flameheart{trying to even out the score}

[bast]

HAWKEYE was fine. Fine. Her pelt was groomed, expression impassive and step unfaltering just as it had been before she'd heard Flameheart's little bit of news. She hadn't batted an eye when he told her because, to be honest there was a part of her that had always expected this. Ever since Flameheart had discovered she-cats he'd been all about being a lady's man. She-cats trailed behind him in a steady line, wound up in the splendor and grandeur that Flameheart threw around every chance he got. He never glanced behind him to see the shards of broken hearts because Hawkeye always took care of those. She swept them up and sent them on their way, somewhat put back together. Admittedly some of them had pieces that wouldn't fit back together the right way, leaving them sharp and jaded after Flameheart's attentions but Hawkeye kept their claws dull and warded them off with her quick fangs and sharp glares. They never reached him because she didn't allow them to, so perhaps it was her own fault that Flameheart didn't think of the consequences of his actions. Hawkeye had been handling his consequences her entire life.

THIS one, Hawkeye wanted nothing to do with this one. It wasn't the normal love them and leave them line that Flameheart normally followed. Oh no. This time she couldn't put the consequences under the rug because Brightcloud had told him before Hawkeye could convince her that was a bad idea, long before Hawkeye even knew. She'd been kept busy in the last moons and thus hadn't seen Flameheart and Brightcloud, or at least they hadn't registered as significant. Brightcloud was another pretty face, another soft-hearted fool. She was temporary. Hawkeye was the only she-cat that had ever been allowed to be with Flameheart for longer than a few nights and...well...didn't that mean anything? Apparently not because Flameheart wasn't waltzing away from Brightcloud. He was helping out, visiting her in the nursery, taking her meals. Hawkeye had to walk away from the whole thing.

IN her mind, the scarred warrior could hear her father's voice ringing in her ears, rough and gravelly. 'If you can't help yourself then you don't need to be an apprentice, much less a warrior.' Talonswipe had never allowed weakness. Tenderness, gentility, they weren't his strong suits. Oh no. He made sure that Hawkeye knew it all through her kithood and apprenticeship, reprimanding her for showing signs of a bleeding heart. 'Never let them see you bleed, never let them see you week. They'll eat you alive.' Those words rattled around in Hawkeye's mind as she stalked through the undergrowth toward the Sandy Hollow.

HER relationship with Talonswipe had never been that great, to be totally honest. He taught her to be tough, to be strong and to never bend or break. Talonswipe taught her how to roll with her enemies and gouge out their bellies. He'd taught her to aim for the eyes. Everything else he'd given to Flameheart, when he'd come under their care. Anytime Talonswipe had told her anything it had always been a warning against some enemy, some random They that would come and destroy her. For a long time Hawkeye had wondered just who he had feared so much. As a kit she had thought it was just enemy warriors or rogues. The older she'd grown, the less she'd thought about it. Talonswipe's lessons to keep her face blank and her back stiff had simply become habit and the advice that echoed those lessons had laid quietly in the back of her mind, easily forgotten. Now though, it all reared up and...well maybe Hawkeye understood a little better now.

'NEVER show your belly. Let them think you can't bleed, that you can't bend or break.'

TALONSWIPE had never been talking about an enemy warrior. He was talking about...

HAWKEYE slid out of the undergrowth into the Sandy Hollow. Yellow sunlight warmed her unusually dappled pelt and flashed over her pale gold eyes. She'd come out here to practice her fighting stances but...now that she was here her paws wouldn't move. Soft sand cradled her paws and warm sunlight soaked into her fur but her face didn't soften from it's normal severe expression. Her limbs and back were stiff, like she was expecting some faceless enemy to leap out of the undergrowth and attack her. Too bad her enemy wasn't faceless. Talonswipe's hadn't been either. Hawkeye finally knew who They were and she wished she could have her ignorance back.

FOR a long while, the slight, scarred she-cat simply stood in that quiet hollow in the afternoon sun before reclining on her haunches. She curled her tail around her paws and closed her pale eyes. Her tail curled tight around her and unless you knew her well, you couldn't see the tiniest slump in her shoulders.

'IF you have to carry the weight of the world that's fine.' In her mind's eye she could see afternoon sunlight slanting through the leaves and falling on this same hollow. Talonswipe was sitting beside her, dwarfing her tiny apprentice frame with his bulky, muscular form. It was one of the rare days he wasn't training Flamepaw....he'd chosen to take her instead. She remembered feeling both honored and wary at the prospect of a full day of her father's attention. Flamepaw had been jealous and grumped about not being able to continue his battle training. Hawkeye hadn't indulged his whining...not even back then, too busy being worried about her father's undivided attention. In the memory, Talonswipe wasn't looking at her. He had his deep golden gaze fixed on a oak tree across the clearing. Hawkeye hadn't looked him in the eye very often...it had always felt like a challenge and she'd always looked away first. 'Just don't let anyone else see you carrying it. If it's your burden, then you pick up your feet and start walking, you don't whine and ask for someone else to do it for you. If it means anything to you at all you won't mind carrying the burden.'

AS those words echoed out of the past, Hawkeye's shoulders stiffened and straightened from their tiny slump. Even in death Talonswipe could still order her around and she still obeyed. Opening her eyes, Hawkeye let out a slow breath and stood. Hunting. She needed to hunt...there were more queens in the nursery now.

[Kin]

[style=width:250px; height:389px; overflow:auto; padding:5px; margin-left:40px;][style=margin-top:-19px;]
Flameheart was facing something of a conundrum. While he had always been considered a ladies' tom as soon as he'd realized the difference between tom-cats and she-cats, he'd never really bothered to understand them beyond what would garner him their attention for an afternoon or evening. He'd never really bothered to learn what made them tick and what won their hearts over as thoroughly as their libidos. As such, the conundrum laid before his paws was twofold. On one paw, there was the tryst that had become more in a way he'd never really considered, and on the other, the she-cat who had always been beside him, who... wasn't really around anymore. It left a hole in his life, a gaping vacuum where she'd been.

The way Talonstrike had raised him had pushed him to be an honorable cat, one who stood by his actions and took responsibility for them. Most cats, even those who stood closest to him, tended to forget that Flameheart had taken those lessons very seriously. Certainly, they remembered them as they pertained to his ambitions and dreams for ThunderClan, but they tended to forget his personal side very much housed them as well.

As such, though he didn't feel overly attracted to Brightcloud beyond her pretty eyes and silky calico fur, the tom felt obligated to help her out, to be there for her and the kittens he'd inadvertently saddled her with. A portion of his ego muttered mutinously that she should be happy that her kits were sired by a tom as healthy and attractive as Flameheart, but the larger portion of himself simply cringed at the thought of backing down from this.

After all, how would Flameheart run a Clan if he couldn't even step up to the responsibility of helping his kits' mother out? He wasn't even going to be her mate, he wasn't obligated to do anything, he'd heard some cats protest. There were others who grumbled that with Ravenjaw settling into the position of Brightcloud's mate, Flameheart was useless, redundant. That only rankled him and goaded him into actually hunting the prey he brought the pregnant she-cat, and made him pay attention to her as a cat and not as a female body. The tom had discovered that she was pleasant enough, easy to get along with, as she seemed to do with most in her quiet way.

But she was no Hawkeye, and though he had no idea why that was important, it very much was. Brightcloud wasn't Hawkeye, and no matter how much he respected her for how she was handling the situation, Flameheart couldn't find it in himself to even picture the calico as by his side in the future, sharing his meals and sitting at his right shoulder during Clan meetings. That space was already occupied to the satisfaction of both himself and Hawkeye. She balanced out his laziness and kept his liaisons quiet and uneventful.

Rising from his position sprawled in a sunbeam beside the sleeping Sedgewhisker, Flameheart rolled his shoulders and padded out of the camp. His paws carried him over the familiar path toward his most recent hunting grounds, but changed direction with the breeze. It carried a rich, familiar scent with it, and the lack of that scent in his life and on his pelt drove him into a loping gait. Amber eyes combed through the trees, and when his paws whispered over sand, the treeline breaking, Flameheart slowed his motion, paws ghosting noiselessly over the sand.

Hawkeye lay near the center of the training area, looking for all the world as though she were sleeping. But the slight slump to her shoulders wasn't customary even in sleep. It pulled his brows together and brought a frown to his muzzle. Something in Flameheart's chest ached at the sight, even as Hawkeye's shoulders straightened back out. Had he put that there? Was it his actions, his mistakes, that caused her shoulders to bow? Guilt bloomed within him, and Flameheart shuffled his paws, feeling like a misbehaving apprentice. As Hawkeye stood, Flameheart made his way to stand beside her uncertainly, watching her face intently.

"Would you like to hunt with me?" the tom asked softly. The words sounded strange, so quiet and nearly tentative. So far from his usual brash confidence, the boisterous volume letting none mistake just who was speaking to them. But try as he might, Flameheart didn't think he could muster words any louder or any more confident until he'd chased that slump right out of her, shoved it from wherever she'd hidden it within herself and brought her back to fond exasperation and chastisements for whatever idiot thing he'd done most recently.

words: 775
notes: mirrors~
tagged! Hawkeye <3

[/style][/style]

[bast]

HAWKEYE could remember when she started taking her first steps. Talonswipe had been there, surprisingly, watching his only daughter try to stand on wobbly legs. Back then he'd been as big as bear to her, impossible to conquer, impossible in all ways. She could remember the first time she'd stumbled in front of him and she'd go on to remember every time that would follow. That first time, her too-young legs hadn't been coordinated enough to keep her upright and she'd been sent tumbling sideways into her father's immovable front legs. Talonswipe had looked down at her for a moment before grabbing her by her scruff and pulling her up until she had all four feet under her. When she'd tried again, again she'd stumbled. That time when she'd looked up from the dusty nursery floor, Talonswipe hadn't leaned down to pull her up. Instead he'd looked down and clicked his tongue.

'GO on. Stand up.'

THAT order had followed Hawkeye from her first humiliating defeat in battle to every relationship she'd weathered with Flameheart. Stand up. All her life Hawkeye had been standing up, hauling herself out of the dust, mud, sand, and planting her feet to try again. She'd learned to dig in her claws and brace her legs so no one could push her around. Her claws, fangs, tongue, glare, had all sharpened over the moons and it kept everyone from wanting to push her. All around her, Hawkeye stood tall and fought her own battles, dragged herself up to hold her head high when someone tried to knock her low. No one was allowed to make her feel small, she simply refused it. Everyone...except the one tom that thought rules were for other people.

'WOULD you like to hunt with me?'

OUT of the corner of her eye, the dappled she-cat had watched Flameheart slink out of the undergrowth. He looked odd, like he was trying to make himself look smaller. That seemed silly, considering how many times Flameheart had told her that she made him feel small. She was perhaps half his size but she'd never felt small beside him. She'd always felt like they saw eye to eye on most things. Today though, for some reason Hawkeye's pale gold eyes darted away from his smoldering gaze. She didn't like what she saw in his face, in his posture, heard in his voice. He was buckling under the weight of something but that wasn't right. That was Hawkeye's job, it always had been. She carried the consequences of Flameheart's actions and ensured the world kept turning for him. Why or when it had become her job, she didn't really know. All Hawkeye knew for certain was that it always had been and always would be her job. Flameheart wasn't supposed to get dragged down because Hawkeye wasn't supposed to allow it.

EVERYTHING in Flameheart's posture, face and voice sounded and looked like an apology. For what, Hawkeye tried not to fathom. He messed up a lot, for as infallible as his followers thought him to be. He stumbled, forgot things, lost things, said stupid things, did stupid things. Hawkeye was supposed to smooth those over so that no one noticed. It was second nature for her at this point, making sure he was subtly reminded or prompted, that his missing posts were covered and the like. This...this wasn't right. Hawkeye had missed something and she didn't like it. Flameheart was apologizing to somebody for something but Hawkeye didn't know who. Certainly not her....he hadn't done anything.

"STOP It. Whatever stupid thing you did, I'll find out what it is, no use being sorry about it. Besides, I'm probably not the one you need to say you're sorry to." Apology didn't look good on his face and for some reason Hawkeye couldn't look directly at him when he wore that face. So, instead of facing the tortoiseshell tom she looked at the undergrowth and padded toward it, her stride brisk and business-like as it always was.

NORMALLY when they hunted, Hawkeye and Flameheart moved in tandem. They had a rhythm that they'd perfected as apprentices while chasing squirrels, rabbits and the like through ThunderClan's dense forest. An elder had once tried to describe to Hawkeye how wolves hunted, how they had something called 'pack mentality' or something so that it was like they were reading each other's minds. Where he'd learned this tidbit of information Hawkeye had never found out since, as far as she knew, there hadn't been wolves in the clan territories in absolute ages. However he'd learned it, the little piece of information had always reminded her of how she and Flameheart hunted. They could read and anticipate one another's moves with ease, as if they were in fact one mind. It made for quick, efficient hunts that often yielded decent amounts of prey in even the harshest of seasons.

TODAY though, as she set off toward the ferns and foliage, Hawkeye felt disjointed, like she was out of rhythm. It was as though her heart was one beat off time or her steps weren't quite long enough but when she tried to fix that, they became too long to be comfortable. She couldn't find the rhythm of a hunt, even though she knew Flameheart was falling into step at her flank. She could feel his eyes on her and wondered if he could see on the outside that her rhythm was disrupted. Hawkeye hoped he couldn't see a thing because she didn't want him to see how off-center she was. Because she wasn't. She was fine. Flameheart had fathered kits that Ravenjaw planned to raise. Why should that put her off her game? The answer was simple: It shouldn't, there fore it didn't. If it took stubborn will to make this so, then so be it. Hawkeye had plenty of that to go around.