Palepetal

Palepetal is a pale gray tabby she-cat with amber eyes.
== Personality ==
Palepetal is a quiet and awkward she-cat. She has trouble talking to cats that she doesn't know well, and when she does try it usually leads to a stammering, stumbling mess on her part and confusion on the other's part. She absolutely hates conflict, and doesn't want anything to do with it; she doesn't even want to be around it, really. She is timid and sheepish beyond belief, and takes a long while to open up to cats; but once she does open up she proves to be a (while soft-spoken) fast talker. She feels the need to blurt out everything she feels and everything that happened to her that day at once, and can gush about her favorite topics for hours at her usual quick pace. As previously mentioned, however, Palepetal is a shy she-cat, and only has a few cats that are really close to her; her mate and kits make up the entirety of them. She cares about her family more than she cares about herself, and she often goes to check up on her kits whenever she can and she enjoys all of her time in the elder's den with her mate.
== Long Posts ==
=== pale fuckin dies my man ===
It was quiet in the elders' den. The sun's golden light streamed into the den through the entrance, casting itself across Palepetal's tabby pelt. It was early in the morning, and no apprentices had come to visit her and Appletide for chores just yet, all of them either still asleep or just waking up for training. The only sound that filled the den was the sound of the deep, even breathing provided by the two elders' sleep - and no one was around to realize that Palepetal's breaths were less deep and even than they should have been.
No one noticed, either, when a calico kit crept into the den. Her ears were perked and attentive, and her eyes flicked between Appletide and Palepetal. She focused her attention on the tabby, padding over to her and lifting a paw, prodding at the top of her head once before she apparently deemed swiping at her ears a better use of her time.
The elder lifted her head after a few moments, blinking the sleep out of her eyes, looking down at the kit that had woken her up and sucking in a deeper, more useful breath. "Um," she began, her tail twitching behind her, "hello?"
"Hi," the kit returned. After a few moments of silence, she added, "I heard that the elders'll tell kits stories."
"We do, sometimes."
"I wanted to hear a story." She blinked up at her, then added, "If that's okay."
Palepetal glanced at the entrance to the den, her eyes lingering there for a heartbeat before they went back to the young calico. "It's early."
She nodded. "I woke up early."
The elder narrowed her eyes down at her slightly. "You're one of Burnrunner's kits, right?
She nodded.
"Beekit?" Again, she nodded. "I'm Palepetal."
"Okay."
The two of them fell silent.
"...What do you want to hear about?" Palepetal asked after a moment.
Beekit let out a small hum and looked up at the ceiling of the den, as if she was thinking. "Well," she began, "My brother was here before, and he said that elders were boring."
The elder blinked at her, her eyes slightly rounded. "Oh."
"Do you have a mate?" Beekit asked, her eyes falling back to the tabby. "Scorchkit said that the cat he talked to had a mate."
Palepetal's ears flicked back against her head, and her tail swished in her nest - a nest that used to be shared, and even though she'd been alone in it for moons now, it still felt so much colder than it could have been. "I do," she told her. "But he's in StarClan, now."
"Scorchkit said that the cats he talked to talked about StarClan, too, and how they were calling them."
He must've talked to Cloudheart and Runningstripe, before they died, Palepetal thought. "We don't have to talk about StarClan, if you don't want to," she offered. "We can just talk about Bonescar, instead. If you're interested."
"Was he your mate?"
Palepetal nodded her head, even though she wanted to correct the was to is. Even though the tom was gone, that didn't mean that she loved him any less than she did when he was alive.
"Okay, then."
She tilted her head, considering where to start - but before she could get too far, Beekit interrupted her train of thought.
"How'd you meet him?" she asked, sitting down in front of her and making herself comfortable in the space in front of her nest.
"We grew up together," Palepetal answered. "He was a few moons older than me, but I didn't have any littermates, so when we were in the nursery we ended up playing together, with his brother." The memories were a bit fuzzy to her, now, especially having lived such a long life, but if she thought about it for a while then she could remember her time spent with both him and his brother in the nursery better, playing games and laughing and tussling with each other without a care in the world.
Beekit nodded her head. "So you were always close to him?"
"Yeah," the tabby mewed, giving her own nod. "We always got along well, too. I didn't start falling for him until I was almost a warrior, though."
"Why'd it take so long?"
Palepetal shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know," she meowed. "Maybe it just took me a while to start really appreciating him - or I could've been falling for him for longer than that, and that was the first time I really noticed that I was."
She could remember that, too - it was far easier to remember than her kithood. She doubted that she'd ever forget the feeling of realizing that the fluttering in her belly and the warmth under her fur was her being in love with Bonescar - then Swiftclaw - and the panic that followed after; what if he didn't love her back? What if she told him, and he rejected her, and they couldn't even be friends anymore? Could she even act normal around him, now that she knew?
It turned out that yes, he did love her back. No, he wouldn't reject her. Yes, she could act normal around him now that she knew, but his brother absolutely could not once he got his suspicions.
"So when did you tell him?" Beekit questioned, tilting her head up at her.
"Tell him what?"
"That you loved him."
"W-well, uh…" Palepetal glanced down at her paws before she looked back up at the young calico. "...It took a while."
"Why's that?" The she-kit leaned forwards, her amber eyes wide. "You wanted him to know, didn't you?"
"I did," Palepetal confirmed, offering a small nod of her head, "but we were young. His brother, Wildfang, started to suspect we felt something for each other a few moons after I became a warrior, and he started teasing us about it."
"So you told him then?"
The elder offered her a small smile, but she shook her head. "He told me," she corrected. "But it still took him two whole seasons to do it."
Beekit huffed, her ears flicking back against her head, as if she disapproved. Palepetal's whiskers twitched in her amusement. "That's fish-brained," she declared. "I wouldn't wait that long."
"He made it worth it," Palepetal promised. "He gave me a sand dollar."
That seemed to gain either her interest or her approval, because the young calico's ears perked and angled towards her. "Really?" The elder nodded. "Do you still have it?"
The tabby shook her head. "Not anymore," she told her. "It got swept away in a flood - but I like to think that it's still out there, somewhere, and that it didn't get broken."
She didn't mention that Bonescar had given the sand dollar to her at sunset and that he was a stuttering mess, because some things she liked to keep to herself and she thought that the memory was more special if it was just between the two of them. And she would take the part about her stammering out her own I love you, too, Swiftclaw and every other sentence she'd spoken as soon as he'd whipped out the token to her grave for purely selfish reasons.
"What about kits?" Beekit asked. "Did you have any?"
Palepetal nodded her head, the look on her face turning fond. "Just one litter - Waterlily and Rapidclaw."
"I don't know them."
The older cat let out a small laugh. "Not many warriors make a habit of stopping by the nursery," she mewed. "But they're good cats, even if I might be a little biased. In the nursery, they used to wake me and Bonescar up early in the morning and ask us all kinds of questions - a bit like you're doing now."
Beekit had the decency to look slightly ashamed with herself, and Palepetal offered a soft purr, whiskers twitching.
"They were the energetic type, too, and still were in their training. It was hard for me to keep up with them, because they wanted to stay up at all hours and play and I had to convince them to at least take a nap. They're dedicated, too, and it can be hard to take their minds off of something when they decide they want to do it."
"Did you want to have them?" Beekit asked, tilting her head.
Palepetal blinked down at the kit, surprised. "Of course I did," she mewed. "Some cats are surprised by their litters, but Bonescar and I talked about having kits before we had ours."
Beekit nodded her head. "Okay," she mewed. "What else?"
The elder's ears twitched atop her head, the shock from the calico's earlier question still fading - but kits could be blunt like that sometimes, so she decided not to read into it too much. She let out a hum, her eyes narrowing as she thought before she decided on a story to tell.
"Not long after we became mates," she meowed slowly, a distant look in her eyes as she recalled the memory, "we went out hunting together, at Fin Pass. You'll see it when you start your training, but it's a pool of water that's a bit deeper and clearer than the rest of the waterways, and you can see sharks there, sometimes. It was leaffall, almost leafbare, and it'd just rained, so it was a bit more muddy than usual, and when Bonescar started shoving at me I fell into the water."
"He shoved you in?"
"Not on purpose, everything was just slicker than usual, so I lost my footing. We thought it was funny, at the time, but we still didn't get much fishing done that day, since me falling in scared all of them away, so we ended up going back to camp. I got sick a few days after, and I blamed him for it, because he pushed me into the water in the middle of leaffall."
"What did he say?"
"That I should have been a better fisher."
"What did you say?"
"Shut up, Swiftclaw."
Beekit's eyes narrowed up at her, and she tilted her head. "...Swiftclaw?" she asked. "You said his name was Bonescar."
Palepetal nodded. "It was changed before he retired."
"Why?"
She hesitated. How was she supposed to explain all of it to a kit? Could she, even? It was part of a time that the Clan didn't look on fondly, a time that she still bore the emotional and physical scars of, and it wasn't something that could be shared lightly.
Beekit, however, didn't seem to take her silence very well. "I think Bonescar's a cool name," she continued, "but what's wrong with Swiftclaw?"
"There wasn't anything wrong with it."
"Then why change it?"
Palepetal heaved a soft sigh. "...Have you heard of Fleetstar?"
Beekit shook her head.
She took in a deep breath, and it took a little more effort than normal to breathe it in. "Before Reedstar, we had Honeystar," she began, "who didn't lead us for very long. And before her, we had Fleetstar. He put us through a lot of battles, and if you couldn't fight, then you were useless to him - even medicine cats weren't very valuable to him. When he was leader, Bonescar and Wildfang found a badger - they're a predator, they're big and black-and-white, and you should hope that you'll never have to fight one of them - in the territory and fought it. Wildfang died, and Bonescar was injured. His face was scarred, and he was left half-blind. He had to retire early, and Fleetstar changed his name from Swiftclaw to Bonescar."
For a few long moments, there was silence in the den, before Beekit mewed a small, "Oh." Palepetal nodded her head in agreement. "Did he like his name?"
The tabby shook her head. "No, not at first. I didn't, either - I didn't even use it. But then he started to use it, and if he was going to start adjusting to it, then…" she trailed off, shrugging her shoulders. "I wasn't going to stop him, so I started using it, too."
"That's nice," Beekit mewed.
Palepetal smiled at her. "I like to think so."
The two lapsed into silence again, but this time it felt more comfortable. She watched as Beekit's jaws parted in a yawn, and Palepetal extended a paw to urge her to stand.
"You should get going," she encouraged. "You look like you could use a nap."
"Okay," she mewed, offering no arguments as she turned and padded towards the entrance of the den, her eyes lingering on the still-sleeping Appletide as she went. She paused, looking at Palepetal over her shoulder. "Does it hurt? To talk about him?"
"No," Palepetal mewed, shaking her head. "Not really."
And it didn't. Sharing memories of her mate, if anything, felt good.
It was waking up every morning in a nest that she had shared for seasons that hurt. It was turning her head, wanting to speak about something that had popped into her mind but finding no one there to share it with that hurt. It was having no mate to share meals the apprentices brought with that hurt. It was now having the joint problems that Bonescar had once complained about that hurt.
(Beekit was disappointed by this. If she was going to spend the day with some boring old cat, the least she could do was be hurting - was that so much to ask for?)
But she was getting older, now. StarClan, as it had been for Cloudheart and Runningstripe, was calling for her - she could feel it in every breath she took and every beat of her heart. It was like a weight that settled into her bones, and as Beekit left the den, she settled her head onto her paws, letting her eyes slip closed and sleep claim her.
Death, though, wouldn't claim her until sunhigh, and she wouldn't rouse from her easy slumber until it did.