Of Bards and Witchers

Fifteenth

    It really isn't his fault that nobles call him to bed. How was he, a passing bard, to know that his courter was the lord's son, or that he was to be married off come the new moon?

    "You've gone and befouled my sole heir," the lord bellows. He's positively ghastly as he is, crowding the exit as he gestures about wildly his small clothes. By the light of the candles one could see the distortion of his face by way of confusion and disgust.

    And wow, alright-- "Befouled?" the bard snarks-- and he really should shut up, but the audacity! "Have you not eyes, my lord?" His grip tightens on his instrument-- "Why, there's nothing befouling about me!"

    The lord snarles something akin to "Grab him!" or "Gut him!" -- and the lord's son has the decency to look sheepish from where he's standing with his sheets tugged around his waist-- and the guards rush forward. Jaskier has no intention of being beheaded tonight, so he does what any sane man in nothing but a pair of trousers and one boot would do; clutches his lute to his chest and clambers through the second story window--

    -- and safely into the pile of hay just outside it.

    The bard laughs something fierce at the lord's shocked face above him, tumbles out of the hay and runs.

    --

    Jaskier stares into the mirror with a frown, prodding at the tender, blue-ish purple-ish blotch of skin below his eye until Geralt catches him ( again ) and swats his hand away-- "Ow!" He huffs and fiddles with the towel around his waist instead.

    "I look atrocious," the bard says. His skin is as damp as the hair that is curling softly against his forehead, not a wrinkle to be seen even as he nears his thirties ( which he is quite proud of, dare he say it ) and his eyes remain their usual cornflower blue, but the splotch just beneath the left-- it looks as if it's darkening with each passing moment. "No one will pay me any mind with this blemish, might as well have lost my voice entirely-- oh, Geralt, do you hear that?"

    "Hmm."

    "No, no, listen-- It's my career passing by the door without me, off into the night, perhaps to see Val--"

    "Jaskier--" the Witcher extends a hand to cup his jaw and angle his face toward him-- there's that familiar feeling at the touch and he swallows, heart fluttering beneath his ribs at the gentleness with which the Witcher handles him-- "Shut up, don't move, and keep looking at me." And there it goes.

    He rolls his eyes. "Quite demanding, aren't you?"

    Geralt says nothing, merely dips his fingers into the salve and sets to his ministrations. The man is focused in his motions, gaze fixed unrelentingly unto the offending bruise as if he might be able to glare it away. Jaskier does his best to sit still, to be quiet, distracting himself as much as he can from the frankly stifling silence by studying the man's features. The starkness of his jaw, the light stubble adorning it, the bow of his lip and how they purse in concentration-- except he shouldn't be looking, really, not as he was, so he thinks instead of other things.

    Thinks of the warbler outside of his bedroom in Kerack, its song ( or what he remembers it to be ), of the gardens then flooded by torrential rains. Wilted flowers smushed into the muddied soil by servant boots and peeling wallpaper, and-- oh. He blinks. There he goes again, that familiar feeling of not being. Of maybe-petals spilling from his lips, of his own hands that somehow are not his own. As if he has left his body behind, and he struggles to remember where exactly it was that he'd left it.

    Something is touching him, possibly-- grasping at him, more like. His gaze slips from peeling Oxenfurt walls to a mirror. The young man-- no, it's him, isn't it? He's eighteen-- sits still in his silly high-collared doublet buttoned up to the base of his throat, stoic as ever. There is a bruise blossoming just below his left eye. Did the cane strike him there? He lifts his hand to touch--

    "Jaskier."

    He's brought back by a hand encircling his wrist and another touching his face-- caressing his cheek, tilting his head to meet their eyes. Geralt peers up at him with furrowed brows.

    "Sorry," the bard mumbles. He feels flush, his cheeks are no doubt warming under the man's gaze.

    "Where did you go?" The Witcher asks, tentatively.

   Jaskier tugs his lips into a smile-- what else is he to do? "You know us bards, Geralt," he says, sparing the mirror another glance; and his companion allows it this time, turning to meet his gaze through it curiously. His hair is damp and skin lay bare-- no doublets or dead eyes, only the towel snug around his waist and Geralt kneeling at his side. "Daydreamers, all of us."