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Every morning that he wakes up to her, he thinks he's still dreaming. Awakening’s a cautious process. He has to take it in steps.
First, the air. He smells sun-drenched earth, herbs grown for their taste, flowers-- the ornamental kind. The bedsheets smell of the two of them.
Second, touch. He spreads his toes under the sheets, touches a finger to his own hip. Still there.
The third step is the most treacherous. This is where a dream would leave him. He’ll grab the last threads of it and wake up with his fists clenched, staring up into a canopy of branches or the rough canvas of a tent. Sometimes the familiar-unfamiliar timbers of an inn, if he’s had a lucky streak.
He inhales the feel of this dream, sweet as lilacs, sharp as gooseberries, and opens his eyes.
That’s their ceiling overhead. Since the last renovation, it’s a very nice ceiling to wake up to. Solid construction. Dark wood. He has to remember to compliment B.B. on his exquisite taste.
Only then does Geralt have the courage to turn his head on the pillow.
Yennefer. There she is.
Yennefer’s sleeping. How late? Must be hours past sunrise by the sounds of the birds outside and the slant of light through the closed shutters. Geralt sniffs again. The smell of eggs drifts in from under the door. Marlene’s using that blend of spices she refuses to divulge. She demures with a laugh and a coy shake of her head, although she must know that he’s not running off to the nearest scribe to steal her coveted culinary secrets. Yen says that if they ever want to recreate the blend, she can do so quite easily with magic. A hollow victory. Illusion magic doesn’t count in Geralt’s ledger.
Yennefer’s eyes don’t open but her voice emerges in his mind, as if she’s always in there. She is.
Lay it down, Geralt.
Lay it down, he echoes. Sword and crossbow, bomb and potion. Some days he wants to do just that, walk across his fields-- his fields!-- down to the river and set it all down on the bank: blades, armor, trophy hook. The flasks he used to boil potions. Lay down a hoard that no dragon would keep and then walk away, leave it all rust. Hard rain will come, long driving gray days that’ll force Yen and Geralt inside, to the comfy chairs by the fire and then to the bed. After many days the sun will come out and he’ll walk down to the river to find the bank emptied, every flash of steel and silver washed downstream. The river will bear Kaer Morhen and the Path away, past the lake and the mountains and, someday, into the silent belly of the sea.
No more sword maintenance or armor repair. Imagine the time savings.
Someday, Geralt thinks.
Yennefer’s eyelids flutter but remain shut. Awaiting a special occasion?
For the right time to sell. It’s a buyer’s market.
Yen’s lips press together. Through the mental link, he can hear her rolling her eyes.
They both know that Geralt will never sell his equipment, much less toss it into the river. For one thing, it was expensive. For another, that’s technically pollution. Think of all the little lake creatures that’ll choke to death on the sword strap alone.
The biggest reason and the only one that counts is that they saved Geralt’s life-- not once, but over and over, when nothing else stood between him and the monsters in the dark. All those years of relying on his own instincts and the metal and leather carapace he rarely took off until the smell of him grew into the hide. Even if his armor lay on the bottom of the sea for a decade, it would still smell like him. The crabs and eyeless creatures of the deep would taste his sweat and blood in the rust.
Lay it down? How? Six months have passed under the Toussaintois sun and Geralt still clutches the bedsheets in the morning, waiting for the dream to yank him away. Evenings by the fire, his back’s still too straight and ears too strained, braced for the answer to a question he can’t stop asking: where are the monsters?
Marlene says it, B.B. says it, Yen says it: there are no monsters here.
Who’d believe it?
Geralt tries, though. He shuts off the sight of the ceiling, closes his eyes and tucks himself into the smaller slimmer curve of Yen’s shoulder. If they fall asleep again, it’ll be past noon when they wake for the day. He gropes for the thread of tightness in his chest, tugs it, and it unwinds into a long sigh that blows across the soft slope of Yen’s throat.
See? He’s trying hard to believe.
* * * *
Geralt still meditates, sometimes, in this parallel universe of strange facts: the wind’s peaceful, the sky’s blue, and the fields are all his. He could roll in them like a dog if he wanted to, and no one would kick him out, spit at his feet, tell him his kind isn’t welcome. Could tell B.B. that he wants to convert that fallow field in the southwestern corner into a sandpit, a mini-Pendulum, a rock garden, a scorched patch of earth, and he’d be able to visit it every day and witness how the earth has bent to meet his wish.
He kneels in the patch of tiny yellow flowers that count as weeds. This soil’s eager to nurture. Everything grows here. So Geralt plants himself, reaches down with the tendril-roots of his consciousness, and drinks quiet into his stem.
There’s wind and sunlight, the scents of the fields: dirt, green, weeds, manure, worms, the birds that eat worms. There’s him and his reaching branches. The earth lets him in easy. He’s planted here, too. He’s grown hairy with new roots.
The birds chirp. The plants drink. The leaves sway. The sun’s a burnished embrace, and there are no monsters here.
Geralt’s poured full of sunlight. His thoughts echo in the stilled chamber of his being, and he thinks: I don’t believe it.
The stillness answers in his own voice: You don’t have to.
He could float like this, in a dream of sunlit days and firewarmed nights and a place where the doors are his to lock and open and in his bed, Yennefer.
It might be possible to lay it down here, sword and crossbow, gambeson and greaves, in a house that’s his. Lay it all down and finally stop fighting.
He’ll pretend his little roots didn’t shudder at that.
Geralt’s very good at what he does. Correction: what he did. He’s a born & bred monster killer and he’s spent over a century with monsters, whether studying them, tracking them, fighting them, or recovering from fighting them. He’s adapted to the job, like any well-designed instrument, and now he’s facing the fate of every obsolete machine: he’s adapted to the wrong purpose. This soft intimate life, it’s meant for someone who can accept it. He’s scar tissue and sinew, a body built for hardship, cat eyes sharp and lambent to help him see monsters. He can’t stop looking for them.
Bullshit, darling.
Yen?
Geralt stirs from meditation. Yen’s standing in front of him with her fists on her hips.
“I would apologize for interrupting,” Yen says, “but you know how hard it is for me to resist the siren song of self-pity.”
Geralt brushes the clinging ribbons of green from his knees as he stands. “And here I thought it was my manly physique.”
“Oh, I’ve no complaint about your-- virility.” Yen slips an arm around his waist. “You’re a man of innumerable charms… who suffers only the occasional lapse into woe is me.”
“Weren’t supposed to hear that. Didn’t we talk about your mind reading?”
“We talk of a great many things these days, dear,” she says breezily. “Come. Enough of the fields for one day. We’ve received a new shipment of bottles from Belgaard Vineyard, and we wouldn’t want to abandon them on our doorstep, would we?”
“Hm.” Geralt shakes his head. “Now that I can finally be a host, wouldn’t wanna botch it so badly.”
“There’s our gallant lord of the manor.”
* * * *
Liam and Matilda each know how to make a decent bottle of wine. Working together, they make minor alcoholic miracles.
“It’s kind of a metaphor,” Geralt slurs, “if you think about it.”
Yen and Geralt haven’t even bothered to bring the delivery inside before opening it. They’re lying together on the chaise lounge that Yennefer insisted upon. He has to admit that it’s a nice spot-- bubbling stream nearby, great view of the sunset at this time of day, clear sight of the river to the north. She’s a light, lithe thing sitting between his legs, the back of her head resting on his chest.
“Darling,” Yen says in a lazy blur, “what in the blazes are you talking about?”
“Oh. You weren’t reading me?”
“No. I was pondering that carnivorous duck in the sky.”
“Huh?”
Yennefer points. The sunset’s splashing garish orange and pink across the sky and it’s glowing in the beak of a cloud that, yeah, does kinda resemble a mutated duck with spread wings and a jawful of inexplicable teeth.
“Better get your silver.” Her voice ripples with laughter and it makes him want to close his arms around her and never let go. Her and everything, this.
Are you reading me now? Geralt thinks.
There’s no answer. He keeps going anyway. This wine, he thinks, taste it. Full-bodied, decadent. Think how much it took to make that taste. To bring it to your mouth and mine. First the grapes had to grow. Everything in Touissant grows thick but someone had to tend that soil, plant it, mind it. Someone had to love that vine through the months it took ‘til the grapes grew ripe. Then the picking, the washing, the stomping, the pouring, the barreling, the fermenting, the tasting, the bottling. Someone started with a patch of dirt and loved it until the soil grew into this: a taste of cherries and sunlight that blooms on the tongue.
Yen. I want to believe in this. Keep telling me that there are no monsters here and one day, I swear I’ll believe it. I’ll wake up in the morning fast, without counting steps, and I’ll roll over and hold you because I’ll believe you’re there. We’ll make love and fall asleep and wake up and make love again, and we’ll eat cold eggs in the late afternoon and tease B.B. when he’s done tsking. Then we’ll walk outside on the grounds that are ours and you’ll pick a spot that I’ll make into something. It’s dirt now but say the word, Yen, and I’ll make it grapevines, I’ll make it a pond. I’ll build a godsdamned fortress with bricks that I bake myself. Help me believe in this place, Yen. I’ll believe it into blossoming.
Yennefer’s head tilts against his chest. The sunlight gilds her eyes into an empress’ amethysts. “Geralt?”
Geralt loops his arms around her. “Yeah, Yen?”
She doesn’t say anything but her hands reach up to find his. They rock together in the mercy of sunlight, the soft breeze, bending with the tenderness of growing things.