Disclaimer: League of Legends and all its characters belongs to Riot. I own nothing but this story.
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Beautifully Scarred
-If there lies a scar on the heart, it must be in the shape of a rose-
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She was beautiful.
He traced, slowly, with his eyes and fingertips and lips, with the tenderness and cautiousness of an assassin, a lover, every scar that decorated Katarina's body. Every healed wound across the slightly tanned shade of her skin marked a victor; another dead body beneath her blade, another time that she returned in triumph from war and combat and assassination. Every coarse, stitched-together line told a story, and there were countless to be remembered, and they were beautiful.
His hands were always cold in comparison to the warmth her body held; as he touched her she shuddered lightly, yet did not flinch away.
In the darkness it was difficult to find what he wanted, but eventually his fingers did fall on that one scar which origin he remembered with perfect clarity. For he was the one who inflicted it. The first one that he imprinted on her, but not the last; never the last.
He recalls the day that he cut her, the taste of her blood drew by his blade. It was a pleasing sensation: to see crimson drops slowly ooze out of her neck, to see her eyes move from shock to disbelief to anger, to know that with the slightest pressure he could kill her. And it was wonderful. The mere thought of ending her life, her endless annoyance, her sarcastic comments and vulgar insults with one quick slice of his blade, was bliss. But in the end he did not do so; instead he simply left a wound of warning there, a wound that scarred nicely, leaving a thin roughness that lead down to her collarbones.
How he hated her, once, a million years ago. How he despised her arrogance, her rashness, her obstinacy; to the point that he could not bear being near her for he simply could endure no longer the string of endless bickering and childish fights, and he had to escape somewhere, or end her for the sake of his own sanity. Eventually he left his guest room in the Du Couteau manor empty and neglected, went back to dwell midst the slums of Noxus—How he hated her! Hated her with every drop of blood and marrow, hated her so that he had to retort every sharp comment of hers with a fiercer one, hated her so that he mocked and sneered and laughed at the minutest of mistakes she made. She used to return every knife he stuck in her twenty times over, and it was not enough.
Silently his fingertips drew across the uneven surface of her skin, and he mused, wordless, over faint memories etched into their souls as these scars are etched into body. Pain. Hatred. Bloodlust. Death. They spoke of something, those wounds, and there were far too many for her to recount the stories of every one of them.
For they are assassins, and it is always too easy to get hurt.
Talon murmured her name, inaudible nearly under his breath, and he knew she would hear. She did hear, saying nothing in reply.
Words were unnecessary. He toyed mindlessly with a strand of her fiery hair, twiddling with it in idle blankness, as he just lied and allowed the moment of wondrous serenity to stretch on between them. Lightly he brushed the end of her own crimsons down her shoulder, until it became him stroking her in silence, and a stifled gasp fell into his ears.
He felt, with the acute senses of a killer, how her body left behind the tense rigidness and accepted his caress, albeit hesitantly; and he smiled.
Another scar lied there, as he remembered it to be; a much larger patch of unhealed skin, left by the blinding magic of Demacia's mages. He remembered that night which nearly took both their lives, the night when he was injured so terribly that he knew nothing else but pain, pain, pain and wanted desperately for someone to be there and give him death, to end that pain. There was blood in his eyes, coating every object within his sight a deep shade of scarlet, and he recalls vaguely how her hair seemed to blur in with the redness that was consuming everything; that was all he remembered.
He remembered nothing of her taking him away, dodging between the twisted foreign alleyways of a foreign country, conscious and alive yet just as desperate. How she managed to drag him back to Noxus with less than a handful of blades, and then how she managed to drag him down from Death's doorstep, he had not the faintest idea; but he was not so blind as to ignore the gaping wound burned into her arm, and he recognized who it came from with ease, as every Noxian assassin would.
And he trusted her. He trusted her as he would trust a hard, cold wall of stone behind his back, as he would trust his blades, as he would trust his skill of killing. Perhaps he trusted only her; a man is never as reliable alive as he is dead, and he spent many years of being lied to and left alone and betrayed to learn this. But he trusted her in a way that he believed she would never bury a knife into his back, and it was stupid and irrational to believe so, but he did.
He pressed his lips—lips just as cool as his fingers—against her skin, feeling her light trembles, and hoarsely laughed. Softly he kissed her, on the back of her hand and her nape and her chest, right above her heart, and as he could feel the pulse beat strong beneath flesh. He could feel that she was alive, and that was enough, though his kisses were cold and fragile as the last of autumn frost.
There seemed nothing more that he can ask for but to have her alive; breathing, heart drumming, blood surging through her veins, to have her eyes sparkle with emerald flames and her stride fill with vigorous confidence, for it was so normal for them to die an early, painful death. With a single hand he traced over the long, jagged mark on her abdomen, left by a sword that nearly, nearly sliced right through her, and even though it didn't she was bleeding in such a horrible way, her body mangled into a shape unrecognizable, her voice contorted into screams of pure agony.
For days, weeks, he though she was going to die.
He saw the funeral pyre, the fitting ceremony for her as it was for all the other deceased commanders of Noxus, smoke billowing off it in a thick pillar of blackness. He saw the solemn rows of soldiers stand in silence, holding vigil for her, for the famed Sinister Blade that fought and died for her country, and they saluted in honest respect to the body that flames consumed without hesitation. He saw her face, pale and deprived of every last shade, and he clutched her hand between his own, feeling the calloused, blood-soaked hand of an assassin, and finally her skin felt just as cold as his always were. He closed his eyes and would not shed a tear for her death.
With all the carefulness in the world he paused his fingers there, on the horrific mark left behind by a horrific wound, and pressed against it to feel the blood flowing beneath. The warmth. The life. Then his hand fell on her waist and stopped there, daring to further no more.
It felt—it felt as if he was trespassing, as if he was on the verge of breaking past some unseen borderline, and he was not sure if she wished for it or not. He was not sure if this was what he wished for.
A thousand names they may insult each other with in secret, yet whenever there was a third present it always became my Lady Du Couteau, or at the very least, Miss Katarina. They were different, so different, and he knew. He knew that she was born into a life that he can spend many lifetimes fighting for and will not earn, a life that never knew what it was like to fight with gutter rats for a bite of dinner, a life that high in the clouds and he has to stare upwards until his neck was sore, and still he cannot see. A life that was beautiful. He knew that a boy who climbed out from the filth of Noxus has no right to do this, and he would have not cared anyways if it was not her.
Somehow, because it was Katarina Du Couteau, he cared and stopped there, unheeding her daunts and sarcasms and mockery.
Then again, he would have had not a single chance to stop there if the redhead had not deliberately allowed it; and with this thought his lips twisted into a wry grimace, and took his hand back, and she laughed.
A sudden flow of moonlight burst through his window, and the room was illuminated, ever so slightly. He turned just in time to catch the last of her lips' fading curve become silvery beneath the moon, and it was beautiful—and she was beautiful.
She was always so, and the wound across her eye did not take away that beauty. He would look at her and see through her the youthful commander of Noxian armies, her daggers crossed high in the air as the cry of battle ringed, her footfalls weaving deftly between the dead and the dying to her targets; he would see her spin, like an artist on the stage she would dance, except her dance was bloody and lethal and she bloomed a deadly lotus midst where war raged most fiercely; he would see her as she is, headstrong and obnoxious and dangerous, and beautiful as a killer.
How he needed her like he needed air and food and bloodlust, needed her to keep his mind sharp, his blade wicked, his heart pumping. How he needed her there, needed her burning gaze and sharp tongue and dancing blades, needed her there for him to hate, for him to love.
Yet he didn't need her to scar him.
He didn't need her to mar him with passion, with emotion. And now she is gone, his soul is left scarred as it never was before.
And now his mind is faltering, his blade is blunt, and his heart is wearied.
Leave, she whispered, but in such a harsh way so that it was a command rather than a plead. It was inebriating him, the way she voiced her syllables, the way she mouthed her words. Leave me, Talon, go look for whatever you are looking for. Go search for father. Go search for something your blade may serve.
He heard the childish anger between her words, and chortled lightly.
I will. He replied, and for one last time he traced the deep line that crossed her left eye, her proud badge of shame. For years he jeered at her over that scar, over the one most eye-catching proof that she had disappointed her nation and her house, that she had been rash and impatient and thoughtless, that she had grown, grown from a girl to the Sinister Blade of Noxus—throughout all the years they bickered and cooperated and hated and loved he knew she changed, and he could say nothing but the same for himself. Yet of course he would leave; they were never together, never meant to, and never shall be.
He opened his eyes. Katarina was not there.
He loved her.
And she was beautiful.
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[END]