Chapter Text
“Darcy, what the hell is this?”
The young woman looked up from her seat at the kitchen table, squinting at the arm that had been thrust into her face. Without her glasses it looked like a long smudge of grease, but if she narrowed her eyed down to practically nothing, the mark came into focus.
“A tattoo?” she offered. “I admire your dedication to the Thunder God and all, but there are about a million cooler tatt ideas you could have come up with. Seriously, even a little Mew-Mew would have been better.”
“It’s not a tattoo,” Jane insisted, rubbing her hand over the long looping line marring her skin. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”
“Strange rashes in unexpected places,” Darcy observed. “Perhaps you and your alien stud muffin need to have a talk about intergalactic STDs.”
“That is not funny.”
“Yeah, it is,” she grinned and hurried from the table with her coffee before Jane could find an appropriate retort. She found her way back to her room, happily chillaxing in her jim-jams for the first slow morning in ages. Despite the ass-numbing boredom involved in the majority of Jane’s work, the astrophysicist kept hours that would make an army drill sergeant cringe. The rare morning off was a luxury Darcy Lewis intended to utilize to the fullest.
She stretched and threw her arms out, falling back onto the bed and smiling lazily up at the ceiling, knowing there was nothing she needed to do. The world was safe. Jane was happy, save her weird new rash, and Darcy could just do nothing.
She rolled over, reaching for her phone so she could snap a shot of her sweet cupcake jammie pants and Cookie Monster slippers, but froze before she even touched her cell.
“JANE!” she screamed.
“What? What is it?” her boss and friend hurried into the room, cricket bat held above her head and eyes darting around the room for some intruder to attack.
“Your rash is spreading!”
She pulled her sleeve up to her elbow and thrust her arm at Jane as she had done to her not five minutes earlier. A long dark line looped across her pale skin forming words that ran the length of her forearm just as Jane’s did, though the words were far different.
“’Access code NOW’,” Jane read, dumbfounded. “That’s even worse than ‘You, what realm is this’.”
Darcy opened her mouth to speak, but never got the chance. Thor, in all his Asgardian glory, burst into her room, Mew-Mew in hand and electricity crackling around him. “I heard your cry, Darcy! Tell me who troubles you!”
“This troubles me!” she insisted, showing him her arm.
The man’s face went from thunderous to joyous in a heartbeat. “Ah, you have grown your mark.”
“My what now?”
“Your soulmark,” he said, smiling. That brilliant smile fell as he looked between the two women, noting their confusion and horror. “Do you not have them on your world?”
“No, I can’t say that we do,” Jane replied. She held her own mark out for him to see. His smile returned, brighter than before.
“You see, this is proof that you are the one and only mate to my soul,” he pulled at his sleeve, revealing the mark on his own arm. “Mine arose last night.”
“’Do me a favor, don’t be dead’,” Jane read the words dumbly. “Isn’t that…”
“The first words spoken by you to me,” he finished for her. “That is the mark all Asgardians bear; the first words spoken to them by their destined match. Your words will be the first I ever spoke to you.”
“That’s totally what he said,” Darcy agreed, pointing to her friend’s arm.
“What does your mark read, Darcy?” he questioned. “Perhaps the words have already been spoken.”
“I can’t say I’ve noticed anyone shouting ‘Access code NOW’ at me recently,” she disagreed. “And why did this thing show up now?”
“Perhaps because of my intention to remain in residence on your world,” Thor speculated. “In opening this world to my powers, I have brought with me some of Asgard’s magic.”
Jane shook her head, ever the scientist. “That makes no sense. You were here before.”
“Banished and without my powers,” he countered. “And temporarily in my pursuit of Loki. Now I am here to stay, Jane. All that I am is yours, my soul and heart and powers belong to you. Such a bond is strong on my world and has been known to result in powerful repercussions.”
“But why this?” she demanded.
“Were my mother still alive, I would ask her. It was Frigga who created the soulmark on Asgard – an elegant means of removing all doubt that she and my father were destined for one another,” he explained, sadness coloring his smile.
Jane cooed and pulled Thor from the room to comfort the man, leaving Darcy to glare at the marks on her arm. A scalding shower and overly enthusiastic exfoliating did nothing to dull the writing on her skin. She had hopes it might wash off as easily as the memos she jotted on her wrist when the sticky notes were hiding under a mountain of coffee cups and old spreadsheets, but, no, the black letters still scrawled across her arm as permanent and unwanted as the remnants of a drunken night out that ended in a seedy tattoo parlor at one in the morning.
Her only comfort lay in knowing that everyone on Earth was dealing with this same problem. Soulmate and Soulmark vied for the 2nd most trended hashtag, after #whatthefuckisthisthingonmyarm. Darcy would have helped keep it at number one were she allowed a twitter account by SHIELD; they might be lacking in jack boots, but they still had the heavy-handed thug mentality. No social media accounts for Darcy.
“Top story this morning,” the newsreader proclaimed with thinly veiled uneasiness, “The sudden appearance of tattoo-like marks on every adult across the globe. Early reports indicated a strange new epidemic, but a statement released by America’s Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division, better known as SHIELD, has claimed this phenomenon as ‘Soulmarks’. Lynn Carson has the latest.” The woman’s smile was fixed as she waited for the footage to roll, but she shifted in her chair, her fingers tugging at the sleeve of her jacket.
Lynn Carson’s piece told Darcy nothing she had not already learned from Thor, so she stabbed the power button on the remote control and threw it at the couch with a growl.
Coffee.
Coffee would make it better.
Proper, bought coffee with caramel swirls could make anything better.
Soulmark hidden beneath two layers of cotton and her denim jacket, Darcy ventured out into the streets of London. So what if everybody had tattoos now? It couldn’t have all that much effect on the daily workings of the world, right?
On the ground floor of the apartment building where they were staying, Darcy found a couple arguing. Loudly. She and Jane had been crashing at Mrs. Foster’s place for a while now, long enough to know the faces of everyone else who lived in the building if not their actual names. This couple, Darcy had dubbed The Perfect Parkers. They were sickeningly in love. Or at least they had been until that morning. Now they were shouting over one another.
“Thank god I found out about this before I proposed!” “—wasted four years of my life on you!”
Darcy skirted around them, though neither showed the least bit of embarrassment at being caught in the middle of a fight.
“What’s that about?” she muttered to the postman, who was shoving letters into their appropriate boxes.
“Them ta’oos are wrong. Means they aren’t soulmates,” he replied in a low tone.
Darcy managed to bite back the groan, but only just. “How can they even remember what they said to each other when they first met?”
He shrugged. “My wife does, and we met thir’y-eight years ago last January.”
“Are your marks right?”
“No,” he shook his head and shrugged as if it made no difference.
“Is she going to leave you?”
“After thir’y-eight years, four children and nine gran’children? What would the neighbors think?” He offered her a grin that implied the neighbors could take their opinions and shove them up their pasty white British backsides. “’Sides, she’s got me wrapped ‘round her little finger, she has. If she dumped me now, she’d have to train up a whole new bloke. Too much work, and she knows it.”
Darcy couldn’t help but return his smile as she made her way out into the streets of London. The postman was right. It was stupid to get so worked up over the Soulmarks, and she was sure everyone would agree.
Again, wrong.
Every newspaper, magazine and tabloid shouted headlines of marriages in collapse, secret lovers baring the appropriate words on their skin, controversial and experimental means of changing the words. It took months and the destruction of three massive floating fortresses before anyone was willing to talk of anything else, and even then most news stories ended in a newscaster wondering what words were written on Captain America’s arm. Through it all, Darcy kept working and blatantly ignored the words on her own arm.
“Hey,” a guy said, and paused as if waiting for her to turn, wide eyed and hopeful.
She rolled her eyes. “Not my words, dude.”
“Well, damn. Can I buy you a drink anyway?”
Holding her beer aloft, she offered him a look. “Already got one.”
The little toad offered a sneer and a few curse words before moving down the bar. A startled cry some minutes later informed him that his sorry manipulation had found a sucker.
She hated how quickly some duchebags had taken to using the Soulmarks against people. Her words were not common, but so many others had been given greetings so ubiquitous that their destined partner might have been anyone they ever met. In the months since they had appeared, Darcy had met dozens of women who had nothing more than the word ‘Hi’ on their arm. She was grateful she couldn’t be preyed upon by these manipulative losers.
Not that she was anxiously hanging on every greeting sent her way. Nope, not Darcy Lewis. She was not going to be forced into a relationship because the rash on her arm told her to.
Nuh-uh.
“I need the access codes.”
A jolt ran through her at the words. They weren’t right. They weren’t even directed at her, but the response had been involuntary, as if the man shouting into his cell phone had physically pinched her.
She kept her eyes locked on the bar in front of her, downed the rest of the beer and ran for the door.