Open Camp 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚒𝚐𝚜 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚘𝚗𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 ◈『 𝚜𝚕𝚘𝚠 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 』

[Smoky.]

Dawn crests on the horizon. It's cold and bitter and unkind, a sun reluctant to rise, and a sky that would prefer to keep its stars.

This morning's break of light feels wrong. A contortion of the world, a defying of routine and precedence. Like something else should be there instead, only he can't figure out what. The concept itself has no substance in his brain, mind, it's just an amorphous sense of discontent—like everything else that passes as a feeling since the battle. Present, yet incomprehensible. Fog that clears away into something muddier than itself.

The very same claws that'd snuffed two lives pick at the crusty scabbing upon his muzzle. Two gouges, running parallel and at a cruel angle, stinging like frost upon sensitive nerves. He's never been one to ignore a good impulse, and so he tugs until a fresh bead of red slips down the slant of his nose. And then he does it again. And again. What pain there is, is distant; he doesn't feel anything. Smoky must wonder if the same could be said for Milky and Leopard. Did they suffer? Did they feel anything beyond fear in their final throes?

He doesn't know. He's not sure what to make of it, either. Idling near the cavity in the thorns that fit both him and his mate, Smoky's body is still and his face expressionless, eyes blank, tail unmoved from the spot where he's laid it across his paws. The bleeding on his nose stops. He's already thinking about picking it again, even while his gaze remains fixed upon the sunrise.

 

[vampire]

Chill takes thin bites from her flesh as she wakes in her scruffy nest, a thing hastily cobbled together in the aftermath of the battle. Pitch-dark eyes slide open in the light left in the retreating stars' wake, cold puddling in the velvet scoop of her skull. He rankles under the grip of the morning's frost, shoulder blades jutting against their white pelt as Vampire pulls themself from their nest.

" Morning. "

In one of their reluctant allowances to courtesy, they hail Smoky with a sleep-scratchy greeting. Whiskey eyes rove over where he sits, statue-still and silent, just before the thorny maw to his own sleeping-place. Then they journey a little more, up to his face, electing to avoid distant amber eyes in favor of tracking the flow of the tiny river of gore trickling down his face. In the afterglow of the battle, leagues from a landscape whose grass clots with the stuff, it seems almost impossibly small.

" Something eating you? "

Their tone is affectless, their face studiously passive. It's less a question of concern than one of curiosity—suitably cowed by Cicada and good old common sense, he's been leaving his own chest wound well enough alone. What could compel a cat to pluck it as if they were defeathering a catch, she wonders? Certainly it was no rational compulsion, for it offered no barter for the sure risk of infection or worse. No particular advantage.

Passively, they follow his gaze to the sun clawing the sky back from the clutches of the moon. How terribly apt, that the cycle of the days followed the cycle of the newfound Clans. Grasping, clinging with open claws to whatever one could reach.

" I'm not so foolish as to tell you not to do that, as if you don't know. It is your face, after all. "

they announce with a lackluster shrug, uncaring as to whether he bothers to listen. Sometimes they really do just like to hear themself talk…

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