Work Text:
They'll tell you cats receive their nine lives when they become leader.
But Onestar's not so sure.
Maybe he did get his lives curled up beside the Moonpool.
But that's not how he remembers it.
***
In his first life, he is a son.
He has kit paws and fresh eyes. His mother licks his ears and her purr feels as much a part of him as his whiskers.
She gives him life and milk and love, wisdom and surety and kindness.
She gives him his name.
And she watches it change, tail over paws, with shining eyes as he becomes an apprentice.
Leaf-bare makes the moor bitterly cold. Snow scares away the prey and invites something deadlier.
His mother was the first warmth he’d ever known and she was always warm, warm fur and warm eyes and warm words, until she is not.
She dies from a rattle in her chest and a fog in her eyes.
Onepaw curls beside her cold body on a cold night and asks the stars to welcome her. Silverpelt looms above them and sometime in the night her spirit slips away.
He knows he is still alive even though he can't feel his muzzle or his tail from the chill. He knows he's still alive even though the pain in his heart feels like it should be enough to kill him.
He knows this.
But.
In his first life, he was a son.
They bury his mother in the frozen ground, hard enough to make his pads bleed and his claws break.
And now, that life is over.
In his second life, he is a warrior.
In his second life, he kills for the very first time. It's different than killing prey. Killing prey wasn't so much taking a life as it was providing for another.
You kill a hare to feed an elder, a rabbit to feed a kit.
This kill, his very kill, is murder.
The night is so still and quiet that when ShadowClan's pounding paws break through the silence, it feels loud enough to shatter the sky.
They burst into the camp with such ferocity, such frantic movement, he has to pick his fighting partners based on scent alone.
When he determines ShadowClan, not WindClan, he pounces.
The ground is alive with a hundred paws beating in battle. The air is thick with blood and he grapples.
He nips and slashes but this fight is strange. His opponent ignores the soft belly he stupidly lets show and lunges instead for his throat.
That's when it hits him.
They're trying to kill him.
Fear as cold as ice whites out the roaring of hot blood in his ear.
The attack on the camp.
They're trying to kill them.
The warrior lunges for his throat again, teeth catching at the fur there, and he has no choice. He twists and kicks in a dirty move.
It's dirty but it's not supposed to be deadly.
The attacker flies back into the sand and Onewhisker tenses.
But he doesn't get back up.
The lump doesn't move and that's when Onewhisker realizes it is a very small lump.
Chaos is all around him but he moves towards that still, silent shape and he finds a kit.
He's maybe three moons old, kitten-fluff still clinging to his ears. His mouth is twisted in a battle cry but blood pools out from underneath his tongue and his gaze is empty.
He's killed a kit.
The thought barely strikes him before Tallstar's caterwauling howl belts through the battleground.
"WindClan, retreat!"
Retreat where?
Onewhisker follows his leader out of the camp and onto the moor. His Clanmates surround him on all sides, blood and fear scent.
He's certain more than one of them is missing.
They race across the territory—their territory—and head to nowhere because their home isn't theirs anymore.
They rest for the night, all but Tallstar who counts heads and sighs with large, weary eyes and Barkface who flits from cat to cat.
It's then Onewhisker remembers. The kit.
He'll probably never know his name.
He's lost his home, a fair number of his Clanmates, and his future seems to be in ashes but all he pictures is that kit.
In his second life he is a warrior.
He'll tell himself seasons later that he lost that life when he lost his home.
What was a Clan without a home?
What was a warrior without a territory to defend?
But he'll be lying.
He lost his life when that kit lost his, when he broke the warrior code for the very first time.
An honorable warrior does not need to kill other cats to win their battles.
What was a warrior without his honor?
In his third life he is a mentor.
In his third life, he is weary and worn.
The moor is beautiful. It is, somehow, more beautiful even than he remembered.
But the wind carries an acrid tang of Thunderpath he knows isn't there and the ShadowClan border-stench makes his fur bristle.
In his third life, the lives of his past are still haunting him but he touches noses with his new apprentice and tries not to miss his mother when Morningflower showers her son in gentle rasps.
He tries not to think of the kit whose life he ended, not to think of how he was someone's apprentice too.
Gorsepaw is a mentor's dream: dedicated, resourceful, respectful.
He's going to make a great warrior someday.
Onewhisker tells him stories of Fireheart, WindClan's noble savior, who carried him when he was still small enough to be carried.
He'd promised Fireheart he'd never forget what the ginger tom and Graystripe had done.
Onewhisker promised a lot of things in his third life.
He promised Gorsepaw that Tallstar wouldn't name him Gorseflower no matter how much Morningflower teased it so.
He promised Gorsepaw they'd fight their first battle side by side.
He'd promised himself he'd be the best mentor to Gorsepaw he could be.
He breaks all those promises.
And he lets Gorsepaw die.
Before he gets his name.
Before he becomes a warrior.
Gorsepaw fights his first battle alone.
Tigerstar tears into him and Onewhisker thinks he was trying to make a point but the point is Gorsepaw's dead and that's all that matters.
Two ShadowClan warriors hold Onewhisker down while Tigerstar slices through muscle that had just begun to form and turns Gorsepaw inside out.
Onewhisker bucks and writhes and they score him with their teeth and claws but he fights with everything he has because they're killing him.
Gorsepaw's mouth is too full of blood for him to give a final scream but he gurgles weakly and fades away.
He dies completely alone, with no one but his murderer to be the last cat he sees before StarClan comes calling.
ShadowClan leaves so quickly after that.
They're there and then they're gone.
Gorsepaw's bloodied body is all they leave behind.
Morningflower crawls over to her son's corpse and cries.
He wants to comfort her but blood is bubbling out of a gash in his throat.
He feels dead already but Barkface tells him to lie down before he kills himself.
Herbs press into his wounds and Firestar is there with his bright green eyes and soft words, so sad and old that Onewhisker wants to look away.
When he does, he looks to Gorsepaw's still form and shudders.
In his third life he was a mentor.
Now he's just angry.
He must be dead because when Scourge guts Tigerstar in one clean swipe, he feels nothing.
Firestar's eyes are wide with horror.
He feels nothing but relief.
In his fourth life he is a fool.
He is especially cruel in this life.
The battle with BloodClan has left him feeling hollow.
Perhaps dying so many times takes something out of a cat.
Perhaps it takes something vital.
One day he begins to wander.
At first he's wandering aimlessly but then he thinks he's decided to go to the Moonstone.
He's not a leader or a medicine cat but he is in need of counsel.
He gets about to the barn where WindClan spent the night on their journey home.
Ravenpaw and Barley's barn.
Maybe he's caught up in memories or maybe his paws have started to ache.
Whatever it is, for whatever reason, he stops and turns around. He wanders through the fences and the fields and, because in this life he is a fool, when he smells cat-scent he follows it.
It leads him to nothing but a few tame kittypets, lapping at their pelts and soaking in the sun.
Once, he might've turned around with a scoff and gone back home.
But now he thinks of Firestar and wonders if kittypets really are worth more than they seem.
He is a fool.
He starts a conversation.
They're nothing like Firestar but they're pleasant to talk to.
He tells them of Clan life and purrs when they marvel at it.
Maybe it's because they're easy to impress and he's not used to being impressive.
Or maybe it's because their wide-eyed amazement, their slack-jawed adoration, reminds him how truly thrilling Clan life can be.
He can hardly believe he's forgotten that.
He weaves stories of half-truth. He tells daring tales and leaves behind the bits of gore, of flesh, of ugliness, and horror.
They gape and gasp and Onewhisker wonders if perhaps this feeling in his chest is why elders are always telling kits their glory stories.
And that's exactly what these kittypets are; they're kits, complete with those unassuming faces and soft bodies.
And who better than a kit to listen to an old tom's recollections?
Only three lives down and already Onewhisker feels so horribly old.
Who else would only flick their ears when the speaker stumbled over the place where a battle should have been or prompted him when his eyes grew cloudy with memories?
With fur fluffed in excitement and eyes wide, those kittypets somehow rush life back into stories so full of death and bogged with blood they’re carried more like stones than memories.
Onewhisker is so tired.
And they are so young and free and unburdened, there are parts of him that don't pity them.
And it is that empty place where pity should be, that dark corner of his heart that is normally so heavy with pity for those silly kittypets and their silly lives, that brings him back two moons later.
He comes back because the hole where pity was and now is not has been filled with an emotion Onewhisker cannot name, cannot bring himself to face.
So he comes back and looks for answers.
Instead—oh instead—because he is the fool of fools, he finds Smoke.
Her eyes are blue like river-water and cloudless-sky and sweet-berries.
"I heard you're one of those wild cats."
"I am."
They are fated for disaster.
She's lovely and soft and smells like a distinct lack of the moor and the wind.
He whispers stories in her perked ears and makes himself the hero of every one.
In his stories, he takes down BloodClan by himself. He returns to WindClan to their stolen home. He alone is both admired and envied by all.
In his stories, he has never killed a kit.
He has never lost an apprentice.
He has never run from a fight.
His mother is alive and well.
In his stories, he is Firestar.
It should shame him and it does, a little, when Smoke's eyes sparkle a little too long or she looks at him in quiet awe.
It should but he keeps doing it because, among a world of strangers, one can become anything and what Onewhisker wants to be more than anything is a hero.
A hero who strides in at just the right moment, who never second guesses, who never makes a wrong decision, and yet is somehow loved not because he is heroic but because he is good.
Firestar is all those things and more and, for a while, Onewhisker really thinks it's working.
He's starting to think like the Onewhisker in his stories.
He tries to stand up to Mudclaw on patrol, to do more than just send a pitying glance the next time he sees an apprentice teased at the Gathering, to be better.
Maybe what makes Onewhisker most foolish isn't that he wanted to be the hero, but that he actually thought he could be.
But it wasn't heroic of Onewhisker, that night beneath the moon, to fall into Smoke's pretty eyes, and lick her cheek with a tongue flavored in lies.
It wasn't heroic to take their twisted relationship and twist it further.
It is, perhaps, the one thing in this life Onewhisker has no excuse for other than that she had been lovely and full of love for him and that while heroes don't make mistakes, Onewhisker certainly does.
He makes mistakes that meet him moons later, on a dark night, mistakes that have their mother's eyes.
She begs him to take that small scrap of fur in at her paws and carry him home.
His nose is so small, like a dewdrop glistening beneath the stars, and Onewhisker says no.
Smoke begs him to reconsider and she pushes that black-and-white tom toward him.
He thinks of the jeers and the snarls and the humiliation he'll suffer if he confesses to creating this tiny, tiny kit.
He thinks of how Smoke was well-fed that Leaf-bare and how she’d complained of how sharp his ribs were when they curled together in the snow, jutting out from beneath his pelt.
He thinks of those kittypets that very first day he wandered far from home, without purpose. He thinks of how they meowed and pranced and chased butterflies and stretched out in patches of sun.
He thinks of Firestar and Cloudtail and the lives we choose but because he has never been a hero, Onewhisker does the selfish thing and refuses his son the choice.
Kittypet or warrior, he'll never know the difference, and maybe that is for the best.
The best for him and for Onewhisker.
He says no and Smoke scores him so deep with her claws that blood splatters across the grass. The kit, so young, dabs at a stray blood drop with one delicate, white paw.
"Go home."
She threatens him and promises to hate him and spread her hate to their son but it is done now.
It's over and she knows it so she picks him up and walks away.
He stays for a while in that cold air before sunrise, face stinging.
He watches her shape disappear into the night and when she is little more than a speck, he heads back to camp.
As he walks away, he finally recognizes that hole inside him for what it is, that crevice where pity fled from so long ago, and wherein flooded something worse. He knows what it's full of now.
He thinks of Firestar, the kittypet who saved the Clans, and of all the other kittypets he met by Barley's farm, fat and lazy and dumb to the horrors of sickness and hunger and pain, dumb to the horror of regret.
It's full of jealousy.
Onewhisker is not Firestar. He did not take his kittypet-born kin by the scruff and lead him home.
In his fourth life, he was a fool.
But a fool doesn't know his own heart and Onewhisker knows aplenty.
A fool makes mistakes because he is foolish.
Onewhisker hadn't been foolish.
He'd been cruel.
This is the first time where he makes a life instead of taking one away.
Yet, Onewhisker feels dead just the same.
In his fifth life he is a friend.
In his fifth life his Clan is dying on the same ground that nurtured and nourished and nursed them.
His Clan is dying because the ground is being eaten away by Twoleg monsters and the prey is running scarce and the noise and the hunger and the heartache and the death and they're going to have to leave.
But how can they leave?
One of the elders dies and Onewhisker's one of a pawful of WindClan warriors still standing.
But how can they stay?
Onewhisker has to carry the body to burial by himself but it hardly matters because the tom is only skin over bones and he weighs next to nothing.
Onewhisker buries him on untouched ground.
When he returns the next day, there's a hole where the land used to be.
The elder is nowhere to be found.
He tries to tell himself it doesn't matter, that the tom's spirit had left for StarClan long before Onewhisker had dug his grave into the soil.
He tells himself if doesn't matter.
It does.
It's not the only land to be swallowed by the Twoleg monsters. Soon it seems everything has been upturned and overthrown.
The moor itself seems to shift underpaw, growling with activity or creeping with quiet.
It makes ThunderClan, cracked and broken, seem serene, curled up on the edge of their territory like hares driven to the corners of their burrows.
In this life, they crawl to ThunderClan on the bellies and Firestar does not turn them away.
Onewhisker nearly dies to save a kit but Firestar is there, always there, and sweeps in to save him.
In another life, on a bloody battlefield, Scourge sharpened his claws on Onewhisker's bones.
In another life, Onewhisker fought with the memory of Gorsepaw and stuttered when Scourge plucked at his skin till the edges split open and burst with blood, stuttered to wonder if this is how his apprentice felt when he died.
In another life, Onewhisker crawls again on his belly, away instead of towards Firestar, but just the same, he is in debt.
Always in debt.
But, because in this life he is a friend, Onewhisker moves his heaving chest to purr in thanks.
In this life, Onewhisker holds his breath as they pass by the land surrounding Ravenpaw and Barley's farm.
His cheek stings with the reminder of an encounter he is hesitant to repeat.
His eyes keep searching and searching but he finds nothing but empty fields.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Tallstar pads beside him, leaning on his shoulder.
In this life, they climb the mountains and warriors have more authority than leaders and kits can be snatched by hawks and cats fall from cliffs and they travel to a home they've never know.
He should be more like Tallstar, noble though weak and hopeful for the future.
Instead, he mourns the lives he left behind and the land where they were spent.
In this life, Onewhisker is a friend who lets Tallstar lean on his shoulder and helps him eat and grooms his coat.
Maybe it is out of guilt, guilt for the mother he could not save, the apprentice he was charged to protect, and the code he so carelessly broke.
Or maybe he is just lonely and sad and looking to help after a lifetime of hurting.
Whatever it is, their pawsteps are one all the way to the Lake.
The Lake.
The sky drains into the lake, spilling stars and moon and it is surely too lovely a thing to behold.
"We are home," someone says and he is too awestruck to wonder who.
He could not see it then, but Onewhisker's life is beginning its end at this moment.
He doesn't start to see until Tallstar is heaving the breath Onewhisker knows will be his last.
This life doesn't end quite so simply, not like the others.
It really ends when Tallstar dies.
Hard as you try, you can't be friends with the dead.
It really ends the first time he looks into Firestar's lovely green eyes and feels a contempt so strong it chokes him.
But by then, his new life has already begun.
In his sixth life, he is a deputy.
It is his shortest life. It ends and begins with Tallstar's final breath.
Now he is leader.
All he wanted was to be a friend.
In his seventh life, he is a coward.
In his seventh life he loses everything he thought he'd keep forever.
In this life, he loses his Clan.
He loses his faith.
And he loses his friends.
Tallstar's gone and the world falls away around him.
"You will never be a leader."
Once, Onewhisker dreamt he could be more than just a coward, too afraid to stand up for himself and too passive to fight for what he wanted.
Once, he dreamt he could be Firestar, noble and handsome and loyal.
Now he is everything Firestar is and he is still nothing.
He is still afraid.
"You will never be a leader. You’re a liar, and a fake, no better than crowfood." Mudclaw's eyes are so bright, beaming yellow, as he spits at Onewhisker.
A moment can change everything. A moment turns life into before's and after's.
Before, before Tallstar said those damning words, they were Clanmates.
They were friends.
Before, Gorsepaw dies on a dark, cold night. Onewhisker lays his head beside Gorsepaw's mangled body and breathes so slowly his lungs ache.
Before, he breathes and breathes and prays his neck-wound stays sealed. He wants to stay here, right where he's meant to be. He breathes and breathes and every time Gorsepaw's scent grows fainter and fainter, suffocated by blood and fear and death.
Before, Mudclaw laid down against him and they couldn't speak but they didn't need to. Mudclaw's shoulders were scored so badly he hissed as he moved but he sat beside Onewhisker on the cold, dark night and they grieved together.
Before, they shared patrols and laughed and hunted and attended Gatherings and sat side by side and purred and wrestled and fought like they were of the same mind.
Before, they were friends.
His eyes were bright with amusement and sympathy and annoyance and pain and laughter and kinship and mischief and ambition and trust.
After, his eyes are bright, bright like a fire that consumes Onewhisker from the inside out. They’re bright with sincerity, aching sincerity, and a hate as painful as poison.
The poison doesn't kill him, the fire doesn't destroy him. It wounds him, a wound so deep it threatens in infection, and he lets it fester.
Onewhisker almost dies on a stormy night. He almost dies when ShadowClan cats, RiverClan cats, WindClan cats, stream through the camp and come to kill him.
He almost dies when Webfoot pins him down and he twists and twists and bites down on shoulder until Mudclaw's paws replace Webfoot's and they press down into Onewhisker's throat, deeper and deeper until his claws clip that old scar there.
Mudclaw's eyes are so bright as he looks down at Onewhisker, and prepares to tear his throat out.
His eyes are bright with victory.
There are words in Onewhisker's vulnerable throat, words he never gets to say because Firestar is there, always there, and pulls Mudclaw off.
It becomes the third time in Onewhisker's lives where Firestar has fought his battle for him.
It is the first, the very first, where Onewhisker almost wishes he hadn't.
In this life, Onewhisker is a coward who must be saved by the brave and true.
The cats scratch and wail and screech and scrape and fight over whether or not Onewhisker is going to die tonight.
ThunderClan is going to win, with his loyal Clanmates beside them, and RiverClan reinforcements perhaps not far behind.
They are going to win but Onewhisker lies down in the grass and doesn't get up to fight in the battle that is going to determine his life.
He has lost his home and his leader and now his Clan plots to murder her.
Onewhisker lies down in the center of a storm of fighting cats and the sky cracks open; rain pours down so thick the landscape blurs.
He lies in fear and horror and because he is a coward, too afraid to take part in the deciding of his own destiny, he lies down and waits for someone else to save him.
By now, Onewhisker knows that he can't save himself.
Thunder booms and lightning flashes but he doesn't move until Firestar hauls him up by his scruff and drags him to the lakeshore.
Hawkfrost is there.
Brambleclaw too.
Mudclaw....
His body is broken.
His head is hanging, his legs are bent like snapped twigs, and there is white bone jutting out from his flank.
Hawkfrost drags him out where they all can see him and dumps him at Onewhisker's paws.
Onewhisker bows his head to the friend that tried to kill him and Onewhisker is the one, his shoulder stinging all the way, that carries his broken body back to camp.
He lies him out in the clearing and curls beside him.
He lies by Mudclaw just as he lied down on that bloodied ground under stormy skies, because is a coward stuck in the past and too afraid of change.
Onewhisker stays watchful and wakeful all night and he is glad of that which the vigil grants him, because he is afraid to sleep.
He's forgiven his betrayers.
What else could a coward do?
What else could he do but forgive, but bury, but hide?
The truth will only come out in Onewhisker's nightmares.
Onewhisker is who he is and he shows his belly and nods his head. He agrees and ignores what he cannot stomach to agree with.
His sits vigil with Mudclaw's littermate and his apprentice.
Tornear gives him space but Webfoot sits as far away as possible.
They are watching him. They are watching him and Onewhisker looks away.
He sits with them in the silence, the long, long silence until daybreak.
When he dreams he dreams of shadows and the scent of friends who slaughter him and laugh and wait for the rain to wash their crime away.
He wakes and paces until he collapses, until sleep returns like a conqueror to claim him.
He dreams of Firestar hauling him up like a kitten by the scruff and batting away all of him enemies.
He dreams of a coward.
He dies at the first touch of his nose upon the Moonpool.
He dies because in this life he is a coward, and against the reflection of the stars, his fear is replaced by something darker.
Bitterness and rage stick in his throat like a bone and a coward has never felt like this.
He is no longer afraid.
He is angry.
In his eighth life, he is an enemy.
In his eighth life, he curls by the Moonpool and comes face to face with an old friend.
At first, there is just an empty moorland.
He thinks this will be his rejection, his sentencing. He thinks this means he will not receive his lives because the cats who are meant to give him them aren't here.
Then there is Tallstar.
"Onewhisker," he greets and the name, his name, feels like an attack.
Onewhisker, it demands, always and forever Onewhisker.
He has no choice, really.
This fire in his belly begs for release so he launches at Tallstar without a second thought.
His blood is boiling, his eyes clouded with the haze of rage.
He wants him to hurt.
Tallstar writhes beneath him, paws thrashing against Onewhisker, against his belly and his shoulders and his chest. He's not using his claws. Not yet.
Onewhisker wants him to hurt the way he hurt when Mudclaw dipped his claws into the valley of his throat and went to tear, when his Clanmates rallied against him, when he was greeted by StarClan with an empty field and felt nothing but met expectation.
He wants him to bleed with all the pain deep in Onewhisker's belly.
He wants him to beg like Onewhisker might have had Mudclaw's claws been anywhere but pressing down on his throat and pushing down his words, back when he wasn't too angry to be afraid.
Back before his coward's heart turned to ice.
In this life Onewhisker is an enemy, and Tallstar must see that in his eyes because he begins to fight in earnest.
His limbs bat with intent, with heart, with all the strength he had lacked moments before.
This Tallstar is not the ailing leader he once was. He's not the sickly elder who leaned on Onewhisker's shoulder and took in shaking breaths as Onewhisker groomed his tattered coat.
This cat is strong, fearless, in the prime of his life.
It is maybe because of this that Onewhisker can slice into him so easily. His claws meet no resistance save for flesh and fur as he dives into the cat that was his mother's kin, his leader, and his friend.
In this life, he has no friends.
The fight is not over quickly. They are fervid. They are frantic. They are made for the taste of blood and it flies all around them.
It soaks their blows with blood. It cakes their teeth, their aching biting teeth so desperate to injure.
It goes on and on. They are mindless craving creatures and Onewhisker is so angry he could kill him.
He wants to kill him. It’s what enemies do.
It goes on until Onewhisker bends over Tallstar, with claws dripping red.
Blood is trickling from his pelt, fresh from wounds that will be sure to leave scars.
"I see," Tallstar pants, and his eyes are wise for one so young in looks, "I chose the right deputy after all."
He slips out from beneath Onewhisker with the ease of a fish between wet paws.
Then they are not alone.
They appear as flickers of eyes and fur shrouded in mist.
In this life, Onewhisker has his leadership ceremony soaked in blood.
In this life, his second to last, Onewhisker receives nine lives.
For something he knows to be a dream, it feels especially surreal.
This first life, like his very first life, is given by his mother.
Wrenflight's eyes are still so warm when she looks at him, her bloodied son, and he purrs at her nose against his cheek.
"With this life, I give you love. Use this life to treasure those around you."
He bends under the weight of her devotion. Like a strong wind sweeping through him, it drags him down and lifts him up.
He pulses with the reminder of his grief when she leaves him, the wound as painful as it ever was.
Then he is there, the brightest star of all.
"Gorsepaw."
His eyes are shining but he is still so young.
He will always be young.
"With this life," Onewhisker has to bow his head to receive this gift, "I give you joy, to find pleasure in the smallest moments."
There is sunshine and satisfaction, the thrill of hunt and pound of success but at the center there is Gorsepaw, with his very first catch, and all the sorrow of his death could never compare to the happiness he brought Onewhisker in life.
"I'm sorry," he whispers but Gorsepaw is still laughing as he bounds away.
There are more.
The father he never met, Stagleap.
"With this life, I give you strength to fight the toughest battles."
It's something taking root inside him, an oak tree sprouting in his stomach and branches wrapping over bone. For once, he doesn't cower.
Deadfoot, who helped to guide them when WindClan was left without a home.
"With this life, I give you hope to see the light in the darkest of tunnels."
This life was an old forgotten friend: the sight of kits in Newleaf and prey in Leaf-bare, a friendly face in a foreign crowd, a promise of things yet to come.
The old leader, Heatherstar, who died when he was a kit.
"With this life I give you passion to lead your Clan through prosperity and struggle."
Fire unfurls beneath his coat, hot enough to burn the forest to the ground, a blistering heat that dares him to try.
Eaglekit, his littermate's lost son, who died at his mother's belly.
"With this life, I give you wonder. See beauty in all that surrounds you, find mystery in all you know."
The world cracks out beneath him, stars expanding, colors igniting. It is lightning across sky and the thunder sound of the Tribe's falling water and seeing the lake for the very first time.
It is everything he forgets to know and he feels young and kit-like again, as fresh to the world as one newly-born, as naive as a kittypet, struck by simple things.
Then there is a cat he had never seen before, her coat too pale to discern color. She stands with the ferocity of someone who has never lost a battle.
"I am Windstar." He flinches in awe. "Kin of my kin," she whispers, voice long and winding, "I have watched you grow and give you a life that served me well."
She smells like the moor and her touch is light as a breeze on his nose.
"May you have courage, with this life, to bring greatness to our blood."
Battles have been fought with a sliver of the roar that trembles through Onewhisker. He feels like a creature from elder stories of LionClan and TigerClan.
He goes to give thanks to his ancient kin but she is not there.
Tallstar.
There is blood under his eye, garish and ugly against a pelt of stars.
"With this life, I give you self-confidence. Use it to achieve your full potential."
For a cat so recently locked in battle, he's strangely gentle as he puts his nose to Onewhisker's forehead.
There is something in this life that was not in the others. It is not the forgotten friend of the others but a feeling new and shaking.
He closes his eyes against the pain.
It nearly turns him inside out. It pushes his bones against his skin until he expands to the size of a mountain.
When he opens his eyes, he is the same as he ever was, Tallstar disappearing before he can find his words, but he feels different.
He waits for his final life. This pause is longer than the others and unease crawls along his spine.
Unease increases when he spots a pair of brilliant yellow eyes.
"Hello, old friend." His bright eyes bore into Onewhisker's.
Something flashes in them, sorrow maybe or regret. "I guess I was wrong about you."
You weren't wrong.
"Mudclaw I-"
"With this life I give trust. Have faith in your warriors and believe in second chances."
This life is strange because there is no after effect: no pain or dizziness, no change.
This life, it does not seem to take.
"Onestar! Onestar! Onestar!"
The chants of his friends and kin fill his ears.
Before he can ask what it means, the nothingness of his final life, he is awake by the Moonpool, Mudclaw's brilliant eyes fading from his memory.
"Onewhisker, are you alright? You're covered in blood! I couldn't find you."
Onestar turns to see Barkface's dazed expression upon him.
His bones ache when he stands, dried-blood-wounds reopening as he stands.
"Onestar," is all he says. "They named me Onestar."
And he never speaks of his ceremony again.
***
In this life, he is an enemy.
He is a leader, passionate, brave, and strong.
He is filled with all the self-confidence he never knew and hungry to prove himself.
The stars have spoken: I am worthy.
He thinks this when he sees Firestar for the first time since Tallstar slit the skin from his ear.
In this life, it will be Heatherstar's and Stagleap's and Windstar's lives that give him the most trouble.
For how quickly courage turns to recklessness and passion to obsession and self-confidence to arrogance.
In this life he is an enemy and enemies are always the worst of themselves.
In this life, a life of enmity, he is, once, merciful.
He once, sends warriors to ThunderClan when badgers lumber in, brutal destroyers. He once, is very malicious, but it is perhaps the memory of his mother's nose against his cheek that drives him to do good.
Her life of love pulses within him and he sends his warriors running.
He meets Firestar's eyes and longs for the dead and the forgotten, the love that once ruled his heart so freely.
Once there was a coward who laid on a lonely field and was bled of all his fear until he turned to enemy and spite.
So he wages battles and accusations.
He commits ugly deeds because once there was an enemy who saw no friends even in familiar faces, who could not conjure up trust when it was given to him as a gift.
ThunderClan is perhaps his greatest enemy if only because it was once his greatest friend.
There is so much hate and darkness he struggles to find the lives of hope and wonder and joy that his dead Clanmates had planted deep inside him.
Onestar thinks he is the least surprised to find out about the Dark Forest trainees.
He thinks he is the most hurt too.
It is his lack of shock that hurts him the most, how fighting for his life against his own Clanmates feels sickeningly familiar.
Betrayed once again and this time with a -star to his name and a leadership securely in his paws.
In this life, he watches his greatest enemy fall and his oldest friend die.
Firestar burns out in a blaze of glory, as he was meant to, but Onestar cannot help but feel revolted at the sight of cats he pledged to give his life to and the part they played in all of this.
Not even the thrill Gorsepaw fighting at his side for the first time can erase the horror of seeing Breezepelt stand alongside the cat that murdered his defenseless apprentice.
He forgave once before, in words alone, but this time, with the fallen carved into a stick, he can't make himself.
In this life, he is an enemy and enemies always find new enemies, because they're always looking.
It is the only life he wills to end quickly and yet it stretches out long past his others. This life, the very worst of all his lives, becomes his legacy.
It ends the first time, since he sunk his claws into Tallstar's shoulders, that he runs from a fight.
It ends the first time he is too afraid to worry about being the enemy.
It ends when he remembers, once, he was a father.
In his ninth life, he is a father.
He is a father that almost murders his son in cold blood.
But before he knows that he is a WindClan leader fighting the Kin.
Onestar will remember so little of that fight.
He will remember the feeling of rage and horror as he watched himself score into Darktail like a mad dog.
He will remember the blood gushing against the tips of his claws and the limp way Darktail laid there and took every swipe.
He will remember Darktail flipping him over like it was nothing, pushing him down, and leaning close until the blood on his cheeks slid down Onestar's ear.
"Careful now. I'm not sure StarClan lets in cats with the blood of their sons on their paws," he whispers, in that voice so dark and bitter and calm.
He pulls away and for the first time, Onestar really looks at him.
He will remember.
He will remember those eyes, like river-water and cloudless-sky and sweet-berries, as clear as pools of water.
He will remember his son.
He will not remember crying out for retreat or the look on Darktail's face as he did so. He will not remember Harespring yowling beside him that they needed to stay and fight or the long race back to camp.
He will remember nothing but those eyes, burning blue.
His mother's eyes.
In his ninth life, he begs.
He begs to be forgiven for his atrocities, begs to walk among his ancestors, begs they overlook the dark parts of his heart and welcome him into the light.
He begs to be forgiven and he forgives.
He forgives his Clanmates and his friends and his enemies and cats who have not walked the earth as the living in moons.
For the first time in his lives, he forgives, not because must or because he should.
He forgives because he wants to.
Besides, that is what fathers do, isn't it?
Forgive?
He doesn't know. He never had one.
In his ninth life, his very last life, he is a father.
In this life, he dies with his claws inside his son's throat and his son’s teeth tearing out his heart.
In this death, they are together as they never were in life.
In this series of lives, the last thing Onestar knows is how it feels to die, surrounded by water, beside his own kin, and yet completely alone.
In this life, he is not a father.
And he never was.
A son once, warrior maybe, mentor almost, fool certainly, friend sometimes, deputy barely, coward obviously, enemy always.
But a father...
The last thing he sees is the burning rage within the eyes of a stranger yet it sends a familiar pang through him.
He has his mother's eyes.
And everything else vanishes like smoke.