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The show has been retooled by the streaming service executives, and it fucking sucks.
Crazed is supposed to give Guts his big breakout role, to make him a bona fide action star after he quit wrestling. A sprawling dark fantasy epic in a gritty medieval setting, kind of Conan the Barbarian meets Hellraiser and he gets to be the hero? Hell yeah, he signed up before he'd even known it was based on a comic. Manga. Whatever.
The original director is a big fan, though, and so a week after he signs the contract a monumental Amazon package arrives at his apartment containing the bulky tome-like deluxe editions of the whole story.
"The whole story so far," the director says when Guts calls him to ask about it. "It's still going on, but for right now we're just doing the first and second arcs."
Guts wonders why he ordered the whole thing for him in that case, but he just laughs and says Behelitflix+ budgets, you know? Functionally infinite if you get your series greenlit since they're desperate to hit on the next big thing with plenty of money to throw away on projects that might not work out.
So, he reads the first and second arcs. It's pretty good, and he now gets why fans online get so worked up about eclipses, and so he keeps going with it as the scripts start to come in and it's all looking like a pretty faithful adaptation. Guts starts to feel like maybe quitting wrestling was the right decision after all.
And then, one crisp autumn day, it suddenly becomes apparent that Behelitflix+ budgets are not, in fact, infinite, that their latest crackdown on password sharing didn't work so well, that the price hike drove people away instead of bringing in more revenue.
Cuts have to be made somewhere. Lots of somewheres, in fact, as ongoing or in-development projects are cancelled seemingly at random and so Guts just kind of expects to find out that the same thing is happening to Crazed too.
In the end it comes down to a legal issue. The licensing and distribution contracts have already been signed, which is a cost Behelitflix+ could deal with, but the bigger problem is that if they don't produce something they'll lose the rights entirely. Some other studio or streaming service could grab them, and the executives refuse to give their rivals any kind of advantage.
"So," Guts' agent tells him on a jerky, low-quality video call, "the positive is, the show is still getting made. The negative is that it's only getting made to stop someone else from doing it. It's a spite project."
And Guts is already signed up without anything else on the horizon so he really has no choice but to push on and hope it works out somehow. There's a meeting, in which the executives descend from the heavens bearing Powerpoint presentations, that sets out exactly what is going to happen to Crazed. It's depressing as shit.
First of all, the budget won't stretch to an epic dark fantasy medieval setting. It's being retooled into a contemporary one instead. That it's set in a medieval kingdom doesn't faze the execs for a moment - they'll just make it a modern-day city instead, Vancouver dressed up to look like Chicago or New York, where the King is the Mayor and Guts and the other main characters are police detectives.
At that point the original director walks out, and although some of the cast and crew follow him, the majority stay put. You can't eat authenticity to the source material, or pay the rent with artistic integrity.
What sucks the most is that the entire Dark Swordfighter arc, which was supposed to be at least four episodes of Guts kicking ass, is getting compressed into the first three-quarters of Episode 1 to get some action scenes for the trailer along with the bare minimum of exposition before they move on to the next storyline.
The reason for this, they explain, is that they want to bring in Griffith as soon as possible. He's being played by one of those classically-trained British actors who started out as the adorable kid in a romantic comedy or a background student in Harry Potter or something, and then ten years later they're suddenly grown up after spending the time in between doing Shakespeare and shit.
It makes rational sense, Guts thinks, but even then emotionally it pisses him off to no end. He was supposed to get more time to establish himself as the main character instead of immediately getting railroaded into an ensemble with Griffith and despite the fact that he hasn't even met the guy he already feels irritated by him.
There's some more cost-cutting, horizon-narrowing bullshit - Rickert and Pippin are being combined into one character, someone high up at Behelitflix+ doesn't like Corkus so he's gone, and of course there's no budget for a CGI Puck any more. Maybe an Elf on the Shelf if they're lucky.
Honestly Guts has tuned out, though. When he gets back to his apartment, after a smoke and a depression nap that lasts until 1:45AM, he finds himself opening his laptop and searching up his co-star on Youtube, just to see what the deal is.
Annoyingly, he's pretty good. Guts watches some videos of him in Coriolanus a year or two ago, drenched in stage blood and thee-ing and thou-ing with a lot of power and intensity. He has the right look for the role, sharp features and bright blue eyes with cupid-bow lips, and really the only thing not already in place is the hair.
Guts wonders if he's the type of actor to grow it out for the role, or if he'll just wear a wig or something. Either way, when it comes time to work together Guts is going to look like a hulking unwashed barbarian next to Lord Prissypants. But maybe that's the plan, who knows?
Guts clicks onto the next video of Griffith, which is a fan edit about a minor character he played in some hospital show, and suddenly the sun is crawling bluishly up into the sky and he realises he's spent hours watching clip after clip of his co-star.
Guts doesn't actually meet Griffith until a few weeks later in, of all places, a ranch out somewhere in the mountains that runs boot camps for actors doing action-focused projects. He figured Behelitflix+ would shitcan it, but it turns out that it's a package deal including not just the cast of Crazed but several other productions as well meaning that it's actually cheaper to just send them all instead of changing it at the last second.
So there he is, milling around one morning with a disparate collection of people he sometimes vaguely recognises but more often just hasn't heard of. Or, more awkwardly, he has heard of them and just finds himself wondering what kind of dirt Behelitflix+ has on them to make them do this. Apparently he's the only one here for Crazed so far.
"Guts!" someone says from behind him in that same cut-glass now is the winter of our discontent British accent he knows far better than he should, and then he turns around and it's him, it's fucking him down to the last detail. He's even growing out his hair and even if it's not all the way there they can do the rest with extensions, and in every other aspect he's already there, it really was perfect casting, and -
Guts realises he should probably say something back to him.
"Griffith," he says, going over to shake hands with him. He's wearing a useless narrow little scarf, because of course he is, and - how the fuck did he get Starbucks all the way out here?
"How the fuck did you get Starbucks all the way out here?" Guts asks, because he's still feeling way more discombobulated that he really should be and that means his brain-to-mouth filter isn't operating like it should.
Griffith blinks, surprised, and then laughs, warmly and indulgently. "I have my ways," he says, and that's it, from that moment on they just kind of fall comfortably into getting along with each other. It's a little weird, since they've only just met, but... it feels right to Guts in a way he can't really put into words.
Action Hero Camp is tiring, but also a lot of fun. There's instruction in archery and swordfighting, horse riding and wilderness survival - all things that might be helpful if their show was still a medieval dark fantasy epic instead of whatever it is now.
Before he left they told Guts that there was a new screenwriter working on it, that the retooled version of the show will be ready to shoot when he gets back, and so it gives his time in the mountains with Griffith a kind of hazy, unreal feeling. None of what they're doing really matters so it's more like a free vacation than anything else.
And, honestly, he's really enjoying being with Griffith. Guts kind of expected him to be a prissy little diva but he isn't, at all, and in fact he matches Guts every step of the way with his sheer determination more than making up for the difference in height and muscle mass between them.
The culmination of the boot camp is a three-day wilderness survival exercise, and even though it's voluntary and a lot of the other attendees don't bother, the look that passes between Guts and Griffith says there's no way they'll give up now.
So they get dropped off in the middle of nowhere with a set of survival equipment, including a tent because Behelitflix+ would be upset with the damage to their finances if their actors froze to death, and are left to their own devices for three days.
It just... works, is the only way Guts can put it. They complement each other. Pretty soon they have a neat little camp going, and that night when they're lounging on the soft grass next to the big, crackling fire they've made, Guts feels comfortable enough to ask Griffith something that's been on his mind for a while.
"Why are you doing this show?" he asks. "You could be doing more fuckin' Shakespeare or... Broadway or something. Anything other than this."
"Do I need a reason?" Griffith asks contemplatively, looking up at the starry sky. "To choose a role that appeals to me, and to pursue that role with all of my strength?"
"To do this, yeah. To pursue this role when you could be doing Hamlet. That needs a reason."
"Hmm. Can I show you something?" Griffith asks, and before Guts can even respond he's taking out his phone.
"Hey, I thought we all had to give them our phones when we got here," Guts says. "Digital detox shit."
Griffith just looks at him.
"In life," he says, "unrelated to one's social standing or class, there are some people who, by nature, are able to resist putting their phones into a big plastic box just because the man in a cowboy hat who runs this place tells them to. They are the true elite."
Guts frowns and is about to call him a fuckin' asshole (affectionately) when Griffith holds out his phone for him to look at a picture on it. Guts takes it, feeling the weird kind of weighty responsibility you get sometimes when you handle someone else's phone, and sees that it's a picture of Griffith in full costume for his role.
He's so much younger, though, still a gawky teenager if Guts had to guess, judging by the artfully concealed acne. The costume is clearly homemade too, albeit with a lot of care and attention that shines through in every detail of the armour, and instead of a professionally-lit studio background it's just a nondescript kind of hallway. But the most noticeable thing is how happy Griffith looks, smiling at the camera, eyes bright with enthusiasm as he revels in inhabiting his character.
Guts would never say so, but it's honestly kind of adorable.
"I was eighteen years old when that picture was taken," Griffith tells him. "At a convention in London. It was the first time I had travelled so far from home on my own. I was so nervous I could barely put the armour on, but some of the voice actors from the 1997 anime were there and I wanted more than anything in the world to meet them."
"Right."
Griffith is quiet for a moment, and when he speaks again he sounds almost vulnerable.
"Do you remember X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Guts?" he asks softly.
"Uh," Guts replies, a little confused. "Kind of. Yeah."
"Ryan Reynolds wanted so much to be Deadpool that he played the character to the best of his ability even though it was a deeply flawed adaptation. In the end, that meant he was able to make an entire series of Deadpool movies. That was the strength of his dream, Guts. And that's what I want, too."
"To be Deadpool?" Guts asks, feeling like the conversation has run away from him at about a hundred miles an hour.
"To be Griffith," his co-star replies, smiling. "In every possible way. That's always been my dream."
"Okay, but you know it's being retooled to shit, right? You won't get to wear any armour or do any of the things from the manga."
"I know," Griffith says. "I've always known. But, as I said, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. One day, years from now, there will be a perfect adaptation of the story and I'll be the one to do it. That's my dream. That's why I'm here."
He has a tone of certainty and determination that seems utterly unassailable. Listening to him in that moment it all just seems so simple and inevitable.
"You're operating on a completely different level to me," Guts says. "I just thought it sounded like a cool show to be in. And the manga kicked ass."
The same wide, infectious smile as in the picture spreads across Griffith's lips once again.
"It is a cool show to be in," he agrees. "No matter what. Even if they've changed it."
They sit together for a while, falling into a comfortable silence moderated only by the soft crackling of the fire they built.
"Can I ask you something, Guts?" Griffith says, his voice low, pitched only to be heard by his co-star in the tiny oasis of firelight they're sharing.
"Yeah, sure."
"In the 1970s," Griffith says, "the Star Trek fans who supported the idea of Kirk and Spock being together romantically called it the Premise."
Guts is kind of getting used to conversational swerves like this, so he just lets Griffith keep going and trusts that he'll get to the point eventually.
"It wasn't an era when you could be open with this sort of thing, so they'd ask one another if they supported the Premise."
Griffith gives him a look, intense and penetrating and hawklike. He really was the perfect casting choice, Guts thinks.
"With that in mind," Griffith says quietly, "since you've read the manga. Do you support the Premise of us, Guts? Of our characters?"
You can't read the manga and not think that they're at least obsessed with each other, but... Guts has known since, like, always, that he swings both ways but it's not like he's had many chances to be overt about it, and yet it seems like Griffith has still seen through him completely.
So are we us right now, Guts wonders, or our characters? Since he met Griffith, since he started spending his every waking hour with him out here so far away from his normal life, the distinction has started to feel fuzzy and meaningless. Every aspect, every iteration of him is being pulled into orbit around the bright, luminescent star that is Griffith, and even if Guts could stop it he's no longer sure he even would any more.
"Yeah," he replies, his mouth suddenly feeling very dry. "I think, uh. I think I do support the Premise of us."
Griffith gives him an angelic smile and then moves suddenly, swinging his leg over Guts' lap to sit on top of him and reaching down to hold his face with both hands.
"Now you belong to me," he says, effortlessly going into character, and then before Guts can do anything other than look up at him Griffith leans in and kisses him, deeply and triumphantly.
After that it's like a dam has broken. They spill messily into their tent, stripping off their clothes as they go before landing in a tangle of limbs and sleeping bags with Guts on top, and they separate just long enough for him to undo Griffith's jeans and yank them down.
If he's going to do this, Guts thinks as he kisses his way down Griffith's chest and stomach, going to give in to this fucking craziness that Griffith brings out in him, he'll go all-in and hold nothing back.
He pauses for just a moment when he actually reaches Griffith's cock, though. It's gratifyingly hard and perfectly proportioned to his body but it's also, Guts realises, the first uncircumcised dick he's seen in real life.
"What is it?" Griffith asks, his voice made low and urgent by how aroused he is.
"You're not, uh. You're uncut, am I gonna hurt you or, or peel you or something?" He can barely focus enough to ask the question in a way that makes sense but he needs to ask, he desperately doesn't want to fuck this up. Not now, not with Griffith.
"You won't," Griffith says, sounding close to desperate. "Just go for it. I'll tell you if I need you to stop. Please, Guts."
It's the sheer, unconcealed want and need in that please that finally breaks through Guts' remaining doubts. He licks a long, slow stripe along the underside of Griffith's shaft, grinning at the moan he wrings out from his co-star, and then takes him fully into his mouth.
Guts isn't exactly experienced in doing this but he tries to aim for what he knows would feel good to him, if their positions were reversed and it was Griffith who had his soft, full lips around Guts' cock (and isn't that a hot as hell idea, something to look forward to later, he hopes) and judging by the sounds Griffith makes, the way he slides his fingers through Guts' hair and bucks his hips, it's feeling good to Griffith as well.
"Guts," Griffith gasps, "I'm going to-"
Before he can even finish the sentence Guts interrupts him with a growl and presses forward to take Griffith as deep as he possibly can, because he will not let him forget this, ever, he wants to make sure that he's searing himself into Griffith's spank bank for the rest of his fucking life.
Griffith gasps and shudders, hips bucking as he comes, and Guts moves with him to stay connected all the way through his orgasm, swallowing it all.
Immediately after he finishes, Griffith lunges down to kiss Guts deeply and greedily, and there's no way he isn't tasting himself in Guts' mouth as he does it, but maybe that's why he's doing it, to revel in claiming Guts and marking him in some irrevocable way as his.
"What do you need?" Griffith asks, his voice low and satiated as his hands settle comfortably onto Guts' shoulders. Guts looks over and sees Griffith's eyes drilling into him and suddenly it's all too much, he's having a fucking panic attack or something right here in this tent next to the dude he just sucked off. Post-nut clarity by osmosis. Griffith notices, like he seems to notice everything, pulls his hands back, gives him space.
"It's a lot, isn't it?" he says after a few long, careful moments of silence.
"Yeah."
It doesn't take too long for Guts to start to calm down, but as soon as he does the cold, sweaty embarrassment of it begins to crawl in to replace the panic.
"I'm sorry," he says. "It's not you, it wasn't anything you did. I'm just kind of fucked up."
"You don't have to explain, Guts."
Griffith's hand moves slowly back onto his, and Guts lets it happen, lets him slowly entwine their fingers. It's crazy how much bigger his hand is compared to Griffith's.
"I think, uh. I think I'd like if you just touched me," Guts says, the words so heavily weighted with other meanings and questions (Do you still want to touch me? Did I fuck everything up again?) that he struggles to get them out.
But he does, and judging by the way Griffith looks at him, some of those deeper meanings have been understood. His co-star smiles at him and reaches down, not to grab his dick right away but to pull one of the crumpled sleeping bags up over them both, like he wants to protect Guts from the entire fucking world, gently separating the two of them off into a realm that's entirely theirs.
Griffith locks eyes with him and then raises his hand up to his own mouth, parting those full lips of his to give his palm a slow, lewd lick that almost makes Guts jizz himself right fucking there. Only then does Griffith ghost his fingers back down Guts' chest and stomach, grasping his cock with that saliva-slick hand and stroking him in a gentle, uncompromising way which makes it clear that he will be coming, sooner rather than later, and that's fucking fine with Guts who just groans and spreads his legs and entrusts himself to Griffith completely.
"I saw the look on your face when we first met," Griffith whispers, pressing himself close to Guts' side. "I don't blame you. I am a walking bisexual awakening, after all."
He picks up the pace of his stroking, smirking at the desperate, needy sound he wrings out of Guts.
"But I felt the same way," he continues, his lips brushing directly against Guts' ear. "I wanted you as soon as I saw you. I knew you were the only one. I knew you were the perfect fulfilment of my dream."
Guts feels surrounded by Griffith, utterly overcome by him even though he's so much smaller and slighter than Guts but that doesn't matter, it's completely fucking immaterial when the sheer force of his presence and his personality are directed at him like a spotlight.
Guts loses himself in Griffith's scent, the sensation of his hand on him and his warm breath and his still-quickened heartbeat, and almost before he knows it he's gritting his teeth and repeating his co-star's name as he's driven to his climax.
They claim as many moments like that as they can over the remainder of their time together, but all too soon Action Hero Camp comes to an end. As they're getting ready to leave, Griffith gives Guts his number written neatly down on a piece of paper - for when they give you back your phone, he explains - and then, quickly and eagerly, reaches up and pulls him down for a kiss.
It's so fucking disappointing to get back to his apartment and his normal routine for the couple of weeks until shooting starts. What happened in the mountains starts to feel unreal, somehow, dreamlike, but he still has the piece of paper with Griffith's number in Griffith's handwriting and he holds onto it like a talisman.
He adds Griffith as a contact but waits for a while before he tries calling or texting, at first because he wants to give Griffith time to fly back to the UK but really because he's actually fucking nervous about contacting him again, worried that he'll just dismiss it as a meaningless fling or something. Guts doesn't think he could stand it, if that was how Griffith felt about it.
In the end his resolve breaks one day just after twelve o' clock in the afternoon which, he estimates hazily, is about 8PM Griffith's time. That's still a fairly normal time to phone someone, it's not like he'd be waking Griffith up in the middle of the night.
He could text, of course, but... call it vanity, but he knows his spelling is shitty and for some reason he's sure that Griffith will text like he's writing a letter to an Archduke or whatever and he just doesn't want to make a bad impression on him.
So he hits the call button and waits and eventually, just like that, he hears Griffith's voice again. It's nice, really nice, particularly in the moment when Griffith's tone shifts from being kind of terse and guarded, the way you would be if you got a call from an unknown number, to warm and bright after Guts says hello.
"How was your flight?" Guts asks, because that's so much easier to say out loud than did it mean anything when I sucked your dick or was it just bros being bros but he really is interested to know, all the same. The idea of Griffith slumming it in economy class is very entertaining to him.
"Not too bad," Griffith replies. "Thanks for asking. I'm still a bit jetlagged, though. I only just had dinner."
"Right. Did you get a cheeky Nando's?" Guts asks, naming the first vaguely British thing he can think of that isn't bad teeth or needing a licence for everything and then feeling his innards shrivel up just a little bit at the awkwardness of it.
Griffith just laughs good-naturedly. "It's been quite a long time since I went there, but when you come over here to visit I'll make sure we go for a cheeky Nando's together."
When. He shouldn't be feeling so fucking... squishy about this guy but he is and, pathetic as it is, Guts' heart soars because Griffith said when, when you come to visit. Not if. Not even asking. It feels a little bit like being swept off his feet.
They call each other more, and it's weird to think about Griffith being thousands of miles away, having a whole life of his own that, until they met, Guts never even knew existed. Griffith's day is already almost over by the time Guts starts his, and he finds himself treasuring the little insights he gets into him as they talk - something about the relatively relaxed almost-doneness of where Griffith is in his day makes him much more receptive to Guts' rise-and-grind morning energy.
Even though he lives and works in London, Guts learns that Griffith is actually Welsh, and he comes from the same town as Michael Sheen and Anthony Hopkins. That's pretty cool to Guts, since the only notable person to come from his hometown was a bank robber in the 1930s.
"And you," Griffith says brightly when he mentions this. "You're on Wikipedia. That's the gold standard nowadays."
It seems Griffith has played a lot of dead bodies, too. It was steady work when he started out in TV since there'll always be medical or crime shows, but of course that conversation happens on speaker while Guts is in the drive-thru and just as he pulls up to the window the cashier gets a sudden earful of Griffith saying "I've done so many corpses, Guts, it's amazing," and Guts almost doesn't get his breakfast sandwich at all.
As the shooting date draws nearer, the newly rewritten scripts are delivered. Based on the multiple names listed on the cover it seems like the new writer he was told about soon turned into a roomful of new writers all spoiling the broth in their own special way, with the final name belonging to someone who a quick check on IMDb confirms has plenty of previous experience of getting scripts into passable shape at short notice.
Not a single one of them is listed as currently attached to the project, though, and that concerns Guts a little until Griffith points out on one of their calls that this may well mean no writers being around to object to whatever changes other stakeholders - the main characters, for example - might want to make once shooting begins.
It really seems like Griffith has this all worked out, particularly when they find out that the new director is, of all fucking people, Corkus. Being let go from the project as an actor didn't slow him down since the man is like a filmmaking cockroach, his career utterly unkillable by mortal means, and his directing résumé is... passable. Mostly commercials and some music videos, but not good ones.
He's an irredeemable time-serving hack, but in an endearingly honest kind of way, just looking for a peaceful life and an easy shoot with the smallest possible amount of drama. Griffith, with or without Guts' backing, will be able to pressure him into agreeing to just about anything within the constraints of reason and budget.
Even though the scripts are all but dripping embalming fluid from being stitched together in a dimly lit basement somewhere, the storyline they present isn't actually that bad, Guts thinks.
Still a very long way from the source material, of course. One of the new writers had a hard-on about digital privacy sci-fi shit, so the show now takes place in the near future with a kind of lived-in, cheap-as-possible cyberpunk angle including silver quadcopter drones everywhere and a lot of the high-tech stuff being done with conveniently invisible nanomachines.
So the Band of the Falcon becomes a shady private military company, equipped with body armour that's at least a little bit evocative of the original's medieval plate armour. That's a pretty cool aspect, Guts thinks, at least they didn't just make them police detectives, and there's a kind of Robocop corporation-taking-over-the-city vibe that isn't too bad.
Guts finds himself watching those same videos of Griffith again, thinking about him. He tells himself it's a proper, actorly method of understanding his co-star, of how he'll play against him, but truthfully he's just watching to watch.
He does also start watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine one afternoon but Griffith was right, it really isn't that great. Instead Guts finds himself coming back again and again to the clips of Griffith on stage as Coriolanus. One clip, really.
It's from the scene where Caius Martius, named Coriolanus for his capture of the city Corioli, has gone into exile from Rome and makes his way to Aufidius, the leader of his enemies who he's been fighting for years, and yeah, it turns out that having desperate tent-sex with the leading man is enough to make him actually read and understand a Shakespeare play. His high school English teacher would be so proud.
So Coriolanus has thrown himself on the mercy of Aufidius, his greatest foe, and in this play they cast a big, burly dude to play him just to highlight the contrast with Griffith. And to be fair to him, this guy does a good job of portraying the raw, fucked-up mixture of feelings you'd have in a situation like that. Or maybe it's just because he's on a stage with Griffith, with that inescapable hawklike fucking searchlight of a gaze focused fully on him, who knows?
In any case, he stalks over to Coriolanus, shoulders squared, and you can't really tell what exactly he's going to do to him once he gets there.
"O Martius, Martius," Aufidius says, "each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart a root of ancient envy. If Jupiter should from yond cloud speak divine things, and say 'tis true, I'd not believe them more than thee, all-noble Marcius."
Guts has watched this so many times he knows it by heart. So it's all good, Aufidius trusts him, yay, but it's the next part that really fucks Guts up.
"Let me twine mine arms about that body," Aufidius says, reaching out and embracing Coriolanus, embracing Griffith, and they've got him in an unnecessarily skimpy white tunic thing just to visually underscore how vulnerable he is at that moment, giving himself up to his enemy.
"Here I clip the anvil of my sword, and do contest as hotly and as nobly with thy love as ever in ambitious strength I did contend against thy valour."
And by this point Aufidius' hand is on Coriolanus' chest, Griffith's chest, and Guts knows it's fucking ridiculous to be this morbidly, sweatily jealous over a scene in a goddamn play but he is, he can't help it.
And then Aufidius leans down to speak closely to him, loverlike, in something between a growl and a whisper.
"Know thou first, I loved the maid I married, never man sigh'd truer breath, but that I see thee here, thou noble thing! More dances my rapt heart than when I first my wedded mistress saw bestride my threshold."
And then they kiss, and there's just the slightest little snippet of a cheer from the audience before the clip ends. And that's it, the video is over, and Guts is left with this seething, virulent kind of feeling in his stomach that it takes him a long time to finally identify.
It should be me, he thinks, still well aware of how irrational it is but dwelling on it all the same, imagining Griffith as Coriolanus in that thigh-skimming fucking tunic but with Guts being the one to say let me twine mine arms about that body and Guts being the one to embrace him and growl at him and kiss him.
Something about Griffith seems to just fucking short-circuit his moral, rational higher functions. When they finally meet up again at the start of shooting, they barely even speak to one another before Guts is slamming Griffith down onto the bed in his trailer and all but devouring him. They get back to work after, both slightly dishevelled and distracted during the process of costume fittings and picking out props.
Guts does perk up again when they let him choose his gun, and of course he goes straight for the Desert Eagle. Fuck yeah. It's too big to be called a practical weapon. Massive, thick, heavy, and far too rough, it's an uncompromising slab of steel and polymer that fits perfectly with his character.
The actual shooting of the first couple of episodes passes by in a blur, he's just so fucking busy that it leaves him completely wiped out at the end of each day. It's fun, though, and even if he and Griffith aren't able to get much time alone with each other they do get plenty of time together, doing their scenes and goofing around and generally enjoying playing make-believe for a living.
Just after episode 3 is done, Behelitflix+ releases an early preview trailer for the show based on what they have so far. The reaction is... different, probably, from what the streaming service expected. Guts takes a while to scroll through the comments in various places and see what people are saying.
Typical Shithelitflix adaptation
Skipping to the Glorious Past arc just like in 97, Dark Swordfighter fans on life support
Why is it set in the future tho
GUTSSSSSSSSSDDSDSDS
They're so in love
Lads is it gay if I like Griffith
He's so outwardly perfect and inwardly repulsive 😍
Wake up samurai you've got a twink to fuck
"He just sees him as a pet or a tool" words of the wilfully blind smh
Gay gay homosexual gay
Bringing out the fujo throne for this one 👀
They HAD to know what they were doing
It's apparent, very apparent, that their chemistry has carried over into the show a lot more intensely than might have originally been intended.
"Omg," Griffith reads from his phone, utterly deadpan, as they sit together in his trailer one evening. "Their gay little water fight, I'm dying, six sparkling heart emojis."
For some reason - okay, for a reason Guts can easily understand - the fans have really fixated on the scene where they're washing a car together and then start throwing buckets of water at each other. Corkus had to talk Griffith down from doing the scene bare-ass naked but somehow when you watch it back, the compromise option of tight metallic-silver shorts just looks even more questionable.
"The execs are gonna lose their shit about this," Guts says morosely. "I fuckin' guarantee you, the first thing they'll tell us is to make it less gay."
"We want you to make it even more gay," the executive says to them less than ten minutes later on a video call.
"I see," Griffith says delicately. "I think it's fair to say that the source material is already rather gay, implicitly. So the only way to make it gayer would be to have the relationship become absolutely explicit. The focal point of the story."
The executive just nods. That was their thought too, he says, since what he keeps referring to as the gay angle and the LBGT aspect will be a great way for Behelitflix+ to burnish their progressive credentials and cover up all the other horrible shit they've done recently. He doesn't put it in those words, of course, but that's what he means.
Even all the outrage coming from the opposite side of the political divide because of Griffith's ass in those fucking shorts is perfectly fine with them - any publicity is good publicity, any clicks are good clicks, any views are good views.
And just like that, the deal is done. Griffith has a blank cheque for gay mayhem and full permission from Behelitflix+ to make whatever changes he needs to achieve that goal. The video call ends and Griffith collapses back onto the bed with a deep, satisfied sigh. Guts props himself up on an elbow beside him.
"Hey, isn't this like, pinkwashing or rainbow catfishing or something? It just feels like there's something morally wrong about using stuff like this to start fuckin' outrage and controversy and helping Behelitflix get away with shit just so the show gets made the way you want it."
Griffith blinks up at him, perplexed.
"Are you suggesting that I deliberately made sure the trailer would include overtly homosexual content in order to provoke a reaction from the audience that would allow me to exploit Behelitflix's allegedly progressive principles to stop the show from being cancelled and to get unrestricted creative control over it?"
He smiles, beautiful and distant.
"That's quite a theory, Guts. I'd have to be some sort of horribly cruel manipulator to do that. Do you think I'm cruel?"
Before Guts can even answer, Griffith is kissing him, touching him, pulling him down to fuck Guts senseless while he's still riding the high of his victory. Afterwards they're tangled up together, both hovering on the verge of sleep because it's late at night by now and they had a full day of filming today with the same tomorrow, and Griffith nuzzles his face into Guts' neck before he starts to speak.
"I don't like the love triangle," Griffith says muzzily. "Let's cut Casca."
"The fuck? You can't cut Casca, she's a main character."
"We'll see," Griffith yawns.
The next day, the atmosphere on set is... different. It's clear to everyone that power over the show has shifted away from the physically absent writers, away from the mentally absent director, away even from the rest of the cast, and now resides only with Griffith, a perfect absolute monarch in his own domain.
Crazed is a Guts and Griffith story now, with everything that entails. Charlotte gets cut without mercy but, since she's being played by a notoriously mean and difficult-to-work-with former child star, no one really minds.
Casca survives, though, since Griffith is at least a partly benevolent dictator. She gets a lot of the action and investigation scenes that would otherwise have gone to Guts and Griffith, much of whose screen time is now occupied by their romance.
It's fun, in a fucked-up wheels-within-wheels kind of way, to be acting out a relationship with Griffith during work hours and then having the real, visceral thing with him afterwards, letting the intensity of it bleed through into their performances in a way that makes them both fucking glow in front of the camera.
Shooting actually progresses pretty well, with cool shootouts and chases and, of course, as much romance as Griffith can get away with crowbarring in. This includes some scenes of them having sex which turns out to be a mixture of strange and just funny, with a Behelitflix+ intimacy coordinator there to choreograph them and weird little flesh-tone modesty panels glued onto their crotches that make them look like fucking Aggravated Assault Ken and Flat Chest Barbie.
Griffith even takes a neck-down mirror selfie of them goofily posing together, panelled crotches on display, and posts it to his social media with the caption you may not like it but this is what peak male performance looks like to a rapturous response from the fans.
It's never going to be perfect, either as an adaptation of the manga or just as a show in itself, but at the same time it doesn't feel like it sucks any more either. Somehow it all just about works, like a scaled-up version of their wilderness survival days with the cast and crew orbiting Griffith just like the stars of a galaxy whirl around the endless, placid darkness of the black hole at its centre. In a good way.
They don't have the special effects budget to accurately depict the devastating physical torture that Griffith suffers in the manga. Instead, when he's betrayed and captured by the evil CEO the Hawks are working for, they rely on those helpful invisible nanomachines to put him into an artificial cyber-coma where the torture is purely psychological.
This is portrayed by Griffith writhing around in interesting ways inside a bright red stasis pod filled with KY jelly, and with nobody left to stop him he finally gets to be bare-ass naked on screen while he does it.
Around the same time, Guts starts to wonder how they're going to deal with the Eclipse - the new script had it go down pretty much the same as in the original, altered just enough to fit the new setting and budget. Like the demons that attack the Hawks are replaced here with the Hawks' nanomachines being corrupted so it's they themselves who are driven berserk and attack each other in an orgy of violence. Much cheaper and still kind of effective in its own way, Guts thinks.
There's some panicked dialogue about how could this happen and only one person has the companywide access codes which leads into the big reveal that Griffith, tortured beyond endurance, has betrayed the Hawks to merge himself with the evil sentient AI that their former employer is using to direct his criminal operations.
What budget there is for effects and costuming has been preserved for this scene, this single moment, to perfect Griffith's horrifying appearance as Femto. Griffith has opinions about it, of course, but he's also smart enough to let the designers do their work.
They draw on a variety of inspirations, some of which are the same as the original manga like Phantom of the Paradise and Hellraiser but bringing in others as well, really emphasising the mechanical aspects of the original's Gigeresque biomechanical vibe with reference to things like Virus and SOMA and even Terminator. Honestly it seems like they're having a good time finally having this one aspect of the show where they don't have to scrimp and cut back and limit themselves.
On the day of the costume test it takes them hours to put it on Griffith, but that's part of the learning process, it'll be faster next time. Guts is waiting outside the dressing room, summoned by a text from his co-star that reads I'm ready for my close-up Mr DeMille.
Griffith - Femto - appears before him. It works, Guts thinks. They haven't made many changes to the pointed birdlike headpiece and the cloaked black silhouette, but the details, the construction, you could say, of Femto's body are intended to communicate the idea that instead of a supernatural transformation, his change after merging with the AI is more of a physical breakdown and reassembly.
His limbs and torso look like they've been severed from each other, coated in glistening black liquid latex and then reconnected with gleaming, bloodied chrome, like a doll's joints, and beneath the helmet Guts can see the elegant lines of Griffith's face are made up to look unsettlingly corpse-pale, with steel teeth behind black lips and electric-blue slit-pupilled eyes.
Griffith angles his head just slightly, watching him, and quirks those black lips in a cold, distant smirk, and it's like those fucking videos you see sometimes of people losing their shit when they meet Darth Vader at Disneyland, rationally he knows it's just his boyfriend in some fetish gear but the costume, combined with how Griffith is performing in it, the way he's holding himself, really sells the illusion that he's looking at someone or something uncanny, inhuman.
And then Guts looks down and the effect mostly evaporates when he sees that Griffith's shiny black costume finishes at the ankles, and all he has on his feet are a pair of worn-out white sneakers since the raking, three-clawed cybernetic foot prosthetics he'll wear on set are apparently still in the workshop.
"What are those?" Guts asks, pointing.
"Fuck off," Griffith says affectionately. "What do you think of it, Guts?"
"Yeah, it's good. It really suits you. But I wanted to ask," he says, pushing on, not sure why he's picked now of all places to bring it up, but Griffith is so busy that it's impossible to even get any time with him other than working or being exhausted together. So much of the project exists only within Griffith's mind, in the substance of his dream, and unless he specifically wishes to share something it's almost impossible to get any information from him.
"I wanted to ask about the Eclipse. About Chapter 86. Since we don't have the love triangle. Is it still happening?"
Chapter 86 quickly became their code-word for the very graphic and controversial event that takes place at that point in the manga, the kind of event that tends to be one of the few things non-fans know about the series. It's easier to just say Chapter 86 than using the word rape over and over again, after all.
Griffith-as-Femto does that fucking head tilt again.
"Of course it's happening," he replies, his voice utterly calm. "It's going to be you, Guts. Just as it always should have been."
Griffith's hand, gloved in black, his fingers tipped with steel claws, reaches up to stroke Guts' cheek, gently and possessively.
Guts scowls at him and pushes his hand away, the first time he can ever really remember refusing Griffith's touch, and the experience of being rebuffed, even this gently, seems to freeze his co-star in place.
"Did it occur to you to warn me about that?" Guts asks, his ire rising. "To ask me about my role in your little let's surprise roleplay fucking Guts up the ass with my evil cyber-dick scheme? This isn't the kind of shit you can just do to people! You don't know what kind of baggage or fuckin' trauma people might be carrying around with them!"
Guts is pretty much yelling at Griffith now. He didn't mean to, but he is. He turns away with an inarticulate noise and puts some distance between them before he gets any worse, throwing himself down in a chair on the opposite side of the room.
"I've had this knot in my stomach about it for days," he says, quieter, "weeks even, and you're so busy I can't even get five minutes to actually fuckin' communicate with you about it."
They're dangling on the edge of a precipice. Guts can feel it. The abyss waiting to swallow them whole.
I fucking quit, Guts wants to say, wants to scream about walking off the set and letting Griffith find some other guy to be his co-star and suck his dick literally and metaphorically and spend his every waking and sleeping hour with him, working for him, thinking about him.
He wants to say it, but he doesn't. He just sits there, arms crossed, seething, glaring at the floor. He can't look at Griffith because he knows if he does, he'll see either that fucking soulless hawk-stare or something soft and pleading and at this point either one of them feels like it'll break him in some way or another.
There's silence, motionlessness, a total absence of activity from his co-star for what feels like minutes.
"Guts, I..." Griffith begins, and then stops, hesitates, which is something Guts has never known him to do before. "You're right," he says eventually. "I didn't consider it that way. I'm sorry."
Guts looks up and sees that Griffith has taken off his Femto helmet, that he's moved to stand near him but not too near, giving him space. He can also see, just from the stiffness of his shoulders and the tightness of his jaw, that it costs Griffith a great deal to say this, that whatever complex, mercurial, brittle construction of ego and desire and need that forms the scaffolding of his soul is wracked at this very moment with the pain of admitting a mistake.
Contrition doesn't come naturally to Griffith, and yet he's making so much effort to show it. For Guts, and only for Guts. After gathering up the folds of his cape Griffith walks over and sits down on the floor in front of Guts' chair and just waits, not saying anything.
"You look goofy as hell with just the contacts and makeup on," Guts says, which raises a small, fragile laugh between them. The smallest green shoot of something better, if they can nurture it.
"I'm so close to the end, Guts," Griffith says, sounding quiet and tired. "So close to fulfilling my dream. It's been difficult to balance everything."
"Dude," Guts says flatly. "Bro. This isn't the end or the fulfilment of your dream. It was never gonna be. Remember Wolverine: Origins? This is a step along the fuckin' way, nothing more."
He feels like he's being a little too harsh so he leans forward and places his hand comfortingly on Griffith's shoulder.
"Don't drive yourself crazy trying to make it something it's not," Guts says. "It gets in the way of other things. It gets in the way of us."
Griffith's hand, still in its weird shiny Femto glove, moves up to rest on top of Guts' and they just stay like that for a while, maintaining that contact. He's the only one Guts has ever felt okay with touching like this.
"For what it's worth," Guts says, "I think it's the right thing to do too, from a storytelling point of view. Just talk to me about it."
Now that they've spent more time with her, Guts feels like a real dick for being dismissive of the intimacy coordinator earlier, even if she is the demonic hellspawn of Behelitflix+ sent to watch over them. She has green hair and shrewd, perceptive eyes that seem to figure out almost immediately that he and Griffith are together but she doesn't make a big thing of it, which is... nice, honestly.
They go through the scene choreographically, step by step, just like with a fight scene or anything else that requires a lot of moving around together, and it's a tiny thing, really, but what helps settle everything into place for Guts, as well as the time and effort and communication that's being facilitated between them, is the fact that Griffith can't walk in his Femto foot prosthetics. He'll wear them for the wider shots, of course, but during the actual events of Chapter 86 his feet won't be in the shot so instead he'll be wearing those white fucking sneakers again, and honestly it's kind of grounding for Guts to be able to glance over and see them no matter what horrible shit they're acting out.
Guts hesitates to say there's a change in Griffith, exactly, but he can tell his co-star is making a greater effort with other people, making the metaphorical descent from his unassailable castle to shine that radiance and charisma and confidence upon them and make everyone's lives a little easier. Maybe no-one else notices, but Guts does, smiling at Griffith across a crowded room and receiving a smile just as warm in return, and that's okay. They're okay.
There's a weirdly celebratory atmosphere when the time comes to film the Eclipse. What with reality breaking down and the Hawks going crazy and tearing each other to pieces, everybody knows that this is it, the end, one way or another a lot of characters are dying and a lot of props and costumes are getting trashed beyond repair. It's liberating in a bizarre funhouse-mirror kind of way.
Other shows would do it differently, shows that aren't held together by one man's dream and his eccentric views about the philosophical meaningfulness of Ryan Reynolds, but this is Crazed and in Crazed everything's a mad, desperate struggle for survival against overwhelming odds, and that includes the process of making it at all.
So the final days of shooting pass, the cast and crew enjoying the chaos and destruction while they have the chance. Guts even spots Judeau taking a jaunty selfie with a disturbingly lifelike model of his own corpse before Casca pulls him away, rolling her eyes at his antics but also settling her hand comfortably into his as they go.
Huh. Apparently he and Griffith don't have a monopoly on workplace romances after all.
He and his co-star are sitting next to each other on folding chairs with Griffith in his full Femto regalia, including the clawed cyber-feet that add several inches to his height. They're both trying really hard not to spill any coffee on themselves while they wait for the Chapter 86 set to be made ready.
Guts has been giving Griffith shit because he ordered a pumpkin spice latte, so there he is having a meaningless, time-wasting conversation about coffee with the only person he's ever really wanted to do this kind of touchy-feely stuff with, and honestly it feels good. Relaxed.
He's just about to say something outrageous to see if he can make Griffith laugh hard enough to spray his drink out of his nose when they're called over to do the scene.
"Shall we?" Griffith says, taking a last sip of his coffee as delicately as possible in an effort not to ruin his lipstick. Guts stands up and then they both remember at almost the same time that Griffith has the foot prosthetics on.
They glance at each other and then, before Griffith can say anything, Guts lifts him up out of his chair, cape and all, into a bridal carry.
The Femto costume is very much not designed to ever look cute but in that moment, Guts thinks that the contrast between the unsettling appearance of the latex cyberdemon in his arms and the expression of total, flustered consternation on his face is pretty fucking adorable.
"Oh my god," Griffith says, sounding utterly mortified but putting his arm around Guts' shoulders all the same, and Guts grins at him and thinks it's just another example to add to the list of the ways their bodies seem to fit together perfectly.
Something comes back to him then. Memories of depression naps and his big break as an action star and watching Youtube videos of a future co-star who didn't even exist to him yet, except as a face on a screen in a play he hadn't heard of before but watched all the clips he could find of, over and over again.
And now here they are, together.
"Why, thou Mars," Guts says, speaking quietly enough for Griffith and only Griffith to hear him as they move towards the red neon-drenched Eclipse set, "I tell thee we have a power on foot, and I had purpose once more to hew thy target from thy brawn or lose mine arm for 't."
Griffith gives him a slightly wide-eyed look, his lips parted in surprise as he listens. Guts is a hundred per cent certain that under all his Femto makeup Griffith is blushing bright red.
"Thou hast beat me out twelve several times, and I have nightly since dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me," Guts continues.
"Oh my god," Griffith says again, laughing and pressing his face into Guts' chest. Guts smiles back at him but keeps going, relentlessly.
"We have been down together in my sleep," he murmurs, leaning in close, "unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat, and waked half dead with nothing."
Two months after its premiere, a press release from Behelitflix+ confirms that the genre-bending gay cyberpunk horror Crazed will not be renewed for a second season. Its fans, of which there are quite a few but not enough to satisfy the streaming service, are disappointed and some of them even post on social media about it for a while, but the loss soon fades and other shows, other stories, other content soon flows in to take its place.
This is normal, a natural part of the decay phase of the twenty-first century media consumption cycle, and except for the inevitable, dutiful recording of its passing on Wikipedia and IMDb the show is soon forgotten. But these are also some normal things, natural parts of the wider cycle of human life, that only had the opportunity to happen because of Behelitflix+ and Crazed and one man's dedication to his dream:
His experience from the show enables Corkus to begin a long and rewarding career directing adult films.
He's happy.
Casca and Judeau hit it off on the set and start dating. Very soon they move in together, get married, have kids - all the conventional things that neither of them ever expected to want before they met.
They're happy.
A flight from LAX lands at Heathrow Airport one afternoon and maybe, an onlooker might think, one of the passengers getting off the plane and waiting in line for Immigration looks like that wrestler who was kind of famous a few years ago. Whoever he is, he goes out into International Arrivals and runs, flat-out fucking sprints, into the arms of the man who has been there waiting since seven o' clock that morning to make absolutely sure he'll be there to meet him. They walk away together to retrieve his bags, talking and laughing and crying all at the same time, and maybe one of them even talks about finally getting that cheeky Nando's.
They're happy.