Work Text:
It had been nearly a year of luteless evenings.
Jaskier had passed in the way lucky humans (exceedingly lucky, in his case) do; warm, safe, in his own bed, with those who cared for him nearby. He’d also had the decency to go during a cool spell in the summer, meaning they could all gather outside for the funeral, mourn him properly, the way he’d wanted: a going-away party.
It had been beautiful; his students from all over had paid tribute, sung songs, played their instruments; tales had been told, Jaskier’s favorite pieces had been played. The annual festival Jaskier had become a patron of made promise to keep his memory alive. Oxenfurt had announced they would set up a fifth scholarship in his name, Jaskier having established the first four himself. All those he held dear had been able to attend, and by the end, it had truly felt more like the going away party he’d wished for rather than a somber elegy. A long line of former lovers had come as well, which had been amusing, to say the least.
It had been… good. It was a good funeral. They’d done as he asked, and he would have been proud.
“Is there such thing as a good funeral?” Geralt had asked.
The wind has whispered through the trees for the rest of the year in ways that sounded suspiciously like the tuning of a lute, to Yennefer, at least. She was projecting, she knew. But it was hard not to, when so much of the little world they’d built for themselves at Corvo Bianco had involved Jaskier, down to the accent tiles in the kitchen, a brilliant touch of cornflower blue running along the walls. The hanging chair in the backyard, wicker and worn now, where he’d sit and play for them while they watched the sun. The library that was filled with so many of his own works, and so many of his favorites.
All of it felt like ghosts now. He had only barely left, but felt so far away already, and yet he was right there in everything they owned, touched, did, said.
“As good as a funeral can get,” Yennefer had replied.
He’d grown old. He was a ripe 94 when he passed, and they’d both privately suspected he had wanted to go sooner than later at that point, as it became harder and harder to play. Not that Yennefer had ever had much insight into how the bard thought; they were… friends. Occasional lovers. Not like he and Geralt had been, though— and not that she’d ever minded, of course. Geralt had brought the mage and bard together, and neither had ever forced it further. Which, Yennefer admitted, had given her a deep respect for the bard she hadn’t been expecting to form. Yes, they’d been friends.
She’d expected Jaskier’s death to be difficult on Geralt. Of course it would, the two had been attached at the hip for decades, they were best friends, lovers, tied together so deeply she wouldn’t begin to try and decipher it, just as he had stopped trying to decipher her and Geralt. What she hadn’t been expecting was the loss to be such a blow to herself.
But that was death, wasn’t it? Knocking your breath away as someone else loses theirs. If he couldn’t breathe it, what use was air at all?
It was a stupid thought. But it lingered in her nonetheless.
Almost a year had passed, then, in the way grieving time always passes; both as molasses and the wind, heart-stoppingly slow and so quick they lost weeks to the ether. But it was summer again, and the birds were singing, and the sun cast the vineyard in a warm and pleasant glow, and the breeze carried the sweet smell of grapes to their porch, and Geralt had been spending increasingly more time in the study.
She’d peaked in a few times, just to see what he was up to— she could only ever see his back, it wasn’t reading, wasn’t writing, wasn’t… whatever she had expected. Instead, Geralt stood in front of the bookcase on one wall, where there was a waist-high counter of sorts, separating the top shelves from the bottom, which were reserved for larger, heavier tombs. He wasn’t looking at a book, though, or even staring ahead blankly as he had so often in the weeks after the bard’s death. He was staring at something small in front of him, lying on that counter, and for the life of her, Yennefer had no idea what it was.
The days were long and the evenings were heavy, and as one tumbled on past another, Yennefer became increasingly frustrated that she could not figure out what was preoccupying Geralt so. It was small, smaller than a book, so it wasn’t one of Jaskier’s poetry collections. Nor could it be the memory album Ciri had put together for the bard’s 85th.
He just stared. More than once, she could see him take a shuttering breath against tears. A handful of times, she’d crept in once he had left, looking for… something, some clue of what had been paining him, but she’d found nothing.
Weeks drew on. Geralt was increasingly agitated and trying hard to conceal it. He must have known she’d been spying, but neither had dared say a word. There was no bar, now, to break the tension. Well, something had to give.
Another evening, another opportunity for Yennefer to peak through the door ajar, to see her witcher’s back, his gaze drawn down, in the middle of a deep breath. The softly lit room made him appear almost as a statue, his sharply defined body looking smoother. She watched for a while, the steady rise and fall of his back and shoulders, the faded loose chemise he wore, his hair dropping around his shoulders and toward his face. She’d think him peaceful if she didn’t know any better. She did, of course. She tended to.
After a minute or two of just looking, (a gift she admitted she often took for granted, after everything they’d been through,) Yennefer pushed the door open just a bit, and it creaked in greeting. Geralt didn’t stir, but took a deeper breath than usual, and she only waited a moment before slowly stepping into the room.
“May I?”
Geralt went stiller, if at all possible, before raising his head and tilting it in invitation. She crossed to him, wrapped her arms around his middle, and planted a soft kiss against his back, burying her head in his shoulder.
“Hi,” he rumbled softly.
“Hello,” she returned with another small kiss. Geralt lifted his arm and brought it around her shoulders, and she tucked in neatly to his side. She looked down at his hands, and finally, there, the culprits lay. Two small strips of fine quality parchment, worn from how often Geralt had held them. Each had a fine filigree along the edges, and along the top read, “Toussaint Annual Bardic Festival”. Below, in neat calligraphy, one ticket read “Geralt of Rivia”, and with a slow sinking in her stomach, Yennefer read the next, identical in all ways save the center, which in small letters read “in memory of” above the gentle curl of the name “Jaskier, Julian Alfred Pankratz”. The bottom of both strips read two dates, the first a week and a day from then, the second a week later.
“Tickets,” Geralt sighed. She hated herself for not having figured it out before. Geralt and Jaskier had gone to the local festival every summer for thirty years, and she hadn’t even realized it was time— how had she forgotten? She’d never… gone, to be fair. She’d heard stories and had made the journey with them more than once, but it was Geralt and Jaskier’s time, and she’d let them have it to themselves. He’d let her have the autumn harvest markets with their witcher, so it’d only seemed fair, but now her heart ached to know she’d never seen the streets of Beauclair cleared, the frivolous banners hung, the tawdry vestments, the excruciating recitation of poetry— she’d never seen it with him. She never would, now, never see his eyes light up at the sights and sounds, the great wave of applause from fans as he bowed after a new song.
Were those tears? Fuck.
It was stupid. The only thing they’d shared was Geralt, after all. And Corvo Bianco. And, to a lesser extent, Ciri. And, she supposed, over 50 years of history. And friendships. And sometimes, a bed.
That was nothing. That should be nothing, to her.
“We usually go together,” Geralt says, as though that needs explaining. But he’d barely talked in weeks, so she let him go on. “He worked so hard to give patronage. Took him years. Was really proud of it. We’d already been going for years at that point, usually stayed the whole week. It was… tradition, you know. Made me promise…” he took a shuttering breath, “made me promise to keep going. Every year. Don’t know how I can, really, those streets are his. That whole place was just… his, you know? They ate out of his hand. It was,” Geralt laughed, and it was thick and wet, “it was something to see.” She could feel the lift of his arm as he ran his shirtsleeve across his eyes, but Yennefer’s eyes were trained on the tickets. She couldn’t look away.
No wonder Geralt had spent so much time in here.
“So, I’m supposed to go to this, and there’s a ticket for him, and it’s just…” she felt him shake his head. “I don’t know. It’s all his, it always was, I don’t know what the point is. They came… a month ago? Something like that, and a note that they’d be sent ‘in perpetuity’, as a gift for his support. But how can I…” The stood in silence, and Yennefer held to Geralt tighter. For her own sake, really. The world had begun to feel… drifty.
“I want to do right by him. But I’m just supposed to go, year after year, and watch as they forget him? As he fades away? It’s a fucking curse.”
“Sometimes I’m afraid I’ve forgotten his laugh,” Yennefer admitted, and she felt like a fucking child, and couldn’t bring herself to mind that, much.
Geralt nodded. “Mm. Or the— the way his nose wrinkled if something had—"
“Green peppers,” they said together around a laugh.
They stood there, wrapped in each other, and Geralt let a hand come up to stroke Yennefer’s hair as she tucked her nose into Geralt’s chest, on what she belatedly realized was one of the bard’s old chemises. “Let me give you something,” Geralt mumbled, and Yennefer opened up her mind, drew up, and went to go digging in his. But the memory he wanted her to see didn’t need to be dug for at all; he was practically throwing it at her, and she found herself enveloped in the sights and sounds of the streets of Beauclair all done up for the festival. Bright banners hung from windows and beside her, someone was selling some warm pastry out of a stall. She turned and there was Jaskier, maybe 60, that touch of gray dusting his temples that had so quickly taken over his whole head. His eyes were bright and shining and he was rambling on about something. He beamed, bright as the sun, and she felt the ghost of his touch as he wrapped a hand around her— around Geralt’s— upper arm.
She opened her eyes back to the dim study, and it was like a bubble has popped in her chest. She pulled away to look up at him, his eyes still cast on the tickets in his hand.
“Take me instead,” she said before she could even think to say it. “I’ll go. Show me everything I never got to see with him.”
Geralt looked down at her, frowning slightly, and for the first time that night they looked at each other, and she saw his face was full of warring grief and pain and hurt and confusion. There were two tracks of dried tears there, and she wondered what her own face looked like, at that point. She hated not knowing. She must look a mess.
“I don’t…” he sighed. “You’re not much for poetry,” he said, sounding more like a question.
“I could be,” she insisted.
“I just…” He took a deep breath, and she could practically see him trying to arrange the words just right for her. She’d grown more patient with him, something she’d learned from Jaskier. “I don’t know if I can go if you’re not enjoying it. It’s always been… his, and he was so happy there. I don’t want… I don’t want to taint it. With my sadness. Or seeing you… not enjoy yourself.”
“We’re going to be sad,” she said plainly. “We’re going to be sad, that’s just how that is. But… it was his. So there’s a piece of him there, and we can enjoy it. I won’t spoil the fun, and I wouldn’t ask to go if I didn’t think I would have a good time. I know I’m not a replacement for him—” she raised her hand to stop Geralt before he interrupted, “—nor do I need to be, nor do I wish to be, nor would I ever presume to be. It won’t be the same. But he wanted you to go— and if you want to go, I want to go with you. I want to enjoy it.”
Something in her nose stung. Geralt swallowed thickly. This shouldn’t have been anything.
She closed her eyes and remembered the memory Geralt had given her, recalled her own of Jaskier’s ramblings and smiles and soon she was tumbling through them, remembering even their spats and quarrels and it overwhelmed.
Wasn’t she supposed to be above this?
“Nothing,” she suddenly remembered Jaskier saying once, “is above song, or poetry. Some things are above words, but that is exactly why we write.” It had been a cool day in Oxenfurt, and on a whim she’d snuck into one of his guest lectures, and stayed behind after to give him a purposefully difficult time. It had all been barbs for a while, but had ended up turning into a real conversation, something they did not often permit themselves.
“So,” she’d asked, “what, is writing just an approximation of something so… big, grand, you can’t name it? What’s the use of words at all, then? There are other ways to convey something that don’t bother to use words at all. Surely they’d be more fitting for such things.”
He’d smiled widely. “We sing, write, tell stories, because after it’s all over, when we’re gone, you can carry it with you. You can’t carry a massive painting around and share it with someone else, and even if you could, it wouldn’t be the same. When you sing, you participate in the story, Yennefer. It’s never about the words. It’s about the people inside of them, and behind them. It’s about carrying someone else. Someones, really. Everyone. The whole world as it is, and was, and everyone to come.”
She hadn’t had much to say to that. She didn’t really get it, then, much as she thought she had.
And now, here she was. Bastard. Probably chuckling from beyond the grave. Smug as shit with a grin to match.
“Okay,” Geralt finally said. “Yeah.”
“We can?” Yennefer asked, yet again feeling so young and so… eager. She wanted to see the damn festival, now. Wanted to revel in it and let Jaskier be right, wanted to be carried by those songs and carry them with her in return.
“Yeah,” Geralt smiled, and his eyes crinkled in a way she hadn’t seen them do in ages. He nodded and tried valiantly to sound serious. “There are these fried pastries there, we’ll have to get some. Requirement, actually. For entrance. Multiple times a day.”
“Oh, of course. And we have to pick up some new volumes for the collection. Legally, we must,” she agreed soberly.
It was only a moment before they broke again, and she buried her face in his chest, in the warm linen of Jaskier’s old shirt, felt Geralt’s arms come to circle her, and the two began to rock side by side in something approaching a dance. They stayed like that, swaying silently as the crickets and cicadas of the valley chorused away, filling the room with a natural music and rhythm she’d grown to appreciate recently.
“I miss him,” Geralt whispered into Yennefer’s hair. She could feel him crying again. “I love him, I miss him, I miss him so much, fuck.”
“I know. I know.” She tangled the shirt in her hands tighter. Cradled the back of Geralt’s neck with another hand. And soon they were smiling again, not in spite of the grief, but because of it.
At some point, Geralt slipped the second ticket into her hand, and she looked down at it, and could not look away. Toussaint Annual Bardic Festival, in memory of Jaskier, Julian Alfred Pankratz. She read it over and over, until it sounded to her like a song.