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Jaskier wakes with a start as his body is launched about a foot-and-a-half off of the bed.
He thinks he might be screaming. It’s difficult to tell, when the sound of his heart rattling around inside of his ribcage and his blood pounding in his ears is drowning out every surrounding sound. A second later, his back makes contact with the edge of the bed, his hands scrabbling for purchase just a second too late—he hits the ground with a resounding thud, very narrowly avoiding basting his nightstand with the blood of the innocent as his head lands within centimeters of a sharp, exposed corner. What the actual fuck had just happened? And what the hell could he do to make sure that it never happened again?
Somewhere above him, he can hear Geralt whimper. Suddenly, the bright spark of pain that’s burning at the base of his spine is forgotten as he reaches underneath the bed for the baseball bat that Geralt keeps on-hand, in case of emergency. He might not be able to swing it with as much force as Geralt, but if they were under attack (by what had to be a very idiotic robber/murderer—who woke up their victims by launching them off of the bed?), he had to do something.
It takes him an embarrassingly long time to manage to get to his feet—he absolutely hit the ground harder than he thought he had, and he was going to be paying for that tomorrow—but once he does—
The bat slips from between his fingers, hitting the ground with a soft thunk.
Geralt’s sixteen-year-old daughter is currently sprawled out on top of him, using his chest as a pillow… and a tissue, if the wet little sniffles Jaskier keeps hearing are indicative of what he thinks they are.
“You are absolutely getting too big for this.” He sighs, “My stomach can’t take one-hundred ten pounds of angsty teenager using it as a trampoline.” Even as he says this, he hooks his hands underneath her armpits and hauls her up so that he can get a better look at her face. Only Geralt would bitch about how much his kid weighed, and then proceed to swing said child around like she weighed nothing. “Now, why’re you crying?”
Hadria sniffles wetly, “’m not crying.” Geralt snatches the box of tissues off of his nightstand and starts to clean her face, grumbling incoherently underneath his breath. Jaskier gingerly lowers himself back down onto the side of the bed, still half-convinced something is going to come along and send him flying again—
Which is when he notices—“What happened to your dog tags?” He pats his own chest, right around where Hadria’s own dog tags would usually lie. But the tags, and the silver chain that they hang on, are both missing.
Geralt’s eyes widen, “Don’t tell me that you lost Luka’s dog tags…”
From his tone, and the way that it immediately has Hadria’s hackles raised, it’s clear that this is not the first time that she’s lost these dog tags. He’s not quite disappointed—Jaskier would say he sounds closer to resigned—but it still stings. “Not on purpose! I went to take a shower, and-and…”
“Hey. Hey. Breathe.” Geralt tugs gently on her long, chestnut hair. “Have you been up all this time, trying to find the tags?” He asks. Hadria lowers her head, her teary face hidden away behind a curtain of wild hair, and squeaks out a ‘yes.’ “’ria, it’s four o’clock in the morning.” He says.
“I know…” She whines. A few tears splatter on her MTT-brand pajama bottoms.
Geralt sighs again, rolling his eyes heavenward, “I suppose there’s no helping it, then. Come here…” There he goes again, moving her around like she weighs nothing. He settles her down between them, rearranging the pillows so that she can have his favorite. “Do you mind, Jas? If I send her back to her room now, she’s liable to spend the rest of the night searching for those tags.”
“No. No, of course not.” His back gives a sharp twinge of protest, but… he thinks that he can find a way to gently contort himself into a comfortable position on the space that’s left in the bed.
Everything is beautiful for approximately fifteen minutes.
Hadria is very wound up, and it takes a little while for Geralt to bring her back down. He scrapes his short, blunt nails along her scalp, whispering soft words of comfort in her ear as she settles into the crook of his arm and begins to drift. It’s a very sweet scene, and once again, Jaskier finds himself marveling at how gifted Geralt is with children—considering how adamant he’d been about not having any of his own.
It’s only once she’s out that things start to get… violent.
Hadria is a fitful sleeper on the best of days. Really, he doesn’t understand how Ciri manages to get a full night’s rest on those mornings he pokes his head into Hadria’s room to wake her for school and finds the two of them cuddled up together under the blankets. Hadria commands the entire bed, and had very nearly given Jaskier a black eye the last time they’d done this. (He’s seen her tackle Lambert to the ground with relative ease, despite her Uncle being at least three times her size and twice her weight—he wouldn’t be surprised if she breathed a little too hard in his direction and somehow managed to accidentally kill him in his sleep).
This can hardly be considered to be the ‘best of days.’ So, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise when, just a few seconds after Geralt drifts off, Hadria starts to squirm. A moment later, she’s turned her whole body ‘round, so that both of her feet are pressed against Jaskier’s stomach, her legs bent at the knee and slowly, carefully extending outward. He doesn’t so much notice that Hadria has begun pushing him off of the bed as he wakes up to the sensation of falling—his eyes snapping open just in time to see that he’s not going to be so lucky about missing the nightstand this time. Pain, like someone hacking at the back of his skull with a dull butterknife, overwhelms him.
He presses a hand to the sweat-damp hair at the back of his head, and is most relieved to find that his fingers do not come back soaked in blood.
That doesn’t do much to dull the throbbing pain in his skull, however.
The door to their bedroom opens, and Ciri shuffles in, her favorite No-Face pillow tucked close to her chest. “’ria? ‘ria, are you in here?” The wonderful thing about teenagers at four o’clock in the morning is that their definition of quiet and Jaskier’s definition of quiet are two very different things.
Ciri’s little whisper-yells could damn near wake the dead.
Ciri’s bright eyes land on where her girlfriend’s body is messily strewn across the bed, her head now resting on the swell of Geralt’s chest, while one of her feet dangle off of the edge that she’d just pushed Jaskier off of. She seems to decide in that moment that Geralt will make an excellent pillow—far better than the stuffy old thing she’s been carrying around with her, at any rate—and slides into the bed on the small sliver of mattress at Geralt’s back. Geralt makes a confused little sound in the back of his throat at the sudden pressure behind him, rolling over to try and see what the hell is going on—and that was all she wrote.
Geralt looks at Jaskier, a little helpless. “I’m trapped.” He says. Jaskier realizes that Ciri is laying on one of his arms. He could probably still move it, but not without running the risk of hurting the petite teenager. The other arm is still somehow around Hadria—that can’t be comfortable.
“I see that.” Jaskier winces as his back cracks. Maybe he’d hit the floor harder than he thought, or… Nope, he’d landed on the bat. Wonderful. Thank god tomorrow was Saturday—he didn’t know what he’d do if he had to go in and teach classes after all of this. “I’m just going to… go sleep on the couch.” Where it’s safe.
“Wait—you’re not even going to help me?” If Jaskier isn’t mistaken, there’s a definite hint of panic in his voice. The girls were liable to keep him pinned like this for hours—he had to start getting ready for work at seven.
Jaskier pulls a face, “I don’t know what you expect me to do. Clearly, they’ve decided that you’re the best pillow in the house—” He can’t quite keep the bitterness from seeping into his tone.
“Jas… are you jealous of two sixteen-year-old children wanting to cuddle with me?” He asks, incredulous and more than a little amused. Jaskier’s face flushes a violent red.
“I am not jealous.” He is absolutely jealous. As far as he’s concerned, Geralt’s chest is the best pillow in the house. The older man has just enough meat on him to keep you from pressing right up against bone, without being so muscular that it’s like cuddling up to a brick wall. And fuck if his body isn’t an absolute furnace. “I’m just tired—both because I have fallen off of the bed twice now, and maybe have a small concussion, and because it is way past my bedtime.”
“You’re absolutely jealous.” He snickers. One of the girls makes a small, disgruntled noise, and he quiets back down.
Jaskier huffs, “Maybe we just need a bigger bed.” Or one with less teenagers in it.
He’s almost immediately hit by a bright twinge of guilt. It’s not Hadria’s fault that she misplaced Luka’s dog tags. Okay, that… may not exactly be true. It’s not her fault that she’s having such a visceral reaction to misplacing the dog tags—that’s better. Geralt has mentioned Luka before in passing—Luka doesn’t appear to be a topic that Geralt actively avoids, but Jaskier is trying to be more cautious in the wake of the conversation they’d had after Yennefer’s car accident, and gleans what he can from whatever Geralt is willing to offer him—but Jaskier knows little more than that he died when Hadria was around seven-years-old.
Oh, and that he’d been the one to encourage Hadria’s love of music. He’d bought her her first saxophone (and had let her keep it in a safe spot at his and Vesemir’s house when Yennefer had pitched a fit about how much noise it would cause), and had made arrangements with a local music store owner for her to take lessons there on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after school. He’d even paid for three years of lessons in advance, when he’d received his diagnosis, because he knew that Geralt and Yennefer were hurting for money and he didn’t want his passing to be the reason that she stopped playing. It’d been his final gift to her—well, that and the dog tags.
Jaskier hadn’t even realized that she played the saxophone—to which Geralt had conceded that she hadn’t touched it in quite some time. She finished out the three years’ worth of lessons, but… when everything started to get moving with the divorce and the custody battle and the move, some things had just… fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately, this included her lessons. He’d always intended to have her pick them up again, but…
Hadria used to love playing the saxophone because it would bring a smile to Luka’s face, even when the pain had him nearly in tears. After he’d died, well…
…The sound of her sax seemed to just make everyone cry.
Jaskier wonders, absently, if there’s a way that he can rekindle her love for the saxophone. He tucks the thought away for later, when he’s more awake and his head isn’t throbbing—he’s definitely not going to come up with anything viable when he can scarcely keep his eyes open. The point is, he feels bad, because clearly there’s a lot of history there—those dog tags are a final connection that she has to a person he’ll never have the chance to know.
Even if he’s salty about his lack of sleep, he shouldn’t belittle that.
…But also, he is very salty about his lack of sleep. He wasn’t kidding about ordering a bigger bed.
After all that, Geralt is still staring up at him, all pathetic… and so he lets out a long-suffering sigh and rounds the bed again. Praying that he doesn’t somehow manage to throw his back out (because wouldn’t that be the icing on the fucking cake?), he grabs onto the nearest teen and pulls. Nobody in the bed moves. At all. “You could help me, you know.”
Geralt rolls his eyes, “And how exactly am I supposed to help you when I can’t move either of my arms, hmm?” He… has a point, much as Jaskier hates to admit it. “Besides, I thought that you would go for Ciri. No way is Hadria going to move.”
“Yeah, well… Hadria was closer.” Jaskier defends, petulant. Then, “Look, do you want my help or not.”
“I would very much like your assistance, yes.” Geralt confirms.
“Then stop micromanaging me and let me do my thing.”
He quickly discovers that he does, in fact, need Geralt to micromanage him… because Hadria is not moving. Like, at all. If he didn’t know any better, he would assume that the teen had somehow managed to superglue herself to the bed. And the harder that Jaskier pulls, the more stubbornly stuck she becomes—to the point where it feels like he’s attempting to drag both her and Geralt off of the bed. Which is… no. Jaskier may be a bit full of himself at times, but he knows his limits and he knows them well. On a good day, he can maybe lift Ciri. Hadria is pushing things into hernia territory. Geralt… he may as well just lay down and let the vultures come for him now.
…And then he gets an idea.
Coming around the other side of the bed, he carefully pushes Ciri up and over Geralt’s body—she rolls easily, barely even opening her eyes long enough to acknowledge that she’s moving, before landing with a soft oomph on top of Hadria’s slumbering form. Her face is… well, that’s not optimal. Honestly, Jaskier isn’t entirely certain that she can breathe. And he doesn’t know how to go about fixing it without making it even more awkward.
“Um…” Clearly, Geralt is having the same thought. “Hadria’s um… you don’t think she’s going to suffocate, do you?”
She seems to be breathing well enough… and she’s certainly making no move to remove her face from the soft pillow of Hadria’s breasts. Still… that can’t be comfortable, long-term. “I mean… she’s grown. She should know to move her head if she can’t breathe.” Still… “We can check back in on her in a little bit, to make sure she’s still breathing.”
“Can’t hurt.” Geralt concedes.
It takes a bit of finagling, but Geralt is able to fish his arm out from underneath both girls. Hadria makes a quiet sound of discontent, and Ciri shifts a little to wrap her in her arms and pull her body just a little bit closer. Hadria quiets almost immediately, settling her head back down on the pillow she’d commandeered from Geralt and drifting back off to sleep. Geralt takes a moment to shake some feeling back into his poor limbs, before rising off of the bed and pulling the mess of blankets—what he could fish out from underneath the girls, anyhow—up over their bodies. As soon as they register that the bed is now empty, they spread out, whilst still somehow managing to remain tangled up in each other.
“You know…” Jaskier muses, “They’re kind of cute, if you can look past the fact that my daughter is attempting to suffocate herself with your daughter’s breasts.” Geralt looks uncomfortable even acknowledging the fact that his daughter has boobs, which, to Jaskier’s tired, aching brain, is just about the most hysterical thing in the world.
“…Yeah…” He’s quick to change the subject, at any rate, which is somehow even funnier. “You want to see a cool trick?”
“I want to see the inside of my eyelids.” He’s pretty sure that he’s been saying that for the last half-hour now. Geralt just rolls his eyes and starts ushering him out of the room.
“Meet me in the living room, okay? But don’t get comfy on the couch.”
And so, Jaskier slowly begins his descent toward the living room, grumbling underneath his breath about children that had perfectly good beds of their own that just went unused because Geralt was a Class A cuddler and too much of a pushover to send the kids packing once one managed to worm their way into their bed. A moment later, Geralt joins him downstairs with what has to be every single pillow and blanket off of Hadria’s bed. He tosses them down onto the floor in front of their coffee table and quickly works to build himself a little nest, while Jaskier stares at him like he’s sprouted a second head. If he lays down on the floor, he makes no promises about being able to get back up.
And if Ciri makes one more crack about him needing a LifeAlert, he swears that she’s getting written out of his will.
He hasn’t fallen, he just can’t get up. There is a very important distinction to be made there.
“I’ll put these back in her room tomorrow morning.” He says, “She won’t come bother us in the middle of the night for at least a week, maybe longer.”
Jaskier shoots him a look, “I’m starting to think that she’s not so much keen on that pillow as she is on being close to you.”
“Ahh yes, because the scent of cigarette smoke and motor oil is so much more soothing than a memory foam neck pillow with cooling gel.” He snarks, but Jaskier can tell that he’s being half-serious. He knows that Geralt is self-conscious about the stench from the shop and the oil that always seems to cling to his skin and clothing—
“I like it.” Jaskier shrugs. Geralt snorts, mumbling something underneath his breath about Jaskier hitting his head on the nightstand a bit harder than they’d thought. “Why shouldn’t she? Those scents mean ‘Daddy,’ and ‘Daddy’ means ‘safety.’ Why do you think she’s always stealing your clothes, huh? I love you—but she’s definitely not trying to make a fashion statement.”
“Fuck you, too.” Geralt says, but there’s no heat behind the words. “Honestly, I always figured it was because she was too lazy to do her own damn laundry.”
“I mean… that is also a valid assumption, seeing as I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen her do laundry in the months that I’ve been living here.”
“That would be because she’s been paying Ciri to do it. Quite well, I might add. At the rate she’s going, she’ll be able to buy that old car off of me in no time.”
A few weeks ago, Jaskier had found a car that would be perfect for Ciri… with a couple of adjustments, of course. He’d negotiated a fair price with the woman selling it, and had brought it to Geralt to have the alterations made and to make sure that everything else was up to code. Geralt had agreed to sell Ciri the car for just the cost of the labor that he’d put in, which was still rather steep—but still significantly more affordable than if she were to buy something from a dealership. Hadria must be paying her rather well if Geralt is this confident that she’ll be able to buy the car so fast. Maybe he should see if she has any chores that need doing, to get a head start on his Christmas shopping…
He doesn’t even want to know where this money is coming from. He doesn’t think that Hadria has a job, and if she does, he’d bet decent money that she’s doing something under the table. If it doesn’t bother Geralt, then he doesn’t need to make a mountain out of a molehill—Hadria is still his daughter, after all, and he knows best—but fuck if sometimes it doesn’t make him wonder.
He’s pulled from his thoughts by Geralt’s hand gently curling around his wrist and tugging him toward their makeshift bed. When had he sat down and made himself comfortable in the veritable sea of blankets? Surely Jaskier would’ve seen something moving out of the corner of his eye, right? Right? Maybe he’s more tired than he realized… He’s still a bit skeptical about the whole thing, but he lets himself be dragged into the nest and cocooned beneath the blankets. The blankets smell of lavender essential oil, and are warm, like they’d just been pulled out of the dryer. He inhales deeply, scooching closer to Geralt until their bodies are pressed firmly against one another within their blanket prison.
And then, at long last, he sleeps.
He wakes to the sound of Geralt cursing.
“Shit, shit, shit—I am so late. Why the fucking hell didn’t my alarm go off?” Jaskier bites his tongue, wanting to respond that his alarm didn’t go off because he never sets the alarm on his phone. He always relies on the mechanical clock on his nightstand, which is also, strangely, quiet.
The phone in question is resting beside Jaskier’s head on one of the many pillows in their little makeshift nest, playing a voicemail from Lambert, who’d apparently arrived at the shop that morning, bright and early, and had been unable to do any work for the past several hours because Geralt had the key. Jaskier cannot help but snicker as he listens to Lambert rant about nothing in particular—until something catches his attention.
“…and your little demon-spawn left Luka’s dog tags at the gym the other night when she came for sparring practice. Aiden gave ‘em to me, and I’ll give ‘em back to you if you ever get your ass in gear and show up to fucking work my god—”
Geralt kisses him on the forehead, tells him to enjoy the rest of his day and that he’ll be back as early as he can (although he’s anticipating a late shift, seeing as he’s almost three hours late for work). He makes it all the way out to the car before he realizes that he forgot his phone back in the house, and Jaskier meets him at the door to deliver it in exchange for a proper kiss—which Geralt is more than happy to provide. Once his boyfriend is off to work, Jaskier sets about cleaning up their little nest, tossing the various pillows back onto Hadria’s bed and rearranging the blankets just the way that she liked. It’s quick work, seeing as the girls are still asleep next door—
Oh, shit. Nobody checked on Ciri last night.
He rushes over to his and Geralt’s bedroom to find the girls in much the same position they’d been in when they’d left them in the wee hours of the morning. Ciri has moved her head ever so slightly, but is still largely smothered against Hadria’s chest… it takes him a moment, in the pitch blackness of the room, to notice the subtle rise and fall of her back with each slow, steady inhalation…
It takes him another moment to realize that Hadria is awake, and staring at him.
They lock eyes for a moment, before Hadria asks in a weak, rasping voice, “Can we have blueberry pancakes for breakfast?”
Jaskier’s heart swells, “Sure thing, angel. You two sleep a little bit more, okay? I’ll come and get you when the food is ready.” She swallows hard, before nodding, and snuggling back down with Ciri.
Jaskier is almost, almost ready to say that being launched a foot and a half into the air, falling out of bed twice, whacking his head on the nightstand, and getting maybe four hours of sleep is worth it for how adorable the kids look in that moment…
…He’d also be lying if he said he wasn’t thrilled to discover later that night that Geralt’s plan had worked perfectly, and they once again had their bed all to themselves. He wasn’t going to move from this spot for anything short of the Apocalypse, dammit.
He had a head injury. Geralt and the girls could serve him breakfast and lunch, and dinner, in bed.