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The School of the Cat has always been a little...laxer about the rules than some of their cousin Schools. Griffins, for instance, won’t take a human contract for love nor money; Wolves insist on sparing intelligent creatures who aren’t doing any harm. But the older Cats teach that you take the contract that’ll give you enough coin to keep going, because it’s better in the long run for the world to have enough Witchers than otherwise. And though most Cats do prefer to walk the Path alone, none of them have ever given Cedric and Axel any shit for traveling together.
They’ve been pretty much inseparable since before the Grasses, which probably helps - have not been more than a few strides away from each other since Axel was brought in, a year or so after Cedric, and Cedric wrapped his arm around the younger boy’s shoulders and told him it would be alright, he’d keep him safe. Their training masters speak of them in one breath, Cedric-and-Axel, and their comrades tease them about being joined at the hip.
But the Grasses are something every Witcher must face for himself, and live or die as the gods will.
Cedric and Axel don’t care.
Axel sneaks into the chamber of the Grasses and sits beside Cedric the whole time he thrashes and screams and weeps and retches his way through changing into something not quite human; he holds Cedric’s hand, unflinching, though Cedric’s convulsions break two of his fingers badly enough that one of the mages has to fix them afterwards. He bites a mage bloody when the man tries to make him leave.
No one even bothers to try to tell Cedric he can’t do the same, a year later. He holds Axel’s hand the whole way through, crooning off-key songs under the sound of a dozen boys screaming their lives away, and once it is clear that Axel will live, he sleeps in his chair beside the stone bed, head pillowed on Axel’s hip, until Axel finally opens newly-slitted eyes.
They’re given a room together after that, because the training masters know full well they’ll only use one. They train together, eat together, study together, sleep together. They learn to kiss with each other, and spy on the older Witchers until they learn what else they can do.
As long as they’re together, they’re safe, after all. Cedric promised.
So nobody really expects them to split up when they go out on the Path. Hell, the masters even turn a blind eye to the fact that Cedric spends his first year on the Path within fifty miles of Stygga, making loop after loop and clearing out every drowner and minor necrophage that even thinks about showing its nose, and doesn’t really go out into the world properly until Axel is past his Trials and ready to join him.
The challenge of walking the Path together is, of course, that most contracts don’t pay enough to house and feed two Witchers; but on the flip side, two Witchers together hunt a lot more safely than one alone, and so they can actually take more contracts, because they’re spending less time holed up somewhere to heal. Cedric is better at close-in fighting, and Axel is better with a crossbow or bombs, and they make a damn good team if they do say so themselves.
The first few years are hard, of course; there’s a big difference between theory and practice, and the first time they run across a pack of barghests or a pair of nesting archgriffins, there’s a bit of a learning curve. They both acquire interesting scars.
Their first year out together, Cedric gets a barghest’s claw across his chest, cutting right through the thick leather of his armor, and the white of his ribs shows beneath the blood when Axel rolls him over. Axel later wonders if he even breathed during the far too many minutes until Swallow stopped the bleeding and Kiss brought a little color back into Cedric’s cheeks. Cedric reinforces his armor with metal plates as soon as they can afford it - flexibility and agility are all well and good, but he doesn’t care for seeing his own bones.
Two years later, Axel gets picked up by an archgriffin, its talons digging into his shoulders, and carried almost a mile before Cedric manages to knock it to the ground with a vicious, desperate Aard. Axel passes out when he hits the ground, and wakes to find Cedric still hacking the archgriffin’s corpse to ever-smaller pieces, lost in the berserk rage of which all Cats must be wary; he does not stop until Axel manages to haul himself to his feet and over to his mate, putting a hand on Cedric’s arm, not sure even as he does so if Cedric will stop - or turn his blade on Axel, blind with blood-madness.
Cedric stops. Axel, who has never bothered to pray before, invents a prayer of thanksgiving to whoever the fuck might be listening on the spot.
The years roll by, and they do learn, quickly enough that the lessons do not kill them, close as it is at times. They come back to Stygga every winter with a few new scars, a few new stories: a flock of sirens that fell for the obvious threat of the Witcher on the beach, waving his silver sword, and completely failed to notice the second Witcher, concealed in a tree with his crossbow at the ready, until it was far too late. A particularly sneaky bruxa that managed to slip past them three separate times before they finally cornered her. A lord they’d taken a contract on, from an ambitious cousin who wanted the title, who’d waited up for them to arrive and asked them quite politely if they’d help him fake his death in return for twice as much as their original contract had offered, and gone off to become a traveling spice merchant with a spring in his step and a song on his lips.
So yeah, they’re an unusual pair, but Guxart calls them a credit to his line, and Treyse just sighs and says there’s no such thing as a normal Cat Witcher anyway, and they go on well enough, all things considered.
After that first disastrous encounter with the archgriffins, they’ve both been very careful not to let themselves slip into the berserker rage which is the unfortunate legacy of the Cats’ Grasses. Some of their brothers enjoy the feeling, the lack of control and the freedom to just let go, but Cedric finds the memory of the one time he was taken by it to be bitter indeed, and Axel remembers the absolute blankness of Cedric’s eyes and knows he never wants to see that look again, much less fall victim to the blood-madness which caused it. After all, Cedric stopped, but Cedric is in some ways the gentler of the two of them. Axel has a little more viciousness to him at the best of times. There’s no guarantee that he will stop, if he goes berserk and the only thing left for him to attack is his beloved.
*
They take a contract early one autumn when they’ve been about fifteen years on the Path, to see a little merchant caravan through a particularly nasty bit of forest. It’s an odd contract for a pair of Witchers - traveling with humans is always a bit of a risk - but there are only three wagons, and the promised pay is very good indeed. There are only eight humans in the party, too: the merchant and his wife and son, drovers for each of the wagons, and two men to do the heavy lifting, who usually double as guards against merely human threats like bandits. It seems an easy enough job.
The first few days go pretty well, actually. The merchant is an amiable fellow, full of questions about the places the Witchers have seen during their travels. A lot of the questions are about popular trade goods, of course, and Cedric and Axel shrug and allow as how they honestly don’t pay much attention to anything besides the price of decent smithing and leatherwork, and how much a pocket pie goes for. They can tell him more about the market for alchemical supplies (the ones derived from monsters, anyhow) than about anything else, and the merchant’s wife laughs at him and asks him why he thinks Witchers would know or care about what sorts of trinkets and gewgaws are popular in Aedirn, anyhow?
The drovers mostly ignore them, which is pretty good compared to how some humans treat them, and the guard-laborers ask Axel polite questions about the pretty watered-steel knives Cedric bought him last year, and his favorite blacksmiths in Redania.
And the kid apparently thinks they’re absolutely fascinating. He clambers all over Cedric, perching on his shoulders and peering at his eyes and even sticking his fingers into Cedric’s mouth to feel the slightly-more-pointed-than-human teeth; and he is endlessly delighted by Axel swooping him up and flipping him upside down and dangling him by his ankles. The merchant’s wife is not exactly happy about her child spending so much time with Witchers, but when neither of them so much as bruises him, she settles for just watching them warily while they play with him.
It’s sort of delightful, honestly. Neither of them has ever wanted to be a trainer - the idea of forcing children through the same torturous lessons they went through is deeply distasteful - but just playing with a kid is kind of amazing. Axel learns to make the kid laugh by pulling funny faces, and Cedric entertains everyone by pretending not to notice the kid sneaking up to pounce on him, and making loud sounds of startlement when tiny arms wrap around his leg.
It’s good, maybe the best contract they’ve ever had.
So of course it goes to shit.
They’re more than halfway through the forest, and Cedric and Axel are starting to relax - the really dangerous bit ought to have been the deepest part of the woods, where leshens or endrega or kikimoras are more likely to lurk - when one of the human guards yelps and an arachas drops out of the fucking trees and disembowels the poor fucker.
Even that, though, wouldn’t be a complete disaster, except for the poor bastard who just got killed. Cedric draws his sword and charges forward, and Axel hauls his crossbow off his shoulder and slaps a bolt into it and is about to shoot when the godsdamned fucking stupid other guard fires his crossbow and instead of hitting the arachas, which is just about dead anyway, it slams straight into Cedric’s back.
Cedric crumples to the ground.
Axel sees red.
*
Cedric rolls over, gritting his teeth as the bolt in his back shifts. There’s...a lot of screaming going on. At first he thinks there are more arachas.
Then he sees Axel, hands soaked to the elbows with blood, standing over the body of the other human guard, and the crossbow shattered on the ground beside them. Axel’s eyes are wide, pupils blown so large there’s no way he’s actually able to see anything in the afternoon sunlight, and his teeth are bared and bloody. The merchant and his wife and the drovers are all screaming. They’d do better to be silent.
There isn’t any threat anymore, but Cedric knows that look on Axel’s face. He struggles to his knees, croaking Axel’s name, but Axel doesn’t hear him.
One of the drovers breaks and tries to run, and Axel pounces, moving faster than anything ought to be able to. Cedric tries to get to his feet, and the bolt in his back shifts again and he goes down hard, both knees and one hand thumping to the ground.
The kid scrambles off the wagon and comes sprinting over to Cedric, wrapping his little arms around Cedric’s arm and clinging to him. Cedric looks up to see that Axel has finished with the drover and turned to the rest of the caravan.
There’s no way Cedric is going to be able to get up and stop him; the bolt has definitely hit something important. Probably a lung. He needs a vial of Swallow and several hours of meditation before he’s going to be any use to anyone.
Cedric is not going to be able to save any of the humans of the caravan...except maybe the kid.
“Don’t look,” he croaks, curling around the kid and tucking the little head into his chest. The kid is shaking in terror, and Cedric covers him with his body and watches through pain-hazed eyes as Axel lives up to Witchers’ worst reputation.
He’s quick, at least. For whatever that’s worth. None of the humans suffer.
And then Axel is standing over Cedric, and Cedric wonders if this is the end.
For both of them, because if Axel kills him, Cedric knows he’ll kill himself once he comes out of his berserk rage.
“Axel,” he rasps, hugging the kid more firmly to his chest. “Axel, please.”
Axel stares down at him, eyes wide and blind and utterly black, barely a sliver of yellow remaining around his enormous pupils. His arms are red almost to the shoulder, blood dripping from his fingers to spatter on the ground, and his teeth are bared. His chin is smeared crimson.
“...Cedric,” he says, and his eyes roll up, and he topples over, landing like a felled tree.
“Well,” Cedric says, looking at Axel’s unconscious form, the mangled bodies strewn around the caravan, the child cradled to his chest. “Fuck.”
*
Axel wakes up after only a few minutes, the blood-madness drained from his mind, and sits up with a groan, reaching up to wipe his mouth and then freezing, staring at his bloody hands. “Cedric? What - oh gods. What did I do?”
Cedric winces a little, and the tiny motion draws Axel’s eyes to the bolt still standing out of his back. “Ah shit, alright, hang on - Swallow, I can get you Swallow -”
He scrambles for their packs, and Cedric waits, holding the weeping child close, until Axel gets back with a vial of Swallow and a rather panicked expression. “Blindfold the kid,” Cedric orders him, and Axel nods and fishes a length of bandage out of his pack. “Close your eyes,” Cedric tells the kid, and Axel carefully winds the blindfold around the little head and ties it in place, and only then does Cedric let go.
Getting the crossbow bolt out of his back is just as miserable as he expected, and Cedric lets himself sink into meditation, knowing that now that Axel is back to himself, he can trust his mate to handle everything.
Insofar as everything can be handled, anyhow.
And when he wakes from meditation, finding the kid still curled in his lap and clinging to his tunic, they agree that as they have no idea where the merchant’s kin might be, nor who, and in any case explaining the whole mess would doubtless end badly, there is nothing to do but to take the child with them.
It isn’t ideal. The kid has nightmares pretty much every night, which is understandable but doesn’t do much for anyone’s quality of sleep, and he flinches from Axel for weeks, which is also understandable but means Cedric spends a lot of time holding the kid and not getting to hug his mate. And it turns out playing with a kid doesn’t actually mean they learned anything about how much and how often to feed him, or what to do when he scrapes his knee, or even how to comfort him after the nightmares. And he’s acquired a deep fear of spiders, which is occasionally awkward.
Oh, and taking contracts with a kid along is not easy. Axel ends up going out hunting alone for the first time since they started out on the Path, and though they carefully limit the contracts to things Axel can probably kill from a distance with bolts or bombs or Signs, it’s still nerve-wracking for both of them, and the one time Axel comes back injured, Cedric frets over him for most of a week.
But it does, slowly, get easier for all of them. Cedric and Axel learn how often to feed the kid, and what to feed him (nobody wants a repeat of the too-many-honey-cakes debacle), and how much sleep he needs. The kid grows accustomed to Axel again, and even starts being willing to play with him, though he’s always warier around Axel than he is around Cedric. His nightmares start to grow less frequent, though they’re still happening more nights than they aren’t.
And when they ask him, a little dubiously, whether he wants them to leave him with some innkeeper’s family, or a blacksmith who needs an apprentice, he shakes his little head and tells them he wants to be a Witcher, and kill monsters.
Well, that’s more choice than either of them ever got. Cedric shrugs at Axel, and Axel shrugs back, and it’s decided.
They reach Stygga Castle late that autumn, with a small child perched on Cedric’s shoulders, staring around in amazement. Treyse meets them at the gate, nodding a greeting and eyeing the wagon Axel is driving curiously. (There wasn’t any point in leaving the goods in the forest, after all, and it was late enough in the season they were heading south to Stygga anyhow.)
“Who’s this, then?”
“Meet our newest little brother,” Cedric says. “His name is Aiden.”