SWEETPAW - THUNDERCLAN - MALE - 6 MONTHS - SINGLE - HOMOSEXUAL (UNDISCOVERED)
Wildpaws response was a comfort to him, something he latched onto, perhaps naively so. His mother had always told him he had a terrible habit of giving others the benefit of the doubt, of blindly trusting cats too easily, but he'd never been any good at judging without reason. He didn't understand the point in treating someone skeptically or keeping them at a distance when they were supposed to be someone you trusted, and one the speckled tomcat came to view you as such, seldom did he hold himself back. And Wildpaw was his clanmate, a cat who, be every sense of the word, was an ally he was meant to trust and look out for, just as Wildpaw was meant to trust and look after Sweetpaw. And he was looking out for Sweetpaw, had stood at his side and helped him push through savage winds until they could find a safe place together. So why would he not trust his words? Wildpaw had been here longer than him after all, so if anyone had a read on the outcome of the other patrol, it was probably them.
"Y-yeah, your p-probably right." he akcnowledged through shivers. The cats in the patrol were far more experienced than he and Wildpaw, so if the two of them had managed to get to safety then chances were the rest of the patrol had as well."I d-didn't know snow c-could fall so fast. It's kind of s-scary how it came out n-nowhere like that."
And while he said the last part with a sheepish smile and a soft chuckle, it was hard to keep the nervous edge out of it. Sweetpaw, while not the smartest cat, had always considered himself a fast learner. He was a keen observer of the things around him, the sort of child who watched and studied the cats and environments around him in order to learn from them. It was a training tactic he'd picked uplong ago, something necessary in the life of a wandering kit whose ability to learn came not from a one-on-one mentorship, but through watching and mimicking the cats around them. And Sweetpaw had considered himself competent at this, at gathering and storing information he could later use to his advantage- but he'd made a severe miscalculation in his assumptions toward winter.
It was not just the threat of slow deaths like sickness or starvation that he needed to beward, but the sudden, violent ones as well.
He still had so much to learn. If only I had a proper mentor.
It wasn't a bitter thought, because he couldn't bring himself to feel any ill will toard their leader when there were so many other things going on that were more important, but it still left him forlorn, wishing he was better prepared so that he wasn't such a liability to those who knew more. Could he even be useful to Wildpaw in this situation? It was disapointing to realize that, no, he probbaly couldn't.
"Our pelts are wet from the snow. We need to groom ourselves in order to dry off, then lick our fur the wrong way to help fluff it up. It should make us warm up faster."
The words snapped him from his silent, self imposed guilt-trip, and almost immediately he filed the words away as something worth remembering for later. "That's a g-good idea." he said with a nod. Getting dry sounded like a great idea.
A little to his surprise though, Wildpaw leaned over and began grooming him instead of himself.
It was a surprisingly thoughtful gesture, one he hadn't been expecting from Wildpaw, and he couldn't help but feel a wave of appreciation toward the other apprentice in that moment. For all his gruff and hot-headed demeanor, the other cat was truly much kinder than he left one to assume. He'd shared his prey with Sweetpaw, had stayed with him in the blizzard, and now he was neglecting his own well being to look after Sweets first.
But the speckled cat wasn't one to leave his friends suffering, and at this point Wildpaw had definitely done enough for Sweetpaw to consider him such. So he leaned over to try and gently rasp his tongue along the others chest, wanting to return the favor. Wild needed to be dry too, otherwise he might get sick and that wouldn't do at all. Sweet would have felt horrible, knowing that the only reason it had happened was because the other had chosen not to dry themselves off first.
A SHORT WHITE TOMCAT COVERED IN OFF-BLACK PATCHES AND SPECKLES, KNOWN FOR HIS PRETTY GREEN EYES
