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Eskel is going to die.
Not literally. Or, well… maybe literally. He’s sweating like a sinner in church, and even though he’s finished two complementary water bottles (in addition to the half-full water bottle that Lambert had had in his bag), he still feels slightly faint, like he’s liable to fall flat on his face if he tries to stand from the ridiculously low, creaky chair he’d claimed at the start of the concert.
It’s not even that hot in the auditorium. But the air-conditioning unit is very broken, and there’re nearly five-hundred people packed in like sardines under painfully bright, white lights… and Eskel is absolutely fucking miserable. If it weren’t for the fact that (1) he and Lambert had carpooled, and he couldn’t just strand the idiot at the high school (never mind the fact that he probably definitely shouldn’t be driving in such a state) and (2) the orchestra had yet to perform, and wouldn’t be performing until the very end of the concert, he’d have left the minute the sweat started gathering at his temples.
Lord, he doesn’t envy all of those poor children, dressed in black from head to toe. Last year, one of the sopranos in the women’s choir had passed out… fell right off the top row of the risers and tweaked one of her ankles upon impact. And this year, during the school’s production of Beauty and the Beast, the boy playing Gaston had met a similar—albeit bloodier—fate. Hadria had showed him the pictures he’d posted on Facebook. It… was decidedly unpleasant. One would think that that would be incentive enough to make the school district fix the fucking air-conditioning unit, but no…
“How’s the hot flash coming?” Lambert flashes him a grin that’s all teeth. Eskel glares at him from underneath sweat-soaked brown hair, “That good, huh? I should buy you one of those little handheld fans—”
“…Do that, and I will shove it so far up your ass, you can taste it in your throat.”
“Ooh, someone’s cranky.” Lambert had apparently never learned to quit while he was ahead… Eskel continues to glare at him, considering the logistics of choking him on a plastic bottle cap, “It must be all the hormones.” He says, ignorant of the irritated rumble that’s building in Eskel’s chest—
“Fuck off, Lambert.” He can either endure Lambert’s stupidity or suffer through the band attempting—and failing—to tune to ‘A.’ God, that ‘A’ is so flat… “Where the fuck is Geralt? And why are we at his kid’s fucking concert when he’s off doing fuck knows what?” They’re long past the point where Geralt could pass his absence off as mere tardiness—
Lambert shrugs, “Somewhere far, far away from this shitshow. Can’t blame him, really. I don’t really want to be here either.”
“Someone has to be here.” Eskel points out, “You would’ve been devastated if Mom and Dad missed one of your concerts.”
“You mean the concerts that I didn’t even want to attend?” A snort, “Allow me to detangle those wires you’ve gotten crossed, yeah? Dad forced me to play an instrument to help focus my excess energy, and then proceeded to bitch every time I played it.”
Eskel blinks, “Well, yeah. You sucked.”
Lambert rolls his eyes, “Oh, like you were so good at the piano—”
“I was. I was a prodigy.” Eskel says, matter-of-fact. Lambert, ever the epitome of maturity, sticks his tongue out at him and ignores Eskel’s request for him to go and get him yet another bottle of water. Fucker. If Eskel didn’t feel like he was about to melt, he would absolutely… do something. …Fuck off, it’s too hot to think.
“Shh!” The woman seated three seats down the aisle shushes them loudly. Eskel rolls his head toward her—he has no patience for Lambert, and he has even less patience for people shushing him like he’s a fucking toddler acting up in the movie theatre. If she can’t fucking hear the three-hundred student strong band over his little old voice, that’s on her.
He must look worse than he thought, because the woman lets out a startled little yip and immediately refocuses her eyes forward. Well, then. Eskel can’t decide how to feel about that… but soon concludes that, just as it’s too hot to think, it’s also too hot to process complex emotions. He can feel a headache coming on, which is absolutely not helped by the fact that the band is just flat enough to hurt. He closes his eyes, trying—and failing—to tune out the sound. How many songs was the band doing? The chorus had seemed to go on forever… Why did the orchestra have to be last?
The band plays one song… then two, three… by the fourth, Eskel is convinced Geralt and Jaskier just aren’t coming.
Hadria’s going to be devastated, and he’s going to have to kill them both, because nobody makes his niece cry.
God, he really doesn’t feel well…
“Take the shirt off.” Lambert says. It takes Eskel a moment to realize that he’s talking to him… and another moment to remember that he actually has something on underneath the powder blue polo he’d worn to work that day. An undershirt didn’t exactly fit with the concert dress code, but, you know… desperate times call for desperate measures.
He’s not exactly opposed to the idea—especially not if it means he’ll be a little more comfortable. That doesn’t stop him from teasing Lambert, however. “Why don’t you take me out to dinner before you start talking me out of my clothes?”
Lambert huffs, “It’s not like it’s not anything I haven’t seen before.”
…And he’s right back to wanting to choke Lambert with a fucking bottle cap.
Is it wrong that he hopes that little JJ veers away from the more artistic pursuits and decides to… oh, he doesn’t know… play basketball instead? He’d say football, but he figures that they’d run into much the same problem, with hundreds of parents and students packed into the bleachers, underneath ridiculously hot lights. At least the gymnasium has functional air-conditioning—thank God for small mercies. But then… who the fuck knows if the air-conditioning will still be functioning that far in the future? …Just thinking about it is making him sweat more.
He takes off his shirt—which leaves him in an embarrassingly sweat-stained white t-shirt—and it’s a little better. Lambert supplies him with more water, thank fuck, and it’s truly a testament to how dehydrated he is from all the sweating that he still doesn’t have to go to the bathroom. He uses the shirt to mop the sweat from his brow—the woman is shooting him annoyed, yet somehow semi-concerned glances after each of the songs. He really wishes that they’d gotten to the school like… fifteen minutes earlier, and had managed to snag seats on the complete opposite side of the auditorium.
They would’ve been able to do it, had they not been under the mistaken impression that Geralt and Jaskier cared enough to show up to their own daughter’s last high school orchestra concert. It wasn’t like this was a major milestone or anything like that. Or that Hadria would look back on this moment when considering what nursing home to stick them in.
And then… he feels his phone start vibrating in the pocket of his slacks. He retrieves it, thankful that he’d remembered to turn it on vibrate before the concert had started. The woman glares daggers at him, grumbling something beneath her breath about why he’d even bothered to come if he was more interested in his phone than in his children—
Eskel is about three seconds away from telling her it’s not even his damned kid, but that seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
From: WhiteWolf :wolf_head:
Need you to come drive me to the hospital.
Sent: Friday, 7:36PM
Eskel blinks. Lambert shoves himself right up into Eskel’s personal bubble to see who is texting him and what they’re saying, “Geralt needs you to drive him to the hospital?” He asks, “Tough shit. We carpooled, and you’re not stranding me at the high school—” Eskel almost mentions that he’d seriously contemplated leaving him here a second ago.
“Glad to know that you’re worried about the idiot. I’ll be sure to pass along your regards.” Why is it that he always gets stuck driving Geralt and Jaskier to the hospital? There’s this great little thing called 9-1-1, which will do all of that for them.
From: BabyAlpha :blue_pacifier: :wolf_head:
The fuck do you need to go to the hospital for?
Sent: Friday, 7:37PM
From: BabyAlpha :blue_pacifier: :wolf_head:
…Also, did you maybe forget something important? Like your *child.*
Sent: Friday, 7:37PM
From: BabyAlpha :blue_pacifier: :wolf_head:
Because if Hadria finds out you couldn’t be bothered to come to her concert, she’s going to be *crushed.* And I’m in a bad enough mood to help her hide the bodies.
Sent: Friday, 7:38PM
Those three little dots march across the bottom of the screen, mocking him. One, two, three. One, two, three. The woman beside him is so annoyed, her face is turning purple. Lambert elbows him in the side just a little too hard, “Do you think he still has you in his phone as BabyAlpha?” He snorts. If he does, Eskel is blocking his fucking number.
The band has just finished performing their final number, and are now exiting the stage so that the orchestra can take their seats. The orchestra is considerably smaller than the band… and as soon as the band leaves, half of the parents leave with them—which is rude as fuck, all things considered. He had to sit through their children playing shitty music, they should have to sit through his. Not that Hadria was actually his child. Or that the orchestra played shittily. The orchestra was easily the best of all three groups, and it was painfully underfunded. He’d seen the broken cellos in the music room—it was heartbreaking.
And all because the school’s marching band were national champions—who cared about a couple of trophies that’d likely only been earned because the school was the size of a small town, and had a ridiculously large pool of students to choose from to fill the band? If they couldn’t play their way out of a fucking wet paper bag, what point was there in pouring thousands of dollars into promoting them and upkeeping their instruments? Why couldn’t the administration be fucked to care about all of their students, not just the flashy marching band that earned trophies that didn’t mean a damned thing?
…Okay, he may’ve gotten a little bit carried away there. He swears to God it’s this motherfucking heat.
A second later, in lieu of a response, Geralt sends him a picture.
“Holy fucking—” Is that a dick? He’s reminded, vaguely, of the absolute shit fit that Jaskier had thrown when he’d thought, for just a split fraction of a second, that Hadria might be his daughter, and wonders what he would think if he knew that Geralt had just sent him the world’s most disturbing dick pick.
Lambert, morbidly intrigued, looks over… and promptly goes green in the gills, “Is the head supposed to… tulip like that?”
Eskel wants to clock him upside the head, “I can’t believe you even have to ask me that. No. No, Lambert. The head of a dick is most definitely not supposed to look like that.”
From: WhiteWolf :wolf_head:
There is a vibrator *stuck* in my urethra.
Sent: Friday, 7:45PM
…There is a vibrator stuck in Geralt’s urethra.
There is a vibrator stuck in Geralt’s urethra.
There is a vibrator stuck in Geralt’s urethra.
Eskel… has so many questions—and he’s absolutely certain that he doesn’t want the answers to any of them. The woman beside him leans over to cuss him out again, takes one look at the monstrosity on his phone, and promptly passes the fuck out. He thinks that they should probably tell someone about that… but, well… Geralt is texting him again, filling him in on all the grizzly details that still somehow fail to explain how even the smallest of egg vibrators had managed to fit all the way into his urethra like that. Even the thickest sounding rod isn’t that big—
His dick twinges in sympathy.
He’s just about to message Geralt back when the conductor takes the stage and directs the orchestra to tune. And holy shit, it takes less than a minute for everything to sound like rainbows and butterflies and why couldn’t the fucking band be like this? And Eskel finds himself pocketing his phone and perking up just a little bit (it’s still hot as hell, and he’s still severely dehydrated, but he's about to hear decent fucking music for the first time that night... so sue him if he's a little excited). Geralt can call an ambulance and explain to the paramedic why there’s an egg vibrator lodged in his dick—
“So, I take it we’re not taking a trip to the hospital tonight?” Lambert asks, already pulling out his own phone to order DoorDash for after the show. Hadria (and JJ, too, probably) will probably be spending the night at Eskel’s, so they might as well make an entire night of it with a couple of pizzas… Toddlers like pizza, right?
“Nah,” Eskel holds that Geralt is a grown-ass man who is fully capable of dialing 9-1-1… and if he doesn’t want to be embarrassed when the paramedics arrive, then he shouldn’t do embarrassing shit. It’s just common sense. “I came to see an orchestra concert… and I didn’t suffer through all that bullshit to not see one.”
Lambert’s grin is downright diabolical as he presses the water bottle back into Eskel’s hand, “Right on.” And then, “Be sure to keep hydrating, though… or else this night is gonna end with me taking you to the hospital.”
“Oh, fuck off.” Eskel says, without any bite. Lambert tries not to laugh as he proceeds to choke as he chugs the remainder of the water bottle.