Chapter Text
“Soul mate, Soul fate,
What have you got for me…”
The high-pitched sing-song chant filtered in through the open window and woke Phil Coulson from his doze with a groan. The sun was up, but barely. Since when did kids get up so early? And why did the ones in the yard next-door insist on skipping all the time? And with rhymes? While he definitely appreciated the vintage aesthetic, was it still the actual 50’s?
“Soul mate, Soul fate,
Who’s it gonna be?”
Great, now he was going to have that rhyme going round and round in his head all day. Perfect when he would be trying to make a good impression on his first morning in his new posting. He levered himself out of bed and stumbled towards the shower, memory automatically filling in the rest of the chant along with the children’s voices and the rhythmic slap of the turning rope,
“First you find,
And then you bind,
And after that,
Well, never-you-mind….
Soul mate, Soul fate…..”
The chant went round and round and once under the water, head clearing a bit, he smiled to himself. Kids had been singing that particular rhyme since time immemorial and he guessed they always would. Hell, he’d sung it himself when he was their age, though his Mother hadn’t really approved of the last…yep, there it was. The frustrated cry of,
“Tara! How many times have I told not to sing that song! What will the neighbours say?”
was muffled a little by the sound of the shower but still unmistakeably a Mother at full-throttle and the little voices dissolved into a chorus of “awww, Mooooom” before they gave in. The silence lasted only a few seconds before the rope started again, this time with a rhyme Phil didn’t recognise.
He rinsed the shampoo from his hair and chuckled. He’d be willing to bet that the kids didn’t have any idea what they were singing about anyway with regards to never-you-mind, he certainly hadn’t back then. But he remembered being their age, when the whole concept of soulmates had been just so…fascinating. To think that there was someone out there, perfect to make you happy and for you to make happy in turn. Everyone had their words, written on their skin from birth, and to be so close to the age when they’d actually become readable and not just a set of dots and lines, to know what words your soulmate would say to you that would allow you to find them, it had all been the topic of endless school-yard conversations and hysteria when he was ten or eleven.
Of course, after puberty kicked in and they’d realised that they didn’t necessarily have to find or bind before the ‘never-you-mind’ there had been other, more…immediate things to talk about. Hormones, crushes and the agonies of dating had taken the focus off the soulmate question a little. But still, almost everyone speculated what their words would say, or what their friends would have and what kind of person it would lead them to, what kind of a life it would bring.
What kind of a life…. Phil sighed and shut off the water.
He resolutely didn’t look at his words, while he towelled off. Or while he dressed in his new suit (impeccably tailored as always but perhaps in fabric a little more costly now that he was graduated from the training academy and posted. Nothing showy, but he was a full-fledged Agent now, and he was determined to look it).
He never looked at his words if he could help it.
The day they came in, he’d been so excited, nervous but excited, and dying to know what they would reveal about his eventual soulmate. Sent home from school by knowingly-smiling teachers because he couldn’t stop scratching at the place where they scrawled across his chest and almost maddened by the heat and itch, he’d endured the world’s longest bus-ride and then almost given his Mom a coronary by bursting into the house and stripping off his shirt right then and there in front of the big hallway mirror. She’d come to stand beside him, taken his hand while he’d stared and strained until his eyes watered. Then, at last, the marks seemed to shift on his skin and suddenly, they were words. He’d read them and gasped, felt the blood draining from his face.
“Well?” His Mom had asked, “Can you read them?”
It had been the first time he’d been glad that only you could read your soulwords, at least until you found and matched your soulmate. Glad that, to her, they remained a random pattern of marks.
“Yes.”
“And?” She’d been so pleased for him, so eager for any hint of his future.
“And yes, I can read them.”
He’d picked up his shirt, kissed her on the cheek and gone up to his room before his face could give him away. She’d never asked again, and he’d never told. He didn’t need to see his Mother cry.
With a start Phil came back to himself, realised he’d been staring in the mirror, glaring at his shirt as if daring it to reveal the words it covered. He shook his head; he did not have time this morning to be gnawing on old and pointless bones. He wasn’t a kid anymore he was a grown man and he had new, important work to be getting to. Taking one last glance at himself, he practised his best ‘I got this’ smile, grabbed his keys and headed out.
>>===>>
The bus downtown was crowded with the morning rush and Phil found himself crushed into the aisle, stuck standing next to the seat of two older teenage girls who were chatting away like giggly machine guns. And, of course, there was only one topic under discussion. Seemed the whole world was obsessed with soulmates today.
“I know exactly what to say, thank you, Little Miss Are-You-Sure-About-This,” one of them exclaimed triumphantly to the other, “I have his words!”
“Lacie, you do not!”
“I do! He told them to his sister who told them to her girlfriend and she told then to Sarah, Sarah told Mike and Mike told me. So I do have them! And I’m going to meet him today and say them and then he’ll find me and he’ll say mine…”
“Do you even read yours yet?”
“Of course I do, you’re just jealous because you’re still illegible. Annnyway, he’ll say my words and we’ll match, just like that. It’ll be beautiful!”
“And what if you don’t say his words right? What if you don’t know his hearttongue?”
“Alex! Are you trying to ruin my big day? Of course I’ll know his hearttongue, it’s destiny….hey, quick, it’s our stop!”
Phil tried not to snort as the girls got up and squeezed down the aisle, their voices cutting off as the door shut behind. Hearttongue. The title romantics gave to the idea that you didn’t just have to say your soulmate’s words, you had to say them right. Had to be speaking their language, as it were.
He supposed it would explain why although most people could find as soon as they met, it very occasionally took a few days or weeks longer before the find happened, this idea that you couldn’t match your soulmate until they could speak the language of your heart. And maybe happened that way for some people. His Mom, a music teacher, hadn’t had her find for his dad the morning they met at theatre group but in the afternoon when she heard him sing. And then there was his friend from the Academy, May, who spoke Chinese not because she was born there but because of her soulwords. She’d moved to the USA when she was five and rebelled against the Chinese part of her heritage until her words had come in as characters and she’d finally attended the lessons her parents had always begged her to so that she could learn to understand them. And yes, she admitted that learning the language again had been like finding a missing piece of herself as well as being handy for the job, so he guessed that could be called a hearttongue, even if she hadn’t made her find yet.
But to Phil it mostly sounded hopelessly self-deluding, just a way for girls like these two to convince themselves that the guys they had crushes on could still turn out to be their soulmates because of some nebulous ‘inner language’, when really all it was, was circumstances. The words were just words, no hidden messages. 99.9% of the time, people met and there was either a find or there wasn’t, simple.
Phil realised he was absently tracing a hand across his left collar-bone, just above where his words were and snapped his hand down quickly, scowling. Hearttongue be damned, it was a nice idea but when it came to whoever was going to say his own words? If that phrase said something about their ‘inner language’, or even his, he had absolutely no desire ever to hear it.
And the thought of ever taking it a step further and making a bind with that person? An indelible, permanent link between souls which was touted by pretty much everyone as the very best life could offer? It somehow didn’t seem very likely.
Besides, he had his work to do, and he was sure there was plenty of it already waiting at his new desk. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes. Plenty of time to grab a coffee to go.
>>===>>
The queue at the Starbucks nearest his new base took forever and Phil began to wonder if he should have skipped the caffeine fix. Abhorrent as the idea of tackling the whole day with nothing but office machine coffee was, he couldn’t be late. As he neared the front he spotted what was causing the hold up, the barista manning the machine today was clearly a flirt and the customers were lapping up his patter, happy to exchange a few minutes and an extra tip for a well-shaped compliment. And who could blame them? The guy was a looker, just a bit rugged, with seriously great arms and while Phil might be in a hurry, there was always time to appreciate a cheeky smile and a well-formed set of biceps. He watched with a mixture of intrigue and impatience, as the barista sent one customer away smiling and turned to chat to the cute red-headed guy next in line. Phil was just about to give up on both the flirt and the coffee and step out, when a sudden burst of blinding light made him screw up his eyes.
A soulflare.
The barista had obviously gotten more than he’d expected with the red-head. The barista’s friendly chat-up line must actually have been the other man’s soulwords and saying them set off his soulflare, the light which was an unmistakeable signal that a find had been made. There was a moment of astonished, tight, silence then, as the red-head spoke, a second flash of light when the barista’s soulflare went up. The whole café let out its collective breath before bursting into riotous applause for the bemused but smiling pair now holding hands at the counter. Phil joined in, clapping as hard as the rest of them, as was traditional and polite. A matched-find. Two souls meant to be together had found each other. Their words would become readable, made clear and coloured by their new partner, they’d no doubt date for a while, get to know each other and then probably decide to bind, maybe in one of those increasingly-popular-but-mawkish new ceremonies, before living happily ever after. At least Phil hoped so.
Just because he couldn’t have it, didn’t mean he would begrudge anyone else.
Realising that coffee would not be likely to happen any time soon now that the barista had more important things to concentrate on, he gave up the caffeine hunt and hurried the last few blocks. Honestly, the kid’s rhyme this morning, the girls on the bus and now an actual find right in front of him, he wondered if the universe was deliberately trying to make him think about soulmates, today of all days. Because it was almost ironic, he tried never to think about his soulwords but he had to admit it, they were the reason he was even here. Once he’d read them he knew he had to make sure he would be able to deal with what happened if his words were ever said. So, when the research for his final History degree dissertation had thrown up one too many mentions of a shadowy agency who seemed to have more than a hand in actually shaping history and then the actual agency had come to see who was following their trail and ask if he’d like to join them, he’d said yes.
Because when the words your soulmate would apparently say to you were,
“Don’t twitch. Don’t even twitch, or you’re dead.”
Phil figured you would need all the help and training you could get if you wanted to survive the find. And where better to get it than a secret extra-governmental, military counter-terrorism and intelligence agency?
So, as much as he hated them, he supposed those words had shaped his life anyway.
He rounded the final corner, stopped and couldn’t help the grin that appeared as he looked up at The Triskelion, his post-graduation posting. A surge of pride rose in his chest and behind those stupid words his heart swelled. Fuck them. Fuck the whole damn soulmate business. If and when his find came, he knew that he’d be okay, because it turned out that he was good at this, combat, espionage, escape, all that agent stuff. He’d been near top of his class in the Academy and was so full of new skills. He’d live. And if he never got to bind? Well. Why would he want to bind with a maniac who’d use that as an opening gambit anyway? No, he would be fine as he was.
He adjusted his tie, straightened his spine and walked through into head quarters, ready to see what his new posting would bring, ready and willing to meet it head on.
Because he was Phil Coulson, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. And he had a world to protect.