#shielwrites

***

“Enough, enough!” Nile laughingly pounds on Nicky’s back, dizzy. “Put me down!” 

Nicky tightens his grip and spins them around twice more, faster, before giving in to her pleas and depositing her back onto the ground. Nile groans and falls onto her back, the Oregon sky spinning above her. 

“Gotta work on your sea legs, kid,” Andy calls from across the fire, cackling. 

Nicky turns on her, eyes twinkling. “Bella.’ 

“Don’t you dare,” Andy warns, holding her bottle of whiskey up in defense. She’s too late. Nicky swoops in, stooping to grab her thighs and lift her straight up, twirling in a circle. Andy does her best to look dignified, resting the whiskey on top of Nicky's head, waiting him out. He tilts his head back and she breaks, laughing as she pours liquor into his open mouth. 

Joe appears above Nile, blocking out the night’s sky. He grins down at her, glitter raining down from his hair. “You can’t be done already, this is your holiday.” She refuses to sit up just yet, but makes a grabby motion upwards to appease him. He obligingly passes a half-burnt sparkler over and then taps his against hers in a mock toast. 

“I still feel kind of weird celebrating,” she admits as Joe sits down beside her, watching Andy try to kick Nicky’s feet out from under him to steal back her cigarette. 

He hums, tilting his head in acknowledgement. “You’ll have many years to contemplate. But who knows when you’ll see that again,” he nods to where Nicky and Andy have come to a compromise, Andy riding piggyback while she holds the cigarette to his lips.

Nile snorts, sitting up and motioning for the last sparkler. Nicky had shot off the last real firework hours earlier with childlike glee.

“I guess it is July 16th anyway,” she says, “we could be celebrating anything. Fuck it. I’m celebrating electricity.” 

They’ve spent the last three months infiltrating a cult with known ties to a particularly nasty trafficking ring. Nicky and Andy were on the inside, trying to figure out where the money was coming from, while Joe and Nile had camped out in a shack a few miles away, listening to the others spit some particularly inventive slurs over the comms while they worked out the supply lines. 

Point being, Nile’s not feeling real patriotic. But they passed a run-down stand a few miles back advertising 75% O f all Fire orks!, the f and w lost to time, and Nicky had insisted they stop - the man’s never met an explosive he didn’t like. It’s close enough to the solstice that Andy had her annual itch to get blacked out next to a dangerously high fire, so, here they are. Celebrating something that isn’t quite the Fourth of July, but isn’t exactly not the Fourth of July either, existing in a liminal space between Nile’s waning national allegiances and a desperate homesickness ten years hasn’t been enough to shake. 

Joe, ever good at reading a room, lets the moment pass unremarked. He’s the best at that. Nicky gets caught off-guard by his own introspection, going suddenly quiet for days at a time. Andy doesn’t have much patience for the whole thing, she figures if she doesn’t know herself at this point then it’s all a lost cause anyway. Joe, on the other hand, thinks clearly, deeply, and at his own pace. Meaning he’ll probably have a lot to say on the complexities of celebrating problematic holidays a month from now, but that’s not going to stop him from making heart eyes at Nicky tonight. 

Nicky makes a grab for the last of the whiskey and Andy dodges, yanking all of her weight to the left so that they collapse to the ground together, rolling out of the fall. She springs up and gets a foot on Nicky’s chest, hamming it up as she downs the last of the bottle in victory. 

“My love, avenge me!” Nicky mimes dying, doing an appallingly poor job despite all his experience.

“Ah, but then who would carry on your memory?” Joe laments. 

Nile knocks her shoulder against his. “Looks like we’ve found the limits of your love at last,” she tells Nicky. “It was that gas station coffee.” 

Joe nods solemnly. “I can still feel its poison in my veins.” He lifts a hand shakily. “Even now, I’m too frail to walk.” 

Nicky bats Andy’s leg away, moving to stand up with the single-minded focus of the very drunk. “Good. Then it will be less work for me to get you on your back.” He struggles to get himself upright, which doesn’t bode well for his luck standing up anything else. 

Nile gags out of principle. By this point she’s all but immune to finding the two of them on any surface, at any time of the day, but she tries to remember she’s supposed to be offended at least once a week. 

Nicky collapses onto the ground beside them, rolling over to put his head on Joe’s lap. “I’ve missed you,” he says. 

Joe runs his fingers through Nicky’s hair. “And I, you.” 

These days, Nile knows that if she wakes first up and tastes rain, she should make sure Nicky has lemongrass tea. She knows Joe has never kept a pair of matching socks for more than a week but hates when one gets a hole in its heel, and that Andy loves cosmopolitans more than she will ever admit. She knows these people inside and out, but then occasionally they’ll do the most mundane shit and it’ll sneak up and hit her all again how long nine-hundred years really is. 

“Don’t you ever worry you’ll get tired of each other?” Nile asks absently, mostly joking. 

Nicky squints up at her, blinking through the alcohol. He pokes Joe in the chest. “She’s not making any sense.” 

Joe flicks his ear in admonishment. “Stop teasing her.” 

“No no, I’m serious,” Nile says, realizing as she says it that she is. Also possibly more drunk than she thought. “Like, what happens if you break up one day. How would that even work? I know you guys have the most epic romance in all of history, or whatever, but what happens if that ends? Am I going to have to swap weekends?”

“What’s romance have to do with it?” Nicky asks, propping himself up onto one elbow. 

Joe groans. “See what you’ve done?” 

Nicky hushes him. “I do not - choose - Joe. Choice is irrelevant.” 

Nile looks to Joe, who shrugs. “The last time I tried to remember my wife, some years ago, she ended up having Nicky eyes, his face,” he reaches down playfully, “his cock.” 

Nicky grinds up into his touch, relaxed and unashamed. 

“I am right here.” Nile pretends to shield her eyes.

Nicky makes a dismissive noise. “I would burn the world to the ground for Joe, and it would be an act of self-defense.” 

Joe makes a wounded noise then ducks down, pulling Nicky’s up to meet him halfway. Nile’s seen this show before, too much of this show before, and knows that’s her cue to leave. Or, in this case, wander the twenty feet away to where Andy’s set herself up with ‘smores. 

“They’ll fall asleep soon.” Andy passes her a sharpened stick with a marshmallow already speared. 

Nile shrugs. “It’s sweet, in a very X-rated kind of way.” She watches the marshmallow slowly brown, keeping her eyes carefully on the fire. “I just, I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get something like that, you know?” 

He keeps waiting for the time Aiden breaks, when he's had enough of being pushed around and leaves him. Lambert's never really played like this before. Oh sure, he's played rough. A hand around a throat is nothing new. But the orders? The dropping on command and the blindfolds and the trust? Yeah, that shit is a novelty.

A novelty he slowly can't stop thinking about. So maybe sometimes he thinks about Aiden's cock working its way down his throat. And maybe sometimes he wishes he didn't have to decide.

For those unfamiliar, The Choice is said to be the first trial that trainees must pass through. As best I can tell, it only appears in book canon. It happens when the boys are around 9 or 10 and is the first, least deadly (relatively speaking), round of enhancements. The boys eat a special diet of mushrooms and herbs and start the really grueling physical training.

The key thing about The Choice is that it’s presented as just that, a choice. In theory, the boys can say no. They could head back down the mountain and seek their fortune elsewhere.

Now, there’s of course a million complications with that. They’re children. They’re unwanted. The world is cruel and they’re just as likely to end up dead if they’re sent out on their own. The Choice isn’t much of a choice at all.

But I think, as humans, we rely strongly on the illusion of choice. Did someone really choose to work a certain job when they applied to a hundred places, heard back from two, and one paid twice as much? In some ways, no. But in other important ways, you sent the applications and you made a selection. It might have been a choice where the alternative was not feasible, but it was a choice. And as a human having some level of agency, any level, is important.

So let’s apply that idea to our boys.

First there’s Geralt. By all accounts he’s been with the witcher’s the longest, to the point where he has barely any memory of the outside world. Kaer Morhen is his home, being a witcher is his destiny. Sure, that’s no choice, but in the same way we have no choice in the family we are born into. We may at times look at other families who seem to be happier, kinder, richer, and wish that ours were different, but there’s rarely a fundamental feeling that someone fucked us over. As Geralt would say, destiny is a bitch. But there’s no one on this mortal plane to direct that anger at, so most of the time we don’t bother.

And what’s more, Geralt has no comparison. Nothing to be angry that he doesn’t have, because being a witcher is all there is. And, other than the likely horrible death, it probably even sounds pretty cool. I’d bet you good money that the fully grown witcher’s wintering in the keep aren’t sharing horror stories while deep in their cups. Not in a culture that values toughness and traditional masculinity. Nope, they’re bragging about their heroics and the best kills of the season. It’s no wonder Geralt has such romantic notions about his own life.

So sure, Geralt was presented a choice. But he didn’t need it, because just like you’ve always been your mother’s child, he’s always been a witcher. Sometimes that sucks, especially later in life when you start to know other mothers, other options, and can compare. But some things are so fundamental to you as a person that if you made any other “choice” and you wouldn’t be you at all.

Next is Eskel. Steady and sure.

From what we can tell, Eskel came to the witcher’s at a normal age, probably around six or seven. Late enough that he knew his family, he knew his town, he knew a little of life outside the keep. We don’t know much about his background other than he was Hillfolk and presumably dirt poor. But he knew a before and he knew an after; he could compare.

So for Eskel, The Choice was, in an important sense, a choice. If he had said no we don’t know what he would be going back to - probably a short life on the streets begging for scraps. But he knew a little of the outside world, knew in a very tangible sense what it was to be human, and he said yes, okay, I’ll give that up.

And I think that a really important factor in why he’s so content with his lot. It might often be six metric tons of shit, and he might sometimes wonder what might have been, or what the hell he was thinking when he said yes. But he said yes, so who is there to blame really?

And then Lambert. My darling angry rat man Lambert.

He came to Kaer Morhen late. Much later than the other boys. He knew damn well that the outside world was shit, but it was his world. His to hate, but his. He never wanted to be a Witcher and he damn well didn’t choose this life.

And this is me stepping out on a limb, but I think it’s really likely he didn’t choose. Not just in a metaphorical sense, but also as in the trials. If The Choice happened around age 9 or 10, Lambert would have missed it entirely. I think it’s really likely that the instructors skipped it altogether, just started shoving mushrooms down his throat as quick as possible, because the older the boys have lower rates of survival and he needed to be put through The Grasses as soon as possible. So even at the most basic level, stripping away any philosophical discussion about what is choice, really, when all your options are shit? Lambert didn’t choose.