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Aldersberg, as it turns out, is still a shithole.
It’d been a shithole the last time Geralt had come through these parts some twenty or so odd years ago, long before he’d met Jaskier or this Roach, but time had a way of turning tides sometimes. There was always hope that shithole towns would de-shithole themselves, come under new leadership and clean themselves up, whether it be better management, improved infrastructure, or Geralt’s preference for de-shitholing, dealing with the spots of mischief perpetrated by bored youths before it could get out of control and turn into a roadside bandits type of situation.
The town had been built, somewhat unfortunately, on the Pontar’s floodplain, but instead of moving the town out of the Pontar’s path, the residents of Aldersberg had stuck to it, bloody-minded and stubborn as humans usually were, moaning and groaning when the Pontar flooded every spring, wailing about lost crops and drowners in equal measure. It was for that reason that Aldersberg had been a favorite of his brothers for years, who could always count on good coin if they made this their first stop after winter finally loosened its clutch on the continent.
No the town hadn’t de-shitholed itself, at least not on first glance, but it doesn’t quite matter today. Not when the path finally curves and Aldersberg is laid out before them, uneven roof lines, slightly dilapidated inn and all. There are fields of wheat and barley, cattle dotting the landscape, the cheerful ring of goat’s bells, and the sun catching the river water and making it shine. It’s nice, idyllic; not any place he’d stay unless he had to, but he can see why it would appeal to some.
Jaskier is still playing his lute, weaving in and out of different tunes as the wind takes him, and music is such a rarity in these rural hamlets that it isn’t long before small children come racing up to them from all corners, dirty faces and dirty feet and innocent smiles. Jaskier usually has this effect whether he means to or not, and he switches from the bawdy first refrain of Watkin’s Ale to something more palatable to tiny ears.
“Would you like to hear a story?” he asks, and the children, at least a half-dozen now, cheer. Jaskier laughs, his diaphragm flexing under Geralt’s palm where his hand is still splayed over Jaskier’s middle. Roach, too, is careful with the small creatures underfoot, slowing down to a walk better suited for a workhorse, her shoes sinking into the sweet-scented, loamy earth. “Alright, this one is a personal favorite. It’s called The Sky and the Steppe, a tale beyond the seas, of the fair southern land of Ofir.”
“I have an aunt, her name is Ophela and she made a baby,” an extremely tiny blonde girl says from near Roach’s front left leg, tugging on the fold of Geralt’s boot insistently where it’s pressed to the stirrup. She doesn’t look old enough to be walking, let alone having a conversation. “He poops a lot.”
“That’s about what babies do,” Jaskier agrees, taking the non-sequitur in his stride. “Have you ever heard of the land of Ofir?”
“Da says that there are animals there, big and gray with noses the length of a man’s leg,” pipes up a boy on the other side of Roach, walking backwards with his cap slipping down his head. His frantic legs take him back and forth, back and forth, a fountain of energy Geralt wishes he could bottle like a potion. “I don’t believe him though, because that would be a very funny looking animal indeed. You can only get there if you’re on a boat, but boats make me throw up, except when we take the fishing boat out, though Da always makes me keep my head over the water after that one time I ruined my new jerkin. Is that a witcher?”
“It is! One of the most chivalrous monster-slayers on the Continent. This is Geralt, the White Wolf,” Jaskier says, and the children all go “Ooooo,” and Geralt doesn’t roll his eyes only by tremendous effort. Jaskier grins over his shoulder at him.
There’s some sort of market going on today, which is exceptional good luck for them. As Geralt dismounts he’s careful to steady Jaskier’s thighs, his weight more lopsided in the saddle without Geralt’s frame holding him up. His leg is bent at the knee and his bandaged foot, propped there on Roach’s shoulder, is still pristine and white, but he can tell that once he begins to unwrap it the wound will have spotted through in places. Not as bad as those first few days, but still.
The tiny blonde girl has now taken to tugging on Geralt’s belt, though when he looks down at her she clearly doesn’t want anything; she’s chattering on about her aunt, and her pooping cousin, the family chicken, her mummy’s bangers and mash, and everything else that filters through her baby’s mind.
They should be frightened – he’s a witcher, the monster hunter mothers warned their children against if they didn’t do their chores, or if they went out after dark without permission. The eeriness of his eyes, at the very least, should have them cowering.
Not so long ago, he thinks, they would have.
He steps out of her reach to help Jaskier down from Roach, arm firmly around his waist, and a red-headed girl gasps, “What happened to you,” as if they’re long-standing friends and not new acquaintances.
“I got bit by a monster,” Jaskier says, and that is the end of their quiet afternoon.
The children all start shouting at once. The boy in the cap takes off running across the village square, and within the time it takes for Geralt to click at Roach to stay still, steady Jaskier, and fetch the lute, the child returns at full speed with a swarm of little boys racing after him in his wake.
The blonde child is going to tug his trousers to his ankles if he does not set Jaskier somewhere where she can ask all her questions to her heart’s content. Geralt sighs because he already knows what Jaskier is going to ask for before he says it. “Fine.”
Jaskier beams, bright and dimpling the corner of his mouth, to hide the fact that he’s limping more than he should. “You didn’t even know what I was going to say.”
“Honey, or nuts?”
“Who says I can’t have both,” Jaskier says on a hum, as Geralt deposits him on the small retainer wall set around the town’s water well, where two elderly men have paused their deep conversation – and pipe smoking – to watch the show.
The children converge upon Jaskier like puppies, seeing him hobbled as a chance to luxuriate in his undivided attention. A dark-haired boy no more than three takes a seat of honor at his side, going on about his sister’s kitten, Plucky, around the thumb in his mouth, while an older girl produces said kitten from the pocket of her apron, a lopsided creature missing half of its right ear and so fluffy from well-tended care that all of its brown fur is sticking straight up. The boys are jittering and running in circles, thrilled to have a storyteller in their midst and unable to keep still in their excitement to hear all of his tales of adventure. It’s a lot, and the old men on the other side of the fountain watch him with amusement. They’re attracting the eye of the older folks manning the booths and shopping in the town square as well, and Geralt can only imagine the figure he strikes, slightly damp in full black armor with swords at his back, especially as the little blonde girl has yet to stop tugging at him.
“First, the tale of The Sky and the Steppe, from Ofir,” Jaskier announces to the children, fingers flying on the lute in a tune that makes Geralt think of deserts and hot burning sun. “Then, then, if you’re very good, I’ll tell you the tale of how the White Wolf, Geralt of Rivia, saved me from the Archespore Menace.”
Fully one-third of the audience gasps, a dozen pairs of eyes looking at him with awe.
“I know,” Jaskier says, widening his eyes appropriately at the children. He shoots Geralt a huge, amused smile over tiny heads and lifts two fingers, and Geralt huffs.
Their arrival has caused something of a stir, and there are surprised smiles on tired faces when the first notes of an estampie from Ofir carry on the wind. Music is so rare in these rural places that a traveling minstrel is always something of an unexpected pleasure, but a master bard of Jaskier’s caliber is something altogether different. Geralt isn’t blind to how far Jaskier has come, from those first poor years with his floppy, little-boy hair and the baby fat clinging to his face, to the man he’s become, the way he can sew words around the ragged edges of a broken heart and pull them together as one would close a bleeding wound.
The townsfolk are more pleasant than his last time through these parts, and he decides that his initial estimation may have been off the mark. They had yet to de-shithole themselves, true enough, but no one was spitting on his boots or refusing him service, which was a step above what happened the last time he was here. There’s distrust – there will always be distrust, no matter how many songs Jaskier sings about him – but perhaps it’s the fact that he’s come with that tender-hearted man singing to their children that softens them to him.
By the time he’s purchased new socks for the both of them and new shoes for Roach, six glass vials and a collection of stoppers for his potions, and four blanched fritters (two for Jaskier, one with topped with honey and the other stuffed with nuts), Jaskier’s crowd has grown. Half the village has been lured away from their chores it seems, and Jaskier is eating it up, a king on his water-well throne.
The river water had left dried silt in the crease of his neck and behind his ears, a sensation that he normally wouldn’t even notice, but he feels raw in an odd way he can’t quite place. Exposed, like he’d shown his soft underbelly. The songs are innocent and as old as the hills they’d walked on to get here, By and By Lully Lullay, and Three Grey Greedy Geese, and The Hound of Beaumont. Geralt had learned his letters on them as so many children had. If he closes his eyes, he could almost hear Visenna humming them as she cooked.
Jaskier meets his gaze across a dozen heads, smiling as he sings. There’s enough coin in the lute case at his feet to easily provide their meal and lodgings tonight, not even counting what he earns tomorrow when he inevitably begs Geralt to stay for one more night.
Taking care of yourself is much more than just patching scrapes and monster nibbles, he’d once said, in the days when Geralt was putting more Swallow into his body than food and was the lean kind of rangy that had his collarbones poking through his tunics, his hip bones sharp enough to cut. Geralt hadn’t understood what Jaskier was saying then, three quarters of a century old with fifty-five of those years on the Path. All he’d known for the entirety of his dismal existence was the derision of those who begged him for help with one side of their mouths and spit on him with the other; the hours and weeks spent hunting in the muck, the sewers, the slime, chasing creatures more likely to take a bite out of him in fear than rage.
Introspection wasn’t a skill that Vesemir had fostered in them, outside of keeping themselves hale and whole to put one more foot in front of the other. To think too deeply about the abject misery of their lives, foundlings and orphans and child surprises all, and the thankless profession they’d been conscripted into, was a line of thought Vesemir cut short before it could reach its natural conclusion. Better to look forward than back, he’d often said, to carve their destiny with their swords and their hands, their backs and their minds, than to think back at the what-could-have-beens.
Still, in those first years when he’d found himself barnacled with a child-bard, puppy-like and eager to explore the world, he let himself imagine what it could be like, to let someone close. Some mornings at dawn, when the sun had yet to climb over the horizon and the world was quiet and still, he’d look across the remains of their fire to that boy Jaskier used to be, floppy hair sticking up every which way and tucked into his bedroll to his nose, and he’d wonder at the affection he felt, simple but no less strong for it.
It was a rare person who saw the monstrosity of Geralt’s being and didn’t run. Jaskier never had, not once in all the nearly fifteen years of their friendship. Instead, Jaskier had wormed himself under Geralt’s skin, waving away Geralt’s insecurity, ducking under his growled words, shimmying past the prickly armor he wore as a shield. With nary a by-your-leave he’d made himself a place near Geralt’s heart that Geralt had no name for or concept of, confident in his welcome as if it had always been a by-gone conclusion, and not the unseating of Geralt’s entire world.
The river silt itches behind his ears, in the creases and crevices of his body, but there’s another sensation, lower and deeper, that he has no name for. He’s felt it once or twice over the years, sometimes in the arms of a skilled cortesan, sometimes waking from a dream, panting and wet like a schoolboy, hard in his breeches. It’s never been this strong, this intense, or filled him with such unbearable wanting, a hunger he’s never sated and which comes to bear now. A knowledge new and unasked for, but now that it’s here, now that he feels it, it can’t be left unanswered.
Jaskier smiles at him from the well, almost sweet as he finishes his rendition of Carmina Burana, and Geralt realizes that whatever this is, sparked into being by his swim this afternoon, has surprised Jaskier as much as it had Geralt.
Geralt would never call Jaskier shy, as the man took his reputation as a scoundrel very seriously, but there’s something of shyness when Geralt wades through the crowd to help Jaskier gather his earned coin and get him to his feet with an arm looped about his waist, in the little self-deprecating laugh he offers him when he lists to one side and Geralt has to hastily correct or find themselves sprawled in the dirt.
The children swarm him and he’s peppered with a hundred questions, “Was the Archespore really twelve feet tall?” and “Are those its guts on your sword?” and “Did you use your Witcher magic on it?” but it’s the little blonde child staring at him, lower lip wobbling, who says, “Is it going to come here and bite me too?” that cuts through the rest.
Geralt stares down at her. “No. I killed it, then set fire to it. The spores won’t grow from the ash.”
Geralt doesn’t handle people well on a good day, and has no idea what to make of the children cheering, Jaskier beaming at him as if he’d just proven a point he was trying to make. The little boys start shouting and doing a dramatic reenactment in the middle of the square, and Geralt is now done with all of this.
He can sense Jaskier’s amusement.
“Shut up,” he growls, and pretends he can’t feel Jaskier’s laughter, pressed as they are together.
.
The sun is on its way down, casting the inn in golds and reds, when they finally leave Roach at the stables. It does nothing to hide the dilapidated roof, the uneven staircase, the windows that haven’t seen a decent scrub in at least a decade. Inside, however, there's a merry fire crackling in the fireplace, the heavy scent of mutton soup and decent ale, and that deeper, human salt-smell of a hard but satisfying day’s work.
He takes a table nearest the fire and sits Jaskier at it, despite his assurances that he is, “fine, Geralt, honestly,” but Geralt had said he would treat the wound when they got to a town, and treatment there would be.
It’s the matter of a gruff word with the innkeep to procure them a room, food, buckets of water for washing. He’s up-charged, but not by much, especially when Jaskier calls from across the room, “I’ll play for you tomorrow night, good sir, and double your midweek takings. That is, if you’d be so kind as to give us a free night so I might rest my leg.”
The innkeep is too smart to kick a gift-bard in the mouth, and he slides a key across the countertop. His daughter, a small thing of barely twelve, brings a steaming bowl of water with rags and a sliver of soap that smells vaguely medicinal to Geralt’s nose, and he grunts a thank you.
“Food’ll be out in a bit,” the innkeep says, eyeing him. “He alright?”
“It’s a wound, not sickness,” Geralt says, eyeing the man right back. “Is there a healer here?”
“I don’t need a healer,” Jaskier calls cheerfully, and Geralt sighs.
He makes his way through the maze of tables, pulls the chair out across from Jaskier and sets the bowl and soap within reach, tugging his gloves off. “You’re worse than Grandmother Pancratz, and she had a surgeon on retainer. Healthy as a horse, that woman, and utterly convinced every day would be her last. Do you know she once had him travel eight days to Kaedwen for what just turned out to be a bout of truly disproportionate gas brought on by pre-dinner soup?”
Jaskier chatters on about his flatulent grandmother and doesn’t seem to mind that Geralt has lifted his wounded foot to rest on Geralt’s knee. The bandages come away carefully, and the puncture wounds, twelve of them, red and inflamed but no longer quite so angry, glare out from the bruised stretch of Jaskier’s skin. He traces his fingertips lightly along the ankle bone, black and blue from the force of the archespore’s venom, manipulating the joint now that the swelling had gone down enough for him to feel the divots and ridges of the bone.
Jaskier falls silent mid-word, and Geralt glances up at him. There’s an odd expression on his face, and not one Geralt can easily read. “Pain?”
Jaskier shakes his head once. “No, ah -- no. Stings a bit.”
“Like prickling, or like a wound exposed to air?”
“The latter, I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
“Well forgive me, it isn’t every day I get accosted by an angry plant.”
He frowns down at the puncture wounds, dipping the rag into the hot water. A medicinal scent flowers into the air, and he can pick up minty traces of pennyroyal, the low notes of honey. “They aren’t plants.”
“Oh not this again,” Jaskier says, rolling his eyes at the innkeeper’s daughter, who has arrived balancing two plates of bread, cheeses and meats. “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck – really, they are truly disgusting – then it is a duck.”
“They aren’t plants,” he tells Jaskier and the girl both, who blushes before slipping away to get their ale.
“Yes, well, nothing quite rhymes with reptilian ground spore, Geralt.”
“Core, floor, ore, swore,” Geralt replies, manipulating one of the puncture wounds gently and pretending he hadn’t heard Jaskier suck in a pained breath even as he groans aloud.
“Jokes! He comes back from hibernating with jokes.”
“Roar, wore, your. Hm. Drawer.”
“Melitele, please stop,” Jaskier says, laughing now despite the sweat that has popped up along his brow. “You’re truly the worst.”
The puncture wound dribbles a line of blood, thin and small, as the scab is broken. It isn’t the sheeting blood of a few days ago, or the hot swelling of the day before yesterday, but the bruising has him concerned. He tucks Jaskier’s heel into his palm and manipulates the ankle joint, feeling for anything out of the ordinary. “Hurts?”
“Now it does.” Off of Geralt’s expectant look he rolls his eyes. “Fine! Like a wound exposed to air and disturbed unnecessarily.”
“Good. Archespore venom can cause nerve damage in humans.”
The tips of Jaskier’s ears flush pink, hidden in the long fringes of his hair. “So you said.”
So Geralt had yelled, dread numbing all his edges, when he’d seen Jaskier lying there in the dirt with the dart-spores lodged in his boot, white to the lips with shock.
Jaskier wasn’t soft, not in the ways his clothes and his mannerisms would have one assume, and could wield the little stick knife in his belt well enough to keep himself out of trouble, but he’d never been out-and-out hurt by any of the creatures Geralt hunted. The archespore had been a furious juvenile and inexperienced in keeping itself safe, and Geralt hadn’t noticed the tell-tale signs of its hiding spot because Jaskier had been walking backwards in front of Roach, laughing, regaling Geralt with some winter gossip about his friend Priss and the Duke and Duchess of Toussaint, looking like all the joy in the world made tangible and bottled in a single human being. It was always like this, as if the long, cold winter months at Kaer Moren dulled the brightness of Jaskier’s being, blinding Geralt anew each spring. The warmth of him lit all of Geralt’s dark and troubled places, and when before he’d growled, turned away from the pain of that light, now it was all he could do not to luxuriate in its warmth.
And so, he hadn’t been looking. And so, Jaskier had been hurt, because Geralt was three-times the fool.
A sensation he hasn’t felt in too many years swoops from his belly to the back of his chest, up his throat, and his fingers freeze on Jaskier’s all-too-fragile bones, his mottled skin. He hasn’t felt its like since his early days on the Path, young and inexperienced and so certain of the Witcher he would be, of the values he would hold dear. It had taken a handful of years to cauterize that idealism clean out of him, but longer to stop feeling the crippling guilt when he wasn’t fast enough, strong enough. To feel it now takes all the breath out of him.
Jaskier had gone into shock from the blood loss. He’d screamed as Geralt plucked each spore out, who’d been unable to help ease the pain of the barbed end coming free from the muscle except to do it as fast as possible, then had vomited violently when Geralt had forced the antidote down his throat, a form of Golden Oriole cut with walnut oil to something safe for humans to take. He’d held Jaskier as the poison settled in, heated his skin to burning, then as the Oriole did its job and flushed all the poison from his body, sweat and urine and burning tears.
Jaskier could have lost his leg. Jaskier could have lost his leg because of Geralt.
Jaskier studies him thoughtfully, as he does at times when he’s trying to look more adult than he is. Only, that hasn’t been quite true for a while now. Jaskier is a man, has been a man, for many years, the impetuousness of his youth faded into something confident and strong, for all his silly outfits, his bright colors. “All is well now, Geralt.”
He rewraps Jaskier’s ankle with care to avoid his eyes. “All is not well. You pushed me into a fucking river.”
“Itchy, are we,” Jaskier says, laughter in his voice, and when he glances up there’s understanding, and kindness, on that cared-for face. “We’ll wash in a bit. Food, first.”
“Hm,” he says, and pulls the platters closer to them both, the weight of Jaskier’s foot solid and certain on his thigh.
.
It isn't the first time he and Jaskier have stayed at an inn where baths were beyond their scope or capacity to provide, but it’s the first time in memory that Geralt is grateful for it, rather than annoyed.
The room is decent, for being a roadside inn in a somewhat squalid little town, and despite its clear age the clean scent of lye soap clings to the bedding, the quilt, even the wash basins. He’s grateful not to have to smell the hundreds of other travelers who’ve slept here, eaten here, fucked here.
By unspoken agreement they strip out of their clothes, armor and boots, jackets and shirts, Geralt providing a handhold as Jaskier wiggles out of his trousers one-legged. He doesn’t look, can’t, focusing instead on his own bucket and cloth to wash away the dirt of the road. Jaskier is a pale shadow in the corner of his vision, all long, lean lines, wide shoulders and hairy chest, going about his own business despite the blush creeping up his neck.
There’s a newfound charge in the air he’s unaccustomed to, has never felt in all the years they’ve traveled together. Geralt had always known Jaskier was lovely, from his coltish youth when he’d been slender and pretty as a picture, to this version of him now, the long muscles of his body, his shoulders wide and hard. He’d always been able to separate himself from the knowledge of Jaskier’s beauty, acknowledge it and move past it, but like a pimply teenager in the first flush of realization that his cock was for more than pissing, he finds himself curiously unable to now.
Geralt thought he’d lost the capacity to be embarrassed by anything years ago.
Geralt is an idiot.
He closes his eyes to it and dunks his head into the basin to wash his hair, giving it a thorough scrub, and feels more than hears Jaskier come close. “Why must everything be so rough with you,” he murmurs, gentling the roughness to a soothing scritch through Geralt’s hair, working the tangled, sweaty knots gently until they come loose in the water.
He’s leaning into Geralt’s side, the hot skin over his ribs pressing against Geralt’s flank where he reaches over Geralt’s shoulder to get at his hair. The entire expanse of his back, scarred and pockmarked, burned and twisted, is on display, but Jaskier has never flinched from it. Jaskier has helped him stitch some of those wounds, and had never said a word about the grotesque evidence of the life Geralt has lived. Everything he’s done, in fact, has been just this - helping Geralt wash the blood out of his hair, or giving him the best slice of meat from his plate, or taking Geralt’s clothes with him to do the washing without asking. All done thanklessly, all done because Jaskier – because –
Because Jaskier cares for him.
“There,” Jaskier says, and taps his shoulder to have him lift up, soaked hair streaming into the bucket in a cascade. He squeezes the ends carefully to keep from pulling on Geralt’s scalp. “If you throw your head back like a yowling cat I’ll be very cross,” he warns, and Geralt snorts but does as he’s told, twisting up and back so his hair falls in a flop against his back, water running in rivulets down his shoulders, his spine. It’s icy-cold and he hisses, but Jaskier just hums in what is distinctly not sympathy. He pushes a cloth to Geralt’s chest, the blue of his eyes clear in the warm candlelight of their room. “Wash.”
He covers Jaskier’s hand with his on the expanse of his chest, there against the prickling heat of his chest hair, the scar that bisects his pectoral, the nipple gone tight and hot under Jaskier’s fingers curled around the washing cloth. He gets to watch those pretty cheeks flush, gets to watch that gaze skitter away.
It seems important, now, to be clean. To be washed, to be fresh. They’re going to get dirty again, very soon, but the Path shouldn’t be between them, caught in Geralt’s hair, tucked behind Jaskier’s ear, omnipresent in the creases and crevices of their bodies.
Jaskier limps away from him, back to their rucksacks at the table by the door. In the dim candlelight he’s lines of pale skin, the shadowed curve of bone and muscle under pebbled skin, the flush of blood at his pulse points. His beauty isn’t in his long limbs, his flawless skin, that enticing dichotomy between dark hair and light eyes. It’s in that funny little grin that crinkles his eyes, the way his brows curve down when the smile tugs at his cheeks, like the world is here to be laughed at.
It’s intoxicating. Perhaps it always has been.
“That’s never a look I thought I’d have my way,” Jaskier says, one cheek dimpling with amusement as he chews on the inside corner of his lip. It belies a nervousness Geralt didn’t think him capable of, but one he mirrors. Fifteen years is a long time; long enough to have seen all of the other’s faults, yes, but longer still to have grown comfortable with one another like one would a favorite sweater worn soft with use.
A part of him doesn’t want to chance it. Not even now, Jaskier’s breeches low on his hips and doing nothing to hide the heat growing between his legs, his eyes far more naked than the skin he was bearing.
He doesn’t know how to do this. He’s never taken for taking’s sake, not when coin wasn’t being exchanged, and never with someone who means as much to him as Jaskier does. He doesn’t know how to step over that chasm inside of him, where all of his uncertainty and anger and self-hatred festered, ebbed and flowed like a tide. Jaskier isn’t fragile, except in all the ways he is. Geralt’s all-too-aware of the strength of his hands, forged by the weight of more years than a man should live in poverty and pain.
In his strength he’s forgotten tenderness. He knows how to fight, but he doesn’t know this.
“I thought about you often, over the winter,” Jaskier says softly, as he lights the single candle by the bed. Geralt’s hands are shaking as he dips the washcloth into the basin, runs it up his neck, down his chest. Jaskier follows its path with his eyes. “About what you were doing in Kaer Morhen at that exact moment I thought of you.”
“Mucking out horse stalls. Rebuilding crumbling walls.”
“Mm, yes, the trappings of winter can’t be escaped. But I would imagine your face as I’ve only ever rarely seen it, those early mornings when you think I’m still asleep and you’re whispering to Roach as you redo her tac. Peaceful, enjoying the task for enjoyment’s sake, and for the love of your horse. It’s how I imagine you to be, in Kaer Morhen. Peaceful and still.”
Jaskier crosses the room to him once more, slowly; for his foot, yes, but that’s not the only reason. That’s not the only reason, and they both know it.
He tilts his head back, just a bit, just those scant inches that separate them in height. His eyes are devastating, beautiful and blue and burning with all the things they never acknowledged to one another. Never said to one another. “But even that imagining isn’t enough. It’s as if I forget the reality of you, when we’re apart. When I see you for the first time in the spring, when you come around the bend of the road, or when I finally catch sight of you in a town square, scowling at the notice board like all you can think is these idiots didn’t think to clean out the barn before it attracted mugwarts, it’s like the entirety of me breathes in.”
To hear his own thoughts repeated to him sends a blaze of heat tripping down the sinews of his body, coalescing in his gut. His eyes drop to Jaskier’s mouth, helplessly. The soft, pink bow of those lips, a bit chapped, a bit nibbled on where Jaskier always chewed at the corner when he was writing, are haloed with the prickles of stubbly beard and so beautiful that all of his insides tighten in a pitiless grip, arrowed down tight and low between his legs.
He reaches out, finally, to stroke the backs of his fingers just lightly down the ridge of Jaskier’s jaw. Jaskier sighs against his palm, cupping his hand around Geralt’s and holding it to his cheek. He turns his head, just enough, to press his lips to the center of Geralt’s palm. “Why now, Geralt,” Jaskier whispers against his skin. “Why not last year, or the year before that, or the year before that?”
“I don’t know,” he says, just as quietly. Jaskier’s cheek, bristly with whiskers, rasps against Geralt’s thumb as he strokes that cared-for face up, tilting his jaw until Jaskier’s lips open of their own accord.
He had never imagined this, and Geralt thinks it’s a poor showing of his imagination. It feels like magic, just as it had on Roach. Kissing Jaskier fizzes across his scalp and tightens the core of him like he’s just touched lightning. Jaskier inhales sharply through his nose, fingers tightening around Geralt’s palm, and Geralt loses the fine tether of his control.
The heat of Jaskier’s mouth. The cleverness of his tongue, and how had Geralt never thought it could be like this? They fit, shoulders to shoulders, hips to hips, and when Jaskier turns his head he slots in as if he was ready-made for Geralt’s body, as if some unknown piece of himself has been found. The relief is as devastating as the heat of the way they join, wet and hot and anchored somewhere behind the cage of his ribs. His stupid, treacherous mouth won’t stop smiling and Jaskier breaks off with those ridiculous giggles of his, arms wrapping around the hard heat of Geralt’s shoulders. He bends to that requested touch, to the embrace Jaskier wants, and feels Jaskier’s smile against his neck, tucked there against the wet tangle of his hair.
They’re hard, the two of them, through their breeches, and the immediacy of the sensation takes Geralt’s breath away. He’s never been with a man, and it seems at once a curious oversight on his part and the kind of blessing Geralt stopped believing was possible years ago. It feels right, that this lovely and unbelievable thing should be for Jaskier alone.
He pulls back just enough to look at that affectionate face, the sweep of his long fringe.
“Score. More. Boar. Fore.”
Jaskier’s eyes widen, then scrunch with laughter. Relief shines like beams of light across his expression, the lines fanning out from his eyes. “Really? Really? We’re going to do this now?”
“If you’re going to sing about it, it should be–”
“Educational, yes, yes, how could I forget your two-day diatribe on this topic, interspersed with grunts and you just, picking up the conversation without telling me you were still complaining about my embellishments. For two days.”
“Embellishments.”
But Jaskier is smiling, something of softness in his countenance, his eyes, as curious as it is intoxicating. “Be serious, Geralt,” he begs, and Geralt softens to him in return. There’s no choice in it, not when he feels tethered by that smile, by the complicated ache in his chest. “Are you sure about this? We can never go back.”
“No,” he says, the ache solidifying to certainty, solid and laced through the bones of his spine. He’s a Witcher, not a poet; he doesn’t have the words like Jaskier does, the ability to weave sentiment together in such a way that they can describe the mess inside of him. He realizes, then, that maybe he doesn’t need to. Jaskier has always seemed to understand him anyway, and he calls on that now as he looks down at the precipice they’re standing on.
It would be so easy to fall into the familiar patterns of their bickering and teasing, Geralt knows, just as it would be a disservice to them both. He shakes his head, stroking a thumb under Jaskier’s eye, down the slope of his cheek to the edge of his jaw. The bristles of his beard are loud in the quiet between them, the tell-tale evidence of Jaskier’s masculinity.
Geralt has only felt this kind or rightness a handful of times in his life. Eskel conspiratorial and giggling next to him in their hiding place in the storage hall, as Barmin cursed a blue streak looking for them. The first time he met his first Roach, gentling her from her furious pawing at the earth. The first winter the year after the sacking of Kaer Morhen, Vesemir waiting for each of them out on the battlements. The sixth year, of knowing Jaskier.
It had been a cold fall night, when they were nearly at the end of their season together. They’d stopped to make camp in a little clearing Geralt knew of. The Yaruga Valley lay spread out below them, the long snaking twist of the water cutting through the heaving forest ripe with a bountiful wet season. The sun had long since made its voyage down over the horizon, but that wasn’t why Geralt favored this spot when he found himself in these parts; it was the crystal clear view of the night sky, cradled in the hands of the valley, and so close it felt as if he could reach up and touch each star if he chose.
Jaskier’s reaction had been worth it. For the first time, in six years of knowing him, Geralt had struck him speechless.
The bard hadn’t so much as blinked, not as Geralt built a fire, as he brushed down and fed Roach, as he went to catch them dinner. When Geralt had returned, a brace of rabbits in hand, Jaskier had been sat cross-legged at the mountain’s ledge, notebook in his lap and his tongue caught between his teeth, scribbling madly. It hadn’t seemed to matter to him that it was pitch black outside of the circle of the firelight and Roach stood over him, lipping at his hair.
The swell of feeling at the striking innocence of this man, and his own helpless affection for him, had been only the first of many. The affection had grown, morphed, built upon itself, unwanted though it had been those first years, to something that Geralt could not help but call one of the foundational pillars of his life.
“I look for you,” he says, voice hoarse, “when you’re not there. Even in winter, when you’re in Oxenfurt. I look over my shoulder for you.”
Jaskier’s eyes grow wet, red along the lashes. “You know, in my wildest imaginings this wasn’t how I thought it would go. I’d already made my peace to walk by your side until I couldn’t walk anymore, just to look at you. To be near you. I never wanted to ask for more.”
Tenderness fills Geralt’s heart, in a way he’s never quite felt. “Afraid.”
Jaskier nods, simply. “Afraid.”
“Are you still?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. It could all go wrong.”
“Terribly so. I’m an unconscionable flirt. There’s Yennefer to consider.”
Yennefer. The many, many complicated things she made him feel, how they came together like lightning, crashing into one another and leaving smoking ruin in their wake. The pain they inflicted on one another could be so oppressive that it felt like a weight on Geralt that was akin to a chain, tethering him to her and her to him. It had felt like that with Jaskier, at one time, at the beginning when Geralt didn’t want to be needed and Jaskier was the neediest creature he’d ever come across.
But that was then, when Jaskier was but a boy trotting after him. The man in front of him has his own strength, his own relationships and ties. He has a life in Oxenfurt, just as he has a life at Geralt’s side, and with that life has come knowledge and growth. Geralt is no longer needed, he is wanted, and he never realized the difference between those two things until now.
“This – this isn’t just about sex. For me,” Jaskier says into the quiet pocket between them. “Not that I don’t want to fuck you, Geralt, because I truly – oh,” and he loses his trail of thought as Geralt lets his hand fall to the small of Jaskier’s back, then lower still. The slopes of his cheekbones blush hot, the flush crawling up his throat. It’s a good look for him, and Geralt drops his mouth to the hinge of his jaw just to feel Jaskier’s arse clench under his hand as he lifts up on his toes to get closer to Geralt's mouth. “Oh,” Jaskier gasps again, eyelashes low. “What was I saying.”
“How much you want to fuck me,” Geralt murmurs, lipping at Jaskier’s ear. The butter-soft lobe has come up with goosebumps, falling like spilled water down his neck. “Don’t be afraid.”
“I am, a bit. We’re at a crossroads,” Jaskier whispers, restless fingers stroking up Geralt’s flanks, over his shoulders, down his back. His throat bobs, the apple of it rising and falling under Geralt’s thumb. “On the left – we go to sleep in different beds, and tomorrow we wake up and get back on the road and I tell you all about my adventures over the winter. You grunt and kill beasties, and I write perfectly accurate songs about them, and we share mead and beer as we always have. Friends.”
A serviceable life. One he once thought he wanted.
Dull. Dying in inches year after endless, gray year.
“Mm. And on the right?”
“Oh, Geralt.” Jaskier squeezes the back of Geralt’s neck gently, stroking through his damp hair. “If you take the road to the right, you take me to bed tonight, and I press all my love for you into every inch of your skin, kiss it into the hollows of your elbows, into the creases of your thighs. We still go on marvelous adventures – you kill beasties, I sing about them, we make decent wages that keep Roach in apples and new shoes – and you give me every single night for all the days Melitele has said I’m to walk this earth.”
He can feel the smile tugging at his mouth, something building in his belly he can’t name, only that it feels painfully like happiness. “Greedy.”
“Exorbitantly so. Absolutely gluttonous,” Jaskier says, and tangles his fingers in Geralt’s hair to give him the softest of shakes. His eyes are shining, bright, with an answered joy. “I won’t be afraid, Geralt. Not if you’re with me.”
There’s no other way it could be. A foregone conclusion.
“I’m with you,” he says, and presses his forehead to Jaskier’s own.