[ Dozens of questions out there Sam could ask. Geralt decides not to guess at it. Instead, he waits. Considers if it'll be anything he even wants to answer. If he'll have an answer to give at all.
When it comes, it's greeted with more silence. He's been asked before. Always dismissed it. The point is that he wasn't given a choice. There's little use in dwelling on what can't ever be. On choices that weren't his to make. That, and—he isn't the same. He remembers the boy he was like he remembers that of another's. Someone he knows of, but has no part in his life. Not anymore. Perhaps that severance was deliberate. The child he never was, the dreams he might've carried: easier, to let it go, than to sink in the knowledge that it was stolen from him. That his own mother decided it was not for him to have.
Funny, how fresh scars so old can feel. It shows, a little, when his gaze cuts away, as if Sam might read too much. There's a knot that grows more tangled each time he buries a feeling, a thought, a memory. If he's a desire to untangle it—and he sure as fuck hasn't any—he'd hardly know where to begin. From how Sam's asked, from the question itself, though—he gets Sam can't know, in full, what it means to be a Witcher. That it goes beyond a singular transformation. ]
When they take us, we don't return. We grow up on those grounds. Some of us were named there. [ His reply comes carefully. It needs no saying, he thinks, for Sam to realize what it means that not a soul ever comes for the boys who don't make it to the end. ] If there's another path I could've wanted, I never became who I'd need to be to know it.
no subject
When it comes, it's greeted with more silence. He's been asked before. Always dismissed it. The point is that he wasn't given a choice. There's little use in dwelling on what can't ever be. On choices that weren't his to make. That, and—he isn't the same. He remembers the boy he was like he remembers that of another's. Someone he knows of, but has no part in his life. Not anymore. Perhaps that severance was deliberate. The child he never was, the dreams he might've carried: easier, to let it go, than to sink in the knowledge that it was stolen from him. That his own mother decided it was not for him to have.
Funny, how fresh scars so old can feel. It shows, a little, when his gaze cuts away, as if Sam might read too much. There's a knot that grows more tangled each time he buries a feeling, a thought, a memory. If he's a desire to untangle it—and he sure as fuck hasn't any—he'd hardly know where to begin. From how Sam's asked, from the question itself, though—he gets Sam can't know, in full, what it means to be a Witcher. That it goes beyond a singular transformation. ]
When they take us, we don't return. We grow up on those grounds. Some of us were named there. [ His reply comes carefully. It needs no saying, he thinks, for Sam to realize what it means that not a soul ever comes for the boys who don't make it to the end. ] If there's another path I could've wanted, I never became who I'd need to be to know it.