Chapter Text
It wasn’t a monster that did it. Not a contract or a curse. It was Christmas.
It was nothing at all, really: a simple chore that needed doing before he could attend to the rest of the long list of chores he had to do to keep his little farm running. In all honesty, the whole time he was doing it, he was thinking about his next task. Something had gone wrong with the wiring to the barn. Half the lights wouldn’t turn on, and most of Geralt’s mind was focused on trying to figure out what might be going on, and what he’d need to do to fix it. He wasn’t focused nearly enough on his current task.
That was probably what did it. It was his ignorance. It was his pride. It was all of the things that had gotten him in trouble in the past. But since this was just a normal, human task, he hadn’t thought danger was even a possibility.
It didn’t matter that this task—climbing high on a ladder to string up Christmas lights—was one of the more dangerous tasks normal, non-mutated people attempted. It didn’t matter that the rungs were slick, or that the weather was poor, and getting poorer. Snow fell around him as he attached clips to the eaves, and he worried about nothing but how he was going to finish this task, and start the next one.
He should’ve noticed how dark, and thick, and ominous the clouds on the horizon had been. But Ciri was coming this weekend, and he wanted the house to be lit up for her when she arrived. He should’ve calculated the risk a little bit better.
These illusions of safety didn’t collapse until he did.
It happened too quickly for even his Witcher reflexes. A string of lights fell out of his hand, he lunged for it at the same moment a strong gust of wind blew snow into his face, and before he could stop it, the ladder was falling away from the house.
Still he thought he could handle it. Geralt thought he would be able to land on his feet and roll out of it. Falling off of a ladder was embarrassing, of course, but he didn't expect it to be anything worse than that. He changed his position the best he could in his final moments before hitting the ground. He managed to get his feet underneath him, but he hadn’t accounted for the momentum of the ladder. It smacked painfully against his forehead.
He thought he still might be able to have a somewhat graceful landing, but he’d lost more of his bearings than he’d thought. He’d expected to land on his toes and then roll out of the way of the ladder.
Instead he fell back hard on his heels. It was all he could do to push the ladder off of him before he collapsed.
His head spun from the blow, and disorientation quickly overtook him as the snow swirled even more frantically around him.
The pain shot up his body like a shock of electricity, from where his boots had connected with the hard packed, icy dirt, to the top of his head. It kept him upright for one more horrifying half second, before he fell onto his back in the snow.
Hard.
Only then did a cry escape his lips, broken and filled with pure, unrestrained agony. The snowy air seemed to swallow it whole though, and a moment later it had been completely absorbed by the storm.
That was when he realized the severity of his situation. The danger he was in.
Pain still radiated up and down his body. His spine had become a lightning rod, conducting and amplifying the electric shocks of agony.
“He-augh.” Geralt tested his voice, needing to see if he could call for help, but trying to fully inflate his lungs for the first time since all the air had been knocked out of them ignited a fire in his ribs. Three of them were broken, he could feel, but he suspected others. And his back.
He growled through his teeth, the sound forced out of him involuntarily, born of frustration and fear. He couldn’t wiggle his toes. Fuck.
There was nobody here. This snow storm had not been in the forecast. Soon the sun would go down, and it would get even colder. And Geralt could not move. Bile crept up his throat and he swallowed it hard, afraid of what could happen if he let his body move with such violence. would one of his ribs puncture a lung? Would he choke on his own vomit? Would he sever his spinal cord?
Had that already happened?
Geralt couldn’t feel anything but pain. His skin stung from the cold, burning him, but that was nothing compared to the fire spreading from his ribs, and the sharp electric pains shooting out from his spine. He had been injured badly so many times. Never before had he felt pain like this.
Never before had he been so fully incapacitated, while still being conscious and able to watch the situation spin further and further out of control. All he could do was lay there, terrified, racking his brain for a scenario where he didn’t freeze to death out here in his own goddamned backyard.
Okay, he may not have the breath to yell, and that was probably fruitless anyway, but he could muster up the air it took to whistle for his horse, and hope to the gods that Roach could distinguish her keeper’s whistle from the screeching winds.
She appeared above him a minute later. Of course she did. Geralt felt bad for doubting her.
“Roach.” He tried to make the words clear, despite being forced through gritted teeth. “I need you to get help,” he told her, trying to wrap his head around the situation. This was actually happening. How was this happening? “Go get Andy. Okay?” He prayed she understood.
Whether or not she was following the order, Roach turned around and left as soon as he issued it. Andy was his only hope—the boy down the road who often came and cared for her while Geralt was away on contracts. He was one of the only people outside his family who had spent any amount of time with her. And he was certainly the only one close enough to be able to do anything.
Now he just had to wait and see if she could do it. He wouldn’t blame her if she couldn’t. Andy’s family’s farm wasn’t far down the road, but Roach had never been without a rider, and the snow made everything much harder to navigate. Even a horse as smart as she was could easily get turned around in a squall like this. He felt guilty to think of her getting lost out there in the snow, but if she didn’t try, he would surely freeze to death. He prayed to every god who might be listening, to guide her safely down the road.
Already he was beginning to get buried in the snow. He couldn’t decide if the burning pain of frostbite was worth the numbing it provided his broken body. He couldn’t do a lot of things. He couldn’t take more than shallow catch breaths, strangled by his pain and his collapsed ribs alike. He couldn’t tell if he was going in and out of consciousness, or if it was simply an effect of the swirling snow and the pain combining to lull him into some trauma induced hypnosis. At least it helped keep some of the panic at bay.
He couldn’t tell how much time had passed before he heard the miraculous, life saving sounds of his horse approaching. With a person at her side. Geralt was overjoyed that she had done it. He would never doubt her again. He would never make her do anything she didn’t want to for the rest of her life.
Or the rest of his.
Help had arrived, but would it be enough?
“Mr. Bellegarde!” Andy ran to his side. “I found Roach. I thought she’d gotten out.”
The fear in his voice increased tenfold as the boy took in the severity of the situation. Geralt wanted to appear as put together as possible, but there was little he could do. The pain was all encompassing, the paralysis only worsened by the cold, and he was holding onto consciousness by a thread.
“I need you to go inside and call an ambulance,” he instructed with all the surety he could muster.
“Here, let me help get you inside. You’ll freeze out here.”
“Don’t,” he growled when Andy reached for him. It came out harsher than he’d intended, and the boy recoiled. “I’ll be okay out here,” he lied. He had no idea how much longer he could last frozen in the snow, but moving him was out of the question. “I need you to go call the ambulance,” he repeated. “Tell them I’ve broken my back.”
Andy nodded frantically, eyes wide. Geralt hated that he was having to deal with this, it was a lot to put on someone so young, but unfortunately, like Roach, he was all Geralt had. “Okay.”
Then he got up and scrambled across the frozen lawn and in through the back door. Geralt expected him to make the call from inside the house, where it wasn’t well below freezing and snowing, but then he was back a minute later, falling to his knees at Geralt’s side, dialing as he did. Or at least Geralt thought he was dialing; he couldn’t move his head. He couldn’t move anything.
He was certain now that he was going in and out of consciousness. It became obvious when he tried to follow the phone conversation between Andy and the dispatcher. All he caught were snippets here and there. The rest of it was drowned out by pain, and cold, and his body’s clear desire to not be here anymore.
Geralt couldn’t die here, could he? No. He couldn’t be thinking like this. Help was on the way. It would take the ambulance at least a half hour to get here, but he could get through another half hour. He’d already lasted for who knew how long. He could make it another thirty minutes.
Before he’d even noticed the phone call had ended, Geralt found himself being covered in a blanket, the frozen strands of hair being pushed off of his face.
“Help is on the way,” Andy promised, voice shaking. “It’s gonna be okay.”
Geralt made himself focus. “You need to go to the end of the driveway,” he forced the words through teeth gritted by pain, and fear, and cold. “Make sure the ambulance knows where they’re going.”
“They’re not sending an ambulance,” Andy said, terrified. “They’re sending a helicopter.”
Maybe it was a coincidence, and that just happened to be the final moment he was able to keep himself together, but no doubt the news hadn’t helped. It sent him spinning, and then he was lost.
Half conscious, half breathing, half dead, waiting for the helicopter to arrive.