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Though it was often assumed that soulmates are inherently romantic, that is not a standard. By and large, soulmates are nothing but confirmations that your souls were connected through some great, cosmic shuffling of the Universe, perhaps an Eternal Plan that no one knows about or can begin to decipher. What is known, is that most often, the marks are the first words exchanged, as the moment one enters someone’s life is what makes the largest impact, the moment the Universe has been barrelling towards since long before their birth. Sometimes, however, it marks a later moment, one which signifies a turning point in one or both of their lives.
Of course, just because the Universe has its plans, does not mean that they cannot be changed. Wizards, especially, with the strength of their magic within them, have the willpower to wander off of the set path. So the Universe must make its adjustments. Rarely does it not get things back on the correct path eventually.
Harry Potter had eight marks.
There was a scrawl of messy handwriting just above Harry’s left foot. “Daddy’s here, Hari” it read, dark against his brown skin. When he was small, Harry would trace the words, staring through the dim light that seeped through the cracks of his cupboard door. He didn’t know why his name was spelled wrong, but it didn’t matter.
Sometimes he dreamed that his aunt and uncle were wrong. That his father was out there, somewhere, alive. That he was trying to find him. But who would look for an unwanted little boy in the cleaning cupboard under the stairs, peering through round glasses far too large for his small face.
(“You’ll grow into them,” his aunt had said with pursed lips, as Dudley ruined a display of wire-rimmed spectacles just past her shoulder. “We won’t have to buy you any more.” The word ever went unsaid, but Harry knew it was there.)
Of course, James Potter was dead, had thrown himself headlong at Voldemort as if he could kill the man with his bare hands. But before that, a year and some months before he lay cold on his foyer floor, he’d held his newborn son in his arms and breathed promises of protection into his messy crop of black hair.
Across his heart in a careful cursive was the statement that finished the sentence, though the boy had no way of knowing. A word that a young woman, red hair still sticking to her sweaty forehead, had whispered in agreement to her husband’s words, a promise etched into her son’s skin. In just over sixteen months, the woman would save her son by throwing herself between him and death. But that was in the future, and for this moment, their small family was complete.
(“Always.”)
Just between his shoulder blades were the words “Hari - you’re a wizard” written in a near-unreadable scribble. Petunia had screeched the first time she saw them. He’d been just a baby then, an orphan for mere hours instead of years. She’d thrust him into the near-scalding water in the sink, scrubbed the spot where the words stared back at her as if she could scrub them away. Baby Harry had sobbed and screamed as she did so, but she was unrelenting.
When the words obviously didn’t budge no matter how raw she scraped the spot, she and Vernon had resolved to never tell their nephew about the blocky letters staining his skin. They’d forced him to wear shirts even when Dudley was permitted to remove his, took the mirrors from the downstairs bathroom that he was forced to use, and never spoke a word of them.
It was Ron who told Harry about them, their first night in Gryffindor tower. Harry had been changing his shirt in front of the open door to the bathroom, his back turned so that the other boys couldn’t see the way his ribs showed through his skin. Ron had caught sight of them after raising his head from spitting his toothpaste into the sink.
He took a few days to say anything, but with all of Harry’s wonder and confusion, Ron had to ask. Because if his skin has said he was a wizard for his entire life, how could he be so baffled by the existence of magic? It was not the first time that Ron heard of how his friend was mistreated, but it was the first that makes rage boil beneath his skin.
Harry, for his part, is nothing less than thrilled at the thought that the first man who’d shown him kindness in his short life was… incredible. The world had been so cruel to him, but to know that Hagrid was, in some way, connected to him - that the world had meant for him to get that one first shred of hope - carried him through the rest of his day with his head held high.
In a messy ink that seemed to bleed together, curling their way around his right arm just below the elbow, were the words, “Anyone sitting there? Everywhere else is full.”
Harry had stared at it for long hours when he was small, tracing the words eagerly with small, calloused fingers. For a boy with no friends, he used this as a reminder that someday that would change. And the moment that Ronald Weasley stepped into his life, with his freckles and his smile, and the mark below his ribcage in Harry’s own thin, neat handwriting ( “yes, but I can’t remember it”), it all did. For now he had a friend, and a family, and felt like, for the first time, he really belonged.
Every summer after, as he wasted away for days and weeks on end in the Dursleys’ home, sometimes feeling as though everything else was just a dream, he had this piece of Ron to remind him what was real. For the rest of his life, Harry would fall asleep clutching his arm below the elbow, clinging to the moment that he’d realized that he was loved.
Along the side of his right foot, nearly where sole meets bridge, was Hermione’s careful print. (“My cursive is far too messy,” she’d said primly when asked once. “I’d never be able to read my notes.”) The moment when Hermione’d entered his life had been rather wrapped up in too many other things. It wasn’t until a month later, that Halloween, that she muttered the words on Harry’s foot, in that momentous moment post-troll fight that had cemented their friendship forever after.
“Is it… Is it dead?”
It matched the same mark behind Ron’s left knee, the same neat print and five words dark against his pale skin. Harry had spent years pondering over the words, fear in his heart as he worried. Was who dead? he’d wondered. Or rather, what? He was quite relieved when it turned out she’d been talking about a troll.
His matching remark blared dutifully across her collarbone. “I think it’s just been knocked out,” and, just below, in Ron’s rushed scrawl, “Yuck. Troll Bogies.” Proof, it seemed, that someone out there, some cosmic force, had meant for them to come together. That they’d spent their entire lives crashing towards each other. Rare was it that three soulmates should all be meant for each other. But the Universe, it seemed, tended to make exceptions for Harry Potter.
“Sorry, but have you seen a toad at all?” was scribbled below Harry’s foot, and as such, he forgot about it often. It was small, scrunched together like the words were trying to take up as little space as possible, much like their owner had seemed to for the first several years that Harry had known him. It hadn’t been until that night in the dorm, as he was removing his socks, that Harry caught sight of the mark against his sole and remembered.
He’d looked up in alarm, locking eyes with Neville from across the dorm. The small boy had shrugged awkwardly, flashing his arm towards Harry ( “he’ll turn up” in Harry’s familiar writing, lengthwise up his forearm) and then crawled into bed. Neither had spoken about it for years, until after the fighting had ended and the bodies had been ushered away and a castle full of child soldiers had been allowed to breathe.
“I could have been the chosen one,” Neville said quietly to Harry, sitting side by side and staring over the rubble that made up the courtyard far below Gryffindor tower.
“Weren’t you?” Harry’d asked with a wry smile, and Neville had seemed taken aback by that. Harry’d patted him on the shoulder as he stood up. “You did good, Nev,” he’d assured him, and then disappeared to find Ron and Hermione.
“Sleep well, Harry Potter.”
It was written in large, swishing script just above his hip. It took Harry nearly half a year at Hogwarts to realize that the words belonged to Dumbledore, and still more time to connect the words written on his hip to the note left attached to his father’s invisibility cloak.
When he got older, Harry realized that it was likely that this was the first moment that anyone had called him by the name he’d come to know. Certainly, it was not the name in his father’s handwriting. It was not the name that Hagrid had called him that first night, though he’d never said it after, not until years and years later. Sirius and Remus had called him Hari too, and it was Remus who’d explained that his parents had intended to name him Hari, that somewhere along the way his name had been twisted and shaped into one that was decidedly more British. A name that the Dursleys wouldn’t balk at, a name that would be so much easier for the rest of the Wizarding World to pronounce when lauding their infant savior.
During his fifth year, in the midst of so much other anger, he sometimes thought he hated Dumbledore for this. For stealing away this connection to his parents, to his grandparents, to a family and a legacy beyond what the rest of the world thought it saw in him. As he got older, the hatred turned to resentment, and faded ever-so-barely. Hari was still Harry to all except for the precious few who’d known his parents, and that still stung, but this was just one way in which Dumbledore had twisted his fate.
Harry would never know that the mark bearing Dumbledore’s words had appeared that same night. He would never know that another set of words were replaced. The universe has its plans, but mortals can change them with enough force of will.
(“Hullo Hari! I’m your Uncle Padfoot!” )
Harry had always hated the words on his forehead. His scar split them, running them jagged and bleeding the sharp, brutal handwriting into itself. Some letters carried away from others in the sharp edges of the lightning scar . If one took the time to puzzle them out, the Killing Curse arced across his temple.
His aunt had hated that scar the most, sneering and attempting to tame his hair down to cover it. When that hadn’t worked, she’d simply locked him away from the rest of the world where no one could see the ugly, foreign-sounding words marring his face even more than the scar already did. On rare occasions that he couldn’t simply be hidden away, she’d pressed makeup into his head with enough force to hurt until he was old enough to cover it himself.
Ginny had recognized the handwriting, had told him in her second year with shaky hands.
“Don’t you see, Harry?” she’d said, when he’d bemoaned it. “That’s You-Know-Who’s handwriting.” And with small, shaky hands, she showed him her own mark, etched across her shoulder.
( “Hello, Ginny. I’m Tom Riddle.” )
The mark disappeared when Harry came back to life and left the piece of Voldemort’s soul within him behind to die.
Soulmates are and have always been. Some believe that they date back to when we were naught but stardust floating through the cosmos, pulling eternally towards each other until the day in which we collide. The generally accepted wisdom is that soulmates are those with a great impact on each other’s lives, a kind of love or importance that transcends time and space. Everyone has at least one. It is impossible to exist without running across someone who changes your life for better or worse.
Harry Potter has seven marks.