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“I hate this,” Geralt says.
Regis’s hand falls back to his side, the echo from the knock dying away.
“It has been noted. Repeatedly.”
He fidgets with the magnification lenses affixed to his belt, while Geralt stands stewing in perfect stillness, absently taking in details of the exterior of the house—the wood worn but sturdy—and the plants growing in neat rows just before it: midnight tinged hellebore, bright celandine, and—Geralt notes the cheek of it with a certain amount of ire—star-petalled ramsons, also known as bear’s garlic.
What feels like an eternity later, a soft shuffling noise issues from inside, and the front door swings open.
The blond woman’s—vampire’s—face shifts from irritated to delighted in seconds.
“Emiiiiiiel!”
Geralt flinches.
She falls into Regis’s embrace and he, too, stiffens then, clearly unready for such a reception.
Momentarily his body relaxes, his arms closing around her in reciprocation, but Geralt doesn’t miss the tension in Regis’s eyes as he flicks a gaze back over to him.
“Yasmine,” he says in some facsimile of warmth. “Wonderful to see you.”
She pulls back, eyes racing over him, her hand diving rather intimately into his hair.
“You’re looking fit! What have you—”
She tosses her gaze absently in Geralt’s direction, and it suddenly catches and sticks; it can’t be the first time she’s noticed him since she burst through the door—there’s no way she could have missed his glowering presence.
But if her surprise is feigned, the act is masterful.
“What,” she says, nose crinkling as though she’s discovered a bad smell, “is that?”
Geralt sucks in a hard, loud breath through his nose. Scores of monsters and more than a few men have heard that sound just before meeting the cutting edge of his blade.
But he remains still, save for a narrowing of his eyes.
“Yasmine.” Regis gestures to him. “This is my friend, Geralt of Rivia.”
Yasmine’s brows alight like a pair of little birds.
“‘Friend’?” She offers him a withering smirk, then turns a softer version of it back toward Regis. “Interesting company you’re keeping these days, Emiel.”
Regis’s brow furrows for a fraction of a second, and Geralt flinches again.
“The world has changed, my dear,” Regis intones softly, proving yet again he is unequaled when it comes to sounding wise and comforting while in fact saying absolute bollocks.
“Yeesss.” Yasmine looks Geralt up and down again as she replies, an undercurrent of distrust stretching the short word nearly into something meaning its opposite. “I suppose these are strange times.” She sighs. “Well, if it can’t be helped.”
Stepping backward, she holds the door open—somewhat surprisingly—for both of them.
“Come in, come in.”
If anyone in the vicinity would have a finger on the pulse of alp activity, it would be Yasmine.
Regis had said it casually enough on their ride from Carcano, and Geralt had had the presence of mind not to retort that he knew the name of at least one witcher in the area who could provide them with similar information, and would be far less likely to try to kill them on sight.
He’s regretting that caution now.
She’s positioned herself as a village witch, Regis explained earlier, much like Keira Metz had in Velen. And similar to the sorceress, the front room of the house Yasmine has ushered them into looks very much like a country spellcaster’s abode—if one doesn’t know to look for certain unusual possessions: rare texts in dead languages, inscrutable ingredients in decorative jars of tinted glass, bits of jewelry shaped into symbols he’s seen rendered in places where death lives.
Geralt sneers, half expecting to see a pale little human child acting as “assistant,” wearing a carefully placed scarf around their neck, but no such person makes themself known.
They continue on to a dining room that appears even more unassuming, bearing no traces of anything vampiric whatsoever. A large oak table stands at the center, dressed with quaint woven placemats and a plain looking vase containing freshly cut honeysuckle and lady’s glove.
Yasmine gestures to the table, and obligingly Regis sits. Geralt shifts his weight from one foot to the other and crosses his arms over his chest, remaining standing.
“Can I get you something to drink?” She asks brightly. “Tea?” Her grin widens, spreading like spilled oil. “Something stronger?”
Regis huffs an awkward laugh in the ensuing silence, on the point of answering, but Geralt inserts himself before he can finish.
“We just need information.”
Yasmine looks up, startled but amused, turning her words away from Geralt again.
“He’s quite blunt, isn’t he?” She looks positively mischievous now. “How does he fare with you, then, my dear? You always were a bit of a talker.”
There’s something about the way she says it, like she’s staking a claim, or carving off and offering up a bit of her knowledge of Regis’s personality for Geralt’s edification, even though she won’t look him in the eye again. Geralt grits his teeth, feels heat coursing up his neck.
Regis’s eyes are darting about, trailing different tiles on the floor; one hand is wrapped around the lip of the table, and he chortles awfully again, filling the space before Geralt can.
“And still am, unfortunately. He…” Regis looks up at him, and there’s a hint of both pleading and placation there; his voice is soft when he continues. “He handles my prolixity admirably, and in fact makes quite a good foil for me, slicing through my circumlocutions with a degree of efficiency I could never fathom.”
He’s obfuscating, trying to make some distance with his words between Geralt and Yasmine, and it almost works, until Yasmine speaks again.
“If you say so, Emiel.”
She says the name a third time, and Geralt can’t help himself: the response is snapped out of him, fast and hard.
“Regis,” he spits, glaring at her.
Yasmine stares back at him, affronted. “Pardon?”
“He goes by ‘Regis’ now,” Geralt repeats, gritting out each word with perfect clarity.
“Oh, does he?” Yasmine asks, her voice lilting high, dressing up umbrage as delight.
Geralt barrels on, taking two steps toward her, making his physical presence a part of his argument. It’s idiotic and fraught no matter how you look at it—it’d be the epitome of a shitty thing to do if she was a human, and because she’s not, the few inches he has on her are of no consequence at all. But the thought of backing down now leaves a sour taste in his mouth.
“Mmm-hmm,” he confirms, squaring up to her, an ugly smirk on his lips. “For over a century now, way he tells it.”
Yasmine scowls back at him, cold flashing in her eyes.
“Is that so?” She turns her gaze to the other vampire. “‘Regis’, is it?”
And with that, Regis is up and out of his seat, hand on Geralt’s chest, placing himself between the two adversaries.
“Ah, ahaha, yes. Although, I have such an abundance of names, it hardly matters does it? And I would dearly love that tea now, if you don’t mind.”
Composure washes back over Yasmine’s features, and she smiles at both men, quietly victorious, or so it seems to Geralt.
“In that case, I’ll be right back.”
The moment Yasmine has moved beyond the door to what must be the kitchen, Regis whirls on him.
“What on earth was that about?”
Geralt shrugs, hugging his arms tighter across his chest. “You were uncomfortable,” he says, matching his lover’s low volume.
“Yes, I was,” Regis agrees, incensed. “And I’m more so now.”
“Your name is your name—”
“—‘Emiel’ is my name, too, technically—you needn’t assert yourself on my behalf.” He pauses, his anger coming out in a little huffed sigh, like he’s hedging on his next words. “Not all of us have your unshakeable conviction of identity.” He shakes his head. “‘Regis’… ‘Emiel’... I know I told you that I—”
And Regis freezes, clearly struck by memory, the ghosts of his past pulling him up short for what must be the millionth time; Geralt understands, perhaps about as well as any human could, and doesn’t interrupt, letting the moment fade.
“But even so,” he continues after a beat, “I don’t know that I can ever only be one or the other. It’s not that simple.”
Geralt recoils; it’s his turn to be struck, apparently.
“Are you calling me simple?”
“No,” Regis volleys back, his tone gone harsh and defensive. “You’re being pedantic.” He composes himself for a moment, bringing his voice down again. “Even if what she had done was some slight, I never indicated I needed your help with it—you’re not the captain of the Five Chivalric Virtues come to save me.”
“Fine.” The word is punched out of Geralt with a blunt finality, just as Yasmine returns, looking impossibly domestic with a tea tray in hand.
“So, what was this ‘information’ you wanted, hm?”
Just because everything about the day has to be shitty beyond measure, Yasmine blithely informs them she doesn’t know a thing about any alps in the area.
She’s ‘never really understood’ those higher vampires who spend excessive amounts of time with their middling and lower cousins, and Geralt and Regis’s arrival was the first she’d heard of any killings in the area at all, particularly ones of a grisly, brutal nature.
But they are, of course, ‘welcome to return anytime’—or at least, Regis is, as he was the sole recipient of her little wink along with that invitation.
Both of them are silent and sullen on the walk back to the village, the violent yellow-orange of the sun’s rays glaring with a hideous precision directly into their eyes as they head west. Nested in a thatch of trees behind them, a warbler lets off a high trill, while the soft whicker of horses not yet stabled for the evening pulls them forward.
Duskier colors overtake the riot of hot light as the little settlement comes into view, and Geralt can feel the heat of his anger ebbing away, too.
He stops in his tracks suddenly, in a place that is neither farm nor forest, only to hear Regis come to a halt a mere step behind him.
“Regis—” he starts, the vampire’s name colliding with Regis’s own unsteady address: “Geralt, I—”
Both pause again, and Geralt places his hands on his hips and chuckles, while Regis, wearing a tired half-smile, gestures magnanimously. “After you. Please.”
Geralt sighs, eyes on the horizon. “Didn’t mean to be… difficult. Back there.”
When he looks back at Regis, the vampire is still, with one brow arched upward, as if he’s waiting for more.
Geralt purses his lips. “Sorry. About the name stuff. I might be… sensitive. To people calling you—” He grimaces, the words sticking in his teeth like taffy. “To people seeing you as you were. Not as you are.”
It takes the better part of a second to see the light come into Regis’s eyes, which isn’t long at all, but feels like an eon to Geralt, especially given how well they usually read one another.
“Ah,” Regis says softly, nodding. “Entirely understandable.”
Geralt rocks forward, shifting his weight as if about to resume their journey, but fails to take a step.
He’s not actually sure why he says it, but it’s past his lips and lands between them in the growing dark before he can stop it.
“And… not that it matters. But. It wasn’t.”
Regis looks puzzled. “Beg pardon?”
A small round stone lays in the dirt at Geralt’s feet; he catches it with the edge of his boot’s sole, kicking it into the field.
“It wasn’t… easy, back then. It wasn’t ‘simple’ for me. And I definitely wasn’t ‘unshakeable.’”
The full meaning of his earlier words seems to hit Regis with more force than even that last realization, and he gasps audibly.
“Gods,” he winces. “I’m so terribly sorry I said that. I didn’t think—” He pauses, sighing. “Well, there’s the sum total of it: I didn’t think. Forgive me?”
“No—I mean, yes, but—there’s nothing to forgive. I shouldn’t have…” Geralt shrugs. “It was a long time ago.”
Placing a steadying hand on the strap of his bag, Regis looks him up and down, frowning. “Do you… want to talk about it?”
It’s been years since he’s even thought about it, let alone the decades that have passed since he actually went through it all, so a lot of it has been culled from his recollection, leaving only certain curated bits and pieces, as though they were lines from one of Dandelion’s songs—as if they happened to someone else.
But, also like lines from a song, they are still, if he bothers to think of them, strangely vivid in his memory:
Nenneke yanking back his long, thick red hair, twisting it up in a high braid in the hopes that it wouldn’t get ratted up again; the sound of high voices, raised to sing the morning prayer, echoing off the domed ceiling of the temple; softer, slimmer, unscarred hands tending herbs in a garden that was never really his.
He can look his distant past in the eye should he need to.
But that doesn’t mean he wants to.
“Oh gods no.” He groans, and follows it up with a bark of laughter, slightly harsh in its sound, but also genuine in its ease. “No. Fuck, no.” He laughs again when he catches a little exhale of relief from Regis as well. “I’d rather spoon with a river’s worth of drowners.”
“Drowners?” Regis muses, seizing on the odd of that phrase. He grins darkly. “Hmm. Never figured you for a necrophage man—”
“Fuck you,” Geralt says, but he’s smiling around the words. “C’mon, I—”
He takes two strides, then stops, and this time Regis makes a sulky little sound at their progress being interrupted yet again.
“Yes…?”
“You don’t… actually want me to call you ‘Emiel,’ do you?”
Regis frowns.
“Oh, Geralt. No. Of course not. Hmm… How can I say it?”
The vampire bites his lip, marshalling his words, and for once, Geralt has no idea what’s about to leave his mouth.
“While I should not have even implied that the occasion of your naming was somehow lesser, I do think it’s fair to say mine is slightly different. Some of these people, these acquaintances of my youth… They don’t know the person I’ve become. They don’t know what I’ve had to do to become him.”
He paces slowly toward Geralt, eyes fixed on the road as he closes the distance between them.
“And I’m not sure they could possibly understand it if they did. I’m just not sure it’s worth… I’m not sure they get to have that part of me.”
Standing before him, with less than an inch separating them, Regis reaches in to thumb the leather collar of Geralt’s armor, first with one hand, then with both, pulling him close, whispering against his lips.
“Whereas you get every part of me.” He smiles. “Whether you like it or not.”
Geralt’s hands find Regis’s waist and squeeze. “Hey, I like every part. Planning to spend some quality time with… every part.”
He leans in for a kiss, when Regis pulls back slightly, making an apologetic face.
“The alps?”
Geralt shakes his head, giving up a tiny, weary laugh. “I’ve got a guy. But he’s probably drunk already. Witchers can be a bit shit, too,” he admits, slightly chagrined. “We can catch him in the morning.”
And this time, when he goes to kiss Regis, Regis kisses him back with all of himself.
“Regis,” Geralt says, quietly adoring. “My Regis.”
In the quiet darkness, the vampire beams at him.
“Yes. Yes. Exactly.”