Notebook

*I mean proper finished titles; not placeholder names

My Candle Bright

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton Characters: Keita Mori, Thaniel Steepleton Additional Tags: pov keita mori, Watching Someone Sleep, Missing Scene Summary:

February, 1884. On a cold night in London, Thaniel Steepleton sleeps, and Keita Mori breaks in to his room to wind the watch he made to save Thaniel's life. It is the first time he comes close to Thaniel, and it is overwhelming.

Advance praise includes:

"it sparkles quietly like if fog was sparkly"

winter prompts day 10 ❄️ lost in a storm

 If Jaskier was a stupider man, he’d be confused about the sheer amount of times he and Geralt seem to be getting stuck places together. But he and Geralt had been the first to arrive and these things only started happening after both Eskel and Lambert had reached the keep. Jaskier can put two and two together and come to the conclusion that none of this is an accident.

Unfortunately for him, Jaskier also knows why it’s happening. Witchers can smell all sorts of stupid, inconvenient shit, one of the more prominent (and most inconvenient) of those being the changes in human emotion. Meaning that if Jaskier wants to keep his feelings to himself, he has to try very hard to do so. And he discovered almost as soon as the other Witchers showed up that he is terrible at it. The only conclusion he can come to is that between the four of them, they’ve come to the (albeit correct) conclusion, that Jaskier is hopelessly in love with Geralt, and set themselves to the task of getting together.

What they don’t know, is that Geralt barely tolerates Jaskier at the best of times and getting them together is a lost cause. He wants to confront them about it, but he rather likes the time he gets to spend alone with Geralt, whether they’re cooking or cleaning or chopping wood. Geralt is different up at the keep than he is on the Path and Jaskier likes this friendlier, more open side of him. So, as long as no one is getting hurt (himself notwithstanding) he decides there’s nothing wrong with their little game. They think they’re solving a problem and Jaskier gets to spend some time with his friend in a place that’s comfortable for him.

Then, one day, they’re all gathered in the main hall. Vesemir has long grown tired of Geralt and Lambert’s bickering and has retired to his room or the library or wherever it is he goes when he’s had enough. Jaskier is once again left alone with the younger wolves and Aiden and he’s enjoying the conversation, but he finds himself tuning out more and more often tonight, wondering what it was like to grow up in a place like this.

He knows it was very different then, that there were many more Witchers who called Kaer Morhen home, but he doesn’t dare ask more than that. He’s gleaned enough from the little bits and pieces from Geralt to know that his childhood was not a happy one and if he’s happier here now, Jaskier doesn’t want to stir up bad memories.

Jaskier doesn’t realize he’s staring at Geralt until Lambert nudges him. He shales his head and turns around to a very smug look.

“Aiden’s gonna grab drinks,” Lambert says, “why don’t you and Geralt go get more firewood while we settle up in here.” Jaskier nods obediently, casting a quick look in Geralt’s direction to see if he suspects anything. Geralt just sighs as he rises to his feet. Jaskier follows suit and traipses after Geralt toward the large doors.

They’ve only been outside a couple of seconds when Jaskier hears the doors click shut behind them and the sound of the lock being slid across. He spins on his heel immediately and Geralt takes a few steps back, pressing on the door, to no avail.

“You can come back in when you figure your shit out!” Lambert calls through the door. Jaskier can hear them mumbling afterward, but it’s too quiet to hear properly. Geralt sighs and rolls his eyes.

“Idiots,” he mumbles and turns back to Jaskier. He seems surprisingly calm, but Jaskier feels immediately guilty. This is his fault. He shouldn’t have let the game go on for so long and now they’re stuck out in the cold until, well, until Lambert and his cohorts decide that they’ve figured their shit out - something Jaskier knows won’t happen.

Fuck. He should have talked to Eskel when he had the chance. He knows Eskel would have listened, that he wouldn’t want to force Geralt into something he’s uncomfortable with. He might have even talked to Lambert and Aiden about it, gotten them to call it off as well, but Jaskier had been greedy. He had wanted too badly to spend time with Geralt that he hadn’t considered things might get out of hand, and now they have.

All at once, he realizes the only way to solve this is to own up to his own feelings. Maybe it will make Geralt uncomfortable for a little while and maybe he won’t want to travel with him any longer, but it’s his fault for not saying something earlier. Now, it’s the only thing he can do to fix this.

He turns to try to explain to Geralt, but when he does, Geralt is smirking back at him.

“Bastards,” he mumbles, “what do you say we beat them at their own game?”

Jaskier, stunned, just looks at him.

“I did a floral design today,” Geralt said, apropos of nothing.

With his head in Geralt’s lap, Jaskier was half asleep, barely aware of the images on the TV or the fingers combing through his hair. “Oh?” he murmured, fighting a yawn. “What was it?”

“Begonia and rhododendron with a frame of abatina.”

Proud as he was of Geralt’s vastly improved floral indentification, Jaskier groaned as he forced himself upright. He pouted at his boyfriend in a way he intended as disapproving, though by the fond smile on Geralt’s face, he imagined he looked more sleep-rumpled than anything.

“This is why you’re supposed to consult me before doing floral tattoos! That poor client is basically walking around advertising that they are an asshole who can’t be trusted.”

Geralt didn’t seem abashed in the slightest. “Well, he did stiff the artist who designed it on the payment. Said he was an ‘influencer’ and she should be glad for the ‘exposure.’”

“Oh,” Jaskier noted, “well, in that case I approve wholeheartedly.”

He stretched his arms up over his head, but when he moved to stand up from the couch and head to bed, Geralt caught him by the wrist.

“I do have another design I’d like your opinion on,” he said.

Nodding, Jaskier dropped back to the cushions, resting his head on Geralt’s shoulder. He gasped with delight when Geralt pulled the paper from his pocket and smoothed it open.

“Did you draw this?” he asked as he traced his finger over the bright camellia blossoms in red, pink, and white; the spray of white yarrow; and the delicate sprigs of myrtle. “It’s lovely. For a wedding, I presume?”

“A proposal actually.”

Jaskier tilted his head back to grin at Geralt. “They must be pretty confident of the answer if they’re having their proposal tattooed on themselves.”

“Hmm.” Geralt tapped his fingers against his knee. “Yenn said proposing with the design was probably a better plan.”

“She’s a smart woman.”

This time when he stood from the couch, Geralt didn’t stop him, but when he tried to hand the paper back, Geralt just gazed at him with an intent expression.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s perfect,” Jaskier replied. “Really. It’s beautiful work, Geralt.”

Again he tried to hand the paper to his boyfriend, but Geralt only glanced away.

“No,” he said after a quiet moment, and Jaskier frowned in confusion as Geralt slid to the floor on one knee. He stared up at Jaskier, his golden eyes soft and vulnerable.

“What do you think?” he murmured.

Jaskier’s breath caught in his chest. He glanced down at the paper in his grasp; as his hand began to tremble, the blossoms danced as if in a gentle breeze. Dropping to his knees to be even with Geralt wasn’t an entirely voluntary move.

“Where?” he whispered.

Geralt tapped a finger against his own chest, the space over his heart, one of the only spots on his torso not already decorated with ink, the place he’d always said he was saving for something truly important.

The very first time, he wakes up one night startled by a sound he can't place but which definitely doesn't belong to the forest. The fire is still burning high enough to illuminate Jaskier in an eerie orange glow but everything else is still around them.

Geralt can't pinpoint any more noise and decides to lie back down after a while. He's about to go back to sleep when Jaskier suddenly turns on his other side, eyes still close, softly mumble a few lines from that awful song he was singing just a few hours ago in Posada, turns again to lie on his stomach and spread his limbs like he's reaching his hand toward something, makes a content noise and then stops moving entirely again.

Geralt lies frozen on his own bedroll. He stays there, one arm supporting him, waiting to see what will happen next. It happens two more times before Jaskier settles in a comfortable position and stays quiet for the rest of the night.

Sometimes Jaskier just whispers a few words, sometimes he actually sings a line or two. But it's always barely audible enough that most humans wouldn't even catch it. Geralt does, every time.

Not that anybody listens, because they see the white hair and yellow eyes and they think monster, and they certainly don’t hang around long enough to make the effort to hear what he’s saying.

At least Roach understands him, and she doesn’t mind whether he’s using words or making sounds or just petting her mane. She doesn’t demand that he speaks, and that’s one reason he prefers her company to humans. He figures he’ll never really be able to communicate with them.

Until he meets Jaskier. For all that Jaskier never stops talking, he actually listens remarkably well too. When Geralt hmms unhappily, Jaskier will rethink and backtrack what he’s just said, and when he hmms teasingly, Jaskier will grin. It makes Geralt feel that perhaps he isn’t impossible to understand after all.

When Geralt uses signs, Jaskier watches attentively and talks back to him. When he writes or doodles on scraps of paper, Jaskier sits by him and writes in his own notebook. When he grunts or growls, Jaskier will pause his monologues long enough to say Well of course you’d say that or Don’t start with me or I know, Geralt, but the truth is so much more poetic when it’s embellished.

It’s remarkable, this feeling of being understood. Of not feeling compelled to form words, not having to force himself to grind out vocalizations that feel like sand in his mouth. No obligations, no pressure, no tying himself in knots trying to spit out awkward, stilted speech. For the first time, he’s being heard without words.

So he travels onward. He sings of Geralt’s adventures like he always does. He composes new songs.

But everything he writes is dreck: maudlin, self-pitying, and flat.

The problem is that Geralt’s words struck something deeper inside him, a festering anxiety he’s never been able to quash. Because he is a burden, really, isn’t he? Can’t fight, can’t hunt, can only earn coin where people have it to spare. He’s known it all his life, which is why he tries so terribly hard to be entertaining. Perhaps, he used to think, if he was charming enough, if he was diverting enough, people wouldn’t notice what a hindrance he was. Perhaps they’d think it was a trade worth making.

He’d convinced himself it was that way with Geralt. That he brought something worthwhile to Geralt’s life, some colour and music, even though Geralt never expressed any affection for those things. As if a few meager coins from odd performances and a few sugar-spun tales about witchers’ heroic deeds could be recompense for tolerating him.

Clearly, he was wrong. There was nothing he had that Geralt needed, and it seemed nothing that he wanted either.

Jaskier is not unfamiliar with the pain of unrequited love. It has happened more times than he can count that he has laid eyes on some beautiful stranger, some compelling vision, someone with whom he has fallen instantly in love, only for them to return his gaze with an upturned lip and an expression of distaste.

But this is wholly different from those fleeting hurts. This is years, decades, of devotion to a man who only ever tolerated his presence at best. What Jaskier feels, most of all, is stupid, and embarrassed, and lonely in a way that has settled into a dull, flat ache in the pit of his stomach.

His new attempts at work are all disasters, so eventually in desperation he digs out the old notebook he’s been carefully avoiding and finds the song he’d been working on before the dragon hunt. The lyrics are all wrong but the melody is solid, and sad, and playing it feels cathartic even when it hurts, like binding a wound to staunch the bleeding.

The fairer sex, they often call it But her love’s as unfair as a crook

It’s petty, and a little mean, but it’s satisfying to lay those words out on the page. She was always bad news. He hadn’t been wrong about that. He lets himself write more. As if he can transpose his pain onto Yennefer, to purge himself by reworking the story so it’s her fault. It’s not true, but it feels good to pretend for a moment.

Tell me love, tell me love How is that just?

It’s the phrase that’s been drumming in his head for weeks. It’s not just, it’s not fair, it’s not right that he should feel this way. He knows this is a fiction too - since when has their world had any interest in justice? - but he’s enjoying the pretense. As he writes, though, inevitably he can’t help but show himself.

I’m weak my love, and I am wanting

He stares at the line.

He scribbles it out. It’s too obvious. Too crass. Too revealing.

He writes it back in. It’s true.

He finishes the song that night. He plays it the next day, both to rip the wax from the wound and simply because he has no other material. The audience seems to like it, the young women especially. He tells them it’s about doomed love which, of course, it is.

He plays it often from then on. He’d imagined playing it might lessen the knot of shame and misery in his chest, but it doesn’t. He keeps playing it anyway.

He keeps playing until, one chilly autumn evening in a small village, he’s wrapping up the evening with the song, looking forward to a quiet ale and a soft bed for once. He barely registers the faces in the tavern, the shhh shhh of the door swinging open and closed. He barely notices anything at all until he sounds the final notes, lets them ring through the smoky air, and looks up to find an achingly familiar figure in the doorway: dark cloak, white hair, two big scary swords.

His heart twists violently as their eyes meet across the room, amber on blue, and there’s an expression on that familiar face not of anger but something akin to curiosity. To puzzlement. To wondering what the fuck was that he was singing about?