[ In the dark, they shape a rite: every night, henceforth, Guts joins the master’s quarters, and sits himself in the newly-anointed throne of his bedside seat, where in time Griffith’s mercy produces him a pallet. Like a dog, he takes his comfort from knowing his master close and safe, the price of his regeneration paid once to the craftsman, then equally, to fate, in daily increments. Necromancy has produced his life once more; Griffith sustains it.
Their lips meet less than their minds wonder. Guts does not push the wisps of his luck.
They don’t speak of their arrangement, barter no loss or gain. Where there is silence, there is mercy. Where there is a soul who abides a secret, there is an accomplice. And they are both too cowardly for words.
No man knows, for all Casca suspects. They share nothing of their deaths and the tragedy of their resurrections, past Guts’ soft murmurs one night, the confession of his return. She cries then, the first tears for him. The rest, most likely, for Griffith. To his face, she says, ‘If I could live off scraps without tainting him, why not you?’ And unheard, If he could starve me out, why were you spared?
His mouth is dry, tongue slack, and voice rasping. He has no answers for her. He keeps even fewer for himself.
But then there’s scant time for wonder, when the sickness that has started to consume Griffith spreads, absorbs his limbs and his mind, shadows his sight. The rot of the wrong runs deeper than Guts’ won death, to Griffth’s core. Guts watches it, a tacit but consenting observer, taking the knowledge in careful, barren hands for those who can heal. There is no cure, an old witch woman who does her work with herbs and women’s spells for seed that shouldn’t grown in their bellies, for distraction. The name of that ill feels too simple for Griffith’s hurts, too plain.
One night carves out the end to it. He comes to Griffith’s bedchamber, only to find the familiar grounds of their paltry arguments and tired banter haunted by the silent, pale form of the man who should be their master. For his part, Guts can’t say what feeds his conviction, except he looks at Griffith’s back, and he sees the shadow of trembling that was there, barely moments ago — he can tell without witnessing so. He can taste it.
He lingers in the doorway, too intrusive for a second step, but equally transfixed. Asks, in the end: ]
Griffith doesn't touch him for days. That night he'd pressed hard at both their boundaries, and eventually been rebuffed. Though he wants to press the boundaries again, he despises the thought of being needy, and chooses instead to be aloof. Guts keeps the place by his side, and eventually accepts a pallet, though he does not touch Griffith and will not lay in Griffith's own bed.
It is enough. He belongs to Griffith, and is every night by Griffith's side. Griffith knows, too, that Guts desires him, and that is its own satisfaction.
The other, larger nations leave them for the time being. The castle is too obscure, too remote, and the news that travels away from them speaks of enormous monsters felled and a vast battlefield of corpses, yet with few losses by the band that now possesses the castle. That, too, is enough, and they have a stretch of peace wherein they can finish burning and burying the bodies and re-planting the crops. It will be a thin spring and a meager winter, but Griffith is a beacon and every day more and more of the common folk sway to him, seeing him as he designs: a savior, not a conqueror.
And yet he is haunted, and it threatens to undermine all that he wishes to build.
He wakes the morning after their kiss and whirls from the bed, sword drawn in one smooth motion--sleeping to armed in half a heartbeat--and pointed at Guts. At the oozing, twitching thing on the bed between him and Guts, which had been creeping tendrils up the inside of his thigh.
Guts doesn't look at it, only at him, and Griffith doesn't understand. If there was something there, something unnatural, then surely Guts would be better suited than any to see it. He crossed the veil, not Griffith.
Griffith sheathes his sword and doesn't speak of it.
They are with him always. Or, when they are not, he feels as if they are near. His skin crawls with anticipation of their presence. Shadows at the edges of rooms and grinning figures with too many teeth and long, sharp claws.
The visions are nothing. He can ignore those easily enough, sparing little more than a glance before determining that no one else can see them. But when they paw at him, melding their cold, sinuous bodies against his spine, Griffith shudders and starts, scrambling his words and curling into himself.
That night, Griffith whips about, sword naked and sharp as he levels it at Guts. He didn't react when Guts entered, didn't hear him, but he reacts now, and his eyes are feverish. He hasn't slept, can't sleep. He wakes from hellish, tortured dreams to find black and hunching creatures squatting on his chest and grinning at him. A black maw swallows his castle, blotting out the sun, and yet everyone around Griffith continues to insist that the weather continues as it should.
"What are you?" Griffith asks the hulking creature before him, the thing with the head of a wolf and hands like claws. He does not lower his sword.
He's silent for two heartbeats, briefly considering whether it will be mercy or madness to extend his cowardice to a third. Were this any other man, Guts might wonder if Griffith has let the evening drink spoil his thoughts — but Griffith is measured on those few occasions when he indulges, outside of the decadent leisure of entertaining envoys and generals. His wine coup went all but untouched over the dinner Guts and Casca shared.
So, then. A different sickness, the same Guts might have suspected before. He pauses again, then nods, nudging himself on to admit the peculiarity of Griffith's behaviours in a new, gentler way, with a soft voice and a thawed manner.
"Me? The fool who took on the early-night shift." The meanest part of the night watch, when dinner conspires to dull the senses and induce a sweet, treacherous lethargy. At least the boys who man the wall with the moon high above them will have the cold to keep them moving, fending away sleep.
And they won't be beholden to Griffith's — oddity, at least not to the extent of Guts' private responsibility. He comes closer, just slowly enough to direct his hand to Griffith's sword, then slide it, carefully to the right. See. No enemy.
"And that's... the curtain?" But there's no humour to it, no laughter or disdain.
As Guts moves closer, the dog-god creature stays put, becoming a shadow behind him, a mantle over him. Guts. Griffith's eyes focus on him, trying not to glance at the thing behind his shoulder.
He puts the sword down, humiliated by how this looks. King Griffith the weak and raving.
"Madness or curse, this will lose me my castle if it continues." It's almost a cry for help, as much as Griffith can ask for help. He sheathes his sword and sets it by the side of the bed, trying to act unconcerned and untouchable, but he's shaken.
The thing behind Guts curls its claws around him, possessive, as if Guts belongs to it and not to Griffith. Guts doesn't seem to noticed.
Griffith sits down in the middle of the bed, back to the headboard, and curls his knees to his chest. He does not take his eyes off of Guts and the shadow.
Griffith withdraws as abruptly as he'd bolted, leaving Guts to frown after his receding back, then take stock of a room he'd thought bereft of threat or contrivance. All the same, nothing stands out: a minor breeze from the balcony doors, where spring's starting to intrude unnotice. Soft shadows against drifting candles.
Nothing unusual. Nothing deranged.
Tossing his sword in its belt and scabbard on the seat beside him, he steps closer to Griffith, stopping until he occupies the better part of the man's horizon. There are no threats Guts' back can't withstand, no protection he won't supply.
"I am suffering hallucinations," Griffith says, looking up at him with guarded honesty. He wouldn't offer as much to anyone but Guts, but to offer less to Guts at this point would be an insult. The others might believe Griffith skittish, sleepless, distracted, but Guts sees past that to the black corruption sickening him. "Nightmares emerged into my waking world. The visions of them I can ignore. The stench, the whispering, their touch..." Griffith curls his lip and looks aside, disgusted by the horrors he has seen and disgusted at himself for being unable to ignore their imagined touches.
"It began that first night we entered the castle. Improved. Now it is worse." Griffith looks up and regrets it. The dog-creature curls its long shadow tongue around Guts' throat in an obscene caress. Griffith's hands twitch with the urge to launch an attack. He glares at it, fixated, and forces himself to stay still. "They're outside the castle, too, when I ride out into the fields and forest. I can discern no pattern."
And if he cannot discern a pattern, he cannot track a source. The visions have demonstrated no threat other than torturing Griffith. Ghosts of the dead, maybe, rising from that strewn battlefield to stalk the mastermind of their destruction. "They had a necromancer. This may have been set as a curse to afflict any conqueror. Post-mortem revenge."
Words they both know, but only Griffith understands. If Guts were to summarise this stretch of ghastly moments, it would be so. He hears, ears open and prone, and some distant part of him dissects and archives Griffith's small gasps and petty truths, conserves them for a proper look later.
First, what he is truly here for — not to produce an answer, but to pretend it comes easily. He leans in, hovering overmuch with his neck craning and his shoulders crying under the strain of a night of watch, and now the care of this precious, spoiled thing beneath him. And he sets his hand on the top of Griffith's head, ruffling curls should know better than to think they can ever survive a day in proper balance, like a child accepting his scolding. There Griffith goes.
"A curse wouldn't know who the hell the conqueror is." Why not Guts, in the end, the man who delivered more blood, spread more agony? Why Griffith, but for the obvious knowledge that now he sits a throne. This, Guts will give him,. "If it thinks you because you're the one giving orders, sure. Then it will pass on to whoever's pulling the duty."
Casca, Guts, whoever's entrusted. Whoever's left.
"Maybe you didn't ride out far enough. Or long enough. Tomorrow you're packing some..." His nose wrinkles in obvious admission that he knows all too little what proper men need for their essentials, and he is not of a mind or age to learn. "Possessions, and you're off for the next sennight. See a city. Broker some treaties I'll get to laugh about. See if it improves."
He barely hears the words, doesn't yet process them. It's like something lifts, all at once, and the shadows are lighter. His vision is a little clearer. "What did you do?" Griffith asks, pushing up the curtain of his rumpled hair to stare up at him. The shadow behind Guts is gone.
He leaps to his feet, running to the balcony and leaning out over the rail--too far, reckless as a child. The moon shone down bright amidst a starry sky, outlining him in silver. The world outside was back, no longer swallowed up by the maw he had seen.
Breathing deeply of the clear air, Griffith turns and leans back against the rail instead, tipping his head up to the sparkling sky. "While I appreciate the offered sacrifice, you and Casca need to be in my proximity. I will not give up my castle, and I will not play some round robin of passing the curse back and forth." He also isn't confident that Guts will be able to resist attacking the shadow monsters that look and feel entirely solid. Maybe at first, but not after a week. Not without Griffith.
Like a startled cat, Griffith spooks away from him, hair rising, eyes alert. Guts stills suddenly where he's standing, hands raising slowly to turn his palms outwards and reveal himself for the scant danger he poses. Whatever threat Griffith's spied within him, Guts can't name, but is willing to diffuse. He stays diligently put, then whispers carefully, "I didn't do anything."
At least, as far as he can tell. But Griffith's already galloping on to the next obstacle, the next threat, the next futile inconvenience. Guts should have learned early never to confront his general with so simple a thing.
"You said it yourself", he gives with a deeper sigh than the pretence of this whole disaster being a natural occurrence can afford him. "You go on like this, they'll think you've lost your wits."
There's no easy answer to Griffith's quandary, but carrying on in hopes that the problem will resolve itself of its own accord is the least likely or elegant solution. If it could, it would have done so already. And it didn't.
Guts is still standing there, so careful and tense, as though if he moves he might upset whatever he's done, whatever relief he conferred into Griffith with that touch.
"So we'll fix it," Griffith decides, and that certainty comes a lot easier in this moment where he feels free of the curse, even though he doesn't know why.
He returns to stand in front of Guts, reaching up to ruffle his hand over Guts' hair. "The shadows were here when you came in, but they're gone now. Somehow you banished them." That's his working theory, anyway, but he rewards Guts for the accomplishment with a sweet, brief kiss. "We're not going to flee this puzzle any more than we would flee any other challenge," Griffith promises him, keeping his hand in Guts' hair to keep him pressed brow to brow. "I will not give up my castle."
His heart swells with optimism and gratitude. The world is once more his for the taking, and he will make an opportunity if none open for him.
They'll fix it, Griffith decrees, like a god or a madman, or the startling, numbing combination of the both. Before him, another man was consumed by the sickness of the same hubris — the sole bearer of a crown that likely came to him by blood, rather than conquest. Griffith deserves it more, but threatens to lose it just as easily, for arrogance.
Guts' mouth brushes that of his — lover? paramour? &mdash friend again, in a gentle, trickling invitation to suffer through the next few heartbeats and their treacherous confession together. He closes his eyes.
"There are other stones on hills for you to conquer."
Whatever began here doesn't need to bury them. The cost isn't worth such a fleeting, modest gain. And though Griffith might call it hateful cowardice, Guts has tasted enough of empty victories to know this one would leave his mind and his bed hollow.
"You're not wrong," Griffith conceded, easily. He dropped his arm away, but his posture was still calm and relaxed, utterly certain of victory due to him. He dropped back onto the bed, lounging extravagantly with his head tipped to look toward the open balcony and out to that starry sky. "But now you've given me a lead. Give me a few days at least to try and solve this puzzle. If it doesn't work, you can sling me over your shoulder and carry me off."
His eyes cut back toward Guts with a wicked, inviting grin. Sounds fun, doesn't it?
Griffith has called retreats before, but he's not yet ready to deem the day lost on this occasion. He feels freed, powerful, reckless, and he wants to chase that feeling.
"You've gotten too fat for it", he pronounces under his breath, but starts the slow crawl to the bed before Griffith can retaliate with hisses and kicks, the typical fare of a child caught out and held. They can both weather through Griffith's whims, but sorcery is a different brand of hardship their skins have only tasted once profusely, like blades and sickness. They may well not live to tell the tale of futile experimentation.
One knee sits the edge of the bed, propped heavily on the covers. Then the next. He climbs over Griffith, hovering above him, never caging in a man who has hated all those who would deprive him of luxury or freedom — both, represented neatly in space. But he looms and he watches, laughter a slip of air from cross lips, even as he dips his head in to push their foreheads together. Hello, you stupid, unbelievably reckless mule.
"When you're the end of us, remember I told you so."
Griffith's smile is wide and happy, iced liberally with playfulness and challenge, and he lets himself be fenced in by Guts' powerful arms and legs. One of his knees is slightly bent, and as Guts climbs over him, that knee rests against the inside of Guts' thigh, intimate and forward and yet innocent of all charges because Guts did the climbing and Griffith only let it tilt a little to one side, nestling against Guts' thigh.
His hands come up again, curling around Griffith's scalp with a possessive reverence that is typical of how he likes to handle Guts, and he closes his eyes as their foreheads touch, blissful.
"I will," he promises, voice all cheerfulness and triumph even as he promises deference upon ultimate defeat. Guts is his, and the castle is his, and for this blessed moment he is free from his curse, protected by Guts's presence. His fingertips caress idle circles against Guts' scalp, offering affection even as Griffith keeps his eyes closed and demands nothing more. The moment is too precious to risk.
He lingers there, a predator satisfied with the prone look of his prey, pointedly ignoring the intimate suggestion that tickles the inside of his thighs, tempting them open. All at once, he surrenders himself, dropping over Griffith in a sea of muscle and bone that blankets completely.
His head seeks out the nook of Griffith's neck, laying his head as sweetly and lightly as possible, and inviting the press of Griffith's hand through his hair. He wants what neither of them ever enjoyed or can hope to have: a mother's touch, or a gentle lover's caress. They're not worth such kindness.
"We could leave any damn day and no one would find us," he murmurs, a traitor to the bitter last. Let Griffith have the strength between them, the conviction and the stiff upper lip. Guts never pretended obedience or service to any cause but blood-letting. "You, me, Casca and the sun. You'd hate that?"
Guts blankets down upon him, all weight and safety, and Griffith hugs his arms reverently around Guts' head, keeping him close. He presses his cheek against Guts' hair, eyes closed with bliss for this moment where Guts is unguardedly his, vulnerable and protective.
He stays like that even after Guts' suggestion. His fingers comb gently through Guts' hair, so calm that he almost seems not to have heard the heresy.
Why not give up your dream? Guts suggests, and if it were anyone but Guts suggesting it, Griffith would eviscerate them. Just another body that had dared to stand in his way. But Griffith has made so many exceptions for Guts. Again and again he has compromised in order to keep Guts at his side. Because Guts says it, Griffith doubts himself for a moment.
He wonders if he was wrong about his idea of a friend. He'd always longed for an equal, someone who could stand at his side without needing to be helped up, someone who had earned the place. But there was an inherent contradiction in his imagined scenario--himself as a king, with his friend... also a king, who had earned his own kingship? How would that work? Two castles? If he encountered someone with an equal dream, it would be an eternal impractical balance. Two castles, and thus never really at each other's side. Two castles, until one yielded or one conquered so the kingdoms could be joined. It was a friendship that could only ever exist in the theoretical.
And here was Guts, offering to set himself in opposition to Griffith's dream in order to save him.
The three of them on the road. They'd do well enough, finding work as they could. Guts strong, Griffith clever, Casca to balance their tempers and make them both more palatable to anyone they encountered. They could find work here and there, building walls, defending towns. It's a pretty image, the three of them in the sun. Inevitably drawing a band again, even if they released the current band go where they would. More would come.
But Griffith didn't believe it would last for long. They'd need somewhere to stay for winter, and a source of food, and that meant settling into quiet domesticity in some nowhere town, or securing allies, or working as mercenaries again, and starting back at the beginning for no reason other than the beginning had been good and the now came with the awful weight of madness.
The freedom of it, though. The open road. The edges of the world, where there might very well be dragons. Guts as a traveling bard, with a lute instead of a sword.
His dream hadn't ever been specific. The castle was a symbol. Wealth. Power. Authority. Respect. Safety. As Griffith had begun to succeed and his dream had become a real possibility, he had simply assumed that success would be a series of stepping stones. Beyond the castle was another, greater, more glorious castle. King of a small country, king of a large country. Why stop? Why put boundaries upon his dream? Wouldn't he be happy if he died that way, king of an empire and working toward king of the world? And even beyond death, why ever change his ambitions? King of Heaven, or Hell. Both, eventually. Let all of creation bow to him.
But here he was, king of a castle, and with a friend who would die to save him.
Was there a point at which he could count his dream achieved? And if so, what then? A new dream?
It was easier to continue on the trajectory he'd set himself. That child's dream which had none of these complications. He'd built himself up to be one thing, to have one skill set, to bend all the world toward his one purpose. If his dream was achieved, then what purpose did he have?
"Wouldn't you?" he murmured, after a long, long time. The shadows all stayed where they belonged. "We'd end up working as mercenaries in someone else's war, or subject to someone else's rule. Even if we took to the road every time someone tried to boss us or conscript us, we'd need places to settle down every winter. And for that time, either we become someone else's soldiers or someone else's peasants."
Silence is the plain man's curse, burying what it doesn't end. If he lets the matter rest between them, cautious delay will lead to pained inertia, both set out to eviscerate. Griffith will divert himself with fantasies of worlds where he is a plagued pauper, a simpleton, a madman, a tool of another, greater man's design. He would rot sooner than be lesser or lessened, unwilling to sacrifice his goals or his glory.
"So you work the field a little", he concedes before Griffith can continue down the path of barren considerations that sabotage and stifle his dreams. There's more to life than empty ambition fools chase for want of a full meal and a warm bed. "You get some more calluses. Casca beats you at every road song. No one knows your name."
The losses of a proud man, who can't see the mercy of simple living for the egregious fault of accepting a rare order. Already, Guts can tell the stench of slaughter, where Griffith's dignity dies a thousand deaths, all beneath him.
"So you give up more than you stand to gain." He abdicates greed and reason, willingly and without shame. "What's so bad about it, as long as you choose it?"
The wish and will to hold a sword, to claim a life, to set order where there lay only chaos and injustice — to put down roots, or tear them whole. This is what the war path gave them, as swordsmen who only know their own will. This is what they should aspire to.
i specifically remember writing parts of this tag but other parts are lost forever
Griffith trailed his fingers down the length of Guts' spine, then back up, and repeated the pattern.
He would never work a field, he was certain of that. He could not accept it. But there were certain compromises he might endure. Staying behind to watch the camp while Guts and Casca worked a field. Learning to do laundry. Cooking. Gathering wood.
But it was still all a kind of failure, and it required giving up his castle. His triumph. He wasn't ready to surrender just yet.
"I'll think about it," Griffith promised, vastly more than he would offer to anyone but Guts. "If we can't defeat this." And with that, he left himself all measure of exception and compromise, no limitations upon the lengths of desperation in order to keep his castle. He'd had a glimmer of hope, and he still could see none of the shadows that had plagued him for days. It seemed a folly to give up now that he had relief.
Griffith will think about it, so it will never get done. Guts isn't the fool to stab at a wound he sees bleeding: there are words Griffith won't speak, and Guts won't abide hearing. They still linger, thick as thieves between them. Waiting to prowl and stab.
"You can defeat anything," he agrees, because it's a cheap mercy he can afford to shed on both of them. He has seen Griffith vanquish odds, cruel fates and tyrant masters, he was there when they unseated the very king from this castle at the price of flesh and blood. He knows the mettle beneath Griffith's silk-tender skin.
Griffith can defeat anything, but he doesn't have to.
"Except me", he throws again, half amused and half challenging. It had happened before, but needn't once again. "Next time you take up a sword against me, I'm putting you on your back on the ground."
Guts has damn well earned the chance to show what he's made of.
"When you're not tired and wounded?" Griffith asked, aware of how narrow his victory had been the day he'd claimed Guts. And yet he remained absolutely certain that he would triumph again, if he ever really needed to. Guts would always be his. Griffith would not allow anything else.
He squirmed comfortably beneath Guts, enjoying how Guts felt above him, and nuzzled at the side of Guts' head, pressing a few possessive kisses against his short hair. "Why would I ever agree to that?"
So they are agreed, which is to say that Griffith has decided what he wants and the world will simply have to bend. They will resolve his curse. He will keep Guts. He will keep his castle. There will be no more about this nonsense about roads and starvation.
"You are mine," Griffith murmurs, soft with affection. He curls his arms possessively around Guts, winding around him like a creeper vine.
They linger like that for a moment, Griffith a known warmth beneath him, while his joints protest the strain of holding himself courteously above his captive. In the end, he rolls over, landing with a tired creak from the bed below, and settling beside Griffith. They'll sleep poorly again, he can tell without the need for asking. Griffith's — agitated, and Guts struggles will take many an hour to ruminate over Griffith's revelations.
They might as well put this time to decent use.
"Have a word with Casca." She won't spare one for Guts, not when do much of their bond was forged on thoughtless abrasions and last-minute truths. "She knows something's happening."
Griffith is hardly the man who needs lessoning on what secrets Guts' mouth must mean. They've straddled this line before, halfway between tight-lipped silence and screaming from atop the barricades that whatever the hell they've got to share, spoils or bruises, is doled out carefully between them. They don't owe answers they never had to give.
But Casca knows now. Guts has never been the man with the strength to deny her. "Just... work your magic."
"I will," Griffith assures him, easily. As if it were his idea. As if he'd meant to do so all along.
A smile, a reassuring touch, and Casca would settle. He'd take the time to speak to her alone, coaxing a laugh from her, sharing a few minutes of victory over their new castle. Then the casual off-hand of his troubles, presented in a pair with Griffith's new theory, that it's linked somehow to them. Guts' touch made it lift. Griffith wants to know if Casca's will do the same. He wants her by his side more. She'll like that. It'll stoke her eagerness to move mountains for him.
All this takes mere moments in Griffith's mind. He curls beside Guts as he thinks, watching him and checking the shadows behind him to make sure that they stay shadows.
In the end, sleep compels him, a bead string of moments, blinking awake then submerging. Beside him, Griffith is a silent sun, warmth crackling but subdued. Fueling Guts alive.
He wakes with a sudden gasp, less nightmarish than elusively chilling, the feeling of stares and touches in the night. Not Griffith, for all their limbs chase each other to borrow any residual heat some days.
Not the band, who've learned in days that precede Guts to never interrupt Griffith's sleep, or enter his bed chamber unbidden — for fear of what company they might find there, or what mood might have seized their leader in the night,.
So, then. His eyes open slowly, despite the urgency that burns the back of his lids. He licks his lips. "You ever feel watched here?"
He knows without checking that Griffith's awake and prone. He always is, fright and fight equally compelling him.
Griffith drifts in and out of sleep. His nerves are soothed by the weight and warmth of Guts pressing into the mattress beside him, and it's a yearned-for comfort after the past nights of Guts in the chair or upon the cot, the careful and agonizing distance between them.
But Griffith's sleep is rarely easy, and his thoughts wake him, revisiting the points Guts brought up but to no satisfactory conclusion. He sleeps again, dreams, wakes again, considers.
Guts stands beside him in a meadow, sun on his shoulders and a grin on his lips, boyish, a different Guts who knew less pain or who has somehow healed, a dream Guts who basks in the freedom of the road. "You ever feel watched here?" the sunlit Guts asks.
Griffith blinks, and he's back in his castle, laying on his bed, and the warmth isn't sunlight after all, only Guts. He looks as though he's expecting some response, so Griffith responds to the dream Gut's question.
"I always feel watched." He has, ever since he received the Behelit. Part of his destiny, he thinks. Watched by the gods, or by the Behelit itself, or by the creatures that lately he has seen in every shadow.
Leaning over, he takes a light kiss from Guts' lips, then sits up to scan the room. Nothing. A lingering warmth like sunlight. "What do you see?"
"Nothing," and the truth of it stings, a flaw in the air-tight wall of their defences. Many nights of watch, and still this slip of a threat prevailed against them. Guts can't name it or give the measure of its reach, but it seeps into the plane of his awareness, raises the hairs on his body, keeps him tethered to an edge.
Enemy and unseen mean arrows, on most counts. Spies, on lesser days. Assassins, on those rare occasions when Griffith's slights have amounted to more than crippling inconvenience, and he's tarnished noble pride, along with treasuries. They don't add up prettily and compact to haunting, but here they are, desolate before the quiet understanding that whatever's lodged in the confines of the master's rooms has a hold of the fortress it's not compelled to surrender.
Griffith kisses him, a mother blessing her child, or a woman trying the lips of her first lover: forcibly effeminate, but thoughtless — a fleeting fancy, nothing to build on or grasp whole. Guts kisses back meaner, teeth and a hard push, something to wake the feeling inside this man, who can't be troubled to take this damn well seriously.
Griffith rumbles at that rough kiss, always interested in a challenge, and he rolls over onto Guts, straddling him, ready to wrestle or kiss or both. His eyes flick closed, once, twice, irritated to be interrupted from this interest by practicalities and questions. But it's Guts, and he'll do nearly anything for Guts.
So he looks again, hands resting on Guts' chest and thighs tight on either side of Guts' hips as he studies the room. He doesn't even feel it, now. He's too distracted by Guts. Blindness or safety, perhaps both, but while they're close enough to touch Griffith feels as though nothing can hurt him. Only sunlight, never shadows.
"Nothing," he echoes, dropping his head in a flash of white hair and kissing savagely at the front of Guts' throat, then the side, nipping roughly at the skin just below his jaw. That sharp, challenging kiss has got his attention, and now he wants more than anything to prod at Guts until he gets more of it.
He hisses under the renewed attention, slow to remedy it with a gentle tug, first at Griffith's sleeves, wrinkling under Guts' hands, then at his shoulders. His grip turns steely, catching now and holding, half lifting and half nudging back Griffith like an anchor that should be deposited to serve its proper use — a possession Guts can shift and place as he pleases.
Griffith's weight serves him, a faint and negligible complication that Guts won't pretend to be obstructed by past the initial effort of a laughing half breath.
"Nothing means you don't need me here now," he warns with a slight show of teeth, no where as menacing as he might have been those precious few moonrises ago, when Griffith had yet to glimpse new ways to stab at his softness.
Nothing, so he pushes Griffith back, just strong enough to signal there are conversations that precede lust, and they're speaking those words now. "Talk."
Griffith makes a feral little rumble in his chest, irritated at being held at arms length. He wants, and does not like being denied the things he wants, especially not when it was Guts' kiss that got him thinking that there might be opportunity for more.
Guts' control over him is perhaps more than either of them consciously realizes, because Griffith lets himself be subdued, and surrenders the information Guts demands.
"Nothing means I should never again let you leave my side," Griffith argues. "After that last night we were close, you spent several days at a distance, always just out of reach, sleeping in that chair and then your damn cot. We didn't touch for days, and I got worse. You touched me, and it lifted. It's stayed lifted, and you've stayed close. I don't know if it's touch or proximity. I don't know if it will work the same with Casca. I intend to find out. I don't know if it's an unrelated coincidence, or if it's something about you unrelated to touch."
It's all just a theory at this point, but Griffith spills it out for him as demanded, laying out the key points. He's thought it out in far more detail and has calculated possibilities and hypotheses--would a lock of hair be enough? Is it skin contact or can there be clothes or armor between them? If skin, why? If not, then is it a proximity of hearts or heads? Is it because of his deal?--but he doesn't expect that Guts wants to hear that level of hypothetical speculation.
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Their lips meet less than their minds wonder. Guts does not push the wisps of his luck.
They don’t speak of their arrangement, barter no loss or gain. Where there is silence, there is mercy. Where there is a soul who abides a secret, there is an accomplice. And they are both too cowardly for words.
No man knows, for all Casca suspects. They share nothing of their deaths and the tragedy of their resurrections, past Guts’ soft murmurs one night, the confession of his return. She cries then, the first tears for him. The rest, most likely, for Griffith. To his face, she says, ‘If I could live off scraps without tainting him, why not you?’ And unheard, If he could starve me out, why were you spared?
His mouth is dry, tongue slack, and voice rasping. He has no answers for her. He keeps even fewer for himself.
But then there’s scant time for wonder, when the sickness that has started to consume Griffith spreads, absorbs his limbs and his mind, shadows his sight. The rot of the wrong runs deeper than Guts’ won death, to Griffth’s core. Guts watches it, a tacit but consenting observer, taking the knowledge in careful, barren hands for those who can heal. There is no cure, an old witch woman who does her work with herbs and women’s spells for seed that shouldn’t grown in their bellies, for distraction. The name of that ill feels too simple for Griffith’s hurts, too plain.
One night carves out the end to it. He comes to Griffith’s bedchamber, only to find the familiar grounds of their paltry arguments and tired banter haunted by the silent, pale form of the man who should be their master. For his part, Guts can’t say what feeds his conviction, except he looks at Griffith’s back, and he sees the shadow of trembling that was there, barely moments ago — he can tell without witnessing so. He can taste it.
He lingers in the doorway, too intrusive for a second step, but equally transfixed. Asks, in the end: ]
...something wrong?
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It is enough. He belongs to Griffith, and is every night by Griffith's side. Griffith knows, too, that Guts desires him, and that is its own satisfaction.
The other, larger nations leave them for the time being. The castle is too obscure, too remote, and the news that travels away from them speaks of enormous monsters felled and a vast battlefield of corpses, yet with few losses by the band that now possesses the castle. That, too, is enough, and they have a stretch of peace wherein they can finish burning and burying the bodies and re-planting the crops. It will be a thin spring and a meager winter, but Griffith is a beacon and every day more and more of the common folk sway to him, seeing him as he designs: a savior, not a conqueror.
And yet he is haunted, and it threatens to undermine all that he wishes to build.
He wakes the morning after their kiss and whirls from the bed, sword drawn in one smooth motion--sleeping to armed in half a heartbeat--and pointed at Guts. At the oozing, twitching thing on the bed between him and Guts, which had been creeping tendrils up the inside of his thigh.
Guts doesn't look at it, only at him, and Griffith doesn't understand. If there was something there, something unnatural, then surely Guts would be better suited than any to see it. He crossed the veil, not Griffith.
Griffith sheathes his sword and doesn't speak of it.
They are with him always. Or, when they are not, he feels as if they are near. His skin crawls with anticipation of their presence. Shadows at the edges of rooms and grinning figures with too many teeth and long, sharp claws.
The visions are nothing. He can ignore those easily enough, sparing little more than a glance before determining that no one else can see them. But when they paw at him, melding their cold, sinuous bodies against his spine, Griffith shudders and starts, scrambling his words and curling into himself.
That night, Griffith whips about, sword naked and sharp as he levels it at Guts. He didn't react when Guts entered, didn't hear him, but he reacts now, and his eyes are feverish. He hasn't slept, can't sleep. He wakes from hellish, tortured dreams to find black and hunching creatures squatting on his chest and grinning at him. A black maw swallows his castle, blotting out the sun, and yet everyone around Griffith continues to insist that the weather continues as it should.
"What are you?" Griffith asks the hulking creature before him, the thing with the head of a wolf and hands like claws. He does not lower his sword.
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So, then. A different sickness, the same Guts might have suspected before. He pauses again, then nods, nudging himself on to admit the peculiarity of Griffith's behaviours in a new, gentler way, with a soft voice and a thawed manner.
"Me? The fool who took on the early-night shift." The meanest part of the night watch, when dinner conspires to dull the senses and induce a sweet, treacherous lethargy. At least the boys who man the wall with the moon high above them will have the cold to keep them moving, fending away sleep.
And they won't be beholden to Griffith's — oddity, at least not to the extent of Guts' private responsibility. He comes closer, just slowly enough to direct his hand to Griffith's sword, then slide it, carefully to the right. See. No enemy.
"And that's... the curtain?" But there's no humour to it, no laughter or disdain.
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He puts the sword down, humiliated by how this looks. King Griffith the weak and raving.
"Madness or curse, this will lose me my castle if it continues." It's almost a cry for help, as much as Griffith can ask for help. He sheathes his sword and sets it by the side of the bed, trying to act unconcerned and untouchable, but he's shaken.
The thing behind Guts curls its claws around him, possessive, as if Guts belongs to it and not to Griffith. Guts doesn't seem to noticed.
Griffith sits down in the middle of the bed, back to the headboard, and curls his knees to his chest. He does not take his eyes off of Guts and the shadow.
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Nothing unusual. Nothing deranged.
Tossing his sword in its belt and scabbard on the seat beside him, he steps closer to Griffith, stopping until he occupies the better part of the man's horizon. There are no threats Guts' back can't withstand, no protection he won't supply.
So, then. "Talk."
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"It began that first night we entered the castle. Improved. Now it is worse." Griffith looks up and regrets it. The dog-creature curls its long shadow tongue around Guts' throat in an obscene caress. Griffith's hands twitch with the urge to launch an attack. He glares at it, fixated, and forces himself to stay still. "They're outside the castle, too, when I ride out into the fields and forest. I can discern no pattern."
And if he cannot discern a pattern, he cannot track a source. The visions have demonstrated no threat other than torturing Griffith. Ghosts of the dead, maybe, rising from that strewn battlefield to stalk the mastermind of their destruction. "They had a necromancer. This may have been set as a curse to afflict any conqueror. Post-mortem revenge."
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First, what he is truly here for — not to produce an answer, but to pretend it comes easily. He leans in, hovering overmuch with his neck craning and his shoulders crying under the strain of a night of watch, and now the care of this precious, spoiled thing beneath him. And he sets his hand on the top of Griffith's head, ruffling curls should know better than to think they can ever survive a day in proper balance, like a child accepting his scolding. There Griffith goes.
"A curse wouldn't know who the hell the conqueror is." Why not Guts, in the end, the man who delivered more blood, spread more agony? Why Griffith, but for the obvious knowledge that now he sits a throne. This, Guts will give him,. "If it thinks you because you're the one giving orders, sure. Then it will pass on to whoever's pulling the duty."
Casca, Guts, whoever's entrusted. Whoever's left.
"Maybe you didn't ride out far enough. Or long enough. Tomorrow you're packing some..." His nose wrinkles in obvious admission that he knows all too little what proper men need for their essentials, and he is not of a mind or age to learn. "Possessions, and you're off for the next sennight. See a city. Broker some treaties I'll get to laugh about. See if it improves."
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He barely hears the words, doesn't yet process them. It's like something lifts, all at once, and the shadows are lighter. His vision is a little clearer. "What did you do?" Griffith asks, pushing up the curtain of his rumpled hair to stare up at him. The shadow behind Guts is gone.
He leaps to his feet, running to the balcony and leaning out over the rail--too far, reckless as a child. The moon shone down bright amidst a starry sky, outlining him in silver. The world outside was back, no longer swallowed up by the maw he had seen.
Breathing deeply of the clear air, Griffith turns and leans back against the rail instead, tipping his head up to the sparkling sky. "While I appreciate the offered sacrifice, you and Casca need to be in my proximity. I will not give up my castle, and I will not play some round robin of passing the curse back and forth." He also isn't confident that Guts will be able to resist attacking the shadow monsters that look and feel entirely solid. Maybe at first, but not after a week. Not without Griffith.
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At least, as far as he can tell. But Griffith's already galloping on to the next obstacle, the next threat, the next futile inconvenience. Guts should have learned early never to confront his general with so simple a thing.
"You said it yourself", he gives with a deeper sigh than the pretence of this whole disaster being a natural occurrence can afford him. "You go on like this, they'll think you've lost your wits."
There's no easy answer to Griffith's quandary, but carrying on in hopes that the problem will resolve itself of its own accord is the least likely or elegant solution. If it could, it would have done so already. And it didn't.
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"So we'll fix it," Griffith decides, and that certainty comes a lot easier in this moment where he feels free of the curse, even though he doesn't know why.
He returns to stand in front of Guts, reaching up to ruffle his hand over Guts' hair. "The shadows were here when you came in, but they're gone now. Somehow you banished them." That's his working theory, anyway, but he rewards Guts for the accomplishment with a sweet, brief kiss. "We're not going to flee this puzzle any more than we would flee any other challenge," Griffith promises him, keeping his hand in Guts' hair to keep him pressed brow to brow. "I will not give up my castle."
His heart swells with optimism and gratitude. The world is once more his for the taking, and he will make an opportunity if none open for him.
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Guts' mouth brushes that of his — lover? paramour? &mdash friend again, in a gentle, trickling invitation to suffer through the next few heartbeats and their treacherous confession together. He closes his eyes.
"There are other stones on hills for you to conquer."
Whatever began here doesn't need to bury them. The cost isn't worth such a fleeting, modest gain. And though Griffith might call it hateful cowardice, Guts has tasted enough of empty victories to know this one would leave his mind and his bed hollow.
"Tell me I'm wrong."
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His eyes cut back toward Guts with a wicked, inviting grin. Sounds fun, doesn't it?
Griffith has called retreats before, but he's not yet ready to deem the day lost on this occasion. He feels freed, powerful, reckless, and he wants to chase that feeling.
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One knee sits the edge of the bed, propped heavily on the covers. Then the next. He climbs over Griffith, hovering above him, never caging in a man who has hated all those who would deprive him of luxury or freedom — both, represented neatly in space. But he looms and he watches, laughter a slip of air from cross lips, even as he dips his head in to push their foreheads together. Hello, you stupid, unbelievably reckless mule.
"When you're the end of us, remember I told you so."
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His hands come up again, curling around Griffith's scalp with a possessive reverence that is typical of how he likes to handle Guts, and he closes his eyes as their foreheads touch, blissful.
"I will," he promises, voice all cheerfulness and triumph even as he promises deference upon ultimate defeat. Guts is his, and the castle is his, and for this blessed moment he is free from his curse, protected by Guts's presence. His fingertips caress idle circles against Guts' scalp, offering affection even as Griffith keeps his eyes closed and demands nothing more. The moment is too precious to risk.
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His head seeks out the nook of Griffith's neck, laying his head as sweetly and lightly as possible, and inviting the press of Griffith's hand through his hair. He wants what neither of them ever enjoyed or can hope to have: a mother's touch, or a gentle lover's caress. They're not worth such kindness.
"We could leave any damn day and no one would find us," he murmurs, a traitor to the bitter last. Let Griffith have the strength between them, the conviction and the stiff upper lip. Guts never pretended obedience or service to any cause but blood-letting. "You, me, Casca and the sun. You'd hate that?"
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He stays like that even after Guts' suggestion. His fingers comb gently through Guts' hair, so calm that he almost seems not to have heard the heresy.
Why not give up your dream? Guts suggests, and if it were anyone but Guts suggesting it, Griffith would eviscerate them. Just another body that had dared to stand in his way. But Griffith has made so many exceptions for Guts. Again and again he has compromised in order to keep Guts at his side. Because Guts says it, Griffith doubts himself for a moment.
He wonders if he was wrong about his idea of a friend. He'd always longed for an equal, someone who could stand at his side without needing to be helped up, someone who had earned the place. But there was an inherent contradiction in his imagined scenario--himself as a king, with his friend... also a king, who had earned his own kingship? How would that work? Two castles? If he encountered someone with an equal dream, it would be an eternal impractical balance. Two castles, and thus never really at each other's side. Two castles, until one yielded or one conquered so the kingdoms could be joined. It was a friendship that could only ever exist in the theoretical.
And here was Guts, offering to set himself in opposition to Griffith's dream in order to save him.
The three of them on the road. They'd do well enough, finding work as they could. Guts strong, Griffith clever, Casca to balance their tempers and make them both more palatable to anyone they encountered. They could find work here and there, building walls, defending towns. It's a pretty image, the three of them in the sun. Inevitably drawing a band again, even if they released the current band go where they would. More would come.
But Griffith didn't believe it would last for long. They'd need somewhere to stay for winter, and a source of food, and that meant settling into quiet domesticity in some nowhere town, or securing allies, or working as mercenaries again, and starting back at the beginning for no reason other than the beginning had been good and the now came with the awful weight of madness.
The freedom of it, though. The open road. The edges of the world, where there might very well be dragons. Guts as a traveling bard, with a lute instead of a sword.
His dream hadn't ever been specific. The castle was a symbol. Wealth. Power. Authority. Respect. Safety. As Griffith had begun to succeed and his dream had become a real possibility, he had simply assumed that success would be a series of stepping stones. Beyond the castle was another, greater, more glorious castle. King of a small country, king of a large country. Why stop? Why put boundaries upon his dream? Wouldn't he be happy if he died that way, king of an empire and working toward king of the world? And even beyond death, why ever change his ambitions? King of Heaven, or Hell. Both, eventually. Let all of creation bow to him.
But here he was, king of a castle, and with a friend who would die to save him.
Was there a point at which he could count his dream achieved? And if so, what then? A new dream?
It was easier to continue on the trajectory he'd set himself. That child's dream which had none of these complications. He'd built himself up to be one thing, to have one skill set, to bend all the world toward his one purpose. If his dream was achieved, then what purpose did he have?
"Wouldn't you?" he murmured, after a long, long time. The shadows all stayed where they belonged. "We'd end up working as mercenaries in someone else's war, or subject to someone else's rule. Even if we took to the road every time someone tried to boss us or conscript us, we'd need places to settle down every winter. And for that time, either we become someone else's soldiers or someone else's peasants."
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"So you work the field a little", he concedes before Griffith can continue down the path of barren considerations that sabotage and stifle his dreams. There's more to life than empty ambition fools chase for want of a full meal and a warm bed. "You get some more calluses. Casca beats you at every road song. No one knows your name."
The losses of a proud man, who can't see the mercy of simple living for the egregious fault of accepting a rare order. Already, Guts can tell the stench of slaughter, where Griffith's dignity dies a thousand deaths, all beneath him.
"So you give up more than you stand to gain." He abdicates greed and reason, willingly and without shame. "What's so bad about it, as long as you choose it?"
The wish and will to hold a sword, to claim a life, to set order where there lay only chaos and injustice — to put down roots, or tear them whole. This is what the war path gave them, as swordsmen who only know their own will. This is what they should aspire to.
i specifically remember writing parts of this tag but other parts are lost forever
He would never work a field, he was certain of that. He could not accept it. But there were certain compromises he might endure. Staying behind to watch the camp while Guts and Casca worked a field. Learning to do laundry. Cooking. Gathering wood.
But it was still all a kind of failure, and it required giving up his castle. His triumph. He wasn't ready to surrender just yet.
"I'll think about it," Griffith promised, vastly more than he would offer to anyone but Guts. "If we can't defeat this." And with that, he left himself all measure of exception and compromise, no limitations upon the lengths of desperation in order to keep his castle. He'd had a glimmer of hope, and he still could see none of the shadows that had plagued him for days. It seemed a folly to give up now that he had relief.
all good!
"You can defeat anything," he agrees, because it's a cheap mercy he can afford to shed on both of them. He has seen Griffith vanquish odds, cruel fates and tyrant masters, he was there when they unseated the very king from this castle at the price of flesh and blood. He knows the mettle beneath Griffith's silk-tender skin.
Griffith can defeat anything, but he doesn't have to.
"Except me", he throws again, half amused and half challenging. It had happened before, but needn't once again. "Next time you take up a sword against me, I'm putting you on your back on the ground."
Guts has damn well earned the chance to show what he's made of.
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He squirmed comfortably beneath Guts, enjoying how Guts felt above him, and nuzzled at the side of Guts' head, pressing a few possessive kisses against his short hair. "Why would I ever agree to that?"
So they are agreed, which is to say that Griffith has decided what he wants and the world will simply have to bend. They will resolve his curse. He will keep Guts. He will keep his castle. There will be no more about this nonsense about roads and starvation.
"You are mine," Griffith murmurs, soft with affection. He curls his arms possessively around Guts, winding around him like a creeper vine.
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They might as well put this time to decent use.
"Have a word with Casca." She won't spare one for Guts, not when do much of their bond was forged on thoughtless abrasions and last-minute truths. "She knows something's happening."
Griffith is hardly the man who needs lessoning on what secrets Guts' mouth must mean. They've straddled this line before, halfway between tight-lipped silence and screaming from atop the barricades that whatever the hell they've got to share, spoils or bruises, is doled out carefully between them. They don't owe answers they never had to give.
But Casca knows now. Guts has never been the man with the strength to deny her. "Just... work your magic."
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A smile, a reassuring touch, and Casca would settle. He'd take the time to speak to her alone, coaxing a laugh from her, sharing a few minutes of victory over their new castle. Then the casual off-hand of his troubles, presented in a pair with Griffith's new theory, that it's linked somehow to them. Guts' touch made it lift. Griffith wants to know if Casca's will do the same. He wants her by his side more. She'll like that. It'll stoke her eagerness to move mountains for him.
All this takes mere moments in Griffith's mind. He curls beside Guts as he thinks, watching him and checking the shadows behind him to make sure that they stay shadows.
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He wakes with a sudden gasp, less nightmarish than elusively chilling, the feeling of stares and touches in the night. Not Griffith, for all their limbs chase each other to borrow any residual heat some days.
Not the band, who've learned in days that precede Guts to never interrupt Griffith's sleep, or enter his bed chamber unbidden — for fear of what company they might find there, or what mood might have seized their leader in the night,.
So, then. His eyes open slowly, despite the urgency that burns the back of his lids. He licks his lips. "You ever feel watched here?"
He knows without checking that Griffith's awake and prone. He always is, fright and fight equally compelling him.
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But Griffith's sleep is rarely easy, and his thoughts wake him, revisiting the points Guts brought up but to no satisfactory conclusion. He sleeps again, dreams, wakes again, considers.
Guts stands beside him in a meadow, sun on his shoulders and a grin on his lips, boyish, a different Guts who knew less pain or who has somehow healed, a dream Guts who basks in the freedom of the road. "You ever feel watched here?" the sunlit Guts asks.
Griffith blinks, and he's back in his castle, laying on his bed, and the warmth isn't sunlight after all, only Guts. He looks as though he's expecting some response, so Griffith responds to the dream Gut's question.
"I always feel watched." He has, ever since he received the Behelit. Part of his destiny, he thinks. Watched by the gods, or by the Behelit itself, or by the creatures that lately he has seen in every shadow.
Leaning over, he takes a light kiss from Guts' lips, then sits up to scan the room. Nothing. A lingering warmth like sunlight. "What do you see?"
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Enemy and unseen mean arrows, on most counts. Spies, on lesser days. Assassins, on those rare occasions when Griffith's slights have amounted to more than crippling inconvenience, and he's tarnished noble pride, along with treasuries. They don't add up prettily and compact to haunting, but here they are, desolate before the quiet understanding that whatever's lodged in the confines of the master's rooms has a hold of the fortress it's not compelled to surrender.
Griffith kisses him, a mother blessing her child, or a woman trying the lips of her first lover: forcibly effeminate, but thoughtless — a fleeting fancy, nothing to build on or grasp whole. Guts kisses back meaner, teeth and a hard push, something to wake the feeling inside this man, who can't be troubled to take this damn well seriously.
"What does it look like, what you see?"
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So he looks again, hands resting on Guts' chest and thighs tight on either side of Guts' hips as he studies the room. He doesn't even feel it, now. He's too distracted by Guts. Blindness or safety, perhaps both, but while they're close enough to touch Griffith feels as though nothing can hurt him. Only sunlight, never shadows.
"Nothing," he echoes, dropping his head in a flash of white hair and kissing savagely at the front of Guts' throat, then the side, nipping roughly at the skin just below his jaw. That sharp, challenging kiss has got his attention, and now he wants more than anything to prod at Guts until he gets more of it.
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Griffith's weight serves him, a faint and negligible complication that Guts won't pretend to be obstructed by past the initial effort of a laughing half breath.
"Nothing means you don't need me here now," he warns with a slight show of teeth, no where as menacing as he might have been those precious few moonrises ago, when Griffith had yet to glimpse new ways to stab at his softness.
Nothing, so he pushes Griffith back, just strong enough to signal there are conversations that precede lust, and they're speaking those words now. "Talk."
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Guts' control over him is perhaps more than either of them consciously realizes, because Griffith lets himself be subdued, and surrenders the information Guts demands.
"Nothing means I should never again let you leave my side," Griffith argues. "After that last night we were close, you spent several days at a distance, always just out of reach, sleeping in that chair and then your damn cot. We didn't touch for days, and I got worse. You touched me, and it lifted. It's stayed lifted, and you've stayed close. I don't know if it's touch or proximity. I don't know if it will work the same with Casca. I intend to find out. I don't know if it's an unrelated coincidence, or if it's something about you unrelated to touch."
It's all just a theory at this point, but Griffith spills it out for him as demanded, laying out the key points. He's thought it out in far more detail and has calculated possibilities and hypotheses--would a lock of hair be enough? Is it skin contact or can there be clothes or armor between them? If skin, why? If not, then is it a proximity of hearts or heads? Is it because of his deal?--but he doesn't expect that Guts wants to hear that level of hypothetical speculation.