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

[ground_me]

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.

Comments

[ground_me]

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.

[up_in_smoke]

"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."

[ground_me]

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.

[up_in_smoke]

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."

[ground_me]

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."

[up_in_smoke]

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.

[ground_me]

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.

[up_in_smoke]

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."

[ground_me]

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.

[up_in_smoke]

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."

[ground_me]

"It hates me," she told him, resolutely not looking at his tiny flame person. Allison was shivering again, from reaction. "It doesn't want to listen and I don't understand it."

She toyed with the ground, the dirt that had moved at her distress and kept her gaze on her hand. "It's mean," she said, pretending her voice didn't hitch at that. "The earth is strong, and it can hurt. It can destroy as effectively as fire. But it's not... mean."

It felt safe, to her. Powerful and enormous and looming... but safe. The earth had a temper but it was a slow one to rouse and it was forgiving of little mistakes.

[up_in_smoke]

Dover nodded again, glancing at his flame. She glanced back, and then flickered away in a wisp of smoke.

"Look up, luv. Tell me what you see."

It was a bright day. There were a few clouds. A few birds. But overall, it was sunny.

[ground_me]

Allison glanced sideways at him, which told her nothing since she couldn't see his face, and then looked up.

The sky was very blue.

"It's sunny," she said quietly.

[up_in_smoke]

"Aye," he agreed, just as quietly. "And she warms the Earth, feeds the trees. The rain falls, and people curse it. The snow comes, and people spend the winter wishing she'd chase it away. She burns, true, if we sit before her for long enough. But that doesn't mean she means to. It's our own bloody fault, innit? For not having the good sense to take the right steps before we go sitting outside, knowing she's fire? You only have to be burned once to be able to respect that that's what she is. But without her, all of this would be dead."

[ground_me]

"She's far away," Allison said, after just... staring up at the sky for a few moments. "If we kept her as close as our stones keep the fire, we'd be worse than burnt."

She looked down.

"It has a purpose but--not up close. Up close, it mostly hurts."

[up_in_smoke]

"And yet, where would our civilization be, without her? Eating raw meat, huddling in caves and using animal pelts to keep warm? No light, after the dark. No metal, no transportation beyond a horse, without even a buggy behind it. We'd be little more than apes, Cuttie. Naked apes, until the first winter swept in and killed the lot of us with cold."

His fingers brushed idly against the blistered, mangled flesh of his arm. And then he rolled his sleeve down again. Most people in the school weren't aware that the scar was there at all. He didn't mind if they knew, really. But it wasn't exactly an attractive sight.

His healer had panicked. And a scar, after the fact, was a scar.

"We owe our civilization to her willingness to work with us. Even if she's wilful. Even if she's dangerous. There are certain rules that she plays by, yes. And she's hungry, greedy, spiteful. But if you respect her rules, there's no need to burn."

[ground_me]

She couldn't, wouldn't argue with him about the good things that fire had given them. There was no rebuttal to that.

But the ground shivered under her fingertips as she realized there was only one question she could ask and it was one that either he wouldn't have an answer to...

Or one she didn't want an answer to.

"What rule," she asked, almost inaudibly, "did I break then, to have deserved to wake up in the middle of a firestorm?"

[up_in_smoke]

"We broke nature's rules entirely, waking up at all," Dover murmured, fiddling now with the cuffs of his shirt. They were fascinating, really. "All of this. The stones. Our rebirths. Fire follows the rules of nature, Cuttie. But there's nothing about any of us at all that even begins to."

A little bit of his Catholic upbringing was peering in around the edges. He tamped it back and shook his head, eyes turned down. There were some shades of guilt that had no place in a conversation like this at all.

"When we came back, there was no common footing at all. Just stones, channelling a fire that fuels itself on whatever power it can take from the well inside of us. Just by being, we broke the rules. Now it's a matter of bending them so that they work for you and the flame, instead."

[ground_me]

"I don't know if I can," she said honestly, still not looking anywhere at him. "Bend the rules, I mean. I'm no good at that sort of thing."

She petted the ground with absent fingers. No, his answer wasn't one she liked.

It could have been worse, though Allison wasn't sure how.

[up_in_smoke]

"Sure you are, Cuttie," Dover countered, his tone a little more gentle than a moment before. "That's what we are, isn't it? Bent rules all over."

They weren't dead. That on its own seemed like proof enough to him.

"How would you feel if I said, next time we meet, I'd like to see if we can work with that geomancy of yours instead of the flames?"

[ground_me]

Her fingers froze on the ground and she twisted her lips into something that was too flat to be a smile.

"Might go better," she said, glancing at him. "Unless that goes out of control too."

[up_in_smoke]

"Well, I'll have a bit of a time tryin' to reign that one in. But your comfort level's bloody near half the battle. Unless you've got some sort of past history with rock slides that you figure I ought to know about?"

He was only partly teasing.

[ground_me]

"No," Allison said, amused despite herself. "No rock slide traumas."

Her shoulders slumped, from a combination of exhaustion and failure induced ennui. "Sorry," she added, "for making this difficult your first time teaching."

[up_in_smoke]

"Aye right?" Dover scoffed, shaking his head a little as he reached for his bag. Instead of pulling out more candles? Those sandwiches he'd threatened to pull out earlier. He'd save the soup. It looked like she'd about had her fill of fire for one day. "Believe it or not, I came into this expecting far worse. What, we had to get you a drink? Not a single brushfire to be had."

And no first-aid necessary. He wasn't going to out and say that he'd been mostly expecting that, too.

[ground_me]

Allison would deeply appreciate that, if she thought of it.

"You're just trying to make me feel better," she said and thought that, maybe, it was working a little bit. "If this was a test, I would have failed it miserably."

Which... yes.