Colors of Summer
a/n: This is a product of both my great love for Spring Awakening and all the wonderful fics I read last night, which inspired me to write one of my own. Standard disclaimer: I don't own anything.
xXx
In the midst of that purple summer, Melchior Gabor found himself looking around at the world as he had not since that night in the graveyard. He looked around and the world ceased to be colorless for him anymore.
It didn't happen all at once. But little by little, Melchior stopped seeing the world as a place that had died along with the pure potential for beauty, wonder and perfection a child might bring. Instead, he saw the green fields and the flowers bursting into life along the riverbank.
Once he'd opened his eyes, Melchior noticed things he'd never realized before, found answers to things he'd never questioned.
He saw Ilse slip over the wall nearly every morning and place fresh flowers on Moritz's grave. Sometimes, she bent her head over the flowers, hair partially obscuring her features, her lips moving over the petals of drooping buttercups or violet sprigs, almost as if she whispered secrets to them, messages they could pass on to the boy turned man lying still beneath her. Then she laid them down, scattering yellow pollen, and darted quickly away, back over the wall.
He saw Herr Stiefel walking down the street, fists clenched, eyes averted as he passed the same wall, muttering under his breath, "Not my son. He is not my son," as tears slid down his face.
He saw Ernst and Hanschen disappearing together into the fields up past the grape arbor on warm, lazy afternoons. And for some reason, whenever Melchior saw them, it put him in mind of the hayloft where he and Wendla-
But whenever he thought of Wendla, Melchior closed his eyes, and didn't see the colors again for a while.
Fin