(iteration six)

She is waiting for them, a spectre in black standing at the edge of the ocean, and the closer they get, the farther away she seems.

Fujin guides the boat up next to the narrow dock, the bump of hull against salt-stained pier the only indication of their arrival. Seifer stands, and Rinoa remains in a huddled pile on the deck.

"Come on," he says, his voice gruff. "We're here."

She looks at him, a faint blush of red on her nose and cheeks, the sun's doing. There's something in her expression that makes him feel like a bug under glass, and so he turns from her, lightly jumping the span from deck to dock. Wordlessly, she follows him, and when Seifer reaches to help her across, he's startled by how delicate her hand is, how fragile. Like he could break her with the wrong word, the wrong look.

Edea meets them halfway across the stretch of sand, and her expression is even worse than Rinoa's, because Seifer has seen it before- a look of great and terrible knowing.

Something in his chest squeezes, just a little bit, a hangman's noose beginning to tighten on his soul.

"Poor child," Edea says, softly, "poor, poor child."

xx

(in her ears is the painful ticking of a never-ending clock-bomb.

tick tick tick tick it goes, tock tick tick tick tock.

poor child, she says, poor child.

poor everyone else.)

Something writhes within her, clawing at her skin, wanting to get out.

She lets Edea lead her into the orphanage-by-the-sea, the place she does not belong. The place that no one belongs, and the place that no one stays at. There are monsters here, hiding in sand dunes and beneath the sea and behind the blue-painted door. She lets Edea lead her, and tries to ignore the beast within her belly.