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By the time the snow has settled enough for Annika to make it back to Jaskier’s cottage, late that evening and with the elderly healing-woman perched birdlike on Pegasus’ back, it’s not the mysterious, arrow-pierced rider who needs her attention.
A fire blazes hot in the hearth, well-stoked, stacked high with wood and broken arrow-shafts. Sparks leap from the arrowheads; their feathers are singed into crisp black curls.
The hearthrug has been scrubbed clean and so has the floor beneath, though both the weave and the wood still bear faint stains and always will. Outlines of where blood has pooled like the rings in the trunk of a felled tree. Two sets of wet clothes hang steaming on a line stretched across the room, similarly tinted. One white shirt still intact, the faint stain spilling from collar to hem as if the wearer’s throat was slit for a sacrifice; the other perforated by arrow after arrow, like the hide of a hunted animal that would not die.
The lacquer on the body of the lute protected it from being too much harmed by the blood that was shed onto it. The strings have been carefully cleaned, left tinged only a little bit pink.
In the bed in the corner of the room, tucked in under heavy layers of sheets and blankets, the player of that precious lute sleeps silently. He had no wounds to tend to, no bruises to salve, no cuts to bind, so there had been nothing to do but mop the blood carefully from his mouth, his chin, his throat, his hands, as he flickered candle-like in and out of fragile consciousness; then lift him gently to the bed, make him drink a cup of water, make him warm. His song had healed his scars, leaving lines too faint and fine to be seen by anyone without a witcher’s eyesight. But it had not put back the blood he lost in opening them.
And now as he sleeps the witcher watches over him, kneeling on the floor by the edge of the bed, his cheek on the edge of the mattress, his hand tucked under the blankets and resting over Jaskier’s wrist where his pulse beats, faint but present.
The urgent rap at the door startles him, though he hadn’t been sleeping, only focused so closely on Jaskier’s vital signs that he hadn’t noticed the sound of footsteps outside. It takes all of Geralt’s iron will to tear himself away from his place at Jaskier’s bedside, to get to his feet and open the door. There is a young girl on the step—thirteen or fourteen, perhaps—who starts at the sight of him, clasps her hands over her open mouth, mute with surprise. Geralt blinks wearily between her, and the old woman that stands beside her, so weathered and bent by age that she curves into a perfect curlicue over the tail of her walking-stick.
“Where,” the girl manages, after a moment. “Where’s Julek? I brought Irmina, to—well, to—for you.”
She stares at him, bewildered. Geralt doesn’t remember falling from his horse in front of her, but he knows a healer when he sees one, can smell the constant lingering scent of herbs and tinctures that always cling to them, and he can put the pieces together. Jaskier sent for a healer, and when none came in time, he…
“You were hurt,” she says, and her stare has shifted to his middle, as if by staring hard enough she might be able to see through his shirt to a scattering of wounds that lie beneath it. She would find none. Only a few silver scars, as faint as if they’ve been healed for years.
“Yes,” Geralt says, and he can hear the strain in his own voice, the constriction in his throat. “I was. Jaskier—Julian, he… he healed me.”
The girl’s eyes grow even wider, about as wide as they can possibly get without falling right out of her head. Beside her, the old woman’s leathered face looks thoughtful, creased in contemplation.
“But it cost him a lot,” Geralt continues, before either of them can interrupt him. Steps back from the door, holding it open to urge them in. “Blood. He lost a lot of blood.”
Fear, now, growing on the girl’s face. No move to set foot over the threshold. Geralt can hardly even blame her. Fuck knows how this must seem. A stranger shows up in a snowstorm, wounded and then not, and somehow now the man who took him in is the one injured. He wouldn’t blame the girl if she turned and ran. But however she knows Jaskier, she must care for him enough to be brave. She exchanges glances with Irmina, who nods her head, and then arm in arm they enter the house. Geralt closes the door behind them.
At the sight of the sleeping figure the girl’s hands fly to her mouth again; she whispers a prayer against harm behind her fingers. Irmina, unperturbed, shuffles to the side of the bed and leans right over to peel back the blankets Geralt so carefully arranged and peer into Jaskier’s face, to touch his brow and feel for the pulse in his neck with her gnarled fingers. Geralt hovers, unused to feeling so useless.
“Mm,” croaks the old healer, eventually. “He wants for blood, yes. Nothing that won’t be mended with time. A fortifying draught, a little restorative, to help things along… and rest. Best cure for most things.”
She turns to look at Geralt; he looks back at her, his teeth clenched tight together, his hands in worried fists, his face betraying him and nothing he can do about it. “He’ll be alright?”
“Of course,” she says, like it’s nothing, and Geralt sinks back against the closest wall, the relief so swift and intense it feels like a blow to the head. “My bag, Annika.”
Annika hurries over with her satchel, and Geralt watches from his place as Irmina measures out a draught with practised precision, as she pats Jaskier’s cheek to rouse him enough that he can swallow it. He barely opens his eyes as he does so, just drinks. Geralt watches the movement of his throat, the way a stray drop of the draught lingers glistening on his pale lip.
“Let him rest a few days,” Irmina tells him, as Annika packs away her things, and Geralt doesn’t have it in him to so much as bat an eye at her assumption that he’ll be staying here. Of course he’ll be staying. “Make sure he keeps to his bed. Give him plenty to drink and to eat when he wakes.”
“Yes,” murmurs Geralt, obedient in his helplessness. As if he doesn’t know to do those things already.
“I’ll come by to look in on him.” She is moving towards the door, now, Annika going with her. Entrusting Jaskier so easily into his care. What does she see in him, he wonders, or know of him, to deem him worthy. “But you may send for me again, if he worsens.”
Geralt nods. Then a second later starts up from where he’s been leaning, moves across the room towards the woman and the girl. They look at him almost in unison with matching questions on their faces, and he wonders briefly if they’re related to one another. “Let me pay you,” he says.
The old healer has a laugh like the creak of old floorboards. “Not for Julek.” She shakes her head. “No.”
And out they go, Annika closing the door behind them, leaving Geralt alone with Jaskier again.
With nothing else to do, and weary deep in his bones, he goes back to his place at the side of the bed. Slips his hand under the covers, finds Jaskier’s wrist, and tucks two fingers in against his heartbeat.
Geralt opens his eyes to the sound of his name. A whisper only a witcher could hear, softer than fingertips dancing over strings. Jaskier is looking at him. Eyes half-closed, heavy-lidded with sleep, but clear blue and looking at him.
“What are you doing on the floor?”
“Dandelion,” Geralt whispers back to him.
Under the covers, a gentle shift. Jaskier dislodging Geralt’s hand from his wrist. Fitting their hands together, palm to palm, instead.
“Get in the bed,” he murmurs, as his eyes slip closed again. “Idiot.”
Geralt can hardly disobey him now. Even if he is half-dreaming, or delirious. Even if he kicks him out again later.
He climbs up slowly, carefully, lifts the blankets just enough to crawl in without letting out too much heat. Jaskier turns part-way onto his side, and Geralt fits himself along the back of him, curls his body against his as if no time at all has passed since they last did this, even as his stomach aches with the lost familiarity of it. Jaskier is warm and sweet-scented, only the faintest trace of the smell of blood left on him. Geralt presses his nose into his hair at the crown of his head and breathes in.
+++
Geralt’s warm bulk at Jaskier’s back is unmistakable. Familiar even after five years. The nudge of his nose at the nape of his neck. The sharp press of his bony hips. The weight of his arm over his ribs. His slow, steady breathing. Not a dream, then, when Jaskier told him to get off the floor and into the bed. Not a dream. So then…
“Are we dead?” he asks, sleepily, even though he can feel his own pulse beating under Geralt’s fingers, where his hand is coiled loosely around his wrist. For all he knows they could be in some afterlife where hearts still beat. It’s not as if he’d know what to expect; he has no proper religion. And he’d gone and been ready to die for Geralt anyway.
He’s too bleary to be quite struck by the full force of that thought just yet, but he knows it’ll creep up on him later.
Behind him Geralt stirs, breathes in deeply. “I fucking hope not,” he rumbles. Jaskier laughs softly into his pillow. Closes his eyes. Doesn’t think he’s ever been this tired before, but it’s not a bad sort of tiredness.
“It worked, then,” he says after a moment, half a question. “You’re alright.”
“Never better.” Geralt’s voice is low and soft and sweet. A little awe there.
Awe that Jaskier, too, is feeling, gentled as it is by tiredness. It worked. What had felt at the time like both the obvious choice and the only one, but now with dawning hindsight seems more than a little bit insane, a swan song based on almost nothing. And it worked. Geralt lived.
He lifts a hand to touch his lips, but loses his nerve before he makes contact. Geralt lived. Isn’t that enough for now.
Instead he braces himself for something else, and turns in Geralt’s arms to face him.
He certainly looks alive. By witcher standards even healthy—there’s colour in his face and his eyes are firelight bright. A little blood in his hair but not much, like he’s tried to wash it out without a mirror.
They look at each other for a very long moment.
“Can I see?” Jaskier asks then, in a whisper, and when at first Geralt doesn’t understand what he’s asking he slips his hand between them and touches it to Geralt’s stomach. Beneath the light brush of his fingers he feels his muscles jump as Geralt breathes in a little sharply.
But he gets it then, and shifts his weight a bit so that he can tug up the hem of his shirt. Beneath it there are no bandages. No wounds. Only scars, one for each arrow Jaskier pulled out of him, neatly healed. Jaskier swallows a breath that trembles. It worked. He feels it now, the force of it: the risk he took. He hadn’t even tried to bind Geralt’s wounds. How easy it would have been for them both to bleed to death there, together on the hearthrug.
Before he becomes aware of the motion his hand flies to his mouth. And then stills there.
The scars are gone.
Jaskier exhales slowly, unsteadily against his palm. “Fuck.”
Gerald nods. “Mhm.”
Silence again, for a minute or two. The slow rise and fall of Geralt’s stomach as he breathes, alive and whole. He hasn’t pulled his shirt back down and Jaskier badly wants to touch his bare skin but doesn’t, not just yet.
“Why are you here?” he asks, at last.
Geralt shrugs the shoulder he isn’t leaning on. His gaze is fixed steadily on Jaskier’s face, flicking now and then between his lips and his eyes. It feels like a physical heat, like standing in front of a bonfire, or the full hot summer sun. “Happenstance,” he says.
“Destiny…” Jaskier offers, because he thinks it might make Geralt laugh. It almost does; he smiles. “But what happened? Why were you full of arrows?” he asks, and Geralt’s smile fades again.
“Just a bad job,” he says, and sighs when Jaskier goes on looking at him, waiting for more of an answer. “A village, a way north of here, if I’m remembering right—folk there got it into their heads that there was a curse on the place, that’s why their autumn harvest had failed, why winter was so hard on them. Decided it was because of a little girl living there. Six or seven years old, I think. The mother tried to hide her. Village folk wanted a hunt. Turned on me when I wouldn’t find her and kill her for them.” He shrugs again, his face almost impassive compared to the crumple of sadness on Jaskier’s own.
It’s easy to picture. Jaskier knows it wasn't the first time he’d been in that kind of situation; hired to kill without question, and abused when he didn’t turn out to be a mindless mercenary. He can almost see him, riding away from a frothing mob, unwilling to cut down a whole town of common folk even though he could, even as they tried their best to kill him.
“Was the child cursed?” he asks, softly.
“No.”
“And did they—?”
“They fled.”
Quiet again. Then Geralt says: “I didn’t know you were here. I was just riding.”
Jaskier sucks his bottom lip between his teeth. How strange his mouth feels without the ridges of the scars. “You didn’t... look for me, after I left?”
Geralt is gazing at him like he might go on gazing at him for the rest of his life. Barely blinking. Jaskier can just barely make out the pale reflection of his own face in the liquid black of his pupils. “Did you want me to?”
It’s not an answer. It’s not a question Jaskier has an answer for, either. He doesn’t even know what he might want Geralt to say, if there’s anything he’d actually want to hear. The thought of Geralt letting him go and then searching for him afterwards makes him feel as though his chest is caving in. So does the thought of Geralt letting him go and letting him stay gone.
And it’s not as if he looked for Geralt, either.
He feels a little sick.
It must show on his face because Geralt's expression shifts, his brows drawing together, mouth turning down slightly.
“Are you,” he starts, as Jaskier says, “I’m fine,” but Geralt ends up climbing out of bed anyway and Jaskier closes his eyes a moment and catches his breath, misses his warmth as he listens to him move around the room, to the splash of water being poured into a cup.
Back by the side of the bed he opens his eyes as Geralt slips a hand beneath his head, holds the cup to his mouth like he’s an invalid. Jaskier lets him. Overcome by the tenderness of it.
“You lost a lot of blood,” Geralt murmurs. Guilt in his voice. Jaskier nods. As if he minds. As if it matters. “Rest,” he says, as he sets the cup to the side, and sets his hand gently on Jaskier’s brow.
It doesn’t seem like he has much of a choice. Half a conversation and tiredness is tugging at him, trying to close his eyes again. “Will you stay?” he whispers, as he gives in.
“Yes,” Geralt says, his palm now warm on the side of Jaskier’s face. “I’ll stay.”
+++
For the next two days Jaskier spends most of his time in long stretches of sleeping. Geralt stays.
He keeps the fire blazing, tends the horses, brings Jaskier food to eat, brews up herbal tinctures and tisanes and rich salty broths for him to drink when he’s awake. And when Jaskier has the strength, and can coax Geralt to climb shyly back onto the bed with him, they talk.
“You’ve made a life here,” Geralt says, gesturing to the four walls around them. It’s half a statement, half a question.
“Five years is a long time.” Jaskier follows his gaze around the room. It’s barer, plainer than he’d ever have imagined his own home being, but it’s clean and neat and not at all devoid of beauty. There is a cloth on the table woven for him by one the mother of one of his pupils. Seashells on the windowsill, and in the summer he keeps flowers there too. Blankets and rugs to make the place feel warm. A life, indeed. He smiles a little. “Though I suppose to you it feels like a blink of an eye.”
Geralt is quiet, until Jaskier looks back over to him. Then he says, softly: “Five years feels like five years.”
There’s that sense sickness again. No longer enough to knock him over, but enough to cause a deep twisting hurt. “I’m sorry I left.”
“No.” Geralt shakes his head just barely. “You had to.”
Had he? Five years ago it had felt so. Now he’s less sure. He looks away, swallows. “I thought I did. But—Geralt.” Jaskier looks to him again. Badly wants to take his face in his hands, but doesn’t dare. Five years is a long time. Long enough, perhaps, for Geralt to have moved on. For that kind of touch to become unwelcome. “The way I left. What you said. What I said.”
Now it’s Geralt who lowers his gaze. Even closes his eyes a moment. Pain in his expression. “It’s alright,” he says, his voice quiet and strained. “It’s alright now.”
Jaskier’s heart aches at the sight of him. He relents, an easing of pressure like relaxing his grip on a set of reins. When Geralt looks up at him again he pretends to be wearier than he is, only so that they can let the conversation end.
+++
“It wasn’t your fault. About the curse. That you didn’t… I don’t want you to think I blamed you.”
Geralt looks up from the chair by the hearth. He has his torn shirt draped across his lap, a needle and thread between his fingers. Stitching it back together even though it will never be the same as it was before. It will still be wearable, will still keep him warm, stained and scarred as it is.
He looks at Jaskier and shrugs. Jaskier, sitting up now but still fairly swaddled in blankets, looks unhappy with the shrug; his expression seems to fidget, his lip sucked into his mouth and chewed on and then released again, his brow furrowing and unfurrowing. Geralt would like to offer him a better response but is yet to think of one. It may have been his fault. It may have been that he could have broken the curse, if things had turned out differently. Or it may not. He thinks Jaskier did blame him, though, at least a little, at least in the last stretch of their time together when he had turned to him and asked—then why am I still cursed.
But he doesn’t blame him for blaming him. The corners of his mouth twitch slightly and Jaskier’s frown deepens ever further.
“It’s alright,” Geralt says, because it’s the simplest and truest thing he can think to say. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Jaskier sinks down into his blankets, still visibly unconvinced. A hand moves to his face where he runs his thumb over his mouth in steady circles; a habit that has developed since he realised the scars were gone, as if he needs to keep checking, making sure they haven’t suddenly appeared again. Like pinching himself to make sure he isn’t dreaming.
Geralt doesn’t like to leave him looking like that. He spears the point of his needle into a fold of fabric, holds Jaskier’s gaze, to say to him: look, I am giving you all of my attention, all of it. Now pay attention to me, too.
“Curses can be fickle,” he says, which is true. “And old magic cast unintentionally in a moment of passion is about as fickle as I can imagine. If it had to be you who broke it, Jasiek, then it had to be you.”
A pause, and then a quiet, faintly disgruntled noise, that may be something like acceptance. Acknowledgement, at least. He hears Jaskier’s heart rate quicken very slightly. Wonders why. Realises what he called him, without thinking, and has to glance away.
Quiet between them. The fire crackles. Outside the horses whicker quietly to one another.
+++
Jaskier wakes on the morning of the third day stiff and sore from lying in bed so long. He is pale, still, and coltishly unsteady as he climbs out of bed, but he looks healthier than he did two days ago. His grip is strong on Geralt’s arm as he uses it to lever himself up.
“I need to go outside,” he says, groaning as he rolls his shoulders. “I feel like I’ve been in bed for a hundred years.”
Wrapped up in blankets so that only his face is exposed, leaning into Geralt’s side, he makes his shuffling way towards the door.
The air outside is startlingly cold. Sharp in the back of his throat, in his lungs. The path from his door to the road has disappeared completely under a thick carpet of snow, interrupted only by the prints of Geralt’s boots where he’s walked between the door and the paddock to feed the horses. “Fucking hell,” he mutters, but he perseveres, even as Geralt tries to usher him back inside again. Against the wall, beside the door, there’s a low wooden bench that looks out over the sea: Jaskier shoves his way through the snow, scrapes the snow off the bench with the back of his arm and drops down onto it, breathing out great plumes of crystallising air.
Geralt clears a space for himself beside him. Through the bulk of his blankets and Geralt’s cloak, Jaskier can just about feel their shoulders bump together.
In the paddock the horses chew hay from their trough, their backs dappled with snow. Along the horizon the sea lies so flat and calm that it blurs into the sky. Barely blue. Almost grey. It is beautiful here. It is lovely. Geralt was right, before: he has made a life here, and not a bad one. For much of it he’s been just about happy. Content, or close enough to it. But he never would have been here at all, never would have needed to make this life for himself if the curse hadn’t ruined his old one.
Jaskier twists the hem of one of the blankets between his fingers, tucked inside his little cocoon.
“Geralt?”
“Mm?”
“Would you still…” he hesitates. Feels shyer now than he’s felt in years. “I mean, when winter’s over, obviously, not now, but—do you think… would you want to—travel together, again?”
Geralt blinks at him, his eyelashes like owl feathers. “Of course.”
Jaskier breathes in relief. Even though Geralt had said it as if it was obvious, as if there was no other answer he could possibly have given—Jaskier hadn’t been sure. Five years is a long time. And the way they parted. Still he feels sick to think about it, presses his balled-up hand against his stomach to stifle the sensation.
“I do have a life here,” he murmurs, after a moment, thinking aloud. “I suppose I can’t spend all year with you, and if I can sing, I… fuck, I’m going to have to apologise to Valdo Marx if I ever want to set foot in Oxenfurt again.”
Geralt laughs softly. Jaskier watches it condense in the air. Then: “I’ll take whatever time you want to give me.”
It feels as though he has reached right into Jaskier’s chest and taken his heart in his hand and squeezed it. All of it, he thinks, I want to give you all of it, every second. He swallows. Tries to keep on treading carefully, instead of throwing himself headfirst into Geralt’s arms like he wants to.
“I don’t know that I could do that again,” he says. “The, the magic, the song. I’m not even really sure how I…”
“That’s alright.” Geralt’s voice is low and soft as the snowfall. “I don’t care.”
It’s a little harder to breathe now, with his heart taking up so much space inside his chest. Jaskier can feel Geralt looking at him but can’t bring himself to look back, just yet, knows that if he does it will be impossible not to do something foolish like take his sweet pale face in his hands and kiss him.
He pulls in what air he’s able to. The most important question is still left to ask. It’s a minute before he can get it out, though, a minute of letting the icy air sink into his lungs and embolden him.
“And,” he starts. Hesitates. Swallows, touches his lips. “…the rest of it? Would you… want…” How to say it? How on earth to ask? “Do you… still…?”
At last he makes himself look over, with his heart in his throat, beating out a chokehold. Geralt is looking back at him. His eyes are buttercup yellow.
“Love you?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
Jaskier takes his sweet pale face in his hands and kisses him.
+++
“Jaskier,” Geralt sighs, against his throat, between kisses, back in the warm and behind closed doors. “Jaskier. Are you still Jaskier?” Jaskier lifts his head, blinks at him, uncomprehending. Geralt smiles in the corners of his mouth. “Or Julian, now?”
“Oh.” A soft laugh, warm against his cheek. “No. Still Jaskier.”
Arms around each other, almost crushing, clutching closer. The point of Geralt’s nose nudges the curve of Jaskier’s jaw.
“Jaskier,” he murmurs, again. “My Jaskier.”
+++
“It’s strange,” Geralt says, while they lie together afterwards in tangled sheets, him lounging on his side, idly turning his medallion between his fingers. “The way my own feelings are blunted, and yet I can taste yours like wine.”
Stretching out towards him Jaskier catches a loose strand of his hair to wind around his fingers. “If these are your feelings blunt,” he says, quietly, gently. “They would be terrifying sharp. I would bleed any time you looked at me.”
Geralt looks at him a long moment. Says nothing, but breathes a little more shallowly, maybe.
“I don’t think anything took away your ability to feel, my love.” Jaskier shifts up onto his elbows, tucks the lock of hair back back behind Geralt’s ear. Geralt goes on looking at him. “I think someone tried very, very hard to beat it out of you. Or, or poison it out, or mutate it away, but… Geralt, it’s still there.”
The witcher closes his eyes. Jaskier lays his hand on the curve of his neck, and then on the centre of his chest. “I know I—I couldn’t always see it, or… believe it, but—my darling. My darling. Look at me.”
Geralt looks at him.
“You have loved me so well. So well. And if I can only love you half as well as you have loved me—” Jaskier’s voice is thick, a little damp, but he doesn’t have to choke out another word, because Geralt takes hold of him and kisses his open mouth.
+++
“Spend the winter here with me.”
Later, both sitting on the floor in front of the fire, taking turns prodding at a cluster of chestnuts that are roasting slowly in the embers. Jaskier says it quickly, shyly, as if not an hour before he hadn’t had his tongue in Geralt’s mouth, his fingers inside of his body. Still, it seems like a lot to ask, with all the time they’ve spent apart.
“I know you’ll probably be sick of the sight of me by spring, but I hate the thought of you and poor Roach trying to get to the keep this late in the winter, and…”
Geralt picks a chestnut out of the fire and cracks its shining shell with the edge of a nail. “Alright,” he says.
Jaskier looks at him, startled by how quickly, how easily he said it. “Alright?”
That almost smile. Firelight dancing in Geralt’s eyes. Looking at him in a way that makes Jaskier’s chest glow, tender and achey, a gentle bruise.
“You’re right,” he says. “It’s late. So, if you’d like to have me.”
And so he stays.
+++
It’s a quiet winter. Slow and lazy.
They keep the fire burning; they ride the horses along the silvery hibernal coastline; they spend whole days in bed.
Sometimes Jaskier plucks lightly at the strings of his lute, or hums his way softly through a verse or two of song, still not quite wholly convinced yet that it’s safe to do it but growing braver, slowly. When his strength has returned to him fully and the snow isn’t falling too thickly Geralt persuades him to come outside and spar with him, silver blade on silver blade in the cold air, and there’s a pleasure in it now that there never was five years ago, when it felt like the only thing left to him.
When the snow thaws they saddle both their horses, and Jaskier rides at Geralt's side for a few miles along the road, clinging to the last few hours in each other’s company until at last they part, with kisses and promises to find each other again come summer, once Jaskier has had a chance to find his footing in this new verse of his life.
Leaning over in the saddle he puts his arms around Geralt’s neck, and holds him tightly, and whispers I love you right into his ear. With his face tucked against Jaskier's shoulder, Geralt whispers back: And I you. And it puts warmth enough in Jaskier’s heart to carry him through to summer a thousand times over.
Then Geralt rides out for the path, and Jaskier turns his horse towards home, where he sits down with his lute and his pen, and begins to compose the ballad of his seven songless years.