Chapter Text
“Soulmates aren't the ones who make you happiest, no. They're instead the ones who make you feel the most. Burning edges and scars and stars. Old pangs, captivation and beauty. Strain and shadows and worry and yearning. Sweetness and madness and dreamlike surrender. They hurl you into the abyss. They taste like hope.” Victoria Erickson
“Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.” ― Robert Brault
Kate feels like she’s gotten run over by a semi.
It takes a few moments for the events of yesterday to filter through her brain, for her to remember Iron Man getting thrown on her. Tony Stark, what is the use of having repulsors or whatever if you’re not going to use them to not crush other people?
Someone bangs on her door, and then Tasha barges in, Banner in tow.
“What the hell, Tasha? Privacy, bro!”
“Did you just wake up?” Tasha snaps. “Well, we need you to wake up and see if you notice anything different.”
“Yeah, I noticed that I feel like an idiot in armor got thrown on top of me.”
“Sorry about that,” Banner rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “I did warn them.”
“And yet, I am the one injured,” Kate reminds him, throwing out her arms. “What? Did someone come in and write on my arms last night?”
There is writing down the insides of both of her arms, elegant if sharp script on the left, ending at the tip of her middle finger; neat, bold print on the right from her wrist past her elbow. It’s familiar but she can’t quite place it. “Is this a joke? Or some sort of Avengers hazing? I don’t get it.”
“We all woke up with these—words,” Natasha starts.
“The marks seem to have appeared around two in the morning local time,” Banner explains. “I was awake at that time and felt an odd—shock, I guess. Every Avenger has a mark—or several,” he takes off his glasses to wipe them on his shirt. “The X-Men are reporting markings as well, and some of our international friends.”
“Every Avenger in the city is meeting here in an hour to debrief with Hill,” Natasha adds. “So up and at ‘em, and make sure your team is there.”
“Do we have any idea what they are?” Kate asks, something nagging at her, something familiar about the way Breathe, Hawkeye, we’ll figure it out is written down her right arm.
“The first things certain individuals are saying to us,” Banner pulls his collar down and she can see Doc, you've got poptart guts in your hair in what might be Darcy's handwriting. “This was the first thing Miss Lewis said to me this morning. And the first thing I said to her was—on her hip,” he blushes a little. “We’re not sure what this means.”
“Did you say you felt a shock?” Kate’s brain is finally attempting to fire on all cylinders. “What kind of shock? Like a bad kind? Or like a pop-rocks kind?”
“Wait, the first thing she said to you?” Natasha cuts in. “You didn’t say it like that when you talked to me—"
“It didn’t feel bad, or painful, exactly,” Banner frowns. “Do you have an idea about what caused this?”
“I might, yeah,” Kate is reluctant to admit. “I don’t know what it is—"
“I might,” Tasha says. “Look, do you read fanfiction?”
“Oh my God,” Kate drops her head into her hands.
“What?” Banner looks confused.
“Oh. My God,” Kate repeats.
Banner still looks confused. “Fanfiction? What does that have to do with—"
Kate somehow manages to shove both of them out of her quarters before she scrambles for her phone.
“Hello?” He picks it up after it rings for almost a minute. “Kate? Everything okay?”
“Billy, get yourself down to the Tower right the fuck now. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.”
..
“So,” Billy looks sheepish when he and Teddy get to the Tower ten minutes later. “I may have, um. Done some inadvertent magic?”
“You don’t say?” Kate feels like an angry crocodile, ten seconds away from snapping someone’s head off.
“You, too?” Billy turns a little green.
“Oh, me, and you, and the Black Widow, and the Hulk, and about a metric fuckton of Avengers and X-Men, and who the hell else knows.”
“Oh, crap. I thought it was just me and Teddy.”
“Billy,” Kate is very proud of how calm she is. “Did you—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—did you cast a spell that leaves us with marks that are the first words our soulmates are going to say to us?”
“Maybe?”
“As far as we can tell, yes,” Teddy crosses his arms. “It wasn’t on purpose.”
“It wasn’t!” Billy has a panicked look in his eyes. “I swear, Kate. The only thing I can come up with is that Teddy and I were talking about how hard it’s been for you guys—the team—to meet people who are right for you. And right before I nodded off, I sort of thought, hey, I wish there was some way we could know who we were supposed to be with and then…” he gestures. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“Can you reverse it?”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Ok, but what are the rules?”
“For us, it’s seems like it’s going to be the next thing your soulmate says to you,” he looks a little terrified, which, well, good. “The first thing Teddy said to me this morning was what was on my chest. What do—what do you have?”
Kate pulls off her shooting glove, pushing her sleeves past her elbow, both glad that it is easily accessible and mad that it’s going to be very obvious to others.
“Was wondering what was with the glove,” Teddy comments.
“Tommy!” Billy snags his brother. “Say something to Kate.”
“Um, what the hell’s going on here?”
Kate shakes her head. “Don’t force it, Billy.”
“That wasn’t-?”
“Nope.”
Tasha choses this moment to stick her head into the room and say, “Meeting’s starting. Now, Hawkeye,” Tasha snags her wrist and drags her bodily from the room, apparently counting on the fact that her team will follow her like baby ducklings.
Tasha deposits her at the middle of the table, next to Steve, which is actually nice? Like saying ‘you have the same weight as Captain America and we will respect what you say’.
“Breathe, Hawkeye,” Rogers squeezes her elbow, smiling down at her. “We’ll figure it out. All of us. Just breathe.”
Kate’s brain is screaming at her to say something! But the only thing she can come up with is oh fuck oh fuck shit shit shit and that’s not exactly the first thing she wants to say to Captain fucking America, the man Billy’s fucking spell thinks is her fucking soulmate, Jesus fucking Christ—
But she does take a deep breath.
“We can do this, we can totally do this, between us we’ve got like, three magicians we can call,” she says, half to herself and maybe half to Steve. “Our teams have some of the most powerful individuals in the universe, we’ll totally be fine.”
“Wait,” Steve looks down at her. “Wait, what did you just say?”
Kate gives him a big, overly toothy smile. “Hi.”
“We’re fucked, aren’t we,” he tugs her close by her shoulder as Mr. Fantastic shoves past them.
“Oh, yeah.”
..
Kate’s initial thought that sitting next to Steve was a sign of respect is, apparently, wrong.
“It might be some sort of chemical—" McCoy is saying, and between Stark, McCoy, and Richards, Kate has been interrupted no less than five times. Even Steve looks a little annoyed on her behalf, and he looks like he’s getting ready to intervene when she slams her hands on the table.
“Will you all shut up?”
“Miss Bishop,” McCoy says. “Would you mind?”
“It’s Hawkeye, for one. And yes, I do mind. Since I actually know what’s going on here, I’d appreciate your attention, so we don’t waste time with any more theories and can start getting answers.”
McCoy, at least, looks interested and properly chagrined. “My apologies, Hawkeye.”
“It’s magic.” She says, raising her hand to stem Tony’s questions. “Wiccan inadvertently bespelled us to,” she wrinkles her nose. “Um, be able to identify, shall we say, compatible mates.”
“Compatible mates?” McCoy repeats.
“Soulmates,” Natasha clarifies. “What we have? Soulmarks.”
Billy looks at them all before hiding his head in his hands. “I didn’t realize I was doing it. It was right before I fell asleep and I just—I said I wished there was a way for people to know who they were supposed to be with.”
“Seriously, do none of you read fanfiction?” Teddy asks with a significant look at Natasha. “The person you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life with. Can be platonic or romantic. You can have multiple soulmates—"
“What we have here is a first words soulmate situation,” Natasha says. “The first words your soulmate—or presumed soulmate—says to you appear on your skin.”
“Wait,” Banner starts to look a little green, in the going-to-be-violently-ill way, not the Hulk-out way. “Soulmate?”
“Soulmate?” Steve looks from Banner to Billy to Bucky to Kate, stares at her.
"I'm confused," Tony waves his hand to silence them. "How does the Black Widow know so much about fanfiction?"
"I'm confused," Bobbi mimics. "Why are you focusing on the least important part of what Natasha's saying?"
“In the interest of fairness to Wiccan,” Strange sweeps in with the drama required of the Sorcerer Supreme, effectively interrupting the outbreak of bickering, “what testing I’ve done to the enchantment, accidental though it may be, indicates that it is a sound spell. The matches are not simply his projection as to who would pair well with whom.”
“Of course not,” Wanda glowers. “He’s not a child smashing dolls together, saying, ‘now kiss!’ he’s a grown man.”
“I don’t like this,” Barnes leans back in his chair, glaring at the ceiling. “I don’t need anybody telling me what to do or how to feel. Not some kid, not about who to love.”
“Bucky, in the short time I’ve known you, you’ve proven to be the most contrary bastard I’ve ever met, so I don’t expect this to affect you too damn much,” Kate shoots back. “Nobody’s telling you anything. At best, consider it a—a gentle suggestion. Right, Billy?”
“Right,” Billy looks like he wishes the floor would open up and swallow him whole, which, tough, man. We can’t always get what we want.
“Soulmate doesn’t equal love,” Strange starts to explain.
“And no one is saying you have to act on it—right, Hawkeye?” Steve looks over at her.
“Right, exactly. And Barnes, if you did what people suggested you do even some of the time, I would be less three cracked ribs and a bruised humerus. So keep that in mind, okay?” Kate leans forward. “Literally. Literally all you had to do was hold your position—"
“Hawkeye!” Steve snaps. “The topic at hand. We’ve got enough problems today without borrowing yesterday’s.”
“There weren’t any problems yesterday,” Bucky mutters, like she’s not sitting three feet from him with a black eye. “It was the right move, Steve—"
“That wound up provoking the Hulk into throwing Iron Man on me?”
“How was I supposed to know that was going to happen, Hawkeye?”
Kate feels like someone punched her in the gut. Left arm, lovely script, How was I supposed to know that was going to happen, Hawkeye?
“By using your common sense—" she says, almost on autopilot.
“Hey!” Steve leans forward, cutting off Kate and Bucky’s line of sight to one another. She wonders if he does it consciously or unconsciously; if he’s figured out that if Kate and Bucky can’t see each other when they get on a roll, they don’t yell at one another; much like fighting cats. “We’ll discuss that later. Now, can we try and figure out this soulmate thing?”
“Unfortunately,” Strange continues as though nothing has interrupted him. “I haven’t yet been able to find a way to reverse the enchantment. Wiccan is—very powerful.”
“I’ll help, if I can. To fix it. Or—whatever needs to be done,” Billy says without hesitation.
“Thank you, Wiccan. Perhaps together, we can reverse it,” Strange nods, and Kate is thankful that at least one person has a level head about this because it’s certainly not her.
“I want to know what we’re going to do about the perpetrator,” Reed Richards' voice is low and dangerous. “That kind of power needs to be controlled.”
“Perpetrator?” Teddy stands, turning green and huge.
“Controlled?” A wind that only affects Wanda starts to whip her hair, the red light of her power building around her.
“You wanna go, Bendy Boy?” Agitated enough to be blurred at the edges, Tommy is vibrating with the effort to hold still.
“Guys, it’s fine—" Billy looks a little ashen.
“He’s on my team. It’s my responsibility.” Kate stares at Reed Richards, lets her glare drift to every member on the Fantastic Four side of the table. “He didn’t do this maliciously, or even consciously.” Her glare travels back to Bucky. “He is not telling you who to love, or whatever. Whatever our marks are, it’s not Wiccan playing matchmaker, because if it was I can think of more than one match that would be very different. The spell—or whatever we want to call it—is for soulmates, people who in some manner or another complement who we are on a fundamental level.”
“Obviously,” Strange says, droll. “I would not have pegged Hawkeye as my soulmate.”
As one, the room turns toward him.
“Um, what?” Kate manages, completely losing the thread of her righteous indignation.
“The other Hawkeye, Hawkeye,” Strange looks almost bored.
Every head whips towards Clint, and a smile spreads slowly across Kate’s face.
“Don’t say it, Hawkeye—" Clint warns.
“You wouldn’t have—" Kate starts, smirking.
“Don’t say it—"
“—pegged Hawkeye—"
“Dammit, Katie—"
“He said it.”
“Could we focus?” Sue Storm finally speaks up. “I think the real question we need to worry about is if this phenomenon is going to spread from us to civilians, and what we do if it is permanent.”
“I agree with Sue,” Hank says with a nod.
“You would,” Reed mutters mutinously.
“If the—soulmarks—are infectious, so to speak,” Hank says loudly, ignoring Richards, “Then we’re going to have to decide what we tell the world—but as Steve said, let’s not borrow trouble. I think our main focus should be on reversal.”
“We might also want to do some tests,” Tasha locks eyes with Teddy for a moment. “With volunteer marked pairs or groups. Are people who are marked linked, somehow? Is there a biological imperative to, to,” Tasha looks at all the faces staring at her, “Well, to bond.”
“Bond?” Reed frowns at her so hard he looks a little like a shar-pei.
“Have sex,” she clarifies.
A very small explosion seems to take place in the room. Reed Richards gets redder and redder, Johnny Storm actually flames on, Strange pinches the bridge of his nose, and Tony just grins.
“So, who are we—paired?—with?” Wolverine scratches lazily at his neck. “I’m guessing some of you know already.”
“I don’t think we need to share,” Johnny says, almost before Wolverine has stopped speaking. “That’s not necessary, right? Sharing?”
“I don’t think we should be required to share that information,” is Natasha’s opinion. “If, as a group, you decide to share—or participate in the tests-I think that would be fine, but there’s no reason to,” she shrugs. “Unless it starts affecting our work or our health.”
“Agreed,” Kate tilts her head towards Steve, who nods.
“Perhaps it would be safer for all of us if we—removed Mr. Kaplan’s powers.” Reed says, just as everyone's calmed down again.
The silence changes from resigned to stunned in an instant.
“Excuse me?” Kate is the first to find her voice. “You wanna say that again, Rubberman?”
Wolverine barks out a laugh.
And Magneto and Wanda are getting ready to start some shit, Kate can see the metal carafes and some of the furniture start to shake out of the corner of her eye, but Billy is also her teammate and, perhaps more importantly, her friend, which is why she feels it is her duty to launch herself across the table and punch Reed Richards right in his smug face.
She gets two blows in before something strong and cold slips around her waist, pulling her off of Richards.
She fights against it, throwing herself against the restraint, spitting out, “And he’s Wiccan to you, you insufferable asshat—" pushing against the metal around her waist in earnest now, Magneto is rude, thinking he can dole out all the hurt for that bullshit—before realizing that the metal is arm-shaped…and attached to Bucky Barnes.
“Jesus,” he sounds a little stunned, continuing to pull her back from Richards as Tony helps him up. “You’re as bad as Steve was, picking fights with guys three times his size.”
“I wanna see if he bounces when I throw him out the window,” she growls, struggling against his metal arm. “Let me go, Barnes.”
“Doll, I would be happy to let you do that, but it would drag out this meeting and I think we’d all like to get on with our day.”
Reed Richards is glaring at her, a bruise starting to darken around his eye.
“I will fuck you up so bad,” she hisses, scratching at Bucky's arm to no avail.
“I’d like to see you try,” he snaps back.
“Magneto sort of likes me,” she says. “He’ll let me help.”
Magneto shrugs. “Like is a strong word, Hawkeye, but yes, I would.”
“Boom,” she says. “Watch your back, Richards. Ain’t nobody fresher than my motherfuckin’ clique.”
“Kate,” David shakes his head. “We talked about this. No. But,” he turns to Reed, “she’s right. You come near Billy, we'll—"
“You won’t come near Billy,” Tommy finishes.
The Young Avengers have closed ranks around Billy, and when Kate crosses her arms to convey, through gaze, just how much she wants to murder Reed, her elbow knocks against a cold metal arm.
That’s new.
What? Bucky mouths at her with a shrug.
Steve stands on Bucky’s other side.
And that’s how you shut down Reed Richards.
..
“Hawkeye, hang back?” Steve calls.
She and Hawkeye stop in the door, prompting a laugh from Steve. “Not you, Clint.”
She exchanges a few signs with him—You okay, girl-y?—
--I’ll be fine, go. Thanks.—
“So, gentlemen,” Kate sits crosses to them. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
Steve turns his hand towards her, and she sees her familiar chicken-scratch curling around his palm. It’s his shield-hand, and she supposes it might look like his shield to most people, but to her it looks a little like a bullseye. We can do this, we can totally do this, between us we’ve got like, three magicians we can call. She’d feel ickier about literally putting a target on him it if he didn’t literally march into battle with one strapped to his arm. He then unbuttons his shirt and pulls it open to reveal the same writing she’s got on her left arm stamped plainly over his heart, Up and at’em, punk.
“That sounds like the sort of thing that you say when you’re slapping someone’s ass,” Kate says. “Was there an accompanying ass slap?”
Steve turns beet red and Bucky laughs outright.
“Good to know,” she says, stripping off her shooting glove and rolling up her sleeves, presenting her arms to them.
“Wondered why you had that on,” Bucky tips his head towards her glove, reaching behind his neck to yank his shirt off.
Steve’s print curves from the top of Bucky’s right shoulder, down his collarbone to above his heart, Did you just wake up or have you been up all night?; her words radiate out from his bionic arm, broken into three parts and written between the scars that starburst out from where metal meets man Bucky, in the short time I’ve known you/ you’ve proven to be the most contrary bastard I’ve ever met/ so I don’t expect this to affect you too damn much.
“Sorry for calling you a contrary bastard,” Kate is the first to break the silence. “So, what are we thinking? Do we want to tell our respective teams?”
Steve shrugs.
“Don’t see how it’s their business,” Bucky says. “We made a decision that we don’t have to tell people unless things start to get weirder, then we don’t have to. Shouldn’t, to set an example.”
“Well, that’s great for you,” Kate tries to keep the bite out of her voice. “But my team isn’t like your team, and since I’m fairly certain that I’m part of the reason this happened—I might like to have someone to talk to this about.”
“Never said you couldn’t,” Bucky crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. “Just that you shouldn’t have to.”
“This is so ridiculous,” Kate says after they stare at each other in silence for a few minutes. “I’m going to kill Billy.”
“After you went to all that trouble to defend him?” Steve gazes at her, eyes half closed. “Nah. You wouldn’t.”
The silence is a little less awkward this time.
“So,” Bucky rocks back on his heels. “When do we, you know. Bond?” He waggles his eyebrows in what is maybe an attempt at being lascivious and succeeds only in making Kate laugh so hard she snorts. “C’mon, soulmates,” and the word doesn’t sound so odd in Bucky’s voice, “I owe one of you dinner for mission stuff and one of you dinner for drinking the last of the juice.”
“Can we do sushi?” Kate asks as they pile into the elevator. “Tasha told me you guys order the whole menu, and I want to see that.”
"You and Natalia talk about us?"