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Taiyo's skin was marked and marred.
Terrible pale lines dragged down his arms from sharp blades, uneven and light red spots almost invisible to one's eye, and accompanied by cracked skin are bullets that lingered despite being pulled out.
Sometimes he looks at himself in the mirror and sees a completely different person. Sometimes Taiyo doesn't see himself, instead he sees the stories that underlie every single one of his scars.
The one by his left eye is a traumatizing one.
It's a small jagged line that runs right below his left eyebrow and down to his cheek, stopping before his jaw.
It's a reminder of his failure when he was 14 years old. Of a time when he failed to save his normal: only able to watch Hikaru die in front of his eyes, only able to hear his father and mother explode in the car in the back, and only able to feel the pain of the debris crashing on him.
The bandages hadn't come off even after it healed. He left it on, his left view obscured. It took a few weeks of convincing from Mutsumi to even take it off and even longer for him to stop shaking every time she takes a step closer.
Trauma doesn't go away in the snap of the eye.
Nightmares haunt him every night and he always wakes, completely drenched in sweat. Shivering all over and crying silently, Taiyo does nothing but press a hand against the cruel memory of when he lost everything, including his own life.
They don't go away and he is left forever scarred.
(They continue to haunt him and Taiyo does nothing but trembles.
The memories never fade and it's a crisp image burned into his mind.)
Finding out that Mutsumi and her family were a bunch of spies was probably the second most shocking thing Taiyo has ever experienced. Being proposed to for Mutsumi by her siblings came in first.
He couldn't accept it. He didn't want to. He didn't want Mutsumi to die by marrying him.
He can't kill her like this.
Before he could say anything, Mutsumi stood up for him. Precisely another reason why the two of them couldn't be together. She will always be stronger than him, and he will always be too weak for her.
He's not depreciating himself. It's a fact.
Then her eldest brother came along and wrecked all the work the other siblings had set up.
Then it was just Mutsumi against her own brother.
Then Mutsumi was going to give up her life to save his.
And Taiyo will be damned if he took away someone's life again.
Courage comes from the strangest of places. He doesn't know what possessed him to step out, to get rid of the disguise on his body, to show himself to the one person that scares him the most right now.
All he knows is that he needs to save Mutsumi.
It takes one step before Taiyo was bound, the ring just out of reach. It takes another for him to face the pain and to push through, grasping the ring and Mutsumi into his arms.
"Let's get along, brother."
He had said with a small pained smile despite everything. His hands were cut deep from the sharp strings, but the ring was on and Mutsumi was safe. He realized something then.
Scars meant nothing if it means he would be stronger, if it means that he could protect his family, his normal.
(And god knows he'll sacrifice himself for them, anytime they ask.
He'll do anything to keep them safe and out of death's door.)
Adjusting to the spy life isn't easy.
Obviously, considering expertise isn't something you can gain overnight.
Neither is getting over his trauma, but that is neither here nor there.
Taiyo found himself nearly dying every other second, and he did find himself bleeding every other second.
Bandages could be found all over his body before Mutsumi's siblings offered to help him out. He took the fake skin, took the medicine, took the advice, took the weapons, and took his chance. He knows how bad of an idea this is, but if it keeps the worried expression off of Mutsumi's face, Taiyo will do anything.
It's not long until he gets caught by the eldest daughter, but hey, at least now he has another ally on his side.
(When Mutsumi finds out after the month, she does get mad at him and Taiyo repents harshly, going straight onto his knees.
Taiyo never really did decipher the gaze Kyoichiro shot him when he figured it out.)
Over time, Taiyo learns to avoid getting marked, if it could at least relieve some of the tension from his wife's mind.
But they never go away.
Taiyo doesn't take the fake skin Kengo offers him whenever the blond sees him tracing the scars on his body. He doesn't take the medicine from Nanao that the blue-haired boy made, which apparently allows the body to heal and erase the scars(he doesn't quite understand the chemistry behind it). Instead, he just pretends to not notice everyone's worrying looks.
Some evenings, he would open the doors and go up onto the roof to stare at the stars and compare them to the scars on his body.
Sometimes they match, other times they just make random images.
His body is ugly, completely marked by scars, and a horrifying sight to see.
But he smiles because these are the scars he got while he protected the Yozakuras. Taiyo smiles because the constellations on his body protected his normal.
(No one ever mentions to Taiyo that they know of his rare nightly activities.
No one mentions it, but Taiyo always had a feeling they knew.)
When Kyoichiro runs off by himself, Taiyo finds himself imagining the worse in his mind.
The entire family banded together to find him, but the scene they saw was barely refreshing. It didn't help that Taiyo felt his finger getting burnt by his string.
"Don't you remember the first rule of the Yozakura Family, Kyoichiro? Tell me what you just did to your brother!"
Kyoichiro answered something that Taiyo didn't really pay attention to. He saw something else that plagued his mind instead. When Kyoichiro ran, he couldn't help but think how weak and cowardly his strings had been.
He escapes and they don't chase. Until they did.
The second time Taiyo sees Kyoichiro, he immediately notices how weak his eldest brother had become. The black flowers attached to him doesn't help to lessen his worries either.
There's always been some sort of wall between them. Now there's a single wall of strings, strung tightly as his defense, but so incredibly weak.
It's almost comical how alike this scene is with the first time Taiyo found out the Yozakura secret. He steps forward, and the strings reach out to stop him.
But Taiyo doesn't stop there.
Before his brother could react, he surged in, a hand outstretched for Kyoichiro. He felt his clothes rip, pushing against the strings, felt the blood bleed, as the strings seeped into his body, and felt the anxiousness when the strings began to waver. When he feels the fabric under his gloves, he holds it firmly.
The black flowers melted away as his Chizakura flowers drowned them. He shuffles a little, getting closer and doesn't let go.
(Taiyo hangs on a little tighter, a little longer. Kyoichiro doesn't push him away.
It's the first time the two of them ever remotely hugged and Taiyo has the scars to remember the moment.)
His most recent scar is quite the beauty, and it matches the one by Mutsumi's heart. Just instead of being at the front, it's at the back.
Running down the upper part of his spine is a pale pink line, slightly jagged.
It's kind of horrifying to see it on the Taiyo that never really fought in any battles until later on, to see it on the skin that was unblemished, unbruised, and unmarked until the secret.
But as he ran his fingers down the scar, he smiled.
Because despite everything, despite dying, despite losing, despite falling, Taiyo still managed to protect Mutsumi to his very last breath.
This time though, he'll protect all of them from the nightmare incoming.
(The scar also serves as a reminder to him of the timeline where everything went wrong.
It's there, connecting every other scar into a large painting of stars, spread across his back.
It's there, but Taiyo will never let the story be retold in this life.)