[ Somehow, even with the mention of years and his own fishing for whether that training looped in there among it, Claude isn't expecting Geralt to say he raised Ciri. During the silence he'd kept reviewing his notes, thought of something here and there to add to them once back at the inn, content to wait for whatever the other man opts to share.
So what finally comes out of his mouth after his own lack of immediate response is, ] Huh.
[ There's a lot to unpack there. Or, more accurately, it promptly drags a lot of things out of some corner of Claude's mind he'd been doing this best to not think about. A joke about children upstaging their parents gets discarded because now his thoughts are on Petra and Sylvain again even if said thoughts hadn't wandered far. What it means that they're here, why he knows what he does, why seeing them is far more complicated than he's been pretending that it's not. How he might feel if any of the Deer show up someday when that possibility comes with both relief and trepidation attached. Is it the same for Geralt? ]
Does it make it easier or harder that she's here too?
[ He asks this before he's fully aware he's going to, but there it is. For once he's not interested in the fine details of something. Any answer will do even if the answers he can think of to apply to himself are no less tangled, no easier to sift through. There's a chance that - aside from the general lack of words - Claude's telling on himself here by keeping his eyes his list even if it's also clear he's not really looking at it, not with his tone also decisively not light or teasing but tinged with something heavier. ]
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So what finally comes out of his mouth after his own lack of immediate response is, ] Huh.
[ There's a lot to unpack there. Or, more accurately, it promptly drags a lot of things out of some corner of Claude's mind he'd been doing this best to not think about. A joke about children upstaging their parents gets discarded because now his thoughts are on Petra and Sylvain again even if said thoughts hadn't wandered far. What it means that they're here, why he knows what he does, why seeing them is far more complicated than he's been pretending that it's not. How he might feel if any of the Deer show up someday when that possibility comes with both relief and trepidation attached. Is it the same for Geralt? ]
Does it make it easier or harder that she's here too?
[ He asks this before he's fully aware he's going to, but there it is. For once he's not interested in the fine details of something. Any answer will do even if the answers he can think of to apply to himself are no less tangled, no easier to sift through. There's a chance that - aside from the general lack of words - Claude's telling on himself here by keeping his eyes his list even if it's also clear he's not really looking at it, not with his tone also decisively not light or teasing but tinged with something heavier. ]