#i will never ever forget that geralt's first commentary on jaskier's songs

[limerental]

for the anonymous prompt: First time Yennefer smiles at him, Jaskier walk full-on into a tree because his brain stops working and his heart takes over and his heart is stupid and only focusing on her 

link on ao3 because this got away from me

---

It is academic coincidence that draws the two of them together. The Oxenfurt professor is drafting a historical epic to be performed at spring commencement and requires the knowledge of an expert on ancient, arcane artifacts. Said expert is a bright-eyed sorcerer fresh from a dig in the south.

The man is dangerously handsome and so enthused to have someone to chatter on about his work with that he pays for a whole pitcher of ale at one of the swankier taverns in town, maps and diagrams and documents and dusty old books spread all over their corner table. The pair laugh and bluster and hotly debate together well into the evening, until work gives way to enjoying a delectable platter of dried fruits and hard cheeses paired with yet more ale.

It is halfway through their second pitcher that both of them go still, blinking at one another, stunned by the realization that they have an unexpected mutual acquaintance.

“You know Yennefer?” asks Istredd, his head tipped in fresh appraisal of the strange professor.

“Of course, I do,” says Jaskier. “I’ve known her for years and years. Mind you, many of those years I wished very dearly not to have known her, but we have reached a truce now. Some may even call us friendly. I’ll have to see about getting us all together the next time she’s in town.”

“No, no,” says the sorcerer, smiling somewhat sadly. “I’m afraid we parted last in less than ideal circumstances.”

“Oh dear, none of that,” Jaskier says and stands to gesture for the barkeep to bring more dried figs and fresh-baked bread and tender slivers of sausage. A bottle of wine for good measure.

“We were in love once,” says Istredd, sighing. “I think so at least. We were very young. And foolish.”

“Mmmm,” hums the poet in understanding as he pours the sorcerer a brimming cup of dark wine.

“I loved her eyes the most,” he says wistfully. “Such bright, clever eyes, despite such darkness in them.”

Jaskier nods in agreement. He can’t say that he has spent long hours peering into Yennefer’s eyes, but he has still seen that flare of hurt that lurks in their violet depths. He has spun that detail into more than one composition. He wonders if Istredd has heard them.

“Oh but her smile. I’ve never known something quite so beautiful. So timid and soft and tender. Full of warmth and light. So genuine and sweet and stunning.”

“That doesn’t sound much like the Yennefer I know,” says Jaskier. Yennefer does not smile. She smirks sometimes or grimaces, but her default state tends to be one of barely-contained irritation. Or maybe that state is only due to his presence. He thinks she surely must smile at the Witcher. Or at Ciri, maybe. But he can’t imagine it.

“If you should ever witness that smile turned your way,” Istredd says, cross-eyed with drunkenness, pointing a sharp finger into Jaskier’s chest. “You will feel like the luckiest man alive. I promise you this. You will be half-ruined for any other. You will wish you could inspire that smile a dozen times over and then some. That she would look at you like that until the end of your days.”

“I will take your word for it,” says Jaskier with a laugh, and they spend the rest of the night in drunken revelry until they stumble back to Jaskier’s rooms together and collapse into sleep.

He half-forgets about the conversation.

Until, that is, the impossible happens.

Yennefer smiles at him.

---

The circumstances that inspire it are not so unusual.

Jaskier has been traveling with Geralt through the summer, and their path crosses with Yennefer in some well-to-do town north of Vizima. She invites them to her well-furnished rooms for drinks and some catching up.

Usually, nights like this end with Jaskier booted from her rooms so that the Witcher and the mage can become reacquainted, but this night, Geralt plans to head out for a contract before the crack of dawn and retires to his own room early, leaving Yennefer and Jaskier alone together well into their cups.

Once upon a time to be left alone with the sorceress would have inspired deep terror in him, but now very little of that unease remains. He still hangs on to some of it, just in case, but beyond some casual bickering with no real edge to the insults flung back and forth, Yennefer has been very tolerant of him recently.

Jaskier is telling her about his last meeting with Ciri, grown into a young woman now and as much a terror as she always has been. She had attended one of his lectures and afterward, strolled at his side through the university grounds and down through the bustling markets of Oxenfurt. On a side street that dipped along a canal, they had encountered a gaggle of rowdy gentlemen who felt the need to whistle and coo at Ciri.

And soon discovered what a horrible, horrible mistake they had made.

“I’ve never seen grown men that size run so fast,” says Jaskier with a bark of laughter. “One of them leapt right into the canal and swam for it!”

Yennefer chuckles into her goblet. “That certainly sounds like Ciri,” she says.

“Oh, you can’t help but love her dearly, our little Ciri. Not so little anymore though, I suppose, but I can’t help but think of her as that wild-eyed young girl still. Oh and remember her hair? What a rat’s nest it would become so easily. So windblown and knotted I could hardly brush it out to braid it. Twigs and burrs caught in it and all.”

“I remember, bard,” says Yennefer.

And.

She smiles.

At him.

Despite the gulp of wine he just swallowed, his mouth goes suddenly dry. It is a small thing, the edges of her mouth quirking upward, her stained lips thinning with it. Her round cheeks dimple slightly, and the faintest breath of wrinkles appear at the corners of her violet eyes. And her eyes echo that tenderness, filled with something that he would describe as affectionate warmth if he did not know who she was looking at.

The smile is for Ciri, he thinks but finds that he doesn’t care. It is warming and wonderful and like nothing he has ever seen on her face. He does not mind that it is not for him. He simply feels awed to have inspired it.

“By the gods,” says Jaskier, foolishly unable to stop the words from falling from his lips. “You have the most beautiful smile.”

And her face shutters at once, that smile forced into a grimace.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” she says. “I’m not one of your comely maidens.”

“I’m not-- Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to blurt that out.” Jaskier flounders, struck by the flood of desperate longing to somehow, some way see her smile like that again. “It’s not nonsense. It’s brutal honesty. I’d never risk lying to you, Yennefer. Or risk flirting with you, for that matter. My bits are much too precious to me.”

“A wise man,” says Yennefer, downing the rest of her drink in one go, and the night ends not long after that, Jaskier passing out in the living area of her rooms rather than risk waking the Witcher.

In the morning, the memory of her smile is crisp and clear in his mind even as the rest of the night blurs into a fog.

Just as Istredd had promised, he aches to inspire it again.

---

The second time it happens, he is so overjoyed and thrilled and relieved to see it again that, looking helplessly back at her as he is, he does not notice his feet stray off the edge of the path as he bodily connects with the solid trunk of a tree.

Geralt is escorting him to Oxenfurt before heading on to Kaer Morhen for the winter, and they encounter Yennefer on the maid road on her way to Novigrad.

Jaskier had been surprised to see her travelling by horse rather than by portal and had made some quip implying laziness, and she had remarked back that she was not surprised at all to see him traveling by foot. Couldn’t he afford a pony after all these years of tenure at the Academy?

He had allowed the back and forth to subside quicker than usual.

Since that night in her rooms, anytime that he happened to encounter her, Jaskier had poured ceaseless energy into attempts to bring that smile once more to her lips. So far, no luck.

He has tried compliments and gifts and more stories of fond memories and self-deprecating humor and commentary on her prestige and power and offerings of food and wine and all manner of things he is sure would have inspired at least a faint smile in anyone else.

But this time, it’s one of his newer compositions that does it. To his surprise, it’s not even a song in her honor but a silly one he wrote at his own expense, the jaunty tale of one of his many ill-advised romantic endeavors that went horribly wrong in potentially exaggerated ways. Sometimes leaning into the role of bumbling fool earns more coin than otherwise.

He has begun the third verse, his voice rising over the dusty road, half dancing a jig alongside the horses, when he looks back and sees Yennefer’s eyes on him.

She’s smiling.

Her dark curls fall loose around her shoulders, and the slanting autumn sunlight gleams on the jewels studded along the bodice of her dress, and there it is, the curve of a soft smile edged with laughter.

A fondness at the edge of it, a gentleness in her eyes.

It’s stunning.

It’s everything he remembers it being.

It’s incredibly, disastrously distracting.

“Oof,” Jaskier says as he bounces off the tree trunk and collapses back on his bottom on the side of the road. Geralt doesn’t even bother pulling up, cursing his clumsiness under his breath, but Yennefer?

Yennefer has collapsed into a fit of helpless laughter as she draws her grey mare to a halt, breathless and wheezing. And she’s still smiling, light and airy, and her laughter is not tainted by cruelty, simply genuine humor at what a sight he must look sprawled on the ground.

Jaskier can’t help laughing along with her, stretching out flat on his back to groan and roll in the dirt. The revelry ends when the Witcher shouts at them from down the road to get a move on, that if they dawdle any longer he’ll never make it to Kaer Morhen before the snows, and Jaskier gets up and wipes the tears from his eyes and pats the dust from his clothing and that’s the end of that.

But now?

Well, now, Jaskier aches to hear Yennefer’s laughter just as terribly as he has ached for her smile.

---

She cottons on to his scheming after a while, because of course she does. Because she’s Yennefer, and Jaskier has never known a woman more astute.

He used to fear that cleverness, tremble under her sharp perception, worry what she would perceive of him. But no longer.

“Jaskier,” she says, as he offers her the slender stem of a rose, its petals so dark burgundy as to appear black. She is visiting Oxenfurt on business. When Jaskier had heard of her presence in town, he had sought out his favorite local florist before stopping by her rooms. “Are you courting me?”

He sputters.

“No! I wouldn’t dare! Simply saw this in the market and thought of you. Simply thought you would admire it,” he says. She quirks a slender brow and reaches to accept the gift in curled fingers.

“No ulterior motives, then?” she asks.

“Ah,” he says. “Well, perhaps there is one.”

“Oh?”

“It’s only--” He knows there is no way to say such a thing without outing himself as an utter imbecile, but she already thinks that of him anyway so no harm done. “Well, I’m quite fond of your smile, is all. I had hoped to inspire more of them.”

She looks at him for a long moment, standing in her doorway. She twirls the stem of the rose in her hand, its dark, upturned petals brushing against her cheek as she lifts it to her nose to catch its fragrance.

And then.

She smiles at him with all the beauty and gentle softness he has come to crave, and he finds his lungs have forgotten how to draw air, standing in perfect rapt stillness before her. Something warm and soaring rises in his breast. His cheeks begin to burn, flushing with the pride and awe at having inspired such a thing and when he thinks on it, when he looks closer, when he examines that swelling warmth in his breast--

His eyes jerk up to meet hers with the sudden realization that he has been staring at her lips for longer than is probably strictly proper, but she hasn’t stopped smiling. She does not jump to chastise him or react in scandalized horror at his blatant ogling.

Instead, she laughs, a bright bubble of a laugh that is almost a giggle, and it thrills through him like a shock of lightning, tightening in his belly.

And she says, “come here, you idiot.”

And pulls him by the front of his doublet into a heated kiss.

And he discovers yet one more gesture of hers that he suddenly aches for.

#and formatting messed up in the ask so #had to repost #yennskier #yenskier #yennefer x jaskier #prompt fills