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He glances around, blinking against the water; the feeling of breathing in water, even knowing that whatever spell that Ilaera and Aris had conjured was working, was so alien, but it offered so much.

He’d never seen her home. Not really. Hakim had only seen photographs, and even then, only once. Rya almost couldn’t believe him when he told her that - she’d just stared across the poker table, her cards folded in her hands, mouth practically on the floor.

“Really, geezer? Of all the places you’ve been, you haven’t been down there?”

He’d just shrugged. He grew up in the desert, and not exactly near the coast, either - she’d seen his home, seen the desert and the stark beauty that lay hidden within.

“What’s it like?” he asks.

Rya had just paused for a moment, and closed her eyes, as if she was somewhere else, sometime else, almost.

“I’ll show you.”

(He can remember when he’d told her the same thing, what feels like a lifetime ago.)

It takes months, but finally, somehow, they end up in Kasoni, and she takes him to the reef she’d grown up on - it’s the exact opposite of the desert he’d born to.

Everywhere he looks, there’s life. He floats along with the current, barely kicking his feet, gazing on as fish dart in and out of the coral, a spectacle of shimmering, muted color that he’s never imagined in his wildest dreams. He can glance up above him, at the surface of the water, and even in the day it sparkles like starlight.

But what he can’t stop looking at is the colors.

They’re everywhere he looks.

Red and green and orange and blue and purple and yellow and a thousand other colors he can’t even begin to name, but all somehow dark and distorted. 

And yet, somehow, it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

So many colors flash before his eyes as he clumsily kicks his feet, hovering over the coral, that he can’t help but stare, no matter what he tries.

They flash in front of his eyes, on the fish and coral and even in the water itself, somehow, and he barely even knows where to look.

A tiny orange and white clownfish pokes out of an anemone, stares at him for a brief moment, then darts back into the waving tentacles. A moray, mottled green and yellow, stares at him, lazily watching out of its little corner. A spotted grouper - a massive fish, almost as big as him, he thinks - darts faster than he could have imagined after an octopus that changes color even as he watches.

(Hakim can scarcely believe it.

All his life, he’d remembered color in the clothes and the glass of his village.

But here, deep beneath the waves in the reefs of Kasoni, color is everywhere.)

(If he could stay here for a thousand years, he would.)

Even Rya, somewhere in the distance, shines with color, the scales of her tail a glimmering gold and turquoise beacon in the distance. (She was whispering to something massive - a shark, she’d said, that she’d known when they were both just pups. )

(He never pretended to understand her.)

Hakim barely pays attention to her, though, even when she swims back to his side, darting around him with an unbelievable grace. He just stares at the colors all around him, at the iridescent light that shines down from above the water, at the way it shines on the coral and the fish.

(They’re muted and indistinct, and he knows that some scientist would say it’s because of the water, because it blocks the light and the colors this far down.

He’d tell them to come down here, and see for themselves, just how little that mattered.)

“How do you like it?” Rya asks him later when they finally, finally come to the surface, her smile bearing her sharp canines, her gills fluttering in the air.

(Maybe it’s just the spell that let him stay underwater with Rya, but somehow, even her face, still striped gold and yellow and with tiny fins on the side and back of her neck, seems just a little more colorful.)

(He’d shown her the desert, and the beauty that lived in the harshest place on Iera.

She’d shown him the ocean, and the most colorful world he’d ever imagined.)

Hakim just smiles as he thinks of the world of color below them, at the grayed out, muted world that somehow had more life than anywhere else he’d seen in his life.

(It was enough, almost, to make him believe again.)

I never paid attention to dust.

It was, after all, an almost imperceptible nuisance; always swept away by a broom, sucked up into a vacuum or washed away with a mop. It was useless. At least, the earth's dust was.

Monster Dust held a different story. A thousand different stories, all sprinkled onto a beloved object. Stories of hundreds of years trapped Underground, of Hope and of Love, of endurance and then freedom. Stories cut short, stolen and discarded on the sidewalk, an alley, in their own homes. Stories left unfinished, untold, forgotten.

I always thought Dust would look like ashes. Like the cremated remains of a human corpse, or better yet, the remnants of a forest fire, ashes drifting down like gentle rain, fertilising the ground to bring new life into the world. It used to look like it still had life. Like the Hope could not be removed from the Dust. Like they were one and the same, glittering with the unbridled joys of life, glowing with the thousands of stories waiting to be told.

Stories that always deserved to be told.

But after a while, the colours get muted. The Dust no longer glitters with life or glows with Hope. The Ziplock bags all just pile up on top of each other to create an endless mass of grey, a mountain whose height cannot be reached, which screams from the top for me to tell their stories. The voices echo, deafening and unwavering over and over and over again, they cry in my ears. An angry torrent that doesn't let me see beyond the grey, that drowns me and pulls me into a familiar dark embrace which holds me closer and closer, suffocates me, brings me nearer to the dust which I so loathe and so wish--

A knock at the door drew Kate out of her daydream. With a shaky sigh, she rubbed her face, squinting her eyes to ease their throbbing as the person opened the door.

"Another report came in..."

It was Edward. His voice was soft as he spoke and he moved carefully around the room, trying not to topple any of the piles of information or himself. He held a mug of coffee in one hand and a case file in another, Ziplock bag stapled to the front.

Gingerly placing the file in front of her, he gave her a stern look, as if chastising her for still being in the office this late. Like he could talk. She had the common sense to look sheepish, though, as she thanked him for the information. After some light hearted conversation, she waved him away with a smile, saying how they both needed to get back to work.

Forcing a glance at the file, she took note of the name Jerry, wondering what stories they had, what their favourite object was, what it would take for it to be me in that Ziplock bag.

I never paid attention to Dust.

Blood.

Blood was all they could feel. There was blood running down their neck, down their collarbones, down their arms. They could feel blood running down their face, from their nose and it pooled between their lips. When they opened their eyes, stuck together by the dried up blood, which had crusted in their eyelashes and dried they looked around.

They could not see much, from the forest that created a wall around them they could see the muted colours of the trees, more grey than green. They fog around them added a layer of black and white, turning the colours into shades of grey. They turned around, with legs that didn’t feel familiar, they couldn’t tell if their body was right or wrong, it just felt off. There was something different about their body but they couldn’t recall what had changed.

They looked down at their arms, looking at the thick, dark liquid running down their arms slowly, it was too dark to be blood. It had more the consictency of mollasse. It was too dark to be human too, but something in their heart told them it was blood, even if it wasn’t human.

A rumble tore through the small clearing, a bony hand tearing the dirt a few feets from them. The earth lifted to make way to the tall figure that emerged from the dirt, it was a man, too tall to be anything human or elvish or anything they might have known. A skull was on his head, serving as a kind of mask or helmet. Too big to be a deer or a moose, instead of the regular two set of antler there were four antlers, absolutely gigantic. The skull was a pure white, which contrasted with the muted orange of his clothes drapping over his shoulder and wrapping around his waist.

“Where am I?” They asked.

“That is not the right question, do you recall your own name, your own life?” Asked the being, twirling a staff just as tall as him in his hand.

“Who are you? Why can’t I remember who I am?” Asked the human, unsure of themself, panic making its way in their voice.

“I am a god, a real one, the god of the paths, the ones made and the ones that have yet to be discovered, the crossroad that have yet to be walked.” Answered the god, the voice echoing in the fog around them doing nothing to calm the panic in the human.

“As for your other questions, you shall know that some powerfull beings are at work here and in your desperation you reached to me. As for why you cannot recall a thing, I needed to meet you unbiased, when you had yet to walk this path.”

They took a step back, seeking refuge in the fog surrounding them, but the staff of the god stopped them, wrapping behind their back. They were forced to look as the god took a step toward them, step so much bigger than their own.

As she turned her eyes away from the red, orange, and yellow robes that surrounded her, turned her face to the grey skies and turbulent waters of the bay, she could almost feel the colors melt away from her vision. 

If you lose your soulmate, is it as though you never knew love at all?

Now she knew. 

The sun was white in the sky, not yellow. 

The fruit she ate every morning was grey, not orange.  

The roses in the Peace Officers Memorial Gardens were black, not red. 

Her wardrobe dwindled, month by month, to white sleeveless shirts and black trousers. Muted greens and greys paired adequately with black. The art came down from her wall, save for the one last watercolor Aang had given her before he died. 

He had painted her, training with Kya, Katara, and Toph. “My four favorite women in this life,” he had said. And Katara had poked him. 

“No more jokes about Tai Min or Rangi, if you please.”

And there had been laughter. 

Back when she could see colors. 

When the Cultural Center blew up, the fire was so bright it almost blinded her. But she gaped in amazement because it was not entirely white. She could see hints of yellow and orange and red, as if brushes had been rinsed and reused, ghostly residue of hues bleeding across her vision. 

When they broke into the Red Lotus’ hiding place under the mountain, Bumi’s form stood out in the dim light of the cave. His clothes stood out from the sea of robes she knew to have been made from the same linens, soaked in the same dyes.

She lifted him, his arm over her shoulder, and asked him what hurt.

He frowned at her, bravely claiming that he had never felt better.

But when she frowned at him, he gasped.

After his friend (neighbor? landlady's shiftless son?) informed her that the man's name was Bruno and that he was currently having a low-grade medical emergency in his apartment, she found someone who needed the colors of home - on his plate, in his apartment… on her.

Whenever Mirabel went to watch her "melodramatic trash TV" with someone who didn't need her to translate the language or the culture, she stopped wearing those dully-colored, almost masculine American jeans and t-shirts that she'd bought to fit in, but instead her brightly-printed skirts and frilly blouses that showed off her collarbones.

Bruno worked hard, had taught himself English, and best she could tell, did not drink to excess or do drugs. Decades of manual labor had kept him fit, and had only refined those beautiful hands, not coarsened them. His manners were oddly prim, more like those of her university-graduate father than those of the construction workers who crudely signaled their appreciation of her backside as she walked from the school gate to the car that whisked her and her sisters home.

Her roommates, who were even worse housekeepers than he was and appeared to be "hooking up" with new guys every week, would mock her for being interested in a man who had to be at least fifty. Her colleagues would turn their noses up at him because he was a fruit truck guy, and not one of the fancy ones that charged way too much for small underripe portions, but the "ethnic" one. Her family… Dios. If she dated while on this placement, anything less than a doctor would be a humiliation for them all - so she shoved what they would think about Bruno out of her mind.

But there was just something irresistible about him. A whole world was hidden in his dark green eyes. So she made the dishes everyone back home loved, using the nutritional knowledge she had picked up in her studies to replace some of the meat with colorful vegetables, and her mother's tips for making convenient, appealing leftovers. She kept wearing those bright skirts and frilly blouses, but started taking them up and in, bit by bit, showing increasing amounts of her warm-colored skin and beginning to despair of him taking her increasingly unsubtle hints.

Until finally, something broke (ironically while she was dressed in the plain t-shirt and jogging pants he had scrounged up after he rescued her from a nervous breakdown in the middle of her shift) and they could no longer deny the need for the home they had found in each other.

Once he had made her his, she felt free to bring the bright, clean colors of home into his sad apartment. New sheets and comforter for the bed they had started sharing most nights, proper curtains, a set of harmoniously-mismatched plates from the secondhand store, and a place where every new piece of her artwork was verbally appreciated. She seriously considered moving away from her slovenly roommates.

Marriage had become even more unfashionable back home than it was in Los Angeles, but she was starting to wonder if he might consider it. He had been in America long enough that he was probably a citizen through The Amnesty. If they married, she could get a real Green Card instead of her restrictive nursing visa and, as he had suggested, find a career she actually liked - maybe try being an art teacher… or even an artist. She could give him a child or two before he was too old to chase them.

And then her mother showed up with her sophisticated, muted-colored suits for a conference and mentioned that the man in the bright yellow fruit truck looked like she imagined her brother Bruno would after all those years away from home.