#g.aius doesn't know how to grieve and thats the post

[heirbane]

I was yelling at bree incoherently earlier and was really sitting here thinking about how Gaius really has just... always been the way he is. As long as he can remember.

He barely had time as a child to be just that. After his father died, he seamlessly stepped into being the head of the household. With his mother being beside herself and still a young adult by anyone's standards, Gaius had to quickly learn how to do what his father had done: provide.

And when he saw how his mother began to unravel, begging his infant brother to be quiet and stop fussing, overwhelmed and alone - he learned what not to do, too.

Gaius doesn't remember crying when his brother was laid to rest. He can't say he truly knows when he died, just that the house finally became quiet but they did not heal. The solace his mother begged for had come, and it only made her worse.

He knew what he had to be. He knew what he couldn't be.

(He doesn't remember crying when she died, either, half a decade into his military service. He was suns shy of adulthood, and her death felt like a mercy, a balm: finally. Finally. Maybe peace would find her. Maybe peace could find him, too.)

With the death of his own children, and the memory of how his brother's death had turned his mother into a ghost, Gaius is lost on how to grieve in a way that feels proper. He remembers his mother, curled up in her marital bed, blankets covering her like the corpse she wished to be.

He remembers her quietly weeping, there in body but not in spirit, and calling for her, a man lost at sea with not a thing to save him.

He remembers himself, and he sees Allie, and the grief and torment is enough to flay him alive.

Peace had found his mother, he hoped.

Maybe peace would find him, yet another call into the void, a whisper in the dark, the weight of it all crushing him alive.