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Aiden wakes on the muddy banks of a slow-moving river, splayed out on his back and agony ripping through his head. The first moments are foggy. He’s grateful for it, barely able to feel anything as he sits up and pulls the crossbow bolt out of his face. The feeling, the slide of wood against flesh and bone, is distant—an out of body experience, watching from somewhere above, below, outside. It should be painful; he is glad he cannot feel it.
His swords are gone, and there’s no cool weight of his medallion around his neck, but he can still feel the tightness of his armour around his shoulders and chest. Distant and muffled like every other feeling, but there. There’s blood on the crossbow bolt in his hand. His blood. His eye. A blackness has swallowed half his vision, and the night has taken the rest.
Aiden blinks, but he isn’t sure if the left eye has anything left to blink with. He has a crossbow bolt in his hand, but he cannot remember how it came to be. The world around him is filled only with the sounds of the night: rushing water and soft wind, an owl hooting in the distance.
Whoever hurt him like this, they’re long gone.
He tries to remember, his mind slowly coming back into his body. He knows there was a contract. He knows he was in Ellander. He knows he was supposed to meet Lambert here.
No, he’d given Lambert the option. And Lambert hadn’t taken it.
That, somehow, hurts worse than his head.
He was trained for situations like this, situations where he is disoriented and confused, where he doesn’t know where he is or how he got there. There are steps he can follow; he remembers them. Take stock of his body—head injured, stiffness in the limbs, left eye gone. Take stock of his surroundings—river, banks muddy enough to cover him; a thick copse of trees all around him, enough that no one would be able to find his body. Deliberate. An attack, one well thought out.
The steps. He needs to follow them. Take stock of what he has—no swords, no medallion, armour still on but no potions or bombs. Wrong. His belt has been taken, but Lambert always made him keep a flask of Swallow in his back pocket, just in case. This is just in case. This is the only thing he has. Whoever hurt him did not know about it and did not bother to look properly. A quick search, take what’s visible and easy and then run like they’d never been there in the first place.
The noise that spills out of Aiden is desperate, borderline hysterical, something like laughter, something like a scream. It’s a struggle to get the flask out, his fingers cold and everything covered in mud. The ground is closer than it appears and the flask feels far away, his fingers gripping on to nothing for longer than he’d like. But he does get it, and he flicks the lid off, gulping down the foul-tasting liquid.
His face begins to knit itself back together. The potion won’t grow his eye back, though.
A flash of memory: a sneer, witcher-yellow eyes and the absence of a medallion. Aiden cannot say which medallion, or who the sneer belongs to, only that it fills him so with so much dread.
He has to meditate. He’s tired and injured and alone, covered in mud, and he knows that no one is coming to help him. That, out of everything, he knows for certain. Lambert has made that more than clear.
His movements are slow and sluggish—dangerously slow. There is nothing else around him yet, no drowners or nekkers or anything that could take advantage of his injury. He is as safe as he can be, while his face slowly heals, while he is missing so much and terribly alone. His head aches.
Meditation comes strangely easily. Aiden does not even have to think about it. He sets himself up against the base of the nearest tree, cringing at the mud that has soaked into everything. Between one second and the next, he enters that calm, dreamlike state. Aware and alert enough to sense danger, but quiet enough to rest and heal and remember what he can.
He feels like an animal, some skittish and impulsive thing, scrabbling in the dirt.
With meditation comes memory, clear and awful. A curse that he’d failed to cure, an ambush when he’d tried to set up camp, a Cat he once knew well. One wrong move towards the trigger-happy woman with a crossbow aimed at his face.
He’d known when he saw her finger squeeze that he would die. He does not remember what he thought about in those final seconds, but he hopes that it was nice. He hopes that it was Lambert. Aiden does not remember the pain either, though it is a constant companion now.
Jad fucking Karadin, who has changed his name so many times now that Aiden can’t say what it once started as. A fellow witcher turned bounty hunter or assassin or some other thing he is convinced will earn him more money. At the cost of so much. Loyalty, for one thing. Brotherhood, too, though not many of the Cats ever bothered with it.
In his mind, Aiden of Metinna is dead by his hand. Hopefully, he is kind enough to at least bring the medallion he took from him back to the Caravan. Aiden would scoff right now if he could. It’s Jad; he won’t.
And yet, somehow, Aiden of Metinna is alive.
Time passes, though he cannot say how much. The sun rises and peaks and falls again, and the world is bathed in pinks and oranges by the time Aiden is able to come out of meditation. Who knows how long he’d laid there in the muck before he woke, delirious and foggy. From the gnawing emptiness in his stomach, it must have been days.
He has nothing on him, and he has no idea how far he’s been dragged from his camp, left to the mercy of a river that did not dare to take him. Doesn’t matter even if it is close by; Jad would have taken everything he had, his horse included. Fuck. He’d liked that horse.
There is little Aiden can do except stand, woozy and unfocused, and walk away from the space in the mud where his body once lay.
It takes him days to feel real again. They pass faster than he expects them to, the sun arcing over the river again and again.
Aiden finds a spot on the banks where the soil is dryer, where he can strip down and clean himself and his armour. There is no saving the hair on the left side of his head, caked with mud and dried blood, but he has nothing to cut it off with either. It sits in a hardened lump against his ear, and he cringes at the feeling whenever he turns his head.
Once clean, he seeks out food. There’s a list in his head, organised as perfectly as he can get it: get himself clean, find food, find his old camp, get back to Ellander and see if maybe—just maybe—Lambert did actually show up.
Aiden gave him weeks already, lingering in town like a ghost. Lambert isn’t showing up. He will still check.
The last item on his list is the biggest one, the hardest one: hunt down Jad Karadin and fucking kill him.
Traitor to his School, traitor to witchers everywhere. Traitor to Aiden, who stumbles half-blind even in the daylight, left for dead in the muck like nothing. It’s the least he deserves. Aiden is a Cat after all, half mad on his worst days. He feels it creeping in, the erratic and twitching need to hurt. This time, at least, it has a target. It might actually kill him this time, but at least he’ll go out doing something, not like he almost did—trapped in his camp and unable to fight.
Maybe Lambert will know what happened to him. Maybe he won’t. Aiden hopes he won’t, hopes that he thinks he simply disappeared back down south, where no Wolf will ever think to look, to lick his wounds and pretend Lambert never existed in the first place. If Lambert even bothers to think about him now, if he cares enough to wonder.
The idea is tempting, now that he thinks of it. If he survives Karadin, maybe it would be best to disappear elsewhere. Somewhere he and Lambert never went, so he doesn’t have to be reminded of all his bullshit mistakes everywhere he goes. There is Lambert even in the trees and the berry he plucks from the bushes, inside jokes and quiet nights, a love that built slowly over years.
Zerrikania. Whatever lies west of Skellige. Whatever lies north of the Dragon Mountains.
No point thinking about it yet. He has a list to follow. Berries from bushes and fish he spends hours trying to spear from the river. What once would have come naturally is now marred by his own vision, the fish swimming somewhere off-centre compared to where he knows they actually are. He misses more than he catches, and he’s ashamed of himself for it.
Has he ever known a witcher with only one eye? If they’d existed, they hadn’t lived long enough for him to meet them.
His head aches constantly, and staring at the light of the campfire he builds only makes it worse. He meditates again and again and again. It barely feels like enough. Animal instinct and anger keep him going, because he is not going to die here, like this, alone on the banks of some river he does not even know the name of.
Aiden ticks off the third item on his list on the fourth day since he awoke. There is very little left of his camp. His horse is gone, of course, and the beginnings of his campfire are strewn across the ground. There, on a patch of flattened grass, is the brown of dried blood. His blood.
There is nothing else, but it gives him a place he knows, a landmark. From here, he can get back to Ellander, though he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do there.
Hand in his hair, Aiden rests against the thick trunk of an oak. The space behind his eye—what’s left of it—is pounding again. If Lambert is in Ellander, if he listened to the last thing Aiden ever said to him, would he still want him like this? He hasn’t seen the extent of his injury yet, but he can feel how bad it is. He’s a liability on the Path now, practically useless. All they’ve ever known together is the Path; Aiden won’t be able to walk it again for a long time, if at all.
But Lambert won’t be there. Aiden already knows this. That doesn’t stop him from heading there the next morning though, something desperate curling in his chest. Hope. As if Lambert being there could solve everything.
It’s a childish wish, but he just wants to be held and told that everything is going to be alright. Even if it isn’t.
Heading back to Ellander is perhaps a mistake on multiple levels, given the sparse information he managed to get out of Jad before his little crony shot him. His failed contract, the terrible curse and the dead girl at the end of it, and someone had thought to kill him for it. They could very well try it again if they see him.
It doesn’t stop him from going though.
He hadn’t mentioned anywhere specific when he frantically told Lambert to meet him here at the beginning of autumn. There’d barely been time to speak, but he knew Lambert had heard him. He remembers seeing him stop, if only for a second, before he stormed out of Aiden’s life entirely. But Ellander is not so massive; there aren’t many places for him to wait.
People stare at him as he passes, with the wariness they always stare at a witcher, yes, but there’s a horror to it now, one they either cannot or don’t bother to hide. He still hasn’t seen his wound, and he ducks away from any window or surface that might show it to him. And while they do stare at him, it is not with any recognition. Whoever paid for the hit on him, they aren’t worried about Jad not getting the job done properly.
They should be. Maybe Aiden can add another item to his list once he’s dealt with Jad. If he makes it out alive, anyway.
Everywhere he looks, shops and inns and taverns and the stables out of sheer desperation, he finds only strangers. It’s hard, there’s a blind spot now, and he finds himself turning his head over and over just to survey each street.
He knew, he did, that Lambert would not be here, not weeks after the deadline Aiden had given. And yet, his stupid pointless heart had hoped that maybe he was delayed by something. Aiden had asked, had told him.
If you change your mind, Lamb, I’ll be in Ellander at the beginning of autumn.
He’d practically been begging, had been for the whole conversation. Of course Lamb had run. Aiden had known it was an option and he’d still decided that right then, in the middle of their camp on a perfect, quiet night, that he’d finally admit the truth. That he’d finally fucking ask if Lambert wanted anything more than the occasional fuck on the road, finally ask if he loved him too.
Lambert hadn’t, it seemed, even when Aiden had given him one more chance.
He aches again—his head and his heart. He has his list; he’s crossed another item off. The next is finding Jad and fucking killing him, because what else does he have to lose?
Which means he needs a new sword.
He has no money at all—Jad took that from him too—but there’s a blacksmith on the edge of town, quiet and secluded enough that he just might be able to get away with Axii. The streets are quiet as he makes for it, a sparse handful of people working away outside a home, barely glancing at the witcher in their midst.
Aiden shoves the rickety door open, hating that it’s further away than it first looks. The minute curl of his fingers against nothing, the frustrated furrow to his brow, and the flush of embarrassment to his face: he despises all of it.
He had never meant to let the girl die, but the curse moved faster than he’d thought, and all his attempts at a cure failed. He did not deserve this in return, a slow death for a witcher.
And he wasn’t even supposed to die like this. Jad’s band was nervous in the face of him, he remembers hearing the frantic beating of their hearts. Maybe Jad had planned to take it slow, maybe he had planned to be the one to kill Aiden, not the flighty woman with the crossbow. Vienne, Jad had called her, screaming it as Aiden fell and fell and fell. He’d forgotten until now.
There’s no point in wondering if Jad was going to let him go—the man had always cared more for coin than anything else. Aiden needs a damn sword.
The blacksmith stands at their workbench, glaring at Aiden in a way that isn’t unfamiliar. “Oh, fuck no,” they growl, and Aiden sighs in resignation. “Not another thrice-damned witcher! Get the fuck out of here!”
Another. Aiden gets stuck on the word for too long, as the blacksmith storms around their workbench and towards him. “I am need of a sword,” he says. They are shorter than him, but not by much, stocky enough to almost rival a Wolf.
Brash too, in the way they laugh. “Yeah, that’s what the last one said, til he stole from me. Go on, get!”
Aiden’s casting Axii before he even thinks it through. “Who? What did he steal? Tell me.”
The blacksmith blinks, woozy, and Aiden hopes no one else walks in. “I… A witcher, dark-haired. Took the biggest fucking sale I’ve had in years!”
Vague, useless. Another Axii. “What was it? Tell me,” he says again, gritted out between clenched teeth.
“Fucking witcher swords, wasn’t it? One of your big necklaces,” the blacksmith says, gesturing vaguely at his stock “Could have made good money on that.”
Aiden isn’t stupid enough to believe that the swords and medallion aren’t his. Of course Jad sold them—not much else to do with them if he wasn’t going to give them back to the Caravan. Fucking prick.
“And where did you happen to get these?” he asks. He knows already, but he’s been given a fucking lead, in the one place he hadn’t expected. If anything, he was planning on scouring Ellander and the rest of the continent until he found him.
Maybe if he ran into Gaetan down south, they could Jad down together. Maybe, if Lambert had come…
“Friend of mine, Lund,” the blacksmith says. They shake their head, woozy and disappointed. “Moron gets himself caught up in bad crowds, but it made him good money this time, huh?”
Not Jad, but one of his crew maybe? Has to be, even if Aiden doesn’t remember the name. “Did this Lund say where he was headed next?” Aiden asks, casting Axii once again.
“Novigrad,” says the blacksmith. It shouldn’t be this fucking simple. If Lambert were here, he’d be laughing. “He works for the guard there, so he said.”
And that’s slightly less simple, but he can work with it. If he finds Lund, maybe he finds Jad, or at least some tie to him that Aiden can chase.
But the blacksmith isn’t done talking, as though the Axii Aiden cast is more akin to more than a few stiff drinks. “Told the witcher that stole my shit this too,” they say, apropos to mostly nothing. “Like I said, damn moron, runs with the wrong crowds. If he’s fucked with witchers then…”
The blacksmith blinks, eyebrows furrowed. Axii only works so long, and Aiden has been tired for days. He has his lead, strange as it is. All he needs to do is follow it. “Thank you,” he says, smirk playing at the corners of his lips as he readies the sign again. “Now, I need a silver sword, if you please.”
It’s not until he’s heading west towards Novigrad, silver sword strapped over his back and a furious blacksmith in his midst, that he truly takes in what he was told. He freezes in the middle of the road, his breath rushing out of him.
Jad had gotten someone to sell his things, that much is clear, but someone else had stolen them back. Aiden’s swords and medallions in the hands of someone who stole nothing else but them, and then demanded to know where they had come from—demanded the same lead Aiden is now following.
It can only be one person.
Lambert isn’t in fucking Ellander. He’s run off to Novigrad, while Aiden was lying near dead in the mud.
“What the fuck?” Aiden hisses.
Lambert came. Aiden had given him the option and he’d taken it, and now he’s hunting down the people who tried to kill Aiden without him. Aiden should have asked the blacksmith how long ago this all was, should have been smarter, should have been focused on anything else that wasn’t getting a damn sword and a lead on Jad.
Lambert could be days and days ahead of him now, if he’s riding on horseback. Dread pools in Aiden’s stomach. The last thing he wants is for him to face Jad and his crew alone. Why the fuck didn’t he come and find Aiden? If he was here, why didn’t he look for him, why didn’t he find him dying on the riverbank and fucking help him?
But he was here. He came. Weeks and weeks late but he still came. It has to mean something, has to mean that he wants to same thing Aiden does. It won’t mean shit if he gets himself killed facing Jad. Something else itches at him, but his head aches, and feeling more real doesn’t necessarily mean he can focus on everything he needs to focus on. It will come to him later, when his mind is ready for it.
For now, Aiden starts down the road again. He’ll catch up with Lambert in Novigrad, and they can have the conversation they were supposed to have in Ellander. They can kill Jad together.
If he catches up in time.
The first time he sees his reflection, his wound, is in a still river after he’s done harvesting the brains of the drowners he’s spent hours picking off. One by one, drawing each away from the group and cutting it down—taking a nasty cut to his bicep when he misses once, swing of his sword not quite reaching something he was sure it would and the drowner launching itself at him from his blind spot.
After, he builds a campfire and brews Swallow in the middle of the day, melting down drowner brains in a cooking pot he stole from some farmer’s house two days ago. It might not do much for him, not when the pain in his head has been slowly fading over the days since he left Ellander, not when he has no open wound anymore, but he will still down some as soon as it’s ready.
Can Swallow heal a head wound like this? Can anything?
Aiden already knows the answer. He’s stuck like this, for however long he can keep himself alive. People have adjusted to living with one eye before, he knows, but they have not been witchers. He doesn’t have the months or years to learn how to live like this.
He glances at the water, still and pristine and clear. Out here, at least, there is no one to witness whatever his reaction will be.
Aiden steps away from the fire, towards the water, closes the one eye he has left and takes a deep breath. He steels himself, and when he finally looks down, he doesn’t quite recognise what he sees. It’s him, obviously, he can see the dark mess of his hair and the too-long scruff of his beard and the notch in the point of one of his ears, but there’s a gaping hole where his left eye once was.
It’s dark with fresh scarring. He blinks, and what remains of his left eyelid barely moves. It’s ugly and ragged and impossible to hide. Aiden is not a witcher who put much stock into the way he looked, not compared to some at least, but he does care about it. He cares about it enough to hate this.
If he does catch up with Lambert in Novigrad, will he still want him?
Aiden tears himself away from the river, chest heaving, and drops down heavily next to the fire. What matters most at the moment is getting to Lambert before he finds Jad and gets himself fucking killed.
Because he will. It’s Lambert, intelligent and resourceful, but so damn brash all the time. It’s Aiden who has to make him stop sometimes, when he’s too impatient to get a contract done safely, and really think through how they should approach it. He will be brash and impatient in this too, and there will be no one to slow him down.
Aiden is still days away from Novigrad, days behind Lambert. There is little he can do while he waits for the rest of the Swallow to brew, but if he’s going to show up in front of Lambert scarred and exhausted and half-blind, he can at least be fucking clean. Vain, he knows, but he always has been when it comes to Lambert.
Slowly, carefully, he cuts away the tangle of blood and mud from his hair with the tip of his sword. There will not be time for it to grow back properly, and the left side of his head will be so much shorter than the rest for months, but it’s better than it was.
He plays with the shortened strands, not confident enough in his ability to use his eyes or hands right now to shear the rest of it to the same length. Maybe he can get Lambert to do it later.
If he finds him.
Fuck, if he finds him then… then they’ll have to talk about what Lambert coming to Ellander means. Maybe, finally, Aiden can kiss him outside of sex. He can hold him in the night and sit leaning against him, grab his hand when he wants to and run his fingers through his hair. They can have a companionship he has been wanting for years now. A companionship Lambert also apparently wants. He wouldn’t have come if he didn’t.
Out here, he has nothing else to think about. He has loved Lambert, unexpectedly, for years. He will love him for however long he has left. If Lambert ever asks why, he won’t be able to give him an answer that encompasses everything, because he cannot even explain it to himself. It simply is.
They’d fuck sometimes, when money was tight and they were craving the contact. It was always more than that for him, and he’d thought he’d seen the same in the way Lambert looked at him. He’d thought himself wrong before Ellander, broken-hearted and confused when Lambert had laughed and yelled in his face at the mere idea of being more than a quick fuck. But now, maybe he’d been right the whole time and Lambert was simply as scared as he always pretends he isn’t.
It still aches, the weeks he spent thinking that Lambert truly didn’t want him, but there’s excitement building beneath the dread of Novigrad and everything it might hold. That, he has to hold on to.
When the Swallow is done brewing, he fills his flask and drinks it immediately. It does nothing. He fills the flask again, douses the fire, and points himself west once more. He doesn’t seek out his reflection again.
There are many little towns on the outskirts of Novigrad, their sunsets marred by the city walls. Aiden somehow manages to attempt to pass through the worst one. It’s tiny, barely a handful of homes and a single inn in the middle. And before it, a funeral procession. Mourners dressed in black surrounding a wooden coffin, silent in their sadness.
There is little point in doing more than passing through. He dares not to bother them.
Aiden doesn’t even get a chance to take more than a step into the town before he’s stopped. A half-elf, like himself, a kindness in his eyes stepping out from his blind spot. Kin, in a different way to most witchers, and they are often kinder to him than townsfolk would normally be.
They stand together on the edge of town, shaded by a home and out of sight of the mourners. “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” says the half-elf.
“I’m not here to bother them, only to pass through,” Aiden explains. The half-elf stares only at his missing eye. Aiden has enough control over his anger to not snap at him, but it is a close thing. The building madness in him itches to hurt.
“You’d best pass through somewhere else,” he says after a moment. “You may not be the Butcher of Blaviken, but a witcher is a witcher when you’re as angry as them.”
Aiden has heard many a tale of Geralt of Rivia, from strangers and from Lambert. Only a few talk of him killing anything that’s not a monster. “The White Wolf was here?” he asks, brow furrowing.
The half-elf scoffs, mouth turning down in distate. “The White Wolf killed Vienne. Maybe she deserved it, maybe she didn’t,” he says. “But a witcher here, now? You’d best head someplace else.”
The name sinks into his chest. There would be many people called Vienne in the world, but this close to Ellander, when Aiden is chasing leads for the people who tried to kill him? A coincidence, maybe, but one he will follow up on. Later, when he’s not being warned away from town. Later, when he has found Lambert. There is little else he can do right now.
“Thank you,” he says, because it is a kindness. The man could have let him walk through, could have let him get himself killed by a mob of angry mourners. Perhaps, if Aiden wasn’t kin, he would have.
Novigrad is so close, even if he has to take a long route to get there. He will follow Lund’s trail, see if it leads him to Lambert, then to Jad. If it doesn’t, he will come back here.
See what the fuck the White Wolf has to do with it all, if anything. It’s the only reason to think that this Vienne is a different one, a coincidence that has him on edge. Instinct tells him it’s not, but that could mean many things he is not yet ready to consider. It is simply a dead woman killed by a witcher, and he’s the unlucky bastard who happened to stumble across it.
Doesn’t matter. He has his list, three items left. Find Lund, find Lambert, find Jad. Anything else is a distraction.
The half-elf watches him go. The mourners in the background sob. That instinct, like dread, sits heavily in Aiden’s stomach.
Novigrad is bustling and busy and filled to the brim with Priests of the Eternal Fire. The city has only gotten worse as the years went on, but it’s always good for money. Anything with a working sewer system often is, as disgusting as the contracts are. Aiden wishes for a moment that Jad had decided Oxenfurt was more lucrative for him. At least there’d be music in the streets.
Getting into the city only made him more agitated, drifting from gate to gate until he could sneak through one. An agitation he struggles to keep a handle on. For some of the Cats, the madness that came with their mutagens is innate, constant. For others, it comes and goes like a cycle. For Aiden, it makes itself known in his worst moments, his most stressed, building and building over the course of weeks.
Faced with Jad again, he cannot guarantee that he will not make a foolish mistake as a result.
The blacksmith had said Lund worked with the guard, and while it’s a useful lead, it’s also a long one. Is he a single guard on payroll, or does he manage a station? Aiden wants to assume the former, given his apparent ability to fuck off from the job and run around with a gang of assassins whenever he wants.
Aiden can’t even say he remembers which one he is. There’d been five of them: Jad and the broad man at his side, Vienne with her crossbow, and two more waiting in the wings. Surrounding him from all sides and the rushing river at his back. A group Aiden could have easily fought off, barring maybe Jad, if he’d ever been given the chance.
The fact that they’re as twitchy as they are, so easily inclined to shoot, serves only to make Aiden worry more and more about Lambert. As if he isn’t already worried enough.
Lambert, who he has not yet seen. He scours each face as he moves through the dirty city streets in the desperate hope that they’ll simply run into each other. But Novigrad is huge and messy and at times difficult to navigate—Aiden won’t find him like this.
There are guards stationed at almost every gate, milling about and pretending they’re working, standing to attention only when someone of importance comes by. Utterly useless, considering how the Priests of the Eternal Fire has increased their workload. Aiden, half-elf and witcher, hasn’t been stopped a single time, and he doesn’t understand why.
South of a grubby little market, Aiden stops at one of the city’s gates, watching lines of people attempt to beg their way into the city, away from the war trying to force itself north. There are more guards here than anywhere else in the city, enough that he can distract a couple of them without drawing too much attention to himself.
They look about as unimpressed with him as he is with them when he approaches. Two of them, swords at their sides and sneers on their lips, break off in an attempt to corner him. “Can we help you, witcher?” one of them asks, voice hoarse.
“I’m looking for a man named Lund, heard he works for the guard,” Aiden says, and then, because he’s not a moron, has to make up a reason to be searching. “He put out a contract but didn’t say where he could be found.”
“Aye, sounds about right,” the first guard mutters, eyeing the second like they’re in on some joke. “Can’t say I know ‘im, though.”
“Hang on,” says the second, turning towards the group at the gate. “Hey, Henrich! You said you worked with a fella called Lund, didn’t you?”
Aiden raises an eyebrow, trying not to squirm at all the attention he’s suddenly getting. Henrich strides over, eyeing Aiden like he’s shit on the bottom of his shoe. The guards explain, ask if he knows where Lund is, and the man shrugs like it takes all the effort in the world.
“Worked with him briefly before I got myself transferred,” he says, and Aiden tries not to look too relieved by the news. “The outpost by the gate near Arette. Showed up a few weeks back like he owned the place, and I got out of there quick as I could. Didn’t like the look of him.”
A lot of information to give a witcher, especially without Axii, but Aiden isn’t going to complain. “Appreciate it,” he replies.
Henrich shrugs, says nothing else, and waves Aiden away. All three of them look down their noses at him, but they’re all as useless as each other. Still, Aiden has the information he needs, and the last place he wants to stick around is here.
He takes the long way to the gate, passing through a square lined with stakes and priests preparing for public pyres. Aiden glares at them, and they glare at him, and nothing in the world changes. Every face he passes, he searches for Lambert and finds nothing. Just strangers, just the dread in his stomach and his thoughts bouncing away from it.
Novigrad’s poorly named southern gate is the same as all the others, though this one is far less busy. This is where he had planned to come in, if he hadn’t been waylaid the day before, and he wouldn’t have wasted hours wandering through the city just to end up back where he planned on being.
He probably still would have, if it meant potentially finding Lambert.
More guards to question, more faces to search. The nearby river laps against the banks, and Aiden tries not to think about the hours after he woke up weeks and weeks ago. It’s impossible when his body is a constant reminder of what he has lost. Things he cannot grab without focusing, stairs he stumbles up and down, the damn blind spot, and awful scarring on his face that people cannot stop bloody staring at.
Lambert has his own scars on his face, scars Aiden has run his fingers over in their softer moments, when they were both coming down from the high of an orgasm and could pretend they were something more. Maybe Lambert will do the same to him, if he wants to. Aiden wants him to.
Again, the guards at the gate stare at him the same way they always do. None of them are Lund. Aiden only got a quick look at him, whichever one he was, but there’s no recognition in any of their eyes. Can’t make it easy, can he?
“Looking for a man named Lund, heard he might be around here,” Aiden says, leaning against the city’s stone walls.
A guard scoffs, spits in the dirt between them. “You and every other bloody witcher, apparently,” he says, and the dread in Aiden’s stomach makes itself known again. “You’re too late, White Wolf already picked the dumb little bastard off few days back.”
Aiden freezes. He shouldn’t. All his instincts scream at him not to, but he feels his body lock up under the archway of the gate, and there’s little he can do to stop it.
“The White Wolf?” he asks. His voice is raspy, a lump in his throat.
“So they say,” the guard says with a shrug, oblivious to the storm raging in Aiden’s mind. “Folks tried to take it higher, to the priests, but a man like Lund—can’t really say he’s missed, so… Whatever you’re looking for, you won’t find it here. Best be on your way, I think.”
Aiden goes on his way, body moving like a puppet on its strings back into the city, following orders without a thought. Out of view of the guards, he ducks into a thin alleyway and pressed against the brick wall of some nameless little shop. Hands on his knees, breathing coming out quick and ragged, his chest heaving.
He is not ignorant or oblivious or stupid. He never has been. Focusing is difficult, his vision blurring and his hands shaking, but he can still string enough thoughts together to come to the worst possible conclusion. The only conclusion that makes sense.
The White Wolf killed Lund. The White Wolf killed Vienne. Geralt of Rivia is chasing down Jad Karadin’s band and slaughtering them. He would only have one reason to do so, and it’s not for fucking Aiden.
Aiden, who crouches in the middle of the alley, hand over his mouth like he can keep his breaths inside. He’d followed Lambert here, days too late.
The White Wolf is fast, efficient; Jad is probably already dead. There’s anger at that, at not being the one to do it, but it is overshadowed by the awful knowledge that the only reason it even happened is because Lambert is dead.
He needs to know how. He needs to know why. He needs to know if Jad fucking suffered for it.
Should have been faster. Should have been smarter about the contract. He scoffs—it comes out choked. Should have never gone to Ellander in the first place.
Aiden suppresses the ragged noise that tries to spill from him, both hands clamped over his mouth now. He is a frantic thing, body twitching with need to move and scream and run. But he can’t, not yet. He needs to find Geralt of Rivia, if he is even still in the city. He needs to find him, and he needs to know what happened to Lambert.
Even though it will probably kill him.
He pickpockets some posh twat by the square, a quick twitch of his fingers that no one notices. Just enough in the coin purse, he hopes, to get the information he needs.
No one cares much about the people sitting in the streets, begging for coin. Aiden can’t do anything to help them, but he can make an exchange. It’s safer, quicker, to get information this way than to run about the city making it obvious he’s looking for the White Wolf.
Grief is a strange thing. He had believed, the rare times he allowed himself to consider what would happen if Lambert died before him, that it would be an all-encompassing thing, smothering him and making it impossible to see beyond what he has lost. This is not that. This is determination. This is another item added to a list that seems to grow forever.
It feels almost like an insult. He still follows the list though. What else can he do?
The first two people he speaks to give him nothing. The first takes the coins and tells him to fuck off. The second looks apologetic when she says she hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Geralt of Rivia.
Aiden squats next to the third person just outside Novigrad’s main square. He can’t quite see the pyres from here, but he knows they’re there, knows what they’ll be used for later. Coins pass from hand to hand and the man glances up at him with a raised eyebrow—almost amused.
“Looking for Geralt of Rivia,” Aiden says. His voice is raspy; it has been for hours now. “Heard he was somewhere in the city.”
The man hums, stares at the coins in the palm of his hand and says, “He is. Not far from here, brothel called Rosemary and Thyme. Comes and goes, but I’ve seen him a few times.”
It’s Aiden’s turn then to raise his eyebrow. Of all the places… Doesn’t matter, it’s a lead. It’s more than he had before, even if it ends up taking him nowhere else. There’s the grief now, making itself known—an ache in his chest, a desperation that keeps him going and going and going.
What will he even do when he finds the White Wolf? Lambert is already dead. Jad is already dead. But he doesn’t know what else to do. Lambert never told his brothers about him, not the way Aiden had told his, but if there’s one time someone else gets to know about him, it’s now.
He hands over a few more coins, the purse light in his palm, and then he steps away. A brothel won’t be hard to find, not in Novigrad. It’s either up by the Pasiflora or down in Glory Lane, and he knows which one is more likely.
A puppet on strings, still. It’s enough, though, to take him down to Glory Lane and search through the worn signs of various taverns and brothels. People pass him, he doesn’t pay attention to them. No point searching the crowds now, no point looking in the spaces his blind spot hides. It hurts. He can’t pretend it doesn’t, and yet he still feels like he should be feeling more. Lambert deserves that at least.
The Rosemary and Thyme is big, for a brothel. Clearly, whoever owns it has a lot of money behind them. If Geralt of Rivia has been here, then the owner is who he needs to speak to. Except, the windows are dark, and there’s no movement inside, and it looks as though this will be a dead end before he even walks inside.
Aiden doesn’t have anything to pick a lock with. A single sword of his back that has gone unused since he walked into the city and a half empty coin purse on his belt. He still has his strength, even if he cannot see things like he used to; it will not be too hard to break down a door.
In the end, he doesn’t need to. The door is unlocked, and voices and heartbeats come muffled from within. Not many, and definitely not a witcher’s, but it’s better than the awful silence he was expecting. He takes a deep breath, finds his heart racing and does not know how to calm it, and steps into the brothel.
There’s a man in the middle of the room, pretty, dressed like a ponce. The kind of person he and Lambert would spend hours mocking over watery ale. He swivels towards the door, towards Aiden, mouth pursed in what can only be confusion. There’s a dwarf next to him, one that glares at Aiden, but he seems to defer to the poncy man, who steps towards Aiden like he’s trying to calm a spooked horse.
“Hello,” he says. “Can I help you? If you’re looking for the old brothel, I’m sad to say it’s no longer open—”
“I’m looking for Geralt of Rivia.”
The man shares a look with the dwarf—concern, a little bit of healthy fear. “He isn’t here right now,” he says. “Can I ask why you’re looking for him?”
“He…” How does Aiden even explain this? He can’t. “Who are you?”
The man smiles, steps towards him again. That fear is still there, but it’s like he barely even notices it. “The great bard Dandelion, at your service. Or Jaskier, if we’re friends. And you?”
Lambert has told him stories of Dandelion the bard, not as many as he has told him of Geralt and Eskel, but stories about Geralt often come with addendums about Dandelion—Jaskier? This might be someone Aiden can trust, at least a little bit.
“Aiden of Metinna,” he answers. Then he swallows, gathers his words, tries to figure out how to say this. “Geralt… knew someone I was close to, someone who died. I want answers.”
The great bard Dandelion scoffs. “If you’re here for revenge—”
“No, just answers. Do you know where he is?”
A beat, heavy. The room around them is dark and messy, in need of so much fixing. Scattered tables and chairs, mats for sleeping, a brothel that became a hovel. The bard before him doesn’t look like the kind of man to own something like this.
“I don’t,” says Dandelion. “But he should be back in a few hours at most, if you’d like to wait.”
It’s a generosity he hasn’t received in a long time, a generosity that doesn’t make any damn sense. Until it does. Pity, again, for his grief or for his eye. Does it matter which? “I will come back,” he says. He can kill time wandering the city and pretending there is anything here for him.
When he turns away, the bard darts forward, lute-calloused fingers wrapping tight around his wrist. Bold, for a non-witcher, but Aiden can’t bring himself to be surprised. “Stay,” says Dandelion. “We were about to eat, if you’d join us. You look like you could do with a good meal.”
He could, but the idea of eating feels disgusting. It would be better to wait outside, corner the White Wolf as he comes up the road. Maybe Dandelion sees it, because he corrals Aiden towards one of the tables with a hand on the small of his back. He goes without a fight, body worn out and exhausted. The dwarven man gives him a bowl of stew; Aiden eats it without thinking too hard about it.
Dandelion asks him questions about his School and his life and his contracts; Aiden answers none of them. He can’t bring himself to talk. The bard gives up halfway through their meal, talking instead about himself, about his dwarven friend and all the plans they have for their former brothel. It’s noise, none of it matters, but it’s better than silence.
A noise that continues even after he’s done eating. Dandelion and the dwarf—Zoltan—go back to what they were doing before Aiden barged in: discussing plans for the dilapidated brothel. He listens in, because it’s better than losing himself to his thoughts, and doesn’t move from his place at the table even though he definitely should.
Once, Dandelion asks him if he would like a bath or somewhere to sleep. He declines, but he still doesn’t go outside. Time passes slowly, hours and hours. Dandelion brings him wine and he drinks. He listens to their nattering and none of it truly sinks in. Lambert would have his own opinions about it, so many of them.
All this time, so determined to get back to him so they could finally make something of themselves, following lead after lead. Part of him had feared getting here too late, but he hadn’t actually believed he would.
He wants to laugh at himself. It’s Lambert, of course he would go rushing in and get himself killed. For what? He hadn’t even tried to find Aiden in Ellander, just ran off at the first sign of something wrong. It’d be flattering if he wasn’t fucking dead.
Aiden tries not to think about it, but it’s impossible. It’s everywhere.
He doesn’t know how many hours have passed by the time he hears footsteps outside, a witcher-slow heartbeat growing louder and louder as it nears the door. There’s a part of him, naively, that wishes it is Lambert. An impossibility. When he is done here, this grief will eat him alive.
Geralt of Rivia pushes the door open. He looks as expected, really, tall and broad and white-haired. Aiden can almost understand the fascination with him, even if most of it can be chalked up to the bard bursting to his feet.
“Geralt! There you are!” Dandelion cries, rushing across the room. It should surprise him how easily a human can gather a witcher into his arms, but it all it does it make him numb. “You have a visitor. This Aiden of Metinna, he’s—”
“Aiden of Metinna is dead.”
The words take a moment to hit him, because they don’t make any damn sense. Long enough that Geralt closes the space between them, silver knife in hand, brow furrowed deeply. “I’m very clearly not,” Aiden says, but he holds a hand out anyway; he knows better not to. “Hear that from Karadin, then?”
It’s the only thing that makes sense. Geralt cuts the back of his wrist, watches the blood well, then hands him a cloth to clean it up with. “No,” he says. “From Lambert.”
Aiden breathes in sharply through his nose, his mind racing. He doesn’t want to consider the possibility, doesn’t want to get his hopes up, but his has to ask. “Is he… Did Jad kill him?”
“No,” Geralt says it like a question, like Aiden is a fucking moron. He doesn’t sit down, and he doesn’t take a step back when Aiden stands to get in his face. “Lambert isn’t dead.”
“Then why the fuck have I been chasing leads about you killing Jad and his band?” he growls, slamming his fist against the table. He doesn’t shove the White Wolf, he isn’t that stupid, but it’s a close thing. “Where is Lambert?”
Silence falls over the room. Geralt stares at him, and next to him Dandelion watches them both with wide eyes, so much understanding in them. “Geralt…” he says, and the single words seems to be enough. Geralt’s shoulders slumps minutely and he drops himself at the table across from Aiden, gesturing for him to sit. It’s the last thing he wants to do. If Lambert is alive, then he needs to find him.
Fuck, Lambert thinks he’s dead.
He should have realised all the way back in the Ellander, but it’s the one thing that never occurred to him in the days of pain and confusion after he woke or in all the weeks since. The one thing that simply didn’t click, even though he’d known something hadn’t added up back in Ellander. If Aiden had walked into a store in the place he was supposed to meet up with Lambert and found his swords and medallion for sale, then there is only one thing he would have considered. Of course Lambert thinks he’s dead.
Aiden sits.
“Lambert asked for my help,” Geralt explains. He stares at Aiden’s missing eye, even when Aiden glares at him. “I was with him for all of them, only one I killed was Hammond, but…”
“People don’t care much about the truth when Geralt’s around,” Dandelion says, his hand on Geralt’s shoulder and a twitch to his lips. “If he was there, then, to them, he’s the one who did the deed.”
Aiden’s breathing is erratic. He can’t control it. His mind repeats the same phrase over and over again: Lambert is alive, Lambert is alive. “And Karadin?”
“Already dead,” Geralt replies. It’s a relief and a frustration all in one, and Geralt must see that. “If Lambert knew you were alive—”
“Where is he?” Aiden asks. Nothing else matters right now. What else can he do? Jad is already dead, his supposed death avenged, and Lambert is alive.
If Geralt is taken aback by his bluntness, he doesn’t show it. “The Nowhere Inn,” he says. “In the Bits. If he’s not there, then he’s already on his way back to Kaer Morhen.”
Aiden’s up and moving before Geralt’s even finished speaking. It’s rude, he knows, but he can’t be blamed for it, not now. Neither of them stop him, nor does Zoltan standing by the door. He doesn’t stop himself until he’s halfway across the room, and even then it is a hesitant thing.
He turns over his shoulder, winces at the pity in Dandelion’s eyes, and asks, “Where did you find Jad?”
The docks are busy even as the sun sets, but not busy enough to hide the two bloodstains on the wooden boardwalk. People step over them, oblivious or uncaring or both. The dead are common in Novigrad now, and the cityfolk have become accustomed.
Aiden can’t tell which of them is which. One is Hammond, who Aiden can only assume was the hulking man he only vaguely remembers, and the other is Jad. Their bodies are long gone, dumped in the ocean or burned somewhere else. It doesn’t matter.
Jad had thought him dead enough to hide his body where he believed the river would take him. Jad’s actions took his eye and almost cost him Lambert. And yet, there is a sharp little ache in his chest at the sight of the blood trampled underfoot. This was one of his brothers, even if Jad had changed his name a thousand times, even if he hadn’t been back to the Caravan for long enough that the others thought him dead. Even if he ended up a traitor.
Lambert is alive, possibly waiting for him in some shitty inn in the Bits, but Aiden needs to do this first.
He doesn’t take long, resting atop an empty crate. There isn’t much to say goodbye too, after all, even less to say ‘go fuck yourself, you useless cunt’ to, but he mouths the words anyway. His fingers graze the hilt of his stolen sword. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to use it. Would he have killed Jad, given the chance?
Yes, yes, he would have. A brother he might have been, but he clearly didn’t see Aiden as one.
It’s strange to have nowhere for the agitation—the madness—to go. He tries to stamp it down, tries to replace it with the excitement of finding Lambert again. It works, to an extent. It could take weeks for him to feel some semblance of normal again.
Geralt told him to come back to the Rosemary and Thyme—the Chameleon, Dandelion’s gating voice corrects in his head—if Lambert isn’t in Novigrad anymore. He’ll be given directions to Kaer Morhen, if he wants them, and a letter from Geralt to a man called Vesemir to vouch for him. All the way north, further than he has ever been, to a place he has always wanted to go.
Geralt told him many things. That he’d found Lambert and watched him kill Lund, that they’d chased down Vienne together, that they’d found Selyse on the northern outskirts of Novigrad. She led them here, to Jad and Hammond in the middle of a sale. So many names Aiden never learned, all of them dead and his own blade clean of blood.
Lambert had been angry, Geralt told him when Aiden made for the door again, angry and irrational and… He’d stopped then. Whatever else Lambert was, Aiden won’t know until he sees him.
He needs to see him. He’d needed to see this first, but he needs Lambert, who had come to Ellander weeks after Aiden asked, who had believed him dead, who had chased his would-be killers down and avenged him.
Even if it takes all the weeks between here and Kaer Morhen, Aiden will find him. The fourth item on his list: find food, find camp, get back to Ellander, find Lambert. All of them crossed off, including the last—find Jad—but now it has returned.
“Fuck you,” Aiden whispers again to the bloodstain on the docks, and hops off the crate. The ground is closer than it looks, and his knees jar from the impact. “Fuck you.”
He walks away from the docks, and he doesn’t look back.
“Is there another witcher here?”
The innkeep gives him a dry look, clearly not understanding how godsdamn urgent this is despite the coin purse dropped on the bench in front of him. Aiden is shaking, he knows it, but he can’t make himself stop. The innkeep jerks his chin towards the flight of stairs at the other end of the room, fingers curling around the purse. “Upstairs, second door on the left.”
Aiden could scream, right then and there. He could sob, fall to his knees and wait for Lambert to come down and find him there.
He doesn’t. He makes for the stairs and blinks and finds himself at the top. Second door on the left. It looks normal, plain, the wood old and a little worn—flimsy. It’s unlocked when Aiden grabs the handle and he bites back a smile. How many times has he chided Lambert for not locking the damn door behind him? He still hasn’t learned.
He expects—as he should—that Lambert would be holding a sword to his throat the second he shoves the door open. Aiden would, if a stranger tried to break into his room, but there is no one on the other side of the door. No one in the room at all.
“Lamb?” Aiden says, only just keeping the panic from his voice.
A huff somewhere to his right. There’s a balcony overlooking the streets behind the inn, and Lambert rests against the railing, his back to the door—to Aiden. He slides a dagger back into his belt and takes a swig from a bottle. He doesn’t move back into the room, doesn’t turn around to face Aiden, doesn’t even acknowledge his existence beyond the removal of his weapon.
It’s strange, wrong. This isn’t what he imagined.
Aiden is gentle, ginger, at he steps onto the balcony, keeping Lambert in his limited line of sight. “You… don’t seem all that surprised to see me,” he says. He keeps his voice low and soft, but Lambert barely reacts. Did he see him walking around below? Did he see him in the streets hours ago? If he did, why didn’t he come to him? Why let Aiden wander the city and wallow in his grief?
He swallows and he stares and he tries to make sense of everything this day has been. Back against the railing, arms crossed over his chest, he watches Lambert take another swig from his bottle and resolutely not make eye contact with him.
A deep breath in to steady himself. “You could have looked for me, you know,” he says, even though part of him does know why Lambert didn’t. But Aiden would have, even if he thought he was only looking for a body.
Nothing. Utter silence
Aiden tries again. “I hoped you would come,” he says.
Lambert flinches. He still doesn’t look at him.
“I… I thought you hadn’t.”
“I know,” Lambert whispers. His voice is a rasp, it sounds painful, and Aiden wants nothing more than to reach out and touch, but the strange distance between them stops him.
“But you did,” he says, because that is the most important thing. Despite everything, Lambert still came to Ellander.
Lambert scoffs and still doesn’t look at him. “Of course I fucking did,” he hisses, barely loud enough to be heard but still like it’s obvious. He hangs his head, as if in shame. “And I was still too damn late, is that what you were going to say? I took too long, I’m an idiot and a coward. I know, Aiden, I fucking know.”
“Lamb—”
Except Lambert hauls himself away from the railing, back into the tiny room. “I don’t know what else you want to hear. You’ve told me this shit again and again; I fucking know!” he says, agonised, running a hand through his messy hair. His back faces Aiden once again. “I thought that if I just—For fuck’s sake, Karadin’s dead and you’re still fucking haunting me.”
Oh.
Lambert drops onto the edge of the rickety bed, bottle on the side table, head in his hands. His Lamb, trapped in mourning.
“What do you want from me? Just tell me, Aiden, I don’t know what else to do. What more do I need to do?”
“Fuck,” Aiden hisses, shoving himself across the room. He falls to his knees in front of Lambert, thudding against the wood. It should be enough to pull him out of it, this belief that Aiden is some terrible ghost, but Lambert only stares at the floor between them.
He goes to speak, to beg, to convince him, when a glint of metal traps the words in his throat. A medallion dangles from around Lambert’s neck, painfully familiar. It’s his, the roaring cat face worn at the edges from Aiden’s constant fiddling. It’s made a home around Lambert’s neck, the wolf nowhere to be seen—it looks like it belongs there.
Aiden reaches for it, feels the metal body warm beneath his fingers. His good eye itches with unshed tears and he wants so badly for Lamb to fucking look at him.
He has to make him.
His hand slides up from the medallion to Lambert’s face, tips of his fingers grazing his chin and jaw. Lambert jerks back, and Aiden’s hands fall away from his face. His eyes are wide, his bottom lip trembling, and he stares at Aiden like he’s never seen him before.
Ghosts can’t touch, after all.
“That’s it,” Aiden whispers, lips twitching up into something like a smile. “It’s me, see? I’m not dead. I swear to you, I’m not dead.”
He’s desperate. Of course he is. Can he truly be blamed for that after everything that’s happened? All he’s wanted, this whole time, is Lambert. Who looks at him like he hasn’t understood anything Aiden has said.
“We can—We can go to Geralt, if you need me to prove it,” he tells him—begs him. “He’s already seen me. But I’m real, my Lamb, see?”
He tries again to cup Lambert’s face in his hand, but Lambert has pushed himself too far away, and instead all Aiden can do is run his hands up and down Lambert’s thighs in an attempt to sooth. A grounding touch, irrefutable proof.
Lambert stares and stares and stares, and for a long time, he doesn’t do a thing. Aiden doesn’t move either, not beyond his hands on Lambert’s thighs. And then, slowly—tentatively, like he thinks Aiden will disappear if he dares to touch—he cups the left side of Aiden’s face. His thumb runs underneath his missing eye, across the scaring Aiden has not yet brought himself to look at again, and the tips of his fingers alight in the shorn strands of his hair. It’s soft, reverent, and Lambert gasps.
“Aiden?” he croaks.
“Yes, I’m here. It’s me,” Aiden says, desperate, jaw clenching and unclenching around so many different things he could tell him. He says the only thing he can think of, the only things he has been thinking of. “You came to Ellander.”
Lambert laughs, high-pitched and a little choked. “Course I fucking did.”
And then Aiden is being kissed like Lambert is trying to steal the very breath from his lungs. It takes him a second to register it and another to kiss back, his hands sliding up to Lambert’s waist. He needs to be closer, needs to feel him. Aiden hauls himself up, shoves Lambert further on the bed and climbs on his lap without breaking the kiss for more than a second.
Weeks they’ve been apart, and weeks Aiden has followed after him.
Lambert’s hands rove over his body, over dirty armour and thin bones, as if trying to memorise him with touch alone. He keeps coming back to his face, to the scars and the mess he has become, and Aiden doesn’t know what to do with it. The best he can do is kiss him back, delve his fingers into his hair, feel the strength of him against his body.
“I killed him, all of them,” Lambert whispers against his mouth when he draws away. “For you.”
“I know,” Aiden replies, curling his fingers in the greasy strands of Lambert’s hair. They’re both as tired as each other, as dirty in their grief and mourning. He can’t bring himself to give a fuck. “I know, my Lamb. How do you think I found you?”
The noise that spills from Lamb is animalistic, and he pulls him down into a ferocious kiss, one Aiden loses himself too immediately. This is all he has ever wanted for years now, the closeness, the knowledge that is more than a free and easy fuck. He groans into it, deepening it—he can’t help himself, not after everything today has been, not now that he can.
When he pulls back, he presses their foreheads together. Lambert is so warm, real beneath Aiden’s hands. However briefly Aiden believed him to be dead, it is still a wonder to hold him again and know that everything he feels is returned just the same.
“Should never have run off,” Lambert says. His eyes are closed. He’s so damn beautiful.
“Wouldn’t be you if you didn’t,” Aiden replies. It’s as close to forgiveness as he can get. Maybe later, weeks or months down the track, he could forgive him properly, but he isn’t quite there yet. “Besides, you still came, didn’t you?”
Lambert shakes his head. “I should have come sooner, shouldn’t have let you think that I didn’t—that I don’t,” he replies, cupping Aiden’s face again, thumb against the scars like he doesn’t know where else to touch. He doesn’t need to finish; Aiden knows exactly what he means. “I should have looked for you. I should have fucking—”
“Shh, shh, Lamb.” Aiden cradles him close, lets him rest his forehead against his shoulder. He closes his eyes, breathes deep, feels Lamb around and against him. Later, they can deal with all of this later. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Lambert clutches him tighter and doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need to. Aiden knows him, has known him for years now. He presses a kiss to his hair and they rock together on the edge of the bed, breathing in the scent of each other. Aiden loves him more than he can ever say.
There’s still so much he wants to tell him, wants to know. Him, haunting Lambert, and Lambert, killing so many people for him out of grief. But when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out. It’s important, but not right now. Right now, he has Lambert in his arms again, and that’s all he needs to focus on. They have time for everything else.
“Your face,” Lambert mutters into his shoulder.
Aiden swallows, throat dry. “Won’t be much use on the Path now, or much to look at—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Lambert says, as charming as ever. “Don’t need you to be fucking useful. Just need you to be… to be here.”
He has to kiss him again then, a soft thing pressed to the crown of his head. Maybe he should have known not to doubt that, but how could he?
Eventually, what feels like hours later but can only be a few minutes, Lambert draws back to look at him once more. His hands come up around his own neck and tug the medallion up and over his head, the metal glinting in the soft candlelight. Neither of them speak, but Aiden bows his head, and Lambert slides the medallion around his neck.
He has missed its weight, and he hadn’t even noticed.
Lambert stares at it for a long time. Aiden cups his face with both hands, pretends that neither of them notice the fact that he misses for a second, and kisses him again. And again. And again. He can’t make himself stop, not ever.
And, fuck, he doesn’t have to now. Neither of them do.
“I’m here,” he says again, whispered into the scant space between them.
“You’re here,” Lambert replies, choked, and he pulls him close once more.