High Rank Announcement [#hrannouncement]
Oh, confound it all, someone was already getting on her nerves. Bumblestar’s head swiveled in Goatscrunch’s direction, pupils shrinking to dark slivers. “I’ll be as loud as I wanna be,” she snapped. “Shut up before I get down there and make you!” Agh, headache, headache, headache– she didn’t have the energy for this, the capacity to handle it. Every little thing was sending her closer to the tipping point. She needed a dark den and no noise and cold air and maybe a creek to go jump into to cool off but they HAD NO CREEK because they had LOST IT-
She tipped her head back, eyes squeezing shut as she tried to suck in a deep breath to relax. It sounded more like a growl than anything else. She gave up on calming down.
There was a kit by the body, when she had specifically told the kits to stay in the nursery. Luckily Violetfreckle got to it before she did, because whatever Bumblestar would have said would have been much less kind in comparison to the other warrior’s wordless comfort. But, stars, Mapleface would be a far worse pain to deal with; the sheer volume already made her headache spike sharply through her skull, and she pinned her ears back to counter it with another growl. Her eyes lingered on the queen as she ran her tongue over her jaws, still tasting the iron tang that clung to her lips. She needed to wash off.
Someone dropped something in the background. She knew what it was. She didn’t care to look.
Her gaze snapped briefly to Eveningdance and she bristled, but Lioncrest at least had some freaking sense and interjected before she could. Might as well, thought it wasn’t helping the slowly growing, pulsing ache in her stomach and her head. And of course one more cat just had to get their piece in. Her ears flattened against her head again as the noise seemed to rise continuously, and with it, that swirling, expanding ball of ache in her gut that combusted once it got too big.
“VIOLETFRECKLE!" The she-cat’s name exploded from Bumblestar’s jaws like a gunshot, accentuated with an abrupt shift to standing position. She wasn’t even sure why this was what got to her the most, but bright stars above and grim forests below, did it get to her. She had enough clarity left over to regret the furious tone as soon as she heard it, and with a snarl directed mostly to herself, shook her head sharply and tore her gaze away, no longer interested in pursuing whatever train of thought she had been headed down. She didn’t really remember, anyway. And whatever Eveningdance said next was lost to her, meaningless noise amongst the rest. “Would all of you shut it before I start yanking tongues? I’m getting a starsdamned headache from all your senseless yammering. Quit screaming your heads off ‘n leaping over ravines to get to illogical conclusions.”
Back to Mapleface. Easiest place to start. Only place she would start. “Use your freakin’ eyes. One, that isn’t a kit, he was sixteen moons old, an adult, ‘n fully capable of making his own idiotic decisions. Two, he murdered Vinekit, so I took care of the problem.” Bumblestar wasn’t about to shy away from this topic, and although her eyes were on Mapleface for the moment, her words were directed to the whole of the Clan. “Caught him slamming a paw into the kit’s head in a secluded part of camp. Impact killed Vinekit instantly, he didn’t even have a chance to react to it before he went down.”
Her attention turned away from the queen to rest on the Clan as a whole, hackles rising. “How none of you managed to hear the amount of screaming coming from that idiot’s jaws and be concerned about it, I’ll never know, but I had to be the one to deal with it. I don’t want to turn my claws on my Clanmates, but given his track record, I’m not shocked it came down to this. And if any of you ever so much as lay a single paw on a kit like that, you’ll meet the same fate he did.
"Vinekit’ll be buried at Willow’s Rise; someone take him there now so that more kits don’t wander outside ‘n chance seeing it. We can hold a vigil later. I want someone else to take the rat’s body into the outskirts. I don’t care what you do with it there, I just don’t want it anywhere on ThunderClan territory.” Personally, she’d rather the vultures and coyotes tear it apart than shield it beneath the soil. It could rot down to nothing but bones for all she cared.
She shot Eveningdance a smoldering look, as if silently challenging him to combat her further on this.
#tcmeeting
