Archive of Our Own ^beta

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You’re lucky, you suppose. You’re born with your soulmate’s name inked into the words that are suppose to identify him. Still, the phrase ‘Tony Stark. Maybe you’ve heard of me?’ drawn in slanted chicken scratch down the inside of your left arm sounds a bit pretentious and a quick flip through any news channel would tell you that your other half is as well. One of the richest men on earth, a superhero, and a notorious narcissist. His face is plastered nearly everywhere in New York, and it’s almost embarrassing when you don’t recognize him, but equating billionaire-super hero to the asshole who just cut you in the line for Starbucks isn’t exactly the first thing on your mind at 7:30 on a Monday morning.

“I’m sorry, but who the actual fuck do you think you are?”

He casts a look over his shoulder and says seven words that change your life.

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You think it’s a sick joke when you’re born with what looks like the inscription of the One Ring set just above your collarbone. The universe is punishing you for most likely being a giant bag of dicks in a previous life, or something, you don’t know. What you do know is that no one can read it. Not linguists, not historians, not the fortune tellers who are supposedly adept at finding soulmates, and so you accept that whatever entity decides who has what soulmark must’ve been drunk when they were doing yours. Your mark means nothing, and you’ll have to find love on your own.

But then the sky cracks open in the desert and gods and monsters come spilling out and Jane Foster, Dr. Jane Foster winds up on the news. You’re watching on a whim when she turns her head to the side and you catch the briefest glimpse of the same print behind her ear. Well, not the same print. Her letters are blockier and in red, and yours are in an iridescent green, canting ever so slightly to the left.  You call her up on a whim, and she has her soulmate read it.

Massive hands hold your shoulders and his brow furrows in concern as the god of thunder reads you. He tells you that the words on your neck are a death curse. He tells you the person who put them there would accept no perceived weaknesses. He tells you to run.

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The problem with being hopelessly in love with people was the risk of them not hopelessly loving you back. Steven Grant Rogers had had two soul marks when he went down in that plane crash and he hadn’t come up with any new ones, but you could hope. You could hold on to the single solitary flame of hope that one day he’d wake up, and your handwriting would be pressed into his skin.

You’d always been a little bit in love with him, you supposed. You’d been a history buff all through school and kept it up in college. A degree in 20th century world history only to end up pushing paper for the Avengers, but God damn it, it was worth it. You saw one of your heroes walking the halls everyday and when he’d finally -finally- come over to introduce himself to you, his hand was warm and his smile bright.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for helping us out.” And your whole face lit up as you rolled up your sleeve to show him his handwriting looping your wrist. His eyes dim and his smile falls as you say the phrase you think you’ll trace on his skin later, remembering the moment you were bound to each other. He shakes his head, stumble through words, tries to explain, and you understand.

You’d heard about unrequited soulmarks. They were rare, but they happened. You feel your throat tighten as you struggle to swallow tears that’ll only make the situation worse.  “I’m sorry.” He says, stepping away from your desk. “I’m so sorry.” And you believe him. You know he means it.

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Your parents are understandably less than thrilled when they find the words, ‘Drop your weapon, Agent.’ emblazoned in almost illegible type across the base of your neck. They’d wanted you to be an artist, like them. It didn’t appear that that was in the cards. As you grow, you show it off to friends, telling them that one day you’ll be the world’s top spy, that you’ll save the country, that your soulmate is a bad guy you’ll have to redeem. None of those things turn out to be true.

By the time you’re seventeen, you discover you can’t paint worth a damn, but you do have a surprising penchant for getting involved with the ‘wrong sort of people.’ But this time, the wrong sort is a recruiting agent for a world-class terrorist organization. You decide to join and keep your life.  You end up working operations instead of being a spy, but you’re still a serious badass. You let your parents know you’re alive every few months just to put them at ease. If receiving proof of life photos could put anyone at ease. Instead of saving the country you nearly end up destroying it, and as it turns out, your soulmate is a good guy the likes of which Captain America would commend on his bravery.

You’re on board the SHIELD 616, trying to hack their systems for intel that you can turn around and sell to the highest bidder, but you hear the telltale sound of a safety being switched off and you whip around, gun drawn and pointed at none other than SHIELD’s resurrected son. Phil Coulson. His gaze is pure steel and you’re almost tempted to roll your eyes at him.

“Drop your weapon, Agent.”

Your eyes narrow ever so slightly and you grip your pistol tighter. “I’m not here for you, Agent Coulson and you know why I’m not going to shoot you.” For all the legends you’d heard about his poker face, he can’t mask a damn thing in that moment. His jaw goes slightly slack, his shoulders relax, his eyes widen. To his credit, he regains his faculties rather quickly.

“Drop the thumb drive and go.”

You do as you're told. Your soulmate being the Head of SHIELD and you being a rather well known Hydra operative was going to circle back around to bite both of you in the ass later, you were sure, but right then you needed to disappear back into the night and burn your mark off your body. If anyone was going to put Coulson under, it wasn’t going to be because of you.

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Heimdall is a husband and father of nine grown children when his second mark appears, opposite the one on his right forearm. It’s in a Midgardian tongue he sees that immediately, just like he sees you the moment you’re born, all clenched fists and flailing arms. The words ‘So, you’re Big Brother?’ don’t mean anything to him at first. He thinks ,for a while, that maybe you’ll become a friend to Sif, the only sibling he has in the world, but she does not venture to Midgard and your paths do not intersect.

He discovers, after a few years, that Big Brother is a reference to Midgardian history as well as a form of entertainment on their world. The corner of his mouth turns upward at that`. You meant it in jest, then. He doesn’t turn his focus to you too frequently; there’s still an entire universe to guard, but he does let his gaze wander once every few years. When you fall out of a tree and break your arm, when you perform a musical piece for your peers, when you graduate, when some foolish mortal breaks your heart and you’re left with the wreckage of yourself to pick up off the ground.

You meet Thor and Heimdall knows you’ll be coming along shortly, that he’ll see his handwriting running across your skin like he sees your’s on his left arm. All this time, and he’s never searched for his mark on you. No, something were meant to remain unseen. Still, in his anticipation, he lets his gaze linger on you for longer than it should.

He knows a war is coming, sees it even while you and your Avengers are safe in your beds, still reveling in victory from another disarmed base. He wants to warn you, but that is not his place. Even for his future soulmate, he cannot upset the balance of the Yggdrasil. You embroil yourself in it, you throw yourself into the conflict wholeheartedly.

You die in that final battle, when Ultron lifts the city into the sky. You’re helping someone get to safety, pulling people out of crumbling buildings, ripping enemies to shreds. You’re doing some good and you’re powerful, but not strong enough to stop the beam of a suspension bridge from falling on top of you. Not strong enough to stop you spine from snapping in two. Heimdall cries out for you, but he cannot intervene, only watch as you die in pain, as the light fades from your eyes, as your mark is seared away from his skin.

His heart aches and his arm burns and he is far from being alright, but he has a job to do.
He looks away. He stares back out into the void.

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There’s a certain grace you have to adopt when you’re accused of murder. You manage to hold it together during booking and processing, manage to keep your eyes unclouded while they take your mugshot. You’re proud of yourself and your father would be too, if he wasn’t lying with eyes wide open in the coroner’s office. You break down when you make it to the holding room and not in a pitiable way, either. You’re all hot-faced and tear smeared, and you’re pretty sure your nose is running when the door opens and two men step in, both in cheap suits, one carrying a cane.

“Wh-who’re you?” The shorter of the pair offers you a blinding grin.

“Us? We’re your lawyers, from Nelson and Murdock. I’m Nelson and this is-”

“Matt Murdock. How’re you holding up?” He reaches slowly for the back of the chair opposite you and seats himself. You offer him a watery smile you realize he can’t see and almost roll your eyes.Of all the times and places, of course you had to meet him here and now.

“You know. Just on trial for my life.” The one who introduced himself as Nelson lets out a noise halfway between a laugh and a yell and slaps his partner a bit too hard on the shoulder. Murdock- Matt, your soulmate, opens his mouth to say something, but his friend cuts him off.

“You know you’re the reason this guy went into criminal law? He could’ve done corporate and been rolling in cash but he was so keen on making sure you were okay-” Matt clears his throat and adjusts his glasses.

“Thanks, Foggy.”

“Hey, man, I’m just-...you know what? I’m gonna wait in the hall.” He grabs his briefcase and practically skips out the door and into the corridor, grinning so wide you’re sure his cheeks are going to get stuck like that.  Matt shakes his head when he hears the door close.

“He found his soulmate about a month ago and has been pressuring me to find you.” He reaches into his suit pocket and passes you a packet of kleenex.

“Not that I don’t appreciate this, but isn’t it conflict of interest for you to be defending me?” He gives a short, husky laugh under his breath.

“I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I didn’t.”

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Your soulmate doesn’t know you exist.

Correction, she knows you exist, has seen your file multiple times, no doubt, but she doesn’t know that you’re hers. To her, you’re likely just another number on a graph, another coworker who’s first name is agent. You plan on keeping it that way.

Maria Hill was the second most powerful person in the world’s largest, best-funded and most notorious peace-keeping organization. In her time as a field agent and then as Nick Fury’s second, she’d made a lot of bad people very unhappy, and she needed her focus to be on her work. She didn’t need it to be on you.

You know her words. You’d seen them in the gym once or twice, half obscured by the strap of her tanktop as you two spar. They’re on her shoulder blade, in your signature scrawl. They're only visible for a flash, in the middle of a roundhouse she does to land you on your back. You’d hit the mat hard and she’d laughed at you, offered you a hand. “Better luck next time, Agent.” You’d grimaced. Better luck next time.

She’d gotten you confused with Agent Jackson from IT more times than you could count, but you didn’t have the heart to tell you you didn’t know how to recover the four hundred family photos her mom sent her that she’d accidently deleted from her Ipad. You took it to the apple store on your day off.

You’re happy to spend the rest of your time at SHIELD -or your life, really. You’re not retiring while she’s still there for you to watch from a distance- getting her coffee, stapling her paperwork and keeping track of her outlying messages. You could be a soulmate in the small things. You could keep her desk clear, her inbox empty and her head focused.

But then Hydra comes up through the cracks and all hell breaks loose on the the Helicarrier. There are bullets flying everywhere, people dropping like flies and you have to throw the scalding hot coffee you just got for Maria -Cinnamon Dolce Latte with Almond Milk and non-dairy whip. She’s got a major sweet tooth, but she’s deathly allergic to lactose- into the face of an oncoming Hydra agent. He screams and goes down and you take the opportunity to break his nose. The bridge is a shitshow, and by the time you get to your soulmate, she’s fighting for her life against three of them, three former agents you thought were your friends. Former people you trusted or not, they’re attacking your heart and soul, and you admit later that you went a bit overboard.

You’re in security for SHIELD, a former field agent and skilled in Krav Maga, Jui Jitsu and you’d grown up street fighting. Your job is to break people down and you do your job very well. You’re so busy making the three Hydra pieces of shit regret that they’d ever been born, that you don’t notice one of them drawing a gun until you hear the shot. You don’t even feel it until they’re neutralized and the bridge is quiet and you have time to be hurt.

SHIELD manages to hold the Helicarrier, but at the cost of many lives. As soon as the last Hydra agent goes down, so do you. Somewhere far away you can hear Maria shouting your name.

When you wake up in the ICU, you immediately become aware of two things:

1. Maria is sitting at your bedside, watching you intently.
2. The soul mark on your collar bone is completely visible.

Your heart jumps into your chest and you groggily try to slap a hand over the words, a move that aggravates the gunshot wound along your ribcage. You hiss in pain and Maria raises an eyebrow.

“I’ve seen it, already.” She says, voice steady. “And I know.” Your face falls and you open your mouth to apologize for letting her find out like this, at all, but she cuts you off before you can. “I’ve known since we met; I could see it in your eyes when I introduced myself.” She reaches out, lets a hand rest lightly on your upper arm, thumb brushing over your skin where the words, ‘Maria Hill. Welcome to SHIELD.’  lay in simple, solid lettering.  “I’m a spy. It’s my job to read people and you looked like you’d seen a ghost when were first spoke. I put two and two together.” Her skin on yours is warm, comforting, right and you wonder why you’d ever resist this feeling. “I wanted you to come to me on your own, but you seemed perfectly happen grabbing me my morning coffee.” You give her a withering look and she laughs, grabbing your hand when she does.It takes a beat but you laugh too.

Everything’s alright.

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The words, ‘Please, stop, I don’t wanna hurt you’ scribbled on your rib cage in a left-hand slant never worried you, and neither does the man who pleads them at you, cowered in the back of some ramshackle hut in Nepal. It’s only been three months since his last incident, and SHIELD stuck him up here in the mountains, because at least when he turns into a monster here, he only has trees to rip apart. At least here, no one can hear him screaming. They send you to give him a physical. You figure he can use a conversation, as well. You extend a hand and speak the words you can see woven around his fingers.

“I don’t scare easy.”

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When you were young, your brother kept you out of the streets and out of sight. Your mother ran out on you shortly after your birth and your father was a druggie, so from the age of twelve, he’d raised you, doing what work he could for the local element. He dealt for one of the street gangs, you knew that, but you didn’t ask him about it. The less you knew, the better. Still, you’re not so uninvolved that you don’t know a mobster when you see one, not so innocent that you don’t know a Don when he walks into the restaurant you’re working at and has a seat with what you know to be armed guards. You watch him for a bit, trying to decide whether or not to take his order, whether or not to pass him off to one of your coworkers. He seems like an easy enough man to take care of. He’s calm and he’s reserved, sitting quietly at his table. So, not a Don, then, but definitely some sort of kingpin. Before you can make a decision, you realize he’s looking back at you and your heart jumps into your throat.

“I’m not paying to be stared at.”

You make your way across the floor, decision made, and already undoing the button on your shirt sleeve. You shove it up just before you reach his table, cramped writing on your forearm now visible.

“I guess you’ll have to get used to it.”

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You’d always pictured the words of your soulmark being whispered in your ear with husky undertones, hands of your lover sliding lower and lower on your hips. ‘Show me’ Has certain undertones you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t dreamed about. In your fantasies, however, you’d always pictured it coming in a club or a bar, not at the end of a bow and arrow. You’re dirt streaked, and there are holes burned in your clothes and you’re just trying to make your way down 32nd, without being shot or taken hostage or something worse. You figured the gun you’d lifted from one of the corpses of the aliens was a good enough deterrent. You figured, but apparently not, because a blur of purple and black drops out of nowhere and draws back, pointing an arrow in your face. You yelp, jumping back and dropping the gun. It skitters and sputters to a stop half way between you. Arrows reaches out and kicks it behind him, but still doesn’t lower his bow. You lift your hands slowly, palms open, facing him. “Show me.”

Well. Shit.

You turn turn your pockets inside out a bit too fast for his liking and the bow string tightens. You immediately go back into ‘not a threat mode’ hands held up in appeasement. “Woah! Woah. Calm the fuck down, Legolas, I’m unarmed.”

He blinks at you for a moment, opens his mouth to speak, the beginnings of a smirk playing on his lips, but then something explodes somewhere far too close for comfort and he grimaces.

“We’ll talk about this later.”

“Yeah, that’d probably be for the best.”

“Get inside and-” He’s walking away already, his back turned, and you’ve started reaching for the gun on the concrete. He shoots you a look out of the corner of his eye. “-don’t touch that.”

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Wanda meets her soulmate in the hell that is Hydra possession and she can’t do a damn thing for you. She’s still weak when they throw you into the cell next to her’s, she can still only make red sparks dance on her tips. She holds presses her cheek to the cold cement walls and whispers to you through the cracks that everything’s going to be alright.

But it’s not alright and she knows it isn’t going to be. When they make her stronger, when they let her manipulate perception, she helps you any way she can. She makes you see windows on cinder block. She makes you feel warm and full and satisfied. She makes you hear your mother singing you to sleep.

But nothing good can live in this place, nothing good can survive and they hold a gun to Pietro’s head and a knife to your throat and they tell her to choose a mind to break. She cries and she pleads, but they will not hear her and you won’t see her harm Pietro. She can live without you. She’ll be hurt, but she’d live. Losing her brother would turn her to ashes. So, you tell her to take you and you smile and tell her everything will be alright even as she sets your mind ablaze.

After it’s over and Ultron is dead, or as dead as he can be, and you’re safe in the best hospital Tony can afford, she visits you. Watches your catatonic eyes stare at nothing and she makes you worlds. She makes you whole universes in your head. She presses her lips to your forehead and whispers to you that everything’s going to be alright.

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Natasha had had three soul marks before the Red Room had seared them off of her skin. They thought she wouldn’t remember, that she’d abandon the words that had wrapped around her left thigh, lay across her heart and sprawled across her shoulder blades, but she didn’t. She was a steel trap on her worst days and had a particular brand  of determination not found in many people.  She’d held tight to the words when she’d met Clint, when she’d come across Bruce and when she’d come across you. You were a bit more skeptical.

“And you haven’t told me yet why?” Your tone was incredulous, but Natasha doesn’t look away. She’s not in the habit of beating around the bush, but neither were you.

“It wasn’t the time.”

“Well when was the time, Natasha?!”

“When you were safe.” Her eyes are narrowed a fraction of a fraction and you almost don’t catch it. You haven’t learned to read her as well as Bruce has, don’t have command of the secret language she and Clint seem to share. She was your soulmate and she’d kept it from you.  Your eyes slip shut and your jaw clenches in irritation. “I understand if you don’t want to-”

“Don’t you dare.” Your eyes fly open and you close the gap between the two of you, trembling hands gripping the front of her shirt. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

And she doesn’t. She does clasp your face between her hands and press her lips to yours, not an ounce of hesitancy. She always was sure of herself.

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Soulmarks weren’t supposed to appear and disappear at will. They weren’t supposed to fade and sharpen and writhe like they were alive. Your’s did. You kept it hidden. The one time you’d worked up the courage to go to a doctor, it had been during one of the periods where it was gone. They’d told you that phantom marks weren’t all that uncommon among people without friends or family to comfort them. You didn’t believe her. You didn’t know the cyrillic alphabet well enough to hallucinate it on your ribcage in wobbly, hesitant writing, in sharp left-hand strokes, and a backward, looping slant, in twelve other styles of handwriting. They disappeared and came back different. Once, when it shows up, you manage to take a picture and get someone to read it. They tell you it says ‘Don’t Look For Me.”

You take their advice.

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You find him sitting in a bar in your third year of law school all by himself, pouring over an LSAT study guide, a beer in one hand and a pencil in the other. He’s on the cusp of something, you can tell, even if his head does keep slipping on the hand that’s supporting it, even if his eyes do droop dangerously low as he mumbles to himself about double jeopardy and insufficient evidence.

“You always go to loud, crowded places to study?” He paused and looked up, sleep bleary eyes resting on yours and the most ridiculous, laziest  grin you’ve ever seen winding its way across his face.

“Only when my soulmate’s there.”

And maybe it’s the way he’s looking at you like you just hung the moon in the sky, or because you’re in that sweet spot between buzzed and tipsy and you’re not thinking clearly, or because he’s been nursing the same beer all night with no signs of progress, but you wanna take him away from this place somewhere quiet and warm and just… You don’t know what.

You go home together that night and you quiz him on arraignments with your head on his chest and his arm slung loosely around your waist. You fall asleep like that and when you wake up in the morning, he's covered the both of you with a blanket and is still reading his study guide, his free arm looped around you. 

"You always sleep in stranger's apartments?" You yawn. He gives you a quiet laugh, restrained and you know his real one is much louder, much fuller. You can't wait to hear it.

"Only when they're my soul mate." 

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You find out Agent Rumlow is your soulmate your first day as a member of STRIKE. You’re not too thrilled. Besides him being more than ten years your senior and scary as fuck, he’s also, technically your boss. He asks you to call him Brock. You refuse. He asks if you can have a talk. You tell him you’d rather not. He doesn’t report your bond.  

If he reported it, then everyone would know and you’d get reassigned. SHIELD has a strict policy against soulmates working together, platonic or otherwise. As much as you were sure he’d hate to admit it, his squad needed you. You stayed on board. You two rarely talk in the three years after you’re hired -there’s hardly any time to, what with aliens dropping out of the sky and dead world war two heroes showing up- but it still aches when SHIELD falls and you find out he’s not who he said he was. What ever minimalistic, reserved relationship you might have had with him, you didn’t expect him to lie to you. Then again, no one ever expects their soulmate to turn out to be a member of a high-profile neo-nazi organization hellbent on world domination.

You tell whatever passes for authority in SHIELD after the fall what you are to Rumlow and they let you sit in his hospital room. You wait by his bedside to have a talk with him that’s three years overdue.

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The first time you meet Pietro, it’s only in passing and you’re not honestly sure it can be called a meeting. You’re freelancing with the Avengers, helping them take down a Hydra base and you catch him coming down a set of stairs as you’re making your way up them. From the look of shock on his face and your unfamiliarity with him you -safely- assume he’s Hydra. You lift your hand to hit him with your powers, but he smirks at you and disappears. You let Tony know there’s a teleporter around.

By the second time you meet him, you’ve found out that he’s not actually a teleporter. You don’t know what he is, but telling everyone he can move really fast sounds a hell of a lot less stupid than calling him a speedster. You’re in Wakanda on some beached ship when he shows up. You’re in cuffs before you know it, somewhere far away from your team and he’s standing there in front of you, that same self-satisfied smirk on his face. You yank on the cuffs to no avail and roll your eyes. “Chaining me up already? It’s only our second date, speedy. Slow it down.” Something flashes in his eyes at that and his smirk falls and he disappears in a flash. You manage to burn yourself out of your handcuffs in time to catch a glimpse of Ultron.

The third time you meet him, his name’s Pietro and he takes a bullet for you. You don’t see it coming. You’re so wrapped up in taking down robots, that you don’t notice one of them sneaking up behind you until you hear the sharp crack of a weapon being fired, the words “Get down!” being screamed at you and feel a body slam against your own. All you catch is a glimpse of white hair before you’re on the ground and Pietro is sprawled ten yards away from you, red blossoming on his uniform, right over his heart. You run to him, ripping apart every Ultron copy foolish enough to stand in your way. You move as fast as you can, but you feel like you’re trudging through mud, seconds dragging on for eternities as you leap over rubble and dodge attacks trying to reach your ally.

Once you’re close enough, you slide on your knees, ignoring the sting of glass and concrete cutting into you. He’s paler than normal and his eyes are closed and he’s not breathing. He’s not breathing and the last words he said to you are etched across the base of your neck.

“Pietro? Pietro, wake up.” You lift his head onto your lap, cradling it between your hands. “Damn it, Pietro…” You open his mouth and place your lips over his, giving him the most rudimentary form of CPR. You push air into his body with everything that you have, hoping against hope that he’ll open his eyes. He sputters and coughs and you feel a tightness in your chest release that you didn’t realize right there.

“If I knew all it took to get you to kiss me was getting shot-”

“-Oh, my God, I hate you.” He offers you one of his boyish smirks, wobbly but still there. How he can manage to come of looking smug with a bullet in his chest in the wreckage of what was his hometown is beyond her.

“No you don’t.” You laugh, fat, happy tears rolling down your cheeks.

“No,” you say pushing his bangs away from his forehead. “I don’t.”

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When you were born, you didn’t know what an Ipod was, much less how to find one. Still, the words, ‘Where’s my ipod?” seemed rather demanding and you were never one to disappoint. You followed technology closely, watching as ever up and comer failed to deliver the one device you needed them to. You had your parents buy stock in every company you could find. And then, when you were in middle school, Apple did what all others had failed to. It was uncomfortable, to say the least, when you had to explain to your classmates why your were crying during the unveiling of a music player. You did it anyway. For a while you were optimistic. You truly believed your soulmate would come along as soon as the tech had been introduced. You waited one year, two. Three, and you stopped thinking of hypotheticals and situations and snappy comebacks to make when you met them. You focused on real life. You moved on. Still, when a rather disgruntled intern bursts into the Human Resources department at SHIELD looking more than a little bit disgruntled, demanding to know where her ipod was, you smile to yourself and hand it back to her, and stand up to introduce yourself to your soulmate.

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Your soulmate is brave, and fearless and guards her heart with all the sharp-edged ferocity of a woman who knew the sting of losing a soulmate. Her tongue is whip and her mind is a knife to all except you. She spares her soft words, whispered with fingers intertwined as warm rain pelts the windows in your bedroom. Peggy Carter is a woman out of time, and she stops it for you when you two are together. She tells you about the words scribbled over her left collarbone in an artist’s cramped chicken scratch. She tells you about a boy named Steve Rogers who was now confined to history, even though his words hadn't faded from her skin. Peggy tells you about her hero and holds you until you fall asleep.

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You met him when you were both still in high school. You’d found out by accident; you two had collided in the hall and he’d helped you clean your books up.

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry-”

“No, my fault. Head in the clouds.”

He shoots you a look for a second, his free hand twitching toward his right thigh where know your words are.There’s a question in his eyes.

“Mine’s on my back.” He nods in understanding and helps you stand, placing your books back in your arms.

“Look, I understand if you don’t-”

“Yeah…” You give each other nervous smiles and make your way to third period. You see him sometimes at the end of a hallway, or dodging by your classroom, or the back of his head as your bus turns a streetcorner, but you two don’t get together. You’re fifteen. You don’t know what love is supposed to look like.

You still don’t know when you’re twenty-five and being held up at gunpoint in some back alley in the middle of December. The Christmas ornaments you’d just bought for your mother are shattered on the ground and there’s a gloved hand clamped around your throat, demanding money and something more. You think you’re going to die there, in the snow in some dingy alley, but a burst of webbing covers your attacker's eyes and a man in a red suit drops out of the sky, wraps an arm around your waist and hauls you away.

It’s not until you’re safely planted on top f a building and he’s getting ready to run off that you dare speak his name.

“Peter!” He freezes midstride, shoulders tensing. “I just...thank you, Peter.”  He nods.

“Get home safe.”

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She’s corporate royalty and you’ve only seen her in passing, but God do the rumors fall short. Pepper Potts is not pretty; she’s nothing short of radiant and you find yourself staring at her through the glass windows of her office as you sit in her waiting area, preparing for your interview. She tucks a section of vibrant red hair behind her ear. You swear under your breath. When she asks you why you want to work for Stark Industries you’re tempted to ask who wouldn’t. Leading tech firm in the world looks good on any resume, but then you remember the writing on your arm. ‘Why do you want to work for Stark Industries?’ etched into your skin in the same thin, careful handwriting you see on the forms on her desk. You’re tempted to tell her that you’re predestined to.

Chapter Text

“Is that an astro-orbital redundancy calculator?”

You freeze, hands hovering over the dials of the decidedly chunky piece of equipment you’d just been shipped as you hear a voice behind you chime the words you’d gotten your head dunked into toilets for, had your books knocked out of your hands for, had the word nerd scrawled across your locker for. Children were cruel, you’d learned that long ago, especially when they didn’t know something. The twelve year olds in your seventh grade class didn’t know what an astro-orbital redundancy calculator was, much less how to find out, so they’d called you Spock instead, pulled on your ears in fourth period. You sigh, take off your glasses, rub the bridge of your nose and turn around to meet eyes with a tiny, mousey woman in red flannel clutching an enormous mug of coffee in one hand and several pages of crumpled notes in the other.

“You couldn’t have just said hello?” Her eyes go wide before she smiles at you.

You smile back.

Chapter Text

He looks like sin, a cigar dangling from his lips and jeans belted dangerously low on his waist. He hasn’t shaved in days, that much is obvious, and he likely doesn’t care to. He’s hunched over working on some absolute antique of a motorbike, muscles flexing in his back as he undoes another screw and tosses it into a bucket near the front wheel. You open your mouth to speak, but he cuts you off, voice rough and low.

“If you’re gonna stand there starin’, at least make yourself useful and pass me a wrench.”

You make a noise in the back of throat an dyou can practically hear him glowering. He straightens up, snatches a rag to wipe his hands off with and faces you. You have to remind yourself to breath.

“I just wanted to know where I could find the professor.” He quirks one eyebrow up at you and you think you see a flash of your words on his bicep.

“Well I’ll be damned.” He takes a drag on the cigar and exhales it slowly and you have a hard time looking him directly in the eyes. “You don’t wanna get tangled up with the likes of me, kid.”

“I think I can decide that for myself.”   You think you see the corners of his mouth turn up, but it’s hard to tell through the smoke. He let’s you decide for yourself. He gets less gruff as the years wear on.

Chapter Text

You meet your soulmate while you’re still young, both the brightest in your college course on the evolution of the human genome. He traces the words that loop your neck hesitant and wide eyes, like they’d smudge if he used even the slightest pressure, like he was afraid they’d disappear. By the time you’re both in your senior year of undergraduate schooling, you know Hank well enough to know that he’s quiet and kind and all too self-deprecating and if you tell him about the scholarship Oxford’s just offered you, he’d give a small smile and resign himself to letting you go. You know him well enough to know that he’d never forgive himself. You show him your letter of acceptance and he blinks at you from behind thick, wire-framed glasses, smiles, tells you he’ll be waiting when you return.

When you come back, he’s bigger. Not just bigger, but wider too and taller and covered in blue fur. He shies away from you at first, like you’d be unable to see the man you love behind serrated teeth and lips poised to snarl, claws ready to defend himself from rejection. You cup his face best you can, straining to reach him and ask him why he thought so little of you that the appearance of a beast would sway your affection.

Chapter Text

You had the tendency to be easily distracted, walking from one class to the next, eyes glued on the bright blue sky just outside the floor to ceiling windows built into the side of Xavier’s mansion. You knocked over a vase at least twice a week and had nearly fallen down the stairs three times today alone. You’d actually fallen twice. You always caught yourself, though. Your feathers lifted slightly and you shook your wings out as you stepped outside. ‘Head in the clouds’ is how your professors described you, but could they blame you? The words, ‘Yeah, but your wings are cooler than mine.’ glints on your collarbone for a split second before you take to the sky in search once again for the one who’d complete you.

Chapter Text

Wade Wilson was-

“Handsome? Stunning? The fastest draw this side of the Mississippi?”

Wade Wilson wasn’t-

“Oh, come on babe, don’t be like that.”

Be like what? I can’t so much as type an early description of your personality without getting interrupted, Wade so you must really not want me to write about you or how you find your soulmate.

“My soulmate ? Is this one of those weird AU things?”

...The Author didn’t respond.

“The author didn’t- alright, look , I ain't judgin’ you. We’ve all done our fair share of fanfic writing -seriously, you should see my Buffy fic, it’s a work of art- but I’m just saying...even if I ever had a soul mark, I can’t read it now and maybe that’s for best, you know? What kinda fucked up nut job would want me as a soulmate anyway, huh? I’m a-”

good man. Wade Wilson was a good man.

“I was gonna say a notoriously merciless assassin without any regard for human life, but okay. Huh. You really think I’m good, huh?”

I do.

Wade offered up a wide smile.

“You got a lot t’learn about me, babe.”

Chapter Text

You’re born with the words of your soulmate etched onto the inside of your forearm in what your mother hopes is a doctor’s or lawyer’s slant and in what your father hopes are the bold pen strokes of a good man. They really should’ve known better, especially considering what it said. Your father gets his wish and your mother will be appeased, you’re sure. Who wouldn’t be happy with a handsome soldier, decked out in a fresh pressed uniform and some of the shiniest black shoes you think you’ve ever seen. You’re still young when you meet him, barely off your training wheels, but you know the second you see him that he’s yours . He’s yours and you nearly topple over the skinny man next to him, trying to get in front of him.

“Excuse me sir, can I see your mark?” Your mother shouts your name and the skinny man’s eyes go wide and he whispers, ‘Buck’ under his breath, his mouth slightly ajar as he stares down at you in what you’ll later come to recognize as awe. You blink up at the ( your ) soldier. “It’s very important.” You feel your mother snatch your hand, start spewing apologies. The soldier ( your soldier, your Bucky) grins at her.

“It’s quite alright ma’am. If you don’t mind…?” She gives a tight nod and he takes his cap off and pulls down his collar so she can see her daughter’s future handwriting on the back of his neck. ‘Excuse me sir, can I see your mark?’ plain as day. Plain as day. In retrospect, you can understand why she’d be nervous. You’re newly eight and he’s obviously not. She’s right to be protective. A look passes between the two of them and he crouches down to your level and you’re nearly blinded by his smile.

“Boys like me are a dime a dozen, doll.” He ruffles your hair and you try to speak to him, open your mouth, do anything but stand there mute as your soulmate rises, adjusts his uniform, puts his cap on and continues down the street, the skinny man with him casting half disappointed looks over his shoulder. Your mother takes your hand and you continue on in the other direction. That night you cry. You’re not sure why, but you feel as if something of great importance has been lost. You never see Bucky again.

Chapter Text

Nobody knew Nick had a soulmate.

That’s all you hear the moment he dies and you show up at the hospital to claim his body.

Nobody knew Nick had a soulmate, save Alexander Pierce and he was the one who made sure you could get in to see your husband before they carted him off to the morgue. You’re cold and hard as diamonds and there’s a particular steel glint in your eye that makes the people in the corridor -hospital staff, patients, visitors- part for you like the red sea. You know they effect you have on people. You’re a former spy and the spouse of the world’s best known one. You tended to intimidate people.

You show up to Nick’s funeral looking like hell in a high-collared peacoat and stay until the very end, staring as they cover a full coffin with dirt. The words on your wrists hadn’t faded and you knew better than to doubt Nick Fury. Your husband was alive, you were sure, and sooner or later there’d be hell to pay. You’d be damned if your family paid it.

Chapter Text

In all my days on this website, I didn't ever think I'd have a fic that broke 1K views. 

I write because I like to and I like to sandbox around with pre-existing characters and worlds. Fanfic is a favorite hobby of mine and is honestly what sparked my love for creative writing. I'd do it if only one person read my stuff. I don't write for comments or kudos or subscriptions even though those things are nice, but as I'm writing this to you right now, I have over 300 kudos, over 100 comments and 10.6K views. Honestly, this is an incredible feeling and I know I never would have made it here without my readers. It is your commenting and bookmarking and prompting that has kept this fic going and I am thankful for each and everyone of you. This is far from the end of the road. 

Odysseus, 1.17.16

Chapter Text

You hear them comin down the hallway, boots heavy on the floor, claws shredding the wallpaper, tremors shooting through the ground. You hear the metal framework of the house groan even as footsteps too fast to distinguish race over your head. The brotherhood was here. Outside, rain pelts the windows and the wind howls. Storm is trying her best, but even she’s just a force of nature against these grim reapers, these harbingers of death. Magneto had warned you, you remembered. He’d warned Charles that there’d be a reckoning.

The door to the bedroom you’re hiding in collapses inward with a bang and you flinch, hoping to god that your camouflage doesn’t break. You press closer to the wall as a flash of lightning illuminates Sabretooth. He has to duck to step into the room, hunched shoulders only making him look more terrifying. You’d never seen him up close before; he was absolutely massive. The mutant tips his head back, scents the air and turns to gold on black eyes to stare directly at your hiding place. You hold  your breath, fearing the slightest stir in the air will give you away, but you swear her can hear your heart hammering in your ears. He sidles close to you slowly, and you feel your window of escape sliding further and further shut with every step he takes. You try to swallow the lump in your throat, but it remains, stuck fast.

He pauses when he’s only two inches away from you, your eyes at the bottom of his chest. There was no way you’d beat him in a physical fight, no way-

A massive hand snatches at the front of your shirt, hauling you into the air. You’re so startled that your camouflage drops and Sabretooth lays eyes on you for the first time. Your shoulders are shaking and you’re so frightened that your skin runs through a million colors at once, reds and blues and greens, nothing more than fractals dancing over you. Your face is a stained glass window; your body is a kaleidoscope. His mouth stretches wide open, a cruel smile spreading his maw wide and you can see the teeth you’ve heard rumors about: sharp and long and gleaming in the half light. He’s about to say something, you know, the sound is crawling its way up his throat and it will be cruel, you’re sure, but you interrupt him.

“I am not afraid to die.” His eyes narrow a hair and the corners of his mouth turn down slightly, turning his grin into a savage bearing of teeth and gums. “You can kill me, but leave the others. I am not afraid to die.” You were telling the truth. You might have been terrified of him but if killing you was the worst thing he could do, what more was there? Dying lasted for only a second. You gripped the trunk-like arm holding you in the air. Dying lasted for only a second. You close your eyes and wait for Sabretooth’s notorious claws to sink into you, but they don’t. He doesn’t do anything.

He sets you down with surprising care, turns on his heel and leaves you alone. You hear his heavy steps moving further and further from you.

“This corridor is clear. Let’s move on.”

It’s only afterwards when you’re helping the injured and trying to piece the mansion back together that you remember the words, “I’m not something that you can fix.” camouflaged on your calf and think that maybe, just maybe they could belong to him.

Chapter Text

“What are you looking for?” You sit across from him in the shadowy recesses of the circus tent they’d chained you in, legs folded over each other, arms barred over your chest. They’d left you naked again, and the only light in the dim space was provided by the lava flowing between the cracks of your charred skin. “Everyone who comes here is looking for something.” Your mouth steams with every word, smokes with every syllable and sparks drip from your tongue. They called you the devil’s child, said you’d fallen at the beginning of the world, said that it was hellfire that had turned you into this burnt and broken creature. You were not pretty, but you were something to look at and that was better than the false signs the circus peppered the town with, claiming mermaids and angels and two-headed boys who could see the future. You were real, and that was enough for the patrons who came to gawk at you. “So what are you looking for?” His eyes were blue, but not the warm sort, not like your best friend’s eyes had been when you were only a child and still whole. His were cold and hard as ice and they seemed to envelop you.

“Perfection.” He answers simply, and snaps your chains.

Chapter Text

If the  branding across both of your forearms was any indication, you’d never been alone. ‘I got you.’ on your left arm and ‘You’re safe now’ on your right, written and completely different handwriting. You had two soul mates and they’d come at the same time. You hadn’t expected it to be something as inopportune as an attack by some supervillain on Stark Tower. One of the Fantastic Four’s villains had gotten pretty upset at them for expanding their reach in the city and teaming up with the Avengers, so he’d decided to take it out on the larger team, evaporating three towers of the skyscraper and nearly making the thing topple over. You’d been delivering coffee when it had happened and been flung out a window and onto one of the exposed steel beams, steaming remnants of lattes dripping down your arms, turning your soul marks sticky with cream and processed sugar. You think it’s the end, you close your eyes and resign yourself to a particularly painful death- but then two sets of hands wrap around your forearms and your eyes flutter open to land on a pair of ridiculously handsome faces looking in concern down at you. Before they even open their mouths you know you’re safe and you will be for the rest of your life.

Chapter Text

“I won’t hurt you.” His hands were held up in surrender before him, had been since you’d stepped into the burnt out warehouse he was hiding in. You couldn’t blame him; he’d probably learned not to trust anyone in a uniform, SHIELD or otherwise. His eyes were wide and fevered, thick hair hanging in his face. He looked like a deer caught in headlights, skittish and ready to dart at the earliest sign of danger. He wasn’t in any danger, at least not from your. Winter Soldier or not, you weren’t going to hurt your soulmate. You holstered your pistol and extended a hand to him, ready to pull him up.

“I know.”

Chapter Text

You were perfectly normal. You’d been born in Anytown, Oregon, you’d graduated in the middle of your class, you’d never aspired to heights you couldn’t reach. You were an average, normal,basic human being. You recite this to yourself in the mirror as you dab globs of foundation over the lines and whorls that traverse your skin. Perfectly normal.  You cover the final dip on your cheek and nod at your appearance. There. Perfectly indistinguishable from anyone else. You drop the jar of makeup back into your bag, check for streaks one last time and satisfy yourself with your appearance. A deep breath and you exit the bathroom, ready to go to start another day at Stark Tower.

You’d been born in a perfectly average way, at a normal weight to boring -excuse you- average parents in the middle of the country in a town most people probably couldn’t point out on a map. You were fine with that. You were fine with being completely unremarkable. You hold your breath as you step underneath a particularly harsh fluorescent light. If only you were truly unremarkable. You’d been born without a soul mark -rare, but it happened every so often. Your grandmother had been born without one and your parents had been told that these things ran in families- but in it’s place you’d been covered in what looked like an elaborate series of welts. No one could decipher it or figure out its meaning and your parents, in an effort to be good parents, had sent you to upstate New York and to Professor Xavier. The man had taken one look at you and known you weren’t a mutant, but he’d let you stay anyway. He knew how cruel the world could be.

Despite everything you’d learned at the school, you still felt the need to hide yourself. Your class mates had been special, and they’d deserved to feel that way but you didn’t belong with them. You were not unique or something to be prized, you were an oddity and not a pleasant one at that. You’re busy hoping to God that no one questions you about the makeup caked on your face that you don’t notice the tangle of bodies hurtling in your direction until they’ve shattered the glass that makes up the entrance of the ground floor lobby and have nearly crushed you.  You stagger backward just in time to avoid being slammed into a support beam by two rather tall, rather overdressed men shouting at each other in what sounds like an angrier version Norwegian. You fall flat on your back, the contents of your purse spilling all over the tiled floor. Your coworkers are running to and fro so frantically that your foundation gets crushed underfoot.

“Hey!” You shout without thinking, you shout out of disappointment. Makeup that could cover marks like yours didn’t come cheap and it didn’t come easy. You’re disappointed and frustrated and scared and you don’t realize until it’s too late that you’ve called the attention of the battling men to you. You freeze and lock eyes with them only to realize that you knew their faces. Thor, the Avenger was standing before you in full Asgardian glory, hand on Mjolnir and eyebrows furrowed. Beside him stood-

Your heart leapt into your throat. You’d last seen him in 2012, during the Battle of New York. One of your roommates had gone missing that day. You’d never found her. Loki of Asgard. You begin sliding back slowly, trying to get out of the sightline of the two literal gods, but before you can make your escape, Loki is on you, his hand around your throat and his front pressed flush against your back. You can feel the hard lines of his body even through his clothes, but your admiration is tampered by the knowledge that he’s using you as a human shield. You squirm but he holds you fast, your jaw secure in his long fingers.

“How would you fare, I wonder, if one of your mortals died because of you?” Thor’s face is fixed to snarl, his hammer ready to fly, but suddenly his face goes slack and eyes widen in wonder.

“Brother, look.”

“You are no brother of-” A sudden flood of warmth cuts him off. Your makeup is melting away and from the looks of it, so is his. Blue is crawling up his arms, creeping out from under his collar and spreading over his face, eating up the pale, fleshy pink. He snatches away from you, but the transformation is complete. His skin is now a deep blue and glistening, covered in patterns of whorls and dips, sharp lines and dots not unlike the ones that dominated your own skin. The god reaches out and cups your face and consciously you know you should pull away, but you don’t. You relax into his touch instead and let his thumb trace the marks on your face. You sigh and eyelids flutter. Loki tilts your head up so his lips are nearly brushing yours. Your eyes lock with his now crimson ones and a sharp smirk overtakes his lips.

“Well, hello, darling.”

Chapter Text

The rooftops over Hell's Kitchen weren't the safest place to be. They never had been, not even back before gangs ripped the neighborhood apart and you could get a dime bag on every corner. That had been back before you were born, when your mother’s mother hadn’t yet gotten out of pigtails. You couldn’t remember a time that your mother hadn’t clutched your hand tight on the walk home from school or had left the doors unlocked past six p.m. The rooftops over Hell’s Kitchen weren’t safe, but they were a hell of a lot safer than the streets and you’d given up running those years ago in favor of a steady source of income and a respectable job. If being a writer for one of New York’s most sensational tabloids could be considered respectable.

You’d wanted to be a journalist, but your family had never been very wealthy. Part-time enrollment at the cheapest community college had been all you’d been able to afford and despite your stellar GPA, the Times wasn’t known for hiring charity cases. You got in where you could, Straight out college into the industry and here you were, dozens of stories later with nothing to show for it. You sighed and flipped open the top of your laptop.

Your editor had put you on the Hell’s Kitchen Devil story, but all you had were odds and ends. He wanted to to make a five-course meal out of fish sticks and fruit snacks and you knew your job as on the line if you didn’t, so you’d gathered what meager information you had and set to trying to string a couple paragraphs together. You weren’t in the habit of publishing pure speculation, but working at a rumor mill, you had little to no choice in the matter. You came to the rooftops to write, you told yourself. It was quiet and you could focus easily, but in your heart of hearts you knew you were hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

“You shouldn’t be out this late at night; it isn’t safe.”  And you almost drop your computer, all your words and half formed sentences forgotten, because those ones have been penned into the space between two of your ribs.

“You’re him aren’t you?” You speak before your head turns, before you can see the black mask tied around the top half of his head and the way the black fabric of his shirt clings to his torso. You speak before you realize he’s the very same devil you’ve been writing about. Lying about. He turns and is walking away without an answer to the double-sided question you’ve left hanging in the air between you. He’s almost reached the edge of the roof when you call out again. “You should take your own advice!” That stops him. He looks over his shoulder, eyes invisible, but you have the distinct feeling he knows exactly where you are.  

“I’ve never been a very good listener.”

Chapter Text

You didn’t speak a lick of French, but even you could recognize the particular slant, the teasing question mark of a pick up line. The words on the bottom of your stomach that clung to your hips like a lover were feather light in elegant handwriting, embellished needlessly and tilted ever so slightly to the right, stems long.

It was Mardi Gras, or it had been. You’d spent the past three days in New Orleans in an absolute haze. You’d come with friends but had lost them somewhere in the Garden District when they’d ducked into some house party and you’d been carried by the throngs of pedestrians all the way to the French Quarter. You didn’t mind it. They had their phones and they’d be safe so long as they stayed together. You could take care of yourself. That had been hours ago, though, and now you found yourself in a tiny bar, beads looping your neck and face streaked in paint and glitter, signs of revelry everywhere. There was a band, but the only thing that could be heard above the din of people was the sultry tenor of a saxophone.

Bodies pressed so closely against yours that you could hardly move, much less distinguish yourself from the tangle of limbs around you. Your hips sway to the music almost hypnotically, you feel at one with the people around you and you feel a long pair of arms snake around your waist and a front press against you, hips melding against yours as the music swells. From the width and length of the hands gripping comfortably tight against you, your partner is a man and a tall one at that. Lanky would be the word you’d use, if you couldn’t feel lean muscle beneath the fabric of his shirt.

The first song ends and you expect him to disappear back into the fray. You pull away from him preemptively but he holds you fast, hesitantly at first, but then with more confidence as you press back into him. Another song goes by, two, three, an hour of music and you’re still entwined with him, whoever he is, all but oblivious to the crush of bodies around you.   Somewhere in the second hour of your entanglement he hunches over to whisper in your ear.“ Voulez-vous venir chez moi? ”

“I don’t speak French.” His chuckle is deep, a puff of hot air against your neck and you giggle. You don’t know why and you’re too drunk off of the atmosphere to figure it out. From the sour-sweet smell of wine on his breath, so is he.

“What I was asking, ma belle , is if you’d like to come home with me tonight.” You look over your shoulder at him for the first time and you don’t know if it's the sharpness of his jaw, or how soft his lips look, or how the dim light in the bar makes his eyes seem like they’re almost glowing red, or how your immediate thought is, ‘oh no, he’s hot .’ but saying no is the last thing on your mind right then. Going with him feels like something you’re supposed to do; it feels right.

“Yes.”  His (perfect) eyebrows shoot up at the immediacy of your response. His grip on your hips lightens.

“Are you sure?”

“ Yes .” You push closer to him now, your front against his. “Get me out of here.” He smirks at that, pearly whites glowing in the low-light. You two duck out of a back entrance and into the New Orleans streets to the sound of a Miles Davis number.

When you wake up the next morning your head aches, but no more than the rest of you, and you’re tucked into the softest bed you’ve felt in a week, the sound of a heartbeat thudding in your ears. You open your eyes slowly, squinting at the sunlight streaming in through a window and find your arm draped over a broad chest, your fingers splayed over a soulmark. You pull back like you’d been burned, heat suddenly flooding your cheeks. Touching another person’s soulmark wasn’t something to be taken lightly. Accident or not, you’d crossed a physical line.  The man -Remy, you remembered, he’d told his name was Remy in a hushed voice, accent heavy as pressed hungry kisses to your mouth- groaned at the loss of warmth and rolled toward you. As he did his words came into view and-

Wait.

Wasn’t that your handwriting?

You squinted at the ink opposite his heartbeat. ‘ I don’t speak French. ’ Hadn’t you spoken those exact words last night? Still you were in a French city; he had to hear those words all the time. Even still, you check your forearm and there, as always, are the French words you’d only bothered to look up once. ‘ Would you like to come home with me? ’ And here you were. Your eyes slip shut and you take a deep breath.

“Remy, wake up.”

Chapter Text

You don’t know what to make of your soul mark when it finally (finally) shows up. You’re scared that you’re going to have over a decade on your potential soul mate and whoever they are, based off of the mark on your inner thigh in perfectly printed Times New Roman 12-point font, whoever they are sounds strange, uninviting. Unknown. You don’t deal in unknowns and you don’t like surprises, so you keep your long awaited soulmark under wraps for as long as you can. But you can’t hide from him when he descends from the sky, skin red as the fire, skin as red as the blood you know doesn’t flow through his veins. He pulls rubble off of you and a group of your fellow refugees as if it’s nothing. He tears the head from a murderous robot as if it’s paper. He is unknown, so you ask him the only question you can.

“Who are you?” Who, not what, because despite the oil leaking from a gash in his arm, there is intelligence in his eyes far deeper than you can hope to comprehend. And the being looks down on you, offers a hand.

“I am your deliverance.”

Chapter Text

You know he’s trouble the moment he strides into the club looking like new money and so very many bad decisions. You shoot the bouncer on the wall a pointed look and he nods in acknowledgement. You go back to pouring white Russians and trying to ignore the way the heavy bass in the air is making your bones rattle.

You know he’s trouble because he’s colder than ice in december one minute, too-bright green eyes sweeping the room with disinterest, borderline disgust and the moment he sees what you assume are his friends his lips twist into a smile. Twist, not melt, because you can still see the frost he’s keeping locked away behind his teeth.

You know he’s trouble because he’s the kind of beautiful it hurts you to look at for too long. He’s all sharp edges; there’s nothing soft about him and you know who he is. Harry Osborne, youngest billionaire in town and the subject of your soulmark. You can feel the words between your shoulder blades twitch with phantom pains the moment you see him. ‘ Harry Osbourne is dead. ’ in elegant handwriting.

You snatch your  tips from the mason jar on the counter, grab your coat and duck out the back door. You’re in no mood to look at dead men tonight.

Chapter Text

“Loki?”

The man before you was not you Loki, not as you’d grown used to seeing him. Your Loki was a pale, thin, wisp of a man with black beneath his eyes and a muzzle clamped round his jaw and hair shorn so short you couldn’t braid it, could barely run your fingers through it when he lay his head in your lap and listened to you sing the songs of your people. Your Loki was a broken man. Your Loki was dead.

You’d been tasked with caring for him during his father’s sleep. His brother had ordered him released, but kept him confined to the dark halls and black corridors of a rarely used wing of the palace. You, the daughter of a defeated king and trophy had been ordered to tend to  the fallen prince’s every whim for the past three years. Other maids regarded your task as a death sentence. You refused to turn your mind to such dark matters.

The youngest prince of Asgard had been locked away for ten years and when Thor had had him retrieved, sent you to his quarters to care for him, he’d snatched and growled like an animal, emerald eyes wide and fearful, hair matted around his face like a mane. They’d given him nothing to wash with. It took you nearly a week to convince him to sink into a bath and a week more for him to let you near his hair with a pair of shears -no scissors were strong enough. His hair had been his pride and joy, and he’d nearly broken when you’d shorn it down to its roots. He’d been stripped bare, and void of all his regalia and dignity, he looked a sad, lost prince who fallen so far from redemption that he no longer knew his way back. You’d tried to show him. In measures, you’d  tried to show him.

You’d made them take the steel and nails contraption off his face, replace it with something gentler. If they were going to muzzle him, it would be one he could at least breath in. You’d wished the thing gone completely, but Thor had not indulged you, no matter how loudly you shouted and bared your teeth. The interim king of Asgard would not be swayed by the serving girl of a disgraced bastard pretender to the throne.

It had taken you years of soft words and gentle touches to bring him back from the brink and though he’d never said a word to you, you counted him as your dearest friend. There were ways to speak without words, you’d learned languages spoken with hands only, had taught them to the prince by the light of a candle in the tower where he now resided. You’d fallen asleep at his side and woken up there in the morning. You had come to know him deeply and you could recognize him anywhere. The man before you was not him. He takes a step forward and you take a step back, hand inching toward the dwarf-forged knife he’d given you as a gift during a Yuletide celebration neither of you’d been invited to. You sat on the edges of the banquet hall and had given him beads for when his hair grew back, beads you could see catch the light for a moment amid the raven tresses of the man before you.

“You aren’t him.” You say, voice tight, eyes narrowed. “He’s dead. He died, I watched him die.”

“You should know me better than that.” And his voice is warm, and smooth and you remember imagining that this is what he’d sound like if he could speak. This is what he’d- and then his hands are on your waist and he’s pulling you closer and in the time it takes him to press his lips gently against yours, you remember that he’d held you like this before, so close and just tight enough so that no other mage could replicate it, no one else knew that he’d held you like this. You remember the words on your side, etched in the lilting handwriting of a noble and you close your eyes and embrace your love.

Chapter Text

You don’t like clubs, but your friends made you come. You’d honestly rather be at home catching up on Scandal, but Mojito Mondays only happen once a week and it’s rare that you don’t have work on Tuesdays, so you give in to their badgering. At the very least, you’ll have a mild headache tomorrow. You see him coming from a mile away and you almost groan. It’s not the way he walks, or the fact that his outfit so clearly screams ‘PLAYBOY’ or the self-assured smirk he has on his lips. It’s that you know him, hell everyone in the club knows him. He’s a superhero, and coincidentally, one you were likely going to spend a significant portion of your life with.

“Hey, there. Johnny Storm, Human Torch-”

“I know, I’m your soulmate.”

And the smirk turns into a full-on grin.

Chapter Text

Despite what your family out west thought, a superhero did not show up every time you’d been at the scene of a crime. You did, however, acknowledge the borderline ridiculous number of them that roamed the city and seeing as you were a police officer, there was a statistical probability that you’d bump into one eventually. You hadn’t expected, however, to be the one in need of saving.

Some dimestore villain crew had been tearing up lower Manhattan and you’d been using your one free day to treat yourself to something finer than the usual gas station sandwiches that you typically subsisted on. It was just your luck that a crack would open in the ground directly below where you were having brunch. You’ve just decided that you had a good life when a strong hand catches you by the back of your shirt and hauls you back to safety. You’re relieved and terrified still all at once, so the only words you manage to form when you turn around to look at your savior are,

“Oh my God, you’re Hawkeye.” His eyebrows shoot straight up and someone behind him, a redhead far too beautiful to be real says,

“This is exactly like Budapest.”  He cuts his eyes at her and growls,

“This is nothing like Budapest.”

“What happened in Budapest?” And it’s Black Widow’s turn to look shocked, the corner of her mouth turning up ever so slightly.

“We found out we were each otehr’s soulmates-” Hawkeye finishes for her.

“-and now we’re your’s.” And its then that you remember the two bars of text between your shoulder blades.

Chapter Text

You’re allowed to be proud of the words on the edge of your jaw. You’re allowed to embrace them and make them fully yours. You are allowed to love yourself, adore yourself, you deserve to be gloried, and when the Avenger who has truly known worship kneels before you after witnessing your powers, takes your hands in his and whispers to you,

“Truly, you are divine.”

You bless him with a smile.

Chapter Text

“Raven!”

Your soulmate was running from you, ducking through crowds at the train station, skin rippling with every step she took. She was a young woman, then a soldier freshly back from war, then a conductor, and then a child, each transformation making it harder and harder for you to keep up with her. For all of her shifting, she couldn’t hide the mark that rested just below her hairline in your handwriting, a bright silver no matter what form she took. ‘You’re beautiful.’ Your words, and her own on your solar plexus, ‘Don’t lie to me.’ She ducked into a corridor and you watch her hair change from sandy blonde to a jet black, her jaw widen and her legs lengthen. You stop, chest heaving and let her go. One day, she’d stop running. One day, she’d believe you.

Chapter Text

The words, ‘How much?’ scrawled across your chest at the moment of your birth had not left your parents with the brightest hopes for your future. They weren’t the wealthiest people- you didn’t know why you were being polite, they couldn’t hear you. Your parents were poor. Dirt poor and barely scraping by on the two full time jobs they both worked and they knew what the phrase ‘How Much?’ meant to anyone living in their part of the Bronx.  They teach you words like, ‘Cosent’ and ‘Options’ and ‘Trafficking’ the second you’re able to speak.

You don’t end up walking the streets at night, partially due to lack of interest and partially due to your parents keeping you holed up inside of your third story apartment studying. Grade school might’ve been free, but college wasn’t, and they wanted you to go somewhere. They wanted you to be something more than another person from their family who wasn’t ever really able to take off. You get a full ride to Columbia and your mother cries and frames your acceptance letter, hangs it between the portrait of her grandmother and the picture of your and her father at their wedding. You still work two jobs during the school year to help out with their bills.

You graduate without a penny to your name and are lucky enough to land a paid internship with Stark Industries right out of the gate. You convince yourself that you can survive the two weeks without a paycheck by scrimping and saving, but you can’t gather together nothing. You can’t penny-pinch an empty bank account. Your skirt suit is the only one in your size they had at Goodwill and it looks straight out of the eighties, and your heels are the only pair your mother had and she gave them to your for your high school graduation, pointy toed and squeaky patent leather, but they fit and they’re the only pair you have, a fact that you’re painfully aware of when someone comes barreling out of the elevator and knocks you flat on your ass. Your ankle twists and you hear the tell-tale pop of a heel breaking off of your shoe.

You’re on the verge of tears, holding the shattered pieces of your heel in your hands when a shadow falls over you, someone crouching down and opening a wallet. “How much?”

“I’m not for sale.” You spit back virulently, a knee-jerk reaction your parents hammered into you. It takes you a second to realize that he’s talking about your destroyed shoes, not you and that the man you just talked to is your boss -and also your soulmate, but it takes you another thirty seconds to register that. “Mr. Stark, I’m sorry, I just-”

“Tony’s fine.” He helps you up -he’s polite, you think, for an alleged billionaire playboy- and offers, once again to buy you new shoes. You tell him you can handle it on your own and by the time you realize exactly what he is to you, he’s disappeared into the crowd with who you can only assume is his bodyguard.

There’s a pair of sensible black heels on your desk the next day and a meeting scheduled in your calendar for lunch.

Chapter Text

The bartender is hot.

But this wasn’t just your average, everyday hot, no, the bartender was aggressively hot. Hot in a way that shouldn’t have been legal, hotter than pretty much anyone you’d ever seen in your life and you along with everyone else in the bar currently in possession of a pair of eyes is painfully aware of this.  You’re not the type to flirt with anyone, but you’re already a little bit tipsy and the words,

“You come here often?” slip out at the exact same moment as his,

“Do you want another shot of tequila?”

You both go silent for a beat, regarding each other from across the bar. He speaks first.

“Well, I own the bar so-”

“I don’t even really like tequila.” He smiles at that and it brightens up the entire room. You wonder how you got so lucky.

“Does anyone really like tequila?” You tell him you can talk about it over dinner tomorrow.

Chapter Text

“I’m not…”

Your soulmate is sitting in a desk chair, feet tapping, hands fidgeting with some gadget his pit together and taken apart at least three times during this conversation and eyes everywhere but on your face. He slips a circuit board between two panels without even looking and lets his eyes run up the wall over to your right, checking the clock. Five minutes in and he hadn’t managed to get out a complete sentence without stuttering.

“I’m not who I used to be.”

You knew, had heard what Agent Ward had done to him and Jemma, what he’d done to save the other member of your triad. She’d left him and you’d been in the field when it’d happened, running auxiliary support for the Avengers as they took down Hydra bases.

“I know.” You tell him. His shoulders hunch in and he drags his eyes down, back onto his hands trembling in his lap. You place your own over them, brush a kiss over his forehead. “-but I love you , for better or for worse.” He squeezes his eyes shut and bumps his forehead against yours. “And I’m not letting go.”

Chapter Text

“On my world we do not have these…” His brow furrows as he traces the words on your forearm, fingers gently despite their size.

“Soulmarks.” You say, finishing his sentence.

“Soulmarks.” He repeats, notes of curiosity creeping into his voice as his thumb rolls over your words. He could snap your wrist if he wanted; you knew that and he very nearly had the first time you’d met. It seemed like eons ago, but you remembered it as clearly as if it’d happened yesterday. He’d gotten into a brawl with one of the guards over some slight he’d been dealt and had been made to stand with weights on his shoulders for days, no food, no water, no rest. Everyone had a breaking point, even Drax, mountain of a man that he was. He’d fallen and when you’d tried to help him, tried to shoulder some of the load, he’d caught both your wrists in one meaty hand and growled his words at you before shoving you away. There, on your skin, in neat, silvery print, the words ‘ I will bear it. ’ in Drax’s script. “What does this mean?”

“Nothing.” You spit it out a bit too quickly and his eyes meet yours, something unreadable in their depths. “It doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” You try to tug away from him, walk into one of the other rooms on this too-small ship to hide from him from awhile, but he holds you fast, pulls you gently to his chest. He’s warm and big and takes up so much space, but his eyes are soft when he looks down at you and taps his forehead against yours.

“My heart quickens for you.” His voice is quieter than you’ve ever heard it and there’s something tender in the way he speaks without pretense, straight forward and comforting. “You are the one for whom my soul is destined. I am yours, if you’ll have me.”

“I’ll have you.”

And he seals it with a kiss.  

Chapter Text

When you woke up your head was aching. You groaned and forced your eyelids open, taking a second to adjust to the darkness of the room you were in. There was a full throbbing that seemed to rest just below your skin, made your movements sluggish and sloppy. You tried to wobble up into your feet, but found your movements impeded by heavy chains wrapped around your ankles. You groaned. You knew this was going to go wrong somehow, running around the city at night dressed up taking on bad guys. The Punisher had been too much for you, but you'd still tracked him down, snuck into his apartment- you'd only managed to get one sloppy hit in before he’d ripped you apart.

Somewhere in the darkness before you, a lighter sparks to life and a cigarette is lit. There, in the dim orange glow you see him: the Punisher. Your heart leaps into your throat and and you scramble backwards across the cold concrete, chains clanking noisily on the ground.

“I ain't gonna hurt you.”

“Forgive me if I'm not optimistic.” You counter, voice shaking. The man blinks at you, expression unreadable before he rises and walks slowly, deliberately toward you, boots scuffing on the floor. You feel your throat constrict. He stops two feet away from you and lifts his shirt revealing, along with a well muscled and heavily scarred torso, the words you'd just spoken to him, tattooed in an arc over his solar plexus. This was bad. Very, very bad.

“I don't…” You swallow, your tongue suddenly made of lead. “I don't have a soul mark.” He scoffs and let's his shirt fall.

“Figures.” If he's disappointed, you can't tell, but he does stoop down and start undoing your chains.

“I'm sorry.” You venture, voice small.

“Ain't nothin’ to apologize for.”

Chapter Text

“There’s nothing wrong with us.” Kurt’s voice is soothing, calm, as it always was even in the most dire of situations. He kept a level-head through everything, through the rejection, the heartache, the way people looked at you as if you’d done something wrong, always on edge, always ready to defend themselves from the perceived threat that was your being. You weren’t as strong as he was, a sideways glance from a mother as she pulled her child closer was enough to shatter you. Your boyfriend says your name softly and your hands clench in your lap. He sighs and sets down the ice pack he’d had held to the cracked scales on your cheek. “Hey…” He places a three fingered hand over yours, squeezes gently, his thumb rubbing over the soulmark on your wrist. He had a matching one on the small of his back, from an exercise where Professor Munroe’d had you break up into pairs early junior year and recite affirmations to each other. ‘There is nothing wrong with us’ written in Kurt’s signature chicken scratch right over your pulse point. Most days you had trouble believing, even all this time later. You loop your fingers together and press your forehead to his. He sighs and repeats it one more time. “There’s nothing wrong with us.”

Chapter Text

You stood in the background as Jean and Eric rebuilt the mansion you’d called home for nearly ten years. Apocalypse had done his best to crush it and your classmates, but he couldn’t crush something as intangible as spirit or something as unbreakable as the bond you all shared. You would rebuild, you would expand and you would all live to see another day, that much you could guarantee. You sigh and close your eyes, feeling another chapter come to a close in front of you. It was time, you could feel it in the air. Slipping through the ranks of your fellow mutants, you tapped a silver haired man only a few years older than yourself.

“Excuse me?” He turned around, face placid.  “I’m your soulmate.”  That changed his expression. Pietro Maximoff, 26, speedster, would in the future be known as Quicksilver  the X-Man, the son of Erik Lehnsherr, your husband and the father of Ivanka and Yvette Maximoff, a pair of psychic mutants. This would all come to pass, you had seen it, all starting from the pivotal moment when you told him who you were. He blinked at you in wide-eyed awe, mouth slightly agape as the Kenyan girl beside him elbowed him.

“Say something!” She hissed. He shook his head blinked rapidly and met your eyes again.

“It’s- sorry, I just didn’t think-”

“I know.” You smile, tapping your forehead. “Psychic.” Whatever nerves he had faded into a blithe smile.

“I’m not gonna be able to get away with anything, am I?” The corner of your mouth slides up.

“I tend to always be one step ahead.”

“I’ll try to keep up.”

Chapter Text

“Human beings aren’t meant to walk among the stars.” The being before you gave you a slow blink, eyes hooded under his lashes and mouth spreading into a slow, sensual grin.

“That’s a, uh, dangerous mindset for an astronaut to-to have.” His words settled heavy in the air between you and you stare at the red robed man from your seat, the restraints around your chest not stopping your heart from thudding. Years of waiting and here he was, an alien in a galaxy far from your own. He approaches and you tense, but jeweled hands come forward and press the releases on either side of your helmet, the breathing apparatus coming off in a hiss of condensed air. He sees you for the first time without your gear and his grin softens, smile lines creasing the golden-brown of his skin. “I’ve been um, eons for you…”The restraints unlock from around you and he pulls you up to stand before him, thumbs rubbing circles in your cheeks. ‘He’s tall.’ you think. He’s tall and dizzyingly handsome and not quite human. He tugs you closer, in full view of his entourage and the woman who’d stunned you and brought you in. Everyone was looking at the pair of you eyes wide and apprehensive, unsure if they should look away or not. You didn’t think they could if they’d wanted to. Your eyes flick back up toward your soulmate and he ducked down, his forehead brushing yours. You bring your hands up and place them over his and are surprised to find them warm. He smiles then, actually smiles and the corners of his eyes crinkle. “...and finally here you are.”

‘Here I am.’ you think as his head tilts down ever so slightly, nose brushing yours. ‘Finally, here I am.’ and it feels like you two are the only people in  the universe who matter. He kisses you and it tastes like stardust.

Chapter Text

It was one of your few days off.

Your window was open and a fan was blowing full-speed, but it still wasn’t enough. The AC in the base had been shorted out and Tony had yet to fix it even though it was the dead of summer and 102 degrees in the shade, so here you lay, stark naked with Bucky’s head on your stomach, staring at the ceiling. A bead of sweat rolled down your forehead and he yawned. It was too hot to sleep, too hot to do anything but lie still and wait for a drop in temperature.

“I should’a let you cut my hair.” He muttered. His eyes were closed and locks of deep brown were plastered to the sides of his face, pulled up into a half-assed ponytail, sticking to your stomach.

“I should have let you buy that extra tub of ice cream.” He sighs and shifts, you smooth stray hairs off of his forehead, the silvery loops of his soulmark becoming visible on his temple. He lets his head fall to the side and brushes his lips against your rib cage, against your mark and you feel your soul bond hum in contentment. Eyes slip shut, happy despite the heat.

“Next time.”

Chapter Text

The bridge has always been one of your favorite places to come. From childhood day trips with your parents to ill-considered high school dares, it seemed like you always ended up here, standing at the railing, staring over the side at the dark water. It had been a center point in your life for so long, it was only fitting that you’d end up here. You close your eyes and exhale as the cool wind brushes over your skin, drowning out the sound of cars in the background, silencing your fears, making it so it was just you and the moon and the water alone in the cruel world you’d lived in for far too long. Your parents were not here now, neither was anyone who’d called you a friend. You were alone and it was right that you be, it was right that you end this before anyone could get hurt. You grip your soulmark through the thin fabric of your windbreaker, the words that had cursed you to this half life burning as  you touched them. Mark rejection. It was killing you.

You’d had your soulmark since you’d been born and what should’ve been cause for celebration had turned first to apprehension and then to blatant dismay. The words, ‘What could have prompted you to commit such a grievous act?’ inked on the soft, newborn skin of your arm branded you as a pariah before you’d even left the hospital. Your parents, for their part, had been good parents. They’d shielded you from the watchful eyes of doctors and mark specialists and behaviorists from cradle onward but there was only so much even they could do. You’d always been alone all throughout school, your peers and teachers fearing the violence your fists, still tiny, balled as you tried to suppress tears, would no doubt inflict. The outside was a lonely place to live. The sun didn’t reach the fringes and you were tired, far too tired, of being cold.

You clamber over the guardrail and let your feet rest on the ledge. The water far below you was dark, reflecting the lights above in multicolored fractals that danced over its surface, a rippling mirror of the world that’d never welcomed you. There’s a sharp twist in your arm and you hiss as your mark started to sting again. People who rejected their soulmark slowly but surely poisoned their body. They were rejecting fate, rejecting the balance of the world and in turn their truest selves. It was a miracle you’d made it this long; you’d been rejecting you rmark since the first moment you heard your kindergarten teacher complaining to your grade school principal about you. It would all be alright soon. No one would ever have to worry about what you’d do ever again, what the dark thing huddling at the end of your path was. No one would ever have to be afraid of you ever again. You’d be free.

You release the guardrail and step out into the open air, wind screaming past your ears as you plummet toward the frigid water below. You feel nothing, not fear, not apprehension, not even the worry for what your parents would do when they realized you weren’t coming home. You hit the water and the breath is forced from your body, eyes closing as you’re swallowed up by the dark, cold silence of the deep. This was where you belonged, far from everyone and everything that you could hurt or ruin. Your soulmate, that shadowy someone you’d now never meet, would be better off without you, everyone would be better off-

Something snatches you by the back of your coat and hauls you out of the water with such force that air is forced back into your lungs. You gag and open your eyes, your senses rushing back to you. The lake was running beneath you faster and faster as you headed toward the bank, your breath steaming in the cold air. You were shivering, the water dredging your clothes freezing you to the bone. Your eyes flick back to the bridge where there’s a crowd gathered, watching the spot where you’d jumped, shouting for someone, anyone, to call for help. They hadn’t seen you be saved.

Saved.

Before you can turn your eyes to your uninvited rescuer, you’re being gently set down on the shore of the lake, sputtering and still shivering from the cold. They’re crouching before you, their hands on your cheeks a gentle warmth that seems to flood your body, their brow furrowed in concern as they push back your sopping wet hair. You want to cry. You’d been so close, so close to stopping the inevitable and this person had dragged you back, putting you back on the path to inevitable pain. “Y-you’ve ruined everything!” And their hands still. They pull back from you slightly and you see Thor -literal Norse god, Avenger, Thor- kneeling before you, his hammer tossed to the side. His eyes are unreadable and when he does speak it’s slow, soft, like the next words are the most important he’ll ever say.

“What could have prompted you to commit such a grievous act?” You balk at each other in silence for three seconds and then the tears do come. Your facade collapses and you bawl as the god of thunder pulls you into his lap, strong arms forming a fortress around you. He already knows but you sob out anyway-

“My words! Those are my words! ” He’s holding tight to you like you’re everything in the world, like you’re all that matters.

“I know.” He whispers against your hair. “I know, I know, I know, I know-”

“I just didn’t want to hurt anyone.” He presses kisses against your hair, your temples, your forehead, your cheeks. How long had he waited? How long had he lived in shame and fear of what his words might someday reveal? Your mark brushes against his skin and for the first time, it doesn’t burn. You grip him so tight you don’t think you’ll ever let go and he squeezes you so tight you feel whole and home and safe. You’ve never been warmer.

Chapter Text

When Bruce Banner feels a tingling on his chest in the middle of his lab on one sunny autumn morning, he’s afraid for a moment that he hadn’t properly sealed his safety gear and was soon going to be sporting a rather nasty set of chemical burns. Upon excusing himself to the bathroom and finding out that his flesh was not, in fact, falling off of his body, he’s confronted by the sight of silver letters sitting in a soft arc just below his collar bone. He immediately bursts out laughing. He could he not? He’d gone twenty-eight years without a soulmark, twenty-eight years of believing that fate hadn’t deemed him worthy of another half and just when he’d become a monster, just when he’d started to be grateful that he didn’t have anyone- the counter cracks under his fingertips and he snatches back, eyes wide as he watches green crawl up his neck, too late and too weak to do anything about it. He wakes hours later in the woods all alone. He’d cracked his glasses again, but he can’t be bothered to do anything about it. He lies on his back and looks up at the snatches of dark sky he can see through the treetops. He can still feel the writing on his skin, soft and slightly warm to the touch. He’d hoped he’d been imagining things. He should’ve known better than to hope it was all a dream. He threw an arm over his eyes and exhaled. If his mark had just now appeared, that meant they were going to be young, significantly younger than him. He groaned. Why couldn’t anything ever be simple?

It’s not until ten years later after one of his... incidents ...is caught on the news and he’s watching it back as some self-inflicted punishment for losing control that he notices silver writing on the base of the monster’s neck. His blood runs cold. He can’t make it out, it’s just a blur, but it’s there and he feels a pit open up in his stomach. Some poor soul was going to spend eternity looking for their soulmate only to find out that it was the worst person imaginable, that their other half wasn’t even a person at all. He shuts off the television and sits in darkness, head in his hands and tries not to get sick. He fails. Bruce wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stumbles into the bathroom, rips open his shirt collar and stares at his mark. It’s a night for self-inflicted torture, it seems. He glowers first at himself, pallid and thin, hair going prematurely gray at his temples and dark circles ringing his eyes. He’s in desperate need of a shave, but can’t be bothered to go get one and won’t touch the disposable ones hidden deep in his under-sink cabinet. He doesn’t trust himself with sharp edges. His mark’s writing is soft, gentle, as will be the person who speaks it, he’s sure. He doesn’t want softness, doesn’t deserve it. He presses his back to the wall and sinks to the floor, willing himself to fall into a sleep that will not come.

His self-imposed exile in the mountains of Nepal only lasts another eleven years. He says only, because despite being on his own for over a decade, he’d have preferred to be left alone for the rest of his life. He’s never been that lucky and a red-haired assassin comes to pull him from his penance with claims that the world is ending. He hopes it’ll take him with it; maybe then he wouldn’t have to worry about his soulmate stumbling onto the absolute wreck he was. His mark slowly fading off of their body would be a far gentler cruelty than ever letting them meet him. He guards himself prematurely from the pain of their inevitable rejection. But the world doesn’t end, and Loki goes back to Asgard and for a few Elysian years, everything is alright. When you come into his life, he’s not expecting you. Of course he’d heard of you before, who hadn’t? A person with your abilities only came along so often and the Avengers weren’t exactly actively recruiting. Your addition to the group’s number had been the talk of the town for over a week. If he was being honest, he wasn’t exactly thrilled with the prospect of adding someone fresh out of undergrad to the ranks of a metahuman task force known for getting into violent scrapes, but none of his coworkers had gotten to where they were by listening to voices of reason.

Afterwards, he’ll think that it’s funny that he should meet you right before everything went to hell in a chrome-plated hand basket. You’re sitting in the living room of Tony’s penthouse holding a wine glass sandwiched between Thor and James Rhoades laughing at some joke the god of thunder’s just told when he catches your gaze and your eyes light up. You set the glass on the table and rise intent on speaking to him. You extend a hand.

“Dr. Banner, it’s wonderful to meet you, I used your study on the long term effects of Gamma radiation on plant life as a part of my thesis.” It’s a mouthful and a hell of an introduction and he knows he’s just staring at you but he can’t help it. You’re good, you’re so good, too good for him and he’s at a loss for words.

“Oh my God…” he whispers. “...it’s you.”  Your face lights up like the fourth of July and you take a step closer to him. He’s ashamed to say he flinches backward, heart leaping into his throat. The look of confusion and hurt on your face twists like a knife in his gut. “I’m sorry.” He mutters, shaking his head. The room is watching. The whole room is watching. “I’ve gotta go.” He bolts for the bathroom, trying to stop the impending panic attack he can feel clawing it’s way up his throat. The mark on his chest burned with rejection and he slapped a hand over it, trying to stop it from eating away at him. It’s only once he’s locked safely away from the rest of the party that he manages to take some deep breaths and calm down. He’s in no danger of turning but he still does his breathing exercises and counts backward from one hundred. It’s twenty minutes later that a soft knock sounds at the door and he hears his name coming out of your mouth.

“Dr. Banner?” You’re nervous, he can hear it in your tone. He doesn’t answer you at first and he can practically feel your hesitancy through the walls. Was this what it meant to have a soulmate? To feel another person’s emotions as strongly as your own? You speak again, voice even softer. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ambush you. I know this is all kinda sudden and I understand if you don’t want to be around me for right now-” Shit. He drops his head into his hands and lets out a sharp exhale. Shit . He’d run from you in front of everyone mere seconds after finding out you were his other half. What kind of idiot runs from their soulmate? He at least owed you an explanation. Bruce pushes himself up off of the floor and unlocks the bathroom door.  You look at him, eyes wide and bottom lip held between your teeth in worry. You two stare at each other in silence. He speaks first.

“I never wanted to meet you.” That comes out wrong and your reaction is immediate. He can already see your eyes misting with tears ready to be shed. “No! I-...” Why did he think this would be easier? His plan up until half an hour ago had been to avoid interaction with new people so as to eternally postpone his meeting you. He can’t tell you that though, not in way that wouldn’t hurt you more than he already had. “I’m sorry. What I mean is I’m dangerous. Being around me is dangerous . I didn’t want to make someone else- to make you deal with that.” Your bottom lip juts out and you fix him with a fierce stare.

“And you never thought that maybe I’d want to be around you?” His jaw goes slack at that, mouth slightly agape. He didn’t know how to respond to that. After years of people running away from him, decades spent hiding and this person who knew him both as himself and the monster, who’d been born into a world where the Hulk was already a threat, was telling him they’d stand by his side. “I’m your soulmate.” You said, eyes determined. “Your problems are my problems. Being with you will never be a burden to me.” He scoffs and shakes his head but can’t help the small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” You place your palm flat against his chest, fingers splayed over the place where his mark lay. His heart skips a beat and his breath hitches in his throat. He looks up and let’s his eyes meet yours. You tilt your head and give him a crooked smile.

“Then show me.”

“...alright.” He knows this is a bad idea, that he should push you away, that he shouldn’t let himself linger on something that’ll never be, but he can’t help himself. You’re looking at him and something inside him melts. He didn’t think that there was this much good in the entire world, but here you are before him, living and breathing and perfect. He lifts a hand up, let’s it rest over your own. “...but slowly.”

The two of you don’t get the chance to take it slow. Three hours later all hell breaks loose and within the week you’re both in Sokovia trying to stop the world from coming apart under your fingertips. You’re out there somewhere fighting, trying to save lives, but there’s nothing he can do. The Hulk has control of the body he shared with him and Bruce was trapped until the monster’s rage abated. They burst out from underground and the monster immediately sets to tearing Ultron clones apart, ignoring the machines firing on him. They feel dull against his skin, like little more than static shocks and the beast is undeterred, satisfied, gleeful even to smash everything within sight- That is, at least until he notices Banner’s soulmate about to get crushed by a falling building. The Hulk tosses aside the robot he’d most recently crushed and bounds the length of an entire city block in a matter of seconds, blowing directly through anything foolish enough to get in his way. Bruce is powerless to help, powerless to do anything but watch as you turn over your shoulder, the realization of your impending death crashing down upon you. He wants to scream your name, but can’t and so he lies still, watches through the Hulk’s eyes as you grow ever closer. Fifty feet, twenty, ten and then he’s standing right above you and there’s a sickening crunch as the building crashes down on the green monster’s body.

Bruce can’t see anything, can’t hear anything but the distant sound of sirens and the muted groaning of the city’s pipes far below. The dust clears and the Hulk blinks once, twice, three times and sits up and there you are, wrapped firmly in the monster’s arms, not a scrape on you. You cough shakily and blink the dust out of your eyes and fix him with the same lopsided smile you’d given him the first night you met, what seemed like a million years ago in Stark Tower. The Hulk reaches down, let’s one massive hand rest on your head and speaks in a deep chested rumble.

“Hulk saved Banner’s small one.” And you laugh. You’d showed Bruce your second soulmark only moments after you pulled him from the bathroom and convinced him to give you a shot. It had made him nervous then, just as it did now, but you’re undaunted. There’s a sparkle in your eye when you reply back,

“Hey, big guy.”

Chapter Text

He places his hand in your's, long fingered, the hands of a violinist, and you can see only the pale parchment of his skin, your words wrapped around fingers with hairline scars, crooked from where bones hadn’t quite healed right. He’s watching you, eyes sharp as you run your fingers over his palm, trying to suppress a shiver when the soft pad of your index finger runs over his soulmark. Dr. Strange, I need your help emblazoned haphazardly across his knuckles, between his fingers. They must’ve once been beautiful, before he’d crushed his body and most of his spirit in that car wreck nearly two years ago. You’d felt it when it’d happened; your soulmark had burned and you’d been unable to move from bed for nearly three full days afterward. The pain had lessened over time, but your hands hadn’t ever returned to normal and still ached when the weather changed. That was why you’d sought him out. Foremost doctor in the country, best surgeon in a decade, if anyone could help you, he could. And here he was, the one you were destined for, but his career path was a bit different these days. “All of this was for you.” He says and you’re not sure if he’s talking about his years of medical school, or his success or the way he seems to hover in midair and the oxygen around the two of you feels like it’s on fire. “All of it.” And you feel the bond between your souls begin to solidify, your words spoken and the soulmark on your rib cage warming. His fingers lock with your's softly at first, then more insistent. He brings your knuckles to his lips and brushes a kiss across them, feather light. “And I’d give it all up for you in a heartbeat.”

Chapter Text

All about you the wind howled and rain beat down in angry waves,  the sky a sickly shade of green-gray. You should’ve left when you had the chance, you knew, but you hadn’t been afraid. Not when all your neighbors had packed up to go, not when the broadcasts had stopped and not when the air sirens had started. You hadn’t been afraid then, no, but when the water started creeping up your doorstep, slipping beneath the crack under your front door and making its way down the hallway, then you’d felt panic begin to set it. Animal instinct had driven you to seek higher ground, and so you’d fled to your attic, climbed out the window and clambered onto the apex of your roof.

The town below looked like a disaster movie set, tree branches and cars floating down the streets, sirens blaring in the distance. The rain was still beating down in waves, plastering your clothes to your body and the winds was tugging harder and harder at you with every passing moment. You wouldn’t last long clinging to your roof, you knew that. You were just beginning to consider making a jump one of the uprooted trees rushing by your house when the wind and rain cut out sharply and a beam of sunlight pierced through the clouds and onto your back.

You squinted and looked up, trying in vain to wipe some of the water out of your eyes- and you saw her. She was descending from the heavens like an angel of justice, hands outstretched and eyes white. Her gaze lands on you and she smiles. Your heart seizes in your chest. She touches down gently and offers you a hand. The woman (angel, goddess, spirit) helps you to your feet and presses two fingers to your forehead. Water droplets fly from your skin and onto the shingles at your feet and you stare at her in wonder, now completely dry.

“Why didn’t you evacuate?” She asks you, voice gentle and void of accusation. You blink once, twice, and then swallow.

“I…um...I wanted to meet you.” You feel something in you stir as your soulmark warms against the skin of your lower back, your bond completed. She pushes some of her hair up and away from her face and you see the words you just spoke etched near her hairline and gleaming silver. She smiles at you and it’s as bright as the sun.

Chapter Text

 Your keys jingle in the doorknob of your apartment as you unlock it. You step inside and immediately become aware of two things: first, that every light in your house is off, and secondly, that your soulmate’s clothes are all over the floor. There’s a black woolen trench coat right in front of you, a thin silver necklace and a black turtleneck a little bit beyond that. You sigh and kick your shoes off, dropping your bag and hanging your keys on the hook. It had been 11:45 when you’d received a text stating that your significant other’s brother had bailed on them for breakfast again. It hadn’t been written in those exact words- if you remembered correctly, all it had said was ‘Thor is an insufferable dolt.’ You’d gleaned the meaning from that alone and had asked to leave work early on sick leave. 

In your seven years with the god of mischief, you’d learned to read them like a book, pulling out truths from well-constructed lies and talking them through their more petulant moods. Loki was old, older than you, older than the country you called home, older than sliced bread, but they were still a person and given to tantrums as much as anyone else. You tiptoed over their clothes, out of the living room and down the hall to the bedroom the two of you shared. The door was slightly ajar, but there was no sound coming from it. You pushed it the rest of the way open, wincing at the creak and sighed.

Being with Loki was unlike being with anyone else. For one thing, they were your elder by several millennia, for another they weren’t human, but most strikingly because you had never seen what they actually looked like. Being with them was a guessing game of what version of your soulmate you were going to come home to that day. Usually, they looked masculine: tall, with black hair and blue eyes, jaw sharp and cheeks hollow. Sometimes they looked feminine: still just as tall with the same facial features, but fuller lips and black hair that fell in waves down their back. You loved to run your fingers through it when the two of you lay in bed, discussing what had happened during the day. Loki changed forms like changing clothes, and the form they were in now was their version of gray sweatpants and an oversized tee-shirt, what you liked to call a pout-fit.

There, coiled in the middle of your bed was a massive snake, scales green and glimmering in the dark. It lifted its head as you entered, staring at you with flat blue eyes, its tongue flicking out. It twisted its body around and writhed so that it was under the covers with only its snout sticking out. You made your way across the room and slipped under the covers too, placing your hand flat on the back of the snakes skull. “Rough day?” You asked. The snake shot you a sidelong look. “Thor missed breakfast again didn’t he?” The snake’s body moved in what looked like a sigh. “You know he cares about you Loki…” but you knew your soulmate didn’t feel as if that was the truth. They needed attention from those they cared about; without it, they felt jaded. Nothing you could say would change the fact that they were hurt. You pressed a gentle kiss to the top of their cold, scaly head and rolled over onto your side. “Go to sleep.” You said. “I’ll be here if you wanna talk when you wake up.”

When you do wake up, you’re considerably warmer. Loki is something like a human again and wrapped around your back like a spider-monkey, their legs intertwined with yours and their lips pressed against your neck. Their breathing is even and they look at peace. You smile and fall back asleep.