Kindred spirits

She chuckled softly when he asked how many children she had, an amused grin pulling across her lips. "Well, I gave birth to five. Gwynevere, Artorias, Rudyard, Daphne, and Bowen. Their other mother, my late mate, she brought home two more pups shortly after that she found out in the world and added them to our family as well. Avantika and Grimshaw. So I've had seven children so far." So far. As if she would ever have any more. Resin's words still echoed in the back of her mind, urging her to find someone else to make her happy, but she still wasn't so sure. But the pain of losing Resin as still so fresh that it was hard to say. Perhaps she might get to be a mother again one of these days. All she knew was that she didn't want to do it alone.

The grin he gave her when she spoke of his wound intrigued her and she happily listened as he explained that it wasn't necessarily the wound, but the fact that he was still alive. Her head tilted to the side curiously when he went on to describe how his culture viewed scars and it was a concept she had never thought about or considered before. The closest she had ever gotten was when she first met Resin and they had shared stories about their scars and were able to relate to one another in that way. But to see them as trophies, as artwork on their bodies, as mementos... That was a new thought for her and it made her gaze flicker to his scars again. It made her curious to hear the stories behind each of his mementos, the same way she had asked about Resin's once upon a time. Her gaze lifted back to his as his expression and voice softened, mint finding hazel as she listened to his warm, rich voice. Beautiful and unique, to be celebrated and respected. Things that she had never dreamed of thinking in regard to her scars. The only looks she had ever received was sympathy or perhaps anger toward the wolves that had put them there when it came to Resin and Sirius. But these other things...

She suddenly realized she was just staring into his eyes as all these thoughts went though her mind and her face flushed, a small, embarrassed smile pulling at her lips as she looked down toward her forelegs. She had seen the question in his eyes, the same question that had lingered in her eyes as she looked across his body at the various he wore as well. She left her gaze lowered to her leg, but shifted it to hold it out to him, rotating the limb slightly so that the light from the near by fire caught on the worst of them. "These are all from my father or brother," she explained quietly, her gaze far away. "All of them punishments for when I tried to step out of line, talk back, ask to join in on the training the boys were doing, disagreed with anything my father told us to do, tried to go exploring, tried to leave the valley..." The list went on and on. She could still remember a few of the specific instances for some of the larger, deeper scars, but for the most they had all blended together in her mind just as they had along her foreleg. "Looking appealing to the men of the pack was important so that you could be mated off to one of the other men when you came of age so when my father started punishing me like this he would only ever bite this leg. I guess he hoped that it would keep me from having large scars elsewhere or that they would be less noticeable, but then he just gave me so many that it didn't matter."

Pulling her leg back, she turned and lifted her head, showing him a scar at the top of her neck, right under her jaw, that he might not have noticed before. The thicker fur around her neck usually hid it pretty well. "Also from my father," she explained, "from the last night I ever saw them." She finally brought her gaze back to his. There was pain in her expression, but it was distant. It was a very old scar at this point and it was trauma that she didn't often think about except for in the occasional nightmare. "He had bartered and begged every single male in our pack to take me when it was time for me to be mated off. I was going to be his responsibility until he found me a mate, but no one would. They saw me as damaged goods, a trouble maker. He was furious, but the only real law in our religion was that there could be no murder. So he attacked me, injured me badly enough that I should have died, and then sent me out into the woods. Banishing me from the pack. He essentially tried to murder me without knowingly having blood on his paws."

That only left one, the most noticeable, the freshest. She sighed and brought a paw to the right side of her face, gently brushing the edges of the scar that dipped down over the curve of her cheek. "This one..." her ears flicked, the pain more obvious in her expression this time as she glanced away. "This one I got from my mate. She had an illness of the mind, completely lost herself. Right at the beginning of it she had these horrible nightmares and one night I tried to wake her up from one and... I didn't move out of the way fast enough. She had unusually sharp serrated teeth, made the bite worse than it probably would have been otherwise. I got away, locked her in our room. Artorias found me and took me to Gwynevere. She saved me." She was quiet for a long moment, dropping her paw from her cheek. She gave a soft, short chuckle and added, "I suppose Death really has something against me by your logic, huh?"

Tamsyn Carpathius