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“Jaskier…? Jaskier, what’s the matter?” Geralt’s voice is muffled by their carpet, the soft, worn fibers blocking Jaskier’s cellphone speaker. He’d heard the soft thud that Jaskier’s phone had made when it’d hit the ground, followed by a long stretch of radio silence that absolutely could not be a harbinger of anything good—
“B-Blood.” Jaskier’s voice sounds foreign to his ears—it’s a tiny, wheezing thing, that is far more air than sound. He doubts that it’s loud enough for Geralt to hear wherever he’d fallen… “T-There’s so much… G-Geralt, I… I was only gone for f-fifteen minutes, not even—” His breath hitches in his throat as his brain struggles to make sense of the scene before him.
The couch where Ciri had been resting is soaked in blood.
The white fabric is saturated to the point where there is an actual puddle in the middle of one of the cushions, so dark that it’s almost black. Jaskier takes a hesitant step forward, bile rising in the back of his throat as he observes what appears to be a bloody handprint on the wall just behind the couch. There’s an open bottle of bleach on the coffee table, as well as a few towels spread out over the carpet immediately surrounding the sofa… While the towels are, thankfully, not white, they’re still light enough for him to be able to see the dark stains that saturate the fabric. His mind is racing, overwhelmed with thousands of different potential scenarios—none of which were good.
He’d left for fifteen minutes to run to the store to pick up Hadria’s prescription for her sinus infection, and had left the door unlocked because… well, it was twelve o’clock in the afternoon. Who committed a crime of this caliber in broad daylight, on the weekend, when nearly everyone and their cousin were home? When he’d come home, the door had been cracked—just a smidge—something red and sticky smeared on the doorknob. He hadn’t thought anything of it, at the time. The garage door had been open, after all—since Geralt stored all of their fresh fruits and veggies out in the garage, he’d assumed that one of the girls had gotten a bit overzealous with the raspberries.
But then, well… neither of the girls had acknowledged his return. Hadria, who’d been so miserable that Ciri had to all but drag her out of bed that morning, blankets at all, was nowhere to be found. The place where Ciri had been lying was soaked in blood, and… is that a bloody t-shirt on the ground? Jaskier bends, lifting the offending garment with his thumb and forefinger, and sure enough…
“Oh my god…” Had someone broken into the house while he was gone? Had they hurt the girls?
“Pick up the damned phone, Jaskier!” He startles, having forgotten that he’d dropped his phone in his horror-induced stupor. He reaches for it blindly, and after a moment, manages to close his fingers around his sleek plastic case—
“I… I don’t know where the girls are, Geralt.” He can’t quite keep the panic from bleeding into his tone, “T-There’s blood… blood everywhere. A-And the front door was open… Geralt, I wasn’t gone for more than fifteen minutes, I-I promise.” He babbles, tears blurring his vision as he blindly navigates the first floor of their house, searching.
“This isn’t your fault, baby—” But it is. It is, because he’d been the one who’d left the door unlocked. He’d been the one who’d left the girls alone, unsupervised. If he’d been there, then maybe…
“W-What if they’re dead?!” The word comes out with more force than he intends, filling the tense silence like a scream.
“They’re not dead.” Geralt denies, but Jaskier is quick to pick up on the fact that he doesn’t sound quite as confident as he usually does when talking Jaskier down from a panic. “I’m sure that there’s a perfectly logical explanation for all of this—”
“There is blood on the couch… the floor… the walls… Geralt, if someone isn’t dead or dying, then…” He shudders.
He knows that he should dial 911 before he stumbles across something that sends him into a proper fit of hysterics. His basic first-aid knowledge will do little to help a wound that’d caused this level of carnage, and if one of the girls truly had lost this much blood, then time is of the essence. Not to mention the fact that there’s no telling who or what had done this to them… and no guaranteeing that whatever it was wasn’t still somewhere inside the house. And yet… he looks at the bloody t-shirt in his hand and makes up his mind. He needs to find them, needs to see for himself what it is that they’re dealing with. And if they’re…
He hangs on, desperately, to the fact that Geralt seemed to think he was missing something. (Although he must admit that he’s sorely tempted to take a picture of the couch and send it to him, so that he can see that Jaskier isn’t just being a drama king—if he can look at that and still tell him that everything’s fine, then maybe, just maybe, Jaskier will be able to believe him). It doesn’t really make him feel better—his mind takes out ‘murder’ and replaces it with something equally horrific, like one of the girls accidentally maiming themselves while making lunch, or tripping and falling and cracking their head open on the coffee table—
It’s all very melodramatic—he knows that. But he’s scared; every time he swallows it feels like he’s trying to force his heart back down out of his throat, the organ pounding so hard he can hear each stuttering thump-thump resounding in his ears. He wishes that Geralt were here with him, at his side, the comforting scent of tobacco and motor oil enveloping him…
It doesn’t take him long to ascertain that the girls are not on the first floor. There are no more signs of blood, either.
He nearly jumps out of his skin when Geralt’s voice comes rumbling over the line once again.
“Jaskier… please, just call 911.” Geralt’s voice is strained, some of that earlier confidence melting away now that Jaskier’s search of the first floor has come up empty. “If anything were to happen to you…”
“Geralt…” Bad idea or not, he’s doing this. His cornflower blue eyes flit toward the stairs, “If I don’t answer you within two minutes, call 911.”
“Please don’t be stupid, Jaskier…” Although he tries to keep his concern from bleeding into his tone, it’s clear that he’s… worried. He doesn’t try to talk Jaskier out of his decision, though—likely because he recognizes that his efforts would largely be in vain. Once Jaskier has an idea in his head, there’s no talking him out of it, no matter how foolish it might be.
He slowly makes his way up the stairs, wincing each time that the floorboards creak underneath his weight. As he approaches the second floor, he realizes that the hall light is off… but there appears to be light pouring out from the bathroom door, which is cracked. He takes a deep, shaky breath—wincing when his sock-clad foot comes into contact with a soaking wet stretch of carpet. There are so few things he could’ve stepped on that, even in the darkness, it doesn’t take his brain long to process the almost black stain on the sole of his sock. He has to bite down on the inside of his mouth to keep from screaming.
Everything is fine, he reminds himself, even if the words are virtually meaningless in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Afraid to turn on the light, on the off-chance that there is still someone—or something—lurking in the house, he turns on his phone flashlight and takes a quick look around. The upstairs hallway appears to be in fairly decent shape, aside from that one, fresh stain at the top of the landing… and a couple of fingers worth of blood smeared on the wall, coming around the corner. He takes a couple of cautious steps forward, his finger lingering just above the button to turn the flashlight off, in case of emergency—
As he nears the bathroom, he realizes that he can hear… voices. He cannot even begin to try and ascertain who they belong to, seeing as most of the conversation is garbled underneath the sound of rushing water. Thanks to the light from the phone, he can see a bit of steam pouring out from the crack in the bathroom door. Was someone… showering?
He remembers the blood on the door… in the living room… in the hall… and wonders if someone was trying to wash the blood off of their body.
He pauses just outside of the door, listening. He can hear the cast of Glee’s rendition of Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl (he and Ciri have watched the show together so many times, it’s not even funny—and he knows for a fact that she has at least the Top 100 Hits from the show downloaded onto her phone) echoing inside the tiny, humid room. That’s… odd. It certainly doesn’t seem like the sort of thing a serial killer would be playing while washing the evidence of their misdeeds down the drain. He presses his hand to the wood, which is a little wet with condensation from all of the steam. His entire body is shaking as he attempts to mentally prepare himself for whatever it is that’s on the other side of that door.
The door swings open far too easily for his poor, frantic heart to handle.
The phone slips from his hand, hitting the tile with a resounding clack as the screen shatters on impact.
And he screams.
“You should really learn how to take your own advice…” Lambert grumbles, as he, Eskel, and Geralt file into the house. The front door was open when they arrived, the handle tacky with an unidentifiable pinkish-red residue.
“I still don’t think that anyone broke into the house.” Geralt says, but he sounds less and less sure as time goes by.
“Julian said he left the door unlocked, right? Is it really still “breaking in” if the door was effectively already open?” And that’s… Geralt supposes that he does have a point. It’s not really breaking in if nothing gets broken in the process, now is it? “Some lunatic could’ve just waltzed right in off of the street and done whatever the hell they wanted—”
Geralt looks like his younger brother is carving into his chest with a rusty butter knife, “Thank you for that… absolutely horrifying mental image that will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life. But it’s really not helping.”
Eskel inclines his head toward the staircase, “Didn’t you say that Julian went upstairs before..?”
Before he’d heard him scream, shortly before the call had disconnected? Yeah. His golden eyes flit toward the staircase—he can tell that the lights are off upstairs, because the darkness from the hall seems to be bleeding down onto the first floor. He doesn’t want to press forward, doesn’t want to find out that Jaskier, was very much right to be worried about the girls. They live in a nice town, where everyone knows everyone and this sort of thing… it just doesn’t happen. Lambert, who lived at the end of the block, had literally been outside mowing his lawn when Jaskier had left to pick up Hadria’s prescription. Certainly, he would’ve seen something suspicious if…
He doesn’t want to look around, to see the blood on the couch, the walls, the carpet… but his eyes seem to have a mind of their own, gravitating to the most gruesome areas and lingering there even as he feels bile begin to rise in the back of his throat. Ciri had been lounging right there on the couch, lazily combing her fingers through Hadria’s hair as they both struggled to stay awake through the end of Grease. It was Hadria’s favorite movie, and Ciri would always put it on when the younger girl wasn’t feeling well. The title screen is still up on the television, Grease Lightnin’ playing in the background. It feels… so very wrong, he cannot even begin to put it into words.
Eskel seems to read his mind, and takes it upon himself to turn the television off. Which is… better. Better, but not good, because now Geralt realizes just how silent it is in the house. Between Jaskier and their two teenage girls, the house should never be this quiet unless everyone is in bed, dead to the world… he flinches, realizing that that was very poor phrasing.
Lambert claps a hand onto his shoulder, and he’s infinitely grateful for the steady, comforting weight of it.
“Do you want to split up?” At least, until he says that. Then, his stomach twists itself up into tight little knots because no. Splitting up has to be the absolute worse idea in this situation. They’re still in danger together, of course, but infinitely less so than if they try to go searching for answers on their own—
“I… think that that might be for the best.” Geralt’s golden-brown eyes snap to Eskel, who is looking at his younger brother sheepishly. “I know what you’re thinking, but… the house really isn’t that big. We’ll cover more ground, faster—and be within spitting distance of each other should any of us need back-up.”
“Back-up?” Lambert snorts. “Speak for yourself. I’ll be fine on my own.” He motions to the bat that he’d brought along—a long, sleek piece of metal, wrapped up in barbed wire. It absolutely looks like it could do some major damage.
Eskel rolls his eyes to the heavens, “One of these days, you’re going to end up in jail—”
“You mean end up in jail again.” He says, far too much pride lacing his words. Geralt rolls his eyes, unbearably fond. Despite the horrible situation they find themselves in, Lambert is, and always will be, Lambert.
“And I’m not going to come and bail you out.” Eskel concludes, as if he hadn’t been interrupted.
Lambert rolls his eyes, “Please, you’ll be right there at the fight with me, biting some poor idiot into submission for looking at me the wrong way.” Eskel grumbles, but doesn’t actually try to deny it. Where Lambert is almost always all talk and no action, Eskel… Eskel can be downright terrifying, in the right circumstances. He’s definitely one that you want to have on your side in a fight.
Then again, Lambert regularly hisses at customers who come too close in the shop, so…
Gods, when he thinks about the fact that Lambert is his only employee, it’s kind of amazing he’s managed to stay open for twenty-three years.
Outnumbered, Geralt has little choice but to agree when his brothers decide that Lambert will be the one to investigate the second floor, Eskel the first floor, and Geralt the basement. He does make them promise to disengage if they find anything potentially dangerous, but he has a feeling that they’re only really half-listening to him (especially Lambert, who’s already halfway upstairs by the time he’s finished speaking).
Geralt has never been particularly bothered by his basement before. It definitely needs to be cleaned—over the years, it had become a repository for all of the clothes, toys, and accessories that the kids no longer needed; right now, it looked like something ripped straight out of a b-horror movie, with strollers and kiddie cars and dollhouses and the like all collecting a thin layer of dust and smattered with cobwebs—but he’s more at risk of tripping over an old pair of roller skates than he is of getting murdered. Still, he turns on his phone flashlight, taking care to make sure that he explores every nook and cranny where an intruder could be hiding.
He's just about to check the closet with the hot water heater when he hears a scream—it’s distant, likely coming from Lambert rather than Eskel. He drops what he’s doing and immediately takes off for the stairs, taking them two at a time until—he bursts through the door, nearly clocking Eskel in the face. They share a look, silently confirming that they’d both heard Lambert’s scream, before taking off in the direction of the staircase. Geralt finds that he’s suddenly horrifically clumsy, unable to keep from tripping over himself—and Eskel—as they struggle to get to their brother before tragedy strikes yet again.
Neither of them are prepared for what’s waiting for them on the second floor.
Lambert is face-down on the ground, with Hadria straddling his back. Her right hand, which is soaked in what Geralt believes is blood, is clutching at his clavicle bone and pulling up so that his back is curved in a very loose ‘c’ shape. His face is nearly as red as his hair as her knees press his elbows into the ground, effectively rendering him completely immobile.
Lambert looks like he was ready to tap out about thirty seconds ago. Eskel snorts.
“Do you yield?” Hadria rasps, sounding like she’d just run a marathon. In reality, Geralt assumes she’d launched a surprise attack on Lambert from the bathroom, thinking that he was an intruder. The barbed wire laced bat probably didn’t help matters, in that regard.
“Is everything okay out here?” And there’s Ciri, coming out of the bathroom with… is that hair dye in her hair?
“Were you two… dying each other’s hair?” Geralt can’t decide whether he’s angry or relieved… perhaps a weird combination of the two. “And ease up on your Uncle, ‘ria. He’s getting old—you have to remember to be gentle when you tackle him.”
Jaskier files out of the bathroom a second later, a look of awestruck horror on his face as he watches Hadria roll off of Lambert. “You’re… She’s… How the hell did she do that? You’re like… easily three times her size.”
“Hey.” Lambert pulls a face, looking genuinely insulted. “I am not three-hundred pounds, thank you.”
Geralt rolls his eyes—because of course that’s what he’d take umbrage with. “Lambs,” Lambert grumbles something underneath his breath that sounds vaguely like ‘don’t call me that,’ “gave Hadria self-defense lessons when she was little. After everything that happened with Yenn, I thought it might be a good way to give her back a sense of self and let her have a sense of control over her body.”
“I’m just glad that she remembered what I taught her. A little too well.” He narrows his eyes as he rubs at his aching clavicle, “Seriously, though, you didn’t have to go quite so hard—I wasn’t going to hurt you—”
“How was I supposed to know that? The old man said he left the door unlocked, and the next thing I know some weirdo is walking the halls with a baseball bat calling my name—” She stops, suddenly, her yelling transitioning into a coughing fit.
Lambert pulls her down into his arms and starts to gently, but firmly, tap her back. Jaskier is reminded of the fact that he’d picked up her medicine (and then promptly proceeded to drop it in the living room, upon seeing the disaster that was the couch). Eskel, thankfully, had picked it up while he was searching the first floor for additional evidence, and he moves over to join Hadria and Lambert now, fishing the little yellow bottle out of the wrinkled paper bag and portioning out the appropriate dosage of medicine. Geralt watches them carefully until, eventually, Hadria’s coughing fit subsides. Then, at long last, he turns back to Jaskier.
A moment passes where the two men simply stare at one another. Geralt takes in his boyfriend’s haggard appearance—there are tears streaking down his soft cheeks, and from the redness of his eyes he would say that it’s safe to assume he’s been crying for a while. His clothes are effectively ruined by what Geralt is slowly beginning to understand is not blood at all… but hair dye.
Very, very dark red hair dye.
Gods, he thinks that he needs to sit down.
Before he can even entertain the idea of moving this little… whatever it is… downstairs, Jaskier is in his arms, blubbering incoherently into his chest. He can feel just how stressed his boyfriend has been in the tension in his shoulders and the back of his neck, the words coming out around great gasping breaths that never seem to bring in quite enough air. He doesn’t realize that he’s begun crying, too. Not until the first few tears slip from his cheeks into Jaskier’s dark, chestnut hair, and the younger man begins to squirm against him, drawing back just far enough so that red-rimmed blue eyes can meet red-rimmed gold.
“I-I was so scared.” He says, and Geralt understands—because he was scared, too, fucking terrified that something had happened to his little girl. His little girl, who was apparently using Lambert’s lap as a makeshift pillow, much to his younger brother’s consternation.
It's then that Ciri steps forward again, a sheepish look on her face. “It’s, uh… It’s actually my fault that the house looked the way that it did. Hadria and I… we were working on our Halloween costumes, and the hair dye we bought was… well, it kind of exploded all over the couch. We tried to clean it up before it set, but…”
Geralt… isn’t even going to pretend to try and figure out why Hadria and Ciri thought that it would be a good idea to use red hair dye while sitting on a white couch. Although, honestly, it probably had something to do with Ciri trying to be considerate of the fact that Hadria looked like she would keel over any second—if she was already in the living room, why force her to move?
He shakes his head, biting the inside of his cheek to fight against his own tears that were threatening to fall. “As long as the two of you are safe, the couch cover and the cushions can always be replaced.”
He opens his arms, and she steps into his embrace, tucking herself in alongside her father. She might not be upset in the same way that they are, but she can sense their distress and appreciate the comfort that their closeness brings. “I-I’ve been saving up for a while now… I can pay to have the cushions cleaned… or… I guess they would really have to be replaced, huh?”
Geralt shakes his head, “Don’t worry about it.” Jaskier shoots him an odd look, because really, the girls should be taking responsibility for this mess. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t actually blood—it still very much looked like someone had been murdered in here. “I have a better idea.”
Geralt and Jaskier end up cleaning the couch and the door, and soaking up as much excess hair dye as possible to prevent it from being tracked further around the house. They don’t speak for much of the time, and Geralt doesn’t elaborate on what he meant by ‘having a better idea’—not until he shows up from work one evening with a can of primer, a can of that weird, pastel-green color that matched their living room, and a couple of brand new rollers. Turns out, the plan was to have the girls spend their designated date night indoors, repainting all of those spaces that’d been splattered and streaked with hair dye in the great explosion.
It's smart. It’s evil. And Jaskier has to admit, he’s both impressed and salty that he didn’t come up with it himself.
Only one thing could make it better, “And what are we going to do on this fine evening, while the girls repaint the living room?” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively.
Geralt snorts, “Take a nap.” Jaskier blinks, surprised but… not put off by the suggestion. It’s definitely not what he’d had in mind, but, you know what… He could definitely sleep for an hour or two—and besides, the girls are literally just painting, what could possibly go wrong?
…So long as he remembered to lock the front door, first.