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Aiden knew he should leave it alone. Despite his school’s reputation for emotional instability, he was not, in fact, suicidal and the sheer rage boiling off of Lambert was more than enough of a warning to anyone that the wisest course of action was to keep quiet. It roiled off the Wolf and coiled through the air like… well… like the water currently evaporating off of him in puffs of turbid white.
A similar cloud was shivering its way off of Aiden’s soaked skin as they trudged back from the lake to the clearing in which the caravan had made camp for the night. It wasn’t that far of a walk and the average land speed of an angry Lambert was generally pretty quick, even hampered by a foot and a half of snow, so unless they wanted to be the butt of every joke from now until New Year’s they had better come up with a damn good story in the next few minutes.
“Lambert—” Aiden tried.
“Leave it.”
The words were as sharp and short as the icicles forming on his eyelashes, but he didn’t even raise his voice. Too pissed to project—that was a new one.
Aiden tucked his hands into his armpits and tried to stop his jaw from rattling out of its sockets before he tried again. “What’re we gonna—”
“I said, ‘leave it.’”
“We’ll need something to tell—”
Lambert whirled with a soft tinkling of ice cracking off his clothing and froze the Cat with a cold stare. “Aiden!”
Ah. There was the previously missing volume. With all the patient magnanimity of someone who didn’t particularly want to have a knock down row at the moment and really just wanted to get back to a decent fire before his cock literally froze off, Aiden raised his hands in surrender.
Lambert narrowed his eyes in suspicion, but when no further lip was forthcoming, snorted and resumed his march.
With a sigh, Aiden followed. It wasn’t like he didn’t understand why Lambert was so upset. It was their first winter together, Lambert forgoing the frigid mountain valley of Kaer Morhen to bum with the Dyn Marv for the season, and he was desperately trying to make a good impression. Aiden had tried to inform him that that feat was impossible; his brothers were, in his expert estimation, shitheads and would give the Wolf no end of trouble no matter what he did, but that didn’t stop Lambert from trying anyway. So when Gaetan had goaded him, expressing feigned surprise that a northerly Wolf knew less about winter outdoorsmanship than the soft southerly Cats, off Lambert had predictably trekked to prove him wrong.
Ice fishing. Aiden shivered in his damp boots remembering the, in hindsight, suspicious tone with which Lambert had spit the words as Aiden had scrambled to follow him out of the camp. It had sounded easy enough. They had a lake near Kaer Morhen right? And it must freeze over. And Lambert bragged about his fishing all the time. Surely, Aiden had naively thought, he knew what he was doing.
In front of him, the master fisherman sneezed violently, startling a flock of starlings from their roost. Well, now the whole caravan knew they were coming. In T-minus eight seconds, a group of Cats was going to saunter into view and Lambert would just have to take another blow to his pride. Aiden had tried to warn him, tried to help him strategize! The Dyn Marv wasn’t a wolf pack, with some fixed hierarchy where you had to growl and bite your way to the top. It was a murky miasma of ever changing loyalties and scheming. If Lambert wasn’t going to listen, he had no one to blame but himself. His stupid, trying-too-hard, desperate to please, terrified of being rejected or ever found wanting self. Aiden should just let him hang.
“Aiden? Lambert? Is that you two back already?” Joël’s voice rang through the trees. “Catch anything?”
Damn it, Aiden couldn’t just let him hang. Out of any better options, he gathered his ice encrusted limbs and threw himself bodily at Lambert, tackling the Wolf to the ground.
“Aiden? What the fuck!” Lambert sputtered before the Cat shoveled a fist full of snow right down the front of his shirt. “You motherfucker!” Never one to not give as good as he got, by the time Joël and Axel found them, Lambert was straddling Aiden’s chest making a decent attempt at force feeding him a snowball.
Axel’s laughter distracted him enough for Aiden to buck him off though. “You both look frozen! Have you two just been wrestling like children in the snow this whole time? Did you even make it to the lake?”
Lambert, panting with exertion and possibly early onset hypothermia, just stared open mouthed at the two new Cats, but Aiden spit out a mouthful of dirty snow and quipped, “Do you see any fish?”
“I knew it!” Joël smirked and shook his head, offering Lambert a hand up. “You can’t take Aiden anywhere. He’s got the attention span and work ethic of a kitten! He’ll get you into nothing but trouble, that one.”
“You’re just lucky we don’t need those fish for dinner! Cedric sto—uh—found a goat. We’re making curry.” Axel, who was rapidly becoming Aiden’s favourite person in existence, passed him a flask of White Gull and helped him get the worst of the snow out of his hair. The liquid burned like false fire in his throat and smouldered somewhere just south of his breast bone, giving him an artificial sense of warmth that would keep him going until he got to a real one.
“C’mon,” Joël said, patting Lambert vigorously on the back. “Let’s get you two back before you turn into snowmen.”
Fifteen minutes and one change of clothes later, Aiden was happily snuggled under a thick blanket in front of a roaring fire, sipping on spiked apple cider and luxuriating in the spicy smell of simmering goat. He was taking some minor flak for being a flake and failing to produce any fish, but it wasn’t like his goofing off was a new thing, so most of his brothers lost interest in razzing him pretty quickly. Once Lambert arrived and snuck under the blanket beside him, it was as close to heaven as Aiden figured witchers could get.
“Mmm.” He snuggled up to the Wolf, letting his head fall onto Lambert’s shoulder. A second later, he felt Lambert’s arm slip around his waist, pulling him closer, and he grinned to himself. “Anger melted away then?”
Lambert snorted, but otherwise didn’t respond. Just when Aiden thought that was going to be the end of it, he heard, muttered softly and sullenly into his still damp curls, “I’m not thanking you for that.”
A ridiculously bright feeling, not entirely unlike the burn of the White Gull, blossomed in Aiden’s chest and warmed him inside and out. It was a relatively new thing that had been happening to him around Lambert more and more lately, and while Aiden wasn’t entirely sure what it was, he did know he wanted more of it. Maybe he was a little suicidal after all, to throw himself so whole heartedly and carelessly at that enigmatic conflagration, but damn if it didn’t beat freezing alone.
He sighed in utter contentment, wriggling around so he could whisper the least conventional sweet nothing ever softly into Lambert’s ear. “Will you at least admit that the bombs were a bad idea?”