Character: Dennee

Warnings/Spoilers: 2x07 - Resurrection

Disclaimer: Legend of the Seeker (TV) belongs to ABC Disney, not me. No copyright infringement intended.

Author's Notes: Written for the legendland 'scars' challenge.

-o-

Lucinda's skin is soft and smooth, warm to the touch when Dennee runs her fingers over it. She stares into the mirror at a body that isn't hers, and the sense of loss she feels is palpable.

But this is her body now and, selfish though the thought is, she doesn't want it.

Some say before Rahl the life of a Confessor was privileged, but his shadow had already stretched across the land by the time Dennee was born. Her life was easier than some but harder than most, and her journey through it was burned into her skin and written deep in her bones.

Lucinda has travelled different paths. The scars her body still bears are mysteries to Dennee and she runs her fingers over Lucinda's skin again, searching for the patterns of a history that isn't written there.

Instead there are scars on Lucinda's elbows and knees from a childhood Dennee can't remember, a fading burn on her wrist that's smoother than the skin around it, raised and bumpy when she touches it. None are familiar, and the knife wound in Dennee's shoulder that Finn inflicted before she confessed him is gone; sometimes, when the rain falls and the autumn winds blow damp and chill, she thinks she can still feel the phantom ache of it, burning deep, and something in her heart aches with it.

Dennee turns away from the blue eyes she doesn't recognise staring back at her in the mirror; she looks down instead and traces her fingers over the skin she can see, making up stories to explain the gaps in her memory. This scar happened when Lucinda fell when she was running at five, back when the world was safe; that scar happened when Lucinda was careless baking her husband a cake.

It doesn't serve to fill the emptiness and it doesn't serve to soothe Dennee's guilt; even if she wasn't the one who snatched Lucinda's life away, she's still a thief profiting from it and sometimes she thinks she'll bend and break under the weight.

She opens her eyes and stares back into the mirror. Lucinda's belly pouches softly under her palm and Dennee's fingers trace over the faded, silvery lines of stretch marks. They, at least, are familiar, and her fingers - Lucinda's fingers - curl into a fist, tight against her skin, mourning a child long dead by her hand. Lucinda's child cries out instead, a low, mournful sound as he wakes from his nap, and she finally meets the eyes of her (Lucinda's) reflection.

She's a thief, if not a willing one, and she's stolen Lucinda's life away. But she'll make this right, do right by Lucinda. Edmund will grow up strong and true, and the only scars he'll bear are the scraped knees of childhood adventures, or the burns of baking. No others.

It's not a promise she can keep, not with the world as it is, but it's a promise she makes anyway.

She owes Lucinda this, and more.