Title: Pigments
Summary: A life in color, a broken mind, a civilian and a missing-nin.
Warnings: Dark?
Notes: For SylvanDreamer, my awesome friend with awesome writing skills who should stop refusing to use them, the one who has seen the best and worst of my writings and the one I continually toss story ideas at to get a first reaction. J, I think I described it better than I wrote it.
Issues: The complexities of a friendship, obsession, and insanity. Except that it is more insanity than anything
Mindfuckery and duckling syndrome and its victims.
I.
Purple was the color of the flowers her mother held out to her whenever she came home from her day job in the market. She would grasp at the blooms, crushing them between her grubby little fingers, letting the juice leak out and streak it on her dress, on the floor, on the walls with pinpoint precision.
Purple was the color of the bruises beneath her mother's eyes, stark against the pale skin, whenever she is caught doing this. Her mother doesn't quite shout, but there is a sob in her voice than is louder than anything else.
Purple was the color of the grip on her first paintbrush, the means by which she becomes attuned to reality, the only way she can convey the world bursting inside of her. Paint, colors and a surface – this is how she communicates.
II.
Blue was the color of the sky when she first meets him. Top rookie in his class. He was good enough to spot her amidst the group of bullying kids, like an out-of-place spot in a graceful weave of tones. He is bright bright bright and she has to squint when she looks at him.
Blue was the color of the paint he stepped on when he tentatively takes a step closer, squirting the glutinous substance onto the rocks and onto his sandals. He frowns, wondering how he'd missed it and grins in relief because it easily could have been a trap. He beckons and she actually understands and she smiles.
Blue was the color of the ribbon he ties in her hair, a poor match to his hitai-ite, a wonderful complement to her stormy cloud eyes he says. Her eyes are startlingly clear when she gazes at him, seeing only him, and the rest of the world fades away to colorless monotones.
III.
Green is the color of the grass before blood spills on it. Her shoulder burns and she is screaming, screaming, screaming instinctively from the pain. He hisses at the amount of noise she is making, unsure whether he is glad or not that the fatal blow did not connect. With a frustrated grunt he leaves the girl that kept following him around, jarring all her colors, making them stark, painful, clashing and leeching and bleeding into each other.
Green is the color of the healing chakra the medic-nins apply in desperation so her arm might not be completely useless after the night ends. The hospital is devoid of color, she thinks as she sinks into her white sheets, staring at the white walls and the white ceiling. She pulls at the white bandages and screams again.
Green is the color of the scarves of the hunter-nin they send after him. She sees the burst of color through a crack in the door, wants to claw desperately at it but her hands will not work as she wants them to.
IV.
Yellow is the color of the summers that pass before she turns ten, when she says her first sentence when her mother wants to throw the ribbon she's always kept, the only thing that remains pure and unblemished amidst objects and people that meld into each other. Her mother drops everything and cries.
Yellow is the color of the paint she uses to decorate her mechanical arm with touches of suns and daisies, that it might match the sundresses she now wears when she goes out with people her age, her mouth working perfectly and her mind starting to become free of cobwebs.
Yellow is the color of the gold she earns, selling her works: landscapes, portraits, stills and whatnot. Her favorites are the ones she does in grays and muted monochrome tones and cracks, because they look the most real. Sometimes she adds fierce veins of blue and they look even better.
V.
Orange is the color of the fire which burns her latest masterpiece, the most ambitious portrait she's ever attempted, the face of the one dream she clings to. Her brush and paints burn with it. In the worst possible manner, her tools betray her.
Orange is the color of the jumpsuit of the ninja who brings the harmony of colors back to her life in the form of a head in a sack and a slashed hitae-ite in his fingers and a note with an apology that came years too late.
Orange is the color of a fruit in the market that she crushes in her hand. She stares a little too hard, a little too intensely at the gooey mess of pulp and juice in her hand and thinks that something is still wrong.
VI.
She dips her brush, and drowns a canvas in red.
Owari
Notes: It's early morning, I'm high on instant coffee and wrote everything within a self-imposed time limit but, apart from that, I have no excuse for this venomous whatever-it-is.
More notes: Okay. I got some sleep. Damn. I think I'm the insane one for writing this. Ah well, it's a new perspective.