𝑟𝑒𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠

[longitudinal]

𝑖'𝑙𝑙 𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢

please don't forget me and all the things we did
please don't be in love with someone else

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𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑙𝑢𝑒

[longitudinal]

[ the manor disappeared under their feet one night - opened its doors and ushered them out, a mass of panicked bodies and screams and confusion. he'd woken beside koby and was torn asunder, ripped from his side and the last he heard of him was his voice, shouting his name.

he wakes with it in his dreams every day. it's been four years since he woke up again in alonso's bed, when his life started over again and everything from that brief time in the place called england dissolved into nothing. he plays his part - guides the regent where he wants to go, uses his mind to pick all the places he should march his troops. every single map he looks at he thinks of sunny freckles, big blue eyes, soft pink hair - his heart aches and he's glad for the blind fold.

it soaks up the salty sea he weeps for a man he will never see again.

he thinks about him once alonso is sleeping, when he can close his eyes and draw up a blueprint of the world and look for the one twinkling star he knows better than any. the one he could feel beside him in a plush, fancy bed. the one he felt on the lake water. the one he felt like a heart beating against his own chest.

it isn't here in solastra. of course it isn't. but every night he tries, every night he closes his eyes and wishes so hard he's sure it will kill him. it makes his ears bleed, makes his head ache - pushing pushing pushing to find him. he has to find him. he promised.

the war crashes into the world like a furious storm - alonso's iron fist destroying everything in its wake and quentin at his coattails, watching the maps he has catalogued in his mind go immeasurably blank.

vysoka tears alonso asunder. quentin having laid all the traps, every little failure a red flag to the people who knew exactly what to look for. the magicians were waiting for them on the shores, turning the sea angry and red, making the one thing about this world he loved the most into a monster.

the ship sinks. quentin closes his eyes when he goes down with it, relieved by the pressure of the waves and the way his lungs surrender to the burn for air.

he wakes up on a short that isn't his own. the sands different colors, the sky too bright, the cities alive and full of life, not wrought with war and purge and fury. he's soaked to the bone when he wanders up into the port, onto docks. no one pays any mind to the man dripping with sea water as they tend to their ships and liners, as soliders march up and down the walkways.

he wanders the port cities for months. a place called delta island, a place where everyone keeps mentioning seas and berry and all of these things that sound so familiar. that remind him of a sunny-faced boy in his bed. but it's been so long, the world has been so torn apart that he's sure he's somewhere healed by the vysokian magicians.

but one of the docks he approaches at the end of a summery month has a ship with the word marines plastered on it. he sees uniformed sailors and high masts and broad, beautiful sails.

it's here he asks about koby. it's here he finds himself frantically pushing through the ranks of each marine and checking their faces, pulling their caps until finally he's subdued, pushed to the ground, face against the stone, a flint-locked weapon held to his temple.

"you're under arrest..."

and quentin doesn't have the heart to feel despair. another cage. another listless existence. he forgets what the sea tasted like, forgets what the sun feels like, forgets what belonging to anything is like now, five years after the manor. ]

There's a cadet... his name is Koby. Please... I'm trying to find him.

I need to find him.

[ he laughs a little when the marine leans a heavy boot into his back to silence him. ah, yes. ]

Please, I promised.