Chapter 1: adapting
Chapter Text
Spider is having a hard time adjusting to clan life. It’s not that she doesn’t want to be here, she really does! It’s just a lot to get used to.
She has a mentor who tells her how to improve on what she’s bad at, she has clanmates and denmates to talk to, there’s nobody constantly looking over her shoulder with an icy gaze, she doesn’t rely on just Twig to be protected, it’s better now! She's better now. She has to be better, she’s part of a larger group now. A clan , she reminds herself. A clan that took them in when they would have been on their own. She needs to be better. And Twig seems so happy! He’s with his littermate and his mother, and he’s adjusting, so she should too.
The molly sighs, trying and failing to clear her racing mind.
“What’s got you so troubled?” Robinclaw –her mentor– asks a few paces ahead of her. The older she-cat decided a bit of hunting couldn’t hurt, and took them both on a walk through the territory, where Spider was supposed to be trying to identify and catch prey. She startles, realizing she hasn’t been doing what she was supposed to, and rushes to apologize for being so distracted.
Robinclaw chuckles before she can ramble on, “Don’t worry about it, you looked like you could use a walk, some fresh air,” she states, like Spider didn’t just waste hours of sunlight trailing behind her aimlessly.
The black she-cat shakes her head, “I was just… thinking…” she trails off, uncertain. Her mentor hums, giving her the chance to elaborate. She doesn’t.
“Well,” The warrior starts, ”Since you’re back to the present,” Spider winces, ”How about we try hunting for a bit?”
“Sounds good,” She replies in a small voice.
The hunting trip goes worse than Spider would have liked. She identified a good amount of prey, even spotting some before Robinclaw did, but she managed to botch a few attempts at catching them. She wasn’t fast enough, she wasn’t quiet enough, she chided herself, repeating what she did wrong over and over in her head until she got it right on the next try.
They decide to return to camp after her third fail in a row, to Spider’s dismay, exhaustion evidently catching up to her.
“We caught a very good amount of prey anyway,” Robinclaw had said, a hint of exasperation in her voice. “I think it’s going to take both of us to carry it all back.” Spider shrugged, too tired and disappointed to speak. She let her mentor lead her back to where they buried her earlier catches and dug them up in silence, picking them up and carrying them away.
On the way back, Robinclaw kept glancing her way with poorly hidden curiosity and concern shining in her eyes, and she was momentarily thankful for the prey keeping them both quiet. She didn’t particularly feel like being scolded, even if she probably would be once they got back, if not by Robinclaw, then by some other warrior.
The sun was close to setting, the last of its warmth sinking into her pelt as its glow cast the forest in golden hues, and she allowed herself a moment to appreciate how beautiful it was compared to the mountains.
Yes, the mountains were scenic at times, allowing them to stand high and watch from a bird’s eye view, its snowy peaks reflecting the sun and shining during the day, softly glowing at night under the moon’s light, but it was lonely, nothing but the wind and cold to keep them company.
The forest was full of life, in every nook and cranny there was something new, something interesting. A bird’s nest in the branches of a tree, a small burrow hidden in the undergrowth, the rustle of the branches in the wind above her head and crunch of the leaves under her paws, it was like she was a part of the world that she was used to watching from afar, and she loved it.
They reached camp far too quickly, in Spider’s opinion. Loud chatter filled her ears as the she-cats stopped by the fresh-kill pile to drop off what they had, and she quickly turned on her heel in hopes of avoiding the conversation she had felt building up over their trip back.
“Spiderpaw! Wait a moment, I want to talk to you about something,” Robinclaw called, forcing her to stop in her tracks as the molly caught up.
That was another thing she didn’t particularly enjoy, the name changes. Everyone seemed to act like it was no big deal, but she liked her name! Cricket had named her, and she would like to keep it that way, thank you very much. Twig seemed okay with this, but that was different, she reminded herself. Twig had reunited with his family. Cricket wasn’t coming back.
Spider turned her head to look at the warrior, dread weighing in her chest.
“You did good today Spiderpaw,” She said, her comforting tone doing nothing to quell the anxiety swirling inside her mind. She nodded anyway, hoping to be done with the interaction. Weariness must have shown in her eyes still, because Robinclaw looked sad.
“You know nobody’s expecting you to catch every single piece of prey that comes your way right? It’s an unreasonable thing to expect from anyone, even from an experienced warrior,” She said quietly, as if Spider was a fragile thing she needed to be careful with.
The black molly dropped her gaze to her paws, staring at them with contempt. She heard a sigh.
"Alright, take some of these to the nursery, then you can eat some yourself and go rest," The warrior said before walking off.
After doing as told, Spider slowly approached the fresh-kill pile, eyeing it wearily. Her eyes flicked between the options, looking too big and too tasteless. She ended up with a scrawny vole that tasted like ash on her tongue.
A glance up revealed the sky being painted pink in the beginnings of sundown, the moon stubbornly showing its pale outline despite the hours to go before nightfall. Footsteps and laughter reached her ears, making the she-cat shrink in anticipation. The ditch was getting too crowded, too many voices overlapping and the unfamiliar scents overwhelming her senses.
"Hey!" the voice of a young molly –Featherpaw, her mind supplied– called, startling Spider from her thoughts. The cream apprentice bounded over to her, leaving the rest of her patrol behind. "Are you looking at the sky?" She asked with a slight tilt to her head. The blue eyed she-cat floundered, uncertain.
"I- Yeah?" She choked out eventually, her voice high and quiet. Featherpaw looked at her with a doubtful smile, seemingly in an internal conflict, before perking up.
"Come with me," She motioned with a jerk of her head, her voice softening,
"There's a cool spot I want to show you."
Chapter Text
Featherpaw wasted no time in rushing towards wherever she wanted to show Spider. Said she-cat was struggling to keep up in the still unfamiliar territory, slowing their pace down. The apprentice didn’t seem to mind this, however, brisk as she was.
Spider wondered what the hurry was. Is she just excited or does she really need us to rush there? She didn’t dare voice her questions though, somewhat afraid of the answer. What if it was short-lived and they missed it because of her? What if it wasn’t and she looked stupid for asking? She’d much rather not take that risk.
She was, luckily, experienced in the art of acting good enough for the most likely scenarios without committing to them, so that she could find out what to do without embarrassing herself.
The she-cat then purposefully stumbled on her path, taking a pause to steady herself to either get the apprentice to slow her place down or tell her to hurry up.
“Come on! It’s about to start!” A voice ahead of her called.
Bingo.
Without stalling any further, Spider sped up her pace through the forest and continued on their path towards– if she remembered the layout of the territory correctly– the lake. And if Featherpaw slowed her pace ever so slightly and went in a relatively easier path to follow, neither of them mentioned it.
The light of the sun started descending as they trod through the territory, occasionally shining into the blue-eyed molly’s face and making her wince, and it only got more frequent as the trees thinned out and the grass mixed with sand instead of dirt.
Featherpaw burst through the treeline and skidded to a stop in the beginnings of the lake bank, while Spider followed much more hesitantly.
She looked towards either side of the shore, surprised when she spotted the mountains so close. It was easy to forget how near they were to them under the cover of the trees.
She turned to Featherpaw questioningly, weariness and hesitation starting to drag their spindly claws down the back of her head and making her hackles rise in a way that could be excused as the increasing chill of sundown. Said she-cat giggled, unfiltered excitement showing in every ripple of her pelt and every shuffle of her paws.
“You’ll see” She said in singsong and dragged out the end as she raised her chin, interrupted once again by giddy laughter. Spider subtly rolled her eyes with a huff, scanning their surroundings again, eyes drawn to the sky's reflection on the lake’s surface broken only by small waves in the clear waters.
The sight was an overly pretty one, it felt good to get lost in the colors and movement, golden shimmers with a pink undertone to them swimming across the water. Her gaze was diverted from the lake however, when Featherpaw spoke.
“You’re looking at the wrong place”
“Huh?” Spider’s head snapped up with poorly concealed embarrassment.
Featherpaw motioned upwards with her muzzle, and after sparing the apprentice a questioning glance, the black she-cat turned her head up to the sky and, after she let her eyes adjust to the light, felt the air leave her chest completely.
The sun was slowly lowering over the treeline on the opposite side of the forest, clouds steadily gliding over it all.
And Spider gaped .
She could feel her pupils widening as much as they could without letting too much light in to take it all in.
The molly couldn’t remember ever seeing such a beautiful burst of color in her lifetime, blue mixing into gold and the deep red of the lowering sun, the pink-ish tint that adorned fluffy clouds that gave life to the picture, while thinner ones hovered overhead and framed the picture perfectly. It was by far the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
She let her eyes wander over the horizon, fixing and dissecting every aspect before quickly flicking forward onto the next, thoughts too fast and loud to pick out over the magnificent sight.
With a rushing thought, she remembered the sliver of moon she had seen just mere moments ago and looked for it in the splash of color, and sure enough, there it was, framed by clouds and adorned with color just like everything else, and she couldn’t contain the breathy giggle that came with being correct.
The color in the lake was somehow brighter, now that she knew where it came from, but it was underwhelming compared to the grand everything above the trees that circled it.
She watched amazed as the blue darkened overhead, orange turning red and into a dark pink and finally a somewhat bright purple that melded with the deep blue-turning dark overhead.
Even after the sky was drained of most of its color, the clouds remained highlighted in bright oranges and yellows, the darker clumps a foggy red that stuck out against the purple-black background of the sky. They slowly shifted and thinned out as most of the light vanished, leaving thin trails of light gray in the gradient welkin.
She turned to Featherpaw when she finally snapped out of her daze, breathless, thoughts running wild inside her mind. The cream apprentice was looking at her with a wind-flushed face, split by a smile just as bright as the sunset had been. The sky was almost fully dark now, stars twinkling in the corner of her vision.
“That was incredible,” she breathed out, looking out over the lake once again, hypnotized by the ripples in its surface reflecting the dawning moonlight and the still fading sunlight.
“Then you’re going to love this,” Featherpaw replied softly, amusement sipping into her voice. Spider’s gaze reluctantly slipped away from the reflections in the water, landing on her company instead. Said cat nodded towards the sky, raising her gaze towards it.
The blue-eyed she-cat searched her expression, letting her eyes drift across her’s for a moment before following them up– The air rushed out of her lungs all over again.
Thousands of sparkling stars adorned the dark cloak of night, blue and purple streaking it in complex shapes and creating patterns within it as the last strokes of day disappeared under the veil of nightfall.
All of this time, and she had not once wondered about what colors could adorn the sky once it has fallen dark, and yet the sight is one she only thought she’d see in her dreams.
“Whoa” she breathed out, eyes flicking from star to star, space cloud to space cloud.
“Starclan tends to have that effect, yeah” Featherpaw’s voice interrupted her gawking.
There it was again, that name. It was said in passing, often in curses, but she didn’t remember hearing of any Starclan cats, or where their territory started. Nobody seemed to mention it outside of that, as far as she was aware. It was always 'The Two Clans, Mountainclan and Shadeclan'.
“What’s starclan?” The words left her mouth before she could think twice about them, stilling immediately after.
A pause.
“You don’t know about Starclan?” Feathepaw turned to face her, perplexed.
“I– um, I–” She floundered. Just why did you have to open your mouth? Spider thought, berating her traitorous mind. And here you are making a fool of yourself, you should have stayed quiet and figured it out on your own, like you always do.
“No, no! Sorry! It’s just– I guess I’m so used to the concept?” The apprentice interrupted her mental scolding uncertainty. ”It didn’t even cross my mind that non-clan cats wouldn’t know about it,” She chuckled nervously at that, “I’m a bit surprised nobody told you.”
“I– It’s come up, a few times, I’m– I just– I didn’t think to ask,” The black she-cat admitted
“Starclan is–” Featherpaw cut off and looked up, a complicated expression taking over her features before vanishing, replaced by an unbothered one. “It’s where we go when we pass”
The placid front the black molly had managed to build cracked slightly. Despite her age, Spider was no stranger to death. She had looked into its victim’s eyes more than once, and the memories that haunted her the most and couldn’t seem to stay forgotten surged from those encounters.
“What?” She asked in a small voice. The cream molly continued on, unaware of the turmoil brewing in the other’s mind.
“Clan cats, at least. I don’t know if kittypets or loners have a different afterlife or not. Who knows?”
Featherpaw’s voice seemed to dim in volume with each passing heartbeat, muffled as if underwater, drowned out by the rushing of her thoughts. Black, slimy tendrils reached out from the dark corners of her mind, flailing and grabbing at her, wrapping around her and squeezing–
“And I guess there’s the place of no stars too, but only the evil cats end up there”
“Evil?” She echoed in a thankfully steady voice, too focused on keeping her breathing even to respond with anything else.
“Yeah! The ones that go against their leader, or hurt their clanmates, even kill them. But I don’t think there’s a lot of them. We would have heard of them through nursery tales or something like that if there were,” Featherpaw reasoned, seemingly unperturbed by her own words.
Spider’s mind unconsciously wandered to Bull at the topic, and she reeled it back in violently, tail bristling beside her and, luckily, out of her company’s sight.
Stay calm, sit still, be quiet, nod when needed, don't get provoked, don’t let your mind wander, face blank, breathing even, don’t give a reaction, stay calm–
“Are you alright?”
“Hm?” She hummed, broken out of her stupor by Featherpaw’s voice once more, doing her best to keep her expression neutral and eyes guarded.
The apprentice opened her mouth once again to speak, lime eyes glinting worriedly in the moonli– moonlight?
Spider sprung into a stand, tail bristling with worry.
Shouldn’t we be back by now? They might worry where we are? Oh stars it’s so long after sundown what was I even thinking–
“What 's wrong?” Featherpaw jumped to her paws after her, voice sounding as panicked as Spider’s mind was in the moment.
“Shouldn’t we be back to camp by now?” She asked shakily, fear already making its way around her chest and constricting her breath. The apprentice, however, seemed to let out a small breath of relief.
“I come here often, most of the clan already knows where to find me during sundown,” She said with a chuckle, settling back down. “There’s nothing to worry about. Although I guess it is a bit late, I doubt they will mind.” She shrugged with a yawn.
Spider did her best to keep her breathing under control, ignoring the way her heart spiked at the mention of the time.
“I think we should go back” She choked out as steadily as possible, met with a momentary frown from the cream she-cat beside her she would have missed if her eyes weren’t fixed on her.
“Alright.” Featherpaw agreed easily, starting toward the treeline. Once she reached it she turned back to see Spider fixed in the same spot as before.
The black molly took one last steadying breath and followed after the apprentice, climbing up the small path she made skidding towards the bank when they arrived until she reached the top, where she was met with a reassuring smile from the she-cat before she took off.
Spider hesitated and let herself look back at the sky above the lake, taking in the sight one last time before she turned and disappeared into the night.
Notes:
hahaha
*falls down a flight of stairs family guy style*
Floretfall on Chapter 1 Fri 11 Mar 2022 05:13AM UTC
Comment Actions
Floretfall on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Jul 2022 03:24PM UTC
Comment Actions