Chapter Text
When Jaskier wakes, everything is different.
While he’d known that it would be, that he would be fundamentally changed at the end of this, it’s still jarring. After all, knowing something theoretically is very different from experiencing it. At first, he doesn’t open his eyes, because he’s already on the brink of sensory overload as it is.
He catalogues everything he is experiencing, picking it apart one by one so that he can acclimate faster. The first thing he notices is that he isn’t chained to the cot anymore, which is nice. He hears the whirring of a contraption, the gentle hum of magic, Yennefer’s light footsteps. He smells the lingering scent of blood, faintly, as if it had been cleaned up, and the clean, sharp scent of alcohol. He feels the scratch of the sheets under him, a large, calloused hand in his, the thumb running over the back of his hand.
Geralt!
His eyes fly open and he sits up quickly. Immediately, he regrets it; it’s like he’s got the worst hangover of his life. Everything is so bright, the daylight filtering through the curtains just bordering on too much, and he’s violently dizzy from the sudden movement.
“Lie back down,” Yennefer demands, and her thin, long-fingered hands are pressing his shoulders back. He’s too disoriented to fight it, so he does. Thankfully, she at least lets him lean up against the wall behind his cot.
“Geralt,” he says, because that’s the immediate concern. He’s assaulted by memories of the night before — at least, he thinks it was the night before, but he doesn’t know how much time has passed. He doesn’t know how much is real and how much was a dream or hallucination.
“Right here,” Geralt says, still holding his hand like a lifeline.
For a moment, Jaskier stiffens, bracing himself for the desire to — he doesn’t know what. Rend, tear, kill.
It doesn’t come.
He lets out a shaky breath that he hadn’t known he was holding. “I don’t know if I can quite trust my memory,” he admits. “Would you…?”
The bard makes the mistake of glancing at the witcher, and oh. If he’d thought Geralt was beautiful before (and he did, Gods, he did) it was nothing compared to what he can see now. It’s as if he’d been half-blind up to this point, like he’s really seeing for the first time. Every minute shift in Geralt’s expression is visible, every little twitch of his muscles. Jaskier bets he could count every hair on the other man’s head, if he wanted.
“Jaskier?” Geralt says tentatively, unsure. He isn’t used to the witcher sounding unsure, doesn’t like it. “Are you alright?”
“Everything looks sharper,” the vampire says, sounding almost as dazed by it as he feels. “Gods, you’re… fucking gorgeous, really, I always knew that but I didn’t know how much I wasn’t seeing, before.”
The witcher chuckles, dips his head — fuck, he’s embarrassed, and it’s adorable.
Yennefer clears her throat to get their attention. “You’ve been asleep for about two days,” she says. It sounds like she’s delivering a clinical report. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure you’d pull through.”
“I told you I’d be fine,” he grouses. He isn’t prepared for the force of the glare she shoots him.
“No, Jaskier, you wouldn’t have. Not if we hadn’t intervened.”
“I thought you were just saying that,” Jaskier says with a frown. Then, it hits him. “What do you mean, ‘intervened’?”
Geralt answers, and when Jaskier looks at him the witcher’s mouth is pressed into a thin line, expression almost guilty. “You were dying faster than you were healing,” he says. “If you hadn’t drank my blood, we wouldn’t be talking about this right now.”
A thousand and one different things go through Jaskier’s head, and he clutches Geralt’s hand tightly in his own. “You— you could have— Gods, Geralt, I could have killed you!”
“Yet you didn’t, just as I’d tried to tell you,” Yennefer says.
“I never would have forgiven myself if anything happened to you, and I could have helped but didn’t,” Geralt admits like he’s confessing his darkest sins.
“And if anything had happened to you?” Jaskier demands. “How the fuck do you think I would have felt if I were the one to kill you?”
“The two of you talked about this already, before it happened,” Yennefer tells him, “but I’m not surprised you don’t remember. If you drank his blood, and it didn’t go well, then there was almost a guarantee that I would have been able to intervene and solve the problem. If we didn’t act, then it was a guarantee that you would not make it. Neither of us were willing to take this risk. And, you might remember, you did agree to it.”
“I didn’t know what I was agreeing to!” Jaskier seethes.
“I know,” Geralt says. “I’m sorry.”
That makes Jaskier sort of crumble. The witcher looks and sounds so guilty. Yennefer doesn’t, but that’s just who she is as a person. If she thinks she’s right, she’ll never back down, and admittedly she had been right.
The thing that really makes him let go of his anger, though, is what the sorceress says next. “If the situation were reversed, would you have let him die?”
No. He knows he wouldn’t have. If Geralt was guaranteed to die, and he thought there was only a small chance for himself to meet that fate instead, of course he would do what he needed to to save the other. He wants to be angry, on principle, but he isn’t. He can’t.
“How did you know it would work?” he asks instead of answering. All three of them know what his answer would be, he doesn’t need to say it aloud.
“It’s to do with bond magic,” she answers easily. “In every case that ended in the survival of both parties, the only common factor was true love. Without it, the bond created in the exchange of blood gets confused, and causes the new vampire to fly into a frenzy. Unable to make sense of the bond, it twists into a need to consume. With it, both parties are bonded. One of the side effects is that both parties take on the vampire’s lifespan and most of their invincibility.”
“How did you figure that out?” he asks. “I have to admit, I’m impressed.”
She gives him a taunting smirk that he isn’t sure he likes the look of. “Tell me,” she drawls, “how old is your mother?”
He frowns at her, trying to figure out what the fuck that has to do with anything, and then it clicks. Well, several things do, actually. “Shit,” he says, because what else can he say? Apparently his mother is far, far older than he’d thought. He’ll admit that he hasn’t visited his parents in a very long time, so he hasn’t known what she’s looked like for some time now, but he is always pleasantly surprised when she’s still around to return his letters.
Then, something far more horrifying hits him. “You’ve been to see my parents,” he says with a considerable amount of horror. “Oh, Gods, they’re going to kill me for telling you.”
“They weren’t happy at first,” she agrees, “but they warmed up to the idea pretty quickly, considering it involved me helping their son through the most painful experience of his life.”
He lets out a relieved breath, only to suck in a startled gasp as he realises something else.
“You said true love,” he says.
Yennefer, the absolute asshole, only rolls her eyes. “Took you long enough,” she murmurs. It would be fascinating that he can hear it now, when before it would have been too quiet even for his trained musician’s ears, but he is currently too focused on Geralt to pay attention to that.
“I thought I’d imagined it,” Jaskier says softly, bringing a hand up to cup Geralt’s cheek. It reminds him of the night before — or, well, apparently several nights ago. This time, though, he is aware, more aware than he has ever been. “Hallucinated or dreamt it, perhaps. But you really…?”
“Love you, yeah,” Geralt finishes for him, and oh, he can actually hear the way the witcher’s too-slow heart speeds up, ever so slightly.
Jaskier can’t keep the smile off of his face. “Then, what are the odds that I could kiss you now?” he asks, tongue darting out unconsciously to wet his own lips.
“Very high,” Geralt answers. So, Jaskier captures the witcher’s lips in what is undoubtedly the best kiss of his life to date. He can actually feel literal magic swirling behind it, and he isn’t sure if it’s because he’s sensitive to it now or if it’s because it’s from their bond. Yennefer was right, fuck, they’re bonded. They’re bonded by magic because they are in true love.
“This is going to make an excellent song,” Jaskier murmurs as he pulls away from the kiss.
For once, Geralt doesn’t argue.