Prompt
2 - You've grown up in the circus. You know your way around it like the back of your hand. It's your home. Yet for some reason, you can't figure out where your tent is. Maybe you need some help. Maybe someone can assist, but they seem just as lost as you are...it's a little disorienting.
This made no damn sense - no sense at all. Joseph knew each and every tent in this place - hell, he had helped set up some of them! Which meant that finding his way through them and back to his own should be easier than finding his own hand, even in the dark. And yet... and yet, here he was, making the third lap through the tents and with no better idea of where exactly his was than he had the first time through. It... shouldn't be like this, he knew, it was supposed to be easy, he wasn't someone who normally got lost in his own home, and the entire circus was his home!
.... Wasn't it?
The more he wandered and looked around, the less certain he was. Had he helped set up that gaudy, three-person pink tent with the little hearts strung up around it? He thought he might have, but at the same time it looked entirely unfamiliar. Had that blue one always been there? That twisting pattern on its sides was starting to make him dizzy, and the redhead ha to take a moment and look deliberately away, shaking his head to clear away mental cobwebs. He knew his way around, he did so why was it like trying to navigate a maze that he'd never seen before?
He knew which tent was his, of course - a relatively subdued one (as much as any circus tent would ever be subdued), in green, that he shared with just one other person (who he didn't see around, or he might have flagged them down even as embarrassing as it was to admit he'd gotten lost.) Joseph groaned an stopped, glancing around one more time as though doing so would make the unfamiliar-familiar tents stop looking so confusing and start sorting themselves out for him into the kind of order he knew they were supposed to make. He could just ask someone, he knew; they might assume he was drunk or ill but at least he would be able to get back to his tent that way.
... And yet he was too damn stubborn to consider that for more than the briefest of moments, and he knew it. So with a frustrated growl and an absent-minded kick to a conveniently-placed pebble, off he set again on what he thought might be his fourth lap around the area. There was that pink tent with the hearts, and he knew his tent was... not far from there, or at least he didn't think it was, he remembered telling the ladies who lived there to keep it down sometimes, because they really got in to their practice, so his tent couldn't be far off. Joseph picked a direction at random, deciding to let his feet carry him wherever they willed. Surely, even if he was having trouble consciously remembering it, they'd know the way back to his tent.
He just had to keep walking for long enough, just had to try and untangle the fuzzy directions in his mind so that he could get where he needed to go. It was fine, it was normal. He'd get back to his tent before long!
Word count: 539
