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In a rare moment of quiet, Tiffany let her glamours drop, revealing a plethora of scars. They ran up her arms and legs down her chest and back. Sometimes, it felt like she was more scar than person. If she even counted as one, she thought as she felt the hard knot on her lip from when her father had decked her, thinking she'd abandoned her baby sister to the wolves.
Something said baby sister noticed while preparing to sketch her big sister. Frowning, she looked to Johnathan, he noticed too. Even as young as seven, she understood how much Tiffany hated those scars. She hide them from even herself.
Instead of trying to downplay them, Angel picked up her pencil and started to talk. "Your scars are kind of like stars, Taffy."
Which made her look up and raise a brow, though she quickly moved it back when her sister huffed. "How do you figure that? They're hardly something so nice."
"Cuz they have stories. Just like the stars," she said rather matter of factly. "Like on your arm," she pointed to Tiffany's left and dominant arm with a large ragged scar running almost from wrist to elbow, "that one is from when you saved me from a hungry wolf. You got between us and kept me safe."
Looking at her arm, Tiffany smiled a little. "I wasn't about to let something hurt my baby sister. No one else gets to pick on you," she teased.
"That's never stopped me," quipped Johnathan with a cheeky grin. "Though I guess I mostly pick on you," he teased and bumped Tiffany's shoulder.
Tiffany laughed and bumped him back. "Yeah yeah. You can be a real pain in the ass. And yeah, I guess some of them are kind of neat." With her sister sketching her she couldn’t move much, but she did look at the scars she could. Many of them had stories. Some still were only painful. Like the one just under her stomach.
"A lot of them are." Johnathan hovered a finger over her neck and her shirt, where lightning had left a large webbing scar that went across her chest and spread to her back. "You took lightning to the chest and lived. Not just lived, but you kept going and protected your men when you were being attacked."
That made her pause. It was a lie. One she would take to her grave. She had been struck by lightning and fought, but it was no hero’s battle, not that she could ever tell the truth. But he was right. She had survived when she should have died. And she was grateful.
Johnathan tapped her cheek, a long scar that almost reached her cheek. "You're good at surviving things that are supposed to kill you." That one was partly his fault, he wasn’t thinking clearly when he hit the doctor with the chair. But it was better than letting him take out her brain.
Tiffany's cheeks puffed out at that. "Jerk!" Though she still laughed while they kept pointing out scars and stories that came with them. Some daring tales and some were just silly things like getting stuck in an engine. It helped, feeling like her skin was covered in constellations instead of scars.