AN: Thank you to Super Berry, my apparently near-ish neighbor and quickest reviewer ever. Also, I apologize that this is technically cheating since it doesn't involve colors.
Elliot hates color as a whole.
It's a little known fact that while many are born colorblind, a sufficiently bad enough dose of brain damage could wipe out the mind's ability to process color. He remembers it, and that's something he's sure he'll never get sympathy for. It doesn't sound like a big thing. He's living, his hair grew back, he got out with minimal scarring, so why complain? It's as simple as the fact that he dreams in color and wakes up to a world washed out into nothingness.
He has to eat things without looking at them. The lack of how taste and sight match up leaves him feeling sick. He dropped out of art after it happened, and would have burned all his paintings had his mother not stopped him. That was when the moving around began, shuffling from one relative to another in the hopes one of them could fix a world so broken he wished he were truly blind just to get away from it. He's alright some days, can even make it through all his classes, but he can't be Elliot anymore. Elliot was a promising young artist in Washington. And in his mind, Elliot died right alongside the man who brought down this curse on what remained: his father.
His father had been driving drunk and now Elliot's life was effectively over.
His father had gotten off with a DUI and a broken collarbone. His lawyer had the first point nixed and he simply healed. But his son, who had taken the brunt of the impact, spent three months in a coma, barely hanging onto life. He awoke with six broken ribs, a fractured skull, and so much pain no painkillers could dull it. Yet even when they upped every painkiller, he kept crying, blurring out a world of gray, black and white, a place he didn't recognize or understand. The world had been drained of vibrancy.
He takes up new identities with each move. New excuses for his scars, new names, accents, backgrounds. He extorts his father for every last dollar, gets everything he wants, and there's a hole inside him that will never fill n matter what games he gets or who he's pretending to be. But if he makes himself believe he's a person who's never seen color or held a paint brush, if he keeps taking the painkillers he doesn't need, he can make it all go away for days. Weeks, even, before he picks up another identity, worrying his family as everything Elliot crumbles like a stone in the sea beaten by the waves of time.
By the time he gets to Sam he barely even remembers he was someone else. So long as he wears shades, and doesn't look at what he eats, and keeps himself busy, it feels like he's living, not just alive. Goth culture suits him, keeps him looking like it's all deliberate. His tye-dye shirts are all in trash bags, his mirrors are all covered, and he fears sleep. In sleep his defenseless nature overwhelms him, reminds him who he is until he wakes up, running to go throw up until his throat and stomach burn with hollowness. He lays his head on the cold toilet seat and tries to make himself believe that color isn't real and it's all in his head.
Pictures of his father are impossible to even contemplate. The last time he saw one, he burned it. Indoors. He couldn't help it, didn't care that it burned his fingers. He stared at the hurting skin and remembered red when he could only see gray; it was like hearing music in his head while an unheard symphony played nearby. After Amity Park comes the next place to try to find something real, and after that there will be another. He will make someone real he can step into, put paint back on the canvas on his existence, because otherwise he will shoot himself through the head.
He hates color, because he loves it so much he is simply no longer here without it.