Burned

The VIP Welcome

He got in last, a bit of a trust exercise for the rest of his team. Little would anyone else know that he specifically waited, just to make the new comers uncomfortable. He knew that they hadn't been warned about his deformities, even if they were doing a good job at attempting to hide it. He casually made eye contact with a few carefully chosen individuals. One of them actually yelped.

By the time he ducked into the car, he was resisting the urge to laugh. People who somehow managed to make eye contact with someone who looked like he did always regret it. The poor fools never knew that they were being watched, not just by him, but by those he trusted, his team. They would know if any of them even tried to do anything to him. Not that he wouldn't see them first, but he was human, and sometimes missed things.

They thought the pale, jagged marks that covered his face, twisting and creating indentations that would never fully heal, were bad. They would have been horrified if they saw how he had looked when his skin was scabbing and flaking. That had been disgusting.

The scars, though, were more of a nuisance than something he despised. He had been quite the looker as a teenager, in his opinion. He had been confident, in both his looks, and his place in life. His hair was slightly waved, like shinning copper, and he worked hard to build a muscular frame from the time he was young.

It was the only thing he ever allowed himself to do that was for his own health, back when he was still at home with the kids. He woke up early, several hours before his siblings needed to be up for school, worked out until his muscles burned, woke the second oldest brother, so that someone would be awake while he went for a quick run. Then, of course, he would wake up the other school age children, help them get ready, make them breakfast, and lunch, before sending them out the door. The youngest one, the two-year-old, spent the day learning to read, playing games, helping him clean up, and growing too quickly.

He missed those days, and sometimes, when he rubbed at the scars on his face and hands, he could still feel the embers exploding and his skin burning to protect the younger one in his arm from being hurt. He had been hurt badly, but the children had managed to get away with little to no exposure to the flames.

Now, he was still strongly built, but the red in his hair had lost its shimmer when it wasn't hidden under the heaviness of dye, while almost always being too short for his curls to be obvious. Most people would have hidden their scars, but he had gotten his protecting his siblings. In his mind, hating the scars was the same thing as hating that he saved his siblings lives. They had survived, and even if he was now scarred, he wouldn't change anything about that night.

He didn't bother looking for a seat belt, and neither did any of his team. They were trained to react in an instant, and thus, he didn't see the need for them. Well, that, and being poisoned, stabbed, shot, and tortured took the fear out of car accidents away. He noticed that the officials were trying hard not to look at him especially, but they were avoiding his team as well. It was irritating but expected.

Proper military, after all, they were not. They weren't soldiers by anymore than rank. That said, he had expected an introduction, at least, but they hadn't said anything.

He knew that he wasn't the only one feeling particularly smug at the thought of being too advanced for their simple minds to understand. After all, they, compared to the Burned Agents, were nothing more than children. But, he didn't need an introduction to tell that only two of the four men in the car waiting for them in the car were ex military. Army probably.

They were ramrod straight and had even polished their shoes. Kazz himself could still smell it. Well, shoe polish and the cologne on one of the other three men that were too strong. The other two, likely, were recruited right out of college, or maybe high school, to some part of a government agency. The CIA, if he had to guess. They thought they were the main protectors of the states, and in a way, they were, but that was only because the Burned Program didn't usually touch US soil.