WHO: Greta [Narrative/OPEN to the wolves] WHEN: Saturday night WHERE: The woods WHAT: Running and wood times and general little red fun. WARNINGS: nothing as yet, but tba if there are wolves. (Sex and violence basically.)
At the edge of the woods, Greta sheds her shoes, her coat, her city skin. Her dress is red and the choice is conscious. It's a dress she never wears outside of these woods and the very idea of anyone but the wolves seeing her in it makes Greta feel exposed. It isn't that it's a revealing dress - it's a rather sweet and summery number - but it has become a piece of clothing so firmly associated with her life with the wolves that Greta feels sure everything about it now broadcasts that relationship to anyone who'd see it.
But here the splash of red fabric in the swallowing greens and browns of the wood feels right. She shouldn't match the woods around her, not like her wolves do. She isn't a part of the woods, just as she isn't truly a part of the city. She's separate from forest and streets, belonging in neither and living in both.
And so the dress is red. Like the blood of a rabbit, like the lips of a harlot, like the first born berries of spring. (Like the marks her fingernails leave on Hati's chest, like the warm roll of Skoll's tongue, like the her bitemarks on Fenrir's throat.)
In the woods innocence is an idea she's long left behind, like her shoes and coat as she takes off into the undergrowth at a run. She doesn't fear the cold darkness of the trees around her, nor does she fear things that bite and scratch in the thick grass and leaves beneath her feet.
Maybe she should. There are snakes and there are spiders and Greta is only human, human enough to die by sting or bite should luck turn against her. But she feels invulnerable in the woods. That is what the wolves have given her.
(Sometimes she remembers the man she fell in love with, the man that Hati tore apart, the man that she mourned and almost lost her soul to avenge. But her memories of him as so distant that she's not sure he ever really existed at all. That Hati murdered him in possessiveness is nearly forgotten. Greta has found the place she belongs and any narrative can be built up to justify keeping that.)
Greta keeps running until her lungs burn and her muscles shake. It takes longer now. She's grown fit and strong and she feels more animal than human here, but sometimes the smallest things can remind her of her true human frailty in the face of all this abounding and uncaring natural world. Her loose hair is bright in the moonlight that makes it down through the stranglehold of the treetops, and her bare limbs look almost silver. Now that she's stopped running each breath is a thing Greta has to drag into her lung, cold and icy feeling even on such a warm night. The sounds of the forest carry on as though no stranger stands among them, but for Greta the pounding her own blood in her ears is the only sound she can make out.