#sun-drown-place

She finds herself on a precipice, grass under her paws and gray sky overhead. The smell of salt and the sound of crashing waves fill her senses; her claws dig into sand-strewn soil; her fur lifts with the ocean breeze, strong and stalwart, whipping steadily away from the rising sun. Below her lies ocean, depthless and desperately, achingly blue; beyond her lies water, leaping endlessly toward the golden, rocky shore.

The sun-drown-place, she thinks, and feels at once the age of eight moons and eighty season-cycles. She reaches at once for Feathertail, dead for countless pawsteps; for Tawnypelt, buried seasons ago; for Stormfur, lost to the crags of the mountains; for Crowfeather, who had closed his eyes only moons ago and had never opened them again. She does not reach for Bramblestar; she does not question why. She simply exists, with the ghosts of her friends almost corporeal at her sides, and watches as the wind plays with the waves, salty ocean spray spattering at her paws.

A pale bird swoops overhead, white and soft, feathery gray; with a bolt of delight, Squirrelflight recognizes it as a gull. It had been so long since she had chased them over sand and into the waves, their calls echoing against rocky cliffs. Brambleclaw had snorted, unamused; Feathertail had joined her, swimming through whitecaps and pouncing clumsily on birds until, with the exaggerated air of someone too good for noisy, troublesome birds, she had pulled the largest fish Squirrelflight had ever seen from the waves.

“You look like a drowned rat,” Squirrelpaw had told her, laughing, as Feathertail struggled with a fish bigger than both cats combined.

“Better than looking like a drowned squirrel,” Feathertail had countered, and then Tawnypelt had joined the fray, chasing an odd-looking creature across the shore, all hard shell and hard, straight tail and weird, wiggly, bug-like legs.

“What is this place?” Stormfur had asked, tipping over a bug-prey of his own.

Squirrelflight blinks, and in one moment the action goes from excruciating to simple. She blinks a few more times just to enjoy it, just to experience the lack of heaviness behind her eyes, the lack of all-consuming exhaustion pulling her downward.

The breeze whips around her, and she raises her chin to it, allowing the wind to catch and pull at her fur. She... hasn't felt like this in a long time. Hasn't felt... well, peace.

Squirrelflight stares out over the horizon, a faint smile pulling at her. Below her is the sea — salt and water and endless waves, crashing against the shore. Below her is her past, tinged golden with memories not yet tainted; below her is her future, a place where breaths don't hurt, where energy floods her muscles. She stands, paws edging at the side of the cliff, and lets herself enjoy.

"So this is the sun-drown-place," comes a voice.

Squirrelflight whips around, feeling her fur spike haphazardly along her spine. “Shrewpaw,” she breathes, ever so softly, as if the slightest inflection could sweep him away with the tide.

“Squirrelflight,” Shrewpaw replies, smiles big and wide and toothy, his eyes lit up with joy.

Squirrelflight feels as if years are melting off her pelt, leaving her the guilt-stricken apprentice she’d once been. “It’s good to see you,” she says warmly, leaning in to touch her nose to Shrewpaw’s cheek.

“This is where you were, huh?” Shrewpaw asks. His voice is light, teasing, but Squirrelflight feels a heaviness growing in her chest.

“I never got to say goodbye,” she says. The words sit heavy on her tongue, cloying and heavy like maple sap. “I was too late.”

Shrewpaw glances over at her. “It wasn’t your fault,” he says gently. “I made my choice. I’d take the risk again.”

Squirrelflight recalls, heavily, how the young tom’s body had looked, stretched out beside Sunningrocks. He’d been skin and bones and much too small, every rib jutting horrifically from his pelt. The wounds had been grievous; his stomach and flanks had been crushed, flesh and blood and muscle and bits of bloodstained brown fur.

She’d been too late to save him. She’d never even gotten to speak with him; he’d died before she’d had a chance. And then he was buried shallowly, hollowly, one more victim to leave behind and forget about.

How long had it been since she’d thought of him? Had reminisced about their days in the nursery, playing mossball and planning pranks? Had truly remembered those glorious days of their early apprenticeship, cavorting among old growth trees and towering, soaring ferns?

“I’m sorry I forgot.”

“You didn’t. You moved on. That’s not the same as forgetting.”

“Isn’t it?” Squirrelflight asks. “You died and we left and somewhere along the line, I stopped remembering.”

Shrewpaw exhales, sharp with amusement. “That’s a good thing. I wouldn’t have wanted you to mourn forever.”

“I should have. You were my best friend.”

“Who is that now?”

Squirrelflight blinks. Considers. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know if I’ve ever really known.”

Shrewpaw breathes out, presses his head against Squirrelflight's own. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry I left you."

There's a tiredness in Squirrelflight's chest, but it's muffled by the scent of her old friend, by the feel of his fur mingling with her own. "You did what you had to," she says. "You'd do it again."

Shrewpaw gives a half-hearted snort. "That doesn't mean I don't wish things had been different."

"Different," Squirrelflight repeats. "I wish a lot of things had been different." Hollyleaf. Bramblestar. Dandelionkit and Juniperkit. Leafpool. StarClan itself. But she doesn't voice those things, instead staring at the grass tickling her paws. Could it be real, or was this just the last fantasy of an old, dying cat?

Shrewpaw is silent, considering. "Well," he says at last. "We're here now. Would you like to race to the shore?"

Squirrelflight smiles disbelievingly. "An apprentice game?" she asks. "Aren't we both a little old for those?"

Shrewpaw shakes his head, presses his nose to her own. "Only if you want to be," he supplies. "Here, you can be anything you want."

Squirrelflight stares down at her chest, disbelieving. The fur there is mottled with familiar gray, but as she watches, it slips steadily away, melting back into the soft red fur of her youth. She looks up sharply, staring at her companion with wide, startled eyes.

"Anything you want," he repeats.

"Anything?" she asks. Energy floods through her muscles. Suddenly, all of her worries seem so very far away.

Shrewpaw opens his mouth to reply, but she's already darting away, toward a tumble of rocks that'll make an easy path down, down, down to the shore and the water and the place where it meets the sky, down to where they'll splash through the waves and race across sand and laugh and laugh and laugh as if life had never really gone on from here, this place with the salty air and the scent of sea and the feel of cold water lapping over young, nimble paws.

They might not have forever, but maybe what they do have is enough — a moment where the burdens of what-was or what-will-be cannot touch them, not under the careful protection of stalwart stone and shifting sea.

They cavort for a heartbeat, a sun-cycle, a moon, a season — perhaps for a mouse's breath, perhaps for an eternity. But did it matter, when everything she'd known was behind her, when everything she knows is here, is sand and sun and sea?

Shrewpaw laughs, darting away from Squirrelpaw's outstretched paws. Squirrelpaw grins, fierce and true.