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The Muses, scattering violets from their skirts,
bring lovely gifts: children, be quick to seize them;
reach for the high-tuned lyre,
companion to our songs.
But as for me:
my skin, once smooth, old age
has now assaulted
- o - o - o -
Geralt asks it once, and only once, of Yennefer.
They’re sitting beneath a tree in the late summer, leaning against each other while Jaskier and Ciri are making the rounds through the field in front of them, looking for flowers to weave into crowns. Jaskier is wearing bright red, his hair frosting at the edges, and Ciri has a red ribbon in her braid. They’re laughing together, bright and whole. Yennefer is smiling at them, lips red. Matching roses.
“Could you make him age with us?” Geralt asks her.
“There is no power that can make a human cease to age,” she tells him. She turns her eyes on his and presses her lips together. Thinks for a long moment. “I will look into it.”
It is almost winter when she appears in the street Geralt is leading Roach down, a town near Kaer Morhen. Jaskier is staying at Oxenfurt for the winter. He’s finished a cycle of songs about the Dawn that he wanted to teach before spring. And his knees have weakened, though he won’t speak on it much. Geralt offered to buy another horse for the trip.
“Geralt, my love,” Jaskier had said. “We can’t let Roach get jealous.”
Geralt had wished him goodbye two weeks ago.
It makes no sense to him, how he lived decades in silent travel, and now it takes getting used to.
Yennefer wears deep green, and her hair is pulled up. There are dandelions tucked into the braids there. No doubt the work of Ciri. She is a garden in the middle of the road.
“Geralt,” she says, and steps around a puddle to meet him. Roach eyes her as she approaches and then feigns disinterest, surely waiting for apples from her hand. “Let’s find a room for the night.”
It’s dark outside, and Roach has been brushed and fed and watered. The meal they find at a small tavern isn’t much, but it’s warm.
Yennefer stares at Geralt a long time over their bowls of stew before she speaks.
“I couldn’t find anything,” she tells him. “He will age as all humans do. There is no magic to change that.”
Geralt looks down into his wooden soup bowl. It is empty.
“It is not,” Yennefer starts. She pauses. “It is not what I wanted to hear, either.”
“Did Ciri know?” Geralt asks. “What you were researching?”
“No,” Yennefer says. “I didn’t tell her.”
Geralt stands.
“I must leave early tomorrow,” he says. “To reach Kaer Morhen before the first snows.”
“Alright,” Yennefer says. “I will pay for the meals if you go on ahead to the inn to ask about a bath.”
They spend the night tangled in each other, kissing away bruises and papercuts long since healed over.
Geralt does not ask Yennefer again.
Jaskier has a collection of lutes in his professor's lodgings at Oxenfurt. He’s hung them on the wall above a couch in his living space. There’s four lutes, and he’s collected different ones from different travels he’s made with Geralt.
He takes good care of them, dusts and cleans and tunes them. The joints in his hands have tightened, but he still picks them off the wall and tends to them every night.
When Geralt visits, he sits at the small dining table across from Jaskier every evening, places his sword across his knees, and cleans and oils it. Jaskier tunes and shines his instruments, and sometimes he’ll play for Geralt a number of songs, old and new.
It is one such night that Jaskier sets aside his second favorite lute and sighs, sinking back into the couch. Geralt sets aside his sword.
“I think I’ll retire at the end of this semester,” he tells Geralt.
“Are you tired of it?” Geralt asks. “Teaching?”
“No,” Jaskier says. “Well, sort of.”
He stands and puts the lute back on the wall.
“Come get ready for bed, my love,” he says.
Jaskier’s fingers brush through Geralt’s hair ahead of the comb. Geralt is nestled between his legs, leaning against the bedframe, nose tucked against Jaskier’s left knee draped in a blue nightgown.
“My hair is almost as white as yours, now,” Jaskier says, once he’s finished combing Geralt’s hair. “Soon we’ll be a matching pair of lovers. Yennefer will enjoy the sight, I’m sure. And Ciri has been wishing I shared any resemblance with her since you practically grounded her for that goose trick. She’ll be glad to match me, too.”
Geralt turns around on his knees and looks up at Jaskier. His hands wrap gently around Jaskier’s ankles, thin and warm. He brushes his fingers over the bones there.
Jaskier’s hair is the first snow on the mountains, and his face wears years, but his eyes are still bright and smiling. The dim oil lamps pour light over his face like a sunrise.
“You’re not yet sixty,” Geralt says. “You speak as though you’ll die tomorrow.”
“I’ve a year to go ‘til sixty,” Jaskier says. “But even then, I don’t want to spend my aging years in a classroom. I spent so long traveling, and I miss it. Well, I miss adventure. And I miss you. I miss Yen. I miss Ciri. I confess that being stuck in the city year round and waiting for others to visit is a lonely thing.”
Jaskier reaches out and cups Geralt’s face in his hands. His skin smells of the rose oil Ciri bought for him a few springs ago.
“I know you do good things when you travel,” Jaskier says. “You have a duty to caretake the world as much as I do with my music. I could not begrudge you your honor, your strength, your kindness. It is what I fell in love with. But I am old and lonely. Let me travel with you once again. Then I may try and join Ciri and Yen for a spell. Surely they can find space for an old man.”
Geralt leans up and presses his mouth as soft as the light on Jaskier’s face to Jaskier’s smiling lips.
“You are Ciri’s father,” Geralt says. “And Yen’s lover as you are mine. There is never a need to find space, we already have it waiting for you.”
Jaskier kisses Geralt back, firmly, as though marking a line in a book to return to, again and again.
“You still love me, even old and withered?” Jaskier asks.
“You are not withered,” Geralt says. “And even though you are not yet an old man, I love you. Even as an old man would I love you.”
“I am not young and beautiful anymore,” Jaskier whispers. He is staring at Geralt’s jaw or collarbone, the smooth skin there split by scars.
“You are beautiful,” Geralt whispers back. “You always will be.”
Jaskier closes his eyes and exhales slowly.
“I wish I could age with you,” Geralt says.
Jaskier opens his eyes. A tear falls from his lashes, catching on wrinkles traced through his face. He brushes it away, runs his hands through Geralt's hair to lace his fingers at his nape.
“What a horrible thing that would be,” Jaskier says, with the smile he gives Ciri when she doesn’t want to listen. “Then Yennefer would be mad at you, and your cub would be stuck with an angry Yen.”
“Nobody likes an angry Yen,” Geralt says, hands wrapping around Jaskier’s waist.
“Exactly,” Jaskier says. “And, besides, dear Geralt. I am not afraid of this age because you will outlive me. I will be loved longer than most mortals are remembered.”
“You’re a famous bard,” Geralt says. “Your songs will outlast most everything.”
Jaskier laughs and rubs his thumb in the space between Geralt’s eyebrows.
“You’re still mad I got that ditty stuck in your head earlier this week,” he says, and hums for a moment. “They may be catchy tunes, and I have been blessed and honored with the responsibility of changing the world’s view of Witchers, and the outcasts, and the downtrodden. My songs may be taught for decades to other bards who will misremember the lyrics, and I could even have that awful portrait hung in Oxenfurt pinned there until the day the world is consumed by darkness. But those bards are not you. They do not have your chivalry or your grace. Those who hear my songs do not hold my heart the way you do. You will not misremember me. That horrible portrait could never compare to that beauty or care. You have loved me in a way I thought I would never get in this lifetime. You have loved me far better than most dream of. How lucky I am, to be so loved by Geralt of Rivia, and to love him in return. How lucky I am, to be dearest friend and lover of Yennefer of Vengerberg. How lucky I am, to have a daughter in our Ciri, and loved as a father by her. I will be able to rest in death in a love that will outlive my songs and my fame. No, Geralt, my love, I am glad you will not age with me. I met myself the Sun and fell into his arms to know his rich and steady warmth for all my days. I would not trade this brightness and fullness anymore than I would trade away our daughter.”
Geralt picks Jaskier up and lays him out upon the bed, settles the blue nightgown around him.
“Let me hold you,” Geralt says, brushing his lips over Jaskier's hairline, and forehead, eyebrows and cheekbones. Jaskier's arms come up around his shoulders to pull him close in answer.
"My Witcher," Jaskier says. "My love."
The room smells of unshed tears.
Jaskier’s skin smells of roses, and he lays warm and breathing, swept up in Geralt’s arms.