A/N: As a young man, Lambert found the more pointless (read: focused and requiring of patience) tasks of training to be the most taxing. Like, why the fuck does a Witcher need to have a precise kerning?
Lambert puffed indignantly, and his breath clouded before his eyes. Every fistful of straw was another slight on his pride, and he practically punched each one into the target dummy. His hands were numb with cold, and his teeth chattered constantly. The thin woollen cloak they’d thrown at him as he’d stalked out into the courtyard provided little to no insulation from the harsh Kaedweni winter.
This was his punishment for thinking there were more important things to do than practice his downstroke. He snorted. It even sounded fucking stupid. Why did a Witcher need to learn to write, anyway? He understood reading. You needed to be able to work out the illegible scrawl of the average, vaguely literate alderman, and he excelled at mathematics, alchemy; everything that didn’t require pointless amounts of patience, endless misery and no visible payoff.
Writing though. What a fucking joke. ‘It teaches you patience, coordination, and allows you to actually communicate with the world, boy.’ He could communicate just fine with the world; a middle finger and a curled lip had served him perfectly well for his last twelve years.
Writing was just so boring; the endless repetition of the same letter until it was absolutely perfect. It was far more entertaining to flick ink at Voltehre, draw dicks on the corner of his page when he wasn’t looking and roll snap-bangs—as Lambert called his much-loathed explosive invention—under old Barmin’s chair when he fell asleep. It was that final little prank that had earned him dummy stuffing duty out in the cold, while the rest of his class sat and practiced their letters in front of a roaring fire. It had been a little bang. Not like he’d rolled a fucking dancing star bomb under the bastard’s arse.
This was a complete over-reaction.
Lambert glowered at the frosted window that shielded the other trainees from his view. Maybe he should throw a dummy through it? They could be as cold as he was, or maybe—no, wait. With a mischievous little smirk, he approached the window and wetted the tip of his finger. Oh, he could write. He just didn’t have the patience to, or like being forced to. There was a big difference between incompetence and reluctance. And, better yet, he’d prove his skill backwards.
First a nice, curly ‘F’, with a little flourish at the bottom, an upwards sweep into the ‘u’, don’t forget to maintain the baseline now, Lambert. Wouldn’t want a wonky ‘c’, would we? Use the very tip of the finger to create a hairline to connect the letters, and a nice, jaunty flick for the ‘k’.
He could hear the sniggering of the other boys from this side of the thin pane of glass, which just made his grin wider, shortly followed by a loud snort as Barmin was disturbed from his slumber by the building mirth of his students…
The chair legs scraped just as Lambert was putting the finishing touches on the accompanying smiley face. The old Witcher snarled. “When I get hold of you boy—.”
That’s just it, old man. You gotta’ get hold of me first.
Lambert arranged the target dummy carefully against the wall, adjusting its arms using the handle of the old broom they used to prop them up, and threw himself at the old, worn stone of the keep’s walls. By the time Barmin burst out into the courtyard, it was completely empty.
His gaze turned to the window, and he heaved a resigned sigh. The backwards ‘fuck’ and smiley face were now accompanied by a dummy pointing right at him. The happiest ‘fuck you’ he’d ever received.
Well, at least they knew the boy could write. Barmin counted that as a win.
