sensitive topics COME BACK AND HAUNT ME - nightmare

[Starlingheart]

// TW: mentions of death + blood

The tunnel underneath the thunderpath has never been something that Starlingheart had a particular fondness for. It had been a long time since she had a nightmare about her mother, about this place but in her dreams tonight the fire around them rages, casting an orange glow into the tunnel that she and her clan hide in. She is not Starlingheart the medicine cat in this dream but rather Starlingkit. Afraid and cowering and much too reliant on someone who was about to be ripped away from her too soon. It's almost like she is watching from an outsiders perspective. Starlingkit presses herself to Briarstar's side, relishing the safety and the comfort that she finds in that spiky ebony pelt. Her mother had just finished telling them a bedtime story to soothe them and she begins to look around for two of her kits who had gone missing. When she cannot find them she pushes herself to her paws, slips away from a kit who dozes peacefully, unaware of what is about to happen.

She wants to scream, to tell Briarstar to not go, to not do it. She wants to tell her siblings to get off of the thunderpath but in her mind, in her heart, she knows how this plays out. There is nothing she can do or say to change the outcome. No matter what she would have to watch her mother, her brilliant and beautiful and smart mother lose all nine of her lives, laid out on the thunderpath. And then she blinks and suddenly she is standing over the body and then she blinks again and the black fur under her paws changes, it is Viridianskies and then Rainshade and then it is Pitchstar. Cats she was supposed to save but hadn't been able to. Blood runs from the bodies, it stains her white paws red.

Suddenly, she is awake, sitting up and breathing hard with tears staining her ebony cheeks. She looks around at all the other sleeping bodies and she knows that it is just a dream but she cannot help the way her body shakes. She knows it was all in her imagination but she still picks herself up, gently extricating herself from her shared nest and making her way outside. She does not go far, though. She walks out of the tunnel and her eyes immediately flash to the spot on the thunder path where she had lost a mother so many moons ago. She is relieved to see nothing there, any indication that Briarstar had breathed her last breath there washed away by countless rainy days. She knows it changes nothing, all of those cats are still dead, but it meant the nightmare was over, for now at least.

She takes a deep breath and tips her head so that she is looking at the stars. "Briarstar- Pi-pitchstar please- please look o-o-over us kee-keep us- keep us safe" she says her prayer softly, but the stars could hear you even when you whisper right?
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[GRANITEPELT]

Where Starlingkit had slept at Briarstar’s side, Granitekit had resented the absence of a tawny flank. The rush of the Thunderpath overhead reminds him of the flames, the ash they trudged through to get to a stinking and damp tunnel below the earth. It reminds him, too, of Sandra’s abrupt abandonment of her remaining kits. “She was very sad about your sibling,” Twilightfall had told them. Sad. So sad she left the children she had left to rot away in ShadowClan without her.

Would he have been happier with her? He doubts it. As a warrior, the space beside Granitepelt’s flank is not occupied by a trembling sister, but his pregnant mate. She shifts and murmurs in her sleep, but he does not awaken until he feels her rise and leave his side. He rolls over, blinking blearily at the tunnel entrance. She sits just there, at the mouth of it, illuminated by the starlight. He can see tears on her cheeks. Her heart is aching. Granitepelt realizes she must be remembering Briarstar’s horrific death on the Thunderpath.

He creeps closer, just close enough to hear the prayer she mumbles: “Briarstar—Pi-Pitchstar, please—please look over us. Keep us safe.” His eyes flash in the gloom. Perhaps both former ShadowClan leaders are watching their kin’s heartache from above.

Granitepelt slips close to her, twining his tail with hers. He whispers, so as not to awaken their Clanmates, “They are watching us. I know they are.” It’s what she needs to hear, though he’s immediately remembering the tattered remains of her mother on the asphalt; the bloodied foam Siltcloud had scraped from rosetted jaws. These are memories he has grown use to, and he is able to push them away as he comforts his mate with a gentle nuzzle to the face.
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[ PENNED BY MARQUETTE ]​