you are someone else, and i am still right here [o]

Snow has never felt so cold before. Cold seeping into her downturned ears, cold nipping at her snowbound feet, cold numbing her cracking nose. Cold stinging at her face as hot, bubbling tears stream down her furry face. Winter is a cruel mistress, snow an unforgiving destroyer; terrible facts that have tiny, reeling Snowkit standing alone in the icy snow.

Winter, that cruel mistress, had killed her mother, taken her life with heart-wrenching coughs, a debilitating fatigue, and, finally, a permanent sleep, leaving her last remaining daughter- the sole survivor of a terrible winter- shaking and wailing at her still form in desperation and disbelief. Amberdawn was gone, Snowkit never got to meet her father, and now this miniscule, microscopic kit was left alone and fighting in a world much too big for her.

Now she stays where her mother will sleep forever, for the rest of her stolen life and Snowkit’s. Amberdawn and Snowkit were never close, never had that bond other kits have with their mothers, maybe due to her siblings deaths, the terrible cold and sickness that surrounded Amberdawn’s motherhood and Snowkit’s young life. They were never close but Amberdawn didn’t deserve to die, and Snowkit didn’t deserve to watch her mother breathe her last breaths with heaving hacks.

The world was too much for Snowkit, but she supposed she’ll have to grow into it. Show her mother that Snowkit deserved to survive, deserved to become a warrior, deserved to continue on in her mother’s memory.

Snowkit was deserving of so much more than this. And she knew it well.

Softly wreathed in the frosty dusting of a tremulously freezing blanket, fine dark fur tipped into curling tendrils of blanching ice; Jaystar looked as though he was entirely made of the unrelenting cold, wiry outline awash with the frigid light of the liminal weather. The faintest snapping of steps colliding with the freezing earth was the singular heralding to his otherwise silent drifting, a rapidly dilating and expanding pupil the finite revelator of his fixed attention on the little figure huddled before him. Delicately lined features slipping into the finest mimicry of a faint frown, Jaystar remained silent for several agonizingly long heartbeats as he continued to peer down at the ruffled little Snowkit, heavy dark tail curling inwards against the iced weight of his own torn and raw pads- settling in a close distance to the grief-sick kit out by her lonesome.

He had been born with grief in his very veins, the lingering weight of impending tragedy always carried near and dear to the fractured pieces of his tired heart, but seeing such a sentiment in one so young was unbecoming. Distantly, he wondered if this was how he often appeared to his own mother- or how Flywhisker had looked for every moment that he was apart. Head lifting in a silent, silky flourish of dark fur awash in the wan light of the bleakly pale sky, the sharp jut of his chin titled slightly as he cocked his head, quietly sizing up the pale-furred kit hunched miserably alongside him.

"Grief is an experience that easily affords the luxury of standing alone," Jaystar eventually began, low baritone of his raspy voice catching sharply against his pristine teeth, "growing ill from sitting out in the snow is not necessary to validate what hurts."