#anyway i hope he bled out enough idk i feel like my focus couldve been more...whumpy yknow

[set-phasers-to-whump]

be okay

X=done, O=taken

Prompt: bleeding out

Whumpee: Geralt of Rivia

Fandom: The Witcher (Netflix show)

For: @deepwoundsandfadedscars​

I haven’t written much for this fandom before (this is only my second work) so I’m kinda figuring stuff out, so this may not be the best, but I hope it’s ok!! (also i hope my like. lore and shit is not too bad i googled stuff lol)

Geralt’s life was simple. Find the monster. Fight the monster. Kill the monster. Get paid. Get out of town. As it always was. 

Except this time, it wasn’t. All because the fucking bard had decided to come along. Well. Decided wasn’t really the right word for it. Decided implied that Geralt had given the bard a choice of some sort, when in fact the exact opposite was true-Jaskier had simply spotted Geralt from across the tavern the night before his hunt, and refused to leave once he knew what was going on. So Geralt was stuck with a companion he didn’t especially want but who he absolutely could not get rid of. 

He’d awoken early in the morning to set out on his hunt for the group of drowners which had been lurking in a pond in the forest at the edge of town. Several young women had already met their demise by the time Geralt had caught word of it, so he’d perhaps spent slightly less time preparing for his hunt than he normally would have. The one saving grace of having Jaskier present, he supposed-the bard could pack his supplies while he sharpened his blade. 

So the two of them set off into the forest. The pond wasn’t too far deep into the trees, so Geralt had elected to leave Roach at the inn and walk instead, a move which he regretted as soon as they stepped foot into the woods and Jaskier swung his lute off his back and began to play. 

Fortunately, as soon as the pond came into view, Jaskier went silent, understanding how important it was to be quiet, now that the fight was nearing. 

The fight itself was not particularly difficult-only three drowners apparently resided in this particular pond, and Geralt, his enhanced senses coupled with the effects of a blizzard potion, had little trouble taking them all out. 

He could feel the effects of the potion begin to wear off as he straggled out of the pond, covered in blood and monster guts and algae. He tossed the head of one of the drowners, retrieved as proof to the townspeople that their monster had been taken care of, to Jaskier, who was standing far too close to the edge of the pond to have been safe should a drowner have left the fight to find another victim. Jaskier reflexively caught the head, saw what it was, yelped, and dropped it on the ground. It rolled away, and would have rolled straight back into the pond, were it not for Geralt sticking out a foot and stopping it. 

“Why the fuck,” Jaskier said, brushing drowner guts off his clothes, “would you do that?”

“You want to come on a hunt, you get to help.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Hm. Too late.”

Geralt tossed the head back to Jaskier, who caught it with a groan and held it by the hair as far away from his body as he could. 

The pair began their trek back to town. Jaskier did not reach for his lute this time. Not that he could, of course, his hands being occupied with the drowner head as he continually passed it back and forth between them, as though it were something hot and he was trying to minimise the damage it would do to his hands. 

Jaskier was switching the head from his left to his right hand when a few feet ahead of them, a rabbit crashed out of a bush with far more noise than Jaskier thought it had any right to make. He dropped the head to the ground once again, and it began to roll rather quickly down the slight slope that they were walking down. Jaskier hurried off after it, already feeling Geralt’s anger at him having nearly lost the damn thing twice. 

He had just caught up to the head and bent to retrieve it when an arrow whizzed past his head, so close that it ruffled his hair. The head forgotten, he stood up quickly, searching for his assailant. A second arrow came flying out of the right side of the woods, and he stepped back, nearly stumbling over his own feet as it came within an inch of his face. 

“Geralt!”

Geralt had, of course, already been aware of the attack before Jaskier had shouted-in fact, he had run into the woods as soon as Jaskier had run off after the head, having heard a twig snap unnaturally and catching the scent of humans who were surely up to no good. 

He reached these humans just as the second arrow was fired, and stabbed the man who’d fired it directly through the chest. Two other men rounded on him immediately, with daggers in their hands and bows slung across their backs. He struck at the first one and managed to cut his neck as he ducked, but the second man was on him in an instant, silvery dagger flashing in the sunlight. But a dagger was no match for a sword, and Geralt easily parried the man’s strike, then stabbed him through the stomach. He collapsed to the ground, and Geralt turned away.

One left. He moved to strike, and stopped cold when a sword plunged into his back and through his body. He looked down at the tip of the blade that stuck out from his armour and wondered how in the hell he’d missed the fact that apparently, one of them had had a sword. 

However, not even a sword through the back could stop a witcher with monsters to kill, and he made short work of the one man left standing, then rounded on the one he’d stabbed through the stomach, whose hands and face were splattered with Geralt’s blood. He hefted his sword, feeling his arms begin to shake, and stabbed the man through the chest, skewering him to the ground. 

He leaned on the hilt of his sword, breathing heavily, as he tried to work out what to do. He’d been stabbed before, obviously, but never quite as...extensively as this. He groaned and sank to his knees just as Jaskier came crashing through the trees, brandishing his lute like a sword, coming to a screeching halt when he saw the carnage in front of him: three dead men, an array of bows and daggers splayed around them, blood seeping into the dirt and leaves, and Geralt at the center of it all, on his knees with a sword clean through his torso. 

Jaskier dropped his lute and rushed to Geralt’s side. 

“What happened?”

“What’s...it look like?”

“No, okay, I know what happened, but...what happened?”

“Got stabbed.”

“Impaled, more like. What the fuck...what the fuck am I supposed to do? Geralt? Geralt, what...?”

“‘S fine,” Geralt coughed, a thin trickle of blood running from his mouth. He couldn’t survive this. He would lose too much blood before they’d be able to reach help. “Always knew I’d...die bloody.”

“No. No, you are not dying. Absolutely not.”

Geralt groaned again. Fuck, this hurt. He could feel his normally-slow heart beating far too fast, the blood pumping out of his wound in time with its beating. 

“Think I am.”

 Jaskier dropped to his knees in front of him. “No, you are not. Tell me what to do.”

“Nothing.” With that Geralt fell forward, the tip of the sword digging into the dirt. 

“No, no, no, okay, think...” Jaskier muttered frantically to himself. What could he do?

If he thought much longer about what to do, Geralt would die. There was no time to think-he just had to act. Be impulsive. He knew how to do that. 

Jaskier stood up, grabbed the hilt of the sword protruding from Geralt’s back firmly with both hands, and pulled up. 

Geralt nearly screamed when he did it, writhing on the ground in some desperate and futile effort to escape the pain. 

“Why,” he gasped out, “did you do that?”

“I don’t know, I panicked, okay?”

Jaskier realised immediately that what he’d done was not the right thing to do-without the sword to slow the bleeding somewhat, Geralt’s wound was bleeding far more profusely now, and Jaskier frantically searched for something, anything-there! 

One of the dead men had a bag slung over his shoulder, a cloth one with a thick rope handle. Perfect. Well, maybe not perfect, but it would do. 

Jaskier pulled the bag off the dead man’s shoulder, dumped its contents to the ground, and searched wildly for something to cut it with, his eyes quickly falling on one of the dead men’s daggers. He chopped the fabric of the bag roughly in two, then cut off the handle. 

He returned to Geralt. “Geralt, I’m going to need you to sit up, okay?”

No response. 

“Geralt?”

Nothing. 

He frantically checked the witcher’s pulse, which was alarmingly quick and faint. 

“Fuck, don’t make me do this by myself.”

But Geralt still didn’t respond, so Jaskier set to work on his own, pushing the witcher into a sitting position as carefully as he could, removing his bloody armor to better address the wound (if Geralt lived through this, and he would, he had to, he’d kill Jaskier for that). Jaskier sucked in a breath through his teeth as the full extent of Geralt’s injury was made visible. A large, fairly smooth entrance wound at the back, and a similarly large but dirty exit wound at the front, and far, far too much blood. 

Jaskier pressed a piece of fabric to each wound, wondering if this would really do anything at all. He couldn’t think like that, he reminded himself. Geralt would live. He had to. Jaskier tied the makeshift bandages up with the rope, as tightly as he dared, then carefully let Geralt’s body sink back to the ground. 

He stood up and grabbed his lute, slinging it over his back. He thought for a brief second, then placed the dagger he’d used to cut Geralt’s ‘bandages’ securely in his belt. He then returned his attention to the witcher, once again carefully lifting him to a sitting position, and then to his feet, which was quite a harder task than it sounded, but he managed it. 

“Okay, Geralt, I could really use your help here,” he muttered. “Please?”

Geralt’s eyes fluttered open for a second. “Jas’...wh’tre you doin’?”

“Saving your life, idiot. Which would be a lot easier if you’d bloody help.”

“Hm.”

Geralt did his best to help, which mostly consisted of taking small and shaky steps and making rather pitiful noises each time he did. Jaskier did his best as well, which was quite a lot better than Geralt’s best, at the moment, and fairly carried the both of them back into town, which, fortunately, hadn’t been too far away. 

The second they (Jaskier, really) stepped into the square, they were surrounded by clamouring locals. 

“Do any of you know a healer?” Jaskier fairly shouted, desperation cracking his voice. 

A few of them nodded, pointing to a small hut near the woods on the opposite side of the square. “Ol’ witch Thornton will set you right,” said a kind-faced man in blacksmith’s clothes. “Let me help you.”

Jaskier sighed in relief, though he knew this whole thing was far from over. He began to walk towards the hut, the blacksmith helping him and taking on some of Geralt’s dead weight. 

Jaskier wasn’t sure what he’d expected of ‘ol’ witch Thornton,’ but he was greeted by a woman who looked like she could be a grandmother. She smiled warmly at her new arrivals and directed the two men to lie Geralt across a small bed in a corner of her surprisingly-spacious hut. That done, the blacksmith headed out, with a quick wish in the way of Geralt’s healing.

“What happened?” the witch asked, as she began to work on Geralt with a variety of jars and bags of things Jaskier could not (and perhaps did not care to) name. 

“I dunno, really. Someone shot at me twice, with a bow, and by the time I got to where it had come from, Geralt had killed three men, and he was stabbed through with a sword.”

“That is quite a story, young bard. Tell me, has your witcher here ever been stabbed through with a sword before?”

“Probably not. He said he was going to die. He isn’t, is he? You can fix him?”

She nodded calmly. “Oh yes, I can fix him. He has lost quite a bit of blood, but with his constitution, he should be just fine. I simply wondered because, as I take it, you carried him here nearly on your own, which is quite a feat for a bard. I thought perhaps you’d carried him before.”

She began stitching Geralt’s wounds. He didn’t even move, too far gone with the blood loss to register anything at all. Jaskier supposed he should be thankful for that-he couldn’t imagine it felt very nice to be stitched up while completely lucid, even with a witcher’s strength.

He thought on the witch’s statement for a moment, watching the needle pierce his friend’s flesh as though nothing was wrong with that, as though everything was fine, which it would be, he reminded himself. Geralt was in good hands. “I haven’t. Carried him, I mean. Usually I’m just tagging along with him-if either of us ended up carrying the other, I’m sure I would’ve thought it would be him carrying me.”

“Do not underestimate yourself, bard. You saved his life today.”

Jaskier nodded-he had done that, hadn’t he? And Geralt...Geralt had thought he was going to die. 

But here he was, alive. Currently unconscious, bloody, paler than death, and being stitched up, but alive. 

He would be okay. 

He would be okay.

I feel like the ending could be better but if it didn’t have a bad ending it wouldn’t be my writing would it lol, anyway hope you enjoyed!!! I liked writing this!