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For Casca, the worst was when the Hawks talked.
It was unbefitting of a commander to shove her sword into the faces of her men the way she had done as a girl, so she held her tongue and clenched her fists around the edges of her tunic. After all, they were not to blame. They saw how small he had become; how he’d stopped eating; how he curled in on himself and tried to scream through his ruined throat every night. And so they talked, wondering when he would die and what they would do then. Sometimes they even prayed that it would be soon.
The first time she changed his bandages, even she began to wonder. She'd let herself cry then, cradling his broken hands to her chest, trying not to look at the raw red holes where his slender nails had once been. Then she thought of Princess Charlotte, sobbing in her little mosquito voice, and remembered that crying was easy. Doing was harder.
So she dashed away her tears, pulled the blanket up to Griffith’s chin, and thought about what she could do.
Judeau had been trying unsuccessfully for days to make him eat some white bread, claiming it was important to be gentle with his stomach. Clearly he meant well, but he hadn’t stopped to think that perhaps it was the only thing Griffith had been given in the dungeons. So Casca ran to the woods and came back with a rabbit, which she left to cook with herbs and vegetables and the best red wine the Hawks had in stock. It was Griffith’s favourite stew, his “palace dinner” as he had once called it, laughing like a brook in spring, his hair falling in sweet waves down his shoulders. She remembered the smell of it, subtle like the petals of a rare orchid, before rot and ruin and suffering had torn them off and trampled them in the mud...
The repetitive motion of stirring the pot helped her not to think. She knew that if she started to think about him, she would break. The irony of the commander cooking did not escape some of her men, but she sat beside the pot and stirred until the meat fell off the bones and the vegetables turned to porridge.
When she dabbed some liquid from the stew on Griffith’s cracked lips, he clamped them shut and turned away.
It was understandable, she thought. After all, whether he lived or died was the only thing he could still control. But then she remembered the bad things that happened when she started thinking. Remembered the way the edge of the cliff had lured her and how Guts' voice had sounded as he'd begged to know what was in her head. Yes, it was better to leap from one action to the next, never looking at the precipice beneath.
The next day, she bought a canister of milk from a farmer's wife. Women were always happy to trade with her, even if, as the Black Dog Knights had shown, she was likely trading them death. It did not matter; Casca had to take care of her own. She heated a cup of milk over the fire, then decided to add some of the honey that Judeau sometimes put on burns. She poured the warm milk into an unused medicine bottle, the kind that had a nipple with a tiny hole to direct the most precious of medicines into an injured eye or ear.
When she approached Griffith with the bottle, she almost wilted beneath his impassive blue gaze. Then she shook herself and lifted him into a sitting position. He was as pliant as a doll, and his lightness terrified her.
"Forgive me," she whispered as she knelt beside him, "but I won't obey you this time. I won't let you die before me!"
She pushed the bottle through the opening in his helmet, shaking drops of warm milk onto his lips. At first he sat frozen, letting the milk drip down his chin. And then some buried instinct seemed to take over him, because he let his eyes fall shut and sealed his lips around nipple.
Casca wrapped her left arm around his shoulders as he drank, letting his head rest in the crook of her elbow. She could scarcely believe that this was happening, her heart beating like a drum with exultation at the thought that he was not going to die, that she would fix him, that everything would be all right. She reached her hand around to the front of his helmet, wiping stray drops of milk off his lips with her fingers. He nuzzled against her hand, gentle as a lamb, seeking contact and warmth. So she sat down with her legs crossed and drew him closer until he was half-lying in her lap, the cold of his helmet resting against her breast. He grasped a handful of her tunic, tying her to himself. Despite his cut tendons, his grip was stronger than suffering or death.
I can live for this, Casca told herself over and over. Finally, I can live for him again.
Griffith was halfway through his third bottle of milk when he stiffened and pushed the bottle aside. He made an unhappy sound and tried to stand, but collapsed back into Casca's lap.
"Did I hurt you?" she asked in horror. "I shouldn't have given you so much, you haven't eaten in days and...oh." She stopped when she felt wet heat trickling down her thigh. Beneath his mask, Griffith's face burned bright red. His hands flew to his crotch and he clamped his thighs together, managing to reduce the flow to a few warm drops.
Casca wanted to cry, seeing how badly his control over the most basic functions of his body had been broken by the torture. She knew she couldn't just let him wet himself, the men might see and the humiliation would be too much for him to bear. Usually it was Guts or Judeau who helped Griffith relieve himself, but Guts was training against some unfortunate tree in the woods and Judeau was at the campfire with the others. Even seeing how thin he had become, she knew she did not have the strength to lift him. Griffith whimpered, and she felt another trickle against her leg. She looked around furiously for something she could use. Her eyes fell upon a folded bath towel.
"Just a second," she told Griffith as she reached for the towel. "Forgive me for making you wait. I promise I won't be long." She had never put a nappy on a baby or even imagined doing so, but she thought she had a basic idea of how these things worked. She pulled down his trousers, leaving him naked except for the bandages that hid the horrors of what was done to him. He covered himself with his hands, helpless tears streaming down his cheeks.
"Please don't cry," she told him as she gently moved his hands aside. "Just trust me. Hush, now..." She moved his thighs apart a little, earning another whimper, and placed the folded towel between them, spreading it out to cover his bottom too. It wasn't much but it would have to do for now.
"You can... go now," she told him.
Griffith wrapped his arms around himself, continuing to sob.
"Go on," she told him, trying her best to smile. "We've seen each other take a piss on the side of the road a hundred times. This is no different." She drew him closer, holding him so tightly she could feel his sharp bones against her skin. "It's not good for you to hold it, you know." She put the palm of her hand on his lower abdomen, the skin hot and drawn tight like a drum. When she pressed down he inhaled sharply, as though in pain, but when she began to rub gentle circles over his bladder, he finally let go with a soft sigh.
Pale yellow liquid gathered between his thighs, soaked up by the towel a second later. Casca closed her eyes respectfully and leaned her head against his helmet. The sound of his bladder emptying seemed to go on for minutes, and by the time he was done, Casca was sure that most of it had gotten on her pants. The damp fabric was hot and tacky against her skin, but disgust was the last thing on her mind as she pulled the soaked towel out from under Griffith's hips and tossed it into the bucket of water that Judeau had used to clean his wounds earlier. It was dirty anyway, and she would throw it out when she left.
Griffith pulled his legs up, blinking sleepily. Casca looked down at herself to find that the wet patch made by his urine covered everything from her crotch to her lower thighs. "Now it looks like both of us wet ourselves," she told him. An unexpected girlish giggle burst from her throat before she could force it down. "I'll have to cover you up better next time. Let me take the wet bandages off first."
He lay still as she changed his bandages, his only signs of life being the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the twitch of his thigh as Casca spread his legs apart. She wiped him down thoroughly with fresh water that Judeau had thoughtfully left for her, even dipping between his buttocks to make sure he was clean everywhere.
When the thought that Griffith, her beloved Griffith, was lying spread open for her, letting her touch his most secret areas, hit her, she felt nothing. No, not nothing - there was tenderness, compassion, concern. But the feelings she had struggled with every time she had bathed in the river beside him and glanced furtively at the way the drops caught the sun as they traced paths across his body she longed to trace with her hands and lips, were gone. She wondered if she would ever feel them again, and decided it didn't matter. There were many kinds of love. One did not love a child or a friend the same way one loved a husband, but that did not mean they were loved less. Casca shivered as she realised that in all her years, she'd only let herself chase after one kind of love. That love belonged to Guts now, but it did not mean that she could not love Griffith.
"I'm going to give you a bath," she told Griffith as she changed into a new pair of pants, for the first time in her life not bothered by whether he was looking or not. "It'll feel nice. I promise."
She ran to the fire, her heart light for the first time in a year. Her men shook their heads and laughed as she raced to and fro to heat up water for the bath, feeling contented. Infected by her hope, Judeau smiled wider than he had done for as long as anyone around him remembered.
For the first time since his rescue, Griffith did not struggle when Casca began to work on the fastenings of his helmet. When she saw what was under it, she, too, began to cry.
Casca knew that she must look, knew that she could not betray him by looking away as she had in the dungeons. She wept as she took in the ridges of scar tissue that coursed over his face, the ashen grey of what little of his lovely hair the torturer had left him with, the pallor of what little remained of his beauty while his eyes - still so blue, blue as they had been when he first appeared in front of the sun for her, stared at nothing. Then she took his broken face in her hands, and pressed a kiss to his forehead.
Griffith's eyes widened in shock, then fell shut in contentment as a slow smile spread across his features.
"You're beautiful", she whispered into his ear. "Still so beautiful. One day I'll make you believe it, I promise..."
Casca spent hours beside the bath, rubbing the dirt of imprisonment out of Griffith's skin with gentle hands. She washed his hair over and over until it gleamed, then massaged sweet smelling oil into his scalp. She brushed out the knots in his hair one by one as he lay back against the side of the tub, eyes shut serenely, taking comfort from the warmth of the water and surely the knowledge of Casca's presence. Then she wove his hair into three tiny braids, the way her own mother had done for the village festival back when things were still good, before she had sold her.
When he was clean and dry, she dabbed a little of the oil on his nether regions, to prevent the sensitive skin from becoming irritated. The she wrapped another towel around his hips, fastening it in place with a pin. This nappy looked far more secure than the first one, and she could not deny feeling proud of her work.
"If you want me to leave you now, I will," she told him. "Judeau should come by soon. If you need a change, send him to wake me up. I understand you're probably more comfortable without--"
Griffith grabbed her sleeve with both hands, trembling all over, his mouth forming a single word: Stay.
They lay together that night, Griffith curled up against Casca like a baby animal, one hand keeping its grip on her clothes, the other with the thumb between his lips. He buried his head in Casca's chest, as close to her heart as he could get, while she sang him songs long into the night, songs she was sure she had forgotten.