by Jester Joker
The door underneath me opens, which means that Will succeeded and my plan worked. Hopefully this isn't just a fluke.
I let the guy (whose name we still don't know) take a couple steps out onto the roof before I send the fireball at him. It stops around him, almost wrapping him up like a cocoon. This is not his time-freezing thing, but my doing.
"Give up now, or this is going to get real ugly," I say to him. There's enough fire around him to back it up. I feel my body freeze, meaning he's using his power on me, but it looks like I was right: he can't do a damn thing about the fire. It'll just stay around him as long as I keep it there.
He doesn't give me his usual cocky answer, so Will must have punctured his swagger a little before the guy came up here. I do hear him mutter something that I believe rhymes with "trucking kitsch" and then... he jumps through the fire!
I hear him scream, but I can't react myself because he's keeping me frozen. He emerges from the flames with one arm on fire and probably at least some part of his body a little singed. I try to move the fire so that it stays around him, but either he's moving too fast, or being stuck is affecting my concentration, because he manages to light his back on fire.
I try to yell out for him to stop, but my jaw muscles are too stiff to open my mouth. Then I notice that his right arm, still on fire, seems to be completely limp as he continues to move around the roof, either looking for me or looking for an escape route. An awful thought occurs to me: he's selectively freezing parts of his body that are burning so he doesn't feel the pain. This seems to be confirmed when his left leg appears to go dead, too, and he hobbles along.
Right now I'm trying to actually move the flames away from him, but his movements have become so erratic that he keeps running (limping?) into them anyways. Good Lord, part of his face is burned, but he just freezes it and moves on.
I have felt helpless before, under certain circumstances, but this is at a whole new level. A guy is burning himself to death right in front of me, and I literally can't move a muscle to save him, or even tell him to stop. I don't think he even realizes his back is still burning. He's starting to look like a walking pile of burnt skin. If he'd just stop fighting me, I could help him, but... somehow, I don't think he'd accept that option even if he knew it was on the table.
After what seems like an eternity, but is probably only a few seconds, he slows down, falls to his knees, and collapses face-first on the roof. He tries to struggle up again but finally passes out from the pain he was trying to ignore.
Slowly I can feel my body becoming unfrozen, and once I can get my legs and arms moving again, I hop down and run to him, putting out the fire that was still going all over his back. I gently roll him over on his back to get a look at him, and the way his skin feels... I don't even want to describe it. Part of our training included some first-aid work, but this guy's injuries are way beyond my capacity.
I hear the door open behind me. It better be Will, or everything is going to get worse before it gets better.
Thankfully, I recognize his voice. "The hostages are all gone now." Will's next to me a split-second later, takes one look at the guy and his eyes bug out. "Holy mother of... what did you do to the guy?"
"I didn't mean to," I say, a lot more defensively than I intended. "I mean, he kind of... he did this to himself." I can't waste time explaining what I mean. "Will, he doesn't have much time. We need to get him help, and I think it's too dangerous to move him. Go to the hospital and bring a couple of doctors here immediately. Don't worry about telling them anything -- I'll describe the situation to them -- just get them here! Make sure you don't go so fast that the doctors pass out when you're running them over. After that, grab all the supplies you can think of from the hospital that aren't being used on someone else. We'll compensate them for it later. Go."
He's off. I take a deep breath. We were told that we might face a situation where we'd have to kill in order to save. Even if that were true, I'd rather not start racking up a body count with my first successful mission.