3-4

Sol and Bill spoke quietly, but Braith sat apart from them, remaining still and silent, watching the men with musing eyes.  Bill was tall and broad, his grey uniform stretched taut over his thick, muscular limbs.  His short, shaggy brown hair framed a childish round face with small brown eyes and a wide, grinning mouth.  He seemed pleasant enough, if not particularly bright, casually discussing with Sol such matters as preferred brands of alcohol and sports teams local to Sayid.  

Within a quarter of an hour, Valence turned to watch Rob march proudly into the red ring of firelight caught between the towering boulders. “What took you so long?” Sol snapped, and Rob smiled contemptuously, lifting in his right hand a long string of small, glimmering silver fish dangling lifelessly from a line of steel thread.  Sol returned this smile and Bill chuckled as Rob strolled to the fire and released first the mass of clinking tin bottles swinging from leather straps, dropping them carelessly into a sloshing heap of makeshift canteens on the pine needle carpet.  As he settled triumphantly into a position beside Bill, Valence noted that this boy was the youngest of the crew, perhaps in his upper teens.  He bore a mop of fair, straw-colored hair falling straight across his boyish face, cutting before his shrewd, bright blue eyes.  He was rather short and stocky, with a fit, young, powerful body.  The boy’s uniform was comfortably loose, and very dirty, splattered up to the knee with a dusty layer of old mud and stained down the front with blood and food.

He quickly emerged as the loudest of the crew, outgoing with twinkling eyes, a broad, goofy, lopsided grin, and a scathing sense of humor.  His arrogance collided sharply with Braith’s quieter disposition, and despite their obvious distaste for each other, the pair seemed to take immense pleasure from the sport of humiliating the other at every opportunity, for the vast entertainment of Bill and Sol.  Rob tore into a tale about a job he had had escorting the princess of Sayid, “one hot piece of work,” from her castle to her summer house.  They were taken captive, and, temporarily trapped in a dungeon together, he had “comforted” the terrified girl.  “Do you boys know what happens when a man and a woman end up alone in a room together for too long?” he asked, grinning impressively to the amazement of his audience.

In the brief silence that followed, Braith piped up in an unbelievably innocent voice, “The fat one gets eaten?”  

She was quite alone, mused Valence from his distant vantage point.  Three ghostly white Sayids and one exotic olive-skinned citizen of the State.  She was one small young woman on the outskirts of three men, and she merely watched them, half-interested, musing quietly.