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It’s too simple. Jaskier knows all the fairy tales, he knows all the true stories behind them as well, courtesy of Geralt. There’s always a catch, especially when it seems this easy. “All I have to do is tell him? If I tell Geralt how much I love him, he will then truly love me back and we’ll be happy together for the rest of our lives?”
The Man consulted the Book before him. “You’ll be happy together for the rest of his life.”
Jaskier nearly bounded out of the tavern at that. All that doom and gloom about the mysterious Man and his mysterious Book. ‘He tells you how to get exactly what you want,’ Priscilla had told him, eyes faraway as she recounted the stories she’d heard, ‘but it always comes with a price.’
This wasn’t a heavy price at all. Just speak the words and Jaskier could finally have Geralt’s love. True love, nothing forced or coerced or magicked into existence, he’d stressed. He’d seen what a wish had done to Yennefer and Geralt; he wanted no such thing. He would tell Geralt he loved him and they would live happily for the rest of Jaskier’s life… wait, not Jaskier’s. Jaskier sat back down from where he’d moved to stand, body feeling too heavy. “…No. No, please don’t tell me I will get all I have ever dreamed and then he just… dies. How long? A month, a year? I would rather live as his friend and see him live on for decades. I would willingly and happily go to my grave with my secret then have him die too soon.”
“Hmm,” The Man looked at the pages of the Book. “You will have decades happy together but still, you will outlive him. By centuries.”
“But… no, he’s the witcher,” Jaskier breathed, “he’ll outlive me. Surely you just got it a bit mixed up.”
The Man shook his head, a small, barely there action. “If you tell him, if you start down the path,” the Book is consulted further, “you and your Geralt will be happy together for decades. It doesn’t say how many, could be anywhere from two to just shy of ten, otherwise it would be singular or talk of a century plus. But then you will spend centuries, again any number of two or more, without him.”
Jaskier tipped his head back and stared at the wood ceiling. Twenty to ninety nine years, being loved by Geralt, being able to properly and fully love Geralt as he has always wanted since he met him seventeen years ago. But for at least two hundred years and what could end up being many more, Jaskier will be alone. Well, he’ll be without Geralt, which is as good as.
The Man closed the Book. “It says nothing further. The choice is yours now. But the task is set. If you ever tell him you love him, this is the path you’ll have to walk down.”
“Wait,” Jaskier frowned, “even if I don’t decide to do this, just saying the words “I love you” to Geralt means this gets put into motion? The decades start from that moment on?”
The man nodded.
“What if,” Jaskier could find a loophole in a straight line, “what if I tell him I adore him? Or that he’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen? Or that I will… cherish and revere him to the end of my days?”
The man didn’t blink, face so expressionless even Geralt could take lessons. “You can do all that and this path isn’t chosen. This isn’t the only road to your goal. But if you ever say the words ‘I love you’ to the man, this is the only result. The Book is clear on that.”
Jaskier nodded and stood. “Right, well, decision's easy then,” he said, words galloping from him. “If just telling him I love him starts off our happy life together then he already feels the same and is waiting on my words. Which is absurd, as I’m sure everyone on the Continent knows how I feel about him by this point, if they’re ever read or heard any of my songs. So I just… can never say the words I love you. No problem. I’ve said the words so often that I barely know the meaning anymore. They’re not special enough for him anyway. So I’ll tell him I am his and always have been and we’ll be fine. And he’ll outlive me, as he should, and then continue his life after. Maybe with a passing wistful smile whenever he hears a lute or sees a field of yellow flowers.”
The Man continued to have no change in expression. “You can achieve your goal by any other means you like. But say the words and you outlive him.”
Jaskier lifted his chin. “I will say them to him with my actions, my synonyms. And I won’t lose him.” His expression saddened and tears spring unbidden but unfallen to his eyes. “I won’t lose him.”
For a long while, Jaskier was right. For nearly twenty two years, Jaskier was right.
“Just tell me you love me, just once,” Geralt asked, breath coming shallower and shallower.
Jaskier nearly laughed, hysterical and breaking at the edges. “I adore you; I worship you; you are the most important and beloved person in my life.”
“Say you love me,” Geralt said, eyes slipping closed before he opened them with obvious effort. “I know you have some weird thing against saying it, but… just once, please? The wish of a dying man?”
“You’re not,” the thought struck him. If Jaskier said I love you, yes, he will lose Geralt but he will get decades more with him first. So that would mean that Geralt can’t die this day. Jaskier closed his eyes, frantic as Geralt’s slow heartbeat began to be barely noticeable. He’s in his late fifties now. If time is kind, he might get another twenty years or so. Twenty years to live without Geralt after this day or centuries without him but with ages more time to make memories in.
It’s not even a choice anymore.
“I love you,” Jaskier says, “Geralt I love you so, so much. So much it feels impossible, too vast for one measly human heart to hold.” Now that the words are loose, he can’t keep them in. “I love you Geralt, I love you, I love you.”
He’s still babbling as Yennefer arrives even though she shouldn’t have thought to worry for hours yet. As she opens a portal for Jaskier to carry Geralt’s quickly weakening body to Triss. Who somehow has recently discovered an antidote to the poison that supposedly doesn’t have one. He’s still babbling it as he falls asleep in the bed next to Geralt, his beloved sleeping peacefully as his body heals. A week, Triss said, he’d need to rest. Maybe a bit more.
Jaskier didn’t notice the changes in himself. He saw Yennefer and Triss trading confused looks, but assumed it was mere worry about how he neglected himself to stay at Geralt’s side.
Triss either elected to tell him or lost some contest against Yen and was forced to. “Jaskier? How do you feel?”
Jaskier ran a hand through his hair, greasy, and along his jaw, stubbled. “I’ll feel better when Geralt wakes up.”
She smiled, expecting that answer, but returned to solemn quickly. She held out a mirror. “Look at yourself.”
“I can imagine exactly how shit I look without confirmation, thank you.”
“Jaskier?” Triss seemed strained. “Please?”
Taking the mirror, Jaskier cast a glance at himself, then made to hand it back. A second later he pulled it back and looked at himself closer. “Oh no. Oh no.”
Triss winced. “No human, that we have record of, has ever been exposed to the gases in that chamber. Only witchers and mages have ever gotten close enough and all of those have died. It’s meant to kill magic users, even those with few skills, like witcher signs.” She looked at Geralt. “As it is, it’s a miracle I found the recipe for the antidote when I did. And that I made some up not fifteen minutes before you two portalled in.
“A miracle,” Jaskier echoed, words hollow as his chest felt. He looked at his face again, not a single wrinkle to be found, no gray edging out the brown in his hair. He looks like he did in his mid-thirties. As he did the day he visited The Man. He looks like he did when he followed a whispered story because the love in his chest felt too big to be contained anymore and all he wanted was to be sure his heart wouldn’t be thrown back in his face. “And me?”
“I want to do some… tests,” Triss admitted. “But I think… we think… you might be immortal. Like us. Like Geralt.” She laughed slightly. “At least you didn’t have to go through any of the pain and horrors we all did to become so.”
Jaskier looked at Geralt, sleeping and getting stronger. Twenty to ninety nine years. “Not yet anyway,” he muttered.
Assured by Triss that Geralt will sleep for a few days more, Jaskier begged Yennefer to portal him to the tavern. He didn’t tell her why and she didn’t ask, though he’s sure she will eventually.
The Man was there, alone, mug of ale in his hand. He looked unsurprised to see Jaskier.
“How long?” Is all Jaskier can say once he’s seated across from him. “How long do we have?”
The Man blinked up at him. “It said decades. It didn’t specify how many years it would be. Anywhere from twenty to-“
“Ninety nine years, yes I remember,” Jaskier ran a hand through his hair, vaguely surprised when he didn’t lose a few strands. His hair wasn’t falling out anymore, his hands didn’t tremor slightly. “Will it be worth it? It feels worth it, right now, knowing I’ll go back and Geralt will wake up and by the gods that man will marry me if I have to fasten his hand to mine myself. Knowing we have years upon years to look forward to,” he sighed. “But there’ll always be this… count in my head. Will I lose him right when we hit the second decade, will I keep him just a day shy of one hundred years?”
“How does that make you feel?” The Man asked, the Book open and his pen poised over it.
Jaskier growled. “I don’t fucking know!” He sighed, the burst of anger giving way to exhaustion. “I don’t know. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”
“It didn’t have to,” The Man said, even as he wrote.
“What? I was supposed to let him die?” Jaskier felt tears in his eyes. “Deprive the world and our little family of more time with him? Not give him the chance at a better death, a more peaceful one? Just because I didn’t want to be alone for the handful of years I had left?”
The Man looked up at last. “There’s always a choice. You made yours.”
Jaskier ran a hand through his hair again. “I have. I did.” He looked at The Man. “I’m supposed to tell you how it’s going, right? Update you? Priscilla said that was a condition.”
The Man nodded. “Yes.”
“How will I find you?”
A small smile. “I’m always here.”
And he was. Jaskier reported back twenty years to the day he’d saved Geralt. Then thirty. Fifty six years, eight months, five days and a handful of hours after Jaskier had finally uttered the words ‘I love you’, he all but threw himself onto the bench across from the man. His hands were shaking, not from the ravages of age, but from anger and sadness. “He’s gone.”
The Man said nothing, but he opened the Book and took up his pen.
“He died in his sleep,” Jaskier blew out a breath. “Near as we can figure. Peaceful,” a quicksilver twitch of a smile, “which is the best we could have hoped for, I suppose. We retired about a decade ago. Finally got him to let us settle down at Corvo Bianco. Did we have the vineyard when I was last here? Did I mention it?”
“Yes.”
Jaskier shook his head. “Our daughter, Ciri, I know I’ve mentioned her, she’s gone quiet. Quiet like she hasn’t been since Geralt first found her, in the first flush of terror she ever knew. Yenna,” he choked a little at the name, “my dear Yenna’s gone too. If you’ve read my book, The Last Wish, you know why.”
The Man said, “I have.”
“I never told him,” Jaskier sighed, “about all this. I should have. Probably. But it was bad enough having a countdown in my own head; I didn’t want Geralt to shoulder that too. We’re grandparents now. Great grandparents, actually. Likely to become great great grandparents any day.” Jaskier’s hand shook and he dropped his head to the table. “We were. Now it’s just me. Just me to become a great great grandparent all alone. Is suicide allowed?” He asked. “I doubt it, breaks the whole deal but can I?”
The Man flipped a few pages in the Book. “No. You can’t.”
Jaskier lifted his head. “Didn‘t think so. I,” he dragged his sleeve over his arm, “I tried. Nothing major, just a little nick on my thigh to see if I’d even bleed. I did, for a minute. Then it closed up. Wonder if that’ll still happen once two centuries have passed.”
The pen scratched along the page, but there was no other sound from their corner for a moment.
“He won’t die,” Jaskier said at last. “I’ve had a long time to think about this and that’s what I decided. Geralt,” his eyes watered, “my gorgeous, grumpy Geralt is…” he trailed off and stared at the table for a long moment. “But The White Wolf. My brave, brilliant Witcher. I’m going to write him the best song. The best songs. Poems. Plays and books even. I’m going to spend the time without him making sure the world never forgets he was here. What he did, all we saw,” the tears finally fell, “how desperately I loved him.”
The pen wrote and then stopped. The Man held out a handkerchief. “You’ll have to tell me about it when next we meet.”
Jaskier stepped into the diner, making his way to the booth at the end. “I hear the pastrami sandwich is very good here.” He chuckled. “You didn’t use to have a code phrase.”
The Man nodded. “There didn’t used to be most of this,” he gestured lightly at the diner around them.
Jaskier nodded. “True, true.”
“How have you been?” The pen, much slicker than the one he’d had in the 13th century, already in his hand.
“Busy,” Jaskier chuckled. “They’re making a TV show about us. My Geralt and I. And our Yenna, our Ciri.” He smiled at the names of those long since passed on. “Again. In English this time, which is nice for me, my Polish was never very good. I got tapped as the foremost authority on the legends of The Witcher, even if they're basing the show off Andrzej’s books.” He laughed. “Mercifully, they’ve returned to Jaskier for the bard. Dandelion never quite sat right with me.”
Doris walked by and Jaskier grinned at her. “Can I get a coffee and some pancakes and bacon? I’m moving to that table,” he gestured to the only booth near them, “in just a minute. Once I finish catching up with my friend here.”
Doris nodded and wrote the order down.
Jaskier looked at her, then at the diner again. “I couldn’t have imagined any of this in my wildest dreams as a boy. The world is so much… more than it used to be.”
“Some things remain the same,” The Man observed.
“That they do,” Jaskier smiled. “Where did we leave off? The 1970s?”
The Man nodded.
Jaskier recounted where he’d been for the last fifty years. The names he’d taken, the jobs he’d held, the lovers he’d loved. “I miss him,” he said, fidgeting with a ring over seven hundred years old on his left hand. “Every day I miss him still. I thought it would… fade, maybe? Become a warm memory, well it is a warm memory.” He sighed. “I thought maybe I’d find another love, and I’ve certainly loved some, but not like him. No one is like him. When I asked for his love to be true, it really was. The love of my life,” Jaskier rubbed his forefinger and thumb together, another habit over seven hundred years old. “I wonder,” he nodded at the Book, “can I ask for something else? Is that allowed? I suppose I’m still technically on the path from the first ask.”
The Man stopped writing. “What would you ask?”
Happy at the way the question was phrase, Jaskier answered, “I would ask if I could be done. Not like, this second. But if this could be my last lifetime? I’m tired, I’ve been tired. My witcher will live on, even if they’re brought him down to nothing more than a fantasy, and my expertise one on lore and myths instead of history these days. I would ask what I would need to do, to have one last life? To grow old again, to die and see my beloved Geralt and all our family in the hereafter. That’s what I would ask.”
Doris swung by, holding the coffee mug and the plate of pancakes and bacon strips. “Do you want me to set it down here?”
“No, no thank you, dear,” Jaskier smiled, pleased when the action elicited a small blush. “I’ll take it at the next table. I’m done here. For now.”
He got up and with a final wink, settled down at the booth next to The Man’s, digging into his food.
Two cups of coffee and an additional order of bacon later, he smirked a bit at his phone when he heard a voice say, “I hear the pastrami sandwich is very good here.”
The Man nodded and someone sat across from him in the booth.
Over the years, Jaskier had seen others approach The Man, had overheard their wishes. Some asked, as he once did, for true love. Sometimes in general, sometimes from someone they already knew. Some wanted riches, power, to bring a loved one back from the dead.
Jaskier was reading some updates about the show he’d been given a consulting role on. Lauren had been keen to speak to the “expert on the Witcher legends”. Of course he was the expert, he wrote them all.
They’d found their… well, their him. Their Jaskier. Apparently, the boy turned up in costume and with a lute that he already knew how to play. Sophie had been all but in tears when she rang Lauren to tell her, it seemed. They’d been having a devil of a time and Jaskier was secretly rather proud of that. Call it vanity, but he wanted to be remembered well.
Jaskier clicked over to IMDB and typed in the name. Joey Batey. Jaskier hummed in approval. Very good looking, apparently tall too, he appreciated that. Bless the Polish version for all it did, but he was never that short; he’d always stood nearly eye to eye with his Geralt. Boy had a band too, so Jaskier clicked over to Bandcamp and bought their album. As it downloaded, he popped the last bacon strip in his mouth and dug in his jacket for his wallet. He looked up to try and find Doris and his heart seemed to stop beating in his chest.
Sitting across from The Man was someone Jaskier was sure he’d never seen again.
“So I’ve been looking but,” the man was saying in a long lost voice, “I don’t know his name. I know his eyes though,” a soft sigh. “Those blue eyes have followed me my whole life, in my dreams. I heard you can do the, well the impossible.”
Jaskier felt like the impossible was happening right now.
With long white hair, though brown roots suggested it was dyed, the impossible was sitting in Jaskier’s eyeline.
“So I was wondering,” the vision said to The Man, “if you could tell me who he is. Is he real? How can I find him?”
“What’s your name?” The Man asked, the Book still closed beside him.
“Don’t laugh, okay. My dad’s a literature nerd. My name is Geralt. Like the witcher in the legends.”
Jaskier felt like he wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. He caught eyes with The Man and mouthed, “Really?”
“So could you ask your Book about him? I’ll do anything to find him. It may sound silly,” Geralt huffed a small laugh and Jaskier couldn’t breathe at the sound, “but I think he might be my soulmate.”
The Man nodded. “He is.”
Jaskier was sure his astonishment was echoed on Geralt’s face.
The Book wasn’t even glanced at by The Man. “A long time ago, he asked me for something, for you.”
Geralt’s gasp was audible and Jaskier would have done the same if he could draw air into his lungs.
“He had to make a choice. A choice to love you and lose you. He didn’t know he’d find you again.”
Unable to not, Jaskier stood on shaky legs, leaning on the table for support.
“But The Book said he would. If he loved you still, true as he did the day he asked how to win your heart, on the day he’d find you again.”
Geralt was standing at this point too, though still with his back facing Jaskier. “He… he loves me?”
“He does,” Jaskier answered, finding words at last.
Geralt whirled around and confusion was erased in a split second by joy, by love, by memories sparking and dancing before his eyes. “Jaskier?”
His name, his name said in that voice by that man. Jaskier pressed a hand to his chest and then nodded. “Geralt. My darling Geralt.”
They came together like magnets, inevitable and instant.
“I’ve missed you, my love,” Jaskier couldn’t help the tears soaking into Geralt’s jacket. “My darling, my dearest, my best beloved.”
“Jaskier,” Geralt was mumbling, “Jask.” He pulled back, holding Jaskier’s face and studying every inch of it. “Every day. You’ve been on my mind every day of my life.”
Jaskier laughed. “Ditto.”
Geralt grinned, big and bright. “You’re not as talkative as you once were.”
“You remember.”
“Everything somehow,” Geralt laughed. And he ran a hand through Jaskier hair. “I don’t remember you going grey though. Got a couple strands here and there, old man.”
Jaskier hadn’t had grey hair since the day he’d saved Geralt’s life with his love. “I remember you as fully grey, where did the brown come from?”
Geralt laughed again and Jaskier drank in the sound. “I dye it. I just… I thought it might help you find me. I always had the white hair in my dreams with you.” He took Jaskier's left hand. "You still wear this?"
"Every day for the last seven hundred and some years, yes. You've been with me every day of my life too." He had to kiss Geralt, Jaskier couldn’t take another breath without doing so.
The kiss felt the same and yet so much sweeter, after all this time apart. Long moments passed as the men stood, learning and relearning each other’s lips in the corner of a diner.
“Oh my god,” Geralt burst out laughing, eventually.
Jaskier laughed too, too light to do anything else while they caught their breaths.
“I named my truck Roach!”
Giggling and happy in a way he hadn’t been since he last held Geralt in his arms, Jaskier fumbled for his wallet. “Let me pay and we’ll… we’ll go home. Mine, yours, doesn’t matter. We’ll make our home again.”
The Man coughed, quietly. “I’ll cover your meal. Go.”
Jaskier beamed. “Thank you. I take back all the rude things I called you in my mind over the past seven hundred years.”
“Seven hundred?’ Geralt seemed to take a moment to calculate. “Jask, my love, we have a lot to catch up on.”
“Lifetimes,” Jaskier agreed as he led Geralt from the diner. “For example, were you aware Superman is going to play you in a new TV show on Netflix?”
Their laughter was audible until the door shut behind them.
The Man smiled and opened the Book. He wrote a single sentence down and closed it again. He flagged down Doris and told her to put Jaskier’s meal on his tab.
He waited.