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Toadstool wheezed.
The water was cold and slimy and stuck to his fur like honey as he struggled in it. He pressed down and lodged one of his back feet into the crack of a sunken log to keep balance; that was all he could do.
His front paw lost its grip, and the cat beneath him shot his head up out of the bog and opened his mouth like a baby bird, begging for food, for air, and Toadstool slammed it back into his throat as fast as he could.
With a gag, the cat vanished below the surface.
“ Like wrestling a big-ass mackerel.”
Ragged Storm had told him that. Like waiting out a fish, writhing and thrashing and trying all it can to escape and get back into the water. You have to keep a firm grip on their spine, he remembered, because the “-fuckers are stronger than they look when they start choking.”
A mackerel, right.
It wasn’t like that though, and for a moment Toadstool thought he could cry and yell at Ragged Storm because no, it was nothing like a fish because fish didn’t have legs and fish couldn’t beg for their lives, but fish could gasp and thrash around and maybe, maybe this was more like catching a fish than he could ever come to terms with.
He couldn’t get mad at Ragged Storm for that. Not that part. So he swallowed it down.
Pretended he was stronger. Pretended he wasn’t angry.
The cat, it, heaved upwards, but Toadstool doesn’t let its head come up this time.
He found himself praying for it to be over, like it was something that he had to do. His clan was starving to death, and this fish would save them. His mother, father, clanmates, all of them with sunken, hollow eyes, ribs jutting out of their skin; they needed to eat.
He was trying to feed his clan. That was all.
Paws paddled up out of the water in a mockery of a fry kneading their mothers belly; they splayed outward and were brown, tabby, with two white toes on its right paw and covered in green, sludgy muck. They lashed out and hit Toadstools chin.
He held harder, and his leg stung where he had jammed it into the log and he held even harder.
He recalled his father talking about murderers within the clans.
He recalled his father urging him to stay in the safety of a folk home.
He recalled cutting his visit with his father short that day.
One of the paws latched onto his arm and he had felt that before; when it was still breathing and strong. Clawmarks, barely three shadesteps old traced down the entire length of it, red and swollen.
But this time the paws were soft, sheathed, and Toadstool remembered how Solstice had touched him like that when they were little, when she wanted him to wake up. She always had nightmares, and prodding at his leg, asked him to patrol the den to look for monsters that might be lurking in the dark.
He always said yes.
The paws were soft and Toadstool opened his eyes, looked down, and saw the barest shimmer of blue ones looking back at his own. Through the dark, muddy water he could almost convince himself he was imagining it, but it felt like they were pleading with him.
He recalled being a fry and begging his mother to stay in the nest with him.
He recalled his mother mentioning how sad and desperate his eyes were.
He recalled feeling angry at how pathetic he used to be.
The bubbles slow down; they only appear once every ten, twelve seconds, and Toadstool feels that kind of dread in his stomach that he gets when walking close to a cliff. His paw is cramping and he’s shaking so viciously that it might as well be the dead of winter. He wonders if it’s too late to turn back.
He wonders about its name.
He wonders about its family.
He wonders if he should ask.
That would be silly, wouldn’t it? Dipping a fish back into the ocean to ask, “Hey, what’s your name? Who are you?” and give it some sort of comfort; an assurance that they lived, they were alive, just to pull it back onto land again.
Ragged Storm would make fun of him for weeks. And it makes him even sicker knowing that’s the only reason he’s not letting go.
He takes a deep breath.
Toadstool feels the death rattle instead of hearing it. Its muscles tense, release, tense, release beneath him and the haunches start to float above the water. The bubbles stop. He tilts his muzzle to the sky and exhales in time with its final breath.
He’s happy. Relieved. There’s no good left in him.
Toadstool grips the dead mackerel between his teeth, hauling it to shore.