Warrior Cat Clans 2 (WCC2 aka Classic) is a roleplay site inspired by the Warrior series by Erin Hunter. Whether you are a fan of the books or new to the Warrior cats world, WCC2 offers a diverse environment with over a decade’s worth of lore for you - and your characters - to explore. Join us today and become a part of our ongoing story!
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Swanpaw understood, no matter SummerClan's unabating hospitality, that she shouldn't just invite herself over, and that it'd be best to wait for a patrol. Honest to StarClan, she tried to wait. The sky was a pretty mixture of rose and peach when she first appeared at the border, though the strong and pervading scent of the dawn patrol confirmed she must have just missed them, and now it was approaching sun-high and all the soft colors had long since bled into the horizon. Swanpaw's paws fizzled with barely contained impatience, wide eyes scanning the treeline for a sign of life. All she saw were field mice and passing deer.
Eventually, the SwiftClan apprentice's itch became too strong; she had to scratch it. With extreme caution and flinches every time a twig snapped, she crossed over and made her way deeper into SummerClan territory. The floral smells intensified the further she got, Swanpaw's own lavender-heavy scent lost in the mix.
Even after his time spent in Summerclan, Nectarinepaw couldn't convince himself he was one of them. Loosely, he followed their ways of life, their rules; he trained, he helped out when he had no other choice, he sometimes spoke to his 'clanmates,' but there was always an underlying isolation, a rudeness to his words and a hesitance to accept their good grace. He found himself distanced from them, even though they had taken him and his sibling in, kept her safe. Their hospitality, aside from the few cats who were utterly irritating to be around, was appreciated, yet he couldn't quite bring himself to like them. It was silly, it was petty, he knew.
Nectarinepaw knew he could be hypocritical, painfully so, and when he spotted the white apprentice, a stranger to him even amongst cats he hardly bothered to know, he felt a sense of indignation? Territorialism? Cross him. He wouldn't have bothered, truthfully — borders weren't a thing that particularly mattered to him, even though he understood them (the city had some of their own, in looser terms; there were parts, allies and streets and neighbourhoods, crawling with gangs and groups. Unless you had something to offer, one usually wouldn't want to find themselves crossing paths with them). But, in regards to the apprentice, the entertainment factor was too good an opportunity to miss. Clementinepaw was out, away from him, anyway, so he had nothing better to do.
Silently, he wound through the flowers and around her until he was following her lead. When the trees had grown closer, he slithered forward until he could pop up beside her as if they were just two friends having a walk through the field. His pace were leisurely. "It's quite nice today, don't you think?" He asked mockingly, "too nice to resist. I'd ask you to spread the word, just to give us a good reputation, but trespassers usually don't make it out alive." He tittered cheerily.
Post by achromatic on Jul 24, 2022 16:23:38 GMT -5
(I was like what cat do I have in SummerClan and then I'm like oh right I have many cats then I was like which cat and then I was like oh fork right midnightpaw)
Midnightpaw was supposed to be hunting, or practicing hunting, or actually, she had no idea what she was supposed to be doing really. Sometimes she liked hanging out with her sister, sometimes she found her presence to be the bane of her own existence. Sometimes she liked hunting and patrolling and pretending to be a warrior and sometimes she absolutely hated it.
Frankly, sometimes she didn't think she had a personality. No, in fact, being a twin really meant that she just went along with whatever her sister wanted and occasionally had enough. It was a complicated existence really, the kind of complicated that only teenage girls in chick flick romances would have, which meant it was both complicated and the least complicated thing ever. A Schrodinger's complication, really.
Which all meant to say that she was out here doing nothing when she bumped into Nectarinepaw. Right, that weird little apprentice who talked kinda weird, and acted like he was smarter than everyone else...and what was he doing with a stranger?
"Shouldn't you be chasing her out?" she frowned, as she approached, completely ignoring the fact that she too should be chasing the intruder out.
At the sound of voices, Sunrisepaw had stirred from her afternoon nap. Since her promotion to apprentice, and especially since she had been named SummerClan Princess, the twin had made it her personal mission to find the best napping spot in the territory and claim it as hers. This one was better than the silly one Monsterpaw had stolen from her, anyways. She'd gone a week sleeping near the spot without disruption, and her sleepy gaze looked freshly irritated that others were around her.
"Hey, I'm sleeping here, you wheat-for-brains," Sunrisepaw called from her spot, lifting her head with an annoyed flick of her whiskers. "Can't ya see that I'm trying to take a nap here? I don't know what cats 'round here don't understand about napping," she continued, before pulling herself up. Frankly, until that point, she hadn't registered who she was talking to; nearly everyone would get the same treatment from her. But, when she blinked a few more times and focused and realized that one of them was her sister, she offered a half-smile (and a slight squint- being her sister didn't mean that waking her up still wasn't rude). "Oh, hi, Middie. Didn't see ya there. Point still stands though, I guess," she meowed, her voice almost sheepish.
It was only then that the she-cat realized the second elephant in the room, perhaps the larger of the two. Her gaze slid to the newcomer, and curiosity flickered through the sleepiness still in her gaze. "Oh? Who's this?" she then asked, giving the stranger a once-over.
Peonykit had been napping nearby Sunrisepaw — not really near, because the apprentice wouldn't tolerate that, but within a hundred feet. So long as she stayed still and quiet, she might not be shouted at. It was an odd thing, for her to submit to anyone — if Sunrisepaw was the prima donna of the apprentices, Peonykit was the prima donna of the kits; but, she was always quick to snap, she was almost an apprentice, too. If SummerClan were a high school, Sunrisepaw would hold dominion over half the grades and Peonykit would hold dominion over the others, shorter but no less full of perfectionist anger and screaming outbursts and ideas for prom that would out-do Sunrisepaw's. Doefreckle had forged for himself popularity; she was determined that she wasn't going to be any different. It was harder for her — she didn't have that... je ne sais quoi. That unnameable quality. If it wasn't for her pure force of will, she would have disappeared into the background. And that was precisely why she was determined not to: she was made to be forgotten and ignored, and so she was going to be a star. If she was honest, it all went back to her mother. She had been left, abandoned — and so she wasn't going to be now. She'd heard stories of what her mother had been like when she was a kit in SummerClan and she was going to be the same. Going back to that high school analogy, she would have had a framed picture of her mother's yearbook photo on her wall, would have looked at it every day on her way out with a mixture of aching longing and desperation for her mother's pride in her, full of that need to live up to her that was the reason she could never be swayed from her goal; and utter resentment. Lilydawn might have been a prom queen if bitterness and loss hadn't derailed her; her daughter was going to be.
She was going to be.
That morning, she was all dolled up in pink flowers. Hot pink — not baby pink. Doefreckle, making the mistake of for once trying to be selfless and kind, had very tenderly offered her purple flowers when all the little family were getting ready — and she had exploded at him. Purple? she'd exclaimed, her voice high and shrieking with outrage as she threw her usual morning tantrum. PURPLE?! When have I EVER liked purple in my LIFE, DAD?! Doefreckle had been bewildered, apologising stammeringly. Purple had been her favourite colour for months — until suddenly it wasn't. He'd just found out the hard way; maybe Shadedsun had already known, but Doe was still learning how to actually listen to people. Either way, Peonykit was going through her tween moodiness. Doe indulged her fondly not only because she reminded him of himself, but also because she reminded him of Sunpetal.
When she heard Sunrisepaw speak, Peonykit popped her head up and sat up. And when she spotted the newcomer, she padded over to stand, stiff and defiant, beside Sunrisepaw, still lounging in the grass. "YEAH," she backed her up, bristling at the strange white she-cat. "WHO are you? This party is CLOSED."
If her brother thought she was away from him, he was wrong. Clementinepaw very rarely was. She'd been distant, but she was always watching. And now, just as Nectarinepaw had slipped in beside Swanpaw, she slipped in on her other side, looking down at her with the eyes of a curious, silent predator. "Why should he chase her out?" she asked Midnightpaw in that raspy, fairy-ish voice of hers, looking at her past the strange apprentice and her brother. "We came here as strangers, didn't we? Don't you welcome those in need?" She said those in need like it was something funny. Everything was always vaguely funny to her.
Nectarinepaw had been interested in taking this as far as he could, giving her a little scare until she fled some place else. He was just looking for some old-fashioned, mean-spirited teenage fun. Behind the more prim, haughty exterior, one still tinged by crudeness, one that acted as though he was better, one that pretended he wasn't just that, he was only a teenage boy. Awkward, mean, with the need to show off, but he was supposed to be old, mature, collected, so he would do nothing but deny it.
It would have gone well, it might have worked, but then — shouldn't you be chasing her out? Nectarinepaw's face fell, wilted into something accusatory, something irked. "Shouldn't you be following your sister around?" He retorted, and they were quite big words for someone who was so reliant on his own sibling that being away from her for more than a few hours sent pangs of anxiety through him. But he wasn't a shadow like Midnightpaw was, he was just achingly dependent on her company and prided himself on taking care of her, regardless if she could or could not do so herself. It was healthy. It was normal. Nectarinepaw would have said more, would have thrown up some feeble excuse and begrudgingly told the white she-cat to bugger off, but then someone else was speaking, and he looked in her direction, then back at Midnightpaw.
"Speaking of your sister," he gave a teasing grin, turning back to Sunrisepaw, his tone suddenly snappy, "I don't know who it is. And I thought you went on huge, important missions or whatever, not slept the day away. And, really, I haven't even —" Peonykit interrupted him, and he clamped his jaws shut with a poisonous, vindictive look in the kit's direction. How was he supposed to even get a word out when they were insistant on cutting him off with every breath he took?
With a glance at Swanpaw, almost relating in the sense he assumed she would be just as bewildered and annoyed as he was, he squared his shoulders defensively. "Party? It wasn't a party until you lot came along. I had it perfectly under control, but nooo, everybody decided to get up in Nectarinepaw's business!" He huffed pettily, and then his eyes caught Clementinepaw winding around the stranger's other side, and he relaxed, letting her speak and nodding along for encouragement. "Yes, yes, exactly — what if she's in need, hm? Ever think of that? No, clearly you haven't. I mean, if we did chase out every stranger that crossed our border, then we wouldn't have our leader or medicine-cats, or your dad, the pretty one, wouldn't have been welcomed back," he turned to Peonykit, "goodness knows what's happened with the other one, but he wouldn't be here, either. Really, you all have got to be more open-minded," he chided as though he were somehow so much better, so much kinder, than them, as though he didn't just bring up the gossip he'd heard from around camp — outsiders, they were, and many knew that; many didn't care, but some did, and Nectarinepaw focused on that small, small portion of cats, the cats that didn't trust Foxstar for his Nightclan blood, who weren't so quick to trust Cypresspaw, who wondered about Sunveins, who whispered about Doefreckle and Shadedsun when they passed. Frankly, he didn't care one bit, clan blood be damned, but he knew it would get under their skin.
Bewildered was an accurate assumption, but, as the cats crowding them increased, so did Swanpaw's nerves; the bewilderment rapidly over-churned into thick, belly-aching distress. She was incrementally moving away from the scene when she felt another presence behind her, and she was suddenly sandwiched between two of the SummerClan apprentices, sitting with her head lowered below her narrow shoulders and a wide-eyed, trembling terror leeching the shine out of her gaze. If she were honest with herself- and further, if she could communicate that honesty with these cats- it was less their unfamiliarity that unsettled her and more the multitude of them. SwiftClan was a small clan; groups of three were considered large by their standards.
Thankfully, the attention turned off her and Swanpaw thought she felt what she perceived as hostility diminishing. At the very least, two of them were speaking on her behalf now. It was both strange and unwarranted, but there was a small, almost imperceptible smile of gratitude on her face when Nectarinepaw glanced at her. She had no reason to think it wasn't goodwill, even if he had been mocking her just minutes ago.
When there came another interlude, Swanpaw was poised to take the microphone this time. She thrummed her forepaws against the soft grass, then used one to gesture to her mouth, shaking her head to then signify I can't speak. With that out of the way, she dipped her head deeply, apologizing for her trespass, and started to swivel her body back the way she came before looking back. It clearly asked: Should I go? She didn't want to cause Adderstar any grief by angering their temporary neighbors, but she didn't want to risk her own safety by pissing off the SummerClan cats at present. Swanpaw could maybe take most of them, but Peonykit would definitely kick her ass.
The first thing she did was look down at the kitten that had appeared next to her. Temporarily distracted from the more important things, she raised a brow. "Oh, good. You again," she meowed, her tone dripping with sarcasm. "And now you think you're part of our party? Even if we had one, which we don't, you have to be this tall to join," she meowed, moving her tail about an inch higher than Peonykit's head.
Then, she let her gaze drift to the fruit apprentice. "Perk of being named princess, I'm free from the important missions for at least another week," she meowed, offering a wink. This was a record for her. She'd gone nearly half a day without bragging about that. "Also, reminder, only I get to talk to Middie like that."
When he spoke of letting outsiders in, her whiskers twitched in slight amusement. There was no cat in this entire group gathered whose own existence in the clan wasn't directly related to the clan's openness towards strangers (although Sunrisepaw tended to "forget" that her father had once been a rogue). What was this, SwiftClan? Her whiskers twitched again, before finally letting her gaze return to the newbie.
After Swanpaw's demonstration, she turned back to the others. "Oh, great, she can't even tell us who she is," Sunrisepaw muttered lowly to them, specifically to her sister but quiet enough that hopefully Swanpaw wouldn't hear, before plastering a smile to her face. "No, you don't have to!" she assured. "I'm like, pretty important in SummerClan, and I won this thing and I get to make decisions and cats have to listen to me," (another brag) "and I think you can stay here for at least a little while." She tilted her head. "You from a Clan?" Had Sunrisepaw been older, perhaps she would have been familiar with the SwiftClan scent from the gatherings. But, given that she'd never actually been to a gathering, and SwiftClan had only just relocated, she probably had never interacted with a SwiftClan cat before.
When Nectarinepaw talked about her dads with such fancy-pants judgement, Peonykit’s legs went rigid and her fur slowly bristled until she looked like a hedgehog capable of immense hate, her face twisted in rage. “DON’TTALKABOUTMYDADS,” she screeched at him. Sometimes, when she was furious, her scream became so high pitched that the words blurred together into a pure, unintelligible shriek of petulant rage. She sucked furiously — anxiously — on her own tongue like it was a lolly, glaring at Nectarinepaw with a fearfully defiant, scrunched up look; she was praying he didn’t know about her mother’s provenance, and if he did that he wouldn’t say anything — it wasn’t that she was ashamed… No, it was more that if she could handle insults about her grandfathers, she’d lose it over any word said against the mother she’d never known; she’d throw herself at Nectarinepaw and have to be ripped off. Her heart fluttered with insecurity over her even more unknown father, too; she loved her mother, wanted to know her, but she felt nothing but apprehensive fear about her biological father — she didn’t want anyone but Shadedsun and Doefreckle, not when they were so warm and safe, and she half hoped he was dead, just so he could never come and disrupt it. “At least they were proper Clan cats — you’re just a dirty rogue! You and your weird sister!”
Clementinepaw raised her brows, letting out a breathy little tittering laugh. She wasn’t offended.
Really, Peonykit lived a hard life. Perhaps the hardest life that anyone had ever lived. One of her grandfathers — the bad cop to Shadedsun’s good — was utterly immune to her kitten eyes and told her off for things that weren’t her fault, like telling the younger kits scary stories that made them cry. The other one babied her, but not quite enough — she was always left wanting more. And now she was facing such horrible oppression. When Sunrisepaw held her tail pointedly above her head, Peonykit’s eyes followed it up. Her mood instantly changed, her voice caught somewhere between whining and falsely over-confident. “I’ll be that tall in another moon! EASY. My grandpa is HUGE — and even though he and my mum aren’t actually related by BLOOD, that still means something— a lot, actually.” She was babbling with desperate-to-prove anger, because she’d also heard that her mother was incredibly short and so hope was running out for her to grow much taller — but she was good at living in fierce denial; she’d WILL herself taller. After her confidence with Swanpaw, now she was talking to Sunrisepaw like she was faintly begging to a superior, begging her to give her another chance for just a few more weeks, a quieter aside in semi-public private. She looked up again at Sunrisepaw’s tail with miserable, affronted anguish, an oppressed frown on her face.
And then Sunrisepaw was talking to the newcomer again. “YEAH,” Peonykit backed her up again, bristling beside her like a furious second-in-command of a stupid school all-girl gang; she was the one with the pink knife. “YOU FROM A CLAN? I’m PEonykit — SOON-TO-BE-PAW.” She said it like it was a last name, so blurted out and furious and run-together that it was clear she said it a lot, her mouth so used to forming the quick, angry words like a tacked on disclaimer. “And YEAH, by the way, I already know it’s a pretty name, prettiest you’ve probably ever heard, so you don’t need to, like, mime it. I KNOW.” She was still glaring at Swanpaw. “Oh, and by the way,” (‘by the way’ was her saying of the week), “my dad also won king of SummerClan,” she cast a petulant, bitterly pointed look at Nectarinepaw while she said it, “so when he’s not here, it gets transferred to me. It’s how it works. So Sunrisepaw and I are in charge. And if you don’t show us exactly why you’re here, we’re gonna execute you.” She said it with all the fierceness of a child who would escort a playmate to a barricaded prison made of sticks and make them sit in there for the rest of the game because they’d been captured.