Someone once mentioned I should flesh this out into a novella. I don't know. Perhaps?
"Hide it! Cover it now!" Shouted a man in drab gray clothes. Behind him, a woman marched with her gaze on her hands. Hidden in her hands was a small square of color; a photograph. Around them, a world of gray walls merged with the colorless sky. In her ears, she heard her husband scream at her, but the plodding of her footsteps hypnotized her as she played back the year in her mind.
A soft rumble, however, broke through her thoughts like that of a bullet through a heart. Like a bullet through her son's heart. Her fingers pressed against the photograph as her fingernails flashed white—a stark contrast from her pale complexion.
She knew the Council would sentence her to death.
"Hide it!" The husband screamed again, his voice concerned yet oddly robotic.
"His name is Alex," the wife stated clearly.
"He has no name."
Her eyes glanced at her number-tag on her left breast pocket. A brief sequence of numbers peered at the world from their gray confines. Her vision returned to the photograph; her world of color.
"I can't hide him anymore," her mind flashed to the room she kept her son locked in. The windowless room that held in the color of her son's life. She remembered tucking him in at night as he smiled with lips of bright red. She also remembered not locking the door one evening.
Continuing her march toward the Council's Court, she glanced up and hated the door that led to the circular chasm of misery and torture.
The Council.
"You know the penalty for color! Death!" The husband reminded as the wife pressed the photograph deeper into her chest. Her fingertips began to crease the picture as she held onto the remaining vestige of her son.
"Why can't you feel anything?"
"It's against the law, do you wish to die?"
"I'd get to see him again," the wife whispered as her finger ran across the top of the picture. Feeling a sharp pain, she swiftly brought her finger to her face. In a thin line of treacherous color, a smile of deep red crept through the cut in her finger. She gasped as she dropped the photograph to the chilly lifeless floor.
The husband turned and watched his wife bleed. His eyes grew wide as he faltered backward. "You have the color!"
In a trance, the wife watched her finger bleed upon the floor as droplets of crimson globes swam across it. Instantly, she fell to her knees and let her bloody hand touch the picture of her son.
She remembered the color of his blood after the Agents were done with him. She remembered screaming at them to let him live. She remembered everything and she would never forget.
At that dangerous moment, the slender doors to the Council's Court cracked open as a cloud of noise surged through the room like poisonous gas. Bright lights blinded her as strong hands pressed into her arms, waist and neck. As she was pulled up, she stretched for the photograph of Alex as an Agent bashed her in the head with his fist. Her vision blacked out but then came back as she felt her body being dragged like a carcass across the floor, her finger leaving a trail of rebellious blood against the monochrome world.
Suddenly, a smile bubbled across her face as she glanced at the Agents in dark clothes of inoffensive color. "I will see him again." Her eyelids begin to shut as she felt something burst inside her. From the depths of her heart, her color exploded into her body; her defiance. In the center of her sclera, her iris melted from lonely gray into a brilliant blue.
"He showed me color," she whispered as her eyelids closed one last time.
