Clarke Griffin is five years old when she sees her soulmate for the first time.
She's standing in the large mess hall on the Ark, surrounded by kids her own age and ones much older than her. She tugs on her white trousers nervously and flips her two braids behind her back. It's the first day of school and Clarke has never seen so many faces in her whole life. Her eyes dart around taking in all the pale and dark features on the faces of the children around her, and her ears try to pick up on all the sounds bouncing off of the metal walls of the space station.
"Do you see anything different?" Clarke's best friend, Wells Jaha, asks beside her, squeezing her hand in excitement. Clarke can only shake her head no in response.
She squints her eyes tight together, blinks as fast as she can, and slowly closes and then opens them. But nothing changes.
"Why did they make everything so light in here? The walls and the floors match our clothes! I can't tell anyone apart! How are we supposed to know when we see them?" Clarke whispers angrily. She looks over at Wells. He's dressed in the same light shirt and trousers that she is, but his skin is dark where hers is light.
She studies his eyes that are the same shade as his skin for a moment. Then she lets out a big breath in disappointment. Even though she's known him her whole life, she was hoping her best friend was going to be her soulmate, but her universe is still black and white.
There's a commotion to her left and Clarke turns to see a group of boys roughhousing around. They have to be about ten or eleven years old. They're loud and obnoxious, and Clarke wants to roll her eyes at them, but she stops when her eyes catch onto the back of a head of dark curly hair.
The person sitting behind the rowdy group is facing away from Clarke, but their hair…
Clarke tilts her head to the side in confusion studying the curls. It reminds her of the dirt covering the roots of the last living tree. Her little fingers itch to reach out and touch the locks. To see if it matches the dirt. To see if it's as soft as the earth.
Something in the back of her mind whispers the word brown.
It's not that much different from the light and dark Clarke has always seen. She shakes her head and looks back at her best friend. He looks the same. And when she goes back to look at the curls they're gone. The children in the room have shifted, lining up as the teachers enter the cafeteria. Clarke stands on her tiptoes and cranes her neck to find the person with the brown curls, but she can't find them.
Wells pulls her along behind him to form a line with the other five year olds. She gives up on her search and focuses on the front of the mess hall.
"Did anyone discover any new colors today? Or maybe, meet their soulmate?" A cheerful teacher asks the room of children.
The children around her murmur excitedly. Clarke hesitates and then raises her hand with some of the other kids. Wells looks at her with shock, but she can only shrug an apology at him before she leaves him behind to line up with the other kids who saw color now, too.
A teacher leads the children out of the cafeteria and down a few hallways until they come to a stop in front of the Ark Medical Station. Clarke bumps into the boy in front of her. It's Nathan Miller, the son of one of the Ark's guards. Clarke and Wells had played with him a few times over the years. They wave to one another.
Clarke then notices Nathan is holding hands with a small Asian boy, who looks like he could be from Farm Station. She waits patiently behind them, hoping to get a glimpse of her busy mother.
"Where's your soulmate?" Nathan turns around and asks her. Clarke is the last one in line and she hadn't noticed that most of the other kids were all paired up.
"I think I saw them, but then I lost them," Clarke tries to explain. Nathan and his soulmate look at her like she's a little crazy, but they don't have time to respond before Clarke gets distracted by her mother's appearance in the next room over.
Abby Griffin is dressed in her Ark Medic scrubs and her hair is falling around her face. Clarke knows this means she must have just come out of surgery. She straightens her back and waves at her mother through the glass. Abby's face lights up in surprise at her daughter and waves back before disappearing into a patient's room.
The line moves quickly and before long, Clarke is the last kid to be taken back into a small dark room. She tells the teacher how she could see brown now and the teacher looks at her curiously before writing it down on a clipboard. She leaves Clarke alone in the room.
The walls are covered in Eye Charts and other posters and there's a glass cabinet full of eye drops and eye instruments. In the middle of the room sits a chair under a large phoropter with more lenses than Clarke can count.
It's all very frightening for a five year old, but Clarke looks around curiously until her eyes land on the color scale chart covering the far wall.
From ceiling to floor, the scale stretches from one side of the room to the other. To Clarke it's just a gradient of grays and she runs her hand along it. She falters at a strip of color the width of her pinky finger.
It's brown.
"According to Greek mythology," Clarke jumps and turns her head abruptly at the voice of her mother as Abby enters the room with a clipboard in her hand and a young woman in glasses follows in behind her, shutting the door. Abby continues reading from a paper attached to the clipboard, "humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves. Plato."
The woman in glasses pulls down the phoropter and clicks the lenses in place before pulling out a set of eye drops from the glass cabinet and setting them down on the counter.
"But the gods were unsatisfied when humans ignored their curse and stopped searching for their soulmates. So Zeus had Iris destroy our ability to see color until we met our other halves forcing us to search them out. Even after the world ended and the gods were forgotten, up here in space we see in black and white until we meet our soulmate. Commander Cole McAdams."
Abby sits down the clipboard and looks up at her daughter with a tight smile on her face. Clarke fidgets with one of her braids under her mother's gaze. She knew the story of soulmates well and understood that her world of black and white wasn't meant to last forever.
"Hello, Clarke. I'm Dr. Glass. I'm going to be evaluating your eyes to make sure you can see color, okay?"
Clarke nods her head yes at the doctor and glances at her mother nervously.
"Some children your age can get confused and overwhelmed. We just want to make sure you can see clearly now."
"What color are my eyes, Clarke?" Abby asks her. Clarke looks up at her mother and then back at the color chart. Her hand still rests on the strip of brown, but Abby's eyes don't match up to it. Clarke has no idea what color they her mother's eyes are and begins to doubt herself.
Abby lets out a big sigh and shakes her head.
"It's like you said," Dr. Glass directs at Abby. "I can run a few tests, but it won't matter if she's lying. Clarke, did you meet your soulmate today?" Dr. Glass asks.
"I thought I saw them, but then I lost them," Clarke says sadly. She can feel the sting of tears pricking at the corner of her eyes.
"It's okay, baby. You must have heard some of the other kids talking about colors. But it doesn't work like that. You have to meet your soulmate face-to-face for you to see any kind of color." Abby squeezes Clarke's arm and looks apologetically at the other doctor.
Dr. Glass puts away her eye drops and Abby takes her daughter back to the classrooms on the Go-Sci Ring. Wells and the other kids are busy at their desks. They look up when Clarke enters and Wells gives her a big smile. She sits down beside him and opens her box of crayons. She tries to ignore Abby whispers with her teacher and the stares from Nathan and his soulmate.
She looks down at the fresh crayons in her box with shades of gray and the blank paper on her desk.
"Can you show me the brown one?" Clarke whispers politely to Nathan. She hands him the box and he pulls out the right crayon for her.
Her hand hovers over the paper carefully. Zeus may have split her apart from her soulmate and Iris may have taken away her full view of the world, but she knew what she saw. Her soulmate was out there, on the Ark with her, floating out in space above the dead Earth. Clarke places the tip of the crayon on the paper and draws the loop of a brown curl she'll spend the next twelve years searching for.