Candlelight illuminates Robin's tent long after others have been extinguished. Her silhouette against the canvas shows only two types of movements while she sits at a makeshift desk: an arm gliding back and forth when it turns pages and scratches quill against paper in the quiet of the night, and two pigtails sinking down then bobbing straight again as she tries to keep from nodding off.
It's just a march.
But books and tomes scatter around her, some in stacks, a few open to choice pages, some weighting down the corners of maps. Her tools of the trade are not crisp as library texts might be, but soft and dog-eared, broken in, worn out and stained. Well studied and loved. They do not smell of fresh parchment or binding glue, but of blood and the oil of her skin, silt and saltwater, food and apothecary fluid. Endless knowledge and endless possibilities, and it's her job to determine the most likely events, no matter how small. Margins and grid lines fill with scribbles, connecting passages, information, and her own thoughts.
It's just a march.
She tells herself, because everyone else tells her to take care. She shouldn't stay up so late, she shouldn't worry so much. They need her healthy more than they need so heavily scrutinized a route. She knows it's true. She says the similar to others. And yet she remains at her plotting, sipping at the savory cream left of potato soup and crunching on a sweet apple. At least she's eating, if not sleeping.
It's just a march.
She might be hallucinating, believing it to be a voice calling forth from her cot instead of her own head. It's comforting and haunting, but she still doesn't give in. She won't until that looming twilight comes to her, stealing her consciousness away while her face presses into the pages and she wakes with a black smear upon her cheek. Sleep is impossible at any point before then, since there's another voice which calls louder, threatening nightmares instead of sweet dreams. Ones where she fails to take care of the ones who care for her.
It's always just a march
...Until it's an ambush.