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i.
“Oi!” Jaskier tries to twist free of the grip Geralt has on his lute strap, but it’s a fruitless struggle. “This is a very delicate instrument, Geralt, and you can’t just swing me around like I’m a wretched little Kikimore caught on the wrong end of your silver sword, firstly because it’s undignified, but—more importantly—because you’ll snap it clean in half, and then where will we be, hmm? Out of half our coin and all our joy, as I’ll not be able to perform for the good people of the Continent, who—”
“Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep,” Geralt says, cutting the flow of Jaskier’s rant to the quick with practiced precision and a none-too-gentle shove out into the tavern’s courtyard.
“Oh, ha fucking ha.” Jaskier spins around to point emphatically in Geralt’s face. “Mock all you want, but my life’s work has only ever been a boon to yours, you ungrateful bastard.”
Geralt grunts, sidestepping both Jaskier’s person and his indignation with ease and heading off toward the stables. “Ungrateful? I’m not the one who nearly came to blows with a fan.”
Jaskier gapes for a second, so profoundly wronged as to be rendered speechless. “That man,” he finally manages, “was not a fan.”
Geralt rolls back his shoulders. “Knew more about your music than I could claim to.”
“He called it cerebral, Geralt! He could hardly know less.”
“You don’t want people to think you’re smart?” Geralt asks, voice flat.
Jaskier sighs. This is what he gets for keeping a witcher as his closest companion. The bluntest, most unimaginative interpretation of everything.
“Intelligence has nothing to do with it,” he explains, trying—and failing—not to slip into the Exalted Lecturer voice Geralt finds so tedious. “Cerebral is inaccessible, it’s too clever by half, it’s more at home at the university than at a banquet hall, it’s-it’s—” He snaps his fingers. “You know what it is? It’s dreadfully boring. He was calling my music boring, Geralt.”
Astonishingly, this penetrates. Geralt tosses a thunder-cloud look over his shoulder, nostrils flared and eyes glinting. “Really?”
The rough edge to the question makes the skin on the back of Jaskier’s neck prickle—not unpleasantly.
“Oh, come now, no need to get all puffed up and predatory,” he says, surpassing Geralt with a hop and a skip, one hand holding his lute secure at his side. “Not that it isn’t a devastatingly good look for you, it’s just that the philistine no doubt meant his comment to be taken with a modicum of graciousness. He’s utterly wrong and absolutely without taste, but he wasn’t trying to insult me.”
Geralt hums, affirming, and falls into pace half a step behind Jaskier. “I’d like your songs better if they were boring. Easier to tune out.”
Jaskier blinks. And then grins. “You find my work catchy, do you?”
“Not what I said.”
“Taking your words with a modicum of graciousness, that’s exactly what you said.”
A gently threatening noise rumbles out of Geralt’s chest. “Next time I’ll let you pick a fight with the townsfolk. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and someone’ll incapacitate you.”
Jaskier throws his arms open wide,inviting the universe to join him in recognizing the sorely lacking lot with which he’s been saddled. “Luck, he says. Ha!” He whirls around, stumbles his next few steps backward so he can raise his eyebrows at Geralt. “You’ll be devastated when my mortality catches up with me eventually, dear witcher.”
Geralt inclines his head toward Jaskier. “Perhaps. I’ll recover, though.”
Jaskier clutches his heart with over-exaggerated offense before spinning forward on his heels. After a beat, he adds lightly, “You can be very hurtful when you set your mind to it.”
“Mm.” Geralt nudges his shoulder into Jaskier’s, faint enough to plausibly claim it as an accident if Jaskier were to press the issue. “Fan of my work, are you?”
Jaskier swings his lute back into position, strums the opening chord of the piece with which he’s been tinkering, and slings himself bodily back against Geralt’s chest.
“I am, as it happens.”
ii.
“Gods, this is amazing. I-I just think you’re brilliant, and—”
“Yes, yes, big fan of yours, as well,” Jaskier promises the crook of the blacksmith’s impressively sturdy neck as he presses her against the door of her boudoir. “Your shoulders, for one.” He bites down on one, thick ropes of muscle under his teeth. “Don’t find many women in the world you could chip a tooth on—simply magnificent.”
She—Tora, he’s relatively certain she said her name was Tora—strains to lean away from him. “What?”
Jaskier widens his eyes. “N-nothing. I’m just going to…” He indicates the ground before sinking to his knees.
“I was here the last time you were in town, you know,” she says, letting him take hold of her hips and drag her into a suitable position, letting him roll her form-fitting trousers down her shapely, shapely legs. “You only had one or two originals, then.”
“Ah, well,” he answers, distracted, “one must start somewhere. Speaking of…” He ghosts his thumb over her. “May I?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tora says, giving his cheek an encouraging pat. “Cheers.”
Catching her hand before she can pull it away, Jaskier presses a kiss to the center of her palm, then releases her in favor of tucking in for a hearty helping of blacksmith cunt.
“I’ve been—oh, now that tickles—been a fan of yours since that start.”
He hums in acknowledgement, then applies more pressure with his tongue. Tell me that tickles, he silently challenges.
“Ask anybody.” Tora continues chattering, even as she falls heavily back into the door and grabs a fistful of Jaskier’s hair. “I’m always the first to know when—ah, yes—w-when there’s a new White Wolf ballad.” She twists her hand when he does one of his reliably effective swirly tongue motions, but somehow manages to keep finding the breath to speak. “I’m the person in town who tracks these things.”
Is this what it’s like for other people to have sex with him? It’s a rather unflattering mirror upon which to gaze. Though, he supposes it’s not a perfect reflection. He keeps most of his mid-coital conversations relevant to the coitus.
At least he thinks he does. Does he?
“I find it masterful,” Tora’s saying, “the way the music so perfectly takes you on a grand adventure. And don’t get me started on the way you use caves to convey repressed desire, I—”
“I’m sorry.” He cuts her off, disengaging with an inelegant squelch. “Am I boring you?”
“Oh,” she says, in what amounts to an insulting non-answer.
“It can’t be my technique, I know, because I have spent years mastering the human body as though it were a phenomenally giving and excitingly tempestuous instrument. So was it my enthusiasm? Have I not been properly worshipful?”
Tora winces.
“On second thought,” Jaskier says, pushing up to his feet, “don’t answer that. Allow me to go on living in ignorance, it’s all that will save my pride from absolute dissemination.”
“If it helps any,” Tora says, stooping to tug her trousers back up and then clearing the doorway, “I’m still a fan.”
He tuts. “Now, now, your flirtatious flattery is what got us into this mess. Do not try to tempt me further, I’m not such a weak man as that.”
She shrugs. “Okay.”
Jaskier throws up his hands. “Alright, fine! Bluff called. Shall we try the bed this time?”
###
“You’re back,” Geralt says, barely glancing up from sharpening his sword. “The sun hasn’t risen yet.”
“Those two facts correlate in your mutagen-riddled mind, do they?”
“Mm. Grumpy, too.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” Jaskier says, shrugging off his doublet and falling into the other seat at the room’s minuscule worktable. “Mr. Brooding Silences himself.”
“What’s the matter, Jaskier?” Geralt asks, his voice a mockery of coddling. “Get chased out of another bed by an angry spouse?”
Jaskier heaves out a great sigh. “You know, I almost wish that I had been? Might have lent some intrigue to the whole affair. No, no, it was a perfectly fine—” He flaps his hand around, courting the right word to him. “—encounter. Satisfactory. Like a midday nap, almost. Comforting and warm, if a little disorientating.”
Geralt holds his sword up, twisting it back and forth to watch the firelight glint off the freshly deadly blade. “Sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself.”
“Alright, fine,” Jaskier says, standing so he can move for the bed and flopping backwards down onto it, “you’ve wrestled it out of me, you scamp, the dirty details—”
“No details,” Geralt says sharply, sheathing the sword. “Dirty or otherwise.”
“She wouldn’t stop talking about my music, Geralt. There I was, generous and doting, and she wanted to discuss the symbolism of caves in my body of work, and—I’m sure it’ll shock you to hear it given that modesty is one of my best traits—but I’ve given a lot of thought to how fame might affect my bedding women and men throughout the Continent, and it never occurred to me—” A peculiar hissing sound prompts Jaskier to lift his head, only to find Geralt snickering from the other side of the room. “Oh, yeah, right, yeah, laugh it up, that’s very comforting, thanks. The esteemed title of Friend of The Decade is due to be awarded to you any day now, you ungracious twit.”
“Serves you right to fall into bed with someone as incapable of holding their tongue as you.”
This is what Jaskier has to contend with for keeping a witcher as his closest companion. An ability to target vulnerability with deadly accuracy.
“Fuck off,” he says, a touch too heartily. Then, after a beat and when Geralt’s entirely too endearing bastardization of laughter dies down, “In any other context, I’d have liked to hear her analysis. One doesn’t exactly tire of being told how clever they are, even by happy accident.”
“That’s the only way you’re clever,” Geralt says without missing a beat.
“You know, the next time you stop by a brothel, I expect the whore will be too busy marveling at what a bloody hilarious jester you are to suck your dick.”
The bed suddenly shifts, Geralt settling at the head as he says with patent somberness, “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Oh, shut up,” Jaskier says, emphatic, and scrambles to claim one of the pillows so he can smack Geralt upside the head with it.
iii.
Jaskier’s lost in thought of the finely roasted bird he had at a banquet in Oxenfurt nearly three years ago when someone grabs up his near-empty tankard and slams it back down again on the bar, far too close to his drumming fingers for comfort. His full-body flinch away turns violent when he finds himself glancing into violet eyes pressing in close.
“I’ve had a vomitous melody stuck in my head for weeks. Is this what it’s like to live in your head, bard?”
“Geralt!” Jaskier calls, voice over-loud with panic.
The witcher steps up behind Yennefer, blurry in the periphery of Jaskier’s Yen-crowded vision, yet with exasperation clearly discernible in the set of his jaw.
“Geralt, we’ve talked about this,” Jaskier continues, studiously pretending the witch doesn’t exist. “You’re supposed to leave the ferocious beasts inside the stables when you leave them, especially when we’re amongst polite company. Most people expect a reasonable amount of distance between themselves and creatures liable to bite.”
“Ha, ha,” says Geralt.
Yen smiles. Meanly.
Since she’s clearly not going away in the next few seconds-minutes-days, Jaskier begrudgingly turns his attention to her. “Honestly—and please don’t mistake this question for my taking an interest in your life when it’s really more a vehicle for expressing just how unwelcome you are, but—what the everloving fuck are you doing here?”
Her smile turns coy as she leans away from him. “What makes you think that’s any of your business?”
“She wouldn’t tell me either,” Geralt says, heralding the barmaid.
“That’s because she’s shifty, Geralt, and entirely without scruples or sense, you must have picked up on this by now.”
“Thought I was power-mad for legacies lost and had,” Yennefer not-quite sings, fingers once again on Jaskier’s drink, spinning and spinning and spinning it by the rim.
He waves that away. “It all amounts to the same thing, in the end.”
She hums, the response Geralt-like in its opacity. “Do you want the truth, bard?”
“Not as a general rule, no. I prefer half-truths. Approximations. Legends, if you will, or—”
Geralt reaches around Yen to smack Jaskier on the back of the head.
“Ow! That’s— She asked!”
Yennefer laughs—a truly chilling sound—so she almost seems friendly when she says, “I quite like your version of me, actually. It’s flattering, how terrified you are of my capacity for wanting.”
“Yes, well, I am inclined to respect a visionary, and you— Wait, wait, whoa now, hold on. This is— You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?
Her responding grin is silken, slippery, salacious.
“I’m already a couple drinks into the evening,” Jaskier says—whines, in the proper light. “If you’re teasing, you have to tell me. It’s only sporting.”
“I’m not,” Yennefer says, and—as she’s still wearing that fucking grin—it sounds more like you’ll never catch up. “I genuinely like your song, Jaskier.”
Geralt snorts.
“Yeah. You’re definitely taking the piss,” Jaskier says, nodding in confirmation to himself.
Shrugging, Yennefer pushes away from the bar. “Believe what you’d like.” She turns to Geralt, holds his eye for long enough that Jaskier feels a blush creep up the back of his neck, watching them. “I’ll find you again in a handful of hours.”
Geralt nods. “I’ll be around.”
“Now that,” Jaskier declares as they watch Yennefer disappear through the tavern doors, “was unsettling.”
“She was singing the damn song when I happened upon her,” Geralt offers, raising his tankard to his lips.
“That proves nothing,” Jaskier says, after downing the remains of his own drink, “except that I am particularly gifted at crafting melodies that linger in the collective consciousness and spinning tales that touch hearts and change lives. But we already knew that.”
Geralt grunts, noncommittal. But that’s fine. Jaskier knows he agrees all the same.
With a grin, Jaskier snatches up his refilled drink and hops off the stool upon which he’s perched, guiding Geralt over to a table—in the darkest corner of the room, just as he likes.
“Speaking of spinning tales,” Jaskier continues as they settle, “though I hate her with a passion I typically reserve for bed chambers and my work, one cannot deny the value of Yennefer of Vengerberg’s ability to supply high drama. Should she keep imposing on our every adventure, it may not be the worst thing for any of our legacies.”
“Hmm.” Geralt inclines his head. “Maybe she’s not the imposition.”
“Oh, please,” Jaskier says, delighted to be taken on, even if half-heartedly. “Her archetype suggests otherwise. The morally dubious temptress? She only ever enters a tale to coax the hero away from the path of righteousness. She’s an imposition on all that is good and true.”
“I’m not a hero,” Geralt says predictably.
“Yes, right, well, you say that, but here you are, no doubt about to save the local guard from being lured away in the nighttime by an enterprising succubus or to restore a shambling farm to its former glory by dispatching the wraith haunting the grounds or-or to save a ludicrously small child from a haunted house, rolling through every town we pass like a muscle-bound stormcloud and leaving the whole place drastically improved.”
“For a price,” Geralt says, “and only temporarily.”
“The point is,” Jaskier says, stubbornly keeping to his point, “you’re the hero, Yennefer the temptress.”
Geralt arches one eyebrow. “What does that make you?”
“The oracle, of course, please keep up, Geralt.”
Geralt huffs, disbelieving.
Jaskier leans into his space, ticking the evidence off on his fingers. “I practically bleed verse—cryptic and prophetic in turns, encounters with me often leave one frustrated, I’m sexy, I’m enigmatic—”
“You’re an open fucking book, Jaskier,” Geralt interjects, pushing Jaskier’s hand away from his face.
“—and I am the keeper of history. Kings and common folk alike turn to me to interpret the world for them.”
Stone-face silence.
“You, for example,” Jaskier continues, resting his head on Geralt’s shoulder, “need me to remind you that Yennefer of Vengerberg, so very tempting though she is, cannot be trusted. Not least of all because you—my dear friend and noble hero—are hopelessly, sweepingly, all-consumingly in love with her.”
Geralt doesn’t respond—though Jaskier does feel his muscles tense ever so slightly, braced for danger.
And this. This is the thorny mantle Jaskier wears for keeping a witcher as his closest companion. All declarations of love necessarily fall to him, and they fall on willfully deaf ears.
###
That night, in a room for one, Jaskier plays the thoughtful, ever complexifying melody that’s been plaguing him for years upon years, feet planted against his bed and chair tilted back on two legs so he can better see out of the tiny slit of a window. Serenading the moon, keeper of all his secrets.
iv.
Jaskier’s in the middle of a performance of an elven ballad he only just finished translating the night before—a moving fucking performance, actually, every warble and minor chord piercing through to the longing heart of the piece—when someone shouts from the back of the tavern, “Oi! Play ‘Toss A Coin’!”
With a gracious smile of acknowledgement for the request, he keeps playing, determined not to mess up the coming verse, the translation of which gave him the most—
“If I wanted to be this depressed,” says a different audience member—one who Jaskier sees here nearly every night, making a sloppy mess of himself—as he pops up out of his seat and gestures grandly with his tankard, “I’d have spent the night at home.”
Jaskier almost lets that, too, pass. But he didn’t sleep well the night before for Geralt’s parting words echoing irrepressibly through his mind, so his patience is already worn thin, is the thing, and this translation was hard work, meant to connect him back to his musical roots, so he’s not going to sit here and let ungrateful letches turn that into an exercise in futility without telling them to go fuck themselves on a steel sword.
“You know,” he says, fingers still picking their way deftly through the ballad, “here I am, presenting you with my soul, gift-wrapped to perfection, so I don’t see how now feels the appropriate time to share your marital troubles with the whole town, Jakub. Bit like getting a bag of dirt in return, see, so if you’d please hold your tongue until the end of the performance, I won’t point out that your home likely only becomes depressing when you—”
“This song’s a bag of dirt,” Jakub cuts him off, and then breaks into raucous laughter alongside his mates.
Jaskier rolls his eyes toward the rafters. “Right, well.”
“Play a jig!” someone else shouts.
“‘Toss A Coin,’” yet another person—or maybe the very first person again—starts to chant. “‘Toss A Coin,’ ‘Toss A Coin’.”
Jaskier does stop playing, then. “You want to hear ‘Toss A Coin To Your Witcher,’ do you? You’d all just loooove if I played that mindless drivel on repeat for the rest of the night, would you?”
There’s a chorus of enthusiastic yeses, and Jaskier’d be willing to swallow his broken heart and just give the people what they so clearly fucking want until one of the women at a table full of academy students adds, “It’s your best work!”
“Fucking hell,” Jaskier says, gripping the neck of his lute tight and drawing the instrument closer to his heart. “Why would you say such a ludicrous and hurtful thing, does my gift-wrapped soul mean nothing to you people?”
“Y-you don’t agree?” she asks, looking crestfallen, which—yeah, he knows the feeling!
“Hmm, let’s see,” he says, slinking closer to the table, “do I consider the guileless tinkering of a painfully needy boy as my best work? Do I understand how the masses find genius in a composition I threw together in ten fucking seconds? Would I have ever performed the abomination in public had I known that it would overshadow each new song assembled with painstaking care and love?” He lets the series of rhetorical questions sit for a moment, the students staring up at him, wide-eyed and hanging on his words, before adding, “The answer is a resounding and emphatic and obvious no, my friends. I do not agree.”
Another silence blankets the room, snuffing out the flickering creative flame Jaskier had been harboring for the rest of the night of performing.
Most unhelpfully, Jakub is the one to break it. “You’re still gonna play it for us, though, right?”
This is his penance for keeping a witcher as his closest companion for more years of his life than he didn’t. Memories as deadly as any monster.
Huh. There’s something there, perhaps…
With a sigh, Jaskier raises his eyes once again to the heavens, and absentmindedly strums the opening chord to ‘Toss A Coin,’ all the while contemplating memories too deadly to attempt to kill, yet deadlier still to leave untouched.
v.
“Playing the lute is a bit like picking up the broadsword, isn’t it?”
Jaskier lifts his head from tuning his newest love, guiltlessly filched from a trading caravan operated by a couple who were callously retreading the finer points of an apparently ongoing bet over who’s to cash in on the bounty placed on the lot of them—Ciri and Geralt and Yennefer and himself—when they had the misfortune of crossing paths with Geralt, to find Ciri watching him.
Jaskier sits up taller, grinning. Ciri doesn’t say much, but when she does speak, it’s always interesting.
“How’s that?” he asks, then in the same breath, “No, no, wait, let me guess. It’s ‘cause they’re both deadly sexy in the right hands, yes?”
“Jaskier.” Geralt shoots him a look of fatherly displeasure from across the fire, and speaking of things that are deadly sexy…
Jaskier flashes an impish grin back at him.
“No,” Ciri says, cheeks flushed as she determinedly avoids looking at either of them. “It’s the way they both start with the bluntest movements repeated a hundred times before you can hope to make poetry.”
“Ah,” Jaskier says, his grin turning hopelessly fond as he watches Geralt huh, stoke the fire.
After a beat, he clears his throat, returns to his tuning with a nod at Ciri, and asks, “Have a taste for poetry, do you, Princess?”
She tilts her chin up, defiant. “I like things that make me feel pretty.”
Jaskier’s laugh rings out in their dark forest clearing. “Finally! The girl exhibits signs of life!” He waggles his eyebrows at her. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to find something we have in common?”
She frowns back. “We only met a handful of days ago. And I’m entirely lively!”
“Take no offense, my dear. Some of my favorite people are professionally dour and only know how to exhibit a maximum of three distinct facial expressions.” Jaskier jerks his head in Geralt’s direction, who growls, soft and—to the trained ear—playful. “See?”
Ciri’s attempted grin is a painfully fragile thing.
In deference to the tenuous vulnerability of the moment, Jaskier refocuses his attention on his lute, starts playing scales to test his tuning. “Now go on,” he says, not looking at her, “tell me, what’s a bit of poetry that made you feel pretty?”
She ducks her head, plucking a twig from the pile of kindling and dragging it back and forth through the dirt as she answers. “There was a song my grandmother used to hum when she’d brush my hair…” Ciri closes her eyes. “Thinking about it almost feels like…”
“Mm,” Jaskier says, letting his own eyelids grow heavy. “Music has an extraordinary ability to connect you to yourself, your history. A dozen notes can transport you a decade.” He licks his lips. “Do you happen to know the name of the piece?”
“‘The Brigand’s Dance’,” Ciri says after a long moment. “I think that’s right, anyway. ‘Brigand’s Dance’.”
“Oh, yes, uh—a series of taps for the chorus and the bless’d refrain and all that. That ‘Brigand’s Dance’?”
Her smile is steadier this time. “You know it?”
“Well, as you’ll no doubt come to appreciate,” Jaskier says with an experimental strum of the opening chord, “there are few songs in existence I’m wholly unfamiliar with.”
Ciri looks to Geralt, who shrugs. “He’s an obnoxious twerp but, yeah, he knows music history better than most.”
“I will ignore your attempt at slander and graciously accept the compliment—thank you, Geralt.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Geralt says. “Didn’t mean for any of that to sound complimentary.”
“Oh, har, har.” Jaskier starts to play Ciri’s song in earnest. “Your comedy styling has not improved with time and distance, I’m afraid.”
“Shh.” Ciri shifts closer to Jaskier. “I’m trying to listen.”
Jaskier shoots an amused look at Geralt, who hums his approximation of an apology and pretends he’s not seconds away from cracking out a devastatingly bright smile, before focusing again on the music. The melody’s simple—meant as it is for line dancing—so after he plays through the basic song once, he loops back around to the start, adding embellishments to really bring out the goading rhythm, the impossible-to-ignore command to stomp one’s feet.
“Do you play every song like you’re trying to hack your way out of a burlap sack?” Ciri asks suddenly.
He breaks off with a discordant note. “Excuse me?”
She blinks at him, waiting for an answer.
Beside him, Geralt stifles a laugh into his broad shoulder.
“Are you—?” Jaskier starts, struggles to find the words to continue. “Are we back on the swordsmanship metaphor? We must be, because I know you’re not implying that I’ve an indelicate touch, firstly, because that’s profoundly rude but, more importantly, it’s objectively and undeniably false, young lady, and I—I can’t even begin to articulate—”
“I didn’t mean to offend,” she says, huffing impatiently. “It’s just, I’m trying to hear the lullaby my grandmother used to sing to me, and you’re acting as though you’re trying to enchant someone into dancing themselves to death.”
“This is how the song is meant to be played, I assure you!”
She raises clearly skeptical eyebrows at him.
“And you know what? Forgive me, but I have a hard time believing the Lioness had a better instinct for nursery rhymes than myself, seeing as she didn’t have a whimsical bone in her body, let alone a—”
“Jaskier,” Geralt says, cutting him off, voice low in genuine warning.
Jaskier works his jaw shut with effort. “Simple and sweet,” he says after composing himself. “I can do that.”
Ciri shakes her head. “Play me one of yours instead. Then I’ll have no choice but to believe you when you say that’s how it’s meant to be played.”
Jaskier feels his nose twitch with the inconvenient urge to smile, which is not fair, he’s mad at this entitled little deadly slip of a girl.
“Well-reasoned, Princess,” he says, hearing the smile win out in his voice. “As you wish.”
He settles on ‘Her Sweet Kiss’ because it always succeeds in making him feel prettier, like slipping into a silken shirt with a generous and decadent neckline.
“See, I liked that one,” Ciri says when he’s done. “Even though you clearly have all the romantic sense of a prison guard.”
Geralt doesn’t bother to hide his laughter this time.
“Well, now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings,” Jaskier says, glaring. “But it’s not going to work.”
“Clearly,” Geralt says, under his breath.
Jaskier promptly ignores him. “It’s not going to work because I have successfully wooed many a distinguished and joyful lover with that song, and none of them seemed to think my romance left anything to be desired. In fact—”
“Geralt,” Ciri says, talking over him, the very picture of innocence. “Do you feel wooed when Jaskier sings?”
Geralt grows unnervingly still for a second before he rises to his feet with a grunt. “I’m going to secure the perimeter.”
“Devil spawn,” Jaskier hisses at Ciri as Geralt all but runs away. “Just—a horrendously devious little monster, you knew you were going to ask him that all along, didn’t you?”
“Not all along.”
He appraises her, impressed against his will. “Did you really find the song to be unromantic? I thought the central metaphor might be a bit harsh, but there is something foreboding about falling in love, losing oneself in another, and I thought it might be just intellectual enough to soar over the masses’ heads while still capturing the mood, you know? I wanted it to be atmospheric and accessible.”
She stares at him for a long moment before saying, “I’ve never been in love.”
“Right, well…right. Suppose I don’t have to take your criticism very seriously, then.”
She barely acknowledges that, leaning in closer to pluck contemplatively at one of the strings on the lute. “Does it really feel like that…like forfeiting something?”
Jaskier stares at this girl—Geralt’s daughter—coveted like treasure and deadly like unharnessed Chaos, and feels something throb deep in his chest.
“Feels a bit different for everyone, I think,” he says after swallowing thickly. “Come to think of it, feels a bit different for me every time it happens.” Tentatively, he reaches out and smooths an errant lock of hair back from her forehead. “Probably best to wait and find out for yourself what it’s like.”
She tenses under his touch, but doesn’t pull away. “You think I’ll get the chance?”
This is what Jaskier knows for keeping a witcher as his closest companion. Love crops up even when the conditions seem entirely inhospitable.
“Mm, if you’re anything like your proxy father—and, from what I’ve seen, you very much are,” Jaskier tells her, “the chance will catch up with you when you forget to look for it.”
She’s silent long enough that he feels entirely justified in starting to play again, his own favorite lullaby. Eventually, though, she speaks again. “Will you tell me how you and Geralt met?”
“You’ve probably heard the song, but…oh, what the hell. You want the full account?”
She sits up, nodding her head eagerly.
“Well, it all started with a bit of constructive criticism, actually…”
+ i.
“I can hear you thinking from down here,” Jaskier says, nudging the part of Geralt that he has access to from where he’s pacing alongside New Roach. So, his sturdy, leather-bound thigh. “She’s going to be fine, you know. Marvelous, even, and certainly well-protected with Yennefer looking over her shoulder.”
“Still feels wrong,” Geralt says, twisting in his saddle to look back along the path on which they’ve barely progressed, “to be going somewhere without her.”
“Honestly, Geralt, I know you don’t mean to be offensive, but your implication that you find a pubescent child constantly on the brink of screaming the barriers between our reality and the rest of the cosmos to ruin to be a better travel companion than me—your very best friend and, I might add, legendarily good company—is just a touch hurtful.”
“She is a better travel companion than you,” Geralt says. “She, at least, understands the value of silence.”
“Oh, please, you love my monologuing. When I’m not around, you entertain yourself imagining me spinning artful diatribes out of thin air and it’s enough to bring a tear to your eye, a wistful smile to your face, an ache to your chest. Oh, Jaskier, you think to yourself, you bring music to my life, and I do so miss—”
“I will ditch you at the first town that crosses our path,” Geralt warns him.
“Nah,” Jaskier says, waving the very thought away. “The scar of our last parting is still too fresh, you wouldn’t dare pick at it. No, my dear friend, we’re definitely consigned to at least three uninterrupted months of quality time between the White Wolf, his Humble Bard, and their shared love: the great, grand open road.”
Geralt grunts, a smile playing at one corner of his lips, and asks, “What are you waiting for then?”
“Hmm?”
“Start barding.”
Jaskier waggles his eyebrows up at Geralt and swings his lute around to his front. “Any requests?”
Geralt sighs—world-weary, as though he’s never faced a more unpleasant task than having to express a preference for one of Jaskier’s compositions—but then offers with devastating sincerity, “I like it best when you play music like you’re thinking.”
“That,” Jaskier tells him, clutching his chest in one hand and the neck of his instrument in the other, “is easily the most beautiful and wonderful thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Geralt shifts in the saddle, visibly discomforted by the proclamation.
No matter—Jaskier can do all his talking with music for the time being, if that’s how Geralt likes it.
Heart beating hard against his ribs, Jaskier starts to play his favorite unfinished song.
“Are you…?” Geralt starts after a bit, after the music’s settled over them like a haze so that it feels like nothing’s real beyond the two of them and their little pocket of the world. “It sounds sad.”
“It does, a bit, doesn’t it?” Jaskier half-agrees. “Like returning to a home that was never truly yours in the first place.”
Geralt hmms.
“It’s no matter, though,” Jaskier continues, the music tinkling on, violently lovely and carefully oblivious of the effect it has. “You belong there just the same.”
There’s a moment of silence in which Jaskier can see his words settle in Geralt, watches them expand to fill his chest as he takes in a deep, thoughtful breath. Then—
“Can’t say jackshit if it doesn’t have words, let alone all that.”
Jaskier throws his head back, laughter exploding out of him.
This is what he gets for keeping a witcher as his closest companion. Blunt lack of imagination and—may all the deities to ever exist look tolerantly upon him—love and love and love.
“That depends entirely, my dearest Geralt,” says Jaskier with a worldly certainty he feels for very little else, “on who’s listening.”