Archive of Our Own ^beta

She takes her time in dressing him but not the way he would prefer, no hands smoothed down his shoulders or pulls on buttons and straps, the dig of her polished fingernails. Those long, dainty fingers flick and fabric ripples in golds and reds across his body. Illusionary. So swiftly that the nakedness as his usual clothing falls away is blink and you’ll miss it.

“What happens if you sneeze and lose your concentration?” asks Eskel, feeling out the ribs and texture of his new outfit. “Doubt I’ll win anybody over in the buff.”

“You underestimate yourself, Witcher,” says Yennefer. “And me. I would never lose my concentration.”

Her lips purse, toying with flickering the ribboned accents along his collar from gold to black and back again. She settles on gold at last and presses with a hand to turn him toward the mirror. He looks like a dressed gamebird, primped and preened and layered with flourishes simply for the appeasement of waiting guests at the table.

“I look like somebody’s gonna stuff and mount me after,” says Eskel. The gold ribbon pulls the molten color from his eyes and deepens it.

“That can be arranged,” says Yennefer, her chin hooked on his shoulder, dark hair spilling down his arm. He curses under his breath. She’s unreal, this woman. He knows why Geralt hates her banquets and finery, hates the spectacle and scrutiny, and he knows also why Geralt so often gives to her anyway. Not this time, held up another few days in Velen, and a chance meeting with Eskel has had him fumbling toward Yen in his stead.

He tips his head appraisingly, looking at himself. Makes for a poor substitute.

“Not quite as pretty in ribbons as your Geralt.”

“Geralt would chew through them and skitter away if I tried ribbons. You’re much more civilized.”

He bares his teeth in a grin, scars pulling tight across his lips and under the wrinkle of his eyes. He has a thought, a dark, needling thing. He scowls deeper in the mirror just to see the gnarled flesh pucker and strain.

“Pity you can’t braid my hair. Gimme some pigtails,” he says, and she tuts over him. He forgets himself, the ways that she dredges deep with her talons into the hollows of his thoughts. She does it without thinking, easy as a breath.

He does not need to ask or voice a single thing. No wonder Geralt loves her. The ease with which she pins him in the palm of her hand, lazy in her scrutiny.

She touches a hand to the pocket of his disfigured cheek, and the flesh ripples as his clothing had.

For a moment, he feels flayed and naked, untethered, and then, the reflection of a different man blinks at him. Soft through the jaw, unblemished, scars melted to bare skin like wax pressed into a mold. His pupils even out, eyes gone simple brown, the color of earth. Not even an acne pockmark left, not a nick from a razor.

“You do this for him?” he asks, the roughness of his lowered voice startling in the quiet.

“Never,” says Yennefer, her cheek against his shoulder.

Eskel pictures him – Geralt – unmade and shrinking back to boyhood. Red-haired and flushed pink.

“Don’t show him,” he says. He looks at the stranger in the mirror, reaches to touch with fingertips. The skin is supple, peachy, soft as a baby’s buttcheek.

“I can leave it if you like,” says Yennefer. “For the banquet.”

“Naw,” says Eskel and watches the surface of the stranger’s face warp back to his, tightening and fissuring. He pokes at the yellowed sharp of exposed canine with his tongue. “Your crowd requested the company of a Witcher. Would hate to disappoint them.”

She says nothing, reaching with a hand to tangle through his hair. It is just long enough to twist into small braids along his temples, holding the hair back from tickling his forehead. She thinks a moment, a smug smile pulling her red lips and whispers a gold ribbon spooling through the narrow braids, falling to sway behind his ears and brush his collar.

“There’s your pigtails, pretty boy,” she says with a tug on a braid and kisses him at the hinge of his jaw.

No wonder Geralt’s so gone for her, Eskel thinks as he turns to kiss her proper, full on her red, perfect mouth. She opens for him, and he touches her smile with his tongue, energy fizzing between them. Forgetting the prying tendrils of her thoughts, he wonders what perished version of herself she would witness in the mirror.

“Nothing pretty,” she says against his mouth. When he doubts it, she pulls at the fine plait of his hair, sharp behind his ear, prickling long after she has gone.