healing.

[Pripyat]

The air was very fresh and very cold. The sun was just reaching shyly across the horizon.

RisingClan camp was as still as it ever got. Soon the dawn patrol would return and the next would be roused and sent out, but for now, silence held the dens in its grip.

A dark, rough shape blotted out the entrance to the nursery.
A mottled gray she-cat limped heavily into the morning light, feeling the reassuring cool of the stone wall against her cheek. One eye was wide open sightless, staring into the light with opaque blue irises.

Timidly, with endless caution, the she-cat stepped away from the wall. She cried out silently against the separation: the wall made her feel secure, it told her where she was, it kept her from falling. Away from the wall, the hovered in space, only sand beneath her stinging paws.

She was a painful sight.

She was still more raw flesh than cat. Her dark fur was clotted with scar tissue; her face was torn and one eye was missing beneath its lid; her shoulders were almost bald with scars; her tail was three time broken; one ear was gone and the other, so badly ripped that it was a mere shred rearing limply above her head. She used to be a good-looking cat. Now she barely looked feline.

Kanji moved slowly. Her wounds had been so severe that she had not awoken for many days, and the scar tissue was so thick in places that she could barely move at first. Her movements were still so hampered that walking was a chore, one that had once been so effortless.
It was like she had to relearn to walk. It was terrible, but she could hear the singing of the wind in the world beyond and smell the freshness of the morning air, and she was glad to be alive, glad for the heat beating in her chest. Still alive. Still breathing.

Kestrel lay in the entrance to her den with her head on her paws. She watched her half-sister move across camp in silence.
It hurt her so see Kanji struggle so hard with her new limitations.

It was that black BoneClanner, that Pripyat character, who was causing her sister's suffering. He attacked her for no imaginable reason, tore her body apart, and left her bleeding on the sand. Kestrel could still see the lopsides dark spot where Kanji's blood had pooled on the compacted ground.

A low, venemous growl rumbled in the RisingClan leader's throat. She would kill that cat if it was the very last thing she ever did. If she spent her last breath doing it.

And not just for Kanji--oh no, for the kits as well. Their once-full nursery was inhabited only by Bluerage and her four kits.
That BoneClanner had killed the rest.

Kestrel shook her head and stood. Events from the past should stay there.

She padded fluidly toward the fresh-kill pile. calling out to Kanji as normally as she could: "Good morning, Kanji."

"Morning, Kestrel."

She pushed a piece of prey from the pile and sank her teeth into it, tearing at it as if it were a hated enemy.[/blockquote][/size]

[Onyxdart]

The bengal tom slipped quietly back in to camp. He wasn't on patrol, but he couldn't help wandering. So he went when it wouldn't be an inconvenience to everyone else to find him missing. And sometimes he could even bring back food, like today.

Kestrel and Kanji were both up and moving. It was a little early to be up and moving, in his opinion, but then... he was up, after all. He stretched fore and aft, flicking the tip of his tail, and then padded over to the freshkill pile to drop the few mice he'd found.

He didn't want to ruin the almost perfect quiet of the camp before dawn patrol came back, and so he just muttered very quietly, a hello to both the she-cats. Despite the fact that she did it with difficulty, Checkmate was glad to see that Kanji was at least walking around again. He had been surprised to see her alive at all after that fight. There'd been so much blood, and most of it had been her's. Some of it had been his, and Kana's, and not enough of it had belonged to the other black cat.

He tilted his head to the side, licking the fur on his chest flat before he bristled up like a bottlebrush. A scar across the side of his face made him look a little scrappy, and there was another scar on his neck, but most of the fur had grown back, albeit a little against the grain. He'd gotten off easy, all things considered. It made him feel more than a little guilty, which was probably why he felt like it was his unspoken job to make sure Kanji healed as well as could be expected.

With another yawn and small stretch, he pawed a bird out of the freshkill pile and began tearing off feathers, flinging them every which direction until they rained down like a gentle snow.

[/size]

[Soulless]

Peace.

It permeated the air of Risingclan camp, stretched out across the entire expanse of the territory and even dared to penetrate the no man’s land between Kestrel’s rein and the fallen ruins that had been, once upon a nightmare, Bane’s. Even so, the noble and true, those who remained as the backbone of the clan, remained fit and active. And waited, oh yes, because at least one young cat did not wish to believe the enemy to be truly dead and forever gone.

Such a peace had not settled well with the now fully grown Soulless, to place it within such simple words to grace a fallen angel’s broken wings. Not at all – she had taken to wandering from the camp for days at a time; rarely leaving confines of the clan’s territory however. An extended patrol, she called it, but would her path finally take her away from the clan that had raised her to be the cat she was now?

As the lean grey-and-white she-cat padded into camp, a large grouse clutched tightly in her jaws, she could only doubt such a faint longing to hunt down the surviving bastards that had caused so much trouble. To quell it, to smile instead around her feathery load and deposit it rightfully in the freshkill, her brilliant blue eyes looking between the two cats currently on the scene – Kestrel and Checkmate. “Good morning.” Instead of selecting something for herself, Soulless found a comfortable point just to the other twos’ right, proceeding to bath both of her front paws and rid herself of the dirt and grime that clung to her from her newest travels.

[Pripyat]

Kestrel nodded at Checkmate in greeting. Her mismatched eyes followed him across the camp, mostly for lack of anything else to look at.

Kanji raised her head, her blind eye staring absently into space. She took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly, savoring each scent borne upon it.
"Good morning, Checkmate," she called out, aiming her face in what she guessed to be the general direction of the bengal tom.
She could hear him--yawning, shuffling his paws, tearing into his fresh-kill. She took an uncertain step toward him.
"Are you well?" she meowed, speaking in her usual broken english. "How your face?" She seemed to recall that he had been wounded in the fight, specifically around his head. She hadn't asked about it lately, and she felt she was obligated to--after all, he had been hurt standing up for her and the kits. He had not even been bound to RisingClan then, but he had risked his own life fighting that horrible BoneClan monster. The kit-killer.

Kanji shivered, angling what was left of her ear back, listening hard. There was nothing there.

She sat clumsily, wincing without realizing. Every muscle was still terribly tense after her long stint in the medicine cat's den.

Kestrel looked up as Soulless approached. A glimmer of subtle but genuine pleasure entered her mismatched eyes, warming them, taking away some of their usual sharpness.
Soulless was a grown cat now. It almost denied belief, but there she was: alive, awake, adult... Kestrel was so proud of her. From her sordid beginnings Soulless had grown to become a very good and strong young cat.

"Good morning, Soulless," Kestrel murmured. "I assume the hunting was good."
Her words were cordial, almost formal. But behind them, perhaps there was some more powerful emotion lurking.
Oh, how Kestrel hoped Soulless would stay--she had come to love the she-cat as if she was her own blood daughter.

[Onyxdart]

Checkmate looked up from flinging feathers around, trying to blow one off the tip of his nose. He screwed up his face for a second trying to see it, and then sneezed. It drifted slowly to the ground.

"I'm good. My face is fine- I've got a dashing scar right down one side. I think it makes me look tough," he said, quite shamelessly. He was a vain one. There was also the hint of a laugh at his own vanity, behind the words. He noted when she winced as she sat down, and tilted his head.

"What about you?" he asked, noting at the same time the arrival of Soulless. He tipped an ear in her direction in greeting, and flicked a quick grin at her before returning his attention to Kanji, not wanting to accidentally ignore the she-cat, seein' as how he had asked a question and all.

[/center]

[Soulless]

“The hunting was very well Kestrel. Has the morning patrol already left? I covered from the dust flats to the oasis through the night – the borders remain defined and not intruded upon.” Even as she paused in her grooming, a slash of dust blotched across her nose almost comically, Soulless neglected to mention where else she had roamed; through the dead lands and patrolled right through old Boneclan territory. A Fool’s Run…but she was still honor-bound to find them to all be dead, and for the cat she thought only as mother to not worry.

Kestrel was no fool, however, and by this fact Soulless was very much so aware of. She yawned, stretched like she had just woken up from a long sleep before continuing, “Things seem so quiet everywhere, though. Nothing new to report at all.”

Disappointment trailed in her mellow voice, but she then smiled and took another look at Checkmate, then Kanji. “I’m glad to see that both of you are feeling, and looking too!, so much better.” The joy in such a fact was genuine, truthful, even though there was a dark cloud. The tom, the black one, who had killed the kits and wounded the two so drastically…his body had not been amongst the remains. For days Soulless had searched through those left behind there in those desolate lands – a gruesome task but one she just had to do. But it had been in vain, nothing, the bastard still lived.

Blue eyes chanced a look in the direction of the nursery, blank in thought for just a moment before a large figure bulldozed her from behind, flattening the grey and white she-cat to the ground with a loud yowl! A raucous laugh and some muttered comment about ‘cucumbers’ and ‘yay!’ immediately dawned to her who the tom the was currently sitting on her was, but before she could roll and take a swipe at him Deadnight was already streaking away across the camp laughing like the maniac he…well…was.

“Will someone get him a damn cucumber already!”

[Pripyat]

Kestrel looked evenly at Soulless with her mismatched eyes. Yes, she knew full well where the young she-cat spent her time; she knew how she wandered, and how her paws sometimes carried her to the desolate lands where the most evil of Clans had trodden.
And the place where Soulless's life had begun.

This thread of thought turned Kestrel's mind temporarily down a more tranquil, philosophical route.
Soulless had been born BoneClan, from the belly of one of their most infamous warriors. The feared cannibal Heartless--mate to the exiled TreeClanner. Such sordid beginnings for such a good and highly-moraled cat.
Very softly, Kestrel mewed aloud, "Imagine if I had not taken you from the BoneClan nursery following your birth. If I had, instead, allowed you to grow up there, among such killers."
She tried to invision Soulless, this proud, distinguished she-cat before her, with her pale coat splattered with blood. With shreds of cat-flesh strung between her stained claws.
With the glint of murder in her hardened eyes.

Kestrel gritted her teeth together at the image. That Soulless was a cat she would kill on sight.
It was also, fortunately, a Soulless who would never be.

But before she could follow her thought to its completion, a figure blurred its way across the camp, toppling Soulless in a burst of motion and noise.
Kestrel furrowed her brow at Deadnight, but neglected to rebuke him. It was pointless; he was a maniac, what could she say to fix that? So long as he was never violent, RisingClan had but to put up with him.
"If I could find one, trust me, I would," she growled.

Kanji purred a laugh. "I am sure it quite dashing, Checkmate," she meowed. "If I could see, I would tell you."
She ran one paw absently over her pitted, distorted face. "I do not think my scars make me look dashing, but maybe look tough." There was a sort of tragic humor in her voice.
She knew her scars made her ugly. It was not precisely a major shock to her; after all, she had not seen her own reflection since she were a kit, so she could scarcely imagine her adult face, let alone a scarred version of it. But the feeling of it under her paws made her shudder. It did not feel like her.

"Is hard to walk sometimes," she said honestly. "Sometimes I am just sore. And most of the time, I am very sore, all over. Is getting better, but still bad. Would be better if I could sleep."

It was true. Since her mauling, sleep had come very hard for her, and when she did manage to drift off, she was haunted by dreams. Vision played only a marginal part in these dreams, and the images were fuzzy anyway--mostly what she dreamed was the sensation of blood on her fur, the memory of pain, and the sounds. Breaking-bone sounds, tearing-flesh sounds, blood-dripping sounds...and worst of all, the tom's gleeful, terrible voice folding out of the blackness. "You poor she-cat. Poor little Risey-kitty.
His voice sent her screaming into wakefulness, and so full of chills and shivers that she could not sleep for many hours.

The BoneClan tom was just a scent and a voice and a feeling, but he had become her greatest fear.

[Onyxdart]

Checkmate tilted his head at Kanji, eyes narrowed in thought for a moment. One ear tilted towards Ketrel and Soulless, and one ear twitched around listening to everything else in case he needed to react to a sound before he saw it.

"Maybe not dashing, but you look like you could take on a pit bull," he said quite honestly. Was he going to sit there and lie and say she looked just fine? Absolutely not. He didn't believe in lying, especially a lie as transparent as that one. But she did look like one scrappy she-cat. He knew he wouldn't have messed with her.

"He ever comes back, Kestrel'll kill him. Failing that, I'll kill what's left when she's done. And this time, I won't get smacked against a wall," he said ironically. Sometimes he had trouble sleeping, but he only saw Kanashimi lying there bleeding, and it was always silent, even where there should have been noise. So he stared at the wall til he fell asleep, and then stared some more if he had nightmares, and cat-napped during the day in spurts. So he got a little more sleep than he could have been getting.

[/center][/size]

[Pripyat]

Kanji looked down...well, she turned her face down. "Thank...you," she meowed quietly. "For honest."
She looked tough, huh? It was a funny thought--that blind, sweet, harmless Kanji could look lik she could take on a pit bull. She almost laughed.

But Checkmate's next comment brought a chill to her heart. She shivered subtly, what was left of her mottled fur bristling unconsciously. "It...hard to think of any cat kill him."
That voice. That speed. A silent rush of movement that twisted her around and parted flesh from flesh and flesh from bone...
She gritted her teeth together (one canine was broken, low to the gum so that it looked almost like it was missing entirely, and some of her bottom teeth were chipped) and forced the thoughts away.
Her sister was fast, too. She was fast and fierce and powerful, and she could kill the tom, couldn't she? Did she not kill the great Bane?
After all, it was hard for Kanji to imagine anyone killing her sister, either.

"Thank you," she meowed again, this time with a genuine (if a tad watery) laugh. Kill what's left of him...smacked against a wall...pfft, kinda funny, huh? But that was what happened, wasn't it? Wasn't Checkmate smacked against a wall?

<Lucky him,>
Kanji thought, with a flash of uncharacteristic bitterness.

<I can barely walk. He has a dashing scar. Lucky, lucky.>

Okay, from now on, I think, <quotes or thoughts in brackets> is Kanji speaking or thinking in Japanese.
And sorry for the late reply. ^^'

[.::Umberwings]

[ooc ;; Feel free to skip me and post, Onyx. xD Not been feeling much in the Soulless!mood as of late, sadly. v.v]