Author's Note: To Raz, water teh evil, so fire would be teh awesome. Thank you and goodnight.

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Fire.

The warm, red and orange flames dance in front of him, and he feels safe. The color palette is the opposite of his dreaded fear, the water. The colors are bright and eye catching, hues that did not hide anything. No monster lurking beneath their surface. Fire is see-through.

Razputin knows he shouldn't be sitting this close to the fire. Or even lighting it, given that it's right under a tree. He knows he shouldn't be lying on the ground by the fire. He can feel that something is fundamentally not right at this moment.

But the ground is warm, the flames are bright, and he feels so safe.

Water is not like fire. Water will be calm one moment, insane the next, always dangerous, always shifting, constantly hiding things from people beneath a murky mask. He hates it, hates it so bad, and always did even before the curse started attacking him. Water is a liar, a traitor, false and untrustable.

Fire burns, scorches, kills, yeah, all that stuff.

But it does it up front.

There are no tricks to fire, no lies, nothing. It is harmful. It looks harmful. It is hot. It looks hot. Everything is straight up, here, in this moment. If he reached out, the fire would not leap at him. It would burn only what he presented it with. It would lick him. There would be no attacks here, Raz realizes. Finally something in camp that makes sense. He closes his eyes briefly, feeling safe enough to do at night for the first time in weeks.

The safety lies in the fact that, at this moment, if a bear or a cougar attacked him, he could use fire to defend himself. His pyrokinesis is faster now, formidable, and every animal cowered before it. It was the universal protector, the constant good idea, and Raz has no worries. He could sleep here, he thinks, except Agent Vodello would kill him.

For a long, lingering moment, he stares at the fire.

Opposite of water. Red and orange and yellow. Warm. Neutral. Fire is everything Raz has ever wanted in this life. Something interesting that didn't involve death was always a welcome rarity in Razputin's life. Slowly, he reaches out a hand. The heat makes him recoil after a moment. He can feel it as he walks back to his cabin.

He feels fearless, and he knows why.

Fire.