A/N: It feels like it's been years since I wrote Scars. Here's a kind of sister-piece. If writing is relative. Sorry, that pun sounds hilarious to me at the moment. Whatever. I'm having a manic moment and forty-five minutes into it, I end up with this. Read on, mes chers.

Scars aren't the sort of thing you show off, like necklace-gifts you wear begrudgingly. Nor are they the kind of thing you hide, like an engagement ring given in a tree. They're there. A reminder of pain, but nothing more than a mark, like scratches on a wooden tag—your membership in a collective of people who have been hurt in the pursuit of something bigger. Something of stories.

Marian has her fair share of bruises. She lives boisterously, unapologetically. If the Nightwatchman happens to get cut by Sir Guy of Gisbourne, it is merely a complication that Marian has to then wear a fresh bandage to an archery tournament. It isn't a problem. It is a complication. An occupational hazard. If you're going to be a hero, then you have to be prepared to deal with that kind of thing. You have to not think that slicing your hand instead of the apple is difficult. In fact, you have to do it without thinking at all.

It's the not thinking about the consequences, that's the key. But rather seeing the necessity, bright, bold, flashing, urgent necessity. Like cutting off your hair to keep a part of you safe—Djaq's own kind of scar. The scar of her womanhood as the world saw it. For herself it is guarded and intact, latent, waiting, but to anyone on the streets of foreign places it was erased, though the softness of her face and shape peeks through like writing not quite washed off, like cuts not quite healed.

See, to be a hero, you have to learn to walk with these unhealed blisters, you have to forget the raw rubbing and give yourself up to instinct, the animal identity. Like the fretting, scurrying squirrel Much becomes to cover over what can't show, a bushy tail over precious acorns, memories, secrets, desperate moments. Someone has to be the keeper of them, has to carry them quietly, the silent bearer of others' grief, others' scars, others' regrets.

For regrets only hinder a hero. Better to pack them up tightly and thrust them into a fallen log, the angry pain inside manifest in unnatural strength. John is the master of transforming what hurts into what heaves, hefts, and hoists, in impervious displays of scar-bred bravado. There's no question where inhuman feats have their origin—it's in the undressed wound, bleeding silently under the skin of meeting needs.

Because it always comes back to necessity. Examined with that strict lens, all the lovely trappings of life seem to shrink. Until even family disappears—a mother withering away without food, a father maimed and murdered, a brother gone to who really knows wear, and for what? Which Will won't let himself wonder, save in absolute isolation, a rarity for someone who lives for others. No private pain in a world dependent on unencumbered heroes. You can nurse the hurt when the battle's won.

The battle will be won. Or else Robin Hood has been walking through life with barely-knotted bandages for nothing. And nobody has scars for nothing.