we didn’t start the fire (nah, we’re the ones who burned)

if there was ever a poster child for teenage angst bleeding into adulthood, it would be mita’jun. the scars are in your face, the staples just make it more jarring to look at. his wardrobe consists of black, metal, and the sort of worn that is obviously deliberate. the fact that he’s miles away from home, having left at sixteen, doesn’t help picture him as a well-adjusted twenty-something-year-old.

in fact, he’s got a fair bit of teenage angst that he still carries around, but really, he’s never been better (at pretending that nothing bothers him, that he hasn’t spent four plus years doing absolutely everything and nothing at all to feed the lie that he’s made peace with the fact that he learned water magic to take better care of his scars - can’t conjure fire anymore). he’s not exactly sunshine and rainbows, but he would like to think he has a laid-back, do as you please pace.

besides, his tastes are for his hobby’s sake - something he looks good in, knows fits with his particular palette of pale skin meet purple hues. maybe he’s not beauty and grace, but with a bit of self-assurance, he knows he’s got an aesthetic that, if not flatters, at least attracts attention. and maybe he’s changed, maybe he’s the same, but he’s still got that confident attitude intact (in pieces, with a puppet’s mask to cover up the cracks).

mita has always liked being the prettiest bitch in the room, and horrible, tragic, life-altering incidents with out-of-control fire magic hasn’t changed a thing. (how long do you think it takes him to style his hair, huh?)

sure, he likes looking pretty, but he appreciates feeling clean. it was an acquired taste for mita, but one too many preventable infections made him come around to the blessings of hygiene.

is there a sense of overcompensating when he wears shoes that lift him up a few inches? absolutely. he’s an average height - nothing that gets attention even among a population of magicians and humans. just a few more inches, please. (look, he puts a lot of effort into his looks - he's gotta make sure he reaches the largest audience.)

books, manuals - anything that gets in the way of practical application. he values experimentation over the theories behind praxis. his eyes glaze over words words words - let him have his cake already.

the world is an oyster of opportunities, but honestly, mita doesn’t know what he is doing anymore. he used to have an idea - had a place once upon a time, when he wasn’t all stapled fashion and ugly scars that bemuse no one. his passion was the fire at his tips, before his connection with the rukh snapped - before he struggled to muster even the tactile sensation of heat. whatever affection he had for the future died with his flames. nowadays, he wavers within the bounds of the present, enjoying whatever of it that he can.

as the last embers die, they leave a numb, prickling feeling behind. mita carries an emptiness that he cannot shake. an air of forlorn infrequently visits him, speaking of lost love to the course of grand mistakes that set him low. he misses the dance of fire - a back-and-forth, how burned do you want to risk? but even more so, he is his own traitor - the brights of red, tipped, draw out lapses in sensibility. reminders bring him lower and lower, so the hearth remains cold, while he stays clammy.

burnt bacon - that’s mita’jun for you. popsicles and permafrost - yeah, mita is the opposite - all spicy noodles and magic-born burns that litter his body in purpled scars. but, hey, he wears them proudly enough. there’s self-consciousness that goes along with his appearance, to the bone, down to the meat beneath, but what’s another feather to his cap?

besides, he has the perks of being literally on fire. he will always aspire for that ten-inch platform look, but he compromises with thigh-high ankle boots that give him at least four more inches to his five foot seven. with a bit of magic sparks beneath his walk-type strut, everything is a bit eye-catching - distracting - leaves nothing to be taken as normal.

(no one actually cares, but if they want to stare, let ’em have more than just unpleasant burns to gawk at.)

take it from the top - tip-top, ignore the fact that he is all off-beat. (he was made to dance to a certain rhythm, but then it all went off the path, and now he’s trying out something new, something he doesn’t know, doesn’t wanna know ‘cause he doesn’t want to be reminded that he’s on his own, winging on a few limbs a dozen.)

mita begins in magnostadt, where he is bold and a glory of red hair. from the start, he has this sort of connection, all about the thermal currents that no one else sees like he does. (everyone is a magician in magnostadt - except those that aren’t - but we all have our own ways of seeing the rukh, and he was bound to fire the minute he was born.) no one loves magic quite as much as he does. from illusory animals to explosive decorations swathed across the sky, his gift is in his passion and fascination.

for the longest time, that’s all he is: lover of magical fire. (well, it is not like he has much else exciting going. only child mita means he has a comfortable upbringing - nothing notable.) but with the break of a spring upon campus grounds of magnostadt academy, mita falls in love with something else. someone else. he’s already reckless enough, but with all the hormonal wreckage, he’s even more stupid.

it becomes a game to impress. he accosts with fetching smiles accompanied by brilliant(ly hazardous) blazes. with all the tunnel vision of a fifteen-year-old trying to win over a crush with a year on him, he doesn’t even notice when the light layer of burns form. he takes the stinging as the granted of using his magic more than usual. it is less of the accident as it is a lapse of judgement that primes him for the actual accident.

the things people do for love, even shallow love.

to make his magoi usage more effective, he was experimenting with a device that he fed heat into and released a light show made by thermal traces. however, while trying to make images more detailed, something blew in the device and lashed back into mita’s face. with the accumulated heat bursting so quickly (no doubt having weakened the structure of its container in the first place) and built up nerve damage already affecting mita’s temperature sensitivity, it caught him off guard. (and look where that got him - gnarled skin, dead on his frame.)

he left half a wing of the academy in smoky rubble. got kicked out, too - given the news right after waking up in a medical room and told that the magical-type fire had done irreparable damage. that wasn’t the hardest part. maybe it’s the fact that he can’t feel half of his body - that the other half is sore and hurting all the time because of the staple clasps that keep his body together - but his relationship with the rukh changes drastically. he can’t muster heat magic anymore, this intense resistance to his command makes for a sorry struggle.

it is in a shameful fit that he chooses to leave for kina, taking residence with relatives. (he feels at least some guilt after a tearful departure, but he’s firm in his belief that he needed the distance to recover.)