A/N: This is sadder than I intended. Ah, well, c'est la vie, I suppose. One chapter left!

Chapter 2: In Fire

I.

Victoire does have a heart; it isn't made of ice and it isn't made of stone.

It's made of sinewy tissue and drowning in hot, blue blood. It sounds like lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub and every time she sees Teddy the steady rhythm is interrupted by the sudden rush of chemicals swimming in the river of her veins. It's clinical and it's natural, and any Healer worth her salt knows as much. She doesn't have to like it, though. Feeling is uncomfortable. Her heart contracts more readily, more forcefully. Her whole body beats with its pulse and her temperature rises until the fire and the heat threaten to burn her up from the inside out. The bones in her ribcage aren't enough to cradle her heart, to keep it from throbbing out of her chest, and skin is just a thin layer holding all the oceans of blood and desire in one small, contained space.

Feeling is too much, it's too wonderful and it's too awful. Teddy is like that, too. Overwhelming, irresistible, crushing, with the all the force of a breaking wave. Once when she was four and he was five, Kent Davies called him a beastly half-breed after losing a game of gobstones. She'd slugged him in the mouth and his teeth cut into the delicate skin stretched over her knuckles. She'd cried, but not as embarrassingly loud as Kent Davies had. After, Teddy held her hands in his and kissed the open, bleeding wounds with his soft mouth and the salty sting made her smile, left her breathless. It is one of her first memories.

Smoking is just another word for all of that.

It's the same habit, the same unwilling and unwanted addiction to the space between heaven and hell. To watching the glow of flames swallowing the thin white paper, to letting the tendrils of smoke and fire lick and burn the cavity in her chest. It warms the blood in the winter air, it blackens and fills her up until she has to spit out the fire or it will melt her into a cold puddle of nothing. Stepping out into the night, letting the snowflakes dissolve against her skin while she indulges herself is nothing especially secret. It's just an unspoken, unsaid kind of need, in the same way that her feelings for Teddy are often only implicit. She fills her mouth with ash and speaks in smoke signals.

Inhale, I want you. Exhale, I need you.

Inhale, I love you. Exhale, I hate you.

II.

Dominique was never very good at staying in one place, but she's doing an awfully good job of it now.

It's unnerving.

Victoire doesn't like it, doesn't like the way that she's beginning to get used to the red hair in the bath drain, the choking grip of her heady perfume, the place she occupies and lives in. She's a terrible roommate. She destroys everything. She breaks dishes into sharp, ceramic shards. She borrows Vic's favorite T-strap navy blue Mary Janes and snaps the heel off. She burns though an entire carton of eggs trying to make breakfast one morning, and the smoke from the fire lingers in the flat for the next few days.

She doesn't have the strength to turn her away, though. Vic will always feel the need to take care of her younger sister. To let her shatter all the dishes in the cabinets and in the sinks, then sweep away the jagged pieces before she cuts her feet on them. To let her break the heels of her shoes, snap the straps of her gowns, rip holes in the folds of her robes. To let her burn through her fridge, through her flat, through everything, until there is nothing left to ignite and then Vic will lay her cool, healing hands on her flushed face and give her more if she wants it. Dominique would never ask it of her, though, and she doesn't now.

She just takes it.

The worst part about it is she doesn't even seem to notice. She flickers, she flits, she never stops to think about what she's doing or why she's doing it. Dominique lounges on the couch that Vic had carefully chosen, splayed out and encroaching on the space between her body and the other two trying to exist in the same space. It makes Vic uncomfortable, and she shifts away from the sticky feeling of unwanted skin touching skin. At the other end, Teddy doesn't move, doesn't flinch away from it, even remotely.

Vic watches the curious way he leans into her sister's warmth and wonders how much longer it will take before they're both gone, until all that's left is ash.

III.

She is an excellent hostess.

Teddy coerces her into throwing Dominique a kind of welcome home party, even though Vic voices the opinion that it's ridiculous since her sister had been back in England for over a month now. Victoire invites all of their cousins and some of their friends and even Kent Davies, who is Dominique's friend(-with-benefits), despite the fact that Vic thinks he's an absolute slime and no good at all for anyone let alone her baby sister. He also leaves rings on her coffee table. Still, she freshens drinks and makes polite, distant conversation with Dominique's friends (except Kent).

Teddy isn't quite as good at playing this game.

He spends far too much of the duration speaking to only specific people. The ice in the kitchen is melting, because he is too engaged in conversation with James and Dominique to remember the proper freezing charm. The fire nearly goes out in the hearth because he is too busy watching Dominique pull Kent to the dance floor, their twined bodies making slow movements together. This whole thing was his idea, and his lack of interest in doing any of the work is rage-inducing, particularly because he seems much more focused on twirling her younger sister away from Kent for a dance of his own.

Victoire is sweating in her off-white satin sleeved dress, and they have run out of liquor, and the guests of the house are beginning to overstep their boundaries in more ways than one. She closes her eyes and braces herself, but when the crest of anger crashes over her head she still can't breathe under the weight of it. She needs a cigarette. Stealing away quietly, Victoire exits to the fire escape, the small white stick already poised between her lips. Vic burns herself on the match in her haste to get it flaming, but takes a long drag from her lit cigarette before she begins soothing the throbbing fingers. They will peel and blister, but she can't be bothered to go back inside and soak them. It would be a waste of a cigarette to stamp it out just as she'd gotten it going. The spring air she exhales her smoke into is warmer than she wants it to be, and it does very little to alleviate the heat of her skin.

The nicotine floods her system, and it's a false kind of comfort but it works anyway.

IV.

Teddy gets ill very easily.

He catches colds and viruses and he has dragon pox four times, even though you're only supposed to get it once. The changing of the seasons irritates his body's natural constitution, and so Vic has to spend the better part of the first week in April smoothing his brow and helping him adjust to the alternating chills and fever sweats caused by the sudden arrival of warmer weather. It's disguising and uncomfortable, but this seems like something you're supposed to do for the people that you love. So every time he grasps her hand with his swampy, blotchy red ones, she pretends that her first instinct isn't to pull away and crawl out of the space he's breathing in.

Vic is made all the more repulsed by the fact that she hasn't quite forgiven him for the party, and all the endless packs of cigarettes she's hid under the bed he lies in aren't enough to ease away the memory of it all. This spring's bout of illness is particularly harsh. Victoire administers potions and holds cold pieces of ice against his throat, his chest, soaking away the sweat from his skin. The heat from Teddy's body turns the cubes into drops of water that leave wet marks on her pristine cotton sheets.

"Please," he begs, his voice harsh, grave. "Please, it burns. S-she's burning me through."

Vic's hands freeze halfway through wringing out a washcloth. She sucks in a slow, steady breath through her nose, but finds the air much too humid. Much too thick, thick and heavy and bleeding into the pockets of her lungs. Teddy's mouth moves again, but Vic can't hear him; she is elsewhere, beyond a thousand leagues under the sea and Teddy is the ocean she's drowning in. The moisture from the washcloth has dribbled down her arms, past her wrists, onto her lap, but Victoire doesn't feel it, she doesn't feel anything but the cruel, steady lub-dub, lub-dub and it's all too much.

It could be someone else. It could be anyone else. It could be, but it isn't.

Vic pours soothing purple potion past Teddy's chapped lips, draining it until she's sure the fever will recede from his weathered body. When the bottle is empty, Vic slides to the floor beside Teddy's prone form. She claws desperately at her little spellotaped boxes of cigarettes and nearly spills the whole thing trying to take one out. She lights up, there on the floor where she's burning, there on the floor where she's on fire, and allows herself the luxury of tears. Her ashes dust the floor and she tosses the stubs of the cigarettes across the room, but she's sure to blow the smoke away from Teddy's air.

She isn't that careless.

V.

Teddy gets well and doesn't see the cigarette stubs because he doesn't see anything.

Nothing he doesn't want to, anyway, even when she's there all but screaming for him to notice. All he seems to want to see these days are wild red curls and a laughing pair of thick lips wrapped in a glossy package of everything he thinks he's missing out on. This is a warm spring, a heavy spring, with yellow rays of sun and heady notes of daffodils and hyacinth and tulips so strong Victoire thinks she might choke on them. Vic spends her time indoors, away from the heat and the perfumes and the sound of life buzzing around everywhere. She isn't surprised to find that her sister thrives on warmer weather. She always has. Vic joins her on the fire escape one morning, silently watching the way she arches toward the light, feeds on it. Dominique stands at the very edge, perched like a bird about to take flight.

"I think it's time you found a new place to say," Victoire says slowly.

Her voice is ice; her voice is stone. But underneath that she's quavering with tears because this is the first time she's ever denied Dominique anything. She's laying claim now. She must. Dominique's mouth turns up at the corner and she steps away from the rusted railing. Vic's body shakes beneath her winter robes, thrumming with heat and blood and nervous energy. Dominique could upend her steady course. She could banish it, make all her bravery evaporate and disperse into nothingness if she just asked to stay. Vic knows what her answer would be. Vic knows she's always been the weak one. But then Dominique says "alright," like its nothing, and her body is simmering with the feeling of victory.

"Bit crowded, anyway," Dom murmurs, digging in the pocket of her robes.

Her fingers find what they've been searching for and she extracts a cigarette. As she lights it with a match and inhales, Vic watches in envy. Envy of the heat and smoke flowering in her lungs, the sure swell of chemical relief flooding head to toe in her body. High on her triumphs, she takes from her sister because she can, now. Vic snatches the cigarette from Dom's long white fingers, stubbing out the smoldering orange tip with clinical preciseness before tossing it over the railing to fall somewhere below. She will grow in strength, she will be what she hasn't been before.

"You shouldn't smoke, Dominique."

Her disproval does nothing to quell her sister's satisfaction. She grins that terrible grin, red lips curled back over white teeth. A queasy feeling settles over Victoire at the sight. Little Red Riding Hood has swallowed the wolf and become him. Dom steps forward, hair shining scarlet in the sun's sure yellow rays, but Vic refuses to move away and will not give ground.

"Neither should you," Dom says, pulling out a familiar pack of cigarettes with remnants of sticky spellotape mangled on the box.

And oh, it burns.

A/N: I didn't intentionally set out to make Victoire the victim, but you'll get some sympathetic Dom in the next chapter. Please, please, please, review! It will fuel my creativity and keep me writing! Thanks for reading!