Scars

She has no scars.

They could have added them, of course, to this body, but it did not occur to Nolikka to ask, any more than it had occurred to her to ask to have them removed from the other, and so her young clone skin is as smooth and unmarked as her nephew Corin’s had been the first time she had held him, a soft, squirming eighteen-month old armful. 

In a way, it bothers her less than her hair, since cosmetic grafting to ensure her very-recently-commissioned jump-clone would have hair as long as she was used to was something else that had not occurred to her.  The ends tickle the back of her neck and her ears, and even worse, Director Roth has made her aware that the color differs from her own.  After nearly twenty years of wearing her hair the length and style it had been the last time she had been able to see her own reflection in a mirror, Nolikka finds it disconcerting to be unable to imagine what she looks like.  In that regard, at least, the lack of scars is not a problem: she incurred them many years after the accident that destroyed her eyesight and has never known how they altered her appearance.

 But her hair is a purely cosmetic matter.  The patch of numb skin just above her highest capsule connection where the collar’s neural interface burned out the sensory neurons is not even visible, let alone cosmetic: only her own fingers, carefully maneuvering the protective cover into place when she has finished flying, know about this daily reminder of years of random agony, and fear of random agony.  The tightness in the skin of her throat when she turns her head to the left is due to scars she can feel with her fingertips, and so assumes others can see if they look, but it is also a reminder of the constant misery of untended sores, and the pull in the muscles of her forehead every time she frowns one of Gallente boots, and fists.

For what it is worth, Val had said, and I am far less qualified to advise you on this than you are to decide for yourself …

 I don't know that you need any reminders of that time.

Once, Nolikka would have agreed with him, without hesitation.  Once, she would have said that she needed not only no reminders, but to have the memory of those years erased from her memory as cleanly as data was erased in a full reformat.

But that was when she had scars.

Without them, she has found herself more quick to speak, more confident in holding her ground.  She does not feel the memory of the collar lodged above her collarbone, too tight to force words past, at every raised voice, at every thought of No.  Without her scars, she finds herself lost in the thread of a discussion or the intricacies of an equation for hours, unaware of the body that houses her mind until she reaches the end of the line of thought and finds her muscles cramped, her hands shaking with hunger.

This is the self she remembers, from before. This is the self she knew as herself for almost all the years of her life, and part of her welcomes it back, with all its limitations. 

But …

But. 

It is not the self that was herself when she first heard a smooth taupe ribbon of a voice attached to the name Captain Night wind through the laboratory.  It is not the self that was herself when that voice offered her a home, a haven, on the Utopian Ideal, nor the self she was when they stood side by side before the steward, hands linked by symbolic red tape, and said the words that made them partners in a new enterprise. Not the Nolikka Toin he eats lunch with daily, nor Nolikka Toin he sends carefully-considered traditional flower arrangements to.  

Not the Nolikka Toin she was when her impulsive, intrusive question received not rebuff, but the quiet answer Val.

This is the self she knows best; but that is the Nolikka Toin he knows, the Nolikka Toin who is a colleague, a friend, a partner.

Just how important that has become to her is only now fully apparent, in the sharp grief she feels at contemplating losing it.  She has felt loss before, of course, many colors of it: the sickly iridescent green of betrayal, the dull blue ache of bereavement.  This loss, though, she can already tell, this keen grey pang, will sink into her like the blade of a knife.

Today, Nolikka Toin has no scars. 

But one way or another, that is a temporary condition.