TW: Sensitive Content Open PAFP Territory LAZARUS, COME FORTH ☼ waking

[cicadabuzz]

{$title} tw: description of the aftermath of death

CICADABUZZ, 31 moons / shc + med. cat
a SH cinnamon tabby/chocolate tortie chimera w/ black eyes
parent to cloudberrypaw, hemlockpaw, mistletoepaw ; mentor to magpiepaw
a reserved, pragmatic healer driven by duty rather than sentiment

Darkness folds around Cicadabuzz like wet earth—heavy, suffocating, dense. But it is not empty.

The first glimpse is moonlit. A ring of medicine cats sits beneath a thinning silver sky. Clouds cast long shadows as wind rustles the pelts of those gathered. Bug is among them—hollow-eyed but whole. Someone speaks, but the words are lost. There is no sound, only the flicker of fireflies dancing between the branches. Noses touch to a faintly glowing stone, bodies settled into comfort.

The image shifts. The moonlight fades into the cold blue of dawn. Cicadabuzz stands beside Sablestar. Sablestar's face is taut with concern or warning. His mouth moves, but there is no sound again—only the slow turn of his head as he looks toward the horizon. Bug follows his gaze. A storm brews in the distance, lightning flashing behind charcoal-crested clouds.

Then—sunlight through reeds. Magpiepaw crouches beside bug, his tiny claws scritching stone as he pulls leaves from stems. Cicadabuzz presses a paw lightly against his to correct him—light motions, less waste. Magpiepaw looks up at bug with wide, eager eyes, nodding as if a lesson had been delivered. He turns back to his task. The den is quiet. Peaceful. Safe.

Darkness again, lit by a single glimmer of red. A single deathberry rests beneath bugs paw. Bug does not do anything with it immediately. Bug simply stares, unmoving, as though weighing a truth too heavy to hold. Bug looks away, out of bugs den, and there is a twitch in bugs features. Bug pulls the berry closer.

The vision shifts once final time.

Two cats stand by the thunderpath. One is taller, tense with purpose, fur ruffled by wind and something deeper. The other seems familiar in posture but distant in detail, a shadow given form. Bug sees them only in silhouette—but then the taller one turns. Just barely. Just long enough.

Bug knows those eyes.

Sablestar's gaze is unmistakable. Stark against the blur of the vision, it burns through the dark like a glint of frost beneath starlight.

A breath—a blink—and the world lurches back into focus.

Cicadabuzz's eyes fly open. The taste of blood still clings to bugs tongue, thick and coppery, congealed thick at the edges of bugs lips. Bugs shoulders scream with every light movement. The damp earth beneath bug has dried around the shape of bugs body, and flies buzz faintly overhead. But the killing wound—Serpentberry's gift to bug—is sealed. Poorly. Awkwardly. Wrong. Bug tries to speak. A wheeze escapes instead, a rattling hitch of breath that scrapes raw behind the scar that now cages bugs throat. The world around bug blurs with heat and exhaustion, but bug moves.

Bug plants one paw, then another, trembling as bug drags bugself upright. Bugs limbs wobble beneath bug like saplings in a flood. Blood still weeps sluggishly from bugs shoulders, soaking dark tracks over the wings and down bugs legs. Bugs jaw tenses against the pain. A wet cough wracks bugs frame. The sound—croaking, jagged, barely a breath—precedes the spitting of thick, tar-like blood, half dried where it had filled bugs throat, bugs lungs. But bug is standing. Still standing. Bug reaches back with one paw, tail flicking forward, and claws clumsily catch on the silky strands always wrapped around the end. The cobwebs are sticky and wrinkled from moisture, but Cicadabuzz peels them loose, pressing them haphazardly to the worst of the wounds along bugs shoulders. It's not clean. It's not precise. But it will slow the bleeding. It will do. It must.

They look once, just once, in the direction Serpentberry's scent has fled. No anger burns behind their eyes. No fear, either. Just the dull, empty silence of something that has died, and risen once more.


[ wait for @Magpiepaw to find bug first please :) ]

 

[MagpiepawMagpiepaw's icon]

He'll learn your face by heart

BUT YOU'LL BE IN BLACK & WHITE IN HIS EYES

Magpiepaw is not far from his mentor, occasionally his head lifts from his scrounging about to glance over and locate the copper and bronze pelt amidst the dark foliage for his own comfort before he resumes his scratching at the earth; he is digging for the joy of digging - distracted in his task of gathering the horsetail only a tail length away by the wriggling of worms in loamy earth. They were interesting critters, cut in two they would continue on as separate entities and wriggle off in opposite directions and he enjoyed observing them inch along the ground and burrow by rubbing their head (or tail? It was hard to say which end was which) into the dirt.
He doesn't see Serpentberry arrive, spitting fire and venom, but he hears her and it's enough to flatten his ears to his head as he stumbles in a circle to face that direction, from where he stands amidst the hanging vines of the bent willow he is all but invisible, blessed with his father's coat of shadow.
The kitten apprentice does not quite catch all of the words, only that she is angry and his mentor is cool and collected as always. Bug does not often bare their teeth and Magpiepaw so rarely saw animosity outside rare moments, so he assumes as he always does that the situation will be soothed easily; mended like any wound.

Then the viper strikes. His violet gaze widens imperceptibly as if not fully realizing what he was seeing, the tighten and coil of tortie spotted limbs and the flash of teeth is so quick his mind at first rejects it. Like the limbless danger of her name she is slithering away with blood stained teeth and a look on her face he can only describe as self-righteousness and Magpiepaw still does not move. Neither does his mentor. Cicadabuzz does not twitch nor quiver, there is no faint movement of breath that would be apparent from sleeping cats, no twitch of whiskers of flicking tail; the stillness makes him hold his breath, willing himself to be just as unseen. The black and white leader's son does not know what fear really is, he had never felt it before in a way that mattered - lingering worries and fretting hardly compared to the way his blood chilled to ice and his nostrils flared as if desperate to keep his own lungs filling where his mentor's did not. He thinks he understands now why death can be so scary.
A worm would rise again in two, or even when not fully cleaved drag its dangling tail behind it as it squirmed. Cats, it seems, are not like worms. His paws itch to move, his fur bristles as he remains sitting stiffly in the warm breeze as if his statuesque visage could spare him the same fate, purple eyes flitting to the thunderpath as if afraid to see that spotted belt come back for more blood.

Cicadabuzz is not a worm, but somehow there is movement still and a stiff-limbed stagger upward that makes his already wide eyes seem even more disc-like in their horror; his pupils blown out like a moonless night. There is an almost spider-like quality to the way the other moves as if unsure how bug's own limbs work any longer, it felt almost like watching something else wearing that burnt umber pelt attempting to walk in a way unfamiliar. It sets off every natural instinct inside him that tells him to run, warns him to go scurrying back to the safety of the camp screaming for someone to do something, but he remains rigidly still instead. Fleetingly the kitten wonders if this means his survival instincts are poor, but when black eyes meet his own he feels himself relax slowly; Cicadabuzz looked a fright but was still the same. Mostly.

As the other wraps webbing over wound the kitten forces his trembling legs to carry him forward on awkwardly bobbing steps with the discarded pile of cobweb he had collected early in his mouth to offer in silence. Magpiepaw doesn't know what to say, doesn't know what to do but there was a hurt needing fixing and it was the easiest thing to think about. Shaky black paws lift up to unfurl the strings of the webbing between his paws, claws curling under to catch them and stretch as he sat up on his haunches to help apply them. He doesn't even know how long he sat out there in petrified silence before he saw movement, his awareness of time was gone, his mind reeling - he didn't even know if what he saw was real but the wounds peppering copper fur spoke the truth. Oh no...oh no...

In the flick of a feather, he flies to your side

MAGPIEKIT

— kitten of shadowclan
— He/They
"SPEECH", 'THOUGHTS', ATTACK
— Solid black w/low white & blue-violet eyes.
— Has 'wobbly cat' syndrome.
#9272ee

 

[Coalstrike Coalstrike]

The scent of blood was the first thing to reach him, sharp and unmistakable. Coalstrike halted mid-step, a frown etching itself into his features as he lifted his head, nostrils flaring. Fresh. Too fresh. Amber eyes narrowed, ears flicking back in quiet warning as his thick tail lashed once to the side. Something was wrong. Without hesitation, he followed the trail, paws silent against the earth, every sense alert. Then he saw them. Cicadabuzz, injured, bleeding. And beside him, smaller, wide-eyed... Magpiepaw. Still a kit, really. Barely out of the nursery, and now faced with this.

Coalstrike didn't speak at first. His eyes lingered on the young apprentice, unreadable. Then he shifted his gaze to Cicadabuzz, expression hardening. They were alive. That mattered. Sloppy work, untrained paws doing their best, but it had likely made a difference. Perhaps, with moons of learning, Magpiepaw would become something more than a fumbling kit in a storm. For now, Coalstrike's sharp gaze swept the underbrush, scanning for movement, signs of whoever had done this. But the forest offered only silence. Whoever had drawn the blood was gone.

His voice, when it came, was dry and even. " Do I need to carry you back to camp? " he asked, eyes returning to Cicadabuzz. He didn't offer comfort, never did... But the meaning was there. If needed, he'd lift the medicine cat himself and see them safely home. No fanfare. No praise. Just action.

___________________ I DON'T FORGIVE, I DON'T FORGET ☆ A wound's a warning, a debt is a debt. ___________________

• "speech"
  

• 

• COALSTRIKE he/him, shadowclanner, sixty-six moons.
  ☆ a lh black cat dangerous amber eyes. has a mane around his head, is huge [ grandiose ]
  ☆ mentoring vanillapaw
  ☆ loyal to sable, despises thunderclan
  ☆ peaceful and healing powerplay permitted / / underline and tag when attacking
  ☆ penned by lion ↛ lionharted on discord, feel free to dm for plots.