Chapter Text
Alchemy by Sara Teasdale
I lift my heart as a spring lifts up
A yellow daisy to the rain;
My heart will be a lovely cup
Altho' it holds but pain.
For I shall learn from flower and leaf
That color every drop they hold,
To change the lifeless wine of grief
To living gold.
His first year at Kaer Morhen Aiden missed many signs that Lambert hates Spring. Spring is supposed to be a time of joy and celebration, or at least, it always has been for Aiden. He’s usually vibrating near out of his skin for a hunt by Spring, to test himself against something with more teeth than a common wolf. Spring means hunting monsters again! It means fresh vegetables, the first berries almost too tart to eat, and the equinox festivals to look forward to. But that was before the Cats came to Kaer Morhen.
Aiden first notices a sign of Lambert’s distress over the changing seasons the week before the second midwinter of the Wolf-Lord’s reign over Kaedwen.
Aiden and Lambert are spending the dark cold evening in front of the fire. Aiden is sprawled on the hearth rug, polishing the pieces of a new checkers set he’s planning to gift to Axel and Cedric. Lambert is darning socks and telling Aiden about the latest brewing experiment he’s just started. He added some warm spices and dried fruits to his latest batch of mead and has high hopes for the results.
“It’s a shame that batch won’t be ready in time for midwinter,” Aiden laments, holding up a pale wooden piece to inspect its shine in the firelight.
“It might be,” Lambert shrugs.
“Midwinter’s next week , Cariad,” Aiden laughs.
“No… that… can’t be right.” Lambert mutters.
“Did you lose track of the days? Too busy fucking the winter away?” Aiden looks up from his work to wiggle his eyebrows at his lover, but the look on Lambert’s face makes him freeze. Lambert has gone tense in his chair, the sock and darning needle in his hands clenched in a white knuckled grip.
“Lambert?” He asks, putting aside the wood and polishing rag to shuffle forward on his knees. The smell of bitter acrid guilt hits his nose, strong enough he almost reels back.
“Shit!” Lambert hisses out a curse and jumps to his feet.
“Lambert!” Aiden calls after him.
“I haven’t even— I forgot— fuck , I have to go do… something, sorry,” Lambert growls, scrubbing a hand roughly through his hair. He can’t seem to meet Aiden’s gaze as he flees the room, the sock and needle still clutched in his fist. Aiden sits back on his heels, head spinning and his nose still filled with the horrible smell. He wants to run after Lambert, tackle his lover into a cuddle and kiss him till Lambert smells like honey and contentment again, but there’s a decent chance he’d get bitten for his efforts trying that stunt. The previous times he’s tried to make Lambert talk about an issue he wasn’t ready to discuss ended badly— not bloody, but they had both said things they later regretted. All Aiden knows to do is wait, to be available when Lambert is ready and give his lover space until then. That doesn’t mean Aiden doesn’t lie awake late into the night fretting about whatever he inadvertently reminded Lambert to do.
Aiden worries more when he wakes up alone, wrapped around Lambert’s pillow with the far side of their bed still cold.
Lambert looks like he hasn’t slept when he shows up to training. Aiden sees Geralt and Eskel exchange glances with each other in between the worried looks they send toward their younger brother. Eskel sighs with something that looks like resignation.
“Want to tell me about what you were working on last night, cariad?” Aiden asks later that morning in the hot springs, slipping into the pool beside Lambert. Gweld, on the other side of the same pool, drops his soap and quickly ducks his head to retrieve it. He’s not quite fast enough to conceal the wide-eyed look of alarm on his face.
Lambert glowers at his brother darkly and growls, “No.”
It takes a lot of effort for Aiden to shrug and accept that answer, but Lambert smells bitterly of guilt and misery again, so Aiden does just that. Aiden doesn’t blame Gweld for getting up and moving to a different pool a few minutes later; it’s not a pleasant smell.
Whatever is bothering Lambert, Aiden guesses that Gweld at least knows what it is. But he’s not quite desperate enough to go asking around behind Lambert’s back, at least, not yet.
—
Lambert’s mood remains sour in the following week as midwinter approaches. He spends more time in his laboratory. He sleeps less and more fitfully. Lambert stops dancing in the evenings, and he fights even more viciously if there’s a brawl on offer. (Vesemir pulls Lambert aside one night during a brawl when Lambert actually bites the old Wolf hard enough to draw blood. He tells Lambert to ‘cool off or bugger off’ and Lambert gives him a black eye.) Only two days later, Lambert goads Serrit during a brawl and winds up in a tight knot of Vipers lashing out at anything and everything without thought to his own wellbeing. Even Aiden finds that to be a bit of an extreme way to deal with the forced inactivity of the seasons.
“Sitting still all winter makes you even more restless than me, huh?” Aiden says to Lambert after the Vipers are done with his wolf, dabbing at Lambert’s resulting split lip.
Lambert just grunts in reply.
“Ah, that’s ok. Winter’s almost half over. It’ll be spring before you know it,” Aiden tries to be reassuring but Lambert jerks away. He glowers, and a fresh dribble of blood runs down into his beard.
“Hate spring,” he spits, then adds almost apologetically, “Going back to the lab. Don’t wait up.”
Aiden’s hand with the bloody rag drops, and he opens his mouth halfway to argue; Lambert should really take a night off. The way Lambert hunches his shoulders and pointedly won’t meet Aiden’s eyes causes Aiden to bite his tongue.
Lambert strides out of the hall quickly, stepping around Gweld and Eskel who are talking to Rennes by the large double doors. Rennes watches Lambert go and shakes his head with what might have been a snort of derision. Gweld shoots Aiden a pitying look.
Does everyone know what’s going on with Lambert except me? Aiden wonders with a sick feeling of budding humiliation.
He returns to the Cat table, where Dragonfly has hoarded a few of the sweet spice rolls. He approaches her from behind and smoothly nicks one out of her basket, before dropping into the seat beside her.
“How can anyone hate spring?” Aiden wonders aloud as he chews his first bite of pastry. His sister squawks when she notices his thievery and swats at his shoulder.
“You owe me for that,” she grumbles before answering: “Don’t know how you could hate spring. Spring means getting out of this place , not that it’s a bad sort of castle, but…” They share a look of understanding. Cats might have patience when stalking their prey, but patiently doing nothing for the overly long northern winter makes them crazier than usual. After the first winter of Geralt’s alliance there wasn’t an inch of the castle at least one Cat hadn’t climbed out of sheer boredom, icy battlements be damned.
“Who said they hate spring?” Dragonfly asks.
“Lambert.”
“Huh,” she hums, squinting up at the ceiling in thought, “spring is pretty different in Kaer Morhen.”
“How so?”
“I guess you weren’t here last year. You were on that harpy hunt in Hagge that ran long?”
“Yeah,” Aiden nods. It had been the first hunt of the season. Eskel would have put off sending anyone over the still snow-covered pass if the summons had been a jot less desperate. Travel at that time of year was pretty miserable, but Aiden had been overjoyed to be selected. He was less happy when it kept him from Lambert for six whole weeks.
“Wolves give their candidates the draught differently than the Cats do— or did,” Dragonfly explains.
“‘Did’? Treyse agreed to change something?” Aiden asks, incredulous.
“Did you notice all the trainees who were old enough were given the draught while you were away?”
“Huh. I… hadn’t really thought about it,” Aiden admits. The harpies they were sent to deal with were more numerous and harder to get to than expected. Then, Aiden’s hunting party got stuck on the far side of the Gwenllech when a flood of snowmelt covered the bridges and fords. It was nearly summer by the time Aiden returned to Kaer Morhen. After that, the only thing he paid much attention to for several days was getting Lambert off (repeatedly and in every way he could devise). The happy golden glow of being reunited lasted long enough that, when it faded, Aiden found more than half his belongings had wound up in Lambert’s rooms. They then decided to make it official, and Aiden moved in with his wolf, which kept him thoroughly distracted for several more weeks.
Looking back, there had been three new young Cats with their clan-fathers on the training fields after Aiden returned. They didn’t get their medallions till midsummer though because the other clans were adopting the tradition used by the Wolves, Griffins, and Manticores of presenting new clan members at the summer feast.
“Wolves apparently do things differently when it comes to the draught,” Dragonfly tells him. “They don’t just dose whoever gets brought back as soon as they can like we did in the Caravan.” When the Cats were nomadic it just wasn’t feasible to feed and care for a child who would never be able to join the clan properly. It also helped prevent a prospective clan-father from getting too attached before their trainee died.
“Wolf candidates get fattened up and trained here till they’re eleven or so. Then, they all get the draught at the same time in the spring. When we arrived, year before last, we’d just missed it. The clan-heads had a big meeting about it last winter— I think your Lambert was part of it as well. They agreed to do it that way too, now that we’re all following the Wolf. Manticores and Griffins apparently did much the same before coming here, but the Bears at least were more like us. Cranes and Vipers wanted to wait a few years between giving trainees the draught; glad they didn’t go with that plan. It’s unpleasant enough already with only a single years’ worth of candidates getting dosed at once.
“There were three days where you couldn’t go anywhere in this stone monstrosity without hearing the screaming,” Dragonfly says and shivers. “I’m getting a good set of ear-plugs before they start this year, I can tell you that. Then… there were just… so many bodies…” Her voice gets soft enough it’s almost lost under the general murmur of voices in the hall. “They all got burned on the fifth night in the festival field. Giffins insisted it had to be on the new moon, dramatic peacocks that they are.”
Aiden tries to imagine what that must have looked like. At midsummer there had been fifteen new wolfblood inducted into the clans, so there were likely at least twice that many candidates who didn’t survive the draught the previous spring. Thirty or forty pyres could have covered most of the large field behind the keep. No Wolfblood had seen all of a year’s casualties to the draught in one place, not since the time of myth before the clans separated. Aiden wonders how many of his siblings and cousins were ready to be confronted with the truth laid so bare before them.
Lambert, who cares more than he ever lets anyone but his closest brothers see, certainly wouldn’t be in a good mood while the trainees were suffering through the draught. Aiden almost feels bad that he hadn’t been around at the time to offer what comfort Lambert would accept— which might not have been much at all. Aiden could have at least gotten drunk with his lover or sparred with him till they were too tired to think about the dead children, couldn’t he? If Aiden’s honest with himself though, after his first castle-bound winter, he hadn't been in a fit state to comfort anyone, so perhaps it was better he’d been away hunting instead.
But is a week of grieving children Lambert doesn’t even know— because Aiden has picked up that Lambert avoids the trainees when at all possible— really enough to make Lambert hate the whole spring season? Is it enough to make him miserable for the months preceding?
Aiden licks the spiced glaze of the sweet bun from his fingers, considering. He still has a nagging feeling in the back of his mind that he’s missing something.
Lambert will tell me when he’s ready, Aiden assures himself. Because surely… Lambert will… eventually…
—
Midwinter comes and goes.
Lambert continues to work on his project. Aiden doesn’t bring it up, and Lambert doesn’t offer any explanation. Lambert starts spending every afternoon in his laboratory and most evenings too. He skips dinner at least once or twice a week for the first month of the year. Really, Aiden can’t blame Lambert for his foul mood. The season is affecting everyone in Kaer Morhen, even the Bears— though they seem more perturbed by the constant press of people than the heaping snowdrifts confining the Wolfblood to their keep.
Still, there are moments when Lambert and Aiden are together that the wolf seems in fairly good spirits. But Aiden can smell the way Lambert’s thoughts turn dark whenever his concentration lapses. Aiden misses the way things were in autumn, when he could bask for a comfortable afternoon in the honey-sweet smell of Lambert’s love in the rumpled sheets of their bed after a good fuck. Now, he’s lucky if that good mood lasts ten minutes after they collapse panting beside each other before whatever is haunting Lambert’s mind rears its ugly reeking head once more.
When Lambert is missing from the head table two nights in a row Aiden decides he’s been patient enough. He’s halfway out of his seat before he realizes that he doesn’t actually know where Lambert’s laboratory is. Joël, one of the alchemically inclined Cats happens to be sitting beside Axel across the table. Aiden tosses a badly burned bread roll (must have been the Cranes’ turn to cook) to get his attention.
“Third door on the left down in the western wing, first floor," Joël tells him, when Aiden asks. "You’ll smell it, trust me. But he won’t let you in.”
Aiden raises an eyebrow, because maybe Joël’s forgotten who Aiden is sleeping with.
“Yeah, even you. There’s a reason he’s got his own lab. I wouldn’t share a space with that asshole for all the wine in Toussaint.” The Cat alchemist rolls his eyes and turns back to his conversation with Kiyan.
“Your wolf still in a funk, brawd bach?” Cedric asks.
Aiden automatically glances up at the empty chair beside Eskel’s at the wolf table, frowning.
“I feel like Lambert turned into an even pricklier antisocial asshole at the end of last winter too,” Axel says through a mouthful of roast chicken.
“I figured that was just cause he’d forgotten how to sleep alone,” Cedric says, shooting Aiden a suggestive side-eyed look.
“Yeah, but then he had that big shouting match with Rennes, right in the main hall before supper. You remember that?
Aiden certainly doesn’t, so it must have happened while he was hunting harpies in Hagge.
“Oh right,” Cedric got a wistful look on his face. “Wish I could remember all the nasty things he called the old wolf. I remember thinking some of them were pretty inventive; ‘Rotted oath-breaking muck-boot licker’ or something like that.”
“Lambert was only on extra chore rotations for a week though,” Axel grumbles. “If he’d been a Cat I think Treyse would have defied the Wolf’s rules and given him a real beating for that kind of behavior.”
“Hmm.” Aiden just hums thoughtfully in agreement. Lambert chafes at any yoke of authority— even Geralt’s— but Aiden doesn’t have a clue what would drive him to cuss out his Clan Head before all the Wolfblood of the keep.
“You don’t know what they were arguing about?” He asks his clan-fathers. Cedric and Axel both shrug and shake their heads. “What the fuck was going on last spring?” Aiden mutters to himself. He abandons the rest of his dinner and makes for the west wing to find Lambert’s laboratory.
Like Joël warned him, Aiden can smell when he’s reached the right door. There’s a foul odor of rotting vegetation, old blood, and formaldehyde seeping under the crack at the bottom where Aiden can see the flickering torch light peeking out.
He knocks loudly and crosses his arms while he waits for a few long minutes with no answer. In the room beyond, Aiden can hear a pen scratching on parchment and the clink of glassware being moved around. He really shouldn’t be surprised that Lambert doesn’t come to the door, but he is.
“Lambert, I know you’re in there,” Aiden calls and knocks again, harder.
He can hear Lambert stomping across the room before the door opens, only far enough for Aiden to see his face but nothing beyond. Lambert looks surprised and tense. More of the horrid stink wafts out into the hallway. Like all Wolfblood, Aiden is fairly good at suppressing reactions to his hyper-sensitive nose, but there’s something distinctive mixed in this smell that brings up a stunningly vivid memory of nausea. Aiden takes an instinctive half step back.
“The fuck is that smell?” Aiden asks.
“Not now, Aiden,” Lambert mutters. “I’m… really busy.”
“You missed supper,” Aiden points out.
“I’ll get something later,” Lambert waves away the issue and starts to close the door.
“Hey, wait!”
“I’m really busy, Aiden.”
“Yeah. You’ve been really busy for the last few weeks. What are you working on in there?” Aiden tries to keep his tone casual, and he’s not convinced he succeeds.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lambert says through clenched teeth.
“Don’t or can’t? Is someone putting you up to… to this, whatever this is?”
“No!” Lambert answers immediately and honestly.
“Is this some project for the Wolf? Working on some chemical weapon?”
“No! It’s not— look, just leave this one alone.”
“Come on, Lambert. We’ve all got our winter projects, but you’ve been— frankly— a mess lately. Tell me what’s going on.”
“I said, leave it alone, Aiden.”
“And let you starve yourself down here? I’m not—”
“I’m not some fucking child you need to care for,” Lambert snaps back, his nostrils flaring with anger but his scent spikes with fear. “And it’s none of your gods-damned business what I’m working on,” he adds before…
Bang!
Lambert slams the door in Aiden’s face.
For a long moment Aiden is too stunned to speak. He raises his hand to bang on the door again, drawing in a breath to shout through it and demand more answers out of Lambert. He thinks better of it the moment before his hand touches the wood. What good would come of it? Lambert doesn’t want to talk about whatever it is he’s working on: that’s very very clear. Aiden drops his fist uselessly.
He goes back up to their bedroom feeling like someone’s taken a sledgehammer to his chest. He gets undressed and ready for bed with sharp angry motions, throwing his dirty clothes on the floor and kicking his boots hard at the wall. He stares up at the canopy and goes through meditation breathing exercises to get a handle on his anger. Maybe Lambert will reconsider, he tells himself, come to bed and finally talk about what’s going on. Maybe…
Aiden wakes up what feels like a few hours later. Lambert is slipping into bed. His hair is damp, like he’s come from the baths. There’s only a hit of chemical smell clinging to him, but Aiden still can pick out that unique scent that affected him so strongly outside the laboratory.
“Lambert?” He mumbles, blinking himself awake stubbornly.
“Go back to sleep, kitty,” Lambert whispers, sounding pleading, not angry. His voice is rough like he’s been screaming or weeping. There are fresh bandages on his knuckles too.
“Lamb, what the fuck is going on?” Aiden asks, too sleep muddled to think better of it.
For a moment Lambert pauses in pulling back the covers, looking like he might turn around in nothing but his braies and flee. The faint but unmistakable burnt hair smell of fear creeps into his muddled scent again.
“Is it really that bad, this thing you’re working on?” Aiden wonders aloud.
“Depends who you ask?” Lambert’s eyes are downcast, and his shoulders hunch inward.
“Sweet Melitele, did you kill someone?” It’s very clearly the wrong thing to ask because Lambert’s scent spikes with such deep guilt and pain. Aiden makes a wounded noise before he can bite it back. He reaches out for Lambert, and when Lambert steps away from him it feels like a punch in the gut.
“I can’t… If you didn’t… ” Lambert looks between Aiden and the door before squeezing his eyes shut and whispering. “Just leave it alone—this one thing. Just leave it be. Please?”
It breaks Aiden’s heart to hear his fierce Wolf sound so desperate and afraid. It’s worse than the day they first kissed when Lambert had answered the door so terrified of Aiden’s eventual rejection he tried to end their relationship before it began. The very last thing Aiden wants is to drive his love away.
“Ok. Ok, Lambert. I won’t ask you again,” Aiden agrees. “Ok. Just… come to bed.” Aiden lifts the covers and opens his arms.
The sweet relief smell coming off Lambert when the big wolf curls up against Aiden’s chest is like the first breath of air after nearly drowning. Aiden wraps his arms as far as they’ll go around Lambert’s broad shoulders and holds tight. He feels jittery, like he’s just looked down into a very deep ravine and stepped back from the edge. He smells salt, and Lambert’s breathing is harsh against his neck, but Aiden doesn’t say anything about it. They fall asleep wrapped up together in a stifling silence.
Lambert is gone again when Aiden wakes.