Work Text:
No Clan is Alone
“Enough!” Blackstar shouted at the other leaders and medicine cats, vehemently rejecting the idea that had been suggested. “I’ll not walk the path of betraying our ancestors again!”
Across the Moonpool from him, with less volume, Onestar addressed the same cat Blackstar’s words had primarily been aimed at. “We’ve been friends through one time after another, Firestar,” he kept as much frustration out of his tone as possible, “but I can’t stray from agreeing with Blackstar. Your habit of Thunderclan arrogance is going beyond our limits.”
“Perhaps our ancestors should be ignored,” The words coming from Mistystar were a shock to everyone, even to the golden medicine beside her who for her own very different reasons felt just the same, “this time.”
Blackstar found the old she-cat’s gaze rather firmly settled upon him, with no waver whatsoever as she spoke further.
“After appointing and even granting lives to so many foul, murderous leaders,” how evenly her words were divided between allusions to the dead, and being laid upon Shadowclan’s current leader was the only uncertainty she left any of them with, though not by much after her words concluded, “and welcoming others back, one time after another.”
The rest of them were all, in their own varying ways . . . uncertain. Looks were traded with each other, in a wordless, uncomfortable acknowledgement of the truth. Kestrelflight made eye contact with blind Jayfeather, who seemed to know as much, as he somehow did when any cat was looking at him. The windclan medicine cat gave his friend an assured and agreeing look, dumbness keeping him for a moment from actually remembering his friend couldn’t see him, and even after that realization came about the fact remained unbeknownst to him that Jayfeather still did know, just not by any of a cat’s normal senses. And as for Jayfeather, whether Kestrelflight had agreed with him and taken his side just because he was his friend, or whether the Windclan cat actually thought for himself that Starclan’s message was stupid, he couldn’t discern. But, regardless, it left him as not the only one, and now actually hearing Mistystar’s agreement, however rooted in bitter history with Blackstar it might be, perhaps–
“Shadowclan, will stand alone,” of course, Blackstar had to send the blind cat’s eyes rolling, “just as we always have.”
“And you’ll DIE alone just as you always have!” Jayfeather wasn’t even in the mood to pretend to have patience, or respect. No tolerance. None. Not now. His was already always thin, but now, having to listen to cats still being like this even when the stakes were this high?
“Jayfeather . . .” Firestar clearly understood his frustration, his voice gave away that much, but it still then seemed like he was also trying to be diplomatic .
Well, Blackstar and Onestar weren’t the only leaders Jayfeather was done with then.
“ENOUGH! ALL OF YOU!!”
A different voice.
An attention-drawing voice.
. . .
Hollyleaf’s voice.
They all spun to look up, and Jayfeather to sightlessly gaze. He’d already known, as had Firestar, and probably most of Thunderclan by now, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still shocked alongside the others, if only because the two of them would never have expected her to appear here. But they all lifted their heads to the top of the dip the Moonpool sat within, and they around it.
“Hollyleaf?” Firestar breathing out his granddaughter’s name was all he had the chance to do, a mere forced acknowledgement that he was likely losing control of the situation.
“. . . Firestar?” Onestar questioned Thunderclan’s leader on the reappearance of the supposedly-dead cat.
Jayfeather didn’t know exactly why his sister was there, but since it was probably the most inappropriate time and place for her to be making some grand reappearance, his words came out in a hiss. “What are you doing!?”
“ I will speak now.” Hollyleaf asserted herself, and her intention, just as she had so prominently at that gathering . . . the night before they believed her gone. And perhaps because of that, or perhaps because it was the same carrying way she spoke that brought them to listen that night moons ago, they all froze.
All but Blackstar. “You carry the scent of fox.” He remarked with narrowed eyes, casting both suspicion and an insult at once.
A bristle came upon Hollyleaf’s fur for the seconds following his specific words, and she matched the intensity he always seemed to have in his gaze, but she did so with her eyes still wide open. “And you reek of the blood of kits and elders, and you will soon more than you ever did before.”
It froze Blackstar, eyes and all, reflexive anger failing to defeat the current of guilt that came with the more explicit points of his past.
Whether he would have attempted to fire back against her, she didn’t give the chance.
“Whatever rotten bees you all had for brains have flown out of your ears.” She said to them all with the same kind of . . .
Jayfeather, he could feel the bristling unsettlement coming off her, the same kind of disbelieving indignation he and Lionblaze used to hear so much whenever their sister would hear any indication of something or someone violating the Warrior Code. Only now, something was missing from it, from the Hollyleaf who now stood atop the ledge of the moonpool hollow. He realized only afterwards, when she went on to shout a question at them all, when he realized she wasn’t asking .
Uncertainty.
Always, Hollyleaf had been sure of herself, but still, in a way, not . . . or not entirely. When they were young, when she threw questions at her brothers, clanmates or any other cats, they were questions, Jayfeather realized now; when her conviction had been to the code. Whatever she held conviction to now though . . . there was no uncertainty in it.
“Tell me!” She demanded of them. “WHEN has anything good ever come from the clans abandoning each other!?”
No one answered the question, not in the minor piece of time Hollyleaf gave before her commanding voice carried across the moonpool hollow again.
“Answer me!” She demanded with the palpable authority both Jayfeather and Lionblaze had known her to harbor the capability of. “All the terrible things you told us stories of, from before we were born, and all that has happened since; how have we always survived everything!? Brokenstar, Tigerstar, Bloodclan, the fire in Thunderclan, the Great Journey, Mudclaw, the drought; How did we survive?”
She allowed no room to breathe before she commanded again that they acknowledge the truth of their own history.
“Answer me!”
“Together.” Memories that no cat could see drove Littlecloud to answer, memories . . . and latent feelings.
Both reached Jayfeather: a withered longing for Cinderpelt.
Whether one of anger at his response, or one merely carrying the prior anger at Hollyleaf’s earlier words, Littlecloud’s answer drew the briefest glare from Blackstar.
But they were not done. Hollyleaf was not done. “You ALL know the answer!” She panned between Blackstar and Onestar that time specifically. “But you’re hiding from it.” And then she resumed decrying them all. “And just how many problems and tragedies themselves have come from insisting we all stay apart?”
“That was different!” Onestar finally responded with something, on reflex, only because of how targeted he assumed her words to be towards his own recent leadership.
“The Warrior Code exists for a reason!” Blackstar’s normal demeanor finally clawed its way back to him, just enough to drive some spit of words from his mouth.
Hollyleaf’s eyes grew wide and full, black pressing outward against shining green, and her fur rising in time and line with her irises giving her pupils way. And then, once the reaction had passed, intent narrowed her eyes again, so firmly and so steadily, as her new absolutism contended with the subject of her prior.
“The Warrior Code.” She visibly shook upon the end of the words, and even the fur on her tail puffed out for the moment it took her to build her way to what she had to say . . . not just to them. “The Warrior Code was made by cats, cats just like all of us here now.” She looked down to her own reflection in the moonpool’s water. “And just like all of us, they were part noble and part coward,” from the water, her mirror spoke the truth back to her as she did them, “part warrior and part criminal.”
Gasps, and incredulous eyes.
Open jaws, two faces of anger and single hiss.
And Jayfeather, deciding however unanticipated the particular moment was, it was time for his sister’s words to be joined by his own, time for the leaders and other medicine cats to be met with more revelations than they came to hear. “Cats have always been mousebrains.” He spoke up. “Even cats from the dawn of the clans, and from long before the clans existed.”
The additional accusation against their ancestors, the raising of an unexpected subject, or maybe even just the fact someone other than Hollyleaf had fully spoken; whatever the reason, all eyes were pulled to Jayfeather then, and all mouths were kept from any words of their own. “The cats that lived here long ago made just as many bad decisions as the clans have.”
Both his and his sister’s minds went to Fallen Leaves, but upon the far stronger sentiment he sensed from Hollyleaf towards the ancient cat, Jayfeather let her say what he would have.
“And the ancient cats of this lake,” she carried on her journey, of speaking things about codes and traditions no cat would ever have imagined to hear her say, “just like us, held far too tightly to flawed, broken traditions of their own.”
“The cats from the tunnels?”
Jayfeather was more surprised than most that Kestrelflight had been the one to interrupt with anything, but the question he asked . . . had his annoying friend just heard the story from Breezepelt or Heathertail of theirs and the three’s escape from the tunnels, or were Fallen Leaves, Rock, or any of the other ancient cats more revealing of themselves than Jayfeather had first thought.
“They didn’t live in the tunnels.” He responded, answering with the realization as it came to him of why Kestrelflight might be the only other medicine cat to have encountered them to any degree. “They made their main camp on the moor.”
His dumb friend looked as if he were about to ask more, and he sensed as much, but a tail motion from Onestar stopped him. And in turn, Jayfeather cast his sightless gaze back up to his sister for her to carry this all on wherever she was taking it.
But she needed no signal from him.
“You all knew me.” She began almost as she did at that gathering four seasons prior. “You all remember how absolutely I obsessed over following the Warrior Code, how I believed all cats should, how much I berated others for straying a single pawstep from it,” her eyes narrowed once more at the ones who had most recently espoused the code, “and how I tried myself to stalk it more closely than any of you could ever pretend to.”
And then she questioned them all, including the cat staring back at her from the mirroring water.
“But what came of it?”
Nothing, for the breadth of silence she permitted.
“WHAT CAME OF IT?!”
None of them met her demand, so she answered herself.
“I clung on with every claw,” all she could remember trembled through her, as she looked down at herself, “to rules, and traditions . . .”
Every memory she didn’t want.
“. . . instead of what is right.” Her eyes shut, finally separating herself from her reflection’s gaze as she lifted her head again. “Just as you are all about to do now.”
“As some of us are always about to do.” Littlecloud quietly gave a chiding remark, though not at her. The black-footed cat it was meant for knew it was theirs, and their anger did flair, but not enough to compel a response, at least not before someone else spoke.
“I know,” Mothwing shared words for the first time since everything had begun, “even now, my words might still not be taken as well as others; the clans have always doubted cats born as outsiders, no matter what position they hold.” She sat herself up fully, her size and frame still as attention-drawing as it ever was, both for a she-cat and a medicine cat. “I wasn’t witness to as much as some of you, only the hardships that have come and gone after Tigerstar and Bloodclan were already defeated, but from all you say, it was the same with everything before.” She, by choice or not, looked not at any of the other leaders, nor even her own, but up to Hollyleaf instead. “Maybe my sight is biased from being a medicine cat, but all I’ve seen, all we’ve seen, is that the times the clans insist on keeping from each other above all else, are when we see the most tragedy and death.”
If anyone was going to try and counter that truth, the long, quiet seconds after definitely made it seem they must be thinking hard about it.
“When Bluestar grew paranoid and closed Thunderclan off,” Firestar spoke up again, “many cats were nearly hurt, or may have even died. However much guilt I felt doing so, we only avoided a war with Windclan because disobeyed her,” he made sure to give a reminding look to Onestar, “and refused to abandon friends.”
And then Littlecloud. “ Every time Shadowclan has withdrawn inside itself, has been the times of its worst suffering.”
While Blackstar glared at his clan’s medicine cat, who stared back with none of fear he’d had of the larger tom long ago, Firestar looked across to Onestar, waiting. The Windclan leader eventually gave in to truth with a bitter dip of his head, just before Mistystar added her own part, eyes up upon Hollyleaf as Mothwing’s were.
“Leopardstar’s habit of that fault is more than well known,” she stared in her pause, gaze locked unto some distant patch of nowhere . . . in the same wise, considering appearance Firestar recognized Mistystar inherited from her mother, “as is my fault of following after her.”
“No clan is unique,” Hollyleaf’s choice of words redrew the attention of everyone without fail, “and No clan is alone.”
. . .
That was a declaration.
. . .
That . . . was an order.
With differing expressions from one cat to another, that much was recognized by all.
“No clan is alone.” It was Mothwing, who repeated her words back to her before anyone else.
A gap of silence came, and the sounds of a peaceful forest night were finally granted a moment’s entry into their ears.
“No clan is alone.” Littlecloud echoed.
Blackstar’s head snapped his way, and the larger cat’s teeth slowly tried to force their way into the open as his ears just as much so wanted to pin themselves against his head. But now . . . he kept them from entirely doing so. And he said nothing. He made no scathing remark against what his medicine cat said. He shouted nothing back against Hollyleaf. He didn’t attempt an appeal to the others. Instead, perhaps . . . he chose to overcome the curse that had afflicted Shadowclan leaders for generations.
“No clan is alone!” Kestrelflight said the same, with some enthusiasm that might have been mistaken for ignorance of the severity of the coming situation.
Jayfeather was as annoyed at his self-assumed friend from Windclan as ever, and his face showed as much. And, his effort going towards his face showing as much kept him from being the fourth and final medicine cat to repeat his sister’s words and speak for his clan in place of his leader. Instead, Brambleclaw was left to, the only deputy to do so, and the only deputy present.
“No clan is alone.” Thunderclan’s deputy affirmed what Hollyleaf had asserted, looking up to the cat he once believed to be his daughter . . . and who he could never come treat as if she wasn’t.