Author's Notes: This drabble may not be everyone's cup of tea. Please use your own discretion.

Scars Fade

by Neko Kuroban

Just before going to bed every night, Emily performs a ritual.

It is nothing more than a girlish routine she had never quite grown out of. She scrubs her face with the generic cleanser from the pharmacy and moisturizes with some organic concoction her mother used to swear by. She strips, folds her clothes with sharp precision, and changes into a nightgown — something loose and flowing and comfortable but faintly pretty, something that will inevitably end up looking better when it has been reduced to a crumpled heap on their bare wooden floor. She gives her long black tresses a hundred and fifty strokes with the bristled brush until a dark curtain of hair hangs, sleek and shining and straight, down her back.

And then, inspecting herself from all angles, she gathers her hair in one hand, lifting it away from the slender column of her neck so that she might study the three jagged, horrifying scars that run from her cheekbone, down her face, along her neck, across her breastbone, ending just below her breast.

Leah had made a show of giving her a balm, courtesy of Aunt Sue, that promised to reduce the appearance of scars, but, coming from her cousin, the present was somehow twisted into an insult. The first time Sam sees Emily dip her finger into the pot and trace a smear of thick cream along her ruined, mangled skin, a thunderous scowl darkens his features. It is directed at himself, not her, but the ugliness she sees there frightens her.

She never uses it again.