Archive of Our Own

Harley’s first memory is of his mother and it’s drenched in pink. 

His mother and he are baking, with him sitting on the counter, and all he can think is how pink the moment is. He’s maybe three or four so he doesn’t exactly remember what he actually thought, but now at seventeen, when he closes his eyes and pictures his very first memory it's laced with the pink tint he associates with his mothers good days and his sister's smile. 

The next memory has created a long run of dull blacks and grays. 

His father creates a long run of dull blacks and grays. Turns his word into a grayscale that he doesn’t know how to cope with.

Because his next memory is him crying on the floor as his father screams something terrible at his mama and threatens her with a bottle of vodka. His mom had told him that he needed to go to his room but he hadn’t listened, really, because he was five and he was a hero. At least in his own head. But he couldn’t save his mom from the snarling figure of the father who never loved him or her. Never loved them. 

And the memory is drenched in black. It’s one of the darkest memories he has- well. Probably not, but he knows that he’s forgotten some of the worst encounters with his father. Suppressed most of it. Big black chunks in his memories where he wonders exactly how dark things got for it to be that overwhelming. He doesn’t actually wanna know. 

His memories come laced with colors and Harley knows that’s not normal at all. That he shouldn’t be remembering his life with some sort of filter on it but he can’t help it. All of his emotions radiate colors too, though he doesn’t like to talk about it, and the doctors he gets taken to when he describes this to his mom diagnose him with synesthesia and tell him it's perfectly fine and there's nothing they can do about it. A part of him, this aching part of him that wants to be normal, wants to beg them to fix it. The other part of him, the louder part that's already taking apart cars at age five, knows that they’re honest when they say there’s nothing they can do about it. 

He thinks it would be fine if almost all of his childhood memories weren’t a monochrome smush of gray gray gray black black gray black. 

Sometimes, if he thinks about it, it's even a blue gray black. Variation. 

This moment right now is probably a gray blue black, if he’s honest with himself. There’s a certain numbness entering his chest that’s so distinctly Antarctic blue that it makes him want to shudder on behalf of the memory it will form. He- he really really really doesn’t want to be sitting here anymore. He doesn’t want another gray blue black and he doesn’t want another parent telling him they don’t want him.

“Sunshine,” His mama- his mother, his mom who’s pink with soft hands and gentle smiles, “Harley. Please, baby, you have to understand-”

“Why are you doing this?”  Is all he manages to say in response. “I’m fine.” 

Tony- red, red, gold, blue, gray gray gray Tony- inheales quietly from the other side of the phone, like he can hear the betrayal in Harley’s voice. Like he can hear the icy blue creeping into his vision. “Kid, you’re really not.”

“You’re not involved in this conversation, Mr. Stark.” The formality is an insult, because Tony has always been Tony, ever since the workshop he was given at ten years old. He’s only Mr. Stark when Harley is feeling particularly bitter about the abandonment- gray blue gray- that laces the years where he’d promised to be there and wasn’t. “You can leave.” 

“Harley.” Tony says quietly, wounded. “Kid. Please. We’re just- we’re worried.”

His mom gently takes his hands, and for a brief seconds memories of soft sunsets and pinks and lavenders cross his mind before he remembers she’s trying to send him away like some annoying pest. “You’re not happy in Rosehill, sweetheart. And the county high school isn’t big enough for someone as smart as you. You need- honey, you need out.” 

“Shouldn’t I get to decide that?” 

“You’d never leave me or your sister willingly, Harley, because that’s not who you are.” Harley meets her eyes. They’re the same shade of blue he has and it sparks another wave of arctic in his soul because she wants him to leave. She wants him to go. It hurts. “But you’re- you’re drowning here, sunshine. You need more than this. And- and it's not forever. Just for six months. I can’t let you go forever.” 

Blue, blue, blue. “But you can let me go?” 

“If it means my baby gets healthy?” She says with a hard voice. “If it means that you go somewhere that's equipped to help? If it means you get to be a kid again instead of a mini adult? If it means you can breath- if it means things are less gray- then yeah, Harley. Yes I will let you go. Not forever. Just until it's easier for you to inhale and exhale without it being full of pain.” 

Blue blue pink creeps into his head and he tries to shake it off because he's numb at this. He shouldn’t be so warm that his mom wants him to get better. There’s nothing to get better from, he’s fine. He’s fine. 

“We care about you, Harley.” Tony joins in from over the phone, voice soft and gentle. “It’s only for the rest of the year. Okay? Only six months. And then you’ll be back home. It’s not going to be a permanent situation kid- you- you’ll always have a home in Rosehill.” 

“Then why do y’all want me to abandon it?” The ice in his chest expands and he looks at his mom, pleading. Macy just gently reaches to brush his curls away from his forehead. The blue blue blue pink pink blue gets worse. “Mom- I can’t leave you or Abbie- I can’t- I’m not dad-” 

“And you will never be that man.” The fingers in his hair start combing through them, and he closes his eyes to the sensation. His mom’s voice is firm and loving and warm. Pink. “It’s not abandonment if you need the break for your own mental health, sunshine. Abbie will understand and I sure as hell do. Okay? It’s not the same. It’s never going to be the same.”

“Mama-”

“I know sweetheart,” She murmurs and pulls him in close for a hug. “I know.” 

Blue blue blue pink gray gray pink blue gray gray black black gray. 

“Fine. I’ll go.”

The words make him choke on the colors behind his eyelids. 

New York makes him feel heavier than he has in a long time. It simultaneously makes him feel a whole lot lighter. 

It's strange having a place where there are no colors behind the streets. They all just look like normal places to him, no colors tinting his memories quite yet. He hasn’t been here long enough to truly be experiencing the stupid memory colors yet. 

Tony is a strained mix of gray and red and black and gold. It makes him look like a phoenix covered in ashes in Harley’s imagination, but he doesn’t really mind it if he's honest. They’re working on it and they need to work on it more. Pepper and Rhodey have wiggled their way into a soft rose gold color- slightly different hues but it makes him feel warm all the same- and Happy is a solid gold in his brain.  They taint his memories so the tower is a soft mix of warm sunshines with dark patches whenever he sits and breathes too long. 

The rest of New York is still yet to be defined yet. 

The rest of the people have yet to be defined.  

Yet to be colored. 

It makes him nervous, really, because Rosehill was layered with colors. Memories from five and up, all the people had an assortment of rainbow attached to them, all his peers some shades of grays or diluted hues. All the buildings are laced with it. His old county high school is laced with it. 

Midtown high is decidedly not laced with a color yet.

It makes his skin crawl after a lifetime of thinking of his world in colors. How do you deal with the absence of it? He doesn’t really know and he certainly can’t ask anyone. No one else has his stupid brand of snythesia and even if they did the colors would all be different, the epirences would all be off. His gut feels heavy and he crosses the threshold of the school. 

Students buzz around him and it creates a lonely aching blue blue blue, why is his first color at the school blue why can’t it just be warm why does everything have to ache blue- 

Someone bumps into him, a boy with tan skin and dark hair, who gives him a confused look. “Dude, you good?”

“Uh.” He pauses. “Yeah. Just kinda lost.”

“First day?” The boy looks him up and down then nods. “Yeah, definitely your first day. You look way too stiff to have been here for more than ten minutes. Like. Seriously, a stone column. Can you like relax or something?”

Something warm blooms in his chest, in the hollow of his lungs, at the boy's casualness. The way he acts like the world is kinda beneath him and how he’s already ripping into Harley gently. It makes him hold back a laugh as he answers, “I’ll relax if you help me find where Garrison's AP Chemistry is.”

“Man you’re so fucked.” The boy's nose wrinkles, and he quickly snatches the schedule that Harley must’ve gotten out at some point away from his hands, invading his space like it’s nothing. He finds that he doesn’t mind it all that much. “You won’t learn anything in that class- I’m in it, too- we’re his first period so he vents all his life problems to us. Your best bet is to read the textbook and ask me or Penis- sorry, Parker- for help if you can’t keep up.”

“I- Okay?” Warmth lingers still, and he can’t put his finger on the color this boy is. “Uh, question. Who’s Penis? Er- Parker?”

The boy laughs, loud and boisterous and it makes people around them give them a look before rolling their eyes and continuing on. This must be a common occurrence he guesses. The thought is really nice. He’d like to be friends with someone with that laugh.

“Penis is like my arch rival.” The boy’s still laughing, and his eyes are way too fond for that to be entirely true. “Sorry, he asked me to stop bringing up the penis incident by calling him that. His name’s Peter, he’s a dick and he’s valedictorian by one single grade point above me. I truly, truly, wish that he chokes.” 

“You sound like you like him a lot, actually,” Harley points out before he can stop himself. “Arch rival my ass.”

The boy laughs again. “I like you, kid. What’s your name?”

“Harley,” He managed after a second because that warmth has spread and it's so orange. It’s bright and warm and orange. This boy is glowing orange in his mind and Harley can’t remember the last time someone was so warm. “Harley Keener.” 

“Really nice to meet you, Harley,” The boy holds his hand out and for the first time in a long time Harley welcomes the touch of someone he doesn’t know everything about. “I’m Flash. Flash Thompson.”

The name is so orange it makes his heart ache. He loves it. He loves orange. 

It’s bright. 

By his third week at Midtown, the entire school is laced with bright oranges. Grays and blacks lace some of the corner and blue shows up every other creping memory, but the school is overwhelmingly orange. 

It’s a testament to just who Flash is because Harley was expecting this place to hold the same dull hue that his old county high school had held. But it doesn't. It doesn’t at all. In fact it probably holds the opposite; the county high school seemed to suck color out, but every time he thinks of midtown, everytime he thinks of the one friend he has in it, everything gets brighter. 

When he tells his mama that she glows- pink pink pink- and tells him he’s healing. 

Which, maybe, but Harley’s not actually too sure of that. Sometimes this aching dull black black black gray gray invades his mind and makes him feel paralized. But those moments have become just that. Moments. Not days or weeks. Sometimes he thinks they could be days or weeks if he lets them, but then Flash is calling him to ramble about a Spider-Man fan edit he saw and well. How could anything be gray when everythings so strikingly orange? 

Flash is orange and warm and it makes Harley warm. 

They haven’t talked a lot about it but something about the other boy makes it glaringly obvious that he’s healing from something too. It makes his heart tug because Flash is healing, and growing, and obviously becoming more and more open every single day- not just with him, but with all his other friends that Harley doesn’t know too well yet- and he’s so orange. New York is splattered with sunsets now, and it makes Harley feel entirely too safe here. 

By the time Flash drags him into the first Academic decathlon meeting he ever attends, he’s comfortable with the orange and grays and blacks. Halloween decor, Abbie called it. He’s very very comfortable with it and it’s nice. 

He’s not exactly sure about the team Flash talks about, though, the people there don’t have colors because he hasn’t ever spoken to them beyond a few odd words when he’s sitting with Flash at lunch. He knows he doesn’t like a few of them- Whoever Flash was before he started growing must’ve been bad and they still treat him like he is. He can’t understand why people don’t see that Flash is bright and is trying so hard to remain bright. Those people quickly find themselves in varying shades of antagonized maroon in his mind, but everyone else on the team is- is- is- well. Like Midtown was before Flash. Uncolored. 

Sometimes, in chemistry class he thinks he associates sparks of color with Peter Parker, but it's overwhelmed by Flash’s orange and he’s pretty okay with that. 

Right now though not even Flash’s orange orange orange can distract from the overwhelming gray gray gray neon neon gray of the anxiety climbing in his throat. Anxiety has never been neon before but it's to describe the feeling as anything other than a terrifying static neon gray. It makes him feel dizzy. 

Harley does not want to be here. He really really doesn't. He’s happy with his one friend and his one color and he doesn't want to branch out to more. But… but he’d promised Flash that if he hadn’t joined a club three weeks in he’d come to AcaDeca with him and attempt to be something smarter than he actually was and braver than his bones. He’s nauseous with the static he’s feeling, the neon, the gray gray gray tinting his vision. 

It gets worse as Flash pulls away from him to offer a grin to the scary goth looking girl, “Hey, sit tight, I need to go talk to MJ about competition arrangements.”

“Okay.” He says as if the neon isn’t overwhelming him. “I’ll uhh… be here I guess.” 

Flash shoots him a raised brow, like he knows something is wrong, and the orange wraps around his heart enough for him to offer up a soft smile. Just nerves. Just nerves. Just nerves. His friend seems to believe him because he turns towards MJ and heads over to her, leaving Harley lingering in distress. 

This was a bad idea. This wasn’t a good idea. He’s not great with new people and all of these people seem to be smarter than smart and those were the worst kind of people in his opinion. Well- not the worst, because Flash was smarter than smart, but Flash never pretended like Harley wasn’t as smart as him or got annoyed when Harley was smarter than him. Where are these people like that? 

The group running through factoids on the floor made his skin crawl. 

He wanted to back out so, so badly but he’d promised. He’d said he would stay so- so-  he would. He’d just suffer the neon gray neon gray neon blue neon black neon neon neon overwhelming overwhelming overwhelming- 

“Holy crap,” An awed voice next to him spoke, startling him out of his panic, “Is that shirt- is that a chewbacca shirt signed by Peter Mayhew?!” 

Blinking hard, he turned to face the boy next to him- a large Asian kid, who was shorter than him by an inch or two and was extremely pretty- biting his lip, “Uh. Yeah?” 

He’d honestly forgot he was wearing this shirt. It was technically Rhodey’s but Tony had forgotten to do laundry that week, so he ended up just stealing something from the pile of clean clothes that weren’t folded out without checking whose shirt he was grabbing. It was too big on him but it was laced with that dark and soft rose gold that meant Rhodey and well. It made him happy. 

The boy beams at him and wow, this kid is- is- he’s not sure what color this kid is yet but he’s soft and he’s bright. At least that’s what Harley thinks. “Dude, you might just be the coolest person ever to exist- how did you get that??”

“Oh, um,” he stumbles out. “It’s technically my uncles. He got it at a signing after one of the prequels was released.”

“Holy crap,” The boy gets bright with every smile. “That's absolutely so cool. I’m assuming you like Star Wars then?”

“Who doesn’t?” 

“Thank you!” he reaches out and grabs Harley’s hand- unlike with Flash the new touch isn’t exactly welcome, but he doesn’t pull away and finds himself sinking into the boy's soft palm. “I’m Ned, you’re Harley right? Flash won’t shut up about you, but you know he’s terrible because he prefers Star Trek to Star Wars so with you here we finally overwhelm those trekkies!”

Something warm and gentle starts spreading in his chest. 

Ned is a soft red. All warm and fuzzy around the edges. It makes Harley’s cheeks flush as he rambles on about star wars and breathes through fandom quotes that make him laugh.

He’s been laughing more and more recently. He’d pinned it on Flash’s influence but now- now Flash is talking to someone else and he’s laughing anyway. Ned rambles on and on about Star Wars and he thinks next time he actually sits down to watch the movies they’ll be laced with this warm, gentle, soft, red. 

AcaDeca turns out to be not so bad after the neon static passes, and instead it's filled with sunset- red red orange soft soft orange red and orange. The other people have laces of colors, promises for the friends they could be one day, flashes of who they may be to him. 

Ned is soft red. Flash is Orange. 

It makes Harley smile. 

His school is a sunset and it makes breathing so much easier. The others- the others spring up colors sometimes, but mostly they’re wrapped up in Ned and Flash’s soft reds and oranges that make Harley grin like an idiot. 

He thinks that if he spent more time with MJ she’d be the same color as the sky when the moon has just started to rise, but he still can’t tell what color Peter is. Which- Peter is.. Peter is wow. Peter is a lot and he makes Harley laugh, so it's weird that Peter hasn’t managed to snag a color in his mind. He doesn’t question it because he can tell that a color is pulling at the other boys edges and it makes him feel soothed. 

It’s all so very nice and warm that Harley forgets that his life is gray gray gray gray black black black. 

And that black- sickening and dark and pushing him towards memories that he can’t even see they’re so coated in the color- overwhelms him harder than anything else in the entire world. It terrifies him when he wakes up and suddenly all of Ned's soft colors and Flash’s bright words don’t seem to beat back that darkness. 

He knows that it’s not their job to beat his depression back, it was one of the first boundaries he and his therapist set when he started going to her, but it still takes him by surprise that they can’t manage to make him feel light like they are. None of his techniques are working. He feels numb and raw at the same time, like everything is too much and simultaneously not enough for his mind. 

Standing in front of the mirror in the classroom the AcaDeca team managed to snag for today's practice he feels is not enough. He’s 5’10 but he feels as small as a speck of dust, like his limbs are too gangly and long, like his body really doesn’t belong in his sight, and it's so dark. 

It’s black black black black in a way it hasn’t been for so so long. 

He hates it. He wants out. He can’t get out, he can’t get out, there’s no way to outrun how dark everything is, and he can barely see past the way it threatens to overwhelm him and consume him and he wants out.  

Someone with soft hands gently grabs his elbow and he's pulled back from the void by Mj’s quiet voice- one she reserves for Peter’s overstimulation attacks, and Flash’s panic attacks, and Ned’s meltdowns- gently rings against his head, “You need to get out?”

Wordlessly, he nods, and he doesn’t glance behind MJ’s shoulder because he can see the way Peter looks like he wants to move towards him and that stirs something in his gut. The implication that he cares. His friend grabs his elbow and gently guides him out of the classroom and the vast hallway makes it easier to breathe. Much, much, much easier. 

MJ’s humming something- off key and out of tune- and he’s never really seen her like this. Normally she’s much rougher edges. Normally she’s not afraid to put him down, or make a sarcastic jab, and she’s not exactly the best with expressing her softer sides. But she’s humming to him like it’ll hold all the secrets of the universe and for a moment, he closes his eyes, presses his forehead to her collar bone in a mock hug and thinks that it does. 

“You wanna talk about it?” She asks in the softest voice he thinks she can muster. “It’s okay if you don’t. I just know sometimes it’s easier too.” 

“It’s so black,” He says and deep down Harley knows he should explain his synthesia, how memories are colors, how people are colors, how places are colors but he can’t find it in himself. “It’s black, black, black and gray and I don’t want-” 

Something like a sob rises in his throat and his panic wells full force again. The world is so, so dark and all he’s ever wanted was the colors that his friends have started showing him. He wanted his mom and sister’s pink, Tony’s blackish red, Rhodey’s dark shimmery rose-gold, Pepper’s light and electric golden rose, Happy’s steady gold, Flash’s bright orang, Ned’s soft reds- he doesn’t want the black of his childhood, of his mind. 

He doesn’t want it. He can’t live in all that darkness now that he’s gotten a taste of what the world looks like in colors. 

MJ doesn’t press him to elaborate or do anything other than run a hand up and down his back, humming in her off key voice. She doesn’t speak about what ‘black’ means or ask him to count his breathing, instead she relies on the knowledge that being there is enough and for Harley it is. A small part of him wonders when she started realizing that he just wanted someone there, when she started learning him. 

Another part of him thinks that they all know him. Flash’s oranges and bright regrets and quiet healing. Ned’s reds and gentle words drawing him into conversation. Peter’s- Peter's something and how the other boy makes him laugh. MJ and how she knows exactly what he needs right now. 

When he looks up, she's laced a royal lilac purple and the world is just a little less black. 

The roof of Stark Tower at sunset smells like sunshine and bathes the world in the rainbow he’s come to expect of the world. 

It’s strange how much six months can absolutely shift the entire world. His mama calls it healing, and he agrees with her now. He’s healing. All those scars and black days are healing. Sometimes his memories are  still too dark for him to breath, and anxiety creeps over his skin like an old coat, but… those days are worth it. At least for moments like this. 

His friends are behind him, laughing and jeering. Everyone’s coming off the high of beating Upper East Academy at the last AcaDeca tournament of the year and Tony let them use the roof as a sort of after party space. Harley had strung up fairy lights with Ned’s help while Flash complained about his rival from the other time, Harry Osborn, who he most certainly did not have a crush on. MJ and Peter were carrying up beanbags, bantering all the while about something or another. Betty and Abe and the rest of their friends were helping set up the TV screen Tony had brought out so they could watch something. 

It’s so bright that it makes Harley grin without thinking. It’s so bright and it's so warm, and the entire world is doused with rainbow colors. 

It’s so fucking strange to him because he’s almost certain that before this- before these people, before this place, before healing- he would never image his memories soaked with more colors than gray and black and pink and red and the dullest version of the world. Now, though, he can’t even picture Rose Hill as dull. It doesn’t matter that it always had been when he was there because now when he closed his eyes his mother’s bakery was laced with the same shade of green that coming home was, and the dinner down the road was the same color as old coke bottles, and the high school was painted with a myriad of colors for the different rooms. 

Different perspectives, now. 

His memories of his father were still overwhelmingly black but they were allowed to be. Just like these people were allowed to be colorful. 

God he loved colors. He loved colors so much. 

“You look happy,” Peter slipped next to him, offering a wide grin, letting their shoulders brush. “Something on your mind, sunshine?” 

Their hands are almost touching, Harley thinks, if he reaches out their fingers will rest against one another and they’ll be touching. His eyes flick to Peter’s brown ones- soft and doe-like- and he’s hit with Peter's gentle yellow. It combs over him and matches the sky. 

He grins, letting his hand sink into Peter’s, lacing their fingers together. The other boys breath hitches and he knows that Harley knows and later, when their friends have gone home, they’ll talk about it. 

For now, Harley just shrugs, leaning to press a head to Peter’s shoulder. “I like the colors of the world, Pete. I like your colors most of all.” 

It’s beautiful.