A/N: I just typed this up and shared today. It has not been beta read.
Steve Rogers was sick of a lot of things- the biggest group of which fell under the category of "assumptions people made about his personal life".
Steve came from a time where romantic soulmarks (the first words your soulmate said to you found written somewhere on your body in their handwriting in black, almost like a tattoo) were few and far between, and platonic soulmates (written in grey) were only slightly less rare. He'd gone into the ice without a mark on him, and when he woke up, he was thrilled to find that he finally had a set. A grey set.
Waking up alone, almost seventy years in the future, he'd been overwhelmed by how much everything had changed. And somewhere around the time that an alien army had started pouring out of the sky in the middle of New York, he'd realized that he was really okay with not having words written on him in black. Aliens were a game changer. And with a whole new universe of threats out there, he wasn't sure he would ever want to leave the fight enough to really give himself over to another person in the way that soulbonds required.
Only about half the population had romantic soulmates anyway, and many people never met their soulmates or didn't until they were much older. He would have plenty of options for companionship, relationships, and perhaps even love one day if he wanted. But he would never have to have another person fully linked to his mind and soul. Someone who would have to live through experiencing all his emotions during the catastrophes with impossible odds he sometimes faced.
All the fear would be overwhelming for a partner to experience, especially if it would take days or weeks to end and even more to see them again and reassure them. He knew it worked for some, but he would just feel guilty.
On top of that, all the complete and utter despair he felt when his best wasn't enough to save everyone (or when something triggered a memory of what he considered his first life and he had to experience the loss of realizing that almost everyone was gone all over again) would be horrible to force upon another person.
And although he'd talked to Dr. Banner who told him that it wasn't exactly how romantic soulbonds worked, and matches were always capable of handling whatever a bond through at him, he thought the amount of adrenaline that he experienced would kill someone else if they had to process even half of it in a non-enhanced body. No matter what Banner said, he feared it would give them an actual heart attack. And it wasn't something he thought he could or would change. When his Avengers teammates teased him about doing things like jumping out of planes without a parachute and called him an adrenaline junky, he didn't deny it. Because he was.
He didn't know if it was the years he'd spent sick, unable to perform manual labor and with reduced hearing and eyesight due to illness. Or maybe it was some sort of side-effect of Dr. Erskine's super-soldier serum. But he loved the way rushes of adrenaline made him feel and the way they took his already perfect hearing and vision and boosted them to even higher levels.
And if he really looked inside himself, he was afraid. He didn't think he could handle losing someone he loved like he had Peggy again. He just couldn't. It may have made him weak, but it was true. In this area, he was a bit of a coward. The part of him that used to want to settle down, have a family, and generally live the quiet life was gone.
Maybe he'd find someone one day that changed that, but for the time being, he really was okay without.
Now the idea of a platonic soulmate, on the other hand, made him smile. He remembered the comradery of his time with the Commandos fondly. And Bucky had been so much his brother that his new set of grey words inspired him to go and secretly get "till the end of the line" tattooed on him in grey as well. They weren't Bucky's first words to him, but they felt like a fitting tribute to the man regardless.
He would love to have another friend like Bucky, and while the thought of losing someone he was that close to again was difficult to fathom as well, it quite simply wasn't paralyzing. When he found out that Bucky was still alive, he was glad he had chosen to have those words permanently inked into his skin. He was fairly certain Bucky would come back one day, and at the very least, he'd have a laugh at Steve's sentimentality.
At least Steve hoped Bucky would.
All of that was why, when people asked about soulmarks, brushed it off. He knew people wouldn't understand getting a tattoo for Bucky- strictly speaking, it was somewhat taboo to fake a soulmark without the other person's knowledge. And technically that was what he'd done. Plus, he figured he had a future platonic soulmate to protect.
After someone (Bucky, he was sure of it) had fished him out of the Potomac after the Insight helicarriers had fallen, he'd been taken to the hospital.
When he'd awoken, Natasha seemed to know about his marks. He liked to think that they were mentioned in his medical chart, and she had looked at (then probably destroyed or doctored) that record. That scenario was better than the alternative of her having opted for a visual inspection.
Still, he took Natasha to task over the invasion of his privacy and explained how much of a violation that had been. How after everything they'd just been through, he'd thought she trusted him of all people. When he'd wound down she'd just been staring at him with that all-knowing smirk on her face.
"Why didn't you just ask?" he'd finally asked her.
"Would you have told me the truth?" she responded.
"I told you, I never lie."
Natasha had hummed and then stood there in perfectly comfortable silence before saying, "it's the doctors I don't trust. As we just discovered, HYDRA is everywhere." After a longer pause she added, "I assumed you never let me set you up because you had a romantic soulmate, and you were waiting for that person."
"I didn't ask anyone out because, as I told you, I was too busy."
"SHIELD's gone. You have time now," Natasha insisted.
"Natasha, no," he warned.
Natasha had stared deeply into his eyes and then nodded. He'd thought that was because she finally understood that he meant it.
He thought that for a whole two days until she got back from making new covers for herself, showed up at Avengers Tower the team was all going to live and started trying to set him up with dates all over again.
When he met Darcy Lewis, he was confused. But not for all the reasons everyone, including Darcy, seemed to think. It wasn't that she was loud and brash. It wasn't the lewd jokes that she sometimes made (and he didn't understand why so many seemed to think that he was a virgin). Honestly it was because he didn't understand why she wasn't his platonic soulmate. He kind of thought that if Bucky had been born a woman and 70 years later, he'd be Darcy.
And that was why when Natasha told him that Darcy was waiting for a blind date at that very moment and he was that date, he was horrified. He didn't want to date Darcy. He loved spending time with Darcy, but he really saw her as more of a good-friend-possibly-like-a-sister-one-day figure. But he couldn't just leave her there, wondering why her date had never shown.
He was too relieved to be offended when Darcy responded to his announcement that he was, in fact, her date that night with a wrinkle of her nose and a loud, "ew!" He'd laughed, Darcy had laughed, and then she'd conned him into staying and having dinner anyway because Natasha was paying. Over the course of dinner, they hatched a plan.
A plan to keep on, nosey spy off both of their backs. They told Natasha that the date went well. Whenever there was a social engagement, they were each other's plus ones. They enjoyed each other's company, so they spent more and more time together anyway. If people assumed they were dating, that was their own fault.
There were agreed upon limits to how they would treat each other in public, and how much of a PDA they were willing to allow since they needed to show at least some affection with each other.
Darcy was a self proclaimed "toucher," and Steve had, over the course of becoming a human science project, long ago lost his sense of modesty about his body. And if their touches were in not terribly intimate places, everyone just figured it was Steve "bein ga grandpa" about things in public.
When Valentine's Day came around, Darcy was insistent that they had to go out and it had to be somewhere Natasha wouldn't know to look for them. He'd been baffled by this because the idea was to make Natasha think they WERE dating, not to hide their dates from her, but eventually he'd acquiesced. Then there had been another round arguing about why on earth they had to go to New Jersey at all, and if they did, Trenton of all places! But Darcy once again put her foot down, and he'd eventually given in.
On the night of Valentine's he'd had to go through a lengthy interrogation by Natasha about his plans, and then when he refused to answer, he had to spend spend a decent amount of time losing her as a tail.
So he was running very late.
He wasn't entirely sure that he had lost Natasha, so he knew he needed to greet Darcy in one of those approved PDA ways. Rushing into the bar, he spotted a curly-haired brunette with her back to him with an empty seat next to her in the crowded bar. He was relatively certain that she was wearing the dress that Darcy had described to him, in detail, numerous times over the past week.
So he straightened his shoulders and confidently strode up to the empty seat. The bartender happened to be standing there, and looked at Steve expectantly as he sat down, so he ordered a beer at the same time that he put his hand on Darcy's thigh, just barely above her knee (it was a location Darcy insisted looked "relationship-y," but didn't make either of them uncomfortable).
The next thing he knew he felt a searing pain in his side and was startled enough that he jerked back and fell off the stool, smacking his head on the ground hard.
It took him a few seconds of blinking to bring himself back to focusing on what was happening above him. The brunette was standing in as much of a defensive crouch as she could manage with the bar at her back and the limits of her dress. She had a stun gun out (which explained the pain he'd felt) and was moving it back and forth between pointing it at him and Natasha. It seemed Natasha had followed him.
It would be easy enough for either of them to disarm the woman, though he wasn't sure that Natasha would do it without hurting her at least a little for attacking a teammate, and it really wasn't the woman's fault. So he held his hands up in the signal for "I mean no harm" the next time she shifted his way, he said, "you're not Darcy."
"No, asshole, I'm not," she retorted.
He couldn't help the little grin that crossed his face or the laugh that crossed his lips as he told her, "you two will get along just fine though."
You could practically see the wheels turning in her head as she realized what he had said to her and then her eyes got comically wider a moment later as she realized who he was. It was enough to have her return her attention to Natasha who, despite knowing his words, still had her gun out.
Before he could try to diffuse the tension anymore, Darcy appeared next to Natasha with her taser out, waving it wildly at his platonic soulmate.
"I'm Darcy Lewis, and I tased Thor!" she yelled, in a way reminiscent of a battle cry.
"I'm Stephanie Plum, and I think I just stun gunned Captain America?" she sounded much more timid.
Darcy was looking much more trigger happy than Natasha though, so I rose to my feet and stood in the middle of the three women saying, "it's alright; it was just a misunderstanding."
I looked around thinking I was going to need to reassure the rest of the bar patrons, but nobody was paying us any mind despite the fact that Natasha had a gun out. I must have had a confused look on my face because Stephanie laughed and said, "this is Trenton; everyone here has a gun. And this is hardly the craziest thing to happen this week."
Apparently she decided that I was going to protect her, which I would, because she made a show of putting away her stun gun then looked pointedly at the other two women from around me.
"He touched me without permission," she told them.
Darcy snort laughed at that while Natasha smirked. Then Darcy put away her taser and said to Natasha, "I guess we can't set them up after all; they're platonics."
Her words were on my forearm, so I shoved up my sleeve enough to show her and said, "I really am sorry about the leg thing, Stephanie."
Stephanie took off her shoe and showed me my words on the bottom of her foot. When she righted herself she waved it off and said, "hardly the worst thing to happen to me this week. And you can call me Steph. Although I don't understand. You grabbed me like we were dating or something, but you thought I was her. And she was trying to set you up with me?"
"We had an agreement to pretend to date," I told her. Then I turned and fixed Darcy with my most unimpressed stare as I said, "I thought we had a deal!"
Darcy shrugged and said, "I was getting bored, so I thought it would be more interesting to double cross you. Apparently Natasha has heard stories about Steph and told me at the very least it would be funny."
I felt my jaw drop open, and I couldn't do anything more than stare at her in shock of her unashamed statement. Then Darcy started giggling and stage whispered to Natasha, "You were right. I can't wait to tell the others about how she took him down! And the look on his face right now- priceless."
"It wasn't my fault!" Steph insisted. "He touched me!"
"Can you please stop saying that? Or at least don't say it that way!" I groaned.
"You did touch her that way," Darcy said with a laugh, Natasha solemnly nodding with a straight face next to her.
"You told me to-" I cut off in absolute disgust and stormed out of the bar hearing Steph's laughter tentatively join the others as they all inevitably followed me. When I got to my bike, I turned and narrowed my eyes at Steph. "You're supposed to be on my side!"
She opened her mouth and I cut her off, pointing my finger at her and saying, "and don't say that I touched you!"
She giggled. The when I grabbed my jacket out of the pack on my motorcycle, she stopped and stared at the bike. She looked at me very calculatingly and said, "if you let me take that bike for a ride, I will absolutely change my story to whatever you want."
I eyed her smaller form and then my bike, and I said, "I don't think you could ride this one, but I will let you ride the Black Widow's bike."
Natasha started to protest, and I just shot her a look that said, "really? After all you've done to me."
Her lips twitched minutely, and I knew I'd won, so I looked back at Steph.
"What kind is it?" she asked skeptically.
"Harley-Davidson LiveWire," I told her. When she didn't seem convinced I told her, "it has a spot for the shield, and I'll let you take that with you on ONE ride."
That got a full fledged smile out of her, and she stuck out her hand to shake. "DEAL!"
I nodded my head at her and gently took her hand at the same time my phone started blaring my Avenger's Assemble alarm.
Wincing I said, "I'd like to stay and chat, but I gotta go. Darcy's a friend. See that she gets home safely?"
The two women eyed each other speculatively, but Steph nodded, so I jumped on the bike and scooted forward enough for Natasha to climb on the back.
As I rode away, I could hear Steph say, "are you going to tase me?"
"Are you going to stun gun me?" Darcy retorted.
Natasha was chuckling behind me, so I let out a laugh of my own. "Was that enough of a disaster? Are you going to stop trying to set me up now?" I asked her.
"I don't see why I would," she replied. I didn't have to look at her to know she was smirking at me again.
A/N: Just thought I'd do a fun, platonic fic in case anyone wanted anything a little different today. P.S. Last chapter of How to Become a Goddess is almost ready! I'm pretty sure it will be up tomorrow!