dragonlady7

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I did get some Jaskier POV back in the present-day part of Meet Death Sitting and I self-inserted my folk music session experiences to do it, ha ha! this won’t be in the next update of The Ancient Sea, but probably the one after that, so hold on. and listen, I wrote lyrics for this, and they might even scan. No guarantees. Also it took a real effort of will not to have Jaskier say “it’s over for you hoes” but know, in my heart, that’s what he says, there. 

Anyway, Jaskier’s Advanced Bardic Performance Techniques Session section is harassing him for being low-energy, and he has to turn up: 

(cw for earworms and your mom jokes)

“It’s just sexual frustration,” Allisande said. “He’s wasting away.”

“Mmm,” Jaskier said, “that is actually my problem. Very keenly diagnosed, thank you Allisande.”

“Pining after someone’s mother?” Dotlef asked nastily.

“Oh, no,” Jaskier said, “I broke up with your mother years ago, she was insatiable, Dotlef,” which made Dotlef put down the recorder and start to his feet, which meant Hestia had to shove her harp in between the two of them, and Jaskier gave Marija a little winking salute and she rolled her eyes. 

“Sit down,” she said to Dotlef, “my gods, you started it,” but she was smiling.

“No no,” Jaskier said, “I am pining because after twenty years I finally got that Witcher to kiss me, but now he’s gone into exile in the desert or something and I will never get him to plow me the way I have been trying for these last twenty years, and I’m just trying to work out how to make it a good ballad. Once I do, though, then it’s over for the rest of you, because it’s going to be really good.”

“I didn’t know you could kiss a Witcher,” one of the students said, a bit dazed.

“Mmmm yes you can,” Jaskier said, and tipped his head back and played a little run on the lute, a riff off of the now-famous bit of Toss A Coin (it had been famous enough for long enough that it was cliche, which was simultaneously depressing and thrilling, depending on the day). 

Allisande sang, in his lovely baritone, “Oh you can kiss a Witcher, if you’ve no sense of danger, you’ve no sense of danger, oh-oh-oh!” 

“No!” Marija shouted. “No Toss A Coin, we have a rule!”

“And no monsterfucking,” Hestia said, “that’s rule two, no songs about monsterfucking.”

“A Witcher isn’t a monster,” Jaskier said, which was an old point of contention by now, “but I will abide by the first rule anyway, since I made the rule in the first place.” It was possible to get tired of one’s own cliche, it turned out. Anyway, Oxenfurt’s stately halls were not particularly in need of pro-Witcher propaganda anymore, after fifteen years of Jaskier’s intermittent residence. He hadn’t stopped playing the song, and now he modulated it into something else. 

I came upon him finally, and close to death was he
I wept to see him in that state, his strength reduced to this;
He gave to me his silver knife, and bade me set him free
Between his ribs I plunged it fast, his bleeding mouth I kissed

“That’s, ah,” Hestia said. “That sounds like monsterfucking.”

“Oh, yes, the knife’s a metaphor,” Allisande said. Then, hesitant, he added, “Surely?”

“I wish it was a metaphor,” Jaskier said. “No, I stabbed him in the fucking chest, it was awful. But he got better.”

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Ha ha I just came on here like “aw no notes? on my update? nobody liked? what?” and it was only as I was disconsolately scrolling that I was like

did I actually… update the fic?

and the answer is that I did not, so. Like, I did not even come close to doing so, did not even compose a post about it, had not even created the work on AO3 as a draft. I made a title, though, so in my head, I was done. 

It’s only a short one, but. There it is. Ciri gets to Kaer Morhen. I wanted to do more of her POV, but– well, she was really tired, so, we’ll get more of her later. This is kind of an interstitial little chapter, setting up for action later and establishing things. Ancient Sea, chapter 1: Wolf Pack, on AO3

“I found all your gear, Geralt, all together, in a guardroom near the gate.” Eskel sat down beside him on the bench, straddling the bench and looking– upset. He was upset. “It looked like they’d looted your corpse. Every knife, Geralt– every knife.” He held up a cloth bag, set it on the table, opened the top, and spilled out a collection of daggers, mostly silver-coated but not all. “The ones you hand over when they tell you to disarm, and the ones you never do.” He poked through them and pulled out a little battered steel folding knife, which Geralt always kept inside his waistband, near the skin. The wooden handle had long since worn through and fallen off, and he’d wrapped his unskilled repair in rawhide that had begun to wear away as well. It was a little boy’s knife, had been a little boy’s knife a hundred years ago. No one ever found it in searches. But the Cintran guards had. 

Geralt nodded. There wasn’t much to say. 

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So the next sequential bit of Meet Death Sitting is taking some editing. It’s. Also not super-fluffy? It’s not noncon but it’s like, there’s some sort of… transactional? sex in it? and it’s. It’s not dark exactly, but it’s not as sweet as the rest has been.

So for this lovely freezing Friday I’m tossing y’all a coin in the form of a reasonably-fluffy backstory fic featuring Eskel. Who, I know, in the first installment of Meet Death Sitting, I had Jaskier say he hadn’t met. But. 

(I’m asking this in the fic notes too– should we pretend he’s an unreliable narrator or should I fix that line and make this line up better? or what? feel free to weigh in)

So anyway, this also is where the most recent banter post I made wound up finding its home. Not shippy, but there’s some fun homoeroticism, everyone loves that. 

Along Came This Song, 5900 words, on AO3. 

“You,” Eskel said, with sudden realization. He’d been catching up to that bard; the last town had said he’d been through “yesterday”. Posh, Redanian, foppish, string calluses on fingers. This was the guy, beyond all doubt.

The young man blinked, not without alarm. “Me,” he said. 

“Do you know,” Eskel said, making himself speak more quietly. Also he was looming over the kid, so he sat down on his haunches to look at him more on his eye level. “I’ve been on this road three weeks, and for the last two, people have suddenly been tossing coins at me wherever I go.”

The young man looked perplexed for the barest instant, then guilty, then delighted. “Have you now,” he said. 

Bonus content: 

It was sort of Geralt’s fault they’d gotten chased out of town before the bard could even try to play at the inn; Roach had wandered off and had apparently eaten an entire nest of new-hatched chicks right out from under a broody hen, and there had been a lot of screaming and general unwarranted chaos. That wasn’t such odd behavior for a horse, really, but the fact that she was a Witcher’s horse meant everyone figured she was cursed.