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—Lucci—
It’s not exactly rare for Lucci to be touched (in combat and while being patched up afterward, at least), but not like this.
This meaning lying on his stomach while your unnervingly gentle hands take a leisurely path down his back, pausing to trace over every scar they find along the way. There’s strange confidence in the unhurried, careful motions— or rather, none of the usual caution of someone handling a living weapon.
“These are awfully deep,” you comment as your fingertips trail feather-light over the uppermost circle branded into his back. “Do they hurt?”
“Of course not,” Lucci replies, almost automatically.
Those wounds are old enough to barely qualify as damage. He’s grown used to the hindered mobility and the aches that come and go— they don’t affect how he fights, and that’s all that matters.
You give a sympathetic-sounding hum, following the arrangement of scars with a broader touch. This time, the motion feels more like petting , and Lucci is vaguely horrified at how his body relaxes ever-so-slightly in response. It still doesn’t hurt, but the deeper patches of scar tissue are uncomfortably sensitive, nerve signals radiating outward from every new point of contact.
And despite a lifetime of experience spent hardening his body into a perfectly controlled tool, he finds himself alarmingly unprepared.
By now, you’re past the lowest of those five scars, moving on with no further comment. There are plenty more marks to examine— two bullet wounds low on his shoulder blade seem to catch your attention next.
Against every trained instinct, his body relaxes a little more.
—Kaku—
Kaku is built tall and lean, all straight, narrow lines and square-ish angles, with lithe, corded muscle that betrays unexpected strength.
With your hands on either side of his torso, palms resting at the lowest point of his ribs, you can feel that strength in every movement— each slow intake of breath or subtle, nervous fidget makes iron-solid muscle shift under his skin.
Skin that bears far more scars than a normal two-ish decades of life could account for.
The ones on his upper body are mostly from battle (or so you’d guess); bullet wounds, a couple of burns, and messy, jagged slashes too uneven to be from a doctor’s steady hands. Your touch moves lower, brushing over those long-healed marks on the way, and Kaku goes tense .
“You okay?” you ask. Usually, he suppresses bodily reactions better than that.
Kaku nods. He won’t look at you, but with no hat brim to hide behind, avoiding eye contact doesn’t save him. “F-Feels a bit peculiar, that’s all,” he insists, though the tremble in his voice says otherwise.
Lower down, you find more; neat, faintly pink lines arranged next to the crooked places in his shins, and pale, shiny splotches haphazardly covering his bony knees. The damage is worse here, more obvious, and with every inch your careful fingers explore, Kaku seems increasingly overwhelmed by the sensation.
Whatever brutal training goes into Cipher Pol agents didn’t prepare them for gentleness— you’ve seen Kaku shrug off pain that would put most people unconscious, yet a bit of skin-on-skin contact makes him flinch.
—Jabra—
The scar on Jabra’s face may be the most obvious, but it’s far from the worst. From the pale shine of countless split knuckles to lopsided rows of what were once hasty sutures lacing together some awful wound, the scars are everywhere.
With his skin bared and his hair down, Jabra seems older, tired; some of his sharp edges filed down.
Sprawled on his side so you can inspect a series of gashes along his shoulder blade, he’s oddly silent. For once, there’s no boasting or playful teases— nothing to distract from the somber reality of what his body’s been through.
“Are these all from fights?” you ask, idly tracing a particularly messy line.
“Nah. Some of ‘em are from training,” Jabra explains, “back before I’d been good enough for any real fights. And some are from getting patched up afterward.”
You trail your touch down, to the side, until your fingers lie parallel with his ribs. A shiver runs through him, and he hisses through clenched teeth, eyes slipping closed. Not a response to pain (he’s better at hiding those), but sensation , too sudden and unfamiliar to withstand in silence.
A few seconds tick by. Slowly, the coiled tension goes slack; in its absence, Jabra slumps backward and almost into your lap. It’s a deliberate show of trust, likely intended to convince himself more than you.
Brushing a few locks of hair off his face earns a contented, heaving sigh. Your fingertips follow his scar from forehead to cheekbone, the caress feather-light.
—Kalifa—
You can wrap your hand around Kalifa’s ankle with room to spare, yet even the slightest shift of muscle betrays strength behind the narrow joint.
It’s not as obvious that she’s a well-honed weapon, just looking at her; Kalifa knows intimately how lust can catch a target off guard, and her appearance is intended to make full use of that. This close, however, you can see the scars crisscrossing smooth skin, and feel solid muscle under every uncushioned curve.
Moving up her shin, the bone seems crooked in places, uneven like fractures that never fully healed. Painful, you’d think, but Kalifa stays perfectly still— at least until your careful, exploratory touch moves past her knee.
“That’s—” The start of a familiar phrase drops off as quickly as it slipped out.
“Sexual harassment?”
“... strange .” She says it with an odd sort of deliberation, as if the word doesn’t quite fit. Her gaze stays intently fixed on where your hands meet her skin.
“Do these hurt?” you ask, resuming your slow path up her thigh. Lines of textured scar tissue stand out under your fingertips, as do the neat, freckle-like puckers of sutured wounds long healed.
Kalifa shakes her head. “Not anymore. What you’re doing doesn’t hurt, either. It’s just... different.”
That’s as close to a confession as you’ll get from someone who’s used to weakness being a punishable offense, but the implications add up just fine. Your thumb traces the ragged edge of a broad slash across her hip, and Kalifa’s next breath comes a little sharper. She doesn’t move, and doesn’t flinch.
—Blueno—
Even though Blueno’s discomfort is sharply present, visible even through the layers of suppression and stone-faced sufferance carved into him by years of practice, he doesn’t tell you to stop.
Of course, it’s tricky to tell whether that’s a sign of genuine contentment or just one more hard-taught habit to unpack.
“Still okay?” you ask, keeping your open palm unmoving on his chest.
“It’s fine,” Blueno assures you, and offers no further words than that.
You slide your hand up closer to where his voice rumbled when he spoke; from sternum to clavicle, tracing over scattered blotches and lines of scar tissue as you go. Cipher Pol agents are durable. They heal well. Or at least, they have to, to last more than a scant matter of years at the job.
As you trace the tight lines of muscle leading upward, Blueno closes his eyes. His throat bobs beneath your touch, but his skin stays unhardened. No Tekkai to guard him, should your wandering hands suddenly try to do harm.
His body feels rather iron-like even without the added defense, however. The thick layers of sculpted muscle beneath a canvas of callused, scar-spattered skin are a weapon and a fortress all on their own, regardless of his unprotesting willingness to yield himself to your handling.
Perhaps that’s what makes this whole scenario bearable— that near-mechanical surrender of will found in following orders with no choices to be made.
Lie still. Don’t hide. Let me see you.
Your hands shift outward to broad, sturdy shoulders, memorizing the textures of old wounds along the way. Blueno exhales slowly, the breath almost a sigh.
—Fukurou—
Fukurou’s body is sturdy; it has more soft parts than one might expect for a highly trained combatant, but solid. Durable. Like a sandbag that won’t tear at the seams no matter how many hits it takes.
With your hands on his skin, however, Fukurou wishes he could zip his mouth shut before something comes leaking out that he’ll really regret.
“This doesn’t hurt, does it?” you ask, splayed fingers trailing over a deep, puckered line of scar tissue.
“N-No, it doesn’t...” As always, Fukurou is honest. He tries to stop there.
Your touch wanders lower, though, kneading into his stomach as if trying to feel the battle-hardened muscle underneath, and Fukurou’s startled ‘ chapa—!’ comes out as nearly a squeak. It feels strange to be handled like this, especially when you’re watching so intently for every little reaction he lets slip. You won’t think less of him for anything, but the scrutiny is still hard to face.
“What’s this one from?” Your fingers settle on a wide, pale mark just a few inches above his kneecap, clearly old and long-healed.
“Oh, a bone broke badly enough to poke through! Back in training, I missed a step when I was high up, and didn’t think fast enough to...”
The words keep flowing from there. As always, once he starts talking, he gets too caught up in the details to know when to quit. You’ve exploited that weakness countless times— not that Fukurou minds, by now.
He’d rather be talking than thinking about how your touch makes him feel.
—Kumadori—
When you get close enough, the sakura-pink curtain of Kumadori’s mane-like hair does little to conceal the scars. For once, he’s silent.
At first glance, only the wide, jagged-edged scar across his abdomen stands out. You move slowly when you reach for it, leaving plenty of time to suppress any instinctive flinches or hardened skin.
Still, you see Kumadori’s chest rise with an inaudible, startled gasp. Abdominal muscles spasm under your palm, rigidly nervous— but he doesn’t pull away. You trace the bumpy path of healed-over tissue, moving up toward his rib cage, and feel the effort it takes him to stay still.
Brushing his hair out of the way reveals more damage. There’s a deep, curved row of old suture marks along his side that stands out most, and the slightest pressure at one end of it earns a subtle flinch.
“Did that hurt?” you ask.
“N-No, it was merely unexpected,” he assures you, though his usual dramatic intonation comes out oddly subdued.
Up higher, past a solid chest, broad shoulders, and the sharp ridge of his collarbone. Kumadori silently allows your hands to wander. He keeps his eyes closed until your palm comes to rest on one side of his neck— his head tips away, then, yielding to the touch almost too quickly to be deliberate.
When you cup your hand over his jaw, he sighs. There are little scars and spots of damage even here, and unevenness in the bone that hints at a messy break.
Still, when you don’t move away, his head soon sags into your touch.
—Who’s Who—
You start with the tattoo on his chest, tracing the inked-in letters and the dark outline of an eye. Already, you find plenty of scars— most of them subtle and faded with age.
Moving up, however, they get worse. One thick, sharp-edged line starts on the side of his neck, then veers inward, narrowly missing his jugular on its way down. Who’s Who nearly flinches when your fingertips brush over his collarbone (you don’t point it out), but he still rolls over obligingly at your request.
“You just gonna... touch shit until you get bored?” His deliberately nonchalant tone is far from convincing, with the mess you’re looking at now.
The scars on his back are deeper, many of them patterned far too neatly to have come from a fight.
“Would you be okay with that?”
Who’s Who shrugs. “Sure. If you’re that interested, do whatever.”
A palm on his back earns another not-quite-stifled twitch. You stroke gently down, then back up, going slow enough to feel every rough patch of skin on the way. Who’s Who goes tense all over at that— as if he can’t decide whether to melt into your touch or brace for a blow.
You just keep petting him, tracing scars to find the softer, unmarred gaps of skin in between. He doesn’t protest the handling, and you don’t call attention to the unsteady breaths that he can’t quite suppress.