Dearka x Yzak.

-Counting Scars.

He picked up his first scar when he was six. It happened when he was schooling his pony in the bottom field, when she shied at nothing and threw him headfirst into the fence. He cried, but only out of shock, and clutched at his bleeding elbow with shaking fingers whilst the stablehand tried to get him to reveal the wound.

Later on, when the bandages were removed, he was proud of the tiny, star-shaped mark until his mother, furious, fired the stablehand and had it removed.

x

When he was eleven he got into a fight with the playground bullies, the kind that was a losing battle right from the start, outnumbered and outclassed. They'd waited until he was alone, trapped in the toilets with nowhere to run. Four fifteen year olds with feral grins and too much time on their hands.

Of course he'd thrown himself at them. It wasn't until they had him pinned against the sinks, his head forced under the cold tap that Dearka had turned up. First thing any of them knew about it of course was the yell of pain from one of the older boys as Dearka's foot made contact with the base of his spine. The boy holding Yzak down jerked around, his fist tangled in the younger boy's hair and the movement cracked Yzak's skull against the base of the tap hard enough to draw blood.

With a shriek of pain and fury Yzak twisted out of the other boy's grip and flung himself on top of him. Horrified at the turn of events and the sudden copious flow of blood from their victim, the bullies turned tail and fled. If he'd been able to walk straight Yzak would have been all for going after them. As it was, Dearka had to help him over to the toilet bowl to throw up and then sit with him, one hand holding a wad of toilet paper to the cut until his eyes uncrossed and he calmed down again.

They sat there together amidst the stink of bleach and blood until the wound stopped leaking and Dearka pronounced him fit for duty again. Yzak scowled and mumbled something that might have been thanks, and Dearka simply shrugged.

After that they weren't often seen apart.

x

He picked his third scar up from Athrun Zala. Competition between the two boys had always been high and sometimes things got a little out of hand. It happened during one of their friendly sparring matches, the ones that Rusty referred to as their "manly cat fights" (but never to their faces). Nichol called time on the match for them, as he always did, but this time Yzak was so involved that he didn't hear him. Athrun dropped his guard and Yzak's foot made solid connection with the other boy's groin. The Zala prodigy went down with a strangled groan leaving Yzak staring down at him in horror. That kind of dirty win really hadn't been what he'd had in mind. Embarrassed, Yzak had crouched down over Athrun amidst the hoots from the other boys and the cutting backdrop of Rusty's hysterical laughter.

Pain and humiliation obviously got the better of the normally restrained Zala boy, for as soon as he was recovered enough to remove one hand from his tender groin the first thing he did was punch Yzak solidly in the gut. Yzak doubled over, completely winded and managed to catch his eyebrow on the metal zipper on Athrun's collar on the way down. It led to curses from the Zala, pained gasping from the Jule boy and blood over absolutely everything.

Nichol tried to staunch the flow from the wound with a sock and was rewarded with a solid smack in the face from Yzak which sent Athrun off again on a rant about how to treat your friends.

Dearka laughed, so Yzak hit him too.

x

His fourth scar came in a small white envelope containing a crisply folded piece of paper and stamped with the Zaft logo. Yzak opened it at breakfast, only half listening to Dearka who was reading out a story from the gossip column in the morning paper. Yzak went so still and silent that Dearka, in the process of stuffing toast in his mouth, stopped reading and looked over at him in concern. When the other boy failed to respond to his questions, Dearka took the letter out of his unresisting fingers and read it himself. After that he made Yzak coffee, strong and very sweet and sat with him whilst he stared at nothing. Eventually, without needing to ask, he cleared away Yzak's untouched breakfast and didn't say anything when finally the other boy lay his head down on his arms and sobbed.

Dearka went with him to his father's funeral and stood at his side whilst preachers and Zaft officers read out rehearsed speeches and Yzak stared into the middle distance. When it was over, he sat in the car on the way back with Yzak and his mother and didn't say a word then either. Yzak never thanked him, but he didn't talk to anyone else except Dearka for a week afterwards and that in itself showed Dearka just how much he was appreciated.

x

The fifth scar, the famous one, was given to him in a blaze of red hot fury and the blinding white of desperation. It hurt like nothing else had ever hurt him physically; an awful burning, screaming pain that horrified him and made his head feel like it had been split in two.

He didn't remember much after the actual blow fell, except clutching at his face whilst panic froze his mind and shock froze his reactions. It all blurred into one horrible mass of pain and humiliation and the coppery sickening stench of his own blood.

It was Dearka that pulled him out of the warped cockpit, supporting his weight with one arm slung about his waist because Yzak's legs just wouldn't stay straight. It was Dearka too that stood over him whilst the medics pumped him full of morphine to take away the pain of the burns on his arms and neck and Dearka that helped them get him on the stretcher.

When finally he woke up, several hours later it was to find Dearka sitting across from him, a magazine in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Yzak grimaced and then called him a pervert for reading porn in a sickbay and Dearka just grinned and held his head for him when the morphine made him puke.

x

The sixth scar was given to him by Dearka. It ran from one end of his mind to the other and seemed to stab him from the inside out, rather than from the outside in like any mere flesh wound. This scar was all about loss and change and turning around to find that your whole world didn't really exist anymore. This scar came from falling off the lofty perches of self-delusion and hitting rock bottom reality at breakneck speed.

It hurt.

The world changed and he was left alone to stand with his ideals and his pride in the aura of his ever-increasing isolation. Finally, when events came to a head and they all met again he was so angry and so desperate that his arrogance got the better of him. Yzak pointed a gun at Dearka and Dearka just shrugged. And then he walked away and that really hurt. Yzak never really forgot that, and the scar is still there, even to this day. And sometimes, when he's lying on his back at night staring up at the ceiling and waiting for sleep to take him, he can feel it hurting still. Those nights he closes his eyes and bunches his fists in the blankets and turns his back on the room and everything in it. It doesn't take the pain away but it gives him something to hold on to.

x

He picked his seventh scar up during the Logos war when shrapnel from a nearby detonation sliced him deep across the base of his back. He didn't notice at the time until he registered one of the soldiers under his command staring at him with wide, horrified eyes and it occurred to him that he did feel somewhat stiff around the lower back. The material of his flight suit was stained almost black with blood, but a cursory examination showed him that it was matted to his skin in such a way as to staunch the flow of blood so he simply shrugged and carried on.

When they met up again once the attack was over, Dearka was horrified at his friend's disregard for his own health. He stood there in the middle of the hangar and yelled, actually yelled at Yzak for not getting the wound seen to. By this point Yzak was light-headed enough with blood loss to find the expression on Dearka's face more than a little amusing, but he still put up a token resistance when Dearka all but frog-marched him to the sickbay.

Once the nurse had finished stitching him up and sticking him full of blood replenishment injections, he was allowed to leave. Dearka, silent and glowering the whole time, insisted on driving him directly home to change. They drove the whole way in stony silence until finally Yzak, tired and now starting to feel the gnaw of pain from his wound, blew up and demanded to know what the hell was wrong all of a sudden.

It took him completely by surprise when Dearka slammed a palm against the steering wheel and pulled the car to a screeching halt in the next lay-by, making Yzak wince with the sudden movement, before proceeding to bawl him out at the top of his voice. Yzak listened to the furious tirade in unusual silence, absently tempted to award marks out of ten for use of colourful language, and waited for it to stop. It did, eventually.

They sat in silence for a while until finally Yzak thought it safe to speak again and caustically demanded to know what the hell had set that off. Dearka looked at him incredulously, laughed in amazement, swore at him again and then leaned over and kissed him full and deep on the lips.

Yzak spluttered, tried to speak and failed. Shaking his head in shock and embarrassment he wound up blushing a deep and very obvious shade of crimson.

Seeing the other man's embarrassment, Dearka just laughed. So Yzak punched him.

After that they both laughed and the kisses that came after suddenly stopped being so one-sided.

x

His eighth, ninth and tenth scars were given to him in the riot on the Hephaestus 6 colony. It wasn't even as though he was supposed to be there in a military capacity anyway, which was just typical. He and Dearka had been on leave enjoying the local museums of fine art. Or rather, Yzak was enjoying the local museums, Dearka was bored out of his pretty skull and all but did a dance of joy at the prospect of a bit of action.

The riot kicked off when a supposedly peaceful protest against a local tax on imported fuel turned sour and several troublemakers in the crowd began to sway the mood of the gathered protesters towards something decidedly darker. These days, after four years experience of trying to make Lacus' Clyne's new Inter-Galactic Alliance of Humanity work out – four years of bitter fighting, politics and assassination attempts - both of them carried guns wherever they went. It was a good thing too, it turned out they needed them.

This time round it was Dearka that went down first, felled by an incredibly lucky blow from one of the rioters. The lucky, or arguably unlucky, rioter quickly found himself flat on his back, out cold, the side of his face swiftly darkening into an ugly bruise where Yzak's boot had connected with it. Looking up from his prone victim as Dearka rose groggily from the floor beside him, Yzak had been in the perfect position to spot the tall, gangling youth throwing something dark and small into one of the nearby Council buildings. He hadn't been able to see exactly what it was the young man had thrown, but instinct provided Yzak with all the necessary clues. He threw himself over Dearka, shoving his partner hard back into the floor just as the grenade blew out the front windows of the building and sent glass and plastic raining down around them in a deadly, razor-edged shower.

Neither of them were seriously hurt, but Yzak did pick up three slashes across his back from falling glass. Dearka, embarrassed at being the inadvertent cause of his injuries – which Yzak protested vehemently: What were you expecting me to do Dearka? You hadn't seen that fool, I had - sought every way possible to make amends and insisted on seeking out all the museums and galleries the colony had to offer and accompanying Yzak around all of them. Yzak didn't say anything, because Dearka was being so very insistent and humble about the whole thing, but by the end of the fourth gallery he would have been quite happy to not see another painting or sculpture again for the next twenty years.

But Dearka insisted and didn't complain again once, so Yzak shrugged mentally and made the most of it.

x

He ended up with his eleventh and currently final scar, whilst accompanying Lacus and her husband to the opera. Strangely, it was Kira who had wanted to attend, and Lacus that had gone along with it. Yzak had never really pegged Kira as a music fan, but then Yzak had never really been able to understand the Chairwoman's strange, quiet husband very well. Either way, it meant that he and Dearka were there not only to enjoy the music but to bodyguard two of the most important and influential people in all of Humanity.

And it was a wise move too. Even with the high security and the guards and the endless security checks, some death-inclined fanatic that Yzak never even saw tried to take a pot-shot at Lacus. It was only by chance that Yzak moved in front of the lady at that point and was the one to take the bullet to his chest and not her. He will never forget the splatter of his blood across the pale chiffon of her dress and over her shoulder the look of utter, inhuman fury in the eyes of her husband before reality cut out.

They told him later that Lacus staunched the flow of his blood with her shawl whilst Kira guarded them and Dearka drew his gun and shot the other gunman in the forehead. Somehow it all made sense in a horrible, haunting way that reminded him of something and nothing all at once. Once they let him out of hospital again, he decided to put it all behind him and never think about it again.

x

Yzak is a creature of perfection and pride, and deep-seated, childish vanity. He hates his scars, each and every one of them. He even went so far as to get that horrible gash across his face removed, even though the procedure almost bankrupted him and he ended up eating economy pasta and tinned fish for a year. The only time he reconsiders is when he and Dearka lie together, arms and legs entangled and Dearka kisses him all along the length of his body, lips tracing every contour and lingering along every silvered blemish. And when Yzak turns his face away and tries to distract Dearka's attention from his scars, Dearka simply smiles and pushes Yzak's hands away, kissing his body and each scar until Yzak pants and writhes beneath him and completely forgets why he is fighting.

It's at times like those, with Dearka smiling and insistent and wicked above him, that Yzak forgets to think of them as scars anymore and simply sees them as what they are. Tokens. Past times. Reminders that he's still alive and still here, when so many other things and so many others aren't.

It's the soft, quiet times after their passion is spent and he lies back in Dearka's embrace listening to the other man's deep breathing that Yzak thinks to himself that maybe, just maybe, the scars don't look so bad after all.