#argananangst

There were times that Lucius Arganan didn’t want to get out of bed at all.

He didn’t have anything to really do. Part of him still wished he could be a Lazulis knight, prove all those worthless excuses for knights in Lazulis that he could fight, but his artificial limbs and lack of an eye prevented that.

All he was was nothing but the Count of Lazulis’ younger brother. That was it. Nothing more or less. And it hurt, being seen as someone else’s something rather than being seen as an individual.

But what could he do now? He sighed softly, sitting up in bed, before deciding to get dressed.

Another day of nothing...unless he could find something to give him meaning in life, that is.

They don’t get it.

They really don’t get it.

How could they ever understand him? He wanted to just let everything gush out surrounding the deaths of his late brother and sister-in-law. Of how he felt alone because of all that happened. How it was so right to destroy the man who destroyed his family.

But they don’t get it. They wouldn’t get it.

Long ago, before he killed his brother, he would have thought of himself as a hero. Now he would call himself a villain.

In the past he’d served as a knight, where he led a faction of the Lazulis knights in battle. His older brother (Calista’s father) helped to lead the army as a whole. Arganan had only thought of his duty to Lazulis (and a little bit of how the only real status he had, being the younger brother, was simply that—the younger brother of the Count of Lazulis). 

But then the loss of the limbs happened and he had second thoughts. Why couldn’t he be someone of a better position? It wasn’t fair that he had nothing while his older brother seemed to have everything. But part of him disagreed (you did what you could for Lazulis, you sacrificed yourself for the people and made it out at least okay) with that and he tried to be content with the fact that he was even still alive.

The stares from the other people around him didn’t help. He even caught his own brother gazing at him with a near horrified look, at the sight of Arganan lacking an eye, lacking limbs, burnt all over the left side of his body. And Arganan would look back at his brother, whole and healthy, and he’d scream inside out of rage, out of envy. Why, why why!? 

It wasn’t fair!

And so he waited for a chance to gain some sort of control over his life. If life itself wasn’t going to give him the control he needed and craved, then he would get it himself.

And he didn’t realize it would come to this—murdering his brother, hurting his niece—and he regretted it all now. How could he ever be a hero if he kept hurting everyone around him? He couldn’t be that, no.

He woke up screaming the first couple of times when the nightmares started. His brother right there, reaching out at him to strangle him, why did you kill me? written on his face, and Arganan could do nothing but scream and scream and scream because he didn’t know what to do, and then he would wake up.

This would forever haunt him. Killing his own brother (Calista’s father) would forever haunt him. And if there was any way for the nightmares to stop, he would take it despite its risks. Trying to direct his focus somewhere else didn’t help too well, but over time he taught himself not to scream so much in his sleep, so that he didn’t scare everyone else in the castle.