"You aren't immortal. You're just real, real old, there's a difference."
- Peter S Beagle, "The Folk of the Air"
It had been blue once. Not the sad, frigid pallor of crusted snow lit by moonlight, but real blue. The blue of a cloudless sky, untouched even by the golden shining of the chariot sun that graced its surface, day after day. That laughing pastel blue, untouchable as the sound of a wind chime heard from far away. Ashen storm clouds could temporarily veil it, night could drape it with her long shawl of black velvet, but after all these deceptions finally dissipated into the heavens, the blue was always there, smugly peering down onto the green and brown earth that might have doubted its return.
No, this color was no longer the endless stretch of azure it might have been, once upon a time. This color held a story of sorrow, a story told in fleeting images and nonsensical words that blended together until the barriers between picture and sound had become entangled in one another. This color was as though someone had managed to chip away a miniscule portion of the sky, its shards falling and spinning endlessly without ever really touching the ground. For no truly aerial fragment could ever make contact with the earth until the world's foundations themselves collapsed and the two areas plummeted into one another, the solid terrain falling up into the heavens, the celestial mirage plunging in a direction it had no prior comprehension of.
These illusional fragments had been caught between the two layers, hanging helplessly in the in-between area for such a length that Time itself eventually lost interest in counting the moments, and had wandered off in search of better things to occupy itself in. They couldn't touch the land beneath them, nor could they go back into the azure stretch above, for the sky had long since healed its fractured patch over, and there was no longer any scar for them to fit themselves back into.
After nonexistent ages that spun themselves into seconds, the shards had slowly frozen over, loneliness and eternal suspension taking their toll at last. The singing blue they had once been comprised of had slowly died, so lost in this place where the stranger Time could have any effect. Their hue had faded to azure shadows, echoes of the vibrant color their spirit had been painted long ago, but that spirit too had receded with the hopelessness of it all. Their coldness, once fresh and playful as new-fallen snow, now calcified until it was the half-hearted bite of years-old ice whose existence had long ago lapsed from lack of newness.
Without purpose, they had been reduced to naught, and no longer saw any point in protesting when they were reshaped again and again into people that appeared different to other mortals, but that the wreckage of sky still knew were all the same. Stretched, slashed, sheared, stretched again, it didn't matter. To these pieces that had once been sky, enough of their former infinite knowledge remained that they knew immediately the different bodies didn't matter, it was still the same broken spirit, circling endlessly but ever lower, like a flying bird that is slowly losing its will to stay airborne.
Gradually, the shards that had once been part of the endless blue began to lose all memory of it. Once, the ice had only been a mask over the true nature of the fragments, but now it had slowly seeped into the character of the blue pieces until it was as much a part of them as they themselves. Every day, the pastel color searched the flagging wisps of memory that slipped away from it in every moment that passed, for something that it seldom and seldomer can recall. How did it come to exist in this strange place, why does it feel like it used to be somewhere else, somewhere far more right than this place it's in now? It knew, a moment ago. But it has forgotten.
Author's Note: Yes. This is a drabble about the color of Satoshi's hair. …Don't look at me like that. I don't even like Satoshi that much. But this just proves that it is possible to become incredibly bored while biking back to one's house from the pool, and therefore to come up with bewildering stupid ideas for fan fiction. And yes, I am aware the quote had nothing to do with the fic at all. …But I liked the quote.