Forgiveness is not something Catilyn gives easily. She used to. Used to forgive every injury and every slight, every word and every blade, because that was what her father told her to do, and she could at least do that much in his memory. But her forgiveness found her imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit, found her weeping over corpses, found her broken down and beaten. She stopped giving out forgiveness like she had once given out sex; she didn’t owe it to anyone in order to survive. She was better for a while. Better with a wall between her and the world. Better when things were black and white. Better.
She wonders if, perhaps, she would be able to forgive if she didn’t look in the mirror so often. She pauses as she dresses, stands and turns in front of Ralyn’s mirror, and takes a stock of her bruises and scars. Her stomach is an interlocking mess, a spider web of old and new scars--swords and knives, never plunged deep enough to kill her, if they weren’t passing slashes. Minor annoyances at the worst. But her fingers drop just beneath her belly button, pressing at the silver coin-sized section of raised, white flesh. Crossbow bolt. Barbed crossbow bolt. Sunk deep enough into her skin that it should have killed her, ripping through inches of her flesh. Should have killed her. But it didn’t.
Blood is thicker than water, she thinks. Blood that she betrayed and set bitter. If she was being honest, it was her own fault. Not that she’d ever apologize. The time for that was long past. Marichai--Cheyanne, she wasn’t sure anymore--hadn’t listened anyway, even if the apologies of a woman thinking she was going to die were not entirely honest. Catilyn had betrayed her for Mayrin (as well as that had turned out in the end), betrayed her blood for a woman who wasn’t even a friend. She wasn’t sure if she regretted it, though. At the time, Mayrin hadn’t been completely innocent, but she hadn’t deserved what she’d gotten. Cat had only been trying to protect her. Marichai had begged her forgiveness again and again, but Cat couldn’t do it. Family or not, no matter their past, assault was assault.
The finger-shaped bruises on her hips, where her hands linger a bit too long and a goofy smile lights up her face, are not wounds, and neither are the straight white lines along her thighs and stomach, remnants of her pregnancy.
She trails her hands back up, pausing briefly as she debates whether or not to take off her chest bindings. She skips over it. That’s not a wound she wants to think about yet. Not that she wants to think about the scars on her face, the one that runs along her right cheekbone or the one that slices through her right jaw, but they’re much easier to deal with. The man who’d smashed her cheek in was long dead (she supposed that was a relief, although she’d have preferred it to have been by her hands). The woman who had kicked her jaw until it snapped, however, was still around, closer than Cat liked. It was too much to hope for, she knew, that some sort of wild animal would have brought Harlyn down in the times where she vanished. But she could still hope. Forgive and forget, Harlyn had suggested. As if it were that easy. She turns her head from side to side, trying to see if there’s an angle where the scars look less angry or at least less ugly. It’s a miracle that she escaped--no, escaped wasn’t the right word. Escaped implies a daring rescue where she saved herself and ran. It’s a miracle that she was released with her tongue intact; she licks her lips, almost as if to make sure it was still there. She still has nightmares where someone removes it. She hates those.
The sun starts to peek into the dim, still-barren house; Mina will be waking any moment. The toddler is good at sleeping through the night, but she rises with the sun, much like her mother. With Ralyn away, Cat took a cart to Archet to collect her daughter and the child-sized bed, moving both into the new house.
Cat finishes dressing as quickly as she stopped, hiking up a pair of borrowed (stolen, really, at this point) pants over her hips, running a few fingers through her short hair in a show of trying to untangle it, and gathering up a borrowed-stolen shirt from the dresser she had claimed when she moved in. She bundles it over her head, letting it hang around her neck; something had caught her eye as she dressed. A small mark, peeking out from under her bindings.
She knew she’d have to face it eventually. Couldn’t keep hiding it beneath her clothes. Well, she could. But she also knows that avoiding it won’t make it any better. So she peeks over her shoulder towards Mina’s room behind her to make sure that things are still silent, and she struggles a bit to untie the bandages; she’s been tying and untying for years now, so long that she considered herself a bit of an expert, but it became a different ordeal when her hands were shaking. It’s another long moment where she stares at the bandages in her hands and tries to get the nerve to look up.
The burn (or brand she’s never quite sure which to call it) still looks as fresh as ever. It’s stopped hurting, at least, unless she puts too much pressure on it or scratches at it. She tries to avoid doing either. It’s an ‘x’ made of seared and melted flesh, crossing between her breasts, but never peeking higher than her collarbone or lower than her first visible rib. She wonders if it wouldn’t be better if it were visible, somewhere everyone could see and know that something had happened, somewhere that she wasn’t the only one who knew what she had done. It had been revenge. Well-deserved revenge, of course, but that provided little comfort. When Mayrin had locked them both into the room, she’d expected a beating. That she could have handled. She owed May at least that much, after everything she’d done. Maybe she should’ve fought more when she saw the hot iron, or screamed for help from the two watching (she could not forgive the two of them, either, especially not the one that had become a Watcher, but then again, he’d been real good at watching), done a hundred different things--but what had happened had happened, and “should have”s wouldn’t change it. She’s not angry at May. She doesn’t know if she forgives her, but then again, she never blamed her. She blames herself.
But the burn isn’t infected (she’s not sure if that’s something that could happen and she doesn’t intend to find out), and that’s all that matters, so she ties the bandages back around her chest, wrapping them high and low enough to cover all traces of the burn. As if on cue, just as she’s pulled the shirt down over her, Mina calls out for her, in the way all two year olds call for their mother.
So Cat puts on a smile and opens the door, cooing down at her daughter and swinging her up and out of bed. Catilyn does not forgive. But maybe she doesn’t have to.
