[Insidious]

S I L E N T P A W
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It was official: today marked his first lesson as an apprentice. It was no secret that he had been avoiding his duty to learn, and to adapt, because the life of a Clan cat simply didn’t suit him the way that his father had likely meant for it to, and no amount of training, no amount of conversations about the warrior code, was going to be enough to change that. He wasn’t like anybody else around here, and if that hadn’t already been painfully clear to him, then it certainly was after his encounter with Skunkpaw in the apprentices’ den. She made him feel uncomfortable now, because it seemed whenever they were in a close proximity of one another, or about to call it a night, she was eying him up suspiciously. He hadn’t thought at the time that he was doing anything wrong. He had been minding his own business, tending to his own task, and then she had called him a freak and cast him out of her life like he was some kind of monster. If anything, she was the one that had done something wrong. It wasn’t the way of a Clanmate to make someone feel so utterly alone, and so completely out of their element, was it?

Either way, he had been expected to meet with his mentor, Blacksmoke, as soon as the sun began to peek over the horizon, and if Silentpaw had to be thankful for anything, it was that he was permitted to sneak out of the apprentices’ den before Skunkpaw opened her eyes. He had sulked through the empty clearing, paying more attention to his paws than the space in front of him. He rather liked this time of day, because most of the cats, save for the dawn patrol, were still asleep and it made it easier for him to go about his business without worrying that everyone was regarding him like at any second he’d do something else to add to his growing list of weirdness. Blacksmoke, as odd as it was to think about, was the closest thing to a friend that he actually had in StoneClan, aside from Riversong. He didn’t quite understand the label, or what it even meant to have friends, but he had seen enough of Clan life to assume that friends were the kind of cats that would go off together, smiling, laughing, and discussing whatever it was they liked to discuss in StoneClan. Silentpaw didn’t smile, he didn’t laugh, and somebody mute definitely couldn’t discuss (or rather, someone so oblivious and trapped inside of their own world as to convince everyone around him, and maybe even himself, that he’s mute) which obviously meant he was incapable of meeting the criteria of friendship.

And that was okay.

He would do whatever he was supposed to do while he was here, and then maybe the other cats would start leaving him alone. The pairing of an apprentice and a mentor still confused him a little, because when he had lived in the mountains with his father nobody had been assigned to him to teach him. He had taught himself, learning a few things from his father, so he couldn’t quite grasp why he wasn’t allowed to take care of his own mentoring. Nonetheless, Blacksmoke made for decent company, because she didn’t treat him like the outcast that everyone else treated him as. She understood that this hadn’t been his life from birth like the other apprentices, and that because of that, he was different from everyone else and required a considerable amount of patience. If he hadn’t been assigned to a patient mentor, then surely he would have been chewed up and spat out by this point. After all, how else would someone without patience regard a quiet, hunched apprentice walking in circles around the clearing, no longer thinking about his training session, no longer thinking about much of anything, as he stared at his paws and made his way around the exact same circle time and time again like, this time, he was bound to end up somewhere different?

Somewhere that was anywhere but here.

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Tags: Fate Admin
Word Count: 692.