private IF IT BRINGS ME TO MY KNEES ⁀➷ sedgepounce

[FOXGLARE]

⁀➷ Gray eyes peer narrowly at Sedgepounce’s face—quiet, but characteristically so. The day it happened, he’d told him he was lucky Cottonsprig hadn’t grounded him to bedrest out of pure spite for wasting her herbs on his sliced up face. Indeed, Sedge was out and running around all over the territory with his apprentice the very next day. It was an accident, one he’d expected from a couple of wily apprentices over a pair of experienced warriors such as themselves, but it was that and nothing more. Scorchstorm was real apologetic-seeming about it. He made sure to scoff his mild disapproval all the same, for good measure, “Try sparrin’ with your eyes open next time, yeah?”

It could have been much worse.

It was well on its way to scarring now, the pink flesh washed over fuschia beneath the violet-painted sky of dusk. The wind died down earlier that afternoon, and Fox was grateful for the absence of a biting frost tugging at their fur this evening. Eyes flick upward minutely to meet dark amber, and his quiet is broken, “Looks alright… Does it still hurt?”

It was quiet all around, their place just over the first hill out of camp was enough to mute the buzz of camp. And the bugs had been silenced by the coldsnap, of course. Birds—plovers, maybe?—whistle and croon somewhere further on the moor, but otherwise it’s their sole duty to fill the silence. Fox was never quite good at that, though.

Something dark sat at their paws, he didn’t look down to it. The body, rotting and beginning to have been reclaimed by the earth before they could even get eyes on it. It was buried somewhere now to fulfill its duty in full. He didn’t know where they’d ended up burying it, he didn’t ask.

Something had come to a close, then. Practically, he thought of it as a net neutral. Another Duskclanner scampering around their borders carrying death on their muddy paws wasn’t something to turn a blind eye to, but… It was something like a blessing to see one of his worries put to a permanent rest. Hm, that sounded macabre. Either way, it was taken care of.

He’d thought too soon about the wind. The sea of wheatgrass rustled as the sky-tide rolled in, just briefly, but sudden enough to bring a chill to his spine. The snow would start to fall any day now. He remembered the snow stuck to the ground that day.

The day Sedgepounce had been dead.

He stayed dead for a while, too. Long enough that they wouldn’t have to make any effort to find a body, it’d be too late to know who. Snake had taken him away, and denied them the honor of something to bury. That wasn’t to be forgiven. Never, never, never.

Now he was alive, not just alive, but living. Living enough to trip and fall onto their clanmates unsheathed paw, and enough to race the moors the next day. Maybe it was a miracle. Maybe.

He realizes then, for some reason, that he hadn’t told him that he’d seen Death so clearly, that night—or day, or nights-and-days, he didn’t know. It didn’t come up. Did it matter? He feels the unease that comes with dishonesty all the same. He remembers that he did not want to die.

It’s dark enough that Fox can’t read his face beneath the shadows of encroaching night. He speaks again, “What’re you thinking about?”

WE CAME FROM DIRT ⁀➷☾⁺₊ WE HAVE TO SWALLOW IT.

• OOC: @SEDGEPOUNCE
• 
• 
  
  — meztli . sun . fox . foxpaw . foxglare
  — he/him. 23mo moor-runner of windclan. Mentored by shalestripe. currently mentoring frightpaw. formerly mentored tigersting.
  — a scarred, hulking white and golden tabby tom with gray eyes
  — taciturn, vigilant, reserved, self-righteous, restrained, independent, humanitarian, unyielding
  — “speech”, thoughts, attack
  — penned by eezy

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[SEDGEPOUNCE]

The biting cold brings them close, shoulder to shoulder to stave the early freeze. The quiet is almost unnerving, but even with the bugs dead and the prey gone, there's always sound—the distant trill of birds, the small shuffling of grass, the heartbeat of the tom beside him. The last bit is mostly imagined. He can't hear Foxglare's heartbeat any better than he can see his breath mist from his nose, but he knows that if he nestled his hear close to his chest, it'd be there. It's...reassuring. Yellowcough's a terrible thing. The fact that Foxglare came back from it unscathed is a miracle. He tries not to think about it.

Though the cold makes his paws numb, it's also a soothing balm against the ache in his face. The wound is persistent, its hurt deep—talking too much agitates it, and in the past few days it's started to itch. It's the first real wound he's been dealt since... "Mm, it's okay," Sedgepounce answers, eyes skating across Foxglare's face in the last glimpses of light. The scar stretched across his maw is an old, weathered thing. A part of him wants to ask: Did that hurt, too?

He knows Foxglare won't chew his ear off about his mistakes. The initial remark was enough disappointment, the sentiment settled. He knows what he did was stupid. A dumb accident born from anger and distraction. Scorchstorm still looks at him like a kicked puppy, and Sedgepounce is just—

He looks out to the moor. The expanse of it smears together in the dark, the rolling hills packed in close. A chill sweeps over them both. There's some unspeakable thing coiled tight in his chest. It tastes like melancholy, only more bitter—troubled and dark and always there, whenever he bothers to stop and notice. He wants to just...claw it out. As if he could reach in a paw and scoop up all his cares and worries and throw them to the wind. Then he'd have no reason to agonize over two-faced snakes, freshly buried.

A sigh brushes through him. He's latched to Foxglare's side like velcro, so he feels him turn before he sees the nebulous shape of his face in the misty dark. It takes him a second to muster the words. "I dunno. I just..." Even in the cold, the meadow is sprawling and free. Camp buzzes somewhere behind them, full of the cats that Sedgepounce has known his whole life. The stars peek from behind wispy clouds. When he was ripped away from WindClan, it was only ever his sole desire to make it back. What's more to life than this? "I can't believe they left."
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