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1. Food
Jaskier is loud, which is not new. But his body is loud too, which is.
“If your stomach grumbles one more time--”
“It’s not like I can help it Geralt, honestly!”
He’s about to snap back when he catches a whiff of something on the crisp air: men and horses, worked up to a sweat.
“Woh, Roach.” And then when she slows to a stop he barks out, “Jaskier, go to the forest,” without sparing a glance for the other man. He can hear him hesitate and then, slowly, comply.
There are three riders cresting the hill ahead, and the telltale glint of metal is bright in the spring sun. He slides off Roach’s back in a quick and sure motion and slaps her rear until she darts off into the moderate safety of the nearby patch of forest, hopefully not far from where Jaskier is pressing himself next to a tree. He can hear the bard’s breathing, a handful of meters to the east, and he wishes he’d gone farther, but it’s too late now.
He stands in the road until they come towards him, and the sour smiles on their faces and the smell of adrenaline and excitement that wafts towards him the next breeze confirm their ill intent.
“Fine weather we’re having,” he says, just as the first man kicks his horse violently into action and Geralt is surrounded by heaving horse flesh, slashing steel, and the calm but persistent woosh woosh woosh of his own mutated pulse in his ears.
They’re easy. They must not have heard the stories, or they didn’t recognize him, and he cuts them down like cattle. A quick jab to the jugular of the first man and a slice to the femoral of the man trying to barrel him down the ravine on his horse. The last man, who has fallen off his mount and is scampering back towards the wood as if there is anywhere safe from the Butcher.
“Didn’t mean any harm,” he’s stammering, and Geralt can smell the piss flowing into his trousers. “Fuck, please--”
“You came at me, blade drawn with the sun behind your back. And you meant no harm?”
“Don’t kill me, please!”
“Geralt!” Jaskier is back, running and panting and his fucking stomach is still growling like an animal. “Are you-- “
“Shut up, Jaskier.”
The bandit smells like food. Geralt inhales again. His mouth waters. The sun is making his head hurt, and he realizes after a slow heartbeat it’s because he hasn’t eaten anything in two days. Last night he’d made the fire and eaten the tree bark, stewed with wine. Jaskier had tucked into their slight and meager rations, and Geralt had given his fruit and wheat to Roach, because the grazing in this gods forsaken swamp was terrible and she was too thin from a hard winter already.
He thinks back longer. The night before, when Jaskier had spent the evening playing for his supper, Geralt had two frogs boiled in blood. Velen is poor, and even the rats had been picked clean.
“Fine. I’ll let you go if you give me your food.”
“What?”
“You heard the man!” Jaskier pipes in, and his stomach rumbles again at even the mention of food. Geralt wishes he’d stayed back in the copse of trees with Roach like a sensible creature.
“You were going to stick me with that shitty knife of yours and pick my bones clean of goods, you think it’s unfair of me to do the same?”
The man reaches two shaking hands towards the simple leather bag looped around his shoulder and produces the source of the powerful aroma that’s captured Geralt’s attention: a lump of lard wrapped in grease paper, and a rotting chicken with flies already hatching. He drops them both onto the ground, scampers backwards on all fours like an endrega, and then runs like the devil is behind him as soon as he hits the treeline.
“Shit, that’s it? A lump of rancid animal fat and a rotting... Geralt what are you doing?”
Geralt ignores him. He sheathes his sword, drops to the ground, and eats the lard from the dirt. His fingers are slick with the grease and he sucks them clean, uncaring of the horse and human blood that taints the flavor. The chicken is mostly rotted, and the feathers are still on, but he eats it too, whole. It will pain him, same as it would a human who ate rotted food, but it won’t kill him. Not much kills a witcher, and he’s learned to use that to his advantage.
He looks up.
Jaskier is staring down at him. The man looks like someone has struck him a blow, and Geralt spends a moment wondering if he’s been hurt. But there’s no blood in the air beyond that belonging to the horses and the dead bandits.
“You...” Jaskier is at a loss for words, and it almost makes Geralt smile, except that would encourage him. “You should have said you were hungry, too.” His voice is faint.
Geralt grunts. “What good would it have done?”
“What did you eat last night, Geralt?”
Geralt shakes his head. It won’t help either of them to go down this road. The bard has been following him on and off for nearly a year now, catching up with him in various towns and during seasonable weather. Perhaps it’s some leftover human feeling of shame, but he desires not to speak of this further with Jaskier. Hunger is easily forgotten, just one more body sense he can deaden, like pain, until it must be dealt with. It isn’t worth the breath to discuss.
“Time to go, bard.”
He searches the packs of the two other dead men and finds a few other morsels, mostly edible. He hands a hand pie that smells okay to Jaskier, who takes it with limp hands. The flour he eats raw, mixed in with horse blood. He allows himself one bite of the apple before he straightens, whistles for Roach, and offers it up to her.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
2. Sound over-stimulation
Fuck, he can’t sleep.
Jaskier is snoring, untroubled. He can even hear Roach down in the stable below them, breathing deeply. The village has housed them, somewhat reluctantly, in the loft above the communal barn, and he and Jaskier are rolled up in wool blankets to keep the straw from poking them, but at least it’s warm.
It’s more comfortable than many places he’s fallen asleep in his seventy odd years, but tonight rest evades him.
An owl coos a hundred meters to the west. He can hear the skittering of mice finding their meals in the grain by the horse feed. Three houses down a woman laughs and then gasps as the late night pleasures are found.
And Jaskier snores on.
“Fuck.”
A snuffle, a yawn, and a deep breath.
“Go back to sleep,” he commands, and, amazingly, Jaskier listens.
He’ll keep this not-so-silent vigil on his own. Geralt closes his eyes and listens to the ever-deepening breaths of the man laying next to him. It doesn’t quite drown out the rest of the world, but it’s close.
3. Toxicity
The ghouls shouldn’t have been a problem. But Geralt was tired and hungry and still aching from the wound that selkimore had left when it’d punctured his lung. So they got the jump on him, and he’d had to take a potion to ward off the blood loss from a swipe to his side.
He can feel it in his body, worming its way through his veins, hitting his heart and then the tell-tale whomph as his heart rate spikes artificially to pump more blood to the powerful muscles of his legs and arms. Fight or flight, but he’s a witcher: it’s always fight.
He kills a dozen of them. And then a dozen more because he hadn’t been quick enough to find the nest opening.
And they keep coming and he’s not given a choice. He reaches into the small leather bag on his hip and drinks another potion.
This time when he kills them all they stay dead and no more come.
He sinks to the ground, surrounded by the blood and viscera of a battle he only half remembers, and tries to slow his heart rate again. He sucks in deep, controlled breaths, but the world still pulses and his hearing is half blown by the sound of his own thundering heart.
“Fuck.”
Jaskier. He’d forgotten about Jaskier.
The bard is here, somewhere. Probably? His mind is pulsing and he can’t be sure of anything, let alone the man’s last movements.
“Jaskier!” His voice is hoarse to his own ears, and still half muffled.
Geralt pushes himself to his feet with a burst of movement, because he’s not sure if he does it slowly he’ll manage. The world tilts and shifts and dances as the potions work through him, and he stumbles about the corpses, kicking at them when they’re in his way rather than trying to walk around them.
“Jaskier, where are you, damnit!”
A sound, somewhere north east, but he can’t make it out, not with the way his head is pounding. He pushes himself in that direction, using the odd tree as a crutch when his legs start to go. He thinks he hears a voice again, and it spurs him on when he might otherwise sink into the mud.
There’s one last potion in his pouch. He fingers it. The glass is cold to the touch, but he thinks that might simply be the bloodloss. It will give him the burst he needs to make it to Jaskier, should the man be in trouble. But he’s already had so much it’s not without risk.
“Jaskier, shout again!”
He listens, as carefully as he can manage, not even breathing and craning his neck. The world keeps tipping and shifting to black and green and white, but he can feel it knitting his skin back together even as he stands. The potions he makes are brutal things, deadly to humans and not kind to witchers either. But they work.
He pops the cork and takes a draw off the potion. Not all of it, but enough that the surge of power and adrenaline is back in and he stands up straight and marches forward, north east, towards the sound of the voice.
“Geralt! Thank gods, they tied me up here like a stuck pig!”
The voice is what he hears first, his vision long since tunneled to nearly a pinprick.
“Jaskier.”
“Gods, you sound awful, is that your blood? Let me loose, will you?”
It’s like the strings have been cut from him. He drops to the ground. The woosh woosh sound of his heartbeat is finally slowing, but that means the potion is on its way out, too. No adrenaline, simply the toxic substance left in his blood trying to eat his body from the inside out.
He tries to get close, but he can’t feel his extremities, and the last thing he hears before he faints is Jaskier shouting his name.
He wakes slowly, without a sense of how much time has passed, and with the smell of autumn leaves strong in his nostrils. Leaves and blood.
He sits upright in a bolt, ignores the pulsing pain in his head, and scans the environment.
Jaskier is dozing next to him, his bonds cut by Geralt’s own dagger apparently taken from his body while he was unconscious. He stands, stumbles a ways to the edge of the clearing and downwind, and vomits up a dark bile.
He’ll have to replenish his potions stock. No telling when he’ll need to do that again.
“Geralt, you’re alive!” Jaskier is upright when he walks back, a few damp leaves rucked in his hair, which is oddly endearing. “Was that some sort of poison? Your whole face went all weird and I could have sworn your veins were black --”
“No. Healing potion.”
Jaskier pauses a beat. “Excuse me, did you say that was a healing potion, because I’m pretty sure it nearly killed you, and I once saw you get eaten by a seklimore and live, so that’s saying something.”
Geralt shrugs. “Nearly, maybe. But it was that or the ghouls. And you didn’t see that happen, you weren’t even there.”
“Semantics, Geralt. Are you alright, though? Truly?”
He looks down and takes stock of the two of them: his blades are dirtied beyond recognition, nearly. The silver is dull, too. He’ll need a full day to care for them as well as re-brew his potion stash. Jaskier at least seems unharmed, if a bit battered about the face and wrists from where he was bound.
He sighs. At least the ghouls are dead.
“I’m fine.” He would have to be.
4. Anxiety
Geralt groans when dawn breaks over the campsite; he hasn’t slept. His knees are trembling from holding his meditative position and his calves and feet went numb hours ago. Jaskier is, of course, snoring gently in his bedroll, curled in towards the fire like a pill bug seeking its heat.
Jaskier joined him a few days ago, despite the lateness of the season. Geralt is heading north towards Kaer Morhen, and Jaskier said, “I’m going up to Redania anyhow, you couldn’t possibly refuse my superb company,” and that was that.
But the winter winds are coming and it has Geralt’s teeth on edge. He’s unable to turn his attention away from the migration patterns of the birds above them, the way the moss is browning on the windward sides of the trees, or how the frogs have quieted as they burrow into the swamp to hibernate. First snows will hit in a day or two and he’s weeks away from depositing Jaskier in Redania.
A twig cracks and he’s up with his dagger pulled into his left hand and his right reaching for his swords, flitting between the hilts, unsure which to draw. His legs are still numb but he knows how to move without feeling them and his discomfort is edged to the back of his mind where it nearly always resides.
“It’s a fucking squirrel, Geralt.”
Geralt doesn’t spare an eye for Jaskier who has woken up and is moving loudly behind him. He focuses his eyes towards the wood where the sound originated from and stalks towards it, blades at the ready. Could be a necker, but they usually travel in packs. Wraith is unlikely with the sunrise glancing over the low branches of the trees. Alghoul, maybe. With the migrations happening and the snows just days away anything could be out there.
Geralt’s heart beat is preternaturally slow by design but it plods along as fast as his mutated metabolism will allow it, unable to rest.
There’s a flash of red brown and two squirrels, one chasing the other, dart up a tree.
“Told you. Did you sleep at all?” Jaskier is awake, though bleary-eyed and pushing aimlessly at the fire with a long stick, hunched over the bubble of warmth with his sleep roll still half around him.
“Didn’t need to.” Which is, of course, strictly true. Geralt can stay awake for days on end before the hallucinations take over, and thanks to his mutations he’ll stay sharp the whole time. He inhales, but all he gets is human-- Jaskier-- and animal-- Roach, and the faint smell of field mice, squirrels, bird droppings, and frogs. He inhales again to be sure, but still scents nothing dangerous. Doesn’t mean there isn’t something out there, though.
Jaskier pins him with a look that Geralt hasn’t quite figured out yet. Somewhere between concern and judgement. Humans are strange. “Did you or did you not reach for your silver blade when trying to murder that squirrel who dared upon our campsite?”
Geralt doesn’t answer. He kicks out the fire, which sends Jaskier scrambling away from the dust and into the cold morning air. “Hey! What about a hot breakfast?”
“No. Gotta keep moving. Pack up what you want or it gets left behind.” He still doesn’t know what, but something is coming and he can’t rest until he knows what. It’s not a choice, simply a reality: his body will not sleep while danger is present. Or even risk of danger. Or, apparently, a squirrel.
At least, not until he gets to Kaer Morhen. It’s two weeks to Redania where the bard will wander off. After that it’s another week and a half to Kaer Morhen. If he’s still alive when he gets there, Vesemir will set him right. And if he isn’t alive by then, then his body will freeze in the snows and it won’t be anything he has to worry about anymore.
“Let’s go.”
5. Enhanced Eyesight
“Geralt, what do you think?”
Geralt is neck deep in a bath, and would strongly prefer some peace and quiet. But he only says, “You could wear a bag for all I care.”
Jaskier sniffs loudly. He’s dressed in one of his silk doublets, this one somehow significantly different from the last, although Geralt is hard pressed to identify why. It is silk, like the last three he’s paraded in front of Geralt, from the same tailor, and has similar lines. The ribbing is different, and the stitching, too. It’s flattering, he’ll admit, but the tastes Jaskier so enjoys are foreign to him.
“Seriously, Geralt, I need your opinion. Which color suits me best? The Countess de Stael will be in attendance tonight.”
Geralt squints again, both at Jaskier who is standing close enough to touch and at the silks piled onto the chair behind him. They’ve long since stopped having any modesty between them.
“She’ll bed you naked, not in all that,” he says, and waves a wet hand from the bath.
Jaskier shoots him a glare, but there’s no malice in it. “She’ll bed me however I want.”
“You mean however she wants.”
A slow smile spreads over Jaskier’s cheeks. “And so you understand my dilemma. This one or the green?”
Geralt wishes he could simply slide back under the bath water, but he knows Jaskier would fish him out again. The man is a terrier dog when he sets his mind to something. Case in point, following a witcher around the countryside for nearly ten years. Any chance Geralt had of escaping him has long passed.
“They look the same to me.”
Jaskier turns on his heel, slowly, like a predator. Geralt realizes, too late, that something is strange in the air.
“Say that again?”
“They look. The same. It’s a fucking silk doublet, Jaskier! Just pick one.”
But Jaskier is like a hound on a scent. He picks up a neckerchief and waves it under Geralt’s nose. It smells of his preferred soap.
“What color is this?”
Geralt glares at him. “I’m not color blind.”
“Then tell me what color it is, oh white wolf, or I shall never stop singing in your ear.”
Gerlat calls his bluff with an even stare, but as soon as Jaskier begins to sing, he lets his head tip back onto the hard wood of the tub. The water isn’t even hot anymore; there’s no solace to be found.
“It’s blue.”
He knows it’s wrong as soon as he turns his head to Jaskier and sees the man grinning ear to ear, like a slit throat.
He sighs and lets his head rest back on the rim. “I see color, but it’s muted. Grays and reds and greens are hard to tell apart.”
Jaskier plops himself down on his heels next to the tub, drawing his fingers through the bathwater like he enjoys doing so well. He’s such a tactile man.
“Tell me, is that a Geralt of Rivia thing, or a witcher thing?”
“Hm. I’m not sure.” He’s never given it much thought before. Before Jaskier, the subtle differences in shades of silk never mattered; his sight is enhanced to see in the dark, to pull apart minute details of the species of monsters, not to help bards dress for their muses. He pauses and thinks of his mother. The red of her hair, the bright blue of her eyes. He imagines Jaskier’s eyes are like that, but he can’t be certain. “No. It’s a result of the alteration to our eyes.”
He fixes his eyes on Jaskier’s. Surely they’re the same bright blue.
“Now pick a fucking outfit, my bath’s gone cold.”
+1
Emotions
The child is trembling. He’s not afraid-- Geralt would smell the fear, and all that’s in the air is the hot stench of salt from the boy’s tears. Just grief.
Geralt’s not built for this. His hands are large and calloused from two lifetimes of hefting his swords. He reaches out a hand anyhow.
The child doesn’t even hesitate. He grabs Geralt about the wrist and all but hurls himself in his lap. Geralt’s arms close around him, gently as he can.
They’re under an oak tree, near Temaria but there’s no life in the village anymore. The bandits burned the place to the ground. There had only been three houses, a barn, and a field, but they’d raised the whole of it. It’s their blood in Geralt’s nose as he breathes in. The boy had been spared only because he was wandering about trying to find a lost chicken and had gotten distracted by a pretty patch of flowers.
He’d been singing. That’s how Geralt had found him.
Jaskier comes stumbling towards them, pale faced. He’s seen the village, then.
“Geralt-”
Geralt shakes his head slowly so as not to jostle the boy in his lap.
Jaskier drops to the ground next to them. He’s quiet for a moment or two, and the only sounds are the remaining birds who escaped the carnage and the boy’s gulping breaths as he tries to compose himself.
Jaskier is the one who reaches out, gently, and takes the flowers from the boy’s hands. “These are lovely. Did you find them near here?”
He nods, and his head rattles against Geratl’s hardened leather armor.
“Daffodils are my favorite, too,” Jaskier continues. He prattles on for a bit, nonsense yammering that helps the boy’s breathing ease. Eventually he falls asleep in Geralt’s arms and he stands, holding him against his chest.
“We can’t leave him here.”
“I know.”
He’s such a small boy. So fragile. Had he been with his mother he would have had his head dashed against a rock and been left for the crows. But he’s in Geralt’s arms now, warm and alive. All because of a wandering chicken. He wishes he’d killed the bandits slower.
He looks to Jaskier, who is still pale faced and quiet, but looks fondly at the boy. And then fondly at Geralt, too.
“All those toothless old women who claim witchers feel nothing should see you now.”
Gerlat swings the boy up into the saddle on Roach’s back and then follows, still cradling him against his chest. “There’s another village a day’s ride from here. He might have family.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Jaskier is still smiling, damn the man. It makes Geralt feel caught on the back foot and he can’t even pin down why.
“Afraid I’ll eat him? He’s too skinny for a snack.”
“Oh hush, you can’t fool me, oh Geralt of Rivia. I know you, now. Now that you’ve got that boy in your arms you’d fight the world for him.”
It sends a strange shiver down his spine. Jaskier does know him, likely better than any other creature.
“Hm.”
But Jaskier keeps smiling, even as they head along the bloodied path towards the nearby village, and when he breaks out into a quiet song, Geralt doesn’t tell him to stop.