Coconut Grove detox just to retox.

There really was no explaining how Penn Blackthorn survived the jump. He definitely shouldn't have. It made no logical sense. The drop had been huge, the rocks at the base of the cliff were many and sharp, the ocean waves were violent and dangerously frigid. It also didn't make any sense how he ended up miles down the coast, washed up on smooth, sandy shores that were fairly idyllic in spite of the season. Maybe if he had jumped into a river in mid-Spring, the outcome would've made some sense. But he didn't--it was the ocean. In December. He definitely should've died a horrible, horrible death.

But he didn't. Penn Blackthorn, apparently, is indestructible.

#semi-realism

That wasn't to say he'd come off the whole ordeal completely unscathed. He'd washed up as a drowned rat--beaten, freezing, choking salt water through raw, weak lungs. He probably would've died then, were it not for the intervention of some random stranger who Penn was pretty sure he'd imagined because she'd looked just like him. He'd spent weeks in and out of consciousness with only his fever dream to care for him. In the end, he'd managed to piss her off enough that she'd declared him "Well enough to be getting on with" and abandoned him. He didn't blame his imaginary friend for it, either. He did keep referring to her as "the lesser Penn", so it stands to reason that she would eventually declare herself over his shit and bail.

Penn paced along the shores with the dead seagull dangling from his jaws. His limp was still pronounced, making him move slower than he used to. It irked him, but the persistent cough that he choked out around the bird's feathers was the more annoying bit. Kind of hard to sneak up on prey when you couldn't stop yourself from hacking up a lung at any given moment. Catching his current meal had been a fluke more than anything else, but Penn wasn't about to complain. He was really thinking at this point that some greater power in the universe was going out of its way to keep him alive. Birds didn't usually fly into each other and knock each other to the ground like morons that just learned they had wings, after all. But again, not complaining.

The Blackthorn slowed as he reached his hideout--a little alcove he had dug into the sand under a palm tree that was gnarled and twisted closer to the ground and littered with debris that had seemed to almost fossilize from an age when the tide swept much further up the beach. Rather than bury himself into it, Penn stretched out in front of his shelter to soak up whatever warmth he could from the sun that shone on this surprisingly blue-skied day. His body ached from lingering bruises in a way that suggested he might not ever be the same, but he shoved his discomfort to the back of his mind to focus on enjoying his meal.