oneshot why do they say bluebird is dead?

[SEDGEPOUNCE]

Wake up.

Water. A thick deluge over his head, rushing, roaring. His head breaks up through the blackened surface. Blinded by the smears of bone-chilled darkness and arctic flotsam smoothed overhead. Breathes in deep, shallow, a guttural sputtering which draws in more water than air. A precious moment of clean, blissful breath through crackling, sparking, phlegmy lungs. A sheet of thin and splintering ice ricochets off the shore and plunges him back into the river.

The world muffles. Pressure all around, a current which grabs him by the leg and flings him forward. Or up. Or backward. Direction is meaningless; he spins and twists and scrapes along the bottom of the riverbed, snagging on flint-sharp rocks that cut the soft soles of Twolegs on their summer trips and draw them to the surface, the shore, to tend their wounds.

Limbs flail, useless. He tumbles. Crashes through the surface like a bullet.

His maw just barely peeks from the water. Steals a breath, a gasp so loud it drowns every other sound in the rushing highway of his ears, so quiet that it sinks into the rain-ragged current of the river and floats there, suspended in the deluge of sound that speeds through the rocky, hollow vein of earth and water and ice. A panicked arm crests over the water like a breaching whale. He capsizes. His head cracks against a stone jutting from the river's center.

He disappears beneath the current.

Sleep.​

 

[SEDGEPOUNCE]

Wake up.

His body is resting on the riverbank.

The river has lost its grip on him, flung him to the shore in the way that a child's toy slips from their fingers when they spin around with it, and it tumbles somewhere just out of reach. Their parents tell them not to worry—not because they can reach the toy, but because it was old and raggedy and crumpled anyway. They'll find something better. Something that isn't all scratched up and dented; with none of the legs broken, and with soft fur and warm doe eyes. They'll just buy a new one.

Everything around him is cold. Quiet. The air, the mud, the water poking tentatively at his back paw as the river asks if he's still alive. The only sounds are the lapping water and the low hum of crickets sawing in the reeds. He peels open an eye and is blinded by muck. The world, blue-tinged and hushed, is awash in a grimy glaze. Sand itches in his waterline. Fog sputters from his nose in a weak, thin breath. It's peaceful.

It reminds him of nothing. He should be thinking of something. Snippets of his life flashing before his eyes, or the voices of cats somewhere down river, or regrets or hopes or pleas to the stars to spare him of this. But there's nothing.

Foreign voices murmur in the background. Sedgepounce's frame shudders and coughs. The murmuring gets louder, sharper. A light bursts to life like a glowing grease-lamp surrounded by fog. It leaves sunburts against his eyelid. It fades away.

Sleep.​

 

[SEDGEPOUNCE]

content warning for distressing themes

Wake up.

Sedgepounce comes to with a gasp.

Light assaults him, blinds him, and he cringes away from the white-hot rays of it searing through the bars of his cage.

He must've slept through the dawn patrol again.

He doesn't mind getting up so early anymore, but sometimes someone still takes pity on him. Foxglare, or one of his sisters—or maybe even Whitepaw, if he'd complained about his assignment enough the night before. They shoulder his insubordination with lighthearted affection and leave him to bask in the rising light, blinking awake to the sounds of bird song. It's Greenleaf, and the sunshine is warm and golden, draping over him like a well-loved blanket; the air is clean, the moss of his nest plush and green. Soon he'll stretch awake and hunt a plump thrush from the moor. Its flesh will spill strawberry-red and just as sweet, for the season is plentiful, and all is as he remembers it to be. But for now he curls back up, savoring the warmth. Just for a minute.

Wake up...

He shifts, and for some reason this spurs an ache across his body. A slow wave of something sloshes over him; the gears of his brain start to churn. There's cold, and metal, and the unyielding feeling of it beneath his frame. No moss nest, no idling clanmates.

He's...he realizes that he's been staring into a pool. Except it's not a pool. It's an ice sheet, nippy and solid, but silvery and flat. He's staring at a muddy smear on its surface for the longest time, watching its occasional ripples across the wall's metal sheen.

It's weird that such a polished exterior is so smudged. He throws out a paw to wipe the imperfection away. The motion is more difficult than it should be; like swinging a heavy log. A mass of colorful wrappings assault his blurry line of sight, and as it brushes the cage wall with a soft thunk, an almost hazy shock of pain shoots up Sedge's arm.

His arm. That's his arm.

It finally clicks.

Sedgepounce wants to move. He wants to gasp and scramble to his feet, and throw himself against the cage bars until they collapse and he tumbles to the squeaky linoleum floor below. To find a way far from here, back to the moor. But he can't. His body just...locks up. His ears, his whiskers, all the way to his legs and his tail. His jaw clenches tight as if wired shut, and for a few heart-rending seconds, his lungs similarly seize. He can't move. He can't breathe. He—

He doesn't usually have nightmares. Sometimes he dreams that there are huge spiders climbing all over WindClan camp, or that he has a flea infestation that no one's told him about. Penance for all those bugs he'd snuck into Hawkswoop's nest growing up. Every once in a while he dreams about the river on the journey. The fox he'd tore from Snakehiss. He dreams about his fur miraculously changing colors, or being so clumsy that he can't walk straight. He worries about being mocked on a border patrol. Like every good son, he fears disappointing his mother.

But this—this.

Wake up, Sedgepounce thinks. His eyes squeeze shut. He trembles; a child squirreled away in the dark, hiding beneath the covers. Wake up, he thinks desperately, but even the voice inside his head is small, weak thing. Tears well behind his screwed-up eyelids. The paths they carve down his cheeks are already tear-stained. This is a realization he's already had before.

Wake up, he pleads. I want to dream about something nice, now.

But Sedgepounce is already awake.​