"What am I doing, Lord? Why do you let me make these choices? I could have chosen to stay with the Captain or go with Imperius but, no, instead I decided to venture off on my own." The rain pattered down on Phillipe's head and he blinked as it sopped his bangs and ran into his face. "Free Will you say, but how can I have free will when you've made me who I am?"

He crouched under a shelf of rock to wait out the rain, crossed his arms miserably. "Honestly, you knew the lure of being a free man would seize me. Can't imagine serving a religious calling with the Father. Grumpy. Terrible. Calling after me all day "Phillipe! Put logs on the fire! Phillipe, rub my feet. No thank you." He paused in his monologue and sat down, pulling his legs underneath him.

"Could have stayed on with the Captain though. But to be a squire, at his beck and call all day. It would be the same thing. Never allowed to make my own decisions. The same way of being fettered…trapped. I'm tired of being trapped, Lord. You keep putting me in cages."

A shelf of muddy water collapsed next to him and he winced. "Cages are dry. Yes, thank you. I see that now."

Phillipe huddled miserably under his rock for a long time, shivering. It wasn't anything he couldn't cope with, nothing new in fact.

After all, Phillipe, The Mouse, had been alone for a long time. So alone that he often kept up a running soliloquy to ease the journey. Truth is, it had never really bothered him. It was simply the cards he had been dealt, the hand that he had been given to play with. And he did.

Yet somehow that same solitude suddenly seemed a bit more intolerable than before.

He'd gotten used to company. Spoiled by it. He'd grown accustomed to a voice next to him that wasn't yelling. –Treating him like a boy, yes. But not like an underling. A thing to be reviled.

And touch– a hand raised to pull him close into an embrace, not to strike him. One could be spoiled by that. One could lose their survival instincts.

Phillipe didn't spend much time feeling sorry for himself. If he had, he'd have been executed in that dungeon long ago. He assessed his surroundings, made a quick plan and moved forward on instinct. Following whatever whim struck him and oftentimes ending up in a worse spot then he had been to begin with… but he was alive. He'd stayed alive. Through rejection and poverty and uncertainty, he'd at least stayed alive.

Still, he figured if he found himself in a less than desirable spot, he didn't have to be happy about it.

And he was not happy with this rock. Or with being pinned under it until God decided to make it stop pouring.

Night was falling. There was an allure to the night that had never been there before, he thought. The night was suddenly welcome in his psyche, because the night had come to mean that soon she would appear. Him and her. The Mouse and The Lady.

"Hawks devour mice," he said aloud. "Pining for something that will kill you, Mouse. No survival instincts, indeed."

And then he felt guilty because the Captain loved her. She was his. His in heart and soul, as he belonged to her as fully as another human being could ever belong together.

And in the end of all that, Phillipe was just an intrusion. As he'd always been in people's lives. As he'd always been told he was. He hated being a burden.

"I'm a burden to myself," he said. "Just imagine what I am to others."

Still, he thought of Isabeau's blue eyes.

And the Captain's too. And then the Captain's smile that softened his rough edges, and that warm fond embrace… and deep down somewhere, Phillipe knew that God had given him a glimpse of what being loved was.

He layed sideways, his shoulder jammed against the rock and tried to fall asleep.

XXXXXX

The rain had died down to cloudy overcast skies in the morning and The Mouse woke, shivering. He did not feel well, his body was stiff, his head full. He peeled back the edge of his tunic and winced. The claw marks Navarre had left on him hadn't healed up entirely and a few of them looked angry and red. Imperius had rubbed a balm on them days before, the same type he'd used on Isabeau, but perhaps it had washed off in the sewers under the castle.

"Lord, if I escaped the Dungeons of Aquila by your hand, and played the part you deigned to me to help the Captain, only to die of claw marks several days later… I'll be very disappointed."