WILDFIRE // KRISTJÁN FOX // 27
KNOWN POWERS: fire manipulation & immunity
Anna Jóhannsson was just hardly twenty when she met Benjamin Fox. As an Icelandic exchange student at Oxford University, she appreciated the quiet, studious young man offering to show her around. She was relieved when he invited her to lunch. She was constantly surprised by the relationship that ensued.
She didn’t discover she was pregnant until a couple months after she returned from her academic year abroad. She worried about writing to him at first, but she felt safe once he’d bought a plane ticket to fly out to see her. He was a graduate student. Surely they could make enough money between them to raise a child once he got that professorial position he was hoping for.
He is born in Anna’s hometown of Húsavik in Iceland. Anna is vehement about the spelling of his first name and so Benjamin settles on passing his own middle name down. The name printed on the official certificate reads Kristján Oliver Fox.
As Kristján gets older, his father’s words grow louder. Shorter. Terse. They move to Benjamin’s hometown of Staithes in England to be close to Kristján’s ailing grandparents. The weight of the stress his father carries in his shoulders give him increasingly poor posture when no one is around to see. He doesn’t quite have the professorial job he had hoped for – instead he is designated to research. It allows him to work from home when need be, though he travels a great deal to different archaeological sites. Kristján grows to like these times best. When it is just he and his mother and the house is quiet but for the Old Norse myths that are read aloud to him.
The house fire’s smoke swallows up his parents when he is six. He doesn’t remember much more than sirens. He meets his maternal grandfather for the first time when he is told that his parents did not survive the fire and that his grandfather will be the one to take care of him now. And so he returns to Húsavik. It’s not until years later that he learns the house fire was his fault.
Friðrik Jòhannsson – or, rather affectionately known to Kristján as afi – is a man with hands worn by work and age, hands calloused, skin like leather. He is full of stories, just like Kristján’s mother, and he is full of lessons that he insists Kristján learns. They begin as tales of gods and ghouls but as Kristján gets older they become simple. Be courteous. Be kind. Have courage. Show humility. A man of honor has never played the fool.
There is a white cat that Afi calls Snorri and Snorri quickly becomes Kristján’s closest companion. Snorri is perhaps one of the only things able to calm him when he is upset and small fires spark throughout the home as he cries, Afi rushing to put each and every one of them out before the young boy notices.
His grandfather owns a bookshop. Rather than attending university, Kristján becomes a bookkeeper, helping his grandfather take care of the shop. The shop becomes his second home. Light filters through tall dusty windows as he curls up with a paperback in his lap. Snorri often curls up beside him, rumbling quietly early on a Monday morning before they flip the sign to read open.
His grandfather is successful in putting out small fires. Kristján remains blissfully unaware of his abilities for much of his life. However, when his grandfather begins to ail, he feels he should not keep the secret of Kristján’s abilities from the boy any longer. There will be no one to put out the fires in his wake once he is gone, and so on his deathbed, he tells Kristján of these abilities. Without being able to be there to put out the fires, Kristján must learn to control them, he says – lest another tragedy on the scale of the death of his parents occur.
The night his grandfather passes, Kristján is left in the bookshop with the knowledge that he was the cause of the death of his own parents. He is only twenty-three. He grieves with his whole being, breathing ragged, sobs lifting up to the tops of the shelves as he falls to his knees. He’s not sure when one of the stacks of books catches fire, but it spreads quickly, rapidly like wildfire, and he is surprised when he survives. With the bookshop blackened with ash, he returns to his home and feeds Snorri.
The four years between the death of his grandfather and being contacted by the EPTP pass in a blur of odd jobs simply to make sure he can feed his cat. Once they’d contacted him initially, however, they became rather persistent, despite his reluctance. Kristján has a cat to take care of. A cat that is over twenty years old and is expected to pass soon – should’ve passed years ago. He figures the EPTP can wait as he snaps his fingers and sets fire to the letters.
He receives the fifth letter from EPTP the same day he finishes burying the cat in the backyard. He tosses the shovel onto the deck and rushes inside before the rain rolls in. He considers what he’s to write in his letter as long awaited reply as he lights the hearth.
