Aulus rebuilt the watch roster the following morning with the flat, economical thoroughness of a man who'd learned, the hard way, that a threat named out loud was a threat that had to be planned around rather than simply feared, and Gregory volunteered for the outer dam line before Aulus had even finished reading the schedule aloud.
"Put me on it every night it runs," Gregory said. "I meant what I told Remus after the funeral. I want the dangerous work, not the comfortable version of standing near it."
"Every night's more than I'd ask of anyone," Aulus said, "but I'll take you three nights in five, paired with Andrea or with me, and I won't pretend I'm not glad to have a man who already stood there once and didn't flinch when the thing actually showed up."
It should have ended there, a soldier's decision made by the man whose job it now was to make it, and Remus, walking away from the roster board with the whole exchange settling uneasily in his chest, told himself for most of the morning that it had.
He found Aulus alone that afternoon instead, checking the dam's own foundations for a weakness that didn't exist purely to have something to do with his hands, and asked, as evenly as he could manage, whether the roster might be redrawn without Gregory's name on that particular stretch of watch.
"Why," Aulus asked, not unkindly, setting down the tool he'd been using.
"Because Malchor looked directly at him last night," Remus said, "and said his name without saying it, and I've already buried one General this month who died holding a door open for people he loved, and I am not prepared to stand at another funeral inside a single season because I let my own brother walk a line I could have quietly moved him off of instead."
"That's not your call," Aulus said, and there was no anger in it yet, only the plain, careful correction of a man laying out a fact he expected to need to say only once. "Gregory's a grown man who fought with the Blue Angels and made it home standing, and he asked for that watch with both eyes open, knowing exactly what stood on the other side of it, because he watched it happen the same as the rest of us did. If you want him off that roster, you ask him, and you let him say no to your face the way he's clearly earned the right to."
"I'm asking you," Remus said, quieter, and heard, saying it, exactly how much he'd already decided not to do the thing Aulus had just told him plainly to do.
Aulus studied him for a long moment, and something in his weathered, patient face suggested he understood precisely what he was being asked to become party to, and precisely why he shouldn't be. "I served nine years under a General who moved men off assignments he thought were too dangerous for them without ever once telling them why," he said, finally. "Men noticed. It doesn't take long for a soldier to work out that his own commander doesn't trust him with the truth of his own risk, and once a unit works that out about the man leading it, you don't get that trust back cheap, no matter how good your reasons were standing behind the decision. I like you, Remus. I respect what you built out there in that swamp more than I've said plainly to your face. I'm not doing this to you, and I'm not doing it to your brother, and I'd think considerably less of myself if I let you talk me into it out of fear I understand completely and still can't in good conscience act on."
"Then I'll ask someone else to cover that stretch instead," Remus said, and heard the stubbornness settling into his own voice even as some quieter part of him recognized, dimly, exactly the shape of the mistake he was making while he made it. "Quietly. Without making it about him at all. He doesn't need to know I asked."
He did it that evening, through Pompey rather than Aulus, framing it as a suggestion about balancing the roster's experience rather than a request about any one man specifically, and Pompey, who read intention the way other men read weather, agreed to raise it at the next watch meeting without ever once asking Remus outright why he was the one raising it in the first place.
Gregory found out two days later, the way secrets in a settlement this size always eventually surfaced, from a soldier who mentioned, in passing and without any particular malice behind it, that Pompey had quietly floated moving him off the dam line at Remus's own suggestion, and Remus, coming back from the granary at dusk with charcoal dust still on his fingers, found his brother waiting for him at the longhouse door with an expression Remus had not seen on his face since the night, a lifetime ago now, he'd announced he was leaving for the Blue Angels.
"Tell me it isn't true," Gregory said, and his voice was very quiet, which frightened Remus considerably more than shouting would have.
"I asked Aulus first," Remus said, because he understood, standing there, that there was no version of this conversation where a half-truth would cost him less than the whole of it. "He told me no, and told me exactly why, and I decided he was wrong and went around him anyway, through Pompey, because I couldn't stand the thought of you standing on that exact stretch of ground the next time something like Malchor decides to test whether the threat he made was real."
"You went around the General," Gregory said, "and around me, and you did it quietly, on purpose, specifically so I wouldn't find out until it was already decided." Something raw cracked through the careful, controlled steadiness he'd been holding since the funeral. "Do you have any idea what that looks like from where I'm standing? I stood on that reconciliation night and told you I never wanted to spend a year not knowing what leaving cost the people I left behind, and you sat there and told me you'd back whatever I asked for, that you'd make sure nobody mistook me standing aside for not caring. I asked for the dangerous work. I meant it. And the very first time it actually mattered, you decided, quietly, without asking me a single thing, that you knew better than I did what I could handle."
"I was afraid," Remus said, and the admission came out rough, unpracticed, nothing like the smooth, managed calm he usually wrapped around hard conversations. "I watched something look directly at you and use your existence as a piece on a board, and some part of me went straight back to a hearth in the Southlands and a man who told me to go, and I decided, standing there, that I was not going to lose you the same way I lost him, and I decided it faster than I decided almost anything else I've ever built, and I didn't stop to ask whether the decision was actually mine to make."
"It wasn't," Gregory said, flat, and there was no comfort offered underneath the flatness this time, none of the gentleness Andrea had given Remus on the watchtower nine mornings after Tacitus died. "I understand why you did it. I even believe you when you say it came from love and not from doubting me. That doesn't make it not what it was. You took a choice away from me the same way our father used to take choices away from both of us when we were small enough not to notice, dressed up as protection, and I spent a year learning to hate exactly that pattern in him before I ever thought I'd have to learn to see it in you."
"I know," Remus said, and found he had nothing else ready to offer underneath it, no practical fix, no next thing to build, only the plain, uncomfortable fact of having done a real harm to someone he loved and having no immediate way to unmake it.
"I'm going back on the roster," Gregory said. "Tonight, if Aulus will have me, which I expect he will, since apparently he told you no already and meant it. I'm not asking your permission this time. I stopped needing to ask it the day I came home from the Blue Angels able to say no to this family out loud, and I'd rather you understood that plainly now than have to relearn it the hard way a second time."
He walked past Remus into the longhouse without waiting for an answer, and Remus stood alone at the door in the last grey light of the evening, understanding, with a clarity that cost him considerably more than the sigil in the mud ever had, that he had just spent something real, something that would not simply mend itself overnight the way the reconciliation on the granary planking had, and that no amount of building anything at all in the days ahead was going to hand it back to him for free.
Andrea found him there a short while later, having heard the shape of it already from Pompey, who had come to her first, before anyone else, with the plain and evident discomfort of a man who suspected he'd been used for something he wouldn't have agreed to if he'd been told the whole truth of it at the time.
"You asked him without telling him what he was actually helping you do," she said, not as a question, standing a little apart from Remus the way she had on the watchtower nine mornings after Tacitus died, and there was no comfort in her voice this time either. "You did to Pompey exactly what you almost did to that council room the morning I told them about my brother. You decided what a good man could bear to be told, and you decided it for him, and I watched you promise me, on this same stretch of mud where Malchor stood, that you understood why that never actually works out the way it feels like it should while you're doing it."
"I know," Remus said, and the word came out smaller than he meant it to. "I heard myself doing it and I did it anyway. I don't have a better excuse than that it was Gregory, and some part of me apparently still believes the rules I've learned for everyone else don't quite apply the same way when it's family standing in the danger instead of a stranger."
"That's the part that frightens me most, hearing you say it," Andrea said, quieter now, some of the flatness finally cracking. "Not that you made a mistake. Everyone standing in this settlement has made one this month. It's that you can say the whole shape of the lesson back to me, word for word, and still walk straight past it the very first time it actually cost you something to hold onto. I need to know you can do this when it isn't easy, Remus. Tacitus taught you that lesson with his own life. I'd rather you learned the rest of it from your brother's anger than from a grave with no body in it."
"I don't know how to promise you I won't do it again," Remus said, honest in a way that cost him visibly to be. "I'd like to tell you I've learned it now, all the way through, the same way I told myself I'd learned it the morning after the funeral boat went out. I think the truer thing is that I'm going to keep finding new doors to walk this exact mistake back through, for a while yet, and the only thing I can actually promise is that I'll keep telling you and Gregory both the truth about it afterward, every single time, instead of managing that too."
Andrea considered that for a long moment, watching him with an expression that held less anger in it now than a kind of tired, familiar patience. "That's a smaller promise than I wanted," she said, finally. "It's also the first one you've made me tonight that I actually believe."
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