It's a war and this is a battlefield. He hasn't got any false ideas about this. It isn't like it is in the movies but he imagines that through the rush of lighter fluid in his ears he can hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire.
He can feel the rush, rush, rush of heat as it curls around the base of his spine and it makes his palms itch. He remembers practising in that big field on the hill, the feeling that if he didn't force the fire out, it'd burn him up from the inside. The way that it met the stream of cold, cold and the way that neither of them ever won.
Then he's cold, cold on his arms and he feels it under his skin and it's stopping the fire, it's freezing the boiling blood in his veins. He remembers after they practiced, that cold, cold mouth on his, hard and insistant, making him numb, the way it made his tongue feel thick and alien, like he'd been eating a popsicle. It stops the rush, rush, rush and for once, he doesn't feel like he's burning.
He remembers even that, even then, it felt as much like a battle as this.