Ashes (Flame Ash Burned Backstory)

Chapter 13: Jealousy

31st October 2005

It was Flame's 10th birthday. For the past two years, she had been harshly bullied by the majority of girls at the school due to her looks - her crimson red eyes, wild fiery hair and her height. However, Flame had developed far quicker than the rest of the girls: already she had wider hips, larger (C-cup) breasts and was beginning to get curves.

And this resulted in the rest of the girls feeling more insecure about themselves, then taking out their frustration on the young fire girl.

How dare she, the freak of the class, be more attractive than them?

How dare she develop faster than the rest of them?

There had been times when they had cornered her. Kicked her. Punched her. Scratched her. Screamed insults at her. She had been called practically all of the most offensive words you could ever think of.

Even if Flame didn't think so, she was beautiful, and because of this, the girls despised her. They picked on her for looking different, while secretly wishing that they could look like her. Flame had begun to gather a lot of attention from boys her age, and boys a little older than her, who only saw her for her appearance and not for her personality. This just added to the hatred and jealousy from the girls at the school.

She had been driven to the point of suicide at one time, but was stopped by Phoenix. Looking back on that, everything felt like a blur. It had happened so fast.

All she could remember from that day was standing at the edge of the school's roof one moment, trying to gather the courage to jump, and then being pulled back by Phoenix, and being hugged for hours while he sobbed into her shoulder and begged her to never even think about doing something like that again. She had been so close to jumping.

If he had come any later, Flame would have been dead on the ground below.

Phoenix had told Blaze what had happened, and as a result, he had taken Flame to the doctors to be checked out. There, she was diagnosed properly with depression, anxiety and Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. Blaze, the ex fire king, had made the decision for the girl to not have her take medication for it, as he had said he didn't want her to "be completely reliant on pills for the rest of her life."

Since then, Flame had spent rather a lot of time training in hand-to-hand combat and working on her fire magic. She liked to feel like she could protect herself so that Phoenix wouldn't feel as if he needed to constantly protect her, and like she was in control of herself.

As well as that, she spent most of her nights studying maths, science, foreign languages and art; she had become the most intelligent girl, not only in her year, but in the whole school. She had also been singing rather a lot, too, and was considering joining in with one of the annual talent shows.

If only all the girls in the school didn't hate her and cause her anxiety to act up whenever she was around them...

Flame preferred to draw in a realistic art-style, however, she was talented when it came to drawing in the manga art-style, and was in the process of learning Japanese in order to communicate with a boy who had moved to the school one week before her birthday and spoke mostly in Japanese.