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The first day of eighth grade is when it happens, a little early but not unheard of, and Kathryn stares at herself in the bathroom mirror.
Her brown eyes have turned blue.
Dad doesn’t notice, of course, but Mom sits on Kathryn’s bed that night, the mattress tilting toward adulthood, toward expectations, and Mom says, “This sort of thing runs in the family, you know.”
“I know,” Kathryn says, trying to think about quantum mechanics, about tennis serves, about anything but the emergence of the soul tie. “But there’s no scientific evidence that soul ties are real. And, even if they are, lots of people have blue eyes.”
There’s no need to point out that there’s also no scientific evidence on reasons for spontaneous changes in eye color since such things simply don’t happen except for soul ties.
“Soul ties aren’t like in the storybooks,” Mom says, shifting on the bed, crossing her legs as if nervous to explain a deep truth to a daughter more interested in studying nebulas than understanding nebulous family fairytales. “It will happen to your future partner, too. Or maybe it already has. Or maybe it’s happening right now. Since you had the change to match eye color, the other person will experience the inversion. Soul ties can be subtle, and you’re the one who has to watch out for the signs.”
The inversion means something Kathryn’s future partner loves will change to become a love for its opposite, an interest inverted, and that opposite will bring that person and Kathryn together.
“My eye color changing is hardly subtle.” Kathryn’s newly blue eyes roll.
But the soul tie is real, Kathryn knows it in her bones, in her marrow, and Mom’s good-night kiss to Kathryn’s forehead lingers, as if saying goodbye to a child and hello to a young woman.
More like a young worker. After all, as the person whose eyes changed color, Kathryn is the watcher who must identify the person to whom her soul is now tied. A job, a task, unwanted and inconvenient.
It turns out that eight to ten percent of the human population have blue eyes. The percentage is higher for Andorians, lower for Vulcans and Klingons.
It also turns out that asking people if they loved something that became a love for its opposite is a good way to observe the varied ways eyes can squint, narrow, or widen in confusion.
Mark has brown eyes.
Maybe that’s why Kathryn stays with him. No chance of the soul tie. Years and years together and his interests are steady: tennis, philosophy, a clean home. No inversions. Kathryn doesn’t have to watch for anything except what she actually wants: promotions, a starship of her own, a mission to prove her worth.
“Tom Paris?” she asks without needing to ask, New Zealand grass under her boots that are better suited to starship deck plating, and his blue eyes look up at her.
No.
Impossible.
The strange pressure behind her eyes, almost like the heaviness that can come before crying, must be a coincidence. Mom never mentioned that sort of thing, anyway.
Could Tom have loved Starfleet and that love inverted to love the Maquis? No, he calls himself a mercenary.
But Kathryn watches him, not because she’s the watcher but because he’s interesting.
Loyal … “I'd hate to see anything happen to Harry.”
Honest … “Captain, I think I should tell you I've never actually landed a starship before.”
Self-reflective … “When I was a boy, my father used to tell me that I was special, that one day I'd do something significant. My teachers at school, all the kids, everyone used to say, ‘Tom Paris is going to do something important when he grows up.’ Obviously, that didn't happen.”
And it probably means nothing, the way Tom sought her out when he was out of his mind from the effects of his warp ten flight, the way Kathryn wasn’t scared when she woke up in the shuttle with him, the way her hazy memories of togetherness with him on the planet—children, they had children together—involved a peculiar kind of … soul-deep comfort.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Not only is she his commanding officer, but also there’s no evidence of an interest of Tom’s inverting to its opposite.
Years go by, and thank goodness he’s dating B’Elanna, more proof this whole soul tie thing doesn’t involve him, and tea in Kathryn’s ready room is friendly, nice.
Until it’s not.
“I was obsessed with stories about the ocean,” says the man whose head had turned downward toward the sea, then shifted upward toward the stars.
“Ancient sailing ships were always my first love,” says the man whose second love became starships, shuttles, anything in space instead of on water.
He blames his father for his change in interests … and Kathryn’s eyes that are blue like Tom’s, blue like the ocean she took from him when his love inverted, possibly a confusing process if the soul tie doesn't run on either side of his family, those eyes feel the pressure like crying but she won’t cry as she speaks truths with depths like the sea—”You'd think Admiral Paris might have understood his son's passion.” and “So now you have an opportunity to make up for lost time.”—and sends him away—”Bon voyage.”
Fires on his shuttle.
Sentences him to time in the brig.
What the hell is she trying to prove? That the soul tie doesn’t matter? That the watcher didn’t realize the truth? That she can still serve as his commanding officer even as he finds love with someone whose job doesn’t entail responsibility for a ship and crew far from home?
No, Kathryn will be fine. Loneliness has become her natural state.
It’s a coincidence that Michael Sullivan doesn’t have blue eyes, even after Kathryn’s changes to his program, and, when she forgets herself, Jaffen’s eyes are dark like the void of space, not the waves of the ocean. That part of Kathryn’s life … that hope … is over.
At the gala to celebrate Voyager’s return to the Alpha Quadrant, the man her soul is tied to is a father bursting with pride for his daughter with someone else .. and arguing with his wife over everything from where they should live—San Francisco makes sense, Tom’s right—to when the baby should sleep in a separate room—whenever she’s ready, B’Elanna’s right, but instead of calling Tom’s ideas stupid, it would be more productive to point out the efficiency of middle-of-the-night wakeups with the whole family together.
By the fifth anniversary party to honor Voyager’s homecoming, the family lives on separate planets, divorce finalized and Tom on Earth.
“I’ve been looking through the Starfleet archives,” he tells Kathryn, his gaze intent as he stands next to her at the bar, sounds of the celebration seeming to recede. “There’s a picture of you as a kid, maybe nine or ten years old. Looks like you went with your dad to work. You never mentioned that your eyes used to be brown.”
Tom knows.
A tear slides down Kathryn’s cheek. The pressure behind her eyes. At some point, she must have stopped noticing it.
“Not exactly the sort of thing a person mentions without cause,” she says, an odd sensation of being here at the party but also in front of the mirror the first day of eighth grade. “Though I assume you’re familiar with the reason for the occurrence?"
A bartender appears with whiskey in a glass. Kathryn’s order from a few minutes earlier … a lifetime ago.
Steady hands—the hands that guided her ship home—grab the glass and press it into her grasp. “The pier at Fisherman’s Wharf. About an hour after sunset tomorrow. Meet me there?”
Her nod is instinctive.
And even in the darkness of an hour after sunset, Tom is easy to find sitting on the pier, legs dangling as he faces San Francisco Bay, not the city.
Kathryn sits next to him, the pier hard on her rear end, her legs crossing not unlike the way her mother’s did all those years ago.
Other people’s conversations rise and fall, stars high overhead and the water in the bay below.
Tom isn’t usually known for silence.
But he stares at something on the horizon.
Maybe Kathryn should be worried, flutters of nervous fear in her belly or choking her throat. She’s not worried, though. There’s a certain contentment in sitting with him, in giving him time to think about what he wants to say.
More stars appear in the sky.
“I was fourteen years old and confused as hell,” he says, voice hoarse. “One day, I loved the sea. The next day, loving the sea was a memory and I loved the stars. I had dreamed of joining the Federation Naval Patrol. Then that dream was gone, and I couldn’t wait to sign up for Starfleet—much to the relief of my father, as you probably guessed.”
Tears drip down her cheeks, the salty water he once loved. “I never meant to take the ocean from you, Tom.”
“Hey, no, you know it doesn’t work that way.” His fingers twine with hers, strong and secure. “My mom explained it. Dad was just happy about my change in plans. And I liked what my mom said about how the watcher would find me. So I waited. I wondered, the day I met you, if it could be you. But I told myself I was crazy. Blue eyes are …”
“Eight to ten percent of the human population,” Kathryn says it with him, a falling into sync that should be odd but it’s not. It’s good. Really good. A warmth of belonging lifts her chest.
“Higher for Andorians,” he points out, his slight shrug almost embarrassed. “I might have had that in mind to make a few passes at Andorians over the years. But then I just kind of … gave up. Figured it was a family story that wasn’t true. Or maybe it just wasn’t true for me. Then I met you and you know the rest. But what I don’t know is when you figured it out and why you kept it a secret.”
“Don’t you?” She’s on the pier. She’s staring at her new eye color in the mirror. She’s a girl in bed while her mother talks. She’s a captain on the bridge of a starship seventy thousand light years away. “I was your commanding officer. You told me about your love for the ocean, and the inversion was clear. But what could either of us do about it? You had B’Elanna, and I had a ship and crew to get home.”
No one needs to point out that he doesn’t have B’Elanna anymore, and the ship and crew are home.
Tom’s fingers stay twined with Kathryn’s.
He looks out to the horizon again, where the sea meets the stars.
“So we choose this?” he asks, solemn, as if proposing marriage, a close enough analogy.
Her head tilts to rest on his shoulder, an intuition that he won’t mind, that Tom wants the reassurance of Kathryn letting herself move even closer to him.
“If I understand the family stories correctly, we don’t choose the soul tie. But we do choose whether we want to act on it.” Regret slices through her chest. “Tom, if the circumstances had been different, I would have told you immediately. I wondered about it as soon as we met, too. I didn’t intend to—”
“Mislead me, yeah, I know,” he says, finishing her sentence, a way to indicate that he’s falling into sync with her, that all of this is something good and right, and her head lifts to look at him. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
His question was, “So we choose this?”
The easiest choice Kathryn has ever been asked to make.
“I do,” she says, and Kathryn has never been a bride, but maybe she is right now, a soaring feeling inside like love rising up to the stars and down to the sea and filling all the places in between?
“I do, too,” Tom says, yet his fingers fall away from hers.
She doesn’t have to worry, though.
She knows what he’s going to do.
And, sure enough, his thumb and forefinger tilt her chin upward, gentle, so gentle, and his lips are soft to kiss her.