#noteli

Πάντα στον νου σου νάχεις την Ιθάκη. Το φθάσιμον εκεί είν’ ο προορισμός σου. Aλλά μη βιάζεις το ταξείδι διόλου. Καλλίτερα χρόνια πολλά να διαρκέσει· και γέρος πια ν’ αράξεις στο νησί, πλούσιος με όσα κέρδισες στον δρόμο, μη προσδοκώντας πλούτη να σε δώσει η Ιθάκη.

In this place time is counted by drops falling onto puddles of stale water. He knows it's stale. Even if he can't smell it anymore. He can't smell anything after all. Sometimes his head is left propped to the side, the helmet heavy weighing on his exposed neck, and he can witness the drops falling, not just listen.

Not that day though.

From darkness, creatures that bring forth voices of others calling his name try their best again to fool him into hopefulness. Everyone's voices gathered and rounding into a call for him, shaping his name and other words he knows must still be pronounced out there, out of reach.

During the first days, weeks, months, spent in the depths of the king's tower, he could smell and hear everything. He could see. He felt the king's spit on his tired face. And the jailer's hands on his exposed nerves. He smelled himself and recoiled, sweat stained blankets on puddles of piss it was too dark to keep away from when he rolled over in the few moments sleep he could get. The puss from his open wounds, infected by the touch of faeces and rat bites and dead maggots on rotten fruit. He can't smell a thing now. It's not for the best.

Guts' face appears to him often. And often the desire to lash out is within him, still.

Until that day.

His head was propped away from the water but teardrops fell on his open flesh from Guts' face. All and any desire for revenge left his body. He hadn't felt himself deflate and suddenly he was small. They stung the same as stale water, and alcohol, and blood, his own or the other's, and those liquids he could never identify, the tears did. They stung the same. Lightly salted, too. But everything stings flesh when it's been torn open, muscles exposed, tendons cut and retreating when their tension is lost, their shapes forming lumps under paper thin skin that'll thin even more. Touch stings. Cloth stings. Voices sting like paper cuts scraping underneath his nails that keep growing despite his will and voices scratch the inside of his head and not even the helmet keeps them out. The blood of others stings. It stings when he watches her wiping blood clean off Guts' face. It stings when Guts lets her.

He's on Pippin's back. No longer inside that cell. He's—

Guts embraced him and he placed his hand on Guts'. He felt Guts' tears stinging his face, and then he'd been picked up, propped on Pippin's back. From there he bore witness to their interaction, Guts' and Casca's, and it was as if they couldn't even see him. His flesh was already exposed so he couldn't do much more.

Outside the city a girl offered him flowers. They stung his charred wounded hands even as they floated away from him when he let them go and the child he once was ran back to the uneven cobblestone of backstreets stinking of urine and rotten food, the view of the castle left behind, and the sun, and everything else that could reach him obscured in the shape of a tall, broad man's sillhouette. He can't smell those backstreets anymore, either, even if they weren't just imagination.

The way the wagon's uneven wheels hit against the road hurt his muscles, his open wounds, his ripped flesh, his cut tendons. No way he'll let them know, though. No way he'll reveal to the rest just how deep he's been cut, just how much he's lost. He has Guts now, at least. He watched Midland's roads fade into distance behind them, the castle and the tower a speck in the horizon. His eyes were heavy with Charlotte's voice, entwined with Guts', with Casca's. Somewhere all of this was concrete. Somewhere this wasn't just a delusion brought about by the creatures slipping out of darkness, out of the interstices covered in mold that lined the inside of his cell in the tower.

Harsh voices filled the void around him: loud shouting and hoarse screaming. Everyone has their own voice. At night he hears words carried by the wind, and the crackling of the fire. He can't smell the food they're preparing but he knows it's clean. Outside the wagon—as it did outside the tower—time carries on without his trace. This is his home now. This will be all.

The drapes that hide him from view and separate him from the rest of them—and the fire and the voices and the smells he cannot smell—rustle. Their movements match the anticipation building within him and he lifts his face slightly—it's all he can manage—to meet the one he waits for.

Sometimes Judeau, or Pippin, or someone else entirely comes. Their faces, their noses, their mouths, twist and wrinkle and disfigure; they open the drapes as wide as they can, let the sun inside, eagerly, urgently inviting a breeze that should wash it all away to start anew. Is it that important to distract themselves from the one in the wagon? Is he that disgusting? Is he that impossible to look at, to learn to live with, to believe? They smile so wide their eyes wrinkle and their faces crack open like a horse before its legs give in. They smile because he’s impossible.

Does he look at you in that same way?

Guts fills the spaces between them with words not of comfort or pity. “Soon, he says, we’ll both be back in the battlefield, soon” he repeats. Soon. Yes. But for now, for now Guts changes his bandages and cleans his skin and fills the spaces between them with laughter.

This face doesn’t twist, it doesn’t wrinkle, this smile is wide and open like a sword, like the sun staring down on the land signalling the best time for attack. For a moment or two he believes in it. He lets himself believe in it. He really truly isn't in that tower anymore. Guts is by him, once more. For a moment he believes.

He doesn’t look at you in that same way.

The drapes rustle and something on the outside breaks. The spell is broken too. Guts looks at the entrance of the wagon (is that the same anticipation he can see in himself?) and no one comes but they both know who could.

Can he even see you?

Guts waits for someone too. And—again, again—it's not him.

He feels small against the hands that help him inside the armor. Small against this voice telling him that soon. Soon he’ll wield a sword. Soon they’ll meet battle together.

He feels small against the voice not mentioning her and them, even when he already knows, he already heard. It’s so easy to forget, so easy to place his own broken hand on those large ones and forgive. He truly believes Guts is with him, here, no longer in the tower.

In this place time is measured by the rising and setting of the sun. The meals brought by Guts, or Casca, or Pippin. The fires lit at night. The voices carried in by strong gusts of wind. The second day he heard their voices, just outside. The two of them, leaving—again, again—leaving him. And now together. Casca who had wiped the blood from Guts' face. And Guts who'd let her. They spoke of leaving. Leaving him behind, torn, open, ripped, limp, unmoving, lying on the shredded remains of those who believed, the festering, broken remains of his dream.

And so he lets Guts say soon. Soon they'll be together again, like they're meant to be. He plays their daily game of dress up and dreaming and longing. Guts lifts his arms and positions him inside the heavy impossible armor. But he knows what hides behind those drapes.

The wagon has travelled farther and farther, he knows. Days have passed and they've only stopped nights, the horses too tired, the food too scarce. He doesn't have it in him to ask. He cannot.

"I know of someone who can heal him" he hears on the seventh night.

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