the amount of times i have done barre in ballet class to this banger, i love it. also now warriors needs to become canon on classic as an iliad-esque epic, like 800 flowery, weirdly sexual verses about a cat called rusty and a made-up clan called thunderclan and blind poets recite it at clan meetings bye. gold if you read this, get bishoppaw on that, they and bumble can collab


“Ah, thank you, charmed.” The voice had hardly spoken before a black and white tom, padding idly up, plucked the mouse from Bumblebeepaw’s teeth with his own and went on walking, tail swishing lazily behind him. Like nothing at all had happened; like taking a kill from someone else’s mouth — a stranger’s mouth — was the most natural thing in the world, not worthy at all of comment. Then, suddenly, Bacchuspaw swung around and turned back to the other apprentice, dropping the mouse and laying his paw atop it like, even with this momentary lull, he still wasn’t going to give it back. “No, you know, I really have to say something — I thought I could just let this go and find it funny. And it is. But I have to ask, because this is going to keep me up at night: are you stupid, or do you just not care?” The way he asked it, which was the way he said most things, was with an utterly incomprehensible middle ground of judgement and complete lack thereof. Like he was judging your idiocy, your slip-up, the embarrassment of you — and completely indifferent to it. What it came down to, really, was the low, uninflected laziness of his voice, the monotone that was less dreary than it was foppishly uncaring. But this time, there was a slight amused smile to his lidded eyes.

It was the misfortune of the century, at least for the uninformed masses, that NightClan and MoonClan had found themselves sharing a border under their new rulers: one with an utter disregard and arrogant contempt for where their territory ended and another began, content to walk over it like it wasn’t there at all and wave their tails in the face of anyone who protested, and the other locking themselves away behind imagined impenetrable walls, walls that stretched up to the heavens and Selene herself. One isolated by the sheer propaganda of their own vicious, infallible power, the other isolated by manipulated talk of that very propaganda. For the two at the top, the coincidence of NightClan and MoonClan’s compatibility might as well have been a choreographed dance; for everyone else below, it was the most contentious, flammable mischance.

“Or, third option — are you just used to your un-hideous face getting you out of arrogant encroachments of other Clans’ sovereignty?” As if Bacchuspaw gave a rat’s ass about sovereignty. He was being sarcastic, but he was also using the dry, disapproving voice he used for wayward fledglings who needed a cruel verbal beating, so it was hard to tell. He went through life with most people utterly incapable of telling whether he had been joking or whether he was genuinely being unkind to them, and usually it was some combination of the two. Erring slightly more towards the latter. He’d learned young that if he put on a slight smile, he could get away with all manner of cruelties, and that if he wiped it off, his compliments went unnoticed. Like, perhaps, the fact he’d just called Bumblebeepaw pretty. Or handsome. It was difficult to tell, and he rather liked that. It was a very fine thing, that verbal uncertainty, and something he enjoyed as much as he could enjoy anything in this drab, lifeless existence.

When the apprentice had been gearing up for a fight, Bacchuspaw had watched with a haughty, bemused air, looking down at them from down the length of his nosebridge. But at their joke, his lofty air shattered. It was like someone tugged aside the curtain and caught the tom half-dressed. A laugh, genuine and caught off guard, snorted from his nose and he quickly raised a paw to cover it. But it was already out, so Bacchuspaw just grinned at them past his paw, like a beetle on the road had made a very fine joke and disrupted his plans. “Alright, you have brains…” he muttered, still grinning, his head turning slightly and eyes wandering away. It made him realise, truly, clearly, just how much he needed to get out of that nursery if a bit of generic wordplay made him laugh. But thanks, glad someone appreciates it. “Ohh, ’appreciates’ is a bit far,” he argued, looking back at Bumblebeepaw with an affronted frown like they’d haggled ten dollars to his twenty. He leaned back slightly.

When the bengal moved forward, Bacchuspaw quickly got to his paws and backed away in a vague circle, leading Bumblebeepaw like a lion tamer. “Fun?” he echoed, still backing round, the mouse in his jaws and his eyes on the apprentice’s. “I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but I don’t think this qualifies as fun — you must be horribly boring.” They’d almost completed the circle; he stepped backwards with such lazy confidence that it was almost like any obstacles in his path, any rocks or twigs, brushed aside and made themselves scarce out of pure deference. It was little wonder he didn’t trip; the world was too scared to. “Really, what’s the issue? It’s just a mouse. Catch another one.” He had no reason not to comply; he was just goading. The faint hint of a smile betrayed that.

So your standards of fun must be pretty low as well. Sighing, Bacchuspaw suddenly stopped dead and sat down heavily. “Yes,” he agreed mournfully, shaking his head at the ground like it were truly so terrible a thing — this boredom. For someone who put so much stock by dying young, any day that passed without something awful or bloodcurdling or thrilling happening was a day wasted. “Nothing has been happening lately. The executions have all dried up and now all that’s left is prayers and confessionals. And there’s only so many times you can cause a ruckus at them before that starts to grow boring, too.” He sighed again, slumping, physically weighed down by the mirthless drudgery of what MoonClan had become. And he couldn’t say any of this to anyone except, maybe, Wickedpaw, so unloading his burdens on an apprentice at the border was all he, very selfishly, could do. If he had a fox trap, he’d trap Bumblebeepaw’s leg in it and keep them there as someone to talk at, a therapist with their mouth stuffed with leaves and dried blood crusted through their fur, someone silent to off-load his woes onto and then return to camp a little lighter.

Can’t catch a mouse yourself buddy? He looked up, bleary-eyed for a moment before the irritated, affronted disdain washed back over his face. “Well, I would, buddy,” he replied, thick with condescension, leaning slightly forward on the last word like he wanted the apprentice to feel the full force of what an idiotic word it was, “but I don’t know how. We have cats for that, and I’m not one of them.” He laughed at that. “Great heavens, I’m not one of them. No, I’m a Mother.” It didn’t occur to Bacchuspaw, already so used to MoonClan’s lifestyle, so centred around the tiny, insular, same-face world of the Estate even if he thought himself a dissenter, that that sentence might sound strange to anyone else outside of it — it was just a simple fact, the way of life, wanings and waxings and male Mothers. Everyone must have them. He said it in a very bored, dismissive sort of low tone, annoyed by the fact of his job, like he’d just drop the explanation and move on. He seemed totally oblivious to the fact he might still at risk of attack; his eyes hardly found Bumblebeepaw, instead wandering irritatedly around the woods surrounding them.

“Oh, my, a one-trick pony,” Bacchuspaw drawled disinterestedly, like he’d been personally let down, when they ran further with the buddy gag. “I really thought you might have some semblance of brain or wit — I really had such high hopes. And now they’re gone, shattered, thrown to the win. Oh, this life is so unfair. Such a miserable thing.”

When Bumblebeepaw continued, he wandered his eyes up from where he’d slumped down in his despair, watching them. He slightly quirked his brows at the implication of a crisis but otherwise stayed silent. Until — “oh, if we’re talking about the prey we’re expected to bring back,” he replied with a sly sort of smiling look, coming alive again as he pushed himself to his paws, “then— no.” He shook his head, sitting back down heavily like he was giving up. “No, I can’t say it. It’s too garish — it’s too exagéré. Oh, that I could be some thick-headed hunter who could look a trespasser dead in the eye and say ‘I’m taking you back to camp’, but alas, it’s too… I’ll throw up in my mouth just thinking the words. As the kids say: cringe.” Like Bacchuspaw weren’t a literal teenager. But if he were a human, you’d never know it — because he’d wear pince nez and foppish coats, and if someone made some sort of mocking comment he’d suddenly garrotte them with a switchblade. Unexpectedly, he pinpointed the dreary, head-tossing lamentation by throwing the apprentice a grin.

As Bumblebeepaw continued, he nodded along like he were taking their words to heart. “Oh, well, I’m no masochist,” he replied when they were done — and then suddenly tossed the mouse’s corpse into the thick undergrowth that surrounded the clearing. It disappeared from sight, Bacchuspaw’s head tipping back to watch its arc as it flew through the air and then vanished with a rustle of leaves. Then he looked back at Bumblebeepaw with a lazy-eyed, sharp-edged little grin — “oops” — and ran after it. It was a clear challenge: whoever got it first got to keep it. “When I find it, maybe you can tell me the ABCs of how to keep your fur so sleek,” he threw over to them as he made for the undergrowth, breathless with the thrill of movement and faintly, so lazily, so mockingly and incisively, flirtatious, — “are those rosettes natural or do you paint them on?”