Ferns quivered, rustled; stirred by unseen gray paws. The foliage was thick enough to provide cover of the sort not even the most wary mouse could penetrate, and his natural coloring—stone with a hint of shadow—added another dimension of camouflage to the warrior’s current position. Of course, he was not technically hunting, though he’d had the good luck to snare a fat sparrow just outside of camp whose tiny body he’d dropped proudly onto the fresh-kill pile. That was all irrelevant, as of the moment, however—for now Riptalon simply waited, flattened muzzle raised high to sample the taste of the hot, dry sunshine as it cascaded warmly down through the gaps in the canopy overhead. This part of the forest was thick, very much so, and the complete absence of even a whisper of wind added to the oddly thick feeling around them. Border patrol. A small party of warriors scouting the fringes of ThunderClan territory, wary of every pawprint to cross their paths, ready to fight at a moment’s ambush. Though hopefully this is just routine and we won’t have to. I don’t like the thought of a fight at the moment. In truth, despite the giant tom’s formidable appearance, he never looked forward to a fight, or indeed, even hurting another cat’s feelings. A gentle giant with a ferocious façade.

A moment later, the small ears barely visible through the verdous sedge flicked and he called, ”Okay. Let’s go.” Finally the face emerged from the heavy brush and it came into full, terrifying view. A round, cold gray face, flattened and broad, with a pair of reptilian yellow eyes whose depths glittered like frozen sunlight. The rest of him as he materialized matched his face and frigid expression; a huge, grizzly, slate-colored body with battle scratches marked deep in his haunches and one long slash which cut a jagged scar across his soft belly. Four huge paws, with the faint shadows of massive, hooked claws etched on their supple tips. They were soundless on the soft turf as the fearsome deputy padded forward, but the sound of his voice had easily betrayed the heart his appearance concealed—soft, velvety, friendly. There was hardly a sweeter cat in all of ThunderClan beneath the face he wore, petrified and etched in stone, against his will. For the first half of his life, he’d spent his days practically outcast for the rage his eyes affected, when all he wished was to be loved as he loved the Clan…

Shaking his broad head as if he could fling away the memories, Riptalon looked up brightly, inhaling deeply the stale scents around them. The summer heat choked the forest in golden heat, but his pelt was already getting ready for the harsh leaf-bare to come and he felt like he was about to keel over from heatstroke. Honeyleaf would just love that. Me, in her den, again. I just can’t stop getting ripped apart and getting pneumonia and whitecough and heatstroke and all that. He stifled a laugh at the thought of the young medicine cat coming back into her den only to find the deputy crumpled unconsciously in the corner again. At least I wouldn’t be covered in blood. Just shed hair. A light purr rumbled deep in his chest as he turned his head, long whiskers fanning out inquisitively from his flattened muzzle. The streaks and bars of slightly darker fur gave him the appearance that fragile tree-branches cast smudges of shadow flowing across his ashen pelt. For a moment, the faintest breeze ruffled and cooled his stormy pelt, and he sighed in pleasure, but the taste of air brought more than just relief from the heat. In surprise, Riptalon pricked his ears and murmured, ”Wait.” Inhaling deeply, slanted yellow eyes narrowing, they rapidly widened a moment later. ”There’s fresh cat-scent here,” the deputy murmured, dipping his tiny gray nose almost to the earth as he inhaled. He was not the best tracker, as his smaller olfactory senses made it much harder to pick up smell—but he knew an intruder when he smelled it. Riptalon sneezed, an action which almost blew him off his feet, and looked back up, eyes watering. ”There’s someone on our territory. We’d better be prepared to chase them off.” His eyes darkened as he turned back into the breeze. ”Wait for me. Or follow. I don’t know. Just… I’m going to go check it out.” His uncertain voice halted as the faintest cry came to his ears, and abruptly he sprung into motion.

Who is it? His senses were not strong enough to tell whether the feline was of a Clan or if it was merely a rogue wandering through—he couldn’t even tell what gender the cat was! I don’t want to fight, but we can’t afford to lose prey. We’re still skinny enough as it is. Flinching at the thought of unsheathing the talons within his heavy paws, Riptalon stopped for a moment behind a wall of undergrowth, lurking for a moment. The scent was heavy now, and now that he was close he could distinguish the tang of sickness heavy in the air. It was strong enough that it masked all other information. The cat was close. Slowly, Riptalon peered around the bush, and was surprised by what he saw.

A she-cat, pelt mottled with brown and orange stripes on top and a white underbelly beneath, sat with tears spilling down her filth-encrusted cheeks. Dirt and mud were caked especially on one shoulder, and Riptalon’s sharp yellow eyes picked out the dark glint of blood and the sour scent of a festering wound which made him recoil in revulsion and sympathy. He realized this was not a Clan cat—no Clan would allow such an injury to go untreated. This was a rogue, or a loner, and she was desperately hurt. The green eyes who spilled such tears had a strange, glossy sheen to them that made Riptalon distinctly unhappy. As he studied her, in his painful empathy he almost forgot that she was an intruder here, on ThunderClan land, and had surely attempted to steal prey though evidently with such an injury she had failed. But she was so thin—every rib stuck out at right angles from her pelt, and Riptalon’s stomach rumbled queasily. I would try to hunt here too, if I was starving. He watched her with pain in his eyes, and indecision—what would he do? What happened to this loner, that she got to be like this? After a moment, he shook his shaggy head, growled once to himself, and pushed himself through the brush.

Imposing, a feral, unmovable mountain of unyielding stone, Riptalon came into view. Once he’d pulled the tip of his stormy tail through the growth into the clearing, he simply sat down, lamplike eyes wary and frighteningly cold, and waited quietly. Not a fur on his grizzly pelt was stirred, he was merely frozen, only the slow rise and fall of his strong chest to show he was anything more than a cold statue. After a long moment, thoughtfully appraising her, he spoke, and he tried to make his words cold but found it difficult to hide the note of sympathy and a slight worry that resonated within his tenor voice. ”I hope you’re aware that you’re trespassing,” the dark tom reproved quietly, trying to sound stern but the alarm he felt at the cat’s condition filtering in. There was only so mean he could be, and attacking a terribly ill she-cat who was crying her eyes out on their territory would have gone against everything he believed in. Slowly, he rose back up and took an unwilling, uncertain step towards the loner, adderlike gaze direct and, almost guiltily, concerned.

From the moment the words left his gray muzzle, reaching out and fading with the faintest whispers into the air like tendrils of fog, the effect on the loner was immediate. Utter shock and confusion cloaked the tabby-and-white face in completely different colors; sending rippling waves of surprise cascading out from those unnervingly luminous green eyes. A moment later, it was gone-- those emotions that it seemed she feared to show. A powerful tide of sympathy abruptly swayed the ashen tom's massive figure, as he realized how his appearance would have aided him in the rogue world. A world where one did not show their feelings for fear of being thought weak, a world where cats could fight bitterly and die without the gentle touch of a medicine cat's herbs to ease their way through the gates of death. She probably saw him on her own terms, an emotionless statue cut jaggedly from slate and shadow, huge in mass and icy in gaze. Showing anything else besides scorn and bravery in the situation would be demeaning in the face of such a winterly onslaught, despite the warmth in his tone.

He could hardly imagine what it was like to seek, every day, to hide how one truly felt, rather than try to prove that one was more than a cruel face. Riptalon curled his fluffy tail closer around his wide, round paws, the sun whose suffocating golden blanket had seemed so utterly miserable to him a moment ago abruptly forgotten in the face of another's terrible troubles. He felt sorry for her-- and still admired her. However, he was still surprised at her answer. "No!" The poison, the utter scorn in her words set him back a pace. Riptalon's small gray ears pricked and he actually blinked once or twice. The warrior had thought surely the sickened loner would have enough sense, even in this condition, to realize they were trying to help her and meant no harm. At the least, even if she percieved cruelty in everyone she met, she should have realized she had nothing to lose. Blinking mildly, he probed softly, "You realize that if not seen you, you will die?" he asked. The bluntness gave him a pang of the heart, but it seemed the she-cat was in no condition to appreciate diplomacy.

At his side, Nighthunter's faintly striped, smoky pelt was beginning to bristle, her amber orbs flickering with something like outrage. Riptalon touched her on the shoulder with the tip of his tail, hoping she'd calm down. Any aggression would surely be interpereted as an attack. He didn't want to fight this pitiful figure of a loner, didn't want to hurt something already hurt so much. A laugh was bubbling from the tabby's throat now as she began to stumble towards them, a laugh bordering on hysteria, and Riptalon realized with a sinking stomach she was probably much worse than they'd thought. Whatever illness or fever gave that eerie shine to her verdant eyes was acting on her in ways he did not know how to fathom. Honeyleaf was truly her best bet to survive-- but now he knew she might not listen to any kind of reason. Who knew what she would do or decide in the sweating madness of fever? Riptalon knew how he felt with his thick, scruffy pelt whose shadowy, smoky hue only drank in the golden light more greedily. He would not want to be burning with fever and pain in this situation.

The loner was talking again, that same defensive snarl in her words. What made them think she would go? Well, most cats were fairly sensible, and all sense led to her accompanying them back to camp. What could they do to her that was more than she was already suffering? Unfortunately, Riptalon had begun to grimly realize how unbalanced this poor, ragged loner could really be. She could be completely insane, for all he knew. This was the kind of cat he wanted to nurse back to health? Yet he knew he could make no other decision. What kind of a cat would he be if he turned her away now, knowing that in days, perhaps hours, crows would gather to dine on her corpse? In his thoughts, he missed Nighthunter's warning hiss of rage and snapped to only when she snarled out a quick threat. He was about to quickly silence her when his yellow eyes darted back to the loner. She was stalking towards them, advancing, no doubt with the intention to go out fighting. Riptalon almost groaned, but silently thanked the younger warrior for bringing him to.

Both their gazes, one fierce orange, one icy yellow bored into the loner she-cat from where she stood. "That's not a good idea, loner" Riptalon told her firmly, twitching his long whiskers. Of course it's not a good idea. She's hardly up to my chest, and she's almost dead to boot. Blinking slowly, mildly, he added quietly, "I think you'll go because if you don't, you're going to die. You're either going to die overexerting yourself trying to fight us, when we don't want to fight; or you're going to die from that injury on your shoulder. What do you have to lose?" Suddenly he straightened up, it becoming rapidly more obvious how much larger he was than this starving feline. Did she truly think she could succeed in attacking them, two fit, powerful warriors?

The deputy's soft voice lost all commanding tone and conformed back to its usual velvety tenor, a voice which spoke in an undertone almost desperate. "My name is Riptalon, and we want to help you." And we will, whether she likes it or not, if I have to drag her unconscious body back to Honeyleaf to get it done... That would be uncomfortable, however, and he wished with all his heart that somehow he could prevail upon the unbalanced she-cat to accept their offer, to come along, and perhaps hardest of all-- trust them. Trust, that which would probably be hardest for her to achieve. Trust, which was all but a dream in the rogue world-- the world where of which she had come, a world which she would leave behind for a time as she entered their own...

The sun had begun to skim the fringes of high, wispy clouds, sending passing strands of cool shade across the baked grasses. Riptalon’s large, soft paws pressed into the twigs and debris on the forest floor, taking fleeting relief in the cool, moist soil underneath the dry layer above. Since he was not hunting, twigs splintered and fractured under his sheer weight; bracken crunching loudly underpaw. Even so, he was quiet for a cat of his size. The quiet buzz of his purr hummed from his throat and chest as they padded through the forest. Technically, they were cutting their patrol short—but how likely was it that there was a pack of invading rogues on the few foxlengths of the border they hadn’t inspected? Poppy had been a surprise— he certainly hadn’t expected to see the tortoiseshell huddled in the shadow of their territory, body crying silently out with hunger and pain. Perhaps it had been the eyes that were so unnerving—glossy with the sheen of fever, luminously bright in a way that seemed unnatural. He’d known at first sight that there was something wrong, just from the loner’s gaze, that couldn’t be attributed to mere tears. How sick exactly was she? They didn’t know how long she’d been limping around as her injury festered, how long it had been since claws had raked through her fur and condemned her life in one foul stroke. If nothing else, Riptalon would show them—whoever had done this to them—that they were wrong.

Vague doubts still whirled around the inside of his broad skull, however—he was no healer and he knew just by sight how bad the injury was. What would the blonde-and-white medicine cat think when the gray giant dumped the loner at her feet and went, ”Fix this.” Probably claw his ears off. Ouch. I don’t want her mad at me, ever again, Riptalon thought, half flinching, half amused. Honeyleaf was, truly, among a Clan of his friends, his best—though she’d been just a kit when he was a full warrior, she truly understood him. Musing over it as they walked, he wondered again what it had been which had set her off so violently that day when Elkstar had first come out of his den. She was just upset that her patient was overexerting himself, he uneasily told himself, swishing the grizzly plume of his ashen tail behind him. And when you tried to hide from a kit in her den she got a little exasperated. Nontheless, the brief flash of her green eyes—normally so warm and filled with compassion—icy and venomous, filled him with hurt and dread. What had he done? He had not been the only target of that poisonous gaze, either—Sunsetstain too had found those emerald eyes leveled warningly at her, spite seething from the medicine cat’s elegant frame. It filled Riptalon with confusion—what had they done? What had either of them done?

The shade of the forest was a relief after the golden rain of heat whose rays had baked his heavy body into a furry crisp. His scruffy, shaggy gray fur was at home here in the forest—not the blinding white so obvious in summer but so adept in winter, nor the black whose tones blended into night but not day. The neutral shade of stone and shadow, of ash and cloud—it was everywhere in the forest, in any time of day, in any season. If he stood still and closed his adderlike gaze, he became a statue of frozen slate. Realizing his reptilian eyes had closed he reopened them and hastily veered from the looming bark before his snub muzzle, padding back and rejoining Nighthunter and Poppy, who’d been walking in silence until the fevered loner responded, "My mother lives in twolegplace with my three siblings, while my father lives somewhere down near where I make my nest." Nodding, a little sympathetic towards the distant aspect to their relationship, the deputy meowed ”I see. Poppy, not to be intrusive—but do you mind telling us exactly how you got your… injury?” His soft, velvety voice was concerned and a little timid as he asked. He didn’t mean to bring her mind back to what surely must be an agonizing wound, but his first priority was keeping this cat alive. If it’d been more than a few days… he didn’t know if Honeyleaf could heal her. Then he would know forever more that he’d given a stranger hope and snatched it away, that her death was on his shaded paws.