a small convention of fools [closed]

ooc- this takes place before the sitewide topic posted march 8th, as approved by staff

Though she had been the one to ask him to come on a patrol with her, Brick still felt... awkward. While she knew she was a little dumb, she had enough sense to know River Captain Loonwhisper might have reason to feel uneasy around her. A spot of tension between the river cats and Asylum exploded into something horrible. It hadn't even been a quarter moon since her sister had ended up killing his brother. Raisha had started acted strangely ever since she went up to their main camp. The standard went about her duties, but oddly aggressive and avoidant. Brick stared down at her paws as they tracked through a patch of cold mud. Whatever happened then, she didn't have time to ask before that rainy day. A normal patrol ended with Shrikefrost dead, and afterwards Raisha, Flashlight, and River Head Ivystar all got taken away by a furious Captain Lyralei. 'I've never seen her so angry before. It was scary.' And now...

She looked over at Loonwhisper to see what he was doing, her expression hidden beneath her hare pelt. What duties Head Ivystar had now rested on him. And regardless of how they left, the river was down four able cats. "I-I'm not going to do anything," she mewed with a little bit of distress coloring her voice. If her pawpads weren't already wet she could tell that they were sweating. She was terrible at talking under pressure, mostly because her thoughts ran so slow already, and it didn't help by feeling stressed. "I, uh, uhm..." Her brain stalled, and she shut her mouth. The overcast sky brought few answers, only the occasional light sprinkle of rain. Hardly any scent of prey passed them by. As if the mice thought a real shower would come down soon enough and so stayed in their tiny dens. Oh, how cute a tiny den and nest would be to see. Wait, no, that wasn't what she wanted to think about at all. Why was it so hard to find what she wanted to say? Think something useful for once, Brick!

Loonwhisper lifted his head at the sound of Brick's quivering voice, hardly acknowledging it, but listening all the same. His ears were focused on the minute sounds of moving things all around him. The territory yawned, sighed, and breathed a slow song of late Leafbare. In spite of the rising temperatures, the earth was still quite dead. It wrought his heart with stress, displayed only in the prickling of his feathered tail. As they came to a puddle of cold mud, Loonwhisper sank both paws into it, spreading his toes to let it seep into his skin. He wanted to sink... but the puddle was hardly a kit's whisker deep. He wiped his soiled paws on the dark parts of his pelt and continued, pressing on.

After a long while, he responded. "I know," and he crooned nothing else.

Fear was not an emotion he knew by name, no matter how he felt it. His terror, his little anxieties, they were transposed into other facets of being. He delegated the responsibilities to other parts of himself and let it fizzle. His pupils grew wide, enveloping the greens of his eyes, as he pressed fear into other places, opting to dissociate from this uncomfortable patrol into other places. Rabbit-cat: a funny chimera. He imagined her long, flopping ears twitching intently. Perhaps if she were a true rabbit-cat, she could find them prey. She could leap into the trees, twice as high as any SkyClan warrior. Loonwhisper giggled, seemingly at nothing.

"Would a rabbit-cat hunt prey, or would it consume grass?" he asked softly. "It would be at such odds with itself, and yet, it would have free will we can only dream off. It could choose at every moment to be either predator or prey. Given the choice, if you were not a cat, but a rab-cat, would you fight or flee? Right now, you are only a cat. We know that a cat cannot run when they feel pursued, because we are given claws and fangs with which we use to fight. And I figure, as we hunt together now, that you'd much rather be a rab-cat... because you'd flee, wouldn't you?"