private snowflake summer // naming

[cottonsprig]

Kittens of her age are still milkfed - but to request a queen care for her when her nose runs yellow and her voice is nothing more than a wisping breath... Cottonsprig is impulsive but not entirely stupid. What she can do, she thinks, if chew up enough prey to hide the herbs within, and hope the child takes to it readily. If the loner's kitten has never had a true meal before, it may take some trial and error - but Cottonsprig decides that it is worth the effort. She will not stand by as a child wastes away. She has some morals, at least.

She parses chewed up vole onto a large leaf, picking through her herb storage for basics. The medicine cat pulls feverfew and tansy to help with the kitten's symptoms, deciding with an afterthought to mix a comb of honey to make the mixture sweeter and perhaps more palatable. Cottonsprig looks down at what she has, mixed together in an unsightly slop truly, before allowing a cold tremor of her arm to tug a stem of lungwort out from their stores. The symptoms line up, but they do so with other coughing ailments too. Wolfsong can begrudge her later for being too careful, she thinks.

Cottonsprig drags the mixture over to the kitten, who settles into a new nest and wheezes the afternoon away. She picks her way closer, her short legs careful to not step on the child's thin frame. She lays down beside her, offering warmth and comfort, before dragging the so-called meal closer. "I need you to eat this," she whispers, so quietly. Her tail loops around the nameless kitten, barricading her from escaping should the delirium make way for excuses. She presses her nose to her fever-hot ears, "Try, please? A couple bites. You might like it..."

She trails, her ears folding back as she waits for the kitten's efforts. Nameless echoes in her ears again, and she asks into the open air, "I wonder what she named you." The child's mother, who's chilled body should be buried in the coming hours, if it's not stolen by the birds already. Cottonsprig sighs, "I wish you could tell me..." She's too young to know much, the medicine cat thinks pitifully. Her tail twitches, and though she wishes there was a way she could honor the queen's choices, she knows that she has no means of doing so.

"I could give you a name," she muses, shortly after. "What name would do you best... I wonder," and she waits, eyes focused on the kitten and the medicine laden meal, wondering if anything will jump out at her.
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[LUNGWORTKIT]

The girl has never known anything but the taste of milk, for a time, and then even less than that—long ribbons of prey slightly too off for the carrion birds, sticking in her throat, lodging between budding milk - fangs until she spat them back up. She can hardly recall the sound of her mother's scolding meow, before it fell away to too much wheezing weakness, her own swirling away into the sickly yellow mist with it. Underdeveloped and underfed, her world is a miasma of hungry fever - heat, stealing memories away until they bleed down the back wall of her mind to circle the drain—she does not know her own name, if indeed she ever had one at all.

" Cotton, " she wheezes thickly, rolling the word on her dry tongue. It has rained upon the pink - blushed split hues of her flowerbud ears, spoken in a variety of tongues, and she mimics it, mockingbird - like, when Cottonsprig draws near. Her small meow is not the clear, high bell of a child—it carries the hoarse, belabored rasping quality one might associate with an elder's death - rattle, as gruff as a carrion - bird's hungry squawk. The very word sets her to a fresh bout of wheezing, her gasps puddling syrupy in her chest as she cries out hungrily for the sudden sweetness of air.

Her single eye, halved cleanly into foggy blue and muddy brown, icy clarity turned cloudy with the miasma of her illness, settles on the leaf carrying what is meant to be her meal. She tucks her thin body close to Cottonsprig on instinct, the narrow planes of her jabbing the medicine cat with far more bone than any healthy kitten should carry. An odd sound clogs in her chest as her tiny white forepaws knead at the moss of her outsized nest, and it slowly becomes apparent that the child is attempting to start up a rusty purr, although the sound is distorted with her illness.

" Oh - kay, " she gasps out with her next insuck of fresh air, her body alive with a sickening fevered warmth again Cottonsprig's side even as her thin spine ripples with imagined chills. The girl does not quite register what Cottonsprig asks of her, rheumy eye gazing blankly up at the freckled muzzle as it moves, uncomprehending of what a name even is.

Her breath rattles thickly in her throat and she takes to the herb - slop as hungrily as she does to air, seizing a mouthful of chewed vole, this one crowned with the distinctive speckled sprig of lungwort, its white - spattered shreds clinging to her muzzle as she half - chews, blending with her own white - freckled cheeks.

OOC : —

❀

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[cottonsprig]

Her heart swells when her tiny voice wheezes out the first two syllables of the medicine cat's name. It's not babbling - it's purposeful, and acknowledgement of the blue smoke she-cat in a more personal manner. Cottonsprig is seconds from congratulating the tiny kitten on her success in recalling little details like that - but then she begins coughing and wheezing, and the medicine cat curls tighter around her.

"Shhhh, shhh," she hushes, frowning as she is forced to watch the kitten fight to clear her clogged lungs. It seems even when she's done coughing, she is not gifted freedom. There's still the telltale rattle of her breath, the bobble of her too-heavy head. Cottonsprig smiles if and when the child looks at her, but it falls just out of view. She can't help if only for a moment wondering if this is a lost cause... And then she decides that it can't be. Even if the kitten dies (StarClan forbid,) then at least she passes in a warm nest and with her belly full.

She takes to the meal feverishly, which Cottonsprig cannot say she's surprised. Who knows when the last time her mother was able to produce milk was - moreso if the child has ever eaten a proper meal such of prey before. She doesn't seem disgusted by the remnants of leaves and petals in her pre-chewed food. In fact, little purple petals cling to a sticky maw. It's as if StarClan has lit her her very own sun above her head, blue eyes blinking with mild astonishment. It was a name that she wanted to reserve for her own, but... It seems more fitting now.

"Hey... Sweetheart, what if we call you Lungwortkit? It... is a bit of a mouthful, but no more than Cottonkit had been. Can you try saying that?" She rests her head on her paws, turning her blue eyes on the crusted singular-but-dual-toned eye of the child. "Lung-wort?"​