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Kate doesn’t know when her soulmate mark appeared, but she can make an estimated guess. The problem, really, is that the mark showed up in a really out-of-the-way spot, right below her hairline on her neck, and it happened during a phase where she rarely, if ever, tied her hair up. There’s also the fact that she didn’t get her mark until she was fourteen, years after most of her peers had gotten theirs.
(She’d put on a show, pretending to be upset, but she never really cared much. No soulmate? Bully for her, she could find someone else that didn’t have one and they could be best friends forever. Besides, there were soulmate-less bars just like there were gay bars, and if she ever got old enough to want sex, that was totally an option.)
Another problem that cropped up even after she’d gotten the mark, though, was that she had no idea what it said. It wasn’t in English. It wasn’t in a human language at all. The markings didn’t match up with anything she’d ever seen.
“Markings frequently appear in the speaker’s native language, regardless of what language the words are spoken in. So even if, say, a German says the words “how do you do?” in English, the soul mark will appear in German.” The specialist her father took her to told her, after questions started cropping up at home and at school. “Your soulmate might be an alien, or speak some obscure, nearly extinct human language. I’ll take some pictures and contact some people if you want, and see where that goes.”
When she finally got a translation, she almost laughed at how mundane it was.
Who’s next?
She got some more connections through the specialist and, half out of curiosity, just began studying the alien language in her spare time. Kree was difficult, but it was a good distraction when she needed one.
When she actually heard the phrase said, it didn’t even register (not for years). She later figured that it only made sense, given her profession; of course she met her soulmate while he was trying to kill her.
o.o.o.o.o
Noh-Varr wasn’t born in a universe that had soulmates, but the Earth and its magics claimed him scant days after his arrival, and he found the words on the back of one leg. Plex pointed them out and translated them, once he got back to the ship, English words saying something strangely comforting that nonetheless caused him dread.
Hey, Noh-Varr, right? He’s almost done. Just a bit longer and you’ll be free again, so just sit tight for a little longer, okay?
Free of what? He couldn’t know, not with how many times he was captured or given something else to tie him down, and he barely believed in the idea that a few words scrawled onto his skin with magic could possibly know something quite this important.
When he finally heard the words, he didn’t know who said them. He was unconscious and in a haze of pain, and only barely recognized that they were being said by someone with a higher-than-average voice, and… that was it.
They were all gone by the time he woke up anyway, so he didn’t even get a chance to ask.
o.o.o.o.o
By the time Kate saw Noh-Varr again, she’d already met lots of Kree other than him. The idea that he might have been ‘hers’ (she hated that way of phrasing it, but it was the shortest) barely even crossed her mind. He was just a pretty, slightly dorky, very dangerous boy that she met in a club and decided to take out for a spin.
(She hadn’t done casual sex or one-night stands with strangers before. It was new. Exciting, even. She decided she liked it.)
It was only the next morning, after she’d woken up to the sound of a running shower and the sight of the Earth spinning slowly below her, that she’d noticed the blur of words gracing the back of her bedmate’s thigh.
Familiar words.
So when she noted that he was the one that kicked all their asses way back when, she wasn’t surprised by the acknowledgement from him.
She kept her tone casual as she continued talking, but scrolled back through her memory as she tried to remember what it was that he’d first said to her.
Her memory was eidetic. It was how she’d remembered the code to get the original Young Avengers out of that “training room,” how she’d gotten so good at so many martial arts so fast, how she’d managed to learn Kree as well as she did.
The first thing Noh-Varr had said to her, to all of them, right after supposedly killing Xavin, was “Who’s next?”
No wonder she hadn’t made the connection. He’d been threatening to kill them all.
(She wasn’t sure how she felt about Noh-Varr, but he didn’t seem too bad yet.)
“Hey, Noh? I want you to take a look at something.” Kate said, and beckoned him closer. He hesitated for a second, still caught up in his dancing, but came to sit down next to her on the bed anyway, visibly curious. She smiled at him, nervous (it wasn’t like she ever really expected this day to come; she’d been perfectly happy not knowing), and then turned around and pulled her hair up, showing him the nape of her neck and the small, alien words scrawled across it.
She felt Noh’s fingers brush lightly across her skin, could imagine him mouthing the words to himself as a tiny breath of air just barely hit her.
“I… I said that, didn’t I?” Noh-Varr asked, sounding not entirely certain. “I don’t remember my days under their control very well, but… I think I said that. Right after I nearly killed the Skrull.”
“Xavin. Their name was Xavin.” Kate told him quietly. No-one had seen Xavin in years.
“I didn’t know that.” His thumb brushed across her skin again. “Does that mean that… the words on my leg…?”
“Yeah, that was me.” Kate said, letting her hair fall back down and turning to face Noh-Varr again. “I know we don’t know each other very well yet, but we must have run into each other again for a reason, right?”
“Probably.” Noh-Varr agreed, but he looked uncomfortable. Kate leaned forward and put a hand on his knee.
“Listen, if you want to pretend this never happened, we can. I’m cool with that.” She was, actually. She’d never had a good track record with romance anyway. “But I’m willing to give this a shot if you are.”
Noh-Varr looked down at her hand with an expression approaching confusion, and then placed his own on top of it. “I… suppose that I can do that much.”
“You can back out at any time if you feel like you need to.” Kate reminded him. “Seriously, I spent years thinking I’d never find my soulmate; I know how to live my life without one, and I’ve always seen these marks as more of a guide to the likeliest match than a surefire way to find a person’s one true love.”
(Not that she thought she’d ever really felt romantic love. It was a difficult thing to gauge, but even then she’d dated before, even now with her apparent soulmate, romance was… not something she could imagine herself feeling.)
Noh-Varr looked her in the eyes and then smiled a bit again. “Okay. Let us… let’s ‘give this a shot,’ then.”
Kate smiled up at him, leaned in for a kiss (hey, his lips were soft), and closed her eyes…
And that was the point at which the Skrulls attacked.