Ocean's Breath Plateau à la dérive en mer

Her eyes narrowed when he turned things around on her. Was it possible he knew her plan? Or was he more in the loop with what went on than she realized, that perhaps somehow he had kept in touch and she had simply been too self-absorbed to see? Somehow she doubted that, all of it. Towhee visited them. Phox visited them. Eljay, Finley, the list went on. She didn't recall hearing that he had ever come around.

But could she really fault him? She could, and did.

"I left?" She snorted, feeling fire at her heels suddenly. "What makes you think that I, or we, left? You think I wanted to leave the plateau to go to some stupid forest? Maybe if none of you had left we wouldn't have had to go there, we would have been happy—" and she hit her tipping point, her voice suddenly straining, cracking with emotion at pent up anger that had nowhere to go for so long. If she had been able to cry, the tears would have been evident.

Forcefully, she managed: "Maybe you wouldn't have hurt us!"

She moved to try and get away, to run, to simply flee this problem and this interaction like she would have any other only to find the cold stone of the coastal plateau at her back. The rough bump of it against her backside only left her feeling trapped and suddenly in a panic, overwhelmed by him, overwhelmed with her own actions both logical and not. None of this would go over well, not now or ever.

It was directionless, pointless to contest. She knew deep down it wasn't his fault.

And the selfishness of her own actions swooped in to fill that hole swiftly.

She sank to the sloping earth, ears pinning back to her skull.