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As a rule, Karin had never liked to be stared at. She didn’t like it when people’s eyes traveled down her bare flesh—they were calling her ‘freak’, whether they actually said it or not; if she didn’t hear it from their mouths, she saw it in their revolted faces. It didn’t matter whether or not they knew where those scars had come from, why they were there, it was a rare sort of person who didn’t recoil when they saw the crescent scars that lightly dotted her legs, littered her arms and pitted her chest and back, leaving not a square inch of unmarred flesh on the latter. For most, any evaluation of Karin stopped at those scars, if they saw them.
Herself, Karin didn’t give a damn what most thought of her. But she didn’t like to be stared at, and, honestly, she didn’t always like to be reminded that those scars were there at all. She liked being able to get up in the morning, walk around outside, just live her life without seeing them. So for the most part, any part of skin that might bear those scars went covered. Even when the temperature soared past one hundred and humidity was maxed out (Mizu was perfectly miserable this time of year), Karin went about with her skin covered. Turtleneck, check. Long sleeves, check. Long pants or stockings, check. She didn’t see her skin, and for the most part, neither did anyone else.
“Did these hurt?”
The hairs on the back of Karin’s neck prickled as Sakura ran her cool fingertips down her back, tracing the outline of a scar here and there. This… Karin was still getting used to this. No one had touched her casually in Oto—it was the rough handling before medical procedures, the pushing and shoving of someone looking for a fight, or the greedy touches Karin had learned early on to beware. Maybe this wasn’t casual, no, it wasn’t casual at all, but Karin didn’t feel threatened, like this.
“Of course they hurt,” she muttered, hunching her bony shoulders. The rain on the roof above them made a steady pattering sound, the distant thunder like Karin’s old memories, crawling back up from oblivion. “You’ve been bitten by a cat before, haven’t you? Imagine that, but coming from something with bigger jaws. A lot bigger.”
“Wrong question. Sorry.” Unlike some of her clansmen, Karin couldn’t sense emotions. She didn’t have to be an empath, though, to sense the awkwardness rolling off of Sakura. Karin sighed a little. They really were just fumbling along, weren’t they? When you fumbled, you hit… bumps.
Sakura pressed her hand against the middle of Karin’s shoulders, not a caress, not a grope, but like Sakura couldn’t tell if she was supposed to be comforting Karin or herself. Her touch was cool, her hand too soft and smooth for that of a kunoichi who’d had years to pick up scars and calluses. Even Karin’s hands were coarse from years of labor, but Sakura’s palm felt as though it was made of satin. The feeling of hands on her skin, the pressure, the prickling sensation, all this without an accompanying sick lurch in her stomach, this was all still very new. As new as that gesture was for Sakura, Karin would bet.
“So what were you trying to ask me?” Karin asked in a low voice, drinking in that cool touch almost greedily.
“I guess…” Sakura hesitated. Karin could easily imagine her gnawing on her lip, confidence fleeing fast in the face of such a topic. “…Does it still hurt?”
They used her like a human battery: consent to use optional, but not required. Karin had been desperate to be useful—she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in Oto if she hadn’t been useful somehow. She accepted it, the price she paid for a roof over her head and food in her belly, the same way she had accepted many things for the same. Sakura didn’t understand what it was like to be in that situation, and frankly, Karin was glad she didn’t. There didn’t need to be any more people in the world who knew what it was like.
When she had watched the sick and the injured grow well again after biting her, she had felt powerful; she still did. It was one of the few ways Karin could ever really affect the world around her, the only time she didn’t feel like she was howling into a storm. To be bitten, though, especially as she grew older became more and more of a burden, became more like something that made her want to tear all her skin off, so she’d never see another scar again, became more like something that made her want to scour her memory clean, so she wouldn’t remember. Even being touched was hateful sometimes—no one touched Karin without a reason, and never was it a good reason.
And then, there was this. No danger, no threat. No rough handling, no pain. Lying on the bed, listening to the rain fall, in a place where a hand on her bare skin didn’t make Karin tense up.
Karin rolled over so she could look up at Sakura’s face. Yeah, there was the hesitant look she’d imagined—so confident outside, so unsure in here. Sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, Karin was the same way. But for now, Karin shrugged and murmured, “Not as much as it used to.”