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There's a farmhouse on the edge of a village twelve miles outside Cintra that doesn't really have much of a farm to it anymore. He hasn't had for years, as far as Jaskier can tell, not that he's an expert on arable land, and he knows even less about cows. He rode one instead of a horse once, while extremely drunk, after burning his shoes, determined not to walk and not entirely bothered where he ended up, but he's not sure that qualifies him as a livestock farmer. If anything, he suspects it does exactly the opposite.
There's a farm outside Cintra, though, and he knows where it is even when he's not sure of very much else. He spent some time there a while ago, and sometimes he goes back, though not very often. When he does, nothing's ever changed - it's still got a herb garden at the back that looks like someone scattered seeds out of the kitchen window and touched wood for luck while they hoped for the best (because that's exactly what they did), and a creaky floorboard in the bedroom where someone, naming no names, dropped his enormous fucking sword and narrowly missed someone else's foot.
It sprung the nails halfway out and before he left, Jaskier tucked some coins in a pouch underneath it, just in case he came back that way and...needed coins, he supposes. He wonders if they're still there, because he hasn't taken them. Maybe Geralt has, if he knows they're there. They both always seem like they're in need of money, it's just that Jaskier spends a lot far too quickly and Geralt never has much in the first place. You'd think people would pay more for killing monsters than singing a bit, even if he's really very good at singing. But, well, if you thought that, you'd be very much mistaken.
He's actually not too far from Cintra, as it happens, so he thinks he could go out there and have a look. Since all the sorcerers and sorceresses descended from their big scary tower at Aretuza and laid waste to Nilfgaard outside the city walls, the place has been really quite peaceful and pleasant for the most part, though honestly people pay a travelling bard a lot better when they're long in the face and want a good cheering up than they do when they're already happy. He could really do with the cash, since he spent his last lot on a nice new coat that he lost three towns ago in a game of gwent. He hates gwent. He always loses. It's more Geralt's game than his.
He's only about ten miles away. He's got a horse outside so he could be there by nightfall, if no one's decided to run off with it, and nothing nasty's eaten it - sounds like there's been a lot of that going around and they might need a witcher, not that anyone ever wants one when nothing's nibbling their goats. So, he finishes his beer and he heads to the door, filled with nostalgia or maybe that's just bubbles. He'd prefer it to be bubbles.
This isn't why he came to Cintra. But he supposes a little detour couldn't hurt.
---
The cells underneath Calanthe's palace weren't the worst place Jaskier had ever been, he thought. He'd actually occupied worse cells himself, though usually not on a long-term basis, and he suspected that some of the men in the cells there had been in residence for quite some time - if judging only by the smell. Of course, he couldn't say the guard at the gate had smelled much better, so who was he to judge at all?
He'd spent a long, long time trying to find him. Well, no. He'd spent a long, long time trying to forget him, but of course he was famous for a song all about fucking him, though not...all about fucking him, because they'd never done that. Just all fucking about him, which he hoped sounded less ambiguous. He supposed that would have been a very different song, and probably not one suitable for the majority of parties or courtly occasions. But when he'd decided that enough was enough, he'd seek the surly bastard out and bury the hatchet even if it meant doing so literally, he couldn't find him. Which honestly seemed odd for a man like Geralt who couldn't help but leave a trail behind him about as subtle as the monsters he hunted.
He couldn't find him. He asked in every town and village and godforsaken outpost of the world that he visited - So, do you know Geralt of Rivia? About so high, grey hair that looks more his age than his face does, big sword, possibly covered in something's innards...witcher? Some people knew him, or knew of him, or just sang Jaskier's Geralt song at him like they were the first ones who'd ever done that and it was, despite being the hundred thousandth time, completely fucking hilarious. It wasn't, and moreover they didn't know where Geralt was. Months passed like that, and really it wasn't like Geralt to just up and disappear.
So, as much as it almost physically pained him, he started spending money on it. A few coins here, a few coins there, shady deals in back alleys behind inns and town halls and various palaces and he still didn't have more than, Well, I heard he got eaten by a dragon, or Didn't the elves slice him up and feed him to a troll? No, the elves had not sliced him up. Nor had a striga mutilated him beyond all recognition. Nor had a wyvern or a werewolf or a wraith, or indeed anything else beginning with a W. He didn't believe that for a second. Geralt wasn't dead. Just...something had happened to him, something that had kept him out of trouble for more than a year and really quite close to two. Or maybe it had kept him in trouble, but either way Jaskier was going to find out. He was determined, and he could be really quite stubborn when he put his mind to something.
Then someone in Novigrad said Geralt had been on his way to Cintra and Jaskier wasn't sure what he'd've been doing on his way to Cintra, but it was a better lead than him being married to a mermaid and living on a rock somewhere in the sea off Skellige. So, there he was, and there he'd been for the better part of two months, making merry and slipping a coin or two to a guard under a table in a tavern or a brothel or a fancy little tea shop to find out what they knew about the Butcher of Blaviken.
One night, he got the right guard properly plastered and he told him - bragged about it, really - that they had someone matching Geralt's description in the castle dungeons. Four nights later, he got the right cook properly sloshed and he told him - not bragging, more like halfway to sick - that he'd seen them pull a man out of a cell who looked like him, while he'd been taking the guards their dinner one night. He asked around, found a few more men willing to spill their guts for gold at least metaphorically if not literally, though a few of them he'd have liked to stick a knife in, the way they talked about their prisoners.
And when he paid enough, when he scraped together all the coins he could and slipped them to the guard of the third watch, he brought him Geralt's medallion. He frowned at it there in his hand then forced a smile though he'd've liked to have shoved it down the bastard's throat so he could choke on it. They'd had Geralt locked up in Cintra since the Nilfgaard attack. Two and a half years in a Cintran dungeon. He was getting him the everloving fuck out of there, as soon as he possibly could.
There were mercenaries in Cintra, good ones if you paid enough, but Jaskier couldn't pay them. So he worked, because what else could he do? He played at parties with a smile on his face. He played at funerals, a few solemn songs before the knees-up started. He played at birthdays and weddings and earned all the coins he could. He played at their winter festival and smiled at Queen Calanthe in the crisp, cold day and pretended that he didn't know who she'd locked up in her dungeons and practically thrown away the key. He understood, at least sort of - Geralt had a bee in his bonnet about his child of surprise or some such nonsense, and the child was Princess Cirilla, and it was typical Geralt, really, rush in headfirst, think about it later. But he was going to get him back. He'd known he would right from the start, when he wasn't busy thinking he wouldn't. It was only a matter of time.
He played at Princess Cirilla's birthday party, and they kept to the less bawdy songs which he had to admit hurt his repertoire somewhat. When he slipped in a rather Geralt-heavy number, Calanthe's jaw clenched, but she probably didn't think much of it. And then, afterwards, while the party was still raging in the ballroom, he slipped quietly down the back stairs. He slipped down corridor after corridor that he read off a map that he'd had tucked into his trousers in rather an uncomfortable location and finally, there he was. Once he'd paid the guard to disappear into the night - a prearranged deal that had a hefty price attached to it - he'd taken the keys and slipped into the corridor. He knew which cell it was. He unlocked the door.
"Geralt?" he said.
The ceiling in the cell was uncomfortably low. There were no windows. There was no bed, no latrine, just a chain attached to the wall by the door that stretched across the room into the putrid dark. Two and a half years, he thought, under the watch of a man who Jaskier would only have spat on if he was burning assuming he'd had a mouthful of liquor first.
"Geralt, it's me," he said. "Geralt, it's Jaskier. I realise it's two and a half years late, but I've come to rescue you."
He didn't reply. But the chain moved, just a vibration along its length that made the links clink like a tuneless tambourine. Jaskier stepped forward, hunched as he was thanks to the cell's low ceiling that showered bits of mortar in his hair. The chain moved, and he stopped, and Geralt shuffled out into the light. Naked. Filthy. Bloody. Grey hair matted. He didn't look up - he looked at the ground, where there were stains on it by Jaskier's feet. That was where they left his food, he thought, turned out onto the filthy floor so he could eat it with his filthy hands. And he was shivering. It was freezing in there, of course it was because there was snow on the ground outside, and he was naked. He should've come sooner. All that time arsing around in Toussaint, spending money like a lord, he should've been in Cintra.
When he tried to touch him, Geralt flinched away then tried to attack. He hit him with his lute, in its bag, and it broke but it knocked him out. It was a shame, he thought - he'd liked that lute. But he could always get a new one and the same really wasn't true of Geralt.
He'd known he couldn't pull this off alone, of course, so he'd hired men with colourful backgrounds to help him get Geralt out. The drummer put a body in the cell while the fiddle player and the dancer hauled Geralt up between them; Jaskier hadn't asked where they'd got the body from and he absolutely didn't intend to. Then the pretty girl who sang choruses sometimes lit some kind of incendiary device and set fire to the cell. The harpist had already fucked off - with his harp - to the cart they had waiting outside the palace gate. It was a good plan. It ought to have been, he thought, considering how much he'd paid for it.
Before anyone could come and find them, they were gone. The plan had worked, though it had cost him a fortune - a king's ransom in payment for playing his fingers raw. He wasn't sure he was going to want to look at another lute for several years.
The farmhouse was twelve miles outside Cintra. He'd arranged it in advance, and that was where they went while Jaskier's motley crew dispersed.
They stayed until the summer. And then they went their separate ways.
---
He leaves the tavern. It's a pleasant enough afternoon - the sun's shining and there are birds in the air, but he supposes that just means there's more of them to shit on him. He's learned the world's a terrible place, even when he's feeling optimistic, but he's also learned to make the best of what he's got.
When he thinks about the farmhouse, he asks himself if he'd like to walk in and find Geralt there. He'd probably look wrong in it, in his leathers, with his great big sword like anyone needs a weapon that big and honestly, if he didn't know otherwise, he'd say he's compensating for something. He'd like to see him because it's been a while, but he's not sure the farmhouse is the best place for that. After all, he's not sure what he remembers.
It was three weeks before Geralt said a word, which he supposed he understood - after all, if he'd been locked in a dungeon for getting on for three years, he might not have been feeling particularly talkative either. Jaskier had bought the house from its previous owner, and it wasn't exactly his idea of luxury, or anyone's idea of luxury for that matter: half the thatched roof had caved in and the less exposed part of the attic had attracted bats, and honestly he thought he'd done quite well to get any portion of it into a habitable state. The kitchen wasn't bad, though he'd had to board up a broken window. There was one bedroom, too, upstairs under the part of the roof that hadn't fallen in. He and his slightly odd crew had hauled a bed in from the back of a cart pulled by an extremely long-suffering donkey and he'd brought sheets and blankets and pots and pans and even some clothes, though they weren't really what Geralt was used to. Not that Geralt seemed used to anything except gnawing on the occasional rat.
Geralt didn't say a word when Jaskier sat him down in front of the kitchen fire and washed him from head to toe. He flinched quite a lot, but he seemed to respond to the sound of Jaskier's voice and, well, frankly, he could talk enough for any five normal people so that was fine by him. Geralt didn't say a word when Jaskier lathered his face and shaved his rather straggly, unruly beard. He didn't say a word when he gave up on the brush and shaved his head. He looked odd like that, Jaskier thought, bare-headed and cleanly shaved, huddled in a blanket in front of a fire. He almost seemed smaller though he actually wasn't, and that had to be some weird witcher thing because frankly he was just as built as ever. Jaskier wondered if his body would have ever begun to waste away, and he was glad he hadn't had to find out.
When Geralt was unsure about the bed at night, Jaskier joined him on the floor and tucked a blanket over both of them to keep them warm against the shitty Cintran winter weather - he was happy to do it, or happyish at least, though that didn't mean he didn't have a word or two to say about the floorboards playing havoc with his back once morning came. Jaskier cooked, though he'd never been great at it, and Geralt frowned at the spoon in his stew then drank it like a mug of beer. Jaskier would have liked a mug of beer, he thought, as the days went by, as he helped him put some clothes on once he felt more inclined to wear some, as he read him bits of the one solitary book he'd remembered to bring with him, as he hummed while he stirred the soup and caught Geralt watching him.
"Do you remember that one?" he asked, and he sang it while the soup got slightly burned at the bottom, not exactly full volume, not exactly full effect since his lute was still bits in a bag. And while he semi-rescued the soup - the burned bits of turnip really weren't going to kill them, he thought - Geralt frowned at him.
"Jaskier," he said, after a moment, and Jaskier dropped the fucking spoon into the soup he was so surprised.
"That's me," he replied, and really, bugger the soup. He pulled it off the heat and left it there, slightly burnt and full of spoon. "Do you remember who you are? Begins with a G. And it's not gwent, though we could play a hand or two if you're feeling up to it."
But Geralt didn't say another word. He didn't complain about his cooking, though he did use a spoon for the first time in the three weeks since they'd arrived.
He remembers one day he took a trip into Cintra. Twelve miles wasn't that far - he could get there and back in a day, so he did, because there were things they needed if they were staying much longer. He hadn't planned on it being a long-term thing, truth be told, more of a three nights and then off somewhere else thing, but there they still were, and there Geralt still was, five weeks since the escape and he had three words to his name: Jaskier, no, and mercifully also yes. Not that he's sure he'd really say he's name's a word, more like a proper noun, but he didn't think getting into that with Geralt at that particular juncture was going to do either of them a great deal of good.
He came back. There was a barn where they kept the horse and he left her there, a nice bay mare that Geralt would probably immediately call Roach if he could've just remembered that was his usual approach to life. And when he went back into the house and closed the door behind him, Geralt pushed him up against it. He was scowling, which didn't necessarily bode well, and gripped Jaskier by both arms.
"You left," he said.
"And you found your words," he replied. "That's new."
Jaskier looked at him. Geralt was frowning, and he was extremely close, and he smelled a bit like last night's stew and the mug of terrible wine they'd had left over from dinner, and really, standing there with him was the warmest that he'd been all day. And it was tempting, he remembers, to think of Geralt as child-like, but the fact was he knew he wasn't. It was tempting to think of him a bit like a big, witcher-shaped pet dog, but he wasn't really that, either. He was the same man he'd always known, he thought, just lacking a bit in the memory department. Maybe they hadn't picked up instantly where they'd left off, which was pissed off somewhere on the side of a mountain, but that didn't mean he didn't know him. After all, the first word he'd remembered - noun, whatever - was Jaskier."
"You left," Geralt said.
"I came back," Jaskier replied. "Do you really think I'd leave you here in the middle of nowhere? Come on, Geralt, I'm a bard, not a bastard."
Geralt nodded. He shrugged. He stepped back and walked away into the kitchen and the evening proceeded as normal, except Geralt made the stew instead and really, truthfully, in his heart of hearts, Jaskier can't say it benefitted from it. There's a reason one of them's a witcher and one of them's a bard, after all, and it's not for their skills in the culinary arts so much as stabbing and singing respectively. So they ate, and Jaskier tried not to look at the bowl of something vaguely brown like it might be an attempt on his life while it started to snow outside again. And when they went to bed, when Geralt spooned up against his back under the blanket and threw one arm around his waist, it was easy enough to blame that on the chill.
---
Jaskier leaves the tavern. When he gets to his horse, a grumpy whitish mare who couldn't run if you bribed her with a lifetime of carrots, he spots another horse beside her. It's not the same horse but it might as well be, so he scratches her between the ears and says, "I bet he called you Roach, too."
"I did."
Jaskier turns and Geralt's there. Of course he's there. So he smiles an awkward, grimacing smile and he takes a step away from him. He really doesn't need to be that close.
Geralt's hair's grown back in. It's shoulder-length again, well brushed, but tied back in a ponytail so that's something new at least. Jaskier tugs his lute up onto his shoulder. He takes another step back, but it's not for safety. Geralt won't hurt him. He never really did and never really tried to, even when he wasn't entirely sure who he was himself, let alone who Jaskier was. At least not after that night in the cell.
They spent months in the house. They started putting bits back together as the weather improved - it turned out Geralt could thatch a roof, which was an odd skill for a witcher but Jaskier supposed sometimes the stabby jobs were few and far between so maybe having a second string to the bow wasn't a completely ridiculous idea. They joked together as they worked, or Geralt worked and Jaskier played his newly reconstructed lute, and sometimes whey went into the village and had that mug of beer he'd been coveting. Without a sword on his back, without his telltale black leathers and his hair still growing in, no one really took him for a witcher till they saw his eyes. And when they asked if that was what he was, Jaskier just told them, "Not at the moment. If there's a werewolf, please don't come find us."
He remembers one sunny spring day when Geralt had been digging out some of the overgrown flowerbeds, probably just for lack of anything else better to do. He remembers he was peeling vegetables in a rather haphazard manner and tossing them across the room into what looked disturbingly like a witch's cauldron because he had to make a game of it or else he's just give up and they'd be eating bread and cheese again. Geralt came in from outside, sleeves rolled up and slightly sweaty, and he leaned up against his back there at the kitchen table, his hands at Jaskier's hips. He paused mid-carrot, both vegetable and knife still hovering in his hands at chest height. Geralt kissed his neck, nuzzled his nape, then stepped away again. Jaskier put down the knife and turned to face him, waggling a carrot in the air. It wasn't quite the effect he'd been going for, but it probably got the general point across.
"What was that about?" he asked, realising he was waving a carrot and not the knife, though he supposed the knife might have looked a bit more violent than he'd been going for.
"What was what about?" Geralt replied. He poured himself a bowl of cold water from a jug and washed his hands and face in it, splashed his lengthening hair, then pulled his shirt off, apparently to help cool him down.
"You just kissed me. My neck, at least, and that's technically part of me. You kissed me."
Geralt shrugged. "Did you mind it?" he asked.
Jaskier put the carrot down. He sagged back against the table, made it screech six inches across the floor, and stood back up with a frown on his face. "That's not the point," he said, though honestly he wasn't sure exactly what the point was. Three and a half months and Geralt had his words back, for the most part, but that seemed very much like all he had, except the occasional memory of a skill or a flower or a star in the sky that he had no recollection of ever having learned about. Three and a half months of sharing a bed every night even though they'd put a roof back on the second bedroom. Three and a half months of quiet and calm and sometimes abject fucking boredom, and trying to pretend it didn't bother him at all when he woke up with Geralt's arm across his chest. It bothered him. It affected him. He should've just taken him back to Kaer Morhen and let whatever other witchers were left in the world look after him - frankly, he sometimes felt guilty that he hadn't done exactly that.
"You understand you didn't actually think about me like that before, yes?" Jaskier said.
"What if I do now?"
"What if you remember?"
"And what if I never do?" Geralt frowned, and for a second he looked just like he'd always used to. "How long has it been? How long are you going to wait?"
Jaskier shrugged. He shrugged hugely, his arms spread out wide, exaggeratedly because that was how it felt - it wasn't a small feeling at all. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe forever. Maybe the next forty seconds. I really couldn't say."
So Geralt decided for him; he strode across the room and kissed him, on the mouth this time and not the neck. Jaskier knows he should've stopped him, but apparently he was even weaker in that direction than he'd realised before.
They went to bed. It was the middle of the day, so it really wasn't for sleeping. And maybe Jaskier felt guilty afterwards, but the way Geralt looked at him almost made it worth it.
---
"I should get going," Jaskier says outside the inn where his horse has not, in fact, been eaten. "Nice to see you, Geralt. Nice to see your horse. Lovely animal. Much nicer than mine."
When he takes another step away, Geralt reaches out to stop him. He takes him by the arm and Jaskier frowns down at his hand until he takes it back again.
"Are you going there?" Geralt asks him.
"Going where, exactly?"
Geralt frowns. "You know where," he says. "The house."
"Are you?"
Neither of them answers, but they both mount their respective horses. They ride together, and they go in the same direction, so that's almost as good as an answer. And when they arrive, it's just like it was - the herb garden's a disaster, just like Jaskier left it, and the path's overgrown, and he's fairly sure that's a wasps' nest nestled under the gable end.
He spent half a year here, coaxing Geralt back, living with him while he remembered piece by piece. He spent half a year here before Yennefer arrived with her magic fucking potion. She brought him back more thoroughly that Jaskier ever could have, and he can't begrudge her that, he thinks, because he'd be a poor sorry excuse for a friend if he wanted him to remember. He knows what they did in the cells tucked away under Calanthe's palace. Three missing years is nothing if he doesn't have to live with that.
It had been half a year since Cintra when Jaskier came back from town to find a different horse tied up to the fence, one he didn't recognise as coming from the village. He remembers walking in, and seeing Geralt sitting in the kitchen, and seeing Yennefer of sodding Vengerberg standing there beside him. She turned and did that thing with her face where Jaskier wasn't sure if she really didn't remember him or if she was just playing at it for effect.
"Jaskier," she said, so evidently she actually did remember him, appearances be damned. "You know, you could have called. You do know where Aretuza is. I think you might even sing a song about it."
"Hello, Yennefer," he said, and he started putting a few things away, if only to keep busy. "Nice of you to stop by. Something we can do for you?"
"Were you planning on curing him at any point?"
"I've been trying to."
"You really don't seem to have been trying very hard."
Jaskier sighed. He leaned down against the table. And the truth of it was, she was right: maybe he hadn't been trying very hard. Maybe he should have taken Geralt straight to Aretuza. Maybe he should have taken him to Kaer Morhen. Maybe he should have taken him to any of a hundred places that weren't a farmhouse that distinctly lacked farmland by a village twelve miles outside Cintra. Maybe he was a terrible man, if a wonderful bard. Maybe he should have known better.
"There's a potion I can make," she said. "It'll be a few days. Please don't run away while I'm gone, Jaskier. Or if you do, leave Geralt here?"
She swept out of the room and out of the house and mounted her horse, but Jaskier had no doubt she'd be back. And honestly, he wasn't sure that wasn't a perfectly good thing.
That night, in bed, Geralt threw back the sheets and knelt there on the mattress between Jaskier's bare thighs. He wished he could have stopped him, or at least he wished he could have stopped himself, but he very much did not; Geralt slicked his cock with the oil that he'd bought for exactly that purpose, after previous experiments with lubrication had gone slightly awry, and then pushed into him. He remembered the amused look on Geralt's face and the surprise on his own when Geralt had come back from the village and suggested precisely how they should spend their afternoon, with a bottle of oil dangling from one hand. He remembered the mess it made of the sheets but they'd done worse than that before then.
Geralt knew his body well, and he knew Geralt's; he'd told him everything he knew about his scars, like that might help him to remember, not that he knew all their stories himself. When Geralt fucked him, as leaned down over him, his awkward-lengthed hair getting into his eyes so Jaskier kept on pushing it back for him, he wondered if he'd done all of this just to have him to himself. He didn't think so - he'd been keeping him out of Calanthe's gaze and trying to help the best way he could, he really had been. But when Geralt remembered, he didn't expect him to be grateful.
Geralt fucked him till they were sweaty and aching and lying there side by side in a familiar if overheated mess. Geralt blew out the candles and he settled close, though Jaskier almost wished he wouldn't.
"You know, I don't have to take it," Geralt said. "This potion she's making. I can just say no."
"You should take it," Jaskier said. "She's really only trying to help. And she probably will, she's sort of like that when she sets her mind to things."
Two days later, Yennefer returned. Once Geralt had drunk the potion, the look on his face changed so rapidly that Jaskier knew it had worked - just a few sentences spoken aloud confirmed that, given the tone of his voice and the words he said, and the frown that appeared to accompany them. And so Jaskier left Geralt's sword and his medallion sitting on the kitchen table, and he left the two of them there alone; it seemed the best thing to do, all in all. Yennefer had taken away the past three years and given him back the life he'd had before, which was more than Jaskier could have ever hoped to do.
Geralt didn't remember. But now, once they've tied the horses' reins up to the fence and walked up to the door, Geralt stops him. Geralt presses him against it. He shakes his head, he grimaces, and says, "Fuck's sake, Jaskier. It took some time but I remember everything." He leans down closer. "It was just a potion. How many potions do you think I've taken in my life?"
So maybe, when he kisses him pressed up against the door, the fact they're both here might almost make a kind of sense. Especially given how he thinks the coat he lost in a game of gwent three towns ago is poking out of one Geralt's saddlebags; maybe this time, Geralt's the one who's been looking for him, not the other way around.
And maybe there'll be a wyvern around the corner, or a werewolf, or a wraith. But that's the kind of thing that witchers deal with all day long. What bards deal with is tales of love and derring-do.
Jaskier thinks he might write a new one. But this time he'll keep it for himself.