How I met your Father

[antimonyschnuck]

How I met your Father

fandom: The Witcher
ship: Emhyr/Geralt
rating: mature

Geralt and Emhyr explain to Ciri how they started to... play Gwent. (They are not playing Gwent.)

Under the cut are 2,402 words, some of them more true than others:

Dinner

“Cirilla.”

“Father.” Ciri returned the grave greeting after a hesitant pause during which the spirits of other possible replies hung in the air - such as “Emhyr” or “don’t call me that”.

They looked at each other for a few more moments.

“You look well,” Emhyr stated matter-of-factly.

“You too,” admitted Ciri, which was true. She’d expected to see more white in his hair, some frailty in his broad frame, but he still looked exactly as he had when she’d last seen him, in Vizima, in another life, before Cirilla of Cintra, heir apparent to the throne of Nilfgaard, Lady of Space and Time, had died defying the White Frost. No, he did look different: he moved more energetically, more relaxed. He was leading them to Geralt’s dining table like he owned the place.

“Mmm, smells incredible,” Ciri smiled at Geralt. “Your cook really is the best there is.”

“Marlene has retired,” Geralt said while offering her a chair. “I’d always felt a bit bad about making her work for me after her ordeal, even if that was her wish. She went back to her Trastamara estate after getting it fixed. No, this is Emhyr’s cooking. Yes, really.” He laughed.

“I needed a hobby horse,” Emhyr explained from across the table. “I enjoy the process.”

Ciri blinked at the surrealness of it all. The stew was a Toussaint dish cooked with fancy, sun loving southern vegetables, crayfish and Corvo Bianco wine, and it was excellent. The conversation was a little stilted and very polite but Ciri had known worse.

By the end of dinner, over a good sized tray with cheese, she decided to ask what she’d wanted to ask since Geralt had welcomed her that afternoon:

“How come you two live together? I mean, I knew. I’ve heard about it,” she held up a hand to keep Geralt from interrupting her, “I’ve heard the rumours, and there’s plenty of them, all of them salacious. What’s the truth? I sent Geralt to tell you I had died and he says you never believed it. What the fuck happened then? Is this political? Or did you conveniently position yourself where I would show up sooner or later?”

Geralt groaned. Emhyr looked disapprovingly down his nose but didn’t appear to be surprised.

“This has nothing to do with you,” he said softly. “But we can certainly satisfy your curiosity with the tale of how we became better acquainted.”

Ciri’s nod was a request to continue. “I’m not insinuating I believed the tattle about the two of you being some kind of couple,” she reassured them.

“Wonderful.” Emhyr got up to open another bottle of wine. “I’ll let Geralt start and interrupt if necessary.”

Canapés

“Well, as I told you, I went to Vizima to inform your father of your demise and he knew it was bullshit but played along. Which was - kinda admirable.” Geralt smiled and Ciri heard a quiet huff from Emhyr, who was pouring them new wine.

“I assumed that would be the last I would see of the witcher,” Emhyr contributed. “There was no reason whatsoever for us to ever meet again.”

“Some time passed, then Dandelion visited Corvo Bianco, bringing news of how you dealt with the situation at Mudford.”

Ciri flinched and Geralt nodded. “You handled that well. It was a shitshow and would have been a much bigger shitshow without your diligence; and you survived it - that’s what we call a success.”

“So Blaviken was a-”

“We don’t talk about Blaviken,” Geralt said with his professional witcher face on. Something like a snort came from Emhyr’s corner.

“I was proud of you with no one there to brag to about it, and I kept asking myself if your father trusted his spies enough to have them keep an eye on you when his whole objective was to keep the pretense that you were dead.”

“I did not,” Emhyr supplied.

“So me and Roach took a trip to Nilfgaard to tell him.” Geralt pursed his lips. “I might also have gotten bored of the stationary lifestyle by then.”

“It was a very considerate thing to do,” Emhyr said quietly, “and also stupid. The political landscape back then was not stable. But he managed to insist on an audience and we had a surprisingly pleasant conversation.”

***

“Va vort! N’ess aedragh a me! Im- Witcher?” The emperor lowered the point of the sword he had drawn on the intruder and stopped shouting. “What are you doing here? How did you get in here? Where are my guards?”

“Wanted to visit. Scaled the wall and climbed in through the alcove. Haven’t seen any guards, which was the purpose of the climb.” Geralt dusted his hands off. “Thought if I officially applied for an audience people might start suspecting it’s about Ciri, since that’s our connection.”

“Imbecil!” The emperor sheathed his sword. “But unfortunately I must agree.” He led Geralt to a group of armchairs next to the fireplace. “So speak. What is it?”

“Uh. I wanted to tell you that she seems to be doing comparatively well. Thought you might want to know.”

Emhyr looked pale in the dim light of the fading day and sat down heavily in the other chair. “I had feared you were going to tell me again that she was dead; and this time I would have to believe it.”

Geralt exhaled and nodded. “If that was the case I wouldn’t have needed to take the back door. Sorry for last time. It had sounded like a good plan.”

He then told Emhyr what had happened in Mudford. The emperor’s face betrayed no emotions while he listened to the story. “She killed an innocent,” he summed up the mess.

“Not her first one; won’t be the last either,” Geralt confirmed and then had to explain: “Back when she had to flee from the dumb goons you hired she fell in with a bad crowd.”

Emhyr nodded. “These things happen. She will get used to it.”

Geralt huffed. “If that ever happens she’ll be lost. We have to accept that we’re often inadequate but if we become ruthless we’ll become the monsters we’re meant to oppose.”

The emperor’s eyes burned through the evening gloom. “No one has dared to lecture me on morals in a long time.”

Geralt’s eyebrows shot up. His interlocutor’s sins hadn’t been on his mind at all. “Maybe someone should have,” he said with a sly smile, and watched utter disbelief flash over Emhyr’s face.

“How-” A knock on the door interrupted his outrage. “One moment!” he bellowed instead. “We need an explanation for your presence,” he hissed. “Strip to the waist. Now!” He himself was already unbuttoning his overcoat and tunic.

“What?” Geralt had already doffed his shirt before his brain caught up with the why. “That’s your plan?”

“Rach!” the emperor admitted a servant who visibly extrapolated from the situation at hand that they had used the time to get more dressed, not less.

“Is it time for supper already?” Emhyr stood so close to Geralt’s armchair, he could see tiny beads of sweat gleam in the emperor’s chest hair, and a puff of warm, pleasantly emhyr-scented air wafted into his face. “Make that wine and a tray with fruit and canapés for two,” Emhyr ordered and the servant scuttled away again.

“This is the most outrageous scenario I could think of,” Emhyr was saying now, his rich, low voice rumbling through his chest, only centimeters away. “It must be true because I would never throw away my dignity like this for a mere ruse.”

Geralt still hadn’t decided how to react when the door opened again and a handful of servants - definitely more than the task strictly required - wheeled in trolleys with food and wine. Geralt suddenly knew exactly what he wanted to do - and Emhyr wouldn’t dare to protest while they had an audience. He slipped his hand underneath the loose hanging imperial robes, slowly sliding his palm over hot skin, and pulled Emhyr close enough he could caress his naked midriff. Emhyr sucked in air and bucked a little, but caught himself almost immediately. “Ticklish, Emhyr?” Geralt whispered, and let the hand holding him around the waist slip down to cup the imperial arse. He planted a kiss on the soft pouch of Emhyr’s stomach and expected to be stopped any moment now, more or less subtly, when the emperor growled, pulled his head up by the hair and bit into his lip. Then he kissed him so viciously Geralt stopped thinking about anything but tongue, teeth and cock. He stayed the whole night.

***

“After that visit to Nilfgaard I returned to Corvo Bianco and not much happened for quite some time,” Geralt narrated. “Well, but we had parted on better terms than we’d been on before.”

“Quite so,” Emhyr agreed.

“Then one morning in Spring he stood in my yard with a whole tross of Impera scaring the chickens - well and at some point in between he had abdicated.”

“That was a rather major part in all of it,” Emhyr snorted. “I had succeeded in negotiating a peaceful transition of power. Leaving Nilfgaard behind for my retirement was one of the terms. I chose Toussaint for its climate and - I admit - also because I hoped for the occasional game of Gwent with Geralt.

***

“Oh, fuck yeah…,” Geralt moaned into his pillow. “Emhyr, please - yes, exactly! Ooh…”

“I will have you know…,” Emhyr informed him, “that I intend to… make this… a regular… recreational… activity…”

***

“We played Gwent a lot,” Geralt mused.

“Mhm,” Emhyr agreed. “Still do.”

Restaurations

“Ok, that’s nice - but it still doesn’t explain why you live in Geralt’s house.” Ciri had knitted her brows together in an eerie resemblance to her father’s stern frown. “Corvo Bianco sure is nice but it’s basically just a large cottage - did you just, I don’t know, waltz in here, scare the chickens and inform Geralt that you’re moving in?”

Emhyr huffed. “Appropriate property further down the valley had been acquisitioned by the Crown and made available for me, of course; a rather formidable chateau.”

“Very representative,” Geralt agreed. “Before the incident.”

Emhyr nodded. “I moved in and was quite comfortable there for about one week. Then some minor noble with an old grudge organised an attempt on my life. Utilising a - Geralt?”

“Earth Elemental,” Geralt supplied.

“Indeed. It destroyed invaluable architectural structures in a most barbaric attempt to assassinate one person,” Emhyr disapproved.

“Flattened the whole estate,” Geralt explained. “Several people got hurt, fortunately no one died.”

“Oh shit! Did Geralt save you?” Ciri sounded much younger than she was, caught in the excitement of the story, and her father couldn’t help but smile.

“Well, he took care of it when we heard of the attack. We…” He cleared his throat. “We had played some Gwent that night and it had gotten rather late, so I was not actually present when the assassination attempt occurred.”

“Oh.” Ciri nodded. “Good. But also a bit anticlimactic.”

“Not really,” Geralt muttered from aside. “I remember there were several - ouch.”

Ciri frowned. “So you only moved in temporarily with Geralt until your chateau will be fixed?”

“Exactly.” Emhyr looked relieved.

“How long is that going to take, do you have an estimate?”

Geralt hummed from the side. “If you own property the repairs basically never stop, y’ know?”

...

There was a long awkward pause in which everyone contemplated how much exactly that had failed to make any sense within the context, then Ciri burst into laughter so hard she ended up wheezing.

“One last question,” she sniffled. “Why? Why are you trying to bullshit me so hard? Why couldn’t you just say ‘well, yes, the rumours are true, if you’ve got a problem with that, that’s on you’?”

Emhyr huffed but looked visibly relieved. “I did not want to risk giving you yet another reason to hate me. The list is already substantial; and justified.”

“We didn’t really lie to you,” Geralt added. “Just ommitted some details most people would keep private.”

“What, so this is really only a temporary arrangement until the little castle has been fixed?” Ciri rolled her eyes at them. “You’re so atuned to each other, you even finish each other’s sentences. Stop the charade.”

Geralt shrugged. “The renovations really take some time.”

“It is amazing how many things can threaten an estate,” Emhyr explained. “There was an infestation of giant centipedes that would have caused structural damage and was only detected because the Golem creature had broken through the cellar walls. Then the rose garden sprouted these monstrous corpse flowers. Then the whole site had to be abandoned for two months because a basilisk had layed an egg on one of the remaining spires and it is an endangered species. There were also rats coming in from the damaged sewers and at some point we had to wait for a mycologist from Oxenfurt to determine if the mold in the northern walls was toxic.”

Ciri snorted. “Impressive work. How did you do the thing with the mold, Geralt?”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” Geralt’s face showed no hint of emotion. “As I said, property is a pain in the ass. There are also so many regulations in place regarding the renovation of old heritage buildings, stating that the original material had to be cleaned and reused and the original designs had to be rebuilt. And ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy! You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Yeah, I don’t,” Ciri giggled. “Great work, father, very subtle.” She rubbed her face in exasperation. “So both of you want to keep your current living arrangements and instead of saying that, both of you independendly sabotaged the chateau renovations. Did I really have to spell that out for you?”

“What, no…” - “Preposterous.” - “Did you?” - “Would you…?” - “I told you, stay as long as you like.”

“I think I would like to stay with you, then, yes, if you don’t mind.”

“Since when do you care if anyone minds?”

“Well with you I obviously do care.”

Ciri sat there, listening and grinning. Then she yawned theatrically. “I think I’m going to call this a successful day of witchering. Going to bed now, leaving you alone to sort things out.” She yawned again, this time more genuinely. “But if you play Gwent while I’m here, keep it down, will you. Some things I really don’t want to know.”