[ When she speaks, he listens, without interrupting. Absorbing what she's saying. The truth is, it's important, what she's talking about, but he also knows he hasn't got a solution for her. Magic is not where his strengths lie. (He wonders if it would be different, had Visenna—but that's not. It doesn't matter.) He understands what it is, though, to be afraid that you've done something you cannot take back. That maybe you've become something you hadn't wanted to be.
Carefully, he lays his hand on hers. He ducks down to catch her gaze. Her pulse pounds between his ears, stuttering. ]
Tell me what happened. Exactly.
[ Too much. He's noticed Ciri's never tried to pull on the magic available to them here. Had she finally done so? With Jaskier there? That is what happened, isn't it? Ciri hasn't said anything about being attacked, about trying to save him, which means the magic that burst out of her, it was not in a moment of instinct or reflex. She'd tried to use it. It's why she believes it was her fault.
Geralt had not asked, about her magic and her powers. Should he have? Could he have kept this from happening if he had? It wasn't that he hadn't had a dozen questions. She'd just seemed so much more content, talking of monsters and hunting, so loath to discuss her Elder Blood—the future that laid ahead of them which only she had seen—that he'd. Let it go. Believing that, as she'd told him, she simply wouldn't be able to access her abilities until they resolved the problem with the Singularity. A mistake, on his part. He should've realized it would never be so easy.
He can't help asking if it was because he'd wanted it to be true in a way he wasn't willing to admit, this notion that Cirilla had chosen to...walk the Path. The first, to decide to live the life of a Witcher not because she'd been made to, but because it was what she desired. Until she'd come along, it was not something he'd thought possible nor something he would've thought he'd wanted to see. His was not supposed to be a life one sought. Except she had, and he was starting to settle into the idea that it didn't have to be...a painful, lonely existence that'd been pushed upon them as children. That it could offer her more than it had for him, for any of the others that'd come before her.
Now it's dawning on him that perhaps she'd taken up the sword because her own magic had frightened her far more than the monsters that lurked outside. And how much of a choice is that, truthfully? ]
no subject
Carefully, he lays his hand on hers. He ducks down to catch her gaze. Her pulse pounds between his ears, stuttering. ]
Tell me what happened. Exactly.
[ Too much. He's noticed Ciri's never tried to pull on the magic available to them here. Had she finally done so? With Jaskier there? That is what happened, isn't it? Ciri hasn't said anything about being attacked, about trying to save him, which means the magic that burst out of her, it was not in a moment of instinct or reflex. She'd tried to use it. It's why she believes it was her fault.
Geralt had not asked, about her magic and her powers. Should he have? Could he have kept this from happening if he had? It wasn't that he hadn't had a dozen questions. She'd just seemed so much more content, talking of monsters and hunting, so loath to discuss her Elder Blood—the future that laid ahead of them which only she had seen—that he'd. Let it go. Believing that, as she'd told him, she simply wouldn't be able to access her abilities until they resolved the problem with the Singularity. A mistake, on his part. He should've realized it would never be so easy.
He can't help asking if it was because he'd wanted it to be true in a way he wasn't willing to admit, this notion that Cirilla had chosen to...walk the Path. The first, to decide to live the life of a Witcher not because she'd been made to, but because it was what she desired. Until she'd come along, it was not something he'd thought possible nor something he would've thought he'd wanted to see. His was not supposed to be a life one sought. Except she had, and he was starting to settle into the idea that it didn't have to be...a painful, lonely existence that'd been pushed upon them as children. That it could offer her more than it had for him, for any of the others that'd come before her.
Now it's dawning on him that perhaps she'd taken up the sword because her own magic had frightened her far more than the monsters that lurked outside. And how much of a choice is that, truthfully? ]