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Even in the midst of being threatened within an inch of his life — and by the gods, Jaskier has no illusions about the scary, deranged, almost completely naked witch meaning every last word of it — there is a part of him that looks at her and wants. And it’s not his dick, for once. It’s some deeper, more primal part, though it will take him several years to figure out what, exactly, it is.
“If you want to keep all you have,” the maniacal mage is saying, which should not send a frisson of excitement through him (but does), “make a damn wish.”
And Jaskier, who knew he had a slight thing for danger — hello, he’s been following a witcher for one and a half decades — but has never before been confronted with just how far this extends, makes the only wish he can think of at that moment that feels marginally safe: “I wish very badly to leave this place forever.”
Nothing happens. Or at least, nothing happens to him. He stays right where he is, but the witch goes back to chanting regardless, looking dangerous and deranged and definitely not sexy. So Jaskier takes his destiny into his own hands and leaves in an utterly dignified fashion that does not resemble fleeing at all.
Of course it’s too much to hope that that is the end of it. No, because Jaskier is travelling with a certified moron, Geralt goes back into the crumbling house with the insane witch who is clearly out of her mind, heedless of Jaskier’s warning.
Which is a very stupid thing to do, as evidenced by the house collapsing entirely, Geralt and the witch inside. Jaskier stumbles over to the wreckage with his heart in his throat and grief rattling behind his teeth. Grief that curdles into something sour when he peers through the window and learns that the witch is still dangerous, deranged, definitely not sexy — and also fucking Geralt.
Fuck.
They make a pretty picture, is the thing. There is no denying it — he is a poet and a connoisseur of the human figure in all its shapes, after all. And both of them are stunningly beautiful on their own; Geralt all hard planes of muscle and scars the colour of his hair atop the softest heart Jaskier has ever gotten to know, and the witch all lying gentle curves and unblemished brown skin covering a truly rotten core. Together and framed like a painting, they are bleeding together like contrasting watercolours, and even as the sight drives into Jaskier’s heart like a thorn, he cannot deny that it is true what they say about opposites: they really do attract. And worse, they attract him.
As confused with himself as the sight leaves him, it does distract him quite thoroughly from the strange yearning that had gripped him when close to the witch.
Small mercies.
“— really, Geralt, I don’t understand —” Jaskier breaks off suddenly and his scent shifts dizzyingly from content to adrenaline with a hint of fear to something too complicated to make out. His face has soured, too, and Geralt feels a smile at the corner of his mouth even before he fully turns around. There’s only one person who elicits quite this response from his Bard.
“Yen,” he says, and tilts his face to accept a kiss in greeting from her.
“I’d be happier over a rabid dog,” Jaskier mutters under his breath. Yen smirks as she rights herself and Geralt feels his smile widen. There is something amusing about Jaskier and Yen and the way they fight like cats.
When he turns back, there’s the faintest hint of dissipating musk and salt. Almost like lust. It’s a rather distracting scent. He inhales again with purpose, but it’s gone. He scans the crowd of humans out in the tavern as Yen slides onto the bank next to him, but none of the patrons look like they’re considering their next bed partner. Not that there are overly many; it’s still early afternoon and the tavern is accordingly empty.
He turns back to his companions, though they’re not much more exciting than the sparsely populated tavern. Jaskier is staring at Yen with a mulish expression, uncharacteristically quiet, while Yen still smirks like the cat who got the cream and the canary.
“What brings you here?” Geralt asks and watches appreciatively as Yen gracefully shrugs out of her fur-lined coat. She smells good, her favoured perfume flooding out the stench of the tavern and human emotions until only the faintest awareness of them remains — enough to sniff out trouble but not so much as to be distracting. She’s changed the formula — the gooseberry is fainter than it usually is, just a slightly acidic note that accentuates the lilac.
“I was in the area,” Yen says and shifts to prop up her elbow up on the table in a languid gesture that shows off her cleavage just so.
Jaskier inhales like he wants to make a scathing comment and then — nothing. When Geralt looks at him, his expression is dazed, eyes fixed somewhere above Yen’s shoulder. Instead of the outrage Geralt expects, or maybe lust at Yen’s rather lovely breasts, there’s sadness and pain, suddenly, enough to push through the gentle cloud of her perfume.
Geralt finds himself leaning forward to — he’s not quite sure what he wants to do, but it’s wrong for Jaskier to smell like this. He’s supposed to be all angry sharp or smug honey when in the company of Yen, not this sour note of plain wrong. Geralt’s motion is enough to startle Jaskier out of whatever weird spell he’s fallen into, however, and he blinks twice like he’s surprised to be sitting in an inn with Geralt and Yen. The sadness fades from the air, though it doesn’t disappear entirely.
“Of course you’d be in the area of an evil sinkhole like this.” He scoffs, but even Yen must be able to tell that his heart is not truly in it.
She raises one elegant eyebrow at him.
“Bandits,” Geralt says in explanation before they can properly get at each others’ throats, and then just looks at her. She will tell him why she’s here. For a long moment, she keeps staring at Jaskier like she’ll be able to dissect him with her eyes alone. Which. She might just be able to. Jaskier, who usually does not pass up an opportunity to needle Yen, does not seem to notice. Instead he’s drawing his finger through the condensation on his mug like it is the most interesting thing he has ever seen.
Yen’s eyes are inscrutable when she returns her attention to Geralt. “Well,” she says, and launches into an explanation like nothing strange has happened. He’s missed her, he realises, and lets his focus narrow entirely down to her.
And, well, if Jaskier remains quiet for the rest of the day — everyone has off days, right?
“You’ve been behaving quite strangely, around me,” Yen says.
“Hm?” Jaskier drops his eyes from the notebook down to Yen’s face where she is lying on her back. She’d been staring at the ceiling, thinking about gods know what. Now, her uncanny purple eyes are fixed on his. Her gaze is still unfairly pinning.
“You’re —” she waves her hand, and he’s hit by a whiff of lilac. He can almost fool himself into feeling a mild breeze, the sun beating down on his back, the grass cool and fresh underneath his fingers. “That! That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
He places his pencil between the pages and closes his notebook as he narrows his eyes at her. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more specific, my dear wretch,” he says. Her lips twitch at the mixed insult and endearment, which does things to his heart he would rather not examine too closely. It’s hard to remember like this, with her loose-limbed and relaxed and apparently fully content to be his guardian against the nightly trips down memory lane, that he finds her dangerous and deranged and definitely not sexy. Though, these days, he’s had a taste of just how deranged and dangerous mages can be. It makes her bid for the djinn seem downright… sane.
“You keep… doing this thing.” She gestures again, still no clearer than she’d been. “You disappear. Into your thoughts.”
A mirthless laugh crawls past Jaskier’s lips. “Have a lot of them. Not all of them fun, these days.”
“You used to do it Before, too.” She gives the word an inflection that leaves no doubt that she means Before I ditched Geralt on a mountain whereupon he ditched you right back. He frowns at her. Just because he and Geralt are in the process of fixing it doesn’t mean she can go around and just… reference that. “It’s not me you’re thinking about in those moments. So. What are you thinking about?”
His cheeks, traitorous as they are, heat. Because that’s the crux, isn’t it? He is thinking about her, just not… her-as-is.
“Jaskier,” she says, impatiently. She looks like she’s seconds from threatening his manhood. But that’s not what incites him into honesty. Instead, it’s the hungry expression on her face, hidden underneath a layer of disinterested haughtiness. She can’t be trying too hard; he has no doubt that she could make her face utterly blank if she wanted to.
“Happier times,” he says, and even he can hear the faraway tone in his voice. “It’s your perfume. Lilac and fucking gooseberry.” He bites his lip to prevent losing himself in the past entirely. It hangs in his nose even now. “There’d always be a weekend in early summer, when the gooseberries were just ripe and the lilac had not yet lost its bloom…” He licks his lips and can’t help the spark of disappointment when they just taste like chapped skin instead of nectar and berry juice. “You smell like home used to when — when things were different.” When things were almost okay. His heart aches.
“I’m sorry,” Yen says, almost sympathetic, “that you lost a good memory to someone you hate.”
“Oh bitchy beloathed,” he says with all the gravitas he can muster because that is better than the pain clawing at the back of his throat, “bold of you to assume that I still hate you.”
Yen, to her credit, does not point out that he just called her beloathed. Instead, she is suddenly in his space, close enough that he can see tiny brighter specs in her eyes, that all he can smell is fucking lilac and gooseberry. He shudders, and it is not in disgust.
“Is that so?” she asks.
He cups her shoulders, not pulling her closer or pushing her away, but just holding. The fabric of her dress is smooth, but, he imagines, not as smooth as her actual skin. “Possibly.”
And then her lips are on his, and while they also don’t taste of long-past summer days, there is nothing disappointing about them.
“Good night, Roachie,” Geralt says and leaves with one last firm stroke over her sleek fur. It’s almost too dark to see inside the stables once he extinguishes the sconce on the wall, even for his enhanced eyes, and Roach looms large and black behind him. It’ll take some time for him to get used to her new form, so unlike what he usually goes for in his mares, but that’s what these talking sessions are for.
Outside, the courtyard is white with an undisturbed layer of new snow. If he were a man of art — which he is not, that’s what he has Jaskier for — he’d probably be inclined to wax poetically. He doesn’t. But even he cannot deny that there is a stark beauty to the way Kaer Morhen rises in front of him, brutal and severe like a slowly decaying carcass that still houses life. He snorts as he pushes himself into motion again. And that’s why he’s not the poet between Jaskier and him: he’s pretty sure that in his metaphor, the inhabitants of Kaer Morhen are maggots or something.
He takes the long way back inside, not quite willing to abandon the quiet desolation of the snowed-in mountains. The silence is broken only by the mountain creatures in the distance going about their normal lives. They are far enough away that he feels alone but in a good way. Alone, not lonely.
And not even that alone, really: he’d thought it late enough for all the others to have gone to sleep already. But the window, brightly lit on one of the upper floors, proves him wrong. It looks like an arrow wound in the side of the keep bleeding steady golden light, not the flickering redness of a fire. Jaskier and Yen, then. Of course it’s them; the steady light just screams mage and Jaskier is still… wary, around open flames.
A moment later, their silhouettes come into view, too, for a mere glimpse before they’re gone again. Dancing in one of the abandoned salles, probably. He huffs and smiles because there’s nobody here to call him out it.
Jaskier is humming, most likely — singing he would be able to hear even down here — providing the music for their dance. It’s one of the courtly ones, the twirly, fancy pair affairs that they so enjoy. It’s a beautiful sight, in Geralt’s imagination, though the reality is, without doubt, far superior.
He takes one last deep breath of the cold and lets his feet carry him up to the salle. For a moment, he hesitates outside the doorway, just listening to the swish-clack of their boots over the floor accompanied by Jaskier’s strange mixture of humming and singing quietly. But then the desire to actually see them wins out, and he pushes the doors open just wide enough to slip inside.
There is burst of warmth-happiness-love as Jaskier and Yen whirl past. Jaskier has chosen an upbeat tune that involves a lot of spinning through the room — it’s a marvel that he still has the breath to sing, really. Geralt leans against the wall and watches them and just soaks in their combined happiness. Such a novelty still, even after several weeks. Part of him hopes he won’t ever get used to it.
Jaskier pokes him in the chest the next time they pass and Geralt swipes at him with no intention of catching him. It still makes him laugh as Yen rolls her eyes fondly.
“You just wait,” Geralt growls and is rewarded with a burst of lust. He pounces on them the next time they get in reach, catching Jaskier with his left arm and Yen with his right and giving a triumphant growl. Jaskier clings to him, shaking with laughter, while Yen heaves a put-upon sigh, but their scents are still all happiness and a little horny, so Geralt just nuzzles her hair. She smells like fresh exertion and a summery afternoon and faintly like Jaskier, strengthened by the man himself so close by, and Geralt could lose himself in this, in these two people in his arms.
Yen turns her head up at him, a clear invitation he takes. It shuts Jaskier up, too, even as the lust in the air spikes.
“Gods,” he says, his voice suddenly hoarse in a way that has nothing to do with singing. “I could watch you all night.”
Yen breaks their kiss to look at Jaskier. “Is watching all you intend to do?”
Jaskier’s expression goes hungry. “Not really.”
Yen pulls him in for a kiss of his own, and they both smell so good that Geralt can’t help but bury his nose in Jaskier’s throat again, inhaling their combined scent.
They smell like home.