The alien, elven blossoms fell slowly, dreamily, from the ancient tree overhead as Casca watched him approach. His armor and cloak were black, as if he were bathed in darkness. She saw him now as though for the first time.
She was struck by how tall he was, the broadness of his shoulders, the pale length of his neck she so badly wished to kiss again. His gait was painfully slow and despite herself, she fought the impulse to run to him and leap into his arms. It was him. The one she wanted to see.
Guts.
He had once been the object of her jealousy, spite, and her anger and one distant day, with something as simple as a kiss that confessed everything wordlessly beneath a waterfall, had become everything she'd ever wanted. She remembered the feeling of those strong arms around her, the roughness of his callused hands on her face, her hips, her breasts, the sensation of him hard and certain inside her; her body's memories flooded back and she remembered pressing her thighs against his sides under the gentle caress of off-cast droplets from the waterfall.
She recalled the sensation of being rocked, her hands locked around his shoulders, the feeling of being safe and cherished in that rough, passionate, physical act of love. The memory of making love seemed so distant; it felt like centuries had passed since she'd felt his hands on her and now, in this torturously slow moment, it was everything and the only thing in the world she wanted. It wasn't strange, she realized, after so long being a distant observer of existence, for her first desire to be intimacy after regaining her lucidity, her sanity. Her longing for him and her loneliness burned now like a lump of molten lead in her chest. For a moment she thought of the throbbing of her brand…
No.
She didn't want those thoughts. Not at all. There were evil things there, smelling of rot and despair, amorphous things lurking behind those thoughts, looming large and black and in four shapes, things that blotted out the sun…
No don't make me see don't make me remember don't make me see please just let me hold him and cry and kiss him and be me again…
(The sun had suddenly turned muted crimson over a lake and Griffith was there, broken and small and defeated and…)
Please no let me have this moment I'll be a good girl I've been so lonely and lost and afraid I need him don't make me see…
It stopped. It stopped for him.
Guts stood before her, looking down into her eyes.
She struggled against the memories that threatened to spill forth, to enfilade her being. No. She was a warrior. She wouldn't go back, not now. Not after she'd been without him for so long. She would fight, as ever she had. She would resist. She would struggle. The pain and the terror and the anger would wait as long as she bade them. This moment was hers. She had paid for it a thousand, no, a million times over.
This moment was hers.
"Casca..," he said, his voice scarcely a whisper.
She stretched out her hand, caressing a face that was entirely unlike the one she remembered. So many scars, the streak of white in his beautiful black hair…
His right eye was gone.
She caressed the cheekbone beneath that eye with a hand that finally felt as though it belonged to her, having felt so long like a ghost haunting her own body.
"Guts," she said.
Her hand felt hot on his face, this ethereal and impossible moment drifting weightlessly outside the flow of time. Casca.
"I'm…I'm back, Guts. I'm home," she said, the tears spilling from her eyes.
He removed his right gauntlet, not wanting to touch her with that black armor which protected and at once possessed him: he stretched out his hand, perhaps to caress her face, to touch her and confirm the reality of her, his remaining eye wide in disbelief. Casca saw the tears forming in that eye and it suffused her with agony; her love, the father of her lost son, had been mutilated. She felt, in the depths of herself, a rising, black, seething hate for whatever did this to him. She wanted to sink her hands into its flesh and tear it apart, to feel the hot, wet spurting of blood. The barbaric, feral thought took shape effortlessly, as though it were alive. The thought itself seemed…the shape of a hound, and she thought that at any moment it would perhaps start whispering to her…
Casca was brought back to herself when she realized he was trembling.
Guts' hand stopped short of Casca's face and he suddenly fell to his knees, the strength drained from him in a torrent, genuflecting in shock and resignation. He wrapped his arms around her and she sank down astride him, burying her face in his hair. Holding him against her, she could feel his powerful body hitching. This was a feeling entirely new to her, one as distant and ephemeral as so many of her recollections of their past.
Guts was crying silently.
"Cas…ca..." It became his mantra, the only word that existed in this and every other world. He repeated it countless times, each utterance heavy with tears. She was finally home, finally in his arms again. After so much hate and death and darkness and despair.
Casca was home. She. The one for whom he'd suffered and bled and wept and left pieces of himself behind on the battlefield.
She was home.
As he stilled, Casca kissed his forehead, remembering how he'd done the same for her and the tears she'd shed aside a waterfall on a distant, sunny day that seemed centuries in the past.
"Guts…oh no… oh god, what have they done to you?" She whimpered, touching his metal left arm, caressing place where his right eye used to be and the white in his hair.
He looked up at her, his remaining eye red, and smiled dully.
"Yes," he said, his voice now so small now that it shocked her momentarily, as this was a side of Guts she didn't know existed, this vulnerability and fragility; she wondered with slightly ashamed vanity if perhaps this side was for her and only her.
It was.
"They did take my eye. After what I last saw with it, maybe that's for the best."
He raised his left arm, interlocking the fingers with hers. He couldn't feel the grip of her hand with his prosthetic and that notion caused a sudden and powerful stab of anguish in him. He once had two arms with which to hold her. The loss of the arm had never truly unnerved or saddened him until this moment. It had been an inconvenience, an irritation. Sometimes the goddamn prosthetic didn't respond as he'd liked and itched when he sweated. Annoying, to be missing the arm. Nothing more.
He lamented now that he only had one arm for her that wasn't cold.
"I had to," he said, regarding his left arm, "An Apostle bit into my arm and wouldn't let me go. The bone was already broken so I… I cut it off. It was the only way I could move, the only way I could try to stop him from…" He trailed off, his eyes downcast.
Echoes of a memory.
He did he hurt me he had changed and I bled and I cried and I told him not to see it Guts don't watch…
"I failed you, Casca," he cried suddenly, pressing his face against her chest, "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I'm not a good man but I gave up the arm because it was all I could do to reach you and it wasn't enough, please forgive me! I've failed you so many times!"
She had never heard him so broken, so anguished, so dejected, so vulnerable. He was nearly wailing.
She raised his face to meet hers, looking into his remaining eye. Casca snaked her fingers into his hair and placed a long, tender kiss on his lips.
It felt like their first kiss and, in many ways, it was. This was a different Guts, a different Casca, a different world from the one that they'd known, the world which seemed now as distant as the very stars. Darkness had encroached on that world within and without, true, but with each other, with the Band of the Hawk, there had been light. They'd made the light. They had fought for it and paid for it in blood. And now, in this world, they would once again make the light. They had no recourse.
There would be light again.
"I love you, Guts," she whispered. It occurred to her that she had so long wandered in the darkness and that she'd been cast into it without ever telling him, without ever hearing him say it. So much had been stolen from them and this was among the things she regretted the most, the things that ached the most.
"And I love you, Casca," he said, "Never doubt it. Never."
And she didn't. She never would. So many of the scars which decorated him were won out of love and she knew, in that moment, she would treasure each of them until her last breath. She smiled to herself too, knowing that she'd make a point of kissing each one.
"You came for me," she said, "You sacrificed your arm because you love..."
I sacrifice…
The dark, encroaching evil that crept and slithered within now raised its head skyward, blotting out the sun, eclipsingall light and hope, towering over all things like four shapes of avarice and lust and hateful knowledge and lies told with truth…
Eclipse.
She remembered.
She remembered it all.
Griffith's broken, mangled, and pathetic body, the dark dimension, the four terrible, nightmarish shapes that loomed like inhuman monoliths over the Band of the Hawk, the sounds of breaking bone and the crumpling of armor beneath gnashing teeth… Friends and comrades and victories and defeats and the smiling faces around campfires of dreams all drowned forever in a sea of blood and screaming…
Fresh tears flowed as she recalled Judeau's smile as he breathed his last. She remembered the scent of his blond hair as he absorbed the death meant for her, the sounds of his armor bending against the blows from which he shielded her, as he gave up his own life. He loved her. He always had. She was certain of that now. She felt a twinge of shame that this love hadn't been requited. He deserved better than her, another certainty in this flood of recollections.
She had been surrounded by love, bathed in it and, in mere moments, all the love and life and beauty in her world had been taken from her by two words, two simple words that dripped with disdain, disregard, and betrayal, two words that would resonate within her forever on.
I sacrifice.
She melted into Guts, shaking, as the feelings rushed forth. Anger, sadness, despair, disgust, rage, anguish, betrayal, horror, desolation, abandonment, violation…and through the myriad of horrors and indignation, the constant that remained for Casca was Guts, the powerful arms around her and the absolute certainty of her love for him. It sustained her, pulled her back from the threatening undertow of torpid, black, murderous hate. She had wondered if her love of him would change.
It had.
It had strengthened, deepened, become as certain as the coming of the tide. Her regained lucidity allowed her to understand that, finally and truly, this love was what had ultimately brought her home. Whatever the efforts of Schierke and Farnese, without this love, she wouldn't have come home; she wouldn't have had a reason to, and would have remained small and wandering naked in the gloom. Did their son, their lost boy, wander now in that selfsame darkness? She couldn't know. She thought and hoped perhaps foolishly, if only for a moment, that Judeau would find him and protect him in the distant dark…
She held Guts tight, pressing her face into the warmth of his neck. She wanted to dissolve into that warmth, to forget the rising tide of vitriol and anguish inside her and merely to be warm and loved and to forget all else forever. He held her for quite a while before she could find her words again.
"I told you not to watch..," she whimpered, her voice small, pained. She remembered what it felt like to be Elaine, for a moment. She wondered if perhaps some fragment of Elaine wouldn't always be with her.
Guts kissed each of her streaming eyes.
"I will never fail you again, Casca," he said, "I promise."
"Why, Guts? Why did Griffith..?"
His name, which had once suffused her with hope and light and adoration, now tasted like tarry, viscous poison. His name felt now like maggots wriggling in her mouth.
Guts' body stiffened at the utterance of that name.
"He…it was for his dream. His goddamn dream. If I was who I am now, I would have seen it coming. I was so fucking stupid. I should have seen him for what he was. Under all his facades and lies and…"
His body was emanating waves of heat, even through the armor which she desperately wished to remove. Casca felt the tensing of his muscles, those muscles which seemed new yet infinitely familiar. As soon as it had appeared, the hound retreated from the door.
As if he'd read her thoughts, he unfastened his cuirass and cast it aside. Her hands explored him, his expanse of his chest, his neck, caressing the latticework of scars that decorated him. She touched the space where his left arm ended in wrought iron.
"I lived in the dark for a long time," she said reflectively, "I was here and not here. He threw me into the dark and I was alone there. Just like he was, I suppose."
Guts remembered seeing the broken, mangled form of Griffith in the bale-light of his cell, that small, withered and disfigured thing that had once been so proud and dignified. He lay motionless in that delirious light, real and not real, dead but not dead.
For a moment, he felt a twinge of sorrow, but it was quickly subsumed by the sanguine tide of his hate. The hound had retreated for now, yet remained pacing menacingly beyond the door, as ever it did.
Guts and blood and Guts and blood and…
"And just like you were, Guts."
This roused him from gazing into the yawning, hungry darkness within him.
"Hmm?"
She smiled at him, a smile that lit her whole face. Guts couldn't help but marvel at her. The brightness of her large, dark-brown eyes, the fullness of her rosebud-shaped lips, the swell of her firm breasts beneath an elven dress that made her look like something out of a fairytale, the contrast of that dress with her skin of dark amber… he had never seen anything more beautiful. Her beauty wounded him as surely as any Apostle had. He slid his hand into the new braids of her hair. He mused that the last time he'd held her like this, her hair had been cropped short.
"I left you," she said, her voice tinged by sadness and shame, "I broke like a doll and…I left you alone in the dark. You had to keep fighting and…bleeding. You're always bleeding because of me." She ran her fingers across the scars of his chest.
The echo of those words from the past touched a still, small place within him, a place of long-buried light and love he infrequently visited, as it left him feeling empty when he reemerged into this world where all seemed to be darkness and blood and evil.
"Guts, can you forgive me?"
He regarded her for a moment, still awestruck by the radiance of her, the surreality and sheer impossibility of her beauty. He kissed her deeply, passionately, his right hand sliding to her hip and left pulling her close enough to feel her breasts against his chest. Tasting her lips and tongue again momentarily shattered all darkness and doubt, all the sorrow and shadow ebbing away in pulses of recollection, love, adoration, and desire. Casca returned this kiss, her hands locked in the hair on the back of his head. She moaned against his lips.
He broke the kiss and stared into her eyes.
"You've done nothing to forgive, Casca."
Her eyes betrayed both her thoughts and her need that had so long been buried. Her breath was heavy now, her face flushed. She stared at him as though she wanted to devour him, grinning lustily and happily. Guts smiled. The air between them was hot and thick with lost years and stolen nights in which they should have been making love by the light of a fire and hadn't. More regrets needing remuneration. In this hot and still air they consumed each other with their eyes and for a time neither spoke.
"Do you like my dress?" Casca asked finally, her grin unbroken.
He chuckled, thinking of his bewitchment by her. "God, yes. You're stunning."
She regarded herself. "I would say I feel a bit overdressed, ridiculous, even. But I do feel pretty. I feel like a girl. I haven't felt that in a long time. But I've lost so much weight. All my muscles are small now. That will have to change."
"Back to the battlefield, eh, 'Boss'?"
She comically narrowed her gaze and leaned forward. "Darling, who exactly do you think you're talking to?"
He laughed wholeheartedly. God, it felt good to laugh.
"Darling?" He teased, "You did get soft without your muscles!"
She punched him playfully in the chest and kissed the tip of his nose. "Shut up."
He regarded her with a grin. She knew that grin. He wanted to tease her more about that term of endearment, but his better judgment had him relenting. He really had changed. She had to smirk to herself at this.
"We have time," he said, squeezing her shoulders, noting their softness and femininity. Though she'd lost the hardness and the contours of muscle he remembered, her beauty hadn't diminished by an inch.
"I am not going to sit on my ass," she said, "And I'm not having you wade into this without me, not ever again. Those days are over, Guts. Oh, we have so much to do…" She sighed, becoming the commander, strategist, and pragmatist again almost effortlessly. She was and had always been amazing.
Guts could only sigh, not only in amazement of the woman she was but in the accuracy of her appraisal of what remained undone. Yes, there was much left to do, and getting Casca back into fighting form was the least of it. Hell, that was going to be comparatively easy.
"I'm going to fight by your side again and in order to do that I'll need to be strong, stronger than I've ever been, but…" She regarded herself with a smile, "I…I do want to wear this dress for a little while longer."
"I can't say as I object to that idea," he said, once again utterly drunk on her and the impossibility of her presence in his arms.
"Where do we go from here, Guts?"
"I don't know," he said, slipping into reflection, "The road ahead is going to be long and bloody. But that's nothing new. We will likely lose people on the way, and we both may not walk away from it, either, but..."
"Guts, understand this," she said, cutting him off, the conviction icy and frightening in her voice, the warrior and the commander to the core, "If you die, I die with you. No more parting or goodbyes. That's over. For good."
Her eyes were focused on his. He thought, only for a single and horrifying moment, what he would do without her now, after she'd just come back to him from the bleary shadows and the darkened corridors of her own mind. His only thought, one which came to him with unnerving speed and lucidity, was that he would sink forever into the crimson and welcoming darkness of the armor, to kill until all the world was awash in blood. Without Casca, all things would be blood and death and he would kill until the armor consumed him.
Kill. Kill until there's nothing left of you. Go with her. Leave this pile of blood and corpses and stupidity.
Yes.
And he would do with a smile in his heart.
He pushed these black/red thoughts away.
"I don't know what the future holds, Casca," he said with resignation, his mind finding its way back to that still, small place he'd so long left chained shut, "but I do know I haven't held you long enough."
She smiled tenderly, tears again welling in her eyes at those ancient words that had won her so entirely, and gently pushed him onto his back into the cool grass. She hoisted herself off his lap curled up beside him, laying her head on his chest. He wrapped his arm around her, kissing the top of her head.
"Can we stay here? Sleep a while, make love, and then just be still?" She asked.
"Of course," he said.
Within minutes, Casca dozed, breathing steadily against his chest. With her in his arms and the sweet scent of her hair in his nostrils, Guts too found himself drifting off with a speed that initially made him fearful, as he hadn't known it for years.
They'll be here. They're always here. And if not them, the hound. He'll come. When does he sleep? Ever?
The brand didn't throb nor bleed. No hound lurked in the gathering dark. Not even beyond the door. Perhaps he knew that, for this night, he had overstayed his welcome? Courtesy? No. It was something else.
Casca continued her slow, steady, breaths of sleep against him. She moaned happily in her sleep and curled tighter against him. He wished to kiss her again but wouldn't risk waking her, not for the world.
When the instinctive dread, instilled by so many sleepless nights, had passed, when he'd reasoned it away, he found himself sinking warmly into the depths of a slumber more peaceful than he'd known for nights beyond counting.
She was home.
And now, with her by his side once more, perhaps he could regain what humanity he had lost. Perhaps he could collect the fragments of himself. And together, as they had long before, they could create light in this world.
There would be light again.
This moment, now, in the realm between sleep and reality, with the woman he loved in his arms, Guts realized that he'd finally come to his own bonfire of dreams. He realized it had always been there, in front of him, for many years. He was a fool, as many men are, and realized that the flickering flames, the sparks, had ever been shaped by not only the fight but by loving as truly, and as fiercely, as ever he had fought.
That was the missing piece.
I have found it, Godo. Can I rest? Can I sleep? Can I be content?
Guts pulled Casca to him and drifted off to sleep, a smile playing across his face.
She was home.
And so was he.