How old had he been when Cassia was born? Time had come and gone so swiftly and so slowly all at once since... everything happened. He remembered being younger, fuller-faced and unburdened with responsibility, Juven absently playing with the newborn's hair as Jullus held her, stunned into silence.
He had to have been barely fourteen summers, he thought. How much had changed in half a decade. His hands had grown calloused from weapon play; his face had lost the roundness of youth, body crisscrossed with scars he had gained along the way.
How little had changed, too - the softness of a new life's skin, the sounds they made, teeming with life and future hopes. A half a decade had scarcely changed anything at all. Jullus still felt too much like a child himself, stumbling his way through existing, staring down at the newborn as if they shared a commonality.
(Their lives were just beginning. The world would continue onward. People would perish, but more would be born, and both of them were but stars in a bigger galaxy.)
He hesitated. He reached out, his hand bare, skimming his thumb over the silken fur on the half-Viera's ears.
Against all odds, humanity would persevere.
"May the new Garlemald show them both a kindness," Jullus said. "They deserve it."
None of this was supposed to be happening. Garlemald was supposed to persevere, the living embodiment of the will to survive.
No, Quintus was quick to correct himself, to reel himself back in from slipping down that dark cliff again. Garlemald would persevere, the living embodiment of the will to survive, a testament to the resilience of her people. It would simply not be the same, and that was alright; for their Garlemald had changed once before during his lifetime, albeit early on -- this time he would adapt, just as he had back then, as had his father and mother and his brothers.
Not for himself, but for the memory of those they had lost, those who would never return, represented by that red link in the Garlean emblem. For those who continued to live, to persevere in spite of everything that had befallen not only their homeland, but the world at large.
And perhaps most of all, for those lives who were newly born, or would come to be in this new world. Lives like the precious newborns held by Jullus and Quintus, twins split between the two of them while Nerva rested in another room.
Quintus cradled the little girl in his arms, struggling to process that this was real. Those deep blue eyes searched her soft and pudgy features as she squirmed now and then, tiny fists balling as if in defiance of the grim fate that had been handed to them, and she cooed to her father to let him know that all would be well.
Calloused fingers gently, tenderly stroked at the pale tuft of hair atop her head. Not far away, he could hear her brother making similar sounds. He knew that the baby boy was in good hands with Jullus -- in fact, he was grateful for Jullus's presence in this moment, otherwise the former legatus might well have found himself overwhelmed by emotion.
But when the much younger man spoke, something within Quintus broke; a floodgate that he had not been aware was present was opened, and out poured everything he had been shoving down until now. But the despair and guilt was replaced with something else -- hope, joy, although bittersweet. A yearning to protect these tiny, fragile lives, to see them grow and thrive. They were not only Garlemald's future, they were his future, his everything.
His head lowered to hide away his face, and he silently began to weep, while the little girl continued to coo to him all the while.
