Chapter Text
“So, which one’s yours?”
The question made him wince.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked. And sure, he looked a little out of place at the playground but the speed with which people decided he was out of place there made him uncomfortable.
The question- well, best case scenario the person that asked was trying to make conversation and it’d run on and he’d end up having to explain his complicated family situation. Worst case scenario they were trying to gauge whether he was some sort of creep coming to the park to stare at kids that weren’t his.
He would give the woman the benefit of the doubt, but he’d done that plenty of times before and it hadn’t often ended well for him.
He squared his shoulders, but didn’t take his eyes off of the kids attempting to push each other off the swings- mostly to make sure they didn’t get in the way of any younger children that were just trying to play.
“The little shit about to take a dive and eat a mouthful of sand right… now,” he mumbled, as he watched Lambert drop face-first onto the ground when his friend gained the upper hand.
They stood in silence, waiting with bated breath to see how the boy would respond so he could decide whether he’d need to go help. When the kid raised his head it quickly became clear his worry was unwarranted. Lambert was cackling maniacally and immediately got up to rush right back into the game.
Geralt let out a relieved sigh, and the woman apparently took that as her cue to speak again.
“How old is he, ten? I thought you said you didn’t have kids,”
He frowned.
“Yeah, he’s not my kid, but uh… well, I don’t know when I would have said I-”
He’d turned to look at her while he spoke, and halfway through he realized she was painfully familiar, and he might, in fact, have told her he didn’t have kids.
“Oh woah, hey, Yennefer... I- wow. It’s been a while,”
The corner of her mouth lifted in one of the small, restrained smiles that had haunted his dreams for quite a while after she’d disappeared from his life without a word five years ago.
“I’m surprised you remember,” she said, “good to see you again, Geralt,”
“You’re hard to forget,”
It was only half a joke.
He’d admit to himself he’d probably nearly driven his friends away with how much he’d talked about her. Until she left, that was, and his gushing turned to brooding silence.
She seemed more than happy to step past the way their acquaintance had ended without either of them mentioning it explicitly, and he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or annoyed.
“So, not your kid, huh?”
He shook his head and swallowed back a remark about how good she looked. Over the five years she’d been out of his life she’d clearly grown into herself more. To be fair they’d both been very young then, and he was sure he didn’t look quite the boy he’d been anymore either.
“Not my kid, no. My brother, Lambert,”
“Oh,” she said, “right, I remember you talking about him,”
He forced himself to turn away from her and keep an eye on his brother. It wasn't easy, and part of him screamed to keep his full attention trained on her and her alone. He cleared his throat.
“Yeah,”
“Babysitting duty, hm?”
“Something like that,”
His eyes followed Lambert’s attempt to climb up the slide for a moment before he quickly glanced at Yennefer again.
“So, which one’s yours then?”
It was mostly a joke, she hadn’t had kids when they knew each other either. Then again, she’d been twenty when they first met in one of their shitty-but-mandatory ethics lectures. He wasn’t sure what kind of answer he expected. He did know it wasn’t a nod towards a group of girls playing in the sandpit, a soft smile on her face when she quietly said, “the blondest one you can find, ironically enough,”
And maybe he would have been struck by the irony of how he’d always made it clear how much he loved her pitch-black curls, back then. Maybe he would have even made a joke about genetics, and the hours of biology classes she’d skipped to hook up with him in his off-campus apartment, when they were younger.
Now he just felt an odd void in his chest, an almost painful emptiness he couldn’t quite explain.
“Oh, wow, you- uh… well, bit late, but congrats on the baby, I guess… What’s her name?” he fumbled through a sentence and winced at how little sense it made in the end.
“Cirilla. And almost five years late, but thank you,”
She sounded amused enough, and he considered himself lucky that she was too busy looking at her daughter to notice his mind taking a momentary absence from his body.
Almost five. She must’ve met the kid’s father very quickly after not quite breaking things off with him. Or maybe the father was the reason she’d disappeared from his life without a word.
“A lot has changed in town,” she said after a while, when the silence had apparently stretched longer than it should have, “I’m pleasantly surprised that at least you’re still here, it makes coming back easier. It feels… a little less like starting over, like this,”
Geralt shook himself out of his thoughts.
“Yeah, a lot can change in five years,” he agreed, “are you- did you move back? Or are you visiting someone?”
“We recently moved here,” she said, and it seemed like she wanted to say more, but was interrupted by her phone chirping an alert for a text. She uttered an apology, checked the message briefly and then looked back up at him with a small, almost regretful smile.
He nodded in understanding before she had a chance to explain.
“Time to leave then?”
“Yeah, we have an appointment, but maybe we can exchange contact information? I don’t really know anyone here anymore, and it’d be good to… catch up, maybe?”
And Geralt knew it was a bad idea. She’d really, really messed him up when she left, and it had taken him a while to feel like himself again, let alone feel like he’d moved on. Then again, he’d never really been good at denying her. Besides, he found himself longing for closure again, now that the wound she’d left him with had been reopened so abruptly with a single glance at the eyes that had plagued him during most of his early twenties.
“Sure, I’ll give you my number and you can just… let me know when you have time,”
---
Geralt was woken from the strange dream by his alarm a few days later.
It was weird, really. He’d never had issues with sleeping, never dealt with nightmares or recurring dreams or anything of the sort before. Ever since seeing Yennefer again three days ago though that’d changed.
He yawned and sat up, blindly reaching for his phone to turn the blaring of his alarm off.
The same odd, hollow feeling he’d woken up with the last few mornings sat in his chest as the remainder of the dream slowly sunk in and then faded into the background.
It’d been the same thing each night; Yennefer sitting in the living room of his old college apartment, a baby he’d never seen but knew on some level had to be her daughter in her arms. He hadn't actually gotten a look at the girl’s face, but in his dream he recognized parts of his own reflection in her fine features. They suited her better than they ever had him.
A quiet curse escaped him.
God, he hadn’t really thought about her in years, had finally gotten past all of this bullshit, and seeing her once was enough for him to start imagining foolishly about having a damn family with her. Even while they were together that topic had never come up.
He forcefully rubbed a hand over his face and swung his legs over the edge of his bed to get up.
Maybe he wasn’t as over this whole thing as he’d thought. He could only hope that getting some closure would help.
If he ever got closure. Yennefer had sent him a very brief text on the evening of the day they met, just to make sure he had her number as well, and then it’d been mostly radio silence apart from the handful of short questions about where in town to find this or that.
It frustrated him how much he felt like a 23 year old punk again every single time her name popped up on his phone. Now that he was a real adult he knew what they’d had back then was far from sustainable, they’d been too young and stubborn, but something like nostalgia sent a jolt through him whenever she texted him anyway.
He scrubbed the lingering remains of the dream away in a scalding shower, and then rushed out to make the time he’d promised his father he’d be picking Lambert up.
His much younger brother had been a bit of a surprise, when his mother found out she’d fallen pregnant at forty. His parents had fostered and adopted Geralt at four a good fifteen years before that, had always been told a biological family was as good as impossible between the two of them.
Yes, Lambert had been a surprise and a blessing, until the pregnancy had turned for the worst, and his little brother’s premature birth had cost their mother her life.
His father’s depression following her death hadn’t been kind on either of his children, and Geralt’s grades had suffered significantly under the stress of stepping up to take care of the baby. That, stupidly enough, was how he’d eventually ended up in the same classes Yennefer was in back then, to make up for missed credits and retake courses he should have passed long before.
Their father had picked himself back up long ago, and he was trying whatever he could to be as decent a dad to Lambert as he’d been to his eldest, but he wasn’t as young as he’d once been, and his youngest was an energetic child. A bit of a hiccup in the man’s health had made it difficult for him to get the boy out of the house, and since Geralt could work from home most days and plan his hours as he saw fit he’d taken to picking his brother up on days without school or whenever their father needed a break.
He loved Lambert, but he hoped it wouldn’t be too long before his schedule could go back to normal.
As it was though he drove out to grab his brother, and then continued their journey to meet one of his friends at the park.
He didn’t get much of a chance to hang out with Eskel anymore these days. Between his friend’s insane work schedule and spending his weekends volunteering, and Geralt’s work hours and obligations when it came to his family it was difficult to find the time. They managed though, and his oldest friend was a saint about spending their manly bonding time while Lambert ran around the playground or played games on either of their consoles.
Eskel ruffled Lambert’s hair, who grumbled about it mostly out of habit and then ran off to join a group of kids. He really didn’t need constant supervision anymore, but there was no sense in driving him out to a park and picking him up later just so he and Eskel could sit and talk somewhere else for the duration of it, and so they dropped down on a bench with the to-go coffees his friend had gotten them.
“So, how’re you feeling?”
Geralt bought himself some time by taking a sip, averting his eyes to consider his answer.
“It’s- I’m fine,”
Eskel hummed noncommittally
“She call you yet?”
“No, just a text every so often. Nothing too interesting, really,”
“So you guys are friendly enough, then?”
“I guess so, yeah,”
“Do you think you can? Be her friend, I mean,”
“Sure, why not?”
"Will it be worth it?"
"Why wouldn't it?"
His friend just hummed again, and it spoke volumes. Their friend group had spent a lot of time cursing Yennefer's existence, five years ago. She’d done some serious damage to his self esteem, left him with a fair amount of trust issues he'd struggled to get rid of.
Silence stretched for a handful of moments as they each took a drink. Then Eskel spoke again.
“And how do you feel about the kid?”
“Why should I feel any type of way about the kid?” God, he hoped he didn’t sound as uncomfortable as he felt. “It’s not like I’m trying to date her or anything, it’s not like that, Esk,”
His friend stayed silent just a tad too long, and when Geralt turned to look at him he found usually kind brown eyes giving him an exasperated, disbelieving look.
“What?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t considered the possibility, man,”
“The possibility of what, going out with her? Nah, I'm not that masochistic, I-”
“No, you absolute moron, how old did you say the kid was again?”
“Four, nearly five, but what does that-”
“And how long ago did Yennefer leave?”
Answering that question felt like a trap, and Geralt stared down into his coffee cup like it would explain what his friend wanted from him.
“Just over five years ago. So?”
“Almost five years old, plus nine-ish months of pregnancy- are you seriously trying to tell me you haven’t even for a second considered that this kid might be yours? That maybe she freaked out about a pregnancy and that’s why she left? Timelines match up, don’t they?”
“I-” Geralt felt the blood drain out of his face, a slight sense of nausea coming over him. He hadn't given it enough thought to factor the time a pregnancy would take in. Still, it didn’t feel like a realization, more like a puzzle piece that his brain had purposely been keeping from him finally slid into place with the outside confirmation of what he should have already known. “But if that’s- why wouldn’t she have told me?”
“Don't ask me, man. God knows what went on in her head at the best of times,”