It’s been months since the mountain, and Jaskier is trying to heal. He knows logically that what Geralt said was untrue. He knows Geralt’s woes aren’t his fault, that he was lashing out because of his own hurt and guilt over Yennefer. He understands that. He forgives that, even.
So he travels onward. He sings of Geralt’s adventures like he always does. He composes new songs.
But everything he writes is dreck: maudlin, self-pitying, and flat.
The problem is that Geralt’s words struck something deeper inside him, a festering anxiety he’s never been able to quash. Because he is a burden, really, isn’t he? Can’t fight, can’t hunt, can only earn coin where people have it to spare. He’s known it all his life, which is why he tries so terribly hard to be entertaining. Perhaps, he used to think, if he was charming enough, if he was diverting enough, people wouldn’t notice what a hindrance he was. Perhaps they’d think it was a trade worth making.
He’d convinced himself it was that way with Geralt. That he brought something worthwhile to Geralt’s life, some colour and music, even though Geralt never expressed any affection for those things. As if a few meager coins from odd performances and a few sugar-spun tales about witchers’ heroic deeds could be recompense for tolerating him.
Clearly, he was wrong. There was nothing he had that Geralt needed, and it seemed nothing that he wanted either.
Jaskier is not unfamiliar with the pain of unrequited love. It has happened more times than he can count that he has laid eyes on some beautiful stranger, some compelling vision, someone with whom he has fallen instantly in love, only for them to return his gaze with an upturned lip and an expression of distaste.
But this is wholly different from those fleeting hurts. This is years, decades, of devotion to a man who only ever tolerated his presence at best. What Jaskier feels, most of all, is stupid, and embarrassed, and lonely in a way that has settled into a dull, flat ache in the pit of his stomach.
His new attempts at work are all disasters, so eventually in desperation he digs out the old notebook he’s been carefully avoiding and finds the song he’d been working on before the dragon hunt. The lyrics are all wrong but the melody is solid, and sad, and playing it feels cathartic even when it hurts, like binding a wound to staunch the bleeding.
The fairer sex, they often call it
But her love’s as unfair as a crook
It’s petty, and a little mean, but it’s satisfying to lay those words out on the page. She was always bad news. He hadn’t been wrong about that. He lets himself write more. As if he can transpose his pain onto Yennefer, to purge himself by reworking the story so it’s her fault. It’s not true, but it feels good to pretend for a moment.
Tell me love, tell me love
How is that just?
It’s the phrase that’s been drumming in his head for weeks. It’s not just, it’s not fair, it’s not right that he should feel this way. He knows this is a fiction too - since when has their world had any interest in justice? - but he’s enjoying the pretense. As he writes, though, inevitably he can’t help but show himself.
I’m weak my love, and I am wanting
He scribbles it out. It’s too obvious. Too crass. Too revealing.
He writes it back in. It’s true.
He finishes the song that night. He plays it the next day, both to rip the wax from the wound and simply because he has no other material. The audience seems to like it, the young women especially. He tells them it’s about doomed love which, of course, it is.
He plays it often from then on. He’d imagined playing it might lessen the knot of shame and misery in his chest, but it doesn’t. He keeps playing it anyway.
He keeps playing until, one chilly autumn evening in a small village, he’s wrapping up the evening with the song, looking forward to a quiet ale and a soft bed for once. He barely registers the faces in the tavern, the shhh shhh of the door swinging open and closed. He barely notices anything at all until he sounds the final notes, lets them ring through the smoky air, and looks up to find an achingly familiar figure in the doorway: dark cloak, white hair, two big scary swords.
His heart twists violently as their eyes meet across the room, amber on blue, and there’s an expression on that familiar face not of anger but something akin to curiosity. To puzzlement. To wondering what the fuck was that he was singing about?
Suddenly there’s not enough air in the room and his skin is crawling and it’s too much, all too much, and something inside his chest rips and cracks. There is something fundamentally broken here, and he thinks it must be him.
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