Chapter Text
“Hollykit, from this day until you receive your warrior name, you will be known as Hollypaw,” Fireheart says. The words do not get easier the third time he says them. He feels exposed on top of the Highrock, his fur and bones laid bare before his Clan, because this is not his duty. It shouldn’t even be a duty — it is an honor, naming new apprentices for one’s Clan, but Bluestar’s mind has descended so far into madness that he cannot even be aware if she knows that a ceremony is occurring. Lionpaw stands with Brackenfur, his fur puffed out and his too-amber eyes bright; Jaypaw looks down and away, and Cinderpelt’s eyes are burning with something like reproach, with something like rage, but Fireheart pushes it down and away — down, down, down, until all he feels is the sinking emptiness of being trapped under ice, of coming up for air but inhaling water instead.
Bluestar was his mentor, a shining beacon of light in a time where jeers sank like claws into his pelt, when he wasn’t sure if he had a place in a Clan at all. And now she’s a shell, hollow and torn asunder by claws she should have been safe from, had every reason to trust. Tigerstar is gone, yes, but his legacy remains in more than one way — Bluestar’s visage, shattered and aching; Goldenflower’s level glares, while even her own father spits at his grandkits; Lionpaw’s eyes, so eerily familiar that they are nothing less than a copy, sent by StarClan to test his resolve; Hollypaw’s pelt, where every stripe is a match… and, worst of all, her ambition, the way her eyes gleam when she looks at the leader’s den, the way she stares up at Fireheart when he assigns patrols, the way she becomes Hollystar in all the kit-games she plays.
This is the reason he has to take her on. This is the reason no one else can mentor her. If she is, at her core, the cat he thinks she might be — well. He won’t make Pinestar’s mistake. “As Cloudtail is a warrior,” he continues, his tongue numb and his posture held carefully loose and his ears pricked forward, not pinned — not pinned, not pinned, not pinned — “I am able to take an apprentice. Hollypaw, I will do my best to pass on all I have learned to you.”
Instead of looking to his new apprentice first, as he should, Fireheart glances to where Goldenflower sits, alone now that her kits have left her side. Her eyes are dark and unreadable, her gaze fixed to her paws; when she lifts her head, her green eyes gleam with warning.
Fireheart swallows, turning his attention deliberately to his new apprentice. Logically, the only thing Hollypaw should be feeling right now — the only thing any kit should be feeling when they’re given their apprentice name — is pure, uninhibited glee. But Hollypaw does not run to him, nor does her tail lift joyfully in the air. Instead, she picks her way deliberately toward him, her head down and her green eyes dull with wariness. Fireheart feels a prickle of guilt as he leans down to touch her nose, but he pushes it down viciously. She’s the daughter of Tigerstar, he reminds himself. She shares his pelt, and she shares his ambition. She’s dangerous. And yet, as Hollypaw trembles, as she finally lifts her nose and presses it delicately to Fireheart’s, as she immediately ducks her head and moves away, tail nearly between her legs, Fireheart feels guilt.
Hollypaw comes to a halt at Sunningrocks, held suddenly shock-still. Her gaze takes in the rocks themselves, baked warm even in weak light, and then her head turns to the river and does not move again. The leaf-fall breeze ruffles her thick fur, muddling the tabby stripes into something that almost resembles the river itself. Looking at her like this — when her eyes are cast away from him — only accentuates her resemblance to her father, and Fireheart winces behind her. Hollypaw doesn’t seem to notice — she just continues to stare, across rushing water and into the clumps of foliage and trees beyond, unscarred by the fire that had almost taken her life.
“This is Sunningrocks,” Fireheart says, hoping that the confusion he’s feeling isn’t threaded through his voice. He’s at a loss, honestly, as to why she’s staring so intently into RiverClan territory — she hadn’t done this when they’d begun the trek along its border, but now that they’d arrived here, it’s as if she had somehow become a different cat — as if some river spirit had transfixed her, frozen her to the earth.
It’s quiet for a long moment. The rush of the river and the tapping of branches fill Fireheart’s ears, but still he rocks side to side, uncomfortable at the display. Just as he’s about to order his apprentice onward, because what good could she be doing here, staring into RiverClan’s territory, she speaks.
“Silverstream died here,” Hollypaw says, “didn’t she?”
Fireheart blinks, thrown. “Yes,” he confirms. He follows her gaze, then, but he doesn’t see any RiverClan warriors, anyone who would give his apprentice pause.
“Featherkit and Stormkit are over there,” Hollypaw says next. “Or—Featherpaw and Stormpaw?” She pauses, turns to him, brow muddled. “I don’t remember them, not really,” she confides, “but I miss them. They were… they were here, and then they were gone, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Their mother was a RiverClan queen,” Fireheart says, surprising himself when his voice comes out almost gently.
Hollypaw looks at her paws. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t my siblings, once. Do you think they’re happy there? Do—do you think they’re happier there than they could be here?”
Fireheart sighs, sitting down and wrapping his tail around himself. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I do know that Silverstream was loved, and that her cousins will look after her kits like they’re their own. And—you won’t remember him, but my friend Graystripe went with them. Being their father was more important to him than staying with his birth Clan. That’s what family does, I suppose,” he adds, even if… even if he doesn’t believe it, not in the same way Clan cats do. “They give up what they have to to keep you safe.”
Hollypaw huffs something like a laugh. “You mean fathers don’t usually abandon their children to try to take over a Clan?” she asks. There’s amusement in her tone, but it’s overlaid by bitterness.
Fireheart flinches. Hollypaw watches the motion, but her gaze gives nothing away — it’s hollow, barren, and despite the color, Fireheart sees her father in their cold depths.
Hollypaw smiles without humor. “That’s a no, then,” she decides, and turns to look back over the river. Her claws are curled in the mud, and Fireheart gets to his paws and moves away, to where he knows Silverstream is buried. He thinks often about Graystripe, but very little about the queen he’d loved — or the kits she’d borne, the kits Goldenflower had nursed alongside her own. “Watch over them,” he whispers to the grit at his paws. There are smooth stones here, stacked deliberately; Fireheart knows they come from RiverClan, but can’t bring himself to be angry for the trespassing that brought them here. Didn’t RiverClan deserve to grieve?
“Is this the spot she’s buried?” Hollypaw asks from behind him. Fireheart startles, leaping up into the air and whirling around, his front claws outstretched. But it’s his apprentice who greets him, not an enemy warrior. She’s backing away even as he bares his teeth, her own claws sheathed even as her body language closes.
Fireheart’s heart races. “Yes,” he confirms, and, with a conscious effort, he draws his claws back in.
Hollypaw’s eyes flick to the stones, and then she disappears into the rushes, leaving Fireheart to gape after her. “Come back!” he orders, dashing after her. “You’ll cross the RiverClan border!” A bolt of anger runs through him, because of course he couldn’t trust Tigerstar’s daughter to listen, to obey, to stay put!
And then… and then he’s reminded, for a painful moment, of tearing after Cinderpelt as she flew from place to place, never stopping, never considering where she was going — and where had that led her? To the Thunderpath, to a trap that Tigerstar had set, to an injury so debilitating that she could never be a warrior.
Your fault, he thinks at Hollypaw as she emerges back, a black, river-worn stone held in her maw. Your blood. His claws start to unsheathe as she approaches — with Tigerstar’s blood running through her veins, she’s taller than him already, even if she’s untrained. But she passes by him harmlessly, unaware of the blood rushing through his ears, and sets the stone in the place Fireheart had once sat. “Watch over them,” she whispers, a prayer and a pleading, leaving the offering and backing away. She looks over the river one last time, and then she comes to Fireheart’s side, looking at him expectantly, as if she hadn’t just fished a stone from the river for a dead cat. As if she hadn’t just asked a dead queen to look over the kits that had once nursed at Hollypaw’s side.
Fireheart stares at his apprentice for a long moment, and then he leads on.
As soon as Hollypaw has emerged behind him and into the clearing, she’s swarmed by her brothers, and not just the two who’d shared a nest with her. Swiftpaw, full-grown and muscled and definitely dangerous, with an attitude that could spell danger for any cat in range of his vitriol, is nudging his sister’s side enthusiastically, asking about her first day out in the territories.
Fireheart watches this, a little stunned, because — because, well, Swiftpaw seems to hate everything and everyone who doesn’t happen to own the names ‘Longtail’ and ‘Goldenflower,’ and somewhere along the line he’d forgotten that the two litters were related.
Hollypaw’s stiff posture melts into something relaxed, and Fireheart maybe feels like he’s intruding, but he can’t look away, because did Tigerstar ever look this relaxed even once in all the time Fireheart knew him?
Yes, his mind supplies. Around Whitestorm and Lionheart and Bluestar. Until he put his claws to her throat.
“How was your first day?” Swiftpaw asks, ruffling the fur on top of Hollypaw’s head. “Drive off any rogues?”
Hollypaw giggles, pushing against the black-and-white tom with a shoulder. “Not hardly!” she exclaims. “What, did you do that on your first day?”
Swiftpaw puffs himself up. “Of course I did,” he said, and Fireheart rankles until he realizes that — stars above — Swiftpaw is joking. “I chased a big hairy stray all the way back to the mountains!”
“Liar!” Lionpaw accuses, flopping on top of his brother.
Even at six moons, Lionpaw is as bulky as a full-grown cat; Swiftpaw groans as the golden tom falls on him, but takes it good-naturedly. “Prove it,” he challenges, pushing his brother off with one black paw.
Jaypaw hisses with annoyance as Lionpaw sags dramatically onto his shoulders instead. “Can’t you see that my day isn’t over?” he asks, gesturing to the herbs between his paws.
“Oh, please,” Lionpaw says. “I know Cinderpelt released you ages ago. You just want to impress her. Admit it,” he adds to Jaypaw’s sour expression.
“I will do no such thing,” Jaypaw says delicately, and then sighs. “Pass the jay, will you?”
Obligingly, Hollypaw slides the prey over, and her brother takes a grumpy bite. “Better?” she teases him.
“No,” Jaypaw says, spitting feathers at her.
Hollypaw reels back, laughing, and steals a bite from the jay as Jaypaw tries to ward her off with sheathed claws.
Fireheart’s stomach growls at the sight; it’s only then that he realizes that his chest is aching, his limbs weak and his paws feeling like stone. He itches to turn around, to leave the happy siblings behind, but he keeps the group in sight as he heads to the fresh-kill pile instead, dragging a stale-looking mouse from the bottom. He’s deputy now: he has to do his part, and that includes eating old fresh-kill. And monitoring potential threats. The conversation seems normal, but that might not last. What can he do but watch and wait?
So if Fireheart settles just within hearing range of the apprentices, that’s his business; if he wants to hear what they say, that’s just him protecting his Clan. He deserves to protect them, has to protect them, and… Tigerstar might not have been Swiftpaw’s blood father, but he’d still had a bit of a paw in raising him, and this was why he was not yet a warrior. It was a fluke — his assigned mentor and a stepfather he hadn’t asked for had kept him an apprentice long after he should have been a warrior. In fact, he hadn’t been apprenticed long after Fireheart himself had become a warrior, and Fireheart… well, he’d become a warrior early.
His pelt itches with guilt as he moves slightly closer, now able to hear the group’s words clearly.
“—dead queen, Hollypaw? What’re the dead going to do for them?” Lionpaw asks as he tears past the feathers of a robin.
“I just wanted her to look after Feather and Storm,” Hollypaw defends. “They were our siblings once, if you care to remember.”
“Barely,” Lionpaw returns. “I don’t even know how you remem—”
“Lay off your sister,” Swiftpaw’s voice cuts in, “or I’ll have to squish you.”
“Squish me?” Lionpaw squeaks. “I’m bigger than you!”
“I’ll help,” Jaypaw says darkly. There are still leaves at his paws, and he stares down at them almost as if he can see them, ears twitching as he sorts and unsorts and sorts again.
“You’re tiny!” Lionpaw says, using one enormous paw to knock him off his center of balance.
Jaypaw makes a sound of annoyance, and then it’s Hollypaw who’s first to tackle Lionpaw, her striped tail streaming behind her as she bowls him into Jaypaw’s pile.
“Watch it!” Jaypaw protests. He makes a cursory effort to gather his supplies back up, but then Lionpaw rolls his sister over and the leaves are crushed beneath their weight. The blind tom sighs, his brow furrowing; seemingly with nothing left to do, he tackles Hollypaw. Soon it’s an all-out brawl in the clearing, and disapproving eyes emerge from dens and from the outskirts of camp.
Is this what siblings do? Fireheart thinks, blinking at the commotion. He can’t remember his own siblings, save Princess; all he can conjure of them are vague memories of fur color and snippets of voice. He has Cloudtail, but Cloudtail has his own life now; and besides, he’s Fireheart’s nephew, not his sibling. For a long moment, Fireheart wonders what life would be like if Princess had joined him in the forest, feeling cold from head to tail.
Finally, he looks up to see that Swiftpaw has joined the scuffle. He’s smaller than his siblings already, but much more well-muscled, an adult cat to near-kittens. He takes Jaypaw down first, though the gray tabby doesn’t seem like he wants to put up much of a fight; Lionpaw is next, Swiftpaw using his bulk against him until he trips over his paws. And then there’s Hollypaw, the only one left, and she’ll be a brilliant fighter one day. She has the instincts, she’s holding her own, she’s… in the dirt, her pelt coming away as light as Runningwind’s.
(It isn’t until later that Fireheart realizes that to train Hollypaw at fighting is to train an ambitious cat to kill.)
Having successfully wiped the floor with his siblings, Swiftpaw stretches out over all of them, which is a feat in and of itself. It’s one medium-sized apprentice against two larger and one smaller, but he makes it work, placing his face just at the base of Lionpaw’s ear.
“Squished,” Swiftpaw says, licking the inside of his brother’s ear. Lionpaw lets out a vaguely disgusted noise, but lets his head fall to the ground in defeat.
“You’ve got to teach us that sweeping move!” Hollypaw pipes up from the dirt, and then Swiftpaw’s purring, and then so is Hollypaw, and then Lionpaw and finally Jaypaw, and Goldenflower wanders over and starts cleaning the excessive dirt off of his apprentice’s head, and the scene is so innocent that he wonders why his chest is burning, why he feels like he needs to sink his claws into bark and stone and earth.
I’m jealous, he realizes suddenly. He hadn’t been listening to them to protect anyone or anything; he’d started that way, perhaps, but then the warmth had crawled into his muscles and the coldness of being alone had traveled through his spine. I’m jealous of apprentices. I’m jealous of Tigerstar’s kits.
The thought sits in his belly like a stone for longer than he cares to admit.
“Swiftpaw,” Goldenflower says mildly, her voice open and friendly, “I think I hear a squirrel in that thicket.” She inclines her head toward it, and her son perks up, looking toward it with enthusiasm Fireheart doesn’t usually see on him.
The black-and-white apprentice blinks back at his mentor, and Longtail — in a show of gentleness that doesn’t surprise Fireheart, not really, not when it comes to Swiftpaw — chuckles and bunts Swiftpaw’s side. The apprentice is taller and broader than Longtail has ever been; it hits Fireheart yet again that Swiftpaw has been an apprentice practically since Fireheart himself has been a warrior; that Cloudtail hadn’t even been an apprentice for any standard length. A pang of guilt hits him as the two disappear into the underbrush, and he lifts his gaze to express something — anything — like it to Goldenflower, but when he meets her green gaze, it’s already burning.
“I hope you don’t take me for a fool, Fireheart,” Goldenflower hisses, her voice low, as soon as Fireheart’s eyes have caught her own. “I know exactly why you apprenticed Hollypaw to yourself, and it had nothing to do with her promise.”
Fireheart comes to a sudden halt, his fur fluffing out. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he says. His voice is an attempt at being measured, but it’s largely a failure, and he wonders if he really sounds as reedy as an apprentice or if he’s imagining it.
Whatever the case, Goldenflower ignores him. “Plenty of kits want to be leader someday,” she says adamantly, her face twisted into something both pained and resolute. “Just because Tigerstar went about it the wrong way doesn’t mean that Hollypaw will do the same.”
“Pinestar—”
“Abandoned him,” Goldenflower hisses, jutting her muzzle into Fireheart’s space. “His own father abandoned him to become a kittypet because of what he might have done. And who’s to say that he would have done it, had Pinestar stuck around?” Her muzzle wrinkles, ears going flat. “And who’s to say,” she continues, pushing past some sort of almost-instinct to choke on her words, to put them back where they came from and never let them see the light of day, “that Bluestar was telling the truth about Tigerstar’s fate in the first place? Or that Goosefeather wasn’t mad? I knew him, you know. He was quite mad, I think,” she laughs. “Got his own sister — Bluestar’s mother — killed, nearly starved us all to death before that, and yet she’s going to take his word about a kit?”
“Goldenflower,” Fireheart says, aghast, but the golden she-cat isn’t done. Her hackles are rising, her voice rising with them, and she takes a step forward as Fireheart takes one back.
“Bluestar isn’t who you think she is,” the queen growls. “She’s not some—some perfect paragon of what’s right, not even when she was sane, and I don’t say that lightly.” She laughs, then, cold and angry, seeming stretched-out and torn apart and incorrectly pieced back together, the layers just far enough apart to be wrong . “You see this scar?” she asks, indicating to her own pelt. “Bluestar gave it to me when we were apprentices, when we weren’t supposed to have our claws out. I was happy,” she adds, “for my first battle scar, but you have to understand, Fireheart. Bluestar has lost a lot in her life, but she’s not innocent, and for as much as you’ve done for this Clan, the way you look at my kits makes you complicit in it.”
Her head raises at a sound in the gorse, but Swiftpaw and Longtail don’t reappear, and Goldenflower lowers her head once more. “You’re judging barely-apprentices by their eye color and the stripes on their pelt and where their blood comes from, as if you haven’t spent seasons trying to prove that all of that doesn’t matter,” she hisses. “Oh, that pretty orange kittypet with the guileless eyes, what will he ever make of himself?” she taunts, and this is wrong, because Goldenflower has never taunted him before, never made him feel like less.
“Their father is Tigerstar,” Fireheart hisses. “He tried to kill his leader! He killed his deputy — his friends — twice! He injured Cinderpelt! He conspired with Brokenstar! What makes you think your kits won’t be like him?” he asks, furious.
Goldenflower laughs, her gaze incredulous. “I never took you for a fool,” she says. Her tail lashes. “You’re the same as they are, you know. All four of you will always have to prove your worth. You’ll never stop having to prove it. And if you’d just— listen, just watch for one heartbeat, you’d realize that Jaypaw despises his father. That Lionpaw doesn’t have the ambition of a kittypet who’s gone to the cutter. That all Hollypaw has ever wanted is to be like you, and that she begged for you to be her mentor right up to the very moment she realized you hated her, and then do you know what she did? Well,” she says impatiently to Fireheart’s silence, “do you?”
“No,” Fireheart admits.
“She resolved to be perfect,” Goldenflower laughs, “as if any cat can ever be, and then you chose her anyway, but by that time she knew it wasn’t because you wanted her. No, you just wanted to protect everyone else from her. Newsflash, by the way, Fireheart,” she adds, a twist of humor to her words. “If you wanted to make her less dangerous, you probably shouldn’t have apprenticed her to the best fighter in the Clan.”
Fireheart sputters, his mind reeling — what was he supposed to do with this information? What was he supposed to believe? He’s always admired Goldenflower, knows that she’d loved Tigerstar down to her bones but was loyal to ThunderClan down past the marrow; being called out, here, so close to Twolegplace, so close to where his fence bordered the forest and where he’d proved himself for the very first time… it’s painful. “Goldenflower,” he tries again, but then the brambles rustle for real this time, and Swiftpaw steps out, a huge squirrel trapped in his maw.
“Look, Goldenflower!” he says, and he’s ready to be a warrior, but Fireheart is starting to learn that all cats are kits when it comes to the ones they love. “I chased it across three trees!”
“He did,” Longtail confirms warmly, his tail held aloft. He’s so achingly proud of his apprentice, the cat he’s raised into a formidable warrior in everything but name, and Fireheart’s chest aches in turn as he watches the three of them, gathered in a loose circle that, for one reason or another, excludes Fireheart.
The ginger tom sags as they speak, watching them with a peculiar feeling curling in his chest, and doesn’t realize until he’s come back up for air that Goldenflower is still watching him, her forest-green eyes cold as shards of ice.
It’s sunhigh in the sandy hollow, but the air is starting to go frigid. Fireheart’s breath clouds the air as he begins to demonstrate a move — one perhaps too difficult for a cat his apprentice’s age, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe she needs to fail, to learn that she can’t do everything perfectly. Maybe that will dull the ambition in her eyes, the rampant perfectionism, the way she has taken the apprentices’ den and practically made it into her court.
Hollypaw watches him carefully, every flick of her gaze calculating, as he finishes the move. Her paws knead at the ground, her claws carefully sheathed — he knows from experience that most apprentices unsheathe their claws while watching demonstrations, excited by the prospect of learning to battle, but there’s still a reservedness to Hollypaw’s movements, something carefully constructed and pulled in until the only glimmers of it he sees are when she flinches when he scolds her, when he knows his eyes grow cold and his body language stills into something that could be construed as grim, if you were from another Clan. Or, he supposed, if you were the child of Tigerstar, an echo of everything wrong with ThunderClan.
“Now you,” he says, instead of thinking, the only thing wrong? What about Bluestar? What about the dogs? What about ShadowClan again? He can’t think about those things. He can’t put words or thoughts to them, because if he does he might collapse under the weight of running a Clan as a young warrior and the weight of looking at someone he’d considered like a mother and seeing hatred stare back.
He wonders if that’s what Hollypaw sees in him.
Still, the brown tabby pulls herself carefully to her paws, tilts her head, and then twists her body exactly right for the move, performing it without a single flaw. Fireheart is silent. He should be singing her praises, he knows, because she’s just pulled off a difficult move on her first attempt — in her first moon of being an apprentice, no less, but she looks at him and her eyes are dark and he knows that she doesn’t expect the praise, doesn’t think it’s coming.
“Good job,” someone says, and he doesn’t realize until Hollypaw’s eyes light up, until her tail curves forward in surprised triumph, that he himself has said it. But there’s something right about how Hollypaw’s posture eases, how every calculation bleeds from her pelt like they’d never been there. “Good job,” he repeats, consciously now, because Hollypaw is smiling wide, her purr loud and her paws dancing on the sandy floor of the training hollow.
“Thank you,” she says, her voice breathy and surprised and joyous. “Thank you,” she repeats, and looks at him like he’s hung the moon. Like he’s the only father figure she’s ever known and she’s finally, finally impressed him. And isn’t — and isn’t that what this is, a strange echo of when he’d looked at Bluestar like every star in the sky was threaded through her pelt?
“You deserve it,” he purrs. “That move took me several tries, you know. You’re going to be a great warrior.”
For a moment, Hollypaw’s eyes glow like every single star he’d once thought belonged to his own mentor, not so many pawsteps ago. And, for the same moment, Fireheart looks at her and doesn’t see Tigerstar, doesn’t see how her stripes line up with his, doesn’t see calculations and burning ambition and the way she flinches away from her own Clan. No — this time he sees Hollypaw, his apprentice, the future of his Clan. He draws his tongue over her forehead in praise, unwilling to let Hollypaw withdraw back into herself — not again, not right now — and she leans into it as if she was his own kit, as if this was sharing tongues outside the apprentices’ den after a hard day, as if he hadn’t spent her entire life flinching from her, glaring at her, and for perhaps the first time, he doesn’t see Tigerstar reflected in Hollypaw’s green eyes, but Fireheart’s own self, his own history and drive and ambition, lost and now found.