Prompt: A great mind - write about someone whose mind you admire.

My Twist: Well... You'll see :)

Lots of things had walls, or so Raymond figured out.

Cities had walls long ago, now dilapidated in piles to moulder while tourists passed by, saying trifling phrases such as, 'oh, how quaint!' and then walking away after the wall's nine seconds of attention.

Ideals had walls, sweeping monuments of prosperity and grace. Some, of course, were not graceful, but rigid walls of iron hewed from the stone-cold pallor of death and tempered in crimson. Rigid fingernails scraped down the concrete, leaving their mark forever as the barriers stood.

Walls could be saviors, protectors from a common foe.

But more often they kept people chained in.

There was no better wall than the wall of one's mind, a wall that Raymond would frequently plunge into, passing through the fluidity of consciousness, the ever-shifting realm of neutrons and emotions and thoughts. To him the mind was always a mystery, just like a city behind high-reaching walls. A present waiting to be unwrapped, a gleeful surprise.

With nothing else to do Raymond frequently found himself wandering into the thoughts of others, drifting about so as not to be discovered. Once he had breached the mind's walls, some firm and some pliable, he would float down the stream of ideas, not unlike the so-called 'train of thought.' No one could escape his reach, although he was not cruel with his picking and choosing.

Raymond knew he was a guest in the person's most intimate of places, the shelter of their own mind. He came not to devastate, but to preserve and learn.

There were the minds of children, free and wild with their fanciful ideas and their brilliant world of pastels, where dinosaurs and monsters roamed. There were the minds of adults, deep and cluttered with worry and the burden of a thousand thousand years shoved into such a small space. He could hardly drift a synapse without bumping into some mid-life crisis or object of stress. There were all of the minds in between, each a puzzle for him not to solve, but to smile and stroke his chin and forever wonder.

Humanity was a marvel, and he would never truly understand it.

But he must have come close, because the men in white came for him. Shiny-white shoes shined in tears, pressed cloth and rigid collars and even more rigid minds. They ripped Raymond from his paradise, his little world of minds, hands clamped firmly around his forearm. Everything about the men in white was firm, like the strong iron walls that loomed over Raymond's head.

He was used to walls after a while. The wall of the door before him, a small grate at eye-level from where the men in white could mock him. Walls of brick, gouged with nails and the imprints of punches. The walls of his very own jumpsuit, immaculately white.

White walls, white clothes, bleached-white minds.

Raymond missed the colors of the world, ever-changing as they shifted. Crimson blood, darkening knights, the amber of dawn as the sun raised its regal crown over the horizon. Rays of light and shafts of chaos. All of it was gone in the utter whiteness of his new world, his prison.

Yet Raymond was too valuable to rot in a cell. Rotting like the walls of old, they brought him to life again. Revived him, picked him up stone by stone. Walls sealed with mortar and morphine, perfectly whole (but not quite the same, was he?)

And so Raymond, yet not-Raymond, scoured minds. His touch scorched and burned, blackened the colors, burned away livelihood wherever his footprint lay. Deep burns, scarred flesh, charring anyone who opposed the men in white, the world of white he had learned to know. They joined him in his isolation, solitary and icy-cold, with deadened eyes clouded by the white.

Every so often Raymond would be reminded of the color of the minds he once knew. Minds that he did not ravage, but simply observed. The bright pink of a summer day, the deep blue of the sky against fleecy-gray clouds that threatened rain. Navy-blue and green grass, freshly mowed. But these flashes were brief and fleeting, soon scrubbed away by the unforgiving white, until color itself was scrubbed away altogether.

And Raymond not-Raymond was no more.

Simply a blank slate.