Somewhat Clear

deerna
somewhatclear

Rating: SAFE
Fandom: The Witcher
Relationship: Jaskier & Yennefer
Tags: Injuries, Enemies to Friends, Pre-slash, Trials of the Grasses-related gross stuff, a little gore
Wordcount: 2011
Notes: n/a

Summary:
Yennefer asks Geralt to fetch a rare ingredient for her. Geralt gets badly hurt and a very angry Jaskier drags him to the sorceress's house so she can heal him. The witcher is saved. Two enemies find out they have more in common they think.

Excerpt:

She could handle being jealous—she could understand jealousy; but that irrational irritation towards a man that appeared to be using Geralt for his own gain, just to become famous, told unspeakable things about her own feelings towards the witcher, and it was intolerable.

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When Yennefer went to open the door, she expected to see Geralt—but she didn’t expect him to show up covered in blood, pale, with evident signs of potion toxicity all over his face, unconscious and draped over the shoulder of a very angry-looking bard. In fact, she had never expected to see Geralt hurt that badly, and it gave her pause.

“You better fucking fix him,” Jaskier greeted her in a furious snarl, “since it’s all your fault.”

“And a good day to you, Jaskier,” she replied, sarcastic and irritated, still reeling from seeing Geralt in such a state. She let them in, helping the bard drag the wounded witcher inside. Her heart skipped a beat at the brush of Geralt’s mind against her own when she touched him, a confused cloud of agony and distant fear—but she forced herself to maintain her calm.

She disappeared a pile of scrolls and books and junk from one of the tables she used as a desk, pulled it at the center of the room with a sweep of chaos, and gestured to Jaskier to lay the witcher down on the newly cleared surface.

“What happened?” she asked as she initially surveyed the damage, going for the larger bloodstains. His armour was mostly intact but for a nasty slash on his side, and she could hear his laboured breathing- maybe a few broken ribs? This was very much not her expertise.

Jaskier stood on the other side of the table, and scoffed. “You have some nerve, witch—you send him to his death and—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, spare me your contempt,” she snapped, interrupting his rant. “Don’t tell me, if it offends you so, I don’t actually care. I’d rather you shut up and helped me take this blasted armor off so I can actually see what’s wrong with him before he bleeds out.”

Jaskier’s jaw tensed—struggling to keep some more nasty insults to himself, no doubt—but he complied. His hands didn’t hesitate as he started unclasping the belts and the buckles on Geralt’s armor, and despite the urgency of the situation Yennefer couldn’t help but feel annoyed at how familiar he seemed with the motions.

“It was that goddamn forktail you asked him to hunt down,” he muttered as he worked, a frown on his face. There was a smear of blood on his cheek. “One moment they were hacking at each other and the next they were both motionless on the ground. For a moment I thought he was dead—” His voice cracked and he swallowed audibly, “—but of course he wasn’t. He grabbed me while I was checking if he was breathing—gave me a heart attack—and told me to harvest the spinal fluid before it went bad or something, and then passed out again. Can you fucking believe it?”

Forktail spinal fluid—the last ingredient Yennefer needed for her modified replica of the Mother’s Tears decoction, that mages once upon a time used to liquify the internal organs of the children going through the Witcher Trials before they were reshaped and rebuilt to withstand the changes brought by the mutagens. When she had asked Geralt to get it for her, she had guiltily wondered if he’d known what she was trying to do; now that guilt was bubbling in her guts anew.

“Idiot,” she murmured, brushing the hair out of his face with the excuse of looking at a shallow cut on his forehead. Aside from the gross slash on his left side, his chest and stomach were mottled with bruises, and a couple of his ribs looked misshapen. She cast a spell to pinpoint the damaged areas, and she grimaced at the resulting data. She didn’t know enough about witcher physiology to figure out how bad it actually was, but it looked pretty fucking bad. All she could do for now was stop the bleeding, and she cursed her own ignorance. She hated being powerless. “Do you know which potions he took?”

Jaskier shook his head. “He never tells me anything. I have his bag if you want—I expect you would know which is which.”

Yennefer considered it. Potions could heal where she couldn’t. White Honey would clear the toxins from the previous decoction without repercussions, and Swallow would knit the flesh together—or maybe White Raffard’s, if he had one.

She nodded to herself. “Yes. Show me.”

Jaskier frowned when he saw her pull the jar of White Honey out of the saddlebag and start uncorking it. “Wait, are you just using a potion? I thought you were going to heal him?”

Yennefer bristled at the suspicious tone. She was about to spit a snappish remark, but when she looked up to glare at him she saw that Jaskier looked terrible, his formerly robin egg blue doublet soaked through with blood on the side where Geralt had leaned on his shoulder, his hair a ruffled mess of sweat and dirt, his face pale and drawn with worry.

She took a deep breath. “My knowledge of anatomy is very specific and utterly useless in this particular situation,” she admitted, trying not to grit her teeth. “Magic is a tool, like a surgeon’s knife. I can use it to find out where the damage is, but I can’t make it tell me how to fix it. But healing potions are designed to read the body’s original conformation—like an architect reading the plan to build a house.” She nodded to the White Honey in her hand. “I need to clear the toxins first, but then if I give him a potion of Swallow—”

“—you’ll know where you need to apply magic to help the healing process along,” Jaskier concluded.

“Precisely.” Yennefer slipped her hand behind Geralt’s neck and gently raised his head so he wouldn’t choke when she poured the potion in his mouth. He still shivered in his unconsciousness when the detoxifier hit his system, but then the black veins started to fade, leaving behind just a sheen of sticky sweat on the witcher’s no-more-chalky pale skin. When she cast the diagnosis spell again, she was pleased to note that Geralt’s naturally enhanced healing was finally kicking in; he was out of danger yet, but she could breathe a little easier.

“Good to know that you’re not as stupid as you look,” she told Jaskier, as she rummaged through the saddlebag looking for a dose of Swallow. “I suspected, but it’s always nice to be proved right.”

Jaskier’s worried frown didn’t quite smooth out and his grin was thin, but it was there. “Careful, Yennefer. That almost sounded like a compliment.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” She noticed he was stroking Geralt’s limp hand with two fingers, but she didn’t comment on it. She found the red potion, quickly probed it with a tendril of magic to ensure that it was indeed Swallow, and fed it to the witcher as efficiently as she could. There was a place and time to indulge in emotional turmoil, and this wasn’t either.

Geralt grunted, suddenly tensing all over; Swallow was forcing his cells to multiply more rapidly, and it wasn’t being nice about it. Yennefer unravelled her senses, feeling where the cellular activity was more frantic, and fed magic into it; bones, muscles and organs took shape under the invisible fingers of her chaos. She was as sweaty as Geralt when she was done, and she could barely stand.

“Fuck,” she muttered, feeling herself sway. “Jaskier. Chair.” She leaned against the table, wiping her forehead with the embroidered sleeve of her dress. She grimaced when she realized that it was soaked in blood where she had carelessly dragged it against Geralt’s skin.

“Now we match,” Jaskier chuckled softly, commenting on the smear on her face. “Here, sit down.”

She gratefully sank on the padded seat and just breathed for a minute. It didn’t take a lot of power, to be honest, but she wasn’t used to that kind of detailed work. Was her lack of finesse the reason for her repeated failures? She put the suspicion out of her mind before her mood could sour—Geralt was alive. She had succeeded.

Jaskier cleared his voice. “Not that I don’t trust your magnificent powers, but—”

“He’ll be fine. He just needs to sleep it off. He’s been healing himself as much as I’ve been healing him.”

It was Jaskier’s turn to sag against the table now, relief clearly hitting him all at once. “Good. That’s—that’s good.” He hooked his ankle around the leg of the nearest chair and dragged it closer before dropping on it.

The silence that enveloped the room wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was just slightly awkward. Now that their Geralt-related emergency was on the mending, Yennefer couldn’t think of a single thing to say to Jaskier. Not that she particularly wanted to say something—she was tired and she had never particularly liked the bard. But that silence. It ate at her.

Jaskier had to feel similarly oppressed by the quiet. “You’re not that bad, you know?” he suddenly blurted out. He grimaced. “I mean—I never really thought you were bad, I’m just—I mean, I never liked you, but that isn’t a secret. I don’t think you ever liked me much, either, so we’re even, really—I just wanted to say. Well. I meant to thank you, that’s all.”

“I can’t quite tell if you want me to thank you or to say you’re welcome.” Yennefer said. “You’re not that bad, too.”

“Another compliment? Now I’m worried,” Jaskier stage-whispered, making her snort. They settled in the quiet again, slightly less uncomfortable than before. She noticed him holding Geralt’s again, on his side of the table.

He truly cared about Geralt, didn’t he? She remembered Geralt hesitating calling him his friend all those years ago, when he had brought the bard to her so she could remove the djinn’s curse from his throat, and she’d thought them more than friends at the time; it was only later that Geralt explained that their relationship was strictly business. For some reason, that had made her dislike the bard more than if they were lovers. She could handle being jealous—she could understand jealousy; but that irrational irritation towards a man that appeared to be using Geralt for his own gain, just to become famous, told unspeakable things about her own feelings towards the witcher, and it was intolerable.

Now, watching Jaskier looking at Geralt’s sleeping face with a soft expression in his eyes, lost somewhere in his own mind, she understood better why Jaskier followed Geralt around, and why he seemed so hell-bent in reforming his name. She was also aware about the fact that, although she now had reasons to be jealous of the bard, she wasn’t; instead, as she looked at Geralt’s hand on her side of the table wishing she didn’t feel like a fool at the idea of holding his hand, she envied Jaskier for how easily the bard had naturally reached out and took it, seeking and giving comfort.

“You’re actually sweet under that scary witch façade, aren’t you?” Jaskier said, startling Yennefer out of her thoughts.

She tilted her head and gave him a dangerous smile. “The last man who called me sweet walked out of that door holding his own pickled balls inside a jar.”

“Ouch. Thanks for the warning. I feel like that explains why you say ‘jump’ and Geralt asks ‘how high?’ instead of grumbling.” He shook his head. “Don’t worry Yennefer. Your secret is safe with me.”

Yennefer smiled, and covered Geralt’s hand with hers.