Closed THIS MIGHT'VE SHOOK THE LOVE FROM ME / FROND

[ember]

Sable's retreat had been called heartbeats ago and his final followers were turning tail, but Ember's single aquamarine eye remains fixed upon Frond with a desperate expectation. She jerks her head towards Sable's disappearing form, gaze darting over the cream tabby, her own rounded belly churning not with her kits but with an out-of-place anxiety. Despite all of their fights, all of their hunger-spurred arguments and disagreements, Ember wishes nothing more than to keep the pale-furred queen by her side into this new ... something. Hawthorne's weakness, Sable's retreat, everything that had come before and would come after ... They had been mates for long enough that they could move past it.

"Frond, come with me." Ember pleads. She takes a meaningful step towards the fleeing felines. Please. She doesn't say, her pride stalling her tongue.

// @Frond

 

[Palefern]

FROND, 28 moons / colony cat, following hawthorne
A lithe pale cream tabby with unusual blue and green eyes.
Mate to EMBER, sister to DAWNSONG
Frond is deaf and uses her own version of kitty sign language to communicate primarily, though she will speak on occasion (speech is often slurred due to hearing loss)
Tagging EMBER

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With me. she says, and Frond can almost hear the desperation rolling off her tongue. Her own tongue feels numb. Her sister... where was her sister? Where was Plume? Where... why .. ?

With me, Ember pleads, though Frond only has the hard lines of her mouth to go off of. Around them, the forest has crumbled into ash (at least, in the ways that ash matters: exploding forth from disaster and destruction from fire and brimstone.) They stood on the precipice of their colony's pyre, staring into the flames, but this time... this time, they were not sitting side-by-side against the smoke. Now (and maybe not just now... maybe now was just the time that Frond noticed the true gap between them) Ember teetered away from her, towards the heat, towards the cinders she had been named for.

and Frond could not follow,

"I can't." and the words are torn from her throat, scratchy and painful as thorns. "My ho-ome is here-, my family, our -" their family, the one thing they had been able to agree on in the past few months, the one thing that tied them at the hips despite the brambles that seemed to encircle their emotions and poison their nest... their family. Our kits.

She can't hear the cats retreating over the sound of her own heart in her ears - her heart tha-thumping against the incessant ringing that dominated her soundscape. She can't she can't she can't she-

won't.

"Sable - is wro-ong. Wrong! It's not worth i-t. I wo-on't risk m-y kits-safety 'cause of his pri-ide." Hold me instead, stay with me instead, love me instead.

but her tongue falls flat to the bottom of her mouth, weighed down by words she can't find the will to say... not now.