A/N: Alright, it's Tawnypelt! This is actually based off a much older piece of mine I found in a notebook recently. I thought the concept was good, but I rewrote the fic to have better grammar and diction. I admit I haven't read the first series in a while, so some of these details might be slightly off. Please tell me if I got any of the events in the book wrong!

The Love My Father Showed

When I was a tiny, tiny kit, not even old enough to see, my entire world was the mingled smell of the nursing queens and the press of my brother's body up against me. I have distant, vague memories of that time, all of them the ghost of sensations. I can remember the feel of soft ferns beneath me in the nursery nests. I can remember the smell of milk and the softness of my mother's fur, and the rough, sharp sensation of her tongue over my thin pelt. These earliest memories have no sound or sight; I was far too small to have begun to see and hear. On their own, these recollections are of little interest. Most cats have some memory of this time, even if it is only a half-dream of sensations. But for me? Ah, for me, these memories are the only recollection I have of my father before his exile. I can remember his smell in my dreams. He stood over me (I do not know how I recall this, since I was blind at this time in my life) and he leaned down and began to groom my fur. After a while, he shifted to groom my brother, and then he left. I do not know if my brother remembers this, but for a very long time while I was very young, I clung to this memory as proof that I did have a father.

I remember when I was an older kit, one who could run about and play, how confused I was that other kits' fathers visited, but ours never did. I clung to the memory of that scent and the feel of that tongue as an anchor in a situation that I did not even approach understanding of. My mother never spoke about my father. And for a long time, neither did my brother or I; we were very young, but somehow we understood that to question our father's absence was to break an unspoken barrier between our mother and something terrible and dark.

When I first became an apprentice, I remember wondering about my father more. From how cats looked at us, and acted, I feared that he had done something terrible, something beyond cruel. Oh, I can remember lying awake at night in the apprentices' den, sick with fear and confusion over the mystery of my father's crimes. When Darkstripe told me and my brother that our father lived in ShadowClan, we were entranced. Why is it such a wonder that we tried to leave, that we let him sneak us out of camp, that we were swallowed up by his tales of a father's love, of a warm and gentle cat torn unfairly from the cats and Clan he loved the most. We were young – too young, again, to understand the reality of what that meant. Fireheart enlightened us. That hurt, it really did. I had not imagined a conspiracy of murder, of betrayal surrounding my father. It hurt me, the apprentice, but it hurt, me, the kit whose father groomed her with love in his eyes even more. The words we heard unsaid behind the story we were told – that he was a murderer, a traitor, an exile – destroyed the silly nursery-dreams of a kit who wanted to think her father was merely busy, busy enough to not come to the nursery.

Those were dark days. I lived with the knowledge of what my father had done, and I saw reflections of the hatred against him pressed up to the faces of my whole family, the three of us who had done no crime but be too close to the wrong cat. These actions had been there the entire time I was growing up, but for the first time, I saw them for what they truly were. Fireheart took my brother as an apprentice because he hated and feared our father, and saw my father in him – saw my father in his fur and his claws and his eyes, not in his actions or his soul. And the other cats, oh I heard their whispers of how we would turn out just like father, and I hated them. I hated them for hating father and for hating me. I loved my father, or at least I thought I did at the time, even though they all called him a traitor, because all kits are meant to love their fathers, or so the nursery queens would tell all us scrawny kits. My Clan watched me and held me away, and I was drowning in nothing at all, breaking apart from the isolation of my love and of my thoughts.

And so I left. I had planned to leave, down in my heart, in the dusk as I lay awake in the apprentice's den, thought my way through the territory to my father far away. I told no cat what I desired – my brother did not see our father the same way, even at my young age I could tell that, and my mother, I saw, hated my father with a broken, desperate passion, the passion of a cat who has lost something she loved with all her heart and knows that she will never, ever get it back. The loneliness, the sensation I felt of alone, and what in the end drove me to seek out my father, would, I think have been less severe had one of them shared my feelings. But I was alone, and I knew it. I knew that no cat in ThunderClan, none of the loyal warriors and apprentices and elders and queens, not my mentor, not my brother, not my mother understood that because I felt that all of my Clan hated me, that I fell back on loving my father, the only cat who had never, ever hurt me. I realize now that that was only true because I had never seen him, and knew him only from the single memory of his warm scent and loving touch, a memory that obscured all other thoughts and left me blind to everything but that love – love that had grown far too thin in the Clan that I no longer felt I could call home.

And, like I said, I left. I got up one day, early before anyone was awake in the camp, and slipped out into the forest beyond. I walked quickly, quietly, with a sense of direction and purpose and caution (for I still remembered the fate of my half-brother, Swiftpaw, and I shivered with fear at the shadows) but I reached the edge of the territory soon enough. I stepped over the edge, onto the Thunderpath, so quiet and undisturbed at this time of day, like an adder still and cold, its fangs hidden from plain sight. I stepped over the edge away from ThunderClan, and my brother, and my family, and I was happy for the first time in a long time, because I was that much closer – one line, one border, one wall – to the father I had convinced myself I loved.