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"Mm?" he says, glancing back at her. "What is it?"

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"It..." She glances briefly over her shoulder at Renny, still following at the prescribed distance. "Doesn't work like how you were thinking," she decides to say. She holds up her hand and gloves it in flame. "I don't burn. It's just like sunshine. Or holding a cup of tea."

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Fascinated, he reaches for her hand.

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The fire's out before he gets close enough to touch it, although she leaves her hand where she was holding it in case he wants to touch her anyway.

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He does, as it turns out.

"You don't feel like you were on fire," he comments. "Weird. I can't decide if I'd like it or not."

On the one hand, being all covered in fire and not burning sounds snuggly (and would be an excellent way to deter unwanted physical contact). On the other hand, if he couldn't ever get burned—that just sounds terrible.
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Kiri glances at Renny again.
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"I think I can leave you and go see how setting up your suite is coming along," says Renny. "I'll see if I can find you again before dinner in case you lose track of time. You have fun."

And she goes back inside the palace.
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"Why would you want to get burned?" exclaims Kiri when Renny is out of earshot. "I remember it from before I - primed, it hurt!"

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"Well, yeah," he says, shrugging. "Hurting's not bad by itself."

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"Yes it is, that's why they call it that!"

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"Is not!" he laughs. "Maybe to you."

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"It's -"

Kiri decides this is a stupid way to conduct an argument with someone who'll be willingly within five feet of her.

She steps a little closer, closes her eyes -

"I don't get it. Help?"
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There are kinds of hurting that are unambiguously bad. These kinds invariably come at the hand of the prince's father.

There are kinds of hurting that just sort of are, and might be okay or not-nice or kind-of-nice, depending. Old injuries with unhappy origins, and hurting when he'd rather not be distracted from what he's doing or for some other reason doesn't feel like it, are this kind.

Most other kinds are actively nice. If he caught on fire a little bit, he would expect it to be fun. When he fell down the stairs last month, he giggled the whole way even though (as he found out afterward) he'd cracked a rib.

When his father beats him it often hurts more than most other things do, but 'more' and 'worse' do not run on the same scale. Falling down the stairs hurt as much as some beatings, but it was still fun, and they weren't.
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Kiri is distracted from her original question by the answer to one she never thought to ask.

(Her hair catches fire when she's startled, down from initial incidents that involved more distant objects or her less resilient clothes. She promptly extinguishes it, as near-reflex by this point.)
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"...Is it that surprising?" he asks, giggling.

(And he thinks it was his reaction to non-parentally-sourced pain that surprised her so much; he is vaguely under the impression that what his father does to him is nothing out of the ordinary.)
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Kiri is momentarily at a loss for words.

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The prince regards her curiously and waits to see if she will say anything. If he has permanently taken away her ability to talk, maybe he will go get her mother or something. Even though this line of thinking is almost entirely a joke, he still contemplates ways to simultaneously make sure that Kiri gets safely back to her family and whatever help she might receive from that quarter, and make sure that his father doesn't find out he had anything to do with it.

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"- I can talk," Kiri snorts.

And:

"I get the thing about wanting to be on fire - kind of - that wasn't the thing that surprised me so much, that was what I was looking for in the first place."
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"Then what? Was it the stairs? If you fall down a lot you might want to stay away from them; there's ones that aren't so steep, I was just messing around where I shouldn't have been."

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"No, it's - your father."

He's the king. Even if she decided that it would be best if the king were on fire, she could not bring this about. Thanks, Great-Aunt Elytte.
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"...Really?"

He blinks at her.

"Yours doesn't do that, then? Good." He is happy for her. It must be nice to have a father you aren't afraid of. Unless hers just does different things, he supposes.
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"He doesn't do any things. Renny either. To any of us. It's not normal," insists Kiri.

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(He entertains a brief image of a vaguely Kiri-looking statue of a man in a vaguely not-a-palace-looking house, and people conversing with it as though it is a person, but he understands what she actually meant.)

"Isn't it? Are you sure? How do you know?"
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"Well, my parents are really normal. Also people mostly like their parents."

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"I thought maybe other people didn't mind as much, like I don't mind stubbing my toes but other people curse and jump around and all when they do it."

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