#geraskier infodumping

“Shh,” Geralt holds a finger to his lips. Jaskier goes quiet beside him, the only noise now is the out-of-rhythm beating of their hearts. After a moment the rose begins to bloom. A small head pokes out first, then two arms and a pair of bright purple-tinged butterfly wings. “It’s a boy!”

“How can you tell?” Jaskier asks. From what he could see, the tiny humanoid figure was neither boy nor girl. The fairy had short, cropped red hair and lovely large wings and not much else to go by. 

“His wings are mauve, see? Boy fairies have mauve wings and girls have white wings and those who are neither or both are blue.”

“You know an awful lot about fairies, dear heart,” Jaskier’s grin grows. He crowds closer against Geralt’s side and pouts up at his Witcher. “Tell me more?”

Geralt flushes his own shade of mauve and Jaskier delights in it, utterly captivated. “Do you really want to know?”

“Of course!” 

The tiny thing before them is slowly pulling the petals from his rosy nest to build a shirt and trousers, sticking the pieces together with sap and dusting it over with pollen. 

“Every time a child laughs for the first time, that laugh goes skipping out into the world and becomes a fairy. The laugh becomes a flower and from that flower climbs a tiny person that already knows how to fly.”

“Are fairies good or evil?”

“They’re so small that they can only feel one thing at a time, so I suppose the answer to your question lies in the hands of whatever any given fairy is feeling that day.”

“Huh,” Jaskier leans his head against Geralt’s shoulder. They sit in the dirt for a long while, watching the newborn fairy gather up his courage and burst into anxious flight for the first time. They cheer him on, watching with bated breath as he finally disappears over the tree line. 

The sun is close to setting by then and Jaskier finds himself shivering lightly in the chill of early spring. Geralt settles his cloak over the bard’s shoulders and gets busy scouting for a good place to rest. He pretends not to notice the way Jaskier buries his nose in the neckline of the cloak and breathes in, his eyelids close and his face blooms into an expression of utmost fondness.