Chapter Text
It begins the way it always does.
Jaskier staggers awkwardly towards him. Too much drink, Geralt surmises, and even in his innermost thoughts his annoyance is tinged with affection. Another night spent at the tavern, each coin spent repaid fivefold by his latest bawdy ballad. He won’t begrudge Jaskier his vices; Melitele knows he has enough of his own. He stumbles closer, and Geralt smells the alcohol on his breath and the sweat on his body-
Except that he doesn’t. In fact, he smells inhuman; unnatural; of nothing at all. His breath quickens and his mind sharpens: his mind sees a friend, a companion (and on the coldest nights, something more), but his body snarls ‘danger’. He makes to speak, but Jaskier beats him to it. (Words were always his weapon of choice, after all.)
“Greetings, witcher.”
Revulsion struck him like a blow. The words came from his lips, were said in his voice, and yet a single truth was clear: they were not Jaskier’s. He was a puppet on malignant strings; a ventriloquist’s dummy, mouthing words without meaning. Nausea settled in his stomach. This was not Jaskier - and yet it was his hands, his mouth, his body, edging ever closer:
“Were you waiting for me to come crawling back, Witcher? The pretty bard to warm your bed?”
He spits his words as venom; a paralytic against which Geralt cannot fight. He draws closer, almost touching, and begins to croon:
“The things I could do to you, Witcher. I’d leave you gasping, begging for a mercy I will not grant. Would you like that?”
His breath brushes against Geralt’s face, warm and sterile, and rouses him from his daze. His words barely have time to register as he traces the cold grey glint of Jaskier’s eyes, reflected from the cold grey glint of his blade - drawn with inhuman speed, held with careful musician’s fingers, plunged towards him-
He watches from above as a dozen witchers deflect a dozen blades: one knocks the knife from his brittle grip, another twists his arm behind him and pins him to the ground, more still smack him with the flat of his sword, sending him unconscious.
One simply says “sorry,”, and lets the blade continue its fatal path.
For just a moment, each witcher and bard hangs still, suspended in the balance under Fate’s watchful gaze. Then Jaskier looks up at him. His eyes are frightened, his forehead burrowed with pain and confusion - but he is here, and present, and alive. Geralt brushes his hand over his hair, and Jaskier preens into the touch; a wounded songbird in his rough hands. I saved him, he says, and prays that this time it isn’t a lie.
Geralt wakes up.
His hand finds the hilt of his sword, grogginess erased by waves of panic and longing and shame. For a moment, it feels slick with blood; the ghost of a memory mocking him. He sees Jaskier’s body, half-propped up and turned away, like he’s writing a song in the dawn light. A peaceful morning, if not for the red seeping through his pristine jerkin. Blood on his sword; in his hair; on his hands-
He blinks, and his vision clears. His sword lays behind him, pristine; a funereal silver. But for the shadows of his sins, he is alone. The morning birdsong startles him into movement - a mockery of what he has lost; another of Fate’s cruel jokes. His shaking hands grasp Roach’s reigns, and she whinnies in equal parts impatience and concern. She’s right, of course - they have to keep moving. They walk in silence. It feels like a disservice, but he has few words remaining, and none of them feel like enough. There was a time when Jaskier spoke enough for the both of them; now his quietude is less a shield and more a shackle.
The midday sun is high and fierce by the time they arrive. Not at all poetic, Geralt can hear Jaskier grumble. Where is the dismal drizzle and mournful mist?
Grief is crueler than any of Jaskier’s ornate poems tried to describe. It does not wait for the grey clouds to settle overhead, or the rain to make tracks for the tears to follow. It is the grey cloud, shrouding him in shadow come rain or shine. Your first metaphor, Jaskier needles. I’m so proud. Geralt cannot bear the shame of those words, so he keeps moving. Through the non-descript field, along the almost-forgotten trodden path, and they’re here. Roach shifts from hoof to hoof, restless and agitated, but she seems to know better than to break the silence. He gives her a distracted pat as he opens the saddle bag, drawing from within a single dandelion in perfect bloom, and one turned to seed. Jaskier would hate them, he knows: hate that they were preserved by Yennefer’s hand, and would stay perfect and pristine whilst he withered under the earth. Jaskier would hate many things about Geralt, nowadays. (Began to hate him even before, he reminds himself sharply, and for a moment he wonders whether he should even be there at all.) But he lays down the flowers, and at last allows himself to rest.
The songbirds flying above might look down to see this: the Witcher, exhausted to his very bones, slumped against the plain grey gravestone. It read:
“Here lies Bard Jaskier / for whom Fate could write / no happy ending.”