cowt 12 sett 5 M3: it's time to leave this town, it's time to steal away (the witcher, pg13)

[janie_tangerine]

it's time to leave this town, it's time to steal away (geralt/jaskier, the witcher, pg13)

The first time Geralt says he can ride shotgun, Jaskier has to pinch his arm really hard.

 

It’s, after all, a fairly known fact that Geralt only lets his brothers and his foster father even sit in the car, and none of them ever has been seen driving it. He’s kind of extremely possessive of the damned black thing, though Jaskier always found it endearing as hell — he treats it like it’s his daughter, and honestly, he doesn’t need to hitch a ride with him most of the time anyway. He can walk and he has a bike and he doesn’t live in a damned farm like Geralt does, of course he can do without.

 

Still, when Geralt actually tells him he can give him a ride when they come back from one of their classmates’ birthday party in town he’s only too happy to accept.

 

He doesn’t expect to kiss Geralt for the first time in the backseat after the party turns out being shit and Geralt ends up leaving early because there was one dig too many about his hair, eyes and familiar situation again, but it happens, and then they have to keep it hidden for obvious reasons and it means most times they kiss or go past second base is in the back of the damned car, baptised Roach, with Jaskier not commenting on the name choice.

 

Then —

 

“Listen,” Geralt tells him when school is finally done and they only have a summer in front of them before they go to Krakow and start university and they are finally somewhere not lost in the middle of fucking nowhere, “I, uh. I kind of wanted to drive where — where I used to live. Before my mother left.”

 

As in, Gdańsk, as in, on the opposite side of the country.

 

Jaskier didn’t even know he still remembered it considering he left the place when he was six and Geralt claims to having forgotten most of it.

 

“Fancy coming with?” He asks, not looking his way as he does.

 

“Sure,” Jaskier says, “as long as I get to choose the music sometimes.”

 

“I thought you’d provide it,” Geralt replies, sounding relieved.

 

Jaskier doesn’t press and three days later they’re packed and Geralt’s driving off to the north and it’s going to take some four days if they take it slow, but they aren’t in a hurry, are they?

 

Geralt doesn’t talk much, but that’s no news. He drives, and doesn’t complain when Jaskier alternates his 80s metal with some of his own cassettes, Roach is an old car and doesn’t have a CD reader, and they end up sleeping in the car the first night.

 

The second day it’s hot as hell and they just go slow because in order to save on gas they’re driving with the windows open, and the closer they get to Gdańsk the less Geralt is talking, and that evening when they still have to sleep on the backseat because they haven’t found anyplace cheap enough and decent enough, he confesses that he doesn’t know what the fuck he was thinking when he decided to go there but it was an itch he had to scratch even if he knows most likely other people will be living in that house.

 

“Do you remember it?”

 

“I’ve always known the address by heart,” Geralt shrugs, and then sleeps with his head buried in Jaskier’s shoulder, and Jaskier says nothing until they arrive in Gdańsk on day four and find out that indeed someone else lives there and that the porter hasn’t had news from his mother for the last ten years or so.

 

“… So that was… after she left,” Geralt croaks, and the man looks at him with something like pity.

 

“Son,” he says, “last I knew, she came here to get some leftover mail and said she was moving in with some other man, I asked her about you and she said it was for the best and she couldn’t have done right by you anyway. I don’t know anything else.”

 

“Thanks,” Geralt tells him, and Jaskier has to force him to eat some food later as they sit inside Roach and Geralt just looks miserable.

 

“I mean,” he says, “fine if she couldn’t do it, but telling me would have been so hard?”

 

Jaskier could say maybe she didn’t want you to assume things, but just leaving and fucking off… well. He doubts that the result has been so much better.

“She doesn’t know what she missed on,” Jaskier shrugs. “You’re the best person I know and no thanks to her, and she can fuck right off.”

 

Geralt sniffs, wiping at his eyes. “Fuck you,” he says, “I’m not.”

 

“You are. I don’t kiss people in cars’s backseats for nothing all the time,” he grins, and Geralt wipes at his eyes angrily again, and —

 

He shakes his head, grabs the keys. “Hey,” he says, “I mean, we could stay here for the night, but.”

 

“But?”

 

“I don’t know if I can do it. I’m too tired. It’s — can you drive?”

 

“Just now or all the way back?” Jaskier whispers, realising what exactly the gesture implies.

“I mean, I’ll watch you closely now and we can see,” Geralt replies, the keys falling into Jaskier’s palm.

 

“Sure,” he whispers, “I’ll leave her without a scratch.”

 

“You’d better,” Geralt groans before kissing him, and good thing no one is looking at them.

 

Jaskier drives the car very, very carefully. Enough that the next day Geralt tells him to just fucking drive and not take the way back — they’re out here, they never even went to Warsaw in their entire lives, they might as well go there and see some places, right?

 

He sounds almost tentative as he proposes it, we never really had the money for vacations anyway falling in a whisper from his mouth, and — well. At least that was why they didn’t. Jaskier’s parents had the money but never bothered to actually go anywhere because they didn’t care for it.

 

“Sure,” he grins back, “we can do the entire country if you like. We have months ahead of us, don’t we?”

 

Geralt grins agains his mouth, small and tentative, and when Jaskier grabs the keys and drives back out into the highway, heading south, he doesn’t look like he’s afraid he’ll crash his beloved car in five minutes.

 

Jaskier is not intending on crashing anything here. He smiles and drives ahead.

 

He’s looking forward to the next weeks.

 

He really is.

 

 

End.