#young lambert

A/N: As a young man, Lambert found the more pointless (read: focused and requiring of patience) tasks of training to be the most taxing. Like, why the fuck does a Witcher need to have a precise kerning?

Lambert puffed indignantly, and his breath clouded before his eyes. Every fistful of straw was another slight on his pride, and he practically punched each one into the target dummy. His hands were numb with cold, and his teeth chattered constantly. The thin woollen cloak they’d thrown at him as he’d stalked out into the courtyard provided little to no insulation from the harsh Kaedweni winter.

This was his punishment for thinking there were more important things to do than practice his downstroke. He snorted. It even sounded fucking stupid. Why did a Witcher need to learn to write, anyway? He understood reading. You needed to be able to work out the illegible scrawl of the average, vaguely literate alderman, and he excelled at mathematics, alchemy; everything that didn’t require pointless amounts of patience, endless misery and no visible payoff. 

Young Lambert: So that means I'm good at mental health, right?

*Crisis Counselor mage enters room*

Lambert never claimed to be a well-behaved child. Before he was given to the Witcher’s, he would do all he could to get food or hide from his ungrateful sack of shit father. Then after the Witcher came to get him, when his body felt like it was being ripped apart and put back together, he would be even more of a whirlwind.

Somehow getting into places he shouldn’t, climbing high on the side of Kaer Morhen’s walls and hiding on the roof so no one would find him, once he was even found <i>inside</i> the oven snaking away on a loaf of bread!

Vesemir did his best to keep an eye on the boy, to make sure he was thoroughly whipped out from training and didn’t have the energy to be such a little hellion. But even the Wolf couldn’t keep an eye on the boy twenty four seven, eventually, he needed to not be a baby sitter for the little shit. Those days arrived with the welcomed visit from an old friend, a Bear Witcher that visited every winter, and Vesemir then dumped babysitting duty on one of the other teachers or one of the boys that Lambert was closest to.

It was one such evening, Lambert had snuck away from the pile of boys he had curled up with to try and find sleep, but after about two hours the boy had given up any hopes of finding any rest and started wandering around the keep, testing his stealth and trying to find new holes to hide himself in sot hat Vesemir couldn’t work him to the bone like he always tries to.

Late at night, everyone was asleep, the snoring varying from light to heavy, some very obnoxious and snorty, and made Lambert giggle as he resisted the urge to break into the room and pinch the Witcher’s nose shut. The same noises for the same dull evening and Lambert was about to throw in the towel on finding somewhere new to crawl into to see how long it would take Vesemir to find him.

It wasn’t until he started to hear a different sort of noise that made Lambert pause and contemplate his options that made the young boy push forward, needing to find out what these new sounds were. He approached a door that he recognized as Vesemir’s room, his head tilting far to the side as he stared at the heavy wood door, candle light filtering through a crack and Lambert licked his lips before easing it open a little bit more.

Instantly his eyes went wide, his eyes getting a full view of Vesemir bent over his mattress and the Bear Witcher standing behind him, hips thrusting forward, both men panting and moaning. Lambert’s mouth fell open and he quickly backed away from the door, blinking rapidly, looking both ways down the hall to make sure there was no one there.