[Fawn]

Drip drip drop, went the rain upon the moorlands, a light drizzle and nothing more, the cool water colliding with warm, fertile earth to build a blanket of mist across the gorse. The earthbound spray sleeked an already glossy black pelt, all condensation accumulating on the outermost layer of fur seemed to dissipate into nothingness, a dense undercoat like armor against any sort of wetness attempting to breach all the way down to the skin.

Quick was the cat with purpose to his stride. With the unimpeded movement of a panther, Rookfrost stalked across the moorland. Though no bite of prey or taste of blood could soothe the sort of hollowed pang in the cavernous reaches of his mind, where he was going was the equivalent of a marketplace, where he might look upon his wares and discover something worth devouring. Like wiping the cobwebs from the opening of an abandoned den, all thoughts of medicine and what had once been a benevolent healing art were brushed away in favor of the dark coldness inside: a place in his soul where no sunlight could touch – not evil, not sinister in the traditional sense, but dark and hungry and driven.

Today was not a day for healing what was broken, for repairing what had been damaged, to prescribe and recommend some estimated amount of rest he had gleaned from moons of experience in deductions. Rookfrost stepped around a patch of feverfew and through a haze of mist. Today was a day for questions, for study, for a gnawing curiosity – either singular or multiple depending on how aggressively he took to his true calling – he had left that old suit of carefully constructed compassion and sense of duty back at home.

Well no, not home, back at camp. He was going home right now.

It was an old gnarled tree with branches that stretched, twisted in their old age to the east, any beams or boughs that might balance out it's lopsided appearance had likely been destroyed the first time lightning had struck it. The longest of the boughs wore mottled skin of paper white and charred black, as though nature had attempted to repair the damage weather had wrought upon it. From the end of this streaked and blackened bough were long, sun-paled leaves of green, hanging in a curtain as though the tree's last efforts to be recognized as a proper species – an ancient willow, decaying while it lived.

In morbid light of the tree's weathered colors, it appeared to Rookfrost like a rainbow, pointing to the cache stored within the hollow of it's fallen kin, alluding to what none but him would ever have the audacity to call treasure. It smelled heavily of ragweed, chamomile and garlic, the plants brought to mask the smell of death, a small severed branch of lavender tucked into a hollowed out 'shelf' within the fallen log. In twoleg terms, what awaited the self-titled-but-properly-earned scientist was the feline equivalent of a research facility. Stored, dried and suspended were projects both fresh and finished, the garish smiling faces of the dead seemed to greet him, though the severed limbs of other things both feline, vulpine and mustidae could not wave him in and say hello, but he took their presence as greeting enough.

First he scanned the hollow, with it's collection of death in all it's forms; upon finding nothing amiss – save for the wing of a butterfly that had fallen from the rest of it's body, nailed upon the inside of the hollow in decorative stillness by the point of a raccoon's claw – the scientist took a deep, hearty breath. Oh the smell! The rain could not dampen it entirely, and the powerful cloying aroma of mortality at it's finest tickled the glands on the roof of the black cat's mouth, the subtler scent of herbs, blood and any lingering musk of whatever fur-bearing thing present wafting up his nose as though to tease him further. Most warriors dreamed of the warm milkscent and the plushness of their mother's fur from time to time, but not him. He took solace in recalling the scent of blood in the rain and the faint odor of death that clung, even still, to sun-bleached, vulture-picked bones.

As though to complete some macabre ritual, Rookfrost smiled at last.
Like a soldier returning home from a long and arduous battle, a king back from a strenuous campaign, he had strode once more inside his domain, soul able to comfortably burn amidst familiarity and curiosity, he and these morbid things with and without names were friends of the oldest kind.

What if, Why and How had come to sit at his dinner table, to share tongues with the one who spoke their language so well, and they would feast upon the world until there was nothing left of it. Perhaps then and only then, they could finally heave a sigh of contentment.

~*~

It was neither the albino fur or her peculiar living conditions that had caught his attention; cats who chose to live in tunnels were no more an anomaly than a potato that grew underground. After a brief bit of tidying – or rather, fondly examining and reexamining those macabre little curiosities he had collected thus far – Rookfrost had gone for a purposeful stroll, for he never walked without intention of some kind. The large black cat had been studying her for a while now, the feline who lived underground and came up when the sun was covered by the clouds and the mists were in full splendor – a day like today. Though he had arguably been spending a large amount of time watching, waiting and hypothesizing about the she-cat with the white fur and the small stature (her growth was likely stunted due to poor nutrition as a kit, with a small part being genetics), what had drawn a cat of so scientific a mind to an anomaly such as her was not the kind of lust many would have accused him of, had they seen.

The interest he took in the cat he could see right now, crouching against the undergrowth and after a plump shrew, was the same kind of interest he took in the cat born with a twisted leg, or the cat that had suffered some awful, genetic disorder – things no amount of medicine or spiritual guidance could ever hope to fix. There was something beautiful in the broken and the damned, something gorgeous about the havoc a mutation of the genes could wreak upon the unfortunate progeny, something like art in the deformity of the bone and cartilage. However, this cat had neither, though what she did have, what startling new curiosity she did possess, he would likely place the blame upon genetics, for he had yet to set his sights upon a cat with this sort of thing before.

Rookfrost was in enough of a good mood that a false face of friendliness came easier than normal, a usually standoffish, deceptively cold visage now arranged into an expression no LightningClan cat could have ever believed he could make.
“Good morning.”

The albino she-cat jumped, her movements appearing kitten-like due to the smallness of her frame, ears large, eyes round and set within a narrow, but pretty face, her posture straightening upon recognition. “Oh hello Blackfur. I haven't seen you around in a little while.”

Blackfur.

When one was doing something any cat with a conscience would have trouble sleeping over, it was better to use an alias. Not that he had a conscience – at least not the type that would cost him any much needed sleep over what he was prepared to do and take.

”Yes, I have been busy training an apprentice.”

”Oh yes, little Whitepaw, wasn't that her name?” said the she-cat kindly, the timidity of her voice of the same weak timbre he would normally have flat out ignored had he not been in need of something. Lying had always been the gift of those with half a soul, and Rookfrost was no exception. Forcing a sort of falsely constructed light to enter his eyes with a joviality equally as untrue, the Medicine Cat dipped his head in a nod to say that yes, you are correct.
”I apologize if I am interrupting your hunting – I'm only gathering herbs, allow me to get out of your way.”

As anticipated, the albino shook her narrow head, wrapping a very long, thin tail around alabaster kitten paws. ”I-I don't mind, really. I'm caught something earlier today.”

Despite being directly engaged in conversation, Rookfrost's attention span was slipping, the automatic drowning out of idle chatter was something he had developed after so many moons in LightningClan's camp, used to vulture-picking only the bits that were necessary, letting any other inconsequential word dissipate even before it reached his eardrums. All that time spent surrounded by the smaller mental capacities of his Clanmates, by the not-so-much-cerebral as they were instinctual creatures who acted upon emotion rather than intelligence, had put somewhat of a lull on his own normally sharp, machine like behaviors.

He was actually waiting for the opportune moment to collect what he had come so far to collect.

Rookfrost nearly rolled his eyes at his own ridiculousness. Waiting? What in the name of science was he waiting for?

Despite the she-cat being in mid sentence, Rookfrost struck like lightning, a single, well-aimed blow to the side of her head to send the small creature falling, the collapsing movement like a kit that had been struck down by a warrior three times their size. It was pathetic, really, but the easiness of this dark deed was the furthest thing from his mind right now, a powerful, unearthly glow having entered the dark gray chasms of his eyes, a burning, frozen fire of insatiable thirst roaring into an inferno as he looked directly into what he had come here to collect.

The she-cat gasped a painful breath, disoriented and fighting to stay conscious in an attempt to get back onto her paws. Her voice shaking as much as her body now that the situation had been flipped completely on it's axis, a day of ordinary becoming a brief moment of terror and panic.
“B-Blackf-fur what are you-”

Paws at her throat, heavy frame looming over her, Rookfrost wore a look of surgical sobriety, as though this were just another day in the Medicine Cat's den, only he was taking life instead of healing wounds and extending the lifespans of his Clanmates beyond natural selection's exceptionally short tolerance for injury. Crushing the breath from her esophagus, her jaws twitched open, body involuntarily jerking in effort to break free of his cruel hold, but his weight was far substantial to hers, water leaking out of the corners of her eyes from the pain it was likely causing her. Soul not shuddering, heart doing nothing but pound out it's usual war drum rhythm, Rookfrost looked down into the face of the one who's life he was stealing in the name of science, staring into the organs he had come here to collect.

”I apologize, Daisy. Your death is a direct result of my incompetence in my field.” He spoke in that lecturing tone he used with Snowpaw when describing the exact properties and uses of feverfew or coltsfoot, though a small shred of remorse could be heard beneath the academic coldness. The medicine cat's front limbs bunched and he drew closer, Daisy's struggles growing weaker and the pathetic mewls she made began to dissipate as death slowly claimed her. The black warrior's words tickled the feathery white fur around her ears.
”If I knew how to take your eyes without killing you, I would have done so. Then you would be free to continue your meaningless existence without ever having to see me again. This knowledge is no use to you now, Daisy, but thank you. It has been quite a few moons since I took anything truly worth examining.”

As a final death rattle shook through the small albino cat's chest, Rookfrost got up, Daisy's body now limp and losing warmth, her eyes stretched wide in paralyzing fear, even as the white feline fell into eternal slumber.

Standing back not to admire his handiwork but to gaze again upon the source of his curiosity and the cause for so blatant a murder, Rookfrost twitched a single tufted ear, as though to flick away any lingering regret over his behavior – not that he had any.

Her eyes were not red, or pink, or blue.

They were violet, as unnaturally beautiful as eyes could possibly be, and no amount of mental strain and hours spent traipsing through the shelves of logic and accumulated knowledge in the depths of his mind had presented him with a solution for that color occurring. Rather than let them slip away forever, he had chosen to take them so that they might better be preserved, better studied. The process of extraction would be messy and time consuming, but he relished the idea of being paws deep in ocular cavities attempting to severe the eye-stalks from the she-cat's skull.

Her name had already been forgotten, not that anyone would ever come looking for her.

Grasping the albino feline around the scruff, he began to carry the dead weight back to his hollow, where he could be undisturbed and properly prepared for the bloody task at hand.

The wind seemed to whisper through his fur a morbid question, the kind of question that rose up whenever someone never-to-be-missed had died.

Daisy?

….Daisy who?