#this is like the yennefer triss dilemma all over again

[charliespoorasshole]

been obsessed with astarion ever since bg3 came out. wanted to play it (in large part) for astarion. admired astarion from afar for months in an non-spoiler free fashion. finally got a ps5 and bg3 with the full intention to romance astarion… cracked as soon as i saw the option to romance shadowheart.

[squidpro-quo]

Hi I absolutely adore your writing, please never stop!! Also for prompts if you ever need some ideas; - Katsune Jaskier that follows Geralt like a shadow, which he's aware of but doesn't know who/what it is and it drives him mad until he finally sets a trap to catch him and lo and behold, it's a cute famous bard - THE HANAHAKI DISEASE AU BUT NOT FATAL - just Geralt secretly loving Jaskier's voice and pining for his singing - Feral Antisocial Geralt who's only Soft with Jaskier is my shitok

 AN: I'm so sorry this took so long! The world went to shit and my brain went along with it, but I loved your prompt so much I needed to write it, even so late >.

   It starts small. Geralt thinks it starts with the djinn but it really began much earlier, years earlier when Jaskier burrows past his defenses in a way that he barely even realizes and plants the seed that will turn Geralt’s life upside down. But it does start with the djinn, in a way. 

    The tickle in his throat had been growing for months, in hindsight its progress was likely inhibited by the twisted physiology of witchers, and Geralt ignores it in favor of working towards the next job, the next town, the next good night’s sleep. Until it turns to an itch that he can feel with every breath, keeping him tossing and turning on the spring earth like a dying beetle. He doesn’t sleep easy in the first place, even with swords in reach and Roach nearby, but the faint pressure in the back of his throat leaves him grasping for even the thinnest veil of peace every night. 

    Naturally, his only solution to this dilemma is to find a djinn. The net’s wet cords are unwieldy until he’s thrown it over three dozen times, more beyond that when he loses count until Jaskier’s voice cuts into his frustrated groans. He’d never admit that it might have been the bard’s lucky presence that wins him the amphora after so many hours of fruitless searching but even that thought is quickly tossed away when he sees what the djinn has wrought on Jaskier. 

    The long rides on his search for help are time enough for him to listen to the ragged breaths Jaskier fights to take and Geralt swears under his own at the foolishness his sleep-deprived brain had concocted as a solution. He’d bear the itch in his throat for the rest of his life if it meant Jaskier’s voice wasn’t torn to shreds between wheezes like this. His traitorous mind wonders if the solution to his problem of sleeplessness might have even happened if he’d had Jaskier’s strumming in the evenings to drift off to, that he’d gotten used to and only found he missed when the bard had left for the Countess de Stael. But it doesn’t matter, the hands weakly gripping his waist are what he should be focusing on. 

    He keeps a hand on Jaskier every second until he stands before the mage, the back of his throat scratched with how many times he’s cleared it in the past few hours and the exhaustion bleeds into his voice just slightly as he hears that haunting wheeze whistle from Jaskier’s lips again. 

    “Just a… friend?” Yennefer arches a brow with enough refined subtlety that he barely understands. 

    “Companion.” 

    “Ah.” The unimpressed look on her face doesn’t stand in the way of her offering help however, for a price Geralt would gladly pay many times over. The guilt that gnaws at him seems to crawl up out of his stomach and nestle in his lungs, his usually slow exhalations paced fast enough to almost be a normal human’s. The change would be disquieting if he wasn’t more worried about someone else’s chest rising and falling faster, and easier. 

    He’s standing over Jaskier, watching his eyelids flicker and trying to explain away why he’d rushed through a bath with a mage like Yennefer when she broaches the subject again. 

    “You care so much about what he’d die thinking, what did you say?” 

    Geralt considers not telling her but he could imagine what Jaskier would say. Brave enough to fight monsters as your day job but not enough to admit you cut me with a sharp quip? It would sound far better in Jaskier’s voice; Geralt’s mind had never been good at filling in Jaskier’s side of conversations unlike Jaskier himself was for Geralt’s. And maybe it was the sleepless nights that had brought back his habit of substitution, of trying to fill the hole in the everyday that had once been bursting at the seams. 

    “I insulted his singing.” 

    “He must be the bard then. The ‘humble bard’, no less. Well, I’m sure he’s heard worse.” Yennefer leaned against the post at the corner of the bed, arms wrapped around the wood as she pressed her face to the whorls carved into it. 

    “He shouldn’t—” He can’t finish the words, a cough disrupts his thoughts and forces him to focus on what had grown in the back of his throat. Swallowing hard, he feels something slip down from the force of it, a tightness as that of food eaten too fast. 

    “I’ve healed his ills, do I have to add yours to the bill?” 

    “No. This is nothing.” He braces himself on the post she’d abandoned, seeing the marking drawn on the floor and his mind scrabbles for something other than Jaskier to revolve around. “You’re planning to use him as bait.”

    “He’ll get his last wish, fully healed. What happens after is a matter of circumstance,” Yennefer says, shrugging. 

    “It’ll make everything worse, trying to cage…” Geralt stops, this time from the cloying scent that’s flooded his nose. 

    “That was faster than I’d have thought. You, witcher, are distracted.” She sways towards him as his senses begin to cloud and her glance towards the bed has him jerking to intercept. “Hush. He’s got all of your attention already, I’m just borrowing you for a bit.” 

    The world goes dark and Jaskier returns. But it doesn’t stop Geralt from marching back into the building to save her in the end. She had saved Jaskier, and as much as he’ll deny any conclusions one could jump to about how much he cares, or as Jaskier creatively put “give a monkey’s about”, him, that act deserves some kind of repayment. 

    ———

    Once it starts, it takes far longer for it to end, however. His and Jaskier’s path weave together in the years after that and he sees the bard’s fame continue to grow and his ballads about him growing wilder, if still mostly true, while for him the only change is the tickle that grows into a cough with every sunny step Jaskier’s takes away from him when he leaves even as he tries to hide it. 

    By the time he meets Triss, he’s found out what he swallowed that night. He leaves them strewn around his campsites, when he can afford to simply hack them up and discard them, and keeps his mouth shut otherwise, breathing only thinly until he can weed out the fresh patch that grows over the course of the day. The only reprieve he ever found was in the slip of meditation when his senses dull just slightly and Jaskier’s wandering fingers pluck out tremulous notes of his latest creation. But that only lasts so long. 

    Triss frowns as soon as she sees what Geralt holds in his palm.

    “If you weren’t a witcher, you might have died from this already,” she mutters, spinning the stem between her fingers. 

    “It won’t be what kills me directly. One good slash from a bruxa while I’m coughing these up and I’ll be the next piece of roadkill in the night.” 

    “I was talking about the poisoning. Buttercups are toxic, but at the rate your—You say you’re coughing them up so much that you swallow them instead, that might just be making it worse.” 

    “What am I supposed to do about it? What cursed me? Who? If I could solve this, I would have done it already. That’s why I’m asking for your help.”

    “This isn’t something I can heal.” 

    “Then who?”

    “You. Just like how symptoms of a sickness get worse the more you ignore them, so too with this. Except this time, your body isn’t what’s being repressed but rather your emotions.” 

    “That’s what the mutations did. Too late to undo that,” he growled, the soreness in his throat mounting in the now-familiar foretelling of a fit. He doubled over, coughing a shower of drifting yellow petals onto the frosted earth. Buttercups in the dead of winter, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to him, giving him away even more thoroughly than Jaskier’s singing usually did. 

    Triss continued once she saw he’d stopped. “This is something you’re deciding to do. Or more likely, something you’re deciding not to do.” 

    “There’s plenty I don’t do. Fight every human who sneers my way or cavort in the streets, for a start.” 

    “But something you want to, but decide not to. That’s your mystery to solve. Not mine.” She smiled. “Unless you really do have a fancy for dancing a jig in the main square, I’d surely watch that.”

    He leaves her disgruntled but with an answer to his problem, even one he doesn’t like. While he racks his mind for what the solution is, the days start to blend together until he finds himself growing used to his condition. The flowers grow rampantly, but clearing his throat helps to at least keep the stems from clogging his breath for the hour it takes for them to grow back. It serves the same purpose as his usual monosyllabic sides in conversations about jobs, with the side effect of earning more than a fair share of stupefied, and disturbed, looks as the petals slip from his lips whenever he does open his mouth. 

    The only one who seems to ask him about it however, is Jaskier. He stumbles into Geralt’s campsite one dusk with a few of the flowers tucked behind his ear. 

    “I hear you’ve been spreading rumors without me! What’s this about the ‘Spring Witcher’? It’s like something from a fairytale, except instead of diamonds you get the burden of flowers dropping from your mouth. Shame it’s only the one kind. Pretty color though!”

    Geralt doesn’t say what he can feel lying on his tongue, that with Jaskier’s sky-blue doublet, the same one from when he’d wished the bard silent and come closer to killing him than anything else, goes so well with the yellow in his hair. Instead, he coughs, leaving a dusting of buttercups on Roach’s back just as he’d finished brushing her down. 

    “The tales don’t tell of that. Is it a curse? Can you still talk? Is it painful?” 

    By the time Geralt clears his tongue of any more bitter stems, Jaskier’s stroking Roach’s nose and looking at him with concern. It takes a second for him to speak, caught in the relief of the weight of those eyes on him, something he hadn’t realized he’d missed. 

    “What are you doing here?” 

    “That answers one of my questions at least,” Jaskier sighs, but acquiesces, “I’m… wandering, for now. I don’t know, I happened to find you. Maybe it was destiny, although I know you don’t like that word. Maybe I can stick around for a bit before I go, help you get rid of those weeds.”

    “You a healer now?” 

    “No, but I’ve taken care of plenty of other things for you.” Jaskier takes hold of Geralt’s wrist, raising it until the scar running to his elbow is shining white in the firelight. “Wouldn’t look as nice if I hadn’t taken that embroidery class all those years ago, you know. And the rash from the—”

    “Yes, I remember the rash, Jaskier,” Geralt cuts in before he can continue down that vein any further. The tightness in his lungs eases just slightly in the moment, and he finds he doesn’t want it to be temporary. “Stay.”

    “Where? Here? I mean I don’t mind holding your hand, Geralt, but I’m also not a dog.” 

    “Just… It helps.” It feels like he’s pulling the words out, slowly and methodically uprooting them from inside and shaking the dirt from them before offering them up. 

    “Does it really?” Jaskier’s eyes widen, his hand tightening slightly on Geralt’s skin and he relishes the warmth of those nimble fingers, but it feels like he still hasn’t finished clearing out the field. 

    “And it’s been too quiet. Roach is good company but…” 

    “She’s not the best conversationist? I’ve noticed that too. She’s all eye-rolls and huffing, with good reason but there’s only so much of that deadpan you can take.” Jaskier smiles, still holding onto his wrist as he talks, stopping only to pat Roach’s flank between sentences. “I’ve missed you too, Geralt. I’ve never met anyone who can brood so expressively. And insult me so bad I almost die.” 

    “Jaskier, I’m—”

    “I kid. I can respect a good repartee as well as any jester. Besides, I flatter myself to think you may have learned such sharp wit from me.” 

    “I somehow doubt it.”

    “See? That was good, but I bet if you spend another decade or so with me, you’ll be killing monsters with just your words.” Focusing back down on the scar that had been the first point to his argument, Jaskier runs the pad of his thumb over the beginning of the raised skin, turning thoughtful. The expression scares Geralt, his mind always returning to the conversation before the djinn, to all the points where he could have stopped what he was doing and spared Jaskier the ensuing pain. To all the hurts that Jaskier bared to him, without him even realizing it. 

    “By then, will you still be using ‘old friend’?” he asks, realizing his words are coming easier, as is his breathing. The dull ache that had sat inside his chest for almost a year had eased, the taste of pollen against his teeth waning with every clear breath. 

    “Maybe something different. I have a few ideas, but I’ll run them by you. See how you react.” He almost doesn’t see Jaskier’s wink, with the darkening sky and the thumb that has traveled from his wrist to his palm, but he catches it. By then, the only buttercups left are those in Jaskier’s hair and even those are knocked loose by his next gesture. 

I’m open for prompts