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

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.