#ciyh update

[color-in-your-hands]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Color in Your Hands has updated.

At twenty-two, Adam has spent more time than he’d like to admit in hospitals and urgent care centers and free clinics.  He has not, however, ever been directed to the not-medical part of such a place before, as he had been this morning.  It still smells like antiseptic and there are people in long white coats, but the walls are wood paneled and no one’s wearing scrubs.  It feels very much like if he looks down the hallway just so, he’d see a TV camera at the end of it instead of the shiny doors of the elevator that brought him here.

[color-in-your-hands]

CiYH has updated.

Adam isn’t standing with his sculpture in the campus museum. He’s standing next to his car, hundreds of miles away, staring at a light blue trailer with a crooked, rusting 28 mounted to the side of it next to the box window of his childhood bedroom. The paint has completely peeled away from the front steps, leaving them washed out, gray and sun-bleached. There’s a pile of newspapers on the steps, and the mailbox was overflowing down where the drive to the trailer park turned off the main road. His old bike is desiccated and abandoned in the yard with crabgrass and dandelions growing up through the spokes of its flat tires,as if through the ribs of a corpse left to rot in the sun.

Even knowing no one is inside, he stays put, planted to the parched grass and cracked soil that he came from.

Read on AO3.

[color-in-your-hands]

CiYH has updated

The picture Ronan gave him makes him profoundly uncomfortable, but in a way that’s less hateful than he usually feels towards his own face.

Adam has never once made a proper self-portrait. It’s too hard to stare at his own reflection long enough to capture the strange lines of his face, too discomfiting to look at a photograph and not struggle with accepting the image as himself. Seeing himself, fifteen years younger, is strange and itchy and he only vaguely sees himself in the boy on the paper.

He finds himself staring at the picture, for the third time this week, while he tries to decide if he can put off going grocery shopping again.

Read on AO3.