holes in butterfly wings

geralt & renfri, geralt & ciri

summary:  Geralt and his brothers are at the end of a contract when they collide with Renfri and her crew. Despite the circumstances of their meeting, Geralt offers Renfri a place to stay and a job - offering Renfri a chance to work legitimately and maybe heal from the wounds of her past. 

*platonic, modern AU, tw: referenced sexual assault

**entry for @witcherladies witcher ladies appreciation week day 1, Renfri and Ciri are my favorites after Yen 😍

Yennefer Appreciation Week: Favourite scene: Sodden Hill

People think that Chaos comes from nothing, but that's wrong.

Yennefer knows all about control. She has learned to push aside her anger and her spite, has tamed her tongue from dismissive acerbity to the sweet words of persuasion.

From her mother to Tissaia to the court nobles, all have counseled her to remain pleasing, and to acquiesce. To get what she wants by smiling and averting her eyes, by letting men think that her ideas are their own, as if this paltry shadow of power is the closest a woman like her will ever get to the real thing.

To draw it, you need a source.

She lets her Chaos explode. It is not tamed or controlled, not harnessed or leashed or deployed with rational tactics. It is base, it is visceral, and the flames leap from her fingers with a ferocity that is as natural as breathing.

The destruction is causes is ugly and brutal and more like freedom than anything she has tasted, and she revels in it. The flame sweeps aside trees and soldiers alike, leveling the world to ashes before her feet.

There is no power in compliance, and she is fueled by a fury at a world which has told her otherwise.

Fire is a forbidden source because it consumes those who draw from it.

Even as her mind fills with bright white light, she knows that she will be changed by this. That taking a single life leaves a mark that will never be washed away, and taking innumerable lives makes one something beyond human.

She is both appalled and heartened by this: She has become the thing of nightmares, she is both forever chained by this action and finally liberated by it.

Unless you're very talented. Then the body can withstand it, but it consumes the soul.

The fire burns something away in her as well. Her doubts and uncertainties, the lingering guilt that she is somehow not enough. The flames burn through the last vestiges of who she once was, that scared little girl who only wanted the approval of others. She will be free of the Brotherhood and its rules, of lascivious kings and small, petty men. She will remake herself anew.

She will rise from these ashes, reborn.

To Be Elven

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Yennefer hated her human side. It may have been her elven blood that twisted her spine, but it was humans who scorned her for it, who beat her for it, who considered her worthless for it. 

Her mother’s husband sold her for less than the pig cost. That was the worth humans assigned to her.

Yennefer didn’t know much about elves, but she’d heard rumors, occasionally, that they accepted their half-blood children. Why couldn’t her half-elf father have been raised by them? Why couldn’t she have been given to them?

Would the elves have hated her for things she could not control, or would they acknowledge her worth as she was: Yennefer, a girl who wanted more from life than what she’d been given? Or would she simply have been caught in the Great Cleansing, as her father was?

Istredd was the first to tell her anything of her father’s people, her people. In the Tower of the Gull, he told her that the skulls and bones the place were built on came from elves – not as slaves, but as the original sorcerers of the continent. 

“When humans and monsters all arrived after the Conjunction of the Spheres, elven mages taught the first humans how to turn chaos into magic. And then…the humans slaughtered them, so they could pretend the power had always belonged to them.” Istredd said, and Yennefer wasn’t prepared for how deeply that would hit her.

She remembered what Tissaia had taught them on their first day. Magic is organizing chaos. And while oceans of mystery remain, we have deduced that this requires two things: balance and control. Without them, Chaos will kill you.

Yennefer wondered whether humans had discovered anything about Chaos, or if the oceans of mystery remained because humans had killed their own teachers.

When all she had worked for was destroyed because the Brotherhood thought her elven blood tainted her, her hatred for her human blood solidified. They didn’t want her? Well fuck their rules then. Yennefer would claim all the power she had fought for, and if they got in her way, she would destroy them, just as they destroyed her father and his ancestors.

To Be Beautiful (YenWeek Day 4 Short)

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Yennefer had never had access to nice clothes. Aretuza had a uniform, a basic blue dress, and her mother’s husband had never bought her anything – as a child, she had worn whatever castaways her mother’s other children had. Certainly nothing beautiful.

But now she was going to be a King’ Mage. She was going to go to Aedirn and be seen as the power she truly was! And apparently, she would also get to wear beautiful clothes.

It was oddly exciting, choosing a dress to wear. Perhaps it was silly to feel like she was doing something forbidden, but Yennefer had never had this chance before and she was going to enjoy it. So what if he couldn’t wear the dress until after her transformation? She still got to touch it and hold it and imagine what it would be like, to be beautiful.

Yennefer was sure this was everything she had been waiting for all her life. Court was supposed to be glamorous, with people wearing such fine garments all the time! Yennefer would finally be powerful and acknowledged, and she could be so while wearing the pretty things that she’d never had before.

The Flower of Ambition

Ambition was a seed hidden within Yennefer, much like her magic, waiting to bloom. When she was young she didn’t feel that ravenous chasm of want inside her. Before she ever portalled into the Tower of the Gull, her dreams were as small as the world around her. 

She wanted nothing more than to survive one more day. She craved a kiss from one of the pretty village girls. Hoped that one day her father would see something more than a burden. A bastard. Less use to him than even the pigs they raised.  

Then Tissaia de Vries swept into her life and shattered her entire world. 

For the first time she tasted love on another’s lips. Felt within herself an unknowable force that thrummed with the beat of her heart. She had more than she ever dreamed of and she consumed it like a woman starved. 

Aretuza painted a shining image of a life within her grasp. Power beyond imagining. The ability to control mortal humans like pawns. Yennefer in her childlike naivety swallowed their lie whole. She hoped their path would satisfy the ever widening fissure of want inside her. 

With a smile she took Tissaia’s hand and followed her. She allowed Aretuza to distort her into their own image. And for what? 

The life of a court mage was just another pair of shackles. No amount of petty and pointless politics would fill the hollow within her chest. The promise of power rotted between her teeth. She was nothing more than yet another pawn for the Chapter.

This time she doesn’t need Tissaia to free her, she does it herself. She is Yennefer of Vengerberg, one of the most powerful mages of the Continent. And she will be cowed by no one and nothing. 

Her hunger grows as large as her anger. The void within her is limitless. She wants - everything. 

Everything that was ever denied to her. Everything that she could not have because she was a hunchback, a woman, barren, of elven blood. She wants every promise that was ever uttered to her. Every declaration that falls from a lover’s lips. 

She is Yennefer of Vengeberg. 

Her ambition knows no bounds. 

She will get what is owed to her. 

Men, Gods, and Fate be thrice damned.

To Be Magic (YenWeek Day 3 Short)

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“Magic is organizing chaos. And while oceans of mystery remain, we have deduced that this requires two things: balance and control. Without them, Chaos will kill you.”

Magic was difficult. It frustrated Yennefer endlessly. She tried so hard, but it was not a skill like reading or mathematics, where practice was enough to make a difference. Yennefer practiced and practiced and still, she could not lift the damned stone.

At least daisies were a nice snack. And if they wouldn’t obligingly wither to balance the magic of lifting her stone, then at least Yennefer got to enjoy the flowers. But it was infuriating – for the first time, Yennefer had discovered that she had the potential to be something more! Not just the bastard part-elf child, not just the girl with the twisted spine who slept with the pigs, but someone powerful, someone who could utilize Chaos to get what she wanted.

If only she could get the damn stone to lift!

Yennefer refused to give up. This was the only path she had – she could amount to nothing in life, as her mother’s husband had always said she would, or she could be magic and powerful and untouchable.

There had never been a question of which Yennefer would choose.

Yenweek Favorite Relationship: Yennskier

Excerpt from my very self indulgently soft one shot about Yennskier:  

Dreams of You

Yennefer’s eyes scan over the same sentence three times without reading it before she decides to take a break. With a yawn she gently rests the tome of advanced magical theory on the side table. She shifts on the love seat so she’s facing Jaskier. The scratching of his quill against his notebook stills and he looks up at Yennefer with a soft, curious expression. 

“I want to try something,” Yennefer says. An idea had been percolating for the last half hour, a half forgotten memory dredged up by the terribly boring magical theory. 

“Ok.” Jaskier closes his notebook with a snap and sets it aside. He turns to face Yennefer, their knees brushing together. “Let’s do it.” 

“Don’t you want to know what it is before you agree?” She asks, eyebrows raised. Jaskier shrugs his shoulders, expression amused. 

“I hope you’re planning on explaining. But…I trust you.” 

She sees no hesitance or fear in his eyes. Even after all this time the way that Jaskier trusts her implicitly is enough for her heart to skip a beat. People don’t trust her, for good reason. But then again, Jaskier likes to take a stick to what people thought he ought to do and beat it until it was a bloody pulp. One of his better qualities in her opinion. 

You can read the full one shot on AO3. 

To Be Loved (YenWeek Day 2 Short)

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Yennefer guarded her heart carefully. Pain was an old companion, but she didn’t need to go seeking it out. There were very few people worthy of being trusted with her heart.

She had thought Istredd was one. He had been so sweet to her from the start, respecting her ferocity as much as her untamed power. Yennefer had thought she could love him, this man who introduced her to a whole new world – who shared stories of the people her father’s blood came from, who told her the truth and not humanity’s lies, who showed her beauty in this world because he thought she would like it.

She had thought Istredd was special, that he understood her.

Then he betrayed her. Yes, in fairness, she had been spying for Tissaia just as he had been for Stregobor, but nothing she had shared had hurt him. Meanwhile, Istredd cost her everything!

And then he thought she would willingly submit to some fantasy where she was nothing but his companion, holding dust pans while Istredd excavated the wonders of the world?

Yennefer would rather die.

She refused to let her power be handed to her by another, dolled out in whatever dose he determined she’d earned. Yennefer was going to be the most powerful mage on the continent, and she would get there herself, and she would destroy any who got in her way.

Yen Week Day Two

HEARTBREAK

Her first heartbreak wasn’t a lover and it wasn’t an explosion, a pretty thing from a song. Her first heartbreak was a slow and small cracking. A denial that was somehow her fault. 

They ask her who did this, and there is no answer, because she was always told that she did it to herself. 

She knows that the fire and love and loyalty that hide in her broken heart are meant for someone. If she can hold onto those things, waiting for a child to give it to, then she should have been given them.

To Be Seen (YenWeek Day 1 Short)

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“Remember that scared girl who tumbled at your feet in this cave totally unaware of her power? I want to never be her again.”

Yennefer thought about the first moment she had arrived in Aretuza, portaling herself from the beating in the pigpen to a barren cave built by long-dead elves. She thought about it and she hated who she was at that time, hated that she had been so helpless that only an unknown power she possessed had saved her.

Yennefer refused to ever rely on the unknown. She had sworn she would learn this power and use it to be seen – actually properly seen for the power she had, not for the twist in her spine or the warped curl of her smile.

The day of her ascension as a mage was supposed to be life changing. Her power would be officially recognized, her court assignment finalized, and her transformation would begin.

Instead, she discovered that Istredd had betrayed her and Tissaia had failed her. 

Yennefer refused to go to Nilfgaard. She refused to be brushed aside by some king who was only interested in pleasure of the flesh while his subjects starved. Yennefer was meant to be powerful, not consigned to a life as the king’s side piece.

If Yennefer could not rely on anyone here to make that happen, she would just have to do it herself.

When it came down to it, she should have known the only one should could ever truly trust was herself, anyway.