Consuming Fire

Chapter 3

Merry Christmas beautiful people (thanks for loving Rouge so much xoxox) !!!

The doctor mercifully decided not to punish Hunter, but instead ordered the guards to escort her back to her cell. She was so out of focus that she tripped twice down the stone steps, her bare feet so calloused that she hardly noticed the sharp rocks beneath them. There was no other sound but the shuffling of their footfalls and the occasional creak of a cell door far down the long corridor. The stench of cold cement, decay and loneliness hung in the air.

Hunter walked like a zombie, the golden glow of her father’s eyes still clear as day in her mind, lighting her way like the promise of hope. After that one glimpse, he fell back into whatever sleep he’d been trapped in. She wasn’t even sure he re-gained consciousness, waving it off as some sort of paranormal reaction to her fire. A personal connection. A bond that only their blood shared.  

But it was confirmed: She knew those eyes like her own because they were her own. Joshua always told her she had golden eyes just like her father. And now the doctor not only had Will to use against her, he had her long-lost father as bait as well.

It was impossible, but she was beginning to believe it.

As she marched through the caves in the tight grip of the guards, she tried to remember the story Joshua told her. The story in which her father burned to death the night she was conceived. The proof was never there, and Hunter did not question why. Did the police overlook the fact that both her mother and father completely disappeared after the fire? Why did the insurance company not do a thing about the apartment?

Did somebody cover it up?

Of course, she thought. Dr. Wolfe did. But how could he have possibly known about her mother and the fire? She wasn’t aware of her powers that night, and Joshua didn’t even have powers. How did Dr. Wolfe manage to rescue her father before it all began?

Hunter forgot about the present, escaping into a memory that was not her own and recalled Joshua’s words again.

He was the greatest man I ever knew.

Suddenly, Hunter started to laugh.

The laughter bubbled from a deep and warm part of her, a part she thought had died in the Death Caves. Delirium wrapped its arms around her, or maybe it was just the guards, paranoid that she was going to try and run away.

And at that moment, Hunter felt as if she could run away. She felt invincible. The oppressive storm cloud that had suffocated her in the Death Caves – the cloud that told her there was no hope left and she was doomed to die – blew away.

“What’s so funny?” asked one of the guards.

Hunter gazed up at him, elatedly happy. “You don’t know?”

He glanced past her to exchange bemused looks with his co-worker, then turned back to Hunter. “Don’t know what?”

Laughter slipped from her mouth again. And it grew. It was the kind of laughter that made hands reach from their cells, calling out to her, clawing at the air for the same happiness she was engulfed in.

Will shouted her name, and at his voice, she ripped her arms from the guards with powerful force and started running.

The Men in White sprinted after her, shouting at the other prisoners, catching her just as she reached Will’s door and grabbed his hand through the tiny iron bars of his cell. They’d not had contact for days, but all of a sudden, things were different. She was different.

There was hope again.

“He’s alive!” she beamed, another giggle falling from her lips. She couldn’t control herself.

“Who’s alive?”

“My dad, Will. My dad is alive!”

“What?!”

“Get back!” one of the guards warned and wrenched her away from Will. But the guard’s grip was shaky. He didn’t know what to do. “I’m warning you, I’ll-”

“What?” she whirled and the both of them stumbled back in shock. Her voice reverberated off the walls, almost as if it were amplified. “What will you do?!” Her smile was so wide that her jaw hurt, the muscles stretched for the first time in days. She looked back at Will and saw him smiling too, amazed at her energy and joy. His eyes burned like fire, and it took her only a second to realize that the glow was only a reflection of her own blazing eyes. His elated smile made the fire burst to life again inside her soul. She turned slowly back to the guards, flexing her wrists, feeling the burn from deep in her core. “There’s nothing you can do. Not to me, or Will, or any of us. Not now, not ever. NOTHING!”

And then, from the palms of her hands came a blazing light that lit up the darkest corners of the Death Caves. Fire consumed her, slipping from her skin, dancing around her broken and bruised body, and the guards stood, gob-smacked, fearful and frozen, and the Death Caves filled with warmth for the first time in decades, and every hand protruded from the cells, desperate for heat, hungry for light, and Hunter put her head back and breathed in fire like the air of freedom. It washed away all her suffering and everything that buried her in darkness.

“He’s alive,” she whispered.

The guards finally remembered their authority and drew tasers from their holsters. They shot Hunter in the stomach and twice in her left thigh. She went down on the stone floor, not unconscious but unable to produce fire. The pain was too much. They dragged her across the filthy ground, one of them attaching a second bracelet to her wrist to stop the fire from growing stronger. Then they threw her into her cell.

She crouched in the dirt and darkness, the pain ebbing away into an uncomfortable sting. In the distance she heard the Men in White ordering the other mutants to shut up, and then the corridor was silent.

“Hunter?” asked Will from his cell beside hers. “Want to explain what’s going on? How do you suddenly have your abilities back? What do you mean, your father is alive?”

Hunter gripped her hair, feeling life course through her under the stinging after-bite of the tasers. But the fire had never felt so strong.

“I don’t know how Will, but I saw him. I thought he died in the fire the night my mother got her power, the night I was conceived. But somehow Dr. Wolfe found him. He’s been here all this time. Dr. Wolfe was healing him using some sort of salve he invented from your blood. He would have been on the brink of death when they found him. And for the first time, he woke up and looked at me and even though I didn’t want to let myself believe it… I knew it was him.”

“What are you going to do now?”

She put her back against the scratchy wall of her cell and looked at her hands, watching the orange light course through her veins again. She couldn’t push the fire out of her skin, but she could feel its strength again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “How could we have been so defeated?”

“Hunter… do you really believe that your dad being alive is going to help us get out of here?”

“No.” She shook her head and smiled. “It just gives me hope.”

After a long moment of silence, Will said, “Want to know what I hope for?”

“What?”

“Paradise.”

Hunter stared at the darkness. “After today,” she said. “Anything is possible.”