fic: from the ashes

[devinwolfi]

Title: from the ashes
Fandom: The Witcher
Relationship(s): N/A
Notes: Mentioned Canonical and Noncanonical Child Abuse
Length: 3.3k; 1/1

Summary: Jaskier had taken their musings and spun some slurred metaphor about a bird made of fire, rising from the ashes of what it had once been. Taking all of the bad stuff that made them and burning it for fuel so that they may soar across the sky and into the sun.

Written for The Witcher Flash Fic Challenge #053

Read on AO3

Geralt was young when he went to Kaer Morhen. Too young, younger than the others certainly. He isn’t sure if that makes it better or worse. Is it better to not have known what human life could be? Boys that are happy do not get sent to Kaer Morhen. Boys that are loved do not get sent to Kaer Morhen.

Perhaps it’s better to have suffered the wrath of the elder Witchers than to have suffered the wrath of his mother. Would she have been wrathful? Druid women rarely are, but it’s better for him, to think that it was a mercy. That she was saving him, instead of herself. One last act of motherly love.

All he had of her were glimpses. In those at least, she was kind. Her hair was red. Had his hair been red? Did he smile as she did? Did he smile at all?

Geralt was too young for training when he’d arrived. Too young for the trials. Even here in the keep of Unwanted Boys he remained an outcast.

Then, they wanted him.

He envied his younger self, too young to survive the trials. But he was older now, and survive he did. He was better than the others. He had been here longer. He spent years watching them train, listening to their lectures when they thought he was too little or too stupid to understand. He was better. He showed off.

Showing off had been a mistake. They wanted him again. If he was so good already, couldn’t he be better?

It’s easier to forget the trials when you’re young. You can block it out, move past it, mostly. The scorching pain of the trials can be reduced to a foggy ache if you’re not looking at it too hard.

He went through the grasses again, with a handful of other boys whose names he could never forget, whose names he couldn’t bare to remember.

He had forgotten how much it hurt. Fire ripped through his body, tearing him apart piece by burning piece. He listened to the room go quiet. There had been nearly half a dozen other boys in with him. It was impossible to know where your own screams ended and your neighbors began.

Soon there were no more neighbors to drown out his screams. One by one, throats broke from the strain, thrashing hearts stilled, and his friends died.

He was alone.

He prayed for an end. He prayed to every god he could think of, what god would do this? What god would let boys die like this? He prayed to his mother, why had she left him? Did she know this would happen? He prayed to the Witchers who came in periodically to administer the next phase of the trials. He prayed to see his friends, his brothers, again, he prayed they would all find peace on the other side. He prayed for death, and like everyone else, it did not listen. It did not want him.

He was better, after. He was faster and stronger than the rest. He didn’t want to be better. He spent a long time refusing to show it. In fact, he’d pretended to be worse. If he wasn’t any better, they wouldn’t hurt him again.

But they knew he was lying. Every failed parry, every lost spar, every time he yielded, they looked at him with contempt. How dare he make a mockery of the gift he has been given? How many mortal men would kill to have his power? If they wanted to kill him, he would let them. He did not want this power. But what he wanted did not matter.

It was easier when he got older. Some of the boys didn't like him. They thought he was weird, his hair was as white as their elder’s and he was twice as large.

But then there was Eskel. Eskel never had an unkind word to say about him, except for when he deserved it, and every kind word, Geralt knew he meant wholly, with every beat of his heart.

Geralt had refused to let himself worry after Eskel when he set off on the Path for the first time. But he returned every winter, his smile as wide and beaming as it had always been.

The dark and cold threatened to swallow him, and he wished for it most days. But those few short months of winter, of Eskel, had allowed him to make it through.

Geralt was excited to join his brother’s on the path. He had been through hell twice over. He would take his torment, his torture, the names of his friends that were as much an oath as they were a memory, and he would do good. He would be a knight in all but name.

He would be reborn. He would rise from the ashes of his brothers, of his mother’s love, of the happy red-haired boy he could have been.

He would save people’s lives. People would want him.

The very first life he saved, the very first life he took. The girl had not thanked him. She had looked at him with as much fear as she did her attacker. They were both splattered in hot stinking blood. Could monsters only be killed by monsters? She screamed when he reached for her, to help her up and nothing more. She shivered under his gaze, she pleaded with him not to harm her. Why would he do such a thing? If he wanted to hurt her he could have just walked right past.

He is not a knight. Knights are honorable, what is honorable about killing for coin? Knights are wanted, adored, revered. He is not a knight.

~

Yennefer hurt. She was always hurting. The twist of her spine made the rest of her bones angry. They punished her for it as if it were her fault they were not as they should be. All she knew was the ache in her bones and the stench of pig shit.

Why must she be punished for her mother’s choice to lay with a half-elf?

Not even the pigs were kind to her. It was as if they knew something about her was wrong. They could smell her tainted blood. It was a wonder they did not eat her. She supposed they knew that living was a far worse punishment for her crimes.

What crime had she committed?

Her father, or at least her mother’s husband, looked at her with disgust whenever he was unlucky enough to come across her. Her siblings hardly even looked at her at all. They ran and played with each other, never once asking her to join them. They did not want to play with her. They did not want to be reminded of the beast that slept in the barn. Her mother hadn’t been much better. She’d fed her, at most once per day and in the dark of night, but she fed her scraps from dinner that her siblings had picked clean.

She sucked bitter marrow from bones and got splinters in her gums. She ate the hard molding bread that was soaked in mud after being thrown in the pen. She ate worse than the pigs most days.

What would be the point of starving? Why should she give them the satisfaction of curling up in a ball and dying like an animal? Even if they did not want her, she would not make it easy. They did not deserve easy.

She wasn’t even worth half a pig. That fact had given her the courage to die, but death had refused her plea. How much was death worth? More than four marks, surely.

Not ever her chaos would listen. She cried for it, screamed for it, yet it still would not listen. If she could not find a place here, where would there be left for her to go? Who would want an ugly little girl with twisted aching bones and not an ounce of magic within her?

Chaos had refused to come to her. Everyone else cast with ease, as they advanced through their studies she was left behind. It took her weeks what they mastered in minutes. What was the point of all of her suffering if she could not even channel it into Chaos?

Sometimes a flower is just a flower and the best thing it can do for us is to die. But she was not even a flower. People loved flowers, nurtured them. They were gifts, they were beautiful. Yennefer was a weed, crooked and shabby. She would wilt and die while the girls around her bloomed into something thorny and beautiful.

Istredd had loved her, at least he let her believe he did. But men could always be relied on to be men. They take and they use. He took her loyalty, her love, and the secret of her blood, and gave it away as if it was nothing. To him it was nothing. To him she was nothing.

If they would not give her love, she would settle for power.

They had taken her father’s life, her mother’s love, her humanity, her beauty, her heart. She was owed. She had spent her entire life hurting, if this pain will give her power, she will welcome it.

She will be reborn.

Painted in the ashes of her fertility, her body ripped itself apart. Every ounce of pain she’d ever felt burned through her all at once. Even with her screams, she could still hear her tearing flesh and cracking bones.

It was only fair that the blood that had cursed her had been her place of rebirth. She had risen from the ashes of that weak and pained little girl and become something new. Something beautiful, something powerful.

What was love in the face of beauty or power? Her entire life had built to this. The starving, the pain, her uterus, it had all been for this.

She held the power of a king, of an army, of a sorceress. She held more power than she could have ever dreamed. Who needed love in her position? Love required trust. How could a woman in her position trust anyone?

Had her pain been worth it? Had her sisters, whom she’d pushed into the waters of Aretuza, been worth it?

Kings were idiots, armies only knew how to die, and if being a sorceress meant sitting in courts dealing with meaningless mortal squabbles day in and day out for decades, perhaps it had not been worth it after all.

King Virfuril discards every daughter he sires as if they were less than his own blood. Not even blood was loyalty, not even blood was love. If a father could not love his own daughters, who would? Certainly, not their mother who is with child again, and rumors of another daughter do not bode well for her fate.

Would her father have loved her? It was his blood that had cursed her after all. Maybe if he had survived the Great Cleansing he would have come and taken her away from it all. Claimed her as his own with pride, twisted aching bones and all. But he was dead. He’s been dead for nearly fifty years now.

No one was coming to save her now. She would have to save herself.

~

Julian was the only son the Count and Countess de Lettenhove. He would be the one to carry his father’s name. His sisters were far too kind and far too beautiful to remain unmarried for long.

He was the third of five. His sex had been a blessing to his parents. Finally, a son to carry on the name, to ensure his father’s legacy, just as he had ensured his own father’s.

His younger sisters were nearly a decade younger than him. That’s how long it had taken his parents to decide they didn’t want him to be the one to inherit the estate and inherit his father’s title. Having his name was enough of a disgrace. They’d tried again, but a sixth child would not come. They were stuck with him.

It was hardly his fault that his parents could not see all of the beauty in the world. They did not see the rainbows after the rain, or the flash of a dragonfly’s wings. He saw it. He felt it. He felt the buttercups bloom every season, breaching the earth and stretching out their petals to feel the warmth of the sun.

His parents saw the sun as little other than a nuisance. Sure it grew their crops but that was all. They did not feel its warmth, they did not see it kiss the horizon good morning and good night. They thought it blinding and harsh, just as they thought of him.

Little boys are not meant for politics. Little boys are meant for dreams, for laughter, for singing with the birds, and playing in the grass.

They did not want this life for him. He was a Pankratz. He was a noble and should behave as such, to do anything else is a disgrace. How can a child be a disgrace?

Julian dreamed of the sun swallowing him whole. If he lived in the sun he would be warm forever and his parents would never be able to find him, for they did not see the sun.

His first poems were about the sun. They were not very good, what with him being barely twelve and all. If he had truly captured the essence of the sun then perhaps they would not have burned in the fireplace of the dining room after Julian had been foolish enough to perform his composition during dinner.

He had wept over the ashes and his father had taken the switch to him for his troubles.

So he kept writing, in hopes that one day, he could capture the sun. If he could capture the sun he would not burn. Or at least, that had been his logic when he was a boy.

But he was older now, and he knew he could not capture the sun. He could only imitate it and hope the sun would be amused and merciful, as his parents should have been.

His parents of course, still thought him a stupid little boy. For a boy who had his nose stuck in books all day he certainly hasn’t learned a damned thing.

His father heartily disapproved of his creative endeavors. So much so that he’d had all of the fiction in the estate locked away, and when that had only forced him to compose more he’d taken all the parchment and ink from his wing.

When he’d caught Julian occupying his now idle hands with the stable boy, he’d been so furious he’d returned his books. A soft-minded creative for an heir was better than an heir with no wife. That of course didn’t mean he’d stopped with the stable boy, instead began similarly sharing his creativity with one of the maids on the estate. That would please his father, certainly. It had not.

He dreamed of an escape. There was only so much he could imagine about the world from between the lines of his favorite books. The world was full of magic and monsters and he would see it all, even if it killed him, for he would certainly die here without it.

Every time he looked at his father he saw his greatest fear. Not just in his harsh words and disgusted gaze, not just in the unfortunate similarity of their features, but in his soullessness. The man had never smiled as far as Julian could remember. Not even at the births of his two youngest daughters.

Julian feared a man who never saw beauty, what was there without it? He’d heard stories of his father, who used to be charming and boisterous, who had wooed his mother away from another man. Some of the older servants of the estate spoke of his father’s youth. You are just like your father was, Julian. You will grow into a fine Count, just as he did.

What had he done for them to wish upon him a fate worse than death? To become a man so unhappy, so joyless, and for what? For a title? For land? Money? What was it all worth if you could not appreciate the buttery soft silk sheets, the sweet air from the peach orchard at harvest season, the golden flash of light when the sun rises over the hill every morning? What was it all worth if you could not love it?

He would rather die.

Death, he imagines, is much sweeter than his father. It frees one from pain, rather than cause it. It lays you down to rest, pressing its cool lips to your cheek. No expectations, no demands. Death would love him in a way his father never could.

A noble family from a nearby district passed through Lettenhove, and custom dictated they offer their spare rooms for them to break from their travels. The Countess de Stael had indulged him with amusement when he recited lyrical prose about the way her hair shone in the evening sun. She had told him of Oxenfurt, an academy on the coast that was full of the best and brightest minds on the Continent. He would fit right in.

Seven months later, early on his eighteenth birthday, he had collected his most prized compositions, books, and weather-friendly clothes. The works he could not carry, he burned. They were sure to burn them anyways, he was saving them time. Julian was ashes. It was more of him than they deserved.

If he was not good enough as he was, he would remake himself. If he could not be good enough for them, he would make himself good enough for someone else. Jaskier pulled himself from the ashes of his compositions and slipped out into the twilight.

~

Geralt had never expected to share his past with anyone other than a witcher. How could anyone else possibly understand what he had been through? Most saw him as a beast no less monstrous than the creatures they paid him to kill.

Yennefer had not been allowed to trust, not even her sisters, especially not her sisters. She had fought for her place in this world, to trust anyone would mean letting them see the rickety foundations on which she was built.

Jaskier could not please everyone. It was a crushing fact that we worked every day of his life to disprove. Surely, if he wrote the right song, the perfect song, everyone could like him, even if just for a couple of minutes.

But here the three of them sat, far too deep in their cups to still be considered fun, sharing pathetically sad stories of their collectively shit childhoods. A lantern between them cast interesting little shapes across the splintering tavern wall.

Jaskier had taken their musings and spun some slurred metaphor about a bird made of fire, rising from the ashes of what it had once been. Taking all of the bad stuff that made them and burning it for fuel so that they may soar across the sky and into the sun.

Geralt scoffed. “You’ll die if you fly into the sun.”

“Not if my wings are made of fire.” The bard replied.

Yennefer knocked her cup into his. “There's no such thing.”

“Neither of you have any appreciation for metaphor.”

She laughed but it bubbled into a hiccup. “Your metaphors are shit.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel,” Jaskier wet his throat with another swig from his cup, “then I suppose I will have to fly away without you.”

Geralt finally met his eyes, it looked like it took quite a bit of effort. The warm light shone in his eyes like the sun. “No, you won’t.”

“No, I don’t think I will.”