Crowpaw
Purrks: Heightened Perception and Agatha Kitty
@
Tiabirb
A short and sweet laugh escaped him as he was teased by his friend. She was right though, this time there was no hostile tone or readiness to shred someone. Last time he was.
“I’m glad RiverClan’s doing okay now. ThunderClan gave you guys a hard time with the raids and all.”
The young tom shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head slightly to the left before righting it.
“Yeah! Uh… yeah, it’s all right.” Crowpaw twitched his whiskers and stood up to watch as Sweetsong rose to her paws and dug out a hole in the sand. Would the hole be there next time they dreamed of being together here on the sandy beach? Probably, considering this was his dream and therefore he had the ability to control what stayed and what went. That’s how dreams work, right?
I think that’s how… ah well, if I come here sooner than Sweetsong does next time, and the hole’s not here, I’ll remake it.
”It sounds like a good way to relax.” And it kind of sounds like a great way to sunbathe… Crowpaw has never sunbathed, if he was really honest with himself. He was always in the apprentice’s den sulking about life. He settled down beside his friend and took a moment to think about what he’d say.
Oh, gosh, am I really doing this? A mere anxiety-induced moment occurred, but much like the thought about Poisonberry, he cast it aside and set his mind on tonight’s discussion.
He looked at the mound of sand, as if looking for somewhere to begin, before setting his green gaze on the smaller she-cat.
“I was born in ThunderClan’s nursery to Quailfur along my sisters: Quietkit and Fallowkit. I was the oldest of us. My father, Thrushfur, didn’t visit us very much, but he always brought us something when he did whether it was for me and my littermates or for my mother.”
“Life was all right for a while… we got along great. I play fought with my sisters and we had fun in the nursery. Everything changed after I made a mistake though…” Crowpaw looked down at his paws for a brief second before continuing.
“When I was four moons old, I had snuck out of the nursery to watch the meeting… my father was attending it, so it’s not like I was going to watch it with all these cats I didn’t know. Um… m-my father explained who the high ranks were: Cinderstar, Sparrowflight, and Sundust. That same meeting, Cinderstar stepped down from leadership and Sparrowflight became the leader.”
He chuckled at the memory,
“I guess my little kit brain was so overwhelmed by the change in ranks that I- I, uh… I fainted. It was only for a little bit I think, but my dad knew it was enough. He told me to go back to the nursery, and I did because I didn’t want to risk getting so overwhelmed again. When I got back inside the nursery, m-my mom… s-she yelled at me for a good bit. She was so upset with me that m-my sisters practically sat on top of me to shield me from her and begged her to apologize to me.”
“I was a hot mess… my nose was running and of course I was crying. But my mom- she apologized for making me so upset and cleaned my face up. After that I told her what I saw… and we had a good time after that.” Crowpaw awkwardly smiled and looked at his chest fur.
“Unfortunately, those were probably the last good moments I had with my whole family.”
Looking back up again, this time with tears at the corners of his eyes, he resumed speaking,
“Shortly after that, my sister Quietkit disappeared. No where to be found in the camp. And she wasn’t anywhere in the territory. I was beside myself… I’ve always seen it as my fault. I’m her big brother- I’m supposed to be the example to my sisters. I’m supposed to be someone they could look up to. And I didn’t… I just showed her that it was possible to get out of mom’s sight. I carried that burden for- well, since then.”
Oh, boy this was a lot. Crowpaw felt his body release a few tears, but he did nothing to stop them.
“Fallowkit left shortly after too… and my adopted sister, Lavenderkit, she- she was adopted somewhere in my fifth moon, I can’t remember exactly when. She was blind. A-anyw-way… my parents were late to mine and Lavenderkit’s apprentice ceremonies. I was renamed to Rainpaw because there was already a Crowpaw in the Clan and my adopted sister became Lavenderpaw. I don’t remember who her mentor was, but I was assigned t-to a tom named Bumbleflight.”
He never did like Bumbleflight very much. The tom was too… serious. And grumpy.
“We got along fine… until I brought up my worries for my littermates. I tried to get some sort of comfort- mostly because my parents never offered any. All I got in return was a smack to the head and a scolding.”
“He covered a good chunk of my training, but he left later on and I was reassigned to a cat named Littlelion. I didn’t get to know them well enough to really form an opinion, but they taught me how to climb trees. Shortly after Littlelion went missing, my other adopted sister- she was adopted much later in life- Flameheart accompanied me into the territory to see if we could find my sisters. I highly doubted we could find them… but we managed to find Quietkit close to the WindClan border.”
He took a long pause, recounting the day his little sister was found. Her frail image was etched in his mind.
”She was… covered in scars and extremely skinny. She was cold, too. It was leaf-bare when we found her. I laid with her while Flameheart and I tried to find out what happened and where she had been- but it was difficult. She wasn’t able to talk… physically, I mean.”
“But we brought her back to ThunderClan… I made her a nest in the nursery, got her something to eat, and my parents were overjoyed that she was back home. We all slept with her that night. But…” a scowl formed on his face. A scowl of anger and disappointment.
“After that night… Thrushfur and Quailfur ignored her existence. It was like she never returned. I was pissed off with their behavior and beyond disgusted. I mean- h-how could any parent be so- so so so SELFISH?!” He took another long pause, having noticed he had dug his claws into the sand, and sheathed them.
“I was the only one in the whole of ThunderClan to learn paw-language so that I could communicate with my little sister. My parents? Tch, they weren’t even interested in learning how to communicate with their own daughter. She was their DAUGHTER, for star’s sake! A daughter they had thought to have been dead for 3 moons!”
The brown tabby inhaled his frustrations and swallowed them down. He would need the energy for the rest of his story.
”My father was chosen as Sparrowstar’s deputy after Quietkit returned. And when my little sister was recovered enough, she became an apprentice with a warrior called Sootfur as her mentor.”
“I couldn’t express to you how much I hated the moment my asshole of a father became deputy. When I talked to Sparrowstar about it, she said she chose him because he was ambitious. In that same conversation, she said it was natural for toms to stray away from their kits… but that was not an excuse I accepted. I just didn’t argue with her any further.”