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The dreams started the day after he woke up from the ice. They weren’t anything like ones he’d had before the plane had gone down. Those were always fiery battlefields and fights to save the world or quiet moments with his mom and Bucky and sneaking kisses with Peggy.
These were … Steve wasn’t really even sure how to describe them. Horrible and traumatic and he was certain he wasn’t even him in these dreams. He couldn’t remember everything by the time he awoke, but he knew there was dancing and fighting and standing in lines with a group of little girls. And was he a little girl in these dreams? He wasn’t entirely sure — he thought so, but he never really saw himself. All he knew was he would wake up with his heart hammering in his chest and his breath coming out in pants and his body gripped in terror.
He wanted to ask someone about them. If they were normal? If they meant something more? But he wasn’t sure who in this new world would be best to ask or who he trusted enough to ask.
But then, a few weeks after the dreams started, he remembered something, something that Peggy had told him once. About dreams she would have that didn’t belong to her.
“I wish you were my soulmate,” she had told him at the time. “But the dreams I’m having aren’t yours.”
He and Peggy had both looked down at his wrist then — at his smooth, pale wrist that was a far contrast to most everyone else’s wrists with their small etched drawings that matched someone else’s. Like the one on Peggy’s wrist that matched a man who wasn’t him.
Soul neutral. That’s what he was. Destined to be alone in the world and not to share his life with any one particular person. He could still fall in love and get married and be happy; it just wasn’t ever going to be like what other people had.
He had accepted that a long, long time ago. Except now — these dreams he was having. He knew for sure they weren’t his. But how he could dream share with another person if there wasn’t another person to dream share with?
He looked down at his wrist, holding it up to the light to study it closely. Ever since he’d woken up, it did appear like there was maybe a dark patch there that hadn’t been there before, but it looked more like a bruise than a soul mark, and none of the many doctors that he’d seen seemed to think it was anything important.
He pressed a finger to the mark. It didn’t hurt and it didn’t disappear, but no, he was fooling himself. If he’d had a soulmark, wouldn’t he have had it before now?
Maybe there was another explanation for the dreams, he told himself, and he tried not to feel hopeful that maybe he had a soulmate after all, that maybe the mark just didn’t appear until now because the person he was meant to be with hadn’t been born before.
--
Time went on, but the dreams kept coming. If he could call them dreams. They were really more like nightmares. But from what he had managed to learn from other people, most shared dreams between soulmates were happy and pleasant. But maybe there was a reason for that, too. After all, his own dreams weren’t pleasant, so if he did have a soulmate, they probably weren’t having the best time reliving his memories either.
But it didn’t really matter. None of the dreams were clear enough to give him a real idea of who his soulmate might be, and if anyone was having dreams about super soldier serums and being frozen in ice, they weren’t saying either.
For a brief while, after he and the other Avengers defeated the Chitauri, he wondered if perhaps his soulmate was Natasha. He knew his soulmate — if that’s who the dreams really were from — was someone trained to fight, and some of the moves in his dreams seemed to match what she could do, but he didn’t really have a way to ask her.
Sometimes, when he spotted her at the Triskelion, he tried to glance at her wrist, but it was always covered, and if she thought of him as anything more than a guy she once saved the world with, she wasn’t showing it.
And then one day, Fury called him to his office. Natasha was there when he arrived, looking none too happy.
“I’m assigning you both as partners,” Fury told them.
Natasha scowled. Steve stared at Fury in surprise.
“What about Barton?” he asked.
“He’s taking some time off,” Fury replied. “You two will be good for each other. Romanoff will show you how we do things here.”
“I look forward to it,” Steve said.
Natasha didn’t say anything.
A day later, the two of them set up a sparring session in the one of the SHIELD gyms. He caught her wrist at one point, flung her over his shoulder. In the split second it took her to get back up, he finally got a good look — completely pale and unblemished.
Natasha didn’t have a soulmate. Not Barton, which he had thought the first time he’d seen them together, and definitely not him.
He felt his heart sink at the thought, but it was just as well, he told himself. He didn’t need that type of complication when the world was so new to him and a lot of things about it needed fixing, and it would be really awkward to be partners with his soulmate. Besides, if he really did have a soulmate, he would figure it out eventually. Maybe Natasha could help him.
--
The dreams still didn’t stop. At least a couple times a week, he would be back in the nightmarish world with the dancing and the fighting and the pure terror racing through him.
He began to wonder if the dreams belonged to someone else at SHIELD. It made sense that this mystery person would be someone involved in the type of life he now found himself in.
He started to become obsessed with staring at people’s wrists — always checking them out, but for what? The mark on his wrist wasn’t defined enough to actually be able to match someone else’s. A side-effect of the serum, a doctor had told him when he finally got up the courage to ask. It was trying to heal his skin, and that included a soulmark, if it was in fact was one.
But Steve still couldn’t help looking. If he was having the dreams of his soulmate, then they were most likely having his, and since most of his involved life before the ice, it couldn’t be too long before they figured it out.
Or maybe they had figured it out and just didn’t want him to know?
He mentioned this to Natasha once. She looked at him almost sadly as the words came out of his mouth.
“Anyone would be lucky to be a soulmate with you, Steve,” she said quietly. “I’m sure if you have a match out there, they aren’t hiding because of you.”
“They would have to know, though,” he said in exasperation. “Why wouldn’t they say something?”
“Maybe it’s complicated,” Natasha said. “Maybe they think they aren’t good enough for you.”
Steve almost snorted. “That seems unlikely.”
Natasha shook her head at him and sighed. “Oh, Steve,” she said.
--
The dreams were almost always the same — the same fighting, the same dancing, the same line of girls, the same sense of terror. Until the night they weren’t. Until the night Ultron messed with their heads.
That night, the dreams changed, became clearer, became more distinct. He saw his own vision — dancing and Peggy and everyone disappearing — and he saw his soulmate’s — ballet shoes and an operation and a woman with a stern expression and an even sterner voice telling him, “You are made of marble.”
He woke up with a gasp — and a clarity that had long been missing. He didn’t knowwhy yet, but he knew he had found the truth.
He got up from his bed and made his way to the kitchen, feeling like this was the moment he had been waiting for his whole life.
Natasha was in the kitchen when he got there, standing barefoot in a long t-shirt that was probably Clint’s and shorts that were probably Laura’s, drinking a glass of water. Her hair was tousled and she looked pale in the glow of the florescent lights. She stared at him for a long time when he walked into the room, neither one of them moving nor speaking.
And then finally he said it.
“That was the Red Room.”
She didn’t move for a few more seconds, just kept staring at him, and he wondered if she was going to deny it, to tell him she didn’t know what he was talking about, but then she nodded. The barest hint of a dip of her chin, but enough to tell him what he needed to know.
“Yes,” she said quietly, her voice barely more than a hint.
Something came over him. He was expecting anger — so much time together and she never said a word — or maybe relief, that he had finally found the one person he had been looking for, but it was different than either of those — a feeling of love and affection he had never felt before.
He wanted to pull her into his arms, to hold her against him, but he needed something first. He needed to know.
“You should have told me,” he said, not unkindly. He knew she knew he didn’t mean about her past.
Natasha shrugged.
“How long have you known?” he asked her.
She met his gaze. “Since the night we defeated the Chitauri,” she said. “I had dreams all my life — I’d wake up cold and shivering and I wouldn’t know why — but I didn’t put it together until then.”
He glanced down at her wrist. Her pale, unmarked wrist. “You don’t have a mark.”
She glanced down as well, as though confirming this truth. “The Red Room,” she said. “Soulmates are considered a weakness. They get rid of our marks when we’re children so we can’t find our match that way.”
“All those times I asked you …”
Natasha smiled sadly. “I know. But I couldn’t.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
She met his eyes, took a deep breath. “You deserve someone better than me.”
He didn’t think, just spoke. “There’s no one better than you, Nat.”
“Steve …” She looked away from him. He moved closer to her, until he was right in front of her though still feet apart.
“I mean it,” he said quietly. “You are one of the bravest, strongest people I’ve ever met in my life. You’ve been through more than anyone should have to be, and you came out like this — good and kind and funny and smart and amazing.”
“Steve.” Natasha kept her head turned away from him, but he thought he saw a small hint of color on her cheeks.
He kept going, the words he had been wanting to say for so long finally pouring forth. “Soulmate or not,” he told her. “It’s you I want.”
She turned back to him, her eyes wide. And then she did something he didn’t expect — she threw herself into his arms, wrapping herself around him. He tightened his own arms around her, holding her close against him.
And as he did something inside him finally seemed to click into place, and he knew.
Their bond was sealed. He had found his soulmate after all, and she had been there all along.