"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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no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.