Scythe || Bellamy Blake

The Color Gray

|||| Part 1||||

SCYTHE

Scythe's least favorite color was gray.

Everything in the fucking cell was gray. The walls were gray, the clothes were gray, the food was gray. A couple years ago she wouldn't have blinked at the color but now?

Now, Scythe was overwhelmed with a blandness so excruciatingly different from the emerald shade she loved so much. Gray made getting floated in a few weeks seem like a miracle. Dying would not be pleasant, but at least she would be free from this plague of a color.

At least that's what she tried to convince herself of.

Truth was, she was terrified to die- she had made too many sacrifices to stay alive only for her to die now. And though she didn't know how judgement in death would work, she didn't want to face what she had done.

Only two more weeks. Or was it three? She didn't know- time passed differently when it was spent staring at a gray wall. Time didn't seem to be passing at all.

It certainly put things into perspective- the threat of looming death. Scythe supposed that if she were a normal person she'd be contemplating her existence, wondering if she had left her mark on the world.

Unfortunately, she knew that she had, and here in this gray room it was almost as if she were already dead.

She certainly felt dead.

Her long black hair was french-braided tightly into a rope that sliced down her back and she had nothing better to do than to redo it. Over and over and over again. It was the sheer perfection of the braid that strangled her rather than the tight spaces and the never ending silence. It was a symbol of her time in solitary where she just sat and stared at nothing.

There was arguably nothing she hated more than that braid.

Her fingers glided through her hair, weaving the thick, black strands together. Her hair was oily and limp, a product of being stuck in a cell with no water to clean herself with. The air smelled of urine from the bucket the guards had forgotten to take out yesterday. Or had they left it in her cell longer? She tried to count the hours since she had last seen another person but soon gave up. She didn't care. This was normal.

They had given her a thin black jacket that had been too large for her ages ago and since then she had barely grown into the ratty fabric. She bundled herself up tighter, careful not to damage it- if she ripped a hole in it she would not get another.

She was ragged and she was hungry and she had been for years, but she didn't expect anything to change. She knew that if the Ark spared a prisoner on their eighteenth birthday, the prisoner wouldn't look back. They wouldn't spend time trying to bring attention to the conditions of the Skybox or criticize the council for locking up children. They would go back to their lives and model stand-up citizens, thanking their lucky fucking stars that they had left that gray behind. There was nobody to advocate for Scythe's treatment anymore.

That was fine. She didn't need anyone but herself.

Just as she had tied the end of her perfect braid together for what seemed like the hundredth time that day, the cell door slammed open.

Scythe was on her feet in an instant, fists up, feet apart in a familiar fighting stance. Her black eyes narrowed and she bared her teeth. She went through this routine every time the guards entered her cell.

Give them nothing, her subconscious snarled at her.

She was becoming more and more animalistic as the gray days wore on, her voice getting scratchy and body scrambling for food the second it was laid out. She disgusted herself, but at this point her body did what her body needed to to cope. She had nobody to talk to, not a single object to keep her grounded in her humanity.