The dragon hunt was years ago.

He heaves out a sigh before squeezing his eyes shut. The shaking won’t stop, even with the nightmare gone. The sweat is sticking to his nightshirt and it feels awful—

“Bad dream?”

Jaskier turns to the source of the question but can’t see Geralt in the pitch-dark room. He knows his witcher is there, roused by the noise he must have made in sleep. Without a moment of doubt, Jaskier inches closer and buries his face in the crook of Geralt’s neck, his leg thrown over the other man’s hip. A tremor runs through his body again, and a large hand soothes it away immediately.

“Shit. You’re so scared,” Geralt murmurs, subtly sniffing Jaskier’s hair, his voice low with sleep. He moves his hand up and down Jaskier’s back before resting it on the small of his back, steady, safe. “Nilfgaard?”

Jaskier feels a kiss pressed to the scar at his hairline. It’s almost faded now, the pain long gone. It is not what plaguing his dreams tonight, so he shakes his head in silence.

Geralt wraps his other hand around Jaskier’s chin. “You are worrying me, Jask.”

Jaskier can only hug Geralt tighter with a suffocating force, and the witcher pulls him even closer. The silence stretches. Jaskier threads his fingers in the long, soft hair that he’s put so much attention into caring. He isn’t sure which one of them he’s trying to comfort.

“It’s…the mountain,” finally he says.

Geralt goes stiff in his arms. It doesn’t take a witcher to sense the uptick of the languid heartbeat against Jaskier’s ribcage.

“Jaskier, I’m—”

“No. No, don’t apologize,” Jaskier adds. “Not again. You don’t need to. I’ve forgiven you, my love, completely. It won’t be fair if I still hold it against you.”

Geralt doesn’t respond. Even without looking, Jaskier can imagine the guilt in his eyes and the furrow between his brows. So he searches in the dark and presses a kiss there, and another on the tip of Geralt’s nose before capturing his lips.

“But you’re still hurting.” Geralt whispers breathily as they pull apart.

“Sometimes my mind plays this trick on me,” Jaskier smiles sadly, dropping back onto a solid embrace. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“What can I do?”

Jaskier rests his temple against Geralt’s cheek, reveling in their closeness. He shouldn’t be this shaken over a dream, and yet just an echo of that day, one moment of believing the venom in Geralt’s words, is enough to leave a gaping hole in his chest. He already dreads the next time when it happens.

“Be here. Just…be here.”

The plea is a desperate thing, but Geralt catches the hidden meaning anyway. His sweet witcher, who has more than made up for his mistake by choosing to stay at Jaskier’s side over and over again, always hears what’s left unsaid.

“Oh, Jask. Don’t you see? There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” he says. “I promised you the rest of our lives, and I intend to keep my promises.”

Jaskier’s shoulders sag in the warm cocoon of their bed, surrounded by the love that he’s long recognized as safety and home. Sleep pulls at him once again.

Контент 16+  I was always a night guy. Did my best thinking in those heart attack hours of the deepest gloom when the good things went to sleep and the bad things woke up. I guess it’s because when I was a child I was afraid of the dark. We lived in a big white ramshackle house at the bottom of a dead-end street in the hills of Charleston West Virgina, and that three-story house overlooked deep…

ever had such a dream that scared you enough to laugh at your foolishness?

The men in blue came in green, red and white. All armed, all jawed; teeth in, and lips out. Man that’s prank ghostly! I love my night wares, Dem nightmares cracked my ribs for a slumber drool. Nyx Morpheus and Erebus sojourned, My mind, the gods rendezvous. Tired of this Chaos; I need the Cosmos- Free and vast; So inhibited; So being inhabited; Damn! I’ve always been a star!