#I have pioneered it with augur AUs use of augur and patrician

[troutfur]

Friendly rivalry between alderpaw and needlepaw in an au where clans are friendly and collaborative with eachother.

I'm writing this preamble before writing the ficlet so I don't know how much of this is gonna reflect on it, but I do want it to be known that my immediate thought seeing this prompt was not to focus on the Needlepaw and Alderpaw of it all but rather on the aspect of the Clans being friendlier and more collaborative.

See, half because a while back my friend group got really into thinking about shipping dynamics based on Ursula K. Le-Guin short stories and half because that's what I was reading about for my class on anthropological theory I have thought about the idea of Clans as a type of moiety that evolved out of a gradual cooling of the political tensions at the creation of the Clans.

I usually group the four forest clans into two sets of two based on the alliances towards the end of TPB, LionClan with WindClan and ThunderClan and TigerClan with ShadowClan and RiverClan. I'll have to brainstorm a name for what the two larger Clans with ShadowClan and ThunderClan on one side and WindClan and RiverClan on the other as their halves would be.

(Want to see me overcomplicate your AU premise? Check my guidelines and give me your prompt! You may just be the one chosen next.)

“Alderpaw, come on!” Molewhisker stopped to encourage his panting apprentice. His trudging step and panting tongue betrayed right away how over-exerted he was from the exercise. Or it would if he didn’t look positively ragged, with fur sticking out everywhere and leaves and even bits of grass caught up all across his pelt.

His siter had convinced her own mentor and Molewhisker to make the trek to ShadowClan camp into a training exercise, though perhaps that’s too strong a word for how easily Cherryfall jumped on the idea. Alderpaw would be lying if he were to say he didn’t resent that about his sister just a little bit for how she had made a trip he was already dreading all the worse.

He understood, of course, the need to do so. It was as vital for a warrior of any Clan to get to know their sister Clan as it was to get to know their own territory and their own prey. But nothing he’d heard about their siblings from the other forest had been the least bit encouraging.

After every single gathering the senior warriors would return complaining about Consul Rowanclaw’s inability to keep the peace among his crowd, especially after the kits from their unusually fecund year had begun into apprenticeship. Most of ThunderClan held no particular love of his father but considering the alternative they dreaded the coming year when Consul Bramblestar would have to step back as Brambleclaw, letting Rowanstar enact his year of primary leadership.

When Alderpaw finally came to rest, almost collapsing without a care for the fact the floor was strewn with endless pine needes instead of the more familiar leaf litter, his peace was short-lived for he was soon faced with an unfamiliar silver-gray she-cat making faces at him. “This is a ThunderClan cat?” she said with an eyeroll as she turned around and slapped him across the face with her tail. “And I thought this was going to be a challenge.”

“The real challenge is going to be having to live with them,” another one jeered.

“They’re even worse at the gathering,” a third one of the apprentices piped up. “All goody two-paws trying oh so hard to impress their mentors. It’s sickening really.”

As they each took turns hurling insult after insult, Alderpaw could hear his sister swishing her tail across the pine needle cover. He knew that kind of look on her face, eager to jump to her own defense, and by extension that of her kin and Clan. But she also looked to her mentor who had not yet done anything about the insolent apprentices in spite of the authority conferred by her rank even over the youth of another Clan.

With a subtle eye signal from his sister and a tap of her foot, Molewhisker sprung into action, bringing the apprentice currently taking his turn at a jab under his grasp.

“Are we done with this distraction now?” The other apprentices tensed seeing the warrior currently grasping their friend but as Cherryfall flashed her claws they backed down.

Molewhisker released his grasp on the apprentice and soon enough Cherryfall was instructing everyone on the training exercise they would be performing together. “Don’t you think just because you have them to intimidate them that I’m going to go easy on you,” the silver-gray molly said to Alderpaw.

Just his luck that he had been paired with her of all possible cats...