Archive of Our Own ^beta

The day that Jaskier dies, Geralt wakes up to an almighty ringing in his ears.

Later, much later, he’ll remember it and think it should've been somehow more; he should’ve known, then and there, that something was horribly wrong. Should’ve had some bone-deep certainty telling him that the world around him was irrevocably different—but instead, his medallion doesn’t so much as tremble. Instead, he staggers out of a shaky meditation and packs up a hasty campsite, ushers the fucking Lion Cub of Cintra onto Roach’s saddle in front of him and starts their mad dash to Kaer Morhen against the encroaching wrath of both winter and the Nilfgaardian empire. They’ve made good time, already a week’s travel into Temeria, but the nights are getting colder and colder still. Snowstorms blow through more and more frequently, forcing them to travel through the biting winds and whipping sleet instead of waiting them out, and the snows stay longer on the ground, pile thicker and higher around Roach’s legs.

In the face of that, a headache? A jagged pull settling behind his ribs, overwhelmingly aware that something is not right? It’s the least of Geralt’s fucking concerns; he can list on one hand with fingers to spare the things that don’t consume him with worry. 

But they’ll be in Kaer Morhen soon. Ciri will be safe, destiny will be fulfilled, and this aching, gnawing thing in his chest will pass.

Unremarkably, destiny has zero qualms proving Geralt utterly, excruciatingly wrong.

Geralt spends the first few days in Kaer Morhen checking and rechecking his own supplies, looking for something wrong. When he finds nothing but the feeling lingers, the weight of something missing lurking just over his shoulder, he makes his way through everyone else’s.

The few days after that, he roams in wider and wider circles through the keep grounds and beyond them, scouring the valley for any monsters who haven’t slunk off to hide from the cold already. The Morhen valley is practically fucking idyllic. It fills Geralt, inexplicably, with a boiling, scratching dread, hot in the back of his throat.

By the end of the week, he caves and asks Eskel, Lambert, and Coën if they're alright. Lambert snorts and nearly chokes on his breakfast, doesn't manage to dodge the smacks upside the head from Coën and Eskel both. (More or less, the exact reaction Geralt expects.) Geralt doesn’t make the same mistake twice; he would sooner rebrick the entire outer wall of the keep starkers naked in a Kaedweni blizzard than repeat the question to Vesemir. But he feels the old witcher’s shrewd eyes on him as he works himself up further and further, chasing shadows. Vesemir will let him have his histrionics—for now. Just until he burns through this.

Another week goes by. Then two, then three. Geralt feels it in his chest, his throat, prickling down his spine like a fever he can’t sweat out. If anything, the more he finds things exactly as he left them, in their rightful place, the more certain he is that everything has changed. 

In the end, it’s Lambert who hunts him down after an entire savaed of his manic skulking. He’s not subtle about it at all: gracious enough to give Geralt a minute’s head start before following him up onto the ramparts, but not enough not to catch up in seconds, whistling jauntily as he takes the stairs two at a time. 

By the time they pick their way onto a relatively stable section of the defending wall, Geralt’s original plan to methodically test the stonework for new weak points (or at least to pace back and forth until his knees ache and his head spins and the steady pulse of panic under his breastbone finally stops) seems less and less feasible. Now all he wants is to survive the ribbing he’s sure is imminent, the mocking that Eskel’s foreboding look and Coën’s grip on Lambert’s shoulder had cut short weeks ago and Lambert’s been sitting on ever since. 

Instead, Lambert knocks their shoulders together when Geralt finally stops his headlong pacing to sag against the stone, and then he steps away entirely to lean against the wall across from him. All the better to scrutinize Geralt’s face while pretending to stare past him into the valley. Geralt’s mouth ticks up in a wry smile, against his better judgement. "Come to nanny me, have you?"

Lambert's lip curls, a half-assed snarl. "Oh, shove a cock in it. Figures you'd pull yourself out of your fucking mood long enough to mock me."

Geralt arches an eyebrow. "And you came up here to find me on a mission of goodwill?"

It's easy here in the keep, with his brothers. His words come so much faster, clearer than with—than with other people. Geralt knows how this conversation will go: Lambert’s mouth will drop open on some colourful new insult he's picked up from Aiden, they'll trade barbs back and forth like wooden swords on the practice field. Lambert might even make a lunge for him, and Vesemir will make a bland comment at supper about a pair of overgrown squirrels he'd seen scuffling along the walls earlier in the day.

But Lambert only frowns. He stays relaxed against the stone he leans on—as relaxed as a witcher can ever be, arms crossed, shoulders tense, eyes moving at any sound—and his voice has no bite to it. "No, you shitstain. I came up here to see if you're alright."

“I’m fine.”

Lambert hums, unimpressed. “Right, so you’re just tearing around the keep like there’s a fire up your arse for the fun of it?” He pauses. “Huh. Then again, it is you—”

“It’s fine, Lambert!” Geralt snaps, and regrets it instantly. Lambert’s eyes light up with barely contained glee at the easy win, and Geralt briefly considers pitching himself over the defending wall. It’s not that far a drop, and the wind-packed snow below him will probably cushion the worst of it. Either way, it would be better than staying here; no one baits him like Lambert can, like he’s been able to since Geralt returned one winter decades ago to find a bristly, snappish little bastard hiding from Vesemir and Barmin in his room, glowering at Geralt like he was the one intruding. 

Geralt bares his teeth at the smug look on Lambert’s face but they both know there’s no bite to it; he’s too tired and strung out to put his energy into responding to one of Lambert’s fangless jabs. They stare off into their respective middle distances for a while at that, a frigid wind whipping up flecks of stone from the crumbling walls around them to scatter across the snow. The howling of the wind through the gaps in the stone has almost lulled Geralt into a light meditation when Lambert twitches away from the wall he leans on, frowning as if something’s only just occurred to him. 

“It’s not Triss, is it?” he demands. “This isn’t you trying to outrun an awkward morning after?”

Geralt briefly considers pitching Lambert off the ramparts before deciding against it: it’s not that far a drop, and unfortunately the snow would break his fall. “No,” he hisses, “it isn’t Triss.”

“You sure? You about shit yourself when she showed up.” 

“You—” Geralt cuts himself off, pressing himself hard against the wall at his back and sucking in a deep breath between his teeth. There’s no sense in reminding Lambert that he’d jumped just as high as the rest of them when Triss’ bird appeared in Kaer Morhen days after Geralt and Ciri, tapping indignantly at one of the kitchen windows while the witchers’ medallions all jumped and rattled in unison. The letter it carried hadn’t been entirely unexpected—as little as Geralt can stand mages, he has met more than a few, and enough of them who don’t outright hate him were willing to pass around pointed, cautious inquiries about Yennefer on the journey to Kaer Morhen. The plan had been to get Ciri to the keep as soon as possible and wait the winter out before searching for the mage in earnest. Teaching her magic could wait, Geralt had thought, as young as she was. It was a plan that rapidly fell apart ten minutes across the Lormark border, when Ciri’s scream had reduced a band of mercenaries to a fine red mist and sent Geralt toppling down a ravine, leaving him with a concussion that had been slow to heal. 

In hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised Geralt that Triss would track him down the moment his inquiries reached her. Even during their brief encounter in Temeria, she’d dug her heels in with a stubbornness that’d been as impressive as it had been fucking irritating, and hearing that Yennefer was at least alive soothes Geralt’s nerves more than he cares to admit. (Until a letter from Yennefer appears in his bedroom soon after, first raking him over the coals for his melodramatics and then extending a wary offer of peace, all wrapped in a healthy dose of condescension.)

So in hindsight, when Geralt replies in extremely vague terms—some purely theoretical questions, with assurances that he’d visit a mage in person as soon as the passes cleared—it shouldn’t have surprised him that Triss would portal directly into the library the next evening, narrowly missing putting her foot in the fire and tipping Coën out of the chair he’d been precariously balancing on two legs. It took the sorceress all of two seconds to look from Geralt to Ciri to determine that his questions had been anything but theoretical. And after all, she’d argued, once Coën had picked himself up off the floor and the hem of her cloak was extinguished, Geralt did say he needed to see a mage. 

(Vesemir is the only one who doesn’t so much as flinch, only arching an eyebrow at her over his book on Zerrikanian sabremanship. Whether it’s because the old witcher is used to the hubris of mages or this is just the sort of nonsense he’s learned to expect from Geralt these days, Geralt doesn’t particularly want to dwell on it.)

Now, Lambert leans back against the rampart, but his frown lingers. “‘S a bit weird, isn’t it? Having a mage in Kaer Morhen again.”

“Hmm.” Lambert doesn’t play well with—with anyone, really, but he’s been especially prickly to the mage. Geralt had chalked it up to a matter of proximity: Lambert spends most of his winters in the stillroom, brewing all sorts of crazy bullshit. It’s no wonder he saw more of Triss than anyone besides Ciri. 

“She took to it pretty quick, is all I mean.” His frown deepens into a scowl, and Lambert waggles his hand as if to clarify. “I mean, I know she’s not gonna drag the kid into the cellars and start pumping her full of mushrooms, it’s just—” Lambert mutters something under his breath, frustrated. “She picked up in the old workshop like the mages never left.”

“There’s only two schools of magic in the Northern Kingdoms. They’ve probably been teaching them the same way to organize a damn stillroom for centuries.” Geralt doesn’t add that he’d bet coin that if he opened his, Coën’s, and Vesemir’s potion bags, they would all be laid out in nearly the same way, age and witcher school notwithstanding. Sorcerers aren’t the only ones who are sticklers for habit.

Lambert makes a face. He knows Geralt’s probably right, even if he’ll never admit it. Instead, he shrugs with affected ease. “Triss isn’t bad, for a mage,” he admits. Geralt keeps his face carefully neutral; from Lambert, that’s high praise. As if he can sense it, Lambert squints suspiciously at him for a long moment before he adds, “Not that bad having her around, I guess.”

“I guess,” Geralt replies, perfectly bland.

“Probably not like any keep she’s used to, huh?”

“Hmm.”

Lambert eyes him warily, and Geralt gets the sneaking suspicion he’s being led into a trap. “Ciri either, I’ll bet. Kaer Morhen’s probably nothing like any castle she’s ever been in.”

“Hmm.” Geralt resists the urge to scowl, if barely, but Lambert isn’t wrong. Geralt knows the sort of bond that forms between a child lost alone in the woods and the man who saves them, who tells them he’s bringing them somewhere safe—the same way he knows the terror and adrenaline of their frantic flight up the Continent can hold off the terror and adrenaline and memories of Ciri’s weeks spent alone for only so long. Dragging her halfway across the world, promising her safety in the burnt-out shell of a sacked fortress, a mockery of the worst day of her life? There were a thousand ways it could’ve gone horribly wrong; a thousand ways he could’ve hurt someone he’d promised to protect.

(If Geralt’s worry stems from experience, of every inn and tavern carrying the echo of different songs, a different singer, of waking to the sound of three heartbeats in the camp but a different body curled into the bedroll next to his—well, it’s different. Ciri is a victim of the tragedy she’s survived, not the hand that dealt it.) 

So Geralt kept a close eye on Ciri when they’d first staggered into the keep, wary of it being too much, too close to the home she hasn’t had time to mourn yet. But in the smallest of mercies, her eyes had been fixed only on the damage to the walls and towers, the crumbling masonry and splintered wood. Not on the real wounds, the ragged places Kaer Morhen still bleeds, even sluggishly: the hilts of swords and points of spears piercing through the snowfall. The empty armour, metal and leather both, bleached and aged in the bleak sun and bitter cold. Geralt could tell her every single place along the path a body is buried, nothing more than bones beneath the snow. He won’t be able to hide them from her come spring, but for now he’s grateful Ciri doesn’t even know to ask.

“You never really did tell us,” Lambert starts again after another long pause, and ah, there it is, “how you two got up here. Came all the way from Cintra, yeah?”

“From Sodden.” Geralt shrugs. “And the same way anyone else does. Walked the Path.”

“‘Walked the Path,’” Lambert parrots back, “like that’s a guarantee of shit.” He arches an eyebrow. “Run into any trouble?”

“That’s the guarantee,” Geralt drawls. Lambert’s eyebrow arches higher, likely expecting monsters or soldiers or mages, and it's easier to let him believe that. Less mortifying than admitting that really, it had just been all the fucking people.

They—witchers, yes, but Geralt especially—aren’t built for people. The extent of his training and his patience only goes as far as asking after contracts and then asking after his coin. And Geralt had anticipated the newness of Cirilla, of traveling with a child and an exhausted, terrified one at that. But he hadn’t expected the sympathetic innkeepers, or busybodies at the market, or caravans of travelers on the roads eager to see new faces. With war looming Geralt didn’t think people would be so fucking chatty, even as he’s forced to admit it makes sense; exhausted, terrified people reaching out for any comfort in uncertain times, especially from people who looked like they shared troubles with. It had worked in his and Ciri’s favour, the assumption that they were refugees from the war headed north like everyone else, but the dread that turned his stomach every time someone appeared around a bend in the road or they joined a throng of travelers filtering into a city lingered long after they were alone again. 

Geralt’s walked the Path for nearly a century. He may not enjoy dredging up the bare bones of a conversation with every innkeeper or alderman or merchant he comes across, but it shouldn’t bother him this much anymore with how long he’s had to do it.

(It occurs to him halfway to Leyda, when an innkeeper lights up at the sight of Geralt in the doorway but frowns when she sees someone new dogging at the witcher’s heels, that perhaps this last year has been the first he’s had suffer small talk, alone, in a very long time.)

Whatever the reason, he’d been twitchy with it by the time they left behind the last village before the start of the Killer, a necessary stop for last-minute supplies to get Cirilla up the mountain. Not even the promise of familiar company—Eskel and Lambert and Vesemir, the nearest thing he has to family—could loosen the clench of his jaw or the steely stiffness of his spine as he'd ushered Cirilla through the gate, the lingering apprehension of more fucking people. Some small, petulant part of him had debated sending Cirilla on ahead and turning tail to lurk in the woods until everyone had gone to sleep.

He hadn't indulged it, obviously. But there must have been some trace of it in his expression as he pushed open the doors to the great hall and surprised shouts lambasted them as warmly as heat from the hearth. Eskel had reached them first, eyes moving from the tense line of Geralt’s shoulders to Cirilla at his side, and a wry, knowing grin tugged at the corner of his lips. 

"Well met, White Wolf," Eskel had drawled, breaking into a laugh when Geralt rolled his eyes. He'd pulled Geralt into a tight embrace, one hand straying to the back of his neck and gripping firmly, as if to reassure himself that Geralt was really there.

(There were only three years that Geralt hadn’t returned to Kaer Morhen for the winter: their first out on the Path, part of the unspoken tradition of newly minted witchers to take advantage of their brothers' absence to make as much coin in the colder savaeds as they could. And for the two years after Blaviken, terrified of returning to the keep to discover that his failure had cost one of his brothers their life in retribution.

This year, with him and Ciri arriving at the last minute, scant days before the passes snowed shut and stayed that way until spring—Geralt read it in the tension across Eskel's brow, in the way his hand lingered at the nape of Geralt’s neck. He'd worried.)

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Geralt tells Lambert finally, speaking around the bitter taste in his mouth as he remembers the worry in Eskel’s eyes and sees its echoes in Lambert’s. He hates it. When there weren’t so many people who gave a shit about him, he wasn’t constantly reminded of all the ways he routinely failed them. He shrugs again. “Not like we’re trained for anything like it.” 

The last children spirited up to Kaer Morhen, Lambert among them, were brought there for the sole purpose of carving them into witchers. A child in a witcher’s care for any other reason was a weakness, an attachment. A selfish decision, which means it can only be a terrible one.

Then again, perhaps that doesn’t matter all that much. Whether they’re to keep someone he shouldn’t want or to chase away someone he’s terrified to need, Geralt’s decisions blow up in his face regardless of how austere his intentions.

Lambert snorts. "Fair enough. The little beast’s been antsy too, so I thought something happened on the road." He nods at something he sees down in the keep grounds, and Ciri's whoop of excitement floats up to them immediately after the sound of metal sticking hard and fast into wood. Lambert whistles through his teeth. "Shit, she picked that up fast. I'll have to watch my fingers at the table."

"Maybe you should stop stealing food off the plate of an actual child.”

"Eh, she gives back just as good. Besides, nobody in this keep stays an actual child for very long."

He says it blandly, almost absently. Just a statement of fact. Geralt really can't argue against it, so he switches tacks entirely, itchy in his own skin with the sense that something's not right. "I don't know what it is," he tells Lambert, hears how the words sound like some sort of confession, "but something's missing. I can't find it."

Lambert cocks his head to the side. Spreads his arms in a grand sweep of where they're standing, from the Killer switchbacking down toward civilization to Kaer Morhen under their feet, and lets that be his answer.

He's got a point, too. The keep is, effectively, a ruin. A burial ground. Yes, they've fixed it up as well as they could in the eighty-odd years since the sacking, the seventy or so since Lambert was the last witcher to leave Kaer Morhen and turn out onto the Path. But it's still a graveyard. Ciri's bright, wild shouts and the clattering of wooden swords and Eskel's quick laugh, it all echoes off gravestones. There's always going to be something missing. They don’t always get to find out what.

It’s halfway through Imbaelk, Birke and the first true touch of spring just around the corner, when Geralt finds out. 

He learns it from Yennefer, of all people. From a letter that appears at the foot of his bed with a pop and hiss of smoke, as unobtrusive as anything can be with Yen's flair for the dramatic. And as Geralt reads her letter—deciphers her unbelievably shit handwriting, almost like she knew it was shit when she'd learned and then kept it that way out of spite, which seems likely—the missing piece he's turned over and over again in his mind for weeks slots into place with the finality of a casket lid closing.

Have you heard? she asks in the letter and no. No, he hadn't. 

(According to Yen, the news only reached Oxenfurt a few days ago. There’s no way Geralt, sequestered away in Kaer Morhen since just before midwinter, could have known, but—but it’s Jaskier. Geralt should have known.)

Eskel's at his door a minute later, mouth open with a question and eyebrows drawn. Fuck. No privacy in Kaer Morhen, not with them all piling together in one wing to make it easier to heat. Can’t keep anything a secret for long living with people who can hear a mouse drop dead on the other side of the building, who can smell distress or fear or rage from half the keep away. "Geralt?"

Lambert skids in on his heels, nearly slamming Eskel out of the doorway, and in the next corridor Geralt hears Ciri and Triss' doors creak open at the commotion. Fucking perfect. 

Lambert wrinkles his nose as Eskel scruffs him like an unruly pest. "Is that fucking lilac?"

Eskel shakes Lambert by the collar of his shirt to shut him up and doesn’t let go even when Lambert shoves at him, Coën’s voice echoing over Lambert’s muttered curses from farther down the hall, all of it building over the clatter of approaching footsteps and the looming press of people crowding at the door—no one’s across the threshold and it still feels like all the air is bleeding from the room. Geralt can do nothing but stare at them, cotton-mouthed and slow like those days out there on the Path when he can’t grasp words between his fingers without them billowing away like smoke. But this is different. Here he has the words, written out right in front of him, only he can’t force them out past the broken glass in his throat. Can only read them again and again, uncomprehending, until Vesemir appears in the doorway, Lambert and Coën scrambling to make room. 

Vesemir looks him up and down with that appraising eye that makes Geralt want to push back his shoulders and sit up straight. “Geralt.”

It’s a command, not a question. But Geralt can’t face it, him, any of them, and he drops his eyes to the letter in his fist. Yen’s terrible handwriting, her straightforward message and the too-smooth fineness of the parchment against his fingertips—they’re the only things that make sense, that moor him against the rising panic scratching up his throat. He notices, almost hysterically, that for the first time in weeks the feeling of something wrong, that there’s something he’s missing, is gone.

“Geralt? Is that from Yennefer? Is she alright?” Triss, standing just behind Eskel. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Geralt says nothing. Or thinks he doesn’t, and it takes him a long moment to realize that the low, ragged noise echoing in his ears came from between his own clenched teeth. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Eskel and Coën exchange a sharp, stunned look, and a hand on his shoulder makes him jump—Ciri, squeezing past the witchers taking up the doorway to sit gingerly on the edge of his bed. This is more than anyone should ever ask of her, and none of her court training would have taught her how to show someone genuine sympathy, but with a determined set to her jaw Ciri shifts closer and leans her weight against his side when he doesn’t push her away.

“What’s the matter with you?” Lambert demands. He’s as loud and brash as always, but even he can’t quite hide the tinge of genuine concern in his voice. “Who fucking died?”

It's not that Geralt hasn't thought of Jaskier at all since he and Ciri straggled into Kaer Morhen, it's only that—well, he hasn't. In fact, between tearing apart the keep chasing that awful feeling and starting up Ciri’s training, not-thinking about Jaskier had taken up the overwhelming majority of Geralt's first few weeks back.

He walks into the kitchen and doesn’t-think about running into Jaskier at a market in Lyria after a summer apart, how Jaskier had broken the hand pie he'd just bought in half (it’s stunningly not-bad, geralt, which is more than i can say for any attempt i’ve ever made at baking) and pressed the piece into Geralt's hands before the witcher had even said hello.

He shows Ciri how to properly sharpen and polish a set of fine daggers Eskel brings her from the armoury and doesn’t-think about the casual way Jaskier had once pulled a knife from his boot and offered it to Geralt before he could reach for his own, how he’d twirled it easily between his fingers and winked (it's why i'm fantastic at cards too) and then, for once in his life, hadn’t elaborated at all.

He finds a violin in some dusty, forgotten corner of the keep while looking for clothes to fit a child that weren't mothridden after nearly a century, and he doesn’t-think about Jaskier badgering him about it—if he'd known the witcher who'd played it, if Geralt could play it and had secretly been holding out on him. Doesn't-think about how Jaskier would likely try to play it himself, which would result in either horrific caterwauling or something halting and beautiful right from the start because Jaskier was just so good at things. Doesn't-think about how regardless which it was, the walls would echo Jaskier's laughter back to them while he kept trying.

Or maybe Jaskier could already play the violin. Geralt doesn't know. In over twenty years, it never occurred to him to ask.

“And you’re sure?”

Geralt nods stiffly. His fingers tighten around Roach's reins so hard the leather of his gloves squeaks, and Roach bites at his pauldron in retaliation for the noise.

Triss checks and rechecks the meticulous chalk symbols she’d drawn onto his chestplate and bracers, then glances up to fix the witcher with a look that screams that she doesn’t think he’s paying attention. “I won’t be able to pull you back, so once you’re there,” she frowns at a crooked line where the leather overlaps, “you’re there.”

“Hmm.” This is the fourth, maybe the fifth time she’s explained that part. Geralt doesn’t know for sure; he isn’t paying attention.

Triss sighs, fingers twitching as if she’d like nothing more than to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Fine, if you’re certain. Then it should be fairly straightforward—I’ll drop you off just beyond the northwestern drawbridge, near the levees." She scrutinizes him again, searching his face for—something. Geralt can’t make himself care what she’s looking for or whether or not she finds it. “And it’ll be easier if you lead Roach through the portal rather than ride her.”

From across the great hall, Lambert shouts, "So long as the White Wolf and his Muddy Mare don't both lose their lunch ten seconds into the city!"

Geralt doesn't bother to respond, but the echo of a sharp slap and Lambert's indignant yelp do make his lips twitch. Triss zeroes in on the motion. “You don’t have to do this, Geralt,” she insists, continuing the one-sided argument they’ve carried on for the better part of a week. “I have friends in Oxenfurt too. They can find out more, you don’t have to chase down the story yourself.” With nothing left to fuss over, she steps back. Chaos starts to crackle and spark up and down her arms. Triss doesn’t try to spare his feelings by couching her words in whispers, either, not when the witchers sitting only a few yards away would hear her regardless. “It’s not the sort of penance Jaskier would want you to do anyway. You do know that, right?”

It hurts to hear someone say it aloud. To strip off all of Geralt’s noble pretenses, scour away his sense of honour or responsibility or basic decency and call this what it is—Geralt is asking a massive favour of an injured mage and leaving behind his brothers and mentor and the child he’s already abandoned once, to swan off to Oxenfurt and harass grieving strangers for a story he has no right to anymore, all because he feels bad. Because he bought in, out of nostalgia or grief—even nearly a year ago, the first morning after the mountain, though then he’d only been grieving the loss of a friendship and not yet the loss of a friend—Geralt bought into the tall tales Jaskier spun about him. That Geralt is a good person. That he tries to do the right thing. 

(Maybe Jaskier had been on to something after all from the very beginning; all those clever little lies were so much easier to swallow when he set them to a tune.)

Still, Geralt schools his mind into calm indifference, polished bland and smooth and empty for any mage who might want to skim the surface of his thoughts. Just outside of his periphery, Geralt feels Eskel’s stare on him like a brand, even as Triss’ sharp appraisal softens. Still looking unconvinced, she ushers him outside, pulling her heavy cloak tighter around her shoulders to brace against the biting wind that shoves past them into the keep. Chair legs scrape behind him as he lets Triss through the door first, and a hand falls heavy on his shoulder and squeezes before Geralt follows her outside. 

Geralt smirks, lingering in the doorway. “Worried I’m chasing ghosts?” he murmurs.

Eskel chuckles under his breath and rolls his eyes as he squeezes Geralt’s shoulder again, stepping around him. “Worried you’re doing it without me.”

It’s a fair point. He sees Coën arch an eyebrow at their exchange, but Geralt just shrugs and follows Eskel out the door. 

Triss is more sparing with her theatrics than Yennefer, and despite the power hanging thick in the air and the echo of sleepless nights in the shadows under the mage’s eyes, the portal springs to life in the center of the courtyard with a casual flick of Triss’ fingers. Geralt doesn’t pretend to understand how much careful spellwork this simple circle of shimmering air really takes, holding stable against the leftover magic sunk into Kaer Morhen and reaching halfway across the Continent at the same time. He takes his cue from Eskel's suitably awed look. “It’s safe?”

Triss has learned him well enough by now to know he’s not asking out of concern for himself. Her smile is loose and easy, no strain or tension lingering in the corners. “It is. You’ll make it through just fine, all your limbs attached,” she teases, not calling attention to his fussing. 

Geralt nods sharply and turns when Eskel leads Roach over to him, busying himself with checking over her tack and her saddlebags, as though Eskel isn’t one of a precious few people Geralt trusts to handle his things. He’s keenly aware of Triss doing the same thing behind him, checking over tiny details of the portal that she knows full well are exactly as they should be, all to give him room to get a fucking grip.

“Thank you for this,” he grinds out finally, because he has to say something, although the furrow between Triss’ brows suggests he’s still not saying the right thing, “and for helping Ciri.” It’s second nature to him now to check in on Ciri every time she crosses his mind—he picks out her starling-quick heartbeat tucked between the heavy beats of Eskel and Vesemir, despite the carefully measured breaths she takes to keep her expression steadily serene like a consummate courtier. The girl had singlehandedly browbeaten all of them, Geralt included, into admitting this trip was important, if not necessarily a good idea. It was only when she’d insisted, with all the vehemence only a child can muster, that he was better off knowing, no matter how much it hurt, that Geralt realized she was speaking from experience. Of course Ciri knows her grandmother is dead, knows she died in the siege, but Geralt hasn’t told her how.

Triss purses her lips in a mix of fondness and exasperation Geralt is getting used to people leveling his way. “Of course, Geralt.” 

From the depths of the portal, shrouded in swirling ripples of Chaos, the thick, briny smell of the sea seeps through the thin mountain air. Roach pins her ears back when Geralt takes a step forward, but she follows him through the portal calmly enough when the mist pulls back to reveal a nondescript copse of trees. She veers immediately towards a patch of grass closer to the roadside and Geralt catches a glimpse of the city below, shot through with tributaries like veins of gold, before he turns back to Triss and the soaring height of Kaer Morhen behind her. It’s suddenly not enough, his paltry gratitude in the face of all this effort, and he needs Triss to understand. 

“I’m in your debt,” he tells her slowly, earnestly, the words heavy in his mouth with how much he means them. It’s too formal by half, a platitude meant for acquaintances kept at arm’s length, and Geralt realizes too late how insulting that might sound. But the face Triss makes as the portal winks shut between them is one he doesn’t understand—not quite pity, nor that look of fond exasperation she’s worn just before. It itches at him for a long time as he swings onto Roach’s back and makes his way down towards the city; the drawbridge and the crowds of early morning travelers are close enough for him to hear when he finally places it. It’s an expression he’s only used to seeing on someone else—it doesn’t feel quite right without Jaskier’s features under it, the corners of his mouth twitching as he’d tried to keep his stern expression from cracking (you, my darling witcher, are so lucky you’ve got such a pretty face)—but even on a different face he recognizes it by those same eyes, looking at him like he’s missing something very important right in front of his nose. 

Oxenfurt is beautiful.

The city was built that way by design, every gable and archway planned in painstaking detail by the brilliant minds of Oxenfurt University—the school predates both the current bustling city around it and its sister academy by the better part of a century. It is, as Jaskier had always insisted, the perfect town for academics. They’d crafted it so on purpose; a spiderweb of gilded bridges and colorful rooftops stretching between the academy’s single island in the bay and the haphazard archipelago that houses the university to the northeast. 

Jaskier had also always insisted there’s a perfectly reasonable order to the way the university is arranged, which island houses this faculty or that building. He’d made the claim five years ago as he’d led Geralt past the pottery workshop, the astronomy hall, and the offices of the geography department faculty, all on the way to retrieve his lute from his office in the conservatory and potentially nip into the dining hall for a quick lunch if they decided to cross back into the city via one of the bridges farther north. Their looping, winding path is a far cry from perfectly reasonable, but Geralt had grudgingly conceded that there was some semblance of logic to the arrangement of lecture halls and libraries and even a small assortment of shops and taverns. With a bit of planning and the ease of experience, someone could live their entire life on the grounds of either campus and the snaking canal that connects them without ever needing to step into the city outside of it.

That, too, is by design, a narrow and uncompromising path not unlike Geralt’s. Oxenfurt Academy is startlingly self-sufficient, with terraced gardens on the southern end of the little island visible from the ferry that runs back and forth across Acorn Bay. Seeing its students in the city proper outside of the start and end of terms is almost unheard of; there was nothing in the city they’d need that the Academy doesn’t house within its walls already. And Oxenfurt University is basically a town in itself, only nominally a part of the rest of Oxenfurt, connected by countless bridges—their guardrails inlaid with abalone instead of the mother-of-pearl insets used throughout the rest of the city, a hairsplitting distinction that Geralt finds unspeakably fucking pretentious—spanning the tributaries that empty into the North Sea. All of it reeks of the trappings of the highbrow bullshit Geralt normally hates. A city within a city, carefully arranged to keep the brilliant or wealthy or noble from rubbing elbows with the common folk, a glorified funnel from birth to death, academy to university to faculty, that never exceeds the length of the Mądrość canal that connects them.

It’s the sort of highbrow bullshit he should hate, and doesn’t, because Jaskier talked about Oxenfurt with stars in his eyes. Because he loved the city, the entire length and breadth of it, even when that cloistered, straightforward path to a comfortable professorship had been all-but laid out at his feet.

For all his hot air and broad winks and blustering, puffing up his own accolades long before he could count on innkeepers and barmen to pronounce his name, let alone recognize it or give a shit, Jaskier was good at what he did. He was, in fact, touted as an actual prodigy, a label he hated and vehemently denied. Refused to talk about it, even, one of a sparse handful of topics Jaskier never brought up and Geralt never asked after. What he does know of it is what little Geralt’s cobbled together from half-snatched conversations of students or professors across the years: the bard had been admitted under the auspices of the academy when he was twelve and relocated to the university a year later. Academy students are typically younger as a rule, the school admitting students as young as six in the same way the temple schools do. But as Jaskier explained to him one morning somewhere west of Hoshberg, prattling on whether Geralt was listening or not—and he had been, obviously, to remember the impromptu lecture a decade later, so which of them had been the fool?—the official distinction rested solely in the individual student’s merit. Age was no barrier for advancement to a higher year, or even admission to the university.

The idea of a young Jaskier with his nose to the books, voraciously tearing through dusty old tomes one after the next sits both perfectly aligned and diametrically opposed to Geralt's first impression of the bard. But with the mountain of laurels earned in his school days and the name he made for himself after, Geralt isn't surprised the university committee had foamed at the mouth to make Jaskier faculty from the moment he’d arrived at the bards’ college.

And then three years after that, he had completed all seven liberal arts and set out on his meandering path across the Continent to ply his trade. Geralt knows how that story ends—in a pub in Posada, with bread in his pants and a witcher in his sights.

Only, no.

That’s not how the story ends at all, is it? 

There’s not a single fucking person in this miserable fucking city who sees Geralt in the street and doesn’t know who he’s here for. 

Oxenfurt sits squarely on the Path of other witchers, Eskel and Coën and at least one Cat, so Geralt only ever passes through to collect Jaskier in the spring. Not every year, not often enough to make too much of a spectacle of himself or establish a routine that someone could intercept, but—but he’s a witcher, the Butcher of Blaviken no less, and he’s hard-pressed not to make a spectacle of himself just crossing the street. The first time some gangly, wide-eyed student referred to him as “Professor Pankratz’s witcher” while arguing with a city guard that that was why the witcher should be allowed on university grounds, Geralt’s mouth had gone dry. The time after that, the combined efforts of what must’ve been half the student body and several musty old professors had finally found Jaskier in some out-of-the-way practice room when Geralt came looking for him. The bard had scarcely glanced up from the pianoforte, cheeks flushed, hair a mess, before he was striding across the room with a grin and a fond ah, there’s my witcher, oblivious to the way Geralt’s breath had seized in his throat at the words.

(Of course, the fastest way to tame a beast is to keep it on a leash—how monstrous can the witcher really be, if darling, foppish Professor Pankratz barely needs a firm hand to keep it in line? Jaskier’d hated that too, the assumptions, the implications, which had threatened to sear the heart right of Geralt’s chest until he’d realized that the bard wasn’t worried for his own reputation, but for him. Jaskier had hated that the fastest way to guarantee Geralt any measure of safety was to treat him like an animal, but Geralt couldn’t make himself explain that this was one collar he didn’t mind.)

Now, Geralt hears the whispers that kick up in every storefront he passes, every corner he turns down. The words he lets wash over him out of long-standing habit, taking only the measure of their tone, their volume. It’s unprecedented, the people have a right to worry—how monstrous can he be now, a witcher without his leash?

The next turn he takes steers him down a street lined with clothing shops, the early morning sun glinting off the rows of windows and the mannequins posed carefully inside. One shop has windows tall enough to span both stories of the building—and enough protective magic worked into the glass to make him want to sneeze—to give Geralt a direct view into the store and its army of lavish dress forms. And, at an unfortunately precise angle with the rising sun at his back, to give him a crystal-clear look at himself.

Geralt’s reflection matches him grimace for grimace, a skulking thing on horseback all pale-faced and amber-eyed and bristling in his armour. Geralt tears his eyes away from the window to glance down at his kit and think, for the first time, that maybe he should have tried to look less like....well, less like a witcher. Less like the Butcher of Blaviken and more like the White Wolf that Jaskier had so painstakingly crafted him into. At the very least he’d gotten clean before he left, scrubbing first himself and then his clothes until the bathwater had stopped running a rusted brown, before settling in front of the fireplace in the library with his sewing tin and a thunderous scowl fixed firmly onto his face to ward off any wise-arse comments. Eskel hadn’t said a damn word, instead helping himself to the pile of Geralt’s armour, punching a new set of holes for the laces of Geralt’s chestplate while Geralt darned a worn patch on his cleanest shirt. 

(if you ever give up witchering, you’d make an excellent seamstress, geralt. seamster? considering how much stitching-up your clothes go through, you’d be quite the artisan. why is it that nearly all monsters have claws, anyway? why doesn’t something ever try to just bludgeon you to death?)

Lambert hadn’t been nearly as merciful. He’d instead arched an eyebrow and drawled, “Cleaned yourself up, Wolf?” with his steadfast, unfailing devotion to being an asshole, but he’d yanked Geralt into a firm hug before they’d joined Triss in the great hall the next morning. And then with Triss bustling around him, drawing on his armour with a spare piece of chalk tucked behind her ear, it had been easy to ignore the twist to Vesemir’s mouth as the other witchers watched. Vesemir hadn’t disapproved, exactly, but neither was he keen on the unnecessary risk. All of Oxenfurt knows about Professor Pankratz’s witcher, and faster rumours have flown in smaller cities than the jewel of the Redanian border.

While Geralt looks for his answers, the entire Nilfgaardian Empire is still looking for him. 

But although they stare, no one approached Geralt when he’d joined the crowd entering the city, or now as he winds his way through the streets towards the university campus. Some years ago, when Geralt had lingered too long at one crossroad a gaggle of children had decided he was hopelessly lost, and his usually surreptitious arrival at Jaskier’s door—as surreptitious as a witcher on horseback in any city can be—instead became a parade of nearly a dozen children all tripping over themselves to ask him as many questions as their little lungs would allow. Geralt had spent the small eternity of the trip waiting for a raised voice, an accusation of butcher, child-thief thrown at him from any direction. By the time Jaskier had finished wheezing with laughter and wiping at his eyes and finally ushered a stunned Geralt into the safety of his sitting room, the harshest word Geralt had encountered was a farrier’s sharp warning for one of the children to quit stepping into Roach’s blind spot.

No one says a word to him now, harsh or otherwise. They all know who he’s come for. They all know Geralt isn’t going to find him here this time.

He knows the route by heart even though he’s taken it less than a dozen times in his life, but the iridescent glimmer at the far end of the next street he turns down still catches Geralt by surprise. He urges Roach to an abrupt halt, grateful no one’s loitering in the streets to watch him falter (although he’s under no illusions that there aren’t plenty of people peering at the dazed, disoriented witcher from behind the safety of their curtains). The familiar landmarks of his destination come together all at once: the faint sound of slow-moving water farther ahead of him, the smell of fresh bread from the bakery on the street he just left, the abalone inlays on the guardrails of the bridge. And three doors down from the top of the street where Geralt sits frozen, is the house of Jaskier the bard.

The house looks exactly the same as it did the last time. As if Jaskier is only just waiting beyond the door, and would be pleased to see him if he knocked. 

Geralt can’t decide if that makes it better or worse.

He never needed to, though. To knock, that is—Jaskier always seemed to have a preternatural awareness of the moment Geralt set foot within Oxenfurt’s borders. And for an esteemed academic who allegedly had a full roster of classes to teach and assignments to mark, he’d find Geralt first almost as often as Geralt did him, which would’ve stung at Geralt’s pride if he hadn’t known the entire city treated helping Jaskier spot him like a giant game.

But although he was perfectly happy to leverage it to his advantage when it came to finding Geralt, the insular nature of the university was also why Jaskier insisted on maintaining a house outside of it, even if only by the span of a single bridge. He still kept his appointed faculty apartment as well, but it was a sparse room with a bed and a desk and little else, for the occasions he needed to hide himself away to work without distraction. 

In comparison, his home was as far from that as possible. Not that Geralt ever saw much of the inside, refused to let himself linger too long or be lured too far into Jaskier’s world and the comfort it promised. A narrow two-storey building that once housed a luthier’s shop, slightly set back from the rest of the street—quaint, by Oxenfurt’s lofty standards—it had been sectioned off into Jaskier’s bedroom and a spare, a kitchen and a study and a larger room for receiving guests. Easy to maintain for the season he lived there, and for the friends and fellow bards who took sabbaticals there while Jaskier was on the road. The most Geralt had lingered was for a few hours in the sitting room, waiting impatiently while Jaskier finished packing for the road. Or the times Jaskier made more of a fuss than usual about how pale and ghastly Geralt looked after a winter in the frigid mountains—ignoring completely that Geralt had just spent an entire season eating better than he did the rest of the year—and insisted the witcher help him polish off the last of the fresh food in his kitchen before they set out. And although he could guess the arrangement of rooms farther into the house, the smell of Jaskier’s soaps and perfumes towards the far wall upstairs, the sharp smell of ink and fresh parchment just beyond the kitchen, Geralt never strayed deeper in. Didn’t ask to, and Jaskier didn’t push, likely trying not to spook him by offering more familiarity than Geralt could pretend to ignore. As if it hadn’t been years, decades of Jaskier weathering Geralt’s shit attitude and chronic aversion to admitting that they had any sort of relationship at all.

And of course, it hadn’t stopped Jaskier from making room for Geralt even then, with all the subtlety he pretended he was too brash and boisterous to possess. A good trick, too, one that worked as well on the witcher as everyone else: two years ago, Geralt came to collect Jaskier only to be ushered inside and planted in front of a table practically groaning under the weight of pastries and cheeses and the obnoxious frippery served at rich people’s parties. The leftovers of some faculty to-do for the retirement of an esteemed professor, Jaskier had said, flitting around the room with a nervous energy Geralt could taste, shoving a plate in Geralt’s hands and plucking an apple off the table to lean out the window and offer to Roach. Jaskier had elected to take some of it home without considering that he would be leaving the very next day, so it was their solemn first contract of the season to gorge themselves on as much as they could manage, before Shani came by to mercifully take what they couldn’t finish off. With the same blatant disregard for his own self-preservation he’d had since Posada, Jaskier had bullied the saddlebags out of Geralt’s hands, unbuckled his swords from his back, and directed Geralt to hang his armour on the standing rack by the hearth, all before Geralt had fumbled through so much as a hello.

(It didn’t occur to Geralt until a week later, trudging on foot through a thunderstorm on the way to La Valette, that Jaskier had no reason to own an armour rack, on account of not owning any fucking armour. His gaze had cut to Jaskier through the downpour, suspicion and quick anger rising in place of something else he didn’t want to name, only to find Jaskier already looking back at him. Between the unguarded warmth in his eyes that didn’t falter despite being caught looking, and the too-hot, too-tight thing that flared under Geralt’s ribs at the sight of him, Geralt didn’t say anything as he turned his eyes back to the road.)

There’s no one to greet him now. The windows on the first floor are shuttered; the second-floor windows with their curtains pulled aside are dark and motionless. It should be a small comfort, that there’s no one inside to see him frozen at the top of the street, Roach shifting anxiously under him; no one to storm outside and demand to know what the fuck he thinks he’s doing here. He should take this opportunity to keep moving, the short stretch of the street all that stands between him and one of the bridges onto the university campus. It’ll only be the work of seconds to pass Jaskier’s house without stopping or looking back, the way Geralt has told himself a dozen times throughout the years that he should do, and swore he would the next time. Or else he turns back and rides another twenty minutes to the next bridge, through the mutters and gossip of people as he goes by, wondering what the White Wolf is doing here weeks earlier than usual to collect someone who won’t ever be home again.

In the end it’s Roach who spurs them into motion. She recognizes the street just as well as he does and, tired of slowly sidling closer to the house, she takes advantage of Geralt’s indecision to toss her head and surge forward. In the second it takes Geralt to react, Roach breezes past the first two houses, whickering as Jaskier’s front door comes into view. In his surprise, Geralt barely manages to jerk Roach to a stop before she reaches her real goal.

Lilies. Dozens of them, in more colours than Geralt had known lilies could be, an unheard-of lapse in his concentration that he sees them before he smells them. They crowd the cobblestones before Jaskier’s door and spill out onto the street, newer blooms stacked on top of older flowers already starting to wilt in the lingering chill. The sight of fresh flowers in such numbers, weeks before Birke and the first real touches of spring—it eases something in Geralt’s chest to know Jaskier is so loved.

He should have brought flowers, Geralt thinks belatedly. That’s what people do, when someone they—when a friend dies. 

He wonders if the neighbours watching from their windows are surprised to see him turn up empty-handed. They likely aren’t; Geralt only looks human, if barely, and everyone knows the saying about old dogs and new tricks. Everyone knows that witchers don’t feel, no hand firm enough to teach them how to play at it either. No one will be shocked later, when the whispers kick up on this street too, to hear that instead Geralt only urges Roach forward with the press of his heels, and crosses the bridge without looking back. 

Someone here will have answers. Stepping off the bridge onto the university’s sprawling campus, Geralt will find someone who knew Jaskier, who can tell him—if they even will tell him, like he has any right to know—what exactly happened. Geralt tries not to think of how often he's had this exact conversation with terrified villagers or exhausted officials, how similar the circumstances usually are. Where did you see them last? What were they doing? Have you been hearing strange things in the woods?

It’ll be enough, those answers, he’d told Vesemir and Lambert and Coën and Triss. He just needs to know—and here, somewhere, are people who can tell him. 

He finds them at Jaskier's wake, just barely getting underway. 

The whole thing goes over about as well as Geralt would’ve expected, all things considered.

It's much easier to find death than people realize. It’s true in a grand figurative way, princes and paupers alike all meeting the same end and stepping into the same darkness with empty pockets, but it's true in a literal salt-of-the-earth sort of way, too. You can die getting out of bed. You can die getting into it. You can die a hundred-thousand big and small and painful and quick and brave and stupid deaths between the two. It is much, much easier to find death than people realize.

For Geralt, as it happens, it's true in a third sort of way.

An older trainee had scared him shitless once, when he was ten years old and had plucked up the guts to sit with the boys about to start their Trials. The lot of them spent nights crammed in front of the hearth in the barracks telling wilder and wilder stories about the Trials, out of some brazen childish belief that it could never be as bad as what they cooked up in their heads in the dead of night, exhausted from a day’s training. Never mind that boys died during the training before the Trials often enough. Geralt remembers thinking even then that he’d already heard the story before, maybe from someone a year or two prior, a legend echoing down the witcher ranks across the long centuries. 

Both times, the telling had gone like this: 

Everybody knew that the boys who died during the Trials were spirited away by the mages afterward. Sometimes they would cook down the bodies into one big stew and strain the mutagens back out of them with a magical sieve. Sometimes they would put the corpses to work in the belly of the keep, enchanting them to chop herbs and pour tinctures and prepare for the next year’s Trials. And sometimes, they would chop up the bodies of the biggest and the strongest boys, the ones everyone thought would make it, and the mages would parcel out their parts the next year to boys who did survive: hearts and lungs, stomachs and kidneys and eyes. Especially eyes, because they were special now. Those eyes had witnessed dying, and any trainee who was lucky enough to get even one to replace his own would be able to see the great god Death where it walked among the living too.  

He'd died, the boy who’d told him the story. Geralt can't even remember his name. He wonders whose head that kid's eyes are wandering around in, or if instead they were knocked out of their jar of viscera and alcohol and ground to a paste underfoot during the sacking. Or most likely he'd been thirteen and full of shit, and his eyes had been safely in his head when he and five other boys in his year were placed on the pyre and set ablaze.

Either way, Geralt finds death like this: he loops Roach's reins around the branch of an elm tree, conspicuously tall and somewhat ominous in the middle of an empty field somewhere west of Knotgrass, branches light with the scant beginnings of leaves. He takes off his armour and ties his hair back from his face. He drops his pack and leans his swords and Jaskier's lute against it. 

(It's not his lute, really, not Jaskier's. They'd buried that in Oxenfurt, but the thought of going to him without one wasn't something Geralt could stand.)

And then he blinks—once, twice, three times—and he looks.

Geralt follows the shifting, flickering thing in the corner of his eye for hours. 

It would make no sense, if he stopped to think about it—Geralt walks a straight line through the tall grass, the elm tree at his back and the far-off mining hills of Coppertown to the south, but he’s following a notion, an instinct, that only appears to him in his periphery. He has no idea if that childhood horror story is true, if he woke up from his first round of the Trials (or his second) with eyes in his head that weren’t his. But there’s no denying that he sees something more. Feels something ahead of him, like the pull of his medallion only down in his very bones. 

(Geralt isn’t sure, suddenly, if he’s looking for death or if death is looking for him. If it recognizes the marrow of him as a place it’s merely rested in for a time, but hasn’t yet deigned to stay.)

So Geralt stalks ahead with a confidence he doesn’t actually feel, following a thing he can’t name to a place he isn’t entirely certain exists—at least not for the likes of him, for the living. Fuck, it’s like he’d told Lambert, what feels like eons ago: it’s not like they were trained for it. The older witchers of Kaer Morhen didn’t have time for the ghost stories of chickenshit trainees. They wouldn’t have spared the precious little time they had left to beat survival into newly-tried adepts to waste on lessons in something that was likely no more than wishful thinking. Before the Trials, they trained their bodies to withstand the mutagens, learned their letters and numbers and basic herbcraft. After the trials, they trained their bodies to use the mutagens, memorized the endless menagerie of beasts they would face and brewed the potions and elixirs that would keep them standing even one bare second longer than their opponent.

Jaskier would make faces when he explained the training at Kaer Morhen, would pester him instead with all the made-up lessons he was certain Geralt had sat through instead. Stealth for Beginners. Advanced Frowning. ‘Standing up really tall and making your shoulders do that thing where you don’t move but suddenly you’re broader than a brick shithouse’ as an elective. Geralt had wanted to tell him, sometimes, the truth of it. Running the pendulum until he threw up or passed out or both, waking up slung between Eskel and Remus as they carried him back to the barracks, or carrying one of them in turn. Being tossed into swordsmanship classes against master witchers when he could barely hold his own weapon, because the monsters they’d face would always be bigger, faster, stronger. How the witchers and the adepts past the Grasses and eventually Geralt himself, as an adept and then as a witcher in his own right, didn’t hold back against the children thrown their way who could barely grip their swords. Because they’d been there themselves. Because if they didn’t learn, they were going to die, and there was no gentler way to teach them. 

He wanted to tell Jaskier about it all the time, sometimes to shut him up, to show him once and for all that it wasn’t fucking funny. But sometimes because it was, because Jaskier would tease him about his Underwater Menacing classes and it would remind him of when Eskel had swam the length of the creek and tied everyone’s fishing lines together. Or when Jaskier would make up his own story of Geralt’s glory days at Kaer Morhen and fumble for a name to use and Geralt could give him one. Could pull a boy from the pages of his memory before he faded away entirely and tell someone, anyone, See? He was here. He was here and I knew him and he died, but for a while we were alive, together.

He didn’t, ever. Because as much as he wanted Jaskier to know the truth, the whole story, he didn’t want him to stop. Didn’t want him to hear what really happened and close the book entirely out of pity or fear, trapping Geralt’s dusty memories and all those boys in the pages between them. 

Geralt wants to believe that Jaskier would’ve let him tell those stories. Even if they hurt. Even if they weren’t funny. He thinks Jaskier would’ve listened, and it would’ve been enough.

The sun is sinking below the horizon to his right, washing the world in muted gold and lurid orange, and Geralt has been walking for hours.

Then again, it was only hours ago that Geralt stumbled out of Oxenfurt, bile in his throat and head reeling. Or has it been days? Didn’t he just start the slow journey back up to Kaer Morhen—it’s one thing for Triss to maneuver herself through the remnants of spells that still clung to the keep and bring herself safely through, portalling someone else once was a risk, let alone twice—moving in a fog, propelled by decades on the Path and a lifetime of training. He’d tack Roach and untack her again. He would meditate. He worked steadily through his rations. He took a handful of small contracts from the isolated farmsteads he passed who had no safety in the numbers of a village or a lord’s protection, and even then, he’s gone through the motions like water.

Even this, now, is just another hunt. A series of practiced steps from start to finish: find the monster, save the victim. Its own sort of meditation where nothing else matters until the job is done.

Still, the world filters back to him in fits and starts, a thin layer of frost and brittle stalks of the tall grass crackling under his boots as he walks ever forward, the burn in his eyes as he blinks for the first time in what must be—hours? Geralt forces himself to stop, turns a slow circle when his stiff neck protests any movement. It had been midday when he set out, the elm tree at his back and the looming hills of Coppertown far, far in the distance ahead of him; now the world is awash in the orange and pink of sunset. He’s exhausted, muscles trembling like he’s walked for days, but the hills of Coppertown are no closer than when he’d just set out.

Geralt freezes when his slow turn brings him back around due south, and he narrows his eyes despite the tears that well up in the corners. What he thinks at first is a trick of the dying light is no trick at all—it’s not that the hills of Coppertown aren’t any closer despite hours spent trudging towards them. It’s that actually, Geralt can’t see Coppertown at all.

He grabs for a sword that isn’t there just as he feels that bone-deep pull again, this time at his back. Geralt whips his head around, his aching neck be damned, teeth bared and ready for a fight and sees—nothing. Truly nothing: dense grassland shrouded in the last dwindling frost stretches out in every direction as far as he can see. Like the hills of Coppertown before him, the tree he’d kept at his back—and Roach, and his fucking swords—are long gone, lost to the curve of the horizon.

There’s nothing but grassland sprawling out for leagues the way he came. And when he turns back the way he was going, he is not alone.

Geralt of Rivia blinks in confusion at the creature watching him an arm’s length away. An arm’s length away, Geralt of Rivia blinks right back. 

This is no ordinary sort of monster. He knows it by the way his hackles don’t rise, by the way his medallion doesn’t jump and shake against his chest, the hush in the air around it where it wields silence like a physical thing. By the fact that it hasn’t fucking tried eating him yet. But most importantly, Geralt knows it by the eyes. It’s always in the eyes. 

Unbothered by the scrutiny, his double cocks its head to one side and asks, “Was it easier than you expected?”

(“Do you know, Visenna,” he’d hissed, vision blurry, eyes wet, slitted pupils still pinprick-thin even in the dead of night because he needed her to look at him but he didn’t want to see her, “what they do to a witcher to improve his eyes?” 

Eskel claims he doesn’t remember. Lambert too. Geralt knows all too well what they do—after all, they’d done it to him twice. Maybe that’s why he finds death so easily, whether he goes looking for it or not.) 

When it’s clear his double is waiting for an answer, Geralt nods warily, bristling with suspicion. There’s always a chance this is just another monster, lurking in the tall grass and besides itself to have prey walk up to it with no hesitation. A fucking witcher no less, potionless, unarmed, going off a child’s bedtime story and his own hubris—

The fog of single-minded desperation that’s clouded his mind through the long, relentless ride out of Oxenfurt lifts suddenly, replaced by blinding, sobering clarity. Geralt is an idiot. Countless witchers before him have fought tooth and nail to drag themselves back from death’s doorstep and here he is, strolling across the threshold with empty hands to beg a favour he doesn’t deserve.

death tilts its head—Geralt’s head—the other way, the abrupt movement startling him from his internal diatribe. Once it has his attention again, death says, "I don't want you yet.”

And— 

And as far as things to hear from the manifestation of your personal demise, it's not the worst, but Geralt can't help but feel a little insulted. Insulted and awkward, because he also has no fucking idea what he’s supposed to say in response. No idea what he’s supposed to say in general, since he has yet to say anything at all—leagues away from Kaer Morhen once more, his words choke and stopper up his throat.

It’s the sort of occasion, he thinks nastily to himself, where he’d benefit from the help of a barker.  

“Hello,” is what Geralt decides on eventually, the word sitting rough and unwieldy in his mouth. He hesitates, nursing the absurd worry that he’s being rude, before he settles again on, “Hello.”

death watches him blankly, and Geralt meets his own dead-eyed stare with a carefully blank expression of his own. Exhausted, off-balance, every emotion he’d been told they’d scraped out of him blending into a maelstrom in his skull, Geralt is in no shape to lay on niceties. And even if he did have a quicksilver tongue and the charm to match, it would be worthless here. He barely abides the niceties and scripted playacting of noble courts and busy marketplaces on his good days, all those convoluted ways humans dance around one another in conversation, all the mandatory steps. None of that matters here; Geralt would have about as much luck trying to bullshit a bolt of lightning.

Because that’s what all the stories get wrong about death. It’s what Geralt remembers from leaning over Jaskier’s shoulder as he read from a book he’d absolutely nicked from Oxenfurt’s library (jaskier, don’t they cut off your hand if you take their priceless collection out of the city? — your hand? geralt, have you lost your mind? you need your hands to flip the pages! so long as you’re not in the music college they probably only lop off an ear. — wonderful. — why, are you going to rat me out? who would read to you then?), staring at the painstakingly illustrated pages and precise script and marveling at their audacity: they give death a name. 

Death, they call it. Capitalized and proper, like a noble title or the moniker of a self-made man. Children, naming their nightmare and believing that makes it safer to close their eyes. But it’s not. death isn’t a place or a person or a god; not a proper noun, not an honoured guest to invite humbly into your home or to wink broadly at from across a pub while you belt the bawdiest, stupidest song you'd ever written, about fucking a glorified goat, just to get a rise out of your friend because you thought it was the funniest—

Anyway.

That’s the danger of silly stories tucked away in harmless books on hallowed shelves, of making death Death, a character in stories that always have a happy ending. It makes it all the easier to forget that death just is. 

And now, death is Eskel. Young, young enough not to have his scars, but death compensates for that with an arrow through his eye instead. The fletching flutters in the same wind that moves through the grasses, a breeze that Geralt can’t feel, when death tips Eskel’s head and replies, “Hello.”

“Do you know why I’m here?” Geralt is reasonably certain death has, literally, seen this coming. But it never hurts to be sure.

death stares. Scrutinizes him long enough for Geralt to grow uneasy, to shift his weight between his heels. It’s hard to look at death directly for too long. Not only because it’s wearing Eskel’s face, a memory that soothes like a balm and aches like a bone set wrong at the same time, but because it stirs something else in his chest and at the base of his spine that Geralt has spent decades tamping down: fear. Looking at death scares him, makes him curl his hands into fists and steel himself against turning tail and running. Worse yet is that it isn’t the raw, animal fear of a predator, of dying or pain. No, the longer Geralt stands before death and battles himself to meet its eyes, the better Geralt feels. Calmer. More comfortable. At peace.

That’s why he’s come all this way, isn’t it? To finally, finally rest? 

When he drags his gaze back up, death-as-Eskel is gone. There’s a blur of movement from above him; Geralt reaches towards it even as his instincts shriek for him to pull away.

“Perhaps.” death settles in his outstretched hand as a bird when Geralt lifts it, dropping an eyeball into his palm. Geralt thinks it might be Eskel’s—lifetimes ago, before everything, Eskel’s eyes had been so blue. (That said, he recognizes death is dressed as a shrike, and he really rather hopes it’s meant to be Stregobor’s.) 

The eye rolls in his palm as Geralt considers it. It’s neither, he thinks. Few people want to meet a witcher’s gaze long enough for him to truly get a good look, so Geralt doesn’t count himself an expert in the subtle nuances of disembodied eye appreciation, but the colour isn’t quite right for either of them. It’s too dark, where Eskel’s had been so pale they caught the light and blazed even before the Trials, and too rich in colour to match Stregobor’s watery stare. He’s seen its like before, a blue better suited for the ever-changing light of a barroom’s fireplace, gold in its glow and bottomless black in its shadow; eyes framed by a smile that nearly reaches them and the lightest touch of crow’s feet—

As abruptly as a bucket of ice water tipped over him, through the soothing, easy lull of his silent contemplation of the eyeball in his hand, Geralt remembers what—who—he’s here for.

If it’s baiting him intentionally, trying to turn him from his goal, death doesn’t seem to mind when Geralt sucks a deep breath through his teeth and holds it until his ribs creak with the strain, wrestling himself free of that syrupy haze. The shrike simply picks its careful way across the witcher’s hand, settling on his thumb with a ruffling of feathers when Geralt holds his finger out obligingly. In his palm, an eye as yellow as his own stares up at him now. “Why are you here, Geralt?”

(oh, geralt! you’re here early! did you miss me? of course you did, darling witcher, you can’t fool me—i’ve rather missed you too, you know.) 

“He’s here.” No point in saying who, as if they don’t both know. “I’ve—Can it be done?” Geralt bares his teeth in a grimace. He sounds like every shifty, mealy-mouthed noble he hates talking to, speaking in riddles around the heart of an issue. But the words stick like burrs in his throat, and Geralt still chokes over what little he can force out from between his teeth. 

“Perhaps,” says death again, pinprick claws digging into the meat of Geralt’s thumb. “What is it you want to do?”

“He’s—I want—” Geralt cuts himself off with a growl. death graciously flits from his hand so he can drag his fingers through his hair, settling a few steps away as a leatherworker from Rakverelin Geralt recognizes in passing. Fuck. First he fails Jaskier with an endless, spiteful font of all the wrong words. Now Geralt fails him again because he can’t bring himself to spit out the right ones. “Jaskier. I’m here to bring him back.”

A bold claim, foolish bordering on catastrophic, considering where he is and who he’s speaking to. If he makes it out of here alive he may not be free of death for very long; once he returns to Kaer Morhen and explains what he’s done, there’ll be a queue to throttle him anyway.

But death-the-merchant only nods. “It can be done.”

The sharp chill of relief rocks through Geralt so hard he’s dizzy with it, but on its heels comes a different thought. "I don't know what to give you," Geralt admits. 

He's read stories about shit like this—or, really, he'd half-listened to Jaskier ramble as they set up camp, or while Geralt rode and Jaskier kept pace next to Roach, or while Jaskier dumped a bucket of water over Geralt's head in a bath he absolutely insisted Geralt had needed right that fucking second—

But. The hero always arrived with a gift. A prize. Something pretty and rare and thematically relevant to whatever fucking moral lesson the fable was trying to impart. Something to make the monster give up what the hero wanted in return.

(Is it ironic that the last story Jaskier had read him was about death? Geralt remembers the broad strokes of it, mostly recalls that it was from an anthology that Jaskier had again pilfered from Oxenfurt’s library; he’d read aloud from it by firelight when they’d stopped a few days outside of Hengfors, back when golden dragons had been the stuff of fairytales too. Was it a prophecy? A prediction? Or was it just another one of destiny’s little jokes, with Geralt again as the punchline?)

death scrutinizes him, picks him apart with flat, unimpressed eyes. “I don’t want anything you would have to give.”

Well. That’s that, isn’t it then?

“Besides,” death adds, “I’m not the one going anywhere. What do you need to give me anything for?”

Geralt frowns. They’re alone. Who else would he give something to?

They’re alone, Geralt and death. Then, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, they’re not.

Geralt knows it’s him immediately. That would’ve infuriated him decades ago, but now it’s only a relief for Jaskier’s presence to settle around him. The scratch of the ridiculous brocade applique on his favourite doublet when his arms brush his sides. The smell of that chamomile oil he’d started wearing just to get a rise out of Geralt after the selkimore and refused to stop until he’d wheedled out of Geralt that he preferred Jaskier’s original bergamot perfume instead. (Jaskier had then slipped in spilled bathwater and dropped the bergamot oil in the tub almost immediately after securing Geralt’s “haggard, hard-won confession”, so it was Geralt who’d smelled like an orange grove had thrown up on him. For weeks.) And under the chamomile, though Geralt tries not to think about it too hard for too long, the barest hint of rot. 

It’s on the tip of his tongue, a joke about slipping in the bathwater, when it occurs to him that this entire scenario is wrong. 

Because Jaskier—Jaskier is many, many things, but he’s never silent. Subdued, yes. Brooding, on rare occasions. Geralt supposes unimaginably pissed the fuck off is more than likely on the table. But even then, Jaskier makes noise: drummed his fingers, tapped his heel, grumbled and muttered under his breath. Even at his lowest and his worst, Jaskier's never been quiet about it. 

Geralt bristles, hair rising on the back of his neck. Jaskier is too quiet, isn’t speaking or moving or fidgeting, but that’s not all. There’s something else, still, something missing— 

(you always do that. — do what? — know where i am. pick me out of a crowd, i mean. you think i’d be better at it than you, really, only one of us has got white hair. — i don’t need to see your hair, i hear you coming. — i hadn’t even said anything yet!)

Geralt’s heart is a slow, plodding thing, yet this is the fastest it’s ever felt, thundering in his ears. It’s the only one he can hear. 

Something waits behind him, wearing his bard’s skin. The question is, what?

A question with too easy an answer, of course. Nothing more than a quick glance over his shoulder just to be sure. But Geralt is loath to turn his back to death when he doesn’t have to, and besides that, it’s—it’s childish, as foolish as chasing after the man he’d chased off first, all the way to the land of the dead with little in the way of a plan. But time and again Geralt stops just shy of putting Jaskier in his periphery, glaring instead at the eerie, unmoving sunset as if it can scorch the memory out from behind his eyes: that illuminated page from Jaskier’s illicit storybook. The fairytale he’d read aloud outside of Hengfors with Geralt pretending not to look over his shoulder and Jaskier pretending not to notice. 

It is, again, a story he thinks he’s heard somewhere before. A knight, and a lady, and a tragedy. A noble oath and a rousing speech and a daring rescue. A knight—who’s a little bit of an idiot, because Geralt’s met enough of them by now to know it’s practically a requirement—greets Death at its doorstep to beg for the life of his beloved. And so earnestly does he plead that Death agrees, allowing him to lead his lady love back up to the light on the sole condition that the knight doesn’t look upon his lady’s face until they’ve both safely returned to the land of the living. 

Here Jaskier had paused, explained that in later versions the knight succeeds in his trial where in the older story he had failed. Sources vary on the how, the crucial mistake at the last moment, but the original fable always ended the same way. The knight turns too soon, glimpses his lady before she joins him in the light of day, and can only look on as his mistake costs him everything.

(“Sounds about right,” Geralt had grunted as Jaskier closed the book with a dramatic flourish, then ducked to sort through the saddlebags to hide his smile as Jaskier whipped around to make a face at him.)

He wants to discount it as nothing more than a fairytale, vicarious drama for soft-hearted, cloistered academics who’d never live such a thing otherwise—but Geralt has rarely encountered a story that didn’t have some grain of truth to it. He should know, he’s lived it; there are still people who look at him and call him butcher despite Jaskier’s efforts. The story of Blaviken might one day fade, but people will still look at him and see that he is capable of carnage.

Here of all places, in this of all things, Geralt can’t bring himself to take that sort of risk. Besides, he’s followed one fairytale all the way here. What’s one more to lead them home?

“Ah,” says death, “I see you’ve read the stories.”

“Heard them.” He swallows hard around a lump in his throat. “I knew this famous bard once, you see.”

death-the-striga might be smiling. Geralt isn’t entirely sure. “Oh? I think I know the one you mean.”

“Those are the rules, then?” Geralt wrestles himself back to calm blankness, features smoothing over into indifference. Behind him Jaskier shifts, the tiniest sound that all of Geralt’s senses snap to. “I lead him out and I don’t look back?” 

When they get back, when Geralt knows that Jaskier is hale and whole in Oxenfurt or Novigrad or—against all hope—in Kaer Morhen, Geralt plans to find that storybook. Every fable has a kernel of truth at its heart, but to be this true? It’s a book worth holding on to, or at least keeping out of mortal hands. 

death shrugs, a great heaving of its shoulders. “If that’s what you’d like.”

The snarl rumbles out of his chest before Geralt can stop himself. “If I’d like?”

“You found your way here because you chose to follow one set of rules. What do I care which rules you follow to find your way out?”

“Rules?” Geralt echoes. “Those weren’t—that was just a story. This,” sweeps a hand over himself, the grasslands around them, Jaskier behind him without turning, “is just a story too.” 

“Is there a difference?”

“Hmm.” That rings awfully close to the sort of question Vesemir forbade them from asking as young witchers. And for good reason—it’s the sort of question that runs hand in hand with lesser evils and the unrelenting grip of destiny. 

“Think of it this way,” death tells him. “Better that you named your own trial than asked me to do it.”

Geralt only barely represses the shiver racing down his spine. He remembers that story too. 

(When Geralt is certain Jaskier is hale and whole in Oxenfurt or Novigrad or—or anywhere else, Geralt plans to find that fucking storybook and use it for kindling. Uncannily true or not, it’s more trouble than it’s fucking worth.)

“And it’s him?” Geralt demands sharply. “Jaskier of Oxenfurt? The bard?” Now that he knows they’re playing a game of his own design, he doesn’t dare assume they’ll play it by the same set of rules. 

death-as-Lambert shrugs. Geralt suffers a moment of bewildering, fierce pride that there’s some innate quality of Lambert’s shitty attitude that not even death can emulate. “You tell me.”

“Jaskier.” From the second Jaskier had turned away from him on the mountain, Geralt had thought about what he was going to say. Most of it sounded like shit and would’ve done more harm than good, and some of it had nearly gotten him laughed out of the keep when he’d floated it past Eskel and Lambert and Coën, after they'd gotten the whole sorry tale out of him but before he'd known Jaskier was—gone. He can’t remember a single word of it. “Hello.”

“Geralt.” Jaskier replies, almost immediately. A sharp and aching thing clamors in Geralt's chest and leaves him alarmingly weak at the knees at the sound of his voice. “Hi.”

That shouldn’t be enough. Geralt can recite entire bestiaries’ worth of monsters who can do something as simple as mimic a voice, has faced his fair share of creatures that tried to trick him with a friendly word or familiar face. But Jaskier says his name—as though they’ve only been apart for hours. As though Geralt has only just been gone on a hunt, or Jaskier at a performance, and everything between them is exactly how they’d left it. Geralt responds to it like a lodestone. A thrumming, shivery pull; not from his medallion, but twined into the sinew and bone beneath it. 

(Geralt would recognize that voice anywhere. It’s offered him nothing but kindness and held his name with nothing but an awe he’s never deserved. By now, Geralt knows Jaskier’s voice better than his own.)

“You came.” Surprise bleeds into his voice, turns his words into a question they have no business being. Jaskier has more than earned the benefit of Geralt’s doubt. He’s only ever done as Geralt asked.

“Of course, Geralt.” The words sound so unlike the bard he knows, still clipped, stilted with hesitation or disuse. 

It’s the storybook heroes who give noble speeches, use clever logic and thematically relevant plot details to riddle out exactly what they must say to walk away the victor. All the better then that Geralt isn’t the hero he’d wanted to be as a child, but a witcher instead. That he has only his hunts and the Path he walks from one to the next, ingrained in him through long decades of habit. Find the monster. Save the victim. 

Geralt glances at the sunset, the closest he can come to looking at Jaskier. When he turns back, Roach—the very first one, gods alive he’d forgotten what a massive fucking horse she’d been—peers down at him.

death tells him, “Say hello to your Roach for me," and Geralt, abruptly, realizes that he has absolutely no idea how to do that. 

He tells death as much, who looks at him in the dubious way that Geralt has come to learn that only horses can. (Concurrently, Geralt also rethinks any idle imaginings he'd ever had of what it would be like if Roach could talk back to him.) Somewhere behind him Jaskier shifts again, rocking from foot to foot. It draws Geralt’s attention like a lodestone, and when he looks back to death, it’s— 

“Lucjan,” says death, in Lucjan’s voice, with Lucjan’s grin and Lucjan’s hands that’d mimed plucking out eyeballs in one breath and helped ten-year-old Geralt lace up his boots the next. “Before Kaer Morhen, he was from Lettenhove.”

Fuck’s sake. Of course he was. 

(why oxenfurt? — why oxenfurt what? — you tell people you’re from oxenfurt, but you grew up in lettenhove. — ah. well, i suppose it’s because sometimes i’d like to think i’m more than the place that made me, you know? — Do you? Do you, Geralt of Rivia? Don't you know what that's like? — geralt? d'you know what i mean? — hmm. no.)

“Thank you,” Geralt replies, because it’s only polite, even if he wants to throw up in the fucking grass and get the fuck out of here, because if he has to keep dealing with destiny and fate and all this other horseshit for much longer, he’s going to rattle apart. “But I still—”

“You’ve been here before,” death-as-Yennefer tells him, waving a hand out at the endless field of grass as the sun bleeds into the horizon to their right. The gesture is much more dramatic when Yen does it. “You know what you’re doing.” death fixes Geralt with a pointed look, and that, death pulls off significantly better than Yennefer can. “Say hello to Roach.”

“I—” He blinks, and he’s alone, no woman or bird or boy or witcher with him anymore. “I will.” Just him, and all this fucking grass, and—“Jaskier?”   

“Geralt?” The reply comes from exactly where Jaskier had first spoken. In all this time, he hadn’t moved, hadn’t meandered or wandered or just generally dicked around while Geralt’s back was turned and that image alone, of stock-still Jaskier just waiting, is enough to get his hackles up.

“I need you to come with me. We’re going to go, alright?” The words of Jaskier’s reply are lost to the wind that Geralt sees whipping up the grass around them, just a murmur of acquiescence. Footsteps crunch closer to Geralt before stopping a polite distance behind him. Geralt scowls into the distance. “Once I know where the fuck we’re going.”

He needs Jaskier for this. Real Jaskier, alive Jaskier, who would repeat his conversation with death back to him verbatim—give or take a few choice embellishments, for the hell of it—and roll the words around in his mouth until he bit upon something that made more sense than running around aimlessly through a fuck-off giant field of galleta and hyssop and milkweed and—

“It’s grasses.” He says it out loud to see if that does anything. It doesn't, and Jaskier doesn’t say anything for or against, so Geralt pushes on, “These are grasses, and this is a trial.”

He has been here before. 

(Here is how a boy makes himself a witcher: he keeps moving forward. He doesn’t look back. He stays on the Path.)

Geralt smells the richness of freshly-turned earth and when he glances down, a dirt trail lies waiting at his feet. It streaks off through the tall grasses as far he can see until everything blurs together against the horizon.

He does know what he’s doing. 

Geralt, absolutely and unequivocally, has no idea what the fuck he’s doing.

In a way, he’d known that as soon as he walked out of Jaskier’s wake, jaw aching, with a scream building in his throat and an old story rattling in his brain. Fuck, he’s known it since Eskel had pushed him to voice his half-arsed, reckless plan aloud as they sat mending armour in Kaer Morhen. Even then it had sounded impossible, the looming specter of insurmountable odds, but Geralt had been certain. For Jaskier? To make even the smallest of amends? It would be worth it.

Now? Geralt isn’t as sure. 

“Why am I coming with you?”

Geralt fights the shiver prickling down his spine. It’s Jaskier’s voice, his faint Lettenhove accent bleeding even into Common, but not his inflection. No lilt or drawn-out syllables or smile in his tone. This is the third time he’s asked, each time as confused as if it was the first, and for the third time Geralt replies, “We're going back.” 

Silence, as Jaskier mulls it over, then, “Back?”

He can't say home, as much as he wants to. As much as it's true. “Back to being alive.”

“Where?”

“Oxenfurt. Kaer Morhen, if you want.” The offer is a hot coal on his tongue, a consolation prize decades too late. “Anywhere you want, Jaskier.”

Maybe, Geralt does not say, we can go to the coast.

Another drawn-out pause greets him in reply, and Geralt wonders if this is what it had been like for Jaskier, trudging after Geralt for years. The landscape around them is unchanging as far around as he dares to look, and as eerily silent as Jaskier is. If it weren’t for his footsteps in the dirt keeping pace behind him, Geralt could pretend he was still walking alone.

After long enough that Geralt thinks Jaskier may have forgotten again, the bard asks, “Why?”

“Because—” He doesn't know how to answer that. He never thought Jaskier would even ask that. The words that come so easily to him in Kaer Morhen hang just out of reach, but Geralt fumbles on a response he hopes doesn’t sound as desperate to Jaskier as it does to his own ears. “Ciri. She wants to meet you.” It’s not exactly a lie, since Geralt wasn’t supposed to find out, didn’t find out until Ciri told him. Jaskier had hedged his bets on Calanthe’s grief and not her temper every year to sing for the Lion Cub of Cintra—he likely knows Ciri better than anyone left alive. “She wants to hear your stories, your songs.”

“Oh, Geralt.” His name in Jaskier’s mouth is soft with sympathy. “Anyone can tell her my stories.”

“Not—" Fuck. "Not like you can. Jaskier, she wants to meet you, really meet you. Eskel, Lambert. Vesemir, even. They want to meet you too."

"I’ll meet them all eventually, Geralt." For all he says them so gently, the words do nothing but burn. "You too. One day you'll be here, and I’ll be here with you."

Geralt’s throat closes up around his next words even as he shapes them in his mouth. His very body objects even as his rot-soft heart prods his leaden tongue to speak. Witchers survive by trusting their instincts, and this is wrong. This stoops so low he knows it in his very marrow.

"What about me?" he asks, voice even and light as anything. Around them, the grasses stretch on forever. There was a tree here somewhere, wasn't there? A horse? A bag, and something important leaning up against it? 

“What about you?” Jaskier asks back, bemused. Like he can’t quite fathom the point of the question. 

“What am I going to do without you?”

Geralt gets another half-dozen steps forward before he realizes the footsteps behind him have stopped. And it’s instinct now, practically second nature for him to look, to make sure Jaskier is alright and see what ridiculous scheme he’s concocted— 

He barely catches himself halfway, facing the blazing sunset that hasn’t moved across the sky at all, just as the boots behind him slowly move forward again. 

Jaskier must be right up against his back when he finally stops; Geralt hasn’t moved except to face their path through the tall grasses. “You’ll do what you did before me,” Jaskier tells him. Blandly. A statement of fact.

This is what he’d thought he’d wanted, in the very beginning. Jaskier quiet. Jaskier calm and simple and matter-of-fact. Jaskier with no lute to tune and strum and fawn over. Jaskier just plain old shutting the fuck up. Hell, if it had been an option for the Geralt who’d ridden into Upper Posada, barely anything more than the Butcher of Blaviken, he’d’ve been thrilled to not have Jaskier along at all.

“And if I don’t want to?” Geralt asks. His eyes slip shut. To his right, the blaze of the sunset washes the insides of his eyelids with orange. They probably need to go. Geralt doesn’t know if there’s a time limit, didn’t think to ask but—but if this is what he’s bringing back with him he doesn’t know if he can bear it.  

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” comes the reply, too matter-of-fact to be intentionally cruel. “But who knows? Maybe I’ll come back one day. Try again as someone new.” Jaskier hums, a tuneless, thoughtful note. “I would still try to find you, I think.”

A cramp shoots up his arm from palm to elbow and Geralt takes a deep breath, loosening his clenched fist with a growl. He wants to put his fist through a wall. He wants to turn around and grab Jaskier and shake him, tell him he’s coming back now, because Geralt’s already fucking found him.

Instead, he asks, “How would I even know it’s you?”

“If they love you, Geralt, then that’s me.”

To hear him say it—so casually—it hurts. It aches in a way Geralt hadn’t expected, which makes him an idiot a thousand times over because he knew. Never let himself believe it, trust it—tried convincing himself Jaskier only loved the idea of him, despite being the only person to see him at his worst time and again and stay—but he knew. Could smell it, for one. Could barely avoid Yennefer’s smug face about it, for another. 

Couldn’t avoid the punch from possibly the strongest arm Geralt’s ever encountered outside of a striga, Jaskier’s friend being physically lifted away by her wife and out of striking range to stop her hitting Geralt again, hissing he loved you, you bastard, you empty hollow son of a bitch—  

Geralt can’t think of a better reply, so he tells Jaskier that. Says, “Your friend Little Eye punched me at your wake,” and waits for anything, a spluttering laugh or a cheer or a scandalized gasp. For Jaskier to crow oh, she didn’t and you have to tell me everything! in practically the same breath.

“That was nice of her,” floats up to Geralt on the cursed fucking wind that ruffles the cursed fucking grass and probably Jaskier, whipping through his hair or his doublet or fucking something. But what does it even matter, because it’s not like Geralt can turn around and see, great powerful witcher with the strength of an army beaten into his frame and he’s helpless in the face of a damned breeze— 

“Maybe you could stay here with me. You could stop.”

The blood freezes in Geralt’s veins, and only the long arm of ingrained training forces him to take another step forward. And another. And a third, moving only forward on the Path above and before everything else, the first and only act of self-preservation he ever learned. Not just because it sounds like a really obvious trap, but because if he stops, he’ll consider it. “No.”

“Please, Geralt,” and gods, the way he says it, Jaskier almost sounds like himself again, “you’re so tired. You could rest.”

“I’m not tired.”

“You could rest with me.”

The bite of his nails against his palms helps ground him. He takes in one deep breath, another, again, sinking just low enough into a meditation that he can clear his head away from the wind and the grass and the knowledge that Jaskier is just right there. But it’s a mistake, because without the rest of the world Jaskier’s words hold a weight of their own, and Geralt can't help but consider them, just a little.

He really is so tired. He has been for a while.

It’s also a mistake because when he surfaces again, shaking his head to clear it, it turns out Jaskier is still talking. 

“—always said that you didn’t know how or when you were going to die, only that it would be on the Path and that it would be painful. But if you stayed, then you would know.” Jaskier sounds closer now. Like he’s walking nearly even with Geralt, maybe even just a step or two behind, and all Geralt would have to do is turn his head to check. Jaskier’s voice sounds so soft. “And it doesn’t hurt, Geralt. I promise.”

Fuck. 

What has he gotten himself into? Him, trying to out-wordsmith Jaskier of Oxenfurt? The bard who’d had the entire fucking Continent singing Geralt’s name within weeks of traveling with him?

He’s a child thrown into the ring with a master, and he expects to fucking win?

Geralt grasps for the only weapon he brought with him, the only tool in his arsenal. For all that it even is a tool and not just a double-edged sword, cutting him as deeply as anyone else each time he wields it: Geralt gets angry. Lets it burn through the weary dread that grasps at him and build in his throat like dragon-fire—huh, maybe Jaskier’s way with words is rubbing off on him after all. Or maybe Geralt can only control his fool tongue when he uses it to draw blood. 

“A minute ago, you didn't give a shit about what happens to me or what I want," he snarls. Muscle memory urges him to turn—point a finger, raise his voice—but he keeps his back to the bard, eyes fixed on a fuzzy shape coalescing in the distance where there was nothing but flat horizon before. It shakes Geralt out of his growing rage; he thinks it might be a tree.

“Well, now it’s a minute later,” Jaskier snaps right back, brash and sudden and loud in Geralt’s ear, “and I’ve changed my bloody mind!”

Geralt flinches. Jaskier must have stalked right up to him, because there’s the distinct sound of his impractical boots scrambling backwards and tripping over each other. From the sound of it, he only narrowly avoids landing on his arse in the dirt, and grumbles as he staggers upright. The unexpected relief nearly brings him to his knees. “Jaskier.” 

“Geralt!” Jaskier responds immediately. Just like before, only this time he sounds—he sounds alive. He sounds alive and afraid, suddenly, but he speaks again before Geralt can react. “Geralt. Oh, no.” 

The stench of terror, too sweet and cloying, spills between them like blood in the water. But Geralt forces himself still, muscles trembling with the effort of facing forward, eyes fixed unblinking at the smear on the horizon that started all of this. He doesn’t understand. They’re the only two creatures out here, there’s nothing Jaskier could have seen or heard that Geralt wouldn’t have, nothing that should make him so scared, not when Geralt is right here with him— 

Ah. 

“Jaskier,” Geralt sighs, shoulders dropping, arms loose at his sides, voice even and measured. Every concession he’s made a thousand times for frightened villagers and jumpy soldiers and never once for Jaskier. 

I’m not going to hurt you, is what he starts to say, just as Jaskier blurts, “Was it bad?”

Geralt blinks. “What?”

Jaskier huffs a laugh, a particular sound Geralt knows too well. It’s easy to picture the face that goes with it, that strange way the bard sometimes smiles with such sad eyes. “Too much to hope that you died safe and comfortable in your witchery bed, isn’t it?”

(silly witcher, what would you do without me? die in your bed at the comfortable age of a thousand and twelve, i’d reckon, without me to liven things up!)

The question takes a moment to sink in. “What?” Geralt bites out, confused. “I’m not dead.”

“But you’re here—”

“You’re dead, Jaskier.” It’s the first time he’s said those words out loud; it hurts less than he’d expected it to. “I found you.” 

Found him, like it was a happy coincidence, not Geralt’s deranged flight from the Blue Mountains to the North Sea with nothing but the vague thought that he needed to fix this. He has no right to chase after Jaskier as if he hadn’t first chased him away, and the bard will see right through his bullshit to the selfish, greedy reasons the witcher keeps tucked close to his chest. 

(“He’s not done yet,” he'd murmured unprompted, eyes fixed firmly on the fire jumping at its bounds in the hearth.

“He’s not done?” Eskel hadn’t looked up from the mending in his lap. “Or you’re not done with him?”)

And Jaskier takes his answer at face value; the telltale scratch of him running his thumbnail along the calluses on his fingertips stops abruptly. “I see,” he says, oddly strained. “I heard about the mages dead at Sodden,” he adds after a pause. “Did you come for Yennefer?”   

Something bitter has bled into the bard’s voice. Geralt doesn’t know if Jaskier doesn’t notice or just doesn’t care. “No.”

“Fair enough!” A rustle of fabric as he shrugs. The bard’s voice is nothing but cool, affected nonchalance. “Not that I think Death would even dare come for her in the first place, or if it did, that Yennefer of Vengerberg couldn’t just stroll right out again on her own—”

Around them the wind picks up, racing through the grass in great arcs and scattering pebbles and hard-packed dirt against Geralt’s boot, though he can’t feel it on his skin. He’s not sure if loudly discussing someone dodging their mortal end will make death testy or not, but he doesn’t want to risk it. A great gust of wind bows the grass at the edges of the path almost flat to the ground, and Geralt hisses, “Jaskier! Watch it.”

“Fine, fine!” Muttering rises up behind him as Jaskier fusses with his clothing again, and Geralt lets his eyes slip shut. If he stands very still, they could be anywhere on the Path, and the familiarity makes him ache. “Fucking bollocks—how are you not getting battered around by this blasted wind?” Jaskier demands. “Look at him—stomping around the land of the dead and not a hair out of place.”  

Geralt grunts, skin prickling as Jaskier flaunts his uncanny talent for inadvertently hitting the nail on the head. So far, he’d assumed that this strange separation—no wind on his skin, the muted sound of his own footsteps, no hunger or thirst or pain—from the land around him is a good thing. A tether he could follow back and drag Jaskier along with him. “Maybe I’m just special,” he mutters tersely.

If it’s not— 

“And you’re sure,” the bard presses again suddenly, an edge of that panic twisting between his words, “you’re sure you’re not dead?”

“Yes.” Geralt grits out. That familiar exasperation at Jaskier and his antics and endless questions simmers just under his skin, wrapped tight in his careful, meticulous control. Once he could’ve loosened his hold, shown his teeth just enough tease and Jaskier would’ve bantered right back, confident that things between them (the thing, unnamed and unacknowledged, that hides in the shadow of Geralt’s heartbeat and drums out an offset rhythm that he can’t drown out) wouldn’t change. Not anymore. 

“Alright.” Jaskier sounds reassured, if only a little. “This is just a—a witcher trick, then?” When Geralt doesn’t outright deny it, Jaskier grows bolder. “Some side effect of the Trials? They stick you full of herbs and spices and then everyone who survives the Trials can fuck for hours on end with supernatural witchery stamina—a conclusion drawn from secondhand anecdotal evidence, mind you, since someone has never bothered to corroborate or deny the claims—and stroll into the land of the dead like a sailor hits the shore on leave?”   

“Hmm.” It’s a fair assumption, easier to let him believe than to try to explain, to risk inviting death down on their heads for a personal demonstration. 

(It’s a clever loophole, really. One that towered unspoken in every corner of every room in Kaer Morhen, breathed down every boy’s neck from the moment they came through the gates to the moment they climbed down that long dark stairwell: surviving isn’t quite enough. Three in ten boys survive the trials, they tell people, but that’s not true. Three in ten boys become witchers after the trials. No one really keeps track of how many boys survive them, because it doesn’t really matter when it comes time to balance the ledger. If a boy is alive by the end of the week but the mutations don’t take, don’t shred him down to his smallest scraps and build him back up proper, it’s easier—kinder—to make him a space on the pyre than in the infirmary. To put him out of his misery and press him into death’s open, waiting palms.)

The thought spurs him back into motion, striding down the path that snakes out ahead of him, towards the faint smudge at the end of it Geralt tells himself is the hazy outline of branches and leaves. After a pause, he hears Jaskier hurry after him and for a time that’s the only sound between them: their footsteps and the rasp of Jaskier’s finery as he walks. It’s fucking deafening, swallowing all of Geralt’s attention in the absence of anything else, every shift and shudder of rich fabric against the measured background of boots on packed earth. 

The same sharpness had plagued him in Caingorn, just after the mountain. Everything became too bright, too loud in Jaskier’s absence when Geralt had expected the exact opposite. But silence was a riot without the steady murmur of Jaskier’s humming or singing or rambling. He would wind Roach into an irritated mess of nerves, tossing her head and snapping at him when they stopped, driven to distraction every time movement flashed in the corner of Geralt’s eye that wasn’t a flurry of brilliant silks. It had scared him then, how deeply he’d woven Jaskier into himself. He’d called it weakness, had used it as proof of sloppy witchering and clung to it as a reason to turn away from the beacon of Jaskier’s trail back towards the city. 

Later, he’d promised himself in a desperate bribe, later. Let him darn his ragged edges back together over this tear of his own making first. Then he’d find Jaskier, once he’d scoured out that weakness that had only hurt them both.  

It’s funny; after decades of keeping Jaskier at arm’s length, citing his mortality as chief reason to hold himself apart, Geralt had been so certain he had plenty of time. 

“So, um—is there,” Jaskier chuckles, breathy and awkward, the laugh he reserves for when he’s staring down the end of someone’s sword or into a monster’s maw, because of course the bastard’s quickest response is to laugh, “is there a reason you won’t look at me?” 

“Can’t.” 

“Can’t?” Jaskier’s voice is oddly tight, the chamomile-bergamot scent of him edged out by a char, like burning grass. It takes Geralt a moment to remember where he’d encountered it last: at the crossroads at the bottom of the mountain, winding its way down the trail towards the Pensive Dragon.

Fuck. “Not allowed to,” Geralt corrects. I’d look at you if I could, he doesn’t add, because it’s disgustingly maudlin and it’s true. I’d never stop.

“What does that—Oh.” 

“Yeah.”

“Like in the story?” Jaskier asks, incredulous. It startles a laugh out of him, bright and astonished. “And you were always on my arse about poets taking artistic liberties, but it’s true! Hah! Of all the ones, imagine that!”

Geralt has the unshakeable suspicion that somewhere, Eskel is laughing at him. “Imagine that.”

“Well!” Small mercies, the bard takes it in stride with the unflappable resolve of a man who followed a witcher into all sorts of batshit predicaments for the better half of his life. “Beggars certainly can’t be choosers and all that, but I always thought I’d write the stories about dashing damsels in distress and their noble white knights, not be in them.” 

“I'm no white knight."

"I know." It stings to hear him agree, but Jaskier doesn't say it with bitterness or spite or resignation. And Geralt has long since lost the privilege of Jaskier’s unwavering, unconditional support, if he’d ever even deserved it in the first place.

“Not that I mind the rescue—again, beggars and choosers and whatnot—but, erm, why?” The burnt grass smell stalks Geralt like a shadow again. It built up slowly in the hours—hours? the sun hasn’t moved, the blur on the horizon is still just that, a blur—they’ve been walking, and now it presses against Geralt’s back like a lover, sits heavy in the back of his throat. The telltale ache in his muscles or pain in his joints still hasn’t set in, but a tremor rattles across his body in waves, as though he’s been wandering for weeks. Behind him, Jaskier clears his throat and continues, “It’s not like we left it on the best of terms, if I rightly recall.”

Jaskier recalls rightly, and they both know it. Geralt’s lips flatten in an unhappy line, jaw set with tension. “You’re my friend.”

The bard scoffs. “Could’ve fooled me.” Geralt deserves that. The same suspicion, the disbelief and derision he’d turned on Jaskier in the very beginning, doubled back on him now. “You do this for all your friends?”

“None of my other friends have died when they shouldn’t have.”

“Everyone dies exactly when and how they’re supposed to.” 

What can he possibly say to that? Geralt keeps walking and doesn’t reply, lets the silence stretch and strain between them as he leads and Jaskier follows. The bard lingers farther behind him now, out of deference for the rules of this game or simply to put space between himself and Geralt, the witcher doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter; the yawning gulf between them might as well be a mountain range across.

“Geralt,” Jaskier starts, another interminable amount of time later, as the sun has set no farther and the path has grown no shorter, “do you know how I died?”

The witcher presses on, gritting his teeth until the muscles in his cheeks and jaw protest. “No. They wouldn’t tell me. Only that it was—” bad, that it was painful, that you died alone and scared and I wasn’t there. “—that it was impossible to recover your body.” 

Only his lute, pristine and undamaged by the grace of Filavandrel’s craftsmanship. It's how the mage Jaskier’s friends paid to track him down had learned the truth after nearly a season of silence. It's the only thing they'd buried in his place after the wake. His last letter to Priscilla placed Jaskier in Brugge, leaving the city the next day with plans to cross the Yaruga at Dillingen and make his way northwest across Cintra. It’s a massive stretch of land. Finding his body would have been an impossible task, even before the war. 

“Ah.” Jaskier laughs, tight and humourless. “Likely there wasn’t one to recover.” 

Geralt’s head snaps up from where he’d been carefully scrutinizing the pebbles on the path. It’s a near thing he doesn’t turn around entirely to throw Jaskier a suspicious look at his tone.

“I don’t even think they left any bones,” Jaskier continues blithely. “Is that a thing I should be able to tell, d'you think? Like a ghostly power of the dead or something, knowing where my bones are at?” As usual he doesn’t wait for Geralt to answer, but that’s just as well—Geralt is stumbling along in the wake of his words, he’s missing something important—“I don’t know! Food for thought, I suppose, but I don’t know that it matters.” A rustle of his doublet as he shrugs. “There was hardly anything left for the crows.” 

(“I was goin’ home to my family when I came upon these poor souls. Cintran refugees, dead at least a week. Now they’re a feast for the crows.”

He’d heard it then, beneath the loose-packed earth at their feet: a steady scraping. The drag of claws through the underbrush. “They’re not crows.”)

Something heavy and cloying curls low in Geralt’s gut, spreading up and out until he feels fever-hot and lightheaded. His next steps leave him wobbling on unsteady legs, and he drops to a crouch heedless of Jaskier’s alarmed cry. Pressing a hand into the dirt, trying to siphon some measure of stability from the earth thrumming lightly with power under his palm, he rasps, “Jaskier. You died in Cintra?” 

He’d suspected as much, they all did. The last person to see Jaskier had been the ferryman in Dillingen who watched Jaskier vanish into the crowd on the Cintran side of the Yaruga, but suddenly Geralt needs to be sure.

“I—Yes?” Jaskier takes a step back from where he hovered just over Geralt’s shoulder, having come closer when the witcher dropped. He clears his throat. “Yes, I did—why? What has that got to do with—”

“Where in Cintra did you die?” When Jaskier doesn’t respond, Geralt rocks back on his heels and slowly rises back to his feet. He presses his hands to his face, a precaution, because if Jaskier doesn’t answer him Geralt will turn around to make sure he’s still there. He won’t be able to help himself.

“Geralt,” Jaskier says slowly, like he’s coming to a conclusion of his own (and maybe he is, he talks about something picking clean and gnawing down his bones with enough confidence to have seen it, to have watched it happen even after he was dead), “What did you do?”

“Jaskier,” Geralt says right back. The scar on his leg, half-moon bitemarks still pale and shiny, starts to ache. “What were you doing in the woods when you died?”

“Considering how much of northern Cintra is the woods, Geralt,” the bard snaps, vicious, “there’s a great very many things I could’ve been doing! None of which, may I remind you, are any of your fucking business anymore—” 

The footsteps behind him pick up again, moving away, and Geralt nearly jerks around after Jaskier until he hears the footsteps pacing back towards him. The smell of chamomile—and rot, the smell of rot, of graveyards, of bodies dead over a week and gone rancid that he should’ve stopped to bury or burn—pours off Jaskier in practically every direction. Geralt turns carefully back around to face the path. Despite the fact that this is about to be, without question, the worst conversation Geralt has ever had in his entire life, it puts him at immeasurable ease to know that somewhere just behind him, Jaskier is wearing a hole into the dirt and waving his hands just like always. 

Melitele’s tits, Lambert would laugh his fucking beard off to hear Geralt right now. He really is going soft.

Jaskier finally stops pacing, crunching to a halt just behind Geralt. Just behind him, from the scent, close enough that he could reach out and touch Geralt if he wanted. 

"Wait, Geralt—" 

That thought coupled with the way Jaskier says his name, like nothing has changed between them, spurs Geralt into motion. Both because with the sunset frozen overhead he still doesn’t know if they have a time limit here, and to put as much distance as he can between himself and Jaskier’s question, hurled at his fleeing back: “How did you know I died in the woods?”

Everything a witcher has and everything he needs is on the Path. It unspools before him from the mouth of the school that made him, it moves only ever forward, and it ends, for every witcher before him and every witcher after, in exactly the same place.

Only now, Geralt has walked past the end of the Path and just kept fucking walking, and it tracks that for a witcher there’s not even any peace in death. Just another fucking path, filled to the gills with monsters of Geralt’s own making.

“Oh,” Jaskier hisses, fury crackling off of him like a building storm, sharp and stinging like Mahakaman spirit fresh from the still, “oh, brilliant. Fucking stellar. So even when I’m trying to stay as far the fuck away from you as possible, as requested, I still end up knee-deep in shit for you after all.”

Geralt takes a deep breath, inhaling until his lungs ache and his chest stretches wide. He exhales just as slowly. It doesn’t really help. He shouldn’t rise to the bait, Jaskier has every right to rage at him, and yet—“What the fuck were you doing in Cintra, anyway?”

“Well, considering the last time we were there together, you put your big foot in your sodding mouth and hopped your way to a Child Surprise,” Jaskier shoots back, “and then fucked off and abandoned her for nigh on thirteen years, I figured it’d be the last place you were likely to turn up!” The bard sucks a sharp breath in through his teeth with an aggravated sound. “Clearly, that was my mistake.”

He made his mistake long before that, Geralt thinks, and much farther north, in the corner of a shithole pub in Posada. Wisely, he keeps that gem to himself. 

“I was a sennight east of the city when Nilfgaard sacked it, and then a couple days west of Sodden Hill when Nilfgaard stormed that,” Jaskier stops to mutter something under his breath. Geralt suspects he’s pinching the bridge of his nose. “So I thought it’d be terribly wise of me to get across the Yaruga as soon as possible, in case Nilfgaard decided to go for broke and try to take the fortress twice in one godsdamn week!”

And he’d been clever, had learned at least something in all his time traipsing after Geralt. The bard had gone off the main road to avoid roving packs of soldiers and bandits both—although more often than not, they’re one and the same in war—and made his way towards the river on game trails and beaten tracks barely wide enough for lone wagons to pass through. The clinging fog and thick copses of trees were perfect for hiding all sorts of things from the sharp eyes of invading forces. Lone bards. Lost princesses. An entire camp of Cintran refugees. Ghouls. 

Geralt knows this story too. He’s heard it once before.

It’s like something out of one of Jaskier’s stupid fucking ballads, the weepy tragedies he kept for quiet nights in slow taverns, where the patrons were more interested in the bottoms of their cups than the bard atop the bar. Geralt had missed him by days. Might not have missed him at all if he hadn’t been sulking, if he’d bothered to do the only wretched thing he was good for. He should’ve helped Yurga move the bodies, burned them so nothing else could have lurked there when someone else passed by. Geralt should’ve done a lot of things, an unbroken chain of horseshit from the moment he opened his stupid, thoughtless mouth in Calanthe’s court—

“Don’t.” Geralt’s head jerks up at the venom in Jaskier’s voice. “Don’t make this about you, witcher. I don’t know what you think you did, but you’re not personally responsible for every fucking ghost and goblin on the bloody Continent!” Jaskier cuts himself off with an ugly, desperate laugh. “Sorry, sorry. I’m just—it’s a bit strange, isn’t it? I’m not your problem anymore, haven’t been for ages, and yet here you are? You came all this way to save me?” The bard scoffs. His voice is oddly strained. “It is just the sort of story I’d tell myself, I’ll admit.”

“Jaskier—” Geralt tries, helpless to stop Jaskier’s hysterical spiral, wanting nothing more than to turn and stop him. For his own sake, yes, as Jaskier starts to pace behind him, breath coming quicker and quicker despite the ringing silence where his heartbeat should be. But also because this is too close, Jaskier’s questions skirting too close to things Geralt’s only barely let himself start considering, let alone explaining to anyone else. He wants to bring Jaskier back and assure himself that the bard is alive, and leave before Jaskier can read him like he does any other open book.

“And off the back of some stupid fairytale—” That laugh again, that cuts Geralt as well as any blade would. “Can’t believe you were even listening, fillingless pie and all—” 

“Jaskier!”

“Prove it, then!” Jaskier shouts. “Tell me why I should believe that any of this isn’t just—” The breath he draws is shaky, catching in his throat. For all the bravado and whip-sharp anger that pours off him in waves, an undercurrent of doubt worms its way through his words. “I need you to prove it, Geralt, because otherwise—otherwise I’m not sure I can do this for eternity. That’s the point, I suppose, if this is eternal torment, but—”

“It’s not,” Geralt snaps. Did Jaskier follow him all this way, for whatever countless, miserable length of time they’ve been here, thinking the witcher was some sort of punishment inflicted on him? 

(After everything, would he be wrong?)

“Then why?” Jaskier demands. The bard is no fool, he knows Geralt too well to take him only at what little he says. It’s their evergreen argument, brought up after every hunt: the real story lies tangled up in the details Geralt refuses to tell him.

And again, that instinct. The prickling down his spine and the squeeze around his lungs that tells him this is wrong, it’s cruel—he has no right to leverage this like a weapon. But Geralt already knows that, has known it from the first touch of Roach’s hooves to Oxenfurt’s cobblestones that this will just be another in a long line of hurts he deals to the people who care for him. Then again, his silence was the weapon that led them here, or at least leveled the earth to start that path. If his words are going to hurt then let it be the healing sort, that scours out the bad blood between them rather than letting it fester. 

All the sort of highbrow, navel-gazing nonsense Geralt could never hope to put paid to out loud. So instead he says, "I love you."

"No."

"Jaskier, I love you." The words hold their form easier, stronger, each time he says them. For once, they feel like the right words to say, like the hero in a godsdamn fairytale. "I'm in love with you."

The blow to his back catches him by surprise—he didn't think Jaskier could do that, for one thing, and for another it’s strong. Jaskier's fist (he thinks? hopefully it wasn’t his fucking boot) catches him right between the shoulder blades and the force of it is enough to send Geralt sprawling into the dirt, barely catching himself on his hands and knees.

It takes every single thing he has, every measure of patience and calm cultivated for decades in the face of jeers and stones and fists, every speck of iron in his bones for Geralt not to react. To dig his fingers into the dust and tuck his chin to his chest and squeeze his eyes shut tight tight tight and wait.

"Don't you dare." From the angle, the way his voice rides the air, Jaskier is still behind him. Geralt can see him in his mind's eye: shoulders up tight, hands clenched into bloodless fists, eyes flat and cold. Smiling. Jaskier smiles when he's angry, a vicious thing that’s all teeth.

This might actually be easier than he'd thought, to get them all the way back without looking over his shoulder. Geralt barely wants to sit back on his haunches and kneel with his back to Jaskier, hot and prickling shame a tight hand gripping his throat from the inside out. He'd never be able fucking bear turning around and seeing the way Jaskier must be looking at him now. It'd kill him. It'd slay the stupid fucking witcher right down dead, and then what would this all have been for?

"Don't you fucking dare," Jaskier hisses again. "You don't get to say that to me."

What else can he say? "I know."

"Why would—" Jaskier sounds so confused. So lost. "Why would you say that?"

"It's true."

"It's not."

"It is, Jaskier, it—"

"Stop!"

Geralt stops. 

There, under the way his voice cracks when he shouts: a tiny, hitching breath. The start of a sob, and the rustle of fabric that tells Geralt that Jaskier is crossing his arms over his chest. Making himself a smaller target.

Hands upturned on his thighs, kneeling in the dirt, eyes carefully closed, Geralt turns his head to the side. If he opened his eyes, he wouldn't have far to turn before he'd be able to spot Jaskier out of the corner of his eye. The flash of his sleeve, the tips of his fingers. It'd be enough, just to tide him over. Geralt can allow himself that much, can’t he? With all the liberties he’s already taken? "Jaskier—"

"Shut up, Geralt." Jaskier sounds muffled. His hand must be pressed to his mouth, but Geralt can still hear the way Jaskier tries to take a breath without tipping over into uncontrollable sobbing. "And turn back around."

It makes Geralt want to lean over and throw up in the grass. There's something behind him, choking on air and smothering helpless little gasps into its hand. Geralt can smell wet and salt and he could hear it in Jaskier's voice already but now he knows, knows for certain that Jaskier is crying.

And yet.

Two people in the tall grass. Only one heartbeat echoes in Geralt's ears.

Geralt turns his head back the other way to face forward. Behind him Jaskier lets out a shaky exhale. "You don't get to do that either," he tells Geralt. "You made a choice. You don't get to quit or think you know best—because that's why you're here anyway, isn't it, why you're fetching me from Death, because you think you know best." The smell of salt scatters behind him, and Geralt frowns before he realizes Jaskier must be scrubbing at his eyes, wiping away tears against the sleeves and collar of his doublet as though that'll hide how splotchy his face will have gotten. "You don't get to give up and leave me behind again just because you didn't realize this was going to be so fucking hard."

"I don't want to leave you." Have the tables turned? Geralt is, by extremely generous definitions of the word, the only human here. Can Jaskier hear his heartbeat? Can he hear it's not a lie?

"Mm, isn’t that what they all say?"

"I’ve never said that." But oh, how he's wanted to.

Geralt's weathered the lash of the cruelest words, the most sincerely-meant threats and promises to do him harm just because somebody can. Just about everything that's ever tried to kill and eat him has tried to tell him so, up-front in its own unique and individually terrifying way. And then Jaskier laughs, a sharp, surprised bark of sound that doesn't echo through the field around them. It is, by far, the worst thing Geralt has ever heard.

"Huh, you're right," Jaskier says, "you haven’t."

When Geralt doesn’t reply for one minute, then two, Jaskier sighs. But the silence doesn’t settle long; after another minute, Jaskier starts to pace again. A minute after that, the muttering starts: “He loves me, the great stupid bastard. Stormed the bloody gates of fucking Death after blaming me for all his problems but he tells me he loves me—” The pacing stops, and Jaskier demands, “I suppose you blame me for that as well? Making you love me? Being lovable?”

Geralt’s eyebrows furrow, confused, and he has to fight to keep a tiny smile off his face. “Isn’t that how it’s meant to work?”

Jaskier splutters indignantly and then falls silent, mulling it over. “Shut up,” he grumbles eventually, and the tension tightening in Geralt’s chest eases at the bright tendril of amusement that curls through Jaskier’s scent. But it’s gone as quick as it had come, and Geralt can tell Jaskier is pensive again when he asks, “What am I meant to do with that, Geralt?”

“I don’t know.”

“What am I meant to do with any of this?” Jaskier laughs, breathy and incredulous, his voice growing steadily louder and more panicked. “Do I just—I don’t—do I just go back to how things were?”

Geralt doesn’t know if Jaskier means how he’d traveled on his own since the mountain, or if he means to follow Geralt again. Hope twists painfully sharp in his throat at the thought, and Geralt chokes it down. “Whatever you want, Jaskier. We can go back and you can never see me again if that’s what you want.”

“You know I can’t.”

Geralt does know, as much as he’s pretended not to.

“‘Whatever I want.’” Jaskier continues thoughtfully, rolling Geralt’s words around in his mouth. “Maybe this is what I wanted, did you ever think of that? Maybe I was ready." Jaskier’s moods have always appeared capricious to Geralt, took him years to suss out the rhyme or reason for what seemed to him sudden causeless shifts, and to parse Jaskier’s natural need for empty melodrama to amuse himself and the people around him from the genuine moments he peered out from behind his carefully crafted veneer of the bard. Here, however, Jaskier’s rage and melancholy and quick bright laughter all tumble over one another as haphazardly as the wind whips up the grasses around them. "Maybe I didn't want to fucking follow you around anymore!"

“I'm sorry.” 

At Jaskier’s raw sound of disbelief, Geralt realizes he hadn’t said the words yet, in all the time they’ve been here. The bard splutters, starting and stopping half a dozen responses before he croaks, “For what?”

Geralt sighs and tips his head back to stare at the sky, still caught halfway to twilight. “It's a long list.”

“I have time, Geralt. I have all the time in the world! The hourglass has run out and shattered and now it's spilling all over the bloody fucking table, that's how much time I have! So please," Jaskier means to sound angry, holding onto the dregs of the rage that just tore through him moments ago, but instead he sounds exhausted, “please give me that list."

“I’m sorry for what I said to you at the top of the mountain. I’m sorry for thinking I meant it.” Geralt forces himself to talk past the low, wounded noise Jaskier makes in the back of his throat. “I’m sorry for thinking I meant any of it, and sorry for not figuring out I didn’t until I was at the bottom.” He presses his clammy palms flat against his thighs. “I’m sorry for not finding you right then and taking it all back.”

“You could’ve found me anytime you wanted.” 

He could’ve. For weeks after the mountain, Geralt kept finding signs that Jaskier had passed that way just before him: barrooms bursting into song unprompted and tossing coins at him, the ashy remains of the fucking weird way Jaskier insisted on stacking sticks to make a fire, the baker in a bigger town who’d told him she was sorry, Master Witcher, haven’t got any more of the potato buns until tomorrow, some sad-looking thing with eyes bigger than his stomach bought the lot of them last night. 

“I could have,” Geralt agrees.

“You could’ve written me a fucking note,” Jaskier bites out. “I know you can rip a graveir apart with your bare hands”—for the record, no, Geralt can’t—“but I’m fairly certain Vesemir also taught you your fucking letters.”

Geralt had known his letters before he’d gotten to Kaer Morhen. He’d learned them at his mother’s knee, tracing the words in her books. “Would you have read it?”   

He can practically hear it when Jaskier’s temper finally snaps, like a rope pulling taut around Geralt’s neck. “Would I have—would I have read it, he asks me? As if I haven’t hoarded every single scrap of attention you’ve ever given me! Do you think I spent twenty years chasing you across you the Continent for my fucking health?” Geralt hesitates a moment too long to answer and Jaskier scoffs. “Right. Right, of course. Of course you do. Or you think it was for my purse, more likely, as if after the first year I couldn’t have retired and sat safely at home in Oxenfurt making up bullshit with none the wiser!”

“You would’ve known,” Geralt murmurs. Which is besides the point, Jaskier’s artistic integrity, when he’s standing in the middle of oblivion with absolutely no stake in this game anymore, and is still trying to convince Geralt that he gives even the smallest shit about him. “If it was bullshit, you would’ve known.”

“I don’t care about that!” Jaskier cries. “I don’t give a shit about any of it, don’t you understand? Don’t you know?” He laughs, a breathless, helpless sound. “You must. You have to, Geralt, or else why would you be here? What would be worth you wasting your time to come after somebody you—” The sentence cuts so sharply that the silence that follows is deafening. Then, “Oh.”

Geralt frowns. Oh, what?

“And why’re you telling me any of this, anyway?” Jaskier demands, the conversation changing tracks so quickly Geralt flounders, “You're only saying all this so I'll go back with you. So you can be the hero and finish the job." He laughs again, this one more bitter than the last. "Gods, was it someone out of Oxenfurt? Did Shani pay you? Because I regret to inform you this will have been a wasted effort, and she's only paying you to bring me back so she can kill me all over again herself.”

“One rule.” Jaskier doesn't respond so Geralt elaborates, “I have one rule, Jaskier.” The witcher code is by and large bullshit, used to ward off the nosier or more insistent sorts of people who want a witcher in their pocket, but there’s at least one rule that most witchers abide by.

“You’d best let me think on it, then,” Jaskier croons, falsely sweet, “it's been ages and ages, remember? Hmm—oh, that's right!" Jaskier’s petty peacocking abruptly trails off. “No necromancy,” he recites woodenly. “No raising the dead. Not to visit, not permanently, not at all.” 

Geralt nods. “No necromancy.” 

(Not for any want of effort or ability or resources—humans and elves and everybody else have been writing about avoiding or escaping death from the moment they realized they could die.  Necromancy as an art is laughably easy: a body, living or dead, wants to be alive. The power required to bring something back from the dead is less of an uphill battle and more a stiff shove downhill.

Besides that, death was anything but possessive of its charges, seemingly unworried as it agreed to Geralt’s barebones plan and released Jaskier with little care. But why should it worry? One way or another, they would both come back eventually.)

Jaskier steps back, fabric rustling as he worries the hem of his doublet between his callused fingertips. The citrus-sharp taste of his frustration ebbs as he considers Geralt’s point and the witcher lets him draw his conclusions, casting his awareness out beyond the both of them. He doesn’t get up, not yet, loath to give up this brief respite from the endless walking and the tremors in his limbs that had taken more of a toll on him than he first thought. 

Jaskier had always complained, before, when they passed through endless stretches of farmland or wide swathes of untouched meadows, lamenting the lack of a good city or town or even suspicious abandoned shack to liven up the monotony of nothing to see. There was only so much any one bard could find inspiring about rolling hills and fields of flowers, he insisted. It’s not a sentiment Geralt shares; if anything, he sees too much, and he’d rather suffer the sprawling expanse of monotonous fields than the crowded, deafening crush of people that materializes two steps through any city’s gates. A grizzled old witcher who made the trek up to the keep every winter without fail (until of course, like all witchers, the year he never did again) when Geralt was small used to say that the most fearsome monster he ever faced was a village square on market day. And Geralt’s faced his fair share of monsters since his days spent hanging onto grown witchers’ every words, but even long before Blaviken—before the days he would send Jaskier into towns alone with a list of necessities, jaw clenched and speaking through grit teeth as he rode the wave of skin-crawling dread at the mere idea of walking through a crowded square, before the days Jaskier would take one look at him and go without complaint—Geralt discovered the witcher was right.  

The pull to slip into a light meditation as he waits and watches tugs at the edges of Geralt’s awareness. The promise of a precious few minutes where he can forget Jaskier’s looming silence behind as he puzzles out Geralt’s intentions. It’s the same soft, hazy temptation that lulled him when he stood before death, and Geralt digs his nails hard into the muscle of his thighs, keeping his eyes stubbornly open as he glares out into the grasses. It’s no village square but there’s more than enough for him to see, and Geralt tentatively lets himself sink into the routine of it. The habit of being constantly here, always looking for the lone, small things out of place that mean the difference between drawing his sword too late or just in time.

Something— 

Something like that, just to the left of the path: a patch of blazing-star swaying opposite the rest of the grass around it, as if moved by something other than the wind.

Like Jaskier behind him, whatever lurks in the grass is missing a piece of itself. Geralt can’t smell it, can hear no heartbeat but his own. He can only watch as the flowers slowly sway, then stop, then sway again in time with the wind as whatever creeps behind them stops moving or wanders away. Either option is a mixed blessing; it could be prey, startled by their presence, and the sign of any animal means Geralt and Jaskier are much closer to finding their way out than Geralt had expected. Or it could be a predator—predators, really, since few things that live out in grasslands like these hunt alone. Geralt can’t be sure he’s not imagining it, weary and drained from this endless trek, but he thinks he sees a shock of fur flash between the blazing-star and the tickseed that crowds around it. Under the sound of the wind and Jaskier’s perennial pacing, he thinks he hears a low, rolling snarl.

Wolf, his addled mind supplies instantly, and Geralt tucks his chin to his chest to hide a snort of laughter. There’s no sign of anything else flanking them out of Geralt’s line of sight, and there’s no such thing as a lone wolf in the wild, not for long. It’s the sort of metaphor Jaskier would call heavy-handed.

(A third option, that Geralt steadfastly refuses to entertain: some lone thing watches them from within the grasses because their time has run out. There’s only one predator in the land of the dead.)

"Alright, fine—so what,” asks Jaskier from behind him, Geralt’s laugh enough to pull him from the mire of his thoughts and remind him that the witcher exists, “this is your personal project? You're doing this, what, out of the goodness of your heart? Because you miss my singing?”

This shit again. For one uncharitable moment that he regrets as soon as he thinks it, Geralt misses the hollow Jaskier who’d trudged behind him without this many fucking questions. “I told you why.”

“No, you haven't!” 

Geralt snarls, irritation catching and lighting in his chest. Jaskier's always known him so well, knows right where to sink his nails in and pull. “How haven’t I?” 

“So you love me? So what?" Gods, it hurts enough to hear it, so fucking casual a dismissal, that for the first few seconds it doesn’t hurt at all. It simply leaves him breathless, struggling not to pitch forward and press his forehead to the dirt. Even Jaskier sounds stricken at his own words as he continues. "Lovers die all the time, Geralt. Friends and family die all the time, I don't need to tell you that. Why not mourn me? Love me and let me go, I would've died eventually anyway.”

“I know that!” How could he not fucking know that? Who the fuck does Jaskier think he’s lecturing, one of his wet-eared Oxenfurt students? 

“Or—or why not stay here? Why are you taking me back? Why did you decide without even asking? You can rest here.” The questions pile up, one after the other, as Jaskier hits his stride, voice urgent and frantic. “You're so tired, Geralt, don't lie to me because I can see it. You're so tired and so sad and I can't fix that for you by myself back out there, just by being alive again. I don't want to go back and watch you start to hate me again when you figure out the same thing.” 

“That’s—”

“I know. Darling, I know.” Jaskier chokes on a hiccupy laugh that may very well just be a sob. “You want to tell me that won’t happen, but I’ve been disappointing people for a very long time. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’ve gotten really rather good at it.” Another shaky inhale, and then he blows air loudly out through his teeth, mustering himself back under control and tucking away the parts of him raw and aching from being exposed. “Geralt, please. Why risk that?”

“Because I have a life." Jaskier laughs, incredulous but not unkind. Geralt presses on. "I have a life. I didn't have one for a long time. Not until I rode into fucking Posada and there was this arsehole with a lute, singing about abortions, and—”

“Geralt?”

“I am tired,” Geralt admits, “but I'm not done. Neither are you, I think.” His legs protest, muscle twinging, as he climbs back to his feet. “I have a life now and I want you in it. Need you in it, in fact."

Jaskier’s tone is dry and brash, the cocky, cheeky façade of bard held up like one final shield, but cautious relief blooms between them, a heady scent that makes Geralt think of jasmine. “Is that so, witcher?” He teases, and Geralt can practically taste his smile. “That sounds awfully like you’re suggesting we’re destined for each other.”

Geralt shrugs. “Perhaps we are.”

“I—Oh. And that’s,” Jaskier swallows thickly, “that is, you don’t mind?”

(you don’t mind, do you geralt?)

(is this alright? do you mind? you’d tell me if you did, wouldn’t you?)

(i’m—i know i can be too much. so many people foist their problems on you and call it your destiny, and i don’t—what i mean is, i’m—oh, listen to me! that last glass of est est really did me in! don’t mind me, dear witcher, it’s not important—)   

Geralt went looking for death because he heard a story as a child and decided it was true. He decided to bring Jaskier back because he heard a story as a witcher and thought it seemed fair. He made a path—the Path—to lead them home because that's how life works for a witcher, a destiny laid out for him centuries before he was born. And yet—and yet it’s his own choices that brought him here, the stories that Geralt chose to believe. Whether he bows to destiny’s wishes or rails against it, whether it’s a gentle guiding hand or a vast, impartial machine, Geralt has made the same mistake as all the air-headed academics he’d sneered at. He’s built himself his greatest foe, his biggest monster, capitalized and proper: Destiny, like a character in a story.

destiny just is, and any choices he’s made in its name or against it have always been his own.

“No, Jaskier.” Gods, even to his own ears, he sounds so fond. “I don’t mind.”

His words hang in the air between them for the span of one heartbeat, two, and then Jaskier crows, “You sap!”

Geralt groans. He can hear Jaskier’s grin from where he’s standing. 

“You romantic! A downright orator you—whooh! I'm hot in my stays!" There comes the exaggerated sound of Jaskier shrugging out of his doublet and fanning himself dramatically. "And I know your secret now,” he croons, stepping closer, "so if you try having an entire conversation with humming and stoic looks, I’m—let’s see, I’m going to horse-nap Roach, and we’ll ride off and have our own merry adventures without you!”

Geralt arches an eyebrow in disbelief, although he doesn’t doubt Roach would follow Jaskier wherever he deigned to lead her. "Hmm."

The bard storms away, but for all his playacted fuss, he only sketches a wide circle and stops right back where he’d started. “Fine, that's a fair bluff to call. I wouldn't have it in me,” Jaskier confesses from right behind Geralt, "it would kill me all over again.” The moment hangs between them, fragile, and then Jaskier huffs. “I wouldn’t even get to compose a song about it, on account of being dead, and then what’d be the point?”

Geralt snorts, surprised. “Fuck’s sake, Jaskier—”

“What?” Jaskier’s laughing too, helpless little chuckles Geralt can picture in his mind’s eye, and it’s so easy. Like the call and response of a song over twenty years in the making. “Shut up?”

It’s a joke, of course, like all the times Geralt had rolled his eyes and knocked their shoulders together or reached out to mess with Jaskier’s artfully-done hair and rumbled, Shut up, Jaskier—but now it makes Geralt flinch. Behind him, Jaskier makes a startled, curious sort of sound. 

“Not that.” His mouth is dry when he finally unsticks his tongue and pushes the words out from where they crowd behind his teeth. “Never that. I don’t mean it,” he needs Jaskier to understand, “I’ve never meant it—”

The warm, solid press of first one hand to the flat of his back, then another, chokes the rest of the words in Geralt’s throat. They spread wide over his shoulder blades, and Jaskier shuffles even closer to press his forehead against the back of Geralt’s neck. Geralt reaches up tentatively, prepared for the disappointment, and groans when he feels fingers under his. He reaches back to cup the back of Jaskier’s head and tangle his fingers into his hair, as Jaskier muffles a sob into the back of Geralt’s shirt and clutches at his shoulders. One of his arms drops to wrap tight around Geralt’s chest and Geralt grabs for it, grasping Jaskier’s hand and lacing their fingers together. 

If this is a trap, he thinks, here is where it springs. Stupid silly witcher, lured by a clever monster and pretty words—by the best predator to ever exist, who told him i don’t want you yet, but when in his life, really, has that ever felt true—this would be how he dies. An arm around his chest to squeeze him tight, a hand pressed over his heart, his guts, teeth at the back of his neck and a second hand at his shoulder to hold him steady; he couldn’t have planned it better himself. 

If this is where he dies, maybe he'll be able to find Jaskier for real when he does. Maybe he'll find him and Jaskier will let him stay.

“You are thinking so very loudly for someone who isn’t very good at it,” Jaskier grumbles, breath hot and damp against his skin.

“‘M not.”

“You are.” Geralt lets his hands drop away as Jaskier shakes his head, and he shudders when Jaskier leans forward to brush chapped lips against the back of his neck. It’s very nearly the final nail in the coffin of his resolve. But Jaskier squeezes his shoulder once, then drops his hand to wrap both arms around Geralt’s waist as Geralt resolutely stares straight ahead. 

“Come on then, Witcher,” he murmurs warmly, and then Geralt hears it clearly on the wind. An echo of Jaskier’s words, dozens of them, hundreds maybe, overlapping renditions of come on, witcher, said over breakfast in a ravine or dinner in an inn, or shouted over his shoulder while climbing out of a barmaid’s window or a kikimora nest, all with that same earnest warmth echoing back on one another and weaving together—

Like a song.

“Did you know, Geralt,” Jaskier asks later, still on Geralt’s heels, “that in the original version of that story, the knight fails? He turns around right before the end.”

They’ve been walking for ages. The sun is no closer to setting, the wind still sends the grass rippling like water, and when Geralt asked Jaskier if he thought the smudge in the distance looked like it was getting bigger, Jaskier said he couldn’t see anything on the horizon at all. 

Geralt grunts something that could pass as agreement. “Out of weakness, I know.” He tries not to let it rankle him, because he understands why Jaskier would worry. Geralt’s already let him down once, of course, he’s worried Geralt’s going to fail him again. “That’s not going to happen, Jaskier.”

“Out of weak—Geralt, no.” Jaskier’s pace falters, slowing as he takes in Geralt’s hamfisted attempt at reassurance before he catches up again. “It was out of love.” 

“What?” Geralt resists the urge to throw an incredulous look over his shoulder.

“It’s—Well, there’s different versions of the original version, but still,” Geralt can picture it, Jaskier ticking them off on his fingers, “the lady trips on the final step on the stairway out of the underworld, and the knight turns to help her. Or the knight can’t hear his lover behind him, so he turns to make sure she’s still there. Or the lady doesn’t know that the knight has been forbidden to look, and she begs him the whole way through to turn and look at her even once, so he does.” Jaskier laughs wryly. “That’s—That’s tragedy. The story is a tragic one, but love isn’t a weakness, or failure. If anything, that failure proves the knight’s love.” 

That sounds like the argument of a man desperate to ease his own guilt, to find an excuse for his unforgivable failure, but Geralt decides not to point that out. “Hmm.” 

Jaskier must hear the warmth in his voice regardless, the easy acceptance of Jaskier’s claims, because he scoffs and insists, “Ah, you’ll learn!” 

Geralt hums tunelessly again, smiling now. “Will I?” 

He expects a joke back, but Jaskier’s voice is softer, fonder when he replies. “Yeah, you will.” 

The tree is a spot on the horizon in the distance, indistinct and laughably small, right up until it isn’t. Geralt can’t tell between one footstep and the next when it changes, only suddenly they’re here. The tree resolves itself into thick gnarled bark and low-hanging branches, a sparse canopy of leaves still enough to shade a pack dropped carelessly in the dirt, swords and lute propped gently against it, and beyond all that— 

Geralt’s lips twitch up into a small smile. “Hello, Roach.”

She throws him a reproachful look but doesn’t lunge to bite him, and the sun is as high overhead now as it was when he left. If he didn’t know better, he would say he’s been gone minutes, at most.

But he did it. It’s done. The grass still waves and sway as far as the eye can see, but the elm tree throws soft shade over its small patch of dirt, and far to the south the hills of Coppertown stand out against a dazzlingly blue sky. Here are his swords, and his pack, and a lute for Jaskier. The wind that moves the grass is nothing more than a soft breeze but he can feel it on his skin, and a second heartbeat is loud in his ears, counterpoint to his own. 

Dread crashes over him in an icy wave.

A second heartbeat, too slow to be a man’s now that he truly hears it, and directly in front of him. Geralt and Roach are the only two things alive here.

“Geralt?”

Geralt’s eyes slip shut; it takes everything in his power not to drop to his knees again, the weight of his name in Jaskier’s—Jaskier’s?—mouth as strong as any physical blow. 

“It worked, didn’t it?” Over the roaring in his ears, Geralt can hear something rustling and moving. “I feel like it worked! Or, I don’t feel like it didn’t work, does that make sense?”

He never actually asked, Geralt realizes, bile rising in the back of his throat. Jaskier had even told him so, time and again—making assumptions and choices for Jaskier is what landed them here in the first place, and still Geralt hadn’t actually asked Jaskier to come with him. Hadn’t asked him if he wanted to. Geralt had, yet again, taken off in one direction and expected Jaskier to follow. 

Fuck. Jaskier would be well within his rights to come all this way and leave him, just like on the mountain, to pay him back in his own coin and be as casually cruel to Geralt as he’d been to Jaskier all these years. 

And what sort of idiot is he, to think it would be so easy? Who ever heard of death giving up one of its own without a fight? Who ever heard of death, of destiny, showing a witcher any sort of fucking mercy or kindness or compassion? Take your pay in coin, and up front if you can, Vesemir had beaten it into them a thousand times over—Jaskier is here with him now, at the end of this hunt with its monster slain, but nobody’s promised Geralt that he can stay. Nobody’s promised Geralt that he’s even real. This could be one last lesson, to finish what was started in Kaer Morhen so long ago to tear that last soft thing tucked deep under his ribs and grind it underfoot, but Geralt can’t argue that he doesn’t deserve it. 

“Geralt,” says Jaskier’s too-close voice, with Jaskier’s scent and Jaskier’s smile in its tone, excruciatingly loud over the silence where his heartbeat should be, “it’s alright.” 

A muscle in his jaw twitches, sending a bolt of pain up to his temple from how hard Geralt squeezes his eyes shut, how tightly he grits his teeth and vehemently shakes his head. Jaskier’s voice sounds strange, still near him but—different somehow? he can't think—it's just there, right there on the tip of his tongue, he should know what's different— 

Cool hands settle against his face and follow him when Geralt jerks back, unseeing, palms pressing to his cheeks and fingers stroking the hair at his temples. “Darling, please,” Jaskier says, voice strange because it’s in front of him now, because Geralt can feel the breath Jaskier takes between them, “It worked, it’s fine. Let me show you.”

“That’s not—” He can’t. He can’t.

“Please, Geralt.” Jaskier laughs, voice light, but Geralt hears the worry shot through it, feels the fine trembling of callused fingertips against his skin. It reminds him of the worry on Lambert’s face, on Eskel’s. “I know I’m the bard,” Jaskier says, fingers tapping a steady, gentle rhythm against the side of his face, and it’s a relief to sink into the pattern and ground himself, “but you can’t let me do all the work!” Geralt frowns, confused, and Jaskier’s hands shift immediately, thumbs sweeping up to smooth out the furrow between his eyebrows. “It’s your story, darling. You decide when we close the book.”

On one hand, it doesn’t sound wrong—in fact, it sounds like exactly the sort of logic magic like this thrives on, poignant and meaningful and irritating in its simplicity. It’s all only as complicated as Geralt makes it, the whole fantastical mess. Small wonder, then, that that crux of it all is something as straightforward as Geralt taking Jaskier at his word now. The exact opposite of the mountain, where instead he’d draped his own insecurities and fears on a person who’d done nothing to deserve his misplaced wrath. 

It occurs to Geralt, with excruciating clarity, that there’s no way Jaskier won’t write a fucking awful song about this. The metaphor is too fucking good to pass up.

To his surprise, the thought of it brings him nothing but bone-deep relief. 

Still—“Are you sure?” he asks tightly. The words grind out too-sharp and snappish, more a growl than a question. 

(Is he a witcher or isn’t he? Hadn’t they burned this gutlessness out of him decades ago?)

“No,” Jaskier admits immediately, voice still bright with laughter. His fingers are already tapping at the corner of Geralt’s lips before they twist into a scowl. “No clue, I’m afraid! Just running off a, uh, bardic instinct? It’s the great and thankless task of a storyteller to notice these things, Geralt.” He shrugs. Geralt feels the movement as it travels up Jaskier’s arms to where his fingers flit up to settle against Geralt’s temples again. “Not unlike a certain witcher I know, wouldn’t you say? Noble white knight dressed all in black, bartering with just his soul and steadfast convictions to rescue the love of his life from the cold and bitter clutches of Death?” Jaskier shrugs again. His fingers trace nonsense patterns against Geralt’s skin. “I think it’s only fitting that you deserve your happy ending.”

At that, Geralt’s eyes snap open. The instinct to shoot Jaskier an exasperated look when he starts waxing his poetic melodrama overpowers the fear buzzing under his skin before he can think twice, so deeply ingrained after twenty years. And then it’s done, over so quickly he couldn’t dream of taking it back: one moment Geralt speaks to the darkness behind his eyelids, and the next— 

“Ah,” Jaskier grins like they’ve only been apart for minutes, separated by nothing more daunting than a village square on market day, “there you are.”

Everything Geralt wants to say, words he’s run through over and over again in his mind for a year, all clamor up his throat. There’s so much Geralt wants to say, for once, and besides—this has always been Jaskier’s favourite part of any story. It has to mean something. 

So of course, the first thing Geralt blurts after his eyes adjust and Jaskier sharpens into brilliant focus before him and the world does not end, is, “What the fuck are you wearing?”

Which—fuck.

It’s not what Geralt expected to say, and it’s certainly not what Jaskier expected to hear; the bard frowns, hands pulling away from Geralt’s face as he steps back to take stock of himself. “What do you mean, what am I—” He plucks at the fine detailing of his doublet, peeks under it at his chemise. “Huh. I see.”

Geralt had guessed correctly by sound alone when Jaskier first appeared. He is wearing his favourite courtly get-up: doublet and trousers with matching detailing, a chemise underneath with tiny embroidery worked around the collar in thread a shade darker than the fabric itself. If Geralt’s memory serves, however, the doublet and trousers had been a rich shade of green, and the chemise underneath had been beige or cream or some other pedantically named version of not-quite-white. A detail that hardly matters now, because the entire ensemble—from his clothes to his boots to the fucking rings on his fingers, Melitele’s sake—is a deep, somber black. Not the darkest blues or browns that nobles would commission to get as close to black as they could afford, but really, truly black, as solid and dark as if some cuckolded husband finally made good on a threat to dip the bard in pitch.

“Huh.” Jaskier makes a face, rubbing his chemise between his fingertips as if the colour will slough off. From his expression, it’s clear this is an entirely new development. A matter of minutes even; Geralt doubts Jaskier wouldn’t have lamented the tarring of his favourite clothes on their long, long walk here. “It’s not that I mind, exactly—can you imagine the scandal, the undead bard returning to Oxenfurt in clothes dyed black like some obscenely rich hedonist—” Geralt arches an eyebrow at the implication that Jaskier isn’t a hedonist in general, and Jaskier shoots him an unimpressed glower before continuing, “but this is a little on the nose, don’t you think? I mean look, for fuck’s sake, even my rings!”

Geralt does look, stamping down the ingrained urge to duck his head or glance away before he’s caught staring. He’s shown his hand by now, bartering with death for the bard and then that extended period groveling in the dirt. Jaskier can hardly mind a little ogling now. And Jaskier looks—he looks good. Geralt’s sat through enough long-winded complaints about the limits of Jaskier complexion on his wardrobe, how he has to firmly ride the middle to avoid colours that wash him out. At the time Geralt hadn’t argued the point (he’d been far too busy not-thinking of something else Jaskier could firmly ride), but he still disagrees, especially now. Against the rich black fabric his skin looks even brighter, flush with warmth and life. 

Jaskier sighs, dramatic and world-weary and with his whole body. “I suppose I’ll learn to live with it, at great cost to myself.” In case Geralt hadn’t guessed he was teasing, Jaskier throws him a wink once, then another when Geralt rolls his eyes. “Or else I’ll sell them to the next ponce who wants to put on airs about his coffers and his cock at the local court.” He pauses, glancing down at his kit again, then inscrutably up at Geralt. “Or perhaps I won’t. I rather like it, I think.” He lifts his arm, holding it out against Geralt’s, the brocade on the cuff scratching Geralt’s skin where his own sleeve is rolled up to his elbow. It sends a shiver up his spine, and Jaskier is too close not to see the way Geralt shudders. The bard grins. “I like that we match.”

The tiny shiver turns to ice in his veins. A knife of formless, wordless panic tears out from under his ribs at even the suggestion of it, the implication that he and Jaskier are at all alike. Jaskier’s spent more than a season with death curled around his shoulders like a lover, he doesn’t need the witcher-stink of it on him again either. Because that’s exactly what he’s signing up for again, isn’t it? Doesn’t he see it? He’d died this time because of Geralt when Geralt wasn’t even there; what could happen if he goes back to keeping Geralt’s company?

Jaskier arches an eyebrow at him, obviously aware of the maelstrom running rampant in the witcher’s head. A muscle in Geralt’s jaw jumps as he tries not to betray his thoughts, and he abruptly notices that he’s trembling again. Minute tremors crawl up and down his limbs, making his skin crawl and rattling his teeth in his head. 

“Hey,” Jaskier says, firm and gentle in a dichotomy that Geralt’s always found baffling, “I know that face. That’s the ‘ride out at the arse-end of dawn and leave teenaged Jaskier in some backwoods village for his own good, then grouse about the looks you get when teenaged Jaskier sprints after you across the village before he’s put on his trousers’ face—it’s my least favourite of your many and varied expressions, so I’d prefer if you quit pointing it at me.” He takes a step towards Geralt, and relief flashes across his face when Geralt doesn’t step back. “I tried spending my life with you,” he adds, “and then I got a taste of life without you. If I’m going to die either way, I’d rather pick the option that hurts less.” 

Of all the things they’ve confessed to each other, this quiet admission aches the most. Geralt wants to reach for Jaskier to pull him close as strongly as he wants to stagger a step back and hide his face in his hands. He smothers both urges. “You could get eaten by a chort.” 

Jaskier laughs and strikes a coquettish pose with one hand on his hip and the other under his chin, but there’s something achingly sincere and too-raw in his eyes. “Like I said, I’m picking the option that’ll hurt less.”

That startles a bark of laughter out of Geralt, riding a burst of relief so strong it threatens to topple him. And this time he lets it, finally sinking to his knees in exhaustion, Jaskier dropping down next to him only a second later. The bard is still giggling helplessly but that’s fine, it’s perfect—it’s better than anything Geralt’s ever heard and he can’t help but stare openly, because now Geralt knows he has breath enough to draw another one, and another— 

Or not, because suddenly Jaskier is climbing into Geralt's lap and kissing him, fingers scrambling to pull Geralt’s hair free of its tie and tug him closer until they’re both breathless. Jaskier gasps against his lips as they pull apart, fingers still idly scratching at Geralt’s scalp, before leaning back in to trace Geralt’s bottom lip with his tongue. He makes a tiny, pleased sound when Geralt opens for him with a cracked groan of his own, tongue sliding along Geralt’s, flicking over the back of his teeth and the roof of his mouth.

Jaskier shuffles closer, farther onto Geralt’s lap. His kisses grow hungrier, needier, even as he gasps for breath, edging into a whine as Geralt wraps an arm around his waist to tug him closer still. He slings his arms around Geralt’s neck in turn, grip tightening around Geralt’s shoulder as the witcher mouths down his neck, pressing an open-mouthed kiss over Jaskier’s pulse. The taste of Jaskier’s skin, the desperate sound pulled from his chest that Geralt can feel against his own ribs with how tightly they grab at each other, it stokes the greedy, ravenous thing in Geralt’s gut that only wants Jaskier as close as possible. Jaskier wriggles in his grip as Geralt’s hands close around his hips, rising up on his knees to find a good angle to rock together, and—   

They both jump when a dry branch snaps under Jaskier’s boot, the noise thunderous in the silence of their little clearing. Jaskier jerks in surprise and nearly flings himself off of Geralt’s lap entirely, held only by the firm hands on his hips. He glances over his shoulder with wide eyes, the connection between the stick under his boot and the sound that startled them apart slow in coming to him, and Geralt takes advantage of the moment to look his fill: Jaskier’s kiss-swollen lips, the hint of his tongue as he gulps down air, the red scrapes of Geralt’s teeth along the hinge of his jaw and the bruise blooming against the side of his neck. The way his gaze flickers from Geralt’s eyes to his lips and back. Distantly, Geralt notices that one of Jaskier’s hands is still playing with his hair.

Unfortunately, other small things bleed into his awareness as they sit here and catch their breath: the damp, cold, partially-frozen ground under his knees, the lengthening shadows of the sun moving steadily across the sky. His paltry pack on the ground just beyond where they sit, with most of his supplies, bedroll included, a few hours’ ride away in an halfling family’s barn in Knotgrass Meadow. As much as he wants to—as much as they want to, the smell of Jaskier’s arousal is beyond familiar to him, but never like this, so close and within his grasp to touch and tease and taste— 

“We can’t do this here,” he rasps. He forces his fingers free of their grip on Jaskier’s trousers, and runs his hands up the bard’s sides instead. 

Jaskier blinks down at him in confusion, eyes fixed on where his fingers trace up and down the line of Geralt’s collarbone. Then he shakes his head sharply and nods, swallowing hard. “Yes. Yes, you’re right.” His eyes jerk up to meet Geralt’s, and he sounds more convincing when he repeats, “You’re right,” even though he looks less than thrilled by it. 

Geralt stays on his knees a beat longer even after Jaskier clambers to his feet, hissing as he adjusts himself in his trousers. And Geralt, he—he should do the same. He means to, fully intends to get up and get Jaskier as far away from here as possible. Only then Jaskier turns from where he’d been fiddling with his doublet and brushing stray bits of dry grass from his trousers, and Geralt is entranced by the colour high on his cheeks. It spreads down his neck, highlighting the bruise Geralt put there, down to the sliver of skin that peeks through Jaskier’s half-undone chemise. Jaskier grins when he notices Geralt looking, but whatever smart thing he plans to say dies on his lips when he sees Geralt’s expression; the flush deepens, not just the warm colour of Jaskier here, alive, but something headier. 

The pause stretches out between them, the space between one heartbeat and the next. 

And then Geralt mutters, “Fuck,” with a vehemence that startles them both even as they move at the same time—Geralt lunges to crowd Jaskier back against the tree before dropping back to his knees, Jaskier’s hands reaching for him, tangling in his hair again. Geralt tugs at the placket of Jaskier’s trousers, too frantic to spare the clever hidden fastenings before he yanks them down his thighs, just enough to reach into Jaskier’s smalls and free his half-hard cock from the damp linen. 

Jaskier gasps when Geralt takes him in hand and starts stroking immediately, a smooth, steady rhythm, pausing occasionally to trace his thumb over the slit. Geralt cups his hip with his free hand, keeping him pinned against the tree as he worries a mark into Jaskier’s hip to match the one on his neck, groaning as he gets lost in the steady pulse he can feel under his tongue and Jaskier’s heartbeat deafening in his ears. 

Jaskier surrounds him as he licks and bites his way down the sharp arch of the bard’s hipbone: his restless fingers trace the swell of Geralt’s lips, comb his hair back from his face, slip to his shoulder to dig blunted nails into his skin when Geralt flicks his wrist on an upstroke. Geralt presses hungrily into the touches, knocks Jaskier’s legs wider apart to make himself comfortable as he rests back on his haunches. Muscling Jaskier’s smalls and trousers as far down as the spread of his legs lets him, Geralt spares a glance upward at the look of awe on the bard’s flushed face before he rocks up to take Jaskier’s cock in his mouth.

He seals his lips around the head and sucks lightly, palms pressing Jaskier back against the rough bark as he flicks his tongue against the underside and Jaskier jolts in his grip with a cracked shout. Geralt pulls back to watch his cock jerk and bob as the cool air hits split-slick skin before he slips it into his mouth again. Jaskier’s prick is blood-hot and heavy, and precome bursts salty across Geralt’s tongue when he pulls one of Jaskier’s legs over his shoulder; it knocks the bard off balance and his hands twist into Geralt’s loose hair and tug hard. The sharp ache makes Geralt moan around Jaskier’s cock, ducking his head until his lips meet his fist, relishing the heat and girth as it slides across his tongue. His fist works over what his mouth doesn’t reach, slicked with spit and precome that drips messily over his fist.

“Geralt—fuck—gods alive—” Jaskier’s heel digs hard into Geralt’s back as he gasps, mouth moving silently even as he chokes on another strangled sound when Geralt hums around him. He scrabbles at Geralt’s hand where it keeps his leg slung over the witcher’s shoulder, lacing their fingers together. “You’re going to be the death of me,” he mutters, eyes squeezed shut tight, chuckling under his breath at his own joke.

Geralt pulls off his cock just far enough to suck hard at the head of Jaskier’s prick, pressing his tongue to the slit in retaliation. Jaskier’s eyes snap to him, mouth dropping open for some kind of retort, but Geralt chases his lips with his fist, pulling back entirely to swipe his palm over the head and trace his fingertip around the edges of Jaskier’s foreskin. Jaskier’s hips jerk violently, legs trembling. But he still looks determined to get his say, the hand still in Geralt’s hair tugging harshly in a way that shoots straight to Geralt’s own prick where it pressed painfully against his trousers. Geralt fixes him with a look he hopes reads as unamused at the joke—though he doubts it, can guess what sort of picture he paints, wavering on his knees with Jaskier’s cock bumping against his spit-slick, gasping mouth—and then they groan at the same time as Geralt takes Jaskier into his mouth again, not stopping until the tip of his cock brushes the back of his throat. 

Geralt rests there for a moment, cheeks hollowing as he sucks, relishing the breathy, punched-out whimpers that edge Jaskier’s ragged breathing. He moans with each of Geralt’s slick pulls along the length of him, going lax in Geralt’s hands. Even when Geralt relaxes his jaw and eases Jaskier’s length into his throat, swallowing compulsively around him, Jaskier’s grip on his hair stays gentle. 

“Ger—” Jaskier’s fist flies to his mouth; he shakes as Geralt eases back to swirl his tongue around his length and bobs back down again, a fine tremor building under Geralt’s hands. “Darling, please, please—” he cuts off with a curse, hips bucking as Geralt rubs his tongue against the vein on the underside of his prick, petting absently at his hair when Geralt chokes, taking him to the hilt. “Sorry, shit—”

Geralt growls, relishing the way it makes Jaskier’s cock twitch against his tongue, the sharp, shocked sound it pulls from his chest. He lets Jaskier’s thigh slip from his shoulder, steadying the bard on his feet before reaching up blindly to tug Jaskier’s fist away from his face and drags it down until Jaskier gets the message and cradles Geralt’s head between his palms. It leaves Geralt’s hand free to slip around to grab Jaskier’s arse and pointedly rock him into the witcher’s waiting mouth.

When Jaskier doesn’t move immediately, Geralt pulls off of him entirely, ducking down to press wet kisses up his length. Tonguing at the slit, Geralt glances up at the hazy, enraptured look on Jaskier’s face and carefully scrapes his teeth across the head of his cock—Jaskier yelps, fingers tightening in Geralt’s hair and tugging in sharp reproach as he crashes back to himself, and Geralt smirks, Jaskier’s cock resting innocuously against his bottom lip. 

He expects Jaskier to retaliate, to snarl and push him down on his cock—craves it, actually, in the back of his head where it’s safe to admit that there’s no reason he wouldn’t go to his knees for Jaskier. But instead Jaskier smirks right back down at him, one hand sliding forward so he can trace Geralt’s bottom lip with his thumb. “Have I been neglecting you, love?” he murmurs, and something hot and sharp lances from the top of Geralt’s head to the soles of his feet, leaves him swaying dizzily forward to rest his head against Jaskier’s stomach and work at the tender skin there. Jaskier eases him away gently from the bruise he bites just under Jaskier’s navel, guiding him down and forward to feed his cock into Geralt’s panting mouth. “Let me give you what you need, hmm?”

Instead of dragging Geralt up and down on his cock like the witcher expects him to, Jaskier holds him steady and leans back against the tree. He rolls his hips carefully, watching Geralt to make sure he doesn’t choke as Jaskier’s cock pries his mouth open that much wider, pushing at the boundary of his throat before retreating. Geralt takes a deep breath as Jaskier draws back and lets himself sink into it; he braces himself against Jaskier’s thighs, lets his jaw go slack and doesn’t do much more than rub his tongue hard against Jaskier’s length as he moves.

Above him, Jaskier seems to have finally found his voice; it rises and falls in a chorus of one, babbling Geralt’s praises. The bard calls him his darling witcher, his lovely, gorgeous Geralt, tells him he’s brilliant, wonderful, you’re so good to me, I can hardly stand it, what have I done to deserve you— 

(What have I done to deserve you, Jaskier grouses more than once, sleeves rolled up to his elbows as he dunks a washcloth in water rapidly growing murky with nameless monster guts, wringing it out and wrapping a sliver of his soap in it before scrubbing at Geralt’s grimy chest. His chemise is soaked in guts and gore and swamp water, his doublet in shreds after using it to pack Geralt’s wound the night before, and he doesn’t seem to give the slightest shit about any of it.

No one asked him to, Geralt wants to snap. He hasn’t, not since that first time when Jaskier had looked up at him with an inscrutable expression far too old and tired for his face. But Jaskier must know the direction of his thoughts; he pulls Geralt’s arm from the water like he’s entitled to it, and if he notices the goosebumps that rise up in the wake of his fingers gently cradling Geralt’s wrist, he’s kind enough not to mention it. Whatever it was, I should only hope to be so lucky as to do it again.)

Geralt chokes on a particularly hard thrust, precome flooding his mouth and jolting him out of his thoughts. Jaskier starts to stammer an apology but Geralt shakes his head as much as Jaskier’s hands allows him, redoubling his efforts. He hollows his cheeks as he sucks, swiping his tongue across the sensitive foreskin, stroking it against the underside of his cock as Jaskier snaps his hips, his own prick hard enough to hurt where it pulses in his smalls. 

After that, it doesn’t take long—Geralt hears Jaskier’s heartbeat stutter seconds before the bard garbles out a warning that sounds like it could be Geralt’s name. Without hesitation, Geralt pulls against the grip in his hair to take Jaskier as deep into his throat as he can. Nose pressed to the curls at the base of Jaskier’s prick, he swallows hard against the urge to gag, working the muscles of his throat until Jaskier comes with a shocky cry. His nails bite into the nape of Geralt’s neck and his cock twitches in his mouth, still spurting weakly across his tongue as he eases Jaskier back to lean bonelessly against the tree behind him. 

“Come on, love,” Jaskier mumbles, voice rough and breathless like he’d been the one with a cock down his throat. “You too, show me, I’ve wanted to see you for so long—”

Geralt gasps, shoving a hand down his trousers with little preamble and gripping himself tight enough to hiss at the searing pleasure-pain of it. He presses his forehead to the curve of Jaskier's hip as he strokes himself, heat crackling at the base of his spine, and in the end it's Jaskier's fingers stroking gently at his temples and combing through his hair that undoes him. That small, simple tenderness—one of Jaskier's hands cups the back of his head while the other traces the curve of his jaw and Geralt comes with a muffled groan, fucking into his fist through the aftershocks.

The world around Geralt comes back to him in slow waves, indistinct shuffling and murmuring and the sudden shifting of the warm stretch of skin where Geralt rests his head. He leans back obligingly, tucking himself back into his trousers and wiping his hand off on the ground with a grimace, and immediately finds himself with a lapful of bard. Jaskier drops like a marionette with his strings cut, the back of his doublet scraping down the entire length of the tree’s trunk. But he hardly seems to care, only mumbling a nonsensical complaint as Geralt moves them so he can lean back against the tree instead, making himself comfortable under Jaskier’s gaggle of limbs.

“There’s something to be said about life-affirming sex,” Jaskier mutters, rearranging himself to loop his long legs around Geralt’s waist. His hands are drawn to Geralt’s hair again like he’s compelled, gathering and twisting it deftly to sweep it over one of his shoulders. This close together, Geralt can't miss the twitch of Jaskier’s lips as some incorrigible thought occurs to him. “Life-affirming sex literally on Death’s doorstep, Melitele’s tits.”

Geralt groans, burying his face in the crook of Jaskier’s shoulder. “Stop,” he rasps, unable to hide his grin when Jaskier breaks into laughter. 

“I’ve just survived a near-death experience, Geralt! I think I’m allowed a little—” Jaskier jolts in his arms, smacking his chin against Geralt’s cheek as he rears back. Geralt sit upright, alert for whatever sparked Jaskier’s alarm, but then the bard blurts, “Sorry, did you say Essi punched you? At my wake?”

The bruise she left healed before Geralt had even left Oxenfurt, but he still feels the vicious fury behind it. “She did.”

Jaskier claps his hands over his mouth, frantically struggling not to laugh under Geralt’s withering gaze. “Did Shani hit you too?” he manages, muffled between his fingers.

“I think the only reason she didn't was because her hands were full of Little Eye.”

“Oh gods.” 

“Hmm.”

Jaskier groans, curling forward to rest his forehead on Geralt’s shoulder. “I’ll have to figure out some way to explain all this, won’t I?” He traces the outline of Geralt’s medallion, dragging his nail up and down the links of the chain. “Fat chance I’ll be able to just slip back home during the term break and pretend this never happened, yeah?”

Geralt hums in agreement. They’re less than two weeks out from Oxenfurt, closer to a week if they find Jaskier a horse somewhere, and he doubts Jaskier’s friends will pack up and parcel out the trappings of his life so quickly. “We’ll have to get your lute out of the grave,” he notes absently. “Someone might notice us digging it up.”

Jaskier lurches back again. This time Geralt is fast enough to avoid getting clipped on the chin. “The grave?”

“They wanted to bury something,” Geralt tells him, and scowls when his words register in his own ears. Perhaps he should scrounge up a hair more tact, discussing the specifics of Jaskier’s funeral arrangements barely an hour after the bard came back from the dead.

“So they chose my lute? My darling lute, locked away beneath the cold, hard earth? Geralt, I can’t stand it!” He sprawls further across the witcher, looping his arms around Geralt’s chest and mashing his face against the side of his neck. “How will I survive the journey? You have trusty, wonderful, magnificent Roach, but me! What is a bard with no lute but a well-dressed gentleman of the night?” He stretches out one of his arms for a moment, admiring the rich black of his sleeve. “A very well-dressed gentleman of the night.”

Geralt rolls his eyes, resting his chin on top of Jaskier’s head. Partly to keep Jaskier from injuring the both of them with his theatrics, but mostly because now he just can. “I brought you another one.”

“Yes, I saw that, thank you—though really, Geralt, I can recite all your horrid witcher potions in alphabetical order but don’t you know by now that it’s sacrilege to lean a lute against anything? They’re delicate instruments! You ought to set it string-side down at the very least—” 

Rolling his eyes again, Geralt squeezes him around the middle, and Jaskier cuts off with a squeak. “We’re just over a week north of Oxenfurt,” he rumbles, sighing deeply through his nose when Jaskier pinches his side in revenge, “you’ll have yours back soon enough, Jaskier.”

“Oh.” Jaskier fidgets, a sour edge of apprehension building in his scent. “Should—Should we make that big a detour? I’m really only joking, I know you need to get back to Ciri and I’m sure the lute will keep for now! And I can write Shani and Essi and the rest of them a letter at least, unless Yennefer is open to bribery and lets me portal back to Oxenfurt to explain.” He grins, sheepish. “Though I don’t want to undo all of your hard work by putting myself within striking range.”

It’s Geralt’s turn to rear back. He doesn’t go far with the tree behind him, but it’s enough that he can stare at Jaskier in bewilderment, thoughts stuttering to a halt. “What?”

(He heard Jaskier plenty well; Geralt just doesn’t quite believe it. Like chasing a ghost out of the corner of his eye, it seems too good to be true.)

Jaskier hesitates, wringing his hands together in a gesture Geralt has missed as fiercely as he dreads seeing it—dreads being the apparent cause of it. “Am I—Did you not want me to come with you?” 

“Did you still want to come?” He’d hoped so. Of course he did, as much as he keeps telling himself that just having Jaskier back will be enough. Letting him walk away again will be the death of him, but Geralt will do it if Jaskier asks. 

Jaskier blinks up at him for a long moment, and then he ducks his head and bites his lip to hide a smile. Behind him, the sun hangs low enough to peek through the thin cover of leaves sheltering them. It washes Jaskier in a riot of gold against his back and in his hair. “Well, you did say you were coming to take me home, didn’t you?”

“Hmm.” There should be something more, Geralt thinks, a bone-deep certainty that everything is irrevocably different. And in some ways it is—an entire empire dogs at his heels, Ciri waits at the keep for a destiny Geralt doesn’t know if he can prepare her for. His own Path stretches out before him and, for the first time in nearly a century, Geralt can’t see where it ends. And Jaskier is inviting himself along to all of it. That thought alone should be too much, both the terror of it and the idea that there’s anything in his life Geralt is this afraid to lose, but—but instead, the dread and doubt and the lingering feeling that something’s not quite right ebbs away to the rhythm of Jaskier’s heartbeat, pressed so close against his own. “I suppose I did.”