A Little Life

Jaskier

Jaskier wakes softly for the first time in weeks, a smile already spread across his face as he slides a hand across the bed to find...nothing. What was he looking for? Empty coolness greets him and he coaxes his eyes open to make sense of it - it's still night, but the fire has been fed enough to keep out the damp chill of spring. A pleasant soreness thrums through his body, fighting for attention over some of his sharper, lingering pain, and wins when Jaskier remembers where it came from.

He finds Geralt - just a shadow outlined against the fire, but Jaskier is accustomed to knowing him in the dark. He's half dressed, bent over that peculiar stick again, and doesn't look up when Jaskier shuffles across the bed to approach him, teetering across the room with the quilt drawn around him like a cloak.

"Are you....whittling?" he asks when he gets close enough to inspect. "You... whittle? You're whittling in the middle of the night, in the dark, like you're some...some...some kind of lunatic old man."

"I am an old man," Geralt deadpans. Jaskier sputters.

"This must be a fever dream."

Geralt squints up at him and raises a hand as if to check for the aforementioned fever, only to be slapped away as Jaskier speaks again.

"Either we've hurtled past some very important milestones and landed at domesticity, witcher, or you're trying to think again."

"Hmm," Geralt grunts at the accusation.

"I won't have it," the bard announces, crowding forward until the stick hits the floor with a hollow thump. The witcher is more careful with his curious little knife, but not by much, and it is sent skittering across the table when Jaskier settles himself across the lap in front of him.

"I should have known this is what would get you out of bed," he grumbles, and a laugh crackles out of Jaskier.

"This, dear witcher, would have woken me from the dead. In fact, I'm starting to feel faint..."

He trails off, then squawks when a cool set of fingers pinch at his hip.

"Imp," Geralt scolds.

"Demon," he chirps back, speaking into the bolt of Geralt's jaw until those hands tighten deliciously around him once more. "Brute. Scoundrel. Take me back to your bed at once. "

**

Jaskier is covered in black armor. Black like tar, black like midnight. It coils at his wrists, sits heavy on his chest and stops him screaming, stops him moving. He's supposed to be moving, moving, moving because someone told him to - sang it at him so soft - the swamp, the swamp, move into the swamp. Run because something runs toward him - something with eight bent legs, something with jaws snip-snipping, something holding a whip, holding a dagger. A swamp, a cell, a forest, drowning-screaming-bleeding, a white white wolf stained so red.

This time, when Jaskier wakes shrieking in that unfamiliar room, Geralt is still there. The solid arm slung around his waist grounds him until he stops heaving.

"I'm here," a voice rumbles into the top of his head. "I have them too."

Memories come trickling in - Geralt pressing him back down into the bed, Geralt's lips covering his, Geralt's rumbling laugh in his ear, close enough to warm Jaskier's cheek, calling him ridiculous and insatiable, sating him anyway. Jaskier twists to face him and finds it hard to breathe again, for an entirely new reason.

Geralt is extraordinary, so close and so unguarded. He looks more lion than wolf in the warm morning light, severe and regal with his silver hair catching gold about his head like a crown, and his eyes - so molten, so changeable in the dim light the night before - are sober again. Anyone else might think he was relaxed, stretched out as he is on his side with a hand propping up his head, but Jaskier knows better. He's shared more mornings with Geralt than without, by now, so he can see the tension in his jaw and the beginning of a crease in his brow.