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Purple has never really felt comfortable in her shape.
Her pixels were always shaped wrong. She could pinpoint exactly how, after a couple bored weeks spent failing to sleep under a bridge. Her fingers were meant to be claws. Her teeth were meant to be sharper. Her legs were meant to be talons.
Perhaps most importantly, her back was meant to have wings.
She wanted to be dangerous. She wanted to look dangerous. She wanted people to see her and shy away from hurting her. She wanted to be a threat.
... She wanted to be a bird.
More than that, maybe. The pigeons she watched in the city were passed without a thought from most of the sticks on the sidewalks. Perhaps she wanted to be a dragon. Yes, a dragon sounded right. She wanted talons and teeth and impenetrable scales and a tail to lash her enemies with and a wingspan to blot out the sun.
She wanted to be dangerous.
She thought that want was just because her father wanted her to be dangerous. When she looked up at the sky and felt that endless longing to soar through the clouds, that was something different.
(Her back itched where wings would connect, either way.)
When she got the elytra, it was heaven. It was a piece of herself that slotted into place maybe not naturally, but in a way that stopped the itching when she wore them. She could feel her wings buzzing with flight and knew exactly where they attached to her shoulders. The beetle shell's legs clipped into her skin even through her clothing, but she couldn't bring herself to take the thing off when no one was looking. It was a part of her. It was practically necessary. She Wanted the sky.
It was almost enough. Those wings soothed the yearning in her heart to nothing more than an ache, compared to the horrible jabbing needles it had been before. She still wanted claws. She still wanted fangs. But, with the elytra, it wasn't so bad. She could handle the rest of the wanting, now that she had this one thing.
(After the Nether War, she found her desire to be feared waning. The desire to be dangerous, to be sharp, was still there, though. She tried to push it away; the others said she didn't need to fight for her father's approval anymore. And besides, the wings she truly dreamed of were beginning to grow soft, fluffy feathers.)
(There was a day, though, when Orange offered to draw her claws. It had seen the way she flexed her fingers, the way she bared her teeth. Of course, she always kept the actual sparring to proper, sticklike moves, ignoring the urge to lash out like a predator to turn the tides in her favor. Regardless, it offered to draw her claws, and she accepted. It wanted to, after all.)
(They were unpolished things. Simple, small lines shaping curved points, ending with wickedly sharp thinness.)
(She looked at those claws, curled them in and out, and felt that ever-burning desire to be a spiked, winged thing suddenly flare up. This, with her elytra and Orange's sketching, was the closest she'd ever gotten to what she Wanted.)
(Of course it noticed how much she liked them. It offered to draw her a permanent pair, filled in with color this time, to act more like gloves than direct attachments. She accepted. It offered, so it wanted to. Her own excitement was nothing, in that matter. So what if she had to hide a grin until she crossed through the Nether portal?)