She stumbles, coughs, and catches herself in the touch of steadying hands. The world blurs, and her body aches, and she is--
She looks up into the poet's eyes, a question in them, worry creasing his brow, and all at once, she is a girl again.
Your worst fear, she thinks, hearing his frantic rush of thoughts as if they are her own. Chaos thrums and burns and eclipses, and that awful gnawing emptiness she had felt as a powerless mortal smacks shut like a parted sea crashing back to stillness.
His very worst fears and hopes and dreams are so small in the wake of her own, but she thinks for the first time, the epiphany striking like a sharp pain, how close our wants truly lie to our fears.
It is only an instant that she looks at him, his thoughts rushing panicked and loud into her head, and then awareness of the rest of the world returns.
The air stinks of sulfur and the sweetness of blood, and she is needed here. She is needed, if not wanted.
She turns aside from the poet and does what she can. She heals wounds and saps out poison and lays shrouds over the ruined bodies.
Geralt does not glance her way, let alone look into her eyes. If he did, she does not know what he would see. Fear tangled in a wish. Longing and regret.
He does not look at her.
She finds the poet, after.
"I read your mind. As my chaos returned to me," she confesses. He sets aside his journal, having been scribbling notes most of the afternoon, and she is surprised to see that he looks curious rather than angry.
"Oh?" he says, leaning forward as though she is about to tell him a very good story. "I thought mages did that all the time." He waves a hand vaguely. "You know just. Plucking thoughts from the masses. Eavesdropping."
"No," says Yennefer. "It's impolite. It's… I didn't mean to."
She feels as though she has said those words again and again and again now.
I did not mean to. I had no choice. I felt I had no choice. I feared that I would become nothing but a sum of the choices I made with my back to the wall. I made a mistake but I did not know what else to do. I have fought my whole life to be allowed a say in my own future. I do not know how to do anything else.
"You saw something bad?" he asks. "Oh dear, I can't say I remember what i was thinking in that moment. Tend to turn off the lights up there when in crisis, you know. Ah. Ah dear, was it nipples again? It's always--"
"I saw your worst fear."
"Ah," says Jaskier. He does not sound the appropriate amount of violated she feels that he should. "I fear a lot of things, you know. Not nipples, at least. Can cross that one off the list."
His expression goes a bit dreamy.
"Stop thinking about tits," she says. "This is a serious conversation."
"I thought you said it was impolite to read someone's mind?"
"I don't have to read anything."
"Drat. I'm making a face aren't I? I always attempt to be subtle about it."
"Jaskier, you could not achieve subtlety if your miserable life depended on it."
"Hey now, I kept up a secret refugee rescuing identity for months."
"While singing songs every night about the crown princess of Cintra and exactly who she was sworn to."
"Er… right." He flushes pink. "I thought you were apologizing for wronging me immensely. Go back to that bit."
"You're insufferable," says Yennefer, but she's smiling. She sits down beside him against a drafty wall, close enough that their shoulders brush. It is the first warmth she has felt in a while. The closeness of his body.
"What's my worst fear, Yennefer?" he asks.
It still takes her off guard how his voice can carry that note of quiet sincerity. She supposes it shouldn't be a surprise. That the endless chatter and frivolity is in some ways an act, only part of who this man is.
She meets his eyes. Something grows taut in the atmosphere between them.
"Irrelevance," she says. "You fear being left behind. Not leaving a mark. Making yourself small for others. Not being remembered."
"Oh," says Jaskier, voice cracking in embarrassment. "Well. Right to the heart of the matter there."
"As I said, I should not have read it in your thoughts. For that I'm sorry. My… control has not been what it should be."
It is difficult. To admit her weakness. His strangely earnest expression makes her believe that he understands this.
"Then why tell me at all?" he asks. How soft his voice is. How quiet, for all his usual volume. She is learning that this strange, peacocking man contains multitudes. That she does not really know who he is at all.
It is difficult. As difficult as it always has been to set aside her pride. As impossible as ever to look directly at the truth of all that she fears.
She breathes deeply, feeling that this foolish man has somehow ended up the bravest among them. He, at least, does not hesitate to speak his mind, thought most words he says are frivolous nothings to fill the silence. But he too has things he does not dare speak aloud. She has heard them. She has felt them herself.
"We are the same," she says. "Our worst fears."
With a careful sort of bravery, she touches the back of his hand pressed against the stone floor. Wordlessly, he turns his palm up to meet hers, and their fingers catch and entangle. He squeezes, once, and she feels as though she may break open along the delicate fracture lines of her body. She may overflow.
Somehow, impossibly, she trusts him to catch the messy spill of her. If he is the vessel that will hold her, it would hardly feel like a trap.
"Yennefer," he says. How gently he says her name. With such awe and heaviness.
"My fear…" she says. "It's…"
"I know." He nudges their shoulders together, tightens his grip on her hand. "You don't have to say it. I understand."
And he does.
They sit slumped together on the floor of a ruined keep. They cling to one another, gripping tight. And for a moment, and in many moments after, Yennefer feels what it must be to be loved.
my personal favorite yennefer/jaskier dynamic is when yelling and snarking at each other constantly is their love language, but little moments of soft yen/jask? where yen lets herself be vulnerable and jaskier turns his impassioned tenderness her way and they comfort one another? love that. good stuff.
heterosexual relationship drama caused by the dude being emotionally stunted with Trauma? boring. overdone.
heterosexual relationship drama caused by Jaskier using the last of the fancy bath salts yennefer had custom ordered and imported at great cost? Excellent. Dynamic. Want to see more.
have a tender lilacs & dandelions ficlet instead of literally anything else I wanted to write, warning for very minor original character death
Yennefer does not know the full history of the little cottage by the sea, having bought it years ago off a fellow mage who used it as an occasional base of operations the same as she once had.
She didn’t ask if it was the mage who planted the sprawling gardens, who lay down the cobblestone pathways that wind down through the hills to the dunes, who designed the house so that the bedroom window faced west and the kitchen window above the washbasin faced east, or if it was some previous, less magical occupant who built this place stone by stone and plank by plank with loving care, intending to live out their life here.
Perhaps they had done so.
She likes to imagine it. Some merchant from town, not too well-off but no peasant either, scrounging up the coin day by day to move himself and his wife out of the city now that their children have all grown. Dreaming of the coast and the quiet and the sweet sea breeze and the hills rolling with wildflowers.
Finally being granted a sizeable loan from one of the banks in Novigrad, spending the spring and summer with his brothers sweating in the sun to raise the beams and rafters, to press the pavers into the silty soil, to plant the twiggy stone fruit tree out in the garden and fence the young thing in a fishing net to keep out the grazing animals until its little roots could sink deep and branches spread.
And as winter approached, Yennefer imagines the merchant putting the final touches into the place and finally driving the last wagon up over the hills from town, all their worldly possessions rattling in the back and his wife sitting sedately beside him on the front seat.
Sitting sedately that is, until they crest the ridge to see the humble cottage laid out before them, its clay tile roof cutting a curving line against the blue-grey ocean and cotton tufts of clouds above, and the wife stands in her seat and sweeps the head covering off her greying hair and beats her husband about the shoulders with it and shouts with joy.
And he shouts with her, and the horses prance in their traces, and they nearly topple from the wagon in their haste to embrace.
And they go down to the cottage together and unload their things. The little dresser that still sits in the spare bedroom, warped now with age. The rusted washbasin, sans rust. The flat plank of the low dining room table, an older, simplistic styling much in fashion at the time.
And they light up the first fire in the hearth and make love before it and do so many times long through the harsh winter that follows and through the stretch of years to come.
The merchant and his wife grow old here, until the wife’s arthritic fingers cramp too terribly to keep up with the garden, until the merchant’s eyes grow too poor to look far out to sea, until the wife catches a chill one fall and does not rise from bed again, until the mage that comes to aid her says ’something to keep her comfortable is all I can give, all I can offer’, and the merchant is grateful even so.
She slips away in peace, no pain at her last breath.
But he has no payment that interests the mage, not his coin or his piddling investments or his retirement fund, and so, he offers the cottage that he built so many years ago with its gardens and its walkways and its weathered stone fruit tree, grown tall to brush its branches along the line of the roof.
And the mage accepts, for there is a peculiar kind of magic in a place built for love and strengthened by it daily.
Curled by the warmth of the hearth long past dark, Yennefer imagines all of this, Jaskier slumbering lightly against her shoulder, a worn quilt pooled around the both of them. His head drifts more heavily against her as time slips on, a gentle lull into deeper sleep that he does not resist, trusting her not to let him lie here all night on the floor before the fire.
Trusting her.
She can feel it, when she closes her eyes and concentrates, that age-old love whispering through each brick and floorboard. The glow of the fire burns behind her closed eyelids. These things have always been difficult for her to read clearly, to follow the veins of faint energy back to the source.
She does not know if there was ever a merchant and his wife or if the place was built with love at all. It may have been simply conjured at the whim of a flippant mage, nothing romantic about it.
The whispers of age-old love that Yennefer feels pulsating through the walls and rafters of the little cottage by the sea may have a very different source.
She can’t be certain. She’s never been good at reading these things.
But if she’s learned anything in her time spent beside him, the strange and wonderful and ridiculous man who drools against her bare shoulder is almost definitely to blame.
“The Witcher believes you’re under a spell,” Yennefer said, conversationally, drawing a sip from her tea.
“I most certainly am,” said Jaskier to her in a warm drawl that Geralt recognized as the tone of voice he slipped into when flirting and frankly, things needed to start making more sense and fast before he gave into his impulse to do something rash and wholly unhelpful. Namely, chuck himself out the cottage window and into the sea.
--
Or Geralt seeks out Yennefer only to find her, of all unbelievable and ridiculous things, shacking up with his bard.
The glimpses in the morning between parted curtains, Jaskier prattling on while Yennefer sipped her tea, flipping through one dusty tome or another. Their shared time in the garden, Yennefer whispering to the plants and Jaskier plucking her a bloom and earning a cuff on the shoulder for his trouble. (That’s Acontinum, you idiot she would say and pluck the deadly flower from his fingers)
