tomato, pear || stink-bug

Overall, it had started as a pleasant evening. The setting sun had purpled the sky as dusk settled. The cold had felt bracing instead of suppressive. Coalwhisker’s fur hadn’t gained any length with the colder moons, but it has begun to grow a little more thickly.

Coalwhisker should have been suspicious. Things were never this enjoyable for long.

Indeed, after the sun had fully descended beyond the horizon and Coalwhisker had stretched himself every which way he could, he was far to content to last. The trouble started when, quietly, Coalwhisker had laid in his nest, curled, with his head pillowed atop his hindlegs. His thin tail against his cheek.

A bug of some kind alighted atop his head and, for a time, Coalwhisker was resigned to trying to will it away with thought alone. He wasn’t going to move, not when he was laying this comfortably. The bug, nonchalant in the face of psychic communication, continued plodding about the top of his head. As it neared one of his large ears, Coalwhisker twitched the ear in an unsuccessful attempt to shoo it.

And then someone smacked him.

More accurately: a well meaning clanmate smacked the bug and, by extension, Coalwhisker. Several things then happened at once. One, Coalwhisker stood and shoved the offending clanmate because, well meaning or not, hey. Two, the bug, injured but not diseased, fell from Coalwhisker’s head and onto it’s back, unbroken legs wiggling skyward. Three, and this was truly the unfortunate one, the scent of the warriors’ den transformed from feline body odor to feline body odor and eggs that have gone bad half a moon ago.

Coalwhisker smartly fled the scene, coming to a stop a few steps outside of the den’s mouth and turning just in time to watch tired and disgruntled warriors file out in his wake. ”Anyone want to fess up to— whatever it is that happened in there?”