Chapter Text
Lambert loved Aiden, but he was too much of a fucking coward to admit it. The words were always on the tip of his tongue, ready to be spoken, but they never came. He knew that Aiden loved him too; it was obvious in everything Aiden did, from the way he looked at Lambert to the way he touched him. They would sleep together, and Aiden would shower him with affection, offering Lambert a love so deep and unconditional it made his heart ache. But those three little words, I love you, were too much for Lambert to say. He was afraid of what they meant, afraid of what they would require of him.
Then Aiden was killed by that bastard Jad, and now Lambert was left to drown in his grief. Deep down, Lambert knew that he had never fully deserved Aiden. But to spend your life being hated, mistrusted, and alone, only to have someone like Aiden look at you with such love, it was addictive. He had craved that love, basked in it.
With a heavy sigh, Lambert dismounted from his horse, leaving it in the stable of a rundown tavern in the middle of nowhere. It was a place he had never been before, just another spot on his endless, aimless journey. Even killing Jad with Geralt’s help hadn’t brought him any peace. The wound of losing Aiden was too deep, too raw, and no amount of revenge could heal it.
Lambert pushed open the door to the tavern, earning the usual glares from the patrons who eyed him warily. He was used to it by now, the way people reacted to witchers with a mix of fear and suspicion. He ignored the looks, his focus solely on the bar and the promise of a drink to drown his sorrows. But then he paused, his breath catching in his throat.
Across the room, sitting at a table with a tankard in hand, was another witcher. His hair was wavy, his skin was brown, and his one eye was a piercing green that sparkled with a devilish glint.
Aiden was alive.
Lambert’s mind raced, his body moving before he could even process what he was doing. He crossed the room in a few long strides as he approached the man whom he had thought was lost to him forever.
When he reached the table, Aiden looked up at him, and for a moment, everything else fell away. The noise of the tavern, the curious stares of the other patrons, and even the years of pain and loss all faded into the background. It was just the two of them, standing on the precipice of something that could change everything.
“Aiden…” Lambert’s voice was barely a whisper, thick with emotion.
Aiden looked up at Lambert, his eye locking onto the other man's with a curious intensity. After a moment of silence, a sly smile tugged at the corners of his lips. "And who might you be, handsome?" he asked.
Lambert froze. After a brief pause, he took a step back, his heart pounding in his chest. "Aiden, don't fuck with me right now," he said, his voice hardening as he struggled to maintain his composure.
But Aiden's expression didn't change. In fact, his brow furrowed in genuine confusion as he studied Lambert's face as if searching for something familiar that he just couldn't place. "Have we met before?" he asked slowly, his voice filled with uncertainty. "I… I don’t remember."
This had to be some kind of sick joke, but the look on Aiden's face was anything but humorous. "This isn’t funny," he growled, his voice low and strained. "I thought you were dead, Aiden!" His words came out louder than he intended, drawing curious glances from the other patrons in the tavern.
Aiden didn't react to the outburst. Instead, he slowly rose to his feet, his movements deliberate and calm, as if he was trying not to startle a wild animal. He began gathering his belongings, his attention seemingly elsewhere, before he finally spoke again, his voice soft but firm. "I believe you have the wrong man."
Lambert's mind was reeling. He couldn't wrap his head around what was happening. The Aiden he knew, no, the Aiden he missed, would never look at him like that. But the man standing in front of him, with the same face, the same voice… he was acting like a stranger. Lambert's thoughts spiraled as he tried to find some explanation, some way to make sense of this nightmare. Lambert's mind went quiet, the airless quiet of a man whose world had just stopped making sense.
Aiden put distance between himself and the tavern, but his thoughts refused to follow. They kept circling back to the wolf witcher, the way the man had crossed the room like he already knew exactly where he was going, like he had done it a hundred times before. The way his voice had cracked on Aiden's name. The way his face had crumbled when Aiden looked at him like a stranger.
How did he know his name?
The cold air bit at Aiden's skin as he walked, but he barely felt it. His mind was too loud, too cluttered with fragments that didn't connect. The witcher's eyes had held something raw and unguarded, the kind of grief that couldn't be performed. Whatever history the man believed they shared, he believed it completely.
Aiden's memory had been unreliable since the mage. The fight had been brutal, the kind that left marks deeper than flesh. He had gone in with both eyes and came out with one, the mage dead at his feet and some dark binding thing finally severed from around him like a cut rope. The victory had felt hollow even as he won it. Afterward came the disorientation, slow and creeping, like waking in a room where someone had moved all the furniture two inches to the left.
He had gone looking for Qamar first. That had been instinct, the same way breathing was instinct. But Qamar hadn't been where he left her. Instead, he had found a horse he didn't recognize, black and white, which was already wrong, because Qamar was black through and through. Yet the animal had greeted him like a homecoming. She had pressed her nose into his chest and exhaled slowly, the way horses did when they were settled and certain. She had followed his commands before he finished giving them. He had stood there for a long time, one hand resting on her neck.
His gear had been the next unsettling thing. He knew his own bag, knew the weight and arrangement of everything in it, the way a witcher learned to know his tools. But the bag was wrong. Familiar weapons, worn smooth in the places his hands naturally fell, sat alongside blades he had never seen before. The unfamiliar ones were not new. They were broken in, their edges maintained with the same care he gave his own, tucked into the arrangement of his pack as though they had always been there. Someone had lived with that gear. He wasn't sure if that someone had been him.
And then there was the school. He had gone to the meeting point, the one Gaetan had told him about, specific enough that there was no room for misremembering, and found nothing. Just empty land where something should have been, and the hollow, nauseating certainty that he was missing something he could not name.
Aiden stopped walking.
Behind him, the tavern sat squat and dim against the darkening sky. He could feel the wolf witcher's presence the way he could feel a change in weather. The man was still inside.
He thought about the grief on his face. The kind of grief that had nowhere left to go.
This might have been some elaborate manipulation. Witchers weren't above scheming when it suited them, and a man who knew Aiden's name and his history could theoretically manufacture exactly the kind of scene that had just unfolded.
He reached into his bag without entirely meaning to, his fingers finding fabric. He pulled the shirt out and looked at it for a moment before bringing it to his nose.
The scent hit him like something half-remembered from a dream, not a full recollection, but the shape of one. It was warm and specific, and it belonged to that witcher, which made no sense at all, except that it did, in the wordless way that his new horse had made sense when she pressed her face into his chest and exhaled.
Aiden stood in the cold for a long moment, the shirt in his hands and the tavern at his back.
Then he turned around, and his horse fell into step behind him without being asked.