"No. I'm not speaking to you as Centurion, but as an equal. I'm not going to order you to do anything you don't want to. The only thing I am going to do is tell you a story about someone who used to be very much like you."

Aqua looked up at the sky, composing her thoughts.

"There was a little boy. When I first met him, he was the loneliest child I'd ever met. He avoided people, hardly spoke, and he was very uncomfortable when someone tried to befriend him. I was only a kid myself when he arrived, but at one point, I made a blanket fort for him to hide in whenever it got overwhelming. He didn't want to be close to people. He'd been shuffled from foster home to foster home, and his own mother hadn't been able to take care of him since he was born.

"It broke my heart to see him like that. He was only ten. I wasn't much older, maybe eleven at the time, but I didn't give up on him. I couldn't. It took a long time for him to come out of his shell, but it was worth it to see him smile more."

Now, she looked at Callie. She wanted to judge her reaction, and she couldn't do that while looking at anything but her.

"His name was Ventus Bradford."