“Ow ow ow, more licking, less criticizing please!”
Rowanshade yelped, as Fennelsting lapped at the shallow gash on her shoulder, doing his best to remove the poppy seeds (or what they were pretty sure were poppy seeds) from the wound. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, Waspsight was always saying ‘get me some poppy seeds’ whenever someone was hurt, but Rowanshade was beginning to suspect this was not a topical treatment. Or if it was, it hurt way more than the thing it was supposed to be healing.
“Well I'd love to hear your solution, you said I was right when we picked that one.” She growled back at her brother, so intent upon who was right and who was wrong that she missed entirely the appearance of their youngest sibling.
Rowanshade gaped at him, as though this was not his den, and therefore a logical place for him to be.
“H-hey!” She cringed, knowing how this looked.
“We were just, um, counting your herbs for you! You work so hard. Say, wouldn’t you like a solo stroll in the pine forest? Far far away from here?”
W A S P S I G H T
As he returned to camp, the petite tom quietly dipped his head to the guard at the entrance. The Clan's healer had left earlier this morning to replenish his herb stock, since the weather was warming up and plants were blooming, now was the ideal time to see what he could snag. Little did he know that by leaving his den, he was opening up an opportunity for mayhem. When Waspsight had finally returned to his den, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of his siblings squabbling with one another. The shallow scent of blood noted him immediately to the circumstances of their visit to his den. By his brief observation, he concluded that they were trying to hide from him that Rowanshade had gotten herself into another fight.
He sighed tiredly, clearly at his rope's end with his littermates' shenanigans. "If you're hurt, you should come to me immediately instead of taking it upon yourself to dig into my herbs," He scolded them, pointing an accusatory paw at the pair. "What if you got into something dangerous and used it by accident? You could seriously have hurt yourself or someone else." Waspsight then fixed Fennelsting with his hard gaze. "And you- you're aiding and abetting! You should know better. You're just as guilty."
Now that he had rung some sense into his siblings, he had to prioritize cleaning up Rowanshade's cut. "Come here," He gestured to her, urging her to show him her wound so that he could fix it up for her. He gave it a look, noting that the pair had tried to actually rub crushed poppy seeds into the wound. Waspsight wanted to rub his temples. He could feel a headache coming on. At least it seemed that they realized their mistake fairly quickly and had begun removing them. "Stay still," He murmured gently, using his tongue to lap the remaining bits out and clean the wound at the same time. Once he had finished, he picked up a tall, bristly-stemmed plant from the plants he had brought back to camp with him.
"Listen closely," He addressed his littermates, motioning for their attention to look at the plant he had in his grasp. "this is called horsetail. It's easy to find since it quite literally looks like a horse's tail. It grows tall and it fans out. We have a lot in our territory because it likes to grow in marshy areas." As he began to chew it up, he spoke around his mouthful. "This is what you should be using on wounds like these. It stops bleeding and treats infection." Once he had his poultice readily prepared, he rubbed it gently to his sister's wound. As he finished, he fixed her with one last reprimanding glance. "Poppy seeds are ingested and used to ease pain or shock. Please don't ever try to actually put them inside a wound again. You'll just make it worse."
Honestly, sometimes Waspsight really didn't feel like the youngest of the litter.