Pleasant Meeting (short story)
“What’s that look for?” Myrtlewing asked, coming up to Aldereyes’s side. They were waiting with most of their Clanmates near the camp entrance for Stormstar to lead them to the gathering.
Aldereyes frowned, flashing a glance at his father’s den. “Stormstar’s still angry,” he answered in a low voice so that only Myrtlewing heard. “Seeing Thunderclan tonight won’t do anything in my favour.”
Myrtlewing brushed his tail along Aldereyes’s side in comfort, but he was feeling angry himself. A quarter-moon had passed since his run in with and failed murder attempt of Nightfly, and he was itching to sink his claws into someone. If that tom showed up at the gathering tonight, so happy and alive, Myrtlewing would be reminded of his failure, stuck in a clearing of witnesses, unable to try a second time.
“Your father always has something to fume about,” Myrtlewing said absently. “If not for something he wants to blame you for, then something else.”
Aldereyes’s silence caught his attention. He focused on the tom’s face, and saw the hurt plain in every twitching whisker and shimmering eye. He nudged him. “But it’s not that he’s angry, is it? It’s that he’s angry at you.”
Aldereyes sunk his claws in and out of the ground. “He wouldn’t be so mad if it were anyone else–except maybe Hollyclaw. It’s because I’m his son that makes the fact that I let two trespassers go that much worse. Like…like I’m a failure to his precious bloodline.”
Myrtlewing opened his jaws to reply, but at that moment, Stormstar slipped from the Oak roots that made up his den and padded silently to the front of the group like a black fox hidden in the night. He gestured for them to follow, and they did without a word, traveling swiftly and silently beneath the pine trees.
“For whatever it means, I don’t think you’re a failure,” Myrtlewing whispered.
Aldereyes looked exasperated. “Great. Myrtlewing doesn’t think I’m a failure. I feel so much better.”
Myrtlewing stifled a smile. He knew that Aldereyes really was grateful, he just didn’t want to admit to himself that he had run to a younger Clanmate to make him feel better about his father–or that it worked. But Myrtlewing could see the fur lift breezily on his shoulders, no longer held down by tension.
Their talk reminded Myrtlewing that he had planned to make Aldereyes feel better by giving him a flower–by Molespots’s suggestion, after he couldn’t do it by killing Maplefall. His frustration over Nightfly getting away had clouded his mind to everything else. He hadn’t completely forgotten the plant, but he was much too upset with his own personal issue to care enough about Aldereyes’s to go back and get it, or whatever was left of them.
As they neared the Great Oaks, Aldereyes leaned to whisper in Myrtlewing’s ear. “I hope I don’t need to say this, but you’re an idiot, so I probably do. We’re here to represent Shadowclan. I’ve already done enough to–Stormstar thinks that I’ve done enough to ‘damage’ our reputation. So as much as this will go against your every nature, don’t do anything stupid.”
“I will try,” Myrtlewing replied, half wanting to laugh and half wanting to smack Aldereyes across the face. He had that effect on the medicine cat.
And he didn’t do anything stupid, just as promised, throughout the light conversations and the leaders’ announcements, which were nothing important. Some kits were born, some apprentices got their warrior names. Myrtlewing wasn’t really paying attention.
But when a dark grey tom with hazel eyes, an almost identical replica of Nightfly, padded up to Myrtlewing during the second round of conversations, he was all ears.
“Hi, I’m Sheepsorrel. You’re Myrtlewing, right?”
“I am.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you! You met my brother not too long ago, I believe, he was helping you pick an herb of some sort?”
Time slowed.
“Nightfly is your brother?” Myrtlewing asked dumbly.
Sheepsorrel chuckled. “Can you see the resemblance? Anyway, I just thought you should know…. Nightfly was very happy to meet you.”
He shouldn't be. He should be rotting in the ground right now, mourning his life in Starclan and regretting ever having met me.
“He couldn’t stop talking about you,” Sheepsorrel went on. “Your looks, especially. It was like he forgot you were off-limits!”
A twinge rippled the air, ever slightly. Myrtlewing could feel the beginnings of something new and great, the shy edges of a still vague formulating plan. “Is that so?”
“It–”
“Sheep!” the Starclan-like, irritated voice sounded. Nightfly hurried over, his eyes round with horror. “W-what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Sheepsorrel replied innocently. “Just talking to Myrtlewing. Say, isn’t he that tom you talked to last night?”
“A quarter moon ago!” Nightfly was quivering with Myrtlewing guessed to be heart-stopping anxiety.
“Oh right!” Sheepsorrel lightly smacked his face with his paw. “You did meet him a quarter moon ago. I got it mixed with the last time you talked about meeting him.”
“Shh! Come on, let’s go talk to Pineflight. She’s probably dying to hear the end of that three-footed hare story. It would be rude to keep her waiting. Let’s go. Now.”
Sheepsorrel followed obediently, a dirt-eating grin plastering his face. “See you, Myrtlewing! It was a pleasure!”
Myrtlewing dipped his head. He kept his composure, but inside he was buzzing with kit-like excitement that made him want to jump all around the clearing in unbridled, disordered joy. “It certainly was!”
