every_blossom_blooming | (no subject)

He answered, though it was fumblingly and awkwardly, the same way he had answered the xenovox in his own world. He spoke too loudly, held the phone too far from his face, and it bothered him when it pressed against the shell of his ear. But he answered, because he would never not.

Where do you need me, he'd said, and I'll meet you there as soon as possible.

And Geralt did. He was fortunate that his life, his lifestyle, left him with huge stretches of general availability. He worked only for himself, and only on his own terms, as apart from society in general as he could get away with.

In seventeen minutes, he was there, looking pale as moonlight on snow. Hard and insolent, Milva had described his visage once, and it was that when he found Nina. He'd run the entire way to her, but looked not out of breath.

"So?" he asked. She'd said he could know the details, once the work had started. He trusted Nina was a good woman, he trusted she had very good reasons, and had chosen him for the same.

Edited 2017-09-17 01:57 (UTC)

Nina was waiting at the end of a dark alley. She looked up when Geralt approached and offered a faint, wry smile.

"Thank you," she said, because that seemed like the right thing to say. She hugged herself and slipped down the alley, where a body lay crumpled over a curb. "He tried to hurt Inej... he tried to take advantage of her." She looked at Geralt, eyebrows drawn together.

She hoped he understood her meaning because she wasn't sure how detailed she wanted to be. And he knew Inej, so he had to imagine what that might have looked like. The tiny Suli girl, taken off guard; Nina could only imagine her terror in the moment the memories that must have flooded her mind.

"And this is what left of him."

The smile shook him, somehow, with the way it wobbled toward the end. The smell of blood was filling the alleyway, sweet, human and coppery, almost sickly, making his mouth water like the gasoline fumes did.

He shoved away the desire to pull Nina against him, not because it would be inappropriate, not even because he thought she might not want it, but because she was right that this ought to be gotten done with sooner, not later. Before it attracted something else in the dark beside a witcher.

It was a crime of skill, but also one of mad passion. That much even a cursory investigation could reveal. Geralt knelt by the corpse, yellow eyes almost swamped with enlarged pupils, taking in as much of the dim light of the alleyway as possible.

He could still hear blood dripping sluggishly into the sewerage grate nearby.

"Monster deserved it," he murmured. The Northern Kingdoms were flogged by war, covered with the smell of corpses. Chaos brought evil men out of hiding, brought out their cruelty and inflicted it on those already gone through immense suffering. He was too familiar with this sort of monster, the reason he carried a sword made of steel along with the silver one.

Geralt reached into his pocket for a paper packet, filled with powder. Saltpetre, calcium equum, black powder.

"Inej make it out of here?"

"I came across her just after it happened. I took her back to the Crow Club and got her settled. I've done what I can for her there... I promised her I would take care of this. It was the only way to get her out of the alley.

Nina knew what war could do, corpses did not frighten her. But this wasn't war: Inej shouldn't have to feel like this here. She wanted to take care of this for her friend, wanted to give her the chance to remain as unstained as possible by the darkness of this event.

She watched Geralt, curious about the paper he pulled out. She could smell the black powder and other things less familiar.

"What is that?"

He was relieved to know Nina had found Inej, helped her. He'd felt what Nina's abilities could do himself before, was confident that, despite the potential conundrum of an ability like Nina's, whatever comfort was given would be better in the long run, would stave off some of the harm of a death this emotionally violent.

"Takes care of the blood," he said. He reached out sith a spare hand and pulled the body over one shoulder, leaving it there like a limp sack of potatoes. With his teeth, he ripped the folded paper packet open. He sprinkled it on the blood pooled beneath the body, and then along the trail to the sewers.

After he was certain that he had as much coverage of the clotted liquid as possible, he formed the sign of igni with his free hand. The powdered jumped and sputtered into flame, burning off, quick and controlled. It left only black scorch marks in its stead.

"Need to get this to the sea. Not too far across town ... are you coming?"

The voice managed to be soft, kind. Nina could come, if it was important to her. She could not, if it was too much for her. It was her choice alone, for her and her friend.

The sudden flame made her step back, but she was calm in the face of it. Nina hugged herself a bit tighter and she found herself quite glad that she'd called Geralt. Maybe she could have handled this herself, or maybe Kaz would have come to help her... but she felt less alone with Geralt there.

"Yes, I'm coming. I promised Inej, and I'll see it through to the end. And this seems like a silly question, but I'll ask anyway: do you need help carrying it?"

Geralt paused, nearly a wince, when Nina asked him if he needed help. She was sweet and kind, in cruel contrast to the dirty alleyways and the stench of dead blood. Nobody in the North would have asked if a witcher needed help. They most certainly didn't need it, with their unnatural abilities, and furthermore, most would consider they wouldn't deserve it. They were freaks, their burden was their own.

"No," he answered. He walked on.

It wasn't far to the sea, as he'd said. He moved with inhuman silence, even with the weight on his shoulder. He stuck to the deepest shadows he could find, moved through the backalleys like a white and black wraith.

Once they reached the surf, he dropped his cargo, grisly as it might be, and dug through the pack at his hip for a thick steel chain, weights at one end.

"So. Inej is safe, and well as she can be. How about you, Nina?"

Edited 2017-09-17 04:26 (UTC)

She followed Geralt without trouble; now that he was there, his unique heartbeat was easy to find and follow. Nina kept silent as she could, solemn all the way to the beach.

She watched Geralt work and held a shawl over her shoulders.

"I'm angry," she said, just loud enough to be heard over the surf. "I'm angry it happened, I'm angry I wasn't there to stop it before it came to this. But I'm alright. And grateful."

Geralt worked in silence, for the most part bent over the corpse, back to Nina as pale hands worked with certainty, no shake, no anger. He tied the steel chain's length around the man, his wrists, crossed over his torso, braided around the legs and feet with the weight to the bottom. The surf would wash away any blood. The fish and lamprey would eat the corpse.

"For some time," he said. There had been anger like Nina described behind the words once, but it had fled. Geralt could no longer hold onto his anger well, it faded quickly to something else. Whether it was his growing age or the mutations, he couldn't know and thought about only infrequently.

"I hunted a man. He was an elf once, but only a monster by the time we'd crossed paths. There's more to the story, more by far than I could ever mention in any conversation, but -- he'd hurt my family. He'd taken me, and stolen all of my memory and most of my self, and he'd turned me into one of his men. Made me a monster, a slaver, and a murderer of innocents. He stole any sense of peace from my daughter, and he slew the man who was like my father. So I hunted him down and I killed him on Bald Mountain."

Geralt was not an assassin, not a murderer. But his anger had been a dark thing in his chest, and he had surely murderer Imlerith. And he was angry too that the elf had pushed him to that.

He felt for Inej. In the way that someone could only feel for another when they are also, in part, mourning for a bit of themselves.

"I'll be back," he said. He turned to look at Nina, eyes swamped with pupil, before picking the body up again, moving into the water slowly to not get bowled over in the night surf.

Edited 2017-09-17 22:35 (UTC)

Nina frowned as she listened to the story. She understood the anger Geralt spoke of, even if she could not entirely understand what that experience might have been like. Having everything taken, turned into something else... she couldn't imagine Geralt that way.

"I know Inej wishes she could do the same to the people that took her to her family, to the men that used her so poorly... and probably Tante Helene, for facilitating it all in the first place."

Tante Helene was a special kind of cruel all on her own, never mind the clientele the Menagerie had attracted. Nina shuddered at the memory.

"I'll wait here," she murmured. And she did. She hugged her shawl around herself while Geralt went into the water. SHe worried about how far he might go out, but she supposed he might want the tide to take what it could. She prayed to her saints that the body became nothing more than fish waste.

When Geralt finally came back to shore she said, "Thank you. Truly."

It took nearly ten minutes for him to return to Nina on the beach. He'd dragged himself and the body out to chest-level water, before he spent a few minutes hyper-oxygenating his blood with deep, quick breaths.

His head fell beneath the cool water, and his metabolism responded, slowing down drastically, using less oxygen. He dove deep, to thirty feet. His ears popped. He ignored it, and tangled the chains around a rocky outcropping beneath the water, near a drop-off. He could be sure that the body would stay there, wouldn't float away, and would be eaten that night by the influx of life from the deeper water.

Geralt returned to Nina. The water, at least, had cleaned off any remaining gore that had stuck to his leather armor. He shook off like a dog, nose to tail, before stepping over to Nina, hair still dripping salt water gently.

"You're welcome." He was still sluggish, waiting for his body to raise his heartrate again, to warm up. "This shouldn't follow either of you."

He meant it in two meanings. Inej would stay clean. Inej deserved to stay clean, and Nina as well, by association. There was real evil out in the world, the people who were simply trying to live shouldn't get dragged into it.

Edited 2017-09-18 03:32 (UTC)

Nina stepped closer, all her senses thrown open. SHe didn't know how it was he did what he did - he cited his mutations and she believed him, because he was like no other human that she'd ever met. Only other Heartrenders had the power over bodies - their own and otherwise - the way Geralt did.

Her hand smoothed up over his chest, ignoring the dampness of his armor. Her fingers spread out, encouraging his pulse to quicken, to return to the beat she had long since memorized. She watched his face as she did it, held his gaze. She didn't ask what he'd done with the body; it didn't matter.

"I'm grateful on behalf of both of us."

She leaned up and kissed Geralt's cheek, tasting the saltwater there.

"I think I at least owe you dry clothes and something warm to drink."

Geralt knew that Nina was doing something with her special magic when he felt the warm begin to flush back through him, bringing more pink color back to his face, which had been too chalk-white for a moment in the dark. The veins on his neck and forehead softened and became less prominent.

And then Nina kissed him, on the cheek, with warm lips despite the breeze off the ocean.

She smelled gorgeous. She always did, it clung to her, her soft skin, her thick hair. He was too tired to fight the urge. He leaned down to press his mouth against the corner of hers, tugging at her lower lip, kissing her in a way that was slow and supple and exhausted.

It was not the swim which had taken it out of him, but the emotion, the memory, the sympathy.

The way he kissed her took her breath away in all the best ways. Her hand stayed on his chest and the other slid up, fingers curling in Geralt's wet hair as she pressed closer against him.

Saints but he knew how to kiss.

Her heartbeat jumped and all too soon she felt warm all over, especially all the places their bodies happened to meet. Despite the fact that they had just disposed of a ruined corpse together, the sound of the beach and knowing the moonlight was there made the whole thing unreasonably romantic.

When they finally parted, Nina wet her lips like she might still taste him there. He smelled like the sea and leather and something that was just him.

Geralt parted reluctantly, his eyes on Nina's, dark in the night, and following her as he stepped away and then moved up the beach, slowly and a little roaming, so that she could keep up. She was right, he was wet, the seaside was damp, and they ought to go get a hot drink, and some dry clothes.

"Where's Inej staying? Should we go back to my place?"

He could get a change of clothing there, and while he didn't have a setup nearly as fancy as Nina's, what he did have was some mulled wine, a stovetop, and enough pots and pans to take care of his necessities. Like warm drinks after a horrid night.

Nina was reluctant to leave that spot, as if that was the only place he'd kiss her like that. She knew that was some nonsense, and Geralt really should get into something dry. She didn't know if witchers could get sick, but she didn't want to find out like this.

She stayed close as they walked back up the beach.

"She's with Kaz. I can't think of a better place for her." Maybe Nina had her issues with Kaz, but he looked after Inej, in his way. And if Dirtyhands had softened for anyone, it was for Inej Ghafa. She knew Inej would feel safe with him, and she knew Kaz would only be upset that he hadn't had the chance to kill the man himself.

Nina decided not to think of what he could do to someone that did that to Inej. She already knew what he was capable of when a man merely nearly got her killed.

"Yes," she agreed, curious to see Geralt's apartment. It occurred to her that she had not been there - he always came to her. "I need to see what sort of house you keep."

The answer satisfied Geralt, not that it was any of his business that Inej was alright. He looked over his shoulder at Nina, amusement in the subtle narrowing of his eyes.

"Afraid you'll be bored and disappointed. It's not very interesting." It was mostly bare, actually, which was the way he'd been raised. In a nearly empty ruin at Kaer Morhen.

"It's not far."

It wasn't, either. He did what he could to keep up conversation with Nina. He was accustomed to silence, but if she needed distraction, he was willing to provide it. She'd just had to deal with something deeply unpleasant.

"I'll be the judge of that, thank you." She smiled at him, but as they walk the expression faded into something more thoughtful, more neutral. Nina didn't make any attempt to keep up frivolous conversation; she was content to walk in companionable quiet as she processed everything that had just happened.

It wasn't the first corpse she'd seen. It wasn't the first body she had witnessed being disposed. But this body had attempted to hurt Inej in ways that had driven her friend to nearly mindless panic, and she hated that.

Geralt said a few things that drew her out of herself. He was easy to talk to, at least.

"Alright, moment of truth," she said when they reached his building. "Are you still living out in the woods, too?"

"Yes. But less often. There's something going on out there. Subtle, but something. And I don't trust it, for whatever reason."

The birds had been quiet, the deer skittish.

Geralt entered the building, holding the door for Nina, and took to the stairwell to make his way up to his apartment. He was still mildly untrusting of the elevators, and they tended to give him a weird sense of claustrophobia that he didn't get, somehow, from crawling through caves or hiding in cupboards.

He let them in to the apartment, flicking on the lights for Nina. It was a human gesture, one he made with only conscious thought. Geralt never turned the lights on in the apartment on his own, when he was there. He had no need. His eyes would adjust, and at times the electric lights could be too sudden and too artificial for Geralt. The buzzing of the wires, distracting.

It was, as he'd said, almost entirely empty, with only the furnishings provided. But there were notably a great deal of pillows and throws on the sofa, and a pile of reading material thick on the coffee table where he'd been studying.

It smelled clean inside, and masculine. There was an herbal edge, because he'd been gathering and drying plants, and on the kitchen stove sat a pot of White Honey that still looked threatening and hours away from drinkability, even for a witcher.

Nina's frown flickered back for a moment. SHe didn't want to think about what might be out there that could disturb someone like Geralt enough that he had taken to spend time in his apartment.

She peered around him as they entered the apartment and she slid the shawl off her shoulders. She had another weather-appropriate long dress, flowing and comfortable and one that cinched neatly at her waist.

"Well, it's rather bare but I suppose that shouldn't surprise me, knowing you. What are we drinking?"

"Not the shit on the stove," he warned. "Don't, under any circumstances, get that anywhere near your face. It's a witcher decoction."

And it was poisonous to a normal human.

Geralt opened his refrigerator, which was mostly empty, and pulled out another copper pot. This one was filled with wine, cinnamon, cloves, whole anise and orange peel. It was a recipe Dandelion had taught him, and it was a stand-by for the autumn and winter.

"Hope mulled wine is fine. Are you hungry?"

He should peel himself out of his clothing. The shirt, wet, was chafing his armpits. But he could get the wine warming first.

Geralt popped it on the front burner, and turned it on low.

Nina wrinkled her nose and eyed the pot in question dubiously. She sort of wanted to peek into it now but she would endeavor to leave it alone. The last thing she needed was her face burned by fumes or something.

"No, not right now anyway. Ask me again later. Go get changed, Geralt... or at least get out of the wet clothes."

Once the wine was on the stove, Nina tried to push and cajole Geralt out of the kitchen and toward the bedroom. "If you get sick or something on my watch I'll never live it down."

Edited 2017-09-18 06:09 (UTC)

"Don't worry," Geralt said, as he allowed himself to be cajoled toward the bedroom. His voice held a hint of humor, and a bit of exasperation. Nina was a bit of a force.

"Completely immune to pathogens. They can't survive in a witcher's body. Not going to get the sniffles from a night at the beach."

He disappeared into the bedroom, already unbuckling and unbuttoning, pulling ties loose so that he could get the leather jerkin and mail off and toss it to into the corner to dry.

Hearing that actually helped her to relax a little. "Well," she said as Geralt headed down the short hall. "I can't imagine it's comfortable."

She peered into the bedroom a bit and the moment she saw bare, scarred skin, a blush rushed into her face and heat through the rest of her. Right. Nina bit her lip and retreated back to the kitchen before she saw more than she'd been invited to see.

And she tried not to think of the occasion or two when Geralt had worn just a towel around her apartment. The apartment smelled faintly of him and she was entirely sure that was not helping her state of mind.

So she tried to be useful and kept an eye on the wine as it warmed, finding a spoon to stir it with so it wouldn't develop a film or anything. The mulling spices smelled wonderful.

Geralt knew the smell of arousal, but kept silent about it, though his breathing deepened. They needed to have a talk, he knew that. It was the responsible thing to do, and Geralt was a responsible man, to the point that Dandelion often thought of him as a moralist.

He worked on getting his codpiece and trousers off, his boots, which his feet were still fairly sloshing in. He left everything in its corner to dry, before putting on a dry white blouse, and a pair of black sleep pants.

He leaned on the kitchen doorway, feeling warm and comfortable and boneless, and stared at Nina. His face had gotten what little color it had back, and his eyes had once again returned to feline slits, under the kitchen lights.

"Hey," he said.