Stavanger Bay may we all die twice

She is alone, for the moment. Julep and Isengrim and the Shadow of Doe must have been around, but for the moment, they were out of sight. They have been for a while, she thinks, but then she tries to stop thinking, and the girl goes back to pretending she is a seashell.

She pretends to be a lot of things, but being a seashell is her favorite. Sometimes, when she's too tired and her chest hurts too much to keep pretending, she lets Doe's Shadow lead her down the shoreline, and they'll collect shells from the water, and Moorhen will almost smile, almost begin to wager her tail. She's watched her companions do it, she she thinks that she could manage it, too...

But then she will remember Doe and her wrath, and she will decide that it is safer to be still. It is easier. It is better. And she will lay down in the sand like her brethren, and she will wish that the Shadow would let her get washed away like the others.

When she sees the stranger - she might've called him Uncle Arturo, in another life - she does what she does best and goes still. Her gaze becomes far-off and glassy, and her body curls in, her head tucks close to her chest. Little white breaths are the only thing that gives her away - that and the rush of blood in her veins.

Moorhen curses it. She hopes, fervently, that the other won't see her obvious little shape in the middle of the beach. She'd been wandering, out in the open. Seashells don't wander, she thinks to herself. She shouldn't have wandered.