Disclaimer: If I owned these guys, paying for college would be no big deal. Bobby's postcard belongs to Mr. Brian Blauser. Agnihotri are Hindu priests linked to the cult of the fire deva Agni.
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: Written for gritkitty as part of the X-Men Movieverse Ficathon. Many many thanks to Vagabond Sal and Beth/CG for the driveby beta jobs.
I.
He was walking to the village when the sorcerer found him at last. Both were in disguise, and each pretended not to know the other, but they were merely animals with bared teeth, circling before one decided to dive in for the fight.
"Where are you going, my boy?" the sorcerer asked, his face kindly. He sat leaning against a large boulder that lay by the side of the road.
"I am going to the place of my birth," the youth replied. "It is where my mother is buried, and where I will remain until I go. I choose to stay here and I will not be swayed."
"Is it a long way to this churchyard, my boy?" the sorcerer asked, the light gleaming off his teeth.
"It is a long way to the churchyard, but I will walk it all the same." The youth thought himself brave, for he had seen many things and many places in the world. The sorcerer stood up. He wore a long cape over his shoulders, and carried no walking stick.
"I will go with you," he announced. "I too have business at the churchyard. We will walk together, and we might converse. It is good to talk."
The youth stood his ground. "I am sorry, but I must go alone."
"I'm afraid you have no choice in the matter," said the sorcerer, and threw off his disguise. The youth had tricks of his own, however, and changed himself into a firebird. He rose up in the sky, but the sorcerer's face darkened and he conjured a great eagle, made of iron and swift as fury. The firebird wheeled and dodged, shrieking, but the eagle caught him in his claws and began flying away from the road into town. One by one, the firebird shed his magnificent red feathers, and they dotted the countryside, where they scorched the brown earth and left ash footprints on the ground. The sorcerer changed the firebird back into a boy, and imprisoned him in a keep past the edge of the world, where not even Baba Yaga dares peer.
"I have friends who are waiting for me in the town," the youth insisted. "They will know that I did not come, and will look for me."
The sorcerer had a wife who looked after him. Her eyes curved and her mouth twisted. "No one will come." When she left, the youth wept amber tears. They dropped to the floor and scattered, in color green and brown and yellow, like flame.
Bobby Drake held two things, one tightly and one loosely, in his hands. The first was a postcard, No Rest for the Wicker printed at the bottom of a black-and-white photograph showing a long line of people snaking through a field in front of a set of wicker furniture. He had both sides memorized. The back had a twenty-three cent stamp (greenish, white profile of Washington, ponytail and all), slapped crookedly into the box in the upper right-hand corner; it had a postmark stamped half into the message on the left side, dated five days before today from Parkersburg, West Virginia. The letters were scrawled (typical), slanting up. The pen had died a few words in, and the note changed color.
Bobby Fett, it ran, come collect your bounty. This left just enough room for the address of a diner in White Plains, and a small, thin notch of empty space burned into the bottom, near the line that halved the postcard. The post office had pasted a white sticker with a black and orange bar code over this.
He had more letters spread over the foot of his bed. An hour before, he'd taken a bundle out of his drawer, slipped the rubber band off and arranged the one-way correspondence in fans by date. Some of them were pages long; most were on hotel stationary, and the address on the header did not always match the postmark. The oldest was mailed sixteen months ago, from Silesia, Montana. It was the longest.
His other hand held a misshapen lump of glass, vaguely resembling a foot. There had been a trail of them in the ash near the compound site the X-Men found outside of Corpus Christi, Texas. There they also found bone shards, charred like ancient Chinese oracles; these were half-immersed in a pool of melted sand stretching fifty feet towards each horizon, scorched flies trapped in strange amber. Bobby had pried this up from the ground and examined it, not sweating in his black leather uniform under the March sun. No one said a word when he brought it aboard the jet and cradled it all the way back to New York. He'd unearthed some of John's old shoes, still cluttering the closet because Bobby could not bear to get rid of them, broken and smelly as they were. The glass foot matched: size eleven.
The letters were their secret, still. He'd thought on several occasions that maybe he ought to tell somebody -- Scott or Marie or Professor Xavier himself -- but he held back without knowing why. He knew John was in danger, but then, living the life that he did, John was always in danger. ("And so are you," Pyro muttered, his breath hot on Bobby's neck; "when you've seen them say we're a disease and we should take death at their hands on our knees because it’s God's will, like I have."
"That's when you show them there's nothing to fear," he insisted, trying to reason with him.
The vision shook its head. "No, that's when you show them what God's wrath looks like, so that next time, they stay in line." (That chilled him.)
Bobby set the glass foot-shaped blob on his mattress and laid the postcard neatly at the end of his arc of letters. He was good with keeping quiet, and with being patient. "Fat load of good that'll do," John snorted, somewhere, and crossed his arms. Bobby's brow creased.
"What do I do?" he said aloud.
"Bobby? Is that you?"
Jean Grey's voice squeezed through the crack beneath the door, and he froze. He glanced desperately at the damning evidence spread across his comforter, and then swallowed. "Come in."
II.
He struggled as they lashed him down to the slab of hard stone. He screamed and he writhed and he cursed them, calling out god-names to come to his aid and testify to his worth. "You have no right to do this to me!" he raged. The woman smirked, and knelt close. Her features wavered, and the fire god saw his own face, the lips stitched together with fishing line. He jumped, but did not cry out, and this seemed to amuse her more as she stepped away, wearing her own visage.
"Because of you, your brother is dead," said the All-Father, and in his voice was no pity. "You have eluded me enough. I will do it right this time." The tip of his staff glowed without heat, casting deep shadows about the cavern.
"What sort of reason is that?" he exclaimed. "Is your hand entirely bloodless?"
"You would bring the great end to us," he replied coldly. "Left to your own devices, you would aid our enemies and ruin all our works."
The god gaped, and then laughed; the sound echoed through the hollow, but the binder and the woman did not flinch. "You fear the future you cannot oversee," sneered the prisoner.
"That is my function, to lead. I have sacrificed and suffered much for the visions I harbor."
"You do it because you love to revile those who pity you."
The All-Father raised his hand. "You, my boy, are finished speaking." The woman circled the withered tree, a bowl in her hands. A snake emerged from a jagged fissure in the wood, and wound its way over the branches until it hovered over the prisoner. It was white, no color for such a creature. "This serpent keeps a fire in its bite even you cannot combat, once it takes root in your flesh." The woman offered up the bowl: the snake lunged for it, and sank its teeth into the thick wooden rim. One of the All-Father's two ravens alighted on his shoulder, and he smiled. "I will not soon forget you, or your services. For you did some deeds for me and made chaos in the world, as I intended."
He bent his neck, and the woman stroked the serpent with two fingers. The fire-god watched the movement of her arm and the color of her eyes, and the snake seemed to have found a sister, transformed somehow into the shape of a person. The serpent released the bowl, and flowed closer through the dimness. She stepped back to the All-Father's side. His face held some measure of true regret. "It was a mistake for me to use you. After all, to what else can a fire be trusted other than that it will eventually go out? For that I do hope I can make amends." The god’s eyes stretched to their widest as the fangs shone against the All-Father’s staff. The reflection brightened, and then a drop of liquid quivered at the point of the snake’s tooth.
He lost sight of the grim man and the woman. In the dark, he whimpered, once, and struggled weakly against his bonds. The moment passed: the liquid began to drip.
The nurse with thick ankles thought of them as the Nice Couple. She was a pale young thing, with stark blonde hair cut sharp across her jawline; she was a mousy-looking girl with faraway eyes behind her tortoiseshell glasses. (Not your average Nielson family, but this was Oregon, where that sort of thing didn't bother so much.) The patient was the brunette's younger brother: he'd come in already catatonic four or five weeks before. She always wrung her hands as they stood at the foot of his bed, and the blonde would wrap her fingers about her wrist and press them against the cool iron frame until they were stilled. They visited almost every day, and the thick-ankled nurse, normally an unsentimental person, found herself strangely touched watching them.
"Our parents are gone," she'd told her the first few times they came in. "He's got no one to look after him but us, and this horrible accident -- I can't believe he'd be so stupid --"
"Don't upset yourself," the blonde would say, her accent crisp as New England snow.
The full story of how he came to be in a coma was never made clear -- something about smoke inhalation, although the nurse spent many an evening trying to concur with the diagnosis when she couldn't sleep at night. This was what was on her mind as she made her way toward the supply room. She passed the blonde in the enclave housing the vending machines; her arms were crossed, and she paced. Her girlfriend was nowhere to be seen. The nurse forgot this as soon as she walked by, and a few turns later, arrived in the small, chilly room, more a medicine cabinet than anything else. One of the new male nurses was there, stocking IV drips by patient. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. "Have some more for Room 423?"
The intern was a big, handsome boy, who looked better suited to a football field than a special care unit. He gave her a broad smile and handed her a bag. The nurse, although she was almost forty and married to a foreman with the logging company, tried to make small talk with him. He was polite, and insisted on returning to his station. She shrugged her shoulders a little, told herself not to expect anything in any case, and thanked him, walking off.
She found the blonde stroking the patient's forehead when she came back into the room. "Brenna just went to the ladies' room," she said as the nurse walked in.
"Oh, no worries, I'm just here to replace the drip." She set about her work efficiently, her hands long-practiced in the art. As the liquid began to seep through the tube into the boy's bloodstream, the nurse glanced over at him. The girl's eyes were half-closed as she ran the pad of her thumb over his temple. He seemed to jerk beneath her touch -- but no, the thick-ankled nurse reminded herself; our patients don’t do that. She made a show of checking the bag one last time, and then left the blonde with the boy. She passed the brunette on her way out of the toilet, and Brenna offered a shy smile as they passed each other. The nurse found herself thinking that she and the new male nurse would make a lovely couple -- something about their smiles; but the thought was fleeting and she moved on down the hall as the fluorescent lights flickered.
III.
The sea was beautiful today, and he said as much to the eagle when she came to him in the morning. The curve of the earth was visible from this high up on the cliff, and the rising sun glinted on the horizon, sickle-like. "I saw some whales last night," he told her as she settled on his shoulder. "They were playing, I think -- it was like one of those airbrushed t-shirts they sell in malls and card stores, you know? It made me think about Herman Melville, and how I lied about reading most of Moby-Dick. Not that it would have come in handy, but you know. Regrets."
The eagle smiled and nuzzled his jaw. "Eat," she said tenderly, and dipped her head into a sack looped around one foot. She emerged with a hunk of dried meat, and he opened his mouth to receive it. He chewed thoroughly, and when he swallowed, she had another piece ready. He took his time, and she did not share the meal.
"I'm so thirsty," he said, working to somehow wash down the taste of the meat. Her great golden eyes watched him as she held the last bit, waiting for him. He licked his lips and laughed, and looked out at the sea again. "Is it their intention to let me enjoy a little before you start again? Is that to help me or to hurt me?" The eagle made no reply: she bobbed her head forward insistently, and he took the last of it from her beak.
The sun was high enough so that it burned his eyes to look into it. He shied away from its glare and tried to bury his face in his other shoulder. The eagle hopped off and flapped down to his waist, where she clung to his belt and anchored herself by the talons. His bare stomach quivered as she examined it: no messy scar tissue to be found.
"Eat," she said, more to herself, and smiled again. It was all she ever said. And she did.
Jean awoke sometimes with the taste of silt in her throat. Even she had no control over her dreams, though she wrestled with them often enough. Tonight, she was naked again, and wreathed in fire. Our master is hidden, it whispered, in a voice like burning paper.
"The Professor?" she asked, both arms crossed over her chest.
No, the fire answered. Another. One who is known to you. A helicopter flew overhead, and when her eyes opened, her neck was craned and the pillow had bunched up under her nape. Next to her, Scott mumbled and buried his face into the crook of his elbow. Discomfited, Jean settled back into her warm spot and tried to fall asleep again.
Half an hour later, she sat up and massaged her temple. After a few moments' pause, she slipped her bathrobe on and left the bedroom. Her slippered feet led her into the basement, and Cerebra's doors opened for her with unhesitating obedience. The great machine was like star-gazing for her: follow the patterns people's minds laid out and you found a constellation. Far to the west in the great sphere, a light pulsed. Jean let it guide her; she followed its trail until she landed in a field of snow.
She was a red fox -- this was a true thing, and after walking for some time, found a white fox sitting primly atop a rise, licking one paw. "Do you know," she said lazily, "the Japanese believed once that when the fire god was born, he burned up his mother as he came out and his father, in anger, chopped him into three pieces, and that is why there are volcanoes."
Jean was puzzled to hear this, but she accepted it, and nodded politely. "I didn't."
The white fox looked up from grooming herself: she had very blue eyes. "They so rarely come to good ends."
"Excuse me?"
"Fire gods. They always have to make trouble of one sort or another. The bigger gods don't like them very much, but it's their place in the pantheon, isn't it.”
All the while telling herself that foxes don't have expressive lips, Jean smiled and shook her head. "I’'m afraid I don't understand."
The white fox tilted her head cannily. "You probably will, soon enough."
Jean took a step forward. "What god, what are you talking about?" The snow melted, too fast, and she yelped as--
The cave was dark, though there seemed to be enough ambient light to give a sense of her surroundings. A husk of a tree cowered above a slab of rock, across which were laid lengths of snapped cords. "You followed me." The fox's voice hadn't changed, although when Jean followed the source of the noise with her eyes, she saw a dragon sprawled across a ledge overhead, vaguely luminescent. Her scales shone diamond-like whenever she breathed.
"You made me curious," she replied, and settled back on her hind legs. A heat churned in her gullet, but she bit it back with a smile.
"Hmph." The white dragon tossed her head and let her tail dangle oh so slightly over the ledge. "He's not here anymore, in case you haven't noticed."
She nodded on her long neck. "Who? What does he mean to me?"
The other dragon rolled her shoulders. The curve of her beak was perfectly formed, and all the crueler for it. "I could show you. A picture's worth a thousand words, isn't it? And I do hate mincing." She didn't wait for an answer. The colors in the room flared into the surreal, and Jean saw that it was made not of rock but of fire, made solid somehow. The stone table was no longer empty, and a man-shape flickered there, bound and screaming. He arched his back, and his eyes shot open. His pupils were black as wick. The illusion vanished before she could catch her breath.
"Where do you have him?"
"Oh, that would spoil the fun, wouldn't it. I haven't had a good run like this in ages. You have no idea how hard it is to find a decent mind to spar with. I'm glad you answered my challenge, though. I've been waiting for you to catch it. I've heard things about you."
The white dragon had blue irises, like Bobby. Jean reared and spread her wings. "Where--"
She stood on a cliff, her bare human feet crushing stalks of fennel. Her back was to the sea. The sudden vertigo of the shift left her dizzy, and she had to clutch her head for a moment to keep herself from falling down. A blonde woman shaded her eyes against the sun and surveyed the view. "There. Much less claustrophobic than that other place. Wouldn't you say that's a small mercy of ours?" She wore white, though that clothing probably only stayed on by sheer force of will rather than any design element.
Jean squinted, and had to laugh a little. "Who are you, Albino Spice?"
"Hardly." She lowered her hand. "The White Queen will do. I feel it's important that my enemies know my name before we face off."
"Who says we're enemies?" she tried. "I just want to find John. Tell me where he is and no one has to come to any harm."
"We are enemies," the blonde said smugly, "because we are diametrically opposed. Your team fights to keep us normal among all the rest of them. Mine fights to put us where we should be -- at the top."
Jean arranged her feet. "Are you with Magneto? Is that who did this to him?"
"My being with Erik is more for the opportunity to stretch my wings than having been 'recruited,' if that’s what you're asking. I needed practice, he needed a telepath. It's convenience, that's all."
She felt herself losing patience. "You have no right--"
"Funny, that’s what he said too. And yet he knew what he was getting into when he carried out our arsons and our assassinations."
Jean gritted her teeth. "He belongs with us."
The woman chuckled. "He belongs with whomever he chooses, and that is most decidedly not you and yours. What are you fighting to save, anyway? He's no good to you anymore. Those morals you tried so hard to instill are shot."
"It's not for me, it's for someone else. Someone who loves him."
"Really? How novel."
"Why are you doing this to him?"
"You said that already. Because I can, I suppose. After all, what's an imagination if you don't exercise it?" She took Jean's silence for shock, and smirked again. "Well, Dowdy Spice, let's do this the old-fashioned way. I’m a girl of tradition at heart. We'll duel."
Jean blinked. "Excuse me?"
The blonde grinned. "Oh yes, you heard me. Isn't that what we've been doing all along, the test of three shapes? Come on, one more and then we'll walk away."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-three," she answered with all the appropriate confidence, "but don't let that fool you."
"Oh, I won't," Jean murmured. "The White Queen," she said, louder. "That’s not your name. Tell me who you are."
She folded her arms, the twist of her lips cross and growing bored. "I don't have to tell you. Why don't you find out for yourself?"
"I don't like to pry. It's called respecting the privacy of others."
"Such a doctor you are," she sneered.
"And what--"
The blonde turned away. With hardly a glance backward, she took a running leap off the cliff and disappeared. A moment later, a huge white eagle shot skyward, wheeling against the cloudless blue vault. Jean followed her with her eyes, marveling: all things aside, she knew a thing or two about beauty, if little else.
The eagle soared until she was nearly out of sight. A distant screech drifted down on the wind, and then Jean saw her begin to plummet, claws outstretched. "Oh please," she murmured to herself, and spread her own wings. The smell of burning fennel filled her nostrils as she rose to meet her.
IV.
A thousand and one nights, perhaps, since he'd been free to walk beneath the sun. In his brass confine, he languished with what he remembered, and the promises he would make if he ever escaped. He tried to count his blessings. At least it is quiet. At least I am unharmed.
It’s boring, he retorted. I have done and want to do too much with my life to settle for this. He thought of the sand and the ocean and the sky, of jest and movement and companions. He was too restless by half for this non-life.
"And what's this?"
A voice -- a woman's voice, engulfing him from above and without. He threw himself against the curved walls of his chamber and lifted his hands in supplication. "O kind lady, a magician put me here against my will after I angered him by a deed I did. Now he has hidden me away with a curse, and you are the first to find me. Listen to my tale: to anyone who lifts the curse, I will give gifts and grant wishes. I will find you a magic carpet, so that you may fly over the earth and see the jeweled cities men have built from above. I will show you the secret ways through enchanted gardens, paths that head to ancient treasures and hidden wells that will answer any question if you but toss in a pebble from a vanished river. I will fill --"
Her laughter cut him off. "I have no use for any of that, o voice within the lamp. None of it interests me, for I am already gifted with many things. Tell me, though, what are you, who speaks so within my ear?"
He ran his palms over the beaten metal. "I am of the djinn, kind lady, made like man in the shape of God but with fire in our veins rather than blood. A lowly little ifrit is all, who thought he could make his way unaided in the world." He wondered what his voice sounded like from outside the walls.
"I see. And tell me, how is it you angered this great magician? What did you do to make him treat you so?"
"This magician had a son, faster than the caliph's finest horses, speedier than the wind that sucks the dust into the heavens and quicker than the sharpest scimitar in the hands of the palace guard. He had been sent out after me, when I fled the magician and sought my freedom on foot. I did not want to be his servant anymore, you see. I did not want to act only on his behalf for all my days. His son ran a race with me, far out in the desert. He thought he was faster and could outwit a flame, but it was not so." He paused, recalling the boy's screams. "In my defense, I was provoked."
"Aren't you always," murmured the woman, to herself. And to him: "I see. And how is it this curse may be lifted from your head?"
"That I cannot tell you." He dropped his forehead against the cold brass. "It is hidden from me, and beyond my power besides. I am here forever, or until the magician sees fit to set me free. I do not see that happening, though, and my wait will be a long one."
The woman was silent for a moment. "Listen to me, little ifrit. I too have known the crush of prison walls. I lived in a tomb of water, far from the face of the sun. It was cold and heavy and dark, and I raged to rise always. Little ifrit, I will let you out, but you must trust me and follow my voice. Do you feel the heat from my hands?"
"Yes," he whispered, hope warming his heart for the first time in many months. "Kind lady--!"
"Quiet, and stop calling me that," she said. "Let me draw you out."
He knew two things as he woke up: first, that he was airborne, and second, that he was stretched out on a cot, wrapped in a fleece blanket. His mouth was dry when he opened it. "This is the Blackbird," he rasped, and opened his eyes.
Dr. Grey was sitting beside him, smiling. "More or less," she replied, and laid a hand on his arm. "Good to have you back."
He coughed, and managed a small laugh. "Back to where, exactly? You taking me to jail?"
"We're taking you to Westchester. To the mansion. We're over Nebraska right now, I think."
"South Dakota," Scott called from the cockpit. "We just passed over Mount Rushmore." Someone else twisted backward in the co-pilot seat and peered at them. It was that blue freak from Alkali Lake, whose name John couldn't remember. He smiled encouragingly and turned back again, his tail dangling over the side of the chair.
John was silent for a minute, staring at his covered feet. "I can't believe you're not really dead," he said at last. "Christ."
Dr. Grey's smile stretched a little more. "I get that a lot."
He glanced wearily at her. "I heard you can set yourself on fire now."
She settled back in her seat. "After a fashion."
John sighed. "I still can't make it. I tried and tried but I guess it just isn't in me. Give me one little spark to work with and I can do anything I want, but I can't start anything on my own. Magneto said that was 'clearly indicative of my place in the hierarchy as a follower,' that it was in my blood to take orders and not give them." He coughed again, more violently. "Can I have some water?"
Dr. Grey summoned a bottle of Poland Springs and twisted off the lid in midair for him. He gulped greedily, draining most of the bottle without taking a breath. Finally, he sat back and the movement of his chest evened out. "How'd you find me? After all this time, how come you tracked me down now?"
"Your captor ran into me in a dream. Poor, silly girl. Once she realized I knew you, she tried to fight me for you."
"Whore Frost," he spat. "I hope that bitch rots in hell."
Dr. Grey furrowed her brow. "Who?"
"Emma Frost. That's her name. She and Mystique, they were the ones who--" He shot upright, too quickly. "What about Mystique? Did you get her too?"
She shook her head. "She got away. We tried. Kurt almost had her, but..."
"She pulled the mommy card, didn't she." Dr. Grey nodded, and stole a glance toward the cockpit. The tail had been curled into the weirdo's lap, and the chair was still. John curled his lip, and glared off to the side. "She's a slippery bitch. I think she really gets off on that whole 'right hand of evil' thing." He looked back at Dr. Grey. "But Emma, huh? You really got her good, sounds like."
"She was hurting you, John."
"No, I'm not angry! It was pretty cool, actually, to wake up and see her spazzing all over the floor like that."
"John, that's not--"
"Oh, piss off and let me be amoral, damn you." He scowled. "Anyway, I was glad to see her go. I mean, if I had to be even half-awake for anything, I'm glad it was that."
Dr. Grey dropped her eyes. "Why did they do this to you?"
"Didn't I already tell you that?" He looked away again. "'A god among insects,' that's what he said to me when he reeled me in. He taught me a lot of things about being a god. Not quite immortal, but with infinite potential. He thought so much. I've never met a guy with a mind like his. And yet, on the flip side, being a god means that you have all the more capacity to suffer."
"With great power comes great responsibility?" she prompted, hoping more than she knew she should.
"More like, with great power comes more to exploit."
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and clasping her hands in earnest. "You're not a god, John. You're a person, a human being, just like me, just like Xavier, and just like Bobby."
He arched one eyebrow at her. "Do you want to tell me, after all I've seen and done, that I'm really fuzzy-wuzzy normal and capable of living just like everybody else? Shit, how normal are you? Come up from the bottom of a fucking lake, you mean to tell me that’s because you're just like the rest of them?" Scott made an angry sound from the pilot's seat, but the blue guy hushed him.
She didn't appear offended. "Good to have you back, John. You were talking pretty funny back there in that hospital bed."
"Yeah, well, I'm suggestible, what can I say." Neither of them spoke for what felt like several hundred miles. John looked out the window at the clouds rolling by. "You want to know why I left him, if he was so great. Isn't that right?"
"You're the one who liked to write. Isn't it a logical question?"
"Yeah. Pretty damn Agatha Christie, to reveal it all to the cast at the end." He patted at the spot where the pockets to his pants would be, and his lips thinned. "He was holding me back." Dr. Grey drew back, oh so slightly. He smiled without humor into his chest. "Yeah, now you're so proud of who you rescued?"
V.
In the Rig-Veda, told for millennia in the Indus Valley, the fire god is counted the second most powerful in the pantheon. They speak of him in very grand terms: destroyer of darkness, he who drives away demons, master and eater of sacrifice. He is also the animator, the keeper and giver of life, omnipresent in all that breathes and dreams and loves something. The bull is his, and the sun also. And yet he lives among men, and acts as messenger for them and for gods. The artists paint him with two faces, and many fiery arms.
At that moment, the fire-god was walking with his boon companion, a being of stillness. "Sentimental dipshit," he said, laughing. "You should have destroyed them all."
"Don't be an asshole, I had to keep them. You know how much blackmail those are worth?" His friend touched his arm. "Seriously, though, some of the things you said -- how much did you mean them?"
"I wrote them down, didn't I?" He looked off into the garden. "Well, times were boring, I had a lot of thinking I could do. At first it was a thrill, sure -- I mean, hell, it's in my blood, isn't it? But you can only burn down so many houses and so many factories and embassies before you start to feel like maybe you're missing out on something.
"It hit me pretty suddenly, that I was only a tool to him. He was shaping me like there was an anvil beneath my head. He only saw one thing in the fire, destruction. He didn't get it."
His friend frowned. "Get what?" he prompted.
The fire-being stopped walking. "It's not just about tearing things down and making them disappear. Fire adds to the world, shapes it, shapes things, events, people. It's more complex than something that just eliminates. He couldn't see that -- it wasn't useful to him. So, in the end, I left for the same reason I left this place. It was just one side of the story."
It was there in the garden that the being of stillness saw many phantom arms on his friend, one side raging for devastation, and the other forming wondrous shapes in the air; and it was at that moment he knew that he was not a god, if only by virtue of the fact that he could not and would not be reduced to a single element in nature.
The End