Try, Please Try For Me

The Boiling Point

"Fucking cock, how many times are you going to keep playing the same four notes?"

Jaskier pulls his attention from his lute and turns to Lambert where he sits perched on a stool at the other end of the kitchen. An assortment of kitchen knives and about a dozen other blades of varying sizes lay scattered around him, save for the long, curved sword that he holds now, slowly dragging with a whetstone. Jaskier is almost jealous of how many knives the man owns.

"I'm composing," Jaskier says, turning back to his work and scribbling a quick line in his notebook. "And it's seven notes, and they're going to sound lovely once I've decided how I'm gonna structure this riff."

"Well it's fucking annoying. I can hardly hear myself think."

"And I can hardly hear myself compose with that shrill scraping you're doing, but I'm keeping that thought to myself."

Lambert leers at him and slowly puts down the blade, not breaking eye contact, then picks up another, staring at Jaskier for a moment before sharpening it even more aggressively than the first.

Jaskier tosses his pen down, snapping his notebook closed. "Must you?"

The corner of Lambert's mouth twitches and his eyes narrow in an expression that says, "try me, fucker," as a smirk pulls at his lips. Then he turns back to his knife as if Jaskier is the one that interrupted him. "Don't like it, go somewhere else."

"We both have to be here," Jaskier points out. "Vesemir will have our heads if we abandon kitchen duty again and I am not running another week of laps with you. It's just until the meat is done. Suck it up."

Lambert's smirk sharpens. "Isn't that your job?"

"Fuck off, Lambert."

The witcher just chuckles and continues to sharpen his knives.

Jaskier knows Lambert is just trying to get a rise out of him. It seems to be the witcher's favourite activity after drinking alcohol and pestering his brothers. He pokes comments at Geralt and Eskel the same way, but Lambert appears to have a special joy when doing it to Jaskier. Perhaps it's due to the fact that Geralt and Eskel will just walk away or take out any frustration in training-- but Jaskier threw a potato at his head which is apparently more entertaining.

He's working on a song that's not about Geralt for once, but instead an original idea. A tragedy about a woman in love with a sailor lost at sea, who now stands at the cliffs overlooking the ocean each night, waiting for her love that will never return.

He hums a few notes, then tries the riff again, eliciting a hiss from Lambert, and scribbles down the change in his notebook. He only gets through a couple minutes before Lambert decides to speak up again.

"Why don't you go and do something useful?"

Jaskier raises an eyebrow. "You mean like sharpening your swords for the fourth time this week?"

"Knives," Lambert says, gesturing to the blades around him. "Not mine. For the kitchen."

Jaskier snorts. "Oh please, even I know some of those are yours. No one uses a scimitar for cooking."

"Well that's where you're wrong, Buttercup, these are all-- wait--" Lambert's eyes widen and he sniffs the air. "Is something burning?"

Jaskier is on his feet in an instant. "Fuck!"

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Jaskier's heart falls as he and Lambert gaze into the smoking oven at the ruined chunk of meat. It's black, smoldering, and most certainly inedible, even by witcher standards.