Soul marks could be a tricky thing. Western society had usually treated them with romance and wonder. What would Shakespeare or Jane Austen be without soul-mark fueled love stories? Hollywood seemed to be able to crank out a new mark driven rom-com every six months. Some Eastern religions used soul-marks to show the divide of the self, the unity that could be found in your soul-mate and therefore in nature and all things. Some ascetics refused to acknowledge their marks, denying themselves of even that pleasure in their pursuit of something grander. And in the worst moments of human history, they had been used as means of control or coercion. Not that a soul mark could be removed. Burn it off, remove a limb, tattoo over it - the soul mark would simply reappear on the body elsewhere. Fate would not be denied this mark of eternal bonding.

Bucky would know. He had vague memories of words showing up in the middle of a mission in 1984 just under his collar bone. His handler had burned it off with a hot knife blade. The words must have shown up again, probably along his hip where a wide, shiny scar now sat and down his calf where another large section of skin had been burned clean. Assets don't have marks, so it was removed each time. He didn't even know (remember?) that he had one until he had been free for three weeks. On day nineteen of being Bucky, not the Asset, he had been at a men's shelter that actually had full length mirrors. He'd caught the flash of something dark running down his spine and twisted around to catch the tiny printing of words.

No, I'm here to love you.

Bucky stared at the words, somehow foreign and yet oddly comforting. They would keep him going in the dark of the nights, when the memories of long dead missions came back to haunt him with their ghostly accusations. The words grounded him when the memories of Steve Rogers made him question if he would ever be good enough to deserve someone's forgiveness. In the end, it was the confidence he felt in those words that kept him going when he would have just eaten his gun instead. Somewhere, somehow, someone would love him.


Natasha was born with her mark low on her abdomen. When she was handed over to the Red Room, they decided it was unobtrusive enough to leave alone. Some girls had their's burned away, in hopes that it would reappear in a more advantageous place on their bodies. They were all taught that their marks were meaningless, a throwback to an old way of thinking, a weakness to be overcome and suppressed. In this, Natasha excelled. After all, her mark was a question with a clear answer... Yes.

When she joined up with Shield, she was exposed to a whole new way of thinking about marks. Most people had them, and they were a cherished part of their bodies - something to be celebrated and enjoyed. Natasha landed somewhere in the middle, not suppressing it as she had been taught, but not quite ready to bare it all for the world to see. When the Winter Soldier shot his target through her, she actually ended up laughing as the medics patched her up. The bullet hole ended up right between the unnaturally large space between the 'here' and the 'to' on her mark. Fate had been planning for that bullet it seemed.


Bucky... James... The Asset. Whoever he really was now, he had one last thing to do before he could even think about Steve and the safety he represented. He couldn't bring this fight to Steve's doorstep. He wouldn't come in from the cold until the ice in his veins was thawed a bit more, and that meant taking down Hydra cell after Hydra cell. He would burn them all to the ground and warm his frosty heart over their crackling fires.

It was one such slash-and-burn mission that was almost his undoing. His intel was good, his entry unnoticed, his plan without flaw. Something went wrong though, and he found himself facing not the twenty men he had prepped for, but a full scale army of Hydra agents, waiting for an enemy much larger than he. Bucky did his best, fighting against a superior force in close quarters until he was eventually pushed back into a dimly lit hallway with no exits. He could hear the sounds of battle from above him, and realized the enemy Hydra was expecting had finally arrived. Usually the whole 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' thing would work, except that The Asset was an enemy of just about every nation-state on the planet.

There was no way out of this one. He was strong, had super healing, was trained to be the best, but there were too many Hydra agents and not enough exits. He felt the tear of bullets as they shredded his leg and shoulder, the punch of force as more impacted his armored vest. They ricocheted off his metal arm, slicing his exposed skin with bullet fragments. He counted eleven Hydra agents, and the weight of the gun in his hand said he had four bullets left. Three bullets, ten agents. Two bullets, eight agents. One bullet, seven agents. No bullets, six agents. No gun, five agents and a new hole in his other leg, causing him to crash to his knees. His eyesight was growing a bit dim but he thought he could take five agents if they quit shooting at him. And came at him one at a time.

Now he could only see four agents. No, three agents. There was a black blur and there were no more agents crowding the hallway in front of him. There was a slender young woman in a black suit and flaming red hair. She looked vaguely familiar to Bucky, but he couldn't quite place her. Her posture though, it told him everything. She assessed the hallway, him, the dead agents, the weapons strewn around the ground. She was an assassin and Bucky knew this was it for him. Hydra, the US, any other nation on the planet, someone had found him and sent her and this was how it ended for Bucky Barnes.

"Are you here to kill me?" he croaked out. Probably not the greatest last words, but he doubted that she would care much.

She looked at him with unreadable eyes and passed a hand across her left hip before coming closer to him and crouching down.

"No, I'm here to love you." She smiled then and it transformed her face. She was radiant, soft, beautiful. She spoke into a comm unit then, "Steve, get down here. I found him. And we have some news for you!"

Bucky raised a blood smeared hand to her face, brushing aside a tendril of hair. "I know you..."

"You shot me once," she replied with a raised eyebrow. "I won't hold it against you though."

They both looked up as Steve came barreling around the corner and skid to a halt in front of them. "Is he okay? Crap, that's a lot of blood, Buck! Damn it, Nat, why didn't you call for a medic!"

"Watch your mouth, punk, that's my soul mate you're talking to."

Watching Steve's mouth open and close like a fish's was probably one of the funniest things Bucky had seen in decades. He felt a laugh rumble out of his chest for the first time in seventy years. He reached out a hand to the red-head who had saved him before he had ever met her. He was coming home and it was all because of her.