Chapter Text
The fire inside started burning the day I turned thirteen, May seventeenth, two thousand and twelve. At first, the incidents were minor. Little sparks here and there, things heating up when I was angry. I blamed it on the bad heating system at the school I went to, or the hot summer weather. But when the temperature started to drop as winter approached, the ashes of the small fires I’d made had not blown away in the wind. It was December when I finally found out that I wasn’t normal.
It was a cold day, with a thin layer of frost covering the ground. Thick snow was already drifting down from the clouds. A frigid wind blew, ruffling the heavy jackets and scarves that the eighth-grade students walking to their homes from their school wore. I had no reason to be worried. Any sparks I accidentally created would be quickly snuffed out in this blizzard. Or so I thought. I was treading through the ankle-deep white powder, hands stuffed into the pockets of my dull green parka, face down to avoid my face being bitten by the cold. I was almost off the school grounds when the tingling feeling began. I stopped in my tracks, confused and nervous. The other students continued on their way around me. My fingers quickly heated up, and my anxiety soared. A few moments later heat was coursing up and down my body. In the last seven months I had discovered that normal heat didn’t hurt me, but I was in pain now. I couldn’t control the flames. As I lifted my face, my gloves starting smoking. I stumbled backwards, tripping on a chunk of chipped pavement and falling. I sat there on the cold ground, snowflakes melting on the bridge of my nose, staring at my hands, which were completely on fire. I screamed, ripping my disintegrating gloves off and flinging them into a snowbank. Other students were stopping now, staring at the spectacle in shock and confusion, gasping. I watched as the flaming gloves were reduced to ashes, until there was nothing left but a pile of burned black string, smoke rising from it. I felt a flare of heat as a few people screamed, and fire spread up my arms, flames wreathing my body. I was in complete and utter agony. Right before I blacked out, the last thing I saw was a familiar blond-haired face running up to me, and falling back, tears streaming from her sky blue eyes.
When someone finally recovered from their shock enough to call 9-1-1, the doctors thought for certain I was dead. The boy who had called and probably saved my life, Zach Coleman, later told me that I had been lying in the snow unconscious, my whole body covered in dying flames and most of my clothes burned to nothingness. If it wasn’t enough that the fire had left my body completely unscathed, it was a complete miracle that I didn’t dye of hypothermia. Once the ambulance took me to the ER and cleaned me up, they were appalled that I didn’t have any burns on me. My hair was the last thing to catch fire, so there was no damage done there except a bit of singing on the ends. The doctors came up with some fancy scientific explanation for my unbelievably close escape from death, that the snow all over me had shielded my body from the flames, but I knew that wasn’t true. My mysterious powers over fire had gone out of control, but they hadn’t hurt me. After many, many scans and tests, the doctors declared that I had miraculously escaped from a thin shave with death, and I returned home for winter vacation. But when I returned to school, everyone who hadn’t ignored me before started keeping away from me like I was contagious and I might set them on fire. And that’s how we discovered the portal.