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jaskiercommabard · 7 months

Note

Hey! It's moonykins from AO3! You asked for a prompt so here's one: Jaskier getting hurt on a hunt he was perhaps not supposed to be on and Geralt feeling guilty because Jaskier could have died. Geralt can take care of Jaskier and bandage him up and Jaskier probably survived because of his own dumb luck. Feelings can come out? I really suck with ideas but I wanted to give you something <3

Thank you ANGEL for this prompt, this was interesting and fun to write. Thank you also for your very thoughtful and encouraging words.

This one got away from me again, probably to no one's surprise. I hope it's alright!

Read on AO3 (4k)

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“No!”

“Yes.”

“No! You’re telling me they aren’t related to mermaids at all?”

Geralt nods sagely and knocks back the last of his ale, then hails the barkeep to refill their cups as Jaskier hides a smile. It’s a balmy spring night, late enough in the season that the hearth in the Drunken Gull remains unlit - a treat, this far north, one that has both their shirts unbuttoned - and he’s caught Geralt in the rare, talkative mood that only strikes him when he’s been paid up front for an easy contract.

“But the songs-”

“Lies.”

“The stories!” Jaskier flaps a hand above his head, gesturing vaguely to stars that - he presumes, despite being in the midst of a revelation - still hang in the sky above the roof of the tavern. “The constellation! The Seven Sirens, Geralt!”

“In Zerrikania, they call those stars the Seven Goats,” he deadpans, amusement sparking in his rolling eyes. "Goats aren't relatives of mermaids either. Write that down."

Geralt taps the songbook laid open on the table, flicks Jaskier's nose when he tries to shut the witcher’s finger in it.

“You're a menace, you know. Terrible. I thought they were just…just..” Jaskier’s hand flutters in the air again. “Ornery, flying mermaids!”

“Mm. Common misconception. Sirens aren’t sentient - not like merpeople or humans, anyway. More like…sharks. Or wasps.”

“But they look like-”

Geralt slaps his broad palm down on the bartop. “But they look like women!”

Jaskier can’t help his startled laugh, and Geralt huffs easily back at him. His mouth is twisted up at the corner, amber eyes expectant, and it’s…something. It’s something.

“Go on then, witcher, tell me. Why do they look like women?”

Jaskier leans in close like he's asking for a secret. Geralt leans in close like he's telling one.

“It’s not a mutation. It’s an adaptation,” he says. His breath smells like honey and hops and the flagon of vodka Jaskier’s goaded him into drinking.

"Brilliant," the bard says.

"Effective," the witcher concedes. "Up close, once you get them riled, they change. It’s…”

His voice drops off, eyes shuttering slightly.

“Ugly?” Jaskier provides.

“Ugly,” he confirms, but he’s still frowning. His fingers tap the bar restlessly, disturbing the beads of condensation gathered below their mugs, and Jaskier's eyes get caught on the motion.

On nights like this - nights when they’ve been laughing - something ancient always comes to settle itself heavily over Geralt. He knows better than to try and lift it.

Jaskier clears his throat, pulling them both from their separate thoughts. When he grins at Geralt, his companion hums agreeably enough in return, and it's as close to a goodnight as they'll get.

Jaskier claps him on the shoulder anyway, squeezing to pull himself up. He's just on the right edge of drunk, perilously close to giving himself a wicked hangover if he doesn't quit - that won't do, now that he has plans for the morning.

“Thank you for indulging me, my friend.”

Geralt shrugs easily, lifting his palms as Jaskier gathers up his untouched quill and empty songbook.

"On my own head be it."

So really, all things considered, it's not even Jaskier's fault that he ends up trailing Geralt to the shore the following morning, not with an invitation like that.

After no small amount of charm laid on the baker’s daughter and the stablehand's father, Jaskier finds himself with a honey-soaked bun in one hand and a crudely drawn trail map in the other. Trail might be overselling it, really - it’s little more than a footpath of tamped-down grass, with dense sagebrush and gently drooping ferns encroaching so heavily from both sides that it disappears altogether in some places. A layer of oppressive fog, so thick it hides most of the formidable Koviri mountain range in its haze, doesn’t ease the way either, but Jaskier is a coastal boy. He follows the call of seabirds and takes his time licking the honey from his fingers as he picks his way toward the ocean.

Eventually, the dense forest starts to give way to the coast and the hard-packed dirt beneath Jaskier’s boots becomes slippery with silt. Younger trees take the place of the massive ones, bending out from the soil at impossible angles where the ocean has washed it away to expose their roots. When the trail finally disappears completely, he finds himself on a high, rocky outcropping above the sea. It occurs to him that the view must be astonishing on a clear day, but as it is, the fog sits so thick above the turbulent sea that he could almost pluck it from the sky like spun sugar.

Spotting Geralt is easier than he thought it might be, even in this weather. He's built - and outfitted - to blend into the night, black armor standing out against the morning sky and greyish bark of the cypress tree he's climbed into, but that won't stop him getting a job done.

Not for the first time, Jaskier is fascinated by the stillness Geralt possesses - even as he settles into his hiding spot behind one of the larger boulders dotting the cliffside, he’s tapping out a rhythm with his fingers, chewing on the inside of his cheek, shaking hair out of his eyes. The witcher doesn’t move any more than a boulder would, doesn’t bend to the wind any more than a tree would. He simply waits, crossbow upraised, until the first siren emerges from the fog.

From where Jaskier crouches, the adaptation is indeed an effective one - to his human eyes, it looks like Geralt has shot an angel from the sky. He’s struck by the grace of it falling, leathery wings cradling her, blowing like great sails as she tumbles down into the horizon. It could almost be a song, but when she splatters on the rocky outcrop below, Jaskier loses the melody.

Several things happen at once, after that. A shriek rises from the fog, just one at first before more join in an eerie, skull-splitting chorus. Jaskier’s ears are roaring with it as Geralt starts picking them out of the sky with impossible precision. He’s thinning them out, but not enough, it can’t possibly be enough. Geralt drops from his perch and lands easily on his feet - Jaskier can almost hear the curse he lets out from where he watches the remaining sirens swarm around the clifftop, banking hard to swoop and dive at the witcher. The crossbow is thrown down in favor of a silver sword - Jaskier sucks a breath in as it slices through the air in a wide, red arc, and then he’s gone.

Geralt has disappeared in the fluttering swarm, invisible until a blast of magic explodes from the center, knocking some of them back into the air and sending a few of the others to their deaths in the churning water below. Jaskier waits. He does wait for Geralt, but the hand that had cast the sign simply crumples to the ground beside the odd angles of his fallen body.

So, objectively, it is not his fault, with Geralt unconscious in a slowly growing pool of blood at his feet, that he finds himself in the thick of a hunt he promised not to join, defending them both.

“Hand-and-a-half, my arse, Geralt.” His shoulders are screaming as he lifts the witcher’s silver sword, which certainly should be called three-or-four-hands-at-least, but he plants his feet on either side of his friend’s body and raises it anyway. He can’t swing it, really, the thing is far too heavy for him to wield with any precision, but it keeps the few remaining sirens at bay long enough for him to dig the heel of his boot into Geralt’s side. It earns him a promising groan and he takes a steadying breath. He can do this, he can keep them back until the professional is on his feet again. Ornery mermaids, he tells himself, they're just ornery mermaids.

The weight of the blade wrenches his wrists as he jabs it toward the two closest creatures, making them hiss and scream. It’s horrific, bone-jarring, hitting his head like twin daggers. The shrieks send him to his knees until he’s crouched over Geralt, the blood dripping from his own ears and nose mingling with the already gory trenches in the witcher's armor. Gritting his teeth, Jaskier lurches forward and buries the blade in the belly of the monster that had carved bloody grooves into Geralt’s chest while Jaskier had watched, horrified, too far away and too weak to stop it.

Geralt was right - they are ugly up close, ugly enough to staunch some of the guilt rolling in Jaskier’s gut, anyway. Gone are the fair faces they use to lure fishermen to their nests - those plush lips stretched thin around dripping, needle-like teeth, flowing hair gone wild and tangled like sea moss. Their talons rip into the earth, close enough that the sharp tips are stained by the widening pool of blood that surrounds them.

When the creature at the end of Geralt’s sword crumples, its sisters fall back, rising into the air with great flaps of their wings that send sand flying into Jaskier’s eyes.

“That’s right,” he shouts triumphantly, jabbing his weapon into the air. “And stay out, you ugly-”

Ah, fuck.

She rises from the fog like a shipwreck, raising herself above the cliffedge with concussive beats of her ancient wings, so impossibly large that the tattered ends of them blur into the edges of Jaskier’s vision. They’re ragged and torn in places, littered with scars so deep Jaskier can see the sunlight shining through them, yet still they keep her aloft. She’s two, maybe three times the size of the other sirens, easily. Ekhidna.

“Geralt, get up,” he shouts as the creature’s reflective, fish-like eyes settle on them. It's worse than any storm Jaskier's ever been in, the wind and water from her wingbeats tearing at them like a hurricane.

"I need you," he shouts frantically, shaking one of Geralt's armored shoulders. Fear grips him for the first time since he rushed out to help the witcher, perhaps for the first time in his very short life - that's what it feels like, anyway, as the ekhidna's tail begins to coil in the sky above them. "Come on. I can't- I can't do this, I need you."

She's flipping in the air like an acrobat, diving at them with deadly grace, and Geralt’s eyes are still closed. Jaskier twists, curls himself over the other man’s body to shelter him as best he can, his own useless fear choking him as the ekhidna's shriek grows louder, closer, until-

Until it doesn't. Until the air goes still and silent around them with a pressurized pop. Jaskier's eyes open - when had they closed? - to find Geralt already struggling to his feet, hand outstretched to hold the golden shield around them.

It bursts like a soap bubble when the beast hits it, scattering in a shower of orange-gold sparks, but it's enough to knock her back. Enough for Geralt to get his feet under him and yank his sword from Jaskier's trembling grasp.

The witcher is unrelenting, brutal, graceful as he beats her back, wielding his weapon with no more strain than it takes Jaskier to wield a quill. She swipes at him with her great claws, bares her gory teeth, and still he lunges. He has her balanced on the edge of the outcropping, ready to take flight, when he buries his sword in her chest. He pulls it back with a grunt of effort, green-black liquid spouting from the wound, and launches a boot into her gut to topple her over the precipice.

He wastes no time rounding on Jaskier, stomping back until he's looming over the bard still kneeling in the bloody dirt.

"What the fuck were you thinking?" he demands. Oh, he's furious.

"I was thinking you were bleeding out and covered in monsters, and that you needed my help!"

Geralt scoffs, teeth bared, and it hits Jaskier like a bolt.

"It would have been helpful for you to stay at the inn, like I told you to."

"If I had stayed at the inn, you would be fish food right now, not henpecking me for saving your life."

"Idiot," the witcher hisses.

"Prick," the bard bites back. They both deflate after a tense moment, the frenzy burned out of them, and Jaskier hauls himself up with Geralt's offered hand.

“Ah, very good," he says, taking a few steps back to dust off his trousers. He's shaking like a leaf in a storm and his clothing is covered in witcher blood and siren guts and gods only know what else, likely a total loss.

He must look a sight, which explains why Geralt is looking at him like he's grown a second head.

"Well done, witcher. Well done, bard-”

“Jaskier, get back from the edge.”

“I don’t know about you, but I am swearing off fish forever, in fact-”

“Jaskier.”

“-maybe women, too, for good measure. At least scary ones with needle teeth and-”

“Jaskier, get back-”

He has the length of a single heartbeat to meet Geralt’s eyes, to watch him lunge forward with his hand outstretched, before the sky tips and Jaskier is falling through it. He barely has time to register the hot slice of talons ripping through his leg or the brain-rattling pain of the ekhidna’s final shriek before they plunge into blackness together.

Jaskier knows the sea, but not this one - it’s dark, made darker still by the clouds hanging in the sky he’d fallen out of, and so impossibly cold that it sucks the air from his lungs. Those massive wings must have broken their fall enough to keep him conscious, but now he’s caught in them like a net, already half-full of seawater and sinking far too quickly. They’re not leathery, like he thought, but fishbelly-slick, making it impossible to find purchase in the ever-darkening water.

When he kicks himself free, he’s buffeted and turned by the current, unsure of which way he should be swimming to get back to the surface.

He can’t even see past the tiny bubbles already starting to escape his nose, but he knows he’s losing too much air as his lungs begin to burn. It’s all turning white at the edges by the time his chest starts to tighten, and still he pushes through the water.

Julian Pankratz came into the world with a song to sing. That's what his mother tells him, anyway, when she reminds him that she labored for a full two days just for him to greet her screaming. The servants and townsfolk had gathered behind the manor to throw flowers into the sea while she brought him into the world - buttercup and blowball, daffodil and coneflower, sprays of roses the color of noontime sun - an offering to the Goddess, a plea for her mercy.

Did he look like a flower, tumbling through the air? Was it a song?

Julian is six years old. It’s his birthday, and his father is showing him how to cast a net into the mudflats behind the manor to catch alewife and perch. The sight of the netting makes him sick, all bloated with wriggling silver skin and dotted with eyes that bulge out into nothing. He spends the rest of the afternoon alone, hunting seashells, lining them up on the shore until the sun spreads like fire on the horizon. He dips his ears below the water when his mother calls him in, letting it swallow his name. Julian, Julian -

“Jaskier!”

Someone is shaking him, slapping his face. A great weight meets his chest, socking him like a sledgehammer - it might steal the breath from him, if he had any.

He’s twelve, all knocking knees and long-limbed shyness, showing the porter’s son how to coax little crabs out from the tidepools. Their clay-stained knuckles brush in the silty water and his face grows hot, hotter still when Janus hooks their little fingers together. Julian runs, then - runs until his lungs feel as though they’ll burst. He doesn’t play with the servants’ children again after that.

He’s retching, the salt-bitter water burning his throat as it comes up. There’s no room for air, no time to breathe before more spouts forth from his mouth and nose. He’s twisted onto his side, fingers clawing through the sand like bloody talons.

Eighteen, and he holds Julian beneath the waves until Jaskier emerges. The world is stretched out before him and he’s hungry for it, starving, holding it in his teeth like a first breath. Posada is as far inland as he's ever been, far enough that his clothes have just stopped smelling of brine. He crests and falls like a wave that afternoon, crashing against his own heart, dissolving into foam and rising again. Three words or less.

The first breath hits him like fire, colliding sharply with the water still left in his lungs, but it comes. He takes another, chokes up more foam, and then he must be back in the water because he’s rocking, rocking. There’s a shh-shh in his ear, like the inside of a seashell, a secret thing. It’s warm against his temple, his forehead, his eyelids.

Twenty. Drowning in Rinde. Heat, salt, copper, bubbling up in his throat, stealing all the spaces air should be. Geralt is holding him, until he isn’t - until he’s holding her. Hope washes out like a tide.

Consciousness returns to Jaskier in fits and starts - the crackle of a fire and the distant, scratchy hum of early cicadas comes first, then the cool breeze ruffling the dry hair across his forehead. Everything else is warm, soft enough at the edges to let him float just below the surface of awareness for a while, just beyond the grasp of pain.

When he does manage to drag his eyes open, they settle on a familiar shape - Geralt, outlined by the glow of a fire, folded into a meditative stance beside the bed. His chest is bare, starkly pale against the gashes that are already healing - not quite closed, but already turning a healthy pink at the edges.

His hands are closed around one of Jaskier’s, rough and warm. Something about that is peculiar, but it slips from his mind, silverfish-quick.

He turns instinctively into that warmth but doesn’t have a chance to examine it further before his body ignites in pain. It feels as though he’s been wrenched apart and put back at odd angles, his insides not quite where he left them. He gasps, a mistake that sets him heaving, hacking around shards of ice as the shadow beside him startles and shifts.

“Easy, Jaskier. Small breaths,” Geralt’s voice is rough in his ear as he tilts Jaskier to one side, just in time for him to retch into a waiting basin. The ringing is back in his ears, his mouth full of brine and blood, when he’s hauled back up. The room spins.

“What,” he tries to ask, but it comes out as a wordless croak.

Geralt's hand sparks weakly in the corner of his vision, and then the rough edge of a mug brushes his cracked lower lip. Hot tea, something vaguely medicinal but sticky-sweet with honey, soothes his dry mouth but scratches his throat. It’s taken away too soon when his chest spasms again, forcing what little air he has out in burning gasps until his vision starts to blur.

He's gulping, hiccuping, his body crying out for air, but there seems to be no room for it.

He registers, distantly, the bed dipping under Geralt’s weight as his fingers are gently unwound from where Jaskier is clawing into his arms, and then their hands are tangled together.

One hand pressed flat to Geralt’s chest, the other against his own, their discordant heartbeats keep time beneath his palms as Geralt takes slow, shallow breaths. Jaskier matches them in time, regaining some control.

“What happened?” he rasps.

“What do you remember?” Geralt asks in return. His eyes are shadowed, searching Jaskier’s face in the dim light as he wades through his muddled memory. Images bubble to the surface, disjointed, curling in his stomach like he’s falling again.

“The water, and- oh, ow, fuck- my leg.”

Geralt winces, nods as Jaskier reaches down to clutch at his thigh above the neatly bandaged wound that had, until now, escaped his awareness. The movement tugs at the other set of bandages, snug around his ribs. When he looks at Geralt for an answer, his golden eyes flick away, pupils narrowing as he stares into the fire. It looks like a door closing.

“You weren’t breathing.”

Of course. Jaskier had seen it once at Oxenfurt - a ghastly demonstration on a corpse, no match for the brutal reality of it that had come years later when they spent a season in Skellige. Jaskier had been held back with some difficulty, thinking one of the villagers was beating a man who had washed up along the shore to death. The sick snap of a rib cracks in his memory.

"Broken, then." It's not a question - not a hopeful one, anyway, but Geralt shakes his head.

"No, but badly bruised." His voice cracks like it chokes him, like it's weighing him down, and Jaskier can’t bear it.

"Ah, good news. We'll be back on the Path in no time, then-"

"You will stay here and rest," Geralt interrupts.

"Geralt, enough." Jaskier swats the witcher's hands away where they fuss at the edge of his bandages and attempts to push himself upright with trembling arms. "I am not some fragile-"

"You are fragile, Jaskier," he growls, snatching the bard's wrist in his hand to still him, grip just tight enough to make him wince. Geralt drops it like a hot brand. "You're human."

Jaskier's heart falls into his stomach. It's churning, tempestuous, stealing the breath from him. Just human, always just human. He feels small, insignificant as he drops his hands into his lap.

"Geralt, I don't-" Jaskier swallows thickly, struggling to keep hold of his shallow breath. "I don't feel well, could you-"

"What is it?"

“Could you just…yell at me in the morning?”

“I won’t yell at you in the morning.” Something peculiar dances at the edge of Geralt's voice, and Jaskier knows better than to think this is the end of it.

“What, then?”

“In the morning, we will find the healer, and then I am going to make sure this never happens again.”

A cold spike of fear, of grief, jumps into Jaskier’s throat, a fresh wave of saltwater already stinging behind his eyes as he nods his understanding.

“You’re going to leave me.”

Geralt shifts, his expression tightening in a way Jaskier is sure will hurt to remember later.

“I should.” And then, impossibly, “But I… I would not like to be without you, Jaskier.”

Jaskier stares at him, unreadable as always, before he decides to throw himself from another edge.

“I would not like to be without you, either,” he whispers, carefully metering out his precious air with each word as his foolish heart slams in his chest. Surely, Geralt can hear it. “Do you understand?”

Geralt laughs, the wretch. It’s a wet, breathless thing that he throws into the ceiling, like he’s praying to one of those gods he doesn’t believe in. The palm of one broad, warm hand slides up Jaskier’s arm, along his shoulder, against his neck, soothing the chill from his skin. Geralt tips into him slowly, slowly, until their foreheads press together.

“I do,” Geralt breathes, so close that Jaskier feels the words on his own lips. “Now, I do.”

Two fingers hook beneath his chin, tilting his face up. Geralt’s eyes have gone round and soft and fond, the agelessness slipping from them for a moment. He gathers Jaskier’s hand against his chest again and he can feel the witcher’s tempered heartbeat flipping beneath his fingertips.

Surely, Jaskier must be at the bottom of the ocean. Surely, the sweet brush of lips at the corner of his own is merely a pleasant hallucination. It's probably a crab eating his face.

"Wait, no," he squeaks. That wonderful pressure disappears immediately. "I mean, yes, I mean, Geralt!"

The witcher in question only watches him, merciless amusement arching his brow.

"I've just thrown up half of the North Sea," he says seriously. Geralt grins, unseriously, as Jaskier tugs on his wrist to get him closer anyway.

"Don't care," he mutters against Jaskier's cheek.

“You smell like a grave hag.”

"I've smelled worse, and you wanted to kiss me then, too."

"You're disgusting," Jaskier protests, tipping his face into Geralt's anyway. "And a bastard. I hate you."

"You don't," he accuses.

"I don't," Jaskier agrees, and grants Geralt his kiss, dry and chaste and sweet against his salt-chapped smile. Their noses are in the way, the angle is wrong. It’s nothing like he had imagined - and gods, he had imagined this - and nothing, nothing, has ever been more perfect.

The fog has lifted, dawn curling her golden fingers toward them through the mountain peaks in the distance by the time Jaskier wakes again. He's startled from a dream, something about flowers falling from the sky, but it floats away from him like mist when he finds Geralt’s hand settled carefully around his hip. He smells like saltwater and cypress, leather and horse - like an old home, and a new one.

“Geralt?” he asks, softly, just in case his witcher has found sleep. A gravelly hmm slips into his ear anyway. “You'll stay?”

"I won't leave you," he answers. "Go back to sleep."

“Good," Jaskier mumbles, somewhere just on the softer edge of wakefulness. "I won’t leave you either."

In this light, with the morning sun washing them in gold, with Geralt's heart beating free and steady under his open palm, it could almost be true.

#Brought to you by the writer having pneumonia #I hope you like this!! I shook your prompt and 4200 words fell out #Thank you so so much #I'm unhappy with this one but I can't poke it any more than I already have #Geralt x jaskier #geralt x jaskier fanfiction #the witcher fanfiction #geraskier #geraskier fic #I'm so bad at tagging #the witcher #geralt of Rivia #jaskier

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youvebeenlivingfictional · 1 year

Text

All Shook Up

You Eat Yet? | Masterlist | You Got a Minute?

Pairing: Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto x Reader

Rating: M (though it may have explicit chapters in the future)

Notes: Welcome back! I hope y’all are having a nice week!❣️ Also no worries, there’s another chapter incoming, it just doesn’t have a name yet.

Warnings: ...Angst. Soz. Stubborn reader.

Summary: The other three drinks you’re tasked with presenting have to be abso-fuckin-lutely on point. And for better or for worse, getting it right becomes a bit of an obsession. And you can go with a couple of standards that you’ve had, but you want one to be just yours.

Mack frames it as a trial—as if he’s never seen your specials bring in money. Still, it’s a step in the right direction—a show of interest, and a sign that he wants to bring Barky’s into the 21st fucking century.

So you start fiddling with recipes when you’re home. You already know you’re going to put the slow gin fizz up for consideration. It’s a little time-consuming, sure, but considering how much it paid out the last time it was on the menu, you can justify it to Mack.

The other three drinks you’re tasked with presenting have to be abso-fuckin-lutely on point. And for better or for worse, getting it right becomes a bit of an obsession. And you can go with a couple of standards that you’ve had, but you want one to be just yours.

“Babe,” Carmy groans from your couch.

“...What?” You call back after a moment.

“C’mere, c’mon. Siddown.”

“In a minute.”

You hear Carmy sigh, then grunt again as he pushes himself off to stand.

“You said that twenty minutes ago.”

Your eyes are set on the shaker as you add some vodka to the shaker. One…Two…Pop! You draw the bottle away with a jerk of your wrist, setting it aside and reaching for the cinnamon. Your hand hesitates over the container, eyes narrowing slightly before you shake your head a bit to yourself. Add that to the rum, if anything…Or you could try a cinnamon syrup…Cinnamon syrup, that would be better. You turn, crouching down and beginning to rifle through your cabinet for a small pot.

"Babe."

“...Yeah? No, this’ll only take me like, less than ten minutes,” You reassure, straightening up. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

Carmy doesn’t answer. Or—well, maybe he does, but you’re in your head, getting down the cinnamon sticks and sugar.

It has been at least an hour. Your head is killing you, you’re tired, and your eyes are crossing—but you’ve got it down, you know you’ve got it down.

“Can you come here and try this?” You call out. Your kitchen smells heavenly—sugary and light, with only a mingling of alcohol under it. You glance over as you hear the floor creak.

“C’mere, take a sip,” You urge. Carmy takes a few steps closer. He takes hold of the proffered glass. You watch, stomach tingling with anticipation as he takes a whiff, processes, then takes a sip. You bite your lips, brows raising as he hesitates, then swallows.

“Good?” You ask, nodding, “Right?”

“...Yeah,” He agrees…But he says it in a way that doesn’t seem like he quite buys it. Your brows lower and furrow, a frown taking over your lips.

“What?” You ask, immediately defensive. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing is wrong with it,” Carmy insists, peering down between the glass and your face. “It’s just…It’s too much.”

“What?”

“It’s too sweet.”

“Oh—Please,” You scoff. “That’s such a guy thing to say. What, you don’t like it, 'cause it's a girly drink?"

“No! I did not say that. It just—It needs something to balance it. A few dashes of bitters.”

“Oh, sure,” You scoff, turning from him, “Thanks, great advice from someone that’s not a bartender.”

“I may not be a bartender, but I know how to create a flavor profile that fucking works.”

“Yeah, you know what, great. Thanks for the feedback,” You agree dryly, beginning to clean your counter before looking at Carmen. He watches you with an almost blank cruelty, eyes searching your face.

“You don’t think I know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

“When’s the last time you drank a sandwich, Berzatto.”

The two of you stare one another down icily before Carmy wordlessly slams the drink down on the counter, the remaining liquid sloshing over the side before he turns. He shakes the few drops that landed on his hand off as he heads for the door. You don’t stop him; you just stare at the back of his head as he goes, irritation roiling through you. “Some bitters,” You scoff to yourself as the door slams shut behind him. “Some bitters.” You take a sip of the drink, hesitate, then turn away. You start making the drink again, grumbling all the while.

“Tell me to add some bitters, like someone made him the fucking king of fucking bartending—bitters. Guy learns one fucking thing at smart guy chef school and thinks he can do my job better.” You add bitters to the shaker before slap the top on it. You take it up, shaking it with a renewed vitriol. You strain it into a fresh glass.

“Add some bitters, like he’s got a perfect fucking pallet, like he knows—” You pause in your rant to raise the glass to your lips. You take a sniff and go still, stomach flipping with fear. But—No. No. This is your area of expertise. You know what you're talking about—he doesn't.

You take a sip and you…Freeze.

Goddamnit. Fuck. Fuck—

You spit it into the sink, pouring out the rest of the mixture and dropping the glass as you hiss:

“Son of a bitch!”

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