Plip, plip, plip...

She slowed her pace as she began to yawn. It was late, but she didn't feel like going back to the hotel.

Her personal assistant had expected her to stay at the beach house, so he hadn't booked her a room in advance. Now the hotel was already full, but he had managed to make arrangements for her to share the accomdations her bandmate had already booked. Gareth was kind enough to let her take the bed, while he took the cot room service had brought in.

But as it turned out, her violinist talked in his sleep.

And being probably the only virgin in the world, (not counting groupies, which meant she could probably make a fortune off of selling him to the Dark Cult of Kobe for use as a ritual sacrifice,) the content of his sleep-talk was... loud... to say the least.

Sighing, she slowed to a walk, as she scanned the nearly-abandoned beach. After another long day of interviews, rather than listen to the late-night play-by-play of her bandmate's subconscious fantasies, she had made a quick change to her workout gear and had gone for a run. She couldn't remember the last time she went out for a run, much less one along the beaches in Rio.

She had only seen a couple of other runners and a pair of lovers walking hand-in-hand take advantage of the full midnight moon. Otherwise, all the sane people in the city were asleep.

The tide lapped lazily in time with her steps, the shifting sands whispering underneath the soles of her shoes. Pausing, she approached the water and bent down to pick up a small, flat rock.

She hadn't done this since she was a kid.

She straightened, and deftly flicked her wrist. She watched the tiny ripple-rings erupt along the ocean's ebb-and-flow surface.

One. Two. Three. Four. She counted as she listened to the plip, plip, plip of the stone.

Inspecting the beach again, she picked up another stone of similar shape and size and flicked her wrist again. Her mother used to always take her to The Lake to skim stones, when she was upset. Usually after she was bullied by the kids of one of the other celebritites her mother used to hang out with. It was her mother who taught her how to skim stones.

She always used to say that anger was like skimming stones. Anyone can take a rock and chuck it in the water, and make a big, ugly splash. It took patience and focus, concentration and a little bit of luck, to take the same power, the same anger, the same action and accomplish something graceful and meaningful, use that same energy to make something to be proud of instead.

Plip, plip, plip, plip, plip.

She stared out over the water, watching the last tiny ripple expand before fading into the tide. Then nothing but the surging-receding ocean.

Suddenly, she growled and unceremoniously grabbed at the ground, pulling up a handful of sand and rocks. With an angry yell, she whipped it into the water so hard she lost her footing.

Falling heavily to the ground, she closed her eyes and heard rather than saw the loud, ugly splashes of stones and clumps of sand tumbling into the sea.

She didn't have to look up to know that the water had swallowed up the ugly splashes as indiscriminately as the graceful plips a moment before.