Work Text:
“No,” Yennefer says as soon as she sees him.
Jaskier grimaces. He doesn’t look any happier than she feels. “Hello, Yennefer.”
“No,” she says again. “Get out.”
He doesn’t so much as twitch from the doorway of her office. Yennefer likes to think the past eight years of working her way up university ranks has made her more threatening, not less. She must be losing her touch if Jaskier still looks so nonplussed.
“The fuck are you doing here anyway?” She herself didn’t know where her office was until an hour ago, and it’s still only half-unpacked, trinkets and papers strewn everywhere. Her phone buzzes again, signalling the arrival of another email in her inbox, and she resists the urge to throw the paperweight she’s holding against a wall.
Jaskier opens his mouth, but Yennefer holds up her hand before he can say anything. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. Get out before I call campus security.”
He sighs. He looks exactly the same as he did in undergrad: full, pouty lips, hair completely a mess, and wearing some hideously garish floral short-sleeve button-up even though it’s fucking January. Once upon a time it was irritating; now, it’s infuriating.
“Do you know when Dr Vries will be in?” he asks.
“What the fuck do you need to see Tissaia for—”
“Julian!”
Tissaia comes striding down the corridor, faster than someone in five-inch heels should really be able to. Her assistant— who easily clears six foot— trails behind her, but one’s actual physical height means nothing when you’re standing next to Tissaia, who is both the youngest President NYU has had in fifty years, and the first woman in the role. Yennefer almost laughs when she looks back at Jaskier. He looks like a child getting called to the principal’s office.
“Dr Vries,” he says. “It’s a pleasure—"
“Nonsense, the pleasure is all ours,” Tissaia cuts in, and Yennefer feels her mouth drop open.
What the fuck.
Tissaia continues like she hasn’t just thanked Jaskier for being here like she’s lost her goddamn mind. “I see you’ve met Yennefer. She’s just joined my team as my Chief of Staff.”
“Yes.” Jaskier cuts his gaze to Yennefer, looking like he’s sucking on a lemon.
“Yennefer,” Tissaia says, “Julian is taking this semester’s masterclass at CDI. You may be familiar with his music.”
She shuts her mouth and plasters on a smile. “I’m not.”
If Tissaia notices her scathing tone, she doesn’t comment on it. More likely she doesn’t care; she’s told Yennefer multiple times that the petty inter-faculty disputes are beneath her, which may not be the best way to run a university, but has worked out pretty well so far. In any case, it means Yennefer is free to inject as much venom as she likes when she glares at Jaskier.
“Ah, well,” Tissaia continues blithely, “You have the rest of the semester to get acquainted with it. Come, we’re about to go on a quick tour.”
Terrific, she thinks sourly, but she didn’t get here by letting every thought that flies through her head show, so she sticks out a hand, making sure Jaskier can see the sharp edge of her nails that she got touched up yesterday. And if she grips a little harder than normal when he shakes her hand, before pointedly turning away from him to follow Tissaia back down the corridor, well. Nobody else has to know.
She doesn’t let it get under her skin. She’s not territorial— she’s not, no matter how much Triss eyes her doubtfully over the rim of her coffee mug, and who cares that she’s poured her blood and sweat into this university? Education is a public good, and what matters is that the students who walk through their doors are getting the best access to resources, teachers, and industry professionals. So what if Jaskier’s career has apparently taken off enough that NYU has deemed him good enough to teach their masterclass? It’s been ten years, and she’s a proper adult now, with multiple degrees and a 401k and everything. Jaskier is just another fluffy-brained popstar artist that floats through their doors, just like every other year, that Yennefer will sign off a hundred forms about and then forget as soon as the semester’s over.
And anyway, even if she was territorial, or the kind of person who got maudlin about the past, which, again, Triss, she’s not, it’s still not a big deal— as Tissaia’s chief of staff, she has plenty on her plate, and NYU is a big university. The Clive Davis Institute is all the way over in Brooklyn. In New York, that might as well be Timbuktu.
So there’s no fucking reason she should be bumping into Jaskier as often as she is.
“Okay,” she says, the third morning she comes into work to see him loitering in the foyer, all long legs sprawled out on the decorative couches. “Are you stalking me?”
He squawks, and that’s a little better, there’s the annoying shit she remembers. “Of course not!”
She stares at him, unable to calm the frustration simmering under her skin. It had been a good morning, up until now— the subway hadn’t been too crowded, and while it was overcast, the humidity was less pressing than normal, which meant her hair had remained manageable on her walk over, and she wouldn’t have to use the emergency dry shampoo she kept in her office. Jaskier’s wearing impractically tight skinny jeans, ones that probably creak if he so much as bends a knee. He’s still looking up at her indignantly, and for some reason she can’t stop thinking about those long fucking eyelashes of his for long enough to cobble together some sort of witty reply.
He’s not supposed to be part of her life anymore. She’s moved on— the Yennefer that knew and was annoyed by Jaskier was twenty-one. She left her behind three cities ago.
So why does he still get under her skin so easily?
She abruptly turns around, leaving him sprawled on the foyer couch, hearing with not a small amount of satisfaction the click click of her heels as she walks across the tiles. She’s earned those clicks. She’s earned the way some of her idiot colleagues look at her like they’re scared of her.
Triss pops her head in from next door two seconds after she’s unlocked her office door. “Everything alright?”
“Yep.” Yen dumps her bag on her desk, and sits down with a thud.
“O-kay,” Triss sounds skeptical, but she also knows better than to push. Yen makes a mental note to pick her up a coffee when she gets lunch, as a thank you.
She boots up her computer, and the double monitors flash to life. She ignores the cheerfully blinking INBOX (351) from her email and opens her calendar instead. She has two meetings in the morning: one with the Provost, one with the head of the alumni program, and then a quick coffee catch-up in the afternoon with the new head of the GIDSI initiative. She has to finish off the policy document about student co-design, proofread Tissaia’s monthly column, email the comms team about next semester’s orientation. She has a thousand things she could be doing, that she needs to do, that isn’t just staring blankly at her computer screen.
She presses the intercom on her desk phone, and waits for two rings before Istredd picks up.
“Yen?”
“Is the guy in the awful shirt still there?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Ugh,” she says, and hangs up.
Jaskier yelps when she snags his arm as she walks past, not bothering to slow her pace. “Hey! Yennefer—”
“Shut up, you’re giving me a toothache by just existing.”
To her astonishment, he actually shuts up. The only indication that he’s heard her at all is that he adjusts his stance slightly so he’s not slouching down to where her fingers are still wrapped around his bicep.
That’s new, she thinks absentmindedly, and she gets a whole two minutes of blessed silence before he pipes up again. “Where are we going?”
God. It’s week four of the new semester, so if it isn’t already obvious where they’re headed by now, Jaskier is even more clueless than she thought he’d be.
“Food,” she says shortly. She scans her ID before pushing open the door to the staff café.
“Yen!” Katarina swoops by as soon as she steps in. “The usual?”
“Yes, please. And,” she narrows her eyes at Jaskier. From memory his diet consisted solely of box mac and cheese in undergrad. “Fruit granola for this one, and a mocha.”
Jaskier squints at her. “What are you saying about my figure?”
“When was the last time you ate a vegetable?” she counters.
He grumbles, nose scrunching up, and that— that raises feelings that Yen had not expected, right there on a Thursday morning in the middle of the staff café. She pushes down the sense memory of irritation, because the Yennefer that was annoyed at the way Jaskier couldn’t hide his emotions was a poor, tired, and hungry undergrad. Yennefer today is still tired, and right now, still hungry, and one hundred percent certain that she’ll find new reasons to be annoyed at him in the next five minutes. No reason to fall back on old habits.
“Not that I’m not delighted for you to grace me with your company,” Jaskier says once they’ve sat down. “But to what do I owe this pleasure?
Yennefer rolls her eyes. “You’re spending all day doing nothing in the foyer. It’s a bad look for the school. Don’t you have things to do? Classes to teach?”
“It’s a masterclass, it only happens once a week.”
At Yennefer’s unimpressed stare, he adds, “I promised some of the other kids who didn’t get into the masterclass that I’d hang out somewhere a couple days a week so they can swing by and chat. It doesn’t seem fair they shouldn’t be getting help just because someone higher up thought they weren’t talented enough.”
Yennefer hides her surprise with snark. “And you chose the foyer?”
He shrugs. “It’s a fucking maze here. I want the kids to find me, not hunt the Minotaur.”
Their food arrives, as well as two coffees, and Yennefer covers the grudging respect she feels by saying, “Hope you’ve grown out of your mochas with three sugars.”
“Not all of us like to torture ourselves in the morning with Americanos,” Jaskier snipes back. It looks like he does it without really thinking, because in the next second, his face slides into surprise. “You remembered.”
“You were insufferable about it for four years. Made it difficult to forget.”
Jaskier snorts, and he does indeed pour three sugars into his coffee before taking a deep sip. It’s probably at least his second coffee of the day, if he is already able to keep up with her. He’s useless before caffeine.
“How’s Geralt?” she asks as she picks up her cutlery, because it’s the thing hanging in the air between them, and because she’s an adult.
There’s a long pause, and she looks up from cutting into her salmon bagel just in time to see Jaskier’s smile go brittle. “I wouldn’t know.”
She must have heard wrong. “What?”
With false nonchalance, Jaskier unrolls his cutlery from his napkin and starts digging into his granola. Unfortunately for him, Yennefer’s job is not only unofficially subtitled the person who gets answers out of people who avoid questions, but she also dated his best friend for the better part of four years. To her utter chagrin, she can read him, even after all this time. She knows how to pry, how to wait, and she’s got all the time in the world.
Well. She checks her watch discreetly. Forty-five minutes before her meeting with the Provost. But Jaskier doesn’t know that, and he never did like silences. Couldn’t sit in them the way Yennefer and Geralt could.
Eventually, he says, “We haven’t talked in a while,” and she pounces.
“What’s a while?”
Jaskier pauses. He’s pretending to count back the days, like Yennefer doesn’t know this is the kind of thing he’d have the date stamped on the back of his eyelids. “Last night of senior year.”
Huh. Looks like Yennefer didn’t get the last word that night after all. She’d wondered what happened after she slammed the door in Geralt’s face.
“I thought— you guys were friends. I thought after I left—"
“You mean after you ran away to Germany.”
She closes her mouth. Changes track. “Where is he now?”
“Connecticut. Back on his dad’s farm.”
Jaskier pointedly spoons a heap of granola into his mouth after he says this, and well. If she really wanted him to talk, she could do it: push and prod and wait and threaten until he spools out the information that she wants. But Jaskier’s not meeting her eyes, and it also hasn’t escaped her notice that despite him meeting her level of snark and sarcasm, just like he had a decade earlier, he hasn’t actually hurled any insults back at her. Yennefer may be a bitch, but she’s not cruel.
She thinks, briefly, of Fringilla, of being twelve and asking each other, over and over again, but you’re my best friend, right? And I’m yours? They haven’t seen each other since high school. Last Yen heard, she was working at McKinsey’s in-house legal team on the west coast.
Geralt and Jaskier had known each other since before they could talk. Years and years before Yen came onto the scene. They weren’t supposed to be like her and Fringilla.
Yen isn’t hungry anymore all of a sudden.
She checks her watch again. Twenty minutes to go until her meeting, but she throws down her napkin and gathers her things anyway. “I have to dash. Have the other half of the bagel if you want.”
She keeps Jaskier’s face in her mind as she leaves, mouth half-open to say something, still full of granola. He looks absolutely stupid. It doesn’t make her feel as good as she thinks it once would have.
See, the thing is that after Yennefer had moved to Munich and its hulking grey buildings, and buried herself in her work, she’d always imagined that Geralt had moped a bit, Jaskier had come to comfort him about her, and somewhere along the way they had figured it out and were living happily ever after. She could picture it exactly: the crumpled grey of Geralt’s sheets, how Jaskier would lay a hand lightly between his shoulder blades, like soothing a wounded animal, because Jaskier did know tact when it really mattered, and then once he was sure the worst of the soft bits had healed over, he would return to the poking jibes and loud exclamations. Because that’s how Jaskier was— that’s how he worked. Once he figured out that you were mostly okay he went back to acting like everything was fine and normal and good, and everything would have fallen into place after that.
But now all she can think about is Jaskier sitting in front of her in the university café, looking a million miles away, still and sad in a way she has never seen him.
“Yen?” Triss rapping on the glass wall of her office startles her. “You okay? You’ve been staring at the wall for fifteen minutes now.”
“Yeah, fine,” she says, but she must not sound it, because Triss reappears ten minutes later with a takeaway coffee that she leaves on the corner of Yen’s desk.
“Don’t mention it,” she says, when Yennefer opens her mouth to say thank you. Her smile is warm. “We all have those days.”
Yennefer is going to get her a box of chocolates. Triss really is too good to her.
But no amount of caffeine is going to fix the nagging pest in her brain, because it wears horrible bright clothes, flails its arms everywhere, and takes up a space in Yen’s head that has been blessedly, quietly empty for the last ten years. And now it’s looking at her with sad, doleful eyes, and she’s reread the same paragraph on how the university is going to support international students five times and nothing has sunk in.
She curses, opening a new tab and finding Jaskier’s number in the staff directory.
If you’re doing anything at 8PM tomorrow, cancel.
Who’s this?
Guess.
Alright Yennefer. I’m trusting that you’re not planning to murder me and dump my body in the harbour. Name a place.
Yennefer chooses the bar because she knows if she left it up to Jaskier he’d choose somewhere tacky. He’s only ten minutes late, which is pretty good from what Yennefer remembers. His shirt, as always, is immaculately crisp, and she grudgingly admits that he looks good. If they were strangers, maybe she would have gotten him to buy her a drink.
He slides onto the stool across from her, the curiosity unhidden in his eyes.
“First lunch, now this?”
She sips at her wine. “You looked so pathetic yesterday, it would be morally wrong of me to fling you back into your own moroseness.”
Jaskier’s face goes wobbly for a second, and Yennefer thinks, shit. She opens her mouth, even though she doesn’t know what she’s going to say to fix this— and that’s new, when was she ever concerned with fixing a non-existent rapport with him?— when his face goes back to normal, relaxed and a tinge of cockiness in the corners of his eyes.
“Ah,” he smirks, leaning forward. “Charity, then.”
“Exactly.”
She does a good job of hiding how relieved she is. She came to drink and insult Jaskier. Not babysit him. She carefully doesn’t think of why they’re here together, now. They never did this before— she tolerated him, he made digs at her that weren’t particularly hurtful because of how shitty they were. This might be the first time they’ve hung out one on one, besides breakfast yesterday.
“So, Yennefer Vengerberg.” He leans back after he’s given his order to the waitress. “What have you been doing these past ten years?”
She snorts. “This isn’t a high school reunion.”
Jaskier is undeterred. “All I see is that you stalk around threateningly in a suit and heels, and you always look angry when you’re on the phone. For all I know you joined the mob and are planning an assassination.”
Yen is not going to laugh at that. She’s not. Was he always this funny? “At NYU?”
“Playing the long game,” he waves his hand, almost knocking the waitress out as she sets his drink onto the table. It’s a shocking shade of pink.
“Every assassination plot begins in the bureaucracy of academia,” she says drily. Jaskier clearly doesn’t have the same qualms as she does, because he throws his head back and cackles, loud enough that the table next to them looks over. She swallows at the sight of the long line of his throat, and a feeling of unfortunate realisation settles into her stomach.
His laughter dies down, and his gaze meets hers. His cheeks are flushed, and his hair’s a mess. His eyes are a piercing, startling blue. Far too knowing for someone Yen has seen throw up in gutters and who barely passed his gen eds.
“What about you?” she asks, just before the space between them stretches to the wrong side of awkward. “Who did you blackmail to get a record deal?”
His grin turns sharp. “You’ve done some research on me.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re an NYU employee. It’s my job.”
He ignores this. “What did you think?”
“Of what?”
“The album.”
“It’s my job to know the students are getting what they’re paying for. I don’t get paid to listen to your caterwauling.”
“So you liked it?” He’s leaning forward now, long fingers splayed across the table. His fingernails are neatly manicured, but his nail polish is chipped. It’s all part of the carefully careless singer-songwriter look, and Yen, who’s been spending $50 every two weeks since she was nineteen to get her nails done, would normally turn her nose up.
“Stop fishing for compliments,” she says, and he laughs again. The waitress comes back around, and they order another round of drinks.
Once she’s left, Jaskier shrugs at her. “It’s a pretty boring story, really. After college I was still writing, still playing at Leeroy’s. And then one day someone hands me their business card, tells me to ring them.”
“Really.” She doesn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“It’s not a very good story. I thought you were all about those.”
His grin fades, and he’s quiet for a second. It’s not uncomfortable, but Yen isn’t used to a version of Jaskier that takes the time to think about what’s going to come out of his mouth before he says it. Part of it was that she wasn’t looking closely enough ten years ago, but the truth is that Jaskier at eighteen bounced back from love like he was made of elastic, so he never cared about what he said or who heard. It never affected him. He hadn’t lost anything that mattered yet, and it was one of the things Yennefer had hated about him— his shiny, smooth edges. Her and Geralt were different: rough, a bit more imperfect. Something a bit more uneven that you could get a good grip on. Hold on to. A shitty story to tell. Jaskier was the story you’d set to music and sing to children at afternoon tea.
“I grew out of them,” he says finally, and Yen swallows.
“What happened?” she asks, because they’ve known each other a long time, even if they didn’t like each other, so it seems like the polite thing to say, but also because she’s been dying to know since yesterday’s breakfast.
His gaze sharpens, and he sits up straight. “Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t suit you.”
Immediately she’s bristling again. She’s never giving Jaskier the benefit of her politeness ever again. “Well, excuse me for making an inquiry.”
“I’m sure you can guess the broad strokes. Fill in the rest yourself.”
She can, is the thing. Sometime after Yen got on a trans-Atlantic flight, instead of living happily ever after, there had been something that tore them apart. And Jaskier, because he’s a fucking artist and never learnt to built up walls where it was good for him, is still hurting over it. A fucking decade later.
They’re not the same. But he’s looking at her from under his eyelashes, still a little angry, a high flush on his cheeks. There’s a peek of chest hair escaping from where his shirt is unbuttoned. He’s not so sad and moping and pining after a long-lost best friend that he still can’t give as good as he gets. And suddenly Yennefer knows, with a crystal clear certainty, that they’re going to sleep with each other tonight.
So she cuts straight to the chase: “Your place or mine?”
There’s a flash of surprise in his eyes, and she almost laughs. There’s no way he hadn’t expected this, no matter how small. She’d seen the way he’d eyed her cleavage when she’d turned to the waitress to order her drinks, when he thought she wasn’t looking. She wasn’t being subtle with checking out the long line of his body either. And then: the banter that was jibing, rather than caustic. The brief moment of softness. And above it all, the knowledge that they could still be cutting with one another, that they could still dig their elbows in for another moment of the sweet satisfaction, the brief hiss of pleasure-pain-pleasure.
“Yours,” he says, watching her carefully, and his lips are stained pink as he drains the rest of his drink.
“He was my best friend,” Jaskier tells her the next morning.
His chest is pressed against her back, not an inch of space between them, and she’s still half asleep and deliciously warm. It’s close to a perfect morning as it gets, if she pretends to forget the night before and Jaskier hadn’t opened his goddamn mouth to talk about Geralt.
And anyway, she can’t really relate— she’d had friends when she was younger, of course, but no one that had looked at her the same way Geralt had looked at Jaskier; was aware of his presence in the room the same way people were aware of sources of light. They had always been each other’s biggest and softest blindspots, and Jaskier had never quite managed to adapt to Yen and Geralt being YenAndGeralt. She’d ignored it for four years because it wasn’t her problem. If they’d wanted to be together, they’d be together. Geralt chose her. Jaskier wasn’t her friend.
And then she’d left all of that behind.
“Have you tried talking to him?” she asks. She knows how stupid it sounds as soon as the words leave her mouth.
“I’ve tried,” he says. “Of course I have.”
It’s been ten years— and it’s not like this kind of thing doesn’t happen between friends, not even the oldest, most trusted of them. People change. Friends leave. And life moves on with or without you. Jaskier and Geralt are adults, and they can sort things out on their own. It’s none of Yen’s business anyway.
“You hated me,” she says a week later. She’s watching Jaskier pitifully try to make breakfast, touching all the appliances in her kitchen like they’re about to come to life and bite him. She’ll rescue him in a second, but for the moment she’s perfectly comfortable in his t-shirt, sitting on the barstool on a sunny Saturday morning.
She doesn’t know why she says it. A minute ago he was complaining about one of his students who keeps trying to set Charles Bukowski’s poetry to music, which first of all, Yen, has so many copyright issues even the lawyers will need lawyers, and secondly, if he was going to pick a poet, why did it have to be Charles Bukowski?
But Jaskier doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t even react at the abrupt change of subject. “Geralt wasn’t himself around you.”
“Wasn’t himself?” she bites out. “Or just someone you didn’t know?”
Jaskier stiffens; she knows she’s hit a nerve.
She stands up and shoulders him out of the way, clanging a pan onto the stove and flinging open the fridge so hard it slams against its own hinges. She’s mad at herself for bringing it up, for ruining a nice morning by saying it out loud, and she’s mad that she’s mad, and guilty, and all mixed up.
“Hey.” He touches her shoulder lightly, and it makes her furious.
“What,” she snaps, swinging around. She’s holding a carton of eggs in one hand, and her movement slams it directly into his chest. There’s an audible crack, which ruins their plans of omelettes for breakfast.
He looks at her searchingly. Takes the broken eggs from her hands, tosses them in the bin. Sticks two slices of bread into the toaster.
“I don’t hate you anymore,” he says, eyes still glued firmly on the toaster. She feels the fight leave her. They stand in silence until the toast pops up.
“And anyway,” Jaskier says, plating the toast, and pulling out the spreads from the pantry. “He’s not here.”
There isn’t anything Yennefer can say to that.
They keep fucking. Jaskier’s good at it— all those stories from the girls who fawned over him in undergrad really were true, but of course those stories had never really mattered because the only person Jaskier really had eyes for was Geralt. It’s not healthy, but any standard of measure, but it’s— something.
He brings it up, once, like they’re in high school or some shit, a whispered, what are we? Except it’s after some fundraiser gala, and Yen’s tipsy off champagne and Jaskier’s more than tipsy off pink, fruity cocktails, again, so Yen kisses him hard against his apartment door instead, and the next time he looks like he’s about to open his mouth to ask something similar, she shoves his head down between her legs and makes sure his mouth is busy doing something else.
She’s self-aware. She just doesn’t want to fix it— they don’t need to put a label on whatever they’re doing. They’re perfectly fine as they are— what kind of adult professionals would they be if they couldn’t compartmentalise this undefined something from the rest of their lives?
Besides, it’s not like she could put a label on it even if she wanted to. They know each other’s schedules, and breakfast is a standing affair now, whether it be on campus or at one of their apartments. She’s not sleeping with anybody else— too busy, but she doesn’t particularly care if he is. Jaskier knows that if he interrupts her in her office during the workday, she will throw something at him. (It’s only happened once; he’s a quick learner even out of bed.) He disappears every Saturday afternoon, 11AM until 4PM, on the dot, and Yennefer doesn’t ask— what he does is his own business.
But— he makes her laugh. And he makes her ache with a kind of nostalgia she’d once thought was a weakness she’d long shed.
(She makes sure to compartmentalise that too.)
It’s a Saturday, three months into— whatever they’re doing, when she’s leaving the office because she’d been called in to some weekend emergency because apparently the place can’t function without her, and she’s walking past Washington Square Arch to get to the subway when she sees him with the child.
He’s swinging her around in a circle, laughing loud and bright, her ash blonde hair gleaming in the sun. Yen squints. Blinks.
A booming chuckle comes from nearby, and she sees— she sees the huge man with them. For a second, her breath catches, but then she registers: short, brown hair, instead of long and silver. And then he turns, and she sees the scar, and a new wave of pain washes over her. She hasn’t seen Eskel for a long time. She’d underestimated how much she’s missed him.
She doesn’t stop, continuing on her way to the subway, but when Jaskier unlocks her apartment door at 4:10PM, whistling, (and since when did he have a key?) she doesn’t bother with pretenses.
“Who were you with today?”
He freezes. “Uh,” he begins, and she levels him with an unimpressed look. He wilts immediately under her stare. “How did you know?”
“Saw you. In the park.” Her voice is clipped, and normally, she’d be cursing at how invested she sounds. Like a controlling girlfriend who freaks out if her boyfriend takes longer than five minutes to reply to her texts. The kind of girl she’d always prided herself not to be.
“It’s complicated,” he says eventually.
She refrains from rolling her eyes, but only barely. “Uncomplicate it for me.”
He takes his time toeing off his shoes, neatly lining them up in the corridor. Hanging his coat up on the coat stand, which is already laden with his scarves and floral snapbacks, and all the traces of the time they’ve been hanging out together over the last few months, all the time he’s been keeping this from her. She steps forward until she’s in his space, uncaring of how she looks, or what he interprets from it.
“Were you or were you not with Eskel and— and—”
She can’t even bring herself to say it. All she can see is the long silver hair in a high ponytail, the giggling of a child, a girl with too much resemblance to ignore.
“Yen.” Jaskier takes her hands, and leads her to the sofa. “Sit down.”
She sits. There’s a ringing in her ears.
“I thought you and Geralt don’t talk anymore.” She tries to not make it sound accusing.
Jaskier sits down too. “We don’t.”
“But?”
“But we were friends for twenty years. Eskel and I are still good friends. He gets Ciri every weekend. We hang out.”
“You hang out.”
He nods, and it’s the fact that he looks so serious, that he’s taking her meltdown like it’s completely reasonable, and that he hasn’t blinked, hasn’t flinched at any of this, that finally lets her shoulders come down, lets her let go of the breath she’s holding.
“So you and Geralt really aren’t talking,” she repeats.
“I told you.” His mouth quirks up into a smile. “Drives Eskel nuts.”
This gets a laugh out of her. “I bet.”
They sit in silence for a minute, Jaskier’s thumb gently sweeping over the back of her hand.
“Eskel’s in New York?” she says, eventually.
“Yep.”
“And… Ciri?” She tries the name out. It feels clumsy in her mouth.
“She’s just turned nine. I don’t know the details.”
“But she’s Geralt’s.”
“Mmm. She’s at the farm during the week. Geralt drops her off to Eskel on the weekends.”
Yennefer lets this sink in. “Vesemir must love having a girl.”
“Probably.” Jaskier sounds wistful, and it reminds her that while this is news to her, she’s not the only one that feels complicated about it. If he hasn’t seen Geralt, there’s no way he’s seen Vesemir, or the farm. It makes her chest feel weird, completely independently from the idea that Geralt has a child.
She thought she was over the dramatics. She thought that she’d gotten over Geralt fucking Rivia. Jaskier had brought that all rising to the surface again, opening up her perfectly compartmentalised boxes. She should resent him for it, or maybe at least be angry at first before it fades into something she can examine properly. The problem is that his thumb is still drawing circles over the back of her hand. And he’s still sitting next to her, patient, as she sorts out her thoughts, a warm line against her side. It’s difficult to be anything but grateful to him now.
Yennefer remembers the moment in undergrad that she realised Jaskier would make a brilliant musician.
She was kissing Geralt in his and Jaskier’s shared dorm. She’d always liked doing that. Geralt kissed with a single-minded determination, like he was trying to convince you that all of his thoughts were focused on you in that second. She liked that, being the centre of his entire body for the minute, the hour, and knowing that it would all go back to normal once they were apart.
It was a Monday evening. Jaskier was at band practice, the only time during the week that Geralt was guaranteed their room to himself. The week prior, Yen had lugged her full-length mirror across campus so they could watch themselves fuck on Geralt’s king single. So she knows what they’d looked like when Jaskier had come in, hours earlier than planned.
They’d made eye contact. Yen lips were still attached to Geralt’s.
Much, much later, when Jaskier came back into the room, she was comfortably lying on Geralt’s bed as she finished off an essay while he quietly sketched at his desk.
“Alright?” he’d said absently, and Jaskier’s eyes had flicked over to Yennefer, imperceptible if she hadn’t already been watching him.
“Peachy.”
He was good at faking it. Yen would have to give him that. He would make a brilliant musician.
She doesn’t contact Eskel. It would be easy to— he’s one of the numbers she hadn’t deleted, so she could call, they could get coffee. Catch up. Whatever it is that adults do in their spare time.
But everytime her thumb hovers over the call button, she remembers the farm in Connecticut. The smell of the fireplace. The colour of Christmas. The strong, spiced, wine. Geralt’s hands, gentle with the baubles as he decorated the tree. The infuriating strumming of Jaskier’s guitar. It’d been as close to family as she’d ever known.
She doesn’t think she could ask for it all again if she doesn’t get to keep it.
They slip up, because Jaskier’s famous or some shit now, something that she forgets when he’s prancing around her kitchen in her nightgown. He’s all but moved in, really, something that they’ve mutually decided not to talk about. Jaskier only goes back to his own apartment once a week to get a fresh change of clothes. That’s not what infuriates her. What infuriates her is how they slip up.
Jaskier calls her in the middle of a meeting, and she ignores the buzzing of her phone, even as the science AD looks at her quizzically and says, “Did you need to take that?”
“No,” she snaps, and he wisely returns back to the point they were discussing before. Her phone quietens for a second before ringing for the fifth time in row.
By the time she gets back to her office, she’s fuming. She has six missed calls from him, and a text that just says CALL ME.
He picks up on the first ring, “Yen,” he says, cautious.
“This better be good,” she snaps.
“Have you checked the news recently?”
Yennefer pauses. “Has the president died or something.”
Jaskier lets out a half chuckle, crackly over the phone, but not enough to hide the undercurrent of anxiousness. “There’s a couple of photos of us floating around. Media’s picked it up.”
She digests this. Connects the image she has of Jaskier inches from her bathroom mirror as he pops a pimple, to the idea that there are news agencies that care enough about him to sneak photos of them— what? Getting groceries? Waiting at the subway? “Are you trying to tell me that we’ve been paparazzied?”
“…Yes?”
She sighs. It’s been a long week: a pretty serious bout of plagiarism cases in the last exam period, and the way negotiations to purchase another apartment complex to convert into a residence hall are going, it looks like they won’t be able to open up the new rooms for another year. What’s one more thing? “Fine, yes whatever. I suppose your publicist or your manager or someone will want to send things to me?”
A pause. “I hadn’t thought of that, but yeah, probably.”
Yennefer tries to hide the swell of fondness in her chest as she groans. “How do you manage to get anything done.”
“Wit and charm, of course. Chinese for dinner tonight?”
“Only if you’re paying.”
“You probably earn more than me.”
“But I’m not the one with paparazzi following them around.” A sudden thought strikes her then, and she slips on her work voice. “It’s not going to affect the students, will it?”
“I’ll make sure it doesn’t.” And god, moments like this when Jaskier knows exactly the wavelength she’s on, when she realises he cares for his students the exact way she does. His voice is soft, steel underneath. It reminds her that he isn’t actually a bumbling idiot anymore.
She clears her throat, clutching her phone harder than necessary. “See you tonight.”
Jaskier doesn’t mention how her voice has suddenly gone rough, but his own voice is gentle as he says, “See you.” He knows. And Yen doesn’t know how to feel about that.
At quarter past five, when Yennefer has just clocked off, and her phone rings, she answers without looking at the caller ID, assuming it’s just Jaskier saying he’s going to be late, or has changed his mind and he actually wants curry instead of Chinese now.
But she answers the phone with a crisp, “Yennefer speaking,” and in silence that follows, none of Jaskier’s quick babbling, it only takes ten seconds before she knows with a terrible certainty, and she hangs up the phone before Geralt can get a word in. Her heart pounding. A headache building behind her eyes.
She turns around, unlocks her office again. Grabs the emergency tequila she keeps in her drawer, and after a shot, she texts the number that has just called her with the address of a café nearby.
She speeds all the way there.
“Yen,” he says when she storms into the café.
He’s just sitting there, hair tied back into a ponytail, undercut neatly shaven. Denim jacket. Black jeans. He looks exactly the same.
She slows down slightly, taking a second to ensure that the first words she says to him in ten years aren’t just a garbled scream.
“Geralt,” she says primly. She sits down, perching carefully on the edge of the seat. He has a cup of tea in front of him. She doesn’t bother to order anything.
“How did you get my number?”
He at least has the decency to look a little embarrassed as he says, “The NYU website.”
Fuck. She needs to get Triss to remove that. Too late now. Anyway— “How the fuck did you know I work at NYU?”
A pause, long enough that Yen contemplates getting up and leaving. Going back to her apartment, where Jaskier will be lounging on the couch, watching reruns of the Bachelorette.
“I saw the photos,” Geralt says.
It hurts her to realise that she can’t follow the jump he’s making. They used to be able to do that in conversation, easy as breathing. “The photos?”
“Of you. And…”
Fuck, she thinks for the second time in under a minute. Fucking paparazzi.
She puts aside her frustration, consciously exhales a breath. “So to what do I owe this pleasure?”
It’s only after the words leave her mouth, that she realises she’s parroted back what Jaskier asked her, the first time she dragged him to breakfast. That was months ago now. God. It feels like yesterday. It feels like she slammed the door in Geralt’s face and got on a plane to Germany yesterday. She doesn’t feel thirty-one.
“Are you…”
She raises an eyebrow, and Geralt huffs a bit, seemingly frustrated at himself for struggling to put together the words. Yen has to firmly stomp on the tiny blossom of fondness that comes unbidden behind her sternum. None of that. There’s too much lost time between them for that now.
“You and… Jaskier. Are you…”
She realises what he’s getting at. “No.” She pauses, thinks about it. “Not really,” she amends, even though that also leaves a sour taste on her tongue.
“Right.”
Yennefer almost laughs. Geralt, with all his clumsy ways of showing how he feels, says the word with so much emotion it could’ve been turned into a feature length film. After the time she’s spent over the last few months with Jaskier, and seeing Geralt for all of five minutes now, it’s not hard for her to fill in the gaps for herself. Men are idiots.
She’s missed him, is the thing. Is missing him. Present tense. It’s good with Jaskier, but now, in the presence of Geralt’s warm bulk, the careful way he’s holding himself, silver hair tucked behind his ears, the calluses on his thumb. She thinks suddenly of how it all could be so much better. It’s not just about old friends, old wounds. It’s about her boys.
So she says, “You know him and Ciri hang out every Saturday with Eskel?”
He nods, and she lets the incredulous space between them speak for itself. Vesemir’s farm is only a three-hour drive from New York; while not a short trip by any means, if someone was making the trip with Ciri anyway, well. Geralt ducks his head. He can read her expression, what it means, and how she doesn’t want to hear his excuses.
“He misses you,” she says. In case it needs to be spelt out syllable by syllable for him.
Geralt hunches in on himself. “I hurt him.”
She can feel her gaze go flinty, even as she tries to stop it. “I know.”
She thinks about the spaces that her and Jaskier still tiptoe around. How certain things will make him go silent and sad. And how, at drinks with Triss last night, Triss had asked her, simply, are you both happy? And the first thing she’d said in answer, was I want us to be.
“You should come. This weekend.”
Geralt’s head jerks up. “What?”
“Stay. Instead of leaving Ciri with Eskel.”
He only stares at her, and she realises the enormity of what she’s just said. And yes, she’s missed him, and yes, he used to hold the vulnerable parts of her, but she’s not quite ready for him to witness her silently freaking out just yet, so she stands, says, “Think about it.”
She can’t stop herself from dropping a light kiss at the corner of his mouth before she leaves. His hand comes up to grip her wrist from where her hand is balancing herself on his shoulder.
She feels those two points of contact like a brand all the way home.
Yennefer knows Jaskier can tell something is wrong. She was antsy the whole night after seeing Geralt, and she’s antsy for all the days after that right up until Saturday morning. He doesn’t say anything though, just silently forwards on a few things from his publicist re: the paparazzi photos, lightly updates her on how the kids in his class are going. (“Geniuses, some of them,” he says, shaking his head in amazement. “Far better than I was at eighteen, and probably ever will be.”) He’s probably just chalked it up to nerves; her screwing up the courage to mutter a request to join him and Ciri at the park hadn’t been faked at all, and it had made her feel so guilty when he’d replied of course, so earnest it could melt butter.
He keeps up the chattering as they get into her car, as they drive to Washington Square Park. He’s going on about some dogs he saw the other day in Burberry scarves when Yennefer parks the car, and his eyes finally fall on the people at the other end of the carpark.
There’s Ciri, her blonde hair gleaming in the weak light. And beside her, not Eskel, but—
“Geralt.” Jaskier exhales his name like it’s been punched out of him.
Geralt’s holding a pink backpack in one hand, gripping the strap so tight his knuckles are white. “Jaskier.”
God. What was she thinking? Jaskier’s going to get in Geralt’s car and drive with them all the way back to Connecticut, and Yen will never see either of them again. She’ll have to explain to Tissaia why they need to find someone else for CDI’s masterclass. She’ll have to pack up his thousand bottles of shampoos and soaps that he’s left strewn around her bathroom and ship them to him.
But when she turns to look at Jaskier, he’s not looking at Geralt. He’s looking at her, and there’s a twist to his mouth that she can’t read. Not betrayed, like she’d been worried he’d be. Not even grateful, like she’d been even more worried he’d be.
After an excruciatingly strained silence, where the three of them stand in the carpark like the finale of a low budget Western, Ciri’s head buried in her Nintendo and oblivious to the tension, Jaskier claps his hands. Both Geralt and Yen jump at the sudden noise.
“Um. Right! Ciri, shall we get ice cream.”
He’s trying for light, but his voice doesn’t go up at the end to signal a question, instead falling flatly like the dropping of a balloon. Ciri doesn’t notice, but Geralt definitely does, his eyes flicking between the two of them.
“Ice cream!” Ciri cheers. Jaskier grabs her hand.
“I’ll um. Let you two talk,” he says, without meeting their eyes, and him and Ciri have disappeared around the corner before Yennefer can figure out what’s wrong.
She looks at Geralt, who still looks shell-shocked, slightly lost.
“What just happened?” she asks, and Geralt only shrugs helplessly back at her.
Yen and Geralt try to follow Jaskier and Ciri, once they get over their shock at whatever the fuck had happened in the carpark, but after looking around fruitlessly for an hour, and Yen’s text to Jaskier asking where they were remaining unreplied, they give up. The next four hours are spent making painfully awkward small talk in the park.
It had never been like this before— one of the things Yen liked best about Geralt was that sure, he was quiet, and he had a chest that trees would weep over, but he was smart. He could match her, wit for wit. Their conversations had crackled, quips that made leaps from topic to topic, games of word association that left everybody else spinning. Even in the beginning, when Yen had walls higher than heaven and Geralt felt so out of himself in the city that he did barely more than grunt, they had never stuttered in circles like this. Yen can’t help but think it’s more than the fact that they’re different people now, or that there’s all this unresolved history between them. There’s something missing. Something that had always been there, when there was YenAndGeralt, whether she liked it or not.
When Jaskier shows up back at the park at 4PM on the dot, saving them from yet another stilted silence, he’s carefully avoiding both of their eyes. Yennefer wants to scream.
Talk to him! she glares pointedly at Geralt. Ciri has bounded over to him, chattering about the exhibits they’d seen at the Met, and Geralt’s soothing one, big hand over her head, nodding absently as he looks helplessly back at Yen. His gaze flickers over to Jaskier every few seconds, like he can’t help it.
“… and Jaskier got me this!” Ciri pulls out a rolled tube from her backpack, and unfurls it proudly right there and then to show a poster.
“Did you say thank you?” Geralt asks, finally looking down at her.
“Oops.” Ciri swings around to face Jaskier, her eyes huge. “Thank you, Jaskier.”
“That’s quite alright.” Jaskier sounds odd, but Yen doesn’t have the time to examine it before he’s continuing, “You should probably get going soon. Before the traffic gets bad.”
His tone sounds like he’s talking to Geralt, but his eyes are fixed firmly somewhere to the left of Ciri’s head. There’s another, horrible pause, before Geralt opens his mouth.
Yes! Yennefer thinks. Say something! Fix this!
“Right. Yes. Ciri, we need to get going.”
Yen bites her cheek so hard she draws blood.
“Aww.” Ciri pouts.
Jaskier opens his arms. “Come give me a hug, sweetheart.”
She runs over, colliding with him with not a small amount of force as wraps her skinny arms around his waist. Jaskier stumbles back a little with an oof, but wraps his own arms around her shoulders. Yen watches this all like it’s being projected up in Times Square.
“Bye, darling.” He presses a kiss to the top of Ciri’s head, and Yennefer knows that face. It’s his goodbye face. He lets her go, and Yen watches in slow motion as he raises his head to look at Geralt. He looks like he’s being held at gunpoint.
“Goodbye, Geralt,” he says, overly formal.
Geralt makes a choked noise, and if Jaskier has any kind of reaction to that, he doesn’t show it. Instead, walks back across the carpark to Yennefer’s car, and sits himself down into the passenger seat. Behind Geralt, Ciri opens the backdoor of their car, and scrambles into the backseat.
Geralt and Yen stare at each other, both unsure as to what had actually happened, over the past couple of hours, only knowing that something had gone completely, catastrophically, wrong.
“I’ll talk to him,” Yennefer says, but she feels completely useless as she says it.
Geralt holds her gaze for a second longer, those goddamn amber eyes that are just as piercing, just as gripping. He nods, his lips a straight, unhappy line. And then there’s nothing for Geralt and Yen to do except get into their respective cars and drive away.
The ride back to the apartment is deathly quiet.
Jaskier stares at his hands all the way from the parking garage, and in the elevator ride up. And then they’re in her apartment— their apartment, with Jaskier’s keys hanging on the hook, and his sugary cereal in the cupboards, and his guitars still lying out of their cases in the living room, and his rings carelessly strewn over the coffee table. She turns around as soon as they’re in the foyer, and looks at him expectantly.
To his credit, he doesn’t look away. Only breathes in and out once, deeply, and says, quietly, “Please let me stay on the couch tonight.
At first Yen doesn’t think she’s heard him correctly. She thought he’d be angry; she’d prepared herself for yelling. Judging from the way he reacted today, for better or for worse, she thought he was going to slam the door in her face as he left. “What?”
“Tomorrow I’ll start moving my stuff out, I promise, but— tonight—”
“What are you talking about?”
He’s got that same, hollow look on his face as he did at the park. “I’ll pack everything up in the morning,” he says. Pleads, really, except Yennefer doesn’t know what the fuck he’s asking for. Only that his tone is setting her teeth on edge, making something unpleasant flutter behind her sternum.
So she says, “Don’t do that.”
He has the audacity to cock his head, still looking miserable. Yennefer briefly contemplates slapping him. “Do what?”
“Don’t— don’t fucking beg, it’s beneath you.”
He laughs. “It’s really not.”
They hold each other’s gaze for a minute. Everything is wrong.
Jaskier blows out a breath. His bangs flop up and down. “I’ll get a hotel tonight,” he says. He’s moving towards the bedroom as he says it, and here Yennefer thinks she should be trailing after him, tracking his every movement because he’s clearly so not okay right now, except her feet are frozen to the ground.
He reappears with a backpack over one shoulder. “I’ll start moving out tomorrow,” he says, and it clicks. Yennefer feels her heart drop to her feet. Suddenly there’s a huge gulf between them.
“If that’s what you want,” she hears herself say. She can feel herself withdrawing, her face going cold. Her walls going up.
He makes an aborted motion towards her. He wanted to touch her cheek, she knows. He’s made the same movement hundreds of times before, the full arc of his hand to cup the soft underside of her jaw.
“Text me when I should come get the rest of my stuff,” he says, and then he’s unwinding his ridiculous scarf from her coat stand, opening the door. And then she’s alone in the apartment, only the whistling of the wind down the corridor.
This is something else Yen remembers:
“You’re in love with Jaskier.”
It was the last day of senior year. They were at a Starbucks, of all places, and Geralt was drinking some sweet caramel monstrosity topped with an absurd amount of cream, because Jaskier had texted him the day before you’re meeting Yen for coffee tomorrow, right? You have to try this!!!!!
“I’m not,” he’d said.
“You absolutely are.”
Geralt had frowned at her. She remembers the crinkles by his eyes, how much she’d loved him in that moment. How her acceptance letter from the University of Munich had been sitting at the bottom of her bag for two weeks.
“I’m moving to Germany next month,” she’d said.
He hadn’t replied, not even a hmm. She couldn’t read him; something she was secretly proud she’d learnt to do over the last four years. It had terrified her.
They’d finished their drinks in silence. Driven home in silence.
Geralt had disappeared into his room as soon as they walked into the apartment. Yennefer had sunk down onto the sofa, and dug the heels of her palms into her eyes until shapes started to bloom in the darkness.
She remembers the shuffling sound, the way it took a few seconds for the scene in front of her to register when she looked up. Geralt, kneeling in front of her. The look on his face. The ring in his hand.
And that’s when the yelling started.
The clock has just ticked over 4AM when Yennefer thinks, fuck it.
She swings her legs out of bed and only bothers to pull on a hoodie— Jaskier’s, because of course it is— and grabbing her keys.
She calls him as the elevator doors are opening, and he picks up after three rings. The way he says her name, with a pause just a little too long at the beginning, opens a cavern under her sternum. He doesn’t sound like he’s been sleeping either. She rubs absently at her chest as she walks through the parking garage to her car.
“Where are you?”
“The Concorde,” he says, and now he sounds a little wary, a little confused. Vulnerable.
“Don’t fucking go anywhere,” she snaps, instead of examining how she can read the exact notes of emotions in his tone now, and hangs up.
Fifteen minutes later, she pulls up outside the Concorde, parking haphazardly across the visitor spots. She’s not bothered to put her contacts in, or run a comb through her hair. She’s also got no shoes on or pants on, so she’s never been more grateful for all the dull meetings she’s sat through that allowed her to perfect her resting bitch face, because none of the valets or bellhops stop her as she storms through the glass doors.
He’s in the lobby, in the exact same clothes as he was a few hours ago. He’s also barefoot, and his hair is a disaster. His eyes are bloodshot, bags huge and dark against pale skin under the fluorescent lights.
Yennefer loves him so much she could die.
“I don’t know what the fuck happened tonight,” she says as she stalks towards him. She sounds a little hysterical. His mouth is hanging open in a comical O. He looks utterly stupid.
She comes to a stop in front of him, and pokes a finger into his chest where his shirt is unbuttoned. “Do you want to leave?”
This shakes him out of his stupor. “No! Of course not.”
“Then why did you?” she demands. She narrows her eyes as she says this, daring him to bring up the way her voice is shaking.
Jaskier shrugs. He won’t meet her eyes. “You were just passing time. It’s not a crime to not love me back.”
He’s trying to joke, still, but it falls miles and miles short of it. He looks too fragile. A little cracked.
The bright lights of the hotel lobby are beginning to hurt her eyes.
“Fuck you,” she says. “I have never told you that I didn’t love you.”
He looks up, mouth falling open again. He looks completely floored, and even more stupid than before.
“But Geralt— I thought—”
“Stop thinking,” she orders. She hauls his face down to meet hers and crashes their lips together, biting into his mouth. He opens up easily, bending down and pulling her up in one smooth motion so they’re, impossibly, closer together.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” she breathes against his lips when they part. She’s acutely aware of the fact that they’re still in the middle of the hotel lobby, neither of them wearing shoes or looking like they can afford to stay at a hotel like the Concorde in the first place, but right now, she doesn’t care. She’ll kick anyone that interrupts them now.
“Geralt?” he murmurs, half a question, before ducking down to kiss her briefly again. She likes that about him, how he’s greedy, like he can’t help himself around her.
She lowers her heels, plants her feet firmly on the ground. Meets his eyes. “You two have to sort out the issues between you yourselves. I’m not doing that for you.”
He nods, and his face is starting to fall again, so she ploughs on: “But I’ve got two hands. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”
She kisses him again before she has to look at the way his face breaks open in sheer, unadulterated delight. It’s the happiest she’s seen him.
(“Wait,” he says later, much later, after the fourth time the concierge pointedly clears his throat. “Are you wearing any pants?”
She buries her head in his chest and laughs and laughs and laughs.)
The drive to Connecticut is scenic, and that’s the only thing it has going for it. Jaskier won’t stop singing, feet propped up on the dash. If Yen crashes the car, which she’s more and more tempted to do by the second, his legs would break on impact. That would teach him a lesson.
“Feet off the dash,” she says for the fifth time in as many minutes. Jaskier only leans over and turns up the radio louder, the guitar solo in an Eagles song drowned out by Jaskier’s own vocal rendition of it. Yen thuds her head against the headrest and grips the steering wheel a little tighter. When the song on the radio changes, Yen almost moans with relief, except in the next split second she realises what song it’s changed to, and it changes to a despairing groan at the same time that Jaskier all but squeals with glee. It’s one of his own songs that came out two weeks ago. It’s good, not that Yen will ever tell him she thinks that, but Jaskier is about to be insufferable for the next three and a half minutes, which cancels out any joy the song might bring, no matter how good it is.
“It’s always you, always you,” he croons, leaning over the gears to get into Yen’s personal space, and thank god that not only is the highway empty around them, but that Yen’s had time to get used to Jaskier’s bullshit when not driving at seventy miles per hour. As it is, she simply takes one hand off the steering wheel and pushes his face away.
“Hey,” he says, during the instrumental bridge. “It’s almost been a year.”
She knows, but it still sends a thrill through her to hear him say it. It’s December, and the air is crisp with snow. Jaskier is still woefully underdressed for the weather, and the royal purple of his trackpants stick out like a sore thumb against the grey landscape, and clashing awfully with one of Geralt’s navy Adidas hoodies that swamps his hands. So many things have changed in the last year, and yet. So many things have stayed the same. She ducks her nose into the collar of Geralt’s sweatshirt which she stole from Jaskier, hiding her smile and breathing in the faint smell of his deodorant.
In an hour, they’ll be at the farm. Vesemir will be there, arms crossed, stern, fond, wearing a flannel that smells of oak and polish. They’ll see Eskel, laptop set up in the only corner of the house with strong enough WiFi, his absentminded wave in the middle of a weekend work call, and later, his laughter and he and Ciri knead out the dough for bread. Lambert and all of his scowling glory, grumbling about being left to his childhood bed— the smallest— even though he, like his brothers and father, easily clears six foot.
Geralt, waiting with a woodstove, three cords of ash, homemade jars of jam, the smile he saves only for her. And of course, Jaskier, by her side, singing them home.