"Urgh..."
Ryou awakens to the sound of sirens and yelling all around him. Slowly blinking his eyes open, he winces against the sudden light, awkwardly lifting one hand to shield his eyes against the sunlight only to feel something wet on his forehead. He pulls his hand back within his line of sight, blinking dazedly at the sight of something red on it (Is that blood? Why's he bleeding?), but before he can really comprehend it, someone off to his side speaks to him.
"Hey, easy does it, kid." Looking off to the side, he can see a paramedic crouching next to him, looking at him with concern. "You were just in an accident. Can you tell me your name?"
"...Bakura Ryou..." An accident? For a moment he can't think of why he would have been in an accident, but then his gaze slips behind the paramedic to see a car crumpled against a guardrail, tire tracks stretching out along the icy road behind it. At first he can't recognize the boxy grey car, as mangled as it is, but then it hits him that he does know this car.
That's his family's car.
"I - where's my family?" Ryou struggles to sit, panic flaring up inside as he suddenly recalls the car skidding sideways, his mother trying to steer, how he frantically tried to hold onto his screaming sister before what must have been the impact that knocked him out, despite the paramedic trying to get him to stay down. "Where's-"
A flash of pale blue catches his eye, and he looks further down the sidewalk to see a small form laid out on the pavement, obscured by a plain white sheet. The sheet hides most features, but the long pale blue hair peeking out from underneath that's now matted with blood gives Ryou enough clue to know exactly who's under there, and for a single horrible second his heart seems to freeze at the sight before he snaps back to reality.
"Amane!" He pushes against the arms of the paramedic, struggling to break free despite being held back. "Let me go, that's my sister! I need to help her! Let go-"
Suddenly there's a pulse of heat in his core, warming him against the January chill, but it's not just a slight warmth. It's hot, burning to be unleashed on his surroundings, and all Ryou can think about is how easy it would be to let that heat out. To just burn everything to reach his sister and make sure she's alright after the accident. He doesn't notice how the paramedic has pulled back and away from him, eyes wide as he calls for backup, nor does he notice the tiny pink embers shooting off his arms as the heat builds to a breaking point.
No, the only thing on his mind now is the desperate need to Burn.
And burn he does, abruptly bursting into bright pink flame that reaches for the sky and lights the crumpled wreck of his family's car ablaze as he staggers upright, gaze locked on his sister under that sheet. Ryou stumbles forward, leaving little patches of fire on the sidewalk behind him as he moves, oblivious to all but the need to Get To His Little Sister and the need to Burn More, to spread his flames further than just the car and the sidewalk.
"Amane-" Suddenly he's struck by a blast of cold, knocking him sideways to the ground as his flames die out. He cries out in shock, fighting to ignite himself again, but there's suddenly someone holding him to the ground while someone else secures a metal block around his arms, trapping his hands within despite his thrashing around and wild sparking.
"Let go of me! Let me bur - aagghhh!" Suddenly his hands are frozen stiff, and he looks down to find that the block has encased itself and part of his arms in solid ice. Ryou screams in desperate frustration and pain, and he tries frantically to get his hands warmed up, pink flames briefly emitting from the top of the box only for it to freeze up again, drawing another scream from him as another layer of ice encrusts his hands. He tries again and again, continuing to squirm and thrash and scream as the box just freezes his hands over and over while his captors - people he only dimly recognizes as more paramedics - keep him pinned down until someone else runs to his side.
"I - I just - let me go..." The new person - the paramedic from before - doesn't respond to Ryou's plea for help, instead pulling out a syringe of something and injecting it into his arm. All at once he's tired, exhaustion creeping in, and the last thing he recalls before he slips under is the vague question of why he's being treated like this.
Ryou awakens to find himself in a hospital bed, his clothes switched out for a hospital robe at some point. He sits up, still somewhat dazed from being knocked out, only to stop short as his arms don't move the way he wants them to.
"What..." Looking down, he finds his hands still trapped in their metal box, though the box is at least now defrosted and not actively freezing him. Panic building, he shakes his arms around, trying to work himself free, until a few sparks shoot from the top of the box and it beeps and freezes up all over again.
"Hhhhhh..." He whines, curling in on himself as his hands ache from the cold and the sparks die out again. "Why..."
Before he can question what's happening further, a doctor slips into the room, only pausing briefly as she realizes Ryou is awake before pulling up a chair to sit down.
(Oddly, the doctor is sitting some distance away from him, as if she's unwilling to come closer to Ryou despite his hands being sealed up and unable to do anything. What does she expect him to do, anyways?)
"Hello, I see you're awake." The doctor flips through a clipboard, never making eye contact with Ryou. "Bakura Ryou, age nine, correct?"
Ryou can only nod, still not quite putting the pieces of what happened to lead to this together. "...Yeah, I...what happened? What's with the box?"
The doctor blinks. "You don't remember?"
"...No, I know there was a crash, and I wanted to get to my sister..." And he'd wanted so badly to burn everything to get to her for some reason. The urge to burn is still there, in the back of his mind, and his fingers twitch in their icy prison at the thought.
Then another thought hits him. Only Burnish want to burn things like that, but he's not a Burnish. But if he's normal, then why is he stuck like this, hands trapped in what's starting to look like anti Burnish cuffs and frozen stiff? Why does the doctor not want to get near him, like he's some sort of threat?
As if in answer to his questions, more tiny, weak flames emit from where his arms disappear into their little prison, followed by another burst of ice that reaches halfway up his forearms as the anti Burnish cuffs do their job. Ryou flinches, eyes widening in horror at the realization that he's become a Burnish.
"I...no...I don't..." He chokes out, tears welling up as he pushes himself sideways and away from the doctor who just watches him, never coming any closer to him. "...I don't want to be like this..."
"Unfortunately, there's no way for you to go back to normal now. You mutated into a Burnish after the crash and started flaring out of control, forcing the need to restrain you before you could cause more damage."
"No! I didn't - I just wanted my sister!" Ryou wails, mentally rejecting the idea that he could have actually done any of that despite all the evidence otherwise. "Where's my family?! Where are they?!"
Ryou's distress causes him to instinctively try to flare again, his hands very briefly warming as they're enveloped by flames only for the cuffs to activate with a beep. This time the ice crawls its way up to his elbows, and Ryou helplessly cries out in pain and fear as he shakes from the cold.
"M-make it stop...please..." Ryou curls in on himself for any scrap of warmth, trying desperately to stop himself from continuing to try and flare up so that the cuffs won't freeze him again. For a moment, the doctor stares at him, and Ryou thinks that he can see a bit of sympathy in her eyes, but then she shakes her head no.
"I'm sorry, but I can't permanently remove them until I know you've gotten control of yourself. Right now they're what's keeping you in check."
"What?! But-" Another beep, and another blast of ice halts yet another attempted flareup. Ryou whimpers as the cold seems to sink bone deep, struggling to think through the fear and pain and the desire to burn, to warm himself up the only way he can.
It's that desire to burn that scares him the most. Ryou's heard enough stories to know that it's some sort of instinct that all Burnish experience, that it's the reason why the Burnish are as dangerous as they are and why they so often start fires.
And now he's one of those dangerous Burnish who wants to burn things with his fire.
Choking back another whimper, Ryou clamps down hard on the need to burn things, pushing it back in his mind so that he can avoid another flareup. His hands are still frozen within the cuffs, but by now the ice on his arms is melting, and he watches it melt with a sort of dull curiosity as he fights to stay calm.
(Despite the bitter cold, his arms aren't even slightly marked from the ice coverage. It's as if the ice had never coated them in the first place.)
"...Where's my family?" Ryou wants to see them, to know they're okay after the crash and to have some sort of comfort after becoming a Burnish. He looks to the doctor, but she only has that sympathetic look again and his heart sinks without his even knowing why.
"...I'm sorry, but your mother and sister are both dead. They died in the crash."
"What...? I saw Amane, I saw her after the crash..." Ryou thinks back to the last time he saw his younger sister, all but her bloodied hair obscured by a sheet on the pavement. Could she have been dead all along, his efforts to protect her during the crash in vain?
"A-Amane...Mom..."
The doctor mentions something about his father, but Ryou doesn't hear her as he breaks down sobbing, not even caring anymore as the cuffs freeze his hands again. It's gross, ugly, loud sobbing, muffled only when he buries his face in his pillow in an attempt to not have to look at the doctor who still won't come near him. Eventually she leaves the room to let him grieve, but Ryou doesn't notice as he just keeps crying until he eventually exhausts himself and falls into an uneasy sleep.
The sounds of footsteps outside his hospital room are what pulls Ryou out of his sleep. Blinking the sleep out of his eyes (and realizing that hey, the anti Burnish cuffs aren't freezing him anymore, the horrid box must have stopped activating while he was out), he turns to look at the door just as it opens, revealing-
"Papa!" He perks up, relieved to see his father finally here after all he's been through today, only to frown in confusion as his father pauses just inside the doorway to stare at him.
"...Papa? I...I'm over here." His father slowly walks over to him, sitting on the edge of the bed and not saying a word. Ryou sits there awkwardly, trying to figure out why his own father is acting so odd to him, before deciding to just talk.
"...Is it the cuffs?" He sort of lifts his cuffed hands, showing the metal box to his father. "The doctor said that it can't be removed until I can control my flares, but-"
His father flinches at the mention of his flareups, and Ryou falls silent as he realizes what the problem is.
His own father is afraid of him.
Ryou shrinks back, trying to look like he's not the dangerous Burnish he is, and he speaks faster, trying to get through to his father.
"I don't really want to burn anything, I just...I just want to be a normal person. All I want is to go home and play with Ama-"
He breaks off his explanation, blinking back tears as he remembers with a stab of grief that no, he can never play with Amane again. It seems that this gets through to his father, as Ryou is slowly pulled into an awkward hug, one that Ryou can't return because of the cuffs binding his arms together.
"...You're warm, Ryou." Ryou looks up at his father, still fighting not to cry over his sister's death, and it takes him a moment to realize why he would be warmer than normal.
"...I think it's because...you know..." He can't bring himself to say it out loud to his father, too afraid of how he might react to hearing him admit what he is now.
His father doesn't have that same reluctance though, and plainly addresses the massive burning elephant in the room.
"...Because you're a Burnish now?"
Ryou nods, glancing away as he tries to keep up the appearance of being the same as always.
"...Yeah. I haven't changed though, I'm still me-"
"Ryou, this changes a lot of things. How well do you think you can control yourself? You and I both know how the Burnish are with fires!"
Ryou doesn't answer, too afraid of what he knows the answer is. Taking his silence as some sort of permission to keep going, his father plunges on.
"Ryou, how often do you 'flare up'?"
"I'm trying to control it-" Ryou abruptly stops as he flares up right then and there, the distinctive hot pink flames briefly peeking out from the armholes in the anti Burnish cuffs before the freezing kicks in. He lets out a pained whine and tenses up as the now familiar cold sets in, looking down to see that yes, the ice has reached partway up his arms again. Looking back up reveals his father has seen this too, and both father and son struggle to find the words for what just happened.
"...I don't mean to do it, Papa, I just get upset and it happens-" Ryou instantly knows that was the wrong thing to say as his father flinches back and away from him.
"Does this happen every time you get upset?" His father is staring at him again, watching with a look that says that he expects Ryou to burst into flame on the spot.
"I...yes."
His father doesn't respond, only staring at Ryou with that uneasy look in his eyes, and Ryou knows exactly what his father sees. Someone dangerous, someone who can't control his own flareups or hide that he's a Burnish.
"...I'm sorry. I don't want to be a Burnish, and I promise I won't burn stuff or hurt anyone!" He can resist using his fire, right? All to get his father to stop fearing him?
"...Alright. Thank you, Ryou." Ryou still doesn't like how his father is looking at him, but at least he's getting somewhere.
In the meantime, the two just sit silently, neither wanting to think too hard about what Ryou's future as a Burnish looks like.