Work Text:
bread and butter
Jaskier loathes Yennefer on sight. Well. Almost on sight. Before she turns around and looks at him as a fastidious man looks at a cockroach, he's rather taken with the lines of her body, the smoothness of her skin, the way her hair falls like a waterfall of dark silk down her back, how she frankly doesn't appear to be wearing an awful lot of clothing as she sits at the foot of his bed. It's too bad the second she turns around, she's instantly terrifying, and he can't even concentrate enough to get a good eyeful of her breasts in between desperately trying to get away from the absolute madwoman holding a knife to a part of his body he'd much rather she forgot existed.
He doesn't have a fucking clue what she's playing at, but even his poorly developed sense of self-preservation says he absolutely shouldn't hang around to find out. Between his fuzzy memories of why they're even here and the encounter with (he suspects) an actual real-life harpy, it feels like a miracle to step out into daylight and immediately run into Geralt.
Later, he loathes her on principle.
He doesn't understand what their deal is, sometimes touching each other with an aching tenderness that just isn't fair, sometimes snarling at each other like rabid dogs. He understands hate-fucking - hello there, Valdo - but not the absurd push-pull-love-hate thing that Geralt and Yennefer share, how they love and hate and hurt and desire all at once, all the time, at an intensity that's frightening, why they keep doing this when it's clearly fundamentally wounding both of them.
He loves Geralt; he's predisposed to forgive him even when it's foolish and painful. Yennefer? Not so much. And hating her makes the rest of it a little easier to bear.
~ fin ~