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The first time she saw Scott’s scars was the first time they tried to have sex.
As could be expected of anyone who’d gone through Granny Goodness’ Orphanage, Scott was covered in them. Barda recognized quite a few, because she saw them in the mirror; those burst-shaped ones were from the shock baton, the stripes edging over his shoulder were whip marks, the burns on his side were from a hot poker. But the further her eyes wandered, the more scars she didn’t recognize. And as she cataloged them in her head, she slowly realized that his number exceeded her own.
“Is something wrong?” Scott asked, a worried look on his face. Barda shook her head.
“We don’t have to do any of this if you don’t want to,” Scott said, his voice soft and reassuring, as he gently picked up her hand. The scars in the crook of his elbow wrinkled as he did, and Barda found she couldn’t draw her eyes away from them. Their shape was one she didn’t recognize; long and drawn out, almost like claw marks, but much duller, less defined, almost like —
“How did you get those?” she asked, moving to touch them. She aborted the motion halfway through. Her hand hovered over them, her fingers a hair’s breadth away.
Scott blinked and followed her hand, before grimacing. “Ah,” he said, almost sheepishly, “Didn’t get them in a fight or anything, nothing like what you’re probably imagining —”
She hadn’t been imagining anything of the sort.
“It’s — well, it’s embarrassing —”
“I won’t judge.”
“Right.” Scott was tense, tense enough that Barda expected him to rip his arm away, but he stayed carefully still. He didn’t look at her as he said: “Granny really had it out for me, which, well, you can probably tell by all the, you know —” he gestured towards his body with his free hand.
Barda wanted to say You have more scars than me, but for some reason, the words got stuck in her throat.
“— but she was very hesitant to actually do anything that would leave lasting damage. So although I got punished a lot, I managed to duck out of the really severe stuff; mostly it was just beating, and lashings, some simple burns, and, ah —” he grimaced, “— solitary.”
Back in the orphanage, Barda had been, for a lack of a better term, a model student. It was something she used to take great pride in, back when she was still part of Darkseid’s elite. When she did get punished however, it was mostly physical. Solitary hadn’t been used on her very often, so it hadn’t left much of an impact on her. But based on the way Scott talked about it, it had on him. He said the word with a soldier’s weight, the same way Lashina used to talk about the time she’d almost died out in the field. The words came out slowly, as if they were heavy on his tongue, and he didn’t look at her as he spoke them.
“Longest I’ve ever been there was about - three months? Four? I had no way to keep the time, and I wasn’t — wasn’t really listening when Granny told me how long it’d been, afterwards. I can’t even remember what I was in for. And by the end of it — maybe halfway — I was. Well. Let’s just say I wasn’t doing so great.”
He laughed, awkward, fake, then said in a rush, “I scratched the inside of my elbow open just to convince myself I wasn’t dead.”
Barda stared at his scars and missed the next few words Scott said. “— dark, you see, pitch black, and I couldn’t hear anything that went on outside either, and they’d do this thing where they’d — skip meals, or something, at least I hadn’t got any in a while, and I was starting to think — well — starting to feel like I wasn’t quite real, so —”
Barda finally settled her hand on Scott’s skin, properly, and caressed the scars with her thumb. Scott’s mouth clicked closed, and he stared at it.
“Does it bother you?” she asked, feeling the ridges of underneath her fingertips.
“No,” Scott answered, softly. “If I was bothered by people touching my scars, I wouldn’t be able to touch anyone at all.”
Barda nodded. “There is no reason to be ashamed of them. I have quite a few myself, as you can see.”
“Yeah,” Scott said, still not looking at her. “Sure. I bet you made none of yours yourself because you couldn’t stand to be alone for a while, though.”
Barda may not have been in solitary very often, but she remembered the few times she’d been exposed to it very well. The longest she’d ever been locked up was a week and a half. By the end, she was ready to start hitting her head against the stone wall, just to feel something, anything at all.
She ducked down and pressed a kiss upon his scars. “Don’t be ashamed of the battles you’ve won.”
Suddenly, Scott ripped his arm away, leaving her to rock back. Scott balled his fist, his jaw set, looking uncharacteristically angry. “It wasn’t a battle,” he said, his every word laden with bitterness. “It was a punishment. There is no winning those.”
He tensed even further, before letting out a deep breath and unclenching his fists. “Let’s just go to bed for now,” he said. “I don’t think either of us are in the mood.”
It was still a novelty to sleep with Scott, but that night, their bed felt almost cold.
When she was a little girl, she sometimes used to etch lines into her skin with her nails and pretend they were battle scars. If she came back with wounds from training, she used to hope they’d scar, used to check the skin daily to see how it was healing, disappointed if clean skin replaced the bloody wound. Even punishments were marks of pride; punishments that she survived were steps towards becoming Darkseid’s soldier, serving his glorious regime to the best of her ability, and better. Better because she survived those punishments.
The Female Furies bore their scars like badges of honor. They boasted about them when they appeared, showing them off in the barracks, everyone jeering and yelling about how their own scars were infinitely better, while secretly jealous. Being a private person, Bernadeth was perhaps the only one who didn’t partake in those boasting sessions, but there was only so much privacy you could retain in the Fury Barracks. Even she, when a new scar was noticed on her, got a glint of cat-like pride in her eyes.
Standing in front of the mirror now, Barda could recall almost every scar on her body. The long, thin one on her hip was from failing to dodge a rebel’s knife; the starburst on her shoulder was from a New Genesis laser; the burn scar on her hand was from coming just a bit too close to the Apokolips firepits, before turning around to throw her opponent, a defector from Granny Goodness’ orphanage, into them.
She’d boasted about that one a lot, because it was one of her most visible scars. With her costume covering her entire body, it hardly mattered, but within the barracks, those scars always received the loudest acclaim regardless.
The defector’s face was fuzzy in her memory. Hair that had barely grown back, maybe, pale skin; not much else. She’d carried a 24k New Darkseid style laser, stolen from one of Granny’s guards. She’d been only about half Barda’s size.
Had she screamed as she’d fallen into the fire?
In all likelihood, yes. Burning alive was not a pleasant way to go. Barda vividly remembered the smell of searing flesh that always hung around the firepits. But she couldn’t remember whether the runaway had screamed.
“How’d you get that?”
Barda had just put the tea on the stove to boil when Shilo pointed towards a thin scar on her high collarbone. Absentmindedly, Barda touched it. “Why do you want to know?”
Shilo shrugged. “Curious. Figure you guys can guess where I got most of mine, so I kinda wanna know yours.”
Shilo had few visible scars, even when he wore shorts. But there was one on his knee that looked like a knife wound, and one on his upper arm that was round and ugly, which Barda couldn’t identify.
“I can’t, actually,” she answered.
“Can’t what?” Shilo replied, confused.
“Guess where you got your scars.”
Shilo swung his legs. He was sitting on the table, something that drove Oberon up the wall, but that neither Barda nor Scott minded much. Etiquette hadn’t exactly been a focal point in their upbringing. He looked taken aback, before schooling his expression. “Huh,” he said. “Funny. I thought it was obvious.”
Barda raised an eyebrow. “Well, where did you get them?”
“Fights, mostly.” Barda could tell Shilo was trying to sound nonchalant. But he was still only a child, and not very good at lying yet, at least, not by her standards. His gestures were too intentional and his voice too tense to be truly indifferent. “Didn’t start most of them, but in the orphanage, you had to be ready to finish them.”
“Ah. Did you have to fight any of the adults, too?”
Shilo blinked. “There’s no fighting the adults. There weren’t very many that hit you, and if you could get the principal to believe you they’d be fired for it, but if they did, you just had to hold still.”
She almost flinched at that. Oblivious, Shilo continued. “Me and my brother ran way after I got this one,” he pointed at the scar on his knee, “One of the bigger kids got his hands on a knife. Landed me in the hospital for a week. Should’ve been longer, but the orphanage didn’t wanna pay for it. Still kinda hurts sometimes.”
“What’s the one on your shoulder?” Barda asked. “I can’t identify it.”
Shilo’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? I thought you were a soldier. Got that from a gun.”
Barda frowned. “A gun? Why were you shot at?”
“Bad neighbourhood. Got mugged. By some rich looking dudes too, and they were laughing the entire time, so my money didn’t even go to anyone who needed it.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty much all fights and muggings, mine. Except the scar on my pinkie. That was because I opened a sauce tin wrong.”
The kettle whistled, and she took it off the fire. Behind her, Shilo said: “Anyway, your turn now. Where’d you get those scars?”
“All of them?” Barda asked, pouring the tea into two mugs. “We’ll be here for a while.”
She turned around just in time to catch Shilo rolling his eyes. “Start with the one I asked you about earlier.”
Barda sat a cup down in front of him. “Shrapnel. Someone stepped on a mine, and I got caught in the edge of the blast.”
Shilo whistled. “Must’ve been a mess.”
“Sure was.” She blew a bit on her tea. “Luckily, our uniforms were self-cleaning.”
“Handy. That one?” He pointed towards a bigger scar on her upper arm.
“Sword.”
“Sword?” Shilo repeated, incredulous, before groaning a little. “No, never mind, of course you don’t have guns but you do have swords.”
“We have guns, just not your primitive ones. Ours shoot lasers.” She sipped her tea. “There’s a guy named Kanto, Darkseid’s master assassin. He uses swords. I got that scar while sparring with him.”
“Is that the same guy who and Scott fought? You know, when you got married? The weirdo who looked like he was cosplaying a Shakespeare character?”
“Not sure who that is, but yes, probably. He did attack us during our wedding.”
“Huh.” Shilo took a sip of his tea and made a face. “You steeped it for too long.”
“I like it strong.”
“It isn’t strong, it’s burned. Speaking of, how’d you get that?” He pointed towards the burn on her hand.
Did the girl scream when she died?
“No.”
Shilo blinked. “No?”
“No. Ask me about another one.”
“Uhm. Alright.” He gave her a weird look, but pointed to another scar. “That one?”
It was a scar on her shoulder, barely uncovered by her shirt’s straps. The rebel had managed to get a screw through her shoulder before she broke his neck. It had gotten infected. Bernadeth had told her she’d gotten her brother to torture his friends, as warmly as Bernadeth ever said anything.
Barda stood up. “I need to leave.”
“What?” Shilo’s hand shot up to catch her, but she stepped around. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean -”
She barely managed to avoid slamming the door behind her.
“I used to be proud of my scars.”
They were curled up in bed, Scott held tightly in her arms. As she spoke, he turned to look at her, but she pressed her face into the top of his head, burying her cheek in his hair.
“I used to be proud of my scars,” she repeated. “I’ve bragged about them. A lot. But now, whenever I think of them, I just feel...”
She trailed off, and after a short pause, Scott finished, “Sick?”
She let out a small sigh. “Yes.”
He didn’t turn his head, and she was glad; she didn’t want to look him in the eye. But he did reach a hand up to her hair, and started softly carding his fingers through it. “That’s okay, Barda. It’s pretty normal.”
“I guess,” she said. “But I liked being able to look into the mirror without wanting to puke.”
Scott’s fingers hesitated, before continuing. “I used to have the same problem when I got here, you know. After first escaping Granny’s orphanage.”
She stayed still, focusing on the soft sound of Scott’s voice as he continued, “I hated any reminder of that place. Actually, that’s an understatement. It made me sick, like, physically. It was like certain smells, or sounds, or even just situations made me feel like I was back there again. The first time someone locked a door behind me I didn’t leave the room for hours. Not because I didn’t want to, or couldn’t; but because I was too busy trying to remember how to, you know, breathe. It took that long to convince myself that I was safe, that I didn’t have to panic.”
Barda tightened her arms around him, and Scott petted her head a little. “It’s alright. I still have some of that stuff; I really don’t like cooking chicken, for example. The smell reminds me just a little too much of the firepits.”
“I’ve seen chicken at the store, but I don’t know how it smells. Nobody’s actually made it before around here.”
“That’s because the first time Oberon did, I threw a fit,” he chuckled softly. “Oberon was surprisingly okay about it. Talked me through it, threw out his whole supply of chicken, asked if we needed to, quote, ‘stock some more rabbit food’. Turns out most meat is fine, as long as I don’t have to smell it too much.”
He vaguely gestured with his free hand. “Point is, I still have problems. But it’s gotten better; I wouldn’t be able to do my escape stunts if I still panicked whenever someone closed a door on me. You only just got off of Apokolips, you’re still processing stuff. Give it time.”
Barda buried herself further into Scott’s hair, as deep as she could go. She could feel it pricking against her eyelids. “It’s different for me. You’re — you’re good.”
“And you’re not?” Scott’s voice was soft and soothing, far more than she deserved.
“Most of my scars are from killing people,” she breathed in, tried to keep herself from bursting into tears. “Good people. Or at least, innocent ones. I fought for Darkseid, wholeheartedly, and I killed a lot of people who didn’t deserve it in his name.”
Scott didn’t say anything, simply letting her speak. “There was a girl,” she started, hesitantly. “It didn’t really — register or matter, at the time, but she couldn’t have been much older than twelve, I think. She’d escaped from Granny’s orphanage. I killed her. Pushed her into the firepits. I can’t remember if she screamed.”
Scott’s fingers stuttered.
“I keep thinking about her, more than any of the others. Because I — you. Because I helped you escape and I killed her. Why did I kill her?”
“Did you want to kill her?” Scott asked, and Barda half expected there to be an angry edge to his voice. There wasn’t. It was still as soft as ever, soothing as if he was talking to an animal in pain. Part of her bristled at it; she didn’t need to be coddled like a kitten, as if she wasn’t responsible for the death of dozens. The rest of her was glad, relieved that she’d get to keep him a little longer.
She thought. Honestly tried to think, to remember what she’d felt in that moment, before she’d pushed the little girl off the edge. But all she found was an emptiness; all she could remember was the burn on her hand. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t — I think I was caught up in the fight. I don’t remember.”
Scott shifted slightly so that he could lock his arms around her, pull her into a hug. It almost felt like she was drowning in it, pressed into his hair as she was. When she breathed in and caught the faint scent of oil still left over from his workshop, it was almost like nothing but him existed in this world, right now.
“You’re a good person, Barda,” he said, and it was like a weight was lifted off her shoulders, like she could breathe easy again. It was stupid; it wasn’t like Scott’s opinion meant much, in the grand scheme of things, and it certainly didn’t mean anything to the people she’d killed. But it meant a lot to her. “You believed what you’d been told to believe your whole life. That doesn’t make you a bad person; if it does, then I’m bad as well.”
Barda stiffened. “You rebelled.”
“Metron and Himon had to practically spell out in neon letters ‘You Should Rebel’ before I so much as thought about it. And even then, when you met me, I hadn’t quite decided whether I’d betray them all or not.”
He wriggled out of her hold, sitting up slightly, forcing her face out of his hair. When she tried to bury it into their pillow, he gently cupped her cheek and made her look at him. Even in the soft light of the evening, the love in his eyes was obvious. “Getting out was a process that involved far more than the escape attempt. And I had people to help me find my way and aid me in my escape. You came to it all on your own. Don’t beat yourself up for taking a little more time.”
She looked away from him. “The time I took got people killed.”
“The time you took got you to me.” He bent down to kiss her forehead. “And I, for one, am happy with that.”
He picked up her hand, and stroked her burn scar. It was all she could do not to flinch. “You don’t have to be proud of your scars. I have plenty I’m not proud of myself. You just have to learn to live with them.”
She caught his fingers as they caressed her hand, and pulled them closer to her. The scars on the crook of his elbow became visible as his arm unfolded. Barda felt Scott flinch a little, attempting to pull his hand away, but she kept it steady. “And you should be proud of yours,” she replied, steel in her voice. “You survived. Even if it wasn’t pretty, you survived.”
Scott’s eyes darted away for a second, before he took a deep breath and resettled them on her. “Well then,” he said, with the same conviction she did. “So did you.”
There were a million things to argue about. Scott’s survival and hers were incomparable. When her survival had cost the lives of dozens, was it worth it? Wouldn’t it have been better if she’d just let that little girl kill her?
But in that moment, Scott leaned down to kiss her, and she was happy, too, that she survived.