#same boat g.aius. same boat

[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.

#when u parentify a child and it causes emotional dysregulation for decades. hi. its me #ⅹⅳ tertius oculus ( hcs. ) #death tw #child abuse tw #just in case :))))))) #g.aius doesn't know how to grieve and thats the post #he remembers what his mother's depression felt like To Him as a boy and doesn't want that for A.llie #but also doesn't know how else to carry it. he's picking up glass with his bare hands and letting himself bleed. #he has no idea how else to hold himself together. i don't think this man has ever truly cried tbqh #anyway #grown man has been microdosing in disassociating for decades #same boat g.aius. same boat

[heirbane]

WHAT  TAROT  CARD  ARE  YOU?

THE HERMIT. - It’s a skill, to look inside yourself, one you have mastered. The endless corridors and shifting thoughts are mapped to very carefully. This all takes time, of course. And those twisting hallways are so very difficult to map. It would be so easy to get lost. You know this space so well. Wouldn’t it be a lovely place to stay? So well-known and comforting. Why go back? How nice, how easy, to dissolve, to hide from the rest of the world and all the people in it. Why bother, when you are so good at looking inside yourself. Like enlightenment, the self. Retreating this far inwards is like retreating just as far out, into the vast ether. So comforting. The thing that was you looks at the thing that was the old woman. There is no you anymore. Goodbye.

stolen from @sephaeroth / tagging @iernbone

#ⅩⅣ speculo ( aes. ) #frankly i don't think he has it mastered or very well mapped out at all. he broods and thinks so much about his own thoughts and feelings #and it often falls into 'is this how i truly feel?' because he's spent decades thinking as van not as G.aius #and now he has all this bonus life to figure out when he thought he should have perished. same boat old man #what do you do with the life you never expected to see? the mirror isn't who you were before anymore and it's a yawning canyon between - #'were' and 'am'. and he's still not sure where he is. how much of him is 'were' still #if that. makes any sense lmao #ⅩⅣ tertius oculus ( hcs. )