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The mark that Mercedes Jones gets on her wrist when she’s six says Harry Potter. Of course she knows about the fictional Harry Potter, she reads the books, she likes them as much as the next person (though people expect her to be obsessed but sorry she just isn’t.) But it’s a common enough name in the real world, so it doesn’t really tell her much.
She just keeps singing.
~*~
By sophomore year of high school when a bunch of the people she knows are already starting to date - she looks at the mark every morning when she wakes up and every night before she goes to bed. She starts wearing necklaces that relate to the name on her wrist, because she can, lightning and glasses charms. She’s lonely, she knows she shouldn’t be because non-soulmate dating isn’t really important anyway, her more religious relatives are even vaguely against the whole concept, but at least she has her mysterious man to look forward to sometime not too far in the future.
When some of the soulmate matchups in her circle of friends start coming out - Kurt and Rachel, then Tina and Blaine, and everyone eventually learns about the dramatic triangle of Brittany, Quinn, and Santana - she still clings to hers. Her friends are weird, okay, having a soulmate mark that’s not reciprocated or to whom you’re still not attracted is super unusual, and if she knows a bunch of people with that circumstance, well, all the more chance that she’ll be normal.
That there’s a Harry Potter somewhere out there with Mercedes Jones written on his arm, and when they meet they’ll fall so perfectly in love, and never fall out until the day that they die.
~*~
Sam Evans comes to McKinley her junior year, and his soulmate mark says Mercy Jones. She’s never been called Mercy, not once, and Sam swears up and down that he identifies with Harry Potter (the fictional one) to the point where that might as well be his name, but it doesn’t escape Mercedes’ notice that he always quotes superhero movies and Star Wars more.
Sam’s sweet enough, anyway, and they date for a while, but Mercedes doesn’t quite fall in love.
~*~
Mercedes turns eighteen in the spring of her senior year of high school. She immediately signs up for the databases, of course, but no results end up coming back.
It’s fine. Her Harry must be a little younger than her, that’s all. She can wait.
~*~
She goes off to Los Angeles after graduation, small-time backup singer record deal in hand, and a beautiful song on her lips. Eighteen, and she’ll get to sing and dance in the big city near the stars, and maybe there she’ll meet her soulmate too.
~*~
Soon enough she does. A strange man shows up at her house mysteriously one evening. He has messy black hair and green eyes and a lightning scar on his forehead (and he doesn’t look anything like Daniel Radcliffe but that’s not really surprising), and the name Mercedes Jones written on his wrist. He says he’s Harry Potter.
She says, hell no you aren’t, magic is fictional, and don’t ask her about choirs appearing from nowhere to help her sing okay, that’s just the power of belief.
He turns her empty Coke can into a spray of flowers and tunes in the Wizarding Radio for her to hear, and she’s kind of shocked but it’s so much fun, and when he takes her outside to fly with him swooping through the sky under the stars, it’s the most romantic thing ever.
Soulmates are supposed to be magical, okay, and hers is way more magical than she’d ever dreamed of. It’s lovely and dreamy, and mostly she can’t stop laughing in joy all night.
~*~
She asks him why he wasn’t in the databases, if he’s old enough and he wanted to find his soulmate after all, but he says that’s a Muggle thing, it’s not something you do in the Wizarding world, and anyway he still can’t make himself that easy to find. He’s famous and there are still too many people who want him dead.
There were magical protectors secretly around her for the first three years of her life; Voldemort wanted to kill Harry Potter’s soulmate even if Harry had never met her yet, and the wizards have ways of telling who’s who before your complimentary mark comes in, even if the Muggles don’t.
It’s kind of creepy, but she’s flattered.
He’s way older than she is, she can see that clearly, and when she asks he says that he’s thirty-two. He’s divorced from his childhood sweetheart Ginny Weasley (how much of those books wasn’t true?) (well, pretty much anything about someone’s thoughts or feelings), he has three children but he only sees them sometimes, since not just their mother but so many of their mutual friends want to spend time with them too.
~*~
He kisses her and it’s everything she ever wanted; he makes to love to her, too, soon enough, and if it’s not quite everything she wanted, well, they have time to learn. He tells her how beautiful she is, how her voice is like a whole other type of magic that he never even knew, and he spends a few months more-or-less just living with her in L.A. because he doesn’t exactly have to have a job.
She doesn’t have magic herself but Harry enchants all sorts of artifacts to do things for her and she goes off to live with him in England, because hello,magic. She’s happy enough to have an excuse not to visit Lima all the time anyway.
~*~
They fall in love and if it’s better or different than non-soulmate love she doesn’t know. It’s the only love she’s ever had, and Harry won’t compare and contrast Ginny with her, he doesn’t think it’s fair.
But it’s love, and it’s good, and it turns out that she can actually sing for both wizards and Muggles even if the wizarding part means that she can’t have the sort of fame that she’d always hoped for on the Muggle side. She’s happy, they’re both happy.
And if it’s a name on both their wrists that led the man that she loves to her, well, it’s at least as valid a way of meeting as anything else.