Work Text:
💙💙💙
He was twelve when he first saw it in a dream.
He remembers asking his mother to take him to a paint shop the next day, desperate to find the right shade. In his dream, he had floated in it, this colour; had let it pour over him and wash into every pore on his skin until he was saturated with it, and God, Colin felt right for the first time in his life. He was desperate for it, then – desperate to paint his room that colour, or buy linens in that particular shade – anything so he could feel the gentle rock and warmth of love that he had felt in his dream.
“And what colour is it?” his mother had asked patiently.
“Blue,” Colin had replied. “But not an ordinary blue. I’ve never seen this blue before.”
His mother had hummed in that loving and palliative way that only a mother can achieve. She took him to the paint shop and watched him stand in front of the blues for nearly an hour, picking each card up and comparing it with the others; closing his eyes and trying to convince himself he had found it. He took a paint card home in his pocket; assured his mother that yes, this was the one.
That night, the dream came again, although it was more vivid this time. The blue tinted everything in his world, and it vibrated with some sort of deep, warm, resonating pulse that made him feel like his soul was cradled by the heavens. This blue was healing; this blue was home; this blue was love in some intangible way that no 12-year-old should possibly know or be able to understand, other than through the drive to find it in his waking life. He opened his eyes the next morning and scrambled to find the paint card; squinted at it with tired eyes, only to feel completely empty inside as the shade that had looked so close to this dream blue now suddenly looked dull and empty.
It was simply the wrong blue.
It took two more days like this – two more days at the paint shop, Violet confused and patient as she waited. Two more days of Colin selecting what he believed to be the correct blue. Two more nights of dreams, perfect blue dreams, other than their absolutely devastating conclusion by the time he opened his eyes and fumbled for the paint cards on his nightstand.
Wrong.
Wrong.
The third day, Violet had to take Hyacinth to a dental appointment, so Anthony begrudgingly drove him to the paint shop and sighed long, dramatic sighs as Colin paced back and forth in front of the blues.
“Why not just take them all?” Anthony finally huffed impatiently, and, well, it wasn’t a terrible idea. They each grabbed a handful of cards and stuffed them into their coat pockets. When Colin returned home, he laid them out on the floor beside his bed, organized in a cascade of hues from light cyan to a deep blue-gray. His blue was somewhere in the middle, he felt, although he couldn’t be entirely sure.
The next morning, he hoped he was sure. He practically fell out of bed and scanned the cards until he was in tears, absolutely certain that none of these shades were his blue. His mother had found him there, sitting on the floor with his knees hugged to his chest, several cards smeared a different hue from the tears he’d let fall onto them without a care for what his older brothers might say if they had caught him crying over the colour blue.
“My sweet boy,” she had said, pulling him into her arms. “Maybe you don’t need to go looking for it? Maybe it’ll be like it is in your dreams – maybe you will find it without even trying.”
Over the years, his blue would appear in his dreams every few months. Sometimes it was a bit like a lens, casting the hue upon everything around him as he experienced the world in his dreams. Sometimes it would just accent certain things in his dream – eyes, or flowers, or water. Other times, it was like the first dream – overwhelming, flooding him, drowning him in it.
His siblings knew, because he talked about it every time he experienced a dream. Most nodded, smiled placating smiles.
Benedict occasionally humored him by pulling out his paints, mixing shades that felt closer than the paint cards, perhaps because they were crafted by hand; richer and deeper just by the nature of having been forged by an artist. They were beautiful, of course, but never right.
At some point during his teenage years, Eloise clearly grew tired of the recalls of his dreams. “It’s just a dream,” she’d puff with annoyance. Once, she pulled up Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue” on her phone to play in the middle of his story; Violet immediately chastised her, but Colin couldn’t forget the snickers of the rest of his siblings, so from that point forward, he kept his dream blue to himself.
💙💙💙
The dreams continued off and on, and more often than not, Colin tried to placate himself by simply enjoying the colour when he saw it.
Every year or so, he’d get inspired to do more research after a particularly vivid dream. He took a course in uni on lighting design in theatre, wondering if he might view colour differently when it was sourced from light. It was interesting enough, flipping through a Rosco E-colour Swatchbook, and learning how to light the gels just so to get different shades of blue to spill out onto a stage, but it still wasn’t quite right.
He turned to graphic design next, taking an introductory course at the library that was taught by a young, hip American girl. She introduced Colin to hex colour codes and Pantone chip books. He poured over all 2,390 PMS colours nightly until he could name every single shade of blue. His instructor was very impressed by this (not so much by his terrible graphic design), and recommended he spend his time at the library not in front of a computer, but finding books on colour theory.
Colin’s colour theory phase lasted about three months. He became obsessive, studying tint and shade before moving onto spectral colours and other things not covered by little six digit codes or pretty colour wheels. It was during this phase that he learned about impossible colours: colours that could not be produced by the eye in normal circumstances. It made some sense as he studied cone cell responses and spectral sensitivity, chromaticity and the colour gamut; all of these terms, and formulas, and theories that legitimately made his head spin if he allowed himself to be swallowed up into this world for too long, but eventually, eventually, he deduced that his dream blue must be exactly this – an impossible colour.
Impossible.
It threw him into a funk for a bit. Colours dulled and grayed around him; everything seemed a bit foggier, like he was looking at the world through the glass window on a bus that had been smudged by a few too many hands. The dreams disappeared, too; he wondered if they would ever return.
An impossible blue.
It made sense, really. He felt so at peace in his dream blue; the world wasn’t kind enough to let him find that in reality, he figured.
One night, he finally saw it again in his dream. He wept in his dream at the sight and feel of it; wept more when he woke up. It had been nearly three years since his last dream about this blue, yet it was more vivid than ever. It hurt this time; ached in each chamber of his heart with the deep longing of a want for something you can simply never have.
He got dressed slowly that morning. Took a lonely walk outside of his flat, just a few streets over. It was cloudy and dreary, a fine mizzle prickling the pores of his skin as he kept the collar of his coat pulled up around his neck and his head down low.
A colour wheel on a paper sign on a lamppost caught his eye as he walked back. He leaned in to take a look as the bottom part of the flyer rustled in the wind, little slips of paper waiting to be torn.
Headlines about Olo pique your curiosity? Are YOU interested in seeing a colour that has never been seen before?
We’re looking for participants aged 16+ willing to participate in colour research.
Contact Professor Penelope Featherington, PhD, with the Colour and Vision Research Laboratory - University College London
Colin’s hands were shaking so hard when he went to tear off one of the little slips of paper with contact information on it that he accidentally ripped off half of the flyer. He stuffed the torn paper into his pocket and must have temporarily blacked out, because he swore that the next time he blinked, he was sitting in front of his computer and composing an email.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]Subject: Colour Research
Hello Professor Featherington,
I noticed your flyer on my walk home today, and I am quite interested in participating in this research. I’ve actually been interested in colour research for years after seeing a unique colour in a dream. That might seem farfetched, but I’ve truly tried to find this colour in the real world, and it’s been impossible. Hopefully I can learn more in your lab.
Thank you,
Colin Bridgerton
It took everything in him not to refresh his inbox every thirty seconds. He tried to distract himself – cooking some eggs in his kitchen, a round or two of FIFA on the Playstation, the hottest shower he could stand. He hoped he wasn’t too late to participate; hoped his email didn’t get lost in the professor’s junk folder.
Finally, after three hours, he refreshed to see a reply.
To: colin.bridgerton@outlook.com
CC: [email protected]
From: [email protected]Subject: Re: Colour Research
Hello Mr. Bridgerton,
We’d be delighted to get you scheduled in our lab. I’ve copied one of my research assistants here, Rae, to get you set up with an appointment to come in.
Thank you for your interest,
Penelope Featherington, Ph.D.
P.S. How fascinating that you saw a unique colour in a dream. I, too, saw a unique colour (we call them ‘impossible colours’) in a dream when I was around twelve years old. Seen it many more times in my dreams since then. It’s what made me interested in colour research, actually.
💙💙💙
Rae scheduled his appointment for February 14th (“Doing uni shit seems awfully depressing for Valentine’s Day,” Daphne had remarked when he told her), bright and early at 8:30. Colin could barely sleep the night before; took a car and arrived almost an hour early to the appointment. The research assistant, Rae, arrived twenty minutes after him, unlocking the big glass doors with a swipe of her ID card.
“We’ve had a disappointingly difficult time getting participants for this study,” she commented as she ushered Colin inside the frigid laboratory hallway. “I guess a lot of people aren’t keen on having lasers shot into their eyes.”
Colin couldn’t care less what the actual experiment entailed – he had spent the last week praying to every deity he could think of that this experiment, this lab, this professor might have some kind of answer for his impossible blue.
He was ushered into a smaller room that looked similar to a doctor’s office, and given a clipboard with a thick stack of papers to sign away any right to sue the university in case their eye lasers made him go blind, or worse, but fuck it – he felt good about this. Maybe he would finally get some answers, or at least some advice on a direction to take.
“-- and we’re working closely with our colleagues at Berkeley. There’s a lot of indication that this might really help with retinal diseases.” Rae, who had apparently continued talking while Colin mindlessly signed his life away, collected the clipboard and gave it a once-over. “Oh, by the way, Dr. Featherington wanted to introduce herself before the study began. She doesn’t typically do this, but I think she wanted to ask about your colour dream just out of curiosity’s sake. She double checked with the review board that it was alright to chat with you before the study, so long as you don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind at all,” Colin managed to respond despite his first instinct to scream, “Yes, of course I want to speak with her! I’ve been needing to speak with a researcher like her for fucking years!”
“Great,” Rae smiled, drumming her fingers on the edge of the clipboard. “I’ll let her know she can stop in.”
Rae slipped out the door, leaving Colin alone with his thoughts and the gentle buzz of the fluorescent lights above him. For a moment, he closed his eyes; conjured up the version of his impossible blue that he’d memorized from his dreams long ago. He wondered if he could see it from this experiment; wondered if it was similar to the blue this professor might have seen. He wondered if she felt the same way as he did when she saw it in a dream; wondered if she had figured out a way to replicate it in the real world.
A gentle knock on the door roused him from his daydream. He was quite used to this moment of opening his eyes – his dream blue always disappeared instantly.
A small woman appeared, red hair standing out as it curled down the front of her white lab coat.
“Mr. Bridgerton, it’s a pleasure to meet you –”
He found her eyes.
He always thought the phrase ‘heart skipped a beat’ was hyperbolic, but he quite literally felt his heart stop for a moment as he stared directly at her. Warmth bathed over him; that sense of peace that he had only ever felt when he was asleep, awash in it …
His blue.
Her eyes.
“Fucking hell,” he heard tumble out of his mouth; he gripped the edge of the giant chair tightly, white-knuckling it for fear of passing out, because it was his fucking blue. His dream blue – this impossible colour – stared right back at him under long, blinking lashes, and he had absolutely no clue what to do. Part of him wanted to scream in happiness; part of him wanted to die right there, certain that he would spend the rest of his life trying to find those eyes again were he to leave this room and never see this woman again. He was frozen.
“Forgive me.” Somewhere in the fog, he heard her clear her throat and try to speak. “I’m Dr. Featherington – Penelope Featherington – and –”
She stood there, mouth slightly agape, and he wondered if he was completely freaking her out, so he tried to steel his nerves and regain some peace and calm from his blue staring back at him in those goddamn beautiful eyes of hers. He willed himself to say something, anything to explain himself.
“I’m so sorry,” he tried. “It’s just … your eyes –”
He stopped, at a loss of words for how to explain this to her – this poor fucking professor who he was sure just wanted to do her study and go home, not have to deal with him sitting there like a hapless idiot.
But those dreamy blue eyes just blinked, seemingly in shock, as she looked back at him and muttered: “No, I’m the one who should apologize. I’m standing here like an idiot, when … it’s just that, well …”
She closed her eyes for just a moment to shake her head, and Colin begged her with every psychic power he wished he possessed to open them again; to let him see that blue again. When she did, she bit her lip, and he could swear he was hollow the way she seemed to stare directly into the very core of him.
“Your eyes, Mr. Bridgerton,” she began, and he felt it – this feeling like every single dream he had ever had was a winding, nonlinear, splendid blue carpet that led to her and those impossibly perfect blue eyes.
“My eyes?” he muttered. He couldn’t imagine what could possibly be so special about his eyes.
But she simply nodded, a look of wonder glowing on her face.
“Yes, your eyes. They’re the most remarkable shade of blue. It’s a shade of blue that I thought was impossible; that I’ve spent my whole life trying to replicate in the real world. It’s a shade of blue I’ve only ever seen in my dreams …”
💙💙💙