Blue is Jack's favorite color. He knows it's bad for Water Horses- his Chinese lunar sign- but he loves it nevertheless, especially when it comes to painting. He took me to Miss Medda's place once, and blue was everywhere; a palette smeared on his apron, the hue of his new shirt, Miss Medda's dress that matched the sky.
"Blue is full of hope," he once told me.
But Jack is wrong. Or maybe I am different. I do not know. But blue is unlucky, for Water Sheep like me as well as Water Horses like him. But I'm surrounded by blue quite often.
Cobalt shadows lap over one another, fighting to snuff out the light. The sky has no stars, only an ocean. Empty, dark splashes. It's like Jack spilled all his blue paints- navy, midnight, twilight, evening right after sunset- on a sullied canvas. Hopeless, like the ocean.
Blue is like the ocean that my parents took to come here. I can almost remember the endless waves, like a bolt of silk unrolling. Almost. I was almost three. I almost drowned in that ocean. That I can remember clearly.
Almost. The word is blue in my mind. Almost. It reeks of disappointment. But that is not all that can describe it. Disappointment is for the few times you get beat down. After a lifetime of disappointment, I think it's time to find a new word.
Jack loves sunsets. He doesn't just paint them; he sketches them in every medium he can get his hands on. Colored pencil, chalks, pastels… sometimes a mixture since one can rarely afford a whole set.
I once tried painting the sun slipping below the city the way he does so effortlessly. It didn't work. My hand slipped, the innocent pinks smeared into yellow, the color emperors wore. They clashed horrendously. Not to mention the blue overwhelmed everything else.
I thought Jack would be mad when he saw how I wasted his paint- not his, his patroness, Miss Medda. But he didn't shout at me or kick me out of the theater. He simply made a few tweaks- a stroke of purple there, a dash of orange here. It still was nothing like his masterpieces, but it didn't look too bad. He even told me I might be a great artist if I kept practicing.
No, not just great. Better than him. That's what he said.
"You'll be even better than me if you keep at it." He gave me a half crooked grin, showing his teeth. I didn't laugh, only smiled at his yellow face against the canopy of blue. It shone like the sun.
Blue was never good for me. But Jack made it better. He took the bluest of blues, the ones that swallowed me up in an unending tide of numbness, and turned it violet.
Violet. Keeps the blue, but mixes it with red, the lucky color in China. The lucky color that brings prosperity, happiness, passion.
Red is hot and fiery, boiling through me. It's scary how it envelops my insides, like a dragon breathing flames, but it feels wondrous. Your heart thunders and lightning strikes, igniting a spark, and spreads through your veins until not even water can extinguish it. I always feel powerful when scarlet courses through my being; on my best days, I take a crimson swipe at the Delancies and even Snyder himself. I know it's cruel, but on really bad days I picture wine colored blood dripping down their broken noses- they did it to me, throwing in some a couple "chinks" with a knuckle sandwich.
But red burns out quickly; it melds into the blue. But with Jack's blues and my reds, we make violet. The purples of lavenders and sunset, the color of immortality back home. The purple of amethyst mountains that supposedly touch the wisteria clouds out west, where no blue and gray city cages you in. The hue of lotuses floating on the water, rooted in the mud beneath a turquoise lake. Violet.
Violet- the delicate troopers that survive even in the rockiest, ugliest cracks and crevices of New York; the deepest blooms grow from dung piles. Violets that emerge from a sea lavender blue winter, every spring, no matter how cold or fearsome. They stretch upward, ignoring the urban maroon rust around them toward the sky.
I drown in blues. I sink, paralyzed by the cold and the poetic, cutting beauty. It fills my lungs, crushes my heart in a cold fist, but never quite kills me. An unending current.
I burn in reds. Luck, passion, anger, but no caution. I set my world ablaze, letting the flames rampage without limit. I feel powerful, prideful- I am the ten suns walking across the sky, but after a while, one by one, Wang Yi's celestial arrows have shot all but one son down. So I burn alone, in a perfect blue sky, chased by a navy blue night.
Jack is a Water Horse, born in the spring of 1882. I am a Water Sheep, born just before the new lunar year started in 1884. Blue is ominous for us both. Red is auspicious, but too much of it spoils people and turns them rotten like those ten bad sons. But there are people who make it balance- yin and yang, equal. All good things come in pairs. I need some blue to make the red shine through; but with Jack, it all blends together, in a perfectly entwined pair, delicately blotted together the way a scholar combines two characters or Jack blends his paints to create the perfect sunset. The one we'll watch together, at any time of day, because it lies in our eyes- the sky both our minds can see. Yellow sun, orange horizon, red earth, even blue dusk approaching, but the clouds' color- scarce and light as it might be- overlaps all.
Violet.
Newsie Paper Selling Competition S3 Circulation 2
Word Count: 985
Prompts: Blue (Depression), Red (Anger/Passion), Violet (Romance)
This story is from Crutchie's POV. This is technically a JackCrutchie (romantic) fic, my very first. Hope you like it.
Crutchie frequently references his Chinese culture, which he shares w/ Jack. Water Horses and Water Sheep are lunar signs based on birth year, while the Ten Suns and Celestial Archer refer to a famous legend where ten brothers who each embodied a sun nearly destroyed the earth by walking across the sky together and had to be killed, w/ the exception of one, by Wang Yi, the Archer God. Red is a lucky color in China, while purple symbols immortality and yellow is royalty. Blue is a neutral color, but for Jack and Crutchie's lunar signs, it's not good luck.