Chapter Text
“Can anyone hear me?...”
The woman’s voice, soft and entreating, called out as she stepped slowly through the fog of battle. Her words were not spoken aloud, they travelled telepathically searching for a response far and wide. No-one answered.
“Is anyone still alive?...”
The woman was strong yet she needed help. She was injured. Betrayed by a friend under duress. The smell of death was everywhere.
“Tissaia, I need you...”
“Tissaia?”
“Tissaia?”
“Are you awake, Tissaia?“
She blinked herself awake, trying to focus on the young nurse in lilac-coloured scrubs standing beside her hospital bed. The nurse was holding a clipboard and pen, looking at her expectantly.
She frowned. “What did you call me?”
The nurse smiled. “I said ‘Are you awake, Helen’. Would you prefer to be called Ms Weekes?”
“No, no, that’s fine. I thought I heard… Never mind.”
“I see you’re still in the woods. Take a second to wake up.”
Detective Inspector Helen Weekes pushed herself up in bed with some discomfort. She’d had a strange dream. She could barely remember it now. She tried to chase what was going on in the dream, what was happening, who and where she was, but the memories fled faster than she could catch them.
The events of the previous day came back to her with much more clarity and explained the soreness between her legs and the plastic padded maternity underwear that she wore. Her muscles ached all over her body, worse than she’d ever had in her life even at training camp, and she felt crampy, wet, and miserable.
The nurse strapped a blood pressure cuff around her arm. “How’s the pain?”
It’s a fucking delight , she thought sarcastically. It feels like I’ve been ripped apart down there .
“I’ve had worse.”
“Scale of 1 to 10?”
“Four.” Liar.
The nurse pursed her lips and nodded sympathetically. She ripped the velcro cuff away and started jotting notes into the chart. “Alright. I’ll get you some analgesia. We’ll have you up for a short walk down the corridor later this afternoon. How does that sound?”
She grimaced. “Terrible. But necessary I suppose.”
The nurse chuckled and turned around at the sound of the door opening behind her. A second older nurse in navy scrubs held the door open as she pushed a plastic cot on wheels through the doorway. There was a little blanket-wrapped bundle riding in the cot.
“Oh, look who’s here! Someone’s come to visit.”
The older nurse wheeled the cot until it was next to the bed. She had a strong Northern accent and matronly face. “Baby had a good night. Was getting lonely out there and wanted to come see Mum.”
Helen felt her heart jump into her throat at the sight of her baby. She reached out for the tiny bundle who was swaddled in the standard-issue NHS baby blanket. Seconds felt like years until the weight settled into her arms. Her chest felt full to bursting with love for this little blob of a creature. She breathed in the baby’s scent. God she smelled amazing. A riot wouldn’t have been able to tear her eyes away from staring at the perfect face of her daughter.
“She’s okay then? I got punched in the stomach when I was 10 weeks along. I’d just found out and I was still working in the field-”
The young nurse placed a hand on her shoulder. “Everything’s fine. Don’t worry. So have you thought of any names yet?”
Helen remembered finding a hand-written list in her dead partner’s things. He’d wanted a flowery girl’s name. Honouring his memory by choosing Lily or Holly was an option. But she’d always hated flower names. She wondered how someone like herself would have fared, having to introduce herself with an overly feminine name to some drug dealer who refused to cooperate in interrogation or to some department colleague who still had the belief that women shouldn’t serve on the force. Her short stature made it hard enough to be taken seriously.
She shook her head. “I thought I’d know which name when I saw its face.”
“Give it time. Get to know her and she’ll tell you her name.”
“Right.” She tried not to scoff at the sappy sentiment.
The baby’s face scrunched when the little puff of air hit her face. Unhappy grizzling noises followed. Two tiny eyes opened halfway revealing dark blue eyes, unfocused yet searching. The baby books that she’d skimmed through had said something about newborns not being able to see properly for the first few weeks.
Helen spent the rest of the day trying to rest in between visits with the baby. The pain settled to a manageable level, thanks to the drugs, but not enough that it would let her sleep. As promised, a nurse got her up to get cleaned up in the bathroom and to go for a slow walk down the corridor. Before she knew it evening visiting hours had arrived.
Her Dad and his partner Sid came with flowers, a basket full of disposable nappies, packets of wipes, and a teddy that was at least twice the size of the baby. Helen tried to bear it with good humour, but she couldn’t help feeling like they were treating her with kid gloves -- as though they only saw Helen, the abuse survivor with the dead partner and an incarcerated bastard of an ex-lover. Not Helen Weekes, Detective Inspector, Manchester Metro P.D., who just happened to have an infant accessory now. Her sister Jenny and her husband turned up, thankfully without their three kids. Her dear friend Phil dropped by with a bottle of non-alcoholic pink champagne and stayed just long enough to make her laugh and feel somewhat like herself again.
There were plenty of cuddles and photos taken all around. Everyone commented on the colour of the baby’s eyes, which were a deep dark blue.
“It might change,” said her Dad. “You and your sister had blue eyes at that age too.”
“Dad. We’ve still got blue eyes.”
“I know, I know! I was jus’ saying. Don’t get your heart set on the colour.”
“What colour were Paul’s eyes?” said Peter, bless him, having no idea what he’d really asked.
Helen looked back down at the baby so that they wouldn’t see the lies. “Brown.”
It made fuck-all difference now what colour Paul’s eyes were. Or Adam’s. As far as she was concerned her baby didn’t have either of their eyes, nor any other features belonging to them. She vowed she wasn’t going to torture herself by searching for a resemblance of biological fatherhood in her daughter’s face. She would never know the truth and was determined not to let it matter.
Later, once they were alone. Helen trailed a finger down the baby’s soft cheek. Tiny eyes popped open again, staring straight back at her. The baby’s eyes were so blue they were almost violet. The colour nagged at her, begging her to remember.
DI Weekes had met many different people in the course of her career and so she dismissed the persistent feeling that she’d seen eyes like that before.
“Why?! Why do you want a baby .”
Tissaia couldn’t understand it. After all this time wondering what had become of her protegee after she abandoned her post at the court of King Demavend, she learned that Yennefer had surfaced in a backwater village called Rinde. For this . Taunting the Brotherhood with her continued existence and all for what. Over a baby. Over a lost chance at motherhood?
How could she want a role so common, so banal, so much less than she was worth? It was the same all over the Continent, for peasant and noble women alike. Their lives revolved around babies as a result of men's pleasure, men's choices, men's power. Sorceresses, though, were meant for more important ventures than motherhood. Their beauty, intellect, and influence endured far longer than a single lifetime.
Of course Yennefer would want the one thing that she’d been denied. She had always been perverse like that. She’d been a stubborn thorn in Tissaia’s side ever since she’d been pulled out of a pigpen. She was impossible to ignore, impossible to forget.
“I know it was you.” Yennefer stared at Tissaia’s reflection in her vanity mirror. Her eyes were hard and the colour of amethyst. There was no hint of the mutual respect and fondness that had formed between them by the end of Yennefer’s tenure at Aretuza.
The Arch-mistress sat on the edge of the bed and idly fingered the gossamer curtains. “To what are you referring.”
“' The Poisoned Source ’ by Tissaia de Vries. I finally got around to reading it. It was you who instituted the policy at Aretuza that all sorceresses be sterilised upon ascension. But not because it’s necessary for performing the enchantments. That was all bullshit!”
Tissaia’s eyes narrowed. “It is necessary. For the good of all involved, none more so than for the sake of the potential children.”
“No. You took that potential from me. You took everything from me.”
“I gave you everything I could. You still can’t see that.”
“I want more. I deserve more.” Yennefer leapt up and in a flash she was leaning over Tissaia, bearing over her like an angry thunderstorm. But Tissaia could catch lightning with her hands and did not flinch. It was many years since she’d been able to reach out telepathically and find what was in her protegee’s mind. It was as impenetrable as a steel vault now.
“For what it’s worth…” Tissaia said softly. “If I could reverse it for you, I would.”
“You only say that because you know you can’t. It's beyond you.”
“Believe what you need to. But for pity’s sake forgo the charlatans and quacks with the supposed infertility cures. Their ignorance is understandable, yours is pathetic. I taught you better than that.”
Yennefer snarled. “You sit there with your intact uterus saying how ridiculous of me it is to want a child when you could have one whenever you want. You still have a choice, I don’t!”
“Yennefer, dear.” said Tissaia, looking up at her with her insufferably calm countenance. “If you wanted a child you could have your pick of the unclaimed street urchins that litter the Continent. You could call it your own, smother it with love, and no-one would object. What you want is to be loved in return. To not be looked upon and rejected. To feel worthy of it all. You think a child birthed from your own body could never grow to hate you? There are no guarantees.”
A cold blank expression spread over Yennefer’s face and she leaned back up to her full height. “We’re done. I will never come back to Aretuza. But I will find a way to get what I want.”