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When a Cat goes missing, they usually stay missing, for one reason or another. There’s already too few of them, fewer by the year, witchers of all schools declining as the mages get more and more power hungry, and the caravan has to go further and further out of its own way to avoid Nilfgaard’s expanding territory. They make it hard to find them on purpose, and sometimes that means Cats can’t make it home, if they been gone too long.
No one expects Kiyan to come back for how long he’s been missing, but fuck if they aren’t glad to see him. He’d been missing— what, three years? Four? Long enough that they’d sent a Cat to carve his name into the walls of Stygga, where they all go to their graves, finally returning to the screaming meat and broken magics that made them in the first place.
The scars tell more of the story than Kiyan ever will, shiny and red where they’re not dead and white. Burns up his cheek and ear, arms and shoulders covered in twisted, ropey webs of keloid scars, so much darker than his natural skin tone, and when Gaetan asks him what the fuck happened, Kiyan looks at him with his dark, dark eyes, and just says, “Mage.”
His eyes are different, too, that’s another thing. They had been dark before, a deep amber near all the way to brown, but he keeps his pupils wide open these days, like his light sensitivity has gone to shit, and they look more black than anything else, so big and dark as to be a shark’s eyes— not a Cat’s.
But he still fights as mad as ever, so when Gezras looks him in those big black eyes and narrows aer own in question, ae doesn’t pursue it any further than Kiyan’s mute, strained shake of his head. No, there’s no fixing it, or no he won’t, or no it’s not a problem— or no, Kiyan’s not even letting the Aen Saevherne near him to try and get a look.
Elven mages are just more mages after all.
Gaetan keeps as close as he can, all of them do, but Kiyan’s prone to fits and tantrums— even more than the usual, after what he’s been through— and it’s best to keep some distance, even among themselves.
Some of them get like that. Gaetan knows it himself, how the urge to scream comes out swinging and then all of a sudden he’s standing in the wreckage of another mess he made ‘cause he couldn’t keep his damn temper. And that’s not even counting the real berserker shit.
Everyone remembers what happened to Brehen.
Kiyan at least makes sure to lash out away from the others. Sometimes he doesn’t get far, and they can hear him screaming and crying, cutting a fiend to ribbons to get it all out. Sometimes he comes back with fresh wounds on top of old scars and they know it wasn’t just from the monsters outside him that gave him those, but he’ll be quiet and still again for long enough that Gaetan can stop the bleeding. He’ll take a salve and a bandage, sometimes a dose of Swallow if the damage is more than cosmetic, so long as he knows who cooked it up and that it went nowhere near the mages.
Sometimes there are words carved into his skin, but the scars blend together once they start to heal, so no one looks too closely until they’re no longer legible.
They all have to cope somehow.
Kiyan sticks around the caravan for a good long while, muttering to himself and twitching over his swords, kept in immaculate shape even when he’s beat himself to hell, throwing himself at the training dummies like he’s looking for a punishment.
After he’d dragged himself back, he’d been quiet, but a year or so on and he’s doing about as good as any of them expect him to be, frankly. Who wouldn’t be a little fucked up, huh?
He finally tells Gaetan about the prince who had hired him, before the mage kidnapped him. He doesn’t put it like that, he says, “Adrien wanted to keep me, too,” and then looks haunted by the idea, but not with the same dead-eyed anger and rage that churns beneath the surface every time fucking magic-users come up.
Gaetan blows out his breath. “You’da done it, huh? For a prince? Not a bad option, if you can get ‘em.”
Kiyan looks away. He had been a handsome motherfucker before that mage did him in. Before he did himself just as bad. His black cap of hair only covers half his skull now, the rest covered in swirling burn scars over his temple and down the back of his neck. His ear made it through intact though, which Gaetan always thought was funny.
“What happened to your prince?” Gaetan asks, looking away. He wouldn’t fuck royalty if he didn’t have to, doesn’t see the appeal of a human at all, and especially not one with that much power over their lives. Much better to be surrounded by their own. Only ever had themselves to look after, only ever each other at their backs.
“We’ll find him.” Kiyan’s voice gurgles low, intense and strained.
“Oh, you think I’m coming on your little rescue mission? Think again, brother,” Gaetan lies. He’ll come, and he’ll see this Prince Adrien for himself, and he’ll kill him if he needs to. Kiyan deserves that much.
“Not you.”
That’s— not Kiyan’s voice.
Gaetan turns, instincts on edge all of a sudden, and jolts away— Kiyan’s face is too close, too fierce, those deep black eyes staring with too much intensity, whatever unscarred skin left of his face ashen grey and pale as death.
“Oh, shit,” Gaetan says, and casts a fucking Yrden.
***
“Are you telling me he’s been possessed this whole fucking time and we didn’t notice?” Gaetan asks, nursing his face. The cut stings, eyelid to cheekbone, like he wasn’t using his face enough already.
Gezras shrugs, arms crossed over aer chest. “What the cat’s making is the cat’s business,” ae says, scarred lips twisting as ae looks at Kiyan, writhing helpless in the salt circle.
“That saying is for midwives and humans, and you know it— a problem with one of us is a problem for all of us,” Joël snaps, looking incredulously at aer. “Did you know? Did you know when he came back?”
Gezras shrugs again. “I’ve seen worse.”
Joël throws his arms up in disgust.
“At least he’s not trying to fuck a Wolf,” Gaetan says pointedly, rinsing the cloth out and reapplying it to his face. The cold water helps, but damn Kiyan fights dirty. Gaetan would be proud except he’s the one who got hit. And if it had actually been Kiyan who’s hit him— and not the thing inside him.
Aiden sputters. “Royalty is not better. Wait. How did you—”
Gaetan snorts. Everyone knows about his little Wolf bit he keeps running off to see— Axel has a hit on the scrappy fucker just waiting to go out at first notice of him fucking around.
Kiyan screams from the binding circle, neatly diverting the conversation from Aiden’s abysmal tastes. The mages are struggling to control the fucking thing, Kiyan looks fit to burst at the seams. He writhes, back arching, limbs contorting, a thin red light twining around his body. Shining through his scars like cracks in a broken urn.
“No, no,” he screams in his own voice, cracked and raw but recognizably his the way the other voice hadn’t been, “No, don’t let them— don’t let them take it—” He claws at his chest, arms twitching in unnatural angles, hands slapping blindly at his scars, light shining between his fingers.
“Fuck, what the fuck is that?” Gaetan shoulders past the mages to hover at the edge of the binding circle. Salt and silver and Yrden together to keep the thing inside, but it’s not slamming itself against the barrier seeking an opening like a wraith or a hym— it’s crawling along Kiyan’s body like it’s trying to get back inside. The circle is supposed to draw it out, any ghosts or demons, hyms or whatever shit, are dragged to the surface, and once there usually make a break for whatever greatest threat they see.
“Stop.”
This isn’t right.
Whatever this is, what they’re doing— Kiyan hated the mages too, not just whatever that thing inside him, he has plenty of reason himself to not trust them after that fucker did what he did, and Gaetan doesn’t much like mages himself anyway, but he knows, he knows that that had been Kiyan himself with his wary, fucked up eyes— not just this fucking thing.
“Stop,” Gaetan says again, drawing his sword on the closest unsuspecting magic-user. He grabs the mage by the collar, strangling him by surprise and wrenches him out of formation, breaking the spell. The barrier holds, but the Chaos is no longer drawing the spirit from inside Kiyan. His body slumps, exhausted in the center of the ring.
The caravan is silent, tense around him, waiting for a cue. They won’t pick a side, not even for a fellow Cat, until they know what’s up— or until Gezras has a say.
Gezras is watching him with piercing gold eyes, the finest and palest champagne gold that Gaetan had ever seen, almost the direct opposite to Kiyan’s murky amber brown.
Gaetan stares back, holding aer gaze.
This could get him killed. Him and Kiyan both, if ae decides it’s not worth pulling the spirit out of Kiyan against the needs of the caravan, the elven mages that keep their ranks up.
“Let him speak,” Gezras says, cutting through the silence. Ae blinks once at Gaetan, thoughtfully, and looks away to the circle, taking in Kiyan’s pathetic form, just now pushing himself up into hands and knees.
His eyes are even more fucked up than usual, dark as pitch and glassy, like he’s been chugging Black Blood for a week. His skin crackles along the scars, red sparks where he’d been cut up and stitched back together by that mad fucker, by himself, by the real monsters out there in the world.
“I need it,” Kiyan says, gasping, pleading, clutching at his own chest. “I need it, it’s mine, it’s mine.” He sags to the ground again, curls up on his side with his knees to his chest, hands like claws still digging into his heart where whatever foul spirit has apparently taken up residence. “It’s mine, it got me out— no good, no evil, only mine,” he sobs, crying into the ground, not even knowing where to fight or who to plead with for mercy.
Gezras watches for a long, cold, minute, calculating and unsettling as ae ever is, and then nods. “I wondered if it wasn’t that. Let him go. If he can control it, he can keep it. If not— well.” Ae shrugs again, and moves on, no longer concerning aerself with the problem.
The mages disperse reluctantly, one of them following Gezras, tentatively attempting to lecture aer on the nature of demonic possession, as if they don’t fucking deal with that shit more than the fucking mages would ever know. Gaetan lets his captured mage go with a threatening lunge at his face to make him squeak.
Kiyan is still laying in a heap when the caravan starts to move on for the day, and Gaetan finally drags himself over to kick him up. He prods Kiyan’s leg with the toe of his boot, and gets an unexpected bolt of fire lancing at him from Kiyan’s half-hearted swipe to knock him away.
“Don’t you fucking throw fire at me,” Gaetan snaps, and kicks him for real, right in the back of the knee. “Jack-ass.”
***
So. Kiyan’s haunted.
It still doesn’t change nearly as many things as it might otherwise have.