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“Yennefer had a car accident.” Geralt says, calling Jaskier back from the brink of sleep. His boyfriend seems to have developed this annoying little habit of waiting until two o’clock in the morning—or later; the time doesn’t seem to be as important as the fact that Jaskier is almost, almost asleep—to have these deep conversations about whatever it is that’s been troubling him throughout the day.
It takes his tired brain a moment to process what it is that Geralt just said, and another to formulate something bordering on an appropriate response.
Jaskier knows that Geralt has a somewhat… complicated relationship with his ex-wife, but he hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with the details and Jaskier hasn’t pushed. It seems like a sensitive topic, despite the fact that he and Yennefer have been divorced for something like ten years now. While time may heal some wounds, the scars will always remain, and it’s not his place to judge how Geralt processes and handles his trauma. He would like to know more, so that he doesn’t end up tripping and running headlong into a metaphorical mine-field, but he’s not going to pressure him into sharing more than he’s comfortable with.
This is the first time that Geralt has mentioned Yennefer in quite a while, but from the way he appears to be readying himself for verbal battle, Jaskier has a feeling that he’s been sitting on this morsel of information for a few days, at least—perhaps longer. It can’t be too serious, if he’s waited this long to mention it… or perhaps it is that bad, and that’s why it’s been on his mind. He may not love Yennefer anymore, but she will always be the mother of his children (although her qualifications as mother were… suspect, considering that Geralt had received full custody of their three kids after they’d begged the judge not to send them with Yennefer).
“She’s been asking to see Hadria.” Geralt continues, and even in the darkness of the bedroom, Jaskier can see the way his face pinches at the thought. “And I don’t… I can’t do that to Hadria.” He says.
“Have you… told her about the accident?” Jaskier asks, although he’s confident that he already knows the answer. Geralt doesn’t talk about Yennefer, and all of the negative emotions she stirs up within him, if he can help it. Hadria is much the same way, squirreling away the anger and resentment and pain that she associated with that name in a deep, dark corner of her mind that was best left untouched.
“I… about that…” He sighs, “She said ‘the bitch can go die in a hole’ for all she cares.”
“That’s… rough.” It’s perhaps the most inelegant response he could have come up with, but really… what the hell is someone supposed to say to that? He is absolutely not awake enough to handle this conversation. “But… isn’t that how you expected her to respond?”
Geralt hums, “Not exactly, no.” He twirls a few locks of silver-white hair around his left ring finger and tugs, before confirming Jaskier’s original suspicions, “I… try to avoid talking about Yenn with her whenever possible, unless she’s the one to bring her up. The last time we tried… it, uh… it didn’t end well.” He doesn’t elaborate, and Jaskier lets it drop.
Jaskier doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know what he can say—this is the most that Geralt has ever spoken of Yennefer, and he’s still not giving him all that much to work with. “If it makes you uncomfortable, you’re her dad—and you have sole custody. She can’t do shit if you say ‘no.’”
“I don’t… know how I feel.” He confesses. “I don’t want her to want her mother dead. I raised her better than that.” He seems genuinely distressed by Hadria’s comments, “If she doesn’t want to see her, that’s fine, but…”
Jaskier… thinks that he understands what it is that Geralt is trying to say. Maybe. On the one hand, he doesn’t want to force Hadria to do something she clearly doesn’t want to do—which, now that he says that, he has to admit that he’s not entirely convinced that Geralt wants her to go and see her mother in the hospital, either. On the other hand, if Yennefer’s condition takes a turn for the worse, and the last thing Hadria said about her was that she could go ‘die in a hole’… that sort of thing could very well be traumatizing. Jaskier doesn’t envy the position that Geralt has been placed in. He’s stuck between a rock and a hard place, and both of his options are absolute shit.
It’s in moments like these that he really wishes he knew just what’d transpired between the two—what’d caused Geralt’s kids to be so upset at the prospect of staying with Yennefer that they would come into the courtroom and beg the judge to award their father full custody. He had his suspicions, of course, but again… it didn’t feel right to pry, especially with how hard Geralt had worked to put that part of his life behind him and move on.
That being said, he’s also not entirely clear on what they’re doing here. Is Geralt asking him for advice on what he should do? Because, if so, he’s going to need a bit more information to work off of. Information that may be uncomfortable to share. Or does he just need a sympathetic ear to rant to while he works out the situation on his own? Jaskier can do that, too, although he still wishes that he’d initiated this conversation a bit earlier in the day.
Like, say, while the sun was still up, and they weren’t cutting into his much-needed beauty sleep.
Geralt is staring at him expectantly, and so he decides that his boyfriend is likely looking for advice. He rubs the sleep from his eyes with the heel of his palm, buying himself some time to think of how to phrase his next question—
Perhaps it’s best to just stop beating around the bush and ask.
“Geralt,” as soon as he goes to speak, he finds that the words sit heavy on his tongue, like he’s swallowing molasses. “Did Yennefer… hit Hadria?”
“No.” Geralt’s response is immediate, his voice a bitterly cold snap in the otherwise uncomfortably silent room. He’s not quite yelling, but he’s close—the threat underlying his tone unmistakably clear. If Yennefer had put her hands on Hadria, they would not be having this conversation. If Yennefer had put her hands on Hadria, she would be—
“Did Yennefer hit you?”
There’s a long stretch of silence, too long to be comfortably ignored. When he speaks, his voice is a small and quite unconvincing rasp in the back of his throat, “No. No, she… No.”
Geralt shrinks away from him, just a little, and Jaskier’s heart shatters in his chest. Every nerve in his body seems to cry out to the other man, demanding that he take him in his arms and kiss him until the pain fades away into nothingness… but he doesn’t know if his touch will be appreciated, not now—and somehow, that hurts even more. He opens his mouth to say something, anything, but all that comes out is a wheezy rush of air. This… This was exactly what he’d been attempting to avoid. This cavern that he can feel growing between them, spreading like a damned curse with each passing second—fucking hell, Geralt had to be the only person left on the planet who had a fucking mechanical alarm clock.
With each quiet little tick-tick-tick, he can see Geralt withdrawing in on himself, retreating to a safe place behind shoddy, hastily constructed walls that Jaskier had carefully dismantled when they’d first started dating (he refused to break anything of Geralt’s, even an intangible barrier he constructed to separate them in the hopes of protecting himself from an invisible threat—he wanted—needed—Geralt to want to let him in).
He wants to reach over onto the bedside table and yank the batteries out of the back of the clock.
The only thing stopping him is the fact that he has to reach over Geralt, and he wants to allow the other man as much room as he needs to come back to himself.
The process is jumpstarted by a quiet knock on their bedroom door.
The door opens a second later, to reveal a very disheveled looking Hadria—her dark, chestnut brown hair, which she’d pulled back into a ponytail for bed, is now sticking up at all sorts of odd angles. There’re even a few strands plastered to the side of her face with drool. The oversized t-shirt that Jaskier can guarantee she’d stolen from Geralt is hanging off of one of her tanned shoulders, the hem just long enough to hide the majority of the powder blue shorts she was wearing. She’s wrapped from head-to-toe in a blanket, which drags on the carpet behind her as she slowly makes her way over to the bed and plops her head down right onto Geralt’s shoulder.
“You okay?” She asks, her voice muffled by the fabric of Geralt’s pajama top and the bulk of his shoulder. “I thought I heard yelling.” Jaskier frowns—before realizing that she would think that him raising his voice when he’d asked about Yennefer would constitute ‘yelling’.
Because Geralt doesn’t yell at her, or raise his voice, or anything.
It’d been one of the first things he told Jaskier, when he and Hadria had first been formally introduced. If you have something you need to address with her, you need to do so in a calm, even tone. Anything that might be construed as aggressive or confrontational just caused her to shut down. Sometimes, this would take the form of dissociate episodes, but, in the past, she’d also been known to cry until she made herself sick—
Jaskier had never really had anything he needed to take up with her—for a kid that had a nasty little habit of occasionally starting fires in her free time, she was fairly well-behaved when Geralt was around.
Although he’s pretty sure that that has less to do with the fact that she’s being well-behaved in general and more because Geralt’s opinion seems to be the only thing she genuinely cares about.
Well, that and Ciri.
“Everything’s fine, angel.” His voice is still a not-quite-there rasp, but it’s sounding a little more convincing. “Go back to bed, okay? Ciri is going to wonder where you ran off to again.”
Her honey-brown eyes flit over to Jaskier, before she frees one of her hands from the mess of blanket enveloping her and makes to grab one of the pillows from behind Geralt, “…Can I have the pillow tonight?”
Geralt rolls his eyes, “What is your fascination with this pillow?” He grabs it just a second before she can snatch it out from underneath him, holding it just out of her reach. “I have bought you so many pillows, you can barely fit on your damned bed. I need this one for my neck.” He says.
Hadria pulls a face, “But Daddy—”
“Don’t ‘but Daddy’ me.” Geralt huffs, “You have a whole slew of perfectly good pillows in your bedroom. Leave mine out of this.”
Hadria, now full-on pouting, proceeds to tumble headlong on top of Geralt, and make herself comfortable in the small sliver of space between their bodies. While she’d been determined to get her hands on the pillow that Geralt is still holding just a moment ago, she seems more than content to snuggle up to any of the pillows currently lining their headboard. The poor girl must’ve been pretty much dead on her feet, because she’s out before her head hits the pillow, drool trickling over the side of her mouth as she definitely doesn’t snore. Heaven forbid you tell anyone in this family that they snore. It’s a crime akin to telling a small child that Santa Claus isn’t real.
Geralt watches her for a little while, gently stroking drool-damp hair away from her pretty face. Despite knowing that Hadria is adopted, Jaskier thinks that she looks quite a bit like her father. Their eyes are both the most peculiar shade of brown… It’s not quite amber… After a moment’s consideration, he decides that the best way to describe it is ‘honey, with a dash of milk.’ All of Geralt’s siblings have the same eye color—and Vesemir, too, for that matter.
Being near her seems to calm him, so Jaskier remains silent, despite the fact that with every passing second he’s being pushed just a little bit closer to the edge of the bed.
He looks up to find that Geralt is now staring at him, a curious expression on his face.
“I should’ve told you sooner.” He says, his voice exceptionally soft so as not to wake the teen that’s currently curled into his side. “I shouldn’t have left you in the dark for so long.”
And that’s… Geralt is under no obligation to tell him anything. He just… He wants to help, and he can’t do that if he doesn’t know. Guilt roils in his stomach at having pushed Geralt into thinking he needs to tell him what happened, and he doesn’t know whether he should encourage him now or not. “Geralt…”
“She was a… a better mother than mine.” He starts, haltingly. “Not that she set the bar all that high.” A broken, ghost of a laugh spills over his lips, “That woman scared Eskel so bad he didn’t speak until he was six, after dad and Luka finally stopped dancing around their feelings for each other and…” He takes a deep, shaky breath, “She hit Lambert—once. I thought the old man was going to have a stroke. After that, well… we never saw her again.”
Jaskier’s breath catches in his throat, “I… I am so sorry…” It takes a minute for Geralt to register what he’s said, but once he does, he simply shakes his head, his mouth spreading into a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Don’t be. It’s not like it’s your fault. And besides, there’s no way that you could’ve known.” He says, “I never thought of her as… abusive,” the word leaves his lips with such jarring force, it takes Jaskier aback. “She was just ‘mom.’ She drank a lot because dad was never home, and he’d left her alone with three very young, very different little boys she’d never actually wanted—and when she drank, she yelled.”
He proceeds to recount the absolutely horrifying story of how he had stood there, at six-years-old, using his body to shield little Lambert—who was too shocked to even consider crying—from their mother’s wrath. Their dad loved all of his boys, in his own way, but Geralt was the clear favorite—and he’d been hoping that that would be enough to stay her hand. He’d been fully prepared to end up with a black eye for his efforts. If their father hadn’t come home when he had, he very likely would have. Vesemir had taken one look at Lambert’s face, red as the shock of hair on top of his little head, and snapped. Because Lambert might’ve been a disaster child, but he was his disaster child, and you don’t fucking hit his kids.
“Yenn… she was good with the boys. She yelled, but… it was no more than any other parent would, in the same scenario. I was watching, of course I was…” He starts fiddling with Hadria’s hair again, “But when Hadria came into our lives… when she realized that Hadria was different…”
“…Different?” Jaskier isn’t sure that he follows.
“Different from her unattainable idea of what a perfect daughter ought to be.” He says, “She didn’t want to be Yenn’s mini-me. Which, honestly, who could blame her? She was a fucking bitch.”
That sentence comes so far out of left-field, Jaskier can’t quite bite back the bark of a laugh that builds in the back of his throat at the irony of it. The sound, obnoxious as it is, causes Geralt to flash him an almost genuine smile.
It’s gone in a flash, however, when Geralt continues, “She would get… angry with me, because I would take Hadria’s side. Because I didn’t think it was worth making our child, who we were supposed to love, cry so hard she was throwing up all over herself because of a stupid dress. A dress she knew she wouldn’t wear when she bought it, and bought anyway.”
Jaskier could hit something. He bites down on the inside of his mouth so hard he tastes the bitter tang of copper.
“She bought a dress for Hadria to wear to Luka’s funeral. It was… cute, but again, not anything Hadria would wear. Hadria refused, and threw a tantrum, and I told her that I was going to be bringing her a spare set of clothes because ‘ria was just going to keep getting more upset until, well…” His hand stills, his fingers gently splayed over her forehead. “And she h… she hit me.” He confesses, his voice soft. “In front of Hadria.”
Jaskier wants to tell him to stop. He knows now that the mine-field he’d been so worried about accidentally wandering into was so much bigger than he had ever thought, the trauma that Yennefer, and his mother, had left him with leaving scars that Jaskier would wager Geralt had steadfastly avoided addressing until that morning. There’s a part of him that recognizes just how much Geralt loves and trusts him, to be telling him all of this… There’s another, larger part of him that aches for the fact that it seems like Geralt has only recently come to the realization that he was abused for nearly half of his life. That, even when Yennefer hit him, he honestly seemed to believe that he…
That he deserved it.
He feels like he’s just opened Pandora’s Box. Like allowing Geralt to give voice to his trauma has allowed him to realize just how traumatized he was, and still is, by what’d transpired. Telling another person about his mother and Lambert, about Yennefer and Hadria and the dresses… Now that the stories are out in the world, hanging heavy in the air between them, there’s no taking them back. There’s no pretending like this night didn’t happen.
Jaskier knows that there has to be more, but the guilt of pressing Geralt to share this much with him is eating at him already. To think that, even after all that, Geralt would still be having so much trouble deciding whether or not to press Hadria on the issue of whether or not to visit Yenn in the hospital. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t bring his children within one-hundred miles of the woman. But Geralt… it was clear that he still felt something for Yennefer, even if those feelings could no longer rightly be considered love. Perhaps it was pity… or perhaps it was a genuine fear that something might happen to her while recovering. Because Geralt, fucking saint that he was, wouldn’t wish ill of anyone.
Jaskier, however, has no such reservations.
“Can I go and visit her in the hospital?” He asks, hoping that the question appears innocent enough on the surface.
Geralt arches a silver-white brow, “What for? No offense, but even bedridden that woman will chew you up and spit you back out before you have a chance to blink.” He says.
“So I can stand on her oxygen line, of course.” Jaskier says, as if they’re having a conversation about the state of the weather as of late, and not potentially plotting to murder his ex-wife while she recovers from a massive car accident. He flashes the older man his most innocent smile and continues, “Aww, don’t look at me like that. You can’t tell me that I was the only one who was thinking it.”
Geralt rolls his eyes, “No. I do believe that Hadria came up with the idea first.”
“Can I… ask you one more question? I know this has already been a lot more of an emotionally taxing evening for you than you planned, so feel free to say ‘no’ if you’re uncomfortable—”
He’s silent for a moment, before asking, “…What is it?”
He sits there for a moment, carefully considering his words, before positing, “Does Hadria not want to visit Yennefer because she knows that you’ll insist on going with her, and she’s trying to protect you from whatever is going to be said in that hospital room, or…” Or does she honestly not care if something serious happens to Yennefer? Because honestly, Jaskier can see it going either way.
“I…” He starts, stops, and then starts again, “I… don’t know.”
“If I were to… volunteer to go with her, to make sure nothing happens… would you be okay with that?” He asks.
Geralt looks at him seriously, “Are you going to attempt to murder Yenn?”
Jaskier pulls a face. He’d most definitely been half-joking. “Scouts’ honor.” He says, “If that is, indeed, what’s holding Hadria back, then I will gladly be her escort. And if she still says ‘no,’ well, then, at least you know definitively what’s what.” A breath, “As I see it, it’s the lesser of two evils.”
“The lesser of two evils, huh?” Geralt leans over Hadria’s body to press a kiss to Jaskier’s cheek, “I’ll think about it.”
Jaskier’s face burns bright red as he sputters indignantly, his arms flailing as he tries to keep from tumbling off of the side of the bed during his little fit. Geralt just laughs at his misery—and really, nearly falling off of the side of the bed and breaking himself in two at two o’clock in the morning would be one-hundred percent worth it just to hear that beautiful sound again. He has absolutely no right to be this cute after they’d just had such a heart-wrenching conversation… but Jaskier is thankful for it, all the same, because it means that Geralt isn’t pulling away, isn’t shutting him out. These demons may’ve been difficult for him to face, and recovery was a long, uneven road ahead of them, but…
Geralt’s eyes shine in the darkness, clear and focused on him and only him. He shifts a little, before leaning in to ghost his lips over Geralt’s own in a gentle kiss filled with promise. Geralt presses back against him, his tongue teasing along Jaskier’s swollen bottom lip, lapping at the blood that’d pooled there from when he’d first begun to worry it. His lips fall open, eager to deepen the kiss, when—
Hadria grunts, shifting slightly to bury her face in Geralt’s side.
Their bedroom door swings open again—apparently, Hadria had never fully shut it when she’d come in—and Ciri shuffles in, rubbing at her tired, swollen eyes with the heel of her palm.
“’ria…” She grumbles, “’m tired. Come back and cuddle with me.” She reaches out for Hadria’s arm, only for the much stronger teen to end up pulling her onto the bed alongside her—right on top of Jaskier.
“Oomph…” All of the air is knocked out of his lungs when Ciri’s head hits right around his bladder. Fuck, both of these girls are too big to be sharing their bed, and he’s too old to be getting poked and prodded like a fucking alien test subject. But then Ciri rests her head on one of Hadria’s boobs and sacks out, and Jaskier doesn’t have the heart to move her. “Fuck, these two are spoiled.”
Geralt snorts, “And whose fault is that, hmm?”
“Yours.” Jaskier insists. “You are, in fact, the world’s worst enabler.”
“Maybe.” He muses. “But we can all do with a little spoiling every now and then.” He shifts a little, rolling onto his side and pulling Hadria (and Ciri) just a little bit closer to him so that Jaskier isn’t quite falling off of the bed anymore. “Now, I suggest you make yourself comfortable—and fast. I can’t promise you you’ll have that sliver of bed for much longer.”
Jaskier would not claim that his sleep that night was restful. But his heart was full, when Geralt reached over the mess of pillows and heads of soft, downy hair to interlock his hand with Jaskier’s and squeeze ever-so-gently. If someone had told him, a year and a half ago, that someone like Geralt would be waiting for him in a little town in the middle of nowhere, where everyone knew everyone else’s name and your neighbors brought over plates of malformed, homemade cookies as welcome… well, he would’ve laughed, like it was all one terrific joke. He already got his chance at happily ever after. Lightning didn’t strike twice.
Except… sometimes, apparently, it did. And he’d honestly never been more grateful to be proven wrong…
And when he catches the barest hint of a smile on Geralt’s face as he drifts off, their hands still intertwined, he knows the other man feels the same.