Chapter Text
There's war council today.
“Griffith—“ he hears coming into the war room—that voice?—followed by the slap of skin on skin (her hand?) “Ouch! Your Majesty , sorry,” Corkus (enveloped by darkness, limbs being ripped apart) corrects himself.
“Is Your Majesty okay?” Judeau (torn and stabbed, bleeding out in her arms) asks.
“If you’re upset over Lord Blackfell not being here—Ouch!”
Her hand again.
“He’s sulking because Your Majesty didn’t put him on vanguard.”
He didn’t miss her voice, it stings like talons. His body wants to look at her but he won’t.
He looks. She’s old, as she’d be if she hadn’t been killed long ago. Her hair is braided, grayed by the temples.
Next to Grunbeld is Pippin (his corpse a puppet), Zodd and Irvine and Locus but their faces show no sign he can read. He turns to his attendants. They worry.
“Shall we fetch Lord Blackfell?”
“He’s in the Northern Woods,” she tells them.
“Where else?” Corkus mumbles.
There are woods to the north of the main castle in Falconia, and the north of the settlements, but there’s no place they call the Northern Woods, no place for him to sulk. No place for him but his burial site. But Griffith knows where to go, the woods at the northernmost end, where the walls curve.
He doesn’t run toward that spot--Blackfell, Lord Blackfell--and he doesn’t run through thick forestry--he stayed and--doesn’t let his hands and face be scratched and pricked by low hanging branches and thorns until he finds him--Lord Blackfell stayed and became a noble. It’s so dim here it’s practically night. Still, Griffith can see him (black armor shattered, torso cut clean through, insides spilled on grimy dirt).
His shoulders are broader, his back bent. He grunts, drags his heavy sword—that same one—and mumbles curses. His hair's all white. This was supposed to be a world where winters were warmer, summers longer, and there was none of this pain, this longing, this missing. Terror itself. He turns.
“How?” Griffith asks.
He’s missing an eye and an arm but he's not branded and his torso is intact.
“Should ya be here?”
“Should you?”
This might be death.
Griffith’s body lunges forward—he does—he lunges like he should’ve done that snowy day, stopped him, broken his legs, duels be damned, you cannot leave me—
“Hey! What’s witcha?” he says but falls backwards all the same under the weight of Griffith, the unevenness of the ground, Griffith’s hands on his shoulders, Griffith’s eyes on his.
“Guts,” Griffith says. He never thinks of that name. Never says it.
It hurts him and Griffith knows. Still Guts takes the fall.
“What, ya feelin’ bad bout leavin’ me outtuvit?”
There’s something in his eye, the way he strokes Griffith’s hair, the way he holds him close. If this is death he’ll die every hour.
Can he even die?
Or has he stepped into another world, a forking path running parallel to his?
Underneath Griffith, Guts shifts.
“Sum’one could come.”
Griffith’s throat is dry.
“Dun look at me like that.”
He shifts but makes no effort to push Griffith off and his breath too has quickened, his cheeks reddened, his lips parted. Griffith, who’s beyond human, has a body that's regardless slighter than this mortal man's. He can die.
Griffith pushes his hands against Guts's chest to help himself up but Guts catches him, presses him against himself, places his chapped, dry lips against Griffith’s, half-opened, wanting. Griffith stops for a second then drags his tongue across Guts's lips.
Guts laughs and helps Griffith up. Griffith’s body trembles.
“Yer old. Years ago ya woulda fucked me here anyway.”
“In this world I fuck you in the woods,” Griffith watches him, curious, desperate, hungry. “And you don’t go to war councils.”
“Toldja already,” Guts sighs, scratches his head. “I’ll go f’ya—F’ya lemme do anythin’.”
Griffith lets a second pass before replying.
“Too dangerous.” He can die. He has . He’s killed Griffith too.
“Bullshit.”
He cups Guts’s face in his hands—gloved and cold and heavy—and kisses him, desperate, as if it were the first time—it is (it is!)
The last time they were this close he was driving a sword through his stomach, feeling Guts’s spit and blood on his face and he hates the Griffith of this world. Guts holds him in his arms, close to his chest.
How did the other Griffith, the one he hates, manage to keep him, convince him to stay, be called Lord, be put in a room waiting for him to drop by? Who did he sacrifice?
“How?” Griffith traces the scars on Guts’s face with his gloved fingers. Guts kisses them.
“Your Majesty,” his attendants hesitate. They hang back, their view obscured by foliage and dim light. They probably know, though. They’ve seen them, the way they’ve seen Griffith and Charlotte in his world. “The council.”
“Battle to free the Rayma?” he asks Guts.
“What’s witcha really? Need me ta hold yer hand through it?” Guts, indeed, holds his hand to his lips. So that hasn’t changed. What else remains then?
Asiol coughs.
“Her Majesty requires you after.”
Guts lets go and forces Griffith to turn around. He pats Griffith on the back.
“Go.”
How’d you convince him, he asks himself, the one he hates, did you tell him that was enough for him? Did you will it so? Did I?