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If there could have been a tangible link between Chauhn's desperate gaze and Clurie's little body, the little Phasmas would have been pulled right off the desk and dragged across the floor as the Clemmings boy was firmly guided away from the room. Link enough there was, however, because, as soon as the heavy wooden door slammed shut, Clurie felt as if he couldn't breathe. With his own little mouth dropped into a haggard gasp, he scrambled and skittered at the edge of the table and whined, like a faithful steed tethered behind a fence.

Any mere glance could communicate the nervousness that suddenly wracked the Phasmas's body, wrenching it away from the happy go lucky flighty thing he was to a more hunkered over and fretful ball.

"Chauhn?" he asked, his question pointed at the door. When there was no answer from his brother's familiar voice, he tried again, raising his voice louder to that it squeaked, "CHAUHN!" Again, no answer, no holler back to comfort him. Clurie curled up his hands near his cheeks, biting on one of his small fingers as he paced back and forth. Perhaps he didn't hear him? "BROTHER!"

Instead of Chauhn's voice, there came another's: Hayat. Clurie glanced over her, not really able to digest her question until he was hopping on the balls of his feet with anxiousness.

"He's never left me before. We're always together. Always! Is he coming back? He's coming right back, right? WAIT! I can catch up to him, I'm sure!" he chattered, anxiously pulling his hat over his head tight. "All I gotta do is get to the door...And I can catch up with Chauhn. Okay, one and two, and through and through, let's go and do!" With his short comforting rhyme complete, the Phasmas sped about in a tight circle before leaping off the edge of the table, holding his hat tight to his head.

The pillow of air was definitely unexpected and quite detrimental to Clurie's quickly thrown together plan. He wiggled a bit, gave a gasp, but before he knew it, he was deposited safely on the table once more, completely derailed from his desperate intention. He gave a loud and plaintive whine before his hat was swiped off his head, revealing a flaky and burning crown of ember freckles and flakes that peeled off from the movement, an ashy kind of duck butt. Once, twice, he was hit in the head, which prompted the charred circlet of glow around his head to flare brighter, before he was smothered again underneath his hat. He coughed in the resulting flurry of soot and ash that wafted up into the air in great plumes.

"Ow, Hayat, that really smarts!" Without moving to adjust his sloppily skewed hat, for he had nor the want nor the strength to do so, Clurie twisted about to frown with hurt at the Excito nearly twice his size. "But...What if he doesn't come back? What if he isn't fine? This has never happened before. What if something happens?" And, giving a vacant rub at his cheek with one hand, he tucked himself up where he sat, drawing his knees up to his chest so that his little satchels of ash and pieces of paper flopped to either side of him.

He looked again towards the door, suddenly feeling very forlorn and forgotten. Tightening his shoulders about his neck, he glanced again to Hayat, who stood towering over him with a displeased frown on her bright face, "Why does the Lord come and go and leave you all the time? Don't you get lost? Or worried that he might forget you or lose you?"

Clurie condensed himself into a tight little sooty speck, frowning all the more with Hayat's answers to his questions. For some reason, her answers didn't appease him, but they were, in some way, just the answers that he was looking for at the same time. It confused him. Especially that one word... What was it? Freedom? Clurie, in all his days of being conscious, "reborn" as Chauhn liked to say, he had never heard that word. It was seldom used, but he could just barely grasp the meaning simply from the inflection of the Excito. Then...Solemnity.

"It is like you do not know who you really are."

Clurie stared up at her, struck dumb by that single statement. Where had he heard it before? His flighty thoughts racked at his memory with their little bird claws, tearing open a wound that had not yet fully healed. Adal. The Hat Plague had said something similar, not too long ago, back in the cankered and swollen terror that was the carnival massacre in Colwe. Had he not said something along those same delicate threads? Words that had spurned his brother into revealing that dangerous buried self that only Clurie had seen before at the worse of times. Why would that make Chauhn so angry?

Clurie stared back at her, unable to come up with an answer viable save the few words, "...Who I am?" Empty hollow repetitions, like the well of punctured earth before sown with seeds.

Then habit kicked in. "Why, I'm Clurie Clemmings, Chauhn's little brother! I died and then I was reborn," came the automated answer, a sentence that had been hammered away into the crown of his head for as long as he had been alive. "Chauhn told me so."

Unfolding himself, limbs freeing themselves from limbs, he neglected to dust off the ash that had gathered in the folds of his clothes and instead hopped up to stand before her, arms up underneath his chin and suddenly happy now that he was reminded of his favoritism towards burning things. "Oh, yes! I do, ever so much. It keeps me warm 'n'....Wait," he paused, suddenly remembering the stern words of his Grimm, before he relaxed his arms and scuffed his boot at the tabletop. "But I can't burn things without him to watch over me. When I burn things when he's not around, bad things happen. He told me not to use fire. He says I don't have enough control yet."

"Uh...I don't know...Chauhn might get mad," he said in response, knitting his face into a frown. There were only two others who knew about the anger that the small Clemmings boy could wield, and he didn't think that Hayat had the slightly inkling of what "Chauhn might get mad" meant.

But she was very convincing. She gestured to something, and he followed.

Clurie the Ash Plague stood, small and open-mouthed as he clung to Hayat's line of sight, still wary and cautious. He followed until he focused in on the small little fireplace, and, at the sight of a place he so normally viewed as a playground and warm place, he couldn't help but crack a bit of a goofy grin, giving in to instinctual need for the brick and clay structure. Tip-toeing closer, he slowly pried one of his arms from its tucked position on his chest, and, with his fingers hesitant in their reach, weaved his fingers with her pale hand.

Perhaps, his mind thought, if she was truthful in her claim of aid, of being able to control his flames, then perhaps, just perhaps, he could prove to Chauhn that he was getting better? That accidents like what happened at the Council wouldn't happen again and cause that anger to surface. He wouldn't sate his curiosity about it unless he took her hand, though...So...

"Together, then," he said, grasping her hand more firmly before, without a second's thought, giving a great laugh and throwing himself off the edge, Hayat in tow.

The statement did very little to ease Clurie's nerves. Again, she didn't seem to understand the bond that bound him with Gordian knot complexities to his brother. He was firmly convinced that Chauhn would know everything about him just as he knew everything about Chauhn. Lies weren't something that Clurie thought could exist between them, the very thought of them being there was a new concept to his mind. Expressing his disagreement with an unsettled screw of his mouth was all that he could muster up in return to Hayat's casual aside, as soft as the words a shoulder devil or angel would whisper.

As they floated down, Clurie found himself grasping ever more onto Hayat's arm, grappling his way closer for security as they descended as gently as would a dislodged leaf. Instead of landing on his feet, Clurie curled up and landed upon his knees, as if into a clumsy sit. He got up, though, again, not bothering to dust himself off, and let go of Hayat's hand. His attention was once more snatched and trained away at the flickering fire before them.

"Brave," he repeated, his little chest puffing up with the word, "Like Warrior Wizard Clurett!" and he stared at the fire like a horse that was about to be broken. Offhandedly, he began to rub at his cheeks with one fist before bringing up the other, sparking both of his cheeks to light up with a lively glow of their own...Before he was distracted again. He paused and looked over to Hayat, his cheeks dimming again to their dull red.

"Something of my own? Hayat, don't be silly, I already have my brother!" he was proud of this fact and the smile that twisted up on his face was a happy one.

Clurie didn't need a command to return his attention to the glowing coals. There wasn't much flame at all, just several solitary licks that stood like guards over the broken precipices of wood, watching over the neglected coals and tinder. This was, in a sense, a reflection of Clurie, in the sense that he was nothing more but burnt out remains of something that used to be, not alive, just...Holding on, struggling to cough up warmth and blink through embers, drowning in the ashes that were supposed to comfort, not suffocate. Life, however, was possible. It just needed to be coaxed out.

The Phasmas approached the splinters of wood like he would a frightened animal, and, with a determined set of his frown on his sooty face, he rubbed his cheeks, prompting them to glow and spark to life until they were heaving with their own heat. His own hands reflected the embers, dipping into the heat as if it were a taint, before they gave a vicious cough of flame. Clurie startled at the lack of control in his own ability, shocked by the sudden spurt of flame, but, with the wave of his fingers, as if they had gotten too hot for him to handle, he was able to manage it back into some sort of wobbly control. Then, with the embers still glowing like stars on his fingertips, he reached forward and bequeathed the warm grip to a piece of crumpled tinder. It didn't take much for him to coax the tinder to burn, in fact, it burst aflame at his mere touch and curled away from him, leaving ash and black flakes in its wake. Satisfied, no...Encouraged by the new ash, Clurie stepped deeper into the hearth, spreading his hands and moving about with a tenderness as if he were spreading crumpled bed blankets or performing magic tricks meant to be silent, he set the base of the wood tinder aflame.

But eagerness and hunger were two things that Clurie couldn't control. He began to move his arms in wider arcs, not really thinking about the extent of the fire he was beckoning to life, and despite the growing pile of ashes about his ankles, he urged the fire greater, feeding it with, not a fire of his own, but a warm ember that, when focused, gave rise to new licks of flame.

Before he knew it, he had nearly forgotten his fear, his detachment from his brother. The depressing thought of being separated from him no longer weighed on his shoulders and he found, to his disparagement, that he was...Still functioning and still safe. What used to be a horrifying displacement of security, was slowly being nurtured into a kind of bittersweet understanding.

Then, one of the pieces of wood gave a crack and a buckle, eaten away by the flame to the point it could no longer support itself before turning into a miniature avalanche of charred splinters and ash, burying Clurie beneath it.

But, instead of a scream of fear, Clurie gave a quick gasp before it bubbled into a rowdy laugh. Wrenching himself partially free from underneath, covered in ash more fully than before, he displayed a big white grin. "Oh cor! I botched it."

Hearing her laughter, Clurie felt a spasm of pride. He wasn't sure what he was proud about, at least, not entirely. Seeing that she had laughed at something he did made him feel like he had done something right for a change, even though it was through an act of failure that he had come to earn that precious giggle. There weren't very many times when he could make Chauhn laugh, although Chauhn laughed often. Clurie knew deep within himself that Chauhn was laughing at something else that Curie didn't know about and figured then that it must have been all the suppressed memories that he was told about, all the ones that he hadn't yet tapped into. So, here, with Hayat, Clurie felt pride for earning an honest giggle from something that he actually did.

Pushing himself up onto his little legs, he dusted himself off with help from Hayat, smiling earnestly at her so much that his cheeks glowed with a happy bright ember light.

"You really think so?" he asked, his voice giving a hopeful rasp. He puffed his little chest and straightened his cap on his head, "I want to be able to be all kinds of help to people. Can you help me do that?"