Disclaimer: not mine

AN: Sorry, guys, I'm trying to get out the Silee fic I promised :) Patience is a virtue! But here! It's Wingedraksha Does Angst again!

When he was a boy, his ma took him to a museum in the city. She lingered by the clothing from Earth-That-Was, the tools and the ancient flight machines that barely got a couple thousand feet off the ground. He passed her by, trailing a hand along the tarnished bronze railing that separated the displays from the visitors. He paused at the weapons section, blue eyes taking in the old guns and swords hanging on the wall. A bow. A copper arrowhead. He moved on. People stopped him as he explored the dim rooms, wondering where his ma was. Such an adorable little boy. Such messy hair, and oh, those eyes. Gonna be a heartbreaker when you grow up, chile, said the dark woman with the patterned dress. Heartbreaker. He turned a corner, breath coming in a cough. Still a little sick. And there… the pictures. Ah, those pictures. Men and women, children, dogs, cats, anything and everything from Earth-That-Was. Photographs. Color. He stared at them hungrily, wanting to reach out and stroke the glossy print to see if the people could feel him. See if they’d step out of their frames and play. For a poor farmboy from a Rim planet who’d scarcely seen a simple capture, the photographs were somethin’ else. Life, frozen in a square of vibrancy. It made him smile, and yet brought an aching sadness that he couldn’t quite understand. That life, those people, were gone. They would never smile again. Never pose for the flash of a camera. Never kiss. Never be. He traced his eyes along the wall, going from one picture to another. Black-and-whites, now. They changed with the loss of color, he noticed. Faces went from laughing or off-center to perfectly poised and awfully, awfully solemn. Eyes like dark stones stared out from pale, expressionless faces. Men with the little curls of mustache, women with the delicate ringlets of hair pinned up. Children, oh, they were the worst. Little boys and girls a-sitting with their hands folded in their laps, features so still and sad. He moved on to the next panel. The negatives. These pictures made his heart seize up, his little-boy breath coming harder. They frightened him, the negatives. Ordinary people turned into demons. Shadows glaring, eyes white and blindingly blind or black as the deepest night. But that wasn’t all of it. There was something deeper in the negatives that scared him, scared him way down in the gut. They stole from you and turned you inside and out. Displayed everything in a horrible, garish, cruel sort of way that left nothing soft and nothing gentle. And he had a terrible suspicion that maybe the negatives knew something, knew that those bright, happy pictures down the wall were doomed. The colorful, ordinary scenes had no cares and no fears. The black-and-whites were solemn and sad, but they didn’t… they didn’t have that eerie, gleeful tint of knowledge that the negatives exuded. He looked at the strange photos and shivered. The negatives saw the truth, didn’t they? The negatives saw the truth of destruction and the negatives didn’t lie. Now, years later, he remembers the negatives. Late at night, lying awake, trying desperately to keep himself from going to pace around the cold halls, trying desperately to make his mind rest, he remembers the sick little-boy fear of the negatives. He was right. They do know. Life is like a string of negatives, he thinks. Life knows the truth, and life doesn’t lie. Tricks and mocks and hurts, but doesn’t lie. Life turns the soft edges inside out and the gentle colors into bright, harsh light. He thinks of the captures he took of his home, his family. Captures that were in color. Movement. Smiles and laughter and no eerie switch from dark to light, light to dark. Should have known better. If he’d taken negatives, maybe he would have seen. Would have been warned. Negatives would have shown him that his home, his life, his everything…. well, that was doomed, too. Just like the smiling people from a dead world. He wants to walk. To move. To pound his fist against metal and force away the cold bite of despair that’s getting harder and harder to fight. When he wakes up, he sees in negatives. It takes thought to see colors again. The defeat is creeping up his legs, eating away his knees. He sees the desperation of his time. His eyes, when he looks in the mirror, are going blank. Color seeping away or sharpening like ice, darkening with the chill until the whites are dark and the darks are white and it’s all in negatives and he can’t fight it any more. But that’s not yet. He pushes it away during the day. Makes it lie down in the back of his mind and rest a while, leaving him in peace and gaining strength to attack again with all its gleeful, malicious horror as soon as he’s alone in his bunk again. It’s getting harder and harder to leave the despair behind. It’s getting harder and harder to see the colors. He closes his eyes and sleeps.