Chapter Text
*
They say there is a genie in the lake.
In the last hot gasp of a miserable summer Geralt pulls the net from the lake to find an amphora there. It's smaller than he'd thought, and his hands shake as he pulls the stopper from the jug. In the exhaustion-tinged rush of finally, of please, let it be, his grip tightens on old fired clay by accident and shards pour out of his palm.
He has not slept. He could not sleep. The days and nights of the past week have become a single, unbearable smear between blinks, and if in that unreality Geralt breaks a jug, it can’t be as important as the lead seal shuddering in his hand. He glances down at it and
“Finally,”
exclaims the man at his side. He doesn’t even flinch when Geralt whips around, hand gone to his shoulder where, fuck, his sword doesn’t sit. It rests yards away down the shore where Geralt had started. The man watches the half-second of this pantomime with bright eyes, as bright as the fine silk of his doublet, done up in the glowing blue of an evening sky. Geralt’s head spins. He hadn’t heard him. He hadn’t heard him.
“Who are you?” Geralt growls.
But the young man, unperturbed, continues as if he hadn’t spoken. He is looking at the shards at the toes of his fine boots. “You know, I didn’t think anyone would be finding that for ages. Really, who hides such a small jug in a lake? It’s like they didn’t want it found this century,” he ends in a cross mutter, eyes darting out across sun-spackled waters.
Geralt has little patience for fools, but less when he hasn’t seen the inside of his own eyelids in days. He looms closer, not terribly much taller but certainly bigger. He sees when those bright eyes lift and take that fact in.
“I asked you a question,” Geralt says, and he feels but cannot stop when his pupils contract just a moment. He knows how it makes his irises catch light and flash in a way that has sent more than one peasant running. Blue eyes widen, take it in–and the man grins.
“Those are lovely, aren’t they? I should hope they’re not why you’ve gone through all this trouble to find me,” and without a hint of fear he claps Geralt gamely on the arm.
Geralt freezes. Something creaks in his hand. When he looks it goes through him with a jolt what he had forgotten: the cracked lead seal, leaving a metallic graphite sheen on his palm that glistens green-purple like oil or raven's feathers. He blinks and finds that he doesn’t know how long he has looked, or how long the man buzzing at his elbow has babbled on, his voice as startling as his hand on Geralt's elbow.
“-really, not all the time one gets to meet an interesting fellow like yourself. I just can’t imagine what drew you out so far, unless the village has grown closer to the lake than last I recall–”
Geralt turns. The stranger has no choice but to take one and then two stumbling steps back, because Geralt (who has not slept) walks him back into a tree.
“Stop talking. Now.”
“Right, yeah, of course, take me out someplace nice and then don’t even give me the air to stretch my lungs,” the man complains, completely unperturbed. He even has the audacity to roll his eyes.
Geralt stares. He wants to ask what in the world he’s talking about—no, that's a lie. What he really wants is to sleep. Regardless, he can’t seem to dig the words out.
The stranger has enough for the two of them. With a critical once-over of Geralt's person and then the lake shore surrounding, as if his back is not pressed to rough bark, he sighs.
“Well, at least it is enough to be out in the sunlight and air. Gods, but look at that water. Late summer, I’d wager? Though to look at you I’d almost say dead of winter; not a hint of color to you, big strapping thing that you are. It’s really quite a shame. I mean, some do go for the ivory skin look. White hair, though–” he gives himself pause.
Tongue bitten and simmering, Geralt feels his lip curl on that final cusp between confusion and real anger. As the stranger takes in everything from his hair to the medallion on his chest, he waits for fear and revulsion born from understanding. He is almost thankful for the thought of it, if it will mean the man leaves him to his business.
Of course, luck has never been on Geralt's side. An interested, half-heard comprehension begins to burn in the man's face.
“And what,” the man asks, slower than he had before, "are you?"
Geralt can't help but to stare. His chin is a jut of solid, boyhood mischief under full cheeks that make him appear even younger still. Young, and unafraid. The dull foreboding that he will not be let alone any time soon drops down into Geralt's stomach.
Unsatisfied not to be answered, the man asks, “What is your name, then?”
With shocking impetuousness, he reaches out as if to catch a flyaway white lock around one finger. Geralt jerks aside and catches his wrist. He knows his grip to be too hard yet cannot reel it in, and figures that clearly shows the situation has gone long enough.
“I don’t have time for this,” he huffs. He throws the man’s hand back at him and turns away to collect his discarded belongings. “Go back to the village.”
Mirth follows him. “Is that where you think I’m from?”
Geralt grunts. The man chuckles.
“Really? Unless a lot has changed since last I found myself there, I think you might need to look again. Quite a lot of Cidarian silk wandering around Lorham these days?”
Geralt ignores him. All he can think of is the weight of the seal in his hand. The vagueness of exhaustion in his head. In his body, the unfamiliar brittleness that has dogged him and pushes him onward. He crouches down to his bandoleer, for not even exhaustion can make him abandon caution. He’ll chase the boy off, return to camp, and make his wishes there. The sun should be setting in the next two hours. Plenty of time to study the seal and give Roach her nosebag.
Then, hopefully, to sleep. The idea tempts him more, he thinks, than has anything in his whole life. More than food when he had starved and touch when he had been too long alone.
The skin all along Geralt’s right side prickles.
“You know,” the man says from an arm’s length away. He doesn’t so much as blink when Geralt twists around with a curse to find him idling against a log if he'd always been there. Geralt had heard not a sound. “I’d thought you would be more polite, considering.”
Geralt sneers on principle. “Considering what?”
In the rush of surprise tripping through him, something of the fog clears. With a sudden presence of mind Geralt takes in what he had not before.
“Well,” the man hums. When he shifts, the fine silk of his doublet and trousers shimmers in the light. There is not a wrinkle, smudge, or tear to hint that he had had to make the same trek as Geralt through the mile and a quarter of humid, overgrown forest track. It is, he knows, the only way to the lake from Lorham, and Lorham the only village for days. “Considering all the effort you’ve gone through, really. By the look of you, you’ve been at it all afternoon,” and flutters a delicate hand at Geralt’s person: his sweat-soaked shirt, disheveled hair wisping and curling in the damp heat, the smell of sweat and horse that hangs around him. Geralt doesn’t need to look to take it in.
Instead he observes the neat lay of dark hair on the man’s forehead, the barest flush in his cheeks and the sweat beading on his lip at such odds with the crisp cool of his clothes. Even as Geralt looks, he reaches up to undo the top few buttons of his doublet, as if the heat had just reached him. Noticing his audience, he dimples a coy cheek. “I hope you don’t mind. Improper, I know, especially given we’ve just now met and all.”
The man pauses halfway, reaches a decision, and undoes the whole line of hooks. The undershirt revealed from beneath is an airy, lacy mess of misplaced funds—completely untouched by sweat.
“Though, please, don’t let me embarrass you,” blue silk adds magnanimously, taking Geralt's silence for something else. A flash of tongue wets his lips. He winks. “Of course, I’ve always found that a healthy flush and the sweat from a man’s work suits better than even the finest of vêtements. Would it be too bold to say that of the two of us, you look rather the more—oh, yes?”
For Geralt, unblinkingly afixing his kit across his chest as the man prattled on, had stepped closer, where he now breathes deep.
Lax limbed and terribly vulnerable where the long line of his neck curves up from the lace of his, the stranger watches him do it without a hint of trepidation. He simply tilts and arch look as Geralt crosses well out of polite and into personal space. Ignoring his gaze, Geralt breathes deep again; a great drawing breath that rumbles bassy in his chest.
“Not that this isn’t terribly cozy,” hums the stranger, “but you still haven’t told me your name. Am I to guess?”
He smells algae and lake grasses and sweet hummus baking in the sun around them, pungently sweet. It battles with the sticky cloying musk of the forest a day after rain in the dry season. After the first shower of the summer, pine resin perfumed the air. It was enough to make a man dizzy.
From himself Geralt smells sweat and horse and herbs, the leather and oil and old blood from his kit, and the bright tang of the lead seal in his hand. But there, underneath it all, something else lingers: cool clay and deep waters, a drop of spiced wine and cedar; ozone like at the front of a lightning strike; mingling with the heat of human in front of him, and something of magic. He takes another step closer, and the pendant against his chest begins to vibrate.
“What,” Geralt rumbles, slow-footed and dangerous, “are you?”
The man smiles with good humor. Again he reaches for that stray wisp of Geralt’s hair, just so Geralt stop him, or so the triumph in his face says.
“I asked first, you know,” he says. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll just have to find out for myself.”
Geralt pulls his lips back off his teeth in a much less friendly expression. The man nods as if he had spoken.
Geralt doesn’t understand. All he knows is what he has before him. A man who is not a man, a seal, and a broken jug. His head is thick with what feels like all the cotton wool in the kingdom. He has not slept. He cannot sleep.
But what happens is this:
Geralt had broken the amphora. He doesn’t know what this means, and won’t know, not until it happens- a decade in the past, seconds from now; before, after.
What happens is that time flows for most people forward in a tidy little stream, and it does not diverge often or easily.
This is not universal. On rare occasions the lucky might find those things that exist outside it. The places where time pools deep or turns sharply aside—where time has forgotten to flow forward and instead turns sideways, or backways, or in some other direction altogether. Places like the dark belly of a genie's amphora sunk to the bottom of a lake. But no matter where it may linger, time will always be given to flow—like water poured from a jug, when the jug is poured.
A jug Geralt had broken. Shards had fallen into the moss (and one, he will find later in camp, into one of his boots). And for all time does like to flow tidily, in that moment it is not at all well ordered. It spills out giddy and mischievous, as things do tend to be when given their own way.
Given his own way, some mischievous thing long stagnating in his little bottle of time might take such a chance to slip back, not through a stream but in the space between one fallen shard and the next. Given the chance, when time for a moment runs not forward or even sideways but in all directions, such a thing might take one long step through the unexpected scatter of nights and days and nights and days and nights and days and days and nights and
water from a broken bottle flows differently, just for a second, which is quite enough
–enough so that sixteen years ago, Geralt meets a bard who wears a doublet slashed rakishly down the chest, red beneath stone-beaten blue. He is effusive and young in such a way that pricks, perhaps because he is so open, and Geralt knows he will see him close tight like a slammed door soon enough.
Yet when Geralt glares and rumbles, his brightness doesn’t waver. The bard asks his name and when he doesn’t get it, he guesses (rightly). He doesn't turn away.
He follows Geralt to find a devil who isn’t a devil, and babbles stupid things about elves and golden palaces, and of course it is then that the elves find them.
Geralt drags them out of the situation by the skin of his teeth—or the skin of his neck where, for a moment, Filevandral’s blade had sat and assured him of his own death. Sixteen years in the past, I’ve lived long enough for this, he thinks, it’s for the best that I go alone.
But he wasn’t alone.
Was he?
Standing on the shore of a lake, Geralt had thought—just for a moment, he thinks...
But sixteen years before, the young bard’s shoulders had been sharp and warm against his back, not cold stone and empty air. He had felt the knobs of his spine when the elven woman kicked him in his chest, rocking him back with a whimper that reminded Geralt just how young he was. Then, why had he thought-?
After the King of the Edge of the World lets them go, the bard follows. He cajoles. He pesters, just enough that Geralt becomes used to his presence. Which is of course when he leaves to Oxenfurt.
Alone again, Geralt travels. He vows to cure a cursed princess. He fights the striga with iron to keep from harming her, and nearly kills the princess on the edge of his own desperate teeth. Like all men who have sought redemption, he finds it only tastes of blood.
Spring comes fifteen years ago, which turns to summer, and the bard finds him like a dryad’s arrow. In he walked through the crooked-hung door of the tavern, the boyish man Geralt was sure he would never see again, and made a sharp path for Geralt’s secluded corner.
"Hello, Wolf." He smiles as if he had already known who he would find there.
Geralt tries to chase him off. He would always try to chase him off those first few years. A witcher’s path was no place for a perfume-smelling troubadour. It did not matter that the times together run so much more smoothly, more warmly, that they passed sometimes softly and sometimes comfortably by like burnishing leather under a bone polisher, with another's footsteps alongside his own. It did not matter that the townsfolk opened like flowers to the bard’s warmth when their otherwise colorless, hard faces would turn away from Geralt himself.
They traveled together, fifteen years before a lake-shore. Fourteen. Thirteen. They parted. They met again. The world smoothed and warmed. They met. They parted.
The pattern as simple and reliable as plaid cloth, meeting and parting, meeting and apart, until the bard had completed his training. With long-practiced mistrust, Geralt had half expected that to be the last of him. Now a university trained troubadour with better prospects that could not include stale bread breakfasts and a bedroll by a witcher’s fire. Why should he stay?
However, twelve years before a lakeside when Geralt suggests it—on one night whilst they share a demijohn of too tart raspberry wine around the fire, not an unfamiliar pastime—his companion makes a sound like an un-oiled hinge and sloshes wine down his chin.
“You, my friend, are a pessimist! Leave and quit my work now? Now, when I am finally trained and your tales are beginning to gain traction? For even suggesting it, you owe me another one of these as well as a cask of fine ale after our next success,” and at that he drains the demijohn dry. Next to the fire he smells of raspberries, of the sweat of travel, wine in a clay jug.
On a lakeside near Lorham and a day from Rinde, the smell of it presses up and over his head as if it pours out of the bright-eyed man. The enormity of Geralt’s life for ten years swells up hot and dizzy and almost painful in his chest. Then, it settles. An unseen hand smoothes away the long, dusty expanse of loneliness stretched like an unwelcome road inside him. He almost tastes the grit of the highway in his throat because
in the long years of his memory, there: he finds nights together around fires beside the long road; in inns; in the odd hold or castle; in peasant's cottages and cow barns and stables. Even the nights alone were better for all the times when he was not. Familiar hands, a familiar voice, music on roads that had been long and quiet. Or, no. That's not right, had they ever been
Geralt wavers and the amphora crunches beneath his boots. The lead seal has gone hot in his hand.
He thinks he dreams. He thinks his head dizzy with the heat and lack of sleep. Blue eyes watch him. Geralt remembers
six years ago, a Cintran banquet that the Queen herself had invited him to attend. She dressed him in the false livery of a fake Lord and saw him seated at her side– her side? His side, always at his side, there had been
a bard who Geralt had long grown accustomed to finding around the furthest bend of a forest path, or in a house of ill repute, or in the lap of a beer-drunk Lord’s son. or fishing for catfish in nothing but his trousers and a handkerchief. It was always him. Each time he turns up like a bad copper. Should he still be so unexpected? His full-cheeked, boyish face which seems never to change.
And why, Geralt thinks with abrupt disbelief at himself; why should a queen invite him to a banquet?
It was the bard who had sought him out and who had laughed at his grumbling. He knew exactly which of his healing salves Geralt had needed worked into bruised muscles after the selkiemore. The one that smells of chamomile and mint and can fade a bruise in hours.
It was the bard who played at the banquet and, when the princess came into her power as a Source, who threw himself quite gleefully over the lady with whom he'd been flirting before the battle broke out. He who found Geralt after the fighting and the broken curse and his fucking stupidity in claiming the Law of Surprise. He hadn’t said a word about destiny. After Geralt had nearly slammed their room door off its hinges, he had simply helped work Geralt's shoulders out of the too-tight silk and murmured a ramble of trivialities until they became a buzz of background noise.
That night, they part.
They meet.
They part.
They meet again.
Five years. Four, and three, and two.
Geralt’s boots squelch in lake mud. Had squelched, not minutes earlier.
“Geralt! How’re you doing?” That familiar voice. “What’s it been? Years, months?” Blue silk. Blue eyes. “Ah, what is time anyway.”
With the seal in his hand, Geralt feels the air rush from his lungs.
“Jaskier.”
The grin the man flashes at him—Jaskier. He preening brushes imaginary dust off his doublet.
But that’s not quite right. Geralt looks again. His cool, pressed silks have rumpled in the summer heat. They are, he is shocked to see, smudged with lake muck from Geralt's hands where he had grabbed him. Had he? His head spins and rights all of once.
“You’re the genie,” he says dumbly.
“Took you long enough,” Jaskier huffs.
It’s not that there is a rush of memories into him. They have always been there, even if Geralt can remember a time minutes before when they had not been.
It is just that now, with his boots sinking into mud, with all the discovery of a man who turns into an unfamiliar room to find he has been there before, Geralt looks at him and with a sense like righting finds he is more himself now than he had been when he stood alone.
Geralt is a man who has never trusted comfort a day in his life. Feeling it now, something cutting and awful spears through his chest.
“How?” He demands.
He sounds angry enough that Jaskier pauses in twinkling at him to glance him over. It is not the heavy-lidded look of before, flirtation and discovery, but familiarity. Somehow, that change only makes him angrier.
He knows Jaskier. He knows his voice, his mannerisms, how he speaks with his gestures as much as his words, as if his head and hands were a three part act. He even knows his scent.
Or thought he did, before the amphora had shattered. For a moment, Geralt squeezes his eyes shut, overcome with vertigo. If the amphora had broken in his hand, if Jaskier had dropped it with almost inordinate glee. He breathes, and the air is laced so suddenly through with magic and ozone that Geralt feels he might sneeze. Jaskier has never smelt of anything other than human, sometimes almond oil or beeswax, cedar or the fleabane stored with his clothes.
Geralt can barely smell anything now beneath magic and clay. It sets his teeth on edge. He opens his eyes to glare.
“I was here alone, Jaskier," he snaps. "I found the amphora alone, I broke it-”
“-Until I did,” Jaskier agrees. Geralt cuts the air with his hand.
“You’re human,” he says. Jaskier watches him, unmoving, nothing but eyes. “You’ve always been human. I would have smelled it before, the moment we met. But now,” he breathes deep. Almost desperate for what his senses have told him to now change.
It doesn’t. Geralt sneezes. Jaskier is shaking his head.
“That was before. You hadn’t broken the amphora yet.”
“You broke it,” Geralt says, just to be contrary.
Jaskier flashes a sharp, satisfied smile. “We could talk semantics all day, but- we both broke it, shall we say?” he offers magnanimously. Geralt, who has already had a headache for days, feels it begin to throb behind his eyebrows.
“If you’re a djinn-”
“Genie!” Jaskier corrects.
“-then you were trapped in the amphora until I- we- fuck,” he spits, “until the seal came out and it broke. How could I have met you in Posada, then?” He boxes Jaskier in against the tree. It is not a terribly friendly move. He feels his pupils dilating, flashing again, as they had before Jaskier had known him, not five minute ago. Five minutes; sixteen years. Geralt’s heart is suddenly, inexplicably in his throat. “How, dammit?”
Within the cage of Geralt's arms, the suddenly cautious way Jaskier watches his face rests at odds with the following careless shrug.
“You broke the amphora,” he says slowly, like that means anything. Geralt continues to glower and stands unmoved when Jaskier pushes a testing hand against his shoulder. Jaskier rolls his eyes at him, like it will hide how tense he has become. “Time works differently inside it. When you broke the amphora, it…” He cards his hand through his sweat dampened hair. “Time always needs something to contain it. It's like water. It needs a bottle. It flows where it will, can be poured in but it can also pour back out. You broke the bottle completely. I just… took advantage, for a moment.”
The absurdity of the statement leaves Geralt staring.
“By going back sixteen years to meet me in the middle of nowhere.”
Irked, Jaskier sniffs. “You wouldn’t tell me your name!”
“And then following me. For over a decade,” Geralt continues flatly. Jaskier grins into his hostile stare, a little manic.
It is, Geralt realizes with a jolt, the expression he often makes when waiting for the first punch. Last Geralt had seen it, Jaskier had turned it on a very drunk, very large man who had threatened him with a gelding behind a tavern, pressing him up against the outer wall.
Geralt now has him against the tree in much the same way, he realizes with a jolt. Almost without thinking, Geralt takes a quick step back. Immediately, Jaskier's entire body goes lank as if the strings have been cut. Only for a moment. Then he is casually looking away to brush down his jacket, like his busy hands it will hide his relief (and as if any amount of brushing can save the soiled silk).
“Well, of course," he chatters, deceitfully cheerfully. "You were going to find the amphora eventually. And a bard needs a muse.”
Geralt opens his mouth, decides he does not have the energy to even begin, and promptly closes it. With a hesitation that feels to Geralt monumental, Jaskier eventually claps him on the shoulder and grins.
“Now what was it you said before? Something about not being able to sleep?”
*