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.