dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with the ancient sea

update

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Chapter 18/18: To Completion https://archiveofourown.org/works/22894186/chapters/62222104

It is nine thousand words of explicit m/m/f threesome porn, with pegging, emotions, cuddling, face-sitting, dramatic readings of bad porn, manhandling, and general fuckitude all around. It is absolutely not what I set out to write but it turned out pretty great, I think.

“Fuck off,” Geralt said fondly.

“C’mon,” Jaskier said, “I know you’re tired, Yen, but arch up a bit, you could– oh, that was a good one, I could tell– I love how your eyes roll back, that really sells it.”

“Fuck,” Yen said, eyes glazed and distant, “ah fuck– Geralt– fuck–”

“Very heartfelt,” Jaskier said. He picked up a notebook that was lying on the trunk, and pulled out a pencil stub fastened to the spine with a loop, flipped to a blank page and pretended to be taking notes. “I give that one a nine out of ten. Now, Geralt, you’re on your third climax of the night, yes? Yennefer, is it worth attempting to count?”

Geralt looked over at him in amusement, rubbing his chin along Yennefer’s hair. He wasn’t quite at the point of no return but he was close, hitching into her with a glazed kind of focus, and Yennefer was completely beyond even knowing Jaskier was there, staring blindly at the ceiling utterly lost in pleasure.

“If you’re trying to get me to fuck you instead you’ve got to wait,” Geralt said, “I’m not done here.”

“No no,” Jaskier said, “I’m invested in this outcome.”

I also touched briefly in the end notes on this but I wanted to say I glanced at my AO3 stats and if I sort all my shit from all seven or eight years I’ve been on there, none of my Witcher works are in the top five for hits, but they are four of the top five by kudos, and three of the top five by comment threads. So like. Y’all, this is a hell of nice fandom. Thanks, guys, this has been a hell of a way to get through a scary period of history.

And yes yes, my Lambert-in-the-hallway epilogue is coming along, I’ll figure it out.

Ah, relatedly somewhat to the above ruminations– I just also hit a big (for me) Tumblr follower count milestone, and like, sometimes people do great thank-you things for that but listen I just wrote 9k of porn, I’m kind of tired, so I’m treating this chapter update as a celebration of the follower count milestone. It doesn’t matter in any kind of absolute way but I do love that y’all are here, especially the y’all of you who are real human people who actually are here to read stuff, LOL. I’m not always good at replying to asks or replies but I do really like getting them, so thank you and if I didn’t write back it wasn’t because I was mad it was because I forgot to.

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So I decided this porny chapter would be the end of the story and like

well

[image id: screen shot titled Word Count that underneath says “Pages: 17 of 82″ and “Words: 9060 of 48700″]

No, Ancient Sea is not 48k words long, this is in a doc where only some scraps of Ancient Sea are, along with some unrelated notes, because anything too long in Docs gets unwieldy plus also I am a tire fire of a human and don’t ever have anything organized in a coherent fashion. BUT, yes, this current chapter, which mind most of my chapters for this entire series have been aimed to be about 5k words, is 9060 words long.

Also it’s all sex, basically, so– It’s character-driven sex, but no less filthy for that. I hope there’s enough character to make it worth it, esp for those of y’all who aren’t super into sex scenes…

But I did find an end, so.

The other awkward thing is that like halfway through writing this chapter– before I even wrote this chapter I had the idea, and then halfway through I paused and scribbled this great little coda of Lambert eavesdropping in the hallway, right? but I don’t know where to put it.

I might just post that not on AO3, like on Dreamwidth or something, and link to it, because it’s not part of the story and I added a silly “ten years later” thing with some videogame-verse stuff in it and I don’t actually want that to be “canon” to MDS-verse here, but I’m not sure about that, so–

anyway, the Ancient Sea chapter will probably go up soon, and I just have to figure what to do with that coda. Maybe I should put it on AO3 anyway as a standalone, for archival purposes. IDK. IDK! IDK.

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I did manage to make some progress the last couple of days on Ancient Sea– the scene where a particular character is browsing through Geralt’s bookshelves and finds a promisingly worn cover and the cracked spine opens it to a suitably well-worn page containing some scene that was certainly formative to Geralt’s budding awareness of sexuality when he was an impressionable youth.

I read a bunch of this translation of Amadis of Gaul, thinking that was certainly the very model of the chivalric novel, and figured I’d try to write a bodice-ripper sex scene in that mode of storytelling and see how I did.

It turned out almost embarrassingly vanilla, which hadn’t been my original intention, but on reflection it is actually perfect that it turned out like that.

And then she did unfasten her kirtle, and letting it drop to the ground she stood before him altogether bare, and the sight of her radiant form completely arrested him. But in a moment his wits returned to him, and he turned his face away, saying Nay, my lady! I am not worthy of such treatment.

She took his hands in hers and, climbing upon the bed, pressed his wrists against the head-board, that he could not move, and such was his condition from the many wounds he had received and the exhaustion of the fighting that her delicate strength exceeded his in that moment, and he could not wrest free, and feared to try lest he injure her flawless limbs. She pressed herself to him, and he could not but yield to her, and in but a brief space after, all his thoughts of duty and self-denial had fled.

She bade him leave his hands affixed to the headboard as she had placed them, and he could not but do as she asked. With his body thus restrained only by her words, she set about bestowing upon him his reward…

[geralt, aged 12: omg NUT
yennefer, aged 98: !!! this is hilarious
jaskier, aged 42: aw that’s adorable, baby do you want me to hold your wrists and tell you you’re good? Yen don’t be mean.
geralt, aged 104: omg NUT
yennefer, aged 98: okay, okay, it’s adorable, sheesh *pets him*
geralt, aged 104, slightly quieter: omg NUT]

There’s some distinctly Less Vanilla stuff on that shelf that later Yennefer and Jaskier are going to find, [cut for Less Vanilla which is meant as a humorous thing but is going, in the final draft, to require an incredible list of warnings for Fantasy Noncon of the classic bodice-ripper Unrealistic type where everyone totally gets off on all of it but feels slightly ashamed of themselves afterward because it’s incredibly gross]

certainly including one [which for the record was surely not one of Geralt’s favorite books] where a Fair Damsel is bodice-ripped by Some Hideous Enormous Monster in extremely, ridiculously fantastically non-plausible ways, like super-gross hentai tentacle porn style by something non-human-scale at all in ways that are completely incompatible with human or any other anatomy, and they’re laughing and doing dramatic readings of it to each other (Our Dear Heroine is simultaneously being body-horrored with a phallus like larger than her actual body kind of deal and also having improbably constant orgasms, it’s that kind of porn) and Geralt’s like hmph, that’s just unrealistic (because when has he ever been able to let unrealistic depictions of monsters go by) and Yen and Jaskier turn and stare at him like… you’d know this because you’ve personally been ravished by an [enormous creature]’s monster dong, eh? and Geralt blushes bright red and is like No! No! I just mean– of course not! that’s just not how [enormous creature]s act and they’re like suuuuuuuuure tell us more about the monster dong Geralt

so then they have to roleplay it and Geralt’s like no way that’s gross and yet somehow gets talked into being the damsel getting ravished (jaskier is extremely persuasive, especially when naked, and actually, yeah, Geralt is super a monsterfucker), and I mean, Yen’s got illusion magic so it’s simultaneously convincing and clearly fantastical, and hoo boy it’s completely implausible but also super, super hot.

And afterward Geralt’s brain is fried enough by a stupefying orgasm that he actually admits all the various times he’s fucked or been fucked by monsters, which as it turns out is kind of a lot, even for a Witcher, because our dear boy is kind of, well, a monsterfucker.

[jaskier, aged 42: i thought *i* was a slut
yennefer, aged 98: you, my dear bard, are what we call an amateurgeralt, aged 104: did i say all of those things out loud????? fuck]

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I felt like we all deserved the diversion of some slobberingly-incoherent morning-after sex.

chapter 15, Worth The Wait, which I know is a soppy title but listen I have seen so goddamned many stories in this fandom and specifically this pairing where the participants lament that because they’ve waited until the standard human in the pairing is so incredibly aged at the age of 41 that they’ve got practically no time left to fuck before he keels over of just being Too Wizened To Continue, and like, listen,

no.

“You’re impossible,” Jaskier said fondly. And then, possibly because he was drunk with pleasure and fondness, he said, “Thank you for not fucking me when I was a stupid kid.”

Geralt glanced up then, eyebrows quizzical. “Yeah?” he said. “I figured you were mad at me for wasting all that time.”

“No,” Jaskier said. “I mean, yeah, it would’ve been great to have all that sex, and I feel like I could’ve kept up with you better when I was young maybe, but I was absolutely trying to use you to hurt myself and it would’ve been a disaster and you don’t deserve to be treated like that. And then we couldn’t have had this. So, no, it wasn’t wasted time, and it was worth the wait.”

“I didn’t have to be quite such a cock about it,” Geralt mumbled into Jaskier’s neck.

“Well,” Jaskier said. “I could’ve done without some of that, to be sure, but. The overall point remains. At least you didn’t fuck me and then pull that shit.”

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OOOOOH that’s a good one! No, I hadn’t yet worked out if I was going to have Aiden appear anywhere in the series, though I do have a Lambert POV scene that’ll be in the next Ancient Sea update (which is coming… i promise… eskel is taking his sweet fucking time falling into triss’s bed which i hadn’t thought would be quite such an epic scene but you know, choreography, and ya boy is shy it turns out though once you finally get him started he does get there) —

but you’re right, i could throw in a flashback scene of that.

Man Eskel really is the glue holding this family together, and Coen knows it but literally nobody else does. (Well, maybe Vesemir does, I have not at all in the slightest discovered anything from his POV yet and I am just not sure what he does or does not know about or realize.)

I’m excited to include Aiden and am also delighted that given the relative timelines of everything, I am under exactly 0 obligation to address literally the only canon event for him in the game timeline (which is dying). As far as I’m concerned, that never happens, but I also don’t have to come up with any alternative because I’m just not going that late in the timeline.

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gwogobo replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

I probably shouldn’t find this playthrough as enthralling as I do, but I do so /shrug

I am trying to keep it interesting. It’s the only interesting thing happening in my life and for a while there it was the only writing I could do, so I sure hope it’s entertaining, LOL.

(That’s my advice to other writers, too– if you’re having terrible writer’s block, writing anything is better than nothing, and nonfiction and essays are, at least for me, a really great way of getting those gears turning because it’s easy enough to start trying to think of a way to structure and embellish a nonfiction story that happened to you, and from there at least for me it doesn’t take long for my desire to tell a whole new story to build up until I can’t actually stop myself from writing, so– it works, generally.)

more joy behind the cut, including a bonus AO3 comment:

childoffantasy replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

OKAY ACTUALLY I MIGHT HAVE AN EXPLANATION ABOUT CUNNY OF THE GOOSE. There is some historical precedent for goose being slang for one’s prostitute, so every time I hear about this Cunny of the Goose place I wanna know if they have a particularly good brothel that might have given their town its name

OK that’s hilarious. Listen, maybe there was a brothel there, we didn’t actually look!

akilah12902 replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

Re: the dead son: huh. I tell her about it; the letter you find on him actually has a lot more detail about how he realized what a lot of the Nilfgaardian war machine was doing was wrong, and like… maybe changing hearts and minds.

I didn’t find that the letter really had that much good content in it, it was mostly him being full of despair. If I were the mom I’d’ve wanted to read it, but I understood Geralt not handing it over and telling her a pretty lie instead. Because let’s be real here, a sad mom is going to change the mind of the White Flame Dancing On The Barrows Of His Foes?

I don’t think so. This ain’t a democracy.

(Also, the Hearts And Minds phrase comes from a really fucking horrible Vietnam campaign that Really Really Did Not Work, so, sorry if I had an involuntary cringe response to that thought. Ooh it’s got a dark history in general, as a phrase. [link is to wikipedia])

kaijyuu replied to your post “no mercy once she grips a sword”

deffo what akilah said. also, coral was just… sort of a huge asshole, but doesn’t iirc use artefact compression on anyone? it was used on yennefer by another sorceress tho, and is quite unpleasant. also dandelion’s voice is– something. i feel like netflix!jaskier is a huge glow up for the character in general, really.

IDK about Coral at all, but you are absolutely, absolutely right that Netflix!Jaskier is an enormous fucking glow-up, I know this and haven’t even really properly met Dandelion.

bygodstillam reblogged your post and added:

/chinhands at this entire thing

Hee, hi! I’ve made some great progress on the Morning After bit too, I’m rather pleased.

gnomeicecream replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

A lot of fic I’ve read show Dandylion with a sister? Maybe its only fanon

It’s definitely fanon. I mean, I gave him a sister too, but– in this game plot it is extremely clear that he is lying to every one of the women he speaks to and is claiming that the woman he’s most infatuated with is his sister, to keep the others from being jealous, and it’s presented as being on the face of it rather flimsy, as a story.

Yeah, Netflix!Jaskier is in every single fucking way a huge improvement.

saffronheliotrope replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

I’m delighted to hear that Morvran is obsessed with horses in the game, because pretty much the only detail I remember about him from astolat’s fics is that at one point Ciri says he’s a magnificent horseman who fucks as well as he rides. A+ for consistent characterization!

!!!!

Go Ciri! I hope she’s getting what she wants out of it.
(Maybe I remember that bit. I should reread those now that i know who most of those people are.)

nogling replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

I will say that if you DO ask why Elihal is dressed like that, you get some great lines about personal expression, and Geralt is pretty chill about it.

Oh, that’s good to know. We weren’t willing to risk it. DF was so funny, he was just like, I am absolutely fucking not choosing that dialogue option, it’s none of Geralt’s fucking business why he’s dressed like that.

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

There’s a few nice Elihal/Eibhear fics, if that’s of interest to you

Oh is Eibhear the one with the dumplings? Ohoho I should probably seek those out. I haven’t done the swords and dumplings quest though we did accidentally do the opening cutscene bit, I’ve probably met him enough to go on with.

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

The game’s treatment of Elihal is Extremely Questionable, but they did really weirdly manage to give Elihal some good lines? It’s confusing and upsetting at the same time. Thankfully a very small subset of game fans really like Elihal and ship them with Eibhear, the elven blacksmith in the same city.

I mean– that’s the thing! He’s so undeniably a rad character!! Like, why’d you have to make it weird, CDPR???

OK I definitely will have to look those up.

Be hilarious if later Geralt’s like back in Kaer Morhen and he’s like “oh so this is wild, I met this elf in Novigrod who wore these pretty dresses–” and Lambert’s like “yes he was so cool” and Geralt’s like “… oh you know him” and shuts his mouth but I won’t write that because it would require acknowledging their weird awkward characterization of Geralt as somehow being 100 years old and never having met anyone cross-dressing before.)

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

IMO Zoltan is not only a dadfriend (he’s probably forever trying to feed Dandelion and Geralt) he is also clearly Geralt’s FWB.

ORLY? Hm, I can see that. Surely someone has ficced this. I mostly consume fic through recs but I see between this and the elf dress-person I am going to have to do some searching.

enchanting-person-wizardreplied to your post“UNDERCUT ACHIEVED”

Dude oil has me in hysterics every freaking single time and I live for these play through writeups - I look forward to them all the time lol I’m playing, too, atm, so it’s cool to be like yeah, I know what you’re talking about rn, and that’s so fun! Plus, absolutely the undercut is like 10/10 the best option- like, especially paired with the full beard?? Lol

ugh I WISH we had the full beard. But the soul patch is, at least, ignorable; I can just make it a goatee in my mind, because the rest of his chin is sort of stubbley, so it’s kinda acceptable.

Dude Oil. I should’ve worked harder on incorporating a mention of Dude Oil into the sex scene I wrote but I figured I should keep it lowkey– Geralt’s Box O Where Weird Salves Go To Die is as close as I’d let myself come. Maybe the saddest bit of that is that I know he’s not using those to wank with, he’s mostly using them as chapstick/moisturizer/hair oil because his skin gets so dry in Kaer Morhen’s winters and if he greases himself up before he goes to bed he winds up less ashy and frizzy and it’s all soaked in so he’s not trying to live his life with a fine coating of grease on his face all the time. But sometimes whatever odd ingredients are in it give his hair a weird color cast or make him smell funny and he just deals with it because he doesn’t take bad care of himself, but he also doesn’t take real great care of himself. He’s going to not be ashy (not that an albino can really be ashy, per se– he is, more or less, an albino, after all, but you know. as a very pale person I totally can get ashy) but he’s also not going to pamper himself with, like, cocoa butter and rose hip seed oil or anything. (Rose hip seed oil is supposed to help with scarring, which, he’s definitely not bothering with that.)

which brings me to OH the BEST AO3 COMMENT of the recent lot (and there have been a lot of good ones):

transcript: Mikiwatches left the following comment on The Ancient Sea:

I am sorry, but Geralt is a dangerous bottle reuser and needs to go to jail for 1000 years. Geralt buys bulk spices and puts them in mayonnaise jars unlabeled. Geralt decants hand soap into shampoo bottles as body wash. When will he pay for his crimes??

THIS IS SO TRUE

He doesn’t even buy the bulk spices, he makes them himself. And he’s just like my sister, who is this times a thousand including the growing the herbs herself– she doesn’t peel the labels off the jars so they’re still like, Chunky Salsa or whatever, and then she scrawls the new thing in Sharpie on the lid but then neither crosses it off nor removes it with rubbing alcohol when she puts something else in there so you’re left standing in her GIANT kitchen (which TEN PEOPLE use on the reg, that’s the farm sister with the crew who take turns cooking) holding a jar that’s printed with Chunky Salsa and the lid has a Sharpie scrawl that says LARD and it’s filled with some greenish dried vegetable matter that smells like perhaps borage or it could be marjoram and who the fuck knows, maybe it’s poisonous!

(My favorite were the unlabeled jars that held the baking powder and the baking soda. TAKE YOUR CHANCES, BABY. Also the sugar and the salt. GOOD FUCKIN LUCK.)

So he’s got like, twelve unlabeled jars next to the bed, all of which contain salves or oils that are mostly based on the same combo of oils and fats so they’re semi-solid at room temp but melt on the skin, and all of them are varying shades of beigeish-green or beigeish brown. And some of them are completely harmless, even beneficial to humans, and some of them will MELT YOUR FUCKING SKIN OFF, MORTAL.
Best of luck!

(This is why Lambert teaches Ciri immediately how to mix her own goddamned cosmetics, because he knows very, very well that Geralt is a fucking menace.)

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I was planning fully to finish the Ancient Sea Geralt/Jaskier FINALLY sex scene and post that next and then do chapter 3 of fugitive but oh my god sex scenes take For God Damn Ever to write especially when you’re surrounded by children all the time. it’s. it’s a lot.

so probably i am going to give up and put chapter 3 of Fugitive up even though that’s deffo not the update people are waiting for, oh well, and then hope for a miracle to bestow me the inspiration to complete the goddamn Ancient Sea sex scene.

For some reason Geralt is being very wolfy, which is sort of funny and also sort of– I mean, it’s not deep, it’s just that he’s comfortable being inhuman and that’s sort of sweet. I imagine with sex partners he knows less well he spends more effort on not obviously scenting and biting and growling and acting more like he thinks a Normal Person must, and with Jaskier he is just not bothering because even though they’ve never fucked he’s known him nearly half a human lifetime by now and has already tipped his hand on the Weird Shit.

Here is a teaser snippet, but this is basically where it ends, it took me literally two weeks of writing to get them naked. Argh.

“You keep making those noises, I’m going to fucking devour you,” Geralt promised.

“Please,” Jaskier said, breathless, “please do,” shoving his hips upward.

Geralt managed to pull himself away long enough to unfasten Jaskier’s trousers. Jaskier wriggled to help him, which set off his prey instinct again and made him pin the bard down and bite his shoulder, at the last second exerting enough willpower not to break the skin with his teeth. He’d said he wouldn’t leave marks.

“Fuck,” Jaskier gasped. “Fuck, Geralt–”

Somehow he managed to get Jaskier’s trousers off him, and his braies, and then there was skin, and his scent was overwhelming– the strongest notes in it were of happiness and relief, underscoring the arousal, and it made Geralt feel soft in the middle even as it made him hard elsewhere.

Jaskier laughed suddenly. “Are you smelling me?”

Geralt just growled in response, a contented noise. He’d spent so long, decades, with Jaskier’s scent, often tinged with arousal, but usually shading to wistfulness, unhappiness, pining, distress, frustration– it wasn’t that he’d never smelled contented, but mostly he hadn’t, and it hadn’t been Geralt’s business to fix.

“Get your kit off, you nut,” Jaskier said, shoving his fingers into the waistband of Geralt’s trousers, finding where their lacings were and unpicking them carelessly. Geralt growled again, not in the slightest bit annoyed.

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Jaskier comes to Kaer Morhen for his dick appointment, but there are other matters to deal with, like– meeting the family.

At Home, on AO3. No warnings, I don’t think, but as usual, do let me know if I should’ve tagged for something.

Geralt had heard the song before, and was already rolling his eyes a little bit. “You should sing along,” Jaskier said.

“I don’t sing,” Geralt pointed out, which was true; he pretty much never had, that Jaskier had heard. Not even really humming.

Jaskier plucked out the rest of the song and then put his hand against the strings to stop them ringing. “Oh!” he said. “This is my chance, then, to ask– all the weird shit Geralt does, how much of that is Witcher stuff and how much of that is that Geralt’s just weird?”

“Geralt’s a fuckin’ weirdo,” Lambert said immediately.

Geralt leaned forward slightly, and Jaskier could read that it was him weighing his options insofar as attempting to hit the other Witcher. He decided against it, and sat back, glaring. But he wasn’t really mad, and he wasn’t really afraid of anything Jaskier might find out. It was… refreshing.

“So you can sing,” Jaskier said to Lambert.

“I mean,” Lambert said, “not great, but yeah.”

“See in the dark,” Jaskier said.

“Standard,” Lambert said.

“Sarcasm,” Jaskier said.

“Part of the schooling,” Lambert said.

“Obsessive about sword care,” Jaskier said.

“Oh,” Vesemir said, “I personally beat that into all of them.”

“Good to know,” Jaskier said. “Weird obsession with giving your horses all the same names?”

“Oh that’s just Geralt,” Lambert said.

“It does get tedious coming up with new names,” Vesemir put in.

“The baths thing,” Jaskier said. “Absolutely no personal hygiene but really fond of baths.”

“That’s just him,” Lambert said, “most of us know how to wash our faces.”

“The teeth thing,” Jaskier said.

Lambert, Coen, and Vesemir all looked at Geralt, for some reason, and Geralt sat up, abruptly losing his bored expression. “You told him–” Lambert said.

“I have never told him one gods-damned thing about my teeth,” Geralt said, indignant and slightly– horrified?

“It’s not funny,” Vesemir said, sternly.

“I did not,” Geralt said. There was an unexpected depth of feeling in that.

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oh my fucking god

oh my god

i finally, at 5:45 this morning as the little boy in the next bedroom woke up Super Early and started singing and slamming doors, finished the big Triss/Eskel scene which has literally taken me weeks to write and i reread it and it’s like… 5k words long… why was that so difficult… it took me so fucking long. i don’t even know if it’s good or conveyed what i wanted it to, but i just. it was so much. it’s blown any pretense of an “update schedule” right out of the fucking water, single-handedly, but i was determined that if this scene didn’t happen now, i couldn’t really justify myself as any kind of, something.

anyway now i’ve realized that the scene i wrote a month ago that was going to come next won’t work so i need another filler scene and a new POV so now i have to do that but since it’s not a sex scene i can hopefully fly through it and maybe update ancient sea before people forget it exists or die of despair.

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I did it, I posted the missing scene as a standalone fic.

i am having so much goddamn trouble finding both the time and the focus to fucking finish the next chapter of Ancient Sea, it is not going well y’all, but I have this to offer instead for the moment.

featuring Geralt and Eskel being super childish and also super adult, and Ciri being Super Done With Them Both even though she’s only been at Kaer Morhen for like, a full day at this point.

Forty, on AO3.

Geralt was still lying on the floor, and he rolled his eyes and made no attempt to get up. “It’s all right, Ciri,” he said, “Eskel was trying to beat me up but he didn’t succeed.”

The crack widened slightly, and a small face peered suspiciously out until Eskel was within her angle of view. “Why would he do that?” she asked.

“Because he’s basically rotten,” Geralt said, sitting up onto his elbow. “Don’t worry, I won.”

“You don’t look like you won,” Ciri said doubtfully, and Eskel started laughing, laughing so hard he bent double.

Geralt whipped to his feet and had yanked Eskel down and pinned him again before Eskel even stopped laughing. He lay on his back on the floor under Geralt, still laughing. “Never assume a fight is over,” Eskel said.

“Well,” Geralt said, “maybe it is now,” and that was when he realized that Eskel’s left hand was still mostly free, and just as the realization hit him, so did just enough of an Aard that he flew backward approximately his own bodylength and slammed quite hard into the wall. “Fuck,” he wheezed.

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somehow i found some time to write today and did get some progress on the Fantasy!Skype Threesome. [yeahhh… i am all about being Accidentally Topical.] It’s a little jarring to be sitting at a dining room table overhearing a kindergarten math lesson while writing unabashed smut, but I managed, so I guess I can add that to my Life Experiences Merit Badge Sash.

I want to update Little Fishie instead but I need like. Probably another paragraph for it to be done, and it won’t work, so that needs some attention.

I admit, from the moment I had the idea to have Yennefer cloak herself in an illusion of being Geralt in Innermost Depths, I was thinking about how fucking entertaining it was going to be to have her do that in front of Geralt, who in basically every canon has this ridiculous streak of self-loathing.

(nsfw text snippet!)

“Why don’t you show him, pet?” Yennefer said. “Show him what you’d do to him, if you were there.”

Jaskier made a fantastic, eager little noise and slid out of Yennefer’s lap, landing on his knees on the floor in front of her. Yennefer, meanwhile, flickered out of being herself and became Geralt, a mirror of how Geralt looked at the moment, though again it was an imperfect copy– Yennefer clearly thought of Geralt as both taller and broader than he really was, his jaw squarer and his expression angrier.

“Fuck,” Geralt said, as Jaskier delightedly grabbed ahold of Yennefer’s– er, Illusion-Geralt’s– dick, wriggling in between his spread knees to approach it. It was– it was hot, but it was also off-putting to watch not-quite-himself put one enormous hand alongside Jaskier’s jaw and give him a predatory, sneering look. “I– I can’t look at– that’s not– I don’t look like that.”

Illusion-Geralt looked at him, raising an eyebrow in a very Yennefer expression. “Oh?”

“I don’t look like that,” Geralt repeated.

Jaskier looked up at Illusion-Geralt, looked down at Illusion-Geralt’s very clearly substantial, not-illusory, cock that he had in his hand, and then looked over at Geralt. “I can see how this would work better for me than for you,” he said, then looked back up at Illusion-Geralt. “Love, maybe you’d better get your tits back out.”

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so sometimes the thing about raising a kid is that it makes you think extra hard about the way you were raised and sometimes that’s hard to go through.

“I never coddled you boys like this,” Vesemir said. He’d said it before, earlier, too, before Triss had come, and it had taken everything in Geralt not to snap at him then.

This time, Geralt turned and looked straight into his face. “I know,” he said.

Vesemir stared at him, relentless eye contact, and all of Geralt’s instincts wanted to make him drop his gaze, submit to his elder, but he wasn’t going to. He couldn’t. Vesemir’s expression shifted slowly, going incredulous and offended as Geralt didn’t move.

“Geralt,” Eskel said, coming up behind him.

Vesemir blinked at that, and looked at Eskel, and now his expression changed slightly again, to something Geralt wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before. Doubt, maybe. No, hurt. “You think I did wrong,” Vesemir said quietly. “You think I did you wrong.”

anyway, this is working up toward more comforting things but this is where we are, at the moment.

Chapter 8: Disposable

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Chapter 6: Tongue Tie

featuring Jaskier and Yennefer. Please see TWs in chapter notes.

ha, i am getting no fucking writing done lately, but i did manage to edit this.

Jaskier went to his armoire and pulled out a bottle of wine and started drinking as he went back to the page with the poem scraps.

He’d gotten some themes, a few really vibrant images, and about half a stanza down when there was a gentle rapping at his door. “Fuck,” he said, as his concentration snapped and the image he’d been contemplating shattered into little bits. No, no, he’d come up with another. It was fine. He stuck the pen back in its holder and wandered over to the door, limping as he realized he’d been sitting funny and couldn’t feel one of his legs.

Ooh, and he’d also had rather more of the wine than he’d thought. Mm he was a little light-headed. Not wise, Julek, he thought to himself, and the old name was like a stinging slap in his mind that he had to shake off. Cautiously, he opened the door a crack and peered out.

“Fucking Yennefer of fucking Vengeberg,” he said mildly, in some surprise.

“Is that what you call me now?” she said, amused.

“It’s what I’ve always called you in my head,” he said, taking his shoulder away from the door so it could open. “I just don’t usually say it aloud. I’ve had rather a bit of wine and I’m quite emotionally vulnerable, as it happens, so if you were planning on finishing me off now’s the time.”

She swept in the door, carrying a largeish bag on her back with some sticks or rods or something poking out of it. “I wasn’t, actually,” she said, “but if you want me to, I’ve some time to spare. Is there any wine left?”

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[image description: an AO3 comment thread on chapter 4 of The Ancient Sea. AO3 user szzzt comments: “Lambert…. Lambert’s bullet journal…. (I’m just gonna imagine that spread as one of the really pretty ones, with calligraphy and stickers.)

bomberqueen17 replies: “OH MY GOD WASHI TAPE HE’S GOT IT COLOR-CODED GOLD STAR STICKERS”

szzzt replies: “SO MUCH WASHI TAPE gold stars *dies* XDDDD”]

I just had to share this gem from the comments on the last chapter of The Ancient Sea, which features Lambert creepily keeping notes on Geralt’s sex life, among other things. (Listen in the games Geralt always has to write things in his journal and I just rolled with that.)

Lambert totally has one of those really beautiful hand-lettered layouts. It’s completely customized and he’s got a habit tracker with gold star stickers in it.

I bet he’s got really pretentious washi tape in it though, like, black with gold accents and red with black and stuff. he’s not into the pastels. and the calligraphy’s all blackletter to look badass. But like. It’s definitely a bullet journal.

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(this is future The Ancient Sea)

Sometimes you write a fun story that has neat updates of consistent lengths with a nice balance of different POVs and sometimes you have two characters whose chemistry won’t let them shut up and you wind up with a 7k chapter in which nothing happens.

(is it the characters with a oneshot single-POV story that went to 12.5k but at least there was pegging? yes)

“I shouldn’t think you have much need of art, Yennefer.”

She was still prowling around the room, and paused, cocking her head again. “Why not?” she asked.

“Art is something we make to help us feel we have some control over things we feel but don’t entirely always understand,” Jaskier said. “It’s a way to say the unsayable and make sense of concepts too large to hold in one mind. But it’s also just a way to feel control over something that can’t be controlled.”

She held her hand out, and he passed her the bottle. “What about my current state,” she said, and then paused to take a swig from the bottle and swallow it and then apparently stand there a moment doing nothing, “leads you to believe that I have no need of feeling in control of things?”

“You do control things,” he said. “That’s what you do. You have power and you make things happen for you and you see something that you want and you batter the world down until you get it.”

“Do I?” she asked, staring at him.

“Just because you haven’t yet succeeded at whatever you’re trying to get doesn’t mean you aren’t going to,” Jaskier said, and held his hand out for the bottle. “You have a lot more recourse than sitting around trying to write poems about how it made you feel in a vain attempt to come to terms with things you couldn’t possibly have done anything about but are wracked with guilt over anyway.”

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chapter 4: supervision

We get Triss and Lambert’s POV on things. Listen there’s juicy Jaskier and Yennefer stuff coming but not yet, so instead you get Lambert being a total fucking nerd, and Triss being a grown-up actual woman instead of her creepy character arc from, apparently, both book and game. Listen I can buy that Geralt is hot but not that literally every woman he meets throws away the rest of her life in a quest to bone him, that is really not how it ought to work and your Creepy Male Writer Bullshit is showing.
(Occasionally people reading my fic are like “i can’t wait to read the books!” and I’m like well, I haven’t, and am not going to, and listen that kind of shit is why. Life is short.)

“What do you mean, Geralt knows more about girls?” Triss asked, as Eskel checked another door and made a face.

“Oh, I mean– Geralt… well, he’s a little better at fitting into society in general than the rest of us, so he… interacts more… with women.” Eskel was clearly working very hard to come up with the words to say this.

“You mean he gets laid regularly,” Triss said, sparing him the need to be delicate.

“I wouldn’t say regularly,” Eskel said, amused. “But more often.”

“He’s better at society than you?” Triss was skeptical. “You seem reasonably well-socialized, to me.”

Eskel gave her a look that was hard to read, and continued down the hallway. “I’m missing half my face,” he said in a moment, a little curt. “Tends to put people off.”

It certainly wasn’t half his face, and Triss had already gotten used to it, but she guiltily remembered her first impression, which had been that he was the scariest person here. “Does it really?” she said. “Everybody here has scars on their faces, though. I was starting to wonder if it was an initiation thing.”

Eskel swung around suddenly, leaning slightly into her personal space, and she shrank back in sudden fear from his frightful expression. Then he laughed, a little bitterly, and turned around and kept walking. “It does,” he said. “Weird. No, it’s not an initiation thing, it’s just an occupational hazard of getting the shit beat out of you by supernatural horrors for a living.”

“That wasn’t playing fair,” Triss protested. “It wasn’t your face that scared me so much as you being twice my size and looming at me in a dark hallway! Maybe don’t do that to people!”

“And you thought I was well-socialized,” he said.<br