Exeunt [open for Night + 2 others]

ooc: for the True Reading Experience, throw the song on

The frost had just begun to thaw when the geese, no longer particularly bothered by the tomcat’s presence, began to honk and haw with anticipation. It was nearly time to take flight. The cold times, Leafbare, were waning. High temperatures and rainy mornings were awakening their instincts. Moons had passed since the day when, spurred forth by some unknown aching in his bones, the cat departed from his colony. A renegade. A deserter. His kin were far, far behind him now. The flock’s feline companion grew to understand their daily patterns. He followed them from pond to river to lake, even to wide grassy fields where twolegs took their kits (who were always very perplexed and enthused by his perceived dominion over the geese). He protected their goslings from little hands and put on flashy displays of playfulness for the curious, naked creatures. Compensated with their picnic scraps and relief from any hard-to-reach itching, the cat made an excellent living for himself. He cheated the twolegs, and they admired him for it. How funny, he might think, if he found anything particularly “funny.” His amusement was never quite clear.

Being well-acquainted with waterfowl, he knew their time together would one day, perhaps soon, come to an end. He could not float through the air, untethered, a nomad alongside them. One day, this pilgrimage would lead him back to the beginning. His home was among his own kind. Each day he woke up to greet the sun, he was more sure that StarClan had no plans to let him fade peacefully in this new life. The eventual demise he expected was not coming, and restlessness was building a den in his gut.

He was not sure what he was chasing when he left, though he could manage a guess. He wanted silence. He wanted his little world to turn, with no one to disrupt it. In truth, the tom was not a traveler or wandering spirit. He followed the flock because they gave him something nice to look at. It was something fascinating to watch and never be expected to take part in. The waterfowl held no expectations at all, happy to reap the benefits of their symbiotic bond, but never approaching him open-winged for their share. He was certain that if he stopped following some day, they would not beg for his return. They might not even realize he was gone. RiverClan, though, surely would. Surely did.

One morning, the flock began to waddle. Then they flapped. Then, one by one, they each lifted off the ground. In the park where they slept the night before, there was only one little pond to fish in, and it was no longer sustainable for their growing mass. The tomcat blinked up at them, listening to the beastly flapping and fluttering of a hundred wings all spiraling up towards the sky. All of them began to follow, except one.

The oldest goose in the flock did not lift its bowed neck from the grass. She was far too tired to continue. She would not survive any trip to faraway lands, or even, perhaps, to the edge of the clearing. The cat’s toes twitched towards the goose, ever aware of the danger her powerful beak still held in her crippled state. He had tangled with their type before, been wounded by them. This goose, though, had nowhere to go and nothing to defend. She had her eyes shut.

“I never told you my name,” he crooned. “My name is Loonwhisper. Like the bird. Like you. But… I am not like you, I do not think. I have tried to be, you know.”

Pressing his chin to his paws, he lay beside the dying bird. ”I do not know which thought I despise more: that they might remember me, as I remember them… Hooo-Hooo… or that they might have forgotten me altogether.”

There was a great pause, a wide divide in the sound of mourning doves and their paired breathing. When the tom looked up again, his companion had stopped moving entirely. Her feathers ruffled against the breeze. ”Memories… do they matter? We are here now, and then we are not.” He plucked a tail feather from her body before nuzzling the length of her elegant neck. “I will remember you until I do not. Then, your purpose to me is served. That's all there is. It is not sad or unfortunate.” This felt like a great revelation to Loonwhisper. Why should I hope to fade? Fading is guaranteed. It will come eventually.

Feather in mouth, he looked once more to the assembling flock, in their daring V formation, chasing the gathering sunlight upon that dizzying horizon. “Happy forgetting, birds. Honk! Honk!”

---

He hardly recognized the outskirts of territory until it all came flooding back into his bones like instinct. Even at dusk, without the light of day to guide him, he knew the sound of each stream individually. Loonwhisper darted bravely into the depths of the river, his muscles toughened and toned by the wandering and days of constant swimming. However, he lacked the fattened belly and stamina of his practiced, well-fed clanmates. His body was left fragile by scarcity, and he felt himself become winded before he could reach the bottom of the river. He pressed back up into the current and let it carry him downstream, floating anxiously in the foam. Each of his legs burned from exertion. He shivered, feeling the cold for the first time, and forced himself to turn and face the riverbank.

"Hoo-oo!" he howled, paddling with the power of three cats, shoveling his weak frame onto the sand and gripping it between his claws. The scrape of rocks against his pawpads made him wince. Loonwhisper's muscles contracted to tug his torso out of the water, his fur hanging in clumpy tendrils and dripping all around him, warbling with his ragged gasping and shaking. He hardly had the strength to stand. This was his home, and here he stood, a stranger. A phantom, perhaps. Loonwhisper's saucerlike eyes shifted to admire the furious river behind him, imagining a black and white pelt being tossed against the stones, moving downstream. It was... plausible. Silently, he asked for confirmation: Could I be a ghost after all?

No, he was not. And he was about to experience what the act in living had in store for him.

Soft pawsteps wound through the reeds, perhaps a little faster than the others, like a snow-fed stream made living. Then, she heard it.

"Hoo-oo!"

That noise, she wasn't immediately sure why it caused her to stop. One of the mud-caked risen grumbled in her direction and yet she still did not move. It echoed over and over and over again until it began to distort. The dead were starting to get irritated with her now, yet she seemed to have forgotten their very presence, returning them to mere ghosts. Her paws began moving on their own. First at a walk, then at a trot, and finally at a full sprint, the trees and rivulets whizzing past, too fast to properly even see. Why was she running? She wasn't sure, but it didn't matter if she ran headlong into some unforgiving rock or stump, all she knew was to keep running. The flapping ears of her hare pelt - the whole thing worn and in bad need of replacement - whipped her shoulders and only further encouraged her to keep speed. 'It was just a bird,' Some rational, cobweb-covered corner of her brain thought, and yet she did not slow.

Perhaps she should've!

Through the undergrowth came a tortoiseshell she-cat charging at breakneck speed, too fast to slow down or even change direction before slamming into something living. Harebounce's paws flew out from under her and she tumbled across the riverbank, covering herself and her unwitting victim in mud and bits of gravel. She had landed on her back and now lay extraordinarily dizzy from the collision. What was up? Or down? Or left or right? Or- urgh. She lay there like a turtle trapped on its own back, her eyes swimming and sense of balance shifting every which way. Eventually, though, she could see and think clearly again (as much as she could think clearly to begin with). But why could she see Loonwhisper? Albeit upside down, muddy, and skinnier than she remembered. Maybe she'd hit her head a little too hard... Maybe it was that, but she still called out with a groan not unlike an apprentice who had just been suddenly woken from their nest and still had the vestiges of sleep clinging to their brain. "Loon..?"

Loonwhisper quickly crumpled under the weight of a stranger, and though he braced his trembling muscles against the assault, there was no more fire left in his limbs to burn. Hollowed out, he could do nothing but twist his most sensitive body parts away and tumble. The spray of pebbles and mud subsided and both cats lay heaving in the dirt, with only the chirping of crickets to accompany them. What a display! RiverClan was guarding its borders well.

The tom rose halfway to his paws, processing the mirage before him from an exhausted crouch. A chimera! Half-rabbit, half-cat. A special and unique creature who he would know blind and deaf. Still sopping wet and weakened by the fury of the river’s current, Loonwhisper placed a paw upon her tattered rabbit ear and brushed it off of her face. Coming in close, he nearly touched his nose to hers to assure himself that he was not wrong (even though he didn’t know of any other beings like her in the world). She said his name, or part of it. The part that mattered.

“Rab-cat,” he confirmed, blinking brightly. “Brick.”

There was so much that he might be expected to put to words. Should he get ahead of it? Should he justify himself? ”Hello.” And that was all he chose to say.

Despite his long legs and strong frame, Rushpaw found it hard to keep up. The warrior was flighty and it seemed sometimes in her own world. No matter his best efforts, the apprentice found himself every few moments having to track her down through trodden foliage and traces of her scent. He thought about asking her to slow down or to focus but he was just an apprentice and it wasn't his place. Sighing, the russet tom followed after where he thought she'd gone. Slipping through the reeds, he finally found Harebounce... laying on her back. His whiskers twitched ever so slightly, what a funny sort of cat she was. It didn't bother him much, he found it to be rather amusing.

Eyes drifted upwards, following her sight, and what he saw there caused him to stiffen. There was an odd looking type of rogue. The black and white cat's frame was thin as a fallen twig but his gaze was wide as twin moons. Rushpaw padded forward to stand next to his clanmate as the fur along his neck prickled with discomfort. He'd never encountered anything other than clan cats and predators out on the territory before. Surely, a clan warrior wouldn't be this comfortable around a rouge? Although, she was a quirky one. Trying to find Loonwhisper's gaze, the apprentice realized he'd unintentionally widened his eyes to match that of the peculiar tom.

"Who are you? What are you doing on our territory? And are your eyes supposed to be that big?" Rushpaw was normally a cat of intentionality but he was so wrapped up in the unexpectedly odd nature of this moment that he couldn't help the last question that fell of his tongue. Blinking slightly at his own prying, the apprentice took a rather defensive stance next to Harebounce as he awaited some explanation to sate the new and unending curiosity.

For a while Harebounce too remained silent, reaching her paws up to touch both sides of his muzzle. He sure felt real. For good measure she moved his head from side to side in a swaying motion until a wide grin broke across her face. "It really is you!" He smelled a little odd - not unlike a goose's nest - but he still looked and acted how she remembered. She didn't even realize he hadn't said her clan-given name; he was gone by the time she'd had her warrior ceremony. "Brick" still felt so natural, especially if it came from his mouth.

While the brief, private reunion was nice, Rushpaw's sudden appearance brought her back to her senses. And also scrambled them. What should she even try to say first? Who Loonwhisper was? Ask Loon if he was just visiting or if he was coming back? (That was her hope, at least.) Explain as quickly as possible that they may soon be beset with the reanimated corpses of evil cats and that StarClan was well and fully dead, and that the clans were now being ruled over by their killers? Wow, she ran out of breath just thinking that. Or maybe that she'd ended up having kits with the cat he perhaps disliked the most - who had also disappeared not too soon after. Perhaps that one would be for later.

...Introductions would be a decent start. The tortoiseshell she-cat rolled back onto her stomach, taking care to shuffle her pelt back on top of her before she stood up. From this angle she could see just how thin Loonwhisper was. And how dirty, which was her own fault. She shifted her stance so she could brush away some of the debris with her tail. "I'm sorry Rushpaw, I don't know what came over me. This is Loonwhisper, I-we, well, he disappeared a few seasons ago. But I knew it was him." The instant she'd heard his distinctive Hoo-oo, nothing else mattered. She glanced intermittently between the two tomcats and the place in the undergrowth she'd blasted out of, wondering when those ghosts would catch up. "Loon, this is Rushpaw, he's Fly's boy." A little twinge moved her heart as she said that, remembering Darkglow's vanishing as the same night the forest fell. It was a strange coincidence, and had unfortunately been a little forgotten, much to Harebounce's discomfort.

Loonwhisper's head swiveled slowly at the sound of more frantic commotion as a small tom burst through the reeds. He was far too pleasantly surprised already to be surprised by much else, and as such the tom hardly twitched at the intrusion. Within a few heartbeats, Rushpaw had endeared himself to the former clan cat, who flicked a still-wet ear as he replied, "Hoo-oo. If eyes on cats came in larger size, wouldn't you be peculiar instead? How funny."

He said it was funny, though he did not laugh, did not even crack a smile, and his tail-tip stayed low to the ground with no inherent enthusiasm or kindness to openly display. He just stood at Brick's side, his gaze fastened to Rushpaw's. Still, there was something about his posture that conveyed instantaneous fondness. Fly's, she had said. Little Flypaw? The tom stayed very quiet for very long as an emotion ripped through him, something bittersweet as honey-coated yarrow root.

"I am... continuously perturbed," he finally crooned, "By life's willingness to move on with or without its many prying eyes."

It wasn't difficult to miss the odd, almost cosmic tension in both clan cats' shoulders, dense as Loonwhisper could be. Their eyes were shifting more than usual, and the tom swore that darkness danced at the ends of his vision. Their picturesque reunion began to feel more and more like a bone shifted slightly out of its joint. Blinking (for what felt like the first time since the conversation began), Loonwhisper meowed, "You are both... haunted. Hoooo."

In spite of himself he shifted his footing, ready to move against danger. "By what?"