Rosin

8- Home

It happened one day of spring, when the sky had been unusually clouded all throughout the afternoon.
The days were getting longer again. The shadows were softening. And yet it still wasn't quite warm enough to wander around without some type of furs draped over your shoulders, and so Rosin had been rummaging about her and Wren's bedroom for something to wear. The winter furs were too thick, too heavy. But she couldn't just wander about in her pink vest. And then she found it.

Under the bed is the place for forgotten things. Unused clothes, missing pillows... and old diaries.
Rosin had to take a minute to identify that blocky shadow, then realised her own book was underneath all those layers of dust. Her diary, her journal. How it had fallen into the dark and dusty depths she wasn't sure. Most likely she had left it on her pillow after writing an entry, maybe fallen asleep, and it had slipped down behind the bed and clonked to the floor. There it had remained, forgotten and gathering dust. For how long... she couldn't be sure.
How could she have forgotten it? Her diary, her journal, her precious book. Everything was written in there— from the first day she left her tribe, to her initial feelings about Wren. Everything. Quite honestly it had devolved into something far more personal than she meant it to be. If Rosin had initially intended it for reading, it had lost all possibility of being read by any eyes but her own.
She wondered how she could have forgotten it so... so cleanly; the little book hadn't crossed her mind for gods know how many days. A moment later she supposed that it was hardly surprising. With all that had gone on in the past few seasons, many things had been forgotten.

The girl had splayed herself flat on the wood of the floor and reached in despair for the leather book. No good. Her arm was too big to go so far underneath the bed. Her shoulder caught between the bed-frame and the floor whenever she tried, and then even her most straining scrabbles couldn't retrieve the lost diary.
She had to ask Wren for help.
Which she had been very reluctant to do. All anyone ever did was ask Wren for help. Mostly Rosin's job was to help them, not the other way around... but what other option was there? Perhaps she could have asked Silk, he was just as slight as Wren, but... silly as it was, that diary was a personal thing to her. Wren knew about it, of course, but to ask Silk to retrieve it... to touch it...
It felt like letting him in on her private thoughts. Her secrets. Ridiculous, but undeniably the way she felt.

So, though it weighed her with guilt, Rosin had caught Wren in one of their few moments of free-time and told them of the conundrum. There was no heavy sighing, no impassive nod— Wren did what Rosin hadn't expected. Their face lit up in a way it hadn't for a very long time at Rosin's dramatic description of how the book was lost in the dust and the darkness. Wren, still draped in their over-heavy furs and adorned with stupid flowers petals, came very quickly into their room and wriggled themselves under the bed. Totally under. Where Rosin couldn't even fit her arm, Wren could fit their whole body.

They emerged from under the bed with dust on their nose and the book clutched in their hands. Not quite smiling, because Wren hardly smiled anymore, but with a little colour to their cheeks.
"Retrieved." They had murmured as they handed it back to her. They never tried to read the words inside. They wouldn't dare. Of course because they respected Rosin's privacy, but for other reasons too.
There would be memories they had put far from their mind scrawled inside those pages.

Wren had of course returned to their responsibilities a moment later. And Rosin had of course began flicking through her loggings, unable to resist.

A rather dramatic introduction. A scrawled excitement of how she had crossed the lake and bested a bird. Complaints about the state of her hair. Her writing blotted and smeared by raindrops on one page. Her innocent wonder at seeing a tribe for the first time. A... an embarrassing paragraph detailing Wren's strange mannerisms— the way they flopped themselves about, never still and never steady, leaning on everything in sight, draping over surfaces like hanging vines. Paragraph... s. Blocks of text that turned into a page... or two. Or more.
They really had been a puzzle to Rosin when she arrived in Hawthorn. Wren Agraulis. How in the blazes could the Elder of such a tribe be a... strange, awkward little child.