The Lost Colors of The Dustlight

I have always lived in black-and-white.

They drained the color long ago—wrung it from the sky, scraped it from the walls, pulled it from the sunrise, until no one remembered that the world had ever been anything else.

I had never seen it. Not really. Color existed only in whispers, a rumor passed from old lips to young ears, a fading memory dimming with each generation. A bedtime story our grandparents told before they, too, forgot what red felt like. What blue did to the spirit.

The Bureau called it protection. Color was distraction. Disorder. Difference.

And difference was dangerous.

A monochrome world was safe. Stable. No one brighter than the rest.

So we lived in shades of certainty—gray skies, gray streets, gray faces.

Gray spirits. Gray lives.

-

My parents told me about the letter.

It arrived—pressed neatly, sealed with the emblem of The Bureau of Advancement.

I was in my first year at Academy Level One—the youngest rank. To be invited so soon was a privilege. A mark of distinction.

A gathering of top students from all the elite institutions in the region. A Meeting of the Minds, they called it. A night of formality, forced conversations, and stiff smiles.

There would be a ceremony. There would be awards.

We were meant to feel honored. Chosen. Proof that the Bureau’s system worked. That their decisions were right. That we were becoming something efficient. Something perfect.

I should have been excited. But I hated the clothes. The suffocating pretense. The small talk. The recitation of achievements, as if we were all machines programmed to perform.

“At least there might be cake,” my parents said, as if that made it better.

-

I stood in my evening dress under synthetic lighting. Nervous. Bored. Trapped.

The fabric clung to my ribs, stitched in shades of absence—like everything else.

They began with the first-years. New faces, wide-eyed, eager to impress. I smiled and nodded at my classmates.

They called my name. I stood. Walked up. Accepted my award for highest marks in my division.

The applause swelled. Then faded.

The second-years followed. All strangers to me. Their names were called, their faces blurred together, interchangeable.

By the time the tenth name was called, I yawned, leaned back in my chair, and counted ceiling tiles. The dress cinched tighter with every minute, as if designed to suffocate the space around me.

Then, the third-years. Another procession of foreign silhouettes.

One by one, the professors read their names in the same measured cadence.

Until, I saw her.

“Top honors in the Academy’s Upper Division awarded to Rouxa Kain—”

And my mind froze. Then shattered.

A rush of sensation—too much, too fast, too real. It hit me before I could name it.

I scanned the room, waiting for someone else to see it. To confirm it. But no one reacted. No one else saw.

For the first time in my life, the black-and-white world cracked at its edges. And at its center, she stood—brilliant, impossible, untouched by the grayscale that swallowed everything else.

I could see her.

Bright. Unhidden. Real.

Could she see me?

-

The fourth-years, the final group, went last.

I barely heard their names.

My eyes tracked her, but she vanished behind the curtain with the rest of the third-years—lost to the gray.

The last of the awards dragged on forever.

When the ceremony ended, I sprang to my feet, shoving past the others. My pulse hammered in my ears. Something inside me wavered.

I had to find her.

A flash—her hair, bright against the rows of gray figures. Brighter than anything I had ever seen.

I pushed forward, forced my way through the faceless crowd. Almost tripped, but I didn’t care.

I called her name.

She turned, startled—but not surprised. As if she had been expecting me.

Our eyes met, and for a split second, everything around us fell away.

I couldn’t breathe.

I opened my mouth to speak, but she pressed a finger to her lips.

Then, a glance—quick, deliberate—toward an empty room.

Without a word, we slipped inside.

Out of sight.

For a moment, I could only stare.

She was bursting with brilliance—with colors I had no names for.

I studied at her hair. Was that orange? Red? No—was that green?

The world had never given me the words for what I was seeing.

We stood there, motionless, the silence thick between us.

“Of course, I see it,” she whispered. “I saw you from across the room. I couldn’t believe it.”

“What is happening?”

Her dress wasn’t gray. It was something else. Something unimaginable.

She lit up, like a beacon made of everything we had lost.

And I had no reference for the colors she carried.

Over the loudspeakers, our names echoed through the halls. The closing ceremony. Parents waiting. Professors gathering students. First-years in one room, third-years in another.

“Tomorrow,” she said, her voice low. “After class. Meet at The Dustlight.”

I nodded, heart pounding.

We hurried through the halls, stealing glances, memorizing each other in pieces.

Before she disappeared down a dark corridor, I caught her eyes one last time.

I wished I knew what color I was looking at.

-

I could barely focus in class.

Every minute dragged. Every lesson blurred, a fog I couldn’t force myself to see through.

My stomach twisted, a dull ache, refusing to leave.

My friends noticed. They asked if I was okay. I lied. The words slipped out like a practiced reflex. Told them I thought I was coming down with something.

But the truth was heavier.

I wasn’t sick—I was coming up with something.

Questions that refused to let me go:

Was yesterday real?

Had I truly seen Rouxa in color? Would it still be there today, or had it already faded—erased back into the gray?

When the final bell rang, I didn’t wait. I shot out the door like a comet tearing through the sky, moving faster than I thought possible.

Heart drumming to the rhythm of my stride.

The world outside didn’t matter anymore.

Not while these questions burned in my chest.

Not when I had to prove it wasn’t just a dream.

-

The Dustlight Cinema was a relic, fading, forgotten, left to time.

It sat in the crumbling part of the city, tucked behind corroded steel and settling dust. Outside, the streets buzzed with progress—digital billboards, fast people, glossy theaters.

But here, time unraveled. The walls were soft with age and frayed posters. The seats sank under the weight of abandoned years, their fabric worn thin by time. The air was quiet, untouched by the fever of the outside commotion.

At The Dustlight, they played films from the lost world—fragments of another time, another life, when color still meant something. Smuggled from buried archives, grainy with age.

No one came here. Not unless they wanted to disappear.

-

When I stepped into The Dustlight and saw Rouxa, I exhaled—a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. A breath laced with fear, threaded with hope.

I was terrified the color would be gone.

But there she was. Still glowing.

We stood, unmoving. Alive in color—two stars against a storm, shining in a place blind to our light.

The room swayed around us in muted grays, but we remained—steady, vibrant, unnoticed to all but each other.

Rouxa unzipped her bag and pulled out a book—a fragile thing, worn at the edges. She offered it to me, a dusty, forgotten artifact. Proof that color had existed once, that it had names, that it had meaning.

We huddled in the back row on shabby cushions, a flashlight flickering between us, carving light into the darkness.

The book said lips were red.

But hers made it real.

“Your hair,” I whispered, staring. “I think it’s yellow.”

Her smile widened.

“What about mine?”

She studied me, long and careful. “Brown. It matches your eyes.”

I turned to the book in her lap, skimming the pages, the ink blurred by the shifting light of the film.

Then I looked up and fell into the color of her irises.

And in that instant, I knew what blue was meant to feel like.

A silence settled between us, broken only by the low whir of the projector and the voices drifting from the screen.

“Can you see color in anything else?” I whispered, glancing around the room.

“No, just you.”

We giggled—soft, breathless, tangled together in disbelief and wonder.

Minutes or hours passed as we traced the edges of our clothing. Soft threads of green, white, pink.

It felt like standing at the edge of something vast—the brink of an uncharted universe.

Then, our fingertips brushed accidentally. A whisper of contact.

A spark—bright, electric, impossible.

The whole room flashed into color.

We jerked back, eyes wide, breath caught.

“What was that?”

“When we touched…” Her voice trembled. “The whole room—it was in color. Not just you. Everything.”

Goosebumps rushed over me, a wave I couldn’t outrun.

“Should we try again?”

We hesitated. Just for a moment. Then, slowly, we reached out.

Our palms met—fingers pressing, holding, grounding. Like a key unlocking something ancient.

And then—the world burst open.

Crimson velvet ropes. A burnt-orange carpet. A riot of hues painting the walls, the ceiling, the floor—spinning around us, a cyclone of light and pigment—a world reborn in secret.

We sat there, palm to palm, breathless and dizzy, as color surged through the room like it had been waiting. Waiting for us to see it.

On the screen, the black-and-white film bloomed into a rainbow, vivid and awake, as though it had only been resting, ready to rise.

And in that dark theater, in that private, luminous universe, we were the only two people alive.

And nothing else mattered.

-

We met in the late afternoons at The Dustlight—that in-between hour when the outside softened into shadows, and the slow unraveling of celluloid became our salvation.

The place was perfect for us—overlooked by the city. It was our sanctuary, our secret.

No questions.

Inside The Dustlight, we were hidden.

We held hands, brightening each other’s world.

The only sound was the slow reel turning, the mechanical breath of a machine long out of place.

We sat side by side, not speaking, only inhaling the restless air that swirled between us.

Words weren’t necessary. We were learning the same thing, at the same time.

When the screen blinked to life, it didn’t just color the room—it flooded it. The cinema pulled us in. And we were swept away.

Reds bloomed into endless poppy fields, stretching far beyond the frame.

Blues unfolded within me, vast and open as the sky over a brick road.

Golds and yellows so bright they lit the path to an emerald city—distant, shining, daring me to look.

Daring me to see everything in a way I had never been allowed to before.

Before she clicked her heels. Before she was sent back to a place stripped of color.

I forgot to breathe.

I hadn’t realized how much had been robbed from me. I had lived my whole life trapped inside grayscale—vibrancy erased, color outlawed, its absence a law we followed without question.

But now—now, in this dim theater, with the light from the screen casting halos across our faces, everything opened up before me in ways I never thought possible.

Every shade pulsed freely. I hadn’t known such beauty existed—let alone that I would one day be lucky enough to see it.

The frames clicked forward. Soft one moment, overwhelming the next. Always alive.

And suddenly, I knew—it wasn’t just the screen that was alive.

We were too.

Sitting there in the dark, experiencing color for the first time, I realized, with a quiet shock, that in this small, forgotten corner of the city, we were stealing something back.

“How does this exist?” I whispered, my voice barely a breath.

Rouxa’s fingers tightened around mine.

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “But I never want it to go away.”

-

When we sat together in the theater, our forearms barely touching, a current ran through the space we shared—an electricity I couldn’t name.

Rouxa leaned in once, her breath grazing my ear. Her warmth wrapped around me, like a quiet flame flickering at twilight.

“It’s different here,” she whispered, her voice almost lost in the movement of the screen.

I nodded, my throat caught in a knot. “Yeah. It’s like… like we’re finally living in real life.”

She didn’t respond, but I felt the shift.

The unspoken understanding between us was an invisible thread tightening and pulling us closer. The room seemed to hum around us, pigments from the screen spilling across our faces, our bodies.

But it was her—the way she looked at me with eyes the color of lost oceans—that made everything feel vibrant.

We didn’t need words. Not then.

Because the truth was in every touch, in every glance, in the way she settled against me just a little too close.

Every time our fingers met, every time I caught her staring at me in the dark, a question lingered—hanging between us.

A connection neither of us dared name. Not out loud.

But I could feel it growing. Every day.

A silent agreement that if left unsaid, it might never fade.

And yet, there was fear in it, too.

Fear of what it could mean.

Fear of what would happen when we finally admitted that our hands held more than simple affection.

That our touch had become more than just a portal for color.

That seeing in color meant seeing each other—completely.

-

I’m not sure how they found us out.

Maybe it was the way we couldn’t hide the glow in our eyes, the way color forced its way into our lives like a raging secret, refusing to stay locked away.

We spent those weeks slipping in and out of The Dustlight, stealing moments in the dark, always looking over our shoulders, always wondering how long we had—how long before they would rip it from us.

We clung to the colors like fragile lifelines, knowing any second, they could be severed.

Malfunctioned chips. Frequencies out of sync. The Bureau’s excuse, every time order cracked.

And when they found us—when they found out—it was like the air left my lungs all at once.

My heart stopped, but I couldn’t stop the cry that ripped from my chest.

Everything collapsed in front of me. The colors dimmed. Life bled away like a wound that would never heal.

There was nothing we could do.

They made us turn off the colors.

I cried. Screamed. But the metal walls swallowed every sound whole, burying them before they ever had a chance to escape.

My hands shook as they destroyed our world, as they flicked off the light, as they dragged us back into the depths of gray.

I wanted to fight. I wanted to claw my way back.

But it wouldn’t matter.

I knew, in that moment, there was nothing I could do. Nothing my parents could do. Nothing anyone could do.

We had already lost.

Yellow and blue were the last colors I saw.

Bright. Alive.

Like a dream I wasn’t ready to wake from.

I held onto it—the last breath of blue fading from her eyes as they pulled her from me.

I reached, helpless, fingers outstretched, grasping for one last moment—as the world drained of color, leaving nothing but emptiness.

And then they took Rouxa away.

Yellow. Blue. Gone.

And her.

Gone.

I shouted her name.

But my voice was lost in the cold, gray silence.

-

They tried to separate us.

But after some time, Rouxa and I found each other again. And the gray had reclaimed its place, settling in like dust. Like waking up after a twister, where a dream was just a dream.

The colors were gone—bleached from existence, as if they had never been.

Still, we sought refuge in the quiet ticking of the projector.

At The Dustlight, the rolling images no longer burned with the vibrancy they once held.

Now, they were only shadows shifting across the wall, in monochrome tones like everything else.

But when we touched—when I met her gaze, now gray—it was as if the world was painted in something more.

And somewhere, deep in the gray, I still remembered blue.

A memory of color.

A love too vivid to erase.

And so, we spent our afternoons at The Dustlight, holding hands in the dark, watching films in black-and-white.

Dreaming of our life in Technicolor.