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amatchforyourmadness · 4 years

Text

as stars that wait to fall (in love)

Chapter: 2/40

Pairing: Geralt of Rivia × star!Jaskier | Dandelion

Words: 3265

[ AO3 link ]

Geralt could not for the life of him figure out if all stars were supposed to be this insufferable, mud-throwing, hissing dirty mouthed creatures that just so happened to look pretty only when hanging in the sky, when they were thousands of miles away, a safe distance from mud and from his face (and Roach) or if he had lucked out with his find. He doesn't have one word to give him that doesn't come heavy with cursing and insults after, he only glares or scoffs at him and whenever Geralt so much as steps near his personal space he bares his teeth as if to remind him how he almost lost a chunk of his sword arm.

Yet, he finds that he's all soft spoken and reassuring words to the girl — Fiona, he called her — and smiles too, smiles that don't match at all with the 'I'll bite your balls out, try me' look he had received over breakfast when trying to hand him a loaf of old bread. He has the nerve to take the piece of bread from him, only to look at it confusedly, nip the old crust lightly, and twist his face in distaste and offer a hungry Cirilla the piece, which she takes eagerly.

He considers strangling the man then, but he has self control, Vesemir taught him self-control, he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath from time to time and almost achieve inner peace while at it.

Birdsong fills the morning as the sun creeps higher in the sky and Geralt watches the horizon, a falcon floats above and he can hear the distinct sounds of fleeing wild creatures from the loud sounds from the star’s struggling along on a makeshift crutch, grumbling loudly and pointedly all the while. Geralt grants himself a bit of self care, ignoring him from up Roach’s back.

“How much longer are we supposed to follow you?” Comes yet another annoyed whine from behind him, along with a tugging of the enchanted chain to make sure he's paying attention. “Oy, I can’t walk far on this leg.”

“I’ve made you a splint and a crutch.”

That seemed do nothing to sway him.

“You wrapped an old shirt on my leg and gave me a stick.”

He sighed deeply, and hear the soft sound of giggles he's quickly chalking up to the one noise the star's child is willing to do when she is not arguing with him as if he's not twice her size and very much clearly capable of murder, if that wasn't plenty clear yet.

“We’ll get you to a proper doctor at the next town.”

“Next town?!” He squeaks out indignantly, and Geralt feels his arm be yanked again through the chain, this time with almost strength enough to strain his muscles, and he turns to glare at the star, whose chin is high and eyes are defiant. To be honest, he looks like he’s testing his good leg’s strength in case he wanted to try and aim to swing a good hit at his head. “At least let me ride the horse until then! this stick won’t carry me far!”

“Don’t touch Roach.”

“I will throw myself to the ground and you will have to drag me all the way then, and I’ll not make it easy and you will have to explain to your sorceress friend why I’m all tattered up and useless.”

“I’m sure a dead star is still a star.”

“You’re not killing him!” Fiona adds herself to the conversation and Geralt groans, closing his eyes miserably.

“Of course, he’s not! I would kill him first!”

“Would you, really?” Geralt asks, dryly but mildly amused nevertheless, as he fixes a stare down at him.

“Would you like to risk it?” The man says, leaning forward with a charming smile and batting his eyelashes.

He had not. Wanted to risk it. Not now that Geralt finally realised how deep his eyes were, like lakes untouched by men or the skies at dusk, when the stars start to show themselves to human eyes. If he looked long enough, he could see there was a thin outtrim of silverish grey around his pupil that seemed to spread through the blue like small rivers of silver, like the glow of a star breaking the sky. He blinks once more and Geralt finds himself growling softly when pale eyelids shield the sight from him, even if it’s for a second, only relaxing when eyelashes flutter up, and his eyes are back into view. It’s too mesmerizing and he wonders for a moment how magical can a star’s eyes be. Is that what yennefer is looking for? He doesn’t want her to have it. He wants to look at them forever.

He does not realise he’s leaning closer to the man until amusement flashes through the star’s eyes a beat before Geralt is slipping from roach’s back in attempts to follow his retreating figure, falling face-first onto the ground.

A booming, joyous laughter fills the air, and he glares up to the sky as he bends over his stick to delight himself at the outcome of his little trick. Against the sun’s light, his showy clothes glimmer slightly and he seems to reflect it with his joy as he turns to a snickering FIona, hands pressed against her lips as she looks up from the spot where Geralt has crashed against the ground to the delighted star, and lets her laughter run free. It seems to make the star thrice as happy, but it only makes Geralt twice as grumpy.

“Quiet.” He brings a hand up, still laid to the ground to command them into silence, the star opens his mouth, either to say something snarky or to rub his small victory on his face with the sort of pride only he could muster. “Listen.” Geralt presses once again, more strict than annoyed this time, which seems to get them to comply reluctantly.

The distant roaring of a lion-like beast shakes the earth, followed by the valiant whining of a horse.

“That’s coming from up ahead.” The star said, as Geralt jumps up to his feet and pulls Roach along with hurried steps. “Ow! Wait for me, the chain’s not that long.”

They move forward to a meadow between two banks of trees. A giant beast with the body of a lion, bat wings and a scorpion tails attacks a white horse viciously. It’s not hard to miss the horse sports a long, ivory horn jutting from the centre of its forehead. Geralt is not sure he’s cursing this profusely because this is a bloody unicorn or because that over there is a fucking manticore. Maybe it’s just because when he is almost done processing the whole stupid, gigantic, cosmic joke his life is right now, the other cosmic entity shakes him by the arm with enough energy to get Roach to try and kick him.

“Do something!” Demands the 5’9 little shit that he regrets so fucking much that he promised Yennefer he would find and bring back. “Aren’t you all muscle and no brain? Use them, for Melitele’s sake. The unicorn is hurt, that beast is going to kill him!”

“And let him kill me, too?” He grumbles, but he’s already reaching for

“Oh, I promise I’ll try to spare you a few tears.” He says, rolling his eyes dramatically before he shoves his shoulder in just the right way to get Geralt to stumble towards the confrontation. “You’re a witcher! I’m asking you to fight a monster, that’s the sort of thing you do!” With that, he throws the stick away from him, ignoring how Fiona squawked indignantly, diving behind it immediately before he pulled the silver sword he had fastened to Roach’s saddle from it’s spot and shove it to his hand. “So you go there and you do your witchering!”

There was a beat of hesitation, white eyebrows furrowing as he stared at the star as if he had grown a second head, only to wrap his fingers around the hilt of his own sword when thee smaller man shook it towards his hands a little more fervently.

“Stay here.”

The stars huffs and waits for Geralt to turn to fight the manticore before shuffling towards the unicorn on the other side.

┈━═☆

“My stomach hurts.” Cirilla groans miserably before tucking against him, much like they’ve done the past five days before the ever gracious witcher man decided to barge into their lives, chain him and drag him all the way to who knows where for a sorceress.

“What’s wrong with you?” He asks gently, running a hand over her knotted platinum hair soothingly, shifting slightly to better accommodate her head over his good leg while having his other leg wrapped around the wounded magical creature by it. “Are you sick?”

The manticore gives another thunderous roar and he, Ciri, Roach and the unicorn at his side glance towards where Geralt still fights the thing. He seems to have already crippled one of the wings, but the beast refuses to fall, stretching a fight he absorbs eagerly into his memories to sing his tales up to his siblings, if ever he decided (or survived) to return home.

“No, I’m just hungry.” She murmurs, watching in quiet fascination as Geralt flips his sword skillfully and thrusts it through the poisonous tip of the beast’s tail, much to it’s displeasure. Her brows furrowed for a moment before she looks up at him. “Aren’t you hungry?”

Jaskier smiles kindly down at her and shakes his head.

“We stars eat only darkness, and we drink only light, so I'm not hungry.”

Of course, there’s slightly more of a reason for this than what he was willing to share; he ought to keep any human food from his lips if he knew what was better for him.

“So why did you fall?” She asks what she had not built the courage to during all the while, “Did you trip over something?”

“Stars don’t just trip over the sky.”

The thing was: he did trip over.

Jaskier hadn’t meant to fall, he had just… Been looking too closely. Leaned over slightly.

Stars were so boring, they were all but eternal and usually unchanging.

Cirilla of Cintra was born months after the disastrous engagement of her parents, and she had been so bright he could not help but to coo at her, along with his siblings, marvelled at the great destiny such a small being was burdened with. Julin, for he was Julian over the starred camps of the sky, had been so delighted by her first cry, by the first sight, that she had granted her his brightest glow, a vow of his protection and favour that would bode well over her fate. As she grew, the interest died down, and his siblings averted their eyes to more interesting events, to return upon her when the greatness caught up to her years, but Julian does not. He watches over her, and keeps the glow he granted upon her at birth during all the years the girl lives through.

The little princess had been dwelling on peace for a long time, when for both his horror and her own, she was been thrown into a stellar nebula of her own. He watched Nilfgaard march and his siblings inched closer. He saw her grandfather fall and the stars focused more on the scene. He saw Cintra fall, her people be slayed, Mousesack fall, her grandmother leap from the window, the soldier who guarded her be murdered, the scream that left her rip stones and ground.

He needed to help. He couldn’t. his siblings were there, muttering in compassion, holding onto one another. It was dangerous for a star to fall, they all knew the stories.

Besides, that suffering, was what it would take a star, he knew, a great one. Maybe a sun. As the space dust, hydrogen, helium, and plasma swirls around inside the nebulae, they begin to stick together and form into large blobs. When those campacted masses got too big, she’d collapse and pull the dust close to her hot center, to the thing humans called a heart. It would happen over and over again, until her heart became a star and she would glow with the greatness she’d achieve then.

But she was alone. And she was suffering.

He couldn’t leave her alone.

“Then why did you?”

“I fell for someone who is important to me.”

So he had leaned closer to watch, closer and closer, bit by bit until all the others were paying no mind to what he was doing, too focused on Cirilla’s travels further and further from home, with no hope of safety. Closer to the edge. He could very well never come bak from this, Julian reminded himself, but he couldn’t leave his child alone, not after watching her grow, not now she needed him the most. He looked behind himself, over his shoulder, to the sky and the others stars, the millennial bore that was the everlasting glow. He had spent a century sheltered here, singing songs to the black nothingness in between his sisters and brothers where the planets roamed, but down there, there was a girl who had led a sheltered life and now had nothing at all, no one at all. So he slipped.

He had not expected that his siblings would try and reach for him, their united voices calling for his name.

He had not expect it to burn.

He hadn’t expect it to hurt.

He had screamed all his fall, as the glow of his being died down under his terror and pain, as his family grew more and more distant and the comforting vastness of the universe could no longer shelter him.

His siblings looked much prettier from afar, he had thought, before hitting the ground.

Jaskier is snapped from his thoughts by Roach’s whinny of recognition and he looks up to see the brute of a man that had left him chained to a mare walk closer, covered in black blood and looking like he had crawled from hell.

“He lives!” Jaskier calls, with a delighted laugh, deciding not to hold onto the chain matter for now, because he did save the unicorn he asked him to. ‘Fiona’ shifts, sitting up promptly as the witcher approaches them, only to glare at him as she walks around the bunch of them to pet his mare and reach for some other sort of disgusting vial. “Are you alright?” He calls, but he only give another ‘hmm’ that sounds like ‘shut the fuck up’, so he turns to the unicorn instead. “How about you, old fellow?”

The unicorn in question snorts before throwing his head to the side to whinnie in the dramatic manner Jaskier thinks only kindred souls like himself and this magnificent creature, apparently, can be. It makes him smile, and he runs his fingers over his white coat, pretending the shine of its body it’s also his, and daring to hope he can one day shine like a star should once again, when Cirilla is safe and this is all done with.

“Poor thing.” Cirilla says sympathetically from his other side, reaching to ru her hand down it’s neck and the unicorn lets her. Surely enough, a fire lights up her eyes, with the fierce protectiveness he has so often seen take hold of her these last few days and she turns to Geralt. “We can’t leave it.”

“His wounds aren’t too deep.” Is what he replies, and Jaskier’s brows almost touch his hairline when he decides to actually use words instead of just humming. “You could probably ride him. That would speed us up, and help the star’s leg heal more quickly.”

To that Jaskier cries out “The star has a name!” at the same times Cirilla yelps a childishly delighted “Ride an unicorn?” that has both witcher and star sigh in a knowing way.

“Only if he is alright with it.” Jaskier says, looking at the magical creature by his side as it stands up, throwing it’s pure white mane back harrumphing and stamping it’s hoof. “Well, I guess that’s a yes."

┈━═☆

“How did you know?”

“Uh?” The star asks, shaking his head half in a sleep daze, straightening his back from where he had been all but falling from the back of the unicorn and tightening his hold around his sleeping charge. “Sorry, what?”

“How did you know?” He repeats, already feeling the build of annoyance that interacting with him evokes on himself, but reigning Roach in, so both her and the unicorn are side by side as he turns to look at the star, frowning at him as if he can’t fathom what the hell he is talking about. “That I was a witcher?”

“Uh… Was I supposed not to?” He says, making a confused sound before gesturing at him as if Geralt was his own explanation, and Geralt finds himself looking at his black leathered armour for any showy signs that could denounce him as a witcher to a bloody star. “ You’re not really being subtle here, darling. I mean... White hair, big old-loner, two very, very scary-looking swords? Silver for monsters, iron for men, isn’t that what you lot say?”

“Two weeks on a crater teach you that much about witchers?”

“A hundred years on the sky did.” He said, perking up even letting out a voice almost laced with amusement, as he tilted his head up, towards the darkening sky. “We watch, you know?”

Geralt frowns minutely.

“What for?”

“For the tales, of course.” He said, proudly, breaking into melodic sound in words that didn’t belong to any language she knew of. “They make for great songs, good entertainment. Yours isn’t a merry one.”

“You know me?” He asks, arching a pale brow.

“By something that’s not your name, I’m afraid.” The star says and suddenly, the expanding personality shrinks into him, and he won’t meet his eyes. It’s only the heavy silence that wears down on him until he lets out a low grumble. “I would rather insult you with things that I know you are from experience than call you Butcher, if I’m not to be given your name.”

Oh. So that’s what he’s known for, even as far away as in the skies.

He snaps his eyes away from the star and stare the road ahead.

“It’s Geralt.”

Another beat of silence hangs above them.

“Where are you from, Geralt?”

“Rivia.”

“Huh. Geralt of Rivia. It sounds like a name that is destiny-bound.”

“It’s just a name.”

“It’s never just a name.”

“And what’s yours?”

“Well, it depends.”

“Hm?”

“To the ones that map the sky I’m Viscount, from the Pankratz Constellation. You see there? That’s the one. To my siblings, I’m Julian. But the people from Lettenhove have another name for me. I like it better than all others.”

The Viscount of Pankratz stars or whatever the fuck he liked to be called turned to him, and through the dark of the night he can see the man smile, so white and bright it could light the path around them and he makes a point to not look at his eyes, just in case he wanted to try that trick again.

“What’s it?”

“The Jaskier star.”

“So, you’re Jaskier?”

“It has a good ring to it, doesn’t it? Jaskier of Lettenhove?”

“I thought you were a Pankratz. And a Viscount.”

“Well, we’ll figure something out.”

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