[gs29513]

Name: Wormwood (Wormwood is a moderately poisonous ornamental plant)(IC Worm = very lanky as a kit(but later filled out), Wood = strength and tenacity)
Age:43 moons
Gender: female, she/her
Sexuality: Bisexual
Role: Bad Cat
Appearance: A large, muscular, solidly built brown molly with darker, almost black stripes scoring her coat. Yellow eyes, and long whiskers. Several scars cut across her nose and left shoulder.
Personality & Backstory:

 

Wormkit was never the….nicest kit in nursery. She was always a bit rough and a bit too likely to run off into some unknown corner and make trouble. This came to a head just a few days before her apprentice ceremony. Instead of staying IN the camp when she ran, she left it, quickly becoming lost and being captured by twolegs. Wormkit remained with them for several moons, during which time the twolegs had her spayed. When she returned to the clan it was several moons later, and her already rough demeanor had only been harshened by the week of difficulty it took her to make it back to the clan. Still, she tried her best to fit into the role expected of her, training hard and quickly earning her warrior name.

Here she had her first brush with romance. A handsome tom who she fell for quickly, becoming infatuated and pursuing him relentlessly. She was a bit possessive, and he was as well. Both insecure, both needing someone to see past the “I’m fine”’s to the messy truth within, and then on again to the pure, glowing cores of their souls. And….it worked. They enjoyed a few moons together as a happy couple, tails intertwined, fur brushing, making plans for the future.

And then the illusion of peace was shattered with only a few words. As they sat at a gathering, watching the crowd, tails intertwined, Wormwood remarked of a passing she-cat “She’s really good looking, huh?”. For a moment her love was silent, eyes wide as the statement set in, Wormwood still blissfully oblivious to the mistake she had made.

When his speech caught up to his racing mind her lover spoke, words hesitant. “You’re…..gay?” he asked, tail already pulling away from what had been secure moments before. “What? Of course not! I’m Bi!” came the response, naive and trusting. It had never seemed an issue to her before, it just meant double the options! The fact that she couldn’t have kits, that she had interpreted as a potential problem, but it had been surmounted by their combined love. They had plans to adopt as soon as possible, this was simply another step in peeling back the layers, revealing the pure cores of life that powered them. Or so she thought.

Her lover had other plans. The layers returned, as if by magic, folding and tightening around his heart like iron bands. He was not one knowledgeable of the sexualities, the genders, so unique that they outnumbered the stars of the sky. Neither was she, but she knew how she felt at least, and that was too much. They had both been insecure, but while her confidence had grown, sure in the knowledge that he needed her, they were too important to each other, for him to leave, his had only fallen further.

The jealousy was too much. Dramatically, ironically, he turned on her, walking away with nary a word.

She cried.

Her layers, too, returned, husking her heart so that no eye would ever see her true feelings, her true vulnerabilities. Hers was a heart encased in stone, frozen in ice, for her and only her to view. She wove a new being from the threads of the old, a glorious tapestry of majesty and ice. The clan saw. The clan believed. Her former lover was gone, and all that remained was the tapestry woven of her dreams, her tears, and his scent wreathing her pelt before it had blown away like a breeze.

The tapestry hid her, obscured her face from all the onlookers. It was safety. One day she hoped to destroy the tapestry. Rip it, pull the dreams from its threads, and weave them anew into the fur of some new cat, binding them together till all was as it should be. As it should have been.

In darkness, there is no accountability. Without a reason to improve herself, with jealousy and anger festering in her heart, Wormwood’s empathy, reason, and will to live rotted away, leaving only a beautiful husk of a cat to walk through the clan, a projection of what hadn’t been for a long, long time. Until Shimmeringpool returned.

She had never paid much attention to the other molly before, content with what she had. But now, Wormwood experienced a fierce attraction, a desire to be close as she hadn’t been with another cat since her first lover. The kits Shimmeringpool brought with her presented another opportunity. As a single molly there had been no way to fulfill that particular dream, but this, this was a chance. And her feelings were reciprocated. And Wormwood grew fearful.

She concealed any bit of her past she could, inventing stories of she-cats she had crushed on in the past, obscuring any mention of toms, of her first lover. She became controlling, desperate, now that she had something to lose, to ensure nothing slipped through her claws. What had begun as a genuine passion became an obsession, with Wormwood’s sole focus on possessing Shimmeringpool as hers, and hers alone.

When she left her, Wormwood did not cry.

She refused to believe that the unthinkable had happened again, and followed Shimmeringpool everywhere, hoping against all logic that she would be let back in, that she could reassert control. She threatened her former lover a few times, watched with thinly veiled jealousy as she took a new mate, withdrawing to the shadows of her own longing and misguided victimhood.

Plot ideas: Nothing well-fleshed out yet, but if Shimmering and Good Cat had kits we could have a potential kit-napping or even murder attempt.
@Sweetie