If life could give me one blessing...

He called me beautiful

"I was getting worried you wouldn't show up," Eskel mumbled when Geralt finally found his way down to where his brother was waiting for him. He still looked terrible. Dark circles under his eyes, lifeless look on his face, his lip bleeding sluggishly from where he bit on it. At least he listened and put on some warm clothes.

"Here you go," he put a bundle of things into his brothers hands and watched as his golden eyes took a while before focusing and the witcher put on his hunting gear with mindless moves that were ingrained into their brains. He waited for a few moments, looking at Geralt with worries, before turning around and walking out of the fortress into the woods.

It was quiet under the trees. The storm calmed down two days earlier leaving thick snow blankets on the ground making it so even their footsteps weren't as silent as usual. The crunching sounds filled the air as they made their way further from Kaer Morhen, neither of them speaking a single word. The only things coming out of their mouths were the soft clouds of their breath that changed into cold frozen mist the moment they left their bodies.

They walked for a few hours, only silently searching the woods, and trailing after the animals they found, hunting down a few rabbits and a single deer with their arrows only, before the sky darkened and they walked some more into one of the caves they prepared for this exact reason before the snow fell. There was a firepit and enough firewood that they didn't have to worry about cold, if they also took out their bedrolls.

The next day they would return to the keep, as it was safer to travel during the time daylight was strong. The forest was being cleaned habitually and they had their silver swords with them but getting surprised by a monster at night with a deer over their shoulders was never pleasant. It was then, when they took out their waterbags, dried meat and bread-rolls, that Eskel finally looked across the fire into his brother's eyes and sighed.

"So... What are you gonna do about this?" he asked, watching the frown between his brother's eyebrows deepen and his expression sour again, even though it has softened a bit before, thanks to the whole afternoon outside. The shadows were dancing over his pale face and Eskel watched the muscles in his jaw move, as he was looking for the words that so often escaped him.

"If I knew that, I wouldn't be sitting here like this," he bit out at the end, anger apparent in his voice, before he looked at Eskel guiltily and sighed, bowing his head down.

"It's just so much right now. So much stuff in my head, so many memories, words I didn't say or those that I did. Words that he threw at me, and I didn't understand. That I still cannot wrap my head around. And it is just so much..." he rubbed his forehead, before breathing out shakily, folding his hands in his lap and watching his fingers play with a piece of wood he found on the ground of the cave.

Eskel saw the struggle. He was sure that the others saw it too, but none of them knew Geralt as much as he did. Lambert knew him as the big perfect brother he was looking up to. When he spotted imperfection, he would point it out and hit it to make Geralt squirm. But in the big scheme of things, he still saw the white wolf as his role model. So Lambert knew that Geralt fucked up and he took Jaskier's side and while he also cared for Geralt, he believed that the older wolf would lick his wounds and come to save the day as usual, because that was what Geralt did in his eyes.

Then there was Yennefer. Geralt's ill-fated ex-lover-turned-friend, who knew a bit more about Geralt's insecurities, but also never spent so much time with him to understand him on the level other witchers did. She saw him as someone who bound her to himself out of selfish want. Now she had to get to know him again. Not as a lover, but as a friend, and the bond that began to form between them again was still too frail to breach topics like these so casually.