fic rec: waiting for the wind to throw me down

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I had been meaning to rec this, which was a completed work being posted in installments, and kept forgetting to, but now the last installment is posted and I shouldn’t procrastinate any longer– I got to beta-read some of this as it was being composed and I am here to tell you it is fucking great.

It is Geralt/Lambert, and features the two of them fumbling to work out some sort of mutual support against the intergenerational trauma of witchers, via the vehicle of moderate-to-serious BDSM. (Bondage and knifeplay feature prominently but not as prominently as Studiously Not Talking About Emotions.)

Notably this is Not A Romance, but there’s a lot of fucking in it, and so many goddamned feelings. All undiscussed, of course.

Waiting For The Wind To Throw Me Down, on AO3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/32008507?view_full_work=true

by some_stars https://tmblr.co/m0l4iDjxkB7VuWm6d1vXtOQ

Lambert glared at him. “I’m not fucking delicate.”

Geralt raised his eyebrows. “You want me to hurt you?”

“What the fuck did you think the point of this was?” Lambert snapped, struggling a little now under Geralt’s hands. (Your picture was not posted)

flaming arrows

geralt

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i have no hilarious writeup of the whole thing but there was one moment, amidst all of the enormous drama of some_stars https://tmblr.co/m0l4iDjxkB7VuWm6d1vXtOQ playing the Battle of Kaer Morhen on stream last night, that made me laugh so much and I keep repeating the laughter this morning.

So right it’s all dramatic and they’re preparing for this battle and you’ve been emotionally gutpunched by Ciri’s reunions with everyone and now Geralt is walking around making sure everything is ready and

Roche and Ves are there in this playthrough, and as you walk past them you hear the single stupidest fucking exchange of dialogue I’ve ever overheard in a video game, and Dude and I kept repeating it to each other the whole night.

Ves says something like “well what’s so great about flaming arrows”, and Roche, sounding utterly, utterly serious in that square-jawed way only he can, says “well the point is that they are aflame”, and it’s presented as if this were a perfectly reasonable and serious conversation for them to be having.

Dude keeps saying “well what’s so great about flaming arrows” to me and I love this.

(Like, obviously it’s just meant to be atmospheric, and it’s just meant to sound like they’re having a serious conversation in the background, but oh my god it’s hilarious.) (Your picture was not posted)

flaming arrows

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laurelnose https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/655347781640323072/flaming-arrows:

akilah12902 https://akilah12902.tumblr.com/post/655346685083549696/flaming-arrows:

bomberqueen17 https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/655327141582520320/flaming-arrows:

i have no hilarious writeup of the whole thing but there was one moment, amidst all of the enormous drama of some_stars https://tmblr.co/m0l4iDjxkB7VuWm6d1vXtOQ playing the Battle of Kaer Morhen on stream last night, that made me laugh so much and I keep repeating the laughter this morning.

So right it’s all dramatic and they’re preparing for this battle and you’ve been emotionally gutpunched by Ciri’s reunions with everyone and now Geralt is walking around making sure everything is ready and

Roche and Ves are there in this playthrough, and as you walk past them you hear the single stupidest fucking exchange of dialogue I’ve ever overheard in a video game, and Dude and I kept repeating it to each other the whole night.

Ves says something like “well what’s so great about flaming arrows”, and Roche, sounding utterly, utterly serious in that square-jawed way only he can, says “well the point is that they are aflame”, and it’s presented as if this were a perfectly reasonable and serious conversation for them to be having.

Dude keeps saying “well what’s so great about flaming arrows” to me and I love this.

(Like, obviously it’s just meant to be atmospheric, and it’s just meant to sound like they’re having a serious conversation in the background, but oh my god it’s hilarious.)

This might just be a translation thing, but I also love the idea that this is a conversation that those two have had like two dozen times before and it’s just turned into this utterly nonsensical-sounding argument where the sentences you’re hearing are conveying entirely different information than they seem because Roche and Ves have developed a ton of verbal shortcuts over having had this argument twenty fucking times.

i didn’t remember this but my experience with Witcher ambient dialogue is that even if the premise of the conversation is insane, it usually follows more or less sensibly—if you manage to catch the whole thing. anyways this sounded like a fragment to me so i thought I’d check if there was more, and there is! the full context is that he’s been correcting her archery form and she’s starting to get frustrated. probably because the night before a battle with the Wraiths of Mörhogg is a bad time to be told you’re doing archery wrong, RIP.

ROCHE: Elbow higher.

VES: It’s high enough.

ROCHE: You drop it a bit every time you release the string. Apart from which, flaming projectiles require a different trajectory.

-

VES: What the hell’s better about flaming arrows, anyway?

ROCHE: They set things alight.

this conversation is coded as two separate chunks of dialogue (possibly to give the impression of them arguing for longer before Ves snaps) so it’s really easy to only catch half of it.

ok i went looking actually to see if i could discover this snippet written down anywhere because surely i’d heard it wrong but I couldn’t, so I expected someone would be able to correct me, but– no i did not and i am fucking dying that in fact that is what they were saying.

I mean, I get it, in context, but, also, that’s funny.

Okay, dad, they’re on fire, get off my ass. (Your picture was not posted)

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