11-17-2025, 09:36 AM
— i would rather learn what it feels like to burn than feel nothing at all —
His reaction causes guilt to burn at the back of her throat, and she doesn’t know why she can’t seem to do this without hurting someone in some capacity, each and every time.
She wonders if it would have been better if he had been angry instead.
His apology feels like sea-water on a wound, vibrant and burning, and she realizes she doesn’t know how to navigate this when it has not devolved into fighting. Even though there is nothing in his demeanor that suggests he is about to unleash some kind of cruelty against her, she finds herself tensing anyway. It is difficult to see, beneath the flicker of flame; the way her eyes turn to unreadable shields, the way muscle pulls taut beneath the flames across her skin. But it is there, coiled and tight in her chest, in the clench of her jaw as she waits for what always comes next.
It doesn’t come; instead his own body loosens, and he keeps talking, propelling the conversation forward almost as if nothing had happened.
You and I. The phrasing shifts something inside of her, as if a previously barricaded door has been opened. She had been trying to outrun fire for so long that she had never considered turning to face it. Instead she had only let herself want the things she couldn’t have — like Brigade and his ice (the fact that she even thinks of him, the absolute briefest flicker in her mind, ignites such a searing pain that she remembers why she had boarded him up).
She had poured fuel onto her own fire, stoked her own anger to such an impossible height that it had had no choice but to burn and burn until it choked itself out.
Her eyes follow the blaze that he creates, and she ignores the small ember of jealousy that it sparks. She can’t actually control or manipulate her flames — that is the root of so much of her frustration. But before she can think too hard on it he is disappearing and re-emerging as a shadow, all the light seeming to be swallowed by its void.
There is a long pause as she turns over the things that he has said, and the things that he has shown her. In the silence she has found that she has stepped forward, the edges of her fire-glow reaching for and then disappearing into the newfound darkness. “Were you born this way?” she asks him, her mind working through a puzzle that he cannot see, thinking back on how she had been born plain and natural and how everything she is now had fallen over her like some kind of curse.
She wonders if it would have been better if he had been angry instead.
His apology feels like sea-water on a wound, vibrant and burning, and she realizes she doesn’t know how to navigate this when it has not devolved into fighting. Even though there is nothing in his demeanor that suggests he is about to unleash some kind of cruelty against her, she finds herself tensing anyway. It is difficult to see, beneath the flicker of flame; the way her eyes turn to unreadable shields, the way muscle pulls taut beneath the flames across her skin. But it is there, coiled and tight in her chest, in the clench of her jaw as she waits for what always comes next.
It doesn’t come; instead his own body loosens, and he keeps talking, propelling the conversation forward almost as if nothing had happened.
You and I. The phrasing shifts something inside of her, as if a previously barricaded door has been opened. She had been trying to outrun fire for so long that she had never considered turning to face it. Instead she had only let herself want the things she couldn’t have — like Brigade and his ice (the fact that she even thinks of him, the absolute briefest flicker in her mind, ignites such a searing pain that she remembers why she had boarded him up).
She had poured fuel onto her own fire, stoked her own anger to such an impossible height that it had had no choice but to burn and burn until it choked itself out.
Her eyes follow the blaze that he creates, and she ignores the small ember of jealousy that it sparks. She can’t actually control or manipulate her flames — that is the root of so much of her frustration. But before she can think too hard on it he is disappearing and re-emerging as a shadow, all the light seeming to be swallowed by its void.
There is a long pause as she turns over the things that he has said, and the things that he has shown her. In the silence she has found that she has stepped forward, the edges of her fire-glow reaching for and then disappearing into the newfound darkness. “Were you born this way?” she asks him, her mind working through a puzzle that he cannot see, thinking back on how she had been born plain and natural and how everything she is now had fallen over her like some kind of curse.
Brinly
@Fireheart