#the bare hint of marelliana snuck into this LMAO

[dreaming-of-the-end]

lessons in fire, lessons in hate: Marella

A/N: this has been sitting in my drafts for too long. Comments/reblogs are better than the satisfaction that comes with being right!

Summary: Marella was fourteen when she began to hate fire.

What happened was this: she woke up engulfed in it.

TW: self hate, fire, swearing, tell me if I should add more!

Taglist: @steppingonshatteredglass @real-smooth @sunset-telepath   @stardustanddaffodils @jaxtheoraliestanner  @song-tam @turquoise-skyyyy @skycourthouse @silveredviolets @wu-marcy  @b-blurryyfacee  @rune-and-rising @lavender-and-rainy-days @chasteliac @confusedamphibian @hellomyfriends @cadence-talle @kai-i-guess @callas-starkflower-stew @a-harmless-poison @professionalwhalewatcher @theogony @keeper-of-the-jew-jew @gay-otlc  @confuzzled-fox @almostfullnerd  @athenswrites @synonymroll648

Marella was nine when she learned to fear fire.

The lesson was this: fire burns, and so do you.

Simple enough when everything in her life was so complicated. Complicated like when you take a step too far and feel your body start falling; complicated like how lemon juice squirts in your eye when you try to make lemonade; complicated like watching your mom cry from the staircase when she doesn't know you're looking.

So this was a simple rule.

Fire burns, and you will with it.

(unless...)

She learned to fear it, scribbling down the lesson in her mind, taking notes on what not to do and what to do. She learned so well that it was written into her very being. DNA is unchangeable? Well, she changed it to be afraid of fire, like everyone told her to, because every else didn't really have to learn to hate it.

Lack of self-preservation was a shitty side effect of being unique.

Yes, she memorized, watching her father's lips move as he taught his lessons and rules. Yes, fire is bad.

(...unless you're smart enough to avoid it. unless you're quick enough to run. unless you know not to love it, not to like it, not to look at it like that, Marella stop looking at it like that—)

...

Marella was eleven when she decided to fear fire.

She'd learned her lesson two years ago (about how things are complicated, and fire is simple), but never once had she believed it.

Rules were hard, and not following them was easy. Rules were hard, like when you shake out your clothes after a night on the floor because your mother isn't there to tell you to pick them up, like when you give up on lemonade and sprinkle sugar directly on the lemons wedges and eat them like that to savor the puckering sweetness, like when the girls at school make fun of you for having messy hair and messy braids and a messy life.

Rules were hard, especially the ones about fire and how she had to stay away.

She'd learned to follow the easy rules: show up to class, don't talk to the Vackers (especially the youngest), help your mother on her hard days (even if she couldn't quite adjust to letting her mother help her), and don't complain.

The last one was the hardest. But she learned well.

But this was worse than that. This wasn't a rule, this was a fact: fire is bad, and so is anyone who can use it, anyone who loves it, (anyone who looks at it like that Marella please stop looking at it like that—)

So, she decided, it was time to fear it.

First, she lit a match. Then, she set her favorite shirt on fire.

It burned faster than she'd expected. There was more smoke than she'd planned for, fanned into her face and making her eyes water, swallowed with the gulp of air she tried to take, sending her into a coughing fit. By the time she remembered to pour water on it, it had already spread to her carpet, growing until she drowned it with her ready bucket.

More smoke went up. She coughed. The fire went out. The smoke drifted out the window lazily, turning the pure sky briefly gray.

Her shirt (pink, with sparkles around the edges) was crumbled to ashes. A portion of her carpet (blue, fluffy, with a pattern of scattered purple petals) was blackened with fire.

Marella sat down in the middle of her ruined carpet and let her tears clear the smoke from her eyes. She waited for the smell in her room to go back to normal. Then she shoved the ruined remains of her favorite shirt into a bag and threw it away, cleaned her floor as well as she could with the water and towels from her bathroom, cut away the burned part of her carpet, and went downstairs like nothing happened.

Another thing she learned that day was that fire was hungry. It spread faster than water could reach it.

That was the day she decided to fear fire.

...

Marella was fourteen when she began to hate fire.

What happened was this: she woke up engulfed in it.

That was the simple answer, the easy answer. The complicated, the hard, the dangerous answer took longer to say. It's the danger of not looking before you leap, the danger of tilting your face to the sky and staring straight at the sun as long as you dare, the danger of taking a breath and another and another and smelling smoke instead of air. The danger of fire.

So the answer was dangerous, and it was that Marella imagined herself crumbling into dust like the shirt she'd burned. She imagined the carpet catching (she had a new one now, one that didn't have a big section at the ends cut away) and spreading to her parents and the rest of her house without her bucket of water there to stop it. She would be ash. She would be burned. She would be—

Warm.

She was so warm.

The only thing she could do was roll around her room to put out her fire, and scream. Scream from the pain that didn't exist, scream at the top of her lungs, the ones that weren't giving out from the smoke.

Something thudded, and then she was choking, losing her air, clutching at her throat, burning and dying and she couldn't breathe—

Air flooded her lungs and tears flooded her eyes as she gulped down air, knees stinging on her ruined carpet.

Her clothes were steaming.

"Marella—" Arms encircled her, flinched back. "Marella, you're burning hot. Boiling. Are you all right?"

"Does it look like I'm all right?" she forced out, a tear dripping down her cheek. She tried to wipe it away, but it had already evaporated. Her skin didn't feel hot to her. Her throat was the only part of her still on fire.

Her dad's face appeared in front of her, creased. "Look around you."

She did.

Her room was ruined. Blackened, charred, smoky. Her bedsheets, her closet, her carpet. The door to her bathroom had blackened, but was far enough away to be fine. Everything on her desk was in ashes. She would have to think of new excuses for her half-finished homework.

Heat swirled around her.

She could feel it in the air, in her very blood. It wanted her to touch it, wanted her to let it spill from her hands, to dance and twirl around her destroyed room with her. Hungry, hungry, hungry.

"Where did the fire come from?" Marella asked dully, staring at her hands.

Durand brushed a finger down her cheek, wiping away a tear. He winced like she'd burned him. Maybe she did. "I don't know."

But he did.

He did know.

And so did she.

"Your mother called a Regent when we realized there was a fire, Mare. They're coming now." Durand placed a hand on her knee, protected by a layer of still-hot pajama pants. They were an old pair, sparkly and pink from when she liked that sort of thing. His eyes searched hers, matching blue finding each other in the remnants of smoke. "They're coming here."

She sucked in a quick breath, choked, coughed. "Can you get rid of the smoke?"

"I took away your fire's air to put it out. I could blow away the smoke, but they're still coming here. It wouldn't dissipate in time."

Your fire, he said. Yours.

The doorbell rang from the end of a tunnel. "Where's Mom?"

"Waiting," he answered softly. Waiting for you to be safe. Waiting for the Regents to arrive. Waiting, waiting, waiting for it to be okay.

Marella stood on shaky legs. Durand stood with her.

The Regent had dark, deep eyes, like staring into an ocean. Dark skin, curls flopping around her head. Her ears were curved, but angled ever so slightly in a way that showed her age.

"What was the issue?" she was saying as Marella got close enough to hear.

"A fire," Caprise said, her voice strong. So this was a good day. Not a dangerous one. Not a hard one. Not a complicated one.

"Was it an accident?" This one knew who Caprise was. Knew what she was.

Was it an accident?

Marella started forward, but Durand placed a hand on her shoulder. "Yes."

"Of course. Where did it occur?"

Caprise looked at Durand, at Marella, her windblown hair, her unmarked skin. Her mouth tightened. "I set it. It was an accident, but it's out now."

Marella's eyes widened.

"How did you set it?" The woman wasn't surprised. Marella decided then and there that she hated her.

"During one of my moods." Caprise emphasized the last word too much, widening her eyes, making her bottom lip move when it shouldn't have.

Crazy Caprise. Where's your mom? Why isn't she here, Marella? Big talk from someone with a crazy mother, Redek. Why don't you let us come over to your house anymore? My dad says your mom is dangerous to be around. He says I can't sleep over unless she's not there. She might hurt me because she doesn't know what she's doing.

The woman nodded.

That was when Marella began to hate fire.

...

Marella is sixteen, and she doesn't know how she ended up here.

Here: hating herself like this.

Of course, she can trace every step that got her to this point.

She knows that Caprise falling off that balcony wasn't at fault any more than the person who pushed her. She knows that Sophie Foster didn't make Stina bully her after their friendship tore apart, and she didn't make Marella ostracize herself and hate every girl for being who she couldn't. She knows that Forkle didn't make her a pyrokinetic and Fintan isn't the reason she's dangerous and it isn't Biana's fault that she's too fucking beautiful.

Making everyone else at fault was an accident, and accidents happen all the time.

Accidents that she can count. Accidents like her mother's tumble, like Stina tripping her in the hall, like forgetting to flatten her uncombed hair before class or setting another fire or Gisela getting away for the millionth time or Keefe getting taken because Marella convinced Linh to take him underground.

If she burns the world down, it won't be an accident. It'll be the kind of burn that comes when lemon juice gets into a cut, when the sugar you tried to add turns out to be salt, when you aren't trying to catch yourself anymore because you fall down the stairs and land running, when you hear your mom crying and leave the house so you don't have to remember that you can't help anymore.

(she's crying because of you. because she found your plans to burn the world down. why'd you leave them out like that?)

She counts everything in her life, so why not mistakes? Why not dreams that never came true? Why not faults and blames, fires and flames, burned plans and lemons squeezed dry and flamed to charred bits of fragrant peel?

Fintan tells her that she shouldn't hate the fire erupting from her skin, that he doesn't hate his power even after everyone he's killed.

She can see it in him. How unafraid he is of himself, how proud he is of her power. Sometimes, she doesn't know if his satisfaction is in her or in the power constantly simmering in her veins.

"Don't be afraid of it, Marella!" he shouts constantly at her whenever they train. "Don't be angry! Fear and anger, this is how you lose control, of the fire and of yourself."

But fear and anger are all she has ever known. Fire burns, and she has to be ready to burn with it—

"It's everywhere!" she screams back, something in her voice breaking. The smoke is making her eyes tear up, and she's too afraid of crying to keep going. She puts out the flame with a twist of her wrists and falls to her knees on the ground, clothes steaming. She wishes Linh were here. "It's everywhere. All the fucking time. It's all over me."

"That's your burden. And your gift." Fintan's anger is clear in his voice. She's failed again. No fake pride today. "Start feeling the sun instead of wishing it was night."

"The sun shouldn't feel like fire ants when I use it." Her nails dig into the skin on her arms. "I can't forget it. I can't ignore it. I can't use it. Fintan, it hurts so bad. It hurts so bad."

"If you can't ignore it, then stop trying to. You are not afraid of your gift, you are not afraid of me." He's stone-cold like she's not on fire. "What are you afraid of?"

Her tears steam up as they fall. "Everything."