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!
News & Updates
11.06.2022 The site has been transformed into an archive. Thank you for all the memories here!
Here on Classic we understand that sometimes life can get difficult and we struggle. We may need to receive advice, vent, know that we are not alone in our difficult times, or even just have someone listen to what's going on in our lives. In light of these times, we have created the support threads below that are open to all of our members at any time.
(this is a day filled with sadness and pain sorrow and shame like i've never known why can't i get it right on the first or the second time will the third be a wasted life should we try again? and smile again? hold our breath and pray... should we leap in faith or stand in vain? hold our breath and pray... and try again. the is a day of failure that brings memories that sting. a heart that is stained. this is for love. this is for love. that we try. that we pray. oh, this is for love.)
(the secrets you tell me, i'll take to my grave)
The tom with the twisted front paw limps through SummerClan territory, the clouds drifting across the moon washing the wildflower meadow a tender, faded silver. It feels like a dream. It might be. Nothing has seemed entirely real for a long time now. He stops by the old twoleg cottage – the Sunflower Cottage, he’d named it; a faint smile, chased away by a burst of homesickness aching in his chest – and raises his muzzle to the old, changing moon. It’s beautiful. He’d never seen a more beautiful night sky than the one that melted to life above him his first night in SummerClan, a fresh defector of BrookClan with only Ravenstar to take pity on him. He closes his eyes and breathes in – breathes in the cool air, the sweet, sticky scent of the flowers around him, imagines he can feel a little of the self-assured calmness of the stars settling in his lungs.
You need to grow up, Doe.
If you’re like this when you take over SummerClan, deputy, none of us will be safe. StarClan help us all.
Are you ever going to stop acting like a love-struck apprentice?
But there isn’t. There never is. In life, right near the end, he was starting to settle in to who he truly was – who he’d wanted to be from the start, who he’d dreamed of, vaguely and far-off, never daring to believe it would ever really happen. At the start of his leadership, he’d been running scared – spending nights away from camp because his den was too big and too empty, silently pleading for his Clan to come to their senses and drag him down, desperate to push just that bit too far. Call me Doefreckle, when it’s only us, he’d said, eyes bright like he was half-joking, like it didn’t matter, like he wasn’t afraid. Please. Doestar just... feels wrong. (Sounds like something an immature, irresponsible thing like me doesn't deserve.) He’d covered up all that terrible insecurity, that poison, that piercing belief that he'd never be able to protect all these cats, never be able to be worthy of them, with laughter and cheerfulness and noise, danced through the flowers and pretended his heart was as at ease as he wished it were.
And then, near the end, he’d been so close. So close he could see it, just out of reach, like liquid sunlight in the air. Happiness. Peace. Meaning. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t self-destructing. He was becoming a leader, a good one. His confidence was growing day by day.
He was so close.
Now, in this sad, haunted existence, there’s only a soft, quiet yearning – for what he had, for all he wanted, for what he never got the chance to experience.
Well. He was right, really, in the end, to be afraid. He’d started to believe it would be alright – that StarClan’s rejection of him didn’t mean anything; that it didn’t matter they’d left him waiting in that cold, black place; that he could be a leader without nine lives. He’d prove them wrong. He’d give that one single life to SummerClan, give them peace and safety and joy and love – all the love he had to give, all the love he’d been trying to give since he was three moons old. He was in love. He had a home. He had two healthy kits, and more on the way. He was loved. It would all mean something now. This single life would mean something.
But they’d been right. StarClan. He’d run from the truth, but it had caught up to him in the end – on a misty spring morning with the sky painted a gentle pink; with two blinding headlights and a single, terrible second of fear. Hadn’t meant anything. Doestar: leader for less than a year, his one, sad little life snatched away by a monster. No reason. No sense. No great, heroic end – no poetry. Just his last breath easing out in the middle of the small, earthen thunderpath; just the sun slowly rising over the pine trees in front of him (Chim will be waiting for me tonight, he’d thought. I hope he doesn’t worry); just his eyes slipping shut for the last time.
Just a small, dappled body slowly growing cold as the sun rose.
Well. Last time is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?
Opening his eyes, Doefreckle lets out his breath and watches it mist in the chilly air. Funny, he thinks, that it still does that. Limping through it, he makes his way slowly around SummerClan territory, each pawstep achingly familiar. The soft lands, the gentle lands – he named them all. He drifts around the edge of the camp, listens to the quiet murmurs within the walls, smiles sadly as he passes the hollow tree that had been his den. The terracotta pots he'd spent an afternoon rolling over from the abandoned barn are gone now, the orange trees with them. He limps past the garden, tended by the ranks invented by him a moon before the end. SummerClan scents float on the breeze; some he recognises, some he doesn’t. Time has moved on. He’s the only one who hasn’t.
He raises his eyes as he passes the mountains, towering high above him and disappearing into the white, starlit clouds. Gazing up at it with glassy, grieving eyes, he remembers his first Gathering, beginning it falling on his face in front of the other leaders and ending it with a friend he loved until the end. Remembers the Gathering called when the moon didn’t shine, beginning it with his heart fluttering at the prospect of seeing Chim and ending it a sobbing mess against his fur. Remembers the sleep over nights with the Mountain Clan leaders, scrambling up tree trunks and giggling like kits. Remembers finding the foundling kits in a patch of ferns. Remembers that first burst of love—
Swallowing, Doefreckle squeezes his eyes shut and lowers his head. Remembers that other, terrible night. Blinking the tears away, he moves on.
He limps past the small copse of birch trees he’d spent hours decorating – a red twoleg blanket, a feast of freshkill, hundreds of flowers slotted into the bark. A flower left at the border. He pauses there a moment with a small, soft smile, imagines he can still see his old self flitting about between the trunks, humming cheerfully to himself, a big grin on his face, eyes bright with joy, with excitement, with nerves. His eyes drift to one of the trees and the vision fades into the breeze. In the pale moonlight, Doefreckle thinks he can still see a tuft of pale ginger fur snagged on the birch bark, still feel his warmth pinned under him as they lounge in the light of the stars, still see the gentleness slowly creeping into his eye. But there’s nothing there. There’s no scent of stone or water. It’s just like everything else that made up his life: an awful, wistful wanting.
Turning, Doefreckle drags his gaze away and pads into the long grass.
Behind him, a single, wilted flower is all that’s left of that night, forgotten on a branch.
He passes by SpringClan territory and gazes through the trees into the swirling memories of a sweeter, simpler time. The cherry orchard, the fireflies, the fight at the end. A love confession, unreturned. Big amber eyes and a necklace of gemstones. Tears beginning to spill over his cheeks, Doefreckle limps on. He passes over where the kits’ bodies were left abandoned, the victims of some stupid, senseless war no one remembers the reason for. The barren soil has been flattened by time, no longer stained dark by blood. No grass grows there, no flowers. It’s empty. A quiet, terrible longing aches in Doefreckle’s chest, restless and dark and painful. He wonders if they walk this land too, this dark, haunted, lonely place. If they do, he’s never seen them. He hopes they don’t. He hopes they made it to paradise.
Limping on, he comes to the edge of FallClan territory, to the dark, endless forest with the autumn coloured leaves. He peers into the shadows, searching for movement, for anything; for a moment, he feels like his old self again, that dangerous, childish curiosity stirring in his heart. There’s only darkness between the trunks now. Only silence. He turns to leave.
“Well, well,” a quiet voice says. Doefreckle turns back, blinking into the gloom for a moment before his eyes settle on a small, dark ginger she-cat sitting on the forest floor. She watches him with a hooded, disinterested gaze. “It’s a cold day in Hell when the ghosts come wandering. When was the last time I saw one? A year? A thousand? They all fade into the mist.” She gazes steadily at him; he gazes back, breath fogging in the cold air. Orange leaves whisper overhead. Vague memories from that terrible night push at the back of his mind, long repressed and half forgotten; he searches for a name. Peppermintpaw. Set to be the next medicine cat of FallClan, and with such promise ahead of her. Dead the same day as he. “Yes, I remember you. Came mewling for some foundling kit wit that big, lumbering oaf of a leader.” She pauses, dull, dead interest flickering for a brief moment in her gaze. It fades quickly back into the black, replaced by emptiness. “Blood on both your fur that night.”
He draws in a soft, shuddering breath and dips his head – slightly, numbly. “I haven’t seen another soul out here,” he says quietly, voice rough from disuse and so pathetic. Helpless. His brows knit together, pleading for something he doesn’t know how to ask for. Just… something more. An answer.
“Yes,” she replies, gaze drifting to the cold, empty meadow behind him. “It’s a lonely life, this.”
“Why are we here?” His voice cracks; his broken paw, snapped years ago by a tom whose eyes burned with mad scientist glee, gives out from under him and he half stumbles.
Her eyes follow him. “No better soul to haunt the living than a haunted one.”
Silence falls over them, bleak and hollow. Doefreckle’s throat works against a sob; what comes out instead is a crackly choking sound. He bows his head to the cold, dark earth, sucking in a shaky breath. Still, the apprentice watches him. He can feel her gaze boring into him, empty and prying. He lifts his eyes, meets hers. “Doefreckle,” he murmurs in answer to her unspoken question, voice scarcely loud enough to hear before it’s guided away by the cold breeze.
She nods once. “Doestar back then, I believe.”
Doefreckle smiles, faint and empty. With any possible answer dying on his tongue, he turns and leaves her to be swallowed back up by the gloom of the forest. The crickets have started to cry out. Mist swirls around his paws, over the streams and rabbit burrows where he used to hunt. He thinks of Chimerastar. He thinks of Shadedstar. He thinks of Eshek, of his brother, his mother, his friends. Calamityshrine. Glowstar. The old deputy with the twisted teeth. The ceremony of the leaves. The kit who only wanted to care for plants and bulbs, name now forgotten in the fog. WaterClan. NightClan. The bittersweet party when the former had been put to rest. First meetings, last ones. All the words he would have said, all the things he would have done, all the ones he would have gone to, if he'd known that dawn morning was his last. Sadness swims around him. Longing. Pale, fragile hope. The memory of being loved. The memory of sunlight warming his fur, of running through wildflower meadows and splashing through lakes, of laughing till his stomach hurt. Of being careless and young and full life. Of what it meant to truly be alive, only fully realised in the heartbeat before the impact.
And so he wanders on with the faint scent of mandarin and rosemary left behind on the breeze, this ghost of the SummerClan meadows.
we are the reckless
we are the wild youth
chasing visions of our futures
one day we'll reveal the truth
that one will die before he gets there
FIN.
[ this wasn't supposed to be so sad, this was supposed to be happy closure!!! :') guess my boy just gets to haunt y'all now in my absence. i remember i had a kitten who drowned in a river haunting summerclan as well, so i have a monopoly on the ghost market lmao. anyway, i love you all so much, i hope you're all doing well and that you're happy, and i'm sorry for the way it ended between us. take this as my proper, loving goodbye a year late and a year more grown up. doe is always gonna mean the world to me. maybe i cried. maybe jasmine thompson's cover of 7 years should be illegal. you'll never know ♡ reach out to me @cottagefoxes on insta or softschofield (kaitie)#9378 on discord if you wanna! mwah. ily xo, fox ]
