Chapter Text
Geralt’s life was a series of transactions. His human heart and soul exchanged for a predator’s teeth and eyes, a monster head for too little coin, too much coin for gruel…an endless spiral of uneven trades and bad bargains, Geralt giving too much and receiving too little in return.
Sex was just another transaction. At its very best, an exchange of physical needs met, but more often, double price for a night of impersonal pleasure from a dead-eyed stranger. And occasionally. Occasionally. It was worse.
Geralt had the vague idea it could be different, that it could mean more for humans. After all, he had heard Jaskier’s epic romantic ballads whether he wanted to or not. But he didn’t spend much time thinking about it.
After all, Geralt wasn’t human.
Geralt shoved his way into the inn, leaning hard on a door too swollen with moisture to fit its frame. It had been raining for five days, a heavy, soaking rain that ran down the back of his neck and made his armor chafe at every joint.
“There’ll be no food or drink for you here, Witcher. Not until the beasts are dead. Orders from the alderman.”
Ignoring the innkeeper, Geralt made his way to the fire. He sat with a squelch of wet leather on the bench closest to the blaze.
“No luck?” Jaskier asked as he joined Geralt. He was in his element, eyes glittering and cheeks flushed.
Geralt grunted. “Faring better?” he asked, tipping his head towards the rest of the room.
“A generous crowd,” Jaskier waved away the implied compliment with one fine-boned hand, but his face reddened even further. He pushed his ale across the table to Geralt. “You know, when I agreed to accompany you, I imagined that witchering involved more valiant fighting, and significantly less tromping around in the mud looking like a half-drowned cat.”
“Told you what to expect, you followed anyway.” Geralt shook off the distraction and got to the point. “Alderman is an idiot.”
“Yes, I gathered that. He is starving his potential savior, after all.”
Geralt rolled his eyes. “Not even sure there are monsters here. No den to the south.”
“And in the foothills to the west of town?”
Geralt blinked at him.
“I happen to have overheard the gentlemen at yon table discussing the unfortunate recent loss of their flock, shepherd and all. I believe you will find their homesteads to the west.”
“Hmm.”
“Just a thought,” Jaskier stood and bowed with a flourish. “My adoring public awaits.”
Of course, three soggy nights later, Geralt found a pack of wargs in the foothills to the west of town, just as Jaskier had suggested.
“See! That will teach you, to ignore me.” The bard fussed over his outfit for the evening performance as Geralt bathed away the last of the blood from the fight.
“If I listened to everything you said, I’d go insane.” Geralt folded himself further into the tub, wishing it was deep enough to hide his head under the water.
“Don’t be churlish; it doesn’t suit you.”
“Churlish.”
“Boorish, resentful, rude, childish…I could go on.”
“Don’t.”
“You know full well I was right!” The bard glared over his shoulder at Geralt for a heartbeat too long, then returned to fidgeting with the folds of his shirt.
The witcher hummed and relaxed into the water. Warm and fed at last, he almost missed Jaskier’s parting comment.
“You owe me one, witcher!” he declared as he swept out of the room.
Geralt’s nose twitched at the wave of scent that swirled in the bard’s wake, his usual rosin and chamomile underpinned with something new, something musky.
“Hmm.”
“Oh. This is bad. Very bad.” Jaskier narrated to no one in particular.
Geralt had been waist deep in yet another foul swamp, jabbing around at random with his silver sword, when the water grew teeth and clamped down on his arm. The darkness seethed, an enormous, many-legged creature rising to its full height with the witcher’s arm still clamped in its mouth.
It shook Geralt like a dog with a hare, all 200 pounds of muscle and leather snapping in the air, water flying. The audible pop broke the last straw for Jaskier, who scrambled out of hiding and launched himself into the fray armed with nothing more than, well…nothing. He was unarmed.
As Geralt would say, Fuck.
“Drop him!” Jaskier yelled, skidding to a stop in the bloody mud before the creature. “Drop him this instant, you demon-born, eye-searing atrocity!”
He might have shaken his finger at it, he was never sure later.
To everyone’s surprise, probably the monster’s most of all, it dropped Geralt. Jaskier and the creature blinked at each other, and the bard could swear the thing shriveled a bit with embarrassment. Jaskier felt the perverse urge to apologize, but the witcher snatched up his fallen sword and lopped its head off before he got the chance.
“That was. Spectacular.” Jaskier said, and he wasn’t sure if he was referring to himself or Geralt, who moved like a marble statue dancing down from its pedestal, a whirlwind of scarred stone, an avalanche of violent beauty…yeah, the metaphors were getting away from him.
Geralt was attractive, that was the key point.
He was also…stripping? The witcher had dropped his sword, and he worked at the buckles on his armor one-handed, struggling with his equipment. Not that Jaskier was thinking about his equipment. Oh gods. Now he was.
“Uh. Geralt. What are you doing?”
Geralt gave Jaskier his, “What does it look like, stupid?” look, a complicated cocktail of raised eyebrows and twisted lips, then blinked and went still. His nostrils flared, like he scented danger on the wind.
“Yeah, not an actual answer, that. Bit weird, really.” Jaskier said. Weirdly attractive.
Geralt huffed and went back to his buckles. He grunted, barring his too-sharp teeth, and Jaskier remembered the pop that sent him scrambling into the battlefield in the first place.
“You’re hurt.” He stepped up to Geralt.
“Hardly,” the witcher replied, but the little lines carved around his mouth marked him as liar. “Shoulder’s out.”
Jaskier pushed the man’s hand out of the way and began to fumble with the unfamiliar buckles of his armor. And because he absolutely did not know how to shut up, he said, “It seems cruel, to take a man’s kinder emotions but leave him the pain.”
“I am not a man,” Geralt observed mildly, as if pointing out the sky was blue.
“Right. You just walk like one, talk like one, and hurt like one.”
“Pain is important. Tells us when something is wrong.”
“Hmm,” was all Jaskier could say, and what was even happening, that was Geralt’s line. But the witcher’s face was close, so close, and the bard couldn’t think beyond those golden eyes boring into his, the slit pupils visibly expanding and contracting as he stared at Jaskier.
Then the armor was off and Geralt moved, hitching his dangling arm above his head and pulling on the elbow. Jaskier’s stomach twisted.
“Wait, can I help?” he asked, trying to talk with a tongue suddenly grown too big for his mouth. He put his hand on Geralt’s back, feeling the muscles rippling under his shirt. Then the witcher’s whole body jolted as his shoulder thunked into place beneath Jaskier’s hand.
“Got it,” Geralt said. He had stopped moving completely.
“Great,” Jaskier responded. He stumbled away and fell to his knees, losing his lunch into the bushes.
“Are you…hurt?” Geralt asked when the bard finished. He was already back in his armor, sword across his back and monster head in hand, looking at Jaskier as if the bard had grown a second head.
Jaskier waved away the question. “Don’t try to distract me. You owe me for two now.”
A scowl.
“No, I won’t be put off.” Jaskier tried his super-effective finger waggle on the witcher. Perhaps it would be more impressive if he weren’t on his knees at the man’s feet. “Everyone knows a witcher who doesn’t honor his bargains doesn’t win many contracts.”
“Never asked for your help. Told you to stay out of the way.”
“A debt is a debt.” If Jaskier hadn’t intervened, Geralt would have lost an arm, and the bard was (he thought) understandably proud of doing the witcher such a service. Few could claim such a privilege.
Jaskier wobbled to his feet, catching himself on the pillar of muscle that was the witcher and clinging to his good shoulder.
And oh, this was a new scowl to add to the inventory and then hopefully never see again, a bitter, feral expression with too many teeth way too close to Jaskier’s face. It should probably have scared him, but his endlessly soft little heart only beat against his ribs faster.
The bard forced a chuckle and tried to give Geralt a friendly pat, but the witcher wrenched himself away, leaving Jaskier to paw at the air.
“You can pay me back later,” Jaskier said to Geralt’s broad back. Perhaps he’d get some actual details from the man about his next hunt, or even another chance to observe.
Jaskier didn’t see Geralt for weeks after that. Not too out of the ordinary, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had stepped in it, worse than usual.
He was playing to a sullen crowd in a two-street town in a dukedom he’d already forgotten the name of when he caught the glint of silver hair and golden eyes shining at him from a dark corner. He abandoned the song mid-verse.
“Geralt! How…”
“Your room and board at this inn,” the witcher said by way of greeting as Jaskier sat at his empty table. He looked meaningfully at the purse of coins in front of him, and then back at the bard.
“I…what?” And yeah, generally he could do better than that. But here sat Geralt, blood smeared across his nose, and greasy hair hanging down around a hollow face.
Geralt just stared, unblinking.
“What? No. That’s not necessary,” Jaskier said, even though it very much was, if he wanted to avoid the beating the innkeeper had promised him. He’d been eating and sleeping here on promises of larger crowds than he’d so far produced.
“A debt is a debt,” Geralt said, and oh, how those words fell like stones when the witcher was pushing coins across the table to Jaskier, looking like he hadn’t eaten or slept since they parted.
“Perhaps we can share a room?” Jaskier asked, because he suddenly knew all the stories about witchers who didn’t sleep, never tired, and couldn’t starve were absolute bullshit.
Geralt’s eyes flashed and then went dull. “It is not enough. You want. More.”
“What?” He knew other words, he was sure. Lots of other words. “No. That’s not what I...”
“What do you want.” Geralt’s rumbling voice rose, and several nearby patrons shifted their attention to him.
“Nothing! Well. I mean there’s a lot I wouldn’t turn down, elaborate dinners, well-aged wine, a soft bed, a willing companion, but…” he rambled to a stop as Geralt’s head jerked like he’d be struck. What in the spheres was going on here?
“Witcher! You owe this bard?” And the innkeeper had joined the conversation. Perfect.
“No, he doesn’t,” Jaskier said, hands fluttering uselessly in the air. “Everything is fine here, just a discussion between friends.”
“Those things don’t have friends,” a hulking man at a neighboring table interjected, spitting at Geralt’s feet.
Annnnd…yup, Geralt’s teeth put in an appearance as he snarled at everyone without discrimination. The rest of his body was doing two things at once, his shoulders collapsing in on themselves to make him appear smaller and less threatening, even as he shifted his weight in preparation for exploding off the bench.
“You’ll give the bard what he’s owed, animal,” the innkeeper said.
Jaskier put one hand on Geralt’s wrist, where his hands clenched around the coin purse, still pushed across the table towards the bard. He wanted to untangle this increasingly confusing misunderstanding, wanted to tell the idiot witcher he hadn’t been serious when he flippantly demanded payment, he was hardly ever serious, but there were actual idiots listening.
“Thank you, Geralt,” he declared in his richest, most sweeping tones. “Your debt to me is paid. Next time, we’ll negotiate more amicable terms.”
Geralt twitched, then jerked his hands out of Jaskier’s hold and shouldered his way out of the inn without a backwards glance.
This time, Jaskier didn’t see Geralt for nearly a year.