Imagine Immortal! Jaskier who gets a factory reset every time he dies. Scars go away, any previous injuries or non-fatal aches disappear, etc. The only catch is it takes anywhere from a few minutes to several hours/days to come back depending on the extent of his injuries.
But Jaskier isn’t stupid, and so he carries around a very potent poison that can kill him almost instantly, and from experience has been proven to only leave him dead for around fifteen minutes. Because he does travel alone sometimes, and it’s better to kill himself in the middle of nowhere than to risk getting robbed when he’s sick, injured, etc.
Even though he can do it though, he’s not a big fan of it, and prefers to just ride out the pain/sickness with Geralt when possible. Because, okay, dying HURTS, and he’s never been able to find a poison that works rapidly and doesn’t make it feel like he’s being boiled alive, his heart thudding painfully in his chest until it just…gives out.
(Plus, he secretly likes the way Geralt will give him his cloak, and make him tea, and gently check his wounds. The witcher doesn’t exactly fuss, but he does let him ride Roach sometimes when he’s particularly unwell, with the witcher sitting behind him in the saddle and making sure he doesn’t fall off as he dozes.)
But then the mountain happens. And Jaskier is traveling with Geralt again, sure, but now he knows how he actually feels about traveling with a “human”. So even though Jaskier would prefer to just power through the nasty head cold he feels coming on, he digs in the bottom of his pack for the poison as soon as Geralt leaves to hunt. Because he can’t give the witcher yet another reason to leave him, not when the fix is so easy, not when Geralt clearly already wants as little contact, physical or otherwise, with him as possible.
He downs the vial, the familiar spasms taking over him almost instantly, and is about to let his eyes fall shut when he hears Geralt returning far too soon. A Geralt who does not know about Jaskier’s regeneration ability.
But the bard’s mouth has already stopped working, he can’t even lift his head, and the last thing he thinks before he’s gone is that Geralt looked a lot more…concerned? Than he thought he would.
And when Jaskier wakes up in Geralt’s arms, and explains everything, the bard is more than a little confused at the witcher’s insistence that he never kill himself again, at least when traveling with Geralt. The bard tries to argue that sometimes it’s necessary, but agrees to not do it unless it’s an emergency at the wild look in the man’s golden eyes.
Jaskier is still a little worried when he starts to feel another cold coming on two months later, but instead of Geralt leaving him like he feared, the man becomes a verifiable mother hen, refusing to leave the bard alone for even a second. And if Jaskier notes the way all weapons are kept far out of his reach, and the dagger he usually hides in his boot goes missing, well.
A little bit of extra comfort and coddling won’t kill him.
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