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Feathertail drops a glass. She watches it shatter, grabs at a shard. She sobs before her blood hits the ground.
* * *
Mistyfoot replaces everything breakable the next day.
* * *
Stormheart calls Greystripe every night. He misses his father, of course he does.
Feathertail asks him who he’s talking to. She doesn’t ask any follow up questions.
* * *
They are all learning how to have their own space again. This house is the right size for them, but it feels too large. Stormheart finds himself avoiding rooms, pacing between the kitchen, his bedroom, Stonefur’s room.
He’s pretty sure Feathertail has only been in her room a few minutes.
But where they are together, it looks like theirs. They don’t have many family pictures, but Stonefur puts up one of him and Mistyfoot and Oakheart and Greypool, and like a bursting dam, Stormheart watches their house transform.
It is small things, but they are meaningful. The rug on the hallway, the curtains, the books left on the countertop. Stormheart finds his jacket left over the back of a kitchen chair, and Feathertail’s shoes at the backdoor.
Slowly, they creep into more of the house, as it becomes a home.
* * *
Frogkit is the first to walk. Stonefur has kept his same video camera, all this time, and he keeps it near him, always fully charged, determine to record every milestone. He misses a few, but not many.
* * *
Stormheart graduates. It is not the day he thought it would be. But it is still a good day. He still walks across and takes his diploma, Feathertail and Stonefur and Mistyfoot cheering despite the statements to wait until the very end.
* * *
The triplets turn six. Feathertail brings home a ceramic flower pot.
* * *
When they are in school, and he is at home, he pushes her to study. She is still sharp as a razor, still exhaustingly witty, and when she learns she passed (of course she did, there was no question), she thanks him.
* * *
He repaints his walls.
* * *
Frogpaw brings home a drawing-of-his-family, and Stormheart hangs it on the refrigerator. All of their childhood art has long been destroyed, and Stormheart can’t remember what he would have drawn for one of these.
But Frogpaw has drawn him, and his siblings, and Feathertail, and Mistyfoot and Stonefur, and Stormheart, all evenly spaced. No afterthoughts or questions.
* * *
Mistyfoot brings home a set of porcelain plates.