i'm not a child [c, sprucebark]

Toadlegs needed guidance. Desperately. Perchstar was back, which meant that she would be looking over all of her warriors, which meant that Toadlegs was screwed. He was able to scrape by when Poppyshine was in charge, as sweet as she was, but Toadlegs was completely, one hundred percent certain that if Perchstar-- scary, cold, run-over Perchstar-- took one glance his way he'd be demoted immediately. Toadlegs simply couldn't let that happen. He'd be ridiculed endlessly.

First order of business when it came to impressing his leader was finally getting over his fear of water. He was a RiverClan cat, for the Stars sake, yet the mere thought of plunging into the river made Toadlegs shake with fear-- even if all of his other flaws were excusable, this one certainly wasn't. Therefore, Toadlegs needed a clanmate to help him learn how to swim, and fast. Every day was simply a countdown until Perch would schedule him to patrol with her.

Sprucebark was the first cat Toadlegs saw that morning when he stepped out of the warrior's den, and the tom quickly decided that he would do just fine. However, he couldn't just walk up to the senior warrior and ask him to teach him how to swim-- that would reveal that Toadlegs didn't know how, which wasn't the plan-- so an excuse formed itself in the tom's head as he ambled over to the calico warrior. "Sprucebark!" Toadlegs called, a little bouncy in his run, "I swore I saw a snake over by the riverbank just now! And it was huge-- I mean, ginormous! I needed back up! Do you mind if you helped me take it down? I'd be doing most of the work, obviously; i could've taken it myself if I wanted to, but I wanted help just in case, you know? Snakes are tricky!"

Toadlegs mouth ran much faster than his brain did. He had absolutely no idea how he was going to tie a dip in the river with a snake encounter, but it was too late to back out now.