#i've set this during the super special cahir lives game!verse just so we're on the same page here

[closedcoffins]

❛ Why did you help me? ❜ [ ciri to cahir 🙃 ]

It had been easier to think about having this conversation than to be confronted with it so suddenly. Cahir has never felt dread, exactly, at the thought of properly speaking to Ciri, but there has always been a certain desire to stall longer than necessary when the time eventually did come---and he'd known for some time it would. Destiny does not let people go easily, and as little as Cahir had known Ciri, he had dreamed about her enough to know that it was enough.

"I don't know. There were many reasons." Cahir isn't exactly willing to admit to his dreams. It feels almost like an invasion of privacy to have seen moments in her life, though he too had been unwilling. Has tried never to think about them, though the only dreams she features in now are the nightmares about the first real siege Cahir had ever been present for. "I was not the loyal Nilfgaardian solider everyone thought me to be. I was not even Nilfgaardian."

Cahir pauses, looks away; it feels somehow shameful to look at her at all, knowing what he does about the fear he had caused her unwittingly. He weighs his next words carefully, and contradicts his own decision not to speak of the dreams. It is important to know; if Cahir's life has taught him anything, it's that it benefits to be transparent with those who deserve transparency.

"I started dreaming of you. I don't know why. When you ran away from me the first time, at Cintra, I was---frightened. I knew the Emperor would have my head for it. When I was spared, I was locked away, and the dreaming began. I told myself it meant I had to find you, to fulfill my duty, but really... I wanted it to stop. I was afraid. And at Stygga, I just believed I owed you that much, for the trouble I had caused. And Geralt; I owed him many times over what I had promised him, which was all the help I could have given."

It's uncharacteristic of him to speak so much, but it had become difficult to stop talking the moment he had started, and the words pour out with so little control that even Cahir wishes he'd kept silent altogether. "I'm surprised you asked at all."

random dialogues. / accepting.