happy halloween. here's a gore warning now- if you're uncomfortable with blood, cannibalism, and murder, this... probably isn't the story for you.
Stone was raised on a steady diet of his mother's love and warm blood. Probably. Maybe it was love, or maybe it was infatuation, or maybe it was a spiteful obsession. Maybe it was hate. He couldn't tell.
The blood was from his siblings- Mama had revealed that to him about a week after she started feeding him it. She told him his siblings were good cats and that he was a bad cat and maybe this would make him feel better. It didn't.
"Mama," Stone said, "this is making me feel sick."
"It's only in your head, my dear," Mama replied, gently squeezing the blood-soaked moss into his waiting mouth, or later, when it started to dry, feeding him the congealed red chunks. He took it because despite it all, he was hungry. The blood gave him nearly no nutritional content, and he was slowly starving, but at least it filled his stomach, albeit with death and fear and empty hope. It fogged his head and made him docile.
Mama said the blood made him a good son. "You're my little monster, aren't you?"
About a moon after he was born, a group of cats (clean, bright-eyed, and well-fed) found him and Mama in the ratty abandoned fox den they called their home. The new cats brought them to their "clan", they called it. He stuck close to Mama. Nobody commented on the smell of blood. Mama discreetly licked the red off of his muzzle before they entered the camp.
The first night, all Stone- sorry, Stonekit could do was complain, even after the new cats gave him water and honey and small prey to eat. He didn't like the new cats, and he didn't like the smell of the camp, and he didn't like the nursery, because there were six other kits in there, all crying and screaming and climbing all over him. He especially didn't like the nursery. Mama said she would take care of it.
Petalkit, a soft, sweet newborn thing, went missing that night. Mama resumed feeding him blood, which he hated, but at least it was fresher this time, and he knew that any hint of disagreement, of non-compliance, wouldn't end well for him. Stonekit didn't ask where she got it. Mama didn't like questions.
One of the other queens in the nursery, Petalkit's mother, let Stonekit suckle on her for a bit. The milk was everything blood was not. It swelled his stomach to almost breaking and its scent was good, and pure, and untainted. The queen asked Stonekit why Mama wouldn't let him suckle. He told her that Mama didn't like him enough to let him do that, which was the truth, but it wasn't the whole truth.
Mama only fed her other kits, the dead ones. Stonekit knew he wasn't her favorite, which was why he was surprised when he learned that Mama had let him live, but he would have preferred death to blood. Once he saw her slip out of the camp in the dead of night and so he followed her all the way to the old den. He found her begging her dead kits, the decaying corpses that she'd killed nearly two weeks ago laying in the dirt, to just drink, my darlings, drink or you'll starve.
It was a gruesome sight. The kits were already mangled and torn, but when they didn't respond she screamed and sliced at them even more viciously. They were so long dead that no blood flowed out, and she screamed again and ate them, flies and all. Stonekit wondered if she was mad.
Stonekit wondered if he was mad.
The next day, three kits went missing, and he drank hot blood, and Mama cried as she ate. She told him it was small prey, easy prey to catch. Stonekit believed her, but he doubted that what she was eating was ever meant to be prey.
He was glad for the clan now, for the kind, comforting queen with her milk, but he still feared for his life. He was almost three moons old now. He knew who killed Petalkit and those other three kits whose names he'd never bothered to learn so long ago (at least, it seemed so long ago. He'd seen a lot. He'd grown a lot). Mama made subtle threats towards him sometimes, and had only gotten more openly aggressive since the night she'd slipped out of camp. She actually bared her teeth at him in public now. The kind queen whose milk he'd been taking, long past the age where he should have stopped, grew more and more protective of him. Mama did not stop this from happening. The moons passed without any suspicious incidents, however, and she never acted on her threats. Stonekit wondered if Mama was losing her edge.
The queen died the day before he was to become an apprentice. She was found outside of camp with her insides torn out, half-eaten, and badger-scent all over her. The clan accepted this as an explanation. Stonekit did not, because he knew who her murderer was, and his insides twisted into tight knots, over and over. He wondered if the queen had felt her insides twisting too, and he felt his resolve harden even further.
The next day, he was Stonepaw, and he tried to kill Mama.
Of course, he didn't succeed. She was Mama, and she was tough and fast and most importantly, she was murderous. It was a bad idea by anybody's standards.
He attempted to ambush her, but she knew. And she spun and around and pinned him down before he even got a blow in. She was a sleek cat with soft fur who must have been beautiful in her youth, but right now in the dead of night, with the thin, watery moonlight shining from behind her, all he could see was a monster with blood staining her paws, her teeth, every hair on her body, the blood of everybody she'd ever killed. A monster who was ready to kill her only living son, barely out of kithood. A monster.
Stonepaw should have kept his mouth shut, but he had never been very good at making his mother happy.
"Pathetic," he said, and she slammed her paws down onto his windpipe, eyes flashing. "Monster."
"I'm pathetic?" she sneered. Her claws were pricking at his throat and she was pressing so hard that the world was getting dimmer by the second. Stonepaw wondered why she didn't just hurry up and get it over with. "Look at you. Look at yourself."
"Not... monster," he gasped.
"Oh, you're not a monster? You're not a monster?" she mocked. "You've been a monster in my eyes since the day you were born. That's why I chose you. That's why I killed the last three litters and you're the only one who's still here. You're a bad son and that's why you get to live."
"Not true." Stonepaw doubted he would last much longer. His lungs burned and his heart pounded in his chest. He felt like he was floating, spiralling away to some unknown land.
"When you're dead I'll eat you," Mama told him, "and I'll enjoy it. But for now you get to live. You're a self-fulfilling prophecy. You'll see the monster inside of you soon enough." She leaned back and Stonepaw shot up, coughing and massaging his throat. He couldn't bring himself to look her in the eye.
Mama left that night, her tail swishing behind her, fur smooth and soft and untouched. Almost pure-looking, as if blood cleansed her rather than dirtied her paws and soul. The clan gave their condolences to him in the moons following when they couldn't find her. They all said she was killed by a fox, snapped her neck falling off of a gorge, taken in by twolegs. All horrible endings for a horrible cat.
"Don't be so quick to assume she's dead," he said, licking his chops. "Don't pretend her presence isn't still here." He'd developed some cravings for blood recently.
They thought it was a false hope and a son's love for his mother. It wasn't. It was a warning, for himself, about himself. A little monster. Mama's little monster, however much he wanted to deny it.
It was a warning that was very much warranted.