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The first time Jaskier sees the keep, he feels it like a hand has reached down his throat and into his chest to squeeze his heart. It’s not just the trepidation of meeting his lover’s family, it’s the echoes of screams in the stone, the scent of ash in the air, the way the building itself cries out and claws at the dirt surrounding it. This was fae land, or elven land, once upon a time, he thinks, and it has saved every single little hurt up, waiting for someone who can understand it – and it’s thrown all that pain straight at him. He nearly staggers with the sheer weight of it.
Perversely, he notices that Geralt’s shoulders seem to loosen as they get close, how the guarded tension he carries on the road – so much less now there’s Jaskier, but still very clear to see – starts to drop, while Jaskier’s own tensions ramp higher and higher. He wants to scream, but he can’t tell Geralt why, can’t say how he can taste the agony of this place on the air, and so he swallows it back down, plasters on a smile, and tries to focus on meeting the other Witchers.
It doesn’t escape him that there aren’t many of them.
The second year they winter together, Jaskier thinks he’s prepared for it, that he remembers how much hurt there was and has braced himself for the impact, but it still makes him stop and take a few slow breaths, desperately wishing he could cloak himself in magic until he can’t smell the death that enshrines the damn keep. He wasn’t kidding when he listed off Geralt’s scents, and whilst death is part of the smell of his lover, and it follows him everywhere, it isn’t like the scent of death here. Geralt smells like a good, clean death, no suffering, just peace. Jaskier couldn’t explain it even if given a thousand years, but there’s a difference between the death of a beast and the death of a thinking, feeling being. And then there’s a difference between an equally matched fight to the death and the scent of slaughter.
He clutches Geralt’s arm a little tighter as they enter the keep, trying to disguise it as a lover’s urge to cling, rather than an attempt to keep himself on his feet. Geralt takes his weight like it means nothing to him, and once more, Jaskier can feel that fist around his heart tighten with the knowledge of the heavy duty these men carry out into the world with them. He has to try hard not to let a tear roll down his cheek, and instead goes to greet Vesemir, arms clasped in a gesture of respect and friendship. Eskel he meets with an embrace, and feels the fleeting sensation of his magic meeting that of the other man, twining together like a cat between the legs of a kitchen maid. Lambert gets a rude gesture, and returns it in kind, the both of them grinning.
And then, he watches as Geralt meets the rest of his pack, checking each of them for the scent of injury, the stench of infection, and Jaskier wonders how it is that none of these four brilliant men can smell that they spend their entire winter inside a rotting corpse.
After five years or so, he’s almost used to it. It still hurts him, that squeeze around his heart as the land desperately begs him to do something to help it, to rid it of the burden of souls it carries, but that’s not far from how he feels when he looks at Geralt, these days. It’s taken him a surprisingly long time to realise that he’s in love; not a fleeting fancy, not a few years here and there, but real, abiding love that doesn’t seem to know how to fade. It’s unlike his kind, to find one person – for all that Geralt is extraordinary, he is but one person – and stick by them, to want to stay by them for as long as they can. Which is longer than either of them cares to admit, not that Geralt knows that. As he always does when his lover shows him a deeper part of himself, Jaskier feels guilty when he looks at the keep and remembers the things he isn’t telling Geralt, can’t tell Geralt yet. But he wants to, and that’s the first time that’s happened.
He hopes that means something, when Geralt finds out, but he’s not convinced that it will. Though he doesn’t know how Geralt doesn’t know, with his ability to scent magic and creatures, the medallion buzzing around his neck at the first taste of magic on the air. That he doesn’t know how to scent fae seems to be the only possible truth, but still, Jaskier wonders. He hopes that it isn’t going to be how he ends up without a travel companion, that he isn’t going to have to go home with his tail between his legs and tell his mother that he was in love, real love, and that he lost it because of what he is. It’s a fable as old as any telling of their people, the faerie bride, the ones who spend a few seasons with the humans before someone notices that they’re not ageing along with their spouse, and they have to make their loved ones choose between the world aboveground, the world they know, and a hidden life in a knowe.
Almost none of them choose to make faerie their home, and Jaskier knows that Geralt never would.
When it’s been almost a decade, Jaskier almost welcomes the smell, the way it’s become something he can call home too. The other wolves greet them at the door, and Jaskier lets them all scent him, too, checking him over the way they do each other, and that fist tightens around his heart a little more at how they care for him. He may not be able to chase the ghosts from this place, and none of them would thank him if he could, but he does what he can to make their winters a little easier. Vesemir gets a balm for the aches he gets in the cold, with just enough magic in it to ensure it lasts all year. If Jaskier was asked if it slowly heals damaged tissue, he’d lie, but he does notice the old wolf takes stairs a little easier these days. Eskel seems to be soothed simply by his nearness, and they spend a surprising amount of time together; in the library, in the kitchens, with their magic twining closer and closer together with every year. In another life, Jaskier thinks he could have loved Eskel, had he met him first, his lover’s darker twin. They both look at Geralt like he’s the sun, even if it's in two different ways, and their love for the white wolf is another thing that binds them closer together.
Lambert has always been the hardest one to get through to, the hardest one to get to trust. Jaskier can’t blame him; being the last of a dying breed has to weigh heavily on him, and he uses his joking nature to hold onto any laughter he can. Not unlike Jaskier’s own people, he muses, as he picks his way across the slippery roof to where the youngest wolf sits, staring off into the horizon.
“I used to fucking hate it here,” Lambert says, as if that’s a perfectly fine way to start a conversation. For Lambert, it almost counts as manners. “But it’s not so bad these days.”
Jaskier doesn’t say anything, for once, simply settles himself next to the dark-haired man and lets himself be drawn close – ostensibly to keep his fragile human body warm – and held, safe and secure in a place that has seen so much death and destruction. He gently pets the hair at Lambert’s nape, grinning at the hissed swear word from the chill of his fingers, and lets the silence of the mountain help both of them find peace.
He doesn’t know when this place became a knowe to him, a place full of deadly creatures who consider him their family. But he’s determined to keep them as safe as he can.
Once Geralt finds out what he is, Jaskier is certain he won’t be allowed to go back to the keep, despite what they said to his mother. Geralt’s brothers and mentor are all he has left of a world that’s slowly fading, of his childhood, and Jaskier almost wouldn’t blame him for wanting to keep a destructive force like a faerie prince away from them. So when winter starts to darken the horizon, he starts to make excuses, only to be silenced by Geralt’s mouth on his. The kiss doesn’t deepen, doesn’t become passion and sex, just stays soft and loving. And that’s when Jaskier really believes it, for the first time – Geralt loves him. Not just Jaskier the bard, Jaskier the bedwarmer, but Buttercup the fae, too. The emotional blow hits him almost as hard as when he first saw the keep, first saw the burned, broken husk of the Kaer, and learned that somewhere inside it was still a beating heart.
Vesemir is suspicious, and rightfully so. Jaskier can’t blame him for his caution; he lost a castle of his wolves once, and he would not survive burying his last boys. He admits to the magic in the balm, the slow healing, and offers something a little more immediate, like he’s been doing for Geralt for years, and tries not to let it sting when the old man says no.
“It’s a very generous offer,” Vesemir says, and Jaskier can hear the thanks within the words. “And what would you take in return?”
It shouldn’t surprise Jaskier that Vesemir knows the old ways of the fae, the way bargains and deals are struck, but he’s family, he’s important, and Jaskier would never try to trap him in a web of words.
“Geralt’s hand,” he says, softly, and watches the old man smile. “Someone has to make me an honest man one of these days, before I’m past my prime.”
He hears the old wolf huff out a laugh.
“Alright, just start with my knees, they’re murder in this weather,” he says, as if it’s as easy as that – and Jaskier does as he’s told.
When they tell Eskel, Geralt is there with him, eyes shining with amusement as he watches Jaskier pick at his sleeves, nervous of the reaction. Good, sweet Eskel, his second favourite – he can’t have Eskel despise him or hate him for what he is, he couldn’t bear it.
“Makes sense,” Eskel says, with a shrug. “Trust Geralt to get his hands on someone likely to live as long as he will, lucky bastard.”
“I’d – “ Jaskier feels the colour drain out of him. “I’d never keep him from you, Eskel, please, you must know that.”
“Not like that,” Eskel says, shaking his head. “Just that if one of us was to manage it, it would have to be him.”
It does make sense, in a way, but Jaskier can feel his hands shaking, so afraid of the rejection of any of these men who have wormed their way into his heart in a way humanity as a whole never has. And he loves humanity, loves their bright, shining world, so full of things that are true, but his Witchers… his Witchers are his family, and he cannot stand to have them deny that bond.
“My magic always liked you,” Eskel says, finally, and Jaskier can almost lift his gaze from the floor. “And Geralt trusts you. That’s good enough for me. Don’t suppose you’ve got a good glamour for the scars?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Jaskier says, because he will never let Eskel believe he’s anything less than devastatingly handsome. “The poor girls wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if you were any more attractive, you’d leave a trail of fainting maidens behind you from here to Toussaint. And Vesemir would scold you when they tried to follow you up the mountain and froze solid. Maidens don’t thaw out well come spring.”
Eskel laughs, and draws him into an embrace, and Jaskier finally feels like he can breathe again.
Lambert, of course, has already been told, or overheard the others being told, because he likes to lurk in the rafters like a rather smelly, uncouth bat, so he greets Jaskier with a heft of a bottle of vodka.
“What’s up, Buttercup?” he says, because of course he does, and so Jaskier plonks down next to him, grabs the bottle from him, and takes a swig. He manages not to spit it back all over himself somehow, but it’s a tough battle, and when he can see again, Lambert’s laughing at him.
“Oh, right, sure, laugh it up, just because I didn’t know how to tell you lot that I wasn’t human, you’re going to bring out the plant name,” Jaskier wheezes, trying to sound dignified and failing. “Just because I didn’t know if you’d ever trust me to be here again – “
His voice breaks, and he realises with a dawning horror that he’s almost crying. In front of Lambert.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Lambert says, hauling him closer, and Jaskier sinks against his warmth, out of habit. “I knew there had to be a reason you kept coming back to this fucking ruin every winter. Course, I thought it was just because you’re quite taken with Geralt’s cock.”
“Taken by,” Jaskier smirks, as Lambert shudders theatrically. “I’m often taken by Geralt’s cock.”
“See?” Lambert says, with an evil grin. “We already knew there was something wrong with you.”
Just for that, Jaskier’s extra loud when he and Geralt fuck that night. It’s worth the disapproving look from Vesemir to see Lambert’s face when Jaskier settles into Geralt’s lap at the breakfast table, allowing his Witcher to feed him.
They’re going to let him stay, no matter what he is. Jaskier’s heart sings so loudly that he’s sure every Witcher at the table must be able to hear it.
After they’re married, the first winter they spend at Kaer Morhen, Lambert refers to Geralt’s room as the honeymoon suite. Eskel writes a charming and utterly filthy little poem that makes Jaskier chase him up two flights of stairs. Vesemir engraves Geralt’s medallion with a tiny, almost invisible buttercup, and Jaskier has to stop enchanting it with a dozen protections to wipe away a tear. The castle still smells of death, the land still cries out from the blood spilled across it, but Jaskier can admit that it’s mostly background noise to him now. When he extends his senses, late at night, Geralt snoring next to him, Jaskier’s head on his chest, he can hear those deep, slow heartbeats of his Witchers - content, safe, healthy – and knows that he has centuries to look forward to, here. In the Knowe of Kaer Morhen.