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She always hated black and white movies. Why bother with the dark and boring films when the world was full of so much color? Why bother trying to imagine what color a gown was when you could see it in all its splendor? Why question whether the metal was silver or gold, inlaid with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, or sapphires? Why stare at a grainy screen in differing shades of gray when there was so much beauty to be seen?

And she thinks it's strange because she never saw the beauty – not in her real life. All she saw was black or white, and she classified it as such. So why did she hate it so much?

Charlie, herself, and all her friends in the police, as well as their families, were colored a stark, pure white. The girl down the street who stopped to help pick up the stranger's groceries lost her color and all Olivia's eyes picked up was an alabaster glow.

The men she arrested and put away were all black – darker than midnight on a moonless, starless night. They swallowed up the light shining from the pure white of the police – took away the innocence of the little children, dampened their bright glow. And so she took them away and shut them up with all the other dark things, and sometimes the people were evil, sometimes the things they did. But always, always she shut them away and that was it. There was no more questions, no more thoughts. They were evil, she was good. Black and white. Her world was simple. Until she met Peter Bishop.

When she had first met him, he had fallen into the black category – but she wasn't going to arrest him. She needed him for something, and it was only fair that if she took, she gave back. Black and white, tit for tat. He had broken the law, he had probably killed people, or at least gotten people killed, which in her book was really the same thing, and he was cocky and arrogant.

And then his arms wrapped around her as she whimpered in pain. He soothed and comforted and her vision flashed – he was glowing pure. And then he had to go and be an idiot, and she blamed his temporary color change on the drugs his father had poured into her veins. Even if at the time she had been completely clean.

The more time she spent with him, the more confusing it was. Her brain ached from constantly flipping him back and forth. First he comforted her about John – then he made some snide comment. He threatened to leave, then listened to her sob stories about her stepfather. It was enough to make her go crazy. Finally, she angrily grabbed him and threw him in between, letting him be half and half. But the colors mixed, until he was gray.

Well, that was settled, she decided. Gray – a neutral color. Like those movies that she hated – they said black and white, but really, there was gray in there too. So she classified him as her gray piece – the only one she had. Walter had gotten thrust in the white section – after all, he was insane, and therefore not responsible for his actions.

But gray was not fitting for Peter Bishop. It was too bland, too boring, too simple. Peter Bishop wasn't just gray – he had too much life in him to be assigned to such a dead color. He encompassed every color in the rainbow – every paint tab in the paint aisle of the hardware store. He was too funny, too passionate to be any single color. And so her vision changed again – taking him in with all his glory.

And once she saw him differently, the rest of the world changed too. First, Walter came into full color. Then Mitchell Loeb – he had saved so many lives, but then destroyed hers. Such an oxymoron wasn't as simple as black and white, or even black white and gray. There was too much depth, too much complexity, too much color. And slowly, her whole world became a brilliant ball of life, light, and brightness.

She still hates black and white movies. But now it isn't so strange.


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