The Lagoon pt. 3
(Part 1 and part 2 if you like!
Just as a note, any future updates to this will probably be posted to my AO3, along with the already existing parts in a single fic! Thanks everyone for reading, and @teddylacroix and @taketheshot21 for showing interest in this weird idea the won’t let go! Please everyone know how supremely self indulgent this ha becomes :I is it good? nah. is it a good time? well. one hopes.)
Ever so slowly, daring eyed and unblinking, the man with lilies in his skin watches Geralt watch him as he pulls himself from the water.
For Geralt, who does not for a moment release his gaze, or his sword hand, he catches only the barest impression of scales sliding silkly from the water. In the air, they melt into more and more pale skin, until the spirit lounges most deceptively, nakedly human on his mossy stone. A tumble of long lines and languidly loose elbows and knees. He leans forward ever so artfully, inviting Geralt’s eyes to drop. They don’t.
“I’ve heard stories of your kind, witcher,” he says with air of a man sharing gossip.
Geralt says nothing.
“As personable as I’ve been led to believe. What could have brought you here?”
“I have heard stories,” Geralt says. Slowly, “Like you.”
Mischief. “Oh? And what have you learned?”
“That I don’t know what you are.”
“But you know what I do?”
Geralt cocks his head just so, to better see the planes of his face in the upside-down light. At times like this, with the Cateye potion in full effect, everything searing in his sight burns more vibrantly, more starkly, more. Against his background of wetly green vines and smartingly bright waters, his velvet shadowed moss, the spirit rests like a pearl. He is beautiful; but any witcher knows better than to trust beauty. His beauty tempts, and it is meant to tempt. Geralt knows better than to be tempted.
“Listen to woes. Sing songs. Tell pretty stories.” He tilts his head yet further. “Kiss pretty villagers.” The spirit smiles, there and gone.
“I do that,” he admits, and says nothing more, though that inviting smile still lingers around his eyes. Geralt hums.
“Why?”
“Why do I listen?” He slithers up on his haunches then-- or does he pour himself out?-- and of a height with Geralt he straightens nearly knee to knee, a parody of Geralt’s kneeling meditation. “Or why do I kiss them?”
Geralt ignores his provocative glance altogether and instead allows the silence to press his question. After far too long a pause, the spirit makes a show of his disappointment and sighs himself back onto his heels.
“Company, if you must know. They bring a glimpse at the world beyond this lagoon.”
“And gifts,” Geralt says meaningfully.
He rolls his eyes. “Don’t mistake me, White Wolf. The gifts are just that-- non-binding, freely given, and inconsequential to the ones giving them.” He grins into Geralt’s face, pleased by whatever change he had caught there. Pleased by his own cleverness. “Yes, I know you. White hair, two very scary swords. I’ve heard of you, Geralt of Rivia, as you’ve heard of me.”
A clever spirit means a vainglory one. Geralt raises two dispassionate eyebrows. “Yet I don’t know your name.”
“Perhaps you should have brought me a gift, then,” he returns. Unblinking, moving slowly enough to see, he then curls his fingers in the chain around Geralt’s neck and lets his hand hang there beside the wolf like ornamentation. Geralt growls, and does not move. Two self-satisfied eyebrows jump and jig pointedly at him.
“Are you sure you haven’t anything?” the spirit wheedles, and chuckles when Geralt frowns severely at him. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You know, I knew you wouldn’t believe me about the gifts. It really is nothing nefarious. I’m afraid I’ve just been spoiled by my dear hearts, is all. They are much more appreciative than you.”
They are getting too far off topic.
“That’s what you want. Their appreciation.”
He huffs a breath as if Geralt is being particularly dull. “No. That is what I earn.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Why the interest?” He tilts his head in a coquettish mirror of Geralt’s posture, just this side of mean and grinning with it. “What do you want?”
“Answers.”
“So you can decide whether or not to kill me.”
In the sudden still and chill, Geralt says nothing. After a moment of calculating, he takes the risk and inclines his head. Just enough.
Though no describable change shifts his face or the curlicues of his always near-laughing mouth-- a twilight, in the eyes. The stars that had sparkled there recede to a winter’s distance. Wrath, or pain? From the bob of his throat, the latter.
The grip on his chain shifts. “I’ll give you your answers if you’ll give me mine,” bargains the spirit with purposeful, dishonest lightness. “Tell me, were you called here to kill me? By one of,” mine, his lips shape, but only breath escapes. Geralt, who has heard many a man take a dagger to the back, finds himself… uncomfortable. Momentarily. But even a spirit can playact.
Firmly, Geralt removes the spirit’s bold hand from his person. The spirit doesn’t fight, or blink, and no magic shifts, and the lagoon is quiet. His unwavering gaze so close could almost discomfit, were Geralt a lesser man. Thankfully, he is not a man at all.
“No,” Geralt says at last. There is no harm in sharing the truth, after all. And better to say it than risk turning an unknown spirit’s wrath on the good villagers. “They did their best to convince me of your good nature. I came to investigate only because I heard rumors in a neighboring hamlet.”
The admission gentles him immediately. He hides his relief in a turned gaze; Geralt lets him without comment. It gives Geralt the opportunity to observe every twitch of his eyelashes, and his fingers where they have risen to his neck in a mimic of human vulnerability. (Or is it genuine?) He rests it there only a moment, there and gone. When he turns back, his good humor has returned.
He looks at Geralt then in earnest. He cannot say how he knows it. It weighs differently. Without the charade of before he looks, brow to chin, shoulders to glove-clad hands. Whether he searches out some hidden aspect or believes himself possessed of its secret already. Geralt wants-- no. He wants nothing, he tells himself, and does not twitch. There is no want when his duty is to watch, to understand, to wait for any first hint of magic or ill intent. He has come to either kill or let free. Clenched fist, Geralt-- does. Does not.
Blue eyes meet his own once more. The spirit settles, stills, and splits open like waters around sharp stone.
“Freedom,” he says. “It’s what I want. To leave this lagoon.”
“Hmm,” doesn’t say Geralt, who knows at times that no words are better than too many. It works now.
“Don’t misunderstand,” the spirit rattles out breathlessly, “I love every one of my visitors. I remember every one of them that has ever come to me, by accident or by purpose, and I have been here a long, long time, witcher. Since before the village existed. There are some who come to me today whose great grandmothers I remember in their youth. There are some who live only because I whispered secret courage to their parents when shyness or misunderstanding might have kept them apart. No, their company and the time they spend with me, the work of inspiring their joy and seeing it on their faces, or tasting it on their sighs. It has been reward enough for me. Only...” He hesitates. “I began to dream of leaving only when they... gave in return.”
It takes Geralt a moment. Eyes on his, then down to the silver chain, as tactile as his hands. Perhaps you should have brought me a gift, then. Geralt purses his lips.
“The stories,” he surmises. “The gifts.”
His teeth slash open a white flash. “You were listening. I want to leave these waters. I want to see the world and find the stories myself.”
Surprised, Geralt chews wordlessly on the admission. He had begun to believe him a tethered spirit. Something of the forest and mountains, something strange, for sure, but grounded in the land. Books and tomes and lectures, and he has never heard of such a spirit wanting to leave. The power that would take; and from what source? He thinks of the trusting, besotted villagers and nearly grimaces. Doesn’t, only by strength of will, and instead asks,
“How?”
A frown tells him he did not hide his suspicions well enough.
“...You wanted to know what I am,” he says at last. Geralt grunts something like agreement. “Then let me tell you. Then you will understand.”
He goes quiet, for longer than he ever has to this point. Then, he tells his story.
*
“Centuries ago, this forest stretched untouched and unbroken all the way to the coast. Even the Aen Seidhe did not touch these trees, for they knew as surely as you must that when they looked, the forest looked back. It was so looking that She saw me.”
(“She,” Geralt says.)
“She. She has no name. She is the forest. Far more ancient than any spirit I’ve ever encountered. I’ve always imagined She is as old as the spheres, though I can’t know. I’ve never seen Her, not as you see me. She is too grand to have a humanoid form. Like too many birds against the sky that by filling it become greater than it.
“Centuries ago, when the forest still reached down to the sea, before the humans too dumb to magic’s song to hear its cries cut back the forest’s edge to build their cities and towns there. A traveling bard wandered the wild lands. Upon finding the ocean, he fell in love with the blue of the water and the call of the gulls, and sitting by a sheltered cove composed a song. He picked up his lute and played. The waters there had never heard such music, not by lute or human voice, and they fell in love in return. He did not know, of course. But he played, and he sang, and it was the first song in any voice not the ocean’s own there sung.
“And as he sang the bard dreamed of chime-voiced mermaids floating like lilies in the waves; and as the cove gazing up at him sang back and dreamed of sweet-face bards with gentle hands; all the while, the song echoed and returned greater each time from the throats of the rocks and waves --light that runs between crystals and multiplying grows brighter, like that. And the song grew; and the bard played, not knowing he sang a duet; and they sang with emotion deep enough to touch that stuff at the heart of all things, be they rocks or oceans or stars, the stuff of Chaos; and the song was the first; and the song was me.
“That is what I am.”
*
Listening, Geralt thinks that it is not the least likely thing he has ever heard. There have always been tales of spirits born from emotion if it is great enough. From Firsts, too, for they have power. Old tales from the elves recall a breathless time Before when the Aen Seidh knew only peace across years unbroken by suffering and hardship. In the stories, a betrayal between siblings saw its end. From the first death was all Death born, in all its many visages, its spirits and gods. Witchers had spent the past two centuries amassing all knowledge of such phenomena. Geralt had read every tome in Kaer Morhen, and so knew they understood so very little of these spirits. Who was he to say that it is not possible?
Besides which… as he had told his story, just for a moment in the way of true things hidden in a shape mundane, Geralt had heard and seen. Gulls and waves grumbled and shrilled beneath his breath.
When he had first appeared, glowing and serene, Geralt had known his nature in part because he had looked for it. Now lit with the light of his own tale, recalling his creation, there could be no mistaking him for a human. A more-ness swelled about him. As it fades, blue eyes gone distant with remembering, Geralt finds he believes him.
But he had not finished the tale.
“And she saw you,” he parrots when the silence has grown too clinging. The spirit smiles brittly. “She did,” he says, and takes his cue.
*
“She had watched me for decades as I lived within the echo of the waves barking off the stone, and sang in the mist there. No, don’t look so grim, it suits you too well for my tastes. I wasn’t completely alone. What the bard did not know all those years ago was that there are mermaids in that cove. We enjoyed each other’s company quite immensely. The harmonies we created! Ten, twelve, twenty voices rising in tandem as the tides, ululating, soaring, sighing, deeper than the dark waters, lighter than the foam lacing the waves. Oh, the nights we passed, all of us silver and amber and umber on the rocks. How the moonlight gilded their abalone-smooth breasts-”
(“The forest, spirit,” Geralt reminds him. He gets an annoyed hand waved at him for his troubles.
“No appreciation for an artfully woven scene, I see. Tell me, are all witchers so short-tempered,” he teases, “or is it just you’ve not the attention span?”
“Spirit,” Geralt rumbles, this time in warning. Another flap of his unconcerned hand.
“Yes, yes, I was getting to it. It. Well.” He sighs.)
“The humans came with their axes, and the forest dwindled until only the last willow smoothed its lonely fingers over the brow of the waves there in my cove. It was sitting under it that I first heard her whispers. Such a voice, Geralt. Never before had I heard one like it, and never since. She told me of how She had listened all those years as I sang, and how She mourned to never hear me again once Her final tree was cut from the embrace of the coast. How she sighed. The wind blew and moaned through that willow like a dirge.”
(“She pricked your bleeding heart. Played on your sympathy,” Geralt surmises, not flatteringly. The spirit turns from gazing soulfully out across the lagoon-- westward, towards the sea-- to glare at him balefully, beautifully wounded.)
“And can you blame me? Pah, don’t answer, I can see that you can. Yes, my heart went out to her plea. She begged that I come visit her. She would gift me the legs of a man so that I could leave the waters behind and move freely through the trees. I was fascinated. I had never left the cove, nor walked as any of the elves or humans or dwarves did. I had no ability to shift my form then. I had never even considered it! And She was the first spirit to whom I had ever spoken. How different She was from my friends the mermaids; how like to me, or so I thought. I longed to visit Her and to ease Her loneliness. I loved that She had listened for so long. I loved that She loved me.”
(Geralt does not need to speak to earn this frown. “She did,” the spirit snaps.
“She did,” Geralt agrees mildly, and crosses his arms over his chest. “Enough to keep you.”
For a moment, the spirit trembles. Expressive to a fault. Geralt can see why the villagers long to make him smile, if this is the alternative. Hearts softer than his would not be able to stand the blow of those crumpled brows, the agonized dip of eyelashes on his cheek. More’s the better, he thinks firmly, without the sliver-stab of guilt under his skin; the better that a witcher’s heart does not ache.
“Yes,” he says at last, wet- and bright-eyed and, to Geralt’s surprise, unfaltering. “Enough to keep me.”)
“She told me to wait for the new moon, when I would find in the grotto beneath the willow’s roots a lily growing. I found the crevice, and the lily. I did as She had told me. I pulled myself up the vines and roots of the willow with the nectar held on my tongue, and only when I was free of the water did I drink it, and found I had legs like a man.
“But the change had been painful and long, and the climb tiring, and the air so dry. So I laid amongst the roots to sleep and regain my strength. I would then follow my new friend’s voice into the trees, or so I thought. Yet when I awoke, I was here. Here I have remained.”
*
“And yes,” he snaps, “I have tried to walk from the forest.”
Geralt closes his frowning mouth. The spirit snorts.
“I can only leave the waters at night, and even then, I cannot walk far. Too far from the lagoon and every step will feel as if I trod on a bed of thorns. Even pushing through the pain-- and I have, too many nights to count-- there is no path out that will not turn me back. I cannot be carried from the forest, either, no matter how determined my carter. No matter how far I go, when the morning rises, I or my potential saviors are lost, and then I am back in the waters. Always, I return to these waters. For what I am, if I am anything, is a prisoner.”
His tale told, he sits back as if in punctuation. Well? His stubborn mouth unspeaking seems to ask.
Geralt finds the tale sits wrong with him.
It is not, he thinks, that it has the sound of a lie. And as a witcher trained to brutal honesty with himself as well as others, Geralt cannot say it is wholly that his sense of right and justice pricks at the fate, which it does. For all he might not experience those feelings of mortal men, in whatever fashion, he does feel some pity for the pretty, kept thing. He has always been a stalwart on the behalf of those unjustly kept. Princesses in towers, wolves in menagerie cages, and, now, spirits in lagoons.
But it is not sympathy or any doubt that unsettles him. It takes Geralt a moment to realize what.
“Most spirits of that age and breadth can’t lie. Not when they offer a greater magic, as it did in giving you legs. They can twist meaning, or hide it, but not lie outright. If she told you that your time would be to visit... there should be some way for you to be freed,” Geralt reasons.
“There are… stipulations, to the magic she worked on me,” the spirit admits. “A way to leave her hold and the lagoon. She explained them after. Just once.” He beats his fist once upon the stone. “Would that I had asked that she be more specific, that day under the willow. It had sounded quite simple.”
“It always does.”
They sit in silence for a while. It is nearly comfortable.
Geralt’s eyes wince and prick. The Cateye will wear off soon, and he will let it. There will be no battle here tonight, and there is light enough from the waters besides. He should have no trouble finding his way out of the forest. Perhaps, if he makes good enough time, there might be an ale for him at the festival. They won’t have reason to turn him away. He needn’t slay their precious spirit after all.
“So?” The spirit asks, breaking his half-hearted considerations. “Will you be killing me? I should hate for you to have walked all this way for nothing.” This, for once, is not a flirtation. The spirit smiles blandly. “Though I suppose if you hurry, you might still make the festival. It is tonight,” he asks Geralt’s momentary startlement, “is it not?”
For a moment, so surprised by his own thoughts spoken back to him, Geralt considers that maybe-- but no. He looks, and there is no tilt of victory to the look leveled on him. It had not read his thoughts. At least, not any one that he hadn’t shown clearly on his face, apparently. He had let his guard down almost without realizing. Sometime during his story, Geralt wonders with a foreboding inkling of his fate? Sometime before?
Geralt realizes he has already made a decision and, sighing gustily, unslings his swords resignedly. He gives himself exactly one moment the mourn the ale he won’t be drinking. Then:
“What stipulations?” he grunts. The man jolts from his pointed slump. The ungracefulness of his gaping speaks to his real shock as Geralt settles the swords on a bed of ferns. He himself doesn’t speak, though his mouth moves. Opening. Closing. Smiling. Geralt dodges directly catching his gaze like one avoids a direct look at the sun and clears his throat, saying to his chin (which is just about the only safe place to look which isn’t his eyes), “The role of a witcher is not only to slay beasts and monsters. We are expert curse breakers. This sounds close enough.”
“Even if I’m one of the monsters you might otherwise slay?” he lilts, like a man who knows already. Geralt scowls at being made to say it.
“You’re a spirit, not a monster. You’re hurting no one. If I can free you, I will.”
Now it is Geralt’s turn to jump.
“Thank you,” the spirit murmurs as soft and rasping as his fingertips across the back of Geralt’s hand. He leans close enough that Geralt wants to turn away-- not only for himself. He knows how his eyes and face will look from so close. The sickness of Cateye still burns through him; more so, when it is burning out. The thin, corpse-colored skin around his eyes does nothing to hide the blackness of the veins there. It seems almost indecent to expose a spirit infatuated with beauty and humanity (in fact, a spirit born from it) to such ugliness. “But I- it--” he stutters.
Geralt looks back then. Not once to this point has the spirit ever stumbled his words. So he looks, and the despair so clear in his face is all he needs to see.
“But you can’t tell me,” he concludes, and curses, and cuts his throbbing eyes back to the trees. “The magic prevents you from revealing how to break it. Of course.” Nothing can ever be easy.
The spirit bobs to the side, trying to catch Geralt’s gaze. Resolutely, Geralt turns his head.
“Witcher?” A moment. “Geralt? Why do you turn your face? Is there something you hear? Or see?”
“No,” Geralt grits out. He winces at the throb and sear of shifting blood and inflamed blood vessels. He raises a hand over his eyes when the spirit presses closer chasing his gaze like a child. He snaps. “Will you stay there?”
“No! Let me see what’s wrong.” A hand grabs his wrist. Geralt flinches.
“Don’t-”
“Touch you?” The spirit challenges.
“-look!” Geralt snarls, and closes his mouth tight immediately after, breathing hard out through his nose. A flush of nausea goes through him, followed by a dowsing of cold sweat. The sickness without battle adrenaline to cushion him from the full extent of the toxicity symptoms. Made more uncomfortable for the unfortunate honesty.
A thumb swipes along Geralt’s wrist, caressing tendon and bone.
“Your lovely eyes? Why not? Are they hurting you?”
“Not lovely,” Geralt grunts, “and not mine. The effect of the potion is wearing off.” Another throb, a flush of fever-hot blood draining down his cheeks. The muscles of his back ripple before he forces each one to release.
“You didn’t answer me. Are they hurting you?”
Silence.
“Can I see?”
Stubborn. “You won’t like it.” No one does.
Geralt can hear him shift, him in his bare skin and naught else.
“Can I see?” he repeats, so softly that he could be talking to one of his kissing villagers. “Your eyes. Please.”
It twinges to have them open as his pupils begin to contract and close and the irises shift back into place. Geralt turns to look at him anyway and bears it because he wants to punish the spirit for asking. To see him reel back in disgust. He had acted too long as if he spoke to a man and not a witcher and, Geralt thinks, needs reminding.
Only, as the night leans in on its shadowed haunches to fill in spaces that had been bright as noon not seconds before, and as the lagoon and the forest and the man with lilies in his skin go pearlescent and cool blue, the spirit startles. He watches unbreathing as the pain and therefore the blackness begins to recede, receding, gone. The shift complete.
But he does not pull back. His eyelashes splay open their beautiful, greedy, grasping fingers, and he wondering breathes, “You have brought me a gift. You just didn’t know it.” Geralt stares.
“What?”
At Geralt’s twitch his expression breaks open, not cool at all. He beams rose and peach and shell-pink warmth. His fingers weave their way into the hair behind Geralt’s ear; and he is reeling from the potion, he tells himself, that is why- why he doesn’t--
“My name is Jaskier,” the spirit says, a mere hand’s breadth away.
And that is when he dips forward and kisses Geralt on the mouth.