Chapter Text
Beneath the Skin
“And all the quiet nights you bear
Seal them up with care
No one needs to know they're there
For I will hold them for you
…
And while you sleep
I'll be scared
So by the time you wake
I'll be brave”
I Will
Mitski
From skin to internal organs, Lucas has built himself up strong. He has carved characteristics he desires into his own bones--an easy, effortless kindness, a sure sense of protection, yet enough distance between him and the next person to keep his features too blurry to fully define. He’s taken care to hide the gaps in his armor, the space between his ribs where one might slip a blade, and whenever he needs to give his aching body a break it’s always when he’s alone.
It got close for a moment there. He had let the blood begin to flow out of his chest, out of that space between his ribs, but he’s patched up the damage well enough. Nobody should notice.
And as he knows, nobody does.
“Where’s Yuugo?” Sandy asks, two hours after he forced the aforementioned man to get some sleep. “He was supposed to teach a class ten minutes ago.”
Lucas glances up, feeling the smile instinctively take over his face, the one that comes whenever his kids approach him. “He’s been feeling sick.”
“Oh!” Sandy frowns, and Lucas can sense that the cogs are whirring in that medic’s brain of his. “Is he okay? How is he sick? Is it contagious--”
“It’s an infection,” Lucas elaborates, and before Sandy can express the worry that hits his face he continues. “Just a minor one, he’s already treated it. He’s got a fever, though, so he’s resting up.”
The worry on his kid’s face dims, but it doesn’t disappear. Even as Lucas taught him how to bandage cuts and administer antibiotics and disinfect wounds and suture gashes, he never taught him how not to wear his heart on his sleeve. Lucas is glad for it.
Sandy nods. “Okay. We can have it some other day. Does… Does Yuugo need any more help?”
Lucas can’t hold back a chuckle. “Even if you could somehow convince him to let you give it, he probably doesn’t. I’ll make sure to take care of him, anyway.”
There’s a transfer, here, of the heavy weights of worry. It’s a transaction that Lucas has become unspeakably used to as he’s raised them. Lucas will look after things, and Sandy doesn’t need to worry. None of them need to worry. He’s got it handled.
(A time so long ago it’s another world, Lucas would be on the other side of that transfer, giving up his fear to his Teacher. When she betrayed his trust, he tried to rely on someone else, to hand his worry over to Yuugo and Dina. Now he knows never to try it that way again.)
Sandy goes off to tell the others that the class has been postponed, and Lucas heaves himself up, biting his cheek so he doesn’t wince as a familiarly painful ache shoots up his bad leg. He leans his weight onto his cane and heads off.
Even if he’s off-duty for the young kids today, that doesn’t mean he’s free of responsibility. When he gets to the library, Anna is waiting for him, already studying the books he assigned for her last time.
She looks up as he approaches and gives him a smile tinged with excitement for the lesson ahead. “Good afternoon.”
“Afternoon, Anna. Should we get started?”
When she was learning the content he was teaching to the older kids so quickly she was getting frustrated and reading ahead, Lucas knew that he needed to hold individual lessons with her. Her aspiration to heal is something he’s never seen this way before. Even Zack, his star pupil, only learned so voraciously so he could treat his own wounds.
They’re onto common bacterial infections at the moment, which perhaps hits too close to home at the moment but he pushes on.
“Have you ever had to treat pneumonia?” Anna asks, not looking up from where she’s steadily absorbing the book’s content. Grace Field kids are really something else.
“Once,” Lucas says. “Paula got it when she was young. I panicked at the time, actually, since I’d never treated an infection that serious before.”
“Ahh,” Anna murmurs. “Did you already know what to do? Or did you have to study up?”
She often asks him about his practical experience like this, considering it’s the most significant difference between them. He has nearly a decade and a half and she has none.
“Well, I’d read about it before, but there’s a big difference between that and actually having to deal with it. Honestly, medicine is more about figuring things out in the moment with your knowledge as a baseline than always knowing what to do,” he says. Gently.
Anna looks up with her lips pressed together and a raised eyebrow. “Yeah, I know. You said something about--about your relationship with the patient being important when it comes to treatment, too?”
“That’s right,” he tells her. “How you treat someone depends on how much they trust you, how much you know about their medical history. That sort of thing. So you do have an advantage if you’re taking care of someone you already know, though it’s obviously not a requirement.”
“Makes sense,” she says, and he knows he’s already lost her full attention again when her eyes flick back to the book.
The lesson goes as ever after that, but once it’s over and Anna is keeping her place with the book’s ribbon, he can read the anticipation still on her face. He knows something else is on her mind.
Lucas asks, as he must, “Is everything alright?”
She looks up, blinks. “You…”
“It’s pretty hard for anyone to keep it from me when they’re worried,” Lucas says matter-of-factly, which is enough for Anna to crack a fragile grin.
“It’s alright, really. I’m just worried about Emma’s group, like I always am.”
Lucas knows the feeling. When he first met Emma, all optimism and determination, the reflection of the past along with the confirmation that Yuugo was alive had been enough to bowl him over, even briefly. Except this firebrand managed to destroy the prison that had murdered his family and tormented him for 13 years at age 11 , and is forging on so fast that Lucas couldn’t hold her back in a desperate bid for protection even if he tried.
She has Ray, though, and he’s figured out by now that the two of them have the sort of inseparable bond that Yuugo-Dina-Lucas used to have. She has Gilda and Don, who will make sure she protects herself despite her nature. And she has Violet and Zack, two of his kids who he misses dearly but has utmost faith in.
“They’ve got a tough road to traverse, but I can’t think of anyone more capable,” Lucas says after a moment of thought. “They’ll look after each other. That’s the important thing.”
“I know,” Anna says with a smile that’s widening. “Sometimes I just wish I could be there, though. I feel all useless hiding in the shelter while they’re out risking their lives.”
There are arms reaching out to take care of talented young people who can take care of themselves, and a deep ache in his chest that mirrors the ache in his leg beat-by-beat.
He manages to say, “I know. But you just have to rely on them to do their part, and you do yours. If you went out, you’d never be able to study medicine like this, and that’s a skill that’s going to be extremely important in the future. It’s all about delegation. You’re doing exactly what you need to.”
Lucas feels successful, when Anna heads off with a smile now firm on her face. Something genuine and precious.
The frustration of his own limitations comes sudden and unwelcome, tearing straight through all the tissue to the center of his body. When he has to send his own kids to fight a battle he started while he waits in hiding, and then watch as they come back, one by one, bloody and limp. When he has to leave the more physical labour in the shelter to kids decades younger than him. When he has to lean on other people.
(It’s not often, when he has to do that, because he’d only admit it to another person in the most dire of circumstances.)
His physical limitations are far overshadowed by the comfort his presence keeps within the shelter. That’s how it should be.
Once, though, he was a very different kind of protector.
Lucas stands with another hidden grimace and heads out to check on Yuugo.
~
Most of the kids who are old enough to look through the shelter’s armoury choose knives. Some of the more stronger or ambitious ones pick up guns, testing their weight. Lucas watches as Yuugo and Dina deliberate over which gun would be most efficient to bring on a long trip, especially taking ammo into account, and tests the weight of a rifle himself. The cool metal feels wrong in his hands--perhaps not too heavy, but as if it doesn’t fit the shape of them right.
He ends up with a pistol, which feels marginally better, before he spots the display of perhaps-less-efficient weapons and walks over with piercing eyes.
The weight of the axe feels good, the wood of the handle smooth and familiar enough. He adjusts his grip and has the feel of it in seconds.
“Geez, what are you going to do with that?"
He glances over to Yuugo by his side, who’s sporting a medium-sized rifle already slung over his shoulder and a smug grin. Lucas returns it by habit. “Well, I feel like swinging at some man-eaters might be a good start.”
“Are you sure?” Yuugo asks. “You might be better off with a knife, and you can’t use it as a ranged weapon.”
“I think I’ll be fine with my bow and arrow, honestly. And I feel like I could really pack a punch with this,” he confesses, unable to properly express what it’s like to hold it in his hands. How inexplicably and intoxicatingly powerful he feels with its heavy weight reassuring him he could do some real damage against the monsters trying to hurt his family.
Yuugo shrugs. “Suit yourself. Dina and I are going to figure out how to use these, though. You might want to come just in case.”
Lucas does end up figuring out how to fire a gun with the two of them, as well as Jatte and Damian. He grits his teeth at the shock of noise filling up the tiny underground space, but manages to hit the cans they’ve lined up well enough.
He stays with the axe, in the end.
One evening as they’re camping on the way to Goldy Pond around a low-burning fire, Lucas is sitting next to Yuugo, and Yuugo is cleaning his gun. They had to use them today. Lucas gave support with a bow and arrow, but didn’t get to use his real weapon of choice. He watches, near-enraptured at the sight of the aluminium reflecting the warm marigold of the fire, of how the same light is instead a rusted amber splashed across Yuugo’s cheek.
“I kind of hate this thing already,” Yuugo admits. “You made the right choice.”
Lucas snorts and says, “Really?”
“I mean, some of us have to use guns, but you got off lucky,” he smirks.
“Just you watch, I’ll show you how useful the axe is.”
He holds Yuugo’s attention for a moment as tangibly delicate as the wings of a butterfly, and Lucas becomes infinitely aware of the expanse of inches between them. He’s wanted to kiss that smile for a while, hold it, feel the warmth of his cheek in his hand.
Lucas has also come to accept with a gentle stillness that those inches between them will remain unbreached, and the closest to Yuugo’s heart will always be Dina. He loves Dina as well, in a different way, and he loves the two of them together because they’re an unstoppable team who will never back down. Lucas may be a third half, but his support in their endeavours is crucial. He loves the both of them, and that’s what’s important.
I’ll follow you wherever you go , Lucas does not say, even though the both of them understand it.
Yuugo goes back to cleaning his gun with a focused furrow in his brow, and Lucas watches the rusted amber flicker across his cheek, unpredictable and perfectly illuminating.
~
A vast expanse of time is another kind of space. A longer one, perhaps, than the 101 kilometres between Goldy Pond and the shelter. There is no comparison chart of 13 years to physical distance, no way to convert the temporal ache to a spatial one.
“I’m not the person I used to be,” Yuugo once said to Lucas, not too long ago. His breath had been warm on his cheek, whispered close like the most precious secret. There was a deep sense of shame, dark and entrenched at the core of him.
“Why would you be?” Lucas asked with an exacting stare. “I’m not, either.”
They teeter on the edge of progress, but the fragile, precious thing between them seems to hang in the balance, hang between their tense bodies which don’t dare to move an inch. They retread the paths they know. They play the roles they’ve set out for themselves.
Worrying. Kind. Protector. Lucas’s chest is set in place.
Yuugo lies alone in the depths of a terrible fever and feels entrenched. Unable to move a single muscle for fear of the ache that will come, mistakes long-made revisited like the cruelest kind of flat circle.
(Yuugo has read Nietzsche, because there’s not much else to do for 13 years in a shelter with an impressive library. He’d found Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Will to Power particularly overblown and pretentious. If suffering was actually progress towards a good life, he’d be very happy, indeed.)
Even in a feverish state, idle moments are spent in contemplation. The truth is simple:
He’s fucking sick of it. All of it. The paradigm between him and Lucas, the paths he keeps retreading, the way his body repeats patterns he desperately wants to break out of. He hates it when he gets angry instead of being able to express himself, instead of being able to open up. He hates how he still can’t get the words out right. He hates how Lucas can’t break out of his own patterns, either, but in all regards doesn’t want to .
“I said you don’t have to worry, because everything will be okay.”
Lucas is a liar, and the worst kind, too. The worst kind of liars are the ones who think it’s the best thing to do for the person they’re lying to. He knows it too well.
Lucas lies every day, with every action, every word. Everyone lies with the personas they put up, but Lucas is especially heinous because he’s locked away half of himself and built up the rest beyond belief.
Though Yuugo may not be able to see what’s beneath the surface, the gaps of the lies of omission are clear as day. It’s the ammunition he needs for a confrontation he’s scared to death of, but he’s been scared plenty in his life and being emotionally honest with his partner isn’t a challenge more foreboding than facing down demons.
(Even if it feels that way.)
So the fever burns through Yuugo, and he burns with it as he half-forms half-baked plans for a new understanding between them.
I want you reckless, and I want you kind.
I want you to tell me what you need, and continue to look after others.
I want you to be a human being.
I want you to want what you want.
To say he’s lucid would be a stretch, but he finds a strange simplicity in his addled state of mind. A convoluted, straight-forward contemplation.
Love yourself like you love me, and maybe I could do the same.
It’s a tall order. Perhaps an impossibility. But they’ve kicked impossible’s ass before, and Yuugo isn’t afraid to do it again to see a break-through smile on Lucas’s face. The kind that speaks multitudes, instead of a one-word phrase.
Lucas comes to him at a time he’s long lost count of, and brushes a gloved hand against Yuugo’s own sweat-soaked skin.
“How are you feeling?” the selfless bastard asks.
“Better,” Yuugo says, throat dry and aching. “Not good.”
“That’s okay. How’s your sleep?”
“...Not great, either.”
So Lucas presses up against him, holding him close with a strong arm, warmth shared between them. It’s nice. Lovelier than Yuugo could’ve ever imagined, not too long ago.
Yuugo’s wounds have scabbed over, in the slow and arduous process of healing, but at least they’re no longer open. At least he doesn’t bleed into newly-washed sheets anymore. Behind him, even without words or sight, Yuugo feels how Lucas has a chest full of broken glass. The unspoken tremor in his arm. Someone needs to keep them both healthy.
He could let his eyes drift close, let himself be encompassed by the warmth that feels so right and the protection that eases the arrhythmia of his worry.
But he can’t accept the crucial parts of another person just to keep himself ever-calm. Can’t retrieve a transplant that is more trouble than it’s worth. He’s tried to make it clear through the anger that burns in him, tried to make himself out to be independent, strong, unharmed.
With gently healing wounds, in the faint-trembling arm of the man he loves, with a mind fevered and true, Yuugo comes to understand.
If you want to help heal another, you can’t hide your own wounds.
For the night, Yuugo lets Lucas help.
Early in the morning, his fever breaks.
~
“I’m worried about Yuugo,” Dina murmurs all low. Yuugo comes to a still outside the door. He hears Lucas shift his chair, the leg scraping against the floorboards.
“I mean, I see where you’re coming from,” says Lucas. “But he should be okay, right? He’s got us to support him.”
“We do support him,” she acknowledges. “But I’m always scared it’s not in the ways we need to. Always scared I’m not helping him right.”
“...Why?”
A bated breath behind the door.
The murmur goes so faint he has to strain his ears.
“You know, I’ve fallen in love with a compulsive liar.”
(Lucas knows the feeling.)
~
The kids celebrate Yuugo’s return joyously. He was sick for barely over two days, and here they are clinging to him like limpets as if he’s essential to their survival.
The first day he’s well again, he’s too busy to continue thinking of impromptu, overemotional plans made in the throes of fever. For all his presentation, he likes to keep the shelter in a certain way, and resting for a moment when you’re surrounded by droves of bratty kids means books get put back in the wrong places, teacups get moved to the wrong cabinets, and blankets are folded in the wrong way, no matter his eternal efforts to teach them his system.
“Remind me never to get sick again,” he mutters to Oliver as they reorder the philosophy section of the library, and the kid snorts.
“Sure I will,” he says. “But only if you remind me never to trip over in this shelter again.”
The toys set loose across every floor are especially heinous. “Horrors, the little ones are,” Yuugo gripes.
He picks up a book that had clearly been used as a building block in some sort of aimless structure instead of the catalyst of any actual learning. When he sees that the title is The World as Will and Representation , however, he figures that’s a better use of it. Schopenhauer occupies a particularly dark part in his heart, reserved for only the most ridicule-worthy philosophers.
(Which is a difficult achievement, considering how most philosophers are ridicule-worthy.)
“So,” Oliver says in a suspect tone, and Yuugo prepares himself for the bi-monthly intrusion into his relationship by annoying kids.
“How are you and Lucas going?”
Got it in one.
“Firstly, none of your business.”
A useless pause.
“Then what’s secondly?”
“Secondly, we’re fine.”
Oliver hums vaguely and allows him peace of mind for the next couple of minutes, silent as they shuffle books together, before redoubling his attack in a new form.
“I’m worried about Lucas, sometimes,” Oliver admits in a low voice, and Yuugo almost does a double take.
He focuses very intently on putting Hobbes’ Leviathan back into the correct place before responding. “How?”
“I know you know,” Oliver says matter-of-factly, temporarily turning away from his shelving to give Yuugo a piercing look. “You know, when you were sick, he didn’t let anyone else get near you. Even when it was inconvenient. It’s not even that he’s overprotective, it’s just that he takes too much on himself.”
Yuugo sighs, because Oliver is handing the opportunity to him free and easy. He musters up, “Yes. I do know, probably better than anyone.”
The kid doesn’t look away and Yuugo shifts uncomfortably even as he begins to speak. “It was less obvious when we were growing up. Or, well, I suppose we were less observant and believed everything he said at face value. It doesn’t help that he’s a great actor. But I’ve never heard him really confide about his own struggles in the seven years I’ve known him.”
“He’s a bastard,” Yuugo grumbles, with no weight to it. “I’ve never known someone so purposefully ignorant of their own needs… Except maybe Emma. She does it for a different reason, though.”
A breadth of time.
Oliver brings his gaze away gently and looks down at the cover of Philosophical Investigations .
(Wittgenstein is one Yuugo can tolerate, partially because slogging through his work took him months as he deconstructed the complex philosophical concepts. It was a good distraction.)
“I’ve lost a few people,” Oliver says with no segue. “You can’t live in Goldy Pond for so long without that happening. But I have no idea what it would be like to see my entire family die right before me. I have no idea what kind of person that would turn me into, and I’m scared of that because of it.”
His voice is halting and cautious. Yuugo still hears his pulse in his ears. He doesn’t say anything, though, as Oliver continues. “I have no idea how to find any reasonable common ground with Lucas. Even Emma’s type of force-of-will empathising has some limit, I think. I’ve never had the courage to ask him what he’s feeling since I doubt I have the ability and experience to bring him out so vulnerable like that. But you…”
Though he wants to say something, Yuugo’s voice abruptly meets the old internal wound of barbed wire choking and cutting up his throat. He thought he’d cleared most of that out by now, despite the scars.
There’s a new quaver in Oliver’s voice next, though, “And I know it’s selfish of me to ask but--”
“Christ, kid, you didn’t have to,” Yuugo traverses that familiar obstacle. “You didn’t have to ask. I was going to talk to him soon.”
Brown eyes that seem both too young and too old for Oliver’s adolescent face snap up and stare right back at him. “Oh. Did I seem… Shit, I didn’t mean to be patronising.”
Though not particularly near, there are little ears around. Yuugo grumbles, “Language.”
The shock of it makes Oliver laugh, and some part of Yuugo feels satisfied. He deeply understands the urge to soothe all the worries of these kids, no matter how he feels about Lucas’s own actions.
At least Yuugo knows it’s impossible to heal all perfectly, to protect all the upsettingly young ones from all the horrors of this world. Some things have to scar for you to move on, or at least scab over. He knows it better than anyone.
“It’s okay,” he ends up saying. “You’re concerned for your da… For Lucas. I understand why you’d ask me, and I’m frankly glad you did. Now I’ve got someone to hold me accountable.”
“Yeah,” Oliver agrees with a faint smile that formed from his brief chuckle. “I’ll make sure to ask you about it next time I see you, then. I just don’t want him to keep going like this, honestly.”
“Me neither,” Yuugo says rather uselessly, just as a way to find some finality.
A more comfortable silence exists between them as they continue shelving, and after Yuugo has shelved the last book they needed to in the philosophy section (bloody Mill, for some reason), Oliver looks back over at him before they move on to numbers 200-299 of the Dewey Decimal System.
“It’s okay, you know,” he says. There’s a hesitance in his low lilt.
He looks away again, as if he can’t bear to say it openly. “You can call Lucas my dad.”
If Yuugo were a better man, he wouldn’t tease Oliver about it, but the kid can handle some gentle ribbing.
~
“Every time I remember I can die out there at any moment,” Lucas mutters as in the telling of a near-untellable secret, “all I can do is force my thoughts away from it. But it never works for long. I just have to let this frantic rush of adrenaline take over. Fighting makes me feel safer.”
He glances over to Yuugo, whose smile is twisted to a sympathetic angle. There is genuine empathy in his dark eyes. “Christ. I can’t imagine that.”
Dina is so fucking right.
~
“We need to talk,” says Yuugo.
Lucas has read terrible romance novels. He knows what that's supposed to mean in a conventional relationship. But that shouldn’t be enough to get him nervous, so he looks up from his book and smiles out at his partner. “About what?”
He lumbers over to where Lucas is sitting on his lower bunk and joins him. Lucas marks his page with the ribbon and closes his book to place it on the upside-down bucket he’s using as a nightstand, and moves his body to face Yuugo, meeting his eyes boldly.
Yuugo’s eyes immediately flick away, though he leans closer. Just. Lucas is viscerally pained at the awareness of it.
Until Yuugo flicks his eyes back, draws his eyebrows in determination, and reaches out his bare hand. Lucas brings up his own gloved hand to take it, but Yuugo moves past it and instead pushes his hand up Lucas’s sleeve, holding the warm skin of his wrist. In his partner’s grip, Lucas can feel his own pulse as it shudders through him, and barely avoids a shiver. This feels more intimate, somehow. Yuugo’s hand is hidden now by his sleeve, but Lucas can feel the gentle hold there.
The space between them is nothing.
Lucas can’t breathe when Yuugo leans just one inch closer and says, “I’m scared too, you know.”
He blinks, and breathily says, “What?”
“Of talking about the important stuff. But I know that it’s a stupid idea to stay silent about it forever, no matter how terrifying it is.”
We need to talk about pain.
We need to talk about the things that dig deep under our skin and make us bleed and bleed, whether internal or external.
We need to talk about what we do for each other, and what we don’t do.
We need to talk about 13 years.
That’s what Yuugo says with his loyal stare and the warm grip of his hand on Lucas’s wrist. Lucas still can’t breathe at it. He wants to accept, wants to help Yuugo through his own fear and pain and the ever-present memories of 13 years of suffering. He wants to stitch up skin and watch it heal, even into scars.
Lucas doesn’t want to undo all of his own hard work.
“...What do you mean?” he says, perhaps to simply stall for time.
Yuugo sighs and now breaks eye contact to look at where their skin meets, underneath Lucas’s crisp white sleeve.
But he keeps talking.
“I know the kids told you about it, but you have no idea how bad I was before… Before Emma and her damn force-of-will empathy. I feel myself slipping into it all the time, even with them here. Even with you here. So, I’m sorry.”
Lucas breathes only to let out some semblance of a hysterical choke of a laugh. “Sorry? What on earth for?”
“For pushing you away,” Yuugo insists, and then his other hand, his gloved hand, comes up and grabs Lucas’s own. Two points of contact now moored between them. “For getting mad when you only want to help me, and just getting mad in general when it really didn’t help at all. I don’t want to be that person anymore, but it’s something I have to work on myself, and something I’m scared to talk to anyone about. Those 13 years did so much damage.”
His voice is wavering, slipping into something low and muttered, something hard to discern and cracking with an emotion that struggles to get out of his throat.
“I love you, Lucas,” Yuugo says, and finally looks back up with such a sudden and unfamiliar earnesty in his dark eyes that Lucas is once again unable to take a breath as they pin him down with their gaze (dear god, they’re shining).
And at the words which have gone unsaid for lightyears.
Lucas can hear and see how it pains him to speak so openly. The struggle of a torn throat and chest that is getting the right words out. He swears he can see blood dripping, cooling, soaking into fabric, crisp white.
It’s okay. I’ll keep you safe. I forgive you for anything.
Lucas does not say.
Instead, he is speechless at the emergence of a new eon. That indefinite yet infinite span of his body is broken, transformed into something new. The changes he made when he reached inside his own chest and carved into his ribs, shattering and reforming into something not perfect, but new. Broken, but fitting together. Painful but good.
He doesn’t want to accept it. His body wants to reject it like a foreign pathogen
But he knows so deep within that he can’t keep hiding from his own internal workings, can’t keep them buried forever. Eventually something will give. It has happened before. It will happen again.
In the end, Lucas says nothing, and Yuugo’s face breaks but he mutters that it’s okay, that he can take all the time he needs if they both make it through in the end.
For now, Yuugo holds him closer, arms encompassing Lucas’s tired body. Lightyears have been traversed, and that’s enough for now.
~
Lucas does talk eventually, just as Yuugo did. It feels irrevocably wrong. The body he built up himself from skin to organ wasn’t made for this, wasn’t made for spewing out unsightly truths about what it takes to carry the burdens of all those who need it.
Crucially, Yuugo listens, and even if it’s inch by awful inch progress is made. Healing is ugly. Epithelialization is slow and painful, and although the proliferative phase takes far too long, the maturation stage of a wound takes longer.
Between that, things get better.
Turns out, all it takes is a few honest words for certain burdens to be shared more equally. All it takes is an inch of honesty to go days. Bleeding heart. Love is about bleeding.
Eight days after it appeared out of nowhere, Yuugo takes the gauze off the thin scratch across his torso and is wordless to find that it didn’t scar. Some things take scarring, but others simply heal perfect, the scabbing falling off the unblemished skin.
It doesn’t erase Yuugo’s other scars. It shouldn’t. But it’s a nice surprise, after everything.
“How are you?” he asks Lucas later that day, when their nighttime tradition of having tea together has started to continue again, stronger than ever.
Lucas smiles genuinely and takes a sip out of the old, repaired cup. “I’ve been doing better, you know. Oh, the other day Oliver said…”
And Yuugo listens, a gentled grin on his face as he drinks his tea and reaches out a bare hand across the table, meeting Lucas’s warm grip through his glove.
They meet each other in the middle. And scars heal like an old beginning.
If it takes lightyears.