skymuffins | [Sept. 9/11] Training Hall, Room 15, Afternoon

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[Sept. 9/11] Training Hall, Room 15, Afternoon

Allison tapped her laminated class schedule against her cheek as she made her way down a hall she hadn't been before. Huge windows showcased an equally huge field and if she stopped and squinted through the sunny glare, she could spot areas that looked a little charred.

Well, there was a reason this area of the school wasn't for those who had no reason to be here. Allison hadn't yet decided what she thought of the fact that she was here, though anything had to be better than setting things on fire when she got upset.

She grimaced a bit while she counted doors. There were worse things than the fires, really, but they were more noticeable to others. Allison supposed that was a good thing. She stopped outside the fifteenth door and double checked her schedule to make sure it was the right one.

It was. She was stalling. That's dangerous, she scolded herself, and then tucked her schedule into her backpack. Then, before she could think better of it, she rapidly knocked on the door (to give her tutor the heads up she was here, in case they weren't one of the ones that could just tell that) and opened it.

"Morning!" she said, poking her head in.

It was one in the afternoon.

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"Again," he agreed. "We'll give it one more go for now, and then take a break. Talk about what it is you were feeling while trying to pull back again. Sort of... sort it out, if we can. How you think of it, that's a lot to do with how you manage it. So we'll see if we can't skew that some in your favour."

Probably over dinner. Mm, tofu.

She nodded, wishing absently that she'd thought to tie her hair back, and set the water bottle away from her.

"Okay," Allison said, trying a faint smile on for size. "And you'll catch me if I mess up."

Okay.

She could do this. She hoped.

"I'll catch you," he agreed as he set out another candle and eased himself back again. "That's what I'm here for, Cuttie."

He echoed her smile with one of his own.

"Now go on. Whisper."

She smiled and closed her eyes, sending herself tumbling back down where her magic lay coiled about her stone, deceptively quiescent.

Allison's fingers got cold again and the chill her nose felt was worse. Her magic, she knew, hadn't liked being crammed back into the stone. Now she had to let it out without letting it all out.

A whisper, Dover told her. In the privacy of her own mind, she could admit that she wasn't sure her power knew what a whisper was.

Then she banished that thought. Doubt wouldn't help her here. Breathe in, breathe out and reach for the barest brush of power. It felt like snow on her fingers, though it was all in her head, and for a second, a bare second, she thought she had had it. Just what she needed and no more.

Then the second past and her magic, furious at being caged roared past her with the fury of a thousand flames as her hands felt like they were caught in a blizzard. She didn't, couldn't, open her eyes. All she could see was snowflakes, like her stone was patterned with, as fire leapt forward, consumed the candle, and went after the wet sand.

And the sand hissed and the fire roared, and instead of pressing back against her this time, Dover watched, one hand reaching toward the pond, coaxing it to be at the ready in case it was needed.

"Reason with it," he said, his tone even. "Don't open your eyes. Don't look. Just promise it that you'll let it flex again. Fire needs to breathe, Cuttie. It's as alive as you or me and that piece of you has been strangled until now. Promise it, mean it when you do, that you won't keep it caged like that again."

His words sounded like they came from a long way off because she was lost inside a swirl of snow and darkness and the rage of a fire that should have burnt her from the inside out but instead left her cold.

She could make sense of his words. She didn't like them.

Allison didn't want to let the fire go free. Didn't want to promise it that. All it did was hurt things. Right now, it was hurting her. She could feel it draining at her.

A lie, she knew instinctively, wouldn't work here. The fire raged harder at the very thought and Allison flinched away from her own power, her own ragged control.

"You've seen me do it already," Dover pressed on. "You've seen me let it dance at the tips of my fingers, let it play free. It isn't just a force of destruction. It burns, yes, but where would the entire world be without flames?"

She stepped up behind him, blue and pale white, the size of a small child, no longer tiny enough to fit inside a thimble. And she rested a hand on Allison's shoulder herself, warm and comforting, as she held the other out toward her flames. Inviting it to whisper with her, instead of screaming against the sand.

"We are not wildfires, Allison," he pressed on. "We are just as important to the magic as the healers and the seers. We are the sun. And even she agrees to take a step back every day so that the world doesn't burn."

She'd seen him play with it and no one had hurt. There was... something... touching her, resting against her, and not hurting and it was pure flame and she knew that without seeing.

Two slim bits of evidence to place against what raged inside her.

Allison didn't believe him. Didn't believe the evidence.

She wanted to. She tried. She really did.

The ground began trembling under her, roused by the effort she was putting in to convince her fire that it shouldn't rage even when she believed that rage was all it was good for. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps that didn't give her enough air, as her hands shook.

What could fire do that wasn't dangerous?

Her cold-numbed mind struggled for an answer, fumbled for one, and kept searching.

The ground kept trembling.

The shaking underfoot was disconcerting. And while Dover had the power to push back a firestorm, he had no such ability to calm the ground itself.

The world might be mostly water, but that did him little good while sitting at the edge of a tiny, babbling stream.

He narrowed his eyes. His flames, she did the same.

And the two of them reached forward bare handed into Allison's flames, as though to hold it in place while the water he'd had at the ready rushed forward and washed over all three of them.

"Down."

Allison coughed and spluttered, soaked to the bone abruptly, and disoriented. Half her vision was still swirling with snowflakes of her power and the other half was struggling to deal, make sense of, the water that had been called up to deal with her mess.

Her fire didn't like the pressure Dover was placing on it. Didn't want to listen. Wanted to burn, to consume, to destroy more.

But Allison didn't want it to and Dover was in full agreement with his power. It was a battle that even she could tell the conclusion to even as her fire tried to deny it.

The earth kept shaking but that didn't worry her. The earth wasn't angry. It couldn't burn her.

Her fire fought Dover every inch, even as she tried to convince it that giving up was better for now.

He kept his hands in the flames. His flames kept her hands in the flames. And they were joined by a third, hissing steam at the unbelievable heat, boiling alongside them and curling itself around the wildfire.

"I said," Dover snarled, to the flames themselves and nobody else, "down. You'll get your chance to play, you bloody can of piss. So you can either stay easy and work with us, or keep pushing and see how I get when I lose my head."

He closed his hands into fists, and the flames and the water at his sides did much the same. They'd strangle these flames into submission if they needed to.

She was too afraid of them yet. He should have known, somebody as soft as her would be too afraid of them.

And strangle them into submission he had to do. Even with her tugging at them, trying to pull them back, trying to get them to see reason, that they weren't going to be able to burn anything right now anyway wasn't enough to convince her flames.

They weren't listening to her. Not when they knew she didn't want to control them.

Allison shivered and shivered and shook as her flames slowly lost their battle.

Slowly, yes. And then faster, as Dover pulled off the kid gloves, let his fire take a step back, and then gave one massive push, all water and sweat and grit teeth. The ground shaking below them wasn't helping, but he ignored it all the same.

He gave one more push, as the water wrapped its arms around Allison and held on for dear life.

And this time, when he pushed, he didn't pull back. His hands moved to grab at her shoulders, his eyes narrowed, and his hair tousled around his face from the heat. He pushed, and he held, and he didn't dare back away, waiting for her to open her eyes.

And grumbling, furious and soaking wet, her fire slunk back into her stone to lick at it's wounds. At least, that was the impression she got from it.

It hated her. Which was fair because she hated it.

Her shivers now were partly from being soaked, partly from exertion, and partly from being tied up, still, with the shaking of the earth.

Allison opened her eyes and saw nothing. What looked out her eyes was the swirling flakes of snow and endless darkness.

She swallowed hard. More importantly, most importantly, she had to stop the earth. Her hands slipped from her lap to press against the dirt, as she smoothed her palms against the tangled grass and wet ground.

It's okay, she thought, and hoped it would be enough. Everything is fine now.

Dover kept his hands on her shoulders as the trembling of the earth began to subside.

The water that was soaked through her clothes started to seep away, leaving only dry fabric in its wake.

And the blue and white, childlike flame wrapped her arms around Allison from behind, holding her close, trying to warm her.

Dover was trying like hell not to frown. He knew what he was looking at. He knew all too well, having felt much the same way with a completely different element, at her age. She didn't fear the ground, just as he'd never feared the water.

That was a start.

She was warm and safe and the earth was stilling. Allison took strength from the earth and comfort from it as well as it calmed and then slipped away from her like a morning mist.

Her eyes cleared, her gaze sharpened, and she slumped forward, exhausted.

"That's enough for today, I think, Cuttie," Dover murmured, his hands resting on her shoulders for a moment more before he finally eased back, sitting on the scorched glass behind him. "Rest up, and we'll talk in a minute."

The water bottle he'd handed her a few minutes ago had melted away entirely. He contemplated that spot for a moment, too.

"Cup your hands, luv. You need to drink something."

Moving was just about the last thing she wanted to do but Allison could tell from the way she felt that he was right, again, and that she really did need water. With that in mind, Allison made herself sit up straighter and obediently cupped her hands.

She didn't ask where the bottle had gone.

She was pretty sure she could guess.

It started as a few beads on her fingertips, like dewdrops clinging to grass on a misty morning. And then there were a few more still, until the beads turned to drops, and the drops ran into a puddle in her cupped hands.

Cool, fresh, clean water.

"You're not just afraid of it, are you?" He watched the water as it filled her hands, and then told it to stop before it could spill over. "You don't want it there at all. You wish it'd go away. The ground is safer. The ground never burned anybody. G'wan. Drink."

She drank.

When she lowered her hands, she felt both better and worse. Better, because she was hydrated. Worse, because there was no doubt that she'd managed to spectacularly fail his first lesson.

If she hadn't been so tired Allison thought she might have given into the urge to feel sorry for herself. As it was, she just studied her hands.

"Fire hurts," she said, her voice small. "That's all I think about when... when it comes to it."

There was no judgement in his face. Nothing in his voice that suggested even for a moment that he was disappointed.

"Have you been burned before, Cuttie?"

Only a sort of quiet understanding. A bit of that same quiet from earlier, perhaps.

Her hands clenched tightly enough that her nails bit into her skin.

"Once," she said flatly, the way she'd learnt to talk about it from her therapist. "Right after... after coming back."

She'd died by her own hand and woken up in a firestorm that had done it's best to destroy her a second time.

Allison didn't remember much of the first month after coming back. She knew it was better that way.

Ah, yes. Dover nodded a little.

It burned. It reached out and made damn certain that you knew it was there, because if it didn't, maybe you'd think for a moment that you were the one in control.

The trick was proving to it that you were.

"'Ere, luv." He reached down and quietly rolled up his shirt sleeve, only slightly. Only enough to show just the beginnings of what was likely an extensive stretch of some fairly gruesome burn scars, that likely reached up well beyond the cuff of his sleeve. "For what it's worth, you wouldn't be the first."

She stared at the scar that disappeared into his sleeve and tore her eyes away, to look up at him.

"And you... you play with it now."

Allison didn't think she'd be able to do that.

His shoulders hitched a little in what was probably a shrug.

"We play together, now," he agreed. "But I always preferred the water. It was safe. Didn't hurt nothin', the water. It could put out the flames, even. Just like people bury 'em in the dirt to try to choke 'em out if there's no water around, really."

She had something not unlike water, then, right there at her disposal.

"I'm not asking you to learn to toy with it. You don't have to let it dance on your fingertips. But there isn't much out there that's as dangerous as the fire is. And we respect the power we've been given all the more, for having felt it ourselves."

She was sitting on his shoulder now, as small as the flicker at the end of a candle's wick.

"I'll grant that it's frightening. Especially at first. But hiding from it means you'll only get burned again."

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