Necessary
Suffocating. That's the feeling I recall the air as being, as if something cloying and lethal had poisoned the atmosphere, augmenting the toxic awkwardness between us. As I and Oakclaw stood across from each other staring, frankly, there wasn't a thing I wanted to discuss with him then, the memory of what had occurred the last time I'd done so still fresh and vivid in my mind. But the odd tom had a way about him, an ability to make anyone sit and listen, if he so desired.
They were sitting in a separate portion of the forest disclosed off from the others where there could be no interruptions.
Not a single word was shared between the two polarizing toms. On the surface, Oakclaw displayed the serenest depiction of tranquility, leisurely sitting with the same aloof demeanor that had come to be standard for him. The ginger apprentice sitting directly across from him, however, did not exude that same air of harmonic disposition.
Redpaw's eyes were downcast, but his paws were alight, itching with the desire to flee. He didn't want to be here. Literally anywhere other than the company of the sizeable tom was ideal.
He wasn't in the mood to do much of anything right now, his thoughts being consumed by the absolute precision in which Sagepaw had been able to easily dispatch him. To be so soundly and utterly toyed with and then defeated in such a flash by a cat that did not even consider it worth his time to seriously fight him was incredibly humiliating for the ginger tom.
Why hadn't he just heeded Hollypaw's advice when she'd told him it wasn't worth it? She had known from the very start that engaging in any sort of physical confrontation with Sagepaw would lead to his immediate downfall. But still, still Redpaw had allowed his pride, his own oversaturated jealously of Sagepaw to get in the way, causing the eventual outcome that was now a glaring stain on his overall psyche.
He had never even stood a chance.
The sheer crater sized gap that lay between the two cats individual skill levels was substantial. Redpaw now saw more and more cause for why Brackentail had referred to Sagepaw as BoulderClan's future. In terms of just where they stood on the opposite spectrums of how they were perceived by the Clan, it was no contest. Sagepaw was everything he could never aspire to be and more.
For just a split second in time Redpaw had wanted to rebel against the snares of such a harsh reality, and so he'd agreed to Sagepaw's challenge, challenging not only the russet furred tom but himself as well. He had wanted to silence his own self-doubt, proving to it and Sagepaw that he could walk the same path as him.
The full brunt of a head-butt to the chest and stinging blow from the aforementioned tom was more than enough to send Redpaw crashing back down into the stark reality of his own obscurity.
'I can never compete with him,' he thought forlornly, his thoughts closing in tight on him. 'We're not the same. We can never be on equal footing. I can never be-'
"You have quite a bit to account for today, it seems," Oakclaw finally chose to speak, snatching Redpaw from his thoughts, as he began the conversation with a leisured style of delivery. "Mind explaining to me the poor judgment on your part, allowing a more battle savvy and experienced apprentice to goad you into a fight?"
Redpaw's breath caught hearing this. Sinking his claws into the soft soil of the ground so he could clinch, tightly, the dirt between his paws, the ginger apprentice was doing so to forcibly restrain himself from blurting out something that, unlike Hollypaw, he would immediately come to regret. He was more than already painfully aware of his own mistake. He didn't need nor desired Oakclaw's unique style of brutally pointing it out to him.
"I asked you a question apprentice," Oakclaw's airy voice carried over to him, only proving to incite Redpaw's already agitated state more.
'Just leave me alone,' Redpaw thought imploringly, pressing his teeth together to keep from yowling out. He couldn't stand to sit here and have Oakclaw so casually berate him over his own incompetence. Not with how terribly displace he already felt about it.
'Please, stop. I don't to talk about it. I don't want to talk about anything.'
Presented with the continued force silence of Redpaw, Oakclaw clicked his tongue several times, pausing to curl a claw around a blade of grass, as he casually continued with, "Pretending to be mute isn't going to get you out of this. The sooner you speak up, the-"
"Oh, so now you're speaking to me?" Redpaw hotly snapped, resentment clear in his tone.
The usually reserved and timid tom's tolerance had reached its apex. He was unable to withhold his anger any further.
"That doesn't answer my question," Oakclaw immediately responded, brushing completely over Redpaw's outburst like it hadn't happened. "What you did was foolish and completely out of your own character."
"What could you possibly know about my character when we don't even speak?" Redpaw bitterly responded. "You've suddenly picked a specific time to want to behave as my mentor now."
"This proves my point," Oakclaw gestured with tail towards him. "You're behaving incredibly unruly right now. Your demeanor is unpleasant. You're still only an apprentice, so I suggest you remind yourself of your position and behave as such."
Redpaw staggered back in surprise, completely and utterly stunned by what he'd just been told. He actually had the nerve to say such a thing to him, especially after how he had behaved towards him these past days?
"That's ironic coming from a cat that doesn't even play his own role as a mentor," Redpaw rebounded back, refusing to allow Oakclaw to weasel his way out of the blame. "Because of you, I'm behind the others in training! I can't hunt and I barely know how to fight!" Redpaw snarled, his chest heaving heavily as he continued on his rant. "You've done nothing to aid me as a mentor. You play games and give me riddles as an excuse not to train me, keeping me entrenched and trapped at a level of inferiority to cats like Sagepaw, who are only more skilled than me because we haven't experienced the same equal level of training! It's your fault I can't progress as a warrior! It's your entire fault!"
I remember feeling a sense of relief in that moment of pure outrage, like a sizeable burden had just lifted its weight off of my chest. For so long it had felt like I'd carried all of those pent up emotions in my heart, waiting for the precise moment in which to unload them upon whom at the current stint in time I had felt was responsible for everything that was wrong in my life. I remember feeling as though I'd just shoved Oakclaw's words back down his throat, relishing briefly in finally seeing some sort of emotion flicker in his eyes in response to be. However, there was nothing that could have ever prepared for what happened next.
Oakclaw threw his head back, laughing out loud in a light and airy way that sounded more like a whistle than anything else. Redpaw stood in stunned silence, watching as the brown tabby fell onto his back, kicking his legs up in the air, as he continued on in his bout of merriment.
What was so funny? Did Redpaw's words hold such little value to him that in the heat of probably Redpaw's most transparent moment of revelation, he laughed in the face of tom's greatest anguish?
"And so now you're tossing blame elsewhere in response to your own shortcomings as a cat?" Oakclaw finally spoke after sometime, having properly recollected himself, as he rolled back onto his side. "Quite frankly, I guess I'm not surprised to hear such a thing from you, but with most things you're wrong in your assessment."
Oakclaw then rose to paws, effectively towering over Redpaw as the ginger tom's entire being was engulfed in the presence of his shadow. The brown tabby hummed, fixating his pale gaze upon a spot somewhere right between Redpaw's eyes. Instinctively, Redpaw squirmed under the faraway stare, despite the fact that it wasn't directly on him and that they would immediately shift to a spot elsewhere if he tried to meet them.
"I shouldn't even have to state this, but because you seem to be under the impression that you've unearthed some great truth here, I'll have to personally point out the flaws in your logic," Oakclaw began, in an almost bored tone, as his eyes ultimately drifted from Redpaw and back up to their favored fixation, the sky. "As I've told you before respect cannot be gained. If you want your Clanmates to respect you then you must give them something to respect. Tell me one thing you've done, taking steps towards that little goal of yours? Nothing, I'd guess. You want to be needed, but have done nothing to put yourself in a position that would make you deemed worthy of being perceived as valuable."
He began pacing around the empty space in front of Redpaw, mesmerizing the ginger tom's eyes into following his lateral movement. "You've probably been thinking lately that if you just try hard enough that you can be just like Sagepaw, right?" he poised, with startling accuracy to what had been the topic of interest in Redpaw's mind, causing a shiver to run down the ginger tom's spine. How could he possibly know such a thing?
"Well, listen up," he continued, "Because I'm here to tell you otherwise. You can't and never could from the start. Every cat has their own set individual path that they must walk alone. You even making the attempt to walk along another cat's path shows your ignorance and why you'll never amount to anything."
Redpaw winced under the biting criticism, visibly shrinking within himself as Oakclaw's words began to take their toll.
"I swear, for someone that's allegedly supposed to be so determined to accomplish their goal of proving their worth as a valuable member of the Clan, you've certainly allowed such a miniscule thing to detour you. If you honestly believed that I was your hindering progress, then you would have done whatever it took to prove that you belong in BoulderClan, regardless of the limitations placed upon you. You're within the embrace of the Warrior Code every day of your waking life, yet still you say that you don't know the answer as to why we follow it. In response to that I said I wouldn't train you, but I never said that you couldn't train yourself or barred you from seeking help from others like Hollypaw. But what did I see you doing with your time?" Oakclaw mused out loud. "You hid off in the forest or huddled yourself away in the apprentice den, proving neither an asset to the Clan nor a cat that wanted to be a part of it. Yet somehow I'm the one responsible for your failure? Frankly, you're a walking contradiction of everything you supposedly stand for and don't even realize it. Now that, little apprentice, is what you call ironic."
Oakclaw finished his monologue off with a satisfied hum, pausing from his pacing to briefly yawn and stretch as if he'd done nothing else, but just woken from a light nap.
Redpaw stood there with his ears stinging, feeling completely flustered with his pelt ruffled and hot, burning from the tabby's casual dissection of his life up to that point. He felt shaken. How could Oakclaw have known or deciphered such precise, personal detailed information about him?
Redpaw felt exposed for the world to see, almost as if Oakclaw had taken one of his massive paws and used it to slice open his chest, revealing the inner contents of his heart and the fears that lay among its surface. This wasn't how things were supposed to have turned out. He hadn't expected a detailed examination of his own mind, but Oakclaw had found a way to bring them up to the forefront, shocking even Redpaw.
Despite being struck with such damaging information though, there was still a faint bit of fire left in him, sputtering in and out of existence as the ginger tom came forward with one final question.
"You're telling me all these things lack, but the most important one. If you want to go on and on about what's wrong with me, then tell me why everyone hates me?" he found himself pleading desperately to the tabby. "Tell the truth about why I'm treated as an outsider in my own home!"
Oakclaw tilted his head to an askew angle in what Redpaw could only take as him pondering over the answer. "You knowing wouldn't change a single thing," he stated after a pause, shattering Redpaw's final hope with it. "It wouldn't even be worth it to tell you, honestly. Knowing would probably just serve to alienate you even further."
Redpaw bulked in denial. "More than I am now? There's no way you're going to convince me that's even possible."
Oakclaw shrugged. "Probably not, but as I've already stated previously, it would change nothing. Your situation would be exactly the same. The Clan's coldness towards you would still remain."
He ended it off with an air of being matter of fact in his words. Whatever the reason for which the Clan despised Redpaw, Oakclaw would not be divulging the information to him, leaving the apprentice off in a disposition of desolation and defeat.
Redpaw felt haggard and displaced a feeling of having had his entire world sliced to pieces in front of him. In a way, he supposed it had. Oakclaw had seen to it without little or no remorse, despite what his tone may state otherwise. Well then, if there were no other obvious question that Oakclaw would answer then, Redpaw bitterly wondered if he would he give a response to this?
"At least tell me this," he said in a quiet voice. "Are you like the rest of them too, Oakclaw? For whatever reason that no one is willing to tell me, do you hold the same opinion as of those that do know? Do you hate me as well?"
Feeling completely beaten, Redpaw had recklessly thrown the question out fully expecting to either get no answer or a straightforward yes. The response he received in return was not one that he expected, but somehow managed to hurt worse than anything else he ever could've said.
"I have no interest in you."
Oakclaw's unsettling upbeat voice tore through Redpaw's heart, spilling the collection of his hurt and remaining emotions everywhere. He did so with a welcoming smile, one that gave off the impression that his words held no real levity, but Redpaw knew without a singular doubt in his body that there was no fallacy laced in the tabby's intent.
That was like saying he was too insignificant of a being to garner his hate, to gain any type of feeling resembling an emotion towards him. Somehow he hadn't expected to feel so crushed.
Trembling with emotion, his voice painfully shaking as he did so, Redpaw asked, "Th-then why did y-ou volunteer to be my mentor?"
Why did it hurt so much? Why did it feel like he was so desperately struggling to try and breathe right now? It was as though all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the atmosphere. His lungs felt restricted by a cold front emanating from his chest.
Oakclaw sighed in fashion, resembling that of a kit that had finally grown bored with the game that they'd been playing.
"Nothing of any real relevance now that I've exposed your true colors," he answered. "How could anyone trust you to one day protect this Clan if you can't even protect yourself? You lack the true fortitude and desperation necessary. A cat with an actual purpose in life is harder to take down. That is because they have something worth fighting for, worth defending with all their heart and being. You have none of this, nothing, thus making you weak by default. Cats that are weak simply fall to the waste side and die. And with saying that, I will no longer squander my time with someone as such. Effectively now, I rescind my position as your mentor."
Without a further word, Oakclaw whipped around and began leaving in a scene reminiscent of the previous time he had sent Redpaw reeling with his words. This time was different though. He wasn't leaving any avenue open left for Redpaw to crawl through.
"Stop! Please, come back!" he shouted out to the departing form Oakclaw in desperation. The tabby did not halt though, continuing on without pause.
"Wait! Don't do this, I need a mentor!" Redpaw yowled himself hoarse after the ever increasingly distant figure.
Redpaw made move to race after him, but fell flat on his face. He scrambled to get back to his paws, but that he couldn't. His body had gone into a state of shock after hearing that Oakclaw was no longer going to be his mentor.
"Oakclaw, wait!" He had to make him stop, make Oakclaw reconsider somehow.
He felt frightened, his senses completely overtaken with terror. Why? Why? Redpaw thought as he continued calling out. Why did the idea of Oakclaw leaving him behind fill him with such dread, despite the fact that he and the tom barely had any relationship to speak of?
Was it possible that he felt like he couldn't succeed without him? Oakclaw seemed to know so much, so much about him that even he didn't understand or was aware of. If he could just discover a way to make him take Redpaw under his guidance, then maybe, just maybe he too could find his own way.
The feeling of watching his one and only possible chance at acceptance walking away drove Redpaw into frantic. Clawing around desperately in his own mind for something, anything that might help, Redpaw yowled out the first thing that flashed across his eyes.
"The Clan!" he screamed. "Everything revolves around the Clan! The code is designed to ensure the safety of the Clans future. We don't follow it because it works; we do so because we couldn't survive without it! Every rule is for the betterment of the Clan. It all keeps coming back to the Clan! The Clan must survive! The Clan must prosper! No matter what, it must always exist!"
Nearly out of his vision of sight, the gasping tom saw Oakclaw suddenly pause in mid-step, his tail flicking from side to side. Redpaw's heart hammered in his chest as he waited with abated breath for what came next.
Slowly, very slowly, Oakclaw turned back around, an amused expression plastered across his face.
"That's quite an interesting answer."
Intersting. He said it was interesting, I remember reciting over and over to myself in a blind daze as Oakclaw casually came padding back. Unknowingly, I had unwittingly saved my apprenticeship in that wild spew of frenzied panic. It would also be my very first pawstep on the path to walking alone, as a resident of 'the way', though it would be some time before I found that out. From now I just felt relieved that I hadn't been abandoned and cast to side like waste. I still had the chance of one day being necessary.