Chapter Text
The scrunching of the snow underneath his boots sounds loud in the eerie silence of the night. Jaskier pulls the collar of his coat closer to his neck and leans against the wind as he passes the corpse of the basilisk lying shattered in the courtyard.
He stops at the hitching post where Geralt tied down his horse, and with a sick feeling of satisfaction, he pats the mount’s neck.
“You’ll be good for me, won’t you?” he murmurs. The horse watches him with attentive eyes and neighs.
“Good,” Jaskier mumbles and closes the buttons of his doublet and then of his coat. They are meant to mainly look good, but if he wants to leave the mountains behind without freezing to death, vanity and fashion need to take a step back, and the buttons will have to prove their true worth.
Jaskier unknots the reins and tosses them over the horse’s head. He looks up at the keep, so much larger, so much worse than he had imagined it, made it sound in his songs. But he understands his friend Geralt better now, having been here. This is his home. This is where he grew to become the man he is now, where he recharged every winter they spent apart. For sure not a place for warmth. Not a place to learn to deal with emotions beyond reining them in during a hunt and keeping people at arm's length.
The bard purses his lips, his jaws clenched. No wonder that even after decades, he couldn’t carve out a tiny space for himself in the witcher’s heart. No, for that to be achieved, one needs destiny, and that one isn’t on Jaskier’s side.
Granted, he comes from a privileged place. Not one filled with love either, but at least one needn’t worry to freeze under the blankets while being fully clothed.
The events in the hall have sobered him up, but he can feel the weight of a hangover combined with an adrenaline crash pulling on every muscle of his body.
What a fragile thing the human body is. No wonder Geralt never meant to burden himself with someone as fleeting as Jaskier. Humans must be like annoying midges for long-living creatures like him and his witch, irritating, but easy to slap away.
Just like Geralt did back on the mountain. But like a moth to the flame, Jaskier had returned to him. An ‘I’ve missed you too”, a tender cupping of his shoulder, a rumbled “I need your help’ and one ‘I’m sorry’ a few hours later—that’s all Geralt had granted him as reparation. And Jaskier had lapped it up like the loyal friend and lovestruck fool that he was. That he is. Still.
That’s why he has to go away, leave before the heartache infests every cell of his body and realm of his soul again.
He had barely survived the way Geralt had sent him away. He knew that Geralt would never return his feelings. He had made peace with that at least a decade ago. That didn’t mean that he deserved this kind of treatment as a fucking friend.
But his return to the witcher’s side? He brought it all on himself. He could have said no, taken his newfound freedom and brought as much distance between them as possible. He owed Geralt not a dreg. If anything, it was the other way around.
Well, he’ll take his horse now. A tiny gree, at last. Jaskier can just imagine Geralt cursing colourfully under his breath when he sees the horse gone. Not that he would miss him very much. He fulfilled whatever function he had, as daft as it was.
Geralt didn’t really need him. Nothing would have gone differently if Jaskier hadn’t been at his side. Yarpen and his people would have brought Ciri to the keep, and the empty space under the table in the big hall wouldn’t have changed anything either.
Lambert, at least, was honest. Jaskier doesn’t belong to them, to their brotherhood of witchers, not to the fateful family of three either. He doesn’t belong to anything or anyone. He’s free as a bird, lonely as a cloud. Nothing is waiting for him in between these thick walls and cold halls.
Geralt didn’t even ask about his well-being. Nobody did. He was invisible throughout their travels and after this battle more than ever. Not even Yennefer had a nice word for him, now that she had her magic back.
Jaskier mounts the horse, and without another glance, he urges it to the main gate. He’s sick of being the fool, the Jester, the deliverer of comic relief. He is a person, and he only has this one, short, mortal life.
If he had only known all these years ago how right he’d been. Geralt does smell like death and destiny. And Jaskier wouldn’t have dreamt about their lives being so connected one day that the smell that had once urged him on, lured him in would turn pungent in his nose.
Watching Geralt looking past him, only eyes for his brethren, his daughter, and the woman he claims to detest—Jaskier hasn’t felt such loneliness in all his life.
Realising that he wasted his best years with a man who only saved him out of a sense of obligation, and maybe—and that’s a big maybe—because he needed someone safe and trustworthy in a world that was breaking apart, it hurt. It still does. Like an all-consuming fire licking on the inside of his body.
But he’ll get over it. He nearly did the last time.
The reins bite in his still healing flesh, the fingertips and palm still raw from the torture, the knuckles pricking under the icy wind. The skin will chap soon enough, likely before anyone will even realise that he is gone.
‘Good,’ Jaskier thinks. He wants his hands to hurt. He wants a visible manifestation of his pain inside. Maybe then, his heart will stop hurting in his chest, maybe he’ll get numb. Maybe, the winter will swallow him. It’s not as if anyone would miss him, after all.