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Yennefer tightened her grip on her wine-glass, taking a long sip to hide her expression as Obi-Wan and Ivar finished up their dance and began to collect their drooping children. Obi-Wan was smiling, tiny Grogu snoring over one arm loudly enough to be heard over Jaskier's playing, and Var'ahele's face mashed into his chest, lekku twitching to Jaskier's beat. Ivar wasn't smiling, but he looked… soft, as he gathered up Rabra and Livain, and wasn't that a thing to still be getting used to. Probably not as hard as it was for the Witchers who had known him even longer, though; Keldar kept looking at him like he was about to either poke him with a stick or make a new bestiary entry about him.
Lowering the glass, she sighed and swirled the dark liquid around. She was sulking. No, she was brooding, and she knew it. Blast Geralt. He was contagious. There was a nudge at her elbow, and she looked up to see Eskel staring at her with concern. She shook her head dismissively. He stared at her more insistently. She glared. He folded his arms.
"Ugh, fine," she said, knocking back the last of her drink. "Stubborn." He let out a barely audible huff of laughter, and she stood to lead the way to her rooms with a swish of her skirts. Once they were there, she poured herself another glass of wine. Eskel cleared his throat, and she shot him a look. "I'm getting to it," she said, taking a larger mouthful than the wine deserved and filling a mug with Eskel's White Gull. Before she could hand it over, the bottle of spirits hovered over her own glass for a long moment.
"It's like that, is it?" Eskel said wryly, plucking the bottle out of her hand and corking it. "You know you'd be miserable for days."
"A woman has a right to do something stupid now and again," Yennefer said in her most superior tones, but didn't try to get the bottle back. She could have won, of course, but scuffling over it would just let him tease her later.
Instead she drank more wine, leaning against her desk, and watched Eskel drink as well. Then he sat, and watched her. Calm, patient Eskel, giving her a chance to decide what she wanted to say and how to say it in her own time.
Damn the man.
She drank again, then refilled her glass and drank again. Eskel simply sat, sipping at his mug and letting the silence do its own talking. She turned and put the glass down, pressing her palms flat on the desk and digging her nails into the wood hard enough that she thought they'd snap.
"It's something about Obi-Wan, isn't it?" Eskel asked, apparently having decided she needed the nudge. "I saw you watching him and you smelled… odd."
"Odd," she muttered. She supposed that was one word for it.
"Hm," Eskel said, taking another sip. She bared her teeth at nothing in particular, wishing for a moment she had the license to just bite when the urge took her that little Rabra did.
"He's handsome," she finally said.
"If you like that sort," Eskel acknowledged.
She snorted. "He's clever. He's better with his words than the most experienced courtiers I've ever met. He's an incredible fighter, and while I can't judge him against the strength of his own people, measured against the mages of this world he's powerful. He's charming. He has Ivar wrapped around his finger, which is not a sentence I thought I'd ever say."
"You are not the only one," Eskel said fervently, and took another drink.
"He has changed nearly everything we know about science and medicine. Hells, what he's taught us is probably saving someone's baby or someone's mother right this moment," she hissed.
"That's all true too," Eskel agreed.
"And yet he still— I've been in his mind," she reminded him. "And it's— he's— he feels…."
"I know he's grie—" Eskel began.
"Unworthy," Yennefer finally hissed. "All that skill, all that knowledge, all that ability, and he still doesn't feel good enough. Still feels like he has to struggle for every bit of good he does and every bit of self-improvement he can scrounge."
"Hm," Eskel said again. Yen looked down at the claws her hands were making on the wood, felt the ghost of pain in her reconstructed spine that still haunted her on bad days. For a moment, muscle memory tried to drag her jaw back into a position it hadn't held in decades. She was glad in that moment that she kept her scrying mirror behind a drape; she wasn't sure she could see herself as anything but small and crooked and hideous just then.
The words were a fish-hook in her throat, but finally the barb worked loose and they were free, passing ragged and bloody between her teeth. "How. Dare. He?" she demanded, one hand leaving the desk to curl into a fist and crash back down, accomplishing nothing against the heavy wood but to leave her knuckles sore. She hunched a little, and hated herself for it. "He has everything I wanted. The charm, the grace, the looks, the power, but he still… he still…."
"He still feels like you do?" Eskel said quietly, putting his mug aside and standing. She nodded miserably. It got to her sometimes, made her cut harder than she meant to in their verbal sparring. Made her bite to draw blood, when they were meant to be playing. It was why Jaskier had formalized the rules of the game: you could say what you wanted, but the first to laugh gave a point to the one who launched the volley, and if you landed an unintended blow you lost one yourself. She had lost far more points than he had when they played, but he always forgave her. It was infuriating.
"All that power, all that knowledge, all that skill, and he still doesn't think he's good enough," she snarled, her throat tight. "What gives him— what gives him the fucking right—" that fish-hook in her chest had left bloody shreds, and they nearly choked her. Then Eskel's hands were on her shoulders, and he was gently turning her around. She took a shuddering breath and tipped her head forward to rest against his chest.
"To hold up a mirror?" Eskel offered. "To show you that you're not the only one who feels like an imposter?" One of his hands went from her shoulder to the middle of her back and rubbed gently. "Or perhaps you want to know what right he has to show you that you don't need to doubt yourself any more than he does."
She didn't actually have an answer for that, so she just brought one fist up and thumped half-heartedly at his chest. Eskel chuckled, but it was a little sad.
"I don't have to remind you of everything you've accomplished," he said. "You know your worth. You know those doubts are lying to you. I suppose it's not so strange that he'd have a liar too."
"I hate it," she admitted, her forehead still against his chest. "I can't even turn it into a slug."
"If anyone could find a way, it would be you," he reassures her, still rubbing her back. She lifted her head to look up at him, her jaw firming into its proper place, her back straightening.
"Maybe I will," she said. Eskel drew back to meet her eyes, and gave her a small smile.
"Give the bastard one for me, will you?" he said. Yennefer laughed. "And be ready to share your methods; I think a lot of people around here have that liar giving them grief."
Yennefer went still for a moment. She thought of Jaskier's 'Father says', of the way Lambert still tended to watch Milena like an unearned and unlooked-for miracle, even the look in Leocadie's eyes when Merten went on the Path without them.
"Oh," she said.
"I think there's more of us that have him than don't," Eskel continued with a shrug, oblivious to the revelation that was shaking her to the bones. More faces flicked through her mind; Dragonfly, Livi, Mouse, Vesemir, Geralt, ye gods Geralt. Her eyes sought Eskel's with sudden suspicion.
"You too?" she demanded. He hesitated, then let out a breath.
"Me too," he admitted, wincing a little.
"Well," Yennefer breathed. "Fuck." Her mind started working. "I need to write Nenneke."
"In the morning," Eskel told her. "She wouldn't get it until then anyway, and if you write her when you've been drinking, she'll know." He looked slightly haunted.
Yennefer snorted inelegantly. "Fine," she said, but her mind was working. Nenneke had healers for the mind as well as the body; if anyone would have advice on this matter then she would. A thought caught crosswise and she snickered.
"Hm?" Eskel asked. Taking the laughter as meaning she was no longer in need of comfort, he stepped away and picked up his mug of Gull again, handing over her glass of wine as well.
"If Nenneke and I can work something out, it's another improvement to Kaer Morhen we can attribute to Obi-Wan," she said with only a little malice.
"I don't know if it counts as something you can credit him with if you came up with it because you were irrationally angry at him," Eskel pointed out. Yennefer waved it away.
"Details," she said airily. "I never said he did it, only that I was going to credit him."
"Blame him," Eskel corrected.
"Same thing," she sniffed, and drained her wine. Eskel drank as well, but he was laughing.
"Spiteful," he accused fondly.
"Born that way," she acknowledged, and filled her glass again. She was going to regret this in the morning, but she couldn't find it in herself to care. "It'll be hard," she mused, a frown settling on her face. Was it really something to make a fuss about? If so many felt the same way, surely it was normal.
"Mm," Eskel said, sitting in his favorite chair and propping his feet on a hassock. "Probably," he agreed. "Might not be worth it."
She shot him a look. "I know what you're doing."
"What?" Eskel asked with his best innocent look. "I'm just being honest. I don't even know what the plan is, but anything we've lived with this long is probably too much trouble to fix."
She grumbled quietly to herself. The most irritating thing about Eskel's blatantly obvious manipulation was that it was working.
"If I promise I won't let my second thoughts stop me from reaching out to Nenneke will you cease your pathetic machinations?" Yennefer demanded, waving her wine glass reprovingly in his direction.
"Not pathetic if they're working," Eskel said contentedly.
"I'll give you 'working'," she grumbled, sitting down on her couch and using his leg as a foot-rest.
"You do that," he said, resting a warm hand on her ankle. She sighed, and drank more wine.