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She finds the first one in late February, poking its obnoxious yellow head bravely up through the snow. Stupidly up through the snow really; its way too early for this minor thaw to be real spring. The next frost will freeze the water in the dandelion’s stem, roots and petals, bursting them from the inside as the ice expands. Altogether not a pleasant way to go… if a flower had feelings, that is. But when the woman she’d hired to help out around the house tuts at it and moves to pull it up, Yennefer stops her with a hand on her arm.
“No. Leave it.”
That nets her a politely respectful yet incredulous look. “It’s a weed, ma’am. Gotta get it out by the root or you’ll have hundreds come May.”
“They’re medicinal. Good for the digestion,” she responds, which is true if not honest. In another second she’s shoved the sharp pang of whatever-feeling-that-was safely behind the thick, barred door she’s constructed in her mind marked “Do Not Open Under Any Circumstances” and continues up the three stone steps to her front door.
In her peripheral vision she sees the woman glance back at the flower, fingers twitching with the urge to act, but she finally follows Yennefer inside without accosting it.
Saved, she thinks, but then puts that feeling forcefully away as well. There’s a lot of work to be done in getting the place liveable again after she’d let it stand empty for so long and no time like the present… given that she apparently had a present.
She’d come back to her house in Vengerberg last week fully expecting to find armed mages waiting to take her into custody. That that hadn’t happened was still a slightly sore spot. If Yennefer of Vengerberg gets so low she’s given up hope and is willing to turn herself in, the least reality could do is accommodate her melodramatic self-destruction. God knows, it’d never bothered trying to stop her doing something stupid before. But when she’d arrived, the house had been cold, dark and utterly empty. Eight days of listless sulking had been long enough both to convince her that she was not at risk of being imminently abducted and to slightly dull the stinging memory of Geralt’s heartbroken eyes. Enough, at least, that she’d been able to shove it firmly behind her door, slam it shut and start thinking rationally for what felt like the first time in forever.
Tissaia. It has to be Tissaia. The old witch had clearly spilled Yennefer’s secret to the Council—that she was now, had been since Sodden, and would evidently remain for the foreseeable future, completely powerless. Tissaia may have even hinted that the firestorm which decimated the Nilfgaardian forces hadn’t been Vilgefortz’ after all as a way of encouraging that infuriatingly machinating man to leave her alone lest his reputation suffer with her. Since the Cintran princess is out of the picture, her connection to Geralt is meaningless to them, and with the word on the street being that Nilfgaard and the Elves are on the move against the human kingdoms, she can’t really blame them for hardly ranking her as a viable threat. The only thing she could be a real danger to now is the dandelion in her garden, and she’s already spared that pest on a nonsensical whim.
There’s a moment when Yennefer wonders if the other woman is correct and this act of mercy will come back to bite her in the ass as all attempts at kindness inevitably do. But there is dusting and sweeping and mending and cleaning and restocking and organizing and as long as she keeps moving it’s easy to put it out of her mind. It’s only a single flower after all. What could it really do?
*
The world keeps going on, just as it always has, and that’s bullshit. There’s war, of course, which she supposes is technically different but only on a very narrow timescale. Historically, there’s always war. But what’s pissing her off is the sun keeps rising and the garden keeps growing and the rain falls and the spring comes and it shouldn’t. Because the world has a fucking hole in it, a gaping, oozing, festering wound where a person isn’t, and, damn it, that should have changed something.
Every snippet of birdsong, every sparkling sunshower, every audacious yellow dandelion sets her teeth on edge. It’s frankly a relief when Geralt arrives; compared to some amorphous concept, he’s something nice and solid to rage against.
“Yen,” he says softly, standing on her doorstep, not entirely sure what to do with his hands.
She lets him in and makes him tea and waits for him to say something she can scream about. Knowing him, knowing her, it’s inevitable really.
He sips his tea and clears his throat before asking, “How have you been?”
She doesn’t bother responding to that inanity, only narrows her eyes.
But Geralt just bravely—always so damned bravely—meets her gaze. “That good, huh?”
“What do you want, Witcher?”
And she can’t read his mind anymore but she reads his reason clear as day in the tension in his jaw, the antsiness in his hands and the softness of his eyes. He’s worried about her. And that’s infuriating. Her mouth twists into a snarl before he can form a response.
“Get out.”
“Yen—”
“Out!” Her chair screeches across the kitchen tiles as she stands and points to the door.
His nostrils flare and he crosses his arms, but he doesn’t raise his voice. “No.”
“This is my house and you can’t—”
“You can’t make me, can you?” he interrupts.
She is confident that even without his enhanced hearing he must be able to hear her teeth grinding. “Yes, I am still useless, thank you for asking. Now take your insufferable bulk out of my damn kitchen and go fuck your—”
“It wasn’t your fault, Yen.”
The fire in her veins instantly turns to ice.
“Just because you were there doesn’t mean you were responsible.” It’s Geralt’s voice, but it’s not Geralt’s words. “You tried your best, you failed. It happens. That’s just… how it goes sometimes.”
It feels like the ice inside her is pressing inexorably outwards, bursting her blood vessels. An incomprehensible ache just under the surface of her skin. Just as painful as she had assumed when contemplating the fate of the too early dandelion.
“Last time, when we parted, after it happened, I didn’t say that, and I should have. I was—” He has to stop to swallow around a lump in his throat and Yennefer barely restrains the urge to scratch his eyes out. “I was upset, but I didn’t blame you. Don’t blame you. It wasn’t your—”
She can’t bear to hear him say it again, so she cuts him off. “Did Jaskier tell you that?”
He winces. It’s barely perceptible, he has such good control of his physicality, but she’s watching for it. “Yen—”
“Did it help you sleep at night when you heard it? Help you look at yourself in a mirror?” If he says, “Yes,” she’ll kill him for lying and if he says, “No,” she’ll kill him for daring to ply her with shallow platitudes.
But Geralt wisely doesn’t say anything. He just finishes his tea, puts the mug in the sink and pushes in his chair. For a moment she thinks he’s actually going to just cut his losses and leave, but, never one to abandon a hopeless cause, the witcher can’t help but add, “I’ll visit again, the next time I come through Vengerberg. I’ll say it as many times as you need to hear it.”
She throws her mug at his head. Blinded as she is by tears, she only knows she misses by the sound of the porcelain shattering on the wall. At first, he rests a heavy hand on her back as she sobs, grounding her through the worst of her hysterics, but by the time her vision is clear again, he’s made her another cup of tea and disappeared. Which shouldn’t be surprising. She’s told him, time and time again, whenever some weepy relative or wet-eyed loved one approached the witcher in the street with a job opportunity, how utterly embarrassing it is to be seen crying, and how she herself would rather die than let a living soul catch her in such a compromising position. And so, as instructed, he’d left.
And, low and behold, that makes her angry too.
The second cup, full as it is, makes a much more satisfying smash.
*
Yennefer’s summer blooms, exactly as predicted, in a suffusion of yellow. But, back in her royal babysitting days, she’d paid a very nice sum of money for this very nice house in a very nice part of Vengerberg, and if she wants to let the garden go to weed, she feels that’s her prerogative. Some of the neighbours feel differently, she knows, but they have not gone so far as to directly voice that opinion aloud, so she doesn’t consider it to be a problem. She’s been ignoring pointed glances and leading questions for longer than most of them have been alive.
They might be more vocal if they knew she was still powerless, but that particular bit of knowledge apparently hasn’t found its way into the ballrooms and parlours of Aedirn’s upper middle class yet. There are some whispers as to why she hasn’t opened up shop again, seeing as she’s been back for four months now, but the polite excuse that she doesn’t really need the money and is working on a private project stalls the worst of the gossip mongers. It still rankles her like nettles under her skin, though. Especially because, lately, the urge to act, to do something to fix this, is becoming unbearable and not having the power to do so is nothing short of excruciating.
She sits in the library and plays the altercation out in her mind a hundred different ways. She stirs the soup on the stove and sees dozens of little details that would have changed the outcome had she only noticed them at the time. She combs her hair at the vanity in her bedroom and catalogues a full sixty-two mistakes she had managed to make in that fatefully brief interaction. By the time she’s in the garden, picking dandelion leaves for a salad, she must be at a thousand ways she could have fixed it, if only she had another chance.
And it’s that thought, one thousand, coupled with the wispy grey dandelion fuzz on the stem in front of her that triggers the memory of her and her mother in a meadow when she was very young, back before her mother had completely given up on her.
“A thousand pure wishes on the dandelion’s seeds, Janka. It’s old magic. The seeds will float away and carry your wish to the spirits. One thousand, and then one of them will grant it and make you well.”
She knows it is not real magic, not Aretuza magic, nothing but an old wives’ tale. But it’s also all the magic she has right now. One thousand sincere wishes on dandelion fluff.
Ridiculous, she thinks.
And then, one, when she blows.
*
Three hundred and forty-eight.
There are not, she discovers, actually hundreds of dandelions in her garden. At least, not in fluff at the same time. So she takes to walking the streets and parks of Vengerberg in the afternoon, wishing.
Five hundred and twenty-three.
People are starting to talk around town now. No amount of carefully curated mystique can make up for such bizarre behaviour.
Seven hundred and sixty-six.
She wonders if this is what ghosts feel like, wandering their prescribed paths day in day out. She doesn’t remember how many days it’s been, one bleeding into the other like ink through water until the whole world seems to be the soft grey of dandelion seeds.
Nine hundred and fourteen.
She finds Geralt on her front step when she gets home. It isn’t the first time he’s visited since she threw the mug at him that spring, but it is the first time she doesn’t feel like chasing him off. She hasn’t been feeling much of anything at all, really.
“You can come in,” she tells him, “if you promise not to say it.”
“Hm.” He considers her for a moment. “Just once, out here, and then I won’t say it again today.”
Yennefer sighs and motions for him to go ahead.
“It wasn’t your fault, Yen.”
She almost welcomes the sting. At least it’s a sensation. Reaching past him to open the door, she mutters, “You weren’t even there.”
“I know.” He stands in the hall, waiting for her to decide what to do. But she just stares dumbly back at him until he finally suggests, “Tea?”
Not having any reason not to, Yennefer trudges to the kitchen and puts the kettle on. He comes to stand behind her, but doesn’t touch her. Defeated, she leans back into the solid mass of him and he brings his hands up around her waist. Despite the fact she can’t see his face while they are standing like this, back to front, she closes her eyes.
“You weren’t even there, so how do you know it wasn’t my fault?”
“You told me what happened.”
“Maybe I lied.”
“Did you?”
The kettle boils and they break apart while Yennefer fills the pot with leaves and finds two mugs for them. They stare in silence at their hands while it steeps, Yennefer not sure what to say and Geralt clearly trying not to break his promise and repeat his stupid mantra again.
Once the tea is poured and the silence has become well and truly uncomfortable, Geralt’s lip twists up in a sardonic half smirk. “Honestly, I didn’t think you liked him that much.”
And she’s back in the inn, remembering the utter relief she had felt at hearing him play his melodramatic break-up song. And she’s back on the boat, baring her soul and somehow finding solace instead of mockery. And she’s back in that damned room, watching the fire mage murder him again while she, powerless, can’t do a damned thing.
“Shit,” she hears Geralt say and the scrape of a chair. “I didn’t mean— That was— I’ll go—”
“Don’t,” she whispers, blinded by the tears she hasn’t let fall yet. “Don’t leave if I start crying.”
“All right,” he gathers her into his arms. “All right, I won’t.”
It’s embarrassing, she hates every minute of it, but when she’s done the atmosphere feels a little fresher, less oppressive. Less grey. Like the world after rain.
“I think, I think we were becoming friends. Before… before I didn’t save him. I don’t… I don’t have a lot of friends.”
“He was good at making friends,” Geralt agrees, voice tight and strained, and he doesn’t tell her it wasn’t her fault again despite the fact he clearly wants to. But for the first time her mind is clear enough to realize exactly why he’s so certain in his conviction.
“Geralt,” she unwinds herself slightly from his grasp so she can see his face. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He looks awful, come to think of it. Thin, paler than usual, with a tension in his jaw that makes her teeth ache. He doesn’t respond, but she can see he doesn’t believe her in the dullness of his eyes.
Her voice, rough from crying, squeaks, but she's too insistent to be embarrassed. “You weren’t even there!”
All he manages is, “Hm,” which clearly means, “That’s the point, isn’t it?” and Yennefer could kick herself for not figuring this out sooner.
“What? You’re supposed to be everywhere at once? Saving everyone? Is that it?”
“You said it yourself. The torturer was after him for information on me and Ciri.”
“You’re not responsible if some asshole decides to start torturing people! You might as well say it’s Ciri’s fault because he was after her!”
“Yen,” he warns, voice dark and she knows that’s another death he blames himself for. After Yennefer had failed to stop the fire mage, while she was dead drunk in an attempt to purge the memory of lifeless blue eyes from her mind, the bastard had rounded up a few equally unsavory friends and caught up with Ciri and Geralt at the temple of Melitele. The little princess had scampered away to hide while Geralt fought, but had found herself trapped in a burning room with no way out.
“You said it. Jaskier said it.” Her voice only cracks a little on his name. “You try your best, but sometimes things just happen…” And she remembers exactly how hollow it had felt to hear that herself and lets the platitude trail off. It’s true. It has to be true. If there’s any expert on universal truth, it would be a poet, right? And they are each over a century old. They know it’s true, that time will make it true, but it doesn’t feel true. Not yet.
She envelops him in her arms, cradling his head against her chest. “What are you doing, you stupid, stupid man? How can you possibly be worried about me when—”
“I couldn’t save her. She needed me and I let her burn. There were just too many and I— I failed her. And Jaskier— I never— not since the mountain. So he’s gone, my… my friend, because of me. And the last thing I said to him—” Geralt has to pause to swallow hard around a lump in his throat. It doesn’t work, and a second later he proves a lie the rumour about witchers and not being able to cry. “And you were hurting and I couldn’t bear the thought of failing you too. Again. And—”
“Shh,” she soothes, stroking his hair and letting him soak the front of her bodice as she had soaked his shirt. “You’ve got me. I’m here. I’m here.”
*
Geralt stays.
It’s awkward and clumsy as they try to find a rhythm to their days and slowly kill each other with kindness.
“What do we do now?” she had asked and once again Geralt had responded with someone else’s—someone bright and beautiful and achingly absent’s—words. “We tell their stories.”
“He would have forgiven you,” she says one morning, and Geralt won’t speak to her for the rest of the day.
“You would have loved her like a daughter,” he tells her, and she makes him sleep on the couch.
But gradually, inexorably, it gets easier.
The morning Yennefer finds her one thousandth dandelion, she had even managed to laugh at an anecdote Geralt had told her about his and Jaskier’s first meeting and bread in unlikely places. She holds the final flower up, twirling it slowly for a minute before she softly inhales and then exhales, scattering the seeds. One thousand.
Nothing happens. She knew nothing would happen. She’d known, but it still stings for a second, although not as much as she thought it would.
Despite everything, she knows she’s lucky. She’s lucky Geralt is here, she’s lucky they managed to hold on to each other, she’s lucky they can move forward together, days upon days still to come. They’ve been given the time. They’ve been given the tools. They can be happy. Humans have been finding ways to move past tragedy for as long as there have been humans. And even if she could undo that day, there's no guarantee that new reality would turn out any better than this. Saving one man could create a cascade of changes that could quickly balloon out of control, like a single weed infesting an entire garden.
Sometimes, Tissaia's voice whispers in her ear, the best thing a flower can do for us is die.
But the world contains many weird and wondrous things—genies, demons, necromancy, portals between realities, maybe even portals between times if the legends of Elder Blood are correct—and she’s never been one to settle for less than everything she wants.
She plucks another fluffed dandelion as she stands and heads back towards the house. There is a library in Ebbing, deep in Nilfgaard territory, that is supposed to contain an original copy of ‘De Fonte Aen Elle.’ If they leave tonight, she and Geralt can be there inside a couple of weeks.
“One,” she blows and tosses the barren stem away.
She has work to do.