@loyaelst said: [ SCAR ]
It still looks like a cut. He knows how it looks, a dark line, razor straight, spanning the column of his neck. She’s taken a red string and tied it around his throat twice. He still sees her, his rampaging executioner, burying her blade in him, letting it eat what her teeth fail to grip. Now, in the distant light, they look so much like children. Her outburst was brutal and precise, but she hesitated even in the throes of her suffering, every realization, every failed promise breaking apart around her. She hesitated, and the sword that should have felled him only struck him to the ground. The blood was thick and hot in his mouth, gurgling down into the cramping bellows of his lungs.
He remembers her over him, trying to correct her mistake, erase him like pouring ink over a line she regretted ever writing down. Couldn’t do that, either. And all the worse, maybe, that Mikasa’s last labor of love was destined not to leave a mark. His throat does not remember the blade. His skin has never felt the touch of her sword. These earlier centuries of their history are blotted out, only oral tradition. And what does oral tradition amount to, in a silent house?
What was a warrior, once, and now is nothing, lies still beneath her. He prays to her bent form, the tent of her sharp-edged, muscled body. Always correcting mistakes, that seems to be her lot. She runs after the willful hateful bumbling cruelty and wrests from it some meaning. With stoic, Sisyphean patience, she forces her way. Even years after the fact. How pleased she looked, when he yielded his throat to her at last. When he invited her blade again, and she came to press the thin razor into his skin. No lethal intent, no intent at all. She only drew the line again, made sure his body won’t forget where they have come from, what blood must be marched through to make it to the dusty sink, the cracked mirror and the sunlight on the tiled floor.
With Mikasa the intimate architect of this blemish, it must seem to her such a fool’s errand when Bertholdt’s hand comes up to cover it. The bed frame creaks like a crying child as she stretches him out upon it. He cups the side of his throat to feel the welt beneath it, the brand that she repaid him with. Do not forget who you were because that is what you are. Did it please her, too, when the wound she cut into him did not close on its own accord? When it bled and bled and bled, and she hung on his neck like a vampire, kittish licks cleaning along the length of his piano-wire tendon.
Her cool hand slides into place above his own and pries his palm from the scar. Bertholdt does not resist her, the way she tugs on his strings as if he was tied at every joint to her whim. It is her handiwork. She has a right to it, the way he has a right to the gash in her cheek. A thief, such a thief, he’s stolen this, too. He’ll eat her own moment at a time, gorges himself on her ruined life, as if he could help in the aftermath. She is fucking her own parasite. —Ah, he never wanted to be that for her.
Mikasa pins him down, renders him puppet. As she crouches on top of him, there is something so wholly inhuman to her pleasant, glacial mask that he shivers towards it. His shoulders tense and his heart constricts with tender longing. She has torn this wound and it belongs to her; that is where the light gets in. He imagines her gloating, lording her victory over him. Slayer of goliaths, god-killer girl. What is he, compared to her ugly, awful brother? How can this prize whet her appetite after such sublime horror?
Berholdt does not ask, and she would not have answered. He lets her look at him, his naked form, taut like a bow that’s long been overdrawn. The wood is straining, threatening to break. And yet she keeps him, yet she keeps restringing him. The scar on his neck aches tenderly, as if her gaze is a touch that bruises. Called forth, her dark crown descends, and Mikasa finds him where he is sore, where he is raw, where she has placed her beautiful red necklace around his throat. She kisses the mark with her tongue. She sucks and bites as if to worry the knitted skin apart, as if to open him up again in her thirst.
That’s when he finally says her name.
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