Beneath the dappled shade, it took her a moment to work out the softly shaded color of his coat. Like one of the rare pearls that had washed ashore back home, it gleamed with hints of warmth and beauty that would have taken her breath away if she had not been so absorbed by the striking quality of his eyes. Like a great bird of prey, he fixed her with a pointed stare that - when combined with the sudden stiffening of his massive body - almost made her reconsider approaching him. Up close, she could not deny the overt difference in their sizes (some 8 inches at the shoulder and a few hundred pounds), but she did not quail before him.
She had spent far too many years imagining facing down her bullies in the Lagoon and beyond to shrink away from a potential threat.
As he softened, so did she, shifting her petite body to stand just beneath the last few inches of shade as offered her a response. She chuckled softly in commiseration and the frown that had marred her earlier smile faded, allowing her brightness to shine through instead. His question sends her spiraling back through her memories; to Shenzi's testimony of Nyimara, and to the day when she finally pieced together what Oswin had done (or, at least, what she assumed, given that she had not confronted her), and then further back, to the conversation she'd had with Iscariot and the chaos that had preceded it. Each time her reaction had been the same: to blow up and be angry about it, only to intensely regret it almost immediately after.
When Shenzi had offered a different view of Nyimara, Roisin had not wanted to believe it. And while she thought that she had managed to keep a fairly respectable composure throughout that conversation, she had almost immediately unleashed her anger on the first willing victim she could find. Learning that Nyimara was a real creature and not just a scarecrow villain was an uncomfortable realization she didn't enjoy having.
"The first time it happened, it did," she admitted thoughtfully, her heart aching with the memory of those first few days she'd spent alone after her argument with Iscariot. Although she understood his point of view better now (not that she agreed with it anymore now than she did before), she could not forget how betrayed she'd felt to think that he didn't care about the child he'd created with Faolain. That - despite watching how her heart broke each time her father left - he would willingly leave his own foal without a father figure. She knew now that he had done so because of his own self-doubts, but that didn't lessen her own fierce desires for him, nor the betrayal she'd felt that day.
"After that, it mostly just made me mad." Chuckling faintly, she turned her gaze away from her own feet (it had come to rest there sometime during her musings) and back to his face. "As for what I do about it," she tilted her head cheekily, a smirk on her pale lips. "I have a bad habit of picking fights with trees and rocks when reality stops making sense." And other horses. And herself. You know, the usual.
She pauses for a moment as if to appraise him, unsure if she was truly comfortable sharing her burdens with a stranger. Maybe an outside perspective would at least allow her to put her ducks back into some semblance of a row. "Want to trade trauma?"