Summer’s Muse || Fawnheart & Rookbriar Hang Out!

It was nice out, and far from the first greenleaf Fawnheart had taken a walk just to take a walk... but certainly the first time they felt themselves truly paying attention to the atmosphere of everything. Truly letting himself take in the details, without a job to do or a brother to keep tabs on. Instead, there were other things to notice; the brush of Rookbriar's pelt, her resounding hum with seemed to fuse with the droning cries of cicadas somewhere in the trees. The swell of the sun, the floral scents in the air from warm seasoned plants making their big debuts. Things he'd probably always been able to notice before, but things they were trying extra hard to appreciate after the extent of their chat with the cat beside them at this very moment. To see the world like Rookbriar might.

Suddenly, it appeared an opportunity had arisen for that very goal to be achieved, marked by the rush of the pointed queen off to a random patch of greenery. Feeling strangely returned to his kithood, rushing around on someone's tail as they made for the nearest stimulus, Fawnheart couldn't help the wistful smile that came along with the nostalgia. A smile that only grew with his surprised gasp upon encountering the subject of Rookbriar's fascination- a beautiful set of flowers, posed like a singular being in spite of their separate origins. "O-Oh my goodness... I don't think I've ever seen this before..." Granted, there was a very real possibility that he'd simply passed over the blossoms like he would have any other little flower. It was hard not to, when there was so much you were expected to do with your day as a warrior... It nearly elicited some sorrow, thinking he could've missed it so easily and never gotten the chance to see, had it not been for his partner. But- No! Rather than being sad he'd never noticed such things before, it was more important to be grateful for the fact that he'd dodged that fate! With a friend's help, no less.

..It still didn't get any less nice to think about that last bit, the fact that he was out with someone who so readily recruited them into companionship. An easy, casual bond that didn't make demands, didn't ask questions that complicated things. Something they hadn't experienced much outside of...

Well. Tinyleaf would like this flower, too, now that he was really looking at it. Fawnheart's brain couldn't help but be reminded of his brother, especially looking at these two little flowers who'd grown up to nurture one another. "I... don't know a lot about plants. But, I think... it's probably just how they are! Because, if cats can stay together, why not flowers?" Swaying a little on their paws, they blinked thoughtfully before inserting a sheepish disclaimer- "There's probably some sort of explanation for it. But, ah- I think it'd be way too much trouble to set up. I think... maybe they're friends, or clanmates in a way. In the way flowers can be. Normally, you see weeds and vines choke other plants out... but they're not hurting each other, so they must be like this for their own reason!" It was too easy to suddenly see identity in the twin blooms, to characterize them as he would another cat or even another animal. But then, who was to say flowers couldn't have their own characters? There was a whole world of life out there that cats weren't privy to, and if Starclan were real and thriving, then Fawnheart believed it best to keep their mind open to any possibility.

Fawnheart experienced some relief of their own, glad that despite being asked directly for their opinion, it hadn't been a mere courtesy call. Rather, his clanmate was more than happy to not only humor him, but expand on their mutual belief... Pleased to have meet a like-minded cat, he crouched for just a moment to touch each flower with the tip of his pink nose, bidding a silent blessing. The least they could do after verbally acknowledging the flowers as potentially sentient, even if not in the same way as himself and Rookbriar. Drifting his attention back to the warrior in question, he sent her an admiring smile as she recounted the tale of helping a poor tortoise. It wasn't something many cats would stop for- if anything, they'd see it as a shot at an easy kill, an interesting prey to bring back should they catch the poor beast before it retreated into its shell. But not her. Does that kind of empathy come naturally? I'm so curious...

Hearing the same story from Rookbriar's perspective was another relief, another instance of Fawnheart's presumed oddness being not so odd after all. From a strictly parental stance, they'd thought it natural to assume the only thing on an expecting mother's mind would be the safety of her kits, not emphasizing with the thread after the fact. It was just another way that she blew his expectations out of the water, made him wonder how much he'd misunderstood about his clanmates up until recently. It seemed at every turn, Rookbriar was full of internal and external surprises, be it noticing the unnoticed or thinking outside the box in ways unconventional to clan culture. It was... nice.

Moreover, it made them all the more eager to see how else they could be surprised, with so much more of the day left ahead. As much as they liked the flowers, at the very least they were so close to camp that it'd be easy to return to them and reexamine them should Fawnheart wish to do so. After watching Rookbriar circle around and around, head tracking her motions until he started to get a little dizzy himself, Fawnheart shook out his ears with a soft snort, settling the spinning of their head before reconnecting with the other. "I don't mind staying to enjoy them more." Ah, but... honesty. Remembering how to be more proactive, they volunteered an expansion of the statement, albeit sound more like a question than an offer: "But... if you feel ready to go, I'm.. okay doing that, too? To look at more things, maybe. It's your walk, though. So you should do what you want, since you don't get to walk out as much..." That was another good point. They didn't want to be inattentive to the queen's own needs, not when this outing was such a recent rarity for her.

He just hadn't been able to miss that instance of distance on her face, as fleeting as it'd been. Unsure where it'd come from, he hoped that perhaps moving on would take her mind off whatever had dulled her mood just then.

"Ooh.." Fawnheart breathed out with fascination, eyes widening as he hurried after Rookbriar. Bees taking naps? That was something he wasn't sure he'd ever noticed before, either. Honestly, when they'd seen bees around during their apprenticeship, they usually just rushed away out of fear of being stung, not realizing until much later in life that most bees wouldn't actually sting without provocation. Since then, he made himself scarce solely for the purpose of maintaining a peace treaty between himself and the little insects... but here Rookbriar was describing something so catlike, so natural to the living experience, that it kind of made him realize that even bees could be similar to a Sunclan warrior. That theme of broad thinking, of understanding the incomprehensible, just kept reoccurring!

Padding to her side, Fawnheart thought hard about the propositions, taking them as seriously as one would an omen from Starclan. "I guess... if you try to think about bee names, then you also have to think to the core principle. Like, ah... do bees have language? Do bees talk like a cat? Or..." Their brow knit slightly, the scope of the subject becoming more ambitious than they'd originally realized when they dipped their toes in. "Well. Bees buzz a lot... But I don't hear much else, not like all the sounds we make. So maybe bees talk, but more simply than we do. Or... maybe they don't need to talk, and they just get along like flowers. Maybe the word is. Communication? Oh..." They were rational questions to ask, but quickly spiralled out of control. The patched warrior shook his head as if to clear it, twitched their ears as if dislodging water.

"Well. I guess bees are actually just as complicated as we are, when I think about it. So maybe SunSwarm is real and waiting for us." A much happier thought, eliminating Fawnheart's wondrous rabbit hole about the nitty gritty details. "I feel like they might have a lot of words and names about flowers, though, since that's what they like most!"

Fawnheart nodded along to Rookbriar's idea- after all, cats understood each other because they knew themselves. It'd probably be the same as a bee. When you're born as something, that's just what you are, and that's what you'd understand. Or something. They started to get that spiralling, overly complicated feeling again, and as such didn't protest when his companion decided to change topics to something more lighthearted. Flowers, just like the ones they'd met so recently! It was easy to take them for granted, when you lived among them your entire life. For Fawnheart, things like flowers and green leaves were as constant as the sun and moon, albeit held to seasonal limitations. Even so, they were just part of his surroundings, nothing more meaningful than the moss in his bed or the walls around the camp. At least, not meaningful until now, of course. Now, everything felt so detailed, so in focus. They felt their whole body prickle with hyperawareness, suddenly noticing the texture of the grass and grit beneath their paws as they stepped. Had it always been so prominent? How did you lose sense of things so completely?

Midwalk, Rookbriar made the move to lay down, leaving Fawnheart's pawsteps stuttering to stop alongside her, not expecting the halt. They blinked down at the seal fur now bunched into a crouch at his forelegs, not understanding at the first glance what she was doing down there... Then, like having an epiphany of his own, his eyes widened in understanding a mere instant before she was back on her paws, gifting him a pleasant nudge and a pleasant piece of her mind. It was strange- he'd been raised, like all other warriors, to view the purpose of life as servitude. To live one's life for another, to give all you got, and then to die grateful for your company. In a way, those sentiments still rang true, but Rookbriar's narrative opened up a new path. A story not of giving your heart away until you had nothing left to give, but to exist on the endless charity of the world itself, something that neither ran dry nor expected payment for its kindness.

"Oh.. I never really thought about any of that either, until now." They almost felt like protesting. After all, it was their clanmate who had taken his single seed of thought and grown it into something so much bigger and brighter. And yet... they dipped their head shyly, accepting the kind words regardless of whether or not he'd actually meant to inspire Rookbriar so much. At the very least, he'd been a catalyst for that inspiration, and that much was something worth being happy about. "I'm happy." Ah! That much he hadn't meant to say aloud. Fawnheart didn't often speak even the words they meant to say, which made that slip of the mind all the more uncharacteristic, surprising even themselves. Ears warming, they kept their head ducked as he clamped his muzzle shut to relocate his usual silence. Was magic making him sing, too?

"Um. Even though we're just two cats, I'm still happy.." They mumbled a recontextualization, ginger ears twitching the heat away. "It's because we are who we are, right now in this moment and space, that we can have this conversation. So even if we can't be birds, I still think things... are going good. Maybe we can still dream about it."

Fawnheart, still doing their best to be active and in the moment, couldn't help but fall back into timidness with all the affection being directed his way- It was a peaceful timidness, composed of positive feelings, but one that silenced him as he attempted to deal with the sheer overflow of kindness from Rookbriar. It's not like cats weren't nice to him; More often than not, his clanmates could be nearly too nice, tiptoeing around him as if they'd break under any undue pressure. But that's what was different. Out here, with a friend who seemed to genuinely like being around him, that kindness was meaningful and personal. It was a direct product of his presence in her life, and it was more than a little flustering. Outside of direct family, they'd simply never dealt with an open heart like Rookbriar's.

Still feeling warm and fuzzy on the shoulder that'd been touched, Fawnheart dwindled along after the point, eventually picking up her habit of sniffing around at nearby petals, although he felt a little anxious each time. After all, as much as he was aware they were looking for bees, peeking into the rim of each flower felt like waiting for a jumpscare- a bee who might wake up startled and fly at their nose! But with their clanmate being so brave, Fawnheart tried hard to overcome that fear as well, and persisted in examining the forest flora.

"Um." They finally dared to broach conversation again, having recovered enough composure to try and contribute to the walk as they had before. "Are there any particular flowers that are more likely to have bees? I'm not very experienced, so I don't know if I'm looking in the right spots... Oh- I know you're doing most of the searching, I'm just trying to help."