I've always been fascinated with the stories about soulmates (this is my second one on FF, even though it's the first time for this fandom) and when this idea popped into my head, I just HAD to write it down. Hopefully I can keep up with my muse on this one. ;)

Pairings (because FF only allows for 4 characters):

Tony Stark/Steve Rogers/Natasha Romanoff/Bruce Banner/Wanda Maximoff/Clint Barton/James "Bucky" Barnes, Thor/Jane

Darcy/Loki (this may just happen in my head and we may not ever see this pairing, but know that it's there)

Pietro Maximoff/Pepper Potts/Phil Coulson

James "Rhodey" Rhodes/Sam Wilson

A few things I changed from canon, first and foremost being that Tony's parents were killed when he was thirteen, and he was in the back seat at the time rather than at school. Second, I changed Clint's back story a bit from canon (in both comics and movies). A lot of stuff is just guesswork, since there wasn't a lot for Clint in the movies and I only know some from the comics because I used Wikipedia. Third, Bucky's birthday is March 1917, and Steve's is July 1920, but I'm pushing Bucky so that they're both in 1920. I just want them to be closer in age, because it makes a lot more sense. ;) Fourth, all of the stuff with Wanda and Pietro happens earlier, so that they get control over their abilities around the same time the Chitauri invade New York. Fifth, because it was kept secret who Iron Man really was, Natasha was never sent in to spy on Tony, but he figured out the new arc reactor core, anyway.

Trigger warning: a woman is killed, and it's discovered after the fact that she was pregnant. It is a minor character in a single scene, but if this disturbs you, turn back now, or skip over Natasha's part.

...

NATASHA

When Natalia turned eight, she got her soul mark, just as expected and just like everyone else did. But when she saw it, she could only stare at it, visible by the pale moonlight seeping through the window. Because it didn't look like a normal soul mark. Rather than the yin-yang design that would show her own print on one side, with the other side blacked out until she met the other half to her whole, there was just a circle in the center of her chest, completely black, save for the red hourglass shape in the center.

She, along with the instructors in the Red Room, thought that it was because she had no soulmate. The red hourglass was reminiscent of the marking on a black widow spider, so they supposed that she would be the Black Widow in her future years, and her mark illustrated that rather than finding her perfect match.

She was favored over the other girls after that, worked over harder and trained more, and soon enough, she lived up to expectation. She made her first kill in the Room at age twelve, and by age sixteen she had a ledger dripping with red as she made her way around the world, fulfilling her assignments with the cold ruthlessness she'd been trained for since she was a toddler.

It was when she had just turned nineteen that things went slightly…awry.

She was at a gala in Hungary, the arm candy of some politician after she'd spent a couple of weeks at an escort service and she'd succeeded in catching his eye. He'd been the one to front the money for her dress, a gorgeous black number that dipped low in the back and attached in a choker style on her neck, covering her entire front. She thought absently that she might like to keep this dress for the future – it nicely covered the black circle on her chest, but the back had people staring enough that no one would suspect her of being a Russian spy. There was also the added bonus that the type of fabric it was and how it was cut allowed for several secret pockets on the inner seams. Her target that night was a woman named Amalia Novak, a possible turncoat that they wouldn't be waiting to take a chance on.

It was rather easy to lure her away for a few minutes, under the guise of seducing her. There hadn't been definite record of the woman being lesbian, but there had been some whispers and Natalia had figured out that it was at least somewhat true after watching her for a while at the gala. If she had to guess, she would say that she appreciated both sexes, but it was enough that she had noticed her that she didn't care about any more personal details she might pick up from inspecting her longer. She led her into one of the smaller bathrooms, and as soon as the door was locked behind them, she had a needle full of poison jammed into her neck.

As she collapsed to the ground, her eyes were still open, and she was in a panic as she gasped for breath, but Natalia paid this no mind as she rifled through the clutch she'd had with her, on the chance that there might be information about any partners with her. She found her cell phone, and removed the GPS before stashing it in one of her many pockets to go through later.

Upon reaching the bottom however, she felt like she'd been punched in the stomach when her eyes fell on a compilation of pictures in black and white – an ultrasound, with a barely-there fetus growing inside. It was dated for the week before.

Her eyes darted up to Novak's face, and the woman was already dead, her eyes still wide with terror. A terror that suddenly had a new meaning.

Natalia had never felt guilty for killing anyone before – but she'd never killed a child before, either. That she'd killed a baby before they'd even had the chance to grow and be born tore at her like nothing else had ever been able to.

She rested a hand on the woman's stomach, bowing her head and whispering, "Prosti menya*," before she reached up and closed Novak's eyes. The mission was complete, and there was nothing she could do for either of them now.

She rose to her feet, checking herself in the mirror that everything still looked in place, and tried to cut off her emotions so that no one would suspect anything of her when she reappeared at the gala she suddenly wanted to do nothing but escape from. She adjusted the jeweled bobby pins in her upswept hair that had come loose, before stepping around Novak and jamming the bathroom door behind her as she left so that no one would find her for a few more hours.

The guilt was still gnawing at the back of her head, demanding to be examined, so rather than going directly back into the ballroom, she went out a side door to get a few minutes in the cool air. She shivered slightly as snow drifted down on her bare shoulders, but she didn't bother hugging herself to keep warm. It may be minor, but it would be a bit of punishment for what she'd just done.

She leaned against the cold stone wall, resting her head back against it and closing her eyes, trying to get her emotions back under control.

She was an assassin. It's who she was – who she'd been training to be since she was two years old. There would probably be a lot more women she killed that she wouldn't know was pregnant at the time, and she shouldn't feel as sick as that thought made her. She needed to pull herself together – the overseers of the Red Room would not accept this. And while she didn't live in the Red Room anymore after she'd graduated three years ago, she still answered mostly to them and their superiors. If any one of them got a hint that their famed Black Widow was feeling guilty over a job, she'd be swiftly eliminated and replaced without a moment of hesitation. She was valuable, she knew, but she wasn't indispensible.

Still, she couldn't help the single tear that escaped her eye – and she hadn't cried since she was nine, but she felt so sick with what she'd done that she couldn't help it.

She didn't know how long she stood there, progressively getting colder in the snow, but she was forced abruptly back into awareness when a gloved hand touched her shoulder. She barely caught sight of a man a couple of inches taller than her, dressed all in black and with a bow and arrows slung over his shoulder when she was lashing out, knife in her hand and slashing out at him. He dodged quickly, grasping the wrist that held the knife, and she used his grip against him to jerk him forward, rolling to the ground as he sprawled out.

She recognized him, vaguely. She had seen him in files before in the Red Room – the famed archer who never missed a shot, who used to be an assassin for hire and now worked for a division of the United States government. And with him there, in full costume and weapons slung on his back, she had no doubt that he had been sent there to kill her. But she wasn't going to give him that chance.

She wasted no time in taking out her guilt and frustration on the not-so-ex-assassin, trying to get a knife in him somewhere, trying to inflict pain and injury to the best of her abilities. He was quick though, and he had a good eye (his name wasn't ironic, after all), and she could never manage to get more than a couple of good hits in. And after she started going at him on the offensive, he stopped his defensive and avoiding maneuvers and went offensive as well.

They were fairly evenly matched, and the back entrance only had the small sounds of grunts and scuffling as they fought to incapacitate the other. She never allowed him to go for his bow – though that didn't seem to be his intent, anyway – and she had a bit of a difficult time reaching her own weapons, as she wasn't in her normal uniform that allowed everything to be slung about her appendages and around her waist.

He managed to get one of her knives from her, but she didn't consider this of any concern as he clearly wasn't the best at using one. She dodged his blows and avoided the knife – although once he got very close to drawing blood as it slashed across the dress' fabric over her chest.

And then, it was the damn dress that was her downfall in the end. The end of it had gotten ripped when the archer had grabbed it during one of her kicks, and now as she stepped forward to deal him another blow, one of her heels got caught on the stray fabric, causing her to stumble just slightly.

It was enough for the famed Hawkeye, though. Before she could use her stumble in her favor, he grabbed her by the arms and, using the momentum of her fall against her, spun around and pushed them both to the ground. He straddled her, holding her in a way that any fighting she had left was for naught.

And then, still holding her arms, both of them panting heavily from their fight, he froze completely, his gaze fastened to her chest. She had the brief idea that he was staring at her breasts, but this wasn't a look of arousal or fascination or anything else she'd come to expect with men in relation to seeing a woman's body. It was shock – pure and complete shock and disbelief.

A beat, and then Hawkeye pushed himself off of her, releasing her and rising to his feet, still gazing at her. She wasted no time in rising herself, standing defensively in wait of attack, but she didn't honestly think one would be coming. Not when he'd had his chance to kill her, and he hadn't taken it.

"I'm not going to hurt you," the man told her in American accented Russian, clearly understanding her defensive pose and deciding to address it head-on. "You have my mark."

"Your mark?" Natalia repeated, not understanding.

In response, the man reached up, to his chest, and Natalia tensed in expectation of another weapon. But the archer only unsnapped the fastening at the top of his vest, before unzipping it all the way down, and then pushing up the shirt underneath over his chest. Natalia noticed a very nicely muscled abdomen, before her eyes went to what he was directing her to – the black circle in the center of his chest; the soul mark.

Her eyes passed disinterestedly over the purple hexagon in the middle of the circle with a bright red arrow in the middle of it, and locked on the red hourglass above it. An hourglass that looked just like the one on her own chest.

Startled, she moved her dress aside at the slit that had been cut into it – she supposed Hawkeye must have seen it when it slipped while she was on the ground – and she found her own soul mark underneath.

And, sure enough, in the space above her familiar red hourglass with a black background, there was a trapezoid-like shape with a rounded edge – purple background, bright red arrow.

Her mind raced with the implications of this. She knew that soul marks stayed black in the places where a soulmate hadn't been met, and after meeting their own design would become visible. And at this evidence of a soulmate, she realized that she wasn't just the Black Widow – it was just that her own mark had a black background, so it had blended in with the others because she had yet to meet them. And assuming that the marks all around her own were the same size – and there was no reason to think that they wouldn't be – she would have six soulmates. And the archer that had just been sent to kill her was one of them.

She looked back up at said archer – at his face, not his mark, and the man lowered his shirt in response – as her mind continued to poke and prod at this new information, wondering what to do with it.

"I'm not going to hurt you," the man repeated, arms hanging empty and unthreateningly at his sides. "I'm yours."

Years later, after she had defected to the United States and began working with SHIELD alongside the man whose name she learned was Clint Barton, and after she had changed her name to Natasha Romanoff (a bit of a 'fuck you' to her mother country), she would tell him that it had been those words that had convinced her to go with him that night. It was those two simple little words he'd said at the end that told her in an unconscious way that he wasn't going to dismiss her after they'd got out of Hungary, that he only wanted to get to know her and truly be soulmates. If he'd said something like, "You're mine," or "We're soulmates," or "You're my soulmate," she likely would have struck him down where he stood. But it was the unconscious wording that said he was hers that told her he was putting his trust in her, and not expecting a turnaround of the feelings on him. He was literally putting his life in her hands, because, as he had told her in the years following, after he'd seen the mark on her chest that matched his own, he had refused to kill her or even injure her, whether or not she raised a weapon on him after he'd released her.

And it had been those two simple little words that made her think that this might just work – and she had no intention of reporting back to Russia again.

Because some things were just more important than missions.

WANDA

When Pietro and Wanda approached the last minutes before they turned eight, they had sat in the front room with their parents, Wanda with a loose tank top and Pietro shirtless as they eagerly anticipated the appearance of their soul marks. Their parents sat on the small couch next to each other, holding hands with fond smiles, and Wanda remembered the perfect matches on their chests – the yin-yang symbols that illustrated for all to see that those two were truly meant to be. She was excited to see her own soul mark, to see how she would be painted to the outside world. She was excited to share the same love that her parents did with that one special person that would be her all. She could hardly wait till she met her soulmate and she had someone who would love her completely and unreservedly.

In following years, she tried hard to remember those feelings of excitement, because she knew in her heart that even though others said that it was a bad thing, she knew that having six soulmates couldn't be too awful. Right? Because if it was, surely they wouldn't exist. But still her parents had told her that it was lucky she was a girl, because wearing clothes to cover her chest wasn't as odd as it would be for a young boy.

And so she covered her chest, never letting anyone see the red hexagon in the middle of a pool of black right over her heart. She was glad for the Gemini symbol inside of it, because it showed how important it was to her to have Pietro as her twin, and the orange flames inside the symbol were interesting…but she could never tell her friends about it, because that would just be asking for the scorn of her peers and anyone else they told about it.

Triads were uncommon but not unheard of, and a three-way marriage between soulmates had been made legal in Sokovia a year after she was born, so there had been plenty of time for people to get used to the idea then. Pietro was lucky, she thought, because he didn't have to worry about people seeing the triple yin-yang design on his chest – it was practically normal by now. Only the serious traditionalists would have issue with it.

But her – six soulmates? It was unheard of. No one she had met and asked had ever heard of soulmates bigger than the rare foursome, let alone a group of seven.

There were some liberals, of course, who cried that a group of soulmates should be allowed and not scorned by the general populace. Wanda agreed with them, because was it her fault that the stars had placed her with six others? Love was love, she decided (with Pietro's supportive agreement), and if she was deserving of six others to love and be loved in return, then so be it.

And then the bombs came.

As she and Pietro lied trapped under the bed for two days, staring at the missile that had miraculously not gone off, Stark Industries in white lettering on its side, she could only think that she was never going to meet her soulmates, and Pietro would never meet his. Because their parents were dead across the room, and she was certain that the missile would go off at any moment, and she could only picture six other people, trapezoids on their chests never lightening to the bright red that was her mark – instead turning a dull, depressing, telling grey the moment that missile exploded in front of their faces.

And as she stared at the white lettering – the name that screamed to all who was responsible for this – she felt the hate boil up in her at the one responsible for making the group of seven soulmates be six forever; the one who would make their bond broken and incomplete for the rest of the others' lives. The deaths of her parents, the impending deaths of her and her brother, and the destruction of so many towns over Sokovia – they all paled in comparison to her feelings for making it impossible for all seven of them to be together one day.

This hatred didn't diminish or die down after they'd been freed and led to safety – it only festered, growing stronger as they entered their teen years. And Pietro agreed with her, because his triad had almost become a couple, and he was definitely not okay with that. They grieved for their parents of course, and they certainly blamed Tony Stark for their deaths, but their quest for revenge came from their outrage at almost being separated from their soulmates.

And then came the day of reckoning.

It had been a long year of experimentation with various chemicals in their bodies, and it was nothing short of torture as their bodies accepted the changes. They would have escaped from the HYDRA base long ago were it not for their deep-seated need to destroy Stark. Their anger towards him was what drove them both through the endless weeks of fire racing through their veins, of electricity through their brains, and of the feeling of all the bones breaking in their bodies as they were unable to breathe while undergoing the experiments.

Then their systems had finally settled down, finally accepting one of the chemicals and giving them their powers. Pietro gained the ability to move faster than the eye could follow, while Wanda could move and destroy with her mind, as well as seeing into the minds of others and placing images there. It was enough for the scientists, and thus began their training in gaining control over their powers. It wasn't as painful as the experiments had been, but it had been difficult nonetheless as they continually pushed themselves to the point of exhaustion to satisfy the ones training them.

And, thirteen months after the experiments started and five months after they gained their powers, Wanda walked alone from the training room to go back to the bedroom that felt more like a cell. She wasn't comfortable with all of the gun-toting guards around them that shoved them or ignored them like they were unimportant, and she knew that Pietro was uneasy with it as well, but it was the only way they had seen becoming able to destroy Stark. Only someone with superhuman abilities could go against him, and they'd jumped at this chance.

As she walked across a metal catwalk, a couple of guards came from the opposite direction, walking together and taking up the whole width of the bridge, clearly expecting her to be the one to move. She stepped quickly aside, grabbing the nearest thing for support, and they brushed past her uncaringly.

Even after they'd passed, however, Wanda remained still in her position, feeling decidedly different. It was…odd. And then she realized that there was a slight warmth between her breasts, only noticeable because she'd been slightly chilled moments before. Looking down in bewilderment, she unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, and gazed down at her soul mark, where the warmth originated from.

Over her hexagonal mark, another mark had appeared. It was light blue, so pale it was almost white, with an upside-down triangle in darker blue taking its center. In the middle of the blue outline of the triangle, it was red – almost the same color of red as her own mark.

She could only gaze at it in confusion. It hadn't been there this morning, when she'd gotten dressed, and she hadn't met anyone new in weeks. Even the guards that had passed her had been there for months.

But…

Her eyes caught on the thing she'd grabbed for support – it was one of Stark's weapons, with his name emblazoned like a sign on the side in white.

She knew that sometimes people's marks could appear if they touched the right name, or something that their soulmate had a connection to – and this one had both. And she suddenly knew with utter certainty who her first soulmate was. She couldn't say what made her so certain, but she just knew.

Mind racing, she hurried back to her room, waiting for Pietro to show up. She had to talk to him, because this new development…it definitely changed some things.

...

*Prosti menya - "I'm sorry"