Chapter Text
Cherri was thirteen the first time the pain woke her up in the night. A squeezing, clawing feeling in her legs and stomach and chest and back. She gasped against it, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. It lasted for maybe half an hour before it faded, leaving a horrid wrongness behind
The worst part wasn’t the pain itself—Cherri had endured far worse in her life already—it was the awful feeling of violation that came with it, the feeling of something groping where it didn’t belong, tainting her body in a way no amount of washing could scrub clean. When she got out of her bedroll the next morning, marks were littered across her body, etched in red ink under her skin. It wasn’t long before the reprieve was ended by a series of repeated blunt impacts, but this pain she was at least used to. A strike was better than what happened in the night.
The clawing returned once every few weeks, the horror of it all leaving her gasping and shaking in the dark. It hurt at first, but over the years the pain dulled until she stopped waking up at all, instead opening her eyes in the morning to new marks in the place of hands that were never there.
—
Apo had been getting marks as long as she could remember. Ever since she was a little kid, she remembered the feeling of a strange, phantom pain that burned the shapes of little pink flowers beneath her skin. Her father hated them, said they made her less attractive to customers, but as much as Apo tried to cover them up or scrub them away, they always remained visible.
She hated them, hated how they enraged her father and caused her so much more pain. Wasn’t the person the marks came from supposed to love her? So why did they always hurt her again and again and again, leaving a field of horrible pink cherry blossoms in their wake. She never gave them so many marks, never caused them so much pain.
Liar, said the ghosts of countless hands crawling across her skin.
As the years went by, the marks spread, more and more and more appearing until her skin looked like a field of flowers. Her father grew angrier, going on his tirades almost nightly—when she wasn’t with a client, anyway—raging at the blemishes that only grew with time. Apo scrubbed and scrubbed at her skin until it bled, but even within the raw redness, the marks were still there.
Small pains were a daily occurrence, but every so often there would be a spike of agony that rocked her to her core, that made the wild, unthinking part of her brain wonder if it was going to die. The feeling of something small and sharp entering her back once, twice, three times, making her stumble and shake before pulling herself back together under her father’s watchful gaze, and later the feeling of fingers shoving into the marks to pull the objects out; the pain of a blade driving clear through her hand; even the slow, clawing agony of starvation that once followed her for a week before abating again.
The worst one was when she was twenty. She’d finally gotten a night to herself in an inn while her father hashed out the finer details of his newest deal downstairs. She’d gotten ready for bed, laying down and pulling the covers over her head as if they could shield her from reality. That sentiment was quickly shattered by the feeling of a strong, blunt force impact in the back of her skull. She clenched her teeth around a strangled whimper, clutching at her head as spots danced in her vision. The throbbing continued for at least another fifteen minutes before it was joined by the feeling of rough rope tied around her wrists. Apo had just enough time to wonder what was going on before she felt the sharp coldness of a blade resting against the side of her face. She cowered and trembled and tried to cover her eye to protect it from the blade, but of course it wasn’t there, there was nothing she could do.
The pain began at her hairline, cutting slowly down her face, moving with the smooth unhurriedness of complete apathy. There wasn’t any blood, of course there wasn’t, she wasn’t actually being hurt, but as she clasped both hands over her eye, she kept expecting her fingers to come away sticky and red. The pain reached her eyebrow before stopping. She had just enough time to wonder if it was over before the phantom blade sank into her eye socket. Apo screamed, tears rolling down her face as the blade dragged around in a slow, lazy circle, finally joining back up at the top and levering the blade behind her eye. She barely registered the pain trailing down from the bottom of her eye all the way to her jaw. There was a void where her eye should be, and yet her eye was still there. Apo staggered to her feet, stumbling to the window and vomiting over the edge. She could barely see, her vision was black and spotty as her body tried to register anything through the overwhelming agony.
Distantly, she heard footsteps coming up the stairs. The gait matched her fathers, she needed to get back in bed. Apo lunged for the bed, cocooning herself beneath the sheets and pretending she was already asleep. In the morning she’d have to deal with his reaction to whatever new mark was surely forming over her throbbing eye, but for now all she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry.
—
Cherri was jolted awake early the next morning by the blunt pain of a strike. It came over and over and over, lasting far longer than it usually did. She buried her head in her arms as if it could shield her, shaking against the pain from both the blows and the persistent bone deep throb from her missing eye. Suddenly the pain landed just beneath her bad eye, over the sloppily bandaged gash still leaking blood. Cherri choked on a scream, salty tears stinging in her eye cavity around the glass replacement that had been inserted while she was unconscious. She had to get out of here, but she couldn’t move through the pain. She knew she wasn’t safe here, and the helplessness burned in the shape of that ever present bone-deep fear that reminded her that nowhere was safe and no one could be trusted. Eventually she passed out again, and when she woke up the pain was gone, leaving only pools of fear and misery in her soul. She pushed herself to her feet, stumbling to the window of the medical room she seemed to have been transferred to. Her sight was completely gone on her left side and her depth perception was awful, but she was still able to grab some additional bandages and antibiotics on her way out, which she stored under her cloak.
She broke the window and heaved herself out into the night. She grabbed the first horse she saw tied to a porch, mounted up, and rode far away from this awful town. She’d taken up a new bounty on her way to report the failure of this one, a man called Sal Kuna. Hopefully he’d go down easier than the last guy. The red marks littering her skin twinged, as though in agreement.