WARNING: vague implied past torture
The sponge makes another pass over Thrawn's shoulders, dripping warm water down his back. He feels the touch of a hand follow it, Pellaeon's fingertips stoking over yet another scar.
The touch is gentle, perhaps even more gentle than the sponge's, yet it makes Thrawn tense all the same. It is not something he can help; his body's reaction is pure instinct. Reacting to something touching the reminders to dozens of different injuries. Some that were made in the heat of battle, and others that had been more purposeful, methodical.
Thrawn knows his whole body looks like a map, littered with a hundred different marks. Thick dark roads and thin pale lanes. Mountain ranges and deep trenches.
It's an ugly sight to behold. He doesn't know how Pellaeon has managed to keep from flinching at every other mark.
The sponge slides over his skin again, bringing its soothing heat. Pellaeon's hand follows it again, his palm caressing over a few of the longer scars that run across his back. They're thickest near the bottoms of his shoulder blades and Pellaeon's touch softens impossibly more as his fingers brush over them. Thrawn knows that there are too many of the perfect lines to ever be mistaken for wounds caused by the claws of an animal. He hopes that Pellaeon assumes that's what they are regardless.
When the sponge makes its next pass it is lower, down near the bottom of his rib cage. There are more scars there too, but they are mainly caused by blaster shots that didn't miss, by sharp knives that had cut too deep to ever heal cleanly. Those scars are safer, ones that don't make Thrawn want to hold his breath when Pellaeon touches them, though Pellaeon is still gentle when he is investigating them.
"I would ask about some of these." Pellaeon brushes his knuckles over a healed gash across his ribs and that alone is enough to make the ghost of that pain flair up in Thrawn's mind unbidden. "But I don't think I want to know."
Thrawn pulls up a knee and rests his folded arms on top of it, bowing until his forehead presses against the warmed skin of his arms.
He thinks on the cruel things he's seen, on the harrowing events he has experienced.
And he sighs, long and hard, trying to expel those memories as easily as he can his own breath. And he tries to focus instead on the man who is sitting behind him in the tub, who has only ever treated him with kindness and respect.
"No. You would not."