Chapter Text
There was a time, Jaskier thought distantly, when he wouldn’t have minded this at all.
A time when he could simply grin and bear it as his own blood trickled down his chin, as his insides tore themselves apart and knitted themselves back together again, as the body that Jaskier had spent decades inhabiting decided it quite fancied a complete overhaul of everything, and made this known by bleeding Jaskier dry, setting his nerves on fire, and altogether destroying the bard little by little and all at once as his anatomy inched its way, excruciatingly, towards its new shape.
There was a time when Jaskier would have toughed it out, for the sake of the people who would be there on the other side, waiting for him, as well as himself.
That time had passed, however, long ago.
He’d heard rumours of these experiments, before, but he’d dismissed them as bullshit - and really, was he to blame for being wrong such an assessment? There’s a mage who wants to bring back the witchers, the townsfolk had said, in the same hushed tones as they whispered that elves eat human children for sustenance, or I heard the reason for Nilfgaard’s war is that their king made a deal with the gods, and in return must unite the continent under one rule, or - and this was Jaskier’s personal favourite - Jaskier the bard must be a faerie, he’s not aged a day and he’s well over forty, and his songs enthral his audience like nothing else!
He was equal parts flattered and insulted at that one.
The fact remained, though, that in this case, the rumours had been true, and there really was a mage trying to recreate the witcher... formula? Tests? Trials? Hadn’t Geralt mentioned Trials at one point? Regardless, the sorcerer was trying to recreate them, and Jaskier - what with his absolutely fucking abysmal track record of not getting into trouble - had gotten caught up right in the middle of it, and he was fairly certain that the reason he’d all but coughed up all of his insides and more - twice - was because some clown thought that Jaskier would be an excellent test subject for round two of making new witchers.
At one point, when Jaskier was still deluded enough to think that Geralt was his friend, who liked him, and kept Jaskier around out of affection and not some grudging inclination to humour his fantasies, he would have been able to grit his teeth and tough it out, knowing that there was someone waiting for him on the other side.
Now, Jaskier was half-inclined to drop dead just to spite the stupid fucking mage and their stupid fucking experiments, even if that generally wasn’t something one could do on command. Apparently he’d been taking to the trials remarkably well - the sorcerer, under their ridiculous hooded cloak, had been very excited about Jaskier’s progress.
Wouldn’t it be such a beautiful fuck you if he managed to hang himself on his chains, then? If he wasn’t too busy vomiting up half of his internal organs, he might well have at least tried.
It had been - according to Jaskier’s very rough and shoddy estimates, given that he’d spent most of his time in this little cell blacking out, unconscious, or otherwise in excruciating pain, he’d been here for at least three weeks.
He had been lucid for approximately an hour, and the scent of blood was making him sick, as staggeringly overpowering as it was, The draughty cell howled with the noise of the breeze that cut through it, as the ventilation system that had been set up did its highly annoying work.
The bard would gladly have asphyxiated at that moment, if only the whistling through-draught would just shut up and leave him be.
Jaskier simply lay there, chains still around his wrists, in a pool of congealing blood, eyes closed and head pounding. He’d never been awake for so long - the sorcerer who’d been grievously violating his bodily autonomy had usually been quick to administer the next potion the moment he showed any outward sign that his torment was lessening, the utter arsehole.
Come to think of it, the sorcerer had never left Jaskier alone for so long, either. The one clear memory he had of the past... however long it had been, was the incessant hovering.
Jaskier cracked open an eye and immediately wished he hadn’t, head spinning as he was hit with the sharpest, most vivid rendering of his surroundings he could ever have imagined... perhaps even more intense than any of his wildest stretches of what if might be like, and Jaskier had a very good imagination - even if he did say so himself.
Fuck. He wouldn’t be getting rid of that migraine any time soon.
As his panting breaths registered as his own, and he adjusted to the painful clarity with which he perceived his surroundings, Jaskier pulled himself into a sitting position - an action that was not nearly as painful as he’d expected.
His chains clinked, uncomfortably loud, and Jaskier’s gaze alighted upon the dozens of potion bottles laid out on a wooden table on the other side of the stone cell, all empty, the barest hints of potion residue visible in all of them, the faint reek of whatever it had been inside them almost completely drowned out by the overpowering tang of Jaskier’s blood.
Ah.
That answered that question, then.
Jaskier shifted once, more, chains clinking once again, and he noticed that he was not actually chained to the wall anymore.
The metal ring that the chains had been looped through had been pulled out of the stone it had been embedded into with considerable force, it seemed, given the significant damage the area had received. Inspecting the chains themselves, Jaskier noted a significant depression in once of the links - likely the one the ring had been pressed against when it had been pulled from the wall.
A very considerable force, then.
Either way, Jaskier was, it seemed, free to leave. The rusted cuffs and chain held, much to his disappointment, but he was no longer tethered to the wall, which was the main thing.
The wooden cell door was not locked - the mage had been too fond of bursting in at random hours to add something so fiddly - which Jaskier was now thankful for, given that he could simply walk out.
Perhaps, under different circumstances, he might have been concerned that this was so easy - but it was hard enough to stumble forwards, with the ache in his trembling limbs that the Trials had so kindly gifted him making him barely able to stand, let alone make a break for it. Most likely, the sorcerer had simply not expected Jaskier to be able to get up at all, let alone attempt to escape.
Served them right. Fuck that presumptuous shitrag. Fuck them and their witcher experiment bullshit all the way to hell and back.
Barely able to lift his arms to push open the door, Jaskier resorted to collapsing on it and hoping that it opened outwards.
It did not, in fact, open outwards, and Jaskier yelped as he slid off the wood and crashed to the floor. Fucking sorcerer. Fucking door. Fucking sorcerers and their fucking inwards-opening doors.
It was a few minutes before Jaskier could bring himself to stand again, but this time, he managed to pry the door - which was a lot lighter than it looked - open, and stumble into the corridor.
Immediately, he realised why the sorcerer had abandoned him.
It appeared that not all of the blood he’d smelt was his own, as mutilated corpses lay strewn all over the damn floor. The sorcerer lay at his feet, hood finally off and blood streaming from all their orfices, desperation and terror frozen on their face.
They looked young, barely an adult, but Jaskier couldn’t find it in himself to pity them - not when they had so many innocents’ blood on their hands. Even if - and it was always questionable with sorcerers, as stupidly long-lived as they were - this one was actually as young as they seemed, Jaskier would not grant absolution based on such an arbitrary standard. They’d experimented on and tortured people for fun. The more vindictive part of Jaskier was glad that the sorcerer was dead, and that they had died in pain.
The rest of him was disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to grill them for answers.
The other corpses, the men strewn around the corridor, looked to be bandits or raiders of some sort, the remnants of their organised formation and cohesive style of dress suggesting that they were some kind of unit, though Jaskier couldn’t possibly tell who or what they were, or why they’d have been here in the first place.
Lowering himself as carefully as he could, he crouched down next to the sorcerer, and lifted their cloak.
If they had chained Jaskier up, they had to have had the keys to lock the cuffs in the first place. There was always the off-chance that the cuffs had been magicked shut, but he knew well enough that magic always demanded a price to be used - it would be less than sensical to use it for something so mundane.
Jaskier’s eyes alighted on a keyring in the dead mage’s pocket, several keys dangling from it, which he reached for with trembling fingers.
A light-headedness overcame him, and he stumbled back, pushing at the door to the cell he’d just crawled out of with a fist desperately clutching the keyring.
If he was going to pass out in someone’s blood, then it would be his own, gods damn it. He had no desire to come to face-to-face with a corpse.
He didn’t make it into the cell before he slid, once again, to the floor.
Numbing emptiness overtook him, as he fell into unconsciousness, keys still pressed between his fingers and palm like it was his most precious possession.
Numbing emptiness overtook him, soothing his pounding skull.
Numbing emptiness overtook him, and when he woke some time later, his head was no longer aching, and his limbs no longer trembling.
His foot was also in the dead sorcerer’s face. So much for not waking to the sight of a corpse.
Curiously, the keyring was still in his hand, grasped in his hand a dead man’s grip, even as Jaskier had fallen unconscious. Picking the key closest matching the metal of his cuffs, he inserted it into the tiny lock, and was pleased to find that it fitted neatly, unlocking the restraint with a resounding click. Soon, Jaskier had shed his shackles, and observed the sight before him.
The dead men wore bits and pieces of armour, and were armed to the teeth - and who was Jaskier to pass up such a haul? He would gladly take up the weapons laid before him - dead men couldn’t fight, under the usual circumstances - and then, maybe next time some eclectic sorcerer with a penchant for kidnapping and human experimentation tried to jump him, he could stick them before they did any damage to him.
Jaskier, the travelling bard did not have any combat training to speak of, but Julian Alfred Pankratz, probably Viscount de Lettenhove unless his father was somehow still kicking - and really, it was probably unhealthy, the amount of detachment between the two names and personas that both referred to the exact same person - Julian knew his way around a dagger.
He’d been trained to a degree at the insistence of his father, who posited that a noble should achieve some level of competence with a rapier on principle - and Jaskier had decided to stick it to him by convincing his instructor to teach him how to wield short swords and daggers instead, under the correct assumption that it would prompt his father to have a conniption about why Jaskier was wielding weapons so unbecoming of a noble.
He’d been pretty good with them, at one point, a quarter of a century ago. He did not have high hopes for himself currently.
The dagger in his boot was gone, though he thankfully still had his boots themselves, at least, as well as the clothes on his back, sans his doublet, covered in blood and bodily fluids as he was.
Still, it didn’t bother him too much. He had a veritable armoury to pick from, as well as whatever clothes he chose to yank off the corpses strew before him. Most of the men were bloodied, but not as much as Jaskier, which was a plus.
First things first, though. If the sorcerer could attend to Jaskier with as much frequency as they did, they had to have been living here, and Jaskier intended to make use of their quarters to get cleaned up a little. It had, after all, been weeks since he’d last bathed, and he was covered in his own gore.
Picking his way across the field of corpses, Jaskier peered into every room he passed, disappointed to see rotting bodies and potion bottles in the other cells, the noxious scent of what had to have been witcher mutagens clinging to each room.
Fuck, this smell thing was weird. How did Geralt manage it? The overpowering sharpness of his senses was giving him a migraine again, already, and he was in a dark, silent dungeon.
He walked towards the end of the corridor, where stone stairs led upwards in a spiral. The grey slabs looked old and worn - too old to have been placed at any point within the last two centuries.
Admittedly, that piqued Jaskier’s curiosity. Where was he? Clearly nowhere in Temeria, where the sorcerer had stumbled upon him, they didn’t really go in for this kind of architecture, never had - if Jaskier had to hazard a guess, he’d say he was somewhere in Kaedwen - he could work with that. Thank gods for the repository of useless knowledge his time at Oxenfurt had left him with. He could distinctly remember his seventeen-year-old self complaining to thin air about how he’d never find himself in need of the ability to identify the different styles of architecture found in different kingdoms, this was such a pointless thing to include in the syllabus, and couldn’t they just get to the music part already... Now, Jaskier was eating his words. He was in Kaedwen, and he knew that only because of the boring bloody architecture.
Pox on it all, he was in bloody Kaedwen. Other than perhaps Nilfgaard, there was no place he was less familiar with. He’d not been to Kaedwen for years, and for good reason - Geralt, thanks to the close proximity of Kaer Morhen, probably, liked to frequent the kingdom.
As a result of this, Jaskier had avoided it like the plague.
It had seemed like a great idea at the time, he fumed, as he clambered up the spiral staircase, but no, now he was in the one bloody kingdom he knew he had no place to go in.
Actually, no. That wasn’t quite correct. If Jaskier really was a witcher now, at least physically, then he had nowhere to go in general. He’d be turned away by previously amicable acquaintances, he didn’t doubt. Chased from Oxenfurt with knives and pitchforks.
He was in Kaedwen. This was, as it turned out, a good thing. At least nobody knew him in Kaedwen.
Part of him wished that Geralt was here, that Geralt could help him, comfort him, hold him whilst he mourned the end of his bardic career, and help him pick up the pieces after all this, keeping him by his side as he adjusted, protecting but that - hah! - that was even more unrealistic than him just waltzing back out into the wide world and resuming his bardic career as though nothing had happened. He didn’t appreciate the reminder at any rate - the reminder that Geralt couldn’t give a rat’s are about what Jaskier was up to, and the reminder that Jaskier still found himself wishing for his company. That Jaskier couldn’t bring himself to return the bloody favour and hate the stupid witcher like the Geralt apparently hated him.
Or perhaps Jaskier just didn’t want to be alone. It was all the same, really.
At the top of the staircase, he found himself in a fairly grand hallway. The sorcerer’s residence was actually quite nice, disregarding the creepy torture dungeon. It reminded him vaguely of the building that he’d met Yennefer of Vengerberg in, now that he thought of it, if he’d met Yennefer in Kaedwen.
It was a refreshing change of surroundings from the bloodied dungeons, at any rate. Besides, and perhaps more importantly, it would undoubtedly have a bath that Jaskier could make use of, to clean both himself and then his clothes to the best of his abilities... if they were salvageable.
He hoped they were. He had precious little left - if his memory served, he’s smashed Filavandrel’s lute over the sorcerer’s head in a last-ditch attempt to escape, and who knew where the rest of his belongings were?
The house was grand, and rather old-fashioned, which made sense given the age of the stone stairs. Jaskier stumbled upon the bath almost immediately - a luxurious stone one, nicer than anything he’d ever bathed in since his childhood - and wasted no time drawing himself a bath, patently ignoring the returning ache in his limbs that protested the action. Jaskier had been lying in his own bloody viscera for upwards of three weeks, and he was going to have a bath, residual pain from three weeks of torture be damned.
As the water splashed into the bath, Jaskier winced, and tried very hard not to feel guilty for all the times Geralt had told him he wanted silence that Jaskier had ignored. He hadn’t know the world could be so damn loud.
His head was pounding by the time the bath was ready, so perhaps he could use that as his excuse. He knew bloody well what the sorcerer had done to him, knew bloody well what he’d become, because Jaskier wasn’t as oblivious as people seemed to think he was, thank you very much - but he couldn’t stop his flinch when he caught his reflection in the water.
His face was covered in blood and possibly also vomit, yes, but it was his eyes, his damn eyes that had spooked him.
He’d look himself in the eye plenty of times, in mirrors and such, because he didn’t look as good as he usually did by never seeing his own reflection, and he was plenty familiar with the blue-grey irises he was supposed to have, but the eyes staring back at him from the water were ones that did not belong to him.
They were Geralt’s eyes.
Geralt, Geralt, Geralt. Fucking Geralt. And he’d been doing so well not thinking about the man before this whole ordeal, as well.
Jaskier all but threw himself into the bath, and immediately regretted it. The hot, steamy water was an assault on his senses. A strangled choke left him, and he clenched his fists. He, Jaskier, a humble bard, had survived the fucking Trials. He would not be brought low by a goddamn bath.
The bath, however, was putting up an excellent fight.
The sheer intensity of the hot liquid against him made Jaskier wanted to rip his skin off, but instead, he settled for scrubbing at all the dried blood and other bodily fluids that marked his skin, which was even more bloody uncomfortable.
He would not be beaten by some stupid water and some stupid grime. He wouldn’t.
By the time he’d gotten to his hair, he was almost used to the uncomfortable, prickling sensation of the water, at the small cost of a headache so intense that, had this been under any other circumstance, Jaskier would have been dragging his arse to a healer.
As it was, he merely focused on washing the blood and possibly also vomit out of his matted hair.
Gods, this whole witcher experiment thing was so unhygienic. Jaskier had absolutely no idea how he’d managed to get so much gristle in his hair, but somehow, he had.
The bath was almost room temperature by the time he’d managed to free himself of the last of the mess he’d spewed up in the cell, and he resigned himself to washing his clothes, too. He quickly determined that his chemise was somewhat salvageable, though he doubted that the stains would ever wash out properly, leaving large patches of brown all over it - but other than that, and his boots, he would need to find something else to wear.
How far he’d fallen, Jaskier thought wryly, as he hung his chemise over a nearby ledge to dry. To think that something he was about to pry off a corpse would be more hygienic than his own fine silks.
It was somewhat ironic that, now that he wasn’t constantly smelling the stench of his own gore, the foul odour in the dungeon was even more overwhelming and pungent. The reek of blood and decomposing bodies at such an intensity was something Jaskier would pay to never have to suffer again.
Still, he braved it magnanimously - for all he liked to complain on the road, even where there was nobody to listen, he could still tough out a few unpleasant situations. He wasn’t as much of a milksop as people tended to assume. Fuck, he had more of a stomach than even he thought he’d had. If someone had told him a month ago he’d be looting corpses after scrubbing three weeks worth of bodily fluids out of his hair, he’d have laughed in their face with great confidence.
As it was, he was pulling soft, brown trousers, undoubtedly designed for fighting, off of a decomposing man’s legs. He only hoped that the unfortunate young man wasn’t rotten enough that his dick would get pulled off his remains with the clothing. If Jaskier had to see that, he would undoubtedly scream, in a most loud and undignified manner - outward impressions and dignity be damned.
He tugged the trousers free, thankfully devoid of any kind of human remains, and, almost as an afterthought, took the man’s nondescript jacket as well. It was dark red, and it would fit him well enough, from the looks of it.
Now, for the weapons. Jaskier wasn’t about to let a veritable armoury go to waste, after all.
Finesse weapons such as short swords - short swords specifically, in fact - were Jaskier’s first choice, and, as luck would have it, one of the men had a pair of them in his dead hands, numb fingers barely still closed around the hilts. That was nice of him.
He picked up the swords and set to work unfastening their sheaths from the dead man, the blanket he’d wrapped around himself on the interim jostling uncomfortably as he did so. It was surprisingly easy to manhandle items off corpses compared to his original assumptions - he’d have expected it to be far more fiddly an endeavour.
Weapons, clothes... he needed coin. He needed coin if he were to leave, and there was no way he was going to stay in the house any longer than he needed to - the many corpses in the basement aside, a sorcerer had taken up residence here. Who knew what kinds of horrible, cursed items were lying around, simply waiting for an idiot bard to knock them so that they could unleash their evil powers? The memory of the djinn was still far too fresh in his mind, the occasional phantom pains far too familiar in his throat, for him to risk getting cursed again.
Jaskier snorted under his breath, at that. All his newfound caution, and where had it gotten him? A cell covered in his own congealing blood, where he surely would have rotted away, abandoned and forgotten, had it not been for a well-timed convulsion freeing his chains from the wall.
Picking his way across the bodies, her quickly noticed that none of the men carried coin pouches on their hip, much to Jaskier’s perplexed frustration. What kind of man carried no coin?
Still, if he couldn’t procure any coin outright, Jaskier would have to work around the problem. There was more then enough in the house that the bard could loot and sell, and, while that wasn’t exactly honourable of him, it was mainly the sorcerer’s fault that he was doing it in the first place. He hadn’t stripped himself of all he owned before a casual bout of human experimentation, after all... And he figured that, even if his prized lute hadn’t been lying, smashed into pieces, by the side of some Temerian dirt track, he wouldn’t have been making any coin performing as he was.
Witchers generally did not get paid to sing, and to the outside eye, that was what Jaskier was, now.
How laughable. Jaskier was the furthest thing from a bloody witcher that there was. If nothing else, his time with Geralt had at least taught him that much.
He made his way up the stairs again, arms full of armour, clothes, and weaponry, and stumbled back to where he’d left his chemise to dry. It was far more dull brown than white, at this point, of course it would have been his best white chemise that he ruined in the Trials, and it was now almost completely dry.
Tugging on his new outfit - and gods above, did the sensation of slightly damp fabric against Jaskier’s skin make him want to claw the clothes off of his back - Jaskier neatly fastened the two scabbards onto his person. It wasn’t steel and silver protection, far from it - they were some kind of iron alloy, if he had to hazard a guess, and it had also been a very long time since he’d had to appraise a blade, though these ones were of sound quality, and seemingly well-cared for - but the short swords would do well enough.
It was enough for Jaskier that he had blades that he could actually wield. He didn’t have the time to worry about quality.
Rolling his looted belongings up in the blanket he’d appropriated and hauling his makeshift pack over his back, Jaskier decided to set off, away from this godforsaken house. He was well aware that this was probably not the wisest course of action, but fuck it - he was not staying in that damn house a second longer than he needed to.
The summer should have turned to autumn by now.
Jaskier had heard that Ard Carraigh was nice this time of the year, insofar as Ard Carraigh could be described as nice - the place was a bit of a shithole, in the bard’s humble opinion.
Still, it was a destination, and so Jaskier set off, patently ignoring the aching tendrils of a migraine that twisted around his skull.