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- Length: 00:17:49 minutes
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- Writer: Eriakit
- Sound effect: Spooky! Ominous bells of doom (youtube)
- Reader: LenaLawlipop
- Cover artist: LenaLawlipop ( original image)
- Editor: LenaLawlipop
Geralt feels it the second his fist drives into soft flesh. It twists in his own gut, his mind making a mirror of the pain he’s inflicted on the boy. It squirms through him, clenching and grabbing at heartstrings he shouldn’t have, as the bardling sucks in air and tries to steady himself.
Geralt doesn’t look back. Doesn’t let himself regret the choice made under a split-second lash of rage at hearing butcher from the bard’s grinning mouth. He keeps walking, and the boy keeps following. And talking. It makes the writhing ache in his gut worse, the longer it goes on.
Is he simple? Worse, is he accustomed to such treatment? Is Geralt merely the latest in a lifetime of aggressors to the boy, or had he chosen to harm someone who couldn’t know any better? Neither option is preferable. Geralt wishes he would just stop talking, at least - maybe then he could let go of the guilt filling his belly. But the boy just keeps rambling as they walk, and Geralt feels the heaviness grow in his chest.
It’s doubled when he wakes with a pain in his head and the bard bound behind him.
It’s tripled when he hears the bard snap and snarl at the elves, apparently capable of fighting but he just hadn’t fought when Geralt hit him.
By the end of their dealings with the elves the guilt is so large and so heavy that Geralt struggles to breathe around it. The boy sings lies and makes Geralt out to be a triumphant hero while still holding himself to favor where Geralt’s fist struck his middle, where the elves had hit him again, worsening it. Geralt says where’s your newfound respect to avoid saying I don’t deserve your forgiveness and the boy says respect doesn’t make history as if he thinks that Geralt will.
He can’t find room around the squirming weight in his chest to protest as the bard, as Jaskier, continues to follow him.
***
A few days later they make camp and Jaskier strips to bathe in the creek with unholy delight. Geralt glances over, thinking to soothe himself with the sight of the bard’s healed skin. Instead, he’s hard pressed not to gasp against the drowning sensation of regret filling up his throat at the sight of Jaskier’s midsection painted yellow and green and purple.
Jaskier hisses through his teeth as he bends, face turned away from Geralt, unaware of the monstrous eyes watching him. He turns the hiss into a word, ssssay, Geralt - and asks a question about the last monster Geralt fought. Geralt grunts out a short response, both uninterested in discussing drowners and feeling strangled by the sight of the bruises.
He picks out the outline of his knuckles under the smaller ones of the elves as Jaskier laughs about him never answering questions properly.
The bard slips and stumbles, laughing and screeching as he falls to his knees in the water. His legs spread just so, his back fully to Geralt now, the bruises out of sight. His ass flexes and heat and temptation bubble together in Geralt’s belly and there is a whole new sort of guilt. It fills his throat and weighs down his tongue and presses behind his teeth like vomit as he turns away, eyes wide.
***
He leaves Jaskier behind without warning at the next town they come across. This guilt is sharper, prickling at his spine and the back of his neck, the shame of both tricking Jaskier into staying and of being so monstrous that such trickery is necessary mixing into a nausea-inducing cloak over his skin. But it’s better, it must be, than risking traveling with the boy when he has the urge to -
It’s better. It must be.
***
It’s not better.
He finds Jaskier again three villages to the northeast. Jaskier’s favoring his left leg and sporting a black eye and says you should see the other guys as if it’s funny. He doesn’t blame Geralt, doesn’t insist that if Geralt had been with him, he wouldn’t have been hurt.
Geralt knows it anyway.
He doesn’t leave him behind again. Better one monster than multiple.
***
The long absence after Cintra is almost relaxing. But where Jaskier once was is only silence, and it rings with his own words as he damned a noble child to being bound to him.
Maybe if he bites off his own tongue he will do less damage in the future.
He’s tired enough to consider swallowing his own tongue, just for some fucking rest, when he decides to try asking a djinn for sleep. He isn’t sure it’s the best idea, but it can’t be the worst. He is focused on his task when Jaskier appears.
Geralt doesn’t feel guilty for yelling, or for insulting Jaskier’s singing. They’ve both said worse to each other over the years and neither took it personally anymore. He doesn’t feel guilty for getting in Jaskier’s face, or for wrestling over the amphora. He doesn’t feel anything but tired, and irritated, and ever-so-faintly fond - until Jaskier starts to choke.
Terror fights with regret as he gets Jaskier to a healer, winding him and making him hasty, forgetting every reservation he’d had about Rinde. By the time he’s been told that the elf can do nothing and he’s found the sorceress instead the terror has burnt out, leaving behind nothing but the greasy, echoing emptiness of knowing he’s fucked up yet again and that nothing he does will fix it. He expects that emptiness to be filled with grief in short order.
It’s filled with rage, instead, as Geralt comes to in a jail cell with a healer who had done nothing wrong beyond being born and trying to help ingrates like himself.
The relief of seeing Jaskier alive - and well, and once again without an ounce of the blame Geralt deserves - doesn’t last long. There’s an urgency in the back of his mind to ensure the sorceress survives, paired with the creeping certainty that everything that has gone wrong in the last day has been of his own stupidity. It blinds him, guides his feet, and possesses his tongue.
The house falls down around him, just like everything else has.
***
Geralt doesn’t understand why he feels guilty every time Yennefer leaves. He doesn’t understand why it’s worse when Jaskier is there, after, smile too-wide and words sharper than normal until the scent of lilacs and gooseberries fades from Geralt’s skin. He thinks they’re related. He doesn’t think he has the right to assume anything else. He doesn’t deserve anything else.
***
Yennefer’s portal leaves sparkles in his vision as he pants into the open air at the top of this gods-forsaken mountain. It hurts, this guilt. The confusion that twines with it behind his breastbone only sharpens it, instead of dulling it as it rightly should. He wants to squirm, to writhe in the dirt, to flail and scream and claw at himself until it’s out of him.
Jaskier’s voice, full of the succor he shouldn’t be offered, sends him over the edge.
The guilt tears at him, claws up from his belly to drown him as he yells around it. He gags on it as he turns away, lungs chilled and straining like he’d breathed in sea water. He hears Jaskier walk away from him and it’s worse, it’s oh so very much worse than it has ever been before. His stomach rebels and only decades of control keeps down what little is in it.
Geralt had hit Jaskier, once upon a time. Led him into danger. Left him behind. Spat harsh words at him. Insulted him. Denied his friendship. Dragged him over countries all across the continent. Left him to walk. Refused him comforts. But none of that, not a shred of it, had ever made Jaskier leave him. Jaskier had never blamed him, or demanded better. Jaskier had never even said that’s not fair. Until now.
Geralt’s eyes burn as he shakes, listening to Jaskier sob as he walks away, only audible to a Witcher’s ears. He’s drowning in his guilt as Jaskier stumbles and curses and keeps going. He knows himself to be a pitiful, wretched thing when he thinks to run, catch up to Jaskier, beg for the bard’s forgiveness. He’s pitiful because he cannot even stick to his path, can’t just let Jaskier go, let him find someone better.
He is wretched because he knows that if he did ask, Jaskier would forgive him.
He doesn’t.
***
He should have learnt this lesson years ago, he thinks, as he eyes the Nilfgaardian encampment. He had learnt it, but time and emotionality had made him forget.
He turns to Ciri, eyes hard. “Stay on Roach. Stick to the edges of the woods and keep heading north. I’ll catch up. Don’t turn back.”
She doesn’t argue with him, but her eyes water as she asks: “And if you don’t catch up?”
“Try to reach Kaedwen. Look for the brothel on the north side of the city, and tell them you were sent by me. Tell them to find you Eskel, Vesemir, or Lambert. Don’t leave there with anyone not wearing a wolf medallion. They’ll take care of you,” he says, and he wishes her life hadn’t been so hard before this even though it’s that very harshness that makes her nod at his blunt orders. The guilt that twists around his love for her contracts and aches - if only he’d gone back for her sooner. If only he had listened to Jaskier. If, if, if.
She rides away on Roach and he slinks towards the camp.
The soldiers do not go down easily, or quietly, or peacefully. He is blessedly clear-headed as he cuts them down; they are the enemy. More than that, they chose to be his enemy. They are not commanded by their nature to capture and rape and steal and murder and torture, as a monster might be. They just do, because they have been given permission to do so and no one stands in their way.
Geralt wasn’t there to stand in their way. But he is here, now, to punish them for it. He doesn’t bother to finish off the few that don’t die immediately when they fall. He doesn’t regret a single agonized moan as they bleed out and cry for gods that don’t care.
When no more Nilfgaardian soldiers are able to lift their weapons, Geralt begins breaking open the cages on their wagons. The elves thank him, call him Gwynbleidd with respect, and his gut twists as he thinks of a song that popularized the moniker of White Wolf to begin with. The human men shout curses and run. The human women shy away, some thanking him, some not.
The last cage has only one body in it and he has saved it for last only because he knows that if he hadn’t, he would be hated for it by the person inside.
He swallows around the cloying weight in his throat, eyes stinging, as he bypasses the metal cage door and breaks the wooden sides of the wagon with his bare hands. The body on the floor whimpers, then rolls to face him, and yes, yes he should have learnt his lesson the last time he left Jaskier behind. The last time he thought Jaskier safe without him and found him with bruises and a limp.
The damage goes far beyond bruises this time.
But Jaskier doesn’t blame him. Doesn’t spit curses or foul Geralt’s name. He smiles as tears leak down over his filthy cheeks. “I hadn’t dared hope,” he croaks, and Geralt’s heart twists itself into a knot in his chest and he isn’t sure if it’s because Jaskier would hope to see him again, or that he hadn’t let himself after the way Geralt had treated him.
Geralt pants from emotion as his chest feels like it’s caving in under the onslaught of his regrets and shame. But Jaskier needs him, now, and there is only one way to even try to make amends for this. He scoops Jaskier into his arms as gently as he can, and when Jaskier cries out at the jostling to his ribs Geralt shushes him like he would Roach when she’s spooked, or Ciri after a nightmare.
The three of them are unique in his heart, he thinks. Sure, loyal, loved. He aches, and lets himself be the wretched monster he knows himself to be, whispering pleas for Jaskier’s forgiveness as he walks them into the woods, toward the faint sound of Roach’s hooves and Ciri’s heartbeat. Jaskier’s heart beats faster in response, and his hand - bloody, raw-knuckled, missing two nails, but bones unbroken - cups Geralt’s cheek.
“I already forgave you, you bastard,” he mutters, and he gasps as Geralt turns his head to kiss his bleeding palm. The blood on his lips feels the same as the guilt slicking his soul.
“You shouldn’t,” Geralt answers, voice breaking.
Jaskier slaps him, so weak it barely makes a sound. “I can’t flog you harder over it than you’ve already beaten yourself, I’m sure.” He blinks, and Geralt jostles him to keep him conscious. He hisses, but doesn’t complain. He refocuses on Geralt’s face. “Did you get her? Ciri? They were certain you had. They didn’t believe me that I didn’t know where you’d taken her.”
Geralt nods, breathing through the clenching in his chest. The ifs of before crowd his mind again. If only he hadn’t chased Jaskier away. If only he had stayed with him after Cintra, and not gone to Rinde. If only he had taken Ciri, and stayed with Jaskier. If only he had gone to the coast.
***
“I forgive you,” Jaskier says. They are years and miles away from that night in the forest. He’s laughing, cheeks pink, shirt torn where Geralt’s hands had pulled too harshly. They resume their struggles to reach bare skin, and Geralt hopes in vain that Jaskier missed the way his eyes went wide and his breath went harsh at the words.
***
“Don’t feel bad,” Ciri giggles. Her hair is a mess from Geralt’s failed attempt at a new braid that apparently all the young ladies enjoyed this season. The sun is warm on their backs where they sit on the walls surrounding Kaer Morhen’s inner courtyard. He believes she means it. “Brush it out and you can try again.”
***
“It’s fine,” Jaskier sighs, rolling his eyes as Geralt ducks his head. “Well no, you’re right, it isn’t. It’s very annoying. But lucky for you, I’m forgiving.”
“Yeah,” Geralt rumbles, looking up to meet Jaskier’s eyes. A missed competition because of a job that ran late is nothing compared to the things Jaskier has forgiven him for in the past. But his heart still pounds every time, sure that this failure will be what snaps Jaskier to his senses and sends him running. “You are.” More than you should be, he doesn’t say. But Jaskier looks at him knowingly anyway.
“I’ve good reason to be,” Jaskier insists.
Geralt believes Jaskier believes that. He makes a silent promise to do better, in any case. He doesn’t repeat his mistakes as often, anymore - guilt is a harsh teacher, but an effective one.