Phoenix stared into the flame, almost hypnotized. She ran her fingers through the flame without thinking about it. Once. Twice. Three times until it actually started hurting and she put her hand down. Pyrrhus could do it for longer. She couldn't. She didn't know why.
She looked at him through the flame and it seemed to... compliment her face. Like that fire was meant to be there or had always been there - hidden and it just needed some sort of representation and suddenly it was there.
"/Because... Ekaterina was never happy. Not until she realized she was a firebird. When the dreams began of burning and dying and being reborn./" What she didn't realize was that she had said all that in Russian. Almost as easily she slipped back into English, "Do you have anything you might not mind being burned...?"