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When Geralt finds out that Jaskier is dead after twenty-odd years following a Witcher into danger, they tell him it’s because of a fever.
He overhears it in the market first and it grabs his attention immediately. He’s getting Roach re-shod and the blacksmith’s apprentice is chatting to the shop at large, not really caring who hears him.
“Say that again,” Geralt grunts, whipping around and startling the young man into taking a few steps back. “About the bard, what did you say?”
“I- I– apologies, master Witcher, I just said that I heard. That is. The bard Jaskier,” he stammers.
“Spit it out, lad.” Geralt gestures with his hand. “What about him?”
“He’s dead, sir,” the apprentice tells him, and the ground drops out from under Geralt’s feet. “T’was a fever what took him,” the youngster continues, warming to his subject. “They say the whole of Oxenfurt shut down for his funeral, must have been a sight if ever there was one.”
“No,” Geralt blurts. “That’s not…are you sure it was Jaskier the Bard?” I can’t be. It must be someone else.
“Oh aye sir, I’m sure,” he nods emphatically. “The famous Jaskier, sometimes called the Viscount Julian of…Lettercove? Letting–Let–”
“Lettenhove,” Geralt gruffs, throat tight. The boy keeps talking, but he can’t hear it over the fog that rises up in him. He’s dead, sir, echoes on repeat in time with the blacksmith’s hammer.
He’s dead, sir, follows him to the beat of Roach’s hooves on his way back to the safe house.
He’s dead, sir, crunches under his boots as he approaches the door.
He’s dead, sir, whispers one more time in the click of the latch. He looks up, seeing what’s in front of him for the first time in a good while. Yen and Ciri heard him enter, rising to meet him, but their smiles falter and they hesitate when they see his face.
“Geralt?” Ciri asks, cocking her head and reaching for his arm. “Did something happen?”
He stares. Her eyes are so, so green. He’s going to hurt her. He’s going to hurt them all.
“It’s Jaskier,” he rasps, voice strange and hollow in the quiet room. “He’s gone.”
“That can’t be right,” Yennefer frowns. “There hasn’t been even a whisper of the fire mage since we split up; he’s as safe as he can be in Oxenfurt.”
Geralt shakes his head, glancing from Yen to Ciri and back. “Wasn’t the mage,” he grimaces. “Fever.”
Ciri’s fingers curl into Geralt’s shirt. “No, it’s not even winter yet. He couldn’t get sick!” His human daughter, Geralt thinks. She understands on a more fundamental level than her nigh-immortal parents the constant menace of illness and injury. Even her blazing magic can’t keep her completely safe, but with a mage as her mother, whose best friend is the best magical healer on the continent, she needs never fear the clutches of something so mundane as a fever.
Jaskier, though. Brilliant, beautiful, human Jaskier…they had sent him unarmed and unprotected back to the Sandpiper network, and feared only that he would run afoul of the political and magical machinations that swept across the continent like an incoming storm. None of them had ever expected something as pointless and banal as a common illness.
If Geralt had held out any hope that he was imagining things, Yennefer’s face rips that away. He watches it fall and then crumple, her chin creasing in a way he rarely sees. “Oh, songbird,” she whispers. Then she’s in his arms, clasping Ciri between them. “Geralt. Geralt, I’m sorry. We couldn’t have known.”
“We should have,” Ciri quavers, tears in her voice and hot-then-cold against Geralt’s shirt. “He got hurt for me; what if it was infection or–or–”
“No, Ciri,” Geralt squeezes his girls, trying to press them into the aching void where once his heart beat slow and steady. “No, he was healed before he left. This has naught to do with you. Us.”
“Just a stupid sickness,” Yennefer’s voice is brittle. “After everything, just a stupid, gods-damned sickness.”
*****
Geralt has always experienced death as an inevitability. His brothers die. He’ll die. Such is the life of a Witcher.
Jaskier, though…Jaskier isn’t–wasn’t–a Witcher. He was light and sound and color and somehow Geralt had felt that the darkness of his own life just slid off the bard. It was as if Jaskier had parted the shadows wherever he went, like shafts of sunlight through the glowering clouds of Geralt’s existence. He knew Jaskier was mortal but he had always, when he allowed himself to think of it, pictured the poet retiring quietly in his old age, perhaps dandling his grandchildren on his knee and singing them lullabies of his own writing.
The idea that the world no longer contains all Jaskier’s brightness and joy is beyond unutterable. There are no words to express the depth of loss Geralt feels, like a physical hole in his very self. It’s like he is reduced to nothing more than the way he hurts in the present moment; the future doesn’t exist anymore.
“Geralt.” Ciri’s voice comes to him from far away, although the hand she lays on his shoulder is startling and immediate. He realizes he is kneeling in front of their home’s small hearth, hands on his knees as if in meditation. He knows he did not mediate. “I’m off to bed,” Ciri murmurs and her hair brushes his face as she gives him a hug around the shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she whispers to him, his beautiful child. She has lost her entire world once over already but still has room to comfort him. He doesn’t deserve it.
She doesn’t wait for him to reply and disappears into her loft. He hears her soft shuffling as she settles in. It means nothing.
Yennefer sinks down beside him. She says nothing, but he can feel her misery. It feels like his own, a bitter potion of regret and devastation. When she lays a slim, cool hand on his arm, he breaks. He’s already on his knees but anguish drives him down further, elbows on the stone beneath him and hands clasped over the back of his head. Sound refuses to pass his throat, but he can hear his own breath in the darkened hollow he’s made for himself as it rasps in and out. Yen makes a soft, formless sound beside him and then she’s laying herself over his back, head tucked down onto his shoulder and arms going as far around him as she can manage.
Geralt understands physical pain. He knows how to treat injuries. If this were a wound to his body, he would apply a tourniquet, a poultice, a potion. He would breathe through the agony with gritted teeth and short gasps, his hands would tremble and his skin would bubble and burn. But in the end, it would heal. He would be up and walking within a day. Anything other than an actual amputation, a Witcher can usually come back from. Even then, he can probably cope with losing a digit or maybe an eye on the path, he can adapt his fighting and hunting and be a successful Witcher still. But this?
There will be no coming back from this, Geralt realizes. The shape of the world has changed, and himself along with it. Even now, he is growing around the shape of the grief in his soul, cracking and shattering to make room for it. He suspects, dreads, that he will carry it always.
“Come.” Yen’s voice is no more than a breath, as if she fears breaking him into his very atoms if she speaks aloud. “Come to bed.” The fire has burned down into a bed of coals, glowing and crackling softly every so often. Geralt feels as if he is made of stone, but Yen’s cheek presses against his shoulder and her arms scoop around him. She stands, and he drags himself up with her as though coming from deep underground. He is the one that can see in the dark, but she guides him to their bed and helps him undress. They lie down and she wraps herself over his side, head on his shoulder and his arm around her back. Her breath trembles over his chest and he feels a few tears there.
Eventually her breathing settles and the tears dry, but no such relief comes for Geralt. He stares into the dark and does not sleep.
*****
In the morning, Geralt cuts his hair.
He doesn’t so much make a decision as he follows a burning undefined need to do something. It’s not right that the sun rises the same as it always has, that the birds wake in the foggy morning and sing like they did before Jaskier…before. Something needs to change in the face of such sorrow. He is cruelly and acutely aware of what he is doing, and of everything that he feels. There is no muting comfort of shock, just the grey stretch of a near-guaranteed long life without Jaskier in it.
So, kneeling at the treeline around their cottage, he takes a blade to the silver mane that won him the name the White Wolf. That made Jaskier call him the White Wolf. Jaskier is gone. Maybe Geralt’s name will be, too.
His head is cold as he walks back inside, where Yen looks at him with sad, sombre eyes and Ciri hugs him around the middle. He pets her hair and stares back at Yen, completely at a loss for words. She just presses her lips together and turns away, making a show of chopping herbs at the table. Ciri gives him an extra squeeze and steps back, still close enough that she has to crane her head to see his face fully.
“I want to wear black,” she tells him. He cocks his head and she goes on. “I know you and Yennefer wear it all the time but in Cintra, before. That’s what you did when someone you love died.” She buffs her forehead against him like a kitten seeking comfort. “I didn’t get to after I escaped, but can I now? For…my family?”
She means Calanthe and Eist, Geralt knows, and Mousesack, but also Jaskier. He was as much family to her as he and Yennefer, someone she could confide in that wasn’t wrapped up in Destiny to his eyeballs or needing something from her. He brought her light and joy, just as he did to Geralt. He lays a hand on her head again and thinks about the catharsis of shaving his own head, the way it’s something tangible he can feel that is fundamentally different. It helps.
“Of course, dear girl,” Yennefer tells her, and Geralt nods. “We can make over something of mine for you, or cut down some of Geralt’s castoffs. You can practice your sewing and your magic.” Ciri darts over to hug Yennefer as well, and Geralt sighs. It feels like it comes from the soles of his feet.
Nothing will fix this, but…they care as much as he does. That helps.
*****
Yennefer surprises him in the coming days. Perhaps it’s a little selfish to think of himself as the most grieved, insofar as he’s been able to think around the fog in his head, but the depth to which Yen seems to feel the bard’s loss startles him.
“What was he to you?” Geralt finally asks her one afternoon as they pull weeds in the kitchen garden.
Yen sighs and sits back on her heels, eyes closed and tilted toward the sky. They are silent for a long moment until she sighs again and says, “Possibility. Promise.” She winds her fingers together in her lap and looks down at them. “In Oxenfurt, he saw me. I’d lost my magic, and, well, you know. I was desperate. We weren’t even friends.” She smiles ruefully. “He even told me ‘good riddance’ once I was on that boat to Xin’trea.”
Geralt sits back as well, watching wistful amusement play across her face. “But after that, it was like…he knew the smallest, darkest parts of me and cared anyway.”
“Hm,” Geralt draws a deep breath that smells of moist earth and growing things. “I know what that’s like.”
“I know,” Yen smiles wryly at him out of the corner of her eye. “I didn’t know such a thing was possible until I met you in Rinde. I never told you, but when I healed him–I saw what he thought of you.”
He looks away. “I’d just set a djinn on his voice.”
“He loved you,” Yennefer continues over top of him. It hurts to hear, but it is perhaps the sweetest pain Geralt has ever known. They are words he never let himself think, but hearing Yennefer say them sets something in him free.
“He loved us,” Geralt breathes, trying the shape of the words in his mouth and finding that they fit.
“So much.” Yen tips to the side so her shoulder presses against his. “With everything he had.”
*****
Geralt collects enough ichor from his hunts to dye Ciri’s leathers black and she would look like him in miniature if it weren’t for the fact that he keeps his hair cropped short as the months pass. Yennefer favors black and always has, but she now wears a buttercup pinned to her dress or in her hair, bespelled to be ever-blooming.
They move to a new house, and another, and another. Geralt thinks of going to Oxenfurt, to see if Jaskier has a grave site, or if there is anything left of him that they could remember him by. Jaskier was a creature of treasures, of comforts, and some days Geralt thinks he would give anything for a scrap to hold close. Something that Jaskier touched, as if holding it in his absence would confer that touch across time. It’s silly, sentimental, and too dangerous to be seen in a city anyway, so Geralt buries the ache of wanting a tangible memory in his hands alongside the much larger, piercing grief of wanting his friend back.
It’s easy to call Jaskier his friend now and he wishes that he’d been brave enough to tell Jaskier. The poet had never shied from letting Geralt know that he was Jaskier’s best friend and had never been stingy with his regard or affection. Geralt’s own unfairness and reticence sits like a brick of regret in his gut whenever he thinks of it.
What would it have been like if he could have let himself…love Jaskier back?
The morning he thinks that, he saddles Roach and rides out alone, letting her pick their route and just drifting in his own thoughts. What would it have been like? Jaskier would have been so happy. Geralt would have been so happy. What could it have been like with Yennefer? Jaskier’s love was always so boundless, his affection so genuine, Geralt thinks it would have healed something in Yenn that his own rusty, gruff fondness just can’t quite touch. It certainly changed Geralt.
The rhythmic squeak and jingle of Roach’s tack and the scuff-thud of her hooves on the packed dirt road soothes him as he thinks, although it’s bittersweet to do it in silence with no jaunty strumming or cheerful patter from the bard to break up the quiet. He misses it, and the realization doesn’t hurt the way it might have at one time. He can see now how hard he’d tried to keep his heart closed, only to realize how deeply Jaskier had crept in by dint of having him ripped away. But Jaskier had also made way for Yennefer and Ciri, whom he still has and suddenly he needs them to know. They need to know how much he needs them, loves them. Jaskier will never know, now, but he still has time to tell Yennefer and Ciri how much they mean to him.
With a quick shift of his weight and a light hand on the reins, Geralt turns Roach toward home and lets her have her head to speed them there.
*****
“I love you,” he murmurs, kissing Ciri’s forehead as she heads off to bed.
“I love you,” he smiles, running a hand down the silky length of Yenn’s hair as they move around each other making dinner.
“I love you,” he whispers to the dawn, thinking of all the times he and woke before Jaskier on the Path and listened to his friend’s peaceful breathing as the sun rose.
It’s as if the words bubble out of him now that he realizes he could lose the opportunity to say them to the people that need them. The first time he says it to Yenn she stares at him for almost a full minute. Ciri just smirks and ducks her head. It doesn’t stop him; he feels it constantly, the sweet ache in his chest and the battering of the words against the back of his teeth. He’s felt it before, but he always clenched his jaw and fought the words back, hardened himself and ignored the beating of love in his breast. Later he always thought. There was always something happening, somewhere to be, a contract to fulfill, the Path to walk. It’s not for me. Don’t get involved.
But somehow, he was–is–involved. Losing Jaskier wouldn’t have hurt him so, if he hadn’t cared. Without even realizing, he had built a life for himself with dear, beloved friends and family, and somehow fooled himself into thinking he was alone.
And now Jaskier will never know how much he mattered. But it’s not too late for Yenn or Ciri to know, and so he keeps telling them.
“I love you, I love you, I love you,” his voice learns how to fit around the words so they feel natural and well-worn. Yennefer smiles at him now when he says it, looking young and hopeful in a way he’s never seen. Ciri blossoms, secure in her place with them, their child in truth by fate and by choice. It’s good. It’s very good. Jaskier would have been so happy with them. They would have all been…home.
*****
Five safe houses without Jaskier, and it’s late autumn. They’re on the move again and Geralt knows this time they need help. The weather is worsening and they need a truly safe place to hunker down for the winter. He can survive just about any hardship, and both Yenn and Ciri have magic on their side, but there can be plenty of misery along with survival if they have to struggle through the teeth of winter on the run, and he wants better for his family. Yennefer has property near Vengerberg, heavily warded and seldom used, so that is where they need to go…without being detected.
So, they follow a rumor. Yennefer had gone to the Sandpiper once in desperation and found a friend. Jaskier is gone now, but people still whisper about the Sandpiper so the mantle must have been taken up by a successor. Elves and other non-humans are still fleeing persecution in the Northern kingdoms and the network seems to be alive and well if the information Geralt has is any good.
As it turns out, the rumor finds them. They’re riding single file through a smattering of woods between towns when someone calls out to them from the brush beside the road. “Vattghern,” the elf is bright-haired and dressed in mismatched armor and hunting garb. He’s armed, but has his hands up and empty to show he means no harm. “You and your traveling companions are made welcome.”
“Really now,” Geralt halts Roach, angling her so she obscures Yenn and Ciri as much as he can manage. “And who do you think we are, to be welcomed so easily?”
The elf snorts. “Don’t mock me, Gwynbleidd. You are known to us even shorn and bearded.”
Well that doesn’t sound great. He does know some elves, but hasn’t seen them since he went into hiding and so drastically altered his own appearance. “Show yourselves,” he bids to the open air, addressing the heartbeats he can hear off the path, hidden in the trees. “We mean no harm, but I would know to whom I speak.”
“Really, Geralt, that’s such a grouchy way to greet people. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”
Geralt knows that voice. He knows it, but it’s impossible. He hasn’t heard it for nearly a year, and there’s no way he’s really hearing it now.
He has steel in his hand before anyone can blink and he snarls, “Show yourself,” at the –spectre? Spirit? Hallucination? Using Jaskier’s voice to greet him.
The man who steps out of the woods cannot be real. He looks real. He sounds real. But Jaskier is dead, and Geralt has grieved him these past months like a widower. “How dare you,” he’s off his horse and reaching for the doppler–it has to be a doppler–faster than the elves, who are suddenly very visible and upset, can draw down on him. The forest bristles with arrows and the monster wearing Jaskier’s face shouts.
“No!” he calls, holding his hands out to the sides and turning his head to look at his elven companions even as Geralt’s hand closes around his throat. “N–Geralt–they’ll shoot you,” he chokes.
“Let them.” Geralt can hear the lifeblood thumping through the apparition’s carotid and it sounds human. “I can crush your throat before I die and you’ll never wear his face again.”
“Wh–wh–” Jaskier’s stolen face is red but he’s still flapping his hands frantically at the elves, waving for them to lower their bows. “Ger–” he flails one hand forward and slaps at Geralt’s chest.
“Geralt!” Ciri’s voice, shrill and afraid, cuts through the roaring in Geralt’s ears. He sees her in his periphery, dismounted and holding her sword, sure and steady. His brave daughter; he turns enough to make eye contact with her.
“It’s all right,” he tells her, and the imposter’s fingers find his medallion.
“Geralt!” Yenn’s voice is a deeper timbre, and oh, she’s furious.
There’s a sharp tug on his medallion and…nothing happens. That’s…that’s not right, what–?
“Geralt, look,” Yennefer begs, and he does.
The man–he must be a man, for Geralt’s medallion is still and the man’s hand isn’t burned or harmed by the silver–he is still hanging from Geralt’s grip, turning red and gurgling. Gods. “Jaskier?” Geralt forces the name out in tatters, shredded by the jagged pieces of his heart that tremble as he loosens his hand. “Jask?”
“Fuck!” Jaskier croaks, one hand still on Geralt’s medallion and the other gripping the wrist of the hand that a moment ago was poised to tear his throat out. He heaves with a wet, nasty cough and spits to the side. “What the fuck, Geralt, you ass.”
“You’re dead,” Geralt rasps. “A fever. Last winter. How. Jaskier.” Geralt’s entire face burns and his body washes cold. If Witchers could faint, he’d be flat out. Fortunately a slow heartbeat means he doesn’t even get a headrush, but his hands tremble as he grips Jaskier’s shoulders so, so gently.
“Jaskier!” Ciri blows right past Geralt and flings herself fully into Jaskier’s arms. The poet staggers, but catches her despite having just been on the verge of strangulation.
“My but you’ve grown,” he hacks again, what meagre breath he has knocked out of him by Ciri’s dive.
“Sandpiper,” the leader of the group, who first greeted them, entreats. “Perhaps–ah, off the path?”
“Help me stumble,” Jaskier bids Ciri, smiling at her. “Your father has quite winded me.”
“Brute,” Yennefer’s voice comes from behind Geralt and he takes the reins she hands him numbly. He finds himself in charge of his horse as well as Ciri’s as they move off the trodden path onto a little track that’s hardly more than a deer trail.
Geralt feels as if he’s stepped into a muffling fog. He can hear Jaskier murmuring to Ciri ahead of him and feel Yenn’s irritation behind him, but his own thoughts are far away and muddled. Just, Jaskier, Jaskier, Jaskier to the beat of his own slow heart
*****
The elves’ camp is some ways off the road and just as promised, they are welcomed and made comfortable. Geralt manages to hold it together until their horses are tended and they’ve accepted the elves’ hospitality in the form of seats around the fire and mugs of an herbal brew to stave off the cold. Then, he catches Jaskier’s wrist as he passes and looks helplessly up at him.
“How?” is all he can say.
Jaskier’s face melts into an unbearably soft half-smile. “My dear Witcher,” he clasps Geralt’s hand and keeps hold of it as he sits down beside him. “Have you truly thought me dead all this time?”
“Yes,” Yennefer blurts, scowling at her mug.
“I’m so very sorry,” Jaskier turns that longed-for, lovely face on her and she casts her eyes to the side, avoiding him. “I didn’t think–that is,” he clears his throat. “I didn’t want to assume.”
“What, that we…” missed you? Needed you? Loved you? Geralt searches desperately for a way to say it all but Ciri preempts him with the beautiful bluntness of a child.
“We missed you so much,” she tells Jaskier gravely, bending forward to impress on him just how much his loss was felt. “It was horrible, you were just gone, and it didn’t make any sense.”
“No, I suppose it didn’t.” Jaskier squeezes Geralt’s hand, which is when Geralt realizes he's still got a hold of Jaskier. Or maybe Jaskier has a hold of him. Their fingers are interlaced now. Did he do that? Did Jaskier? “Oxenfurt became too dangerous,” Jaskier explains, “and my name and face were too recognizable. I couldn’t risk exposing the network, or someone besides Rience deciding that my past association with you all was something they wanted to explore. So, Shani helped me. She falsified my death certificate and the elves smuggled me out.”
“But you should have come and found us,” Ciri insists. “We could have.” Her voice tightens and she stops. “Oh, sweet girl,” Jaskier reaches out to pat her knee. “I was still helping here,” he explains, “and it wouldn’t have been safe for you three, in case I was followed,” he shook his head. “Please believe me, I took no joy in it.”
Abruptly, Yennefer hisses and bolts to her feet. Her mug tumbles to the ground as she whirls away and they watch her stop out of the circle of firelight in the growing dusk. Jaskier watches her go, eyebrows tilted up in bewilderment, and he looks to Geralt for answers.
“She took it hard.” Geralt lifts one shoulder in a little shrug. “We all did.”
“Should I…?” Jaskier looks down at their interwoven fingers and up into Geralt’s face.
“Go.” Geralt squeezes his hand. He’s loath to let go but Jaskier is here and he’s real and if he thinks Geralt’s not going to grab his hand again when he comes back, he’s not paying attention. “She–you should talk to her.”
“I’ll be back,” Jaskier promises, standing. Geralt nods, and Jaskier stares hard at him for a moment. “I’m coming back.”
“You’d better,” Geralt gives him a lopsided half-grin. “Go, though.”
“If I get hexed, please un-hex me,” Jaskier grins. “Be back in a bit.”
*****
For all Geralt knows it’d be polite to give Yenn and Jaskier some privacy, he can’t take his eyes off the bard. He’s still all muddled inside, but seeing Jaskier–walking, talking, living Jaskier–stills the wild thrashing of his mind to a manageable level of chaos.
It’s dark enough now that if he weren’t a Witcher they’d already be hidden in the gloaming, but he can see Jaskier approach Yennefer off to the side of the horses’ picket line clear as day. She’s got her back to the camp, shoulders hunched and arms crossed, fingers digging into her own upper arms viciously. Jaskier wisely stops a little ways off, letting her acknowledge him before moving close enough to converse.
“We would have kept you safe,” Yennefer says into the dark, her voice even but heavy with hurt. “You said it wouldn’t have been safe for us, but we can–we could have–”
“Yennefer, Yenn,” Jaskier steps up to her back, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder. Geralt sees her flinch and jerk her head to turn farther away so that Jaskier won’t see her face. “Darling Witch, we both know you are the most fearsome mage on the Continent, and our Witcher is the strongest of all his brothers. We know that Ciri is magnificent in her own right. But don’t you know what it would do to me if any harm befell you? Because of me?”
Yennefer smacks Jaskier’s hand away as she whirls on him. “It wouldn’t!” She cries, all but stomping her foot at him. “You didn’t give us a choice!” She balls up her fists. “We thought you were dead and you just did that to us without–” her voice chokes off as Jaskier dares to reach forward. Ever so slowly, he catches the night-sky fall of her hair where it spills like ink over her shoulder and brushes it softly back.
“Yennefer,” he whispers hoarsely. Her hair falls back behind her, exposing the defiantly fresh petals of the little buttercup she wears over her heart. Her eyes are so wide, so deep as she stares up at Jaskier, caught. “Yennefer, is this…?”
“Yes,” Yenn’s eyes flick back and forth, looking Jaskier in the eye, and her voice is so soft Geralt almost can’t hear it even with his mutations. “It–you were gone.” She clenches and stretches her fingers by turns, bringing one hand up to touch Jaskier’s elbow. His hand still hovers over the bright blossom, not quite touching it.
“Oh, my dear,” Jaskier breathes, a fingertip just brushing the edge of a petal. “I didn’t know.”
Yenn scowls. “I hate you,” she tells him, an obstinate set to her jaw.
Jaskier gives a laugh that sounds distinctly watery, but his voice is warm and fond when he says, “I love you, too.” He moves a hand to cup her face. “I shan’t leave you alone again by choice, I swear it.”
Yennefer closes her eyes, pained, and leans into his touch. “I’ll kill you if you do,” she swears with a choke in her voice. “Or turn you into a slug.”
“I hope so,” Jaskier whispers and presses a kiss to her forehead. “My dearest Witch. Yenn.”
*****
Yenn shoves Jaskier back toward the fire after they’ve murmured to each other a little bit, for which Geralt meticulously focused his attention on the other activity in camp. He knows he’s still staring as soon as they’re moving back toward him and Ciri, but he doesn’t have it in him to be embarrassed about it. He can feel questions and confessions bubbling up in his throat as he watches them approach and judging by the narrow look Ciri is giving him she knows he’s hanging on by his shredded fingernails.
“I’m just going to…go,” she says as smoothly as a teenage girl can, when Jaskier drops down next to the fire and Yennefer folds herself elegantly down so that Jaskier is between her and Geralt. “To bed. Do not disappear!” She points directly at Jaskier and uses her most imperious tone, at which Geralt hides a smile in his mug. He loves her so much.
“Cross my heart.” Jaskier grins at her. “Sweet dreams, Ciri.”
She darts off, and Geralt can feel Jaskier’s attention on him without looking. Here it comes…
“Geralt,” Jaskier touches his wrist. “I know you must be livid, gods know I’d be beside myself if I thought you were gone! Just, I thought…I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think that it would be such a…problem.”
“Problem?” Geralt turns to him, wide-eyed. What a word! “Jask, you died.” That is so much more than a problem. It was the end of the world. “And then I almost killed you!”
“You didn’t, though,” Jaskier points out with a rueful half-smile. “And you didn’t think it was me while you were trying.”
“Jaskier,” Geralt growls, exasperated. He is upset, but it pales in comparison to the overwhelming joy that is emerging, having Jaskier here with him. It’s dark out, but it feels like the sun has risen for the first time in months and months.
Jaskier gazes at him, face half in shadow in the firelight. He’s so lovely, painted in warm gilded shades that dance with the deepening shadows around them. Slowly, giving Geralt a chance to duck away, he pets his fingertips over the shorn brush of Geralt’s hair. Geralt’s eyes slide shut and he tilts his head into the feeling, which trails down his sideburn to cup his whiskery cheek. “You look so different,” he whispers.
“I am different,” Geralt tells him with his eyes still shut and leaning the full weight of his head into Jaskier’s hand. “How was I meant to go on without you?”
“Geralt.” Jaskier’s voice is so soft he can’t hear anything except the click of the consonants and when he looks, Jaskier’s eyes are brimming. “Forgive me?” he pleads, still holding Geralt’s face in the welcome home of his palm.
“I love you,” Geralt says in answer, the worlds spilling out of him as they’ve been waiting to do for months. He never thought he’d get to say them and he won’t miss his chance now.
Jaskier shudders out a breath, eyes falling shut and two fat tears tracking down his face. One slips down to the point of his chin and the other snags on the edge of his trembling lip. Geralt leans forward to catch that one with his own mouth, just the softest press of lips he can muster. He takes the hand from his face then and presses another kiss to the palm. Jaskier’s other hand flies to his knee and squeezes, bracing himself up at the same time. “Geralt,” he husks again, helpless.
Geralt takes Jaskier’s face between his hands and kisses his forehead. “I forgive you,” he says into Jaskier’s hairline. “I love you. Of course I forgive you.”
“I still hate you.” Yenn’s voice startles them both and they jolt apart just a hair. She’s moved around Jaskier to stand at his side, between them and the fire. “But I forgive you, too” she murmurs and slides a hand in to take Jaskier’s chin between her fingers. He gapes up at her for a moment, and she goes to her knees to kiss him. He huffs out a shocked breath through his nose and takes a moment to catch up and get his eyes closed. His lashes are still wet, but he pushes back into Yennefer’s kiss eagerly, hands fluttering between her and Geralt before settling on one atop Geralt’s knee and the other curved around Yenn’s shoulder.
“I love you both,” Jaskier blurts when Yenn lets him go. He’s looking at them both, one after the other, looking a little desperate. “You know that, don’t you?”
Geralt smirks. “We figured it out.”
“Oh, that’s good then,” Jaskier beams. “Wait, was it before or after I supposedly died?”
He tips directly over onto his back, laughing warmly, as both Yennfer and Geralt scoff in indignation and shove him. Yennefer follows him over to pin his shoulders to the ground, giving him a little shake but laughing along with him. “You little shit. I figured it out first,” she declares, glancing at Geralt. “I think our Witcher knew, but it took him a minute to figure out he loves us back.”
Geralt reels back, attention sharpening on her face. She’s giving him a hard, pointed look, but he can see the vulnerability itching at her in the tension around her eyes. “Us?” he asks her. “Back?” Geralt has spent the last several months affirming his affection to both Yenn and Ciri, but Yennefer has never…
“Yes, well,” Yenn says primly, sitting back up and adjusting her cuffs. “I suppose we both love you, don’t we?” She sniffs. “And we,” she gestures between herself and Geralt. “Both love this idiot.”
“Oh my dears,” Jaskier laughs, still on his back. “I love you too.”
*****