The one with Kintsugi and the unwritten laws of dirty dancing

Kit was sitting on a bench, hiccupping at the stars. Geralt had been living in Toussaint for years but every time he saw the night sky, it took his breath away anew. Seeing the deep blue sky that was illuminated by thousands and thousands of stars was always a humbling experience. It reminded him that his life, in the grand scheme of things, meant nothing and therefore his problems meant nothing.

The night was warm but considerably cooler than the unbearably hot day. A light breeze made the grass dance in the moonlight.

Kit twitched nervously when the door creaked but calmed down when she saw who it was.

Geralt sat down next to her, unsure what to say and if she actually wanted him there. Thankfully she started the conversation.

"The sky is incredible. I don't think I have ever seen this many stars." He could sense the heat of the tears streaming down her face. Her eyes were puffed and red, she looked thoroughly miserable.

"But that's not the reason you are crying," he tried cautiously.

She shook her head. "I don't recognize any constellation. Not even the big dipper." She turned towards him. "It's not my sky… I'm not in Kansas anymore."

Then it dawned on Geralt - she had finally and truly understood the situation she was in.

"I don't know how I got here. How will I get back? What about my family? Will I ever see them again?" She started shaking violently, burying her face in her hands. Geralt's heart grew heavy seeing her like this. "What about my life? How do I even live here?"

He did the only thing he could think of: He hugged her tightly, one arm firmly wrapped around her back, pulling her as close as he possibly could, the other hand cupping the back of her head, stroking the soft, long hair. He nestled his face to hers, whispering in her ear, silently: "I'll get you back home, I promise." His skin prickled where it touched hers.

Kit's heart skipped a beat. Then she wrapped her arms around Geralt's neck, sniffing and hiccupping uninhibitedly.

Her hair had lost the fruity smell that, as she had explained to him, was coming from the shampoo she had used. After she had taken her first bath, the undefinable fragrance was gone. Now, she only smelled like warmth and, weirdly, comfort.

When she had calmed down a little, she leaned on his shoulder, her legs draped over his lap. She trembled ever so slightly. Geralt kept one arm tightly around her back, afraid she might just fall over if he took it away.

"How are you still alive and sane? This world is too much," she mumbled.

"I was trained for this," he answered stoically.

She stayed silent for a moment. "You were actually genetically altered. Monsters exist. Your witcher-Hogwarts probably also exists," she recounted to herself. "How can I ever go anywhere again and not be afraid of something killing me on the way? How do people deal with this who are not like you? Who are like me?"

"You're not on your own, I'll help you," Geralt answered. "If you want," he added, remembering that the women who came into his life usually did not take well to being told what to do.

"Never thought I might need a bodyguard one day." Kit let out a dry laugh. "It's not very realistic though. I suppose there is no way for me to grab a pair of those cat eyes and all that comes with it?" she mumbled into his shoulder.

"I'm afraid not. The knowledge of the transitional processes has been lost a while ago. There will never be new witchers." Not that it would have worked on a woman, he added in his thoughts.

"I'm not cut out for it anyway," she whispered and touched the skin on his chest through the open collar of his shirt, feeling the lines of the scarred tissue. Geralt winced slightly, the sensation of her touching him being nearly too much.

"Sorry, did I…" She was about to remove her hand but Geralt pushed it back onto his chest firmly.

Blue eyes looked at him in confusion and wonder. When he did not say anything, she placed her head back on his shoulder and her fingers resumed tracing the outlines of his scars. He relished the shivers she sent through his body.

"It's a miracle that you are still alive. I can't even begin to imagine how much pain you must have been in."

Most people, who saw his scars, just accepted them as decorations that came with the job. Kit was probably the first person to ever consider what he had had to endure to survive looking like he did. Geralt had always thought that Regis was the most empathetic person he knew but Kit seemed to be a contender for this position.

"Sometimes it was worth it."

"Sometimes," Kit repeated. He felt her tears on his skin, hot, wet and full of despair.

"Sometimes lives were saved."

"And… the other times?"

Geralt remembered being forced into fights for the amusement of others, feeling his skin tear while the audience clapped and screamed. He remembered the hopelessness he had felt when he had tried everything but it was not enough.

"They don't matter. It's all well now." He believed what he said. As unreasonable as it might have been, he would do it all again if it meant he got to sit in this exact position, feeling soft fingers caress his skin. "Would be nice if people weren't so repulsed all the time though," Geralt added as an afterthought. Would his life have been any easier if he did not look like he had been torn apart and patched together repeatedly? Would people consider him less terrifying?

"Have you ever heard of kintsugi?"

He shook his head. "What's that?"

"The term is Japanese. It describes the art of repairing broken ceramics. When they put the pieces back together, they use varnish and put gold powder or other valuable metals into the cracks. The broken pottery not only looks beautiful afterwards, it is, factually speaking, worth more than it was before." She paused. "I think this is what your scars are, your very own version of kintsugi. Beautiful in their own way, every experience making you richer than before."

Her kindness and the fact that she tried to console him when she was the one in an extraordinary situation baffled him. He hugged her even tighter, not willing to let go of her. Still, something bothered him.

"Beautiful?" he wondered aloud remembering her reaction from earlier on after she had seen the battlefield that was his body.

Kit just nodded.

"I got a very different impression this morning when you ran away from me and didn't talk to me after you saw… everything."

For a moment she seemed to freeze in his arms. "Sorry, that had nothing to do with you. I just… I can't… I just realized a few things and it was all too much." She sniffed. "It's still too much actually."

Kit's hand had not ceased to caress the mangled skin on his chest. To Geralt that was proof enough that her words were true. He felt relieved.

Utterly exhausted, Kit fell asleep in Geralt's lap.

For a little while longer he stroked her hair, not wanting to move her or wake her up. His knee however did not allow him to spent any more time in this position, so he carefully scooped her up. He treaded cautiously, not making a sound, and carried her up to her bed. Only when he lowered her onto the mattress did she regain consciousness for a moment.

"Please, don't go," she pleaded softly, before falling asleep again.

Geralt had sworn to himself, time and time again, not to get involved, not to bond. So, he did what he always did in such a situation: He got involved. And he stayed.

It was nearly noon when he woke as someone brushed some hair out of his face and behind his ear. The touch was soft and delicate, electrifying him. Last night he had pulled an armchair close to the bed and eventually fallen asleep with this head on the mattress.

Kit whispered his name.

Geralt slowly came to, rubbing the left side of his face that he had been sleeping on. He hissed when he tried to move his stiff neck.

"What are you doing here?" Kit asked, her face displaying confusion.

You begged me to stay, he thought. "Just wanted to make sure you were okay," he said instead.

"Thank you, that's very… sweet," she said, looking rather astonished.

"Why do you sound so surprised?" he asked while moving his head in every possible direction to loosen up the tense muscles.

She shrugged. "We are basically strangers and yet… You took me in, you take care of me even though you have no obligation to – you make sure that I'm okay... I can honestly say that I don't know any other person who'd do that for me. I owe you so much already." He could tell that she was absolutely sincere, the tone of her voice devoid of sarcasm or irony.

Geralt nodded. "Let's not be strangers anymore then." He thought that there had to be an unwritten rule stating that once you fell asleep in someone else's lap, you could not call yourself strangers any longer.

Kit smiled weakly.

Geralt spent the afternoon in the greenhouse, removing weeds, watering the plants and carefully choosing ingredients for potions to be prepared. Kit was elsewhere, scribbling into a book that he had given her. She said she needed to write down her thoughts or she was going to go crazy.

A crow was perched onto a replica of Reginald d'Aubry next to the entrance of the wine cellar. Geralt pondered for a moment before he spoke to the crow: "If you meet Regis, please let him know I could use his help." He mumbled a thank you, feeling silly for talking to a bird, before he descended down into the basement to continue his work. When he was done, he prepared a letter to an old acquaintance in Novigrad. And while he considered it pointless, he still tasked Barnabas-Basil with finding out if during the past few days people had turned up in Toussaint who did not belong there. He knew that his majordomo was well connected in the area and letting him ask the questions would arouse much less suspicion than the witcher investigating himself.

Geralt was determined to contact Ciri in case his efforts did not amount to anything. But that was easier said than done. During her last visit she had mentioned that, after returning to Nilfgaard for a month, she was planning on travelling between the worlds for a while. Ciri argued that, in order to be a good ruler, she needed to learn how other countries were ruled, preferably those with more modern societies. Emhyr certainly did not like it when she disobeyed his demands, but he had no means to stop the force of nature that she had become. Sending a letter to Ciri was pointless, it would never reach her as his endeavors in the past had shown. Geralt was a persona non grata in the empire and Emhyr would do everything he could to interfere with his plans and limit the witcher's interaction with his child surprise. But that, Geralt thought, was going to be a problem for another day.

He felt caught up in an impossible scenario: He understood that Kit needed to go home because she suffered. But he did not want to let her go as he liked her being so close to him.

Kit walked through the shallow river behind the house to cool herself off. The day had been obscenely hot and she had traded her usual outfit for one of Geralt's shirts that she wore as a short dress, pulled together at the waist by an old belt. Geralt smiled to himself. Seeing her like this somehow lifted his spirits. Maybe having a woman wear his shirt was even better than seeing her naked, he thought.

But more than that Geralt was relieved to find her to be her usual self, a whole different person from the one who had fallen asleep crying just yesterday.

He noticed her fingers were smeared with ink.

"You know, the ink belongs on the paper, not on your skin," he remarked drily.

"You know, feathers are for birds and make shitty tools for writing," she retorted while balancing on a few bigger stones in the riverbed.

"Then what would you prefer? How do your people do it?"

"My people are lazy, so we don't. We just talk into our phones and have them write it down for us." She smiled. "Our entire lives evolve around us finding more ways to be lazy."

"Then you must have a lot of time on your hands. What do you do with it?"

"Cats."

"What?" For a brief moment Geralt was not sure if she maybe had lost her mind after all.

"Sorry, that was a joke. One that is so ingrained into our society that there would be no point in trying to explain it to you. You have to be part of it to understand it." She shot him an apologizing glance.

Geralt shook his head in disbelief. "You are a fish out of water and yet you are trying to give me the feeling that I am the one who has no idea what's going on."

She sighed. "That's me, panicking. My usual methods for working out problems don't apply here. I'm not just a fish out of water, I'm a fish who's about to fall into an active volcano." She plopped down on the grass and grabbed her book. "Virtually all my abilities are useless in this world because the things I'm good at don't even exist. How am I supposed to earn money and make a living?" Without breathing she continued: "Sadly, my only idea so far is becoming a prostitute. And I don't like that."

"You will not become anything of the sort." Anger sounded in Geralt's voice.

Kit chuckled. "I'd be the worst prostitute on the planet. I hate being touched by strangers. The thought of having to… engage with someone I don't know is close to vomit-inducing. So, if you have any better ideas, I'm all ears." She shuddered, clearly playing through the aforementioned scenario in her head.

Geralt pinched the bridge of his nose and made an effort to sound less aggressive.

"You can stay here as long as you want. You don't need to worry about work, you will be cared for. Understood?" He could not believe he actually had to say it out loud. Was it not obvious?

"Geralt, I very much appreciate that but…" She sighed. "I don't like living out of your pocket, not being able to return the favor. This is not how I was raised. You've given me so much already and I have nothing to give to you in return." What was it, Geralt wondered, that he did to always attract these headstrong, proud women?

"You are a stubborn little thing." He sat down on the grass next to her.

"I'm not little. You're not even a head taller than me." She rolled her eyes.

"Anything or anyone I can just throw over my shoulder is little."

"That's a stupid way of classifying things. You're pure muscle and a mutant on top of it, you can throw grown men over your shoulder. Actually," she laughed wholeheartedly, "you could probably do the Swayze-lift from dirty dancing with a grown man. I'd pay to see that."

"No, you wouldn't, you don't have any money," he replied, not knowing what she was even talking about but trying his best to play along.

"Well, you'd pay for me to see that."

"Then I'd be paying myself."

She nodded. "Yes, you would. You just said a minute ago you'd provide for me. I assume that includes entertainment."

Geralt smiled. He liked it when she started these silly arguments.

"I guess so. But… tell me more about this dirty dancing and the Swayze-thing." Geralt did not dance nor did he care to, but he wondered whether the dancing she talked about was literally or just figuratively speaking dirty. He could probably muster some interest in the latter.

"Dirty Dancing is a movie from the late 80s, so it's about 30 years old now. Oh, and a movie is like a theater play that has been, so to speak, conserved so you can see it again any time you like. Anyway, the movie is pretty well-known. An innocent girl from an uptight family learns how to dance with this guy, I don't know his name. But the actor is called Patrick Swayze. At the end of the stay there is a competition and they decide to choreograph a dance to compete. And the highlight is the lift. She runs at him, he grabs her by the hips and lifts her above his head." She imitated the motion with her arms. "Obviously, it's a love story. If you analyze it on more levels it's also a story about emancipation and the different prospects of people with and without money. But we all watch it for the romance..."

"Do you dance? Have you ever done this… dirty dancing?" Geralt had no idea where these questions came from but he figured that, if he wanted to understand her better, he had to ask these things, even if it made him feel a little ridiculous. He had realized early on that his usual brooding, taciturn ways would not get him anywhere with the fast and always-talking Kit.

Kit blushed. "No, I'm not a dancer. And all the men I know are weak, they wouldn't be able to do this."

"Just out of curiosity: Do you think I could do it?" Again, Geralt was not quite sure what exactly he was asking.

"No. Not because I think you can't lift me, I know you can, I mean I've seen the…" she gestured in his vague direction, "and all. But that's not how it works. It would be sacrilegious not to practice in a lake first. Also, I'm kind of scared that you'd overdo it and I would faceplant straight into the ground."

Geralt was thoroughly confused again. Why was a lake needed for all of that? Maybe he had to ask something easier, something that could be mirrored in both worlds.

"You'll have to explain the lake business to me at some point. You are really not making much sense." Geralt cracked his neck. It still had not quite recovered from the last night.

"You will get used to it, I promise." She apologetically shrugged her shoulders.

"Tell me about the people who raised you to become so damn complicated." Kit lowered her gaze. Her big blue eyes looked very sad all of a sudden. But eventually she told him about her family. Her parents seemed very nice and normal, he concluded, and had provided a sheltered life for Kit and her younger brother. They were not rich, but they were affluent enough to offer their children certain opportunities.

"I love them very much. The thought of never seeing them again kills me." Geralt tried his best to emphasize but it was hard. He told her how he knew nothing about his father, and his mother had given him away. It was so long ago, he barely had any memories of the life back then.

"How old are you even?" Kit looked at him curiously. "Your face doesn't match your hair color. It's been bothering me all this time."

"Well over 100 years now. I feel older every time I look into a mirror."

Kit whistled appreciatively. "For someone that old you look dashing. I would have assumed you're in your late 40s at most."

"Is dashing the word you use to make an old man feel better about himself?" He studied her reaction carefully.

"Are you really going to pretend that you are not the most popular man around here? Remember, I saw how all the ladies were ogling you. Do you really need me to swoon over you, too?" she asked jokingly. No, he thought, but I want you to. With women from here it was so easy to tell: They either liked him or they did not. It did not take much in terms of deductive skills to guess their opinions since they were not shy about expressing them. Sometimes no talking at all was needed and they ended up in bed anyway. However, with Kit he could not tell. Was she flirting with him? Or was she making fun of him? Irony and sarcasm seemed to be at her core. But aside from that, she only knew a part of the truth. He was popular, certainly, but not in a way he liked. That whole matter was an exhausting story of and on its own.

"It's complicated and not at all what it looks like." He cracked his neck again, hissing silently. Kit eyed him up critically.

"Do you trust me?" she asked.

"With what?"

"Wrong answer. Do you trust me?" she repeated.

"Yes?" Geralt figured that this was the only correct answer or the only answer she would accept.

Kit patted her hand on the grass next to her. "Lie down and let me see if I can do something about your neck."

Assuming that whatever she planned on doing would lead to her touching him, Geralt obeyed immediately.

She sat down behind his head. Kit placed her hands at his neck, her fingers meeting in the recess of his spine just below his skull. Carefully, she dug her fingertips into the indentation and started to draw towards the front, stopping short before his ears. A wave of pleasure and relaxation washed over Geralt immediately and he closed his eyes, his mouth falling slightly open. Kit repeated the motion over and over again.

"Now, relax your head and neck," she instructed. She lifted his head with one arm, twisted it to the side carefully, while her other hand massaged along his neck, down to his shoulder, stretching the entire area.

"What did you say your job was?" Geralt asked while he felt all tension slipping away from him.

"Just an office job. Why?"

"Why does someone, who works in an office, know how to massage?"

"I used to have back issues all the time from sitting so much because I didn't believe in the magic of working out. My physiotherapist did this whenever my neck hurt." Without setting his head back on the ground she changed the arm beneath it and continued the stretching motion on the other side. "I'm not at all qualified to do this. You might or might not be sore tomorrow. We'll see." Geralt only hummed. He did not care whether he would be sore at any point or turn into a pickle, as long as she kept doing what she did.

"Also, don't ever let someone, who's not qualified, work on your spine like that."

"But you just said you weren't qualified."

"That's what I said," she confirmed.

"Are you telling me that I should not let you do this right now?"

"Yes."

"Your warning is a little late, don't you think?"

"Sue me then."

"Sue you for what?"

"All I have, I guess?"

"You have nothing."

"Yup. Go for it."

He smiled. "I could sue you for your, what did you call them, yoga pants?"

"Ah, yes. I'm sure they'd look terrific on you." She chuckled. Geralt smiled.

Eventually, she placed his head back on the grass. He had not opened his eyes yet, when he heard her move next to him to lie down as well.

"You know more about magic than I do." Her tone had become serious again. "What do you think happened? How did I get here? You must have a theory at least." When he opened his eyes and turned his head towards her, he saw her looking straight at him, her face showing a mix of desperation and truculence.

"It's hard to say." He paused, not sure where to begin. He remembered the initial thought that had popped into his head when he had first talked to her. "Something like this has happened before. A conjunction of spheres that brought all sorts of beings into this world from other worlds, humans amongst them. But that was a large-scale event that displaced a multitude of beings. I don't know of any similar occurrence affecting just one person. It seems very unlikely."

"But it has happened before?"

"Over 1500 years ago…"

"Mh… I feel like the butt of a cosmic joke." She turned on her stomach. "Maybe it's not even relevant how I got here. But why? Just why would you pry someone out of their live and throw them into a different world?"

Geralt was unable to answer her question. He had not even bothered to ask this question as he had already chalked it up to cosmic chaos – there was no reason. Just randomness, sometimes disguised as destiny.

"Maybe time will tell." He turned his head to find Kit staring and plucking some blades of grass.

"That reminds me: I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"That dress that I ordered? For the wine festival?"

"What about it?"

She turned her head back towards him. "I kind of believed that this was a game when I ordered it. I didn't think you'd actually be paying for it. Otherwise I would not have dared to waste your money like this."

Geralt smiled. "I'm not going bankrupt any time soon. But what do you mean with you kind of believed?"

She turned her face back to the sky, closing her eyes. "It's like most peoples' relationship statuses on facebook around 2009: complicated."

"Facebook? What's that? A collection of actual faces?" Geralt tried a new strategy where, whenever she said something that he could not make any sense of at all, he would pick one thing and ask about it.

"Wow, that went dark quickly." She laughed. "No, god, no, this is not game of thrones. Or so I would hope." For about half an hour Kit tried to explain the concept of social networks to Geralt who quickly realized that he should have asked about something else. Anything else.

"Well, just a few more days and we'll see if the money spent was worth it."

"I'll be very disappointed if it was not. I'm actually looking forward to this."

Geralt was relieved to hear this as it meant that next to sadness and despair, there was still room for something positive in her mind. And so, for the first time in forever, he was looking forward to the festival, too.