Scratchpaw

Thistleclan

slender hazy tabby tom with dark facial markings

Whilst not small outright, Scratchpaw falls into a slighter, lither category of  builds common in his Clan - if perhaps a shade smaller still. This gifts some swiftness, some greater ease of grace, but too does it mean that the tom offers little physical presence - at least for now, and at least ever from sheer bulk. His coloration is a distorted one, a flickering blend between murky blacks and hazy almost-whites. While given to ruffle and curl in places, his fur is on the shorter side, leaving much of the texture feeling more suggested than overt. Starker are the facial markings his name derives from, sharp black curves cut in wide berth behind the subdued green of his eyes.

Positive Traits: forthright, idealist, protective, devoted
Neutral Traits: quiet, serious, broody, reactive
Negative Traits: insensitive, conformist, nosy, paranoid

Though it would take a careful eye to have noticed, Scratchpaw underwent a strong shift of personality in his nursery days, Largely thanks to his mother's influence, the first half of his kithood was a quiet and isolated affair. Later on, separated from his mother, he eventually came out of his shell - with a mild vengeance. No longer a quiet shadow, Scratchpaw became a presence of questions, sometimes vaguely accusatory ones in their phrasing. Given the chance, he was something of a tattler - a predilection that forecast his increasingly black and white worldview: My Clan, right or wrong. He struggles with nuanced ideas of Clan loyalty, and struggles even moreso with seeing anything worthwhile in cats beyond ThistleClan.

There is an element of worry in these ideas. Scratchpaw holds great concern over how he is perceived when it comes to such. When in doubt, he conforms and doubles down upon what he sees as the more loyal and Clan-ideal side when such question arises. There is no zealot like convert, and Scratchpaw is almost unmovable once he has chosen someone's side in a matter. No doubt does he somewhat externalize his moral compass, though not for lack entirely of an internal one.

He is too prone to being forthright oft verging on insensitive, especially when it concerns Outsiders and other Clans.

Beliefs:

Scratchpaw believes that the Clan is the only thing standing between cats and a life of chaotic violence. Rogues and loners verge upon mad agents of chaos, in his mind. Other Clans are only slightly better, and he still does not like them on principle.

Scratchpaw believes that his father was not a ThistleClan cat, though he is in deep and tangled denial about this. He is sure that he would never belong anywhere ever again if this proves true.

Scratchpaw believes that most of his Clanmates are worthy of trust, much as anyone can be, though he feels like an imposter in giving that trust. Conversely, he believes that anyone outside his Clan is a potential monster.

Scratchkit. What does it mean to belong? Not a query young Scratchkit ever weighed, and yet one that should be weighed for this ThistleClan kit born at the Bear Stones. Not for where he was born, but for what it meant for him - most of Scratchkit's earliest memories are of another place entirely than the one his clanmates historically called home. Memories of his mother Mossfur carrying him alone wherever she went in the early days, though her sullen and evasive manner towards clanmates eluded him. 

Mossfur didn't tell stories. She groomed him and corrected him mildly. Otherwise, she was frequently disengaged, inward-turned by a life of family gradually ebbing away. When he asked once of his father, she simply passed on the question in favor of smoothing his pelt, with a mood of that it didn't matter.

It wasn't perfect. But Scratchkit was content to linger in his mother's shadow. Home was the Bear Stones. Until it wasn't.

Madness.

Cacophany.

Scratchkit's memories of that day are both stark and harried, carried upon a vertigo of screeching warriors and unfamiliar shadows.

It was the night Scratchkit learned that the world was terrifying.

It was the night Scratchkit learned he could not trust anything - except maybe his Clan.

Largely, his mother had made him secondhand accomplice to her own standoffishness - many of his own Clan were still almost strangers to him, due her evasive, suspicious ways. But amid the battle, his mother pressed him between two stones, and never came back. Eventually, despite her hissed warning, he called out for help as sound began to wane.

And someone came. Fennelfall wasn't gentle, for the night did not allow for it, but he spirited the kit away from the thick of things, stayed with him back to the old camp. Said that Mossfur would come.

She never did.

For those first weeks after the return to the old camp - or in Scratchkit's mind, a terrifying new place absent sign or scent of fond familiarity beyond the occasional sight of Fennelfall - the kit silently fussed and fretted. Mossfur had always said she would teach him to be clever, but Mossfur wasn't here anymore.

Something about that felt wrong, and not only in the sense of a missing mother. His father unknown, the kit was absent any of the bonds that even a ThistleClan kit might tend to trust in. But the worse yet came the one rare occasion that he heard his mother's name on the tongue of a clanmate. The idle speculation of whether his unstated father was even a ThistleClan cat.

Equally passing idle snipe of it perhaps being a RedwoodClan cat.

The horrified kit, already wrestling with a sense of unbelonging that he scarcely had words for, practically transformed overnight. Sullenness became a hyperfocus on pestering for any information on being a ThistleClan cat that he felt he lacked. Fussiness became an overenthusiasm for finding failure in himself and others in regards to the same. Fear coalesed into a tight ball that he clung to within, a desperate need to be devoted to his Clan.

Because so long as he was devoted, surely it would have a place for him. Surely he would belong.

Right?