#Or even Culber; they bonded once over how they both died!

[poebrey]

gonna write a whole thing someday about how characters of color who clearly have a history of trauma or mental health issues aren’t given consideration or acknowledgement in the fandom imagination

[professortennant]

katgabe soutlmate au: Meter of how in danger your soulmate is

1525 words; soulmate AU. i hope your day gets significantly better my friend

It takes everything in her to not constantly check the inside of her forearm; to not compulsively rub the imprinted meter and his name etched upon her skin. It’s the first time they’ve been separated for a mission and her fingers twitch at her sides. She needs to roll up her sleeve and ensure his name is still there, that his meter is still in the green. 

Green is good. Green is safe and happy and alive and thriving. Yellow is distressing–emotional distress, physical distress, anything to cause a spiked heartbeat and a burst of fear. Red is imminent, life-threatening danger: the prelude to black. And black, black is death. Black is a soulmate lost forever, their name faded and scrubbed from your skin and your meter blank and lifeless.

But Kat needs to know. Everything inside of her feels unsettled until she knows. So she excuses herself from the deck and in a darkened corner, she rolls up her sleeve and looks at the inside of her left arm.

Gabriel Lorca. Status: Green.

She breathes a sigh of relief, closes her eyes and swallows hard. He is safe aboard the USS Buran. He will come home.

As the months pass apart, it grows easier and easier to forget the meter on her arm. She finds herself rubbing a thumb over his name, etched at the top of her wrist, but the meter is forgotten. 

They content themselves with video calls once a week–they need to check in, need to see the other. Gabriel greets her every time with his slow, sly grin and a lazy, “Evening, darlin’.” 

(She hates that his drawl still sends her heart racing.)

Kat listens while Gabriel describes in great detail exactly what he’s going to do to her as soon as they get on the same ship. She leans back and slips a hand beneath the waistband of her panties and lets Gabriel talk her into orgasm. She comes with a, “Fuck, Gabe!,” before sitting up, out of breath and grinning, her fingers already stroking over his name on her skin. 

(She hopes he can feel even the ghost of that touch upon his own skin.)

The meter for them both glows an ephemeral, brilliant green. They are happy.

The day everything changes there is something like a faint burn on her arm. It starts in the morning, just a tingle–like pins and needles–beneath her skin. She absentmindedly massages the skin but carries on with her day, barks orders at her First Lieutenant and keeps her ship on course. 

Gabriel is scheduled to call later that night (they’re going to try something rather adventurous with the hologram feature of their ships that she knows is going to make her blush). She will check in on him then; make sure everything is okay.

“Lieutenant Mel–”

And then her arm explodes in pain, white hot daggers that make her feel like the skin of her arm will split open if she doesn’t hold it together. She gasps, falls to her knees and scrabbles to roll up her sleeve, ignoring the concerned looks and calls of her crew.

Vomit and bile rise up in her throat when she sees Gabriel’s name flickering on her skin, the meter flashing an eerie, blood-red with veins of black weaving through it. 

“Gabriel,” she gasps, tears stinging her eyes, her fingers clutching at his name. She turns to her crew, desperate and panicked. “The USS Buran. Get her coordinates and get us there NOW. NOW.”

A flurry of activity surrounds her as her ship goes into hyperdrive, hurtling through space towards Gabriel. She will get there in time, she will, she will.

Her eyes stay glued on the flashing meter on her arm, fingers terrified to touch the tinges of black, terrified that she is about to watch the evidence of her soulmate’s death appear on her arm. 

Closing her eyes against the burn of tears, she presses trembling lips to his name and wills him to live, wills him to hold on. 

Kat and her crew appear next to the remnants of the Buran: ship debris, fire, and bodies float in space. “Lieutenant, scan for signs of life. Now.”

The order comes easily. This is something she can control. Her eyes flicker back to her arm where Gabriel’s meter is fading, the veins in her arm turning black and blue and she’s never, ever seen their meter like this before.

“Report!” she demands, her own eyes scanning the galaxy for signs of survivors, willing Gabriel’s slow, soft drawl to come over the comms, willing Gabriel’s meter to return to green.

And then her worst fear comes to fruition.

Pain explodes across not just her arm, but her whole body. Her chest goes tight and her heart feels like it’s made of steel as it drops into her stomach. The ground rushes up to meet her as she falls, convulses on the floor and clutches her forearm.

Kat knows, without having to look at her arm, that he is gone.

But Kat has to look, has to know. 

Her eyes glimpse the mess of black on her arm, evidence of a meter filled in. Evidence of death. Gabriel’s name is already fading from her wrist and no matter how hard she clutches at his name, no matter how hard she wills it to stay: his name disappears. 

A hush falls over the ship and there’s a distant part of her–the Admiral in her–that knows she needs to stand up, needs to begin recovering what she can from the Buran, needs to let Starfleet know what has happened.

But she is not Admiral Cornwell right now. She is Kat, she is darlin’, she is hurting. Grief fills her, silences her tongue, weighs down her chest, makes it hard to breathe. Perhaps she needs to scream to let it out, to feel again. 

Her fingers still stroke at the rapidly fading name: Gabriel Lorca.

“Admiral? What–what are our orders?”

Kat blinks at her crew, tries to remember how to speak. 

(Did she speak before Gabriel? Did words mean anything before him?)

“Recovery protocol,” she whispers, standing to her feet shakily, still clutching at her arm, desperate to be holding onto the last of him until he’s gone forever. “If you need me, I’ll be in my quarters. Second, you’re in charge for now. Dismissed.”

She needs to get out, needs to breathe, needs to be alone, alone, alone.

(Alone is her new status–one of the forgotten, one of the lonely, one of the abandoned. Her soulmate is gone and she will never be the same.)

Stumbling to her quarters, Kat collapses into her bunk–a bunk that only a few days ago she was teasing Gabriel with (”Think you can maneuver in a Starfleet ship bunk, Gabe? You may have to get creative with me…”). 

She keeps her fingers wrapped tightly around her forearm, wills his name to stay. And finally, finally passes out and hopes that when she wakes up, it will all have been a dream.

Hours later, Kat is awoken by the sound of frantic banging on her door and the insistent yell of, “Admiral! Admiral, he’s alive! Commander Lorca is alive! We have him.”

Kat will stumble to the med bay, will gasp Gabriel’s name and fling her arms around his shoulders, ignoring the way he shies away from the light, shies away from too many questions. She will press desperate, reassuring kisses to his exposed neck and trace trembling fingers over scrapes and scratches and bruises. 

She will cherish the way he says, “Easy, sweetheart,” and she will not think anything of the fact that he’s forgotten she is his darlin’. 

She will take him to bed and hold him, cry into his shoulder and promise him weeks of leave–just them and a bottle of whiskey and all the Chinese takeout food they can afford. 

She will ignore the way her arm is permanently spidered and veined with black and red and yellow and green and the way his name is only a shadow on her wrist now. Soulmate marks are a mystery, even with the advanced technology and medicine of Starfleet. 

The best Culber can explain is that the trauma of a soulmate loss–however temporary–shattered the connection, the magic, of their bond. But Kat doesn’t care, not when his name is still on her skin–however faint. Not when his body presses hers into the mattress and she clutches at his shoulder and reminds herself he is real. 

She will ignore all the warning signs that something is wrong–something is off about Gabriel, about them. She will call it post-traumatic stress disorder when he forgets her birthday, forgets their anniversary, forgets, forgets, forgets. 

She will explain away his lack of meter with the fact that he died. She will tell herself that it is still his name on her arm and they are still bound together.

Her soulmate is here and her meter says somewhere in this galaxy or the next, he is alive. So, she will ignore it all.