Vampire/Witcher!Yen, anyone?
So, @queerfantasycharacter and @icedragondreams and I got to talking about vampire!witcher!yen, and I propose this:
witcher yen who has mostly vampire mutagens, and she slowly gets more and more vampiric tendencies until she might as well be full-blown vamp
she takes on her first vampire contract and hates how it makes her feel, hates the sense of betrayal sitting heavy in her stomach
afterwards she pledges never to kill another vampire, unless they're truly out of control and an active danger to herself
(of course, her survival instincts always come first.)
but a couple times, her vampire tendencies are really helpful for the lesser vampire contracts, the ekimmaras and the fleders and such, because she can reach for some instinct buried deep inside her and sort of...just urge them to move on
and all the witcher texts she read said that higher vampires were the most dangerous beasts you could come across, that there was no way to recognize them--not even by her medallion trembling--but one day, she's by the docks in Novigrad, and she sees a man with white hair and just knows that he's like her
so she sheathes her silver sword and goes up to him, radiating beauty and seduction from every pore, and it...doesn't work. he's utterly unaffected.
it turns out he's also on the prowl, looking for a beast rumored to be luring and killing young kids; coincidentally, the same contract she's on
but the difference is that he's doing it because he knows who the killer is, and it's yet another higher vampire, who's going to end up giving the entire race a bad name
and yen and geralt are like fire and water at first, two explosive personalities in too-close proximity, but they put aside their natural enmity to work together to find the killer. together, with their vampiric strength and yen's strategic use of bombs and careful application of silver, they take him down.
and despite their bickering, they find themselves falling into bed and a partnership together
so they trawl the continent, more often than not avoiding vampire contracts, but every so often geralt will get word that there's a higher vampire somewhere doing something naughty, and together they'll take them down.
and one day, they're just in time to rescue a terrified bard from the clutches of death, and by all rights, he should be horrified by them, shaking in his boots
but he isn't. he takes one look at them, and falls head-over-heels in love, fangs and claws and all
and instead of singing the praises of witchers, he ends up writing ballads to vampires' beauty, bewitching and enchanting
(there are a few songs about witchers in there still--though yen is beautiful, even she faces the prejudice against witchers sometimes)
and the three of them travel the continent spreading word of good vampires and taking out the bad ones
(and maybe decades later, yen and geralt are faced with the very real possibility, no, certainty of outliving their pet bard. so they experiment with some mutagens, and give jaskier a modified version that makes him as immortal as them, minus the super strength and the claws/fangs. he still craves red (read: bloody) meat about once a month, though.)
and they live happily ever after the end