Chapter Text
It happens sometimes.
They’re leaning over to pick something up, the wind happens to tug their clothing away at the perfect angle, some desperate fan grabs at them, a former lover comes forward with a clandestinely taken photo. Some asshole pap manages to snap a lucky shot of the flavor-of-the-moment celebrity at just the right time.
It used to be that such incidents were rare. It used to be the scandal of the decade when a celebrity’s soul mark got leaked. Now it’s tabloid fodder, and not even particularly interesting tabloid fodder at that.
It’s such a fact of life now that every public relations manager worth their salt has the damage control protocols for navigating the aftermath of a mark leak memorized. The paps have refined sniffing out celebrity marks to such a perfect predatory degree that most B-list celebrities and above invest in patches that can’t be removed without a special solvent. Though, some celebrities straight up leak those photos on purpose as a publicity stunt to get their names back into the mainstream conversation.
Still, it’s a shitty shitty thing to do to a person. It’s one in a long list of indignities public figures suffer, a reminder that people treat their privacy and bodily autonomy as inconveniences at best. Bucky never understood the cultural obsession with celebrity marks. Well, he could understand the fascination from an intellectual standpoint. It’s like winning the lottery. Statistically speaking, the chances of your soulmate being anyone remotely famous is slim to none. Hell, the chances of you even actually meeting your soulmate is dubious at best. But even the slightest probability that you could win, and win big, is enough to drive people to do crazy things.
Bucky mostly just ignored it every time someone’s soul mark made the news. He even started blocking all mark-related keywords on his social media feed. And sure, that means he doesn’t ever see any mentions of Mark Wahlberg or Mark Zuckerberg, but if he’s being honest, that’s more of a pro than anything else. It’s a shame about Mark Hamill though. And if he does ever manage to hear about any celebrity soul mark leaks, he’s usually the last to know, which he’s more than fine with.
But that also means there’s absolutely nothing preparing him for the moment he walks into Stark Tower and sees at least a dozen people loitering in the lobby with his soul mark proudly emblazoned on their skin.
He really regrets not keeping up to date then. Because he would’ve loved to have time to brace himself for a sight like this. It hits him like a physical blow. He feels sick to the pit of his stomach, a bone-deep nausea. And it’s like all the air in his lungs got sucked out, leaving him gasping and wheezing. Every ounce of strength in him leeching out in a single dizzying moment until he’s almost certain he’s going to wind up on the ground. Yeah, Bucky knows what a panic attack feels like by now. It’s an old fucking friend at this point.
But somehow, this one’s worse. Worse than the moment he looked up and saw a dark shadow pass over him as rubble fell from above. Worse than the first time he tried to walk and ended up falling over because he was eight pounds lighter on one side.
Because Bucky hasn’t seen his own goddamn soul mark in seven years.
Not since a doctor sawed his left arm off to save his life.
And God, he’d imagined what it might be like to see it again. A quiet moment. A private moment. His soulmate slowly lifting their shirt, their trouser leg up—stepping out of the shower maybe—so he can finally catch a glimpse of it on their chest, their ankle, their back. It would be after years of knowing them and yet not knowing, and then it would all click into place. The world making sense in a way it never has before as he looks at the profile of a mastiff standing proud silent vigil on their skin.
He misses his mark. He never thought that this would be one of the hardest parts of relearning how to live a normal life. He never realized how much it grounded him to be able to look at his left wrist and know there would be a jowly dog looking stolidly into the distance hidden beneath his wristband.
He’s starting to attract attention, drawing concerned and annoyed looks, and really, that just makes it worse. It brings him back to that dark headspace when he was convinced everyone who looked at him was staring at the empty gap where his arm should be. Like he’s wrong in his own body. It’s in moments like these that all the self-affirmation exercises and conversations with his therapist just fly out the window. And he’s right back to those first months when he was still waiting to wake up from this like it was all just a horrible dream.
And then there’s a pair of hands cupping his cheeks, cool and soothing against his heated skin. He doesn’t even have to look to know who it is. He’d know her steady presence anywhere.
“Nat,” Bucky croaks out.
“You idiot,” Natasha says, filled with such exasperated affection that he starts to feel a little bit better. She’s magic like that sometimes. “This is why you actually need to answer your phone when people call you.”
“Forgot to charge it.”
Nat rolls her eyes and starts to steer him away from the gawking bystanders. “I don’t even know why I put up with you.”
“Your life would be empty without me.”
“It would, which is why I can’t have you dying dramatically in my boss’s lobby.”
She’s taking him down the bright clean hallways of Stark Tower. A couple of official-looking employees pass by and send Bucky curious looks, but everyone else for the most part ignores them. It’s a blessing, considering Bucky’s pretty sure he looks like utter shit. Nat swipes through a couple of very high-tech doors with the keycard hooked onto her lanyard, and after a few more twists and turns, she pushes them both into what looks like a handicap bathroom.
Bucky sinks gratefully to the tiled floor and puts his head between his knees to try to get his breathing back under control. He still feels light-headed and shaky from the nasty surprise in the lobby. The sound of Nat flipping the lock on the door is startlingly loud. After a moment, she sits next to him, leaning her weight into his side.
“I used to wonder,” Bucky says, conscious of how his voice echoes in the small bathroom, “if I would even recognize it if I saw it again.”
“Bucky…”
“It’s been seven years, Nat. And memory isn’t—it’s not the most reliable. I was so scared that I would think the wrong person was my soulmate because I’d forgotten what my mark was supposed to look like.” He laughs. “I guess I had nothing to worry about.”
Standing in a roomful of people with mastiffs hastily drawn onto their shoulders, biceps, collarbones at least showed he still hadn’t forgotten his soul mark. There’s absolutely no way to doubt it with how his gut roiled at the sight of a dozen forgeries on sordid, obscene display. One particularly enterprising woman even had it displayed on her cleavage. Bucky wanted to be sick all over the carpet.
“It’s not something anyone can forget.”
“I kinda wish I did. This is so fucked up. I haven’t felt this shitty since, since—”
“I know.”
They sit in silence until Bucky’s breathing sounds a little bit less like he’s drowning. His heart rate is slower to settle down, but eventually it does too. He lifts his head, resting his cheek on his knee as he looks at Nat. “Thanks for sitting with me. You didn’t have to.”
“I never have to, but I do anyway.”
Bucky snorts. “Normally, people would say you’re welcome here.”
Nat smirks back at him. “If either of us were normal, we wouldn’t be friends.”
“Touche.”
“I am sorry though,” she says quietly. “I’ve been calling you all morning, trying to give you a heads up. The stills got published in the UK papers, so they had about five hours to spread online before they got picked up by the morning talk shows in the States.”
Bucky sighs and closes his eyes. “So who is it?”
Nat hesitates.
“Oh god, please tell me it’s not Stark. That would just be the worst.”
Not that there’s anything wrong specifically with Tony Stark. There’s a lot of issues he has with Stark Industries, certainly, but what does he know about the man himself? Sure, he comes off as a bit smarmy and self-important in all his press, but there’s no telling what the guy’s really like underneath all the PR filters. But Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are one of the few celebrity couples that’re actually public about the fact that they’re each other’s soulmates. And Bucky does not want to be the bomb that blows that particular dream couple apart. A messy highly publicized break-up between two very prominent figures is the last thing he needs.
“It’s not Tony.”
Bucky tries not to make his sigh of relief obvious, but Nat probably notices anyway. “Is it Banner then? That wouldn’t be so bad. He seems like a decent guy. Or Thor—do Asgardians even have soul marks?”
“It’s—well, I think it’s better if I just show you.” Nat pulls her phone out and quickly flips to a photo she clearly already had opened in her gallery. Bucky has no idea how he feels about the fact that his best friend apparently has a photo of his soulmate’s mark saved. “Here,” she says, holding it out to him.
Bucky takes it from her and looks.
It’s a video as it turns out, clearly taken on someone’s cell phone. The scene shakes and jumps, and the sound is a bit tinny and hard to understand. There’s the background noise of people shouting and talking, an explosion in the distance. Some portions of the video are just the camera pointing at the ground as the person is shuffled along with the crowd. Clearly someone was filming as they were being evacuated.
Then the person holding the phone starts to speak excitedly, too rapidly for Bucky to identify the language. The camera swings up, and there’s an arm taking up almost the entire frame as if someone is shielding the camera person with their body. The person seems to see something because their voice starts to get louder and faster. Then the arm moves back to reveal a broad chest covered with the stiff fabric of a military tac suit, scuffed and grimy from earlier fighting. It looks like claws had torn into the reinforced suit, shredding large sections of cloth away. The man’s skin is partially exposed, but there’s nothing resembling a soul mark in sight.
Bucky shoots a questioning glance at Nat. She just nods back to the phone.
There’s a roar somewhere in the distance, and the man whips around to look to the source of the sound, turning his back to the camera person. The armored suit on his back is in just as bad a state as it is on his front.
And there, clear as day, is Bucky’s soul mark.
Some emotion starts to coil tight in the pit of his stomach, and he can’t even begin to tell if it’s a good or a bad feeling. The mark’s not in frame for long, but the shot is clear and steady enough for the shape of his mastiff to be unmistakable.
The mark passes out of view as the man turns back around, and he says in English, “You need to evacuate the area now,” then clumsily rattles off something in the camera person’s language.
The man’s face never passes into frame, not even when he runs off in the direction of the monster’s roar. The camera follows him as he leaves. It’d been impossible to tell who he was when he was standing so close to the camera, but once he moves further away, it quickly becomes obvious that he’s holding a red and white striped shield.
Bucky numbly hands the phone back to Nat. It’s not until she doesn’t immediately take it from him that he realizes that his hand is shaking. “Do we—” he clears his throat, “Are we even sure it’s him? It could just be someone holding his shield. You never see his face. You can’t even tell if the suit he’s wearing is,” he stumbles, “is Captain America’s uniform.”
“Does it matter?” Nat says gently. “The world believes this is his soul mark. It doesn’t even matter at this point whether that’s actually true or not because the only way for him to definitively prove otherwise is to—”
“—is to show everyone what his mark really looks like,” Bucky finishes wearily.
“They’ll never believe him otherwise.”
People have tried before. Considering the lengths public figures go to in order to keep their soul marks hidden, mark leaks are rarely clean shots where the person’s identity is immediately obvious. So it’s very easy for celebrities to simply claim that the person in the photo isn’t them. It’s usually impossible to tell one way or the other, but in the end, the narratives constructed by tabloids are always more compelling and powerful than the ones constructed by someone’s public relations manager. As long as there’s that uncertainty, people just prefer to believe the more scandalous sensationalist version.
“So we don’t know if this is Captain America’s actual soul mark, or if it belongs to some hapless field agent who happened to pick up the shield and got caught at the wrong place and the wrong time. And even if it was Cap’s soul mark, there’s no way in hell he’ll know I’m telling the truth. It’s not like I can ever actually prove we’re soulmates considering my fucking arm’s been lopped off.”
“Bucky,” Nat says sharply.
He shuts up, his chest heaving because apparently he’d been on the verge of tipping himself into his second panic attack in under an hour. Nat rests her hand on his shoulder, and for long minutes, Bucky grounds himself in that single point of contact.
“SHIELD will verify if Rogers is the man in the video when he returns for debriefing,” she says after he’s calmed down.
“It’s probably not even really him.” He kind of hopes this whole thing was a mistake. It would be so much less complicated if his soulmate was just a random SHIELD agent.
“It seems…likely that it really is him. He’d been deployed on a mission in Eastern Europe at the time the footage was taken, and the video was originally posted in the forums of a Romanian news site.”
“I dunno, Nat.” Bucky sighs and tips his head back against the wall. “He was born a century ago. His real soulmate’s probably been dead for a long time.”