Private Prompt Territory BURY MY HEAD : SERPENTBERRY

[Thornkit]

If forcing him to adjust to Clanlife was hard, at the very least the culture, the norms, roles, rules, couldn't talk back to him or hold anything over his head. That was the problem that laid exclusively with adjusting to the bodies that populated his new home, and perhaps worst among them was his own caretaker: Serpentberry had rubbed Thornkit the wrong way since she'd first slunk out of the shadows on that fateful day and taken him and his siblings from their mother - but he'd also been quick to realize that, in the same fell swoop, really, Serpentberry had forged a dynamic where he was dependent on her. Juniperstar might have held the final say in ThunderClan, but Serpentberry had other ways of twisting what otherwise was a good deal if she so chose.

For his siblings' sake, Thornkit did his best to curb the animosity that continued to radiate off of him in waves, even if it wasn't as present in his words - which wasn't to say that he wasn't still clipped when speaking with Serpentberry, as he very much was, but only that he wasn't as vicious as he could have been. Better to not bite the hand that fed him.

When Serpentberry had pulled him aside, away from his siblings and the nest they shared in the medicine cats' den, Thornkit had already been on guard; a defensiveness that only increased when, sickly sweet, Serpentberry offered to take him out of the camp - as if she'd been watching, and knew how restless he was, how much he detested the rule that kits weren't allowed out of camp. His second thought was that this was it for him: that Serpentberry had assessed the littermates, one by one, and decided that Thornkit wasn't special enough, or wasn't as good as Faithkit and Falsekit, or had even thought that, as he had himself, that he simply didn't fit in aesthetically with his littermates.

He'd agreed, in the end. He needed to get out of the stuffy hollow, needed to be able to move without dozens of eyes watching his every move. If worse came to worst, he'd run — he was fast.

As Thornkit followed Serpentberry out of ThunderClan's camp, he took a deep breath in through his nose. The medicine cats' den stunk of bitter herbs and the sickness they worked hard to cover up, and the camp as a whole was an over-abundance of individual scents sharing in the musk that made them all ThunderClan. It'd been since his arrival that Thornkit had been able to breathe truly fresh air.

"Is my sister getting better?" Thornkit finally broached the silence that had fallen between him and Serpentberry as they'd ventured out into the forest. It had seemed like Faithkit was getting better, but he wasn't a master of medicine in any way similarly to Serpentberry, who had made her livelihood around such things. The extent of his knowledge was being able to make a guess that a sniveling nose might indicate a cold. "Is—" Thornkit began, and was silenced as a bellow sounded through the trees. It didn't sound like another cat, and even other animals — even predators; he could recall how silent the thing that had attacked his mother had been — weren't so noisy.

"What was that?" A growl sat at the back of his throat as he dropped closer to the ground, tail lashing. He was the picture of a little warrior, though his size took some of the edge off.

THORNKIT—he/him + 02 moons
ThunderClan kit
NPC ♡ NPC | adopted by Serpentberry
Brother to Falsekit, Faithkit
Mate to N/A | Father to N/A
Mentored by N/A | Mentoring N/A

penned by Archivist

 

[serpentberry serpentberry]

All three of them were difficult in their own way. Serpentberry expected the illness of the youngest, given that Faithkit's health was one of the last things their mother wasted her breath on. Falsekit liked to turn themself into a mockery of kindness and sensibility - something that, admittedly, Serpentberry could appreciate. At least, in someone older and more capable of a battle of wits, and not a child hardly taller than her tail. And Thornkit. Though she had gifted the young boy a name befitting of a damn-near God in the medicine cat's eyes (for in the least, that'd make her some sort of Goddess,) he never took to it, or Clan life, in the way she wanted.

It seems he knows it, too. She gathers him with her tail and offers him an escape, something he no doubt sorely needs after the many sudden changes in his life. She gives him one last chance to fit in and assimilate, and if he can't - well, it's easy as to drop some bothersome kitten back into the wilds, she supposes. It would hurt given she does have some attachment to him now. Faithkit is unsurprisingly her favorite, given how the kit clings to her and how she poses as salvation, but the other two aren't so bad either.

She lets the silence plague them. Thornkit will break it first, she thinks - the boy has an iron will, truly, but a curiosity that cannot be beat either. And soon enough, he does. He asks of his sister, and for a moment, she looks at little Thornkit and sees her own brother, worrying about another of their kin. She and Snake had seen family so easily wither away, too. Maybe that's why she's pulled these children so close, and why she's so reluctant to cut the troublesome one loose.

"She's responding well to the herbs I give her," she tells the boy honestly, ears perking as she hears far off rustling. She thinks it another ThunderClanner, acting foolhardy in the undergrowth, when instead an unnatural yowl sounds not too far away. It cuts Thornkit's words short, and the boy instead questions the noises around them. Serpentberry acts with ease - as he hunkers down, a growl beginning in his chest, she moves to stand over his small frame. Her tail poses as if it, too, can strike. "Into the brush, boy - if you want to stay, you will move into the brush...!" She leans down, pushing her nose against his side, urging him to move.