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This was where it all began. Of course, her brother had gotten on her nerves before the death of Oakleaf, but it had gotten siginificantly worse after his death. Perhaps she had been too self-absorbed to notice that this was because he was in pain. Was that why he had blamed Oakleaf's suicide on her that fateful day, because he was hurt? Surely, that didn't justify it, but it had been the straw that broke the camel's back. After that moment, any empathy she had held with her brother had evaporated.
Or at least, it did, before he opened his stupid mouth in her den the other day. She should have just let Phantomfox kill him, she really should have. She was sure she would have been able to find someone in the forest somewhere that would complete Jackdawpaw's training, and it would save her a headache. After all, letting him speak had caused a crisis: part of her was made even angrier, the fire in her heart stoked, and the other part realized that maybe, just maybe, Pinesimmer had a point. Now, she still had half a mind to rip out his claws and make him eat them, she really did, but she supposed that she owed it to him to give him the benefit of the doubt. Well, owed it to him was a stretch. She owed him nothing. She owed it to herself to try to make ammends; after all, there was a part of her that wished things were different. All she had ever wanted was a perfect family, one where love and comraderie was the rule of the game with her littermates. That part of her knew that it was probably too late to change things now. Three of her brothers were dead, Dawnpoppy was on her last legs... Maybe that was why she invited him to a more private venue; she was becoming acutely aware that time was not unlimited. She wasn't entirely sure why, if she was being honest. It would be much easier to not, yet here she was.
She let out a soft sigh as she heard him approach, her gaze still transfixed on the waterfall's edge.
Pinesimmer didn't trust Aspenstar. He really had no reason to, considering. She only barely let him go, and he was pretty sure that was only because he temporarily shorted her brain from the cognitive dissonance of his experience versus what she wished were true. Of course, he'd been shocked by that much lack of fight himself. Enough so that he'd simply gotten up and walked out, heading back to his den to sort herbs, and leaving a poultice with his guard, and the instructions of how to apply it to Aspenstar's injured eye. It was probably too late to save it by now, and there had been no guarantee she'd even use the herbs, but he needed something to do with his paws, and that was about the only thing to fix, besides checking his own injuries. Wouldn't want her dying before she killed him, right?
Well, due to the fact he wasn't at all certain this meeting would result in him leaving alive, he'd brought company. Specifically, the she-cat who had saved his life. Not that he needed to owe her his life should she have to save him from his sister... but he did appreciate the assurance that he would PROBABLY survive the meeting. Eshek was more a fighter than he, so she could probably beat Aspenstar or hold her off until he could run. Funny, that he was admitting he couldn't handle his sister on his own. He could run his mouth all he wanted, but if it came to it, he wasn't convinced he could beat his sister in a fair fight, or that she wouldn't try to lie and claim he did something to get him out. Or even that she had Phantomfox or Larkspur hiding, waiting to attack him. Sad, that he had to be so paranoid for his own safety. It was nothing new to him in this clan though, not like anyone had cared what happened to him before or since. Except this random cat he was pretty sure that StarClan would or did hate, but he had no other options right now.
He sat down a foxlength away from Aspenstar without a word, following her gaze to the falls. What did one have left to say when they'd already bared their soul?
Eshek loped along behind Pinesimmer, eyes wandering around the rushing waterfall and the black, silhouetted pines rising up to meet the dark sky. She was tense and uneasy, her bravado slipping just enough for any cat to see the stiffness in her muscles and the sombreness of her eyes; she silently picked out escape routes as she plodded along in the medicine cat’s pawsteps. She could take the one-eyed leader, she was certain of that - but a meeting on Aspenstar’s own territory, with her own warriors and guards possibly lurking behind every tree… She tasted the air again; nothing. Since when was she loaning out her services, she wondered, the voice in her head somewhere between grim and terribly amused at the ridiculousness of the situation. A hooked smile played at Esh’s mouth as her eyes wandered up the ridge of the falls.
When Aspenstar’s pale pelt melted in through the dark, Eshek’s gaze settled on her, sweeping up and down. As Pinesimmer sat down, Esh stayed standing a moment longer, still looking at the leader openly and brazenly, but not aggressively. She was just… looking. Finally, she gave a small dip of her head - messy and unpracticed - and took a seat beside the medicine cat, uncomfortably close. Their pelts brushed; the ex-proxy had no concept of personal space. She’d promised Pinesimmer she’d stay silent, and so far she was honouring that; her mouth was clamped shut, though her eyes glittered wildly in the moonlight.
As she heard them approach, she turned her head in their direction with a sigh. "Your friend is not invited to speak. If she speaks, I will throw her off the cliff side. As you made painfully clear in our last discussion, I have lives to waste, but you two do not." She let out a mirthless laugh. She'd drown once; she wasn't afraid to drown again, especially if it was a reason to burn off some steam. "You, Pinesimmer, have my promise that you will not be harmed, but my grace does not extend to her. Are we understood?" When Aspenstar had left the instruction with the guard to let her brother know he was allowed to bring one feline, Aspenstar had been pretty much convinced that he'd show up alone anyways. After all, what NightClan cat would stand against Aspenstar to protect him ? She should have expected that he'd seek assistance from elsewhere. That didn't mean she liked it, though. She didn't like the fact that Eshek was here at all. In fact, it was quite unnerving to her. After all, the she-cat was on The List, a collection of cats that NightClan was under immediate orders to attack if they found her. The fact that the she-cat was looking at her, then, was an affront; yet, out of all cats, she should have expected that Eshek would be the one he brought. After all, it was her that saved him from probably a very long stay in SunClan's prison. Littlestar did not seem impressed with Pinesimmer. The look in her eye was a warning; whoever you are, strange other feline, you will not test me. Cats with nothing to lose were the most dangerous, and Aspenstar had absolutely nothing to lose.
She turned back to the waterfall, her gaze settling somewhere deep in the distance. Sure, in theory, she had objectives for this meeting. There were things that needed to be said. But in practice? She wasn't exactly sure how this would go, what there was to say. He had bore his heart; did that mean that it was time to bare hers? Was it only then that they would be able to get anywhere? There was a part of her that said yes, which meant that it was her turn to start.
"I know that you think things have been easy for me," she meowed, not looking at him. "The elaborate story you tell that everyone has always just loved me would make it seem so, that it was just an accident. Cats coddled me because I was darling and charming and everything the rest of you weren't." It was a slight jab, but she wasn't about to be able to do this without making fun of him at least once. "You seem to accuse me of having poor memory, forgetting the ways in which you were all thrown aside, but I can't imagine yours is much better, Pinesimmer. If it was, you'd remember." Remember what? Remember all of the ways that her childhood was stolen from her. Sure, Pinesimmer had gone largely ignored, but was that worse? "If my first crime against you was stealing all of their love, don't you remember how I did it?"
She turned towards him, her gaze exhausted. "Five kittens, four boys, one girl. The limelight was always going to be on me, Pinesimmer, because I was different. Lostriver knew that you all would be fine, some how, some way. But he didn't feel the same way about his little Aspenkit." She shifted slightly. "While his sons were big and strong, his daughter was small and weak, too soft for her own good. It's almost laughable that you think our parents coddled me, Pinesimmer. Those hours that I spent with Lostriver, what do you think we did? Pick daisies off the side of the road?" There was a slight bitterness in her voice. "No, those hours were spent destroying Aspenkit. Taking every softness she had and turning it off, creating a well oiled machine out of what had once been a child. He praised me because he created me, Pinesimmer. I was his canvas, a blank slate in which to paint a vivid picture of perfection." She turned away from him again to look back over the water. "His love for me is only pride in his own painstaking work. For every single praise you heard him say, there were sessions upon sessions of him telling me that I will never be good enough unless I am perfect. He believed that either you all could manage yourself well enough, or that you were a lost cause, I honestly cannot tell you, Pinesimmer. But I was his toy, his pride and joy because I was clay in his hands. Everything I did was perfect because he ensured it was." There was a slight sadness in her voice, the part of her that always wondered how things would have been if she had not been the object of her father's affection. "How else could you explain it? That I am naturally skilled enough to be top of the class? Get real, Pinesimmer. Look at me." She let out a humorless chuckle, glancing at herself. She was small, compact, not at all the cat that should have been at the top. "I earned every single ounce of praise I get. You have no idea how hard it was to earn it. How many times I had to be told that I would never be good enough before I became good enough. The best way to create a soldier is to destroy every remnant of their old self and build them up exactly in the way you want them to be built. Did you want that? Did you want to be the one? The prized possession, the proof that all things are possible? Did you want to be the one that was too weak to survive on her own? The one who had to be valuable before being loved? Sometimes, I wonder if I would have preferred to be you, completely ignored, but able to live. At least then I'd still be me, not some version of me someone else wanted." She had spent many evenings morning for the cat that could have been. Who would she have become on her own? Who would she have been had she been left to remain subpar? If she wasn't groomed to be queen? What if she'd been able to be a child? What if she didn't have to prove that she was good enough?
"Its almost astounding, how differently we've experienced the world." She'd been thinking about all of the things that he had said since their meeting; they haunted her, playing like an endless loop. God, they were at polar opposite ends of the spectrum. How were they ever going to find a middle ground? Was there a middle ground to be found? Would they always be stuck in this never ending cycle? The very idea exhausted her. "I don't even know where to go from here, Pinesimmer. I really don't. Something has to change, though."
She paused. What else had she needed to say that day that she couldn't? There was one thing... "I didn't tell you because I couldn't," she murmured, her shoulders slumped slightly. "Not a very good look to lose a life on the first week. Before you told the entire clan, only three cats knew, four if you count Cradlegrave. It needed to stay that way because it was the only way to avoid the clan doubting my abilities immediately. If that hurt you, not knowing, I really am sorry. I couldn't imagine a world where your first reaction wouldn't be to laugh and tell the entire clan what happened, which," she meowed with a squint, "wasn't an unfounded concern was it?" Her tail tip twitched in irritation. "I didn't know you cared. Until the other night, I didn't know you had the ability to care. Do you really even care?"
"I'd like to see you try. I think she'd have too much fun with that." Pinesimmer answered dryly, glancing at Eshek as if to confirm she would in fact love to have Aspenstar try and throw her off the cliff.
He felt back to silence, and then his sister spoke more. The lanky tom chose to be kind enough to listen and not interrupt, since she hadn't for him. Honestly, he wasn't entirely sure he believed her. Of course she wanted to spin a story, anything to make herself the victim, to place herself as hero of the story instead of the villain. Even still, he wasn't so stupid as to think that it didn't make sense, however much he hated it. After all, the core problem was the same, wasn't it? Their father destroying every unique part of them. The difference being that Aspenstar gave in to who he wanted her to be, and it earned her praise, and he, Pinesimmer, had rejected it all, because no amount of perfection would make him obedient enough, perfect enough, to compare to his broken sister. And between both sides lay their dead brothers, suffering somewhere in the middle. Presuming he chose to believer her, that is. Which, he did. For now, at least.
The brown tom leaned back slightly. "I could ask you the same. Do you care? You've said you do, but every single you've done has shown you don't. We could go round and round about this in circles if we want, see how long it takes one of us to fall into the water and join our brothers, not sure it'd do any good, though. I'm sure if dad could see he would just LOVE that imagery." Pinesimmer barked out a bitter laugh.
"Let's just go on the assumption we're both acting in good faith, even if that means we're both insane for a bit for leaning into... not trust, but about as close as we're going to get to it. Don't you dare call it something cheesy like 'love' or 'sibling affection' otherwise I think I'll just follow Oakleaf's example and throw myself into the water." He scrunched his nose, looking on the verge of gagging at the sugary words on his tongue. "So yes, we both care, blah, blah, blah, we're not just lying for the sake of it. Oh, and my first reaction to your death wasn't to laugh, by the way. No, that's a lie, it was. I thought Ahava was LYING, because no way you wouldn't tell me something that important. But apparently we're both very good at that, hiding the important things."
I'd like to see you try. I think she'd have too much fun with that. Eshek met Pinesimmer's glance with a smile, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at Aspenstar's warning. But as the two siblings started to bear their hearts - a truly agonising experience, given how emotionally-repressed the both of them clearly were, anger the only emotion the both of them could find common ground on - she started to withdraw into herself, sitting there in silence with the pain of both cats filling the cool night air. She watched Aspenstar as she spoke, eyes pained and sympathetic; there was something she could relate to in what she said, the perfect little soldier stripped of a childhood. Her attention was broken only by occasional glances at Pinesimmer, studying his profile as he listened. After a while, she simply bowed her head and gazed down at her paws, crushed under the knowledge that this was a private, intimate thing she had no right to bear witness to - a leader speaking of her lives, two siblings picking apart the stitches that had kept them from each other for all these years... It wasn't something she was supposed to see.
Finally, when Pinesimmer started to speak, clearly struggling to navigate the waters between sarcastic indifference and earnestness that a lifetime of trauma had created such a rift in the middle of, Esh opened her mouth to speak - to excuse herself - but quickly thought against it. Bowing her head to Aspenstar and giving Pinesimmer a gentle stroke along his spine with her tail to let him know she was still there if he needed her, Eshek padded away to the edge of the water and lay down on her stomach with her back to the two siblings, touching the silver pool with the tip of one paw and watching the ripples spread out in their own calm silence. The rush of the waterfall wasn't enough to drown out what either of them said, but it gave the illusion of privacy.
"The ultimate ending," she murmured in agreement, bitterness laced in her voice. For once, though, it wasn't aimed at him. It wasn't often that she considered the particular cross she had been forced to bear; it was far easier not to waste time considering how a cat goes from a child to an unstoppable force. After all, it didn't get her anywhere, and most of the time, she'd let herself be convinced by the idea that somehow, it was all for the best. Her father did what he did and it made her stronger, so how could she fault him for that? It was a strange Stockholm Syndrome, loving endlessly the cat who caused her to burn and rise again. "Maplevow never forgave me for not picking him as deputy," she then meowed, her head tilted to the side. "He took his anger to the grave. I didn't want that, but he didn't want this ," she gestured indistinctly with his paw. "He thought I thought he wasn't good enough. It was never that..." What a peculiar story to tell to demonstrate that she did care. "I was afraid that if he joined me, he would no longer be ignorable. He'd fall into the same trap that I did. The world would destroy him. Turns out, my rejection destroyed him just as much."
She let out a sigh. "It seems like that's par for the course, though, mm? Every decision I've made to try to protect one of you has only come back to hurt one of us, or all of us. I don't know how to show that I care, when every time I try, it all ends up pissed away in the end. All I ever wanted was for us all to be okay." She put a paw to her forehead, trying to massage her temple to prevent the migraine that was lingering from setting in. "The day you told me that Oakleaf killed himself because of me? Remember that day? I had brought you both there because it had become very, very apparent to me that we were running out of time to fix things. Hell, we did run out of time to fix things. I was going to have you two come with me. We were going to figure out what happened to him together. And then you said that, Pinesimmer, and I realized it was already too late. This all was just a lost cause. Should I have given up so easily? Could anyone blame me when I did?"
She then laughed out loud as he spoke. "Oh, trust me, Pinesimmer. I would rather blind my other eye and send myself face first into the water below than admit that I felt anything more than slight distaste for you when there were listening ears." She glanced over to Eshek. Oh, no. Even if she did love her brother, which she wasn't sure if she did,to be honest, she wouldn't have said so when anyone else could listen.
She then smiled wryly. "I'm good at hiding the imperfections, and you seem to be good at hiding... the only part of you that's even remotely tolerable, it seems. If you were like this more often, I probably wouldn't want to punt you to the moon most days," she responded with a slight chuckle, although she did sound surprised that he sounded genuine when he said his first reaction wasn't to laugh. God, had she really just misinterpretted their entire relationship?
"So, what does this mean? I have to let you out of solitary and let your girlfriend over there come hang out whenever she wants?" She paused to glance over to Eshek to monitor her reaction. In all honesty, she had absolutely no idea how Pinesimmer knew her, or how she kept her around after getting to know him. Maybe she was gay? That was the only reason a girl wouldn't immediately punch Pinesimmer in the face for talking to her, right? "Assuming we both care ," yeah, she couldn't blame him if he wanted to vomit in his mouth saying that out loud, she sure knew she did, "how do we make this work a little better?"
Post by Honeystorm on Jul 20, 2021 22:21:16 GMT -5
"Well we have two options. Kill each other, or treat each other better." Pinesimmer commented blandly. "Not really, we could probably come up with a hundred if we tried, but those are the ends of it anyway, so may as well just cut to the chase. We both cut the attitude and treat each other with some respect since we're stuck working with each other as leader and medicine cat, or we may as well just fight it out now and see if your lives are enough to win a two on one. And we both know which is the easier option." It wasn't even a question that the simpler, and probably almost preferred option was to just get rid of the other sibling, see which one won out. Otherwise they actually had to put in the effort to change themselves, to hold back and build at least a semi-civil relationship so that NightClan could function with Aspenstar leading it, and actually survive with Pinesimmer healing the clan.
