I’ve been waiting for you, Anon. I’ve been waiting for this prompt specifically and boy when I tell you I might have cried writing it...
2k ish (a little less) words long. Idk why y’all were worried, it’s me. It’s gonna have a happy ending.
tw: Hanahaki, blood mention, illness, angst with a happy ending, whump with a happy ending
---
It had started up just before they parted ways for the winter; Geralt had quietly coughed a handful of rose petals into the corner of his cloak and hidden them from sight as Jaskier gave him their yearly parting embrace. “See you in the spring, Geralt!”
“Hmm.”
You might not ever see me again, actually, the Witcher thought. He tried not to let anything show on his face; not his fear and certainly not his longing, but he ached to tell Jaskier that he loved him and that he’d miss the bard’s presence through the long and dreary cold of the winter months. Geralt also knew that if he told Jaskier the truth about his feelings that he may never set eyes on the bard again anyway, regardless of how the disease currently wracking his body developed over their time apart. He was sure that Vesemir could identify whatever the strange illness was; the old swordmaster might even have a cure ready to go in the old storeroom. If not, they could send for Triss.
“Safe travels.”
“And you as well,” Geralt nodded curtly. He mounted Roach with all his usual grace and ease, biting back another cough and tasting the sickly sweet floral note of rose rising up his throat to coat his tongue again.
---
“Fuck,” Vesemir sighed. “It’s Hanahaki disease, Geralt. It’s not going to be easy to cure now that the pass is full of snow.”
“What’s Hanahaki disease?”
“It’s-” the eldest Wolf Witcher scrubbed his hand over his bearded face and took a moment to compose himself. He’d seen it happen before. He’d seen human bodies buried in the ground with entire root systems crawling from their chest cavities. He’d watched young men and women alike cough entire violet or rose or daisy buds from their mouths while they shivered with fever and seemingly unending pain, but a Witcher? Vesemir hadn’t even thought it was possible for a Witcher to contract such a frivolously deadly illness. “I don’t know exactly how to explain this to you, Geralt.”
“I won’t go screaming into the hills, if that’s what you’re afraid of,” his middle-child joked, “I can’t run very far anymore without a coughing fit.”
“I can’t send for Triss or Yennefer, either. They won’t be able to do anything,” Vesemir spoke calmly and evenly. Geralt, propped against some pillows on adoptive-father-enforced bed rest raised an eyebrow. “It’s a disease that eats at you from the inside out. It latches on to, uhm, romantic feelings and grows with them until it overtakes its host completely. Or until the host, uh… confronts those feelings head on and admits them to the object of their affection.”
“So this is…” Geralt’s eyes were wide and terrified. The eldest Wolf had never seen the stoic boy look quite so scared before, and he’d seen him go through the Trials. “This is going to kill me, is what you’re saying.”
“Who are you in love with, you stubborn oaf!?” Lambert cried, marching into the room from where he’d been lurking in the hall. He startled the other two Wolves and Geralt coughed out another handful of petals. The blood that came with them was surprisingly new.
“What do you mean!?”
“He means,” Vesemir said, as slowly as possible (so that even the great Geralt of Rivia would understand his situation), “That until you tell this person how you feel, the flowers inside you will continue to grow and dig their roots in and, if you never tell them how you feel at all, you will eventually die.”
“Then I guess my fate is sealed,” Geralt smiled sadly, settling himself back against the pillows. “My time as a Witcher is up. Coughing up flowers isn’t the worst way to go, all things considered.”
Lambert growled angrily. “I’m not ready to lose my brother yet, Geralt, so just tell us who you’re pining after and we’ll go fetch her back!”
“No.”
“Why the fuck not?!”
Geralt, growing increasingly more feverish and already exhausted from everything that had happened that afternoon, closed his eyes. “Because he deserves better than me, Lambert. He deserves so much more than I could ever give him and I’m not about to steal him away like a selfish ass and force my feelings onto him for my own sake. I’d rather die.”
“Self-sacrificing bastard,” the youngest of the Wolf Witchers snarled, storming from the room. “Ass! Cock! Fool!”
Vesemir could only nod his agreement and follow silently after.
---
Jaskier read the letter once.
Then he read it again.
After a third time through he was sure that he hadn’t misunderstood the contents.
Dear Jaskier (aka Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount de Lettenhove, Prof. of the Seven Liberal Arts at Oxenfurt),
I am Eskel, brother to Geralt of the Wolf Witcher School at Kaer Morhen. I write to you now to ask for your presence at the keep. Geralt has fallen gravely ill and will not likely make it through the season. He does not know that I have written to you, but as his best friend and companion on the Path, I thought it my duty to invite you to see him one last time before he’s gone for good. He’s loathe to admit it, but he misses you and fears for your safety come springtime.
Sincerely,
Eskel of the Wolf School
Somewhere beneath the bright embroidery of his doublet and the hand-woven muslin of his chemise, Jaskier’s flighty, deeply-loving heart shattered into a million pieces.
He grabbed his heaviest woolen cloak from its peg near the door and made for the stables at once.
---
“Geralt!”
The White Wolf opened his eyes a sliver to confirm that he wasn’t hallucinating again; ah yes. What a lovely last dream to have before I die. Standing in the middle of his bedroom at Kaer Morhen, covered with still-melting snow, was Jaskier. The bard’s blue eyes were brimming with tears and his bottom lip was wobbling violently as he gazed upon the Witcher’s withering form.
“Geralt, what’s wrong? Your father and brothers sort of explained it to me but I’m still not sure what’s happening. You’re dying?”
“Don’t worry, bard,” Geralt smiled. A loud, sudden cough wracked his body and he bent over double, spitting a blood-spattered but fully-bloomed rose out into his cupped palm. He laughed joylessly and tossed the bloom onto his bedside table. “I’ll be out of your hair, soon. Won’t this be a last ballad to write, a wolf dying as he’s eaten by flowers?”
“I don-”
“Hush,” Geralt rasped. Jaskier dropped his cloak to the ground uncaringly and rushed to his Witcher’s side. He sat on the edge of the mattress and took Geralt’s closest hand in his, grasping the appendage to his chest and sobbing into the sword-calloused skin like his tears might save his best friend’s life. “Don’t be sad, Jaskier.”
“I am sad, Geralt! I’m absolutely fucking terrified and heartbroken and crushed! Vesemir said you could heal this at any time but you just… you just won’t because you’re stubborn and an idiot and the sweetest goddamn man I’ve ever met in my life! How dare you tell me goodbye when you are perfectly capable of fixing this problem yourself! How could you promise to see me in the spring and then break your word by dying well before the grass turns green again?! You bastard!”
“You won’t miss me after another year passes,” Geralt reassured him, flexing the hand still held tight in Jaskier’s grip. “You won’t even remember me by the time the first daisies spring up.”
“How dare you,” the bard cried again. He pressed a nervous kiss to the tip of the Witcher’s pointer finger before letting go completely and dropping his head into his own hands. “How dare you say those things to me when you know full well that I love you with all my stupid, fragile mortal heart. You asshole.”
“Wh...what?”
“I love you, Geralt!” The Witcher stared up at his friend with nothing but confusion written across his handsome features. Jaskier reached out, wiping a smear of blood away from the corner of Geralt’s mouth as tenderly as any maiden in any of the bard’s favorite romance novels. “I love you and I’ll never forgive you for letting yourself die on me like this.”
Geralt blushed. He stammered. He coughed up two or three more bloody roses and Jaskier tossed them all into the fire with rage blazing in his cornflower irises.
“I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything on this gods-forsaken Continent and now you’re going to take yourself away because you’re, what, scared of something? Is it Yennefer? If she’s refusing to help you then I’ll ride all the way to Vengerberg by daybreak and then I’ll break all her fucking fi-”
“I love you, too.”
“What?” Jaskier asked, stopped mid-rant and mid-thought by the Witcher’s sudden admission. “What did you just say to me, Geralt? If I didn’t misunderstand, you said you loved me too.”
“I did. I do! I have loved you for a rather long time, actually.”
“Well, I’m glad we’ve settled that,” Vesemir said from the doorway. He turned on his heel and disappeared. “See you both for breakfast tomorrow, I’m sure. Well... maybe breakfast is being a bit optimistic. I’ll see you for lunch.”
“What did he mean?” the bard asked. His eyes flitted between the empty doorway and Geralt’s guilty grimace. “What the fuck did Vesemir mean when he said he’d see us at lunch?! You’re still clearly dying and I-”
Geralt felt his fever receding and coughed experimentally. There were only a few brown, half-dried petals that fell from his lips. No blooms. He coughed again and nothing came out of his mouth at all. He grinned and laughed, tugging Jaskier up onto the bed and against his broad chest. “Vesemir was right!”
“What the fuck is going on?!” the bard begged. His hands twisted into the neckline of Geralt’s shirt, holding him still and steady. Blue bore into gold with such heated intensity that the Witcher thought he might pass out regardless of his recently healed disease, “What just happened!?”
“I- I told you I loved you and it cured the Hanahaki!”
“You had fucking Hanahaki and I was the cause of it? Oh Geralt, I’m so sorry! I should have noticed sooner! I should hav- Why didn’t you say anything sooner?”
“I didn’t think you loved me back.”
“You didn- Geralt, have you been paying any sort of attention for the past seven or so years? I follow you everywhere, I bandage your wounds, I put food on your plate and a pillow under your head whenever we get the chance. I bathe you and mend your clothes when your fingers are too stiff from practicing your forms to do it yourself… you utter fool. You buffoon. You great, dumb, goofy, idioti-”
He was cut off by Geralt bringing their mouths together with such gentle but insistent pressure that all Jaskier could do was melt against him. His hands unwound from the shirt and stabilized against the Witcher’s pectorals instead. He sighed into Geralt’s mouth, swallowing down the happy sounds his dearest Witcher made in return. When they were finished pouring out their affections they sat, breathless, curled against the pillows of Geralt’s enormous bed.
A large pointer finger slipped beneath Jaskier’s chin and tilted his face up, locking their gazes, “This isn’t how I wanted you to meet my family or see Kaer Morhen for the first time, but I’m glad you came. I know the journey through the snow couldn’t have been easy, even though I’m sure there was some magical assistance.”
“For you, my love, I’d travel the pass barefoot.”
“You’d die of exposure.”
“Not if your life was on the line,” the bard murmured against those flower-chapped lips. “For you, Geralt, I could survive anything. Just as you must swear from this moment on to survive whatever you can to make it back to me.”
“Will you go back to the academy until spring?”
“I’m never leaving your side again, Geralt of Rivia. Come flora or fauna, you’re stuck with me for good.”
“Hmm. Good.”
“Just… Just don’t bring me flowers any time soon.”
please accept this humble geraskier bath scene analysis:
do you ever notice that most of the time in the episodes 2-5 that geralt acts grumpy with jaskier, its when jaskier is going OOOOOON about beautiful ladies and maidens he wants to see or has been with??
that feel when your beautiful, slutty friend goes on and on about all the women they've slept with/are going to sleep with and you're just sitting in your bath trying not to be so so gay for them (speaking from experience, i remember i would come back from showering in my uni dorm to find my best friend lying in my bed and she'd demand to cuddle me while i was in just a towel and talk about her boyfriend while i was just like "... this is ... fine ...")
(did you mean exasperated af face, jaskier?)
i mean, in the djinn episode, where geralt goes from 0 to grumpy snowman 100 in the first minute, how does jaskier announce his presence after supposedly not seeing geralt for months or years?
back to episode 4, when geralt had just come from fighting the selkiemore, while he doesn't *look* to happy (ahaha geralt <3) he doesn't seem to have any problem standing around while jaskier prances around him and rambles away
can we agree that he is definitely staring here?
and he doesn't really seem to be going anywhere while jaskier is chattering at him at the bar ...
to me that face says: oh, a cornucopia of earlthy delights, y'say? *interested hmm*
he seems content in his quiet, crotchety way to clean selkiemore guts off his hands and sword while listening to jaskier... UNTIL:
that feel when your beautiful, slutty friend keeps doing their best to put you into situations for you to pick up women, just like them, when you have no interest in doing that and they just seem to have NO CLUE and you just adljadlsfjasldjdfsj
put every ounce of your self into acting like you totally don't care at all
but then you still do whatever they ask because fuck
ok i can only put 10 images in a post, so stay tuned for further bath time analysis of geralt and jaskier as gay, closeted, in love with each other, but hiding it, because they're idiots.
