sounds of life [closed]

There were a hundred things, from simple to impossible, that Raventail needed to do. Fortify the camp against the attacks he feared were to come. Find a way to boost morale. Bring Finchstar home. Hunt and fight like a warrior; organize patrols like a deputy; lead the Clan he hadn’t come back to that long ago. Perhaps leadership might have suited him under different circumstances. At the moment, however, keeping himself grounded felt sort of like trying to hold the Gorge’s sides together. His calmest moments were the fleeting ones spent at Dappleshine’s side before he collapsed into sleep. It wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t something he could control, either, and so he continued on.

Under a dull post-sunhigh sky, he rooted around in the fresh-kill pile with a paw until he fished out a sparrow. Once he’d secured it in his mouth, the small tom turned away from the pile in search of a private spot to eat. Instead, his gaze landed on a tall, graceful she-cat. He paused, sparrow dangling. Despite the shadows drowning WindClan, Zinnia had a perpetually unbothered air about her. Furthermore, she’d come from beyond the Clans. Raventail’s curiosity about her was halfway selfish—a distraction from what WindClan lost, what they needed him to be—but the rest felt genuine, almost kittish. The world outside the forest had loners, rogues, kittypets (as little as he understood them), barn cats, more kinds of lives than he could begin to imagine. Raventail couldn’t be any of them; that didn’t stop him from wanting to know.

He blinked. Zinnia was still there… What harm could there be in talking with a Clanmate? Maybe her calm would be contagious. Raventail approached with a flick of an ear, his greeting somewhat muffled by the sparrow: ”Zinnia, hey.” He set down his prey, then let himself flop onto the sandy ground in turn, stretching out his front legs. After a moment, he blinked up at her. ”I probably should’ve asked before I sat down, but—d’you have time for a chat?”

The shadows all around seemed nearly impossible to ignore; seemed to encompass the WindClan cats. Zinnia remained constant all the same, calm and pleasant as she'd been since her first meeting with their leader on the moor, when he had warned her of foxes and she had been more curious than afraid. Danger threatened their lives, yes, but hadn't it always? Every day that passed was a day that could prove to be their last, as was true for all things. It was a simple truth, one she had been taught since she could first understand.

(Why, then, did such a simple fact of life seem to bother these Clan-bound cats so much?)

She was brought down from her wonderings as the WindClan deputy - a leader in the absence of their leader, as she understood; someone who could step into Finchstar's paws, though she was fairly certain he had other responsibilities as well - joined her. "Raventail," she greeted politely, in part to be sure she'd remembered his name correctly. "Of course, unless there's something I'm meant to be doing at the moment that I've somehow missed." It was unlikely, as she'd done her best to pay close attention to each thing requested of her, but not impossible. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Truth be told, the concept of leaders and deputies was still more or less lost on her, but she was trying not to let it show. How could any one cat lead so many others, making decisions for all of them? Still, she had pledged herself to this life, and so she would remain silent, until and unless someone else raised the subject.

Amidst the two-part names held almost universally throughout the Clans, Zinnia’s stood out. Like Strom’s. Though Raventail was certain he’d remembered it, he relaxed further when Zinnia returned his greeting without a correction. ”If there was, I’d probably know about it.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it was truer than he would’ve liked. His ear twitched again, and he dropped his gaze, tapping a paw against the sand as he searched for brighter topics. ”Where are you from,” ”what’s life like there,”, ”how in StarClan’s name are you so calm when this is happening”—all things he wanted to know, and all rather shaky as far as conversation starters went. As much as he enjoyed talking to other cats, he’d never claimed to do it with grace.

Pulling the sparrow close, Raventail took a small bite. Then he nudged it toward Zinnia. In the time that took, he failed to come up with anything spectacular, so he settled for “honest.” ”Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious. I was just wondering how you’re settling in,” he said, a touch sheepish, ”especially after the Gathering. Those can be a lot to take in—it definitely was for me the first night I went, and I sort of knew what to expect.” He’d left the East Shore long ago, but he hadn't forgotten how long it had taken him to adjust to things like borders and Gatherings and sleeping out in the open. Life in the barn had come with its own changes. Now that he thought about it, some of WindClan’s customs were still strange to him. Raventail huffed out a laugh. ”I guess all of it might be a lot to take in.”

"I'd like to think that I'm doing alright," Zinnia mused. "Perhaps not as well as those that were born for things like this, but enough. The Gathering was... Fascinating," was the word she finally settled on to describe it. "So many things about the way the Clans live is still strange and foreign to me, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn more." It was the most polite way of phrasing that their way of life often failed to make any sort of sense that she could think of, and she hoped she hadn't offended with it. "So many separate groups, yet all bound by the same code of honor..."

(Why weren't they just one big Clan, again?)

She'd drifted off-topic, she realized, and swiftly tried to return to the original conversation. "But on the topic of the Gathering, there were more cats than I'd ever seen." The Garden hadn't been small, but from what she could gather its inhabitants evened out to perhaps a single Clan, maybe two; and even then it was rare that they all gathered in one place. "Truthfully, I fear that I may have been so caught up in the excitement that I missed most of the actual news," she admitted. Well. That and her tendency to daydream, she supposed. And the cat who'd spoken to her. And the sheer amount of things that had happened.

As Zinnia began, Raventail sat a bit straighter. However long it had taken him to learn Clan customs as they were meant to be, rather than what they’d become on the lakeshore, he was still a Clan cat by blood and birth. He’d been raised to believe in the power of his ancestors, whatever ways in which he disagreed with them. Even in the barn, he hadn’t been able to abandon the traditions he knew; in the end, WindClan’s hold was too firm to ignore. But Zinnia was a true outsider, with an entirely new perspective. Strange, she said. Foreign. Separate, yet united. On the surface, not altogether different from how he’d felt upon coming back to the moor, though Raventail was certain her opinion had a much different context behind it. ”What matters is, we can work together when it comes down to it,” he said quietly.

Then the conversation returned to the Gathering. ”That happens to most of us, I think,” Raventail said with a half-smile. ”To be honest, I never paid that much attention to the leaders until I had to. Most of the time, the news is just news—how prey’s running, new apprentices and warriors, things like that. It’s not usually this, um…eventful?” Looking back, there had been Dacepaw, Leaftwirl’s kitting, the reveal of Sparrowpaw’s execution, StagClan’s rise and abrupt disappearance… Maybe the forest was always this chaotic. Pulling himself away from that thought before it could fester, Raventail shrugged. ”Anyway, if it’s other Clans you’re interested in, talking to other cats at the Gathering’s a good way to learn. You might even get a few friends out of it.”

For a moment, he was quiet. His tail swished behind him once, twice. It still felt like an odd question to ask, but he couldn’t think of a way to stall further. Besides, he was already starting to breathe a little easier. It was…nice, just sitting and talking. ”Stop me if this is too personal, but where did you live before? I've been a Clan cat most of my life," he added, pushing past his hesitance, "so it's always nice to hear about things outside our part of the forest.”