Colorblind {Mad Max Fanfiction}

Chapter I

A/N- So hey, guys! I finally got the first chapter up and running. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Ardis couldn't help but think of cameras. Raise the exposure, and the white burns into the edges of everything else, taking color with it. Lower it, and the world darkens, colors falling away.

And when she could finally open her eyes again, she thought of photographs: old Victorian ones, with blacks and whites and grays. No reds, no blues, no greens and oranges and violets.

The End took away her family. The world took away her sanity. The sun took away her colors.

And so, one day, Ardis let her body hit the sand.

She didn't intend to get up.

Somehow, things never worked out quite the way Ardis wanted them to.

It was the second time she thought she'd never open her eyes again, and then found herself able to.

But this time, she wasn't surprised to wake up in a world without color. She was surprised to wake up in the backseat of a car.

A man was driving, but she could only see the back of him: hair as long as hers, broad shoulders straining against a tattered leather jacket.

"So what's your plan?" she asked.

He turned towards her slightly, not showing surprise at her sudden consciousness.

"What do you mean?"

His voice was quiet and gravelly. He clearly didn't use it much.

"I'm assuming you wouldn't pick me up without a plan," Ardis clarified, smiling slightly. That made it sound like a date.

But it did make her sick to think about what his plan might be.

"You aren't scared," he observed.

She wondered what color his eyes were. They looked pale. Green, maybe. Or blue.

"I'm not scared of anything," she eventually replied.

He looked like he didn't quite believe her, but it was true. Ardis had nothing to be afraid of. The worst anything to do to her would be to kill her, but that was really what she wanted. What she'd been trying to do.

"I'll drop you off with the next non-hostile caravan I find," he said. "If you were any closer to being dead, I would've left you."

"Should have left me," she said.

He didn't respond to that.

Ardis looked down at her body. Her arms were dry and flaking from God-knew-how-long in the sun, her hands red and blistered from crawling through the sand. She wasn't actually sure how long it had been since she'd eaten: she pulled up her shirt and examined her stomach. It was slightly bloated, but there was nothing in it. She pulled her shirt up further and touched her ribs, barely coated with skin (she halfway expected to see holes worn through it). She was numb to the pain by now, but she wondered how long it would be before she starved to death.

"There's food under the seat," said the man. Ardis reached under and felt around.

She came up with a granola bar, which was more than she'd seen in a long time. She gently tore the plastic wrapper, the sound as loud as a hurricane in the silent car. The man didn't flinch.

"Can you fight?" he asked, after what seemed like years of silence. Ardis had long since finished the granola bar and was tearing the wrapper into tiny confetti pieces.