Scar

Opening the door to my apartment, we both walked inside. We didn't say a single word during our return to the academy, too busy trying to prepare ourselves for the conversation to be had when we got back.

I signaled with my arm towards the couch and Lindsey sat down. Just as I was about to sit on one of the armchairs, Lindsey broke the silence we had kept between us.

"Aren't you going to wash off first?"

As she spoke, I realized what she meant. I was still completely covered in someone else's blood, 'Did I honestly go through that entire questioning without cleaning myself up? The people on the train home must have been completely freaked out...'

Turning to the bathroom, I excused myself, "Oh right, sorry. I'll be back in a minute."

I entered the luxurious bathroom, almost fully built in marble, and immediately took off my clothes and threw them into the laundry basket. As I was doing this, I noticed that my jacket had a large, burnt hole in it from the fireball I had gotten hit with. It still hurt a lot, but thanks to my high pain threshold, it was more than manageable.

Turning my back against the mirror, I tried to see how it looked. A dark red pattern had gotten ingrained all over my upper back, all the way from my upper traps down to my waistline. After getting a potion at the station it had healed to some degree but I knew that if I didn't get it treated properly soon it would leave quite the scar. However, somewhere deep inside I knew I needed to bear that scar.

Not wanting to keep Lindsey waiting for longer than necessary, I went into the shower to wash the evidence of my actions away. Feeling the pain of the water hitting my back, I scrubbed the blood off me until I couldn't see the water on the floor turning red anymore.

Grabbing a towel, I realized that I hadn't even brought a change of clothes, meaning I had nothing to put on and my female friend was just behind the bathroom door. 'It's Lindsey anyway right? She wouldn't care? Especially not tonight...'

Covering my lower body with the towel, I went back out to my living room. When Lindsey saw me, she turned bright red and quickly lowered her gaze to the floor, "What are you doing?!"

'Guess she did care...'

I kept moving to my bedroom to get something to put on while I explained myself, "I just forgot to bring a change of clothes, sorry!"

In a matter of seconds, I had thrown on a pair of training wear and was back in the living room again, and I could finally sit in my armchair, "Sorry about that..."

Lindsey just shook her head and tried to answer, "No, it's fi... Pfft! Ha...ahahaha!"

This conversation did not start the way I expected it to, as the ice queen was now for some reason laughing so hard she could barely breathe. 'Did she go insane? Did I cause the righteous Lindsey to walk the path of madness?!'

Thinking I had fucked up badly, I panicked a bit trying to find a solution to this dilemma but appearing to have noticed me freak out, she collected herself and spoke again, this time with a bright smile, "It's fine, Miren. I'm fine. I'm just happy that you are the same Miren who I think of as my friend."

Then she stood up and said, "Don't worry Miren, everything is fine." as she left the room.

'What the fuck just happened?'

****

[Lindsey's Pov]

Finally, I was back in my bed, having had one of the best and, at the same time, one of the worst nights in my life. First, the incident with the creep feeling up my butt at the bar. I had felt so incredibly guilty over my reaction, having slapped his cheek without thinking. Yet, Miren had gotten angry at me when I apologized, saying it wasn't my fault at all.

It was scary to have your friend yell at you but, in the end, it made me happy. Happy that I had someone who felt comfortable enough to be honest with me, someone who didn't care about who I was or what family I belonged to. Afterward, he had told me that it was fine to rely on someone, that I didn't always have to be strong.

From the way I grew up, I never had the chance to be weak, I had to be strong. A Borr couldn't show weakness, we were born to protect the weak from evil, but Miren had told me otherwise, and somehow, I believed him to be right. He had proved it tonight after all, when he got rid of the man for me.

I had been scared, not because he was strong, but because I didn't know how to deal with the situation. When he told me to apologize, I almost did so, shaming myself in front of the crowd, but my first real friend saved me.

Looking up at my roof, I automatically started to smile when thinking about how we had sat down in the club talking and drinking the night away. I couldn't say I enjoyed the club, but I enjoyed being with Miren.

Then when we left, everything went badly. When I thought that the night had been saved, that I would get home full of happy memories, the creep had waited for us outside. It was Miren who reacted to his attack, pushing me away and getting hit himself instead.

As I saw his tiny body flying through the air, I thought the worst. The creep hadn't held back in the slightest, he had attacked with the intent to inflict as much damage as possible, and with Miren's physical attributes, it wouldn't have been surprising if he died right there and then.

However, when I had tried to make sure he was alive, he had just pushed me away and stood up, seemingly not even hearing what I was saying. In a matter of seconds, his eyes had changed.

I knew that they were black, but at that time they had been blacker than black. As if they were gateways to a void that would consume everything. I tried to stop him, but I couldn't. Not because it wasn't physically possible, but because I got scared. I didn't want him to turn those eyes to me.

The next sequence of events was all a blur, Miren in a single moment making his enemy's throat spraying blood, and me stopping him before he continued to chase after the men who had fled.

Then the police came and brought us for questioning. Luckily, they seemed to understand the situation and we got released quickly because they judged it to be an act of self-defense, which it was.

On the way home, I was still scared, scared of Miren, the small boy who I had gotten to know more and more these few days we had been hanging out. It wasn't that I was scared of him hurting me, I was just scared that he would look at me with those emotionless eyes, those orbs of infinite black.

Luckily, that didn't happen. As we entered his apartment, he seemed to just be the normal Miren I knew.

The clumsy but thoughtful guy I enjoyed spending time with who even forgot to bring something to wear after he showered, a shower I had to remind him to take as he had blood all over his uniform.

'His body was so well built. It was pretty insane...'

Even though he was small, his body was immaculate. His muscles were so incredibly defined that it was hard to believe he had an I-strength stat. As soon as I saw his body my face heated up so much that I had to look down at the floor. I couldn't help but smirk as I remembered it.

"Ouch!"

'Oh right, I was crying...'

My eyes hurt a lot, most likely from when I cried my eyes off in the middle of the street. Miren appeared to believe that I had been crying because I didn't want him to continue fighting, something I truly didn't want him to do, but that had not been the reason I cried.

It had been something else that triggered my tears to fall, something that I couldn't help but feel such an intense sense of sorrow when I saw it. After he had killed the man, his expression didn't change at all but there was one big difference from before he had taken the man's life;

Tears had been flowing down his cheeks, showing how much in pain he truly was.