kelly_chambliss

Here is my second entry in Remix Madness 2012. The original story, woldy's Escape Routes for a Stormy Night, was one of the standouts of the 2011 hp_beholder fest, and I was delighted to have the chance to revisit both the excellent fic and the great pairing: Poppy Pomfrey/Amelia Bones.

The original contains a brief section about the colours Poppy uses to paint the house she buys with Amelia, and it's this section that gave me my point of entry for the remix. I gave Poppy a "condition" that I share: synasthesia, or the involuntary neurological understanding of one physical sense in terms of another. I don't know if synasthesia works quite the way I have it work in the story -- that is, to have a neurological link between colour and emotion -- but I liked the idea, so I went with it. As Arthur Conan Doyle said, when told that nearly all the racing details he'd included in "Silver Blaze" were wrong, "well, sometimes [a writer] must be masterful." I prefer to be "mistressful," but the idea is the same.

Although synasthesia can involve several different senses, my own version of it is a fairly common one: I see letters and numbers in color. Each letter and digit has its own consistent color, no matter what word or string of numbers it appears in. Like Poppy in the story, when I was a kid, I thought everyone saw the world this way, and I was astounded to learn that no one else I knew did.

Synasthesia hasn't been widely studied, but so far, there doesn't seem to be any particular medical benefit or drawback to the condition. For myself, I think it's helped make me a really strong speller: once I've seen a word a couple of times, I rarely misspell it, because if I do, I can spot the error pretty quickly: the word is not the right color.

Well. On to the story --

Title: Colour My World
Remix of: Escape Routes for a Stormy Night by woldy
Author: kellychambliss
Pairing: Poppy Pomfrey/Amelia Bones
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1890
Summary: To Poppy Pomfrey, her colours are not a "condition." They're the sum of her world.

Thank you, woldy, for this wonderful story and for all your femmeslash.

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( Colour My World )