Title: Outliers
Fandom: Agent Carter
Rating: PG
Length: 3200 wds
Content notes: none
Author notes: ... I finally wrote a soulmark AU, and it's the world's gennest soulmark AU. *facepalm* This was inspired by a vaguely-recalled fandom discussion from a long while ago, about what happens to people in a world where soulmarks are a thing who don't have any, or who lose the person they were supposed to be with, and what happens then.
Summary: Maybe soulmarks mean whatever you want them to mean.
Peggy's soulmark came out when she was one and a half, on the inside of her upper arm. It was a tiny shield with a star in the middle. Her nanny didn't know what such a soulmark could mean, and when she showed it to her parents, they didn't know what it meant either. Clearly, though, a soulmark appearing so early in a person's life must indicate a deep and lasting bond, the sort of love that was meant to unite a couple heart and soul, holding them through an entire lifetime together.
Twenty-four years later, Peggy learned that the sweet, skinny kid she'd been shepherding around for the SSR had a birthmark on the heel of his hand. It was much less ambiguous than most soulmarks, which tended to be more symbolic or vague. Direct and simple -- like Steve Rogers himself -- it was nothing more or less than Peggy's first name, in gently curling letters. It had come up when he was six months old, an almost unprecedented young age for a soulmark to rise to the surface of an infant's soft skin.
At age twenty-seven, Peggy listened to static on a radio and all she could think was that this couldn't happen, the soulmarks said this couldn't happen. It was a love for the ages. It was meant to be. They'd had all the time in the world because their soulmarks said so.
She touched the mark on her arm through her jacket, and tasted the salt of her tears on her lips.
Edwin's soulmark looked like a plain ink tattoo. It came up on his arm when he was nine. It was a number.
Anna had none. She never had. She'd always hoped she would get one someday.
It was only after the war, from newspapers, that Edwin learned about the tattoos and understood what the number on his arm was -- or rather, what it would have been for Anna, if Howard hadn't helped him rescue her.
For a long time, he wondered if Anna's lack of soulmark meant that he bore the mark instead of her. If it meant he'd saved her from that terrible future.
It didn't occur to him until a very long time later that he had no idea if it was Anna's (hypothetical) number on his arm, rather than someone else's. She was, after all, unmarked in any way they'd been able to find.
He decided to believe it was Anna's. After all, he loved her, and she loved him, and they'd risked everything for each other. Not having her in his life was unthinkable. He could not imagine how anyone else could be more of a soulmate than she was to him.
Besides, the alternative was too terrible to contemplate.
Once he was old enough to understand what soulmarks meant, Howard searched himself obsessively from head to foot in the mirror, every night, to see if his mark had come in.
He was seventeen when he finally, finally found a discreet mark on his inner thigh. It was shaped like a spider with eight delicately curled legs. Over the next decade he pondered what it might mean, and consulted numerous soulmark-symbology tables and magazines. Many ladies shared his bed, and an abnormal proportion of those were Scorpios (not a spider, exactly, but he was hedging his bets). But when he finally married Maria Trelane in 1957, she was a Taurus.
It wasn't Howard who coined SHIELD's code name for the Leviathan female assassin program, Black Widow, in 1965. If the connection ever occurred to him, Howard never mentioned it, even to his closest confidantes.
The woman briefly known as Dottie Underwood never knew what her soulmark was. It had been a small one, just below her ankle. It had appeared so long ago she didn't even remember having had the surgery to remove it. Because she'd been so young, it healed up nicely, hardly leaving a scar at all.
She knew she'd been lucky. Several of the other girls had their marks in prominent places, where they were impossible to remove without leaving an identifying scar. Those girls were removed from the program. Some people, too, had their marks come back, either in the same place or elsewhere on their bodies, but she never did.
Jack's soulmark was a small flag on his chest, right over his heart. It emerged when he was six, and his grandmother always said this was the best place it could possibly be, meaning that he and his soulmate would love each other for all of their lives.
On Okinawa, he didn't have a chance to look closely at the god-damned white flag as he stuffed it hastily under some bushes to bury later, with his camp coming awake around him. Later, he snatched an unwatched moment to stuff the thing into the latrine pit. As he kicked dirt over it, he noticed something that made his hands start trembling.
It was the same shape as the flag on his skin.
He stumbled away and leaned against a tree, trying not to retch. And told himself that he was wrong. It ... wasn't. Couldn't be. Every man he'd shot had been -- well, a man, for starters, and Japs to boot. There was still someone out there for him, someone who might be a General's daughter or a USO girl or something else along those lines.
But he'd seen the flag on his chest enough times in the mirror to recognize the distinctive little notch where the ragged white sheet had been torn, which he'd always figured was just because his skin wasn't quite smooth in that spot.
He'd heard that some people got a shock of instant recognition when they looked into their soulmate's face. Sentimental claptrap, he'd always thought. Still, he very carefully avoided looking at the faces of the dead Jap soldiers as he helped dump the bodies into a communal grave pit.
Daniel was one of the roughly 17% of the American population who had no soulmark.
He tried not to let it bother him. After all, there were 17% of the rest of the people in the country to keep him company, not to mention all the numerous majority who had lost their soulmate, or failed to recognize them, or irrevocably alienated them. His aunt, who worked in a newspaper typing pool, clipped him out articles she found and, while the actual science of it skated over his head, what he came out understanding was that there was a lot more to this soulmate stuff than you'd get from just reading the horoscopes and gossip-rag stories about celebrities finding their True Mates. The percentage of people who actually met and identified their soulmate, and weren't already married to other people, wasn't too much better than the percentage who didn't have a soulmark at all. So that was okay, he supposed. And other nations had different percentages just like they had different everything else. He memorized the numbers: 8% without soulmarks in Norway, 22% in Mexico ...
After the war, after everything, he understood his lack in a very different way. No one would want half a man, with half a leg. Of course he didn't have a soulmate -- a chain to anchor some poor girl to him, who expected a husband and breadwinner, but got ... this.
It was only to be expected, really.
Angie had the words Hi, English in a neat little ring around her left wrist. She usually covered it up with a bracelet.
She'd had the mark since her early teens, and stopped really thinking about it, to the point where she'd already known Peggy Carter for a few months when the penny dropped. She was enjoying the luxury of a long bath, stretched out and idly studying the oh-so-familiar words on her skin, when she sat up with a gasped "Oh!" and sent a wave of sudsy water cascading across the floor of Howard Stark's enormous bathroom.
Then there was a very distracting scramble to get the water cleaned up before it dripped through the ceiling into the dining room and got her kicked out of the best situation she ever got herself set up in.
But afterwards, wrapped in her bathrobe and lying on the bed, she gazed at her wrist and thought about it. Peggy? Really? She didn't know how to feel about that, especially since she knew, now, that her friend Peggy was that Peggy, and yes, the speculation was true: Peggy and the Captain really had carried each other's soulmarks, in the love-for-the-ages way that the gossip mags were all over. So Peggy was already taken, in that way.
Not that there weren't other ways of doing things. Why, Mabel Bledsoe down on the second floor of the good ol' Griffith had three different fellas carrying her soulmark (and didn't she let everybody know it, too). And Angie's great-aunt Alma had been one of those rare people who had two soulmarks, and yet she'd died a spinster.
It wasn't a path to destiny, Angie thought, not like most folks thought. It was definitely saying something, all right, but whether it was God (like Mama said) or some kind of as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon in accordance with the modern scientific way of thinking, she wasn't sure if it meant anything except what a person wanted it to mean.
It had to mean something important, or significant somehow, but she didn't think human beings were smart enough, yet, to figure out what that important thing was.
Because she just didn't think she wanted to step out with Peggy like that. She knew gals did it, of course. Angie was a woman of the world (and quite familiar with all the things the family didn't say about Aunt Ethel and Aunt Fran). And she hadn't met a fella she wanted to step out with yet, either. Oh, sure, she had a couple of beaus in high school, and she flirted with the fellas like anybody does. And dancing was fun. But that was it, so far. She'd always assumed that she'd feel differently when she met her soulmate. Hearts and sparkles and stars, all of that stuff you were supposed to feel. And now apparently she had, and, well. Here she was, hanging a leg over the side of the bed and staring at her wrist and feeling not much of anything at all, except a bit nonplused.
But a few weeks later, when she and Peggy were sprawled and giggling on one of Howard's huge silk-draped beds, with an empty bottle of brandy on the nightstand, Angie's bracelet slipped down and Peggy got a glimpse of the writing there. Her eyes went round.
"You do have one!" she said. Angie had denied any such thing. "Let me see, let me see."
"No!" Angie squealed, rolling away. They tussled, but she was no match for Peggy's wiry strength, and she ended up with Peggy on top of her, holding her wrist firmly, legs braced on either side of her. Both their chests heaved with rapid breathing from their exertion.
Peggy was looking down at her, eyes bright, lips parted, and Angie thought, Why not? She lunged up and caught Peggy's bright red lips with her own.
It was not too different from kissing a fella, except it tasted like lipstick and brandy and it was -- soft and reaching and familiar, where her kisses with fellas had been more like groping in the dark. But it also wasn't stars-in-the-eyeballs, burst-your-head-open destiny-kissing, either.
Then Peggy parted her lips from Angie's with a sucking little pop, and sat up. "Well, that was interesting," she said, and then realized she was sitting on Angie's lap and scrambled off to sit beside her on the bed.
"I'm real sorry," Angie said, still flat on her back.
Peggy brushed her fingertip across her lips. "There's no need to be sorry, but ... what was that?"
"Please don't laugh. Cross your heart."
Peggy crossed her heart, and Angie pulled down the bracelet and hesitantly showed her what she hadn't shown anybody, not even her Ma and sure as shootin' not her brothers.
"Well," Peggy said thoughtfully. She held Angie's wrist with light fingertips, reading the words scribed there.
"I know!" Angie said. "What's it mean, English? You ever hear of such a thing? You ain't got one hidden somewhere about, do you? 'I'll take eggs and sausage', some kinda thing like that?"
"No," Peggy said. She pulled up the sleeve of her dress. The star and shield had not faded; it was vivid as a fresh tattoo. "Only this."
"Huh," Angie said, flat on Howard's big bed with her head spinning slightly, gazing up at her hand framed against the ceiling above her. The bracelet had left red dents in her skin, and a paler stripe, with the words scripted lightly across it. She almost expected them to change, but they didn't.
Peggy lay down beside her, and after a moment, found her other hand. Peggy's warm, strong fingers laced through hers.
"I think perhaps people make it mean what they want it to mean," Peggy said at last. "And most people claim it means one thing, you know, that you've found the person you'll marry. But maybe it means different things to different people. Perhaps it only means that you will meet someone who changes your life, who puts a bolt of lightning through you, shocks you to the core and makes you different." Her tone was distant ... wistful.
"But not always in a stepping-out kind of way," Angie said.
"I suppose it doesn't have to be." Peggy's thumb ran over the back of her hand lightly.
"Or maybe," Angie said sleepily to the ceiling, "it's something like ... like a chance you could take, not a bolt of lightning but a train that passes your station, the most important train of all, and you could get on, or let it pass you by."
They didn't talk about it anymore, just fell asleep curled in the mess of Howard's silk sheets, and woke headachy and tired, hands tangled together.
The topic came up two nights later, at Mac's -- the SSR's hole-in-the-wall hangout bar, which had been solidly invaded by the distaff set ever since Jack invited Peggy down to drink with the boys that one night, months ago. Some of the SSR boys had stopped coming, switching to different watering holes, but a gang of regulars had coalesced slowly around the new normal. Peggy was a fixture, and Angie dropped by when she didn't have a shift at the diner or an audition, playfully flirting with the boys and sometimes bringing along various showgirl friends of hers. As Daniel put it, they brightened up the place something considerable.
On this night, everybody was buying a round of drinks for Ramirez, who'd caught a slightly inebriated girl falling off the boardwalk at Coney Island and found his soulmark on the underside of her right forearm. "Exact same place!" he crowed, holding up his arm in the bar and stabbing a finger at the scattered circle of dots on his forearm, looking like a homemade tattoo.
"What exactly is that thing?" Jack demanded, reaching for his arm. "It looks like a two-year-old bit you."
Ramirez jerked his arm away. "It's the Coney Island fireworks. She has one just like it. Identical! Same place! And we met under the fireworks. Her name is Clara and she has a room in Flatbush and the most amazing brown eyes ..."
He seemed to be, if not madly in love, then at least deep in infatuation, as well as about a sheet and a half to the wind. Peggy couldn't help noticing the girl in question was not actually here, but, well, she hadn't exactly had a textbook soulmate bond herself, so who knew how it worked? Perhaps the girl was presently rhapsodizing to her flatmates about the handsome SSR agent she'd met at the Coney Island fireworks last Friday night. Or perhaps the fireworks tattoo meant both of them were supposed to do something else important, something they'd both failed to do while they were making drunken overtures at each other on a Coney Island boardwalk ...
She found her hand had drifted to her arm, fingers lightly brushing the inside of her jacket sleeve above the soulmark, and she took it away quickly. She hadn't suffered that particular tic in months.
The tragedy of the soulmark is that we are marked forever by our failures. And, being human, we are more likely to fail than to succeed. But, then, Steve marked me in many ways. This is only the one of them that I must admit to.
Ramirez, still boisterous and even more drunk now, was being helped out of the bar by Agent Mikkelsen.
"You think there's something to it?" Daniel asked, on Peggy's other side. She looked up. He was tracing around the rim of his glass with a fingertip. "This soulmark business, I mean."
And what was his? Peggy wondered, though she would certainly not presume to ask. Daniel was a very nice man; it would point him towards someone nice, she hoped. But whoever or whatever it pointed to, whatever it meant, he clearly hadn't found that person yet -- or had found and lost them already. "I don't know," she said. "Angie and I were discussing the matter the other day."
"What matter?" Thompson asked.
"Soulmarks," Angie said, flinging her arm around his neck. She'd had a few, too.
Peggy wondered if it was Angie's cheerful overture that made him flinch, or the topic of conversation. "I wouldn't presume to read too much into it," she said.
"Oh, it means something, for sure," Angie reported, still draped in a cheerfully friendly kind of way on Jack. "Just don't know what that thing is."
"I thought there was a general consensus on that," Daniel said, a trifle gloomily.
"Don't tell me you buy into this superstition crap, Sousa," Jack snapped.
Daniel looked a little taken aback, not expecting the vehemence of the response.
"I think," Peggy said, surprising herself a little, "that one makes one's own destiny." If the star on her arm tingled slightly, then so did the rest of her skin, a light flush from the alcohol.
"I'll drink to that," Daniel murmured.
He raised his glass; the rest of them did likewise. The glasses clinked together, a ripple passing around the table. Angie sagged off Jack's shoulder to rest her head against Peggy's arm, but kept her arm thrown around his neck; Daniel smiled at Peggy, and leaned a little closer.
And, in a world without Steve and with the soulmark on her arm still an open question with no answer, she drank to a long and glorious future. For all of them.
Fandom: Agent Carter
Rating: PG
Length: 3200 wds
Content notes: none
Author notes: ... I finally wrote a soulmark AU, and it's the world's gennest soulmark AU. *facepalm* This was inspired by a vaguely-recalled fandom discussion from a long while ago, about what happens to people in a world where soulmarks are a thing who don't have any, or who lose the person they were supposed to be with, and what happens then.
Summary: Maybe soulmarks mean whatever you want them to mean.
Peggy's soulmark came out when she was one and a half, on the inside of her upper arm. It was a tiny shield with a star in the middle. Her nanny didn't know what such a soulmark could mean, and when she showed it to her parents, they didn't know what it meant either. Clearly, though, a soulmark appearing so early in a person's life must indicate a deep and lasting bond, the sort of love that was meant to unite a couple heart and soul, holding them through an entire lifetime together.
Twenty-four years later, Peggy learned that the sweet, skinny kid she'd been shepherding around for the SSR had a birthmark on the heel of his hand. It was much less ambiguous than most soulmarks, which tended to be more symbolic or vague. Direct and simple -- like Steve Rogers himself -- it was nothing more or less than Peggy's first name, in gently curling letters. It had come up when he was six months old, an almost unprecedented young age for a soulmark to rise to the surface of an infant's soft skin.
At age twenty-seven, Peggy listened to static on a radio and all she could think was that this couldn't happen, the soulmarks said this couldn't happen. It was a love for the ages. It was meant to be. They'd had all the time in the world because their soulmarks said so.
She touched the mark on her arm through her jacket, and tasted the salt of her tears on her lips.
Edwin's soulmark looked like a plain ink tattoo. It came up on his arm when he was nine. It was a number.
Anna had none. She never had. She'd always hoped she would get one someday.
It was only after the war, from newspapers, that Edwin learned about the tattoos and understood what the number on his arm was -- or rather, what it would have been for Anna, if Howard hadn't helped him rescue her.
For a long time, he wondered if Anna's lack of soulmark meant that he bore the mark instead of her. If it meant he'd saved her from that terrible future.
It didn't occur to him until a very long time later that he had no idea if it was Anna's (hypothetical) number on his arm, rather than someone else's. She was, after all, unmarked in any way they'd been able to find.
He decided to believe it was Anna's. After all, he loved her, and she loved him, and they'd risked everything for each other. Not having her in his life was unthinkable. He could not imagine how anyone else could be more of a soulmate than she was to him.
Besides, the alternative was too terrible to contemplate.
Once he was old enough to understand what soulmarks meant, Howard searched himself obsessively from head to foot in the mirror, every night, to see if his mark had come in.
He was seventeen when he finally, finally found a discreet mark on his inner thigh. It was shaped like a spider with eight delicately curled legs. Over the next decade he pondered what it might mean, and consulted numerous soulmark-symbology tables and magazines. Many ladies shared his bed, and an abnormal proportion of those were Scorpios (not a spider, exactly, but he was hedging his bets). But when he finally married Maria Trelane in 1957, she was a Taurus.
It wasn't Howard who coined SHIELD's code name for the Leviathan female assassin program, Black Widow, in 1965. If the connection ever occurred to him, Howard never mentioned it, even to his closest confidantes.
The woman briefly known as Dottie Underwood never knew what her soulmark was. It had been a small one, just below her ankle. It had appeared so long ago she didn't even remember having had the surgery to remove it. Because she'd been so young, it healed up nicely, hardly leaving a scar at all.
She knew she'd been lucky. Several of the other girls had their marks in prominent places, where they were impossible to remove without leaving an identifying scar. Those girls were removed from the program. Some people, too, had their marks come back, either in the same place or elsewhere on their bodies, but she never did.
Jack's soulmark was a small flag on his chest, right over his heart. It emerged when he was six, and his grandmother always said this was the best place it could possibly be, meaning that he and his soulmate would love each other for all of their lives.
On Okinawa, he didn't have a chance to look closely at the god-damned white flag as he stuffed it hastily under some bushes to bury later, with his camp coming awake around him. Later, he snatched an unwatched moment to stuff the thing into the latrine pit. As he kicked dirt over it, he noticed something that made his hands start trembling.
It was the same shape as the flag on his skin.
He stumbled away and leaned against a tree, trying not to retch. And told himself that he was wrong. It ... wasn't. Couldn't be. Every man he'd shot had been -- well, a man, for starters, and Japs to boot. There was still someone out there for him, someone who might be a General's daughter or a USO girl or something else along those lines.
But he'd seen the flag on his chest enough times in the mirror to recognize the distinctive little notch where the ragged white sheet had been torn, which he'd always figured was just because his skin wasn't quite smooth in that spot.
He'd heard that some people got a shock of instant recognition when they looked into their soulmate's face. Sentimental claptrap, he'd always thought. Still, he very carefully avoided looking at the faces of the dead Jap soldiers as he helped dump the bodies into a communal grave pit.
Daniel was one of the roughly 17% of the American population who had no soulmark.
He tried not to let it bother him. After all, there were 17% of the rest of the people in the country to keep him company, not to mention all the numerous majority who had lost their soulmate, or failed to recognize them, or irrevocably alienated them. His aunt, who worked in a newspaper typing pool, clipped him out articles she found and, while the actual science of it skated over his head, what he came out understanding was that there was a lot more to this soulmate stuff than you'd get from just reading the horoscopes and gossip-rag stories about celebrities finding their True Mates. The percentage of people who actually met and identified their soulmate, and weren't already married to other people, wasn't too much better than the percentage who didn't have a soulmark at all. So that was okay, he supposed. And other nations had different percentages just like they had different everything else. He memorized the numbers: 8% without soulmarks in Norway, 22% in Mexico ...
After the war, after everything, he understood his lack in a very different way. No one would want half a man, with half a leg. Of course he didn't have a soulmate -- a chain to anchor some poor girl to him, who expected a husband and breadwinner, but got ... this.
It was only to be expected, really.
Angie had the words Hi, English in a neat little ring around her left wrist. She usually covered it up with a bracelet.
She'd had the mark since her early teens, and stopped really thinking about it, to the point where she'd already known Peggy Carter for a few months when the penny dropped. She was enjoying the luxury of a long bath, stretched out and idly studying the oh-so-familiar words on her skin, when she sat up with a gasped "Oh!" and sent a wave of sudsy water cascading across the floor of Howard Stark's enormous bathroom.
Then there was a very distracting scramble to get the water cleaned up before it dripped through the ceiling into the dining room and got her kicked out of the best situation she ever got herself set up in.
But afterwards, wrapped in her bathrobe and lying on the bed, she gazed at her wrist and thought about it. Peggy? Really? She didn't know how to feel about that, especially since she knew, now, that her friend Peggy was that Peggy, and yes, the speculation was true: Peggy and the Captain really had carried each other's soulmarks, in the love-for-the-ages way that the gossip mags were all over. So Peggy was already taken, in that way.
Not that there weren't other ways of doing things. Why, Mabel Bledsoe down on the second floor of the good ol' Griffith had three different fellas carrying her soulmark (and didn't she let everybody know it, too). And Angie's great-aunt Alma had been one of those rare people who had two soulmarks, and yet she'd died a spinster.
It wasn't a path to destiny, Angie thought, not like most folks thought. It was definitely saying something, all right, but whether it was God (like Mama said) or some kind of as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon in accordance with the modern scientific way of thinking, she wasn't sure if it meant anything except what a person wanted it to mean.
It had to mean something important, or significant somehow, but she didn't think human beings were smart enough, yet, to figure out what that important thing was.
Because she just didn't think she wanted to step out with Peggy like that. She knew gals did it, of course. Angie was a woman of the world (and quite familiar with all the things the family didn't say about Aunt Ethel and Aunt Fran). And she hadn't met a fella she wanted to step out with yet, either. Oh, sure, she had a couple of beaus in high school, and she flirted with the fellas like anybody does. And dancing was fun. But that was it, so far. She'd always assumed that she'd feel differently when she met her soulmate. Hearts and sparkles and stars, all of that stuff you were supposed to feel. And now apparently she had, and, well. Here she was, hanging a leg over the side of the bed and staring at her wrist and feeling not much of anything at all, except a bit nonplused.
But a few weeks later, when she and Peggy were sprawled and giggling on one of Howard's huge silk-draped beds, with an empty bottle of brandy on the nightstand, Angie's bracelet slipped down and Peggy got a glimpse of the writing there. Her eyes went round.
"You do have one!" she said. Angie had denied any such thing. "Let me see, let me see."
"No!" Angie squealed, rolling away. They tussled, but she was no match for Peggy's wiry strength, and she ended up with Peggy on top of her, holding her wrist firmly, legs braced on either side of her. Both their chests heaved with rapid breathing from their exertion.
Peggy was looking down at her, eyes bright, lips parted, and Angie thought, Why not? She lunged up and caught Peggy's bright red lips with her own.
It was not too different from kissing a fella, except it tasted like lipstick and brandy and it was -- soft and reaching and familiar, where her kisses with fellas had been more like groping in the dark. But it also wasn't stars-in-the-eyeballs, burst-your-head-open destiny-kissing, either.
Then Peggy parted her lips from Angie's with a sucking little pop, and sat up. "Well, that was interesting," she said, and then realized she was sitting on Angie's lap and scrambled off to sit beside her on the bed.
"I'm real sorry," Angie said, still flat on her back.
Peggy brushed her fingertip across her lips. "There's no need to be sorry, but ... what was that?"
"Please don't laugh. Cross your heart."
Peggy crossed her heart, and Angie pulled down the bracelet and hesitantly showed her what she hadn't shown anybody, not even her Ma and sure as shootin' not her brothers.
"Well," Peggy said thoughtfully. She held Angie's wrist with light fingertips, reading the words scribed there.
"I know!" Angie said. "What's it mean, English? You ever hear of such a thing? You ain't got one hidden somewhere about, do you? 'I'll take eggs and sausage', some kinda thing like that?"
"No," Peggy said. She pulled up the sleeve of her dress. The star and shield had not faded; it was vivid as a fresh tattoo. "Only this."
"Huh," Angie said, flat on Howard's big bed with her head spinning slightly, gazing up at her hand framed against the ceiling above her. The bracelet had left red dents in her skin, and a paler stripe, with the words scripted lightly across it. She almost expected them to change, but they didn't.
Peggy lay down beside her, and after a moment, found her other hand. Peggy's warm, strong fingers laced through hers.
"I think perhaps people make it mean what they want it to mean," Peggy said at last. "And most people claim it means one thing, you know, that you've found the person you'll marry. But maybe it means different things to different people. Perhaps it only means that you will meet someone who changes your life, who puts a bolt of lightning through you, shocks you to the core and makes you different." Her tone was distant ... wistful.
"But not always in a stepping-out kind of way," Angie said.
"I suppose it doesn't have to be." Peggy's thumb ran over the back of her hand lightly.
"Or maybe," Angie said sleepily to the ceiling, "it's something like ... like a chance you could take, not a bolt of lightning but a train that passes your station, the most important train of all, and you could get on, or let it pass you by."
They didn't talk about it anymore, just fell asleep curled in the mess of Howard's silk sheets, and woke headachy and tired, hands tangled together.
The topic came up two nights later, at Mac's -- the SSR's hole-in-the-wall hangout bar, which had been solidly invaded by the distaff set ever since Jack invited Peggy down to drink with the boys that one night, months ago. Some of the SSR boys had stopped coming, switching to different watering holes, but a gang of regulars had coalesced slowly around the new normal. Peggy was a fixture, and Angie dropped by when she didn't have a shift at the diner or an audition, playfully flirting with the boys and sometimes bringing along various showgirl friends of hers. As Daniel put it, they brightened up the place something considerable.
On this night, everybody was buying a round of drinks for Ramirez, who'd caught a slightly inebriated girl falling off the boardwalk at Coney Island and found his soulmark on the underside of her right forearm. "Exact same place!" he crowed, holding up his arm in the bar and stabbing a finger at the scattered circle of dots on his forearm, looking like a homemade tattoo.
"What exactly is that thing?" Jack demanded, reaching for his arm. "It looks like a two-year-old bit you."
Ramirez jerked his arm away. "It's the Coney Island fireworks. She has one just like it. Identical! Same place! And we met under the fireworks. Her name is Clara and she has a room in Flatbush and the most amazing brown eyes ..."
He seemed to be, if not madly in love, then at least deep in infatuation, as well as about a sheet and a half to the wind. Peggy couldn't help noticing the girl in question was not actually here, but, well, she hadn't exactly had a textbook soulmate bond herself, so who knew how it worked? Perhaps the girl was presently rhapsodizing to her flatmates about the handsome SSR agent she'd met at the Coney Island fireworks last Friday night. Or perhaps the fireworks tattoo meant both of them were supposed to do something else important, something they'd both failed to do while they were making drunken overtures at each other on a Coney Island boardwalk ...
She found her hand had drifted to her arm, fingers lightly brushing the inside of her jacket sleeve above the soulmark, and she took it away quickly. She hadn't suffered that particular tic in months.
The tragedy of the soulmark is that we are marked forever by our failures. And, being human, we are more likely to fail than to succeed. But, then, Steve marked me in many ways. This is only the one of them that I must admit to.
Ramirez, still boisterous and even more drunk now, was being helped out of the bar by Agent Mikkelsen.
"You think there's something to it?" Daniel asked, on Peggy's other side. She looked up. He was tracing around the rim of his glass with a fingertip. "This soulmark business, I mean."
And what was his? Peggy wondered, though she would certainly not presume to ask. Daniel was a very nice man; it would point him towards someone nice, she hoped. But whoever or whatever it pointed to, whatever it meant, he clearly hadn't found that person yet -- or had found and lost them already. "I don't know," she said. "Angie and I were discussing the matter the other day."
"What matter?" Thompson asked.
"Soulmarks," Angie said, flinging her arm around his neck. She'd had a few, too.
Peggy wondered if it was Angie's cheerful overture that made him flinch, or the topic of conversation. "I wouldn't presume to read too much into it," she said.
"Oh, it means something, for sure," Angie reported, still draped in a cheerfully friendly kind of way on Jack. "Just don't know what that thing is."
"I thought there was a general consensus on that," Daniel said, a trifle gloomily.
"Don't tell me you buy into this superstition crap, Sousa," Jack snapped.
Daniel looked a little taken aback, not expecting the vehemence of the response.
"I think," Peggy said, surprising herself a little, "that one makes one's own destiny." If the star on her arm tingled slightly, then so did the rest of her skin, a light flush from the alcohol.
"I'll drink to that," Daniel murmured.
He raised his glass; the rest of them did likewise. The glasses clinked together, a ripple passing around the table. Angie sagged off Jack's shoulder to rest her head against Peggy's arm, but kept her arm thrown around his neck; Daniel smiled at Peggy, and leaned a little closer.
And, in a world without Steve and with the soulmark on her arm still an open question with no answer, she drank to a long and glorious future. For all of them.
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