Work Text:
A bard and a sorceress walk into a tavern.
No, really. There’s a joke in there somewhere, Geralt, hold on.
i.
For all Geralt’s complaining over the years, Jaskier never intends to pick a fight with anyone, is the thing. Not drunk, and certainly not sober. He’s a lover before he’s a fighter, but he’s a fighter all the same, when the occasion calls for it, and he knows the steps like any well-practiced dance: sidestepping to dodge a blow instead of executing an outside spin, an upward strike in place of a dramatic dip.
He’s no knight or soldier or Geralt, but one picks up on all manner of things as a traveling bard—not much of a choice, on the road, alone or with the man in question—and he can hold his own. It helps, usually, that people underestimate him, although Geralt isn’t entirely wrong in his assumption that Jaskier tends to bite off more than he can chew.
Given that he bested three men and still finds himself here, with blood in his mouth and a hand at his throat, he’s likely making Geralt’s case for him. That only some of the blood in his mouth is his feels like a small victory in and of itself.
Jaskier is already mourning what’s sure to be a broken nose and the black eye to match, but the tavern goes abruptly quiet before the punch ever comes, everything and everyone around him seemingly frozen in time, like something out of a fairy tale.
“Bard,” drawls a familiar voice.
Not a fairy tale, then.
Instead of his usual knight in witcher armor, the gods have deigned to bless—or curse—him with one Yennefer of fucking Vengerberg. They’re smiling down on him, certainly, though it remains to be seen if it’s to come at his expense.
“Witch,” he says, and flashes her his most winning smile, bloody teeth and all. “Impeccable timing, I must say.”
She eyes the man pinning him to the wall with all the interest of someone regarding the weather outside, face impassive, before her gaze returns to Jaskier’s face. It wasn’t so long ago that he was in nearly this exact position because of her; perhaps the novelty of seeing him in such a state already wore off back in Rinde.
“Quite the predicament you’re in. Care to share?”
Does he?
He doesn’t need Yennefer’s help. If it comes down to it, he can take the extra beating, so long as it means dishing out his own blows. Despite his inevitable grumbling, Geralt will tend to his wounds, lecturing Jaskier on his stupidity as he does, or convince Yennefer to lend a magical hand. And that’s what gives him pause: Yennefer cares for Jaskier as little as he cares for her, but she’d probably do it, for Geralt, because whatever differences she and Jaskier may have, whatever opinions he may have of her and their relationship, they have that in common, don’t they? Geralt. However deep her feelings go, she cares for him, in some capacity, as Jaskier cares for him.
“Our… mutual friend,” Jaskier explains, haltingly. What else is he meant to call someone bedding only one of them? “They had some choice words to say about him. I might have had some choice words back.”
Butcher, he doesn’t say. Monster. Words that need no repeating.
Through mind reading or simple deduction, Yennefer seems to hear them all the same, violet eyes darkening. “I see.”
It’s as good a warning as any.
The hand wrapped around his throat is violently ripped away by an unseen force, that same arm twisting, twisting, twisting until the audible crack of a bone snapping thunders in the still and quiet air of the tavern. Whatever magical hold Yennefer had over everyone else is drawn back like a curtain, noise and movement filtering in, but she doesn’t let up on the men before them.
“If the broken arm wasn’t warning enough, perhaps I should break something else.”
The other patrons aren’t pretending to turn a blind eye, now that it’s clear Jaskier isn’t some sad sack about to get his teeth kicked in, but Yennefer doesn’t pay their enthralled audience any mind, too used to all eyes being on her or simply uncaring of the attention. A bit of both, is his guess.
“Volunteers?” she asks, a dangerous lilt in her voice. “Or shall I pick one of your cocks at random?”
The only way it could possibly be more gratifying to watch the lot of them tuck tail and run is if it didn’t come at Yennefer’s behest. As it is, he is actually grateful for her timing, especially when the rat bastard with the broken arm looks to be in near tears on his way out. That gratitude lasts all of ten seconds when Yennefer casts a judgmental look in his direction.
“What, pray tell, possesses a bard to take on five men by himself?”
“One man.” It isn’t a lie, exactly. It was the one spewing the majority of that utter horseshit that Jaskier decided to punch square in his already-crooked nose. The others came after. “He just happened to have four friends, is all.”
When Yennefer laughs, it sounds only a little fake, but underlying it is a mocking edge that grates on his nerves. “You know, Geralt mentioned something about your lack of self-preservation, but I thought the extent he spoke of was exaggerated. Consider me impressed. Truly.”
This coming from the mad fucking witch who nearly killed herself and Geralt in her attempt to tame a djinn. It’d be funnier if laughing didn’t mean pulling at what feels to be bruised ribs.
Already he can hear Geralt’s voice: If you didn’t want bruised ribs, you shouldn’t have stuck your nose where it didn’t belong.
“You can spare me the lecture,” Jaskier informs her. His ego’s taken as much of a beating as the rest of him; he may as well fucking let her have it. Something tells him there will be other opportunities in his future to hold Rinde over her head. “I’m sure Geralt will sit me down like dear old mother used to whenever I got so much as a speck of dirt on my finest clothes.”
“Why do it, if all it earns you is a slap on the wrist?”
Because Geralt is a good fucking man, and to hell with anyone who claims otherwise. Because Geralt can fight his own battles, but that doesn’t mean he always has to. Because it suits Jaskier just fine when Geralt is none the wiser as to why he gets into some of the scraps that he does.
He doesn’t do it for a pat on the back, or because he expects anything to come of it, least of all from Geralt.
“Because someone has to.”
ii.
Gors Velen is only meant to be a stop along the way until Yennefer steps inside The Unlaced Corset. She doesn’t normally venture so close to Thanedd Island, but there’s a promising lead here that she couldn’t very well ignore, Aretuza and its Chapter be damned. The lead somehow turns out to be the second most interesting thing on her agenda when she catches sight of what has everyone up and out of their seats.
It’s Geralt’s bard, because of course it’s Geralt’s fucking bard.
Why wouldn’t it be?
She suspects fighting isn’t his standard method of getting an audience to their feet, but she has a similar suspicion that he’s years removed from being a stranger to brawls.
This time, at least, he seems to have the upper hand, quick to regain the advantage after getting downed by sweeping his opponent’s legs out from underneath him. Not a moment later Jaskier is on him, closer to a predator with its fallen prey than the pesky little songbird she dismissed him as, delivering a punch that earns him bloodthirsty cheers from the crowd.
It’s a compelling enough sight that Yennefer finds it hard to look away.
Like this, he looks to be in his element, and for one very brief moment, just the briefest of moments, she thinks she sees what it is about Jaskier that draws Geralt to him. As a friend or as something more—however deep his denial runs—it’s evident what might appeal to Geralt’s own taste: that unshakable loyalty, those delicate hands made for music but capable of more, a fire underneath honeyed words and soft smiles that burns as hot and bright as hers and Geralt’s. They’re things that appeal to even her, in the here and now.
So caught up in watching Jaskier, she almost misses the man approaching him from his blindside.
Trouble magnet, Geralt called Jaskier, back in Murivel.
Too fucking right, she thinks.
Magic is out of the question if she wants to keep a low profile—and she is, for once in her godsforsaken life, making a conscious effort to avoid any unwanted attention—so she makes do with the next best thing up her sleeve: she cuts through the crowd to grab the man by the collar and levels him with a flagon from a nearby table. If Jaskier is shocked to see her when the commotion it causes diverts his attention, he hides it well, but it proves to be enough of a distraction that the man underneath him lands a nasty blow to the side of Jaskier’s face.
Fuck.
Thrown off-balance, it’s all the leverage his opponent needs to flip their positions, Jaskier on his back and on the defensive.
Now that Yennefer’s able to get a good look at the other man, it’s obvious he has both the height and weight advantage, not so much of a giant that he dwarfs the bard but stocky enough to have a leg up on him. Surprisingly, that doesn’t seem to deter Jaskier. As soon as he spots an opening in between blows, he grabs one of the man’s arms and maneuvers himself until he has it in a firm hold, bent at the elbow and angled far enough back to look painful.
Hand-to-hand combat isn’t Yennefer’s forte; she can handle a blade and is particularly lethal with a dagger, but with magic at her beck and call she’s never needed to use her fists. While it doesn’t appear to be Jaskier’s either, it isn’t quite in the same way. It’s true he’s not as skilled as someone with years of formal training under their belt—like Geralt, who fights as efficiently without a sword as he does armed—but he gives as good as he gets, faring better than Yennefer and most others would. What he lacks in brute strength he makes up for in agility. What he lacks in experience he makes up for in quick-thinking.
It was intended as a jab, more than anything, that day she told him she was impressed. Part of her was, begrudgingly, because whether he needed rescuing or not, it was no easy feat to take on five men by yourself, and she didn’t miss that all of them had wounds to lick prior to her arrival. But a larger part of her, the same part that thought him a nuisance and no more, brushed it off, because what could truly be so impressive about the pest that followed Geralt at his heels?
She’s eating her words now.
A silhouette of black and white pushes through the throng of onlookers opposite Yennefer and pulls Jaskier from the fray before he can further bloody his knuckles or break an arm—if he even would. If that bloodlust even breaks the surface. There’s still mush underneath that skin.
Any inkling that might betray Geralt’s surprise upon looking up from an armful of bard and meeting Yennefer’s gaze melts away into resignation when he spies the flagon, clutched loosely in her hand and forgotten until now, then the man crumpled at her feet.
“When I told you two to get along,” Geralt says, not unlike an exhausted parent, “I didn’t mean start fights I’d have to finish.”
“Oh, come on,” Jaskier says, playful. Gone is the man Yennefer would have gone so far as to call savage earlier, replaced by someone else entirely. Sugar where not an hour ago there was spice, fine silk where there was hard steel. It’s fascinating to watch how he can shed one skin and wear another so easily, neither of them false. “Haven’t you heard the joke? A bard and a sorceress walk into a tavern—”
“And the bard immediately gets kicked out of the tavern for his shitty jokes,” Yennefer finishes for him. Because she can’t help but get a rise out of them both, she adds kindling to the fire. “Or perhaps that was for being the one to start the fight.”
Blue eyes narrow at her, but the mirth is still there. “As I recall, the sorceress wasn’t just an innocent bystander.”
“If you’ll recall,” she says, with just the edge of venom, “the sorceress only intervened on the bard’s behalf.”
There’s a long-suffering sigh from Geralt. “I need a drink.”
iii.
“Jaskier.”
“Yennefer.”
“We really must stop meeting like this.”
“I agree,” he says. “We really must stop meeting.” It lacks the biting edge of their usual barbs, which he will accredit to feeling like one giant bruise if Yennefer thinks he’s gone soft on her.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been playing white knight again.”
Jaskier attempts a glare and ends up squinting at her more than anything when the light of the afternoon sun catches in his eyes. “I’m well aware that Geralt isn’t some damsel who needs me to defend his honor, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Hard to miss the way Geralt is built, wall of stone and muscle that he is. Equally hard to miss the two swords on his back.
Something resembling a smile pulls at the corners of Yennefer’s mouth, but just barely. “And yet… here you are.”
It’s so close to being an echo of what he told Geralt before the betrothal feast in Cintra that it startles an actual laugh out of him. Damn her and Geralt both, but no one catches him off-guard quite like them.
“For the record, it could be argued that I’m merely defending my own honor, seeing as I’m his barker,” he tells her. In truth, he couldn’t care less about what it means for him if all his years of singing Geralt’s praises can’t get through to some people. He cares only that some people are so stuck in their ways they can’t see what Jaskier sees. “But alas, I’m afraid you’ve actually caught me on a day off.”
“Cuckolded husband, then?”
“No.”
“Jealous wife?”
“No.”
“Some other vexed lover?”
“No.”
Either his reputation truly precedes him and Yennefer has caught wind of it, or Geralt—grunting, growly, monosyllabic Geralt, with an entire repertoire of hums Jaskier had to work hard to decipher just so he could hold a conversation with the grump—is an uncharacteristically chatty gossip when Jaskier isn’t around.
“How intriguing,” Yennefer comments, in a way that suggests she isn’t intrigued in the slightest. “So am I to gather that you’re laying in the dirt outside of a tavern for no discernible reason?”
“No.” Possibly he’s picked up on Geralt’s habit of one-word answers. At Yennefer’s increasingly impatient look, he relents and says, “As it so happens, there is a lovely barmaid in this fine establishment whom I may or may not have enjoyed a very long and very satisfying evening with. The aforementioned barmaid may or may not have brothers who don’t exactly care for scoundrels such as myself bedding their sister. So, to avoid being caught in the act, that barmaid may or may not have ushered yours truly to the nearest exit, which may or may not be that window up there, so that I might beat a hasty retreat.”
Silence.
In his peripheral, Yennefer blinks. Lifts an eyebrow. “That’s it?”
“None of that was actually hypothetical,” he says dryly. “Are my misfortunes no longer up to your standards?”
“I was just under the impression you’d already gotten your arse handed to you,” she says. There’s a smile, now, as close to genuine as he’s seen since their first meeting, and it should bother him more than it does that she’s all but laughing at his expense. She offers out a hand, wiggling her fingers expectantly when he doesn’t immediately accept it. “Well? Are we going in or not?”
“You want to go in,” he says, slowly, just to make sure he did, in fact, hear that right.
“I’m thirsty,” is all she says to that.
Jaskier snorts, not buying the faux innocence for a second. “For a drink or for a fight?”
Another expectant wiggle of her fingers. “I suppose we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”
iv.
Geralt isn’t sure what he expects to come back to after finishing off the wraith. Last he saw Jaskier, he agreed to stay behind with remarkably little hassle, promising Geralt he’d have a warm bath and food waiting for him after the hunt, the same as always. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, given their history, that he instead finds Jaskier in their room with a knife in his shoulder and Yennefer poised just so, as if intending to pull it out.
It’s late in the evening, but not so late that the tavern downstairs shouldn’t still be bustling with music and motion; the absence of people and the curious stares that followed him up the stairs from those that remained suddenly make a great deal more sense.
Several questions come to mind, but namely the one. “Do I want to know?”
Left to their own devices, they find trouble. Even when they don’t, trouble seems to find them.
A noncommittal hum from Yennefer, who, a minute ago, Geralt wasn’t even aware was in town. “Gwent.”
“Gwent?” Geralt repeats disbelievingly. Every time he thinks he’s heard it all, he’s proven wrong.
Jaskier says, “That is a gross oversimplification—” Which is, of course, when Yennefer decides to yank the knife out of his shoulder without so much as a forewarning. The metallic scent of blood is overshadowed by the flare-up of pain, and whatever else Jaskier was going to say is lost to a moan that tugs uncomfortably at something in Geralt’s chest. “Melitele’s fucking tits, woman! Was a warning too much to ask for?”
Geralt is across the room in one long stride and letting Jaskier slump against him before it’s even a fully-formed thought, unsure of what to do with his hands until he ultimately settles on placing one between Jaskier’s shoulder blades. “Gwent?” he tries again.
Yennefer is watching them with what can only be called interest, next he looks up, but her expression shifts into something closer to neutral between one blink and the next. “Yes, a rather heated back-and-forth game that ended with the man calling this one a little shit and accusing him of cheating. It’s a shame you missed it, really.”
“Did he?” Geralt can’t help but ask.
“I would never,” says Jaskier, which is a bald-faced lie if Geralt’s ever heard one. It wouldn’t be the first time Jaskier pissed someone off over something as trivial as a game, all because he thinks needlessly cheating at things he’s good at adds thrill.
“You would and you have. And I wasn’t asking you.”
Jaskier makes a half-aborted move to put a hand over his chest, no doubt to feign dramatic affront, and seems to think better of it when it jostles his injured shoulder. Idiot. “Geralt, I’m wounded. Well, I am, but I mean figuratively—”
“He won fair and square,” Yennefer cuts in pointedly, and if Jaskier has any of his usual objections to being interrupted, he’s unusually quiet about it. It would worry Geralt more if his curiosity didn’t win out at catching the look he and Yennefer share before she continues. “There’s a hot new card on the market that your bard here managed to get his hands on. Close combat, exceptional strength. He saved the best for last and waited until the end of the third round to play it. It just about gave the man an aneurysm, but it was a decisive win.”
Geralt’s brow furrows. “What was wrong with the card?”
“Nothing,” Jaskier insists with a huff. Something about his scent—underneath the usual honeysuckle and salt from sweat, the blood, the pain—says the opposite. “That ugly whoreson was just a sore loser.”
“Indeed,” Yennefer says, agreeable, but Geralt knows them well enough to know that there’s writing between the lines here that he can’t quite make out, illegible in no small part because they’re keeping him in the dark about something or other. “In any event, words were exchanged. You can see how well that turned out.”
Under his breath, Jaskier says, “It was worth it.”
“It was worth it to get stabbed?”
“You didn’t hear what he said,” Jaskier tells Geralt, and part of Geralt wants to shake him and say, Then fucking tell me. Few things ever go unsaid on Jaskier’s part, and Geralt doesn’t know why this is one. “It would have been worth it anyway, but your witch stabbed him back.”
It jars Geralt enough for the anger to give way to surprise, and that that surprises him more than anything else must say something about him or the company he keeps. “You stabbed him?”
Tilting her chin up, Yennefer meets his eyes with a challenge in her own, as if to say, We both know you would have done the same or worse. “It felt rather justified, given the circumstances. Wouldn’t you say so?”
It eats at him, the not knowing. It shouldn’t be of any concern to him, and it wasn’t, originally, but there was something there, in Yennefer’s gaze, in Jaskier refusing to meet Geralt’s when Geralt brought it up again, and it continues to eat at him, more and more, until all that’s left is an itch that demands to be scratched.
“What card was it?” he asks, the next time their paths cross with Yennefer’s.
Yennefer, not one to expect much in the way of pillow talk in between rounds or afterward, props her head up on her hand and raises her eyebrows. “What card was what?”
“In Tretogor. The Gwent card you mentioned.”
And there—that weighted thing in Yennefer’s gaze again. Heavy. Knowing. As though she’s privy to something he isn’t. “Does it matter?”
“If the idiot got himself nearly killed over it, yes.”
It’s a half-truth. What he doesn’t admit aloud—what he’s barely willing to admit to himself—is that it matters simply because it concerns Jaskier. Because Jaskier matters.
“Nearly killed is a bit dramatic, wouldn’t you say? It was hardly a flesh wound, Geralt.”
“Yennefer.” Many things suit Yennefer: the color black, her trademark scent, the sinful noises she makes with Geralt between her legs and his mouth on her. Coy doesn’t look to be one of those things. “You know something. Spit it out.”
For a moment, all Yennefer does is regard him. It makes him feel naked beyond the physical sense, even when he can’t sense her using magic to get inside his head. Like she’s picking apart all of his defenses as easily as she stripped him of his clothes. Only two people unnerve him with how well they can read him, outside of his brothers and Vesemir, and the other is sound asleep in the adjoining room.
Yennefer swings a leg over his hip and levers herself up so that she’s straddling him, both of her hands planted firmly on his chest. It’s clear she’s drawing this out just to make him suffer, but he can’t say he minds completely when her hands sweep across the plains of his shoulders and down his arms, teasing, until finally she takes one of his hands in hers. There’s a whisper of magic in the air, and then the unmistakable shape of a card materializes in the palm of his hand.
When he turns the card over to peer down at it, it’s his own likeness staring back at him.
“The White Wolf, of course. Who else?”
v.
Fucking godsdamned shitshow of a dragon hunt.
It feels fitting, upon descending the mountain, to stop at The Pensive Dragon for a drink. Or ten. More, if he wants a hangover to rival the pain that’s making a home in his chest. There’s something poetic about ending this stretch of the journey where it began, isn’t there?
So what if Geralt stops here? So what if he doesn’t? It doesn’t concern Jaskier either way.
Except for the fact that it does. It does. Because even when Geralt’s a right fucking bastard for throwing twenty-two years and Jaskier’s heart, freely given to him on a silver platter, right off a mountaintop, Jaskier still hopes—stupidly, foolishly, achingly—that Geralt will show his face here, if only so Jaskier can pretend, for even a moment, that Geralt wants Jaskier in his life half as much as Jaskier has always wanted Geralt in his.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
“And I thought you’d be long gone.”
“I was,” Yennefer confesses, and doesn’t wait for Jaskier’s invitation to take the seat to his right. “But misery loves company and all that. Isn’t that what you poets say? I thought you wouldn’t be… entirely opposed to some company.” In a surprising show of honesty—and, he realizes belatedly, vulnerability—she adds, “Perhaps I selfishly wanted some company myself.”
As a gesture of goodwill, he slides the bottle of Fiorano her way and says, “And here you are.”
There’s the ghost of a smile as she waves the barkeep down for a spare cup. “And here I am.”
Silence has never been his strong suit, but he finds he doesn’t have the words to fill the silence that settles into the space between them. He is, for all intents and purposes, a man lost at sea. Stranded, nothing to anchor him, wishing for land. Bereft of everything, even words.
Eventually, Yennefer does it for him. “Did you know?”
He doesn’t do her the disservice of asking what she means. “No. I wondered, admittedly, when it seemed as though we were doomed to never escape you. But it never felt like my place to ask. And it’s not like I was exactly keen on knowing.”
“Jealous?” she asks, just a hint of teasing in her inflection, and what once would have come across as intentionally malicious seems to come from a place of genuine curiosity.
An eye for an eye, a truth for a truth. “Yes.”
There wasn’t much of a point in hiding it anymore, was there?
Yennefer’s gaze bores into him, long enough for it to be unsettling. Finally, just as he’s about to half-jokingly ask if there’s something on his face, she says, “Why aren’t you angrier?”
Why aren’t you as angry as I am?
And what is he supposed to say to that? That it wasn’t until halfway down the mountain that the fog of complete devastation that hung over him cleared long enough for him to feel something else? That he was fuming, fucking livid at Geralt, at Yennefer, at Borch for ever inviting them, before that anger dissolved into tears? That he spent the rest of his miserable trek down the mountain feeling emotionally wrung out?
He could say that. He could bring up the jab at his crow’s feet and joke that he’s too old for anger. He could get away with saying nothing, if Yennefer is sympathetic enough. He could say any number of things, but the truth wins out in the end.
“I love him.” It’s the first time he’s said it out loud. There have been so many roundabout ways over the years, in song, in poems, in countless other words. But never the three. Never outright. Like speaking them made it too real. “I am terribly cross with him, and I cannot say I’m above punching him in the face the next time I see him, but—”
“But you love him.”
“Yes.” Against his better judgment, he says, “And I think you love him, too.”
“How am I to know for certain?” she asks, which isn’t the outright denial he was expecting. Why I feel this way inside, she said, back on that mountain, before writing it off as a product of Geralt’s wish. “How am I to know what’s magic and what’s real?” It’s not because of anything real or true. It’s magic. “Magic has given me a lot, but it’s taken away tenfold that.”
“I don’t think he meant any harm—”
It’s entirely the wrong thing to say and he knows it at once, before she ever pierces him with a steely glare.
“Do not fucking make excuses for him.”
“I’m not trying to,” he says, placating, and finds that it’s the truth. At the moment, he feels less inclined to defend Geralt than he ever has before, but he can’t unknow him. His intentions have always been good, if misguided at the worst of times. “But I watched him go back into that crumbling building for you, in Rinde. I thought he was as fucking mad as you, but short of a marble or not, he did that of his own free will. Far be it from me to tell you how to feel, but know this at least: I believe in my heart of hearts he only wanted to save you.”
There’s no putting out the fire that fuels her anger, but Yennefer’s shoulders slump, as if it’s some small weight off the load she’s been burdened with. A beat passes where she says nothing, but then, as quiet as he’s ever heard her, “As he wanted to save you.”
“What?”
“Whatever the price,” says Yennefer. She stares down at her wine, contemplative. “It’s what he said to me, that night we met. He was willing to pay whatever the price if it meant saving your life.”
It’s not as though he didn’t know Geralt cared about him. In his own way, Geralt showed Jaskier time and time again that he did. Actions spoke louder for him than words, so Jaskier took great care in paying attention to all the things Geralt said through gestures. But to hear it in words—it soothes something in Jaskier that he didn’t know needed soothing.
“I think I forgave him the moment he said it,” Jaskier admits quietly, the confession pulled from him, unbidden. So many times he wondered how it didn’t overflow, all the love for Geralt he kept inside. It’s spilling over now. “Stupid, right?”
Something in Yennefer’s face softens, all her sharp edges not quite dull, but sheathed like a sword, maybe. “I think you’re a bleeding heart that loves as recklessly as you pick your battles. You’re incredibly stupid for an astounding number of reasons, but that isn’t one.”
Jaskier draws in a shaky breath. Closer to sober than drunk, he’s barely toeing the line of tipsy, but the look Yennefer fixes him with is heady enough that it leaves him feeling dizzy and off-kilter, gravitating towards her mouth until he feels her plush, velvet lips against his.
He kissed Geralt, once.
He was proper drunk then, so in his cups that Geralt cut him off, telling him in no uncertain terms that he would leave Jaskier there at the crack of dawn otherwise. It was belied by the steadying hand on the small of his back as Geralt shepherded him up the stairs to their shared room, by the gentle squeeze of an ankle after Geralt unlaced Jaskier’s boots for him, by patient fingers that helped Jaskier strip down to his smallclothes. So Jaskier, feeling equal parts brave and stupid, kissed him with all the urgency of someone who thought he might never have the chance to again.
It was Geralt that pulled back, but he looked pained more than angry. “You’re drunk,” he said, before gently pushing Jaskier in the direction of the bed. Like that mattered. Like he didn’t know how far and deep Jaskier’s feelings went. But he had to, didn’t he? “Go to sleep, Jaskier.”
What Jaskier wanted to say was that it didn’t fucking matter, that he wanted Geralt just as fiercely sober as he did drunk, but instead he let himself be guided and said, voice small, “Okay.”
In the morning, neither of them brought it up, and that was that.
The second Yennefer pushes him up against the door to his room, Jaskier knows that this will mean more than just one night to him, whether he wants it to or not. One night stands aren’t new to him, but the unnamed feeling taking root in his chest is.
She buries a hand in his hair and kisses as intensely as she does anything, firm and demanding and relentless, refusing to let up until he has to brace himself against the door with both palms, a soft noise of pleasure escaping him. It makes him feel devoured, like at any moment she will either swallow him whole or take him apart with just her tongue alone.
He’d be lying if he said he never imagined this, to some extent. It was nothing like he imagined with Geralt—moonlit kisses, the press of their mouths after a long winter apart, lips locked onto his as Geralt fucked into him—but he did, more often than he was comfortable with. It was hard not to, after seeing Yennefer ride Geralt in the ruins of that house, after seeing how one night with her was enough to leave Geralt looking sated for days, after seeing for himself, up close and personal, all the delicate curves of her body that contrasted the sharp edges of her personality.
Her hands trail down his chest until she palms him through the fabric of his trousers, clever fingers squeezing until all of his nerves are alight, fixated on her even as she pulls away from him.
Mischief dances in her eyes as she inches backwards towards the sole chest of drawers in the room and knocks aside everything atop it with a careless sweep of her arm before perching there herself. It’s a whole production that she tops off by letting her top slip loose from her shoulders.
“There’s a bed right over there,” he says, just to be a little shit. Mostly he’s so aroused that it’s a little maddening.
She spreads her legs invitingly. “Beds are boring. And I’d quite like to fuck, unless you’re suddenly itching for a barfight instead.”
Yennefer is long gone by the time Jaskier wakes, sheets cool to the touch and the rest of the room back in order, almost as if nothing ever happened. The only evidence that she was ever here at all is the lingering scent of lilac and gooseberries, and the note he finds on the pillow next to his: Stay out of trouble, will you? For the both of us.
(If, on his way out, he tucks the note away into his pack for safekeeping, carefully folded into the black shirt he stole from Geralt, that’s no one’s business but his own.)
vi.
It’s a long three years before he sees either of them again.
In the middle of a set, performing Her Sweet Kiss of all the fucking songs, his eyes happen to drift over to the door just as they’re stepping inside. Any lesser bard might miss a beat, fumble a chord, stumble over a lyric. But he didn’t make a name for himself by being just any fucking bard. He finishes off strong—despite them, in spite of them, because of them.
His heart thunders in his chest all the while, and he’s uncomfortably aware of the fact that Geralt can hear it from across the room as Jaskier wraps things up early under the pretense of needing to rest his voice, apologizing to his audience for the short notice.
He’s collecting the last of his coin with trembling fingers when two pairs of boots come into his line of sight.
“Tell us if you’ve heard this one before,” says Yennefer.
Jaskier swallows, willing his heart to stop beating so violently against his sternum.
“A witcher and a sorceress walk into a tavern. They’re quite the pair of fools, you see, this witcher and this sorceress. One for failing to hold onto what he had all along, the other for failing to realize she had it at all. So, they walk into a tavern. And then another. And another. And another. They’re looking for someone, but not just anyone.”
“They’re looking for a bard,” says Geralt, voice deep and rich like the earth, as it always was, but gentler than Jaskier remembers it ever being. “In the hopes that they might be able to prove themselves worthy companions to him.”
Jaskier waits for the punchline: for this to be a dream brought on by so many sleepless nights, or a hallucination, or some other figment of his overactive imagination. But when he looks up, they’re there, real and whole and tangible. A sight for sore eyes.
“It’s a shitty joke,” he tells them, not unkindly.
Hopeful wasn’t a word he would have ever used to describe Yennefer in the past. Oh, there was an extensive list, covering everything from insane to terrifying to beautiful, but a woman like that, who took life by the horns, who knew what she wanted and pursued it till she had it—what need was there for hope if she had the means to just take?
There’s no other word for the look she gives him now.
“And for an apology?”
There’s anger, raw and simmering, if he searches deep enough, and hurt, somewhere much closer to the surface, but mostly he finds that the years apart have only left him weaker and all the more wanting, even still, even after everything.
“It’s a start.”
A bard, a witcher and a sorceress walk into a tavern.
The bard asks after the available lodgings. Says, after the inkeep tells them there are plenty left, “We’ll take your finest room, good sir.”
The innkeep, skeptical, eyes the three of them. “Just the one?”
“Just the one,” the witcher says.
Not one to turn down business, the innkeep merely takes this in stride. “Two beds, then?”
“No,” the sorceress says with a wicked smile. “Just the one will do.”