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It came on gradually.
It wasn’t a big deal, he could manage it. Until it was, and he couldn’t.
Geralt was at the river washing the blood off his knuckles after their most recent contract– Barghests haunting a nobleman’s garden. The scene was set; a dying garden with wilted flowers, overgrown trees chasing away the light. The White Wolf valiantly fought the pack in an exciting and creepy battle (Jaskier had an incredible view from where Geralt had thrown him halfway up a tree), and they discovered why so many ghosts of misfortune had gathered in the one place. The unmarked grave of an illegitimate daughter.
It was everything a ballad needed. Heroism, action, a shocking twist and cohesive imagery to boot!
Jaskier wondered if it’d be more or less appealing to add the ending, where the nobleman’s spokesperson tried to cheat them of their reward and Geralt socked him square in the face. He wasn’t sure it gave off the right impression, but Jaskier sure as hell found it attractive. Eh. He’d get back to it.
“Ahem, the White Wolf fought the…” Jaskier began, strumming the lute.
Geralt sighed grumpily, trudging his way back over with a distasteful expression that Jaskier thought was a little offensive, actually! Wait. He’d lost his train of thought– where was he going with that line, again?
“The White Wolf… He… He was fighting valiantly against,” he mumbled, and oh gods, that was so dull, the audience's ears might just fall off. Geralt grabbed Roach’s reins and tugged her along. Jaskier followed, he always did, but lagged more than a few steps behind.
Something like dread began to pool in his stomach. It wasn’t– He was just, hungry. That was it. He was hungry.
“Jaskier,” Geralt’s deep voice called, and Jaskier obediently jogged to catch up, missing completely the slight note of worry.
“Hmmm, hmm, ahh, the White Wolf–” Jaskier tried a new angle, picking up the pace suddenly on the first verse. It came out hollow, and left him breathless. “The White Wolf– No, that’s not it, fuck. The wolf–”
“Jaskier.”
“–Barghests, what rhymes with barghest? Artist? The White Wolf valiantly fought the ghouls, the filthy barghest didn’t stand a chance, as an artist I’ll tell you how his sword… danced…”
“Barghests aren’t ghouls,” Geralt interrupted, again, and Jaskier finally spun around, his face twisted in frustration.
“I know that!” He snapped.
Geralt’s eyebrows lifted in a miniscule display of surprise. Ah. Maybe Geralt deserved a taste of his own medicine, with his own habit of taking out his moods on others (Jaskier) and snapping at those around him (Jaskier), but in the end he couldn’t bear to give it. He stewed in the boiling frustration until it subsided, and Geralt calmly walked by his side the whole time.
I’m an artist. It’s just a bad day.
“Sorry, that was a little mean. Didn’t mean to take it out on you. That line won’t, ah, be in the final version, anyway,” Jaskier apologised, finding a way to gently say that he fucking hated the whole thing. That there was something currently wrong with his brain and its ability to put words together in the right way. That he just didn’t feel like singing, and exactly how much that terrified him.
Geralt gave him a look. It was a good thing Jaskier had grown more adept at reading him; If he could use one word instead of two, he’d use none. Jaskier couldn’t imagine it. He’d always relied on words to communicate the vast, gaping archive of feelings and colours and voices in his chest; otherwise, where would those stories go?
With no way out, they might just eat him alive.
“Jaskier. What’s wrong.”
“Nah, it’s nothing.”
It didn’t have to be good. He could just sing whatever came to mind, because he truly loved to sing. Geralt didn’t mind– Well, he did a little bit, but when had that ever stopped Jaskier? His lute weighed heavy in his hands.
“Do you… need a break?”
“What? We just left. Don’t be a drama queen, Geralt.”
He could always practice an old song, instead. Something easy, without a complicated tune. Six different songs came to mind.
“Barghests come from a concentration of ill will, or a curse,” Geralt awkwardly spoke up, for once put in the position of filling the silence. Jaskier usually begged him for details, and had to fight for every scrap of information. “They don’t burn or bleed.”
“Like every other ghost, yeah.”
The trip was silent. Jaskier’s lute never made a sound.
It was just a bad day, except that it didn’t get better the next day or the day after that.
“You’re sure you don’t sense a curse? None at all? Not even a super tiny little one?” Jaskier asked for the third time, starting to feel a little hysterical. They say you can’t force creativity, but Jaskier wasn’t above trying. He forced every breath from his tight, aching lungs.
“No.”
A pause. Jaskier dragged his fingernails slowly down his face, groaning. This would end, it always did, but the fear that it wouldn’t stretched him so thin that all he could think of was snapping.
“Jaskier, I can’t do shit if you don’t tell me anything,” Geralt continued, with what appeared to be great difficulty. Jaskier shot him a weary smile, hopelessly. Swords couldn’t fight his problems, when the problem was himself.
“It’s just…”
He’d been avoiding directly acknowledging it– like, somehow, his dull words still held power. His art, his music, his words; they were inseparable from him. They were what made him Jaskier, not Julian.
They made him worth sticking around.
“I’ve just been lacking musical inspiration, lately,” Jaskier admitted, downplaying it to the extreme while not technically lying. “I’ll be right.”
Geralt hummed and said nothing, like he believed him. He was disappointed, but he had no one to blame but himself. He tried not to let his face fall.
He experimented in taking inspiration from everywhere. He thought about the times he’d been wronged and outshone, controlling his anger so there was just enough feeling to put on paper. The disconnect between whatever he managed to write and the frustration he actually felt left him tearing up the pages like he was a teenager trying to write his own songs for the first time all over again.
He’d thought about Geralt.
Geralt had been selling monster parts to an ealdorman, and Jaskier, he– He had opened his lyric notebook and wrote
‘eyes so yellow they–
outshine the sun
(cliche)
put yellow to
(stupid) eyes so yellow they– My eyes were caught in his eyes so yellow– (used eyes twice, fuck. FUCK).’
He shut the book succinctly and pocketed it, before the storm could catch up with him again. The unfinished verse burned a hole through his chest. Upon slipping away his book, always acutely aware of the room, he felt a curious lingering gaze. After a little bit of staring and probably wondering why the witcher kept an annoying-looking stick-armed man around (jokes on him, Geralt didn’t have a say in the matter), the ealdorman recognised Jaskier from a few of his more famous ballads.
He praised his work, and in the true fashion of a scholar, was eager to discuss it. Jaskier didn’t mind the attention, really. He thrived on it, he paid his rent with it, and anyhow, between the two of them there was always one who stood out like a sore thumb. It was weird to see a witcher at a ball, and it was weird to see a bard on a monster killing contract.
It never bothered him, though. He had talents of his own! Jaskier wasn’t a monster slayer, but he was a wordsmith, he crafted lyrics and songs and changed minds and–
And the ealdorman asked if he could stay and sing at their local tavern that night, and–
“So sorry, I’m unfortunately still resting my voice from my last performance,” he lied through his teeth. Geralt had a stare hard-set on him, but Jaskier was long past being intimidated by it. “I’ll be sure to come back here though, it’s always a pleasure to meet those who support real art.”
Jaskier bowed, and his stomach lurched. How long, until Geralt ran out of patience? The ealdorman hadn’t caused a fuss about it, thankfully, nor had he lowered his original offer to Geralt. But he had said,
“I’m looking forward to new ballads of yours, bard!”
He felt sick.
They left town that day. He tried to brush off Geralt’s quiet concern; his furrowed brows and oddly considerate actions, because, he was fine. It wasn’t like he’d lost a hand or his voice, or that he’d forgotten how. He knew how, and there was nothing stopping him. He forced himself through a song, and, technically, it was fine. He played the right notes and his voice never strayed off key. Even Geralt didn’t seem to super extra hate it.
But fuck, it wasn’t the same, he was falling short of every standard he had set for himself. The idea of playing this to a crowd, of proving that he wasn’t anything that special after all, made him vividly consider throwing up. Jaskier had always brushed the criticism off his coat and kept his chin held high; he knew where he wanted to be, and he knew he had the drive to do it. Even when he had been growing, and his music had more than enough flaws to count on– he had something in him that gave it life.
The song he sang now was long dead. It was engineered, mechanical– music wasn’t made to be played like a maths equation. No matter how hard you trained, there would always be a clear distinction between those that happened to have the voice to sing, and the artists . Those who created something from nothing, who had a story to tell and who felt the music in their bones from the very first day. It was passion, inspiration, and something else Jaskier had never quite been able to put his finger on.
Perhaps that was the thing old poets named the muses. Unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Jaskier bet his whole life on his art, he had the skill, a story to tell, and by the gods he’d do anything to be able to tell it again–
So what was missing? What was he doing wrong? What the fuck was wrong with him?
“You wouldn’t get it,” Jaskier grumbled, his fingers never leaving the lute, despite the fact that he hadn’t moved to play it in hours. They rested there like a lifeline. Bound together– or perhaps they weren’t, afraid that if he let go, whatever magic happened between his skin and the string would disappear.
“Really,” Geralt hummed back, uninterested. He silently poked the fire with a large stick, and the frustrating silence spurred Jaskier on.
“Really! I mean, we’re never going to run out of monsters, and you never have to think about it. It’s just like, you know, there’s a monster, now I’m gonna kill it, it just happens. You don’t have to worry that one day you’ll… stop being able to kill monsters.”
Jaskier plucked a single string. It was impossible for one note to sound bad; a single note was only that, there were no bad sounds, only those that were not well put together. Somehow, the noise managed to make him wince.
“Why would I worry about that?” Geralt asked. Jaskier wanted to bash his lute over his head, and kill the two birds he wanted to protect with one large and bloody stone.
“Because! It’s like, what if you just didn’t feel up to it that day? What if you stopped feeling anything about killing monsters– No, not that. You’d feel something. You’d want to kill monsters. But you can’t. I mean you can, physically, nothing is there to stop you. The monster is right there. But you just can’t. It’s not the right weather, you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, it’s just not calling to you that day, and you just keep thinking of excuses because you’re scared of the fact that you don’t know why. And if you don’t know why, who’s to say when you’ll ever get it back? What if you lose that feeling forever? Who am I, if I can’t make music– I mean, who are you, if you can’t kill monsters.”
“Dead, probably.”
“See? You can’t even imagine anything else! It’s what you were made to do, it’s what you’ll always do.”
Jaskier had loved music since the moment he could love. How could he love anything, anyone, if he couldn’t play music? If he couldn’t write songs? He finally put down his lute, no matter how similar it felt to giving up, and he could see from across the campfire that Geralt sat at the edge of his bedroll.
He’d thought, once, that he couldn’t imagine speaking so little. Now, he’s starting to see the different ways Geralt says things.
“Scooch over, you overgrown mutt,” Jaskier muttered, crawling over to his side and bringing his knees up to his chest. He sighed, pointedly. Perhaps Geralt knew him better than he gave him credit for, because if there was one sure fire way to get Jaskier to speak, it was by just saying nothing at all.
“I’m just saying that it’d really be quite unfortunate, and that you’d also be in a shocking mood, if you couldn’t kill monsters. Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically,” Geralt rumbled, sounding half-amused.
“And that it’d be natural to worry about whether you’ll ever kill monsters again, and wow, have I mentioned how much I hate your thin bedrolls, I can feel sticks up my ass–”
“Jaskier. You’ll make music again. It’s who you are,” Geralt simply said, confident in a way Jaskier desperately wished he could believe. It may come back this time, but what about the next? Will it always be temporary?
The embers of the fire were wisped away in the wind. For now, he had nothing to say about it. He would remember their colour, their shape, and he would try again tomorrow.
“It’s who I am,” he repeated quietly, his eyes glancing at his lute until they watered under the ache. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”