He's on his knees, and the snow is cold. He tries shaking it off his hands and letting it slide down his chest, but the fire comes back so he holds more snow against his chest with both hands and shivers hard. He hates this, hates the unrelenting grim sky and the cold he can never, never get away from, cold that hurts inside his throat and against his skin, and hates everything that drove him out here, being so messily out of control that he couldn't put the flames out himself and looking it in front of a man he respects, hates that that man will have to know... other things about him, now. The past maybe, but the future, too. The essential truth of Raju that it somehow hadn't occurred to him to tell: what he is, the things he'll do.

He'd tried to tell Francis the things he'd done, managed what he'd done to that man in that abandoned room and been told it wasn't Francis' to judge, but he'd forgotten the part that matters more. The part where he'd do it again. Because of what he is. Of course Francis hadn't known that. He wants to leave but he can't bear to go. Footsteps from the doorway mean Francis is close enough to see him but Raju keeps looking down at himself instead, feeling the cold and the burns and the sour clenching of his stomach that'd nearly disguised the feeling of the fire gathering there until it became impossible to ignore it. He tries to ignore Francis there looking, and tries to steady his breath, and shivers again. It can't last forever, this particular state of things, but he wants it to. He doesn't want to explain, or leave. The skin on his chest and hands feels hot. Things were better when he'd been able to forget, somehow, the kind of man he is and neither of them had a single clue what Francis didn't know.