Chapter Text
It’s a gloomy morning in Pittsburgh, Dana throws her backpack over her shoulder and rushes out the door towards the bus stop. She squeezes down the aisle past a group of girls who are excitedly giggling over something. Dana sits down two rows behind them and listens in on their conversation. The first one of their group has met her soulmate and she is describing the colours she can see to her friends. The yellow of the school bus, the hues of the leaves on the trees which have started to change and the warm blonde of her soulmates hair. Dana rolls her eyes at the discussion. She’s always thought that people put too much stock in the idea of soulmates. How you’re supposed to get this one person and it’s decided for you and that’s it for the rest of your life.
When the bus finally comes to a stop Dana shuffles off with the rest of the students. She turns around to take a final look at the bus as the grey object speeds away into the sea of shades of grey that she lives in. For the first time in her thirteen years she wonders if she will get to see the colours of the world, and when. She’s quickly taken out of her daydream as a new batch of students start to hurry past her to get to class.
By age fourteen Dana would say that about a tenth of the students in her grade have met their soulmates. There is excited chatter in the corridors whenever a new soulmate match is made. People start to put more stock into colour matching their clothing and personal items for those around them who can see.
Dana Evans was fifteen when her world burst into glorious colour. She'd locked eyes with a boy in her class and suddenly she was seeing warm chocolate brown for the first time, followed by the forest green of his shirt. They become fast friends and Dana finally gets it. Everything with Benji is easy. He’s caring and sweet to her. They get on well and really understand each other, Dana thinks that she couldn’t have picked a better match if she were given the choice. The rest is history.
Dana and Benji had started dating right away, high school sweethearts, the couple everyone wanted to be. Married at nineteen while she was getting her nursing degree. Her and Benji have three beautiful daughters, she has a job that she loves, a comfortable house. Dana Evans has it all, a life in technicolour, until one day it isn't.
She’s in the kitchen making dinner for her daughters when the tomato sauce turns from a rich, deep red into a dull grey. Dana feels her heart sinking. At first she thinks perhaps the lighting in her kitchen has dimmed but when she turns around she is met with her biggest fear. Her whole kitchen has gone monochrome. She drops the spoon on the ground before stumbling over and grabbing the edge of the marble countertop for support. Her daughter looks up from her homework and asks what’s wrong. Dana doesn’t know how to find the words to tell her that her father won’t be coming home. Her other daughters rush into the room, but it's too late, both her sauce and her life are in ruin. Dana resigns herself to the fact she's a single mother and a widow, and she'll spend the rest of her days living in shades of grey.
It’s difficult to describe the loss to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Living without colour isn’t so bad when you don’t know what you’re missing out on. But for Dana she can’t help but see everything else she’s losing. It’s not just Benji, it’s the fact she will never see her daughters eyes again, won’t get the full experience of trying on homecoming and prom dresses with them, won’t get to experience the hues of the florals at their weddings some day. Her youngest is only three, Dana has to come to terms with the fact her sisters will be the ones who will some day teach her the names of all the colours. It isn’t one singular loss, it’s shaping the way that she will experience the rest of her life.
They say that the majority of people will have found their soulmate by the time they are twenty one. It seems an unlikely statistic but there is a study that shows that approximately 96% of people had found their match by this age. There is something in the universe that throws soulmates together. So as Cassie blows out the candles on her birthday cake when she turns seventeen she wishes to meet her soulmate. The following year she makes the same wish as more than half her friends have now met their soulmates. When she makes the same wish on her nineteenth birthday she starts to think that perhaps she’s in that small percentage. Perhaps if she is more adventurous and meets more people it will increase her odds. So the day after her birthday she heads out to a club on the other side of town. She’s had a fake ID for six months but had been too scared to use it, but as time ticks on she figures that she has to do this or she may never find her soulmate.
On Cassie’s 21st birthday she doesn’t even have a cake. Her boyfriend holds up a match for her to blow out before he retrieves another and lights his joint with it. But still, she makes the same wish that she has made for the past four years even though the odds are even more stacked against her now. A year later and she’s too far gone to even realise the date. She’s on the floor of a bathroom hundreds of miles from home rolling up a hundred dollar bill, resigned to the fact that meeting her soulmate was a silly and childish fantasy.
Cassie is twenty five when she is rushed into PTMC following an overdose. The doctors are able to revive her but she’s groggy and barely conscious for most of her stay.
Dana walks past the bed in south sixteen. She looks at the girl who lays there, stable but unconscious, and all Dana can think is that she’s really just a kid. Not much older than her daughters. She’d been brought in as a Jane Doe and they still don’t know anything about her. The shift has been quiet and Dana finds herself gravitating towards the young woman’s bedside. She hovers next to her, as she says a silent prayer that the girl will be okay. She’s about to turn away and head back to the nurses station when she catches the flutter of her eyelids. She’s waking up. Dana edges closer to her now and sure enough the woman's eyes slowly open, and much to Dana’s surprise she is staring into crystalline blue eyes with the faintest fleck of amber. Almost as quickly as they opened her eyes close again. Dana waits by her side to see if the woman will open her eyes again, but minutes pass and nothing. If it weren’t for the fact the entire emergency department is suddenly in screaming colour Dana would have sworn that she imagined it. But there is no mistaking this, her world of black and white has once again been thrown into colour.
Dana shuffles out of south sixteen and vows not to tell anyone about this development in her life. Benji was her soulmate and he’s gone. She thinks perhaps this is some kind of glitch, or maybe she’s just exhausted and she’s imagining the colours she used to see since she once knew them so well. But, when weeks pass and she continues to see the world in colour she starts to think that maybe it isn’t a mistake. She even puts it to the test, she visits some places she’s never been before, places where she wouldn’t have memories of the colours of things, and sure enough she can identify each and every colour.
Cassie awakens to her boyfriend calling her name. She's greeted by sterile white walls and the sounds of beeping and clattering. It takes her a moment to adjust and realise that she's in a hospital. When her vision clears and she looks at Kyle for the first time she realises that everything is different. She's seeing him in vivid colour for the first time, but this is wrong. She shouldn't be able to see colour, the last thing she remembers is the world in black and white. She was at a party, in the bathroom with Kyle and her best friend Lila, they were laughing and having a good time and then it goes blank. But, she knows what the colour means, it means she met her soulmate at some point in that missing time, which also means she'll probably never find them.
Seeing the world in all it's hues now she isn't overcome with joy over finally finding her perfect mate, the colours feel like a cruel mockery, she's been given the gift of colour at the cost of knowing the one person who was meant for her. It awakens something in her, if she hadn't blacked out then maybe she would have locked eyes with her soulmate and that would have been the very first colour she ever saw. But now she'll never know the colour of her soulmates eyes, what colour clothes they were wearing when they first met, or anything else about them. She bursts into tears and turns totally inconsolable. Kyle manages to get her discharged AMA. He takes her back to their apartment, but Cassie doesn't have it in her to explain to him or her friends that she is the only one of them that can now see in colour.
Cassie dreams of forests, lush green in the early morning sunlight. She's wandering through getting lost in the trees. Sometimes she thinks that there is someone with her in her dreams, it's a ghost of a person, barely there. But she can feel the presence, warm and comforting. Occasionally it's accompanied by what she thinks might be the swishing of hair, but she can't be certain.
It grows exhausting having to lie to her friends, so one day she ups and leaves. She takes the little money she has and checks herself into a motel to go cold turkey and get herself sober. It's a difficult step, but it's one she knows that she has to take. If she can get sober then maybe she can face going back home.
They never do find out Jane Doe’s name and there is no address or contact information on file, so even if it wasn’t breaking a million laws Dana has no way to track her down. Part of her hopes that she got clean and that Dana will never have to see her in the ER ever again, but the selfish part of her wants her to come back. There was something about her, a magnetism that Dana couldn’t seem to resist, even now she feels like something is tugging at her and she gets a chill whenever she walks past south sixteen.
As days fade to weeks and to months the feeling fades, but it doesn’t disappear. Dana is haunted by the piercing blue of the eyes that reintroduced the colour into her world. Images of those eyes, so full of life, out there somewhere living a totally different life now. On her worse days the eyes are cold, frozen, lifeless and Dana runs through worst case scenarios over and over. But thanks to the law of soulmates Dana knows that this isn’t the case, if it were she wouldn’t finally be seeing her girls growing up in colour. So she knows that her soulmate is out there somewhere, alive.