it's my fifth ficlet month! I'll be writing a little fic every day of November again this year and once again, these will mostly be witcher related of any and all canons.
starting off the month strong with a yennskier(/geralt) modern au
Fleeing emotional upheaval, a regretful and nostalgic Yennefer waits backstage for popstar Jaskier to finish his concert of the night-- just the way she used to.
One impulsive midday flight away from the last gasps of a fading dream, Yennefer found herself waiting in the wings of a great performance hall, swathed in refracting light and sound.
A cross-armed security guard stood beside her in the alcove beyond the stage. Even with the call she'd made to his handler, Vespula, before takeoff, she'd had trouble talking her way in backstage.
Had had to scroll through grainy photos on social media feeds to point to for proof, suffering the humiliation of his security's blank looks, pitying frowns.
Though she'd said she would, Yennefer hadn't visited this whole tour, even months since the first show. Too busy, she'd said, when he called some nights. Maybe when Ciri's home from break. Maybe after the holidays. Maybe–
From hundreds of miles away his voice crooned and then softened, phone tucked between her ear and the pillows, the master bedroom as cold and empty as it always was now. If he were there, he wouldn't stand for it. He'd make them talk through the cold distance that had grown between them.
Geralt snored down the hall in the guest room, feeling further away than Jaskier did.
His last tour, when they both were freshly on the outs with Geralt and thought themselves better for it, she'd surprised him often enough that his whole team knew to expect her. She'd slip in through some backdoor, shake off small talk with his wardrobe and makeup crew and lie in wait to pounce after the last encore.
Fresh from the euphoric high of performance, Jaskier was always a living furnace, sweat-slick and dripping glitter, Yennefer's grip on his body possessive and consuming. He could cavort across stage, seduce millions with his vapid pop songs and the thrust of his hips, but afterward, she beckoned and he tripped over himself to get to her and they kissed like lovers torn apart and reuniting after far too long.
They kissed like that every night, brazen and thorough, unconcerned who saw.
She ended up with her own security detail, the fans beginning to recognize her, to seethe with jealousy in Instagram comments, wishing they were her.
Cameras caught their heated embraces and their nights out afterward at fine dining and VIP clubs. Photos of the pair were smeared across the front cover of gossip rags. Kissing in sleek evening wear, in the rain beyond nightclubs, in the backseat of cars.
And then, eventually, it had come out that international popstar Jaskier's mysterious raven-haired paramour was a married woman who lived in the quaint countryside and had a teenaged daughter and a doting husband at home, and the whole thing had blown up into the affair of the decade, several high-profile appearances needed to explain the whole thing away.
“No, you see,” said Jaskier, the fool wholly in his element in the midst of spinning a story about his life-long friendship with Geralt, how he had hated her intrusion into his life until he hadn't at all. “Yen and I have some fun. Rarely safe and sane but consensual on all fronts. But Geralt and Yennefer? Those two are destined to be together.”
The stage lights swung in a blinding arc, and the crowd's roar crescendoed. Only a song or two left and then security said he'd slip back this corridor and take a waiting car to the hotel. These days, he turned in early most nights, they said. Don't keep him up too late, he has appearances first thing tomorrow.
As if it had been Yennefer alone who was the impetus behind the sleepless, wild nights from years ago, as if he wouldn't have found someone else to drag along into the spotlight if not her.
These days, they were used to being small, vital parts of one another's lives, to sharing only moments, to knowing their lives unfolded beyond the times they reunited again. Never wholly separate but inevitably apart.
That had always felt good and right. To know Jaskier missed them well enough, loved them dearly, fit neatly back into the family every time, but did not covet the life Geralt and Yennefer had built together. That he had chosen his path apart from that domestic bliss and did not have to feel jilted, unwanted, or secondary.
Waiting in the wings as the last song gave to shouts and applause, Yennefer felt very small.
He didn't see her at first, the shadowed alcove off stage full dark after the blaze of the stage. Only when security stopped him by the arm, stalling his animated flounce down the corridor, did he see her there and grin and throw back his head with laughter.
Glitter on his cheekbones caught the scant light and fuck-- he was beautiful, all popstar surreal and larger than life.
In a breath, he noticed something off in her expression and sombered at once, crowding close to hold her in his arms without asking a single thing.
Clutching him with her fingers caught in his sweat-damp collar, Yennefer thought of the sheaf of legal papers left on the kitchen island beside a vase of flowers from the garden, thought of the empty drawers she'd found upstairs, the quiet of the house closing in around her.
She thought how's that for destined? Destined to slowly dwindle to nothing.
The woman she had been years ago, the one who had kissed him breathless in the wings most nights, would have hurled sharp accusations his way, crafted to cut. If he had stayed with them, then maybe– If he had thought to take his head out of the clouds and join them in that life then–
The skin of Jaskier's neck smelled of sweat and was so warm it burned Yennefer's forehead as she swayed into him and wept.
She had no one to blame but her own misplaced hope.
(And days later, when Geralt found them cocooned together in the hotel room, she did not shout the angry, hurt things that she wanted to, that she would have, and simply took him, meek and apologetic, into their arms.)
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meve/reynard post-canon gooey fluff with a touch of chivalry/praise kink
A sleepy Reynard misspeaks, inspiring Meve to indulge in sharing a silly girlhood fantasy.
It's a simple slip of the tongue one morning, a misplaced word heavy with sleep. Both the Queen and her consort are slower to rouse these days, loathe to leave a warm bed for their duties in the winter chill of the castle.
Reynard in particular has never slept so deeply, rising slowly to consciousness with little sighs and grumbles rather than snapping alert, and Meve delights in it, rolling to her belly to tuck her face against his sleep-warm shoulder and trail her fingers across the span of his chest as he mumbles nonsense and groggily protests her occasional whispered requests that he wake.
Some mornings, she wakes him more pleasantly, rising to straddle him or slipping beneath the bedcovers, but the hour is already late enough that the servants meant to dress and feed them and prepare them for the day are likely growing antsy waiting outside their shared bedchamber, as they’ve instructed them to do.
In truth, tradition dictates separate bedrooms, which they maintain for the occasional sleepless night, but they’ve gladly shirked tradition and wasted far too much time to sleep apart.
As much as Meve would love to lie here beside him half the morning, to allow Reynard as many moments of peaceful comfort as he deserves after everything, both of them have too many responsibilities looming.
Meve prods him in the ribs and rises on an elbow above him, giving to the impulse to press a brief kiss to his jaw, rough with the previous day’s stubble.
“Reynard,” she says, “it’s time you woke. What ever are you dreaming about?”
“Urgghhff,” he huffs, slack brow tightening as his eyelids flutter, gaze unfocused. “Hmmph?”
Meve prods him more insistently.
“Up,” she says. “No more lazing about.”
“Mmm,” Reynard hums and blinks open his eyes. She knows she’s gotten through at last when he stretches, groggy but conscious, and reaches for her, touching a hand to her cheek as she looms above him. He appears so openly besotted as he looks up at her, that Meve feels her face grow hot. His thumb strokes her cheekbone, as gently as though touching thin-blown glass. His eyes drift shut again.
“Reynard,” she says, her voice hardening into the sharpness of an order. “Wake up. On your feet.”
He’s fully awake at once, stiffening to sit up with covers pushed aside.
“Yes, Sir,” he tells her firmly, realizing only a moment later what he’s called her by mistake. “I mean… Your Grace… err… Meve.”
Meve giggles breathlessly, deeply amused by his mortified expression as much as the slip of the tongue, and she forgets their waiting duties and antsy servants and rises to straddle his lap, planting a hand flat against the ridge of scar tissue at his sternum to tip him backwards against the pillows.
“Call me that again,” she says, laughing. “Sir Meve, hmm?”
“M-my apologies,” stutters Reynard, “if I’d been more awake, I wouldn’t’ve–” Tutting over his embarrassed flush, she catches her fingers in his greying hair to kiss him soundly in apology for the teasing.
“Oh hush. I must confess I like how it sounds,” she says even as she coaxes Reynard’s hands to grip her hips, her own hand stealing between their bodies to cup his morning erection. There’s truly no time for such intimacy, but then again, all of Rivia and Lyria can wait beyond their bedchamber as long as she wishes.
“Meve, we should–”
She shushes him and kisses down his throat and does not hesitate to lift her hips and settle him inside her body, delighting in his quickening breath and pinched brow as much as she had his relaxed slumber.
“D’you know as a child I yearned for th’ day I’d be knighted and all would have to call me sir rather than princess?” She rocks back as she speaks, tangling their fingers together at her hips. “My mother had to inform me of th’ proper title. Unfortunately, Dame doesn’t have quite th’ same appeal.”
Reynard laughs, breathless.
“Call me it again,” she says.
“Sir,” says Reynard, “yes, Sir.”
His hips move up against hers, and she remembers as a girl dreaming of gleaming armor and glorious battle, of earning the respect and adoration of doting tournament crowds. Of being powerful and important, far more than a simple princess destined to be married off into the meek servitude of matrimony and motherhood.
Gripping tight to lean against the leverage of clasp of their hands and Reynard’s raised arms, Meve tells him every foolish fantasy, even as he responds in turn, muttering praise against the skin of her breast, looking up at her through dark lashes as they move together.
The repeated, earnest whispers of sir warm her thoroughly.
They laugh together, sweaty and spent.
Meve knows she has no need of the fanfare of admiring crowds, though these days they wait anywhere she goes. She cares only to have earned the respect and doting adoration of this man beneath her, who would follow her into any battle and indulge her any silly fantasy.
Captured and bound with his least reliable regular informant, Roche ends up in an embarrassing situation.
Dazed and disoriented, Vernon Roche blinked into the sudden dark. A weight pressed down on his ribcage, and his arms met the resistance of bindings when he shifted, his boots a solid wall. He'd been drugged, maybe, his thoughts sluggish and blurry at the edges.
Panic seemed the appropriate response in this situation, but he forced his breathing to steady and willed his mind to clear.
Last he remembered, he'd been in the market near Novigrad’s docks, following a coded message from an informant. He may have been there sooner, had said informant followed an established code rather than hiding his message in the syllable count of a poem published in a university journal.
The message may have been obscure and so discreet as to be nearly useless, but the spy who penned it requesting a meeting in person had been far from obscure or discreet, performing a ballad on a makeshift stage amidst the market stalls and wearing bright blue silk and a gaudy hat with an exorbitant feather.
It was difficult enough to sneak into the city while avoiding detection, let alone to deal with the overblown headache that was the bard known as Jaskier.
It took the ridiculous man only a few moments to spot his hooded figure on the edge of the crowd. With an absurd wink in his direction, Jaskier bowed to his audience, turned on his fashionable heel, and disappeared into the crowd of onlookers.
A more competent informant would have simply left a message in a loose brick in the third alley to the left, rather than put on an impromptu performance while waiting for him to arrive, but Roche knew not to expect competence by now. Occasionally, the performance contained the message, which was nearly as infuriating as counting syllables all night.
In said alley, Roche had found Jaskier leaning against a dusty stack of crates, and he would have said something like if you start talking in riddles, I won't hesitate to pummel you if a sudden blow to the temple had not interrupted him.
He next settled back to awareness in the dark.
It wasn't full-dark, slats of light slipping in from a wall beside him and from a ceiling a foot or so above. Re-orienting himself soothed the claw of anxiety behind his ribs. There was the cry of gulls and the distant murmur of the market, the stink of fish guts and shit and piss. Damn it, he hadn't left the alley and neither had–
“Oh fuck,” groaned the bard that pinned Roche's chest, shuffling his arms in a way that pinched the bindings tight around both of their wrists. “Fuck, am I dead?”
“If only,” Roche grunted. “Quit moving, you little-"
“Agh– ouch. No need to be rude. Your fingers are quite pointy, you know. Hardly even need a dagger with those things. You could stab people right to death with those things. Ack! Do you ever trim your fingernails? I'd taken you for a chronic nailbiter but apparently--"
“Think, bard. Were you followed? Intercepted? Who knew you were publishing that poem?"
“Most of Oxenfurt,” said Jaskier. “I publish in that column weekly. Great place to hide little messages.”
“Yes, very clever. Next time consider leaving a message that doesn't require studying meter all night.”
“Hmm, well I personally would have gotten it straight off, you know– ouch! Is that a horribly talon-like fingernail in your pocket or are you happy to–”
“Quiet.”
There was the sound of booted feet passing through the alley. Possibly someone who could free them but just as likely one of their captors.
Either way, knowing Novigrad, a stranger would be highly likely to hear the muffled shouts of someone calling for help from what appeared to be a coffin shaped box and firmly mind their business. Roche wouldn't really blame them.
Though quiet for the moment, the bard seemed unable to still his errant shuffling. Jaskier was regrettably taller than Roche, which in the limited space left little room for his bent legs, especially with all the unnecessary movement. Roche's chin dug into his shoulder, chest thoroughly pinned. The man's breath warmed his neck as his silk-clad thigh slipped between his legs.
As the moments passed and the stranger's steps faded away, the shifting of Jaskier's body seemed far too deliberate to be coincidental. And that was certainly not the weight of a hefty coinpurse in his pocket Roche felt clearly pressed against his own thigh.
“Are you–” Roche grunted. “Are you doing that on purpose?”
“Well, ah– no but a man can't be blamed for– listen, my body is a well-tuned instrument and therefore, the proximity of a warm body, especially given er– well, that night in Maribor was memorable wasn't it? And we were quite drunk in Flotsam but I'm certain you must remember–”
“Can't say that unfortunate past encounters are really at the top of my mind given the circumstances.
"Those circumstances being pressed against a handsome and alluring former lover somewhere dark and private?"
"Shoved in a box with an imbecile.”
“Rude,” said Jaskier. “I don’t recall you finding the whole thing all that unfortunate in the moment. That thing you did with your–”
“Hopefully our kidnappers hurry back and kill us both.”
“Vernon–”
“Keep still. And shut it.”
“Fine, fine.”
Jaskier obeyed. He went as still and quiet as seemed possible for him.
Unfortunately, some quirk of adrenaline and yes, the heat of the body that pinned him, the sense memory of the bard's preferred fragrance and the whisper of his breath, spurred on by a lingering dryspell in bedding anyone at all, left Roche unfortunately hopelessly burning with arousal as he lay there wishing all the harder for their captors to arrive and put an end to it.
Speaking of all the harder–
“Vernon,” Jaskier whispered, shifting his weight again. Roche truly disliked the sound of his name spoken in his lilting voice. “Is that really a dagger this time or would you like to–”
Tossing aside all good sense – perhaps the blow to the head had addled his mind more than he’d thought – Roche gave in and rutted his hips up in a deliberate grind against Jaskier's thigh.
For a breath, that shut the idiot up, and then he groaned wantonly and aligned their hips better to thrust in equal measure down, the silk that cupped his erection slipping in an insistent tease against Roche's own.
And that, of course, was when the lid of the crate cracked open and Geralt's face hovered over them as they blinked into the sudden light.
“Hm,” Geralt said as his brow furrowed, the corners of his mouth twitching with amusement. “Should I shut the lid and go stand over there for a few more minutes?”
“Oh fuck you, Witcher,” sputtered a hot-faced Roche.
Later, when their captors had been tracked down and dealt with and the whole business had led back to the contents of the very message Jaskier had wanted to relay to him, Roche downed long swallows of ale in the corner booth of a shitty tavern. He offered a rude gesture when the bard peacocking about with a company of minstrels winked in his direction.
“Don't look like that, Vernon,” said Geralt beside him. “I've caught him with his pants down in worse company. Under worse threat of imminent death even.”
Roche made a far ruder gesture his way.
Even so, he was soft on Geralt and could never deny him much at all, not after everything. When he was beckoned to join them later in the bard's room for a “private performance”, he went willingly enough to his likely doom.
i'm in the midst of planning for my fifth (!!) ficlet month this November, where i challenge myself to write one small fic per day for a whole month, so i figured i might rec some of my favorites from past months.
the majority of ficlets were written for The Witcher but it's very funny to see my canon interests broaden and change from year to year.
Ficlet Month Masterlists
November 2020 - tumblr & ao3 collection
November 2021 - tumblr & ao3 collection
October 2022 - tumblr & ao3 collection
November 2023 - tumblr & ao3 collection
Ficlet self-recs below the cut!
written out of the stories - '20 - yennefer & original female character
a meta heavy future fic where yen speaks with a museum curator about her forgotten place in The Witcher legend inspired by book canon asides and featuring a heavy dose of spite
monster - '21 - yennefer/geralt
a tragic frankenstein au where yennefer creates a monster to love her but cannot ever be sure that he truly does featuring body horror and angst and yucky tenderness
a study in perseverance - '21 - geralt/jaskier
a crack taken seriously centaur!geralt au where jaskier is wholly determined to prepare himself physically and mentally (mostly physically) to have penetrative sex with geralt's horse bits featuring over the top melodrama, bad sex and gooey romance
the little griefs - '21 - geralt & roach(s)
a study of a series of horses called roach through a witcher's life on the path featuring loss, loneliness, and carrying on
from such great heights - '22 - yennefer/geralt
in an alternate universe where magic users are born with wings, yennefer gave hers up and geralt's were stolen from him. featuring two broken people loving each other as best they can and wing preening
a unicorn for tea - '22 - yennefer/geralt &ciri
a post book canon fic where ciri and ihuarraquax come to visit yennefer and geralt in their idyllic ambiguous afterlife featuring yen's poor baking skills, humor, and a lingering bittersweetness
degradation for degradation - '22 - dijkstra/geralt
a porn with very little plot game canon divergent fic where dijkstra seeks to even the score with geralt featuring humiliation, geralt being a little shit, and a healthy heaping of size difference
when we were girls - '23 - calanthe/meve
a pre-canon twn/book/game-blended exploration of the childhood relationship between two young women who later became powerful queens with very different fates
we worship nothing in the foxholes - '23 - isengrim/iorveth
a post battle of brenna missing scene between two virhedd commanders who are just beginning to grapple with nilfgaard's defeat, the scoia'tael's lost dreams of freedom, and the likelihood that they won't get out of the war alive
how much it was worth - '23 - geralt & ciri & kelpie
a missing scene before the end of lady of the lake where geralt admires ciri's black mare and feels the rift of time and trauma that's grown between himself and his daughter
In the wake of the events of the Thanned coup, in an attempt not to fall apart, Yennefer falls into Jaskier's arms.
cw for twn canon and mentions of canon injury and assumed gory character death
It had taken only hours for Thanned to be rent to pieces but would take days, maybe weeks to repair the damages. To knit the fragile protective wards back together and force the very foundations of the island not to sink into the sea. To recover magical artifacts from the rubble, praying that none had been made unstable in the desctruction, would not ignite fresh fires and cause more casualties.
It would take several days to bury the dead.
Yennefer pushed on for hours through the trembling of her limbs and aching hunger, her body and mind the wobbly sort of stretched thin that warned of too many incantations used far too close together. Too much more and her very being may rattle apart. Nothing left to give to the veins of power she called on than her own marrow made dust.
It was not some selfless, newly-awakened devotion to her sisters that drove her on. If she did not rest, did not slow, her mind could not return to the myriad of ways she had failed the ones she loved.
If she stopped even more a moment, she could hear only the deafening concussion of Tor Lara.
There was a harsh whistling and buzzing in her ear when she reached for Ciri's presence and found–
Echoing again and again, the telepathic whisper from Triss about the state she had found Geralt's body, all but a corpse, her message interrupted by hysteric weeping, and then silence as they vanished.
Yennefer could not think about those things or she would fray to pieces whether or not she overtaxed herself magically. She would sink into the sea that churned against Thanned's broken cliffs and dissolve.
By the tenth hour, Keira Metz grabbed her by the elbow and swore colorfully in her face, spittle flying, until she sat down and had a cup of tea in an undamaged alcove that still smelled sweet with domestic magic.
She and Keira had not been friends before this, not really, but they leaned their exhausted bodies together and for a moment, Yennefer's thoughts drifted back to–
She stood abruptly, turned to thank Keira and found her dozing against a column, dusty tear tracks drying on her face.
If she had not run into Geralt's bard not long after, she may have thrown herself back into the thick of salvage and repair, but she encountered the man in a dingy hallway traipsing about picking up side tables and setting decorative vases back atop them with great care, as though such a thing were as vitally important as dragging their dead from the ruins.
Hours and hours ago, they had embraced in the rubble and she had told him what she knew and tried not to collapse in his warm arms and sob and she had thought he'd be gone by now, returned to Gors Velen with the other minstrels and unfortunate outsiders from the banquet who had been caught up in the deadly affair.
She watched Jaskier clumsily try to set a fallen chair to rights only to find several of its legs charred to nothing and then flounder over what to do with the thing, and in that moment, Yennefer found him so pleasantly foolish and human and wonderful that her tired limbs at last gave out.
He caught her, voice pitched high, and then he dragged her up in his arms. Yennefer must have been a babe the last time she was carried in someone's arms. She felt weightless in his iron grip, one arm curled tight under her bent legs and the other around her shoulders. The long spill of her hair swayed.
He carried her so easily, even while he moaned about the weight. The chatter of his teeth betrayed his fear as he complained casually, lips against her hair, about the roles they were supposed to play in this story. That she was meant to carry him like a bride from the wreckage, not the other way around.
Yennefer lost track of reality. She thought of Geralt, milk-white hair stained bloodied red even as the tide rose and washed it away. She thought of Ciri. Wondered how they would bury her if the explosion of the portal had reduced her body to a fine mist of viscera lost to the air above the island. Atom by atom?
She woke on a bed in a dark room, buzzing with the acrid burn of healing magic. Jaskier sprawled beside her, their hands clasped tight.
He woke when she did, eyes catching with a glassy shine in the dark, and he told her she'd apparently nearly unraveled her own cellular structure. He called her an idiot. He pushed back the curtain of her hair.
Yennefer kissed him, full and thorough.
Maybe she had thought about kissing him before this, had admired the narrow dip of his waist and imagined fitting her hands there, had been struck by the full pout of his lips and wondered how he would taste, but the right time had ever evaded them.
This was the wrong time.
The grief crescendoed, as though it was her body that had been splintered and broken and reduced to a cloud of ash.
Jaskier kissed her like he knew what she was thinking. She knew what he was thinking, caught by his feeble human anxieties of feeling like something very small standing in the midst of a hurricane.
His grief stood in miniature beside hers, his little sigh of an attempt to help fix something, anything, to help hold Yennefer's fracturing pieces in his hands and clutch them tight enough that she did not spill like sand between his fingers.
When their bodies fit themselves together, rocking sweetly in each other's arms, she felt the sore echo in her thighs of her love-making with Geralt and ached through her whole body with the wish that he were there instead and then ached with the guilt of that thought and clung to Jaskier and held his weeping face in her hands and kissed away the spill of tears.
In the stillness after, she did not weep, but she pressed her cheek against the softness of his chest and imagined that they could have been lovers in another life.
She, a humble peasant girl and he, a travelling minstrel. Dancing around the bonfires at a village festival, kissing under the stars, eloping at dawn with a new life in mind. No monsters or magic. No blood-stained prophecies.
He asked what she was thinking, long fingers tiptoeing along her temple, and she asked him to marry her and he laughed a wheeze against her scalp and she held her face to his breast and imagined another life. How ugly their filthy peasant children would look, how they would argue and argue, how she would waste away one day of consumption or dysentary and he would remarry but visit her barrow in the woods and lay down soft sprigs of chamomile.
Yennefer tried her very best and her very hardest not to shake wholly to pieces in his arms.
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ciri & her messed up parents modern au ft. yenralt
For the first time in years and with great trepidation, Ciri returns home for a holiday family gathering.
aka I'm pushing my ciri as jenny from thebes agena
Ciri dropped the kickstand of her bike and worked her stiff fingers in and out of fists, regretting her smart-looking fingerless gloves after miles of chilled highway. The driveway and street out front of the little house was full, and somebody had slung lights up on the eaves and chucked a crooked wreath on the door.
Half the cars she didn't recognize, but then, she hadn't been back for years.
A little tabby hurried up the walk to meet her, tail raised high, and Ciri swung off her bike to drop to meet her. Scratching behind her ears, she tipped up an oversized tag on her collar to read– of course.
Roach nudged at the laces of her boots and purred.
For all the things that did, some things never changed.
When Mama had called to tell her they were doing family Yuletide dinner, Ciri had laughed out loud. Couldn't help it. She couldn't imagine her Mama home-cooking anything without some disaster happening. When she was little, Mama used to peel the label off store-bought jam to give as gifts to her teachers. They’d always gotten takeout on the important holidays. Eaten quiet together washed by the glow of the TV.
Those were the good holidays. The bad ones were loud.
Daddy home late from a shift he claimed he wouldn't take this year. Mama red-eyed and yelling. She looked like she could call down lightning sometimes when she was real mad, black hair frizzed out and wild, and Daddy usually got that stubborn gleam in his eye and put his foot in his mouth and then–
There were great holidays too, of course. Her years spent with Pops and her uncles in the mountains, bundled up like a marshmallow for hunting trips and coming in out of the cold to a feast laid out by the roaring fire. There'd been times with her cousins from the islands, learning to ice skate and rev a snowmobile.
And there'd been great times with her parents too. Just never together under the same roof. That's when it soured.
There'd been that year that she and her dad went camping in the middle of fuck-all nowhere. Just them and their bikes and the fog and shitty freeze-dried army rations cooked out of bags. That'd been nice.
And the year Mama took her to the city, bought tickets to a show and let her dress up fancy, a little slutty, and ate takeout in their opulent hotel room after, gossiping and giggling like little girls at a sleepover. That'd been a night she remembered so fondly it ached.
But there'd never been great times in this house. Mama had lived here in Vengerberg forever, and Daddy had lived here in a rotation of years on and off and Ciri had lived here when she wasn't off at school but always done her best to find other places to go.
The first chance she could, she was gone. That escape came with its own measure of fucked up nights and bad times, but that was another story. Ciri had clawed her way out of several dark places and had figured she'd keep doing that forever.
She'd never seen her Mama's place with Yule lights on the eaves. Couldn't quite remember why no one had ever decorated. Maybe just to be stubborn and miserable. Any time they'd tried, it became a fight. The same as anything.
Ciri made herself go up the front walk, climbing the stoop and just standing there looking at the crooked greenery on the door. She reached out and straightened it rather than knocking.
She wished she'd brought somebody with her. Someone to stand here with a hand at the small of her back and make the decision to go in for her. She'd been told on the phone she could bring a guest, her Mama's voice dipping in question like she wanted to ask who she was with now but had thought better of it.
Ciri didn't have anybody. Maybe never had anyone.
She knocked on the door and didn't wait for the answer, just pushed in. Roach leapt past her legs, and the gathering in the front room that rambled out into the dining room all exclaimed with joy when they saw her. Some of the people who clapped her on the back or called a greeting were unfamiliar, but maybe she'd just forgotten or they'd shaved their beard or dyed their hair.
The rooms were hung with garland around the doorways, and music swelled from somewhere. The light was warm, and the space was full.
After being released from the umpteenth bear hug, somebody told her that her parents were in the kitchen finishing up dinner. They laughed over the mock-scared face she pulled, but the way her heartbeat kicked up, it was barely a joke.
The kitchen was too small for much of anything. Daddy always said he'd take out that half wall and give it some breathing room, but there'd been hemming and hawing over details and then a bitterness that it never got done and then a grudge and a stubborn insistence it wasn't necessary anyway to expand a kitchen no one stepped foot in.
Now, every bit of counter space was swathed with foil covered dishes. Enough to feed an army. Ciri felt a little pang of guilt that maybe they'd been waiting for her.
Mama and Daddy were standing at the stove together. Daddy with his white hair tied back, wearing a kiss the cook apron, and Mama looking short as hell in her stocking feet stirring a pot of something on the stove.
They spoke quiet together, heads bent close. Daddy's hand rested at her waist and when she cut the burner and turned to him, he dropped a kiss into her hair. They swayed together, a vision of opposites. Rising up out of Ciri's muck-stained memories like a mirage.
Mama short and fat and happy. Daddy stooping a little to rest his chin against her cloud of dark hair.
It didn't seem wholly fair. That after everything, after all those ruined holidays, everything she fled from, her parents should claw their way to something as peaceful and real as this. Something that felt different.
Ciri hadn't believed it when Mama told her. That something was different this time. But she believed it now, as much as she could believe anything at all.
The tabby weaved between her legs and meowed after a piece of ham, and her parents looked up and turned her way, faces brimming with wet smiles, and when they opened their arms together, she fell into them and held tight to both, hoping someday she'd look back on this year as one of the great ones. Fighting back the bitterness like a cold and solid wave.
iorveth/roche weird criminals modern au of reason of state or something
Though an elite team of unsavory characters has agreed to work together with the hopes of assassinating the shady CEO of Redanian Industries, that doesn't mean they have to like each other.
content warning for canon-typical violence and a mostly non-explicit blowjob
The intercom crackled.
"Shit, pack it in, lads, our man's long gone."
A moment later, the staccato hum of the helicopter rising from the roof of the factory confirmed the announcement. Radovid had fucking gotten away again.
With their mission failed, animosity predictably reignited among the ragtag crew of would-be assassins.
"I fuckin' had him. One damn floor away. If you'd kept those heavies off me on that platform–"
"Ah, my mistake, Vernon. I had assumed you preferred your skull attached to your head. You were too close together to take a–”
“Thought you used to be a better fuckin' shot than that. You losin’ your touch? Your eyes goin’ bad, Iorveth? Can you see this?”
A distant middle finger, blurred through the lens of a scope.
“Permission to shoot him, boss?”
“Sorry, denied,” grumbled Dijkstra’s voice through the intercom. “Unfortunately, we need the unpleasant little bastard. Quit bitching and get out of there. All of you.”
There came a chorus of affirmatives from the crew. Geralt, already in the lobby. Isengrim, packing up in the building opposite. Philippa, disappearing easily into the crowded streets.
“Triss,” called Roche. “Law enforcement?”
“Thirty minutes out,” said Triss, her soft voice warped by the distance. Her van was somewhere down on the streets, parked in a discrete location. “I scrambled their comms but–”
“No rush then.”
“Fuckin’ hell–”
"Roche, don't."
“Damn it, someone make sure he doesn’t kill–”
Roche’s intercom clicked off.
For a few moments, having clicked off his own noisy comms, Iorveth trailed the barrel of his rifle after the figure scurrying across the roof in the unearthly blur of his night vision scope. He considered how much trouble he’d be in if he took a shot after all. Just a few warning shots whizzing near his ankles. Couldn't hurt.
He leaned away with a sigh and rolled his stiff neck and shoulders, beginning to pack away his rifle. A dozen flights of stairs separated this floor from the lower roof below, but the elevator was already pinging.
Iorveth amused himself imagining Roche jogging in place in the little box as it rose.
All that furious energy wasted just for a chance to hit him once or twice before they had to flee as the building was inevitably surrounded.
The door whooshed open just as he clicked the last latch shut on his packed equipment, and the man descended on him, all but vibrating with rage.
Iorveth deflected a punch with his forearm and jabbed with his own hit that Roche twisted easily away from. There was no real sense in hand to hand fighting like this, both of them too well-matched and too familiar. Each strike inspired a fluid counterstrike. They circled the empty room, locked in a stalemate.
There’d been a time when Iorveth would have played dirtier, unafraid to knock the man’s head against a nearby surface in a move that could split his skull in two. Similarly, Roche did not pull the gun from its holster on his thigh and let loose the way he may once have.
Things had been simpler when Roche was special ops and Iorveth part of a now defunct terrorist organization. For now, they were on the same team, and it wouldn’t do to maim or dismember one another before fulfilling their goal.
After Radovid was dead, no holds barred.
Time ticked by. This building would be buzzing with cops before long.
Roche managed to pin Iorveth with a rough shove against the long span of windows, the city lights glowing on his furrowed brow.
When their mouths met, the crush of their bodies together was no less furious.
Roche tugged at his braided hair, and Iorveth bit his lip hard. When hands fumbled at his belt, tugging, Iorveth caught them.
“No time for that,” he said. They’d have enough trouble escaping the building as it was. Iorveth could imagine the panicked demands and warnings buzzing from their silenced comms.
Unfortunately, the bastard couldn't resist a challenge.
“There’s time,” Roche grunted and went hard to his knees.
Sirens echoed in the distance. Iorveth shoved back the slouch of Roche's beanie to run his palms along his buzzed scalp.
"Hurry up," he said, even the hot pleasure of the mouth stretched around his cock not enough to dull his awareness of how close they were cutting it.
Roche pulled back a moment, breathing in sharp pants.
"You're usually more of a hairpin trigger," he grumbled.
"Maybe you're boring me."
"Fuck you."
The renewed focus and intensity brought him to the edge and over in a few quick breaths, and the warm twitch of his belly had barely waned before Roche was on his feet and had him by the collar.
Roche grunted as his back hit the wall, Iorveth punching the flash of the button to call the elevator even as he sucked a red mark onto the man's stubble-rough throat. When the door pinged and slid open, they fell inside with Iorveth's thigh crooked between Roche's legs. Roche gripped the bar along the wall and rutted up against him as the elevator hummed to life and plunged.
Iorveth watched dark eyelashes flutter as his mouth dropped open, almost pretty.
Later, sprawled out across the dark sheets of their shared high-rise apartment, he'd like to take his time and really watch the way this man's expression lost its stubborn tension momentarily at the cusp of his pleasure.
The fluorescent lights flickered into the red glow of shutdown just as they crashed into a lobby swarmed with policemen.
They'd have been wholly fucked had Geralt not appeared suddenly to beckon them down a side corridor. A full-tilt sprint took them through a maintenance hallway and out the other side of the building to crouch together behind a dumpster, listening for the roar of Triss' getaway van.
"Bastard just had to get a fuckin' punch in," grunted Iorveth as he leaned, breathing hard, against the slump of Roche's shoulder.
"Sure," said Geralt as he eyed Iorveth's undone belt. "We'll go with that."
After a king-slaying alliance forms between Letho and the Scoia'tael, Iorveth brings the Viper to stay in his personal hideout in the forest.
The Scoia'tael camp was a many-headed beast, not one great gathering of Elven warriors but dozens of scattered camps hidden in the ruins, caverns, and wild brush that surrounded the outpost of Flotsam.
“So that one camp discovered may give early warning to the rest,” Iorveth explained as he led the way through the thickening undergrowth toward his personal lodgings.
“You mean so your enemies can't guess how few of you are left,” said Letho, following soundless behind him.
The location of each little camp was plain as day to his mutated senses. He could hear which bird calls were shaped by Elven mouths, could smell sweat and oiled leather, the ash of their cooking fires, could see clearly the faint impressions of footsteps in the scattered leaflitter that marked the path.
Iorveth abruptly led him through a narrow gap in the rock wall beside them, looking back over his shoulder in the dim light of the cavern that opened to them to watch him follow.
“Did you think I'd get stuck?” Letho asked, having swiftly shed the swords strapped at his back to fit easily through the opening. Once inside, he could do nothing about his body filling a great deal of the space, but despite his size, he knew there was nowhere at all he couldn't slip in or out of if need be.
Letho was simply glad Iorveth hadn't beckoned him into some precarious treetop shelter. There he may have had some difficulty.
“Welcome to my humble home away from home,“ Iorveth deadpanned, gesturing with a broad sweep of his arms. The dingy cave was lit by a shaft of evening light falling from above. It boasted no obvious amenities beyond a pallet in the corner, a few dusty crates, and a low tabletop littered with parchment and oft-used candles. “You have your choice of several patches of dirt to sleep on. May I offer you a rock as a pillow?”
“I've slept worse places,” said Letho, even as Iorveth cracked open a chest and lay out a perfectly serviceable bed roll for Letho to sleep.
“I considered letting you sleep with the arachas, since you must be immune to its venom, but since you might be useful, I'd rather keep you close enough to keep an eye on.”
“Pity,” said Letho in a flat voice as he watched Iorveth light several candles with a long match, a warm glow flickering across the earthen walls. “Quite amenable creatures, once you've tamed them. Very cuddly.”
“I'm certain you've had worse bedfellows.”
Iorveth’s green eye caught the light, having been shrewdly sizing him up, piecing his true intentions together from the moment hours ago when Letho had offered himself as an ally. An assassin.
As clever as the sly elf was, he wouldn't be able to sniff out Letho's true loyalties. The Lodge, Nilfgaard, the Scoia’tael– all of it tangled together into a complex web, but at the heart of it, it was his brothers alone he was loyal to. He would carve out a home for them somewhere in the world, even if it killed him.
Settling in for the night, the elf began to strip himself of weapons and armor, slender beneath it all. He had always heard it said that Iorveth was a hideous, deformed creature, but it seemed that was only true by Elven standards or by the account of enemies who had seen his sneering face contorted with hatred.
In the candlelight, he was beautiful, skin a tangle of green ink, body leanly-muscled. Whoever called Iorveth hideous would have to invent new words to describe Letho's appearance.
Iorveth eyed the one-handed grip Letho had on his twin sword sheaths, and he deliberately set them aside, leaving the rest of his kit on. The swords were the only possessions of any note that he had left, and he'd long slept in his armor like a second skin. Mirroring the elf, Letho settled down on his bed roll, though he'd be unlikely to sleep more than strictly necessary, if at all.
Iorveth extracted an apple from somewhere and tossed one Letho's way. His stomach yawned with hunger despite his meal earlier, but a mealy fruit wouldn't satisfy. He took small bites, familiar with the empty pangs of his stomach. He'd hunt tomorrow morning, gut some poor beast and eat it raw, torn into bloody pieces easy enough to swallow.
The Scoia’tael lived like their animal namesake, burrowed in the earth and scratching out an existence as vermin, but Letho truly was an animal. At the very least, he suspected he'd die like one.
For now, he was alive, slithering from one trap to the next.
In the nights that followed, with bottles of forest-brewed mead and stolen vodka cracked open to share between them, Letho recognized the way Iorveth began to watch him, could scent the bodily tells of lusty interest. For all that elves haughtily claimed to be above the messy rutting of humanity's ilk, they weren't so different. Iorveth warmed more and more with curious arousal.
“Have you got two of them? Like a true viper?” slurred Iorveth one night, the drink coloring his unscarred cheekbone, the other lost to shadow. “And of course, I don’t mean the swords.”
“Come and find out,” said Letho and beckoned to his lap. Iorveth did not hesitate, moving before he'd finished the gesture. Both knew better than to deny themselves a pleasant moment in a life filled with unpleasant ones. “I'll only bite if you ask me to.”
In response, Iorveth's dull teeth sank into the skin of Letho's bared throat.
