#i almost never get sick.... but i guess viral infections are really contagious....

[seariii]

I was gonna doodle tonight but I got a flu and I feel defeated ... I don't feel shitty or anything, I'm just tired of my runny nose and constantly sneezing....

[aenwoedbeannaa]

The Red Death | Geralt x Reader One Shot

Summary: Your life has never been peaceful or comfortable, but it has never fallen apart quite this way—as in, everyone in your small district in Novigrad are taken by the Red Death. You are sick, but you know that no help is coming. Your district is poor—cut off from the rest of the city and left to die. You’ve accepted your fate, not expecting a silver-haired Witcher, a philanthropic Higher Vampire, and maybe even destiny, to come barreling in at the last second.

Word Count: 3,078

Warnings: There are some descriptions of the Red Death, or what I imagine it would be—a viral hemorrhagic fever. So, if you’re extra scared of viruses and pandemics right now, probably skip this one.

A/N: I really don’t know why I wrote this. Quarantine Day 4 has me losing my mind. But I mean, I did want to be an epidemiologist until I learned I was terrible at chemistry. So. Here we are. Also maybe I’m channeling my real-life fear into fanfiction, who can say?

If you enjoy my work and want to check out more of it, you can check out my masterlist, and if you’d like to be added to any of my taglists, comment or message me and I would be happy to add you 😊. Also, I do have a ko-fi page now, and I would really appreciate if anyone is able to give a little; it would really help me out with this whole career change dream & the whole not working and not getting paid amid this disaster thing. But of course, the best way y’all support me is just by reading and sharing my work. I appreciate it more than I can say.

The Red Death & Destiny

Novigrad’s seedy underbelly, feared by most, has been your home all your life. As a half elf, you land at the very bottom of the social ladder. To the humans, you are not human. To the elves, you are not an elf—and that’s just how it’s always been. You’re used to it.

What you aren’t used to is the eerie quiet that has settled over the overcrowded, poverty-stricken district where you’ve rented a small apartment for the last three years. Even the screams have died down. You’d thought hearing the constant groans of pain floating through the shuttered windows and the thin walls had been the worst—but it doesn’t even compare to the silence. 

The blankets are soaked in sweat, partially due to the stifling air in the room and partially from the fever currently raging through your veins. You bones feel like they might disintegrate from the heat. Still, you refuse to lift the blankets—you don’t want to see what your body looks like underneath; don’t want to see the angry red lesions marring your skin. 

Red Death, indeed.

You can’t help but smile bitterly; of course Catriona’s Plague would make an appearance in Novigrad, and of course it would hit your small, already poor district. Once the first case had been confirmed, the district had been placed under strict quarantine—no one went out, and no one came in. Perhaps if it had been a wealthier district, they would have sent doctors in their robes and masks, or called for mages immune to most of these things, but it was a poor little district filled with undesirables.

So they just leave us to die.

You have a feeling, based on the suffocating silence, that you are the only one left. You’d tried helping your neighbors when it began, but most didn’t want you near them. Even here among outcasts, you are an outcast—one of the only elves.

Less susceptible to the disease, yes. But clearly, you are not immune; not that there is anyone left to see.

You’d ignored the symptoms first, then you’d gotten angry, slamming yourself against the door to your apartment building over and over and over until you had no strength left. Once that happened, you trudged back up the stairs and slid into bed. That was two days ago, and all you’ve managed to do since is take a few sips of water and stagger over to the bathroom.

So this is how it ends.

***

“Remind me why we came to this gods-forsaken city again?” Geralt huffs, taking a long draught from his mug of ale.

“Jaskier’s performance,” Regis answered in that way he always does, making a simple fact sound profound and thoughtful.

Geralt just nods, knocking back more of his ale. He had, in fact, told Jaskier he would be in the city in time for the grand reopening of the Rosemary and Thyme—or whatever he was calling it now. It wasn’t that he had a problem with coming to see his friend perform. No—it was simply that this city, once the jewel of Redania and now just another one of Nilfgaard’s cities, disgusted him.

Nilfgaard promised plenty of things to its citizens, namely safety and security, but from what he was overhearing, those promises were not being kept.

“The whole district was cut off… They say everyone is dead.”

“Good riddance.”

“Albert, how can you say that? There were children living there!”

“Children who would’ve grown up to be beggars and thieves. I say burn it all down, and take the plague with it!”  

“Cheers to that, friend.”

Geralt winces, shaking his head. Regis studies him intently, cocking his head to the side.

“Catriona’s Plague… Highly contagious. It leaves its victims almost completely defenseless. It’s as if it were from another land, another world—“

“Yes, yes I know,” Geralt mutters, waving a hand at his friend. “I don’t need a history lesson.”

Regis just smiles softly before continuing, “But of course, Witches are immune to its effects. And I… Well, I’ve got herbs to protect against it.” He smiles knowingly at the Witcher, who lets out a deep, long sigh.

“We have to go.”

Regis nods intently, as if he’d been expecting exactly that. Perhaps he had been—he’d been Geralt’s friend for long enough now that it was easy to guess when Geralt would go involve himself in something. And, with less and less monsters roaming the wilderness, searching through a deserted

Geralt and Regis in Novigrad. Regis hears about the quarantine and wants to help. Geralt is convinced to come with—fighting tiny, invisible monsters is just as hard as fighting big ones. Maybe even harder.

***  

Faintly, you hear the sound of footsteps. It pulls you out of the fitful half-sleep you’d been stuck in. You heart, despite its weakness, speeds up, and you find the strength to pull yourself into a sitting position on the bed. It is exhausting, but you manage to push yourself up onto your knees so you can peer out the window through the slats in the wood. Of course they’d boarded up your window, you were on the first floor, and you could have escaped through it and into the streets.

Between the slats, you see two men walking. One is larger than any man you’ve ever seen—wearing leather armor and carrying two swords on his back. He has long, silver hair that is pulled back halfway. The man next to him looks considerably older, but not ancient. He is wearing a brown robe, like some kind of Apothacary. Both walk with such calm confidence that you are utterly thrown off-guard.

What the hell are they doing here?

You see the swords on the man’s back, and the pouch tied around the waist of the other. Your eyes widen—perhaps they are here to burn the whole district to the ground, as you’d heard whispers about for days. They must have taken the silence as a sign that everyone was dead.

No no no no no no.

You had resigned yourself to the Red Death, not being burned alive.

“Stop!” Your scream sounds hoarse, just about how it feels—like every breath and every word is being ripped from your throat, and costing incredible energy to do so.

Instead of listening to you, both men turn their heads sharply in your direction and head straight for the window. Your heart continues to race, somehow even faster now as they approach the window. They shouldn’t be coming closer… They could be putting themselves and thousands of others at risk. They can come back tomorrow, or maybe the next day, when you’re gone—when the virus is gone.

“Don’t come closer!” You try again, fingers turning white as you grip the windowsill to keep yourself upright. “I’m infected.” 

The last words come out as more of a sob than words. They had to get out, they had to go now.

But the bigger man continues to approach the window, the older man hanging back only slightly. If they are here to burn the place down, he might only be approaching the window to ensure that the last host is burned along with it. Your breath comes out in short gasps.

But, time slows nearly to a halt.

He reaches the window in a few short strides, and actually grabs one of the wooden planks haphazardly nailed to the wooden walls and rips it off with his bare hands. It is only then that you notice his eyes—the eyes of a cat, almost. Liquid gold. 

He is a Witcher. Witchers are immune to the plague. All of a sudden, your brain short-circuits, your pleas changing. They’re not here to burn down the district—they might be here to help. There had been no talk of that; none at all. But you don’t have to question the hows and whys of the Witcher and his old companion’s presence.

“Please… I’m the only one left. Help me.” Your eyes lock on the Witcher’s amber-gold ones for a moment, and he nods. Relief floods over you—not relief that you will live, necessarily, but relief that you won’t have to die alone.

And then the world goes black as you fall back onto the bed, body too exhausted to do anything else.

*** 

Your sleep is blurred with strange dreams, as you’d come to expect now with the fever raging through your body. You dream of a man, strong but gentle, carrying you somewhere—you don’t know where, but you know that the next bed you find yourself tossing around in smells of freshly washed linen; so much so that it soothes you into sleep. Or maybe it is the strange liquid you only half-remember being given that does that.

From there, more dreams. But these dreams are even stranger than the ones you’ve been having. Now, you dream of strange cloud, weaved together of the grays and blues of a calm evening and laced with glittering starlight. It pulses with some kind of magic, like nothing you’ve ever seen.

“He is your destiny.”

It takes you several moments to realize where the voice is coming from. It seems to emanate from the cloud, going straight to your head, like the words are being spoken out loud but only you can hear them.

“Destiny?” You respond, voice strained and whisper-quiet, the way your voice always seems to sound in dreams. Of course, you have no way of knowing that you’re speaking out loud as you lie eerily still on the bed—no longer tossing and turning from fever thanks to the sedating draught Regis gave you along with several other herbal mixtures he and Geralt had quite the time convincing you to ingest.

Regis looks from you to Geralt, who has hardly left your side since they’d found an uninhabited apartment a few blocks over, one of his all-knowing glances that Geralt found both infuriating and comforting at the same time. Geralt, on the other hand, turned to look at Regis, eyebrow raised in confusion—only to be met with that look.

Geralt had bathed you as best he could, dressing you in a clean linen shirt of his own while Regis tended to washing the bedclothes. You’d shivered in his arms, and he’d whispered over and over, “I’ve got you. It’s okay, I’ve got you.”

Regis had tended to the angry red marks that marred your skin in several places, covering them in some kind of thick poultice Geralt had never seen before, but he’d sagged with relief when he saw the way your face seemed to relax, no longer in a constant look of pain, as Regis bandaged them up.

“Its… fever dreams,” Geralt attempts, glancing back to Regis for confirmation.

“If you say so,” Regis responds in that way of his that told Geralt that he was utterly wrong. Your fever had broken hours ago, after all.

But, trapped in your dream, you have no way of knowing any of this, or that your responses to the mysterious starlight cloud were being spoken aloud, in the world beyond your dreams.

“Yes, my lost girl, your destiny.” 

“Destiny is bullshit,” you respond, a little stronger this time.

Outside of this dream-world in your head, Regis tips his head back and laughs, and even Geralt smiles. You sound just like him, how he’d once sounded.

“Destiny has brought you to him, it matters not what you believe.”

“Brought me to who? Why?” It is hard to keep the curious urgency from your voice now.

“To Geralt of Rivia; the one you’ve been waiting for since the day you were born.”

“Geralt of Rivia… Is my destiny?” You hadn’t even considered that you had any destiny beyond a miserable life in a miserable part of town; one likely as not to end early. One that almost had ended early.

But the voice does not respond, and you watch in mystified silence as the cloud vanishes to nothing, as if it hadn’t been there. And with it, everything is enveloped in black. A silent, dreamless sleep. 

Meanwhile, both Geralt and Regis stare in somewhat of the same mystified silence, before Regis says matter-of-factory, “You never told her your name.” 

***

You float back to consciousness slowly, the world full of vague shadows. You feel a soft breeze, cooling air from outside. Before daring to open your eyes, you move your fingers gingerly as if testing if your hands still work.

Apparently, they do. You feel the sheets beneath them, soft and cool and clean. They aren’t the same sweat-soaked ones you’d been tossing around in earlier. Even the air smells different—not the stuffy, stifling smell of sickness and death, but the cool, crisp smell of clean outside air. And there is the smell of herbs, sharp but not unpleasant.

“Look.” You hear the hushed voice of a man, an the memories of the two strangers walking straight into your desolate, death-filled piece of the city without a fear. Hearing the voice is enough to have you flickering your eyes open.

You are in a room somewhere, likely still in your old district. There is no way the guard would have let the two men—even if they were both apparently immune to the virus—leave with one of the sick. But this room is more spacious and definitely cleaner. You try not to think of who’s home it might have been and why they were gone. You suppose that doesn’t much matter now.

It takes only a moment for the Witcher to appear at your side, crouching down so that he level with you. Your eyes lock on those amber ones again, full of questions that you can’t bring yourself to ask, unsure if you are capable of talking. Your body still feels exhausted.

“You’re safe,” the Witcher says in a voice that is deep and gravely but calming. “I’m Geralt, and this is Regis.”

“T-Thank you,” you force out, eyes darting between the two men.

The robed one, standing a few feet behind the Witcher, speaks next, “You were nearly dead when we found you, but with a combination of Witcher’s remedies and my own herbal ones, your body was able to fight the virus.”

Your eyes open wide, in wonder and surprise. Regis talks as if he’s been alive for a good few centuries, centuries spent healing and curing people. But he can’t be more than sixty years old; or at least it appears that way.

Finally, you let your eyes drift to your own body, were you see a few bandages wrapped in various places, but you feel no pain. You even notice you are wearing clean clothes, and your skin no longer has the grimy, filthy feeling you’d grown used to in those last days. You blush slightly, wondering how exactly they’d managed that.

“How long have I been asleep?” You finally ask, surprised to find that your voice seems perfectly alright to speak.

“Three days,” the Witcher answers, eyes boring into yours. You can’t explain it, whatever is drawing you to him. Though, perhaps the fact that he’d saved your life is part of it. “It was better if you were sedated,” he explains.

“Three days…” You mumble, hardly believing it. You hadn’t expected to live. Most people didn’t, but these two had just appeared out of nowhere just as you were on the brink of death? You can’t help but think of your mother’s words—the ones that she’d always spoken to you when you were a child.

There is a reason for everything; we cannot know what web destiny has woven for us.

You’d always thought it was bullshit. But this… It was all too much of a coincidence. Though, the words brought with them a surge of guilt—what about all of your neighbors? Even if they were not kind, they didn’t deserve to die. If destiny was weaving some web for them, it had clearly fucked up royally.

But at the same time, the thought of destiny brought up some murky memory, probably of some fever dream you’d slept through over the last few days. A cloud, laced with starlight… A voice. But your mind can’t seem to conjure up any more than that.

“You spoke in your sleep,” Regis says as he hands you a flask of something that smells truly terrible. You sniff it gingerly before deciding that whatever they’d been giving you so far clearly saved your life, so you decide not to argue. You knock back the liquid, wincing as the bitterness of it slides unpleasantly down your throat.

You cough a few times before collecting yourself enough to ask, “I spoke?”

Regis, taking the flask back from you, nods with a slight smirk, glancing down at Geralt, as if he should be the one to tell you what you said. Your heart rate starts to speed up, but you can’t exactly place why. You remember a conversation… with the cloud? None of it makes any sense, it is too incomplete of a picture—so you just look at Geralt, eyes wide with curiosity.

“You spoke my name,” he says finally. “Have we… met before?”

It all hits you at once, then. The cloud, the starlight, the strange magic, and the voice. The voice going on about destiny. It is the first time you realize that he indeed hadn’t given you his name, not until after you’d woken up.

Your mind is about a million miles away as you mutter, “Holy… destiny.”

His amber eyes snap to yours, and somehow the almost electrical impulse that flows between you makes perfect sense, even though all rational thought would tell you otherwise. Time seems to freeze there, as Geralt tentatively reaches out a hand that is large enough to cover both of yours.

He doesn’t pry, doesn’t ask what you dreamed of; perhaps because he knows it would be difficult to believe, even if you tried to explain, or perhaps because he feels this same… feeling that you are feeling now. Though, he does have one question for you. 

“Destiny didn’t deign to share your name with me.” He cocks his head to the side, flashing a grin that feels like home, that feels like you’d been looking at that same grin for centuries.

You can’t help but grin back, “My name is Y/N.”

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