[Frozen] When Winston woke up, he noticed that he wasn't in wherever it was that he had been initially sleeping. No, when Winston wakes up, he is warm. He is somewhere that has a roof, that smells like rust and iron and moldy, musty bedding. When he wakes up, the first thing that he notice is that the room has two doors- both with heavy locks.
The next thing he notices are the two windows with bars on the outside. The windowframes are painted shut and the glass is filthy and frosted.
There is no furniture, save for the old, metal bed and the blood stained mattress. There are feathers on the floor. The carpet is old.
This is where we open the scene. Nowhere.
[Barks Secrets] Being warm was something out of the ordinary for a Bone Gnawer in the month of December. Winston slept heavier because of it (or perhaps because of whatever had kept him out long enough for him to be transported without noticing). He snuggled into the threadbare, bloodstained mattress in a manner less than human, curled with his arms folded curiously about his face rather than supporting under his head. It wasn't any noise that woke him, noticing that there were no blankets or suddenly not feeling comfortable for not being at home (for he had none).
It was simply that his body had finished resting, and he woke up slowly and groggily as people do when unprompted to rise.
Smells hit his nose that didn't immediately register as odd because of his lifestyle, he scrubbed at his eyes with the side of his hand, one after the other, then groped at the mattress he was laying on-- that was the first clue. Unfamiliar, he'd fallen asleep on cardboard. The second was all the obvious when he opened his eyes.
He sat up on the bed, sloppy-bottomed shoes finding the ground as he did. Palms pressed into the bloodstained mattress, and his eyes searched the room-- doors and windows and floors and ceiling all alike. Finally, after appraising the situation, he murmured a vague "Huh," and sat to wait. To see what happened. For at least ten minutes.
[Frozen] It's a sad state of affairs, because there is a solid chance that this is the nicest place that Winston has slept in some time. His shoes find the floor and he notes that the ceiling is the same as the walls, which is the same as the color on the carpet. It's all dirty, all filthy and worn. He can hear waht might be cars- or maybe it's water- outside. He inhales and smells pine instead of garbage, so it's probably mroe likely that it's water.
The doors are solid, and the windows don't look to be a good means of actual escape.
The blood doesn't smell fresh, not by any means. When he moves, if he moves, he can smell the scent of what could be some kind of poultry and pork being cooked. It smells delicious. That is, it would smell delicious if he didn't smell pine trees and those little christmas tree air freshner scents coming from one of the doors.
The rock in his pocket, the one that wasn't there before, starts to feel too cold for comfort.
[Barks Secrets] So Winston is left to further discover his environment through the various different scents. He finds pine trees rather than garbage and gasoline, he can hear something moving-- something he immediately classifies as vehicular traffic, though later logic tells him that a place that smells of nature rather than city wouldn't have traffic. He finds that there are feathers all about and that the smell of meat, not just dead animals but actual cooking food.
His hands go in his pockets-- all god-knows-how-many of them, searching no doubt for weapons and all the handy little dohickies that a good Bone Gnawer and Ragabash keeps on them, and instead finds those feathers and, curiously, a stone that is far colder than the room, unreasonably so. It's uncomfortably cold, like holding onto an ice cube for too long.
Roughly ten or fifteen minutes pass before he stands with a groan, wheezes largely and coughs once, then moves to one of the two doors-- the one with the strongest of smells coming from it. He rolls up the sleeves of his tattered blue-and-black checkered flannel shirt, and he knocks solidly on the door. After a couple of solid, sturdy taps of his knuckles he steps back and whistles some Christmas diddy while waiting.
[Frozen] He knocks on the door where he smells the scent of pine air freshener. He knocks and whistles some Christmas jingle, and the door cracks open a little. Something falls hard and harsh against the door, hitting it like a ton of bricks.
[Barks Secrets] The Ratfink didn't startle or cringe away from the door when it thumped heavily and threatened to break down the middle. He eyeballed where the door had buckled, eyeballed where the crack had appeared and fallen into place once more, then made a curious little 'hmm' noise.
Again he moved forward, closer, with his hands jammed into the pants of his crusty and stained jeans, put his mouth near the crack of the door (but kept his weight light on his feet and his muscles ready for motion, in case the door were to fly open and try and nail him in the face), and spoke loudly, obnoxiously in something of a sing-song voice.
"Yoohoo? Who's there?"
[Frozen]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 1
[Frozen] There is no reply.
Just a rotting, inhuman growl.
[Barks Secrets] "Mmm."
Again came that contemplative humming noise. Winston leaned back from the door, shuffled back a step, then sighed and let his body snap like a rubber band back up into the figure of gristle, wiry strength and shabby pelt that was his birth form.
[Init + 8]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 5
[Frozen] [Closet monster, +5]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 4
[Frozen] The door lurches again, this time, Winston can hear the wood snapping and he can hear things trying to give. the more the door is pounded on, the more he can tell that something isn't right. that pine smell is trying to cover up something.
[Frozen] [action: break door]
[Barks Secrets] [Defensive!]
[Frozen] [door smash!]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 3, 3, 7, 7, 7, 7 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[Frozen] [door soak?]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 6, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Frozen] [Door: X_X]
[Frozen] The door starts to give, and finally, it does give out. winston can see what was in there, and amidst what looks like a mummified corpse, he can see a blood-splattered creature with biceps the size of Winston's crinos head... and little else. it is large and formitable, but ultimately, it is overcome by the smell of rotting flesh and its digusting , rotting teeth. Its shirt, what was left of it, was some godawful designer label knockoff. It tries to climb through. All it knows is hunger.
[Barks Secrets] "Fucking great."
That didn't come out as language, though. Rather it was a garbled, rasping snarl, something that sounded uncomfortable and precisely as unhealthy as it truly was. He rolled his shoulders, eyeballed the far too muscly zombie that was trying to squeeze its way out of the closet, then lunged forward.
[1a.Claw
2b. Claw]
[Frozen] [zombiedudeaction: try and climb out]
[Barks Secrets]
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Barks Secrets] [That was Damage]
[Frozen] [Zombie: O_
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 5, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Barks Secrets] [Put this in the wrong chat]
Winston
Tue 11:55 pm
Roll valid
[Claw 1: Dex + Brawl -2 split action +1 diff]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 4, 8, 10 (Success x 2 at target 7)
[Barks Secrets] [Claw 2]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 6, 6, 9 (Success x 1 at target 7)
[Barks Secrets] [Damage]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[Frozen] [OW SERIOUSLY]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 6 (Failure at target 6)
[Frozen] Winston takes off one of the things burly arms through the door, and the would-have-been-a-man, falls, almost in half, down over the doorway. The legs fall, but the rest of the body tumbles over. It looks at him with dead, hungry eyes, and crawls over. The carpet is stained red from where it drags itself. the feathers stick to his body. if he gets ahold of Winston, he would bite him.
It does not know pain. Only hunger. Only need. Only now.
[Action
1a: claw
1b: BITE!]
[Barks Secrets] The over-muscled zombie, like some strange children's toy that was all torso and arms, with undersized legs and a waist and some mechanical need to... well, Winston would guess eat. This was trademark zombie behavior right here, and not exactly the first time he'd run into creatures of this particular variety.
You know what they say, he thought while flicking the blood off the claws that had cut through the rotting flesh of the arm that was left behind in the closet.
His foot lifted.
Go for the head.
[Head stomp!]
[Barks Secrets] [Brawl + Dex, +2 diff headshot]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 5, 7, 10 (Success x 1 at target 8) [WP]
[Barks Secrets] [Damage: Str + 2 headshot bonus]
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 5, 5, 9 (Failure at target 6)
[Frozen] ... you know what they say about meatheaded jocks. No point in going for a kill shot, because there wasn't much of a brain in there to begin with.
[claw!]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 3, 6, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Frozen] [damage]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9 (Success x 5 at target 6)
[Frozen] [aaaand a bite]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 5, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Barks Secrets] [Soak]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 5, 6, 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Frozen] [damage: -2 die, because human jaws are not for biting, +1 die because of the success]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 5, 7, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)
[Barks Secrets] [Soak]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Frozen] The zombie thing bites into winston, and its teeth fall into the meatiest part of his calf muscle and it rips. The thing seems content to try and gnaw his leg off, or at the very least try to take him down to its level. It groans an unpleasant groan, and swallows. The muscle tissue has a taste- it doesn't matter. Food is food.
[Frozen] Declare: more biting?]
[Barks Secrets] Whoever might be in the rest of the house, if anyone was there at all, would certainly hear the ruckus that follows:
Winston's heavy foot slams into the floor with all the weight of a Garou (and that's considerable, even for an underfed one), and if it's anything but cement the sound will reverberate through the establishment. Even then, after those teeth are embedded in Winston's calf, through that pelt of brown-gray dusted white in places, patchy and unpretty in the kind of way that makes a puppy be the last one adopted, Winston howls.
It's an ugly sound, almost a scream really before it deteriorates into a voice, and from there into a rasping, awful sound that tore away from his throat to choke up and cut off the howling/screaming of pain. It was time to get this over with, fire in his throat and lungs and lack of oxygen or not. He could not breathe on his own time.
[Spending WP]
He promptly leaned down, jaws spreading open wide enough to remind imaginary bystanders of a tasmanian wolf's yawn.
[Bite/Bite]
[Barks Secrets] [Bite 1: Dex + Brawl, -2 split]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 4, 6, 8 (Success x 1 at target 5)
[Barks Secrets] [Damage 1: Str + 1 bite bonus]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 7, 8 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Barks Secrets] [Bite 2: Dex + Brawl, -3 split]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 3, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 5)
[Barks Secrets] [Damage 2: Str +1 suxx +1 bite bonus]
Dice Rolled:[ 8 d10 ] 2, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6)
[Frozen] Soak 1?
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 8 (Failure at target 6)
[Frozen] and 2
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 2, 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Frozen] It didn't matter what it was, or where this thing was actually going, or what it had been in a previous life. The fact of the matter was that it was dead now. Not just dead, but deader than dead. And when all was said and done, Winston was a mess. His leg was missing a substancial bit of meat on it and his stomach was full of something that was fermenting and tasted worse than Natty lite.
He was soon greeted by the smell of fresh cooked food, and the person who opened the door looked entirely too much like June Cleaver for comfort. She even smells like Americana. She does, however, look from him, to the zombie with distaste, then budding horror, and the woman looks like she might get sick. Then, she looks back at him and screams. Screams like she was going to be sick and runs away from the door.
At least now the door was open, to say the least.
[Barks Secrets] [Resist Toxin]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 5, 7, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Barks Secrets] Whatever had flooded his mouth when he gnashed teeth into the back of the deteriorating thing that was trying to (matter of fact, doing a pretty good job of) eat all of his left leg had left him feeling pretty goddamn awful. But he knew a secret, one taught to him by a spirit that many didn't look for, hardly acknowledged as anything other that scuttling in the Umbral reflections of city alleyways. Whatever it was that sloshed about in his stomach behaved as though some Wyrm-neutralizing Pepto-Bismal had been ingested, and he was allowed to instead worry about the fact that most of his calf was missing.
"Fuck." Again, actually snarling rather than speaking.
A woman that looked like Beaver's mom appeared in the other doorway, stared for a few long seconds, went a shade mixed between green and pale, then ran off screaming.
Well, at least the door was open. He glanced left and right for something he could use as a crutch, because he knew for a fact his ruined leg wouldn't support his weight. Finding nothing but the bed, and the bed's legs weren't nearly long enough to work, he huffed and whuffed and snarled, then decided that three legs were easier than just one-- he sunk down into his Hispo body instead, groaning and wheezing as he did so.
A loud, awful hacking sound filled the room once the shift was completed, miserable and unhealthy just like the howl before, and after perhaps thirty seconds the massive dire wolf beast was shouldering its way through the door and out of the room, lumbering like a bear awoken too early (but way too skinny for that to be a proper comparison) with his back left leg dragging pitifully behind.
[Frozen] [poor little kind-of-a-mortal woman WP!]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 1, 4, 9 (Failure at target 8)
[Frozen] She won't remember any of this in the morning. She would, however, remember all sorts of other awful things about their little cabin in the woods. It's a nice little house, and when Winston walks out, he notices that most of it doesn't reek of the wyrm and doesn't seem like it's a horrific excuse for a bad trap. No, no what you had here was the little rural home of some lovely family. When he walks out, he might notice pictures on the wall. He'd see pictures of a happy family- with June and the Beav and Ward and that... zombie... guy. His muscles weren't as big, then, but who knows what the wyrm does to bulk people up.
the house is lovely, all wooden and rustic and lovely.
A large, hulking mammoth of a wolf walks out into the hallway, and the woman screams, tries to run away but she doesn't find anything to really hide in, or from, so she ends up sinking to the ground and covering her head. She can't look in the room. She just gibbers about that poor homeless man and her Thomas. Her lovely, wonderful Thomas.
She pleads with the animal, but doesn't have any luck doing anything other than cowering.
[Barks Secrets] The woman screams, and Winston barely notices the pictures on the mantel-- until he recognized the face in the picture, and recognized how very much the younger by really did look like Beaver. So the gigantic wolf beast whose back leg was hanging by a few threads of gristle and fur, paused to put his nose close to a picture, sniff it, and stare at it with one eye. He circled to sniff near the walls, near the table, then paused to stare at the woman who had sunk down into a crouch with her arms over her head, begging and going on about him (when he was just some poor homeless guy) and her beautiful, wonderful Thomas.
He stares at her blankly for a few seconds, then whuffs a hot puff of breath over her head and lumbers toward the door.
She would forget by morning, and there was no extracting useful information from her now.
[Barks Secrets] Night fades away into the deep still that was the wee hours of the morning, where only owls on their silent wings moved, where nocturnal rodents scurried across the crusted snow. Winston's big hulking monster-wolf body shifts down into a smaller wolf, something underfed, that looked like it had been kicked out of the pack and was on its last few days before starving to death and dying a sad, lonesome death.
He was dusted in snow by the time morning rolled around and he woke sluggishly from the sun glaring off the snow and back up into his face. He shook his head, rose slowly, and shuffled about, sniffing and hunting for a fallen branch that would serve as a proper walking stick. Upon finding one, he shifted back to the weak fleshy human form, seized the stick and used it to help himself hobble to the cabin's front door.
Blood seeped sluggishly through his pants and down his leg, leaving a patchy trail of red in the snow behind him. His hair was long and curly, forming a loose and bouncy sandy-brown afro that was better suited to the seventies than this particular decade. The sleeves of his flannel shirt were sloppily left unbuttoned, and he was shivering pathetically while he stood, bleeding slowly onto her doorstep, waiting for Mrs. Beaver to answer.
[Frozen] It was a nice, picturesque sort of place when he finally gets a good look at it. He can't see the bars ont he windows, but he can hear the creek nearby, see the evergreen trees, and observe the tiny little garden and flower beds out front. Someone cared for the m in the summer. They're well tended, to say the least. With nice little scallopped edes.
The snow is shoveled from her front step.
The male is on her front door step, and she perks up when she hears the door. The woman answer the door and pulls it open. she was probably a beauty queen in her younger days, but like all things, she fades with age. It could be the fine lines around her eyes, or the way that her shade of red lipstick has been discontinued, or the fact that there was little circular bruises on her long neck that aren't quite covered up by the top of her shirt.
She looks at the man, with the bloody snow trail and the white man afro- and she tares at him. Her features pale. He looks pathetic. All she can think of to do is grab him by the lapel and drag him in-
"You need a hospital!" she all but yells at the homeless man. Her hair is piled on top of her head. Her hands won't stop shaking.
[Barks Secrets] The one thing about being a begging, homeless mutt was that you knew how to turn on the pity and fine tune it to your style. Puppy dog eyes and looking plumb helpless didn't work for everyone, not for Winston because he was too scraggly and not young enough for that anymore. He had too much facial hair, even if most of it was on his throat, jaw, and upper lip. Rather, he looked gruff and grimaced a lot, and the unhealthy whistling wheeze of his breathing was the cherry on top. He looked unhealthy, but like he was grudgingly shouldering the burden and not asking for much.
It worked on June, apparently, because she literally seized him by the shirt and dragged him inside-- something that had him yelping wordlessly, raspily in half-protest, half-pain and hobbling with his snow-soggy stick over the threshold.
She's got shaky hands and a bruised neck. He eyes her once they've come through the door and closed it behind, and baldly states in answer to his yelling that she needs a hospital: "You need help." He doesn't specify what kind, but he looks exhausted and far from a mood to play while staring up at her from his position hunched over the stick that helped him stay upright. (The moon was empty from the sky last night, the effects lingered on his temperament.)
Immediately after, he nods his head back toward the door that he remembered coming out of: "Is he still in there? Did you check on him?"
[Frozen] She looks at him, and he tells her that she needs help. She looks at him again, and the woman pretends like she doesn't know what he's talking about. That is, until she looks again at his leg and back at the room. Her stomach turns. The woman has all but attempted to deposit Winston ont he couch. it doesn't do her much good because there's only so far that she can take him.
"He's... Thomas is... Thomas is gone," she says. It sounds like it hurts her to say it. She looks from the door back to Winston's leg. The one that is bleeding that makes her sick to her stomach, "he.. He won't be a problem anymore. I'm so very, very sorry he... that... I'm sorry, sir."
It's probably the first time anyone's legitimately and honestly called Winston sir and not meant it in some strange, ironic fashion. The house doesn't smell like pine anymore. It smells like apple pie and bleach. Heavily.
[Barks Secrets] The whole while that he'd been talking, telling her she needed help and asking about the zombie kid with gigantic arms, she's still steering him toward the couch, only allowing him just enough time to keep up with his hobble stick, one that doesn't even have a Y at the end for him to stick under his armpit appropriately. It's difficult, but he manages, and lets himself plop down on the couch when near enough. His leg still oozed, but he made no effort to stop it. Squeezing with his hands would only hasten the flow of blood, after all, it was best to leave it alone.
"I know." This is an offhanded statement in regards to him not being a problem anymore. He's got his chin tipped up toward the ceiling and is scratching at his throat with the butt of his walking stick, still eyeballing the woman from over his cheekbones while he does so. He thinks for a moment about what direction to lead this to get the information he wanted, then decides straight forward seems the best approach with this lady.
"What happened to him? And I don't mean last night, I mean... how did he go from that--" he gestures with the stick to a family picture-- "to that?" Gesturing to the door.
[Frozen] She is trying not to panic, btu there is a bleeding man on her sofa and he's leaving little puddles of it everywhere. Something about this doesn't work out too well. She takes a second, and she looks back at the door again. the house is quiet. It's not the same. Even without the scratching or the moaning or the growling, Marla was missing her son. It was as though losing her son once wasn't hard enough. She's lost him twice, now. this second time was harder, because...
well...
the second time felt right. The second time, she didn't recognize him. The second time the smell was unbearable, and there wasn't enough left to really even put in a casket. He'd fit better in a trashbag. Marla looks at the door again.
"Well, he was always... well... Thomas lettered in wrestling. When he went to college he'd gotten on to a football team, and he wanted to bulk up... When he came home this semester he was-he was angry. Fall break he was different. He was... well, he was huge. He just stopped breathing one night, but he was fine. We didn't have to call a doctor or anything but he wasn't eating... and he wouldn't eat anything... and we tried-"
she looks at Winston, and her eyes are desperate, "-we tried other things, sir, I promise you that we did. And James always did it before. But he's out of town and Thomas has.. he's been so hungry."
[Barks Secrets] Winston watched her with what was a flat expression at first, but grew exasperated and sprinkled with disbelief as her story wore on. His face was drawn, pale, he'd lost quite a bit of blood (it was just a flesh wound to a Garou, though, he'd linger out here for a few days while healing, watch the joint, sniff around, and by the time he was better he could head back into town and he'd have hopefully gathered enough information by watching the Mr. and Mrs. to know what had really happened to 'Thomas'), and he just didn't have it in him to hold a poker face.
He moved a hand to scrub at his eyebrows with the pads of his thumb and middle finger, and muttered something about 'genre-savvy' into his own wrist.
"When's James get back? And where's the littler guy that I'm seeing in these pictures?"
[Frozen] [scale of 1 to 10]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 1
[Frozen] She looks like she might say something, or like she has something important to say or like she might actually be able to say the rest of it. She just looks at Winston, and breaks down sobbing.
[Barks Secrets] "Oh for shit's sake..."
This is muttered under his breath, granted, but it's still said aloud. Perhaps she won't hear it over the sound of her own gasping, half-choked sobs, but that wasn't his priority concern. Winston wasn't a great guy, after all. His chief focus was rarely the feelings of others. But here was this lady, just a regular woman who's probably had a normal life of contentment raising her sons and being a wife to her husband. She didn't grow up with this shit, she wasn't jaded like everyone else in the goddamn world.
And Winston? Well, he wasn't as much of a monster as he behaved sometimes. With a wheezing half-growl of effort he pushed himself back up to his feet (or foot, depending on how you looked at it), and opened an arm up to offer her a shoulder to cry against.
"C'mere," was the gruff invitation. And what woman in the state of such emotional distress is really up to refusing offered support, even if it was from a stranger? Well, this stranger she tried to feed to her son, so maybe this would alleviate the guilt some? Maybe it was like forgiveness? When she shuffed forward near enough he put his arm around her shoulders and patted her arm lightly, lifting his chin over her head and inspecting the house while letting her cry. He'd allow her to go on for a couple of minutes before speaking.
"I do need to know, though, where the little guy is, and when James gets back."
[Frozen] And she didn't really care that he smelled like wet garbage and her dead son, there was a man here that she tried to kill- and really should have killed before she'd done all of this. If she would have just calmed down long enough, or if she'd given him a legal dosage of whatever it was she'd given him to make sure he stayed down or whatever the Hell it was that had her get Winston from point A to here. Because if she would have killed him Thomas would be alive and this wouldn't be a problem and-
Stop it.
She realizes, on a fundamental level, how horribly wrong this train of thought is. And so she sits there, and cries on that strange homeless man, whom she tried to feed to her necrotic, dead, festering son.
"He-he-" she inhales hard enough that she hiccups- "he's at school. He doesn't come home for another week. James gets home on Thursday."
Admittedly, it all comes out gibbered and struggling for calm. The house is nice. There are letters on the coffee table, and from what winston can tell, most of the mail seems to be from a place called Aududelle Processing.
[Barks Secrets] "Good."
If you ask anyone in Chicago that knows what a Garou is and who Gaia is, they'll tell you that Winston is the furthest thing from a stoic beacon of light that the world has ever seen. He's sniveling, he has no honor to his name whatsoever. He's selfish, he's got a bad history, and he can't even hold his own in a fight against a puppy.
But they will also confirm that he's smart, he's cunning, and if anyone needs to know anything he's among the first to be consulted. He was the quintessential Ragabash, he fit perfectly into his role as a Rat Fink. He knew that there was information to be sought out here-- something, potentially drugs from what this woman was telling him, had turned that boy into a zombie. He had died and he'd come back craving human flesh (he wondered for a moment if he would've been spat out, then remembered that no, the kid swallowed his calf).
Yet, regardless, he seemed sturdy for the woman, and at this time he was the most solid thing in that house, even against oak furniture. He moves his arm from around her shoulder, pats her on the back a few times, then leans his weight into that walking stick and exhales in a way that sounds like air leaking from a pitiful balloon that's beginning to sag. "Tell you what: I let the whole thing go if you find me something to wrap my leg up with and send me on my way with some'a that apple pie."
Leave it to a Gnawer to con food out of a broken hearted woman.
[Frozen] He'll let it slide if she gets something for his leg, and sends him home with the pie. Well, some of the pie to say the least. He would get a nod, solid and sure and certain. The woan reaches up and wipes her eyes with the heel of her palm. She starts to stand, adjust herself and scampers off to the kitchen. She knows exactly where the first aid kit is, and when she comes back,it's not a little one she hands to Winston.
"The bathroom is next to Thomas's room," she says. The name pains her to say.
a moment passes, and she calls back, "do you want to stay for dinner? I can send you some more food than just a pie."
[Barks Secrets] He'll accept the first aid kit when she brings it back to him, and without much of an answer beyond that he'll shuffle to the bathroom when she points it out-- until she mentions dinner. This gets him looking back at her with perfectly round eyes and a look on his face not unlike a starving animal that's just had a plate of food dropped in front of it. Like it had to be suspicious or too good to be true.
But it wouldn't be. "Who am I to turn down hospitality?"
And he's off into the bathroom. He'll emerge some time later after taking advantage of a shower (she owed him that much, he figured) and carefully cleaning his wound. He was a Garou, he would live, and he knew how to resist Wyrm poisons in ways that most people didn't, but it still didn't hurt to make sure everything was clean. He'd wrap the leg up as well as he could, re-dress, and be out to play the role of an improper house guest and sit half-awake in a chair while she cooked, wheezing and coughing occasionally.
Dinner would served, and he would eat like the underfed man he was, but he was sure to (quite honestly mind you) gush and rant and rave about how she should boot Paula Deen off her high horse and rule the Food Network because this was hands down the best food in the world. He was convinced that she could take raman and make it worthy of royal tastebuds.
He'd go 'home' with a little kit made and be told not to worry about bringing the tupperware back (please for the love of god don't come back here). In truth, though, he'd travel about a third of a mile away before settling in for the long haul, shifting to lupus, and staking out the house while bracing himself to heal up as well. He doesn't make full promises, he wasn't 'letting the whole thing go' as the deal had been. He wasn't bothering her exactly? He wasn't holding the episode against her personally? But it was still his duty, his goddamn job, to make sure that what happened wouldn't repeat itself and this woman and her husband weren't anything worth sicing the Ahrouns on.
