Who: Winny, narrative but Open. What: Tradition. When: November 18, mid-afternoon. Where: The midway. Warnings: General sadness, some references to violence.
After being chased away from the stables in tears by a very angry Ivarr, Winny retreated to her trailer, working to clear everything from the middle so she could shift without causing damage. Even with that effort, she couldn't move much, just stand there and take in the comfort of being in her true form. She slept there, standing still, and, when she woke again and shifted back to her human form, she felt a little less like randomly bursting into tears at the memory of Ivarr's rejection. It wasn't fair. She had just been trying to protect herself, had just been trying to keep herself from being torn to pieces, rules or no rules. She was going to have to figure out what to do during the full moon but, for the moment, Winny just wanted to wander, to distract herself, to forget.
Pulling an over-sized hoodie over her head for both warmth and comfort, she headed to the midway, where things were just starting to liven up in preparation for opening that night. She plucked a small bag of popcorn from a vendor, idly popping kernals into her mouth as she wandered, taking in the new lay-out and trying to remember which way she had come as she navigated the twists and turns. Her eyes were still red from earlier and she pulled her hoodie a bit tighter around herself as her dull, sad gaze moved over the shops.
She stopped in front of one of them, one that looked like a new addition. There were a multitude of Christmas ornaments hanging in the windows, most glittering, made of glass, the type of perfect, shiny ornaments they'd never had. Instead, in the commune, when it was just them and the family of deer shifters, they'd decorated pine cones and laced them together with twine around the one large pine tree in the middle of their clearing. Brody, the oldest son of the deer family and Winny's boyfriend, had had a knack for decorating them with pine needles so that they'd look like adorable little hedgehogs, and Winny sniffled lightly as she saw, down in the corner, a pine cone ornament. It wasn't the same. It had been painted gold and had little bits of shiny red and green glass glued to the points, but it was similar enough that Winny slipped inside the store.
She scurried away a few moments later after being separated from a five dollar bill, the ornament clutched in her hand. Brody was gone, torn apart by wolf shifters, along with the rest of his family and Winny's father and sister, but she could still remember him. And even though Ivarr had rejected her from the Cirque herd upon learning that she was a shifter, Winny would survive. There was no other option, really.