Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Tell me the Story, Mama,” four-year-old Julian said as his mother pulled the blankets up to his chin. The nursemaids had gone to bed and his mother had come to tuck him in as she always tried to do, even when she was very tired. If he was lucky, she wouldn’t be too tired to tell him a story. If he was very lucky, his father would come to say goodnight tonight too.

“What story, my dearest one?” she asked. She sat on the edge of the bed with a little sigh.

She was very tired most of the time; everyone told Julian not to bother her.

“The Story,” he repeated anyway. It wasn’t a long story, after all.

“Alright, the Story.” She smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “Once upon a time, a beautiful elven sorceress fell in love with a mighty human mage—”

“Was he beautiful?”

“I’m sure he was. Hush now and let me tell it.”

Giggling, Julian mimed buttoning his lips.

“Their love was forbidden, hated by both her people and his, for it represented a bond neither side could tolerate. A bond between two people everyone thought could never love each other. The world hated the young lovers and they suffered for it.”

“They killed him,” Julian whispered. He hated this part and always tried to rush through it.

“Yes, my son, they killed him. And then her, for daring to have a child.” His mother raised her hand and pressed it to her temple, shutting her eyes as if the dim candlelight hurt her head. “But before she died, she spoke with all the strength and power in her mighty soul.”

“Did she curse her child?” Julian knew the answer, but he liked the way his mama said it, the way the words sounded like a song.

“But she did not curse her child, no. With the strength of her love and the pain in her heart she gifted and cursed our spheres, gifted and cursed every human and nonhuman in them.”

“She gave us soulmates,” Julian whispered as his heart swelled.

“Yes, my love, she gave to us soulmates. People bonded by a love so strong it can heal the sick and defeat evil.”

“Like the witchmen,” Julian said.

His mother dropped her hand from her temple. “What?”

“Father said they’d kill the wyverns, and they did!” Julian sat up and bounced, happy to have this secret to share. “I saw them, when I was hiding from Millie in the stable. The white one had this big, bloody hole in his side—”

“Julian—”

“And then he didn’t!”

“You mustn’t make up stories like this, Julian.”

“I’m not!” Julian crossed his arms over his chest and threw himself back on his bed. “The big one put his hands right in all the blood, and his hands glowed, Mama.” His excitement got the better of him and he sat up again. “And then the big hole was gone! And then they were kissing, and they saw me—”

Julian stopped. That part had been scary. He didn’t think he’d made any noise when he tried to sneak away, but they spun around to look at him so fast he squeaked. The big one had just held his finger up to his scarred lips and Julian had nodded.

But telling Mama, didn’t count, right?

“Julian, listen to me.” His mother took his hands and looked into his eyes. “You cannot tell your father this.”

“What can’t he tell me?”

Oh, Julian was very lucky tonight! “Father!”

“What can’t you tell me?” his father repeated, frowning at his mother. He came to stand beside Julian’s bed and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder.

Julian looked back and forth between them, not knowing what to do. “The witchmen are soulmates, Father.”

“Impossible,” his father said with a snort. “Witchers are incapable of such a sacred bond.”

“I’m sure your father is right,” his mother said, squeezing Julian’s knee beneath the blanket. “Let me finish the story.”

“But I saw, Father!” Julian argued. “The big one healed the white one! He glowed! They’re soulmates, I saw it!”

“Interesting,” his father said. He patted Julian’s head absently and walked out of the room without looking back. 

“Good night!” Julian called after him. “Tell the rest of the story, Mama?”

His mother was biting her lip and looking at the door, her eyes following his father.

“Mama?”

“Yes, Julian.” She scrubbed her face with her hands. “Lara Dorren gave us soulmates, people bound by never-ending, unflinching love. It is a love so strong that it can heal the most grievous of wounds with just a touch.”

“Never ending love,” Julian said, hugging himself. Soulmates had love forever, had each other forever. They never felt lonely and sad like Julian sometimes did, he was sure. “Thank you, Mama.”

“Julian, that’s not the end of the story.”

Julian blinked in confusion. It had always been the end of the story before. “It isn’t?”

“No, my love. For the bond is beautiful, but it is also a burden.” His mother cradled the side of his face. “And they are so rare, soulmates. So very, very rare. Those who do not have such a bond want the power for themselves.” 

“I don’t understand.”

“I pray you never do. Come now, lay back and go to sleep. It’s late.” She tucked Julian into the blankets again and rose from the bed.

“If Father was your soulmate, could he make you less tired?” Julian asked, just before she blew out the candle.

“Oh, my son,” she said softly. “Your father is not my soulmate.”

With a puff of breath, she plunged the room into darkness.

“—and Lara Donne, she gave us soulmates. A bond so strong it thrills with a touch—” Jaskier ran his fingertips lightly down the woman’s silky neck, pressing her body further into the shadows with his own.

“Young lord?” a footman called, his voice just audible above the noise from the main hall.

“Shit,” Jaskier hissed as the woman in his arms (Anna? Susanna? Annabelle?) giggled. “This way.”

She followed willingly enough, eager for a few stolen moments with the heir to the Pankratz fortune, the sprawling, ever growing estate Jaskier had little interest in inheriting. His father had been making noise about duty, about marriage, and Jaskier wanted to be well out of the old man’s shouting range.

He drew his paramour deeper into the underbelly of their keep, down past the wine cellars and then further, until they had descended farther than Jaskier had ever gone before.

“Now, where were we?” Jaskier asked as he leaned her onto the rough wall and bent to kiss her, hitting her chin in the dim light.

“You were seducing me with foolish children’s stories,” she said. She grabbed one of his ears and steered him to her mouth.

“Oh, soulmates are real,” he said against her lips. It was bullshit he’d given up on believing years ago, but it was good bullshit. It occasionally got him laid. “Let me show you, let me make you glow, let me give you new life with a touch—”

“Ssst!” the woman hissed at him.

Jaskier fell silent, mostly so he could summon an appropriately outraged response.

Then he heard it. Heard them. Two sounds, both equally haunting as they echoed out of the darkness of the hallway beyond the last torch. One was like the patter of rain on stone, the other was a high-pitched, two-toned squeal, mechanical in its regularity.

Eeee-eeel.

“Hello?” Jaskier called into the shadows.

The pattering stopped.

The squealing didn’t.

Eeee-eeel.

“Vermin, maybe,” Jaskier said to the woman.

“Let’s go,” she said. “I don’t want to tangle with rats.”

“Come now, where is your sense of adventure?” Jaskier asked, inflating his chest. “They won’t bother us this close to the torches.”

“I’d rather go back to the party.”

“Here, I’ll show you.” Jaskier tugged at the nearest torch until it came free from its sconce.

“Your mother will be asking after me,” she said, backing away. “I’ll see you back upstairs, my lord.” Then she was gone, the sound of her footsteps swallowed up by the corridor.

Jaskier should go too; the threat to his masculinity had passed now that there was no one to see his retreat.

The pattering sound started up again.

He raised the torch and could just glimpse a door in the darkness at the end of the corridor, a heavy, banded steel door unlike the other wooden cellar doors. The sounds were coming from behind it.

Probably vermin.

And yet. And yet. Despite his mother’s best efforts to keep her only beloved son close, curiosity had already dragged him out of his well-appointed rooms at the estate and into the wider world. It had called him off to Oxenfurt, had set him wandering the roads between there and home every season. This tug on his boots was a familiar one, one that had never let him down before.

Jaskier walked cautiously down the corridor.

The pattering sound resolved and became recognizable.

He stopped.

Someone was muttering on the other side of the door.

That couldn’t be good. His tutor’s horror stories about specters and wraiths sprang to Jaskier’s mind. He began to back away from the door slowly, barely daring to breathe.

Eeee-eeel.

The ever-present two-toned squealing kicked up in volume, stopping Jaskier in his tracks. It wasn’t a mechanical sound at all, not at this range, but an animal one. A sound of pain beyond words. Maybe some creature had gotten trapped down here and needed to be put out of its suffering.

Jaskier forced himself to take the last steps up to the steel door. To take the handle, to feel the cold metal bite into his hand, and to tug it open.

At first, he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. The little room beyond the door was lit by a dim, blue-white light. It emanated from two narrow tubes that descended from the ceiling, a few feet apart, terminating in the center of the room. The end of each tube branched into little tendrils of light like the veins of a leaf, feeding into two shadows on the floor.

The muttering, the whining. They were coming from the blue-laced shadows.

Jaskier stepped closer and his torch finally lit the scene.

Men.

The shadows were men, naked and bound, their skin gleaming with sweat and blood. The one on the left was huge. He came nearly to Jaskier’s waist even though his wrists were fixed to the floor by a chain too short to allow him to straighten out of a crouch. His position on his knees left his back rounded, exposed. The web of blue threads dangling from the ceiling was embedded into the skin down his spine.

He hadn’t stopped muttering under his breath since Jaskier had entered, hadn’t even raised his shaggy head.

The horrible two-note whining sound was coming from the other man, the thinner one, whose unkempt hair was a dirty gray-white in the mixed light of Jaskier’s torch and the blue tubing. His position was a mirror to the dark man, except for many, many more chains anchoring him to the floor. With every slow breath out, a sound escaped through his nose, a whine that made the hair on the back of Jaskier’s neck stand up.

Eeee-eeel. Eeee-eeel. Eeee-eeel.

“H-hello?” Jaskier asked, his own voice nearly startling him into dropping the torch.

“Come to mock the souls that power your pretty life, human?” the darker man rasped, raising his head at last and tossing back the mop of his hair.

His cheek was horribly disfigured, the topography of his scars throwing shadows on the rest of his face. The eyes that peered out at Jaskier from that face were yellow and slit-pupiled, expanding and contracting as the torch flickered. 

Jaskier had seen that face, those eyes, once before, long ago. He couldn’t remember where, now. Didn’t want to remember where.

“Nothing to say?” the man asked, a little louder.

At the sound of his voice, the other man raised his gray head to reveal yellow eyes that would match his counterpart were there any sense left in them. A wad of cloth was stuffed in his mouth, bound in place with a dirty bit of rope.

EEEE-EEEL. EEEE-EEEL. EEEE-EEEL.

With a great heave of his chest, he threw himself against his bonds, straining toward the other man.

There was no way he’d ever reach him. Whoever had bound these two so effectively, whoever had strung them up by their spines had left enough slack for them to thrash but not enough to reach each other. The empty foot of space between them may as well have been a mile.

“Stop, please stop,” the darker man begged. The glow around him intensified and his head drooped, even as he pulled weakly toward the struggling man. “We’re alright. You’re here, I’m here. We’re alive. Geralt, please stop.”

Geralt, if there was anything left of the man who once answered to that name, didn’t stop. He writhed, fresh blood seeping from beneath the bands carving into his throat, his waist, his ankles, a dozen other places, running in red-black rivulets from the points of blue tubing disappearing into his back.

Jaskier fled to the sound of him crashing against his chains.

“Once upon a time, a beautiful elven sorceress fell in love with a mighty human mage—”

*

Beneath the warm glow of the mage lights, a twelve-person orchestra played, silk-clad dancers swayed, and couples flirted. The celebration Jaskier had left not ten minutes ago continued as if nothing had happened. And nothing had happened, not to these glittering nobles and mages.

The finery and frippery swirled in front of Jaskier, but in the back of his mind two men strained towards each other in the dark.

*

“—the bond is beautiful, but it is also a burden—”

*

“Are you alright, my love?” his mother asked him. “You look very pale.”

He’d crossed the room to her side without thinking; it was his natural place in this world. Leaning down to embrace her, he inhaled the soft scent of her perfume. She felt so real in his arms, so bright and clean and tangible, such a contrast to the shadows slithering deeper into his mind.

“Mother, in the cellar—” bile coated the back of his tongue like rancid oil. He gulped for air and tasted poison. 

“Karl!” his mother called, gesturing to their family mage and advisor. “Come here, I think something’s wrong with Julian.”

“It’s Jaskier,” he argued absently. “Mother, I have to tell you something—”

“Something wrong?” his father asked. He joined them, breaking away from a group of visiting mages. “They’re about to start the evening’s experiment.”

Mages came to Lettenhove in droves. They talked in near rhapsodic tones about the ley lines beneath the estate which lent their castings extra power.

They were supposed to be here for the ley lines.

*

“—those who do not have such a bond want the power for themselves—”   

*

“The room was right here,” Jaskier said. He looked frantically around the cellar, ducking around barrels and peering under wine racks.

Their advisor watched with one raised eyebrow. “There is a room here.”

“No! It was a different room, with a steel door. And there were, there were men.” He swallowed hard and forced himself to whisper the word. “Soulmates.”

“I don’t like his color, Karl,” his father said, raising one hand to press the back of it to Jaskier’s forehead. “And he feels hot to me.”

Karl hummed thoughtfully. “He has always had his mother’s weak constitution.”  

“I’ve never been sick a day in my life,” Jaskier argued. He hadn’t. No one in Lettenhove ever got sick, not even last year when the plague had ravaged the other provinces. “And mother—”

“She’s doing so well, isn’t she?” his father asked, smiling.

*

“—bonded by a love so strong it can heal the sick and defeat evil—”

*

Jaskier pushed his father’s advisor away and went back to searching the room. He knocked on the walls and rapped on the floors, listening for an echo.

“Julian, come away now,” his father said.

“Ssst!” he hissed. “There!”

He could just make it out, as if listening to the ringing of the temple bells from deep under water, the endless, two-toned whine of the white-haired man. It scraped along Jaskier’s nerves like a file across his back teeth.

Eeee-eeel.

“Hear it?” he asked.

Eeee-eeel.

“Gods, why won’t he stop?” Jaskier asked. “It’s horrible.”

His father and their advisor exchanged a glance, eyebrows lifted.

“Julian, come away,” his father said. “I hear nothing.”

Their advisor sniffed. “I hear only vermin.”

*

“—Witchers are incapable of such a bond—”

*

Jaskier woke in his own bed, woozy and confused, with his mother sitting in a chair at his side.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, putting down her embroidery to take up a glass of water.

“I—” he had to stop to sip as she held the water to his lips “—I don’t know.”

“You’ve had a fever, been rambling in your sleep about those old stories I used to tell you.”

“Soulmates,” Jaskier repeated. There was something about soulmates. Soulmates with slit-pupiled eyes, hidden in the dark, a tainted memory/dream/memory he could taste on the back of his tongue.

Eeee-eeel.

Jaskier nearly thrashed out of bed as a bird called from outside the window.

“You’ll be on your feet in no time, you’ll see,” his mother said, shutting the window. “I’ll make sure of that! Though perhaps you will have to forgo your next term at the university, my love.”

Eeee-eeel, the unseen bird called.

*

“—but I saw, Father! The big one healed the white one! He glowed! They’re soulmates, I saw it!”

*

Jaskier had done this to those men. He had done it unwittingly, with the innocence of a child, but he had sold them into slavery in the dark.  And he was no child now.

As soon as he had the strength to do so without being caught, he snuck from his bed. For hours, he explored the depths of the estate, crawling through storerooms and breaking through locked doors, searching, always searching for the source of the sound right on the edge of his hearing.

Eeee-eeel.

He heard it when he pressed his ear to the pipes in the bathrooms and he heard it when the dogs brayed from the kennels.

Eeee-eeel. Eeee-eeel.

He heard it in the ringing of the clock that marked the hours; he heard it the sigh of the wind in the trees. When he sat at his mother’s side in the day room to watch her sew, he heard it in the soft snicking squeak of every stitch she made. 

Eeee-eeel. Eeee-eeel. Eeee-eeel.

He could not escape it. It echoed in his ears, waking or sleeping, speaking or silent.

And sometimes, sometimes in the quiet of the earliest morning hours, he could hear the other sound too, the pattering raindrop speech of a dying man trying to soothe the unending pain of his beloved.

Chapter Text

Jaskier left his sickness in Lettenhove at the end of the spring social season.

The sound followed him.

Eeee-eeel, said the cows beside the road he thundered towards Oxenfurt.

Eeee-eeel, eeee-eeel, croaked the frogs beside the creek.

“Eeee-eeel eeee-eeel eeee-eeel,” Jaskier chanted under his breath in time to his horse’s hooves.

At the university he went straight to the library without stopping at his rooms, slamming into the quiet entryway in a cloud of road dust.

“Jask?” Priscilla asked.

“Priscilla. Pris.” Jaskier scrubbed his face on his sleeve. “This is…this is good. You still work here? Can you help me find something?”

“Of course. How was your visit?”

Jaskier shook his head wildly. “No, I can’t—I have to do some research.”

“I heard you were sick, really sick.”

“No!” Jaskier took a breath and moderated his tone. “No, not really. Just a passing cold. But I’m better now. I am. Can you help me look something up?”

“Sure Jaskier, sure,” Priscilla said. “But the term hasn’t even started yet.”

“I’m—writing a song. About soulmates.” It wasn’t true; he hadn’t sung since he’d first found them. 

Priscilla rolled her eyes and stood, gesturing for him to follow her into the stacks. It was silent there, dust motes sparkling in the still air between the shelves, absolutely silent.

Jaskier inhaled the scent of parchment and felt a weight lift off his chest.

“What do you need to know?” she whispered. She stopped, gesturing to three shelves in the bookshelf at her side to indicate which tomes to try.

“They exist, right?” Jaskier blurted. “Soulmates?”

With a wistful smile, Priscilla pulled down one of the books. “They must have, once. There are laws to protect them. The only treaty ever signed by all the races, in fact.”

“How the hell did that happen?” He took the book from her hands and squinted at the elaborate script, but his crusty eyes refused to focus.

“Well, it was in everyone’s best interest, I suppose.” Priscilla turned a few pages, opening the book to a sprawling color illustration of a pregnant elven woman screaming at the sky while a sword swung at her neck. “Every documented soulmate pair back to the very first has rearranged the world, especially when someone in power got a hold of them. The Brotherhood of Sorcerers burned through at least two pairs at the battle of Sodden Hill.”

“Shit. Shit shit shit.”

Priscilla frowned at him. “It’s good source material. For a song.”

“Excellent source material,” Jaskier agreed, smothering a hysterical giggle.

“Thankfully, they never last long as power sources,” Priscilla mused, smoothing the corner of the page.

Jaskier’s eyes bulged. “How is that a good thing?”

“Well, it limits the scope of the damage, doesn’t it?” Priscilla shrugged, then turned to another page. This one contained a list of names, pairs of names, and date ranges. Very short date ranges. “Human bodies make poor conduits for that much power.”

By Jaskier’s count, the Witchers had been powering the sprawling Lettenhove empire for well over a decade. But then, they weren’t human, were they?

“So after Sodden, there was a treaty,” Jaskier said. “And soulmates were protected. What happens to people who violate the treaty?”

“Absolute annihilation,” Priscilla said, smiling in satisfaction. “Execution for everyone who knew about it, banishment for everyone even related to the guilty parties, the salting of their fields, destruction of assets…it’s almost beautiful.”

Normally, Jaskier would agree, would be tickled deep down in his dramatic, romantic soul that the entire known world had agreed that to exploit a love of such magnitude would be an atrocity.

Normally his father wasn’t committing the atrocity.

Or perhaps he was, apparently he had been holding two soulmates captive since Jaskier was a child.

“I need to sit down,” Jaskier said, collapsing on his ass.

“Did that answer your questions?” Priscilla asked, sitting on the floor across from him. A wrinkle had appeared between her brows, a little worry line Jaskier had no idea how to soothe away.

Because if anyone found out about the Witchers, he was dead.

His whole family was dead, and all their people too. 

“Jask?” Priscilla shifted, her boots scuffing across the floor.

Eeee-eeel, went her heels across the stone.

Jaskier shuddered. “What have you got on Witchers? And dispelling magical illusions?”

*

Jaskier did what any smart man would do when cursed. He ignored the sound whispered against his skin until he couldn’t stand it. Then he hired a professional.

The contract he posted was worded very carefully.

Seeking a Witcher of the wolf school to break a curse. Wolf school relics available as payment.

All the lore about Witchers conflicted and three quarters of it was clearly bunk, but it sounded like a bad idea to risk the soulmates falling into the hands of potential rivals from another school.

Only one Witcher answered, a thin, olive-skinned man with a head of tight black curls who sat down beside Jaskier as he was drinking his fifth ale of the night.

“You posted a contract?”

Jaskier blinked at him muzzily. The medallion on his chest was a snarling cat.

“For a wolf Witcher,” Jaskier said, trying to signal the barman for a rescue. The barman ignored him, as he had every time Jaskier called for another ale for the last hour.

“I’m Aiden.” The man grinned at him, an expression that hovered just this side of sanity. “And I know a wolf Witcher.”

“Good for you.” Jaskier paused. “Just one?”

“Why?” His yellow-green eyes narrowed. “Anyway, the gear is interchangeable.”

“I said nothing about gear,” Jaskier said with finality. “Good day to you, sir.”

Jaskier returned to Lettenhove like a corpse being lowered into a grave. For six months he tried to avoid it, waiting for a wolf Witcher to answer the contract. He buried himself in research, in collecting stories about Witchers and soulmates, in finding tools that might show him what was hidden in the dark. But there was nothing anyone could sell him or tell him that could reveal if the shadows in his mind were shades of memory or madness.

No one else answered the contract.

In the end, he had no real choice. He’d lost agency over his own life, lost it to the beat of a two-note scream echoing over and over in his mind.

He went back to where it had begun, to the corridor beneath the keep, sneaking into his own home like a grave robber.

The Eye of Nehaleni worked exactly as the sorceress promised it would. It dispelled illusions, revealed the truth. There was a door beyond the last torch in the corridor, a heavy steel door where his father had once shown him nothing but a wine cellar.

The betrayal of it nearly drove Jaskier to his knees, but he couldn’t afford to collapse now. He had to save the estate or save the Witchers or maybe just save himself from the sound of their suffering.

Except. Except.

It was silent in the corridor.

No quiet muttering.

No unearthly whine.

Nothing but the memory of it sawing endlessly at Jaskier’s mind.

“Please, gods,” Jaskier whispered as he pressed his palm to the cold, gritty surface of the door, “I can’t fix this if they’re dead.”

Silence.

Echoing, crushing, screaming silence.

Eeee-eeel, eeee-eeel, eeee-eeel, went the air in and out of Jaskier’s lungs as his breathing picked up.

He opened the door.

The room behind it was entirely dark, not a hint of blue-white light, no light at all until Jaskier stepped forward, bringing his mage light with him.

The two Witchers knelt in the middle of the room, sagging from the now darkened tubing snaking down from the ceiling and embedded in their bare backs. They were still bound to the floor by chains that prevented them from uncurling, still bound forever apart from one another, but they were thinner, their naked bodies skeletal beneath the dried blood and grime.

And they were not moving. They were not moving at all. 

Jaskier approached the dark-haired Witcher. He didn’t know the man’s name, but he was not Geralt of Rivia, the white wolf, the butcher of Blaviken, so Jaskier had decided to free him first. Up close, he could make out the lattice of scars beneath the blood on his back. Old lash marks, neatly laid across either side of his ribcage to avoid the tubing.

He touched the man’s neck and held his breath for half a dozen beats of his own heart before he felt the slow, two-beat thump of the Witcher’s pulse.

“Eeee-eeel,” Jaskier said under his breath without thinking, in time to the man’s pulse.

The white-haired Witcher came awake with a cacophonous clanging of his chains, throwing himself towards Jaskier. The crusty black lines dripping from beneath his bonds began to glisten with fresh blood as he thrashed.

“Eeee-eeel,” the sound was torn from his throat, high and grinding.

“Shh, please,” Jaskier begged, dropping his pack. He dug out a hammer and a spike and set them against the hinge of the shackles around the dark-haired Witcher’s wrists. “I’m trying to get you out of here, I’m trying to help. Geralt, please.”

Geralt’s skin rippled as his muscles bunched and jumped, his chains creaking as he strained. There was nothing in his corpse-glassy eyes, no sense, no anger, not even pain.

A dim blue light began to emanate from the other Witcher, faint and close to his skin at first and then slowly lighting the tubing in his back. His inhumanly slow breathing picked up, getting faster and faster as Geralt wrenched and heaved in his chains.

The soul bond. Geralt was hurting himself, his wounds open again, and the bond was trying to heal him. But the power flowing from the already weakened dark-haired Witcher never reached Geralt, the tubing siphoned it away.

And then the light died entirely and the room dimmed again. 

The hammer fell from Jaskier’s shaking hands, skittering across the room. He scrambled after it.

With a whimper Geralt deflated, hanging once again from the tubing embedded in his back.

“Ok,” Jaskier said. “Ok, alright. I’m going to get you out first. And then you’re going to kill me, so I hope to the gods you have enough sense left in you to get yourself and him out of here.”

Jaskier approached the white wolf, whose body went bowstring tense.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said as he set the spike in the hinge of the metal collar around the man’s neck. Wincing as the first blow from the hammer yanked the metal across Geralt’s throat, Jaskier amended himself, “I’m trying not to hurt you.”

The collar fell away with clang, coming to rest against Jaskier’s foot.

It was studded with little nails. On the inside.

“Melitele save us,” Jaskier breathed out. He kicked the collar into the corner and began to work his way through the rest of the studded shackles around Geralt’s body, until only the set around his wrists remained.

Geralt had stayed silent and still throughout, but now he very, very slowly raised his head, turning empty eyes on Jaskier.

Jaskier’s long dead survival instincts flared to life. He threw himself back when Geralt stood with a jerk, snapping the chain from the stone floor as if it were twine.

“I’m sorry!” Jaskier cried out, raising his hands in a weak defense.

But no blow fell.

Geralt darted across the room, his frantic motion ripping the tubing from his back in a rain of bloody spatter.

“Eeee-eeel, eeee-eeel,” he ground out around the gag still embedded in his mouth as he fell to his knees beside the other man and began to tear at his shackles, prying them open with his bare fingers despite the nails on the underside.

When the other man was restrained by only the tubing lacing up his spine, Geralt levered him up onto his knees and crushed their chests together, pressing as much skin to skin as he could. He sank one bloody hand into the tangled mop of dark hair and the man close, the awful keening never stopping.

“Eeee-eeel, eeee-eeel, EEEE-EEELLL!”

The dark-haired man didn’t move.

His arms hung limp at his sides as he slumped against Geralt.

“Oh, please,” Jaskier begged. “Melitele, Lebioda and all the gods above, please. They’re soulmates, they’re together again, please.”

The dark-haired Witcher was still, so still, in Geralt’s arms, not even reacting when Geralt began to pick the ends of the tubing from his back.

Jaskier sank to his knees as tears welled up in his eyes. He had failed. He had hidden from his guilt too long, and his cowardice had caused two souls to be tortured into death and living death.

And then a cracked whisper broke the silence. “Geralt?”

Without letting go of his partner’s limp body, Geralt scraped at the rope cutting into his own cheeks. He yanked it away, coughing out the bloody, sodden cloth that had gagged him.

“Eskel,” Geralt rasped, caressing the man’s scarred cheek with gentle fingers.

With aching slowness, the dark-haired Witcher raised his head and hooked his chin over Geralt’s shoulder. He didn’t open his eyes as he looped his arms weakly around Geralt’s waist. 

“Geralt,” he sighed, rubbing his cheek against Geralt’s hair.

Geralt whimpered and clutched him tight, the two men becoming one silhouette in the flickering of the mage light. His hands roved over his soulmate’s body as if relearning the feel of his skin, catching on scars and tracing protruding bones. His fingers left in their wake a gentle white glow that sealed open wounds, erased purple bruises. 

“Geralt,” the dark-haired man repeated, his voice thick with tears. He pressed his palms flat to Geralt’s back, somehow ratcheting himself even closer to the white-haired man. “Did we die?”

“Eskel, Eskel, Eskel,” Geralt repeated.

Eskel.

Eeee-eeel.

“Oh, the gods wept,” Jaskier choked out, his hands rising to clutch at his face. “It’s his name.”

*

“Julian! What are you doing here?”

Jaskier whirled, pushing himself across the sticky floor on his ass as he tried to back away from the door. His father loomed above him, his mage at his side and a dozen guards crowding the hallway behind them.

A low growl echoed from over his shoulder

He was between the Witchers and the humans.

“Julian?” his father repeated. “What have you done?”

“The only thing I could do,” Julian—Jaskier stammered out. “This is an abomination. There are iron-clad treaties in place to protect people from being used this way!”

“Oh my son,” his father said, smiling affectionately. “They aren’t people.”

Jaskier recoiled further, his back slamming into the hand Geralt had thrust out to keep him away. His growling grew louder. 

“Look at them, they’re animals, vermin,” Karl agreed. “And we don’t really hurt them, not anymore. The butcher broke years ago. He hurts himself enough to keep the power flowing.”

His father shrugged. “Unless we need a bit of a boost.”

“No.” Jaskier shook his head wildly. “Father, you didn’t, you couldn’t have.”

“We did what we had to do, boy,” Karl said. “And we’ve protected you from it.”

“You haven’t, though! Father, if anyone finds out about this, all our lives are forfeit.” 

Holding out a placating hand to the mage, his father gave Jaskier another smile, this one tinged with mild regret. “Come away, now, son,” his father said, gesturing.

The mage began to mutter under his breath, and Jaskier’s eyelids grew heavy.

With a grinding scream of rage, Geralt launched himself over Jaskier. The chains dangling from his shackles jangled as he clamped both hands around the mage’s neck, one steadying his nape and the other clutching his throat.

Karl gurgled out an incoherent protest.

Geralt ripped out his throat one-handed.

Jaskier’s father yelped and hid himself behind the guards as the room descended into chaos. Geralt was a blur of bloody violence dancing to a chorus of wet squelches and brittle snaps, but the guards pushed him back long enough to organize into a half-circle of shields and swords around the door.

Stalking back and forth before them with teeth bared, Geralt crouched, preparing to throw his naked body at the deadly barrier.

An explosion of blue light from Eskel knocked everyone from their feet.

Geralt was upright first, darting not towards the remaining guards but back to Eskel again. He fell to his knees and scooped Eskel into his lap. Pressing their foreheads together, he began his refrain again, “Eskel, Eskel, Eskel.”

Jaskier pushed himself to his hands and knees a few moments later, shaking his head to clear it. “Eskel, Geralt. We have to—”

“Not that I’m ungrateful for this, for one last chance to hold him—” Eskel kissed Geralt’s bare collarbone and then cleared his throat with a hoarse grind of sound “—but what do you want?”

One of the guards groaned, a blade scraped across stone.

“I’m here to rescue you,” Jaskier said, wobbling to his feet. 

Eskel huffed, tucking his head under Geralt’s chin. “Our knight in shining armor. So, what’s your plan? Sell us to the highest bidder? Use us yourself?”

“N-no! Never!” Jaskier shuddered. “Listen, we don’t have time for this. We have to move.”

“I can’t,” Eskel said into Geralt’s chest. “Too weak. Too empty.”

“Hey!” his father’s captain shouted. Several guards got up, weapons clutched tight in shaking hands.

“But you’re together again!” Jaskier shouted, backing away from the armed men. “You’re soulmates! A power beyond words, immeasurable strength—” he trailed off, gesturing wildly to complete his sentence. 

Eskel opened his eyes and turned his head enough to give Jaskier an unimpressed look, his unscarred eyebrow arching slowly up his face. He raised one shaking hand and twisted his fingers into a strange claw.

A spout of flame erupted from his hand, arcing towards the guards.

Clapping his hands over his ears did nothing to block the screaming. The room filled with the scent of burning flesh as the soldiers contorted into blackened husks beneath the flames.

Eskel’s hand flopped down and the flames went out. The only sound was Jaskier’s father’s footsteps receding as he ran up the corridor.

Jaskier stared at Eskel wide-eyed, jaw working silently.

“How about now?” Eskel demanded, turning glittering eyes on Jaskier. “Still here for the gallant rescue? Going to risk your short, human life for two broken monsters?”

“Yes,” Jaskier said.

“Eskel, Eskel, Eskel,” Geralt said just as nonsensically.

“Right. Well. Why not?” Eskel huffed out a bitter laugh. His hands twitched in his lap like broken-winged birds until Geralt unwound himself enough to pick one up and press it to the side of his own face. He held Eskel’s hand there as the dark-haired man stroked back a few locks of grimy white hair, then pulled their heads close together again. “Geralt? Are you in there at all? You have to go.”

“Oh no. No, no, no, and also no,” Jaskier said as firmly as he could. He gestured for Geralt to follow him, resisting the urge to pat his thigh like he was calling a dog. “If you’re strong enough for spellcasting, then you’re strong enough to escape. This is an everyone lives situation.”

“How—” Eskel cut himself off as Geralt staggered to his feet with the larger man cradled against his chest like a child. “Well, ok then.”

“That’ll work,” Jaskier said. “Come on.”

*

“Julian? What are you doing here?”

Spinning away from his horse, Jaskier threw himself between the Witchers and the new threat.

“Mother,” he realized, his breath leaving him in a whoosh. “Thank the gods it’s you.”

His mother stepped a little further into the stables. “Who are these…people?”

Geralt hissed wordlessly at her from the shadows. He was crouched against the wall, still holding Eskel close, still stroking mindlessly at his scars and his pulse point, but he’d at least put on the trousers Jaskier had pulled from his saddlebags, wrangling a second pair onto Eskel’s unresisting body while Jaskier readied the horses.

“I tried to tell you,” Jaskier said to his mother, clasping her hands in both of his. “Father had two soulmates imprisoned beneath the estate; he was selling their power to the mages. We have to flee before he gathers more guards. Come with us!”

“That can’t be right,” she said. She glanced towards the house, where lights were going on in rooms too quickly for Jaskier to count. “I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding. We can clear it all up. Come away now, Julian.”

“Listen to me,” Jaskier said, shaking their joined hands. “You used to tell me about soulmates, remember? A beautiful bond, but a burden. Because people use them.”

His mother smiled at him. “The story, I remember. But your father would never do something so terrible. Maybe Karl, but not your father. Stay, Julian. Jaskier. Stay with me, please.”

“She’s lying,” Eskel said without opening his eyes.

“Impossible,” Jaskier snapped back.

“I know her scent, her heartbeat,” Eskel said. “She visited us often.”

Between one breath and the next her face hardened, losing its soft look of supplication and twisting as if she scented rot on the wind. She shook her hands loose from Jaskier’s. “You’d better go.”

“What?” Jaskier asked, gaping.

Geralt stood, pushing Jaskier out of the way to get to a horse. He carefully lifted Eskel into the saddle, arranging his feet in the stirrups and threading his fingers in the horse’s mane. When Eskel was situated, Geralt jumped up to sit on the pad behind the saddle, his motions fluid and practiced, as if he wasn’t barefoot and bleeding from dozens of deep wounds.

“We’re going,” Eskel said, looking down his nose at Jaskier, his head tipped back to rest on Geralt’s shoulder. “Come with us and live or take your chances with this thrice-cursed woman.”

“She didn’t know,” Jaskier argued. He turned to his mother. “Tell them you didn’t know! Tell them you would never have let that happen.”

She smiled at him then, bitter and fond. “You always believe the best in people. Take care, my son, your naivety will be the death of you.” She turned and began to walk away.

“No,” Jaskier said.

Geralt’s fist in his collar stopped him from chasing her. The Witcher reached down from his perch to grab Jaskier, kicking his horse into motion and dragging him down to the next saddled mount.

Across the yard, guards began to spill out of the barracks, swords already drawn.

Jaskier climbed onto his horse, the animal dancing between his knees.

“No!” he shouted at his mother’s retreating back. “Never ending, unflinching love, mother. How could you abuse something so beautiful this way?”

She stopped but didn’t turn to look at him. “I didn’t want to die, Julian. I didn’t want to die.”

A sound was torn from his throat, a wordless cry of grief.

“Run, Julian,” his mother called over his shoulder, “While I can still let you.”

Dashing his hands across his eyes, Jaskier gave his mount her head, letting her follow the Witchers into the night.

Chapter Text

The golden light of a dozen clean-smelling candles lit the room with a warm glow. A striped Zerrikanian rug and decorative tapestries softened the edges of the room, and the air smelled faintly of parchment and clean laundry. In the distance, Jaskier could hear students singing as they returned home from a night of innocent carousing.

The two broken men in the tub didn’t belong here.

Five days of fleeing across the countryside had heaped exhaustion on their rounded shoulders and crusted their wounds with dirt and grime. They’d washed the worst of it off in the courtyard, but their footprints had still left stains across Jaskier’s carpets as they made their way to his bath. They stripped each other, unbothered by Jaskier’s presence, Eskel leaning heavily on Geralt.

Jaskier didn’t belong here with them.

Geralt lowered Eskel into the water and stepped in after him, allowing himself to be poked and prodded into sitting across the tub. Even sitting practically in each other’s laps, it was the most they’d separated since they’d escaped, and Geralt fidgeted nervously.

“Let me just get you—” Jaskier cut off his nervous babble and dug out his soaps, a clean washcloth, and towels. Setting them next to the tub, he caught a glimpse of their fingers laced together on the edge.

Jaskier’s tongue was too thick for his mouth when he spoke. “I’m going to go.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Eskel said mildly, without looking up from his scrutiny of Geralt’s naked body.

“You want me to stay?” Jaskier asked.

“Not particularly, but I don’t trust you to go.” Eskel took up a washcloth and began scrubbing at his own wrists, revealing pink and healthy skin.

“You had wounds there!” Jaskier exclaimed, making Eskel twitch. “They’re gone!”

Eskel’s face pinched. He scrubbed harder, revealing a body scarred by teeth, claws, and blades, but few marks from his captivity. “Geralt’s been working on them as we rode.”

Geralt’s restless hands had gone back to their endless roaming around Eskel’s skin, as if he was searching for new wounds with the pads of his fingers, a quiet jingling accompanying his every motion. Studded shackles still hung around the white-haired Witcher’s wrists, the skin around them shiny with fresh blood. He hadn’t allowed Jaskier close enough to try and remove them.

“Amazing.” Jaskier collapsed in a nearby chair, the release of his relief making him feel his own exhaustion. “True love conquers all, after all, thank the gods. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Geralt heals, and—”

Eskel had begun to wash Geralt, starting with the ring of bloody divots around one bicep. The wounds bled freely, staining the water pink. Before he’d even finished cleaning those, Eskel slumped forward to press their foreheads together, shaking with exertion.

“Why isn’t he healed?” Jaskier asked. “And if you’re healed, why are you so weak?”

“Same answer to both questions,” Eskel said without opening his eyes. “Used up.”

“No, I’ve read the stories.” Jaskier gestured at his bookshelves, they were full of stories about soulmates. “The bond is boundless. The power can be drained, but the bond regenerates it endlessly.”

“The bond may be endless,” Eskel said, turning the word into a curse, “But I’m not. I’m used up, a cracked vessel that can’t hold the healing power.” He raised his hand to press it against the ring of bloody holes the spiked collar had left across Geralt’s throat like a gruesome necklace. Nothing happened, and he dropped his hand with a snarl.

“He hurt himself more than you did,” Jaskier realized, comparing the marks on their bodies again. “That pulled most of the power through you.”

Eskel sighed and twitched his fingers against Geralt’s bare chest in a caricature of a caress.

“Maybe it’s better if he never comes back to himself,” Jaskier suggested, hating the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. “I mean, at least this way…he’ll never know what he did to you.”

The narrowed eyes Eskel turned on Jaskier made him lean back reflexively.

“Your family did this to me, to him,” Eskel spat. “And I want him back. I want him back.”

“I—”

Eskel raised his hand in a strange gesture, and Jaskier’s mind stilled.

“You will sit there and be quiet,” Eskel ordered. “And tomorrow you will remember none of this.”

Jaskier nodded slowly.

Eskel’s attention had already turned back to his soulmate.

“Geralt?” he asked, kissing the white-haired Witcher’s scarred eyebrow. “Ger? Are you in there?”

Geralt gave no sign he’d heard his soulmate, but when Eskel pushed weakly at his chest to get a bit more space, Geralt loosened his arms with a concerned sound.

Taking one of Geralt’s hands into his lap, Eskel pulled ineffectively at the shackle around his wrist, wincing as it bit into his fingers. “Come on, help me get these off.”

Raising his other hand, Geralt stroked his fingers down Eskel’s face, ignoring his soulmate’s frustrated growling as he struggled with the band of nail-studded steel cutting into his wrist.

“Damn it,” Eskel snapped. He gave up, taking up the washcloth again with shaking hands. Resuming his methodical washing of Geralt’s wounds, Eskel started to work on the blackened scabs around his neck.

“I’m sorry I can’t fix these,” he said as he worked. “Witcher healing should take care of them once we get some food in you, but they’re going to scar. I’m going to see them every damn time I look at you, and know I failed you.” His hand stilled. “You were right, I should have axii’d the stable boy.”

A flush of fear stirred the unnatural calm washing over Jaskier’s mind.

They didn’t know Jaskier had betrayed them to his father.

Taking a breath, Eskel started moving again, washing across Geralt’s chest and down one arm, his touch slow and reverent.

“We’re better together, that’s what you always say.” Eskel gestured at the scarred side of his face. “And it’s true I wouldn’t have these scars if we were together then, Blaviken wouldn’t have happened if we were together.”

One of Geralt's hands was on Eskel’s shoulder, holding the sagging Witcher up. His flat eyes were fixed on the pulse jumping in Eskel’s throat.

“Geralt?” Eskel washed down his other arm, then dipped the washcloth lower in the water, his hands disappearing beneath the edge of the tub.

Geralt didn’t react.

“Please,” Eskel begged. Dropping the washcloth, he wrapped clumsy arms around Geralt and laid back, tugging weakly until the white-haired man lay down on his chest in the tub. He tucked Geralt under his chin with his ear over Eskel’s heart and pressed a kiss to his still dirty hair. “Please, Geralt, hear that? I’m here, you’re here. We’re ok. Come back to me.”

Geralt tolerated the position for a bare handful of moments before he shifted them around, sitting up, bringing Eskel’s limp body back into his lap, and wrapping protective arms around him. His only reaction to Eskel frantically kissing his cheek, his mouth, was to pull away and tilt his head towards some sound from deeper in the building.

A ragged sound of pain fell from Eskel’s lips.

He didn’t try to talk to Geralt anymore after that. It took another agonizing hour for him to finish cleaning Geralt’s wounds, which had finally begun to close by the time they staggered out of the tub together and collapsed on the bed.  

They ended up sitting against the headboard, Eskel once again in Geralt’s lap.

“I love you, Geralt,” Eskel whispered. He pressed his hand to Geralt’s chest above his heart. “I know we never said the words, never thought we had to, but I should have told you every day. You were worth it. I’d gladly trade another ten years of torture for ten of our worst minutes together on the Path. Don’t leave me to walk it alone.”

Jaskier woke the next day with tears on his lashes, mourning something he’d already forgotten.

*

The door rattled on its hinges as someone pounded on it.

This was it. They’d lingered too long, Jaskier having nowhere else to go and no way to get the Witchers away in secret anyway.

“Gonna get that?” Eskel asked from where he sat in Geralt’s arms on the bed.

The door slammed open before he could reply.

Jaskier had an impression of broad shoulders and red hair before he was shoved to the side hard enough to fall to the floor.

“I told you I knew a wolf,” the cat Witcher said with his half-mad grin, following the redhead into the room.

“Geralt! Eskel!” The redhead charged towards the two Witchers on the bed. “We thought you were dead!”

“Lambert, no!” Eskel cried, holding one hand out to stop him.

The redhead, Lambert, ignored him, and found himself brought up short by the point of a dagger set against his throat.

Jaskier didn’t even know where Geralt had gotten a dagger.

“Pretty boy, it’s me,” Lambert said, hands held up in surrender.

“He’s not himself,” Eskel said. He pulled at Geralt’s arm, trying to drag the dagger away from Lambert’s throat, but the white-haired Witcher might as well be carved from stone.

“No fucking shit, Eskel.” Lambert took a step back.

Achingly slowly, Geralt lowered his arm. The dagger disappeared.

“How long has he been like this?” Lambert demanded, his hands flapping at his sides as if he wanted to reach for them.

Days had passed, but Geralt remained eerily empty, a puppet without a person to pilot it, a body that dressed itself and put food in its mouth and listened always for danger, but all to serve a single external purpose: Eskel. Protect Eskel, save Eskel, heal Eskel, it was as if the whole of his personality had been burned out. All that was left of Geralt was Eskel.

Jaskier shuddered. As an impressionable youth he had dreamed of finding his soulmate. But even knowing they could be used cruelly, he’d never realized the bond could be perverted this way, that a person could become nothing but the bond.

“You don’t know what happened,” Eskel said defensively, clutching Geralt’s arm to his chest like a child’s toy. With his other hand he reached for Lambert.

Geralt’s eyes narrowed, but he allowed the two to clasp hands.

The relief on Lambert’s face was short lived. His eyebrows snapped together. “Eskel, no. How?”

“I’m used up, I guess,” Eskel said. He dropped his hand away from Lambert’s and tucked himself back under Geralt’s chin. “And he’s gone. A while ago, I think. Nearer to the beginning of it than the end.”

“Eskel, you’ve been missing for thirteen years,” Lambert said. He sat on the end of the bed as if his strings had been cut.

Jaskier remembered Geralt and Eskel as he’d first seen them, laughing and kissing in the stable yard. He’d been a child, barely more than a babe at the time. He couldn’t remember what they said or wore or even really looked like, but he remembered the way he felt when he looked at them, warmed and comforted by their easy joy.

For a long, long time the only sound in the room was the delicate jingle of the chains on Geralt’s wrists as he stroked Eskel’s neck.

“We need to get you somewhere safe,” Aiden finally said. “Kaer Morhen?”

“Hah, Kaer Morhen, safe?” Lambert asked.

“There’s nothing there that can hurt us now, just the memories,” Eskel said.

“But memories hurt so much,” Jaskier said without thinking.

“Who the fuck is the human, anyway?” Lambert asked.

“He saved us,” Eskel said, and gods above, the suspicion had faded from his tone.

But Jaskier hadn’t saved them, no. He hadn’t saved them.

*

They fled north, towards the dubious safety of the Witcher stronghold.

It went well for a while.

And then on a warm and sunny fall day, fifty mercenaries led by a Witcher assassin caught up with them in a wheat field. They were only three days from the safety of the mountains.  

It seemed Jaskier’s father had done what any smart man would do. He had hired professionals.

But his father could have sent one hundred and fifty; it wouldn’t have made a difference. Jaskier’s four Witchers were an army unto themselves. He merely had to sit on the seat of the wagon while battle raged around him. Eskel sat beside him, using magic to fend off any who got too close.

Jaskier turned his face away as another head went sailing past, mouth still open in a scream.

At least Geralt was using a sword this time. That had to be progress of some sort.

“Where’d Jad go?” Aiden asked as an unnatural silence settled on the bloody field.

Eskel slid down from his seat, draping himself on Geralt and searching his body with his hands, checking for injuries he could not heal.

There was a twang, a thunk, and an agonized scream.

A crossbow bolt protruded from one of Aiden’s eyes.

But Witcher bodies were beautiful, terrible things. Aiden was still alive as he fell into Lambert’s arms, still reaching with gentle hands for Lambert’s horrified face.

Lambert screamed.

Jaskier waited for the white light, the healing miracle that made a soulmate bond worth all the pain and agony.

Lambert screamed and screamed, but there was no miracle to save them, no blinding, healing light.

They weren’t soulmates, just in love.

How had Jaskier ever believed in love?

Jaskier fell to his knees across from them. Geralt arrived in time to catch Eskel as he wavered, lowering them both to the ground beside the dying Witcher and his beloved only because Eskel pulled him that way. Geralt hadn’t even noticed their agony, had been too busy systematically removing limbs from the enemy Witcher Jad.

“The human should have left you there!” Lambert screamed at Eskel, and perhaps Geralt, but the white-haired Witcher did not hear him.

“Lamb—” Eskel touched Aiden’s heaving chest, but nothing happened, nothing happened. “I’m sorry.”

“The two of you and your gods-damned bond are a curse, a blight on us all!” Lambert clutched Aiden’s shaking body close. “You did this! You killed him!”

“I’m sorry.” Eskel tried to fight his way out of Geralt’s mindlessly tight arms and then stilled.

Geralt’s head was tilted to the side.

He was looking at Lambert.

Then Aiden.

He reached for Aiden.

“Don’t you dare, you fucking fucker—” Lambert snarled, batting Geralt’s hand away.

“Lamb, let him, let him,” Eskel practically chanted, pushing Lambert’s hands aside.

With a contemplative sound, Geralt yanked the crossbow bolt from Aiden’s eye in a gush of blood.

Screaming wordlessly, Lambert dropped Aiden and tried to tackle Geralt, only to be stopped by Eskel. The two rolled in the muddy blood beside Aiden’s convulsing body, Lambert trying to pry Eskel’s hands from him long enough to get at Geralt and Eskel flopping like a rag doll as he was thrown around, all his failing strength locking Lambert’s arms to his sides.

A flash of white light and a concussive wave threw everyone back.

They all went still.

Aiden turned his head beneath the hand Geralt had pressed to his forehead, two green-gold eyes finding Lambert as if he were a flower turning towards the sun.

“Lamb?” Aiden asked.

Eskel hit the ground with a squelch as he dropped away from Lambert, letting him scurry to Aiden’s side and snatch the cat Witcher away from Geralt.

“Aiden, Aiden, fuck,” Lambert said, slamming Aiden’s forehead against his own.

“Ow,” Aiden said without heat. He hugged Lambert tightly, clinging to the larger redhead. “I’m alright, Lamb. I’m alright.”

Geralt sat back on his heels, watching the two Witchers for a moment, before turning to collect Eskel into his lap.

“Ger?” Eskel asked, cupping the side of his face. “Are you in there?”

For a moment, Jaskier swore he could see something stirring in Geralt’s eyes as he blinked at his soulmate, and then it was gone.

Geralt put his fingers on Eskel’s pulse point. “Eskel.”

“Yeah, I’m here. But you aren’t,” Eskel said, his voice clogged with tears. He shifted around until they were embracing each other, chest to chest, as they had the very first time after Jaskier set Geralt free. “Come back to me, gods damn it. I can’t do this alone.”

Jaskier woke the next morning to frost on the ground and an empty camp. The Witchers had disappeared during the night, leaving Jaskier with nothing but the clothes on his back and the shadows in his soul. 

“I’m lucky they didn’t take my life as well,” he commented to the cold campfire, trying to summon some gratitude for his good fortune. He felt empty and ash-black as the fire pit before him. “They’ll never be safe as long as there are those yet living who know their secret. Like my father and his cronies.”

His father had an extensive network of influence, one that would no doubt hunt the Witchers until their dying day.

A network he would now have to do without.

For lack of anything better to do, he rose and began to shuffle down the road.

Eventually, it would bring him to a town, at which point he’d have to come up with a better plan than ‘survive’.

He did eventually reach that next town, although it would be a long few days before he managed his next meal. And as hardship piled on top of tragedy, he was forced to acknowledge to himself that surviving might be all he was capable of, and only just. What little cash he earned by pawning the last of his finery was gone by the solstice, and he was just as likely to beg for his supper as he was to play for it by mid-winter. He made it to Novigrad, a city that could support an unproven minstrel like himself, by spring, though he lost the tip of one toe to frost-bite traveling in his too thin socks.

His fortunes should have improved then, as he began to earn his bread with his skills as a bard. By most external measures, it did. He had food in his belly, a shirt on his back, and a roof over his head. Most nights, anyway.

And yet…every stray cat staring out at him from the shadows had familiar, slit-pupiled eyes. They followed him from tavern to tavern as he did his rounds, looked in at him through the milky panes of flophouse windows while he tried to sleep. Every audience he sang to had at least one set of broad, bony shoulders that made Jaskier’s heart jump into his throat, though no one he’d met yet had a match for Eskel’s scars.

Eee-el, said Jaskier’s creaking chair as he stood from his last set and eee-el called the nightbirds from under the eaves and eee-el wheezed Jaskier’s breath as it whistled in and out of his performance sore throat.

The blackness festering in his soul seeped into his music. He could only sing around the edges of it, songs of lovers kept apart and innocence lost, of Witchers and the monsters they fought. He tried to correct some of the many misconceptions the world had about them in his new compositions, but the stunted nature of his uninspired work probably did more harm than good in the end.

It wasn't safe, he told himself, to get too close to the truth at the rotten heart of his shame. His father might hear and track him and the Witchers that way. But it was a lie he could only believe during the day, when the warmth of the sun on his face convinced him he could swallow the corrupted center of this story without rotting from the inside out. 

Because just as freeing the Witcher soulmates had not saved them from their awful fate, it had not freed Jaskier from their shadows.

*

“You know them Witchers steal children,” a voice behind Jaskier said. He whirled drunkenly, but the man only leaned out of range of Jaskier's sloshing ale and focused on the others at his table.

“Nonsense,” his benchmate responded. “Just las’ fortnight one of them chaps answered our notice about the fog wights and did away with 'em. Did a right proper job of it.”

A matronly woman across from him, his wife perhaps, nodded in agreement. “Never took more than the good coin he were offered, neither.”

Jaskier cleared his throat and tasted vomit. “My good people,” he interrupted, still smacking his lips and swallowing. “Care to share the story with a curious traveler?”

Three sets of identically suspicious eyes landed on him as he took a seat at their table.

“Why?” the woman asked.

“I'm a collector of strange stories,” Jaskier answered. “And too much of a damn coward to come by such stories on my own.”

They exchanged a glance.

“I'll buy you a round,” he added to sweeten the deal. 

Those were the magic words that would unlock many stories for him. 

*

When he ran into Lambert in yet another faceless, stinking tavern two years after they'd parted on that bloody field, it was less a matter of chance and more one of time. Jaskier had been looking for him since he'd put together enough coin for good traveling boots.

“Human,” Lambert greeted without turning as Jaskier settled on his bench, hopefully out of stabbing reach.

“How are they?” Jaskier asked. He had many other things to say, things he probably should have said first, but none of them really mattered. Only Geralt and Eskel mattered. 

The red-headed Witcher seemed to slouch further into his hunch over his foul-smelling stew. “You want me to believe you care?”

“Please, I need to know.” Jaskier winced at the raw emotion in his voice.

Lambert side-eyed him, then turned to give Jaskier his full attention. “You've survived better than I thought you would.”

“Thanks? And Eskel?... Geralt?”

The Witcher turned away with a shrug. “They haven't.”

“Haven't what?” Jaskier asked with lips gone suddenly numb.

Lambert shrugged again. “They breathe, they eat, they shit. But they aren't them anymore. Why am I telling you this?”

“Because I know what they've become,” Jasker said, almost absently. His eyes burned as he stared into the fetid prison cell of their past, of his past. Eee-el.

“You really don't.” Lambert pushed away his inedible meal. “It’s the damn songs.”

“What, my songs? You’ve heard my Witcher songs?”

“Everyone, and I mean everyone, has heard your damn Witcher songs.” He touched the full coin purse on his belt. “Some might even have listened.”  

“Well good, that’s why I wrote them. Please, Lambert. Geralt and Eskel?”

Lambert threw his spoon down into his stew with plop. “They aren't as bad as they were. Took the better part of a year but Eskel is about as strong as an ox, again, and at least Geralt doesn't have to be touching him at all times anymore.”

“That–that's good!” Jaskier could imagine them, Eskel with the bulk of a blacksmith, the two of them side by side, walking up some nameless mountain path. “That's so much better!”

“It's been two years, human,” Lambert said, lips twisting. “Geralt hasn't said a word, not a single word, in two years. He stopped even saying Eskel's name, and gods, if I knew how much I'd miss that I–I wouldn't have yelled at him for it, maybe.”

Jaskier got control of his expression before it could betray any disbelief at that, and then what Lambert said sank in. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.” Lambert turned the full force of his slitted glare on Jaskier. “He's an empty shell. A liability on the Path and burden off of it. And somehow, Eskel is worse.”

“How?”

“Eskel is angry in a way I didn’t think he could get. He was pretty bad back when his child surprise fucked up his face, but this is worse. It’s a ‘hate everything and anyone you’ve ever loved’ kind of anger. Geralt brought him back before, but Geralt–”  he cut himself off with a growl.

Jaskier swallowed hard. “I tried. It was–I did everything I–”

“Oh fuck you,” Lambert said, voice dripping scorn. “This isn't about you, human.”

But it was. It was, because it was Jaskier's fault, everything that had happened to Geralt and Eskel.

“Plus his–” Lambert tapped under his left eye, marking the horrible wound that had nearly taken the cat Witcher–"his special skills are gone.”

“And how is your cat Witcher?” Jaskier asked, suppressing the wobbling smile that threatened to sneak onto his face. Geralt had saved Lambert’s mortally wounded lover. That at least was a good thing, one good thing in a pack of terrible ones. 

“He’s not my anything,” Lambert said, far too vehemently. “Haven’t seen him in years.” 

“What? But I thought…I mean,” Jaskier huffed out a disbelieving sound. “You obviously love him.” 

“I can’t ever love him,” Lambert spat. 

“He’s a perfectly lovely man!” Jaskier said before he realized he had no idea what sort of man Aiden was at all, except…”A little insane, maybe, but he certainly came to our rescue. So he can’t be all bad–”

“He’s the best, the absolute best man I’ve ever known,” Lambert said. “And for some gods forsaken reason, he actually cares about me. Me!”

“So–”

“Which is exactly why I won’t risk it, won’t risk him.” He glared at Jaskier, boring into him with sparking gold eyes. “You saw. You know what happens to soulmates.” He said the word like the curse it was. 

“It’s…” beautiful, Jaskier did not say. Because it wasn’t, what had happened to Geralt and Eskel. 

“It’s a fucking curse, one that I won’t let happen to Aiden. They’re shells now, both of them, in different, horrible ways. And the old man, our grandmaster, thinks they always will be. Thinks we should do like they used to with the broken ones.” 

“Gods.” Jaskier clutched at Lambert’s forearm. “You won’t let him. You won’t.”

Lambert shook off his grip. “Of course not. But, fuck, who knows? Maybe it would really be mercy. They aren’t getting any better.” 

“I hope you haven't told them that,” Jaskier said before his brain could catch up with his mouth.

This time Lambert hitched one knee up so he could face Jaskier fully on the bench. “What.”

“Nevermind. Listen, how many years did we–” oh gods, just strike him down now–"have them? And they're better, you said so. It takes time to heal from something like that.”

“It takes time to heal,” Lambert parroted back. “What do you fucking know?”

“Well, for one thing, I did a lot of research into soulmates when I first figured out what was going on. The power regenerates, given time and rest, as long as both soulmates still live–”

Lambert cut him off by standing. “And we're done. I should have killed you before, but Eskel disapproves of murder. Or he used to, I’m not so sure anymore. This time I’m just being generous. Because of the songs.”

“Wait! Where are they? I have to–I want to help.”

“You can't,” Lambert lashed out with his foot, knocking the bench backwards and sending Jaskier sprawling on his back. He rested the sole of his boot across Jaskier's throat and pressed just hard enough to make him wheeze.

“Stay away from me and what's left of my brothers, you sniveling son of slug infested corpse fucker.”

“I will,” Jaskier mouthed breathlessly.

He wouldn't. 

Chapter Text

He found them the following spring. He hadn't looked for them, in fact he'd gone as far from where he expected them to be as possible, but when he blew through the longhouse door on a sleeting Skellige evening, there they sat, side by side at a table in the darkest corner. If Jaskier still believed in gods he would have cursed them, because as soon as he met Eskel's eyes he knew they'd have to kill him to stop him from following them.

“Bard,” Eskel said as Jaskier staggered up to their table on legs gone stiff in his frozen trousers.

Geralt, of course, said nothing, but the halfway friendly greeting from his scarred soulmate was a surprise.

Jaskier opened his mouth and was cut off by a crash of thunder that shook the glassware on the shelves. The waif of a woman singing in the corner didn’t even pause her lament, nor did her sparse audience particularly seem to notice the interruption of the rising storm. 

“Only in Skellige does it rain, hail, snow and thunder at once,” Eskel commented as he pushed out the chair across from him in invitation.

Jaskier sat. For a moment they just studied each other.

At first glance, both Witchers looked good, though perhaps that was only because Jaskier had never seen them in any state but two steps from death's door. Eskel had a broad, barrel chest that strained the buckles of a battered leather jerkin. His cheeks had filled in, he was clean shaven, and he had trimmed his hair to just above his ears.

By comparison, Geralt was disarrayed, with his beard poorly trimmed and his hair loose around his shoulders. Though his clothes were no more threadbare than Eskel's, they hung in awkwardly on his frame, as if he'd dressed in the dark without much care to what ended up where. He had less meat on his bones too, and hollow cheeks to match his empty face. His eyes were focused on a point somewhere over Jaskier's left shoulder.

“You look well,” Jaskier said, because they did, relative to the half-mad skeletons he'd liberated from his father's dungeon.

“We aren't,” Eskel said, voice mild as milk.

“Maybe not wholly yet.” Jaskier leaned in, trying to convey his earnestness. “But you're traveling again, walking the Path together. That is progress, real progress”

Eskel's head gave an aborted shake that became a shrug. “The Path is between us and where we're going. That's all. We’re not capable of true contracts anymore.”

Jaskier picked at the cracked skin of his knuckles and dismissed an intrusive memory of his mother pressing a vial of lavender lotion into his hands as he left home for the first time.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To where we...became,” Eskel answered. His eyes scanned the alehouse, but no one looked up from their beers. The wraith in the corner had switched to yet another trembling dirge, this one about sirens and sailors. 

It was an old song, one his mother used to sing, about soulmates dying at sea. 

Jaskier blinked. The lore claimed that soulmates became bonded through an act of great, loving sacrifice. It was part of what young Jaskier had loved about the story back when he was a stupid little boy, but the details of the bonding were either lost to time, fettered in foolish embellishment or buried by those who exploited the resulting power.

“And you still can't...?” he asked.

In answer, Eskel reached over to where Geralt's forearms lay on the table and pulled up one over-long sleeve. The rusty, nail studded manacle on Geralt's wrist clanked to the table with a spatter of flesh red spots and a rain of dusty flaked blood.

Jaskier slapped his hand over his mouth to stifle his horrified cry.

“He won't let us, me, remove them,” Eskel said, his voice flat. He slid two fingers over an exposed gash and frowned at it. Nothing happened.

“It doesn't make sense,” Jaskier said, half to himself. “The energy isn't boundless, obviously, but it regenerates. That's what makes soulmates so astounding...the power of highly compatible souls to generate healing energy in each other, for each other and for those around them.” He stopped, biting his lip as he met Eskel's eyes again.

Eskel tipped his head. “A gift. A curse. I know .” The word sizzled in the clammy air of the alehouse like a bolt of lightning, and then it was gone. Eskel dropped his gaze to his fingers, still in the blood on Geralt's wrist, and Jaskier could breathe again.

“Lambert told us what you said. We're both alive, we should be getting better–”

“That's not what–” Jaskier began.

Eskel talked over him. “But we aren't.”

“What? You are–”

“Vesemir’s operating theory is an extension of yours. He's dead, Geralt's dead.”

Jaskier wobbled back in his seat, eyes darting to Geralt's empty face just in time to catch a breath of movement there. Or had he imagined it?

“That's insa–that doesn't make any sense.”

“I can feel his heartbeat,” Eskel continued with that dangerous edge, and oh, Lambert had been right. Eskel was angry, the kind of anger that broke the world open. “But apparently my soul doesn't recognize what's left in this body as Geralt.”

Geralt's left eyebrow twitched, just the tiniest of movements. His eyes, if anything, went more unfocused.

“I can feel his heartbeat,” Eskel said one more time, the pressure he was applying to Geralt's wrist making his knuckles whiten, “but Geralt is dead. That’s what Vesemir and the others think. His soul is gone.”

“If he breathes, he lives. If he lives, he has a soul.” Jaskier had done the research, had read until his eyes felt like burnt holes in his head. He had to believe souls were immutable, untouchable, lest he give in to the fear that his soul would be polluted forever by what he'd done.

“I know. That’s what I thought too. But what is a soul, if not who you are?” Eskel asked Geralt's wrist. “And he isn’t who he was. He doesn't make bad puns or dote on his horse, he doesn't pick wildflowers for me and pretend they’re alchemy ingredients. If he has a soul, it is not the other half of mine.”

Jaskier held his breath, half hoping Geralt would snatch away his hand in anger and half hoping he couldn’t understand a word of the poison dripping out of Eskel’s mouth.

Geralt's face was gravestone-still. 

“Watch,” Eskel said. He tugged Geralt’s hand close to his chest. “Geralt, look at me.” 

The white-haired Witcher’s attention had snagged on the singer in the corner. It didn’t waver.

“Please,” Eskel added. “Look at me.”

The door slammed open, twitching Geralt’s gaze to the two men staggering in from the storm. He did not look at Eskel, did not even hear Eskel. 

“You can't give up,” Jaskier said, and this time he was talking to himself.

“Don't tell me what I can't do,” Eskel said, the snap of his eyes on Jaskier rocking him back again. “I haven't forgotten, son of the man who killed my world. I haven't forgotten. Don't tell me what to do.”

It was worse than that, so much worse.

Jaskier opened his mouth to tell Eskel so, to tell him that he'd been the fool to hand the only living soulmate pair in the world over to his father's greed and desperation, to tell him he'd done this to them.

Geralt stood abruptly, pulling Eskel up by the elbow. He was looking pointedly at nothing again. 

“Guess we’re leaving,” Eskel said. He stepped around Geralt to take the lead and headed towards the door without looking back to see if the white-haired Witcher followed. He did, with Jaskier scrambling along behind like an uncoordinated puppy. 

“Wait, I'm coming with you,” Jaskier shouted out their backs.

The woman in the corner stopped caterwauling and now they did have the attention of more than a few curious patrons, but Jaskier ignored them.

“Why would we let you do that?” Eskel asked.

We, Jaskier thought, he said we.

“I could help?” Jaskier asked, not knowing how but knowing he had to, that he'd never truly be free of the sickness in him if he didn't.

“You can't,” Eskel said. He paused for a long moment on the threshold, looking out into the flashing light and whipping sleet of the storm. “But I want you to come anyway.”

“What?” Jaskier asked, his stomach dropping.

Eskel glanced over his shoulder and Jaskier recoiled from his expression, from the howling rage that twisted his face into a mask.

“I want you to see, son of the man who murdered my world,” Eskel said. “I want you to see.”

Then he stepped out into the storm.

And Jaskier would not have followed him, he would have damned himself to an eternity of hell on earth and beyond for his unrepented crimes. Because he was afraid. Eskel's voice promised death and Jaskier was a coward.

But Geralt looked back. He paused in the doorway and turned towards Jaskier just as another bolt of lightning lit his face. For a heartbeat Jaskier could see that Geralt was looking at him, really looking at him, and his mouth twisted into a bitter little smile.

Jaskier followed them. 

*

The first night, they took shelter from the remnants of the storm in a ruined tower. Geralt dropped his pack and disappeared into the sleet as soon as Eskel had a fire going.

A wolf howled, close enough that Jaskier whirled to stare out into the darkness. “He didn’t take a weapon,” he said to Eskel. 

Eskel snorted and didn’t look up from his unpacking. “He’s as well armed as any predator out there.” 

Another wolf howled, then cut off suddenly. A chorus of yips and yelps like pained laughter broke out, the sound echoing off the stones of the tumbled down tower until it sounded as if the cries were all around them. 

Geralt materialized out of the darkness with a stag in his bloody hands, ignoring Jaskier’s yelp and dropping the carcass at Eskel’s side. 

The other Witcher didn’t acknowledge it. But after he’d finished his fiddling with the contents of his pack, he spitted the meat. He suspended it half on the fire and half off, then gave Geralt the rarer portion. Geralt shoved a third of it, the more cooked part, back onto Eskel's plate. It could have been because he preferred the bloody meat, it could have been some instinctive, animal response. That somehow included an understanding of flatware. But Eskel was also the bigger man and there was more of him to feed. 

A nest of harpies attacked them three days later. Geralt hung back to protect Jaskier without being told, gnashing his teeth and pacing, his entire body thrumming with nervous energy as Eskel fought the bulk of the flock alone in a savage flurry of spinning blades and flashing magic. 

Despite Eskel’s obvious skill, even Jaskier could see he let their claws get too close, waited too long to blast them back when they mobbed him as a group. Something almost word like bubbled out of Geralt’s throat as he paced at Jaskier’s side. 

When it was over, Geralt darted out to press his hands to the bloody gash on Eskel's cheek. It disappeared in a white flash before Eskel could wrench himself away. 

“It was nothing,” he bit out, practically spitting in his soulmate's face.

But when they rolled out their bedrolls that night, Eskel put Geralt's closer to the fire, taking the outside position.

“He gets colder,” Eskel explained when Jaskier raised an eyebrow at him.

“Do you think…” Jaskier looked at Geralt, who looked at nothing, staring blankly into the fire, where a pot of water was boiling for Jaskier’s water skin. “Do you think he notices where you put his blankets?”

“No, I don’t,” Eskel said. 

Jaskier kept his mouth shut until he was sure a sob wouldn’t come tearing out of it. Then he steeled himself. 

“Eskel, there’s something I have to tell you–”

Geralt stuck his bare hand into the fire to retrieve their cooking pot, spilling the boiling water all over himself when his grip on the searing-hot metal faltered.

“Gods above–” Eskel leapt over to his soulmate, kicking away the fallen pot. “Can’t trust you to do even the simplest tasks…” 

Tripping away into the darkness, Jaskier fled to the nearby stream under the guise of collecting more water. Eskel’s cursing echoed in his ears long after he’d gotten out of earshot. 

Eskel continued to put Geralt's blankets closest to the fire.

Geralt never spoke, never seemed to even hear Eskel, but they set up camp without tripping over each other. They walked narrow mountain passes in single file and wider roads side by side, moving smoothly from one to the other without having to discuss it. They fought monsters like a two-man army without ever needing to strategize. And always, always, each gave the other the best bits of what little they had to give. 

Even after everything, knowing what he knew about how the world had treated them, how it would treat them if they were found out again, Jaskier was bitterly jealous of their casual intimacy. They knew each other, deeply, wordlessly, in a way Jaskier could never hope to know anyone. It was beauty twisted into a horror, because they could not see it.

He was reminded of the price they paid for that intimacy again when they finally reached Ard Skellige's harbor. The closer they got to the town center, the thicker the crowd got and the stranger Geralt acted. Out in the wilds, Jaskier could almost forget how broken the white-haired Witcher was. He hunted, he fought, he made camp. He functioned, at what seemed to Jaskier to be a high level of consciousness.

Apparently more of that was instinctive than he'd thought.

Eskel had to drag them into a quiet alley before they got anywhere near the inn, digging at the fingers Geralt had wrapped around his wrist and glaring into the other man's snarling face.

“You can't do this here,” Eskel hissed, trying to pry himself free. “You have to back off, you have to let me lead.”

There was no sense in Geralt's eyes as they darted around, following every distant sound and twitching at every close one. He didn't understand what Eskel was saying. Maybe he'd never really understood what they said to him day after day, maybe they'd only trained him into habits that looked like understanding.

“You're hurting me,” Eskel said as he twisted his wrist in Geralt's grasp, but even that didn't break through. “You–you're not supposed to hurt me.”

Every time Jaskier thought his heart had broken into pieces too small to break any further, Eskel and Geralt proved him wrong.

“Just let go, gods damn it,” Eskel snarled.

The snap of Geralt's index finger breaking was thunderclap loud.

Geralt recoiled from Eskel like a kicked dog.

“Melitele, Ger, I'm sorry,” Eskel said. He held his hands up placatingly, then reached for his soulmate again. “I didn't mean to. Let me see.”

The white-haired Witcher shuffled backwards away from Eskel, tripping over the gutter and slamming backfirst into the stone of the nearest building. 

“Look at me, Geralt, gods damn it,” Eskel snarled. “See me. I’m trying to help you.” 

But Geralt wouldn't let Eskel get close, wouldn’t even make eye contact with him no matter how he begged or cursed. 

“This,” Eskel spat at Jaskier, gesturing at the man cowering against the wall, flinching at his every movement. “This is what I wanted you to see. This is not my soulmate.”

In the end, they snuck out of town again with Geralt still clutching his visibly broken hand to his chest. Jaskier set the broken finger after they set up a hasty camp, while Eskel made old growth forest into kindling with his bare hands. He disappeared shortly thereafter.

It was the first time Jaskier had seen them separate since he'd set them free.

When Eskel plopped down in his bedroll behind Geralt smelling like cheap alcohol and even cheaper perfume two days later, the white-haired Witcher’s face lost its blank cast. He continued to feign sleep, but the corners of his mouth furrowed and his brow wrinkled. Then Eskel’s belching snore startled his eyes open just in time to catch Jaskier staring. 

He froze like a startled deer, eyes wide.

The naked fear in his eyes stole Jaskier’s breath. 

Geralt shut his eyes again and hugged himself tighter, making no move to seek out Eskel’s touch just a hand’s breadth behind him.  

Jaskier's heart ground into ever small shards of dust.

He woke the next day with tears still in the corners of his eyes, jarred from his uneasy sleep by a particularly loud snore.

Eskel lay sprawled out on his bedroll still, one hand clutching the empty space where Geralt had been. The white-haired Witcher was nowhere to be seen.

Sitting up, Jaskier found Geralt a few paces away, leaning on Roach's neck. It was hard to tell from where he sat, but it looked like Geralt was running his fingers through her mane over and over, straightening out the tangles.

Jaskier refused to believe what Eskel now seemed to accept as fact. A man could change, could become something new from the ashes of who he'd been, without losing his soul. Jaskier had to believe it. 

Geralt lived. Eskel lived. Jaskier just had to prove it to them. 

They got where they were going eventually, though Jaskier would never have guessed without Eskel’s announcement.

“Here,” Eskel said, staring off into the misty distance. He pulled harder at the oars, rocking the little skiff they’d stolen for the last leg of the journey.

Jaskier squinted. It was raining (because Skellige), an endless, drenching rain that cloaked the landscape in curtains of mist. A shape rose from the water before them, looming like the ghostly prow of an abandoned shipwreck. 

“Here?” he asked, frowning at the rocky little island as they approached it. “It all happened here?”

Eskel grunted in confirmation. “A griffin nest and an accident of fate. We both sailed out here on our own, neither had any idea the other was on this hunt.”

“A griffin.” A monster had made Geralt and Eskel into soulmates. 

“Three, actually.” Eskel actually smiled at the memory of the uneven fight. “I could hear his cursing from a quarter mile to shore.”

“Seems an odd number.” 

“Two were a mated pair, but the third…I’ve never figured it out, actually. Young, but too old to be their juvenile chick…cub? And the wrong colors too. Geralt always said–” he’d been doing that more now, talking about Geralt in the past tense, but he always tripped when he realized it– “Geralt said we shouldn’t judge their lifestyle.” 

That startled a laugh out of Jaskier. “I like him, your Geralt.” 

“You would have.” 

Their Geralt continued to stare into the distance on the other side of the island unspeaking.

They landed on a spray of gravel that had tumbled down the cliffs to create a steep, narrow beach. Jaskier choked on the humid air, trying not to gag on the smell of death and rot. 

“Looks like something else chose here as a place to die,” Eskel said, pointing with his chin while his hands were busy with the rigging.

Jaskier followed the gesture to a humped form at the far end of the beach. What he’d originally taken for a rocky outcropping was indeed too rounded and organic to be anything but the corpse of some large sea creature. 

“This is the setting for your soulmate story,” Jaskier said, covering his nose. 

Both Witchers turned to stare at him, Eskel with that angry twist to his handsome face. 

“You still think this is some bardic tale of romance and triumph?” he asked. 

“I’m sorry,” Jaskeir said. 

Eskel shook his head, still scowling. “For what your family did or for your own foolishness?” 

“No, no that–or wait, yes, both of those.” Jaskier’s breath caught. “For more than that. Eskel, it was me–” 

Geralt jumped down from the skiff and landed in the shallow water with a great splash. He skittered away up the slope in a grinding crunch of boots on gravel. 

“Whatever,” Eskel said, following his soulmate onto the beach. He pushed the skiff a little farther from the waterline. “Just, do you think you can handle this on your own?”

“I…” Jaskier’s tongue was still tangled up around his aborted confession. “Why?”

“In case the griffins came back from the dead.”

“Do they do that?”

“Nothing does that.” Eskel started up the slope. “Come.”

“Eskel I have to tell you something–”

“No,” Eskel said. “Just follow, just watch. And then I want you to write about what you see. Tell the bloody, terrible truth of it.”

“I see two men who are hurting, who've been hurt by the world, hurt by–”

“Enough,” Eskel said as he flicked his hand at Jaskier.

Jaskier flew backwards in a blast of blue light. By the time he'd shaken off his shock and stumbled to his feet Eskel was just disappearing above him.

Heart hammering, Jaskier followed at a run, tripping and shredding his trouser knees, his hands, as he stumbled up the rocky slope. At the top, the footing evened out into a sparsely grassy area beneath a few stunted, twisted pines.

Geralt was kneeling in the mud beside the remnants of a large nest. He dipped his fingers into a furrow in the earth before him, his hand and shackle bound wrist disappearing into a puddle at least a foot deep.

Eskel dropped to his knees across from Geralt and took his hand. 

“Do you remember, Ger?” Eskel asked, and for the first time in a long time, Jaskier could hear something other than anger in his voice.

If Geralt remembered, if Geralt was Geralt at all, he gave no sign of it.

“We were doing pretty well for ourselves until the last griffin. Guess he didn't like what we did to his mates.” Eskel huffed a humorless laugh.

Geralt didn't respond.

“And you, you damn fool, you pushed me out of the way and took those claws across the belly, right here.” He dipped their joined hands into the puddle between them. “I've never seen anything more terrible, even now. Even after Lettenhove. I could see the whiteness of your spine. I kept thinking, 'Shouldn't it be wet?' but you had no blood left in you, already.”

Jaskier made a terrible noise in the back of his throat, but Geralt didn't speak.

“And you were still alive,” Eskel added. “Told me, 'make sure it's dead and get the damn livers. Good for a coin or two.' Laying there with your guts out, talking about the price of griffin livers, that was you.”

A tear rolled down Jaskier's cheek, and then another, warm tracks mingling with the rain water on his skin. 

Eskel slicked his wet hair out of his eyes with his free hand, then pressed it over his heart. “You were dying and I couldn’t imagine a world without you. It couldn't be. I wouldn't let it.”

Geralt's eyes remained fixed on some point in the middle distance.

“It was like–” Eskel glanced over his shoulder at Jaskier, as if Jaskier was the one he was really talking to– “it was like I reached down, inside, and tore a hole in my soul. It was like finding a whole universe on the other side of the limits of your own existence.”

The body that had been Geralt had never seemed more empty, but Eskel turned back to it.

“It hurt, that first time, remember?” Eskel asked. He didn't wait for an answer. “It hurt both of us to pour ourselves out into the world, into each other.”

He sighed, then laughed. “But when I could see straight again, you were whole beneath my hands. And of course the damn griffin wasn't dead. Got me good while I was still gaping at you. You ended up putting me together afterwards in another flash of light.”

“You became soulmates,” Jaskier whispered.

Eskel's head wobbled in disagreement. “We were always soulmates, with or without the damn curse. But yeah. I saved us, and doomed us to this.”

He reached out to take Geralt's other hand, cradling his splinted fingers carefully.

“I need you to come back, Ger. I can't bear the weight of this thing between us alone. You never blamed me, convinced me it was worth it to have each other. Remember, and come back to me.”

The rain drummed on the top of Jaskier's head. The branches of the pines sighed in the wind. The two Witchers knelt on their heels in the mud. An eternity passed while they waited, and waited, while the world went on around them. 

Jaskier was still waiting when Eskel squeezed Geralt's fingers gently and let one of his hands go. Jaskier watched in a stupor as Eskel reached up and loosened the buckles on Geralt's armor, pushing it back from his chest. Geralt swayed toward him at the movement, but it wasn’t a real response, just his body finding center again.

The zing of a blade being drawn from its sheath startled Jaskier into motion, tripping and splashing towards them.

They ignored him.

“Please,” Eskel begged, as he placed the tip of a long dagger against the thin fabric over Geralt's heart. “Please, come back to me. Because I tried, Geralt, we all tried. Vesemir, Lambert, Aiden. Hell, even the human tried. But they all say you’re dead. And I need you to try, love. Try to live.”

“Eskel, no,” Jaskier rasped out, but any other argument was lost as he slammed into an invisible wall that glowed gold at the impact.

“I doomed us because I couldn't let you go,” Eskel said. “I won't make the same mistake twice.”

Chapter Text

The moment stretched, silent but for the buzzing of the golden wall, which flared bright every time Jaskier beat his fists upon it.

Geralt didn't move, his face gray sky blank as Eskel indented the fabric above his heart with the tip of his dagger.

“Please Geralt, just look at me damn it.” 

But Geralt didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t.

The blade wobbled in Eskel's hand.

“Damn it to all the gods,” Eskel spat out. “Damn them, damn us, damn you. Damn you for leaving me alone with your screaming corpse for a decade. Damn you for leaving me alone forever after that.”

Eskel’s hand drifted back from Geralt’s chest, still holding the dagger loosely pointed at his soulmate’s heart.

“I hate this, I hate what they’ve done to us, sometimes I even hate you.” He tipped his head back and spoke to the sky, letting the rain fall on his upturned face. “And still, I can't let you go. I’d rather hate you than lose you.”

Jaskier took a breath like a sob, relief making his knees weak.

Geralt moved, then. Not quickly but deliberately, the change from passive emptiness to intentional movement shocking enough that neither Eskel nor Jaskier reacted as he wrapped his hands around Eskel's fingers and the hilt of the dagger.

Then he yanked, pulling the dagger towards his own chest with a burst of strength that Eskel barely checked, catching it just before it plunged into his heart.

Jaskier struck a new barrier when he threw himself forward, thinner and dimmer, but still impenetrable.

“Geralt, no!” Jaskier shouted, slamming his body into the barrier again.

On the other side, the Witchers continued to struggle for control of the dagger. The tip dug a shallow hole into Geralt's chest with each of his gasping breaths now. They were evenly matched, as they had probably always been, Geralt's determination and Eskel's strength locking them in an impossible struggle.

“Sorry,” Geralt ground out. They both stilled, Eskel's eyes going wide. “Sorry. Left you alone. Sorry I can't be who you loved.”

“No, Ger--”

Geralt cut him off with a kiss, his lips turning up as Eskel's arms slackened just a little. Geralt's biceps bunched.

“No!!!” Jaskier screamed. He threw himself against the barrier one more time.

It exploded in a shower of sparks that knocked Geralt back into the mud. Jaskier landed on top of him.

“No,” Jaskier repeated, panting. He twisted, kicking away the dagger just as Geralt's eyes landed on it. “No, no, no. No.”

“Please,” Geralt rasped out.

“No,” Eskel agreed, crawling over to collapse beside Geralt in the mud. He pawed at Geralt until he turned his face towards Eskel, then pressed their foreheads together. “Ger, stay with me. I love you, stay with me.”

Geralt's focus drifted, then sharpened again, roaming over Eskel's features as if memorizing them. He shook his head back and forth, digging his hair into the mud with the motion. 

“Have you…” Eskel stammered to a stop, brushing a wet lock of gray-white hair out of Geralt’s face. “Were you here for all of that? You understood?”

Geralt glared a hole in Eskel’s chin. His shoulders hitched in a barely there shrug.

“Enough of it,” Eskel interpreted, his face falling.

Another shrug. “You should hate me,” he growled. “I failed you.”

Jaskier rolled a little farther away and sat up, touching his own throat in sympathy to the shards of sound tearing out of Geralt’s mouth.

“Okay, okay,” Eskel soothed. “You don’t have to talk–”  

“I broke. Left you alone with my screaming corpse. You should be angry. But it wasn't a choice then, hiding myself in my mind.”

“Now it is,” Jaskier guessed. "Or it has been, off and on." 

Two sets of slitted eyes flicked over to him, blinking in unison.

“I saw that you were afraid,” Jaskier continued, when neither seemed inclined to break the silence. “Afraid of what?”

“Of me?” Eskel asked. His hand drifted down from Geralt's face to rest over the bloody stain on his shirt.

“Never, not even at your worst, Eskel Even-hearted,” Geralt said, laying his splinted hand over Eskel's on his chest. “You weren’t going to kill me. You were going to carry my corpse through the rest of your life.”

Eskel propped himself up on one elbow and looked down into Geralt's face. “Then what are you afraid of?”

Geralt stayed on his side, staring off into the distance. Jaskier began to fear he’d slipped away again, but then he drew a deep breath and spoke. 

“Everything,” he said. “Only everything.” 

Jaskier understood. “It’s too much to believe, isn’t it? That it could get better. Sometimes the night is so long, I can’t trust the day. I can’t trust…”

“Myself,” Geralt finished. “What’s left of me. Can’t trust it to be enough.” 

“You've always been enough for me, Geralt,” Eskel said. “When you were a bubbly red-headed boy, a silent white-haired trainee, a hunted, hated Witcher and now--”

Geralt raised one hand to push aside Eskel's fingers on his chest, and then the collar of his shirt. The hole above his heart remained, still seeping blood. “Now your soul doesn't know me.”

“But I know you,” Eskel said. “I know this you, the one who never believes he deserves love. Look at me, Geralt.”

And Melitele bless it, Geralt did.

“I love you,” Eskel said, flicking the tip of Geralt's sharp-bladed nose when it wrinkled in disbelief. “Accepting you, loving whoever you become to survive–it's not a soulmate thing. It's a love thing. I will love you in any way you can come back to me.”

He laid his hand over Geralt's wounded chest again. As always, nothing happened. “And this, what I've lost, it’s not your fault. You aren't the only one they broke.”

Geralt made a sound Jaskier couldn’t interpret. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Eskel said. “I just need you to try. Will you do that?”

“Will you?” Geralt asked. “It’s eating you too, Eskel. The anger.”

Eskel opened his mouth but only a sob came out. They reached for each other in one motion and fell together as if magnetized, smashing their chests together. They rolled back and forth in mud in each other's arms in a crushingly close embrace that made it impossible to sort one soggy Witcher from the other. 

“Guess that’s a yes,” Jaskier commented to no one, his voice high-pitched. A laugh bubbled up from deep in his belly as he watched them wrestle or hug or whatever strange ritual they were performing there in the mud. Geralt rumbled and Eskel whispered as they rolled around, a gentle pattering of sound Jaskier couldn't catch above his rising, semi-hysterical laughter.

Both Witchers froze, then sat up with muddy water streaming down their faces and twigs tangled in their hair. They squinted into the rain behind Jaskier. 

“What the actual fuck is going on here?” Lambert asked from the edge of their mucky little clearing.

“Is it mud wrestling?” Aiden asked at his elbow. “Please say it’s mud wrestling.” 

*

“What the hell is this?” Lambert asked as he squelched over to Eskel. He pulled the larger Witcher up by his collar and smashed a wad of paper against his chest.

It looked like the remnants of a handwritten note, though between the crumpling, the rain and now the mud, it was surely illegible.

“Lambert,” Eskel said, “I thought I was doing the right thing for all of us.”

“ 'Lambert,' “ Lambert imitated, “ 'I'm sorry for being a burden.' “He ground the paper into Eskel's chest a little harder.

“Well, I am sorry for being a burden--”

“You're not a burden, you're my brother,” Lambert snapped. “And this bullshit about 'fixing this or ending it' had better be done with. Don't you dare go off and die on me, now, you selfish fuck.”

“Lamb,” Eskel said as he offered his hand to Geralt and pulled him to his feet, “You're not alone. Even without us--”

“Shut up.” Lambert slammed into Eskel in a hug that looked a bit like assault.

“I keep telling him that,” Aiden commented to Jaskier as he hauled him to his feet. “That he's not alone.”

“Not that I'm not glad to see you, Aiden,” Eskel said, wriggling out of Lambert's grasp to shake Aiden's hand, “But what are you doing here? This little rescue mission was hardly a--” he looked around--”three man job.”

Jaskier wondered if he was included in the headcount.

“He won't tell me what he's doing here.” Lambert waved his arms at Aiden. “And he won't go away. Just showed up at the foot of the Killer and hasn't stopped stealing my potions since.”

“He steals my bombs,” Aiden said to Jaskier.

“Oh no. I am not getting between you,” Jaskier commented, stepping away from the cat Witcher.

“So it's over?” Lambert asked. “You gonna let pretty boy go back to being the dramatic one?”

Eskel snorted and sent a transparently sappy look at Geralt, who was looking around the little group as if he'd never seen Lambert or Aiden in his life.

“It's over,” Eskel said. “Or maybe it's just starting, I don't know.”

“Well that's helpful.” Lambert eyed Geralt uneasily. “Will he bite me if I act like he exists?”

“Depends on how much stabbing your greeting involves, I expect,” Eskel answered.

Lambert stepped close to Geralt and gave him a quick back slapping hug. He received a baffled look in return, but after a moment of indecision, Geralt patted Lambert a few times on the shoulder. He was even mostly looking at Lambert's face as he did it. 

“Huh,” Aiden said. “That does look sort of like progress, I'll give you that.”

“Now what?” Lambert asked. “And fuck you if you want to go back to Kaer Morhen. The old man can sit on his 'survival of the fittest' shit and rot up there.”

Jaskier could barely hear Eskel's voice above the rain when he responded. “Yeah, ok. Not Kaer Morhen.”

“Heya,” Aiden said, snapping his fingers, “Doesn't your white wolf here know that Skellige druid? What is his name, it's something strange...Ratsack? Mouseballs?”

“Mousesack,” Jaskier supplied. He'd always been curious about the druids, they seemed to be the only magic users on the continent who stayed away from Lettonhove and its 'ley lines.'

“Yeah,” Eskel said, poking Geralt's side to get his attention. “Think Mousesack would put us up for winter?”

The 'hunting lodge' Mousesack made available for them hadn't seen a hunting party in decades. Made of enormous rough cut pine logs thicker than Jaskier's waist, it perched atop a steep hill that rose above thick evergreen forest.

Jaskier leaned both hands on the front door and levered it open. The slow, low creak of the hinges groaning made the hair stand on the back of his neck. He coughed as a blast of musty air hit him in the face.

“Oh, this place is definitely haunted,” he croaked as his eyes darted around the main room.

Dim, blue-white light from the narrow windows lit a combined cooking/eating/living area. A thick film of dust lay over floors and furniture, here and there disturbed by the tracks of mice and larger vermin. In the back, a narrow staircase led to a second story.

“It's not haunted,” Lambert said, shoving Jaskier out of the doorway. “No reaction from my medallion.”

“He's no fun,” Aiden commented to Jaskier as he followed the red head inside.

Eskel herded Jaskier and Geralt out of the gathering twilight into the gloom of the interior.

The Witchers looked around and then exchanged a glance Jaskier couldn't see in the darkness.

“Cozy,” Eskel said.

“Remote,” Lambert added with a considering tilt to his head.

“Defensible,” was Aiden's contribution.

Geralt said nothing at all. He just began to clear the detritus that had gathered at the threshold of the door away with one boot.

“Then we're agreed,” Eskel said.

*

Within a matter of hours, they'd made the main room livable again, sweeping away dust and shooing away vermin with a minimum of peripheral blood spatter. What followed was three weeks of frantic activity that was brought to an abrupt stop by two feet of wet snow.

“Well, at least the pickling and preserving is done,” Lambert said.

“I've laid my traps,” Aiden reported as he ladled his breakfast porridge into a bowl. “The perimeter is secure.”

“Should have enough meat and fish smoked now, too,” Eskel said.

And so, winter began.

Jaskier expected to be bored out of his inquisitive mind by an entire season trapped in what amounted to one large room, even with the varied company of several well-traveled men whose collective age was slightly less than half a millennium. He soon found however that he had several sagas to follow throughout the winter.

The first, and truly the only story he could recognize at the beginning, was Eskel and Geralt.

*

Jaskier was standing at the open door, searching for the path that led across the yard to their stable and not finding it beneath the fresh snow. He could feel their isolation settling against his bones like a weight, stifling his breathing.

The screech of wood on wood made him whirl to look back into the room.

Geralt had dragged a crate out from under one of the tables.

“Books!” Eskel exclaimed with clear delight as he began to dig through them.

Grinning at no one in particular, Geralt produced another crate of books, and then another.

“How the hell did he get a hold of these?” Lambert asked Eskel as he stomped over to peek into the boxes.

Geralt hadn't talked since the near disaster on the little island, at least not where Jaskier could hear. But he now responded more often to what was happening around him, appeared to follow conversations and even occasionally shrugged or gestured.

He was trying.

Still, Lambert tended to talk about him in front of him like he was deaf and possibly blind.

It didn't appear to bother either Geralt or Eskel. Their dynamic had changed again, had come to a center somewhere between the extreme clinginess of those first few awful days after Lettenhove and the equally awful distance that had followed. Each day seemed to bring a bit more balance to them, as if just agreeing to try had tipped the scales. 

*

If Eskel and Geralt weren’t enough to occupy Jaskier's mind, there was always the delightful evolution of Lambert and Aiden's story.

“No,” Lambert announced one night, cutting Eskel off mid-sentence.

“You disagree with...this erotic interpretation of the male form?” Eskel asked. “The purple prose?”

The Witchers, who were well-practiced in surviving long winters, had a brilliant way of making their limited collection of books last: they read to each other aloud. They seemed equally practiced at ignoring the dubious subject matter of their reading material.

“No,” Lambert repeated, holding up one finger in Aiden's direction. “I was talking to Aiden, and no damn it.”

“I didn't say anything,” Aiden said. He was reclining in a seat across the fire from Lambert with his hands folded on his belly.

Geralt huffed from his position on the floor, cross-legged on a heap of furs and leaning back on Eskel's shins.

“Indeed,” Eskel drawled. He cleared his throat and continued reading.

It happened again at breakfast a few days later.

“I said no, you fucker,” Lambert said, throwing down his spoon and stomping outside to take care of the horses.

“Well, you have his answer,” Eskel said. “What was the question?”

Jaskier gave Aiden a sympathetic smile. “I'm guessing the question was something like 'Will you let me love you?' “

“Hah.” Aiden rolled his eyes. “Actually it was 'Can we travel together next summer?' but...”

“It was really the other, bigger question,” Eskel finished.

“Hmm,” Geralt said.

They all managed not to stare at him, but only just.

Geralt rose, pressing his hand to the back of Eskel's neck briefly, then followed the red-headed Witcher.

“Don't let him break your nose, again,” Eskel called after him. To Aiden, he said, “Geralt will let him work out some of the frustration.”

“Well. Hmm,” Aiden said.

“Hmm,” Eskel agreed. “I'm sorry. Geralt and me, we’re poor role models, as lovers. And since most Witchers pretend they can't love at all, we are his only frame of reference.”

“Yeah, that's bullshit.” Aiden grinned at Eskel. “You guys are the reason I think we can pull it off. How many decades did the two of you work it, after the whole, you know--”

“Soulmate thing?” Jaskier suggested.

Aiden pointed at him. “That. And before the whole 'captured for your magic' thing. You had what, fifty good years in there?”

Eskel's face went through several expressions before blanking out entirely. “Yeah.”

“I figure we do it like you did.” Aiden got up and began to pace. “We walk the Path together, separating for the easy contracts and staying together for the tough ones.”

“You can do that?” Jaskier asked. “You don't have to like, stay within so many miles of each other or something?”

Eskel gave him an unimpressed look. “It's not like that. Separating from him always felt like cutting out an organ and living without it for three seasons. Being soulmates doesn’t change what it feels like to love him.”

“It just made you targets,” Jaskier said.

“It just saved your lives,” Aiden said at the same time.

Eskel frowned at them both.

“Fifty years,” Aiden repeated. He waved his arms as he monologued. “You'd both be dead a dozen times over if you weren't soulmates. But instead you got fifty years of, of--someone waiting for you back at camp. You had a reason to live beyond monsters and money, for fifty years.”

“And after that?” Eskel huffed out, standing and planting himself in Aiden's path to poke his chest.

“And after that you had thirteen years of being milked for magic,” Jaskier said with more bitterness than Eskel had.

“You lived,” Aiden said. He shoved hard at Eskel's shoulder and didn't even rock him. “And you still have each other, mostly. You have hope. And even if you hadn't lived, or you'd lived for another century in that hell, it couldn't have changed those fifty good years.”

Eskel turned without a word and disappeared outside.

“Gods damn it,” Aiden said. “What is that old tripe the human grandmothers are always telling the young ones?”

“Better to have loved and lost...” Jaskier said.

“Well, isn't it?” Aiden demanded.

“I don't know.” Jaskier had once thought the answer was obvious, a natural law. To love was always better than not, no matter how much it hurt. “I don't know anymore.”

*

It was a beautiful sunny day, one that fooled the inexperienced into thinking winter might be breaking.

Jaskier sat with his arms crossed on a windowsill, watching Geralt and Eskel outside in the little clearing in front of their lodge. They'd thrown a few furs over a wide stump in the center of the open space and sat on it back to back, Geralt with his face tilted up towards the sun and Eskel with his nose in a book.

Neither Witcher spoke. At some point around midwinter, Jaskier had noticed Lambert getting as red in the face as his hair when romances were read aloud and had talked the others into not torturing their brother that particular way, so Eskel was reading silently. Every so often he'd turn a page, but otherwise they were nearly as motionless as they were silent. If not for a trickle of blood seeping out from under Geralt’s sleeve, from the spiked manacles he still wore like some sort of trophy, it would be a perfectly idyllic scene.

"What are you looking at?" Lambert asked. Bored with watching Aiden sharpen knives, he wandered over to Jaskier's window and looked out over his shoulder.

Outside, Geralt sighed and sank a little lower in his seat, wiggling his shoulders against Eskel's. Eskel shifted with him until they found their balance against each other again.

Geralt tipped his head back again and leaned it on Eskel's shoulder.

A tiny smile ticked the corner of his mouth up.

"Alright!" Lambert exclaimed, startling Jaskier and Aiden. "Fine, yes."

“Wait.” Aiden slowly lowered the knife he was brandishing haphazardly at the room at large. "Yes? Yes to me?"

"Yeah, sure. Fine." Lambert crossed his arms and huffed, blowing up his bangs. He pointed out the window at the soulmates with his chin. "It looks nice, doesn’t it?"

Aiden came over to look out at the other Witchers. "Wait, you want me for my potential as something to literally lean on?”

Lambert shrugged. “And figuratively.”

“Really.”

“It’s just.” Lambert cleared his throat. His eyes were on Geralt and Eskel again. “I want that, with you. What they have, not the soulmate bullshit, but the other shit. I want campfires side by side and shared blankets and the smell of your stupid soap.”

“Aww,” Aiden said, beaming. He sobered, tilting his head as he looked at Geralt again. “He’s bleeding.”

“We’re always bleeding. We’re Witchers. I'd be a real chicken shit if I let that stop me from having the best thing that has ever happened in my long, shit-filled life.”

“I see.” Aiden grinned at Lambert, a softer, less mad expression than the one he usually put on. “Yeah. I want that too. With you. And if I’d known you were looking for a glorified camp chair…” 

A slow grin cracked across Lambert's face.

"Gods, I love your dirty mind," Aiden said, smashing himself into Lambert mouth first.

They disappeared upstairs without ever letting go of each other.

Geralt and Eskel continued their silent contemplation and their reading, but now Eskel was smiling too.

*

Mid-winter found the motley crew of wolves, one cat, and one human gathered around a table laden with food and alcohol.

“So Geralt gets it in his feverish head that the horses are cold,” Lambert said to Aiden, who uh-huh’d as he took another drink. “He’s always been weird about horses, never mind that the stables were usually cleaner and always warmer than the trainees’ rooms.”

No one looked at Geralt except Jaskier, but by this point he thought it wasn’t about what they wouldn’t see so much as an irrational fear that looking might drive the bits of Geralt that had come back away again.

Geralt, as always, was sitting silently at Eskel’s side, but his eyes followed the conversation from speaker to speaker and a smile lurked around one corner of his lips.

“Ok, what else was I supposed to do?” Eskel burst out.

“Wait, what did you do?” Aiden asked.

He gestured ambiguously, spilling white gull everywhere. “I put the fire out.”

“With Aard.” Lambert leaned across the table to punch Eskel’s shoulder, hard, jostling him against Geralt. “He knocked the whole damn building down.” Throwing his head back, he laughed uproariously at his own story, choking on spit in the process.

Eskel reached over to slam a not entirely friendly hand on Lambert’s back to help him clear his throat, sending him sprawling forward onto the table.

“I’ve always been pretty strong with my signs,” Eskel explained to Jaskier, still looking down his nose at Lambert. “Might be because I actually studied.”

“Aarduously,” Geralt said, his voice a cracking rumble.

Jaskier could hear the snow tapping against the windowpanes in the silence that fell. The Witchers turned to look at Geralt, their faces frozen in identical expressions of disbelief.

“Was that a fucking pun?” Lambert asked. “Mute for a decade, and your first real word is a fucking pun?”

“Lambert,” Aiden said, snapping out one hand to clap it over the redhead’s mouth.

“He talks plenty to me,” Eskel said. “So. Might want to ask yourself why he isn’t talking to you. Right, Ger?”

Geralt grinned with too many sharp teeth. “Fuck you, Lambert,” he said clearly.

“You asshole!” Lambert yelled, leaping over the table to tackle Geralt. The two went down in a tangle of limbs, falling to the floor behind the table.

Geralt ended up sitting Lambert’s chest, holding his hands up and out of the redhead’s reach.

“Come on, pretty boy, let me take those off,” Lambert demanded, gesturing at the shackles.

Shaking his head with a sad smile that turned feral the longer Lambert struggled, Geralt caught the redhead’s flailing arms and then leaned down to lick a wet stripe across his cheek.

“What the ever-loving fuck,” Lambert shouted as they descended into another wrestling match.

Eskel tipped his head back and laughed and laughed and laughed, filling the room with pain-edged, echoing guffaws that bounced around the rafters as Geralt and Lambert rolled back and forth at his feet.

Jaskier could not help but join him, his own strangled chuckles a high, trembling counterpart weaving in and around Eskel’s bass booms, their hysterical laughter punctuated by much growling and snapping from the floor. 

He realized that he loved them. Maybe not in the way they loved each other, they had near a century of loving one another through death and blood behind them, but he loved them. 

Gods save him, he loved them.

Chapter Text

Eeee-eeel . The squeal of hinges on the loose shutter outside Jaskier’s room woke him with a start.

“No,” he whispered, his breath curling into mist in the cold air of his tower bedroom. He pulled his blankets up and hid his cold nose beneath them, staring with wide eyes at the frosted panes of glass. A shadow moved on the other side. “They’re safe now, it’s fixed.”

Eeee-eeel, eeee-eeel, went the squealing hinge as the snowflakes whispered against the glass.

With an incoherent scream of mingled rage and fear, Jaskier threw himself from the bed. The aching cold of the bare floor bit into his bare feet as he rushed to the window and tore it open. A gust of wind and snow swirled around the room, disordering papers and putting out his lamp with a hiss.

On the back of that icy wind flew a raven the size of a dog.

Eeee-eeel, eeee-eeel, eeee-eeel, it screamed as it flew around Jaskier’s head.

“No!” Jaskier screamed back. “They’re better! I fixed it! They fixed it!”

The raven landed on the floor, its body convulsing as it cawed. With a final shudder, it spat a wad of blood-speckled paper at Jaskier’s feet and disappeared in a swirl of silver sparks.

Behind Jaskier, the window shut with a snap. The air in the room stilled.

The paper rested against his big toe.

Eeee-eeel, went the hinges on the shutter as the snow scratched at the windowpane.

Jaskier picked up the wad of paper and started walking, then running, careening down the stairs and into the main room, hoping, praying that the Witchers were still up.

They were up.

He caught one glimpse of them, two gleaming bodies moving together, one dark and thick, the other colorless and lithe, but both scarred, so scarred. The image burned itself into his mind; he could see nothing else, hear nothing else but their quiet sighs.

Everything went black like a torch going out.

And then everything went white. Jaskier floated on the light for a while, letting it warm him, buoying him up like the sun-warmed surface of the sea.

Eeee-eeel, creaked someone’s leathers as they knelt beside him.

“What the hell happened to him?” Lambert asked.

Jaskier opened his eyes to find himself laying on the rugs in front of the fire. Geralt knelt beside him in nothing but a loose pair of sleep trousers, the long fingers of one pale hand buried in Jaskier’s hair.

Geralt was the light.

Jaskier inhaled to thank him and choked. He could smell Geralt’s blood, could smell the rust and rot from beneath the band of steel locked tight around his wrist. He still hadn’t let anyone remove them, though Jaskier had seen Lambert try again just days ago.

“But you’re better,” Jaskier told him.

Geralt smiled, just a little twitch of his lips, but Jaskier smiled back automatically.

“You fell down the stairs,” Eskel said, appearing over Geralt’s shoulder in a similar state of undress.

Geralt rumbled at him. “Fainted.”

Whipping his head around, Jaskier spotted the wad of bloody paper at the foot of the stairs.

“Can you see that?” he asked, pointing at it with a quivering finger.

Lambert wrinkled his nose and picked it up. “Yes, it’s very definitely paper. Smells like magic.” He unfolded it and began to read without offering it to Jaskier. “Seems Lettenhove has a bit of a pesta problem. Lettenhove? Why does that name sound familiar?” Crumpling the paper, he tossed it to Jaskier.

“Lettenhove,” Eskel said with sudden understanding, rage making him bristle.

Geralt had gone very still at Jaskier’s side.

“Geralt?” Jaskier asked, touching Geralt’s bare shoulder with two fingers. “Don’t go.”

The white-haired Witcher rose and turned his back to them, staring unseeing into the darkness of the room beyond the reach of the light from the fire.

Jaskier hadn’t seen his bare back in a long time, but the scrimshaw scars decorating his spine still made his stomach clench.

Sitting up and unfolding the paper, Jaskier held it to the light of the fire to read the words scribbled there in his father’s messy hand.

Julian. Lettenhove is haunted by a pesta. The Witchers are our only hope. If you ever loved your mother, please, return with them. I will make it worth their while.

Eskel cursed and leaned away; he’d apparently been reading over Jaskier’s shoulder.

“Plague maidens are a specialty of ours,” Geralt said into the darkness. “Were. Were a specialty of ours.”

“You’re not seriously considering going back there,” Lambert said, looking back and forth between the two Witchers.

Eskel rolled his shoulders with an audible cracking of joints, his lip twisting. “Let someone who they didn’t torture for decades save them, or better yet, let them rot. We owe them nothing.”

“But,” Geralt said to the darkness without turning. He didn’t continue.

For once it was not Eskel who finished the thought for him. “They’re probably the only ones in the Continent who have a chance of stopping it, even now,” Aiden said, putting a hand on Lambert’s tense shoulder.  

Lambert shook it off and stomped up to Geralt. He dragged the white-haired Witcher around to face him, stabbing his finger into the other man’s chest. “You’d consider going back there after everything they did to you? After what they did to your soulmate?”

“It’s a trap,” Eskel spat. “We’ll end up right where we were.”

“And even if it isn’t,” Lambert said, “Pestas breed abominations. The place will be crawling with necrophages and wraiths, feeding her strength.”

“What’s a pesta?” Jaskier asked, voice quaking.

“Creatures born of hate,” Geralt growled. “Can be defeated by force, but only dismissed by breaking the curse. The scope of their destruction can be…”

“Continental,” Aiden finished as he drifted close and gently shoved Lambert back from Geralt with his hip.

Jaskier’s head spun. “How do you defeat the curse?”

“Love,” Geralt said simply. “Forgiveness.”

Lambert threw his hands up. “Bullshit. What, do you fucking hug it to death?”

Shrugging, Geralt looked at his soulmate. “More like heal it to death. Tell him.”

“Just because we’ve managed it once or twice before doesn’t mean we’ll pull it off this time.” He wrapped his hand around Geralt’s wrist, just below the shackle. “The first time we had help; we just fought it and the boy broke the curse in truth.”

“And the second time?” Aiden asked.

“Brute force soulmate magic,” Eskel said. He pulled Geralt’s hand up and inspected his bloody wrist. “But that was before. We are not what we were; we will never be what we were.”

Jaskier had done that, had made them Eskel who could not heal others and Geralt who would not let himself heal. It had been so easy, now that everyone was together, now that everyone was safe, to put off telling them the truth.

“I have to go back,” Jaskier said. He brought his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them and stared into the fire, thinking of all the people he’d failed. Of who he’d left behind to face sickness and death. “I have to go back. My Mother is still there, and if there’s a plague…I know she’s not innocent, but. I love her still.”

“You don’t have to go back,” Eskel said. He leaned forward and tried to catch Geralt’s eye, his fingers tightening around Geralt’s wrist. “None of us do.”

“Well good, because I’m not going back there,” Lambert said. “And neither is Aiden.”

Aiden tugged at their joined hands, pulling Lambert away from Eskel. “We’ve never been there, Prickly.”

“Don’t have to, Lamb,” Geralt said, still not looking at Eskel. His quiet growl nonetheless landed hard in the quiet room. “Our bond, our burden. Was bound to burn us up eventually.” He glanced over at Jaskier, the light catching in his inhuman eyes. “And he saved our lives.”

But Jaskier hadn’t, no. He’d doomed them, would doom them twice over if they came back with him.

Jaskier opened his mouth to tell them to stay away from Lettenhove, to stay away from Jaskier, because he was the poison that seeped oily rot all over their lives, he was the curse that called out in the darkness.

But his mouth opened and closed soundlessly. He couldn’t get any words out.

Because he didn’t want to die.

He didn’t want to die.

The hallucinations started soon after they crossed into Lettenhove proper.

It was easy to ignore them at first, amidst the general horror and chaos of what his homeland had become. Spring had come to the rest of the continent, delicate green leaves gilding branches and tufts of fresh grass poking from the snow, but the dregs of winter still held Lettenhove in an icy grip. Heavy, clay-rich mud sucked at their horses’ hooves as they galloped down roads lined with skeletal trees. Beneath a leaden sky the villages of Lettenhove crouched, their little cottages and crooked streets teeming with twisted, feral life.

They stopped at every hamlet, the Witchers fighting off the corpse eaters with blades and the rats with flames, so Geralt could free the trapped dogs and starving livestock.

At their first stop, Jaskier glimpsed a flash of red from the corner of his eye, the bright color at odds with the washed out, deadened landscape. He turned his head and glimpsed a woman in a red skirt leaning on a broom, standing at the edge of the naked trees. When he blinked, she was gone.

Jaskier sucked in a breath and choked on the miasma of rot that lay heavy over the place. He stepped a little closer to Eskel, who stood with his blade drawn, staring into the home Geralt had disappeared into.

“Survivors?” Eskel asked as Geralt emerged.

Geralt didn’t even bother to shake his head.

They mounted and rode on.

Eventually, they had no reason to stop. The sickness had struck closest to the estate first and the only life left existed to feed on the dead.

The Witchers picked their battles with the corpse-eaters carefully. Sometimes they punched a clear path to gallop through, at other times they stood their ground and cleared an area. They fought together but separately, rotating around Jaskier in a whirl of silver and sparks.

But even Jaskier, who was no expert in monster fighting, could tell that something was wrong.

Eskel fought with his head tilted towards Geralt, tracking his soulmate even as he faced a dozen enemies of his own, leaping in to defend the white-haired Witcher at the slightest indication he might need help.

“What the fuck Eskel,” Geralt growled, the third time he had to heal a gaping wound on the scarred man’s body, this one a slash like a grin across Eskel’s throat.

“You can heal me,” Eskel said, panting. “I can’t heal you.”

“Can’t reattach your head.” Geralt slammed their foreheads together even as white light spread from his fingers. “It’s not fucking necromancy.”

A flash of red made Jaskier twist around to stare into the woods. Two glowing eyes stared back, then blinked out.

“Fuckity shitting fuck,” Jaskier breathed out. He was going mad, the last of his sanity gushing out like arterial spray.

“She’s watching,” Eskel said. He brushed his hand across his throat roughly, slapping away the remnants of his own blood. “The pesta.”

“You can see her?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt hummed and wobbled his head back and forth.

“More like sense,” Eskel translated.

Both Witchers turned their faces towards the empty forest where the pesta had disappeared.

“I thought—I thought I was going crazy.” Relief washed over Jaskier, making him wobble in his saddle.

Geralt patted his knee, climbed onto Roach, and nudged her into a trot. Eskel and Scorpion followed, with Jaskier as close on their heels as the stallion would tolerate.

Something else followed too, a flit of a red-tinged shadow darting between the trees.

The first wraiths didn’t attack them until they reached the road to the estate. They appeared as floating, incorporeal women, wearing gauzy white dresses that rustled in an otherworldly breeze.

Jaskier recognized one of them.

“Jaskier,” she said, her voice hissing across his eardrums like the wind through the dead canopy. “Jaskier, you’ve come back for me.”

He didn’t even know her name, this woman who’d been the last to know him as a boy, before he found out the truly horrible things humanity did in the dark. After their failed tryst, he’d never spoken to her again.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

An explosion of silver dust rocked the road and she screamed. Geralt followed the bomb, falling on her like a hawk diving on prey, his blade singing as he spun. Eskel threw out his hand and filled the air with a circle of glowing purple runes as he joined the fight. Jaskier lost count of the number of shades they struggled against, the women splitting and multiplying before his eyes.

His scorned lover died last, with her eyes locked on Jaskier. “This is your fault,” she whispered as she faded into dust.

“What did she mean by that?” Eskel asked.

“Yes, what did she mean by that, Julian?” a woman’s voice asked on the wind. A flutter of red fabric disappeared through the open gate.

Jaskier chased it into the empty courtyard.

His mother stood at the top of the stairs before the open double doors, a broom in her hand. She swept back and forth across the top stair, humming under her breath in time to her work.

“Mother,” he said, staggering towards her. “Where is it? Where is the pesta?”

Geralt’s hand fisting in the back of his shirt stopped him.

She was wearing a red skirt.

“No, mother,” he whispered. She turned, raising her head to look at him with eyes that glowed in the dim half-light.

“Julian,” she spoke, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, unnaturally long and the color of old cheese. “You came back.”

With a high maniacal giggle, his mother dropped to all fours and skittered down the stairs towards them.

Jaskier stayed on the edge of the courtyard as Geralt and Eskel fought the pesta, his mother. There was nothing he could do, no way he could keep up with the inhuman grace and speed of the Witchers, no comfort he could give either man if they were injured. There was nothing he could do but crouch against the wall and shake.

He had done this.

That blow to Geralt’s chest that sent him flying across the courtyard to slam into the side of the stable, that was Jaskier’s fault.

The deep wound to Eskel’s torso just beneath his arm, Jaskier had done that.

His mother screaming and writhing as they held her down with silver and magic, the rats that swarmed out from under her skirts, the maggots crawling through the holes in her skin.

It was all Jaskier’s fault.

With a screech so high it hovered on the edge of hearing, his mother disappeared.

Jaskier raised his head from where he’d hidden it beneath his arms.

Geralt panted wordlessly, his free arm wrapped around his chest and the tip of his blade dragging on the ground. Staggering towards Eskel, he dropped his sword to press his hand to the bloody wound on Eskel’s side. The white light gathered under his palm slowly, but Eskel’s face immediately went slack with relief.

“Is it over?” Jaskier asked.

“She’s defeated,” Geralt ground out, bending with a groan to pick up his sword. “Not banished.”

“So she’ll be back.” More tears gathered in Jaskier’s eyes. “Over and over, until you’re too weak to fight her.”

The two Witchers exchanged a glance.

“She might be more amenable to letting go of the hate that’s keeping her here now,” Eskel said. “Just have to find her.”

They wandered the empty halls of the Lettenhove manor, chasing the rustle of red fabric.

The eaters had been hard at work in the months since the plague hit, and the stench of rot had faded into the dusty dry scent of rooms that had been closed for too long. Skeletal remains lay where they’d fallen, unrecognizable but for their clothes and jewelry. Most of the corpses were in their beds, but Jaskier’s father sat on his high chair in the great hall, his empty eye sockets looking out over a feast for the dead.

They left him there. Why should he be put to rest when Lettenhove was an open grave of his making?

Eskel paused at the top of the stairs that led deeper into the belly of the keep, to the horrible little room that took up so much space in Jaskier’s mind.

“No,” he said, throwing out one arm to bar Geralt from going further as they all stared down the stairs. “We’re not going back there.”

Geralt had gone silent when they crossed the threshold into the manor, his eyes sometimes focused, sometimes glassy, his steps a half-beat behind theirs whenever they started to walk. He didn’t speak now, just stepped closer to Eskel’s back and let his forehead fall forward to rest against the bare nape of Eskel’s neck.

“But we have to find her while she’s weakened, right?” Jaskier asked.

“That place isn’t hers,” Eskel said. “It’s ours, the place that haunts us. Where would she be, Jaskier? Where is her place?”

Jaskier took a breath and let his feet take him to the one room he’d so far avoided, the top room in the squat tower that was the oldest, most defensible part of the manor. The door swung open smoothly at his gentle push.

The nursery looked much the same as Jaskier remembered it. Someone had boarded up the windows with wide, uneven slats that let in stripes of weak winter sunlight, but the beds were just as he’d last seen them. There were two, a child sized cot and a crib, both kept long after Jaskier had outgrown them, kept for the children his mother never had.

She was sitting on the cot with her back to the door, her skirt a smudge of bloody color against the sheets.

“Mother,” Jaskier said.

She turned at the sound of his voice, a wild halo of black hair drifting around her waxy face with the movement. “Julian.”

“Jaskier,” he corrected automatically, earning himself a disbelieving sound from Eskel.

But his mother only smiled, revealing a mouth full of rotten teeth. “Jaskier. My son, my beautiful songbird. Who do you sing for now?”

“I don’t,” Jaskier said. He’d composed nothing of worth, nothing true, not once in the years that had passed since he’d first found the Witchers, too afraid that if he opened his mouth and sang from his heart, a descending two-note scream would come out.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, mother.” Jaskier forced himself into the room one lead-heavy step at a time. Falling to his knees at her bare feet, he looked into the twisted facsimile of his mother’s face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I left you, that I killed you and cursed you with my cowardice. Forgive me.”

“My son.” She touched his cheek with leathery fingers, her tongue lolling as she spoke. “Stay with me now.”

“Please,” he begged. It was the only way to set her free, to save Lettenhove. “I love you, please forgive me.”

“Jaskier, my songbird, stay with me and it is all forgiven.” She held out her arms to him.

Jaskier stood up again, looking at the two Witchers side by side behind him. He was the last human alive who knew their secret. This would set them free, too.

“No,” Eskel said, pointing at him. “We can still leave this place to rot.”

Geralt grunted in agreement.

Blinking away a sudden film of tears, Jaskier shook his head. He was talking to them all now, to the soulmates he’d ruined and the mother he’d killed. “I’m sorry. I love you. I’ll stay.”

He fell into his mother’s embrace.

Rats swarmed around his feet and maggots squirmed over his hands. His mother kissed his forehead, her tongue twisting across his sweaty skin.

A flash of familiar white light blinded him, an explosion of concussive force that seemed to originate somewhere in his own chest.

When his vision cleared his mother was gone.

Jaskier exhaled, the strength draining from his limbs, and collapsed backwards to stare at the ceiling above. The next inhale hurt, rasping through his tight throat like the air had claws, and barely lifted his chest. He drew another, even shallower breath as his vision wavered.

“Jaskier!” Eskel fell to his knees at Jaskier’s side. He was suddenly scooped upright, held against Eskel’s chest as he’d so often seen Geralt hold Eskel.

“Did we do it?” Jaskier gasped.

“You did,” Geralt said as he tore open Jaskier’s shirt with one yank. He set both glowing hands on Jaskier’s chest. “You agreed to stay, to die, for love of her.”

The air that whistled into his lungs on his next breath came only a little easier.

“Yeah, that’s what it feels like,” Jaskier wheezed.

“Love has many forms,” Geralt said. “And she may yet have her way.”

“Shit,” Eskel said. “Can you save him?”

A speaking look passed between them over Jaskier’s body, Geralt apologizing with his eyes and Eskel shutting his, his mouth twisting bitterly.

“I can’t lose you again,” Eskel said.

Geralt’s hands began to glow. “I have to try.”

Something gave way beneath Jaskier’s sternum.

“No,” he wheezed, pushing Geralt’s hand away from his chest. “No, please don’t. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?” Eskel demanded.

“It was me,” Jaskier gasped, and the words he’d been dreading for so long fell easily from his mouth. “I was the boy. In the stables. Saw you heal Geralt. Betrayed you.”

“No,” Eskel said, shaking his head violently. His arms tightened around Jaskier. “You saved us!”

“I told. My father.” Jaskier stopped to swallow the bile creeping up his throat, panting. “I betrayed you. I told—”

“I know!” Eskel practically shouted.

Geralt blinked at him over Jaskier’s chest. “You do?”

“You both do?” Jaskier whispered in wonder.

Eskel snarled and wrapped his hand around Geralt’s wrist. He dragged it back to Jaskier’s chest in a clear command.

A burst of white light cleared the black spots from Jaskier’s vision.

Eskel glared down at him. "Between you with your puppy eyes always trying to tell me something and him always trying to stop you, yeah I figured it out. You were just a child, Jaskier, with a child's innocence. I forgave you about ten minutes after I figured it out."

Geralt reached over Jaskier to cup Eskel’s scarred cheek, drops of blood from his perpetually ruined wrist falling on Jaskier's face like teardrops. "Forgive yourself too, Esk."

With a strangled snarl Eskel took hold of the shackle and wrenched it between his hands, the hinge splitting with a crack. Hissing, he pried the metal away from Geralt, pulling the iron nails from where they were embedded in his flesh.

“How can I?!” He snatched up Geralt’s other hand and broke the remaining shackle just as easily. “Every day I look at these and see how I failed you. I look at your scars and see that I failed you.”

“You didn’t,” Geralt said, allowing his hands to be moved around.

“I never should have healed you where others could see—I can’t—” Eskel looked down at Jaskier, his face crumpling. “I’m sorry.”

Geralt pulled him closer by the grasp Eskel still had around his bloody wrist, until they were leaning together above and around Jaskier.

“You can,” Geralt said, bumping their foreheads together. “It’s ok. I’m here, you’re here, we’re here.” Then he smiled down at Jaskier, that little quirk of his lips he’d come to treasure. “Forgive yourself.”

“I can’t,” Eskel repeated. He pulled away. “I did this to us. If not in Lettenhove, then before. When I made us soulmates. I did this to us all, and I hate it.”

Geralt turned his bloody wrist in Eskel’s hand, trying to tug him closer. “I don’t. I’m glad you did it. It’s worth it.”

“This?” Eskel demanded, gesturing around wildly with their joined hands. “This is worth all that pain, worth living with the fear that it could happen again?”

“Yes,” Geralt said simply.

“How? Why?”

“You’re here.”

“Geralt, that doesn’t make any sense.” Eskel shook Geralt’s wrist as if he could shake sense into the other Witcher with the movement. “I’m not worth this, I’m not worth any of it.”

“You are to me,” Geralt said. Then he leaned over Jaskier and kissed Eskel, soft and sweet, until the angry, rigid line of Eskel’s body relaxed.

Eskel made a wordless sound of confusion.

“You’re worth it to me,” Geralt whispered against Eskel’s lips. He laced their fingers together and placed their joined hands on Jaskier’s chest, just above his heart. “Who we are together is worth it. He was just a child and we were just men. We can forgive ourselves for what we could not stop the world from doing to us.”

“Us?” Jaskier whispered as his vision dimmed. “But I betrayed you.”

The brush of lips on his forehead made him squint upwards, hoping for one last glance of Geralt’s face.

But it was Eskel leaning over him now. “Geralt’s right,” he whispered. “You were a child. And we were just men. I’m sorry for what has happened to all of us.”

Jaskier let his burning eyes drift closed, falling into white light like sunlight.

And then he knew no more.

Chapter Text

“Sing us the song," a drunken man called. "Sing the Last Soulmates!”

One of the Witchers in the corner stood with a great jangle of armor and shouldered his way out of the crowded common room, but everyone ignored him. What would a Witcher know about soulmates anyway?

“Alright, my good people. The Last Soulmates it is!” the bard in the center of the tavern shouted. He hated the song, hated the strange two-note descending musical phrases and the horror-soaked lyrics. But his audiences had been obsessed with it lately, with all its lurid details.

The other Witcher, the thinner, white-haired one, exited more quietly, following his colleague into the drizzling Velen night.

The bard did not watch him go.

Setting out down the town’s thin, muddy track, the white-haired Witcher inhaled. He followed his nose to a ruined house on the edge of the settlement.

“Eskel,” he greeted as he slid through the gap between the crooked door and tilting door frame.

The scarred Witcher winced in response. “Ger. Anything but my name, please.”

“Sorry.” Geralt knelt on his heels beside his mate, who was standing and leaning on the wall as if it were the only thing holding him up. The rough, tumble-down timber looked unequal to the task.

They stared at the cold hearth.

“That damn song. It’s you—what you—it’s my damn name.”

“Hmm,” Geralt agreed. “Hate it too. Usually don’t remember that place, but. That song.” He didn’t finish the thought.

“If it weren’t fucking working, I’d track down every bard on the Continent and cut their tongues out,” Eskel said.

Geralt looked up at the other Witcher with raised eyebrows. He peeled off his gloves, growling a little as the wet leather clung to his pickled skin.

“Here,” he said, putting his bare wrist in one of Eskel’s dangling hands. Eskel looked down at him, and then at his wrist, rubbing his thumb across the delicate, unscarred skin there.

“Never did say,” Eskel mused, “Why you wore those damn shackles for so long.”

“Did I have to?”

Eskel brushed his thumb across the blue-white veins in Geralt’s wrist again, the skin soft and smooth. “Guess not.”

The rain beat a steady tempo on the thatch. They existed, side by side, Eskel still holding Geralt’s wrist as he knelt at the larger man’s feet, while the gathering dark filled their little shelter.

Eventually, Geralt shook off Eskel’s grip and began to move around the hovel, converting it into a camp of sorts. The fire had been going not more than ten minutes when the splashing of footsteps on the path outside heralded company.

The bard was still singing softly under his breath.

“Jaskier, for the love of the gods, please,” Eskel said as he dragged the door open to admit their companion.

“Sorry, love,” Jaskier said. “It’ll be haunting me for weeks, that damn song.”

“You wrote it,” Geralt pointed out. He bent a little to accept the kiss Jaskier pressed to his cheek, then pulled Eskel over from his brooding to receive his own greeting from the bard.

“I still hate it,” Jaskier said. “And it’d be better at covering our tracks if you two didn’t bolt as soon as it’s requested.”

“No one would ever believe we’re the soulmates in the song,” Eskel said. “We’re Witchers, not mercenaries. And we’re both men.”

Jaskier rolled his eyes. “That is the point, dear heart. Even the mages who did know what was happening at Lettenhove didn’t know who my father had captured. So I gave the audience tragic heroes they would believe.”

“Heroes they would mourn,” Geralt said. He smiled, just a little. “The last soulmates are dead, they killed each other to escape the burden of their bond. We’ve heard the song.”

“Yes, well.” Jaskier exhaled himself into a seated position in front of the fire. “I may have taken certain liberties with the plot in the name of tonal continuity.”

“A fitting end to the soulmate story,” Eskel said, poking hard at the fire and sending a shower of sparks up the chimney.

“Perhaps,” Jaskier said. He pulled a loaf of bread from beneath his cloak, and they shared a meager meal beside a stranger’s abandoned hearth.

*

Much later that night, when they were laying side by side in front of the fire, stacked in order of smallest to Eskel, Geralt cleared his throat.

“Is it wrong?” he asked his silent companions. “If we really are the last soulmates. If the song makes it true, because people believe only the horror of it, is it wrong?”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Eskel said. “As long as no one hunts us again, I don’t give a fuck.”

In the distance a loose gate creaked on squeaky hinges, Eee-el, eee-el, eee-el.

“If one scary song makes people fear becoming soulmates so much that they stop loving, the world did not deserve them in the first place,” Jaskier said with finality.

“One scary song, and the ruined husk of Lettenhove,” Geralt said.

“People will forget how it came to be that way,” Jaskier said, “No matter how much I sing about it. They’ll forget the song too, eventually. They’ll love again, they’ll break the world open again, for love or greed or immortality. It’ll all happen again.”

Eskel threaded his arm beneath Geralt’s waist and pulled him close, then wrapped his fingers around Geralt’s unscarred wrist. “Just so long as it happens to someone else, I do not give a single fuck.”

Jaskier hummed in agreement. “Let it be someone else’s story, someone else’s tragedy.”

Geralt lay awake long after the others had drifted off. It was often like this, now, as if his mind had hidden itself too long and couldn’t bear to leave the world, even to sleep. He listened to the pattering rain and thought of Eskel, alone with the living corpse of his soulmate. He listened to the creaking of the gate and thought of Jaskier, haunted by the shadows in his mind. He thought of Lambert, afraid to love Aiden, and Jaskier’s parents, who might have even loved each other, once, at the beginning of their tragedy. He even thought of Lara Dorren and her doomed human lover, who had started it all.

“We are each other’s stories,” Geralt whispered to his loves as he lay between them.

Eskel stirred, pressing a kiss to Geralt’s nape that lit the room with a flash of white light without fully rising to consciousness.

Geralt smiled into the dark. “We are each other’s tragedies.”