More Sky High fic.
Aug. 30th, 2007 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rahmiTitle: A Fire to Be Lit
Fandom: Sky High
Characters: Warren Peace, Nurse Spex
Pairings: None
Summary: Superpowers or not, teenagers still need to see the nurse.
The first time Warren comes to Sky High, he's fifteen and already towering over the other freshman in his class. Part of this has to do with both of his parents being tall, but the other half is that he's something like fourteen months older than all of his classmates.
He's five foot eleven and he's failed eighth grade once and almost failed it the second time around for good measure; it's hard to pass classes when you're always getting suspended for fighting. His mom's threatened to disown him more than once.
Warren narrows his eyes at the other kids milling by him and they all back off three or four steps. Better.
The first whisper of Baron Battle's son (never Evelyn Peace's, even though he has her last name and he hasn't seen his father since he was six) being in the superhero school follow him in. He's got an empty circle around him at least a three feet in every direction.
---------
The first time he's picked for Save the Citizen, they just keep picking him. He loses battle after battle, throwing fireballs and burning whoever comes close enough because there's no way in hell he's going to be able to get through two seniors to save the dummy.
The spectators sneer at him, his opponents laugh while they douse him in water or make him stumble because of an invisible shove, and Coach Boomer just calls him Hothead and smiles when they keep choosing him as an opponent.
Coach Boomer lets them keep picking him and picking him, pairing him with other freshman, juniors, sophomores, seniors, until the two hour class is over and he's ready to drop from exhaustion. He's furious with himself and the school as a whole, sick of listening to people scream that he's weaker than his father is and twice as likely to go evil.
"Hothead, hit the showers," Coach Boomer finally calls, chuckling to himself, "Good hustle out there; you'll get better at it."
Warren stumbles off towards the shower and wakes up in the nurse's office. He stinks, he's hot, and he has no idea how the hell he got here.
He drapes an arm across his eyes and thinks. He's never hot. He's usually cold, actually, because most days the temperature doesn't even come close to what his own is. Hot?
"You awake now? You took a nasty little beating out there. I've told them that Save the Citizen is too dangerous for freshman, but do they listen to the school nurse? Of course not." There's an old lady sigh, heavy with "in my day..." implications.
He removes the arm from his eyes with more effort than it should take and looks at the nurse. Spex, he drags out of somewhere in his head. She was a sidekick forty years ago, with x-ray vision and nothing else. Kind of worthless, when you got right down to it.
"I'm hot," he finally says.
"Your body temperature is elated to help with your powers," the nurse responds easily.
"I know," Warren mutters back. It's kind of hard to miss the fact that everyone feels cold to him and he's wearing a jacket when the kids around him are in shorts and tanks. "It's usually not like this."
He'd burned his mom, once, even when he wasn't powered up; she'd touched him when he'd been pissed about something, school or trying to wrap his tongue around Cantonese or something equally stupid, and she'd hissed in a breath and drawn her hand back with a first-degree burn. That hadn't happened in a while. He's careful, even if nobody else believes it.
Nurse Spex makes a little noise of acknowledgement under her breath, shuffling things on her shelf. "Good, good. I'd expect you to know something like that." She closes in with a thermometer in one hand, something Warren hasn't had to use in... years.
Nurse Spex shoves a thermometer in his mouth as soon as she's close enough. Warren sits up, keeps it in his mouth only because his head is killing him. Spex smiles at him, clucking under her breath as she turns around to reach for his chart. "Your normal temperature is 115.7?" she asks, flipping through the papers.
Warren nods and clamps his teeth around the thermometer when it threatens to slip out.
The nurse pulls it out of his mouth a second later, humming lightly to herself. Warren feels fire flare along his shoulders and lets it; his hair lifts in the sudden heat and then flattens when it whooshes out just as quickly. His headache picks up intensity.
Nurse Spex doesn't even glance up from reading the thermometer.
"You're running a little high, Mr. Peace," she finally decides. Warren rubs away the sweat starting to bead on his forehead and bares his teeth at her back. He could have told her that. He never sweats. "Looks like you're at about 118 degrees."
Spex shakes out the thermometer while Warren stares into space and tries not to burn her by proximity. "I know it doesn't sound like much, three degrees, but there's a fine line between your normal body temperature and your organs cooking in your chest."
She lifts her glasses up and peeks at his chest while he's still trying to figure out if he can actually cook himself, since he's a pyrokinetic and all, red light flaring from her eyes; Warren clenches his fingers on the edge of the bed and feels the metal start to soften under their heat. "They look fine, by the way. No harm done.
"I'd appreciate it if you didn't melt my bed into slag. It's already uncomfortable enough as it is, don't you think?" Spex smiled easily at him, wrinkles framing her mouth.
He glances at her and let his hair fall into his face. Warren eases his fingers away from the metal, digs them into his own thighs instead and hopes that his jeans aren't going to catch fire if he stops paying attention to his hands.
His head still hurts, his fingers are shaking, and he knows if anyone were to accidentally touch him right now, they'd walk away with third degree burns. So far, he thinks this nurse is really, really terrible at her job.
"Have you had anything to drink today?" The nurse asks suddenly.
Warren narrows his eyes and tilts his head slightly to the side, tucking one side of his hair behind his ear when it gets in the way. "Why does that matter?"
"You need to drink water before and after you power up," she says. She pushes her glasses back up and smiles patiently at him. He looks away, forces the heat back in until she can come within a foot of him without scorching. "Lots and lots; keep those insides nice and wet. Makes it so you don't pass out when you use your powers extensively. Here you go."
There's a sweating bottle of water suddenly pushed into his hands; the condensation on the outside steams off with a hiss as soon as he touches it and Spex purses her lips and grabs another one. Warren twists off the cap of the now lukewarm water and takes a gulp while she sets the other bottle on the bed next to him. "Now, you drink that and this one too," she says, "And then we'll see how you're feeling, hmm?"
She turns away to mess with the counter, but not before Warren hears her mutter under her breath. "Honestly, you'd think they'd teach superheroes how to take care of themselves."
He ignores it, drains the nearly boiling water and scrapes his tongue against the top of his mouth to get rid of the gritty taste it leaves behind. The empty bottle melts into a sad little lump of plastic in one hand while he picks up the other and downs it too.
He doesn't feel any better.
"Stop using your powers, Mr. Peace," the nurse says without looking back, "You need to recharge for a little while. You don't have an infinite energy. Take another bottle of water and go catch the bus before it leaves."
There's a sucker on top of the bottle of water she motions to. Warren takes both items and stumbles his way towards the front of the school. His mom is not going to be happy.
---------
The first time he falls asleep in Mad Science, Mr. Medulla sends him to Nurse Spex because, "No healthy person could be so bored with Mad Science that they fall asleep, Mr. Peace."
He drags his feet the entire way, heating up his fingers and rubbing his eyes in an attempt to wake himself up. It had been a late night at the Paper Lantern and an even later night of trying to figure out what the hell Mr. Muk had called him before he left, and he's tired.
Warren wouldn't even be working if Mom could find a steady job. Instead, they're both stuck working minimum wage shit jobs when she should be out saving the world instead of ducking her head in disgrace every time she has to go out in public.
Fire flares along his fingertips and he drops them before he has to worry about singing off his eyelashes. Not that he's ever done that, but now wouldn't be a great time to figure it out. He knows he can't scorch his own hair off, he's assuming it's the same for all his hair, but wouldn't the school love it if they could point and laugh at the freak who hurt himself with his own powers?
Whatever.
He trails his flaming fingers along the lockers in the hallway and leaves a line of soot.
"Mr. Medulla says you should check me out," he says as soon as he gets into the nurse's office.
"Sleeping through his class?" the nurse returns cheerfully, "I get at least one of those a day. Have a seat."
---------
The first time he takes out one of the seniors laughing about Baron Battle's prison time, Warren's not the one who gets sent to the nurse's office. He takes an absurd amount of pride in that, even if his mother looks close to tears when he gets home.
Nobody's allowed to talk about his father except him.
---------
The first time he breaks a bone, he barely even feels it. It stops him only long enough for him to make sure that it's healing like it should and then he's pulling himself to his feet and snarling at both Stronghold and the cheering cafeteria.
Nurse Spex is not quite as unconcerned about it, when Principal Powers finally lets them out of the detention room and sends him to her office.
"Fighting again, eh, Warren?" she asks when she sees him. She waves him onto the bed that still has his fingerprints melted into the frame and thins her mouth out. Warren feels unaccountably ashamed of his actions and looks away. "You're lucky you have your mother's power.
"Still," she continues when he perches on the edge of the bed, "That doesn't mean you should be careless." She tugs her glasses down and Warren closes his eyes while she scans him and hisses under her breath.
"Young man, you had better eat a big meal tonight. Make sure it has plenty of calcium." Her fingers touch the bridge of his nose, poking gently, and then skitter over to the bone over his right eye. Warren doesn't flinch, but only because he's too tired to bother twitching his muscles if he doesn't have to. "That's two breaks in your skull alone."
She clucks some more.
"Three broken ribs, nicely healed. Fracture to the spine. I'm surprised; your mother wouldn't have been able to heal that nearly as fast as you did." Warren sees red light through his eyelids and tries not to flinch away from it. He hates that, he wants her to be finished already. The litany of injuries is making him queasy. "And what looks like the remains of a compound fracture in the ulna."
Warren opens his eyes in time to see her push her glasses back up onto her nose. Spex gives him a little smile and hands him a litre of cold water; the label boasts that there's calcium carbonate and potassium in the water and Warren resigns himself to gritty water again. "Drink that, make sure you eat a big meal, every meal, for at least a week, and take these." She sets a bottle of pills on the bed next to his leg and turns away.
"That all?" Warren asks.
He wants to leave, go home and get his ass chewed out so that he can crash for the night. He's tired. He wasn't expecting Stronghold to fight back, not really; the kid was a sidekick with no powers, he should have been able to scare him into leaving him the hell alone for the rest of his high school career. But, no, he had to manifest super strength in the middle of it and now Warren feels like hell.
It takes him a second to realize he's closed his eyes again and by that time he's already starting to drift off. Warren forces them open to find that Nurse Spex is watching him with gentle eyes.
"Take two of those before you leave." Warren stares right back at her, trying to make his suddenly fuzzy head figure out just what the hell she's talking about. She sighs and points her stethoscope at the bottle of pills next to him. "They're calcium pills, Warren. Take them before you eat tonight."
Warren reaches over to pick up the bottle and let a lick of fire melt the childproofing seal completely off. He doesn't want to mess around with them right now; the cap pops off with a tortured squeal of plastic, bouncing along the floor as he shakes out two pills and swallows them dry. They're hot and they try to stick in the back of his throat.
"Water," Spex reminds him, amusement singing through her voice. Warren grunts, twists the cap off his water, and drinks half of it in a single gulp.
"I'm leaving now," he says. He sways when he gets to his feet, but he stays on them.
The nurse just shakes her head and offers him a lollipop. "Let me know if you start to feel weak or if those breaks start hurting. Get a good night's sleep. Try to stay out of any more fights with people with super strength, hmm?"
---------
The last time he sets foot in Sky High, Will, Layla, Magenta, Ethan, and Zack all crowd into the infirmary with him. He's six foot two, he's got his hero license, and he doesn't know why the hell he's still hanging around with the loser sidekicks from his sophomore year.
This was supposed to be his physical. But they'd all barged their way in as soon as he'd put his clothes back on and they've been hanging around the nurse's office ever since.
Layla perches on the foot of the bed, proprietarily gripping one of his hands between two of her smaller ones as she traces the flame marking on his wrist. Will leans half against Warren's shoulder, unconcerned with what his girlfriend's doing, talking a mile a minute with Nurse Spex about what his father was like in high school. Warren tries to ignore the both of them being in his space and mostly succeeds.
Ethan's playing with his palm pilot and Magenta's braiding the purple streaks in her hair while Zack hovers his fingers ineffectually over another part of his girlfriend's hair.
It's weird, is what it is.
"Hey, why'd you get these, anyway?" Will asks abruptly and Warren has to focus. The other boy reaches over Layla, presses carefully on the fire tattoos spiraling up his wrists; Warren feels the bruise start to rise, heal instantly, and start to rise again under the pressure of Will's finger.
He raises his eyebrows at Will. "Too much pressure," he says lightly. Will looks embarrassed, lifts his finger off and presses down again, more lightly. "Yeah, better."
Layla lets go of his hand to twine her fingers with Will's, smiling. "He's getting better."
"Heroes always have better control when they get older," Nurse Spex interrupts. She offers all of them a sucker; cherry flavored like always, and then tilts her head. "Those are pyro tattoos," she says after they've accepted them, "They appear on fire users sometimes, like the hair streaks. We still haven't figured out why."
Ethan gets a speculative look in his eyes. Warren hurries to talk before he can. "They showed up the day after I powered up for the first time."
"Like my hair," Magenta says thoughtfully. She waves the braid she's been working on at the lot of them, then shrugs and goes back to what she was doing. Zack finally pulls the courage from somewhere to put his hands on her hair and comb his fingers through.
"And Warren's too," Layla shoots back. She reaches up and separates the bright red strands from the brown in Warren's hair and Warren lets her. Layla's pretty gentle about it, after all, and if he smacked her hand away Will would just do it; Will's liable to yank them all out on accident.
Layla twists quickly, tugging gently on his hair, and when she lets go Warren can see thin vines wrapped around the red hair.
Half a thought and the vines burst into flame and fall in ash rain to the bed.
Will snorts quietly. Nurse Spex hands him a bottle of water and gives him a steady glare until he cracks the top and takes a swig.
Fandom: Sky High
Characters: Warren Peace, Nurse Spex
Pairings: None
Summary: Superpowers or not, teenagers still need to see the nurse.
The first time Warren comes to Sky High, he's fifteen and already towering over the other freshman in his class. Part of this has to do with both of his parents being tall, but the other half is that he's something like fourteen months older than all of his classmates.
He's five foot eleven and he's failed eighth grade once and almost failed it the second time around for good measure; it's hard to pass classes when you're always getting suspended for fighting. His mom's threatened to disown him more than once.
Warren narrows his eyes at the other kids milling by him and they all back off three or four steps. Better.
The first whisper of Baron Battle's son (never Evelyn Peace's, even though he has her last name and he hasn't seen his father since he was six) being in the superhero school follow him in. He's got an empty circle around him at least a three feet in every direction.
---------
The first time he's picked for Save the Citizen, they just keep picking him. He loses battle after battle, throwing fireballs and burning whoever comes close enough because there's no way in hell he's going to be able to get through two seniors to save the dummy.
The spectators sneer at him, his opponents laugh while they douse him in water or make him stumble because of an invisible shove, and Coach Boomer just calls him Hothead and smiles when they keep choosing him as an opponent.
Coach Boomer lets them keep picking him and picking him, pairing him with other freshman, juniors, sophomores, seniors, until the two hour class is over and he's ready to drop from exhaustion. He's furious with himself and the school as a whole, sick of listening to people scream that he's weaker than his father is and twice as likely to go evil.
"Hothead, hit the showers," Coach Boomer finally calls, chuckling to himself, "Good hustle out there; you'll get better at it."
Warren stumbles off towards the shower and wakes up in the nurse's office. He stinks, he's hot, and he has no idea how the hell he got here.
He drapes an arm across his eyes and thinks. He's never hot. He's usually cold, actually, because most days the temperature doesn't even come close to what his own is. Hot?
"You awake now? You took a nasty little beating out there. I've told them that Save the Citizen is too dangerous for freshman, but do they listen to the school nurse? Of course not." There's an old lady sigh, heavy with "in my day..." implications.
He removes the arm from his eyes with more effort than it should take and looks at the nurse. Spex, he drags out of somewhere in his head. She was a sidekick forty years ago, with x-ray vision and nothing else. Kind of worthless, when you got right down to it.
"I'm hot," he finally says.
"Your body temperature is elated to help with your powers," the nurse responds easily.
"I know," Warren mutters back. It's kind of hard to miss the fact that everyone feels cold to him and he's wearing a jacket when the kids around him are in shorts and tanks. "It's usually not like this."
He'd burned his mom, once, even when he wasn't powered up; she'd touched him when he'd been pissed about something, school or trying to wrap his tongue around Cantonese or something equally stupid, and she'd hissed in a breath and drawn her hand back with a first-degree burn. That hadn't happened in a while. He's careful, even if nobody else believes it.
Nurse Spex makes a little noise of acknowledgement under her breath, shuffling things on her shelf. "Good, good. I'd expect you to know something like that." She closes in with a thermometer in one hand, something Warren hasn't had to use in... years.
Nurse Spex shoves a thermometer in his mouth as soon as she's close enough. Warren sits up, keeps it in his mouth only because his head is killing him. Spex smiles at him, clucking under her breath as she turns around to reach for his chart. "Your normal temperature is 115.7?" she asks, flipping through the papers.
Warren nods and clamps his teeth around the thermometer when it threatens to slip out.
The nurse pulls it out of his mouth a second later, humming lightly to herself. Warren feels fire flare along his shoulders and lets it; his hair lifts in the sudden heat and then flattens when it whooshes out just as quickly. His headache picks up intensity.
Nurse Spex doesn't even glance up from reading the thermometer.
"You're running a little high, Mr. Peace," she finally decides. Warren rubs away the sweat starting to bead on his forehead and bares his teeth at her back. He could have told her that. He never sweats. "Looks like you're at about 118 degrees."
Spex shakes out the thermometer while Warren stares into space and tries not to burn her by proximity. "I know it doesn't sound like much, three degrees, but there's a fine line between your normal body temperature and your organs cooking in your chest."
She lifts her glasses up and peeks at his chest while he's still trying to figure out if he can actually cook himself, since he's a pyrokinetic and all, red light flaring from her eyes; Warren clenches his fingers on the edge of the bed and feels the metal start to soften under their heat. "They look fine, by the way. No harm done.
"I'd appreciate it if you didn't melt my bed into slag. It's already uncomfortable enough as it is, don't you think?" Spex smiled easily at him, wrinkles framing her mouth.
He glances at her and let his hair fall into his face. Warren eases his fingers away from the metal, digs them into his own thighs instead and hopes that his jeans aren't going to catch fire if he stops paying attention to his hands.
His head still hurts, his fingers are shaking, and he knows if anyone were to accidentally touch him right now, they'd walk away with third degree burns. So far, he thinks this nurse is really, really terrible at her job.
"Have you had anything to drink today?" The nurse asks suddenly.
Warren narrows his eyes and tilts his head slightly to the side, tucking one side of his hair behind his ear when it gets in the way. "Why does that matter?"
"You need to drink water before and after you power up," she says. She pushes her glasses back up and smiles patiently at him. He looks away, forces the heat back in until she can come within a foot of him without scorching. "Lots and lots; keep those insides nice and wet. Makes it so you don't pass out when you use your powers extensively. Here you go."
There's a sweating bottle of water suddenly pushed into his hands; the condensation on the outside steams off with a hiss as soon as he touches it and Spex purses her lips and grabs another one. Warren twists off the cap of the now lukewarm water and takes a gulp while she sets the other bottle on the bed next to him. "Now, you drink that and this one too," she says, "And then we'll see how you're feeling, hmm?"
She turns away to mess with the counter, but not before Warren hears her mutter under her breath. "Honestly, you'd think they'd teach superheroes how to take care of themselves."
He ignores it, drains the nearly boiling water and scrapes his tongue against the top of his mouth to get rid of the gritty taste it leaves behind. The empty bottle melts into a sad little lump of plastic in one hand while he picks up the other and downs it too.
He doesn't feel any better.
"Stop using your powers, Mr. Peace," the nurse says without looking back, "You need to recharge for a little while. You don't have an infinite energy. Take another bottle of water and go catch the bus before it leaves."
There's a sucker on top of the bottle of water she motions to. Warren takes both items and stumbles his way towards the front of the school. His mom is not going to be happy.
---------
The first time he falls asleep in Mad Science, Mr. Medulla sends him to Nurse Spex because, "No healthy person could be so bored with Mad Science that they fall asleep, Mr. Peace."
He drags his feet the entire way, heating up his fingers and rubbing his eyes in an attempt to wake himself up. It had been a late night at the Paper Lantern and an even later night of trying to figure out what the hell Mr. Muk had called him before he left, and he's tired.
Warren wouldn't even be working if Mom could find a steady job. Instead, they're both stuck working minimum wage shit jobs when she should be out saving the world instead of ducking her head in disgrace every time she has to go out in public.
Fire flares along his fingertips and he drops them before he has to worry about singing off his eyelashes. Not that he's ever done that, but now wouldn't be a great time to figure it out. He knows he can't scorch his own hair off, he's assuming it's the same for all his hair, but wouldn't the school love it if they could point and laugh at the freak who hurt himself with his own powers?
Whatever.
He trails his flaming fingers along the lockers in the hallway and leaves a line of soot.
"Mr. Medulla says you should check me out," he says as soon as he gets into the nurse's office.
"Sleeping through his class?" the nurse returns cheerfully, "I get at least one of those a day. Have a seat."
---------
The first time he takes out one of the seniors laughing about Baron Battle's prison time, Warren's not the one who gets sent to the nurse's office. He takes an absurd amount of pride in that, even if his mother looks close to tears when he gets home.
Nobody's allowed to talk about his father except him.
---------
The first time he breaks a bone, he barely even feels it. It stops him only long enough for him to make sure that it's healing like it should and then he's pulling himself to his feet and snarling at both Stronghold and the cheering cafeteria.
Nurse Spex is not quite as unconcerned about it, when Principal Powers finally lets them out of the detention room and sends him to her office.
"Fighting again, eh, Warren?" she asks when she sees him. She waves him onto the bed that still has his fingerprints melted into the frame and thins her mouth out. Warren feels unaccountably ashamed of his actions and looks away. "You're lucky you have your mother's power.
"Still," she continues when he perches on the edge of the bed, "That doesn't mean you should be careless." She tugs her glasses down and Warren closes his eyes while she scans him and hisses under her breath.
"Young man, you had better eat a big meal tonight. Make sure it has plenty of calcium." Her fingers touch the bridge of his nose, poking gently, and then skitter over to the bone over his right eye. Warren doesn't flinch, but only because he's too tired to bother twitching his muscles if he doesn't have to. "That's two breaks in your skull alone."
She clucks some more.
"Three broken ribs, nicely healed. Fracture to the spine. I'm surprised; your mother wouldn't have been able to heal that nearly as fast as you did." Warren sees red light through his eyelids and tries not to flinch away from it. He hates that, he wants her to be finished already. The litany of injuries is making him queasy. "And what looks like the remains of a compound fracture in the ulna."
Warren opens his eyes in time to see her push her glasses back up onto her nose. Spex gives him a little smile and hands him a litre of cold water; the label boasts that there's calcium carbonate and potassium in the water and Warren resigns himself to gritty water again. "Drink that, make sure you eat a big meal, every meal, for at least a week, and take these." She sets a bottle of pills on the bed next to his leg and turns away.
"That all?" Warren asks.
He wants to leave, go home and get his ass chewed out so that he can crash for the night. He's tired. He wasn't expecting Stronghold to fight back, not really; the kid was a sidekick with no powers, he should have been able to scare him into leaving him the hell alone for the rest of his high school career. But, no, he had to manifest super strength in the middle of it and now Warren feels like hell.
It takes him a second to realize he's closed his eyes again and by that time he's already starting to drift off. Warren forces them open to find that Nurse Spex is watching him with gentle eyes.
"Take two of those before you leave." Warren stares right back at her, trying to make his suddenly fuzzy head figure out just what the hell she's talking about. She sighs and points her stethoscope at the bottle of pills next to him. "They're calcium pills, Warren. Take them before you eat tonight."
Warren reaches over to pick up the bottle and let a lick of fire melt the childproofing seal completely off. He doesn't want to mess around with them right now; the cap pops off with a tortured squeal of plastic, bouncing along the floor as he shakes out two pills and swallows them dry. They're hot and they try to stick in the back of his throat.
"Water," Spex reminds him, amusement singing through her voice. Warren grunts, twists the cap off his water, and drinks half of it in a single gulp.
"I'm leaving now," he says. He sways when he gets to his feet, but he stays on them.
The nurse just shakes her head and offers him a lollipop. "Let me know if you start to feel weak or if those breaks start hurting. Get a good night's sleep. Try to stay out of any more fights with people with super strength, hmm?"
---------
The last time he sets foot in Sky High, Will, Layla, Magenta, Ethan, and Zack all crowd into the infirmary with him. He's six foot two, he's got his hero license, and he doesn't know why the hell he's still hanging around with the loser sidekicks from his sophomore year.
This was supposed to be his physical. But they'd all barged their way in as soon as he'd put his clothes back on and they've been hanging around the nurse's office ever since.
Layla perches on the foot of the bed, proprietarily gripping one of his hands between two of her smaller ones as she traces the flame marking on his wrist. Will leans half against Warren's shoulder, unconcerned with what his girlfriend's doing, talking a mile a minute with Nurse Spex about what his father was like in high school. Warren tries to ignore the both of them being in his space and mostly succeeds.
Ethan's playing with his palm pilot and Magenta's braiding the purple streaks in her hair while Zack hovers his fingers ineffectually over another part of his girlfriend's hair.
It's weird, is what it is.
"Hey, why'd you get these, anyway?" Will asks abruptly and Warren has to focus. The other boy reaches over Layla, presses carefully on the fire tattoos spiraling up his wrists; Warren feels the bruise start to rise, heal instantly, and start to rise again under the pressure of Will's finger.
He raises his eyebrows at Will. "Too much pressure," he says lightly. Will looks embarrassed, lifts his finger off and presses down again, more lightly. "Yeah, better."
Layla lets go of his hand to twine her fingers with Will's, smiling. "He's getting better."
"Heroes always have better control when they get older," Nurse Spex interrupts. She offers all of them a sucker; cherry flavored like always, and then tilts her head. "Those are pyro tattoos," she says after they've accepted them, "They appear on fire users sometimes, like the hair streaks. We still haven't figured out why."
Ethan gets a speculative look in his eyes. Warren hurries to talk before he can. "They showed up the day after I powered up for the first time."
"Like my hair," Magenta says thoughtfully. She waves the braid she's been working on at the lot of them, then shrugs and goes back to what she was doing. Zack finally pulls the courage from somewhere to put his hands on her hair and comb his fingers through.
"And Warren's too," Layla shoots back. She reaches up and separates the bright red strands from the brown in Warren's hair and Warren lets her. Layla's pretty gentle about it, after all, and if he smacked her hand away Will would just do it; Will's liable to yank them all out on accident.
Layla twists quickly, tugging gently on his hair, and when she lets go Warren can see thin vines wrapped around the red hair.
Half a thought and the vines burst into flame and fall in ash rain to the bed.
Will snorts quietly. Nurse Spex hands him a bottle of water and gives him a steady glare until he cracks the top and takes a swig.
