It's been two years. Two years, eight months, forty-three days.
He feels like an old man. He feels like a ghost. Maybe none of this was real - maybe they never existed, created by his overactive brain to cope with all the shades of grey he's been forced into. Harry, Tom, Neil. Aurora.
He hasn't seen blue in lifetimes.
The days have blurred together. He keeps count of the numbers, but if you ask him what happened yesterday, he wouldn't have an answer - someone died (shot, beaten, starved, gassed), someone screamed, someone gave up. He's getting tired of seeing the same eyes, everywhere - hopeless. Pleading. He can't tell them apart, anymore.
Yesterday, he fell in the food line. He didn't even feel it happening, just saw the ground rushing towards him, the speckles of mud clinging to his eyelashes. He felt it when the guards kicked him, though; when the old man behind him dragged him forward, unable to pull him to his feet -
He thought of Aurora then.
Her face has been locked away for nearly a year now. At first, he kept it fresh in his memory, there to remind him every time he hurt, every time he wanted to give up - Aurora, Aurora, Aurora. Until months passed. Until she never came.
He thinks of her, and the cacophany of colors is blindingly painful. His whole body aches. She's a dream. She's a dream. She is more real than the blood inside his skin.
"Prisoner 267!" A guard calls out in a harsh voice. Alfred turns, flinching. It seems in this lifetime, all he knows is pain.
"Come with me." The gruff voice says again. "You've been assigned a special work detail."
He finds a way to move his heavy limbs, half-dragging himself across the field. It's rained for the past three days, an outpour so hard he forgets what being warm and dry feels like, but he doesn't mind. Rain means he doesn't smell the stench of death every waking moment - when it rains he smells the taste of freedom. Rain, sometimes, almost looks blue.
The guard shoves him forward, kicking his ankles and his knees like a rider whipping at a horse. He doesn't complain. He doesn't think he can, anymore.
He's shoved into one of the lean-tos by the gate, a rickety structure where normally the dead and the nearly there are kept. This one is clean. This one just tastes like rain.
"Don't say a word." The guard says, and with a last vindictive slap at his back, he leaves. Leaves Alfred confused, and terrified, and lost. Is this his execution? Have they brought him here to starve, too afraid to crawl back to the camp and risk a more painful death?
He hears the movement of another person in the shadows. He stumbles back. Freezes. Please, God, let it come quick.
"Alfred." Her voice comes out of the shadows; he sees blue before he realizes who it is. Before his heart stops beating for too long, before his soul starts humming and he feels the startling heat of tears slipping down his skin. Before his breath catches in his throat.
"Alfred, it's me. I'm going to bring you home."
Two years, eight months, forty-three days.