bakerstreet | a scar means i survived } scars meme

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a scar means i survived } scars meme

the s c a r s meme

Most everyone has some sort of scar. Some are from happy accidents. Some are from events you'd rather not speak about. Sometimes, people can share a moment over scars: Be it friendly, romantic, or even with a complete stranger. These are those moments.

01. NEW: the scar is fairly new-- maybe you still need to do something to make sure it heals properly. maybe you're just worried about the new scar that's appeared on someone you care about.

02. DISCOVERY: you've just had someone find out about your scars, or you've just accidentally learned that the other person has scars. do you say something, or let the moment pass?

03. SHAME: maybe you're ashamed of your scars. maybe you want someone else to know that there's no need to hide their scars around you.

04. SHOW: you're proud of your scars, or at least you don't see a reason to keep them covered-- never have, or not anymore. or maybe someone is showing you their scars for the first time.

05. STORY: it's time to talk about the story behind your scars. or, perhaps, it's time to listen to someone tell you about how they came about their scars.

06. TOUCH: maybe you want someone to touch your scars so you can remind yourself you're still here. maybe you want to touch their scars because you want to show them you don't mind them.

07. ATTRACTION: you've heard that people like someone with scars, so you're flaunting them, or you're the person very attracted to someone with scars.

08. KISS: letting this person kiss your scars may be a moment of extreme vulnerability, or just something you like. kissing someone else's scars may be just what you need to do to show someone how much you care.

09. SOULMATE: you live in a world where your soulmate's scars appear on your own skin. what's that like?

10. OTHER: wildcard option.

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Post with your character's name and canon, if you're interested in gen/shipping/etc., and maybe a list of some of their scars. Reply to other people's comments by picking RNG for an option, or pick your own!

Warning: May have reference to abuse, torture, violence, self-harm, or similar.

A mash up of several other scar memes.

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"I like how you immediately doubt that your way is the right way," she chuckles. She must still be a bit of an idiot or maybe drunk on Eskel's own optimism, because she can't entirely snuff out the tiny spark of hope that ignites in her chest every time he talks about taking her away with him. She wants so badly to believe he can do it.

She's afraid that if he can't, then no one else can, and somehow losing that hope is worse than crushing it out herself.

While he's mentioned going home now and then, she hasn't asked too many questions. She hasn't wanted to ruin the limited time they have together by pushing too hard about something uncomfortable or sensitive. Her curiosity gnaws at her as persistently as ever, even so, and faced with the inescapable reality of five or more months without his company, she's more inclined to surrender to it. "How do you pass the time up there?"

Winter is simply not her season. Like other green things, she tends toward sleeping when the weather turns cold and the earth goes dormant.

[ngl, Puck would probably be SO delighted if he managed to do it that way XD]

"My way's a good old-fashioned wager." He laughs. "Figure you'd like the odds of a well-researched curse-breaking than me trying to win you off your boss like a fancy racehorse in a hand of Gwent." He says, squeezing one pale ass-cheek affectionately and snuggles down among the pillows.

"Nothing too exciting. I do repairs to the keep, patch up my gear. I hunt and fish." He smiles fondly. "And at then I stay up all night drinking and bullshitting with my brothers. It's cold up there, takes a lot of booze to keep a witcher warm."

Robin rewards him with a bright bark of laughter, but she doesn't miss the chance to roll her hips up into the squeeze of his hand. "I would be honestly impressed if you managed it," she admits, raising her head to give him a grin with a wicked edge. "But also very disappointed if you didn't, so perhaps you're right about trying the other way first." Being won as a prize might not be particularly dignified, but somehow, she still prefers it to being sold.

She settles fully down against him again. Her hand slides down from his neck to run over his chest in a slow, meditative stroke.

"That sounds kind of cozy." Not the frigid weather, but the drinking, certainly, and even the repairing. Her kind of magic is made for that sort of thing--cleaning, mending. She never imagined she would miss being able to do even that sort of menial magic without significant effort. "Your brothers..." She hesitates but pushes on. "Are you all truly brothers?" She knows that witchers are made, but she knows nothing about the method or the meaning.

"Nah. More like...monks in a fraternal order are brothers." He laughs. "Ostensibly, witchers used to be in a monastic order, but you wouldn't know to look at us, we get so rowdy. What with the drinking and gambling and hiring nice ladies." He watches her, liquid gold under his black eyelashes. "My brother Geralt might as well be my blood though, we're almost the same age and I don't really remember a time without him. Attached at the hip. Other novices used to ask if we were brothers when we were kids 'cause we even looked alike. Not anymore though: trials changed him and now they call him The White Wolf 'cause he lost all the color in his hair and skin."

"Monastic doesn't exactly describe what I've learned about you," Robin says, voice and smile equally wry. She wouldn't exactly describe herself as a nice lady, either. Imagining a tiny version of Eskel is unexpectedly endearing; picturing two of them increases the charm by a factor of ten. She tips her head to the side, a little rueful, and admits, "I've heard the song."

She might not get a lot of culture, locked in a brothel, but if something is popular enough, she's bound to hear about it eventually.

The golden slits of his eyes are almost hypnotic. "Is any of it true? Besides the color of his hair." A woman who worked here a couple of years ago swore up and down that she'd met the White Wolf when she worked in Cidaris, but she'd told a lot of tales, and Robin knows a truth stretched to the breaking point when she hears it.

"Hell if I know." He says. "I'd wager about half of it is bullshit dreamt up by that bard that follows him around. But some of its true: the djinn, the violet-eyed sorceress. The dragon." He smiles. "He's always getting into shit like that. Dunno if he's just unlucky or if he has a secret taste for all the attention." He kisses her shoulder lazily. "Sorry I don't have any stories like that to tell you, darlin'." He smiles. "You're the craziest thing that's ever happened to me."

Edited (Had to add a bit of fluff.) 2021-11-01 01:52 (UTC)

Robin laughs softly, and the sound vibrates against his skin when she nips at his collarbone in gentle reprimand. "Careful, that kind of compliment will turn my head." She always strives to be memorable, if nothing else. "I like your stories well enough." He's told her a few, some about creatures she hasn't seen in decades and some about entities she wouldn't have cared to meet even at her most reckless. "I'm pleased to hear there are still dragons to be found. Whether they want to be or not, I suppose," she adds on a rueful note.

Better for them if they stay scarce.

"They're almost gone. The scholars keep declaring them extinct, but every couple of decades one shows up, wrecks a city and disappears again." He says, absently rubbing his hands up and down her sides. "At my school, we don't hunt them. They're too rare, too sentient."

"That sentience means that when they wreck a city, they generally have a reason," Robin says, as her hand slides into his hair again. She loops one strand around her fingers, letting it unravel almost to the tips before winding it up again. She flashes him a grin. "But you know that already."

People tend to covet the rare. They tend to attribute mystical properties to it, as well--whether or not that assumption is deserved--and they'll do a great many questionable things in pursuit of it. A little vengeance is probably inevitable.

She has a few fantasies of her own about that sort of thing.

"Yeah. Usually it's human encroachment. Not a lot I can do about that. Most of the time I just try to get the monsters somewhere safe and away from the cities, if they're willing." He nuzzles into her hair. "But you don't want to listen to me talk about work, do you?"

Robin hums an agreement. "And you're hardly responsible for any of that." His willingness to intervene for the good of both sides strikes her as noble, anyway, since he's unlikely to earn as much coin--if any at all--for a driven-away monster as a proven-dead monster. "And I suppose not. Not if you have a more interesting subject for conversation," she says with a slanting grin.

Honestly, she doesn't mind hearing about anything outside these walls, his work included, but she's not going to badger him either way. She wouldn't mind hearing more about his family, either, but she won't ask without an opening.

"If I'm the craziest thing that's ever happened to you," she murmurs, letting her eyes slip closed, "what's the second craziest?"

She'd be right: while Eskel had been raised to drive a hard bargain for as much coin as he can wring from the locals, he's also raised to follow the nebulous but prized Code instilled in him by the old man. He'll take a pay cut to do the right thing.

He's quiet for a long moment and his fingers along her spine are suddenly cautious.

"I made a gamble a long time ago and it came back to haunt me." He says, softly, gesturing to that long and terrible tearing from chin to hairline. He could make something up, or tell the story of some other scar. But he wouldn't like to lie to Robin-- her trust in him is such a precious thing.

Fuck.

She winces but keeps the flinch entirely internal; she won't have him thinking he's the cause. Her own thoughtlessness comes back to bite her, as usual, because of course this story would have everything to do with that set of scars. Cursing herself for a fool, she flattens a hand against his chest with a quelling press of her palm. "You don't have to tell me," she says. She tucks her head beneath his chin so that they don't have to decide whether or not to meet each other's eyes. "I didn't mean to ask, I'm sorry."

He's never asked about hers. Repaying that favor by prying about his would be worse than careless--it would be cruelty, and she's done her best to leave that kind of maliciousness far in the past.

"It's okay." He kisses her forehead with the good side of his mouth. He huffs a gentle, self-deprecating laugh against her hairline. "My life just isn't that exciting, darlin'. I work as hard and as much as I possibly can, I drink, I curl up in whatever beds will take me for a little coin. And I stay the fuck away from anything to do with destiny or politics. So I only have so many stories...and that's the closest one I've got to one of my brother's fairytales." He brushes his fingers through her hair. "I didn't want to lie to you and make something up. Or just tell you that it was some dumb thing I did when I was drunk, or when Geralt and I were kids. You mean too much to me, for me to start lyin' you now."

"Eskel," she murmurs, because his trust wraps fingers around her heart and squeezes with a poignancy too close to pain. The hand on his chest slides up to the hollow of his throat, and her fingertips rest just over the slow, soothing throb of his pulse. She swallows hard. She ought to tell him that he doesn't owe her anything, because that's the truth, but she doesn't particularly want to make light of what he's offered her, either. "Thank you."

Honesty disconcerts her, even when someone else is the source. Her nature demands something in balance.

Perhaps she doesn't mind so much, with him. She sighs against his shoulder. "I can't say much about destiny, but I never tried to avoid politics, when I was free." Not that she was free then, but it's a useful shorthand for a complicated set of circumstances. "I couldn't have if I'd tried. I spent the majority of my time at court."

He lets her do this, wondering what kind of assurance she draws from those questing fingers against his neck.

"Don't know how you did it. Courts make my skin crawl. Thankfully, it's rare a king has a contract to give you himself. Usually, it gets filtered down-- to the captain of the guard or something-- and I almost never have to set foot inside a palace. I can't stand politics and I can't stand nobles. I was born less than dirt poor, and sometimes I think they can smell it on me, no matter how nice I dress or how good my manners, even with my mutations. And there's always sorceresses around." He shudders. "And those are worst, by far."

Maybe it's just the contrast she likes--his preternaturally slow heartbeat against the flutter of her own.

"Funny how nobility acts just the same way, no matter the type of being," Robin drawls, wry. "Human, Aen Seidhe, fey. Every one of them loves to crush someone else beneath the heel of their boot." Her bitterness carries clear through every word, but Eskel sounds as if he understands better than most. "It was fascinating at first, like a new game to learn." She'd learned it very well, but not quite well enough to remember that she wasn't playing by the same set of rules as everyone else, not even when things between her and Oberon were at their best.

She sighs, shifting against him until she's tucked into the curve of his arm again, head on his shoulder. Her hand slides back down to his chest.

"By the end, I was just tired. It was never the politics I liked, anyway." She liked the attention, the performance--always dancing, one way or another. She was able to do enough of the latter to withstand the former for a long time.

"Would you have to go back? If I got you out of here?" He asks. "Would you just be trading one cage for another?" Though he supposes a cage one enters of one's own accord will always be better than one in which one is thrust violently with one's wings clipped.

He steers his caressing fingertips around her scars.

"I..." She pauses, torn between something vague but reassuring and the simple truth. She owes him the latter. He probably wouldn't believe the former, anyway. "I'm not sure. It probably depends on how the thing is done. If you just sort of stole me--for lack of a better word--then probably, yes."

These circumstances of hers were meant as punishment, after all, and a bargain struck by her kind can't be broken so easily.

She taps her fingers against his breastbone, trying to consider the matter from more than her own limited perspective. "If things were transferred somehow, then maybe not." She grimaces. "If he cares so much about exactly where I end up, I like to think he wouldn't have sent me away in the first place."

"Hmm." He says, and that gives him some more information to turn over in his head.

"If I break the binding that might be stealing." He muses. "But if I were to, say, win you in a wager...that might be a transfer? And then I could do with you as I like. Which would be to formally release you from your servitude, obviously." He adds, just in case the thought made her nervous.

She chuckles, and if there's a touch of relief behind the sound, she won't admit it. While she thinks she knows Eskel well enough now to trust his benevolent intentions... Well. She's been a fool before, and trusted when she shouldn't, and paid more than once for that misstep. He could still turn against her, but even if he eventually does, she has a hard time imagining how that could be worse than her present circumstances.

Especially when he's touching her so carefully, calloused fingers drawing precise boundaries around the scars on her back.

"I'm willing to give it a try," she says. "Not that it requires me doing anything, precisely." Except not trying to escape at the first opportunity, but she hasn't had much luck with that thus far. New chances aren't likely to present themselves in the next few months. The proprietors here have learned a little something about her usual tricks.

"Well...guess that eliminates the need for me to ask my mentor for help." He says. And also eliminates the possibility that Vesemir will sway him from this course of action.

He rolls away from her, candles tracing the scars on his nude form as he gets up to rifle through his bags, coming back with a worn-smooth card box to put on her bedside table.

"Your employer plays, I've seen her. Tomorrow, we'll test my theory and by nightfall you could be a free fairy." He says, with a cocky smile.

Oh, this could be a terrible idea.

But most of the best ideas have a fifty-fifty chance of going completely sideways.

The hope that clenches tight around her heart takes her breath away; it leaves her lightheaded with a sort of dizzy intoxication that feels like half anticipation and half terror. She knows that she's not going to try to talk him out of it. She's never been particularly good at doing what she should, when simply doing what she wants involves so much less resistance. In this case, she wants so badly that she can taste it, like the sharp tang of frost on the wind.

Sitting up, she reaches for the box and runs her fingers over the wood before opening the lid. "She does love a good game." Robin returns his smile with a narrow grin of her own. "How does your luck usually run?"

"Pretty good." He says, ignoring that his luck is somewhat all or nothing: how unfortunate does a man have to be to get an eclipse princess for his child of surprise, after all? "And Gwent's a game of skill too, it's not all down to luck. My deck's pretty good, been at it for a while." He sits back down on the bed. "I mean, better than not trying at all, right? And if I lose I can keep playing her every time I come back." He grins lopsidedly.

She upends the deck into one hand. Then she spreads out the cards between both hands, arranging them in one wide fan with the backs facing upwards. Her magic is nothing to brag about under these circumstances, but even so, a puck always carries a bit of luck. Saturation is probably best. She brushes the tips of her fingers along the edges of the cards before dividing them, cutting the deck, shuffling it with an extra touch of flair.

She lifts the top card, presses it to her lips, and sets it back into place before returning the deck to the box. "For extra luck," she says, glancing sideways at him with a glint in her eyes. "Which is not any kind of criticism of your skill. Just insurance."

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a scar means i survived } scars meme

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Cuuuurse of the mobile log-in

the cuuuuurse D:

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