An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 30/?
Fandom: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Eskel & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Lambert, Eskel & Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion & Lambert
Characters: Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Lambert (The Witcher), Eskel (The Witcher)
Additional Tags: Miscommunication, Past Rape/Non-con, Dubious Consent, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Misunderstandings, Power Imbalance, Unintended power dynamics, Mentions of past abuse, Mentions of Starvation, there will be comfort eventually I swear, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Food Issues, Self-Esteem Issues, intermittent braincell reception, also should probably have had this already, Slow Burn, Dissociation, partially inspired by ‘Seeking Shelter’ by sphagnum
Series: Part 1 of Out of Shyness or Shame
Summary:
Seeing no other alternatives before him, the witchers really are his best bet at surviving the winter at this point, as much as Jaskier wishes it wasn’t so.
Julian Alfred Pankratz, a small noble boy of Lettenhove, runs away from his lessons to play in the woods, because he would much rather prefer being bare-footed and climbing among the trees than being in some stuffy room learning about assholes who killed their people and then themselves. And, out in the woods, he finds an egg.
He gets excited because he learned about eggs before, and they always hatch into cute little birds. And this egg is really big, so that means this is going to be a really cute bird.
That was logical, right?
The bigger the egg, the cuter the bird?
What he doesn’t know is that it is a griffin egg – not just a griffin, but an arch-griffin egg – that was orphaned by a witcher who killed the griffin and cleared out the nest, but missed this egg, which had rolled away and stayed hidden.
Julian only sees one option, and it’s to carry the egg home so he can care for it and wait for the baby bird to hatch. Because what else would he do?
<><><><>
He’s in his room when it hatches, and eww – the baby bird is covered in slime and mucus and whatever else had been packed inside the egg, and this is definitely not cute, what were his mentors talking about – but then the baby screeches and rolls around, blind and weak, and its behaviour is cute and Julian’s heart absolutely melts.
The baby is promptly named Alfie, and Julian uses towels and cloth to clean off the baby, and he scrunches up his nose in confusion, because this is a really weird looking bird.
And ugly.
But ugly as in cute.
So, Julian shrugs and showers the baby in coos and praise and love.
He hides it from his parents and house staff, keeping Alfie hidden under his bed whenever someone comes in his room.
She’s so smart, too, as young as she is. She listens so well to Julian, like a trained hound, and she loves curling up with Julian at night at the foot of his bed. To make sure she doesn’t starve, he feeds Alfie leftover scraps from the kitchen, and finds that she really likes meats. Specifically raw meats. Which makes sense because she’s a bird, right? Birds are omnivores, right?
It’s not until the next week that Julian learns about griffins when he hears servants in the manor talking about the contract the witcher took, and something clicks in his head, and he’s like, “oh, so that’s why it looked like a weird bird. Because it’s a weird bird monster.”
He brings the baby, who is growing really big, too big to fit under his bed now – which he now knows is a griffin – outside again and plays with it and gets so proud and excited when Alfie starts to flap her wings and glide, jumping from high places and chasing after Julian. Alfie is really affectionate and likes to nuzzle and press against Julian like a cat. She even responds to her name, the clever little thing, but only when Julian calls it.
She also hunts down small rodents all on her own, and even though Julian thinks the raw meat and the blood is kind of disgusting, he still praises her for her hunting skills.
And she loves praise, and she’ll preen and puff her chest out whenever Julian showers her with love.
Alfie becomes protective over her human, and anytime Julian wanders into the woods with someone else, he quickly has to steer the other person away, lest Alfie mistake them for a danger to her Julian. Years after finding her, Alfie even once mauled a man who tried to rape Julian in the woods, when he was only fourteen, and Julian had never loved Alfie so much before. Immediately after, Alfie sniffed and tried to lick the blood off Julian, making high pitched whining and keening noises, like an overgrown puppy, worried that Julian was hurt. Julian gave her so much praise and coos that day, and he even brought back the best cuts of his dinner for her to enjoy.
Within a few months of bringing her outside to stay, the griffin grows to full size, and has the power and strength to kill ten men without blinking.
She’s still cute when she rolls over for Julian to give her belly rubs.
<><><><>
Imagine Geralt’s surprise and exasperation to learn that the hopeless, painfully vulnerable and naïve bard who followed him, has a massive arch-griffin as a pet.
Certainly not him, who is attacked promptly after punching said bard.
<><><><>
“Wait!” Jaskier choked out, still out of breath from being sucker-punched. “Don’t hurt her! Please!”
Geralt ignored the bard, tucking and rolling to avoid a swipe of massive razor-sharp claws. He brings his sword up, but the griffin jumps back, cleverer than most of its kin, and hisses at him, strangely subdued for a normally aggressive monster. It was weird, the way it kept glancing around and back at the bard, like it didn’t want to fight and wanted to fly away. And Geralt usually would have let it go, if not for the fact that it was between him and the bard and posed a danger.
He signed Aard, and the griffin was pushed back, shrieking as it crashed painfully into a tree.
Geralt brought his sword down to meet it, but then he was being body-checked by the bard, being thrown with unexpected strength.
“What the fuck –”
Then the bard stumbled and put his body in the way. “Stop!”
“Get out of the way, bard,” the witcher growled.
“No, you can punch me all you want, but I won’t let you hurt Alfie! She was only trying to protect me!”
The witcher had to blink to ensure he wasn’t hallucinating.
Then the bard spun around and was running over to the arch-griffin, absolutely and painfully no sense of self-preservation in sight. And then, he fucking cuddled up to the monster.
“Oh, baby, are you okay?” He asked in a high-pitched, soft voice, as if talking to a kitten.
That was definitely not a kitten. The furthest thing from it.
Then the griffin moved, and Geralt was ready to watch the bard’s head be chomped off, when the griffin nuzzled into his chest in what could be called an affectionate manner.
Geralt blinked.
The griffin fucking what?
<><><><>
It was unsettling to travel with an arch-griffin. It was even more unsettling to see it act like a tame overgrown puppy to a painfully naïve bard, who showered it unconditionally with love, kisses, and praise, near constantly. Jaskier would stroke and pet the griffin whenever he liked, and would fucking climb on its back to ride, and the damned griffin let him.
“Oh, you’re so beautiful! You’re so cute, such a good girl!” Jaskier crooned. “Yes, you are! So majestic! Geralt, isn’t she the cutest thing you’ve ever seen!”
Geralt wouldn’t exactly call an arch-griffin cute.
<><><><>
“What the fuck is wrong with you,” Lambert said, two seconds into meeting the bard.
The fucking arch-griffin chirped affectionately and nuzzled into the bard.
The scrunching of the snow underneath his boots sounds loud in the eerie silence of the night. Jaskier pulls the collar of his coat closer to his neck and leans against the wind as he passes the corpse of the basilisk lying shattered in the courtyard.
He stops at the hitching post where Geralt tied down his horse, and with a sick feeling of satisfaction, he pats the mount’s neck.
“You’ll be good for me, won’t you?” he murmurs. The horse watches him with attentive eyes and neighs.
“Good,” Jaskier mumbles and closes the buttons of his doublet and then of his coat. They are meant to mainly look good, but if he wants to leave the mountains behind without freezing to death, vanity and fashion need to take a step back, and the buttons will have to prove their true worth.
Jaskier unknots the reins and throws them over the horse’s head. He looks up at the keep, so much larger, so much worse than he had imagined it, made it sound in his songs. But he understands his friend Geralt better now, having been here. This is his home. This is where he grew to become the man he is now, where he recharged every winter they spent apart. For sure not a place for warmth. Not a place to learn to deal with emotions beyond reining them in during a hunt and keeping people at arm's length.
The bard purses his lips, his jaws clenched. No wonder that even after decades, he couldn’t carve out a tiny space for himself in the witcher’s heart. No, for that to be achieved, one needs destiny, and that one isn’t on Jaskier’s side.
Granted, he comes from a privileged place. Not one filled with love either, but at least one needn’t worry to freeze under the blankets while being fully clothed.
The events in the hall have sobered him up, but he can feel the weight of a hangover combined with an adrenaline crash pulling on every muscle of his body.
What a fragile thing the human body is. No wonder Geralt never meant to burden himself with someone as fleeting as Jaskier. Humans must be like annoying midges for long-living creatures like him and his witch, irritating, but easy to slap away.
Just like Geralt did back on the mountain. But like a moth to the flame, Jaskier had returned to him. An ‘I’ve missed you too”, a tender cupping of his shoulder, a rumbled “I need your help’ and one ‘I’m sorry’ a few hours later—that’s all Geralt had granted him as reparation. And Jaskier had lapped it up like the loyal friend and lovestruck fool that he was. That he is. Still.
That’s why he has to go away, leave before the heartache infests every cell of his body and realm of his soul again.
He had barely survived the way Geralt had sent him away. He knew that Geralt would never return his feelings. He had made peace with that at least a decade ago. That didn’t mean that he deserved this kind of treatment as a fucking friend.
But his return to the witcher’s side? He brought it all on himself. He could have said no, taken his newfound freedom and brought as much distance between them as possible. He owed Geralt not a dreg. If anything, it was the other way around.
Well, he’ll take his horse now. A tiny gree, at last. Jaskier can just imagine Geralt cursing colourfully under his breath when he sees the horse gone. Not that he would miss him very much. He fulfilled whatever function he had, as daft as it was.
Geralt didn’t really need him. Nothing would have gone differently if Jaskier hadn’t been at his side. Yarpen and his people would have brought Ciri to the keep, and the empty space under the table in the big hall wouldn’t have changed anything either.
Lambert, at least, was honest. Jaskier doesn’t belong to them, to their brotherhood of witchers, not to the fateful family of three either. He doesn’t belong to anything or anyone. He’s free as a bird, lonely as a cloud. Nothing is waiting for him in between these thick walls and cold halls.
Geralt didn’t even ask about his well-being. Nobody did. He was invisible throughout their travels and after this battle more than ever. Not even Yennefer had a nice word for him, now that she had her magic back.
Jaskier mounts the horse, and without another glance, he urges it to the main gate. He’s sick of being the fool, the Jesper, the deliverer of comic relief. He is a person, and he only has this one, short, mortal life.
If he had only known all these years ago how right he’d been. Geralt does smell like death and destiny. And Jaskier wouldn’t have dreamt about their lives being so connected one day that the smell that had once urged him one, lured him in would turn pungent in his nose.
Watching Geralt looking past him, only eyes for his brethren, his daughter, and the woman he claims to detest—Jaskier hasn’t felt such loneliness in all his life.
Realising that he wasted his best years with a man who only saved him out of a sense of obligation, and maybe—and that’s a big maybe—because he needed someone safe and trustworthy in a world that was breaking apart, it hurt. It still does. Like an all-consuming fire licking on the inside of his body.
But he’ll get over it. He nearly did the last time.
The reins bite in his still healing flesh, the fingertips and palm still raw from the torture, the knuckles pricking under the icy wind. The skin will chap soon enough, likely before anyone will even realise that he is gone.
‘Good,’ Jaskier thinks. He wants his hands to hurt. He wants a visible manifestation of his pain inside. Maybe then, his heart will stop hurting in his chest, maybe he’ll get numb. Maybe, the winter will swallow him. It’s not as if anyone would miss him, after all.
Rating: G
Words: 2044
Ships: None, really (Hints of Geraskefer)
Summary:
Lambert has met the White Wolf's bard and can't believe it's the same man that's gone around repairing Witcher reputations for the past 20 years.
One of the fundamental truths that the universe loved to remind Jaskier of was that he was utterly useless. Unworthy, even.
It was only cemented in his mind the countless times that Geralt had to save him from a monster, or even worse, a random thug in a tavern.
He had no true talents other than his words, his music, and what use were they really?
He couldn’t save anyone with words or a lively tune. And yet he was surrounded by the most powerful people on the Continent.
Geralt of Rivia, the famed Witcher, the Butcher of Blaviken, the White Wolf. A mutant, a man with unnatural power, whose mastery of the sword was unparalleled. Yennefer of Vengerberg, one of the most powerful mages who walked the earth. A woman who could raze cities and read minds.
They were a love story for the ballads, two powerful, beautiful people brought together by destiny, by fate.
And then there was Jaskier. A simple bard. A human bard. Whose greatest talent was managing to keep a steady note even while drunk.
Gods, he really was worthless, wasn’t he.
In the presence of gods and monsters, what worth is a man?
It was part of the reason he had never come between Yennefer and Geralt. Because he loved Geralt, and he knew that he was unworthy of him. Geralt deserved someone who could keep up with him, someone who could challenge him. He deserved someone powerful and as immortal as he was.
Someone who wasn’t Jaskier.
Every time he saw Geralt, he had to stop himself. Had to hide the love which encompassed his entire being.
Every word he said to him, every move he made was perfectly calculated to make sure that he never knew.
It was an endless torture, but a sweet one.
And so the next time they encountered Yennefer, he left.
He stood outside the tent where they lay together, and whispered his final goodbye to the wind.
okay so I’ve 100% read fanfictions that r kinda based on this premise (and if you want me to rec them, let me know!) but I want Jaskier to be a bard but Dragon Age style. For people that don’t know, a Dragon Age bard is just like a normal bard, they go to courts, compose music and generally tell the stories of the world, however they also acts as assasins and spies of the highest order, inflitrating courts and selling their secrets to the highest bidder while also killing however they need to. Their facades as happy-go-lucky musicians keep everyone fooled until it’s too late.
So, imagine Jaskier as a bard who decided he had enough of the courts and the intrigue and left it all behind because he did not want to just spill secrets to a faceless noble but instead tell stories that will last generations. He wouldn’t be in trouble or anything with other bards for ‘abandoning’ his training but he would most likely be seen as weak.
Bards are trained in dual sword wielding and archery for weaponry and I can totally see Jaskier using butterfly swords/Baat Jaam Dao cause he wants to remain inconspicious and achery is little bit too obvious, Baat Jaam Dao are small and easy to conceal. The fighting style is all about overcoming your opponent with fast, agile strikes, and disarming them, not killing them. I think this fits Jaskier really well. For reference, here’s what the swords look like:
Jaskier could totally hide them. Also, this sword idea may or not be inspired by a move from the Dragon Age series called the Butterfly where you slash the enemy’s wrists and then their throat immedialy after. (Please go read Dragon Age: The Masked Empire)
Bards are also expected to be able to complete a mission in private, say, at a banquet and then return to being the life of the party, not a hair out of place and no one even noticing you are gone. And oh god, I love this idea so much.
Like Jaskier doesn’t really take jobs anymore unless they strike him as somehting that needs to be done, morally speaking, and he actually doesn’t really and try and hide it from Geralt. So Jaskier tlak all the time but never about his past but Geralt never asks about his past so Jaskier basically pretends it doesn’t exist.
And Jaskier is really more trained for dealing with human monsters so it’s not like he’d be of any help for a kikimora hunt or whatever, that’s not really in his wheelhouse.
Ugh just imagine if Geralt gets captured or incapacitated, something that Jaskier has never had to deal with so he steps in and just takes whatever the threat is OUT. Geralt is surprised and horny.
Let me know if u want more of these headcanons or something
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/14
Fandom: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion & Vesemir, Jaskier | Dandelion & Renfri | Shrike
Characters: Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Vesemir (The Witcher), Renfri | Shrike (The Witcher), Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Lambert (The Witcher), Eskel (The Witcher), Aiden (The Witcher)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon, Witcher Jaskier | Dandelion, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, starts before the show, mentions of jaskier/others, Curses, Cursed Jaskier | Dandelion, Stregobor Being an Asshole (The Witcher), Blood and Injury, mention of the witcher trials, mention of child death, Identity Issues, Jaskier | Dandelion Needs a Hug, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Pining
Summary:
Made a witcher when he was young, the halls of Kaer Morhen have no secrets for Julian. He is an expert witcher now, inseparable from his friend Vesemir's side. Amidst teaching chaos, he is asked to help prepare new trials for a thirteen years old boy, who just passed his first trials.
When he refuses to help them, he is cast out from the wolf witchers' stronghold, separated from his friend. He is then confronted by Stregobor, a mage with whom he fought a few years prior, who seeks revenge on him, and who is helped by another wolf witcher set out against Julian.
This is the story of how Julian, Wolf Witcher, became Jaskier the bard, and how, accidentally, he discovers himself a family outside of Kaer Morhen.
