Chapter Text
It was definitely a joke.
Jaskier may not like Yennefer – he’s both terrified and terribly jealous of her, which doesn’t make a fertile ground for friendship – but even he can admit that she’s a good bantering partner. It started with snipes and sarcastic comments, but at some point along the way, it turned into something else, not quite gentler but kinder, barbs with no heat behind them. So it’s become a habit, between them. On either side of a grunting, emotionally repressed Geralt, they have to make conversation somehow.
When Yennefer shows up one day at the Alchemy, powerless and on the run, months into Jaskier’s frightening but rewarding underground enterprise to get elves to safety, their bantering turns into something else still, something raw and sad, real in a way they’ve never been with each other. She looks so vulnerable when she confesses the loss of her magic, and Jaskier can’t help the outpouring of compassion that comes out of him. He’s always slipped into other people’s shoes too easily, feeling everything they feel, even when they pretend not to have feelings at all.
Yennefer pays it back tenfold when she skips her own bid at safety and freedom to rescue Jaskier from his torturer. They’re both terrified and hurting, coming out of it, feeling small and powerless, so of course they default back to bantering and a false rivalry they no longer feel.
“I’d rather break my neck falling off a table in front of the entire Redanian court than put a ring on your finger,” Jaskier claims, leaning somewhat painfully on the ledge of a window and trying to avoid looking at his injured hand as he catches his breath. “Wife.”
“And I’d rather fling myself off the cliffs of Aretuza than be shackled to a chattering twit for the rest of my life, husband,” Yennefer snipes back, not quite managing the keep the relieved smile off her face.
“Still, you did save my life, so I owe you a thank you,” Jaskier says a little shakily. “I do not like being indebted to a joy-sucking crone, even one without magic, so how can I repay you?”
“You could get me out of Oxenfurt, since I missed my boat,” Yennefer shrugs. “Or I could pull a Geralt and claim the Law of Surprise.”
It’s definitely a joke. She says it with a smirk, for them both to laugh a bit at Geralt’s expense, because the witcher deserves it. Jaskier even starts to snort.
Then the guards catch up with them, and Yennefer punches one of them, and they have to run in different directions to lose them. By the time Jaskier finds her again, she’s tied up to a chair in the guard house and when the guards come to take her, she mutters something and disappears.
Which means that he never gets her out of Oxenfurt. And she hasn’t rescinded her claim.
*
Destiny has a twisted sense of humour. Later, Jaskier will wonder how often, when the Law of Surprise is called, the prize actually ends up being a puppy or a new shawl. He has no idea what the real power of destiny is, but he vividly remembers Pavetta of Cintra almost blowing up the whole throne room in her desire to be with the man who’d claimed her. Maybe destiny purposefully makes these things happen because the more children touched by her there are, the more powerful she is.
Here he is again, philosophizing, when he has plenty of other things to deal with. Specifically one small, loudly crying thing currently getting snot all over his beloved leather jacket.
“What happened?” Jaskier signs urgently with one hand. It’s his burned hand, and flexing it hurts, but he doesn’t care right now. “Why is Maja here?”
The little girl clings desperately to his neck and Jaskier does his best to soothe her, hugging her tightly and rocking on his heels. He still smells horribly of the prison cell he’s been in for two days, and in other circumstances, it would probably have her staying as far as possible, but she seems too distraught to care.
“Essi brought her,” Tes signs back. She’s the Alchemy’s innkeeper’s wife, a slim dark-skinned human woman who was born deaf, and one of Jaskier’s lieutenants in the smuggling network. “Cyssiel and Herkal took a group to the ship last night, but something went wrong, they got arrested.”
“Fuck,” Jaskier swears aloud, forgetting that Maja can hear it. It hardly matters anyway – he doesn’t think she’s listening.
“Essi is trying to find out where they were taken, but…”
She trails off, but Jaskier can fill in the rest himself. Cyssiel and Herkal are elves themselves, who chose to stay behind and help instead of fleeing to Cintra. If they’ve been arrested, they could already have been executed. Jaskier pulls out a chair and sits down brusquely. “No…” he murmurs.
“I’m sorry,” Tes signs.
It’s his fault. He should have been the one leading the refugees to the ship, but he had to get himself locked up. Worse, he had to get himself locked up for peeping , such a ridiculous charge that wasn’t even true, and it took Tes two days to even find out what had happened. If only he’d left Yennefer to her fate, or if they hadn’t separated, or something…
And now Cyssiel and Herkal are as good as dead, and Maja…
Jaskier is all she has, now.
He’s known nearly since she was born that little Maja was his by blood. Cyssiel and Herkal are siblings, the best luthiers in Oxenfurt, and up until a few months ago, they had a thriving music shop on the waterfront. Jaskier shared Cyssiel’s bed once, and neither of them expected her to get pregnant – while elven women seem to have an easier time carrying half-human children to term, it’s still a rare thing – but when he found out, he took his responsibilities. Cyssiel was content to raise the little girl herself and didn’t want him to be a large part of Maja’s life any more than Jaskier himself wanted to be a father, but Maja has always known her uncle Jaskier, who shows up a couple of times a year to bring her treats and little gifts from far-off lands and sing her any song she wants.
She’s almost four, now, and she has Jaskier’s eyes and hair and the slightly pointed ears of a half elf. She doesn’t really speak, but she flaps her hands and runs around with a determination only matched by the loudness of her cries.
She’s only just starting to calm down, half-asleep in Jaskier’s arms, when a loud noise startles her and she starts wailing again. Jaskier is jerked out of his thoughts and looks up to find Essi coming into the closed tavern. She looks awful, with her hair in disarray and tear tracks down her face.
She shakes her head, silently crying. “They’re gone,” she signs to both Jaskier and Tes. “I was at the harbour square.”
She just saw them hanged, Jaskier understands. He closes his eyes and loses his own battle against tears. Maja hiccups and stops screaming, and she curiously pats his cheek with her little hand, a question on her face.
“It’s okay, I’m alright,” Jaskier murmurs to her. “Just sad.”
She buries her face in his shoulder and hugs him tighter.
From that moment on, his entire life revolves around her.
*
He doesn’t even remember Yennefer’s joke until weeks later. To be fair, he’s hardly had the time to think. He’s had to act fast to protect Maja and find a way to care for her.
Since the ship route is no longer safe for elves, the network has had to move on to other pursuits to help them. It means that Jaskier is no longer needed every night at the Alchemy, which is for the best given his new situation. He retreats to the Academy instead, moving back into the flat he vacated when things started to become too delicate at the docks. It’s large enough for him and Maja, and it has the distinct advantage of being next door to two of Jaskier’s best friends, Essi and Shani, who are both slightly more experienced than he is in the care of children and willing to babysit while Jaskier gives lectures.
The Sandpiper is done. There are no more ships going out of the country, and virtually no more elves in town in need of smuggling. Essi and the students continue to write pamphlets against the regime, and Jaskier helps where he can, but he has his hands full with Maja.
She’s a delight and a terror all at once. She’s curious about everything and she likes nothing more than riding on Jaskier’s shoulders and pointing at random things, pulling at his hair until he explains what they are. She gets overwhelmed easily and she starts screaming with her hands pressed over her ears whenever things get too loud. She sucks her thumb when she’s tired, and she puts her tiny hand around Jaskier’s fingers and drags him wherever she wants him, and he’d do absolutely anything for her.
He keeps waking up in a cold sweat, his head full of nightmares where he’s lost her somewhere in the city, or worse, where she’s caught by the mob. He’s all too aware that now that most of the full-blooded elves are gone, the hatred has turned toward mixed people, toward everyone who isn’t quite human. Several dwarves among his acquaintances have had their business vandalized. Half elves have taken to hiding their ears under hats and headscarves. The growing rumours that mixed-species babies are often born deformed has even led to the brutal lynching of poor people judged too different.
Maja is too young to reliably hide her ears, and it’s impossible to spend any time with her without noticing that she isn’t quite like most children her age. Cyssiel didn’t think it had anything to do with her heritage, and Jaskier would tend to agree – he has a few cousins who never learned to speak, and they’re all fully human – but the mob of angry people out in the street will hardly ask before they act.
But she’s sleeping peacefully beside him, curled up on herself, looking tiny on the double bed with her thumb in her mouth. Jaskier reaches out and runs his good hand through her fine dark hair, cradling the burned one to his chest. The nightmare was different tonight, worse somehow. It took the form of the fire mage’s face. “Should I go and get little Maja?” he asked with his chilling smile, his flame dancing at the end of his finger.
Jaskier feels nauseous. It didn’t happen, of course – the people who knew who he was to Maja before Cyssiel’s death could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and he trusts them all with her life. The mage couldn’t have got to her, unless he’d gone straight into his mind—
But Yennefer could do that, couldn’t she? She’s read Jaskier’s mind before. This mage likely has the same skill-set, he could come back and—
He wouldn’t even need to read his mind, now. Maja is right there with him. If he’s still looking for Geralt, he could come back for Jaskier, try to interrogate him again, and this time he’d have the most precious leverage – Jaskier would crack in seconds if someone threatened his daughter.
His daughter.
He never thought about her that way before. She was his blood, yes, but she wasn’t his. Now…
He has to protect her.
But how? They’re vulnerable here, he’s too well-known, too visible. His association with Geralt marks him as a target, and so do his extracurricular activities. He has to get out of the city somehow – but the road won’t be any better. He doesn’t have Geralt to travel with any more.
Yennefer . She may be on the run, she may have lost her powers, but she’s still a sorceress, right? That means connections, money, access to things Jaskier doesn’t have. Plus, she portalled away somehow in the guard house, so she must still have some magic, or be recovering.
Yennefer. Something tickles at Jaskier’s memories. “ I could pull a Geralt and call the Law of Surprise.”
Fuck. She didn’t take that back, did she? And in the absence of another option – it would have taken. Maja was certainly a surprise, a child surprise. Is that why Jaskier is thinking of Yennefer right now? Because Maja is now rightfully hers?
She wanted a child, didn’t she? That’s why she was on the dragon hunt, to try to heal her womb. That’s why she wanted the djinn, all those years ago. Will she want to claim Maja for her own? Tear her away from Jaskier?
He whimpers and curls up tighter around the little girl. No. He won’t let her. But he needs help, and she may just be his best option.
If only he knew where she is.
*
Ellander is just about the last place Yennefer was expecting to find Geralt, especially with his Child Surprise. She knows he comes here regularly, but it’s hardly the safest place he knows, full of non-combatant adepts, and he’s being chased.
And his Child Surprise is the fucking Lion Cub of Cintra. How Geralt ended up with her is a mystery – she should have asked Jaskier, because Geralt isn’t going to tell her. He doesn’t trust her. He’s probably right not to, given that they’ve been talking for several hours and she’s still hiding the loss of her magic.
Well, the slow recovery of her magic, anyway. She can’t yet reproduce the panic that let her portal from Oxenfurt to here, but she’s gaining back a little more every day.
“I ran into Jaskier,” she says, tiring of the weird sexual-emotional tension between her and Geralt, even now that Ciri has gone to bed. “In Oxenfurt. He was in some trouble.” Okay, maybe bringing up Jaskier of all people isn’t the best way to get rid of the tension. But she feels like this is news that Geralt should know as soon as possible, actually.
“What kind of trouble?”
“This fire fucker was after him. A mage. I don’t know who he was.” She pauses, looks him in the eye. “He was looking for information. About you.”
Geralt’s eyes widen and he stays stumped for a moment. Yennefer can see the guilt worm its way into his expression. It was her intention – there’s a part of her that resents him for being here, safe, almost unconcerned after what she and Jaskier went through back there. But now that it’s here, she realizes that she doesn’t want to see it.
She’s not entirely sure what happened between him and Jaskier. The song she heard was quite eloquent, and “it came from the heart – perhaps a broken one” saddled her with a level of compassion she never expected to feel for the bard, but she didn’t get any details.
“He said he didn’t know anything anyway. Did you guys have a fallout or something?”
And there, she’s hit the mark. Geralt flinches and looks away.
“Come on,” she says. “He was all broken-hearted, singing breakup songs at the top of his voice. He’s become quite popular, you know. His audience was delighted.”
“He’s singing breakup songs about me?” Geralt asks, with a tight, almost amused twist to his lips.
“Stop deflecting.”
He sighs. “After you… I lashed out at him. I said some things.”
“That sounds familiar,” Yennefer raises her eyebrows.
Geralt frown uncomprehendingly.
“In Rinde,” she clarifies. “When we met. You said essentially the same thing. ‘I don’t want it to be the last thing he hears,’ or something like that.”
“Yeah. Well, we parted ways and we haven’t seen each other since.”
“And you would very much rather it wasn’t the last thing he heard,” Yennefer finishes for him, because she knows he won’t. “I suppose it’s a good thing I saved his life.”
“It was that close?”
“He was being tortured, Geralt.”
Geralt turns to stone. He stops moving completely, stops breathing even, and with his colouring, he suddenly resembles nothing more than a marble statue. “Tortured?” he asks very slowly, very carefully.
“No permanent injury that I could see, but I think I got there just in time. This mage had a thing for fire.”
“I have to go get him,” Geralt says.
Yennefer blinks. That was fast, and not entirely what she expected. What did she expect, though? She’s been uncomfortable with the idea of Jaskier alone in Oxenfurt, with no one to protect him, ever since she left, but she couldn’t do anything about it. Isn’t that why she brought it up now?
Is it? Or is it because she wanted to get a rise out of Geralt, see real guilt in his eyes even if it wasn’t directed at her?
She’ll examine her motives later, she decides. Either way, she got both things, and neither has alleviated the twisting in her gut. “Right now?” she asks.
“In the morning,” Geralt amends. “I won’t leave Ciri here, so she’ll have to come.”
“Is it safe?”
“I doubt anywhere is safe for her,” he sighs. “The Path is as good as anything. If Jaskier can forgive me… At least with him I’ll have someone to watch our back.”
“What about me?”
Geralt raises an eyebrow.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Yennefer clarifies, without even knowing why. Does she want to go with them?
Yes. Yes, she does, and she doesn’t understand it. Is it still the djinn wish pulling them together? Is it the confusing and entirely too strong emotions she feels toward Ciri, without even knowing her properly? Is it because she wants to make sure that Jaskier is safe?
Is it something else entirely?
“Can you portal us there?” Geralt asks.
Fuck.
“Ah,” she says. “About that.”