A Colourful Meeting (Quinera) - blitz post

Black was heavy tonight as he sat on my shoulders, covering my face. It was difficult for yellow to peek through, but enough that my eyes could reach out to yellow as a guide. Soon, they wouldn’t need yellow, relying only on the electric feel that would crawl up my skin as it finally made contact. Black kept pulling me towards him until finally he was accompanied only by grey and brown. Hello, my friends. Shall we hunt together tonight? They were eager, ebbing in intensity as they took my hands and danced through the streets. There was no other human where have all the men gone? but I didn’t need humans to live. All I needed was the electricity, the heat, my drug.

Lines of pink lined my arms, becoming a network of hills along the tan landscape of my skin. They were starting to crave for my attention, sending signals to my mind so I could run my fingernails lightly over them, but I resisted because I didn’t want to see red just yet. Red would have to wait until I was home again, looking through clear once more.

A shuffling of feet turned my attention in another direction as black moved around until it became a form, a figure. “Hello?” I whispered toward the form, my arm reaching out so black could grab my hand once more.

Sound waves bounced back at me with an echoing “hello”, but it was not my voice that spoke. Black had carried the message back to me, before carrying more words, a question this time. I took a few steps forward until grey finally unmasked the figure it had been hiding. Silly, grey. You could have just showed me all along. It was no man, rather a girl who looked younger than me, but with a pale light dancing off of her skin. The words were so familiar had I whispered them so many years ago? that I took a few steps closer, finally being pulled in by another human.

“My name is Qibby,” I said, black and grey and brown nodding their heads in agreement. “These are my friends,” I told the human as I gestured at the space that they occupied. “They must like you.” They had all but masked the girl for theirselves you guys are so selfish, but they had also let me see her face finally and let the green from her eyes pull me even closer though ever so slightly. “Who are you?” I whispered back, even though I knew that brown would cover our sound.

“Yes, my brother named me,” I said, my voice still a whisper but my smile still there as I greeted my maybe friend. Black and grey and brown weren’t protesting and I hoped that yellow and green and orange would agree when they saw her too. “Some people call me Quinera, though.” Those were always the ones who would come into my room and force yellow and green to be silent as they tried to remove red. No no no! I would shout at them, but they would call me by full name as they held my arms and white, the traitor white, would take away red.

“Ru—by,” I echoed, letting the name roll of my tongue. “Like the color,” I added, the smile on my face growing. I wanted ruby to meet her, to see if they got along. “My friends? You don’t see them?” My eyebrows scrunched as I waited for my friends to show theirselves. They had guided Ruby after all, so there was no reason for them to be uncomfortable around her. “Don’t you see? Black is surrounding you. And grey! Grey is watching over us. And brown just stands in the distance but his job is very important too.”

“Colors? Yes, they keep me company,” I replied. Did other people not see colors for who they really were? She named red as her favorite and a mixture of happiness and pain filled my body. “Red can be difficult to me sometimes. But sometimes red is nice and I don’t like it when they take her away.” Red had been my first friend, the first one who greeted me. I didn’t trust her cousin purple, but red I knew would always be by my side, even if I didn’t want her there.

Ruby started talking about her hair, its light color almost as bright as her skin. “A change? Do you like to switch the colors often?” A shudder went down my spine at the thought of swapping one color for another. They would hate me if I tried to do that. But they don’t seem to mind when she does it. “It’s pretty now,” I said, my voice back to a whisper.

Ruby started talking about guys, her friends, and my mind had to think back to a time before the colors watched over me. Yes, I had once had friends. Yes, I had once seen guys as friends. But it was so buried in my mind, that everything was starting to sound so foreign. “Bright red is very pretty too,” I responded, as if encouraging her to change it to that color. But then she started throwing words like Capitol and money and parties, and I looked at grey with an eyebrow raised. What are these terms? Warmth was my only currency, District 1 the only place I knew about. And parties, I had once heard whisperings of such things, sometimes in the words of the men cloaked in the darkness, but I had never been to one.

“Oh, I was…craving,” I finished with a question in my voice. “Can you keep a secret?” I inquired, a skittish giggle emerging. “Sometimes, I like to come out at night to find someone.” My giggles were small, but the excitement coursing through my body was large. “Sometimes, I like to connect with humans. The colors, they can’t give me that. So, I wander around.”