Witcher Mutagens - Tumblr Posts
Prompt 119
The problem with having a human bard follow you around is that bad food can make them sick. Geralt could and would happily eat undercooked or overcooked food. Food was food. Stale food was food. Food. Was. Food. But his bard is more delicate than him. He could get sick, or could even possibly die if he so much as eats something wrong. Thus Geralt begins paying a kind older woman in a town to teach him how to cook. She assures him that with enough practice and recipes from her, he'll be a perfect spouse for his Jaskier. Geralt goes to correct her and say they're just friends, but when she mentions telling him a special recipe because of it, Geralt decides there's no harm in going along with the lie. Jaskier meanwhile is surprised, when he gets to the town where Geralt and him have agreed upon meeting each other that spring, only to run into a woman who very loudly exclaims "Oh! Geralt's husband!" Geralt's what?
“What are you putting in your soup?”
“Hemlock.”
“Ha! And they say Witchers don’t have a sense of humor.”
But Geralt isn’t joking. Because Witchers are immune to most human poisons, they tend to use them as spices.
Geralt has always been conscious of the fact that this is a thing that marks him as inhuman. He doesn’t bring out the human-deadly spices in towns.
At first, Geralt didn’t add poison to his food in front of Jaskier. But then, the bard proved himself unphased by black eyes, growls, and all sorts of strangeness. Surely, he wouldn’t think differently of Geralt for eating a bit differently.
Only, Jaskier keeps shrugging the poison off as a joke. And he keeps trying to steal food off Geralt’s plate like an idiot!
(Nevermind the fact that Geralt let him do it before and thus gave Jaskier the impression that the behavior was acceptable)
Geralt never lets Jaskier sneak food any more... Jaskier's starting to worry they're regressing in their relationship. Less amounts of intimacy shown. Geralt would just like the bard to stop trying to eat his poison!