• Cold Fire


    When he sleeps, he dreams of fire. And heat. Always heat. Boiling, blistering, licking close, and drinking down all the oxygen until the air is so thin and dry that he can't breathe. He is always trapped in these dreams, a strap cutting diagonally across his chest, holding him upside down.

    Glass cracks.

    Paint blisters.

    The body beside him begins to burn, long hair igniting.

    He thinks, This is hell. And then he wakes up.

    ~


    They call it a phobia.

    He isn’t convinced.

    They tell him he suffers from post traumatic stress, that he’ll adjust, adapt, and they give him drugs to help because they don’t really believe it.

    He doesn’t either.

    But he takes their drugs because they stop the dreams and make him feel just a little better, and yet they don’t ever drown the fire in his mind. There, always, he is burning, but through the haze of medication he just doesn’t care.

    He likes not caring.

    It makes things easier.

    Then the drugs aren’t enough.

    They call it tolerance, and they increase the dosage. A simple solution for a simple problem. Or so they think.

    He takes more than he should because he’s tired of the heat and the roar of fire in his ears.

    Now they call it addiction.

    The fire burns hotter without the drugs, and he falls into self-obsession. He knows these people—parents, doctors—he knows they want to help him.

    But, honestly?

    He just doesn’t care.

    It’s a different kind of not caring than before. A sort of bitter, acidic aftertaste that he doesn’t particularly enjoy but can’t help. The fire has burned away that part of himself, he thinks, and he blames them. All these horrible people. Their fake sympathy. Their token kindness. Their oh so sage advice.

    They make him sick and he hates them.

    He wants them to burn like he burns, to writhe in the heat until there is nothing left but ashes and charred bits of bone.

    But then he always regrets such thoughts. He wishes hatred weren't such a close companion of fire. He wishes it weren’t the emotion that comes the most easily to him, like a haze of smoke filling his soul.

    He wishes he were a better person.

    And he wishes more than anything else that the dreams would end, that the fire in his mind would burn itself to embers.

    The doctors, the parents—none of them know what to do.

    He is miserable and furious, and hatred burns in his eyes like a wildfire. They want to put it out, but they’re not sure how, especially in the dry, arid streets of the desert where the sun shines with a stifling, burning heat even after it has set.

    So they take him north.

    Here winter comes early and with a vengeance. Perhaps they think the change of scenery will help, that it will ease the raw burns of his mind. Or maybe their hope is this: that the snow and ice will drown the fire in his eyes and leave him content and docile.

    Either way their intent fails.

    The dreams still come, and he suffers in his own personal hell, burning anyone who gets too close, heat and hatred his most intimate, despised companions. He suspects that by the time this is over, there will be nothing left of him, and he despairs. When he dies, the fire will follow, and hell will be all he knows.

    He does not expect salvation.

    That would mean hope, and in his head there is no room for hope. There is only fire and fear and the heat of hatred. Sometimes he doesn’t believe there was ever anything else, that ice and snow were things he dreamed up to try to drown the fire.

    Then he meets the girl, and she is a sudden shock of cold.

    She is alien and unfamiliar. Frost coats her lips and freezes her eyes hard. Angry. Bitterness underlines her every word, practically drips from them, and her smile curves like the sharp edge of a knife.

    He loves her.

    He wants the cold, the ice that surrounds her, fills her, and he discovers he is the only one who can get close to that ice, his fire too eternally hot to let him be frozen by her winter storm fury.

    And when she touches him, she is not burned, and the raging fire in his mind dies just a little.

    There is only warmth in their melding.

    No longer is there the burning heat of the desert or the tundra’s aching cold, but a paradise, and for the first time in a long while he nearly forgets the fire. He is safe and warm and happy.

    It’s been so long since he was happy.

    He basks in the emotion now, absorbing the warmth and burning only when he sleeps, when memories of hell pay him a visit.

    But warmth is a fragile thing, and the girl is too cold in the end.

    Her soul is coated with a shield of frost that doesn’t melt in the presence of his heat. She doesn’t even want it to—she’s been burned before, scalded raw, and she’s promised herself never again.

    Never again.

    She fears the fire in his mind nearly as much as he does, and when her cold doesn’t freeze it out, she begins to draw away, putting distance between herself and the boiling, blistering heat.

    He pretends not to notice. He’s too afraid to admit that she’s leaving him, but the nights don’t let him forget, and as he burns, he weeps.

    It hurts him now to look at her, to meet her gaze and see the frost in her eyes, so cold that it has become a different kind of burn. Her smile is cutting, and her words trail like ice down his spine. Things like hypothermia and frostbite cross his mind like chilling whispered nightmares.

    The fire roars higher.

    It doesn’t take her long to withdraw completely, and once again he is alone, the fire raging through him, burning him, destroying him, and he is lost in it.

    But all he feels is cold.