Archive of Our Own

The first place Lambert goes when he makes it down from Kaer Morhen, riddled with grief and anger and the desperate need to do something about it, is a little town in Aedirn in the foothills of the Mahakam. A town wedged between Asheberg and Vengerberg, a town he has not been to in ten years, a town that will not care about who he used to be.

A man more monster than human waits in the worn wooden walls of a home Lambert only faintly remembers.

He has dreamed of this for years.

It takes him weeks to get down there, longer than it should. He takes his first contract outside Ard Carraigh and doesn’t even remember what it is by the time the money is in his hands. It matters little, not when there was supposed to be someone else with him, not when he has a job to do. A real contract, not whatever the fuck monster he just killed. Finishing the job Vesemir had started all those fucking years ago.

Voltehre was supposed to do this with him. That had been the plan. There had been a lot of plans, pointless and naïve.

When he crosses into Aedirn, he asks and asks and asks for directions, wandering almost aimlessly over hills and flat plains. He remembers none of this, but the weeks after Vesemir took him are a decade-old blur. They are a blur again now. He has not seen the world in a long time, and he does not care to see it now. Not yet. Not until he’s done this, the only thing he can do for himself.

Witchers kill monsters, and that is what he will do.

The town has flourished while he has been at Kaer Morhen, but the streets are laid out the same. Muscle memory pulls him from one side of town to the other, ignoring the fearful looks people send him. Some of them he would have once known, children he played with and adults he cowered from. He doesn’t recognise them and they don’t recognise him. All they see is a witcher. All they do is hold their children behind them and forget the boy they watched be pulled kicking and screaming from his mama’s arms a decade ago.

His old home is still there, the porch as rickety as he remembers and the stairs creaking under his weight. Everything else around him is quiet. His father had made sure they lived far enough from anyone else that no one would hear what he did to them. That has not changed. It is an old and isolated thing, and it will rot away with time.

He can hear the heartbeat within, calm and oblivious. Singular. A confirmation. He’d known in those early weeks at Kaer Morhen what would happen once he was gone. What his father would do to his mama. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. That doesn’t mean he isn’t back in a cave in the Blue Mountains, listening to a cyclops wake, listening to it crush Voltehre to death.

Lambert has a plan. He can’t afford to be distracted, not now.

Picking locks is easy, especially one as old as this. He knows how to do it quietly, but he still keeps his ear trained on the heartbeat inside. His father has no idea what’s coming, what kind of creature his son has been made into.

The door creaks open—it was always so loud, he remembers—and he crosses the threshold on legs he wills not to shake. He pulls his sword from his back. Steel for men, though he’s tempted to take the silver anyway.

The heartbeat is faster now, panicked. Footsteps in his parents’ bedroom, determined to be quiet. Not the drunken stumbling he expects, but it’s still early in the morning. He still, in all the days and weeks it took him to get here, does not know if he will make it quick or slow. He knows he will make his father look upon his face and recognise him, and he knows nothing else.

Voltehre would know what to do, how to ground him. Voltehre is not here.

Sword in hand, ready, he strides into the bedroom. There, huddled in the corner, a fire poker in hand, is a woman. Young, dark hair that falls in waves to her shoulders, and a face so painfully familiar that it stops Lambert in his tracks. There is fear in her eyes, and when she sees the sword and the armour and the yellow where there was once blue, it turns to anger.

It’s an anger he knows. It’s an anger he’s felt from the moment Vesemir took him.

“What the fuck do you want, witcher?” his mama yells. Because it is his mama. He looks like her. The same nose, the same face shape, the same sneer pulling at their lips. “Come to take another, huh? Well, good fucking luck. You lot already took the only one I had. Get the fuck out. Get out!”

He’s shaking. He can’t move. His mama is still alive, after all this time, when he’d thought the first thing his father would do was kill her. He’d come down here to avenge her, to avenge himself, and here she is.

Lambert takes a step forward. His mama sees the sword. She doesn’t recognise him. How could she? It’s been ten years. He is something different now, something not entirely human. He is anger and grief and raw strength. He is fucking tired and his mama is right there.

She grips the fire poker tighter, pointing it at him, lodged in the corner of a room he had rarely been allowed to step foot in. “What do you want from me?” she cries. There are tears in her eyes, streaming down her face. He can’t stop staring. “I don’t have anything left.”

“Where is he?” The words don’t sound like his own.

His mama sobs, hands trembling. He puts the sword away. It does little to calm her. “Who?”

“My—Your husband. Where is he?”

Laughter, short and sharp and sardonic. “My husband?” his mama says. “My cunt of a husband has been dead for nine damn years.”

Dead. His father is already dead. He’s come all this way and his father is already fucking dead. He doesn’t get to have this. He doesn’t get to have Voltehre either. But his mama is here. She is still here, and he never thought she would be.

“How?” he growls.

She flinches from him. He doesn’t know how to make himself smaller, non-threatening, doesn’t know how to make himself be the boy that would hide under her chin when he had nightmares. He doesn’t know how to make her recognise him.

“I killed him,” she whispers. “Why? Come to finish the job? Witchers are taking contracts on people now, that’s what I heard. Come to kill me, witcher? Come on then!”

It feels like Speartip’s cave. It feels like a medallion in his hand and no one at his side. “No, Mama,” he croaks. “Never.”

Silence reigns. She looks at him then, really looks at him, and she must see the nose and the hair and jawline, must see the way his hands shake at his sides and how his chest heaves under the pressure of the room. She looks at him and she sees him and the noise that falls from her mouth is a wounded thing.

“Lambert?” she says, raspy and choked. The fire poker falls, clattering against the worn wooden floors. “My Little Lamb?”

His knees give out, and he slumps to the ground, staring at her. She’s still so young; he’s barely older than she was when she had him. “It’s me,” he whispers. “It’s me, Mama. I came back.”

She’s scrambling over to him in an instant, hands reaching for him. He doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing, when her hands come up to cup his cheeks. This is his mama; he didn’t think he would ever see her again. She holds his face like he’s a precious thing, even now, after everything that’s been done to him.

“You’re alive,” she says, thumbs running over his cheeks, brushing away tears that no longer fall. “Oh, my little boy. I thought—What have they done to you?”

His lips tremble. He can’t speak. All he wants is for her to tuck him under her chin and keep him safe. It’s a childish thought. He’s a fucking witcher. They’re not supposed to go back for their families, but he hadn’t, not really. He had come to kill a man who is already dead.

“They killed me, Mama,” he says. His voice is soft, like a child’s. He hates it.

“No, no, my Little Lamb. You’re here. You’re right here, with me,” she tells him, pulling him closer until his forehead rests on her shoulder, but she doesn’t know that he’s telling the truth.

They pumped him through of mutagens and killed him screaming. They poked into his mind and killed him writhing. They sent him into a cave with a cyclops and made him lose everything. He’s been dead a long time. He doesn’t know how to be anything else.

“How did he die?” he asks.

It takes her a moment to answer. Her hand is in his hair like it used to be, carding through the strands to soothe him; it doesn’t quite work. “I stabbed him in his sleep,” she says. “He gave you to them, pulled you out of my arms. What else was I going to do? Should have done it sooner.”

He doesn’t say yes, even though he wants to. “I came to kill him. For you.”

He wraps his arms around her. She’s so small now, frail in his hands, and he remembers when she was a giant, curling him up and carrying him around when he was still something to be cared for.

“Shh, it’s alright,” his mama says. He’s shaking still, and each breath spills out loud and rasping. “It’s just me and you now. Just me and you.”

And he knows then that while he may have her, he will never be able to stay. That’s not what a witcher gets, that’s not how they live. He will never be granted reprieve in any town, and his mama will be shunned for having a witcher for a son. But he can stay for a little while, for a few weeks, long enough to pretend that he is something else entirely.

Lambert slumps against her, lets her cradle him close and whisper soothing nonsense into his ear. He can have this, can’t he? After everything he’s been through, after everything he’s lost, can’t he have this?

Mama makes him visit her whenever he can, and he plans his year on the Path so that he be back in Aedirn as much as possible. Vesemir would be furious with him for it, going against all the rules and traditions of their School, but their School has been a dying thing since long before he was born. There will be no witchers after him, not when their mage died years before his final Trial.

He can do whatever the fuck he wants. And what he wants is to go back to a little town in the foothills of the Mahakam and spend days upon days in the safe confines of his mama’s house.

Soon, he will have to return to Kaer Morhen and shove his survival in all their fucking faces. Soon, he will have to face a keep without Voltehre, without any of the friends he had made in the long years spent training. He knows he could simply not go, but he wants them all to know he lived, that he’s better than they expected, that he only has two fading scars of his back and many healed bruises for his trouble.

But first, his mama.

He doesn’t pick the lock this time. He knocks awkwardly on the door, checking over his shoulder for anyone coming down the road. Their house was always set apart, that has not changed. It does not mean he is in the clear.

His mama’s shuffling footsteps echo from within the house, and there’s a tiny smile building on his face. It feels a foreign thing, and he doesn’t know how to get rid of it before she opens the door. He sees the same smile on her face a second later, blooming small and scared.

Neither of them say a word. He still doesn’t know what to say to her, even though he’d known he was coming back here for weeks. He had promised her, after all, and he doesn’t think he could ever break a promise like that. But he still does not know how to speak to her, despite the days he’d spent in her home in spring, asking her about the life she’d lived without him.

He hadn’t told her of training, of the Trials, of Voltehre. It weighs on him. It has for months.

“You look tired,” she says.

The world hates witchers, he doesn’t say, I will spend the rest of my life like this and die to the claws of something foul.

“Long year,” he mutters instead.

He flinches when his mama puts a hand on his shoulder to guide him inside, and he hates himself for it. “Lambert, it’s alright,” she says, soft, different to how she used to speak to him. Her voice has changed, he suddenly realises. He hadn’t noticed last time, but it’s deeper now, older. He still looks childish, hairless and slight despite the strength given to him—the aftereffects of the Grasses.

He swallows, mouth dry. “I know,” he says.

Things blur then. He finds himself in a ragged armchair before the low-burning hearth, a mug of something warm in his hands and his mama hovering around him. He doesn’t know how he got there. Everything feels both bigger and smaller than it is, and there’s an exhaustion sitting under his skin that’s been there since he left Kaer Morhen three seasons ago. It’s a bubbling thing, threatening to burst.

It has been for a long time. It’s why he came back here, now, so he could burst somewhere safe. His mama will always be safe.

She’s crouching in front of him, head cocked to the side like she’s trying to see into him, know him from the inside out. He doesn’t know how long she’s been there. He’s so fucking tired of everything, of Kaer Morhen and the months spent trudging through shit and gore for fuck all money and spit on his boots.

He knows he cannot stop. There is no stopping. A witcher will never be welcome anywhere except the Path.

“I’m tired, Mama,” he says. He feels like a child again, voice soft and body weak. He can’t muster the energy to be angry at himself for it this time. The mug in his hands shakes; he can’t make himself drink. “My best friend is dead.”

There isn’t really any other word he can use to describe Voltehre, the closeness and the camaraderie and the way they sought each other out in the dark. Two boys seeking comfort in a keep determined to kill them, young and confused and desperate. What other word can he use for that?

He doesn’t hear what she says, if she says anything, but she moves forward until she’s perching on the arm of the chair. There’s a hand in his hair, small and soft, gently pulling him down until his head rests on her shoulder.

She doesn’t ask him, but he finds the words spilling from him anyway. A decade-long story he could not bear to tell her when he was last here. It bursts from him, training and Trials and Voltehre. Watching boys die and witchers never return for the winter and his body change in ways he never wanted. The Grasses and the Dreams and the Medallion—a lake and a cyclops and a path full of trolls.

She holds him through it all, rocking him back and forth like she would when the world became too much. He knows she’s whispering too him, but the words are muffled, underwater. Lambert doesn’t cry—the Dreams took that from him. He simply stares at the floor, at the dirt on his boots, and he doesn’t listen to the words spilling from his lips.

It feels like years have passed by the time he stops talking, his throat burning. He has not spoken this much ever, and he doesn’t want to do it again. His mama is still holding him, hand carding through his hair.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry, my Little Lamb.”

He feels like a child, small and safe. “I miss him,” he says. He hasn’t dared to admit it out loud before, but he can here. Only here. “You would have liked him.”

“I’m sure I would have,” his mama replies. Her voice doesn’t sound so muffled anymore, the world coming back to him piece by piece. “He kept you safe.”

They’d kept each other safe until they could no longer, and now Lambert is alone. Except for when he’s here, in his mama’s arms, for the brief days that he can be.

He doesn’t need to be a witcher here, he realises. It doesn’t matter that he has the eyes and the strength and the longer lifespan. None of it matters. Here, in this nothing town, he can just be Lambert, sitting with his mama in their home and ignoring the rest of the world. He can drink tea and curl up in the chair, and she can run her fingers through his hair and tell him that everything will be alright.

And it won’t matter that it’s a lie.

Every year he visits her, and every year she tells him not to go back to Kaer Morhen, not to be a witcher anymore. Lambert wants to listen, wants to believe it could be that simple, but they both know it can’t. That is not how the world works. People would rather kill a witcher than let one live among them.

He takes his chances multiple times a year, sneaking in and out of his mama’s house. He keeps quiet about it, and he makes sure she does too. No one can know, not anyone in town, not anyone in Kaer Morhen. The witchers have rules; they’re expected to leave their families behind, if they even still have one. But he knows it can’t just be him, and he knows he can’t ever talk about it.

That was part of the sacrifice of being a witcher, the trainers had told him, forget the life you used to have—forget the life you could have had.

Fuck that.

Still, it’s dangerous for both of them, so he keeps her secret from the others, and he spends his winters in Kaer Morhen lording his survival over people who don’t give a fuck about him and drinking as much White Gull as he can get his hands on. And when spring comes, when the pass opens, he high tails it from the keep and down to Aedirn.

His mama is kind and quiet and sad when she thinks he isn’t looking at her. The first thing she does when he gets there is make him tea. She tells him about her life, simple as it is, working at the seamstress’s down the road and having lunch with women who once pretended they didn’t know what was going on between her walls. It is more than she had when he was a child.

In return, Lambert tells her of the Path and Kaer Morhen and the other witchers. He doesn’t talk about Voltehre again, he can’t. Instead, he tells her about the monsters and the scars and the hatred he receives from people who will never know him, who will only ever see him as the thing he has been turned into.

“Just stay here,” Ma says every time, and he doesn’t know how to convince her that he can’t. She’ll listen when he tells her not to tell anyone about him, not to talk to any other witchers that might pass through, but she won’t when he tells her this. “You’ll be safer here.”

He won’t, and neither will she, so he makes himself leave after a week. Every time, a week or two and then he’s gone. It’s better that way. She looks so sad when he leaves, so scared that he won’t come back. And maybe he won’t. Maybe the Path will get the better of him earlier than he expects. But he can’t stay. He won’t put her in that kind of danger.

It doesn’t matter that she still looks like she’s mourning him even when he’s right fucking there.

He goes back to her year after year after year. He can’t imagine not doing it, not seeing the smile on her face when she opens the door for him, not feeling like the weight of the world has been lifted from his shoulders the second he walks inside, not listening to her talk about the simple life she never would have had if his father hadn’t given him over to Vesemir.

That’s the truth of it. They both would have been long dead if Vesemir had been given anything else. Maybe his mama isn’t ready to acknowledge that yet. Fine, he can acknowledge it for her.

“Don’t go, my Little Lamb,” she says when he gets ready to leave, and it takes everything in him not to listen.

“I’ll see you next time, Mama,” he tells her, standing in the doorway and pretending he isn’t hesitating. “Stab that prick at work with your needle next time, won’t you?”

She laughs at him, and the sound follows him all the way out of town, keeps him company on the lonely road he has to follow.

When he is twenty-five, when his mama is forty-two, he brings down White Gull and vodka, and he watches her collapse into her armchair, giggling at some silly little story of the people he meets on the Path. He’s never seen her like this, so relaxed and free, in all the years he’s been visiting her.

She works and she works and there are scars on her shoulders that she tries to hide from him even though he’d witnessed what created them, all those years ago. There are memories of a man she killed, that the whole town knows she killed. They linger in the walls. Lambert never asks her why she hasn’t left yet. He thinks it’s for the same reason he doesn’t stay.

But they’re both drunk. He’s lying spread eagle on the floor, staring at the cobwebs on the rafters she will no doubt ask him to clean tomorrow. He doesn’t have to move now, doesn’t have to put on a performance for his brothers, doesn’t have to pretend like he’s fine.

He’s not fine. He hasn’t been fucking fine since… since ever.

Still, he laughs with her. It’s easy. He’s warm from the drink and the fire. There’s a flush on his mama’s cheeks and a looseness to her limbs; he has never seen her like this.

“I never travelled,” she whispers. Her words are slurred, sad, taking all the warmth with them. “I wanted to, when I was a little girl. I wanted to go to Vengerberg. And then I had you.”

“You can still go, Ma,” he says, blinking sluggishly at her. “I can take you.”

And he would, if that’s what she wanted. He would take her anywhere she wanted to go.

She smiles at him. There are crow’s feet on the corners of her eyes. “I’m happy here, Lambert,” she says. It feels like a lie and the truth wrapped into something he doesn’t understand. “I have a good job. I have friends. I have… I have my fucking son.”

“You killed that damn whoreson.”

“I killed that damn whoreson!” She laughs again, but there are tears laced in it now, and he’s too drunk to make himself get up to comfort her. “Gods, he was a fucking cunt, Lambert.”

It shocks him, like falling into ice cold water, and laughter bursts from him without his control. He loves her more than anything. He hates that he has to leave her. But she is still so young and if he is lucky, he will see out the entirety of her life, as a child should.

He takes another swig of his Gull. “He was,” he says, then takes a breath. “If you ever want to go, I will take you. I will keep you safe.”

“I know you will,” his mama says, and he can’t look away from the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes now that he’s noticed them. “But I need to be here, so that you’re safe. Do you understand?”

He doesn’t, but he nods anyway. Her cheeks are flushed with drink and something he pretends isn’t pride. What is there to be proud of, when he is this shunned and angry thing? He doesn’t let her see how angry he truly is; the rage doesn’t simmer to the surface here, stamped down and hidden by the fact that she is still fucking alive. It bursts out of him on the Path, killing whatever monster he has been hired to kill and getting paid nothing for it, on and on and on.

He sees the world, and it is beautiful. It hates him. But not here.

Here, he is drunk on his mama’s floor, watching her drink and live and laugh. Here, he is safe and warm. Here, he doesn’t have to think about being a witcher, at least for a little while.

“Your witcher strength has to be useful for something,” Ma says mere minutes after he walks through the door.

“It’s useful for a lot of things, Ma,” Lambert replies, still halfway through untying his boots. “I could write you a whole damn list.”

“You could! I might actually be able to read it now,” she says, beaming with pride.

Lambert freezes. “You can’t read?”

Surely, he should have known that by now, but he can’t think of a reason it would have come up. But it makes sense when he properly thinks about it. As a child, Lambert did not go to school, did not learn how numbers or letters worked. He learned all of that at Kaer Morhen, years behind the other trainees, but he picked it up quickly—sometimes, when it interested him.

There was no one to teach his mama.

“I can, a little. The new girl at work has been teaching me,” she tells him. She looks proud of herself. She looks young. “She’s very sweet.”

“I can help,” Lambert says, though he knows for a fact that he’s a shit teacher.

Ma shakes her head, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Not with this, Lambert,” she says, and Lambert doesn’t understand why. “But I do need your help with… with your old room.”

It’s a space he hasn’t really thought about, even though he’s been visiting her for years now. A closed room she told him was full of junk from her early years as a seamstress and useless pieces of furniture she didn’t know what else to do with. He remembers sleeping in there with her on the nights his father didn’t come home. He remembers, in distant flashes, playing with old wooden toys across from her and laughing.

Now, he sleeps mostly in her sitting room, bedroll on the chaise and the soft sounds of her snoring lulling him. Or he meditates in the armchair. Or he spends the night cleaning and fixing whatever she needs. He hasn’t needed his own space here, but now that he thinks about it, the idea will not leave.

“What do you need from me?” he asks.

She wants to clean it out for him, make him a place to sleep that isn’t his bedroll on her old chaise. A place he can store his things that isn’t up in the mountains, and he might not have to throw away shit he wants because he can’t lug it up there. He could leave it here, with his mama.

It is a damn mess though, dusty and dark, filled with broken furniture and something that might be his old bed. “Well, shit, Ma. You could make a decent bonfire out of most of this,” he says.

“Shut it,” she replies. “Do you want it?”

“What, the room?” he asks, and falters when Ma nods. “I… Yeah, I think so.”

It feels permanent, and he doesn’t know how to feel about that. Why would it not be permanent? She’s his mother, and while he cannot always be here, he will always be able to be here. It’s simply… strange, to know with absolutely certainty that she wants him here as much as he wants to be here.

“Where do we start?”

With the furniture. The broken pieces of wood sit by the unlit fire to become kindling later, and the holey blankets end up in a pile in the porch for Ma to take to work and make into something new (or be thrown out entirely, most likely). It takes them a couple of hours just to empty it, Ma sneezing with every cloud of dust they kick up.

What remains is simple: a tiny bed that hasn’t fit him in decades, a chest of drawers so old he fears they’ll collapse the second he puts any weight on them, and a surprisingly sturdy bookshelf. And dust, so much damn dust.

“Well,” Ma says, hands on her hips. “I’m sure someone around town has need for a bed. Pregnancy’s going around again.”

Lambert splutters a laugh. “Like a disease?” he says.

“Fucking feels like it. Got two girls off at work at the moment and the rest of us are making poncy baby clothes.” Ma’s eyes widen. “Ah, that’s what I forgot!”

She’s gone before he can say a word, darting into her room. “What—Ma?” Lambert calls, listening to her rummage and bang around in bemusement.

She returns with a burlap sack only half full and drops it on the chest of drawers—it creaks ominously under the weight. “For you,” she says. “They’re not anything special, stuff the boss didn’t deem good enough or made from offcuts, but…”

Whatever she’s going to say, it never comes. Instead, she gestures to the sack and steps back to make room for him. He shouldn’t be so hesitant, not when it’s his ma, but it’s practically habit by this point. He’s not had as many years on the Path as the other witchers that still return to Kaer Morhen, but enough to be constantly wary of anything handed to him, even from her.

“Clothes?” he says when he looks in the sack.

“What else do I make, Lambert?” Ma replies, dry. “They’re for you to keep here, so you’re not constantly stinking of monster bits. You can keep whatever you want in here, if you’d like.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to any of that. He pulls out tunics and trousers and thick woollen socks, a long-sleeved tunic for the cold autumn nights and leather gloves he could wear on the Path, the colours drab and grey but he’s never cared much for bright things.

“Ma…” he says, his voice thick and his throat sore.

“Do you like them?” she asks. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was nervous.

For a moment, he doesn’t know how to answer, not until the thudding of her heart grows too loud to ignore. “Yes,” he whispers, fingers curling around the soft leather of the gloves. He imagines putting them in one of the drawers, atop the trousers and tunics, and leaving them here. If he’s sneaky, he could even drag one of the nice blankets in his room at Kaer Morhen down here, keep him warm on whatever bed Ma gets him.

“Good,” she replies. “Now, do you think you can build a bed?”

“What? Ma, what the fuck do you think I’m doing out there?” he asks, whirling towards her. “All I do at Kaer Morhen is fix the damn walls.”

“So you could build me a house?”

He stops, stares at her a moment. “Do you want a new house?” he asks.

A smile blooms over her face, and she pats his shoulder. “No, Little Lamb,” she answers, then heads back out to the sitting room. “Stay here, I’m going to go see how much the carpenter down the road wants to scam out of me.”

She only argues a little when he throws his coin purse to her, but it’s the only way she’s going to get something decent for him. And then the front door is closing with a soft thud, and Lambert is left alone in a room that was once his and now is again.

He stares at the bed, at this place he slept for years. Once, he had fit in it. So small. Just a kid, and his whoreson of a father sent of him to die in the mountains. Sometimes, rarely now, he wishes he had been able to kill him, but he is still so fucking proud of his mama for doing it.

And, quietly, angry that it had taken him being torn from her to do it.

Doesn’t matter. It’s over and done with now—years ago. The bed will go too, and he won’t have to think about how young he was, how small. This is his new room, and he can do what he wants with it.

The bag of clothes stay where they are on the chest of drawers and will do until they get something new, but the shelves are in decent condition. Lambert, almost hesitantly, brings his saddlebags and rucksack into the room, and rifles through the latter until he pulls out a journal. Full, as of last week, and he was planning to swap it out for a new one at Kaer Morhen, leave it in the room there.

Now, he doesn’t need to.

He places the journal on the dusty shelf and leans back against the wall, waiting for his ma’s return. It looks right there, as empty as it is, and he can imagine filling the shelves up in all the years to come.

He pounds on his mama’s door, blood on his face and chest heaving. It’s late, pitch-black outside, but he knows she won’t be asleep. Not now, not when he went off into the foothills to kill a griffin that morning.

She hadn’t tried to convince him not to, but he knows she was thinking it.

Swallow and Thunderbolt are still coursing through him, the toxicity a familiar burn in his veins. His eye stings, and he doesn’t know if it’s the blood or something worse, and the Swallow hasn’t quite taken care of the gashes in his chest from when the griffin had attempted to pick him up. It hurts and he’s tired and the alderman had screamed at him when he’d brought the fucking thing’s head back, even though that’s what he’d asked for.

He’s fucking tired, and he’s covered in blood, and he knows he’s going to scare the shit out of his mama.

Her footsteps rush for the door, and he barely has a second to prepare himself before it’s flying open, before he’s swaying into the warmth that seeps outside. “Lambert?” his mama cries. “Oh, fuck, Lambert! Oh, fuck. Shit!”

“I’m fine,” he says, but the words are slurred and his face fucking hurts, and he still isn’t sure if his eye is still in one piece.

“You’re not fucking fine,” she hisses, and despite how angry she sounds, she still grabs his hand gently and leads him inside. The house is dark, a single candle lit in her bedroom, and she pulls him towards it with a determination he so rarely sees in her. Their time together is quiet normally, a break for them both. He was supposed to give her that this time too.

She deposits him on the bed, and he makes quick work of his swords and armour, not wanting to spill blood on her blankets and furs. Everything feels hazy, his fingers moving slower than he would like, but he knows he’s going to be fine. His armour lands with a thud on the floor. Ma stands before him, a bucket of water in her hands; he doesn’t remember seeing her grab it.

“It’s going to be cold,” she tells him, voice soft, a cloth held aloft. Lambert reaches out, casts Igni, and the water steams in the bucket. “Wh—If I’d known you could do that years ago, I would have made you heat my damn baths.”

He chuckles; the noise is strained. She presses the warm cloth to his face and wipes away the blood. It doesn’t sting, the wounds already closed over, but he does try to blink the blood away.

“My eye,” he says. “Is it still there?”

Her fingers don’t have callouses, not like his, not like the other Wolves. They’re gentle on his cheek and his temple, even through the cloth. “It’s still there, Lambert. There’s a lot of blood, but it’s still there.”

Good. That’s good. He wouldn’t know what to do if he was a half-blind witcher. He didn’t know of any, but it only took one bad injury to kill a witcher. He wasn’t yet ready to join the medallions on the tree at Kaer Morhen.

The wounds on his face are still a little tender, but they’re no longer openly bleeding. The water in the bucket is stained red. His ma cleans him up in silence, and he stares at the worry lines on her face for longer than he would like. She will grow old one day, hair grey and wrinkles on her face. He can already see the signs of it.

She will be beautiful.

A part of him wants to apologise, but he doesn’t truly know what for. This is his life. This is normal for him, blood and injury and disgusting, toxic potions. She is only now seeing the truth of it. “I’ll be fine, Mama,” he whispers.

“You fucking better be, Lambert,” she hisses, but he knows she’s not really mad. He can smell her fear, pungent and distinct. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Now he apologises. He has to. “Sorry, Mama.”

She doesn’t say anything, just wipes his face until the tacky feeling of blood on his skin disappears. He could do it himself, but he knows she wouldn’t let him. When she finally pulls away, she sees the blood staining his undershirt, the tears in the fabric and the healed gashes beneath. He does not let her near then, taking the cloth from her and wiping himself down quickly and methodically.

Exhaustion washes over him, different to how it is on the road, closer to the warm sleepiness that sometimes comes when he’s at Kaer Morhen. This is heavier, sudden and determined to take him down. His ma must see it, and it doesn’t matter that he is so much bigger than her, because she helps him to his feet and walks him into his bedroom.

Nothing more than a bed and a chest and the old shelves, but it feels more like his than the brick walls of Kaer Morhen. He pulls out the clothes he keeps here, thick and soft and comfortable—not the kind of things designed for the Path—and swaps his undershirt out for a tunic.

He’s asleep mere seconds after his head hits the pillow, trousers and boots still on, his ma watching over him. It’s one of the heaviest sleeps of his life, safe in his bed instead of out in the middle of nowhere, clean and looked after. Cared for.

A heavy enough sleep that it takes a few seconds for the pounding on the front door to wake him. Morning light streams in through the window. His boots are on the floor. Someone is yelling on Ma’s porch, furious and demanding and surrounded by uncountable heartbeats.

Lambert hadn’t checked if anyone saw him when he staggered towards the house the night before. He’d been so focused on getting to safety, on making sure his eye was still in his damn head. He should have fucking checked, he knew better.

He can already hear Ma opening the door, yelling back at the townsfolk likely forming a damn pogrom on her porch. “Fuck,” he hisses, swinging himself from the bed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Mama!”

She’s in the doorway, hands on her hips like a stern talking to will send the crowd on their way. “What in Melitele’s name do you lot want?”

A rabble rises up, multiple voices crying out at once, all of them saying the same damn thing. There’s a witcher in her home, and they want it gone.

His ma looks over her shoulder at him. Years they’ve spent being careful, pretending he didn’t exist beyond the confines of their home. His ma never talks about her son at work, even though he knows she probably aches to as much as he aches to talk about her during the slow winters at Kaer Morhen. All that wasted because he hadn’t been careful enough to make sure he wasn’t seen.

They could kill her for it.

“A witcher,” she snaps, turning back towards the crowd. Oh, fuck. Fuck this. “A witcher? That’s my damn son!”

Lambert’s at the door before she can finish speaking, but it does nothing to stop the way the words land over the heads of the townsfolk—people he vaguely recognises from all his years here, the alderman standing furious at the front of them all, the very same man who had paid Lambert only the night before. Silence falls over them, dozens of eyes locked on Lambert and the brand new scars on his face that he got trying to save their fucking sheep from a griffin.

“Your son?” says the alderman, choked. Do they see it, the resemblance? Lambert has his mama’s face, hidden beneath a beard and scars and yellow eyes. The same nose, the same disappointed twist to their lips. Do they see it?

He has a dagger strapped to his hip; he always does. His fingers brush against the hilt. He’ll use it if he has to. Ma will be disappointed with him, but if it’s to save her, even at the cost of himself…

“My son,” his mama says, voice strong in a way it never was when he was a child. He’s silent in the face of it, in the face of her, as is the alderman she’s glaring at. “Do you remember him? Your daughter used to chase him through the fields right over there. Do you remember?

“My husband sold him to a witcher. Do you fucking remember that? You helped me bury his body, you all understood why I did it. So whatever you’re thinking of doing, you can turn right the fuck back around and keep fucking going. It’s not happening. This is my son.”

He loves his mama. He loves her so much. He will slaughter them all if he has to.

Lambert stares at them, the crowd, face aching still and his eyes the very thing they tell their children to be scared of. He probably knew some of them when he was still a child himself, but the memories are so faded and twisted now that their faces blur with those he had once trained with.

A dagger will be nothing against the pitchforks and kitchen knives they’re wielding.

None of them move. None of them speak. His mama’s chest his heaving and his own mouth his curled into a sneer, and no one says a damn word. It wouldn’t be a terrible way to go out, maybe. Better than a monster.

“Your son,” the alderman says again. “Lambert.”

“Yes,” says his ma, reaching for his wrist. “My son. Please. Look at him. He took out that griffin for us all. He’d never… He’d never do what his father did to him. You have to know that.”

Never. He never fucking would, even if the Grasses could still be made. But he can’t tell them that, the words trapped in his throat and his mind focused only on the dagger against his hip, on the fury in the eyes of the townsfolk. Their shifting feet, their twitching hands, their desperate need to take and kill something they can never understand.

“Just trust me,” his ma whispers. Her hand is a vice around his wrist.

The alderman sighs, runs a hand down his face, and stares at them both with an expression Lambert doesn’t understand. “One foot out of line, you do anything to hurt my people,” he says, and he sounds like fucking Vesemir, “and we’ll be back.”

“Good luck getting anyone to deal with your monsters then.” The words spill from him without his control, before he even realises he’s speaking. It’s still the damn truth; the moment any other witcher hears of a pogrom, no one will come through this town again.

They know it too, but he won’t put anything out of line. That’s what the Path is for. That’s what Kaer Morhen is for. Not here, not with his mama. He needs to keep her safe. That’s the most important thing.

It’s the calmest ending to a pogrom he’s ever seen, and he feels as confused as some of the townsfolk look. They glare at him—at his ma. There will be gossip in the coming days, that she has a witcher for a son. She could lose her job; she could be kicked out of town. She could be killed when he leaves, and he will not know until he’s able to come back. It’s almost enough to make him stay. Almost.

“Back inside,” he hisses, pushing at her shoulder. “Now.”

She doesn’t fight him, only watches as he slams the door shut and moves a chest of drawers in front of it. Won’t stop them breaking the windows and climbing in if they chose, but it’s the best he can do right now.

“My Little Lamb…” she says. It’s been a good couple of years since she’s called him that, now that he’s visibly older, visibly scarred, so very much not the lamb he had been. “It’s all going to be alright.”

“It’s not! They’ll fucking kill you the second I leave,” he growls. He hates talking to her like this, but he needs her to know. It’s his damn fault. He was supposed to be the careful one, sneaking around town and checking constantly over his shoulder.

“I’ve already killed one man,” she says, like it makes any difference.

But he is her son, and he knows nothing he says will deter her. She would have woken him and hidden the second she saw the mob at her door if that was the case. “Fuck’s sake,” he mutters, and he strides into his bedroom. There’s blood on the floor. He’ll clean it up before he leaves.

“Lambert?”

There’s a spare dagger in his pack. He pulls out it with a lazy flourish, exhausted from last night and this morning and everything the last few weeks have been, and thrusts it into her hands. “I’ll teach you to use it,” he says. It’ll take a few weeks for her to get the basics down, and then he’ll have to leave so he can get to Kaer Morhen before the pass closes.

It’ll be the longest he’s ever spent here, and he’ll be short on coin, but it will be worth it.

Ma smiles at him, but it’s sad. “Alright, Lambert,” she says. The dagger looks right in her hands, and he wonders for a moment if she used something similar to kill his father.

He’ll teach her, and then everything will be alright.

He doesn’t just give her a dagger. The year after, on his second visit that summer, he gifts her two silver rings. She looks at them with distaste. They were expensive, and they’re not the kind of thing he has ever seen her wear.

“They’re for monsters,” he explains, sliding them onto each index finger. “Some look like people. If they touch silver, it burns. Wear these, if you burn someone, fucking run.”

“What? Don’t trust my skills with the blade?” she asks.

“Not against the kind of thing that can wear another’s face,” he says. Maybe he’s being too paranoid. Maybe it doesn’t fucking matter. This is something he should have done years ago.

She pats his cheek. The silver is cold against his skin. “I didn’t die last year like you thought I would,” she tells him. “I doubt I’ll run into some… face stealer.”

The town had been quiet when he’d wandered through, like it had been last time, and like it had been when he’d left last autumn. He walks through the streets instead of sneaking around, smug and daring. The townsfolk watched him warily, but they weren’t overtly hostile. Best he could get, really, as long as his ma was still able to work and still able to keep her house. And she is, for now.

“I know, just…” Lambert hangs his head. He’d seen them in some jeweller’s in Vengerberg and known he had to give them to her. If he can’t stay, he can at least keep her as safe as possible.

Ma smiles at him, and he likes to think this is what she might have looked like if they’d ever been the kind of family to celebrate yule with gift giving. “They’re very nice, Lambert,” she says. “Thank you.”

She has stew cooking in the kitchen, a spicey thing that plays with his enhanced senses in strange ways. There aren’t many witchers that can handle spice, but there’s something about the way it overwhelms him that has him seeking it, especially here. When he’s done, he can collapse in the worn armchair in the corner of the living room and tell his ma stories of the world and not have to worry about anything.

Sometimes, as she cleans and lets him rest, she will walk past him and run her fingers through his hair, like he’s still the little boy that was taken from her. He is in his thirties now. There is grey threaded through his ma’s hair. He should have given her the dagger and the rings years ago.

She should have given him a key years ago. It sits in a pocket in his armour, given to him last time he was here. She’s too scared to leave the door unlocked now. People call her names in the street, but they don’t go beyond that, not yet. Maybe they won’t, as long as Lambert does his job and doesn’t bother any of them.

He doesn’t think about the fact that some of his brothers didn’t bother anyone before they were killed in pogroms.

They have rules. The first is years and years old: do not mention him to a single other witcher that passes through town, and he will not mention her at Kaer Morhen. Lambert does not know what Vesemir would do if he found out that Lambert still has his family the way none of the others do. It breaks tradition, it breaks the rules, but he cannot think of a punishment that isn’t exile. But it is his ma, and he will do anything to keep her safe.

It will be harder, now that the town knows of him, to keep that rule. They, like so many others, are going to be terrible gossips. But she will still follow the rule as best she can, he knows it.

The other two are more recent: practice with the dagger and keep the damn rings on. He tells her the last one as she scrubs at a pot and demands he reheat the water for her. She tells him she knows, that she can follow instructions to the letter. Where does he think he gets that from, after all? It’s sure as fuck not his father.

Lambert laughs at her. He always laughs at her, because it’s easy. It’s the easiest thing he’s ever fucking had.

He’s a lucky godsdamned bastard, and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

Lambert swans into his ma’s house after two months of being followed around by a prick of a Cat, and the first thing he does is collapse on the shitty little mattress in his bedroom. His ma is at work, probably, and the house is comfortably quiet around him.

His coin pouch is heavier than it has ever been, and he hates that he has to thank Aiden of the fucking Cats for it. Bastard’s probably the best negotiator he’s ever met, wily as all hell, and extremely bloody annoying. Always up in Lambert’s face making snide remarks about his swordplay, bragging over the amount of money he rakes in by bullshitting people to their faces. And following him from town to fucking town no matter how many times Lambert yelled at him to piss off.

At least here, it’s quiet. He doesn’t have to deal with anything he doesn’t want to, and he knows there’s no chance of the damn Cat following him here. Not when Lambert had screamed in his face to fuck off three weeks ago and he finally took the damn hint. He hasn’t seen him since.

If he feels a little guilty about it, well, that voice in the back of his head can shut the fuck up.

Lambert lies there for longer than he cares to admit, seething and needing to get it all out of him. But his ma is at work, or wherever the fuck, and he’s left with his frustrations. A shit year on the Path all round, and he still has to make the journey back to Kaer Morhen for the winter. He almost doesn’t want to, but he’d fucked off to Skellige last winter, and he knows he has to go back.

If he’s at Kaer Morhen, then he doesn’t have to worry about Aiden of the Cats.

Footsteps on the rickety porch, a familiar gait. “Lambert?” his ma calls as the front door swings open. “Is that your horse out the front?”

“Don’t know anyone else who would bother leaving one here,” he replies, and he can’t bring himself to get up from the bed.

“You’re in a mood,” she says, stopping to lean against the doorframe. “Good to see you too. Are you going to build that lean-to while you’re here this time, or is your poor horse going to get caught out in a storm again?”

He grunts, waving a hand dismissively at her. “I’ll get around to it.”

He doesn’t really like the look she gives him, something surprised, something a little disappointed. He’s snapped at her before, or in her presence, but anger feels more distant here. Not today though, not after the longs weeks he’s had.

“Come help me cook and tell me what’s crawled up your arse and died,” she tells him. No room for argument, even if he had the energy for it.

He follows her into the kitchen, helps her cook dinner, and tells her what crawled up his arse and died. She listens with patience and a raised brow as he tells her about the first run in with Aiden in Ellander. Messy fucking contract, made messier by his employer rushing in and getting himself killed. And by the damn Cat.

Then he tells her about the second. A week later, on the other side of the Mahakam. Not even a hunt that time, or there was, until the Cat came in and took it out from under his nose.

And then he tells her about the third and the fourth and the fifth. Better than the first, and the second, but not by much. “Fucker can get money out of anyone,” he says, cutting potatoes into uneven chunks. “It’d be alright if he weren’t so damn annoying.”

“Uh huh,” his ma says. It’s all she’s been saying. Lambert glares at her about it when her back is turned. He doesn’t tell her about the handful of nights on the road between towns, quiet and peaceful, where they’d barely spoken. He hadn’t known what to do with them, the sudden ease that he’s only ever found here making itself known with someone still practically a stranger to him. It’s easier to ignore them, to not speak them into existence.

“He’d piss you off too, Ma,” he says instead.

There’s a look in her eyes that he’s never seen before, something knowing. “I’m sure,” she replies. “You’ve never spoken to me this much about other witchers before.”

Of course he fucking hasn’t. What’s there to talk about? Vesemir is a prick stuck on traditions and rules and bullshit. Geralt likes to antagonise him and then cry victim when Lambert snaps. Eskel… Lambert doesn’t mind Eskel, most of the time, but it’s not like he likes him enough to tell his ma anything more beyond the fact that he exists. And that he can’t ever know about her.

And Voltehre… he’s already told her all there is to know about Voltehre.

His ma’s rings are stacked on the windowsill, glinting in the light of the setting sun. “Not much to say about them,” he mutters. “Bunch of pricks.”

“But you’ll talk about this one,” she replies.

Lambert freezes, knife in hand. “The fuck is that supposed to mean, Ma?” he asks. “He’s fucking new, and he pissed me the fuck off for three months, and you think it’s strange that I want to fucking talk about it?”

She blinks at him, lips parted in indignation. “Lambert—”

“I’m going to build the damn lean-to.”

He storms out of the house the same way he stormed in, boots thudding against worn floorboards. His ma doesn’t call out to him, not like he expects her to, and all that follows him as he slams the front door shut is silence. His stupid damn horse stares at him judgementally, but he’s not so far gone that he’ll start swearing at it. Not yet. Not again.

Lambert builds the lean-to off the side of his ma’s house—opposite the kitchen, so he doesn’t have to see her watching him through the window. It takes hours, but his horse looks grateful when he guides it over. It’s not his best work, but he’s made do with what he has—what the town is willing to still give Ma—and it looks like something he would build at Kaer Morhen, made from scaffolding and detritus.

More than anything, it lets him focus on something that isn’t Ma, that isn’t the Cat. He doesn’t understand what Ma was trying to insinuate. Not even his brothers have pissed him off the way the Cat did. But he doesn’t let himself think about it, not even as he settles and feeds his horse. When he’s done, the sun has long-since set and dinner is ready.

He wanders back inside to face Ma’s disapproving stare. They eat in silence. Neither of them brings up Aiden of the Cats again, not for all the days he stays there.

She has never been so cautious around him, even as he calms down and settles into the familiar routine of staying with her. He fucking hates it, but he doesn’t want to talk about the Cat either; he doesn’t want to have to think about anything here, surely she gets that.

When he apologises days and days in, she smiles, and he can’t remember if it’s the same smile she’d used to placate his father. The mere thought makes him sick.

Lambert makes another promise to himself that year, one on a list of many. He will never be angry at his mama again; he does not ever need to be, not the way his is with his brothers and Vesemir and the damn Cat. That is the last thing she deserves.

He will be better than that, if only for her.

Every winter, Lambert experiments with potions, with Gull, with vodka. The first two he shares with his brothers and Vesemir, but the last he keeps to himself. He stuffs it in his saddlebags and hauls it through Kaedwen, through Aedirn, all the way to his ma. She likes his vodka. Maybe he should be a little ashamed about supplying his mother with alcohol, but he can’t remember the last time he was ashamed about anything.

On the way there, he runs into Aiden again, because of course he does. He’s everywhere lately. They travel together for a month, take on three contracts and get paid more than they should. Not for the first time. He’s still a damn prick, but so is Lambert, and it evens out in a way he never expected.

After the initial bullshit, after another cold winter at Kaer Morhen, running into Aiden again the year before hadn’t been so terrible. He calls Lambert out on his shit, but doesn’t scoff and chide and walk away like his brothers do. And he’s easy to fight with, easy to rely on, easy to talk to when things are calm. Lambert can’t be blamed for finding something easy.

But he still keeps the vodka tucked in his saddlebags, even on those calm nights where he actually finds himself laughing along with Aiden, enjoying himself in a way he rarely does on the Path. It’s not for him, after all.

He’s alone when he eventually makes it to his ma’s house, Aiden somewhere in Temeria now most likely. Lambert had turned back the way they came when they separated, and maybe Aiden had thought he was strange for it, but he hadn’t questioned anything. He tends not to with Lambert, just takes him at face value. It’s fucking weird. They’ve been meeting up for long enough that he should have grown used to it, but he still falters when Aiden simply listens to him.

Ma welcomes him as she always does. So does the town, watching him warily but letting him pass through without issue. He doesn’t hurt them and so they don’t hurt him. None of it makes any damn sense, and he’s not going to take it for granted, but he’s not going to complain either.

“Oh, I like this one,” his ma says over a mug of his vodka. The fire burns in the hearth, and while it would take more bottles than he has on him to get him drunk, he still drinks with her. Maybe it too should be strange. Maybe many parents don’t drink with their children. His ma isn’t like many parents. He isn’t like many children.

“I’ll make more of it next winter,” he replies. He will. None of the others really give much of a fuck what he does in Kaer Morhen’s labs, long as he makes their fancy potions and Gull.

“How was your winter?” she asks. There’s a flush to her cheeks already; she’s only had a couple of mugs.

She always asks. He always gives her the same answer. “Cold and godsdamned boring.”

It’s both true and not. There are good days. There are shit ones. He spends time in his labs and drinks with his brothers; they tell stories of the Path and laugh with each other. He screams at Vesemir until one or both of them disappear for weeks on end, and he tries not to think about everything he lost in the keep’s walls. But he keeps going back. He probably always will, even if he does fuck off to Skellige some years.

“Is that all?” his ma asks. It’s same tone of voice he’s heard so many times now, when she’s gearing up to asking him to stay with her, to come off the Path, to stop doing what he’s been made to do. To linger in this house and do nothing else; it would make him go insane.

“Nah, Eskel and I went hunting for a week or so, that was good.” And it was. They’d argued the second night, but it hadn’t blown up into something massive like it normally would if they’d still been in the keep. It was just them, in the wilderness, with the cold and the quiet around them.

It was nothing like the nights he shares with Aiden.

Ma smiles at him. “And your new friend?” she says, far too fucking knowing for Lambert’s liking.

New friend—it makes Lambert sound like a damn child.

“He’s fine, Ma,” he says.

“Oh, so you’ve seen him already?” she asks. Sometimes, he hates how easily he walks into whatever she wants him to say.

He sighs, a little exasperated. “Yes, Ma. A few weeks back.”

Lambert doesn’t look at her, but he knows she’s smiling. She usually does when he brings up Aiden, when he tells her that they’ve been travelling together, even when he complains about him. She is frustratingly smug about the whole thing, for reasons Lambert can’t even begin to understand.

The fire crackles. He’s comfortably warm on the chaise, the old wood of the house creaking and settling around him. Ma will get him fixing things now that he’s here, like she doesn’t bother with anyone else in town. Or they don’t bother with her.

“Does he look after you?” she asks. Her voice is quiet, concerned, a little slurred.

He bites back the urge to sigh again, to growl and snap like he would if he was at Kaer Morhen. Aiden is a secret there too—so many secrets now, and he’s so tired of keeping them.

“We have each other’s backs,” he replies, because Aiden doesn’t look after him. He doesn’t look after Aiden either. That’s not how to the Path works. They work together, patch each other up and commiserate over shitty ale in whatever tavern doesn’t immediately throw them out. And that’s it. That’s all it can be.

But his ma nods like he’s agreed exactly with what she asked. “Good,” she whispers, and she hauls herself to her feet to wander past him to the kitchen. Doesn’t matter how much his hair is determined to recede, she runs her fingers through it anyway. “I’m glad you have someone out there with you. Even if it’s not all the time.”

“Me too, Ma,” he says, and it’s the truth. It’s probably the easiest truth he’s ever uttered.

“And you look after him?” she asks, pointing at him with her mug. “I like to think I’ve raised you to—”

The silence that falls is thick and palpable; he almost chokes on it. They’re on the other side of the small room from each other, and maybe that makes it worse, but moving now feels wrong. He swallows, throat tight. There are tears in his mama’s eyes.

“Ma—”

“Listen to me, Lambert,” she says. She’s crying, tears on her cheeks and the smell of salt in the air. “Listen to me.”

“I am,” he whispers.

“You look after him, when you’re with him. Make sure he’s safe. Who does he have, aside you, Lambert? Do you know?” He doesn’t. He’s never asked. And he won’t; Aiden could be keeping the same secrets as him, for the same reasons. “You have to look after each other, out there. I should have told you when you were younger. Maybe I did, I don’t remember. But I’m telling you now. Nothing is more important than that, do you hear me?”

Something burns in him, unnameable. “I hear you, Ma,” he says.

She nods at him like it’s enough. Maybe it is. He heaves himself to his feet, takes the mug from her hand and, haltingly, kisses her forehead. He loves her. He doesn’t know how to tell her that. She knows, though, she has to.

She did raise him. She is still raising him. Maybe one day he can make sure she knows that too.

Lambert knows Ma’s sick from the second he walks in and sees her sleepily working away in the kitchen, but it’s not until the next day that it becomes a concern. She’s coughing and sniffling and trying to keep him away from her no matter how many times he tells her she can’t pass it on to him.

He has seen sickness before; he has felt it, remembers a flu he once had as a child and the vicious vomiting he’d had in the days after he first arrived at Kaer Morhen. He’s seen it briefly in towns, watching people cough up a lung with a wince, seen the bodies of those it has taken. He has never seen it so close before, never cared.

It is simply a flu, Ma tries to tell him, one caused by a sudden summer storm and its lingering chill. Just a flu. But she is feverish and exhausted and frankly disgusting, and Lambert cannot hide his worry from her.

Someone knocks on the door around mid-morning the day after he arrives, and Ma waves at Lambert to answer it. Gone is her fear of the people who know of him, or it’s been pushed aside for the moment. Still, Lambert keeps a hand over the hilt of the dagger on his belt, and the unlocks the door.

A woman stands on the porch, eyes widening the second she sees him. “I was—She hasn’t come to work,” she stammers, terrified even though she must know who Lambert is. He’d be stupid not to think that word spread like wildfire the second they learned of his existence, not to think that they don’t ask Ma constantly about him. “Is she… Is she alright?”

Ma coughs from the living room. “She’s sick,” Lambert drawls. “There a herbalist in town?”

The woman nods, trying to look around his body like she doesn’t quite believe him.

“Great,” he says, and pulls a few coins from his pouch. “Do me a favour and send for them, won’t you?”

She stammers and stutters for a moment, but darts away the second the coins hit her palm. If she actually does as he’s asked, he’ll be pleasantly surprised, but it’s probably still safer than going over and asking himself. He doesn’t trust the town; he never has. They knew his father, and they did nothing. They almost fucking killed him for nothing—for their own bullshit hatred.

Ma is sipping at a mug of tea when he walks back inside. “Which girl was that?” she croaks.

Lambert shrugs. “I didn’t ask, just sent her to go get the herbalist,” he says. Ma hums and nods and seemingly stares at nothing. “What do you need, Ma?”

She blinks at him for a moment. “Stay here until I’m better.”

“Wasn’t going to do anything else.” He still has weeks before he truly needs to head off, and Aiden left him early to find the Caravan this year. He has time to kill; he can do that here, even if he might be short on funds by the time he reaches Kaedwen.

He hovers near her armchair while they wait for the herbalist, wishing he could be more useful. The best he can do is take Ma’s mug to put it back in the kitchen and grab the thick woollen blanket from her bed when she asks.

For a moment, he wishes she was a witcher, if only so that she wouldn’t feel like this. If only so that he wouldn’t outlive her by decades and decades and decades—if he is that unlucky. He shoves the thought aside as quickly as it comes; her going through what he did is the last thing he wants.

Ma will be fine. The herbalist is on his way.

When he finally does show up, more than an hour later—long enough that Lambert almost goes out to get him himself and drag him here—he’s old and tired and frustratingly dismissive. He takes one look at Ma, at the redness to her cheeks and the exhaustion in her eyes, and tells Lambert that she’ll be fine. Or, more accurately, tells Lambert’s boots that she’ll be fine.

“She has a damn fever!” Lambert says. He keeps his distance, because he isn’t such a fool as to antagonise the one person who can help.

“Her and everyone else in town,” says the herbalist, a thinly veiled sneer on his face. “Keep her warm, drink some water, get some rest. She’ll be fine.”

“I didn’t ask you here to tell me she’ll be fine. I want medicine!”

“Lambert…” Ma croaks from her armchair, curling her fingers around his wrist.

The herbalist sighs. Lambert wants to punch him. “I can only make so much, and there are others who need it more right now,” he says in some bullshit attempt to be placating.

Lambert’s nostrils flare, and he pulls his coin purse out again. He’ll need to take a few extra hunts after this to have enough to make it Ard Carriagh without struggling, but it will be worth it. “You have a recipe?” he asks, wishing he’d known to do this years ago. How many times has she gotten sick when he hasn’t been here? He’s never even spent a single winter with her. Maybe he should.

The herbalist takes a moment, staring at the coins in Lambert’s hand. “Do you have parchment?” he asks.

The recipe ends up written in his journal, tucked between notes on hunts and his newest recipe for Black Blood. The herbalist darts out with his tail between his legs and a stupid amount of money in his pockets, and Lambert immediately starts digging through his bags for what he needs. A fairly simple recipe, annoyingly so, one he could have probably figured out himself given time and resources, but he has it now thanks to the useless fucking herbalist.

His ma is napping in the armchair, having fallen asleep again at some point while Lambert was bartering his way through the recipe. He leaves her to it, ducking outside to pick the rest of what he needs from the fields heading further up into the mountains. The fresh air is nice; he makes himself breathe deep and settle into something as close to calmness as he can get right now.

This feels a little like the last hunt he went on with Aiden. A nasty arachas got the better of him, and Lambert spent most of the night pouring Golden Oriole down his throat and watching over him while he meditated. The same franticness, the same pressure sits in him now. The same worry.

He brews the medicine in her kitchen, listening to her congested snores like she’s the world’s shittiest bard. A simple thing, the medicine. He knows he will rip the page out later and leave it in his bedroom, tucked between all the other full journals where it will be safe, if he doesn’t memorise it first. If only his trainers had bothered to teach him basic first aid for someone who isn’t a damn witcher.

But a witcher walks alone. A witcher doesn’t have attachments or friends or family. A witcher must still learn teamwork for a bullshit trial that goes against everything they’ve ever been taught. Lambert has done a decent job over the years of not thinking about that. He’s been breaking all the rules for years now, with his ma and with Aiden.

He’ll keep them both safe.

Ma is still sleeping when the medicine is ready, and he only feels a little bad about having to wake her. “Come on, Ma,” he says when she grumbles at him. “Might taste like shit but it will help you.”

“Does taste like shit,” she tells him once she’s swallowed the whole thing down.

He snorts at her. “Either that or you keep snotting everywhere.”

Her hand is clammy when it grabs his own, and the look in her eyes is something he has never seen before. “You’re good, Lambert,” she whispers. “A good son. I’m glad that I… that I didn’t completely fuck you up.”

Lambert swallows, feels his eyes burn. “You never could have, Ma.”

She is what he would think about on the cold nights as a trainee, all the happy memories they shared despite the bullshit. Now, he thinks of her and Voltehre and whatever the fuck he has found with Aiden—such a bloody unusual camaraderie there, considering he’d pissed him off the first few times they saw each other. How could she ever think she fucked him up? He already knows what did, and it could never be her.

She falls asleep again not long after. He lets her rest and keeps a watchful eye over her all the while. Two days of medicine and grumbling later, she’s finally feeling better, and Lambert lets himself relax for the first time since he got there, finally lets himself sleep. He’d do it all over again though, and he knows he one day will—knows that one day, he will not be able to leave for a very long time.

They have time. Ma is up and moving in a matter of days, the flu shaken off like it is nothing, but Lambert has a recipe tucked away in his room and so many books to read over the winter. He’s going to be better, like he always should have been.

And when the time comes for him to inevitably stay, he will be ready. It will be awful, but he will do it, for her.

The final step leading up to the porch snaps under his boot, and Lambert narrowly avoids breaking his ankle as he stumbles.

“What the fuck?” he hisses. The wood hadn’t been that rotten and worn last time he was here, and that had only been a few months ago. A busy year, too busy—he hasn’t been able to visit as much as he usually does, trapped in fuckin Velen for weeks. And even now, he only has a few days and then he would be heading up to Asheberg, where Aiden waits for him. “Ma!”

“Lambert? Is that you?” Her voice is muffled by layers of wood, but he can hear her wandering to the door.

“Does anyone else call you ‘Ma’?” he asks when she opens it, and she gives him a droll look in response. “Your stairs broke.”

She sighs. The apron of her dress is stained with what smells like berries. “Melitele’s fat fucking cunt,” she says, and Lambert can’t hold back the laughter that bursts from him. “That new carpenter down the road said I had nothing to worry about, now look at this. Can you fix it?”

He doesn’t spend a winter fixing crumbling keep walls and every visit here repairing who knows what Ma throws at him for nothing. “Will they let me buy a plank or two around here?” he asks. He already knows the answer, and so does she. They’ll let him stay, and they’ll pay him if there’s a monster or two, but wanting anything more than that is asking for trouble he will not bring to her.

“I’ll buy some after work tomorrow,” she replies, hands on her hips and her mouth twisted in a disappointment he never wants aimed at him. “You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”

“I’m fine, Ma.”

“Swear it?”

“I swear it,” he says, holding back a huff of amusement. “Can I come in now? Your little interrogation’s new.”

“The mouth on you isn’t.”

“Where d’you think I got it from?” Many people, in reality, but also her. Always her. He has her face and her eyes and her attitude. He too would kill a man for wronging him—he already has, more than once.

Ma laughs at him, as she so often does, and the tenseness that makes a home in his chest when he’s alone on the Path dissipates in an instant. A different kind of looseness to what he feels on the quiet nights with Aiden—he’s more willing to think about this one—but a looseness nonetheless.

In his room, he places a journal written entirely in Skelligen on the half-full shelves she’s kept clean for him, and he wonders if she knows he can write and speak it, if she opens them up to know him and realises that she never will, not in his entirety. She is his mother, but he is still his own man.

In the kitchen, he helps her cook and listens to her complain about the carpenter some more. He’s glad he was the one who caught the brunt of its collapse; Ma probably would have snapped her ankle. He steals slices of vegetables off the bench and grins when she points her dull little knife at him, silver rings glinting in the fading sunlight.

In her sitting room, he tells her of his hunts, but not his injuries. She asks after Aiden again and seems a little too pleased to learn he’ll be meeting up with him again soon, even though it means spending less time here. She tells him of the book she has been reading, a gift from one of the girls at work, and Lambert makes a silent promise to bring one back for her next time.

It’s a calm and normal night. It is nothing like the Path, nothing like the cold winter nights at Kaer Morhen. He wants to stay forever and doesn’t all at the same time.

There is little to do when his ma is at work the next day, but he’s used to this by now. Years spent visiting, spent sitting around while she earns just enough coin to keep herself going, he knows how to fill his time. He starts by dropping a coin pouch onto the table beside her bed, ready to fight her on it when she dares to kick up a damn stink like she always does. He’s never backed down and never will.

Then he cleans, more than he would bother to do at Kaer Morhen. Before Vesemir starts yelling at him, anyway. But Vesemir is not his fucking ma, and he can still get off his arse and do shit. Unlike her, he’s still got decades and decades and decades ahead of him, so he can still do this for her. His ma, though… there’s more grey in her hair than there is brown now. She’s not even yet sixty. But close, too close.

He’ll practically be her fucking live-in maid for a few days. Worth it though, for the way she lounges in her chair with tea or vodka and smiles at him like she’s never been more proud of him.

The fact that he gets to have this still sometimes makes him choke.

Lambert throws the remains of the porch step in the fireplace. It’ll make shit kindling, but that’s what it gets for trying to break his ankle yesterday. He writes in his new journal while it burns, catalogues the drowners he’d taken out between here and the last time he’d seen Aiden—weird things, moving erratically; something he wants to talk to Eskel and Vesemir about this winter—and makes a note of the supplies he’ll need to get before he reaches Asheberg.

His ma comes home late in the afternoon, planks of wood in her hands, and looks at him like he’s an unruly teenager, sprawled out in her armchair.

“And what have you been doing on all day?” she asks.

He rolls his eyes, biting back a grin. “Cleaning your damn house,” he says.

She shoos him outside only a few minutes later with orders not to come back in until the porch is fixed, like he wasn’t going to do that anyway, and a promise to bring him a cup of tea. Still, he grumbles half-heartedly, puts on a show to watch her scoff at him. This is how it always goes; a routine he’s gotten more and more comfortable in.

It hurts to leave every time.

The step is easy to fix now that he’s burned the broken pieces. There’s a rhythm to it, measuring out the planks and cutting them down with whatever he has on hand—not a fucking saw, because that would have been a useful thing to tell Ma to grab—and hammering nails into wood. A more enjoyable Kaer Morhen.

Ma potters about inside, relaxing after a long day of work. He likes listening to the simplicity of her day, the rhythm of it. Later, he will be shooed out of the kitchen for trying to help her with dinner and he will spend days lazing around her house, listening to her stories of the town and telling her his own of Aiden. Nothing particularly special but still perfect.

Lambert isn’t paying as much attention to anything beyond what he needs to do. Distantly, he can hear Ma in the kitchen, making him tea and dinner for when he’s done. Even more distantly are the sounds of the town, horseshoes on packed dirt, scattered chatter—nothing out of the ordinary.

It embarrasses him how much the voice surprises him, how much he didn’t expect it. He’s a witcher; he should be better.

“That hard up for coin, are you?”

Lambert whirls around, hammer clenched tight in his hand. Aiden rests atop his horse, eyebrows raised in amusement and his head cocked to the side. He looks as good as a witcher can, if a little tired, long black hair tied up and his yellow-green eyes locked on Lambert.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Lambert barks, body tense in a way it rarely is here.

He should have been paying attention, should have been listening for any sign of someone coming down the road, but Aiden hadn’t sounded any different to anyone else. So many fucking years spent looking over his shoulder whenever he came here, keeping secrets from his School, gone to waste because he was so focused on what, rebuilding a damn porch?

Both times he’s been caught, it’s been his own fucking fault.

Aiden scoffs at him, as he is wont to do. “Heading to Asheberg, Lamb, like we agreed,” he replies. “What are you doing here? You genuinely can’t be that desperate for coin. There’s a notice for a hunt the next town over.”

He’s such a fucking prick.

“I was getting to that,” he says—lies. He had no idea it was even there.

“Uh huh,” Aiden says, the bastard. “Gonna answer my question or not?”

He is, until he hears footsteps from inside the house, his oblivious mama coming to check on him. Aiden can hear it too; Lambert watches his gaze flick up to the house, endlessly curious. It’s a look Lambert likes, most of the time. But certainly not when it’s here.

He makes for the door, feeling like an obvious fucking fool, and only just makes it before it swings open. His ma stares up at him, eyes wide, a mug of steaming tea in her hands. “Lambert?” she says, glancing over his shoulder. “Is something wrong? Who—”

A thud, boots on dirt. Aiden’s standing beside his horse when Lambert looks over again, a deep furrow to his brow. Fuck. Fuck all of this. There’s the slide of metal on fabric—ma’s dagger in her hand like she actually thinks she could hold her own against a witcher.

He glances between her and Aiden, each of them watching him with differing expectations. This is not how he wanted anyone to meet Ma, but Aiden, at least, isn’t one of his brothers.

Lambert could tell Ma to go back inside, could turn around and make Aiden fuck off and then attempt not to answer the thousand questions he’ll have when they do meet in Asheberg. But it’s Aiden, who walks the Path with him, who deals with his anger, who laughs at his dumb fucking jokes. Who sits with him in the silence of the night and lets everything be calm. They keep each other’s secrets. What’s one more?

That, and it’s far too late to pretend that this really is a way to get more coin. There is little choice in this, but Lambert finds that it is not as terrible as he used to imagine.

“It’s alright,” he says, pushing Ma’s hand down and biting back a frustrated sigh. “You don’t need that.”

“One of your brothers?” she asks, spitting the last word like she doesn’t quite believe it.

“Uh, no. Just… come.” He steps away from her, hopping over the half-installed step, and doesn’t dare look at Aiden again. Not yet.

She watches him for a moment, a frown on her face, before she glances over at Aiden. Whatever she sees there, it makes her put the dagger away, makes her take a step towards him.

Lambert holds out a hand to help her down, and she smacks it away. “I’m not that fucking old yet,” she tells him, hopping gracelessly over the step while Aiden chuckles behind them.

“Sorry for trying to help,” he replies with a smirk. It’s forced. It has to be. He doesn’t know how to do this otherwise. But she’s on the dirt now, and there’s no taking this back. Aiden’s watching him, waiting, and so is his ma, and he has to do this. He wants to; she’ll love Aiden. “This is… This is Aiden. I—Aiden, this is my mother.”

The expression on Aiden’s face is not something he has ever seen before, in all their years of knowing each other. Shock, obviously, but something that might be awe too. Something that might be anger, might be jealousy, might be want. All the many things Lambert assumes any witcher would feel if they knew he, of all people, had this.

His mama’s eyes are wide, pleased. She makes for Aiden, hand outstretched, seemingly oblivious to the way he stares at her—like she’s something wonderful, like she’s something impossible. She clasps his hand tight, and even though Lambert can’t see it, he knows she’s beaming at him.

“Hello,” she says, voice soft like she’s talking to a spooked horse. She might as well be—Aiden’s face hasn’t changed once. “I’m Rosalie. Lambert’s told me a lot about you.”

Aiden’s glances between the two of them, and his face finally softens into something familiar: that’s stupid damn charming smile that lured Lambert in all those years ago and so thoroughly pissed him off. “An honour,” he says. He sounds like he means it. “Aiden of Maecht.”

Ma turns then, looking at something behind Lambert. “Will the lean-to fit both horses?” she asks. She’s still holding Aiden’s hand, and Lambert’s heart squeezes tight.

“Should do,” he says, voice more than a little choked.

“Good! Come in for dinner then,” Ma says, no room for argument at all. Lambert huffs in amusement—what else was he expecting to happen?

Aiden just gapes at her, even as she drops his hand and moves back towards the house. He doesn’t say a fucking word, but he doesn’t go running for the hills either. Instead, his hands clench tight around his horse’s reins, and a strange little smile curls beneath his beard.

“We’ll be inside in a moment, Ma,” Lambert tells her. He doesn’t bother holding out a hand for her this time, and she hops over the half-done step with less ease than he’d like.

She jabs her finger at him. “Not until you’ve finished here,” she says, and Lambert rolls his eyes at her. She bends down towards him, keeps her voice low even though Aiden will hear her anyway. “This is alright? I should have asked.”

If he said no, would Aiden even leave now? If he said no, would he mean it? He did this to himself, really, but he thinks about it, dinner with Ma and Aiden, as strange as it will be. “It’s fine. It’ll… It’ll be good,” he says, and he doesn’t even try to hide the wistfulness in his voice.

The seconds that follow her heading back inside are quiet, awkward. Aiden leads his horse to the lean-to; Lambert finishes the step as quickly as he can, the sound of the hammer a rhythmic pounding in time with his heart. A mug of tea cools on the porch that neither of them touch.

And then, soon enough, Aiden stands over him, arms crossed over his chest and his eyes locked on the tiny house that belongs to him and his ma.

“Lambert…” he croaks. “How fucking young are you?”

Laughter spills unbidden from him. Of all the damn questions. But he can’t exactly blame Aiden for that. “I’m forty-one.”

“Fuck,” Aiden replies, running a hand through his hair. Younger than he must have thought, that’s for sure, but the Wolves had managed to keep their mages alive longer than the rest. Bastards. “Fuck, Lamb. Your mother? How?”

“I’m just a lucky fucking bastard, didn’t you know?” Lambert hauls himself to his feet, grinning at him. A grin that Aiden returns, if a little hesitantly. A grin that fades, as the reality of all of this finally fucking sinks in. “You can’t tell anyone, Aiden.”

A hand on his shoulder, warm and gentle. “Who would I tell?” Aiden says. He means it. Of course he does, he’s always been so bloody genuine. “You’re not the only one. There’s… there’s a Cat, he still has his sister. If I can keep that quiet, I can keep this too.”

“You’re doing a shit job of that,” Lambert replies, “seeing as you told me.”

“I haven’t told you his name, have I?” he says, and Lambert swears he is about to wink. But then his face softens again, and he glances towards the house once more. “You’ve had this the whole time?”

“Yes.”

He stares at Lambert, expression unreadable. “Good,” he whispers. “That’s good, Lamb. I won’t say a word.”

You can have her too, he doesn’t say, even though it threatens to spill from him. “Get the fuck inside, then. You can watch her tell me off for cleaning her house wrong.”

There it is, Aiden’s laughter. A loud, barking sound, one Lambert has come to seek out over the years. He follows it inside, towards his mother and the dinner she’s making them in the kitchen, towards laughter and teasing and Aiden’s awestruck face. Towards something that feels so impossibly normal and profoundly good.

“Bring him back, you hear me?” his ma tells him, and so Lambert does, over and over and over again.

The first time, he asks Aiden to meet him in Ban Gleán and come to Ma’s house with him. Aiden grins at him, surprise in his eyes. The same kind of surprise that had been there when Ma had handed him a bowl of stew, when Lambert had shown him his bedroom and its messy belongings, when he’d watched them move about the tiny kitchen and swear at each other.

“He is handsome,” his ma had said when they were in the kitchen, and Lambert had tried very hard to pretend like he’d suddenly lost his hearing. “Much too young for me though.”

There’d been a look in her eyes then, one Lambert still doesn’t understand. “Ma,” he’d said in warning.

“I actually think I may be older than you, Rosalie,” Aiden had called from where he’d been snooping through Lambert’s room, picking out journals written in Skelligen that he—hopefully, probably—couldn’t read.

Ma had stopped then, sighed, and said, “The bloody hearing.”

“It’s how I know you snore,” Lambert had told her, and he’d gotten a dish cloth to his arm for the trouble.

Aiden had been hesitant for the two days they’d stayed, but Ma welcomed it like it was nothing, like it was a fucking joy for her. So, of course Lambert brought him back as soon as he could, taking them back down south instead of towards Flotsam like they’d originally planned.

And then again in the spring, watching Aiden laugh with his ma like they’ve been friends for years, watching Aiden watch his ma like she’s something wonderful. It’s a good week. Aiden fits in with them in ways Lambert never expected, sitting at Lambert’s side and sleeping on a bedroll on the damn floor and helping Ma out with whatever she needs.

Lambert doesn’t always bring him, but when he has the chance, he does.

This time, the next autumn, they’re quieter—more tired—coming off a string of difficult hunts and an injury to Aiden’s knee. A long season, one that will only be followed with more and more. Ma waves them both inside with a frown, locks the door behind them, and stands in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips.

“What can I do?” she asks. She’s worried. She’s always worried; there’s nothing Lambert can do about it.

“Tea?” Aiden says, plastered against Lambert’s side and determined to slouch towards the floor. “Please.”

She bustles in the kitchen a second later, shooting Lambert a look like she really thinks Aiden can’t see it. Ceramic thuds against the wooden counter, and Lambert winces at the sound, sharp and grating in his ears.

He shoves Aiden unceremoniously down on the chaise. “Trousers off,” he says. “I’m checking your leg again.”

“Most men are a lot nicer about asking me to take my pants off,” Aiden replies, lips curling up into a wan smile, too tired to even bother quipping back properly. “My leg is fine, Lamb.”

“Oh, so why did I have to help you inside then?” he asks.

“Felt like being lazy,” Aiden tells him, but he does kick off his boots and shimmy his trousers down his hips. The claw mark under and up his knee has healed well in the last few weeks, already pink with scarring, but the ghoul had cut into the muscle, and Aiden had been walking on it before it could heal properly. “It really is fine, you know.”

Water boils over the hearth in the kitchen. Ma hums to herself and pretends she isn’t listening; he meets her eyes over the back of the chaise. “Injuries like this can fuck you up permanently, Aiden. Just let me check.”

Aiden very rarely puts up much argument when Lambert wants to do something, only if he thinks it’s a truly terrible idea—and then he’s usually right. It’s the same now. Aiden slumps back against the plush cushions in his gambeson and smalls, a comical sight, and lets Lambert check over the wound.

All in all, his leg is actually fine. He might have problems with it years and years down the line, if he lives that long. Still, Lambert takes the chance to massage the muscle around it so that it doesn’t lock up when he sleeps, already thinking of the recipe he has for scar balm in one of his journals. Aiden smiles down at him the whole time, calm and quiet, hands resting at his sides.

“You’re taking the bed tonight,” Lambert tells him. No argument there either, he’ll make sure of it.

“You’re as bossy as your mother,” Aiden says.

He grins; he can’t help it. “Gotta get it from somewhere, don’t I?”

Ma clears her throat from the kitchen. “Do you want tea or not?” she asks. “Because I can just pour this out if you’re gonna bully me in my own home. And put your damn trousers back on before I come over there.”

Aiden huffs a laugh, but he does what he’s told like he often does with Lambert, who tries not to mourn the loss of lean and corded muscle under his hands—don’t fucking think about that. They drink tea on the chaise together, armour and saddlebags scattered across the floor. Ma doesn’t comment on it, not when it’s so late at night, but Lambert knows he won’t hear the end of it come morning if he doesn’t clean it up quick enough.

Ma doesn’t ask about their hunts either. She will later, when they’re not so visibly tired. Aiden hasn’t done more than meditate for an hour or so for weeks. Lambert’s only managed to get marginally more, and it’s far from enough. But that’s the Path, that’s normal. It’s not the first time.

Aiden doesn’t stay awake much longer than it takes him to finish his tea, slumping against Lambert’s shoulder and smiling tiredly up at him whenever he checks on him. “Get the fuck to bed,” Lambert tells him, snatching the empty mug from his hand.

He doesn’t even get a grumpy little remark in return like he usually would. Aiden stands, blinking muzzily, and wanders into the bedroom with a lazy wave and nothing else. Ma chuckles at him, fondness in her eyes. It’s only the fourth time they’ve met.

The least Lambert can do after barging into her house, demanding tea and then barely saying a damn word is clean the dishes—even if he doesn’t have the energy to clean up the rest of the mess he made yet. He takes Ma’s mug from her too, ignoring her protests and huffing a laugh when she follows him into the kitchen anyway.

“You’re… You’re both alright, aren’t you?” she asks, a hand on his shoulder, a comforting warmth.

“Just tired, Ma. Long few weeks,” he replies, leaning back against the kitchen bench. For a moment he wishes he still had the vodka and Gull he’d brewed last winter. “We’ll rest up here a few days.”

“A week,” Ma says. No room for argument. A week it is. Bossy, Aiden had said; he wasn’t exactly wrong. Her face softens then, a smile so much like his own. “You’re good to him.”

Fuck, he hopes Aiden’s fallen asleep already. “I told you, we’ve got each other’s backs.”

She nods, hand slipping from his shoulder and her gaze darting towards the darkened bedroom hesitantly. “I think… I think he looks at you the way… the way people who care about each other are supposed to.”

“Ma—”

“You do too,” she says. There isn’t any room for incorrect interpretations. He knows exactly what she means, and it sinks it him like a stone.

He doesn’t. He can’t. That’s not how this works. Doesn’t fucking matter that he finds himself thinking about Aiden whenever they’re not travelling together. Doesn’t matter that he wants to know if Aiden’s hair is as soft as it looks or that he would take any bullshit excuse to get his hands on him. That’s not how this fucking works.

Lambert sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Leave it, Ma,” he grumbles, not wanting to snap at her. He promised himself he wouldn’t a long time ago, but the urge bites at him anyway. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath—he’s so damn tired. What the fuck could she have seen over tea and exhaustion? This woman who only knew love when it came in the form of a fist.

That’s unfair to her, and he damn well knows it.

“Lambert…” she whispers, and all he sees is worry, both founded and not.

“I’m going to bed.” It’s easier to run than to stay and say unforgivable shit that she will still forgive him for anyway. She doesn’t fucking deserve that. “I… Goodnight, Ma.”

He doesn’t wait for her to reply, just grabs his bedroll from the mess on the floor and walks as quietly as he can into the bedroom. It’s dusty, like it always is, his old journals resting neatly on the shelves and clothes tucked away in the drawers. Aiden is curled up under the blankets, facing the wall, heartbeat slow in sleep. Thank Melitele for small mercies.

Through the closed door, he hears Ma head into her own room and he sighs in frustration. Lambert spreads the bedroll out on the floor next to the bed, tries not to look at Aiden’s sleeping form—tries not to think about Ma in the kitchen, so fucking determined that Lambert can have impossible things.

“Your mother’s a smart woman, you know.” The words are muffled by the pillows, by the blankets, by Aiden’s thick exhaustion.

Lambert swallows, a lump in his throat and anger blooming in his chest. “Shut the fuck up,” he spits.

Aiden turns under the blankets, heartbeat still deceptively slow. He watches him and doesn’t say a word, so much expectation in his eyes. And want, hidden beneath it. A familiar look, one Lambert has been trying to ignore for months now. One he pretends he doesn’t share. One Ma can so easily see.

And then Aiden throws the corner of the blankets back, revealing a space just wide enough for Lambert to fit. A space they have never shared, not in all the camps and inn rooms they’ve been in together over the years.

Aiden smiles at him, soft and sleepy. “Get in the bed, Lamb,” he says. It’s not like Ma: Lambert knows he can say no to this, that Aiden won’t be mad at him if he does. But he thinks about it, glancing down at the bedroll on the floor, about the cold autumn night seeping through the walls and Ma telling him that they obviously fucking care about each other, forgetting again that Aiden could hear her the whole damn time.

It’s Ma’s house, and he brought Aiden here again. Of course she saw what was right in front of her face, as much as he has been determined to believe it isn’t there. It’s Ma’s house; they’re safe here. They always have been.

Lambert takes a deep breath, steels himself, and feels his exhaustion deep in his bones. “Fuck, alright.”

The bed is body warm when he climbs into it, trying not to look at Aiden’s face. If he does, he knows he’ll reach out, brush his fingers over his cheek and the shell of his pointed ear. He might even kiss him, learn the feeling of his stubble on his skin.

It’s too much. He can’t do it, not yet. But he can pull the blankets over them both, and he can let Aiden sling an arm over his waist. And he can fall asleep with his nose buried in Aiden’s hair and Aiden smiling against his shoulder. Isn’t that enough? Is this what Ma meant?

The rest of it can come later.

Ma has never looked this damn smug before. It’s spring, slowly crawling towards what will be a disgustingly hot summer, after a winter spent far away from Aiden, and Lambert can’t help but admit that he’s excited for a few days to not have to worry about all the damn drowners determined to haunt every single body of water he’s dared to go near.

He and Aiden had met up in Ban Gleán and made their way through Aedirn without ever saying anything about where they were going. A silent agreement. The one place Aiden knows for sure Lambert will always want to go.

It’s all going fine until Lambert comes inside from patching up the hole in the lean-to’s roof, when Aiden kisses him on the cheek and tells him there’s a bath ready. Painfully domestic, and it makes his heart pound in his chest.

And when he moves away, Ma watches him from in front of the fireplace, eyebrows raised and a smug little smirk on her face.

“Yeah, Ma,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I know. You can see everything.”

“Only took you how long to realise that?” she asks, and Aiden laughs loudly behind him. Godsdamned traitor.

He laughs mockingly at them both and goes off to take his bath, pretending all the while that he can’t hear Ma asking Aiden as many questions as she possibly can about the two of them. Only some of them he answers, ones that don’t delve too deep into their privacy, but he doesn’t ever remind her that Lambert can bloody hear them.

When she’d last seen them, they’d spent little more than a week moving between sharing the bed and Lambert sleeping in the bedroll on the floor when it all got too much. Nothing more than that. He hadn’t been ready. That hadn’t come until weeks later, out on the Path, when they’d both needed comfort after another bullshit town and Aiden had kissed him with a gentleness he didn’t deserve or expect.

It isn’t something he is used to yet, having Aiden close like this, like it’s still not something that is safe to have. He has it anyway, the same way he has Ma despite the world’s determination that he shouldn’t.

He sinks into the hot water and lets their muffled whispers wash over him, for once not bothering to bite back the smile on his face.

When he’s done, he grumbles and groans when he wanders back out again, a performance of annoyance for them both. They’re sitting together on the loveseat, leaning together like little conspirators, and Lambert’s chest clenches tight at the sight. He had known Ma would like Aiden—that she’d like anyone who stuck with him like Aiden did—but he’d never been sure about the opposite. Now, though, he almost wants to keep Aiden here forever for the way he grins at her, boyish and charming.

“Aiden won’t tell me what made you pull your head out of your arse,” Ma says when she sees him, smug smile back on her face.

“What makes you think I’m going to tell you?” Lambert replies. His expression is identical to hers, and he doesn’t bother to pretend that he can’t see Aiden’s gaze flicking between the two of them with so much curiosity. “Who says I even needed to?”

Both of them give his unimpressed looks then, and he sneers jokingly at them. Ma stands and walks over to him, and he knows before she gets there that she’s going to grab his face gently between her hands, and he will have to look at just how old she has gotten. She is in her sixties now, hair more grey than brown, and she moves slower with each passing day.

He tries not to think about it, but it’s hard when it’s right in front of his damn face.

“I’m happy for you both,” Ma whispers. Her face softens, and her wrinkled hands are far more gentle on his face than he expects them to be. “Really.”

Lambert huffs, glancing over at Aiden, who watches them with that same awestruck look he had the first time he met Ma. “I know,” he replies.

He thinks then of going back to Kaer Morhen, of an entire winter pretending he doesn’t have either of these things, pretending that there isn’t someone out there who can be happy for a witcher—two witchers. It hurts more than he will ever care to admit.

He thinks of how lonely he will be, and then he tries not to think about that at all.

She lets him go, and he moves for Aiden as though some invisible string connects them. Aiden opens his arms for him immediately, and smiles when Lambert presses a tentative kiss to his forehead. It’s only been a few months since they’ve started whatever they’re calling this. Lambert’s still getting used to it, learning how his own body wants to move and how Aiden’s can move with his. Still learning to seek out what he wants when he wants it, still learning how to do so.

He’s never really been very good at that, but it feels easier here—safer. So many things are safer here. He can act on urges long buried without fear of repercussion.

Which means he lets himself fall onto the chaise and into Aiden’s arms. He knows he’s tense, he knows Aiden is trying to arrange them into something that is comfortable for both of them. He knows, too, that he could simply sit somewhere else, but he wants to be close. There hasn’t been as much chance as he would like on the road here.

Fuck, he really doesn’t know how to do this.

Aiden huffs a laugh at him and holds him tight, guides Lambert’s head down to rest on his shoulder. If only he could understand how this comes so easily to Aiden, how he can be so comfortable when Ma is cooking away in the kitchen nearby, especially when he still sometimes stares at her like she doesn’t make any sense to him.

Relaxing should not take this much effort, not when he already knows he’s safe. As if his ma would ever tell him he’s not being a proper witcher by letting Aiden’s arm curl around his waist. She was the one who told him they looked at each other like they care about each other, she’s happy for them. She’s the only one that would be.

Lambert slumps further into Aiden’s side, feels the slow rise and fall of his body as he breathes. He could meditate like this, to Aiden’s breathing and his ma’s humming in the kitchen.

“I’m also glad you got your head out of your arse, you know,” Aiden whispers, turning to press his nose into the damp mess of Lambert’s hair.

“You’ve made that plenty fucking clear,” he grumbles, then wants to kick himself for sounding pissed off about the whole thing. “Me too.”

Aiden tenses minutely beneath him, barely noticeable if Lambert weren’t paying such close attention. “Oh? No more telling me you think it’s a bad idea?” he asks with faux levity.

“Not here,” Lambert says. Not anymore. He doesn’t have the energy for it, not after all the time he’s spent fighting it and failing. He still thinks it sometimes, the same way he still thinks having Ma in his life is a bad idea, but he’s had her the whole damn time he’s been on the Path, and Aiden’s been with him in one way or another for years now.

He gets a kiss to his hair for his trouble. “I’ll take it,” Aiden replies, then he pauses for a moment. “I like it here.”

“I know,” Lambert says. He can see it, he can feel it, Aiden relaxing the same way he does. As though nothing outside could ever be a problem, even in a town so godsdamned suspicious of them. They don’t know about Aiden yet, but he can’t imagine they’ll be happy about a second witcher in their midst. A problem for later. “Why do you think I keep bringing you back?”

Aiden hums, nose brushing Lambert’s temple, as Ma comes wandering back into the room with bowls of soup. She stops and stares at them for a long second, a smile blooming on her face. Happy for them, she’d said. Of course she meant it.

He pulls himself away from Aiden to eat, but their shoulders brush together with every movement. Ma perches in her armchair, watching them over mouthfuls of soup. She asks Lambert about his winter, as she always does, but she asks Aiden’s about his too, and Lambert tries not to snort into his food at the stilted and confused answers Aiden gives, like he doesn’t understand why she’s asking.

“You do not have a keep like Lambert’s School?” she asks, brow furrowed in what Lambert knows is worry. He’s seen it aimed at him enough times by now.

“We did, long before I was born. The Cats are nomadic now, we travel south of the Yaruga, all the way down to Nilfgaard,” Aiden explains. “I was too far north to reach last winter’s meeting place on time. Finding them after that is often mostly chance.”

It takes a moment for his ma to respond, watching them both like she’s trying to make sense of them—of Aiden—the expression on her face reminiscent of the ones she shot Lambert when he first explained what being a witcher is like years and years ago.

“Come here,” she tells him. “Whenever you need to, Aiden. Come right here.”

“I…” Aiden trails off. Lambert doesn’t bother to hide his smile, tiny as it is. “Of course, Rosalie. Thank you.”

Ma smiles. “You don’t need to thank me,” she says.

For a moment, Aiden looks like he’s about to argue, but then he glances at Lambert and shoves his spoon in his mouth to stifle it. Enough to make his brow furrow, enough to make him frown, but not enough for him to tell Aiden to speak his mind.

“While we’re talking about it,” Ma says, putting her bowl down on the table next to her armchair and clapping her hands together in a way that makes Lambert’s stomach sink. “When you are both here, please no fucking while I’m still awake. My hearing might not be as good as yours, but it’s good enough, and there are things a mother does not need to hear.”

Aiden splutters over his soup, chortling loudly. Lambert doesn’t know whether to glare at him or Ma, who is looking far too pleased with herself. His shoulders bunch up around his ears and there’s a part of him that wants to flinch away entirely, but he forces it down, even if he cannot make himself relax again.

“Fuck’s sake, Ma,” he mutters, just loud enough for her to hear.

She raises her eyebrows at him. “I think it’s a reasonable request, don’t you?” she asks. Aiden’s still fucking giggling.

“Yes, I get it,” Lambert grinds out between gritted teeth, then elbows Aiden in the ribs. “Quit fucking laughing, would you?”

If anything, it only makes Aiden laugh harder. “Don’t think anyone’s told me not to fuck before,” he says once he gets his breathing under control. “Especially not someone’s mother.”

“Shut up and eat your food.”

In return for his grumbling, Lambert gets a soft kiss to his temple. Ma smiles all the while, smugness settling into something calmer, like she can’t think of doing anything else. She might be fucking determined to embarrass him, but not out of animosity, not like his brothers would.

Slowly, his shoulders come down. Slowly, he relaxes again, arm pressed to Aiden’s. He imagines days of this, of safety and calmness and the two people he cares about most so close to him, and he almost can’t imagine leaving.

The way the Path is, it is impossible for Aiden to be with him every time he visits Ma. This is one such occasion, but at the very least he’s bringing a gift for her from Aiden. A book he found in Toussaint, one he carried with him all the way to meeting with Lambert and parting again, specifically for her.

It’s early enough in the afternoon that Ma will still be at work, what little of it she does now. She does repair work mostly, her hands too slow to make new clothes at the speed people need them done by, but she still takes scraps home to make things for him. For Aiden now too. They’d left last time with a new pair of gloves each and Aiden had stared at them like he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with them.

It’ll only be a few more years before they stop letting her work at all, but that’s what the coin he keeps in his room is for. Savings so that she can still feed herself should the damn stupid fucks in town decide not to support her as she grows older. Because they will, that’s the consequence of letting him stay—of him coming back again and again to her.

The house is as quiet as he expects, which gives him time to set his horse up under the lean-to and unpack his things, stashing the coin in his room and resting the book from Aiden on the arm of her chair.

He has an hour to himself, in which he spreads out on the chaise and simply stops for a while. He’s still there when Ma comes home, looking as tired as he feels, and they smile at each other across the room.

“No Aiden?” she asks.

“Hello to you too, Ma,” he answers, not even bothering to get up. “Aiden’s spending the winter with his School. He got something for you though.”

Ma makes for her chair, collapsing into it the same way he did on the chaise. “You didn’t want to go with him?” she asks.

“Cats and Wolves don’t get along, Ma, you know that. His lot would sooner kill me than let me travel with them,” Lambert says, jaw clenched tight and a rueful twist to his lips. “And mine would do the same to him.”

Ma always has the same look on her face when he tells her something of the Path and of his School: a haunted thing, wide eyes and parted lips, like she is trying to pretend she isn’t horrified. “Am I the only who knows about him?” she asks.

“Who else would I tell?” he replies. “He got you some pirate story, by the way. He thought you might like it.”

Ma’s hand curls around the spine of the book as she draws it into her lap. “I like him,” she whispers.

“I know you do.” She’s made that more than obvious over the last few years, welcoming him in like it’s nothing simply because he’s Lambert’s. They cook in the kitchen together now, and Aiden is with him as often as possible when he comes to visit, even if it is well out of the way of where he wants to go. Because he wants to ask Rosalie something, because he wants to not worry about a contract for a couple of weeks, because he wants to share a bed with Lambert without having to look over his shoulder.

“Do you mind handling dinner for me?” Ma asks, waving a hand towards the kitchen. “Work was…”

“I’ve got it.”

It’s not strange without Aiden here, but it is noticeable. It has to have been about a year since he was last here without him, and Lambert had forgotten how quiet he and Ma often are in just their own company. Aiden brings a loudness to their house, a welcome one.

Lambert cooks and he thinks and he listens to his ma read in her armchair, muttering along to the book like it’s a song. And all the while, there is a thought that lingers in the back of his mind, one that has not surfaced in decades.

There is no reason not to voice it. “If you like Aiden,” he says, “you would have liked Voltehre too.”

It’s been years since he’s spoken of him, the last time being when he haltingly told Aiden about him, woken from a nightmare and needing to talk about it. He can’t remember if he ever told Ma his name.

The armchair creaks, and Ma’s soft footsteps head into the kitchen. Always so hesitant with him when he speaks of things like this, when she doesn’t need to be. “I can imagine I would have,” she says, placing a hand on his shoulder. This would be so much easier if she stayed in the sitting room. “What was he like?”

He snorts despite himself. “Too much like Aiden, pissed me off when I met him too, trying to keep me company when it was the last damn thing I wanted. But he was kind, funny, good at sneaking past our trainers,” he says. It’s the truth, but the memories are so faded by now that he doesn’t remember the details. But he does remember thinking, in the months before Aiden kissed him for the first time, how similar he felt with him. “It was his idea, coming down here. I told him about… about our family, and he said he’d come down here with me.”

So much shit would be different if Voltehre had survived. Maybe he wouldn’t have to pretend he didn’t have his ma every winter, maybe it wouldn’t have taken him so long to introduce her to someone. Maybe he wouldn’t have met Aiden at all.

“He sounds like a good man,” Ma says, and Lambert has to bit back telling her that Voltehre never got to be a man at all. “You loved him.”

Not a question, of course. She knows him better than anyone. This is the woman who could see exactly how he and Aiden looked at each other, long before he was ready to admit it. “As close to that as I could get back then, I think,” he rasps.

“Oh, my Little Lamb,” she says, and it’s been so long since she’s called him that that it takes his damn breath away. “Aiden too?”

“Aiden too,” he replies with no hesitation. “He knows, probably.”

Ma’s hand slips from his shoulder and she rests at the bench next to him. “He’s very good for you,” she says. “I can imagine your Voltehre was too. I’m so… I’m so glad you have someone, Lambert. You know I worry about you out there, I’m glad he’s there to keep you safe.”

He doesn’t correct her like he once would; he’d be lying if he did. “Me too, Ma. I’ll try to bring him next time.”

“You better,” she says, heading back to her armchair. “And tell him to stop buying me shit. If I wanted more books, I’d get them myself.”

He barks a laugh at her. “I can’t stop him from doing fucking anything,” he says. It’s mostly true, at least when it comes to anything that’s not a contract. Especially when it comes to Ma. So many of the books she has now come from one of them. He can’t even see her and he still knows she’s rolling her eyes.

It doesn’t stop her from finishing the book over the course of the two weeks that he stays with her, flipping through the pages whenever she’s not at work or spending time with Lambert. They cook and they clean and they lie around drinking wine, and the house is quiet without Aiden in it. They do not speak about Voltehre again, but they don’t need to.

When he’s getting ready to leave, Ma asks him for another book, just like Lambert knew she would.

“Ma’s going to kill you,” Lambert growls, slinging Aiden’s arm over his shoulder again. “You’re damn lucky I don’t.”

“You wouldn’t,” Aiden rasps, grinning. There’s blood on his cheek still, old and dried. They hobble up the stairs together, Aiden’s arm slung over his shoulders. It’s early in the morning, the sun only just about to rise, and the streets are still empty enough that no one notices him dragging a wounded witcher into his mother’s house.

“Yeah, well, you’re sure as fuck testing that right now,” he says, fishing his key out from his pocket. If he’s lucky, Ma will already be awake and he can dump Aiden’s stupid arse into the bathtub in her room without disturbing her too much.

Aiden grunts as they shuffle awkwardly into the house. “I’m fine,” he says, as if his leg hadn’t completely given out from under him the second he climbed down from his horse when they’d arrived.

Lambert scoffs. Whatever he wants to say is interrupted by Ma bursting out her room bleary-eyed and messy-haired. He knows exactly when she’s seen Aiden slumped against him, seen the blood on his trousers and tunic, and then she’s rushing into Lambert’s room, where his spare suture kit lives.

“Don’t need it, Ma!” he calls, walking Aiden towards her room. “He’s all stitched up already, just needs a clean.”

“I’m fine,” Aiden says again. He sounds tired, worryingly so. Lambert rests him on the edge of the tub, hidden behind a partition that needs replacing soon, and kneels down to take of his boots. “Don’t need you to do that.”

Lambert raises an eyebrow at him. “Gonna bend down and do it yourself, then?” he asks, and Aiden only frowns at him, letting him unlace his boots without another argument. The room is quiet, filled only with their breathing, and Lambert still is not as gentle as he should be, tugging and pulling and dumping the boots off to the side.

Ma bustles into the room, dropping two buckets of water next to the partition. Lambert hadn’t even heard her head out the back. “What happened?” she asks.

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Lambert grumbles. He pours the water into the tub, heats it with Igni, and watches Aiden wince as he pulls off his tunic. “Found him a couple of hours outside town like this, just fucking sitting there.”

Aiden glares at him now. Lambert knows exactly what he’s doing, because Aiden shouldn’t have been sitting there for as long as he was, waiting for his body to heal, not when there is a safe place for him to go right here.

Ma plants her hands on her hips, and Lambert bites back a grin. “And why didn’t you come here?” she asks, voice hard in a way that would always made tiny child Lambert shrink back a little.

“I can handle myself,” Aiden replies, just as hard, no nonsense, as though he doesn’t ask Lambert for help constantly when they’re walking the Path together, pestering him to do whatever he doesn’t want to. “This is yours and Lambert’s home. I won’t come barging into the middle of that. Especially when I don’t need to.”

It makes them both freeze, Lambert and his ma, and then Ma’s striding forward and cupping his face the same way she does to Lambert, hands on either side of his jaw. His eyes widen, and Lambert sees him flinch, but he doesn’t push her away. He never would.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Ma says, serious but soft now. “Whenever you need to, you come here. I don’t give a fuck if Lambert is here or not, and you shouldn’t either. This could be your home as much as it ours, understand? Now get yourself clean, and next time, you come straight here. You get me?”

Aiden blinks. The ties of his tunic are half undone and the water is slowly going cold behind him, but Ma’s hands don’t stray from his face. “I get you,” he replies, quiet. Not quite reprimanded, but maybe something close, something a little shy.

Ma nods and steps away, patting Lambert on the shoulder when she passes. She looks tired, barely awake, but she could tell someone off no matter her state—could probably do it in her sleep if she really wanted to.

In her stead, Aiden still stands against the tub, looking for all the world like he doesn’t know what to do now. Lambert rolls his eyes at him. “Get the fuck in the bath already,” he says, and tugs Aiden’s tunic over his head.

He ends up on his knees behind the bath, rubbing oils and whatever else in Aiden’s hair. Weeks since they’ve seen each other, and this is the reunion they get. He’ll take this little comfort though, Aiden’s head tilted back against the lip of the tub, his eyes closed and a pleased smile on his face.

Lambert swallows, feels words in the back of his throat, a jumble he struggles to untangle. “You’re not—Fuck, you’re not intruding, Aiden. Where did you get that shit from?”

Aiden cracks his eyes open and glances up at him through the wet mess of his hair. “I’m a guest—”

“You’re not. You know you’re damn well not,” Lambert says, tugging at a lock of his hair. “You think I bring anyone else here? It’s just you, Aiden. If I didn’t want you here, I never would have introduced you to her in the first place. So quit being a fucking moron.”

A beat of silence, one that is immediately followed by Aiden’s soft laughter. “You take after her, you know,” he says. “Pair of stubborn bastards.”

“Ma will smack you if she hears you call her that,” Lambert tells him, but he feels himself grinning anyway. “Always did take after her, just didn’t know for a long time.”

He is his father. He is also Varin. He is also Voltehre. But he is also his mama, and he has always been his mama in all the ways that matter, including in this. If it gets Aiden to look after himself properly, to come here when he should, then he is more than happy that they behave the same way.

“It’s nice,” Aiden mutters, “to see where you come from.”

Lambert’s hands freeze in Aiden’s hair. He doesn’t know how the fuck to respond to that, but he never does whenever Aiden gets like this, strangely sweet and genuine and so many things he has never been prepared for. So, he doesn’t. He chooses another avenue entirely.

“How’s your thigh?”

Aiden glances back at him, head tilted further over the lip of the tub, a knowing smile on his face. As always. Bastard thinks he knows everything. “Could do with another Swallow, if you’ve got one,” he answers. “Then some sleep.”

“Course I’ve got one,” Lambert says. “And then you can use our fucking bed, got it?”

Aiden pushes himself up then, water sloshing and spilling onto the floor. He stares at Lambert like he’s surprised by him, like Lambert hasn’t already said it tonight, like he hasn’t already proved it by bringing Aiden here again and again.

And then his face settles into something sweeter, the same kind of expression he’d had in the seconds before he’d kissed Lambert for the first time. He kisses him again now, soft and wet and slow. Their kisses are often rushed things, bites pressed to skin and something possessive in every movement. Rarely, after a good fuck or when one of them is recuperating from some bullshit injury, they will be softer—Aiden will be softer, Lambert is still figuring out how to do more than simply go along with it.

Lambert sinks into it, ignoring the water Aiden is dripping onto him, then shoves him back into the tub the second they draw away from each other. Laughter spills into the room.

When he gets out of the tub and dries himself off, Lambert gives him another Swallow and Ma makes him eat the oatmeal she’d been making while they were in her room. Aiden does it without argument, watching them both with a wistful expression that only reminds Lambert of the bath. Aiden sees his mama in him, and that’s more of a comfort than he ever expected.

Lambert sends him off to bed with the promise to join him later, if only for a few hours. He’d travelled through the night in an unusual desperation to get to Ma’s house, to rest somewhere warm and comfortable. With Aiden. He’s exhausted.

Ma rubs his shoulder when Aiden disappears into their bedroom. “I’ll make sure he listens,” she says. He knows she will. “So will you.”

Lambert rolls his eyes. “Obviously, Ma.” As if he hasn’t been trying to do that already.

Aiden might be just as stubborn as both of them.

“Shit,” Lambert hisses, freezing in the bedroom doorway with Aiden behind him.

Ma hadn’t woken when he’d called out to her, and she hasn’t woken now, sweat soaking her skin and her pillow. She smells sick, the stench thick in his nostrils. There’s no medicine on the bedside table, no empty bottles, just his mama, breathing ragged in the silent afternoon.

“Fuck!”

Aiden moves gracefully out of his way, and Lambert sweeps into the kitchen, opening every cupboard in reach. If she listened to him, one of them will hold the ingredients he needs to make medicine. Something to combat what is definitely a flu. Something to help her sleep. Something to deal with any pain she has.

Distantly, he can hear Aiden go for the well out the back, filling a bucket with cool water. Lambert hadn’t even needed to ask.

He has everything he needs in the kitchen except beggartick, which he can do without if he has to, but it will help with pain if he mixes it in correctly. Ma wheezes from the bedroom, and it doesn’t seem to matter how much noise he makes banging around in her kitchen, she does not wake up.

Aiden bursts back into the house while Lambert sets himself up at the bench, bucket of water in hand. “Cloth,” he says, and Lambert throws him one wordlessly. “Have everything you need?”

“No beggartick,” he replies, the words scratching their way up his throat.

“Swap,” Aiden says, thrusting the bucket towards him. Water splashes on the floor. “There should be some growing nearby, I’ll grab it. Go cool her down.”

If he weren’t so tense, so stressed, Lambert would kiss him. He grabs the bucket, darts into Ma’s bedroom, and listens to the back door slam shut again. Ma groans in her sleep, eyebrows furrowing. Lambert sits on the edge of the bed, dips the cloth in the water and wrings it out. There isn’t much he can do right now, not until Aiden get back, but he mops at her forehead and temples as best he can.

This might be worse than the last time. She looks thin and pale and so fucking old. Too old, old enough for this to kill her.

He folds the cloth up, places it on her forehead, and pulls the sweat-stained blanket off the bed. There’s another in his room, and he already knows he won’t be sleeping tonight to use it. He tucks her in like she’s a child, like she did to him in the early days, when they were both still so damn young.

He should be back in the kitchen now, prepping what he can before Aiden comes back, but he can’t make himself move. “Mama,” he whispers. How long has she been like this? How long has it been since any of the townsfolk checked on her?

Or do they leave her to her own devices, now that she’s almost too old to work anymore, because she is the mother of a witcher?

He knows the answer without even having to ask aloud, and there’s a part of him that wants to rage through the town until they listen, even if it would only get him killed.

She doesn’t wake, but her face does relax, and it’s enough for him to finally go back into the kitchen. He preps the ingredients like he is a ghost outside his own body. A blink and they’re done, and Aiden is bursting back into the house with beggartick blossoms held tight in his hand.

They’re passed over silently, and Aiden darts back into the bedroom while Lambert gets to work. It takes longer than he would like to make the medicine—the same length of time it always does. His mama isn’t going to get anymore sick in the hour it takes, not when Aiden is there to keep an eye on her, but she isn’t going to get better either.

When it’s done, he pours it into a mug and waits for it to cool down. He’s restless, pacing the length of the house and checking ma’s bedroom constantly. Aiden sits at her side, pets her hand and changes the cloth on her forehead whenever he needs to. He glances at Lambert, a silent check in, and Lambert can’t make himself do anything more than nod.

The medicine cools; Lambert rushes into the bedroom with the mug in hand. “Mama,” he says as he places it on the bedside table, nudging her shoulder with his free hand. “Mama, you need to wake up.”

It takes a moment, longer than he’d like, but she does stir. Groggy, a furrow to her brow, she looks at Aiden and whispers, “Little Lamb?”

“Over here, Ma,” Lambert says, drawing her attention. She frowns at him, blinks slowly, and says nothing. “I need you to sit up. I have medicine for you, then you can go back to sleep.”

Aiden helps her up, quiet in his concern, his hand between her shoulder blades. Mama’s hand is sweaty when she tries to take the mug from Lambert, and she makes a little noise of protest in the back of her throat. He helps her, tipping it slowly so she can take small sips until the mug is empty.

“Feel like shit,” she grumbles.

“I know, Mama,” he replies.

“Rest, Rosalie,” Aiden tells her, lying her back down and adjusting the blankets around her. “We’re both here if you need us.”

Her brow furrows again, like every word takes so much focus to understand. “Oh, Aiden,” she says. “Good. He needs you.”

There’s a smile on Aiden’s face, small and a little sad. By the time Mama drifts off to sleep again, he hasn’t said anything. They both already know it’s the truth. Silence pervades the room, only interrupted by Mama’s occasional snuffles. He’ll need to wake her again in a few hours, give her more medicine.

If the sickness grows any worse, she could—

He’s not going to think about that.

Lambert stands, strides from the room, drops himself into the armchair in the sitting room and puts his head in his hands. Footsteps follow him, of course, and it is only a matter of seconds before Aiden crouches down in front of him.

“Lamb,” he says, achingly gentle. “She’s going to be alright.”

“She’s getting too old to stay by herself,” he mutters. He has known this for a while, a constant reminder every time he sees her. It’s one thing to know it will happen; it’s another to see it.

“What will you do?” Aiden asks. As if he doesn’t already know.

“Stay here, until—” He swallows. He can’t say it. His whole life he has known that there was a chance he would live longer than her. Every child should. But… But…

Aiden cups his jaw, tilts his head up until they’re looking eye to eye. “I’ll stay with you,” he whispers, and he shakes his head when Lambert scoffs. “I will. Maybe not all the time. Come and go when there are contracts around, but I’m not going to leave either of you alone in this, Lamb.”

It’s a stupid decision on both their parts. There’s war on the horizon. Geralt’s gotten himself involved in some bullshit again. He’d spent the winter listening to a little Cintran girl’s predictions of his brothers’ deaths. It’s safer for them to keep moving, for only one witcher to linger at a time, but he knows that nothing he says will convince Aiden otherwise.

And… he knows, even though he doesn’t want to admit it, that he will need someone with him for this. He cannot look after his mama alone, cannot watch the end of it alone.

He will have to tell his brothers and Vesemir what he plans to do, if he won’t be coming back to Kaer Morhen, but not for another year or two at least. His mama is only sick for now. She is not so unwell that she needs him around all the time, though she would probably ask. She has not asked in years, but she will now.

“Not for another few years,” he says, leaning into Aiden’s palm. “We’ve still got a little time.”

Aiden brushes a strand of loose hair behind his ear and stands. “We’ll make a plan,” he whispers, bending down to kiss Lambert’s forehead. “Now go back in there with her. I’ll make us something to eat.”

Lambert does exactly what he’s told, sitting by his ma’s side and eating what he’s given, smiling at her when she wakes up a couple of hours later to drink more medicine. Pretending that he isn’t scared, because a witcher doesn’t get scared, of everything that is still to come.

There’s a horse already resting in the lean-to when Lambert arrives, and a grin spreads unbidden on his face. It’s been months since they’ve seen each other, the harvests rough and so too the Path—a result of the war slowly climbing up the continent—but they’d agreed to meet here, even if Lambert is a week or so later than planned.

A handful of people had seen him walk through town, but none of them called out to him or screamed in his face about another witcher lingering about. As shit as it is to have to make Aiden hide and sneak around, he knows the only reason he is allowed to stay is because half the damn town knew him as a child. The alderman helped bury his father, after all. No one had done anything like that for Aiden, not here at least.

Ma is the only one inside when he wanders in, reading in her armchair, her cane resting nearby. She doesn’t grab it when she hauls herself up, even though she definitely should, waving away Lambert’s grumbles all the while. He holds her to him and tries not to think about how frail her body is now.

“Go put your things away,” she says. “Aiden is looking after your garden. He’ll be back soon.”

Their garden. The first step in their plan. A small patch of land to grow the ingredients they need for potions and medicines and who knows what else, where Aiden will be able to stock up when he comes and goes for contracts, and Lambert will not have to worry about having what he needs to treat Ma’s growing aches and pains. There are still so many things they still have to implement, and he is not stupid enough to think that Ma doesn’t know what they’re doing, but she hasn’t said anything yet.

Lambert heads for their room, dropping his bags at the foot of the bed. Aiden’s are already there, his swords leaning against the wall and his armour a messy pile nearby. Lazy bastard.

He pulls his most recent journal out of his rucksack. It’s been full for weeks now, notes on medicines and poultices gathered from herbalists across Aedirn and Temeria littering most of the pages. He puts it with the rest of them, a green ribbon down the spine to delineate it from the rest, for when he inevitably needs it. Aiden’s own are scattered among them, a recent development, but a welcome one.

Everywhere he looks, he sees little pieces of Aiden. Journals and clothes and strange little titbits from the Path. He fills the room better than Lambert ever had, makes it feel like they both belong there, even if he is messy about it.

The back door swings open, and Lambert hears Aiden come stomping into the house. “Rosalie!” he calls, even though Ma can definitely hear him—she’s not going deaf yet. “Do not tell Lambert, but I hate looking after his hellebore. If they start wilting one more time, I’m throwing them in the nearest river.”

“Of course, dear,” Ma says, shooting Lambert a wry look when he wanders out to lean against the door frame, perfectly in Aiden’s field of view.

“Ah,” says Aiden, frozen by the kitchen, a sheepish grin blooming on his face. “When did you get here?”

“Hello to you too,” Lambert replies. “About ten minutes ago.”

He looks good. He looks happy and healthy and uninjured, slinking across the room towards him. It’s been too damn long. Lambert reaches for him, but Aiden ducks his hand to slide around behind him, arms wrapping around his waist and curling against his stomach. Aiden presses his nose to the back of Lambert’s neck and Lambert, relieved and tired all in one, slumps back against him.

“Hello,” Aiden whispers.

“Throw my hellebore into the river and I’ll never bring you Gull again,” Lambert says. He places a hand over Aiden’s, squeezing tight, and ignores the way his ma pretends she is still reading her book, even when her eyes are flicking to them over the top of it.

Aiden hums into his skin. “Noted,” he says.

Lambert should strip out of his armour and have a quick wipe down in the bath, but it’s been a long few months alone on the Path and he isn’t ready to step away from Aiden. If someone had told him years ago that he would feel like this about another witcher—about anyone other than Voltehre—he would have punched them in the face.

He can’t bring himself to regret it now though, choosing Aiden, as hard as it sometimes is. Lambert is a witcher who has what he wants, despite everything.

“You stink,” Aiden grumbles, but he doesn’t let go.

“No shit, I just got in,” Lambert says.

“Hmm, you’re late,” Aiden replies, kissing the back of his neck. “Had me worried.”

He shouldn’t smile, but he does anyway, as Ma pointedly flips a page in her book. “Flash flooding, had to take a detour, then got caught up in a contract, but I’m fine,” he explains. Fine, but stinking, apparently.

Aiden must have gotten here exactly when they’d agreed, and the thought makes something pleasant squirm in his stomach. It isn’t often that Aiden gets here before him, and he knows of only one time that he’s visited without Lambert at all—only a couple of days a year or so back, when he happened to be passing through after leaving Lambert in Kaedwen for the winter, but Ma had talked about it fondly.

He’s a week late, but they’ve still got a couple more here, or as long as Aiden wants to spend cooped up in Ma’s house. A week might have been too much for him already, but he’s been trying to stay longer and longer, so that he can get used to it for when it becomes a necessity. Maybe, by then, Lambert will be able to convince the townsfolk that two witchers aren’t that fucking bad. All part of the plan, kind of.

Eventually, he has to step out of Aiden’s arms, if only to bathe and put away his armour. After, he lounges on the chaise and listens to Ma tell him about the town gossip, even though he doesn’t care much for it. Why would he? He knows them only from his childhood and their current animosity towards him. Aiden likes it though, peppering her with questions like he’s been living there his whole life. It makes Lambert snort with laughter.

The days pass the same as they always do when it’s the three of them. Ma doesn’t work anymore, but she does go out to the market when she can, and she picks up the little scraps of fabric from the tailor’s so that she has something to do with her hands—she’s got a coat in the making for Aiden, one that won’t be done for a while.

Lambert looks after the garden, including the damn hellebore, which is fine, actually; Aiden’s just being dramatic. He replenishes their potions while Aiden fixes up the draft coming in through their bedroom. A thousand little things that always need fixing, but neither of them complain about it.

Of a night, Aiden helps Ma in the kitchen, deliberately annoying her until she shoos him out with a flick of her dishcloth. Lambert would think she’d have learned by now that he likes to antagonise people almost as much as Lambert himself, but she still lets him follow her around for a little while.

Lambert likes watching them more than he could ever say. The first time he brought Aiden here, he had hoped they would get along, and knew that they would at least respect each other for Lambert’s sake. But to see them here like this, laughing like children in the kitchen while dinner simmers away over the hearth, it makes something warm settle deep in his chest.

Ma loves Aiden, and not just because Lambert does.

“Go pester Lambert, for Melitele’s sake,” Ma chides. “I swear, you’re worse than he is sometimes.”

“Do not pester Lambert, thank you very much,” Lambert calls from the chaise. He’s not doing much of anything except watching them, a well-earned break from a day spent maintaining the house and garden.

He is not so lucky. Aiden comes sauntering over to rest on the arm of the chaise near Lambert’s head, a grin on his face. Lambert groans, pretends to be put out, and is pleasantly surprised by the fingers that card through his hair. Nothing else comes; Aiden talks to Ma while she bustles around the kitchen and scratches at Lambert’s scalp.

One day, they’ll manage to convince her to let them cook more often, to just fucking rest for once. But not today. She jabs a finger at Aiden any time he dares to move from the chaise, and Lambert doesn’t bother to smother his laughter.

He thinks of days of this, years of this, even though it will be hard sometimes watching his mama grow even older, but he thinks of days filled with comfort and laughter and Aiden’s fingers in his hair, of not having to be a witcher for longer than he’s ever considered. He doesn’t even have to say or do anything, he could watch Aiden with Ma and not have to worry about a thing.

Not much longer before he gets to have that. A couple more years; they’re still preparing, after all, but it will come sooner than he expects. Aiden’s fingers run through his hair, and Ma chatters in the kitchen, and Lambert makes himself not think about anything except where he is right now.

It takes him weeks to make it back to Aedirn after he leaves Novigrad. Geralt had asked him to go back to Kaer Morhen, return the favour and help him out with whatever Ciri has gotten herself into, but he can’t. Not yet.

He needs to tell Ma. He—He needs his ma.

In his fifties and desperate for his mother. The only person who wouldn’t look down on him for that is…

Fucking dead.

It’s late, pitch dark and the sky full of clouds. Ma will be asleep. He almost doesn’t have it in him to wake her. Almost.

Key in the lock, door open and shut, his bags dropped on a floor in a heap. He wants to follow them down and forces himself to stay upright anyway. The door to his and Aiden’s room is shut, and Ma’s is just a little bit open. An invitation, even though he can hear her snoring softly inside.

Boots off, Lambert stumbles into her bedroom. She’s burrowed under the covers, hair whiter than it was last time he saw her. Months ago, with Aiden, right before they split for too damn long. If he’d—if they’d decided to meet up again sooner, then… Then.

What if’s are pointless. He knows that; it doesn’t stop him from thinking about them though.

Ma is curled on her side when he stumbles closer to her, drooling into her pillow. There are wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. They’ve been there for years now. How long will he have left with her? How long until it is just his brothers and Vesemir and Ciri? If Geralt gets Ciri back.

Exhaustion weighs him down. He’s been fighting it for weeks now, that urge to lay down and stop and let the world move on without him. He can do it safely here, now, and so he does. He sits with his back against the bed, his mama’s curled frame just behind him, and he lets the sound of her breathing fill the silence.

Hours pass, or maybe it’s only a few minutes. If he focuses on syncing his breaths with his mama’s, then he doesn’t have to think about anything else. It’s as close to meditation as he can get right now. And then there’s a hitch to her breath and a confused grunt, and Lambert knows his time is up.

“Shit,” Mama hisses, and he can hear her shuffling under the pillows for the dagger he convinced her to keep there years ago.

“It’s just me, Mama,” he says.

“Melitele’s—You scared me, Lambert!”

His bottom lip is trembling, and he knows his breathing is short and raspy. There are words he has to say, and he doesn’t know how they will ever leave him. Geralt had been easy to tell, though it had still felt like a punch. Years and years of hiding Aiden and the only time he ever gets to say he existed is after he’s been fucking killed.

Karadin didn’t suffer enough.

“Lambert?” Mama says. Her hand lands on his shoulder, and he flinches. “Lambert, what’s wrong? What happened? Where’s Aiden?”

The noise that falls out of him is painful, animalistic. He can’t keep it contained no matter how hard he tries. He has to tell her; the last thing he wants to do is tell her.

“Aiden’s dead, Mama,” he gasps, curling in on himself. “He’s dead.”

The silence that follows hurts more than anything else. Mama’s hand doesn’t move, but he can feel it shake. “Oh,” she says, a broken sound. “Oh, my Little Lamb. Come here.”

Like a child, he does. He scrambles onto the bed, into Mama’s waiting arms, and he breaks apart. In all the time since Ellander, since Novigrad and Tretogor and Novigrad again, he hasn’t let himself break. He had a job to do, people to kill, and nothing was going to stop him from finishing it. Now, though, there is nothing left to stop him.

A witcher cannot cry, but they can sob, dry and painful. This is what Lambert does, chest heaving, and it sounds like screaming. Torn and ragged and buried into his mama’s shoulder. He wails and he rages and he wishes the arms around him were Aiden’s.

Aiden isn’t here. Aiden will not ever be here. So he screams, and he tries and fails to bury the sounds in the thin fabric of his mama’s chemise, and she holds him through it. She whispers, soothing. She doesn’t tell him that it will be alright, doesn’t tell him that he’s safe. She tells him that she is here, to let it out, that she is so fucking sorry. It both helps and doesn’t.

She loved him too.

Salt in the air—Mama’s tears. She breathes heavy into his hair and he can’t make himself stop sobbing long enough to check on her. There is only the grief, that constant companion, weighing him down and exploding out of him and drowning him all in one. All the time, every second of every day that has passed since… He has nothing of Aiden’s left except what lives here.

“Mama,” he rasps, unsure what he even means the gain from it.

“I know, I know,” she replies, and she sounds just like him. “Oh, my Little Lamb, I know. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

He wails. He doesn’t know how to stop.

She rocks him, like he really is a child (he is, a voice whispers, he is her child), and it’s just enough movement to feel real. Enough to ground him. Enough to soothe him. Enough, eventually, what feels like hours later, for the sobs to settle and fade into hiccupping breaths.

“There you go,” Mama says, patting his hair. She is so old now; she should not have to do this for him.

Slowly, reluctantly, he pulls back enough to see her. Tear tracks on her face, bottom lip trembling the same way his does, a mirror of his own grief. There are still differences, and maybe she will be comforted by Karadin’s death the way he never can be.

“I killed them all,” he whispers, because his voice will not go any louder. “The assassins that—that were hired to kill him. I hunted them down and I killed them all, Mama. I got them.”

She looks pained; that wasn’t what he wanted. Then her face hardens, and he remembers the first time he saw her as an adult, telling him that she’d killed his father. “Good,” she says, like it’s a sure thing, like she’s proud of him. “That’s good, Lambert.”

Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like it, doesn’t feel like enough. But he hadn’t known what else to do.

Mama’s hand runs up and down his back, over and over again. That’s real. That’s more than he’s had in months. He wants to curl up in a ball and disappear, damn the consequences—damn the Wolves thinking him a coward if they ever knew.

And then Mama stands, her hands on his shoulders pushing him back onto the bed. She still wears her rings. Good. It’s the only thing he can focus on, the metal body warm against his cheeks when she cups his face.

“Sleep, Lamb,” she says, but he can’t. He can’t. He hasn’t properly in weeks, subsiding only off sporadic meditation. There are no arms to hold him, no body nearby promising to keep watch, no soft voice to lull him down into something dreamless and peaceful.

There are so many gaps in his life now, and he doesn’t know how to fill them. When Voltehre died, he found his mama. Now, there is only the return to Kaer Morhen looming over his head—days and days in which he will have to pretend he hasn’t lost one of the most important things in his life. Geralt knows, but not the extent of it, and that won’t be enough.

“He’s gone, Mama,” he whispers.

“I know,” she replies, choked. “Just… rest. I’ll be right here.”

He shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t, not when it means keeping her up all night, but the second he’s flat on his back, exhaustion washes over him. Mama brushes hair away from his forehead and shushes him even though he hadn’t spoken. He feels young, small, like it’s what could have been if his father had just fucking died all those years ago.

Lambert drifts off, and the sound of his mama’s heartbeat lulls him to sleep.

When he wakes, it feels like no time has passed at all. Sunlight streams through the thin curtains, and his mama sits against the headboard, chin tucked against her chest and snoring softly. He smiles at her, and he knows it’s sad, and then he pushes himself out of bed.

He feels less like a child now, less desperate for touch and care and arms around him like they could pluck the grief that’s made a home in him and throw it far away. He wishes they had.

The house is silent in a way it rarely is when he’s here. There’s always movement, his mama making tea or food, Aiden chattering away at her about all sorts of shit—utterly determined to embarrass Lambert every chance he has. Had. Every chance he had.

Lambert doesn’t look at the front door. If he does, he might very well believe Aiden will walk through it at any moment. He doesn’t look at their room either, not yet. So many of Aiden’s journals and trinkets sit in there, covered in dust, and he isn’t ready to face them. He isn’t sure if he ever will be.

Instead, he makes for the kitchen. Ma is still asleep, but he can make her tea this time. He’s spent enough years watching her make it to know how she likes it. A routine, a pattern, something he doesn’t have to think about. He’s so fucking tired of thinking.

The water is still boiling with his ma stirs. He can hear the confused little noise she makes even from here. “Lambert?” she calls. She sounds worried. She doesn’t need to.

“Kitchen,” he answers, and her footsteps echo through the house. Three now, the soft pad of feet and the heavy clunk of her cane. It doesn’t hurt to hear as much as it first did.

She smiles when she sees him, still so tired. Her neck must be sore; they should still have something for pain tucked away in one of the cupboards.

“Shuffle over,” Mama says. “I’ll make it.”

He almost doesn’t let her, but she’s never been one to take no for an answer. He watches her while she makes it, pouring water into identical mugs, and pretends that there has always been two of them. There was once, long ago, when he was young and so damn unsure of what the Path could ever give him.

They wait for it to steep, and Mama takes a breath. A damning thing, and Lambert knows what she’s going to say before she does. “Stay here, Lambert,” she whispers, gaze locked on the mugs. “Stay here with me. I know it’s earlier than you planned, but…”

He hates himself for having to say no.

“I would, Mama,” he says, and he means it with every piece of him. “I would, but—”

“But?” Mama says, eyebrow raised, a disappointment in her eyes that quickly fades when she looks at him. What does she see? Exhaustion, grief, someone who wants to disappear—to go back to when everything had been good? Or something else entirely?

“But… Geralt asked me to go back to Kaer Morhen,” he explains. “He helped me with… with Aiden. I made a promise. It’s his daughter, Ma, she needs help. He asked me to.”

It takes a moment for the words to land, but when they do, Ma’s face softens. “Oh, Lamb,” she says, and she sounds so damn proud of him. What is he supposed to do with that?

“I’ll come back after,” he says, and he doesn’t even dare to mention that he’s not even sure if he will still be alive. “I’ll come back and I’ll stay. I don’t want… I don’t want to do this anymore, Mama.”

He can’t even say what ‘this’ is anymore. All of it, everything. But he’ll come back and he’ll stay with her until she dies comfortably in her sleep and then he’ll… do something else. Find something else to live for, if there is anything.

She is nearing seventy now; that isn’t much time to figure it out, but it might be enough.

Lambert watches her breathe, feels her hands cup the scruff of his jaw. “Alright, my Little Lamb,” she whispers. Then she sighs like saying it physically pains her. “Alright. When you come back.”

He wants to come back, so badly. But Geralt is nothing if not predictable, and whatever he’s gotten himself involved in this time, bad enough to ask his brothers for help, can only be something that will get Lambert killed.

Lambert lives, barely. It’s a close call, but he comes out of it missing only a couple of fingers from his left hand. He’s not the worst off.

Vesemir is dead, Kaer Morhen is gone, and Geralt has fucked off once more with Ciri in tow.

The only thing Lambert can do is exactly what he promised: return to his mama and finally fucking stay.

Winter has come and gone, months since he left, and he feels like he hasn’t slept at all. He’d only managed to stay a few days with her last time before the weight of everything around him had gotten too much, sleeping in his bedroll in the sitting room. He will have to learn how to deal with it now, how to walk into a room he was determined to keep shut, even when his mama wanted to open it.

It should be strange, the idea of stopping for however long he gets. But he’s been tired for months now, and the last thing he wants to do is take hunt after hunt after hunt alone. He won’t have to here, not for a long time. The mere thought alone is the only thing that got him through Old Speartip’s cave and the battle against the Wild Hunt.

It didn’t stop him from telling Geralt to leave him behind when they were in the thick of it, though, but he tries not to think about that too often.

Ma is sitting on the bench on the porch, cane at her side and a book in hand. One of Aiden’s, kept in their bedroom. He almost wants to scream at her for taking it out, disturbing the room, but he will have to get used to that eventually. It’s her house; she can do what she wishes with anything in it.

He doesn’t have a horse anymore, doesn’t have anything more than two rucksacks he’s been carrying around for all the weeks it took him to get here, which means that Ma doesn’t hear him coming until he’s a few steps from the stairs.

She darts to her feet, faster than any old woman Lambert’s ever seen, grabbing her cane and making for him before he has a chance to say a damn thing. “There you are,” she says, her voice soft and sad and so damn relieved. “Fuck, Lambert, you had me worried.”

“Sorry, Ma,” he replies. It comes out as a croak. How long has it been since he last spoke?

He lets her hug him, lets himself fall into it just a little, fingers bunched in the back of her dress. She freezes against him for a second too long, before pulling back and grabbing his left hand. Pinky and ring finger gone, the worst of his injuries. Scars on his chest and back, and a strange chill that comes over him even on warmer days, but the fingers are the most obvious, two jagged stumps so close to the palm of his hand.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Wild Hunt. Vesemir’s dead. Kaer Morhen’s gone,” he says. Flat, like it’s nothing, just another day. “I’m so fucking tired, Mama.”

He wonders for a moment what she sees inside him. Mothers aren’t supposed to witness their children like this, he thinks. Or maybe that’s why they exist in the first place, to be somewhere he can go when everything is shit.

Her hands shake around his. “Come inside, Lambert. Everything is going to be alright, I promise.”

Something about her voice unsettles him, and he rubs his thumb over her knuckles. Her silver ring is still there; he almost beats himself up for his paranoia. When she pulls him up towards the porch, he follows. He can do nothing else.

There’s someone already inside. He can hear their heartbeat, steady and sure and too slow to be a human’s. “Ma, there’s—”

“I know,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at him, her smile weak—encouraging. “Go on.”

If he can hear whoever’s inside, then they can most likely hear him. Lambert runs through a list of creatures that could hypnotise, control her mind, and comes up blank. He knows those kinds of heartbeats, has been surrounded by them his entire life, and yet… And yet. Geralt is with Ciri. Eskel was still at Kaer Morhen when he left. There is no one else who could be here.

Go on, Mama had said. She’s dropped his hand and now watches him expectantly, and Lambert doesn’t want to hope. It might just break him.

He pushes the door open and steps inside, and the house looks the same as it always does. There’s a clatter from the kitchen, where he can’t quite see, and he freezes just beyond the threshold.

The man that rounds the corner, that races towards him and pulls him into his arms, can only be Aiden. He stumbles back from the force of their collision, hands hovering in the air but not touching—not daring too, in case they fall through him, in case none of this is real. He’s died at Kaer Morhen, or still frozen by the Hunt, and this is all something his desperate mind has conjured up.

“You’re here,” says the man that can’t possibly be Aiden. It’s his voice, exactly as Lambert remembers it, rumbling low into his ear like nothing at all has changed. A rough hand in his hair, another at the small of his back, and Lambert knows he’s shaking.

The door closes softly behind him, Mama’s cane clunking against the floor, and he still has not moved. He needs to move. This isn’t real. It’s not fucking real.

It feels real.

Ever so gently—slowly, hesitantly—he places his hands on Aiden’s—it can’t be Aiden—sides. He doesn’t disappear, and his muscles twitch beneath the thin fabric of his tunic. Lambert gasps, vision blurry, and holds on tighter, burying his nose in the crook of his neck. He smells the same; he smells a little like Ma’s tea.

“Fuck,” he says. It explodes out of him, muffled by his face against Aiden’s shoulder. It has to be Aiden. What the fuck else could it be? “What the fuck?”

“I know,” Aiden says, voice a rasp. “Your mama told me—I waited here for you.”

And just like that, Lambert breaks again, right there in the middle of the room. Like he did last time he was here, sobs tearing at his throat and his body slumping into Aiden’s. His mama is elsewhere, giving them space, but he knows she can hear him crying out like he’s been stabbed.

But everything has been wrong. Aiden is dead—was dead? So is Vesemir. Kaer Morhen’s nothing more than lonely ruins, and their School has fallen with it. He has wandered the Path these last few weeks alone and in pain and desperately needing someone by his side all the while knowing that he would never have that again. Aiden has been here the whole time.

Aiden, who doesn’t know what to do in the face of this, grabs him and holds him close like he’ll never let him go. He sounds scared when he talks, telling Lambert that everything is alright, that he’s here; asking him what’s wrong, what’s happened, what can he do. And Lambert can’t say a damn thing. All he can do is cry and hold on for dear life and try to believe that this is actually real. Aiden’s fingers in his hair and his voice in his ear—he knows them both too well to believe them staged.

“Lambert,” Aiden says. He sounds panicked. “Lamb, please.”

He has to pull himself up, shift back just a little bit, because something is wrong. Already. Of course. His breath shutters out of him, and he doesn’t have the energy to be embarrassed about it.

Aiden stares at him, and it’s the first time Lambert’s been able to look properly at his face. At the black eyepatch that only just covers a mess of scarring where his left eye was. He can’t bring himself to touch, even though a part of him itches to. Aiden’s eyebrows are furrowed, concern in the downturn of his lips, gaze darting over him like he’s trying to read deep into the very core of him.

Lambert kisses him. It’s desperate, a little sloppy. He wants to bring Aiden into himself and keep him safe behind his ribs, so that when Lambert dies they will die together. Aiden kisses him back with the same ferocity, hands cupping Lambert’s jaw, making soft noises whenever they briefly come apart to breathe.

It doesn’t matter that Lambert’s hand is twinging with pain. It doesn’t matter that he has so many questions that he still needs to ask. It doesn’t matter that his godsdamned mother is somewhere in the house listening to all this. All that matters right now is Aiden.

“Where the fuck have you been?” he growls when he has enough room between them to speak.

“Right here,” Aiden whispers.

There’s the anger, blooming in his chest. He was wondering where it went. He shoves Aiden back, only a step or two, and cannot take his eyes off the eyepatch. “You know what I mean!” he yells.

Aiden grabs his hand. The left one with its two missing fingers. “I know, I know,” he says, and then he glances over his shoulder at Mama’s bedroom. She’s standing in the doorway, watching them both with tears brimming in her eyes. “Come sit, and I’ll tell you everything. And then you can tell me what did this to you.”

He shakes Lambert’s hand at him. “Wild Hunt,” Lambert says. He’s drained and tired and so damn confused.

“What?”

Aiden’s stepping away. He can’t, not yet. Lambert pulls him back, slips his arms around his waist and keeps him close. Aiden doesn’t laugh like he normally would, doesn’t tease Lambert about his sudden need for affection, he just holds him. They stand there in silence, breathing each other in.

Over Aiden’s shoulder, Lambert’s meets his mama’s gaze. She’s smiling, tear tracks on her cheeks. Her and Aiden would have been looking after each other all these months, waiting for Lambert to come back when he wasn’t even sure if he would. He loves her more than anyone.

He came here to stay for however long she has left. That’s not going to change. The only difference will be that he will have Aiden with him through it all. Just like he had planned.

“Come, Lamb,” Aiden whispers, guiding him towards the chaise. “It’s alright. I’m here, I’ll tell you everything. I’m not going anywhere.”

Lambert follows, still pressed as close to Aiden as he can get, and tries to believe him.

“Ma, should you be doing that?”

From atop the stool, Ma shoots him a dismissive look. “I can do what I want,” she tells him haughtily, waving the cloth she’s using to dust at him. “You can stand there and make sure I don’t fall over.”

“Wasn’t exactly planning on doing anything else,” Lambert replies.

Ma’s been furious about cleaning in the last few days, a burst of energy that means Lambert is following her around the house, taking orders and making sure she doesn’t hurt herself whenever she climbs up on the damn stool. It’s the one thing she won’t let him do for reasons he still doesn’t understand. Not like it matters too much, as long as he’s here to watch her and hold her cane for her.

She hums a tune under her breath, one he doesn’t recognise, but it sounds nice. Their days are fairly quiet. They have to be, now that two of the three of them aren’t working regularly. Most of their money comes from contracts now. It’s harder than it has any right to be, but they’re managing.

They clean, Lambert tends to the garden, and Ma spends a long time reading. It’s easier when Aiden is here, more to do, more to talk about. It is harder when Lambert is the one heading out on a contract, itching for some space and frustrated that he needs it.

He never travels more than a week in either direction, and only when Aiden is at home to take his place. It’s a good break from the monotony, a reminder that he still is a damn witcher, even if he does live in a squat little house with his mother, and yet he finds himself missing the warmth of it within a matter of hours.

Aiden’s the one out on a contract now, gone nearly two weeks. He travels further out, all across Aedirn and Rivia and Lyria. He is a restless thing, and Lambert wouldn’t dare to keep him so cooped up, even if it does mean not seeing him for weeks at a time, worrying about him all the while.

That had been hard at first, when Aiden had finally felt strong enough again to take on contracts, to leave Lambert behind for a while. But it is the way of things on the Path. It had to happen at some point. And besides, Lambert has made sure he’s strong enough to be out there again.

He can ignore that more and more dread pools within him with every passing day that Aiden is gone.

Aiden will be fine. He always is. This is hardly the first time.

Ma finishes dusting the top of the bookshelves he recently set up in the sitting room and slowly climbs down from the stool, a hand on Lambert’s shoulder to steady herself and his around her thin arms. She lets out pained grunt that hasn’t stopped worrying him since the first time he heard it, and waves him away like she always does.

“Tea?” she asks, and Lambert rolls his eyes with a grumble. Somewhere in the last year or so, she has apparently realised that he makes it better than she does, which means it’s always his responsibility to make it now. Fuck knows what she does when it’s just Aiden here.

He does make her tea, though, because he’s not one to ignore her when she asks for something. In the middle of making it, the routine simple and calming, he hears the familiar sound of a horse being settled in their tiny lean-to outside, and a smile blooms unbidden on his face.

“Aiden’s home,” he calls into the sitting room.

“Short trip,” Ma replies. She never bothers yelling now, not when she knows both of them can hear her no matter where she is.

Lambert shrugs, mostly to himself. “It’s winter, or close enough. Lotta monsters hibernate,” he explains.

If he weren’t in the middle of making Ma’s tea, he’d head outside to help Aiden settle the horse in the lean-to, reunite with him under the hidden shelter of it. Instead, he focuses on what he can hear. The horse nickering, Aiden muttering to her as he takes all the shit off her. He doesn’t sound injured, and his gait isn’t staggered in a way that means he’s limping. From what Lambert can tell, he’s fine. Good. That’s good.

Ma gets up to greet him at the door, opening it before Aiden can and bringing him into her arms. A greeting, but also an attempt to survey him for injuries. Just like Lambert does.

“Hello, Rosalie,” Aiden says. He’s a lot less awkward about being hugged by her now; it’s not like she’ll let him avoid it. It’s not like he actually wants to. “I’m alright.”

“Tell that the scar on your neck,” Ma says, voice sharp but still full of fondness.

“It’s healing still, nothing to worry about.”

Lambert sets the tea to steep on the bench and wanders out towards the front door, unable to hide the smile on his face. Who would have fucking thought? Three years after Kaer Morhen fell and he’s living in a house with his mother, waiting for his turn to greet Aiden at the door. Him, a witcher, a Wolf.

Aiden does have a scar on his neck, newly pink and still healing, one that will fade in time. Claws from something mean, but not too terrible. “Nekker get the better of you?” he asks, just to be a prick.

“Grave hag,” Aiden says, which is only a little less embarrassing. He crosses the room and slips his arms around Lambert’s waist, kissing him the way he always does when they’ve spent so many weeks apart. Soundly, like he can’t think of doing anything else. Lambert hooks a finger into his sword harness and keeps him there for so many long minutes, even as Ma wanders past them to grab her tea with a put-upon sigh they all know is fake.

“Path treat you well?” Lambert asks when he draws away, adjusting the eyepatch on Aiden’s face.

“As well as it ever does,” Aiden answers. He steps back, pulls something out of the pocket of his trousers. “Ran into the courier on my way in, he had this for you. Thought I was you.”

Lambert’s eyebrows furrow. “For me?” he says, but sure enough, his name is written in familiar handwriting on an envelope. Geralt’s handwriting.

His brothers known where he is for a while now. He told Eskel before he left Kaer Morhen for good, which means—thank all the fucking gods—that Eskel eventually managed to leave the keep himself.

Not another godsdamned contract at least. Some of the folks in the nearby towns have gotten wind of witchers living nearby, and the letters they get are often requests for help. Good source of coin and a not entirely terrible reception for a post-war country, and it means that their town is not quite as wary about their presence as they could be. Aedirn isn’t Redania, after all. Still, he gets a little tired of constant contracts sent directly to his damn house.

At the very least, the townsfolk aren’t too pissed about a second witcher, as long as neither of them bother anyone. They probably all know that they will only be here for a few more years.

Lambert dumps himself onto the chaise, while Aiden drops his bags in their room. The letter, when he opens it, is a simple one. Not a surprise, considering it’s from Geralt. A handful of paragraphs telling him of an estate in Toussaint, primed and ready for what remains of their School, and an invitation for Lambert to join him and Eskel there whenever he wants.

He shows it to Aiden wordlessly when he comes back, and both of them glance at Ma drinking her tea in the kitchen.

“Tell them to visit us, for fuck’s sake,” Aiden says, and Lambert bites back a laugh. “I’m sure Geralt has plenty of people to look after his winery.”

“Why the fuck does he have a winery?” Lambert asks, but all Aiden does is shrug incredulously at him.

What neither of them say, but what they both know, is that they will not go to Toussaint for a long time. Not for another few years, most likely. But they will go, eventually. It’s nice, even though he won’t ever say it out loud, to know that there is somewhere else for them after everything is said and done here.

The letter he will send back will say something like that. It will invite them here, as strange as it will be, because Vesemir is dead and their School is gone, and maybe it won’t be so bad to let his brothers meet his mama for once. Then they would understand why he must stay.

Maybe, he thinks, they will like her and she will like them.

“Aiden,” Ma says, coming back into the room with a second cup of tea. Not for Lambert, who turns his nose up at the stuff for weeks on end and then suddenly craves it like a man dying for thirst. “Tell me where you went this time.”

She settles in the plush armchair she has always sat in, and Aiden, pressed to Lambert’s side, tells her everything.