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Three blue squares.
That’s what Syril notices first. How he knows what blue is, he’s not entirely sure. Thirty-five years old and he’s nearly given up hope he’ll find his soulmate. His mother certainly has, if she ever had any; she’s been telling him since he turned thirty that it’s a shame he won’t just settle down already, with no apparent regard for compatibility.
But as Lieutenant Dedra Meero lists the reports he’s submitted to the Bureau of Standards data center in the past few weeks, he finds his eyes drawn to the rank insignia on her chest.
Three blue squares.
“...you’ve filed five false inquiries,” she says, oblivious to his realization.
He manages to locate his voice. “Six, actually.”
“I wasn’t counting this morning.” Her eyes meet his, and — oh. They’re blue too. Not as vibrant as the insignia, but just as commanding. He wants to live in the cold depths of her irises. Perhaps his presence could warm them.
“What are you doing, Mr. Karn?”
Longing for you, he wants to say.
He tells her about his mission to track down Andor instead. To his dismay, she’s not impressed. To his delight, she approaches him. He forces his eyes not to follow her. Something tells him he’ll have to be deferential if he wants her to take him seriously.
Until she says, “One would think you’d want to leave Ferrix as far behind as possible,” and Syril can’t help himself.
“One would be wrong.” He punctuates the declaration by looking up at her. Only at such close proximity does he register the golden hues of her hair and the soft pink of her lips.
He's never before seen such beauty.
She leaves the room a minute later, and Syril spends the next few hours terrified that what he just experienced was a fluke, that everything will have reverted to greyscale when — if — she returns.
As it turns out, one would be wrong.
He all but begs not to lose her. He tries to spin his fateful Ferrix misadventure into a reason he "could be a valuable asset going forward." He looks at her shiny rank pips, then at her impassive eyes as he pleads his case.
His soulmate layers a threat on top of the rejection.
His soulmate.
Lingering doubts that it’s her start to fade when he leaves ISB headquarters to find dots of color littering the promenade. The voice of reason that sounds suspiciously like his mother continues to remind him that perhaps everyone was simply wearing grey earlier, that he unknowingly crossed paths with his soulmate somewhere between the Bureau of Standards and the COMPNOR arcology. If Supervisor Meero cracked his world open and poured color into it, there must have been little in the interrogation chamber to verify it, the notable exceptions being her eyes and the blue squares.
(Not just her blue squares; her assistants’ too. He’d chosen to focus on that instead of the way they’d glared at him while he tried to appeal to their boss.)
Syril goes back to his cubicle and proceeds to get nothing done, instead repeatedly scanning his annoyingly monochromatic surroundings to reassure himself that yes, something has changed since he left this morning. Everything he sees has more depth, more definition. Everything has been sharper since he first laid eyes on her.
It’s when he gets home that he knows for sure, and the reassurance is tainted by his mother’s shrill voice and resurgent nagging. He almost has to squint at how bright her dress is.
As the days drag on under Eedy’s roof, Syril becomes aware that the gaudy colors she wears are decidedly unflattering, but he’ll never tell her that. He learned years ago to be stingy about what he does and doesn’t tell her. She’s unsurprisingly tickled to learn he’s already been promoted, but she’s not going to learn the source of the promotion, or that said source is the reason he can now see how orange her outfit is.
Speaking of whom, he owes Dedra Meero his gratitude. It’s the perfect excuse to seek her out.
Dedra has never minded all the grey. She even finds it comforting. Familiar. Safe.
In the kinderblock, she dismissed the concept of soulmates as a foolish myth that circulated among the other children. She’d been annoyed and disappointed to learn in adulthood that it was widely considered true.
Her admission to the ISB academy upon leaving the kinderblock seemed to validate what she’d grown up believing: that color was in short supply, that it only existed on a black-and-white spectrum, and that the Empire fit neatly in the framework of this reality as much as the inverse was true.
Greyscale provides consistency and reliability. It holds few to no surprises, unlike Syril Karn, who should not be on the boardwalk outside ISB headquarters, fixing her with his unnervingly intense stare.
The first ridiculous thing he does is to be there at all. The second is to expect her not to remember him; all she thinks about these days is the Axis case, so how could she not remember an interrogation subject, unhelpful as he may have been?
She stops counting his displays of ridiculousness as soon as she learns he’s waited for her out here more than once. Instead of apologizing and leaving, his response to her lecturing him about the lines he’s crossed is to gush about how she’s shown him justice and beauty and color—
“Color?” she nearly spits.
He nods vigorously. “I can see color now because of you, just when I thought I never would. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Dedra’s too stunned to respond.
“It means you’re my soul—”
“Don’t say it,” she snaps. “There’s no such thing. If there were, I’d be seeing color as well.”
He deflates, shoulders and chin drooping, but before she can feel anything close to victorious, he dares to speak again.
“Regardless, I thought if I just kept going, perhaps my deranged belief that there was something better fated for me in the future—”
Deranged, indeed. Having had her fill of nonsense for the day already, Dedra tries to leave but doesn’t make it far.
“—was a dream worth clinging to.”
The nerve of this man to grab her arm like he knows her, like he has even a shred of power over her. She looks down at his audacious hands, then up at his earnest, pitiful blue eyes and—
Wait.
Blue.
That wasn’t the case a few seconds ago.
After a few more seconds (though they feel like years), she tears her gaze away from his to briefly survey their surroundings: still grey, while Syril Karn’s eyes remain strikingly blue.
Dedra could curse this absolute nobody, this forgettable bottom-rung bureaucrat for giving her the only glimpse of color she’s ever seen. She could slap him for touching her. She could scream at him for his contagious insistence that he belongs in her life because that’s not up to him, nor is it up to whatever switch just flipped in her brain without her permission.
She doesn’t do any of this.
Instead she says, “I could have you arrested, you’re aware of that?”
He doesn’t seem to care. She volleys another threat at him before resuming her march toward her office, adjusting her kepi as a means of pulling herself together. It seems to work, and by the time she reaches her office and finds Attendant Heert waiting there with good news, she feels like herself again.
The relief is short-lived. As soon as she’s processed Heert’s briefing, she notices there’s something different about him. Or rather, his uniform.
Two blue squares. Kriff.
The clinical side of Dedra is genuinely curious what part of the human brain sees color and what could possibly activate it besides the preposterous concept of soulmates. She’ll have to ask Dr. Gorst; she’d be shocked if he doesn’t know.
Gorst is currently en route to Steergard, though. Dedra compliments Heert’s initiative and sends him away.
As soon as he’s gone, she glances around her office for anything else out of the ordinary. Nothing sticks out at her, though she’s also not entirely sure what she’s looking for. The Empire is meant to be even-keeled, not evocative, in all respects. If she’d been born with the rare natural ability to see color, she’d probably still prefer neutral tones.
Her sweeping gaze pauses on her bonsai tree. The cashier at the garden center where she’d purchased it had waxed poetic about how beautifully green its leaves were. They’re no different to Dedra now than they were then.
She undoes the belt holding her trench coat together, revealing her rank insignia.
Interesting.
For reasons she can’t fathom, the only color available to her is blue, and it’s Syril Karn’s fault.
She takes a deep breath. If he has even a shred of sense, he won't lurk outside her workplace again, and she's had no use for him since he corrected Blevin's report. She never has to see him again, and she can learn to live with the changes he's wrought.
She can learn to live with the blue. She believes she's done so well enough by the time she returns to Ferrix.
Dedra throws Maarva Andor’s hologram a disgusted look over her shoulder as she marches down Rix Road, death troopers in tow, away from the old woman’s funeral. Blue is an Imperial color, she’s decided in the little time she’s been able to see herself and her colleagues wearing it every day. A dead rebel hag has no right to it.
Never mind that. She's laid the trap perfectly. She just needs to know if Cassian Andor has fallen into it.
But a thorough search of the surrounding area comes up empty, and when the unsettling tones of insurrectionary shouting and a struck anvil draw Dedra back to where she started, her objective soon shifts from finding Andor and Axis to simply staying alive.
By the time there’s dirt in her eyes and mouth, she’s lost her weapon, and her head is throbbing from the impact of a thrown rock, her objective shifts again.
For kriff’s sake, at least let me die with a shred of dignity.
(The screams escaping her mouth certainly aren’t helping.)
With all five of her senses on maximum alert, the hands that drag her out of the throng are anything but comforting. A blaster barrel presses against the small of her back, and some childish part of Dedra’s psyche supplies the involuntary thought that she’ll never get to see any color but one.
Her abductor has apparently decided a storeroom is the most appropriate place to kill her. As the door slides shut behind them, she grabs the nearest item that looks like it could hurt someone and swings it at the bastard, only to freeze when her eyes lock with—
“You!”
—a familiar shade of blue.
She’s shaking so hard it’s blurring her vision. At first she credits that for the way everything apart from Syril Karn’s eyes doesn’t look quite right. She scans as much of his person as she can without pulling away from the warmth of him.
Warmth. That’s the only word she can come up with to describe the hues of his hat, his hair, and the flush of his skin. Greyscale has never been this warm. The fact that it’s gone sinks in as she surveys him one more time.
Hat: orange. Hair: brown. Face: an infuriatingly endearing shade of pink.
Colors. More than one. Possibly the whole spectrum, though she can’t know for sure until the danger has subsided enough for them to leave.
Her eyes return to his, which might as well be the core of their own galaxy.
“How?” is all she can force herself to say.
He thinks she means the rescue. “You were in trouble.”
He removes the weapon from her hand and reintroduces himself unnecessarily.
“I knew that,” she huffs. It’s damn near the only thing she can be certain of at the moment.
She drags her eyes down and registers that Syril’s shirt is, if she’s not mistaken—
“Is that blue?” Her mouth betrays her by voicing her thoughts, and her body betrays her by lifting a trembling hand to touch his collar. She’d been incensed when he touched her unprompted outside ISB headquarters, so why in stars’ name is she doing the same to him?
“Y-yes,” he stammers. “You can see it?”
Dedra can only nod. No point in denying it now that she’s given herself away.
“I should — I should say thank you.” She chokes out the politeness before she realizes it could be misconstrued. “For saving my life, not for anything else,” she rushes to clarify.
His lips twitch into the smallest of smiles. “You don’t have to.”
He could be smug, but he isn’t. Damn him for continuing to inconvenience her. She wants so badly to resume finding him irritating and nothing else, but something tells her that’s not an option anymore. The man who proved that there is indeed one being in the entire galaxy who can make her see color happens to be the reason she’s alive and safe.
She’s not sure if that makes him her soulmate. What it definitely makes him is useful.
What else is he useful for? Answering that question will require keeping him in her life.
To her surprise, she doesn’t mind the thought of that.