"You could be good for me;
I have a taste for danger."
--Madonna, "Beautiful Stranger"
It wasn't that he was colourblind; he simply tended to notice black and white and charcoal shades in far more detail than "real" colours. The striking thing about snow was that it was white, and the true dazzle in lightning lay in the way it stood out against a pitch night sky.
He saw extremes and wondered at the degrees of nuance between them. He studied shadows of every kind.
Noise--thunder, crowds, the roar of a spell's backlash--was like the sun to him, neither yellow nor gold but blinding white and unwelcome. Silence was like pitch blackness, familiar but deeply unsettling, reaching with inky fingers to stir the bases of old and private fears.
Voices were grey, and music, and especially office talk.
Rumours tended to feel pale to him, particularly in the months after he had decided to end his partnership with Tsuzuki; then again, everything felt pale, as though someone had turned on a switch somewhere and flooded the world with too much watery winter light. He'd had a dream a month or two ago that had taken place in the back seat of a car: someone had handed him a pad of paper and a pencil and told him to draw, then started the car and began to drive, leaving him to struggle with the effort of making a coherent image with only the brief flashes of passing streetlights to help him.
Tsuzuki, he thought, was disturbingly like that drawing, only understood in fits and starts.
He was well aware that talk made them all out to be more than what they were. Some of the stories featured him as a hard-hearted bastard who dumped his partner out of sheer exasperation; he had long since given up on trying to make anyone believe he was a good man, and he absorbed the gossip without really listening to it.
Some of what he heard, though, made him think.
For example, there was a rumour going around that, when Watari had first been appointed Chief at the sixth block, someone had been teasing him and had dared him to cut his hair--and that he'd done it, right there, just picked up a scalpel and held up the end of his ponytail and sawed right through it. It made for an odd mental image: he could picture Watari frowning ever so slightly in concentration, nose wrinkling just a bit, and then shaking his head as gold hair spilled raggedly around his chin; he could even imagine the broad smirk that would have had to come afterwards, the cocky young Chief tossing his braid at some white-faced field agent.
The odd thing was that when he pictured the scenario, there was a faint glimmer of yellow in his mind, highlights against a washed-out image.
Other, occasional things stood out the same way in his imagination: Tsuzuki's eyes, dark-violet rather than simply dark; seashell oranges from a rare happy evening during his last year of life; vague green firefly dots from his childhood.
More recently, he could recall the red of insect wings.
He was pale, as blurred as the edges of his own shadow on a rainy December day. The things he remembered were not.
I have a taste for danger."
--Madonna, "Beautiful Stranger"
It wasn't that he was colourblind; he simply tended to notice black and white and charcoal shades in far more detail than "real" colours. The striking thing about snow was that it was white, and the true dazzle in lightning lay in the way it stood out against a pitch night sky.
He saw extremes and wondered at the degrees of nuance between them. He studied shadows of every kind.
Noise--thunder, crowds, the roar of a spell's backlash--was like the sun to him, neither yellow nor gold but blinding white and unwelcome. Silence was like pitch blackness, familiar but deeply unsettling, reaching with inky fingers to stir the bases of old and private fears.
Voices were grey, and music, and especially office talk.
Rumours tended to feel pale to him, particularly in the months after he had decided to end his partnership with Tsuzuki; then again, everything felt pale, as though someone had turned on a switch somewhere and flooded the world with too much watery winter light. He'd had a dream a month or two ago that had taken place in the back seat of a car: someone had handed him a pad of paper and a pencil and told him to draw, then started the car and began to drive, leaving him to struggle with the effort of making a coherent image with only the brief flashes of passing streetlights to help him.
Tsuzuki, he thought, was disturbingly like that drawing, only understood in fits and starts.
He was well aware that talk made them all out to be more than what they were. Some of the stories featured him as a hard-hearted bastard who dumped his partner out of sheer exasperation; he had long since given up on trying to make anyone believe he was a good man, and he absorbed the gossip without really listening to it.
Some of what he heard, though, made him think.
For example, there was a rumour going around that, when Watari had first been appointed Chief at the sixth block, someone had been teasing him and had dared him to cut his hair--and that he'd done it, right there, just picked up a scalpel and held up the end of his ponytail and sawed right through it. It made for an odd mental image: he could picture Watari frowning ever so slightly in concentration, nose wrinkling just a bit, and then shaking his head as gold hair spilled raggedly around his chin; he could even imagine the broad smirk that would have had to come afterwards, the cocky young Chief tossing his braid at some white-faced field agent.
The odd thing was that when he pictured the scenario, there was a faint glimmer of yellow in his mind, highlights against a washed-out image.
Other, occasional things stood out the same way in his imagination: Tsuzuki's eyes, dark-violet rather than simply dark; seashell oranges from a rare happy evening during his last year of life; vague green firefly dots from his childhood.
More recently, he could recall the red of insect wings.
He was pale, as blurred as the edges of his own shadow on a rainy December day. The things he remembered were not.