A little belated, but here it goes:
When the people talked about color, Kathryn supposed she had always thought they were exaggerating, their smug satisfaction in having found “the one” validated with this overblown hyperbole about the “vibrance” of it.
She’d seen flashes, a few times at the academy and spaceport hubs, faint traces of something that might have been what her “lucky colleagues described. Then again, it might just have been something in her eyes.
She hadn’t worried about it. After all, a lot of people never experienced the color phenomenon, her own parents hadn’t and that never seemed to have kept them from having a happy marriage.
After Justin died, well a strangely superstitious part of her wondered, whether maybe it was somehow her fault for ignoring the signs, for not seeking out the source of that smear of warmth she’d seen on a handful of railings and bar tops.
But then, well she stopped seeing anything that might have been color. The trail had gone cold. (A trail to your soulmate, some trash she must have forgotten reading whispered.)
She stopped being oblivious to the nature of the invitations to “catch up” that Mark was making and moved on from curiosity she probably couldn’t satisfy if she wanted to anyway.
But then, well she hadn’t been expecting to get flung into the Delta Quadrant and she hadn’t expected to beam down to the Caretaker’s array and then suddenly be assaulted by bright, strong, swatches of color… clearly infinitely more fresh than any of those earlier faded hues.
And then to see him. She’d never thought about how much the average person touched himself, running their hands through their hand and over their faces.
She’d looked at Chakotay that first time and the color of him had screamed, sending reverberations through her.
No, she breathed. No one had been exaggerating about color.
Of course, when they’d made the decision to work together to get back home, they’d had to talk about it like rational human beings who could put aside impulse and make choices for the good of the crew.
That didn’t mean she never took his hand in hers (in awe at the hue she discovered on herself) and place it on interesting items she wanted to know more about the full nature of (flowers, food, art), didn’t indulge in some of the lesser pleasures of the secret openly shared between them.
It didn’t mean she wasn’t pained to watch the color fade from her, lips slowly draining from pink back to grey with time, after they returned from New Earth.
It didn’t mean that something in her didn’t break the day that she saw Seven dotted in fingerprints of color, streaks of it on her mouth and up the side of her face along her jaw.
Thanks, Satan.
Oh!!! Oh NO! Why?!? Ugh….this was gorgeous though, really @lodessa.
I’m only giving the community, and it’s angst fixated trend, what it asked for, @jhelenoftrek.
Are you still accepting prompts? Ignore if not! I’ve not done one of these before, but I love the idea of only seeing colour on things your soulmate has touched. For J/C of course :) can you imagine in the chaos of the Caretakers Array Janeway noticing splashes of colour. (I’m now doing heart eye emojis. Haha). Hope you’re well, despite summer going to quickly for you! Millie
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