Page 37 of Mating Her Dragon

"Garrett."

His expression changed instantly, every muscle in his body going tight. "What?"

She told him. Every word of it– the shape, the blackened edges, the way it sat there, not screaming, not glowing, just hollow, in a way that made her chest ache in sympathy for something she couldn't even properly see with her human eyes.

Han went very quiet in the back of Garrett's mind, a silence so complete Sydney felt it echo through the Mating Bond itself.

"Leviathan," Han said finally.

Not because Leviathan was still there. He wasn't– Sydney would have felt that instantly, the same way she'd felt the black thread reaching toward Garrett back in New Mexico.

This was what he'd left behind.

She studied it more closely, carefully, patiently, the way she'd learned to study anything that mattered. It wasn't the same construction as the black thread. It was not searching, not reaching, not active in any way at all. It was still. Waiting, if a wound could be said to wait.

And then it hit her, sudden and cold.

The thread hadn't turned toward Garrett randomly, back at that first campground, out of some vague generalized malice. It had recognized the scar. It had been searching for exactly this– for the shape of a door that already existed, half-formed, in the place Leviathan had once occupied. It hadn't been curious about Garrett.

It had been looking for what he'd been left with.

"Can you remove it?" Garrett asked, low.

Sydney didn't reach for it. Not yet. "Do you want me to try?"

"Yes."

She studied the scar, gathering the same quiet certainty that had repaired the chapel Charm.

Be whole, she thought.

Nothing happened.

She tried again, shifting the shape of the thought. You don't belong here.

Still nothing.

That bothered her more than she expected. Magic had listened to her every single time since New Mexico– a frayed Ward, a foreign thread, a seam torn open between Realms. Why not this?

Then she understood, and the understanding arrived with a gentle, devastating clarity. The scar wasn't foreign anymore.

Leviathan had been foreign. Leviathan, she could have ordered gone, denied permission to exist, the same way she'd denied the black thread in New Mexico. But the damage he'd left behind wasn't Leviathan. It was simply what remained after something terrible had been survived.

It belonged to Garrett now. Not because he deserved it, not because Leviathan retained some lingering claim on him. Because that was what scars were. What was left, after healing.

"I can't remove it," Sydney said quietly, "because there's nothing left to remove."

Garrett didn't understand, not at first. She watched him try to.

"Leviathan isn't there," she said. "But the shape of where he used to be– that's still here."

"A door-shaped wound," Han said, very quietly.

“Yes. Exactly that.”

And Sydney felt something settle in her chest alongside the grief of it– a strange, quiet relief. Because if she could simply erase this—simply will every scar out of existence with a thought—then what was she, really? Some blunt, indiscriminate force sweeping through every wounded person she ever touched, undoing whatever pain had shaped them, whether they'd chosen that undoing or not.

She couldn't do that. Wouldn't have wanted to be able to, if she was honest with herself. Garrett's history was his. Even this piece of it. Especially this piece of it.