Work Text:
And so the presence of the Ignition washes away the scars; the sins . Restarts things anew on blank canvas to be marred again, scraped reminders of failure.
Galo watches as Meis idly reports his scars - where they had been in former years before he'd Burned into brilliance, becoming the orange-red star in their constellation. It’s not Galo’s intense blue-white or Gueira’s yellow, singing the Burning Revolution’s anthem in the crackle of eye-searing infernos.
Before the Ignition - the Rebirth, the birth of a new phoenix - Meis had numerous scars. The only past clinging to Galo’s skin is the scar that burned there when his flare-up had gone bottlenecked and wrong - resisting his truth. Of course, why would a firefighter want to be the thing they sought to extinguish, and so Galo had bottled it up; ignoring the volcanic ash in his mouth, prelude to the inevitable explosion of Mt. Galo.
Of course, that all changed - having been rescued by Patrol that had been cruising the neighbourhood for what routes they should avoid - mark off as escape for the Flame-less to flee down. There was always a small flaw that left the Innocent from the fires of biting revolution - burning down those that opposed the Burning. He had been cradled by Gueira in his larger armour, hand dwarfing his body as panic had rendered him into a quiet strength.
It is odd though - to see the clean slate of skin, marble-statue pristine. The small nicks and tell-tales of childhood magic-erasered away. A strange reset led on by the Fire that demands prayer, sacrifice and rebirth in the ash as they burn, Ouroboros within a phoenix fire. Some Burnish subsist on nothing but the blaze until their last ember faded to cold coals and flakes of ash, smearing their history on nothing resolute, every scrap of organic and inorganic returned to the Earth in the purest way.
It is easy to tell who has the closest scrapes from the amount of scars - those who have been fighting their hardest since their Ignition, the first Flares, the brilliance of their pyre ignited. They all end in ash, and Galo knows that. He’s lucky - he has escaped capture of the Foresight Foundation, but as a former trainee… He doubts that there would be any spared mercy for him.- Foresight’s poster boy that the fucker has paraded for years, so graciously set him up to be one of the next pawns in his genocide of the Burning. It left slick bile gripping to his tongue - sour and harsh.
Lurking thoughts get pushed aside as Galo tunes back into Meis’s solid droning voice - the fire between them bringing images from Meis’s own memories, of the foolish injuries from careless mistakes. A thin whiplash from broken wire strings across his forearms that get the flashes of pain across Galo’s own arms ( phantom but whispered through the strange burning bond between the Conflagration ) - scars on his hands from encounters of the feline kind and foolish mistakes of a mortal against a god.
A scar on his knee that stayed put into an awkward late teenage-hood that had been received from a nasty fall from too high a climb in a rickety tree that was a reminder that it could have been worse for Meis. For a moment at that, the memory had Galo’s breath rushing from between his lips. The dark haired man simply smirked at that with only a small murmured apology.
Now his skin is marred by jagged cuts along his arm - of the Foundation’s doing. The one time before, a lucky escape -- he knows the story, flashes of Meis’s side - of medical drug induced trances, too out of it to even use the most instinctual of flame. If he could. The scars on his wrists from healed frostbite -- jagged lines that tell a story sick and greasy. The matching patches on his ankles and feet.
It’s how Meis met Gueira. A bust that had gotten few precious lives out, actions that had devastated the early numbers of Mad Burnish as Gueira took over.
Galo stares into the fire crackling between them as Meis’s words, both spoken and not, fall silent. The rumbling of his own collection, absorbed into the blaze to spill out secrets to those he deems close enough to, guarded secrets. Meis has his walls that Galo cannot pick apart, even if he is one of the most intune that they have met.
He’s brought up, the dark silhouette in Galo’s memories, cast in pink and hotter flames of only Burnish origin. Something has never set quite clearly with Galo, and now with the shattered rose glasses upon his nose, something feels closer to the surface, glinting silver below sunlit scattered upon broken seafoam as Galo grasps at the truth. The fire in front of them flares forth.
“Dude, I need you to stop that.” Gueira’s voice breaks through, shattering the illusion that had taken over him. “You’re goin’ that thousand mile stare again. You good?” He sits down, sniffing as he rubs the back of his index roughly to scratch an itch before staring at the crackle of the bonfire. “I’m taking that all as a no .”
“Ya.” Galo stretched before hunching back over, tugging at his shirt. His head is already spinning from thoughts that betrayed him, crackling for the other two to pick apart, and Gueira had already sobered up. “Did you just get back?”
Galo doesn’t need to specify what he meant, and the hollow look that overtakes Gueira - eyes sunken in by the horrors of medical battlefields. How far he must have fought these last days to get any sort of progress, hidden behind rowdy burns. The amount that has licked at obsidian palms should have padded out Gueira, sustaining him, but it appears that what horrors have taken what life the fire has restored.
“I don’t know if this settlement will last much longer.” Gueira glanced at the small shack that held a group of twenty, not including the three of them. “ We need to keep moving anyway. Hopefully the Quench won’t get us soon.”
Galo sighed, remembering the Burn they had planned in Promepolis coming up - it would be a riot, a fiery fiesta - their greatest yet. It would be an attack on some of the Foundation’s anti-Burnish labs, testing drugs that suppressed the urge to burn - the call to renewing life for the Burnish and bringing them to early Ashing.
He took a deep breath, reaching out to stick his hand in the fire to poke at the logs, eyelids heavy as he dragged a log through the coals to better aerate the bonfire. The Burn is only days away, after all.