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The dreams had never really stopped. They weren’t usually the vivid, violent ordeals of his boyhood, when he woke up screaming in the dormitories with Voltehre shaking his shoulders, his face creased in worry. It was as if age and the Path had worn away his sensitivity, leaving behind a callus to protect him from the worst of the horrors he faced on a daily basis. How could you stare down a wraith manifested from the abject cruelty of humanity with any part of a soul left? There was truth to the rumours of soulless witchers, of that Lambert was certain. So much loss had hardened him to the prospect of losing his brothers on the Path. It was all part of the wider clusterfuck of being a witcher.
But when Ciri arrived, they had started again.
His dreams had always involved blood and violence of some description, with sneering faces and glinting eyes in the darkness. Sometimes the object of his terror had claws or teeth, but it was always he who was torn to pieces by the end. These new dreams were different.
His mind was filled with images of demon leshen and mutated basilisks bigger than any he’d seen. The keep was full of witchers and civilians, torn to pieces by monsters falling through doorways ripped in space and time. Vivid scenes of execution and death that felt more like memories than nightmares: Eskel perishing in agony as his body twisted and changed, Coën falling on the battlefield, Geralt’s blood spilling over blue lips as his last breath was caught by rusted iron.
It was during one such nightmare that Lambert shouted himself awake, his subconscious fighting to survive the onslaught of blood and death washing over him. He strained against the last tendrils of the dream as it clung on to his mind, shaking fingers clawing at the air before his face and narrowly missing something solid, something real, in the space above him.
A firm hand rested in the centre of his chest, pushing him back onto his pallaise. As Lambert’s vision cleared, he saw the familiar, craggy face of Eskel loom in the dim morning light. He wore an expression of gentle concern; his eyes shining gold with the tapetum lucidum which would have allowed him to see Lambert’s terror even before he had thrown the curtain askew.
“What are you doing in my room?” Lambert rasped, cracked and broken.
Eskel sat back, weighing down the mattress at Lambert’s side. “’M sorry,” he said, one broad palm swiping down the pitted wreck of his face. “I heard you calling for me."
“Vesemir calls for you thirty times a day and you manage to ignore him for twenty of ‘em. Couldn’t extend me the same courtesy?” Lambert sat up slowly, every muscle aching from fighting the battle that raged inside his head. That was the problem with sharing a castle with four other mutants with superhuman hearing and a penchant for sleeping light. No secrets. Not ever.
“Yeah, he does,” Eskel said. “But he doesn’t scream it in terror, begging me to live.”
Lambert felt the sharp edges of the dream cut at him, the backs of his eyes blistering with what he could only assume to be tears of shame. The secrets of his fear threatened to spill out like a fountain of blood from an open wound, cresting with every hammer of his still thundering heart. The tangible horror of what his mind conjured left him split open and raw.
“You’re not sleepin’ well. Haven’t been for a month. You’re pricklier than usual. Never heard you be mean enough to the point of realisin’ you need to apologise. To a little girl too.”
Lambert pressed his lips together hard. Yeah, he’d been mean - cruel, even - to Princess Cirilla. Part of him blamed her. She was a threat to everything he had left after the sacking. His mother had once told him that bad luck and heartbreak followed some people like a shadow. Lambert had always thought Geralt was one of those people until he’d clapped eyes on Ciri and heard her story. “Yeah, so what?”
Eskel studied him carefully. In that unassuming, plaintive manner he had. There was no ruffling Eskel. No amount of bitterness or callous humour could rub him up the wrong way. Not like the Eskel in Lambert’s dream; short-tempered, egocentric and predatory. They didn’t even look the same, but somehow his mind knew it was Eskel he was watching die. Watching Geralt murder.
“Wanna talk about it?” asked Eskel after a long pause.
Lambert’s lips twisted into a dismissive sneer. “Go to bed, Eskel.” He threw himself down onto the sweat-soaked blankets and rolled over. Eskel didn’t move immediately, probably in the vain hope that Lambert would change his mind and spill something of the horrors that were torturing him in the early hours of the night. But Lambert screwed his eyes shut and ignored him. They stayed shut even when the door latch clicked and the keep fell silent again. Silent, but for the groaning of ancient timbers and mortar under the assault of endless mountain winds, that sounded so similar to the wounded cries in his dreams.
Lambert tried everything to exhaust his body to the point of blank unconsciousness. If he collapsed from exhaustion, passed out from drinking, then the dreams wouldn’t be able to reach him. His mind would be a bottomless void. He went hunting, fought hard during sparring, ran the combs and the poles, went fishing with several bottles of ale and considered disappearing below the ice.
Nothing worked.
Two dreams rose to pre-eminence. The Eskel dream, where a rotten wound festered and turned him into some kind of mutated leshen hybrid, and the Coën dream, the corpse of a witcher laid out in a medical tent, tutted over by unfeeling surgeons who didn’t know the man that laid inert before them. The sheer travesty of his loss.
The next time Lambert kicked himself awake, there was a hand in his. He held it with a white knuckle grip, every limb quivering as the images melted away to reveal the familiar cracks and cobwebs of the ceiling above. All he could hear was the blood rushing through his ears and his own short, shuddering pants as his lungs struggled free of terror’s clutches.
A gentle thumb circled over the back of his hand and Lambert focused on it. Used it as his anchor to secure him in the present, allowing Eskel’s death to fade into darkness. When his senses returned, it was Coën’s scent he caught beneath the funk of his own sweat and fear, and he tilted his head. The quip died in his throat because Coën wore the same expression as Eskel had several nights before, but it was edged in something different. Fear.
“Eskel told me you had asked for privacy,” Coën started, carefully. “But I couldn’t. You were shouting for my help.”
“Don’t need help,” Lambert croaked, “I need fuckin’ sleep.”
“Well, you’ve tried everything short of running headfirst into a wall,” Coën turned Lambert’s hand over once the grip had relaxed and drew gentle circles on his palm, “so, that leaves talking about it.”
Lambert had told Coën once that his mother would stroke his palm and the soles of his feet after a nightmare. That it was soothing when reality felt like serrated knives across his skin. But these weren’t the dreams of a young boy hiding beneath his bed. These were dreams haunting enough to terrify a fully grown witcher with decades of horror in his wake. Lambert didn’t want to talk. The words would get lodged in his throat and it felt like he was standing on the brink of something, clinging on. Coën had never seen Lambert uncertain of anything nor stripped back to the raw nerve that thrashed in sweat-soaked bed sheets, and it frightened him. Lambert could probably work out why if he thought hard enough, but his mind felt like a pile of tangled horse tack left to moulder on the stable floor.
He always got that feeling at Kaer Morhen though. The other edge of the world. A broken keep at the furthest extent of civilisation, impossible to reach unless you knew how. That was where Lambert’s mind was at. Isolated, trapped in ice. He needed heat and touch. “Can think of something else I’d rather do,” he said, offering a lopsided smirk.
Coën shifted onto his hands and knees to lean over him, eyes lidded and dark; he didn’t need asking twice. Their foreheads pressed together, Coën’s palm slipping behind Lambert’s head, and for a moment they hung in that liminal space between dreams and waking together, their hearts finding a shared rhythm as they shared each breath. Coën tilted Lambert’s chin up and kissed him with chapped lips, weathered by hours spent working in the cold, and Lambert moaned softly at the familiarity of it. The rasp of an unshaven jaw through his beard, the coarse fabric of Coën’s tunic against his naked chest.
Coën peeled the blankets away and the shock of cold exposure sent a rush of shivers over Lambert’s skin. He clung to Coën’s shirt and pulled him further onto the bed, seeking the heat and the touch that would free him from this cycle of fear and bullshit. Coën tugged gently from his grasp and slid lower, planting lingering kisses down his chest to his navel. Lambert looked down the slope of his body to watch Coën’s progress, but his head flopped back when Coën dragged a long, slow lick down the length of his soft prick.
He wasn’t sure he’d even be able to get hard. Wouldn’t be the first time his body had got to winter and decided that arousal was for chumps with energy for that shit, but now he wanted it to work. Another slow pass of Coën"s tongue sent pleasure bubbling through Lambert’s groin, but earned only a faint twitch from his useless cock. “S’cold, give it a second,” he said, trying to head off his embarrassment before it settled in to ruin the moment.
“I’m in no rush,” Coën whispered, his breath hot on Lambert’s damp skin. He went back to playing at his own pace, sucking gently, rolling Lambert’s length over his tongue with satisfied grunts, until Lambert’s toes were curling and he was muffling his noise with his forearm. No privacy in the halls of Kaer Morhen, remember. It felt good. Fucking fantastic. But it wasn’t enough. Like a candle flame brushing the surface of an iceberg. He needed a roaring inferno, something blistering and overwhelming.
“Coën, fuck me,” he said, voice thick in his throat. His legs flopped open eagerly and Coën used the opportunity to nuzzle at his balls with a contented hum that was so outrageously close to a purr that Lambert wanted to scream at the gentleness of it all. “Coën.”
Lambert"s voice was sharp in the quiet, and Coën lifted his head slowly. His tongue ran thoughtfully between his lips, and knowing he was savouring the lingering taste of him made Lambert"s cock twitch again. "Are you sure?" he asked, studying Lambert"s flushed chest and the soft curve of his prick.
"Need you to fuck me "til I can"t think straight. Hard, like a chort in rut."
"Passionately is the word you"re looking for," Coën said, head tilted.
"I"ll take it."
Coën left the bed and Lambert watched him undress. The scars on his face ran down his neck and chest too, bisected by tattoos that had meant something once, but the fall of Kaer Seren had rendered their meaning obsolete. Now they were just fanciful swirls on a broken canvas.
In Coën"s absence, the ghosts in Lambert"s mind began to stir again; the icy talons of fear and isolation scraped over his skin, sending jitters down his spine. In a blink of movement he left the bed. Coën had only just kicked away his trews and twisted to catch Lambert in his arms. The kiss was bruising. Lambert held Coën"s jaw in both hands and crushed their lips together, desperate to feel. His legs wrapped at Coën"s waist, but it wasn"t enough to keep him up; Coën slammed him against the wall, leaving possessive fingerprints on his hips and thighs.
Coën fisted Lambert"s hair and pulled his head back to ravage his neck, sucking bites and kisses that would fade only a little by morning. Coën"s cock smeared the crease of Lambert"s hip with precum, and Lambert"s traitorous prick finally stirred to life. Unfrozen, like the rest of him, from the paralysis of fear and exhaustion. "Fuck, Lambert, fuck." Coën rarely lost control, but Lambert knew how to tug and coax him until he did. Knew how to roll his body just so, how to graze his teeth beneath his ear and grip Coën like he was needed.
They fumbled to the bed and Lambert heard the rattle of ancient drawers as Coën ransacked the nearby nightstand for slick. "Lambert."
"Use spit," Lambert huffed, only to receive a slap on the thigh that spurred him to point at the third drawer down. Almost in the next moment, slick fingers pressed around his rim, slipping inside only briefly before they were replaced by the blunt head of Coën"s prick. Lambert tilted his hips greedily, pulling Coën further into him and revelling in the white hot not-quite-pain that arced up his spine.
Coën ran a hand into his hair and bit the prominent tendon in Lambert"s neck as he speared him open in one hard thrust, punching a filthy groan from deep in Lambert"s chest. Lambert clung to the heat inside him, ran his hands over Coën"s back, finding the familiar topography of bumps and welts that he had learned over the years. Despite the weight behind his eyes, the cold withdrew until his skin was fire and his body crashed through an orgasm. Coën sat up, hips still rolling slowly, a palm smearing cum into Lambert"s dark chest hair. "Don"t stop," Lambert begged, his voice broken.
He didn"t. His palms slipped up Lambert"s thighs and pushed his legs to his chest, practically folding him in half as he slammed into him with renewed vigour. Lambert bit off his sobs of over-sensitivity, the drip-drip of icy fear melting away. He felt the pulse of Coën"s cock inside him and reached up with clawing fingers. Coën fell over him and bit at his mouth, sharing a kiss that was as much teeth as lips and tongue. It wasn"t the last time they fucked that night. Lambert twisted in the sheets, Coën spooned up behind him, their moans drowning out the castle and the reality of their loneliness at the edge of the world.
When Coën was done, his body slick with sweat and spend, Lambert was asleep at his side. His mouth lolled open, his face relaxed. There were no more nightmares that night.
Two days later, they decided to call Triss.
Lambert liked Merigold only marginally more than the demons in his dreams, but she would know what to do.
The clack of wooden sparring weapons filled the courtyard as Lambert put Ciri through her paces. Eventually, he had tired and sent her up onto the comb to fight the swaying pendulum, her eyes covered by a blindfold. She was getting better. A quick learner. Vesemir had tasked Lambert with her sword training and footwork drills. It made sense; Lambert was second only to Vesemir as a swordsman.
"That’s it! See how such a parry lands? You can take any strike from it. You can cut backwards from it, if you have to. Right, show me a pirouette and a thrust backwards."
"Haaa!"
"Very good. You see the point now? Has it got through to you?"
"I’m not stupid!"
"You’re a girl. Girls don’t have brains."
"Lambert! If Triss heard that!"
"If ifs and ands were pots and pans. All right, that’s enough. Come down. We’ll take a break."
Lambert wiped the back of his hand over his brow. Despite the frigid temperatures and the fresh lot of snow on the ground, they"d worked up a sweat in just twenty minutes of explosive sparring, with only the occasional pause to correct form.
"I’m not tired!"
"But I am. I said, a break. Come down from the comb." He had been sleeping better since Merigold"s arrival. Almost like the sorceresses latent power was keeping the monsters in his head at bay. The thought caused him no small amount of chagrin. But now that the fog had begun to clear, he could see Ciri for what she really was. A scared little girl looking for a place in the world and people to love her. He could relate to that, and he would make damn well fucking sure Ciri could hold her own against anyone who would seek to hurt her. He wasn"t yet ready to dig into the reasons behind his dreams, and he definitely wasn"t going to tell the others. Fuck that, they"d think he had finally cracked for real.
"Turning a somersault?"
"What do you think? Like a hen off its roost? Go on, jump. Don’t be afraid, I’m here for you." Lambert cast the sword aside and held out his arms. He was surprised to realise that he meant it.
"Haaaa!" She flipped and landed with only a slight slip on the ice. More agile than he had been at her age.
"Nice. Very good – for a girl. You can take off the blindfold now."
There was one dream that came back with a vengeance one night when Eskel had headed out to check the traps. The Leshen Dream. It was more vivid than ever before. His bedsheets tangled around his limbs like leshen vines and he woke inside the flickering golden shell of his own quen shield.
Enough was enough.
The following morning, Eskel was sitting at the breakfast table with a heaped plate of bacon only a man his size could possibly consume in one sitting. Lambert marched over and threw himself down on the bench next to him. "How d"you kill a Leshen?"
Eskel sipped ponderously at his drink, a crease in the centre of his brow. "Nope, can"t think of the punchline. Hit me."
"Fu--, I"m serious. Tell me."
"Uh." Eskel scratched his head. "You know how to kill a leshen."
"Eskel!" Lambert snapped, teeth clenched. When Eskel looked taken aback, Lambert took a deep breath through his nose. "I need to hear you say it. I need to hear you… be your tryhard, professional self. So just fucking tell me, alright?"
"Not a tryhard."
"Eskel."
"Alright, don"t get your knickers in a bunch." Eskel still took another sip of ale because while he may be about thirty or forty years Lambert"s senior, he was still a petulant shithead when he wanted to be. "Open with a moondust bomb if you can, stops it from changing form. Be swift on your feet to prevent the vines from wrapping your ankles, fast, glancing attacks so you"re not in one place for too long, and you roast that bitch with igni."
"With igni." Lambert breathed a sigh of relief, rubbing his hands down his face. The Eskel in his dream hadn"t used igni, or even a Dragon"s Dream. He had fought a fucking Leshen for six hours and not thought to use fire on a forest spirit. Leshen, werewolves; you finished those fights as quickly as possible or you might as well jack it all in. Lambert reached forward and clasped both sides of Eskel"s head. He rested their foreheads together and gazed into those familiar honey-gold eyes. "You roast that bitch with igni."
"Yeah." The corners of Eskel"s eyes crinkled in obvious amusement, but he was old enough and wise enough to know that Lambert needed a minute to regather; to ridicule or poke fun in this moment of vulnerability was as likely to get his nose bit as it was to lose him a plate full of bacon. When Lambert sat back, Eskel hummed. "Gonna tell me what this is about?"
"No," Lambert replied, eyeing Eskel"s plate of bacon.
"If you touch my food, it will be the last thing you do."
Lambert darted forward for the plate but Eskel was quicker. Ciri arrived in the grand hall at Coën"s side in time to see them fall from the bench, Lambert"s teeth sinking into Eskel"s forearm. She sighed. "Really?"
Coën nodded in mock solidarity. "If you get that plate of bacon, I"ll tell you how to beat Lambert at cards."
She grinned, green eyes bright. "Deal."