Phoenix, a sky high fanfic

Celebwen Telcontar: This is an entirely new fic, an entirely new genre, and an entirely new pairing. It's Warren/Layla, in case you're wondering. This story has been redone, and is better, I think, athough not much has been changed. Please tell me how you like the new version!

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The hammock creaked as it swayed in the gentle wind, the young redhead in it quietly reciting the names of the constellations she remembered. She saw Draco pick his way through the stars, and Ursa Major growl at nothing, as did Ursa Minor. The North Star gleamed gently, like a guiding light, to show her home. Heracles was there, bashing the heads of his twin serpents. Such brute strength needn't be expressed.

The now claustrophobic high school girl frowned in thought.

Will showed off his strength too much, far too much. Like Heracles, he needlessly bashed things left, right, and center.

Slowly, the woods off towards the house began to glow an eerie yellow-green color, and her friends stepped into the circle of light thrown by Zach. Ethan was carrying a bucket, probably for supper or a midnight snack, Magenta was just being herself, and Will was carrying a bouquet of roses. Layla's heart pained to see the roses that would soon wither and die. Warren came closer and went to the other side of the hammock, staying as far away from the others as possible. His eyes seemed sunken, and his skin relatively papery, as if he were in a concentration camp in the 1930's in Poland. As if he were starving to death.

"How are ya, Hippie?" he asked quietly.

"Horrid, to tell you the truth," Layla replied, looking off into the distance and not at any of her friends. "You don't look any better yourself. Have you been eating?"

"Every day. I'm starving though," he whispered.

"You look it," Layla murmured back.

"Can we come close?" Zach asked.

"No, I've been feeling worse."

"Here, your mother said to give you this," Ethan handed her a bottle of vitamin-enriched water. Layla ripped the cap off as fast as she could, and guzzled the life-giving liquid, feeling her parched throat ease off a bit. Every ten minutes, she would guzzle yet another one, and soon had most likely broken a record for the amount of water able to be drunk in one day.

She scratched at a particularly itchy bit of dry, insect-feeling skin, and picked the whitened cells off of her arm, watching fascinated as her blood seeped from the wound.

"What causes something like this in forests?" Magenta asked, looking at her.

"Huh… Drought, uhm… beetle kill, like the kind of pine beetle in the American West that kills whole forests so they have to be cut down, a bit of overcrowding, but I don't feel like that, uhm… nothing else comes to mind."

"So, a lot of beetle removal, water application, and a few trees cut down?" Will asked.

"No, there's only… Warren… You. Fire. Fire helps the forests like that… Goddess, Warren… plants, trees, excess forest loam… they feed fire." She reached up and kissed him passionately, letting all her raw nerve endings feel the fire he sent into her, the cleansing flames that removed the standing, dead forest that was Layla Greenleaf, and burned the loam to a fine powder of highly-fertile ash that soon had a new, completely healthy forest growing in the ashes of the old one. The old forest created a veritable feast for the fiery inferno that was devouring and rebirthing the forest. They were together like the Phoenix, the mythical bird who burned itself up every five hundred years and was reborn from the ashes.

"Layla!" Will cried indignantly.

"Oh, shit…" Magenta said before turning tail and running, as did Zach and Ethan. Now the three of them were alone, Layla in her hammock and still drinking the water, though now even a blind person would be able to see the distinct improvement in Layla that kissing Warren and letting his Phoenix fire cleanse her had done, and that Warren now looked completely healthy and less like a concentration camp victim than an average bad-boy high-school student.

"Uhhh… Will, I… we're over. I… I'd seem to die without Warren, literally, it seems. I… I can't be a lover to you when you slowly are my death and you leech my light by standing in front of the sun, just waiting for me to notice yet another Herculean feat that you've accomplished. With Warren… He is fire. I am a forest. When a forest grows too dense, a fire is begun by nature, to burn off the remnants of the old growth and let new, better growth in its place." She laid a hand on Will's arm. "Hopefully we can still be friends?" she asked.

"O… of course, Layla," Will said in a choked voice before he launched himself skyward, returning home.

Warren looked at her.

"Did you really mean what you said, Hippie?" he asked her, reaching down to gently touch her face.

"Of course I did," she whispered. He pulled her in for another searing kiss, then they both lay in the hammock and stared at the stars which went round and round, setting the tune for the time that Layla and Warren would be a couple.

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They become, eventually, man and wife, and, at the end of their lives, they became much more, they became the fiery Phoenix in and of themselves. They burned to death at ages of ninety-nine and one-hundred and two. When they died, they left in their place a healthy infant, who was taken in by Will Stronghold's werewolf granddaughter, and raised as one of her cubs.

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Celebwen Telcontar: Do you like it? Should I make a sequel, with the Peace child growing up in a pack of half-werewolves?

Balrog: Huh. Just as long as the child is a pyretic.

Celebwen Telcontar: That may or may not be the case, Balrog. The Peace child is going to be… an aquatic, perhaps? Or maybe like its mother, a Hero in tune with nature. Who knows what I'll do.

Balrog: Then be kind and just do it!

Celebwen Telcontar: It depends entirely on who reviews.