History

Swiftkit was born to two Thunderclan parents, though one of them was a former outsider, along with a few siblings and her upbringing wasn't really anything out of the usual, even if she from an early age preferred her own company or her siblings over her other clanmates' and was never the social kind. At the age of 6 she was apprenticed alongside her littermates, but even though Swiftpaw had been looking forward to starting her training for a while now, her mentor turned out to be a disappointment. Aloof and lazy, the warrior never paid her much attention, and Swiftpaw quickly learned to seek out training on her own instead of relying on her mentor to train her. It bothered her deeply since behind her shell of pessimism, a part of her had still hoped to be able to form some sort of bond with her mentor. Now that turned out to be impossible.

Eventually, her mentor disappeared or left the clan, to this day she is not sure which, but Swiftpaw was reassigned to another cat, and then another, and so on running through a handful of different teachers, each of them as unremarkable and distant when it came to her training as the last, and gradually Swiftpaw grew to blame herself for her mentors' absence and shortcomings, and it only solidified her belief that she had to rely on only herself.

At the age 15, when she finally managed to complete her training, she was given her full name, Swiftrunner, after her tendency to hunt alone and often chase down her prey when her large situate scared it away. 
But that name only stuck for only half a year. One day Swiftrunner was out on a hunting patrol with a young apprentice and their mentor named Nighthawk, also a younger warrior, and had just chased a squirrel up a tree when something swished past her. A hawk had taken a dive towards the apprentice and their mentor managed to get between their trainee and the bird of prey, but suffered pretty bad injuries and would die soon after the encounter. Swiftrunner, knowing she would not be able to climb down quickly enough to save both of them, took a leap down from the lower branches och the tree and dropped onto the hawk's back, and with her help it was killed. She had hurt her leg badly in the fall but she and the apprentice rushed the mentor back to camp but weren't able to save them.

Both Swiftrunner and the apprentice had to spend a long time in the medicine den after that, but Swiftrunner's leg took longer to heal than expected, and the medicine cat warned her that it might never properly heal. Having heard the news, Swiftrunner went to the leader to ask for a new name since her current one now felt like more of an insult and bitter reminder of her injury than something to be proud of, and after some thought the leader agreed to give her a new name the following meeting, but asked for time to think until then. At the next meeting, Swiftrunner was called forward and, and in praise of her boldness and in memory of her clanmate, renamed to Hawkcatcher and assigned to become the apprentice's mentor.

It was neither the first nor last apprentice Swiftrunner would guide to warriorhood, and she was very often assigned apprentices who themselves had been deserted by a mentor. But because of her fast-paced training schedule and the fact that the apprentices already had had some training before getting her a mentor, they were never her apprentices for all that long, and though she had vowed not to be as distant of a mentor as her own teachers and been, she never really formed any strong bonds with her apprentices during their training period.

Despite her pessimistic and generally somewhat cold demeanor, she has mentored many cats, been on more patrols than one can count, and lived in the clan all her life, so many cats still know her, even if it generally is just as an acquaintance or former mentor and not a close friend.