✿♦️▼☼∇ ☠️ for Eskel please? Or you can choose a couple if that’s a lot lol
unfortunately anon most of these had already been done! and fair warning it does get a little bittersweet at the end, but i loved writing it.
♦️ - quirks/hobbies headcanon here
☼ - appearance headcanon here
∇ - old age/aging headcanon
☠ - angry/violent headcanon here
eskel was pretty well behaved as a kid
however,..,. if there were shenanigans occurring around him, he would just have to participate
hence the infamous bumblebee incident
to be fair, it was an abnormally large bumblebee and geralt was gonna catch it anyways, so he might as well help
he just doesn't want to be left out, whether of the fun or the inevitable punishment
eskel was always fairly shy, which definitely continued into his adult life (no thanks to his scar)
but he becomes much more outgoing if he has an outgoing person he trusts with him. or a lot of alcohol. usually both.
he took his studies way more seriously than geralt or lambert. geralt definitely wasn't a slacker, but he didn't go out of his way to really apply himself unless the assignment was especially interesting to him
eskel would rather cut off his hand than not do his work, mostly because he genuinely enjoyed learning (and being recognized for doing a good job)
that being said, he wasn't exactly bookish. i personally hc eskel as dyslexic (and the type to not bother doing work in a system that he knew wasn't for him), but he loved sciences
he'd always be the first to volunteer during a dissection, and had really good instincts about zoology in particular.
one time vesemir noticed eskel didn't do the reading like he was supposed to, and planned to teach eskel his lesson by having him go in front of the class and locate and label the main digestive organs in a species they'd never seen before. to his (pleasant) surprise, eskel got all of them right and even told vesemir what the creature's last meal was.
after that vesemir stopped assigning eskel reading and started letting him dissect drowner corpses instead
but not all of eskel's scientific adventures were so academically oriented.
after he learned how to brew his own moonshine at 17, eskel gained quite a reputation for his ability to make wildly strong alcohol out of anything
there are so many loose floorboards with a flask of what could be used as paint thinner under them that eskel still finds ones he didn't even remember hiding
eskel always loved the animals they had in the keep, but didn't quite put the pieces together that most of them were being kept as either bait for monsters or food for people for a few years. when he did, he was fucking devastated
logically, he knew that monsters had been hunting the livestock by the gwenllech for centuries, and an unchecked deer population would be disaster out for the local plant ecosystem, but he still cried
before eskel left for the path the first time, vesemir made a deal with him that he would keep one (1) animal during the year as a friend for eskel to visit during the winter.
after multiple close calls on even the simplest contracts, plus being reminded of his age by the way his joints ached every time it rained, eskel decided to go home and take care of kaer morhen full time
part of him wanted to say that witchers never die in their beds, and his pseudo-retirement was unnatural and selfish, but he had made a promise to vesemir and was not about to go back on his word
sometimes he considered leaving, letting the castle fall into the ruin it had been heading towards for centuries. geralt and lambert seemed to spend winters there largely out of sympathy, even eskel knew they'd all be a lot warmer at corvo bianco
but walking through the stone halls brought back too many memories to just leave
the tiny spot of blood on the kitchen tile from when he and geralt had an impromptu knife fight instead of preparing porridge for the other boys
the oak closet he built ciri so she'd have a place to put her dresses, for the occasion that she was "indisposed"
the rope ladder up to the roof where he and geralt would drink half their weight in homemade booze
the locked room where he kept coën and vesemir's things, since he didn't want lambert poking around and bitching about sentimentality
the bedroom he kept made up for deidre in case she wanted to visit, even if it had been nearly a decade since he last saw her
the now boarded-up room where he spent 6 excruciatingly painful nights during the trials, barely being able to hold his head up long enough to check if geralt's laboured breathing was still there
the trellis arch he built in the courtyard so keira could have a slightly more tasteful wedding
he... he just couldn't leave it all behind. the one winter he spent in toussaint was definitely warmer, but it still felt off. even geralt and lambert noticed the strangeness of not wintering at kaer morhen.
all three of them had precious little stability in their lives, the one thing they could count on was a freezing castle with a warm great hall to fill with music and booze and roasted pig and all their friends and more booze, even if just for 3 months
if eskel left kaer morhen, he knew he'd leave that all too. he felt responsible for it, for continuing the legacy of the school of the wolf, especially as its oldest surviving member (only by 3 years, geralt loved reminding him)
ultimately, he knew there just wasn't much else for him to do. there hadn't been a forktail spotted in hercht for decades, and there's only so many cracks in stone to pack with mortar for the winter. geralt and lambert had more or less settled down with beautiful yet terrifying sorceresses, but still made a point to visit. the wild hunt was gone, ciri spent most of her year either on the path or with the queen of skellige. the queen! yennefer taught her well.
he was happy. even with the guilt and pain and memories, eskel was happy. and, when the time came, he couldn't help but regret that vesemir didn't get the honour to be the first witcher to die in his bed.
