The sun sat low in the sky as a set of large paws padded across the frozen ground. It wasn't quite cold enough for snow yet, but it would be soon -- and by then, there would be nothing to offer who she was visiting. Speaking of, delicately held in her jaws were a sad looking flower, petals practically begging to fall for the winter... and a cutting from some evergreen tree, it's quills no doubt poking at her lips. Despite that, she continued her walk, a steely look on her face.
The meadow, which gave way into a sandy shore with looming cliff faces, was silent. It made sense - any prey that made itself home here had no doubt disappeared for the season, and there was hardly a reason for Thunderclan cats to be here anymore. Their graveyard had moved under that stupid willow, at the sight of which Cinderpaw wanted to scream. What the apprentice was looking for, however, laid untouched beneath the open sky, kept safe by a wall of brambles and other foliage around it.
Her chest felt like it was being squeezed by some unknown force as she grew closer to what she was looking. It was the first time she had made herself seen around here since the previous winter, and that shame weighed on her; she couldn't have spent even a second before her death to visit? And she had been so upset her burial site hadn't been visited. There had to be something wrong with her head, like everyone no doubt thought there was. Would that part of her ever be fixed?
She faced the wall of thorns that marked the place she was searching for, and a breath caught in her throat. Did she even deserve to be here? Was she even supposed to?
But there was no changing the fact she was. She exhaled, and dove under the brambles to find a patch of earth that appeared untouched. Cinderpaw would have assumed it was if she hadn't used her own claws to toil it just a few seasons ago.
She dropped her meager offerings of a flower and fir tree twig as she looked at the grown over ground. Her brain searched for something,
anything to fill the silence. All she could come up with was a whispered,
"Hey."
It was quiet moments like these that hurt the most. The silence of a meadow at nighttime, quiet lulling over a den when those who were those she could trust could find nothing else to say, the hushed whispers of her clanmates as they stared at a girl who was an affront to all they believed in, the stillness of a crowd who ignored the pleas of the voiceless as they pointed at the very spot she sat and asked them to please,
please listen.
And as any other words died in her throat, Cinderpaw asked herself how different from that crowd she really was.
[closed.]