Title: On Fire
Characters: Ellen and Edilio
Summary: "I have learned that playing too close to the flames will get you burned, but that's only if you believe it will. Lucky for me, I know that love doesn't exist." An insight into the life of Ellen the fire chief and why she is the was she is.
Rating/Warning: K+ Some partially graphic scenes of a fire but no real violence.
Disclaimer: I do not own the GONE series, nor do I own the lyrics to 'On Fire'. They belong to Michael Grant and Switchfoot, respectively. Perhaps the only thing I do own is the 'Do Not Remove By Federal Law' tag on my mattress which I am too terrified to remove.
Authors Note: About this particular 'shot', I have always been fascinated by the character of Ellen the fire chief. She's kind of an odd one. She has a role in the books but her character is not developed. I know she is a very minor character, but apparently she played a big part in the Great Fire but no where else. I don't know why, but I would like to find out more about this girl. Mr. Grant has put forth enough effort to give her a name...just not a past. I've tried to do that here. Based on the grand total of like six lines she had (p. 234, 258-263, and 308 in my copy of LIES), I've managed to scrap together than Ellen is probably a very smart and strong girl. She didn't seem to be overly broken by the fire which suggests she can ignore some emotions. With only the fire scenes as my basis, I revolved flames and an aversion to a certain feeling around her story. I hope the way the tale is presented isn't too weird. I really don't like 1st person point of view but I feel it was necessary to tell it that way.


Love is a cruel, illogical monster. If I have learned anything in this prison called the FAYZ, I've learned that love is something best to avoid. It makes a person senseless, brittle, and weak. People will always claim love fills one up with a burning passion, a drive to be unstoppable in their goal to save their loved ones. But they lie. Love interferes with one's duties, and only causes strife in life. In a world like the one I live in now, to shirk your responsibilities means death…or worse. In reality, love clouds one's rational thinking like thick, toxic smoke and leaves them bare to fatal mistakes. There is no 'great fire' that sparks within one's heart, for the heart is merely an organ. It is not the heart that determines love; it is the brain that creates a scorching, meaningless lust. There is no such thing as a real, true, all consuming love. And yet, still, foolish people want to believe there is such a thing in this icy world.

Tell you who you need to be...Tell you what you need to know

But I already knew all of this before the FAYZ wall came down. 'Love', the thing is supposedly meant to buildfamilies, ripped my own apart within a few weeks. My father was Perdido Beach's Volunteer Fire Chief, and when I was seven he was invincible. Every night he would come home to me, covered in soot, and tell me stories about the 26 cats he might have saved that night, or the baby he rescued from the third floor nursery. These stories never became boring to me and I would ask ceaselessly for more tales. I would lie in bed at night and wish for exciting situations like that to happen to me. As irony would find me, my young fantasies soon came true, much to my mortification. About when I was a few weeks from reaching eight years old, the jarring sound of the fire alarms brought me into a scene of choking smoke and heat. Somehow my family's house, the dwelling I had spent my entire life growing up in, was in flames. I always had wished for a chance like this, but when it had finally come, I was frozen in fear. Where was my father to save me? Like he always had before, when I had to eat my carrots or finish one particularly hard math problem? But I waited in the suffocating, thick smoke and blistering heat and no one came for me. I had tried to call out, but no one had heard me. I had never felt so alone, wondering if I was the last person alive in my family. After my strangled screams had become racking sobs and after they had become soft cries, someone was coming to get me. Gloved hands poked through the window and I dared to hope that they belonged to my father. Shrieking with joy, I had stumbled quite blindly to the strong gateway that led to freedom. But as the hands closed in what was meant as a comforting, 'I got you' sort of way, they only made my heart despair more. They were not the hands of my invincible father. And as I was pulled into the cold and dark night, I did not see my father behind that mask. I did not see my father anywhere.

It was not until I had spent a fretful night in a frozen, sterile hospital room in some neighboring hospital that I learned that Perdido Beach's Volunteer Fire Chief had perished in the fire. Never before in my young life had I ever been so grief-stricken. Later I was told that after safely getting my younger sister and brother out of the house, my father rushed back to either save my mother or myself. He was so quick in his haste that he completely disregarded firefighter rules and skimped on the equipment needed to make another successful trip. To try to cheer up my very low spirits, his friends told me in a forced, light tone that his had been driven completely by love to save us. He could not have spared a few moments to ensure his life was saved because every second taken up by doing that was another second that my life or my mother's was in jeopardy. The comments were meant to cheer me up but they did just the opposite. My personal vendetta against this meddlesome emotion called love was just beginning to fester.

My poor mother did not last longer. She too suffered from another complication from this accursed love. She wasted away without her husband and became sicklier than a corpse. It was not too long until she simply wasted away to nothing. I did not understand how a single emotion could kill two people in so very distinct ways. Many years later, as my class would read tragedies of Shakespeare, they would scoff at the multiple deaths from love—either from being too overjoyed or being too heartbroken. I did not believe any of them realized it could actually happen in reality. The funeral for my mother was exactly one month after the funeral for my father. Just as many people came and about the same amounts of condolences were given to the rest of my pathetic family. To me, love was an abomination that if it joined two people in marriage, it would surely kill them eventually.

Just when I thought I had a chance to recover, irony and fate decided to team up together and make another joke out of me again. My two siblings and I were tossed into homes of relatives and friends of my late parents. My sister acclimated well but my brother did not. From a lack of love, he grew more bitter than even I. Not even three years later, he became tangled within gangs and violence because no one cared enough to try to stop him. A rare shooting a few towns away led to his premature death. Horrified at what happened so close to home, my sister, my last closely remaining relative, and her new adoptive family fled town and I've yet to hear from them since. I suppose I never will again, either.

By then I had been to three more funerals than anyone should ever have to endure—least of all an eleven year old child. Again people, now ones so distant that I hardly remembered their name, came to offer their condolences. I did not know them, and they did not know me. Their words were cold and hollow and did not hold the warmth of even a tiny ember. It did not matter to me though. I was sick of fires.

So much more than empty conversations...Filled with empty words

Love was my greatest and bitterest rival. The lighthearted, giddy feeling I had paralleled with 'true loves kiss' and fairy princesses in my childhood had taken a complete turn for the worse. After over six years of numbness and isolation, I thought my head was about to burst. Of course I had a few friends at school, but that was the closest I ever came to an honest-to-goodness relationship. There was no one I could tell my secrets to so naturally I turned to writing and reading and thus improved my vocabulary tenfold. At least with fiction I had the choice to read light, adventurous stories or tragic poems. Never once in my life did I ever pick up a romantic novel or read a flowery sonnet in my own free will. It started as a Herculean task, and I often thought I would not succeed, but I managed to banish love from my life. All that was left of the tiresome emotion was an empty name which had no other meaning to me other than a mere space holder in sentence not completely finished. Now, along with the departure of love, much of my happiness died as well. I did not mind. It closed me away from much of the world and most emotions but I seldom made any mistakes or experienced pain or sorrow.

When the FAYZ began, I was fourteen. I supposed that holding out against love would be no different than it was in my past life. In fact, I fell under the impression that it would be easier. In my twisted mind, I reasoned that a fragile and worthless emotion like love could not survive in the cruel world of the FAYZ. Hunger, insanity, fury, and death would soon overpower all hope for its survival. After all, if one wants to survive, one must remain as numb and closed to those around them as much as possible. Like all other children in the first few panicky months, I looked up to Sam Temple. He was the leader. We were, by some invisible law of natural, supposed to love him and praise him for saving us from Drake, Caine, and the Darkness. While it was Sam Temple who I initially admired, another boy soon came into the scene. His name was Edilio and much to my chagrin, something began to happen.

I immediately wrote it off as a simple companionship. He had done something for me and it was so minor I can not even recall it. Perhaps it was that he shared some food or something along the lines of that. I tried to convince myself that it was nothing more than friendship that I held for Edilio. The Thanksgiving Day Battle came and went and my feelings intensified. He saved me from one of Caine's men, firing a warning shot over the thug's head and warning him to never come near me again. The coolness and confidence that radiated from the boy actually caused me pain, for it made me think of my lost family. He reminded me of my father who also had saved me from a jerk in a sandbox many, many years ago. After the battle, the general feelings of all preteen girls for Sam changed from a hidden puppy love to an open inferno of obsession. Knowing I was clearly losing the 'Edilio was just a friend' battle, I compromised with myself: I had a slight infatuation for the Honduran. I allowed myself the little crush. I had never faltered in the line of battle against love before, but I also had never been so emotionally and physically compromised in my life. What could it hurt?I had thought. Like my first thoughts at the beginning of the FAYZ, the little spark would soon choke itself out and that would be the end of that. It was only some blasted hormone in my body, crying out for someone to pine for. Many had chosen Sam, who protected them, some followed their stomachs and loved the fisher, some even fell for the bad boys who had tried to kill them, Caine and Drake—although no one admitted to liking thosetwo openly. I suppose I didn't want to be left out so I picked the one hardly anyone had noticed, yet he had been as big of a hero as Sam. I chose Edilio. In a desperate attempt to destroy the simmering feelings for the boy, I became a soldier. Maybe seeing him more would drive any mysterious feelings from my body. Sadly, it did not work. My cold detachment from illogical emotions such as fear and love made me a better soldier than I could have anticipated. Edilio and I grew closer due to the fact that I would not shy away from my duties. While others chickened out when we faced coyotes and other monsters, I did not. The FAYZ slowly tore apart my dusty covering of my family and I was reminded of them more on a daily basis. I was fueled with the determination to be just like my father. I did not miss him but I grew in strength from the fleeting memories I held of him. As my aspirations led me to be the best I could be, my friendship with Edilio became deeper and exactly the opposite of what I had wanted it to be in the beginning. But I did not care by then. I had finally found someone I could trust for the first time in forever. I was becoming a girl completely different from the Ellen that had cursed the emotion of love and everything that sprouted from it. I had tried to convince myself that everything would be okay; this was a new world so I could be a new person. It ended up being a huge mistake.

And you're on fire...When's he's near you

Days faded into weeks and weeks faded into months. Sam had become the leader of our town and Edilio replaced Drake as sheriff. Perdido Beach needed a new fire chief. Cold irony could not and would not leave me alone. Knowing of my past story with fires but not knowing the wholestory, Edilio and the rest of the council asked me to take the job. I could not refuse them. The town of Perdido Beach somewhat needed me. Like the case of Nurse Dahra, if one had even a lick of knowledge about something, they were considered an expert in the FAYZ. I kept a cool head in a crisis and knew how to work most of the machinery in the fire department. And so I became the new fire chief. If it wasn't for the fact that I was needed by all the kids of Perdido Beach, then it was because that would have been what my father would have done. It seemed like a fitting way to preserve his memory if I was refusing to love.

Caine's decision to meddle with the power was the final straw in making me realize love was a horrible thing. While Sam, Edilio, and the other fighters had gone off to battle Caine's army, I was left back in town. A drunken mob of eleven year olds had set fire to some abandoned house. It was just a small fire—nothing that would be too dangerous or taxing. My fellow firefighters had already hooked up the pipes and turned on the water, waiting for the powerful jet to come coursing through.

Nothing happened.

With the electrical system out, we lost the water and sewage as well. The fire crackled and set a dangling blanket on fire. The flames sped across the fabric and onto the wooden porch above. That too ignited and soon the entire building was in flames. What had started out as small fire soon erupted into an impossibly hot inferno. Sparks flew from the abandoned house onto one that was currently in use. Three sparks sizzled on the gravelly shingles before finally catching. They made a hissing noise as the flames joined together and started to burn through the roof. The others and I stared at it with gapping mouths. Several had never seen anything this terrible before. I, on the other hand, had before when my own house was in flames. I forced my sluggish brain to form a plan of action. I was about to start some movement to get the fire off of the house when I heard screaming. My blood froze as if someone had poured ice cubes into my bloodstream. It was a little girl, probably a few years younger than I was when I had lost my family. It sounded as if she were close to a window by us. By then the fire had completely absorbed the roof. A hot, waxy material from the shingles dripped from the roof and splattered against the pavement. Sweat beaded across my forehead from both the heat and stress. My fellow coworkers flinched and looked at me with wide and questioning eyes. They didn't know what to do. 'We have to get the people out,' I had choked out. I told those nearest to me to get a ladder and set it up against the house. I was personally going to climb it when another frantic child came running to find us. 'Help! Help!' he had cried with wide eyes. 'Everyone's dead!' I asked him what he meant and he told the firefighters gathered around me that Sam, Edilio, and the other leaders had been killed by the Darkness. He had heard from others that the results from the battle against Caine and the Darkness had not been cheerful. Despite the intense heat from the blaze, I was frozen in place and soon began to shiver slightly. I could dimly hear my helpers shouting at me and everything else around me. They were trying not to panic and were doing a commendable job of it. I had completely shut down and left my crew to whatever they could scrap together. Terrified thoughts rushed through my head. What if Edilio really was dead? What am I going to do?I continued to dwell upon these glum ideas until the fire was safely contained. They had managed to get the girl out without too much injury, no thanks to me. I quickly congratulated those who went into the house and made my exit from the scene as fast as I could. I had never been so ashamed in my life. My feelings for Edilio almost killed a child. Here I was, the girl who was supposed to hate love till the end of her days, becoming infatuated with some hero who could sling a gun and it made me lose control. Just like I had warned myself, love almost had claimed more innocent lives. It did cause me to become weak and irrational. The choice to stand and stare was illogical. It almost killed someone. I would never do it again.

One more thing I learned from the FAYZ was never trust the word of a frantic eight year old. Sam was not dead and neither was Edilio. They had come close, but they were still breathing. Sam congratulated my squad and me on our relatively successful save. The flames of embarrassment had burned even more in my cheeks. I wanted to resign from my post as fire chief but I could not bring myself to say the words. What would my father have done? So instead I destroyed every last scrap of feeling for Edilio in my entire being. I had come too close to the fire and in punishment was badly singed. Like a small child, I learned my lesson to stay away from the dreaded emotion.

Give me one more time around...Give me one more chance to see

By the time the Great Perdido Beach Fire happened, I had rendered myself to be completely emotionless when the time needed me to be. People forgot my first mishap and soon I was a helping star in the community again. Young children, who I had been able to pull out of accidental blazes, thanked me profusely and threw different sayings of love at me. To them it was just a deeper way of thanking me. I just forced a smile and would accept it. They didn't mean it. In a few days, perhaps hours, it would all be forgotten. At the fire, my resolve was tested again. The flames were hot and high. They were the worst and most horrible things I had ever laid eyes on. I quickly spotted Edilio and decided that he would know what to do first. Unlike my first attempt at quelling a fire without water, I was not paralyzed with fear. Sure, I was a bit apprehensive, but I was not afraid. Edilio himself had looked like he was losing it. I forced my mask into a firmer expression of cool confidence, the same I had seen him wear so long ago with the coyotes, and told the others of my plan. I had heard my father speak of fire bricks when the Stefano Rey National Park had caught on fire from a freak lightning storm. It seemed like the best way to defeat this fire here. I retold my idea to Edilio, who seemed to grasp onto it like a drowning man. It had been a long and exhausting night but finally we managed to compress the fire into one small area where it soon folded in on itself. Edilio watched it die with a sad weariness, Howard with a pathetic smirk, Orc was about as revealing as a rock, no pun intended, and the others watched it with emotions varying from anguish to defeat to small albeit unbridled victory. I, myself, watched it with a mix between contempt and conquest. To me, this fire was the final campaign in the war against love. And I just won.

I had spent almost half of my life hating anything and everything that had to deal with the four letter word associated with Valentine's Day and marriage. When I thought irony had spent all of its time laughing at me, it gave me one last gift. The fire, which had inadvertently destroyed my family, was my ally for once. Its ravage upon Perdido Beach killed all renegade thoughts of love in my mind. I had finally become immune to the disease. Like it was before the FAYZ, love was again an empty word, and that was the way I preferred it. I was numb to all emotions that ran along that thin line between love and friendship. I suppose some would say this isn't a healthy way of thinking. If things had been different when I was a child, I certainly wouldn't be like this now. Some could definitely argue that I've killed all of my happiness and this will soon be my downfall. But I would rather sacrifice any happiness to maintain my duties. With love, you can not perform as well. Love clouds one's rational thinking like thick, toxic smoke and leaves them bare to fatal mistakes. Love makes people brittle, senseless, and weak. It is a cruel, illogical monster. I suppose I should be grateful that you can't drown in fire like you can in freezing cold water. Fire is not completely harmless though, either. I have learned that playing too close to the flames will get you burned, but that's only if you believe it will. Lucky for me, I know that love doesn't exist.

Cause everything inside looks like...Everything I hate
I'm on fire...Burning at these mysteries


Please offer advice on ways I can improve my writing! With the small amount of info given for this girl, I feel like I was making a new character. I hope she doesn't sound too Mary Sueish. Thank you for reading! Also, a special thanks to my reviewers from 'Losing My Religion'!

Strawberry-fluff - Thank you for your review! I don't think I'm going to make a sequel to the 'Losing My Religion' shot but you will definitely see Caine and Diana again :).

Unlucky Word Shaker - Thank you! That was my first attempt at Diana so hopefully I'll get her voice down soon. I have no clue where the Justin Beiber answer came from. I think I was trying for a sarcastic angle yet it fell kinda flat. Oh well :). And thanks again-I was worried about the title but I guess I shouldn't be.