#thymestem

And she's right.

Due to Striped'Claw's intermittent/ nearly non-existent training methods, Thyme'Paw usually had to go out of his way to get extra training. He wanted to learn what he wasn't being taught.

So he asked his littermates for help! He would ask them to share what they'd learned on their training sessions and try to understand what they'd been taught by watching and copying them. Sometimes, they'd straight up do secondary training sessions, apprentices to apprentice.

Thyme'Paw's determination to train one way or another did impress Striped'Claw. She could tell his heart was in his training — and he would have made a better warrior, had her heart been in his training, too.

He was apprenticed to Striped’Claw, who left the Clan as a loner shortly after Thyme’Paw became Thyme’Stem.

Training with Striped’Claw was, admittedly… Pretty hard. She’d been really close to an older sister of Thyme’Paw’s, Sweet’Heart, who died not long before Thyme’Paw and his littermates were born. He wasn’t a reincarnation of her, but, coming from the same parents, it was natural for the two to look alike. Thyme’Paw was apprenticed to Striped’Claw while the warrior was still grieving her deceased friend’s death, and standing around somebody who looked so much like her didn’t exactly make her mental state better.

Striped’Claw would often go out of her way to avoid scenarios that involved being around Thyme’Paw. She couldn’t stand being around her own apprentice. Not with his sister’s death still present in her mind. It hurt to interact with him. She would often ask to put him in different patrols than her,

end training sessions early,

or straight up walk away in the middle of a training session.

Sometimes, she wouldn’t come to training sessions at all.

Although Thyme’Paw understood that the warrior needed her space, he couldn’t help feeling a little bit resentful towards the warrior’s absent training methods. His siblings had gotten good mentors. How come he hadn’t? He didn’t want to awaken negative emotions in other cats, but it sometimes felt like his mentor was afraid of him, even. Her lack of praise and intermittent training, mixed with how off their interactions felt, made Thyme’Paw promise himself that, when he became a mentor, he would never lose his composure around his apprentice. He would never make his issues feel like theirs, and he would work hard to be the mentor he wished he’d had.