John hadn't realized how much he missed the markings until he contemplated adding another one.

It had been many, many years since he'd done it, for all sorts of reasons. You needed time to yourself to properly scar, and sterile materials, and in the Army he had neither.

Hadn't had much privacy as an operative, either, and in retrospect he was glad for that. It wasn't a time he wanted memorialized on his skin.

And Jessica. He'd wanted to add something of hers to his body – not her name, that would be maudlin – but a memento of some sort. He'd even, when he felt daring, thought of asking her to choose his mark for her, so that it would even more be hers.

She would have been the first person he'd ever told about that, if he had. He had to be sure that it wouldn't frighten her.

And then she was gone, and he'd tried again and again to add a mark in memorial but he couldn't even prepare the knife before he started to shake because he didn't deserve it.

And now there was the bullet hole, healed over but still pink and recessed, giving him a perfect opportunity.

He'd done it the first time when he was twelve, for strictly practical reasons; he'd wanted a tattoo because the one thing he distinctly remembered about dad were his tattooed arms and so he'd decided to make his own with a paring knife and a pen. It had looked terrible – it still did, a shapeless faded spot across his knee – but even then he'd found the experience of tracing lines across his skin calming.

Of course his mother wasn't happy about it. She'd found him in the bathtub with cuts across his knee and she had washed them and bandaged them up tight – tight as she could, the covering meant to hide and punish instead of heal.

He'd learned then not to leave any signs. When he added marks, they'd been simple, short lines, score marks, easily excused as something else. And he learned too to prefer it that way. They were messages, left for himself in the mirror each morning, that nobody else would ever see.

That would probably be the best approach here. He'd need to be careful to avoid the scar tissue itself, of course, but a small tally or two around it would pass for stitches.

Except.

Except the scar lay just below his chest and between his ribs, where so few people would ever see it. He could have more – could have something deeper, something that tangled in the scarred skin and bloomed it into something beautiful, growing pain into relief, into joy –

"Give him something to bite down on," he remembered the doctor saying, at least he thought that was what he remembered. He knew he remembered Harold's protests – "You aren't going to put him under?"- just before he'd undone one of the straps on the gurney and placed it between his teeth, and then after that the doctor began to extract the bullet –

Just because he'd endured it before didn't make it easier.

"Stay awake, John. Look at me."

Just months ago he would have welcomed death – would have waited to bleed out – and now –

"Look at me."

– now he was afraid, and didn't want to die.

Something so important needed something more than the shy, discrete tally-mark. Something specific – something that was only his. He had entertained the thought of something elaborate – a bird, maybe even a finch if he was feeling especially sentimental. But being so explicit after so long with private marks embarrassed him.

So instead he chose five short lines, forming a half-moon curve below the ellipse of the gunshot; two lines in a peak above it. It suggested a songbird, not necessarily to anyone else, but to him.

It enclosed the wound, protected it.

Such a long, long time it'd been since he indulged. The tools were familiar and close at hand – a handle and seven scalpel blades, one for each cut, fanned out on the bathroom sink; tincture of iodine for disinfection; cotton and bandages to cover the incisions as they healed, towels that could be bleached clean. Every detail of them hummed in his head like liquor.

He sketched out the pattern first, brushing the knife across his skin just enough to leave a white line trailing behind it. He hoped it was abstract enough; it looked simpler in flesh than when he'd imagined it. Most importantly Harold couldn't recognize it. Wasn't likely, but he'd had to dress in front of him before. Finch was quite invested in his boundaries, and something like this would do far worse than overstep them.

How peculiar that he had to think about that now.

He couldn't stay in a hospital – hospitals kept records – and so Harold had taken him back to the hotel room he'd set him up in. He had propped him up in bed and brought him medicine for the pain and changed the bandages around his thigh and stomach and washed him clean of sweat and blood.

He had given him his shoulder to lean on as he began to walk out of bed, his free hand gripping a cane for stability – John had insisted that he didn't need the assistance, that should he stumble he'd take Harold down with him, but he wouldn't hear it.

The opiates clouded his head to block out the ache but it was the care and the tending that brought the most relief. Back in Ordos he'd had to dig the lead from his body himself.

Cuts to mark had to stay shallow; too deep and they healed slow and messy. There was no danger in the way they hurt - sharp, yes, but harmless.

The first time breaking the skin was a freefall, catching the breath and tensing the body and quickening the pulse. The sensation didn't fade with time, either. You had to start a fresh cut every time, with a fresh blade; if you dragged the blade from the old cut to the new you risked tearing skin instead of incising. So every line built anticipation in the ritual of fitting the new blade, opened with the icy kiss of the cut, faded after into the residual endorphin thrill.

He liked the cleaning least. The iodine stung without complexity or pleasure.

You could tell Harold. The thought came giddy and frightening, like the thoughts a few months back of you could fall in front of this train or you could step off this rooftop. Just as dangerous too. But those tempted him with oblivion back then, and this -

- this offered a touch, hesitant and feather-light, as Harold traced out the healed mark and realized what it meant and his shock turned to fascination.

The blade slipped; the cut he'd started split too far, past the point where it was meant to intersect with the others. His pounding heartbeat dizzied him.

He set the knife down. Couldn't work safely feeling like this. Probably needed a break anyway; he wasn't used to marking in long sessions. He pressed one of the cloths to the half-finished mark and breathed deep as he waited for the bleed to slow.

A touch would be too impossibly intimate even to think of, but he craved the spark of recognition when Harold looked at him. John wanted him to know how deeply he was buried in his foundations, how much of himself was him.

Of course the best part about imagining it was that it skipped over the awkwardness, eliminated the possibility that he'd be disgusted or afraid. With Jessica it had taken months of halting practice to talk about something as simple as feeling. He's be lucky if he was ever able to find words for this particular need.

And yet even to have it...

When you marked your skin you changed the body you'd been given, took control over it. And he had changed many many times but there were so few changes that made him better.

He could be better. The semicircle that bounded his scar, taking shape now line by line as he picked up the scalpel again, was that reminder.

For now, I am his was enough, poor substitute though it was for you are mine.