Title: Colors
Rating: PG
Summary: Michael Dawson had always been a bit of a loner.
Written for an LJ Challenge about Mr. Eko.
Michael Dawson had always been a bit of a loner. He had preferred to sit on cold concrete steps during recess than play football with his peers, vying for quiet peacefulness of mind than obstinate grass stains on his knees. He would take a pencil and a blank sheet of paper over any girl who tried to charm him with quiet classroom flirtations. There was something about the way the pencil moved, how it created something two dimensional and manageable, that felt safer than the endless spectrum of human emotions and actions. Feelings were dangerous – he had experienced them first hand when his grandmother came over to endlessly antagonize his mother, watching tears run uncontrollably down her face when she left, while washing dishes and scrubbing her hands raw. But Michael wouldn't comfort her, he didn't know how –he didn't know how his mother was feeling, but he knew that the scene was dark shades of blue and purple with a touch of red anger rippling in the background like waves at low tide.
When he met Susan, it had been safflower yellows and gentle pinks – he had painted open windows with light refracting through them, blue skies and rolling hills. Susan would say that these pictures meant he was happy, her attorney's mind using evidence of the bright colors to deduce a feeling hidden underneath. But Michael's mind didn't work that way. Years later, when he sat on cold ground after hours of yelling himself hoarse for his son, discouraged didn't come to mind. Failure – black and endless empty gray space, did. He was a failure, he had failed his son… the only relationship in his life that had finally started coming together instead of drifting away. And all he could do was yell and scream and whine, like the sissy he was, the young nerd who was pushed into the mud by the larger upper classmen.
He had imagined himself, the loner that he was, mysterious and interesting, but deep down, he hadn't ever been brave or courageous or stately. When he had left home at seventeen, the goodbye with his mother hadn't been poignant or dramatic, it had been him abandoning the poor, lonely woman who had raised him. And when Susan had left with Walt, he hadn't been cheated, he might just be the object of someone's pities at most. And when Walt had been taken away, he had screamed for his son, not wanting revenge from those awful people, but he was whining, like a little boy who didn't want to share a toy fire truck. He wasn't brave, he never had been.
He could never be like Mr. Eko, whose intense presence was almost god-like. He could never be tough and silent and graceful. He imagined that he was… deep jewel tones, maroon and burnt sienna, but Michael had always been watery and weak, a feeble salmon color. And the more time that Michael spent with Mr. Eko, the more he wished he could be him. Walt could have used a hero anyway.