The Lost

23- Rosin

Lucius

Rosin looked over her shoulder, to the girl atop my hoodie. And when she spoke, the sudden docility in her voice caught me off guard, "This is no place for us, I'm sure you know that. And this little girl, Lyn... have you really been protecting her all this time?"
I nodded. It was all I could do at the moment.
Rosin's shoulders dropped back and she smiled a little. It was strange, that. Seeing her smile genuinely. And it suited her, made her eyes softer, made her look less brutishly stoic. I wanted to smile back, but I just looked.
"I won't hide from the fact that you could quite easily overpower any of us here... including me," a sharp gaze regarded me, "Or Lyn."
The frown that grew on my face couldn't be helped. Just the thought of someone 'overpowering' that tiny girl was grating. Our argument was still at the back of my mind too. How I had lost my temper and grabbed her...
But Rosin pressed on and made my thoughts calm, "It would be so easy for you to treat Lyn as that human treats my friends. Like... like toys." Her voice quivered with rage for a second, until she collected herself. "Yet you've watched over Lyn with fondness... you say you saved her life. Why?"

It was a silly question really. It seemed so simple to me and so complicated to her. Why had I looked after Lyn? Because it was the right thing to do. So I didn't even answer her. I just shrugged. Instead of waiting for her to say something else, I asked her a question.
"When we get to the forest," my voice was quiet, "Where are you gonna take her?"
Rosin looked up at me, her face instantly guarded again, "Why?"
I half-shrugged though I didn't feel like moving. Even my voice felt heavy, "Cause I want to know."
She paused before saying slowly, "Where we come from. A tribe." And instantly, her eyes had hardened, every inch of her growing frosty. "Why do you want to know?"
Oh. I groaned inwardly. Right. How must that sound to her? A human demanding to know where her home is, where the people she was trying to protect are.
"Not like that, Rosin." Unintentionally, the words came out as a sigh, "No offence, but I don't care about your 'tribe' or whatever. I just wanna know that Lyn's safe. I didn't look after her just for her to be killed by some bird or something."
Rosin bit her nails, maybe wondering whether it was safe to tell me things about the tribes. She didn't didn't trust me, did she?
"You know, you really need to stop doing that."
She looked up, "Doing what?"
I nodded at her hand, "Biting your nails. You do it when you're nervous."

To my surprise, she simply laughed, running a hand through the cascading plaits on her shoulder. "Do I?" She half-smiled, looking awkwardly away, "I didn't realise. You're right, it's a bad habit."
I was a massive hypocrite for telling her to stop when I did it all the time. But the quiet had been making me anxious and I had wanted to fill the silence with something.
"To answer your question," Rosin seemed to decide to trust me after a few more moments of thought, "We'll go to Azure's home, Lucius. There will be no birds there. Lyn will be perfectly safe."
I would have liked to ask what exactly that meant. Where did these people live? How did they live? Whether they liked it or not, they were tiny compared to everything else, so how could they possibly survive?

All of a sudden, I realised that she had gone very quiet. Still too. Once again, Rosin was looking anywhere but me. This quiet between us was upsetting her too, I realised. Not me or Rosin liked each other very much... so this wasn't the best of situations.
"Why d'you hate me so much, Rosin?" I said without thinking.
She blinked.
Feeling suddenly stupid, I shook my head, words coming out in an uneven rush, "I-I mean, I know why, I'm double your size and all, but... you really hate me, don't you?"
More than her friends, at least. Azure didn't dislike me at all now that we were creeping into the beginning of a friendship, though she still had her occasional glints of fear. But that couldn't be helped. I was still a thousand times her size in the end. And Aspen... well, nobody had any right to expect anything from that boy for a while. He could be as scared of me as he liked and I wouldn't complain. But Rosin? She wasn't just scared like they were— she hated me. Like it was personal.