Chapter Text
Up until her second week of college Darcy had never fully understood how much of modern society still clung to antiquated precepts. Of course, she had always known that soulmates were a big thing for some people. The evidence was everywhere: from teenage girls going moon-eyed over flashy magazine spreads, to the elderly boasting about matched grandchildren at the weekly bingo meet. Yet, it had not quite hit her how soulmates were of any importance in her personal life.
No, Darcy did not go bananas over the universe plastering an arbitrary sentence on her skin, because she had a plan . That plan involved a finely-tuned GPA, a college degree in politics, and a fruitful career in social activism. She was very proud to say it had been smooth sailing until her college turned into a madhouse over the exact thing she'd been ignoring for so long.
Soulmates, you've got to love them.
The shift in attitude was very subtle, however, and she barely noticed anything until a guy approached her at lunch and brazenly asked her ‘if she was reserved’. Darcy had managed to successfully weaponize her soy latte by the time she realized what ‘reserved’ even referred to. She’d sent the soaked freshman off with the firm reassurance that she was not in any way ‘reserved’ and hoped from the bottom of her heart that she never would be. Afterwards, she’d had a good laugh about it in the privacy of her dorm room and written the entire incident off as a horribly misplaced pick-up line. Boy, was she wrong.
The second week of college is when shit truly went down. Like every other year, the Universe decided that she’d very well had enough of playing the absent parent and afflicted every newly-minted adult on the planet with a soulmark. Thus, she gave the starting shot for a week that Darcy would euphemistically call ‘full-blown madness’, but that Fox News titled ‘the race to happiness’.
Suddenly, every stranger on the street seemed to want to know what words were decorating her skin, who she thought they belonged to, and why she wasn’t trying to track them down. The barrage of attention was enough to make even a social flower like Darcy wither and die. For four blissful days she counted herself lucky that the Universe had apparently skipped her chimney as she doled out her presents. Then, her marks set in.
The big morning happened something like this: her roommate screaming like a banshee right next to her head, Darcy startling awake and bashing her head against the dresser as she fell out of bed, and a long, uncomfortable trip to the emergency room during which she’d cried more than she had over her beloved cat dying in eight grade. (Not because of the bump on her forehead, though the concerned nurses definitely thought she was an absolute wuss after.) Needless to say, it was an experience she’d much rather forget.
Unfortunately, the Universe was a bitch and did not care one whit for what little Darcy Lewis wanted in life. Darcy’s marks were plenty, highly visible, and most of all grotesque. A true triple threat.
All things considered, it was bad enough that she’d received a mark. Soulmarks were infuriating in how they refused to comply with any kind of rhyme or reason. Scientists had broken their heads and their reputations by trying to figure out why some people got the first spoken words, others a name, and the most unfortunate a seemingly random sentence. Finding your soulmate was either a very long wait or dumb luck. Neither of which made Darcy experience any of the fuzzy, romantic feelings that the books and lifestyle manuals described. Her marks made her feel cold and angry. Most of all indignant, because the Universe had judged her soul and found it too heavy for her to bear alone. And, going by the marks, it hadn't just been split down the middle either. Darcy's soul had been hung, drawn and quartered in the great trial of love. Which was more than enough proof that the Universe didn't know shit about how kick-ass Darcy Lewis was.
In grand total, three marks were taking up real estate on Darcy's skin. Three strangers that Darcy knew nothing about except for the fact that they were all unique and nothing like each other. Frankly, it was fascinating how much the imprints of their personalities differed. How was it possible that one woman could attract so many contrasting individuals? The conundrum definitely gave drunk Darcy lots of food for thought, even if she loudly wished they'd express their unique identities in less eye-catching ways.
The mark that had got her roommate to scream at seven in the morning was the biggest headache of the three, and by far the most difficult to hide. Etched in the soft tissue of her lower left arm, it stretched from the inside of her wrist all the way up to her elbow and tended to give people the impression that Darcy Lewis must be a deeply troubled individual. Not even on two hands could she count the incidents in which she'd been dragged to the hospital or the student councillor by a concerned citizen thinking she'd mutilated herself to gain attention. Then, Darcy would have to roll her eyes and joke that the Universe had wanted her to never forget her own name.
DARCY! Her forearm practically screamed to whoever had the singular pleasure of seeing her with bare arms.
And she kind of had to give it to those annoying concerned citizens. From afar, the aggressive lettering did sort of appear like scar tissue left over from a very intense encounter with a carving knife, possibly with a deranged criminal attached at the other end. Entire Hollywood PR campaigns could have drawn inspiration from the font on Darcy's arm to promote their horror films. (A fact that Darcy had gleefully taken advantage of during a few Halloween parties.)
Objectively, this mark did not paint the best picture of the person she shared part of her soul with and was entirely unhelpful in pinning down their identity. Literally every passerby in the street could tell what her name was with that kind of mark, which is why she was usually very careful with keeping it covered up. Only the few lucky boyfriends she'd brought back to her dorm had seen it up close so far, but that had been enough to make some of them feel like they'd better never return.
In comparison, Darcy's second mark was pretty tame and never sent any of her boyfriends running. The thing that bothered her about this one was that she could make heads nor tails of it. The mark curled around her ribcage in multiple, long-winded sentences that resembled the ramblings of a mad professor. Even the handwriting reminded Darcy of doctor's notes and pretentious Harvard graduates. In a bid to reassure herself of her soulmate not being a boorish, old college professor, she'd attempted to decipher the mark. In the end, Darcy had just about enough maths classes under her belt to recognize that some words were related to physics, but she'd given up on researching them after she'd fallen asleep in the library for the third time. That was that. Once the research had lost its appeal, so had the mark. Darcy moved on.
Now, her third soulmark, that was an interesting one. You realize we could break you into little pieces, right? could be read on her right shin. The words were arranged in a jumbled mess with uneven spacing and letters seemingly slipping down her skin. On her best days, Darcy sympathized with the horribly confused man attached to that part of her soul. On her worst, she couldn't even look at the mark without terror gripping her heart. This made it the only one of her soulmarks that Darcy kept covered up to fend off more than strangers' misplaced interest. She didn't need that stress in her life, not when there were deadlines to catch and exams to be studied for.
By the end of that initial trip to the hospital, Darcy had made the executive decision to never let any stranger, soulmate or not, decide how she lived her life. So, the next day, she bought a ton of long-sleeved shirts, swore off shorts and skirts, and point-blank told any guy that asked her if she was 'reserved' that he could join in line behind three crazies. That attitude made her life significantly more bearable. Until she started making close friends, that was. Close friends like Jane, who were ever inquisitive and Darcy cared too much about to ever lie to.
Frankly, Darcy couldn’t quite recall what had inspired Jane to start talking about soulmarks with her. The topic had simply sprung into being from a haze of grant-induced excitement and cheap piña coladas. They’d ridden the high of success right through town, visiting every bar and shack along the road, and wound up in lounge chairs on the roof of the lab of all places.
The night sky above New Mexico had stretched out above them like an inky black canopy, stars scattered across its expanse. They shone a lot brighter here than Darcy had ever known back in Massachusetts. She’d expected the absence of light pollution to make the world darker, but instead she’d found that it threw the breadth of the Universe into sharp detail, and the stars were merely the diamonds sparkling on top of the crown. She’d started to understand why Jane was so enamoured with them.
The scientist in question had been in the middle of explaining how most of the stars they were watching actually had burned out a long time ago, when she’d suddenly fallen silent, her gaze fixed on some indeterminable point in the sky.
Darcy, who’d switched from nursing cocktails to a cold beer ages ago, shifted inside her blanket cocoon to watch her more closely. It wasn’t unusual for Jane to zone out in the middle of a conversation, but it rarely happened when the subject was something she had a vested interest in. Jane was perhaps the most driven person Darcy had ever had the pleasure to meet. An awesome boss and just the right amount of crazy to turn her on the establishment to pursue her own dream. Stars should have had her at the edge of her seat, bouncing in excitement to share her vision. So, either the intoxication had finally given her the epiphany she needed to build the Einstein-Rosen bridge, or Darcy was going to play witness to a bout of truly epic drunk philosophizing. What eventually emerged from Jane’s brain didn’t exactly fit either category.
‘You ever think that the Universe might be a star? I mean…’ Jane hesitated, her scientific brain struggling with how to best translate the very unscientific topic. ‘I know She doesn’t actually exist, that She’s just another social construct fed to us by the Church and then the Media, but what if she did? Would she be looking down upon us, like a star?’
Darcy sighed. She already didn’t like where this was going. ‘I don’t know, Janey. You’re the one with a partial degree in quantum physics. You tell me what shape the Universe takes on a Sunday.’
Jane seemed to catch onto the undercurrent of irritation in her voice and turned to give Darcy her full attention. One of Jane’s eyebrows lifted in curiosity. ‘I thought you’d have big ideas about the propaganda aspect of the soulmate ideology, Miss political science major. Seems weird that you don’t have much to say about it.’
And this was exactly why Darcy thought her boss was part bloodhound, because she sniffed out secrets like a seasoned detective. Once she’d caught the scent of something, she’d never let it go, which was part of the reason why she was out here in New Mexico chasing a statistical improbability, while all the other bright minds in the astrophysics field were giving lectures at universities and headed research centres. Darcy was going to have to throw her a bone to get her to back off.
Her buzz now well and truly gone, she chugged the last half of her beer to buy herself some time. What to tell? Over the past few months, she and Jane had grown close, but Darcy wouldn’t call them intimate friends yet. There were too many expectations and boundaries of the boss and intern variety left for her to feel comfortable sharing a pretty well-kept secret of hers. Furthermore, she doubted that Jane would appreciate her launching into an anti-soulmate diatribe. There was a reason that most friendships Darcy had formed in the past few years had ended with a polite smile and an agreement to disagree. And Jane’s view on soulmates and other such paraphernalia was a mystery. Darcy had never even seen a soulmark anywhere on her skin. She might be one of those dreadful, mark-less idealists who thought soulmates were the height of romance, although her steadfast support of science counted somewhat in her favour.
Darcy finished her beer and squashed the can against the arm of her lounge chair. Jane was watching her patiently, her eyes bright and much less intoxicated than Darcy would have liked. What the hell, she might as well get it over with while the liquid courage held.
‘ I hate soulmarks ,’ she very nearly spat, years of suppressed frustration bubbling to the surface. ‘I despise everything they stand for. Their unpredictable nature, the lack of choice, the supposed romance, I hate the lot.’
Strangely, Jane didn’t seem in the least taken aback by the vehemence of Darcy’s emotions. Instead, her expression turned more pensive as she leant back in her chair. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve got the sense that you’ve been dealt a dirty hand.’
Darcy let out a bark of laughter. It sounded bitter to her ears. ‘That’s a poetic way of putting it, but yeah… How did you figure it out?’
‘Because I’ve been dealt a dirty hand too,’ Jane said simply, like she wasn’t turning Darcy’s world on its head through her confession. ‘And I was angry too, for a long time.’
‘What made the anger disappear?’ Darcy asked, mouth dry. Here was a woman, perhaps going through the same shitty situation that she was, offering a piece of advice Darcy had been desperately chasing after during the past four years. After all, Jane appeared to have her life all figured out; she was thriving without the interference of a soulmate. In fact, she seemed completely unbothered by the expectations a mark had placed on her. Darcy could not squander this opportunity. Even if Jane’s advice turned out to be utter nonsense, Darcy was ready to sell her markless right arm to reach a state of inner peace.
‘The realization that my life didn’t need to stay in limbo while I waited to run into a lackluster person. My mark set in early, I was seventeen and about to pick which colleges I was going to apply for, and I spent the entire semester losing my mind over it. I almost lost my scholarship because I was so out of it.’ Darcy imagined Jane at seventeen, studious and shy, trying to hide her red-rimmed eyes from her friends and family as she tried to compromise between her plans for the future and the chain that was suddenly attached to her leg.
‘Luckily, my dad remembered to send in my application, and he sat me down for a talk straight after,’ Jane continued, smiling fondly at the memory. ‘He told me that a soulmark was not a binding contract, that I had plenty of choices still to make before a significant other would factor into my life. I could either allow my personal growth to stagnate because I was waiting on a person who I might not even like, or I could pursue my dreams and decide later if that person would fit into my life.’
‘Easy choice.’
Jane shrugged. ‘Not really. I still lost a lot of sleep before I managed to put that theory into practice. I hit my stride after I got dumped for the first time.’
That hit home. Darcy had known her fair share of partners that had run for the hills once they’d discovered she was marked. After the first three, she’d quickly learned that promises of forever rarely held in the face of perceived ‘destiny’.
She nodded morosely. ‘Had one too many of those. Still makes me want to claw their eyes out, though.’
Sighing quietly, Jane rose from her chair and stumbled over to Darcy, who made room for her on her lounger, and wound an arm around the intern. ‘You’re plenty strong, Darcy, and I’m sure you’re going to land on your feet once you’ve got those science credits securely in your pocket.’
Darcy stifled a wet sniffle against Jane’s shoulder. ‘Do I sense a ‘but’?’
‘ But, ’ Jane echoed, drawing back from the hug to look her in the eye. Her brow started to furrow like when she was considering a tricky equation. ‘I’d caution you against making anger your motivator. It tends to burn through people fast.’
Darcy’s first instinct was to push her away and tell her she had it all wrong, that she’d gladly let her anger carry her to where she needed to be, regardless if she left some fires in her wake. But then, her mind started to rehash all the evenings she’d fled to her dorm room, exhausted to the bone by constantly maintaining a shield of antagonism between her and the rest of the world. Maybe Jane’s wasn’t that far off the mark.
Stepping away from that initial response, Darcy dropped her gaze and resolved that she’d at least try to hear the astrophysicist out. ‘What do you suggest I do, then?’ She couldn’t quite keep the sarcastic bite out of her voice, but that was par for the course. Passive-aggressiveness ran in the Lewis family’s blood.
Throughout her inner-pondering Jane hadn’t moved an inch, keeping her arms firmly around Darcy’s shoulders. Once again, the intern got the impression that, despite her fragile appearance, Jane was actually pretty fearless. Yet, when she spoke, her voice was unwaveringly gentle.
‘I’d suggest you practice acceptance for starters. If you really don’t want to let your soulmate have any power over you, you should start treating your soulmark like any other part of your body. Let me show you.’
Curiosity took hold of Darcy as Jane dropped the half-hug and began to unwind the flimsy shawl she kept tucked into the front of her shirt to protect her neck from the chafing desert wind. She let it flutter to the ground without a second look and drew down the collar of her shirt. Shadows played across the skin she’d laid bare, but the fire provided just enough ambient light for Darcy to get a proper look. She sucked in a breath.
Jane Foster’s soulmark was regal and utterly alien . It curled around the base of her neck like a golden necklace, the chain of words only briefly interrupted at the dip of her clavicle. It reminded Darcy vaguely of those ancient golden bands that Viking women had once worn around their necks. The blocky, foreign script of the words only reinforced that impression.
Leaning closer to read the words, Darcy was startled to find that she couldn’t read them at all. ‘What kind of language is that?’
‘I’ve got no fucking clue,’ Jane admitted wryly. ‘Erik said they’re definitely Nordic runes, but they don’t translate properly to any modern equivalent. If my soulmate were to show up right now and say my words, I wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s him.’
At the back of Darcy’s mind, the puzzle pieces began to fit together. ‘Acceptance means letting go to you, doesn’t it?’
A solemn nod.
‘Then what are you going to do if somebody suddenly shows up with your words on them?’
Jane laughed. ‘Then I’m going to politely point them to the door.’
Of course, when Jane’s soulmate turned out to be nothing less than an alien prince that made a habit out of falling from the sky and electrocuting giant robots with his fancy accessory, that promise altered ever so slightly. Who wouldn’t melt for ‘I think you might be the brightest star in the universe’?
Herself a bit starstruck by the sudden revelation of intelligent life in other parts of the universe, Darcy hadn’t blamed her boss for latching on to the blonde hunk that had been quite literally thrown at her feet, but she couldn’t call herself surprised when Jane’s response to Thor rapidly cooled from a boil to a simmer after the first rush of endorphins and adrenaline passed. Down to the marrow of her bones, Jane was a scientist: calm, collected, and crazy intelligent. Sure, Thor had those godly biceps, but how much were they worth in the grand scheme of things? Not much if Thor’s two-year-long absence was anything to go by.
Darcy had not so subtly thanked the heavens for taking Thor back to Asgard before he’d had the opportunity to smash more earthenware. Sanity could finally return to New Mexico, so that Darcy could finish her internship in peace and add those pesky science credits to her name. By the end of her first semester as Jane Foster’s intern, she’d set her heart on pursuing a doctorate in sociology. Her topic? A study in the psychological and social ramifications of living with an unconventional soulmark.
Yeah, crazy what path acceptance could lead you to.