maybe we started this fire [flamevein]

[Cress]

all that we have amassed sits before us, shattered into ash

She doesn’t feel like she’s on fire. She is on fire.

She touches him and she should be burning, by every right, but her healing keeps the heat of his body at bay. To her it is nothing more than a common warmth, crackling from his coat to hers. It is warm but it is not unbearable; perhaps it is her own fire that has superheated her from the inside and perhaps their touch against one another is nothing more than warm. She doesn’t know. She is too confused, too torn up inside to even think of his touch. He’s not even touching her. She’s touching him. Oh, how the thought of touching a man would have frightened her so many years ago!

She still dreams of Demian’s touch. She should stop. Should have stopped long ago.

Unlike him, Cress was not born into her flames; they were thrust upon her and she has been forced to accept them, lest she fights too hard and they burn her away. He speaks of the fire being as much a part of her as it is a part of him, and though she wants to shrink away in fear, she forces herself to stand tall, moving just far enough away that her lips are no longer touching his burning skin.

She would be a liar if she said that she has never dreamt of turning her flames upon another horse—there are more than a few out there that she would like to brand with her flames—but she has never actually been compelled to harm them. Feel the fire, he encourages her, and she forces herself to relax. It is almost instantaneous—the fire roars inside of her, but it is merging with her being, becoming her. The flames rage inside of her chest and throat but instead of being afraid of them she feels as if they are, for once, part of her.

She hasn’t truly relaxed since the whole ordeal. Maybe, maybe, maybe (she should strike this word entirely from her vocabulary) she just didn’t want to lose herself in the fire.

“Burn me,” he practically begs her, and she can feel herself craving the release as much as he is craving being awash in flames. “Flamevein,” she says in a strangled voice that is nearly a moan, fire licking at her lips as it threatens to overflow and engulf him. I need this, she reminds herself and takes another step back, eyes roaming over his superheated body.

She cannot hold herself back any longer. The flames erupt from her as if from a volcano, streaming over the stallion’s black body. She cannot hurt him—he is a harmless target, a mere piece for her to practice and hone her ability on. She is on fire but he is fire and it is like a small flame being drawn towards the mighty wildfire. She cannot even hope to have an effect on him for she is just a fraction of what he is, of what he has been since his very birth. He is fire.

When her breath runs out, so do her flames. The ground and shrubbery around them are smoldering softly in the background, but Cress only has eyes for Flamevein. “Is that what it feels like?” she asks, her voice clearing as her healing flickers into autopilot. “For you? All the time?”

For a brief moment, she had almost felt powerful. Unstoppable.

cress

oxytocin x kindling