Perspective of orin
She silently wrapped the gauze around my hand, her fingers trembling only slightly.
"Your hands are burnt," she said, not quite meeting my gaze.
"I gathered that much," I replied, voice dry as ash yet forcing a smile.
She didn't laugh. Instead, she gently pressed the final fold of bandage down and fastened it with a bent paperclip.
"You know," she murmured, "fire doesn't have to be feared."
I watched her in silence. The snowfall beyond the window cast flickering shadows across her pale face.
"It's like life. Shifting. Unstable. Sometimes it burns. Sometimes it gives light. Either way, it reminds us that we're alive."
Her voice faded, and for a moment I thought she was done. But then, her eyes lifted—toward the ceiling, or perhaps beyond it.
"When I was born, someone had to choose between two lives. My mother... she chose mine."
A long silence followed.
"They cut me out of her. There was too much blood."
I didn't speak.
"My father returned from the war to find her gone. What came back wasn't a man. Not entirely. My aunt said he used to be gentle. But war hollows things. She was the last warmth he had. When she died, something inside him... cracked."
She folded the remaining bandage and turned it in her hand, over and over, as if the motion itself offered comfort.
"Sometimes he'd smile. Sometimes he'd burn things. He never knew which version of him would wake up. Neither did I."
She paused, then added softly, "He vanished one day. Just never came back."
The weight of her words sat heavily between us. She didn't cry. Not until the silence stretched too long and her body stopped remembering to be strong.
Her tears fell silently onto my bandaged hands.
"My grandfather found me. Raised me. He taught me The Requiem, though most of what I learned came from listening. Remembering. I was good at that. Remembering. In recent years he had gotten dementia. "
"But me… I believe it's S.A.D."
I hesitated, then reached for her—awkwardly at first, then with warmth.
"I'll show you another fire," I said, my voice low. "One no one has ever seen before. One that doesn't burn."
I wasn't someone who cried. I didn't believe in tears. But as I held her, something unfamiliar stirred in me. Her sorrow, poured so quietly into the world, now seeped into me.
And I let it stay.
"My eyes…I'm…Crying?"
It reminded me of something I once heard, "The axe forgets– what the tree remembers."