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Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount de Lettenhove, is born with a fit of dramatics that portends the rest of his life. The midwives shoot anxious glances at each other as they clasp the Countess’s hands and flit around the end of the bed. The babe is turned around in the womb, coming out foot first, but it’s not the babe’s position that has them nervous.
There, on the bottom of the child’s foot, dark as a summer’s storm, is a soulmark. An inky splotch, still fuzzy where it rests under the skin, already cleaned of blood and examined before the babe can take his first breath.
It’s an inauspicious mark for an heir. A very inauspicious mark.
The babe cries for the first time in the hallway of the castle, already nestled in the crook of a midwife’s shaking arms as she descends the stairs, the rest of them following quickly behind. They don’t swaddle him; instead, he’s loosely wrapped in a square of linen, his feet kicking out as he struggles. His cries are high-pitched and squalling, searching for his mother’s warmth.
“He’s strong,” the Count says, pride in his voice as he leverages himself out of the armchair in his study. He comes over to examine the babe as if checking over a horse at the market, pleased until he gets a good look at the heel. The warm expression curdles on his face.
The eldest midwife rubs her hands together, eyes on the fuzzy mark. “It could mean any number of things, my lord. Any number of things.”
“A mark on the heel.” The Count’s voice is flat. They know what heelmarks mean. The child’s soulmate will be a wanderer, straying from place to place, never settling. They’ll be flighty at best and unfaithful at worst. Everyone’s thoughts turn to the recent news from the north. The Countess de Nyse had a lovely heelmark in the shape of a perfect little heart. They arrested her foreign husband for treason, loyalty to his country coming before loyalty to his love.
“Remove it,” the Count says, lips curling in disgust as he drops the crying babe’s foot.
“But, my lord—”
“Remove it—now. We’re lucky to have caught it so early. It’s not yet fully formed; the bond is still nascent. It can be broken without anyone being the wiser.”
And so, as dawn breaks in golden shards, a midwife delivers a wailing Julian Alfred Pankratz to his mother’s arms for the first time, a bandage wrapped tightly around his heel.
Geralt isn’t sure how long the damn thing has been there by the time he yanks off his glove and slams his hand palm-up on Kaer Morhen’s dining table. At first, he took it to be a bruise, and then a stain from repairing his leather armor, and then, rather desperately, he hoped it could be some grit that got buried under his skin after a hunt. But months have passed, and the splotch is still there. In fact, it’s more pronounced than ever, blue-black and nestled in the meat of his palm right below his index finger.
“Tell me I’m fucking crazy,” he growls as Eskel and Lambert lean over the table to stare at his hand.
“You’re fucking crazy,” Lambert says before getting a better look. “Now what the fuck is that?”
Eskel squints down at the blob, cocking his head to the side. “It kind of looks like a bird.”
Lambert pokes at it, as if expecting it to jump up from Geralt’s palm and bite. “More like a fleder.” At Geralt’s murderous stare, he continues. “Not that your soulmate would be one of those fucks. Surely—I mean, I don’t think fleders can even have soulmates—” He cuts off when Eskel elbows him firmly in the gut.
“Witchers don’t have soulmates,” he grinds out. Lambert looks like he’s about to protest, his own splotch a beauty mark near his eye. He came to the keep with it as a child, well before the Trials, and so wisely shuts his mouth before arguing his point—a rare win.
“Well, I’d start looking for other gainful employment then,” Eskel says, pulling off his medallion in a smooth motion. He rests the edge of it on the splotch. It hums, barely, reacting to some fucked up soul-Destiny-Chaos bullshit Geralt never signed up for. “Because that’s definitely a soulmark.”
Fuck.
Jaskier doesn’t have a soulmark, and he’s totally fine about it. Really. He did have one, for a handful of moments at birth; he has his mother’s stories and the deep, curved scar on his left heel to prove it. But there’s no hint of the tell-tale splotch on his skin, the mark that would match another’s perfectly if it were still there.
So there’s really nothing for it, except to tumble into bed and bare his heart to half the people he meets, hoping by sheer luck of numbers he’ll bump into someone and there will be a spark and he will just know. Some kind of magical sexy shackle will bind their souls together forevermore, and fill up the hole in his chest that matches the depression on his heel.
Today is not that day. He careens through the busy market, one hand holding up his unlaced trousers, the other reaching towards the wall of muscle standing at an herbalist’s stall. He grasps for the black cloak, turning himself around from the momentum to place Geralt in front of the murderous husband. He’d caught Jaskier underneath the candlemaker—his candlemaker, apparently, from the matching splotch on his fist and matching ring on his finger—while Jaskier was trying out some of her more intimate wares. The wax is still peeling off his back in chunks.
“I swear on my life and on my lute that I didn’t know she was married,” he says quickly into Geralt’s shoulder blades, panting after sprinting half across town. Geralt lets out an all-suffering sigh that Jaskier prefers to read as fond.
“Next town, I’m shackling you to the bed.” From his tone, he does not mean with the sexy metaphorical love shackles. The witcher grabs him by the collar and drags him back to their room at the inn before the husband can make his way through the market’s thick morning crowd. Jaskier goes willingly, ducking underneath Geralt’s cloak to hide.
Geralt does not shackle him to the bed or tie him to a post so he can return to the market in peace. Instead, he looks down to the circle of wax that flakes off in a generous radius around Jaskier, as if Jaskier had made it his personal mission to impersonate a snow cloud. “You’re shedding.”
Jaskier rubs the back of his neck—fuck, how’d he get wax in his hair—and makes a wavy gesture with his other hand. “The candlemaker wanted to test out her new wares, if you know what I mean. They ran a bit hotter than my usual preference, honestly.”
Another long-suffering sigh and ten minutes later, there’s a bath brought up to their room. Geralt warms it with Igni, and Jaskier pulls his undershirt off and yanks off his pants before jumping in. White blobs of wax float to the surface as he scrubs over his arms and shoulders and backside with a rag. But it’s his back that’s the issue. The wax is stubborn, clinging to his blessed back hair as if it never wants to let go.
Geralt must see some of the struggle because he pulls off his gloves, rolls up his sleeves, and comes back over to the tub with a knife. Before Jaskier can decide if he’s scared for his manhood or just unadvisably horny, Geralt falls onto a stool and places a firm hand on Jaskier’s shoulder, making him lean forward to expose the long line of his back. And then slowly, delicately, he uses the unsharpened spine of the blade to work away the remaining pieces of wax, coaxing them off one by one. When he reaches a stubborn spot, he rests the point of the blade gently on Jaskier’s skin and uses it to lever off a chunk of wax. It’s meditative. The only sound is the scrape of the blade, the sloshing of water, and their breaths. Geralt takes one breath for every two of Jaskier’s. Eventually, Geralt pulls back, wiping his knife across the leg of his pants before his fingers come to dance across several points of sensitive skin along Jaskier’s spine.
“Burns,” Geralt says simply, and without judgment, but with a tone that Jaskier knows means he won’t get out of being covered in some kind of burn cream, lest he get an infection and his fragile human body wastes away in the night. Geralt rummages through his packs for something human-safe, and Jaskier climbs out of the tub. He shakes like a dog, water sluicing off his body and onto the wooden floor, and then runs a towel over his limbs to dislodge the last of the loose wax. Geralt is already by the bed when he’s done dripping, a small jar in hand.
Jaskier submits to his fate and lies face down and cattywampus on the bed, tucking his head into his arms.
The salve is cold. Geralt massages it into the burns with a firm pressure, melting it into Jaskier’s skin. The burns are dotted in constellations along his back, over the curve of his waist. There’s a memorable one on the back of his thigh, where the wax had melted hot and dripped too quickly, burning as it slid down. Geralt follows the line with his thumb, tracing it from above his knee to just inside his inner thigh, right at the junction where the curve of his ass kisses his legs.
And isn’t that strange, now the salve suddenly feels hot on the skin, as hot as the wax had been. He crosses his ankles and buries his nose further into his elbow, thinking horrible, horrible thoughts. Like about rotfriends exploding, and harvesting drowner brains, and definitely not about Geralt’s finger sliding further north, slipping between his cleft and—
Wait.
Wait, wait, wait.
Wait a damn second.
He peers over the safe wall of his elbow, trying to catch it again and—there! Geralt closes the salve jar, and there, on the palm of one hand, underneath a thick silvery scar, is a blue-black splotch.
“Geralt!” Jaskier scrambles over the sheets to yank Geralt’s hand towards his face. Geralt, caught by surprise, goes off balance for a moment before plopping down on the side of the bed. The little jar of salve falls onto the floor and rolls off somewhere. “How have you kept this from me! You have a soulmark!”
Geralt grunts. It’s not a grunt that Jaskier knows how to translate, but Geralt doesn’t pull away. He does, however, attempt to close his fingers into a fist. Jaskier forces his index finger to stay open so he can still see the mark, turning Geralt’s hand this way and that, prodding at the scar over it. No doubt begotten in some long-ago monster hunt, making the blue splotch hazy around the edges. “It looks like a flower,” Jaskier says, amazed by it. He’s always loved finding his lover’s soulmarks, tracing the outlines of them, imagining them on his own heel.
“Looks like an onion to me.” Geralt tugs his hand away gently, and Jaskier lets him go, mind already spinning. A handmark means a soulmate who is clever with their hands. He imagines Geralt’s soulmate must be a swordsman, or perhaps a master armorer in one of the cities they frequent. Maybe it’s a gentle innkeeper with a soft spot for horses, who manages to get near enough to Roach to pet her nose and feed her sugar cubes.
His expression must be giving him away, because Geralt says, rudely and out of nowhere, “No songs.”
“But Geralt!” An entire song cycle’s worth of witcher romances are already blooming in his mind. They’d be a perfect fit for next year’s bardic competition circuit. He can see it now—fame, fortune, and Valdo eating his dust.
“No songs.” But his voice is almost teasing as he leans over to pick up the salve, so Jaskier knows he’s halfway won the battle. His fingers twitch over the sheets, playing invisible chords, his subconscious already hammering out lyrics.
“How long have you had it? Do you know them?”
Geralt straightens, shaking his head. His hair is no longer neatly pulled back; instead, silky strands have found their way out of the leather thong, framing his face and obscuring his expression. “Longer than I’ve known you.” He hesitates, just for half a breath. “And no.”
“No?” Jaskier sits up, uncaring about his nudity as he throws an arm around Geralt’s shoulders. “Well, you’re in luck, because you’re saddled with the nosiest gossip on the Continent. With me by your side, it’s only a matter of time before we find your flower’s match.”
“It’s an onion.” Geralt flexes his fingers and shakes off Jaskier’s arm. He stands up from the side of the bed, rolling the jar around in his palm almost absentmindedly before crouching to place it back into the pack. “Don’t waste your time, Jaskier. Romantic fairytales are for bards and babes, not witchers.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.” Geralt settles on the edge of the bed again, reaching over to tease out a chunk of wax still stuck in the curls at Jaskier’s nape. “I don’t care who my soulmate is.”
But there’s a small smile at the edge of Geralt’s mouth, as if he's entertaining the thought.
Geralt watches Jaskier flirt his way across the courtyard, his hands dancing across silk doublets and velvet dresses, his mouth pressing against hands and ears and cheeks. Like any good guard dog, Geralt stations himself by Jaskier’s lute case, growling at anyone who gets too close to the table he’s commandeered for the night. He nurses a glass or several of cloying, bitter red wine that sticks to his tongue like blood. Even after rinsing it down with water and ale, the bitterness doesn’t leave.
Jaskier bends over a seated woman, hair falling forward into his face as he whispers something into her ear. His hand curls on her freckled arm just below the blue velvet of her sleeve, fingers barely grazing her skin. His thumb rubs small circles at the juncture of her elbow. Geralt has long since learned the art of tuning out the bard’s flirting, and so he doesn’t catch what the man could have possibly said to make the woman look up with wide eyes towards Geralt, before turning her full attention back to the bard. She feeds him a grape, popping the fruit between Jaskier’s smiling lips.
He doesn’t know why Jaskier is still here, both in this courtyard and in Geralt’s life. As for the former, he could’ve bedded half the guests by now, taken them in some secluded area of the garden, or down by the river banks, or even back to their rooms at the inn. As for the latter, for over a decade, Jaskier has clung to his heels like mud, and Geralt can’t seem to shake him, no matter how hard he tries.
Admittedly, he no longer tries very hard at all. There’s no need to — it’s obvious from the bard’s flirtations that he’ll eventually fall into the arms of his soulmate, and there’s no way a poet will stick around with Geralt after finding their true Destiny-ordained muse.
The woman smiles and lifts her glass of wine to Jaskier’s lips. Jaskier takes the stem and tips back his head, taking a long drink. Geralt watches the bob of his throat. The goblet is placed down on the bench, immediately abandoned as the two of them go off to dance.
The wine is still bitter. The couple twirls around the courtyard, falling in line with a dozen other dancers. One day, maybe even tonight, Jaskier will slip under someone’s sheets and never leave.
And Geralt will be alone again.
There was a time when Geralt had foolishly thought maybe, maybe Jaskier was his soulmate. He knows Jaskier has a soulmark; half his pickup lines mention comparing marks with a waggle of his eyebrows. Geralt never went so far as to hope it was Jaskier— he doesn’t hope for a soulmate at all—but he also couldn’t come up with a better reason for the bard to be following him around, other than Jaskier was dropped on his head repeatedly as a young child.
But they bathe together, share rooms more often than not, and Geralt even dresses his wounds and wipes him down with rags whenever he falls unconscious (which is disturbingly frequent). And yet he has never seen Jaskier’s soulmark, can’t find it in any glanceable location. (Jaskier is covered in more hair than a bear, and it’s not as if Geralt has combed through the curls on his chest to find the small splotch.)
Geralt's mark has never been activated anyway. There’s never been that bright burst of warmth that supposedly happens when two soulmarks press against each other. So the notion faded, leaving Geralt with the conclusion that Jaskier is simply a few Gwent cards shy of a full deck and is poised to leave at any time.
Jaskier moves from dance partner to dance partner, and Geralt moves from pouring wine into a glass to taking pulls straight from the bottle. Jaskier kisses cheeks, cooing like a dove, face flushed with wine and attention. His lavender doublet is unbuttoned enough to reveal cream linen and the dark curls of chest hair. He takes a lord’s hand in a bow and presses his lips to the meat of the man’s palm. The angle is just right that Geralt can catch the dark soulmark there as Jaskier pulls away, laughing. The lord takes Jaskier’s arm and leads him into another dance, a drunk bastardization of a waltz, palm flat against Jaskier’s neck—soulmark against pulse. Geralt knows Jaskier’s pulse intimately now, can pick out the thrum of his heart in a crowded market, and he can hear it pick up now. The courtyard smells heady with lust and arousal and blooming summer flowers. There are petals scattered amongst the grass.
Geralt’s hand twitches around the neck of the bottle.
The woman from earlier, in recently-crushed blue velvet, wanders over holding another plate of grapes. She stands by where Geralt is slumped beside Jaskier’s lute case, watching the dance with bright eyes. Her heartbeat swells with the music as well, but there’s none of the sour fear from her that humans tend to have, and so when she settles down on the bench next to him, he refrains from growling and grumbling. Barely.
Her soulmark peeks out from under a ruched sleeve, a wobbly cloud shape just below her inner elbow.
“You’re lucky,” she says, her voice almost breathless. Her eyes trace a lavender swirl through the crowd before she drags them over to meet Geralt's, her gaze dark, doe-eyed, and serious.
He raises an eyebrow at her around another sip of wine, and she chews a grape thoughtfully. Her eyes return to Jaskier. “You’ll leave tomorrow. When he turns to follow you, half the hearts in town will be crushed under his heel.”
Jaskier is making a show of lifting and twirling his current dance partner, head thrown back in laughter. His skin glows amber in the firelight. For a moment, his eyes snag on Geralt’s. For a moment, Geralt can pretend Jaskier’s smile is meant only for him.
“I know,” he says, throat thick with wine. “I know how lucky I am.”
The woman nudges the grapes closer. Geralt plucks one; they’re just as bitter on his tongue.
As far as Jaskier’s plans go, this one is simple. There are only four integral components: research, gossip, sing, fuck. Not even necessarily in that order. He enjoys all these things, and so it’s no hardship for him to do them in the name of love.
Not his love, of course. Geralt’s Love-with-a-capital-L, his soulmate that’s somewhere out there, not yet knowing that they’re about to spend the rest of their days head-over-heels enamored with the sweetest grump alive, who saves kittens from trees and widows from werewolves.
Jaskier just has to find them first. And then convince Geralt in that order.
Of course, deep, deep, deeeeep down in Jaskier’s heart—which, frankly, isn’t that deep since he keeps it pinned neatly to his sleeve—he wishes he didn’t have to go carousing around the continent trying to find Geralt’s soulmate. This whole thing would be so much simpler if he were Geralt’s soulmate. He could cut out the middleman, go straight to convincing Geralt about the merits of having a soulmate, and then circle back to the ‘fuck’ part of the plan and spend a good long while there.
But they’ve spent years now all but glued to each other, and no metaphorical magical sexy love shackles have appeared around their wrists. Not to mention, besides some weird petting of his leg hair while recovering from some monster bite or another, Geralt has only shown completely platonic interest in him. And even calling it platonic interest is pushing it, since Geralt chokes on the word ‘friend.’
Hence the plan.
The next several years go a bit like this:
He’s pressed up against a wall, shoving his tongue down the local blacksmith’s throat, legs wrapped around the man’s firm waist. Jaskier paws at his chest. He plays this game often, comparing marks, and so the blacksmith isn’t surprised when Jaskier thumbs over the soulmark over his heart. It’s not a match—it’s too round, too large to be Geralt’s—and so he throws himself more passionately into the kiss. The blacksmith pulls back, panting against Jaskier’s lips. “Where’s yours?”
Jaskier winks. “Undress me and find out.”
He’s sitting in the Oxenfurt library. A late-season snowstorm traps everyone inside, thick globs of snow hitting the glass with little pat-pat-pats. He’s collected a stack of books tall enough to tower over his head when placed on the desk. They all have names like ‘Rare Soulmark Afflictions’ and ‘The Soulmark and You’ and ‘Strangest Soulmark Locations and Their Meanings.’ There are a few of his favorites in the pile, the ones he read as a teenager after his mother finally told him about the scar on his foot. They’re dense texts on soulmark theory. He tries to find any information on witchers with soulmarks, but the only scrap repeated through the texts is that witchers can’t form soulmarks. Which is just plain untrue, all things considered. A blatant lie, like how witchers don’t have feelings. He imagines where Geralt’s mark is on someone else. The hands maybe, for Geralt’s mastery over swords. Or the heart, for his strong moral code.
He’s on a pedestal in a meadow, surrounded by banners and pennants and tents. The summer bardic competition is in full swing, and he’s performing a new piece from his latest song cycle featuring witcher romances. He croons about a silent witcher who saves a monastery from bruxae and falls in love with a kind scribe who shares his soulmark. He’ll never play it in Geralt’s company, of course—mostly because he’s taken great liberties with the bruxae—but it helps his search if he can glaze the concept of a witcher with a bit of romance. The audience eats it up, and so do the judges. Eat shit, Valdo.
He’s leaning over the shoulder of a beautiful noblewoman. Her name is lovely and melodious and starts with a ‘C’, he’s sure of it. Catrina, or Ceycila, or Celine. Word in the courtyard is that she’s the township’s biggest gossip. He presses his lips to her ear, whispering that he needs her help. You see, he’s looking for a matching mark for his brooding friend in the corner, and he’s wondering if she knows anyone at the party who’s currently waiting for their own match. She glances over to Geralt before glancing back at him. Instead of clamming up with fear or confusion, like some do when they see Geralt, her face blooms with a knowing smile, and she pops a grape between his lips at his answering grin. She lets him ghost over the hazy cloud shape on her arm, and says she’ll spread the word before offering him a sip of her sweet wine and asking him to dance. She pulls him around the courtyard, presenting him to those without a match, and he dances the night away.
It goes on and on like this—endless streams of lovers, none who match Geralt’s unique mark. Endless streams of gossip that lead nowhere, endless hours of fruitless research, and he sings endlessly, song after song, smoothing Geralt’s rough-hewn edges into something softer, well-worn, hoping one day Geralt’s Love will pop out of the woodwork and appear.
He has got to be careful what he wishes for.
Jaskier has a wonderful imagination. He can conjure up all manner of horrors. Dangling over a pit of an unknown liquid, bubbling with what is—by the smell and the sounds—some kind of necrophage atrocity, is only the second worst thing he can think of.
The first worst thing he can think of is dangling over the aforementioned death pit while tied to his nemesis. Unfortunately, that is the exact predicament Jaskier finds himself in.
“It would have been a kindness if they hung us upside down; maybe then I wouldn’t gag on your ratty dead ends.” Jaskier spits out a thick black curl from his mouth for the third time.
“And with any luck, you would have lost consciousness, so I wouldn’t have to hear your incessant blabbering.” Yennefer pinches his arms again.
“Quit pinching me with your nasty claws, witch—who knows where those things have been. Keep your hands on your side of the death trap.” Her nails are long and sharp, and he’s pretty sure they’ve drawn blood multiple times now.
“Only if you stop humming that contrived song.”
“I sing when I’m nervous. Bite me.” She pinches him instead, and he hums louder.
In three words or less, Geralt’s soulmate is horrible. She’s incredibly rude, most definitely a bit evil, and whenever she appears, she makes Geralt smile like someone just dropped a wonderful present into his lap. That present is a gorgeous sorceress with beautiful tits and a penchant for casual nudity. Ugh.
He’s not even sure how he got into this mess in the first place. One moment, he was camping with Geralt; the next, Yennefer of Vengerberg, with her stupidly beautiful face, cuts a slit in reality and steps through, distressed in her Yennefer way, pretending nothing is wrong. And then suddenly there was another outrageously beautiful woman with magic hands, and Geralt had unsheathed a sword, and then another rip through reality, dizzying blackness, and a lovely trip to the bubbling necrophage death pit with the last person on the Continent he wants to be tied up against.
And no Geralt.
After what has to be the hundredth pinch, Jaskier feels the ropes around his wrists jerk. Just a tiny bit. As if one of the cords had snapped.
As if someone with claws just partially sawed through the rope.
“You crazy fucking bitch.” Jaskier jerks like a fish out of water. “You are not sacrificing me to this—this sludge!” The sludge groans in protest, which makes Jaskier jerk harder against the restraints. Oh, if he’s getting eaten by the melted necrophage goop pit, then so is Yennefer. It’s what she deserves for trying to sacrifice him.
Yennefer hisses. “Stop. Moving.”
“You started it!” He continues to swing, picking up momentum. The conveniently placed tree branch they’re tied to groans. The necrophage goop groans. There’s far, far too much groaning. He thinks he can even see a sludgey hand or two coming out of the pit.
Yennefer’s hands have gone wild, shifting in her bonds, frantically sawing both the rope and Jaskier’s delicate skin. Jaskier pitches his weight back against her, throwing them into a wild swing, and somehow, at the perfect apex of their pendulum, the rope gives away with a sharp crack, and they launch into the creepy woods next to the necrophage pit.
Jaskier is only sort of aware of a sword-fight-magic-battle going on nearby. He hit his head on at least three thick oak branches and a jutting piece of slate on the way down, so his thoughts are a bit hazy. But he definitely hears Geralt yelling something.
He manages to organize his body to do something other than lie prone, but by that time, the battle noises cease. Yay. Unfortunately, they’re closely followed by pleasurable moans and grunts that gradually increase in volume. There’s a brief moment where he considers feeding himself to the necrophage pit after all, but decides it's too much work to drag himself over there and slumps back down in the dirt. They’ll find him when they’re done doing…that.
Ugh. They’re so fucking perfect together it hurts.
Jaskier is upset, and Geralt doesn’t know how to fix it. He’s tried everything in his arsenal of Jaskier pick-me-ups that he’s accumulated over the years, and none of them seem to work.
When passing through Rinde, he picks up a sweet roll from the bakery Jaskier prefers, despite being short on coin. They split it, Geralt giving the bard the bigger piece. Jaskier eats it, but only after tearing it into minuscule pieces while lost in thought, his lips turned downward.
He makes sure to fuss when he catches Jaskier sneaking Roach sugar cubes and apple slices. For some reason, this makes Jaskier smile and sneak more sugar cubes to Roach in retaliation. Recently, it’s had the opposite effect. Roach bites Geralt for it, since she’s getting fewer treats than normal.
He places their bedrolls on the same side of the fire, facing Jaskier while he sleeps. This usually results in waking up with a face full of brown hair and an arm full of bard, Jaskier migrating towards him in sleep. Now, however, he wakes up with a view of Jaskier’s curled spine, his arms crossed over his chest.
In taverns, he encourages Jaskier to go and enjoy someone else’s company for the night. He can’t even recall the last time Jaskier had entertained a flirtation, let alone the last time Geralt had to defend the man from an angry spouse. Jaskier always seems so bright in the company of others, but at Geralt’s subtle suggestions that he go off with some farmer or barmaid, Jaskier scowls down into his ale. Or worse, silently leaves the table and climbs the stairs to their room.
Geralt compliments his singing one evening around the fire, and the bard puts away his lute.
Geralt offers to take him along on contracts, only for Jaskier to refuse.
Geralt even tries asking him what’s wrong—with words—only for Jaskier to look at him like he was part selkimore. His smile didn’t reach his eyes when he told Geralt that everything was fine.
And now Geralt’s getting desperate. He wants whatever this is between them to end. They spend a majority of their days and nights less than a few feet away from each other, yet the rift between them feels impossible to cross. He wants Jaskier back, Jaskier with all of his endless chattering and casual touches and soft smiles over campfires. He doesn’t know when he began to lose him, when Jaskier started slipping away. He doesn’t know how to stop it.
There’s one more thing he can try. Something that risks showing his hand a bit too much. But he’s a desperate man.
The tavern is raucous and dim, the light from the fireplace not quite reaching the corner where they’ve settled in. Jaskier taps out notes on the table with one hand, scribbling things down in his journal with the other. He hasn’t so much as glanced at Geralt since the barmaid plopped two bowls of stew in front of them.
Now or never.
Geralt clears his throat. Jaskier glances up, a brief shock of blue, before glancing back down. Geralt fidgets in his seat. Geralt takes a long sip of ale. Geralt bites back his stupid pride. “I uh. I was wondering—”
Jaskier blinks up at him. “Yes?”
“Well, it’s almost winter and. It’s a cold year. Colder than usual. I—I don’t think I’ll make it to the pass before it snows in.” It’s a lie, but not that much of one. It is pretty fucking cold.
Jaskier frowns, covering Geralt’s hand with his own and squeezing once before pulling back. Geralt feels like a thirsty man who stumbled across a cold mountain spring.
Jaskier speaks down at his journal. “I’m so sorry. I know how much going home means to you.”
Geralt hums. Seeing his brothers does mean a lot to him, but Jaskier means more. He shifts again in his seat. “I—could I stay in Oxenfurt? With you?” He tries to make it sound casual, and fails miserably.
Jaskier looks back up, stunned. It’s the face that Geralt privately calls Jaskier’s crossroads face. It’s at the intersection of all of Jaskier’s emotions. From here, Jaskier could split into a sunshine smile or a horrible scowl. He could squawk or laugh or cry or yell.
Or, worse, his expression could shutter entirely, his face closing off into impassivity. Like it does now. Geralt’s stomach sinks.
“I’m sorry, Geralt.” And truly, he does seem sorry. He casts his eyes down at his hands, then sweeps them across the room. “I accepted a position at court this winter. I won’t be in Oxenfurt.” He tugs at his fingers, a nervous habit. “Maybe...maybe you could ask Yennefer?”
Fuck.
Geralt hums in response, not trusting his words. Jaskier stands from the table and floats over to the bar. Geralt is so focused on tracing the slump of Jaskier’s shoulders that he doesn’t even notice the creepy old lady now sitting at the table until she coughs.
Geralt does not startle, because he is a witcher.
“I could help you, for a fee.” She smiles. It’s not a kind smile. Geralt shouldn’t be cowed, but he is, in fact, a bit cowed. Her fingers work deftly with a quartet of small needles, turning the heel of a finely knit sock.
“I don’t need any help.” There are little yellow flowers on the ribbed cuff of the sock. The wool sticks to the dirty bar table. The old lady doesn’t seem to care.
The woman drops her knitting entirely and holds out her hand. Geralt thinks she’s asking for coin, until she scoffs and grabs his hand with more strength than she should possess. She rips open his fist and points at his soulmark with a gnarled finger. “I can help with this. I see you’ve already tried removing it, with no luck. Well, you see, I’m a professional. I’ve broken even the most stubborn marks. For a modest fee, I can sever you from the shackles of Destiny, witcher.”
Jaskier returns, another tankard of ale in his hands. He slams it down on the table with an uncharacteristic amount of anger towards old wise women. His expression has gone from regretful to stormy. “That’s not how it works.”
The old lady squints, picking up her knitting again, working the stitches without looking. “Oh? And you’re an expert, then, boy? What do you know about my trade?”
“I know you can’t get rid of a soulmark after it’s set in. You have to sever it when it’s still nascent. And more to the point, I know you shouldn’t try to fuck with Destiny at all.”
The old lady looks at Jaskier and tsks. “Yes, yes, you would know that.”
“I also know that you’re a desperate old woman preying on those more desperate to make a bit of coin. I’ve met your kind before, many times. Go peddle your tricks somewhere else, they’re not welcome here.”
The old woman stares poisonously at Jaskier. Jaskier stares back with enough fury that it could light kindling. The old woman snatches up her knitting and retreats, and Jaskier slides back into his seat, downing his ale. He shakes his head, still smelling of anger.
“What was that about?” Geralt says, watching as the old woman ducks out of the tavern and into the night.
“Scamming hedge witches,” Jaskier sneers. Geralt watches as Jaskier buries his incandescent anger under layers of exhaustion. “It’s not uncommon for nobles to have soulmarks removed if a local witch deems it inauspicious based on superstitious nonsense. My father liked to keep some employed in the local towns—I was born with an ‘inauspicious mark’, and my father had it removed immediately. He hired hedge witches every year to make sure it never returned. What they do is mostly a heaping crock of bullshit meant to placate the wealthy and rob the desperate.”
Geralt thinks he can hear himself blink, as he reorganizes his entire mental model of Jaskier. “Inauspicious?”
Jaskier waves a hand around as if batting away flies. “You know, a mark in a disreputable location is bad for marriage prospects. It’s all about image. Noble marriages are rarely soul matches, and so soulmates can be a particular sticking point. No mark, no issues.”
“So.” Geralt has no idea how to neatly segue into the question that his mind is circling like a pack of vultures. “So, you don’t have a soulmark?”
Jaskier snorts and shakes his head. The hardness in his eyes turns into something aching, and he looks down at Geralt’s hand, still lying on the table where the witch dropped it. “It’s for the best. Who’d want to be tied down to little ol’ me?”
There’s a twinge in Geralt’s chest. Like heartburn. “Jaskier—”
But Jaskier is pushing himself up from the table, gathering his journal. “I’m heading to bed.” He jams his thumb behind his shoulder, towards the stairs. “Don’t get into any more trouble without me.”
Geralt watches as he retreats, that terrible sinking feeling still lodged in his gut.
Years of worry and desperation sharpen into a fear keen enough to maim. He struggles in the gray space they occupy, watching as Jaskier slowly slips away from him, unable to do anything to stop it.
Geralt snaps at Caingorn. He yearns for black and white, for an easy resolution or a clean break. And so, on the mountain, buoyed by anger and fear, he breaks it himself.
It shouldn’t be this hard to find somewhere to brood alone in Kaer Morhen. The place is a ruin, for fucks sake. He should be able to duck underneath a slab of rubble and rot away there, unknown for the rest of his days. But no matter where he wanders, there’s always someone’s eyes trained on him, or someone ‘just passing by’, or someone popping in to see if Jaskier needs anything.
What Jaskier needs is peace and quiet and a half-decent apology from a certain White Wolf.
Geralt is Geralt-ing again, silent unless his life depends on it, or if Yennefer enters the room, or if Ciri does something adorable (which is nearly always), or if Eskel and Lambert make a dirty joke, or—
Point being, he’s only brooding and awkward and silent around Jaskier, and so aside from cooking and cleaning and eating, Jaskier tries to keep himself scarce.
Except wandering the keep has an unusually high probability of bumping into another witcher, who will happily drag him to Geralt as if he’s a lost dog, where they’ll be forced to make stilted conversation until they can make an excuse to bolt off in opposite directions.
That leaves the safety of his room, which is small and freezing. Jaskier takes it upon himself to pilfer any and every abandoned blanket and fur he can find, because like hell he’s starting a fire in a room the size of a generous coffin. Now his room is more like a nest of furs that spills from his bed to the stone floor. Books peek out from under blankets. The keep has a decent, if dusty, library—he sneaks books back to his room, reading them during the day while the light is still bright enough to see by.
There’s one place he still seeks regularly. The hot springs below the keep, where he can bob around every morning in the hottest pool he can manage, until the ice thaws from his bones and his joints no longer feel fit to snap. He massages his stiff fingers and gently cleans the burn on his hand, which has started to heal up nicely—if Jaskier ignores the thick gnarl of scar tissue that makes it difficult to bend his fingers—and the oozing and weeping and scabbing blisters.
He’s currently examining said blisters when the water of the pool dips and splashes, and he realizes he’s no longer alone. He shoves his hand under the water, holding in the hiss from the sting, as Lambert and Eskel pointedly pretend not to want to talk to him. He pointedly pretends to ignore them. It goes on like this for a few tense minutes before Lambert sighs and comes splashing over.
“Listen, I know it’s rude or whatever, but we’re dying to know. Where is it?”
Jaskier blinks. “Where’s what?”
Lambert makes a gesture that seems to encompass Jaskier’s entirety, as if that explains anything. “The mark.”
Jaskier blinks again.
Eskel steps forward, shoving Lambert to the side. He holds out a hand placatingly, voice teasing. “We have a bet on where Geralt’s mark is on you. Closest answer gets a hundred orens and exclusive teasing rights for two winters.” He wiggles two fingers, grinning.
Jaskier’s stomach sours. He steps back, back flush with the wall of the pool. “You’ve got it wrong—”
Lambert has a shit-eating grin, leaning forward to try and see a mark that doesn’t exist. “I think it’s a matching hand mark, but the big guy here thinks it’ll be on the back of your neck or some romantic horseshit like that.”
The pool suddenly feels too hot. He squirms, holding his hands in front of him as if he can shove the two of them to the other side of the pool and end this mortifying conversation. “Listen,” and, gods, his voice does not quaver. “You have it wrong. I don’t have a soulmark, and I certainly don’t have Geralt’s. If you’re looking for a chance to win that bet, maybe try accosting the terrifying sorceress upstairs.”
Lambert's face screws up. “No, that can’t be right. The witch isn’t--”
But then both witchers seem to notice the unwrapped oozing, weeping, scab-encrusted burn on Jaskier’s hand, which admittedly is healing nicely but still looks like absolute shit. Their brows furrow in twin expressions of confusion.
Jaskier swallows and shoves his hands back under the water before realizing how incredibly suspicious that seems. Fuck. In for a copper, in for a crown. If he’s already going to look suspicious, he might as well turn tail and run. With a half-baked excuse, he clambers out of the pool, throws on his clothes, and all but sprints back to his rooms.
He’s not surprised when, later that evening, Geralt opens the door to his room. Jaskier is wary, but he’s not surprised. The witcher wavers in the doorway like he isn’t sure if he’s allowed in. Or, perhaps, as if he’s calculating if Jaskier has noticed him and, if so, if he still has time to run away.
The diffused evening light from the little window is still enough to read by, and so Jaskier is curled up in the furs underneath it, sitting on the floor with his back against the cool stone of the keep. He pages absentmindedly through a bestiary on vampires. The leather tome is big enough to take up the entirety of his lap, and the script small enough to squint at, but Jaskier is only lingering on the pictures.
Oh, look, a bruxa ripping out the still-beating heart of a young lad. Pleasant.
Geralt is still in the doorway, bathed in residual golden light. He must realize Jaskier has no plans to invite him in any further, and so he just takes slow, halting steps forward until he’s knelt on the other side of the massive tome, looking at upside-down pictures.
After a moment of quiet page flipping, Geralt points at a particularly anatomical drawing of an Alp. “I traced that one when I was a trainee. Kept it under my pillow.”
Jaskier closes the tome with a pleasing thump and a less pleasing cloud of dust. The motes drift in the light, settling on the floor. “What do you want, Geralt?”
Geralt fidgets with his hands, rubbing a thumb across the center of his palm. He glances at the empty fireplace, the full stack of firewood in the corner. “It’s cold in here.”
“It’s cold everywhere here, except for the hot springs.”
Geralt winces in a way that confirms Jaskier’s suspicions that the brothers went straight from the hot springs to hound him. “I told them not to ask you about it.” Geralt seems—well, sad isn’t the right word. Dejected, maybe. He looks down at his flexing hands. “They thought I was taking the piss so that they couldn’t win their bet.” He finally sits down, crossing his legs, elbows on his knees, looking anywhere but Jaskier, and drums his fingers on the furs. It’s a nervous habit Jaskier has never seen him employ. His words come out halting and strained. “They—I—witchers aren’t meant to have soulmarks. The trials are supposed to ensure that. Our Path is a solitary one. It’s…difficult to understand why someone would willingly walk it alongside us unless there’s some magic Destiny bullshit involved.” He swallows. “My brothers just…assumed.”
Jaskier holds the tome up to his chest like a shield. “And you never corrected them?”
Geralt shrugs, shaking his head minutely. Something flashes across his expression. “I tried, early on.”
The tome smells like foxing and desiccated leather and a thousand-year-old dirt. “What about Yenenfer?”
Geralt’s head shoots up, his eyebrows knitting together in a gorgeous swoop. “What does Yen have to do with anything?”
Jaskier does something that can only be described as a hysterical snort, regretting it when he inhales a lungful of bestiary that sets off a coughing fit.“I assumed your brothers knew she was your soulmate. I didn’t know you two were keeping it a secret.”
Three deep furrows formed above Geralt’s brow. “Yen is not my soulmate.”
“Yes, she is?” Jaskier doesn’t mean for the end of that statement to turn up into a question. The tome digs into his thighs.
“No, Jaskier, she’s not.”
Jaskier thinks of how they’re like the night sky and the moon, two perfect pieces made to slot together. “But—”
“I think I would know.”
“Are you sure? Because historically there have been many times where you didn’t know something that should have been obvious, and—”
“Jaskier,” Geralt’s voice is calm. “Yen is…a friend. I’ve never met my soulmate.”
“Oh.” Jaskier lets the book fall, the cover thumping down onto his thighs. “Well, I haven’t ever met your soulmate either. Though truthfully, I stopped looking in earnest after Rinde. I was so sure—”
“Jaskier—”
“I could start looking again, of course. But I suspect I’ve lost years of progress on the image-rehabilitation front after a few of my more… recent songs. No matter.”
“Jaskier,” Geralt repeats, and the expression on his face is…fond. Or perhaps murderous. Or perhaps he ate bad stew for lunch. “I’ve told you, I don’t care who they are.”
Jaskier sniffs. “You’ve tried to remove it.” The silver scar layered over the mark winks in the dying light. “You have to care a bit.”
If Jaskier hadn't spent more than two decades pining after this idiot, he would have missed Geralt’s flinch. “That wasn’t because of them.” He shifts, his gaze falling away from Jaskier again. “No one should be saddled with a witcher just because Destiny is a bitch.” He lets out a long sigh, ruffling strands of his hair that fall into his face. “Managed to entangle myself up in it anyway.”
Jaskier makes an aborted movement with his hands, stuck between wanting to reach out in comfort and wanting to disappear through the floor. His hands drop and skitter uselessly over the tome instead.
“Can I—” Geralt swallows, looking at the bandaged hand. “Can I see?”
Jaskier holds out his hand. If it shakes, Jaskier blames it on the damn cold.
Geralt’s fingers are warm and sure. He unties the bandages, unwinding the gauze with fluid movements. He looks down at the wound with downturned lips, cradling Jaskier’s hand in his palm like it’s a dying bird, and Geralt is a child facing the concept of death for the first time. It’s not a look that inspires much hope in Jaskier’s ability to have a full range of motion again.
“Stay here,” Geralt says, rising from the floor with an ease that makes Jaskier’s joints ache. He leaves the room only for a moment before returning with his pack of human-grade medical supplies. It’s the same one he kept stocked for Jaskier on the Path, the one he likely uses for Ciri now. Sitting back down in front of Jaskier, he spills the contents of the bag out onto the furs. His fingers skim over the pile before grabbing the little jar of burn salve. It’s in the same stout green ceramic pot it’s always been in, the one that Jaskier picked up for Geralt on a whim.
The golden light turns ruddy with dusk, but Geralt doesn't try to light a candle. The salve smells gentle, like honey and chamomile, and Geralt’s fingers are similarly gentle as he rubs it into the wounds, massaging his scarred fingers.
There’s a quality to Geralt’s silence, a heaviness. A calm-before-the-storm kind of absence in the air. He lets out a hitched breath. “I’m sorry, Jask,” he says, his voice as soft as his touch. “I fucked up.”
“You did,” Jaskier agrees, watching as Geralt thumbs over his wrist.
“You didn’t deserve that. Any of it.”
“I didn’t,” Jaskier agrees again, “but you were angry.”
Geralt purses his lips. He examines one of the blisters that curls around to the back of Jaskier’s hand. “No, I was scared.” He rubs salve over the wound before curling his hand down to cup Jaskier’s scarred knuckles. His eyes are sad, his smile is wry. “Spent a lot of time alone afterward; had a lot of time to think. I thought…It felt like you were slipping away. I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I kept thinking I’d wake up one day and you would be gone. It was…easier to stomach you leaving my side if it was because I was an ass.”
“And a bastard.” Jaskier’s voice comes out quieter than he expected.
“And a bastard,” Geralt says, solemn. “And a coward. I was terrified of losing you, but more than that, I was terrified that I’d lose you because I wasn’t…enough. The anger was simpler, but it wasn’t true. I’ve regretted it every day since.”
Jaskier looks down to where Geralt cradles his injured hand between both of his own. He brings up his free hand and rests it on Geralt’s wrist. Geralt’s normally steady pulse pounds under his fingertips. “Who are you and what have you done with my witcher? When did you get so verbose?”
“Thank Ciri,” Geralt isn’t smiling, but it’s a near thing. He hesitates for a moment, his hands curling to cup Jaskier’s. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
“Are you planning on doing it again anytime in the next century?”
Geralt tenses, his answer immediate and forceful. “No!” And then he slumps. “No, Jask. Never.”
“Okay. Well, then I forgive you.”
Geralt snaps his head up. “What?”
“I forgive you.”
Geralt’s pulse races. “You don’t have to. I know I was an ass, and a bastard, and a coward, and—”
“Hey, now.” Jaskier nudges Geralt’s knee with his own. “That’s my best friend you’re talking about. I won’t stand to hear this kind of slander.” He squeezes Geralt’s wrist. “I didn’t deserve what you said on the mountain, but you didn’t deserve doing that to yourself either, Geralt. I’ve been by your side for twenty years. I’ll likely stay by your side until my bones grind down to dust. You’ll always be enough for me.”
Geralt’s eyes shine with the last of the light. “You are—that to me too. My friend.”
And fuck the burn salve and the irreplaceable vampire tome, Jaskier is leaping up from the furs and pulling Geralt into a fierce hug. Geralt’s hesitant hands come up to circle Jaskier, fingers splayed across his back. He tucks his head to rest in the crook of Jaskier’s shoulder, his eyelashes tickling Jaskier’s neck. They stay like that for a long time, until the dust motes start up a nighttime waltz in the moonlight.
There’s no fire lit in the hearth, yet for the first time in years, Jaskier feels warm.
Yennefer’s cottage looks like something out of a fairytale.
“What poor, unsuspecting family did you swindle this from?” Jaskier mutters to Yennefer, stepping out of the portal and around Geralt’s slumped, moaning body. There was a lot of turbulence. “Did you turn them all into doves? Or perhaps you chopped them into little pieces and used them to fertilize the garden?”
“Shut it, bard, before I turn you into fertilizer.”
“Sheesh, tough crowd. Someone woke up on the wrong side of the portal today.”
“I think it’s lovely,” Ciri says, twirling through the rows of herbs and flowers. A vegetable garden along the perimeter is bursting with impossible amounts of ripe produce.
The interior of the cottage is just as cozy. And surprisingly colorful, considering Yennefer’s usual monotone wardrobe. Rich rugs carpet the wooden floors, jewel tone pillows are scattered across brocade armchairs and couches. There are small jars filled with herbs and big jars filled with all manner of spell-crafting components, lined up neatly on little shelves. Leatherbound tomes recline in stacks along walls, and ceramic pots filled with delicate, exotic flowers sit on windowsills. The windows themselves are made of diamond-paned glass, dotted through with the occasional brightly colored panel that throws rainbows of color across the entire house.
It is, in a word, idyllic.
Somewhere in the garden, Geralt collapses onto the grass and retches.
Home sweet home.
There are three bedrooms. Ciri gets her own, of course, complete with a fancy desk and bookshelves laden with tomes and a magic wardrobe that conjures endless outfits for a growing witcher-princess. Jaskier expects to get a room to himself as well—surely Geralt will bunk in Yennefer’s room down the hall. Yet he’s pleasantly surprised when he pads into the room after his bath to find a white-haired lump already asleep under the quilts. Without opening his eyes, Geralt lifts the edge of the blanket and shifts over. Jaskier crawls into the hollow next to him, curling towards his warmth.
The days pass in a lovely blur, Ciri at the center of them. Geralt teaches her sword forms and footwork and all kinds of witchering in the field behind the house, the wildflowers stamped flat by countless hours of circling. The carefully arranged herb jars soon end up scattered throughout the cottage as Yennefer instructs Ciri on how to control her Chaos best. Jaskier reads dry passages of history to her while lounging in the garden, and less-dry poems while curled up next to the fire, and teaches her courtly manners and how to play the lute when the opportunity arises. After dinner, if the mood is bright and the wine is flowing, he makes Geralt punch a beat on a table while he dances around the room, leading Ciri in waltzes.
It’s a good life. A great life, in fact. Far better than anything he could have dreamed of just a handful of years ago.
It’s just. Well. Geralt is acting strange.
Ever since they got burn salve all over that one-of-a-kind, priceless bestiary penned by some famous someone or another, Geralt has clung to Jaskier’s side. He’s there when Jaskier wakes up, nose pressed to Jaskier's shoulder. He sits in the kitchen, sharpening knives while Jaskier attempts to bake with varying degrees of success. He slips onto the couch when Jaskier reads poetry to Ciri, picking up Jaskier’s legs only to deposit them into his lap once he’s settled on the other end of the settee. And every night, Geralt is there in Jaskier’s room. In their room. Not once has Jaskier caught wind of Yennefer and Geralt making the beast with two backs, doing the horizontal tango, sticking a sexy sausage in a sorceress’s pantry. They don’t even fuck each other with just eye contact anymore. It’s maddening. Jaskier doesn’t know what to make of it.
One night, he even presses the flat of a little silver butter knife to Geralt’s arm while he’s sleeping—because surely, despite all evidence to the contrary, this kind, domestic, verbose-in-comparison version of Geralt is some kind of doppler. But his skin is smooth and burn-free when Jaskier pulls it away, and Geralt continues to sleep with adorable little snores and all. It’s a feat in itself, because he’s not sure if he’s ever seen Geralt sleep this deeply.
He corners Yennefer in her laboratory, grabbing the perpetual wine bottle she always has on her desk and pouring himself a liberal glass. “What in the fuck is going on?”
Yennefer doesn’t look up from the tome she’s copying from. “Other than your whining ruining my peaceful evening, you mean?”
Jaskier throws back the glass of wine. “With Geralt. He’s not acting like himself. He’s talking. He’s smiling. He’s—he’s handsy.”
Yennfer looks at him for a moment, taking in his manic expression, and then opens her mouth to say something that gets cut off by a wild fit of cackling. She laughs loud enough and long enough that it dissolves into snorting. Dropping her head down into her hands, she takes a moment to compose herself, only for her composure to break when she looks up at Jaskier again, points at whatever expression is on his face, and bursts into fresh peals of laughter. Jaskier is forced to retreat.
He’s scrubbing dishes when it falls into place. The last vestiges of sunlight are filtering through the window above the sink, all gold light and violet shadows. There’s a ridiculous amount of dishes—Ciri wanted to make dinner that night, and somehow managed to use up every plate, pot, and pan in the process. Normally, Yennefer would clean the dishes with a snap of her fingers, but she tugged Ciri out into the garden as soon as they finished eating, not wanting to miss a rare night-blooming flower opening its buds for the first time. Honestly, Jaskier doesn’t mind doing the dishes—he has nothing but time these days, and nothing better to do. Geralt’s sleeves are rolled up, a rag in hand, and he diligently dries the dishes Jaskier passes to him, placing them neatly back on the shelves when he’s done.
It’s an otherwise innocuous motion. He turns to pass another plate to Geralt, and Geralt turns to grab it. But there must be something about the angle, because suddenly Jaskier only has eyes for how delicate Geralt’s face seems when carved by the light of sunset. Can only see the gentle pink of his lips, the soft curve of his ear, the sloping arch of his cheek. He’s no stranger to reveling in Geralt’s beauty. He’s done it often. He’s practically made an art form of it, would have a master's in it if possible. What’s different now is the tension between them as his eyes linger, a string pulled taught. Like Geralt has finally grasped the other end of the rope Jaskier has been tossing to him for decades.
He watches, transfixed, as Geralt’s pupils widen ever so slightly.
Slowly, like he’s telegraphing a strike with his sword, Geralt brings up a knuckle to curl over the ridge of Jaskier’s cheek, wiping away a stray drop of water. His hand smells like the rosemary sprigs he’d stripped while Ciri cooked. Geralt’s knuckle traces a path down from cheek to jaw, his eyes thin bands of gold eclipsed by black. And maybe he’s the one who leans forward, or maybe Jaskier is the one who steps closer, but either way their mouths press together, and they’re kissing.
It’s soft, almost unbearably tender, free of any of the desperation that usually found its way into Jaskier’s fantasies of this moment. It’s as if they had the rest of their lives to dedicate to this single kiss. Geralt’s hand comes to rest on Jaskier’s neck, palm against pulse. Jaskier’s own hand, wet with suds, tangles into the soft hairs at Geralt’s nape. They’re both still gripping the plate until they’re not, and it clatters back into the sink, their fingers entwining instead.
They come up for air eventually, soft breaths against lips, nose to nose, forehead to forehead. Ciri’s clear, delighted laugh comes from far away in the garden. There’s a summer’s worth of insects warming up for their nighttime orchestra.
“Is this where we say something grand?” Jaskier whispers against Geralt’s mouth.
“You’re the poet,” Geralt says before capturing Jaskier in another slow kiss.
They kiss in the kitchen until surely those rare night-blooming flowers have well and truly bloomed. Until the kissing turns into a swaying embrace where they’re simply holding each other. Jaskier pets a thumb absentmindedly across Geralt’s palm. Geralt hums where he’s pressed up against Jaskier’s neck, a content rumble that shakes Jaskier to his toes.
“Never cared who they are,” Geralt says, and Jaskier’s blissed-out mind struggles to comprehend for a moment until Geralt flexes his palm in Jaskier’s hand, his palm with the soulmark. “Never wanted to know. Didn’t need Destiny to tell me who to point my compass towards, when it’s always been fixed to you.”
“Who’s the poet now?” Jaskier asks, feeling faint.
He can feel Geralt’s grin against his skin. “You were taking too long.”
Summer bleeds into autumn. Jaskier kneels in the garden, pulling up onions and shallots. The curved gathering basket on the grass next to him is laden with them, their foliage brown and crisp. There’s a repetitive thunk of training swords from behind the cottage, Geralt’s low voice entwining with Ciri’s jeers. Yennefer is reclining on the garden bench behind Jaskier, flipping casually through a leather journal.
Until suddenly she’s not. Jaskier’s only warning is the shuffle of skirts against grass before claws grasp his bare ankle.
“What’s this?” She asks, gripping his foot.
“Uh,” Jaskier says, gripping a shallot. Just in case he needs an impromptu bludgeon. “My foot.”
She groans. “No, this.” And jabs her finger at the back edge of his heel, where there’s a depressed scar where a soulmark should be.
“A scar on my foot.” Jaskier’s tone is only a bit frosty.
“It’s a magic scar,” Yennefer says, enunciating her words as if he were slow on the uptake. She pulls up on his ankle to examine it closer. Jaskier yelps and rebalances, barely preventing himself from faceplanting into the dirt.
“Yes, well.” Jaskier tries to infuse his voice with as much haughty nobility as he’s able, considering he’s sweaty and covered in dirt and smelling like all the best parts of soup. “It was where my soulmark was, for an hour after I was born and no longer.”
For some reason, he expects Yennefer to drop it. She does not. In fact, she doesn’t even drop his foot. Instead, she’s gripping him by the ankles and (undoubtedly with the aid of magic) dragging him through the garden and into her laboratory, utterly deaf to Jaskier’s cries of help. The whole way, she grumbles sentences under her breath about scamming hedge witches and entitled pricks who think they can fuck around with Destiny like it’s a cheap whore and idiot bards.
Somehow, he’s manhandled onto a table and tied up into a position he would find erotic in any other situation, but which currently leaves him feeling like a trussed turkey. The infused salts and herbs scattered liberally around his person don’t help. Yennefer jams a golden anklet down over his foot, scribbly sigils pulsing with purple light.
Geralt picks this moment to appear in the doorway.
“It’s not what it looks like,” Jaskier says at Geralt’s sardonic expression. “Unless it looks like Yennefer’s about to do a spell on my foot, in which case it’s exactly what it looks like, although I never consented.”
“You never consented to it being removed in the first place,” Yennenfer snaps, sprinkling more herbs over Jaskier’s chest. “And they didn’t even truly remove it; they obfuscated it.”
“Yes, well, it’s really more about the principle of the matter—”
Yennefer dusts her hands off with a few quick smacks of her palms. “Stay still, bard, unless you want to lose your foot.” And then she grasps his ankle and chants out an incantation. There’s a pleasant tingle that runs from his big toe up the length of his calf, and a less pleasant tugging sensation like someone pulling a nail from his heel. And then, rather anticlimatically, the static crackle of Chaos dissipates.
Yennefer turns his foot this way and that, admiring her handiwork. “I’m not sure why I’m surprised,” she says, squinting down at it.
Jaskier tries to grab his ankle to see, but he’s thwarted due to the aforementioned trussing. Geralt beats him to it, taking Jaskier’s foot from Yennefer and cupping the back of it with his palm. There’s another feeling now, like molten gold pouring through his veins, like honey slathered on bread, like warm stone underfoot. It radiates up from his heel, curling through his body until it settles like a dog on the hearth of his heart.
The feeling of love doubled.
Geralt looks up at him, grinning broadly, his eyes a bright gold.
Jaskier scrambles against the bindings, grasping again for his own foot because surely it can’t be.
It just can’t be.
He bends into an improbable position, turning his foot so he can make out the dark mark on his heel and—
Well, fuck, from this angle it really does look like—
Geralt’s laugh is rich and warm. “You’re my onion.”