carried him on a well-rehearsed gate towards the entrance, conversations playing over and over again within his head - how he wanted things to go, how he expected things to be. All it required was Cottonsprig to be within her home, and not running off in the fields doing Stars knows what or playing caretaker for a bunch of sick cats. He took a deep breath, and beneath it, an allusion of a prayer to the ones who had forsaken him long ago.
He should've learned by now they could not control the whims of lesser beings. But, he blamed them all the same for the will they placed upon them. Sootspotpeered his head into the den and the light within his eyes grew deprecating for a spell as they settled upon the cat he hadn't been looking for. The tom easily remembered himself, casting a slight smile towards Celandinepaw.
Even as the great conflagration and seeing her pain had not brought him any closer to Celandinepaw, whose position under Wolfsong was just as disrespectful as when the one-eyed brute had been promoted. Sunstar must have had ulterior motives allowing so many rogues and kittypets by his side, but such implications for his home were darker than a moonless night. Her nest was one that should've belonged to Heatherkit, or Bramblekit, or even Nightkit, someone who would've grown up to support him, and not spit upon the very foundations he was raised under. He caught her glance and mewed an, "Apologies, I was looking for someone else," he mewed, glib.
He did not turn to leave. A quick glance around the den revealed she was alone. Sootspot stepped forward, blocking the entrance with his frame for a short spell before finding a comfortable spot to the side of it. "That can wait." Cottonsprig had left once already, he doubted she would do so again. She was a prisoner to her morals and, very likely, her fear. Bluefrost was no longer useful, she'd played her part and proven to the world that he deserved her spot, but now she was disgraced, and disowned from the council. Cottonsprig stopped being useful the moment she wished to follow a similar path, so why would she threaten her darkest secrets emerging and ruining the faux halcyon she could make for herself in the aftermath of her mistakes?
'But I haven't figured out your part in it all.' He detested the way she mourned for a lifeless Twoleg structure, detested how she was so close to StarClan, but she was irritatingly popular in spite of it all. Such things were orthodox for his clan, he realised, rejecting both the bad and good his mother had stood for, as if acknowledging either would make them as bad as her.
There was nothing bad about admitting that allowing someone who barely understood clan culture to be its keeper was a terrible idea.
"This must be quite the upgrade from sleeping beneath the stars," he mewed, his serpentine gaze surveying the herb stores, what lay where, pretending as if he knew what each thing would, that it would somehow benefit him to know. "Do you miss their gaze?"
@CELANDINEPAW