Multi-Fandom One-Shots Part 2

Colorblind - Stydia (Teen Wolf)

Stiles Stilinski is in third grade when he falls in love with Lydia Martin.

And he knows it's love, he really does, because when she briefly meets his eye across the playground one innocuous Tuesday the world around him blossoms into color.

He sees the shade of her hair for the first time, not quite red in the way that he'd imagined from his parent's descriptions, but definitely red-ish. Maybe it's closer to orange, or maybe even blonde, he thinks, but he won't know for sure until he gets to see yellow, too, and it's super rare to get more than one color at once. Red is enough for now, though.

The new color layers over his previously grayscale world and Stiles can see Lydia's red hair, the light pink blush of her cheeks and the deeper pink of her lips. Stiles looks at Lydia and sees color, and it is beautiful.

His best friend Scott frowns when he tells him, like he doesn't understand. "What do you mean you see color? Aren't we too young for that?"

Stiles waves off his concerns and goes back to rifling through the classroom crayon supply, which suddenly holds a whole new world of possibilities. Some of them are still in black and white, and most are just sort of shades of gray, but some are vibrant colors and Stiles knows that's more than most of the other kids can see so he's happy.

He picks out the ones that look closest to Lydia's colors, labelled red and pink and orange (that one's a bit of a guess, but he has a good feeling about it) and sketches a rough drawing of her. He's not the best artist, but just seeing the colors on the page makes his heart race.

He catches her just before the end of the day. "Lydia!" he calls as she neatly tucks her pencils into their case. He can see that she's got a red one and a pink one, and another color he can't think of the name of, and he wonders if she sees them too.

She blinks up at him as he skids to a stop in front of her desk. "Yes?"

"I drew this for you."

She takes the drawing and he waits with baited breath for her response. She glances over it before rolling her eyes back to Stiles's face. "What is it?"

"It's... uh..." Now that he's here in front of her, admitting that he's drawn her seems like a creepy thing to do. He can see Scott wincing sympathetically across the room. Stiles finally settles on, "It's in color. Don't you see?"

Lydia scowls, pink lips pressing together. "No, I don't see."

His heart drops, because this is not how the stories go.

In the stories, when you meet your soulmate your whole world suddenly changes, and you start to see color. Because they're your soulmate, they see color too. You look at each other, and you see color, and it's beautiful. That's what happened with Stiles's parents, that's what happens in all the stories of true love Stiles has ever heard.

But Stiles sees color, and Lydia doesn't.

This doesn't make sense.

Stiles is very lost when he asks, "You don't?"

"No, I don't." Lydia eyes him warily, glancing from the drawing to his face and back again. "Why, do you?"

"Uh... I... um..."

When he doesn't give her a straight answer, she pins him under a very scrutinising stare. For a second Stiles swears that she's seeing it too, that she knows exactly what he's talking about, but then she silently pushes the paper back towards him.

Stiles feels like he might cry. "Keep it," he says quietly.

He turns to head back to Scott before she can reply, and his friend offers him a consolatory pat on the back.