RGB SCALE (Ch. 1) Legends ZA Reader Insert
The petrichor from damp clumps of shed leaves from Autumns past. Seasons layered, folding in on themselves. One second, delicate snowdrops peeking from the soil, dawning themselves awake at the first light of Spring. The next, dead black twigs peaking out in their finality from underneath a fresh blanket of fallen snow.
Over and over again. Cyclical, somehow, eyes to watch as tiny feet stumbled through the bramble and the thicket of some unknown woods. Those hands that pushed overgrowth out of the way never seemed to stay consistent in their length, shade, peculiarity, and yet the action was steady, the pilot the same.
With each blink, the camera shutter snaps yet another frozen moment in time. White feathers halted mid-flutter. Rain to streak the dull, grey sky.
It all bleeds away the moment you shake off the sleep, leaving faint impressions of something that should have been known, a past truth, maybe. Gone was it all, just as your foundation of self had long since eroded.
You just got there, got off the train -
Prism Tower was in shambles.
You remember in a quick, temporary flash, something unknowable. And then you die, crushed under rubble.
Not in some metaphorical sense. The news channel keeps droning on. Disastrous, genocidal weapons, painful, rogue Mega-Evolutions, the full stack of cards had been laid out on the table. Modern-Day Kalos sounded like some sort of nightmarish hellscape to live in. For many, it was.
That felt like it was your nightmare, somehow, but that, too, faded away.
No... No, there's more. The time and space disorients and collapses in on itself like the seasons in your dreams, like you've played out this exact same scenario too many times to count in just slightly different ways.
That little boy and his far too wild hair, the cold, and you in a forest devoid of color. He stands, framed in the distance by two trees, two towers. One fully black, one fully white. He needs someone. Needs someone to hold his hand.
Hold my hand, boy.
Take my hand, don't let go of my hand-
It's scary, not knowing what it means to be here.
On a spectrum of light, somewhere between red and blue...
So then there was a small girl, interjects the news. Was. She was all that she was, the memorialized who stopped the ultimate weapon some years ago, who blocked a full-scale genocide the likes of which happens only once in a handful of millennia, so narrowly avoided mass extinction by the breadth of a hair. And that sweet, untimely perished young woman was presumed tragically lost at the bottom of the weapon's crater that plunged so far down into the Earth there was no way of knowing how long she could have survived down there.
Press conferences, mug shots, framed memorials. Blood splatters of a red lion's mane on a mean scowl of a man's weathered, hateful face. That picture doesn't seem right, somehow. Those two, piercing blue eyes, you feel as though they should have a different expression, in some way. But a normal living man has two eyes, and those eyes naturally saturate with color from the world around.
This is the picture that the man with frazzled black hair and something of an overgrown stubble clasps in his arms while trying to hold back his sorrow as he addresses the crowd gathered.
ON THIS DAY, FIVE YEARS AGO,
For some reason, when you fixate on those red and blue pixels of the TV, all you can picture is grey.
The footage of the explosion, the terrifying comet sent hurling into the sky, keeps repeating over and over on the international news channel. It's strangely beautiful, in a sublime and cosmic sense. Raw, pure energy, it fills you, even the photonegative of a flash-fried camera. Staring into the face of death, it's not something you can understand, especially not over the memory of the recording on the TV.
If only you could just have a fraction of that energy, to lift your limbs, to get yourself out of bed-
Earlier, you woke up in some hotel room, a suitcase and a pair of old shoes sat by the bedside. Nothing else to your name. Not an ID, nothing but a mirror some ways off. There are days when you dread looking, for some reason, at the stranger who will stare back.
I can't remember who you are,
"That's probably for the best." He, in the static of grey, sat his old and far too lanky body into the plush loveseat beside the old armoire that wafted faintly of dust and old clothes.
That isn't what you said at the time, but it's the dialogue that plays in your mind now.
You sat together in the silence, cast in the gentle yellow grey of the streetlamp wafting through the sheer, pink grey spool curtains.
Then why are you sad about it?
He pauses to cough, a small cough, and then smiles.
"It's a privilege that I can recall in great detail enough to feel sad, so I am grateful. I mourn. But in some ways, you might argue it's the last of what's enjoyable for me in all my years."
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
[I have so many pairings in this book that I'll have to make a series that focuses on say, Ingo, Leon, Colress, Guzma, etc.]
