(i'll set this slightly before she re-joins pi and becomes proxy <3)

"How. The turns. Table." Eshek's voice echoed quietly, eerily, through the dark, damp woods, though the she-cat herself was nowhere to be seen. Her voice had the low, child-like stickiness of a haunted horror movie doll playing hide and seek. Unlike in the city, back in these woods where she'd been born, Eshek held the upper hand; she knew every breath of it, every tiny tunnel hidden beneath the surface by webs of leaves torturers had used to catch prisoners and drag them to the dungeons, every old, black bloodstain imbedded in the gnarled trunks of trees and who had spilled them. Here, she'd hunted kittypets with Innocentia. Here, she'd murdered her kitten half-siblings. Here, she'd met Funk. This was her home.

Eshek was suddenly beside Bermondsey. "Out for a stroll, kitty?" she purred, eyes sparking. Then, immediately, they glossed back over to their usual manic clarity and Esh burst into laughter, her whole body language changing as she visibly relaxed. "Just messin' with ya. Whatcha doin'? Can I join? Man, it's good to be back." She continued on before he could reply, padding lightly a little way away and looking up and around at the familiar trees. "The city was fun, y'know, but it wasn't the League. Street cats strollin' around, twolegs walkin' down the sidewalk - the League needs to be somewhere where they own it, y'know? This is back to the way it was always meant to be." Her voice was slightly wistful - the League was back but she wasn't, and soon she'd have to leave and return to DayClan - but mostly she was just proud and happy to see the group she loved return to their true home and purpose, even if she wasn't a part of it anymore. Like a sad high school graduate heart-achingly proud the place they loved would now be better for the new generation, in a pitiable sort of way, an outsider looking in and yearning.

She smiled and turned back to Bermondsey. "What are we doin' tonight?" she asked, and as upbeat as she tried to make it, her voice was sad. Lonely. In need of companionship, comfort, distraction.

At Bermondsey's question, Eshek's eyes softened, losing their usual mania like it had been peeled away and slipping back into that genuine, childlike sorrow he'd glimpsed once before. She smiled. "Maybe," she replied quietly, smiling that same, small smile all the while.

A moment or two later, the mania clawed back over her. She watched Bermondsey's frown - he was going to get premature lines between his eyes, but it was cute, and she found that serious fretfulness of his endearing - and the corner of her mouth twitched up into a crooked half-grin. She padded over to stand beside him, her eyes darting over his face as he spoke. "'Familiarise myself with the location' - okay, Colonel," she purred. "Hell, I've got nothin' but time." Thwacking him over the eyes with her tail-tip, Eshek loped off ahead with that usual, heavy-footed stalk of hers, her head down and her shoulder blades sharp. She'd tucked the feathers - love and growth - she usually had knotted into her tail safely back at home; even if the League would always feel most like home to her, DayClan had taken her in when she had nothing and she loved them with that grateful, unknowable brand of loyalty Eshek had, like a lion indebted and devoted to doves. She didn't want the League seeing the feathers and causing trouble for them.

As she prowled along, she looked up and around at the dark, gloomy forest; the leaves and roots felt as familiar as if she were exploring her own veins. The smell, musty and damp and cold... She'd missed this more than she'd let herself realise. She let out a long breath. "The last time I was here," she told Ber quietly, though she may have just been speaking to herself and the thick, chilly air, "I was Proxy. I'd barely set foot outside of the League - of course I had, I'd been on... sabotage missions," the words came out as a tired sigh, slightly heavy, "and to SummerClan and Gatherings, but I was never an adventurer. I probably seem like I am, but I'm not. I like having a home. My friend - he used to live the most mind-boggling triple-life between here, DayClan, and WaterClan. I never knew how he did it. How he had... that much heart to give to all of them. I understand it a little more now, I think. How you can love two places at once." She fell quiet for a moment, two, three. "I miss it," she added, and the words were little more than a whisper, to Bermondsey or herself or neither.

They were passing a sheer, jagged cliff with a fallen tree trunk balancing precariously upon the top, half in mid-air, half on the short, wiry grass, damp in that way that everything in the League simply was. There was a few tree-lengths of open ground until pine trees swallowed up the dark grey light. The last time she'd been there, she'd been with the other Proxies, playing one of Innocentia's games. It had been gloomy then, too; it always was in the League. Eshek hopped up onto the log and padded to the end, looking out over the great expanse of trees and darkness that spread out below and in every direction. The early autumn breeze smoothed her fur and made her paw pads prickle with cold. One strong gust, one little bit of too much weight, and she'd be falling into the abyss. She smiled over her shoulder at Bermondsey, a little more herself. "Join me."

"Mm. Glowstar's son," Eshek replied, her voice faraway as she looked out over the gloomy expanse of pine trees and ruins, still so shadowy despite the weak daylight. She was nothing more than a white silhouette against all that darkness. "He's the one who gave me the warrior name you're so fond of mocking." She let out a husky purr, the rough, unfamiliar sound snagging in her throat like she was some creature trying to imitate the sound of a cat. "Carriondare is a good name. Better than Bermondsey." She tipped her head backwards, grinning upside down at him like some carnival terror.

At Ber's weariness, Eshek righted herself and rolled her eyes, but there was no real irritation in them. "You survived the trolley. You survived getting cross-faded. You'll survive sitting on a log." She looked back at Ber and her grin spread, sharp and messy, like ink leeching out into pure paper. "If the curse is gonna get you, I think it'll think up a more inventive way." She didn't reply to his accusation of her murdering him; it made for a funnier friendship if neither party was quite sure. Maybe she'd start planting little clues that his mother had killed someone important to her and she was just trying to weasel her way close to him so she could get revenge. Something fun like that. Gaslighting is, as we know, the best way to make friends. Especially when one of them is already so afraid of losing their mind.

Kidding.

A moment later, Eshek's grin softened, and so did her eyes. "Relax, Ber. I just wanna spend an hour or two with my friend." Hopping off the log again, she stalked past him, adding with a teasing glint to her eyes, "that's you, by the way."

The primal, buzzing tension that surrounded Eshek returned. She always carried with her the air that even if she was standing still, she was jumping up and down, or manically fiddling with her claws, or laughing. She was never silent when she was silent. There was always that frenetic strain of energy. Now, taking the lead once more, she started in a direction that felt both breathlessly dangerous and as natural as life: the mansion. She quickened slightly to a lioness trot, the air around her crackling like everything around her was telling her not to venture near there and she was ignoring all of it, like she'd broken through whatever flimsy constraints she'd put around herself. She just wanted to see it filled with cats, as it was supposed to be - the last time she'd been there two moons ago it had been silent and abandoned. She wanted to stand at the threshold and just look, to see the League where it belonged.

“Aww, Ber!” Esh replied, stopping to let him catch and up and genuinely getting a bit choked up as she looked at him. “You care about my nose!” Her cheeks squished up against her eyes as she smiled at him, her chin dimpling. She let out a little sigh. “He cares about some hawk getting my nose,” she told her imaginary theatre audience in an undertone as she turned away and trotted ahead once more. “I know! No, it’s what he said. He did, too.”

Where are we going next. “Jeez, for all those brains you sure suck at directions. We are going to the Mansion - y’know, your house? Heard of it? Anyone home?” She suddenly veered across the rough path through the forest to leap at him, bowling him over and pinning him down to knock her paw against the side of his head a few times. She leaned down and turned her head to the side, pressing her ear against his skull. “Huh. Empty. Wait-no- ooh, there’s a pumpkin pie recipe in there. And… some old grandma’s number. Bermondsey, you rent boy.” Her voice lowered to a rumble, her eyes glinting.

Tittering and grinning widely, Eshek took Ber’s paw and helped him up like she were a gentleman and he were a lady. “C’mon, pretty face.” Bounding ahead, Esh led the way to the Mansion. Within a minute or two, scents both strange and familiar began to drift in the still, humid air and she slowed to a cautious walk, picking her way through the shadows as the trees started to thin out. And then, she was standing at the edge of the clearing, gazing out at the only home that had ever mattered to her. The familiar uneven cobblestones, smoothed and rounded by a hundred paws and with swamp grass sticking up between them; the glassy, rectangular man-made pond that reflected the gnarled, dead trees; the window of her old room, with the whiteness of the walls just visible through the reflections. Here she’d been born, and here she’d died.

But far from feeling any grief or loneliness, she just felt giddy, breathless, fearless. Maybe she was overwhelmed, maybe it was a strange effect of being faced with such trauma, maybe it was terror at its most pure, but she couldn’t think properly - the thoughts half-formed, and then crumbled away. This was how bad decisions were made. This was just recklessness killed. Esh sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, the corners of her mouth twitching repeatedly into the beginning of a smile before falling again, over and over. Then she spotted the little glass greenhouse attached to the side of the Mansion, overgrown with trailing plants and with half the windows smashed in. There, she’d met Funk. “C’mon,” Eshek told Ber, the quiet of her voice buzzing with some tight-drawn, ominous excitement.

Not looking around at anything, her gaze trained solely on the greenhouse, Esh trotted across the courtyard and, taking only a moment to dart her eyes over the little building that held such memories, leaped up a series of wooden crates that had been there as far back as she could remember and scrambled up onto the roof. Barely taking time to breathe, too adrenalised or too in pain to think, she continued her climb up onto the roof of the Mansion itself. A sudden gust of cold wind sent dry leaves skittering around her legs and almost knocked her off paws; she lowered herself and continued on. She could see the slight dome of her destination rising up ahead of her, glassy and silent against the bleak, pale grey sky. Finally, heaving herself up, she stood before it: the glass ceiling of the entry hall, the middle of it still shattered in a small, jagged circle and letting cold air whistle into the Mansion.

“This was where I died,” she whispered, eyes huge and legs quivering as she stared down at it. Her voice didn’t sound like terror; it sounded like breathless, joyous excitement. But that was precisely what fear felt like to Eshek, and at that moment her mind couldn’t cope with all the emotions; it was just switched off, numb, silent. It was impossible to know what she was thinking, or if she was thinking at all, but it might have been something like this: kits kicking in her belly, dreary pink dawn light, the splinter of glass, the fall.

Eshek didn’t know whether to lie or not. Her lips, drawn back in a messy smile that looked more like a circus grimace than anything, twitched slightly at the top. It felt like faced with this sight, her mind had wrapped itself up tight to protect her. More than anything, the genuine part of her replied, quiet and terrified. Not at all! the Eshek part of her chirped back. I’m not scared of anything. “Why should it?” she replied at last, voice just a bit too loud and a bit too gratingly high-pitched. “Can’t happen twice.”

She turned her head to beam at Bermondsey. She stayed like that for a few beats longer than would be normal, her eyes just locked on him with that same vacant smile fixed on her face, like she was grounding herself with the sight of him, of someone else there with her. Finally, she drew in a cheerful breath and turned away, picking her way around the edge of the gaping glass wound. Then, stupidly, because she was nothing if not defiant in the face of fate, nothing if not petulantly determined to show she wasn’t afraid, she bunched her stringy muscles up and leaped clear over the break in the ceiling. That moment in cold mid-air felt both like freedom itself and raw terror - suspended there, the thought of will I make it? was almost a thrill. And she did. She landed clumsily, falling on her side and letting out a great gasp of laughter, eyes huge and wild and darting everywhere across the glass roof beneath her. She did it. Still laughing breathlessly, Eshek collapsed onto her back and grinned open-mouthed up at the dreary grey sky, feeling shaky and exhausted and triumphant and like all her nerves were on fire. Her smile wasn’t the usual sharp one she wore; it was genuine and full of life, making her look far younger than she usually did.

“Death can’t touch me,” she breathed, and laughed again. She rolled her head against the glass to grin at Ber, suddenly feeling incredibly close to him.

Eshek was moving before she even knew what she was doing. Whipping up from her back, she threw herself at the gaping shatter in the glass and caught Bermondsey’s scruff in her teeth a second before he fell beyond her reach. In reality, they were more or less the same size and he was incredibly heavy for her to hold. The rusted metal beams she was standing on, her forelegs splayed wide to avoid standing on any glass surface, arched slightly downward; she found herself slipping, her neck straining under Ber’s weight and her spine feeling like it was about to snap. Only a foot or two away, the broken metal beams gave way to nothing - and from there, it was a straight plummet through thin air to the cold marble below. Ber was dangling out in that thin air; Eshek let out a frightened little sound in her throat at the realisation. But even as her paws slipped down the rust and her claws scraped uselessly at it, even as Ber’s weight pulled her down, even as shards of glass from her own fall two years ago lodged themselves in her paw pads and scraped at her ankles, she never once thought of herself, of her own closeness to the chasm - her whole mind was just Bermondsey. He was all that mattered in that split second. Saving him was the only thing that existed in the universe.

Finally, her whole body tight and screaming, and with only the certainty that whether or not she tried this the punishment for failure was death driving her, Eshek managed to turn around on the beams. Her back paw slipped and she felt nothing beneath it, just empty air, but she pushed herself upward, slivers of red rust cutting at her pads, and, after what felt like centuries, clawed her way back up onto the glass roof from the yawning chasm beneath. By now, her pads were bloody, smearing red over the glass and making her slip. Her steps were clumsy and stumbling around Ber, but she still didn’t let him go - she didn’t know whether he’d gone into shock or not, and she wasn’t going to risk leaving him near the edge of the drop. Finally, near the eaves of the Mansion, where crumbling grey gargoyles overgrown with ivy and moss looked out over the gloomy forest, Eshek finally let Bermondsey go and slumped down beside him.

And then, immediately, she was sobbing.

She’d been foolhardy. “I forgot,” she choked out, voice raw and strangled and wet, staring wide-eyed and distraught but not seeing. It felt like she’d forgotten her kits, like she’d forsaken them and their memory and their death for- for what? For a stupid game? For some invisible prize that didn’t matter? All she kept replaying over and over and over in her head was Ber’s wide, too-young eyes; the taste of wet dirt in her mouth that morning she screamed her lungs raw; kitten skeletons; the fall, her fall, Ber’s fall - soon, the two were blurring together and she couldn’t differentiate between them. She and Ber were the same. His blood, her blood, his body, her body - her sobbing turned to brittle, anguished wailing, her face hidden against her blood-stained forepaws, but not enough that you couldn’t still see her lips drawn back and her sharp teeth bared in grief. Her paw pads stung from the glass that was still imbedded in them but she hardly felt it. And if she did, she deserved it. She’d been stupid. So stupid. And it had almost cost Ber his life. “I’m sorry,” she wept, as blood pulsed from around the jagged little shards glistening dimly in her pads.

As Ber pulled away, Eshek didn't even really seem to notice. It was like they were both dealing messily with their own fear and grief as two entirely separate, terrible lives, cut down the middle, hardly aware the other one was there. Where a heartbeat ago she'd been so focused on Ber's survival, now she was curled in on the horror of her own. She gasped out sobs on her own, the crying turning to that painful, jerking breathlessness, and she bowed her head and shakily began to try and pull out the shards of glass with her teeth. She was shaking so badly that the glass between her teeth wobbled terribly in the flesh, just cutting it up and making it bleed more, the sound of glass clacking against enamel filling the silent air, before she finally managed to draw the first shard out. She set it down blindly at the edge of the roof, not paying attention at all, completely dissociating and switched off; a second later, it tipped over and toppled down to the cobblestones below, shattering. Eshek didn't notice, leaning down to pull out a second shard.

Don't you dare tell anyone about this. With her paws almost free of glass, Eshek looked up for the first time, her white cheeks streaked dark with tear trails and her eyes huge and wet and broken. "I won't," she whispered quietly, her voice ending up a high-pitched near-whimper, tight and strangled. With glass still in one paw, Esh shakily pushed herself up, feeling heavy enough that she almost slumped back down immediately, and limped pitifully over to Ber's other side, holding her injured, glass-studded paw close to her chest and leaving bloody paw prints behind her. "Ber," she whispered, and it was almost a sob. She stood over him for a moment, looking down at him, before sinking down close beside him and scraping her tongue soothingly over the white slash of fur on his forehead. "It's okay." Her voice was so shaky, and the smile she tried to give him, her brows pushing up and together, was pathetic. "We're okay. You're okay. You lived. You lived, Ber."

The sight of Ber closing his eyes cut through the trembling static in Eshek’s own head. Everything else - the pain in her paws, the blood drying and making clumps of her fur, the terror, the guilt, the grief - faded like the dark, blurred edges of a pinpoint frame: there was just that, that grounding feeling, Bermondsey closing his eyes under her touch. She let out a high little sound, like a sob or a choke, and bowed her head so the long bridge of her nose was pressed against Ber’s forehead, staring desperately at the blur of his grey fur from this close up with her brows pushed together in quiet, lingering terror. She closed her eyes, tilting her head further so they were hidden by his short fur, and breathed him in.

Then he was speaking - she didn’t hear what he said - and moving away. She let out another low, frightened sound in her throat at the loss of him from near her and raised her head, her eyes opening. He was now below her, looking up at her with his paw pressing onto her foreleg and a foreign commanding look in his bright green gaze, and she nodded without really knowing what she was agreeing to. The pain in her paw pad was answer enough. She let out a small, gasping breath, eyes welling again despite the fact she’d felt far, far worse pain, despite the fact the tears weren’t really for the pain. “You’d give the Shaman a run for their money,” she joked weakly, lowering her head and giving her paw pad a few long, slow licks. The stinging had already turned to numbness; her tongue just felt like faint, soothing warmth. “Bedside manner…”

Eshek raised her head and then, in silence, her eyes found Bermondsey’s. She just gazed at him, crouched there in front of her, his eyes so disarmingly beautiful and still so afraid. It felt like lifetimes passed. Then, finally, in a single breath, she closed the distance between them and pressed the bridge of her nose against his, her muzzle slipping down a second later to brush against his cheek. “I’m glad you didn’t die,” she told him shakily, suddenly not knowing entirely what she was doing, what she was feeling - all she knew was her heart was thudding in her chest, and all she could smell was her friend, and they were both alive. Alive. So completely, fully alive.

Eshek let out a slight gasp when Bermondsey reciprocated, freezing for a heartbeat when she felt his tongue on her fur; she'd mostly expected him to pull away, hadn't expected-hadn't... She hadn’t fully realised just how touch-starved she’d become, how starved of meaningful contact with someone she cared about, someone she loved. There was Luc, but his touches were borne of friendship. There had been that night curled up around Pinesimmer, but again that had been a budding friendship on the come-down of a thrill. To be touched, to be loved - the last one had been Funk, and suddenly her heart was weeping for him. She half-opened her eyes for just a frantic, shivering heartbeat and snatched a glimpse of Ber’s green gaze. Closing her eyes again, she let out a quiet sob against the grey tom’s cheek and imagined it was her mate instead. But it wasn’t just him. She cared about the tom in front of her, too. She wanted to be held by him, too. She wanted to love him, too. She did love him. He was her best friend. Her best friend.

“Ber,” she whimpered, ducking her head and pressing it close under his chin, her cheek pushed almost painfully against his chest. But she didn’t care, she welcomed it - the feel of his body, of his bones, his heart thudding out of control against her ear, alive, alive. Her eyes were still squeezed shut as she buried herself against Ber’s heart. “I’m sorry,” she told him frantically, and she didn’t even know what she was saying - she was just blurting out words through a dizzy haze. “I don’t know what I would have done if something had happened to you. I want you in my life. I need you in my life. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ber.” Eyes wide and panicked and not entirely focused, Esh raised her head again, her skull clacking against Ber’s chin without her registering it, and darted her gaze between his eyes. “I’m so sorry.” Her chin puckered, her face falling to ruins, and then she was sobbing again.

And then, suddenly, her tears slowing just enough to let her gasp in a few breaths, her gaze darted over Ber’s eyes a few more times, both delirious and strikingly sharp - and she kissed him.