The next day, Loren had been feeling better when Harmony checked on him, or at least had gone from the piercing pain stage of his wounds to the itching stage of his wounds as his body mended. He was also slowly putting on weight according to the bathroom scale, even as Auntie Marie muttered and sighed about eating so much fat being unhealthy. After her two days off, Harmony had to go back to work, leaving Loren to his own devices, both literally and figuratively. Fortunately, he'd never been the sort who had much problem with sitting still, and he no doubt had a lot of shows he wanted to catch up on.

  When the weekend came, she, Aunt Ganda, Uncle Tetsu and Maddie all climbed into the family's pickup and drove out of the city towards Loren's house, with only a brief stop on the way.

  "Ganda!" Dad greeted with a wide smile as he hugged his sister, while Uncle Ben greeted Uncle Tetsu. "How have you been? Has Harmony been giving you any trouble?"

  "Oh, she's been very helpful around the house," Aunt Ganda said with a smile. "Hello, Alice!"

  As the adults greeted one another, Harmony went out to the backyard to get the wheelbarrow. The familiar old firepit, just a round stretch of ground covered in gravel where Uncle Ben kept grass from growing, had been lengthened. It now stretched out to be two meters long and a meter wide, with the gravel covered by sand. A small pile of sand lay on one end of the expanded firepit—though she wasn't sure it counted as a pit anymore—and two sack of charcoal, a huge pile of leaves, and several tree branches lay next to it, as well as a head-sized red clay flowerpot.

  For a moment, she wondered they'd even need the wooden debris that Steve said they could collect from the work site, but Uncle Tetsu had said they needed every bit of fuel…

  "Are you comfortable down there?" Harmony asked about two hours later.

  "The sand could be a little thicker, but I'm fine," Loren said, even as he looked vaguely uncomfortable. That was perfectly understandable, as he was completely naked except for his cast and the flowerpot on his crotch, lying on top what had started off as a layer of dried leaves, on top of a bed of charcoal, on top of the sand of the firepit. His head was cushioned on a taller pile of sand. Loren's broken arm was held out to one side out of the firepit, where Dad, Uncle Ben and Uncle Tetsu had carefully piled cut-up tree branches and wooden debris from the worksite—with the nails and screws pulled off, of course. "It feels kind of good, actually. I can feel my magic building up already."

  Uncle Tetsu had carefully used his Flame to set the pile of wood around Loren alight, and did something to keep it from smoking. Loren would probably know what it was, but all Harmony knew was that it was working

  At the moment, he, Dad, and Uncle Ben were carefully piling on more wood around Loren's legs, both because that was where they would be cooking and to give him some more modesty now that the meats were ready and being brought out of the house. She, Maddie, Lily, Mom, Aunt Ganda and Auntie Marie had been inside ostensibly getting the barbeque stuff ready. The meat had been marinating since last night and they had just been putting it on skewers, while the packs of hotdogs and hamburgers—the latter was unfortunately storebought, because Loren wasn't in a fit state to make any and Auntie Marie had been too busy making the barbeque—were thawed out in water and prepared.

  "So, you just… cook there?" Harmony said. The blaze wasn't as hot as she thought it would be, probably because of some sort of Flame magic thing, so she was able to get up close and talk to Loren.

  "Roast, actually," he said dryly. "And I won't be going anywhere for hours, so it's a good thing we found that copper tube."

  The tube in question was a bit of salvage from a worksite, a metal tube that had originally been part of an air conditioning system. After asking Steve if she could have it, Harmony had thoroughly washed it inside and out with soap in case any coolant or whatever had still been smeared inside. Then Uncle Tetsu had set it on fire to make sure that no remaining chemicals were clinging to the metal. The copper tube now served as Loren's drinking straw, although at the moment they were only giving him water.

  "So… talk me through this," Harmony said as she squatted down next to him, using a piece of cardboard to gently fan the air toward his face so that she wouldn't send any ashes flying. "I get that fire is no big deal for you, but how's this supposed to help your arm?"

  Loren sighed. "Well, you know the four aspects of Flame, right?"

  "Sure. Light, Life, Energy and Change. You use Life to heal, right?"

  His left arm shifted briefly, and he glanced down at it before recalling he wasn't supposed to move. "Well, yes and no. Yes, Life covers healing, but it also affects things like metabolism and animation."

  She raised an eyebrow. "You use it to make cartoons?"

  "Yeah, I should have seen that coming. No, it's what we use as a basis for Necroturgic Flame and golem-making. You know all those videos of Flame mages using bikes without pedaling? If those are simple golems, then they're using Life to make the pedals turn on their own, although usually in conjunction with Energy or Change—I'm getting off topic. Yes, in this instance, Life is being used to heal, or at least accelerate my body's natural healing. The problem is I'm not supposed to be using magic right now because I don't have a lot of reserves."

  He turned his head to give the impression he was looking at the arrangement around him. "That's why the roasting. I could get energy by eating fatty food, but if I do that, my body gets a cut, which goes into replenishing my fat stores. The same for drinking oil. Gasoline is expensive and tastes horrible. So… direct heat absorption it is."

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  She switched hands for fanning. Her right had started to ache. "But how does that fix your arm?"

  "Well, this is Life Flame I'm burning in, and while Mang Tetsu is the one who's claimed it, he's letting me have the heat. Life Flame is the only one that lets you do that. So I'm using the heat and converting it into Life Flame inside my own body and sending that Flame to my arm to heal it." He sighed. "Mang Tetsu says normally the arm is in here with me, but since it's a plastic cast we can't do that. Dad and Uncle Ralph say they used to do this in the army when a Flame Mage got injured. They have a big bonfire and all the Flame mages just soak in the flames to heal up. And it seems to be working, because my broken arm's been itching this whole time, ugh!"

  "Hey! How come you got told that army story! I demand to hear that story in full!"

  Loren had the gall to roll his eyes at her. "They told it to me while they were covering me in wood. Ask your uncle, I'm sure he'd be willing to repeat it."

  She turned towards her uncle by marriage. "Uncle Tetsu!" she cried, putting just enough whine in her voice to be cute. "What's this about a story you told Loren but not me?"

  "Whining doesn't make you cute!" Loren called out behind her, and was also objectively wrong.

  As barbeques went, it wasn't all that strange, and Loren had finally gotten his wish of being the heat source. Unfortunately, they still spent for coal anyway, and her bestie didn't seem to be enjoying the experience as much as he seemed to think he would.

  It might have had something to do with the marinade that kept dripping off the skewers and onto his legs.

  "Come on, keep the meat in the center! That's where the most heat is anyway!" he whined. With him, he was correct: it did not make him cute.

  "Which is why we're not putting it there, it will burn," Aunt Marie said, even though she was sitting some distance away on the table they'd unfolded with the other aunties and mom. Auntie considered barbeque something the men did, and was perfectly fine sitting back and letting them do it. "Lily, stop poking your brother's flowerpot!" Lily snickered but put down the stick they'd been using to turn over the wood and push it into place while Uncle Tetsu had been enjoying his beer with the other dads.

  Harmony had been offered a beer too, but she'd declined. She'd unfortunately been born with a tongue that could taste the alcohol and only the alcohol. Whatever enjoyable flavors other people said they tasted in beer—or any other alcoholic substance—was for her overcome by a strong chemical taste that had her nodding 'yup, that's alcohol all right, why do they never add sugar to this' and giving her drink to Loren to finish off so it didn't go to waste. It happened with baked goods too, ruining several chocolates that might have been quite pleasant if they hadn't happened to be rum balls.

  That meant she was drinking a diet soda, and almost enjoying it, if she managed to keep from thinking it needed sugar.

  Once the food was ready, Harmony put Loren's on a long-handled frying pan and carefully put it at the edge of the fire, along with a metal fork. She immediately pulled the pan back once the Flame mage's hand came out of the fire, sooty and dark with ash, and started patting the ground next to him. "Wait, your hands are too dirty, you'll get ash all over the food."

  "Well, I can't exactly wash my hands, can it?" he sighed in exasperation.

  "Look, hold out your hand, and I'll put the fork in it. That way you won't get anything on the food."

  "The hotdog, then. Might as well get the biggest one, because after I'm done eating the fork is going to be too hot for you to handle," he pointed out.

  Oh, goddesses damn it, he was right. "I'll go get an oven mitt."

  "Hey, while you're at it, can you take a spoon and scratch my other arm? The itching is getting worse!"

  While Loren was able to eat hotdogs at a leisurely pace, since he was able to hold the fork out of the fire while he was chewing, the same couldn't really be said for the barbeque, which were on wooden skewers. Every pass through the fire after he finished chewing charred them a little bit more, until he said that the last bite was so crispy and hard it risked breaking teeth and tasted like coal.

  Harmony solved this problem by stripping the barbeque off and just spearing them onto Loren's fork, which as she'd been warned got progressively hotter as well as more sooty. She had to use wet paper towels to wipe it off between mouthfuls, but at least it kept the food from getting overcooked and Loren didn't mind having an inappropriately huge mouthful of food to chew on in any case.

  Despite the logistical hurdles of feeding Loren while he was roasting, it was an enjoyable barbeque, even though he occasionally tried to drag his broken arm along the ground to get it to stop itching. Everyone was able to eat their fill, and once the food was done—or at least no one wanted any more—everyone spent the rest of the afternoon catching up, telling old stories, and occasionally putting more wood on Loren to keep the fire going.

  About the only hiccup in the proceedings was when Loren warned that he was a bit too full and needed to sit up a little, lest the food he'd just eaten try to come out the same way it had gone in. That took some scrambling, and they had to find something they could put on his back to elevate his head a little. The only thing they found was some old paint cans that, after they'd quickly peeled off the layer of dried paint inside so it wouldn't burn, Uncle Tetsu had pressed down flat using some Flame magic and his foot.

  Fusing the resulting cants together had made for a surprisingly smooth backrest, albeit one with a few bumps from the welds, but Loren had said it was comfortable enough, and after they'd put a cinderblock under his cast to elevate it he'd almost fallen asleep.

  It was late afternoon by the time all the wood had finally been consumed and even the coals had turned to ash. Mother, Aunt and Auntie had all ushered the girls inside—Harmony included, even though she'd seen Loren naked before—as the dads had helped Loren up from the firepit and given him an initial washing off with the hose.

  He was much more presentable and dressed in more than a flowerpot by the time everyone was ready to sit down for… not dinner. A very late afternoon snack, more like.

  "So, how are you feeling?" Harmony asked him as he came downstairs, his cast held against his body by the sling he was wearing.

  "It's… better now," he said, glancing down at his arm as he did so. "Still hurts, but definitely doesn't hurt as much as it did this morning."

  "Think you'll be good enough to go to work on Monday, or should we tell Steve you need a few more days?"

  He looked down at his cast again, and Harmony could almost see his sense of responsibility going head-to-head with his desire for comfort. "Let's see how it feels tomorrow," he non-answered.

  "Fair enough," she said. "So, which ice-cream do you want to try first: cookies and chocolate, or brownie latte?"

  After all, her bestie still needed to put on more weight, and his broken bone needed milk!