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At some point—though they couldn’t say when—Queen had stopped looking for a cure.
For multiple reasons, really. There weren’t many sorcerers nowadays who kept their profession out in the open, so it was difficult to even find them, and if they did find one they could never seem to pay the price, be it gold or favours or information or blood . Honestly, Queen thought they might’ve just grown tired of being let down. That was much more exhausting than the curse itself ever had been.
Yes, they’d have taken a cure, had it been handed to them freely with no strings attached, but the toll it took on them to constantly be searching for one, never finding it, never free, always lacking—no. Their mind was their sharpest tool, and they could not afford to lose any more of it.
So, you know. Whatever. They couldn’t finish songs. They’d grown accustomed to it, had learned to reignite their joy in creation within these newfound barriers. Words did flow best when restrained, after all.
Gryffon, though—well, Queen wasn’t sure if he had other plans, or if he wasn’t aware of what he was doing in the first place, but he had been quite encouraging through all this.
Queen could not will their hands to write words down as they came to mind, seized with uncontrollable cramps as soon as they set quill to paper with the intention of writing down their thoughts. So, Gryffon had started doing it for them.
They’d lost their ear for tune and pitch, unable to tell if the notes were lifting one another up or melting together into a discordant mess, so Gryffon had begun making encouraging—albeit short and vague—comments whenever they sounded particularly nice.
They could not remember melodies for long, could feel them slip through their fingers like sand, try as they might to hold on. So, Gryffon remembered.
During the brightest days, when he volunteered to watch the ship while everyone else went out to explore whatever island they’d landed on, Queen would find him humming to himself by the time they returned. They’d learned to approach quietly, for he would stop the moment he noticed them. Queen wasn’t sure he was even aware that it was their songs he was humming, but it always seemed deliberate, like something he was sparing a morsel of thought to instead of letting notes come as they pleased. Like he was trying to get it right.
Their creations, half-baked and unsung as they were, lived on in him. Deliberately or not. Their curse had doomed them to a life of halves, fractions, portions, and yet Gryffon hummed their songs like they had an ending, like he was simply repeating his favourite parts as they were stuck in his head.
They would never sing before an audience again, and yet Gryffon knew all their works by heart the way people used to. They’d never feel the satisfaction of a finished song again, would never get to pick the best ones for the occasion from a near endless repertoire, and yet Gryffon softened whenever he heard them play, like it soothed something deep in his bones. Entire towns used to know their name, their face, would treat them to ale on the house in exchange for a night of merry tunes, and losing all that, their purpose in life, their soul’s truest calling, that’d devastated them, and yet—
And yet, Gryffon tapped his fingers and bobbed his head and smiled like they’d never seen in those brief moments before he became aware of their presence and his lips turned pink.
Well, Queen was sure the rest of him turned pink, too, but his lips were the only part of him not covered by fur. Though they did feel the heat beneath it all whenever they strode up to him, pretending they hadn’t heard, greeting him like it was just another day that did not tug at the strings of their heart with the way their music was lost to them but played on loop within him, whether they were able to work on it or not.
One day, they’d caught him writing possible continuations of their lyrics in his notebook, leatherbound and beautiful, meant for important things to be preserved for the future, and they still remembered the look of concern on his face when they’d burst into tears, looking at him in silence at first as it all overflowed before throwing themself at him to gasp their heart’s essence into his chest.
They could not sing his additions, couldn’t get their lips to form the words, couldn’t remember the melody no matter how many times they listened to him hum it. But still it lived on, as music always did, outliving its artist. Already their songs had outlived them; Queen could no longer perform them, but someone out there loved them, kept them in his mouth as he went about his daily work. Someone out there, right beside them, who kept all they held dear close to their chest when they could no longer shape their arms properly, when they dropped it at his feet when it got too heavy. He carried it for them, kept it where it belonged.
Their music was his more than it was theirs by now, but they still loved him for it. They loved him for a great deal of things. Oftentimes they cried because that alone was too much for their narrow body to hold, because they wanted to tell him every day, every time they felt like it, which was every second of every day, I love you, I love you, I love you, but—they didn’t know if it was safe to tell him, if it wouldn’t just fade from their mind like everything else that cried out from the farthest corners of their heart, begging to be released. Gods knew there was nothing that came as deeply from their heart as this. They didn’t want to forget the words.
But then, they didn’t want him to forget, either, if they could no longer say it—if they’d been able to say it all along and had chosen not to. If anything, that’d be the greater tragedy.
The choice was an easy one, all things considered. Only a few sleepless nights later, Queen found Gryffon early in the morning, looking out over the sea as he always did. The sky was purple around the edges, way out there on the horizon where the sea reached for it, still glittering with stars, the moon tilted overhead. He liked the peace, Gryffon had once said, when everyone was still asleep, when the ship was quiet save for the gentle creaks as it bobbed in the sea’s cradle, when there was nothing that needed to be done.
Gryffon exhaled the other way when he noticed them coming, making sure to breathe his smoke away from them. Queen was conflicted about it; on one hand, smoking was unthinkable for them, even now that their whole livelihood no longer depended on the quality of their voice, but on the other, they quite liked the smell. Gryffon’s smoke, anyway, not the cheap, shoddily rolled cigarettes that every island seemed to sell regardless of their usual exports. The stuff Gryffon lined his cigars with was nature alone, and the scent clung to his clothes and fur, lingered on his breath long after the ashes had burned out.
They still appreciated the gesture, though. Gryffon held his cigar far away, a dark orange glow kept between two fingers as they joined him at the railing, and they knew he would not take another drag until they were at a safe distance again.
“Hey,” he said, his low rumble even deeper this early in the morning. Queen wrapped an arm around the cold metal at his side; they knew he had no sensation in this arm, but he’d told them once that he still felt some of their touches in his shoulder where the limb connected.
Besides, Gryffon had always carried himself like something frightening, and they knew that deep down he was afraid to break them, afraid that he couldn’t turn off the meanness enough to be palatable for them. So, they hugged his gun, a part of his body like any other and just as worthy of love, if only for the slight sensation it might give him to love it. If only for all it had done to protect Queen—and the entire crew, really. For all the effort he put in to be intimidating, Gryffon hadn’t once raised hand nor gun nor voice against his companions.
Well, save for the times where he was forced to physically remove Chip from trouble by throwing him over his shoulder, but if anything that was even more of a testament to how much he cared.
“Could you write something down for me?” Queen asked, resting their head on the shoulder plate of his arm, right where the stylised Jolly Roger sat. Doesn’t need to be now, they would’ve added, but they heard the plop of Gryffon’s cigar dropping into the sea before they had the time to tack it on. They made a struck sort of sound, something that said oh, Gryffon, but Gryffon seemed unfazed, unaffected by as grand of a gesture as this. Expensive pleasures, tossed into the sea for Queen’s mere convenience. His hand and ears always ready for them, should they need it.
Helpless, Queen watched him dig his notebook out of a large pocket in his pants, laying it open on the railing—because it did feel a bit like helplessness. Positively so, but helplessness nonetheless. Helpless to his undying devotion, unable to stop him from it if they’d wanted to; helpless to all the things he’d sacrifice for them. If there’d been a bullet headed Queen’s way, they knew they could not stop Gryffon from shoving them out of the way and taking their place, and if there’d been only one slice left of those lemon tarts that Gryffon would never admit to loving, Queen could not talk him out of refusing it so that they might have it, and if they’d woken him up late at night because the world felt like it was tilting, only for them to realise a few desperate, breathless minutes later that it had simply been the usual panic that seized them randomly, Gryffon would not take no for an answer when he offered a spot on his bedroll, open and warm for them, as well as his chest, comfortable and unclothed for the night so they could run their hands along whatever tuft of fur they liked, and—
Gods, they really just needed him to know. Even if their mouth would never form the words again after that.
Gryffon was giving them an expectant look, having slipped a pencil out of the loop attached to the book, and Queen took a deep breath to stop their voice from failing them. “I,” they said shakily, enunciating, like it was a difficult thing to spell, like it was another word Gryffon would need defined first because language that flowery wasn’t used where he came from.
“Mhm,” Gryffon hummed, taking his eyes off them only for a second to write before lifting his head again.
“Love.”
“Yup.”
“You.”
“Okay.”
Queen said nothing. For a short, eternal moment, Gryffon kept his head down, awaiting further instruction. And then, he looked at them, an eyebrow raised. “That’s it?”
“Yes, la. I don’t want to forget that, too. And… I don’t want you to forget it, either, la, in case I can’t say it anymore.”
Gryffon looked unsure, as if mid-sentence, his lips hanging loosely around a thought that’d broken off and turned into another. Queen could pinpoint the exact moment he stopped interpreting and started understanding, his pencil slipping from his unmoving hand, his movements tense as he stopped it from falling.
“Queen,” he said, a breathless, grasping-at-straws sort of whisper, and Queen looked on, determined, not having any of that pleading undertone, that expression that said please reconsider. They didn’t wanna hear it; they’d heard quite enough of Gryffon’s doubts, the way he thought he wasn’t good for them, that he attracted bad luck, that he couldn’t always be there to protect them no matter how hard he tried.
They had no time to consider things like that. They might’ve both died tomorrow, be it at the hands of the sea, a creature, or another person, and life was simply too fucking short.
“I know,” they told him, hoping to encompass all of this. “La, you don’t have to say it back. I just want you to remember in case I can’t.”
In the dark, the red of his mechanical eye cast a warm glow on the rest of his face, catching in the tips of his fur, his damp snout, the other eye that looked at them with a softness they’d never seen.
“I know you love me,” they added, because perhaps Gryffon hadn’t known this either. Perhaps he’d thought himself subtler than he really was, all his feelings tucked to his chest when they were, in reality, spilling out whenever he laid eyes on Queen. They turned to him, laid a hand on his chest, feeling the steady pound there. “You don’t have to say it back.”
They, too, couldn’t help but spill their guts for him whenever they were near him, and they were sure the entire ship knew that they’d have torn the world in two for him, but they weren’t sure Gryffon had the means to receive it. He’d always described himself as bad with feelings, would struggle to bend his heavy tongue into kind words when they were needed. But Queen didn’t need him to say it. They just needed him to know that his feelings were returned, because they weren’t sure he would know if they didn’t tell him.
Blindly, Gryffon reached out for his notebook where he’d left it and closed it, placed the pencil back in its loop, and stuffed the whole thing back into his pocket, without letting his eyes leave Queen’s.
And then, he pulled them against him like he thought they might turn to thin air otherwise. Queen found the air knocked out of their lungs, colliding with the solid mass of his torso for a moment before Gryffon shifted, fitting them together the way they usually did with Queen on their toes as Gryffon wrapped himself around them, bending at the knees to meet them in the middle, and for a moment Queen just existed in that, winding their arms around his neck to place their cheek to his, breathing into that lovely hair. It, too, carried the herbal scent of his cigar, though there was also something else. Something uniquely him.
Just when they’d settled into a position, they felt Gryffon’s arm hold them tighter, and he lifted them, though they found semi-solid ground again soon enough. Gryffon had sat them down on the ship’s railing, dangerously balanced on the narrow wood, but his arm was still spread across their back, holding them steady. He did not emerge from where he’d buried his face in their neck, but even so, he would not let them fall. Queen felt safe in the way he was holding them—the way he held them every time they were close, throwing dexterity and attentiveness to the wind in favour of throwing his only arm around them, or guiding them as they walked ahead of him, his hand on their back like a man much more chivalrous than Gryffon, guiding his lady.
The thought made them laugh—as did the fact that, after months of uncovering Gryffon piece by piece, learning his past, his interests, his sense of humour, finding that there was little he had nothing to say about, it was this that left him speechless. Gryffon, who was only quiet out of habit, not out of desire, who had spent nearly every night talking about anything and everything with Queen as they passed wine back and forth, was reduced to a heap of fur holding Queen like he didn’t know what else to do with himself, giving a drawn-out, contented huff when Queen found his scalp and began drawing little lines over it with their nails.
He was such a softie, and Queen had never been as grateful for anything as they were that he was letting them see that. He was a soft, cuddly teddy bear on the inside—and the outside, too, when his gun had been laid aside for the night and he was left with nothing but seven feet of surprisingly soft fur that he let Queen toy with to keep a hold of their train of thought.
Sitting on the railing like this while Gryffon was bent down, they could hold him more comfortably than they could when they were both standing, and they took full advantage of it now, scratching all the spots that they could normally only reach when they were in his lap. Gryffon melted a little further into them with every second, and Queen could only imagine what was going on in his head, how deep this must have struck for him to turn to putty like this.
“I love you,” they told him, soft-voiced and close to his ear, and—”I love you,” when they realised they could. Their tongue obeyed them, their lips moved at will. Gryffon squeezed them a little tighter. “La, is it alright that I told you?”
Against their shoulder, Gryffon made a distinctly inhuman sound, a little chirrup that seemed to come from way down in his chest. In the brief moment it took Queen to interpret it, he seemed to realise what had come out of him, and he nodded for good measure.
“Aw,” Queen said, continuing to draw their fingers over his head, scraping right between the ears. “You take your time, la. We’ve got plenty of it.” The sun’s very top had begun peeking out from the horizon, shimmering red and brilliant on the skin of the sea. “And it seems I can tell you as many times as you like.”
At that, Gryffon pulled away slightly. He turned his head, and there was a split second where Queen saw him open his mouth before he had their entire shoulder between his teeth. Gently, though. The slightest amount of pressure, positioning his jaw just so that his canines would neither cut nor poke. Always gentle, even when he seemed to not know what to do. He released them after a moment, laying his forehead on Queen’s shoulder, and sure, Queen’s back was beginning to ache, and the railing wasn’t the most comfortable spot to be sitting either, and they hadn’t eaten yet, but all of that could wait in favour of holding Gryffon the way he so clearly needed. A talk would need to be had about this, but it could wait.
“I love you,” Queen told him again, feeling Gryffon’s face rise into a smile against their collarbone, and they knew they’d have waited all day for him to be ready. Whatever he needed. For him, they’d have waited a thousand years, walking at his side as they took it at his pace, just as he’d done for them.