STAND OR DIE ; PRIVATE

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    [center][fancypost=width: 500px; line-height:1.4; text-align: justify; padding: 2px][size=9]When his parents weren't [redacted], they'd sometimes made this noise, particularly when they wanted his attention and a loud "Robin" hadn't done the trick. He had never been sure of its true meaning, but they'd both used it enough times for him to remember it, a low, loud sound that had always given him goosebumps, and come to think of it, it was one of the few snippets of them that he had, that he could replicate at any one point. He couldn't match the grace or scent or tone of his mother, he thought, or the steady largeness of his father, but that? He felt like he could try that. It's one of those cheesy situations in which he's desperate to salvage any sort of memory, doing something stupid to try and feel closer to people that aren't around anymore, and he probably should be embarrassed (probably is embarrassed) but he's almost on the verge of missing them, almost on the verge of something shifting, and he's subconsciously seeking an escape from that, a relief. Something. Anything.


    First things first: Robin can't, in fact, oof. Is that the technical term? That's what it always used to sound like, anyway, when his parents did it. Oof. Oof. Oooooof. It had been nothing short of majestic, if a little bit odd, but he just sounds plain pathetic. Is this how they felt when they first tried it, or were they perfect from the get go? His face is flaming, even if he finds it kinda funny, and he rubs his nose against his foreleg, releasing a quiet sort of half-oof, half-whine squeal of contemplation as he does so. And then he tries his hand at this oofing business again, and... he still sounds squeaky and all-round unimpressive, nothing like his parents. Still, nothing changes without practise, so he plants his forepaws firmly on the ground as though the leverage'll make him sound better, and tries again, and again, and again, until his chest feels all rumbly and he's not even sure if he even remotely resembles the noise he's aiming for.
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    [center][fancypost=width: 500px; font-size: 12px; line-height:1.4; text-align: justify; padding: 2px]Now that's a sound that Wintercub knows well. That low puff of air through a loose throat and an open mouth. It still served to prelude his name when he's being particularly obnoxious or unruly, or as something of a last warning when he's doubting their sovereignty on all matters in his life. It's not that they're particularly inclined towards discipline, his parents, but they led their lives in a way that made Winter want to emulate them. He wasn't obeying them, he was trying to be them. So while his parents are not (yet) redacted, or whatever it is that Robin says when he finds it best to deny what's going on, he knows what it's like to cling to them, to put his paw where they had walked a moment ago and realize just how far he still has to go. Children were a messy mix of those who were with them when they were young. His own body shows little resemblance to his mother, in all of her dark-red-spotty prettiness, and he doubts that he'll look much like his father when it's all said and done, but the lion cub has his mother's charm and intelligence, his father's soft heart, and Alfred's strangely loving aloofness. Kids are patchwork quilts.


    And while he's still quite new to this, Winter thinks he likes the idea of contributing the the quilts of others as they expanded, trading off little squares. Here, take a little piece of me with you when you go. Wow, now that makes him sound kind of sappy, doesn't it? He's not. Promise, cross everyone's hearts, cross his own, cross his roleplayer's because Rev's sleep deprived and feels like breaking the fourth wall, he's not sappy. Totally not. Maybe just a little bit. Enough so that when he hears what he understands to be an attempt at an oof, the lion cub makes a detour from his former path through the enchanted forest and towards Robin, that weird little lion cub that he actually kind of likes. He meant it when he said that he didn't like people, but what wasn't there to like so far? Not many other people are this decent to him with no reason. Win's kinda an asshole, anyway. "You have to kind of push," he offers, though that sounds really weird just a second later. A rounded ear flicks back, a nearly imperceptible gesture of oops before he decides that he doesn't really care. "From your stomach up."
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    [center][fancypost=width: 500px; line-height:1.3; text-align: justify; padding: 2px][size=9]Kids are patchwork quilts. What is it that he takes from the people around him, then? With limited early-life interaction, one would anticipate that his behaviour closely emulates that of his parents', if not tempered by immaturity and that independent, purely-him streak that sets him apart from being little more than a carbon copy of the both of them. He'd like to think that he takes his parents' intelligence from them, and his mother's inclination to want to avoid unnecessary conflict, but his skull is thick enough for butting heads with others, and while he may possess a natural affinity for learning, he hasn't had that tested enough for him to decisively say that he is smart enough to compare himself to them. He doesn't have any form of steadiness, or a tendency to tip over into hot-headed frowns when things get too much; he doesn't have the bearish warmth of his father, nor the easy strength of his mother, though perhaps that can be attributed to his initial lack of interaction with them. Not that he avoided them, but rather they were often busy, so while they weren't complete strangers, and while he loved them a great deal, he can't exactly say that he spent hours and hours with them. If kids are patchwork quilts, then he must be very, very small. He's taken little, and he has little to offer. He's as complex as a blank slate.


    Still, Robin similarly likes the concept of people taking part of him with them. It's just a matter of making himself big enough to survive after the act of cutting bits away for other people, hoping that he'll get something in return. Interaction can be exhausting, sometimes, particularly when it's all one-sided, but he likes to think that everybody's putting something into the pot, that everybody's getting something back. Win may not be much of a sap, but at this stage, it's safe to say that Robin's optimism and good heart mean that he still is, that he still believes in trust and love and affection without any real fear. There's a part of him that thinks he's wrong to put his faith in something as futile as that, but he can't seem to shake the openness out of him just yet, so for the most part, he wears his heart on his sleeve, lets people in, lets people out. Maintains a high opinion of free will. Hopes that free will'll lead people back to him.


    His train of thought — and pathetic practice — cuts off at once when he hears a voice, and he turns his whole body in Wintercub's direction, radiating interest and shame in equal parts, eyes wide and mouth open in an 'o' shape, because he hadn't intended on being caught, and yet here he is, listening to someone not much older than him give advice. But hey, he reasons, if it's that obvious, then he must be at least semi-okay, right? Win wouldn't've been able to tell what he was trying to achieve if his previous attempts had been total flops. From the stomach up? He doesn't respond at first, instead choosing to try it like that, and it takes a while to move from his chest down to the pit of his gut, but it does sound a bit better. Is this weird? He's just making noise right in front of the guy, and he'd only just decided that he hadn't wanted to be seen doing anything like this, but— whatever. There's that childish lack of inhibition cutting through, and Winter seems like a good person. Good enough to help him, anyway.


    "Was I being loud?" He clears his throat, which feels strained from all the effort, and tries for a grin. He hopes that Win only heard because of proximity, and not because half the damn clan was able to pick up on his failed wailing. "You're right, though. About the stomach thing." And now he's got to assume, which is stupid-dangerous, considering his own position, but he does it anyway. "Do—" not did, not used to— "your parents make that noise, too? Mine did all the time. Could hear it from miles away, it seemed like."
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    [center][fancypost=width: 500px; font-size: 12px; line-height:1.4; text-align: justify; padding: 2px]Well, maybe it's just him, but he thinks that Robin probably got quite a bit from the people around him. Not enough that he's all there are, but there's always that central part of the quilt that just you. You'll never completely be the people you learn from, and if only Wintercub can find a reason to cling to that for the rest of his life. He'll struggle with it. He'll never feel quite right. Later on there will be some pieces that he wants nothing more than to tear apart, to tug them apart at the seams and get it out of him, out, out, out. You grow into the person you're supposed to be, not out of it, but he wonders, then. Is cutting off a tree's dead limbs a part of its growth? Is cutting off the living parts? Picking the flowers that bloom before the fruit? Do people live solely to produce something for someone else to enjoy? That's not completely terrible, he supposes. Winter likes the idea of people getting something from him, likes the idea of helping, providing, pushing people to greater heights. That's not all there is to life, surely, but he doesn't mind it. As with most kids, and as with Robin as well, he's not much of anything yet. His parents were not strangers, though his father seemed to always have something to do and his mother worked with a lot of people he didn't know.


    To say it more directly, this is the first time he's really gotten the chance to speak to people not in some way related to him. And they're weird, these people. Robin has more to offer than he thinks, just because he's weird.


    There really is something so self-sacrificing about this, isn't there? Just hoping that what you give them is worth something back. Personally, he hasn't yet reached the stage of guarding himself for fear that letting people in will only leave him with slash marks through treasured fabric, but there's still a wariness to him that the younger feline doesn't have. Perhaps he's simply not brave enough to offer himself so readily. It's not that Wintercub is in any way jaded, he hasn't seen enough of the world to have reached that point quite yet, so is it just him? There seem to be more questions than answers here, but that could just as easily be the point. To make him want to go out and find more. BlizzardClan is good at that.


    That was an easy excuse for talking to people, and sometime late at night Win would sit down and ponder over how pathetic it is that he needs an excuse to approach people for a conversation, but for now he'll focus on what he actually came here for. He offers his typical inelegant snort that shares its root with laughter, a sharp contrast to the almost prim and proper way he holds himself even with wind-tousled fur and muddy paws. The sound that had drawn him in was a peculiar one, something that carries and automatically draws him in. So it wasn't too off, really, for an oof. (Ha, off for an oof.) A faint smile broadens to something warmer once he nearly reaches the sound, and he straightens his throat and pushes his head forward to make it back at him. "You're not annoying, if that's what you're really asking." His shoulders tip unevenly in a partial shrug. "It kinda carries, though. Just because." Very scientific, Win. He can't help but stare at him with a strange force when he asks his question, because that's his family, but — there's no reason to act like that, and it was weird of him in the first place, so once more his posture relaxes faintly. Which is about as relaxed as he can get right now. "Yes. Mostly when they think they've lost me or something. So that's why you're trying to do it?"
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    [center][fancypost=width: 500px; line-height:1.4; text-align: justify; padding: 2px][size=9]Robin likes to think that assuming that every change in a person's life brings about development, because some people grow smaller (is that an oxymoron?) by grief. Once, his father said that hard times created strong men, and that strong men created good times— but then that good times created weak men, and that weak men created hard times. From his standpoint, those hardships made people better, but then did not that betterment give birth to a state of fragility and contentment? People become happy with where they were, irritated by the concept of striving to be more, and as much as he probably shouldn't be considering this, Robincub thinks that everyone'd be better off if they just broke that cycle entirely. Somehow. He doesn't actually know how anybody'd go about achieving this, and he doesn't actually have any idealistic notions on the matter, either, besides his stubborn belief that maybe, maybe, it could happen one day. Otherwise, these patchwork people will continue to sew and cut and cut and sew until they're shallow imitations of what they can be, if they try.


    He's working his way through his own hard time right now, dealing with his own things, doing it all alone. By his father's logic, this ought to make him stronger when he's older, once he's survived it all, but he can't really see that happening. If he had a piteous enough self of humour, he'd probably start preparing for the layers on layers of future issues stemming from childhood trauma and compartmentalisation, but instead, he thinks, he's just going to struggle a lot. Both of his parents maintained the belief that a little cry did nobody any harm, but since they [redacted], he hasn't actually been able to do so. He tries to think about what happened to them, but all he feels is this cold, sucking numbness. No crumpling, no stab to the heart or anything like that, no winding punch — just... silence. Blankness. Tranquility, if tranquility felt like falling.


    Coping with that involves throwing himself at people. Not in that constantly-loud, desperate sense, but in a way that was just open enough for others to know that he was seeking any form of companionship they'd offer. Coldness doesn't put him off as easily as it probably should, and it's not that he doesn't know how to take a hint, but rather that for the sake of waiting, he doesn't always bite the bullet immediately. Sometimes, insistence yields rewards. Other times, it yields a kick in the teeth, but hey, he's willing to risk it. "Aw, thanks." Maybe it's just him, but Win seems a bit irritable, so to be described as something other than annoying is, he assumes, the biggest compliment he's going to get. Even if it is just about his noisemaking. "Just because? Wow. I'm guessing you have a degree in this, because that was... informative." He grins, all teeth and crinkled eyes. Happy.


    "What— because I'd lost you, or because I'd lost my parents?" For a moment, his smile turns sour, but it's a fleeting shift; the warmth returns so quickly that it's as though it had never left, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of change that he sorta hopes wasn't noticeable. He'd hate to have to try and get out of some sort of explanation; people have been kind enough to skirt around the topic of his loneliness, as they have with every kid to turn up without anybody else to guard them, and the last he needs is somebody with the very things he's had robbed of him nagging him about his lack of family. Not that he sees anybody here as irritating enough to press him into a corner, but curiosity does bite hard, and he can only hope that its teeth have missed the mark this time. "Yeah, this was actually me trying to get your attention. It worked, didn't it?"
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