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“Geralt?”
He looked up to find Yennefer standing in the doorway coming out of their bedroom. It was clear she’d only just woken up, though the sun was already rapidly nearing its highest point and from the kitchen he could smell Marlene preparing a meal.
He’d have to vacate their dining table soon to make space then, which was probably for the best anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time Yen’d scold him for using the table ‘we eat at, Geralt, that’s disgusting’ to work on repairing his armor when he had a perfectly good workbench by Roach’s stable. Outside.
“Good morning, Yen,”
Something in his chest ached wonderfully as he watched her yawn and then make her way into the room, her thin robe and tousled hair just as beautiful on her as any courtly gown and fancy updo. If he was honest he preferred seeing her like this; gorgeous as ever, but more real. There was proof of her contentment in the way she allowed him to see her without the protective armor of her carefully selected attire- because that’s what it was. Her appearance, her ensembles; they were as much of a set of armor against the dangers of her world as his finely crafted gear was against the dangers of his.
Geralt hadn’t ever been… well, happier than he was here, with her, both of their defenses against the world down because there was no need to protect themselves against each other anymore.
He put his tools down when she stepped up behind him to look over his shoulder, a small, warm hand landing lightly on the side of his neck. He tilted his face to look up at her when she spoke.
“You’d do well to stay in bed longer, darling,”
“I did stay in bed much longer than I should, just not quite as long as you,”
Yennefer hummed, a barely noticeable uptick of the corner of her lips betraying her amusement. Her fingers ran from his neck up into his hair, her nails scratching over his scalp lightly and sending a shiver down his spine.
“I thought retirement would mean you’d be getting some rest, Geralt,”
With a content sigh he leaned into her touch, smiling up at her.
“I am getting rest,” he insisted quietly, “I’ve slept more since you’ve gotten here than in probably my entire life before then,”
He couldn’t remember ever just sitting down because there was little else to do for any purpose other than an almost utilitarian version of bonding with his brothers in arms, but with her he could sit for hours, just watching while she wrote her letters, or messed with her endless cosmetics, or puttered around in their garden.
“And yet you insist on always being ready to be dropped back in the middle of a war you should be no part of,” she said, her gaze flitting pointedly between him and the armor he’d been mending.
He shifted so he came to sit sideways on his chair and wrapped an arm around her middle, and then followed her lead in pointedly looking towards where his swords were hung up on display over a dark wood cabinet by one of the walls.
“If I felt like we were under threat I wouldn’t keep my weapons so inconveniently stored,” he muttered, laying his head against her ribs. Her free arm wound around him.
It had taken him quite a while to be comfortable, even around their house, without his blades well within reach.
“But you’ll never be able to let the feeling go entirely, will you?”
With a fondly exasperated roll of his eyes she luckily couldn’t see he pulled her closer.
“Some of the fieldhands mentioned some odd holes appearing on the grounds, and I just want to be safe while I go see what the issue is, and if it is one creature or another I don’t see why I’d bother hiring some other form of pest control when I can just take care of it,” he said, “I’m just taking care of our property, Yen, nothing more to it,”
And no, he probably wouldn’t ever be able to be entirely free of the effects of decades of fleeing and fighting and throwing himself mindlessly at whatever threat he faced. Still though, he felt safer than he ever had before, and he was sure she could see that better than anyone.
“Alright,” she said placatingly, continuing to run her nails over his skin, “I suppose if I must compromise with you on you still making any use of those skills of yours this is the best I’ll ever get, hm?”
“Damn right,” he spoke against the fabric of her robe as he pressed a kiss to her ribs, before sitting up straighter to trail a series of them over the curve of her chest. He knew that, should she ask it of him, he’d burn his armor and bury his swords in the dirt outside of their little villa and he’d never dream of the path again. He also knew she’d never ask.
For a moment they were silent, both lost in thought as he breathed in her scent, her perfume mixing with the dense, grassy smells that always swirled across the Sansretour Valley.
When she spoke again it was quiet, more sincere than he was used to, still.
“I do see that you’re more well rested,” she admitted, and when he tilted his head back to look up at her she placed a hand against his face, rubbing her thumb across his cheekbone, “the perpetual bags under your eyes are gone, you look healthier. The lack of a constant fear of our untimely demise is a good look on you,”
Geralt smiled. He’d always fucking hated his horrific smile that’d nearly sent Ciri running when she’d first seen it, but Yennefer just returned it with a soft smile of her own and leaned down to press a brief, chaste kiss against his lips.
“Aren’t you going to tell me I look good as well?” she asked as she straightened up again, and there was a teasing spark in her eyes he adored wholeheartedly.
“You look good,” he said dutifully, pulling his face into a careful mask of neutrality just because he knew it would get under her skin. Telling you you look good is such an understatement that it’s almost a lie, he thought, but you know that. You know without a doubt that you haunt my every waking dream. That when you tell me to look at a Toussaint sunset I without question and without fail turn to look at you instead, no matter how magnificent you claim it to be. You know that from the moment I met you there hasn’t been a day I didn’t mourn every second of that I couldn’t spend looking at you. You know it, but if I said it out loud as often as I thought it, you'd just tease me about being far too romantic to uphold any witcher’s reputation, or that I could give Dandelion a run for his money if only I found a way to put the words to a tune.
“You could stand to say it more, still. Surely you don’t mind my teasing so much that you’d deny me the pleasure?”
“Reading my mind again?” he asked, more out of habit than anything, because truly he’d been counting on it. Yennefer hummed.
“I still like what I hear,”
He smiled at the reminder of the previous conversation in which she’d said those words, and which of his thoughts she’d been speaking of then. They still hadn’t made use of the rope. There’d been a long list of fantasies to work through, after all.
“You only say that because my every thought is of you,” he said, freeing one of his arms from around her to take hold of her hand and lift it to his lips so he could brush a kiss to her palm.
“And because they’re flattering,” she corrected, “I’d be much less pleased if your every thought was of what a nasty hag I was,”
“Right, of course,”
“And I like it when you think of Ciri too,” she admitted, voice going oddly sincere again, “and when you think of work that needs to be done on the farm, or of picking up a book, or what we’ll have for dinner… anything inconsequential that proves you’re not constantly thinking of what our next big fight may be,”
And Geralt wasn’t sure what to say to that. Sure, he’d realized she was intent on having him hang up his swords, on having him sleep in and spend time learning to be lazy and at ease, on breaking away from the fighting and the fear. He hadn’t quite understood until now that it wasn’t just because she wanted him to keep himself alive, but also because the mentality he’d been stuck in all his life clearly affected both of them more than he’d known.
Rather than try to reply he used his hold on her to pull her down into his lap, and Yennefer dropped down with a nearly undignified yelp, wrapping her arms around his neck to regain her balance.
“Geralt,” her tone was warning, but she made no attempt to get out of his arms, instead shifting to accommodate him when he hid his face against the skin of her neck.
“The last time I felt at ease, convinced that nothing bad could happen to us anymore…”
“Was on the isle, between the orchards,”
“Yes,” he confessed, “I… allowed myself to believe that if we’d be safe anywhere surely it would be in the closest thing to an afterlife we’d likely ever get. It made us vulnerable, unprepared when the Red Riders found us. If I’d just held on to some of that paranoia you want me to lose maybe I could’ve prevented them from taking you,”
Her hold on him tightened, and all he could do was allow it and breathe her in.
“We’re alive, Geralt. Even without being prepared, from a more than desperate position, we made it through. We’ve managed more than once, and we’d do so again if it came to it. Maybe you can’t quite believe our peace will stick, but even if it doesn’t we’d manage,” she said quietly, and he could feel the movement of her forming the words where she rested her chin on top of his head.
“I know,” he replied, pressing a brief kiss to the hollow of her throat, “I’m just too used to losing you, I think,”
“Nearly losing me. You only ever nearly lost me,” she corrected gently, as though that thought alone wasn’t enough to make him want to cry.
He let out a shaky sigh, and carefully forced his thoughts away from the memories of all the times he truly had been convinced he’d never get to hold her again. Instead he tightened his arms around her, slipping a hand under her robe to feel the soft skin of her side and focusing on the warmth that spread through his chest at the feeling of her squirming away just slightly at the ticklish feeling.
He thought of her, and how her hair obscured his vision but there was nothing but her worth seeing anyway so it didn’t matter.
He thought of the smell of Marlene’s cooking in the kitchen and how it’d been the only thing keeping him from bending her over their dining table when she’d entered the room.
He thought of the last time Ciri had visited them, how full of love and life their home had been- and of how exuberantly Yen’d screamed when they’d made love the night after their daughter left again, no longer holding back for the girl’s sake. He thought of their house, and how he was planning to walk through their garden on the way back from examining the grapes so he could pick flowers for the vase she’d bought. Of how he hoped to find her sitting on the chaise longue under the olive tree when he got home, allowing the heady warmth of Toussaint to warm her skin as she read her shitty romance novels, even in the shade.
He thought of the feeling of her weight in his lap, and how maybe safety wasn’t about the lack of a threat so much as the sensation of having her in his arms, her heartbeat pounding in his ears.
Geralt felt her shift, tilting her face to press a kiss to the crown of his head, her hand landing on his arm, her nails tracing the edge of a scar on his bicep.
His smile felt almost perpetual, these days.
“Maybe there’s something to be said for staying in bed a bit longer,” he whispered into her shoulder, “I’m retired after all, no one could begrudge me a few extra hours laying down,”
“My remark about you being in bed was about you getting rest, dearest,”
But she didn’t complain when he clambered to his feet with her in his arms, and their staff was used enough to their antics that their food was still fresh and hot when they eventually reemerged from their bedroom.
Yennefer was less pleased about how the hours passed meant he didn’t get around to his check of the property until the falling of dusk, but when he got back under the cover of a star-speckled sky she was on her chaise longue, and though the evening had chilled the air just a little he found her skin to still be warm to his touch.
When her quiet gasps and moans started tumbling out to fill the valley, the thought of where he’d dropped his swords was the furthest thing from his mind.