Chapter Text
“Why is it whenever I find myself in a pile of shit these days, it’s you shovelling it?”
“See you around, Geralt.”
Jaskier is no stranger to heartbreak, in its many guises. Raised voices and slamming doors; pleading before an indifferent stare; slipping silently out from rumpled sheets and never coming back. “It’s not you, it’s me.” That Geralt would instead opt for “it’s not me, it’s you”-- it hurts, admittedly, but he cannot say it surprised him. Geralt was, Jaskier thinks wryly, unlike anyone else, in more ways than one. He’s come into his life on his own terms; he supposes he’d always known, deep down, that he’d leave him like that, too.
He’s accustomed, too, to the lonely walk that follows, though admittedly he’s never experienced one this arduous. Sure, there’s been times he’s felt like death, waking up with a hangover in a strange bed; sometimes even fancied he’d prefer death to whatever his latest partner’s husband wanted to do to him, if he couldn’t get his stupid ass through the window now. But here… here he felt death lurking in every step, in every weary creak of the trees in the wind and every sharp clatter of stones down the cliffside. The sheer scale of the mountain serves as a startling reminder of his own fragility. One wrong step, and he might just-- well, that doesn’t bear thinking about. He oughtn’t to tempt Fate, now he had no Witcher to spit in the face of her whims and wiles, carrying him blindly through. That said, Jaskier fights fiercely to remind himself, he isn’t useless without Geralt; he’s not some ruined maiden, with rumpled sheets and tattered prospects. He did perfectly well for himself before meeting Geralt -- there was no reason to think he would not cope perfectly well afterwards, too. After all, what he lost in… companionship, he surely gained in poetic angst; fuel to his artistic fire, if you will. What living muse could hold a candle to the parasitic phantom already planted in the artist’s mind? And sure, this would be no raunchy comedy, no bittersweet lament leaving the listener sad, yet satisfied. But with a little artistic interpretation, it could be- something, someday; maybe even something that didn’t hurt to sing.
It is some time later that he realises, quite without warning, that walking has become falling. A loose rock, a poorly placed step, and he’s gone-- off the precipice, hurtling down past the unsympathetic face of the cliff. He’s heard it called weightlessness, before -- he’s read many a tale of heroes relishing the freedom of the air, safe in the knowledge that Someone is watching over them to break their fall -- but Jaskier has never felt more aware of the earth’s inescapable pull than at this moment.
It’s a little late now, for such poetic realisations.
In his dreams -- the darkest of them, the truest of them -- he’d imagined going out not like a candle snuffed but like a pond in drought. Enough time to leave a lyrical lament on his lips, or some smart quip to imprint forever the ghost of a smile on his cold, waxen face. But the words that he’s depended on his entire life -- been served by and served, in equal measure -- have now abandoned him, along with anyone who might have heard them, and it is with his mind scrambled in silent terror that he tumbles forward into the dark.
Except- if this is death, then it is far different from any of the amateurish accounts Jaskier has encountered in ballads and books, from religious folk and sceptics alike. It is… prickly? He could laugh, if he had the breath for it; how fitting, that a thorn bush would break his fall. Rid of one giant prick, now left to suffer a thousand small ones. For once in his life, he hopes this isn’t a metaphor. But as suddenly as his nervous hysteria gripped him, so too does it begin to fizzle out as reality sets in. He is-- by Melitelle, he is unspeakably lucky to be alive. He needs to get up; to assess the damages; to return to the path; above all, to keep moving. (Is he moving on, or running away? This ache, body and mind, is not an answer.) He’s survived better. He’s seen others-- he’s seen Geralt survive worse. This is not the note on which his life’s song will finish.
And yet he lies here, prone, breath hitching, hands shaking. His fingers ghost over imaginary strings; he’s worn so thin the distinction between composing thoughts and music that it is translucent, gossamer, a suggestion his brain no longer chooses to follow. He scrambles for some words to string together, to fit to a tune, to express the chaos of fear-relief-grief-anger-empty flooding his mind. Only one coherent thought sticks; a microcosm for everything that has happened, for everything that hasn’t.
This is the way you left me.
It says nothing; it says enough. He rises shakily to his feet, and continues his solitary descent.