Chapter Text
The first thing Ciri hears when she wakes up is Geralt’s breathing.
It sounds wrong. It is strained, choked, a tight, unevenness to the sound that makes it painful to listen to. She draws her arms around him and that breathing stops entirely, and she picks her head up, feeling him tense so suddenly it feels like a shudder.
“Geralt?” she says, and pulls back enough that she can see his eyes. He’s staring at her, and the grief still hanging on him tempers his joy and surprise. It’s like he’s afraid to believe this is real, and she’s startled and upset to see tears in his eyes.
“Ciri--” his voice is harsh and he can barely get her name out, and now the strain in his breathing makes complete sense. Ciri cradles his face, her brow twisting with upset and guilt, and she shakes her head.
“Geralt no, I’m so sorry I had to find you--I’ve learned so much and I worried with you coming to the island I just...I dreamed of you, Geralt. I dreamed of you so often. So many ways so many things that could go wrong I just had to find you…” she trails off, breathless, conscious she’s not making a lot of sense. Conscious even more painfully that Geralt can’t quite hear her.
It’s been a long time since she’s seen him look this lost, this hurt, and it scares her. He’s in some kind of shock, and when he closes his eyes and swallows compulsively a new concern sparks in her chest and she’s immediately pressing her hands to him, searching for what must be causing his pain.
“Where were you injured, Geralt let me see I can help--” she says, trying to control the desperation in her voice. She is looking at his armored chest, seeing nothing, and yet trapped suddenly in the memories of Rivia. The last time she’d seen him, after all, he’d been laying in a pool of his own blood, white hair spread on the flagstones. She’d taken him and Yennefer, made sure they were safe before leaving,, but the image of him laying serene and bandaged in Yennefer’s lap is not so vivid as the dying had been.
Even after facing it, she can’t stop fearing his death. Especially after.
“Not, not injured,” he says roughly, shaking his head and clasping at her hands to stop her. She doesn’t believe him though. There’s too much pain in his eyes. Too many signs in the posture she still remembers so well. Geralt may think he’s good at hiding his state, but she’s always been able to read him. She knows something is wrong.
“Don’t lie to me Geralt, I can see you’re in pain! Don’t you think you’ve risked enough? I won’t watch you...” she stops, grinding her jaw angrily, blinking away equally angry tears. “I won’t watch you bleed out again,” she says at last, her voice far harsher, far more accusing than she’d intended. Geralt swallows again, but his gold eyes are locked on her, as though he’s afraid even to blink. A small, broken smile ends up cracking his stricken expression and he shakes his head again.
“I’m not lying...I--Ciri….”
Something is broken, she can tell, and it’s only when a look of discomfort again crosses his face and he breathes out a long, unsteady breath with one hand pressed to his chest that she realizes what. Fear shoots through her and she quickly pulls away from him, shaking her head.
“Your heart...Geralt--” she’s nearly breathless, her voice mournful. She’s staring at his hand pressing against his breastplate, staring at the injury she knows must still linger. She’s had this dream before. Dreamed that she’d only bought him a little time. Dreamed that fate would get weary of waiting and death would return in the quiet moments and silence him again.
“Ciri please, listen to me,” Geralt says, and she clenches her jaw, looking up at him again. His hand has moved from his heart to rest on her neck instead, his other hand coming up to cradle her face. For a split second she hates him, because here he is again attending to her and ignoring himself, as if that’s what she needs. As if she doesn’t need him to be alright more than anything right then.
“No, Geralt, let me look. Just, let’ me--”
His expression is sad, his brow furrowed, but he doesn’t stop her as she makes quick work of the buckles on his breastplate. He just watches her.
In a few moments she has his armor open, and her throat closes up. Her fingers are trembling as she brushes the place his heart resides, brushes his shirt aside to reveal the ugly pucker left behind by the weapon that killed him. There is no injury now that she can see, and so if there is something wounded inside there’s nothing she can do for him.
She surprises herself with a pitiful groan in the back of her throat and she blinks a hot tear down into her scar.
“Geralt, I’m so...I’m so sorry,” she sobs, flattening her hand against his chest and leaning into him, resting her forehead against his collarbone. His arms come up to hug her tight, and she feels him shake his head against her.
“No, Ciri, no,” he says, and his tone is so sad it only makes her feel worse. “You have nothing to be sorry for. It should never have taken me this long to find you.”
His heart is beating too hard, and too fast, and it’s scaring her how different it feels. Her brow twists and she tucks her head into his chest, laying her ear in the exact place it used to rest when she was very small and couldn’t sleep. She remembers with a pang the long silences between rich, steady beats and her fingers curl in his shirt.
The sound now is wrong, and she feels magic prickle around her as she wishes fervently she could reach inside him and smooth away the damage. Restore that steady strength. The way his heart is beating now, she can hear far too much mortality in the sound and she’s genuinely afraid she may yet hear him die.
Nothing about Geralt had ever been unsteady, and now everything is. His strong, carefully trained muscles tremble. His breathing is ragged, his touch fleeting like he expects her to dissolve and for him to wake up.
His heartbeat is unstable, fluttering, and she wonders that it can sustain him at all. She opens her eyes and keeps her head pressed desperately to his chest, settling her hand next to it and stroking gently, like his heart is a panicked animal she can calm.
He sags against the wall and rests his hand against her back, and she feels his tension bleed away with a bone-weary sigh. He lays like that, and just lets her listen.
She’s afraid. Afraid to move her head away, afraid not to. She has this desperate idea that if she’s listening his heart can’t stop, because he can’t do that to her. Not again.
“Geralt, what’s happened?” she asks pitifully, stroking her hand down his shirt again, desperate to soothe him. Desperate to steady that painful sound.
“I thought I lost you, Ciri. I thought I lost you for good.”
His voice is so broken she flinches and looks up, meeting his eyes. She doesn’t dare move her hand from his chest, but she sits up, reaching the other up and stroking his cheek.
“Oh Geralt, I’ve missed you so,” she says softly, drawing their foreheads together and tangling her fingers in his hair. “I’ve done this to you, haven’t I?” she asks, stroking her thumb against his heart. “I’ve wounded you so deeply…”
“Not you, Ciri. Never you.”
She closes her eyes again, and they are silent for a while.
His heart gradually slows under her touch, and his breathing deepens. His trembling has stopped, and his posture radiates weariness. Ciri opens her eyes again, but she doesn’t move from his sternum. She traces her fingers reverently across his chest once more, listening to the thud-thud of another weary beat, and she imagines dappled sunlight across their bodies.
“You can sleep,” she says softly. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t stop.”
She flattens her hand against his breast and feels him huff the weak, stillborn remains of a laugh.
“Alright. Just for a few minutes,’ he murmurs, his hand tightening on her shoulder where it rests.
“I won’t go anywhere,” she assures. “I promise you that, Geralt. I will be exactly here when you wake again.
He shuffles, shifts to lay down where she’d just been, and she settles in next to him, listening carefully as promised. He falls asleep almost immediately, and after a few minutes she can hear the strain ease. The fluttering turns stronger, the breathing deeper, and when she hears the first solid, steady thump she blinks tears into his shirt.
“There you are,” she whispers, stroking her thumb along the curve of his heart, feeling it beating steady and full once more. “There you are, dear wolf.”
She keeps her promise and stays with him until he wakes, listening to every single heartbeat. Treasuring every single heartbeat. He isn’t injured after all, she realizes, only grieving so strongly that it has damaged something physical inside. She’d always thought it fanciful, the stories where a maiden pined away and perished of a broken heart, but she remembers her own anguish when the Rats had been killed and thinks her heart may very well have struggled along for weeks the way Geralt’s had been only hours before.
His heart had broken over her, and she’s overwhelmed by that realization. She knew he loved her, loved her in a way nobody else ever had, but knowing it ran so deep had her mind full.
She resolved to steady that heart every chance she got. She’d never be the cause of its weakness again. After all, she needed it strong and safe as much as he did.