Wrench knows what he fears and what he hates when he sees the expression cross the face of his friend. The scars themselves are a fact, and each one tells a story in the long and meandering take of his short but brutal life. It's not the sight of them that turns his stomach or makes him naturally want to fold his arms across a hollow and hungry chest. Wrench doesn't care much about the sight of himself laid bare, except that what he feels Kurt sees when he looks at him is a veil of inability.

He's not sorry for his old scars. The puckered wound he earned being gunned down in the blanket of a snowstorm. The punctures and slices from scuffles won, doubts squashed, and tasks accomplished. But twice now since his arrival he's been patched up by hands he should not have put to the task. The first of those belonged to a man who hadn't asked Wrench to darken his doorstep. The second, worse yet, to a child. He feels the hard knot of disgust moving up from the pit of his belly and settling heavily at the base of his throat. It's his own foolishness that shames him, and the fear he feels in the face of another man's tender pity that tells him he's failing himself.

In service of the other man, he's gone to Kurt easily. Wrench has reached for him without being asked and folded himself into the spaces at his back. He's tended to wounds, fixed meals, and rubbed the man's feet with no hesitation or sense of need for reciprocity. In fact, he's been glad to do it. It's given him the opportunity to feel useful. More than that, to feel as though he belongs to something. To someone even. But now he shivers under the evaluating gaze and measures a step toward the hand that reaches for him.

I'm fine, Wrench insists again. I will be fine.