Title: Scars

Disclaimer: I don't own these characters. So don't sue, it's petty.

A/N: I have a bird book. I read a chapter on wing notching. I couldn't help myself.


The soft post-storm wind sailed smoothly through the ancient oaks' leaves in the cool midnight air. The stars barely peeping between scattering gray cloud formations in the sky. The ground, still tormented by the recent thunderstorms, sloshed as the local wildlife quickly foraged for food before the next wave of life threatening weather rolled around. The nocturnal and diurnal creatures coexisting side by side in the wavering moonlight.

There Shayera sat, alone, with her back to a fallen moss covered oak. Her fighting spirit and her feisty nature forgotten in the dampness of the forest's undergrowth. It was odd, when she came to think about it, during the months of severe isolation and emotional deprivation. An aerial creature, born to fly through the crystal sky felt more comfortable trekking through woodland than soaring above the treetops. Something, she felt, she should never be allowed to do again.

Reaching into the back pocket of her worn out jeans, Shayera pulled out a buck knife she had found on an abandoned camping site she'd stumbled into earlier that day. Her bruised, but nimble, fingers pulled the blade out of its sheath and into the open. The light blue gleam from reflected light on the blade shined like a beacon in the dark underbrush. Her faded green eyes squinted as the light bounced off the blade and into her irises, emitting a low grunt of annoyance from the Thanagarian.

Wing notching, she mentally noted, is a procedure used on poor breeding stock by the locals on her planet for thousands of years. A simple operation, nothing more than a quick slice to separate the segment at the base of the primary, or flight feathers, from the individual. A grounded Thanagarian was neither a warrior, a politician, nor a mate. An exile, a mongrel, an infected, a coward, or a traitor were the only true possibilities.

A punishment worse than death.

Something, Shayera felt, was only appropriate for her betrayal of her people, the Earthlings, the Justice League, and her John.

She snapped her eyes shut and forced the thought of him to the back recesses of her mind. Shayera couldn't think of him. Not now. Not again. It still hurt with so much fire and passion that it burned the very core of her heart, and if it existed, her soul.

Grasping the knife tightly in her hand, she stood up. The sudden movement startled a small herd of white tailed deer grazing nearby and the woman watched, entranced, as their fluffy tails disappeared into the night along with the slap of their delicate hooves on the moist soil.

She shook her head to clear her mind and focus on the task at hand, no sentimentalities could stand in her way. Punishments must be carried out. Her countless years in the Thanagarian military and her experience with Earth's governments had taught her that.

Shayera raised a pristine white wing and flared the primary feathers. Using her free hand, she quickly found the junction where the crescent shaped piece of flesh was located. She suddenly found her mouth very dry and her fingers very cold. Never in the history of her people, did someone voluntarily maim themselves in such a way. Now she was to be the first.

She moved the blade expertly to the junction. Her spine tingled as the icy metallic surface brushed against the sensitive skin.

Only one wing.

'Hera help me.'

With a primitive scream, shattering the silence of the Midwestern night, she shoved the blade through the flesh and hollowed bone. Her knees buckled, the knife fell. And in her hands laid a clump of flight feathers that would never grow back.

She could never go back now.

She wasn't a hero anymore.