This is my seventh one-shot for the Caesar's Palace Color Challenge. I've done Green, Pink, Brown, Gray, Bronze and Rainbow, and this is White: Disorient. Warning: This is 1000 words of pure mind-killing disturbia.
Kara x
Disorient
They tell him what he did was unforgivable.
He can't remember, but they wouldn't lie…right?
The boy wakes up and instantly flinches at the brightness. Was it always this…white? His bright eyes examine this room of white, white walls, white floor, white furnishings. There's not a crack, or a speck of dust…everything's flawless, perfect. It's unnerving.
(How did I get here?)
The boy looks at his hands, expecting for them to be white and flawless too, but they're brown and calloused and home. They tug him back to District Eleven with his family, at the moment just a set of blurred and beloved faces in his confused mind. District Eleven with the forbidden jewel-fruit dangling temptingly from trees. District Eleven with the electrified fences and machine guns.
(I don't know where this place is, but I know nothing in District Eleven is this inhumanly perfect. Well, except for the fruit. Did I ever get to taste it, again?)
(Who am I?)
It's not long before the door flies open without the slightest creak, and several flawless white people step through, not a trace of colour visible in their tailored frames. The boy flushes, feeling out of place. A very beautiful girl with smooth ivory curls stretches her full, ashen lips into a smile that makes his cheeks turn ruby-red.
(Am I still alive? Nothing back home could ever be this stunningly perfect…)
The girl leans forward; smile still stretched on her features, so eerily dazzling that he's vaguely fearful. He just catches sight of a flash of metal in her smooth palm as she brings it almost tenderly to his face…
(I'm lost in this paradise…)
Shock.
A shocked scream escapes his lips as the pain ricochets through his skull, and the translucent girl brings back the metal tool, now stained with blood, and smiles again.
(Wait, that smile…it's beautiful, yes…but was it always so empty, cold?)
Without warning, she raises the tool again and black reverberates through this white room, cracks running through the flawless walls as his agonised screams hit the air.
(Pain…)
A river of red blood marring these crisp white sheets. A flash of black visible in her empty eyes as she giggles coldly, the metal colliding with his forehead again and again.
(So much pain…)
Is it just him, or can he see the colour in his hands fading with every hit? With every crack of metal against bone, the colour tethering him to home dims and yet brightens, his blood morphing from scarlet to glaring white.
(The white disguises the black, and they're taking my colour. They're taking my colour from me! Help me, somebody help!)
But it's too late, the boy is slowly fading, rushing away with his clear rivulets of blood, and with one last audible crack his eyelids fall shut, with one last hit his screams are silent.
He's dead…
…but he's still breathing.
"Long live the Capitol," chorus the group of dark and evil people in their sterilised white masks and white coats. The darkest and yet brightest one puts his hand on the girl's shoulder in what would be, in a different time and place, a signal of pride and not just an empty gesture. "You are one of us now, Claudia. And the boy is too."
Claudia's empty smile graces her empty face, a stained-glass window into her barren soul that was poured with her blood onto a floor much like this one, not so long ago.
(She can't remember how long ago it was, when the metal tools took her from the blurred place, but it doesn't matter. Everything is perfect now, and the boy is about to come and join her and be her friend, right?)
The boy opens his pallid eyes, and as he takes in his surroundings, they flash black, and then brighten to inhuman, cruel white. He rises from the puddle of joy's paint and wipes it disgustedly from his forehead. Facing his brethren and the girl, he smiles.
"Long live the Capitol." Perfect monotone. Just how they like it.
"Come with us, Aden!" Claudia skips over to him and takes his arm, but there's nothing in her once-blissful eyes.
(Aden? That word feels wrong, like it belongs in a different world, not this paradise. Maybe he's meant to love her…whatever that means.)
He takes the metal tool wordlessly from her hand. He weighs it in his palm. It feels right, like it was meant to be there. Six pairs of transparent eyes follow him as he strides purposefully out of the room.
It's exactly 3 minutes and 18.25 seconds later when the screams ring out.
(Claudia wonders why this music is so familiar to her.)
It's not long before the beautiful music ends, and Aden returns, a new girl in tow, blank stare and pretty hair. Her hair is prettier than mine. Aden instantly jolts away from her when he sees Claudia, and links his arm through hers again.
(Maybe it's a good thing that I'm supposed to love him, thinks Claudia. Whatever that means.)
"Long live the Capitol," the new girl says in her perfect monotone. And all is right in Paradise again.
The Capitol's newest soldiers smile as the joyful, terrible colour pours out and they paint over the black with beautiful, suffocating white.
After all, white is pure, innocent, clean. The Capitol is white. (At least on the surface.)
The soldiers tell them what they did was unforgivable.
They can't remember, but white never hurt anyone. White doesn't lie…
…right?
Explanation: A lobotomy. These 'soldiers' are all criminals who did things like eat the fruit in District Eleven, but instead of being killed, they were lobotomised and turned into the Capitol's blank-stared soldiers, black and evil inside but white and beautiful outside.
Hope you enjoyed Disorient!
Kara x
