♔ ( - silvertonguedopportunist, because why have one soulmate AU when you can have two? :D )
James had long since accepted the world as it was.
Everyone spoke about it, the way the sky changed, or the brightness of it all - but what he had remembered were shades of something almost grey. It hadn’t been what he had expected, but he assumed that was his shot, done, over. Because the moment grey and muted hues were gone, along with what he assumed had been love… well, there was very little you could do about it. Colour, it seemed, hadn’t been that special. They said he hadn’t known the real thing. That it couldn’t have been the one. What bullshit. A non-believer then, and certainly one now, James would say he couldn’t miss what he had never truly known, and had settled to be alone. Friends to drink with, strangers to take home on the odd night where he didn’t want to be alone, something akin to family in those he worked with (some of them anyway). He wasn’t happy, perhaps, but he was content.
It had been a day like any other when the world that had been black and white began to shift. Unlike all the stories, all the writing about the events, it started slowly, almost too slowly to realise. Muted hues began to simply fill in at first. The walk to his usual coffee shop was lighter than usual, the grass wasn’t the same, the shades slightly off, the sky clear, but a hint of something James could only assume was a very odd shade of grey. Suspicion arose within him just enough to make the walk unpleasant, and kept the man on his guard until he reached to push the handle of the coffee shop door. That’s when James’ physically flinched.
What had always been a boring handle, flecks of a grey and black sticker that someone had tried to scratch off stuck to the outside of it… was something he couldn’t describe. Vivid, bold. Red.
Glancing around at the rest of the world, nothing else had the new colour. Nothing. There was a hint of excitement mixed with dread, the idea that something might be causing him to see something against his will. There might be something he didn’t understand and that really wasn’t on. So, pushing open the door, he began to seek more clues, and they were in abundance. Lines across a once bland table were streaked with brown, the shape as if someone had run their fingers over the surface while bored. The counter was stained like marble. James held his breath, if only to steady himself as he paced closer, and that’s when it all began to fade into it. The voice that sounded so unfamiliar, the voice that made colour completely sink into his world, the voice that made him realise how much he had been missing.
He could have walked straight out and pretended it never happened, but instead James stood, at the counter, listening to the man who claimed he was lost, and wondered if this was it. Was his world the only one that just changed to colour?
@silvertonguedopportunist
