Work Text:
These days, Geralt had a new routine.
He woke well before anyone else in the house, taking care to slip from bed without waking his two bedfellows. Though he knew even if he did, it would be many hours before either surfaced from the bedroom. The dogs, Roach the borzoi and Buttercup the miniature poodle, showed no such care, leaping from their spots in the bed to race Geralt down to the kitchen.
Buttercup begged on his back legs, and Roach stood patiently at her dish as he portioned their food. While the dogs ate, he brewed a small pot of coffee and sat out on the back porch to drink it while the dogs rushed out into the garden to do their morning business and sniff the whole length of the fenceline.
He woke Ciri for school just as the sun began to crack over the horizon, his daughter begrudgingly fumbling out of bed with much grumbling and grouching. She and Yen had picked out her outfit the night before, and Geralt helped her into overalls and a yellow sweater, then brushed her sleep-frazzled hair in the bathroom mirror, his deft fingers easily coaxing twin braids into her blonde hair.
He poured the both of them a bowl of cereal, and they ate together at the kitchen island, Ciri still grumbling over being conscious and the dogs begging to lick the milk from the bowls afterward.
Geralt stood his daughter in the entryway of the house to run through their usual checklist of things she could not go to school without. Backpack, lunchbox prepared the night before, pencils, folders, shoes on and laced, a meager attempt at a smile, and they were off down the street to the bus stop, the leashed dogs trotting happily beside them. After he saw Ciri off, waving after her hunched form in the bus window, he took the dogs on their usual neighborhood stroll.
Sometimes, by the time he made it back to the house with the sun well up and the dogs ready for their first of many naps of the day, his partners were awake and up to something, but he was just as likely to hear only silence from the master bedroom. Geralt cracked the door to peer inside and saw Jaskier as nothing but a ruffle of brown hair amidst a mound of blankets and Yennefer sprawled out fully nude on her stomach beside him, both still dead to the world.
Geralt returned to the kitchen for another cup of coffee, which he drank while checking his work email. He had sorted through the junk to set aside a few potential contracts by the time he began to hear signs of his partners’ wakefulness drifting from the upstairs bedroom.
More precisely, the familiar moans and erotic whispers signalling that they had roused themselves in more ways than one, the same as they did every morning.
Geralt sighed, listening to the whines and yelps and dirty talking rise in volume. He would be unlikely to get more work done until they were through with their activities, so he switched his attention to his newest mid-morning ritual of preparing his partners a nutritious post-sex snack.
He had no desire to join them in the midst of whatever strange affair seemed to be going on upstairs, Jaskier’s groans of oh fuck, yes, daddy, please interspersed with the occasional loud spank and Yennefer’s firm orders echoing from master bedroom.
He would, however, not mind curling up with them in bed afterward, two bodies curved soft on either side, a platter of prepared snacks shared between them. Lovingly delivered with the ulterior motive of perhaps getting either of the overgrown children he shared a home with to eat a vegetable for once. He had seen their food selection before moving in. Dino nuggets and mac and cheese paired with boxed wine got old fast.
Shaking his head in amusement as the sounds overhead shifted to a more frantic height, Geralt sliced several wedges of celery and slathered them in peanut butter, carefully pressing several raisins atop the sticky surface. The dogs licked their chops at his feet. Above him, Jaskier began all but wailing as Yennefer’s voice slurred into calling him scathing insults that somehow ended up sounding more like praise.
And then, at last, silence.
Platter in hand, Geralt climbed the stairs, pleased in some deep part of him with his strange, warm life.