Work Text:
The first week's leisurely travel through the summer hills of Dol Blathanna fails to kill Jaskier. It also fails to rob him of his resolution and send him limping back to the nearest village that might have had an adequate hovel to sleep in, although they're roughing it the whole way. Too bad for the witcher. Geralt wakes Jaskier more than one morning in a row by prodding him with the toe of his boot anyway like he really thinks Jaskier might have died in his sleep. Could be he's just wishing for it—Jaskier has yet to see him taken by surprise by a single damn thing, which means he probably does know that Jaskier is still breathing every time and does it just to be an arsehole.
On the eighth day out from Posada, Jaskier’s theory is definitively proven.
"Geralt!" Jaskier loads that single word with all the betrayal he really, truly does feel. He’s made a terrible discovery. "This is a—you have a bedroll in here. You have flint and tinder and a—is this a whole tent?"
"It's a tarp. For one person." That's Geralt's I'm-a-very-dangerous-killer growl. Jaskier knows it already. It's been more than a week spent travelling the same road. With most people, this would have qualified them as friends, and Jaskier is quite good at making friends, historically. "I keep it for emergencies, not summer camping trips. I also keep it in my saddlebag. What the hell do you think you're doing with it?"
The only reason Jaskier doesn't run screaming for the hills is that, well, firstly, eight days out and he's yet to see Geralt use that sword on someone who hasn't very clearly been asking for it. Secondly—on the off chance that going through Geralt's personal belongings might have counted as asking for it, which Jaskier is just now considering but maybe should have thought of first—this objection is delivered with just one eye cracked half-open. Geralt is presently, as far as Jaskier can tell, sunning his barbarian self in a patch of cornflowers. Armour and leather and all. His mile-wide arms are crossed above his head, the better to sprawl out in the golden almost-evening light. It's something, but it isn't, to be frank, very intimidating.
"Foraging, Geralt,” he says with utmost dignity and no fear whatsoever, no matter what his pulse might have to say about it. “I am foraging. I know you keep your whetstone in here, and then I thought, well. We're travel companions. And I'll admit I've gone into this a bit under-equipped, which you should know isn't normally my way.” It's probably important to explain at least this much about himself, if they’re to keep to the same road. He’s not a naturally light packer. “I'm a planner, really. But most of my belongings were left behind recently when I had to, shall we say, leave a lady's house quite unexpectedly. Just the regular sort of peccadillo; it was not so long before you and I met, and since, as a practicing romantic—"
"Mm. And my bag?"
"And, actually, whoops, that's both eyes open, is it now? Yes! Well! And it doesn't behoove anyone to kiss and tell, does it, so I'll just say that I recently suffered a loss of a considerable portion of my personal items and now," Jaskier rallies to his point, "I am without a whetstone. Among other things.”
This does not seem to be a point which resonates with Geralt. He still has something going on with his face that can’t decide whether it wants to resolve into outright hostility or merely some sort of confusion.
“But you,” Jaskier makes a face right back at Geralt, “as I happen to know, are not without a whetstone. And in fact are possessed of all manner of useful things that we might have been using all along to, oh, I don't know light a fire and cook something. Not to mention,” Jaskier rummages, up to his elbows now, “oof, half a bloody library of—what even are these? Gwent handbooks? Your poor horse.” He shoves the books aside without checking. “So. Overall, I don't think you're the one who gets to be angry. Here." He tosses the finely-made tinderbox he’s found, steel attached by its little string, to land squarely on Geralt's huge chest. It doesn't wind the witcher or even make him blink, but it's somewhat satisfying nonetheless.
"Hmmf." Geralt stares at him a little longer, stares at the tinderbox where it’s landed, and flops back down without removing it. Presumably this means Jaskier is free to fish out the whetstone. He has his prize now, jumbled amongst any number of murky bottles and sachets of who-knows-what, all of it surely either poisonous or decomposing, and he sits himself down on the nearest available hillock to use it. The sun really is quite lovely, out here amongst the wildflowers. The sky above is as blue as the cornflowers below—or maybe that ought to be the other way around. Which is bluer? How would you tell? Jaskier kicks off his boots, humming a little. Not to any purpose, not even really to any tune, but it's nice. So nice that Geralt wasn't even able to work up to a full strop.
A summer camping trip—well, Jaskier has heard of some people enjoying those. It's certainly one way to describe what they're doing. Another way would be: fruitlessly roaming about the impoverished countryside, hoping that someone will want to pay one of them for something, someday.
None of this is exactly what he'd thought he was volunteering for. First of all, he'd at least thought this would be interesting. More interesting than backwater taverns, and maybe more interesting than finding new ways to make Geralt glare at him without killing him. Although, that is proving to be its own kind of intellectual challenge. Jaskier’s historically not too bad at making enemies, either, but he's still alive so he figures he hasn't truly managed that, either. Irrationally, that’s something close to a frustration, too. He’s gotten nowhere.
It’s possible that their first heady adventure combined with his own inherent optimism has given Jaskier a false impression. He'd thought he was signing on for something dangerous enough—thrilling enough—that it might actually, really kill him. That bit’s not so much a goal; it’s more a fact of what he’d assumed he knew about the lifestyle. Dead in a ditch, which is just the way his own dear mother had always threatened he'd end up. What she’d never understood was that Jaskier is, in fact, committed to it.
He thought it would kill him for sure halfway through that first day, with a broken lute and a chestful of bruised ribs.
Instead, he has found himself burdened with the terrible knowledge of exactly what it feels like to sit bound back-to-back with Geralt of Rivia, hopeless and terrified, and feel the steady breath a witcher takes when he bends his neck to wait for the killing stroke. Since then, it's been mostly just working the kinks out of the new tune whilst keeping pace with someone who keeps trying to ditch him. Frustratingly, now it turns out Geralt can’t even be fucked to try very hard at it.
One bright spot, today, is that Jaskier has finally managed a ballad that paints the exploit in a favourable light. He has had to rather skirt around some of the more fruitless and untellable bits, though. And the elven bits. He's been trying to work out whether he ought to be ashamed of that un-telling, or trying to be ashamed of it, or… he isn't sure either way, out here in the sunshine. It's not a particularly heroic emotion, whichever way he tries it on. That’s been its own kind of disappointment: he thought he’d acquit himself better, somehow. With his knife in his hand now, in the safety of camp, he is mostly trying not to be ashamed of the part where he didn't even think to reach for a real weapon. Geralt is still right there in the corner of his vision, difficult to ignore and making this small shame even more difficult to reconcile. He tells himself that it’s because he’s never been a fighter. Not the way a witcher is.
The untold bits are not the bits that matter, anyhow: if the truth is the heart of a story, the embellishments are the comely trappings that get song sheets printed and sold. Jaskier excels in the embellishments, and this new song has a hell of a hook.
Twaddle. It’s all twaddle, even in his head, but perhaps there’s a useable parable somewhere in there. Or something.
Perhaps he’ll play the whole thing through for Geralt tonight and ask what he thinks of it.
After this long stretch of silence—a stretch so nearly companionable that no one even feels compelled to say anything snide about anyone else's humming, for once—Geralt heaves himself to his feet and stomps off somewhere. He's not likely going far because he doesn't say goodbye to his horse. Which—he does that, usually. This is another useless thing Jaskier has already learned.
Usually, Geralt says goodbye to his horse right before he goes off to kill something so apparently trivial that afterwards, when Jaskier asks him how it went, Geralt barely even bothers to shrug. This time, Geralt’s only slung on a crossbow and a couple of inconsequentially murderous hunting knives the size of short swords. Nothing major-looking. So Jaskier doesn't trouble himself to start that argument up, he just moves on from knife-sharpening to repairing his bootlaces for the third time in eight days. Whatever mad, monstrous thing is out there, Geralt is going to tell him it's nothing when he gets back.
He really ought to invest in a sturdier pair of boots. As a part of this already very educational afternoon, he's discovered that Geralt has a secret second pair, rather nicer than his first. They're definitely the wrong size for Jaskier, though, and then there's always the risk that they're made out of some kind of hide that Jaskier doesn't want to think about. Also, being well-made and sturdy, they’re boring. Geralt would probably make Jaskier buy them off him, anyway.
Then again, one larger expense upfront might pay for itself in the long run, at the rate he’s running through laces.
Perhaps the whole thing’s more of a limerick, now he’s thinking of it. It’s probably not even a very good one of those. It’s not nearly dirty enough. Although… He turns it over for a while anyway, thinking idly of Geralt, spread out in his pool of sunshine. All that brawn and beef and a cicada-song summer. He even gets as far as considering setting the little poem to some sort of melody, possibly, to give it the backbone it’s sorely lacking.
It's not quite a sound that interrupts him. Maybe it's the quiet where there'd been a sound. Maybe it's nothing? The tail-end of a cold breeze.
He feels, suddenly, quite horribly alone.
Or: he was alone. Now there's this pricking of the back of his neck, this uneasiness. It comes again, and it's not nothing. It is not welcome company. It's still not quite a sound, but now it's almost a shape: something stalking him from the edge of the trees, only a very little way off. There are eyes out there, slit-pupiled, inhuman eyes. They glint from the summertime shadows, focused on Jaskier and all the barefoot, soft, tasty parts of him. It’s looking right at him.
He doesn’t panic. The shadows shift, drawing in thicker.
Slowly, so slowly, Jaskier picks the whetstone back up and runs it once more over the blade of his little boot-knife. Nothing worth seeing here, he says with everything he can project. Just a man who is at home in the wilderness, who is prepared for every eventuality. Armed, but just... casually. An adventurer. No one here to be stared at, and certainly no one to be devoured for dinner.
He isn’t—it’s the truth. He is, this time, determined. He is someone who is ready for anything. Even if he has to be ready to be the one who gives the killing stroke.
The shadows thrash and all at once become singular and man-shaped, and Geralt stomps back into Jaskier's idyllic little meadow. Geralt is attractively sweat-sheened, reeking like a dead pig and, incidentally, hauling over his shoulders a medium-sized dead boar. A single arrow is stuck right through the thing's heart. It's gotten blood everywhere. Geralt's been gone, oh, maybe forty minutes at the absolute maximum. He very evidently didn't even need to use any of the hunting knives to bring it down. Next to all of this, Jaskier's own little dagger feels both inadequate and like an unfortunate case of overcompensation, somehow at the same time.
"Nice knife," Geralt says, offhand, slinging his prize to the ground. Like he hasn’t been lurking, probably laughing at Jaskier’s terror while he does it. He picks up the discarded tinder box and begins to arrange a sizeable fire pit. That's—that's impossible to tell whether it's a joke or not.
Witchers, Jaskier decides and not for the first time, are fucking insufferable. What is new and instantly clear, though, is that witchers also have exacting, extremely well-practised bushcraft standards. If he hadn't just spent most of a good week eating nothing but glorified trail mix, Jaskier would be tempted to think that Geralt routinely sets up a proper camp and makes himself a hot dinner out in the wilds. And then Geralt starts the fire with nothing but a gods-damned flick of his fingers, which Jaskier knew about but really only in a fighting context, so what the hell's the flint even for?
Jaskier is indeed a romantic. A lover, through and through. He's quite tempted to stick said knife into the witcher's thigh and just—find the fuck out if the bastard is joking about it, why not.
Anyway, he's glad he hadn't done something idiotic while Geralt was gone, such as try to help around camp in any capacity whatsoever. He's also incredibly, unbelievably glad for the great, sizzling slab of what might have been boar back-bacon if it had been prepared by an actual butcher but is still dripping salty, delicious fat all over his fingers, fresh-roasted and the best thing he's tasted in months. Weeks. At least eight days, but maybe longer. Fuck, he's—this is stupid; this is the stupidest plan Jaskier has ever had, and it isn't even a plan. It's just some mad impulse to leave every vestige of civilization behind and follow a barbarian into the dark. He's had mad impulses before. They don't typically end very well.
"Where'd you get the knife, anyhow?" Geralt asks the next morning. He's packing away the best cuts of pork they hadn't managed to eat in waxed parchment, now salted and smoked overnight over smouldering coals. He doesn't even look like he's paying attention to what his hands are doing; they just fold everything up into tidy string-tied packets while he thinks about other things. Witcher-y, unknowable things. Knives. "Some noblewoman didn't give you that."
"Excuse you very much, you don't know that." Geralt says exactly nothing, but this time Jaskier can sense his expression—and it's a real smug bastard one. "Just because nobody likes you, honestly. Women have given me many gifts. Often. Practically constantly!"
"Not this one. Any woman who would give a piece like that as a gift would've known enough about good steel to cut you down when you played her false." So, smug: yes; bastard: yes. Joking: no. How... enlightening.
"Maybe I didn't play this one false." Jaskier reaches down to set the boot sheath more firmly, focusing only on the straps.
Geralt snorts. "Likely."
"Really."
There's a long, telling silence, full of nothing but wax-paper sounds and a capricious summer breeze.
"Oh, fuck you, Geralt of Rivia, you've known me a week."
"Mm. And you haven't shut up once, the entire time." Had Jaskier really been thinking kindly of him? Something about how he was stunningly competent, and on top of it, inclined after all to share his bacon? And yet here he is, ready even on such short acquaintance to tell Jaskier all about how shitty he is, apparently, which is just—
"I didn't. I tried not to. Well, but I didn't go back for her, either. So." He jerks at the buckle and gives up in disgust. With Geralt, with himself, with the whole thing. "Maybe that's the same thing. Might be! Might be you'd like to fucking tell me that it is!"
"Hmm," Geralt says. When Jaskier finally looks up at him, he still isn't paying attention to what he's doing with the boar meat, but now it's because he's watching Jaskier. Carefully, with the same side of skin-prickling consideration as from the bushes, before. They say a witcher can smell a lie, although Jaskier doesn't care to ask. "I'm sorry, then."
"You're—what?" Jaskier deflates, all at once just tired instead. "No, that's... I shouldn't have put it that way. And you don't deserve my anger for not knowing. It was a gift. From my older sister, when I left home. The last time, for school and then—just left for good, I suppose. I haven't been back since, and there was plague in Kerack a few years back—well, in all of Redania, more or less, and everywhere else too. It's what comes of wartime. I don't speak to my parents but I—my uncle wrote. To tell me that she, ah."
Geralt nods and doesn't make him say it. "It's a fine knife. Well-kept. It'll do you a service, someday."
Jaskier still kind of wants to tell him to go fuck himself. The bitter taste of that doesn't go away for hours. He tries, for a bit, to play as he walks, and stops before he winds up snapping a string.
The next town they stop in that has a halfway functional market, a fine-grained whetstone appears in Jaskier's little sling-pack. After he finds it, it takes Jaskier days to stop wanting to snarl at Geralt that witchers aren't the only ones who can't be bought. How lucky for both of them, then, that Geralt never says a word about it: Jaskier’s never quite learned how to accept any apology he hasn’t had to fight for tooth and claw, except by starting a new fight.
Which he does not want to do. He’d swear it.
The problem is, Jaskier is increasingly forced to admit that their grand adventure is not going to arrive on schedule. A great deal of the life of an itinerant witcher is very similar to the life of a travelling bard—which is to say, dusty and slow going—and moreover Geralt is never actually going to tell him when something exciting does turn up. He’s coming to grips with it. In the interests of making at least some coin from this whole endeavor, Jaskier dedicates most of their time on the road to interrogating Geralt about witcherings past, instead. The process of turning Geralt’s grudging, grunted commentary into adventures invented almost whole-cloth is its own kind of challenge, to be sure, but he finds himself setting most of them to popular tunes. Jaskier is above using his own work on what is mostly drivel.
One notable, unexpected effect of these attempts is that Geralt has started offering occasional conversational starters of his own. It’s a transparent attempt to head off the song-writing. Unfortunately, they’re usually insults shouted back at Jaskier from fifty feet down the road.
“You’ll deafen my horse,” Geralt shouts, this time.
“It’s you who’s gone deaf, you monstrous philistine,” Jaskier lowers himself to shouting back. “This isn’t even one of yours. It’s the ballad that won me the grand prize at the Roggeven Bardic Invitational last season. That’s a thousand crown purse, Geralt! Your horse should consider herself lucky! The adjudicators called the scansion inspired.” It sounds a bit less inspired when he picks it back up again at half the pace and three times the volume, with considerably more rude lyrics added in. By the time they make camp, Geralt is ignoring him completely.
So it’s probably turned into a fight anyway.
The frustration isn’t all Geralt’s fault, really. Jaskier doesn’t deal well with boredom in the first place, and he the farther away he gets from it the less he likes to think of that performance in Posada, either. He needs some fresh material, wherever he can get it. The whole thing has amounted to a bit of a prick in Jaskier’s self-confidence, and frankly it’s sheer stubbornness that keeps him going. Plus a certain amount of sunk-cost fallacy. It’s weeks of effort spent on Geralt at this point, strung together only on the fact that he has not, yet, just left Jaskier in the dust, though he certainly could.
Doesn’t care enough to try—that’s what Jaskier had thought the explanation was, back there at the beginning. It’s gone on long enough, though, that Jaskier wishes he could call it something else. Maybe it is something else, a kind of companionship after all, only Geralt isn’t telling and Jaskier can’t figure out how to ask without leaving himself very much exposed to a blow that he knows well enough he should see coming. Does see coming, in point of fact.
Geralt leaves Jaskier behind in camp readily enough, for example, and with never any care for Jaskier’s well-being as far as he can detect. When there’s killing to be done, Geralt just goes and does it. Presumably he does it with the sort of stoic heroism which needs no songs of praise. Really, anything could be lurking out there, ready to come for Jaskier as soon as his protector is busy. Jaskier has tried telling him so, once, and it’s almost—not that question; it’s not, have you actually secretly decided to let me, but it’s some question.
Geralt responds to it by staring at Jaskier in a way that baldly implies he is an idiot and no responsibility of Geralt’s whatsoever. It’s a familiar look, unfortunately, and then he’s turning his back and striding off. That, also, is becoming a very familiar look on him. “Sorry, Roach,” he says while he does it. Jaskier tries not to hear the subtext, suddenly present, which is that Geralt is only sorry to leave her—not alone, but to leave her with such a fool. He looks back at Jaskier, almost out of the clearing, gilded in sunset light on all his hard edges. It’s probably been an afterthought and not a deliberate insult, this time. “I’ll be back before dawn.”
“A short contract, then?” Jaskier tries again anyway. As approaches go, this one has never worked yet. It’s much too direct to fool someone as straightforward as Geralt, at least when he straightforwardly does not wish to tell Jaskier his business, ever. If he does have some idea that this is a way to keep Jaskier out of danger, Geralt clearly has no idea just how much more of an idiot Jaskier can be when left to his own devices.
Regardless, Jaskier has the distinct impression that multiple vicious foes faced down in the dead of night is not quite enough to register as danger, for Geralt. It’s probably not even a consideration. Foolish to think of it. And since Geralt’s gone to where the monsters are, Jaskier can be pretty sure on his own behalf that there are no monsters here. He feels a little thrill as dusk falls anyway, to look up at all that sky with its hundred thousand stars prickling themselves into existence. Despite everything; despite bloody Geralt. It’s a gloriously warm night, a gorgeous, alone-in the-world night, and Jaskier lets the fire burn down and the stars come out and acknowledges to himself that he has no idea what he’s after, anymore. The song-writing isn’t exactly working itself out.
Except that maybe it is, if only he’d let it. Which—Jaskier cannot. With Geralt gone off into the darkness, it’s still Geralt he’s thinking about. More worrisome than that, it’s not even Geralt’s idiotically huge shoulders that the idle summer heat in his belly wants to curl itself around, when he stretches himself out alone to sleep. Though they’re magnificent and worth a ballad all their own, to be sure. Especially caught gold at the sunset, or wet as he washes all his laundry at once in a clear mountain stream, or. Well. There’s all those little pilfered bits of it, too, snatched up over the days and weeks. Those are to be expected. Those, he could write. But out here in the moonlight with even the crickets finally gone still, Jaskier can acknowledge this, too: it’s the focused way he looks at Jaskier, just for a second sometimes, just when he’s right on the verge of saying the one unforgivable thing that would send Jaskier finally on his way and then—does not.
Jaskier would feel like a heel just for watching the way that he does, let alone for the lazy pleasure he lets himself take now with Geralt gone. Not quite thinking of Geralt, but still—he’s thinking of Geralt. But that would require fooling himself into thinking that Geralt—observant to a fault—doesn’t already know. And Jaskier isn’t quite that foolish. Or quite that good at pretending he’s not looking, either. Sometimes Geralt lets Jaskier see him with his shirt off anyway, and it’s only another part of that sideways sort of mercy that Geralt pretends he doesn’t have until it makes Jaskier want to scream at him.
Geralt has no right to judge Jaskier for running through a song or two for Roach's approval; that’s what Jaskier really objects to, here. There’s simply no better audience on offer. No one out here wants to hear songs about heroic battles or long-ago wars or even, really, witchers. Not even if the witcher in question has all of Geralt’s many fine attributes and none of the bad.
They've all got their own problems. Even this far east, at the foot of the Blue Mountains, the war is encroaching. And the summer is getting on anyway, war or no, and the countryside along with it. The jobs they find are badly-paid and unheroic: a lost goat or two, or at best a dairy where a fledgeling leshen keeps souring the milk. One lucky week, it’s a werewolf who turns out to be the very man who'd said he’d pay them to investigate a werewolf sighting. And then Geralt really does have to kill him, so that no one gets paid at all.
In the taverns, work for a bard is almost as thin. It's time for the second sowing of the year and the farmers are mostly too busy to drink. So Roach is currently his best and most discerning choice for an audience, and so what? Geralt has made it clear that he certainly isn’t volunteering himself.
When they do happen on a public house here or there that’s willing to pay Jaskier—or at least feed him and let him put a cap out for his trouble—he knows better than to go in for lyricism. It’s the drinking songs that anyone would know, and maybe a bawdier ballad or two for a good crowd. Sometimes a particularly generous innkeeper will feed Geralt, too, if he’s stuck around for the performance. Once, just once, he sticks around and Jaskier sees him tapping his foot. It’s in time with the chorus of a particularly smutty broadside called Fair Susan, the playing of which would have rightfully gotten Jaskier thrown from any respectable establishment south of Sodden, but never mind.
Something about that glows in him as much as his satisfaction at the little dragon’s hoard of silver he collects at the end of the night does. As much as the applause, even.
“You liked that one,” Jaskier crows the next day, perhaps a mite too triumphant, but he never could resist rubbing it in. He deserves to. His performances, even the ones where he doesn’t exactly have his pick of the set list, have reach, and here’s the proof.
“I knew that one. There’s a difference.” Geralt takes a swig from his water-skin. But then he does offer it to Jaskier, too, which is almost as good as an admission. If it were someone else, it would probably have been a nod and the tug of a smile. “Stew was good, though. I’d eat there again.”
“You know he liked it,” Jaskier says to Roach, but she, being a horse, has nothing to say about it. Well, she has no reason to. Geralt smiles at her all the time. He has noticed that she seems to prefer the more sentimental tunes, if you’re going by whether she flattens her ears and takes a chomp at him or not. At least she and her master don’t share the same coarse tastes.
Also, the other reason Geralt cannot judge: Geralt doesn't just talk to his horse, like the normal sort of crazy person. He talks horse to his horse. Jaskier has heard him.
“Bugger,” Geralt is saying, currently, and then a growl which might not exactly be horse-language this time, but which is certainly animal in nature. He has one hand fisted in Roach’s mane, leaning heavily. She takes his weight as placidly as a tree stump while he contorts himself around trying to reach something at the base of his shoulder that looks, as far as Jaskier can see, to be oozing. “Fucking piece of shit gods-damned motherfucker. Roach. Hold.”
Roach snorts, indignant: she is holding.
It’s very, very early in the morning. Some might have said too early. The swears tell Jaskier that Geralt is absolutely fine. On the other hand, the protruding spine, not unlike a giant hedgehog quill but sort of ichorus, is interesting. Maybe he’ll just insert himself into the conversation. “Would now be a useful time to mention that I am right here, actually? And available to help?”
Geralt shoots him a scowl much grumpier than the one he’d been giving his horse. Well, it must sting at least a little. Jaskier can make allowances for that.
“Ghoul spines, is it?” He unrolls himself from his chilly bedroll and ambles over. The mist is still grey on the trees, a premonition of autumn. If Geralt’s not in a rush then neither is he. Also, he’s still a little miffed at being left behind at camp in the dead of night, again, and is not, therefore, making quite as many allowances as he might this morning. “Or I assume it was ghouls, as that’s what the alderman tells me the contract was for, not that you thought to mention it.” Geralt twists with renewed vigour, still trying to get a look at the quill situation. Maybe he’s just trying to be contrary. “Oh, honestly, Geralt, hold still. I have two perfectly good thumbs and I can see what I’m doing. Let me yank it, and then you can take your armour off and we’ll have a look.”
Jaskier is lucky that the sight of a bit of blood doesn’t phase him. Though it must be said that the sight of Geralt, sweat-stained, de-spined, and now shucked out of all his layers of armour in the clear, dawning light could have put anyone with an interest in danger of feeling a bit woozy. He’s even luckier, then, that he’s been actively working on developing an immunity to exactly this sort of thing. Working it out of his system, as it were. Geralt humors him just far enough to let him see the damage, while Jaskier considers the little second-hand knowledge he’s managed to compile of witcher first aid. Three or four stitches and by evening, this will probably be healed over without a trace.
That’s probably all there is to know about it, actually, for witchers. Either you’re dead at the end of the fight, or you aren’t: black or white.
“I’m a dab hand at mending a doublet. I’m assuming the technique is the same?”
Geralt slings another dark look over his shoulder, but he follows it up by bracing himself squarely against Roach’s withers. Taking this for the grudging permission it is, Jaskier fishes through the saddlebag Geralt already has spread open until he finds the needle and little spool of waxed catgut he’s seen Geralt use.
“Let me know if this hurts.” It probably would have sent Jaskier crying to the nearest surgeon. It’s in a tricky spot; were Jaskier not here, Geralt likely wouldn’t even have bothered to dress it. He’d have shrugged it off with a grunt and left it to scar. Jaskier tries not to notice, faced with the rippling expanse of Geralt’s bare back, that the bits Geralt can’t reach are, actually, all scars.
“You can’t hurt me, bard.” Like he thinks Jaskier’s hesitating.
“Right. He says with a bloody great spike in him. Tell me,” Jaskier sets to, yanking on the thread with maybe more force than he ought. It doesn’t matter. Hot skin pulls tight under his fingertips. It doesn’t matter. “Do ghouls usually have spines?”
“It was an alghoul,” Geralt says. He says it through his teeth, which is a bit gratifying since it means the stitches probably are hurting him. “They’re spikier.”
“Ah.” Jaskier can feel all that muscle held taut over Geralt’s ribs, but he doesn’t even shift as Jaskier ties off. “And he brought a few friends to the fight, I expect, if he was able to get a hit in on the likes of you.” He claps Geralt on the shoulder—the same shoulder—not gently. “There. You’ll do.”
“There were six.” It’s a bit of a growl. Roach chuffs in sympathy.
Geralt chuffs back, quite soulfully.
Jaskier rolls his eyes. “You’ve gone ‘round the twist, has anyone ever told you? An absolute madman.” Geralt’s already shrugging back into the same bloodied, filthy shirt. “You ought to warn people before they offer to pay you for things. I ought to warn people.”
Disregarding him utterly, Geralt scratches Roach behind the ear.
A sad man left alone too long in the wilderness, with no one but his trusty steed. A traveller gone half mad from the dullness of the scenery. That Jaskier could understand. He could even work with it. A berserker with no friend but his horse—it has pathos. It could be framed as romantic. The conversations with Roach that Geralt somehow thinks Jaskier doesn't know about, when Jaskier comes back from gathering kindling or just stepping behind a bush for a moment and Geralt cuts himself off like Jaskier hasn't fully heard him, chatting away; even those ones are normal. It's the, well, it's really the chuffing. There's also some nickering. Sometimes Geralt snorts at her a little, if they're in an argument. Possibly it's fully mad. Possibly Jaskier is fully mad, also, because he bites down a smile every time.
Even this time, even angry as he still unaccountably is at something he can’t quite find the name for.
“Just think,” Jaskier says to Roach as they strike out once more to gods-know-where without so much as a consultation, “if I’d never met either of you, I might still be asleep right now. I could just lie down and sleep forever.” It sounds, to be honest, like a dream. She goes for the bite and he has to dodge smartly.
They fall into a routine: forage, make camp, hunt where they can and sleep in what lodgings they can afford, when they can afford them. Strap up sprains, bandage cuts, sew each other's sutures. Although really, it's mostly Geralt getting the sutures. And he does most of his own suturing, as well—which might be understandable. Jaskier really didn’t give it his best shot, the first time around. Perhaps he would have if he’d been awake enough to truly consider how often he’d end up sat across a campfire having to watch Geralt gnaw the thread to cut it like the most unsanitary sort of beast.
Or if he’d considered the other side of it: that Geralt was letting him do it, and that perhaps he should not have allowed that to slip him by.
Jaskier himself is generally the one more likely to have sprains in need of strapping. For example, he might sprain his ankle on a scree slope he didn't quite mean to slide down, only an hour over the border into Kaedwin. It could happen. Could happen to anyone, in fact. Why, one might ask, are they headed to Kaedwin in the first place? He does not know. Probably neither does Geralt.
Probably the whole thing, all of it, is exactly the exercise in catastrophe that Jaskier’s better instincts have been screaming it’s been all along. But Geralt is still there, and the road is still there, even though the nights have started to stretch a little longer and a little colder. Even though it’s reminding Jaskier that Kaedwin is north, and that summer doesn’t last forever, and that he’s never cared at all for snow. That’s the boy from the seaside kingdom still in him, who he’s never quite been able to outrun.
He comes down hard and wrong on one foot, sharp shale up to the ankle, and all he can think to say about it is: "Shit." Geralt doesn’t even pause. “Shit,” Jaskier says, again.
He feels, absurdly, like staying sat down right there in the gravel and giving it all up. Geralt is going to be scowling at him about it for days, and they’ve only just got past their last roaring argument about nothing at all. Or Geralt is going to abandon his erstwhile biographer by the side of the road. Alone. Where he will probably die, and certainly never have another adventure. Not that he’s truly hurt; not so badly he deserves to be left here. Worse, Jaskier is going to have to eat crow and admit that he ought to have saved up for some more boring boots by now, which is an argument of its own. And to be fair, yes, he should have, and he always means to. But any market that that sells boots usually also has its share of pretty girls; girls selling ribbons and what-have-you. Perhaps girls in need of a ribbon or two themselves. It's a disaster, is the upshot.
Autumn will come along one of these days, and Jaskier will still be stuck here, alone.
He tests his weight on the ankle and, well, it’s not broken. It’ll hold. Maybe not comfortably, maybe not all day, but with a little determination, he can use it.
The best-case scenario is a lonely walk three miles back to the same village inn they'd stopped over at the night before. It wasn't a fantastic inn the first time around. Nor was it an especially affordable one—although there’d been no cheerful girls there, working or otherwise, for either of them. The thought of paying for room and board two nights in a row, this time with no chance of a performance to offset the cost, is almost enough to make Jaskier regret the fortunes of the travelling bard on financial grounds. Though he'd known what he was choosing, he supposes. He tells himself so.
He strikes out forward, instead. North, if he has to, if north is where the witcher’s work takes them. Just… one step at a time.
Jaskier's resolute hobbling only gets him about four steps before Geralt turns Roach's head around. He gives Jaskier a long, steady, expressionless look. "We'll ride back. I had my eye on that innkeeper's gwent deck anyway. Won't mind an extra night."
“Like hell you won’t,” Jaskier argues—for some fucking reason. His ankle is killing him and at this point he wonders if it’s just that he really would rather die than shut up. Luckily, Geralt doesn’t ever give a shit about what he has to say. He’s already passed Jaskier on the return and made it halfway back up the hill.
Naturally, 'we'll ride' means that Jaskier is still not allowed to ride on Roach, even uphill, even when grievously injured. He limps the whole three miles. It’s for the best; she'd probably spend the entire time trying to scrape him off on a tree anyway. Still, Geralt never lets Roach outpace him, and he never makes it obvious that he's holding her back, either.
The bit about gwent might likewise have been a polite fiction meant to soothe Jaskier's wounded pride, except that it's Geralt, who does not care. And except that Geralt really does spend the best part of the night hunched over hands of cards. Apparently, he has a true collector’s deck buried somewhere in those saddlebags along with everything else. The mysteries of a witcher are unceasing. Jaskier can only watch in awe as Geralt mercilessly fleeces first the innkeeper and then the rest of the common room out of an extra night's room and board and twice as much in gold besides. Usually, Jaskier politely makes himself too busy with his own business—or his own conquests—to watch a witcher play cards. But this is a heroic feat of its own type, by anyone's estimation.
In the morning they head out again going south instead of north. Jaskier spent his night in a chair by the roaring hearth with his leg propped up, gossiping just as mercilessly as any witcher might fight, and he’s won them a prize of his own: a rumour of a ferocious nest of lamias just south of Rinde. Even one lamia, to Jaskier’s mind, sounds a good bit more glamourous and exciting than another week of solving mysterious sheep-thefts that will definitely turn out to be ghoul related. Again. Every time.
They've a goal and a purpose, if only for now, and the second sowing of grain is coming in silver-green all around them. Jaskier isn't limping anymore. Geralt is—just for a second—whistling. Well. Maybe he’s just whistling to his horse, or else he truly has no idea how to carry a tune, but Jaskier is happy enough to take it as a sign that their partnership is solidifying.
In Ellander, the lamias duly dispatched, they strike a second bit of dubious luck: a fat contract for a tangled situation involving a comely local maiden, an ill-fated conception, and the rumours of an elder vampire. It even comes with the promise of actual, reliable payment, since the seal on the contract belongs to Herevard the Second, the Duke of Ellander himself. It's the duke's own lady-love who has been lost to, maybe, the clutches of the evil undead. Or maybe not: even in his own ducal study, facing Geralt down across his own ducal desk, Herevard has had some difficulty with the explanation of the events leading up to poor Lilla's disappearance.
“If it’s a true vampire,” Geralt starts, approximately the third time this morning he has tried to sabotage his own job prospects. Every time he does it, Jaskier twitches. Every time Jaskier twitches, Geralt gives a tiny, damnable smirk. As improbable as the entire explanation has been, this is likely the best-paying chance they’ve had yet. They might have lucked into enough of a sum to sleep indoors the whole winter, and here Geralt is poking fun at the man. Albeit in secret witcher code, which slides straight past the duke to needle Jaskier directly. Luckily Herevard is so stiff-rumped that he just cuts Geralt off every time.
“I assure you, it is an elder vampire. You can appreciate, I’m sure, that I’ve consulted enough to be certain,” the duke says. He says it very ducally, which is to say in the tone of someone who has never found himself in the business of explaining himself and therefore is not inclined to do better even if Jaskier were stupid enough to get a word in and mention that the entire situation sounds very unlikely indeed. “I will pay you appropriately in any case.”
“You’ll pay me the agreed price, in any case.”
“To be sure, Witcher.” Herevard doesn’t even roll his eyes. He probably has people for that.
"And you're absolutely sure," Geralt asks, pressing their luck now with a certain set of his own jaw that says this time it’s meant to be the direct insult it sounds like, "that Lilla is not carrying your child? A farmer's daughter might not have known how to say no to a duke. Might not have wanted to, even."
"No! I—" Herevard starts strident but then goes a little pink. Honestly, that blush is the first time Jaskier’s liked him all day. It makes him look like what he is: a very young duke. "I have not—I have approached her father, only. Once I was certain she would have me, you understand. There was nothing to—we met in the market square. In public. I was riding back from an inspection of the roadworks and..." He shrugs a little. In someone else, it could be charming.
The single other point in Herevard’s favour is that he hasn't asked why Jaskier is tagging along, which means that Geralt hasn't had an excuse to tell him to stop tagging along yet.
If he did, Jaskier would likely be forced to actually introduce himself to salvage the situation. And what a lovely, new set of problems that would create. Jaskier has never met Herevard before in his life, although he has a vague sense that Ellander features somewhere in the background of his own family tree, which set of circumstances means that Herevard is probably best pen-pals with Jaskier’s mother. Or worse. They might be cousins. The dark gleam of hilarity that’s been in Geralt’s eyes since they walked in suggests that he’s seen Jaskier’s face and guessed it, on top of everything else. Jaskier’s twitching nerves are probably, in fact, why they’re still here. Geralt is an uncouth, unspeakable imbecile.
"And?" Jaskier is desperately curious anyway. It's his romantic soul again; he can't help it. "There's few nobles who would look twice at a girl in the market."
"Not with an eye to marriage, anyhow," Geralt grumbles, still mostly at Jaskier and now just when they’re getting somewhere. Jaskier truly would kick him if it wouldn’t get him kicked right back.
"And she was selling the most beautiful strawberries I'd ever seen. Lilla is—" Herevard breaks off. There’s something there: something enough that Geralt leans in and finally sobers. "She has not been herself. Not for weeks. Quiet, where she was always laughing. A week past, we were meant to go walking, but she told me she was unwell. And she looked it; she was so pale. Then, the day after, she sent me a letter, refusing to meet. It says... well. The duchy keeps no court mage, but I've shown it to an alchemist. It was he who suggested I contact a witcher. He says it's... possible. What she wrote. That there is a ruin not so far from here, where girls have come to harm before. I'm hoping that if she truly carries the thing's child, she is not—that it is perhaps not too late." He offers a piece of parchment to Geralt, no envelope, creased like it's been carried in his breast pocket since he got it and unfolded and re-folded with care.
"Hmm," Geralt says, scanning it. He doesn't pass it over for Jaskier to read—of course not—but he nods. Some sort of foul play is certainly afoot. It's the first time in weeks Jaskier has truly seen Geralt's ears prick up; he's interested. This is more than just the promise of brute work and a scant purse in exchange, or a chance to torment Jaskier. An elder vampire is something devious, and worthwhile, and difficult to hunt. The rest of Geralt's questions are bread-and-butter, the thorough routine of an experienced hunter: all the whos and the wheres and the whens, and none of them nearly so sharp.
When they finally ride out the next morning, Jaskier wouldn't go so far as to say that Geralt seems newly cheerful, but his dark silence is the dark silence of a man turning over facts and theories. Geralt likes a mystery, when he can get one. And he likes a good breakfast, which the duke has made sure they've been supplied with, plus an army platoon's worth of sandwiches for later. If Jaskier had somewhat dawdled over that breakfast, it was only because he was similarly determined not to rush into danger on an empty stomach. Plus, how often does he get to enjoy the hospitality of a duke's table, these days? Now Geralt's set them a cracking pace to make up for it, but the spread was worth it. And it's a beautiful day.
Jaskier lets himself be bolstered by the realization that he isn't the only one who's been feeling a bit creatively unfulfilled, wandering amongst the barley fields with nothing more worthy of a song than the occasional small-town lycanthropy case. Tragic, yes, but so banal after the first two or three—and the fact that they've encountered five in a summer is really making Jaskier question some things he thought he fundamentally knew about the safety of hearth and home. There’s been more crying widows than he’d bargained for. It's been disheartening. He hadn’t quite realized that perhaps Geralt was disheartened, too. All those woodcutters, avenged too late. But! Here, at last, is something to be spun into a saga.
A prince, and a girl, and a terrifying fiend. It’s the oldest story in the book, and here’s Jaskier’s chance to tell it as thrillingly as it’s ever been told.
"So. Let's go over what we're up against here, hmm?" Jaskier ventures, when it becomes clear that Geralt does not intend to spin out this particular saga without prompting. He hikes along beside Geralt briskly; these things, he's learned, are never conveniently located in the same town as the local lordling who'd like to pay them for the service. No, the proper monsters are always miles off, ideally in the heart of some forbidding and uncomfortably dank forest. They might be walking for hours yet.
"Some kind of higher vampire, if you believe the girl’s note." Then Geralt goes right back to turning things over, which is unacceptably boring of him on such a promising journey.
It is promising, though. Even the trees, closing in sullenly now around the road, are darkly portentous. The silent sentinels of… something-or-other. It’ll come to him. Geralt rides straight on, as quiet himself as if he’s listening to the wind breathe in the spruce. Jaskier wonders, fancifully, if it does breathe, or if maybe the trees do.
"Yes," Jaskier prompts. Obviously, Geralt simply does not realize that there’s more to be said. "But. Pregnant by a vampire? I think I've read that novel. Isn't it a bit, I don't know, too melodramatic not to be suspicious?" He asks as brightly as he can, because he's beginning to sense from all the silence that despite his initial interest, Geralt’s ruminations have turned up some kind of reservation about the whole thing after all—maybe just the same reservations that Jaskier is trying not to have. It's almost too juicy a case. Perhaps he suspects a trap. That would be a pity; it's a very appealing sort of narrative otherwise. "Not that I'd complain about some melodrama,” Jaskier adds. “It’ll certainly lend itself to a ballad or two. Although I suppose she'd be complaining. A farmer's daughter caught between a handsome duke and the thrall of a charismatic vampire! What a choice! Also, if the pregnancy were sucking her dry."
Geralt sighs with poor grace, but accepts the conversation on the second try. "Unlikely that it's what it seems, but it's definitely possible. Herevard seems sincere, anyway. Definitely not a pleasant fate, either, if it's true. The fetus presents first as a wasting disease, slowly draining its mother's life force. Like a parasite. There's, hmm, maybe thirteen known cases in the literature, and a disputed account from Adalbert Kermith. He's usually reliable, though, so I'd say about fourteen."
"Fourteen—Geralt, literature? Witchers are writing about this?"
"Mm. In between killing the fuckers, yeah, sure. Most of the sources are scholarly stuff, though. Half the time working off some description that somebody gave to somebody else who wrote it down in their memoirs like it'd happened to their own grandpa. Plus the bad novels. Pain in the ass to sort out, from a historiographical perspective. So we record it ourselves when we can, and value a firsthand account when we can get it."
"Right, well, that's... sensible." He can't help if it comes out a bit dubious. Historiographical perspective? He knew Geralt's saddlebags were always half full of maps and musty books he'd picked up gods-knew-where—hell, Jaskier has more than once watched him snag a few choice volumes from the study of an inattentive alderman. He's seen Geralt read them, occasionally, now he thinks of it.
Geralt snorts at him, rather unkindly, and walks Roach faster. "I sell them after I read them, if that sits better with you. Not much coin in it, outside of the big cities, but it's kept me in whores and ale more than once."
"Don't be a cretin," Jaskier snaps, unaccountably stung by the bite in Geralt’s voice when he'd no reason to know it was a slight. "You know I know you're clever, in a woodsy kind of way; it's unattractive to brag about it. I just didn't know there were. You know. Resources. To consult on this kind of thing. …Or that you consulted them.”
"Maybe you were out sick from barding class on the day they covered it." Geralt's countenance has gone absolutely stony.
"Maybe you never bloody answer any of my questions, and then repay me for offering you my very best lyrical work anyhow by getting shirty with me when I'm not actually a psychic. You ass.”
“Maybe you should take your fucking lyrical work to someone who’ll pay for it.” Geralt has fully stopped now, hauling Roach back around the better to snarl down at Jaskier. She stamps like she’s angry about it, too. “Pretty sure I saw the duke look at your ass on the way out. If we don’t find the girl, you can ask if he’s hiring a minstrel. Or tell him your goddamn name.”
“You absolute—you fucking—” Jaskier can physically feel himself swelling with outrage. “You could at least point me to a relevant tract now and again, if you're out here doing intellectual reading in your spare time but you can't find a spare minute to, you know, tell me anything, ever. And how dare you bring my ass into this when you know perfectly well—oh!” Roach takes one step forward of her own and nearly bowls him over. “Oh—Geralt, what's, um, why's Roach doing that?"
Roach and Jaskier are only just barely on first-name terms even now, after months of acquaintance, although they've recently solidified a truce whereby he may walk apace with her in the lane. As long as he remains respectful, she doesn't try to bite a chunk out of his rear end. It's a little alarming, therefore, in the middle of a screaming match to have her suddenly butt her enormous whiskery head against his shoulder and rub, like he's a scratching post conveniently planted in the middle of the road. She almost staggers him over into the hedgerow. He hadn't thought his secret carrot campaign had made nearly so much progress.
Perhaps she’s choosing a side.
It seems doubtful, but then, who knows with a horse. Certainly not Jaskier.
"Hmm," Geralt says, notably still a furious and frowning sort of hmm, and dismounts. Evidently he doesn't believe it's affection either. When he makes to run his hands over her bridle, she shies a little and shows her teeth. He frowns more, and examines more closely, sniffing. Then he lets out a great huffing breath like a sigh. "Right, we'll stop here."
"Geralt?" It comes out a bit more of a question than he’d meant it.
Geralt glances over his shoulder from where he's already leading Roach to a clearing just a bit off the main road. "Just ear mites. She's uncomfortable. Should've tacked her myself while you were mooning over your kidney and eggs; that hostler obviously didn't check her over. I'll need an hour or two to fix a remedy, that's all. We can travel on after, if you like, but it'll be late."
"Sure, no, camping's fine, that's not what I... okay. Sorry. For the kidney-and-eggs bit. Is she—should I find something for a poultice, or something?"
"You're fine, bard." He still sounds gruff enough, but... that's almost a laugh underneath, and after Geralt’s sour mood all morning. It staggers Jaskier nearly as much as Roach's headbutt. He doesn't even know what it was for. "Use the time to practice your warbling. Gods know you need it."
The estate is already looming up on the road in front of them, a good day's travel that ends up taking them the better part of two with the unscheduled overnight rest stop added in, before Jaskier thinks to ask: "Wait, what do we do if the baby is a vampire, um, spawn? What does she do? How does one... raise that?"
Geralt, walking beside Roach now and a little way ahead, actually stops to look straight at him. It's a look that suggests he's being dense. "You'll do nothing. I'll kill the vampire that sired it, if I can find it. And then—well, it depends how far along the thing is. There are herbs a woman can take, if it's not grown too large and taken too much of her strength, and if she'll consent. Or if she won't, or it's been too much time... it's the kind of problem that takes care of itself. None of the known cases made it to term without a sorcerer's intervention. Usually, the hosts don't make it either, if the miscarriage comes too late, but there's steps that can be taken. If she wants the thing, and has sought magical help for it... worse. No woman who's tried to birth a vampire's offspring has survived it. Not an easy death. Bloody, and by then there won't be much left of her to bleed.”
“And... and the baby?”
“Don't fool yourself thinking what comes out will be a baby."
"Ah." Jaskier looks away to casually reach for his waterskin. It tastes soured, somehow. He has been dense. He'd been picturing—something rather star-crossed. He takes another nonchalant sip anyhow and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Of course, makes perfect sense. Vampire spawn, obviously not, um, ideal. Only, I'm not sure that's quite what our employer was hoping for, in hiring you. What with poor Lilla dying in most of the scenarios."
"Well, we'll hope for his sake she's only a little pregnant. Always pays better if the girl survives."
Right, of course.
The girl doesn't survive. Jaskier doesn't have to watch her die screaming in a pool of her own blood, at least, because she's dead when they find her.
They search the dilapidated estate, and Jaskier is taking notes—not literally, of course, this is no time for ink and quill—because, yes, this is what the lair of an elder vampire ought to look like. It's so delightfully atmospheric, in a perfectly macabre sort of way, that he can barely believe Geralt hasn't tried to scare him into waiting outside yet. Every corridor has some new gruesome threadbare tapestry or horrible, looming locked chest. The threat of some hideous shadow seems to lurk around every corner. Jaskier's knife is at the ready. Empty, though, it's all very empty, and it's going to be difficult to spin this into a heroic epic if they've gone on a wild goose-chase to some derelict ruin with a thousand empty rooms and nothing lurking except a few startled pigeons.
And then Geralt pauses outside of an open door for one long, cold witcher heartbeat, long enough that Jaskier, following just behind him, has enough time to think that maybe, actually, he could have waited outside. "Here," Geralt says, and he never sounds surprised but—he doesn't sound anything like surprised. "She'd read the novels, too, I think."
Of course there's no vampire in the place. Geralt could surely sense that there wasn't, or maybe it's that amulet of his. Maybe he just knows a lie when he hears one, even second-hand. Either way he'd never have let Jaskier dog along if there had been. He wouldn't have trusted Jaskier not to get underfoot. Obviously. Lilla—because it must be Lilla—sways slowly where she hangs, all alone. She might have been pretty. The duke didn't say, but... she must have been pretty, to catch a duke's eye and keep it. Jaskier can only see that she had long, dark hair.
There's a note. Geralt reads this note too, with the same resignation on his face that he's had for a while now.
"There's no vampire? No thrall?" Jaskier asks, although he's put it together, even if not as quickly as Geralt did.
"No. Just—a babe. Not the duke's. She doesn't say whose." He passes Jaskier the paper this time, but Jaskier barely glances at it.
"And she..." He wants to sputter something about those herbs, about the things that can be done, not this, and was it her choice or— But it doesn't matter much, anymore. "She told her father that— And the duke. Did you know the whole time? That we'd find her like this?"
“Sometimes there’s nothing to be done.” Geralt shrugs one shoulder. "Hoped we wouldn't. There was a rumour, the last time I was through this way, of something that kept the wild animals away, scared the stable boys, that kind of thing. I didn't find anything then, but I thought maybe the duke had something, after all. Even if the parts didn't line up." He folds the note carefully and tucks it away. "Because the parts didn't line up. We'll bury her here; he won't thank us for the sight."
Herevard pays them anyway, both of them, for their time. Jaskier spends it all on a new doublet as soon as he can possibly manage to do so. The shot silk lining is a very au courant shade of chartreuse that makes Geralt wrinkle his nose when Jaskier walks out of the tailors. Still, Geralt doesn't actually say a thing about it, and Jaskier is fairly sure the witcher's own portion is already long gone by that point, probably slipped quietly to some beggar before they even left Rinde just to get rid of the weight in his purse. He tries not to think of—but no, Geralt said she'd been hanging like that for days. Dead before they'd ever taken on the contract. Even if Geralt had known somehow and ridden hard, alone, to reach her, he'd never have made it in time.
They don't speak of it. Wherever it was that Geralt spent the coin after all, it wasn't on accommodation, because they're back to sleeping rough not two days later. Jaskier builds the fire, as he usually does. If he didn't, they'd go without six nights out of seven. Geralt can light a bonfire from a damp twig with a flick of his fingers, but Geralt doesn't notice when it's cold. Or dark. Or when a silence has gone on long enough to be truly uncomfortable this time.
"Why," Jaskier starts, quite mildly, turning to Geralt before he knows that he's angry, and before he even really knows that he's going to ask the question. But then it turns out that he is. He drops all of the firewood he'd been carrying and walks straight up into Geralt's space where he's standing as still as an animal that's suddenly scented danger. Sensible of him. Jaskier doesn't care. "Why the fuck didn't you just tell me that she'd made it up? That she slept with some woodsman, or some woodsman had— That she was dead?"
"I—" Geralt starts—nearly answering a question; there's novelty for you. Jaskier could punch him.
"You've let me make a fool of myself, Geralt, and I know that you think I am a fool. But I’m not one.” Geralt opens his mouth to try again. Jaskier isn’t done. “I’m not. And I fell for the whole fucking—witcher act and I did it because you let me."
"It's not—"
"Oh no? It's not? You’re not playing? I thought you were some bloodhound—maybe quicker than the average hound, or funnier, or even sometimes kind but—I came at you like I was befriending some stray dog, right from the start, just like every other cocksucking whoreson who'd spit on you as soon as hire you. And you let me. You let me and you led me on like that and you meant to do it, meant to keep me away, and fuck you, why didn't you say?" He catches himself with a shove against Geralt's chest, a hard shove, one that doesn't budge Geralt even an inch. “Are you laughing at me?”
He does look almost startled now, though, and isn't that a victory.
"Is this because of the girl?" Geralt says, having taken the point that Jaskier is not asking because he cares to know. "Or because of the books?" He asks it so hot-coals carefully that he must have finally realized he's speaking to a madman.
Jaskier feels mad, to match.
"Sorry.” He is. His fist is still clenched against Geralt’s chest, and he thumps it there one more time, hopelessly, and takes a half step back. He's broken things this way before, by shoving at them. "I—sorry. I don't like to play the fool unless I'm doing it on purpose. I don't mean to shout."
Geralt tilts his head even further. "You've been shouting at me the entire time. Since we met."
"Shouting after you, more like."
"Well," Geralt says, after a beat of some strange deliberation where he takes a step back of his own, finally, "if I waited for you, I'd have to listen to you talk." And the benefit of having built a routine is—that's it. Jaskier picks the firewood back up, and Geralt goes back to checking over his gear. If dinner isn't good, it isn't bad either, and at least there's salt and some greens in the pottage tonight.
And then they're setting out their bedrolls across the fire from one another, as they have almost every night for months across hundreds of miles of country filled with monsters, yes, but mostly just filled with nothing and no one but them. Geralt pauses. "You didn't think that," he says.
"What?"
"You never thought that. About me. Not the way that duke did.” Maybe it's true. Maybe Geralt believes it. Or maybe Geralt, for all his protestations, knows the value of having at least one friend, and means to keep him. He's the fool if he thinks that Jaskier would have left in any case. Who the fuck would he leave Geralt for?
Jaskier goes to sleep. Or he doesn’t, quite, because if he does, then he dreams that Geralt says, even softer and stranger: “You only thought that you could sing me into an adventure.” If it’s a dream, it’s a truly mortifying one.
The barley crops of Ellander turn into the swamps of Velen, and summer turns, and stays turned. It's a bitter fall sliding into a bitterer winter, which—Geralt points out, as though this is an advantage—does tend to bring the monsters out. The only genuine advantage as far as Jaskier can tell is that every one-horse town in Velen looks pretty much like every other one-horse town and even Geralt doesn't seem to care which one they've ended up in. So at any rate Jaskier doesn't have to bother learning the geography.
The road still has its hardships, even beyond sprained ankles and cold feet and depressing dead ends, and it’s worse in the winter. Still, a travelling troubadour has, by his very nature, travelled far and wide, and Jaskier considered himself well seasoned as such even before this current chapter of his life. No green fool, young as he might look to a witcher's eyes, and he'd like to think he's proven himself since. At least in the sense that he’s proven quite tenacious.
"You're staying at the inn," Geralt informs him anyway. This would be a reasonably polite opening to the usual negotiations, for Geralt, if the Pickled Jenny had anything at all to recommend it. It does not. Even the misshapen donkey painted on the inn’s sign is sort of peeling as it rattles in the wind.
"It's reconnaissance, Geralt,” Jaskier whines, and he can feel himself whining. “You told the alderman yourself that the job would take days! You have to at least let me come for the reconnaissance bit.” This offer, a new sort of reconnaissance strategy of his own that Jaskier has been attempting to refine for several weeks now, still draws the standard flat look of disbelief. Frankly, it’s irritating. “I can handle myself and you know it. I'll keep watch while you... sniff things out. Does an erynia have a particular scent, would you say?"
"No," Geralt says, which is obvious nonsense. If monsters didn't have particular scents, why would a witcher be scenting them? Jaskier might have asked this as well, except that he's been abandoned in the inn-yard with Geralt’s horse and all the luggage.
"Damn," Jaskier says, to Roach. She snorts at him, as if he’d answer to that sort of address.
The trouble is, somehow, he hasn’t proven himself. Geralt still acts like the next night spent huddled under scrubland in the pouring rain will be the one that sends Jaskier crying back to his old student rooms at Oxenfurt. Even though Jaskier has been trudging the road, with all its aforementioned hardships, right there next to him for more than half a year now. On good days, that means Geralt leaves Jaskier behind in the dust and maybe, just maybe, it’s for his own protection. On bad days, it means Geralt still acts like that’s what he’s hoping for.
“D’you suppose it’s because I told him I was a romantic?” Jaskier ends up asking Roach, after all. “That was months ago. It was one time! I was referring to the poetic movement. He can’t still be holding it against me.”
But Jaskier chose this. He chose it before he ever met Geralt, in fact, and has kept choosing it ever since—even when perhaps he should not have. He knows the dangers of the road as well as he knows its singular pleasures: the tasting of vintages never before tasted; the tavern girls in ports uncharted, sweet and willing and warm when the trek has been long. The mysteries and allure of paths untrodden.
Also, getting absolutely piss-drunk down to your last coin in a backwater public house with no need of a bard and then falling asleep heedlessly, at last, alone, behind a door that properly locks for once. He’d had to get that drunk, honestly, to sleep here. The whole place smells like mildew and an ineffable misery, or maybe that’s more swamp, and the unconsciousness is a terrible relief.
He wakes not nearly enough hours later to a suppurating kind of hangover and a witcher on his side of the locked door. The witcher's face hovers very close over Jaskier’s own. His yellow slit-eyes are all that can be seen in the dark, reflecting moonlight that's not even really there.
"Geralt?" Jaskier manages to gasp out. He's not sure whether it's the hangover nausea or the terror of waking up like that that's made him breathless. He knows that door was locked, even as drunk as he'd been. "What the shit. Is it morning? Can't be morning. I thought we'd be at least another night, with the beast, you know, that has the fangs, and the staking out the lair, and.” He just breathes for a second, trying to get the hang of it back. “You said. With the erynia. Not as fearsome as you'd hoped? You've infiltrated his terrible lair and dispatched the be-fanged beast already?" He’s going to throw up and then he’s going to die of the heart attack he's just had.
"No fangs," Geralt says. Then: "Yes. Kind of an accident." So, at least it is Geralt. It's really very dark—definitely not morning, then, or else something much worse than an erynia has come up. The same something that is making a dripping sort of noise in the darkness, maybe.
"What? What does that even mean?"
"No fangs, because erynes have talons. Like harpies. Female. Near-sapient. Fast as fuck, too."
"Did you— No, I mean—” Jaskier scrambles a little more upright. “Have you actually come here to tell me about the fight? For once?" The rare novelty of this is almost enough to overcome the nausea and make him glad to be woken at fuck-only-knows o'clock. It's at least enough to convince him that sitting up could be worth it.
"Are you still drunk?"
"What! Of course not, I'm as sober as—" Well, he's not sure as what, but he's mostly sober by now, anyway. As sober as anyone stuck in a village called Downwarren would care to be. It must be nearing dawn after all. Still black as a shithouse hole at midnight, though.
"Jaskier. I'm bleeding on your floor. I'm not here to discuss it."
"Ah. That's the... the dripping-ish. Kind of sound. Then."
"You're drunk, aren't you." Geralt sounds, at worst, disappointed. Not even worried. And he woke Jaskier anyway, the bastard.
"I am not; I can't fucking see you! Not all of us have got great, glowing fucking cat eyes, you'll recall, so if you want me to just... to just know I'm supposed to be doing first aid, or whatever, in the dark, in the middle of the night, you're going to have to—bring me a candle, or something."
Geralt snorts. Like he thinks this perfectly valid outburst hasn't been very climactic, somehow. There's a sudden spark in the pitch black—it does not make Jaskier jump or even startle him one whit; he is seasoned—and the candle on the washstand lights itself.
And oh, Lyfia's cursed cunt, is Geralt ever bleeding on his floor. He's slumped against Jaskier's bedpost like Jaskier's bedpost is what's holding him up. That bedpost must be what's holding him up, because the cut is—not a cut, not a battle-scratch across his weathered brow, not a scrape from a monster who got a lucky hit in.
"Geralt," Jaskier wavers, "that's a wound. That's really. Um. That's bleeding. From a really big, ah, area." There's—it's torn.
"Help me pack it and wrap it. It's enough to get the bleeding stopped. For now. I've taken Swallow; there's no chance of infection."
"Swallow?" Jaskier tries, buying himself time to figure out—this. How to do this. It doesn't look like there's enough of an intact edge for stitches. Which is fine. Pack it, Geralt said. With gauze, or somesuch. "That's one of your potions? I thought those were, hmm. Not so great. If you're already unwell. And, I'm just going to say here, you don't look very well." His eyes, now that Jaskier can see them properly, are not quite so clear or so human as they sometimes are.
Geralt slides with a choked-off huff to half sit, half slump on Jaskier's vacated pillow instead. Now he'll get all that blood on the bed, much better. "It's—hahh—” He winces and bares his teeth, pulling at what remains of the jerkin. “’S what I had to hand.” He’s almost slurring. Or. Being careful not to, Jaskier realizes. “Don't concern yourself, bard. I’ll mend once the sun rises. Just get this wrapped and give me a few hours, and we'll be on our way."
He isn't concerned, Jaskier wants to protest.
He doesn't protest, though. Who knows what a witcher can smell on someone—gods know Geralt has never told him, even when he's asked point-blank—but if it's any kind of fear, Geralt can surely smell it now. It would matter very little, then, were Jaskier to let that show where Geralt might see it. But he doesn't. Not a tremor in his littlest finger, even, as he tears strip after strip from the bedsheet and binds them tight under Geralt's lowest ribs. That's worrisome, too—the depth of it, and the slow-oozing bleed that says it was bleeding more before, and that Geralt came to him at all, yes, but mostly:
Jaskier ties with unfaltering hands and thinks, here is where a punctured lung might have been, with a claw slid up instead of down. Here, just an inch or two deeper, is his liver, his stomach, his guts. All the soft, wet, stinking parts he's watched Geralt butcher out of his nightmare beasts for Gods-know-what arcane purpose, countless times. He still has to look away from that work, shuddering, even now. Even though he's seasoned, even after months on the road together. Still swallowing bile.
Bent close over his side, he can feel Geralt breathing now, too. Steady as a blacksmith's bellows, although a crater like this carved out of his flesh must hurt like—Jaskier can't even imagine. With Jaskier pressing at it, too. "You smell like used-up liquor," Geralt says, his fever-breath ruffling the back of Jaskier's neck. He still sounds offended, of all things, if he sounds like anything. This half-psychic bastard; it's Jaskier who should be offended that Geralt is probably mostly dead and still somehow reading him. And answering him now.
Every cut heals. This is no different from any other patch-up-job; of course it isn't. One more scar is nothing except another scar, out here where even honest country farmers have seen their share of war.
That would have been a good line for a very maudlin song indeed, if Jaskier were writing one.
Like so many good lines, it's part of the embellishment, not part of the truth. He cleans his hands after, in the basin of last night's water gone cold and now rusty red on the washstand, and they are shaking. Sometimes there's nothing to be done. But Geralt is breathing: steady in, steady out, asleep or pretending but either way not watching him to see.
Jaskier hasn’t even tried to close his eyes again by the time Geralt heaves himself out of bed, awake exactly as early as he always is, which is as always much too early. He startles the hell out of Jaskier anyway. The witcher gives his bandages a cursory poke and declares that they’ll be leaving immediately. Of course they’re leaving. The monster's dead, the sun has risen, and with it the huge, gaping, terrifying, bloody hole is on the mend, so Jaskier will just forget about that whole… bit. Then.
Never mind that he’s spent hours listening to the wind moan at the shutters like it’s another stalking creature, listening and absolutely not waiting for those steady breaths to stop. He’s been thinking, strangely, about black-haired Lilla, left all alone in the dark. About himself somehow left the same way. It’s a song—a maudlin one, yes—that writes itself almost despite Jaskier, although it’s one he doesn’t have the heart, this morning, to learn to sing.
That’s why he jumps, when Geralt appears next to him, patched up and half-dressed but apparently once again almost whole.
It isn't the first time that Jaskier has found himself dangerously low on sleep, smiling winsomely at the innkeep the morning after some gruesome incident. It’s not even the fifth. He’s gotten quite practiced at explaining that he and his big, scowling friend—who is really quite amicable once you get to know him, only a bit cranky this morning on account of the circumstances, which are completely understandable—are very willing and yes, certainly able, to pay for the damages. And all of the ruined bedding. Although perhaps they should be given a sort of charitable discount, since after all, the wounds were incurred dispatching of monsters, which was of tremendous service to the people of Downwarren. And also to the peaceful existence of their sheep.
The proprietress of the Pickled Jenny is an accomplished scowler herself, nearly as good as Geralt. To her point, it is also really quite a lot of blood that has gotten onto her bedlinens. Not to mention onto the mattress, and also some various other parts of the room and the inn at large where perhaps one might not have wished to have to deal with cleaning up bloodstains. More blood than usual, even. To Jaskier's:
"Listen, my good woman—Esme, isn't it? May I call you Esme? Listen, Esme. I understand your concerns, completely, of course. I know it must be difficult, running a charming establishment such as this in times like these. I mean, tourism cannot be a booming business out here.” Jaskier does his best not to look pointedly out the window, where the rutted track calling itself a street is losing the battle against an unwholesome bank of scrub-brush that lurches its way up from the swamp. She lives here. She must be used to it. “But surely a woman of the world such as yourself can understand that these things, er. Happen. Especially in the course of the kind of heroic work that has won my friend Geralt such renown."
"Geralt? Of Rivia? That one's the White Wolf?" Esme's glare sharpens into a skeptical sort of squint. Frankly, Jaskier's surprised that Geralt's reputation has somehow preceded him all the way to this horrible backwater. Hopefully it's the witchering version of his reputation, not the butchering one. Although, Jaskier is willing to work with either at this point if it gets them out of here without landing them in the stocks.
"The very one!" He edges over a little to put more of his own body in between Geralt’s bulk and the innkeeper’s formidable bust, just in case one of them decides to pick a real fight. "And as I have been saying, we've been in town on civic business, engaged on contract by your local alderman in fact, to rid you of the monstrous scourge that has been terrorizing your, ah, swamplands. Lovely swamplands. Which we have done most triumphantly, though not without great risk and some injury. As you can see."
"Hmph," she says. Geralt, behind Jaskier, makes a noise that also sounds like 'hmph,' which Jaskier chooses not to have heard. "I suppose time will tell if that's true. You'll pay up for the cost of the linens, mind. And a replacement for that mattress. And you'll both be on your way once you've done with breakfast."
"Oh yes," Jaskier agrees brightly, "we would love some breakfast. Are there any more of those excellent wheatcakes?"
There's a reason that Jaskier tries, whenever he can, to put himself firmly in charge of all civilian negotiations. He gets results. It's also because Geralt has stood behind his shoulder this entire time vibrating with a growl so low that Jaskier can't quite even hear it, only feel it. While that no doubt has served Geralt in his lonely past, sort of, it surely wouldn't get either of them welcomed for a return visit. Not that Jaskier wishes to return to Downwarren, ever, for any reason. As it is, he's probably managed to block Esme's view of the worst of Geralt's mood and has definitely blocked Geralt from adding what would have been a most unwelcome stain to his good name.
Also, when the wheatcakes show up still hot from the oven, Geralt dives face-first straight into the fight and inhales them. There's no accompanying look of speaking gratitude or even anything so mundane as a thank-you, but Jaskier likes to think that it's felt.
“I think,” Jaskier says, when they finally ride out, “we’d better find somewhere with at least enough of a market day to sell us some more bandages. Maybe somewhere where they’ll appreciate an artist’s craft, as well. If Velen has such a place.”
“Bored, are you?” Geralt asks, very dry. And perhaps in his dry way he is grateful—maybe he is, despite being sliced nearly to ribbons, merely also bored—because he leads them unerringly to the world’s most small-town brothel. Three wet days’ travel later, no signposts in between, no signpost outside the town, for that matter, and Jaskier tries not to be outraged that Geralt obviously knew exactly where it was and chose Downwarren anyway. Despite its small size, it offers, amongst other things: beer, an audience for a disreputable ballad or two, and linens for sale.
So, he sings town-to-town. Fucks whores when they're nice-looking—or nice-enough—and he has the crowns to pay. Woos pretty milkmaids behind the occasional tavern with a little more enthusiasm than that, even. Patches his witcher up, sometimes, and now Geralt almost even lets him do it without a fight. It's all in a winter's work for a travelling bard.
That's what he'd write, in a letter home, if there was anyone at home he cared to address it to. He sings it all to Roach as a walking song, instead, a lusty little ditty gone a bit sad and slant-rhymed underneath, and earns Geralt's incredulous stare burning itself into the backs of his frozen ears.
The span of the winter season must be even worse for Geralt, who sort of... stabs things swamp-to-swamp, like the meanest kind of mercenary. Well, there's lots of kinds of shitholes out there, and after an inauspicious start Velen is turning out to be one of Jaskier's least favourite so far. The kind that's got blood mixed in with the excrement, and few thanks ever given for clearing it out. For some reason, they still haven't left yet. "Why," Jaskier does ask him, one evening, eventually, some way into this months-long, circuitous slog through dismal, wet hell, "do you like Velen so much? It certainly doesn't seem to like you." Tonight it's to be one lean and rangy hare, turned on a spit until suitably stringy and shared in half between them.
"I don't. I hate it here. Velen's the," Geralt gets his teeth into his half of the meat like it's a matter of revenge, "back end of the continent. Shitrag Nilfgaard hasn't finished wiping its ass with." Still chewing.
"And yet?" Jaskier makes a courtly gesture, leaving his companion an opening for generosity.
"And yet, it's somehow not the Black Sun that keeps eating all the fucking peasants. It's just the Black Sun that's not stopping it from happening."
"Ah. Right. Perfect." A humanitarian mission. Jaskier tears a bit of—of haunch, or something—off of his own chunk of hare with a little more delicacy, thank you. He really doesn't know where the fuck they are. At least neither of them have been gored lately. "So when is it you think that we might have, er. Cleared that up? Only, it's nearly March, and I'd thought maybe—some more drowners, sure, but maybe the drowners in Toussaint, for a change, or a nice haunting on an estate in the foothills somewhere, in the spring..."
"Be my guest," and Geralt, the unbelievable bastard, parrots Jaskier's courtly gesture right back at him.
"And break your flinty heart?" He flicks a bit of gristle into the campfire, but maybe accidentally some of it gets onto Geralt's boot. "I know you think I'm no fighter, but you'd miss my singing, surely. Brightening your sorry days."
"That's not why a miner keeps a canary," Geralt says. But—he doesn't mean it. Not the insult or the joke. And Jaskier can tell. And the hare is like half-cured bootleather in Jaskier's mouth, not worth the trouble of chewing.
Stupid. He's being so fucking stupid.
"You know," Jaskier says, not quite sure why he's saying it, and especially not why now, nearly ten months too late, "there was a lovely girl in Posada. Even lovelier than usual. Her name was Annabeth. Kissed like a dream—tits like a dream, too, now that you mention it. I was in town for the scenery—" he catches Geralt's sardonic eyebrow— "not that scenery, although yes, thank you, it was a lovely bonus, as I’ve said—and I thought I might pick up a bit of history while I was there. Some inspiration. Last continental stronghold of the elves, and all that."
"And?"
"And what do you think? There's nothing much left of them out there, or nothing much that anyone would give me the bloody directions to, anyway. I was bored out of my mind when I met you. No better options. Homesick, actually, if you can even believe it—nothing like a whole idyllic valley full of farmers with no sense of humour to make you look back fondly on civilization. But I have other options, Geralt, never think that I don't." Geralt is now looking at him like he agrees very strongly, at least with the bit about how Jaskier is out of his mind, so he just stops.
He does forget, sometimes, that he's already as good as told Geralt what that other option was. Not his name; that's neither here nor there and half the time they still put it in the festival programmes without asking him. Plus, Geralt definitely wasn't listening, whatever he says. But—the rest of it. He plays out the rest of the walking song like it's a continuation of the conversation, considering the sorry shape of it as he does, before he sets the whole thing aside as something better left by the side of the road.
It turns out he should have given up on much more than the song.
In the middle of gods-damned nowhere between some bog and some other slough, Geralt goes and fucking leaves him. Somewhere. Still in Velen, definitely, so of course there's a bog; that’s not a navigational aid, it’s just a fact. One minute they’re trudging, and the next Geralt jerks around, wolfish ears metaphorically pricking, and is just off. It’s only notable, really, because he’s never actually left Jaskier just standing in the middle of the road before.
The only word of explanation Jaskier gets is a grunt that might have been, "Hex." It also might have been, "Hell," or just a general sort of swear, or literally anything else. Whatever it was, Geralt is gone sloping off into the noxious mist with one hand on his silver sword. Jaskier tries not to admire the focus in the set of his spine, the length of his stride, or any of it.
He and Roach set down at a crossroads to wait, him on a dryish boulder next to a charming little half-decomposed shrine, her munching her way through a patch of blood-red beggartick. He's not, honestly, entirely sure that's really... supposed to be a plant that horses eat. Maybe. But then, this is another one of those matters on which a horse would almost certainly know better than a bard. It’s only that the slow rain is making Jaskier a little forlorn.
The shrine, now he looks at it, is an even more forlorn choice of company: three aspects of some local goddess, but her face has weathered away on every statue, gone eyeless and cragged. He’s certainly no religious expert, but if Roach didn’t seem so set on her choice of snack, Jaskier might have chosen to move on a bit. It gives him the shivers, on top of the chilly weather. He longs to be somewhere warm—it’s not just being left alone out here, or the fresh trickle of rain down the back of his collar. It’s been raining on and off for days, and more days before that since any of them have slept indoors. The chill is in his bones; the faceless goddess is just echoing it back at him.
It must be said that Geralt did not actually tell either of them to wait. Jaskier doesn’t even know what they’re waiting for. They're not out here on any purpose, or not one that Jaskier’s heard about. And Geralt took his bag with him, too, the one with his witcher things, which even Jaskier normally isn't curious enough to go rummaging through. He does do this sometimes, this thing where he just takes off. Not usually, though. Not usually without at least making sure Roach is settled, even if he doesn’t tell Jaskier where he’s gone.
"I suppose he is coming back for us, then? Eventually?" Roach flicks a fog-dewed ear in Jaskier’s direction and goes on chewing. Not much of an answer, but it's something. A show of faith in its unconcern, perhaps. It must be the weather that’s making Jaskier doubt it more than usual.
Jaskier takes his little boot knife out and balances it on one finger—looks around by his feet for something to whittle, but that would require there to be a tree somewhere within, oh, two hundred miles that wasn't rotten. He supposes he might hack a bit off the shrine, as it’s in such poor shape already, but it still feels like vandalism. The way the eyes have gone on it make him feel more watched and not less, a bit nastily, like someone with an interest has heard him thinking it. He flips the blade between his knuckles.
Maybe, if he's lucky, there's still some hardtack or something in the bottom of Roach's saddlebags that he could snack on. The grey light has a timeless quality that makes the waiting doubly unpleasant, and Jaskier doesn't much feel like making the best of it in any case, so he never quite gets up to check. The lute's an impossibility, what with the wet. His whistling is depressing even to himself and it can't be impressing Roach much, either.
But surely even an idyll this pleasant must end.
Eventually, as if in answer to the glum direction of Jaskier's thoughts, there comes a glum, squelching sound of slow footsteps from the swamp somewhat behind him. "I hope you have—" Jaskier starts, but in the middle of demanding an explanation, it occurs to him that somewhat behind him was not the direction of Geralt's disappearance. He stands, slowly. "Geralt?"
The squelching stops. And starts again, double-time. Roach's ears are pinned back now, and she's staring in the same direction that Jaskier is, the whites of her eyes showing all around.
Oh. Oh, fuck. No, that's something, Roach would know, and it's coming towards them. It's coming for them. Fast. And it isn't Geralt this time, and Geralt isn't here to get to it before it gets to Jaskier.
It’s almost walking like a person—like a woman, naked, and horrible for it, and he thinks for a frantic second about that shrine—except. Except that there’s no person who moves like that. It's nothing he's seen before—Geralt tries not to fight in front of him—not unless something jumps them—where the fuck is Geralt—
It barely matters, it’s much too late to think of a rescue, only some of those things are harder to kill than others and Jaskier is going to have to kill this one or die trying. He grips his knife in one hand—fucking, finally, there when he needs it and drawn in time—and picks up the only other thing he can reach with the other. A half-rotted stick, not sturdy enough for a walking stick but splintered to a point, at least. It'll do for some kind of weapon. It'll have to.
He has time for one terrified glance to Roach, who is not looking back and who is not trained to fight for him. He wishes he hadn’t had even that much time, really. He wishes it was here, that he was doing anything except watching it come for him. But it comes, not slow enough and not fast enough; unstoppable. Roach spares no glance for him. So be it. He steps into the ankle-deep muck between the thing and the horse.
Instantly, he realizes his mistake.
He should have—
It's too late. The thing is on him, much faster than he’d thought, staggering him back.
She has teeth, mainly, and horrible, grasping arms, and greyish corpse skin that is as cold as swampwater and as hard as leather when she grabs at him. They struggle, the thing's fetid breath and her meatsack weight and the grave-stench in Jaskier's face making his eyes stream. He drags a breath in though his bared teeth anyway and wins a single step. He's got his knife out this time; she hasn't got the drop on him.
But a knife is a close-range weapon, for bar brawls and highway-robbers, and this is a thing from a nightmare, and he should have gotten farther—should have looked for the advantage; he's seen Geralt fight. You don't step in close until it's finished. You don’t let it put your back at the wall. He loses the step and slams backward into the shrine half-stunned. Her fingers scrabble at his wrist, licheny nails like claws drawing blood he can't flinch from or even think of. He presses, and she presses, and one clawed hand is at his throat when she screams in his face, rotting tongue, rotting teeth.
The sucking mud holds him fast and it's almost useful. Like a brace, when he sets himself against her.
She—it—she—is making sounds like talking. The most horrible sounds Jaskier has ever heard. A chant, or a curse, or—her hand on Jaskier's knife is as strong as quenched steel, and she presses, presses, presses, turns the blade in his own hand against him until he can feel its edge at his belly and all he can think is to get away. And he can't get away. The mud grips him tight. He pushes down, instead. Maybe it gains him another six inches. Two seconds. The chance for a single hit, just one.
In his left hand— He has the tearing-sharp point of the stick at her guts in his left hand, almost forgotten, but he remembers it now and he gets the wood of the shrine at his back and he shoves. Just under her leathery, half-rotted breasts. Shit. It’s like lancing a boil. Like punching a hole in a rotted sheep's carcass, suddenly putrid, and her face is something maggoted but almost human, inches from his own, shrieking in pain. Shrieking again and again, horrible, charnel breath, but he can’t buckle backward and he can’t afford the sickness at the back of his throat so he just doesn’t feel it. He pushes and he feels that, something truly awful as it pushes and then pushes through her.
It stops her. For a second, it works. But he’s panting, barely on his feet even with the statue at his back, and she screams.
And he's got her, but she's got his own knife, in his own hand and he can’t pull it back from her, though it’s not at his gut now but at the outside of his thigh. She’s so close, for a beat, that he could bite her. He screams right back at her instead. Maybe louder. Maybe worse.
The scream knocks something loose in their terrible tableau and—she rears back thrashing. The knife drags through his leg, into his leg, shit, but it’s almost secondary—with an awful, scraping gurgle, she wrenches herself back off of the branch.
He should lunge. He should finish it. She’s still standing. There is something wrong with his leg and if he feels that, it’s going to go out from under him, mud or no.
She stumbles backwards, convulsively, out into the fog.
And is gone.
Jaskier might have flattered himself, here, that she’s fleeing. There’s a long stretch of gasping silence where she is just… vanished. But he's got the branch still clutched in a numbed fist and is trying in earnest now not to retch. His throat works, over and over. And his leg—she could have finished him in a second, one more push—she’s gone, wounded, but he’s terrified that she’s not gone away.
She’s—whatever the fuck she is, she’s the kind of thing that does not hunt alone. He knows that much. She’s the kind of thing that might have enough friends to get a hit in even on a witcher. Who knows what she might come back with.
Jaskier has to run, get away from here. He certainly doesn’t have one good hit left in him. His knee gives up and he sits down hard in the mud still clutching his putrid stick.
He can’t run.
The knife is. His knife is—his leg is. He makes himself look at it. He pulls the knife from the meat of his leg—not his belly, not his guts, it's in his thigh, low, near his knee—half expecting that same slow slurping sound. It slides out and he feels it slide, which is worse than any sound. Then he immediately remembers that he ought to have left it because this is so, so much blood. The only person he's ever seen this much blood on is Geralt, and he hadn't liked it much any of those times. He never quite knows what to do. But it's—he's going to have to touch it, too. He'll have to.
He hasn't passed out yet. It's not so bad. Possibly. Possibly the rest of his body simply hasn't caught up to the fact that he's supposed to collapse. With his guts in his teeth, it feels like, he works sticky-wet cloth away from the wound.
All right. All right, so the leg is still all there, and that’s a start. The seam on his trousers caught the blade and turned it, and the monster was already running. There's blood everywhere, yes, but—he sucks in a slow, shaking breath. Even the one breath hurts like hell, hurts more than the cut. He’s not sure he’s tried breathing again until just now. Maybe there's something wrong with his ribs, or the inside of his chest—but all right, some of that blood must have been hers. It’s too dark to be his. A lot of it, maybe. If this cut had been on Geralt's leg, Geralt would give it one glance and dive straight back into the swamp to finish the fight he'd started.
It isn't on Geralt's leg, and Jaskier isn't nearly so certain that this is actually fine. Even if maybe most of the blood wasn't his to start with, it's bleeding fast now. And he’s started shaking, worrisomely.
Right.
Pressure—a bandage—someone to help— Jaskier runs through his options while he tears his fine doublet into dressing strips. The blood is already black on the green silk lining. His hands have gone too clumsy for it; he uses his teeth. Geralt would be proud of him, probably, for keeping his head. Well, proud in a surprised way, because Geralt never gives him credit for a damned thing and then just leaves him on the side of the road and—
And Geralt’s run off, and taken the pack with the suturing thread with him, and left Jaskier here in his own fucking blood.
Stanching it. Finding help. Focus. He breathes. It scrapes, both in and out. He's not, in fact, keeping his head very well. But the careful act of bandaging helps, and it’s almost familiar, like watching someone else’s hands tie the knots. The fact that there's no sound from the swamp of anything coming back helps even more.
Even though, perhaps, it should not.
“What,” he says to Roach, very thinly, “the fuck was that. A wight?”
She rolls one eye to look at him for a second, but she’s still watching the swamp with both ears back.
“Right. Shit, right.”
The longer he’s left with it, the more it really seems to Jaskier that now there's more blood than there should be. His makeshift bandaging is soaking through too fast. He's never heard of a wight being poisonous, but he's never heard of anyone getting close enough to one to get rotting wight-juice into a cut and then turning up still alive afterwards, either. Geralt probably has, sure, but Geralt drinks poison on purpose, as his job. Thinking about Geralt is not helping. Thinking about anything at all isn't helping; Jaskier needs to act. Roach is right, this is no place to stay. He sheathes the knife, gore and all. It takes him two tries to get it in.
He waits, and Roach waits, for any other shape that moves. But nothing is moving, and the longer they wait the less time Jaskier likely has to wait with. He manages to stand again—leaning on the same stick, which is really quite horribly gory—and he goes to her. His stomach is churning again, more urgently now. She's a brave horse, to be still standing here even without Geralt at her side to reassure her. Maybe she would have fought. If he’d asked her. She shores Jaskier up now without letting up on her watch, and they examine their options together.
He'd call out to Geralt again, only—he doesn't feel much like being a full idiot on top of being half dead.
One side of the crossroads marker is weathered so badly he can't make it out. The other one points to a sad, muddy track headed leftwards that looks identical to the sad, muddy track bending right, and it says: Downwarren. Of course it fucking does.
Well, he's been to Downwarren, at least. He didn't much enjoy Downwarren, and he's not so sure that Downwarren’s only inn will actually take him back, but it's certainly... somewhere. That he's been. And people do live there, which is going to be to Jaskier's advantage by the time he gets there and has moved on to being mostly dead. Plus he's been there with Geralt, even, so the chances of the witcher tracking him down are really quite good. That's assuming Geralt does try, of course, but... well, he'd come for Jaskier almost certainly, but he'll come for Roach for sure.
"Right," Jaskier says again, to a horse, yes, but also to the only person who's listening, "please let's just get out of here. Before she comes back with… whatever. We'll be fine."
Roach lips at his ear like she's worried anyhow, or maybe like she doesn't agree. She lets him mount up, though, steadier than she usually is for anyone except Geralt, and he can't say that he doesn't appreciate the show of favour. His own voice is like hearing a stranger speak, from the other side of the swamp. He hopes he doesn’t finish falling over before they get there.
It's a nightmare ride. Jaskier grits his teeth and gives Roach her head and does not faint and does not fall off. He goes on not falling off for what seems like much longer than a few miles. Every rotten tree and scrubby branch is a reaching shadow.
It’s going to be fine. He tells himself this, when he remembers to, while he hangs on. Good place for bleeding out, actually, Downwarren—lots of... absorbent things to be had. For a price. One of several amenities. Breakfast that Geralt likes. He tries to list more amenities, just to keep from looking off the edges of the road. Those shadows are much more than swamp-brush, and he knows it.
He's never hung on to anything for so long in his life.
But Roach is looking too, thank the gods. She sees their rescue coming before he does, and plants herself at a halt that almost unseats him after all.
She's stopped them directly in the path of, miraculously, a person: a man in a rough-cut tunic, hoisting an axe. He's whistling before he sees them, headed out somewhere like he thinks there's actually going to be a tree sound enough to be worth chopping—but then, even Downwarren must get its charcoal from somewhere, Jaskier supposes. It doesn't matter, except that the space where his chest hurt has become a very sick feeling instead and this is also something else to think of.
"Hail," Jaskier croaks, as soon as the woodcutter is in hailing distance. So that's embarrassing. The wound has stopped aching at all, which has got to be bad. Shock. Or poison. Probably if it was poison it should have been bled off by now, though, what with all of the… blood. Unless it's the bad kind of poison. His head feels floaty. It's not his fault. The axe is almost making him think in a fearful way of what he hasn't been thinking, which is something about amputation that he refuses to examine at all.
The woodsman just stares at him with eyes wide like Jaskier looks much worse than he'd hoped.
"Sorry," Jaskier says, trying not to mumble it up too badly and also not to slide straight off of Roach and into this man's reassuringly burly arms. He does kind of look like he hasn't bathed recently, though. That could be a downside. Or an upside, if he’s to match Jaskier’s state. "Sorry, good sir, I've had—there's been a hunting accident and. I'd appreciate." And oh, yes, okay, Jaskier is going to slide off of Roach now. "Some help?"
Things go a bit grey and sideways. But the man does, actually, reach out and stop his fall, and then helps him slither off in a way that's almost controlled enough that Jaskier could have pretended they'd done it on purpose, if he'd had to. They lean on each other in a mistrustful silence for a minute. Well, Jaskier leans. Up close, the woodsman smells about as unscrubbed as he looks, but in a wholesome, peat-smoke kind of way.
"You'll be wanting a healer," says his rescuer. Eventually. Plain-speaking, straight to the point, perfect. Jaskier excels at getting straight to the point.
"Fucking please."
"Ach, now." He hefts Jaskier a little more over his shoulder, like a chastisement. A little more of Jaskier's dignity goes when he does it. Still, better to be undignified than exsanguinated, by a wide mile. He's probably delirious, because he almost says so before he notices how long the pause is. It's long enough that even delirious, he might be on his way to really quite worried about it. Then the woodsman sighs. He's very sturdy. Jaskier's grateful and also not in any position to notice, but he still notices it a little. "Well, my wife used to be the healer woman, round these parts. Skilled, she were, and with the hand of the Good Ladies of the Wood on her side."
"I see. And what, um, what's happened to her? Now?" he asks, faintly. It's not going to be good. It's never good.
"Well. The Good Ladies were with her, as I said. Now she's with the Ladies."
"Right." Not exactly a full answer, that, but almost a year with Geralt has taught him that in this sort of case, the whole answer is much worse than Jaskier would've wanted to know. And the woodsman is definitely limping him along to somewhere, now. "Is there perhaps someone else you'd be willing to recommend?"
There is. Her name's Hertha. She wouldn't have been Jaskier's first choice. Possibly she would've been his very last choice after literally everyone else in town including the butcher. After the good woodsman Brahn has taken the trouble of propping Jaskier up long enough to get him there and then facilitating introductions all round, though, Jaskier isn't going to be churlish enough to mention it. Even if she is, as charitably as he can describe her, a half-mad bog witch. Were he in a position to be uncharitable, he might have called her an insane old bat with something hung above her lintel that looks like a literal ear. But beggars, as they say, must take what's given and fucking like it.
She lets Brahn dump him in the only chair in the place and takes a look at Jaskier's bandaging—it's a neat job, if he does say so himself, if only it weren't still bleeding—and then looks at him. Her eyes are bloodshot like a drunk's. It's still the kind of piercing gaze that makes him both want to look away immediately and understand that he should not, under any circumstance, be the first one to look away.
Without unwrapping anything or even blinking, she says, "That's not a rabbit-hunting accident what's got you."
"No," Jaskier agrees. It might help to elaborate, but he doesn't... want to, somehow. He wishes she'd blink. That would've gone a long way towards a soothing bedside manner.
She nods anyway, like this is a good enough answer. "It’ll mend. But there's a cost."
"I've coin," Jaskier says, a thoughtless, old instinct. But. He doesn't have much here with him now. He'll have to play for more—gwent, maybe, on top of singing for his keep. Hertha just gurgles what might be a laugh and turns to the little workbench next to her hearth without a word about the price either way.
Some time later, various jars have been opened and herbs have been crushed, and something burned that smelled horribly of hair, and Hertha produces a shallow dish of gluey-looking mess that Jaskier just sort of hopes is a poultice. His head's gone all vague and spinny again—blood-loss, fumes, or both—and Brahn has, rather heartlessly, abandoned him to whatever kind of medical treatment this might turn out to be.
When she comes towards him, he realizes that in the hand that isn't holding the dish, Hertha carries a little dagger. Silver-bladed. Fuck. The hilt glitters against a greasy-looking engraving: three blank, empty eyes in a cycle of symbols that Jaskier doesn't know and doesn't like the look of. Ah, fuck, of course they’re doing hedge-magic. And him with so little extra blood already. Hertha's breath, when she leans in, smells like old hops and pickles. The dagger's blade glints with an oily, unwashed sheen.
She's murmuring something over the knife, then over the bowl, then over the knife again. Something that isn't Elder; something he can't hang onto.
He wishes he wasn't the one this was happening to. This sort of shit never ends well, especially when it's happening to Jaskier. He really wishes Geralt was here in case it starts to happen more and worse. His leg throbs again, not encouragingly, as if in response to Hertha’s chant, and his vision shimmers with a nasty blackish edge. The hurt now is worse than when it was fresh, and then worse again, and then thick and horrible and aching, and it hurts and hurts and it goes on hurting until he thinks he'll have to scream.
He doesn't want that knife to touch him. He can't let that knife touch him. He can't. He'd rather die. He's breathing so fast he might be going to die from it anyway.
He doesn't want to die.
He doesn't want to scream where these horrible people from this horrible place can hear him.
Hertha pricks her own finger and a single brilliant-red drop slides down the blade to spill into the sludge. Then she catches his eye and winks. "The cost," she says. She sucks the pinprick closed, businesslike, and uses that same hand to begin to spread the mixture carefully over his wound. Her lower lip is smeared red now, on top of the pickle-breath. Jaskier's stomach roils. He bites his lip bloody, till he’s choking, but his body screams where she touches him—everywhere, not just the cut anymore. A horrible, tearing agony right from his bones. He prays while she works, to any deity of any stripe who might be listening, that he isn't going to throw up on her floor.
And his leg stops hurting. So does everything else.
"Oh," Jaskier rasps. "Oh, fuck." There's a terrible taste in the back of his mouth like a mixture of burnt keratin and bogwater. His insides are as numb as frostbite. On his thigh, where she'd spread the poultice, is a thick, black scab. It looks days old, maybe a little fouled, but it doesn't hurt.
His heartbeat is in his ears, fast and trapped as a snared rabbit’s.
Afterwards, Hertha pours him a shallow cup of some smoky green tea and watches him cannily with those unsettling eyes as he drinks it down. The tea is surprisingly nice. The experience that came before it, he cannot recommend. "It'll mend," she says again, "if you mind your manners. And that'll be half a crown for the tea." Jaskier scrapes up the half crown in coppers with shaking fingers and does not ask what she means by manners. Jaskier really just cannot care. At all. Actually. But really—what a thing to lecture on, having none herself.
He walks himself back to the taproom of the Pickled Jenny, half out of his body but not even limping, and orders the largest amount of alcohol that Esme the innkeep will sell him in a single cup. It’s not going to be nearly enough. She’s still scowling ferociously from behind her taps at the very sight of him. How nice it is to see a friendly face in places like these.
He vows that he will never think of this again. Not of Hertha, and not of the feeling of his own knife getting into the meat of him and slicing, and not of how very afraid he had been that he was going to cry out and that there was going to be Geralt's name in it.
Not even a limp, and shouldn't there have been something? Just an arrow-thin scab the length of his middle finger to show for the whole ordeal.
It's not that he particularly wants to renew his acquaintance with the Pickled Jenny. Certainly, the flat, hostile stare that Esme keeps levelled on him while he drinks suggests that her inn is not eager to renew its acquaintance with him. She does let him take a room upstairs, though, after he pays upfront for the ale, and that's friendlier than he'd expected from Downwarren. It's charitable, even, considering that he probably doesn't look especially likely not to get blood everywhere this time, too. Maybe Brahn's been by and vouched for him. Seems unlikely. Still, the numbness in his leg is spreading to the back of his skull, or maybe that's finally the drink, and he's glad of anything like a warm place to lie down.
He dreams on the first night that his leg has been cut off altogether. An ugly dream. An uglier way to wake up, gagging on the remnants of it, groping for a stump.
He dreams on the second night—far worse—that the leg's grown back.
That dream he wakes from in a terrible sweat, his stomach churning again. It takes him a long, long time to fall back asleep, first cold under every blanket and then swelteringly hot and afraid, somehow, to push off even a single layer. Buried feels safer. He hasn't had a nightmare like that in years. Ever. Not even after all the terrible things he's watched Geralt face down. But maybe that last is easily explained: Geralt always wins.
Awake, he can't stop feeling it. He pushes his spoon into a bowl of stodgy porridge and feels the catch and the juddering wrench of the stake through the bog-wight's guts. The taste of old metal is on the back of his tongue, like blood and like rot, and it kills any appetite he might have had, for anything.
Esme is watching him from her place behind the taps again, and over the course of a few days her scowl has turned into a look of grudging consideration. “Bard,” she nods him over. It’s not precisely a friendly conversation starter but he’s glad enough to give up on his meal, so he goes. “Are you waiting for your witcher, then?”
“Ah.” He should have expected the question. He didn’t, somehow. “No. Not— No. I’m not. I’ve had a bit of a mishap on the road and I…” Here is the part where he should say something flowery about her fine establishment again, or his firm plans to leave in a day or two, or… anything. He can’t muster up the stomach for the conversation, either. In the end, he just gestures at his perfectly sound leg as if that answers for anything.
It’s fine now. It is, only he has this feeling like it may or may not still belong to him.
This morning, alone at the washstand in his room, he’d spun around fast with a certainty that he’d only just missed someone who’s been watching him like it’s theirs.
“You’re in town for the healer,” Esme says, still not quite on the side of things that could be called hospitable.
“Er,” Jaskier says, inclined to agree except that he’s not quite sure he does agree. At least not with the implication that it’s been on purpose. “I paid Hertha a visit already. It was very, um. Healing.”
The look she gives him at that is a heartily dubious one, which only goes to show that at least he was right in the first place about her being a woman of good sense. “She’s not what the last one were, I’ll grant you, but folks do still pass this way for the luck of the Ladies, now and again. And I suppose she’s one who’s got it. As you’re standing here, I guess you’ll come right.”
“Well. Well, ah, thanks? For the kind wishes?” He has to suppose that that’s what they were.
“Mind yourself,” Esme says, with one last hard stare that he really, really can’t be fucked to interpret, and turns her back on him to busy herself with the stew pot.
On the third night, with nothing left to do and no one to do it for, he touches himself under the covers. He’s just reaching for a distraction, no better than partly hard, not even really that, and he's alone in the dark, awake—he's alone. There's something furtive about it anyway, almost hunted. But no eyes shine back at him from the corners this time. Nothing rustles, nothing breathes. The dark corners are all empty; the little looking-glass reflects nothing but the flickering candle and then nothing at all when he blows it out and curls in on himself in earnest, spit-wet hand, looking for a rhythm he can't find. There’s no spark to chase. He doesn't even manage all-the-way-hard before he gives up with a sour feeling in his stomach. It does nothing to chase away the ghost of that last nightmare, either, nothing has; it only leaves him feeling watched and horribly exposed. Like a snail cracked open and salted.
Sleep, like this, is not a possibility.
He switches tactics to a purposeful kind of insomnia. With the door locked and the lights out and his jaw locked, too, against any sounds, he listens for a rattle at the door. Wildly, alone, he listens for anything. A scrape on the floorboards outside, an intruder. Whatever it is, it’s followed him home from the swamp. Whoever it is.
He keeps hearing breathing. Ragged, furtive breathing, very close. Nothing else.
Nothing comes. No one comes. By dawn he is forcing himself awake, his eyes dry and burning. In the first weak light through the shutters, he finally realizes that the breathing has been his own.
By the fourth night, the restlessness has festered into a migraine. Today’s sludgy porridge comes back up, although he fights it, although he can barely face the thought of having to choke something down in its place after it does, just to keep going. The only grace here is that he makes it behind the door of his own room so Esme probably doesn’t know it. Now, when he breathes, it pounds behind his temples, a poisonous kind of pain. It makes him think of other poisonous things, until the very thought of walking out the door leaves him shaking. The most splitting headache of his life: literally split, like looking in a cracked mirror, half of him half-blind with it and the other half, without. Raw and sensationless. He focuses on that half instead, on the spreading, severed silence in his head, as though it could be a relief.
This, he does try to sleep through, mid-morning on what has to be the fifth day. It has to be the fifth day, because he’s counting. Counting down to what, he isn’t sure. The only way he can crawl into bed this time is with all the shutters thrown open. Even so, there’s no reprieve. Fitful sleep turns into horrible, formless dreams, turns into waking up in the middle of the afternoon, roilingly nauseous again with the light stabbing straight in his eyes. He has a blisteringly sore throat that he's afraid might be from yelling after all. He doesn't remember why, doesn’t remember what, and somehow that's not better either. It doesn't bear thinking about; none of it does.
He coughs on the sore throat, once, to clear it, and then with a terrible momentum, he keeps coughing. He’s wheezing and wet-eyed before he manages to take a deep breath, and then another, and finally stop. His lungs burn, but not for long; his throat burns long after, like he’d choked up acid instead of nothing at all.
It is a blank, crawling horror of a day.
He goes downstairs toward the end of it. Maybe he’ll be sick on the public room table after all. Maybe—likely—he could do any repugnant thing he wanted and it wouldn’t matter a whit. He hasn't actually left the Pickled Jenny in—some time. Since he came here, however fucking long it’s been. Another thing he’s lost the stomach for, on top of the smell of the spit-roasting pork that nearly forces him to test the theory.
Brahn the woodcutter happens into the taproom while Jaskier's nursing his raw throat and his terrible head with barley water. He’s generous enough to stand Jaskier a cider, which is—once again—an unlooked-for kindness from a stranger and perhaps the only good thing to happen to him in days. Although, Jaskier reflects over a companionable sort of semi-silence, maybe they're actually acquaintances now. Maybe he could even confess that he’s not sure it’s a hangover he’s suffering with. Is a pint or so of blood between them enough to get them as far as friends?
Esme likes Brahn, too, or at least she nods at Brahn more civilly than she’s ever nodded at Jaskier. Maybe that’s not saying much. More and more, Jaskier feels like she’s watching him—really watching him, with a sinister eye. Her, and everyone else. Brahn is practically the archetype of bon-viveur, by comparison. In his stolid company, Jaskier manages a little bread, tonight, and even a little dour conversation.
"There's holes out there as'll suck a man down," Brahn opines, two ciders in and after Jaskier has absolutely not asked about the bog. "Happened to my nephew. Never seen again, not even a body, but then sometimes... peat cutters'll find 'em. Years later, decades. Washed up, like, or buried just under the peat mat and pickled brown as tea. This friend of yours, that you're waiting for, he knows how to get through a swamp all right?"
Jaskier just shrugs, gone long past morbid himself. They stare into the middle distance together, almost comfortably. He’s afraid to talk, really, around the tightness in his ribs that threatens to turn back into that wracking cough. The drink is the only part of the thing tonight that hasn’t nearly strangled him. He signals to Esme for another and pretends he doesn’t see the way she frowns when she brings it.
"It'll come right, lad," Brahn says, eventually. Almost funereally. “Ladies willing.” Jaskier has such a vertiginous sense of déjà vu, suddenly, that he cannot think of an answer. The back of his neck crawls, as if with maggots. Or with fear. He’d been—joking, or something, he thought, about being sick on the table. Now, again, it seems like he really might. Shouldering his coat, Brahn claps one huge ham of a hand on Jaskier's back, staggering him almost face-first into his mug, and is gone home.
They’ve a strange way of talking, in Downwarren, Jaskier reflects into what is more likely his own fourth pint than his second. That’s what it is. That’s all it is. All of them the same, all of them in circles like they’re talking around something, or around him. Once he’s finished his pint, he feels better enough to be getting on with, not about his situation but at least in his skin. He’s beginning to hate it here.
It hates him here. There’s malice in the very air of the whole place, like a sweating sickness waiting to claim him. Maybe it already has.
Maybe this part is the dream.
Jaskier stays holed up anyway, and he waits. He waits those first few days, sleepless and shaken, and then a whole week more, and he does hate it. He truly, truly does. He is aching and numb by turns with some malady that no one else in the room even notices, and then at some point he starts for the first time to look directly at the thought that maybe Geralt isn't coming. That maybe Geralt is the one who is, actually, finally, exsanguinated in a swamp somewhere. Or pickled in peat. He waits so that he can’t think even to himself that he is running.
The part where it turns out he is waiting for Geralt, after all, and even Brahn who knows nothing about him knows this, is just—
Or maybe Geralt is only walking down the road in the other direction; yes, maybe that. There’s Roach, though. Safe in the stables, although he hasn’t been visiting. Geralt wouldn't just leave Jaskier with the care of his best friend like that. Not forever. It's a conversation he's already had with himself more than once, very sternly.
On that thought, he curls up, quite miserably, and somehow manages a little more sleep at last. The coughing only comes sometimes, and only when the sun is up, which is something like a blessing.
He wakes late the next morning, feeling—bizarrely—almost himself. He opens the shutters, trying to scrape up some kind of enthusiasm for the day, or for a better breakfast than he’s been managing, or—the floorboards slide under him; it’s moonlight outside. A full, harvest moon, though there’s nothing to be harvested, not in winter, not likely for a hundred miles. How has he mistaken the time?
It seems impossible.
Fuck this, he realizes. Absolutely fuck it. He’s depressed. He’s a wretch. He’s told himself that this was coming. He will wait until it’s properly morning, and he will order a bath, and he will dress to his usual standard and then he will—he’ll befriend the locals, or something. Brahn doesn’t count, kind as he, maybe, is, because Brahn seems to think that swamps are acceptable.
Jaskier will find someone else.
There might be no cheerful working girls in all of Downwarren—there might be no single cheerful person in all of Downwarren—but Jaskier will find himself the first willing woman he sees, cheerful or not, and just… Do exactly what, he’s not honestly sure, not in the state he’s been in, but inspiration in the moment has never yet been a problem. He’ll think of something. He won’t think of trying to touch himself in the dark, or of failing at it, and that’s just all there is to it. Even if it means insisting that they leave the lamps lit.
He’d settle for the first willing man, though that’s often a pickle of a different nature and—it’s been longer than he’d quite realized since he’s settled for either outside of a financial transaction, truth be known. Whores are not the same thing as winsome milkmaids, nor as farmer’s sons, either, and something about Velen has had him losing the heart for the chase long before he landed up here. It’s a horrible swamp country, that’s what it is, though Brahn would perhaps not agree.
What he needs is a milkmaid who wants to get out. Those can’t be hard to find. It surely describes any pretty-enough maid who’s ever so much as set a toe in the county. So there.
Quite a respectable time later, he’s as groomed as he’s ever going to get. He’s managed to stretch the process out until nearly noon, even with the unfortunately early head start, and his hair is as immaculate as he can make it. With a solid plan at last, a plan of his own for the first time in, well, in longer than it’s been since the last milkmaid, definitely, he strides out into the world a renewed man. A man closer to himself than he’s been in much too long.
It’s a bit of a waste, as there’s absolutely no one in the hallway.
There’s no one in the common room, either—and fair enough, it’s midday. So he walks outside. That huge harvest moon still hangs there, almost egg-yolk yellow against the washed-out noon sky. Even the main street is empty, not so much a chicken. Well, he says main street. There’s a single dirt track, run to mud. It’s difficult to blame the locals for not wanting to promenade down it.
There is a smithy just down the way, he happens to know. The heart of a village, or so they say.
And, as a bonus, when he comes upon it, although the forge is not lit, there’s a clatter from inside of someone at home. A blacksmith. He’d more than make do with a blacksmith, for sure. It smells welcomely dry inside, a peaceful, charcoal-y smell, and that’s enough to overcome the flicker of a qualm he feels at stepping over such a dark threshold with no invitation. The door creaks closed again behind him, leaving only the thinnest, weakened slats of shuttered sunlight.
“Hullo!” he calls into the shade, in the friendliest voice he has that isn’t his carnival barker’s one. Although it’s not such a bright day outside, either, he finds himself blinking in the sudden shadow. “Is, ah, anyone here?”
There’s a rustle—and a shape stands away from the wall, a very broad one. Ah-hah, he was right.
But, “Hush, Jaskier,” it says in a very, very low whisper.
It’s a whisper that Jaskier should recognize.
Its eyes are open, the shadow’s, and they’re light in the black, black dark.
“Geralt?” Jaskier whispers back, not quite certain. The eyes blink, one then the other, and then another, because it isn’t Geralt, not at all, and it never was.
Oh, he thinks. This part’s the dream. It's a nightmare.
Explains the moon.
He takes one step backward and then another, quite calm. He’ll just—politely retreat back to his room until this stops as well. Groping behind himself in the gathering blackness, Jaskier finds the doorjamb. The latch is caught fast for a moment—a slow, stinging slice across the palm of his hand as he fumbles for it. His right hand; his lute hand; his fingers scrabble rust-wet over the metal. He keeps his focus and keeps looking straight ahead at the shape in the shadows, the cut doesn’t matter, and the shape in the shadows looks straight ahead back at him.
And then he has it, and he’s out.
But, though he’s over the threshold, the street outside goes on and on under the boiled-egg moon in its colourless sky, till he’s running, till he’s panting, till he thinks it can't stop, and when it's done and he’s made it and the door’s slammed behind him, he's head-swimmingly exhausted. Dizzy and sick with it. The Pickled Jenny’s single set of rickety stairs is almost the end of him. Everything hurts; nothing hurts. Something thick that isn’t air is still choking at his lungs. He coughs once, and then doesn’t stop coughing, though all that comes up is something clear and bitter. He stands stock-still in the middle of the bare floorboards of his rented room and catches his breath, for hours.
His fingers are cold and numb to the tips, and he goes downstairs again to order a bowl of watered-down vegetable soup from Esme just to have something warm to wrap his hands around. He doesn't wake up in between.
Brahn isn't there this afternoon, and although he tries to ignore it, Jaskier’s outstayed his welcome. He’s long outstayed any hope of a willing woman. He was kidding himself, before. Every farmwife from here to Novigrad has probably heard by now that Jaskier the Bard has installed himself in some nowhere backwater as the town drunk. Well, if they’ve heard of him at all, and chances are they probably haven’t.
There's almost no one in the taproom now, or maybe it's later than he thought it was. That’s been happening, lately. The few, grubby farmers that have washed in huddle together in the corners, heads bent together. It's difficult not to think that they're watching him, talking about him. Perhaps they’re talking about how he’s stopped being able to hold his drink. Perhaps, they’re talking of ways to have him gone. He catches dark looks from the corners of his eye a few times, but when he thinks perhaps he's had enough and should say something—ordinarily he'd say something—he turns to stare them down and finds they aren't paying him any attention at all.
He's glad of it. Everyone here has eyes like a rotted fish. It makes his gorge rise to look at them.
Esme has to ask more than once if he's finished with his bowl; he hears her at last with a start. It's gone stone cold. It's only been a few minutes. But it's dark outside, no late afternoon light at all slanting in, and he can hear rain against the dirt track. A step missed on treacherous ground. And—shit, and how has he forgotten—he’d hurt his hand, before, and never even looked at it. Never even got as far with the soup as trying to pick up a spoon. The only thing he can keep down, the only thing now for days, is his drink. But when he turns his right hand palm-up on the table, prepared for a wound he hasn’t felt, somehow, there’s no sign of it. The sensation of the cut is as strong in his memory as the terror of it, no dream at all, but there’s nothing. Again.
Esme’s left him a little plate of this morning’s bread. Not a wooden trencher, a proper ceramic plate, just by his elbow, and butter along with it. Like she’d noticed he hadn’t touched a bite of the soup, too. A little gesture that should be a kindness but tonight smacks of a pity that all of Jaskier’s resources are strained far too thin to bear. She hasn’t brought him another drink. He shoves the plate off the side of the table quite deliberately. When it smashes, all those fish-faced fucks are looking at him, and they’re right to, and he doesn’t care.
Let them watch. Let them watch when he picks up the biggest sharp-edged shard of it and presses it into the meat of his palm, until it goes white and until it goes in. A bright, grounding line of pain, the same trajectory that he remembers. The cut wells up as clear and as wet as water and not a drop of blood runs out. Not even when he flexes it, staring at the way he shakes like it’s someone else’s hand.
The malignant scab on his thigh throbs, once, a reminder that here at least, something has marked him.
He goes up to bed one more time, to stare down the shadows in the corners of his own room, instead. Under all his blankets once more, he shivers and sweats, again and again. He doesn't think he sleeps, and he doesn't think he's losing time, but when he wakes up it's gone past noon anyway.
There's not so much left in his coin purse, when he counts out another night's stay into Esme's impatient palm, that he isn't thinking about where to get more, or where to go when he can't afford even this shabby inn anymore.
The option is there—and always has been—to just leave. Walking away is something he's done well enough by in the past. He could walk away now. He could walk away now, alone, in the dead of the night, he could leave every part of this and all of his things, and he thinks that what’s behind him wouldn’t follow. Months ago, there was a plan: follow a witcher for the summer, gain some new material for a ballad or two, maybe see some of the more remote corners of the Continent where he'd have been unlikely to go alone. By the time the fall social season was picking up, he'd be back in Oxenfurt. It's been twice that time, nearly a year, and there's a chance that at least someone has missed him.
Months ago, there was a plan, and it’s started to feel much longer.
“Can you play tonight, bard?” Esme asks him, almost another favour in it, like she’s heard how few coins there are now to rattle together. Can you play, like she’s heard the coughing, too. Or like she’s seen his hands. The thought that it might really be a favour turns his stomach all over again. He says yes.
He's in a corner of the common room, playing knucklebones against himself through the late afternoon. Which afternoon, he can’t quite decide. But he’s managed this much, today. Nightmares or no. It rains dismally outside, again, and the wind makes the shutters groan, again, and Jaskier can't... he can't afford enough ale to make this all right, tonight, not even with what Esme might pay him, not and then still have a place to sleep it off after. He's doing the math, in fact, on exactly how much ale he might have to buy to make that last bit not matter quite so much. A cost-effective solution, possibly; he's not sure why he hasn't thought of it before.
Geralt, probably. Geralt likes getting walleyed drunk as much as the next man or witcher, but it certainly isn't cost-effective with that kind of a constitution, and Jaskier has generally felt bad about doing it on purpose unless they could both afford it. Fuck, but Jaskier's maudlin. Or he's just getting too old to hold his liquor. Or he’s been drinking like this for much longer than a week. He'd do better to stop now, while he's still clear-headed enough for the economics of the situation.
A shadow falls across the table, tall and broad, and Jaskier doesn’t bother to glance up to see who owns it. It’s not that he’s afraid. He doesn’t care to.
He tosses the jack, scoops the bones up, doesn't fumble it. And again.
And again.
The shadow clears its throat, and even though—even despite everything, Jaskier’s idiot heart trips over itself to a sickening stop. It isn’t—
"I thought you'd finally proven yourself a fair-weather traveller, bard," says Geralt, thumping onto the bench opposite, and Jaskier’s startlement lumps itself up in his throat in such a horrible way. The shock of it and Geralt’s shadow and that shadow and all the other shadows, and— For a second, before he realizes what it is, Jaskier is sure it's all going to come out as tears. The jack drops to the table with a clatter; nothing else.
Geralt. It’s Geralt. He reeks of the swamp.
"Yes," Jaskier says, perfectly pleasantly after a single moment spent choking on it, "I am one, thank you. Fair-weather. Which is why I'm here, indoors, in this fine establishment—where, I might add, I've been for a week and a half. My hair is damp, not from rain but because I have recently bathed. Unlike you. For a week and a half. Did you also think I'd stolen your fucking horse?"
It comes out sounding all right enough in his head. It sounds like his own voice, anyway, for once and against all odds. But Geralt—Geralt, across the table, Geralt across the table like he’s always been across the table and maybe he has, maybe Jaskier’s the one who—Geralt makes as if to say something in answer, and then he doesn’t say something, and then he doesn’t say something, still, but differently, as though Jaskier’s missed his line. Then he grimaces and steals Jaskier’s pint and drains it, which is typical. Even if the way he’s using it to just keep watching Jaskier while Jaskier can’t really watch him back is not typical at all. Not recently, anyway.
Well, recently, he hasn’t been doing anything to Jaskier, not anywhere, not where Jaskier could see. But before that. It was a move for other people, for hostile people; not for Jaskier. Jaskier didn’t quite realize, and now he has, but like everything lately, it’s somehow too late. Everything is somehow too late.
"Actually, is that ichor you've dragged your elbow through, or just the regular sort of swamp... stuff?" Jaskier inquires. It's getting on his nice, clean, empty table. "I ask professionally, as someone who has to look at you sometimes when you decide to turn up."
Geralt thunks the mug down, lets out a deep breath like maybe he's setting something else down, too—though Melitele strike Jaskier if he ever speculates about that sort of thing; it's a fruitless proposition—and says, "Yeah, bath's next on the agenda. Can you lend me a couple of crowns?" There's no reason, really, why Jaskier doesn't punch him every time he talks.
It's just that he's so very tired. He hasn’t been sleeping well.
And now Geralt is—Geralt is here, he is, but he’s watching Jaskier, now, too. It’s a relief when Geralt stands up with Jaskier’s last whole half-crown in his fist and goes upstairs to see about the bath after all, leaving Jaskier behind with everything else. Without him there, Jaskier doesn’t have keep pretending he’s not still choking. He can concentrate on pretending that he’s now very sure that Geralt will be coming back. He should have started practicing that one sooner.
But—Geralt does come back down the stairs, somehow. In time for the dinner crowd, even.
Everyone wants to know what a witcher’s life is like, when there’s one in the room. Jaskier trades on it, in fact, even though by now he knows very well that it’s mostly killing the same monster, over and over: same blood and guts, different claws, different swamp. No one ever asks a bard what it feels like to sing the same song over and over. Same song, different nights, different tavern.
Worse songs, same tavern, and this time it's Jaskier with a hair-thin scab on his leg that's turned into something with pus that's turned into a fever. He’s realized, thinking it over while Geralt was in the bath, that of course this is what’s happening to him. It’s wound-fever. It’s getting better. It was getting better, he’s sure, he remembers he’d slept long enough to dream of—of something, only now Geralt’s here and it’s thrown him off so he can’t remember what and his hands won’t stop shaking.
It’s just... something that needs to burn off as it heals, Jaskier reckons. Now that it’s occurred to him. His stomach has almost totally stopped doing that thing it was doing the other day. Mainly. Better now if he drinks a bit to calm it. If his head's a bit fuzzy from it—either the drink or the fever, but Geralt would know if he was drunk so Jaskier hasn’t actually bothered to get drunk enough tonight to face the way he’d frown—if his head’s a bit fuzzy, it's not fuzzy enough at the moment to stop him from earning them some spare change. Now that Esme has thought to ask him. It could just as easily be the terrible night's sleep he's had that's to blame, too. Or the eight or nine even worse nights before that one.
It's less fuzzy the less he thinks about it, anyway, so Jaskier just doesn't think. He plays.
Geralt, freshly washed and curried, keeps his watch again from the furthest table in the darkest corner. A fixed watch, frowning anyway: not so much as a flicker of his eyes to the tables at his left or right. Not a twitch of his head, even though Jaskier knows full-well that Geralt's favourite hobby, when he's taking a load off, is listening in on the petty squabbles of field workers and farm labourers. And then he has the gall to pretend he isn't interested in their drama like he isn't the most dramatic fucking person in every backwater shanty-town he turns up in, anyway, Downwarren included. Like he doesn't spend nearly as much time finding lost fiancées and tracking down stolen heirlooms as he does stalking mangy, half-dead drowners, and somehow for even less coin. Not tonight, though. Tonight, he's just staring. Still staring.
He seems to be the only one listening in the whole place.
Jaskier stares back. He looks him right in the eye and grits the chorus out like Geralt’s very presence is what’s stuck in his throat.
It doesn’t help the performance any. Frankly, neither does the part where he feels like absolute hell, but then—some things, there's no hope for right from the start. Tonight certainly wouldn't have been the right time to premiere some sparkling new work. Even if Jaskier had managed to write anything of note in the past, oh, couple months. Or so. Or anything worth listening to at all. And he hasn't, not for a while—not really since the whole first flush of the witcher's travelling bard thing, so maybe that’s more than just one month or even two—and eventually someone's going to notice that he's just singing the same six songs every night.
Well. He knows quite a few more than six songs, usually. Tonight, though, that's about all he has in him before he gives it all up for a bad job and exits stage left. Or just puts down the lute, picks up his well-watered ale, and heads over to the back table before any disgruntled patrons can decide it would be more fun to make him exit. Doesn’t happen often—hasn’t properly happened since Posada, or since Geralt—but it happens. He feels them on the edge of turning on him now; he has all along.
He'd understand. He's sick of himself, too.
"What's—” Geralt tilts his head at him. Still scanning him without really blinking, like he's some village miss Geralt's interrogating about a haunting after all. And that’s almost what Jaskier wants, it’s so close to what Jaskier’s wanted—but Jaskier doesn’t welcome it now. Geralt doesn’t care, because when has he ever. "Hmm. What's wrong with you?"
"So, so fucking much, Geralt, you have no idea." Jaskier lets himself sag onto the splintery bench next to his witcher with a heavy gratefulness anyhow, although more than half of it must be Geralt’s fault. At least being the one who gets to hide behind those scary looks will be good for something, tonight—even if it's just intimidating Esme into not asking for a refund on the money that she's finally spent on pity-hiring Jaskier.
"Yes," Geralt says, agreeing where a good and true friend would not have, "but I meant, tonight. You did the one about Maid Bilberry and that stupid squire. Twice."
"And?" And fuck Geralt anyway, for choosing now to suddenly know which songs Jaskier never liked in the first place. It's not Jaskier's fault. Downwarren is not the kind of town where the fine arts are welcome. He'd gladly have advised as such if anyone had asked him. His time here was much better spent on their last visit, when he was getting the no-nonsense kind of incredibly plastered. Alone. Waiting for Geralt to come back to him in the dead of night carved up like a fresh-butchered swine without even apologizing for it, as it happened. Sounds ideal. He leans his head back against the wall and closes his aching eyes.
"And the second time, you sounded worse." The way Jaskier landed in the bench has his shoulder pressed right into Geralt's, not quite on purpose. Ordinarily he'd lean away again, casually, as you would. Tonight, it's become very difficult for him to give a shit. Geralt doesn't move away either, so he mustn't have given a shit all along. His shoulder is like—like a whole fucking mountain, strong and dependable and just, just absolutely there, and that's great. It's perfect. Let's all watch Jaskier try to use that one in a jaunty crowd-pleaser without sounding anything except excruciatingly thirsty for it. Hah. Julian Alfred Pankratz, Master of the Seven Liberal Arts summa cum laude, Oxenfurt University. Hopeless, that's what the whole endeavour has become. "Jaskier," Geralt shrugs a little, nudging him carefully, and that's when Jaskier realizes that he's all but falling asleep. "Hey," Geralt says, just about in his ear, with enough of a real question in it this time that Jaskier could almost feel obliged to answer honestly, "are you well?"
Jaskier laughs without opening his eyes. It comes out accidentally wretched. He feels sick again, feels mostly delirious, feels the infected scab on his leg throb. Should have done something about that earlier, now that he's thinking of it. Gone back to Hertha for a refund on that tea, at least. Why wasn't he thinking of it? "I just really hate it here. Also. I have a fever, I think. So... probably not. Would you fix me anyway?"
He's been here for a hundred years at least. Did he say it'd only been a week? That must have been days ago. He’s been having such bad dreams. When he chances a look again, Geralt is searching him with real intent, eyes flicking over him in a way that would be nice if he wasn't sat quite so close, or if Jaskier didn't find his closeness quite so dangerous. There are worse dangers, of course. Like whatever probably still has its teeth in Jaskier.
"Jaskier," Geralt snaps, and Jaskier does, to his credit, start paying attention again.
"No," Jaskier says, suddenly afraid in a very alert, concrete way that he hasn't been afraid in for days. He sits up straight, heart rabbiting. "No, actually I think I'm—I think something's really, really not right at all."
"For fuck's sake." Geralt touches him. Carefully. Watching only his eyes. His fingertips are cool against Jaskier's temple, just for a second, before he hisses through his teeth and pulls his hand back. "Shit."
And Geralt stands and is gone, nothing left for Jaskier to brace himself on. Again. Without Geralt's attention keeping him upright, he slumps back against the wall and tries not to feel so fucking tired. At least he doesn't have to go anywhere tonight, or do anything. Esme only asked him to play in the first place because he's been haunting around long enough that she finally felt sorry for him. Or decided he should earn his keep. Or something. She's certainly not going to come over and demand he do another set, not after the first one. Behind the bar, she's whistling to herself—nothing he recognizes; certainly nothing he'd played tonight—and safely ignoring him. He's not so sure he could do another set, even if it was demanded of him. To avoid that thought, he lets himself slide back into a doze.
Geralt is back a moment later, or... possibly more than a moment or even two, actually, because the hearth has burned low and the last few disreputable tavern-goers are hunched close over their dregs in the smoky gloom.
It's much later. Jaskier must have slept, but he feels as disoriented as if he'd blinked and been transported here. It’s becoming a commonplace thing. And Geralt is touching the back of his hand to Jaskier's forehead. Checking on him. Again. Or it's another fever dream and when Geralt asks him, again, if he is well—and before Jaskier can summon the ability to lie to him about it properly—he'll open his mouth and instead of words, instead of the lie, centipedes and black bile will spill out. Or Jaskier's whole, bloodied heart. Or something.
"Where's your knife, Jaskier?" Geralt asks like this is the second or maybe the fourth time he's had to ask it.
"It's in my—" no, hang on, it isn't in his boot. Hasn't been for more than a week. It's upstairs, probably. "Why? D'you need to borrow it to kill something?"
"Fuck's sake," Geralt says again, but this time he says it very strangely; a strangeness that Jaskier might have said he understood if it weren't Geralt who was saying it. Or if his head didn’t ache quite so ferociously. He's crouched down, right in Jaskier's space, which is nice of him no matter what he means by sounding that way. It makes him not so far away to look at. "No, I have my own. You need it, because we're going to have to fix this. And pray it stays fixed."
"Can't we, ah, use one of yours? For... whatever?" Jaskier doesn't much like the idea of his own knife being involved in... anything, honestly, ever again. And Geralt can see it, too, because his mouth almost quirks up at the corner before he answers and then it doesn't, quite. Perverse bastard. Jaskier was scared of something, right before he fell asleep. Maybe he was just scared because Geralt wasn't here.
"No. We can’t. I've been to see your new friend, the hedge-witch. It's a curse. An old one. Or—” Geralt shakes his head, corrects himself— “a pact.”
“Do all your friends know what a pedant you are?” Jaskier asks, mainly to avoid dealing with the curse bit. “Or do you save that just for the ones you don’t like very much?”
It only earns him the scowl he deserves. “It’s a bargain. Neither good nor ill, of itself. In service of ending the bleeding, she tied your healing to the Crones. Maybe she didn't know another way to stop it, or she didn't know exactly what the price for stopping it would be. Or that it would have stopped on its own. They're exacting their payment. It’s not— They'll pull it out of you whether you give it freely or not, slower than a bleed but… not better. Unless you cut some other part of yourself away in sacrifice, and then keep sacrificing, there's no end to that kind of debt."
"Huh." Jaskier says, all right, thinking about it, fine. If only because Geralt is going to make him think about it. Mostly he’s thinking about all those ears nailed up on Hertha’s doorposts. And then: "Huh!" He sits straight up again to stare down at Geralt. The Ladies. The Crones—the shrine, with its three aspects of the same faceless woman. "That double-dealing bitch! She knew, all right. Good Ladies, my arse. And didn't warn me, when I'd asked! Specifically!" He'd almost asked, anyway. He shouldn't have had to; she should have offered it. This is a level of professional negligence beyond what he'd expected even from a hedge-witch. It's malpractice. It's murder, if this ends badly.
"Ah," Geralt nods and sits back on his heels. He never does look surprised. But this time his expression has gone very tight. "Then she probably meant for this to happen."
"Rotten fucking witch." That's an understatement, but Jaskier's not at his best.
"Hmm. Yeah. Or she's passing on some debt of her own, and the Crones will have gotten their claws in there, too. The whole damned swamp reeks of them. Worse than last time I was through this way."
"What'll we— Can we do something?" Even now, next to Geralt, warm by the fire, he feels cold into his very bones. The crawling horror is creeping up on him again. It’ll drown him this time, close over his head, and never mind that Geralt’s come for him after all.
"About the Crones, maybe. That's an old evil and ending it won't undo what's done. But this—yes. And I'll kill the witch afterwards, once it's done, if she tries to stop me. The thing that got you, too." Geralt tilts his head like, all right, bard?
The same conciliatory way he tilts his head when he agrees to pay for a bath on the road because he’s realized that they’ve hit Jaskier’s absolute last straw. Like he’s compromising. Perhaps the worst of it is, now when Jaskier dies, Geralt will feel like he should have stopped it. So in the end she'll have made Geralt do the messy part of watching Jaskier finally split open all the way.
"Once what's done?" Jaskier asks, resigned. It's not going to be good. It's probably not even all right. This is another one of those things that was never going to be good.
"You have to end it. The healing, and with it, the bargain.” Even before he gets there, Jaskier knows what Geralt's going to say. “We reopen the wound with the same blade, bleed the poison out along with the curse. Then close it with silver and fire."
They’ll cut him. Put the knife back to his skin.
Right here, maybe, right now, at this grimy table with all the grubby, shadowy patrons of the Pickled Jenny watching him in wet-mouthed delight. Waiting for him to squeal. Like it’s another kind of song, the kind they’ve really been wanting. The shadows in the corner, behind them, are things that reach, things that are not waiting. In a moment, even Geralt will see them. Even Geralt, who hasn’t looked away from him once.
If he had, if he’d looked, Geralt would have set himself between the shadows and Jaskier. As soon as he sees them, he will, and then maybe Jaskier will have to watch them drown Geralt too.
No. Geralt wouldn’t let them.
"Right." Jaskier swallows. "The knife's in my room." He stands much more bravely than he feels and leads the way up the stairs. This isn't about to be an entertainment fit for the common room of an inn.
"Oh, right. Fuck." And of course, the knife is right there where he dumped it more than a week ago: kicked into the corner next to his pack, on the floor, dried gore still on it. Geralt picks it up without a shift of expression, although if it had been Geralt's knife, he'd have cleaned it and put it away oiled even if he'd pulled it bloody from his own heart. Jaskier feels like he's been untrue, somehow. He feels like a coward. Worse still, Geralt polishes it clean on the hem of his shirt without even saying anything and Jaskier knows he's been a coward.
He sits at the edge of the bed so that perhaps it won’t matter so much once his knees give way. Which, they’re going to, whether he gives them permission or not. Geralt stands studying him, and it would feel like that same terrible déjà vu except that all the candles are already lit this time and no one's bleeding out. Not yet, anyway; not right at this very second. The knife is very much there, though. Geralt's run it through the flame—quick, just to sterilize it—and now, Jaskier knows, he's waiting for the blade to cool. He's watched Geralt lance unclean wounds before. His own, typically.
This is going to hurt. He tells himself this very firmly. He’s not good at this kind of thing, at standing still for the things that are going to hurt him. The longer he has to think about it, the closer he is to bolting. But—it’s Geralt. Geralt wouldn't hurt him. Not like this. Probably. It’s increasingly hard to be certain, which is terrifying. Now that he’s remembered, he’s so very afraid.
"How do you know how to—that this will— Geralt," Jaskier finally just gulps, plaintively: "Geralt, are you sure?"
"It's a good knife," Geralt says like that has ever had any fucking thing to do with it, crouching close. His face is so sure and so still. "It'll cut true." And then, before Jaskier can tense, Geralt cuts.
This time, Jaskier yells outright. Geralt doesn't so much as flinch to hear it, although he looks up into Jaskier's face—whatever face Jaskier's making—and waits just long enough to be satisfied that Jaskier has himself back under control.
Which he does. He won't shout again. No need to get the night watch called to come witness his disgrace. No need to give those jaundice-eyed cunts downstairs the satisfaction. He grits his teeth and prepares to swallow his tongue if he has to.
He’d swallow poison, if it would help.
Assured, Geralt goes back to his work. He's as calm and competent as if Jaskier were some prize piece of game that he's butchering to be divvied up between them. Or one of his horrible trophies. Jaskier feels right on the edge of monstrous, to be sure.
And it’s not—it’s not a single cut. It would be fine if it were just one cut. Jaskier could survive it. But Geralt is cutting and cutting, the knife burning cold, and the problem is not that being butchered alive hurts. It does hurt. It hurts like it will never stop hurting, not even if Jaskier were to die.
It's what the butchering is doing. The shadows have followed them up the stairs, or—the shadows were here all along, in here with Jaskier. In the corners. In the very room. And he’s walked like so much slaughtered cattle to his doom, and then he’s let Geralt lock them both in with it. No one is listening. No one is coming. Not from downstairs, not from anywhere else in this whole pit of a town. If they were, they’d have heard Jaskier screaming every night for as long as he’s been here.
The shadows are coming, though: closer and closer, in flickers and fits across the floor, in cold fingers that will reach, and Geralt is busy— He's trying to— Jaskier is staring, desperate, frozen, and Geralt doesn't see—
"Look at me, Jaskier." With a wet little gasp, Jaskier does. And finds that Geralt is watching him again, very steadily. His golden eyes should be unnerving. They always should have been. The room flickers around them and Geralt is the most solid thing in the world. He spares no attention for any of the terrible things trying to creep in around the edges. He just holds Jaskier's gaze, absolutely calm. He breathes, and Jaskier breathes, and the corners of the room don't matter.
Geralt nods, once, and sets Jaskier's knife down on the floor with a thud that sounds heavier than it should. Are they done? He wants to ask, but he's still watching Geralt with his heart hammering in his throat like he'll vomit the whole mess up if he opens his mouth.
They're not done.
Jaskier probably should have paid more attention to the bit where Geralt said he was going to close it with fire. The technique of choice, apparently, is to switch implements out for one of Geralt's own daggers after all, a fearsome solid silver thing set with a snake-green stone, thrust into the hottest part of the coals for a few long minutes—minutes where Jaskier's leg oozes, sluggishly, first some greyish, rotten fluid and then that clear ichor and then a disconcerting amount of blood. Geralt cleans it, gentle and excruciating and horrible, and presses until he must be satisfied that what's running out is clean. It goes on for a long time, much longer than Jaskier’s ability to watch him do it. Then Geralt pulls the new dagger out from the hearth barehanded—he barely winces, never even takes his eyes off of Jaskier’s, but that little hiss through his teeth means even the handle must be searing—and yes, it is, it sizzles like hot fat on a stove as Geralt presses it to the wound. Methodically. One side and then the other.
Jaskier can't even feel it now, not really. Its all gone woolly. It might as well be the innkeeper's leg that Geralt is fussing over, biting at the corner of his lip in concentration like that, or a leg of mutton on the spit.
As soon as he’s thought it—then he feels it. He's going into shock, probably. Pain in waves that start with his fingertips, and then with his toes, and then with his leg—and when it gets to the heart of him, he’ll finally die. He’ll die, and come to think of it he’ll be sorry to be dead, with songs left unsung.
No, he won’t, Jaskier realizes suddenly. He won’t be dead at all.
He looks at down at Geralt and he knows that he won’t, because Geralt wouldn’t— Geralt cares very much, just in general, about the things he tries to save. Whatever he feels about Jaskier in specific, he wouldn’t do his damnedest to cut the curse out of him, wouldn’t kneel at his feet to do it, only to let him die.
There’s no one in the room but them.
Geralt puts the knife down after a long time, stops fussing with the bandaging after even longer, and carefully rests one big, reassuring hand on Jaskier's knee. The other knee. The one Jaskier is absolutely certain is still part of his body, because suddenly, cutting right through the head-swimming pain, that touch goes straight to his spine. A lightning strike and a whole glass of strong, sweet brandy, both at the same time. Lighting him up to the backs of his teeth.
"Fuck," Jaskier says, wetly. Shocked. There's water on his face, too, although he would've sworn he wasn't crying. "Oh, my fuck. Geralt." His own heartbeat in the wound, hot and throbbing, is the most excruciating thing he’s ever felt. Worse than everything before.
The rest of him is all sparks.
"It'll—" Geralt pauses, an uncharacteristic hesitation, but then maybe the cloying smell of grilled meat gone off has turned even his iron stomach. "It's going to scar,” he says, and if that’s what it is, this is a very stupid thing indeed for him to care about. “Worse, I mean. Cauterizing it isn't as good as stitches, so. Sorry."
"Sorry? Sorry?" Jaskier lets himself fall over backwards, and it's only good luck that he thought to be already sitting on the bed. He's been on the verge of collapse for days. He cackles. Also wetly. Up at the ceiling, or up at the gods themselves; it's hard to say. "He saves my life for the seventeenth time in a row and he's only sorry about it?"
He doesn’t know he was dying, really dying, until he says it—and then he does know, and—
The gods don't answer, but then again they probably have had nothing to do with it from the very start. Also, the hurt is stopping, swirling out like bloodied wash water out of a basin, and all the last of the terrible things from the edges of the room along with it. And here Jaskier is, alive, and Geralt still has one huge, warm hand on Jaskier's uninjured leg. It's a gentling sort of thing, as though it might possibly anchor Jaskier instead of sending him spinning.
A terrible pressure imbalance is left behind as everything else washes out; that’s the trouble. Jaskier may just float away once it's gone. There'll be nothing to weigh him down if only the very, very bright parts are left.
Geralt would catch him, though. Geralt's come back to catch him. Maybe Geralt's actually just forgotten to take his hand back, but it's still brilliant.
"I haven't," Geralt says, low enough that it's almost a growl and almost irrelevant, still kneeling somewhere down there on the floor where Jaskier can't see him anymore.
"Haven't what, Witcher?" Jaskier asks him anyway, because after all he does still want to know. “Forgotten?” That comes out very soft, too. Drifting, still, but perhaps not in a bad way. Geralt can scar him up all he wants, as long as he stays. And Geralt is down there. He knows because his hair is right there when Jaskier reaches out, blind, to check for him. It's a little coarse between his fingers, in a nice way, like slub silk. Huh. Washed witcher. Nicely alliterative, that is. Jaskier smiles to himself, at the ceiling, which is very far away.
"Haven't saved you." And Geralt stands, abruptly, tall enough that Jaskier doesn't have to sit up to see him now. He's angry, actually—it was that sort of growl. Oh. Fuck. Jaskier probably should sit up. He definitely should stop talking like that, in that stupidly soft voice, to Geralt of all people, right the fuck now and also forever. And, oh, bollocks, petting his hair. He curls his fingers back, though they’ve already betrayed him. Geralt is his whole field of vision.
"I—sorry?" He's having quite a bit of trouble catching back up. He didn’t really know he’d have to catch back up, frankly, and he’s getting around to it with a new and different kind of dread. But there, he can apologize for something which was absolutely, definitely Geralt's fault if it was anyone's, Geralt and his huge, soothing hands, and his horrible, kind expressions, when he never has any intention of doing anything about them, and that's—normal.
When nothing’s been normal for days.
The relief and terror of it staggers him into babbling. He doesn’t even care that it will certainly make things worse. “I need you to know, Geralt, that I actually—it’s difficult to credit it, I realize, because you’ve found me at a bit of a low point, but I actually acquitted myself, honestly, not that badly out there. With the swamp-thing you left me with. Got a good hit in, to be frank, and got myself out. Only I—I was trying to gut her and gutted myself a bit, or nearly did. But I’d like the credit for trying anyway. And I'd argue that the curse is no one's fault but the Crones', which, who the fuck are they, Geralt, and can we please go kill them? Only I think I may need another week or two of actual recovering first, because the last couple don't seem to have stuck very well."
"They probably haven’t." There’s a bit of a wry twist to his mouth, which is better than furious, but even so Geralt only shakes his head a little as if to dislodge an unpleasant thought. Or shake off the memory of Jaskier's fingers. "You need rest. You've had a difficult evening." He shifts his weight like he's halfway out the door already.
"I—" well, yes, he has, but— Geralt still looks awfully forbidding. Plus he's about to fucking leave. Jaskier chokes down the impulse to grab for him a second time. He isn’t sure he’d be forgiven twice in a row.
"I'm going hunting," Geralt says. Like someone who pathologically needs to be some kind of motherfucking hero in a way that has nothing to do with Jaskier at all. "I'll be back by dawn."
Right. At least he’s said he’s definitely coming back. So Jaskier will know, if he doesn’t—so at least Jaskier will know.
It doesn't matter very much, because Geralt is gone again already and Jaskier is still here on his back, on the bed, alone. He’s hideously—really, truly terribly, and also a bit throbbingly—hard. Wearing nothing but his smallclothes and a lawn chemise with blood on the edges. Practically glowing with it, and with all of—whatever that was. Like that single brilliant touch is in his blood now instead, sparkling and amazing and absolutely mortifying.
He’s still not all right at all. He’s incandescent.
So, that's going to be troublesome.
He'll worry about it, he decides, when he's a bit less busy passing the fuck out without even putting out the light.
He has a very muddled dream, this time, one where one of his old professors is asking him something very important that he doesn’t know the answer to, because it’s raining so much he can’t hear the question. The hills in the distance, over the river, are drenched to a vivid, incredible green as sunshine breaks over them anyhow and he is terrifically afraid of whatever’s on the other side of those hills. It’s such a mundane sort of fear that it’s almost a relief now. It’s a dream he must have had a hundred times. Familiar. Something to be conquered. He hasn’t dreamed it since he quit his teaching post and strolled out of Oxenfurt with his lute on his shoulder.
It is, for all it’s not a very good dream, somehow: a real one, and unquestionably one of his own.
"You didn't cut yourself."
"What?" Jaskier props himself up, muzzy. He might still be asleep, actually, nightmare or no; the question comes out blurry enough. His whole upper leg feels like a carved-up piece of roast, begging very much to differ on both counts. "Didn't cut... I did, you saw it. It was a whole mess; curse and everything. Did you—did something get you, out in the swamp? Hit your head? There was a great big scar, nasty pus, home surgery..." He squints to get a better look at Geralt, who is out of focus but does not appear to be damaged.
It’s definitely Geralt. How the nightmares ever fooled him, Jaskier has no idea, because none of them were quite that surly.
“You told me you almost gutted yourself with your own knife.” Geralt crosses his arms across his chest and gives him a very flat look. “There was a water hag out there half bled to death, run to ground with a week-old stab wound like somebody'd put a spear through her gut. A blunt spear. With splinters. I went out for a fight and I got a mercy killing."
"Oh, I... yeah. Well. There was a bit of tit-for-tat, I suppose. With a water hag, you say?" That's interesting, actually. Explains the tongue situation. He wriggles himself up onto his elbows.
"You got her first, and you got her worse. This is the one time you decided not to brag about it?" Geralt sits on the foot of Jaskier’s bed. Jaskier, who cannot run, panics.
"I told you I'd acquitted myself! Not my fault if you didn't believe me, and anyway, it turns out I'd've been embarrassed if I said more. I thought I'd stabbed a wight." Geralt's tiny, serious, crooked smile is so— It's so fucking unfair, all of it. Jaskier could roll right over in that smile and go straight back to sleep. And Geralt never bothers to show it to anyone, he just lets them all drive themselves away. "Also," Jaskier covers fast, "it's no thanks to you for leaving me to fend for myself in a hag-yard, apparently. So. You're welcome for doing your job for you, Witcher, and I'll be expecting at least half the pay, assuming you've managed to scrape any up."
"Hmm," Geralt says, still just... still just. "It's a poor negotiator who starts so low. And shows his hand so early."
"It's a poor monster-hunter who leaves his bard behind to be slaughtered!" Jaskier manages to squawk. It’s a desperate last resort. "I thought you felt bad about that!"
"Oh, I do." Geralt is—coming closer. And Jaskier knows he's showing his hand, thank you, and likely much more of it than Geralt was prepared to play for, and his heart is hammering like he'll be sick again and he is not remotely strong enough to be turned out of the inn in the rain tonight. Not that Geralt would do it. Not that Geralt would do anything but leave, himself, and leave Jaskier too sick and slow to follow after him. "Jaskier."
"Um." Jaskier gulps. "Present?"
"You're terrified." A whole smile, now, or what passes for one if you know him.
"And you think it's funny, you absolute— you cock-waffle, you— you horrible man!" He kicks at Geralt with his good leg. It's a bit less effective than it might have been because he's tangled in the covers. Geralt renders all of it absolutely useless with one massive hand planted carefully on Jaskier's thigh again.
"Jaskier," Geralt growls, much more insistently, and very, very close. And then stops. The weight of that hand is searing even through the bedclothes. Jaskier couldn't have fought him off if he'd wanted to and he—
Well.
That's not the trouble. He's never wanted to fend Geralt off for even a second. The trouble is that he should have been trying. Something. He's been trying to do something, quite desperately, he promises. He’ll promise it to anyone. And even so, here they are and he finds he doesn't know what he's been trying, anymore, or: there's no trouble at all, the exact opposite, actually, and Jaskier wants to tell him so. Needs to tell him so. He's just... caught. "Did you really think I'd just left? Fucking—now, after everything else?"
"No," Geralt says, then, "Yes." Then: "I thought—"
"Thought you'd finally gotten me into trouble I'd be glad to get out of? Thought, one little, tiny, no big deal, arterial nick on the leg and I'd gone running like the coward you always knew I was?" There's a quaver in his voice he thought he'd trained out of it years ago.
Geralt just looks at him. A bard of lesser ilk would have said it was a searching kind of look, or a speaking one. It isn't. It's helpless. It's the look he saves for when he really just needs Jaskier to step in and finish the negotiations. It looks exactly like all of his other faces, fuck him, and fuck Jaskier too for recognizing it anyway. “You don’t think it’s funny,” Jaskier suddenly realizes.
“No,” Geralt says, but he still looks glad. Maybe, somehow, just very slightly possibly, he looks glad because Jaskier is still alive to be terrified, which isn’t very retroactively reassuring about everything else that came before it.
Jaskier gathers all the courage he's ever had into two trembling fists, clenched in the blankets.
"You know, right, that I'm panicking because I'm really, really very sure that you're about to kiss me? And I am a coward, actually, it turns out, so thanks for that, but. But it's honestly never occurred to me that you. Um. Might?"
"Yeah," Geralt says—or agrees, or—
He kisses Jaskier without the courtesy of closing his eyes.
It’s all sparks again in Jaskier’s poor, empty head, instantly.
Underneath the sword oil and the astringent bite of whatever he's put on Jaskier's wounds, Geralt still smells clean and peaty and he doesn't even bother to put Jaskier out of his misery, he just kisses him and it's— He tastes clean. Like ale, a little, gone warm in his mouth. Like he didn’t even work up a sweat killing Jaskier’s monster. Jaskier tries on nothing but instinct to crane himself closer, get the angle better, or deeper, or something, and fuck, right, that leg still hurts. A lot.
"Don't," Geralt says, right against him in something like a bite, with his teeth in Jaskier's lip, but softer, and climbs the rest of the way on top of Jaskier himself. He means: don’t move, and Jaskier hears, impossible, treacherous: don’t worry. Much too late by either measure. Geralt shifts his grip on the nape of Jaskier's neck, just holding, and Jaskier drops back into his own body with a jolt.
"Oh," Jaskier says, stupidly and still impossibly, "okay then." The very real danger is that Jaskier would have agreed to anything right then. With Geralt touching him. All Geralt is asking, somehow, is for him to be still and let Geralt do to him the very worst thing that Jaskier has not been imagining, not in detail, not ever, since the second they met. "You're not a curse, right?"
"Hmm-mm," Geralt says, and sets his teeth in the hinge of Jaskier's jaw just as gently, just something to gnaw on while he tips dangerously towards the philosophical. Ordinarily, that would be fine. Geralt is more philosophical than most people would credit. But also, ordinarily, Jaskier wouldn't be trying quite so desperately to figure out if the fact that he isn't wearing trousers is still coincidental or about to become sort of the whole point. It was a stupid damn question that shouldn't have been asked. "No," Geralt says eventually, rescuing them both yet again. "Not cursed right now."
“And you're not—ah!—” Geralt teethes a little harder, whoops, there's the fight, and Jaskier writhes into it because he can’t help it— "You're not, um, doing this because I am still cursed and, I don't know, dying? Sort of a, a last wish sort of a thing? But you’re too scared to tell me?"
"No." He sits back from where his weight was only just starting to be enough to convince Jaskier that this is, actually, happening. He looks down at Jaskier. In bed. In all his armour. Heat from him like an iron forge, warming the shadows of the room right to the corners. He looks down at Jaskier, and Jaskier could be still for him forever, for as long as it took.
"Oh, Gracious Lady," Jaskier breathes anyway, and for some reason this is what makes Geralt laugh—the deep one now that anyone would recognize, the one that shows his teeth—and get back off of the bed.
He'd complain. He should. It's terrible bedroom etiquette. The exact opposite of what he'd been so nearly sure that kiss was promising—but then Geralt is. Geralt is undressing. The belt and then the sword belt and then the... other belt thing. The quilted gambeson following after. It's almost familiar; it's almost another shitty shared room in another shitty inn. He knows the movements. He's watched Geralt at it a hundred times, a thousand, after a fight and before a bath and across the campfire on a summer night, all the way back at the very beginning, and he could have done it for Geralt himself. He wants to have done it for Geralt himself, with his teeth. Only the very thinnest thread of self-preservation has kept him from saying so all along. But this time, Geralt does it watching him.
“How’s your head?” Geralt asks, unlacing the ties at the neck of his shirt so that Jaskier is imagining, helplessly, in burning colour, the salt-and-hard-work taste at the hollow there. He knows it on his tongue. He’s just tasted it.
His head is still spinning tremendously. Jaskier couldn’t have stood up even if he had two working legs to try it with. It doesn’t signify.
Geralt isn't even showing off, although the candlelight is doing him all kinds of horrible, unfair favours. When Geralt comes back to him, he comes back under the blankets with his trousers still on. It should be mundane. The only word for it is spectacular, with a side of something that is choking Jaskier, slowly, so that he cannot think of it with Geralt so incredibly there. Having spent the very last of his good sense on finally shutting up, Jaskier can do nothing but grab for him. And then grab for him harder.
Geralt sighs when he settles in, a little hum under a hungry breath, like Jaskier is the one taking pity on him.
This is not, it turns out, going to be the case.
This is Geralt with his hand cupping his cheek and then suddenly with his mouth on Jaskier's neck, rearranging him completely and also giving Jaskier one hell of a beard burn, from his collarbone to his ears, both sides, without asking—but asking is useless. Asking is Jaskier arching into it like he'd like to please be chafed bloody and peeled out of his skin. He would. He might. He'd let Geralt, anyway, and Geralt has to know it, and Geralt is just going to spread him out and dismantle him to see his gory insides. It's amazing. It's— Jaskier's probably going to thank him for it, too. Humiliating, that's the word he's looking for. Two hard fists clenched at the roots of Geralt's hair don't even slow Geralt down.
Probably nothing could slow Geralt down, if he didn’t want it to.
That thought squeaks out in the sort of noise that really does get Geralt to pull back and look at him. Yellow slit-eyes like some kind of panther, here to eat Jaskier all up, except it looks more and more like he's going to fuck Jaskier straight through the bedframe without so much as a conversation first, and also: it looks like he's stopped now because it's suddenly occurred to him to worry that Jaskier might have been saying no. Like there's a possibility Geralt hasn't heard him screaming please.
His hair is a mess. Jaskier's ruined it. This is a crisis of the worst kind on several levels.
"You look like an idiot right now," Jaskier says, because Geralt does, and Geralt says, "You look like an idiot all of the time," automatically, which is of course what he would always have said to that no matter what the circumstance, even if both of them actually were dying. Jaskier kisses him this time, because he's gorgeous and he deserves it and because he was mean to Jaskier and because he's come back just to absolutely ruin Jaskier once and for all. Also, because he’s close enough to reach. He never has been, before.
It still fucking hurts.
There's the leg, which hurts quite enough on its own. And then there's the sheer quantitative fact of how much Geralt weighs, a thousand bloody pounds of pure muscle—and Jaskier's allowed to have it, he's allowed to put his hands on it, he digs his nails in again just because he can and then doubly hard because Geralt’s breath grinds in his chest when he does it—and there's the fact that Geralt's worn gods-damned leather trousers into bed where Jaskier has only his smallclothes on—and a shirt, still, Jaskier is fairly sure he also at some point had a shirt, and it's still mostly there, but Geralt’s working on it—and the leather is, ah, quite a lot of what Jaskier's feeling and very insistently, too, and—
Oh, hell, it's so good, and it's so much, and the final devouring never seems to arrive. Only a slow and piecemeal taking-apart as though Geralt intends to satisfy himself just like this. Pinned, with Geralt pressing a heavy thigh between his legs to give him something to squirm himself miserably against, Jaskier is the farthest from himself he's ever been. With both of them half naked and worse still, it's different halves. He does squirm, and it’s absolute hell, and Geralt grinds down into him, leather—leather—and it’s worse.
And then there’s just—how glad he is to see Geralt, too; how glad he was to see Geralt, which is the very worst of it all. When Geralt finally finds his way under Jaskier's chemise and brushes a sword-callused thumb over Jaskier's nipple, Jaskier groans high-pitched. A mortal blow.
"Hm," Geralt says, thoughtfully, considering Jaskier and the ruin of Jaskier's chemise and dignity, both.
"Geralt," Jaskier manages, panting, dying, "if you're going to just—decide that we're doing this, which, please don't get me wrong, I really could not be more in favour of this decision—but if you're going to. And I should add that I will never, ever forgive you if you stop. Although we can stop, if you, if you need to, we could—um. You don't need to. Right. Please don't stop. But I need you to touch me, all right, or one of us is going to die and it might not even be me this time."
Geralt blinks down at him, as ironic as his laugh. It's a blink that sees the entirety Jaskier's undoing and says: good. It isn’t.
Jaskier bares all his teeth. "Fuck off with that look, I finished that wight, or near enough. I could end you too."
“Hag,” he says. Pedant. Jaskier told him so. And then: "I am touching you." Thumb, callus, nipple: Jaskier jerks, weakly, and his dick jerks, and he whines again exactly as embarrassingly but at half volume.
"You monster." It comes out absolutely breathless, aspirated an octave too high. He sounds like a nimwit. "What you're doing, Geralt, is giving me some kind of new full-body chafing injury as a sex act you've just invented, and while I am personally always in favour of innovation, I am going to need your fucking hands. At a minimum."
"Hmm," Geralt agrees, much lower, and instead of doing anything that Jaskier wants, stops paying him any attention in order to work his own trousers off. Except, well, except then Geralt's fully naked and propped up on one arm on top of him, everything just sort of casually flexed, and:
"Wow, that's. Um.” He wets his lips. “Yes, please, thank you—will you— Honestly, will you just shut me up right now, why haven't you shut me up—have you even been trying, because—" Because he's supposed to be shutting up: he is shutting up. Because Geralt is the most fantastically competent person Jaskier has ever met, and so if he were trying—
"And if I like it?" Geralt says, very near Jaskier's mouth, an absolute disaster, Jaskier's ruined, financially, emotionally, physically, and then he just reaches in and fists Jaskier's bare cock. Once.
"Oh," Jaskier says. A hiccup in it. He bites the rest of what he might have said down between his teeth and swallows it, as gristly as organ meat. In his throat it turns into the kind of desperation that cannot be understood by the human body as anything but despair. All that gladness, transmuted. "Oh, you bastard. I'm going to cry on you after all, I think." It’s been coming all along.
"Try it and I'll put my shirt back on," Geralt says, with one more excruciating grind. Fair enough, so Jaskier chews down as hard as he can on all of that, too, one more time, and just—does not.
“You cocksucker,” Jaskier gasps, his throat burning again instead, as Geralt doesn’t stop touching him and touching him, as carefully and as forcefully as he’s ever been touched in his life. “You absolute whoreson piece of shit.” All this and Geralt let him think he was dead. He dares Geralt to be psychic right now. He just dares him.
Geralt’s eyes are on him, always on him, as serious and perhaps as sorry as if he is: as if he is, and he knows, and he has nothing to say.
Geralt strokes him slowly, heavily, just the heel of his hand, really—watching him so closely the whole time—and Jaskier makes the sound that's the next nearest thing to the sob trapped in his chest when he spills hopelessly all over himself. And Geralt's fingers. And Geralt's abdominal muscles, oh fuck. Oh, fuck, yes, those.
He’s shivering over it even once he’s done. And Geralt’s not stopped touching him, although his hand’s gone still. He’s obviously, murderously hard; enough so that it wrings another little sympathy-shudder out of Jaskier just to see, when he checks.
Breathing miserably hard with the effort of it, himself, Jaskier runs a thumb through the slick, riveted. He did that. Geralt’s muscles bunch up under his fingers, as though he’d like to strain into that touch and just… isn’t. And that’s— He’s not at his best, he’s already admitted it to himself, but that’s something. He meets Geralt’s eyes with his mouth half open to offer—something else. He doesn’t need to make the offer. Geralt returns to him the single most dangerous look Jaskier has ever received.
Jaskier has betrayed himself utterly. He can never un-spend what’s been spent. And Geralt, who notices everything, is—well. Even an idiot would have known. The clear space after an orgasm is so useful for horrible little realizations like that.
And it doesn’t even matter because, ah, right: devouring.
Geralt looks at him, the wreck of him, and it’s something consuming, something much more frightening than a hand-job in the dark, and Jaskier has time to get one deep breath, maybe, before it doesn’t matter whether he can go again or not. It doesn’t matter, because Geralt is on him and they’re going. Will he or nil he, horrible realization or not.
Again turns into right now, immediately, and Geralt’s fingers are wet, too, his huge square fingers in the mess that Jaskier’s made and they’re making a worse mess of him. And—oh well. Oh well, he’ll allow it, it’s happening. It has him ridiculously, hideously close to just giving up and sinking back into it and letting Geralt pull whatever he wants out of Jaskier's limp body with no fight at all.
Doesn’t matter.
All he seems able to do is run his palms across Geralt's back, up his shoulders, catch his fingers again in the hair at the back of Geralt's neck. This time—a miracle—the little tug works, or maybe it's the petting—maybe it's the knuckle-shaped bruises he must be leaving, even in a witcher, every time Geralt presses just so, so that Jaskier feels it straight up to the back of his throat—because all of a sudden it's not three fingers, it's four, and gods he's never going to find space in his lungs for air ever again. And Geralt goes all dark-eyed and pleased on top of him when he does it.
"Yeah," he says, unbidden, and Geralt crooks his fingers like he's laughing at him again, but very, very solemnly. It feels like being unmade. It feels like Geralt is tightening every string in him until it sings and then until it snaps. "Yes, oh, please."
"Have you," Geralt starts, not stopping the teeth-aching, amazing, agonizing, terrible thing that he is doing and Jaskier does not have the space in his head for that question, thanks.
"If you ask me, right now, if I have—hah!—if I've ever done something as stupid as taking a man to my bed before, then you have no idea what a stupid life I've led." He can feel Geralt’s cock, right there against the inside of his thigh, and the bastard isn’t doing a damned thing about it.
And Geralt huffs—it’s still not not a laugh—and like the blessing Jaskier's been cursing down from the heavens without hope ever since he walked out of Kerrack and never turned back, he gives Jaskier what he's begging for. Twists his wrist and moves on him and, Morrigan's sake, kisses him some more, and he's pulling him up, up, up, and there. Fucking—there. “Have you got any oil you would rather use, Jaskier, because the oil I have is for killing things.”
There’s no possible answer; he crushes down against Jaskier, his mouth against Jaskier’s—how is anyone supposed to answer a question under these conditions, impossible—and breathes him in and then just breathes. Jaskier really does not give a shit. He can’t be this hungry for it. Not and be getting it, too. Some new emptiness has yawned itself open inside of him, worse than the curse, impossible and horrible and desperate. Geralt wants to kiss him.
That's—Geralt has four fingers in him to the last knuckle, now, sword oil and sweat and salt, and that's still what Jaskier is stuck on. Geralt wants to kiss him. Geralt’s cock is wet against him and it’s still all he can think. He stops kissing Geralt, in fact. Reaches down to find Geralt's wrist and grips as tight as he can, just grounding himself. There’s nothing to be done about the fact that his face is still pressed into Geralt’s cheek, or the fact that he can feel Geralt’s deep, ragged breathing with his whole body. Like it’s his own. Like Geralt’s sweat is his own, too. Geralt grumbles in the back of his throat and pulls out anyway. Slow. His thumb presses just behind Jaskier's balls while he does it, almost sweetly, and the tiny sound they both make, together, would be damning if anyone heard.
Ignoring Jaskier’s desperate grip almost completely, Geralt takes himself in hand instead. "Oh," Jaskier gasps when he presses against him, "oh my fuck, what are you doing to me, you absolute murderer." Or he tries to. Geralt is working himself in, even slower, the stretch a strangeness even after the unbearable years of fingering, and now, now Jaskier knows that he's going to die from this. For real, for sure. He makes some kind of pathetic sigh that can only confirm his expiration and hitches himself closer.
Geralt's eyelashes flutter. He closes his eyes to feel his way in. He's maybe a million years old and he closes his eyes like he can't watch Jaskier's face and get his dick in at the same time, like he's holding on, and exactly like he hasn't made Jaskier come about three and a half times already. The searing pain in Jaskier's leg is still there, but it's nothing, nothing at all, just a spark, next to how it feels just to hold as carefully as he can and hang on and hang on and let Geralt fuck the life out of him.
And Geralt growls, and the muscles in his back shift for an incredible, breath-held second, and then he does.
Jaskier hangs the hell on.
Also, he probably yells.
“Ohh,” Jaskier breathes, finally, when he’s breathing at all again. He’s working on staying alive through the gentle fizzing that is just… all of him. He takes a second deep breath for the simple pleasure of filling his lungs. It’s been midnight long since. Belatedly, he considers that this liaison is not, perhaps, the most discrete he’s ever been. It might well be the straw that gets them thrown out of the Pickled Jenny for real. His throat’s gone raw again and it’s got nothing to do with screaming nightmares this time.
“All right?” Geralt mumbles, which is patently ridiculous of him to ask when he has his mouth in the crook of Jaskier’s neck the better to taste what must be the extremely satisfied scent of him. Jaskier is much, much better than all right. Literally everything aches where it doesn’t tingle. He could close his eyes and sleep for a decade. He could write a motherfucking aria in his sleep.
It’s like he’s thinking clearly for the first time in an entire year.
“No, actually,” Jaskier says anyway, and shoves at Geralt’s stupid chest until he can see Geralt’s stupid face. "What on earth were you—no, honestly, don't scowl at me, I know your type. I told you. Now you’ve got yours, you’re about to pass out on top of me and be gone in the morning, and I've got to know and you haven't explained yourself—what on earth were you thinking, going stomping off into the swamp without so much as a by-your-leave, and why would you come back to a—a bunch of bloodstains, I suppose, or whatever it is that you track out there, the smell of a bunch of bloodstains, and it was my blood, obviously, and so you thought, oh yes, Jaskier is fine? He's only gotten really bored at last and abandoned me?"
Geralt is scowling at him now, though, maybe blindsided by this reminder of whom exactly he’s taken to bed—but then, he has a witcher’s reflexes and sleeps exclusively with heinous bitches, so he recovers fast enough. He pulls back of his own accord.
“I went after the gods-damned hag-yard I was hunting for. I missed one. It happens.” He sounds as irritated as he ever sounds facing down some magistrate who’s decided not to pay. There’s a snap to his voice like this is ground that they've already covered. Only they haven't, not nearly to Jaskier's satisfaction. A less charitable bedmate might even be tempted to think that Geralt had distracted him on purpose. "There was no poison in your blood,” Geralt goes on, like he’s launching into a list of Jaskier’s past indiscretions. “I’ve seen you care for a wound; you’d bandaged it. And you'd ridden away. You couldn't have been hurt that badly. Not and ride off down the road under your own power like nothing had happened."
"Like nothing— Excuse you, I was extremely badly hurt."
"Yeah. Nicked by your own ordinary knife.” He flops back sulkily onto his own side of the bed, eyes closed. By virtue of the many fantastic amenities of this shitty, shitty inn, that’s still most of Jaskier's side of the bed, and he really is sweaty. He even smells of it, properly, now. "Hag wounds bleed, that's all. They've got kind of a... miasma. Not serious.”
"Oh, fuck you, honestly, yeah, he says, like you didn't basically leave me alone to die out there. That would have been very helpful information, only you weren't there to tell me, were you? I was riding for my life! I don't know how much fancy mutant blood a witcher's got, but I don't have so much that I can just afford to—to leak it out all over the place!"
Geralt’s huge, bare chest rises and falls, as calmly now as if Jaskier is yelling into the void about nothing at all. Maybe, from where he’s sitting, Jaskier is.
“Even a human would have clotted up in an hour if you'd just kept it bound.” Geralt doesn't open his eyes. It’s like he’s talking to himself. It’s like they’ve slid back ten months and Jaskier is some unwelcome stranger, gone pawing through a witcher’s things.
Only—this time, he’d thought Geralt had invited him. He really, truly had.
Geralt kissed him.
Geralt walked back in the door, Geralt sat down at Jaskier’s empty table, Geralt put his hands on Jaskier to hold back a hurt. Geralt was not planning to come back at all.
They both breathe exceedingly calmly, for a minute, on the exact same cadence. It’s the way Geralt breathes when he’s very, very angry at something he cannot fight. Jaskier, too, come to think of it, although really, he’s not known for his common sense when it comes to picking battles. He can taste it at the back of his throat: tears again, or something worse. A second and then a third terrible realization.
“I thought you were sorry,” Jaskier says, because he doesn’t know how to hold a silence, even at the expense of his own mortal heart. “I thought you were sorry, I thought you were—were afraid, maybe, for me, or—and now I can’t fucking tell.”
Without looking, Geralt reaches one huge hand over the bare inch between them and flicks Jaskier in the side of the head. Oh.
Oh, he’s not angry at Jaskier. "You told me," Geralt says, very slowly and clearly, in the tone of a stubborn man who is saying something very important and saying it once only, "that you had other options. You constantly told me.” His very steady breathing goes on uninterrupted for a long time in the silence after that. But Jaskier’s has all but stopped. He isn’t sure how to start it again.
“I thought that you'd chosen one,” Geralt says at last. And he leaves his hand there, tangled now: a strange, open, grounding sort of hold. There’s a fresh welt, just there on his palm, seared in the shape of a knife hilt.
"I'm so angry with you," Jaskier says. Maybe he shouldn’t be. Maybe they shouldn’t both be angry with Geralt at once. "After all this time? What kind of a coward do you really think I am?" Only there's been a lot of cold nights, when a shared bedroll might have been warmer. Or a fucking tent, come to think of it, but Geralt genuinely doesn't own one and Jaskier wouldn't know where to start. Maybe he is that angry.
“You should,” Geralt says anyway, like Jaskier’s said nothing at all. Like he didn’t hear Jaskier swallow it all down and then try to ask again, one final time. “You should—choose differently. While some of those people you’re running from are still alive to know it, bard.”
He punches Geralt as best as he can, as hard as he can.
He gets him in the soft part of his side, left entirely vulnerable. It must hurt, even disadvantaged as Jaskier is. Well, Jaskier was trying. But Geralt let him land the hit. Geralt breathes in one more time, sharp, through his nose—pissed at himself, definitely—but then he exhales through his mouth, mindfully, which Jaskier recognizes as a mindfulness technique typically used for not returning Jaskier’s punch. He turns his head to look over at Jaskier across their one shitty pillow.
"The very brave kind," Geralt says then, because he was listening after all. “Of coward,” he specifies. Of course. He’s always listening, and especially when Jaskier would most like to pretend he’s said nothing at all. There’s something there, under what’s almost a badly-timed joke. A whole mile of indulgence he's suddenly, impossibly, unrolled just for Jaskier, who’d only thought he was fighting for an inch.
And yet: Geralt keeps watching him for much too long to be entirely comfortable, except that it’s been an entire year of Geralt, watching, and Jaskier wondering what the fuck he’s looking at. No use asking, ever. Geralt nods like he’s made his own decision. "Brave,” Geralt says again, and this time it blooms hot under Jaskier’s ribs like a compliment. He tries not to take it as one anyway. Geralt sees the struggle and gives him that flicker of a grin again, the one Jaskier could swear he never uses, the one he in fact uses like a hook, and, oh, shit. “Extremely brave. My cock is massive. Wenches run screaming."
"I'm—" Jaskier sputters, speechless, fucking furious, actually— "You absolute—I—" He knows very well what he's choking on, this time. What business has Geralt being this way. What business has he ever had with Jaskier’s poor, trapped, fluttering pulse or with Jaskier at-fucking-all? Why can’t Jaskier ever shut the fuck up, and oh, worse shit, how will he ever stop before he says it, now that it’s almost been thought. Hold on. “Hold on, did you—back in the middle there, Geralt, did you really say you liked it?”
He starts to laugh at Jaskier again. Silently. Without moving, except for the smallest twist of his fingers where they’re anchored. It’s barely even a movement, it’s certainly a caress, and Jaskier has to either fall asleep immediately or let Geralt wring him dry one more time. The second option is unsurvivable; Jaskier chooses the first.
They’re well on the hunt again when spring finally, finally comes, and it finds them somewhere that isn’t a bog, gods be praised. This time, they’re trailing something a farmhand swears is a Skellegan giant. Actually—it might be full-blown summer, and Velen might just have been so shit that Jaskier couldn’t tell winter was over until they were shot of it. Anyway, the grass on the other side of that particular swamp is very green indeed. The smell of summer is in the trees, balsam and sunshine, and every brook is full of frog song as evening falls.
Geralt, on the evidence of half a chewed-up cow that he pokes at with his boot, says it’s probably a small rock troll they’re after. The morning will tell who’s right, but if Jaskier were a betting man—and he is—he’d put his money on a witcher over a farmer every time. He’s frankly more interested in the fact that the cow carcass is found in a field, a real one, with real, sweet-scented green hay that they have to stomp down to make a place for their camp. Once Geralt’s dragged half a cow out of the way, of course.
This much done, Jaskier perches himself by their campfire to pick a tune out, one that he’s been working on. It might even be good. Geralt is watching him with only partly disguised interest and, flatteringly, it’s not an interest edged with any disdain at all. It's a new melody, a completely new one, and it's nearly all there. That’s probably what Geralt's noticed; he’s a philistine, but he’s a philistine with very good hearing. Jaskier fills chords in, tries other progressions. He doesn't fuss at it, doesn't rush the words—that's how mistakes are made, and Jaskier knows because he's made them. But it's growing.
Roach, half asleep at her grazing, keeps a dozy ear on them both.
"It's a sad song?" Geralt asks, once Jaskier's worked the beginnings of it back and forth a few times and then begun again.
"No?” Jaskier hasn’t considered it, really. Maybe it started out that way. He grins—to himself, to Geralt, to the little sparks that pop and crackle against a backdrop of first stars. To the lute, who has never really done him wrong, even when perhaps he has treated her badly. “Just a song, I think,” he says, and plays it all the way through with panache. The cornflowers are blooming again, out here in the hills, as blue as any blue thing in the world.