[dino.]

// @poppy.

>Buckbranch<

He raised one eyebrow at her quizzically. "...Why would I yell at you? They're just... jokes, they don't affect me." Hell, he'd even cracked a few about the same thing. It didn't make sense to him to get angry at others for doing the same as him. He curled his tail over his paws and tore his gaze away from Cloudypaw's broken leg as she spoke up again.

"Ah, right. I-" Quickly, he cut himself off, a second apology dying on the tip of his tongue. She got those a lot, she said, so why would she want to hear another one? He tilted his head at her curiously, and then jumped as she reached out to brush the grass away from his fur. That... was unexpected. And so was the question that followed.

'What are you trying to do with your life?' Something he'd heard several times before and still had no answer for—or he had had an answer at one point, but no longer did. Gently, he lifted a forepaw to nudge her own away. It didn't feel right to let her try to clean him up when he refused to do so himself, and brushed the rest of the mess out of his coat. 'You look like crap.' What an understatement.

"No, I wasn't," he said after a moment. "And I'm sorry you have to see me in this state." Ah, shoot, another apology. Too late to bring it back now. "I just... I tried so hard to raise this Clan back up and I still managed to screw things up, and now we're back at our lowest point. Hell, we had to bring Dawnstar in to make us fix ourselves, and seeing that? It's crushing."

He tipped his head up to look at the stars. Those same cold, distant, unforgiving stars he'd spent so long cursing because of what they'd done to his Clan.

Maybe it wasn't their fault. Maybe it was his, for refusing to step up when ThunderClan needed him. What did it say about him that he needed to talk to a kid to realize that?