Eleven one shots. Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Purple White Gray Brown Black. If you need any more guidance than that check out my as of now much more finished "Eleven" story. (I hope you like Don Bluth's Anastasia, though.)

Red is one of my favorite colors. It's a good thing I tend to love villains.


Red

When he was younger, Jeremy always thought it unfair that most villains and anti-heros were depicted with their main color as red. Sure, you'd always have at least one superhero whose main color was red, such as the Flash or Spider-Man, but more often than not a lot of the bad guys always had red about them. Maybe it was because he was growing up in a world that was letting go of the communists as a potential global enemy. Red may not have been his favorite color, but he still wondered why it had to be the characterization of evil.

True, he fainted whenever he saw blood until he was eleven years old (and granted, he had no proof that he still didn't faint from the sight of it) but even that wasn't enough justification for him. He always sent out a silent little word of sympathy to villains who had fallen into the trap of having red as their theme color. Red was not an evil color.

Or so he thought.

Xana changed his mind. It was gradual at first as he tenderly felt his way around, learning the super calculator's programs and dipping his toes into the vastness of the Lyoko network, pulling together programming codes as he met Aelita for the first time. Every now and then the red little symbol would appear, and he knew it was bad, but he'd always push it away to the back of his mind. It was just a little bug, nothing big. He could handle it, it wouldn't become a big disaster.

But oh, how wrong he was. And now, bringing a group of three other friends, three other warriors, to help him fight this battle, he saw the red symbol every day. In reality on his computer screens it flashed in its malevolence, in his dreams as it plagued him to sleeplessness.

And from then on, the very moment he had discovered the ultimate dangers of the secret super computer, the very moment that infernal eye blazed red on his computer screen, was the very moment that he hated red with all of his heart. Any shade of it; from crimson to vermillion to ruby suddenly had a loathsome glint to it. After months of fighting the computer only to be futile, everything possible that bore that color burned a hole in his brain if he stared at it. And if the color was in his vision, he stared at it. Glared at it, even, lost in his boiling hatred for the cruel artificial intelligence. At one point Odd had to interrupt his thoughts in the middle of math class so that he could answer a question that the teacher had called on him for. Odd, of all people, had to bring him back to math class, of all the classes. And when he jolted back to the here and now of Kadic Academy's school day, he broke his pencil. Snapped it in two. He earned a splinter from it, and had to go visit Yolanda.

When she removed the splinter it unveiled a bead of blood, red against the palm of his hand.

How could he ever see that color as anything but the pure embodiment of evil? Whenever he saw it now, he always saw Xana's eye staring back at him, pulsating in its wickedness, waiting for its day of glory. In the tiny bead of blood on his hand he saw the eye laughing at him, mocking his incompetence as a human.

But the blood would heal. No color lasts forever. He closed his fingers over the wound, forming a fist. He no longer cared what Xana looked like. Xana was evil, that was it. Everything. Jeremy felt his red blood run through his veins, fueling him with determination.

What difference did it make.

He was going to defeat Xana.

That was the only thing he needed to think about.