Castoff: Righteous Anger (ch. 21) (Patreon)

Guts had no idea what to say. That became readily apparent when he found himself speechless as Casca sat up in the bed, wincing at the light, and peered at him through narrowed eyes. He had been desperately hoping for this moment since the Eclipse -- it was the one hope that he allowed himself, even if he knew he'd more than likely find his death in his quest for revenge. He had wished for it so desperately, yet now that the moment was here, Guts realized he had never imagined what came next. What would he say? What could he say?

Words failed him. He was sat frozen by her bedside, and it was only their child struggling to break his grip that made him aware of the passage of time. His breath felt stuck in his lungs, his mind refusing to budge. The child manage to escape, crawling over to the bed and over to Casca and settling in her lap. Casca looked down at him with some surprise, her brow furrowing… "It wasn't a nightmare," she whispered softly.

"... It wasn't," Guts found his voice, her voice breaking the spell that had been cast over him. His hands curled into fists, his shadow stirring. He grit his teeth to swallow the rage down -- he understood what the armor was, and he almost wished Gaunter had just killed him. It would have been easier. The armor was his desire for revenge. Gaunter didn't take it from him. Instead, he did something far worse.

Guts knew that if he ever lost himself to the armor that lurked in his shadow the deal would be null and voided. The cost of his previous two wishes were suspended because of his third -- that he would be the only one to suffer any consequences. He still yearned for his revenge, he still ached for it, but the armor acted as a noose that would strangle him if he ever tried to pursue it.

He watched Casca's reaction carefully, uncertain what to expect. She gazed down at the child, not looking at him at all. Almost as if she couldn't. "I went insane," her jaw clenched. Despite the raw emotion in her voice, Guts couldn't help but be happy to hear it again.

"... So did I," Guts admitted. He hadn't been mindless, but he was driven every bit as mad as she had been.

"I… it felt like a dream," Casca confessed, still not looking at him. "I still remember everything leading up to the Eclipse, but everything after that… It feels like it happened to someone else. Like I watched it happen instead of experiencing it." Dissociation, Guts figured. He had seen enough trauma to know that it was a common enough way to deal with it. "He betrayed us. He sacrificed us. He- he-" Casca clenched her jaw, the words going unsaid. He raped her.

Guts wished he had something profound to say. Something that would take all the pain away. If those words existed, then he didn't know them. There was a lengthy pause as Casca took a moment to process, her hands going underneath the boy's arms, lifting him up to get a better look at him. He gazed back, his expression vaguely curious.

"He looks like you," Casca said, still not looking at him. She remembered what took place when she was insane? "He looks exactly like I imagined he would." That probably wasn't by coincidence. Their child has been a spirit. With the wording of the wish, Gaunter likely modeled his body after her imagination. "Never thought I'd be a mom."

It felt like they were avoiding the issue, but Guts wasn't any more eager to address it than she was. Geralt, thankfully, seemed to have stepped out the moment he noticed Casca was awake, giving them a moment of privacy. "I never thought I'd be a father. Poor kid."

The kid was indecisive, it would seem, because he held his arms out to Guts, a gesture that he wanted to be picked up by him. After a moment of hesitation, he took the child from Casca, their eyes meeting for the briefest of seconds before she looked away. Guts felt something squeeze his heart, but swallowed it down. The child rested in his lap and took notice of the armor that stirred in the shadows. He might be indecisive, but he had courage because his first reaction was to punch Guts' shadow to little effect. And if there was any doubt that he was of his blood, then those doubts died when he just tried again -- dropping a hammer fist on the wisps of black smoke that threatened to rise.

A chuckle escaped Casca and it was pure music to his ears. It ended all too soon. "Your eye… I thought you lost an eye," Casca muttered, and he saw her gaze going to his prosthetic. Her expression tightened at the sight of it. She would have seen it, Guts knew -- when he cut just enough to weaken the muscle before tearing the rest off.

It was then that Guts realized that she probably had no idea what was going on. They hadn't explained anything to her -- why would they, when she was locked away in her head? "I did. This Sphere -- this world… it rejects the influence of the Godhand. My eye came back. My arm didn't." The conversation felt stilted. Awkward. They danced around the heart of the matter, neither of them having the courage to address it.

Casca made a noise of acknowledgement, "After… you went away. I remember missing you. I… left that cave because I wanted to find you," she muttered and regret gave his heart a savage squeeze.

What could he say to that? "I was… I was insane, Casca. I still might be. After the Eclipse, I wanted blood and I didn't care whose it was. I hunted the apostles for years, and more often than not, those fights ended with me more dead than alive. I… didn't care. I just wanted to make him pay." Guts confessed, and apology in his voice. One that he didn't have the heart to say. He should have stayed with her in that cave. He should have stayed. He chose vengeance over her and without realizing it, he put her in danger.

But, in the depths of his own mind, he knew that being with him then would have been a danger in itself.

"The little guy saved us both. He made a deal on our behalf to bring us here. It's… an odd world, but outside of storybook monsters, it's nothing we haven't seen. I met some people-"

"Ciri," Casca interjected, as if she were realizing the name as she spoke it. "I remember liking her. She was kind. Triss too."

That made things easier. "They helped me help you. We hunted a wish granting creature. The wishes were granted, even if it wasn't by the creature we expected." To that, Casca looked at him with an expression that he was intimately familiar with -- a dull look of 'are you serious?' He received it often enough, but usually when he was being to sparse with his reports. A frequent thing when he left the raiders. She liked to know every detail, and.. well, only the important details ever mattered to him -- numbers, positions, and the damage dealt.

Their eyes met and Casca quickly looked away. She couldn't bare to look at him, could she? Guts couldn't blame her for that. Even with Gaunter wiping away the damage done to him at the hands of the apostles, he felt like he had aged a decade in the past two… near three years.

"I remember your wishes," Casca told him, drawing her knees up to her chest. The statement sounded damning to him. "You gave up vengeance. For me. Us." Guts wished he could tell what she thought of that from her tone alone, but it was impossible to decipher. It was flat and even. Completely neutral.

Guts looked down at his prosthetic, seeing his kid taking another swing at the shadows that churned beneath him. There was a look of intense concentration as he tried to whack it down each time it rose, as if he could beat back the rage with physical force. A rage that had become his backbone. The only reason he was still alive. He lived because he refused to die before Griffith -- he should have died a thousand times over, and he would have, without his rage and hate. And now he foreswore them both. "I did," he confessed after a moment.

"He killed them all," Casca whispered and Guts heard it. The hate in her voice resonated with his own.

"... He did," Guts agreed. He had imagined this conversation in his head a thousand times and it still hadn't prepared him for it.

"He betrayed us. Sacrificed us. For power. We… we gave everything to him. We risked everything for his ambition! We- we fought for him. Bled for him. Died for him! And when he was captured, we fought like hell to get him out!" Casca's voice rose with each word she spoke, her hands curling into fists at the blanket that covered her. She had kept the Band of the Hawk together after Griffith. For a year, they survived being hunted as bandits, waiting for an opportunity to break Griffith out of the dungeons.

Guts reached up and patted the kids head when he seemed alarmed at the yelling. "He did."

Casca was silent for a long minute, the tension growing thick as she chewed on that. He had two years to adjust to the idea, and even with that time, the hate burned just as hot. He just got better at focusing it. Casca didn't have that. So, it was no surprise when she said what she said. "You shouldn't have made that deal. You should have killed him!"

The words stung, but Guts expected them. If their positions had been reversed -- if he was the one driven completely mad and Casca took up a quest of revenge… he would have said the same thing if he learned she gave up a chance to kill Griffith for his sake.

"I had a choice between vengeance and you. I chose you. I don't regret it," Guts replied, and now Casca looked at him. Her eyes were wide, reddened with unshed tears. He could see that she wanted to argue. So, he continued. "I met him once after the Eclipse. An apostle was half dead and he went begging them for help." Casca went tense like a spring about to snap into action.

He paused, chewing on what he heard for a moment. It was a bitter pill then, and it still was now. "I attacked him. He did something to my brand, made me feel hellish pain, but I still managed to take a swing at him. I didn't come close before I got blasted away and he continued on without missing a beat. I hunted dozens of apostles over two years -- those monsters we saw in hell… and I didn't accomplish a damn thing, Casca. Not a damn thing." Guts admitted to her softly, forcing himself to say the words because it hurt.

It hurt more than words could say. Some apostles were more valuable than others -- Zodd came to mind -- but the fact of the matter was most of them were trash. They were fodder. Peasant levies. He killed them and the Godhand would simply make a deal with another desperate human willing to sacrifice their humanity for power. It was painful to admit, but Guts wasn't even sure he had so much as inconvenienced the Godhand.

"That--" Casca started to argue, her expression twisting before she abandoned the expression when she saw his. The sorrow he wore openly for the first time. "You… I'm… I'm not worth that. I'm not worth letting him get away with it." Her voice broke and Guts understood. It was rough hearing that your friends and family would go unavenged because of you. Even if there was only a sliver of a chance of it happening.

"That's for me to decide, not you. I decided that you were," Guts told her bluntly, knowing she needed to hear it. Let her blame him.

Casca's expression twisted -- at first, he thought it was a snarl, but when she buried her face into her hands, Guts knew she was fighting off frustrated tears. She was audibly fighting them off, but her breathing hitched when their kid decided to leap off of him and land on the bed. Guilt gripped Guts heart when the kid tried to hug Casca -- shamed for how he treated him in the past. Guilt for knowing that there was nothing else that he could do. And guilt that such a kind hearted kid ended up with them as parents.

"Can you really live with that?" Casca demanded, a sob in her throat as she tried to comfort the kid even as he was trying to comfort her.

Probably not. "I can," Guts said, not entirely sure if the words were a lie or not. They should be, but they didn't quite feel like a lie when they left his lips. His gaze fell to his prosthetic again, closing it into a fist. It felt odd having an arm again, even if he couldn't actually feel it. "It won't be easy. It'll probably be the hardest thing I've ever done, but I can. We're in a different Sphere and the Godhand aren't welcomed here. We'll never have to deal with them- him again. We… can build a life here."

The best revenge was a life well lived. Guts had heard the addatage before and it always struck him as one of the stupidest things he had ever heard. It reeked of the weak willed justifying their lack of ability to take revenge so they made excuses to help them sleep at night. And, perhaps, that was still true. Guts didn't have the ability to take revenge now if he ever had the ability at all. He gave it up.

"That's it then? We just leave it be? We let him live?" Casca questioned harshly, turning to look at him with a gaze that was sharper than any knife. It cut right through him.

His lips thinned, "I think we've given enough of our lives to Griffith. Let's give him no more." It was a struggle to say the words, and it was a struggle for Casca to hear them. She seemed stricken, a lone tear dripping down her cheek. He hated it. He hated it more than words could ever hope to convey, but he had picked her over vengeance and he would live with that choice. He would live with it for the rest of his life, however short it might be. And, if he had the opportunity to choose again, Guts knew he made the right decision even if it was a hard one.

Casca looked away, chewing on that for a long minute. She pulled the boy to her chest and he seemed right at home, basking in the warmth that Guts had scorned him from. "So… what? We… become mercenaries again?" We. A small fear that had worked its way into his heart was ripped out with the word. We.

"I'm under contract to unite most of the world under Ciri. Never really discussed my pay. Could become nobility. A duke," Guts informed with a hint of a smirk and through the sobs that were lodged in her throat, Casca laughed. It was the single most beautiful sound that Guts ever heard. He had feared that she would never laugh again after everything. Guts wasn't sure that he could laugh. Though, that could be he hadn't found any reasons to in the past few years.

"Duke Guts. You'll have to pick out a family name," Casca laughed, and laughed again when his expression twisted. He hadn't thought of that. "And house words. Everyone thought we rose high when we became knights. Planning to steal a name from them?" Casca asked, and he saw how fragile her smile became, but she was forging on.

"... I don't remember any of the names of the nobles we dealt with, much less their family names," he admitted. She didn't seem surprised by that. "Dunno. Shisu?" Guts reached into his memories for a name that meant anything to him.

Her brow furrowed, "Shishu?" She asked, prompting him and Guts… it wasn't a story that he ever told.

"Suppose you could call her my adoptive mother. Mine died after I was born… or before, depending on how you look at it. I would have died if it wasn't for her. Gambino and his band would have walked right by me if she hadn't picked me up and fought to keep me," Guts said, knowing the story because Gambino constantly reminded him. He had vague memories of her. He couldn't remember what she looked like, but he recalled her being kind and gentle.

"... I didn't know that," Casca admitted. To that, Guts shrugged. The past didn't matter. It was a weight that everyone had to carry, but it wasn't a burden that could be shared. "Duke Guts Shishu. Doesn't really roll off the tongue, but I suppose that's other people's problem." She remarked before her gaze slid to the boy that looked up at her. Her fragile smile fractured ever so slightly when she saw that even the boy saw through her act, but she pressed on. "And I suppose we need to pick a name for you."

The boy perked up, clearly liking the idea. "Most men name their children after their father?" She offered and Guts shook his head with a pinched expression. No. For more reasons than he cared to count, he wouldn't name the child Gambino.

"What about yours?" He offered, only to see the same expression appear on Casca's face.

"My father tried to sell me into sexual slavery to a noble," Casca told him. Hm. That was almost reassuring in a way -- no matter how terrible they were, they couldn't be worse than their own parents. "A member of the Hawk, then." Guts almost wanted to argue -- the names would have far too many memories attached to them. He swallowed the arguments, though -- he couldn't free his friends' souls from the deaths of hell, and he couldn't even avenge them. Honoring their name was the very last thing he could hope to do.

"Judeau," Guts voiced after a moment. The child perked up, looking at him.

Casca lifted the child up, "Judeau. Judeau Shishu. That rolls off the tongue better," she decided. It was the name of a man that meant a great deal to both of them. He wasn't the strongest fighter, but he was the most cunning. He was reliable and kind. When they needed help, before they even knew they needed it, Judeau was already there with a helping hand extended. If they managed to raise his namesake to be half the man that he was, then Guts could say they raised a fine man.

The young and freshly named Judeau seemed proud of his name, puffing out his face with a pleased expression. Then his gaze snapped to the door a split second before Guts heard the faintest of squeaks. Glancing over, he saw Puck trying, and failing, to sneak into the room through a parting in the door. He wiggled back and forth for a moment, fitting his fat head through the crack, and seemed thoroughly pleased with himself until he realized that they were all looking at him.

He straightened himself out, smithing his hair back, before plastering a wide friendly smile onto his face. "Hi! I'm Puck!" He introduced himself, and Judeau's gaze was locked onto him as he flew over, 'I'm- gak!" He cried out when Judeau hand snatched out, plucking Puck from the air. "You-you-you're d-definitely Guts' kid! S-such grip strength!" Judeau seemed amazed by Puck, staring at him in wonder.

Casca seemed baffled by his appearance, and he supposed that she didn't spend much time around him one way or the other. "That's Puck. A wind spirit. He's…" Guts trailed off, not entirely sure how he would describe their relationship now. Before, he would have called Puck a parasite for the sake of being hurtful. But, try as he might, he couldn't bring himself to call him that now. Puck had been there the entire time. It was Ciri that helped him at his lowest point, but Puck was the one that was there for it all. He stopped him from falling any further than he already had. Not to mention, he'd be dead a hundred times over without him.

"Best friend?" Puck croaked out to Guts flat look. "Friend? Friendly acquaintance?"

"One of those," he conceded and Puck looked at him with such wide eyes that they could have popped out of his head from shock. Or because Judeau was tightening his grip. Either or.

"I remember seeing you at times, but I wasn't sure if you were real or not," Casca said, setting Judeau down and accepting his offering when he passed a gasping Puck over to her.

"I'm a hundred percent real! And I'm glad that I finally get to talk to you! Guts has been really worried, you know? Not that he would ever say it! He's a big ol' grouch," Puck informed and he almost snapped at him to shut up, but he swallowed the words when Casca's fragile smile became more genuine. She cast a look in his direction and he wasn't sure what to do, so he offered a halfhearted shrug. She closed her eyes for a moment and… it was almost as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders.

"Thank you, Puck. For telling me. And making sure that he stayed in one piece. I can't imagine it was easy," she said in a gentle tone.

Puck scoffed, "For any other elf, it would've been impossible! Really, Guts can't do anything without me, but luckily for him, I like the cut of his jib." It was Guts' turn to roll his eyes at that, earning a look from Puck. "Oh! Before I forget! That whole war thing is happening downstairs, soo…" he trailed off and Guts swallowed a sigh.

That was the very last thing he wanted to hear. He would have preferred it if Puck had interrupted for the sake of interrupting. He almost refused, but Casca looked at him. "You should go, Guts. For the future." She told him and there was so much packed into those three words. For the future. When was the last time he gave a damn about the future?

He swallowed a sigh before standing, "What about you?" Would she be okay?

Casca gave him a soft smile, "I'll be fine. Little Judeau will keep me company and… I think I need time, Guts. To come to terms with the past." She admitted, and he was surprised by it. Mostly because he half expected her to do what he did -- deny it and bury it under rage.

He offered a nod and made to leave, Puck darting between Judeau's grasping hands, but Casca spoke up before he left the room. "I'm sorry," she told him.

"You don't have-" Guts began, reassurances dying on his tongue when he glanced at her.

"I'm sorry you had to go through it alone. I'm sorry that I wasn't here," Casca said, lowering her head as she hunched her shoulders, fighting off tears. That… hm. He knew her well. That wasn't a burden she was going to relinquish so easily. Telling her that it wasn't her fault wasn't going to reassure her. Worse, it wasn't like he could say that it wasn't hard carrying what happened alone -- something that no one else in the world could understand, even if he tried to explain.

So, he sighed and turned away from her. "You're here now, right? That's enough."

And it would be enough.