Work Text:
Patton had a couple of scars. He had one on his hand from a stapler, an unfortunate event that he hated to remember. When he’d gotten it he’d cried for hours, and it had taken his mother and father ages to calm him down. It was right next to his thumbnail, and he rubbed it absentmindedly sometimes when he read or watched tv or concentrated too hard on whatever the teacher was saying. Virgil thought it was the cutest thing ever. Who could blame him?
His second scar was on his left arm. It was an unfortunate result of a cat scratch from their family cat when he was a child. Neither he nor the cat was to blame.
His third and final scar was a half crescent on his thigh, a line that started out straight and curved sharply to the left as though jolted suddenly. He never spoke about it and no one ever asked. Besides, it was barely large enough to be noticed, unless you were looking.
-----
Virgil didn’t have many scars, but the ones he did have he wasn’t proud of. If his tank top rode up and his pajama bottoms were low hanging at night, you could just barely begin to see the dozens of thin, slightly raised lines that coated his hip bones.
This self torture had gone on for months after junior year, Virgil refusing to get help and Patton refusing to back down from figuring out what was wrong with his friend. When he had found out, he was beside himself. Virgil had sworn to him that it wasn’t his fault.
“The next time you even think about doing that... I’ll do it too!” Patton had declared foolishly, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes and hands balled into fists at his sides.
“No!” Virgil had cried out, horrified.
“Well if you wouldn’t be okay with me doing it, then why should I be okay with you doing it?” Patton had shot back at him, volume the cause of panic rather than anger. Patton had never been angry with him, only scared.
That had just made it worse the next time Virgil put the blade to his skin. Patton may have forgiven him every single time he cut, but he never forgave himself for just that one time.
Therapy had helped. Senior year was a mess of emotion and the stress and he never would have made it through it without the love and support of his family and Patton. Virgil hadn’t relapsed since, and even if the thought crossed his mind he just thought of the look in Patton’s eyes as he tried to drive the blade into his thigh.
Patton liked to circle looping patterns across his hip when they cuddled, never once minding the bumps and ridges his fingers traced over. The first time he’d done it, Virgil had cried. Patton had asked him why he was crying and he hadn’t had an answer.
“There’s no need to cry. Besides,” Patton had whispered with a smile, tucking his head up onto Virgil’s shoulder blade as he hugged him, “I can tell you’re happy, your emotions are so strong right now I can barely feel my own.”
-----
Remus had never broken a bone, but that hadn’t stopped him from acquiring a massive collection of scars over the years. His legs were dotted with little popcorn kernels of scarring, for example, bug bites from years and years and years in the past.
He actually had one across part of his hairline, but you could only see it if he pulled back his hair and traced it for you. That was his secret shame, one of the few times his reflexes kicked in after the object had hit him in the face. That object had just so happened to be a very large rock. In Roman’s defense, Remus had asked for it, in the most literal sense of the term. They weren’t allowed to throw rocks around in the backyard after that.
He had a scar on the back of his ear too. When he was very small, he’d had to get tubes in his ear to drain water out from behind his eardrum. How the water had gotten there in the first place, he hadn’t the faintest idea. Apparently, one of his eardrums hadn’t actually closed up again after the tubes fell out, and he ended up going through a second surgery to ‘patch up’ his eardrum using the fat behind his ear. Remus loved the story only because of how much Roman hated it.
One of his larger scars was the one on the back of his calf, a short jagged line that was a result of slipping in a lake and cutting his leg open on rocks. He had been out with his brother and a friend that neither of them really knew well at the time. Their friend had immediately fainted at the sight of his blood blossoming in the clear water, and Roman had to carry both of them home.
Sometimes, he let Logan connect the little scars on his leg like constellations. It seemed to calm him down, and Remus was an absolute sucker for being drawn on. It was a mutually calming activity for both of them, and those were few and far in between these days.
-----
At first glance, Janus had no scars. And as far as the general population knew, that was absolutely true. He smiled at you with pearly white teeth, his skin seeming to shimmer and fade in and out of perspective if anyone concentrated too hard on it. If you brushed shoulders with him he would wince, even as his perfect, pristine skin looked back at you.
It wasn’t until he let his guard down that they started to appear. The lighter dots of white on his face, not scars, but still something he kept hidden, appeared first. Vitiligo dotted his skin as he slept, finally dropping whatever defenses he had put up as his body slipped from consciousness.
The vitiligo wasn’t even what he was hiding anymore, that was just second nature. The real thing he was hiding were the burns marking his arms and legs. They were ugly and twisted and an angry, melted pink. Clearly still healing and clearly not taken care of, they were enough to make almost anyone recoil in horror. At least, that was what he assumed. He had no other real reason for keeping them hidden. He had grown accustomed to hating himself years ago.
-----
Logan was littered with scars. They criss crossed over his skin like constellations, the faint white lines barely visible. When Logan became particularly cold, they turned almost purple against his white skin.
Roman liked to trace his scars when they cuddled, barely brushing their pale outlines. Logan remembered where they all came from, and he smiled when Roman’s fingers turned to tickles instead of tracing.
There was one on his thigh from a literal gunshot wound, for instance. Apparently it had “just barely grazed his skin” and “honestly, Roman, it’s not that big of a deal”.
There were several on his upper arms, from nicking them on filing cabinets and other pointy surfaces around the bunker when he was a child. It was astonishing they had even scarred over at all.
Across his back was one big one, twisted and ugly and raised to the touch. Logan didn’t like to talk about that one.
There were four little ones across his other leg, which had apparently happened on four different occasions. All of these occasions involved swords, something that fascinated Roman to no end.
The scars around his ankle apparently came from trying to ride a tricycle indoors. He’d wiped out and apparently that involved Ellie stitching him up and buying a new rug for the hallway. He hadn’t gone near the tricycle again for years.
Finally, there were a few scars down his face, remnants from Cassidy and their fight at the Safehouse. They were barely perceptible, but the image of Logan with blood streaming down his cheeks was ingrained in Roman’s mind forever.
“You can’t even feel the difference,” Logan protested, even as Roman’s hands ran down his cheeks, tracing the scars that might as well not even have been there.
“I can feel the difference,” Roman stubbornly contradicted, even as Logan flushed pink. The white lines were more obvious now, a softer, more subdued version of Ellie’s scarring.
Roman liked to kiss Logan’s scars to wake him up. The other boy would get all blinky and squinty as he woke up, a low grumble of protest in his throat even as his ears burned red.
Once, Roman named every single one of Logan’s scars. The only one he still remembers is Horacio, the small cut on one of Logan’s thumbs; the unhappy result of a mistake in the kitchen.
-----
Roman only had one scar. You forgot to look for it until it was time for him to shower and he shrugged his shirt off absentmindedly, or they decided to go to the beach and he forgot his swim shirt. It was perfectly ovular, an indentation in the otherwise unmarred skin of his shoulder. It was slightly cold to the touch and lighter than his actual skin tone. Every time Logan glanced at it, guilt washed over him in a wave.