Hello! I thought I would give this a shot, since I take the prompt in a pretty different direction from the other fill. This part is pretty happy, but it'll only get worse (by which I mean better) from here on out.
“CONFIRMED: Norse Gods Have Soulmates, Too!” a tabloid headline proclaims to Karen as she walks by the checkout lane for the seventeenth time that afternoon. Thor, the flying Avenger with the hammer, stares out from the low-grade newsprint while a pretty dark-haired woman looks up at him in adoration. Karen pretends that she doesn’t see them. She has found everything she needs for the coffee machine in the office, except for filters, and it has been so unnecessarily long by now that she finally caves and asks for directions. (Apparently, since the advent of the Keurig, coffee filters have become more commonly used in children’s arts and crafts projects than in the brewing of coffee.)
Finally, she has everything she needs. But as she joins the checkout line, she is constantly aware of Thor gazing at her as she inches forward in the line. And Karen gazes right back, because if there is one thing that she’s never been able to resist, it’s stories about soulmates.
Ever since she was in kindergarten, she had been fascinated with the romance of princes saving their soulmates from towers, dragons, and witches, with the narrative of fated and irrevocable love, and especially with the poetry of the birth of color: she had taken Spanish in High School just because most of her favorite love poets were Mexican. She imagined that, once she met her own soulmate, she would be just as fascinated by the paintings that all of her paired friends had always talked about--The Birth of Venus, Starry Night, the collected works of Jackson Pollock--but for now, she was perfectly happy with the descriptions of color to be found in her favorite poets… Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos…
She ends up buying the magazine, just as she’d known she would from the moment she first saw it.
*
Soulmates had been particularly on her mind since she got her new job--or really, since she met her future bosses, who were just her lawyers at the time.
Foggy and Matt had the sort of relationship that everyone dreams of having with their soulmate--blissful, joyful, natural as breathing. Each of them seemed to be able to anticipate the other’s needs, movements, even sometimes thoughts, and it’s marvelous to behold. Karen is glad that she’s the sort to celebrate other people’s happiness rather than desire it, because otherwise she thinks she might not be able to stand watching such a perfect match when she hasn’t met her own soulmate yet.
They all go out to celebrate the new Nelson & Murdock the day she’s hired, and she is proud of the fact that she managed to last a full 20 minutes and 2 shots before asking them how they met.
“We were roommates,” Matt says, “in law school.”
“Yeah, for all of two days, but then the Man found out and moved us to separate rooms. Apparently, there are rules against sharing college-owned space with your soulmate. Something about property damage,” Foggy says, already happy-drunk. “We wrote a mock argument suing the school for homophobia in one of our classes that semester.”
“Right, but I meant, how did you know?” she asks. “I mean, I guess I know how you knew, Foggy, but like, you can’t see color anyway, right Matt?”
Matt smiled at her as he explained, probably not for the first time, what it was like to be blind when you meet your soulmate. “It’s not just color, Karen. It’s never been just color. It’s just that sighted people tend to emphasize seeing in color above everything else, since it’s the most dramatic change. But you also get greater sensitivity in touch, taste, hearing--”
“Yeah,” Foggy interjected, “while he used to be able to hear a pin drop across a crowded room, now--”
“Now I can walk through a crowded street and still be able to tell which heartbeat is his,” Matt finished.
“Oh, wow,” Karen said.
“Yeah, wow indeed,” Foggy marvelled. “We need to find more excuses to have this conversation, so that you can have an excuse to say things like that.”
“I say things like that all the time, Foggy.”
“Yes, but you can never compliment me enough. Or, if you can, you haven’t yet.”
“I always knew that what you really wanted was a sycophant, not a soulmate.”
“But you always wanted to be a sycophant, so what you’re saying is that we’re perfect for each other,” Foggy answered, laughing. “But to go back to what we were talking about, the best metaphor I’ve come up with for it is the Wizard of Oz.” Karen’s confusion must have shown on her face, because Foggy asked “You have seen it, haven’t you?”
“Of course I have, but I don’t know…”
“What’s the difference between Kansas and Oz?”
“What? I don’t--”
“Just try to describe it for me.”
“Um...Oz is cleaner, and brighter, and just...happier, I guess. I don’t really know what you’re asking,” she answered.
Foggy smiled at her. “The correct answer, my dear Ms. Page, is that Oz is in color.”
“What? Really?”
“Really. The whole movie is basically one big metaphor for sexual awakening, but that’s besides the point. You could tell that there was something fundamentally different about Oz, even though you couldn’t see the colors, right? Well, that’s exactly what it’s like, having a soulmate. Whether you see the colors or not, there’s no way you could not tell the difference.”
Karen smiled. “That’s really beautiful, Foggy.”
“Just wait until you’ve heard it 30 more times,” Matt interjected, “and I’m sure you’ll feel differently.”
“Shut up, Murdock, you’re infecting this poor girl’s head with lies. I only tell that story once a month, at the most.”
“No, I think it’s very--like, poetic. Both of you,” she said. “Did--um. Did you guys read the article that came out about soulmates’ brains?” Karen asked them.
“Karen, we’re lawyers. We don’t keep up with all of the brain science,” Foggy said.
Karen laughed and said, “I don’t keep up with the brain science, either, I just read an article on the internet. Apparently these no--nuh--neuroscientists were doing some experiments on a bunch of people, and two of them bonded in the waiting room. They were able to look at how their brains changed after they had bonded with each other: you know, their minds started to work the same way, or on the same wavelength or whatever. People knew that already. But because they had already done other work, they could see what the people’s brains were like before bonding. They think that their brains were already set up to be in parallel to each other: like, all of those things that aligned themselves afterwards were already ready to be aligned before they met, like they were literally made for each other,” Karen concluded enthusiastically. She took another drink, proud that she had managed to speak so coherently.
“Huh, that’s interesting,” Foggy said. “What do you think, Matt? Were we made for each other?”
Matt looked somewhat far away, but Foggy’s question brought his attention back. “I think--well. I’m sorry to ask this, I know we’ve just met, but… Karen, are you religious?” he asked. “I mean--. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
Karen blinked. “Um… No, not really. Sorry?”
“No, it’s fine, I just--I’m Catholic, you know, and I’ve always--I’ve always thought that finding your soulmate was a very spiritual experience. Like, finding that person out there who was ‘made for you’ always seemed like proof that God’s really out there, watching over us. At least, that’s how it was for me,” he said, squeezing Foggy’s hand. “So, what I’m saying, I think, is that what you’re saying is something that we’ve always known. Not Catholics, I mean, but people. I think that almost every bonded pair you ask could have told you as much as that article did.”
“Mattie, that was beautiful. You obviously aren’t drunk enough if you can still say shit like that,” Foggy said. “You’re going to make me cry.”
“You’re not going to cry,” Matt said to him.
“Nope, pretty sure I’m going to stop at welling up this time. But then again, I am pretty drunk,” he said, his voice beginning to warble melodramatically. “Maybe I will cry. What are you going to do about it?”
“Foggy,” Matt said, pulling him in for a quick kiss, “you’re not going to cry.” Then he went in for another kiss, this one deeper and so sweet that Karen’s heart started to ache. He pulled away slightly, then added in a low voice, “And if you do, I’ll leave you here for Josie to take care of.”
Foggy gasped and playfully shoved the laughing Matt away. “You wouldn’t!” he proclaimed.
“Wouldn’t I?” he said provocatively. Then, “No, you’re right, I wouldn’t.”
Karen laughed along with them as they all got more and more and then most drunk. They stayed at the bar until Matt insisted that they needed to get some sleep before work tomorrow, and then they called a cab to take her back to her apartment. As the driver began to pull away, Karen turned back to look at her new bosses one more time. Matt was leaning into Foggy’s shoulder as though he were too drunk to stand without help, and he was laughing as Foggy whispered something into his hair. She turned away then, because it was clearly a private moment and if she wasn’t careful, then she really would start crying.
As the cab passed by the familiar paths of Hell’s Kitchen, Karen tried to imagine it in color. Maybe it was just the liquor talking, but she felt like she were on the brink of something--like maybe she was about to fulfill whatever fate God or neuroscience had in store for her. They passed a little park with some trees, and Karen could have sworn that she saw green--but the moment passed, and soon they arrived at her apartment. She changed clothes, took an aspirin, and tumbled into bed. Three pages into the song of Thor and Foster as told by the Bugle, she was asleep and dreaming of cherry trees.
*
(The line of poetry Karen quotes is from “Every Day You Play”, Poem 14 from 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda. It translates to “I want / to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”)
Second Fill, 1/?: "Love Poems and a Song of Despair" Karen/Wesley
“CONFIRMED: Norse Gods Have Soulmates, Too!” a tabloid headline proclaims to Karen as she walks by the checkout lane for the seventeenth time that afternoon. Thor, the flying Avenger with the hammer, stares out from the low-grade newsprint while a pretty dark-haired woman looks up at him in adoration. Karen pretends that she doesn’t see them. She has found everything she needs for the coffee machine in the office, except for filters, and it has been so unnecessarily long by now that she finally caves and asks for directions. (Apparently, since the advent of the Keurig, coffee filters have become more commonly used in children’s arts and crafts projects than in the brewing of coffee.)
Finally, she has everything she needs. But as she joins the checkout line, she is constantly aware of Thor gazing at her as she inches forward in the line. And Karen gazes right back, because if there is one thing that she’s never been able to resist, it’s stories about soulmates.
Ever since she was in kindergarten, she had been fascinated with the romance of princes saving their soulmates from towers, dragons, and witches, with the narrative of fated and irrevocable love, and especially with the poetry of the birth of color: she had taken Spanish in High School just because most of her favorite love poets were Mexican. She imagined that, once she met her own soulmate, she would be just as fascinated by the paintings that all of her paired friends had always talked about--The Birth of Venus, Starry Night, the collected works of Jackson Pollock--but for now, she was perfectly happy with the descriptions of color to be found in her favorite poets… Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos…
She ends up buying the magazine, just as she’d known she would from the moment she first saw it.
*
Soulmates had been particularly on her mind since she got her new job--or really, since she met her future bosses, who were just her lawyers at the time.
Foggy and Matt had the sort of relationship that everyone dreams of having with their soulmate--blissful, joyful, natural as breathing. Each of them seemed to be able to anticipate the other’s needs, movements, even sometimes thoughts, and it’s marvelous to behold. Karen is glad that she’s the sort to celebrate other people’s happiness rather than desire it, because otherwise she thinks she might not be able to stand watching such a perfect match when she hasn’t met her own soulmate yet.
They all go out to celebrate the new Nelson & Murdock the day she’s hired, and she is proud of the fact that she managed to last a full 20 minutes and 2 shots before asking them how they met.
“We were roommates,” Matt says, “in law school.”
“Yeah, for all of two days, but then the Man found out and moved us to separate rooms. Apparently, there are rules against sharing college-owned space with your soulmate. Something about property damage,” Foggy says, already happy-drunk. “We wrote a mock argument suing the school for homophobia in one of our classes that semester.”
“Right, but I meant, how did you know?” she asks. “I mean, I guess I know how you knew, Foggy, but like, you can’t see color anyway, right Matt?”
Matt smiled at her as he explained, probably not for the first time, what it was like to be blind when you meet your soulmate. “It’s not just color, Karen. It’s never been just color. It’s just that sighted people tend to emphasize seeing in color above everything else, since it’s the most dramatic change. But you also get greater sensitivity in touch, taste, hearing--”
“Yeah,” Foggy interjected, “while he used to be able to hear a pin drop across a crowded room, now--”
“Now I can walk through a crowded street and still be able to tell which heartbeat is his,” Matt finished.
“Oh, wow,” Karen said.
“Yeah, wow indeed,” Foggy marvelled. “We need to find more excuses to have this conversation, so that you can have an excuse to say things like that.”
“I say things like that all the time, Foggy.”
“Yes, but you can never compliment me enough. Or, if you can, you haven’t yet.”
“I always knew that what you really wanted was a sycophant, not a soulmate.”
“But you always wanted to be a sycophant, so what you’re saying is that we’re perfect for each other,” Foggy answered, laughing. “But to go back to what we were talking about, the best metaphor I’ve come up with for it is the Wizard of Oz.” Karen’s confusion must have shown on her face, because Foggy asked “You have seen it, haven’t you?”
“Of course I have, but I don’t know…”
“What’s the difference between Kansas and Oz?”
“What? I don’t--”
“Just try to describe it for me.”
“Um...Oz is cleaner, and brighter, and just...happier, I guess. I don’t really know what you’re asking,” she answered.
Foggy smiled at her. “The correct answer, my dear Ms. Page, is that Oz is in color.”
“What? Really?”
“Really. The whole movie is basically one big metaphor for sexual awakening, but that’s besides the point. You could tell that there was something fundamentally different about Oz, even though you couldn’t see the colors, right? Well, that’s exactly what it’s like, having a soulmate. Whether you see the colors or not, there’s no way you could not tell the difference.”
Karen smiled. “That’s really beautiful, Foggy.”
“Just wait until you’ve heard it 30 more times,” Matt interjected, “and I’m sure you’ll feel differently.”
“Shut up, Murdock, you’re infecting this poor girl’s head with lies. I only tell that story once a month, at the most.”
“No, I think it’s very--like, poetic. Both of you,” she said. “Did--um. Did you guys read the article that came out about soulmates’ brains?” Karen asked them.
“Karen, we’re lawyers. We don’t keep up with all of the brain science,” Foggy said.
Karen laughed and said, “I don’t keep up with the brain science, either, I just read an article on the internet. Apparently these no--nuh--neuroscientists were doing some experiments on a bunch of people, and two of them bonded in the waiting room. They were able to look at how their brains changed after they had bonded with each other: you know, their minds started to work the same way, or on the same wavelength or whatever. People knew that already. But because they had already done other work, they could see what the people’s brains were like before bonding. They think that their brains were already set up to be in parallel to each other: like, all of those things that aligned themselves afterwards were already ready to be aligned before they met, like they were literally made for each other,” Karen concluded enthusiastically. She took another drink, proud that she had managed to speak so coherently.
“Huh, that’s interesting,” Foggy said. “What do you think, Matt? Were we made for each other?”
Matt looked somewhat far away, but Foggy’s question brought his attention back. “I think--well. I’m sorry to ask this, I know we’ve just met, but… Karen, are you religious?” he asked. “I mean--. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
Karen blinked. “Um… No, not really. Sorry?”
“No, it’s fine, I just--I’m Catholic, you know, and I’ve always--I’ve always thought that finding your soulmate was a very spiritual experience. Like, finding that person out there who was ‘made for you’ always seemed like proof that God’s really out there, watching over us. At least, that’s how it was for me,” he said, squeezing Foggy’s hand. “So, what I’m saying, I think, is that what you’re saying is something that we’ve always known. Not Catholics, I mean, but people. I think that almost every bonded pair you ask could have told you as much as that article did.”
“Mattie, that was beautiful. You obviously aren’t drunk enough if you can still say shit like that,” Foggy said. “You’re going to make me cry.”
“You’re not going to cry,” Matt said to him.
“Nope, pretty sure I’m going to stop at welling up this time. But then again, I am pretty drunk,” he said, his voice beginning to warble melodramatically. “Maybe I will cry. What are you going to do about it?”
“Foggy,” Matt said, pulling him in for a quick kiss, “you’re not going to cry.” Then he went in for another kiss, this one deeper and so sweet that Karen’s heart started to ache. He pulled away slightly, then added in a low voice, “And if you do, I’ll leave you here for Josie to take care of.”
Foggy gasped and playfully shoved the laughing Matt away. “You wouldn’t!” he proclaimed.
“Wouldn’t I?” he said provocatively. Then, “No, you’re right, I wouldn’t.”
Karen laughed along with them as they all got more and more and then most drunk. They stayed at the bar until Matt insisted that they needed to get some sleep before work tomorrow, and then they called a cab to take her back to her apartment. As the driver began to pull away, Karen turned back to look at her new bosses one more time. Matt was leaning into Foggy’s shoulder as though he were too drunk to stand without help, and he was laughing as Foggy whispered something into his hair. She turned away then, because it was clearly a private moment and if she wasn’t careful, then she really would start crying.
As the cab passed by the familiar paths of Hell’s Kitchen, Karen tried to imagine it in color. Maybe it was just the liquor talking, but she felt like she were on the brink of something--like maybe she was about to fulfill whatever fate God or neuroscience had in store for her. They passed a little park with some trees, and Karen could have sworn that she saw green--but the moment passed, and soon they arrived at her apartment. She changed clothes, took an aspirin, and tumbled into bed. Three pages into the song of Thor and Foster as told by the Bugle, she was asleep and dreaming of cherry trees.
*
(The line of poetry Karen quotes is from “Every Day You Play”, Poem 14 from 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda. It translates to “I want / to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”)