Grey

"Colour Vision Deficiency isn't the end of the world. It's just a different view of it."

Karen Rae Levine

"The sky is blue," was the first colour Steve learned. The sky was blue. To him it was bright and dark, a shade between a shade. But, everyone said that the sky was blue, so it must be blue.

"What colour is the sky?" the teachers would ask and Steve would hesitate. The same colour as everything else, he wanted to say, but because he was young and had already been made fun of that day, he let a boy with slicked back dark hair raise his hand and shout, "Blue!"

(He later learned that the kid with light skin and dark hair was named Bucky and his eyes were the same shade as the grass in the park by the school.)

"Grass is green," was the second colour Steve learned. And because Bucky's eyes and the grass were the same shade, Bucky's eyes must be green (and, yet, the other boy laughed and said, "No, silly, my eyes are blue!").

So shades were different too, because Bucky's eyes were the same colour as the grass which was not the same colour as the sky and, yet, Bucky's eyes and the sky were blue and the grass was green. So Steve also learned that eye colours could be green, blue, brown, and hazel (but then there were also people with pink eyes and some with black eyes so he just figured he'd figure it out when he was older).

"Black" was the third colour he learned. Picking up a bag of apples with his mother (as a treat because she was given a raise at the hospital) and the man next to her said something about "how they ain't gonna pick up no fruit from black folk". Steve looked upon the woman selling his mother the apples, but she didn't look black to him—not like Bucky's hair which was like the tar in the street or oil dripping from Mr. Casiletto's car. She was darker than his momma, cheekbones strong, jaw curved like someone brushed their fingerprints upon her skin like a sculpture in his class. He liked her hair, though, it was springy and wild, reminding him of bush out by the river he and Bucky had chased frogs into.

On his sixth birthday, Steve got a box of coloured pencils and he didn't want to tell his momma that they all looked the same to him, especially since she had spent the money she normally did on sewing supplies. He didn't want to seem ungrateful.

"Apples are red," turned out to be a lie, because some apples were light and crisp while others were sour and tart. And Steve kept them apart by thinking that green was sour and red was sweet.

Red, it turned out, was also fiery, because he ate a box of 'red' candies and they made his tongue burn.

(But green also burned, because he ate a pepper and it, too, made his tongue feel like it was on fire.)

The water was blue like the sky, but he would lift up his glass and see no shade at all. So it must just be the ocean that was blue, not all water.

(Colours, Steve decided at the age of ten, were exhausting and interchangeable and he didn't like them one bit.)

Yellow was the sun, but the sun was bright and light like his mother's Sunday dress, and Steve figure that his teachers lied about that one, too. The flowers in the front were yellow, but so were the taxis and mustard and he figured out that it was bitter.

He didn't see purple until he was older and Miss Maranica came by with a basket of blueberries for him and his mother and they made jam out of it. The squashed berries were purple, his mother told him, letting him taste the dark, sweet juice. But then she peeled one and told him it was green, then she pointed to the skin and said it was blue.

"Why are they three different colours?" Steve whined, because shouldn't a berry called a blueberry be blue inside and out? Why make it harder for everyone to remember that each part was different?

"I don't know," His mother said, wiping her hands on the stained rag. "Maybe it's God's way of telling a joke."

Steve didn't like God's jokes very much.

Cheese could be white or orange or yellow. He didn't like cheese very much either.

"What colour's this?" Bucky would ask him after school, holding up a random object and Steve would stare at it, squinting.

"Blue?" He'd guess and some kids would pass by them, laughing.

Bucky never laughed, though. "I think you're colour blind," he told a twelve year old Steve. "What colour's this?" He picked up a pine cone.

"Brown," Steve answered, cause all pine cones were brown, right?

Well, not that one. That one was apparently green.

Steve kicked it all the way home.

For his twelfth birthday, his mother got him a box of paints which each colour carefully labelled down the side. The paintbrushes were soft and it had taken all of his neighbours and his mother to get enough funds together to afford it. Steve held it like it was a fragile doll, hugging it close to his chest, eyes wide with euphoria.

He painted the sky purple because he could, but it still looked the same to him.

At thirteen Steve still hadn't figured out eye colours so he just ignored them and called everyone's eye colour's yellow in his mind and acted like he hadn't heard the question when people asked him what his were. Snark became useful in his later years, and his mouth got him in trouble.

"What colour are your eyes?" A teacher would ask.

"Why don't you look at them," he'd say.

It wasn't like he was trying to be problematic, it's just that no one ever told him what colour his eyes were.

"You have such pretty eyes," the woman down the hall would say, but she never said which colour they were so Steve didn't know until he was fourteen that his eyes were blue.

It was Bucky, of course, who told him. "You have eyes like the ocean," he had said.

The ocean was blue, therefore, Steve concluded, his eyes were blue.

Why did people have so many names for so many shades? He always wondered. The flag was red, white, and blue. Steve recognized the white, but the red and blue blended together. He pledged his allegiance to that flag and had never seen it in its full glory.

(And the blue didn't match the ocean and the red didn't match the apples, how could he know which was which? White, at least, never changed. Good ol' white.)

At seventeen, his mom died and the sky was cloudy and apparently grey (which he didn't understand because wasn't the sky supposed to be blue?).

Steve heard someone say that loosing someone made the world seem like it was in black and white. He wondered if he had been like that ever since his father died—but the colour didn't come when his mom was gone. The colour didn't come until years later when he looked at Peggy Carter's lips and wondered what shade she wore painted across her skin.

(Red, it was red like sweetened apples and strawberries.)

But there was Doctor Erskine in his life, the army, the war and Steve was being pumped full of something that burned (and he wondered if that was red, too). He screamed and felt his bones rebuilding, his muscles, his eyes.

Something in his eyes was being torn apart and he kept them shut in case they decided to bleed out of his skull—

But then the machine opened up and everything was bright and white—

Then there was Peggy. Peggy's who's lips burned like those red candies he had eaten as a child, Peggy's who's lips were red like strawberries and apples. Red, red. The floor was familiar, the machines were familiar—grey, grey, steel, and cold—and Erskine with his darkened hair and Stark with the shade of chocolate (brown? It must be brown).

Steve fell in love with the world and the brightness, the fast pace, the spinning, and the sudden, aching desire to touch everything.

The gunshot was red too, red was blood, red was sweet, red was life and death and shame. His entire world blurred together, shapes popping out and he ran down the black streets (black, sweet, sweet black that never changed) and slammed into a window, landing on a white dress (white, too, was the same but he couldn't stop to breathe in that gentle reminder).

Blinding yellow of taxi cabs stood out like a flare amongst the streets. It shone like a flashing sign. It was as bright as the sun and now he knew that the teachers long ago had been right and the sun was yellow (and orange and red, red, red).

How could he miss it, how could anyone miss it?

The water was blue and black and something else (green? Or purple?). It was light when he looked up, and dark when he looked down, pushing against from all sides, suffocating and cold. Cool colours, warm colours, he knew the difference now. Knew what all those art teachers had long tried to explain to him.

Cyanide was white. White was death and cold and unforgiving. (What else was death? Was blue death? Did his mother turn blue when she died like the man's lips did when he bit down on that pill?)

Then, life was moving on and Erskine was in the back of his mind and Steve avoided looking at the red on his costume because he thought of death and Peggy and wondered how Bucky was doing in Europe. He saw the flag for the first time and stared a bit longer than he should have—the colours were bright and vibrant, daring, and he wanted to paint it but there was no time between shows (that's okay, though, because he drew the girls instead with their painted smiles and bright laughs). Each show was colourful and bright—so bright that he squinted when people weren't paying attention because it was habit and because it had hurt.

He travelled to Europe with blondes and brunettes and a few redheads (now he could tell the difference between that and he wanted to run his fingers through their hair to see if the texture changed with the colour), but Europe was grey. Steve had never seen green look so... colourless—not lifeless, because it seemed like the world was mourning. That the earth, the sky, everything was mourning.

Steve didn't belong in the land where green was more grey, he stood out in his red, white, and blue. So, when he heard about Bucky and the 107th, he grabbed brown and green and a single blue helmet with a white A on the front (he would later keep that A—white standing out on blue. He kept all the colours—why not? He could finally see them, after all.

The HYDRA base was just like every other base—minus the, you know, glowing blue around every corner—and Steve found Bucky strapped to a table.

And his eyes were blue.

Blue, Steve decided, was the most complicated colour of all.

(And then Bucky fell and Steve hated blue and he hated white and he hated black and he hated red and green and purple and yellow... but Peggy kissed him and she tasted like apples and fire candies and blood and Steve fell in love all over again.)

The plane crashed into the ocean and Steve woke up again to a new world, a brighter world with colours he had never seen before, colours that hadn't been available before. He sat down in a black seat on the helicarrier, Phil Coulson hovering near with the blue waters of the ocean stretching out below.

"I've always wanted to ask you this," the agent said, looking like he was toeing the line like a naughty six year old waiting to get caught. "But, what's your favourite colour?"

And Steve thought about the blue of Bucky's eyes and the red of Peggy's lipstick, the white of his mother's Sunday dress, the green of the army uniform, the purple of blueberries and the yellow, yellow sun.

"Grey," Steve Rogers smiled softly to himself, his eyes on the horizon.

Grey, after all, had been all of that and more.

This prompt came from a long discussion on Tumblr (the link can be found on my profile page if you want to read it).

I hope you enjoyed this touch upon colour blindness-something that I wish would be focused on more (but I'm biased, oops).

Thank you for reading, drop a review if you liked.

Gospel.