In his fourth life he is a fool.
He is especially cruel in this life.
The battle with BloodClan has left him feeling hollow.
Perhaps dying so many times takes something out of a cat.
Perhaps it takes something vital.
One day he begins to wander.
At first he's wandering aimlessly but then he thinks he's decided to go to the Moonstone.
He's not a leader or a medicine day but he is in need of counsel.
He gets about to the barn where WindClan spent the night on their journey home.
Ravenpaw and Barley's barn.
Maybe he's caught up in memories or maybe his paws have started to ache.
Whatever it is, for whatever reason, he stops and turns around. He wanders through the fences and the fields and, because in this life he is a fool, when he smells cat-scent he follows it.
It leads him to nothing but a few tame kittypets, lapping at their pelts and soaking in the sun.
Once, he might've have turned around with a scoff and gone back home.
But now he thinks of Firestar and wonders if kittypets really are worth more than they seem.
He is a fool.
He starts a conversation.
They're nothing like Firestar but they're pleasant to talk to.
He tells them of Clan life and purrs when they marvel at it.
Maybe it's because they're easy to impress and he's not used to being impressive.
Or maybe it's because their wide-eyed amazement, their slack-jawed adoration, reminds him how truly thrilling Clan-life can be.
He can hardly believe he's forgotten that.
He weaves stories of half-truth. He tells daring tales and leaves behind the bits of gore, of flesh, of ugliness, and horror.
They gape and gasp and Onewhisker wonders if perhaps this feeling in his chest is why elders are always telling kits their glory stories.
And that's exactly what these kittypets are. They're kits, complete with those unassuming faces and soft bodies.
And who better than a kit to listen to an old tom's recollections?
Only three lives down and already Onewhisker feels so horribly old.
Who else would only flick their ears when the speaker stumbled over the place where a battle should have been?
Who else might have prompted him when his eyes grew cloudy with memories and, with fur fluffed in excitement and eyes wide, rushed life back into stories so full of death and bogged with blood they were carried like stones inside of memories?
Onewhisker is so tired.
And they are so young and free and unburdened there are parts of him that don't pity them.
And it is that empty place where pity should be, that dark corner of his heart that is normally so heavy with pity for those silly kittypets and their silly lives, that brings him back two moons later.
He comes back because the hole were pity was and now is not has been filled with an emotion Onewhisker cannot name, cannot bring himself to face.
So he comes back and looks for answers.
Instead-oh instead-because he is the fool of fools, he finds Smoke.
Her eyes are blue like river-water and cloudless-sky and sweet-berries.
"I heard you're one of the wild cats."
"I am."
They are fated for disaster.
She's lovely and soft and smells like a distinct lack of the moor and the wind.
He whispers stories in her perked ears and makes himself the hero of every one.
In his stories, he takes down BloodClan by himself, he returns to WindClan to their stolen home, he is admired and envied by all.
In his stories, he has never killed a kit.
He has never lost an apprentice.
He has never ran from a fight.
His mother is alive and well.
In his stories, he is Firestar.
It should shame him and it does, a little, when Smoke's eyes sparkle a little too long or she looks at him in quiet awe.
It should but he keeps doing it because, among a world of strangers, one can become anything and what Onewhisker wants to be more than anything is a hero.
A hero who strides in at just the right moment, who never second guesses, who never makes a wrong decision, and yet is somehow loved not because he is heroic but because he is good.
Firestar is all those things and more and, for a while, Onewhisker really thinks it's working.
He's starting to think like the Onewhisker in his stories.
He tries to stand up to Mudclaw on patrol, to do more than just send a pitying glance the next time he sees an apprentice teased at the Gathering, to be better.
Maybe what makes Onewhisker most foolish isn't that he wanted to be the hero, but that he actually thought he could be.
But it wasn't heroic of Onewhisker, that night beneath the moon, to fall into Smoke's pretty eyes, and lick her cheek with a tongue flavored in lies.
It wasn't not heroic to take their twisted relationship and twist it further.
It is, perhaps, the one thing in this life Onewhisker has no excuse for other than that she had been lovely and full of love for him and that while heroes don't make mistakes, Onewhisker certainly does.
He makes mistakes that meet him moons later, on a dark night, mistakes that have their mother's eyes.
She begs him to take that, that scrap of fur in his mouth and carry him home.
His nose is so small, like a dewdrop glistening beneath the stars, and Onewhisker says no.
Smoke begs him to reconsider and she pushes that black-and-white tom toward him.
He thinks of the jeers and the snarls and the humiliation he'll suffer if he confesses to creating this tiny, tiny kit.
He thinks of how Smoke was well-fed that Leaf-bare and how she complained of how sharp his ribs were when they curled together in the snow, sticking out from under his pelt.
He thinks of those kittypets that very first day he wandered far from home, without purpose. He thinks of how they meowed and pranced and chased butterflies and stretched out in patches of sun.
He thinks of Firestar and Cloudtail and the lives we choose but because he has never been a hero, Onewhisker does the selfish thing and refuses his son the choice.
Kittypet or warrior, he'll never know the difference, and maybe that is for the best.
The best for him and for Onewhisker.
He says no and Smoke scores him so deep with her claws that blood splatters across the grass. The kit, so young, dabs at a stray blood drop with one delicate, white paw.
"Go home."
She threatens him and promises to hate him and spread her hate to their son but it is done now.
It's over and she knows it so she picks him up and walks away.
He stays for a while in that cold air before sunrise, face stinging.
He watches her shape disappear into the night and when she is little more than a speck, he heads back to camp.
As he walks away he finally recognizes that hole inside him for what it is. That crevice where pity fled from so long ago, and wherein flooded something worse, he knows what it's full of.
He thinks of Firestar, the kittypet who saved the Clans, and of all the other kittypets he met by Barley's farm, fat and lazy and dumb to the horrors of sickness and hunger and pain.
Dumb to the horror of regret.
It's full of jealousy.
Onewhisker is not Firestar. He did not take his kittypet-born kin by the scruff and lead him home.
In his fourth life, he was a fool.
But a fool doesn't know his own heart and Onewhisker knows aplenty.
A fool makes mistakes because he is foolish.
Onewhisker hadn't been foolish.
He'd been cruel.
This is the first time where he makes a life instead of taking one away.
Yet, Onewhisker feels dead just the same.
***
Here we start to see a little bit of Onestar poking through in poor Onewhisker. I'm afraid he'll only be more Onestar-ish from here. Thank you so much to those who have left reviews and I hope you've enjoyed reading about Onestar's first four lives.
DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction using characters and world created by Erin Hunter. All rights are reserved and I do not claim any ownership. This story is for entertainment purposes only. I do not profit from the creation or publication of this story. I give my deepest gratitude and respect to the Hunters.
