Chapter Text
Edwin hates the way the heavy cuffs feel against his wrists. Oppressive, draining, and above all else cold.
He hates feeling cold.
The transport rocks, the train car going over historic tracks. They can’t take him on planes anymore, not after last time, and cars are already prone enough to overheating without Edwin’s help. So,the Lost and Found Department drug him up with the strongest sedatives they can afford, wrap him in power dampeners,and have four guards who switch out watching him.
The sedatives are great, usually, Edwin can’t sleep without external help like that so it’s always a bit of a novel experience to wake up from something after so long. The bad part is that the sedatives are only just enough to keep him down for about an hour. Only enough time for them to secure him, their most powerful asset, for the train to just begin to move.
It’s a long, slow journey where Edwin is cold.
He can’t try to get warm, either. He shouldn’t. He actively knows he has to fight against the instinct. The stagnant air of the train cabin bites against cheeks that are covered by both a blindfold and a muzzle. The blindfold helps with temperature regulation in the ambient room, the muzzle helps cool down the breath he exhales. His jacket is thick, insulated, and even now they’ve turned on its freezer function.
Edwin doesn’t even know where they’re sending him, just knows that apparently some villain du-jour’s got some kind of lava golem running around that nobody can handle the heat of.
Nobody but him.
So, the L&F had gotten paid and shipped him off somewhere in the country to handle a monster, who had been attacking near a school for the past week.
Edwin hears one of his guards whisper to the other that it’s getting too hot in here.
The guard gets told to switch out. Heatstroke is no joke.
The train rocks again, Edwin’s chains rattle, and the room heats up.
Edwin exhales steam, the way it billows out from around his restraints make the guards flinch, heats up the air that bites against his face, his cheeks, his forehead. It’s still too cold. Is it winter? Summer? Edwin doesn’t know; he can’t tell.
It’s just cold.
Brilliantly, wickedly, cold.
He’s starting to shiver now; his body is desperate to warm itself up. The freezer train car that they’re using to contain him has no hope of matching the same chill that the ones in the facility do. He can feel the way his hands flex in their cuffs, trying to bring back the blood in his fingers, another guard has to change out.
“Stop that.” A guard growls, “Stop using your freak ability!”
Edwin doesn’t control his ‘freak ability’. He just wants to be warm. He wants to be able to build up enough heat inside of his chest so that he’s not constantly frozen. He wants to be able to relax, unwinding from the layers and layers of desperate attempts to keep him contained, keep him palpable.
He wants to be safe.
The train continues onwards, rattling down the tracks at top speed. When will they get to where they need to go? Edwin doesn’t know. The less he knows the better the Lost and Found can keep him from running away.
Can’t run very well, when you don’t know where you're running too, after all.
Edwin wants to go back to his bed, in his cold isolation airtight room, tucked under blankets, and reading the newest book they’ve placated him with. He’s in the middle of it, it’s all about the physics of space. Fascinating read.
He’s been absolutely enraptured by the section about space dust, and how it makes zodiacal light, how they find evidence of it landing on earth in the micrometers range. Molecules are sometimes found and explored and researched because they make up so much of the dead space in the outer regions of their own night sky.
Edwin always looked up at the stars, did so when he was still a simple schoolboy, so now he and the lights of the constellations have something in common.
They look to be something big and special, but really they’re nothing, but micrometer sized disgusting grime.
Edwin’s starting to warm up now, he can feel it. His knees; kneeling on a soft pad, are going to go soon, already dissolving into the hell-hot particles that keep him ablaze. As soon as they took him out of his secluded deep freezer, the timer started.
Mrs. Nurse has a pocket watch on her person at all times, and she keeps count religiously.
A guard falls, collapsing this time outside of his own violation. The sound makes Edwin jerk, twisting in an instinct to help- to run- to something.
“Medic!” One of the other four screams. “Medic Evac!”
Two down at once then, a rare treat as one of them takes the time to drag their friend out of the room. Edwin can’t see them, he wonders if they’re okay, really. Even standing as far away as the train car allows, Edwin can smell the sweat in the room, can hear them wipe their foreheads, breathe quicker in their perceived blistering heat.
They can’t wear metal near him, he’d heat it up by accident.
More than one cocky, gunsure soldier had been introduced to him in the facility as a prank. It’s written, in bold, big letters on the door long before Edwin’s resting chamber, that no metal should be near him;buttons and zippers and guns included.
He’s not sure what makes people ignore that last one, maybe it's because the rest of the Lost and Found host things that need to be contained with more force than Edwin himself, maybe it’s just because the rookies who start screaming about their burning hands can’t read.
The train rocks again, slowing down now?
Another guard asks to change out.
“Time to switch trains.” Somebody tells him. “He’s heating up this one too much, it’s warping the car.”
Somebody tells his handlers, then, it’s not like Edwin doesn’t have perfectly functional ears or anything.
“Get up.”
Edwin gets up. He wants to snarl, to fight against the things holding him, the things making him cold, the things that feel like freezer burn on his skin. He wants to rage and to run and to sprint away from it all to finally, finally, be-
Edwin gets led to another, identical freezer car on another train.
It’s cold again.
Edwin breathes deep, the steam billowing around his holds.
❄️ ∘ 🔥
Running through the woods, Charles can feel his heart pounding, thudding hard in his chest; it feels like it’s going to burst. He’s so cold, his fingers are long numb, his hair is soaking wet, dripping ice water down onto his jacket’s collar.
He’s stopped shivering.
He knows that’s not good.
It’s November, the chill in the air has long since turned the leaves brown and the grass dead. There’s no warmth to be found on a new moon night, not here, not when he can still hear the screaming jeers of his friends who are hunting him down for sport.
He’s so cold.
He’s stumbling, fumbling, the woods are dark, darker than they’ve ever been before, and the pain of the bruises that the beating he took earlier isn’t helping him focus.
God, he’s so, so cold.
The irony is hilarious. He’s cold, frozen almost, when the same feeling drove one of his schoolmates to madness recently. It’s doing something to get some kind of true supervillain shit and make the entire school unable to leave St. Hiliaron’s due to the damage. They were calling in professionals, last time Charles had heard anything about it, but that was before he had seen his friends beating on a poor kid-
It doesn’t matter now, does it?
Charles has to get somewhere, he has to avoid the hunters who want him dead. Deader than he already is.
He’s so, so cold.
So why does it begin to burn?
He stumbles into the gym building, on the outer edges of the school’s property. There’s been damage to the outer walls here since Saturday, so it’s been closed off. Charles has to duck under the bright yellow caution tape.
There should be blankets in here. Towels. Anything.
The sounds of his former friends- it’s pretty clear they won’t be accepting back Charles' easy smiles and slightly too dark skin now- come closer, somebody yells to check the gym.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck!
He has to hide, he has to get somewhere safe. Why isn’t anywhere safe? Damn it all, damn it all!
Charles moves; no matter how much it hurts to do so, no matter how much the damage to his sides scream out in pain, how much his lungs are on fire with the effort to keep up his breath. He has to keep moving. He has to get somewhere he can rest, for just a minute.
Charles finds himself climbing the stairs to the upper floors just as the door gets kicked in.
They’re here.
❄️ ∘ 🔥
“Who’s there?”
A voice cracks, scared, small, and weak.
Edwin had thought he had seen, but-
“I shan’t hurt you.”
He needs to leave, he needs to turn away. The air around him shimmers with heat; he’s just starting to get warm, he can’t hurt anybody, he doesn’t want to hurt anybody.
The boy in the attic is wrapped up in blankets, eyes red rimmed and watery from crying. A pile of wet clothing is discarded in front of him, piled in a great heap of wet fabric. Pulled all the way into a corner, tucked away as far as he can be.
There wasn’t meant to be anybody here. There were meant to be people who came through and evacuated everyone out. There wasn’t meant to be anybody here. It was dangerous to be this close to Edwin without protection. It was- Edwin needed to leave. He tries to wrap himself smaller as well, copying the boy in the corner, brings down the flame he’s had burning in the palm of his own hand for light-
The boy gasps at the motion, eyes huge and wet and focused on the fire that dances in Edwin’s palms. “You- You’re one of them government people.” He says, his voice is so, so soft. Nobody’s spoken to Edwin in that tone in years. “You’re here to help, right? Can- Can you help me?”
His lips are almost blue.
Fingertips frozen, nails black from frostbite. The boy isn’t shivering.
He’s dying.
He’s dying, past the point of saving, if the way his pupils don’t react to the light of the fire and the smell of urine in the air are correct.
“Are you cold?” Edwin has to ask, he’s moving forward, even though his mind is screaming at him not to, how everything these past seventy years have told him that he’ll hurt anybody within twenty meters, if left unchecked for longer than a minute.
The boy nods, weakly, gaze unfocused and breathing slowly. “I’m freezing, mate.”
The boy in the attic is dying of the cold, who is Edwin to deny him a few minutes of warmth?
❄️ ∘ 🔥
Charles has never been so, so warm.
The other boy-
“Edwin.”
“I’m Charles. I’d shake your hand but I’m so bloody cold-”
Edwin had walked in with magic. With warmth wrapped around his hands, with a shine at the end of the tunnel to focus on, when it was getting to be so hard to focus at all.
Charles had thought that it was going to be the end, really truly, the end, before Edwin had walked in with a halted, nervous swagger and a flame.
“What’s with the getup then?” Charles asks, wrapping the meager towel he’s found around himself tighter. It’s not providing nearly the same amount of heat that Edwin is. Where Edwin is sitting so close to him, barely an arms length away.
Edwin seems to be waiting for something, something big to happen if the tension in his shoulders are anything. But for now he sits primly, stiffly, across a small space. There’s a fire still held between his open hands. It’s dancing between his wrist and his fingertips and back again, swirling and circling and twisting around.
He’s wearing something similar to the government cops that came by earlier. Some alphabet department that had told the entire grounds they needed to go as far as they could to one side, while they dealt with the fallout of some kind of gas leak.
(Gas leak, they had said, like the entire student body wasn't sharing and showing shaky polaroids of the hulking beast haunting the campus.)
White and gray, a thick winter coat appropriate for the weather, with short white fur around the hood and collar. Right proper, the coat was a historic cut made with modern material. There's a tight white shirt underneath as well, one of those athletic ones. The coat has a logo on it- the same as the ones from the government people from earlier.
L&F
Edwin’s trousers are the same way, some kind of old-timey style with almost a ski-pants type make to them. His socks are simple and blue, a navy, the same shade as the gray, with a white stripe. He’s wearing some kind of hilarious little getup, and Charles wants to know why somebody his age is dressed up like a government goon.
Is he an intern or something?
He can’t be-
“What’s wrong with my ‘getup’?” Edwin asks, looking down at himself, even his voice is posh and old sounding. “I’m wearing the uniform that the Lost and Found department gave me.”
He is.
Charles laughs, the tight ball of shame and worry in his chest is looser now than it’s been the whole year. He’s warmer now than he’s been the entire fall semester, wrapped up in the probably supernatural warmth of the boy beside him. Just his luck to get caught by a Superhero.
A joke, really, most metahumans and the like have been caught and are in use by the armed forces. If you tested for the gene even at all you were put in special schools for it. Less than two percent of the world's population, and cause of nearly ninety percent of the trouble.
Edwin must have gotten tested when he was really young, to be in the Royal Army when he barely looks older than Charles himself. Normally, they don’t test you until you’re eighteen, not unless you're doing something obvious about it. But of the people who have the metagene, who are carriers of the mutant ability, there’s only a very limited number of people who have an activated ability.
Charles gets the feeling, according to all of the people who made it famous, who ‘told their story’, who get interviewed on the TV and radio for ‘being a superhero’, that activating an ability was something that wasn’t for the faint of heart. Or anything of the heart, it was always told as an uplifting kind of thing, of overcoming the awful things that can happen to you.
Charles always sort of read those stories as very, very sad.
But Edwin’s beside him, smiling silly at the sound of Charles' laughter. Legs pulled up, elbows locked around his own knees, the fire from his palm has moved from waltzing on his palms to hoving between them, sparking sands twirling fire like a galaxy of coziness.
Embers like white and teal fireflies dance around Charles, around Edwin, and it feels like heaven.
❄️ ∘ 🔥
“You can’t be serious.” Charles says, the old raggedy towel pushed back to rest against his waist. He’s warm now, happy, chatting with Edwin’s like a hot summer day after a very long, hard winter.
“1913 to 1916.” Edwin repeats again. His face is smug, even without showing it. It's the way his mouth curls into a little smirk, a hint of a dimple against a cheek.
“How?” Charles can’t believe it, there’s no way. “You’re lying.”
Edwin shakes his head, that damn little coy smile still in place. He knows he’s being a little shit. Charles loves him.
“I went to school here in 1913 to 1916.” Edwin’s sparks, his little floating bits of fire show his own happiness more so than any expression ever could. The bits of sparkling blue magic- fire- whatever it was sometimes land on Edwin’s skin, his face, his hands and merge back into him. It’s alive, the fire is, and breathes just as Edwin does. It’s probably Edwin himself, the flame.
Charles wants to feel those sparks land on his own skin, he bets they feel amazing.
Edwin continues, his smug little smile just falters, just a hint, as he explains. “It’s my imperium, it was activated when I was sixteen. Rather lucky, on my part, they tell me-”
The sparks around them, that halo their private, quiet conversation jerk, flicker, kick away for a barest moment.
Charles won’t stand for it.
“That must be awful.” Charles tries, “I’m sorry.”
The embers grow warmer, their flickering blue waning to purple in a slow kaleidoscope blizzard of wonder. They dance; twirling and spinning and landing on Charles’ skin.
Edwin gasps, jerks forward-
Charles laughs, delighted.
Edwin is as warm as Charles thought he’d be.
❄️ ∘ 🔥
The door breaks down.
Both boys jump, jerking to attention, unfolding out from their comfortable curled up positions, seated side by side. Edwin propped up on an old chest reading a novel and Charles leaned up against his shoulder, almost all the way asleep.
(Charles knew it was bad for him to fall asleep, but it had stopped being cold a while ago, had changed from just on the edge of too hot to a perfect sort of air around them. Charles thought he had warmed up enough to slip into a nap-)
Charles shoves Edwin behind him, without thinking. Protecting this precious, warm thing that stumbled into his life so suddenly, without warning. Who’s smile is small and like a coal on a fire, who was reading mystery novels to him, who stayed while Charles was so, so cold.
They brush skin, then palm to palm as Charles uses a hand to grab ahold of his new friend.
Edwin’s hands have calluses on them, the palm, the fingertips, a working set of hands. The lazy blue embers spark up, growing bigger, warmer, hotter-
“He’s here!” One of the guards shouts, immediately backing up from the doorway, a tranquilizer aimed directly at where the two of them sit. “Call the Nurse! We found him!”
“I haven’t been gone long.” Edwin’s floating little embers are coming back to him, receding from the air, where they’re resting on Charles' own skin, “I swear. I-“
Edwin stands, Charles drags himself up on shaky feet right after him. Charles is not about to let his friend stand in front of a mean looking gun, no matter if the side says tranquilizer darts or not. Not if Charles can body block even a bit for him.
“Don’t come any closer!”
Why is the room getting warmer?
Charles doesn’t understand. What’s happening? Why is it happening? Edwin's pulling himself in, those lazy little blue sparks that danced and played around their space are yanked with a vicious sort of fear backwards, back to Edwin.
Edwin’s folding himself smaller; he’s dousing the fire, he’s yanking every bit of his warmth inwards. So, why is the temperature rising?
Charles-
He doesn’t understand?
“The Nurse is on her way.” Somebody is saying from the stairs. How many soldiers are there?! Charles feels panicked. It was so perfect, the moment between him and Edwin in the quiet of the attic. Why did everything get ruined so quickly?
“There’s no need to call her!” Edwin’s voice shakes, “I’ve only been gone for a few minutes! I can’t have been out long nothing here’s caught flame yet, and besides you need to help-“
“You’ve been MIA for over two hours.” The guard informs them both.
Behind Charles, a breathless punched out whimper comes from deep inside of Edwin’s chest. “Impossible.” Whispered low, in awe.
The room gets warmer.
The guard continues to speak. “The Nurse will be here within ten minutes with dampening equipment. Young man, you’re safe now, please, come with us.”
A gloved hand gets held out, reaching towards them both.
No.
Charles steps back, situating himself more squarely in front of where Edwin remains frozen still. The room gets warmer still, is this what the soldiers were worried about? A change in temperature? A silly stupid little heating power?
“Kid.” The guard's voice is gruff, his breath shows in the November winter air. “Kid I need you to get away from 16-P, he’s dangerous, okay?”
“He’s not-“
Edwin’s soft voice cuts off Charles' protest. “Go with them.”
Then, louder. “He needs medical attention.” Edwin says to the room at large. The room that just keeps. Getting. Hotter. “I found him after he had been pushed into a lake. He’s freezing.”
How can Charles be freezing, if it’s this fucking hot?
A bead of sweat drips down Charles’s neck.
“We’ll get him medical attention,” the man in the uniform promises them both. “Kid, I need you to come to me, okay? Step away from subject 16, towards the door.”
Charles doesn’t want to. No. His brain is mush. It’s been frozen and now it seems to be melting. He can only say, softly, nonsensically, “His name isn’t subject sixteen.”
Edwin puts a hand in the small of Charles’s back and pushes him forward.
Charles stumbles, the heat of the room making it hard for him to focus now. Not when Edwin is pulling himself so tightly into a presence so small behind him, flame flickering, dying, smothered under all this oppressive fucking heat.
Charles needs it to get colder. Isn’t it meant to be November? Where was all the chill from earlier, when he was running, when he was pushed into the lake?
The man in the white and gray uniform takes the shot, within an instant, tranquilizer gun up, a thick, heavy dart punches three holes into Edwin’s chest. Three massive, truly huge darts with little stupid white tuffs stick true from Edwin’s center.
Edwin doesn’t flinch.
The air is boiling.
“Edwin!” Charles is screaming, panicking. What’s going on? What is happening? It’s so fucking hot in here he can’t goddam think.
He needs it to be colder.
“Go with them,” Charles is being pushed away by Edwin’s gentle, soft hands. “They’ll help you with the hypothermia.”
Edwin’s eyes flutter, the effect of the tranquilizer taking effect.
Charles doesn’t want to go to them. He wants to stay here with Edwin.
Edwin, who’s already faltering under the effects of whatever drug they’re pumping through his system, must see something in Charles' face, trying to say something more-
But it doesn't matter what he was about to say, because Edwin stumbles not once, but twice.
Right into a heap on the floor, gracelessly, like he was a puppet with its strings cut. Charles tries to catch him, to make the slide a little easier, but before he can begin to catch Edwin’s collapsing form. The guards, in their stupid thick protective gear grab him from behind, Charles is already being forced to move.
The rest of the army swarms in their little safe attic. Trained eyes on where Edwin lays there, limp.
There are no gentle sparks now, no embers fluttering in the air, there’s just Edwin, who’s skin is fucking dissolving into scattered flicks of weak flame.
Charles screams, reaching out, trying to fight the hands that pull him back, away from the collapsed, slim figure of Edwin that’s pooled on the dusty wooden floorboards.
❄️ ∘ 🔥
“Hm.”
The medical tent, these white and gray government workers have set out, is filled to the brim with anxious nurses and doctors. There’s people who are being treated for what looks like pretty severe burns, people who are sobbing while nurses clean up charcoaled skin. It's gruesome and awful, and Charles feels like a whooping idiot sitting with a shock blanket that’s been forced onto his shoulders.
He’s sweating. He can feel it drip down along his spine. Gross. He has already tried to take off the shock blanket twice but each time people start talking to him about paradoxical undressing and to stop messing with it.
He slides the metallic sheet down a little further on his back, just for a little bit of relief against the medical tents boiling temperatures.
“This one must be broken.” The nurse who’s been pulled away from her much more important work is frowning. “I’ll get another one. Be right back.”
She shuffles over to where a gaggle of medical professionals work, her voice the only giveaway of her gender, as most every other person in the tent is wearing thick protective layering, heavy goggles and huge gloves. They look like if firefighters had to scrub up in uniform for a surgery, if it’s this hot in here those getups must be sweltering.
Charles lowers the stupid shock blanket another couple of inches.
“Here, honey, try this one?”
Charles rolls his eyes but compiles, diligently putting the glass mercury thermometer under his tongue. What was wrong with the digital one she has been using earlier, out of batteries?
Even the glass of the thermometer feels like it is burning, turning the rest of it all into ash.
The nurse has turned away, throwing away the digital thermometer into a medical waste bucket. She’s snapping off the big latex gloves that go over the thick protective ones, writing something down in some form.
Charles wants to go back to the dorm, really. Curl up in his blessedly slightly too cold dorm room to get out from the heat, and, he won’t even care if he wakes up all five of his roommates kicking off his sheets.
He’s tired, he’s exhausted, he’s too fucking hot, he wants to figure out where the hell they took Edwin, take him back, and go home.
She comes back, the nurse does, snapping on the special large latex gloves again as she does so.
Charles lets her take the glass thermometer, moving his body forward to slide the shock blanket down another inch or two.
From the briefest flash, there’s not enough red.
And by not enough red, Charles means he didn’t see any red colored mercury in the main tube of the glass thermometer. It was all just bundled up at the very bottom, sitting well below the lowest measurement of 34 degrees.
That’s not good.
The nurse also apparently seems to think so, because a lot of things happen very fast all of a sudden.
“Woah!” The nurse has all her attention on Charles all of sudden; yanking back up the blanket that’s stifling him, calling back behind her shoulder for help, telling people they’ve got some kind of code happening. She’s pulling out equipment Charles doesn’t know, wires and packs and- “Can you tell me your name, honey?”
They’ve already done this, after Charles got pushed into the medical tent by the guards with a rough explanation and rougher treatment. They shoved him inside, it was nice to hear the ice cracking on their gloves. Served them right for being dipshits, not knowing to dry off when it was November. “Charles Rowland. I’m a student here. I’ve already told you this.”
More people come over, plugging wires into each other, trying to put a blood pressure cuff on him-
“Tell us what’s going on.” A gruff woman says, her uniform is different from the others, still that thick, protective layering with the goggles and the mask but she’s got an orange stripe across her heart.
“Severe hypothermia.”
“How severe?” The orange stripe woman asks, critically looking Charles over. Charles pushes the shock blanket back again, sitting straighter under her mean gaze.
“Under any measurement I could read.”
The glass thermometer gets handed over.
“Unrecoverable.” Orange stripe hands it back. “We’re just making him comfortable now-”
“I can hear you.” Charles snipes, irritated, and hot. “If you want to make me comfortable I want you to turn down the heat in here. Or let me leave, actually, and let me see Edwin again before I go.”
This makes orange pause, even while the people around her continue on their attempts to do things to Charles that he doesn’t understand. The stethoscope, the blood pressure cuff, sure, but there's also people shoving searing hot bundles down his white singlet, wrapping him in even more blankets that do nothing but stifle him further, placing sticky tabs with wires on his head.
Orange stripe says something, something that may sound like “You were in contact with subject sixteen?” or maybe something similar, but Charles can’t hear her anymore.
Charles begins to rip at the burning, boiling, horrific feeling of those hot packs that are being pressed against his torso. Finally, ignoring being polite, being nice, ignoring his words at all.
He’s mindless now, the pain is making him crazy, is shredding his higher thoughts and making him mean.
Charles finally, finally, fights back.
One of the hot packs shatters when it smashes against the ground, a couple of the people who are trying to push those branding, searing packs of inferno against his ribs get kicked. The table that he’s been sitting on grows smoothe, strange, but finally blessedly cold.
“Run!” Orange stripe is screaming, pulling people away- people who look to have ice coating their arms. How do they have ice here, if it’s so fucking hot?
They’ve been making him sweat in here when they’ve had access to ice this whole time?
Charles is so, so angry. He feels it bubble up under the surface, he feels the irritation grow into a monster that he’s inherited from a long line of them. Charles wants to scream, wants to break things, wants to hit and kick, and make people feel as miserable as he’s feeling.
Charles lets the anger flow through his veins, to his fingertips, letting the blessed cold it brings with it begin to saturate the air.
Charles doesn't want to hurt anybody.e doesn't follow the screaming gaggle of medical professionals out of their escape paths, isn’t tearing open doors and hunting them down. He doesn’t want to cause the pain that his father has caused him. He allows them to scatter, picking up the hurt members of the Lost and Found and dragging each other away from the hailstorm that Chalres becomes.
So he turns his attention onto the blankets around him instead, the shiny, metallic shock blankets. Turning to ice in his grip, shattering when Charles goes to rip them to shreds. Those heat packs crumble when he stomps on them, the equipment around him becoming brittle, frozen, and easily smashed. Liquid that Charles can’t name freezes, making the bottles brillant to break against the edges of iced over table tops.
Charles breathes in deep the air that has finally, finally lost its heat and eased into a comfortable hum all around him.
❄️ ∘ 🔥
Edwin wakes up and he’s cold.
This is not a new feeling to wake up to.
But this time, he’s not woken up after a mission in his perfectly prepared airtight room, slowly reforming himself into a person again, collecting all his embers, and then, having to record a mission report verbally so that some poor intern can inscribe it later. He’s not even woken up in a transport car, on his way to the next job that the Lost and Found wants him to accomplish.
He’s been weighed down with dampening equipment, thick cuffs on his wrists and ankles, chains that wrap from his neck down to his feet. The fireproof fabric covers him, zipped up tight like a coffin, blindfold in place.
If they’ve kept him in the temporary carrying case that means he’s still on the jobsite. He’ll burn through the fireproof fabric without much effort, he already feels himself working up to a comfortable temperature.
Edwin wishes that Charles is okay.
He wants Charles to be happy and healthy and whole, smiling like he did in that attic and laughing at dumb jokes shared between them. Edwin will get the chance to speak to Mrs. Nurse sooner rather than later. He always likes going over the missions with him, likes to do some minor tests to make sure Edwin’s core temperature is at his steady, constant, hellfire inferno. He likes being able to bring his own heat out, cracking open his core and spilling his inferno into the air, making himself warm-
But the air begins to burn around his skin, he knows he needs to contain it, pull it back, push it down, smother it with his entire self; so that he can interact with the people he can, so that he can still press play on on the audiobooks and the speakers don’t melt. So that he can try to live to the best of his ability.
It’s not long before Edwin’s musings are cut off, shuttered and shelved, when Mrs. Nurse does a polite little cough from wherever they’ve stashed him. “Subject 16-P, please, I would like to talk to you.”
“I’m awake.” Edwin says through the thick iron that rests against his face, his cheeks, his jaw. “What’s my temperature?”
Huffing, Mrs. Nurse responds with her usual dry tone, “When we found you in that attic with the damned boy, or right now?”
Edwin doesn’t bother giving her a response. He breathes deep, even through the restrictions on him. He can’t panic, he’s been taught not to panic. Panicking does nothing. Not for Edwin. He if can’t panic, then he has to move, to run, to sprint, to dissolve into his embers and scatter.
The restraints keep his powers on lock, however. Keeps most of him together and unable to ignite.
“You’re now sitting at approximately 160 degrees, celsius.” Mrs. Nurse begins to list off her numbers. “Which is below your normal operating temperature, but above what we want you at for transportation. We’ll need to ice you down again before we get you back to your room.”
Edwin expected nothing less, but- “They said I was in the room with Charles for two hours.”
A pause, considering, hesitant. “You were.”
“Two hours? Without any dampeners?” Edwin knows how he gets, knows that he’ll power creep up into the combustion limit of nearly anything. He wants to reach his own internal equilibrium, push himself until his body is comfortable, then even hotter, and, to do that he needs to get hot enough that he begins to tick into temperatures that will ignite things all on their own. He should have at least caught Charles’s unprotected clothing on fire.
But he didn’t.
Charles didn’t even seem uncomfortable.
“It took us that long to find you, because the infrared thermal cameras weren’t picking up what we normally would expect from you after an engagement. We were looking for temperatures in the thousands, a white path to follow, and you did leave a trail-”
Mrs. Nurse pauses again. “The trail cooled off enough to reach ambient outdoor temperatures after a certain section, we began to send out teams then, looking in the areas you were last. I continued to monitor the thermal imaging equipment in case you blazed up again.”
‘You knew my temperature when they found me with Charles.”
An accusation. A correct accusation, from the way the silence settles around them like thick, dense guilt.
“You-!” Edwin can’t even believe it. “Of all the dangerous things you’ve made me do over this past year-!”
“You were barely above boiling!”
Edwin snaps his jaw closed, breathing heavy, angry.
“Your temperature when we found you- and we did only notice you on the thermal cameras, not the other damned boy- was only 120 celsius at its peak. At your very core. We hadn’t even thought it was you, just a potential side note to the student experiment we took care of earlier.”
It didn’t make any sense.
So Edwin says so.
“I couldn’t have been that low.” Edwin’s mind is working overtime, he can feel himself heat up at just how fast his thoughts are pumping. “I was unencumbered, and my imperium was working full force to help Charles pass away peacefully. I had- the hypothermia was already too progressed when I found him, I never thought he’d last more than thirty minutes, let alone two hours. I just wanted him to be warm.”
Edwin had wanted him to be warm, so he had brought his own temperature up, and up, and up-
But he didn’t ignite anything.
Edwin had been comfortable, at the very end of it all. Edwin had been warm, happy, curled up closer to Charles than he’s almost ever been to anybody else before. Edwin had chalked it up to, at the time, Charles dying. Charles’s nerves being so shot, that he simply couldn’t feel how the air was probably too warm for any normal human anymore. Charles had almost been asleep, at the very end there, and Edwin would have wanted to run his hand through Charles’s hair, but wouldn’t want to burn it. He would have left then and informed everyone that there was a dead body in the attic, unrelated to the experiment that had gotten loose and rampaged.
Two hours.
“I have an answer for why the damned boy didn’t bake alive with you in that attic.” Mrs. Nurse breaks Edwin of his musing. “I’ll tell you after we clean up a bit, so we can get out of this school. Before we clean up, however, I need you one more time tonight to help us. Think you can crank down the heat for a bit so we can undo the dampeners?”
Edwin sighs, deep, feeling the heats brush against his own skin from his exhale, and begins to pull his embers down tight once again.
❄️ ∘ 🔥
The medical tent is completely iced over.
Edwin stands right outside of it, looking up at the way the thick white and gray canvas has become stiff with a glacial amount of frozen verglas. Even the L&F logo that should be visible big and bright from all sides is muddled and hard to read. There’s frost that’s spreading slowly on the ground, the unnatural chill in the air makes Edwin kick up his own heat just a bit to match.
Edwin can warm himself up no problem, it’s the cooling off he doesn’t enjoy.
The Nurse had explained it, a bit, that the monster du jour had caused a student to activate their imperium.
Well, nowadays nobody calls it an imperium anymore, it was getting out of style even when Edwin was young, but to call it an abnormality or an ability or even a metagene seems wrong still. He likes the way calling it an imperium makes it sound. Like he had some control over it, like he chooses when and where and how things happen.
Edwin tugs off one of his leather gloves, tucking it into his thickly insulated pockets.
He places a hand against the canvas door, the ice begins to melt post haste. Dripping, like a concentrated timelapse of a heat gun against snow.
Edwin cracks the thin veglas that’s left after he cranks up his innate abilities again, walking through the door.
He’s almost at a comfortable temperature now. Edwin glances around at what could be the Ice Queen's throne room in any fairy tale, taking note of the pink and red blooms on the thicker sections of concentrated frost.
It’s beautiful, truly, the way the ice and frost has clawed its way up, around, and over everything. It’s an intricate oil painting in real life. It’s jagged and angry and delicate to the touch. It’s refracting, light catching crystals and dancing prisms of light across undisturbed frozen expanses of desks and medical supplies.
The ice cracks forward, edging into the melted footprints left behind, trying to creep up Edwin’s own shoes.
Edwin smiles, it’s not everyday that ice can touch him so carelessly. He edges open a bit more of his own flame, turning the dial inside of his chest hotter, hotter than he normally could.
But the ice fights back.
Edwin smiles, just a little more, alone in the castle of an Ice King, where the snow continues to build on itself, and throws more coal onto his own fire.
He’s almost, maybe, for the first time in a good long few decades, warm.
It continues on like this for who knows, Edwin keeps fueling his inner inferno and the verglas answers in turn.
Edwin doesn’t think he’s allowed to be this open since the first time Sa’al had injected his serum into Edwin’s veins. He had used the schoolboys he had stolen to try and win the tide of the war at their doorsteps. Edwin had ignited, all consuming, all encompassing, and, burning out his own form into something new and dangerous and strange.
Into something to be feared.
But here the ice, the snow, doesn’t fear him, it continues to reach forward, dancing, sending up flurries of snowflakes each time Edwin searches further.
Who could this be? The student who turned into an ice wall capable of handling, containing even, Edwin’s hellfire?
He hopes it would be-
“Charles?!”
“Edwin!”
Charles stands in the very back corner, curls covered with a frost that just barely touches the tips of the strands. His lips aren’t blue anymore, but a flushed cherry red; eyes wide and brilliant and slick as black ice. He’s not shivering, even in a room full of beautiful, blooming ice. The red and pink circles loop around in concentric patterns around his bare feet, from where he’s sitting on the medical exam table.
The ice is covering up the minor destruction that has been wrought along a pathway that encircles the outer ring of the tent, following the pop up cabinets full of all kinds of treatments for heat exhaustion and burns. It looked like somebody had taken the shame that Edwin carries with him on these missions, the pain that he causes the people around him, and torn it apart. Ripped the gauze from the containers, spilled the slave across the floor, fluids and pain medications and antibiotics all torn apart, and thrown into the center.
Charles’s hands have black fingernails, there’s little cuts across his palms where he’s torn through glass to tear apart the medical tent.
“Edwin!” Charles rushes forward, with every step that strange pink and red ice blooms underneath his heel. “You’re okay!”
Charles throws himself onto Edwin-
Edwin, who’s been gradually superheating himself, bringing himself to a warm, rolling boil, who will burn people even when he’s sedated and covered with a cooling agent. Edwin tries to react, tries to dodge, tries to avoid burning Charles.
Charles wraps his arms around Edwin’s neck, smiling, laughing, “I was worried about what had happened to you!”
They’re so close, they’re too close. Charles is still smiling, still pressing himself close.
Not screaming, not crying out in pain. There is no hissing, there is no burning, there is no pain.
Edwin doesn’t know- he hasn’t hugged anybody in over seventy years.
Charles pulls them tight one more tug, before releasing Edwin to break apart.
Edwin instantly misses it.
He wants another one. He wants Charles to latch back on and hug him again. It was warm, it was brilliantly gentle, it was being handled without the awful padded protection that everyone else prodded him through.
But Charles hands trail from Edwin’s neck to his shoulders, down his arms, holding loose on Edwin’s palms. Fingers curled and thumb brushing against Edwin’s knuckles, Edwin stays very, very still so as to not make Charles release their hands from each other.
“I’m alright.” Edwin feels himself get even warmer under Charles’s gaze. “Are you alright? Charles what happened?”
Charles blinks, as if confused. “I-”
Charles glances around himself, the destruction behind him, the rage that he has wreaked upon the popup medical facility. “I got mad.”
Mad seems to be a bit of an understatement.
“But I didn’t hurt anybody.” Charles promises, swears, grips their hands tight. Eyes dark, wide, and sparkling against the crystalline refracted light of the ice castle around them. Edwin’s thoughts falter at the gentle pressure, at the visual of a god before him. “I was just- it was so hot, Edwin, you have to understand. It was driving me crazy. I was so hot and nobody was listening to me and-”
Charles breathes deep, the ice spreads, a sharp sting of cold pops against Edwin’s knuckles.
Edwin gasps, and for just a moment he loses the tight control on himself.
Unleashes the full extent of himself between them, in the galaxy of space between the knuckles of their hands. Edwin blushes, a deep brilliant red and his inferno burns a brillant blue hellfire.
Because Edwin gets it. He gets it. He knows being cold and being ignored and having his own comfort be pushed aside again and again for the betterment of others and-
Edwin gets it.
He gets it.
Edwin can feel himself falling apart, his carefully constructed facade shattering when hit so perfectly in its weakest point. Unraveling, unspooling, toppling. His inferno blazes hot and sparks up the blue embers of his entire self, burning brighter and brighter and brighter and-
Charles is there, a counterpoint, standing tall against the storm. A point to hang onto, to hold onto, his fingers holding Edwin’s own and keeping him at least somewhat solid. Able to withstand the heat of it all without flinching.
The ice and fire clash against each other, spiraling into millions of possibilities between them, snowflakes of fire, flickers of snow, molten ice freezing up after it oozes out brillant lava.
Then-
Equilibrium.
❄️ ∘ 🔥
The Nurse knew that it was a risk, sending in Subject 16-P to capture the newest metagene anomaly that’s cropped up so suddenly.
The frozen medical tent was hindering their progress, and the treatment of staff. Something needed to be done, and quickly. There was always the option of calling in an outside contractor to help, but that would take time and resources they didn’t have. They could always pull one of the subjects from the Lost and Found, but there was a reason that the Lost and Found didn’t release their subjects unless it was dire, or something very specific was needed.
Subject 16-P had been known to them for a long, long while, one of the first real examples of a modern human metagene expression. Only acquired less than a year ago, after he had fled his last captor and right into their arms.
The Nurse watches the thermal cameras, considering, thinking.
The thermal image was a barren, blue, icy landscape of a black void of hell that had frozen over in startling real time. There had been attempts to breach the frozen medical tent, but each team had to be pulled before they got too far due to dangerous temperatures. Everyone on the team had been trained against heat, to withstand the constant, creeping furnace, that was Subject 16-P, not against the icy snowstorm raging in their fucking medical tent.
The Nurse could have killed Subject 16-P, sending him in there. Could have lowered his temperate enough to truly destabilize him by pitting him against an icy schoolboy. Could have scattered Subject 16-P’s heat into nothing, could have done so many things.
Could have, but didn’t.
(Thank god.)
The thermal infrared cameras show everything, showing a bright ball of white hot human shaped heat trail into the heart of the black void storm. The temperature reading when Subject 16-P woke up was 160 celsius, by the time all the dampening equipment was off and Subject 16-P was headed into the medical tent he was nearing the 180’s.
The canvas of their tents were made to withstand temperatures of up to 450 celsius, a last resort just in case if Subject 16-P ever couldn’t be reasoned with. Not ideal, and the canvas wouldn’t last long under what The Nurse thinks a full assault would look like, but still it always makes her nervous to see Subject 16-P start to boil near the camp.
Subject 16-P’s temperature readings from the infrared cameras climb.
210.
The water in the air around Subject 16-P has all boiled away. Talking with him would be painful.
240.
Regular clothing would start to ignite, exposed hair would too. Skin at these temperatures is drying out, cracking.
250.
Trees would begin to burn now, catch fire just from being near Subject 16-P.
But the fire that burns so bright in the center of Subject 16-P’s core isn’t spreading. It’s holding steady centered around him and only him.
290.
They’re reaching the autoignition temperature of a few hydrocarbons. This is why The Nurse can’t have anything near Subject 16-P that runs on butane, propane, or methane. He’s a hassle, really.
330.
It’s amazing that nothing has caught on fire yet, that there’s still the ambient air temperature below freezing. It’s a fight that Subject 16-P never seems to loose and yet-
390.
Subject 16-P is igniting faster. He’s spinning higher and higher and out of control. The Nurse needs to pull the plug. She needs to send in a long range team to take out both subjects with high doses of sedatives and dampeners.
480.
The tent should have ignited around them, but the hellfire is still contained-
“Pull it.” The Nurse hears herself say to the men and women around her that depend on her for their lives, for their safety. She handles the subjects, she’s been built to handle them, to hunt down and neutralize and to subjugate. “Somebody get the long distance team. We’re reaching temperatures that are too high. Put them both down.”
600.
“Lethal?” A man asks.
720.
“We try the sleeper darts first.”
ERROR.
Fuck.
The air hasn’t caught fire yet, but the core temperature of Subject 16-P is getting too high. Dangerous levels that they try not to let Subject 16-P reach often, or ever.
If the boy knew that he could ignite the air in people's lungs without a second thought, there would be no containing him.
The Nurse pushes away from the cameras, clearly they aren’t helping anymore. She needs to make sure- needs to see-
The medical tent looks … defrosted.
The ambient air temperature doesn’t seem to be burning at the very molecules. The grass is still there, damp and wet and ugly for November groundskeeping. The tent still stands, a little tilted now that it's gone through a rough night of use and abuse. Her protective gear is still protecting her skin, her hair.
She takes out a little thermometer, checking the air around her.
It’s a little warm for a November night, but it’s not outside of the realm of possibility for what was on the forecast. This shouldn’t- Subject 16-P doesn’t just inflict his heat onto himself or what he’s aiming for, he’s an unbiased weapon, inflicting his hellfire onto friend and foe alike, no matter how many tests or trials that they have him run through.
Opening the tent, the air’s the same, a little warmer, maybe, but nothing that a human wouldn’t be able to handle without a light jacket.
There’s no more ice walls either. No snow covering every single table in sight. It’s a fucking wreck, sure, but there’s no ice cave look that was going on earlier. No frozen tundra from hell.
Just two boys, in the middle of the back, eyes glazed over-
Holding hands.
The Nurse can’t help herself. She takes a gasp, a startled little intake of air.
Subject 16-P has never been able to touch somebody before.
Not in the care of the Lost and Found, not in the meticulous notes that had been recovered on the raid on the Dollhouse. Subject 16-P would ignite anything that touched his skin, instantly incinerating even if he wasn’t aware of the touch. It was the one final barrier that surrounded him at all times.
But now-
“Sleeper darts.” The Nurse speaks into her collar. “Fire at will.”