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Wylan had always known that not all bruises were visible. Sometimes they sat just beneath the surface, etched into the skin without ever marring it. A comment, an expression, a silence long enough to suffocate. Those were the bruises he grew up with—small, invisible wounds inflicted by a man who thought him too useless to be worth physically hurting. Jan Van Eck didn't waste time on what he thought was already broken.
"Stop playing, " his father had said once, not even looking at him when Wylan fumbled a note on his flute. The words fell flat, barely audible. Dismissal. His father didn't even raise his voice when Wylan missed a note or stumbled over his studies. No anger, no frustration—just disinterest, as if every mistake Wylan made was confirmation of a long-held belief. Bruises in the shape of silence.
He never yelled, not at first. Never hit, either. Why would he? Jan Van Eck saw no point in striking something he didn't even care about. That was the part that hurt most. There was no passion, no heat, no fire. Just ice, cold and clinical, eroding Wylan's confidence inch by inch. His father didn't care if Wylan failed. That's what the bruises had been back then—a collection of Wylan's own growing awareness of how small and useless he seemed in the eyes of the man he desperately wanted to impress.
It wasn't the obvious kind of hurt. His mother had kissed his forehead once when he was small, her lips brushing against his skin like she knew something would go wrong before it ever did. "You're enough," she'd whispered, before she disappeared. The memory of her, that soft warmth, made the bruises from his father harder to bear. Because when you've known love, the absence of it becomes a wound all its own.
Not enough.
It was always there in the background. He could play the flute, but never well enough. He could study, but it wasn't enough if he couldn't read. He could breathe, and even that was a failure somehow. Every breath Wylan took felt like he was wasting his father's air. And that... that was a bruise that sat under his skin, heavy and dark, waiting for the day it would break him.
Jan Van Eck didn't start hitting him until later. Not with his hands—no, never that. His father wouldn't touch him. He wouldn't stoop that low, because that would require acknowledging that Wylan existed enough to hit. Instead, it was worse. It was when the staff was instructed to drag him by the arm out of the room, too forceful for him to stay standing but never forceful enough to leave a mark. Or the back of a hand knocked into his skull with a book—a thing, an object between them, to keep them distant. As if touching Wylan directly would have somehow dirtied his father's hands.
That distance was intentional. It was like Jan wanted the abuse to be clinical, like everything else in his life. Precise. Detached. Always a thing between them. A cane knocking him off balance when his father couldn't stand the sight of him any longer, or a glass paperweight thrown just shy of his head during a dinner when Wylan said something wrong. He had ducked reflexively and felt it shatter against the wall. He had stared at the shards for what felt like an eternity, wondering how easily it could've been his skull, wondering if his father would've felt anything if it had been.
By the time the physical bruises started to appear, Wylan was almost relieved. The marks felt more real than the emotional wounds that festered inside. He could press his fingers against them and feel the pain bloom under his skin, at least knowing there was something tangible, something that proved he wasn't imagining the hurt.
He'd stand in front of the mirror, lifting his shirt to see the faint purple on his ribs from when one of their servants had pushed him too hard into a wall. The bruise from the thrown vase a year later, the dull ache in his shoulder where his father's stick had knocked him to the floor after a failed attempt at accounting. They were ugly, yes, but at least they were real. At least they were proof.
The bruises would fade in time, though the memory of how they got there didn't. He would run his fingers over his skin, long after the purple had turned to yellow and the yellow had disappeared, wondering why his father had never bothered to hit him directly. Did he hate me too much to care, or not enough to try?
His father's face had been calm, even then. A thin line of a mouth, eyes that looked through Wylan rather than at him, fingers always drumming the table in impatience. Every bruise had been like a passing thought to his father, a moment of inconvenience rather than rage. And Wylan hated that more than anything—the way his father never cared enough to actually lose control.
The transition had been gradual. He couldn't remember exactly when it started to change. When the cold indifference started to erode into something that felt closer to violence. Maybe it was when his father realized Wylan would never be the son he wanted—when the tutoring, the discipline, the humiliation had failed to make Wylan into a miniature version of Jan Van Eck. Maybe it had been sooner, when his mother was gone, and Jan had already known he was left with something broken. Maybe it wasn't until he'd sent Wylan away to be killed by those men.
Wylan had learned early to brace for the worst. But what he never expected was how the bruises would come to mean something different later—how they would turn into marks of something else, something powerful.
When he met Kaz and the others, bruises became a different kind of language. He got them often—more than he had ever gotten from his father. But they weren't the same. These bruises weren't thrown at him out of disgust or disappointment. They were earned. Fought for. The bruises that came from crawling through tight tunnels, from falling in a fight, from throwing himself into a job with reckless abandon. These bruises were the cost of survival, not reminders of failure.
It felt strange, in a way. To wear his bruises now as badges of his strength, not his weakness. When he looked in the mirror now, he didn’t just see the purple marks left from a heist gone wrong or the scrape along his jaw from a rough landing. He saw proof that he had lived through something. Proof that he had chosen this . These bruises were the result of his own decisions, not someone else’s control.
There was a night after a particularly rough job when Jesper had noticed the dark splotch on Wylan’s arm. His fingers had grazed it, light but curious, and Wylan had flinched out of instinct—too many years of reacting to touch like it was meant to hurt him. Jesper had withdrawn, his eyebrows furrowing in concern.
"Did I—?"
"No, it's fine." Wylan had shaken his head quickly, trying to play it off. "It's from... y'know." He gestured vaguely, as if their lives were a thing that could be summed up in a wave of his hand. "The job."
Jesper had nodded, but his fingers had hovered, still uncertain. “Does it hurt?”
Wylan had thought about it. It did hurt, of course it did, but in a way that didn’t bother him. He felt the ache every time he moved his arm, a sharp reminder of the narrow escape they’d had. And somehow, that pain made him feel more alive than he had ever felt in his father’s house.
"Yeah," Wylan had said, slowly, "but not in a bad way."
Jesper had smiled, a small, understanding smile, and let it go.
These bruises didn’t feel like failure. They felt like defiance. Every new mark on his skin was proof that he was still standing, still breathing, still fighting for something that mattered to him. And that was something his father would never understand—what it was like to choose pain for the sake of something bigger, something that made the pain worth it.
Jan Van Eck had given Wylan bruises that made him shrink, that made him want to disappear. But these... these made him stand taller. The pain wasn’t gone, but it didn’t crush him like it used to. It didn’t make him feel smaller. If anything, it made him feel like he could take more, withstand more, and still keep going.
His father had bruised him without touching him, because he couldn’t bear to acknowledge Wylan as something real. But Wylan knew he was real now. He knew because his body ached, his skin bore the marks of every fight, every escape, every plan gone awry. And he knew, too, that these bruises weren’t signs of weakness—they were proof that he had survived.
And that... that was the difference. His father had given him bruises to remind him of how little he mattered. But now, Wylan had bruises that reminded him of how much he could endure.
He would never be broken again.