birds of a feather [c]

She hadn't had an interest in being an apprentice yet, truthfully. The not-so-little kit sang her own song, followed her own tune. She was just fine with getting to know about the world from the confines of camp, and after all, it meant her mum didn't need to worry about her. It did mean, however, that she sometimes missed her mum terribly. Murkyriver didn't spend as much time in the nursery anymore as her kits were certainly old enough to behave themselves, but there was still nothing like the comfort of her mother's side during cold evenings. It had been a bit since she'd seen her mum or her dad, at least to Loonkit, and so she sat anxiously outside the nursery, hoping to find either one of them. Tiny little paws kneaded constantly into the sandy earth of camp, practically digging her a little hole where she stood.

"My pa is strong like the roots of a tree~ my ma's like the river, free as can be~♪♫" The kit hummed the little tune to herself, comforting herself as she waited for either one of them to appear.

The simultaneous mundanity and novelty of his daily life left Dovetail's mind reeling sometimes. Just like he had for most of his life, he still woke up in the morning and slept in the evening. He filled his hours with patrols and hunts. He fished and swam in the cool rivers of his chosen home. However, the nuance of those actions had changed with the addition of members to his family. In the past, these actions had all been done with only his siblings in mind. Every breath that he took, every pawstep he put forward was for their wellbeing. The only other cats to get even close to that importance in his life--until recently--had been Egretswoop, his mentor and near-sister, and Murkyriver. Murkyriver... and that was where things changed. Because at some point, she had become as important to him as breathing itself, and he could not envision himself without her. Complicated though their relationship was, and defying all definition and description, it ran through his blood. It had taken some time for him to come to terms with that. What were they to each other? He didn't quite know. But everything had turned on its head when she bore his kits.

Recontextualizing his behavior from that of a brother to that of a father made his head spin. Now, instead of simply protecting his siblings and his denmate, he spent every spare hour looking after four tiny lives that bore half of his own life within themselves. They looked up to him. They needed him, far more than his siblings ever had. They relied on him with an entirety that he had never seen before. He loved them, in return, with a ferocity that would have set the forest aflame to keep them warm. But the terrifying part, the one that constricted around his heart and awoke him panting in the middle of the night, was that he did not know how to be a father. He did not know what a father did. He did not know how a father acted to his kits, let alone to their mother. He did not know. What if he did it wrong? Visions of one-eyed specters haunted his every pawstep already. What if he led them to their doom?

Wrestling with this lack of knowledge, with this looming precipice that he approached closer to every day, kept his mind distant from his Clanmates as he moved automatically through his warrior duties. But nowhere was his predicament more immediate and viscerally real than when he returned to camp and interacted with his family. All of Dovetail's exhaustion, all of his dutiful serious silence dissolved like starlight when he caught sight of Loonkit sitting by the nursery. Perfect, tiny Loonkit. His daughter. Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. The warrior shell fell away, and found itself replaced with the uncertainty that was his core, the rawness of his inner self that he could not hide. All harshness, all coldness, gone. Something inside him always felt horribly soft when he looked upon his kits. But he could not hide it, the way he loved them. "Loonkit," he said gently, pale blue eyes offering her a slow blink of greeting. "What are you doing out right now? Surely you weren't looking for me or your mother again." Dovetail walked up to the little she-cat, regarding her fondly. "I was out on patrol, but I'm back now. I would spend all day in camp if I could. You know that."