A Little Life

Jaskier

When Jaskier wakes again, someone is rubbing a foul-smelling salve onto his lips. Through it, the scent of earthy lilac and tart gooseberry fills his nostrils, which gives the whole thing the impression of having been passed through the back end of a horse. Fitting, he thinks.

"Not Paradise, then," he mumbles against the fingers. When she swims into focus, Yennefer is smirking.

"Oh, I should be so lucky," she snarks, and flicks his nose before retreating. She's either done some sorceressing or Jaskier has been asleep for a very, very long time, because it doesn't hurt. A great number of other things do, however, meaning...

"Right. Okay. Right, not dead," he rasps as sensation wakes and begins to prickle all over his body. "Ah, fuck, definitely not dead. Maybe just a bit hopeful."

"Jaskier," a third voice growls. It's the voice Jaskier hadn't realized he was bracing for, the voice that sends him once again lurching into a reality that he would rather not face. The last time he had heard that voice it was so very far away, begging for something he can't remember now.

"I was rather looking forward to waking up with a golden lute and dozens of virgins doing naked cartwheels around my deathbed. Is it too late to send me back to Nilfgaard?"

"Jaskier." A warning.

He stares stubbornly at a spot on the ceiling, and the voice that comes from him is lighter than he thinks it ought to be. His throat is tired, tight and aching, but there is something looming in the room that might swallow them all if they keep staring at him in silence.

"I suppose you're right. If I were dead, Geralt would be doing the naked cartwheels instead of looking at me like I'm on my funeral pyre."
"Jaskier."

"Geralt."

He's poked too hard, he knows, but only cares a little because Yennefer is laughing and it feels just like music.

"Quit your incessant grousing and bring me something to drink." Jaskier rolls his head toward the voice and the room spins wickedly around him. He finds the witcher, pinch-faced and frowning, and softens.

"Please," he adds. Yennefer gives them a look which is either fond or disgusted - likely both, it's hard to tell on her face - and excuses herself by muttering something in Elder and fizzing out of the room.

Geralt tucks something away - from where Jaskier lies squinting, it looks like he's carried a gnarled stick inside like a neglected dog - and stashes a small knife into his boot before stalking across the room. Tension gathers in his shoulders like a storm, sending them bunching up halfway to his ears. It wakes a parallel, creeping unease in Jaskier, so he decides to look anywhere else instead.

Sweet evening air is pushing its way to him through the massive window he's been tucked up against. It is beautiful, banded with iron and paned with stained glass like the casements he used to sneak out of at Oxenfurt. Beyond it, the courtyard surrounding Kaer Morhen stretches out as far as he can see - dusk has already swallowed the high curtain wall that marks the edge of the keep in darkness that sinks closer until Jaskier has to pull his eyes away.

"Why are we here? Not Aretuza?"

That rigid tension twitches along Geralt's back again.

"I wanted to bring you home." He says it simply, but the word tugs at Jaskier, clangs inside of him. Home. Is that where he is?

So much talking has drained him, scratched at his throat and set him to sweating again. When Geralt returns with a mug of water, he struggles to sit upright until the witcher grasps the back of his neck and wedges a shoulder behind his own.
"Oh fuck, oh gods, oh Melitele's pendulous tits," he pants into Geralt's chest where he's sagged, utterly useless. New and forgotten aches spark across every part of him that moves, igniting quick as brushfire until he can no longer pick them apart. Heavy black pushes at the edges of his vision.