Scars

Scars
20 December 2016
Anchorage, AK, United States
You've been in Alaska nearly a year when you let yourself slide down the cool gray tiles of your bathroom to sit on the floor, legs stretched out in front of you. The razor in your hand glints under the light from the bulbs over the mirror.
The world doesn't need another monster, you think. The Kaiju are more than enough. She didn't even know how monstrous you really are. Your back against the wall presses your wing bones and feathers into your shoulders. You flip the razor from knuckle to knuckle.
You let her kiss you over and over, your back pressed to the wall, feathers and bones digging into your shoulders, trying to give her what you both wanted without giving away what you could not. Six months pass like this. Her begging you for more. More together. More touch. More skin. Pushing away her hands as they desperately try to reach under your shirt. Redirecting her embraces away from inhuman bones. Forcing her to content herself with intertwined fingers and increasingly forceful kisses as you plead you are not ready for more.
She is tall and pale and beautiful. You meet her when she knocks you to the ground as the pair of you hurry in opposite
directions in the hall. You instantly connect. The two of you are immediately inseparable. You've only had one friendship like this before. When she asks you for a date, your heart nearly stops in your chest. When she holds your hand, when she kisses you, you fight panic and an urge to disassociate. You fight to stay there, stay with her, be normal. You fail. You are too frightened. Every time she touches you it is an effort not to pull away.
Six months. The week before Christmas she sits in front of you while you perch on the edge of your bench in the mess hall struggling against a rising tide of anxiety. You know what she will say.
We're adults, she says, not teenagers. I can't wait for you any longer.
You open your mouth to beg her for a little more time, but snap it closed and drop your eyes when you realize she's right. She should not have to wait for you. She deserves the sort of love she wants, the kind you are unable to provide. Not when every touch could betray your secret. Not when you are unsure you will ever be ready to provide what she needs from you.
She turns and strides away, not looking back, long braid swinging with each purposeful step. Six months. You had fought with yourself for a fortnight over whether to tell her, to let her see the real you, the monster hiding under your frumpy, frayed armor. As she leaves you, you still have not decided.
As you sit on the floor of your bathroom in Anchorage, crippled leg stiffening, your memory vomits images of your father shouting at you in the dining room of your family home. How stupid of you to think someone outside the family will keep your secret. They will see your abnormality and leave you to tell the world what a monster you are. Is that what you want, Hermann? To be exposed as a freak? He tells you he will transfer
you to university in Berlin to keep a closer eye on you as you cannot be trusted with your own life and safety. He will put you back in the cage you thought you escaped. He reminds you the only way to survive is to stay hidden, to be the lab rat your mother created you to be.
While Dietrich manhandles you out of the room you are shouting horrible things in every language you know and Father is shaking with rage.
You are sixteen and your first semester of university in Manchester gives you both freedom and a new cage. Hiding in such close quarters among so many intelligent, observant individuals stokes your paranoia, your natural inclination to turn inward and fade into the background. You are smarter than anyone in your classes, but you hide in the middle of the room inside your oversized jumpers and standoffish attitude, behind a scowl and your limp and your cane. You never speak unless singled out by professors, which they learn not to do after you make a display of correcting their mistakes.
Somehow, in the last weeks, he notices you. You notice him the first day of class. It is difficult to overlook the weedy Scot with curious eyes. He talks to you after your shared probability theory seminar, matching his pace to your hobble. You try to shake him off, but he laughs and keeps talking. The two of you are immediately inseparable. You've never had a friendship like this. The last evening before holiday you watch the stars together from the hill behind the theater. When he gently cups your chin and pulls you in for a kiss, you don't know if you should run or hit him or melt into his touch. You allow yourself the last. You hold his hand until shortly before dawn, his skin hot against yours. At least for this one night, you let yourself believe a normal life is possible.
You never see him again.
You return to your family's home in Berlin the next morning and that evening tell Karla about him. Your father overhears and yanks you to your feet by your collar, red-faced and vibrating with anger. You argue.
You sneak past your siblings to the bathroom, then out into the back garden. You sit on the grass and strip off your jumper, then your shirt. You undo the clasps of your binding and let it fall. Spreading your wings to their fullest extent, you lean your head back to study the stars. The city lights obliterate those near the horizon, but you can see Deneb, which you've adopted as your personal star. The head of the swan. Your feathers have never felt city breezes like this.
You make the cuts with quick, sure motions, careful to reach the proper depth. Lying on your back, feeling the cool, damp grass on your skin and pushing through your feathers, you watch the stars and wait.
In Anchorage, you flip the razor from knuckle to knuckle.
You hate Anchorage. The cold tortures your bad knee and amplifies the aches in all of your healed fractures. Even the extreme environments parka the Kaidanovskys give you before they leave for Vladivostok can't keep you comfortable although it serves as a wonderful piece of camouflage.
You coded the software for the first Jaegers. You triangulated the location of the Breach and your colleagues consider your model of its structure the best in the world. You have done what for most men would constitute a life's work in only three years. But you are not most men. You are not even a man. You are a monster like those you fight, only smaller and lacking any strength. You have no more right to happiness than the Kaiju do.
In Berlin, Karla finds you in the garden. You half-listen to her calling you an idiot as Dietrich presses folded pieces of
his shirt to your wrists to stem the bleeding. They ask question after question, poke and prod you, anything they can think of to do to keep you awake. You argue, ask them to leave you alone, but they refuse and keep working to save you from yourself. When you finally stop bleeding, all three of you lie exhausted in the grass.
In Anchorage, Tendo Choi appears in the doorway. Mind if I join you? he asks. You must've forgotten to lock the door behind yourself. You don't answer, but he sits down beside you anyway. You flip the razor from knuckle to knuckle. Tendo may be the only person on this godforsaken base who qualifies as a friend. You bond over Doctor Who and Jaeger construction and software and he learns not to share his romantic exploits.
He draws you into a discussion of the Torchwood reboot and revisits your running argument over who was the superior Doctor, Eleven or Nine. This is safe ground and you allow yourself to tread it.
The razor is gone. You don't know when or to where it disappeared.
Tendo pulls you to your feet. You let him. He leads you back to his quarters, bearing your weight on his arm. You're too out of sorts to remember your cane. The two of you play card games far into the small hours. He chats about anything and everything sticking to neutral topics. You find yourself towed along in his conversational wake until you are too exhausted to keep your eyes open.
You fall asleep in his bed. When you wake, he's asleep on the floor. When he rises, you walk together to the mess hall in yesterday's clothes. He provides his arm and his strength to get you there. You eat in companionable, if nervous, silence before he guides you back to your quarters and your cane and extracts a promise that you will meet him for dinner that evening. He knows
you are a creature of your word.
You clean yourself up, re-bind your wings, tug your shirt and blazer cuffs over the scars on your forearms, take the morning's raft of pills, and make your usual slow and uneven way to your office.
There is work which must be done. Software upgrades, a model to predict the emergence of new Kaiju, a better structural model of the Breach to help plan its destruction.
You are not sixteen; you are twenty-seven. You have borne your secret for nearly three decades now, a few more years alone should provide no challenge.
You shove thoughts of her, of razors and scars, from your mind, pick up your chalk and begin to calculate.
Category:Ficlet
Category:Pages in need of tags