Prismatic

It did not happen in a single night of harrowing pain and nauseated tossing and turning like everyone naturally assumed these things did. Instead, it was a gradual change that he could pretend was not happening. If he could tell that his mother was walking up the stairs to kiss him goodnight it was only because living with her all his life had taught him the fall of her footsteps and the scent of her cologne. But then he woke up on the fifth morning, only to find that he could no longer tell where the horizon ended and the sky began, because both suddenly were the same color.

That day he did not leave his room. His parents, who'd been told by a healer with too much pity in her eyes that the healing bite wound would be the least of his future problems, left him alone after he answered their concerned questions with a tranquil voice. He spent the whole of the day in bed, immobile, as he went through every single memory of his childhood, cataloguing them not by time or place, but by hue, wondering with childish innocence how it was possible to see inside your head things your eyes would no longer show you.

He'd shut his eyes quickly, in the morning, knowing that he had the rest of his life to see the world in these new shades of blue and red, but only so much time until green and yellow and white were beyond his reach. His task lasted the whole day, because once he finished trying to recall what color the trees outside his window had been last night as the sun set, he moved onto his belongings; books and clothing and toys that he could see despite his closed eyes. He remembered the color of the spine of every single book, the slight differences in tone between 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, both of them part of the same old boxed set.

The next morning he went down to breakfast as if nothing had happened, and his mother smiled while saying good morning. He told her while they shelved clean breakfast dishes and she said nothing, but when they finished they went up to his bedroom and paired all his socks, so that when he returned to school the next week they would never be mismatched.

***

When the letter came he read it disbelievingly and then gave it to his father, who immediately told him the ink was green. Not because they had thought both things equally lost to him and saw in his acceptance the promise of a cure, but because they always did, so he would not forget what things looked like.

He helped his mother pack his trunk as they sorted through his clothing and his books and his new robes and decided what he would need and what he could live without for all of ten months. He saw her tuck a small photo album between the layers of clothing, and she told him to wait until school to look through it, to save it for a day when he was feeling lonely. He nodded and went back to his bookshelf, picking Kipling over Verne both because of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and the fact that the book had black and white illustrations, forgetting all about the photographs.

His parents went with him to the station, crossed the barrier with him and gave him reassuring looks and words. Out of habit his mother idly mentioned that the train engine was red, bright red, and he didn't tell her that he could see that himself, that red he could always see, because she knew that. It was just a habit of hers, no more.

The trepidation he felt while riding on the train was perhaps less, perhaps more, than that of the rest of the students, but regardless what the books said he could not smell their fear, so there really was no way to know.

***

The album he had seen his mother slip into his trunk contained photographs, of course, both stationary and otherwise -- of him, of his parents, of the three of them, of their dog, of him and a myriad of relatives who knew very little about him -- but the last pages were devoted to something completely different. His mother had written on the flimsy sheets of plastic that were meant to protect the photographs, written in big letters and thick black ink the name of one color on each page, and underneath it both she and his father had crammed as many different examples as they could think of for each color. Not things as fickle as the sky, the sea or the soft hills outside his window at home, but things that could be relied upon, could be expected to be constant and serve as honest reminders of all the colors in the world. Whenever they bought him something, or gave him a gift, anything from a new book to a Quidditch jersey, it was always accompanied by a note which would say nothing but “yellow like your father's favorite umbrella” or “blue like the tiling in the upstairs bathroom,” because his parents did not want him to forget what the world had once looked like to him.

The first nights at Hogwarts, alone, he missed their almost constant narration and description of his surroundings, but as the days passed he found that life without them was not only possible, but also tolerable. He meandered through corridors between classes, taking everything in and not looking at things through the distorted filter of memory, because for the first time there was no one at his side telling him what he should be seeing.

Perhaps the only place where he really longed for his mother's voice in his ear was the potions classroom. The professor was a kind woman, tolerant and prepared for the mistakes the children under her charge would inevitably make, but his errors she simply could not understand. The first lesson she thought him clumsy; the third, daft; the seventh, hopeless and the ninth, obstinate. If by the end of the year his marks were higher than they should have been, it was only due to the single-minded effort he put into brewing the most elemental of potions, and because he obviously knew the material, despite not being able to successfully brew even the simplest of sleeping draughts.

***

After they had sorted all his socks his mother and he had methodically swept through his whole wardrobe, discarding things he suddenly did not like. His mother watched but said nothing as from memory he told her what color every shirt he owned was. He could not do that anymore. He'd grown up since being bitten, and of course they'd bought him new clothing over the years. Although at the beginning there had been a lingering sense of fear, of having all his small secrets inevitably reveal the large one to the Muggle children he'd gone to school with prior to Hogwarts, by the time he reached eleven he had grown habituated and orderly enough that he no longer feared going to class wearing mismatched socks.

He still dreamt in color, occasionally. It used to happen all the time. He'd open his eyes in the morning not remembering his dreams and would be jolted into awareness by the sudden difference between both worlds. But over time he grew used to it; the dreams became scarcer. He hardly ever remembered what he dreamt about even now, let alone in what color, but sometimes, when he woke, there would be hazy memories lingering behind his eyes of greens and yellows, or what he thought were greens and yellows but were somehow off, perhaps even wrong.

But that did not bother him nearly as much as it would have when he was six or seven or eight.

***

A new potions professor began to teach at the start of fourth year, and this one was not as tolerant of his mistakes as the previous one had been. Over the past three years he had learned to work slowly in the classroom and always sit next to someone who could be relied on to be a competent brewer. He made subtle inquiries, asked his companion whether he thought his potion was the right shade of blue for adding the mandrake, or whether he should give it some more time. He learned to watch the cauldron next to his for texture and bubbling, thickening and thinning, smoke and smell, and to then look for the same things in his own. Whenever they worked in pairs he would pick his partner carefully, making sure he was always the one who ended up having to grind the asphodel into a fine powder and chopping the daisy roots into tiny, even pieces, watching carefully as the ingredients came together to yield something that, more often than not, matched what their professor demanded of them.

***

Sirius or James always did the brewing, when the four of them were concocting something late at night in one of the disused classroom, while he read the procedure aloud. It was an established routine, until the night when both of them got a sudden craving for chocolate and vanished under James's cloak to go find some in the kitchens, leaving Peter and him to mind the slowly bubbling cauldron. When Peter disappeared for a minute, saying that he had to go to the bathroom, he found himself having to decide when to add the porcupine quills. Having added the quills, he found himself in the difficult position of explaining to his friends how he had managed to botch the carefully researched boil-inducing potion that Sirius had been wanting to spill all over Snape since first reading about it, two months ago. When Sirius let out a disappointed whine, he said nothing in reply, but when Sirius began to sulk petulantly he snapped at him and told him that next time, he could try brewing his potions under the effects of a daltonism hex and see where that got him.

Sirius replied that that had to be the most useless hex he'd ever heard of, and it was only the next morning that he asked if tree leaves were blue, then, with a tone that was half morbid fascination and half sincere curiosity.

Remus told him that he still remembered what green looked like, and left Sirius behind to puzzle out what exactly that meant; Sirius must have understood more than he let on, because regardless of everything he would come to do he never again asked about the color of anything.