"There could be colors... There could be love."
-The Giver
Scott doesn't like to talk about it very often. Stiles is a different story.
Stiles has been seeing in color since before he could remember. He has already seen his soulmate, perhaps their eyes locked one day on the street and the world exploded in color for them, and perhaps it startled a baby Stiles so he cried and his mother sighed because he was such a finicky baby, and she loved him but she wouldn't mind some peace and quiet every now and then. But she didn't know. She didn't know that her son had seen his soulmate and so the moment was lost forever.
It wasn't incredibly uncommon, especially in a town as small as Beacon Hills, for children to have seen their soulmate at a young age. Technically, soulmates could be born any proximity away from each other, but statistically, they often ended up being close to one another.
The problem that Stiles dealt with, was, since he could not remember the moment his world turned from black and white to color, he could not remember who his soulmate was, either.
In the third grade, there was a girl named Lydia Martin in his class who also saw in color. From that moment on, he was convinced she was his soulmate.
Unfortunately for him, an eight-year old Lydia Martin had no interest in things as petty as soulmates. And in the seventh grade, she met Jackson Whittemore, who had also been seeing in color since he was young.
Stiles was sure one day Jackson's real soulmate would come along and everyone would realize their mistake and then maybe the strawberry-blonde goddess that was Lydia Martin would actually give him a second look and they could live happily ever after.
Honestly, Scott was sick of hearing about it, but he put up with it because he was pretty sure that's what best bros were supposed to do. He knew that if he ever wanted to spend obscene amounts of time waxing poetic about some girl's eyelashes, Stiles would let him.
He couldn't fault Stiles for his lovesickness. Ever since his mother had died, he'd been a little obsessed with finding his soulmate and spending as much time with them as he could. He supposed he could understand Stiles' frantic search if he had had to watch his father try to drink himself into a stupor every night for a year after losing his soulmate. But Scott's parents weren't soulmates.
Melissa didn't like the idea of being forced into a relationship based on anything other than her own free will. She had not met her soulmate. And when she met Scott's father and fell in love, she decided even if she did meet her soulmate one day, her feelings for Raf wouldn't change.
She didn't really count on him turning into a raging alcoholic, but at least she wasn't societally bound to him by some weird soulmate stigma.
So it was just her and Scott. And he was okay with that. Scott wasn't sure how much stock he put into soulmates, but he was incredibly proud of his mom for everything. She was a fantastic mother and no matter what dirty looks got thrown at her, he had never, ever, once faulted her for having a child out of the traditional soulmate-pairing.
Maybe the dirty looks were what put him off from the soulmate idea. He didn't want to be with someone because society thought it should be so. He didn't want to just go with it because it would be easy. He really wanted to be so hopelessly, head-over-heels gone on them that not being with them would hurt. And if that was what meeting your soulmate was, then he could accept that. But he also remembers, and this is one of his earliest memories, his dad looking at his mom like her smile could make up for all the colors he would never see. So he was pretty sure soulmates had nothing to do with it.
The day after another of Stiles' hare-brained adventures was the day everything shifted out of place for Scott. He felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. Everything felt the same, yet different. Every sound seemed to have more depth, everything he touched seemed to have less resistance.
He went to school because he had to. Class was nothing new, but it still felt different.
He looked out the window because there was this ringing and he shouldn't have been able to hear it, but he did. And there was a girl. She was talking. She was walking. He tracked her sounds as they got closer and closer. He shouldn't have been able to do that. Everything was strange.
She walked into the room and it felt like everything shifted back into place, better than before. Because now he knew.
He knew what the color red was and what the color blue was and he knew.
His eyes followed her as she sat down behind him. Remembering the conversation he'd heard not two minutes earlier, he made to hand her a pen. And she looked at him, really looked at him.
She was staring at him in wonder, and he knew that she was looking at him in a way that he'd never even seen himself. She could see the exact shade of brown his hair was, the 'cuddly brown bear' color that Stiles had fruitlessly tried to explain to him one bored summer day. And he was seeing her in a way he'd never seen anyone else. How her pale skin wasn't quite completely white; her cheeks still caught some of the pink of her lips. How 'dark' did not necessarily mean thousands of different tints of gray, it could mean a dark green or a chocolate brown, too.
She smiled at him, Allison smiled at him, and he swore that that smile was worth every color in the world. And he knew he was so, so lucky that he'd get to see both.
Something new. I know, I forgot I was capable of writing, too. Cross-posting from AO3.