Me playing 12 hours of the mario series going to trixie house for a visit and imagining her as a power up star run trixie run

M!A NO BEANIE - 8/10

Pink used to be his favourite colour.

Junkrat liked it as a kid because much like orange and yellow, pink felt warm and fun and uplifting. Unlike orange and yellow, pink was also often paired with sparkles, which may as well have been fireworks to Junkrat’s young eyes. Even the different names for it – bubblegum, magenta, fuchsia – were so much more appealing, so much more interesting than dull, boring blue, the colour he was supposed to like as a boy.

It was always the smallest crayon in his box, the most well used, well loved. He didn’t have many crayons to begin with – had to make do with the neighbour’s hand-me-downs – but Junkrat liked how pink stood out against the darker colours, against brown and black on the reams of white paper he tore through when he had no friends to go out and play with.

There weren’t many things in the real world that were coloured pink, either. He’d stand out in the backyard and see it all across the sky when the sun was setting, though, a vibrant gradient that bloomed into lilac at dusk. Seeing it up there made him feel good - served to remind him that they’d managed to survive another day, even when times were rough and it often felt like the sight of the setting sun was the only thing he had to look forward to.

Pink was his mother’s favourite colour as well. She had a big pink purse, one filled with multi-coloured credit cards, though it got so gnarly over the years that a lot of the pink peeled off. Junkrat remembers how sad he was when it was eventually stolen – how she cried and cried and cried over it. How he cried, too, after she tucked him into bed that night. She replaced it with a purple one, a dark colour that made Junkrat wish he was older. If he was, he could work like she did and buy her new purse, so he wouldn’t have to be reminded of her tears every time he saw the purple one.

“What do you think?” Angela asks, breaking him out of his thoughts when she peeks out of the bathroom. Junkrat jolts where he’d started to slump, attention drawn from the floor up to her new suit as she steps out.

“Woah,” he says, eyes going wide. “Holy fuck.”

The pretty girls at school liked pink. They wore it as ribbons in their hair, as shoes and skirts and dresses. Junkrat discovered the hard way that liking pink was something to be kept private. The other kids bullied it out of him quickly enough, and then he found more to like in orange anyway, a safer, stronger colour that meant he wasn’t picked on. But he still liked pink, even if it was girly, even if it made him gay. Junkrat never understood that. What was so gay about liking something the girls did?

“I think it’s a bit… garish, really,” Angela says, smiling shyly.

“What?! No way!” He gestures for her to come closer. Angela seems unsure, but she steps up to him where he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. Junkrat watches the ribbons ripple through the air as she does – the ones that are on her arms and tied into her hair.

“Jesus,” he says, reaching out to hold her by the hips. He takes his time looking over her, wanting to drink in how good she looks in it, how strange it is seeing her in something so feminine. Angela isn’t the girliest girl in the world, but she’s by far the prettiest. Pink suits her.

“Do you like it?” Angela asks him, hopefully. She puts her hands on his shoulders, squeezing slightly, please tell me you do, I feel like such a fool in this.

“Y’look stunnin’,” Junkrat says, instantly, because she does. He grins when he meets her eyes. “Bloody – breathtaking. Absolutely love it.”