Fitting Back Together

You Tore My Scars Wide Open

A/N: buckle up kids, you're in for a bumpy ride

. . .

Trigger Warning: implied domestic abuse

. . .

Yumiko idly stroked the soft skin of Magna's cheek, hoping it would soothe that lingering doubt her kiss had failed to wash away. But from the conflict waging in her eyes - carefully suppressed but she could see it, she could always see it - her efforts seemed wasted.

Magna opened her mouth, tried for a tone that might have been light - to anyone's ears but hers. "You know, there was a part of me that worried you were avoiding me because of what I did. Before the cave."

The lie.

Or rather, lies plural.

Yumiko hadn't forgotten about the stash.

"That wasn't it."

Not really. Not entirely.

But Yumiko would be lying if she said it hadn't been a factor. Just not one that would have kept her away all on its own. She regretted that her distance - avoidance - this last month had led Magna to think otherwise.

Magna hesitated. Yumiko couldn't tell if she believed her or not. "Are you sure you don't want to talk about what happened? Just talk, I mean. No arguing." She raised her hand in a three-finger salute. "Scout's honour."

Yumiko's mouth twitched.

It was a tempting offer.

The offer of staying silent and sweeping everything under the rug was even more tempting.

"Positive."

"Huh."

"What?"

"Just. . . things really have changed. Normally you're the one pushing us to talk about shit and I'm the one shutting things down."

She wasn't wrong.

Yumiko imagined that if their friends could see them now, they'd be completely flummoxed by the drastic reversal of roles.

"It's not that I don't want to talk about it." Although, she definitely didn't want to talk about it tonight. "It's that I'm not even sure that there's anything to talk about. I know why you did it. Lied to me. I know. But it doesn't change the fact that you did it. That you hurt me."

That her nightmares about Nicole had returned again.

That she hadn't had a good night's sleep in months.

That a wound she'd worked so long on trying to heal, and which had finally started to scab over - was now torn apart. Oozing once more.

That she couldn't talk about any of it with the one person in the world she might want to.

Because that person was the reason she was bleeding again.

She clenched her jaw, that seed of anger returning, sprouting in her chest. Taking root. "But more importantly, you didn't care that you hurt me."

Magna's eyes widened slightly. "Miko-"

"I know you care now. And I know you cared before. But in that moment, you didn't. In that moment, all you wanted was to prove a point. To prove that I'd been wrong about you all along. That I didn't know you at all. That I'd never known you."

And for a while she'd succeeded. Had torn loose the certainty Yumiko had clutched all these years. Made her doubt.

Could you really know someone that had existed inside a lie for thirteen years? Who had come into your life under false pretences?