Chapter Twenty-Five
To say Grassfur was bemused was an extreme understatement.
"You want me to catch Cloudtuft's favorite food," he checked.
"That is what I said," Sapere informed him.
"Then you're going to take the prey and... do what now?"
The orange-and-white tabby swished her long tail across the cave floor, disturbing the leaf litter below. She repeated what she'd already told him a few minutes ago, although in slightly different words. "The prey, its scent will call the dream-spirit of Cloudtuft to me, so that I may communicate with him tonight."
Grassfur was about to glance at Maplepool in a sort of and what do you think of this? way, before remembering at the last moment that he hated her and she was annoying and she'd annoyed him just yesterday, a freshly dark splotch on his otherwise mellow memory of herb-gathering. The russet tom kept his eyes firmly on Sapere.
"You know what, I'm not even going to argue with that," he meowed. Or overthink it. If he tried to think at all about this insane situation beyond we're having an old cat chat with my brother, through a dream, so we can find each other after being separated by a blizzard and a weird river, he'd get his mind tied into knots. Either he was going to go with it, or he wasn't. And he'd made his choice yesterday, cemented when he'd seen the notably unnerving magical herb garden that afternoon.
"Good. You should work quickly. After, I will speak to you each, alone."
On that concerning note, Sapere waved them off with her tail. Grassfur turned to leave, paused, then turned back.
"Cloudtuft's favorite fish is salmon," he said, remembering. "They only show up in leaf-fall." Which was, coincidentally, why it was the white tom's favorite. RiverClan celebrated the salmon run as they feasted on the sudden influx of fish, and Cloudtuft had enjoyed it a little too much, in Grassfur's opinion.
The old cat offered him a roguish grin. "Not with this river."
As if. "I'll just catch a trout," he tossed over his shoulder as he exited the cave, this time not turning. "An old ragged cat couldn't tell the difference."
"Oh, but a dream-spirit can."
Grassfur had never been one for small talk or banter —that was Cloudtuft's thing, and he didn't see the point of it— but for some reason, he'd be happy to keep talking with Sapere about nothing forever. Exchanging words with her made him feel feather-light, at peace, carefree like a clear greenleaf sky...
But a stormcloud kept hanging in that picturesque scene, a fawn-and-ginger smudge of imperfection that went by the name of Maplepool.
She followed him silently; he sped up, annoyed and not bothering to think about why he was annoyed besides the plain fact that she was annoying. The WindClan cat was making him use the word annoy so much that the word itself was starting to get on his nerves.
Tonight. Sapere said the dream-messaging would happen tonight. He could ignore her until then.
And if she was lying, like Grassfur should suspect but didn't anymore, he could just leave. It was Maplepool's decision to stay here in the first place. He could blame her.
He gritted his teeth and walked to the river.
Today was another one of those days that was nothing like leaf-bare; the forest was lively and the river sparkled cheerfully. Catching a fish shouldn't be an issue; the bigger problem was the whole salmon thing. Grassfur was still vaguely skeptical about... everything, really, but if Sapere was just doing this for herself, why would she be so specific?
To trick you, of course, and she's done a fine job of that.
We've been through this. I decided to trust her. Although, come to think of it, he was possibly being the biggest fish-brain in the world.
Grassfur chose to entirely disregard Maplepool as he slipped into the water. It wasn't like she'd be any use; she acted like a flighty sparrow around water, and obviously she didn't know how to fish. The only thing the mottled she-cat would be here was an aggravation, and he had no time for those.
The mud beneath his paws was thick and held his weight, while the current was soft and barely nudged at him. A barely discernable change in temperature as he entered the river, there for only a flash, told him that the water was on the warm side.
Although he preferred to catch fish from the banks as opposed to actually swimming, this river —at least, this section of it— was wide and shallow, so he'd have to work with actually being in the water. In any case, Grassfur didn't care either way; though the elders in RiverClan had warned that not every river was safe, this one seemed fine enough.
He focused upstream.
If I trust Sapere enough to be doing this, I should trust that there are salmon in the river. That logic seemed very much like something his littermate would say.
But there's no such thing. The salmon just pass through in leaf-fall.
...In our section of the river.
The russet tom hated all this doubt. Why couldn't he just pick something and go with it, all the way through, without second-guessing anything?
A shadowy underwater movement of glimmering green scales— Grassfur studied it, then turned his head as he saw a flash of its yellow underbelly. Bluegill. Cloudtuft doesn't like those.
"Grassfur?"
He stiffened as he heard Maplepool's soft voice, then set his jaw and fixed his gaze on the river in front of him with such intensity that he was surprised he didn't burn the water dry. Ignore her. Ignore her. Ignore her. With each breath, he took in the belief that he hated her, he hated her, so that it once he repeated it enough it would turn him to stone and he wouldn't falter.
Why? asked that insistent voice in his head, and he didn't know, he just did, led blindly by his heart. Everything about her lit a fire within him, not the good light-bringing sort of flame that resided in the stars or the sun or fireflies, but the roaring wildfire that consumed everything in its path. Mindless agony, burning destruction, gouging out his insides until he wanted to do the same to her, to tear and claw and scream and snap.
The voice told him it was irrational, but the voice was a whisper while it was there and it was real and it was the only here and now he felt, the anger.
"Grassfur," Maplepool repeated cautiously.
The way she said his name. He couldn't handle it. Sometimes it was like this, when she spoke, where he wanted to wrap his claws around her tongue so she never spoke again.
And yet, there was that one time— days ago, before the fog... where it had given him pause.
Grassfur wasn't entirely sure where Maplepool actually was; even his peripheral vision couldn't see her, and she wasn't moving (thank StarClan; he thought he might really snap if he had to hear her paws thumping just one more time). From her mew, he could tell that she wanted to say something else. A question, perhaps? Well, he wasn't answering any question of hers, he thought with a flicker of empty satisfaction.
If she was trying to ask him something, or just say something to him in general, why not get out with it? Why just say the "Grassfur" twice and then clam up like she was mute? He had two working ears, didn't he? The whole thing helped to bolster the idea that Maplepool made bad decisions and never did anything right and he was perfectly justified in disliking her.
Or you're being nitpicky and finding justification, pointed out that small, very Cloudtufty, very annoying voice in his mind. He ignored it.
"Are you ignoring me?" Her voice sounded strained. The four words echoed in Grassfur's head and grated on his last nerves. Oh, he was so tempted to snap back a remark that showed how incredibly stupid that question was; something like "What else could I be doing, sleeping?" but that would annihilate the entire fact that he was, in fact, ignoring her in the first place.
He lashed out at a flash of silver just below the water and missed it narrowly. Frog-dung! The fish slipped past him in a hurry. That wasn't a salmon, but it would work.
Maplepool had fallen silent at last. Grassfur exhaled slowly, calming the raging storm in his mind, trying to just think of catching a fish and nothing else now that she wouldn't bother him anymore.
The russet tom barely finished that thought before splash, splash, Maplepool was in the river—
Maplepool was what—?
He stared at her, uncomprehending, for slightly too long before gathering himself and twisting his features back into the dark glare she deserved. Grassfur forced every last bit of surprise out of himself even though his head was running in a frenzied line of thought: she just up and jumped into the river, she's a WindClan cat, what if she drowns, don't be stupid it's too shallow for drowning and why would you care anyway, she just jumped into the river, how and why, I thought she was terrified of it, it was the one way I was able to keep her away from me when we were going upstream...!
There was some sort of expression carved into the lines of her face and the blaze of her amber eyes (a blaze? What was up with that? She didn't spark, she was the dullest, had always been the dullest) that Grassfur couldn't name, something between fear and defiance and a should-I-have-done-this uncertainty all at once.
"What's up with you?" she demanded, and it was so unlike Maplepool to demand anything that he was startled into meowing a "what?"
The fawn-and-ginger she-cat seemed to recoil slightly, drawing back as if she was having some second thoughts. "Ever since the herb gathering, something's been off. I thought we'd reached a— an understanding."
Grassfur scoffed. "What understanding?" He shoved as much disdain into his voice as possible. I could never understand you.
"I felt it, yesterday," she tried. "We were... peaceful, up until I tried to help you with the chamomile."
Oh, yes— that. Had his mood shift been so obvious? He'd been trying to hide it, because Sapere was there and watching and he'd felt the strangest wave of shame envelop him as he considered snapping at Maplepool in front of the old cat.
"So you want to know my problem, do you?" he spat. "Yeah, you and everyone else. Took you that long to work up the courage and you still can't just ask me straight out. That's the problem, and that's your problem!" Words were bubbling out of him, dark and oozing and venomous, as he struggled to put his own thoughts together.
Her trying to be careful around him— that was a part of it, and certainly the part that had set him of yesterday, but it felt like just a single leaf in a branching tree of hatred he couldn't fully figure out. Almost every cat tiptoed around him except Sweetleaf, but he hadn't loathed any of them with such vehemence.
But it was the only thing he had, so he clung to it, speaking on while Maplepool seemed to struggle with silent indignance and bewilderment.
Yesterday, he'd held back because Sapere was watching and for some inexplicable reason, he hadn't wanted to lash out in front of her.
But the old cat wasn't out here this time.
"Trying to tiptoe around me like I'm made of eggshells! Trying to coddle me or treat me like I'm a kit who can't handle a whiskerlength's fall! I hate it! I hate you and I've shown that a thousand times over, but you just take it like you're soil to be walked on— you don't stand up for yourself, you don't— you don't— stop trying so hard in all the wrong ways!"
He stopped talking. His words seemed to strike something in her, and she seemed to shake for a moment, breathing hard, before finally responding in a way that was completely subpar to the intense current of emotions running between them.
"I'm only trying not to offend you."
"I don't want it! I don't want to be treated like I'm about to explode! I don't get offended at every single thing!" The conversation was swerving now, veering away from the original issue of what's up with you? and he detested that he was almot grateful for it because he didn't have a clue about that.
Maplepool growled softly and ducked her head, not an expression of deference, but a quietly smoldering anger. "If you don't want to be treated that way, don't act like you're about to explode! You're being offended by me trying to not offend you!"
This was getting really out of hand. Grassfur wasn't entirely sure he was following everything anymore— perhaps a side effect of them using the word offend way too many times.
"I'm only 'offended' because you're the one acting," he retorted heatedly, swishing his tail through the water and sinking unsheathed claws into the muddy river bottom. "Acting like I am. Acting nice and careful all the time."
"I'm not acting!" She appeared personally affronted by this, but her voice didn't match his in volume at all. "It's called being nice. I'd especially have to be careful around you, since you're getting worked up over normal manners." Maplepool clamped her muzzle stiffly, as if biting back more words.
"Why would you be nice to me?" Grassfur's words were sharp. He didn't notice her flinch, already barreling on. "You obviously don't like me either; you're faking it, and it's only annoying when you do!"
"That's a whole different hornets' nest. Cats expect you to civil —at the very least— to everyone, no matter how you feel personally." The WindClan cat's tone was almost dismissive as she said the words, stiff and sharp, as if she were reciting something that had been told to her time and time again. Her eyes followed a butterfly as it fluttered past them, soaring on the light breeze. Grassfur suddenly felt tired, as if he'd been drained of words as well as anger, and lowered his hackles.
"Well, I don't. So just... stop."
Their confrontation had been intense but brief, escalating only to drop back down. Maplepool looked simply confused, entirely uncomprehending of the idea that Grassfur didn't expect or want her to play meaningless games around him.
"Fine. If that's what you want."
"Enough about what I want already!" he nearly shouted. "What do you want?"
Now she was completely confused, her mystification showing in the uneasy twitch of her ears. She stared at him for a moment that stretched into forever, then turned away from him and lashed out at the river with unsheathed claws. Grassfur ducked away from the splash in reflex and stared at the fish that had just barely escaped her paws.
Speckled back, pink-tinted underbelly— that was a salmon. Undeniably, definitely a salmon.
Great StarClan. Sapere is right.
Grassfur preferred brooding over this mystery as opposed to the hot mess and impulsive words that had been his interaction with Maplepool.
That old cat is a witch. Herbs growing in the middle of leaf-bare— a river that has salmon— ostensible magic and dreams— let's not even talk about the fog.
His thoughts slowly, grudgingly circled back to Maplepool, mostly because she was still in front of him. The russet tom considered snapping at her to get out of the way so he could catch a fish, but found that he didn't have the desire to. Instead, he sidestepped, moving around her and a few pawsteps further upstream.
He dipped his head into the water to clear it and emerged with a splash, ready to focus on the task and nothing else. Catch a salmon first, sort out complicated things later, or not at all.
The RiverClan cat waited for so long that he was starting to think he might have misidentified some other fish as a salmon when finally, another swam past. He lunged, quick as a snake, and caught the salmon in his teeth. Grassfur bit down on the thrashing fish's spine. Warm blood flooded his jaws.
Maplepool had left the river some time ago; he didn't know where, and he didn't particularly care. He felt calmer, lighter, without her presence. Triumphant, Grassfur carried his catch back to the cave, where both she-cats were waiting.
"Good," Sapere said simply. She rose gracefully to her paws and stretched, nodding to Maplepool before padding towards Grassfur. "Walk with me."
This was probably the "I will speak to you each" that she'd mentioned earlier. Had she already done that with Maplepool, while Grassfur had been fishing? He felt a vague sense of unfounded irritation at the thought.
Both cats padded past the lichen and back out into the sunlight, the russet tom following the orange-and-white she-cat obediently. There was no reason to be difficult. Grassfur noted that Sapere's gait was slightly shaky, her pelt tattered in places, her whiskers and muzzle greyed; she was possibly older than the oldest elder in all the four Clans. The regal way she held herself, the general way she acted, was almost enough to make him forget.
If someone had told past Grassfur that he'd run into an old she-cat after being pummeled and tossed by a river, he would spend his every waking moment waiting in deep dread for that day. His only experiences with old she-cats were RiverClan's elders, and they were the worst. If he'd woken up to one of them finding him and Maplepool by the river, he could all too well imagine how that would pan out:
"Oh, sweetie-berry, are you all right? Come to my den, honey-sugar-kitten, dry yourself up and have a nice nap!"
An annoyed remark from his end.
The resulting shock masked by an indulging smile.
Further difficulties from him, because he detested those fake saccharine smiles.
The smile strained, nearly bursting at its seams.
They played some kind of game he wanted no part of, a figure-out-the-nice-thing-to-say and I-bet-I-can-shove-the-most-politeness-down-my-own-throat instead of just... saying what they wanted to say.
Not Sapere. He'd called her an old ragged cat several times over and the grin she was giving him right now was real and wonderful.
"Look, Grass," she said, swinging her head across the entire view. "The sun, it shines through clouds— separation. An omen that our parting is near."
He should feel happy about that. Relieved, even. Perhaps he should make a snarky comment about exactly how happy he'd be —or thought he should be— about that.
He did not.
"My name's Grassfur," he ended up saying.
"Is a name without permanence a proper name?" the old she-cat mused. As Grassfur blinked, trying to comprehend, she continued. "Our cultures, they are quite different, or so appears. A sign of how wide this world truly spans."
"What do you know about my culture?" the russet tom asked, echoing the word with slight emphasis.
"Your customs, hierachy, the Moon Tunnels. Maplepool told me of the Clans from which you came and the journey you are on." Sapere, Grassfur noticed, called Maplepool by her full name. He suspected that she was calling him "Grass" to bother him, not because she had any actual problem with a Clan cat's changing suffixes.
Then he felt angry, because how dare she blurt out all information about them to a complete stranger? Did she have no sense at all?
"She told you everything?" he asked, unable and perhaps unwilling to keep the harsh bite out of his voice.
"Well, it is hard to know what it is you don't know," Sapere said in her calmy unbothered way. She came to a halt by the edge of the river, a little further downstream than Grassfur had ever been. Her dingy pelt was shaded by the branches of a pine tree. The russet tom went to join her and sat down as she did, feeling the soft brush of air as a breeze blew past.
Then the orange-and-white cat pierced him with hazel eyes. If looks could kill, he'd be dead; not because of any menace (there was none), but because he felt like he was being flayed open and she could see everything inside him.
"Do you anger because the information was shared, or because it was Maplepool who shared it?"
That was far too observant for Grassfur's comfort. Don't think about it, he told himself, don't answer that question, even in your head— but that traitorous little voice in his mind grabbed Sapere's words and ran with it, gleefully.
There's no harm in telling even a stranger something like that. It's not like it's a secret.
Shut up.
You know you'd do it if Sapere asked you.
I wouldn't. And if I did, I'd think about it before spewing everything out.
How do you know that she didn't?
He uttered a soft, wordless growl and chose pointedly not to say anything out loud. Sapere seemed unperturbed by this, cheerfully disregarding the unanswered question and going on.
"Let us move to the original intention of this conversation."
"Oh, yes, let's." His voice was rougher than it really needed to be.
"Tell me about Cloudtuft."
Grassfur wasn't entirely sure what he'd been expecting, but that certainly wasn't it. He responded with his first reaction— "Why?"
"The messaging of dreams requires it."
"That's a vague response. Not sure if I trust it."
"It was purposefully so."
The russet tom eyed the tabby with skepticism. "You know what, fine. It's not like it changes anything. He's my brother. White tom. Blue eyes like the sky. Really fluffy; bigger than me, slightly." Sapere had a certain way of looking completely unsurprised at anything, and Grassfur couldn't tell whether she was aware of any of this information or not. Knowing her, and Maplepool's apparent tendency to oversharing, he thought she might already know.
"You and I both know that's not what I'm looking for."
Did he? He did, maybe, somewhere, slightly. "He's annoying at times," he tried.
"Littermates, they do get in each others' pelts at times, do they not?"
"Sure." Grassfur paused. He had never been away from his brother for longer than a few hours, in RiverClan, but how long was it now...? Five days? Almost a quarter moon. "He's... logical, definitely. Cloudtuft likes to think about things, and then overthink them. Honestly, he's a bigger skeptic than I am."
There was a beat of silence. Then he added thoughtfully, "You know, even if you are telling the truth and you visit him tonight, I don't think he'd actually listen to you. He might pass it off as— as the inexplicable whims of his subconscious, or something, after he wakes up."
For once, Sapere actually looked alarmed.
"That! Neither of you thought to perhaps lead with that?" She stood up, looking into the evergreen forest. "Perhaps I may message the other two as well... bolster his beliefs." More to herself, she started muttering plans, something about probably havig enough herbs but needing to catch more prey.
The other two— oh, Maplepool told her about them, too. Grassfur grimaced. At this point, he should probably just treat Sapere like she knew everything he did unless she asked for clarification.
"In any case, go on," Sapere urged, settling back down and wrapping her long tail around her paws.
"He likes to act like nothing bothers him," Grassfur said at once; he'd been puzzling over his slightly eccentric brother while waiting for the old cat, and now he was spilling all those thoughts out loud. "Like the tunnels. He talks about it like it's no big deal, walking to our deaths, okay, that's fine." The russet tom thought he might be rambling at this point, but pressed on. "He's carefree, in the sense that he doesn't care. You don't really notice it— from a distance he just looks... friendly, I guess."
"Friendliness, it was mentioned by Maplepool." Sapere tilted her head.
Was it? Grassfur was too distracted by figuring out his brother to feel indignant about that (she didn't have the right to say a thing about him whether it was good or bad, how could she be so entitled, she'd only known him for a day).
"Friendly, sure. He hit it off real well with cats at Gatherings." From what I know. Grassfur hadn't paid much attention to his brother back then. "But he..." he hesitated. "He doesn't have anyone he's really close to." Though, to be fair, the pickings were slim if you discount me and Sweetleaf. Heronwing was a straight up horrible jerk, and the other two in that litter... I couldn't be around them for more than a minute before wanting to claw something.
These were things that only Grassfur could tell Sapere; only he had been by Cloudtuft for those thirteen moons of growing up and coming of age. Whatever Maplepool saw, it certainly wasn't everything to the white tom.
Sapere watched him almost expectantly, as if she sensed there was more to be said. "His behavior," she prompted, "is it consistent? Have there been exceptions?"
Grassfur blinked, considering.
There was something—
"Twolegplace," he nearly exclaimed, fur raising. "Cloudtuft was mad. I'd never seen him so out of control before. Maplepool got kidnapped and he kind of lost it."
That might have been an exaggeration; Grassfur's reminiscences of the Twolegplace that they had passed by were blurry, fuzzy messes.
"The place of Twolegs," Sapere echoed thoughtfully. "Could it be..."
He frowned at her, baffled. "Twolegplace. Where Twolegs live. It's got a lot of dogs and smells horrible." That was the gist of what he remembered.
"The city!" Her hazel eyes cleared, as if somehing had clicked into place. The old she-cat made an almost disdainful noise. "If it is the city you were in, then there is no doubt that Cloudtuft would have been— off. Humans poison the air and the city brings out the worst in us all."
Grassfur didn't know what humans were, but if the city was Twolegplace... well, that did make some sense.
"The rest of your group, how did they act?" Sapere asked.
He wasn't sure why that was relevant, but he answered anyway, realization dawning as he spoke. "Flamepaw ran off and then stayed hiding in a tree instead of fighting the dog with us." I didn't have her pegged as the type to hide from battle, no matter how injured she was. Then again, I don't know her well. "Stonefall jumped from the tree, and he" —a flash of blood and a raging gray tabby in Grassfur's memory— "he nearly killed that dog after we already defeated it."
"Flamepaw, she is brave; Stonefall, he is gentle, or so I presume," meowed Sapere. Grassfur nodded; it certainly wasn't exact, but both those words seemed to be at least a facet of the respective cats' personalities.
"Maplepool yelled at me," Grassfur said, blinking rapidly. He'd almost forgotten; five days of her being her usual meek self had all but washed away the unpleasant recollection like sand in a river. He didn't want to linger on that, so he quickly added more words to move onward. "But— I didn't notice anything different about me."
Sapere looked at him closely, a strange expression on her face. Moments passed, a hesitation, then: "That is because you are already at your worst, Grassfur."
A long, stretching silence, punctuated by birdsong and river-gushing. He was acutely aware that he was staring at her.
"That hurt," Grassfur said at last, feeling and perhaps sounding like a kit in his surprise. This wasn't the usual light insult from Sapere that rolled off his back like a raindrop; this made his chest twist in a way he'd never felt before and he really didn't like it. Hadn't she done worse before? Hadn't she called him dry and wilted, said he had a sour aura, even? But that had been teasing, with an undercurrent of humor, and this was serious and stoic.
Her voice was odd, firm and unmovable but reluctant at the same time. "Words will do that."
Yes, that was what he'd been told, but he'd never really believed it. Words were just words, and if they bothered you, you were just sensitive. But now he was on the receiving end and he was not sensitive and yet... it... it stung.
"Words, they should be watched. They have more power than you know," he thought he might have heard Sapere say past the choking cloud of confusion that surrounded him.
Grassfur shook his head, because everything he lived his life by was hanging precariously in the balance and he wouldn't let it fall, he refused to let it fall. He couldn't be wrong. Words didn't hurt, shouldn't hurt, but Sapere just said one sentence and suddenly he was injured and smarting as if she'd dealt a physical blow. Already at your worst.
And it hurt that in the eyes of this cat in particular, this cat he had no reason to respect but did, he was the lowest of the low, so far that Twolegplace couldn't bring him down anymore.
He turned and fled, his paws carrying him back to the cave despite him wanting to be anywhere but here in this forest.
Maplepool was sitting languidly by one of the walls; she was unable to hide the flash of surprise crossing her face when she saw him, but nevertheless turned her head away from him.
He shouldn't care, and yet...
It felt like there were stones in his stomach, heavy and awful and cold. The russet tom tried to summon even a spark of hatred, something to distract him from these feelings he didn't know and didn't want, but found nothing.
Words, they should be watched.
The words he'd used with Maplepool— venom, all of it, poisonous words soaked in vile loathing.
Grassfur folded his limbs, almost collapsing in a pile, and tucked his muzzle under his paws. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if not seeing the cave would make it go away, so he could go back to being five-minutes-ago-Grassfur, who believed so strongly in being perfectly point-blank honest without care for what the other cat was thinking. Now he was the other cat, and he didn't like it one bit.
Mostly, he didn't like the idea that his own talking could have this effect on other cats.
I'm not wrong. Sapere is just a crazy elderly stranger.
Surely nothing I ever said could hurt someone else so much. Maplepool certainly never showed even a glimmer of being injured whenever he was feeling particularly irritated. He ignored old memories of RiverClan, of fights with Heronwing and sniping at Thymesong for never talking or trying to knock Meadowpelt's ego down a few notches.
He ignored everything. Tonight, Sapere would visit Cloudtuft, and they'd find each other again.
Then I can leave behind all of this star-cursed doubt in this stupid forest and the stupid river and fog and herb garden and whatever else.
I'll never look back.