White Rose - Blood Stained Innocence

Innocence - White Rose

Chapter 1: Prologue

White.

He had always liked that color. Someone had once told him that white represented purity and innocence, something mystical, something special... like the snowflakes that fell from the midnight sky.

He agreed to that. There was something unique about that color, so beautiful in an unexplainable way. And everything that surrounded him was white. The tiles of the ceiling, the cemented floor, the soft wall cushioning, the steel bed frame, the sheets... even his clothes. Everything white, everything untainted. He liked it that way; it was perfect.

The ceiling was laid with a regular tessellation of large polystyrene tiles. Pure white, unstained. He would spend long hours, lying on his cold bed, staring up at the white ceiling. Not that there was anything else to do: counting the ceiling tiles seemed rather interesting. In actual fact, he had counted them so many times that the number was memorized somewhere in his head, but he always pushed it aside.

He was quite good at that. Whenever he found something he didn't really like - or when some faint memory he couldn't decipher arose - he simply pushed it away. He wouldn't let anything hurt his pristine world.

Well, there was no use counting something when you already knew the answer, right? So he would forget that number every time he looked at the white ceiling.

Occasionally, he would switch to counting the floor tiles. But he didn't like that, because he had to crawl under the bed frame to count the tiles underneath it. Once, he tried with the large slabs of padding on the walls too, but he had to keep backing away from the wall and crane his neck so that he could count the cushions closest to the ceiling. He didn't like it. He preferred lying on his bed, where he had full view of the ceiling.

He raised his hand slowly, pointed at the first square tile at the farthest corner of the room and began.

1, 2, 3... 9. His voice sounded oddly loud in the otherwise silent white room. There were nine tiles along the length of the ceiling and twelve on the breadth. Automatically, his mind did a mental calculation - there were a hundred and eight tiles on the ceiling. Each tile was probably... twenty inches by twenty inches, he mused to himself. And that would make the length of the room a hundred and eight inches and the breadth two hundred and forty inches. That would make the ceiling one thousand and ninety-seven point two eight centimeters square.

Interesting...

He returned his attention to the first tile again and began counting once more.

***

White.

He had always liked that color. Someone had once told him that white represented purity and innocence, something mystical, something special... like the soft cottony clouds of an azure blue sky.

The people he saw were always in white. They always came and went from his rooms in groups or pairs, like silent ghosts that drifted in and out. Whenever he grew immensely tired of staring at his tiles, he would stand by the steel door with its soft padding and peer out of the peephole in the door.

The white clothed people were always murmuring among themselves, but he had once heard one of them comment that he was a smart kid with brilliant intellectual abilities. They said that all the information had come in with his report when he had first stepped into that white room.

"Such a pity... " they all signed.

He didn't understand. It wasn't a pity. Why, he was enjoying himself, counting his tiles and living his own world... He loved every minute of it.