Chapter Text
Geralt stared at the Regis, unable to believe his eyes. His mind couldn’t process it. He tried again, sure, with sudden certainty that the mutagens he had taken were messing with his mind.
Alive. Regis, is not dead in Nilfgaard like he had heard. Like the Bruxa had taunted him, when they attacked to give him Regis’s thumb. To tell him the debt he had incurred killing another higher vampire with Regis had been paid. He had killed the messenger and hadn’t felt any remorse for it. Let the Elder crawl from his lair and Orianna slither out from her mansion bolthole. He in that moment no longer cared to save face or keep the tentative veil of polite fiction alive.
The hours that passed were a blur. Geralt had been a bit mad with grief and upset, consumed by some reckless crazed frenzy that night. He had barely remembered stumbling to the lab and decocting mutagens with what he had been convinced were the last bits of Regis. Anything to keep the vampire closer to him. To cling onto some piece of the now forever gone vampire in a haze he didn’t look at too closely lest he start seeking the Path for utterly selfish reasons.
But- somehow, after weeks of agony, of recovery from his own foolish choices, Regis is. Here. Or he’s finally broken with reality. It’s possible. Probable even. His own nails are a bit sharper now, he notes they are fully regrown from where he had trimmed them not an hour before. The way light seems to shift and bend around them, as if being sliced by them, had left him staring at his own hands like a dullard that first morning after he had taken so many mutagens all at once. Even now, over a month later, he gets caught by the newness of it all. His eyes have become even keener than they were, the only reason he thinks he is so aware of these changes to his hands. It isn’t the only change. He swears he can hear the flow of blood within others. Can almost trace the heat of his human majordomo and cook long after they have left the room.
It’s been like his third trials. It’s been overwhelming. It’s been a neverending isolating horror. Geralt swallows hard as his fingertips brush and trace along Regis’s sideburns, almost begging for the sheer overwhelming input of that feeling to make this somehow real. It's familiar, yet at the same time completely new.
The sight of that curl of smile, somehow softly warm even as it seemed to chide him, the way those incredible and utterly inhuman eyes sparkled with an oily sheen over the neverending black pools that had always drawn him in. All these little details, the bristle of some hairs, the slippery smooth slide of others, the cottony whisps near the ears and along that hyper-defined temple. Even the ridge along the sides of the forehead, the thick veins that fascinated him even before he had lost Regis that first time over two decades ago.
Even without seeing Regis, it had been fine to be parted. Fine to be here without him. Yet, here and now. Regis was in his bedroom, the moonlight streaming in behind and around him the only light in the room and yet to Geralt’s eyes it was as if they were in daylight. He soaked in every detail, fingers trembling as he tried to angle his nails away from Regis’s flesh. Something was shaking, and he couldn’t be sure what, till he really took in the fact it was him.
Regis’s own hand, so gnarled and potion stained as it ever was, cupped over his own. The sharp edges of his own nails pressed into the hair, yet Regis’s own seemed smoother by comparison as he dragged his fingers along the new feel of Geralt’s hands.
Geralt’s teeth itched, eyes bouncing from detail to detail as he tried to soak it all in. Soak Regis- being alive, and here, and, with him- into his bones. Geralt’s throat clicked as he tried again and again to make any sound come out. Regis beat him to it, the tone of that oh so familiar and slightly sardonic voice making everything seem all the more real. “Geralt, I do believe when I last teased you about having Vampire traits from mutagens, it wasn’t exactly my blood and flesh involved.”
All the air Geralt had been trying to push to form words escaped in a long burst of noise and his eyes went unfocused as he buried his face into a musty and decaying tunic. Geralt choked sounds against the rough and ragged cloth, the gentle pressure of Regis’s hands against his hair, along the nape of his neck and crown of his head through the hair, was like a blessing. Geralt’s entire weight didn’t stagger Regis for even a second. It never had.
Geralt’s own arms gripped with a creaking desperation around Regis’s chest. The palms pressing to the worn fabric less a hindrance to the nearly full body hug, and more a sign of how urgently Geralt needed to feel it was real. The fabric didn’t stand much of a chance, tearing under his fingers, even as the curling points of his nails seemed to slice through cotton and leather like so much butter.
Regis only moved his arms, one palm cupping the back of his head, wrist brushing cool along the nape of his neck. The other arm and hand moved to the small of his back, soothing and rubbing along over the nightshirt that was all Geralt had been wearing, from some desperate attempt to find even a bit of sleep before Regis had arrived.
The weighty itching behind his teeth increased, despite how he wasn’t doing anything like eating or drinking. His nose picked up a hundred herbs, different mandrake decoctions, potions, the threads of the shirt, the moulder and bouquet of torn fabric leaving puffs of scents to invade his nose. Yet, the only scent he cared for was the one just under Regis’s ear. That strip of flesh between sideburns and hair, the curve of ear, where the scent of Regis was strongest.
There was no direct comparison for that unique scent, for that unique presence that is purely the vampire before him. He could tell the thumb was from Regis even without anything at all being said. That it hadn’t regenerated the way Dettlaff’s body had not regenerated, had made him something in him scream without words or even sound.
But here, fresh, raw, undiluted, is the scent proof that Regis is alive. Geralt can’t even understand his nipping at that flesh till he’s being gently pried up. Regis’s tongue clicks his teeth, his tone fond and wondering even as the words are sharper. “Somehow, I feel there is a wonderful explanation for why you now have fangs. Especially as you just tried to use them on me.”
The room is too bright, it’s blinding for Geralt as he blinks owlishly. His entire body aches, feels like when he was growing too fast on Sad Albert. Feels like when his bones all became denser and his lungs remade themselves five fold more efficient.
The grip on his head, on his shoulder, is firm and immovable, even as it is so gentle in moving him back. Geralt’s voice finally works itself free of its tangle in his throat. “You were always saying if you could leave one thing to me it would be your wisdom. Thought to myself, I could use some of that. Your finger wasn’t regrowing.” It’s a jumbled tangle of things he wants to say and doesn’t understand why he’s saying it. That last fact, even with Regis right before him, aches like a sucking gut wound, festering in his belly.
That itching is back, vaguely he remembers that the way his teeth itch is similar to how his eyes would itch, back before the second trials. When he was overly emotional or upset, that itch would take him and remind him to keep it inside. He carefully closes his lips- jaw feeling weird where the teeth don’t match up. Nothing matches up and there is the scent of something tantalizing in the air.
Geralt tracks the smell absently as he is held at arm’s length, eyes drawn to where Regis’s padded armor shirt and leather vest are gaping, sagging from long slices that seem to have made ribbons of the material. Geralt swallows hard, knowing, without having to look, that there is blood on his hands. That scent, that smell, is blood. Geralt shudders, pressing the soles of his feet against the floor, lifting into the hold Regis has him kept in so intractably.
Regis makes that clicking noise with his tongue again. “Geralt, there is sentimental, and then there is deciding, on hearing your lover is dead, that you must make him a part of you forever. Quite literally.” There is a bemused fondness to the tone but that look on his face is one that speaks of slight exasperation. Geralt has spent so many years gazing at Regis, enjoying the quiet moments in his little cottage so long ago, that he reads all the subtle little facial movements as if they were second nature to translate. He doesn’t actively process the faint narrowing of eyes or the slight change of angle to the corner of the lips, or the jut of jaw- yet he reads them all the same.
Geralt doesn’t have any reasonable response. He had known even as he had created the decoctions, that Regis himself would have chided him for it. Yet even in the morning, as the pain had settled in from such wildly new mutations, he hadn’t found it in himself to truly regret his choices. He finds himself smiling despite himself, too giddy from the familiar comfort of having Regis in his life once more to suppress the urge. “We have got to stop having decades between meetings. Last time, it led to me nearly fighting all of Redania and Nilfgaard, this time it ended in me taking mutagens.” He was teasing, that edge of flirting they had always had in their banter as easily found as if they had just talked earlier this same day.
Regis laughed, the dark circles under his eyes not seeming any deeper or lighter for how the skin near the edges of his eyes crinkled with the force of his mirth. He gave Geralt a light shake and let go, stepping back and away from him to look along the length of Geralt’s body where it wasn’t hidden behind the flowing nightshirt. “Even when we met quite regularly, it didn’t keep you from trouble. I doubt much could truly keep you from diving head first into the closest puddle of it.” The tease was evident and the scar over Geralt’s heart ached.
Geralt’s body had changed at multiple points in their long acquaintance. In Regis’s little cottage, the large scar across his chest over his heart had been treated by cool skilled hands. That was in fact, one of the first times they ever kissed. Geralt couldn’t tell what things Regis saw now, what changes he was seeing that so enthralled him, but then again, they had always enthralled each other.
Decades before Cintra and Ciri’s birth, Regis’s cottage was as much a place he called home as Kaer Morhen. To say he was fascinated by the nails of the higher vampire, even before his own changes, was to undersell it. While high on the pain relieving decoction Regis had made for him, Geralt had kept grabbing for Regis’s hands. The memory was so vivid it was as if he were reliving it, from start to finish.