Story Telling Scars

Every one of us, at some point in time, acquired a scar. Not the kind of scar that lay deeper than tissue and muscle and bone – we all had multitudes of those. I’m talking about the visible kind of scar, the kind that all the world could see and use to define you by. Because that’s what the world does, you know. It passes you by and glances you over. What it sees in those few precarious seconds seals your fate with the world for the rest of your life. So, you can see the impressions a scar can make and the story it can tell.

Harry had a lightening bolt on his forehead for seventeen years. At a glance the world knew it was him – the Boy Who Lived. The son to Lily and James Potter; the godchild to Sirius Black… Harry is actually the only one of us to lose a scar on the same night he gained one. A second lightening bolt adorned his chest where Voldemort’s killing curse struck Harry. But in the moment Harry killed Voldemort, the mark on Harry’s forehead faded away until it was nothing. Now, unless Harry is walking around with his shirt off, the world has to look him twice over before the impression is made.

Ron was attacked by brains in our fifth year when we fought at the Ministry of Magic. They attached themselves to him and eroded away the top three layers of his flesh. Madame Pomfrey healed Ron and the marks became pale puckerings of new skin. Faint and gleaming in the right catch of light. Whenever he wears a tee shirt or goes without a shirt, the world knows at a glance who Ron Weasley is.

Luna has a line the runs the lower length of her left inner leg. Professor Snape stunned the both of us during the first battle at Hogwarts. As Luna fell a clock crashed from the wall and the broken pieces of glass embedded themselves in her leg. She doesn’t mind it. More times than not you’ll find her scar turned into a work of art. She’s really talented with a quill or paintbrush. The line representing a bad memory gets turned into a flower vein with butterflies and bumble bees or a tree providing shelter to a nest of nargles. Whatever the scene, she turns the disadvantage to an advantage and the world knows Luna.

Ginny helped Neville and Luna to attempt to remove the Sword of Gryffindor from the Headmaster’s office whilst Snape was Headmaster. He caught up with them on the stairs, causing them to fright and the blade to slip between fingers. Her arms had closed and the ancient blade had sliced through the insides of both her arms, bathing her in blood instantly. Snape began an unheard of chant and now Ginny is left with only pinkened flesh to show the world, but those that look know and those that know are the wiser.

Neville has a multitude of scars that might follow him for the rest of his life. During the masquerade of what was supposed to be our seventh year Neville took numerous beatings. His face, neck, torso, arms, and legs are dappled with discolorations, nicks, and tiny craters – each a testament to Neville’s impeccable character. The world doesn’t have to look at Neville twice. Half a glance and his name rises to the tip of its tongue. He is one of the two people who have more scars than I do.

The other is Draco. He can match me scar for scar, and then he has just one more than I do. Thinks it makes him a bloody bad ass, too.

There’s a spider’s web of marred skin over the rounded orb of my right ankle, memories from a shattered bone. His left kneecap sports a healed gouging from a stray bludger. A small circle at my hairline rests as testament to the giant game of Wizard’s Chess back in first year. His right eyebrow bares a slender line of disruption from splintering rock as he fled with Snape from the first battle at Hogwarts. We both have burn marks that lick across the back of our claves from the second battle at Hogwarts. There’s an intricate design around my wrists from being bound underwater during the Tri Wizard Tournament, something I never had the heart to point out to Dumbledore. His wrists display an angry red ring from the iron shackles Voldemort used to punish him with while inside his own home.

My back is a myriad spectacle of fractured skin, road maps of healing, from the second war at Hogwarts. Counted individually, there are twenty lines, but they connect in some shape or fashion and we count them as one. He has a faint line, creeping from just below his right eye, down over his cheek, following the curve of his neck, tip toeing over the ridge of his collarbone, and meandering down and over the hardened peaks of his chest, ending just shy of his bellybutton. He received it from Harry, the results of an ill chosen spell in sixth year.

As my tongue follows the trail over his skin I stop comparing our past injuries and concentrate on the delicious things he’s doing to me with his fingers. We shift and I grin as my hair falls around us, forming a curtain of privacy in our bedroom at Malfoy Cottage – our first home as a married couple.

His hand moves to my cheek and the black lines of his last wound flash before me. The one scar that makes him the carrier of more injuries than me.

The world looks at us, but it doesn’t know - not with one glance or even two. Just because the outside speaks of one thing, it often eludes to nothing of the insides. The world might not know, but we do. We always have.