Come With Me, But Not For Long [Closed]

It felt natural, leading a young cat out into the territory once again. The old warrior had had countless apprentices, even held ceremonies herself at one point, but no apprentice was ever the same. The tom she was leading now hadn't been born in ThunderClan, so she didn't have any sort of estimate as to what experience he had. Her lurching gait was smooth, but arthritis was pricking at her joints. She was old enough to be an elder and yet she wouldn't allow herself to retire. Not yet. Her parents had been older than she was now when she was born, she could keep going. 'Though mother was honestly something else.' Darkflight looked towards Yinpaw, gauging how comfortable he looked beneath the trees. "Yinpaw, how much do you know," she hopped over a branch that had fallen during a storm, "about hunting? Or fighting?" The humidity in the air was building; it would rain later today or during the night, yet for now, scents would be at their more pungent.

OOC: ohmygosh I am so sorry, I was really super busy with school and family issues so I wasn’t able to post. This is a really bad post, please excuse me.

I tried doing something different with my writing style today. Also, Yinpaw is claustrophobic and had some sort of PTSD from the surprise attack back when he was a loner, but of course he doesn’t remember it and it freaks him out.

Yinpaw has mixed feelings about being under the trees. Part of him found it exciting, and he found himself looking around with a kit-like curiosity. The way that the bark swirled with patterns down to the very minuscule detail, it’s rough feel against his pelt, and the clean leafy aroma it faintly emitted was all so fascinating to his moon-old consious. But then again, it made him feel trapped and afraid, like if the leafy confines of his new home were slowly moving in, about to crush him alive. The scarred black cat found himself gulping huge mouthfuls of heavy air in an effort to calm himself after briefly getting stuck between two closely wedged trees. The more he thought about it the holes in the trees looked a little like eyes all watching him and now that they looked like eyes the trees themselves looked a little like cats and now those cats were closing in and it was going to be like what happened in the alleyway and they’re going to hurt him they’re going to hurt him THEY’RE GOING TO HURT HIM THEY’RE-

Yinpaw’s mental panic attack was cut short after the short-legged tom tripped over a fallen branch. He let out a brief yelp of fear and ran straight into Darkflight, before realizing he was screaming over a branch. “Oh,” he thought out loud. “Sorry Darkflight,” he hastily apologized after realizing that he bumped into his mentor after tripping, “I d-don’t know why I’m so incompetent with this stuff. Every time I look at the trees, I feel like they’re trapping me and they’re about to hurt me or something. And it’s really dumb of a thing to be afraid of, but for some reason it feels all too real. How can I be a proper Thunderclan cat if I can’t even look at a tree without getting frightened?” he groaned. “Oh yeah, hunting and fighting. What you were talking about. I definitely cannot hunt. I tried a little in the medicine den when I was bored, just pouncing one fallen leaves and trying to catch bugs, but I couldn’t even do that. The kits do it better than me. At least I can somewhat do fighting, now that I think of it, but most of what I could remember are just uncoordinated slashes and randomly biting places. At the very least, I have a lot of scars on my pelt, so I must’ve fought before at some point.”

The she-cat's eyes softened upon seeing his discomfort and skittishness. She gently laid her tail on his shoulder, looking up at the long branches crisscrossing high above their heads. Darkflight couldn't feel any more at odds with what he was saying, but, she could see where he was coming from with that. He'd been raised in the strange world of the Twolegs. Someplace cold and open and without order. "I see." She took a deep breath before sighing. "When I was younger, Yinpaw, I and many of my clanmates were forced to live in Twolegplace." She left out the reason why, she didn't want to scare him any more than he already was. "We struggled without our trees and brush; ThunderClan cats are made for stealth among the undergrowth. When we returned we had a newfound appreciation for what was passed down to us. The trees shield us from the sun and rain, give us prey, and keep it cool down here on the forest floor. And if you decide to stay with us, you'll know the forest like your own pelt by the time you're a warrior. You'll never be by yourself in the territory unless you want to be." She offered him a kind face. Life on one side of the Twoleg's barriers was so different than on the other.

"In the meantime, let's teach you how to hunt, shall we?" The senior warrior raised her head and opened her maw, tasting for any scents. Nothing recent here, but that didn't mean they couldn't still train. "As I've told you, we specialize in stealth. Here, the most important thing to do is to remain undetectable. Keep quiet, out of sight, and downwind. Some prey rely on one of their senses more than the others, but all three are important." Wordlessly, she began to stalk absolutely nothing, looking to Yinpaw to copy her soft pawsteps and horizontal tail.