Work Text:
Red
Soulmarks were a funny thing. They didn’t guarantee that you met your soulmate, nor did they really give you much insight as to who or where they were. They didn’t narrow down your search any more or any less, and had little to no real effect on how your life would actually turn out.
Yet for years and years, decades and centuries, people have dedicated so much of their lives to researching and documenting these soulmarks, letting the ink on skin dictate laws and how people ran their lives, to find the other half of a person that was supposedly the best for you, to forgo the what-could-have-beens for a mere concept of a person you might never meet.
Perhaps in the vast multiverse, scientists and researchers theorize, soulmarks could take multiple different forms. Perhaps they could be words - names or phrases. Perhaps they could be symbols, shapes, meant to represent something in your soulmate’s life. Perhaps they could even be something intangible, like sound. Or perhaps they wouldn’t be present at all.
In this universe, however, soulmarks were color. A swipe of a color, maybe the deepest red or the lightest blue, across your left wrist. Sometimes it’s the color of your soulmates’ eyes, emerald green and shimmering in the light, and sometimes it’s the color of their hair, golden brown waves cascading to the ground.
It was far less specific that it could be. Anyone with blue eyes could be your soulmate, in that case, or anyone with dyed purple hair, or maybe it could even be the shade of grey of your soulmate’s favorite shirt, or something. More frustrating than anything, knowing that there was supposedly someone perfect for you, and yet you might never truly know who they are, even if you think you found them.
Especially frustrating for one Steven Grant Rogers, in a world where the single splash of color against your skin determined the direction of your life. Because he was colorblind.
--
“It’s red,” Bucky would tell him, a conversation they have often on the metal fire escape of their apartment, “deep, vibrant red. It’s really pretty,” he would offer, “your soulmate’s going to be a real kicker. Maybe it’s the color of her dress, or her lipstick or something. Who knows?”
“I bet it would look amazing,” Steve would shrug in reply, “if I could actually tell what color it was.”
“Mine’s a really gorgeous blue, with a it of green in it,” Bucky would then say, swinging a casual arm around Steve’s small shoulders, “the exact shade of your eyes, Stevie.”
To which Steve would say, “stop joking, jerk. I’m not your soulmate. You just said my color’s red.”
And then Bucky would say, “sure, bud,” in the world’s softest and saddest voice that Steve would stop to consider for the briefest moment, before Bucky beams and straightens up again and starts talking about something or another.
--
Peggy always looked at him with the softest eyes, even if she spoke with the sharpest tongue. There was never a hair out of place on her head, curled to perfection and immaculately styled, and it shone with the most vibrant shine and Steve would wonder if her soulmate had the color of her brown locks on their wrist.
But then he steps out of the supersoldier machine and the first color he saw was not the brown of her hair or the hazel of her eyes, but the deep red of her lips and the pink of the tip of her tongue through her teeth.
“Peggy,” Steve breathed, and he turns his hand to see color on his wrists that he could never see before, and in the seconds before the gunshot rings out, Steve knows he found her.
It’s not a taboo in the army, soulmates, and Phillips just stares at them with a critical eye and flicks a wrist. There is no time for trivialities, and there were only so many colors but many many people, and soulmates have been finding each other all around the battlefield, and one such story is of a German and a French soldier finding each other with the color of their eyes before getting a bullet through their heads.
Steve understands the poems and the sonnets written about soulmates, about how your soul and body sing with the right of it. Peggy brings her wrist up to his hair and laughs when the color matches, laughs like the sound of birds singing and church bells ringing, and she leaves marks of red all over Steve’s neck and torso and body.
It’s all Steve tastes then, the color red.
Its the color he chases with his tongue and the color she presses to his heart, and the color of his face when he lifts her skirt and sees the same color of her underwear. “Took me forever to find it,” Peggy had teased.
--
In Azzano, that deep vibrant red is the color of Bucky’s blood, splashed over his face and along his arms.
“Bucky! It’s me, Steve!” Steve had shouted, shaking Bucky out of his delirium, gasping in relief when Bucky’s eyes focus on his face, and laughing despite himself when his best friend manages a witty retort even near death.
It’s the color of Bucky’s wounds, healing faster than they would, and Steve opens his mouth to ask but then closes it.
“I found her,” Steve would tell Bucky, in the dead of the night trudging back to camp, when Steve’s not behind and helping the stragglers, and when Bucky’s not conversing with his men.
“Who?” Bucky had asked, eyes bright in the moonlight.
“I can see color now,” Steve says breathless, “her name’s Peggy. Agent Margaret Carter. Her lipstick’s this red, and my hair’s yellow is on her wrist.”
“That’s great, punk,” Bucky had replied, voice full of false cheer and sadness that Steve could taste, but Bucky leans into him and closes his eyes with exhaustion and so Steve doesn’t ask. It’s because of the war, or the torture, or the death, and nothing with the color on Bucky’s wrist being the same shade that Steve sees when he opens his eyes in the mirror.
--
There’s nothing like falling, Steve thinks.
The blood in front of him is red, for the briefest moment, before the rushing water sweeps it away.
Steve wonders how he didn’t see it, before, the color of his wrist being the color of freshly spilled blood. Maybe his soulmate isn’t Peggy, or Bucky, or a person. Maybe Steve was destined to be with war.
It’s almost comforting, that thought, to imagine that the same color had been spilled the first time Steve splits his palm on the sidewalk or has his head grinding into the asphalt under a boot. He has lived for conflict, Steve thinks, fighting when he was born and fighting till the last breath. That’s what soulmates are, he supposes, who you live with and for, and who you’re with till the end. Not a person, but blood. Fight.
Steve hopes Bucky finds someone with the sky in their eyes and Peggy finds someone with the sun in their hair, and Steve lets blood wash over him.
--
Red is the color of his wrist, the only pop of bright in the dull room he wakes up in.
Then red is the blare of headlights and the glare of neon signs in the middle of Times Square, New York, and the color of the signs in the shop windows and the blood pumping in his ears.
Soulmates will change your life, they used to tell him.
Steve doesn’t want his life changed. The color dripping from his arms is almost comforting, and it’s right and familiar, and he watches blood drip on white tiles before a nurse rushes in, eyes wide and lips red as she screams.
--
Red is the color of the suit of metal, glinting in the sunlight.
“Captain,” Stark says, hand raised in a goofy salute. The color on his wrist is a startling yellow, the same shade as the strawberry blonde hair on Pepper Potts. Her wrist sports the same red as Steve’s.
“You’re so different from your father,” Steve muses.
“Really?” Tony looks ecstatic, “you say the nicest things, Steve.” It sounds warm, fond, almost like Howard. Howard had brown on his wrist and the color of his hair on Maria’s hands.
--
There’s nothing like flying, Steve thinks.
Her hair is messy, curled and uncurled and tangled, ruffled in the wind as she leaps from alien to alien, a staff in one hand and a pistol in another, graceful maneuvers in the air as she twists and turns.
Steve catches her seconds before she would have hit the ground.
Natasha flips her hair and runs a hand through it. The color of the sky is on her wrist.
Amidst the screaming and the rubble and the explosions, Steve is faintly aware there’s a fight going on against a goddamn alien army, but she reaches over to grab Steve’s left hand. Natasha wrenches his glove off and presses her mouth to his mark, then smirks.
“I saw you schmoozing with the Black Widow over there,” Tony teases him later, when they’re seated around a table in a destroyed diner, “didn’t know you had it in you, Cap. And I thought I was the best at sleeping around on the job - that’s not something you read about in the history books.”
Natasha stares at him, hair falling over her eyes, and she lifts her left hand and brings it to Steve’s eyes and watches Tony’s jaw drop. Steve brings his wrist up, then brushes her hair from her eyes.
“Damn,” Clint says, softly. There’s something in his voice, that reminds Steve of Bucky, just a bit.
--
But Natasha is still a SHIELD agent, and Steve is still a man out of time, trying finding his time.
The next time her hair is soft, light, and straight. But her lipstick is bright, and she leaves a mark on his wrist like Peggy used to do, and it’s almost a painful reminder.
--
Red flashes against his eyes. It’s the color of his blood, of his shield that they repainted, of the star on the left shoulder of the Winter Soldier.
It’s also the color of her lips, and Natasha puts her mouth on his mouth. They waste time they don’t have to taste colors they desperately seek, in the bathroom at a gas station, and Natasha leaves traces of red on a long line from Steve’s throat to his navel, and Steve lets her see the stars and the moon and the sky in his eyes when he enters her.
In the middle of the street, that deep vibrant red is the color of Bucky’s blood, splashed over his face and along his arms.
--
Red is the color of Sam’s suit, his wings. His wrist is colored with a deep black.
“Some people say soulmarks aren’t just for romantic soulmates,” Sam shrugs when lifts his own wrist, “I had a couple of really great friends over the years. One had black hair, one had black eyes, one had a really ugly tattoo in full black on his forearm.”
“Peggy was this red,” Steve tells him, “so is Tony, and Natasha. And you.”
“Maybe that’s what soulmarks are,” Sam says, “trying to tell you not to spend your time looking for a single person you might not find, but instead appreciate the people around you. Maybe they aren’t your romantic other half that’s supposed to complete your soul, but you’ll be pretty damn miserable without your friends, too, full soul or not.”
--
Red is the color he misses and tastes and misses, before the suicide mission. “We have a higher chance of dying than living,” she laughs, “but you know all about that.”
It’s the color of the star on the Winter Soldier’s arm, it’s the color that blossoms all over his abdomen when the bullet hits, and it’s the color he sees before he hits the water.
Natasha straddles him on the riverbank, tilting his head and blowing hot air into his lungs. Sam squats beside him, eyes wide and worried.
“Bucky,” Steve gasps, “Bucky, Buck-”
Natasha’s lips and eyes are wet. Steve tries to chase the memory of Peggy’s lips and the electric blue of Bucky’s eyes and the red of the star on the Winter Soldier’s arm.
--
Red is the color that brings Steve to his knees.
Red is the color behind his eyes, the splash of wine on a white shirt, the popping of a champagne cork, Peggy’s lips as she stands in the hall, arm outstretched, smirk challenging.
Red is the color of the wisps of magic between Wanda’s fingers.
And then red is the blooming of bullet holes across his chest, growing deeper and darker as Pietro collapses, and then it is the sound of Wanda’s screams, and then it is the color of the bodies of hundreds of Sokovians that they could not save.
--
Red is not the color of Peggy’s lips, but it is the color of the british flag draped over her coffin.
The same red of his wrist is a reminder of what could have been. Maybe it’s the color of flags - the american flag, Steve thinks bitterly, maybe that’s what it meant, that he was fated to live and die for this country. Red for blood and America.
Maybe if the world was fair, the color on his wrist would fade away, or maybe it would rub off in the shower, or maybe he would wake up one day and see it was gone. But soulmarks didn’t work like that.
Soulmarks didn’t disappear with the death of your soulmate. They remained, a contrast against your skin and a stark sour reminder of them, forever inked on your own skin the color of their soul. Or maybe soulmarks did disappear, but only if you found your actual soulmate, and soulmarks remained to tell you that you would never truly find the person who was supposed to be the perfect puzzle piece to fit against your body.
Maybe soulmarks weren’t about a single soulmate. Maybe they were about people, like what Sam said, about friends and family and the people who were supposed to affect your life one way or another.
That’s why they were colors, because colors change as people change, and someone could put on a different shirt or dye their hair a different color or put on a pair of colored contacts, because when Peggy stopped putting on lipstick as bright as the color on Steve’s wrist there was nothing else about fate that connected them.
Red is the color of Sharon’s shoes, bright heels clicking against tiles on the floor, but Steve doesn’t think about soulmates, or fate, and he doesn’t wonder what is the color hidden by her long sleeves.
It’s just a color.
But red is the color of the star on the Bucky’s arm, and it is the color of Bucky’s blood on his face and neck, and it is the color of Tony’s anger and then it is the color of the shield as Steve drops it.
--
Red is not the color of Natasha’s hair or lips. Red is not the color of the star on Bucky’s arm.
There’s nothing else tying them together. Steve’s a cynic, but maybe that came with being alive for too long.
Sam was just a normal passer-by in Steve’s life until he wore a suit of red and the Winter Soldier was a normal HYDRA mercenary that Steve would stop at nothing to kill, except there was the red star on his arm and blood across his eyes and the face of Bucky Barnes.
Sharon had worn heels as red as Peggy’s lips once were and then stole Steve a car and kissed him, and the next time he saw her, she had on black flats and didn’t glance in his direction. Maybe that’s what those colors were, a sign that those people could monumentally change your life. People who were important to you, until they changed their colors and was no more important than a stranger in the background of the photograph you took.
Natasha doesn’t kiss him, and Bucky hugs him, but he has no left arm that once had the color of the skies in Steve’s eyes, and Steve doesn’t have the color of the red star on his left shoulder on his wrist, because there is no star. There’s nothing.
But one day Peggy did stop putting on red lipstick, and Sharon did stop wearing red shoes, and Natasha did stop dying her hair, and one day Tony would lie down and forget to open his eyes, and Sam would take off his armor and never pick it up again.
Maybe Steve’s not ready to lose anyone else. Maybe the colors don’t mean anything, and Natasha and Sam aren’t going to stop being his friends, or maybe they mean the world, and Peggy and Sharon have lost the red and Steve will never find them again.
But Steve hugs Bucky the tightest he’s ever did.
--
For years and years, decades and centuries, people have dedicated so much of their lives to researching and documenting these soulmarks, letting the ink on skin dictate laws and how people ran their lives, to find the other half of a person that was supposedly the best for you. Steve was almost ashamed to say he was such a person.
And yet soulmarks were just a color.
--
But red is the color of the gem that glowed on Thanos’ gauntlet, and red is the color of Wanda’s magic twisting and turning and fighting for everything in the universe, and red is the color of Vision’s body, and red is the color of fresh blood that spills from the wound in his head to his hands.
Red is not the color that Bucky or Sam or T’challa or Vision leave behind, and red is not the color of Thor’s cape or Natasha’s hair or Bruce’s shirt or Wanda’s tears.
Red is the color of freshly spilled blood, and the color of the gorgeous sunset in Wakanda, and the color of the stained grass what is left on the battlefield.
--
Steve remembers being colorblind, a lifetime ago. He misses it.