Avengers Verses Xmen? Not Quite

She’s a smart kid (too smart, her teachers would say, scary smart). She knows that this is something her parents didn’t want her to know. Home computer is out- so the school one during their English class is put to another misuse.

She cries, and cries, and nothing Miss Blanchard says can get Sharon to say why.

Sharon learns about soulmates, and death, and heartbreak in less than a week.

Captain Steven Grant Rogers.

He died in 1945, and Sharon has his name on her stomach, in perfect crisp grey letters, and she breaks into something too cold, too broken for a ten year old.

It’s another three weeks before she learns how grief isn’t just one moment, it’s an ongoing nightmare. One of the girls at summer camp spots it. Asks her about the name on the back of her neck, if she knows them-

Sharon demands a photo.

Sargent James Howlett, she discovers, is a flickering grey-black mess of letters, never fully there, never fully gone. He is harder to google, harder to find. She has to take the bus down to the main branch of the city library; she tells the nice lady in charge of the genealogy records she’s doing a school project. Howlett, she learned, served in the Howling Commandos with Captain America, is nearly 80 years old, and while he might be alive now- the constant tendency of her mark to shift in shades of grey means that he won’t be for much longer.

Her parents drag her to several therapists, trying to figure out what is going on to turn their once happy, smart little darling into this quiet, angry teenager.

Aunt Peggy looks at her with sharp eyes, and teaches her to throw a punch.

She joins SHIELD.

Every so often, she holds up a mirror and twists around her neck until she can see the mark below her hairline. James Howlett has held on a lot longer than she would have thought. Sometimes, she regrets not finding him earlier. Every year, it's more time that she could have known him, yet more impossibility of him being around for anything significant.

Sharon meets Bobbi, and Natasha, and watches them dance around each other with a jealousy she tries to bury deep. She rises in the ranks of SHIELD, and develops a reputation as someone who is good, cold, and no strings attached brutal.

She has a standing on-off again with Brock Rumlow. He doesn't say a thing about her double marks. He's good like that.

Logan is a guy she meets at the bar when she's in Alberta for a mission. He's gruff, and cold in a way that reminds her of her eyes in the mirror. He calls her doll, and kisses her hard before leaving her to wake up in a hotel bed alone, his number already in her phone.

She misses him more than she thought she could have missed anyone.

He finds her again in DC, then in Atlantic City, and she'd be worried if he wasn't so aggressively uncaring about who she is. He pushes her around, and she pushes back, and he never comments about the bruises that she has whenever he gets her in a private room.

Rumlow makes a comment about her seeming happier than usual, and Sharon puts a request in for an overseas assignment

She doesn't know why she keeps thinking about Logan, but she needs to get this out of her system.

Bobbi calls twice before Sharon has even landed in Shanghai.

"They found him."

She doesn't understand, and it's not until Natasha also texts her, demanding she check the news-

Sharon crumples in the middle of the airport, air empting from her chest, a broken hiccup her only response to the security guard asking her if she's alright.

Steve Rogers is alive. Steven Grant Rogers- the impossible, heartbreaking, earth shattering name on her stomach that destroyed her world when she was ten- Steve Rogers is alive.

Sharon goes dark.

Natasha tracks her down two days later.

"Oh солнышко," firm hands pull the bottle of vodka out of her grip, and Sharon doesn't have the energy to fight back. "You're an idiot."

Sharon looks at her, but she's all red hair and blurry face, and blinking doesn't clear it.

"Did you really think the universe would be so cruel?"

"Duh. That's what it is." Natasha pokes at her until she slides off the bar stool, and down to the floor. It's comfy down there. She should have been there from the start- Natasha drags her back to her feet. "It's mean. It's damn fucking mean."

Sharon leans heavily on Natasha as she's guided towards the bar door. She hopes Natasha paid her bill. Sharon isn't sure where her wallet is. "The universe- it knows what it's doing. He's alive, and you are an idiot."

"Maybe-" hiccups as Natasha flags down a cab. "Maybe that's why. Aunt Peggy-"

"Duck your head."

"Aunt Peggy always said that. Idiot."

Sharon, even drunk, assumes the expression Natasha is making. "Margaret Carter called you an idiot?"

"No. No, noooo. She called STEVE an idiot." She leans her head on Natasha's shoulder, closes her eyes so she doesn't get sick watching the bright lights as the cab goes wherever it's going. "That's why the universe was mean and stuck us together. He was dead, and we're both idiots."

Sharon doesn't hear what Natasha says in response. She's too busy falling asleep.

Fury puts her on a local undercover assignment as punishment- long term, basic babysitting, make sure the target doesn't know she's watching while reporting on the target's mental state. Something she could do in her sleep, if Fury wasn't also entering his drama king era and putting her on duty to watch Steve FUCKING Rogers!

Does Fury know her soulmarks?

Sharon wouldn't put it past him to have that information somehow.

It just means that the job is even more of a punishment.

She picks it back up with Rumlow, and it's cold, detached, and somehow leaves her feeling empty when before it used to make her feel good about her skills as an agent.

She calls it off with Rumlow.

Rogers goes for runs early, stays at HQ late, and nods at her in the hallway when they pass. He's a good neighbour, keeps his music quiet, brings in the garbage bins after pickup, never leaves his clothes in the machine more than five minutes after the cycle ends. Sharon finds herself hoping he eats enough.

"You're allowed that," Bobbi tells her on the phone when Sharon finally breaks and confesses that she's losing her detachment on this case. Maybe she never had it in the first place. She can't tell Fury. He'll demand to know why. "For gods sake, Share Bear, he's your soulmate! Of course you're feeling attached to him!"

"Bobbi, I'm not- I'm not like that." She knows something inside her broke, that summer when she was ten. She knows there was something messed up in her heart, in her head, and since she could never be honest with the therapists- it's been there, rotting away. Maybe it's why the universe put her with two people who would forever be out of her reach. "Not about-"

"Look." Bobbi was the first person Sharon made friends with at the Academy, the first person who didn't react to the Carter name like it was a blessing or a prize or a win (and it didn't count that Bobbi had been drunk and jetlagged and misheard Sharon's introduction). "You had that Logan guy, right? You liked him."

"Yes...."

"Still thinking about him?"

That takes a moment. Is she? She put in that request for an assignment to get him out of her mind, get detached once again, and it's true that she hasn't thought about him in all this chaos. She's been on Rogers duty for four months now.

"Not really."

"See? That's what I mean." Bobbi sounds so satisfied, and Sharon really can't follow the leaps in logic. "That's Normal, Sharon. You were attracted to a guy, started to catch feelings, and then stuff happened to seperate you. That's how normal humans react. Emotions come and go."

"Oh."

"God, how did I get stuck with a broken Russian spy for a soulmate, and an even more broken American one for a best friend?"

"Natasha is so more broken than I am," Sharon says, and the quip is weak even by her own standards.

Bobbi laughs. "Call Logan up. See if he's still up for a round of bed destroying sex. Test how your emotional backswings are doing, or if it's just a soulmate thing."

She calls him.

He says it's good to hear from her.

He says he was worried.

She apologies.

They set a date.

Rogers comes home as she's getting dressed, and she says hi to him in the hallway over the pretence of laundry, and she's just closing the door when she hears the gunshots. She shoulders open the door- Rogers didn't even lock it, they really are a damn pair of idiots- gun ready, heart pounding. "Captain Rogers?" Nick Fury is bleeding out on his carpet. Sharon's world is narrowing to a simple set of actions and reactions; calling in for a medic team, pressing her shirt to the hole in Fury's chest, ignoring her soulmate, pleading with Fury to stay alive, stay alive, Nick stay with me, look at me-

Natasha is at the hospital already.

Fury dies in surgery.

Sharon gets pulled into a round of interrogation. Turns out no one knew she was on assignment to watch Rogers, and there are many questions about why she was at his apartment. She curses Fury out for his damn secrets and double blind compartmentalization, and she gets a smile from Maria Hill in the hallway. A broken, exhausted, terrified smile. Director Pierces asks her questions about Rogers' reaction, about the shooter, about her trust in Fury. They ask her to lead the hunt for Rogers, since she's been watching him and knows his patterns.

Sharon gives them the wrong lead.

Everything goes to shit.

Everything already was shit.

Hydra. Helicarriers. Winter Soldier. Brock Rumlow grinning at her, talking about using her to break her soulmate, and she'll be a good little hostage for them. About how he put that on her file, Hydra will keep her cause she's Steve's mate. Make her comply. Rumlow is disgusting and brutal, and the worst thing is- she can still see the way he behaved with her before under this. The brutal agent, the cold anger, how he's the kind to find the straight path between where he is now and where he wants to be and just taking it. Sharon wonders how much of what he showed her in bed was a front, and how much was her being too blind to see the red flags.

She kicks him in the head and shoots him in the side and gets the hell out of dodge.

Sharon doesn't stick around for the aftermath. She's tainted, marked, and she can't lead them to Rogers. If Hydra wants her (and she's not so stupid that she thinks that's everyone, that it's a neat and tidy package blown up in DC and it's all over), wants to use her against Rogers because of the damn soulmark, then there's no way in hell she's sticking around to properly meet him and watch him get attached. She burns all her papers and deep cleans the apartment and steals three cars before she even hits Virginia. South and west, backtracking, circling, always watching her six.

Logan calls her twelve times in two days.

She's just inside Michigan, exhausted, on edge, hasn't slept in three days before this whole thing started. She doesn't want to stop driving, but unless she gets some sleep she's going to kill somebody, and the odds aren't on some other driver being Hydra.

Sharon has just fallen into the motel bed when her phone goes off again.

"Ellie- fucking hell Ellie!"

"Logan." She shouldn't have answered. "Logan, you can't call me."

"Fucking hell Ellie, what is going on! I've been trying to reach you for three days now!"

"I'm compromised. You can't. I'm going dark." It's only because she's so exhausted that she even speaks to him like this. He's not an agent, he won't understand, but she's too far gone to really think about that.

"Fuck. Yeah, yeah. Thanks." He's talking to someone else. Sharon can't really hear the words. "Ellie, I'm coming to get you. Just stay put."

"Logan you can't!" Damn, she's begging. But maybe it's okay, because he's got no way to find her anyways. Let him think he's doing something, he's a civilian, they like feeling useful even when they're just getting in the way. "Did you not see the news?"

"Yes Ellie." Even this angry, even through the phone, Logan's voice is softened with some of his typical gruff affection. "That's why I'm coming to you. Just stay put."

"Too dangerous," she tells him, and hangs up, secure in the knowledge that he won't be able to find her.

One hour later, someone is banging on her door.

There had been two schools of thought, in the Academy instructions. The main one, the one nearly everyone who's watched a spy movie expects, is to not even move towards the door when you're in a safe house and compromised. It puts you closer to whoever is trying to enter, it's risky, it's bad. Go out another exit, even if you have to make that exit yourself.

Sharon hated that idea.

If even civilian teenagers expect agents to escape through the secondary window-

She checks her gun at her waist, hides it slightly behind her shirt, and opens the door.

"How did you find me?" She's dragging Logan inside the room, even as she's yelling at him. She's going to kill EVERYBODY if he's here as some kind of triple ass long term hydra honeypot. Kill everybody and then retire to work a coffee shop or some other lame ass job. "Do you even have any idea how much danger you are in right now? Just by being near me?"

Logan grabs her fraint hands, his grip tighter, and-

He hugs her.

Sharon-

Sharon-

Sharon-

Sharon goes still. And then she starts shaking, and crying. She sobs into her chest as his arms go around her back, holding her against his chest. Sharon is wrapped up in his warmth, his smell, his weight. She cries until his flannel shirt is soaked under her head, and her throat is raw, and she cries until her tears are dried up. Logan's hands are rubbing up and down her back. He kisses the top of her head. She sinks into his chest, and feels him falling back until they're sitting on the bed. He turns her sideways slightly, keeping her weight on his lap.

"Damn Ellie. Let it out."

She hiccups, and pulls herself together. "Sharon."

"What?"

She meets his startled eyes. "I still want to know how you found me this quickly, but if I'm going to assume you're not here to kill me- You should know my real name." She tries to sit up properly, and finds that his arms are locked around her. "It's Sharon Carter."

"Sharon Car- holy shit."

Logan pulls his shirt to the side, stretching out the collar, and Sharon has never felt the urge to look this closely at his hairy chest, especially not when she knew he had a soulmate name written there. Except now she has no choice but to look, he's so close to her, and she stares at the black letters on his skin.

"Holy fuck."

That's her name. That's her name. On his skin. In perfect, swoopy, black letters, right over his heart, her name. It even says Agent.

Sharon finds herself touching the words, and hears Logan suck in a breath as she does. "But that means- Your name isn't Logan."

"Only name I remember." Logan's expression is far more open and tender than she's ever seen him.

"Oh."

They sit for a while. Sharon is still exhausted- one hour of sleep and all that adrenaline might have given her enough of a second wind for this talk, but the emotional crash is bringing her back down to that tired baseline once again. She leans in, and rests her head on Logan's shoulder. "If you really are him... how are you alive? I looked him up when I was ten. He served in the war with Captain America, he's old."

She definitely said that last bit like she's ten all over again.

Logan chuckles, and holds his hand out where she can see it, but away from her. "I'm not human." He flexes his fingers, and three blades- knives- claws pop out between his knuckles. Sharon gasps. "Think I might be even older than the war, but like I said. I don't remember much." He relaxes his fingers, and the blades disappear back into his arm. There's small cuts in his skin where they came out, but even as she watches, the cuts close over and heal up. "Gonna have to get you to tell me about myself, darling."

"I will." She wonders where to start, and gets overtaken by a yawn. "Fuck."

"Go ahead and sleep, darling."

"No, no," she shakes her head, hating that she still feels a bit too much like a child. "Should move again. If you found me, Hydra can too." She tries to get off the bed.

Logan looks like he might argue, and then like he's holding a conversation with himself inside of his head. "Well- Guess you're coming back with me then."

"Logan, I really can't-" She didn't want him in danger before, and now that she knows he's her soulmate, it's even more important that she doesn't get tangled up with him. The implications of how this is a double chance to hurt Steve are there too, raw pain and fear just barely kept down by her sheer self control. "Don't you get it? DC, Captain America, the Hydra shit? I was in that! I was SHIELD! And they're going to be coming after me!"

Logan growls. "Look at me, darling. I am not human. I am really hard to kill, and I am going to fucking kill anyone who tries to get at you. Got it?"

It should make her annoyed. She hates overprotective men. She hates the guys at the Academy who tried acting like she or Bobbi or any of the other female agents needed someone to protect them. The ones who didn't learn quickly flunked out. SHIELD was pretty strict about that. And Logan- he's being that exact kind of asshole right now,except that Sharon is- Sharon only feels a little swell of warmth in her quest, a lessening of the tension that she had been holding inside of her chest, a smile starting on her lips. "What are you then? The claws, the healing, the age. What are you? Super soldier?"

"Mutant. And I think.... there's some people you need to meet."

So on three days of insane adrenaline, one hour of sleep, and her entire view on her soulmates being turned upside down, Sharon walks out of the motel and meets the Xmen. Then she passes out in the Xmen's jet, as Logan strokes her hair and one of his friends flies them back to New York. And she wakes up at a school for mutants that she'd never known about, and learns that the reason they're trusting her this easily is they have a goddamn telepath for a leader. And she is still way too exhausted to process any of this properly, or go through any of the meetings with any kind of sense.

Logan hustles her off to a room, and into another bed. Much better quality than the one at the hotel.

It smells like him.

Sharon is sure that when she wakes up, she'll be all sensible again, and not this silly, emotional type of person who seems far more broken than anything that Natasha had ever teased her about. But right now-

Right now she tugs on Logan's hand, and pulls him into the bed with her, and lets herself curl up against his side.

She falls asleep.

Safe.

"Just tell Captain Rogers it's Kate here to see him. Please."

"Kate?" Logan laughs, even as the secretary turns to her phone. "How many fake names you got, darling?"

Sharon is not the ten year old girl she once was when she got all broken up over her soulmates the first time, so she does not step on Logan's foot. She does glare at him though. He'd be a terrible undercover agent, and she can hardly believe that she ever thought he might be working for Hydra to seduce her. The man can't take a damn hint, because he just laughs harder. She really needs to find a way of killing him, patenting it, and using it.

The elevator opens, and Sharon's mirth dies in her throat. Rogers is standing there, in his uniform, and he looks like all her nightmares again. The ones where he rejects her. The ones where he doesn't believe her. The ones where it's all been a stupid lie from the universe. Xavier has said she needs therapy, that her inner child is still dealing with the pain and buried issues from thinking her soulmates were dead and then hiding from the pain- and it takes standing here, in the lobby of Stark Tower, looking at Rogers' shocked and disappointed face- to identify that creepy cold Xavier was talking about.

"Kate? Are you- James?"

Rogers- Steve- crosses the lobby at a run, and Logan steps in front of Sharon in protectively, and her hands twitch for her gun-

Rogers reaches a hand up, almost to Logan's face. Hesitates. Sharon watches his jaw set in that stubborn, familiar, stupid Rogers way. His hand closes the gap, and fingers press against Logan's sideburn and cheek. "James." His eyes seem to be locked Logan's face. "James you're alive."

Sharon tries to step away, but Logan grabs for her hand without looking, and the movement makes Rogers' head turn. Those intense blue eyes focus on her.

It feels like the floor is about to swallow her up.

She is cold.

"Your name isn't Kate. It's Sharon."

She nods.

Speaking is much too hard.

Logan's hand is pulling her in, until she's close enough for him to wrap his arm around. Rogers' eyes are so damn perceptive. Logan sniffs, and tilts his head towards the elevator. "You got a private place we can talk, Captain? There's a lot of long stories I think we need to cover."

"Captain?"

"I got memory issues. Like I said. Long stories."

"Right." It's everything the old movies were, except the literal eagle cry, watching Rogers straighten his back and nod his head. And then he's softening again, in these little movements that Sharon didn't know that she knew, but she knows them. His movements between the performance of Captain America- and Steve Rogers who is still unsure and figuring things out. It's like when he needed to ask her help about the laundry machine. "I- I am- yeah. Let's go talk."

They move towards the elevator. Sharon ends up in the middle. Her hand brushes Rogers arm. He looks up at her, eyes startled, like he's trying to be guarded and isn't pulling it off.

"I'm sorry." It's the best, simplest, hardest place to start. "I was scared. I should have told you."

"Did you know- Did you know when you started watching me?"

"Yes." The guilt makes her look away. "I thought you were dead for most of my life. Your mark was grey. When it came back, I was on a mission. Freaked out. Went rouge. Watching you was Fury's idea of a punishment." Logan squeezes her fingers. Sharon can hear how detached her words are coming out. "Natasha knew."

Rogers' mouth twists. "Of course she did."

The elevator lets them out on what might be the main Avengers floor. It's definitely too big and open to be Rogers' personal space.

Logan looks around in interest, and then pulls out a cigar from his pocket. "You mind, Cap? This seems like it's gonna get deep." He has his lighter out before Rogers can react. Sharon is used to this, and it makes her smile. Because it's just like Logan has been with her. And when she looks to Rogers- The way he smiles- This Logan behaviour is familiar to him as well. He lights up his cigar, and sits down on the couch, all comfortable kind of lazy. "Personally, I'm just hoping it turns out my name on you is some place exciting, and we can move past this drama into the fun part."

Sharon giggles. Rogers laughs.

It's not the start of things.

It's the middle of something that is already great.