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Bruce Wayne didn’t have a soulmate until he was seventeen.
It was considered perfectly normal. Most people had soulmates, sure, but a good ten or twenty percent didn’t, and you didn’t have one by your eighth birthday, you were unlikely to ever get one. Bruce had been sad, for a while, imagining a life filled with loneliness and emptiness. How could you have a life without a soulmate?
Then his parents had died, and well, it seemed like you didn’t need to be an soulmate-less freak to be lonely. Even if he’d had a design painted onto his skin, even if he had that to look forward too… his parents were still buried under six feet of dirt. It just didn’t matter.
And then he got a soulmark.
It happened in the middle of class, senior year, during an unseasonably hot day in early May. Bruce had his tie half off, was leaning on two chair legs as close to the open window as he dared for the hope of a hint of a breeze, when a burning sensation overwhelmed him. His hip, his right hip, was burning — branding.
He fell off the chair and hit his head on the radiator. At the nurse’s office, he pretended that his main complaint was his head; didn’t say a word about the pain on his hip, knowing with a deep internal dread that he had to keep it a secret. Because barring some extreme circumstance, and those were exceptionally rare — he was seventeen years older than his soulmate. It made him sick to think about.
When he got home, Alfred knew what was wrong the second he saw him. He’d made Bruce hot chocolate, and Bruce had sat alone in the dining room and cried.
When he left, the as soon as he graduated, it was in no small part because of the design now engraved in his skin. The design that looked like a swarm of bats, in red and black. Somewhere, there was a baby with that same mark, and Bruce wouldn’t meet them until they were older — and he knew he had no right to pursue it. Ever.
He had a soulmate now, but he was still alone, and always would be. The eight-year-old boy standing between his parents’ graves feeling the crushing weight of loneliness was right after all.
*
It’s not just the soulmark on his skin that prompts Bruce to become Batman, but the symbol helps a little with designing his costume. He gets a sick sort of joy out of seeing something that disgusted and horrified him made into a part of his superhero identity. It would be risky, maybe, but Bruce Wayne publicly doesn’t have a soulmate; it’d been leaked when he was a child, and if he claimed otherwise, the media might discover just when he’d been marked. And that wasn’t something Bruce wanted to deal with, ever. So he covered up the design with concealer and latex every time he planned on sleeping with someone or letting his shirt get unbuttoned at a party. It’s not perfect — it’s anxiety-inducing, more than anything — but it’s better than the alternative. Always.
*
Dick Grayson bursts into Bruce’s life like a supernova, changing everything he’d ever though about a lifetime alone, and changing him, as a man. He sees the mark on Dick’s skin, one night after patrol while he’s bandaging Dick up.
It’s on his shoulder — not impossible to conceal, but not easy, either — and Bruce has seen it a handful of times but never really examined it. It’s blue and orange, mixed together in a strange design with what looks like birds and flashes of lightning. He doesn’t really understand it, but he’s fascinated by it. He doesn’t look at soulmarks often — he doesn’t look at his own more than he has to, and Alfred’s is on his chest, easily hidden by his clothes.
“Do you have one?” Dick asks, noticing his attention, and Bruce starts.
“Yes,” he says after a long moment. Dick gets down off the table where Bruce was bandaging him and grabs a shirt that was lying on it, pulling it over his heard. The mark disappears, and Bruce tries not to think about it as he busies himself with organizing some tongue depressors.
“I thought you didn’t.” Bruce glances at him, sees the way his head is cocked like a little bird. Like a robin. Eyes bright with curiosity, and wonder, even after a gruelling patrol.
“Don’t believe everything you read,” he says, and leaves.
And that’s the last they speak of it for years.
*
When the tires are stolen off the Batmobile, Bruce is more impressed than anything else at the dark-haired, wild-eyed boy before him. He buys Jason dinner, and watches as he eats like he’s not sure he’ll ever see food this good again. He’s amused. He’s fascinated.
He takes Jason in. He gets two weeks of happiness — sort-of happiness, the loss of Dick still hurts like something lodged in his ribs, but close enough — before he sees Jason shirtless, while he’s working out. On his left shoulder blade, a black-and-red swarm of bats is printed in his skin like a brand.
Bruce wonders, for a moment before Jason turns around, if every force in the universe simply wants him to suffer. Because this— this is cruel. This is horrific.
Jason is supposed to be his son.
*
He closes himself off, because he doesn’t see another option.
They’re Batman and Robin at night, and then during the day Bruce retreats. He goes to the office all day and doesn’t come home until it’s too close to patrol time to spend time with Jason. He eats dinners alone, and for once in his life, Alfred doesn’t make him feel like shit for his neglect; Alfred knows exactly why he’s doing this and is probably at just as much of a loss as he is. Not knowing how to fix something has to be Alfred’s worst fear, and Bruce’s soulmate has always been something unfixable.
And then Jason is sick one night, and he knows. He knows he’ll regret it.
But they watch a movie together, and it hurts him, how wonderful it feels.
*
Bruce is afraid, but he soon realizes that he doesn’t have to be — not as much as he is, anyway. He has no romantic desire for Jason whatsoever; he’s only a boy, and Bruce knows this. He couldn’t make himself see Jason that way if he tried. Once he realizes this, it’s easier, a little — but he becomes afraid of something else. A moment he knows is coming.
The moment when he stops seeing Jason as a boy, and starts seeing him as a man. And starts desiring him the way he’s built to, in his his blood and the marrow of his bones, decided by whatever deity decides these things. That’s the moment, he knows, that the true, absolute self-hatred will come and never leave him again.
*
As it turns out, he doesn’t have to wait for the switch to come in a day. Jason dies, and when he comes back, he’s an adult. Bruce would laugh if the situation wasn’t so painful.
The first time he sees Jason’s face as Red Hood, something in his soul seems to shift. And that night, he dreams of Jason’s blue-green eyes and hard, scarred body beneath him. He wakes up at 5am achingly hard and full of self-hatred.
He takes the coldest shower of his life and doesn’t sleep again until the next day.
*
Bruce knows Jason feels it when their soulmate bond snaps into place. It usually happens instantaneously after meeting one’s soulmate, and Bruce had naively assumed that when he’d first met Jason it had happened; that his fatherly affection and immediate draw to and curiosity of Jason meant that the connection had been forged, never to break. Or that it had happened the last time he’d met Jason, when something had seemed to change within him. But once it happens, the second time they meet face-to-face after Jason’s resurrection, he wonders how he didn’t realize that it hadn’t been there before.
Jason takes off his helmet, and steps just a little closer to Bruce. And his world changes.
His entire world narrows to Jason’s face, his angry eyes, and it feels like something has exploded in his chest. A sharp burning pain stabs at his hip — his soulmark — and he flinches as Jason does the same. His heart begins to beat a fast staccato rhythm, and he takes an involuntary step forward. He needs to touch Jason, needs to feel his heartbeat against his chest, needs to hold him, make sure he’s here, he’s safe—
Jason steps backwards, terror and wonder in his expression. “It’s you,” he says. “I — I’d thought — it’s you.”
Bruce doesn’t say anything, doesn’t know what to say. The ground is moving under his feet, and he’s never felt like this before, has never needed to be close to someone with this kind of desperation. He knows it’s the soulmate bond. He’d never thought, before, that it was like this.
It’s pain, a pain in your heart that can only be soothed by your soulmate’s presence.
Jason turns and takes a running leap off the roof. Bruce doesn’t move to the side to see if he’d landed properly; he can feel that Jason is safe, and scared. The emotions — he’d read that they’re usually subtle, not easy to notice, but this is a fear that’s making his heart clench, and it’s not even his fear.
He doesn’t understand why Jason is so afraid. He doesn’t — he does. He knows.
When Bruce gets home that night, the terror has receded, replaced by bitter sadness. He can’t tell where his own sadness ends and Jason’s begins.
It’s lonely, for his first night with a soul bond.
*
By the time Bruce wakes up the next morning, Jason has left Gotham, and most likely the country. He can feel the sharp pain of distance, like an elastic stretched too far, and it hurts — almost like tearing a muscle, getting worse whenever he aggravates the source of the pain. Or, in this case, thinks about the source of it.
The soul bond is unusually intense and fragile during the first week, Bruce knows — he’s read about it. It’s not recommended to travel further than a few hours by car during that week of hyperawareness. He’s sure Jason knows too, and that makes it all the more painful — Jason’s risking his own safety just to get away from him. It’s a sickening thought.
Bruce spends the whole day working on cold cases, since he’s not working on anything pressing by himself, and he’s nowhere close to ready to be working with someone else. It’s boring, but it keeps his mind away from the tight elastic around his heart, stretching and stretching with every breath he takes.
Wherever Jason is, he’s scared, Bruce can tell. He wonders what Jason is thinking, and then berates himself. He had no right to know. If Jason doesn’t want to see him, that’s the end of it; he won’t pursue.
*
Four days of near-constant pain later, Jason starts travelling back to Gotham. Bruce wakes up in the middle of the night, the pain in his chest lessening so much that it wakes him up, and nearly sobs with relief in a moment of weakness. The pain had been distracting, making him less effective for the Mission — or that’s what he tells himself. He refuses to acknowledge that part of his relief is knowing that Jason might be coming back to see him.
*
It’s midday and Bruce has been awake since the bond woke him when Alfred comes down to the cave.
“Yes?” he says, turning away from the monitor. Alfred looks nervous, almost, and Bruce is sure he knows why. The pain in his heart has been completely gone for the last two hours.
“Master Jason is in the foyer, Master Bruce.” Alfred looks, for moment, like he’s about to say more, but then he turns and walks away into the cave. Probably needing alone time; Bruce doesn’t blame him. They only found out about Jason being alive a month ago, and Alfred has been coping remarkably well otherwise. Bruce doesn’t deny him moments of weakness.
He makes his way up to the foyer slowly, almost dragging his feet. When he gets there, Jason is there, like Alfred said he would be. He’s wearing civilian clothes — a leather jacket and dark jeans, the white patch in his hair shocking against the blackness of his hair and the tan of his skin. His hands are clasped behind his back, and he’s anxious, clearing making an effort not to fidget.
“Jason,” he says when Jason doesn’t speak. “Would you like to come into my study?”
Jason stares at him, almost incredulously, before he snorts softly, and nods. “Sure, B.” Bruce leads them to it and sits down in one of the chairs in front of his desk. Jason takes the other one, and they sit in silence for a moment.
Bruce is itching to touch, and to talk — he wants to ask Jason why he’s here, wants to ask Jason to stay. But he knows Jason needs to talk first — needs to have control over this. They sit for almost a minute in silence before Jason speaks, quietly, not looking at him.
“You know that I went away.” Bruce nods. “Right. I needed to — to process this. I just — I didn’t think it could be you. All the papers said you didn’t have a soulmark.”
Bruce clears his throat. “I got it when you were born. I was seventeen.” Jason doesn’t flinch, but he lets out a low breath in a quick exhale. “I didn’t make it public, since I could easily hide it and the stigma was not something I was comfortable with.”
Jason nods. “I get that, I just — you knew it was me, right?”
Bruce doesn’t want to answer this, but he knows he has to — and knows that he can’t lie to Jason anymore. Jason might know, or might not — depends on the bond, apparently — but that doesn’t make it right. He doesn’t want to start this, whatever it was, with lies. Whether it was simply a second chance at a relationship of any kind, or — or a romantic relationship. “I didn’t know immediately. I saw your mark for the first time two weeks after I took you in.”
Jason hisses out a breath. “Christ.”
Bruce nods.
“I… fuck. I can’t — how could you — you didn’t—”
When Bruce realizes what Jason is trying to say, his heart hurts. “Jason — no. I didn’t have any romantic or sexual feelings for you before your death. Nothing like it. You were like my son, Jason—”
“Was.” Jason half-smiles, showing his teeth. “Guess it’s not like that anymore?”
Bruce didn’t answer. Jason’s smile grew a little, but it wasn’t a kind or happy smile — it was dark, and barely concealing a simmering anger. “Must’ve hurt, huh? Knowing that you’re thinking that about your Robin—”
“Jason.” Bruce closes his eyes. The phantom anger residing in his chest recedes a little, and when he opens his eyes Jason looks almost abashed.
“Sorry,” he says, voice quieter again. “I just — I spent so long after I came back hating you. And before that, I loved you.”
Bruce flinches. He’d guessed — especially when Jason had been an older teen — but he hadn’t known. Jason smiles wryly. “Yeah. But I’m sure part of you knew that. I… I wanted it to be you. I knew what the mark looked like, and I guessed that it might be you, but I didn’t know for sure. And you were… you were hardly around for the first while, and then whenever you were around me, you were holding back. I saw how you were with Dick — you didn’t touch him all the time, but you did it sometimes. Touching his arm, or standing closer to him than you would to me, or letting him hug you, even, sometimes. And you never did that to me. I made up this fantasy in my head that… I guess it’s true, huh? That you were my soulmate and you didn’t let yourself near me because of it. After I came back I convinced myself it was because you didn’t care about me.”
Bruce’s throat hurts, aches from holding back the hurt in his chest, but he doesn’t say anything. Jason closes his eyes for a moment, and huffs out a little laugh.
“To my fourteen-year-old self, this would have been the best possible outcome. But I had to leave. I had to try and run. And I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Bruce says when it becomes clear that Jason is done talking for the moment. “I ran from you, too. You were right. I held myself back because I care about you, and maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do… but it felt like the only thing. You were a teenager, Jason. I couldn’t let myself hurt you. I was afraid, and I hurt you by trying not to. I’m the one who should be sorry.”
Jason stares at him for a long moment, mouth slightly open, before he moves. He stands, and Bruce can’t read him at all, and he’s afraid, irrationally so, that Jason’s about to leave — to walk out of his life forever.
But Jason steps closer to him, until he’s standing right in front of Bruce’s chair. He seems almost frozen, a bit of colour high in his cheeks, and Bruce realizes his intentions a moment before Jason seems to decide to just go for it. Before he can react, Jason is straddling him on the chair and leaning down to kiss him.
For a moment, Bruce can’t breathe.
It’s the intensity of the soul bond, suddenly turned up so much that he can feel every flutter of Jason’s heart, and the closeness of Jason’s body pressed against him, and Jason’s mouth on his, Jason’s tongue moving into his mouth and he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe — he’s blinded, by love and by Jason, Jason, because that’s the only thing he can notice, the only thing he can feel.
Jason is trembling, and so is Bruce as his hands slide up Jason’s back and pull him closer. Jason makes a sound that he would almost call a whimper as he settles fully against Bruce’s body, the leather of his jacket pushing into Bruce’s shirt. It’s overwhelming, in a way that he’s never felt before — the only thing he can feel and sense is Jason, Jason, Jason.
When Bruce finally breaks away — because he really does need to breathe — he feels lighter than he has in years. Jason is flushed, his mouth red and slick with spit, and he’s sitting Bruce’s lap, smiling.
He hasn’t seen Jason smile since before he died.
It makes him smile, as well, his cheeks almost hurting as he pulls Jason in for another kiss.
*
Jason’s fingers trail slowly over the mark on Bruce’s hip, tracing the colourful patterns with the tip of one finger before he leans in to press his lips to it. Since Jason isn’t watching, Bruce allows himself the luxury of smiling, in a giddy way that he would almost never allow himself. He leaned over a little to touch Jason’s mark on the back of his shoulder blade, and Jason makes a small, pleased sound before pulling away from Bruce’s hip. He looks so peaceful and happy in that moment that Bruce can’t help himself — he pulls Jason in and kisses him until they’re both breathless.
It’s been almost a month since that day in the study, and a week since Jason first stayed the night. The first time they had sex — the second night they’d spent together — Bruce had been worried the whole time, scared of hurting Jason. More mentally than physically. But it had gone fine, better than fine, and he’d woken up with Jason still asleep and curled into his chest like a cat. The first time Jason had been gone when he’d woken, though only to the balcony. For a moment, he’d looked down at Jason’s sleeping face and felt as though his heart was going to burst, more love than he’d ever thought himself capable of filling his chest.
This morning was a little less intense, but he’d been content in a way that he almost never was until Jason woke up. Now they’re just in bed together, not doing anything but kissing and slowly exploring each other’s bodies, and Bruce can’t imagine anything better.
Bruce pulls away from the kiss when his lips start to go a little numb, wrapping his arms more securely around Jason and pulling the younger man into his chest. Jason makes a soft noise of contentment, settling his head over Bruce’s heart, and Bruce closes his eyes.
It’s been a long journey, he knows. And the stigma is still something he’ll have to deal with, along with judgement from even his closest friends. But Bruce knows it’ll be worth it. If he can wake up like this even a few more times, everything will have been worth it.