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“What does it mean?” Lio asks.
It’s quiet, finally, all the flames put out and the families returned home and the city calmed under a blanket of darkness, and when Lio caught his fingers on the curve of Galo’s wrist and refused to let go Galo let him, let him follow to the firefighters’ barracks and collapse face-first on his bed, still unmade from weeks or lifetimes ago. Nobody gave them so much as a second glance. Which Galo resents, almost—wants to get up in someone’s face and scream, this is Lio Fotia, he rode a volcano and nearly died and came back and psychically bonded with fire aliens and saved the fucking world and if he wants to stay with me I’m gonna let him—almost. Almost, because Galo saved the world too, and that shit’s exhausting, and he collapsed face-first onto the bed a few seconds after Lio, face hitting Lio’s shoulder, nose tangling in Lio’s thick hair.
Which brings them to here, now. The city quieted. Galo lying back on the bed, one hand up behind his head, the other rubbing light circles into Lio’s back where he’s curled up against Galo’s side. Lio is warm—lingering from the Promare or lingering anger or this is just his natural state, a furnace of emotions and strength. Galo isn’t sure, but it makes him want to prove himself somehow. Prove that he can do this, the soft and the quiet, the rubbing circles, along with the yelling and the saving the world.
“What does what mean?” he asks.
“Putting the fires out with your burning soul,” Lio replies. “It’s—it’s a stupid catchphrase. How would something that burns stop fires?”
“It sounds cool!” Galo nearly sits up—breaks his rhythm—then settles. Cool off. Shift from drawing circles to drawing triangles, there you go.
“So what, because it sounds cool it will counteract the heat?” Lio replies.
“Yes! I mean—no. It’s not a fuckin’ pun.”
Lio laughs, a little, at that—a quiet laugh, an exhale with a bit too much weight, muffled by the sheet like he’s trying to hide it. It makes Galo want to float clean off the bed.
“Okay, so what is it, then?”
What is it, my burning soul? The first time Galo fought a fire, he was fifteen—was out running past the library when an attack hit, flames leaping orange and purple, and he was just a stupid kid with no armor or weapons but he ran in, grabbed an extinguisher from the wall and started yelling. It was like stepping into the sun. No—like running full-speed into it, like throwing down the gauntlet with trillions of tons of raging nuclear fission and screaming hey, pick on someone your own size. It was like diving into the earth’s core or staring at Kray Foresight, a flaming specter, more ego than man, or a man left in the microwave for thirty years—staring at him and saying, you’re wrong. We can save them all.
You can’t fight fire with fire. Except that you can: it’s all in the definitions. There is fire like magma, all-consuming cannibal giant, spinning through the city and tearing the buildings up by their roots and snatching the people from their beds and throwing them into its maw head-first. And then there is fire like starlight, like the Promare, like Lio Fotia. Soldering fire, shimmering fire. Lio gave Galo a tiny yellow flame, said give this oxygen, give this love, keep it safe, and it will look after you. Sometimes Galo thinks his whole body is just a fire—peel back the skin or force him to open wide enough at the dentist, and you’ll see a light like a campsite through a tunnel, lungs and heart and stomach all lit up in orange. This is why he likes to scream, when he fights—well, he likes to be loud, yeah, but mostly it’s this—inviting the fire out, saying come and play, saying give them a smile and a wink and maybe they’ll realize our team has the superior names.
It’s all in the definitions: if you call this fire and I call this fire, then what’s to stop us from combining them, modulating, holding the flames up to a glass prism and splitting the white into rainbow. Turn the radio up and scream, give it some oxygen, come and play, let’s save the world together. We can save them all.
Galo tries to explain all of this to Lio, but he doesn’t quite have the language or the mental fortitude, too tired to stay with one metaphor for long enough to make it stick. He does it in gestures, instead. Gestures and exclamations. My fire is better than his fire, my fire is your fire, and we can combine them. And then he claps. Like a kid trying to describe a particularly action-packed episode of Naruto.
But Lio still gets it. Lio gets it. Lio shifts, turns from his side to his stomach and lies flat against Galo: Lio’s left shoulder against Galo’s right shoulder, Lio’s chin against Galo’s collarbone, Lio’s feet kicking at Galo’s knees. And he really is shorter, isn’t he—Galo could pick him up in one even swoop, this angry incredible genius who saved the world, and someday soon he will.
Someday soon he will. But for now, he is quieted—cooled, like lying on his back on the now-no-longer-frozen lake. Lio reaches up and presses a kiss to his jaw, his check, the corner of his mouth. They’re butterfly kisses, barely landing, skimming the surface. Galo wonders, almost idly, if he really did die back there in the ship’s core and this is his personal warrior’s heaven.
“You are the most ridiculous person I’ve ever met,” Lio says, pulling back to fold his arms across Galo’s chest and peer down. His hair brushes Galo’s neck. Ridiculous, he said, but the word has echoes, Galo can hear them. Ridiculous, brave, big-hearted.
Galo grins, and pulls Lio down—for a real kiss, this time. A kiss that’s something like fire combining, teeth and tongues and galaxies spinning just out of reach.
“I’m ridiculous,” Galo echoes, after. “But it’s what you like about me.”
Lio snorts—the air echoes across Galo’s chest—and then shifts again, rests his head over Galo’s heart. Tomorrow, there will be more rebuilding to do. Fires to start and put out and start again. But for now, for now, there is just this. Two hearts, beating in the darkness. Two burning souls.