#have a bit more of this
“Yen,” Geralt says through gritted teeth. “It’s not wearing off.”
She peers at him across the table. “What isn’t?”
He growls. The potion, he wants to say, the stupid potion that had been innocently placed among his own elixirs, wearing a nondescript label and looking innocuous enough. The potion that is making his every thought escape through his tongue and jump out of his mouth, into the world of the living.
Thatpotion.
“Mm,” she nods. “It’ll go away soon enough. The urge.”
They both follow Jaskier’s moving figure with their eyes, the bard prancing around the tavern floorboards with practiced ease and a salacious grin on his pink-bitten lips. They watch as he belts out a high note, sweat clinging to his skin, pooling in the hollow of his throat, uncovered now that he’s shed his doublet on the back of a chair.
Geralt tries very hard not to imagine what it would feel like to put his mouth there, because it’s a stupid thing to think, and because the filter that usually keeps stupid thoughts at the back of his mind where they belong is broken, and it would be very unwise to let such imaginings out in the wild.
But—
“Seems our bard has found himself some company,” Yennefer says, a smug smirk on her lips, as she waves in his general direction. “Such a handsome fellow, too.”
And, because he’s weak, Geralt tears his gaze from a knot on the wooden table and finds that Jaskier’s singing has stopped, and he’s now animatedly chatting with a patron. A broad-shouldered, heavy-handed man, with charming brown eyes and curls that bounce on his head every time he laughs that musical laughter at something Jaskier’s said, and a well-trimmed beard that frames his face ever so nicely. A man whose hand is resting on Jaskier’s forearm, his thumb rubbing distracted circles on it as Jaskier draws closer and closer.
Geralt’s tankard creaks ominously in his hand.
Yen has the gall to look amused. “Anything on your mind, dear?”
Geralt tries to ignore the way his mind is screaming at him, but it doesn’t work, of course, because that godsdamned serum is still coursing through his veins, still making him— “I want to draw my sword and place it on that man’s neck and watch him sweat, and when I’ve made sure he’s gone I want to take Jaskier back here and have him sit on my lap and show everyone who he belongs to.”
It all comes out in one breath, so fast that he doesn’t have time to feel ashamed, and he feels as though he’s never talked so much in his life. He probably hasn’t.
“Interesting,” says Yen, watching Jaskier saunter back to their table. “Very interesting.”
“So,” Jaskier says once he’s reached the table, plopping down on his seat, “seems our Witcher is in a mood tonight.”
“YourWitcher, you mean,” Yen says with a smirk.
“Hmm,” Jaskier replies in a passable impression of said Witcher, gaze still fixed on the invisible trail Geralt’s footsteps had left in their wake as he’d half-jogged up the stairs to the inn rooms, almost in a hurry to leave even though Jaskier had been approaching their table. Huh. “He’s also been awfully quiet today, did you notice? Even more than his usual self. Andright now! He left like his pants had been on fire. Do you think he’s avoiding me?”
Sipping her wine — or whatever the barkeep had advertised as “their finest wine” — Yen hums. “He’s been known to be a weird bastard when the mood strikes. Perhaps this is the full moon’s doing.”
“I don’t know,” Jaskier says, resting his elbows on the table like a child. “I mean, I was catching up with Sam — my good friend from the bakery on the corner we bought those sinfulsweet rolls from this morning, remember? — and I thought I’d seen the two of you talking.” He frowns. “Which I thought he was incapable of doing, since all I got out of him today were a few exhasperated sighs and some very rude eye-rolls. Not even a good, old-fashioned hmm! Not even one! He must be very cross with me.”
“Maybe,” Yen says with a small smile — the small smile that often scares Jaskier because of its ambiguity — and clicks her tongue. “Or maybe…”
She doesn’t finish her sentence, even though she knows it irritates Jaskier to no end.
“Maybe?” He echoes. “Maybe… what? What could it be? We were fine at your cottage yesterday! I didn’t do anything lately to upset him— I mean, well, maybeIdidsort of light his hair on fire that one afternoon, perhaps, but does that reallywarrant the silent treatment after all this time? Guy’s not so fond of holding grudges. Is he mad because I rearranged his potions again? I swear, I don’t understand how he can find anythingamongst that unlabelled mess. He should be thanking me, really.”
“Maybe he should,” Yen says, and sips her wine.
