#i am fucking screaming screaming i tell you
OK but geralt coming back to camp one evening and finding out that jaskier was playing dress up in his armor.
this one was oliver bait
“how on earth does he DO this?” geralt paused, holding the rabbits in one hand and his waterskin in the other. he heard jaskier grunt, shift mightily, and grunt again, and geralt considered wandering back out into the woods for several hours.
jaskier groaned and it was juuuust on the wrong side of wanton.
strike that. he considered wandering back out into the woods for the next several ever.
he wasnt sure if it said more about his relationship (or lack thereof) with jaskier or about his relationship with roach that he absolutely would not leave his horse behind.
he braced himself to see jaskier in his all-together, doing something heinous to his nether regions, but what he saw was…. somehow stranger.
jaskier stood near the fire, clothed, by the gods, but clothed in geralt’s armour.
partially. he hadnt managed to fully strap the breastplate on and he had the pauldrons on the wrong shoulders.
“jaskier,” he stated. asked? begged? “what?”
“ah-heh, heh, heh,” jaskier chuckled, high pitched and anxious. “you can only leave a man in the same room, er, woods, as this thing by himself for so long before he gets curious.”
geralt crouched by the fire to start cooking the rabbits and hummed at bard. for his part, he was making excellent headway, beyond his missing several buckles and also still having the pauldrons on backwards.
“come,” geralt sighed once the rabbits were taken care of.
jaskier froze, almost as if he suspected a trap, before shuffling toward geralt and holding his arms out to the sides.
deftly, geralt fixed jaskier’s mistakes.
“i thought it’d be bigger,” jaskier admitted.
“you’re not all that much slighter than i am,” geralt murmured, tapping jaskier on the side gingerly to get him to turn.
“i suppose not,” jaskier replied. “you seem so much bigger, though. even when you’re not in this thing,”
geralt didnt know how to respond to that.
jaskier had stopped talking, for once, but rather than relief, geralt simply felt awkward.
“it wouldnt chafe here and here if you had a shirt on like the ones i wear,” geralt told him. “and your waist is a bit higher. won’t be as flexible in it. bends at a different spot.”
“oh?” jaskier asked, giving geralt his arm for the bracers. “is that why all your shirts are long sleeved? and you tuck them in like that?”
“keeps packing light,” geralt said with a shrug. “these too?” he held up his grieves and raised an eyebrow at the bard.
jaskier nodded and wordlessly, geralt knelt and began strapping them to his legs.
“these are going to rub, too,” he warned. “thicker pants. i’m only a bit taller, but knees are at the wrong place,” he grunted standing back up.
jaskier looked down at himself and on a whim, geralt bent to pick up his swords. an unreadable expression crossed jaskier’s face as geralt looped them over his head and tightened the sheath down for him.
“thanks,” jaskier breathed, studying geralt for… something; the witcher couldn’t possibly fathom what.
seeing jaskier dressed in armour, even his own, even in the relative safety of their own camp… it felt fundamentally wrong. the wrongness of it all mustve shown on his face.
“what, are you worried i’d hurt it?” jaskier asked.
“no,” geralt said, pretending to busy himself with the rabbit. “i don’t like it.”
“the armour or me wearing it? you shouldve said, i’ll take it off, i don’t—” jaskier’s voice went very shrill before geralt waved him down with a glare.
“you wearing it, but not like that. i trust you with it. you dont belong in armour. youre made for… silks, your colours, your shiny, embroidered… this,” he held up the doublet he’d picked up by the fire. “not black. not swords.”
he tried to word it and say it as gently as possible, but jaskier’s heart skipped a beat anyway.
“oh.”
geralt didn’t try to squeeze more words out of himself. he knew his limits, and statistically speaking, the next words out of his mouth were either going to make the bard cry or laugh at him for the next several days and he wasnt in the mood for either.
jaskier moved around the clearing, squatting and making incredulous noises when he tried to bend over.
“i thought it would be heavier,” he said offhandedly. “im not sure if i like it either,” jaskier said dubiously, flicking at one of the pauldrons. “there’s not much between you and… the everything.”
“has to be light. i have to be fast.”
something like pain crossed jaskier’s face and geralt did a visual once-over, wondering if he’d tightened any of the straps too much and it was pinching.
“have you ever thought about what comes after the path?”
geralt frowned at the bard. he wasnt looking up from worrying one of the studs with his fingernail.
“nothing comes after, jaskier,” even to his own ears, his voice sounded hoarse. “we slow down and we die.”
the bard’s eyes snapped up, then, and if the rest of the evening hadn’t been so damn weird, geralt wouldnt have believed what he did next.
he didn’t say out loud what he clearly wanted to say so very badly.
it seemed dress up was over for the night, but geralt wasnt so blind as to miss the echoes of that evening in the bard.
in the next town, days later, rather than having to drag jaskier from bauble stalls and clothiers, geralt found him lingering in front of a leather worker’s shop, watching the young man at the work desk apply studs to a length of dark leather.
“they help, yeah. not just for decorating.” the young man said, eyeing the bard up with no small amount of confusion.
“and holes, tears, anything like that? how would somebody like me keep the thing in fine working order until we— er, he, finds somebody like you?” jaskier asked. geralt hovered in the doorway, just out of the pair’s direct line of sight, while jaskier took notes in hasty hand on how to repair ripped leather.
when geralt came woke up after a contract weeks later and the bard was fast asleep on the chair in the corner and cradling geralt’s breastplate to his chest, geralt saw that the tear the drowner made over his ribs had been tediously, neatly mended.
when jaskier got too far into his cups during a performance one night, months later, he laid a (wet. eugh.) kiss on the very same breastplate after geralt hauled him back to the room.
“and i love YOU, geralt’s armour,” he slurred, clearly the tail end of some tirade that geralt hadnt been able to parse in the din of the pub.
the bard looked up to geralt frozen, right in the middle of removing his own left boot, and staring crookedly at where he still coddled the armour.
“it keeps the beasties away from the you,” jaskier said, rapidly becoming quite upset.
“it does,” geralt assured him, finishing de-booting himself before moving on to the bard.
“the only think i thing i like more than my lute is the you.” jaskier hiccuped. “geralt! where’s my lute!”
“i have it,” geralt gently traded the lute for the breastplate, setting his armour back down in the corner. “lets get you to bed,”
jaskier allowed himself to be steered toward the bed and once geralt settled down next to him, the bard curled himself around him and put his hand over the scar from the drowner.
“stay fast for me, ‘kay?” he mumbled, already half asleep. “promise?”
“i… i promise.”
