do something [c]

Rosepaw blinked, shocked by what she was hearing. She'd known that whatever had been happening at her old home wasn't going to be sunshine and rainbows, but she didn't know it could get this bad. Her heart ached, thinking of all the suffering her clanmates had gone through, and knowing she'd been out here the entire time. Useless mousebrain. She cursed herself, not for the first time.

At the news of Skyclan's poor relations with Thunderclan, Rosepaw groaned softly. "Why would Mottlestar attack you?! And when did this happen, before or after the clans left the Forest?" Rosepaw's questions, while geared towards learning what she was headed back into, also served to steer the conversation firmly away from herself. "If he wants to know, let him ask," she thought grimly.

"Before," Sunfire said flatly, though he left it at that for the moment, flicking one ear in her direction. He didn't know how much, exactly, to tell Rosepaw... because he hadn't told the story in detail to anyone yet, not even Birdstar. She and his mother knew, of course, the vaguities of the encounter, but everyone had been so busy in the short days that followed the last Gathering, the inevitable storm had yet to come. Truth be told, Sunfire wasn't exactly sure how or why he wasn't going by Sunpaw again... though it probably had something to do with needing every able bodied warrior they could get due to practically everyone being sick.

The tom sighed. "We were starving." His claws sank into the dirt at the memory, the ThunderClan scent so fresh in his memory that Sunfire had to take a moment to make sure it wasn't real, before continuing. "I know I said that already, but just to drive the point home - starving. I tried to convince Wolfblossom that we needed to do something before it got worse. Before we were all too weak to fight. But we had alliances, and we needed to respect those alliances." His voice held a bitter edge now, but he continued. "I couldn't watch the clan - or my kits - starve any longer... so I took Graywind and Bearpaw and Bubblepaw... and went to take back the territory we'd given ThunderClan many moons back..." Before Rospaw was born, before Sunfire was born, even. But those details didn't matter. "SkyClan is so large, and ThunderClan wasn't. We needed the territory. We needed more room to hunt... but when ThunderClan showed up, Mottlestar barely gave us the chance to consider before she attacked me." He folded his tattered ear against his scarred head, both reminders of the tussle he'd had with the ThunderClan leader.

"We fought, obviously. And they will say they won, I'm sure. But it's not like it matters now."