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The Soldier sees red, once.
It shoots across the sky like a star, bright and brilliant, burning through the perpetual night of someone who's never seen his soulmate.
It startles him.
Not enough to throw him visibly off guard, but he makes a noise of confusion that is ignored anyway so at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the world is still black and white and grey because he'll never get to know his soulmate enough to have the rest of the colors.
Red. Red suits him, though.
The Soldier discovers that it's the colour of blood.
And until very recently, he'd always assumed it was the colour of death as well. But then a target's eyes glaze over and it's not red anymore.
Death is not red.
It drips from split lips and broken skin and cracked knuckles and bullet wounds.
And while the Soldier has been coerced into taking up a mantle of death, it is not death he sees when he sees red.
Whoever his soulmate is, they've given him the ability to see the color of life; bloody and angry, stubborn and relentless. It suits the Soldier. Hydra dress him in all black to hide it better, but when the tactical gear comes off and the Soldier is allowed to shed the shadow and the night, his skin is red from the blood, skin tacky with it. For whatever that's worth, he is a man masquerading as a weapon and he is alive before he is anything else. It's a reminder they cannot take from him, not when they send him out to bleed and be bled.
It's a comforting thought, this reminder, that the Soldier is not a machine they constructed, not a creature summoned from the ether to reign destruction at their behest. He is a man, and they had taken him and twisted him, and made him something else.
His reflection is black and white and grey, and his anger, his despair is red. The mirror lays in shards in the sink.
The Soldier doesn't remember when last he felt something other than nothing, but it started with red.
It started, impossibly with Tony Stark flying across the sky after his retribution in Afghanistan. But this is something he doesn't realize. Not yet. Not yet.
The Soldier sees Iron Man in combat, on a television screen during a recon mission. The armour is red, red, red except for places where it's not. The centre of his chest, the most blatant spot. He wonders at it, wonders what color it is. If anyone knows. If anyone would tell him.
There's no one to ask.
Not even the Captain, when he finds the Soldier after Project Insight.
The Soldier is not who the Captain wants, that man is long gone, and one wrong move, one wrong play is not something he can risk. Not when Iron Man's red-red-red isn't something the Captain respects.
The Soldier finds himself wary of the Captain for that alone.
He can't tell if it's survival instinct or intuition or something else entirely. He doesn't care to examine it. His jont with the Captain will be a temporary one. The Soldier has been found and he must adapt in order to live.
Even if he doesn't deserve to.
The quality of the video is awful but the red. The red is bright against the snow.
He knows why Iron Man is upset. Can feel the force of his grief and his anger and his devastation roiling within the nucleus at the star of him.
With his helmet removed, the man beneath it -- Tony Stark -- is vulnerable, black and white and grey, and wrong, wrong, wrong. It wasn't supposed to be like this, is the flicker of a thought, and the Soldier is suddenly desperate for it as he reaches for the black hole in the centre of Tony's chest and tries to pry it out because it doesn't belong, not there, not there. Like an infection, the Soldier has the wild thought that the darkness will spread in him, and for whatever reason the Soldier thinks -- he thinks -- that Tony is meant to be in color.
And then.
Then he is.
But that comes later.
"I'm sorry," the Soldier is saying, harsh and quiet, his fingers are slipping around the black hole of Tony's chest. He can't pull it out. Tony will die. He doesn't want Tony to die. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
He doesn't know what expression he's making, or why his face feels wet, but whatever Tony sees, takes the fight right out of him. In a gust of breath, Tony whispers, "You killed her. You killed my mom."
"I'm sorry," he replies, and means it because he hadn't wanted to do the things he did.
He doesn't want the Captain to pull him away from Tony either. Doesn't want to leave him on the ground and the cold and the black and white and grey of this tomb that echoes with his mother's cries. He doesn't want to go, and Tony. Tony looks like he doesn't want the Soldier to go either.
The Soldier refuses to look at the Captain, and maybe that's why he doesn't notice until he's looking in the mirror later that he can see blue.
He knows what it means.
But when he looks for Tony. Pictures. Videos. Articles. Anything. Tony is still black and white and grey.
The Soldier has heard of unrequited soulmates, but he never thought the universe could be so needlessly cruel.
It's not until a year after, arriving at the Compound where the grounds are flush with red flowers, and Tony is waiting for him, does the treacherous human heart of the Soldier thump-thump-thump.
With a beckoning incline of his head, the Soldier follows Tony into his workshop, his lab.
The world contained within hums and breathes -- in shades of red and blue between threads of black and white and grey. Not for the first time, the Soldier wonders how anyone could have thought of Tony as the Merchant of Death when all he coaxes is life.
"You tried to take something from me the last time we met," Tony says, "I want to know why."
"It didn't belong," is his answer.
"You couldn't see the color."
"No."
"The first color you ever saw..."
"Red," he says. "It was the color of your suit, the first time I saw you." And even though it had taken awhile to click, "And everytime I met you after."
Which is how the Soldier knows that Tony could see red too.
His lips quirk. "The Tom Ford?"
"It was a nice tie," the Soldier offers which makes him chuckle, husky and sweet. The Soldier likes the sound. It matches the tone of Tony's skin, now that he knows it.
"The arc reactor," he says, "it keeps me alive."
"It wasn't red."
"No, it would've been too much red," is Tony's sardonic reply, paired with a quirk of his brows. The Soldier can see the shades of brown at his eyes now. He feels flushed. Tony can probably see it beneath his skin.
Reaching for something round, small enough to fit in his palm, big enough that it bulges, Tony says, "This is yours."
The Soldier can do nothing but accept, and finds what was once a black hole in his hand. It's white around the edges, but a frosty blue in the middle. "You wanted it so bad," Tony says, shoving his hands into his pockets. "I figured you should get to keep it. There's a case," he adds, almost absentminded. "It's...somewhere, if you want it."
"You don't...need it?" the Soldier asks, tentative, gaze flickering to Tony to take him in, as if he can measure the man's health based on the pallor of his skin now that he can differentiate. The Soldier thinks he could, if he given the opportunity to learn.
With an indulgent smile, Tony says, "Not anymore."
And then his eyes flick, and glow and they're blueblueblue. It's luminous, inhuman. And once the initial activation settles it's a familiar shade too.
The Soldier breathes, reverent, "We match."
And Tony smiles, small and shy, and asks, "Want to know what other colours are out there?"
"You asking to go steady?"
Tony quirks his brows in a tease, "You telling me that Brooklyn twang is real?"
The Soldier laughs and something in Tony's expression goes tender. "What?" He asks. "What color do you see?"
"Nothing I haven't seen before. Just. Hadn't seen you laugh before now. It's nice."
His cheeks flush, and with a grin, Tony adds with a wink, "Red's a good look on you."