Queen's Delight!!! |open

“Letting it go might not be the best wording, I think it might be more like... being able to move forward. It's hard to head to the future with your nose in the past, you know? It's difficult, but we've got things that are more... immediate? For us to focus on right now.” She shuffled her paws uncomfortably, trying to think of something nicer to say. She felt as if she'd perhaps said the wrong things. Had she pushed Amaris away, or upset her more?

In any case, she was both relieved and disappointed to hear her ask about her feather-craft. “Oh! This? I'm trying to make a sort of toy for the kits,” she explained. “I'll need more stuff, eventually, but for now I'm trying to make sort of fan. Feathers are a lot harder to weave than flowers, but I think the kits will enjoy having something to test out their limbs on!” Rookbriar admired her work briefly, imagining with some comfort the sight of her kits batting around the toy and developing their skills.

She nodded. “You have plenty of time to process it all! The best way to handle fog is to let it pass, claws don’t faze it at all,” she purred compassionately. It was still hard for Rookbriar to imagine all Amaris had experienced and how it all must feel - she couldn’t imagine living it would make it any easier. She resumed her crafting, but nodded at the question.

“Good thing I’ve already kitted then, and that my kits are just about done with milk,” she joked, another purring laugh reverberating in her chest. “Really, though, what’s your question? I’m all ears!” She made a mental note to offer to teach Amaris some crafting, unsure if kittypets made things like flower crowns. She had heard strange rumors about kittypet lives, she felt radically unprepared as to what Amaris might need to learn.

For now, she kept her ears at the ready, humming quietly as she worked.

The question was shocking, sending a jolt through Rookbriar’s spine as sorrow weighed at her chest. “Oh, Amaris…,” she cooed silently, moving forward to touch their foreheads together. “Of course I would, but I don’t think Beestar would ever be so cruel as to not let you take your kits with you, even if she sent you away.” She pulled herself back so she could look at Amaris, and possibly give her breathing space.

“Nothing will happen to your kits, okay? Whether you’re here or not, I’ll protect them with my life like they’re my very own,” she assured, her voice warm and soft with affectionate reassurance, but with the hint of the genuine severity that flashed in her mismatched eyes. She was a keeper of promises, she always had been and she always would be. She only hoped Amaris would take some sort of consolation in her words, or even notice her sincerity. “You and your kits. You’ll be okay, okay? That’s what we’re here for - to look out for each other.”

Relief flooded Rookbriar in nearly equal measure when she observed that Amaris was genuinely thankful for the gesture, and she could do little else but beam. “Oh! I was wondering, do you have any ideas for what you’ll call your kits? I know there’s no way to know how many or what they’ll look like, but I knew I wanted my kits to have plant-based names - I was wondering if you had something similar? Or is the plan to just come up with names once they’re born?” She idly wondered what sort of names Amaris would even pick - she was still so new to Clan names, not even having her own yet.

“Though, I suppose, if you do have any planned they might be kittypet names, huh? Those seem difficult to come up with!”

Amaris’s reaction brought a bubbling laughter out of Rookbriar, who pushed her paw to her own muzzle to try to silence the sound. She couldn’t help it - she wasn’t trying to make fun of Amaris, but the demeanor shift was so drastic! “Hey, don’t worry! You don’t have to have that all figured out right now! If you do ever want to figure it out, though, I’d be glad to lend a paw if you want it!” Gently, she swatted Amaris’s paws from the dented earth.

“You’re going to scare the kits!,” she mused. She thought briefly. “Yours, not mine.”

The thought of Amaris, pregnant, and stuck in something amused Rookbriar - and brought up an old memory. “Well, I don’t know what a fence is, but I had a similar story before I had my kits! I got stuck in a vole’s den, and had to wait for some cats to pull me out,” she purred with laughter, shaking her head slightly with the embarrassment as she laughed. “I should’ve named one of my kits Denkit, then you could have Fencekit and they’d match!”

She giggled in response. “I suppose that’s the thing about walking forward - the infinite possibility!,” she teased. The thought buzzed about her brain like a hummingbird caught in the medicine cat’s den in spring. She hadn’t much considered the future, having some level of faith that her mate was still alive somewhere, and yet… if Amaris meant what Rookbriar thought she meant by pair… Well it sent a fluttering emotion through her chest that brought her back to being an apprentice.

But she was getting distracted.

Her face dropped with a feigned severity, though her eyes still twinkled with laughter. “I suppose if we really wanted matching kit names, we would need them to be littermates,” she said matter-of-factly, the edges of her mouth twitching with the ghost of a smile - she’d never been good at pretending to be serious. Amaris seemed embarrassed, so Rookbriar hoped this would ease her mind.