BOYHOODS

Written on October 13, 2021 (♎︎)

Author's Notes: Written for Whumptober 2021 for prompt No. 10: Oops, I did it Again (Flare-Up).

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Cid had one memory of something he knew to have happened before the war. He had been a boy barely out of leading strings, his hand smarting from the teeth from some animal he ought not have been teasing. It had been autumn. The tree in the courtyard had turned to orange, and he recalled how it looked against the light blue of the sky, even if he could never make out if it were a puppy or a kitten who had delivered him his first scar.

That mark—a little crescent of pink in the meat of his palm—was one that should have been lost amidst all the others won across five decades of fighting. He had been near gored by a footman's pike outside of Zarghidas. He had been dragged by his bird halfway across a Zelmonian frontier bridge. Once, when they were not yet old but old enough to know better, he had submitted to Balbanes' suggestion that they try to tame a Viuran coeurl and ride it about as Ordallians did. He had joked more than once that he had been the model of one of the wound men in chiurgeons' texts; his body was a patchwork of old injuries waiting to go wrong.

It should have been little strangeness to him then that the first scar would one day pain him, but it rattled him when the moment finally came. He was rushing through the stone halls of Igros then, caught in the thick of three men whose own boyhoods he had seen—who made between them a composite of his dead friend's face and features. In the midst of what seemed too many pasts, it stung him against where his sword grip rested: a little bite.

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