Archive of Our Own ^beta

Geralt doesn’t believe in destiny. As far as he’s concerned and even after everything, after Ciri and Yennefer, even if he knows Destiny exists and liked to fuck with him, Geralt refuses to acknowledge its existence. In part because fuck it, in part because he wants to give it the benefit of the doubt. He wants to believe it’s not written that people have to go through so much shit. If Destiny exists, then it doesn’t get to pick it only exists for heroic and magical purposes; it doesn’t get to only be acknowledged when something grand is happening. If Destiny exists then it gets to be blamed for war, like all the other gods, and Geralt will not have anything or anyone, no god or destiny or mortal or monster, nobody telling him there is justifiable reason for war, and suffering, and hunger. That there’s a reason for orphans.

So Geralt doesn’t believe in destiny, but he’s lived through three major apocalyptic events in his lifetime and lost so many humans he can’t keep count, and yet, Jaskier keeps coming back.

Jaskier dies, because he’s human and he’s not eternal; and Geralt doesn’t cry, because he protected him until the end. Jaskier dies of old age and Geralt has him buried with his lute and two dozens of dandelions, and Geralt doesn’t cry because they had a drink the night before, Jaskier complaining about how he couldn’t hold his liquor anymore, “So much piss, Geralt, you don’t understand,” not because he got drunk too fast or couldn’t get drunk. Then they ate a plate of fruits and nuts, and Geralt made him take a warm bath before going to bed to calm his aches. And then Jaskier played a song and Geralt hummed along, and they said goodnight and blew off the candle. And when Geralt woke up, Jaskier was cold and unmoving but smiling, like he’d had a good dream.

Many people came to see him, but it was Geralt alone who lowered him to the ground. He is glad to have been there on the end. Over the centuries they spent so much time apart, he feared sometimes that word would get to him too late, that Jaskier wouldn’t get to see him again. And they both knew it was the perks of life, to die suddenly, no remorse about it, they had done their peace. But in the end, he’s glad.

It’s twenty years after that when Geralt sees him again—his hair is red and his skin is light, and the freckles on his face, like constellations of unknown stars denounce his father to be a dwarf; but his eyes are the same bright blue that Geralt has hardly come across over the centuries, and he sings, sitting at a table, playing a lute, and he looks exactly like the day Geralt first met him. He looks young, no older than nineteen, with strong hands and small feet, and the boyish smile that gets him in trouble, and the body of a grown man almost; the linger of baby fat on his cheeks and the curve of his stomach, despite the hair on his chest.

And he calls at him when Geralt enters the tavern. “It’s the witcher!” he says, like he’s seen him before.

For a moment Geralt is frozen on the spot, and if anyone bothered to read his face, they’d know the horror and shock, and the longing and grief. He’s missed his friend. For the last twenty years, he’s not thought about it; he’s worked and eaten and fucked his way through the continent like he always did, but then he sees that boy there, like a ghost or a dream or a joke, and if he weren’t a witcher he’d think it a coincidence. But the boy smiles at him like he knows him from long before, and Geralt feels the pain in his chest he hasn’t allowed himself to feel since he saw the first grey hair on Jaskier’s head. He’s missed his friend.

The boy’s name isn’t Jaskier though. His name is Erik, he’s twenty years old. His father is, indeed, a dwarf, and his mother died giving birth to him. He’s shorter up close, like it’s his presence that’s big and not him, and his hair looks almost brown on the sunlight coming through the tavern’s window, and he asks Geralt many questions. Questions like he’s not seen him in a while, not like this is the first time. And Geralt grunts and answers.

Geralt stays in town for longer than anticipated. He tells himself it’s not true, that Jaskier is gone. That he cannot afford himself another bard, but Erik says he’s not a bard. He’s the son of a carpenter. His mother was a great singer, the townspeople tell him, and he found the lute by a tree on an autumn day before the snowstorms came, and he fixed it. It’s a fine instrument, he says, surprisingly easy to learn.

Erik, Geralt discovers, is extensively different from Jaskier, despite the similarities. He favors men, exclusively, for one thing. Geralt knows because Erik kisses him on the fifth day of his stay.

Geralt never kissed Jaskier. Not on the mouth. On all the years he knew his friend he kept his hands to himself, and Jaskier kept his hands to himself, but Geralt knows it wasn’t because they didn’t think about it. Sometimes, when Jaskier would sit by the fire and look up at the stars, as if asking for inspiration after days too long to remember time, and too tiring to remember how to write, Geralt would look at him. He would look at the shape of his jaw and the curl of his hair, and the soft spot of his earlobe, and he would feel a pang on his lower belly and sweat on his hands. Sometimes he would feel Jaskier looking, when they were taking a bath. They never touched each other because there was no need; the void that Jaskier filled in Geralt’s life had nothing to do with the fire in his belly when Jaskier took off his clothes in front of him. They went to the whore house and they fucked the noble ladies, and they fell in love with the women in their lives; and, at the end of the day, they came back to their room and lie side by side, and Jaskier would tell him stories Geralt would laugh at, and Geralt would tell him stories Jaskier would turn into songs.

Erik kisses him though, full on the mouth and with purpose like he’d been waiting a long time to do it. Like he’s not afraid the witcher will throw him off. And when he balances himself on Geralt’s chest, his palm on Geralt’s too slow heart, he gasps and draws back, and he looks at Geralt like it’s the first time in centuries.

He says his name, “Geralt,” slow, like a question. And Geralt smiles and doesn’t say “Erik,” because he knows looking at those eyes, that Erik was a fleeting existence.

“Jaskier,” he says, “you’re back.” And Jaskier laughs, relieved, like he’d been lost and Geralt has found of him.

They don’t kiss again that night, but they lie side by side, holding hands, like Jaskier is afraid he won’t remember again in the morning.

He remembers, and he follows Geralt out of town after saying goodbye to his father.

He builds them a shack by the shore, with a stable and a fire in the living room, and Geralt spends the first three days learning how Jaskier is different this time around.

They don’t kiss again until a week in, when Geralt returns from a hunt with an injured leg but a bag full of coin and finds Jaskier sitting outside on a chair he manufactured himself, softly singing a song Geralt still remembers clearly.

Jaskier gets up and kisses him with his eyes open, looking at him like he expects to be pushed away and daring him to even try it. Geralt kisses back because his leg hurts, and he’s missed Jaskier for twenty long years where nobody wrote a single song about him.

In that body, Jaskier feels small in Geralt’s arms when he carries him with flourish to the kitchen so he can finally get the drink he’s been dreaming about for the two days he was gone. They drink and they talk, and Geralt doesn’t fuck Jaskier until the sun’s come up, when they rest side by side on the bed and Jaskier opens his eyes and hits him on the shoulder. Jaskier rides him slowly first, getting used to the heavy weight of Geralt inside him; and then Geralt pushes up, meeting him halfway, a hand on Jaskier’s chest to remind himself who this is, that his eyes are still blue and his chest hair still soft, and he reminds terrible at choosing color. They grunt and push and pull like it’s an argument, and when they’re done, Geralt carries Jaskier all the way to the bath, where the water is cold but clean and good for the summer heat and the salty wind.

Jaskier lives to sixty-five.

Geralt sees him succumb to a fever no doctor in town can fix and buries him again, with his lute, under a tree on the hill behind their shack, and spends the next five years not thinking about what brought Jaskier back to him to begin with.

It’s fifty years before he finds him again. He’s coming back from a hunt that took him more he would have liked, and there’s a man sitting on a bench someone put by the shore when Geralt wasn’t looking.

He’s been hunting a lot, meditating even more; it keeps him from wondering. If there’s something he’s learned from the centuries he’s lived, is not to question the universe, not to think that whatever happens isn’t fair, not to question any magic that hasn’t done him any harm. There’s enough chaos in his life for magic to just happen around him, he thinks.

The man looks up when Geralt approaches. He’s fishing, Geralt realizes. His boat is by the shore and by the size of it, the man couldn’t have come from afar, but he’s over forty now, his blue eyes marked by the signs of age, and his black hair marked by strings of white.

He says, “Geralt,” like he expects him to just know who he is. “It took me quite a while to find you this time, you wouldn’t believe.”

He’s a fisherman, he says, and he laughs when he tells him that his mother got him a lute when he was twelve, for no reason in particular. He doesn’t tell him his name this time, because he’s been calling himself Jaskier since he turned twenty, and he’s been looking for Geralt sine he turned twenty-two. Geralt wonders if he was waiting for him to find him and wonders why he didn’t try. The sea brought him to Geralt. He got lost on a storm and thought he would die, and on the third day he saw the house he doesn’t quite remember building but could also recognize with his eyes closed.

The time after that is five years into a stupid war he somehow got partially dragged into. It’s a small war, things considered, compared to what he’s seen before, but a war nonetheless, and has claimed more lives than necessary.

There is a child in a house on fire. By this point, Geralt should know better than to get himself mixed up with children, but the kid is crying and his parents are dead, and when he opens his eyes they’re so blue, Geralt curses and pick him up and goes back home, leaves the war to consume itself. Wars always end, this one will kill two kingdoms, but they deserve nothing else.

The child doesn’t speak but Geralt buys him a lute on the way anyway. He hums to himself and plays with the cords, and it’s the only time he doesn’t look like he’s seeing ashes and flames. “Your name is Jaskier,” Geralt tells him when they arrive to the coast, “and this is your home.”

That time around, Jaskier doesn’t make it to old enough to remember him, but when he’s dying at sixteen, he touches Geralt’s cheek and looks at him for a long moment before closing his eyes and not opening them again.

Twenty-four years later there’s a woman standing at his door. She carries a lute on her black horse and a pack of textiles and threads, and she’s five months pregnant.

Geralt says, “Fuck,” and she laughs so hard she pees herself a little.

She’s different like that but still Jaskier in all the ways that matter. And in the darkness, once she’s settled, she tells him she’d imagined this before, being a woman; she just never thought she’d get to remember it.

Geralt makes her a rocking chair and she sits there after meals and sings to the baby, soft things that Geralt thought were gone forever. She complains of aching feet and demands Geralt rub them and then makes surprised noises when he complies.

He doesn’t tell her he’s had enough of children for a lifetime, after last time, because he realizes maybe he hasn’t. Maybe this time will be alright. And because he’s not sure she remembers.

At the seventh month mark she turns desperate and constantly slick and doesn’t let Geralt out of the shack other than for food and supplies.

They fight one time and he goes off to kill something, and when he comes back, covered in blood and guts, she’s kneeling by the door, crying, holding herself for dear life, and for the first time in a long while, Geralt feels his blood run cold and his heart do a double beat. Her water broke while he was gone. She thought he wouldn’t be back on time. She thought he wouldn’t be back. She’s almost delirious and Geralt hates himself fiercely, picks her up carefully and takes her back to bed.

It’s not the first time he’s helped deliver a baby, he’s lived a long time, but it is the first time he’s done it alone and he worries his way through it until the baby is clean, breathing, and Jaskier is asleep, no longer bleeding.

“He’s your child,” she says, and he knows she means it. Not an accident or a product of his mistakes, or something destiny threw at him, but something she set out to give him.

The child is clean and pure and detached from the life they’ve previously had, and Geralt knows it’ll be alright with this child. This child will have a happy childhood, this child will not be abandoned. This child will not be tortured in school for talents others think are necessary.

It’s a weird uprising though, with a mother who’s a bard but makes now a living out of textiles, and a witcher. “A father who happens to be a witcher,” Jaskier corrects him. It’s not that Geralt is necessarily unfamiliar with the concept of fatherhood, it’s just that it’s always happened to him in a context he can’t really call normal. So it’s a weird uprising, but the boy learns to sing and play the lute, and he learns to fight and brew potions for healing; and he learns to respect women because, “no child of mine is going to be a brute,” Jaskier says.

Jaskier teaches him how to make shirts and blankets and pants and socks, and Geralt teaches him a bit of carpentry, just enough to get by in case is needed. And when he’s old enough, he goes out into the world and creates his own stories.

Geralt sees him again when Jaskier is to leave once more. They compare stories of the world they’ve seen, and they drink together, and Jaskier smiles at them and calls them her boys like she did when their child was just a baby. And when she finally closes her eyes, Geralt kisses her on the forehead, like the first time he saw her leave.

When the boy departs once more, Geralt makes him promise not to come back. It was always strange to be called “father,” but the reason he makes the boy not return is because Jaskier he can handle, but this boy he’s not sure he could. He knows he will outlive this fragile human life that’s their child, and he wants him to go away and live—and that’s how he wants to remember him.

Jaskier comes back another seven different times. One of those he’s a woman again but this time she doesn’t get pregnant. When Geralt sees her, they make love on the porch steps, and whenever Geralt goes out on a hunt, Jaskier sings to him the very first song he wrote about the witcher, just to prove he still remembers.

Two other times he comes back blonde, and on one memorable occasion, he comes back a knight from a faraway kingdom.

Jaskier doesn’t always stay, though he always comes back to their home after the age of twenty. Sometimes he comes and goes. Geralt doesn’t ask much about the life Jaskier half abandons because of him, but sometimes he shares details. He tries to remember as much as he can to tell him later, when he returns.

There are times when he thinks that’ll be the last; when it takes a long time and he believes Jaskier won’t return again. Times when he wonders when the last time will be.

The last time, turns out, Geralt knows is the last because he can feel his own life slipping away. He can feel magic draining from the continent, and monsters fusing back into shadows, and people forgetting about witchers, and elves, and mages. He has seen the kingdoms fall. He wonders if Destiny has finally decided to fuck off, but then he thinks maybe not. The people, humans, are dying off too, but they don’t seem all that aware. Maybe it’s just that the times are ending. Geralt doesn’t remember how old he is by then, but he remembers Jaskier’s face.

The last time around he returns at twenty-three. His hair looks a soft brown, and his eyes are blue, and he’s wearing clothes much too out of style, and much too bright for the road. And he looks exactly the same as the first time Geralt ever saw him. He’s riding a horse he’s named Roach.

They don’t fuck at all that time around. They sit at the table like old men, Geralt thinks, and they remember past times, and Jaskier sings songs of hundred lives, and they work on the garden every morning. And they sleep side by side like they did in taverns when the world was young.

And one day Geralt lies in bed, feeling his own faint heartbeat, and Jaskier sings a song he’s been working on, about star-crossed lovers or something. It’s night, the moon is full and the birds asleep, and the horses have been left loose. Jaskier’s hair is grey now, like the first time Geralt saw him depart, and he lies next to Geralt playing his lute. And he says, “Maybe I’ve been just a ghost all along, Geralt.” And Geralt says, “Hmm.” But he knows ghosts and monsters; and he knows Destiny too.

Jaskier holds his hand tightly and closes his eyes, and Geralt tells him, “I will see you, my friend.” When they fall asleep for good this time around, Geralt still refuses to believe in Destiny. He believes in Jaskier, though. In Jaskier’s ability to not leave him alone, and he knows he means it, whatever happens, or doesn’t happen after death, they will be there together.