Cora went back into the Fair, but Harry wasn't there.

She frowned and went out again. She glanced around, trying to spot the figure of the dark-haired man she'd come to know over the past months or the telling shape of his grey cat, but she couldn't find either. Harry hadn't come back, and she hadn't seen Skat in days.

Most people had already retired to their own tents and wagons, but a very familiar fay with dark hair and entrancing violet eyes was still sitting outside hers, staring up at the sky. It took Cora an instant to realise she was looking at her bat, a shadow amongst shadows.

"Where is Skat?" Cora asked, and Thalia blinked up at her.

"Harry sent her somewhere a couple of days ago." Somewhere, code for, I know where she is, but I won't tell you.

Cora sighed. "Where is Harry, then?"

"Follow the river to the left, you'll find him," Thalia replied. "You had an argument, didn't you? It's why he hasn't come back."

"I'd prefer not to talk about it," Cora admitted, thanking her and following her directions.

It didn't take her long to find Harry. She would've been surprised with Thalia's talent, if she hadn't been too worried for the conversation that was about to take place.

He was leaning against a tree, playing with something she couldn't recognise in the darkness, his back to her. He surely sensed her presence behind him, but he didn't make a move.

She hesitantly took a step forward.

"Harry?" Her question shivered in the night, and the only signal that he'd heard her was the low hum he let out. "I was hoping we could talk about what happened."

"What's there to talk about?"

"Harry, please." She put her hand on his lower back, and he jolted. "I know what I said was insensitive, and I'm sorry. I was angry at myself and you were there."

"I'm sorry for burning you," he whispered, "I didn't do it on purpose. I hope I didn't hurt you."

"You didn't." It was a partial truth. Her fingertips were still stinging where she'd held the sphere, but the pain was already dimming, and he didn't need to know. "I know it was an accident." She'd seen it in his eyes in the instant it'd happened, in the way he'd ran away without giving her time to say as much as a word.

"I'm sorry."

Cora sighed. "I didn't come here to have you apologise to me, you know."

"Why have you come here, then?"

"I wanted to..." Her voice drifted away before she could finish the sentence. She wanted so many things—to apologise, to talk to him. To ask him why he was pushing her away. Did she truly want to do that, though? Deep down, she already knew the truth—he'd only kissed her to help her turn off that candle. Did she really want to ask him and have him say those exact same words back to her, and look like she had no idea of the way life worked in the process? She wasn't naïve enough to believe Harry kissing her meant he had any obligation towards her. If that was how things were supposed to go, then she should've had some kind of obligation towards him for kissing him the first time around. But he'd been kind enough to ignore it completely and never bring it up, so why couldn't she do the same for him?

What could she even ask him that wouldn't be awkward and pointless? Why he'd kissed her? If it'd meant anything to him, because it had meant something to her? Harry had travelled all around the world; she wasn't dumb enough to believe he'd suddenly fallen head over heels for a random girl that couldn't even harness her own powers. Harry, the one everyone seemed to know about—every noble, every commoner, even her crow. He was a legend himself, and while he'd seen enough in her to offer her a job, she certainly wasn't enough for him in that sense.

She had to put things into perspective. Even though she'd spent quite a lot of time with him and she'd shared his bed, he was still the same person she'd always heard about. The mysterious man no one knew the looks of, the one people went to the Fair just to hopefully catch a glimpse of. The one everyone seemed to be scared of and wonder about at the same time. He wasn't her friend and wasn't her enemy—he was above her. Even with his broken magic, he was a thousand times more powerful than she could ever hope to be, and she was the same little girl she'd always been, with the only difference that she didn't have a home anymore and wore the pretty clothes he had made for her.

That was what he did. He dressed her up in nice clothes and hoped it would hide the fact that she was useless—but even though it might've worked with the other people of the Fair, he knew the truth and she did too. The truth was that she should've never gone on any quest with him. She should've never left the hostel. It was her home and her world; the only place she could ever shine in.

But she could never go back to it or her city. She'd been exiled. She didn't have anywhere she truly belonged to anymore. In truth, she'd never belonged to the hostel either—she had no relations to that place, and the woman that ran it wasn't even her aunt, despite what she'd led her to believe throughout all her life. She didn't know where she belonged. She'd never known her mother and knew nothing of her father. She could never have a home—somewhere she could go back to knowing her roots were there.

It would've been ridiculous for her to believe someone as bright as Harry would ever like her as more than an employee or, if she was lucky, a friend.

There was no point in bringing it up.

Harry threw the pebble he'd been playing with in the river, and it hit the water with a splash. He raised his gaze to look at her.

"Do you know what it feels like to know that one day you could get angry and kill everyone around you with a simple thought?" There was a distraught look in his eyes. Cora heard the pain in his voice, so sharp it could've cut through glass, and moved closer to him, even though she could already feel its imaginary edges cut through her.

"You'd never do that, Harry. I know it."

"I'm out of control, Cora," he stated. He wasn't looking at her anymore as he walked following the line of the river, a couple of steps ahead of her. His shoulders were sagging, an unexpected show of humanity from someone that wasn't human at all. "I'm a danger to everyone, including myself."

"Stop doing that."

Harry looked at her over his shoulder. "Doing what?"

"Acting like you're already doomed."

He frowned. "I am."

"No, you're not." Cora instinctively took a step towards him. "Once you asked me, is it someone's abilities that make them dangerous, or their choices? I didn't know the answer then, but I do now."

There was an unreadable look on his face as he waited for her to go on. The light of the moon was drawing sharp shadows on his cheekbones as it drowned them in its pale blue hue. She felt like she was in her own personal version of a fairytale, one with darker themes and an even more dreadful ending.

"It isn't about what you could potentially do, but what you do, who you are. And you're good, Harry."

He let out a sour laugh. "Everyone is good, until they aren't anymore."

He walked away from her, and she had to quicken her step to be able to follow him deeper into the woods, the course of the river the only way to tell which way they were going.

"Do you want to know why I'm focusing on you instead of trying to fix my magic, Cora?" Harry asked all of a sudden, turning around to face her. "It's because I can't fix it. I'm a lost cause. Is it what you wanted to hear?"

Cora shook her head, unable to say a word, and he took a step closer to her.

"I could set this forest on fire," he whispered, a darkness in his voice she'd never heard before. "It'd go up in flames before you can take another breath. There would be nothing left of it."

"But you won't." She didn't even know him that well, but of that she was certain; he wasn't as wretched as he thought himself to be.

"You have too much faith in me."

"Do you want to set it on fire?"

"I don't."

Cora nodded. "Then you won't."

He narrowed his eyes at her, but seemed to be at a loss for words.

"You're torturing yourself," she continued, "you're hurting yourself. I don't believe your magic is bad. You can create fireflies with a wave of your hand, you saved me and protected me with your abilities. It's not destructive, it's beautiful, explosive, enchanting." She drew in a shaky breath. "And if one day I'll be able to use my magic even half as well as you do, I'll consider myself lucky."

"Why would you want to be like me?" He let out a sound of disbelief. "You don't know what you're saying."

"Maybe things would start making sense that way."

He laughed. "They do not."

Cora didn't know if she wanted to hug him or slap him. He angered her, because he at least could use his powers to some extent, but she felt bad for him, because she couldn't even begin to understand what it was like to lose control over something that had served him for so long.

"Your ability is fire, isn't it?" The question came suddenly, and Harry frowned.

"Who told you?" She couldn't tell if he was upset by her discovery or the fact that she'd dared to bring it up in such a way.

"I found out on my own."

"Fire is my ability," Harry replied, subdued anger in his voice. "I wouldn't say it's the only one I can control, though. It's the one I can control the most. It slips through my fingers like all the rest. The stronger the magic... I can feel the tether between it and my soul tremble before snapping altogether. When that happens, it's as if it isn't part of me anymore. I have no hopes of putting an end to it, even though I know I'm the one wrecking havoc."

A sudden memory of him knocking people out came back to Cora. Thalia had told her most fays had one single ability—most, but not all. Harry wasn't one of them. Fire wasn't the only skill he had.

"What's it like? When you use fire," she asked before she could stop herself.

He sighed, raising a hand. A little white flame appeared between his fingers, moving from one to the other as if it were attracted to the night sky, and he tilted his head, watching his little creation shiver in the gentle wind.

"It's like unleashing something inside of myself," he whispered. "Something that was always there, lurking, but could never find a way out." He paused. "I can hear it roaring in my ears, calling for destruction. I'm afraid that if I let it out completely, it'll take the world apart."

Cold dripped over Cora. "Why is it calling for destruction?"

He looked up at her. The light of his fire was reflecting in his eyes dangerously. "Revenge."

Cora's heart beat quicker in her chest. Revenge. What did he need to take revenge for so badly that he was terrified of it? Was it against humans for the awful things they did and kept doing, or against someone else entirely?

She picked up a pinecone and started playing with it absentmindedly when she realised Harry wasn't waiting for her answer. He'd already seen it in her reaction.

"You asked me to set the ball on fire earlier," she spoke after a little while, "how can someone do that? It moves too quickly, and I can't focus."

"Look where it will be instead of where it is," he replied. "In the moment you're ready with your magic, it'll reach that point and you'll be able to do the trick. I'll show you."

Cora threw the pinecone up for him. A moment passed, and then there was a glint in the sky. It shone for just a heartbeat and then vanished like a dying star. It fell on the palm of her hand again, warm but not hot. She smiled and threw it up once more.

"Again."

Harry set it on fire for a second time. He controlled the flame for that instant, and then let it fall. She threw it in the air another time, and once more he set it alight, easily, as if he found no difficulty in it.

"Now you try," Harry asked, moments before she flung it up again.

The pinecone flied high in the sky, and Cora watched it rotate against the stars.

She tried to call to her that power Harry had ignited in her some nights before, to feel it rushing through her veins and her very being, but from inside her only a deep, empty darkness answered. There was no trace of the warmth of the fire, of its light. Everything was muted, wadded, as if her soul was wrapped in cloth.

The pinecone started to drop, and Harry understood she wasn't about to set it alight. He glanced at it and it became a miniature sun come to enlighten the obscurity of the night.

It only took a second.

The pinecone plummeted, too quick for any of them to stop it, and fell onto the leaf-covered ground. A blaze of light flashed between them, and Cora just managed to take a step back before Harry's fire rose high.

Harry raised a hand. The water of the river crashed onto them, leaving them dripping in mud.

Cora stared at where the fire had been, her heart pounding.

"I got distracted," Harry said in a whisper, in shock. Distraction. It was all it had taken. One moment of distraction, and they could've gone up in flames.

But he'd stopped it. He'd willed the river to do his bidding and put out the fire before it could eat away them both, and Cora would've been surprised to add yet another element to his list of achievements if she wasn't so terrified.

"Harry," Cora murmured, stepping over the ashes when he turned his back to her and putting a hand on his shoulder. "It isn't your fault. We're okay."

He gave her a hopeless look. "This is what I'm talking about, this—"

Before he could say another word against himself, she pressed her lips to his.

He flinched, but then wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her closer to him. He deepened the kiss, and Cora felt the ground melt under her feet. She clung to him, sure nature would swallow her whole if she didn't intertwine her fingers in his hair and press her body against him, closer and closer. She wanted to crawl into him, to put out the fire burning his heart beyond repair and build a home there so that she'd feel like she finally belonged.

She wanted to learn the shape of his lips so well she'd be able to recognise it with the tip of her fingers in the darkness, to synchronise the rhythm of his heartbeat with the one of her breaths. She wanted many things and yet she couldn't make sense of any, because she'd never felt that way before. She'd kissed and been kissed, but no sweet exchange had ever made her feel the way kissing Harry did. If Harry likened his fire to destruction, Cora saw it as intensity, as passion.

He was a supernova, enlightening the path in front of her moments before setting her alight. And if the instant when he burnt her would come at all, she couldn't bring herself to care, not now.

"Cora," he murmured, breaking away from the kiss and grazing her jaw with a wet finger, stardust in his eyes. "Beautiful Cora. Why are you so kind to me?"

The sweet sound of her name falling off his lips brought her back to reality, and a wave of embarrassment washed through her when she realised what she'd done. She put some distance between them, too aware of the way their damp bodies were entangled, sure she could feel the weight of his judgement on her shoulders.

"I should... you know, go," she said, flame in her cheeks as she took in the messy state of Harry's hair. She could still feel its soft texture under her fingers and she felt so, so stupid.

"Yes," he whispered, a starstruck look on his face. He blinked a couple of times, seeming to come down from whatever high he'd got from that kiss into his usual self again. "I'll come in a few."

Cora nodded and turned around, putting as much distance as she could between them before being finally able to breathe again.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter. x
Miki