Chapter Text
The problem wasn’t really the talking. Lots of humans talked incessantly. Geralt could remember asking a lot of questions before the Trial of the Grasses. The trainers hadn’t been particularly fond of answering most of them. Geralt had heard humans talking constantly every time he’d been within a quarter mile of civilization his entire adult life. Some of them talked in their sleep, making the stream of speech almost unending.
Jaskier spoke more than about half of the adult humans Geralt had ever met, but less than most of the children. In the early days of their acquaintance, it made Geralt question whether or not Jaskier was an adult at all, but there were so many evil things that preyed on children that he was certain that Jaskier’s parents would never have let him go gallivanting around the countryside if he’d been a child.
He was proven wrong a couple of months after meeting Jaskier. They were sitting on the edge of the road, letting Roach graze and taking a brief midday break, when Jaskier proudly interrupted his own monologue to announce that his birthday was coming up and he was going to be seventeen at last. Apparently this mattered if he wanted to play in taverns in Vattweir, though why anyone would want to spend extended periods of time in Vattweir, Geralt could not possibly imagine. He tried asking, but the answer was opaque.
“You’re a juvenile, then?” he finally tried, after fifteen or twenty minutes of Jaskier proclaiming the many and varied highlights of the Vattweiran art scene.
“What?” When Geralt asked a question, it often seemed to put Jaskier off-balance. “A juvenile? Like I’m some sort of… hawk without all its plumage in yet?”
“They always told us to stay away from humans who weren’t through their second decade yet, unless we had direct claim to them. I thought you were children until then.”
“No, of course not! I’m a graduate of Oxenfurt! Well. Mostly. I will be. Just one more semester. I’ve got to repeat geometry because that old bastard didn’t like my family name. I’ll show him. I’ve shown all the rest of them and he had no business tossing me out of his lectures. Who said we weren’t adults until we were twenty?”
“The trainers.” Roach nuzzled Geralt’s cheek and he sighed at her.
“What trainers?”
“Witcher trainers. They gave us… rules. When we left on the Path. One of them was not to touch a human not through their second decade unless it was to save their life. Humans get… protective. Of their young.”
Jaskier stared at him, head tipping to the side. “You aren’t joking when you say you don’t consider yourself a human, are you?”
“Hm.” Geralt shrugged.
“You are though. You’re just as much a man as any of us and I should know. I’ve seen you bathe now!” He gave Geralt a flirtatious little eyebrow wiggle.
“There’s no point in altering our genitalia,” Geralt said flatly. “It would be a waste.”
“A waste of what?”
Geralt didn’t have an answer for that. Magic wasn’t really his area of expertise. He could break curses and use a handful of Signs, but he didn’t understand how the magic itself worked, only the pieces that went into what he did know. The best he could come up with when he considered it was the answer he’d been given when he asked why so few boys made it to adulthood. “There is always a cost. You never get something for nothing, but sometimes you get nothing for something.”
Jaskier pulled his lute around from where he wore it on his back and plucked a series of notes. “Oh, now that’s a turn of phrase. I can get somewhere with that.”
And that was really the problem, in the end. It wasn’t the talking. It was the fact that Jaskier cared about the responses. Geralt didn’t know what to do with that.