Wheeling Gull Isle I've been watching him for my entire life

Every screaming cry of the gulls drove into his skull like an ice pick, cascading the screaming pain into a never ending wail that set his teeth on edge.

His eyelashes were encrusted with salt and lashed together tighter than a solider’s formation, but he managed to pry them open slowly, only to immediately close them again when the light speared into his aching head with unerring efficiency. 

(He didn’t notice, for now, how his left eye did not see anything but shapes, how it was half sealed by darkness as his lid lay half lapsed over it)

(He also didn’t notice the ooze of blood from his wounds, or the pain in his shoulder. To Aquillius, the world had narrowed down to his aching skull)

He knew, as all animals did, that he needed to move, or else he would become food for something else. With the slow, painful shuffle of his limbs, he managed to twitch his legs. Enough to prove he could still move, even if his salt battered body screamed with the movement. He didn’t quite remember how he came to be in the ocean in the first place, didn’t care to even think about it, only knowing in that instinctive way that he needed to get up, get out of the sand, and hide somewhere cold and dark until his head stopped wailing in pain and he could think again.

when heda opened her eyes from prayer, it seemed god was all around her. she was guided up and beyond, as much by this presence as the wheeling gulls.
at first she thought it was bartholomew, heart leaping to throat.
and then she saw the shadow was more wolfish, less large. heda approached hesitantly to find a boy, breathing but battered. she smelled the blood and the salt and knelt close. "can you hear me?" asked her kind voice.

The voice was kind, but to Aquillius it burned. He let out a groan that turned into a whining whimper at its very end, the cry of a boy despite how much he wanted to be a man.

He tried to surge up, try to get away from the voice and the noise and the pain, but he only managed to get up onto his front before his legs gave out and he dropped forward. Drool slipped from his mouth in thick, globbing strands.

His stomach rolled, but he refused to let the rising bile in his stomach come from his mouth. He groaned, low.

Yes He managed to rasp, eyes still closed.

heda saw he was quite ill. "hey, hold still. stop moving," she softly ordered in a voice that held the vague tones of an elder sister. she followed him along the sand until he heeded, then looked over his tormented young body.
"i need you to be still. i'm going to bring you water." but not until the stranger spoke did heda intend to move away. her golden eyes watched his downed form with worry.

His breath came out in horrid, bubbly wheezes. It felt like there was water in his heart, his stomach, his lungs. He turned his one working eye to the sky. Maybe an eagle would appear from the skies? Anything to know his father was watching, that the gods would spill his name out to the only man that Aquillius had ever respected?

But there was nothing.

The gods had cast Aquillius away in his failure, and he wanted to wail like a child. He just swallowed thickly, his throat scorched by salt and water.

I…won’t.

Raspy wheezes, as he let his body settle into the sand for a moment, leeching what warmth he could from it.

tags for ref!

she saw the ruin of his eye and it turned her stomach; heda called for @Bartholomew or @Caracal, that there was an injured boy on the beach.
she ran fleetfooted into the snowy green of their island and scooped freshwater into the silvery belly of a shell.
her return trip back was not so fast, but heda arrived as soon as she was able. she set it close. "can you lift your head?"

Like that, he was left alone.

Just his wheezing and gasping and the fucking birds. They screeched above him, turning his world once again from the outside to the inner, pain filled world he was stuck in with every throb of his heart.

The return of the woman was marked by her pawsteps, the scent of water, and her voice. Slowly did one eye manage to open, the boy moving with aching slowness to twist his head and face her, look at her with the only eye that didn’t sit dull and unmoving. Slowly, his eyes flicked from her white face (so different to Germanicus, his exact opposite beside the red he could barely see, it both set his teeth on edge and made him relax). He ground his teeth together, pulling his wits into a commendable state for his current situation, and managed to raise his head enough to stick his nose into the shell and drink.

Though, once it was drained, all of his strength went far away, and he drooped into the sand once again.

the boy drank. heda watched. he would need more but for now she only extended her body over him, shadowing the young wolf from the worst of the sun.
"what's your name?" her voice asked next, and softly. she wanted to find out how lucid he was before she moved him.
god gives. god brings. the gilded eyes were soft. she wondered why this one had been led to their shores.

Aquillius. Came his sharp wheeze of his own name. The syllables took every ounce of strength that he had, so he left off the last name.

Perhaps, once he was more cognizant, he’d remember to tell it. Or, perhaps, he would need to earn it again. A Redsand, like his father, would have never been beaten by a fucking cat.

He pushed the thought out of his mind.

No need to think of it now. No need at all.

aquillius. it was a heavy name for a young boy. heda knew the damage a cat could do and more than that, she knew the infection that the beasts could carry in their claws.
her paw hovered over his torn shoulder as if to touch, and then she pulled it back. "when you can stand, i'll take you into the shade."
into the lions den.

It would take him a while to do so, Aquillius knew. His eyes rolled, his muscles bunched in cords, and he grunted in acknowledgment, too tired to converse while also trying so desperately to move all of his body.

The first motion was jerky, shaky, but he managed to plant his foot on the ground on his uninjured side, using the motion to haul his body up. He shook like the last leaf on a tree with the effort, tongue slipping from his jaws, drool again falling from between his teeth, but the boy kept standing.

His single eye sought out the kind woman with unnerving jerky motions, and for the time being he just stood there, wavering idly from side to side, as if he was going to tip over at any moment.

heda put a shoulder against his ribs, gathering the brunt of his wavering weight on herself. "just breathe, good. one foot in front of the other."
as slowly as aquillius needed to go, with many breaks in between. like all the others, sweetharbor would take care of him.
god provided.

He would move beside her, gamely placing paw in front of the other, even as his mind retreated from the pain and the trauma and the..everything

He thought of Mereo. Of the future he’d had at his feet as a soldier. Of those days he’d had there, training and training and never stopping to see the world around him. It occurred to him in that hysterical, fragile moment on the brink of his thoughts and utter void, that he’d never made the time to learn how to swim well. Training had been the only thing he’d ever known, his self imposed yoke.

The body was directed to lay, and thus he lay.

He thought of his mother. How, the last time he’d seen her, she had walked away and taken his sister and his brother with her. Another tie, pulled from the foundation of his heart. He wasn’t close to his siblings, he hadn’t ever been close to them before they left and after they left, he didn’t try to get close to the only remaining sister he had.

His eyes fixed on the light outside.

He thought of his father. The pedestal he’d placed the man on, the pedestal he still occupied in his mind. Aquillius had always wanted to be Germanicus, wanted to hold all the values that made the man in his heart and close to his chest, wanted so badly, with everything he was, to be so much his father’s child in more that coat. How his father did not seem to wait, to Aquillius at least, for his mother’s memory to fade and her scent to stop wreathing through his head, to take a new wife. A wife Aquillius didn’t meet, because he was angry. A wife who, in winter, would undoubtedly give him more sons to be exactly like him and take Aquillius’s place in the world. He wouldn’t deny it, the possibility rankled him, made his chest feel empty and his stomach feel sour even without the wounds that drifted through him.

His eyes drifted closed.

Aquillius slept, and dreamed a dream of a happy universe where he was everything he wanted to be.