#yenerference kinda

[bounce-a-coin-off-your-witcher]

In My Dreams Tonight

for @chaotic-bard who asked me for some fluff!

have a soulmates that dream about each other au featuring both a modern au and the canon universe!

brought to you by “Dreams Tonite” by Alvvays

---

“You’re nothing but trouble, bard,” the tall man glared from atop his horse. He always seemed to be glaring or glowering or huffing, the man in Jaskier’s dreams. The familiar stranger wore his long white hair pulled halfway back and he had golden eyes, the pupils of which were slit up the center like a cat’s. His name, Jaskier had learned after the third straight week of seeing him every night, was Geralt of Rivia. A Witcher, apparently, whose job it was to hunt down monsters.

“Ah, but what a lovely piece of trouble I am!” Jaskier replies. And he’s rather sassy himself in these dreams. Far more clever and ready to fight than he is when he’s awake. “You would miss me if I left, wouldn’t you, Geralt?”

“Hmm.”

The stranger hums a lot. He glares and he hums. Jaskier’s heart stutters frightfully in his chest whenever the man smiles, though. The sight is rare. Geralt has smiled perhaps three times in the past two months.

“Where are we going today?”

“Werewolf outside of town. You’re staying at the inn, where I know you can’t get into… nevermind. You can get into trouble anywhere.”

There’s a lightly teasing tone to the stranger’s voice that Jaskier hasn’t really heard before. He likes it. He craves more of it. He tosses and turns in his sleep, his skin damp with sweat. The dream goes on.

“Geralt, please,” he whines, “I can’t write ballads about monsters I haven’t seen! Or fights I did not attend! That’s lying to my audience, Geralt, and I simply won’t do it. I must go with you.”

“Drop it, Jaskier,” the man snarls. Jaskier feels sad. Incredibly sad.

Rejected?

“Gera-”

“I said drop it, bard.”

Jaskier wakes up feeling a little heartbroken and he yearns to be held. His pillow holds the fading scents of leather and wood-smoke. The sight of a pine sapling at the dog park makes him tear up.

He starts to wear the color yellow out of nowhere and his taste in jewelry switches from gold to silver. 

When his best friend asks him about the recent changes, he cannot answer.

---

Geralt pours himself a mug of tea and shakes his hair out of his face. He’s been having odd dreams lately, things that feel familiar but manage to stay just out of his conscious grasp. Someone important is waiting for him. Someone he love and cares about and needs. 

Geralt doesn’t really buy into the concept of soulmates, but he does understand instinct. He knows to trust his gut. He knows to listen and start paying attention when the same haunting blue eyes creep into his dreams every night for six months, plaguing him in the waking hours by refusing to give up their owners’ identity. 

He wipes a hand down his face and sighs loudly into the otherwise empty studio apartment. “Fuck me, I gotta figure this shit out. I gotta talk to Yen.”

Talking to himself has always helped him calm down. He does it again, just to hear his own low voice scraping through the silence. 

“I gotta see what’s going on with my head. These dreams are… getting to be a bit much, even for me.”

He nods to no one in particular and goes to text his best friend and coworker.

---

Jaskier hops off the bus and carries his guitar case down to the coffee shop on the corner. Finally, he’s managed to get a gig that wasn’t through the university.

He sets up his stuff in the tiny alcove the shop treats as a stage and watches as a few customers stroll around near the counter, waiting for their drinks or reading through the menu, hovering just far away enough from the line to keep others from growing confused.

He loves people watching. 

Once everything is ready to go and the light outside the window has dimmed a bit, indicating early evening has finally arrived, he pulls his guitar onto his lap and strums through a few quick chords.

“Rode here on the bus,

Now you're one of us.

It was magic hour,

Counting motorbikes on the turnpike;

One of Eisenhower's.”

 “Live your life on a merry-go-round;

Who starts a fire just to let it go out?”

He watches a particularly handsome man with broad shoulders and a vintage denim jacket approach the counter. Jaskier adds a haunting, well-practiced lilt to his voice as he goes into the chorus, hoping to get his attention:

“If I saw you on the street,

Would I have you in my dreams tonight?

If I saw you on the street,

Would I have you in my dreams tonight, tonight?”

An equally beautiful woman with long, curly black hair approaches the denim-clad angel and whisks him towards a table nearby. She settles with her back to Jaskier, leaving him with a decent view of the man’s sharp, lightly stubbled jaw, glittering eyes, and severe white ponytail. He’s gorgeous.

He’s also uncomfortably familiar.

Jaskier continues to perform, trying to identify his attractive mystery man the whole time and failing miserably.

---

“He’s everywhere, Yen. I feel like I could identify him by scent if I got close enough. I can’t remember his name, though. Or the color of his hair. I don’t know his face, only his eyes. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Have you talked to Dr. deStael about it?”

“Yeah, but she said this kind of thing is normal. Recurring dreams often help us sort out our trauma or something like that. I don’t know. I don’t feel traumatized by this guy I feel… protective of him. Maybe even like I love him?”

“Hmm.”

“Hey, that’s my line.”

“Shut up for a minute, this live music actually slaps and I want to listen to it. Then we can discuss your weird possessive tendencies towards your dream boyfriend.”

Geralt takes a slow sip of his coffee and glances up at the singer off to their left, perched on a barstool with his guitar held carefully on his lap. His voice is soft but somehow bright. Geralt finds himself utterly entranced.

“On the weird guitar;

Said you'd go to work

In the waking hour.

In fluorescent light,

Antisocialites watch a wilting flower.”

 “Live your life on a merry-go-round;

Who builds a wall just to let it fall down?”

The lyrics are strange and hold a dream-like quality to them. They draw a picture in Geralt’s head, something dark and heavy and oddly hollow. He has another sip of coffee and tries to ignore the feeling of panic welling up inside him. He glances at Yennefer to see if she’s picked up on his mood, but her violet eyes are focused on the singer and his nimble fingers as he continues to play and sing.

When he glances up towards their table and their eyes meet, Geralt loses the ability to breathe.

That shade of cornflower blue was…

Couldn’t be…

Had to be…

The gorgeous, feathery tenor continues to fill the air, whirling pleasant notes past his ears and deep into his subconscious. Geralt knows that voice. He’s heard this man laugh and sing and cry and scream a thousand different times. Through a handful of different lives. Geralt knows that face, those hands, those strong legs and long arms and blue fucking eyes. He’s held this singer in his arms every night for centuries, feeling his breathing as they both drift off to sleep.

He has protected this man and been protected by him in return. He has kissed and been kissed, caressed and been caressed. The two men sitting across from each other in the coffee shop physically embody an endless cycle of love. It has been bound up in the souls of two no-longer strangers. Geralt knows that he knows this man. 

He knows Jaskier.

Petal pink lips continue to form soft words and slender hands keep plucking at vibrating guitar strings:

“Don't sit by the phone for me,

Wait at home for me, all alone for me.

Your face was supposed to be

Hanging over me, like a rosary.”

Geralt stands suddenly, startling Yennefer but not the performer, even though he’s clearly just as shocked as Geralt about this recent development.

Their mutual realization.

“So morose for me,

Seeing ghosts of me,

Writing oaths to me,

Is it so naïve to wonder…”

Geralt crosses the room to the edge of the stage in three quick strides. Yennefer is close behind him, her latte just as abandoned as his coffee at their table. She grabs her friend’s arm as if to stop him from doing something violent, but when he doesn’t struggle against her grip she lets it go again easily. 

“Geralt?” the musician asks.

“Jaskier?” Geralt replies. The guitar is placed quickly to the side and a pair of incredibly familiar arms are thrown around the taller man’s neck. Geralt hugs back just as firmly, his arms flung low around the brunette’s waist. Geralt knows that this is Jaskier’s favorite way to be embraced; he doesn’t know how he’s aware of that fact, but it comes to the front of his mind clear as day. 

“Holy shit,” Jaskier breathes, leaning back to stare Geralt in the face. One of his string-calloused fingers traces down over Geralt’s eyelid and cheek and he cocks his head to the side. “No scar?”

“No,” Geralt shakes his head. “Not this lifetime, I guess.”

“Were we? Are we- are we, you know...?”

“Yeah,” Yen beams, adding her two cents from the sidelines. “I think so. Congrats, boys. This is one of those one in a million chances and you’ve gone and done it.”

“Done what?” Geralt asks. Jaskier tosses his head back and laughs. His happiness rings out through the cafe like a struck bell and Geralt’s heart stutters frantically. He really does love this man already. Wholeheartedly and without fear. “What have we done, Yen?”

“As obtuse now as you were then,” Jaskier chides affectionately. “Soulmates, my love. We’ve been bound by the red string of fate and ta-da! Here we are. Again, apparently.”

“Yes, okay,” Geralt breathes, nosing his way along Jaskier’s jaw with giddy determination. He presses a quick and wholly welcome kiss to the bard’s lips. “That makes sense.”

 “Do you... do you want me again? This time around?” Jaskier asks, fingers fiddling with one of the ties on Geralt’s hoodie. A pair of chapped lips press against his again and he sighs into it, melting against his no-longer-Witcher. 

“Yes. And the next one, as well.”