It turns out that it is possible to transmit incoherent vocal sounds over brainphone! This one goes something like: [Mllrrrrrrrrgh.]

Yes. Tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning is good.

Also, he is heading upstairs right now to go take a shower, and if Bella doesn't want to witness the aftermath of her obvious and very successful attempt to gratuitously turn him on, she might want to quit reading him before he gets there. Or not. Her call.

Hmmmm. She decides she may as well go on reading him.

'Cause why not?

Charlie drops her off and goes to work for his afternoon of paper-pushing.

Bella lounges on the sofa.

He hasn't really had the chance to put his pyrokinesis through its paces yet. He's toyed with it, but he hasn't tried to reach its full potential.

Alice decides that is going to change.

He closes and locks the bathroom door behind him with a triangle and gets in the shower with all his clothes on, because he doesn't care enough about them to save them and doesn't want to waste any time taking them off. Another triangle turns on the shower to a not-quite-scalding temperature, and as the spray hits his face he closes his eyes and sets himself on fire.

His clothes are ash swirling down the drain. If his flight power didn't default to hover, he'd fall down. He pours hexagons; the chain looped around him lengthens noticeably. Alice stands under the water and burns. And as he bites through his lip trying not to scream, he imagines it's Bella doing this to him, Bella making him hurt more than he has ever hurt in his life. Fuck, he loves her so much.

He runs burning hands down his burning chest and pulls the fire deeper, closer, hotter. Keeping it burning while the shower continually tries to put it out is hardly even an effort. He's not sure he has any skin left. He's not sure he cares. It hurts incredibly.

And then, finally, he puts out the fire and wraps his hand around his dick while they are both still healing. That, and the shower spray hitting his burned-raw chest without any of it boiling off first, is a whole new universe of pain. The rest of his skin growing back is almost anticlimactic in comparison, although under other circumstances that alone would probably be enough to give him a spontaneous orgasm.

Healing is over in a flat second, and so is Alice. He drops to his knees and takes a deep breath just to feel it in his lungs, presses his hands against the (now somewhat filthy) shower floor, as he slowly regains awareness of his body through senses other than pain. Water running down his back. The taste of blood and char. The smell of smoke and steam.

When he hauls the new loop of his necklace up from where it dangles insubstantially through the floor, he is not surprised at all to see that the parade of hexagons ends in three glimmering black stars.

Laughing, he expends a triangle. [Am not.] Another one cleans up the mess on the shower floor; he sits back and wraps his arms around his knees.

While he was doing it, he wasn't at all thinking about being observed; now that it's over, he kind of wonders what she thought.

Oh, so she liked it, didn't she. Alice grins.

[Okay,] he says happily. He reaches up to run his hands through his hair, only to discover that he no longer has any. A square fixes that. He also, running his hands over his back and sides, discovers that all his scars are gone—burned away and healed back clean.

He is not sure how he feels about that part.

[Yeah, that's the thing,] he says. [I don't know if I want.]

He likes his scars, but partly as a record of intense experience. And not having them anymore is a record of a more intense experience than (almost) any of them.

[I wouldn't wanna to do it like that all the time,] he says, [but yeah, I can make stars.]

He runs his hand along the line of new hexagons, clicking them together, and then counts the points of the stars with his fingertips. It's really something, having these physical manifestations of pain.

(She meant something else with that pause, he's sure, but—she did help, in a way. She was absolutely a part of that experience, and not just because she was watching. It was for her and about her even if it wasn't with her.)

[Maybe it doesn't mean the same thing to you, then.]

What he meant by it was: there are things that are intense, and glorious because they're so intense, but by the same token too intense to make a casual part of your daily routine. Cutting a half-dozen hexagons out of himself is a casual part of his daily routine by now; this never will be. But it's still something he likes and wants and would hate to miss out on.

[Apparently. I'd get bored of Disneyland if I went too often?] Bella suggests instead.

She pauses, then says, [You realize that a primary benefit of the pain power will be the ability to jack up volume for when I can start doing big obvious things like curing malaria, so ideally that wouldn't bother you. But you already pour out way more coins than I could reasonably ask of anyone, so if it does I'll see about getting creative. It's possible that I could just render mosquitoes extinct without damaging the ecology too much, if not with a direct kill-the-bugs wish then with a designer virus or something.]

Awww. Alice loves her. He loves her because she wants more coins out of him and he loves her because she doesn't just want to take them; he loves her because she's going to cure malaria and he loves her because she has no experience that relates sensibly to what it's like to set yourself on fire and burn through skin into flesh.

He suspects, though, that he's going to like it even more when she does it. And he already liked it a lot.

Humming to himself, he gets up and turns off the shower.

[Well, antagonizing you with unwanted all-consuming pain attacks and then swiping your coins? Probably not the best recipe for long-term cooperation, which is more important. That and I like you, and liking you precludes torturing you without you being into that. Heck, if you asked me last year I'd say it precluded torturing people at all, but you're just that weird.]

Pause. [And I could know what it was like, sort of, if I opened up the memory - just have no reason to do that.]