Disclaimer: not mine
Warning: suicide, depression, self-mutilation.... weirdness 0.0
I stared into the fire's sapphire depths; the beautiful blue base of the fire, growing into crimson and tiger-orange flames, tapering into gold at the end. The flames were alive, dancing, flowing, weaving... I sat there, my arms resting in my lap, hands clasped, my body, for once, completely relaxed, as the fire dance reflected in my eyes, which were glazed over, in wonder, in some sort of (deranged, perhaps?) joy.
Fire, my antithesis... It was so unlike me, such a delightful opposite... Fire had always enchanted me. Fire was beautiful, alive, vibrant, powerful, pure, full of wonder, surprise, excitement. It was everything I wasn't. I was ugly, a body with no soul, dull, weak, toxic, monotonous, routine, boring... In short, Fire was perfect... I was everything that could make me not perfect.
Odd, something that I loved so much could be so unlike me. Strange, that something so dear to me could burn me far worse than any normal youkai, or even ningen. Perplexing, that I should love that which I could never have. Ghastly, that I should be able to create it, watch it, admire it, but never, never touch.
I used to touch it... hold it, though it would never stay in my hands. Bathe in it, even. But Jin hated it. Hated seeing me with burns on my hands, my face. I stopped, because he was like fire in flesh. He mastered wind, but... he was always fire to me.
Restless, beautiful, strong... He was everything I saw in fire. Everything I longed to see in myself, but never found. He didn't like it when I touched the fire. So I stopped. "Don't be playin' with fire!" he said. It was the day I stopped talking to him. Because talking to him, even being around him, was playing with fire.
But I still watched it. I still watched him. I longed for fire so desperately...
He left, not long after I stopped talking to him. He was the only thing stopping me.
My 'playing with fire' increased. I needed to watch it more. I needed the burn of it again. Needed it to purify me. I began burning myself again.
By this point, I had not only gotten used to the pain, I enjoyed it. I discovered different acids I could pour on myself to cause a most delightful burning sensation when I couldn't use fire. But it wasn't the same. I discovered kerosene, wax, oil... wonderfully flammable substances. I liked to pour such things in my palm and watch the fire, hold it in my hand like that.
Jin was gone. The Shinobi sect was broken and spread far and wide. I had no more food, no real home. So I decided.
I found an old, deserted building. I poured kerosene in the halls, gunpowder, all sorts of things. I poured the kerosene over my body, all over. I took a match, looking at it carefully.
I could change my mind. I didn't want to. I wanted the peace, strength, beauty, purity... that only burning could give. I struck the match, watching as the head caught light in a flash of white, an acrid chemical smell, and then the fire turned golden as it moved down the wood of the match. I tossed it into a large puddle of kerosene. The fire spread immediately.
It devoured the building quickly. I heard timbers cracking around me. I stared at the fire, watching it in my usual sense of wonder, my flame-induced Nirvana. The fire spread to me. I shuddered, as the flame raced along my body.
The last minute, when I had abandoned myself, I thought I heard Jin's voice. "Don't be playin' with fire!" Too late.
"The old mill house burned down a couple days ago. Heard it lit in a flash, and was gone after only a short time."
"Well, the old building was an accident waiting to happen. At least now it's gone."
"Yeah, but I wonder how it caught?"
"I don't know. At least no one was in it."
"Well, we don't know that, right? The forensics and arson police said there was nothing left to be able to tell."
"The place has been abandoned for years, and no one was squatting there, the police had checked it for squatters only the day before."
"I suppose..."
"Ow!"
"I told you not to pick the flowers around the remains of the old mill house!"
"But they're so much more beautiful, and bright and colorful than the other flowers!"
"Yes, but they're like fire – pretty to the eye, but awful to the touch. They've got poison in them that'll raise sores that look like burns, and thorns that secrete more of such poison."
"The fire patch? They say it's haunted. They say a young man sits there, staring into a ghostly fire some nights, and he just watches the fire. They say he burns himself, and hisses and shakes when the fire touches him, but burns himself anyway. They say the man he loved left him."
They say a lot of things about me. But who can know the truth? For the dead don't speak truth nor lies.