Robbin

27. Perspectives

She was lying among the towers, suffocating once more, when suddenly her own nightmare interrupted the memory in the form of a female voice.

"My brothers and sisters will kill you if they catch even a WHIFF of your scent from now on!"

Terra suddenly stood as herself among the towers, no longer Antoinette. A pale wolf dropped down from the sky and appeared on a tower porch yards away. It watched her.

"It's not just the demons that will be trying to get that neck-ring now."

"Not just the demons," the female voice from nowhere repeated.

She did not linger on the unconscious reminder of Rowan's warning, but the feeling of unease stayed with her as she rose slowly before the streaks of dusky light peering from the leafy moon. After managing to ward off her initial fears for the safety of the necklace, feelings of guilt from the previous day trickled into her pores like tiny needles until finally overwhelming her so much she felt as if they were a thousand knives. It was the sight of him which summoned them.

***

Jake eyed Robbin wearily. His former enemy was unskilled at hiding his misery.

"The moon has barely risen, we haven't eaten, and you're setting us at a pace we can't possibly maintain," Jake tested once they had headed off.

Robbin merely paced ahead sternly with the brief reply of: "we did eat."

"I guess that might have been considered eating by your meager standards, but for a wolf those measly rat carcasses would merely have been considered leftovers," Jake tried again, hoping to get a rise out of Robbin.

It worked. Robbin's shoulders haunched and his face went scarlet. Before he could get a word out, however, Terra interrupted with: "shut up. Will you two please give it a rest?"

Jake gave a small half smile, and Robbin turned back to his miserable stomping, evidently embarrassed. Perfect. She was the perfect distraction to get Robbin out of his malaise.

Jake had actually grown fond of the girl who had gotten caught up in his reunion with the stubborn and obscenely moral dreamer who was Robbin. If he were Robbin, he would have been better at hiding his misery... if not for his own sake, than for the girl's, at least. But then again, Robbin had always been the idealistic type. Jake would know better than anyone about that.

So Jake just trudged behind Robbin, among twisting and haphazard forest, inwardly frustrated at his foiled attempts to cheer Robbin up. He had not come all this way, among damned disorienting trees and roots and ferns, just to watch Robbin stupidly brood and the girl get hurt in the process.

***

Terra knew that she was the reason they were even considering leaving the previous safety of the nomad cave for the much farther and less certain Parantium. She was the reason the cave wasn't safe anymore: why Robbin appeared to shrink smaller with every step away from the nomad cave and inwardly cry at every footfall.

An hour later, they settled around a fire to sleep for the night and Terra stared at Robbin where he had decided to eat alone partially blocked from view by a grouping of trees. His face had become pallid. He barely spoke and his brows were always furrowed together as if he was constantly in pain. Yes, certainly she was the reason.

"I hope you won't be blaming yourself for the way things have turned out the last couple of days," Jake interrupted her thoughts conversationally as he came to sit next to her by the fire.

She studied him shortly and then continued to gaze over the flames at the small hunched figure between the trees. "So, what if I do?" she asked.

He let out a short, rough gust of air. " That would really be a shame," he answered.

She wondered why he cared. After a moment of inadequate response, he elaborated. "Robbin cares about you... very deeply, you know. He wouldn't—"

She was sure he had said that wrong, and was unwilling to accept this, cutting him off. "Oh yes, he's obviously bursting with adoration."

Jake frowned. "He would never have left the cave with you in the first place if he didn't adore you, Terra."

Terra scoffed. Where did Jake get off thinking he knew Robbin's inner workings?

"He just gets a little too caught up in his own head sometimes, but don't take that as anger." Jake's voice had acquired a desperate edge to it and she finally made eye contact.

"How would you know?" she challenged.

Jake gave a confident wink, taking her acknowledgement as encouragement. "He might try to act like he's changed, but deep down Robbin's exactly the same as he always has been. And he's always been too self critical."

She raised her eyebrows, wondering where she fit into his assessment.

"This isn't about you," he affirmed.

Instead of feeling reassured, Terra felt the lump in her throat grow and her eyes narrow, wondering, not for the first time, what Jake's motives were.

***

Robbin's guilt could rack up twenty of Terra's. Too preoccupied to even recognize her anguish, he settled away from her, weighted down by the burden of his own punishments. Where had he gone wrong? he asked himself. Where had he gone wrong to lead his people to want to leave the place he had so carefully brought up? If only he had stayed...

So weighted was he by his own worries about the fate of the nomad cave that even the instance that maybe the nomads had left the cave out of desperation, and not out of free will, seemed an impossibility to him.

Whether it was because he couldn't accept the possibility that his men could lose, or because he felt insistent on punishing himself, Robbin felt certain that after his departure, his nomad brothers had stayed at the cave only long enough to fight off the vicious wolves' initial attacks, and then, in the wake of their victory, they had left their home for the nearest city large enough to house them, unwilling to defend their home any longer. They had left by foot, abandoning the cave Robbin himself called home, to the fate of whoever found it.

Robbin, in his distress, did not consider the viewpoint of those victors there at the time. He did not consider that even though it was obvious in hindsight the wolves' first attack had been their last, his nomads had not known. That they had buried their dead, gathered their things, and left not because they had wanted to, or because the home he had built for them hadn't been good enough, but because, without their leader, they had felt that they had to. Despite the entirety of Jake's arguments to the contrary, Robbin only considered the two questions which played themselves repeatedly in his mind, because, if he had stayed, surely he never would have let them leave his home.

Why had he left? Why had they wanted to leave?

a/n: This is mostly just a look at where all the characters are at right now, and why Robbin is in such a dark place. Heroes can't be positive all the time.

Thanks much for your continued support!