Recap: Oak was stalking the army and unfortunately took the time to start an argument with his ex-girlfriend, Azazel, who was spying on him for Miss (and, not that he knows it, testing the hypothesis of "do Clanners have FEELINGS? seems like they do!). Now he has been captured by the soldiers alongside Uncle Peppermask, verbally threatened by Ice because that's what he does best, and has been… befriended by Thad and co.? Anyway, that's what you missed on ANGRY SAD CATS.
War has swept early through the uncertain ranks of the army.
Trenches of mud score the land; deep black puddles linger underfoot. The soldiers are cold, are tired, and, most importantly, they are afraid. And Oakpaw should be happy. The wave of rebellion will break itself open on the hard, spiteful rocks of PureClan. The Clan will survive. Not one of these sorry city bastards can claim the same. He will go home. For this, for all his suffering, he will be rewarded as a warrior.
Oakpaw should, rightfully, feel delighted. But in him is a strange heavy weight: a nervous pressure in his stomach, a warring agon in his chest. When she walks past, when he sees her, it almost seems to double. He'd be happy to exchange this neurasthenia for another broken leg.
They've been camped here awhile; recovering, recuperating, wondering what the hell they'll do if their exalted little leader expires before the first battlefield blow is struck. Azazel walks back and forth quite often - as though it's a show, a parade, but she has such cold eyes now Oakpaw is not sure what exactly is on display. Perhaps she's only flaunting her four limbs, perfectly in order, without so much as a fracture in a single bone. He flexes his own and glowers back when she passes. At first, she is islands away… then a river… soon a puddle. By then she's close enough for him to catch her scent on the subtle breeze, and it throws his mind right back. His mouth waters with memories. An exquisite misery, maybe, a thing that might stake him in place and threaten to break him, were he not already rendered immobile. A twofold torture; he will never know such memories and happiness again; moreover, he never should have made them in the first place, and now he's a blighted scourged thing crawling back to his master, rules all a-broken, and they might just kill him for the cost of indescretion. Threefold, actually, because from her it was all a lie, and he cheated his Code for a piece of counterfeit tail.
She walks past, jauntily enough, and he thinks of all these things.
Better the old pain than the future one.
Better than remembering she's soon to die.
Just as good as forgetting he will play a part.
I couldn't lie to you. I loved you.
Past tense.
Ah, that's the hit, the right pain, the one that twitches through his veins as it settles into him. A far easier thing to bear. It would be almost cathartic, if only he could truly let it go. But he holds on to it, nourishes it, and each step she sets before him makes it swell.
The other soldiers are busy too, but he doesn't care to track their movements. These things are dead already and it's better if he doesn't recognise their faces. The storm had, certainly, ground things to a halt for the army. One more disaster on the list. It will be a miracle if the horde even makes it to PureClan's doorstep. All the worry rides the camp hard. No one breathes without drinking a little of it in. It's all made worse by Iceface's newfound dictatorship - a waning thing now, but even that does not inspire confidence. Oakpaw is surprised to still be alive. But of course the old deputy has more important things on his mind, and all this recent hopelessness bodes well for the prisoners. They are still chips. The need to play them only grows.
Peppermask senses this. Growing too is his punctured ego and his strange, unfounded sense of self-importance. He makes sweeping statements, ill-received, and thinks he's speaking worldly truths.
Oakpaw rues his luck. Anyone in PureClan could hash out a coup quicker than taking their morning meal. Yet, for some reason - just to spite him, probably, since the cosmos seems to like doing that - it chanced to be Peppermask. Worse still is that he survived the attempt. They are caged together on their hill, but a distance is maintained between them. Prudent they should not bend their heads together and whisper plans of escape. They might manage it anyway, on the fly, but they both know the thing that is coming and they have a need to witness it. Peppermask still has his plans. Oakpaw, without thinking the words, is ready to mourn.
Now, this morning, Oakpaw watches the soldiers move and senses something is different. Then he sees it - him, rather, than exalted leader-turned-drowned-god. Maybe Emory did not know how to swim. Quite possibly he never bothered to learn in the city, where the streams run black and the puddles stand only ankle-deep. Oakpaw has another theory. The secret army headquarters stood right beside the river. Most cats had never opposed a dip, a paddle, a touching of feet to water, on a warm day.
Oakpaw closes his eyes and sees it quite easily. The hell-water rising, the sound of death ringing through the sky as thunder. Emory, as everyone knew, never exactly recovered from Miss leaving; a betrayal worse than death, even the ones they all marched towards now. A lesser defeat, in giving up, than in failure. Or perhaps he really didn't know how to swim.
Whatever the case - accident, washout, fluke - the rescue parties had set out searching as soon as the clouds cleared. Emory had not died. This time, it was a close thing.
Today he is standing. He is walking. His soldiers, adoring, watch these steps as though they are proud parents, and Emory a child. This infant will soon again be leading them to war.
A day or two and they will be gone. The soldiers are drilling in the mud. They look feral, black with the afterbirth of the flood. They will need to be more than feral in the real fight.
Azazel trains too.
He had never seen her fight before - robbed of that chance, when he chased her up a tree and waited to reap from her, unknowingly, his broken leg. He expected some leniency, some softness, to be shown around her fellow soldiers. There is none of that. Azazel burns the brightest, the strongest, the fiercest. Others receive her claws and no apologies. Oakpaw approves. No point sheathing your claws when blood means practice, real practice, rehearsal for the fight no one can really predict. She reminds him a little of Cloudpaw; that same shade of orange, yes, but more a thing in the movements, the concise cut and deliberate strike. Iceface trained them both, he supposed. That thing still sours him.
The day after Emory remembers how to walk, she visits him.
Oakpaw doesn't see her approach but suddenly that scent, so familiar to him he knows it as yearning, as woe, is all around him and without turning he knows. Days he's been trapped here, and she let the last thing she'd said to be stay, Don't bother telling me how you feel. You'll only lie. The nerve of her: his lip curls at the thought as he turns to her, and that's how she first sees him again, with that unhappy sneer on his face. Az looks resigned.
Sulkily, he says nothing. The sneer falls away in the slightest of degrees.
"Still here," she says, in greeting. "I thought you might pull off another great escape."
He looks limply at the mud, the little water that remains. Something like banter flits through his mind - and get my feet wet? - and he passes it over.
"It's my understanding that prisoners are, you know, imprisoned," he replies. "Must be what all these guards are for."
Az is not impressed with his asperity.
"You're going to guilt-trip me? I didn't even do anything."
Oakpaw snaps, "You just watched. Unusual, for you."
If he remembers the alarm, the pity in her eyes as soldiers swarmed the hill… well, he doesn't.
Az seems to hesitate. Oakpaw tells himself he can't really read her at all; can't pick the tension in her face or decipher the meaning in the tremble of a whisker. She is a stranger to him. She was a spy to him, and to her he was just a mark, a thing that might be learned and cast aside with the secrets picked from his bones. It's a little worse than that, in truth, but no one has told him of Miss' secret experiment and it looks likely to stay that way. Oakpaw has always been a little more ignorant than most.
"Well?" he asks. "Spit it out. You're interrupting all this nothing I'm doing and it's very important to me."
Still she says nothing.
It's not anger in him but something else and it burns just as warm.
"Reporting back to Ice again? Telling him I'm ready to die for his cause? I'm afraid even the charms of a pretty face don't extend that far," he drawls. The memory of this discovery is faraway, diaphanous; he tries to bring it to mind and it sits, a thin film, over the face of Az. The harder he thinks the further it slips away. And now it's just Az in front of his face, and maybe he's lying - maybe he'd do awful things for that pretty face in front of him, if she only asked.
Sunset razes the sky, burns it to gold. He wonders if he hallucinates its beauty so Azazel, a vision before his eyes, looks lesser, smaller. Even then it does not work. Her eyes brim full of reflection; the smouldering sky, the gentle swell of clouds, the sinking sun gone half-dead and hazy.
Blinded, he goes on. Anything to drive away this immaculate vision. Anything to scourge its memory with something bitter and dark.
"No," he says, making a little show of realization. "You're serving my death warrant. Of course. A sacrifice to any holy weather deities that may be watching, for fair winds and passage."
He begins to smirk - but he wonders if there's any truth in that. The army is burdened already. Perhaps it cannot travel with the deadweight of two PureClan pawns. Azazel does not look exasperated by this; her expression is something deeper, wounded.
"I asked for your life," she says, a little pain in her voice. He tries to be deaf to it.
"It's not yours to have," Oakpaw says, finally. Not sure it's his either; no clue, in this great cosmic fucking mess, who it really belongs to.
Azazel fidgets, turns half away. Behind her is all of it; the unseasonal beauty of the sunset, the unknowable skyscape, the plains and the forest and the things that dwell within. When he slides his gaze away, trying to grab any piece of that, his eyes go right back. He's still transfixed. To see her here is to almost forget all that's passed between them… and all that will come, too, in bloody hazy glory.
He stares her down with marginal softness.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I've been thinking… if I could take it all back, undo everything we did to each other… I would. Any day, any hour, I'd give you your life back, if I could."
"You should go."
That's all he says.
It can't happen; cannot be unforged, unspooled, reverted. This doesn't upset him. Even Az's retreating figure doesn't pain him, really, though she slips away without a whisper and seeing it cuts through him like a chill draft: not like knowing, as he does now, that's not at all what he wants. That he would never undo it. Not even to save his own skin, and bones, and he's not sure why, but it seems a kind of robbery.
Thad wanders by later that day; no less pretty than his prior visitor, and a sight more welcome too. Oakpaw doesn't feel pangs when Thad shows his face.
"Anything?" he asks. Thad has been scarce, lately, and Oakpaw knows he's taken all the scouting routes the army will give him.
Thad smirks for a little moment. "Yeah… but, well, no. Nothing on the Khia front, at least."
Gideon's nowhere to be seen; Oakpaw knows he might be moping somewhere, just around the corner, more than a little useless right now. Brava's not to be spotted either but he has no illusions about her, whether she really cares about Khia. Thad's the only one doing something… though what that might be, speculating on the satisfied sheen in his eyes, may not be wholly for the cause.
Well. At least someone in the army knows how to have a little fun.
Oakpaw sighs, dissatisfied. If he were out there hunting, he'd know all the places to look. He'd have the liberty of checking the Clan's cave, too.
"Don't get too close," Oakpaw says. "I'm sure they're desperate for more Tainted by now, with the city blocked off to them, and they'll jump on anything they see. And you can't help anyone, if you're under their claws."
"Roger," Thaddeus replies, twitching his whiskers. Oakpaw wonders who that is.
A beat of silence. They both know they're running out of time… yet even with Emory up, walking, hale, they won't say it.
They move on to brighter topics.
Thad clears his throat. "Az was hanging around today… like the little lost lamb she isn't."
Oakpaw puts on his familiar practised glower. Not much of a deterrent, these days, with the proverbial chains just hanging off him. He owes it to his reputation just to try.
"Was she, now."
"I saw she talked to you," Thad says. "Looks like Miss' theorem has been well and truly tested."
Little currents run up his skin.
A curiosity wells up deep and black inside - as well the feeling he shouldn't ask, should close his ears and throw his questions to the void. But he's always been a Clanner and he denies himself nothing; the meaning of self-preservation is hardly a notion he knows.
"What theorem?"
Thad blinks his pretty blue eyes.
"Hm," he says, in the tone of one who wants to backtrack, but has set fire to the path behind him. "Honestly thought that was why you left. We all did. Az never said anything different. You can trust Az to be contrary if nothing else, right?"
The currents turn to something cold, reminding him, with their indelible fingers in his skin, of a storm.
"What's the damn theorem, city boy?"
Thad sets his teeth and glances all around. Whatever he sees - or doesn't, with hungry soldier's eyes all around, and none on them - seems to appease him. What trade secrets is he brimming with?
"Don't rip out my throat, or anything," Thad pleads. "I still need it."
Oakpaw has no patience and he bares his teeth. "Just tell me."
Thad closes his eyes, tilts up his chin and offers a restorative prayer to likely aforementioned holy weather deities, or something a little stronger.
"Right," he starts. "It was clear from the very start you'd never really see the army's… uh… creed as something you could own too. You were, quite possibly, the staunchest Clanner Az could've found. Something to do with the giant chip on your shoulder. And you know Miss wanted someone she could plant back in the Clan… spy, assassin, whatever she could craft someone into. Obviously you were never going to work like that.
"So Miss found something else for you. Well, Az had already brought you in, it seemed a little poetic to her, I guess. And it was the ultimate question. No one thought you were a great candidate, or Az either, but, it, uhhh- clearly it worked."
"What's the ultimate question?" Oakpaw hisses. He has been a game to these cats - little more than a pawn to move in amusing circles.
"Can a Clanner really fall in love?" Thad says, tripping over the syllable of love like it's a coiled, ready snake. "You really answered it, Oakpaw. So now we know. Doesn't change anything for the army, or really redeem PureClan at all… it's still an institute that needs to be brought down, even if its members could be possibly… saved."
"It was… she… all of it for…"
He feels inelegant, feels a form too big and cramped for its confines - feels his leg break again, only the pain is in his chest. Every fucking moment, every touch and look, all of it an artifice. An experiment. He'd always doubted that it had been nothing for Az, that she'd at least felt some small thing, even as she attempted the great task of re-conditioning him. Az had her motives and he thought every last one was aired… only now, he guesses, they were. Layed out, ready for bright intelligent analysis, for everyone but him.
More than an informer, Az, less than a lover… he had only been a mark. And he hadn't fucking seen it happen, hadn't guessed, hadn't recalled to mind the only interest he was of was a passing curiosity, a merry little question to be answered while time passed.
Oakpaw really wants to kill something. Take the edge off, wash it all away in blood. He can't even have that.
Blood is coming, though. Maybe his, maybe hers, nothing certain, only knowing they'll be wading through it soon enough. The night passes blindly, he doesn't even see Thad leave, but morning comes. Dawn scalds him. Cogs begin to turn, the army-beast rears its head and tests the floodplain. The storm scars are yet there... but it's dry now and the way has been washed clean ahead of them.
Marching starts anew.
proofreading? no we die like men.
