Shiro & Angel, Friday noonish

[x-sanfuaiyaa.livejournal.com]

Shiro comes to help Angel after she gets her vision stuck in infrared. See? He can be helpful sometimes.


Though not one to usually interact with the children (or much of anyone), there really wasn't anyone more qualified to help Angel understand her powers than Shiro. They manipulated different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, but the physical effects of their powers were similar enough that he knew just what to do. He knocked on the door to the girl's suite and couldn't help but smirk at her expression when she opened it. "There is a very simple remedy for this, and I will teach it to you."

“You’re like one giant walking woobie of heat!” Angel squeaked, quickly averting her eyes as she let him into the room. This was getting really, really annoying – it was like a powers version of having your eyelids flipped inside out or something and not being able to get them unstuck. Even closing her eyes didn’t work because her eyelids had heat! “Serves me right for practicing,” she grumbled, arms flailing a little bit. “How do I fix this?”

"Stand still. It is a very precise method, so do not squirm. Close your eyes and take a deep breath, like we practiced." Shiro walked up behind her. She wasn't much shorter than him, but he didn't need to tower over her to make this work. "Again. Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth."

Angel had worked with Shiro enough to immediately do as he said, falling into the breathing exercise with a well-practiced rhythm. Her shoulders unkinked from the irritation she’d been carrying around ever since she’d realized she couldn’t shake the heat blobs from her vision. She waited, sort of patiently, for the next set of instructions.

"Good, like that." Shiro walked around her slowly, measuring her up, making sure she was bringing herself the inner calm that pyromancers tended to lack but required for sufficient control. "Brace yourself." Without further warning, he raised a hand and smacked Angel upside the head, not hard enough to leave a bruise but she'd certainly be feeling it for a few minutes.

Out of everything that could have happened, being smacked upside the head was not something she’d been expecting. Angel yelped and danced away from him, covering her head with her arms. “Shiro! Dude, brute force doesn’t–“ She paused and squinted through her arms at him. “Hey, you’re not a moving blob of color. Oh hey, score one for brute force, I guess. I’ll have to remember that.”

"Brute force saves the day again." Shiro crossed his arms over his chest triumphantly. "Sometimes, we can be fixed just like a television or car radio that refuses to pick up the right signal. With violence."

Angel dropped her arms to her hips and eyed him with suspicion. “So if you were going to do that from the get go, was the whole breathing thing necessary? Did it add anything at all?”

"Absolutely not. But if I told you what I was going to do, you would not have let me." Can't deny that logic. "But the better you learn to breathe, the better off you will be in general, so it was not a wasted exercise."

“Argh, I hate you and your Shiro logic!” Walking over to the couch, she fell backwards with that boneless grace that many teenagers had perfected since the moment of turning thirteen. Angel would have sulked but he really hadn’t hit her that hard and it had worked, so she decided on another tactic. “Did that ever happen to you? Or am I just special spaz girl today?”

"It had. I do not remember when I first manifested that particular ability, but it was so different from everything else that it took a long time to perfect." Shiro joined Angel on the couch, pulling his legs into a sloppy lotus position.

“Phew, okay, so I didn’t get stuck doing something everyone else – or, well, you anyway – was able to do from the get go.” Their powers were similar enough for Angel to have some idea of what she had to do and considering how freaked out the second form made her, she was really happy to have that basis. “I still have some troubles going full fwoosh, you know? I’ve done it when I’m angry or I really need to but I can’t figure out how to turn it on when there’s not some big thing happening.”

"The fire form was a gradual progression for me." Shiro held up a hand and his arm ignited. "Before I could do this, any large expenditure of my powers turned my skin black. I spent two months darker than Storm when I burned out my powers. At least that is not a problem for you."

At least not that she knew of – she hadn’t had any reason to actually burn herself out yet. But there was enough of a difference that Angel didn’t think she’d have to worry about that happening. Probably. “It scares me,” she admitted, letting a small ball of fire come to life between her finger tips. “Because I can’t really figure out how to get into it without being all ‘Angel smash!’ or scared. I guess I just need to work harder on it.”

The fire traveled up Shiro's arm and coalesced into a tennis ball-sized orb of fire that floated above his palm. It pulsed almost like a beating heart. "Some things just happen, others we learn voluntarily. While there is much I am capable of, I do not always have the control. Trust me when I say that it is better to learn proper control now before you take on some of the more difficult manifestations."

“I know what that translates to,” Angel sighed. “Practice, practice and, wait, what did I miss? Oh yeah, practice! Still it’s not all bad, I mean I like setting things on fire so practice is actually fun. And then I get to lob fireballs at things which is even more fun.” She wrinkled her nose at Shiro. “Do you think that it’s weird that’s what I think fun is?”

Shiro clenched his fist, abruptly extinguishing the flame. "Not at all. It is one of my hobbies, too." Though that may not be such a ringing endorsement, he reflected, as few others enjoyed the things that he did. "There is nothing to be afraid of," he lied. "Fire is more than just destruction. It is life, too. A duality. Balance is the key."

"I'm kind of the walking balance meter, I guess, the whole water and fire thing going. You know, schools need to get with the program and add this to like the sex ed thing. Put it with Gym, health and sex ed - 'How to deal with being a mutant' or something. But I guess that's why Xavier's exists because the schools are dumb."

"I could pontificate more about the yin and yang of pyromancy, but I doubt that would answer any more questions." Shiro offered Angel a small smile. "The most you should concern yourself with now is keeping the fire inside, which you seem to do well." Better than Shiro could sometimes. "Everything else will follow."

"Keep it inside, gotcha." Angel thought about that for a moment. "I can still set things on fire, right? It's not keep it all inside, all the time, right?"

"Certainly not. That is dangerous. Ask any other energy projector, we all need opportunities to let it out. You should try flying more. I find that takes a lot."

“Fly more. Oh. The hardship, the hard – hey, no threatening with the punches!"