Somewhat Clear

deerna
somewhatclear

Rating: SAFE
Fandom: The Witcher
Relationship: Aiden/Lambert
Tags: Blood and Injuries, Mental Health Issues, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied Internalized Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, The Intrinsic Tragedy of Witchers, Lambert's sad backstory, references to suicidal thoughts
Wordcount: 2341
Notes: commission for besselfcn. Partecipa alla maritombola di landedifandom per il prompt #20 Tristezza.

Summary:
Lambert and Aiden are on a hunt together. Lambert gets sliced up by a cockatrice and Aiden patches him up. Uncomfortable conversations are had, and unexpected feelings are revealed.

Excerpt:

“A little bestiary fact for you, Aiden—do you know why they’re called cockatrices? Because the guy who discovered them called them cocksuckers and someone made a mistake while transcribing it—”

“You say that every single time we take down a cockatrice, Lamb, and it wasn’t funny the first time,” Aiden told him, only half listening to him.

{ read on AO3 | read here }

Witchers from different schools had very different ways to go about hunts. Aiden never really paid attention to it until he met Lambert—and only because Lambert didn’t hunt like a witcher from the School of Wolf, despite being one.

Wolves, much like their animal counterparts, were powerful and organized hunters. They did better in groups—which was a design flaw as much as Cats’ need to socialize in order to function normally, if you asked Aiden—and they followed their prey for days, studying its weakness and the best way to shape the fight to their advantage, be it with equipment or signs or whatever. Cats were trained to do preliminary work on their hunts, but most of them just forgot about it once they caught sight of their target; Aiden too often found himself remembering about potions that he’d brewed specifically for a certain contract only afterwards, while he was being paid for completing it.

Lambert was a Wolf—but he didn’t prepare for the fight. He didn’t wear heavy armor, he didn’t brew potions, he didn’t oil his swords; he didn’t scope the area for hints, he didn’t hesitate one second before jumping into the fray. Lambert went off at whatever monster they were facing with only his swords and his bombs and his screams, and called it a day.

Aiden had suspected at first that maybe he was just bad at the whole Wolf witcher thing—but then he’d seen him hunt with one of his brothers, a scarred witcher who had kept his back from Aiden the whole time as if expecting to be stabbed between the shoulderblades (which had been sort of rude—Aiden wasn’t that sort of Cat, he could control himself, thank you very much) and realized that it wasn’t the case. Apparently Lambert just went at it the way he did because he liked it.

And that was maybe why Aiden was so taken with him: a Wolf that behaved like a Cat, chatty and loud and witty, quick and light on his feet, emotions flaring big and hot on the surface instead of deep inside—seemingly out of want rather than instinct. Maybe that was why Aiden went against his own code of behaviour and liked to team up with him, from time to time, design flaws and self-imposed rules be damned.

Unfortunately, because Aiden’s instincts and Lambert’s modus operandi were so at odds, it meant that they were mismatched in a hunt, especially when they went against a big target and it became vital to join forces and coordinate their attacks—which was why Lambert was currently forced to put most of his weight on Aiden’s good shoulder, with a gash that went from his side down to his outer thigh, cursing a blue streak right in his ear, as they limped in the general direction of their horses.

“Fucking cockatrices,” Lambert howled, with a white-knuckled grip on his own hip, trying to keep both his skin and his pants from peeling open. “A little bestiary fact for you, Aiden—do you know why they’re called cockatrices? Because the guy who discovered them called them cocksuckers and someone made a mistake while transcribing it—”

“You say that every single time we take down a cockatrice, Lamb, and it wasn’t funny the first time,” Aiden told him, only half listening to him. The wound bled a lot but it wasn’t deep; the fucking lizard had luckily missed all the important arteries and didn’t dig enough in his gut to reach any organ. He suspected Lambert wouldn’t be doing his usual clown routine, if it really was that bad—he was just distracting himself from the pain.

“Yeah, about that—Melitele’s dripping cunt, does it sting—I swear to fuck, aren’t cockatrices supposed to be like, super fucking rare? It’s the first line in any bestiary: cockatrices are fucking rare. Do you know how many cockatrices I’ve killed since I was stuck walking that shit-covered shortcut to hell that is the Path? Eighteen. That’s not rare. That’s fucking common. And every fucking year I get to go back to Kaer Morhen and listen to fucking Geralt of Rivia mourn about the fact that that he had to kill another mated pair of cockatrices that summer—” Lambert rambled on, trembling. Aiden couldn’t tell if it was of righteous outrage, or because he was going into shock.

“Eighteen in how many decades? Cockatrices aren’t common, you’re just old,” Aiden chuckled, despite himself. “Sit here, I think I see the horses.” He put two fingers in his mouth—covered in monster gunk and witcher blood, gross—and whistled, before helping Lambert to lie down on a slightly drier patch of grass.

“He mourns them, Aiden! Because he fucking minds that they’re on the brink of sweet, motherfucking extinction, as if getting them there wasn’t literally our job—just get over it, Gods! It sucks risking our hides to murder the damn things for a living, without stopping to think about their place in the fucking ecosystem or some shit!” Lambert prattled on as if Aiden hadn’t spoken at all. Then he glared. “Also you’re older than me, so shut the fuck up.”

“You shut the fuck up,” Aiden replied, patting the side of his horse as it stopped next to them, docile and well trained. “And do try to peel off your armor without taking your flesh with it so I can sew you back up, please and thank you.”

“Fuck, that looks bad. Fucking fuck, that looks so fucking bad.” Lambert grimaced, pupils turning into thin slits as he looked down, trying to pull the sticky leather away from the sliced flesh. “Fuck, this is going to be a bitch to heal—”

“It’s just a flesh wound, you’ll be fine. It does look ugly, and it’s gonna look uglier if you don’t let me patch you up, granted.” Aiden took the waterskin and washed a bit of blood away so he could see what he was doing. “See? It’s already looking better.”

“You call that better? That looks like my dinner before I cook it.”

Aiden rolled his eyes and pressed a Kiss and a Swallow in his blood-slicked hand. “Stop whining like a kicked dog and drink these while I look for my needle. Hope I have enough thread—this is going to take all my supply by the look of it.”

A thrill of elation warmed Aiden’s skin as Lambert downed the potions without hesitation, the small show of trust enough to make him start to slowly blink at him before he could catch himself—but of course Lambert had to ruin the moment by coughing and gagging. “This is Swallow? The fuck you mix it with? That tasted even fouler than usual.”

Aiden shrugged, threading the needle. He doused the cut with the last of his dwarven spirit, for good measure, and started working on the suture. The bleeding was already stopping, thanks to the brews. “Had an archespore job further south earlier this month. Spores are a good substitute for drowner brains in a pinch.”

The Wolf made a face. “Sometimes I really want to meet the guy who first thought that mixing poisonous spores into a healing potion was a good idea, and break their nose. Like, what’s the reasoning there? ‘It doesn’t matter if there’s side effects because witchers can’t be poisoned either way’? I swear to the fucking gods—”

Aiden sort of lost track of his rant after that, too focused on his work to be able to pay attention to Lambert’s words at the same time. He was distantly appreciative of the fact that the Wolf was trying to keep still—but once Aiden reached below his hip bone, in the soft crease of his thigh and the lightly furred outside of his leg, Lambert couldn’t keep from twitching every time he pricked him with the needle. By the time Aiden was finished, he was very pale and sweating a lot—but there was no smell of infection and he was still muttering to himself, so Aiden figured everything was fine.

He leaned down to press a kiss on his bloody hipbone, and laughed when it made Lambert squeak and swat at him. “The fuck was that for!”

Aiden shrugged, getting on his feet. “It was right there.” He rummaged in one of Lambert’s saddlebags, pulled out a pair of clean trousers and a shirt, and threw it at him. “Get changed before you get glued inside your pants—but don’t cover the cut, yet.”

Lambert huffed at him. “How do—do you want me to sit here with my dick out?” Aiden grinned. “Don’t fucking answer that. Help me here, it feels like my whole gut is trying to escape whenever I bend over, stitches or no stitches.”

They managed to get Lambert out of his soiled and damaged kit and into his clean clothes eventually, between curses and laughter. “This is ridiculous,” the Wolf muttered, gesturing at his only clothed leg, the fork of his pants pulled high on his crotch, and at the long black seam that ran up his hip and thigh. “How much was the contract, four hundred crowns—split in two? I’ll need new armor, more ingredients to brew potions and replace the blood I’ve lost, get you more thread—”

Aiden hummed, fishing out a few strips of dried meat to share from his pack. “No need.”

“—hope that the next village has a cheap inn where they don’t hate you too much, or sleep outside with a wound like this on the mend. Which also means no work for a while, or yes work but taking the risk of breaking the stitches and have my bowels slither out—”

“Hey, I’m eating, can you keep it less graphic?”

“—the point is,” Lambert finally inhaled, stealing a strip of meat from Aiden’s hand and ripping a bite off, “being a witcher sucks.”

A small movement in the grass—Aiden had to close his eyes not to get up and go look for it, had to take a careful bite of meat and engage his jaw, had to think about the words forming in his mouth. “Cockatrice would’ve killed you, if you weren’t a witcher.” He made a face at the jerky in his hand. “Hell, this shit might kill you if you weren’t a witcher, I think I seasoned it wrong.”

The usual outburst about Aiden being careless and sloppy with his shit, and that he shouldn’t half-ass things just because it wasn’t going to kill him, which was a favourite from Lambert, never came.

“Sure, this isn’t going to kill me. But at what cost?” said Lambert instead, quiet and gritty.

The world turned very bright for a split second, all noises getting louder to compensate for Lambert’s quiet, and Aiden’s hand automatically closed around Lambert’s naked ankle, searching his slow pulse for—something.

Aiden hated his instincts when they acted like this—unavoidable and vague and loud, as if they knew something he didn’t—but this time he thought they were onto something, because Lambert didn’t hunt like a Wolf and Lambert hated being a witcher. He wasn’t suicidal (not like Cats got suicidal sometimes, not like Aiden got suicidal sometimes when everything became too much and he just wanted everything to stop), he was terrified at the idea of dying—but he didn’t like this life, like he didn’t like looking at Aiden in the eye when they were sharing a bedroll and when he was pushing in him, and he pressed a hand against his mouth to stop him from making noise.

“I’m sorry, Lambert—”

The Wolf tensed under his hand, but didn’t pull away. “No, Aiden, listen—ugh, I hate doing this.” He rubbed a hand down his face. “You’re allowed to enjoy the good things about this shitshow, okay? All my brothers do—the ones who are still alive, at least. Eskel gets up to unbelievable sex shit; Geralt is always meddling into people’s affairs— and I know he knows he wouldn’t be able to, if he weren’t what we are. I’m just a downer who could never get past the fact that, because of his shitty dad and his shittier luck, his mom is dead and he couldn’t save her because he was given up as a Child Surprise to a fucking keep of monster-makers, instead of enjoying virtual immortality or whatever the fuck. It’s fine.”

Aiden didn’t know what he was going to say until he was saying it. “I don’t know what it feels like to lose a family you loved, I grew up in the Cats’ keep. But I remember—” Words blurred together for a while. The grass used to be green, not alive-loud-shivering-toxic-useful-green. Hugging a fellow trainee used to be just nice, not friend-enemy-friend-warmth-fuck-bite-scent. A river used to be just water, not drowning-kill-fear. He didn’t zone out. The world wasn’t suddenly too loud. He didn’t have to remind himself not to do things. “—being different, I guess. I remember losing that. So I get it when—when you’re asking the cost. I miss being different.”

When he focused up, Lambert was still quiet and looked even more upset. Careful not to jostle his own side, he leaned in and rubbed his cheek against Aiden’s, his hand looking for his, before lacing their fingers together. “I like you even if you’re different,” he murmured.

Aiden rubbed back, feeling warmth wrapping all over his skin. “I like you alive.”