to sing a loftier song [jaskier x reader]

1. the wave not yet broken

...does he really have no other options? Has time made him remember his years at the academy more favorably than they were? He had plenty of acquaintances, he is realizing: people he got drunk with, or danced the night away with, or even fucked. But none of them would bear his company out of the blue, three years past graduation. The only reason Shani might put up with him would be because they never fucked, which might make their acquaintance salvageable in a way none of his other female acquaintances are.

Well...

She is an option, and the moment it occurs to him he feels like an idiot for forgetting her. How did he even manage? He decides, in that instant, as he passes through the gates to the city, that he will at least pay her a visit. Ask if she might let him stay the night, if nothing else.

Is she still with that boor Eryk? Are they married now? Is she even still in Oxenfurt? She'd mentioned taking a position as a scribe for her own adviser, but that had been years ago. Things change with time — just look at him; he's famous now, more or less. Or at least more famous than when he left.

He'd never bedded her, either, though for different reasons than he and Shani never did. And gods, are there really so few people in his educational background that he liked but didn't go to bed with?

Jaskier had liked her from — their first meeting, really. They'd both had the same professor for their grammar seminars that semester, and — Well, Jaskier has always been weak to the pull of a lovely woman. He'd not been quite so cocksure (hah!) at that stage of his life, though, and his initial move had been to — to take the desk next to hers, and hopefully strike up genuine conversation. It's not as if he went over with the express purpose of getting into her bed, but it would have been (and would be today) a crime against his nature to see someone that appealed to him and not make at least some approach.

The seminar had begun before he figured out what to say, and perhaps he spent more of it listening to her monologue under her breath than he did listening to the subject material but —

She said something sharp and sarcastic about another classmate's baseless line of questioning to herself, just loud enough for him to hear, and he'd laughed aloud without meaning to. The look they'd shared, when she turned to him with her eyebrow raised and clearly was trying to determine why a stranger was obsessing over her murmuring — it'd been piercing. He's never been the same, since.

But their friendship — because it did turn into a real friendship — never turned into anything else. He would invite her out (sometimes with a bribe) to attend parties and performances, but she either never noticed the way he looked at her, or she was ignoring it. Eventually, he — well. Jaskier knows better than to push where he is not wanted, really he does, and their friendship was worth more than abating his libido.

It shouldn't have hurt him quite so much to see her accept Eryk's proposal. It seemed like he appeared on the scene and within a week had tied her to him. How did she even meet him? He doesn't even know. But it had cut into him, just a little, to see her accept the advances of someone so — terrible. In personality and as a student.

Still, she found the time to hang out with him around seeing her boyfriend, and something about not having the option, even remotely, to pursue her, changed his perception of their friendship. It hurt, sure, to see her with Eryk — at first, anyway. But he got used to it, and she seemed happy enough with him that he kept his remarks about the man's abilities in mathematics and dialectic to himself.

Even when they'd parted upon graduation — he'd set out the next morning with his lute and his pack and a yearning for stories that is only mostly satisfied by Geralt's contracts — it'd been on good terms.