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Cait remembered a time when she thought soulmates were beautiful. She remembered watching her parents and wishing for a soulmate of her own. A person who made you whole. Someone who lit you up from the inside just like that. Someone beautiful and kind who would be safe to love and be loved by.
And then she grew up. She grew up a little too compassionate, a bit too trusting, a bit too righteous, a little too naïve. Until the moment when she wasn’t any of those things anymore. The change wasn’t one specific moment she could pinpoint. It wasn’t one specific person she could pick out from the crowd either. It wasn’t one experience that turned her life upside down. It was just a dawning realization that seemed like a gentle hug at first, safe and warm, protective over her softer parts, something that made her a little more wary, less open to hurt, and then became suffocating, crushing, to the point where it made her cynical.
She knew, people weren‘t necessary cruel. People were just people. Trying to live their lives in ways that didn‘t destroy them. Sometimes that meant it destroyed others. Sometimes injustice bore even more injustice and anger, rightful and wrongful, sowed revenge and reaped devastation. Sometimes nobody was at fault and things just happened.
She lost the first person when she was a teenager still. Barely old enough to be called that and not a child. Greyson was there one day and the next she was informed by her stone faced mother that the Sheriff wouldn‘t attend the next shooting competition. She saw Greyson‘s soulmate break down at her grave during the funeral. Clawing at her arm, as if she could erase the mark, now dulled and grey, and the pain written all over her body with it.
She lost the next person with barely twenty. A girl her age, still clutching the pill bottle in her hand, when Caitlyn finally managed to break the door to the dorm in the academy. Her mark had dulled just that afternoon on her neck. Everybody knew what it meant. The professor immediately escorting the young woman to the emergency consultant for cases like that.
She lost her next person two years into the job. Her partner, finger too close to the trigger and choosing fear over bravery, shooting a middle aged, unarmed man from the undercity, causing a peaceful protest to escalate. Hands slipping in the warm blood that seemed so desperate to leave the cooling body, Caitlyn didn‘t care about the pandemonium around her. The man stared her in the eyes and lifted his arm. The soulmark on his hand losing color by the second in front of her eyes, as she tried to keep him alive through a haze of tears.
“Tell her…“, he wheezed, “tell her I love her.“
She nodded, in a daze. “I promise.“
A promise she had kept.
A different one, she had broken.
Her father telling her, “don‘t let this job change you. At the end of the day, it‘s just that. A job. Your life is so much more than that. Promise me, Cait.“
“I promise,“ she had said and then promptly broken it when she realized that this job was more than just a job. That this job was bearing witness to people hitting rock bottom. That this job meant seeing people doing the unspeakable in the name of their soulmates. To themselves and others. This job changed her in her fundamentals and took that little girl, who thought soulmates were beautiful, and replaced her with a woman who knew that beauty and ugliness were sometimes only a second, a millimeter, a breath away from each other.
Terror gripped her heart every time she met someone new. Hoping beyond hope that she wouldn‘t be exposed to the vulnerability that came with a soulmate. Vulnerable towards pain, vulnerable towards manipulation, vulnerable towards unimaginable things. Every time she got through a new introduction without burning pain somewhere on her body, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Her mother seemed worried, her father outright terrified of that development. Caitlyn felt ill. Nauseated and anxiety ridden by the trauma of other people losing their soulmates, of people being the soulmates that were lost. She wanted to throw up at the thought that a priority shift so drastic could happen to her. That she would only think about one person when she breathed her every breath, even if it was her last one. She wanted to scream, thinking about discovering her mark and then seeing it dull in front of her eyes. Terrified of getting to know what she would miss and then losing it.
Due to her father’s advice, she went to a consultation. A doctor for her mind, her father called it. But Caitlyn and the doctor reached a stalemate pretty fast because she wasn‘t depressed, she wasn‘t unreasonably afraid of improbable odds, research actually supported her worries.
Over the last years with the riots piling up, with more violence and deaths, more people lost their soulmates. The health institutes focusing on soulmate loss were overflowing. Suicide rates were spiking. Caitlyn knew she was rightfully afraid.
And then she met Vi. It was pretty unspectacular. Just one routine control in front of a bar and then she felt her side burning. Horror gripping her, as the short woman in front of her ripped her shirt up and stared at the mark blooming into existence.
The woman was objectively hot. Attractive in a way that would have caught Caitlyn‘s eye even without a mark confirming that they were made for each other. Short, buff, rebellious. Exciting. The kind of person Caitlyn usually liked to bring home to her apartment. But then the woman turned vulnerable eyes onto her and Cait was gone.
She had just found her soulmate and it was as world changing as she had feared.
Violet, Vi, as she wanted to be called, needed only one look and Caitlyn knew she‘d do anything to see her happy.
Morality, danger and even self-preservation taking a backseat for the feeling of completeness rushing through her veins, concentrating in the mark on her side.
When she pulled to woman through the door of her apartment, it was clear for her that she‘d bleed herself dry if it meant it would bring Vi joy.
“Are you okay?“ Her voice was soothing. Like music in Caitlyn’s ears. She almost forgot to answer the question.
“Of course.“
Vi raised one eyebrow and folded her arms in front of her chest. Biceps bulging. Distracting.
“We will not start this with you lying to me. Be honest or I’ll leave.“
“I‘m terrified.“ Just like that, Caitlyn blurted it out. The one thing she had never admitted before. It heightened the dread spreading inside of her like poison. How easy it was for Vi to get her deepest fears out in the open. How easy it would be for her, to get Caitlyn to do whatever it took to see her happy and satisfied.
“Of me?“
“No. Of having a soulmate.“
“Why?“
And Caitlyn told her everything. Admitted to every shameful thought she had had in regards to soulmates. And Vi did nothing but listen and finally reach a hand out. Caitlyn held into the strong limb as if it was a lifesaving line.
“Of course I got myself an overthinker,“ Vi muttered mostly to herself before looking Caitlyn in the eye and stating, “I‘m going to protect you. Even from myself. You can stop worrying about your own fallibility. It is part of your humanity and it makes you beautiful and I am going to protect this beauty with all I‘ve got.“ There it was, plain and raw, just like Caitlyn felt in front of the beauty that was her other half. The person who immediately understood.
Funnily enough Caitlyn believed her. More than the consultant telling her to not lose hope, she believed in her soulmate. A woman as messy as they come. That alone confirmed her worries. But for better or worse, she trusted the woman, who held her so gently with hands that were bloody, bruised and torn more often than not.
Still, sometimes, at night, she lay in bed, wide awake and terrified as her finger traced the slope of a nose, the swell of a cheek, the soft arch of a brow. And those times she reminded herself that this was what it meant to love and be loved in return.