Romeo and Juliet

"Just ruffling the scar beneath the skin, eh?"

Minoth says it like it's easy, like it's commonplace, like it's normal and it's nothing. Like everyone has those - and they do, demonstrably, as one cut heals up and phases away into a new layer of dermis come to draw the cover over, but then this is Minoth, so he's not exactly being clinical and academic. He never really is.

"You're hurt?" Addam asks, to take the baton distantly passed to him from atop Jin's furrowed brow.

Minoth spreads his arms wide. "Always. Which is to say, never."

Now, Addam's not entirely bakeheaded. He has heard something to the effect drifting out from Minoth's quadrant: muffled complaints about chronic pain and temperature dysregulation and the constant ache of wear that won't tear away and get discarded.

So he stops the sham right then and there, with a hand stretched out to ghost and grasp Minoth's forearm, just by the elbow. Lightly, not at all authoritarian, but with meaning. Of course, all action must have meaning. Minoth has certainly taught him that.

"Show me."

If Minoth is surprised by this turn, he doesn't show it. Instead, he lets his arm drop where Addam holds it and steps off to the side; the others have already deserted the clearing.

Just Addam. Minoth can't say he hasn't been waiting for just such an opportunity to bare himself; won't deny that he says things like that, nearly flirtatious in their mischievous nature, just to attract moments like this.

He removes his jacket. On his shoulders and biceps-triceps, faint lashes and pockmarks of dermatillomania long gone by. Addam makes a silent, closed wager that being on the move had helped with that.

A waggle of Minoth's wrist alerts Addam to the pulsing ether lines found there, circlet handcuff burns.

"Those?"

Minoth shakes his head. No, he continues with his armor itself, the part practically glued to him, far too stiff ever to slide like a slim-lined bodysuit over ponytailed head.