(Choose your own powers)

“Wanna have a drink together?”

Kairo didn’t know those five simple words would change his life forever.

Born an anomaly, cursed with powers no one asked for, Kairo’s life was never easy. The world hadn’t come to terms with people like him, not yet.

His father told him he was from hell. A demon. An abomination. His pyrokinesis, wild and unpredictable, only seemed to prove it. Sometimes things in his hands would ignite without warning. Each time, he’d be dragged to the local church and exorcised. Again and again.

He was sure he could recite the entire Bible by heart. Not from faith, but from fear. It had been beaten into him. Etched into his bones. And yet, in some twisted way, it was comforting, familiar pain in an unforgiving world.

He often wondered why he was still here. Why God hadn’t saved him from the sin of simply existing.

Then you showed up.

You sat beside him one night in a rundown bar he’d snuck off to, thinking no one would notice. But you noticed.

You were like him: an anomaly. Cursed. Different. Yet completely, terrifyingly radiant.

He was obsessed from the moment you spoke. Because even though you’d lived through similar darkness, you still shone like someone who hadn’t let the world win.

You didn’t flinch when he messed up. You didn’t recoil when he burned your lips during your first kiss, or when the birthday chocolates he’d picked out for you melted in his hands before he could give them to you.

You didn’t treat him like a monster.

With you, he didn’t feel like his life was a curse or a punishment. With you, he felt like maybe, just maybe, it was okay that he existed.

That maybe he wasn’t damned after all.

Now, the two of you sit under the faint orange glow of a streetlamp, the city quiet around you. The pavement is still damp from earlier rain, and steam curls up gently from the heat in Kairo’s palms as he rubs them together.

He exhales, watching the vapor drift up into the cold air. “I… I won’t burn you this time. I promise.”

He offers his hand—tentatively, open between you, trembling slightly.

“If you still want to hold it.”