Spiderman Oneshots

Soulmates (2)

(Both @itzme___gosh and @Zitamientje requested a part 2, and I got so many other enthusiastic comments that I decided why not \o-o/? Enjoy!)

Peter's life was going great. He visited Mr Stark almost every day under the guise of his personal intern (they'd decided to keep their platonic soulmate bond a secret for now to protect Peter's privacy) and they'd gotten to know each other really well. Tony loved being in the presence of the younger boy, who treated him like an actual person instead of an untouchable celebrity. Whenever Peter was bored in class, his soulmate would write out some problems for a project he was working on for him to solve. Whenever Peter got injured on patrol, Tony was there with his exasperation and private medical wing ready to patch him up. Nothing could dampen Peter's mood, not even Flash's teasing about Peter's so-called 'Stark internship'.

Everything was perfect.

Until his romantic soulmate slapped him.

MJ's life was absolutely terrible. It had been months since her sixteenth birthday, since she had woken up screaming, sure that she was dying.

It had become a common occurrence since then. Enough so that her parents had invested in soundproof walls, at a loss for what else to do. She took painkillers every night before bed, but they barely helped whenever the pain made an appearance. She was at her wit's end. At first she'd been worried about her soulmate, certain that they were dying and she wouldn't be able to help them, but a day later and the crushing pain was nothing but a phantom ache every time her soulmate moved.

After that, when there was a new bout of varying levels of pain every week or so, almost always at night, she'd been worried that her soulmate was being abused. But after a while she realised that the pain never lasted long. Whoever her soulmate was got medical attention - good medical attention - almost immediately.

Her next thought was that they were part of a gang or something, especially after one night she was caught in the shoulder by a centralised point of white-hot pain that could only have been a bullet wound. A few nights before that she was pretty sure her soulmate had been stabbed, but she began to doubt even that when the pain receded completely after only a few days.

She was preoccupied by thoughts and worries about them, keeping to herself in school, ignoring everybody who whispered about 'that weird Michelle girl' who sometimes yelped in pain for no reason or bit back a scream when her soulmate aggravated a particularly bad injury. She hated to admit it, but her heart did sink a little when the pain kept coming but Peter Parker, a boy that she had secretly liked for years, remained bruise-free. She had hopes at the start, when he wore sunglasses for a day after her soulmate had been punched in the face, but by the afternoon he'd taken them off, no bruise in sight. 

Nobody knew what she was going through, apart from her parents. That was the thing with romantic soulmates - you felt your partner's pain, but no markings would show up on your skin. To begin with, even her parents had thought she was just being overdramatic, but enough nights spent sobbing and days passed wincing convinced them otherwise.

One night, after a particularly rough week of school and before an important test the next week, she was jolted from her sleep with a quiet 'oomph' as her soulmate was punched in the stomach. She gritted her teeth, preparing for the pain she knew would be coming, barely wincing as her knuckles stung with the impact of her soulmate's fist on another's body. The fight continued, luckily mostly physical, no knives or guns that she could feel. Then there was a foot-shaped jolt on her chest, and a couple of seconds later she couldn't hold back a scream as she felt her soulmate slam into something very hard. Searing pain shot through one of her ribs, all the other aches fading to background. Her soulmate must have broken theirs.