It had happened like this: Meredith had lost control of her powers. She knew it was technically pointless to worry about Claire getting hurt, but the others were another story. Meredith had known Claire would never have forgiven her if she'd hurt her family-her real family-and that would mean Meredith wouldn't be able to forgive herself either. At the moment, she had been dangerous, and she'd needed her daughter to get out of there as quickly as possible. She'd felt whatever scrap of control over her abilities she'd had left fade away as the heat had crept through her body, threatening to send the whole room up in flames with her inside.
And then it had.
The explosion had been quieter than the ones in the movies. Maybe it'd actually been loud and just gotten muffled or something, but all Meredith had heard was a pop before everything around her was just gone. She remembered a rushing in her ears and a silent scream escaping from her lips as they burned away.
When it had all been over, Meredith had been beyond stunned to be alive. Nobody could ever have survived such an explosion. She was hardly a scientist, but she knew full well that that wasn't how human bodies worked. However, as she had glanced down at herself incredulously, she'd realized that she hadn't exactly had a human body anymore. Instead, she had been entirely made up of flames.
It had taken Meredith a while to figure out what was going on. Clearly, somehow her fire powers had escalated into her being able to straight-up turn into fire. From that point on, Meredith had known that her life would never be the same again-and sure enough, it hadn't been. She'd lived like a lost soul haunting the charred remains of the Pinehearst headquarters, searching for some formula which could return her to normal. Her efforts, of course, had been in vain; as far as she could tell, she'd been the only thing to survive the explosion.
It had taken months to gain enough composure to keep a vaguely humanoid shape, and almost a year to figure out that she could revert to flesh and blood at all. The day she had made that discovery, it had been raining. No, more than raining-it was a torrential downpour. There had been a lot of flooding, and Meredith remembered being shocked to feel her ankles grow cold as the water had risen around her. After so long, it had felt so foreign to her that she hadn't even known what was happening until she had bent down to look at herself and seen the fire that formed her body slowly receding, giving way to flesh and blood.
Meredith hated the rain, and she hated cold, but she was eternally grateful to it too. Were it not for the rain, she wouldn't have been able to stop herself from becoming flame at any given moment. Most of the time, she still couldn't. Whenever her emotions flared up, it was especially hard to control. She was a danger to everyone around her, which was why ever since the day she should have died, she'd been lying low and trying to stay out of people's way as much as possible. She had gone back to her trailer in Texas for a while, and tried to track down her brother, but the Texas heat and her new tendency to flare up didn't mix well. As such, she had started more or less roaming from place to place until she'd eventually wound up in LA. Now, she was sitting in a the rain on a park bench, staring up at a complete stranger who was looking at Meredith like she knew her from somewhere. Meredith wracked her brain to see if she recalled ever meeting this woman before, but she came up empty. She had to admit, though, that this ice woman was… well, to put it simply, she was quite lovely. Meredith envied her looks.
"...And you are?" Meredith prompted after they held each other's gazes just long enough to be uncomfortable.
The other woman blinked, as though snapping out of a trance. "I'm Tracy," she said, holding her hand out for a shake. "I live a few blocks down from here."
"Well, Tracy," said Meredith, shaking Tracy's hand-Tracy winced at the contact, and Meredith felt a twinge of guilt as she willed her body temperature lower. "It's nice to meet you."