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i. orange
Everyone thinks it is red.
It is a fair assumption, Gilbert thinks. After all, anyone who knows Anne—really, truly knows her, not like you know the back of your hand (because Gilbert does not think one knows the back of their hand all that well) but knows her like you know your favourite blanket or the first strains of your favourite lullaby—knows that she is red, at first glance. All fire and passion and sun.
But for him, it was orange.
Orange, like the leaves that crunched under her feet. He had fancied himself her knight—a foolish thing, because he, if anything is the prince stuck in the tower while Anne ventures off to befriend all the dragons—when he had seen her there, and the first thing he had noticed was how she had shrunk. How she had made herself smaller, as if it was something she had just become unused to and was now slipping into again, like a too-small coat she had just grown out of, and was surprised when the winter forced her to resort to it again.
Gilbert has always been one for fairytales—everyone thinks Anne is the romantic one, the mysterious one, and she is, to an extent, but she has been hardened by life like a clay pot in a kiln. She is the level-headed one, at the end of the day. Gilbert is the one who dreams of the knight gracing him with a kiss—and so he had seen this as the perfect opportunity to save someone.
(he can’t save his father, he couldn’t save his mother, but he can save her)
Orange leaves crushing into dust under her feet as she stumbles back, and he saves her.
(she does not need saving)
Still, it is a muted, dull, almost subdued orange that flashes through his mind at first. Like the smell of autumn and his father’s smile.
But when she speaks in class, it shifts from autumn to pumpkin, and it bursts.
She is a sunrise, a sunset, a vision, bright and glaring and in-your-face and the most alive thing he has ever seen. He returned to Avonlea with a dying father in a dying month, feeling like he is dying on the inside himself, tired, beaten down, exhausted, like a tree branch that has battered against a window pane in a hurricane.
But she, she is alive.
She is alive in a way so few things in Avonlea are. She is alive like spring and fall (and everyone always thinks fall is the season of death, but for him it has always been life—and that is even more true now, because fall is the season where he met anne) and the flickering flame of a candle, orange, orange, orange.
Her voice is orange, so vivacious it hurts his eyes, shocks his system like an electrical pulse, and his heart beats in his chest.
(fight, flight, or freeze—cortisol pumping through his veins and revitalizing his systems. she revives him, and he has never felt anything quite like it before)
He decides, from that moment on, that orange is his favourite colour.
ii. purple
She expected his hand to be hot.
It’s—it’s a foolish thing to admit, that she has thought about Gilbert’s hand in hers—an embarrassing amount of times, really. It’s ridiculous, even for a dreamer like her, because—because Anne knows it will never happen. She should know by now her dreams are too big for her.
(oh, but she dreamed of a family, and love, and light, and that happened, didn’t it? and it gave her hope, and where gilbert is concerned, hope is a dangerous, dangerous thing. not so much the thing with feathers as the thing with spines)
And she can’t like him. She can’t think his hair looks exactly like that of a windswept prince, she can’t liken him to Mr. Darcy or Romeo or Mr. Rochester, because he’s not any of those things. He’s not her knight, but most importantly, he’s not hers. Pen pals aside.
But still, she expected his hand in hers to be hot, and it’s not. It’s—it’s cool to the touch, but still, somehow, impossibly, gentle, despite years of farm work. Like purple velvet.
She can’t—can barely look at where his fingers loosely wrap around hers, because if she does she may never look away, but she can feel it, and it feels like everything she has ever wanted. His hands do not shake as they clasp hers, and it is a blessing.
When he spins her around, though, that, that is truly purple.
It is rich and she laughs, violet thrumming through her veins, and she feels like—like a geode cracking open. She had found a book on rocks and minerals—not Nate’s, a bad memory she keeps tucked away—and learned about geodes, and about amethyst, cracking open under stone.
Dancing with Gilbert is a lot like that, like cracking open an amethyst. It’s vibrant and she can’t help but let herself be swept away by him—careful warnings not to get sucked into his gravity falling by the wayside.
(gilbert is the moon and she is the tides, inevitably pulled in by his gravity. she would say he is magnetic, but it is almost more primal than that, more integral to her than the way a compass spins around, searching for true north)
When he pulls her closer she—she is breathless, and light, floating on air, and dancing with the wind. Not like a feather—she is in more control than that. Gilbert does not pull her along with his whim. She is a butterfly, on gusts of wind, pulling him to her just as much as he pulls her to him.
Dancing with him is like twilight, like watching stars wink into existence in front of a lilac background, like the first blush of spring. It fills her veins and she cannot get enough of it.
Is it in that moment, when he smiles at her and lets his hand drop from hers—fingers lingering on her hand, right at her palm lines, for a split second, before her hand is empty, and strangely, burns—that she realizes she is gone for him.
That night, when dusk arrives, like a carriage brought by a white horse, she props her elbow on her windowsill, her chin on her hand, and watches as the sky bleeds purple.
iii. yellow
Loving Anne is yellow.
He writes the letter, his hand shaking, and thinks about what Bash said.
(attraction—yes, it’s important. but love, that’s what truly matters. and love is bigger than those feelings you’re talking about)
But this is Anne.
And loving her—loving her is like the sunrise, like daffodils. It’s bright and easy and blooming. Loving her leaves the taste of honey on his tongue, naturally sweet, instead of cloying, like candy. It is scary how easy it is to love her.
He looks down at the paper, ink slightly bleeding from the letters.
Anne deserves more than this. She deserves sunbursts and marbled halls, not a hastily scrawled letter of his rambling feelings dictated on the back of a yellowing, aged grocery list. She’s always wanted romance, tragical, adventurous, daring romance.
(gilbert has traveled all over the world, has seen places that he couldn’t even dream of, bitten into a mango that has tasted like sunrise itself, like more precious than a bar of gold, and yet—)
Loving Anne is yellow. It is in his face, it is overwhelming, it is eye-catching. Now that he knows he loves her, he cannot ignore it, cannot ignore her. His heart is hers, and if he shall never marry for the rest of his life, then so be it.
He could never really give another person his heart the way they deserve, anyways. Not when Anne exists.
(when his father was dying and everything was cold and dark and blue, anne was there. anne was bright. anne was home, even on a steam ship in the middle of an ocean, thousands of kilometres away. he wasn’t here for when anne arrived. gilbert came home, and anne was there. she was a part of avonlea before she was ever even a part of him)
He slides his fingers across the paper, creasing it, and climbs the stairs. A sense of lightness settles in him when he steps into Anne’s room.
Because even if she rejects him, even if she doesn't love him, even if, even if, he has told her. He no longer has to pretend she does not captivate his mind. He no longer has to pretend she isn’t his sun, the brightest star in his sky. Even if she doesn’t love him, at least she knows.
Her room is warm, bathed in afternoon light, and the floorboard creaks under his steps.
He leaves the letter on her desk, a beam of sunlight streaming through the window, the lace underneath warm to the touch. Gilbert imagines her here, sitting, writing back to him. He wonders if she thought about him like he thought about her. It is almost too much to hope for, that Anne saw him in every place, in every smile. It seems foolish to hope for, but he cannot help wanting it anyways.
Anne is citrus, sharp and sweet, and he wants every piece of her he can get.
Gilbert bites his tongue, and leaves her pen there, and walks out of the room before he can talk himself out of it, leaving the letter sitting in a pool of sun.
iv. green
He tastes like apples.
It is the first thought that runs through Anne’s mind when Gilbert kisses her—and Gilbert, Gilbert, the boy who has invaded her heart and wrapped himself around it like vines around a tree, is kissing her, she can scarcely believe it—his hand shaking as he reaches up to cup her neck.
It’s not the bright red apples she has come to associate with his orchards, the ones that burst over her tongue when she bites into them, not the ones she watched him pluck from the branches, watching the way his nimble hands twist them off the tree, but something more sour, more bitter, but addictive all the same.
He pulls away a second later, his eyes (and how did she never notice now that his eyes are not just brown, but hazel, spots of green threaded through them) darting over her face, nerves clear.
When he asks her if she has feelings for him, voice shaking only the slightest bit—she almost wants to laugh in his face. How—how can he not know? She has become overcome with envy, green eyed at the sight of him and Winifred, desperately hoping he would somehow see how desperately she wanted him. How could he not know?
And so, she chases the taste of green apple on his tongue when she kisses him again.
Kissing Gilbert is verdant, like springtime. Kissing Gilbert is like watching Avonlea burst into life, like coming home to flowers and the smell of summer in the air. Kissing Gilbert is like rebirth, like new life. It is like trekking down the overgrown, underused path in the forest, forging her own way, a whole new adventure.
(this time, though, his hand is clasped in hers)
The closer he pulls her (although Anne does not think she will ever be close enough) the more she feels herself thawing, the frost covering her melting, giving way for a bud of hope to blossom in her chest, pushing up through the soil.
And getting to kiss him, getting to love him, being able to show him how she loves him, that is green. It is a new growth, a new thing for her to nurture.
Anne has spent her whole life wanting love, but she never stopped to think about how beautiful it might be to have something to love. Love, like a golden rose, slipping from its green-sheath, had never been hers to give. No one had accepted it before, not even if she wanted to give it.
But Gilbert, the way he kisses her, the way he holds her, the warmth of his lips against her palm, the sound of his laugh ringing through the air, for some reason, wants her love. He doesn’t want anything but her love.
He tastes like apples, and he is everything good and vivid and bright, and she cannot wait to love him for as long as he’ll have her.
(after all, loving gilbert is the most natural thing in the world)