So this was meant to be a little headcanons post about Vesemir's main relationships over the years, but it got wildly out of control so here have five little ficlets instead
Vesemir is six when he decides he's going to marry Illyana.
He's never known a life without her in it. She's four months his junior, his playmate practically from birth. He pulls her pigtails and chases her with worms, and she doesn't tell his father. He plays house with her for countless hours, letting her henpeck and berate him the same way her mother henpecks her father, and doesn't complain. When they're nine, her father succumbs to the wasting sickness, and she's forced to grow up; she takes on chores of her own, becomes mature and responsible and levelheaded in all the ways Vesemir is not, but her eyes still light up when he leaves stolen honeycake beneath her cot in the indentures' dormitory.
He's not giving up on her - he's not - when he runs away to join the witchers. He always intends to return to her, like he promised that day by the frozen lake. He'll take the most dangerous contracts, make the kind of coin they could only have dreamed off as impoverished brats, and she'll have her lake house, her painting, her wine and food and whatever else she's decided she wants in the intervening years. It never occurs to him that she might not be there when he gets back.
She writes before his Trial of the Grasses, and isn't that just a note and a half to go out on? Forget me, Vesemir, she says, as he's fucking throwing up his own insides in a pit surrounded by dead and dying boys.
(He's not a complete moron. He knows she didn't write that letter - not by her own hand, at least. The old master never taught any of his indentures to read or write. Vesemir's learned at Kaer Morhen, but Illyana's not had that opportunity, and she's got real elegant handwriting for someone who's only just learning to write a few words. No - at best, she dictated it. He's...not surprised, in the end, to hear that her new master's family had a son who cared for her. He's just surprised that a pampered nobleman was thoughtful enough to give a servant girl that kind of closure.)
He doesn't expect to survive the Trial, but he does. Mutagens burn through his blood and remake him from the ground up. Four survivors, in his training class. Him and Luka. Rennes and Sven. The lucky few.
He goes out on the Path, and he does his best to do as she asked; forget me, Vesemir.
Since he was six, he believed he'd marry Illyana.
Vesemir is in his late twenties when he meets Fil, barely out of Kaer Morhen. He's got two or three years out on the Path, and he thinks he's a seasoned hand, because he's young and dumb and overconfident.
It's his first time going after a higher vampire without Deglan backing him up. He's not a dullard, he's done his research, but he's inexperienced, and he stands his ground where he should've dodged. It happens. He feels his ribs break, feels something puncture, chokes on blood. Sheer animal panic takes over, and for the first time in his life, he turns tail and flees from a fight. The bastard laughs, jeers, as he runs for his fucking life.
(He'll go back and take the fucker's head, later, better prepared and with a plan. He's paid well for it, but he comes away from that hunt with a hefty coin purse, a livid new scar, and a whole new respect for the lethality of his chosen career)
Fil stumbles upon him toppled facedown in the dirt at the side of the road with his horse huffing nervously at him as he bleeds out in the muck. Devastatingly romantic, as first meetings go.
It'll be a while yet before the Great Cleansing, but Fil already has every reason to hate humans. He's only marginally less hostile towards witchers. He's got shit to do. Somewhere to be.
He saves Vesemir's life. Nurses him back to health, such as it is. Hunts for him. Cooks for him. Straps up his ribs so they'll mend clean. Watches over him while he sleeps. Helps him lift his head up to drink a vial of Swallow whenever he needs it - the round bottle, he asks for, since Fil doesn't know shit about witcher elixirs. Bullies foul-tasting, fouler-smelling elven remedies down his throat that dull the agony to a bearable pain and make it hard to keep his eyes open.
He's...touched, might be the word. Fil is aloof and prickly and pretty bossy for a guy who looks like one punch could lay him out, but he's also...well. He's kind.
And fiercely intelligent, when Vesemir manages to get him talking in the evenings. And funny, in a serious kind of way. And oddly striking in a certain light.
Which, no, wait - that's probably the blood loss talking.
They part once Vesemir has healed enough to be able to stay in the fucking saddle without keeling over, and honestly, he's a little disappointed. He likes Fil. Fil's company, he means. The - the conversation. You know.
He...maybe realises a few things about himself on the way home.
He speaks to Deglan about Fil when he gets back to Kaer Morhen. Or. Freaks out a little at Deglan about Fil, might be more appropriate? He'll laugh about it, one day, looking back - Deglan doesn't do feelings, and he spends the entire conversation looking like he'd rather feed his own dick to a manticore than hold Vesemir's hand through any kind of emotional revelation, but when Vesemir runs out of steam, the old buzzard heaves a heavy sigh, throws back his entire glass of wine, and - like it pains him - grits out, "Look, young feller, if it's bothering ye this much, just fuck the elf and get it over with. Ye'll either enjoy it or ye won't. Either way, problem solved."
Which makes sense, actually. So when he runs into Fil again, several months down the line, that's exactly what he does.
Well, sort of. Fil knows what he's doing and Vesemir doesn't, and also Fil is a bossy pain in the arse, so he sort of...takes the reins and then just never gives them back. But it turns out Vesemir is - hm. Kind of into that, actually. It's educational, and fun, and apparently wins Sven thirty crowns in a betting pool Vesemir didn't even know existed, so whatever.
(He'll repay his life-debt eventually, in Cintra. He's just finished killing a territorial and directionally-confused water hag who found her way into the bowels of the castle through a fucking sewer tunnel. He emerges via the castle's gaol, and he's following a Cintran guard to his sizeable reward - royal contracts are always lucrative - when he catches Fil's scent coming from one of the cells, overlaid with sickness and infection and fear, and the strange scents of a dozen other elves crammed into the same cell. Witchers aren't supposed to get involved in political conflicts, but...it's Fil. Political neutrality be damned. He rips the door off its hinges with a blast of aard, and guides the captive elves out of the city via the tunnel he's just oh-so-helpfully de-hagged for them. The guard...well, he gets rowdy, and Vesemir deals with him, fast and efficient. Deglan, when he finds out, is furious, which is fine, because Vesemir isn't proud of it either. He knows he's broken the guild's code.
Of course he would. It's for Fil.)
Luka is the first friend Vesemir makes when he arrives at Kaer Morhen. He's a few years younger; a scrawny, loudmouthed runt of a kid, angry at the world and everything in it, with an unfortunate habit of starting shit with boys twice his size. He calls Vesemir a stupid son of a bitch, that first night in the stables when Sven asks for his story, because he's the only one in their initiate group who volunteered to become a witcher, and Vesemir bristles, lunges up and knocks him flat, and Luka grins savagely at him from the floor, wipes his split lip on his ragged sleeve and tells him, "You hit like my Ma. Learn to throw a punch, and maybe you'll live long enough to get out of here."
They're in the same training group - Vesemir is older, but he's never held anything more dangerous than a butter knife and he can neither read nor write, so they're in the same boat. He throws himself into training with the kind of motivation that only comes with wanting to be there, hours upon hours of drills and tracing letters with his pointer finger while he sounds them out like a small child, memorising monster features and alchemy ingredients, hanging on his tutors' every word. Barmin pairs him with Luka for sparring, and Vesemir tends to pull his punches against smaller opponents because it's, you know, unfair, but Luka is stabby and bitey and so fierce that he can take Vesemir two bouts out of four, and well, Vesemir can respect that.
He saves Luka's life in the Red Swamp, and something changes; Luka becomes his friend. When Luka wakes, Vesemir is perched on the end of his bed reading Illyana's letter. Luka rasps, "You saved my life," and Vesemir says, "Nah. Ghoul got in the way, I was aiming for you," and from that moment, they're inseparable.
They start sharing a bed early. It's purely common sense at first - Kaer Morhen is cold for unmutated boys even in summertime, Luka is skinny and underfed; it makes sense to let him burrow into Vesemir's side and share body heat. Then, after the Trial of the Grasses, the survivors are moved into a dormitory and...well. Luka is far from the only one having night terrors. Vesemir doesn't mind Luka crawling in beside him, shaking, pressing close like he's trying to get under Vesemir's skin. He thinks he's dead half the time, poor bastard, trapped in his own rotting corpse, and that's a lot worse than any of the nightmares Vesemir has, so he lets Luka sprawl over him and listen to his heartbeat and they get through those fucking months together.
Luka has known he liked other boys since he was small, and Vesemir has known Luka likes other boys since...gods, sometime before the Trial. It's not a big deal, and he's far from the only one in the keep who'd rather tumble other witchers. But when some of the older boys, newly-minted witchers back from their first year alone on the Path, let Vesemir tag along to go drinking and whoring in Ard Carraigh when he's about eighteen, Luka is weird and awkward about it for days, almost like he's sulking, as though he doesn't go about stinking of sex half the time himself.
Vesemir is highly intelligent, see. But it's...it's kind of a witcher thing to not be very bright, about all that feelings nonsense. It never crosses his mind that Luka is jealous.
He gets older. Deglan takes a personal interest in his training; he's an arse, but he's one of the best, and Vesemir hears him bragging to the other witchers occasionally - my lad this, my lad that. Vesemir's own father never bragged about anything he did. It's nice, to be worth that kind of pride.
And before he knows it, he's old enough to apprentice, and Deglan takes him out for his first year on the Path. It's tough for him and Luka, that year, to suddenly be separated from someone they've been joined to at the hip for near on a decade, but for Vesemir there's the distraction of the job - Deglan has him doing all the work an adult witcher would be doing, claiming that he's "only there to keep ye from gettin' yerself killed, young feller", and it turns out witchering is exhausting. But he's earning decent coin for the first time in his life, and Deglan teaches him some smart cons for when times are hard, and...he's good at it. Really, truly good at something, like he always wanted. Deglan has to intervene a few times, when a monster's about to eat him, but not half as much as he expected to need to, and Vesemir comes back to Kaer Morhen that winter with a new confidence and independence that make him feel like a seasoned warrior compared to Luka and Sven.
Luka missed him, desperately. And it turns out they don't quite know how to be two halves of a whole, anymore. That's...a tough few years, figuring out how to be two people, instead of one. And somewhere in the middle of it, Vesemir meets Filavandrel, and that's a whole fucking journey of self-discovery, and suddenly a few quirks of Luka's, in the way he acts around Vesemir, that he's never thought twice about start making sense.
When Luka is ready to apprentice, Vesemir starts hassling Deglan early - let me take him. Deglan is wary - Vesemir hasn't been a grown witcher that long himself, after all, but he has enough of Deglan's favour and trust that the old buzzard gives way. "If he gets killed because ye're arsin' about, or showin' off, ye'll carry that for the rest of your life. Take. This. Seriously."
And Vesemir does. He works Luka hard, but he steps in sooner than Deglan did for him when Luka needs help, and they spend their evenings flashing hard-earned coin in taverns. They work well together - not as two halves of a single whole, but as...like good food and fine wine. Both serve perfectly well alone, but...they're better together.
And he's less oblivious now than he was, when they were younger. He notices the little sideways glances Luka shoots him when he's bathing or changing his shirt, the light-hearted comments hovering just on the safe side of flirtatious, the sulking and the cold shoulder whenever he spends the night in a barmaid's bed. He brings it up after Luka cockblocks him for the third night in a row, chasing off the blacksmith's daughter with scowls and barbed remarks, because...well, because as it turns out, Luka has never been particularly subtle about his feelings; Vesemir has just been blind. He asks if there's anything Luka wants to tell him.
After Kaer Morhen is sacked, he looks for somewhere safe to take the four leftover brats Deglan charged him with. He tries Kaer Seren first, because the Griffins aren't the worst, as other schools go, and they'd have all the facilities necessary for training young witchers, but that's a bust. He turns to Fil, who's hospitable enough when Vesemir shows up on his doorstep with four skinny, hollow-eyed little wretches trailing behind him like every man's worst nightmare, but he's barely got enough resources to feed his own people, and witchers eat like horses. It's Fil who points him to the temple, actually - the one place he knows of that will take in pity-cases longterm, even freaks like elves and mutants.
Nenneke is a mere junior priestess when Vesemir shows up with the boys. They're a fucking mess, he knows that - it's a little over a year that they've been on the road, never staying in one place for long, trying to always stay one step ahead of the rampant anti-witcher sentiment sweeping down from the north. The boys are twitchy and skittish - that's his fault, he knows that; he's been working while they travelled, because he has to, nobody else is going to earn coin to put food in their damned mouths, and that means he has to leave the whelps alone and vulnerable in a rented room somewhere for days at a time, where it's a benefit to them - no, where it's essential to their fucking safety - to be wary of humans. And he's become a brusque, grouchy bastard in that year, hard on them and harder on anyone else who comes near them, because it's -
It's been a lot. To - to deal with. Humans and - fucking mages - they all look like threats now. And he's the only thing between those kids and getting strung up in the fucking street like the vermin the humans think they are.
Anyway, the temple takes them in, because Melitele is a sucker for punishment, he guesses, and he's introduced to...gods, a whole fucking host of priestesses and acolytes, none of whom particularly stand out as anything other than probably not dangerous, and one of them is Nenneke. She's bald and beautiful and speaks with a strong accent he can't quite place, and apparently she likes brats, because she goes down on one knee to introduce herself to Lambert, and - well, with the benefit of knowing her a little better, he can surmise she was probably going to magic him a fucking...flower, or something, to win him over, but at the time...she opens her hand, palm-up, and he smells the scent of magic, and he reacts. It's not as bad as it could've been - he seizes a fistful of Lambert's little cloak, drags the boy back behind his own body and snarls at her to back off in a tone that sounds half-feral even to him, but he doesn't attack her or anything - but that one interaction is enough for them to take an instant dislike to one another.
It stays that way for a while.
She inserts herself into their lives in a truly infuriating way, always offering to teach the boys or play with them or take them down to dinner, and - it's not that he doesn't want the time alone, he does, he really does, but they're his fucking kids and he hates letting them out of his sight, hates leaving them with anyone, especially a gods-damned sorceress.
(Druid, she tells him firmly, the first time he calls her that. Apparently the difference is that she wasn't trained at Aretuza. She learned magic from...well, a fucking dream, or something, he doesn't know. He doesn't really see much of a difference, not for a long time.)
And she has a lot of opinions about his - he's loath to call it parenting - how he deals with the whelps. He's too hard on them, she insists. Too cold, too detached, too grumpy, too heavy-handed, too, too, too. He doesn't let them 'be children', whatever that means. Hovers too much. Doesn't show them he loves them enough. As if she could do any fucking better, in his place.
(She can. She does. He kind of hates her for it)
And the thing is - the temple is good for them. He's not so up his own arse that he can't see that. Geralt used to go days at a time without speaking a word, and now he talks to the priestesses in the halls. Eskel is less stressed, less overwhelmed with the pressure of keeping order while Vesemir works. Lambert is -
Lambert is Lambert. But he's Lambert a bit less offensively and a bit less angrily than usual.
He doesn't settle as quickly as they do. He's still prickly and tense and tired all the fucking time, because he doesn't really sleep. He catnaps, but...someone needs to be on guard, to protect the boys. He spends a lot of the night hours pacing the temple's empty, candlelit corridors like a wraith or brooding on a balcony with a decent vantage point over the temple grounds, and the rest of them in the hallway outside the bedroom the boys are sharing, meditating or reading or - or just staring blankly at the fucking pages of some ancient manuscript because he's read the same sentence five times already and the voices of his ghosts are too loud to keep out any longer.
Nenneke likes the late hours. She volunteers to go around lighting all the candles in the evenings, and he's...he's not sure if she just doesn't go to bed, or if she gets up multiple times in the night, but it's not unusual for her to amble past him in her house robe and slippers. She claims to enjoy the quiet. The peace.
Vesemir barely remembers what peace felt like.
One day, she catches him on the edge of dozing off on the bench outside the boys' door. He startles, lurching to his feet and taking a step to the side, blocking the way into their room, as she appears in the archway, the candlelight blurring around her like a halo. She stops there for a moment, looking at him like she's trying to figure him out. "They are safe here," she tells him. "And so are you."
That's all she says to him that first night, but over time, they get closer. She finds the gaps in his armour and pokes at them, and bit by bit, he lets her in. She does what she can to heal them - all of them. She teaches Eskel to control his signs. She works with Lambert on his temper. Does her best to mediate between Lambert and Vesemir, and teach them both some communication skills. When Vesemir can't sleep, she sits up with him, lets him exorcise his demons bit by painful bit until he doesn't have to clench his jaw to keep from welling up at Luka's name or flinch at Deglan's anymore.
(She'll tell him, eventually, that she's been skimming his surface thoughts when she spots him late at night. She's watched him replay it over and over: the moment he realised he'd as good as murdered Illyana, a hundred torturous scenarios where Luka dies alone and terrified, your fault your fault your fault. She'll tell him he's torturing himself, that he wasn't to blame for half the things he's laying at his own door, that he shouldn't be so hard on himself. And - he hasn't cried, hasn't let himself cry, since he heard Illyana's heart stop beating, because someone has to keep their shit together in this pack and it's not going to be the kids, but he will then, with his face buried in her shoulder like a child.)
They'll never be fixed, not really. Wounds like these don't ever truly heal. But they get to a point where Eskel starts laughing again, and Vesemir's smiles reach his eyes, and he starts sleeping again - in his room, on good days, or with his head in her lap while she fusses with his hair on bad ones.
Lambert even calms down some, which is nothing short of a fucking miracle.
Eventually, he gets to a point where he's able to focus on properly training the boys, and that's not something he can do at a temple. She - sensible and levelheaded as ever - points out to him one night, as they're sprawled out together in the dark, that the best place to train young witchers is probably a witcher keep. Has he ever considered returning to Kaer Morhen?
And that's what they end up doing.
He goes out on the Path again once all the whelps are done with their training, because he doesn't know what to fucking do with himself in Kaer Morhen anymore without them. He's not the only surviving witcher from before the sacking - there are stragglers, a few of them, who hadn't been home for the attack, and who'd made their way back once they heard that the keep was occupied again - but he's the only one who's been basically chained to the castle for the past...oh, however many years. And now his manacles are all grown up and witchering independently, and he realises that at some point, they'd become his whole fucking life.
He was someone before he became a single father of four. He'll just...adapt, like he always has.
For all that he's been out of the game for what feels like a lifetime, he hasn't changed that much. He's still fit, still strong, still fast, still startlingly handsome even if he does say so himself. There are some changes, of course. He's grown his hair out some. He's less picky about his contracts, because he hasn't had that luxury in years. And maybe he keeps an ear out in taverns for any stories of one of his boys passing through this way. So what? He's still him.
Getting back out there feels like coming home.
There's this one Oxenfurt nobleman he takes a job from, proud owner of most of the properties in an outlying district that's crawling with barghests. He's harmless enough - what Deglan would've called a killing lord (the ones who get you killed out of stupidity or inexperience, rather than a murdering lord, the ones who get you killed out of cruelty or greed) - but he's got a daughter who's a fucking menace. She's young and studiously inclined, and the first time he sees her she's chasing him out of the house with ink on her nose and several rolls of parchment tucked under her arm.
She plans to come with him, she announces, like it's a fucking given. She's never seen a barghest up close. She means to draw one for a paper she wants to submit to some academic journal. Perhaps he would be so kind as to identify its organs for her.
He refuses point-blank, and she argues with him in what must be the most amusingly upper-class way anyone ever has - he's "terribly vexing", apparently, and he swears she actually stamps her foot in frustration under those long skirts at one point. She's got this thing where she seems utterly oblivious to just how dangerous that kind of excursion would be. Why would she be in any sort of danger from a living, hungry barghest? She'd have protection.
Him. The big strong witcher.
That's. Hm. Well, he's flattered, if nothing else.
He does not take her to draw living barghests, because he is not a fucking idiot. But he does return with a corpse slung across the back of his horse's saddle - a whole one, rather than just a head ("Gods, how frightfully unsettling it is!"). Because - because she has a pretty little button nose and long eyelashes and she looks up at him like she has no fear of him at all, and he's charmed, damn it.
He's wondered, over the years, what might have been different if he'd sought Illyana out sooner. She was only in her forties when her husband died. All those years, they might've -
Well, maybe Mignole reminds him of a road not travelled, is all.
Her father pays him generously, though he bemoans Vesemir's having brought "that gods-awful thing" back to the house, and Vesemir goes out to fill up on expensive Redanian brandy and equally expensive tobacco. It's the little things, see. The small luxuries he's had to miss out on, bringing up kids.
It's still early when a matronly woman approaches him at the bar, hooded and cloaked, and delivers a note penned in an elegant, swirly hand. It's Mignole, of all people, asking if he might be so kind as to return to her father's townhouse to identify some barghest organs that don't match anything found in a normal dog.
His eyebrows make for his fucking hairline, because that is a blatant lie. Barghests have no such unidentified organs. Either Mignole doesn't know what a kidney looks like or she doesn't want to see him about the beast.
He goes, because he's never been one to turn down an opportunity, and honestly her determination to go after what she wants is refreshing in the mincing, swooning world of noble ladies.
He hops the wall into her father's lavish garden, because he's 90% convinced this is not intended to be the kind of visit she'd want her father to know about, and spots her, reading a book by candlelight on the window ledge in one of the upstairs rooms. She startles when he tosses a pebble at the glass, but her face lights up when she spots him. He's able to climb the trellis right up to her window, and she opens it to let him in.
He doesn't leave until dawn. She doesn't ask him about the fucking barghest once.
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