apotheosis
Dec. 8th, 2021 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ananjiFandom: The Witcher
Pairings: Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier/Yennefer of Vengerburg
Rating: T
Warnings: Major Character Death
Summary:
“The tapestry of fate is long, Geralt of Rivia.” Nehalenia sounds wistful through her many mouths. “You will finally understand this in your last winter. You will see where the knot was tied.”
Geralt does not look at her. He rubs a thumb across Jaskier’s lips, feeling a ragged breath slip out, and presses their foreheads together. His own blood smears on Jaskier’s skin and he does not cry.
AO3 link here.
Geralt has never been inclined to kneel before the image of a god, but the weight in his arms forces him to the dirt.
He blinks through the blood running down his face at the shimmering figure before him. Cradled to his chest, Jaskier coughs wetly, hands clutching at his slippery throat. The world hums with static and Geralt tries to focus on the silhouette flickering just above, but she burns his retinas like lightning.
“You have entertained me for some years, Witcher, so I will be generous and tell you the price of your demand.” A hundred voices speak at once, some so low Geralt can only feel them as they crash like waves against his ribcage, and he knows who she is without words. Her teeth flash in strange fish-scale hues when she smiles. “If I am to bend fate for him, he will no longer belong to you. Tell me, can you live the rest of time with that sacrifice?”
“He’s never belonged to me.” Geralt speaks with someone else’s voice, desperate and wild, and Jaskier spasms against him in a final attempt at breath. “Please. Nehalenia, please.”
Still grinning, the goddess reaches down with a hand made of soft resin and light and touches her fingers to open wound of Jaskier’s throat. For a terrible moment overflowing with crushing weight and silence, Geralt can see thousands of golden threads in the air, spun between Nehalenia and Jaskier and Geralt and out into the trees. Then Jaskier’s skin begins to knit shut beneath an invisible needle, and Nehalenia draws back.
“The tapestry of fate is long, Geralt of Rivia.” Nehalenia sounds wistful through her many mouths. “You will finally understand this in your last winter. You will see where the knot was tied.”
Geralt does not look at her. He rubs a thumb across Jaskier’s lips, feeling a ragged breath slip out, and presses their foreheads together. His own blood smears on Jaskier’s skin and he does not cry.
A witcher is meant to be sculpted from ice. Geralt is filled with fire.
Yennefer’s bare thighs are molten where they wrap around his legs and waist. She holds him down with one hand, pressing him back into Jaskier’s chest. Her lilac eyes are flecked with hazel and blown wide as she glares past Geralt at Jaskier.
Geralt reaches a hand back over Jaskier’s shoulder and grabs the headboard of their bed. Seamlessly, Jaskier wraps an arm around Geralt’s ribs. Yenn snaps something Geralt doesn’t hear over his own heartbeat throbbing in his ears, but she slides her hand over Jaskier’s when his fingers run along Geralt’s chest.
Jaskier laughs and his breath dances across Geralt’s ear, gently swaying the loose pieces of his long hair. Crooking his head to the point of discomfort, Geralt watches as Yenn narrows her eyes dangerously and grabs the back of Jaskier’s neck to drag him forward. They kiss with teeth looking to draw blood, like they need to devour each other first, but Geralt sees Yenn caress the dark scar that cuts a half-circle around Jaskier’s throat, sees the goosebumps that rise on Jaskier’s skin.
The air is thick with vanilla and berries and woodsmoke, and Geralt’s skin is on fire where his lovers push against him, and he can feel the delicate lines of gold wool that settle softly over them.
On nights when Jaskier is drunk and warm and satisfied, he sings a wordless melody that Geralt thinks must come from a world kinder than theirs.
Geralt isn’t sure Jaskier hears himself like this, settled on Geralt’s lap before the fireplace in their inn room, his bare skin golden in the dim light. His eyelids are heavy and he smells like sex and the lilacs he blends into his own oils when Yennefer is far away. His voice comes deep and a little rough when he sings this song, the lasting trauma on his throat bringing a hoarseness to every low note that warms Geralt’s insides.
It is an ocean song, he decided many years ago, one that makes Geralt feel very small as the bittersweetness drags him under, and he lets himself drown. Watches from far below as Jaskier’s eyes glow cosmic blue and focus on something miles away Geralt can’t quite see. He wonders who taught Jaskier this song, why Jaskier sings himself raw for hours whenever it comes over him. He does not dare ask. The answer was given to him once when he was dripping with blood and kneeling in the dirt, even if he cannot bring himself to accept it.
The years of the humans become meaningless, and Geralt tracks the decades by the laugh-lines that slowly grow around Yenn’s eyes and mouth. He doesn’t often look in mirrors, but he knows he too has wrinkles etched in his brow.
Yenn runs her hands over Jaskier’s smooth face, her smile crooked. A single streak of grey runs from her temple down her thick, dark hair and she no longer glamours it away. Jaskier turns his chin to press a kiss into her palm, his eyes dancing.
“All the magic in the world at my disposal, and still I can’t compete with you.” Her voice is fond, lacking any edge, and Geralt realizes neither of them have seen him leaning in the doorway. From his seat on the floor before her chair, Jaskier sits patiently, leaning into her when she drags her fingers through his hair. “I’ve destroyed kingdoms on a whim, but somehow our little lark discovered the secret of immortality.”
Jaskier’s eyes darken with something unreadable - anger? sorrow? regret? - and he slowly drops his head to rest on Yenn’s thigh. “If I knew what it was, I would give it to you.”
Yenn looks over her shoulder to spot Geralt where he watches them silently. “We know.”
Geralt leans all of his weight into the bare fir tree rooted into the cliff. His body is cold, like he’s trapped beneath the surface of a frozen lake, and he’s too numb to feel the bite of the wind.
Jaskier stands precariously on the very edge of the cliff. He shuts the lid back on the small silver urn in his hands. His dark curls tousle in the bitter breeze, and Geralt can see the shake in his shoulders, but his voice is unwavering when he speaks.
“Until next time, Yennefer of Vengerberg.” His voice hangs in the air like it’s too heavy for the wind to rip away. “It will be sooner than you think.”
And Geralt has to look away. He can’t look at the ocean that has swallowed Yenn’s ashes, can’t think of her demand to burned instead of buried, because when we meet again, it won’t be from me becoming a fucking wraith. Jaskier had laughed at that, and the sound brought a wicked smile to Yenn’s face like it was a century and a half ago and they were still in Rinde, the gold threads of their lives tangling for the first time.
Jaskier sings something new, something other. The scarlet notes warp the air around him, and it is joyous and exuberant and young and Geralt can’t stop listening. He drops down against the fir tree and buries his face in his hands as Jaskier’s hurricane of a voice spins on the salt air.
Summers come and go. Geralt cannot die.
He pulls his sword from the chest of an alghoul with a sick, wet noise. Like someone breathing through a throat full of blood. He does not bother checking himself for wounds - he hasn’t been touched by a monster in years. Someone so blessed can't be hurt.
There is a presence that follows him always on the left, and today it is heavier than ever against the absence on his right. He pulls a cloth from his pocket and wipes bits of lung off his blade. “Jaskier, you are invisible again.”
A blinding light flashes behind him, forcing him to shield his eyes, and the air burns with ozone and magnolia. Jaskier dances around him, humming a tune Geralt hasn’t heard since he was a child. “Geralt, when are you coming home?”
Geralt looks at him tiredly. Jaskier cannot stay still if he tries, the lines of his body glittering like a mirage. He presses into Geralt’s space and Geralt is instantly drunk on strawberry wine and dreams, his very skin trying to rip itself off of him to be closer to Jaskier. “Your eyes,” he manages to slur.
Jaskier blinks. When they last met face-to-face five winters ago, Jaskier’s pupils had disappeared amid paralyzing blue. Now even the whites are gone, Jaskier’s eyes full of empty sky. “Helps me find you when you’re hiding.”
With great difficulty, Geralt tears his gaze away from Jaskier. He has never felt so old as he does now, the joints of his hands swollen and twisted. He sheathes his sword and stares into the dark forest. “Does she speak to you?”
In his peripheral, he can see Jaskier’s head tilt. “Yennefer? Or Nehalenia?”
Geralt shrugs. He supposes it doesn’t matter.
Jaskier slows, the blurring of his edges coming to a halt for a few precious seconds. Geralt looks at him once more, and sees a soft, sad smile curling Jaskier’s lips. If Geralt ignores the eyes, he can pretend Jaskier is thirty and human again, before Geralt sold Jaskier’s soul away in his terror of being alone. “She speaks to you, too, you know. She says thank you.”
“For what?” The words come out as a whisper, rasped and aching.
Jaskier cups Geralt’s face, fingers warm and calloused from lute-strings, and Geralt’s chest knots up as he closes his eyes and pushes his cheek into Jaskier’s hand. “For respecting her wishes. She had been plucking the threads long before she died, but the two of us were too dumb to notice.”
Geralt laughs for the first time in a decade.
Geralt kneels in the snow, draped over the hilt of his silver sword where it's pierced deep into the ice. The full moon washes over the clearing, and he smiles crookedly up into the night sky. Blood flows from his stomach and it keeps him warm as it sizzles against the cold.
The air crackles and he straightens himself in anticipation. Jaskier steps out of nothingness and into the snow. Geralt is surprised to see that his boots leave prints. Jaskier is singing - he's always singing now - and Geralt knows the song in his bones even though he has never heard it before.
Jaskier stops just in front of him. The song fades away, and he grins toothily down at Geralt. "Yenn doesn't like this one, but I reminded her she got her own song."
Geralt tries to laugh through the blood in his mouth. Jaskier is twenty-something and his hair is streaked gold from the year they spent along the roads of Skellige. He smells like lavender and magnolia, too sweet, and Geralt breathes it in until he can't sense anything else. "You could crow like a rooster and I'd still like it."
Jaskier looks affronted. "Are you really teasing me at a moment like this?" He places his hands on his hips, but Geralt can see the amusement glittering off of him. "We're about to cut through the strings of fate and make a whole mess of it, in case you haven't figured it out yet."
And Geralt can't see anything else but Jaskier's sly smile, the soft lines of his muscles, the fullness of his lips and the grey flecks in his eyes. He drops his hands from his sword, feeling the sensation leaving his lower body. "What are we fucking waiting for?"
Chuckling, Jaskier sits down in front of him, placing a kiss to his forehead. Moving his mouth until it brushes Geralt's ear, he whispers. "Yennefer had to steal a scythe from Lyfia to break your thread. Apparently, even gods have rules."
A sun-warmed breeze picks up, playing through their hair, and Geralt presses his face into Jaskier's neck as the scent of lilacs and gooseberries drifts closer.
A widowed mother of three in a cramped hut gives a little blonde orphan a spot in front of her fireplace. As she tucks her last good quilt around him, she softly recounts the tale of the last wolf of Rivia. How he became human by slipping out of his pelt, wrapping it around the Mother Goddess of Vengerberg in the dead of winter. How any child or young woman can pray to the Goddess for good fortune, in exchange for revealing to her their deepest and most impossible dreams.
An old hunter, mute and scarred and covered in filth, stumbles into town with an empty coin-purse. The villagers give him a bed and a warm meal for free, because it’s said that the White Wolf protects those who open their doors to the most suspect of strangers. When the hunter leaves, a little bag of uncut jewels is found resting on his pillow.
The Wanderer has many names - Jester of the Summer Court, the Mother’s Minstrel, Beloved of the Wolf, Weaver of Fate. He is everywhere, all the time, in the orange tones of trumpets and inside the belly of pianos, waltzing through the lively corridors of palaces, filling a seat in every music hall. His most sacred sanctuaries, however, are the campsites of travelers, where he sings the fire alive all night and spins his best tales through the mouths of mortals.
It is the most elaborate of the myths that is Geralt’s favourite, however. He listens in his booth as the old woman in the corner of the bar with a tobacco-rough voice sings bawdily of the Three, a ragtag group of mortals whose love burned so hot that they wound Nehalenia’s thread to their own design, whose shrines are found in every whorehouse and happy bedchamber and drunken spring fertility festival, who bless those lovers who give all of themselves to another even with the knowledge that they will someday lose everything to the relentlessness of time. The bar is loud and cheerful and the woman boldly regales them with the thousands of sheets ruined by the Three in their blessed escapades, and Yenn leans across Geralt in the booth to catch a finger under Jaskier’s chin, and isn’t it high time we destroyed another bed at some backwater inn is met with my dear sorceress, godhood perfected your mind-reading magic. Geralt stands and lifts Yenn laughing over his shoulder, dragging Jaskier by the hand towards the stairs to their room, and if Geralt’s footsteps leave little blue flames on the wooden floorboards, no one is sober enough to notice.
