sensitive topics TALK AWAY THE DARK [ ✦ ] smogmaw

[Starlingheart]

It is just after the journeying cats have returned that Starlingheart finds herself pulling Smogmaw away into her den. Guilt weighs heavily on her shoulders, and there is no easy way for her to tell him that she is responsible in a way for his mates death, for leaving his children without a mother to look after them. Truly she had thought them safe under the watch of Miststep but unfortunate circumstances were to prove her wrong. If she could turn back time there are many things she would do differently she thinks.

She remembers back when she had been much younger than she is now, barely an apprentice and still so unsure of herself. It was a cold day in leaf-bare her clan was hungry, growing desperate, but they still at least had Bonejaw Until suddenly they didn't. The monochromatic she cat suddenly and earth shatteringly had declared that she was leaving to search for her mate, her kit and she remembers standing before her and begging her "please dont go" "I need you" but her words had fallen on deaf ears and her aunt had left them anyways, cold and desolate. It had almost been enough to break her then and there and had it not been for Smogmaw, for Halfshade, she is certain she would have crawled into her nest and never left it. If she could reach into the stars and bring that familiar split pelt back she would. She would. But she can't.

"I'm sorry Smogmaw, so sorry" she says quietly, and in this moment she feels young again. Barely coming into herself but already the full medicine cat of ShadowClan and no matter how hard she tries cats are slipping from her paws. Viridianskies, her own brother, she cannot save any of them. "I didn't-didn't know she was expecting until it was too late I thought- I - she was always so strong" she had thought Heavybranch strong too but her judgement had been clouded by desperation and love, a sick sense of urgency that screamed at her to save her child above all others. She knows an explanation will not make things better but she owes it to him anyways. "I gave my son- I gave him extra of the cure because I was so- so afraid. He was so sick I thought-I thought one wouldn't be enough, that he wouldn't make it. But-but if he hadn't gotten the extra it would-it would have been Heavybranch. If-if I had known it would be different but…" there is no universe where Starlingheart did not know of Halfshade's affliction but had chosen to give her the lungwort anyways. It would be a different story if she had, Halfshade would perhaps even be standing here with them if only she had known. But she hadn't. And Starlingheart couldn't change that fact no matter how many times she screamed to the stars or no matter how many times she said 'I wish'.

She does not hope for forgiveness, but at the very least she hopes he understands.

// @smogmaw

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[smogstar]

[ cw : emetophobia / vomit mention @ second paragraph]

Journey-weary muscles, weathered and strained, stand not in the home Smogmaw had envisioned to return to. He instead wades neck-deep in the waters of unwelcome truth, and it chokes him, a suffocating grasp on the very air he inhales. Halfshade, his guiding star, she who let flow love and warmth into his wellsprings, lies cold and stiff and buried. The beautiful molly he had cherished with tender caresses and gentle shoulder nudges, reduced to naught but a pile of bones and rot.

He is heartsore. Distress consolidates into gluey and phlegmy bile in his throat. Nausea squeezes at his midsection. His breath shudders on the exhale, and the instant he and Starlingheart pass beyond the broader camp's visual range, it spills out and onto the ground, the dry mud stained by acidic sorrow.

That's it. That's all. The physical manifestation of his shock was now free from his system, and he steps over it, following after the medicine cat on languid footfalls. He must reschedule his mourning for a more convenient time; preferably after the missing kits are located, only then may he afford his emotional defences to crumble. The remainder is swallowed down and stuffed deep, and harsh resolve takes its place.

Maintaining as stalwart a posture as he could in such a miserable state, Smogmaw creeps into the medicine den soon after Starlingheart stepped inside. In there, the deputy is faced by the same stuttering too-young-for-her-role healer, her expression a manifesto of irreconcilable guilt. He looms over her, features numb, unmoving, bathing her with insidious scrutiny as she stumbles through her narrative. "It's okay, Starlingheart," he offers her, in attempt to redirect her mumblings away from Halfshade's condition and towards what had actually unfolded. "It's-"

In the blink that follows, a heart-halting instant, the tolerable became intolerable. It wasn't okay anymore. Further delving into the details, she illustrates her disastrous attempts at triage, only to deepen the cut she'd carved by presenting an 'ideal' scenario riddled with folly. "You..." he drawls fiercely. Is her skull so packed with pebbles, not even a draft of common sense could seep through? Brows pinch together something awful. "Some ideas are better gone unspoken," musters the tom, collecting himself. " 'Cause right now... well, this isn't reflecting well on you. At all."

Her fanciful notion holds lasting residence in his mind. In any other world, she alleges, it had to be a thin-pelted elder to receive the third dosage. In no world, she alleges, would his partner be saved and the sanctity of family upheld—all of this explained to him, as if she hadn't so eagerly sought to uphold her own. As per her line of reasoning, a recently-birthed mother was meant to die and her kits meant to live in a family torn. Vapid, cowardly greed from the one supposed to protect and nurture. Striped fur prickles along his nape, patience drained to the final droplet.

"Your kit received an extra dose," he reiterates, words blunt as a boulder. "Don't you start about what 'would have been', don't even. You've caused more damage than could ever be undone. You've undermined your role—you've compromised OUR TRUST in you!"

The pressure mounts in every successive sentence, and his volume reaches its tipping point in the final statement. He isn't done, however. There's something worth reminding her, in a manner less ballistic. "When... your aunt had done the same, ditching her duties for family's sake," begins Smogmaw, tone strained, "her paws weren't covered in ShadowClan blood. But yours are, Starlingheart. Yours are."​

 

[Starlingheart]

Starlingheart winces as words are flung her way, grief presenting itself as anger. She knows because hadn’t Ashenpaw reacted similarly? The shame she had already felt a hundred times over since the moment she had learned of Halfshades condition wells inside of her chest once more. A wound reopened and left to bleed. She averts her gaze, pins her ears to her skull and she endures because that is what Smogmaw needs right now she thinks.

She lets him finish, his words are terrible and biting and meant to hurt. The knowledge of this does not make it any less painful. It is only when he brings up Bonejaw, when he makes the comparison that suddenly the warmth leaves her eyes. Everything she had been preparing to say flooding out the window. Another apology dies on her tongue. "If you truly believe that then you are-are more of a fool then I thought" she thinks back to all the lives she could have saved if only she had someone more experienced to guide her through it, thinks about her mates kit who Bonejaw had delayed in saving because she selfishly decided to take a detour to a clan whos border did not meet their own, the very same she had run to. It was not hard to guess the reasons. The she-cat she had denied to treat. The child she had left behind to care for them all. She had doomed all of them the second she had taken her leave. "Tell me Smogmaw, if-if you were put in my situation could you -could you honestly say you wouldn’t do the same?" she doesnt doubt for a second what the answer is. "If Tanglekit or Halfkit or any of your other children were almost gone and your choices were the same as mine you’re-you’re telling me you would chose a warrior with no other apparent ailments? No other reason why you would believe her to-to not make it through? I only wished to be honest with you. In the same way I would expect you to-to be honest with me" she remembers the way Halfshade had called out for her mate in those hazy moons, how his presence had not even shadowed the entrance of her den to say parting words. "You didn’t even say goodbye before you left" she says, her voice quiet "Tell me, what right do you have to speak to me about betraying trust?" "...I wish he didn't go...I want him here, why did he go? Why did he leave me?" those words haunt the back of her mind, despair marking the memory so clearly. "I think you should go" accompanying these words is a gesture towards the entrance of her den a turn of the shoulder away from him in a clear indication she is done with the conversation. "Halfshade and Dreamkit are buried next to each other if you want to go say goodbye to them both. There’s-theres flowers on both of their graves. Fresh. I just put them there the other day." under better circumstances she would have told him about his Star-bound daughter with kinder words, softly spoken so as to ease the pain and while he still deserved to know, he did not deserve the honeyed words she would have preferred to use. Not now.

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[smogstar]

Clinging to a virtue feigned, the medicine cat licks her paws clean of the blood tainting them so, and deems him a fool in his assessment. Quite the reverent concept, to slight him in the same breath that carried her confessions. The immediate rebuttal further stokes the caustic embers seething deep within. His scarred muzzle coils downwards, lips peel over off-coloured teeth, and a snarl, an utmost unsightly one, tightens around his mouth. What a brazen display of undue indecency. Disgust coils in his stomach's pit like a venomous snake, the aftertaste left by his words only growing more bitter.

Then, the 'what-ifs' come in a second barrage. What limited principle he harbours, it steadies his claws from tearing out her whiskers right then and there. They instead taste the cave-coolled floor, and the scraped groves filled with a fine dust. "I am honest, nothin' else but," he spits, syllables brusque as a thunderclap. "You're of the mind that Halfshade reached her due, yeah? That you had no options, none besides the one taken to let her die." He gives zero credence to her clumsily-constructed hypotheticals. As to what he'd have done in her paws is blatantly obvious.

His amber regard takes its leave from the healer, heavier still than it was prior. Combing through the cave's shadows where he looms, and in a heartbeat's span, his bounty is revealed. Perhaps dropped and forgotten by Scalejaw or Sharppaw, stunted in its journey to an infected clanmate. A lonely lungwort strand. To his understanding, it's a dosage strong enough to withstand mortality's advances, its effects thwarted by negligence alone. "Can't tell you how many times I thought I was gonna end up buried, how many times I felt we'd never reach that stupid plant," the deputy drawls out, gaze firm in its stationary hold. "Could've surrendered to the river, the cliffs, the caves, the snakes, or this idea of fate that you're so fond of." He's only ever stood a hair's breadth away from the last one, always with a paw outstretched.

"Couldn't do that though, not with a clan to protect." A theatrical tail-flourish, and his eyes, sharp and critical, are upon her once more. "So no, I didn't say goodbye." he accedes. "But, I tried save her, and-uh, that can't really be said for you, can it?"

And with a parting glance, the ashen tom heeds her wishes. Making for the cave's mouth, he can only imagine the flowers upon his mate's grave, having wilted after touching Starlingheart's paws. ​