Soon enough, a small bubble forms around Sedgepounce. The weeks that led him here have felt hopeless. He's imagined a cold and barren WindClan, or a forest razed to the ground by Sootstar's limitless hate; a life spent forever trapped, alone, and endless. What surrounds him now is Bearpaw's soft greeting, Rattleheart pressed to his side, and Sunstar, whose headbutting jostles him nearly down to his paws. They're his clanmates. He's
missed them.
"Oh. Okay," Sedge murmurs, blinking away tears. He shuffles forward to grab the first thing he sees off the freshkill pile; a mouse, its neck matted from the teeth which once pierced it. It's dropped to his feet when he turns back toward Sunstar, his limbs all folded beneath him as he sits and tries to put thoughts into words.
"It was a few days after you were all chased from camp," he starts, hazarding a glance up to Rattleheart, then to Sunstar.
"I was...well. Um. I'd asked Yarrowfang what happened, but...Nobody was really willing to talk about why you'd left, or where you'd gone." Yarrowfang has a scar across her neck from fighting off a badger, but to her youngest son she's only ever been kind. She cuffed his ears when he'd tried to sneak from camp as a kitten, and he's seen her yell at his siblings for likewise misgivings. The way she'd looked at him when he asked about WindClan's traitors was like nothing he can describe.
Claws in his shoulder. Lips peeled back over curled teeth; eyes piercing, haunted. A fox stole his mother's face and stretched it over its own bloodied maw and hissed at him:
"Drop it."
So he had. And the only other cat Sedge had even whispered a treasonous thought to was Cottonpaw.
Now he thinks he should have listened to his mother.
"I was out by the RiverClan border," he continues, voice brittle. Snakehiss is this dark, roiling
thing stuck to his brain like a storm cloud. He's made himself scarce since his impromptu prayer at the border, but that doesn't mean he's not lingering somewhere just out of sight. Besides, that sniveling, snotty Snakehiss at the border is not the one that haunts him.
"Snakehiss attacked me. For not being loyal enough. I—" he sucks in a breath through his teeth.
"We fought, and then I fell."
The mouse at his paws is cold and crumpled; its glassy eye stares up at nothing.
"I was taken by Twolegs," Sedge says. He prods at the mouse with a claw. Its throat has already been pierced right through.
"I was in this...it was like a den, small enough just to fit me, but the walls were all...flat, and shiny, and cold." He talks about how he couldn't move his foreleg because it was covered in this strange, rock-like material. How they would prod at him, sometimes, with needles threaded through the gaps in one of the walls. How his head was covered by some sort of film around his neck, though he refuses to confess that with it he couldn't bathe.
"Eventually they brought me back outside, and...and I realized that one of the walls was loose, so. I escaped." The Twolegplace was big, and loud, and smelly, and Sedge doesn't remember how he found the river in the first place, but. It brought him back to WindClan.
Sedge's appetite, minuscule as it was before, has not survived this conversation. He pushes the mouse with a paw.
"...Sunstar," he hedges. He couldn't ask this of Sootstar, in all of her staunch resolutions and followers that would strike down cats for far lesser crimes, but Sunstar...maybe Sunstar cares.
No promises. "I'll do anything to stay. I know this was bad, but I...I can't leave WindClan, I...," Snakehiss would call his begging pitiful. It's a thought which won't leave his mind.
