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Everyone expected someone like him to have a vibrant, warm, favorite color. Red was the first color people thought of because of his personality, despite it being his skin color. It was intense, vibrant, and some would say the most aggressive color. It would be the perfect color for him if it didn't come with bad memories, and always appeared in nightmares.
The interior of the fuel box he was kept inside, shackled to its walls, was always bathed in red light from the heat of the living fire that made up part of him being forced to power the hobgoblin train. It's the color he saw as he closed his eyes due to it never getting dark in his metal cage. It was also the color he painted the walls of the train cars in as he escaped and took out the 10 years of rage and hate that had built up inside him.
Oranges and yellows was everyone's second guess. They were fun, and comforting colors. They were the colors of a fire burning in the fireplace, or a campfire. The colors of a burning match lighting up a cigar, or cigarette. Plus they were the fun colors associated with laughter and summertime fun. Something that matched parts of his personality, but they still weren't his favorite colors.
Although he never said it. Everyone that knew him for a long time knew his favorite color was green. At first Gricko and Frost thought he was trying to hide his love of plants due to how he’d react to them. But realized that it was the color when they saw how it wasn't just green plants Gideon would gravitate towards.
Whenever something in the carnival needed to be repainted green Gideon would almost always volunteer. He had a paint/work shirt that was almost half green by the time it was thrown away. They’d seen that when he was involved in a heist that Gideon would often come back with something that had a green gemstone attached to it. No emerald was safe from Gideon Coal.
To Gideon the color green was the color of the best things in his life. When he escaped it was the first color he saw as he fell into the grass. It was the colors of a good portion of food on his first plate of fresh, and properly prepared food. Later on he found out that his birthstone was green.
His first best friend, and ironic husband, was also green. As was his second best friend. Frost wore beautiful green robes, and Torbek would sometimes come back from wherever he went with questionable green stuff in his fur. So all of his closest friends had that color in one way or another.
To Gideon green was the color of freedom, a color connected to him from when he was born, and was the colors of his friends. It was the most beautiful color in the world to Gideon