[ Isn't that the thing? What the fuck is there to say? He's done it so often, not just amongst friends, family, but strangers. Walking through villages ravaged by plague or men or some beast, and there are times he isn't even wanted—not for being a Witcher, but simply because he is not needed in their eyes. What can he offer, by killing, when everyone they love has already been stolen?
He knows what some tell themselves here. That the ones they've lost have returned back home. The truth is, Geralt doesn't believe it true—perhaps doesn't want to. He knows there have been a small handful who've returned with their memories intact, but in some ways, the finality of they are gone is easier for him to swallow than imagining they simply went home, safe and sound. It sounds so damn pleasant for what is a painful thing. Is it selfish? To want to prefer to think them lost forever than to let that small possibility linger, that they may return only to be taken once more? Does it matter? A part of him thinks those left behind deserve to be selfish where the dead and gone are concerned. They're the ones who pick up the pieces.
It's as though I've not made any fucking peace at all, he said to Sam once, and he hears it echoed back to him when Sam tells him now, I feel like I'm starting over. ]
I thought her dead. For months. [ He does not clarify who he means by her, but there can really only be one person he's speaking of. ] When I heard she was alive, when she found me, it felt too fucking good to be true. And then she— [ Betrayed us. Fucked me over. Broke my heart again. ] Visenna did the same. The woman who...gave birth to me. Showed up a hundred years later.
[ Then vanished, as she had all those decades ago. It should've felt like closure, facing her, but it hadn't. Just reopened old scars.
He pauses, turning his words over in his head. He's never said a word about Visenna before now to Sam, and he gives no further details. ] Sometimes we have to make our peace, with the thought that it may have hurt less had the ones we grieved not returned to our lives.
[ It's not that he wishes he never knew either of them were alive. Existing out there. It isn't that cold, isn't that simple. It's more that...fuck. Their reappearance was painful. In a different way than the losses, but wounds are wounds. You nurse them all the same. He understands, maybe, how much it throws you when someone you'd started to move past comes back to wrench your life off course. How you inevitably begin to wonder, deep down, if your heart might be a little less broken had they stayed gone. ]
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He knows what some tell themselves here. That the ones they've lost have returned back home. The truth is, Geralt doesn't believe it true—perhaps doesn't want to. He knows there have been a small handful who've returned with their memories intact, but in some ways, the finality of they are gone is easier for him to swallow than imagining they simply went home, safe and sound. It sounds so damn pleasant for what is a painful thing. Is it selfish? To want to prefer to think them lost forever than to let that small possibility linger, that they may return only to be taken once more? Does it matter? A part of him thinks those left behind deserve to be selfish where the dead and gone are concerned. They're the ones who pick up the pieces.
It's as though I've not made any fucking peace at all, he said to Sam once, and he hears it echoed back to him when Sam tells him now, I feel like I'm starting over. ]
I thought her dead. For months. [ He does not clarify who he means by her, but there can really only be one person he's speaking of. ] When I heard she was alive, when she found me, it felt too fucking good to be true. And then she— [ Betrayed us. Fucked me over. Broke my heart again. ] Visenna did the same. The woman who...gave birth to me. Showed up a hundred years later.
[ Then vanished, as she had all those decades ago. It should've felt like closure, facing her, but it hadn't. Just reopened old scars.
He pauses, turning his words over in his head. He's never said a word about Visenna before now to Sam, and he gives no further details. ] Sometimes we have to make our peace, with the thought that it may have hurt less had the ones we grieved not returned to our lives.
[ It's not that he wishes he never knew either of them were alive. Existing out there. It isn't that cold, isn't that simple. It's more that...fuck. Their reappearance was painful. In a different way than the losses, but wounds are wounds. You nurse them all the same. He understands, maybe, how much it throws you when someone you'd started to move past comes back to wrench your life off course. How you inevitably begin to wonder, deep down, if your heart might be a little less broken had they stayed gone. ]