A/N: The second half of the previous chapter. As far as I can tell, there's only one more chapter left. And thank you to everyone who has been following this thing!
They re-locate to the bed, and swathe themselves with the bedsheets. He is still only half-dressed, trousers untouched and shirt still on though open. Arms wrapped tight around each other, they cuddle together. Half-surprised, half-touched tears still slip down his cheeks, their faces pressed together. She shifts her lips, catching them and drinking them in. Even they are so very precious, because they are his and it would not do to waste them, to leave them to dry and sting his fragile face. And if she could take away every ounce of every hurtful thing that anyone has ever said or done to him she would in an instant. "It's all right now, my darling," she whispers. "It's all right, I promise. You need worry no longer. I'm right here. I'll always be here." She pulls him closer, stroking back his hair until his tears ease, breaths slowing back to normal. He nuzzles into his throat, and sighs, craving to be closer to this warmth of hers and unable to get any closer.
In silence, they lie like that for a long time, neither willing to break the peace, wrapped in their own thoughts. And though he is tired, and worried still because she has not seen all of the scars, he smiles slightly against her. If he could have her here, just like this, for the rest of his life then he would, and never ask a thing of her.
Eventually, she lets her hands creep up under his shirt. There are long, thing lines under her palms, and it takes her a moment to realise that these are scars too. He tenses beneath her touch, and stutters a sigh as she asks, "And these?"
He swallows convulsively, eyes closing. "Whips from when…when I travelled with the gypsies. It was not long before they came to fear me and it stopped." He knows better, now, than to mention how very young he was at the time, and the cage which he was confined to initially, while his ankle healed after they first beat him. It would only upset her to know those details, though likely she has guessed. His dear Christine is quite quick, after all. Besides, not all of the gypsies were cruel to him. It only took one or two, and the rest kept away. He preferred it like that.
Slowly, he wraps his long fingers around her wrist, guiding her hand around him to feel his back better. She will want to know the extent of it, and he cannot deny her that knowledge, not now. "There is...a collection of them."
She nods and gently, almost hesitantly, taking his words as a cue, she rolls him over, shifting away the bedsheets and slipping his shirt off fully to take in the full scope of the scars. There are not as many of them as she feared – long thin ridges in overlapping webs. But though there are less than she expected, there is no room in her chest for relief. Her heart twists, fingers lightly ghosting over the marred flesh and he sucks in a shuddering breath.
They should not exist, these scars. He should never have been subjected to such things, and especially not as a child. She knows enough of his life by now to know that it must have happened when he was only a boy, though he's never quite given affirmation one way or the other. And though she is powerless to take them away, to ease the pain that they must surely have caused as they were inflicted, she brushes her lips gently over the twisted skin, as if she truly were an angel and could heal him.
And his spine. She can see the knobs of his spine, can trail her fingers down over them and count them and though she is almost positive that this terrible thinness is part of the distortion that has affected his face so, still she is powerless against the roiling guilt that tells her that she needs to help him to gain flesh, so that he does not simply fade away. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm sorry for what they did to you." The wave of regret, of remorse, that washes over her is breathtaking. It cannot be easy for him to lie bare before her and let her see, to draw up the memories in such a way. "I'm sorry for making you show them to me."
"Do not be." His voice is hoarse, terribly so. "I…I am sorry for not trusting you to accept them."
"Erik, darling. I understand, I do." She presses a kiss to the back of his neck, and rolls him back over, laying her head down on his chest. His arm slips up around her, pressing her close to him, his warmth a reminder that he is safe here, now, with her. Nothing can harm him, can take him away and hurt him. And telling herself that goes some way to taking the sting out of her tears.
The scars on the insides of his arms, the pinpricked hollows from his morphine, are nothing new to her, do not cause the same twisting pain inside. Instead it is a wave of sadness that seeps through her at the sight of them now, and ever so lightly she runs her fingers over them. No wonder he needs the morphine to help him sleep, if his scars are any indication of what goes on inside of his head, the horrors he has been faced with.
"There are several more," he whispers into the darkness, voice rumbling deep in his chest. She needs to know, after all, he can see that now though he hates to upset her by telling her of them but if it were the other way around, and she were the one with these scars and these horrors, would he not want to know too? "The one here," he takes her hand and presses it to a place high on his right side along his chest, hidden by his arm, "they shot at me as I crossed the border out of India. It creased me, but I could do nothing about it until I'd crossed a hundred miles and found a cave to lie low in for a time. It almost wore the horse out."
At his words she can picture him, a black-cloaked figure mounted on a dark horse, galloping across the barren land, a knight or a magician conjured from legend. "It stopped bleeding during the ride," he goes on softly, "but I was weak for a long time after it." The scar is thick beneath her fingers, stretching across his side from chest to back, and how terribly lucky he was that it wasn't high enough to shatter his shoulder, or over enough to pierce his chest. He would have undoubtedly died out there, and the tears burn her eyes again.
She twists herself, and presses a kiss to the scar, hiding her tears from view. It would only upset him to see her crying like this over his old wounds.
"There's one across my left thigh," he continues, as though he is oblivious to her lips though he could never be, "from a sword fight in the Sultan's court, and a matching one at my right hip from the same fight."
She does not hesitate before deciding not to see those ones now. They can wait. She has enough images of him to fill her mind for a time, and if she can bury herself in his bare chest like this, then she fancies she need never see the rest of him. (But she wants to, oh how she wants to, and even now there is that thrill in her stomach at the thought of stroking her fingers over his powerful thighs, scars or no.) It is enough, for now, to have seen these, (to have seen him) and kissed them. Yet, she cannot deny that the desire is there, and at his nodded assent she slides a hand beneath the waistband of his trousers, and seeks out these hidden scars, thick beneath her touch. (His skin radiates heat, and his manhood stirs a moment as she grazes her fingertips over it, but they are both too drained now to do anything about it.)
"Perhaps next time," she murmurs, "I will kiss them too."
He chuckles feebly, then the chuckle becomes a sob that she can feel ripping through him. Carefully, she shifts their positions, so that he is back in her arms, his face buried in her neck and his tears hot against her skin as he softly keens, "Oh, Christine."
She doesn't speak, she can't speak around the lump in her throat, can only kiss his forehead and cradle him close, rocking him like a child and silently vowing to love him more, every moment of every day of the rest of her life. Never again will she leave it so that he can doubt her when she says, I will stay. And long into the night, they cling to each other as if they are the survivors of a shipwreck, cast adrift, their words whispers half-lost to the darkness.