Cerosi doesn’t immediately recognize the figure on the beach. She is not familiar enough in the Prairie to call it home, so she does not have the sense of territoriality she might otherwise possess against a stranger washing up on the shore of the place where she slept, battered and weak as that stranger may be. Her only concern is for her son, mixed with preemptive irritation, because she knows Håkon’s curiosity will lead him into trouble one of these days.

“I think I saw a snake, back in the trees,” she says quietly, not looking at the sable colt. It is more than she usually speaks to him in the span of a day, but he is quiet himself, and Cerosi does not think he minds their shared silence. Håkon does not seem surprised by the rare speech, and her words succeed in their intended purpose; the lanky child dashes back to the belt of trees that shield the Prairie, and Cerosi knows he will remain there until he has found his snake.

She moves forward as her son spins around and jogs away. The figure on the beach has moved a bit; it seems she has been spotted, but her presence does not stir the stranger to his feet like she had expected. Perhaps his wounds are worse than they appear from a distance. The lush Prairie grass gives way to tough, sharp-edged beach grass as Cerosi grows closer, but the sting on her ankles is ignored, and then she recognizes the silhouette in the sand.

She halts. Does he know that their pairing had ended in tragedy? Is Cerosi willing to dig up the memories enough to tell him? They are struggling to come up either way; the image of Sybelle on the cave floor had been neatly tucked out of sight, helped along by the arrival of Håkon. Cerosi had shamelessly replaced her dead child with her new living one, plastering over the hurt layer after layer, pictures of Håkon like bandages over the seeping wound. She hoards the images of him within herself, but they are only images; Cerosi cannot bring herself to reach past that barrier and ever so much as touch her son, for risk of causing herself more pain when he dies, too. But beneath the cast of photographs, the memory of Sybelle struggles to rise, her weak legs unable to lift her in life, now finding strength in death to come bursting forward in Cerosi’s mind, shattering the feeble dressing she had made out of Håkon.

The steel-gray mare pins her ears, tears welling unbidden to roll down her cheeks. She screws her eyes shut as if that will keep the tears inside, as if keeping the tears inside will fix anything at all, and turns her face away for a moment, tucking her chin against the curve of one shoulder. She bites down on the skin there, feeling nothing, feeling everything, and then Nuka speaks from where he lies in the sand.

She can’t fault him for not knowing, but part of her is infuriated with him. She had not expected him to stay with her, had never expected comfort through her grief, but she can’t stop the anger that he left her alone to swallow her sorrows. She knows, part of her knows, that it would not have been better had they stayed together; the two of them were clearly broken. It was obvious enough that they both must have known it even in the short time they had spent together. This knowledge does not stop the anger from bubbling up anyway; irrational anger, misdirected anger, but anger all the same.

“Fuck you,” she spits, suddenly, intending for it to be a snarl, but it comes out a broken whisper. It is not in response to his words, but rather, a general exclamation of the amalgamation of all of her feelings. She spits it at him all the same, throwing the words with as much force as she can muster, and with that, the anger dissolves, and Cerosi is left hollow and tired. Everything aches, and she wants nothing more than to return to the Desert, to where Cain had allowed her to figure out her own freedom, and learn how to be happy. It had been short-lived, and she had not loved him in that way, but there had been no pain in those days.

“Get up, Nuka,” she says, the words husky with exhaustion, but lacking all the hostility from a moment ago. She sighs. “You’re not a dead fish; stop acting like one.”