this isn’t ready for ao3 yet bc i have more planned and i don’t want to make it chaptered, but i’m actually quite pleased with how this turned out, so please enjoy this first taste of my banshee/siren hybrid jaskier story!
part 2
minor warning for gore
wc 745
now on ao3
----
Jaskier knows the taste of death.
He tastes it more often than he’d like (which is to say, at all); every few towns or so, whenever he makes eye contact with the wrong person. An old woman putting out her washing, a young man in a tavern, puffed up and boasting while his fellows egg him on to show off, a girl with bruises on her arms and her eyes downcast, walking in the shadow of her husband. The sickly taste of rot will coat the back of his tongue and he’ll feel a Song rising in his throat.
He never Sings it.
He’s tasted the deaths of a hundred strangers, and while his heart breaks a little every time, he fights down the Song and swallows the rotten bile and turns away, knowing he has no power here. There is nothing he can do for them, now.
This time is different.
This time, the Song he can feel building in his chest isn’t for a stranger.
It’s for Geralt.
Something— breaks, inside him. The Song, which has always before felt like a living thing unto itself, separate from the man who hosts it, just waiting to be unleashed, expands to fill his lungs. For a moment, Jaskier chokes on the sudden absence of air, before his world narrows down to a single thought: No.
He feels the moment when the magic inside him changes, when the Song becomes a part of him instead of simply a parasite. For the first time since his failed training as a child, he lets it loose.
The first to fall is the bowman in the treeline, the one Jaskier saw but Geralt didn’t. Jaskier is too far away to see his face when his hands turn the crossbow on himself, but he can taste the moment when his body falls from his perch, leaving his fellows without cover.
Geralt has felled four of the remaining bandits, but three still encircle him, and Jaskier can see him slowing.
“A single thread
hangs limply down,
and I breathe,
‘Not now,
not now,’”
All three men pull back from their attack on Geralt in an instant. The witcher doesn’t stay his strike and cuts down the one immediately in front of him before whirling to stare at Jaskier in shock, but Jaskier can’t stop now. The Song isn’t finished. Geralt isn’t safe.
“And I find you all
unwoven,
trying desperately
to sew,”
The two bandits left take jerky steps towards each other, swords raised, eyes wild and terrified. The leader makes a low, despairing sound as his friend’s innards spill beneath his blade.
“And I know the kindest thing
is to leave you
alone.”
As the last man drags his own dagger across his throat, his eyes never leave Jaskier’s.
The magic cuts off abruptly, the Song finished with the death fulfilled. Not Geralt’s death, somehow, not anymore. He’s done what he swore he never would, he’s outed himself as a monster, but Geralt is still warm and breathing behind him, so it was worth it. Whatever fate he meets at his witcher’s hands, it was worth it.
Jaskier can taste nothing but decay and blood, and he doubles over, his stomach heaving painfully as he expels his breakfast.
He’s still hunched over the ground, coughing on the lingering taste of death while spots dance in his vision, when he hears Geralt come up behind him. His footsteps are more tentative than Jaskier is used to. Understandably cautious around an unknown threat, Jaskier thinks bitterly. He’d known it was coming, it’s what he expected, but it still chafes. Most of all, he just wishes he had more time. More time with Geralt, but just more time in general.
Still, he won’t die crouched in a puddle of his own vomit like some beast. Whatever his parentage, he has more dignity than that. He’ll meet Geralt’s silver sword standing tall, and it will still be a better death than he could have met if he’d stayed at home, like his sire had expected. Love doesn’t need to be spoken to be worth dying for, after all.
Except, the spots in his vision don’t fade when he stands, like he’d expected; in fact, they grow. He sways on his feet as the world tilts alarmingly. The last thing he sees before the world goes totally black is Geralt, hands empty of silver or steel, lunging to catch him, his eyes wide with concern.
I love Nonhuman!Jaskier more than anyone. It’s honestly most of the fics I read right now
But there is something so beautifully poetic about this completely human bard treasuring these two quasi-immortal beings as if they are the most fragile things on earth. How he just looks at these warriors with skin so thick it might as well be bulletproof and saying “yes, my fragile little self is going to make sure these people are safe and loved because they are precious and lovely and need my protection”.
Jaskier’s been pretending to be human for so long now that he hardly remembers what it feels like to be a sorcerer. He doesn’t want to remember what it feels like to be a sorcerer. But people still murmur his name with reverence in certain dim halls; Dandelion, Dandelion, destroyer of worlds.
This is a Merlin AU and nobody can take this knowledge from me. This Dandelion is more Legend!Merlin than Show!Merlin is. I loved this fic so much.
