Oneshot Collection

lessons in fire, lessons in hate: Marella

TW: fire, self hate, swearing

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.