and it was all yellow. arcadia&wolf soulmates au! 🌧️☀️

They say the lucky ones see colour on their eighteenth birthday. Those rare, fortunate few who already knew their soulmate. Some wait decades before the colour appears - Wolf's parents met in their twenties; though they act as if they just decided to pretend the world changed just to get it over and done with. She knows that's not true, that there's test to find the deceptors and jailcells full of those that failed. But if there were ever two of the most loveless people in the world, she thinks they live in her house with just the faintest haze of difference.

Wolf likes the world as it is. Doesn't miss what she does not know. Has passed by so many strangers just staring at each-other, smiling something stupid, and felt nothing. History lessons speak of the ones that go mad in a world of grey; act as though they are missing out on something. But Wolf, hands figeting at the straps of her backpack, walks into school her senior year and thinks they might be the lucky ones after all.

She almost misses it. That -- that something different. Or maybe her subconscious desire to rebel pretends she doesn't see it at all. But Wolf stops in her tracks in the hallway, staring at her feet, and ignores both the flash of something new that passed her peripheral vision and the gripes of those behind her that almost crashed into her backside.

Don't they know that it's her birthday? Not that they'd care. Not that she cares.
Except-

her legs start shaking. No. Surely not. Ten seconds pass and she stays frozen. Students mill around her, paying her no mind. Weird kid being weird. Same old, just another Thursday. To them, yes. Nothing changed, nothing new. But-

no.

She looks up. Slowly. Hands still clenched around the straps of her rucksack. Turns around. Walks one pace, two paces, three, four. Stands dead-centre in the middle of the intersection between three halls. So much around her, yet her eyes stay fixed straight ahead. Kids leaning against lockers, laughing at something, darting in and out of rooms. One with their hand clamped over a blood nose headed toward the nurses office. Two kids attempting to climb the lockers, a teacher yelling at them to knock it off.

A bell rings, and Wolf closes her eyes. Breathes in. Out again, it was just... nothing. She's just paranoid that's all. It's common for people to think they see colour. And besides, it's the first day. Her birthday; it's just been on her mind. Wolf and her tick-tick-tick-tick mind, making sense of it all. Justifying everything with science and logic and reason.

So she opens her eyes, confident in herself. Nods once, steels her self, and turns her head to the right.

The name of it hits her brain like a flower blooming, like lightning striking, like a flash of pain when a fist finds her cheek. Yellow. The rest of the words come too, pink blue green cerulean violet brown gold silver red indigo lilac orange. Words she had in her arsenal but could not place. They all make sense now - she hasn't seen them yet, but she knows that now they will. In time. In due course. This week, perhaps. Today, even.

But what Wolf sees first is yellow; pouring from the head of Arcadia Lumiere-Fray.

It's beautiful. And she hates it.

"This can't be," she whispers to the girl all the boys have loved, to the girl all the others have wanted to be. To herself, to her shadows. (Funny. She'd thought words would have colour, too.)

"Not you."

Not her. Not Arcadia. 

And yet all she can see is yellow.