"Some scars are beautiful," she would tell him, though he never believed her. His marred the stark perfection of his skin and served only to remind him of his failures. And so he kept them covered.

"But the beautiful ones never last." She would smile at him with haunted eyes that told him just how much she missed those scars. Though he suspected she had never known them.

He would blink gold eyes impassively at her, silencing any further attempts at such foolish talk. In her turn she would shrug delicate shoulders, feigning apathy.

Her own scar was ugly in his eyes, negating the weight of her words. The jagged burn mark was striking and unmistakable, a permanent reminder of her servitude, and from it stemmed her hatred. He knew it would always last.

Yet sometimes he wished to touch that delicate, pink skin, run the smoothness of it beneath the tips of his fingers as they lay there naked and entangled. And sometimes she would let him.

She was always on top, spilled lazily across his chest as he caressed that delicate skin; she would never be pinned down. In that way he allowed her the illusion of freedom, and she rode him as if she would fly away, intense and frightened. It added to her beauty, making her feral and unyielding. She refused to be owned, but with him buried deep inside of her, he knew that she was his alone. And she couldn't have asked for a more beautiful cage.

Before he knew it she had faded away.

He shouldn't have been surprised on the day that she left him, the only clue a slight change in the winds–a storm brewing in the hills. He blinked gold eyes curiously at the dark night sky while the wind caressed his neck, billowing his hair gently.

If anything, he knew about pain. Yes, the loss of his arm had been painful, and the stench of fear-sweat-blood-death would forever cloud his nostrils, lingering in the back of his mind. But this–this was foreign. He breathed out slowly, feeling for the first time as if a tiny piece of his soul leaked out in that one exhale. He would never see her again.

And he knew then that she was his most beautiful scar of all.