A Little Life

Geralt

Geralt does not know what is coiling in his gut. He does know that his hands are empty where they had curled into Jaskier's, until he slips them into stiff leather gloves. He knows how sharply his shoulders sting - no longer with the drag of blunt fingernails across them, but with the loss, until his pauldrons are secure. He knows - cannot escape knowing - how the dip of his spine aches where Jaskier's lips and teeth had caught him, until he slings his blades across his back. He shoves his feet into sturdy boots that carry him across the keep before his whirling, traitorous head can make another decision.

Standing in front of Yennefer's room is a mistake, obviously, but no one would accuse Geralt of being in a particularly self-preserving mood this morning. She opens the door with a look on her face that could be called peevish on anyone else; on her, it just looks like boredom. She flicks her eyes over him with a growing smirk.

"Lucky you," she says, and Geralt falters.

"What-"

"Hush," she dismisses him, rolling her eyes. "I know what you look like in the midst of a post-fuck moral crisis."

She reaches out to poke at a sore spot under his jaw to emphasize her point. Not for the first time, he is grateful for the slow-moving blood that keeps away from his cheeks.

He is saved from answering by the snort that erupts from behind the sorceress, and it is Yen's turn to squirm as a sentient pile of red curls burrows its way further into the enormous, lavishly dressed bed behind her. The extravagance looks out of place against the crumbling stone walls, but then, so does she.

Vesemir is going to lose his head.

The sorceress clears her throat, bringing Geralt's attention back to her face, which has by now been carefully rearranged into something that edges past shamelessness and borders into challenging, the longer he stares.

"What do you want, Geralt?"
I need out. Out, right now, I think I might be drowning and it's taking Jaskier too and I am afraid. I need out and I need my fucking horse and I've made a mess of this, Yen, I've made a grave again.

"Portal. Keira's."

Her dark eyebrows shoot up and she sweeps her gaze over him again, but she must decide any further questions would be a waste of time - the minute shake of her head is chiding enough.

This is the trouble with Yen - and Ciri, and especially Jaskier. Geralt knows when he's put his damned foot in his mouth, but can't seem to get it out. He sees it in the shuttering of their eyes, the stiffness in their shoulders. He heard it in the sharp intake of breath Jaskier took as soon as he crossed the threshold of his room.

Fuck.

A graceful hand lifts and pauses in the air, expectant.

"Tell Ciri...." Fuck, and fuck again. "Just, tell Ciri. "

Yennefer nods, then mutters something in Elder before the portal fizzes and flares into being. Geralt approaches the opalescent surface of it with all the enthusiasm of a man stepping up to the gallows, but moves through without giving himself a chance to consider walking back to Velen.

Even with Yen's skill, Geralt is spat out on the other side of the portal feeling like his stomach might have shot straight through him and splattered on the meadowgrass below.

When the nausea passes and he straightens to look at where he's been deposited - at the arse end of a swamp, far enough from his destination to give him something to think about - he realizes it wasn't a mistake.

After a long hike under an ever-darkening sky, the sight of his horse is perhaps the first comfort Geralt has felt since Dorian. Even the relief of Jaskier waking had come with a reminder of every wrong choice he'd made in nearly two decades, but some of the weight slides away from him as he approaches an uncharacteristically delighted Roach.