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The best theory he or Eskel can come up with is that Geralt’s mother, if his hazy memories can be trusted, was some sort of druid, so maybe the second set of Trials woke something long dormant in his blood. It certainly wasn’t an intentional outcome of the double Trials, or at least Geralt can’t imagine it was - it’s not like it makes him a better witcher. But it might have been an accidental side effect, like the way his hair grows in white and straight instead of wavy and red.
Whatever the reason, at least it’s usually easy to conceal the little twigs that grow out of his head like his newly-white hair; they’re small, and soft, and a witcher’s hair is always full of sticks and leaves and mud anyhow, so they don’t really stand out.
Except in spring.
In spring, Geralt goes into flower.
The first time it happens, nearly nine months after the Trials, Geralt has quite genuinely nearly forgotten about the strange little twigs in his hair. Witcher training doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else, after all, and the twigs don’t really affect anything except for making combing his hair a little more complicated, which he gets around by just not combing it half the time anyhow. Everyone else has basically forgotten, too.
It’s Eskel who notices first, because Eskel is the one who most often gets fed up with Geralt ignoring his hair and makes Geralt sit down and let Eskel brush it out and braid it back neatly. (Geralt will never admit to anyone that maybe the reason he ‘forgets’ to comb his hair is that Eskel’s big fingers feel so damn nice running through it, gentle and careful and patient, and if Geralt started taking proper care of his hair, Eskel would stop braiding it.)
So Eskel has bullied Geralt into sitting on the floor next to his bed and is combing his hair, and Geralt is teasing Gweld about having managed to give himself a black eye by running smack into a doorpost while distracted, when Eskel says softly, “Here now, what’s this?”
“What’s what?” Gweld says, and comes over to peer at the side of Geralt’s head. Geralt wiggles uncomfortably.
“Geralt,” Gweld says after a long moment, “you’re blooming.”
Gascaden and Clovis come crowding over at once, and Geralt growls at little at being stared at so blatantly. “Fucking hell, you are blooming.”
“What kind of flower is that?” Gascaden asks.
“No idea,” Gweld says. “Esk’? You’re best at botany.”
“Too soon to tell, it’s not open yet,” Eskel says. “Oi, Gascaden, grab that mirror?”
There’s one mirror in the dorm, a scrap of polished metal they all use for shaving - well, pretending to shave, most of them, and they’re all a bit jealous of Gascaden’s actual stubble - and Gascaden brings it over and tilts it carefully until Geralt can see the twigs growing from his scalp.
And the little bud, as pale as his newly bone-white hair.
“Huh,” he says at last.
“Geralt’s got a flower,” Clovis says, grinning. “You’re gonna be so pretty, little flower crown like a girl at Imbaelk -”
Geralt growls again and tackles Clovis, and the whole matter gets forgotten in the resulting little brawl. Or at least, it’s forgotten until, several days later, Eskel is combing his hair again and says, softly so their sleeping dorm-mates won’t hear, “Geralt, there’s more buds.”
Geralt goes and gets the mirror, and sure enough, there are half a dozen buds now, starting to peek through his hair.
“Pluck them,” he says after a long moment.
“You sure?” Eskel asks.
Geralt sort of wants to know what flowers might grow, if he let them. But they’ll just be a distraction, something else to set him apart even from his brothers, as though the white hair and the extra strength and stamina which are the legacies of his double Trials aren’t enough.
“I’m sure,” he says, and Eskel nods. Geralt sits down at Eskel’s feet again, and Eskel very very carefully pinches each bud off the twig, setting them aside.
It hurts a little. Not much, in the grand scheme of things. Not much at all, compared to a broken bone or a deep laceration or a burn. Nothing compared to the Trials. But it’s a little, quiet, private pain, and Geralt grits his teeth and refuses to acknowledge the tears that gather in the corners of his eyes.
He picks the little heap of buds, when it’s done. They’re such little things, light as feathers, pale as his unnatural hair. Small, and fragile, and pretty, and useless.
He pours the little handful into the fireplace, and casts Igni without a word. The smoke smells sweet.
They burn to ash, and Geralt turns away.
*
Every spring after that, Eskel plucks the buds before they can bloom, before anyone else can notice. Every spring, he asks if Geralt is sure, and Geralt nods. It always hurts, a little private pain that Geralt can’t quite ignore. Eskel always watches, silent and solemn, as Geralt burns the buds to ash. The rest of their year-mates forget about the matter; Geralt assumes they all think it was a singular event, brought on by the stress of the Trials. But no, apparently he’s a perennial.
It’s one more thing to set him apart even from his fellow witchers, and he wishes - he wishes it just didn’t happen.
Or maybe he wishes he could let the flowers bloom.
But that’s really not an option.
And then they all make it through the Medallion Trial, and there’s one more winter of training and sparring and spending nights curled up together in front of the fireplace in a heap, taking comfort in each other’s warmth, and they are sent out onto the Path.
It’s three days after Geralt parts ways with Eskel and Gweld that he realizes he’s going to have to figure out how to deal with the flowers himself.
He doesn’t have a mirror, and he certainly doesn’t want to ask anyone for help, so he ends up finding a little woodland pool that’s clear and still enough to show his reflection. He spends a long morning kneeling beside the water, combing his fingers through his hair until he finds a bud and then tilting his head until he can see what he’s doing as he carefully pinches it away.
It hurts worse than when Eskel does it. Geralt grits his teeth and does not let the tears fall. It seems like there are more buds than ever, and he pinches each one off and sets it on the ground beside him, and when he is done, he casts Igni and watches them go up in sweet-smelling smoke.
There. It’s done.
*
It’s good to see his brothers again that winter - good to sleep in a pile before the fireplace, to wrestle and tease and laugh together, to know that they, too, have survived this first year out on the Path. They all have new scars, new stories, a new hardness in their eyes, but they are there, and Geralt claims a spot at the bottom of the puppy pile, Gweld on one side of him and Eskel on the other, and wishes he could stay here forever, could plant himself like a tree in this moment and let it never end.
It doesn’t work like that, of course, but he wishes it did.
He contents himself with chasing Gweld around the obstacle course, with letting Eskel comb his hair, with teasing Gascaden and Clovis and being teased in his turn. It’s enough - or, well, it has to be enough, because there isn’t any other option.
They part again too early in the spring for Geralt’s flowers to have started to come in, and he takes care of them himself, quietly, deep in the woods where there is no one else to see. It hurts more than it ever did when Eskel pinched the buds away, and Geralt wonders if Eskel even remembers that this happens, or if a year on the Path, two springs apart, has been enough to let his brother forget this hidden strangeness.
He wishes he could forget.
The years roll by, one blurring into the next, and Geralt gets used to the routine: the months out on the Path, reviled and yet needed by the humans who hire him, and then the winters in Kaer Morhen with his brothers, rolling about like puppies, teasing and teaching the trainees, laughing over jokes they can’t even remember starting anymore. Cuddling with Gweld and Eskel beside the fire, content and comfortable as he is nowhere else in the world. And then going out on the Path again in the first chill days of spring, as the snowmelt makes the river roar beside the Trail.
He never quite gets used to the pain of pinching his flowers away before they can bloom, but a witcher’s life is pain.
And then one year he comes back to Kaer Morhen to find it gutted, the gates shattered, the trainees’ bodies piled in the moat for the carrion crows, and oh, that winter is bitterly hard. He and his year-mates work alongside the others who have come home, mending walls and cleaning blood and soot from the stones, burning the bodies of their teachers and their forever-younger brothers, and no one mentions the tears that leave streaks on every cheek. The nightly piles in front of the fireplace have to be moved to the great hall, because it is not just Geralt and his year-mates huddling close for comfort, but all of the remaining Wolves, from grim old Vesemir, the only survivor of the sacking, to fiery young Lambert, barely three years out on the Path beneath his belt. They cling to each other, all the brothers of the Wolf School, because this is all they have left.
They go out onto the Path very late that spring - late enough that Geralt’s flowers have begun to bud. He goes to Eskel, and Eskel looks at him with big solemn eyes and pinches the buds away so gently it barely hurts at all.
“Let me keep one,” he says, when Geralt goes to sweep them into the fireplace, and Geralt presses one into his hand, and pretends not to watch when Eskel tucks it away, a tiny memento that will not last even until they reach the Path again, but proof, all the same, that they are both alive.
*
The year of the tournament, Geralt and his brothers don’t go out onto the Path. The whole keep buzzes with rumors and hope: maybe if they can ally with the Cats, there will be new younger brothers in these halls again, or younger cousins at least. Maybe they can work backwards from the Cats’ mutagens to recreate the Wolf strain, so that there might be Wolf boys again. Maybe King Radowit’s imprimatur will make the Path a little easier, at least in Kaedwen.
Eskel helps Geralt with his flowers again that year, and takes a bud to keep. Geralt hides another in Gweld’s belt-pouch, thinking maybe it will be a good-luck charm. He goes down to the tournament with his pale head held high, the pride of the Wolf School, ready to prove that this alliance will be good for both Schools, that they can work together as all witchers did, once, before the schisms.
He comes back to Kaer Morhen with his hands stained with Gweld’s blood, and he and Eskel sit on the hearth with their shoulders pressed together and a bitter chill where Gweld and Gascaden and Clovis ought to be, one that the fire’s heat will never be able to chase away. Their remaining brothers gather around them, nursing broken bones and roughly-bandaged wounds, and Geralt looks at the last handful of Wolves in all the world and feels sick to his stomach. He was useless. He couldn’t even save Gweld. What good is he? What have his extra mutations ever done, but bring him pain?
The next spring Geralt goes down the Trail early, and he’s not gentle when the buds begin to sprout and he plucks them away. The pain is only as much as he deserves.
But he goes back to Kaer Morhen in the autumn, because even now, even gutted and shattered as it is, the keep is home.
Because Eskel will be waiting there.
*
The year after Blaviken is cruelly hard, harder than any Geralt has had yet. The news spreads faster than he can travel, and no one wants to hire a witcher with such a reputation dogging his heels. Geralt grows gaunt and gaunter. His armor wears thin; his supply of potions dwindles to nothing, and he cannot afford to buy from the apothecaries in the towns he passes, even if they would sell to him.
He doesn’t dare go to Kaer Morhen - cannot bear to think of the disappointment and anger in his brothers’ eyes should he venture up to the old keep. There are so few of them left, and the Path is so hard already, and now he has made it harder yet. His folly might even have caused the death of one of his brothers - from hunger, from hatred, from a contract that went wrong and a town that would not help a Wolf - and he can’t bear to find out.
He passes the winter in a shed that might have been a forester’s, perhaps; it has three walls and most of a roof, and he can curl up in a heap of blankets and stay warm enough to survive, at least. It’s no worse than he deserves, after all.
When spring finally comes, he’s almost forgotten about his flowers. He doesn’t remember until he rakes his fingers through his hair, late in the spring, and encounters an odd bump. A bud.
The only bud, he discovers, when he finds a pool to use as a mirror. And the twigs themselves look grey and spindly, like they’re as weak and weary as he is, after so long without proper meals.
He thinks about pinching away the bud, and just the anticipation of the pain of it makes tears come to his eyes. It’s been such a terrible year - everything hurts so much - and there’s only the one, after all. Maybe - maybe he can let it flower? Who’s going to notice one flower, when he never takes his hood down anyhow unless he can help it, these days?
He lets it grow.
It blooms almost a week after he first notices it, a tiny pale flower with a spot of red at its heart, almost invisible in his bone-white hair. Its petals are soft against his fingers, and it is delicate and fragile and lovely as nothing else in Geralt’s life has been in far too long.
He keeps his hood up and stays away from humans as much as he can for the two weeks until the flower finally wilts and falls. It doesn’t hurt - he doesn’t even notice it has fallen until he takes his hood down that evening and sees the flash of white out of the corner of his eye. He picks it up carefully.
It doesn’t weigh anything; he can barely tell he is holding it, the brush of petals against his palm almost too light to feel.
It is lovely, even wilted. Far too lovely for a monster like him to have made. Far too lovely for his bloodstained hands to hold.
He ought to burn it, probably, but he cannot bear to do so.
He leaves it on a fencepost by the side of the road, where the wind can take it. Perhaps someone else will see it before it blows away, and find it beautiful.
*
Slowly, the Path gets easier again. Humans have short memories, and there’s a small famine in Temeria that leaves enough mass graves behind that the surviving nobles are glad to pay for a witcher to clear away the necrophages, and by the time Geralt is done with that, the most interesting rumors in the taverns and market squares are about a Kaedweni prince who did something scandalous - what, precisely, isn’t entirely clear - so if Geralt keeps his hood up and his hands away from the hilts of his swords, he can at least buy food and take contracts without being spat on or chased away with pitchforks. The second spring after Blaviken, he sprouts a double handful of buds, and cannot bring himself to let them grow - one flower was easy to conceal, but so many would not be. He pinches them off and burns them, and does not let himself react to the pain. It is only little, after all.
It is five years before he dares to go back up the Trail to Kaer Morhen at the end of the autumn, and he goes early, in case his brothers cast him out again and he needs to make his way back down before the snow closes the pass.
He’s not expecting Eskel to meet him in the courtyard and hug him so hard his ribs creak - is not expecting Eskel to have new scars, terrible gashes down his face that curve his lips into a snarl but do not change the fact that he is always, always the most wonderful sight in all the world. “You asshole,” Eskel whispers. “I thought you were dead.”
Geralt discovers he can’t quite make himself let go of Eskel’s doublet. He tucks his head into the crook of Eskel’s throat and clings, and Eskel holds on just as hard.
“I thought you were dead,” Eskel says again. “Fuck, Wolf, you can’t just vanish like that.”
“I didn’t think I’d be welcome,” Geralt admits. “Not after -”
“Fuck that,” Eskel says roughly. “Fuck that. I don’t care. You’re - I can’t lose you, too.”
“Alright,” Geralt says, feeling like someone has squeezed his heart a little too hard. “I’m sorry.”
The winter is awkward, but there are too few Wolves left for them to cast Geralt out without much more provocation than he’s given; Vesemir gives Geralt a good scolding, and Aubry dumps him in the snow a couple of times, and Lambert makes him taste-test all of the truly revolting moonshine he’s been brewing, and that’s an end to the matter.
And in the spring, Geralt and Eskel share the Path for a little while. There’s never much work close to the base of the Trail anyhow; it doesn’t really matter if they split up right at the base of the mountains or if they keep company for a week or three before they go their separate ways. Doesn’t matter to the Path, anyway; it certainly matters enough to them. They’re the nicest weeks on the Path Geralt has ever had.
They’re also long enough that Geralt’s flowers begin to bud a few days before they plan to part. Eskel makes a little startled sound when Geralt sits down in front of him where he’s sprawled on a mossy boulder, but then he starts to card his fingers through Geralt’s hair, as gentle and careful as patient as he’s always been. “I wish you’d let these bloom,” he says softly, touching one of the buds.
“I let one, once,” Geralt admits. “The year after Blaviken. There was only one anyway.”
“What flower are they?” Eskel asks.
“Cherry blossoms,” Geralt admits. Eskel breathes a laugh.
“Guess you’re just lucky you don’t grow cherries in the summer, then. Can you imagine the jokes Clovis would have made?”
“He would have been insufferable,” Geralt says, and for the first time in a long time he thinks of their long-dead brother with joy rather than sorrow. “So many jokes about taking my cherry.”
“So many,” Eskel agrees. “Are you sure you want me to remove them?”
Geralt swallows. “Can’t go around with a flower crown,” he says, a little regretfully. “And it hurts less when you do it.”
Eskel makes a soft sound almost like he’s been punched, but his fingers are very gentle as he pinches off each flower bud in turn. It barely stings at all.
He pauses before the last one. “...Keep one?” he murmurs, and Geralt considers it and finally nods.
“One,” he agrees. And the day before they part ways, the last bud blossoms. Eskel brushes his fingers over the petals, so gently Geralt can’t even feel it. “It suits you,” he says, smiling. “It’s pretty as you are, Wolf.”
Geralt can’t quite muster a proper growl.
*
They share the Path until Geralt’s flowers bud the next spring, too, and the next, and then Geralt realizes it has become a routine. It’s good - every extra day with Eskel beside him is good, and the gentleness of Eskel’s fingers in his hair is more precious than gold. Each year, Eskel pinches away all but one of the buds as they begin to grow, and Geralt lets the last one blossom - and Geralt has to admit, if only to himself, that he likes the way Eskel looks at him with the flower in his hair.
It’s almost ten years since Blaviken, late in the autumn, when Geralt breaks his leg on a nasty wyvern hunt - shatters the bone, badly enough that even witcher healing is going to take a while to put it back together. He manages to make it back to Kaer Morhen, mostly thanks to Roach, and Vesemir tuts over him and orders him to bed rest and pours Swallows down his throat, and Eskel sits beside the bed and frets until it becomes clear that Geralt will heal, slowly but surely.
He’s not back on his feet until nearly spring, and Vesemir shakes his head and forbids him from going out on the Path, with Eskel’s firm backing.
And Eskel chooses to stay in Kaer Morhen with him, forgoing the Path for a year. Vesemir laughs a little and allows as how he wouldn’t mind getting out on the Path a bit himself, at least for a little while, which makes Geralt feel a little better: at least this way there will still be almost as many Wolf witchers on the Path, and he’s not worried about Vesemir’s safety. A witcher doesn’t get to be old without being very, very good at not dying.
It’s very odd, being the only two witchers in Kaer Morhen, when all their brothers have gone out on the Path. The hallways echo, and the soft noises of mice or crows scuffling about in the rafters seem much louder. But Eskel is there, and that is all that Geralt needs to make anywhere a home.
They’ve just finished a race across the obstacle course - Geralt lost, but he’s getting faster every day, and someday soon he’ll win, he’s sure of it - and are sprawled out on the cool stone of the courtyard, panting, when Eskel rolls up on one elbow and reaches out to touch the side of Geralt’s head with one careful finger. “Your flowers are coming in.”
“Guess so,” Geralt says, reaching up to feel: there are at least three buds already.
Eskel says, hesitantly, “There’s no one else to see. You could - you could let them bloom, this year.”
Geralt blinks at him for a moment. “I could,” he says at last, rolling the thought around. Eskel won’t tease him, and Vesemir’s not due back until midsummer. And it might be interesting to see what it looks like, just this once. “Alright. I will.”
The buds do not blossom all at once; it takes three days before the last one opens, and Geralt stares at himself in the mirror in Lambert’s room - Lambert is the only one of them who cares enough about his beard to keep a mirror - and marvels at the crown of crimson-hearted flowers. Eskel stands in the doorway, staring unashamedly.
“How silly do I look?” Geralt asks at last, turning away from the mirror.
“Not silly,” Eskel says. “You look good, Wolf.” His smile is crooked, as it has been since he got his scars, but still as sweet as sunrise. “Flowers suit you.”
“Yeah?” Geralt asks, and reaches up to pick one; it falls into his hand like it was waiting to be plucked, painless and easy. He reaches out and tucks the flower into Eskel’s hair, above his ear, and lets his hand rest against Eskel’s scarred cheek. Eskel leans into it, just a little. “I think it suits you better.”
The flower is pale against Eskel’s dark hair, and it should look incongruous, even ridiculous, a delicate little flower on a witcher, but instead it looks - it looks like the truth of Eskel’s gentle soul showing through the battered, grim facade. It looks like Geralt’s claim, unspoken all these years, made manifest at last, fragile as blown glass, certain as the sun’s return. Perennial.
Geralt leans in, and Eskel mirrors him, as smoothly as they’ve ever moved together on the practice field or on the Path.
Their kiss is soft as cherry blossoms, and as sweet.