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Light touches danced along familiar yet unfamiliar skin. Yet, it had been half a decade since this swathe held this particular combination of jagged and broken skin, some raised, others carved into the otherwise smooth canvas. The scars stood out, light against tanned skin. Scars from foes long forgotten returned, the scars from near brushes with death from sin eaters and every enemy on the first exchanged for them.
Ignia wanted to remove the blur from this set of scars. Make sure that she knew where each one on her husband’s body lay…
Yet before they could trace another one, Thancred tugged at her hand, pulling it up to his lips.
“There are those shining eyes, butterfly…I want to see you,” He pressed a kiss to her palm and sent jolts down her arm and down her spine. Her mottled and once burned hand was ever so obvious in the growing morning light, the mark of her first triumph, and her first failure, “Looks like your sensitivity in this hand has returned with the scars…I guess I have things to re-learn as well.”
“I had always thought it strange that this never appeared when our souls took form in the First…”
“…I think it the same as your own scars,” A glance to the pair on his chest, surgical incisions in nature, yet. The only set that returned with them, his wish to remember his struggle and his choice such a core part of his very being that it had manifested them, “But in reverse. It is the mark of victory and failure I no longer carry so harshly on my shoulders. Unlike others.”
“Even if it be the one that bothers you the most?”
“Only in function…” Ignia smiled softly at Thancred, closing her eyes in memory, “Perhaps the wish for freedom from the hindrance was so much stronger.”
“Will it bother you?” Going forward, fighting again with it when she had been free of it for half a decade.
“…No. It simply will be there. I can do my duty.”
Scars were merely a mark upon one’s body after all, of that they lived and endured and survived.