Work Text:
His arm has a glow, even from the earliest days and Steve’s mother kisses his brow and tells him how lucky he is. He feels lucky because he has her, the faint glow of a soulmark under his skin doesn’t feel like anything too special, after all lots of people have that.
When he meets Bucky it glows brighter, and he’s eight years old and drags Bucky back to his mum and declares them soulmates. His mother smiles indulgently, offers Bucky a piece of chocolate from the tin and while they nibble on the edges, trying to make it last, his mother tells them that they’ll always be close and maybe one day they’ll be soulmates, but they’re not yet.
“I don’t get it,” Bucky says with a pout and folded arms, and Sarah Rogers ruffles his hair like she’s his own mother.
“You can’t have a soulmate if your soul isn’t grown up,” she explains kindly.
“Well I want Steve to be my soulmate,” her argues. They’re both so little that Sarah wants to pinch their cheeks and brush away their worries with what small luxuries they can afford, but also too big to let her get away with it. It’s a shame, because she thinks her son’s new best friend could do with his hair being messed up.
“Well then you had better work hard to be good enough, I’m not letting just anyone be my son’s soulmate,” she challenges. Steve sighs like he’s an old man already tired from his mother’s meddling, but when she sends Bucky home, after they’ve both stopped to compare the brightness of their glows, Steve hugs her middle and helps her clean their apartment before her shift. His glow fades down to a reasonable level while they’re apart.
When they’re in their late teens they glow enough to light a room when too close, but they glow around other people too. Bucky seems to flare and fade with more people than Steve, but he always comes back after a dance and throws his arm around Steve’s shoulders to check on him and reignite his glow before he finds another dance partner.
“You’ll scare off all the smart ones if they think you’re taken,” Steve warns him one time.
Bucky laughs and squeezes him lightly, “Can’t be too smart if they see the fade and still worry. Besides if they can’t beat you, why would I care?”
“They can’t beat me if you don’t get to know their names,” Steve argues back, but he doesn’t mind. Bucky is so much more than anyone else and he’s okay being the closest to a match Bucky has, even if they need to wear wraps when they go to see a film.
“Why doesn’t it lock onto you?” Bucky asks one day, when the sun has gone and Steve’s at the table drawing by the glow of his mark. It’s cheaper than a light, and although it moves with his arm he’s used to it. He’s been using it for so long now it’s natural.
Steve twists his mouth, “Maybe it’s just not for us.” He regrets the words after they’ve been said, but he can see from the look in Bucky’s eyes that he’s already thought them himself.
“Alright then,” Bucky rattles around the cupboard and sets a cup of the home brew Mr Ricci gave them in return for helping him move, “to nearly soulmates.” He holds his cup high, and Steve raises his own to clink them together. They drink the night away, art and sleep forgotten for the company of almost soulmates.
“They’ll have to be amazing,” Bucky breaths hot and damp against Steve’s head when the collapse in a pile of laugher, “to be better than you.”
Steve closes his eyes against the hurt of the idea, of someone more perfect for Bucky than he is. “They will be,” he promises because that’s how it works.
When the war swamps them Steve see’s Bucky off with a lump in his chest then draws at his little table to the dying light of his mark as Bucky gets further and further away. When there’s no light left he fumbles through the room and blind finds what’s left of Bucky’s gin and drinks it down and cries and chokes on the misery. In the morning he pulls himself together, wraps his arm although the glow is gone, and meets another day.
It doesn’t light up again until he’s pulling his best friend off a dirty operating table in the middle of a HYDRA weapons facility. He feels it flare to life again, feels the mark of his soul come back to life, but he doesn’t have time to look under the wrap until days later when they walk back into Colonel Philips’ camp. He finds an empty tent and strips his upper layers until all he’s wearing are his pants and a wrap that barely hides the glow under it. There’s light seeping from the edges, his skin bright and illuminated. Slowly, reverently, Steve unwraps his upper arm, and more and more light suffuses the room until there is nothing but bright brilliance.
It is brighter than any mark he’s seen before, brighter than Old Angus and Mrs Comtois who everyone knew were real soulmates. Brighter than Betty Jones’s that faded when her husband died on the front two weeks after being deployed.
Even half a camp away the glow’s too bright to hide and he knows he’s locked on Bucky Barnes at last.
On the frontline it’s no surprise Bucky never takes pea coat off yet alone his wrap, but through the course of the Howling Commando’s adventures Steve manages to see everyone else’s bare arms so he knows it’s intentional. Intentional because it glows as bright as Steve’s, or because of something else he never has time to find out. One morning he’s wondering how to pull apart the puzzle that is his best friend and that night he’s sitting in a field with a prisoner of war, his wrap torn away in a frenzy, and the light of his glow fading until they sit in darkness. No-one says anything, no-one dares, not even the HYDRA scientist with his quick little eyes.
70 years later Natasha touches his right bicep lightly, spiders her fingers along the sleeve of his t-shirt and says, “You need to cover that before it becomes a problem, Rogers,” and he looks down and see’s nothing but skin.
He’s confused because Natasha doesn’t get things wrong, “That’s never going to be a problem,” he explains. Then orders the STRIKE team to get ready to drop in ten. Natasha drifts away but Steve finds a wrap in his locker when they return from the Lemurian Star.
Steve rips his jacket off the moment they’re at a safe distance from the STRIKE team’s van. The other people in the room flinch away from the blinding light but Steve nearly laughs. The sound comes out choked, horrible, and Sam is wrapping his hand around Steve’s upper arm, around his glow, and asking if he’s okay in that steady voice, again and again, until Steve is calm enough to focuses on his friend, calm enough to listen to his questions and start to answer. Sam talks him through it, and even as he talks the glow fades and brightens like a candle flickering in and out of life, Sam’s eyes stay firmly locked on Steve’s. Even when, like it was never there, the glow goes dead Sam is right in front of him.
“He’s not dead,” Natasha says quickly when no-one else can talk. “It’s still there,” she touches the mark the same way she had a few days before, and Steve can see the faintest of glows still. Barely visible to the naked eye, but it’s there, a shimmer of connection that death and 70 years hasn’t killed.
And Steve knows that once HYDRA has been stopped he will do everything he can to save his soulmate, to bring Bucky back.
He doesn’t know what his name is, although the target ‘Steve Rogers’ called him Bucky. He doesn’t know what his next move is, although he knows it is to run. He doesn’t know why he saved the target, although there was a screaming part of him that knew he had to. He doesn’t know why his arm feels like it’s on fire when he has not suffered that damage.
He tends to his wounds with brutal efficiency, strips his armour off and stops when the room lights up like a supernova.
He knows it’s his arm, he knows the skin on the upper right side of his arm is glowing. Like there’s a light suffused under the surface of his skin. He does not know what it means. Only that it burns a little. Only that the room is washed white by the intensity of it. Only that it happened when the target lifted the beam off him. Only that it happened again when he was trying to punch his way through the targets face. Only that it doesn’t seem to fade. Only that it makes his chest feel tight, and his heart too big, and there’s something that flutterers though him and makes him feel warm and safe- even if he doesn’t know what it all means.
He will find out.
In the meantime he wraps his wounds and wraps his arm until not a bit of light escapes, and then he packs a bag and makes himself disappear.