Bucky didn't have faith in soulmates. Steve and him had been blanks before the war and when Steve got out of the ice, he had the words 'What can I get you? Oh my god, aren't you that guy… what's his name? Cappie A? Captain A?' curved around his ankle. The thing was Steve had his words now and after he managed to break free from Hydra's brainwashing and meet up with the Avengers, he was 32. He resigned himself to be a blank for however long he was to live. Somewhere in him, he suspected the reason he never got his words was because he would die soon. Not that he knew for certain, but according to a study that had started in the 1990s, those who were fated to have short lives often had been blanks.
He would die fighting against Hydra and that was okay with Bucky. He was biologically "34" when his words finally appeared. The pain when the words etched onto him had caused him to stumble in a mid bout with Steve and Natasha. The pain was so sharp and sudden that he had pulled his shirt up to check what the hell had happened. Steve had no memory of the time he received his words since he had been in the ice but Natasha had found it comical. For her, her time receiving the words had been so many eons ago that she barely remembered it and she obliged in reading the beautifully cursive words that trailed down his back.
'Please just let me die. I can't take it anymore.'
The words sent a chill down his spine but it wasn't just the words scared Bucky, not that Bucky would admit being scared. It was the fact that he was biologically 34 and that was a hell of an age gap. Back in his days, it was expected for people to marry their soulmates. No one married a blank unless they were blanks themselves and the pain of losing a soulbond was too strong that rarely anyone survived it. He would be 54 by the time she was 20. For the very few times, Bucky was glad that the modern society had no expectations. Most people still ended up with their soulmates because having each other words guaranteed a certain amount of compatibility that was hard to find elsewhere but there was no social expectation that their partners had to be soulmates anymore.
The more Bucky stared at the words, the more he wondered about the person whose words were etched on his body. Was she suicidal and Bucky tried to stop her from killing herself? Whatever it was, she was his soulmate and even if he didn't expect to end up with her, Bucky was not going to let anything hurt her even if it meant herself. She would hate him but that was alright as long as she lived.
Bucky and Steve were '35' when Steve met his soulmate in a coffee shop. Rena was a barista at Barton's favourite coffeehouse. Thinking about it, it had been rather obvious. Barton was the only one he knew that referred to Steve as Capisy A. She had remembered Barton's nickname for Steve wrongly. It was a year later after what should had been a fatal accident for Rena only to find out that she had an ability to create force fields. She hadn't known about it either and no one would have had it not been for Hydra trying to kill her to get to Steve.
No one messed with the Avengers' family and so they hunted every last one, not that they weren't already. It was just between the Krees, the Chitauri and Ultron, Hydra hadn't been too high on the target list.
Which brought to Bucky and Stark busting into a remnant of a Hydra lab. It was supposed to be not in use and they had came in for some hard files and burn it all down to make sure that Hydra had no more bases.
A woman was lying in a metal case, her body wrapped and plugged with so many tubes that there seemed to be more tubes than exposed skin. Which meant they called in Doctor Banner as well as Doctor Foster and with extreme care, they unplugged the tubes and transported her back to the tower. The girl had not spoken a single word since she woke though she seemed responsive to Banner's questions, Stark was unceremoniously kicked out of the medical room after driving her to tears with his not very well-thought out words.
Even with all apparatus and samples of the liquid in the tunes brought back to the tower, none of the science team had been able to figure what Hydra had to done to her. The drugs had a strange dna result that wasn't truly human. Even the canisters that were brought back contained that. It took the science team, especially for Doctor Cho who stopped frequently to empty her stomach, to go through the files that they had retrieved together with her. The procedures and pictures accompanying the files made Bucky remember the days when he was stuck in Hydra.
She was healing but seemed in a lot of pain and they weren't able to administer any painkillers without fully understanding if it would have an adverse reaction to her. So to take her mind off the pain, Steve read her books, Rena chattered incessantly about everything not that it seemed help a lot but she seemed comforted by the presence of someone beside her.
Bucky took a turn as well. "This too will pass," he started, breaking the silence then paused, uncertain what else to say. "Hydra took me as well. They brainwashed me and forced me to do their bidding." All things considered, he felt a strange kinship to the poor woman who had too suffered under Hydra's hands.
She whimpered, her hand clenching onto his flesh hand. "Please just let me die. I can't take it anymore." Tears streamed down her face. She took a strangled breath before continuing. "It hurts so much."
Bucky stared at her incredulously. The woman he saved was probably 18 or 20 give and take. She was a lot older than he expected her to be considering he had received her mark no more than a year ago. "Do you know what they did to you?"
She never spoke and Bucky knew why now. Each word she spoke we laced heavily with pain, her hand gripping his hand tightly as she replied him. "The procedure wasn't finished."
He summoned the science team who had hurried down upon hearing that she had spoken. With the best of her ability, she told the science team what they had done to her. It angered Bucky. Short of killing her outright, her body's ability to heal had been harvested by Hydra to inject in themselves for as an emergency inject. But it hadn't always been that way. She had been a normal human being. Through several medical procedures and injected with unknown chemicals, her body's dna had been changed. She had known that she had been kept heavily sedated because the pain caused by all the procedures had caused her to crash more than once.
With no other way and horrified by the further insight that brought revelation to the files they had retrieved with her, the science team attempted to complete the procedures to end the pain. It took them another three months and several magic powder that Thor brought back from Asgard to finally end the pain.
She didn't remember much of her life before Hydra, she didn't remember her name. Bucky didn't care. She was his and he was hers and in a way that no one else could actually relate to, they understood each other far more.
Bucky didn't have faith in soulmates, but he was damn glad that fate picked her for him and he wouldn't have it any other way.