Second Chances (sneak peek)
Here is a sneak peek of the opening for a Tissaia x Yennefer story that I am currently working on, premiering Saturday. I hope this gets you as excited as I feel, because I can’t wait to start posting chapters :)
VIEWER DISCREPTION ADVISED: this post contains mentions of attempted suicide.
Yennefer’s life changed for good one cloudless Tuesday morning in July when, at fifteen years old, she decided that tonight was a beautiful night to die.
With the town sleeping and the lights off, the stars were bright, and she watched them from the overpass that lead out of the town centre, her feet dangling over the edge of the railing. Later, when the police asked her how she had gotten there given her condition, she realised that she could not answer. One moment, she remembered lying beaten and bruised in the overgrown grass of the park outside Vengerberg’s town hall, and then, she was sitting at the edge of the bridge with about ten metres between her and the end of everything. She knew that she was ready to go, and she would have jumped, if not for the one passer-by who stopped.
Yennefer didn’t hear the car stop behind her or notice the figure walking towards her until they asked her to come down. The stranger was a young woman probably only a few years older than her, but who was so smartly dressed that at first glance Yennefer had thought she was an adult on her way home from an office job and tensed up. As she came closer and stepped into the dim and particularly unflattering light of a nearby streetlamp, Yennefer saw are youthful features and relaxed. But only a little.
She turned her eyes back to the road below her and watched the passer-by out of the corner of her as she slowly moved up to the railing on her right side and kept out of arms reach. The stranger asked her to come down and talk, she promised that she could help her and assured Yennefer that she did not want to do this. Yennefer didn’t say anything and tried to ignore her, only speaking up when she started to get closer. The young woman stopped, held her hands up and asked Yennefer to look at her. After a pause, she did and stared the passer-by right in the eye when she asked her to give herself just one more day. Then, smiling at her and offering out her hand, she asked Yennefer to trust her, please, because she wanted to help, because she cared. Please, she said, take me hand and let me help you. And Yennefer did.
Tears streamed down her face as she collapsed in the young woman’s arms and cried her heart out into their chest and expensive clothes. The police arrived before she had finished, but the stranger didn’t let her go until she was ready and sat with her in the back of the police car while she talked to the officers and told them things she had never spoken to anyone about, and admitted things that she had sworn she would never say. She told them about how her father abused her, about how her mother never helped her, about all the work she was made to do on their farm rather than go to school, about how she scavenged for food in the pig’s trough, and how her parents refused to let the doctors fix her curved spine. She told them almost everything and stopped just short of delivering her whole life story.
By the end, she was exhausted and must have fallen asleep with her head on the young woman’s shoulder because the next thing she remembered was waking up in the hospital surrounded by adults she didn’t recognize and with her passer-by nowhere to be seen. And she hadn’t even asked her name. No one else, not the police, nurses, or social workers got anything out of her for the rest of the night and most of the following day. She had lost her confidence to speak.
With the evidence that she had provided the police, her parents were arrested and a few weeks later she was shipped out of her hometown of Vengerberg, the only place she had ever known, to an orphanage in the neighbouring city of Lyria, where the authorities believed she could have a new start. For that reason, and to help protect her identity, her name was changed from Jenny Hanson to Yennefer Vengerberg. Yes, like the place, she would say as she endured years of bullying over her absurd surname because the man who had filled out her form was an idiot who should never have been trusted to look after a pet goldfish, let alone a young, traumatized human being. She lived in that care home for about three years before moving halfway across the continent to the portside city of Gors Velen.
Which is how Yennefer came to be standing in a coffee shop near the city’s only university at lunchtime, and why it was her that almost knocked over the passer-by who had saved her life just over four years ago.
