Chapter Twenty-Eight
Grassfur didn't really know much, except that things hadn't been okay, and now they were okay again. Okay again? He tried out the words in his head with a few different inflections. None of them sounded right, but they all sounded like the truth. Which... made no sense, but it was how he felt, so he'd let himself go with it. He'd take the path of least resistance—the path that made all the sense in the world to every particle of him except his brain.
And that was why he was currently walking next to Sapere, as opposed to sticking his head into the darkest corner of her den and refusing to interact with any cat until it was time to head out of this forest permanently.
(He'd been seriously considering that yesterday.)
"He said he's sorry," Sapere informed Grassfur, "and that you're his brother."
The russet tom suspected that the look on his face, whatever it was resembling right now, was exactly what the old ragged cat was going for. If her very faint expression of amusement was anything to go off of, anyway.
"Did he mention anything about bees bumbling into his brain?" Wow, Cloudtuft, I'm your brother. And all this time I thought I was your pet rock!
"A direct quote, I will give it to you." The orange-and-white she-cat cleared her throat, speaking with slightly over-the-top solemnity. "'I want to tell Grassfur I'm sorry. That he's my brother, and he was more important than what we were arguing about.'"
It actually took Grassfur a few moments to remember what exactly he'd been arguing with his brother about. He'd seen some crazy things in the past several —five? six?— days since the blizzard, and the last time he'd actually seen Cloudtuft felt like a different lifetime. He had to pad backwards in time, all the way back to the normalcies of Clan life, then start at the very beginning of their journey to the Moon Tunnels.
Mad at Cloudtuft for siding with that aggravating apprentice— Cloudtuft mad at him for forcing everyone to keep travelling until dawn— Cloudtuft mad, this time not at him, because Maplepool was kidnapped— oh, yes, there it was, that was what had started it.
And then Grassfur had been bothered about why his brother was so obsessed with the cursed mottled WindClanner, and he'd confronted him about it, aaaaaaand so it went.
But his brother apologized. Cloudtuft plus apology. It wasn't a surprise, but Grassfur hadn't expected it, either, not when Cloudtuft had been angry enough to start ignoring him in the first place. Guess I know Sapere is telling the truth. She wouldn't have known that I was fighting with him. I doubt that Maplepool even noticed him ignoring me, so her blabbermouth wouldn't have done anything, for once. So it's real, and Sapere really is a dream visitor.
Unless she just gambled on it being likely that I'd have an argument with my brother.
That thought brought on a flurry of whispered words in his head, taunting, repeating. At your worst, Grassfur, at your worst. At your worst at your worst at your worst.
"Well, thanks, I guess," he meowed gruffly, having let the silence stretch on a little too long.
Things might be feeling "okay again," but the effect of Sapere's words from yesterday still lingered. Only... they made him feel bad in a different kind of way today. Yesterday, he'd felt what he'd only recently realized was an unfounded sting of betrayal: I gave you a bit of my heart and you pummeled it into the ground. "Okay again" meant he knew now that she hadn't done that, hadn't meant to do it one bit, even though he didn't know exactly how he knew. (He was going to put the actual meaning of "at your worst" to the side right now. It was the least of his problems.)
But "okay again" did not change that it had happened. First, that he'd given anything to her at all, that he was so quickly vulnerable to an almost total stranger. And, second, that the almost total stranger had so easily done damage without even trying.
With words.
That was not fair. Not allowed. Words shouldn't be able to do that.
So now, instead of betrayed, he was absolutely terrified. Half of him shouted ABSOLUTELY NOT, but the other half was quite affirmative about how it felt. Absolutely terrified of Sapere, of the power she somehow held over him.
And all of him was very much resigned to his fate, because at some point he'd unconsciously opened a little part of him to her, and there was no going back from there. It was too late for his mind to snatch that piece of him back from his heart; it was already given away.
Somehow, he was still inexplicably drawn to her, wanted to talk to her, the very same kind of inexplicable way he was repulsed by Maplepool and wanted nothing to do with her. Emotions on the opposite end of the spectrum; same part of his mind, or his heart, or whatever it might be, guiding him.
"Your friends were very happy to learn that you're alive," Sapere mentioned mildly.
Grassfur snorted audibly at that. "They're not my friends. Did whatever she tell you imply that we were all a big happy family?"
She was Maplepool, of course. He trusted Sapere to know that— and that scared him too, that he trusted her so easily.
"No. It did not." Sapere smiled and didn't elaborate.
He shook his head, almost exasperated. Almost fondly exasperated? That was dangerous, too.
I'm letting you get through to me combined with I like you could only lead to I care about what you think of me.
And that was bad, that was bad, that was several thousand levels of bad. That went against everything he'd ever believed in, and the worst part was a little tugging, nagging feeling in his chest that said is it really so bad? and... I want to be a better cat—...?
I need Sweetleaf, he brooded suddenly. She'd keep him grounded in the midst of everything. She'd remind him that he was fine the way he was: Grasspaw, her favorite unconditionaly and always. She'd assure him that he wasn't obligated to change for anyone else; why would he be? And, if he mentioned that this arguably crazy old she-cat was the one making him question everything, he could imagine that she'd tell Sapere to kindly shove off. Grassfur indulged in playing out that scene in his head, expecting to feel better, but for some reason his first thought towards imaginary-Sweetleaf was no, don't, Sapere is a good cat.
Like he said: dangerous.
"Can you talk to any cat through dreams?" Grassfur blurted, abrupt, an idea involving Sapere's dream-messaging and Sweetleaf roughly taking shape.
Sapere was thoughtfully silent for a long moment, as if considering. "A location, a name, a description— I would need them. Herbs, of course, and favorite food, preferably."
"What happens if you don't know the location?"
"Nothing. The cat, they may never be found."
Grassfur was pretty sure she meant never be found for dream-messaging, but the words sent a prickle up his spine anyway. He shoved them away. I will find her if it's the last thing I do. If I haven't yet by the time we reach the Moon Tunnels, I will go back and tear up the world from corner to corner until I find Sweetleaf.
There was another stretch of quiet, interrupted periodically by a breeze shifting the pine trees, frequently by the chirping of birds, and constantly by the background burble of the river. Finally, Sapere said, "We should be heading back. I must discuss with you and Maplepool what happens next."
"So what was the point of this?" Grassfur gestured to the general direction of the forest with a paw as they turned around and started heading upstream, to Sapere's den.
"To pass on Cloudtuft's message to you."
"That's all?"
"And to tell you how very happy your not-friends were, knowing that you live."
"That's all?" Grassfur ignored how she embellished "very happy" with relish.
Sapere only smiled, and they walked back in silence.
Grassfur was only just starting to feel completely at ease when they made it back to the den. He fully expected Maplepool to shatter that general state of being calm and unbothered, but she... almost didn't. Almost. It seemed that he would never not feel a prickle of irritation scraping up his spine whenever she appeared in his field of vision, but it seemed a little less intense than usual, as if she were just a fly buzzing on the edge of his consciousness instead of a constant awful aggravation.
Or maybe he was just getting acclimated to the level of annoyance that Maplepool brought him to, and all smaller annoyances were now negligible. He'd have to test that theory out the next time he saw a mosquito.
The mottled WindClan she-cat was waiting for them by the entrance to the cave, tail curled over her paws. She watched Grassfur and Sapere with amber eyes that couldn't hide the glimmer of interest flickering through them.
His first instinct: Nosy vixen. What goes on between me and Sapere is private for me and Sapere. And can't you be productive? Did you just sit there stupidly the whole time we were talking?
His second, or perhaps that niggling voice that liked to hang around in the back of his head: I mean, Sapere did just say she was going to borrow me for a bit. Very cryptic. Any cat would be curious.
He didn't like the fact that the second instinct existed.
"Well!" said Sapere, halting and settling onto the ground near Maplepool. She did not go on. Grassfur stood for a minute, a tailength away from Maplepool, before lamely sitting down as well.
Well...? Grassfur grit his teeth and continued facing Sapere despite feeling Maplepool's eyes burning holes into his cheek. He was not going to exchange glances with her and bond over their shared confusion of the ragged old cat's eccentricities; he hardly wanted to acknowledge that they shared anything at all.
"Well?" Maplepool echoed tentatively, timidly, making Grassfur flick the tip of his tail irritably.
"The dream messages, they have been sent," Sapere said. "If all is well, your friends" —she eyed Grassfur; he glared at her without any real malice— "should be on their way here. Now is the time for you to repay your debts. Should you finish early, you may head off to meet them half-way."
Protesting wasn't even a idea in his mind at this point. It was the only right thing to do; Sapere had helped them, undeniably helped them, and they owed her a lot.
"What do you want us to do?" asked Maplepool.
"I was hoping to have some honey for my stocks, and my happiness," Sapere sighed, gazing out somewhere into the forest a little too dramatically. "Alas, the bees, they are sensitive, volatile..."
"Oh, don't worry," Maplepool meowed sweetly. The absolutely saccharine sugar that coated her voice made Grassfur turn to look at her, just in time to see her give him a mockingly sweet smile. "I'm very used to sensitive and volatile."
Sapere cackled. Before Grassfur fully registered what exactly Maplepool was getting at, the old she-cat caught her breath. "Ah, yes, Maplepool, of that I have no doubt. But teamwork, it is needed to manuever the bees, for your own safety. Teamwork, friendship, and camaderie."
"Why?" Grassfur asked, the word coming out like a demand to hide his curiosity.
"Those without, they will be attacked by the bees."
"I mean, we could—" Maplepool started softly, only for Sapere to continue on.
"So, instead," the orange-patched she-cat said, "I will give to you smaller, more numerous tasks. Maplepool, I would like for you to gather us food to last the next two days. Grassfur, to collect more herbs from the garden, the ones we gathered two days ago."
Grassfur recoiled inwardly.
He didn't hate Sapere's herb garden. It was just... the garden had lingering unpleasant feelings from last time. Gathering chamomile, carefully carefully carefully... and then Maplepool breaking into his trance, ruining his concentration and tearing his motivation to pieces, trying to tiptoe around him while offering advice like he was a volatile beehive—
I'm very used to sensitive and volatile. The words finally fully sunk in. I am not, Grassfur wanted to say, but it was too late now. You just act like I am! Didn't we have this conversation yesterday? I'm not easily offended, you just keep treating me like it!
He'd be thinking about her, bothered about her the whole time he was in the herb garden because of that, and great StarClan, he didn't want that. Not when he was relatively at peace with the world. He didn't want Maplepool to ruin it by forcing her way into his brain through a memory, but she would, if he went to the garden.
It got exhausting, sometimes, actively and constantly hating her. But how was he supposed to control how he felt?
"I feel like those tasks should be switched," Grassfur tried testily. Not that he was going to say why. He wasn't going to show how much Maplepool got to him.
"Do explain," Sapere encouraged, sounding entirely neutral.
The spiky-furred tom paused for a moment, thinking briefly. "She" —he jerked his head towards Maplepool— "can't hunt for all of us. I eat fish."
He did not like the exchanging of glances between the two she-cats.
"That will not be a problem. In any case, I am sure you can manage eating land prey," Sapere said mildly.
It was either yield or be seen as a whiny kitten, Grassfur realized. (He also marginally realized that there'd been many past arguments, back with the Clans, where he'd not yielded and, also, not given a single thought to his behavior. That was irksome, particularly because it irked him.)
So he sighed. "All right. Whatever."
"Go on," Sapere said, "complete your tasks. Return by sunset at the latest."
Maplepool opened and closed her mouth like a very stupid fish, as if she wanted to say something. Grassfur gave a small snort of disgust and whisked past her, making sure to give a wide berth so that not a hair on his pelt came in contact with any of hers.
He marched into the forest, following the vague memory of the herb garden's location coupled with the slightest scent of herbs that the breeze seemed to carry to him.
It wasn't hard to find; the herb garden was all bright and vibrant shades of green, bordering on ridiculously so, flowers and berries and leaves scattered everywhere in soft messes and patches covering the ground like the pelt of nature. Grassfur's eyes roamed the clearing until he found the large cluster of little white flowers, each with a perfectly round sun in its center. He made his way carefully towards it, trying not to step on any plants on his way there. His pawpads felt silky earth; the herbs seemed to almost part and make a path for him as he walked.
His nose picked out the one flowery scent he remembered most clearly from the influx of herb-scents (bitter woody fruity sweet sharp musky pleasant unpleasant, so many he could hardly describe them as a whole, let alone individually). Chamomile— he could only describe it as friendly, absurd as that was.
Grassfur hooked one flower between two of his claws, staring at its open face for a moment.
He wanted to do what he'd done last time: pick them meticulously off their stems, one by one, to make a lovely little pile of flawless white flowers.
But the sun was past its peak, and he could almost feel the time slipping away from his paws.
He really, really, really didn't want to use Maplepool's faster method.
Why? asked that annoying voice in his head.
Because her way is stupid.
It's fast, it gets things done, the voice said. Try again.
Because I was happy and doing fine before she butted in, and she ruined everything.
You weren't doing fine. It was painfully slow, the voice pointed out.
Because it's Maplepool and I hate her.
Of course— because you've too much pride for your own good.
Because "I just don't want to!" Grassfur snarled out loud, his words tearing a gash through the peaceful forest atmosphere. So leave it be!
He shut down his mind and stalked away from the chamomile towards the poppy flowers. He'd start with something else and go back to the chamomile later. So I have time to do everything, he told himself. Not so that he could think about gathering those insipid flowers a different way.
Poppy wasn't difficult. He plucked off ripe seedpods and tossed them a ways from the herb garden, roughly in the direction of a patch of sunlight so thay they could dry. At least half of them hit his targeted area, but he could go neaten it up later. He wasn't about to make ten thousand trips in and out of the herb garden for a few poppy heads.
Soon enough, when early afternoon had drifted into mid-afternoon, he'd finished collecting both poppy and the leaves on the tall purplish plant that he'd recognized but forgotten the name of. Next was an herb he certainly hadn't forgotten, bitter-grass, if only because of the vaguely suggestive look on Sapere's face when she'd named it. Grassfur started to head there—
"You know what I want?"
Five words. They caught him by surprise, and it was a miracle he didn't physically give a start; instead, his ears pricked reflexively, and he slowly turned around.
Before he saw her, he'd guessed it was Maplepool from her voice— only he'd kind of doubted it himself, for a moment, because it wasn't the meek and unassuming tenor he'd grown accustomed to hating, but a more... normal voice. A little bold, even. Almost a mimicry of one of Sapere's tones, the mildly contemplative one.
And then he did see her, and she was looking at him with hard amber eyes, and it made him very uncomfortable. He'd only seen that look twice before. He hated it every time, but a different kind of hate.
"What you want?" he echoed, too busy flipping through his memories to add any extra bite to his tone.
Yesterday morning, the river. He'd been ignoring her and then she'd jumped in the river with that same look in her eyes, on her face, and it eventually ended up with:
"Cats expect you to be civil," she'd said, or something along those lines.
"Well, I don't. So just stop," he'd told her.
"Fine, if that's what you want."
And that was it, that was the breaking point. He'd almost shouted at her, probably fully shouted, then. "Enough about what I want! What do you want?"
And now she was here, responding.
No. It couldn't be. All Grassfur's life, cats had disappointed him again and again by forgetting conversations not long after they'd happened. A cat who remembered —who referenced— a past exchange could not be the one cat he hated to the ends of the earth. That was some kind of next-level wrongness in his understanding of the world. Sweetleaf, his favorite cat, was the only one who was like him, who recalled things like that.
It was a coincidence, that was all.
"I want to repay Sapere," Maplepool said. "And so do you, I believe."
"I am repaying Sapere," Grassfur responded dryly, gesturing to the herb piles nearby. This lapse in logic had stuck out to him first, and the potential resoonse of how dare you have the arrogance to assume what I'm thinking, you son't know a thing about me or my mind or my heart was only an afterthought.
"The bees," the ginger-and-fawn she-cat meowed. "Sapere wanted honey. I feel like that's the least we can do for her."
"Yeah? Well, she's not letting us do that, so I don't know why you're coming to me about it," Grassfur growled. He turned towards the bitter-grass again, ready to resume his herb gathering.
"She's not letting us bevause she doesn't think we can work as a team." Maplepool was being persistent. That was unfortunate. Would she lay off if he intimidated her enough? "We have to show her that we can, and then she'll let us gather honey."
"I don't want to have you, me, and teamwork in the same sentence," Grassfur said, sincerely and emphatically.
"But you care about Sapere. I know you do."
Now would be a good time to use that "how dare you assume—" card, Grassfur thought, but for some reason he didn't. It was true. He'd just spent a whole morning struggling and fighting and resigning himself to the fact that it was true. Was it that obvious?
"So do it for her," Maplepool said. "She's done so much for us."
Also true.
"You can't fool her," he retorted. "Teamwork, friendship, and camaraderie. Not happening. She knows I hate you and she's not stupid; she'll know we're faking it. Or that I'm faking it, anyway. You fake everything, so it's hard to tell the difference." If words really did hurt cats, would the claws of these ones be enough to drive her away?
A beat of silence; the quick flash of an uncomfortable expression across her face before it returned to determination (a look that he was quickly learning to really not enjoy). "And you won't even try?"
"Why waste my time?" He stormed over to the bitter-grass and opened his jaws to reach for a cluster—
"Don't use your mouth!" She was next to him in an instant, shoving him aside with the full weight of her body. He felt sparks bursting across his skin under the fur that she'd touched, everywhere, flickering through his side. WindClan cats are fast...
The thought sent a crashing wave of darkness in his head, and he had to take in a deep gasp of air to clear it out.
"What?" he said, when he'd dealt with the darkness best as he could.
"Instructions. From Sapere. Don't get bitter-grass in your mouth."
He'd have asked her if she was fish-brained, but suddenly he remembered— Sapere had said something along those lines. So, instead of saying anything, Grassfur scowled, shut his jaw, and brought an unsheathed paw towards the bitter-grass to tear it off with his claws instead.
Maplepool sat down a few tail-lengths away from him as he worked. "We have to work as a team anyway; we're going to the Moon Tunnels. Camaraderie comes in the job description for that."
"We will never be friends, if that's what you're going to say next, WindClanner." Bringing their different allegiances into play— the closest he could get to an insult without in being an insult, to appease that tiny whispering in his head that was saying you do want to help Sapere, this is how you do it, she deserves honey, you can take a day of working with Maplepool.
"A day of 'friendship' wouldn't cost you much. A few civil conversations within earshot. Maybe a stroll through the forest. Just that much for Sapere."
"I hate being fake," growled Grassfur, loudly, so that he could try and cover up his mind's chanting of help Sapere, work with Maplepool, help Sapere that was increasing in volume by the second. "Possibly even more than I hate you."
"I hate letting debts go unpaid, and I don't think you're the kind of cat who does," she returned. For Sapere, for Sapere—
"You don't know me." He finally used that card. "You don't know what kind of cat I am." But instead of hissing it or snarling it, like he'd thought he would up until the moment the words left his mouth, Grassfur made it sound like more of a statement.
Maplepool smiled without any real warmth. She wasn't trying to hide the coldness this time; she knew it was out in the open now, Grassfur supposed. Some insignificant part of him appreciated that. A concerningly notable part of him found it a little scary. "So let me get to know you, friend."
Long, long silence as they looked at each other, gold eyes on amber. Maybe if he burned her eyes with his own, she'd give up. His attempts were unsuccessful.
"Shouldn't you be hunting?" he said at last.
"Finished," she said dismissively.
Grassfur heaved a sigh that lasted longer than the previous silence. He suspected he wouldn't get to sigh for the next day or so; might as well get it all out now.
This is why it's dangerous, liking Sapere.
"Help me with the chamomile."