chapter update: Involved Process

[dragonlady7]

lambert/aiden

via https://ift.tt/3dgfAoy

so there were two ways this update could go. 1) end on a kind of nice-seeming note, with some progress made and some hope for a nice next chapter, or 2) end on a massive cliffhanger plot twist, and I thought it through and decided that I could do #2 if I was good and made sure to do the next update promptly. Since I’m not traveling this weekend and nothing should prevent me from doing so, I opted for #2.

So, hold onto your butts. (Just when you thought I was delusional and this story wasn’t really going to have any Action Plot after all.)

chapter 5, on AO3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/28876890/chapters/72504054

Also I got Aiden into a crop top again, though this one has the dubious addition of shoulder armor.

“I’ll take the shirt off too,” Aiden said. “Time to cover my arms and nothing else. Bare belly, to distract my attackers.”

“Oh, in daylight that’d be a good way to blind them,” Lambert said, and they all fell about laughing as Keira paused between spells so Aiden was free to get up. He took the armor back off, took off his jacket, untucked his shirt and rolled it up to expose his belly, and put the armor back on, then stood and posed ridiculously as everyone fell about laughing.

“Still not as pale as Geralt, though,” Ciri pointed out, reflecting that someone had clearly spent a lot of time during his formative years defusing tension in his peer group by being a clown. Well, it was good that he was recovered enough to go back to old coping mechanisms, she thought.

“Ooh he’s like the driven snow,” Lambert said, briefly affecting an archaic accent Ciri vaguely thought must have belonged to one or more of the instructors or old Witchers at Kaer Morhen pre-pogrom; all of them were prone to dipping into it for various poetic expressions. Whoever it was must have been a storyteller, and still shone through in occasional poetic phrases in all of their speech.

“Really,” Aiden said skeptically, hands on hips. He managed to cut a figure simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent like this, his broad shoulders exaggerated by the armor and making his narrow waist look tiny all out of proportion. He was quite pale, but Ciri wasn’t lying, he wasn’t anywhere near Geralt’s albino hue– he was just a pale light-skinned man.

“You look like a fucking idiot,” Lambert said, when he could draw breath after the renewed laughing fit Aiden had just provoked by teasingly flexing his arm muscles like a prize boxer warming up for a match. (Your picture was not posted)