Sun Mote Copse for these changes we will confront

RO <3 just want to chuck this into my threadlog, and give everyone a good idea of how Weejay is coping (read: not well) - FBs feel free to check this thread too!

Bright little Weejay had lost her luster, and seemed bright no longer. Any attempts on the adults' behalfs to cheer up the paunchy pup were tolerated, but not reciprocated. That easy, sunny smile that Weejay was famous for faded and then disappeared all-together, much like the light of a dying star.

She nagged @Eljay to bring her to Mommy's grave often. Any chance she could she brought Mommy pretty flowers that caught her eye, and later would weep when they shriveled and withered away. Imagining Mommy there, under the dirt, turning in and shriveling like the little mountain-flowers carefully arranged on her grave made Weejay break into inconsolable tears.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair she got to lose her Mommy, but the other puppies still had theirs. Weejay didn't understand how @Wildfire could leave them, why had she left them, why couldn't Weejay go with her? No amount of consoling from the adults made this reality any better, and Weejay's features were frequently swollen and crumpled from chronic bursts of sorrowful tears.

She did not play much. Her younger cousins were just barely tolerated, and that was solely because underneath the grief that layered her heart, Weejay was still a generous wolf. A less patient child would have likely snapped at their ceaseless attempts at play much sooner. Weejay endured their play in a despondent manner, and when she didn't want to play (which was increasingly often) she often retreated to a corner of the den she had staked as "her own".  @Elfie might be the only soul in the entire realm that cast a little light in Weejay's world, but it was like wispy orange candle-flame to a yawning chasm -- he lent her a quiet brightness for an hour two, and just as quickly as he left the lightness in her world diminished. She still woke up every day without a mother; she still woke up every day, when Wildfire didn't.

Weejay's grief was slow to abate, and it shed light on a quirk of hers' that might have been a healthy hobby were it not for the trauma in her formative years. She became obsessed with the flowers outside their new den. Every day she marched outside and counted their stalks, eye-level with their thin green stems as she browsed gently through the vegetation. She counted their petals. She measured their growth. She obsessed over their health, crushed bugs and slugs with a tyrant's vengeance, and tended to their needs with clumsy care. When they died, she cried considerably. When they unfurled their petals and bloomed, she cried even more. Any nosy sibling or cousin was chased away with desperate clicks of teeth: this was her garden, her way of coping -- and any wolf to disturb the soil (and consequentially, the tentative peace slowly settling in her raw heart full of choking loss) was met quite unkindly.

She slept poorly. Deeply attuned to her family (especially her father's grief), Weejay preferred to sleep by Eljay's side, and often woke up with fretful whimpers. The loss of her Mommy made her paranoid that Daddy would leave her too; sometimes she held Eljay too tight, and sometimes she cried imagining that someday, he wouldn't wake up either.

It was getting better, day by day... but Weejay couldn't see it. Eventually, she would learn that grief was simply the price you paid for love, and to love something so deeply that it moved you when it was gone was a blessing... but for now she viewed it as a curse, and hurt with an agony she had never felt before, and did not wish to ever feel again.