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For many years, Yasmin Khan had felt as if she’d been hallucinating when she took a glance at her wrist. It seemed to change so often - not what one was usually accustomed to when looking at one’s own body. But then, this was no ordinary part of her body.
Her soulmate timer had sat there since she could remember. Everyone had one. Everyone knew everyone had one. Some made people smile at the low number showing how long it would be until they met their soulmate. Others found disappointment and a long, hard wait until they could be with the person who was destined to make them happy one way or another.
For Yaz, it was far more complicated. And apparently more so than anyone had ever possessed before. Lucky her , she thought. Entirely sarcastically of course.
Yaz seemed to be in possession of the most chaotic and dysfunctional timer in all of history. It changed its countdown and subsequent colour every few days and sometimes every few minutes. On one particularly strange day, it had actually flickered like strobe lighting. It was enough to give her a headache. She’d taken up the habit of taking pictures and keeping an album on her phone. She felt the sense that this bizarre behaviour needed recording for posterity. Or humour. She’d been posting them anonymously online only to go viral and the reactions were just as mixed as her own over the years. She really was one of a kind.
She’d been nine or ten when the significance finally dawned on her what this would mean for her life. High school had begun with her fellow school students finding an instant cause to give her grief over it. The bullying she'd received had been intense and fraught with moments of utter despair. She was a freak , so of course such a freak would have a freaky soul mark . Her teens had been a wash of emotional flips and mental shifts in how she felt and thought about her mark. It was sad, and then she’d make peace with it again, only to have it mess with her head too much not to be upset again. It made her a freak. It made her famous. It made her hate it. It made her special.
She’d come to realise as an adult that it could be more than one thing at once. It was sad and messed up and made her a freak. And it was something she could somehow make peace with that brought her a kind of fame. What it really boiled down to though was, would she ever actually find someone?
That was a tough question and the one that had been on her mind the most once she’d resigned herself to never knowing why it was like this.
That was until a cold night in September. Still a probationary police officer, she'd been sent on what was likely to be a prank call-out, only to find destiny had plans for her.
For the entire day, her mark had been showing a minus number: -104 . It had been a boring shift, so she'd been staring at it and remembering the array of silly minus numbers she'd spotted over the years. Once as a child, she'd blinked and could swear she saw -4,500,000,000 sitting there. It had been gone a moment later, but she'd never forgotten it.
The possible prank call had ended with her reuniting with a boy she’d known in primary school. Then, a blonde woman had fallen through the roof of a train, and the rest was history.
Over the coming months, the more she learnt about the Doctor, the more the crazy numbers had made sense. The woman had had many lives and travelled the length and breadth of the universe throughout time. No wonder her timer couldn’t keep up!
To learn that her soulmate wasn’t the same species as her own had been one of many shocks to come too. The alien wasn’t exactly forthcoming with information or willingness to be in a relationship, but time had worn on and feelings between them had grown ten-fold and become obvious.
To Yaz’s sadness, they hadn't had sex yet, but she held out hope that it would be soon. Once they’d started, the kissing had been growing in intensity rapidly, so she knew it would happen, and she couldn't wait. All those years of waiting and stressing over the freakiness of her mark had made her rather anxious to get on with it in every sense of the word.
Healing from the bullying and coming to terms with everything her mark meant had developed in time. And it was more than a relief - it all was. Every time the Doctor smiled at her with her trademark goofy grin everything inside Yaz would melt and the word would be set to rights.
Who knew that a broken soulmark would turn out to be the best thing that had ever happened to her?