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In some ways, it all leads back to the tower.
If Griffith’s counting correctly, it’s been nearly three weeks since that day the Hawks broke into the tower and peeled what remained of his body off the putrid floor.
Since Guts cradled him amongst the other Hawks, whispering that somehow he was going to fix everything before tearing through the torturer and the rest of the King’s men.
That he’s safe now.
And perhaps when Griffith’s awake, it’s easy enough to believe his captain, but there’s little respite when the tent flap shuts.
He's almost afraid to close his eyes, lest the shackles drag him back to the place where the man waits with all the pieces of him that were stolen.
- His tongue
He’s back in the dungeon, limply hanging from the shackles that have already torn into the exposed muscle.
There are unfamiliar hands prying his cracked lips open with metal hooks, and the taste of iron chafes against the thin fabric of his cheeks.
A man leans in - Kushan, Griffith thinks, based on the mystic attire - and forces his mouth open at an abnormal angle.
“A gift for the Falcon,” he says, beady eyes illuminated by the firelight behind him. “Your captain sought out my assistance - believes he can somehow put his commander together again. Isn’t that lovely? Ah, but he had to choose - don’t worry, he made such a wonderful choice, you’ll be quite pleased! You’ll even be able to thank him yourself.”
The mystic reaches into his pocket and produces a writhing pink object, flailing like a beached fish desperately seeking any semblance of water.
A tongue.
Or rather - his tongue, weeping blood and spit in the Kushan’s shriveled hand.
“T’wasn’t easy to find, you know - that torturer of yours had quite the tumble in the tower,” he says, chuckling as he holds the offending object in front of Griffith’s face. “You’re lucky I found that silver tongue of yours.”
Griffith’s eyes widen in horror as the organ flails in the mystic’s palm, edging closer to his face. The iron hooks keep him from screaming, and he gurgles the mucus and blood spurting forth from his raw throat, flooding his mouth.
The other man chuckles darkly, lifting the tongue closer to Griffith’s cheek. “Oh ho, what a sweet little thing, it misses its owner,” he coos as the dismembered tongue laps Griffith’s chapped lips. “It looks like it misses its home! Such a loyal little tongue, it’s been waiting for you for all this time.”
The base of the white haired man’s tongue thrashes in the back of his mouth as the writhing dismembered muscle slithers past the metal hooks into the bath of spit, blood, bile, and mucus.
His eyes roll back into his skull, his throat gurgling in an attempt to keep the writhing object from diving down his esophagus. The cuffs shred through the scar tissue on his tendonless wrists as his head lolls forward in a pitiful attempt to utilize gravity to force the offending limb out of his mouth.
Tears streak down his face, the brine burning down the stretched muscle and flayed skin. His dismembered tongue caresses the inside of his cheek, flicking against the metal hooks, and he swears that he can taste the salt of the pus weeping from the wounds.
“Is something wrong?” the Kushan taunts and cranks Griffith’s mouth open wider still, causing him to gargle the brew of blood, bile, mucus, and spit until it leaks down his face. “Sweet little thing, happy to be home again… although I do believe there’s still the matter of reattaching it.”
No matter how hard Griffith tries to pull away from the other man, all he manages to successfully do is dig the cuffs deeper into his atrophied muscles. The metal digs into his cheeks, and he nearly gags on his tongue as it laps the scar tissue at the back of his throat.
He reaches into Griffith’s mouth, running a grimy finger along the severed appendage. “Don’t worry, pet, we’ll get you reunited,” he coos mockingly before tapping Griffith’s chin. “I expect a thanks from you for reuniting you both.”
The mystic reaches into his robes and pulls out a double-ended nail nearly twice the length of the tongue and half as thick. He extends his hand, and the tongue hops into his open palm, splashing blood, pus, bile, mucus, and spit all over Griffith’s bare chest.
Humming to himself, he pinches the flailing tongue between his fingers and shoves the nail through the severed root and up the body of the tongue. The new iron vein causes the muscle to stiffen, and he chuckles, holding it up to Griffith’s face. “Marvelous, isn’t it?” he says, tapping on the hooks, forcing Griffith’s mouth open with the now-restrained tongue. “Now don’t struggle too much, my dear boy! It’ll only hurt for a moment.”
New bile rises into Griffith’s mouth as he watches the Kushan pinch his tongue with a pair of the torturer’s old tongs and hold the nail-end to the hissing flames of the fireplace.
He gargles in protest when the metal starts glowing and the tongue comes back to life, an angry and unnatural heat glowing beneath the severed tissue.
Tears and snot course down his nose when the mystic turns to him and cups his chin, weathered fingers stroking the exposed muscle. “There, there,” he coos, beady eyes glowing as he pierces the base of where Griffith’s tongue once was with the hot nail and flailing tongue. “Good as new!”
. . .
He swears he can feel the nail every time he moves his tongue inside his mouth when he wakes up that morning, but he doesn’t dare tell anyone.
Not yet, at least.
Casca is helping him bend his other muscles again to keep them from atrophying - or at least, that’s what she’s been telling him whenever she comes into the tent.
Part of him is tempted to open his mouth and try to form the shape of her name with his newfound tongue, but he’s unsure whether or not he imagined the whole ordeal. Truly, the last thing he needs right now is to see pity in her eyes and for her to fuss over him anew.
He’s heard of phantom pain and phantom limbs from other soldiers, but it almost feels like he can taste metal in his mouth.
Perhaps the heat of his helmet is finally starting to get to him.
But when Guts bursts into the tent wild-eyed, asking Casca if Griffith’s said anything, he knows that Guts is the reason for the iron vein in his tongue.
Of course, he waits until Casca and Guts are done bickering and it’s just the two of them to see whether the madness is contagious.
“How you feelin’?” Guts asks, dark eyes peering up at Griffith with a kind of unguarded vulnerability that reminds him of that day on the hill, Guts’s head heavy in his hands when Griffith claimed him as his in front of all of their comrades.
“Guh.”
His tongue feels foreign in his mouth, and the single syllable weighs down the muscle.
“Guh.”
Guts leans in closer, and Griffith hates the traitorous bthump in his chest.
“Guts.”
The name almost hurts to form, and his throat starts to close up again despite himself.
“Guts,” Griffith repeats, voice cracking on the singular syllable. How many times had he repeated that name since he walked away on that snowy day? “Did you do this?”
“Griffith,” Guts says, and the nearly boy-like wonder tells Griffith everything he needs to know about the nail writhing inside his tongue. “It worked - crazy bastard wasn’t lyin’ after all.”
There’s a moment of silence between the two of them before a stream of questions about the capture starts to pour out of the former captain’s mouth, but Griffith can hardly focus on any of it.
For the first time, the smile on Guts’s face feels like a blade through his chest.
“Never again,” Griffith says coldly, cutting Guts off.
Any trace of relief or happiness drains from Guts’s face. “What?”
“You’re never leaving again,” Griffith says, eyes narrowing slightly when Guts dips his head slightly and shifts his gaze to the floor. “Am I understood?”
He can hear the angry bthump-ing of his heart reverberating in his chest, and it isn’t lost on him that the other man seems to be making a point of looking at everything other than him.
Guts clears his throat after a long moment, and when he looks up at Griffith this time, there’s something that looks suspiciously like guilt on his face.
“C’mere,” he says, reaching towards Griffith. “Gotta finish stretching.”
Griffith flinches away from his touch and does his best to shuffle back, but the muscles in his arms and legs scream with every single feeble attempt to move.
For all the burning in his muscles, he’s unable to back up more than a pace or so, and Guts grabs his leg easily and puts an end to it.
“Stop,” Griffith says, like he should have that day with a half-broken sword in his hand and nothing left to lose.
The only word that he ever should have said, but it’s coming too many months too late.
Guts winces. “I can’t.”
They sit in silence as Guts stretches out Griffith’s ankle the way that Casca had shown him, neither of them looking at one another.
If his tongue and his words hadn’t been enough to keep him around the first time, what made Griffith believe that things would be different now?
- His tendons
When he wakes up in the dungeon, he’s lying on the table with chains loosely wrapped around his thighs and biceps instead of the cuffs that he’d come to know so well.
There’s an unfamiliar face peering down at him with an ear-to-ear smile - or is it?
There’s something about the walls of this prison that inspires a different kind of madness.
“Poor, poor Falcon,” the Kushan says, running a finger along the exposed muscle of Griffith’s arm. “Clipped your pretty wings so you could never fly again. Is that what you want, little bird? It’s not very fun being stuck in the snow alone when the others have left you behind, is it? But your loyal dog, he wants to make sure his pretty bird will fly again. That’s why he came to me, you see? Oh, you can show him just how much you appreciate me fixing you up!”
He digs around in his pockets and pulls out a curved needle that’s as thick as a fishing hook and a pinkish spool that reeks of flesh.
Griffith feels the bile start to rise in his mouth when the mystic unwinds some of the strange pink thread, realizing that, for some reason, it’s self-lubricating. It twitches in his fingers as he smooths it out with his thumb and index finger several times before threading the needle.
“Ah, terrible manners! I thought that perhaps with all the experimenting that they did on you, poor Falcon, they might have killed off many of your nerves,” the Kushan says, bringing the writhing bobbin closer to the other man’s face. “So I thought that it was best to bring some of my own just in case! You never know when you might run out. Yes, yes, always best to be prepared, wouldn’t you think? Now they aren’t quite yours yet, so it might take them a moment to stop fighting and understand that they’re coming home to their new body.”
The warm scent of the writhing reel of nerves is what pushes Griffith over the edge, and he retches, the stomach acid burning his esophagus before splattering on the rusty table next to his face.
Immediately, the mystic shifts him onto his side. Arms and legs are flung over and rearranged so crudely that he’s surprised the weight of the chains doesn’t drag his limbs right out of their sockets. His hips scream at the new position, the weights pulling his muscles in unnatural directions that cause them to cramp, and he lets out a cry of pain.
“Shh, you aren’t the first one to throw up. Poor little nerves - they feel just like feathers, see?” the mystic says, patting Griffith’s back and rubbing the moist spool on the skin of his cheek. The wet kiss only encourages another wave of vomit to tear its way out of his body and splash next to his face, his entire body shuddering with the effort. “Poor little Falcon, I’d hoped the feeling of your feathers would have brought you some comfort. No matter, I’ll have you ready to fly in no time at all!”
Before Griffith can protest, the needle is already sliding through the severed tendons of his left wrist, and his fingers are forced to dance for the first time in months. He sees white when the Kushan pulls the needle through, the new nerve endings shrieking when they scrape against the old ones like a knife skidding across a plate.
His body arches off the table as the mystic's needle punctures the other half of the tendon, the thread of new nerves fluttering through the tissues as they’re reconnected crudely with every careless yank. Pain shoots up his arm, and he lets out a scream of agony with every tug of the needle and nerve-thread, joints straining against the weight of the chains keeping him anchored in place.
Tears streak down his face, and the mucus bubbles in his nostrils before rolling freely onto the cold iron beneath him. Bile and spit leak out of his mouth onto the table, and there’s the faint tell-tale iron bite of blood seeping into the puddle next to his face.
The new cells bite into his sinew angrily, and the unnatural fusion of foreign nerves and long-severed tissue is somehow more painful than when the torturer slashed them open gleefully all those months ago.
“Don’t worry, little bird,” the Kushan says, emphasizing his sentence with another yank of nerve-thread that causes his fingers to seize up into a fist before falling open again. “Your pretty wings will be pristine, just like they used to be.”
. . .
When Griffith rubs his eyes for the first time since capture, he admits that despite his newly attached tendons’ untimely baptism in tears, mucus, blood, spit, and drool, everything appears to function as though they once did.
What the mystic failed to warn Griffith about was the searing pain and how the new nerves would continue to hold a coup inside his body. He hopes that stretching and walking a bit might ease some of the agony, but no amount of pacing seems to be helping.
Casca immediately falls to her knees when she comes into the tent, and the bowl of soup splashes across the soft earth, the tears rolling down her face.
“It’s a miracle,” she whispers.
At least he’s able to offer her a hug this time when she weeps into his shoulders, whispering thanks to the gods and joking about leaving a donation the next time they pass by a roadside church.
She brings him a quill and a scroll, grumbling about needing to find where Guts has wandered off to this time, but hopes that there’s enough here for now to get him started.
The quill feels foreign between his fingers, and the brush of the feathers against his palm is enough to make the bile rise in his throat again.
He shakes his head with slightly more force than necessary to redirect his attention, dipping the offending feather into the ink well.
Perhaps this might be how he gets Guts to listen to him.
By the time he scrawls the last letter, Griffith’s nerves are howling louder than they did when the Kushan was fixing his Achilles.
At least he can finally hear his old captain’s voice outside of the tent.
Griffith rises to his feet when Guts enters the tent, and the taller man closes the distance between the two of them in three strides and yanks him into his chest. His arms wind around his soldier tightly, and for a moment, he wonders if this is what he should have done instead of pulling his sword out on that hill.
The embrace is both far longer than any Griffith had ever given to any soldier who wasn’t Casca, and not nearly long enough, and something twists in his chest when Guts finally pulls back.
He shoves the paper in Guts’s face, unable to stop himself from smiling at the confused look on the dark-haired man’s face. “Uh… thanks…” Guts says, squinting at the page in front of him. “Y’know, Judeau’s better at reading, so I’ll just go - ”
Griffith grabs Guts’s arm and squeezes tightly, unable to keep the sense of pride from welling up inside of him at how Guts immediately cuts himself off.
Perhaps the pain might have been worth something after all.
“Sure, you don’t wanna spar instead?” Guts asks, scratching the back of his neck and smiling slightly.
For a moment, Griffith entertains the idea - perhaps a friendly duel to make up for Guts leaving him that morning is in order - but the last thing that he needs right now is another loss while his new nerves are still attacking his body like a hostile entity.
He shakes his head and taps the page, miming for Guts to read out loud.
“Out loud? Me? I - fine, fine,” Guts says, brows furrowing as he stares at the page. “I… I… I never… imagined what dying would feel like… and then you left… my dream died in that dungeon… but you… you’re not leaving again… if you want to leave, you’ll have to kill me first…”
For the next hour, Guts slowly reads through the scroll, and Griffith watches as his knuckles blanch while gripping the scroll, and his hands start to shake.
“You’re not serious about me killing ya,” Guts says, finally setting the paper down.
The commander nods once, grabbing Guts’s hand and bringing it to Griffith’s neck, using his fingers to press Guts’s into his scarred skin.
He should understand by now that death would be a mercy.
- His skin
For the first time, he’s propped up in the chair in the dungeon, and he isn’t in any restraints.
Well, none that he can see, but the smile on the Kushan’s face makes him believe that the stranger has something to do with the fact that he can’t manage to move any of his limbs.
The other man leans down and pinches Griffith’s chin between his forefinger and thumb, tilting his head from one side to the other like he’s examining cattle at the market. He tries to pull his head away from the other man, but his muscles refuse to cooperate.
“Poor little Falcon, they plucked off all your feathers so that nobody would ever touch you again, didn’t they? Made sure that nobody would ever see you and see the saviour, didn’t they? Smile for me, won’t you?” the mystic coos, and Griffith’s lips stretch grotesquely against his will. “You must have been such a pretty bird, weren’t you? Yes, yes, but they took that away, didn’t they? No matter, I told that angry pet of yours that I’d fix your skin right up. Yes, yes - when he sees you again, it’ll be just like old times.”
The Kushan opens the bag at his feet, and the immediate dungeon is flooded with the putrid stench of blood and wet flesh.
He reaches down and pulls out what initially appears to be a flimsy, lubricated red mask with cut-outs for the eyes, nostrils, and mouth. But the closer the other man brings it to Griffith’s face, the more clearly he can see that the mask is made of skin and is slick with blood.
“Do you recognize it now? ‘Twasn’t easy to find - no, no, not in the slightest,” the other man says, tutting and running his dry fingers across the bloodied flesh. He holds up his stained palm to Griffith’s eyes. “See that? Managed to bring it back to life, just for you and - oh! Well, of course, you don’t recognize this side. Here, tell me- do you recognize this face now?”
There’s the small scar right beneath the left eye from when Gennon’s ring caught on the skin from when the greedy old bastard wanted to make eye contact while puppeteering his head.
An atrophic pocket near his nose from when one of his mother’s suitors had brought some kind of pox that would end up claiming her life.
The small jagged line next to his lip from when Guts had entered the tent abruptly while he was shaving, and his captain took it upon himself to play camp nurse. He insisted on making up for the disruption, and no amount of placation was enough to stop the taller man from spending the next half hour fussing over the wound.
Not that Griffith had minded having Guts’s hands on his face, or hearing him mutter to himself while cleaning the laceration.
Despite Guts’s assurances that the mark would go away entirely, he knew it wouldn’t. In fact, he had been banking on that very fact.
The only scar he wears like a war medallion.
The flesh mask is weeping blood onto the Kushan’s fingers, and the skin itself looks like it's covered in a fine layer of perspiration. He swears that he can see new beads of sweat form and roll down the sides of his dismembered face’s cheeks, dripping onto the squalid floor of the cell.
“See? It’s just like looking into a mirror!” he chuckles, holding Griffith’s flayed skin to his face as though it were a carnival mask, his beady eyes dancing behind it. “Don’t worry, it’ll bond to your skin very easily - the veins are very eager to reattach, you see?”
The mystic leans forward to wrap the skin around Griffith’s face, and he’s frozen in place as he watches at least a thousand bloodied points rise to the surface of the flayed skin. They writhe towards him, hissing angrily before leaping forward and hooking themselves into his flesh.
The pain is instantaneous.
It feels as though the torturer had pierced his face with hundreds of needles. The angry red arrows skitter across his face and burrow into his skin upon contact. He tries to open his mouth, but the needles are threading their way through the muscles of his skin and constricting, tying themselves on tightly, lest they ever be torn off again.
Gall boils in his stomach, body unable to even retch like it’s begging to.
New blood weeps from the old tissue, and briny sweat slides down the newly and crudely reattached tissue, and it carves trails down the exposed muscle of his neck.
“There, you’re looking more like yourself already - now stretch out your hand for me,” the mystic demands, and his arm marionettes forward into a blood-slicked glove of flesh with veins that burrow down into his marrow upon contact. “Just like putting your old armor again, isn’t it?”
. . .
It’s Casca’s idea to look under the mask.
After looking at the miracle wrapped around what used to be a patchwork of scar tissue, she suggests that they try to take off his mask and see his face.
It’s just the two of them after all, and he knows that she’ll spare him the embarrassment of a public spectacle.
Griffith can hear his heart pounding in his ears as Casca opens his helmet with shaking hands, his heart daring to soar for the first time when she lets out a soft gasp.
She bursts into tears and lets the offending object fall to the dirt beside them, burying her face in the crook of his shoulder and whispering about how she can’t believe he’s back, he’s really back.
And when she holds up a mirror so he can see his own reflection, tears roll down his face too as he stares back at a face that finally looks familiar again.
For a moment - just a singular moment - he lets himself believe that it’s possible for things to somewhat look like the way they once did.
Her eyes sparkle with joyous tears as she feeds him breakfast, and even swallowing the lukewarm sludge off the wooden spoon feels easier today.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” she says, and for the first time, he lets himself believe it.
Perhaps that’s why Guts chose to find a way to give him his skin back, Griffith thinks to himself as Casca brushes his curls carefully.
She fetches the others quickly, and it doesn’t take long until news spreads.
Judeau claps him on the shoulder, smiling brightly. “The Hawks were due for a comeback.”
Rickert clings to Griffith for at least 10 minutes and sobs about how much he missed him.
Pippin clasps his hands once Rickert is done and nods at Griffith once, and the former commander can’t help but smile back.
Corkus, surprisingly, isn’t able to say anything beyond an initial noise of surprise. The tears tracking down his face say enough.
It takes longer than Griffith expected for Guts to show up, but nothing compares to how his captain’s face lights up once their eyes meet.
The taller man crosses the room in two strides and pulls him into a tight embrace.
Nothing quite compares to the feeling of having Guts’s warm skin against his own, Griffith thinks as his commander presses his cheek against his.
Perhaps someday in a very distant future, it’ll be possible for Griffith to entertain the idea of forgiving him for leaving that day.
“It worked,” Guts whispers incredulously, pulling back slightly and looking at the commander. “You’re back.”
And so are you.
Or at least, that’s what Griffith wants to say, but when he opens his mouth, all that manages to come out is a broken “ah.”
Guts stiffens, and Griffith’s illusions about life resuming a somewhat familiar form shatter alongside the smiles of every Hawk sitting around him.
The look of horror on Guts’s face tells him everything that he needs to know.
“Ah,” Griffith grunts in an attempt to reassure them, but all the noise succeeds in doing is causing the band to withdraw as though he’d wounded each of them with the singular sound.
Judeau’s smile drops into a neutral expression, and both Casca and Pippin look away. Rickert whispers an apology before springing up and leaving the tent. Corkus mutters something about needing to figure out what’s going on with Rickert and follows suit.
Even Guts stumbles backwards ever so slightly.
“I think that’s enough excitement for one day,” Casca says, glaring at the swordsman, and Griffith wonders if she suspects that he’s somehow responsible. “Why don’t you all tell the rest of the camp to stop sitting around and get to work?”
True to form, Guts leaves again without much of a fight.
At least this time, he looks apologetic.
- The sun will rise again.
Most nights, he can’t dream anymore - not of a cobblestone road to the kingdom, not of snowy footprints heading in the wrong direction, and not of a life outside of the body that feels less and less familiar each day.
He’s got nothing to barter with anymore - not for the crown, not for the only man that made the throne look like nothing more than just another chair.
If only he hadn’t let the dream slip out of his fingers the day he cupped Guts’s face on that hill.
He spent too many dark nights in the bowels of the tower attempting to convince himself that if given the choice, even after all the torture, he might still want the Behelit back instead of the boy.
But even someone who’s spent most of his life lying to themselves for the sake of preserving his sanity, there’s only so much he can do to shield himself from the truth.
When Casca comes in to help exercise his muscles and talks about the future animatedly, he can’t help but notice the shadows stretching longer and longer beneath her eyes.
How much longer will she be content playing dutiful wife? He wonders as she spoons some puree into his mouth, talking about how the nutrients in the fruits will help him heal. How long until the other Hawks start to push back and declare the rescue mission an abject failure?
Casca is stubborn, but there’s only so long that any commander can go without the voices of dissent catching up to them.
The loyalty to Griffith is fine while the days are long and they’re still in farmland, but how long will it last when the food is scarce during the next winter, when they’re enemies of the crown without their leader?
“Try to get some rest,” she says, squeezing his shoulder lightly. “I don’t know where Guts has run off to now, but I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”
That’s the most anyone can hope for from Guts, Griffith muses to himself.
Somehow, he’ll make sure that Guts never tries to leave or anything quite so ridiculous again.
The how is still yet to be determined, but for now, all he knows is that his former captain has duties he needs to fulfill later tonight, so he’s not in immediate danger yet.
“Yo.”
Griffith looks up as Guts drops his satchel on the floor. There’s fresh blood on his wrist bindings, and there’s an undecipherable melancholy in those dark eyes yet again. “Wanna sit outside? ‘S kinda nice.”
Griffith nods.
Perhaps if he finds a way to keep Guts busy, it’ll be enough to keep him from leaving again.
Guts helps him out of the tent, and they sit in the soft grass on the edge of camp.
Birds are still chirping cheerfully, and the air is full of laughter and animated conversation. Corkus must have convinced someone to crack open a barrel of ale because Griffith can already hear him leading some of the others in song loudly and off-key in the distance.
Guts takes Griffith’s ankle in both of his hands, and it causes Griffith to involuntarily shudder as he starts to work the sensitive muscles with his fingers. The taller man smiles slightly, and Griffith can feel himself starting to relax into his touch.
The setting sun is nearly eclipsed by Guts, casting a warm red ethereal glow on the captain. He leans forward as he bends Griffith’s knee inward, and for a moment, the only thing he can focus on is just how warm the other man’s breath is.
Brown eyes meet blue, and in that moment, Griffith decides he’ll do whatever he needs to in order to keep Guts.
Not even the gods themselves will have him without killing Griffith first.