Captivity

Gray Eyed Boy

Just a little special. It's not important to the story, so you can skip it if you want.

"I can remember so vividly the gentle expression; the poetic playfulness hidden behind such big, gray eyes. Eyes that were so bold and bright, and so full of wonder despite their faded colors.

I can remember how they looked up at me, pleading for an answer I could not give. For how could I hold such painful truths before them, to tell him the reason the others would not play with him, to the scornful looks their mothers gave.

That such rejection came from his colors; the ashen scales and cloudy eyes; and that a sickness was superimposed upon such dull shades, where vibrant colors should have flourished. Yet if color were to return to such gentle eyes, it would settle like a madness into the mind, and I fear for what would happen then.

For when I look now, I see the calm, carefree spirit and playful glitter in such gray eyes.

Sometimes I wonder what color they could have been... or what they could still become. I hoped maybe they'd be an ashen blue like his father before him. But I dare not wish for it, as I fear the sickness could still hold strongly, and infest itself with such bloom.

That fear holds bitterly some days. Often it lingers like the clouds above the seas, threatening to pour down, and yet it never rains; just leaving the endless sky of gray.

I remember the little fight that day... The snaps and growls of angry guppies scrapping after a piece of fish left over from the hunts. It seemed a normal affair, for children were constantly competing with one another in their little pecking class. Except... that day, the whole world turned green...For what stared back at me in the afterward was no longer the gentle gray, but a fierce emerald, even with the look of guilt, they held only a powerful and unnerving aura.

The others had felt it too, for even the boldest among us was wary to approach.. even if the sight before them was just a guppy.

I prayed that it was a sign of health rather than the omen it perceived.... But the omen remained and with it came a sea of blood...

Red the waters had turned... a sign of a fight far more severe than the first. One of the guppies growing frustrated and once again going after the others over the scraps.

What I remember most vividly was the little fangs sinking deep into the gills of another, bodies struggling for breath; how he looked up at me with those now toxic, green eyes and chirped happily, surrounded by the dead and dying bodies of his 'playmates'.

It was then that I came to understand... That my little gray eyed boy was gone from me. Lost like the souls of the pour children littered around him.... Everything was swallowed up in that overwhelming swirl of green, even that gentle gray I had come to love.... And in its wake it left a sickness I was forced to cure, even if my hands were shaking.. and my heart pleading..."

~
Maddie