Marked
DarkSlayer84
Notes and Disclaimer: Originally written for the Star Trek XI Kink Meme on LiveJournal. I'm not making money herefrom, herewith, or hereby. With apologies to Gene Roddenberry and Paramount Pictures, and props to JJ Abrams; may he learn to accept fate as well as fame.
Ship's time tips to Romulan midnight, and Ayel lets out the breath he's been holding. The raw ache in his chest is not less with the passing of the hundredth day, the day that would end his first stage of mourning, back home.
But there is no home to go back to, and he made certain his grief signs will never come off. They all did; it's easy enough to do with a medium-gauge hot nail and a low-tuned disruptor barrel; it touches like fire and scores the skin clean so it will take pigment.
It took weeks. He is no weakling, but it was hard to even breathe with the nail searing him bare, cold black ink following in its path, the excess vaporized by the beam. He was raw for days, just from the first set, the slender interlaced rectangles that now trace his jaw on both sides. He's had more done, almost more than anyone else, intricate sharpened curves and diamonds bordered with straight lines, always partly contained by the broken rectangles.
The marks are still so new, so different even on his own face, and he does not recognize his leader anymore. Nero's thoughtful quiet and quicksilver humor have soured to silences, to sudden explosive rages and fits of gibberish, Romulan and Low Romulan and even some choice, blistering gutter Vulcan. The man he knew has disappeared under the heavy dark designs that are now part of him, that shout his pain to the world.
They are alone, for that half-hour of stillness between first and final shift, and Nero has been staring at him for several minutes. He is beginning to feel uncomfortable in that jagged uneasy way, the Nero-is-watching-him-way that usually finds Ayel on the receiving end of a quick, bitter kiss or a fist in the face, or both.
"Ayel." Nero makes his name a command.
"Sir?"
"Do you feel it?" he asks, and shrugs as he sets his spear aside. It is always in his easy reach, but with Ayel he sometimes drops his guard. "The last hour. The first day of the rest of our lives."
Nero laid longest under the nail; his design is the most elaborate, the most thorough. Ayel knows that under his jacket, Nero is inked from neck to wrists, full graceful sleeves of sharp, wicked intertwined curves that spiral almost to his hands, dark as death, sigils etched deep enough to make their medic nervous.
Ayel finds himself wondering how much of Nero those tattoos cover.