Chapter Text
The plan had been foolproof.
Admittedly, truth serum is expensive, and Jaskier had been forced to sell his third-best pair of boots. Geralt, of course, does not appreciate the depth of this sacrifice, and is thus unmoved by Jaskier’s lamentations.
“Next time we’ll just pawn off your sword then, shall we?”
He says it in part to be spiteful, but mostly because poking at Geralt is one of Jaskier’s chief amusements while on the road. Others include making up songs about Geralt, and watching Geralt train. Also, assisting in Geralt’s capers, and laughing at Geralt’s irritation when he calls these jobs capers. Jaskier’s schedule has been relatively Geralt-heavy of late. It certainly hadn’t been the first time he’d dropped everything to follow someone beautiful and fascinating, and it likely wouldn't be the last.
But back to the plan. The aforementioned foolproof plan. Truth serum secured, they go in search of their mark. They find him in a seedy little establishment in the canal district, full of colorful smoke and the reek of grain alcohol.
“I thought you liked places like this,” Geralt grunts as he cuts a channel through the crowd with one massive shoulder.
“I say ‘seedy’ with all the affection in the world. Ah! There’s our man.”
Their man is a scrawny antiquities dealer with a fondness for tacky rings and even tackier facial hair. He has two barmaids with him, wearing plunging necklines and bored expression. He’d recently come into a great deal of money through the trading of exotic animals eggs. Specifically, chimera. Which is all well and good—chimera eggs, very pretty, shiny, make wonderful gifts—until the creatures hatch and begin wreaking havoc.
“Vendris!” Jaskier greets the merchant like an old friend. “It’s been too long. Far too long, since what, that do at Countess du...Waterfowel's villa?” The merchant’s face is ruddy with drink, eyebrows pulled in with confusion. “The next round’s on me!” Jaskier adds, and Vendris’s expression clears right up.
Sure, this little twit may very well be talking out his ass, but at least he’ll get a drink out of it. Which is precisely Jaskier’s plan. Let Geralt stick to the head chopping. Jaskier will do the dreamweaving.
“Wine! Wine for my friend,” he chirps to the girls. They slide moodily off the bench and slouche off. Now that his pleasant company is gone, the man’s half-drunk focus slides onto Jaskier, who launches into a cascade of places and names, needing to dazzle him just long enough for the wine to get here, and to keep him from noticing that Jaskier’s bodyguard is unusually comely and golden-eyed.
Geralt is coiled like a spring; Jaskier can feel his agitation when he leans in close to their mark, the perfect distance to stick a dagger into a soft, unprotected expanse of bard. Geralt had wanted to go about this the slow way—wait and follow Vendris to wherever the eggs were stashed. But all the squirrely bastard had done was drink and carouse over the last few days, and they are running out of time. So Jaskier’s plan it is.
Geralt had flatly refused to let Jaskier go in alone, citing his almost supernatural ability to get himself into trouble, to which Jaskier replied maybe he was looking for trouble. Geralt said he didn’t want that on his conscience, to which Jaskier replied that he thought Witchers didn’t have consciences, to which Geralt replied, “Hm.”
So here they are, jammed together on a tavern bench while Jaskier flirts extravagantly with a crooked merchant with fuzzy eyebrows. After a while he himself barely knows what’s coming out of his mouth, only that he can feel Geralt’s gaze burning a hole in the back of his neck. There is a certain weight that comes over him when he performs, a grounding. The moments with the audience’s eyes on him are ones where he finally knows where his feet are, when he can stand still. When Geralt watches him it feels like being broken into separate pieces and scattered around the room, but in kind of a sexy way.
When the girl returns with the wine, Geralt dismisses her with an imperious flick of his fingers and settles down to the most delicate part of the endeavor—adding the truth serum to the merchant’s cup without him noticing.
Jaskier keeps up his steady stream of nonsense, taking the cups by feel when Geralt hands them to him. He passes the merchant his. “To good health and fortune!”
“Jaskier, don’t.” Geralt’s voice is all breath in his ear.
Jaskier finishes the wine in three steady gulps. To a job well done! “Hmm? Witcher? Don’t what?”
Geralt’s sigh is softly consternated. The colored lights streak and bleed together. The world tips. He has the chance to utter one “Oh fuck,” before he slumps away in a dead faint.
----
He wakes on cold ground with a dry mouth and gaps in his memory. Not a strictly unheard of situation, but he doesn’t feel hungover. He feels the opposite, in fact. Light. Buoyant. He practically floats to a sitting position.
“Jaskier.” Geralt crouches beside him.
Jaskier notes the fire pit, the woods surrounding them, and the horse picketed nearby. Also not unusual. The stiff worry in Geralt’s shoulders and hands is normal, but it’s usually reserved for when someone is bleeding to death, not for Jaskier waking up from a night of drinking.
“How do you feel?”
“Like a balloon.” Jaskier frowns. Why did he say that? It’s accurate, but-- “How did I get here.”
“I carried you.”
“Why--” Everything comes back to him in a swirl of color and laced wine. “Vendris the job, did we--.”
“It’s done.”
“The eggs?”
“Destroyed.”
“And Vendris?”
Geralt’s mouth softens minutely. “I told him if he ever sticks his finger in the curiosity trade again I’ll take his whole arm.” He stands and pokes at the fire, presenting Jaskier with his back. He seems far too gruff for a job well done. Not that he is ever particularly effusive, just…
“Have I done something wrong?”
The response is fast and harsh. “No.”
“Then why are you angry?”
Geralt turns and his eyes gleam in the falling light, liquid gold and startling. No matter how long it’s been, a dead stare from the Witcher still does tight, wicked things to Jaskier’s insides.
“I drugged the whole jug of wine. I didn’t want the merchant to get the wrong cup.” A log falls apart in the fire, spitting sparks into the twilight. “You gulped it down.”
“Oh. Right.” Jaskier rests back on his hands. “Well, shouldn’t it have worn off by now?”
Geralt sighs through his nose. “I don’t know, Jaskier, I’m not an apothecary.”
“Well. Ask me something.”
Geralt gives him a dark, searching look. “Why are you here?”
“Because I’m in love with you.”
Jaskier slaps a hand across his mouth. They stare at each other.
“Devils tits, Geralt!” Jaskier rockets to his feet. Panic thrashes inside him like a bird in a mineshaft. “Why the fuck--you could have just asked me what color pants I’m wearing, or what the weather’s like!”
Geralt has gone, if possible, even paler than usual. He looks like a corpse. “I thought you’d say--I didn’t mean to--.”
Jaskier slithers back to ground, unspooling like a thread. He buries his face in his hands. “I can’t believe this.”
“Are you really in love with me?”
“Yes.” Jaskier yanks at his own hair. “Stop that! Fuck.” He feels the slow, wide brushes of humiliation broadening inside him. “Don’t let it go to your head, I love lots of people.”
“But you haven’t spent the last few years following them across the continent.”
Geralt studies him like a puzzle. Like an unfamiliar language he is eager to decode. That last bit hadn’t been a question, so Jaskier doesn’t feel the sizzling compulsion to respond, but the bastard is right.
He pushes his hands through his hair, trying to think despite his pounding heart and his thoughts, which are currently rabbiting about like a startled beast. “A poet lives on love, Geralt. We live and breathe it. I don’t know any other way to be.”
Geralt sits. “How long?”
Jaskier can’t sit, he paces. “Since the inn. Since the moment I clapped eyes on your big, grumpy physique! I saw you in the corner and I thought, oh, well, this chap hasn’t thrown one vegetable at me, and he looks lonely. And then I got closer and I thought, oh, his eyes. And oh, his arms. And then later when you stood up, oh, his ass.”
Geralt is quiet for a few seconds. There is nothing but the fire and the distant cry of night creatures. “That’s not love,” he says softly.
“Oh, and you’re an authority, are you?” Jaskier says rather nastily. “I’ll have you know I have fallen in love with people for far worse reasons. I could have absolutely loved you from afar for a couple of weeks and that would be that. I didn’t follow you because I loved you.”
Geralt still won’t look at him. “I shouldn’t say anything more to you until the serum wears off.” He turns his face to the fire. For some reason, this makes Jaskier’s pulse thrash worse than ever. It’s like he’s lanced a wound and all the pus has bubbled up.
“Yes, of course.” He puts his hands on his hips. “Yes, that’s clearly the most sensible course of action.”
Geralt looks at him sharply. “Jaskier.”
“No.”
“I haven’t asked a question yet.”
“Yes, well, this is preemptive--.”
“Do you want to keep talking about this?”
He tries to clench his mouth shut. “Yes.” Jaskier sits down next to the fire in a huff. “Fuck.”
Geralt looks at him through the flames, eyes shining with fresh interest.
“Now that,” Jaskier says. “That’s just unfair.”
“What’s unfair?”
“You. Just sitting there, hair in your eyes, all handsome and sad and lonely, forcing me to tell you exactly every single dirty fantasy I’ve had of you over the last few years of our acquaintance!”
Geralt frowns. “I haven’t asked you to do that.”
“Yes, but you could!”
“Do you want to tell me?”
Fuck. He buries his face in his hands again. “Yes. Shit,” he moans. “Sometimes I want things that are not good for me, Witcher!”
“Hm.”
“Hm? That’s all I get? A Hm?”
Geralt’s gaze is positively arresting. Jaskier feels arrested. “You’ve wanted me for years.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve never said.”
“Yes.”
“What do you want to do right now?” Geralt’s voice roughens toward the end, falls into a register he only ever uses to threaten or coax. Jaskier doesn’t know if he feels threatened or coaxed right now. But the serum means it doesn’t matter.
“Suck your cock,” he says. The fire pops and crackles.
They move at the same time. Geralt yanks at laces while Jaskier rolls drunkenly to his feet, skidding back down to the Witcher looming over him like a monument. Geralt’s fingers are almost clumsy as he pulls himself out of his breeches, his face a pale slash in the dark.
Jaskier’s fantasies are legion; he has a creative mind. There are thoughts of hot baths and bare skin, big hands that pin his shoulders to soft beds, a round ass in his hands. But the most ossified, persistent desire is this--exactly this. On his knees in the dirt with the witcher’s thick cock in his face. Except ideally it would be daylight so he could see the damn thing.
He doesn’t tease, he’s too eager. The first touch of his mouth gets a deep, shocked, “Fuck,” from low in Geralt’s chest, sending heat flickering to the tips of Jaskier’s toes. He doesn’t know that the Witcher wants it fast and sloppy, but then again, Geralt had asked what Jaskier wanted, hadn’t he?
“Fuck, you’re a--.” Geralt bites off whatever he’d meant to say, perhaps out of politeness. Jaskier pulls off a moment and gives him the cheekiest grin he can manage.
“Yes? Don’t stop on my account.”
“A fucking--I don’t know, Jaskier, you’re the poet.” His fingers coil in Jaskier’s hair.
“Hmm...shall I compose, then? Let the countryside know how nice you taste?”
Geralt’s cock jumps against Jaskier’s lips and he growls like an animal. Jaskier has just enough time to murmur, “Don’t be gentle,” before the Witcher braces his thighs and fucks hard into his mouth.
Things get away from him a bit after that, Geralt utterly overwhelming his senses. The White Wolf’s stamina is godlike, and Jaskier has to pull off a few times to give his jaw a break, but Geralt doesn’t seem to mind. He takes himself in hand and lets Jaskier catch his breath, which is a bit of a tall order when he’s watching the slick, dusky head of Geralt’s cock vanish and reappear from inside his fist.
It finishes with Jaskier flat on his back in the loam, Geralt above him, thick thighs straddling his chest, cock down his throat, eyes burning golden fire against the sky. When he comes he throws his head back, and gods above, Jaskier is going to write a song about this, and it will be the filthiest song ever written, and he won’t be able to sing it for anyone except Geralt and maybe Yennifer, but also why is he thinking about Yennifer while Geralt is coming in his mouth, for the love of fuck.
Geralt pulls off of him, sitting back against a log, firelight painting his sweaty face in shining lines. His flanks heave like a warhorse after a good run. Jaskier spits as demurely as he can into the grass, then he sits and tries to come to grips with what just happened and the fact that it made him so hot he is literally shaking.
He doesn’t really believe that Geralt is going to leave him like this. He doesn’t. He’s seen women after they’d had a go with the Butcher of Blavikan and they never look unsatisfied, but he is still somewhat surprised when Geralt pierces him with that gaze and says in his threat/coax voice, “Come here.”
“Here” turns out to mean in Geralt’s lap, and “come”, well, that’s inevitable when the Witcher pulls out Jaskier’s cock and starts to stroke him with the same brutal efficiency he uses to clean his sword.
“Oh,” he rasps into the open air. His throat’s rough treatment makes him sound as thoroughly debauched as he feels. “Oh, fuck. Your hands. Geralt--.”
“What about my hands, Bard?” He breathes it against Jaskier’s jaw, and Jaskier kisses him without thinking. Geralt doesn’t just kiss him back, he bites his lip and sucks on his tongue, and does all of that while bringing him to an absolutely merciless climax, Jaskier squirming in his grip, pleasure drawn out in long, shuddering pulses until he has to force Geralt’s hand away.
“Mercy! Mercy, Witcher.”
They stay like that for a while, until the general stickiness drives them a few hundred yards away to the stream. The night is warm so Jaskier takes the liberty of stripping down completely, hoping it will compel Geralt to follow suit. Which he does, with a rather suspicious glance in Jaskier’s direction.
“You needn’t worry about your virtue, I have no designs,” Jaskier breezes. He feels positively radiant, the remnants of the truth serum and afterglow mingling with the precarious high of what may prove to be an extremely bad decision and leaving him giddy. “Under the simple expedient that I don’t think I’ll be able to get it up again for at least a fortnight.”
Geralt laughs, or does the closest he ever comes. A low, vibrating breath. It makes Jaskier feel warm and light. “I’d hate to think my virtue was in peril.”
Jaskier kicks some river water at him.
“Is your throat alright?” Geralt asks offhandedly, when they are half dressed and building the fire back up.
Jaskier presses his fingertips to his neck. “Quite sore, if you must know. No thanks to you.”
“I didn’t hear you complaining.”
“I couldn’t, there was a cock in my throat!”
Geralt’s hair is drying slightly fuzzy around the temples. Jaskier wonders how much touching is now to be permitted, because he wants to run his fingers through it. “Wait, hold a moment. Why did I fall asleep back there? That’s not what the truth serum does, is it?”
“Hm.”
“Hm?” He puts his hands on his hips. “What does that mean?”
Geralt’s mouth quirks. “Must be something in your biology, Bard.”
“Well, that’s forbidding.” With a sigh, he pulls his lute from his pack, strumming a few easy chords. “Just another day in the life, I suppose. Although if this is going to become a regular occurrence we might have to find an alternate arrangement.” He clears his throat. “Can’t have you damaging my instrument. I mean my voice, you cad,” he adds in response to Geralt’s raised eyebrows. “The other instrument isn’t in any danger, as far as I know, and I don’t mean my lute.”
“Yes, thank you for clearing it up.”
Jaskier smiles. They’re gazing at each other across the fire, and it feels dangerously easy. He could get used to this.