06—flame
Where did the flame come from?
Surely not of this world. No known chemical would produce a fire that would damage the mind and not the body. A blessing for the good that was ultimately alien.
When preparing himself for the pain of judgment, Kai did not imagine that it would include Gaillard striking him with his own hand. It was obvious that Gaillard desperately wanted to hurt him back, even if he had to resort to base means to do so once his powers had failed him.
Withstanding the blow, Kai kept himself upright. Gaillard could barely stand on his feet, and looked more like the victim.
There was a stillness within Kai's mind. It was the opposite of emptiness, as he went through his available options. He could punch Gaillard back. He could shout at Gaillard's face and insist that he had changed. He could point out that Gaillard was not the pure-hearted, loyal knight that he thought he was, and that he was as vengeful as any human would be to other humans who had made their life unbearable.
Why did the flame exist in the first place?
The stakes are raised, but the game stays the same. This has all been decided by a distant god. You are either an honorary immortal, or a mortal denied of memory; of eternity.
In what seemed like ages ago, Naoki kept bombarding Kai with questions as they roamed the winding maze of the Quatre Knights' headquarters. "How are they able to breathe on the moon?" "How are they able to build this on the moon?" "Why are they able to use magic Vanguard circles, and we can't?" "Hey, if all this depends on how strong you are at Vanguard, then does that mean you can technically do what they do?"
Kai's first instinct was to tell Naoki to shut up, but he checked himself and remembered that he had been thinking about those same things all along. It started when he had his first taste of superhuman reality, back when he walked the barren waste lands of Cray. It entered his mind then that anyone could be more than human, or less than
In the present, Kai watched the prison of blue flames form around him for the fourth time. He had gone through the two outcomes that the fiery field presented: either get burned himself or watch Gaillard burn.
In the end, both of them were made of flammable stuff.
When will it be time to put out the flames?
At the end of it all, Kai and Gaillard stared into their reflections in the Void. And then they realized that they could always look at each other. Gaillard was looking at Kai in the same way when Kai gave him permission to vent all his rage on him. His soft gaze was adulterated with a sense of restraint.
Just when Kai was sure that Gaillard was not about to acknowledge him, not just yet, Gaillard slipped off one of his rings. With measured movements, he held Kai's wrist with one hand and fastened the ring onto Kai's third finger.
"Go on, Kai Toshiki." He said. "Go on and tell fate to fuck off."
As Gaillard let go of Kai's hand and stepped away, Kai flicked his wrist and summoned a column of crimson flames.
"There you go," he said. "That's the colour of my flames."
A/N: In sum, the only difference that matters is that they are essentially the same. Holy contradiction! TGIF, everyone :)