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Geralt has zero clue what to make of the couple who has just moved into the ranch house next door.
They’re city folk, neighborhood gossip says. Moved out here to the suburbs for a fresh start. They say he’s taken up the position of music teacher at the local elementary school, and she’s some big city lawyer.
“I heard,” says Mrs. O’Leary to him one morning from the other side of her hedge of boxwoods. “That he’s a queer, and she’s one of them exotic dancers.” The old woman taps her nose. “Marriage of convenience.”
“Hmm,” says Geralt, who is just trying to take out the trash in peace.
He’s not so sure.
The man certainly looks enough like a schoolteacher. He’s fresh-faced and high energy, just the sort of person you would imagine enjoys spending all day teaching a circle of kids to play the recorder.
And the woman certainly looks like a big city lawyer, dark-haired and severe and holier-than-thou. She doesn’t seem to own a single non-black clothing item and drives a sleek, black Jaguar to match.
They leave the house together each morning, him in fitted slacks and a pressed, pastel button down, her in a dark blazer and pencil skirt and smart heels, and they lean to kiss in the driveway before she slips into her Jaguar and he clambers into a rusty blue beater.
They look as ill-fitted to each other as they are to the neighborhood.
He just doesn't know what to make of them.
Geralt doesn’t mean to watch them as much as he does, but they are always drawing attention to themselves. The rest of the neighborhood is reserved, quiet, hardly anyone lingering outside for longer than necessary, quick to scurry indoors at the end of the workday. All the yards are neat and prim, and everyone lives their own separate, unobtrusive lives.
Geralt’s lived here almost a year now and only knows Mrs. O’Leary by name (and he has the sinking suspicion that’s due to some untoward crush on her part).
But the new neighbors seem not to understand this unspoken suburban law of staying out of sight and staying quiet.
As the spring nights warm into summer, the pair linger out on their deck long into the evening, drinking and causing a ruckus. The music teacher strums a guitar and belts lyrics, and the lawyer’s sharp voice teases him, dissolving into laughter as the night goes on.
The previous tenant allowed the in-ground pool in the backyard to grow algae-scummed and derelict, but on sunny days, he swims laps in a neon speedo, while she lies out sunbathing. For a family with no children, they have a bizarre amount of inflatable, animal-shaped pool toys.
Their yard quickly grows up too long and green and frothed in a sea of dandelions.
Do they own a lawnmower? Geralt wonders. Should he let them borrow his? But no, he sees the music teacher drag a dingy thing out of the shed one day only for the poor machine to give up halfway through one swathe across the overgrown lawn. The man tinkers for the better part of an hour with the mower before getting distracted and leaving it half-disassembled sitting in the middle of the lawn. Where it sits for weeks.
Their lawn grows up, and the lawyer starts planting garden beds, starting in neat rows in the fenced backyard and then sprawling into the front yard. She doesn’t seem the type to root about in the dirt, and in the end, she isn’t. Their garden erupts into weedy chaos within the first month of summer. Tomatoes sprawl unstaked and pumpkins and cucumbers crawl away untended into the lawn.
They have a little apricot poodle called Buttercup, whose name Geralt knows only because they’re always shouting it across the yard when the little thing gets up to something mischievous.
Geralt’s no professional dog trainer, but he feels like a goddamn expert in comparison. Roach is very well-behaved.
So, it’s not as if Geralt intends to keep an eye on them. They’re just noisy and colorful and always up to something and in such contrast to the rest of the suburban doldrums that he can’t help but part the curtains just to peer out at them from time to time. Or a lot of the time.
Or far too much of the time.
His own life, maybe, is just a little bit boring.
Beyond what’s necessary to keep Ciri fed and happy and on the bus to school or daycare each morning, he doesn’t do much. He goes to work. He comes home from work. He sits on the back deck and cracks open a beer while the grill heats up, tossing a ball for Roach while Ciri occupies herself on the swingset.
He doesn’t have friends. His brothers live all over the country, and he hasn’t seen them in years. Ciri’s grandma hardly stomachs him the amount of time it takes to set-up playdates over the phone. His job doesn’t lend itself to socializing.
He’s got Ciri, and he’s got Roach and that’s been more than enough to keep him busy, thank you very much.
Except he can’t think of any reason beyond boredom why he’d spend so much time worrying about his neighbors’ lives. Maybe suburban curtain twitching is a sickness, and he’s finally caught it. He’ll grow to be old and nebby same as Mrs. O’Leary and peer over hedges to cast aspersions on the ornery folks next door.
And until the neighborhood block party at the height of summer, watching and casting aspersions is all it is.
“I’m Jaskier,” says the music teacher, extending a pale hand.
For this one, particular occasion, the street has been allowed to fall into disarray, the cul-de-sac lined with tables groaning under the weight of a veritable feast of picnic food and cluttered with coolers of chilled drinks. A fleet of grills stands under the shade of a beech tree, and Geralt has been roped into assisting with manning them, fiddling with hot dogs and flipping burgers and checking on the whole roast pig.
The music teacher is dressed in turquoise slacks that bare his ankles to the world and a short-sleeved button down printed with tiny yellow flowers. The lawyer steps up beside him in a black dress and floppy, black sun hat, black-lacuered fingernails tapping against the chilled glass of an IPA.
“Geralt,” says Geralt.
“And this is Yennefer,” says Jaskier. “My wife. She’s much hotter and cooler than me.”
“Oh,” says Geralt. “Ok.”
“Stop being weird, you lightweight,” says Yennefer, touching his arm.
“I’m not being weird, I’m being friendly,” he says and shakes her off. “I’m meeting the neighbors. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To be friendly and meet the neighbors? And this is our next door neighbor, Yen. Our very closest next door neighbor.”
“I’m here for the free booze,” says Yennefer, tipping up the neck of her beer bottle for a prolonged swig.
She isn’t anything like Geralt expected. She also hardly glances at him, eyes on her husband.
A blur of blonde hair interrupts them, his daughter’s arm hooking around his waist as she hits him at speed and spins. She rattles out a high-pitched request to go swimming with the other kids in a neighbor’s pool and then rushes off home to hurry into her bathing suit and join the others. It’s good to see her making friends. Sometimes he worries that she’s lonely with just him around.
“We have a pool,” says Jaskier. “She’s welcome to it anytime.”
“Jaskier,” says Yennefer. “Don’t invite random neighbor children to our pool.”
“It’s not random neighbor children! It’s Geralt’s kid. Geralt’s not random.”
“You didn’t even know his name until just now. You don’t even know her name.”
“She’s too old for my classes or I would.”
“Ciri’s eight.”
“Right, see! Now I know. Now she’s double invited to a pool party. And you too of course. Couldn’t not invite her handsome father.”
“Quit it, Jaskier.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
Yennefer gives him a Look.
Geralt has no idea what’s going on.
“Um,” he says. “I have to check on the burgers.”
By the time he’s done so, the couple has moved on to mingle with other partygoers more interesting than Geralt.
But the damage is already done.
A week later, Jaskier approaches the fence that divides their yards with an official invite to their pool. He reaches an arm to present it to Ciri with a flourish. Roach trots alongside her to sniff at Buttercup snuffling at the bottom of the fence.
The invite is hand-written on expensive-looking, pale blue stationary and in ornate calligraphy reads “THE LADY CIRI IS INVITED TO SWIM ANY TIME IN OUR HUMBLE SWIMMING POOL”.
“I told him he didn’t need to be that extra,” says Yennefer. “But you can’t ever tell him that. It’s just a challenge.”
School’s out for summer, and Jaskier is home most days, lounging by the pool or tinkering with some project in the yard. He waves exuberantly to Geralt whenever he spots him watching. He has the slightly unhinged look of a man who should probably not be allowed so much free time to himself.
Ciri is quick to demand the use of her pool invite.
She demands a shopping trip to prepare for the occasion, Geralt treating her to a new pink leopard print bathing suit and a white floppy sunhat to rival Yennefer’s in sheer breadth and ridiculous, oversized sunglasses. He stops her in the yard to drench her in a cloud of sunscreen, which she bears with all the stoic grit of a warrior preparing to march off to battle, and then she strides off with determined poise to knock on the neighbors’ door, silly invitation in hand.
Jaskier greets her with equal seriousness, an upright stiffness to his shoulders as he regards her down the length of his nose.
“Ah, my most dashing lady Cirilla, your arrival has been much anticipated,” he says. “Please, please, allow me to escort you to the swimming area. Mind Buttercup, lest he bite your heels. Come!” He winks at Geralt over the top of her head and sweeps her out to the poolside.
Geralt follows through the gate into their backyard, Roach ambling at his side, and soon encounters the infamous Buttercup face to face in a blur of apricot curls as the little poodle acquaints himself bodily with the fawn-colored borzoi. Roach wags her tail stiffly, comically large beside the yapping beast.
“Hi Ciri,” says Yennefer from her lounge chair by the pool. It’s barely gone noon, but she has a shandy in hand and the flush of a buzz on her cheeks. “Nice hat.”
Ciri wastes no time in discarding said hat to race Jaskier down the yard to cannonball into the water.
Geralt settles into a chair beside Yennefer to observe their antics.
“He’s good with her,” says the dark-haired woman. She offers him a beer from the cooler at her feet, the can slick with condensation. He watches her adjust her long, tanned legs on the lounge chair.
“Are you two planning to uhhh… you know. Kids?” Geralt tapers off. He’s never been very good at small talk, and the woman beside him is particularly intimidating.
“Not in the cards for me unfortunately.”
“Oh uhhh sorry to--”
She waves away his apology.
“It’s fine,” she says. “I’d be a horrid mother anyway.”
“Uhhh I don’t think… I mean that’s not… That’s...”
Yennefer laughs away his stuttering attempts at reassurance.
“What about Ciri’s mother?” she asks.
“Passed away when she was five.”
“Shit, Geralt, I’m sorry.”
It’s his turn to wave away her apologies.
“Don’t be. Hardly knew her. Didn’t even know I had a kid until Ciri’s grandma demanded child support,” he says. The little girl in the pool shrieks with laughter, her wet hair plastered across her face. It’s good to see. The laughter. “Finally got custody last year, and we moved into this place. Good school, nice neighborhood. Wanted her to grow up somewhere peaceful. Happy.”
“She looks happy,” says Yennefer.
“I hope so,” he says. It’s all he can hope for. And in this moment, she does, involved in beating Jaskier about the head and shoulders with a pool noodle while he struggles to defend himself with his own.
Their conversation lulls into pleasant silence, the shandy sweet and cool and the morning sun warm.
“So, Geralt,” says Jaskier as he returns dripping and out of breath from the pool after several dozen invigorating rounds of Marco Polo. His voice is somewhat muffled by the fuzzy yellow towel he dries his face in as he asks, “what do you do for a living?”
“Sales,” Geralt says dryly.
When talking about his choice of career, most people look at Geralt, broad-shouldered, scarred, mean-looking, and gruff, and don’t ask anymore questions. Sales is clearly not the right description for what he does, but most are too polite to push him to elaborate.
Jaskier is not most people.
“So like… insurance? Office supplies? I dunno… dog food? Farming equipment?”
His flippant suggestions are met with stony silence.
“Jaskier, leave the man alone,” says Yennefer, but her careful gaze says she is regarding him the way others do, noticing the ambiguity that Jaskier glosses over.
No, he’s not quite an ordinary salesman. Not by any means.
It’s way more humdrum than one would think, dispatching terrifying creatures of the night.
He’s something of an independent contractor. The agency posts contracts, connects him with clients. Sometimes it’s hush-hush, and sometimes it’s right out there in the open. Everyone knows these things exist, but most people try not to look straight at it. Just hope someone comes to deal with it and that the beast stalking the hills outside of town doesn’t get hungry.
The agency calls, offers him a contract, and he accepts or declines. It’s almost boring.
He gets a call from the agency for a contract. Good money, but its two days drive away. Used to be he traveled the Continent contract to contract, never settling, never resting long enough to meet the neighbors, but Ciri’s changed things.
It’s longer than he would prefer to be away from Ciri, but it’s nothing he hasn’t done before, dropping Ciri off at her grandmother’s for an extended visit, except--
“Damn it,” he curses, resisting tossing his phone out into the yard. Calanthe really has a way with words, and the majority of them this time were something along the line of “I’m not your fucking babysitter and you should have thought about your inconsistent work schedule before suing for custody and you just aren’t suited to being a father, not with your lifestyle and--”
“Yoohoo, neighbor!” trills Jaskier over the fence. “Everything ok over there? That’s a very scary face you’ve got going on.”
Geralt exhales hard through his nose to beat back his frustration.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Just… business trip this week, and Ciri’s grandma’s gone off the rails. She can’t watch her.”
“Oh,” says Jaskier, visibly perking up. “Well, we could. Watch her, that is.”
“You sure you don’t want to check with your wife before offering that kind of thing?”
“Yen loves kids!”
Geralt quirks a brow.
“Well, she likes Ciri well enough. Think about it. She’ll have the time of her life.”
And in the end, it’s his only option.
He needs this contract, he’s got a mortgage to pay, and Ciri is responsible enough he can leave her on her own for a day or so but he won’t know until he gets there how long this will take. Five days at the most if it’s simple. A week or more if it’s not.
So he presses a goodbye kiss to Ciri’s forehead on their front stoop and leaves her in the neighbors’ care for the week.
“Don’t worry, Geralt,” says Jaskier, a hand resting on Ciri’s head. Behind him, Yennefer stands with arms crossed, peeved at having not been consulted over this babysitting offer but not looking as displeased as she probably thinks she does.
“I’m not worried,” Geralt lies and stoops to press one last kiss to Ciri’s forehead, the girl trying to wriggle away with a groan.
“I’ll protect her with my life,” says Jaskier in stone-faced seriousness and offers him an exaggerated salute. Ciri giggles.
It’s hell to leave her every damn time, but for once, he really isn’t as worried as usual.
The three on the stoop wave him off as he puts his truck in gear and drives out of the neighborhood.
He suspects she’ll hardly miss him much at all.
The contract ends up not being as simple and neat and straight-forward as he hoped, but that’s more typical than anything.
The werewolves terrorizing the sleepy backwater town he finds himself in aren’t werewolves at all. Shadows, he thinks. Must be cast by a nearby witch.
He tracks the witch across the half-dead town, stopping at the local McDonald’s on the strip for a quick burger and a bit of intel. Or four happy meals and a bit of intel. Ciri’s not too old yet for the silly, little toys that come with them, and he never comes home from trips like this without some trinket or bauble.
“Yeah, it’s a real shame what happened to those men from the factory,” says the bored cashier. Her eyes say it is not that much of a shame, not really.
“Is it?” he asks, starting in on his third cardboard clamshell of chicken nuggets.
“Well,” says the cashier.
And tells him a very interesting story.
He finds the witch living up in the hills above the river in a trailer park. She’s dirt poor and freshly laid off for reasons definitely unrelated to her recent sexual misconduct claim against several fellows in upper management. Several of which have recently been found gutted and maimed by shadow werewolves.
Geralt hates these sorts of contracts. He almost wants to drag his feet and let her finish the job, knows that if he waits, there will be fresh bodies in a day or so.
But he met with a tear-streaked widow this morning on the edge of town, cradling a doe-eyed babe to her hip, and he knows he can’t wait.
It’s not Geralt’s job to moralize.
There are men, and there are monsters.
Problem being, it’s sometimes hard to see the difference.
The witch’s trailer is laden with wards that he breaks easily enough, and she’s hissing up spells before he can talk her down and maybe convince her to move on, not kill anyone else. Her face contorts as she chants, fingers twisting with flickering energy as her eyes roll back in her head.
In the end, he has no choice but to slash his silver dagger under the line of her jaw.
She’s bleeding out in his hold, twitching, when suddenly her head snaps back, and she roars.
The voice she uses is not her own.
“THE GIRL,” the dark voice bellows. “THE GIRL IS IN DANGER.”
Something cold slips down Geralt’s spine.
He drives home in a white-knuckled panic, not pausing for more than a brief nap on the side of the highway. He cuts the two day drive nearly in half.
Dusk has begun to settle as he pulls into the neighborhood. He parks the truck askew in his drive and leaves the driver’s door ajar as he stumbles toward the neighbor’s house.
Geralt knocks, heart pounding.
No answer.
He finds the door unlocked when he tries the knob and steps inside to utter chaos. The living room has been ransacked, every couch cushion pulled off and copious decorative pillows strewn across the floor. The abstract painting above the fireplace hangs askew.
Fuck, he thinks. Fuck, fuck. He’s dragged this ordinary couple into his fucked up life, and he’ll never forgive themselves if they’re hurt or--
He’ll never forgive himself for leaving Ciri unprotected.
The kitchen is in a similar state of disarray, every cabinet standing open, pillows and cushions thrown about here as well. There's a towering mound of dishes in the sink that has half collapsed across the counter. In the next room, half the dining room chairs are knocked over, the other half are swaddled in a patchwork mess of blankets and--
Wait.
Geralt strides quickly across the room, grips the edge of a blanket, and tugs.
Revealing two adults, two dogs, and one wild-haired child blinking into the sudden brightness, luxuriously cocooned in an elaborate blanket fort.
“Hi, Daddy!” squeals Ciri and leaps from within the nestle of the fort straight into Geralt’s arms. Roach jumps up to lean against his legs, whining softly, and Buttercup begins to yelp and snap at his heels.
“Morning,” says Yennefer in a sleepy drawl as she stretches from where she has clearly been napping on her side. The sight of her mussed hair is outright disarming. Even more disarming is the fact that she is wearing feather-grey sweatpants, ‘Oxenfurt Academy’ emblazoned in red letters down the legs.
“It’s nighttime, dear,” says Jaskier as he disentangles himself stiffly from the blankets, hand pressing at his lower back. “Remind me to add more padding to the fort next time.”
“Mr. Rivia,” says Yennefer. “Tell me you have not tracked mud all over my home.”
He glances down at his boots, a task that is made more difficult than expected by the dogs writhing at his feet and a child clambering over him like a jungle gym.
Hmmm. He’s tracked mud all over their home.
“Um,” says Geralt. “Sorry, I thought--” He gestures at the mess of the dining room. “I thought there’d been a break-in. This place is ransacked.”
His heart rate is still much too fast, but he forces his breathing to slow, allowing his arms to tighten around the girl in his arms.
She’s safe. She’s fine. The voice from the dying witch’s throat had just been a fluke, one last defense mechanism. He curses himself for his stupidity. Should have a clearer head than all that. The girl’s fine. Ciri is safe.
“I’ll um… I’ll pay for any damages,” he says, and Yennefer laughs.
“The damages are all this idiot,” she says. Jaskier smiles sheepishly.
“I may have gotten a bit carried away.”
“What else is new?”
“The floor is lava,” whispers Ciri very seriously.
“Ah,” says Geralt, the errant pillows and couch cushions strewn about the floor suddenly making a hell of a lot more sense. Though the sheer volume of decorative couch cushions is still alarming. Is there even room to sit on said couches when not disassembled across the entire house?
“You’re home early,” says Jaskier. “We were just about to make dinner. You down for dino nuggets and mac and cheese, Ciri?”
The girl whoops in Geralt’s ear, and the four of them head into the mess of a kitchen. Jaskier flits about trying to tidy here and there but ends up just displacing some of the mess into similar messes a bit to the left. Yennefer extracts said nuggets from the freezer and starts a pot of water on the stove.
“You didn’t have to buy anything special for her,” says Geralt. “She’s not picky. She’ll eat anything.”
“Oh no, it’s nothing special,” says Jaskier.
“You telling me you just had dino nuggets in your freezer?”
“Er… I mean...”
Geralt has the distinct vision of the couple sitting at their dining room table on an ordinary weeknight, serving up dinosaur-shaped nuggets on fancy place settings paired with a bottle of Pinot Grigio.
“Why am I not surprised?” he drawls.
“Complete shocker,” says Yennefer. “This idiot? Same taste as a literal child?”
“As if you can cook anything else either, Yen.” Jaskier has recruited Ciri to help with the stack of unwashed dishes, and she treats her drying duties with utmost gravity.
“I can cook.”
“Mac and cheese does not count.” She opens her mouth to protest. “Neither does hamburger helper.” She closes her mouth.
His adrenaline finally fading, Geralt allows himself to sink into the unusual domesticity of the scene. The couple bickering affectionately. The dogs sitting politely to beg for scraps. Ciri shrieking and giggling.
She’s safe. More than safe.
Something warm and strange settles in his chest.
Just like that, the eccentric couple wheedles their way into Geralt and Ciri’s life.
From the inside, their life in the demure ranch house is even more at odds with the rest of the suburbs.
For one, their interior decorating taste is baffling and in distinct contrast to one another. Jaskier favors knick-knacks and clutter and cheap nonsense from home stores, and Yennefer predictably prefers muted tones and elegant trappings.
Their kitchen walls are a bizarre shade of vibrant green.
They have no consistent mealtimes, with takeout from varying restaurants arriving at odd hours of the day and night. Their mostly empty cupboards are stocked with a mix of sugary cereals and alcohol bottles, their freezer crammed with TV dinners, and fridge barren except for random condiments. Eventually, Geralt starts inviting them regularly for dinner if only so maybe they’ll eat a vegetable or two.
The picnic table out in the backyard becomes the site of frequent barbeques that go on long past dusk, Jaskier strumming his guitar and crooning and Ciri racing to catch fireflies with the dogs yapping at her heels, Yennefer hiding a fond smile behind her pint glass.
Their relationship only perplexes him more deeply the more he sees of it.
They bicker constantly over the most minuscule of details, but the arguments never turn sour or bitter, petering off into affectionate jabs and childish gestures. They exchange insults in the same tone that other couples would use pet names.
Most perplexing is the open admission that they don’t share a bedroom.
“She snores,” says Jaskier with a shrug.
“He sprawls,” says Yennefer.
The more Geralt sees of them, the less he understands.
They’re unconventional and ridiculous and occasionally infuriating, but for all that they often make Geralt’s life messier and louder than it’s ever been, he is glad for their presence in his life, if only because Ciri adores them so.
If not for his assurance of Ciri’s even greater adoration for him, he could almost worry that they would usurp him.
The summer stretches on, bright and long and full of music.
Geralt has never had a friend like Jaskier.
Or any friends at all really.
Exception being his foster brothers, though he hasn’t seen either of them face to face in years. His brothers were rough and tumble, pulling him into wrestling matches and getting him into trouble and incessantly teasing. All pranks and jabs and roughhousing.
Jaskier is different.
None of the typical masculine rituals seem to apply. He is blatantly affectionate and liberal with his casual touches and unabashed with his compliments. It’s unfamiliar and sometimes unnerving but not terrible.
Jaskier drags him to concerts and festivals and art museums and other extravagant places he’s never really been before. Geralt worries at first that he is keeping the man from his wife, but Yennefer wrinkles her nose in disdain at the idea of being forced to go along.
Even in public, he is not afraid of touching Geralt in ways that aren’t strictly typical of any male friendship he’s ever been privy to.
The first time that Jaskier takes his hand to pull him down the bustling aisle of a crowded fairgrounds, he is too startled to do anything but follow after him, their palms snug, fingers entangled. Jaskier doesn’t release his hand the rest of the evening, the festival lights washing out the sky above the fairgrounds and the humid air full of music and the scents of fried food and popcorn. Geralt finds he doesn’t mind at all.
It’s good. Jaskier’s friendship.
It opens up the opportunity for a vulnerability he has never allowed himself before.
He tells Jaskier of his childhood, tossed from foster home to foster home until he ended up with Vesemir as a teenager. He talks about his brothers and his life on the road before Ciri and how lonely it all got sometimes.
It’s only after a few months of his neighbors’ company, summer nights beginning to cool into fall and Ciri preparing to head back to school, that Geralt realizes he hasn’t felt that aching loneliness in a good, long while.
For the last weekend of the summer, the four of them get away to a rented lakefront cottage together.
Ciri races back and forth across the green swathe of lawn that stretches down to the bank, launching into cartwheels and somersaults, the dogs bounding at her heels.
Buttercup takes to the water with ease, racing off to bark incessantly at ducks and swim out after them, while Roach refuses to wet her toes, not even when prompted by beloved sticks thrown out into the lake.
Yennefer and Jaskier are appalled and affronted by his choice of lakeside footwear: a pair of navy blue crocs.
“They’re comfortable! And practical.”
“They’re an eyesore.”
“Disgusting.”
“Appalling.”
“Untenable.”
“Hmm.”
Geralt lights up the charcoal grill on the bank and cooks up a steak for each of them, serving them with boiled sweet corn and creamy slaw. Jaskier balks at the slaw, and Yennefer flicks bits of cabbage at him. Ciri sneaks half of her steak to the dogs under the picnic table.
Past dark, Geralt and Jaskier traipse to the edge of the lake, Yennefer and Ciri left behind in the cottage for a night of feminine bonding.
Jaskier lays out a tattered blanket under the rustling branches of a willow.
Moonlight shines on the water and in Jaskier’s hair. They pass a flask of whiskey between them, and Jaskier’s shoulder is warm against his. Cicadas whir in the trees and bats flit across the surface of the lake, snapping up pestering insects.
It’s peaceful. Simple. Everything right in the world.
That is, until Jaskier leans up to press his lips against his.
Oh. Oh.
The reality of the past few months of friendship suddenly rushes into startling relief.
Geralt lifts his hands to Jaskier’s shoulders and pushes him gently back. The confused frown on Jaskier’s face soon twists into mortification.
“Oh fuck, oh god, I’m sorry, I thought that-- oh god, I shouldn’t have done that.”
“You’re right. You shouldn’t have,” says Geralt, and Jaskier winces. He presses his reddening face into his hands.
“I just thought-- oh, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I don’t know what you were thinking either.”
“You’re not into men, and that’s ok, that’s perfectly fine, Geralt. I’m sorry. Please don’t let this ruin our friendship. Oh fuck.”
“I’m not--” Geralt stares at him. “Jaskier, you have a wife.”
“Oh,” says Jaskier, as though he has forgotten somehow. “Oh, Geralt. Oh no, we’re not-- I mean, we are. But we’re not. I mean. Fuck. Maybe Yennefer should explain it.”
And so, after Ciri has gone to bed, Yennefer does.
They sit together in the rustic living room, a long and exceedingly awkward silence stretching between Jaskier and Geralt, who sit on couches opposite one another.
“We got married for tax benefits,” says Yennefer with a shrug as she settles in beside Jaskier, slinging her legs over his lap.
“Ok,” says Geralt.
“It’s true,” says Jaskier. “I should have-- I mean, I thought you’d guessed it already. You kept saying how weird it was we slept in different rooms.”
“It is weird. But it’s not the weirdest thing about you,” he says.
“Fair.”
“So you’re not…” He makes a complicated gesture with his hands that is meant to mean in love.
“We aren’t romantically involved,” says Yennefer.
“So you don’t…” Another gesture that is decidedly more crude.
“Oh no, we definitely do,” she says.
“That’s the best part about being married.”
“Ok,” says Geralt, who is feeling decidedly not ok about any of this. “Ok.”
“I’m sorry!” says Jaskier. “I misread everything, and I should have been more clear. I’m really sorry. It’s just… we went on a lot of dates, Geralt.”
“Dates?”
“Our first date was at that arts festival in June. Are you really telling me you didn’t know that was a date?”
“I didn’t know that was a date.”
“I said ‘hey Geralt, do you want to go on a date with me to the arts festival’?”
“I thought like… as friends. A friendship date.”
“We held hands at the county fair.”
“Thought you didn’t want me getting lost in the crowd.”
“What about when we got all cozy on that bench in the art museum?”
“The air conditioning was cranked really high in there. Thought you were cold.”
“I bought you jewelry. With our initials on it.”
Geralt glances at the leather bracelet on his wrist, a metal plaque shining on the band that does indeed bear their initials engraved inside a heart.
“Friendship bracelet,” he says dumbly, realizing how very stupid that sounds even as he says it.
Of course. Of course Jaskier has been… courting him. He curses under his breath.
“I’m sorry,” says Jaskier again. Beside him on the couch, Yennefer looks about ready to combust with mirth, her shoulders shaking silently, staying quiet only not to wake Ciri.
“Maybe if I had known your marriage was… whatever it is, I would have caught on.”
“I should have told you. I really am--”
“Quit apologizing.”
“Sor-- hmm.” Jaskier presses his mouth shut. “So um,” he says, shifting in his seat. His fingers drum against Yennefer’s shins. “So, besides the whole infidelity thing, I wasn’t horrifically wrong about the rest, was I? You are into men?”
“I’m…” Geralt hasn’t really thought about it. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” says Jaskier. “Well I’m just horrendously bad at reading things, aren’t I?”
“I’m not into anyone,” says Geralt.
“No one?”
“Haven’t been so far.”
“But… Ciri’s mother?”
“Don’t even remember it. I was really drunk.”
“Oh.”
“Haven’t been with anyone else. Haven’t ever wanted to be.” Geralt shrugs. “Always figured I just wasn’t put together quite right. There’s enough wrong with me otherwise, you know? Figured it was part of that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” says Yennefer. The unfamiliar tenderness in her tone seems to surprise Jaskier almost as much as it does Geralt. “You’re put together just fine.”
Geralt isn’t so sure about that.
“It was lonely before,” he says. “When I was younger.” The wind groans along the cottage roof. He can still see the moonlight rippling across the lake. “But it’s not anymore. I’ve got Ciri. Roach. I don’t need anything else.”
“You have us too,” says Jaskier. He reaches to clasp Geralt’s knee, thumb brushing against his bare skin.
“You do,” says Yennefer.
“I’m sorry that I can’t…” He trails off. “You know.”
“Please, please, don’t be sorry, Geralt,” says Jaskier, tightening his grip on his knee. “Please. Your friendship is enough. More than enough. Will always be enough.”
“It’s… I mean. I didn’t mind it,” he says.
“Mind what?”
Geralt gestures to the palm that cups his knee.
“So don’t,” he says, feeling as though he is pushing the words up through his tightening throat. “Don’t stop. Uhh… unless you want to. Then you can… if you… uhhh…”
“I don’t want to stop,” says Jaskier. He swipes his thumb again along his leg, a soft smile slipping onto his face.
“Ok,” says Geralt. And it is, somehow. “Ok.”
In the morning, he serves up pancakes and bacon and scrambled eggs in the little kitchen.
Yennefer and Jaskier complain that he hasn’t made the pancakes round enough, standing over his shoulder to critique his batter dispersal technique.
“Literal children,” he says as he sets a platter of decidedly oblong pancakes before them. “Every single one of you.”
“I’m almost nine,” says Ciri as she digs into her stack.
“And very mature for your age,” says Geralt.
Beside him, Jaskier presses a warm hand to the small of his back. Yennefer leans across the counter to ruffle Jaskier’s hair.
It’s strange and it’s unconventional, and he has no idea how long it’s going to last.
But oh god, he wants it to. He wants it to last.
And of course.
It doesn’t.
After the warm blur of summer and the unsettling realization at the lakehouse and the rush of getting Ciri to settle back into her school routine, Geralt has completely forgotten about the bizarre, dying words of the witch from the trailer park.
That is, until, the night he hears that voice again.
This time he is dreaming, a disjointed sequence of landscapes that bumbles from one of his childhood foster homes to the weedy drainage ditch he used to play as a boy to the open farmland behind Vesemir’s house, cottony clouds floating in a blue sky over the empty fields.
He turns to see Ciri standing behind him, though she is the age she was when he first met her. Five years old with owlish green eyes and tangled blonde hair. Wearing overalls that hang off one shoulder, her shoes untied.
In the dream, Roach steps up beside her, the leggy borzoi looking particularly out of place in his foggy memory of Vesemir’s backyard.
Her elongated muzzle opens and a familiar, dark voice echoes from her mouth.
“THE GIRL IS IN DANGER. THE GIRL IS IN DANGER.”
Geralt scrambles free of his blankets before he is even fully conscious. At the end of the bed, Roach is sitting up with her head tilted, whining softly.
He pads out into the midnight hallway straining his ear for the sound that woke him.
He nearly resigns himself to it being his imagination, his strange dream inspiring paranoia, but then, he hears it again.
A creaking floorboard. Footsteps.
He creeps to the top of the stairs, willing his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
A shadow shifts below.
Geralt is down the stairs and on the man at the bottom of the stairs in half a breath.
“Geralt,” whispers the shadow pinned in his hold.
“Jaskier? What are you--”
Jaskier shushes him, and his fingers curl tight around his arm.
“Nevermind, nevermind. It’s Ciri,” he whispers. “Geralt, please--”
Something thumps heavily on the floor above them.
No, no, no.
Blind panic tightening in his chest, Geralt flings himself away from Jaskier and back up the stairs.
He has almost reached the landing when Ciri begins to scream.
The world blurs around the edges.
As though floating somewhere outside of his body, Geralt sees himself burst into Ciri’s bedroom.
Ciri’s still screaming, an edge to the terrible noise that seems to crackle palpably in the air.
It’s too dark. It’s too dark.
He sees his hand slap against the lightswitch, like this is just any of the other times Ciri woke with a nightmare. That the light will end the terror.
The sudden brightness as the overhead light blares on is almost too much, but he forces his eyes to focus.
Ciri, her back against the headboard, still screaming. Yennefer, grappling at the edge of the bed with a hunched figure.
Geralt recognizes the figure kneeling up on the bed in the same instant that he recognizes the shape of the knife in her hand,
“Mrs… Mrs. O’Leary?” he shouts over the screaming, and the old woman spares him only a brief glance before twisting in Yennefer’s hold to slice a bloodied arc along the back of her arm.
“Fuck,” she swears, and Mrs. O’Leary lunges.
Ciri’s scream swells. The windows rattle, plaster dust shaking loose from the ceiling.
Geralt is paralyzed, fear rooting his legs to the floor.
Jaskier is not.
The world blurs, and the lights flicker out.
The screaming stops.
No.
The overhead light blinks back on to reveal the old woman collapsed against the side of the bed, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Jaskier drags in ragged breaths on the floor beside her. Yennefer cradles her bleeding arm, crouched on the edge of the bed.
Ciri slumps against the headboard, eyes closed.
His feet at last unrooted, Geralt staggers towards the bed to cup his shaking hands around her face, a hollow dread ringing in his head.
Her eyelids flutter.
“God,” he gasps and presses his forehead to hers as her eyes blink open. Safe. Safe. He realizes distantly that his face is wet with tears.
“Daddy?” Ciri asks in a voice gone raspy from the screams.
“Right here,” he says and ducks to hold her, breathing in the warm scent of her lavender shampoo. “You’re safe. I’m right here.”
“Not to interrupt,” says Jaskier from the floor. “But I think I’m… oh.”
Geralt peers down at him. At the knife that juts from his abdomen. The steady bloom of red that is widening around it.
“Oh fuck, Jaskier.” Yennefer scrambles down off the bed, her own wound forgotten. She hesitates above his body only a moment before swearing and leaning to apply pressure to the wound.
Jaskier shouts, the tendons in his neck going taut.
“Fuck,” says Geralt. “What the fuck was that? What the fuck?”
“Surprise,” mutters Jaskier, breath hitching. “We’re uh--” He grimaces in pain. “We didn’t get married for tax benefits.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Jaskier, shut up.”
“I’m going to bleed out,” he says, matter of fact. Ciri whimpers in his arm, and Yennefer swears, presses down harder against the wound.
“You are not, you little asshole. You are not.”
“We were hired to keep an eye on you. On the girl,” says Jaskier. “I’m sorry. But please know that it was real. All of this.” He shudders. “Please don’t--”
“Jaskier, shut up,” says Geralt, holding Ciri closer in the cradle of his arms. “You’re not making any sense.”
“I am. I am making s-sense.”
“Shut up,” barks Yennefer, an edge of hysteria in her voice. She’s bent double over Jaskier’s body to hold all her weight against the wound. Geralt can’t see her face. Her shoulders are trembling. “You don’t ever shut up.”
Jaskier smiles, wistful and strange.
“Yen,” he breathes. “It’s been good, yeah? I want to…”
He doesn’t finish saying what he wants to do, trailing off into unconsciousness. His eyes roll in his head.
“Jaskier!” Yennefer shouts. “No, no, fuck, don’t be like that, you little idiot. Don’t be difficult. For once, just do what you’re told and don’t-- Don’t--”
Her voice breaks into choking sobs.
A dark stain seeps across the carpet.
Geralt thinks of the warm magic of the summer that stretches behind them, gone in a blink.
He’s always known it. Fooled himself into forgetting.
Good things just don’t last.
Jaskier does not bleed out on his daughter’s bedroom floor.
But it’s a close thing.
Sirens blast shrilly through the night as Geralt holds Ciri tight against his hip, watching the ambulance disappear down the street. Some of the neighbors have woken to peer blearily out of their houses at the flashing lights.
The dewed grass in his front lawn chills his ankles, and he realizes distantly that he’s wearing only rubber duck boxers and a faded sleep shirt. Ciri’s bare legs dangle, her sniffling face pressed into his neck. Roach sits at his side licking sometimes at Ciri’s toes or his shins.
He’s already given his statement to the officer. The body of Mrs. O’Leary is loaded at a more sedate pace into the second ambulance, and it drifts off down the street. No sirens.
Yennefer had gone along with Jaskier.
His last glimpse of the two of them had been just before the ambulance door slammed, her violet eyes wild with grief, both blood-streaked hands clenching the knuckles of Jaskier’s pale hand to her cheek.
Someone is trying to talk to him. Geralt looks around blearily. A neighbor, a woman who lives a few houses down. Asking if he's alright.
He feels the urge to shout at her. Curse the whole goddamn neighborhood.
One of the only good things that’s ever happened in this shithole of a place has just driven off in that ambulance, maybe never to return, and his other neighbors never even knew. Openly cursed the eccentric couple and their wild lawn and their yappy dog and their endless singing and cavorting.
Geralt wants to tell the neighbor to fuck off back into her stuffy, boring house and never talk to him again.
Instead, he spins on his heels and heads across the yard and into Yennefer and Jaskier's house.
He can't go into his. His house is a crime scene.
There’s some of Ciri’s clothes in the dresser in a spare room, and he tugs a half-dozing Ciri into something warm, pulling on some of Jaskier’s clothes himself.
He pauses a moment, tugging at the front of the baggy, red sweatshirt adorned with Oxenfurt’s mascot.
It smells like him.
He packs clothes for Yennefer as well, grabs their toothbrushes and deodorant. His fogged brain defaults to the practical. What can he do to help. What can he do.
Leaves food for Roach and Buttercup in the kitchen. Dumps some water on the potted herbs in the kitchen window, just in case. Thumbs the lock on the sliding glass door.
Stands a long moment in the entryway holding Ciri’s hand. The girl is more awake now, staring up at him with settling awareness.
“Daddy?” she asks, voice scratching. “Was I dreaming?”
“Yeah,” he says, hand settling on her blonde head. “Yeah, just a dream.”
Outside again, he buckles her into the backseat of his truck.
As the sky begins to lighten along the edge of the horizon, he drives out of the neighborhood, following the path the ambulance took.
Yennefer sits at Jaskier’s bedside, her hands folded in her lap. The blinds are drawn against the afternoon sunlight.
She does not look up as Geralt enters.
The blankets are snugged up under Jaskier’s chin, his face pallid and dark hair mussed against the pillows.
“He’ll live,” she says, still not moving her gaze from his sleeping face.
“That’s good,” says Geralt.
“How’s Ciri?”
“Her grandma came to pick her up. She’s watching her for a few days.”
“But is she ok?”
Geralt sighs. He doesn’t know what Ciri truly remembers, what she will think was a horrible dream. She seemed her usual self, if a bit reserved, when he left her with Calanthe in the hospital lobby. Children are resilient. It may fade without scarring.
“I think she’ll be ok,” Geralt says.
He pulls a chair to Jaskier’s bedside and sits. For a while, they watch his chest rise and fall together in heavy silence.
“So you’re not what you seem, then,” says Geralt. He’s always known there was something off about them. Half of him is relieved to have something of an explanation. The other half feels fragile and shredded. A little bit heartbroken.
“Our employers have similar interests in monitoring the child,” says Yennefer. “She’s an anomaly. Mrs. O’Leary was an agent from… the other side. Someone who aims to use and control her power.”
Geralt remembers the terrible screaming, the rattling of the windows, the trembling of the walls.
“So you’re… spies?”
“I’m a mage. He’s an intelligent agent.”
“And hired to what… stalk me? Befriend me?”
“We weren’t told to make contact,” she says. “That was his idea.” She still does not look up from his face. “He liked you too much not to chat you up. Then, he fell in love with you. He was a mess over you. Still is.”
Geralt grimaces.
“I do love him,” he says. “Just not… you know.”
“I know,” she says.
“Wish I could.”
“I know.”
The only sound in the room is the quiet hum of the machines monitoring Jaskier’s vitals. Yennefer sits very still, shoulders hunched slightly, her hands together in her lap.
“When he was dying,” she starts, and Geralt’s eyes catch on the slight wobble of her lower lip. “When he was lying there bleeding out, I realized something.” She huffs a laugh through the tears that suddenly wet her lashes, swiping at them with the back of a hand. “It feels very stupid and cliche. It feels like one of his damn songs.”
“Yeah?” Geralt asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He’s never shown her express emotion like this. Has the feeling she hasn’t cried this much in a very long while.
Yennefer wipes the last of her tears and sniffs hard, blinking to center herself. She lifts a hand to brush his dark hair from his pale face.
“I love him,” she says. “Am in love with him.”
“I could have told you that,” says Geralt. “I never doubted that you were in love.”
Yennefer shakes her head.
“Anything you saw was just an act,” she says. “I could hardly tolerate him in the beginning. He’s so fucking annoying.” The fondness in her tone is palpable. “I never thought I’d survive living with him for months, but it was better than I thought. It was good.”
“It was good,” Geralt agrees. Though he realizes now with a painful pang of dread. It can never go back to what it was.
“I don’t know when it started,” she says. “I helped him court you. Gave him advice. Didn’t think you’d be as completely oblivious as you were, but I'm not really one to talk I guess. I didn’t even know until he… until…”
She breathes deep, shaking off the tears that want to well up again.
“You should tell him,” says Geralt. “When he wakes up.”
“No,” says Yennefer. “No, I don’t know what will happen when he wakes up. We weren’t supposed to cause a scene. He might get reassigned. I’ll have to go explain things to the Chapter and I-- well, it won’t matter what I feel. He doesn’t feel that for me.”
“How do you know?”
“He would have said something by now. He’s not exactly subtle with his affections. He has no brain to mouth filter.”
“So?” says Geralt. “You’ve been pretending to be married for six months. He probably said he loved you loads of times. Could have meant it. How would you know?”
“I would know,” she says.
“Are you sure?”
“Leave it, Geralt. Just leave it.”
She sounds defeated. Exhausted.
Geralt leaves it.
They sit together a long while in silence while Jaskier sleeps.
In the evening, he steps out to stretch his legs and fetch them something from the cafeteria. Before heading back into the room, he pauses to look through the window in the door. Yennefer is curled down against the hospital bed, asleep, her head settled near Jaskier’s hip.
Jaskier’s blue-veined hand has lifted to rest on her dark hair.
The next morning, Jaskier is awake and only slightly groggy from pain meds. He demands an endless delivery of hospital pudding cups and woozily slurs half of his words, but Geralt has a suspicion that it’s just for the drama of it. His morphine dose isn’t even that high.
“Daaarling,” he slurs, reaching to pat Geralt’s cheek. “You look beautiful. Stunning.”
“Quit lying, Jaskier. I look like shit.” He hasn’t slept much and didn’t go home to shower. His home is still a crime scene, and he’s only gone back to Jaskier and Yen’s place to feed the dogs.
He can’t help but stop and look around whenever he’s there, wondering how much of it is a sham and how much is real. Does Jaskier really love decorative pillows that much? Are the photos on the mantle doctored as well? He assumes the wedding ones are, at least.
“He does look like shit,” says Yennefer from Jaskier’s other side.
“He didn’t even almost die,” says Jaskier. “He has no right to look like shit.”
“That’s right, dear,” says Yen. “You’ve earned looking like shit.”
“I have,” says Jaskier. “I’ve earned the monopoly on looking like shit. Therefore, Geralt looks gorgeous. As always.”
Yen rolls her eyes, but looking closer, Geralt can see a slight tension in her shoulders. A tightness at the corner of her mouth.
He stops her by the arm when they go out along the hospital terrace for a walk.
“You have to tell him,” he says, and she shrugs out of his hold.
“I don’t have to actually.”
“What if he’d died,” says Geralt. It’s a low blow, and he knows it.
“Then he’d be dead. And it wouldn’t matter anyway,” says Yennefer. “He didn’t die though. He’s fine, and he’s back to his normal self. And he doesn’t love me.”
“You don’t--”
“I do know that actually. Now fuck off. I need some fresh air.” She strides off down the terrace in a huff, and Geralt lets her go.
When he returns to Jaskier’s room, she’s still not back. Jaskier waves at him from where he is propped upright in the bed.
It’s the first time they’ve been alone together since he woke up.
“Hi,” says Geralt, sitting in his typical chair beside the bed.
“Hi,” says Jaskier.
“How are you feeling?”
“About the same as when you asked me that half an hour ago.”
“Right,” says Geralt. “Sorry.”
“How about you?” he asks. “I mean, how are you doing with all this?”
“All this hospital stuff or all this ‘my next door neighbors are secret spies trying to discern whether my daughter is a threat or not’ stuff?”
“Ah,” says Jaskier. “Both, I guess.”
“I’m doing fine,” says Geralt. “As fine as I can.”
“Good,” he says. “That’s good. And I’m… very sorry. That it had to happen like this.”
“What that you almost bled out on my daughter’s bedroom floor?”
“No, that it had to happen at all. If I could wish for anything it would be to just be your ordinary next door neighbors. Flirting over the fence. Having barbecues. Chasing fireflies.”
“I’m not angry,” says Geralt. He had been, very briefly, when Jaskier was in surgery, and he had nothing to do but pace the hallways alone with his very angry thoughts. He had hated Jaskier. Hated Yen. Hated stupid, yappy Buttercup.
Was Buttercup a spy too? he had thought in a delirious rage. Perfect cover for a spy, being an adorable but extremely irritating dog. Very clever.
He had stopped then and stood for a while just staring at the wall, stood for so long his legs started to cramp. When he started walking again to stretch it out, he wasn’t angry anymore.
He hasn’t been angry since, not really.
“You should be,” says Jaskier. “You should be furious.”
“You’re my friend,” says Geralt. “I forgive you.”
“How do you know I’m your friend? I could have lied about everything.”
“You’re not a very good liar,” says Geralt.
“I am too,” says Jaskier, and his voice squeaks, giving him away. “Shit.”
“See, you’re a terrible liar.”
“I am very good at lying. Acting is just lying. I pretended to be married to Yennefer for six whole months, and no one doubted it once.”
“You weren’t lying,” says Geralt.
“What? I was lying. It was a sham marriage. I don’t even know if the documents are real. I mean, they might be. I didn’t ask.”
“Not lying,” he repeats. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“Stop saying that.”
“You’re in love with her,” says Geralt.
“I am not in--”
Jaskier pauses. Blinks. He sits up ramrod straight in his hospital bed, wincing as his stitches pull, and looks Geralt in the eye.
“Oh my god,” he says. “Oh my god, I’m in love with my wife.”
And of course, that’s the very moment that Yennefer chooses to return from her walk.
Jaskier is released from the hospital after a week of unbearable griping and moaning on his part, which segues nicely into continued griping and moaning from the comfort of his own bed, where he has been ordered to remain for the foreseeable future while his shredded abdominal muscles heal.
Yennefer makes the mistake of giving him a little bell to ring if he needs anything.
She promptly demands that Geralt stay over to help attend to his whims and fancies.
Ciri stays over as well, set up in the spare room. The crime scene cleaners were very thorough with the stain on her bedroom floor, but Geralt still knows it’s there, can almost smell it when he closes his eyes. Even being just next door, he refuses to let her sleep alone.
She has school in the morning, so she’s meant to stay in the spare room and get some sleep. But of course, Geralt finds her in Jaskier’s bed well past her bedtime, her shaky fingers smearing nail polish onto the man’s extended hand.
“Just five more minutes,” says Jaskier. “She’s still got to do a topcoat.”
An hour later, he returns to find her passed out on top of the blankets along Jaskier’s side, Jaskier equally dead to the world, his freshly-painted hand resting across Ciri’s little back.
He grows stronger each day, needing less and less help to rise from the bed, and after nearly a month, is finally pronounced well enough to return to work.
“Will you,” asks Geralt. “Return to work?”
“Never stopped,” says Jaskier with a wink. “Though it’s about time I get back to being a music teacher also.”
“They want us to stay on,” says Yennefer. “The girl still needs someone to keep an eye on her, even if our cover’s blown. Never know how many Mrs. O’Leary’s there are out there.”
“Right,” says Geralt. “I don’t actually want to think about that.”
“Don’t worry, darling,” Jaskier says. “We won’t let anything happen to her. We love her too, you know?”
“Yeah,” says Geralt. He finds that he does know. Somehow.
In the month that Jaskier has been on bedrest, their friendship has expanded into a neat, little family unit. Geralt cooks for them and goes out on errands and exercises the dogs. Yennefer keeps the house tidy and helps Ciri with her math homework. Jaskier assists with book reports and spelling.
It’s domestic. It’s gentle. It swells something tender in his breast.
The air has gone chill with autumn while Jaskier lay in bed, summer fading to a memory.
Geralt builds a roaring campfire in the backyard firepit, and the four of them huddle around it, roasting marshmallows and hollering campfire songs well into the evening.
He carries Ciri inside to bed after she conks out in her chair, pressing a kiss to her forehead as he tucks her in.
Returning to the yard, he pauses on the back porch to watch Yennefer and Jaskier shuffle close together, speaking in hushed tones. Jaskier lifts a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear and tips her chin up to draw their lips together for a beat of held breath.
Geralt still doesn’t know quite what to make of them. Not really.
But he does know he doesn’t have to peer through the windows from a distance any longer.
Leaving the quiet house behind him, Geralt strides toward the crackling fire and settles into his place at their side.