Work Text:
The rumours spread through Midland and past its borders like a root system, tendrils snaking their way through fertile soil and nudging into every isolated corner until there’s no avoiding them. They start as whispers and grow deafening. The Hawk of Light has not been seen in public for days, for weeks, for a month now. The Hawk of Light is dead.
Guts tells himself he’s only going to Falconia to be sure it’s true.
He tells the others to stay behind. He doesn’t want them within a hundred miles of that poisoned confection of a city ever again. None of them even fight him on it. By the look on Casca’s face, she’s got no desire to get near the place, not even to see for certain the bastard’s dead.
But Guts has to know. He’s not gonna believe it until he sees a body. Selling lies is what Griffith does now, after all.
The closer he gets to the city, the more intricate the rumours become. Nobody knows how Griffith died, but there’s plenty of speculation: he was sick, he was poisoned, or even—the one that startles an ugly laugh out of Guts when he hears it—he died of a broken heart.
That one comes up as he’s passing through a market town a few miles outside the city. The woman who says it is a skinny slip of a thing clutching a basket of worm-eaten apples to her chest. She hears Guts’ mirthless snort and shoots him a glare before turning back to her companion. “They do say Lord Griffith was a commoner. Maybe he had a sweetheart, some peasant girl he had to give up for the good of the kingdom. Just like an old legend!”
Her friend sighs dreamily. Guts pulls the hood of his cloak up to cover his face and keeps walking.
He doesn’t think he was ever young enough to believe that kinda romantic bullshit. But everybody’s got stories they cling to.
There are days when he believes absolutely that the real Griffith, his Griffith, died there in the lake when the sun went out, or even earlier—in the dungeon before Guts ever saw him again or on a snowy hillside outside Windham as he walked away. The thing that wears Griffith’s face now is an impostor, a cold, inhuman intelligence in a painted mask.
And there are days when he knows that’s not true. He remembers the old Griffith standing beside the fountain at Promrose Hall, eyes alight with triumph even as he learned Guts had killed a child for him. He sees the new Griffith’s reborn face, all uncanny perfection, turn soft with uncomprehending sorrow and feels a throb like a wound in the centre of his chest. There’s no separating man from monster. They’re grown together like vines.
On the outskirts of the city he stops to buy a hat, the better to hide his missing eye and the white in his hair. It’s a battered, secondhand piece of crap, but as he hands over his money he finds himself remembering another shop, a lifetime ago.
It was a couple days before the ball. He stood there tugging awkwardly at the fancy outfit Griffith had picked out, grumbling, “I feel like a goddamn clown in this stuff,” and Griffith stepped in close to brush imaginary dust off his shoulders.
“Nonsense,” he said, “you look dashing,” and Guts retorted, “You sound insane,” on reflex, but his cheeks burned as Griffith smiled up at him. He had that way of looking at people, bright and marvel-struck as a child, that made you feel like the centre of the whole wide world. Not for the first time, Guts almost wished he’d never overheard Griffith talking to the princess, because otherwise he coulda believed—
“You’ll be here to pay your respects, then,” the shopkeeper says, startling Guts out of his memories. The guy looks about a hundred years old, with the stoop and permanent grimace of someone whose joints were ready to give up the ghost a decade ago.
Guts makes a face. “Something like that, sure.” He turns to go, but the old geezer isn’t done talking.
“They’re saying those who touch the hem of his sleeve come away cured of all ills. Like a true saint!” He rubs at his elbow and winces. “Maybe I should pay my respects, too.”
Guts heads for the door. “Don’t bother. Ain’t no such thing as miracles.”
But as he rejoins the crowd converging on the castle, he can’t keep from seeing it in the faces around him—an enthralled longing, their eyes raised like they’re waiting for a glimpse of the divine. People weep openly in the street. There are peddlers selling trinkets as if they’re holy relics: scraps of cloth they claim were touched by the Hawk of Light himself and locks of straw-blond hair that definitely didn’t come from Griffith’s head.
One of them shoves a fistful of scraggly white flowers in Guts’ face. “From the royal gardens!” she chirps. “Where he used to walk every day!”
Guts elbows past her with a snarl. Tries to walk faster but the crowd is thick now, closing in all around him. The press of bodies and the breathless devotion in the atmosphere are making him claustrophobic.
Up ahead, a cry splits the air. “Here he comes!” The crowd surges forward. Guts doesn’t have much choice but to go with it. He casts around for an exit, an alleyway or an alcove he can duck into.
Then he sees what’s passing along the main thoroughfare in front of them and freezes where he stands.
It’s a glass coffin, like something out of a fairytale. The sun glances off it, the glare so piercing Guts has to shade his good eye and squint to see what’s inside. He’s too far back in the crowd to get more than a glimpse, but it’s enough. He’d know that profile, that serene expression, that cascade of silver-white hair, anywhere.
The crowd has come to a standstill. A thousand pairs of worshipful eyes fix on the coffin. Guts shoulders his way through the mourners, but it’s slow going. He gets to the main drag just in time to see the carriage—an ornate, silver thing pulled by black horses with feathered plumes on their heads—disappear in the direction of a building with a huge spire.
He turns to the nearest mourner. “What’s that place?”
It takes her a moment to notice she’s being spoken to, like she’s in a drunken stupor. “Hm?”
Guts points. “That building. What is it?”
The woman blinks a few times before following his gaze. “The cathedral. It’s where he’ll lie in state.” She presses a hand to her breast and her eyes glaze over again, like she’s forgotten Guts is there at all. “Such a tragedy. Why do the good always die young?”
###
The cathedral is guarded, but not as heavily as Guts expected. He’s surprised they don’t have the whole place locked down against vultures looking to strip Griffith’s corpse for parts.
Then again, there’s an uncanny feeling that sits around the building like a bank of fog, making the hairs on the back of Guts’ neck stand up when he gets close. Maybe the Falconians sense it too, somewhere deep down. There has to be a part of them that knows Griffith is wrong.
He dispatches the two guards at the south entrance easy, and after that it’s no trouble to slip inside. His footsteps echo in the vast, dim space of the nave. He treads carefully, holds his breath.
The air is heavy with perfume, incense and lilies. Griffith’s bier sits in the centre of the nave, surrounded by white candles. Their flames bend in the breeze like heads bowed in prayer as Guts approaches, their flickering light soft and warm.
But beneath the glass, Griffith lies cold and white as an alien star. Guts picks his way through the thicket of candles. He hesitates a second beside the bier before leaning close enough that his breath mists the glass.
When Griffith was alive, really alive, he seemed to gather light to him. It was like the sun wanted to shine on him, like the torches and candle flames stood to attention in his presence, burning brighter, leaping higher. Now he gives off his own icy glow, putting the candles to shame, unearthly pale as snowlight under a full moon.
It makes him look untouchable.
Guts lays his palm against the cold glass and feels a pang somewhere inside himself, deep-buried and unexpected. “You bastard,” he says, and scowls at the tremor in his voice. “Why couldn’t you just be…” A rotting corpse? A marble statue on a tombstone? Alive to torment me for the rest of my miserable goddamn life? “Fuck, why couldn’t you just be you ?”
Back in their old life, he used to tease Griffith about all the sculptors and portrait-painters he’d have to stand still for once he got his throne, how bored out of his skull he was gonna be. Griffith would smile and say, “If that’s all the price I have to pay, I’ll consider it a bargain.”
It’s like Griffith has cut out the middleman completely now, disappeared into the image of himself.
Guts’ hands seem to move of their own accord, lifting the lid of the coffin. The left one scrapes the glass loud enough he freezes, sure he’s summoned half-a-dozen guards from outside, but nobody shows.
And he’s alone with Griffith, nothing between them but a few inches of empty air.
First time since the lake.
He searches Griffith’s face, not sure what he’s looking for. The flutter of an eyelid, the faint rise and fall of breath, because even now with all the evidence before him he’s not sure he can truly believe Griffith is gone? The flaw in the facade, the miniscule difference that will prove once and for all that this isn’t the man Guts knew, and that he’s bound to spot eventually if he just looks hard enough?
The evidence of what killed Griffith, because goddammit, it shoulda been him?
It was supposed to be him.
Guts doesn’t find any of those things. Griffith lies still and perfect and scarless, like nothing in this world has ever touched him. His right hand rests on top of his chest, white-gloved, fingers curled around the ivory-inlaid handle of a rapier. Not the one he used to use; Guts would know that anywhere. This thing looks ornamental, like it’s never seen action.
Griffith’s other hand rests at his side, empty.
Maybe it’s suspicion that makes Guts reach for it, tugging the buttery leather of Griffith’s glove out the way to feel for a pulse.
There’s none, of course. The skin is soft and cold, the fine bones of Griffith’s wrist delicate as a child’s. Guts grits his teeth against an irruption of memory: the dank, stinking underbelly of the tower, Griffith reaching for him with a wasted arm. He isn’t sure even now if it was supposed to be an embrace or a chokehold. He guesses it doesn’t matter much. What sticks in his mind is Griffith’s hand flopping against his shoulder, ruined and useless as a bundle of dried twigs.
Now, even the calluses Griffith should have from handling a sword are gone. The bases of his fingers, the webbing between thumb and pointer, are petal-soft. It could be a scholar’s hand, a court lady’s, the hand of a spoiled princeling who never had to shed a drop of sweat or blood for his throne.
It fucking figures. All the things Griffith’s done, and he gets to leave this world without a mark to show for them.
After a moment, Guts sees that his own scarred fingers are threaded between Griffith’s bone-white ones.
He drops Griffith’s hand as though scalded. The way it lolls bonelessly over the side of the coffin is, stupidly, surprising. Guts realises he’s waiting for Griffith to tuck it primly back in against his side; to laugh at him the way he used to; to say, No need to carry on like that, sometimes a touch is just a touch.
Only it never was, was it? That nameless longing that used to hang between them was there right from the start, only he was too young and dumb and scared to see it.
It still is, in whatever twisted, polluted form, throbbing like an old wound in winter.
He finds himself moving Griffith’s right hand and that too-shiny sword aside, fumbling open the buttons of the pristine white shirt he’s wearing. Guts tells himself he’s looking for clues. Whatever killed Griffith has to have left some evidence—discoloration from poison or bruises around his throat or a puncture wound somewhere on his chest. Surely something in this world must’ve left a mark on him, even if it wasn’t Guts.
He presses his fingertips to the hollow of Griffith’s throat, the flat of his palm over Griffith’s breastbone like he’s feeling for cracks. There’s nothing but unblemished skin, the perfect construct of a body inside which no heart beats.
It’s only a drop of moisture landing on Griffith's sleeve that alerts Guts to the fact he’s crying.
He swipes the back of his right hand angrily across his face. Griffith doesn’t deserve a single goddamn tear.
Telling himself that doesn’t make a scrap of difference. The tears well up from someplace deeper in him than even his rage. After a few minutes’ furious, choking resistance, he stops fighting them and covers his face with his hands.
The next thing Guts is aware of is a thumb on his cheek, brushing away a tear from beneath his good eye. He blinks and looks around, but knows even before he does so that he’s not in the cathedral anymore.
He’s on a grassy hill that could be any one of hundreds, overlooking a campsite dotted with fires like beacons in the twilight. Griffith sits opposite him, cross-legged on the ground. There are bits of grass in his hair.
But he doesn’t look like he used to, not completely. He wears his reborn face, carved like a marble statue, and when the loose tunic he’s wearing slips down to show his bare upper arm, the fine scars that used to be there are gone. His expression is impossible to read.
“I thought this might be easier for you,” he says. “You don’t like my city, after all.”
Guts bares his teeth. “I knew it. It was a lie. You’re alive.”
Griffith inclines his head. “Not exactly.”
“So you’re—what, a ghost?” That’d figure, for Griffith to be something he can’t even fight.
“Not exactly that, either.” Griffith smiles a tiny smile. “I’m a dream.” He touches Guts’ face again, fingertips resting lightly against his temple. “Maybe that’s all we ever are. But right now, I’m your dream.”
Guts shakes off his hand. “Fuck no. A nightmare’s what you are.”
“Then why did you dream me?”
“Hell if I know. Maybe I’m just tryna figure out what happened. What killed you. Because I kinda figured nothing could.”
“Should I tell you?” There’s a hint of mischief in Griffith’s expression now, something that used to mean Guts was about to end up dunked in the river as part of a childish prank, or trying some stupid, semi-suicidal stunt because Griffith dared him to. An old look that sits wrong on Griffith’s new face. “What would you believe, I wonder? Would you believe that I repented of my sins and drank poison, no longer able to live with what I’d done?”
Griffith waves a hand and his eyes film over with white, veins pulsing black in his neck. His face takes on the dead grey pallor of a days-old corpse, nothing like the pristine white of his countenance back in the cathedral.
“Or how about this: I cried out your name while we were making love and Charlotte, sick with jealousy, stabbed me through the heart while I slept?”
The black veins and the grey cast disappear. Instead, a red stain blooms on the breast of Griffith’s tunic, opening wide and wet like a mouth.
“Would that satisfy you? Knowing you were the one to kill me, even if it was her hand that held the knife?”
Guts’ mouth goes dry. “That’s not—you wouldn’t—”
The look Griffith gives him is so full of pity he can’t even finish the sentence.
With another wave of Griffith’s hand, the bloodstain vanishes. “Would you believe this?” he says, and inches closer, lays his palm flat on Guts’ chest. “All hearts give out in the end, even the strongest. And mine was not as strong as either of us hoped.”
Guts’ heart pounds beneath his hand. He wants to run. He wants to smash Griffith’s face in, exorcise this demon from his head once and for all.
He doesn’t move a muscle.
They’re sitting so close together he should be able to feel Griffith’s breathing, but there’s only the evening air cool and still between them. “Would you believe I was just tired? Wanting and wanting and winning and winning; and working every day to convince myself it meant anything without…” The smile returns. This time it is terribly sad.
Guts oughta say, Fuck you. He oughta say, I wouldn’t believe the sky was blue if it was you that told me.
He says, “Without what?”
There’s the pitying look again, for the space of a heartbeat, before Griffith leans in and kisses him.
His mouth is so cold, cold as water drunk fresh from the stream, and the cold flows into Guts, spreads through him like ice in his veins and wraps around his heart. It freezes him where he sits. He can’t break the kiss, can’t push Griffith away, can’t do anything at all.
At last, Griffith pulls away from him. His eyes are wide and wet and—surprised. He puts a hand to his own lips. Then to his chest, where the imaginary bloodstain was a moment ago. “Oh,” he says, in shock and delight, and this time when he smiles it’s soft and real and so achingly familiar. “There you are.”
Guts puts out a hand toward him—
—and wakes sitting on the bier, slumped against the glass coffin. Griffith’s corpse is clutched in his arms, head resting on his chest as though he’s fallen asleep there, listening to Guts’ heartbeat. Still halfway tangled up in the dream, Guts fumbles for his wrist, feels for a pulse. Griffith’s skin is warm…
But there’s nothing. It’s only residual heat from his own body. Guts doesn’t even know how long he’s been here, but the stained-glass window above the altar is letting in the first rays of sunlight. There’ll be people here soon.
He lets Griffith fall back into the casket. Staggers to his feet, legs half-asleep, and stands there for a long moment, staring down at that unmoving face.
Then he bends over the coffin and presses his lips to Griffith’s dead ones.
It feels like defeat.
But it doesn’t feel like Griffith has won.
When the Queen arrives with the first bells of morning, she finds two of her guards dead. A thief has snuck in during the night and taken nothing but her husband’s ceremonial sword.
###
Guts arrives at the Hill of Swords in the grey hour before dawn. Even if it were the middle of the day there’s nobody living around to notice his presence. It hasn’t snowed in days, but the ground is still carpeted with it, undisturbed. Always seems to be winter in this place. His footprints are probably the first here in months.
He unsheathes the stolen saber and plants it in the ground at the top of the hill. Stands there looking at it, unsatisfied.
It doesn’t fit. It’s too new and clean and fancy. No way it belonged to a Hawk. He pulls it out of the snow, lays it on the ground and steadies it there with his foot. Draws his own sword.
The polished blade breaks on the first strike.
Guts leaves both halves there on the ground, hilt and blade lying together, severed, almost touching.