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Jaskier sings about Geralt. Night after night, he plays for his keep, and when audiences ask to hear of the White Wolf he grits his teeth through the ache and sings. At first, it feels like crying.
He doesn’t hear from Geralt for years, long enough for the ache to dull into something manageable, if not to ever truly fade. It makes him coin, and it’s made him famous, and he will live with it until he doesn’t have to anymore.
When he isn’t singing, he gets drunk alone.
“You still sing about me.”
Jaskier would know that voice anywhere, for as long as he lives; will probably hear it echo in his mind as he dies. Once upon a time he used to entertain maudlin fantasies of that voice shepherding him through the pain before that final sleep, of whispered confessions, much too late and all the more narratively satisfying for it. He knows better now.
He looks up into Geralt of Rivia’s ever-inscrutable eyes. Shrugs. Doesn’t flinch away. “Pays the bills.”
Geralt is too tall for this little corner of the tavern where Jaskier sits, too imposing backlit by the February sun. Jaskier’s life is made up of parallels, it seems. How narratively convenient.
But now it is Geralt who hovers awkwardly above the table, much less certain of his welcome than Jaskier had been a quarter of a century ago, brash and young and stupid and hopelessly infatuated with the idea of adventure. Jaskier doesn’t invite him to sit.
“I didn’t think you would,” Geralt says, and sits anyway.
He looks older- perhaps not physically, but something has aged him; something as settled into the subtle crow’s-feet around his eyes Jaskier can never remember seeing. Perhaps in the past he would have asked for the story.
But Geralt closed that channel of communication, high up in the mountains years ago, and Jaskier has spent too much of those years hardening his heart against the memory of it to speak gently now. “Why?” he says, challenging, crossing his arms over the doublet that Geralt’s songs have paid for. “Because I have so many other things to sing about? Because I haven’t spent my whole adult life writing exclusively about you?”
Geralt looks shocked, like he always does when reminded of the passage of time. Typical of him not to notice when a person dedicates their life to him; it’s a wonder people keep doing it. There’s no accounting for taste, but no one ever said Jaskier’s was very good anyway. “You wrote love songs,” he offers tentatively, so out of character for him that the old Jaskier would have melted in the face of his fumbling attempt at comfort.
This Jaskier keeps his arms folded and stares Geralt down, unimpressed. Geralt, to his credit, has the grace to look ashamed.
Jaskier is tired. Of course Geralt knew, has always known, in that oblivious way of his, and all it took was a raised eyebrow from Jaskier to make him realize. What a joke. And worse, how anticlimactic. Some bard he is, if he can’t even manage a dramatic confession after all these years.
He sighs. “I’m forty-three, Geralt. My days as a wandering bard are numbered; about time to make academia my muse and waste my golden years teaching other bright-eyed young idiots how not to make my mistakes.”
He doesn’t expect Geralt to look hurt, because expecting Geralt to react appropriately to anything, even being called a mistake, only ever leads to disappointment. But Geralt does. “You would have called that idealism, once,” he says, eyes downcast, watching his fingers trace whorls in the rough-hewn table. “You’re not old enough to be that jaded.”
Jaskier’s own fingers dig into the velvet of his doublet, ten aching pinpricks of calm to counteract the weeping, agonized ache in his lungs. He feels like crying.
He scoffs instead. “Aren’t I?” Geralt looks up at him, then, sorrowful and contrite, and Jaskier relents. “I’m too old to start over, at least. And I’ve come to realize that muses aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
No one has paid them any attention, in spite of the fact that they are two relatively famous faces. The perks of backwater shitholes, Jaskier supposes. The tavern is as noisy as it was before Geralt approached his table, but all Jaskier can hear is the quiet pounding of his own blood in his ears and Geralt’s slow, familiar breaths. It’s all too much.
The scrape of his chair along the floor barely filters through the rushing silence as he stands to leave, but when Geralt’s hand settles on his forearm, stilling him against his will, that sears through it well enough. Perhaps his traitorous limbs, used to decades of following Geralt’s every whim, will never not listen when Geralt asks.
“Why do you still sing about me, then?”
Jaskier is weak.
“Because everywhere I go, that’s all anyone wants to hear,” Jaskier snarls, because Geralt’s touch may sway his legs but it can no longer sway his emotions. “Because you made me famous just like I made you, and if I want to make any coin at all I have to swallow my pride and sing about the man who broke my heart. So thanks ever so much for that.” Swallow his pride, swallow the ache, swallow the bile that rises in his throat sometimes at the thought that Geralt might hear his songs someday and initiate this very conversation.
Jaskier wishes the words could hurt Geralt the way they might hurt anyone else. But his words have never meant anything to Geralt, never will mean anything, so Geralt only grips him tighter and says, “I have a song for you. If all you want from me is money.”
Jaskier shakes his arm free. He knows the song, has heard the rumors. The White Wolf and the lion cub, the thing that has kept Geralt away from the world these years since Jaskier said goodbye and Geralt said nothing in return. The reason audiences clamor for a hint of what he might be up to. It could be Jaskier’s greatest work, if he chooses to write it.
Of course he doesn’t want money. It’s the last thing he wants, after so long singing about Geralt for lack of any other way to support himself. If there was anything else he wanted, he excised those parts of himself long ago in preparation for this very scenario. He doesn’t want anything from Geralt. Not anymore.
“Find another bard,” he says.
That blow lands. Geralt growls, at the end of his razor thin patience, hands twitching at his sides like he wants to grab Jaskier again, but he doesn’t stand. Doesn’t care quite enough to stop Jaskier leaving again, it seems. “I don’t want another bard.”
“Yes,” Jaskier says, and walks away. “You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
Geralt catches up to him – because how could Jaskier ever escape his past when his past dogs him with every note he sings – on foot in an uncomfortable mirror of the first time they left a tavern in some backwater shithole together. Jaskier wonders whether Roach is dead. Not much of a song in that.
“Jaskier,” Geralt says, a pleading note to the name that Jaskier once would have given anything to hear. “Let me tell you a story.”
“Stop talking, Witcher.”
There is a soft huff behind him that could be laughter. Jaskier walks on, Geralt at his heels. He can’t decide whether that’s narratively satisfying or not.