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Tango is burning.
Sets of icy hands wrestle him away from the rafters, fingers long and cold and worn against his skin, prying the iron bucket from his palms and sluicing its contents over the flames, when Tango is too weak to do anything but stand and watch the destruction and shiver.
The ranch is burning.
Jimmy’s screams are barely audible over the roar of the flames and the guttural yelps of the sheep and cows trapped in the barn, wool and hair catching alight with the ease of a match. They will clear out the bones later, if there is anything left from the corpses after the fire has stripped them limb from limb, swallowing up the fatty marrow with flames like needle-sharp claws.
The sky is black with smoke. Tango can’t see, blinded by the red mist of his fury and the tingle in his veins that tells him it is not over, and will not be for a while.
A tree explodes behind him, scorching his back with a shockwave of scalding heat and white-hot splinters. Jimmy is still screaming, the high screech of his goat horn begging for help from a land that does not seem to care.
The ranch is gone; Tango knew that from the start. Fire in the attic leads to the walls blackening and collapsing from the inside, revealing the haggard, charred skeleton of any internal support. Fire on the fields. Smoke and ash in the air, suffocating his lungs, pouring into his throat and his blood and filling him, like a glass vial, toe to head with the deepest, most potent rage.
Fire in his brain, in his eyes. In his soul.
Scar will pay most dearly for what he has done.
Tango watches, huddled against the crumbling cobble walls, Etho’s woollen blanket hitched around his shoulders as he shivers and sweats, as Joel clambers to the roof and throws another bucket of river water over the flames. He throws the empty pail to Etho, who vaults the wall to reach the freshwater spring that supplied the ranch, iron meeting icy groundwater with a hiss that sends clouds of steam billowing into the skies, mingling with the ever-present black smoke. Etho staggers back, four buckets in his hands; soon they are distributed and flung over the still hungry, feverish flames.
I want to help, Tango cries, but even he knows that the burns on his wrists from the scalding handle of a metal too long in the fire will persist beyond respawn. Even now, phantom welts crackle across his body from where Jimmy throws himself into the fire, the ghosts of flaming splinters peppering his shoulders.
Tango flinches.
His shoulders are trembling, hitching up, down, crushing his neck into his chest.
It takes him too long to realise that he is crying.
How long will it take before every salvageable plank is swallowed? When will the pain take too much toll, and the simplest solution is to let it all burn?
Jimmy stumbles from the door of the barn, white flames lighting his silhouette and casting him in a heavy shadow, darker than the smudges of soot cast upon his face. He cradles a leggy, wriggling thing in his arms — a calf, Tango realises within a heartbeat.
“Here you go,” Jimmy pants. Tango instinctively opens the blanket to warm the poor thing, rubbing life and warmth back into its trembling limbs with a force in his hands that is distinctly separate from his own, fragile soul.
He only needs to look back at Jimmy to see the gashes and weals on his face, the welts and the blisters on his hands, to know that he is staring at a reflection of himself. A cut pangs above his cheekbone; Jimmy’s right eye is swollen shut and weeping.
Still, he picks up his buckets and runs back into the inferno. Tango’s thighs throb white-hot with energy spent from another body, and he sighs, and he pulls the blanket tighter around the little calf.
“You’ll be alright,” he mumbles, through the aching in his chest and the thrum of his heartbeat, “Just hold on for me, okay?”
The calf bleats at him, blinking dark eyelashes sticky with soot and coagulating blood. Tango wraps it closer to his chest, next to his own heart, boiling from Jimmy’s exertion.
Then—
A white-hot bolt of pain severs his knee, sharper than a sword and plunging straight into the deep, fragile nerve endings shielded by his patella, blindingly agonising and enough to force a sob from his throat, rubbed raw and excruciating. If he were standing, every ounce of strength in his muscles would have dissipated, leaving him to collapse on the ground, at the mercy of the flames—
Sweat prickles at the back of Tango’s neck, trickling down his spine. The heat he can feel is suffocating, a stifling oven, content to roast him in his skin and suck his insides dry of plasma; he coughs on invisible smoke and plunges forward to retch.
Wait—
Horror seeps into his veins, cold and numbing, leaching every drop of feeling from his stiff, blistered fingers because Jimmy—
“Get— GET HIM OUT OF THERE!” Tango screams, bile tracking up his throat, the muscles in his shoulders tensing and quivering like the newborn calf he clutches to his chest. “HE CAN’T MOVE! Get— get—”
He raises the goat horn to his lips and blows, though ends up mostly coughing, hacking up his raw, soot-scarred lungs. He blows again, weaker, barely an echo of its melody.
“ETHO!” he cries, ghostly flames igniting his clothes, clawing into his skin and gnawing at the bone. “Joel— I need—”
Through the blur of his tears, a shape — two shapes — emerge from the ruins of the flaming barn. With a sudden churn in his stomach, Tango sees Jimmy staggering between them, skin scorched red and blistered, pus leaking from swollen weals on his cheeks.
Tango stumbles to his feet. “You’re— you’re here,” he sobs, tears freely streaming down his face, carving clear channels through the soot there, “You’re here, and you’re—”
He sinks to his knees, chest heaving; Jimmy follows suit and presses a thin hand to Tango’s spine, so they remain on the ruins of the wheat field, cradling each other through oblivion.
“I will make him pay,” seethes Tango, chest rising raggedly as he draws in smoky air through his nose. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes, but he will suffer.”
His shoulder begins to throb, invisible nails digging into the flesh like claws. It takes too long to register that they are his own, morphing from the touch of a friend into the talons of retribution and breaking into Jimmy’s already tender flesh. The red half-moons on his shoulder fade; those on Jimmy’s do not.
I want to break him, Tango snarls. I want to burn the ashes of the dust of everything he has ever loved, and I want to make it hurt.
“Tango—”
The sting in his shoulder only swells.
He will pay.
“Tango, stop, you’re hurting— ”
Two sets of hands drag him away from Jimmy; Tango fumbles at the air and sees his soulmate clutching his collar, massaging the sting of sharpened keratin having bitten into his shoulder.
He promptly twists behind himself and vomits a thin, watery stream of bile into the ploughed farmland.
“Jimmy,” he gasps, voice low and shaking, “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t—”
“You’re only hurting yourself, Tango,” Jimmy says. “Let it go. Scar will pay for this — but in time, in time. We can regroup and rebuild. Better than before.”
Tango’s feet drag him to standing before his mind can catch up; a rush of vertigo swallows him and he clutches his skull, wincing as Jimmy does the same.
“I will make him regret EVERYTHING,” growls Tango.
“Don’t—”
Tango barks out a guttural laugh, wild and raw, fuelled by the last of the soot in his lungs. “Try and stop me.”
He draws the horn from his belt and blows into it a deep, rumbling tune that harks of thunder, scattering the flocks of crows on the opposite river bank. His chest shakes with the dark violence that the power brings, how he feels he could take on the world if it so slighted him.
Not a single soul replies.
That is for the best, Tango thinks, stormy turbulence thrumming through his veins and lending adrenaline to his taut muscles. Fear travels like wildfire. The sky is still black with swirling smoke and the acrid stench of burning hair. He flicks the flints from his inventory and worries them between his fingers; the hunger continues to gnaw at his lungs and heart, thirsty for blood-spattered stone and the ashes of a thing that somebody once loved.
Everything is all so flammable, says the devil perched on his shoulder, pressing its smouldering fingers against his beating jugular.
He could burn it all in a heartbeat.
He could breathe in the caustic smoke, watch the ash flutter from the heavens like snowflakes, feel nothing but the deepest, purest sense of justice boiling through his skin.
The sense of power in his fingertips, it— it entices him, drawing on the dregs of fury resting in his spirit, waiting— just waiting— to be ignited.
“Tango— listen to me! This isn’t you! Come back to me—”
“He must pay,” Tango replies in a voice that is not his own.
Jimmy swallows. Never has he looked smaller, more pitiful, with his soot-stained cheeks and the rags of his canary wings jutting from his shoulder blades. Poignant. The very air anticipates the approaching storm.
“Then— then you gave me no choice.”
Tango has no time to react. A great punch of air slams into his abdomen, knocking the air from his lungs. He collapses to the ground, wheezing; a glance to Jimmy indicates him as similarly incapacitated.
“Again, Joel—” Jimmy chokes.
Tango’s scream for mercy is truncated by another blow to his chest as Joel slams the butt of his axe into Jimmy’s ribs. Pain sparks in his torso as he struggles to gasp in breath after laboured breath. Every movement is agonising for his muscles; Tango hauls himself to his elbows to hear Jimmy crying again, again!
The third hit is no better than the first two. A sharp stab to his stomach has him flinching into himself. A dull blow to the neck sends him sprawling, gritting his teeth against the tides of agony washing through him. His fingers claw into the dirt; his skin is sharp in his agony; blood oozes from his mouth where his teeth break the surface of his tongue, spilling copper over his chin.
His skin is alight. Tango is screaming, tears coursing down his cheeks and into his parted mouth.
“Enough,” he whispers, but Jimmy is deaf to his cries. With a grunt of exhaled air his arms collapse beneath him. His vision swims. Clouds blur into blue skies blur into glistening river water blur into a face, uneven, one eye red and the other darker, dragging him to his feet but he can’t see, he can’t stand, tottering in an endless twisting spiral of limbs and ache and the same blazing fury—
Tango is burning.
The bruises will fade, yellow and blue and green as they blossom on his ribs and hips, and soon pale skin will cover any trace of the violence. Jimmy will pretend that it never happened, stubborn mule as he is.
Tango is burning, and burn he will, until his final red life is torn beating from his chest and vivisected by the needle-like claws of the beings above.
At least then, Jimmy will understand the true burden of this pain — the heart-rending anguish that reaches into your mind, and twists your thoughts, and steeps your vision in red. The old enemy, the knife in your spine, the daggers in smiles of betrayal.
Oh, how the world will burn.