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Like an ever-present reminder that there’s something, someone out there for him, a red string is tied onto Harley’s left pinky finger.
The string of fate. Said to tie one person to their soulmate, their other half. Some have a platonic soulmate–artists are particularly fond of the concept, as authors often write stories of a thought-to-be platonic bond being romantic in truth. Although, real life is usually the opposite, a seemingly romantic bond becoming platonic over time. Others have romantic bonds, of course; your true love, your partner in all things, someone to love, to have children with, to marry, to die with.
And, well, the same is mostly true for a platonic bond, minus marriage and kids. It’s different though. Not that Harley could ever explain it. He has a hard enough time explaining anything he already understands.
Harley dreams of having a romantic bond.
Someone’s hand to hold. Someone to love and to marry and–
And, well, as selfish as it may seem, someone who he can prove the world wrong with. Preferably…another man. A romantic bond, he would stress, not platonic.
Harley may be young, sure, but he knows what he wants. He knows how long it may take him to get to it, and he’s–he’s fine with that. In six years, he turns eighteen, and he can go to college or travel the world or–well, just about whatever he wants to do.
Eighteen. It feels worlds away. For a young gay boy in the south, just miles from six different catholic churches in his town of fewer than five thousand people, it might very well be just a dream.
-
That year, Harley meets Tony Stark.
Tony Stark has a platonic soulmate–an officer, or soldier, or something like that. Harley only knows what he’s seen on the news, and he doesn’t often watch the news.
“How do you know your soulmate is platonic?” Harley asks, the quiet of the garage getting to him as he helps Tony tinker with the Iron Man suit. “Did you ever want it to be romantic? Did you ever try? Or did you just know it was platonic?”
Tony raises a brow, not looking up or stopping what he’s doing. “My soulmate? Rhodey? Well, we both knew it was platonic. I wouldn’t have minded it being romantic, certainly, but it wasn’t the case for us. And that’s okay. I prefer it like it is. He’s been with me through everything, and I wouldn’t change a thing. Why do you ask? You meet your soulmate?”
“No. I hope my bond is romantic.”
Tony smiles, sparing a glance, finally, to the frowning preteen. “Fairytale fantasy?”
Harley scrunches his nose. He supposes it could be, or it could not be. Maybe it’s too complicated to explain. Should he explain? Well, Tony did say he wouldn’t mind a romantic bond with another man, so maybe it’s okay to tell him. “Does it count as a fairytale fantasy if I mostly just want to prove somebody wrong?”
“Prove who wrong? About what?”
Harley shuffles his feet, humming absently in response. He picks up a screwdriver and begins pulling apart a piece of the leg.
Maybe he isn’t ready.
Will he ever be?
It…sucks, to put it simply, to think of a world where he isn’t. Where he isn’t ever going to be ready. Where he hides himself away, where everything he wants is unachievable. And, god, but it hurts.
-
Sometimes, when he aches a little too much for a little too long, Harley feels a tug on the string. His heart pounds with the pressure. The need to run, to follow, to find a way to his soulmate…it’s almost unbearable.
Instead of running, he simply waits.
And he waits.
And he waits.
-
When he was younger, his father left.
His parents were never bonded, so his mother wasn’t ever too upset. It was understandable, of course, that one would leave another to pursue a soulmate.
It would’ve hurt less if he’d told her. Taken a moment, even a full day or two to explain to a divorce lawyer that he would be leaving her to pursue his soulmate. It would be simple. It happens far more often than you would think.
Never mind the fact he left behind two young children–Harley just seven, with Abbey just a tot.
It could have been simple. It wasn’t.
Harley first starts to wonder about the importance of soulmates when his mother admits to him, one night after a long shift, that she doesn’t have a string. Not anymore.
She had a platonic soulmate, one she met as a teenager. Just a year older than him. Fourteen. They pursued a romance at the beginning, desperate to fall in love and be happy. It fizzled out, of course, because they were never meant for something like that. They stayed friends, closer than anyone she’d ever known, for several years. They were together through Macy meeting Harley’s father, falling in love, having Harley. Her soulmate even had a child of his own.
Macy goes quiet upon mentioning her soulmate’s child.
“Goodnight,” she eventually whispers, blowing her only son a kiss and leaving him alone, on the couch, with a racing mind and an aching heart.
-
When he is sixteen (and a half, he childishly exclaims,) Harley graduates high school two years early. The small school never did know what to do with smarter kids, always pushing them up a grade, again and again, to avoid having to teach them more advanced studies within their actual year.
So, at sixteen (and a half,) Harley graduates high school. He applies to colleges in New York and surrounding states because New York has everything cool–all of the superheroes, all of the tech, it has Tony Stark, and, well…
Harley’s always noticed his string leading northeast. Even if it isn’t New York specifically, it brings him closer, doesn’t it?
He doesn’t get into stupid MIT–this, he will blame on his teachers for likely not giving him great recommendation letters, but it was the best he could do–but he does get into Columbia, and that’s pretty much second best, right?
Wrong, but close enough that he’s willing to let it slide. Second best in the state, at least.
The twelve-hour drive there is long and tiring, filled with Abbey’s mindless chatter–the kind only a preteen could pull off without sounding remarkably immature. She still manages, but Harley doesn’t say anything about it.
He spends the drive staring at the string on his left pinky as it gets thicker and thicker, and he can feel things now, can hear and see in a way he wasn’t before.
Everything is so loud.
When he has everything unpacked in his dorm room and he’s said his tearful “I’ll call every single day”s with Abbey and his mom, he doesn’t even have the energy left in him to search for his soulmate.
For the first time in his life, his string is facing south.
And he falls asleep the moment his head hits the pillow.
—
On Peter’s right pinky finger, there is a string. It’s almost too tight, the constant pinching making it something he can’t ever forget about.
Mary and Richard were soulmates. He doesn’t remember them, but May reminds him often how much they loved each other, how much they loved him. He believes her, but sometimes it’s still hard to even imagine. For many years, he thinks of a soulmate as a pinch in his pinky, and nothing more.
May and Ben are also soulmates. They like to link their pinkies together at the table, and they always look at him with this weird look. He wonders if it’s because they’re soulmates, or if maybe something is wrong with him.
Peter knows there are things wrong with him.
Asthma, glasses, stupid ADHD, dyslexia. Whatever. It doesn’t even matter, because there are so many other things to think about.
When he is eleven years old, Ben takes Peter to the Stark Expo, and it manages to be both the best and worst day of his life.
Peter meets Tony Stark, or one of his suits–May has always pondered if the Iron Man thing was a publicity stunt, and Pete is inclined to believe her–and he is saved from a bot he couldn’t get away from (he panicked. He panicked and he froze and the only thing he could do other than stand there to make himself feel even a little bit less scared was to point his fake gauntlet at the bot and–Tony Stark’s invention kept him from becoming a pulverized child. A bloodstain on the concrete.)
Ben does not survive the night.
It wasn’t–wasn’t even one of the bad guys that killed him. A scared attendee thought the best thing he could do in a crowd of people when the bots began to attack was to pull out a gun and start shooting. Ben was the only fatality, but a handful of others were injured.
Maybe the guy was in on the bot attack.
May was devastated. She wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t sleep. For weeks, for weeks, and this is the first time Peter wonders what having a soulmate truly feels like.
And, maybe that isn’t quite right.
Peter has a soulmate, of course, everyone does. But, well, he hasn’t met him–or her?
He knows it could be either. It could be romantic, or not.
“Him” almost feels more natural.
Peter doesn’t know if that means anything, in the end.
-
When Peter is fourteen years old, he is bitten by a spider inside of Oscorp Industries, and he is ill for almost a week after. He won’t say for certain whether the events are related–May doesn’t even know the spider bit him–but, to be honest…after recovering, he’s noticed some…weird changes.
Really, some of it could be normal. The neverending hunger, the super anxiety. He’s a teenager, these things happen. But he knows that abs don’t happen overnight. His asthma hasn’t been a big issue in a couple of years, but the complete absence of breathing issues is startling. His eyesight…his eyesight is worse. It isn’t very fun having to go into the eye doctor to be told he needs even thicker lenses–he’s finally gotten to a point where they offer a thinner lens with the same prescription for a much higher cost. May sees the look on his face and agrees to the option immediately, not letting him say no.
He appreciates it more than he’ll ever tell her.
No, the strange part, the part that worries him more than anything else, is the stickiness. His hands, his feet, his–everything! Everything sticks now, and the only thing that helps is staying calm.
The issue with that is the super anxiety.
Everything is such a mess.
-
When Tony Stark appears in his apartment and blackmails him and drags him to Germany, Peter probably isn’t as upset as he should be. Not about the blackmail, at least.
The most upsetting part of all is when he boards that plane and it causes him physical pain when his red string pulls taut and pinches and pulls at his pinky. No physical damage, of course, there never could be. It feels real. It hurts like it’s real. The string is thinner than it has ever been, hardly as thin as spider woven silk, and his finger feels numb. He spends the flight thinking about soulmates once again.
His string pulls a little more west than south, now, but Germany is more north than New York, so he likely isn’t any closer than he was before.
He wonders if his soulmate will find him first.
He finds himself fiddling with the string, pulling it lightly and smiling like a dope when it pulls back.
A few days later, when he is home once more and finally resting, he feels a tug as he falls asleep. They haven’t even met, but Peter wonders if this is what it feels like to fall in love.
A short year later, the string slowly grows thicker and thicker over the course of the day. It starts when he goes home from school on Friday, and it stops Saturday morning. It’s about as thick as yarn, now.
Oh, oh, oh, he wants to follow it. He really wants to follow it. How close could his soulmate possibly be? Maybe Peter’s wrong, maybe he’s in–in, like, Pennsylvania, or something. No. It’s facing north, northwest. Maybe he’s in Canada. But it feels so right, so close, and his heart won’t stop pounding like it wants to beat itself out of his chest.
No. No, he has work. He has to go to Delmar’s and do his job. He has Academic Decathlon after, too, and he has to go to Manhattan and–it’s all complicated. After AcaDec, maybe he can swing around and see if his soulmate is in the city. It’s unlikely, of course.
Peter makes it through work and he makes it through the subway ride over to Manhattan, where the group is meeting at Betty’s apartment this week but–
He can see the end of his string. Down the block, maybe fifteen minutes at a walking pace.
Everything is so bright.
When he finds himself running, through crowds of strangers with half-apologies, through traffic just barely missing out on a horrible accident–
How could he not?
How could he not risk everything for this person?
Peter almost doesn’t notice the guy turning and taking a few steps forward as Peter reaches him, and the boy–
—
–gasps when they collide. “What the fuck? Is this real?” Harley asks, stepping back just enough and reaching out to the other teen’s right hand. He takes it in his left, watching the string get shorter and thicker as he moves.
“I’m Peter,” his soulmate whispers, and Harley can hear the prettiest accent he’s ever had the pleasure of hearing peaking through in Peter’s words. His voice is nasally like he’s been crying, and his voice is barely loud enough to be constituted as speaking.
“Harley,” Harley introduces. His eyes are wet, and he takes a minute to take in the sight that is Peter.
There’s a stain on his shirt, by the collar. It’s a sweater, with a t-shirt poking out underneath. He’s shorter than Harley, and he has brown hair and brown eyes hidden beneath a broken pair of glasses and–
Oh. This–
—
–must be what they mean when they talk about falling in love, Peter thinks. It feels–
—
–like they’ve known each other forever.