Do you win many of those? He asked, warmth in his voice and Roisin chuckled in response. "Depends on if anyone is watching," she answered cheekily, leaning in just slightly as if sharing a secret. In truth, she often went until either exhaustion or pain or numbness won, and in those moments she was the most lonely. In the bitter aftermath of her furious temper tantrums, she often found herself wallowing in her own inability to change fate.
In those moments, she was just a sad filly watching her mother swim away again.
Roisin didn't like those moments, and, if reason had been able to shout above the cacophony of her anger when it was at full force, she would have found any excuse to calm herself down. But anger had a way of filling the emptiness in her chest, shoving fingers into bullet wounds to stop the bleeding. It was addictive, and while she hadn't fallen entirely under its spell (having seen what madness could do to a mare), she could not claim innocence.
Her massive companion shrank away from her jovial question, and she sobered with an apology already forming on her tongue. Instead of dodging her inquiry, however, he hesitated and then answered it. She had no way of knowing if it was the truth (nor any real reason to care if it was), but it felt honest, and in its imagined veracity she found more reasons to trust him. Stressed and overwhelmed with her own everyday life, Roisin was eager to latch onto the scenario he laid before her, and she found her lips pressing together uneasily at the thought.
Despite the measured tone and careful selection of words he offered, Roisin heard the echo of her own nightmares from the days in the Ridge. Memories of falling asleep at her mother's side, only to awake to the nightmare of Nyimara snarling down at her; of chasing her elder brother into the jungle in search of their father, only to run headfirst into the grasp of a waiting Aranck or Cullen.
The memories doused the warmth in her chest and she drew in a steadying breath before re-affixing the smile on her lips. "It was worth it," she assured him, jewel eyes rising back to his own. She had initially intended to offer her own vulnerabilities in order to plumb this stranger for an outside perspective, but in the wake of her pounding heart, she opted to delay a little longer by inquiring more.
"Did they do something bad?" Her mind cast once more to the silver-haired witch, and to the humanity that Shenzi had given her. Keeping Nyimara as the villain in her own personal story had been much easier when she had remained two-dimensional. Now that Roisin knew there were parts of her that could be kind, it was much harder to avoid trying to understand her. "Or did you just... know?"