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Laura wanted to throw something. She couldn’t concentrate on the study material for her sophomore trig exam. For days the song that had been stuck in her head-
Well, it wasn’t a song, exactly. It was the damn jingle from the Meow Mix commercial. She didn’t even own a cat. But still-
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow MEOW meow meow meow-
Great. Now it was back. For a moment there she’d been worried. Not. Her soulmate had finally switched it up with the Oscar Meyer bologna song for approximately three hours.
Laura covered her ears and willed the song to go away. It didn’t work; it never did. But it made her feel slightly better. She cranked her own music up in her bedroom until her mother shouted at her to turn it down, but sadly that never worked either. The song would be stuck in her head until her soulmate found something else.
When she finally met her damn soulmate, she was going to strangle them.
Laura didn’t exactly miss the moment her soulmate discovered a new genre of music. They usually got stupid commercial jingles and whatever songs were at the top of the ratings stuck in her head, but then one day, it randomly became classical music. After her brain shorted out briefly in shock, it took her tracking down one of the music professors three buildings over to figure out that it was from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
She wanted to beat her head against the nearest tree. But at this point, anything was better than the Kit-Kat jingle she’d been hearing for a month and a half.
Though the pop music in a language she’d never heard before and much less understood that came through two days later was a little odd.
Laura Matins was 22 years old and at her first day of agent training when the music in her head finally stopped. She whipped her head back to the man she’d just been introduced to.
“You-!” Laura threw herself at him, managing to punch him in the nose before another SHIELD trainee pulled her off of him. “You’re the reason I’ve had the JG Wentworth commercial stuck in my head for the last six months?!”
Trainee Agent Clint Barton just stared at her over the hand covering his bleeding and probably broken nose, if it felt anything like her fingers did.
“I’ve had elevator muzak playing since last Tuesday,” he said, and yeah, she’d definitely broken his nose.
“I happen to like jazz music,” she snapped. “And it’s better than anything you’ve been listening to for the last fifteen-”
Agent Coulson cleared his throat. Loudly.
“Is there a problem here?”
Laura yanked herself out of the restraining hold her classmate had on her and pointed one angrily shaking finger at Barton.
“He’s my soulmate, apparently, and listens to commercial jingles for fun.”
Agent Coulson turned to the idiot she was pointing at and raised an eyebrow.
“In my defense,” he said, sniffing and wiping the blood from under his nose. “She will randomly get that Mariah Carey Christmas song stuck in my head in the middle of June.”
As Laura growled at him, Coulson just shook his head.
“Alright, agents. Let’s get you two to the soulmate office and register you. Just remember that, romantic or platonic, the songs will come back when you get more than a mile from each other.
“Looks like you two are going to have to be field partners.”
Laura wanted to scream.
Three years later saw Laura bolting upright in bed, chest heaving, just as she’d been about to fall asleep.
“Laur?” Clint mumbled, face down in the pillow next to her.
“Clint,” she said, and Laura could hear the panic in her own voice. “Is there a song stuck in your head right now?”
Her boyfriend mumbled and scratched at the stubble on his chin.
“Yeah,” he eventually said. Laura held her breath. “Some classical shit.”
All the air in her lungs escaped in a whoosh.
“Do you know what it is?” she asked, voice trembling.
“No,” he answered, turning over with what looked like the intent of going back to sleep. “I hate classical music, Laur, you know that.”
“Clint,” she said, grabbing his shoulder and rolling him back to face her.
“What?” he snapped. “Laur, I’ve been up for two days, why the hell-”
“Dammit, Clint!” she snapped back. “Just watch my finger.”
Laura concentrated on the music she could hear faintly in the back of her mind. Her finger followed the melody, and slowly Clint sat up beside her.
“Holy shit,” he breathed, and Laura nodded.
“If it’s not mine, and it’s not yours-”
Clint swallowed hard. “Then we’ve got a third out there, somewhere.”
“Someone who likes classical music and non-English pop songs,” she said.
Any time they went on a mission, both she and Clint kept their ears tuned for their third’s music. Sometimes it would get really strong, but the next night it would fade away to almost nothing.
“They’ve got to be traveling a lot,” Clint said. “It’s like tuning a car radio. The closer we are to them, the louder it gets. And since we’re in Japan and it was loud last night but almost silent this morning-”
“And it was loud in Cairo,” Laura added. Clint nodded.
Laura bit her lip. “What if they’re an agent too? Just… not ours? What if one day they’re our assignment?”
“Hey,” Clint said, pulling her into a hug. “Then we abort mission, at least until we figure it out. You know Coulson will back us.” He pressed a kiss to her hair. “And we will figure it out, Laura. I promise.”
Four years and an on the job injury later, Laura retired. Unfortunately it meant that Clint’s commercial jingles began playing in her head again; SHIELD still needed him to move, so their one mile radius was constantly being breached. But in a weird way it was kind of comforting to Laura. Often times he was overseas, so the music was like a barely on radio playing in a back room. And as long as it kept playing, Laura knew her husband was alive.
One day though, not long after she’d finally been given the all clear by her physical therapist to go without her brace, the music started getting louder. That in and of itself was not unusual; it meant that Clint was on his way home.
What was unusual was that the Pepto Bismol jingle and the string music she tentatively identified as Mozart were getting louder at the same rate as she put clean clothes into the dresser.
Laura’s breath caught and she froze mid-fold when Clint crossed into that invisible, one-mile circle and his music stopped, but the classical just kept getting louder.
She threw the clothes on the bed and raced down the stairs, barely catching herself from falling at the landing. Laura didn’t even bother putting on shoes before she shot out of the door and off the porch, running down the drive to greet her husband and to finally meet their third.
The world’s biggest grin was on Clint’s face when he got out of the car, right eye bruised and swollen shut. For a brief moment, Laura managed to forget their soulmate and just looked at his eye.
“What happened?”
“The damn Meow Mix commercial,” she heard a woman’s voice say, and Laura’s head whipped around. She saw bright red hair and brighter green eyes, and suddenly the classical music stopped. “It had been playing in my head for five days.”
“Laura,” Clint said, using his hand as a flourish. “I’d like you to meet Natasha Romanov, recently defected Black Widow. She likes ballet music and Russian pop songs.”
Laura ran around the car and immediately wrapped her arms around Natasha. The other woman was stiff for a moment, but then relaxed. She didn’t hug back, but it was a start.
“I almost changed my major because of you,” she said into Natasha’s hair. “Trying to figure out what music you got stuck in my head drove me almost as crazy as three months of what would you do for a Klondike bar.”
“I remember that,” Natasha said as Laura finally pulled back. They both sent a stink-eye glare at Clint.
He just grinned at them.
And finally Laura’s mind was blessedly free of any music except her own. At least until Clint and Natasha’s next mission.
When they got back, she was going to kill them both, because all of a sudden-
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow MEOW meow meow meow-
It was in stereo.