Silverblood

Scars

Paths of red on a ground of white.
Streaks of lightning against the dark sky.

That's how they looked like.

Three lines slashed through my back, running from my right shoulder to my left hip. I traced the one in the middle with my finger, the ruined flesh cold under my pad. I shivered. The one I was touching was the longest. Probably even the deepest. The other two were half its size.

I scanned myself in the mirror, my fingers still skimming along the edges of my scars. Scars.
Damn, I could kiss goodbye to backless dresses. The thought almost made me laugh out loud. I didn't care what kind of clothes I couldn't wear because, from now on until death, I would have a tale of victory on my back. Forever.

I wasn't the only one assessing my image. Lupine eyes were watching too. Lupine eyes made of gold.

My wolf was proud. Ruined flesh meant nothing to her. Honor and glory, however, did.
And we carried the proof of them on our skin.
Feeling her presence again felt like a blessing. Like being whole once again. When she had reappeared two days ago, making tentative steps in the back of my mind, I was still dozing in bed. At the image of her, unharmed and alive, I had cried out, tumbling on the ground. Hercules had come running from downstairs, finding me sprawled in a mess of sheets, tears falling from my eyes. His expression had been one of pure worry until I explained to him, between sobs, that my wolf was back. He had then picked me up from the ground, gently placing me in bed again. I had probably scared him for his life as he came to check on me more often than necessary.

Three days had passed since I had woken up.
My bones had rearranged themselves and the minor wounds I had sustained healed nicely, leaving no scars behind. The gashes on my back had closed off the second day of me being awake and Hercules had extracted the stitches one by one, following my instructions. There were no words to describe how grateful I was to him, for everything he had done.

We had fallen in a pretty easy routine, even if sometimes his caregiving tendencies were a bit overbearing. Despite that, I had found myself enjoying his company. It had been hard to make him stop fussing and to convince him that I was starting to feel fine. Some threatening might have been involved. Flashing eyes, bared teeth and some growling might have been involved too. Not in a display of power though. It had been something more in the shape of a casual banter, of a cautious dance to test the new boundaries set between us. Something had shifted in the last days, moving the lines that had already changed during my Heat. As if we were...friends.

Not once did he leave the cabin. When he was not tending after me, he worked from here, papers scattered on the kitchen table downstairs. When I had been finally able to stand and walk by myself, I started joining him downstairs. The first time he had seen me on the steps, book in hand, he almost had an heart attack. That had been one of the times snarling and bared teeth had been involved. Needless to say that, in the end, I had won, accommodating myself on the couch. We kept company to each other like that, in silence, him working and me reading or doing research. I even had the occasions to notice little things about him: how he scrunched up his nose every time he read something he didn't like in the reports, how he didn't like to eat raw tomatoes - that according to him were "slimy as snails" -, the way his hair fell all over his head in the evenings and the neat freak that he was. At night we shared the bed, but ever since the first night, when we had fallen asleep holding hands, there had been no touching involved. No mentioning of it either.