A Little Life

Epilogue

Geralt continues to fight monsters, even when Jaskier doesn't listen. When he is too slow, Geralt is faster, stronger, more focused, and Jaskier is still right in the end.

The bard does catch a cold that does not get better - not for a season, anyway, and Geralt finds reasons to stay north of the Pontar that year while he rests in his rooms at Oxenfurt. He inherits the estate at Lettenhove, begrudgingly, and Geralt finds monsters in Kerack, too. He does not get stung by a dozen wasps but he does, in fact, fall off a cliff. It's a small one, to hear the witcher tell it, but he's not the one that does - and anyway, it still twists that old ankle. Geralt stares at the sky for a long time after and says he'll find the worn-down walking stick, and that they'll have an early winter. They head to Kaer Morhen when the leaves in Kaedwen are just starting to turn yellow and if Jaskier notices that the snow doesn't hit until after Yule that year, he doesn't say so.

Life blows them around the continent and it does not pass in a blink, the way Geralt feared it might. It slows, develops an ebb and flow that he had not been privy to before, but still he does not have enough time. Not enough to run from, or cling to, or fight or curse or beg for more of. He would never have had enough time.

**

Jaskier does not live to be two hundred years old, but he does see thirty more winters - fifteen before he stops following Geralt on the path, another ten until his hair turns fully witcher-white and his hands become clumsy upon the fingerboard of his lute. The last meager handful of years, they spend on the coast, where the air doesn't bite his lungs quite like it does in misty Kerack or set him gasping when it thins in the Blue Mountains.

Jaskier delights in it - the gathering of wrinkles around his eyes and the crinkling lines that stick around his mouth from countless smiles - and the delight is enough to blur the sharp edges of some of Geralt's fear. How lucky I am, he laughs when Yen teases him about the first bolt of silver blazing through his chestnut hair, but his eyes are as bright as that first day in Posada when he says it.

The witcher ages too, only a little, only at the corners of his mouth that turn up more than they had in the century before Jaskier. The transformation of his sluggish heart, so slow to change, is the thing he weathers in the end.

**

It does not rain when Jaskier leaves Geralt - it doesn't have to. He wakes in the clear, dark summer air one morning after too many spent sleeping and asks Geralt to take him to the balcony, where they can watch the sun wake over the sea.

"And don't you dare let my lute gather dust," Jaskier says, the latest in a long list of demands, and Geralt huffs a laugh. It's a wet, breathless thing that warms their folded hands. "I mean it. Don't go looking for me, witcher, I know where I'm going."

Geralt doesn't say that he will look for Jaskier everywhere, that he can't help it, that there isn't a footstep he'll take that they haven't first stumbled across together. He'll be ducking in and out between the cramped market stalls in Vespaden, where they stop for treacle cakes on the way to the mountains each winter. He'll be in the wildflower gardens in Lettenhove, singing cheeky songs to the orphans he moved in when he grew bored of managing the estate. Jaskier will be in the halls of Kaer Morhen, stealing Lambert's dinner rolls to play keepaway with Ciri. He'll be in that stable in Lyria, flushed and beautiful with Geralt's name falling from his lips like wine. He'll be in Posada. In Rinde. In Loxia. Always beside Geralt, or sometimes just up around the bend of the road, if he's gotten curious about where they're going next.

He doesn't say any of that - just agrees to Jaskier's many lute and clothing-based demands, makes him one last promise, and lets him fall to sleep just after the first rays of daylight flood his blue, blue eyes.

Geralt watches the sun set alone, and waits for the color to leach out of his life. He waits for the sun to burn out, for every birdsong to cease, for their little cottage to be swallowed by the sea, but Jaskier was so much more than that - so much more than temporary. Like the early days, when his grief is new and raw, Geralt tries to escape the music that follows him, tries to shake off Jaskier's legacy like a stone in his boot while he returns to monsters and money. Like the early days, when his grief has softened and found its home in him, the ballads become a comfort, and a reminder of the life he had been given.

Seasons later, when Ciri comes to help him finally clear out the cottage, he even finds comfort in that hellebore-pink shirt, buried so deeply in a dusty trunk in their bedroom that it had to have been hidden there on purpose. Bundled up inside, he finds a bottle of oil that smells like his father's greenhouse, a new block of soap that smells like Jaskier working tangles out of his hair, and some ancient-feeling knot within his chest is knocked loose.

It hurts a little less after that, most days, and Jaskier is still everywhere.

**

Geralt keeps his promise - to make Jaskier wait a good, long time before they meet again. It's Yen, in the end, who stays by his side in Rivia after some sniveling little shit with a pitchfork catches him in a way that his weary body cannot heal. She pets his hair - silver-grey like her own now, the way it might have looked if it had never been turned white, if in another life it had been the two of them growing old in a cottage somewhere. She hums one of Jaskier's songs in his ear and she does not cry.

"You'll be alright, won't you?" he asks.

"Of course I will," she tells him. It's as close to goodbye as they dare come, and she lets him go with a final, violet flare from her fingertips. Something between them gives way - some golden, shining thing - and then he's letting the remnants of it guide him toward someplace new.

There is music up ahead, just around the bend of the road. The words don't reach his ears, not yet, but he doesn't need them. That shimmering light tugs him forward like a string tied behind his ribs, but he doesn't need that either. Geralt knows where he is going.

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