Title: A Life in Monochrome
Day/Theme: 16th September/"Older ghosts"
Series: Eerie Queerie
Character/Pairing: Kanau's senpai, implied Senpai/Kanau (but, y'know, 25 years later)
Rating: PG-13/12
There is a dull, grey man who lives in a dull, grey house with a dull, grey wife. Every dull, grey day he gets up and goes to work in a dull, grey office. On his way to and from it, he walks on a dull, grey bridge over a dull, grey river. Every day he thinks about throwing himself off it. Every day he thinks about finishing what he started twenty-five years ago.
Every day, he goes home and carries on with his dull, grey life.
He has a son. The boy started out as colourful as a rainbow and a good deal brighter, but the dye is washing out as he enters his teens. His son is a pale pink stain on the man's heart where (blood) red ink was spilt long ago. The man wonders if the boy will ever have a friend who can bring the colours back. Like he had had. Like the one that he (threw away) lost.
He is a dreary man in a dreary world. Twenty-five years ago he had been a dreary boy who dressed in brilliant shades and saw a dreary life stretching out ahead of him. Strange that it had been the boy who seemed to conform so rigidly to the rules who had shown him that it didn't have to be that way. Strange that it had been a boy dressed in monochrome, in midnight black from head to toe who had been the more vivid, the more living of the two. The light streaming through the boy's world had blinded him and he had stepped back, retreated into the safety of darkness.
The boy had had a name, one that he hasn't spoken in twenty-five years.
He doesn't intend to start now.