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The weight of these feelings is heavier than Geralt can ever put into words, so he doesn’t even try. It’s a burden born of his entire life, from the moment he was abandoned on the side of the road. It’s the angry bark of his instructors, telling him he’d never survive out in the wide world if he didn’t focus up and leave his childish fantasies behind. It’s every moment he’s been yelled at or spit on by villagers he’s just trying to help. It’s the scorn in the eyes of the nobility as they take in the state of him, mud on his boots and viscera in his hair.
It’s so difficult not to feel like a monster when the world treats him like one.
But Jaskier never falters, has never shied away from Geralt even on his worst days. The only time his hands shake is when he has to bandage a particularly nasty wound, worry and upset making him unsteady. Jaskier pulls Geralt close when he wakes from nightmares with a head full of pain, and when he stumbles back from a hunt with his veins full of ichor. Jaskier soothes with his words and his actions and most importantly his love, in ways that Geralt has never experienced before.
Jaskier can’t take away the burden of Geralt’s past, but he does his best every day to help shoulder it, so that he can remind his Witcher he’s nothing like the monster everyone else sees.