#because my usual w/itcher beta sent me one of the prompts 😂

[absolute-snzaster]

Hoiy shit, y'all, it's me actually answering a prompt! (Well, two prompts.) With a fic! (Well, a mini fic.) @victoriablackrose and @sniction-fiction , two of my greatest comrades in being hørny for W/itcher snz, were both so lovely as to send me prompts from this list, and I decided to combine them!

500ish words of pre-g/eraskier with sick!jask under the cut, for the prompts "sleepy sneezes", "shivery" and "concern". This is meant to be set in the same timeline as Not With That Cold (which I mean to add chapters to someday I swear I have drafts), but much earlier on. Gonna give slight mess and language warnings just in case but they're really barely there. LOTS of stuffy talk, so heads up if that is or isn't your thing. Hope y'all like it! 💕

If Jaskier’s wits had been any less dulled, he would have woken with a shout at the hulking presence looming over him like a ravenous wolf. As it was, however, he had spent the past several days doing battle with an all-consumingly horrid head cold, and every last one of his senses might have been stopped up with glue for all the good they were doing him. And so he merely stirred into vague half-consciousness and turned over in his bedroll, rubbing his interminably stuffy nose against a warm object that, if he really thought about it, hadn’t been there when he went to sleep.

“heh… ehhh… tssh’hew,” he sneezed as the tickle in his feverish nose spiked, irritated by something decidedly hirsute in its immediate presence. The presence moved, then, the warm rampart drawing away from the wet spray of his sneeze, and it was only then that Jaskier’s eyes cracked open enough to see the lumbering form above him.

“Mbelitele’s sacred tits, Geralt, what cad you possibly be doi’g.” His voice was a thin and reedy spectre of its usual melodious affront, his mind still too foggy and congested to properly startle. “‘s the biddle of the ‘dight. Why’re you leadi’g over be like I’b your dext ‘beal.”

Geralt grunted. “You were shivering.”

“I was s—” Jaskier stopped short in the middle of his usual sardonic repetition, stumbling into wakefulness as the realization dawned on him. “...I was shiveri’g. Oh.” He broke out into a positively delighted grin, one that Geralt recognized all too well even on a red nose, cracked lips and bleary eyes and dreaded all the same. “Why, Geralt, you great cake-hearted fool! You–hehh–you were—hehh’TCHEW!! You were cod’cerdned for be!” He gave a tremendous, self-satisfied sniff.

Geralt turned away with a grudging ‘hm’, and Jaskier swore he could almost see the Witcher’s face reddening in the dim glow of the firelight. “You were!” he crowed. “You care for be, Geralt, I kdew it all alo’gg,” he needled him, languidly poking a finger between his ribs.

“Don’t push it,” the Witcher scowled sullenly.

Jaskier held his hands up in surrender. “All right, all right, I yield,” he capitulated. “Sdf. You kdow, you’re dot wro’g. It r-really is cold out hehh-heh-EHHTSSCHIIEEWH!” He sneezed wetly, and began shivering again as if to illustrate the point. “Oh d-dear… I d-dod’t suppose you had adythi’g id bi’d to put ad e’d to this, did you.” He drew his bedroll tighter in around him, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. Geralt didn’t speak by way of reply. He merely grunted and eased himself down next to Jaskier, wrapping his muscle-bound arms around the shivering bard and pulling him back-first into his big, broad, blessedly warm barrel chest. “Not a word,” the Witcher muttered, stopping Jaskier’s bewildered gasp in its tracks, and while the sniffly bard did technically comply, he couldn’t help the groan of relief that slipped from the depths of his being as the heat—that unfaltering fire he’d always ached for but never had leave to touch—enveloped him.

As he began to drift off, awash in bliss as much as in congestion, Jaskier felt Geralt stir with an unspoken question behind him. “Yes, mby dear Witcher?” he prompted.

Geralt was silent for a moment. Then, “...cake-hearted?”

Jaskier scoffed reproachfully, turning it into a dramatic snuffle which served him all the same. “You mbustd’t laugh at mbe, Geralt. I have—ahhh–hah-hih’TISSH-IEW!—a terrible cold.”