Chapter 1
Maybe she was just a few years younger than him. That had to be it. At the age of eight Steve Rogers was the only kid in his class who had yet to get anything from his soulmate. His classmates' arms were always covered in doodles or little messages from their soulmates, but Steve’s arms only ever had his.
Every time he drew a flower or wrote a little message and didn’t get a response he tried not to be discouraged, but it hurt. He was already tormented by the boys in his class for being so small and sickly. His lack of a soulmate just added fuel to the fire. They would tell him that it wasn’t a surprise that someone like him didn’t have a soulmate. Why would anyone love someone who probably wouldn’t live to see thirty.
He tried not to let their words affect him, he really did, but it was hard. They were vocalizing the things he feared. He was so scared that whatever force paired you with your soulmate knew he wouldn’t live long enough to meet them.
As Steve got older it only got worse. By sixteen he still hadn’t gotten a single mark from his soulmate, but by then he was pretty sure why. Steve had realized that he looked at the boys in his class the same way he looked at the girls. He knew it was wrong and he tried to push the feelings down, but it wasn’t working. He couldn’t ignore the fact that he was attracted to men too.
That had to be the problem. The reason he didn’t have a soulmate was because two men couldn’t love each other. It was wrong and the universe knew that. It had to be the reason he didn’t have a soulmate. It had to be because his partner would be a man and that wasn’t right.
It wasn’t enough to make him stop trying though. As his art skills got better he kept drawing. He drew portraits of people he saw on the subway, beautiful floral patterns, and once he drew the Brooklyn bridge on his thigh. Even though he was certain there was no one out there for him, he wasn’t going to stop trying to see if there was.
When he joined the army and was given the serum he thought maybe that was the solution. The serum was meant to fix everything that was wrong with him. He hoped with every drawing he penned someone would draw something back, but he never had any luck.
He had taken to telling people that his soulmate had died of tuberculosis. It was easier to deal with their looks of pity for that than the ones he would get for saying he didn’t have a soulmate. He told everyone that his girl Dot was a nurse. She was working in the tuberculosis ward and caught the disease from her patients. He would get a sad pat on the back from his fellow servicemen and no one questioned why he never had anything other than his own drawings on his arms.
By the time Steve crashed his plane into the arctic, he had all but accepted that that was why he didn’t have a soulmate. It wasn’t because it was a man. It wasn’t because he used to be small and sickly. It was because he was destined to die young and the universe didn’t want to put his soulmate through that. At least, that’s what he told himself in his final moments before everything faded to black.
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One of the first thoughts Steve had when he woke up in 2012 was that he wished SHIELD didn’t find him. The last memory he had was him rationalizing his lack of a soulmate, but he was still alive. There was a small part of him that thought maybe, just maybe, his soulmate was someone from this century, but he didn’t want to risk it. He knew if he wrote or drew something and didn’t get a response back it would break him. So he didn’t.
He played up the story of Dot, which had apparently become part of the Captain America mythology. One of the men he told in the army had apparently told the world about the great Captain America’s lost love. It had become the inspiration for many novels and films in the seventy years he was frozen. People looked up records of women who could possibly be his Dot.
Even his fellow Avengers questioned him about it. He would tell them all the same story he told people back in the army, while adding something about wanting to respect her and her family's privacy.
The only person who knew it was a lie was Natasha. She caught the slight panic in his face when Tony brought up Dot. A few days later she cornered him and got him to spill everything. He told her how he didn’t have a soulmate, how the only marks on his body were the ones that he put there. He told her that Dot was the first name he could think of and how her story was actually what happened to his mother when he was twenty. He told her all the reasons he thought he didn’t get a soulmate, how waking up in this century proved all of them wrong, and how desperately he wanted to try to see if there was someone out there in this century but he was so damn terrified that it wouldn’t be the case.
By the time he finished telling her everything he was crying in her arms. Finally telling someone all of the things he kept bottled up for years unleashed the dam. She ran her fingers through his hair as he cried, waiting for him to calm down. When he finally came out of it she assured him that she wouldn’t tell anyone and that she would always be there for him if he needed a shoulder to cry on.
She lived up to her word. Whenever Steve needed to talk or cry she was there for him. Every so often she would try to convince him to give it one last shot. She told him to just draw something silly like a smiley face or just to write hi, but he wouldn’t. He always gave her the same excuse, that he would rather not know that than have confirmation that he would never be loved. And besides, he hadn’t gotten anything since he woke up. If his soulmate really was out there, they would have tried to reach out to him. Right?
At least, until one day two years after he woke up. He was at the lowest point he had ever had. After the battle of Sokovia, learning that there were people who hated him and thought he was a fascist, he needed to know. He needed confirmation that the universe had deemed him unworthy of love. So he grabbed the nearest pen, touched the tip to his forearm, and wrote.