Chapter Text
Clark
Clark knew he had a soulmate from a young age.
His parents had warned him it might not be the same for him, being Kryptonian. They didn’t know for sure. Did Kryptonians have soulmates? Could Clark have a human soulmate? Had he had one once, but they’d perished with the rest of his planet? No one had the answers. And so Clark had gone into puberty with lower expectations than his peers, fully prepared to never see the imprint of a bruise or cut appear on his skin even once he started experiencing the other hallmarks of adolescence.
He might have missed the first injuries when they’d appeared; they always started out faint, easy to ignore or dismiss. But then, one day, he came home from school with the faded imprint of a black eye. His parents noticed it before he did. They knew, by then, that Clark was made of tougher stuff than humans – he had never had a bruise of his own – but their natural parental instincts kicked in and they launched a rapid-fire series of questions: Had he gotten into a fight that day? Had one of the other kids punched him or pushed him? Had he fallen? Did it hurt? Clark answered no to all of these, and when Martha and Jonathan finally released him, the first thing he did was run into the nearest bathroom and look at himself in the mirror.
The bruise was a semi-translucent bluish-purple, not as dark as a real black eye would be, but dark enough that he understood why his parents had been worried. But no one had hit him or pushed him that day, and even if they had, it wouldn’t have left a mark. This bruise belonged to someone else.
Clark’s soulmate.
Overtaken by curiosity, Clark closed and locked the bathroom door and stripped down to his underwear, intent on examining every inch of his skin for other injuries. He didn’t need to look too closely. When he turned around, he had a series of bruises down his back like he’d fallen onto a rough surface.
Clark dressed and came out of the bathroom triumphant. He’d felt a twinge of compassion for whoever the bruises belonged to; they must have gotten into a fight at school. But Clark didn’t linger on that conclusion for long. He was, after all, a preteen boy, and one who’d just made a life-altering discovery. He couldn’t help but focus on himself.
Clark’s parents, by then, had come to the same realization he had. Seeing how pleased their son was to have a soulmate after all, they had a celebratory dinner at the nicest restaurant in town, the one they only ever went to on Clark’s birthday. It was, in Clark’s twelve-year-old opinion, even better than his birthday, because a birthday came around every year, but he would only find out he had a soulmate once.
Over the next few years, the novelty of having a soulmate wore off. Clark’s youthful impatience got the best of him; he started to resent living in such a small town where he was unlikely to meet the person he was destined to spend the rest of his life with. He wanted to get out into the world and find them, and as he developed control over his superpowers, he also wanted to get out into the world and do good. His parents saw this and, instead of taking it personally, encouraged Clark to do well in school so he could apply for scholarships. They couldn’t afford to send him to the best schools around the country, but they would save as much as they could, and if he tried hard enough and got good enough grades, hopefully he could go wherever he wanted.
Another damper on Clark’s initial excitement upon seeing the bruises all over his body was how frequently new cuts and bruises started appearing. Even though he’d never been injured himself, Clark knew plenty of regular kids his age, and most of them didn’t get hurt that often. Only the ones who were being bullied, or the siblings whose father everyone spoke about in hushed, disapproving tones; one day, when Clark was in high school, they moved away with their mother in the middle of the night. They were at school one day and gone the next.
So Clark, being the kind-hearted person he was, naturally began to worry about his soulmate. Were they being bullied? Or, even worse, was one or both of their parents hurting them? His parents started to worry too; they had reached the same conclusions, and it frustrated them to no end that there was nothing they could do about it. There were millions of children in the world who needed help, who were bullied or abused, and they couldn’t help all of them, and they had no way of finding the one whose injuries were showing up on their son’s body.
Clark became even more determined to find this person. He studied and did well in school, took the SAT three times until he scored in the top ninety-eighth percentile. He dated a girl, Lana, who he knew wasn’t his soulmate, and she knew he wasn’t hers, but they liked each other well enough, they had fun together, and they lost their virginity to each other after graduation, when they knew they were going to different schools and might never see each other again.
He’d gotten accepted to Metropolis University in Delaware, in the second-largest city in the country. It would be a huge culture shock after growing up in small-town Kansas, but Clark was ready to be at the center of the action. He was ready to see more of the world and meet new people. Maybe one of them would be his soulmate.
There was certainly a better chance of it in Metropolis than there was in Smallville.
In college, Clark met as many people as he could. He dated around, always on the lookout for someone whose injuries matched his. But romance wasn’t his only focus. The more Clark learned about the world, the more he realized how much pain and injustice there was in it. He wanted to do something about it. He was still keeping his powers a secret, as his parents had taught him to, but he didn’t know how much longer he could keep it that way; something had to change. His parents had always told him he’d been sent to Earth for a reason. What better reason than saving people from harm?
Eventually, Clark couldn’t keep his powers to himself any longer. He didn’t want to give up his chance at a normal life, the life his parents had worked so hard for him to have, though, so he constructed an alter ego, a version of himself that was larger-than-life. The media started calling him Superman, and it stuck.
In the meantime, Clark took his passion for writing and spun it into a journalism degree. He got an internship at the Daily Planet, and when he graduated, they offered him a job. He befriended some of his coworkers: Cat Grant, who had a big personality and was tons of fun at parties; Jimmy Olsen, who was the type of friendly that made him impossible not to like; and Lois Lane. Lois… was a whole different breed. She was beautiful, sure, of course she was. But she was also insanely driven and talented and passionate about her work. She reminded Clark a little bit of his high school girlfriend, Lana, but she also reminded him a little bit of himself.
Clark and Lois started dating, and just as it had been with Lana, it was clear that Lois wasn’t Clark’s soulmate, although Lois didn’t appear to have any injuries that weren’t her own. Clark briefly held out hope that maybe he might be her soulmate, but he knew it didn’t work that way. Some people didn’t have one at all – not everyone was destined for romance – but for those who did, it always went both ways.
Even if they weren’t soulmates, Clark liked Lois a lot. So he gave it a shot. He even told Lois his secret, that he was Superman. (Well, she mostly found out on her own.) And the relationship lasted for a while, but eventually they both realized Clark couldn’t be happy in the long-term with someone who wasn’t his soulmate. He would always be haunted by the unknown, in search of someone he hadn’t yet found, and it wasn’t fair to either of them to keep their relationship going past a certain point when they both knew it wouldn’t last forever.
They parted on good terms, stayed friends afterward. Things were awkward for a while, and then they were less awkward, and then they weren’t awkward at all.
And all the while, Clark wondered. He wondered who the cuts and bruises on his body belonged to. There had been a few years when the injuries mostly disappeared, and Clark had been hopeful that his soulmate had gotten out of whatever bad situation they’d been in (or, if they hadn’t been in a bad situation, that they’d stopped doing whatever it was they’d been doing to keep getting themselves injured, playing a contact sport or constantly falling down and running into things).
But when he was still in college, Clark’s secondhand injuries had come back with a vengeance, and this time they looked less like the sort of injuries a kid might get in a fight at school and more like the sort of injuries an adult would get in a no-holds-barred grudge match. With weapons.
Was his soulmate a gang member? Were they in an extremely abusive relationship? Were they in a fight club? Clark’s mind spun with the possibilities. Even more than that, it spun with the desire to find out. To find this person and help them. After a few years of being Superman, Clark had helped so many people, but he couldn’t help the person who mattered the most. The soulmate he hadn’t met yet.
They were out there somewhere.
Bruce
As far as Bruce was concerned, he didn’t have a soulmate.
It hadn’t been his number-one concern during his adolescence; he was deeply traumatized by his parents’ death, working through his grief and a number of unhealthy coping mechanisms. He’d been through a series of therapists and antidepressants. He was keeping Alfred up at night with worry.
And he was getting into fights at school. He couldn’t help it. He had so much rage inside him, all the time, battling with his grief for his attention. Sometimes he felt like all he was on the inside was anger and sadness. Darkness and depression. The ability to hurt other people and the ability to be hurt. And when one of his classmates mentioned his parents, mocked him for being an orphan, he saw red and lost all control. Or maybe the opposite happened; maybe that was the only time he felt like he was in perfect control.
Alfred refused to pull him out of school and get him a private tutor. He maintained that Bruce needed to socialize with other children his age. But Bruce wasn’t interested in other children his age. He wasn’t interested in anything, most of the time. When he was on the right antidepressant, when the eternal darkness that hung over him lifted enough for him to care about anything but his own pain, he took an interest in his parents’ company and charity work. He was going to have to take over both one day. He was going to have to carry on their legacy. It was the only thing that gave him purpose.
The only thing, other than the memory of his parents shot dead in an alley. The memory of the man with the gun that had ended their lives, one after the other, just like that. Bruce never saw his face. But that didn’t matter. As he grew older, Bruce realized it was less about the individual shooter and more about the state of the city of Gotham as a whole. It had the highest crime rate in the nation, the highest homicide rate, a foster system overrun with orphans like him and other children whose parents had been lost to drugs or jail or poverty.
Gotham was overrun, it was corrupt. And maybe the sensible thing to do would be to leave and never come back. Certainly Alfred would have dropped everything and moved across the country, around the world if Bruce had expressed a desire to do so, if it would mean Bruce would get better. But Bruce didn’t want to escape the memories of his parents. They were all he had left. That, and their life mission to make Gotham a better place.
They hadn’t seen their mission through to the end. Bruce would.
He finished school early, because he was a genius and because he couldn’t wait to get out of that place. He graduated college at eighteen. He took over Wayne Enterprises. He started the Wayne Foundation. He trained. He constructed an elaborate secret identity, a role he would play in his day-to-day life to distract from what he did by night. He used his vast wealth and intelligence to compensate for his lack of superhuman abilities. And he relied on the darkness he’d once found oppressive, that he’d taken and cultivated. A persona criminals would fear. A symbol the people of Gotham would come to rely on.
And all the while, from his first fights in school to the nights of getting beaten up by criminals, Bruce never saw a cut or bruise on his body that wasn’t his. For a time, in his youth, this had been yet another source of despair, though it paled in comparison to his grief over his parents. But these losses, the loss of his parents and the loss of a soulmate he’d never have, were complementary. He’d lost the two people in his life who he’d loved the most, and who’d loved him. And, unless there was somehow someone out there who had never sustained an injury in their life, he would never love someone the way his parents had loved each other. He was destined to a life of solitude, and if it weren’t for Alfred, perhaps he would have believed this meant he was unlovable.
Perhaps, even with Alfred as proof to the contrary, Bruce believed this nonetheless.
By the time he’d reached adulthood and taken on the mantle of Batman, though, Bruce had come to view his lack of attachments as a strength. He slept around to maintain his image, and because he enjoyed it, but he never searched for anything more. It was better that he didn’t have a soulmate. Love was a weakness his enemies could exploit. It was the one luxury he couldn’t afford.
Meeting Selina Kyle didn’t change his mind. At least, not at first. She was compelling, and beautiful, and challenging in all the best ways, and when their flirtation evolved into something physical, Bruce would admit he was pleased by the development. But they were both adamant that what they had was strictly transactional, a mutually beneficial exchange between two peers. Even as they orbited closer and closer to each other, became increasingly entangled in each other’s lives, they avoided words that would indicate commitment: “boyfriend,” “girlfriend,” “relationship,” and especially “love.” They were two broken people who refused to be vulnerable with each other.
And they weren’t each other’s soulmates. They figured that out early on, and neither of them were surprised, and neither of them were disappointed. They’d both learned, by that point in their lives, to manage their expectations.
Selina asked him, once, if he had a soulmate. It was a breach of their unspoken rules to ask him something so personal, but Selina had never been one to abide by any rules. Bruce told her he didn’t. She called him “lucky.”
Bruce didn’t feel lucky. And he didn’t turn the question around on Selina. If there was someone out there who was perfect for her in every way, Bruce didn’t want to know about it. Let him go on assuming she was like him: alone in the world.
Their arrangement didn’t last long after that. There was only so far it could go when neither of them were willing to admit what they were feeling, or ask for what they wanted from each other. And for the first time in a long time, Bruce found himself regretting the lack of bruises on his body that weren’t his own.
Bruce could easily have spiraled even farther into loneliness after that, but fate intervened in the form of a story splashed across the headlines: The circus had come to town, and now two acrobats were dead. An accident, the news anchors said.
Accidents didn’t happen in Gotham. As he always did when the police and the media failed to bring justice, Batman stepped in, and he soon learned about the child the acrobats had left behind: a talented, precocious, and bereaved twelve-year-old named Richard Grayson.
The question of adoption didn’t even cross Bruce’s mind at first. He went to visit the kid at the group home he was living in, one of the many group homes in Gotham that had been built and furnished with Wayne money, but it was still overcrowded, and there was still little chance of a traumatized preteen boy getting adopted when there were plenty of younger, happier children to choose from.
After meeting Dick, after seeing himself so much in the kid, the idea started to coalesce in Bruce’s mind. It was a crazy idea, he knew. But he had this enormous house, and more money than he could spend in a lifetime, and he wasn’t likely to have any children of his own.
He pitched the idea to Alfred, who reacted like Bruce had gone out of his mind. As far as Alfred was concerned, Bruce could barely take care of himself. But Bruce explained the situation, and he introduced Alfred to Dick, and there was no going back after that. Faced with another intelligent, dark-haired young boy who’d lost both of his parents, Alfred was powerless to refuse.
The lengthy adoption process gave Bruce something else to focus on besides work and fighting crime for the first time in a very long time, and he threw himself into the task. He met with social workers, met with lawyers, met with child psychologists. He hired an interior decorator to transform one of the bedrooms in Wayne Manor. He researched schools and listened to audiobooks on adoption and parenting.
By the time the adoption went through, Bruce and Alfred had met with Dick multiple times, and though his personality was dimmed by grief and he still hadn’t fully warmed up to them yet, it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that the kid was full of potential. Bruce was determined to give him a better life than the Gotham foster care system had in store for him.
And yes, okay, maybe Bruce’s motivation wasn’t entirely selfless. He’d accepted the lack of a soulmate in his life, but a part of him – a part he wouldn’t admit existed, not even to himself – was rapidly realizing that he couldn't live the rest of his life alone.
Maybe his weak sense of self-preservation had finally kicked in. Out of all of Bruce’s coping mechanisms, healthy and unhealthy, the one that had always worked the best in staving off the deepest depression was a sense of responsibility. Responsibility to his parents, to his father’s company, to his mother’s charity work. Responsibility to Gotham. Add to that a responsibility to Dick Grayson, and he had a pretty good list of things to live for.
By the time Dick settled into life at Wayne Manor, by the time he’d learned Bruce’s secret and taken on a secret identity of his own, the concept of a soulmate was so far from Bruce’s mind it may as well have been nonexistent. Against all odds, he was building a decent life for himself. Romance wasn’t a part of the equation. It was never meant to be.
There wasn’t anyone out there for him, and maybe that was for the best.