Losing Color in September Air

...🏠🧢🎀🧢🏠...

The air in the Florence studio was a masterpiece of stillness. It was a vacuum, scrubbed of dust and the chaotic scent of the Italian streets below.

To Dion Reighart Semmelweis, this room was not just a workspace; it was a sanctuary of the sterile.

Sunlight filtered through the skylight, hitting the white marble floors and reflecting off the rows of precisely aligned brushes.

Dion sat before a canvas, his posture a study in rigid discipline. He wore a mask—white, silk, and scentless—and thin, cotton gloves that acted as a second skin. To him, the world was a collection of textures and germs, a jagged landscape of potential contamination. Only here, amidst the scent of turpentine and cold gesso, could he breathe.

He was working on a sketch of a wilting lily. He didn't use vibrant colors; he preferred the safety of graphite and charcoal—the "unsketched" potential of a world that hadn't been stained by reality yet.

Then, the vibration began.

His phone, resting on a velvet cloth to prevent it from touching the wooden table, hummed. The caller ID was a name he hadn't seen in months, but the contact was a tether to a world he had tried to outrun.

The call lasted less than a minute. The words were clinical, delivered with a heavy, mournful weight from across the ocean.

Louis is gone.

The pencil in Dion's hand snapped. The lead left a jagged, dark scar across the lily’s petal.

For a man who lived his life avoiding "the mess," the news was a tidal wave of ink, drowning the sterile peace he had spent years building.

And so he went, traveled across the vast ocean and allowed the tip of his shoe to step on the concrete of his homecoming.

The heat of his home country was not the humid weight he remembered, but the parched, golden ache of early September. It was a season of transition—a period where the world seemed to hold its breath between the vibrant life of summer and the inevitable decay of the year’s end.

The September air didn't cling like a damp towel; it settled over him like a dry shroud, a thin veil of dust and parched heat that made his skin feel tight and his lungs feel brittle. It was the scent of things that had finished growing and were now just... waiting to fall.

It became a visceral, stifling thing. It didn't care for Dion’s boundaries.

As Dion stepped out of the airport, the air didn't just touch him; it tested him. It was a "dry" heat, carrying the scent of curing hay and the first hint of woodsmoke from distant hills. It felt brittle, like the old parchment of his sketches.

But the fear was currently numb, buried under the crushing gravity of grief.

He didn't go to the house first when he arrived. He went straight to the cemetery.

The cemetery was a quiet labyrinth of stone and wilted flowers. Dion walked through the paths, his eyes fixed on the tips of his polished shoes, avoiding the tall grass.

He stopped before a fresh mound of earth, marked by a simple, dignified headstone: Louis Semmelweis.

The afternoon sun was a fraudulent gold. it looked warm, but it lacked the bite of summer. It cast long, skeletal shadows across the headstone, stretching the silhouette of his father’s name until it felt like a ghost reaching out to touch Dion’s shoes.

Dion stood before the fresh mound of earth for a heartbeat before his legs gave way. He sank to his knees, not caring that the parched soil was staining his trousers. The barrier he had built around his heart for years finally cracked.

"I'm here," he whispered, his voice breaking like dry parchment. "I'm so sorry I wasn't here when the lines started to fade."

Looking at the name carved in stone, the memories began to bleed through the gray reality of the present.

He was five years old again. He remembered the cold—not the cold of winter, but the cold of a house that wasn't a home. Furthermore, he remembered a mother who was a ghost of a rebel, a woman who carried him in the womb for nine enduring months only to look at him and see a mistake conceived with a total stranger.

He was the "outcast," the unloved shadow in a family that treated him like a smudge on a clean page.

He remembered the day he was abandoned. It was a cold, bitter rainy night. He was brought to the park for a temporary shelter. Left to hunger, chill, and thirst while waiting for a promised return of the very matriarch he knew.

Since then, the streets had been a nightmare of noise and aggression. He had been beaten, bullied, and bruised. He learned very early how dark and evil the world was. How dangerous his surroundings were no matter where he went. And how hopeless and unfortunate he was born to be.

One certain day, he had been cornered by older boys, their laughter sounding like thunder, their hands shoving him into the dirt. He had curled into a ball, eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the world to finish its erasure of him.

Then, the thunder had stopped.

A hand—warm, calloused, and firm—had rested on his shoulder.

"It's okay now, little one. They’re gone."

The boy, not yet bearing the name Dion back then, had looked up to see a man with kind eyes and a face that looked like it was mapped with stories of laughter and labor.

Louis Semmelweis.

He hadn't been a man of wealth, but he had a presence that felt like a fortress.

Louis had been patient. He didn't force the boy to speak or to be touched.

He simply stayed.

For months, the little boy was a reclusive shadow in the corner of Louis' small apartment, a trauma-bound child who flinched at every shadow. But Louis never hurried him. He would cook simple, fragrant meals—the scent of garlic and ginger becoming the first "safe" smell the boy ever knew.

“Dion Reighart,” Louis had said one evening, handing him a sketchbook. “A new name for a new beginning. We’ll sketch a better life together, son.”

When Dion was seven, they had moved to a humble house with a small garden.

To the world, Louis was just a chef at a modest neighborhood restaurant, a man of humble status who spent his days over a hot stove.

But to Dion, Louis was the architect of his safety. Louis was the only human being in the world Dion allowed to touch him—a hug, a hand on the head, a steadying grip on the arm. Louis became his only "sanitized" world, his only family.

And now, the world was filthy and empty as the same Dion- now 23- stood at the very headstone of the man who had brought him back to life into this world again even before he thought it was supposed to end.

"How am I supposed to do this without you?" Dion sobbed, the tears hot and stinging against his pale cheeks. "You know, living?"

He gripped the grass, his gloves forgotten, his hands digging into the earth of his father’s grave. "You were the only one who knew how to hold the pencil - that was me. You were the only one who gave the colors in the canvas of my life. You were the one I was grateful for to give a rebirth to the person I became. I wouldn't even get to where I am now if not because of you. Why leave me so soon, Dad? I never even got to say thank you or good night, maybe? You used to rehearse this moment with me before I thought we were just playing."

The sun began to dip, the sky bruising into shades of violet and deep indigo.

"You could have just let me stay here then after we celebrated your birthday. I should never have left again to work in Italy."

The twilight seeped into the cemetery, casting long, skeletal shadows across the graves.

Crunch.

The sound of footsteps on gravel broke the silence. Dion didn't move, but his shoulders tensed. He felt a presence behind him—a cold, professional weight.

Standing a few paces away was a man who looked like he belonged in a different narrative and a different world.

He wore a sharp leather jacket over a dark attire, his eyes hidden behind black sunglasses even as the light faded. He stood with a rigid, military grace, keeping a precise, safe distance that Dion would have normally found comforting.

He bore the discipline of the late Grand Master Louis Semmelweis and the loyalty he had pledged all these years marked his posture and respect to greet Dion's presence brought about by his return.

"Forgive me, Young master," the man spoke. His voice was low, like the hum of a distant engine. "But it is getting late. I should drive you home."

Dion sniffed, the word "Home" hitting him hard like a physical blow he couldn't dodge.

He didn't turn around. He simply stayed where he was. The cold of the earth began to seep through his skin, bleeding through the layers of silk and cotton that had long served as his silent armor—a meticulously woven barricade designed to shield his fragile soul from the jagged edges of an unsterile world.

"How can I go back? He’s gone. And I couldn't even make a joke about it." He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, the grief turning into a sharp, bitter sting. "You could have told me, N. You could have told me his illness was getting worse. I could have gone back and cared for him. What even is a home without him now?"

"Young master," The man of whom the late Louis Semmelweis had regarded his right hand, his most trusted aide and subordinate- N as nicknamed from his name Neisser - said, his tone unchanging but carrying a hint of solemnity.

"I told you not to call me that, N," Dion snapped, though there was no heat in it, only exhaustion.

"I'm sorry, but I must, Young master," N replied, his hands clasped behind his back. "The Grand Master has something he left for you. We cannot stay here through the night. For the very benefit of your well being and health. And with regards to the late Grand Master's will. We should go."

Dion looked at the headstone one last time. The finality of the cold stone was a truth he couldn't sketch over. He stood up slowly, his legs stiff. He felt untethered, a piece of charcoal crumbling in the wind.

He followed N to a sleek black car waiting at the gates keeping his safe distance while still lost in the stinging truth ringing in his ear, heart, and mind.

The vehicle that was parked in wait for his accommodation was the same car the late Louis had bought on the day of Dion's university graduation as a gift for him.

The drive was silent, the city lights blurring into streaks of neon that Dion watched through the glass, feeling like a stranger in his own birthright.

When the car finally slowed, they weren't at a skyscraper or a mansion. They stopped before the familiar iron gates of the Semmelweis residence.

It was an ancestral-style Japanese house, built of dark, weathered wood that seemed to soak up the moonlight. The garden was perfectly maintained—the raked sand and the moss-covered stones looked exactly as they had when Dion left.

As Dion stepped out of the car, the scent hit him. It was the smell of damp earth, cedarwood, and the faint, lingering aroma of the spices Louis used to use in the kitchen. It was the scent of his childhood, of every safe night he had ever spent.

The familiarity was a ghost, reaching out to touch him. Dion stood at the threshold, his hand hovering over the iron gate.

To a man who lived for the sterile, standing before the very place he grew up in, the September wind was now an enemy. It carried the pollen of decay and the fine, gray dust of dried earth. It was a gritty mourning—the kind that got under your fingernails and into the creases of your clothes, reminding you that the world was turning into ash right before your eyes.

For a moment, the imagery of the past was so strong he expected Louis to slide the door open and complain about the evening chill.

But the house was silent.

The garden was structurally perfect—the sand raked and the stones moss-covered—but the plants themselves couldn't escape the season. The hydrangeas were papery and browned, their heads bowing under the weight of a summer they could no longer carry. Dion felt the same—a man standing in the center of a grand, seasonal exhaustion.

September was the month of half-finished lines. The trees were mid-stroke between green and gold; the air was caught between a fever and a chill. It was a messy, unsketched transition—the very thing Louis had taught him to face, and the one thing Dion now wanted to erase

The "Grand Master" was gone. The protector was a memory. And Dion Reighart Semmelweis was standing at the edge of a canvas he didn't know how to paint.

...🏠🧢🎀🧢🏠...

...AerixielDaiminse...

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