Chapter Text
Jaskier goes traveling, after the mountain, after Borch and Yennefer and all the shit that Geralt’d said to him that he is very determinedly not thinking about. It’s odd, to say that he goes traveling, because he’s hardly been doing anything else for the past twenty-odd years with Geralt, but it’s different. Following Geralt around means sleeping on forest floors every day of the week and coming in close contact with monster guts and finding that when you have unrequited feelings for a person it’s sated, at least, by at least being able to be near them. Traveling by himself, really traveling, means going to the coast, and meeting the fascinating people that he wants to meet, beautiful men and women who do not presumably want to tear his heart out and fuck his best friend, and thinking an awful lot about the things that you’re telling yourself not to think about.
It’s better, Jaskier thinks, miserably, drinking delicious mead in a beautiful seaside tavern. The sea practically glimmers under the sun. He wants to cry. He has to put his head in his hands for a moment to try and drown out the whatever it is he’s feeling. A miserable concoction, to be sure. Too grand to be held simply in his heart. Too pathetic to be the subject of a ballad that would make any of it worth it.
Whatever kind of ache arises from being told by your best friend of twenty years and possible love of your life that they hate you and never want to see you again does fade, given time. Albeit slowly. He stops crying, eventually. Geralt’s words still spin around his head ( if life could give me one blessing, it would be to take you off my hands ) but Jaskier cultivates a healthier way of thinking. He’s not… he’s not really such a burden. He’s not just an annoyance to the people he cares about. He’s valuable. He creates things that people love. Geralt is just… just… broody. He’s just broody, and sort of volatile, and Jaskier… Jaskier has never been enough to comfort him. Jaskier’s presence has never been what pleases Geralt. He’s never been enough.
Well, he definitely starts something healthier. It doesn’t always spin out into what he intends it to be.
Jaskier catches the eyes of a very pretty woman by the bar; he’s caught off-guard by the pity in her eyes, where he usually gets a fluttering of lashes. It rattles him enough that he leaves the tavern. Is he a pitiful thing, now?
He goes out to the surf, and takes off his shoes to dig his feet into the sand, and tries to feel the dream of sitting out by the ocean, peacefully, wind in his hair and the feel of the salt air against his face. He tries so hard. This is what he’s wanted, isn’t it? Not exactly how he’d pictured it, not him and Geralt, but this is more peaceful. He’s perfectly capable of enjoying things on his own.
He’d left his lute in the inn, to keep the sand out of it. He feels naked without it. The breeze is turning to cold wind against his cheeks, and he shivers, and tries not to feel totally pathetic. He gives up on the dream after a few minutes and returns to the inn sandy and cold. Defeated, is what he is. Totally and utterly defeated. He collapses onto the bed (trying very hard not to think about the sand he’s getting on it) and cries again.
He’ll go somewhere else and be with someone else, he decides. He can live without Geralt. It’s only been twenty years of learning to live with him, after all, and he’s… he’s had the winters to himself, at least… and… and…
He cries himself to sleep. He sets out to find Essi Daven in the morning.
Because here’s the thing—Jaskier is charming. He’s friendly, and fun, if not reliable, and any sensible person would recognize that. It’s only that Geralt is a fucking prat and can’t tell his head from his ass, much less what makes a good friend. Essi is a lady of culture, and she also hates Valdo Marx, and she and Jaskier get along thick as thieves. She’s just the person Jaskier wants around when he feels so desolate.
(And you know what? Geralt wasn’t even a very good friend. Jaskier can’t even imagine going to him for comfort. Perhaps… perhaps he needs to raise his standards. He’ll talk to Essi about it.)
It takes three weeks to finally track down Essi, which is three weeks longer than he would’ve preferred. As it turns out, trying to find a bard can be exceedingly difficult, what with the way they move around and all. Trying to find a witcher was harder—he’d only stumbled across Geralt on accident, most of the time, when they hadn’t had a set meeting place—considering the fact that bards do tend to announce their presence in most places they pass through, so that you can at least follow a decent trail.
It’s easier finding Essi than it would’ve been most others, to be fair. He knows where she likes to be, this time of year, so most of the time is really spent traveling, and then trying to catch up to her once he hears word of her in some of the smaller towns around Novigrad. He finds her, finally, in the city itself, playing one of his own songs.
He enters right at the end of the song, and his eye catches hers just as she reaches the final strains of the melody. The one blue eye visible from under her curtain of blonde hair sparkles with excitement, and she finishes the tune with a flourish, calling to her audience that she’ll return in time, before flouncing over to him.
“Hello, Dandelion,” she says, primly, and launches right into a verbal joust. “Hadn’t expected to see you looking so run-down, but I expect that’s what happens when your repertoire is limited to mooning over one wolf. The audiences do get tired.” She grins, all teeth.
“Hello, poppet,” he replies, and forces out a smile that he knows looks more like a grimace. Unfortunate. He’s never been very good at hiding his emotions, even as a little one—fortunate, probably, that he’d run from being nobility. He wouldn’t have been very good at politics, to be sure.
Essi drops their game immediately, and looks up at him with concern. “Now, Jaskier, what is it? No, come, come here—” and she takes his hand and pulls him over to a booth, taking the time to lean her lute nicely against the bench before she settles herself and her skirts and guides him down next to him. She frowns at him, putting her face up close to his to examine him, and he smile-grimaces again. “Not even for a game of insults? What, has Valdo Marx gone and personally fucked your witcher, or something?”
“Worse,” he manages to admit, but it’s—fuck, it’s a lot of talk about Geralt, and he collapses into tears the next moment.
Essi scoots closer, expression twisted with concern, so that the soft material of her skirt is pressed against his leg, and she takes one of his hands in both of hers to hold as he cries. She doesn’t say anything; just sits, and holds his hand, and fuck if that isn’t all he could’ve asked of her.
When he collects himself, and starts to wipe away his tears with his free hand and a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his doublet, she makes a worried little noise. “Oh, Jaskier.”
“It’s just—” he hasn’t tried to verbalize it, not yet, not to anyone else, and the whole ordeal is overcoming enough to have him start to cry again. He’s making a fool of himself in front of the whole establishment, he realizes, but Essi only seems concerned for him again. “He—he told me that I was—was always the cause of his problems, and it was a really awful metaphor, too,” he hiccups out, “and he said—he said he’d be better off without me, that if he could have one blessing, it’d be to have me taken off his hands, and we were friends for twenty years—”
This time, he plants his face on her shoulder, and she pats his hand and lets him cry it out. It’s better, with someone else there. Feels like he’s doing something productive, actually working through the emotions rather than wallowing in them, even though his heart still feels like it’s shattered in his chest. Shrapnel, that’s what it is. (Dimly, some part of his brain files that away as a good metaphor for a song.)
“Oh, poor Dandelion,” she mutters. “I’m sorry, Jask.”
“It’s not—” he sits up and wipes at his eyes, starts to tell her it’s fine, but it’s really not. “Sorry ‘bout your dress, poppet,” he says, referring to the tears staining the nice silk, and she frowns at her shoulder but says nothing about it.
“You’re talking about your witcher, aren’t you? Big strong white wolf?” she asks, and Jaskier nods, tearfully. Essi doesn’t skip a beat. “Well. Easy.” She lets go of his hand to tug at her robin-egg blue sleeves, pulling them straight and crisp against her forearms. “I’ll write such a scathing ballad that he’ll be spit on from here to Poviss.”
“Poppet, no,” Jaskier manages, miserably, catching her hands in his again. “He’s not—I don’t want him spit on, or—or turned out of towns, or anything like that, he’s just—it’s just me that’s the issue, not him—”
“ You that’s the issue?” Essi loses her cool indignance to revert to confusion. “Jaskier, you’ve done nothing but bolster his reputation for years now. Melitele knows that witchers have never enjoyed half the privileges they’ve found since your songs about him. Miserable lot, witchers, all covered in slime and scars—and he’s blamed you for his problems?” She doesn’t even quite sound upset about it, so much as perplexed.
“Well, I can’t control the monsters,” Jaskier admits, wiping at an embarrassingly snotty nose with a handkerchief that he supposes is going to be ruined after this, “but I may have been the one to bring him to a banquet wherein he acquired a child he certainly didn’t want by the law of surprise, and I was injured rather grievously after an incident where he pulled a djinn out of a lake, which led to him—well, finding the love of his life, I suppose—” and he can understand why Geralt must hate him so, hearing his own nasally voice, it’s annoying as anything—
Essi huffs. “He sounds like a fool. Imagine, such a penchant for twisting the truth, and even you can’t properly defend him.”
“I can’t even properly defend him,” Jaskier echoes back, and tears swell anew in his eyes.
“Jaskier,” she whines, plaintively, “come, now. I’m supposed to be condemning him, I can’t possibly keep doing that if you keep trying to undermine my narrative—”
“He’s handsome, you know,” he tells her, mournfully. “Dreadfully so. Just your type, if I’m honest, and he’s awfully brutish, but I know he can be kind, he did go with me to that banquet, and I saw him spare a doe with a fawn once and he certainly stopped me eating poison berries more than once—”
Essi pouts at him. He shuts up accordingly.
“You’ll stay with me here a few days,” she decides. “And we’ll write you something truly scathing, defame him across the whole continent, and then we’ll travel together a while if you need it. I will draw a line, though, Jaskier. You’ll have to go out on your own eventually.”
He doesn’t like the idea of having to go out on his own, but he accepts her gracious offer with much gratitude.
Jaskier, normal Jaskier, would’ve loved a few days to live in a tavern and command the crowds, rest on a soft actual bed. Not much chance for that, traveling with Geralt. It was always movement, which is theoretically what a bard should be doing, but there’s a specific amount of resting and revelry that the job calls for which Jaskier was not completing in the fullest. Jaskier of now, with the bruised ego and battered heart, certainly enjoys the bed. Not much more than that, though. He suspects that Essi is actually glad that he doesn’t have the wherewithal to go and perform for the crowds, because she’s making good money as it is, and she doesn’t enjoy having to split tips. From experience, she always steals more than her share.
She checks up on him, though, and drags him out of his room in the mornings to go around town. They visit the market together, enjoy the bright blue morning, and they laugh together about some of the more ridiculous wares. Another day, Essi pulls him out to a little alcove she’d found in the north side of the city, with vines coming up over the walls, where she reads him some of her favorite poems as of late and he recites a few of his own back. He certainly feels better for it.
Jaskier wants to be angry with Geralt. He really does. It would make the whole ordeal so much easier if he could just write him off, say fuck him, but Jaskier has some deep-rooted insecurities that Geralt’s managed to dig his blunt fingernails into, and one can’t simply let go of a friendship like that so easily. He wants to be angry, but there’s really just sadness, resonating through him like the hollow chest of a lute.
Because Jaskier knows that people don’t often want him around, save for entertainment or for whirlwind romances that are more attraction than connection. Fuck knows the whole party on the journey up that mountain had made that more than clear. Jaskier—Jaskier is an acquired taste, if he chooses to word it gently. He’d thought that Geralt had acquired that taste. And he’d been wrong. And it stings.
It’s good to be with Essi, at least. She’s one of his true friends; she’s like a little sister to him, really, his poppet, and he’s very much glad that he went to her rather than some pretty-albeit-shallow duchess or countess or milkmaid.
Jaskier does not write something scathing about Geralt, as Essi had planned, for reasons of therapy or something in that realm. No, he writes Her Sweet Kiss, instead, and Essi lets him do it with a warning that it is quite obvious, the narrator’s feelings for the garrotter.
“You don’t have to air your dirty laundry out to the whole continent, if you don’t want to,” she counsels him. He tells her that the whole point of pain is to make it into art. It’s hardly any use to anyone otherwise, pain.
Besides, he’s shrouded the whole thing in a heavy, safe layer of metaphor. Nobody could know that it was about him specifically, and not just a hypothetical story, unless they happened to be Geralt or Yennefer. Or Borch, he supposes. Not a particularly helpful image, Borch hearing the song in a tavern and pitying him for it. Do dragons pity people?
No, nobody would know what he was speaking about. There have to be thousands of thousands of people who watch their love stolen away by someone who will not be good for them—Jaskier’s only speaking to the heart of the people, and he says so to Essi. If Geralt hears it, and recognizes it as Jaskier’s work, well—well, he’ll probably know what Jaskier’s been feeling all this time, and maybe he’ll have the good graces to feel bad about it. Probably the lyrics won’t get through his dense head.
He finds Essi humming it, the next day, which tells him that it’s a success, if only in melody alone. She still frowns empathetically at him when he sings, “ I’m weak, my love, and I am wanting, ” but there’s nothing to be done about that. Jaskier is heartbroken, and he’s damn well going to write about it.
Besides song-writing, they swap stories of their escapades since they’d last seen each other, as they would normally do upon reuniting.
“I found another witcher, y’know,” Essi tells him, conversationally, over lunch. Jaskier wants nonsensically to flinch at the mere mention of witchers, but Essi waves a flippant hand. “Don’t you fuss your head about it, it’s nothing to do with you,” she reprimands, and continues. “He was handsome as anything—had a cat on his medallion, not like the wolf you always sing about, and he was very interesting. I thought it’d be quite a feat to travel with him and write some song cycles of my own, but he said he already had someone to meet. He did deign to tell me a tale about an ogre, though, and two witchers forced to work together—” her eyes alight with the kind of creative inspiration that absolutely charms him every time he sees her—“I think it could be the next big witcher ballad, Jask, really, it’s got tension and comedy in all the right places and it ends all nice, I’ll sing you a stanza I have for it later, but—ah, right.” She grins. “Real story looked like it was with whoever he was going to meet. He got all dreamy, a moment. Quite sweet, actually.” Something seems to occur to her, and she frowns. “I am going to retroactively declare that I lied. I’m going to make this about you, Dandelion. It seems to me that your particular witcher was emotionally stunted and not nearly as sociable as he could’ve been, if what you’ve said and what I’ve seen are to be believed. He was deliberately being an asshole and he isn’t worth your time.”
Jaskier gathers himself into flippancy. It’ll be good, to try and talk casually about witchers. Exposure therapy. “I’d never heard that any witchers were different, poppet.”
Essi narrows her eyes, which is far from intimidating, with how pretty and dainty she is. “Know that I’m only allowing you to call me that because of your poor bleeding heart. It is a decidedly impermanent privilege. But Aiden, he said his name was, he was really very charming.”
“An outlier,” Jaskier decides.
Essi huffs. “All I mean to say is that you could have better, if you wanted it. I understand he’s important to you, but him being a witcher is no excuse for his actions, and neither is him being pretty.”
“I’d forgive him some of it for being pretty,” Jaskier admits. Essi sighs.
All the stories Jaskier has to tell her in return are tinged with melancholy, and he’s already told her the most relevant one, so he makes up a tale for her about a fisherman’s wife in the coastal town he’d first gone to. In his invention, she’s an unconventional beauty, unloved and unprized by her husband, but she captures the heart of a selkie man. She cries seven tears into the sea, and instead of taking his pelt or waiting the seven years to see him again, she simply jumps into the sea with him, never to be seen again.
Essi gasps empathetically. “Does she drown?”
“Ah, well, there’s the poetic intrigue,” Jaskier says, and taps his nose. “It’s a question of whether the selkie would let her drown, would understand that she can’t survive in the ocean as he can; and then, past that, a question of whether drowning achieves the freedom she’d been yearning for all these years, even as much as happily disappearing into the sea with her new love.”
“Oh, that is a good one,” Essi admits, and immediately goes to thinking of a story to beat his. She presents, eventually, a similarly marine-themed tale, of a man in love with a mermaid. He brings the mermaid three gifts, and after the third, she declares herself madly in love with him, and asks him to bring her ashore. The man lifts the mermaid into his arms, and she clings madly to him, and he takes her to his home, where she refuses to let him go and dies of drowning in air.
“Dying for love, which should make you whole,” he muses. “Awfully good motif.” Essi hums her agreement.
And days pass. And Jaskier does feel slightly better. Noticeably better, actually; being around Essi is always good for his humors, and she’s made all the difference now. He almost feels ready to take his leave of her when she announces that she’s been requested for a wedding a bit further down the coast, in Bremervoord. He pouts at her for leaving him so soon, but she pushes him playfully down the road toward Temeria or Aedirn, maybe, and says that birds must be pushed out of the nest if they are to fly.
“You intend to face songbirds as professional competition, now?” he asks, teasing.
“I understand that perhaps some lackluster Oxenfurt graduates could not even think to meet the grandeur of nature, but I find it to be a reasonable goal, for someone of my caliber,” she replies, cooly, with just a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth.
Jaskier laughs in delight and ducks to kiss her cheek in parting. “Don’t get too caught up with the larks, forgetful girl, or I won’t have any professional competition at all. You won’t let Valdo Marx take your esteemed position as second-best bard on the continent, will you?”
Essi grins at him. “Of course not. In fact, I may just have to seek out the first-best bard, to seek instruction in honing my craft. I’m sure you could learn a lesson or two from whoever they are, Master Dandelion.”
He laughs once more. “Goodbye, poppet,” he tells her, and starts off on his way, walking backwards to hold her in his gaze as long as possible. She starts off on her fork of the path in the same manner.
“Good riddance, Jaskier,” she calls to him, and blows him a kiss, and then he’s off on his own again. To learn how to live alone.
“Oh!” he hears, and he turns to see Essi stopped in the middle of the road, her hands cupped around her mouth to call to him once more. “Be careful going south! I hear tales of war, Jaskier!”
He waves to her in acknowledgement, and she smiles and turns away again. War. That’s ominous. It’s alright, though; if Nilfgaard intends war, he’ll just stay north of Cintra. Nobody could get past Cintra. He’ll just have to skip a trip to Toussaint this year.