Chromaticity

"Everyone is a color, you know, every single person. It's a scientific fact." Character sketch collection.

Disclaimer: JKR owns it all. Except Ron. He's mine.

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Brown

She's neutrals, he supposes, and that's what he likes about her. A lot of people find her browns and ambers and off-whites boring, stuffy, dry even. She feels that way, he knows in his gut, though he can't verbalize it or explain why. She thinks her colors dull and lifeless and not worth pursuing.

She's wrong, of course, and so are they. Her browns are some of the things he likes most about her.

Her hair is brown and probably a little too big, if he's honest, which he used to be and not in a kind way. But sometimes when the sunlight hits it just right, it comes alive and is a thousand colors that have no names because only he can see them and he's never been too good with words (that's her job). And brown is a great color, the color of earth. Dirt, she'd say. Mud, their enemies would jeer. But they forget what he cannot help but remember. Earth is life and given sunshine and water (water's blue), anything can grow out of it. Anything at all.

She'd say her eyes are brown, too, and most people would agree. But they're wrong. Her eyes are amber. The word hits him like a bludger one day when he's thinking about something else, for once not pondering her eyes, which is ironic, but he recognizes it as perfect at once and is very pleased. And he remembers things about amber. It's found deep within the ground (you have to search for it) and it can be used to make jewelry and protective amulets and sometimes, when it's being formed, insects and leaves or something will get stuck in it and be trapped—preserved—for millennia. And that insect is perfect, complete, total, whole, and forever, and all you have to do is look for it. He's not exactly sure what the correlation is, though he knows there is one, and that it doesn't matter anyways because amber is perfect.

Her hands, under their ink stains, are off-white. They are not porcelain and perfect or deep, golden tanned, though he knows she bemoans this, wishing they were one or the other, and not this dreadful in between. She would never admit this, would, in fact deny it, but he knows her and knows that it is true. But her skin sort of reminds him of the pages of books, and she should like that. He knows that it is strange for him to even think about books, but after all, they are so much a part of her. Sometimes she—her skin—seems an extension of the books and off-white is the correct and perfect color for book pages. If they were pristine white, the glare of the sun would strain reading eyes, and the pages would show too much dirt and fingerprint smudges. If they were a deeper tan, no one would be able to read the words.

So she should see that all of her colors: brown, amber, off-white: her boring neutrals are perfect. That she is perfect.

But how can she know unless he tells her?

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Next...Light, I think.