She was going through a phase of grays.
Her walls, her clothes, her eyes; all gray. She took time in choosing her grays, for it was not the color of the pavement, that was too bland. Not the color she remember pigeons had across their feathers, that was too dark. Not the shade you get from rubbing a pencil against paper, that was too cold and unfeeling. Then one day she saw it, through the window of the van that she had been bound to all day.

Her face, pressed up against the glass.
Her eyes, staring straight into the sun.
Her arms, straining against the restraints that she couldn’t seem to get out of.

The sun was just dipping under the cloudless sky, when for a moment, the whole horizon turned gray. A blue mixed with some sort of white and black that created the one shade that she had been looking for.
It was the only thing she asked of them; to see the gray one more time. So they took her out and sat her on a grassy hill, so that her hair could blow in the warm August breeze that came so often, but was so rare for someone like her. She knew that if they waited long enough, the sun would begin its descent, and the gray would come again. She knew that if she tried hard enough, she might just be able to save it; reach out with her hands and pluck it from the sky, so that she could keep it forever.
“We really must get going, Seven.” They told her enough times that she could not longer count on her fingers.
“Just a minute,” she would whisper, “it’s almost time, I swear.” So they waited, and waited, but that day, amongst many others, her gray never came.
She stared at her wall, and decided that it was not the right shade of gray. More blue, then more black, maybe a little more white, but she could never get it right. 
She stared at her floor, with its small specks of black and white, but the gray was still not right.
She stared at her Converse, but even though they did not match her gray, she still wore them everyday.
The guards were starting to get restless with her constant talk of grays, especially when she would complain that their uniform wasn’t even close to what she asked for.
She had an infinite amount of days, hours, minutes, seconds; but no matter what she did, it meant nothing. She asked for more pencils that were created for this kind of conquest, but no matter how many of them she wore down to the eraser, none could make her gray.
She asked them for colored contacts, so that when she looked in the mirror she could see the gray that she treasured. But even they were a disappointment.

Her gray sweatshirt became frayed.
Her gray Converse became too small for her feet.
Her gray contacts ran out, so her eyes returned to their normal bleary, brown color.

She didn’t have a calendar to keep track, but she thought around a month later she was running, free and in the open, her daily exercise, when she noticed how dark the sky was getting. She hadn’t known she had been out for that long, for she had gone down to the yard when the sun was high in the sky, warming her head, and now it was beginning to settle under the horizon for the night.
She didn’t have hope, just a pit where the butterflies used to be.
She didn’t have the light that lit up behind her eyes.
But then - no, it couldn’t be. Was that? Yes. Her precious gray that she had tried to recreate, that she had been looking for was just beyond her reach. She smiled, just a small smile, then headed back inside.

He had been working overtime that week. Over 15 hours a day, standing guard in front of her door. He had been warned about her countless times.
“She’s dangerous.” one would say.
“She has tried to break down the door.” another recalled.
But yet so far, he has yet to see this behavior. In fact, whenever he looks through the one-way mirror, she either colored on her wall, or stared at the ceiling. Although, he had definitely seen why they locked up number Seven-9240. She talked to herself all day about colors - almost always gray. She kept a tattered piece of gray cloth that she wrapped around herself sometimes when she was cold. She scraped paint off of the wall and tried to stick the chips in her eyes, which made all the other guards laugh. They would even give her a pencil through the slot in the heavy metal door, and when she used all of the lead by scraping it against the walls, the guards would send in another one.
Today was different though, she had been laying on her mattress all day, staring at the ceiling. It was November, just a few months after all the guards had transported her to another facility. They had let her out of her cage once, so she could watch the sunset, but all Seven did was complain, though the guard didn’t understand why.
But now, as he kept watch on her through the window, he saw her stand up slowly, and then start running desperately around the room. The other guards told him it was because she was crazy.
“She’s trying to run from something,” his partner had told him, “we don’t have a clue what it is.”
As he watched, mesmerized by her circles, she stopped in the middle of her cell. He watched, as her mouth spread into smile, just a small smile, and then collapsed on the floor.
“Don’t worry about her.” His partner for the day leaned to look through the glass with him. “She hasn’t been the same since we found her.”
“Then why are we keeping her locked up?” he wondered.
“We found her in a closet, in an abandoned house. Some say that she ran away and hid herself there. My buddy Tom thinks that her father put her there after he almost got caught abusing her.” His partner shrugged, he didn’t seem to care that she might have been able to get better.
He wondered that if with the right care, she could have been saved from spending her life contained in a cell. That if they had put her somewhere safer, she could have gotten better. He didn’t have the right to think any of these things, his job was to make sure she didn’t get out. He stood back in front of the door, and raised his wrist to his mouth to speak through a watch that reached the command central.
“This is guard R-4781, the subject is still safe in containment.”

They thought that she couldn’t see through the glass. She knew this because they would watch and laugh and whisper when she would color with her pencils. But she would watch them with heavy eyes as they called her crazy and broken, yet she knew she wasn’t. She knew that if she saw the gray again she would be fixed. She frowned at the newest mark on the wall where she tried to recreate her gray; his hair was the same color.
He promised that he would always come back for her. He told her he would take care of her. He put her in the closet because that was the only way she would be safe.
“No one will find you here, I’ll be back tomorrow.” she remembered him tell her.
She knew that she wouldn’t be here much longer, so she watched the guards through the window and she colored on her wall.
He was coming.
She knew it.