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When Lance was young, he hated the color red. Like, despised it with a burning passion. He didn't really know why.
Maybe it was because he'd associated it with the fire that'd torn through his house at the age of eight. Or perhaps it was the after effects of seeing blood from a shark attack spread across the blue of his favorite ocean.
It could've been other things, even. Things his subconscious threw into play after years and years of life on his precious Earth.
He’d always been a blue kind of guy, too, and everyone knows that red and blue don’t get along.
And it was hard to accept the color red, especially when so many negative things were associated with it: warning signals; blaring blocks of text that'd told him he'd failed; ink that was scribbled all across his school papers.
So, imagine his mental pain when he’s not only thrown out into a-whole-nother universe, but also tossed onto a team where colors subjected both him and his teammates to stereotypes and prejudiced
Black was the natural leader, kind, dependable; Green was the one who actually had a reason to fight, smart – nerd level smart -, always there to save everyone’s backs; Yellow was the you-before-me, selfless, driven by the power of family and friendship and the cheesy ass ‘will to protect’ bullshit.
And Red. Oh, fucking Red. Red was amazing. Red was everything Lance wasn’t. Red was the fire he’d survived and the attack he’d witnessed and all the failures he’d chucked himself into.
And the Red Lion was smaller, stronger, had cooler powers.
And the Red Bayard was powerful, dangerous, feared.
And the Red Paladin was smart and built and good looking – fuck, scratch that! – and did everything perfectly.
And Lance was stuck with Blue. Lance hated it with his very core. Now, Lance loved his lion. Blue the lion was his baby. But Blue the color, while he’d adored it as a child, started sucking him down to the depths of his hellish mind.
Yet it wasn’t enough of a slap in the face that he was stuck as Blue.
It wasn’t enough of a universal ‘fuck you’ that he was automatically shoved into the position of friend-without-powers, comic-relief, strong-on-his-own-but-dwarfed-by-everyone-and-everything-else Blue.
No.
No, no, no-no, no.
The universe just had to shove all his hard work back up his ass with everything Lance’s polar opposite – both in the color spectrum and out of it – had. Red was everything Lance wanted to be. And it was infuriating that such a negative color had such control over his aspirations. His favorite hues had started to tug him into the depths of self-doubt, self-worth – read: lack thereof -, and self-loath.
And his least favorite shade was what triggered it. Red was what made Lance hate himself. Because lance was Blue and Blue could never amount to anything that everything else was, especially if it was Red.
And the absolute worst part of it all?
Keith glanced up at Lance, breaking the said boy’s mental monologue. “You’re staring,” he said, blatantly dripping from his lips like honey and knives.
Lance scowled, the expression taking up his entire face as all his anger, all his frustration, twisted into one single sneer.
“Was not,” Lance hissed, storming past Keith and not so accidentally shoving his shoulder into Keith’s.
“What’s your problem?” Keith snapped as Lance whirled down the hall.
The absolute worst part – the part that had Lance throwing himself into an ocean of guilt and emotions and anger towards both sides of his heart – was that Keith was the one who’d been chosen to be Red.