Work Text:
Soulmate AU
Harry hated soulmates.
Harry hated the words that scarred his right forearm as much as he hated the scar on his forehead.
The one on his forehead represented the death of his parents, two people programmed to love him. The beautiful scrawling scar on his arm represented the death of the third person who was destined to love him.
All around Harry- his classmates, his friends, even his relatives -there were colorful tattoos and loud giggles and blushes over the words of their soulmates.
Everyone in the world had a soulmate.
Ron’s red tattoo, ’Excuse me, but have either of you seen a toad?’, made Harry grind his teeth when he saw it. Hermione’s matching red script, in Ron’s untidy scrawl, ’Ron, Ron Weasley,’ hurt Harry just as bad.
When Harry’s classmates touched their arms, when their eyes were filled with stars and hope and love, Harry was left with the disappointment of knowing his soulmate had died before he’d even been born.
‘You showed up with that horrid scar,’ Aunt Petunia sneered when Harry asked her about it the day they learned about soulmates and soul marks in primary school. ‘Your soulmate was dead before you were one.’
‘Better dead than stuck with the freak,’ Uncle Vernon grunted.
And Harry believed it for years.
Against his own wishes, Harry used to dream about meeting his soulmate, finding out it their death had been a lie and Harry’s scar was merely a peculiar design choice by the same magic that assigned soulmates.
“It’s you. I’m Jasper Whitlock, pleasure to meet you,” they would say, just as was scarred in Harry’s arm. And Harry would have said something clever to start with, something alerting his soulmate to his identity, something his soulmate would have been proud to have on his arm for his entire life.
They would get to know each other, not letting being soulmates stand in the way of building a true connection, and in the end they’d find that they were a perfect match.
All of Harry’s weakness would be bolstered by Jasper Whitlock’s strengths. And all of Jasper Whitlock’s insecurities would be soothed by Harry’s assurances.
They would have had a beautiful life.
Instead, it was just a fantasy that caused Harry pain, so he tried to ignore it like he ignored the pitying looks from his friends when the topic of soulmates came up.
It was as cruel as it was relieving when Peter Pettigrew cut Harry’s right arm open, leaving a scar through the middle of the beautiful writing that haunted Harry’s dreams and nightmares.
Walking to his death at only seventeen had been a kindness, really. A way for Harry to escape the world filled with only the ghosts of people who loved him.
His parents.
Sirius.
His soulmate.
Ron and Hermione would be devastated, but they had each other.
Everyone had someone, and Harry embraced death alone.
*****
Jasper had never put much stock in soulmates as a human. It wasn’t considered polite conversation when he was a boy, and it didn’t matter to Jasper anyway.
He’d been nearly seventeen when he figured out why his mother looked as sad as a wet kitten when she looked at his arms.
“Ya ain’t got a soulmark?” The old drunk Jasper had been sharing a drink with spat on the ground and crossed himself when he looked at Jasper’s bare arms. “Either yer a sicko waitin’ on a baby to be born, or ya ain’t got a soul, boy.”
The next morning, Jasper had ran to the nearest recruitment station he could and joined the army.
If Jasper was destined to be alone, then he’d go out in a blaze of glory instead of as some pathetic old man drinking away the pain of not having a soul mate.
Then he was changed and his disgust at his bare arm remained when even vampires, supposed soulless monsters, had soulmarks.
Magic had blessed everyone except Jasper.
When Jasper met Carlisle Cullen and joined his family, he had a different view of it.
“It’s possible that your soulmate hasn’t been born yet,” he said kindly. “After all, if you can live forever, who’s to say your soulmate isn’t born yet?” He chuckled and smiled fondly at the photograph of himself and Esme at their most recent wedding.
“I waited over three hundred years for my soulmate to be born,” he said. “And look how blessed we are.”
Jasper didn’t want to wait three hundred years. He wanted the perfect love that Esme and Carlisle shared, the obnoxious love that Emmett and Rosalie shared.
It was only Edward who Jasper found solace with. Edward with his bare arms and miserable emotions. Alice didn’t have a mark either, but she always smiled airily when the topic was brought up and said that patience was a virtue.
Jasper had no patience.
It wasn’t until 1980 that Jasper finally felt hope, felt the flicker of joy return to his own emotions. He felt the burn in his arm while wrestling with Emmett and looked down to see a mark appearing as if being written in the very moment-
‘Bloody hell, sorry, mate, ‘m a bit pissed.’
Emmett had laughed himself sick at it.
“Your soulmates going to be some drunk British chick!” he roared, bent over at the waist from the force of his laughter. “Oh, god, I’ve got to tell Rose!”
Jasper bore the jokes and the teasing, he bore Edward’s jealousy for the next three years before his own mark appeared, and he bore it all with a smile on his face because Jasper had a soulmate.
Jasper had a soulmate for 6,483 days.
At only seventeen years old, Jasper’s soulmate died and the emotional pain of Jasper’s beautiful, if cramped and messy, green writing turned in to a scar nearly killed him. He wished it had killed him.
Edward and Alice tried to help Jasper find information on his soulmate. They searched through archives for the entire United Kingdom to find record of a seventeen year old born on July 31st, 1980 who died on May 3rd, 1998, to no avail.
Jasper didn’t even get to see what his soulmate looked like. He would never know their name. He would never have the peaceful contentment that his family had.
And eventually, when Jasper couldn’t handle the pain of wallowing in misery while being surrounded by love and peace, he set out to travel alone.
*****
Harry was five pints to the wind, patting down his pockets to find another note to buy an unneeded sixth.
“Aha!” Harry pulled the crinkled… something… from his pocket and waved it at the bartender in the muggle pub he’d been hiding drinking in.
“Mate, c’n I get another?” he slurred with what he hoped was a sober enough smile to work.
The bartender took one look at the way Harry wobbled on his stool and snorted.
“Think you’ve had enough there, mate.”
Harry shrugged and pocketed the money before stumbling out of the pub. It was ten pm on a Saturday in downtown London, Harry could find another pub or corner store to buy a drink in.
He’d made it three steps outside the pub before tripping over his own feet and crashing in to a body that felt as hard as the brick wall. Or maybe it was the brick wall, Harry probably didn’t need another drink.
The freezing hand that grabbed Harry’s arm, steadying him, definitely wasn’t a brick wall though.
Harry blinked up at a bloke that looked as tired as he felt and as pale beneath the street lamps as the moon looked in the sky.
“Bloody hell, sorry, mate,” Harry stumbled over his own thick tongue as he hurried to apologize for walking right in to some random bloke, “‘m a bit pissed.”
As if it weren’t obvious.
The bloke, tall, fit, blonde, a hand that tightened almost painfully on Harry’s elbow, let out a hiss that had Harry cursing himself for his own inability to handle his liquor.
“It’s you,” the bloke said softly, his voice rich and soothing. Harry looked back up at his face in time to see it transform in to a brilliant and dazzling smile.
“I’m Jasper Whitlock, pleasure to meet you.”