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I won’t go easy on you .
He’d told her that the first time she ever picked up a sword. She is never going to be as strong or as fast. But the things she will come up against, the things that have scratched at the battered walls of Kaer Morhen, they will not go easy on her either. And, often, they are stronger and faster than he is.
Then what are you? she’d asked, unimpressed with his speech. He would be too, if he were flat on his back in the dirt, bruises darkening on his cheeks.
Smarter, he’d told her. And very fucking lucky .
Ciri pants, her hands braced on her knees. “Wait—I just need—”
He strikes and watches her hit the ground again. Her moonlight-pale hair has been so thoroughly caked in dirt, that she could be anyone, any peasant girl in any village in any part of the continent. Sometimes he pitied her, that she was not.
Any other guardian might be worried, seeing her there, still on the earth. Instead he just says, “Up, little lion cub.”
Her eyes fly open. She’s all teeth as she staggers to her feet. “I’m not a lion cub.”
“No?” he asks, as they circle one another. The sky above them is the gray of skipping stones, threatening a storm.
“No,” she says with a frustrated growl. “I am not.”
“What are you then?”
Geralt probably feels too guilty about her cuts and scrapes and hurting little heart. And he had probably been too lenient, in their earliest days.
A new place, with its strange halls, a thousand things he’d snapped at her not to touch, a dozen doors she shouldn’t open, a handful of things to never say. New people, witchers like him. Though, of course, not exactly. Not exactly like him. They did not dream of her, because of a trick of fate. They did not ache with being apart from her.
In some ways, she probably felt the same, his child surprise.
Which is why, in those first days, he’d let her come to his bed, with wide eyes and wringing hands and tears because the nightmares she had were bigger than the nightmares of village girls.
Tata Geralt , the men teased.
Tata , they'd laugh, won't you take us riding?
Tata, they'd tease, won't you slice us some bread?
Tata, they'd croon, won't you wish us goodnight?
She’d been much less herself then. Much less capable. And though he’d tried to turn her away, her voice, raw and broken and still girl-sweet, she’d said—
Tata, she'd said, trembling, please . It felt right. She'd been his to take care of all along. Even when he had tried to run to the other side of the continent to avoid it.
He’d relented. It had been so cold those days at Kaer Morhen. He’d banked the fire, and wrapped her in the furs, still warm from his own body. Made a den of whatever cloth he could find for himself on the floor.
“Come back,” she’d whispered, when she realized what he'd done.
He had.
Crept quietly beside her. Kept six hands worth of bed between them. He barely rested that first time. It got easier, that winter, when she came crawling in, wet-eyed, her heart still pounding in her chest. He learned to make room. Until she begged him for less and less of it. Those six hands. Then four. Two.
The wind booms loud, and the rain beats heavy, making good on the storm that threatened the skies when he and Ciri had wrapped up training that afternoon.
And sure enough the door creaks open. A body several heads shorter than any others than anyone else is in the keep.
“Geralt,” she whispers. “Are you there?”
Without waiting for a response, she opens the door just enough to slide inside and closes it quietly behind her.
Her eyes, sweet and massive—and, thankfully, dry—slide up his form, toe to head, lingering on the book in his hands. He’s long since put out his candles, but he can see well enough in the moonlight, even if she cannot.
They stare at each other for a moment before he says, “You’re getting too old to come to my bed with your nightmares, Cirilla.”
He thinks it's a valiant attempt, if ultimately doomed. How very many times has he said it? And had the same result?
She says what she always says, what he can't resist: "Please, Tata."
Another long moment of staring. His stomach in his throat, blood pooling in all the places it shouldn’t. Pretty girl with her strange pale eyes. Always meant for him. To belong to him.
With a quick hand, he flips the blankets back to make room for her. The cloak around her shoulders slides to the ground the second after she pulls the string.
At ten and seven, Ciri sits flush at the door of womanhood. Breasts pressed against her nightshift and softly rounded hips reminding him that she's outgrown her young girl’s clothing, even though she’s no others to wear.
He is long since accustomed to the way she likes to be held at night, but she’s the one who maneuvers him just so. One bicep for her head to use as a pillow. His other arm wrapped around her middle. Her behind pressed flush against his hips. After some coaxing, a thigh pressed up between her legs. What with her in no underthings and him in just his longshirt, it's all skin to skin at that soft warm vee between her legs.
He can still remember the first time she rocked herself to her pleasure on his thigh. Wide eyed. Confused. Wanting. Determined. (It amazes him still how she has seen so much and knows so little.)
Geralt had felt drunk, drugged, the way he’d stumbled from his bed after her breath went even. He’d also felt confused and wanting as he stood on a parapet nearest to his rooms, and fucked his own fist. It had taken less than a minute for him to come gasping, shaking, lightheaded. Visions of Ciri’s starry-eyed pleasure whenever he closed his eyes.
(How many times since then has he gone into a brothel and picked a slim pale-skinned girl and fucked her until she passed out, went limp, a witcher’s brutality on a woman’s body, and gods, the guilt, but how he couldn’t stop, spending inside her even after she slept, until she woke up with him still inside her, woke up to him whispering my lion cub.)
That’s how it always went, Ciri finding her pleasure with his body—his thigh, his fingers—and Geralt waiting for her to fall asleep before he went tumbling after.
Still. For many nights, they do sleep and only sleep. Shame doesn’t burn him so hot those nights. But he cannot bring himself to deny her anything. Not here. Not in the safety of this bed and these four walls that constitute his room.
Not when she asks him so prettily.
He can smell what she’s going to ask before she asks it. Wriggling away from his thigh. Its nearly pitch black, but she doesn’t need the light to drag his hand down over her stomach. A shiver rips through her, up her spine as though she can be shocked by the movement of his hand. By his touch.
He helps—he can’t stop, he curls his fingers around the hem of her nightdress. He can’t stifle the guttural exhale as his fist grazes the silky insides of her thighs. He rests it there, well above her knees and not quite to that place where he knows he’ll find her dripping.
This is not the first time he’d stopped her—tried to stop here. He’s not teasing, he’s trying to be better, he’s—
“Please?” she asks. And so he does. He cannot deny her. Never has been able to. And now that he knows how she sounds when she finds her pleasure with him, he does not think he will ever be able to.
His hands were not made for gentleness, but he tries his very hardest as he strokes her. Tender with the places that only he can touch. Soft like the way she’ll whisper tata as she goes.
“How is that?” he asks. His voice has been reduced to rasping already. She just makes a little noise and nods, trying to move her hips in time with the rhythm of his hand. “Yes?” he says, verging on a coo, “You like this, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she gasps into her pillow. “Yes, please, I—”
“I know,” Geralt says. He can’t help grinding himself into her. For relief. Because it's too much. The way she writhes makes something horrible come alive in him. Some terrible thing that only hungers for what she can give him and the more she gives the more it wants.
“You’re always thinking of this, aren’t you?” he asks, a whisper in her ear. Ciri whimpers, tense fingers clawing into the skin of his forearm. “Always eager to climb into my bed, hmm?” Then, more to himself: “Such a desperate girl.”
Her hips buck. When she speaks her voice sounds both dreamy and utterly base. “I’m sorry, I just, I need it, I don’t—I don’t know—there’s no one else to ask, Tata.”
The snarl is out of his mouth before he has a chance to stop it. Instinct makes him tip their bodies, roll her onto her stomach. Ciri screeches but he muffles the last of it when he pushes her face to the mattress. He has to fight for a modicum of control, and even then he can still hear the tone of his voice. Watch the way it makes a shiver slide down her spine.
“No. One. Else.”
What would someone else do for her that he couldn’t? This is more than the binding of the ancient law. This is the throbbing, angry heart of a beast protecting what is his. She tries to say something, but can’t, not with the weight of his palm on her. He needs just the one hand to jerk her, urge her up on to her knees.
“Do you play with boys in the village, Cirilla?"
"No, no, I—"
She breaks off, groaning as his fingers find her again.
"They won't know," he murmurs. "They won't care about doing right by you. Never—"
It’s his turn to groan. She's pressed her backside right against his hard cock. He jolts. All that keeps them from meeting is two thin pieces of fabric. And her scrabbling fingers make that false. Pulling at the hem until she can wrest it over the crest of her ass.
Another groan slides from between his teeth. She’s surprisingly round here. Enough to squeeze, to sink his teeth into.
“Tata, please—”
She doesn’t even know what she’s begging him for. Even so, he sinks his fingers deeper, opening her tight cunt. He grunts and withdraws his hand.
“So much wet for such a little girl.”
It’s over for him then. All his self-control, his self-importance, his belief that he should be better. All of that disappears as he slides himself into the slick hollow created by the joining of her thighs.
Ciri gasps, then makes a different sound, one a mix of confusion and pleasure as he fucks between her thighs, but not inside her. There’s an intake of breath, like she’s about to speak but then:
He strokes her, slow, steady pressure on that particularly sensitive spot. She moans. Deep, from her gut, grinding against his cock, looking for a pleasure she’s too young, too sheltered to understand. He knows she’s come from the gentle cry into the bedding, the quaking of her legs, the limpness against his hand.
“No one else,” he whispers again, still rocking, just delaying the inevitable. “When you—when you need—you come to me, do you understand?”
He reaches for her again, for her swollen cunt, and she bucks away from him. Ciri turns, face alight with trust and fear and neediness and arousal so complete it almost obliterates the rest.
“I can’t-not again.”
Thin, shining tear tracks trail down her cheeks. He finds, with some surprise, that he would like to taste them.
“You can—”
“It hurts—”
He grasps her at the back of the neck. “You will .”
Her sobbing is theater, it must be, because she ruts against the cage of his body like an animal, seeking the pleasure he’s going to give her, going to make her take. She’s gasping, crying out, the nonsense of a girl who doesn’t know any better: no and please and more.
“Stop,” he says, slamming the hand that’s not between her legs against the wall. He knows he sounds mean, but he’s holding on to the last thread of whatever decency he has left. “Stop moving or I’m going to end up fucking my way right into your cunt. Is that what you want?”
There’s no hesitance, only the tightly coiled resistance of her next impending climax when she says: “Yes, Tata, please.”
One pump, two, and he’s coming. Shooting spend across her lush backside and down her strong thighs. Just a bit clings to the cleft of her cunt, exposed to him by the arch in her body.
They both slump. Ciri first to the bed, and Geralt after her. The quiet should swallow them both up, but instead he hears the rasp of her breath, the heavy in and out of shock and sleepiness.
“You’ve never done that before,” she murmurs. He draws up to his knees, still spread on either side of her hips. She’s drooled into her pillow. He has been bespelled before and it is nothing compared to watching her fight sleep, listening to her soft voice. The way she doesn’t try to slip out from under him, and instead only wriggles deeper into bed. Content to let his spend dry on her body. He moves a hand up and down her back in steady, soothing passes.
“When I was a little girl,” she says (and for just a moment, as he looks at the trusting curve of her smile and thinks that she still must be), “I was told that it would be different than that. That men wouldn’t—I thought it would be inside me.”
Practicality has his mouth open before he thinks: “You’re too small here,” he tells her. Lets the hand at her back drop so he can stroke his knuckle down her cunt. A ripple runs through her. “You need to go slow. Be patient.”
She hums. “Patience. That’s what my grandmother used to say too. That I would understand when I was grown up. But I am now.”
“You’re not grown up enough to take my cock,” he tells her, wryly and he thinks that he meant it as a joke, but he watches another shiver take over her body.
“Will you show me, when I am, then?”
The next day dawns bright and clean and sharp after the previous day’s storm. As he doesn’t need proper sleep, it’s nothing to rise before Ciri to get ready for the day. He goes about as he does most days at the keep. He prepares her breakfast and readies them both some weaponry for sparring. But he doesn’t see her at mealtime and the time they would usually agree to meet for training comes and goes.
He knocks at her door and enters only after a soft come in .
Ciri stands half naked, in pants but no tunic, turning this way and that in front of a mirror, body lit spectacularly by the sun. Pert, pink nipples, a collarbone for biting, her mouth pursed in thought. A view denied to him because he’d mounted her like an animal.
He quickly slams the door, looking at her with a frown. “How did you know it was me? You can’t be—”
“You sound different than the others,” she says as she lifts her hair into a knot.
It’s only then that he sees what she’s been inspecting in the mirror. A collection of bruises, studding her skin like constellations. Horror has him freezing in his tracks.
“Cirilla. Are you alright?”
She meets his eye in the mirror. “You said you wouldn’t go easy on me.”
Geralt does not quite know what to do with that. “You’re late for training, little lion cub.”
“I’m not,” she says, scowling. “Not anymore.”
He asks her the same thing he’d asked the day before: “What are you then?”
Ciri shrugs her naked shoulders. “I don’t know yet, Tata. But I’ll figure it out.”