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It's bloody chaos.
A demon has taken hold of Cirilla's mind and it has brought forth fucking basilisks, of all things, to dispose of Kaer Morhen's last witchers.
Jaskier himself, ever the lover not a fighter, has been hiding under a, hopefully, sturdy table trying — and failing— to deliver the jasper to Geralt. How a piece of rock is going to help in this madness, he doesn't know.
Whilst shouting 'jasper' to Geralt repeatedly, he feels it snap. The handy little spell that has been accompanying him for the last few hundreds of years dissolves as the demon launches another magical attack on the witchers.
Before his mind falls into panic mode, he takes a long cold breath and feels the stone floor beneath his palm freeze.
Ah, he'd forgotten he could do that.
An idea flashes through his mind.
Losing no time, he gets to his feet, each step colder than the other, each breath more freezing than the wind on the Blue Mountains' summit.
The basilisks slow as he walks between them and he barely registers the witchers hacking them to pieces.
Well, he can say for certain the beasties won't be missed.
And then, right before his very eyes, and without as much as a warning to boot, Yennefer crashes through the shield that's been keeping the demon from advancing and in a swirling swoop of a portal she disappears alongside Ciri and Geralt.
"Now that was—" he starts saying, nervousness rushing in waves inside him, but he's cut off by the shining purple light on his feet. "Yrden?" He scrunches his eyebrows together in confusion and takes a step out of the circle; it never really did work on him anyway.
"Another demon," he registers a witcher saying, probably Everard.
"What are you waiting for? For it to attack?" Lambert yells and runs Jaskier through with a sword through the back.
Jaskier rolls his eyes. "Would you feel safer if I stepped back into the yrden trap? I promise you-" a second sword pierces him through the back. "Oh, that's just rude. Do you have any idea how bloody expensive this coat was? Not to mention mending the cuts is going to be a pain in the arse! Witchers these days! Unbelievable."
They look stunned at him for a brief moment, eyes potioned dark and swords ready to strike. He's acutely aware of how he looks like; grey skin of a corpse melting into charcoal black in his extremities and cloudy eyes one would think unseeing, even if he's perfectly able to see. For how corpsy he appears, he's not rotting thankfully, he'd hate if he had to pick up pieces of himself constantly.
Vesemir takes a step forward, lifting a hand to signal to the others not to interfere. "What are you, son? I've never seen a monster unburdened by yrden."
"Not a monster, thank you very much," Jaskier snaps. "I just can't die. Yes, I am aware I appear quite dead, and no, I am not. Now, can we please go back to caring about where the bloody fuck they disappeared to?" He points with both hands to the empty spot previously occupied by one witcher, one sorceress and one princess. "Because that is more alarming than one unalive bard."
As he finishes his sentence a portal opens and they are back. "Oh, thank the gods," he whispers, relief coursing through him when he sees that all three of them are unharmed and Ciri doesn't feel like demon anymore.
Yennefer turns towards him as Geralt holds his daughter in a tight embrace, her tired eyes going wide before they settle in a mix of confusion and fury.
"What did you do to him?" She addresses the witchers, voice thundering.
Ah— Yeah, right, yeah, he still has swords sticking through his chest.
"I'm fine, Yennefer I'm fine!" He waves his arms frantically to stop whatever foolish thing she has in mind, as he tastes the chaos crackling at her fingertips.
" How are you fine, bard? You-"
"He's an undead," Geralt interrupts her, brows furrowed with something like worry, or perhaps sadness.
Jaskier huffs. "Do not put me in the same category as ghouls, or gods forbid, rotfiends , Geralt! Besides, I prefer the term unalive. Because I can't be undead if I've never died in the first place!"
"What do you mean—"
"Not important now," Jaskier cuts him off. "That's a talk for tomorrow morning, so if you don't mind I'll go nap or doze off, or I don't know stare at the ceiling for a while."
He spins on his heel, ready to head towards his dreadfully small room when the blasted witchering swords —silver for monsters, he notes— throw him off balance and he almost impales himself further on them. With the gracefulness of a newborn calf, he gets to his feet and with a hand attempts to reach the swords’ hilts. When he finds himself unable to, he sighs loudly and dramatically.
“Gentlemen,” he addresses the two witchers — Lambert and, uh… Gwaine possibly?— who attacked him, “As much as I like silver, it doesn’t exactly go well with my complexion. So if you don’t mind…”
“You can’t be serious!” Lambert hisses.
“Dead serious, I’m afraid. Do me a favour and unlodge your… mighty swords from my torso and I won’t write a scathing song about you, please and thank you.”
The men hesitate for a moment, exchanging quick glances between them, but a look from Vesemir and Geralt has them scampering to release Jaskier from the weight of their weapons.
“There’s no blood or ichor,” Gwaine mutters to himself, staring at the sword in awe.
“That’s because I have none,” Jaskier doesn’t even bother looking the witcher in the eye, and instead busies himself with getting the fuck away from here as soon as possible.
Jaskier would very much like to sleep, forget about everything that transpired only a few hours ago, but he seems unable to. He doesn’t know if it’s because sleep is optional when he’s like this or if his nerves are so frazzled that it would take a minor miracle for his brain to shut off for a few minutes. What he knows is that the ceiling consists of forty-six big stones and that rats are living inside the walls. Both of these facts, he could unlive without.
It must be close to midnight, or perhaps early morning when Yennefer graces his doorless doorstep.
“Trouble sleeping?” He asks, more for the sake of asking as it’s abundantly clear that’s the case. She shoots him a tight-lipped smile that doesn’t reach her eyes and he can feel her tiredness seeping inside his bones. “Come, sit,” he pats at the spot next to him on the small bed and she obliges. No cutting remark, no witty banter. No anything.
Gods, whatever happened there in Cintra really did a number on her.
They sit like this for a while, side by side, Yennefer’s (warm) head on Jaskier’s (cold) shoulder.
“He’ll forgive you,” he says unprompted when the words are too much, too quick, too relentless in his brain. Then, hesitantly, “I’m sorry.”
“What for, bardling?”
“You know that fire mage couldn't have killed me, no matter how much he tried. If… If you hadn’t saved me, Yennefer, perhaps none of this would have happened. If I were a little more forthcoming with you all, less arrogant…”
“Can you feel pain?” she asks, a serious edge to her soft voice.
“What?”
“Can you or can you not, you unalive fucker? It’s not a difficult question to answer.”
“I can,” he admits. “Not as strongly when I’m like this,”—he gestures to himself, head to toe— “but as human-adjacent, yeah, I guess. A lot.”
“It would’ve been nice to know you’re practically immortal,” she huffs, “but I’d still save you, you insufferable man.” She intertwines her hand with his between them. Fuck, she’s so warm. “Besides, you don’t know I wouldn’t have given in to the demon- Fuck. She was relentless, Jaskier. Constantly berating me inside my head—” She snaps her mouth shut.
“Not your fault. As you said it was a real fucking demon. The kind nightmares are made of, Yennefer! Nightmares! And- and sometimes, o beloathed witch, sound choices fly out of the window when we’re trapped into a corner— Wait, I said basically the same thing but waaay better to Geralt- how did it go? Ah, I knew I should've written it down!”
She chuckles, a soft melodic thing that makes Jaskier’s still heart soar. Oh, he’s a goner. Perhaps this is how he’ll finally go after countless centuries upon the Continent; slain by one very sexy mad witch’s lovable laughter.
Well, if Geralt decides to top it up tomorrow with one of his rare gravelly laughs then Jaskier shan’t see the sun rise another day. Such is the fate of great poets and troubadours.
Dawn finds Jaskier immobilised by Yennefer’s sleep death-hug.
Honestly! How can a woman so slight have so much strength is a big mystery. He’s been doing his best to keep the cold of his body from escaping, countless (maybe three) hours waiting for the witch to wake.
Wouldn’t do if he accidentally froze her to death, now would it?
To her credit, she doesn’t leave him fighting for long with his innate call to release such vast amounts of cold the highest peak of the Blue Mountains would be jealous of.
“Rise and shine, beautiful!” The words are out of his mouth before he can think them over. Great fucking job self. He mentally facepalms at his treacherous tongue. And because he’s Jaskier and he’d loath to have his banter record annulled by one overly smooth flirty sentence he adds, “Why yes, thank you sun, I am rather handsome myself.”
Yennefer snorts out an inelegant little laugh and it’s last night all over again.
Maybe, just maybe, he could learn to live with that.
Before he has a chance to say anything even stupider, he disentangles himself from the sexy witch. A brief look at his poor mangled coat convinces him to leave it lying on the single decrepit chair of his room; it’s not like the cold inside Kaer Morhen is insufferable. Au contraire , as the Toussaintoi say. It’s almost warm.
Luckily, this time he doesn’t get skewered when he meets the witchers in the now, destroyed grand hall. In fact, he gets ushered by Coen to the kitchens where he finds all of the, still living and breathing, witchers sat around a big table that has seen better days.
“Oh, great,” he mutters to himself- though they can probably hear him if Geralt’s raised eyebrow is any indication. “I suppose it’s interrogation time?” He grabs a chair and brings a fistful of berries in his mouth. He’s quite famished.
“You eat, lad,” Vesemir remarks.
“Well yeah. Running on an empty stomach is plain uncomfortable you know. Next question, please.”
“Revenant?” Geralt asks.
“Nope!” He pops the ‘p’. “As I said I am not undead, Geralt, as much as I look the part. Not a vampire either.” From the resounding grumbles, this seems to have been the guess of several witchers.
“Perhaps,” Coen says, “he’s a lich.”
“Pardon? What’s a lich?” Jaskier asks.
“A very rare form of undead- no, hear me out- a human mage that tried to turn themself immortal-”
“While that’s quite fascinating and I didn’t know such creatures existed, I have to stop you because how do I put this simply? I’ve been around before the Conjunction.”
“That’s impossible.” Geralt’s eyebrows shoot to his crown. “The Conjunction was fifteen centuries ago.”
“Well aware. Look, I don’t know what I am, I just know that I formed well, actually in a cave rather close to here, now that I think about it, way before the humans arrived on the Continent. If I was an accident, or whatever, no one will ever know because in my impossibly long unlife life, whatever you may call it, I have never met another like me.
As you can imagine, it gets rather lonely after a while, and whilst the elves were quite accepting of my condition when the humans arrived… Well, you out of all people can picture how that went.” He gestures abstractly. “So… Here we are!”
“You can’t bloody die,” Lambert surmises, or thinks aloud- who knows? “How do you know?”
Jaskier resists the urge to shoot him a tired look. Instead, he forces an amiable smile and says, “Well, since you asked, I know that by crafting a list and trying each individual item on the said list- Oh, don’t look at me like that, I haven’t lost my marbles just yet! The short answer is: by coincidence.”
“And what would the long answer be?” Probably Everard or maybe Marek asks.
“Ah, that— Poisons are ineffective as I pretty much eat anything I deem edible, to which Geralt attest to, is anything of the meat, fungi or plant variety. As you noticed last night, magic doesn’t really work on me nor do weapons of any sort. As for other methods of, uh, death, let’s just say many people have tried to be rid of me in the past in very, and I mean very, creative ways. It didn’t work a single time.”
“And you just let it happen?”
“What would I do? Fight? Me? Have you met me? Geralt, come on, back me up.”
Geralt, ever the humorist, says, “He gets beaten by rabbits on a good day.”
“Thank you!” Jaskier exclaims the moment Yennefer decides to enter the impromptu questioning chamber. They exchange small smiles that spell ‘save me’ from Jaskier’s part and ‘no, suffer’ from Yennefer’s.
Oh, she’s enjoying that, is she?
“Have you considered that you could be a minor deity?” Vesemir asks, tone carefully gentle.
He had not, in fact, considered that.
It’s such a ludicrous thought that it makes him laugh, loud and unreservedly, frosty tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. He waves a dismissive hand, unable to stop laughing, and shakes his head making a way out of the kitchen to somewhere, possibly, less crowded. Between laughs and heaving, he says, “A god of what? Bad luck?”
Because quite honestly, he can’t think of anything else that could be his domain. Save perhaps, danger magnet or rejection.
Ugh. He doesn’t like where this train of thought is going.
Jaskier finds out that Kaer Morhen has lovely towers that have even lovelier views of the valley the keep is perched on.
It’s nice here, quiet in a way a decrepit castle full of witchers never is. But most importantly it’s somewhere no one sound of mind can follow. Alone with his thoughts, he lets the shitstorm of the past—oh wow, it’s been a couple of weeks already— settle and brew a little in his mind.
He doesn’t really know where he stands with Geralt— Yennefer for once is easier to read than the stony broody, and by the Gods, handsome witcher. It’s all a bit nervewracking, if he’s being honest, his little secret of twenty-something years revealed just like that, with a click of the fingers.
It would have been lovely if he could go back to being just a bard, human-looking and awkward, just like he’s been for nigh a millennia now, but he can’t.
A sigh escapes his lips, and he looks up at the white winter sky. It’s going to snow soon, he can feel it.
“Jaskier,” Geralt’s voice sounds behind him and Jaskier yelps, jumping a bit from where he’s perched on the bannisters of the crumbling tower.
He almost falls down.
As quick and efficient as ever, Geralt grabs him from the collar of his vest and steadies him.
“Melitele’s plump bottom! Are you trying to kill me, Geralt?!”
Geralt’s lips quirk into a half-smile. “Thought you were unkillable.”
Jaskier pouts in response. “Touche.” And then reluctantly, “Why are you here, Geralt?”
“Why are you here?” The witcher counters.
Jaskier elbows him weakly. “Come on, spit it out! I can tell you came all the way up here to talk.”
“Hmmm.” Geralt moves to sit next to him on the stone bannister. “It’s fine,” he says as if it explains anything. Jaskier stares at him in confusion. “You.”
“Me.”
“Yes.”
“Geralt, I know you’re messing with me right now. You can’t possibly be fine with,” — he gestures to himself from head to toe, — “this deathly pallor I don unwillingly.”
Geralt rolls his pretty amber eyes. “All I’m saying is, I understand why you never said anything, Jask. And it’s fine that you’re not human.” Geralt pokes him with a finger on the chest, where his heart would be if he had one. “Because you’re you.”
“Careful there, witcher! You’ll make me think you actually care.”
Geralt’s eyes do that thing Jaskier hate-loves where they look at him with barely disguised affection.
“Well, that’s not fair—”
“Seeing you last night,” Geralt says, shuddering visibly, “it made me realise some things, I was purposefully ignoring for years.”
Where is he going with this? Can it be- but no. As if Jaskier would ever be so lucky.
“What things?” he asks, voice wavering in fear and anticipation.
“You’re important to me, Jask. Always were and I’m sorry it took me so long to say it.” He wraps Jaskier in a half-hug. If Jaskier had a heart he’s sure it would be jumping out of his chest right now.
“I love you, Geralt. You know that don’t you?” he blurts out. Oh, fuck it. He’ll see whatever this is through the end if it’s the last thing he does. “I love you so much it hurts. You’re my- my everything and I’ll admit I-”
Soft lips crash into his effectively shutting him up.
Oh, Gods.
Oh. Gods.
If only he could lock himself and Geralt, in this moment forever.
“Will come with?” Geralt asks, voice a soft rumble, when they break apart.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Well, I don’t exactly remember the spell that turned me human-adjacent and I can’t very well-”
Geralt kisses him again.
“ Geralt.”
“Jaskier.”
“Let me talk.” He takes a deep breath. “If Yennefer comes with then I’ll come too.”
“Because you need her to glamour you.”
“Yes, but also no, you dolt. Because I like her and she deserves something good in her life after everything she’s been through and I won’t-”
“I know that.” Geralt sighs. “It’s hard, to forgive her for bringing danger to Ciri but…”
“But corners and entrapment and shit.”
Geralt snorts. “Corners and entrapment and shit,” he echos. “Yeah.”