Chapter Text
One of Dick’s earliest memories was of his parents spreading out the deck of cards. They were beautifully painted, more of them than he could count, although to be honest he couldn’t count very high.
“We have a very important tradition at the circus,” Mom said, laying the last card out in front of him. “We name our soulmates in a special way.”
“Our soulmates?”
“Our friends, who are with us always. Remember when you told me about feeling someone pull you away from the horses even though nobody was there? That was your soulmate. Or one of them, if you have more. One day, when you’re older, you’ll meet them, and form a bond, but for now, they are with you, and until you meet them, you need something to call them. We do that with these cards.”
“How?”
“Well, you put your hand over the table, and you ask your soulmates nicely to point to the card that has the picture of what they would like to be called. Now hold your hand out.”
There was the flash of a camera as Dick’s father took a picture.
“Excuse me, soulmate? Can you point at a card please?”
And, even though Mom and Dad didn’t move, someone pushed on the back of Dick’s hand. “Woah. Cool. A cat!”
“A lioness,” Mom said, “That’s wonderful.”
The camera clicked again.
“Now hold your hand out, and ask, if you have another soulmate, for them to point.”
Again, a gentle push guided him. “Book!”
“Sounds like your soulmate will be one smart cookie. Now ask again.”
And this soulmate grabbed Dick’s hand tight and pulled so hard that Dick had to stand up to follow it as he placed his hand on Dad’s camera. “Woah, buddy. Looks like we have a little rule-breaker there. Careful with the camera.”
“They picked their name,” Dick’s mom said. “Camera. Maybe they’ll be a photographer, or a reporter.”
“Again please!” Dick asked, and his soulmates picked, Crown and Dancer and Sword. “That’s a lot of soulmates! Will they all be in the circus with me?”
Mom and Dad exchanged a look. “Wherever you are, my dear, they’ll find you.”
--
As he got older, Dick got better at recognizing the differences between his soulmates, in the way they felt, in the ways they touched him, from Lioness and Book who were free with their affection, to Dancer who guided with a bare two fingers. Camera almost never intervened, except, one night when Dick was nine, he grabbed him by the face, hard enough that it left impossible bruises, and made him look away, just before Mom and Dad’s bodies hit the ground. He heard the sound, loud in his nightmares, but he didn’t see. Instead, he was looking at the crowd, at a child sitting between his parents, when they died.
--
Camera intervened more, after he became Robin. Actually, all of them did, in various ways. Camera and Lioness helped him with investigations, Dancer corrected his stances, and Sword and Crown pushed him hard in training. They all made him a better Robin, and he loved them so much. They were his only family left.
“Do you have soulmates?”
“Save it for after patrol.” Batman growled.
If it had been ‘no,’ he would just have said. “Have you met them already?”
“No.”
--
Dick and Barbara had already been patrolling together for a while, and Dick had a little crush on her, maybe, when one day she casually mentioned,
“I have six soulmates.”
Dick stopped. He knew some people at school with four or five, but nobody with so many as, “six?”
She glared at him. “You have a problem with that?”
Which one was she? Not Camera or Dancer, he was certain of that. Not Sword either, probably. Sword always seemed young to Dick, especially the older he got, and he thought it was likely that he was at least a few years older than Sword, and that they would meet when Sword was pretty young. More and more, he worried about how Sword knew enough to still be helpful to Dick in training at such a young age. He hoped the kid was just an athlete or something, but he had his doubts.
Book or Lioness. It had to be.
“No, it’s just, I have six too.”
They stared at each other for a long, tense moment, and Dick idly thought about how he’d like to kiss her. He was much too nervous to ever try, but it was a nice thought.
“It wouldn’t hurt to try and see.”
Dick knew he was blushing and hated it. “I don’t… know how to check?”
“Bruce didn’t teach you?” She snapped, with some horror. He shook his head. “Well, it’s simple really. All it takes is mixing a drop of blood.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, you don’t put the blood back inside of you. I mean, people used to, by clasping hands or whatever, but they realized in like 1850 that you don’t actually need to. Dad told me the safest and easiest way to do it is to get two pins, sanitize them first, each person lets one drop of blood fall on a piece of paper. Or you can get clean pins in those kits at any pharmacy. When the blood mixes, it’ll glow a little and then we’ll get sent back to the first moment we need to visit. Or if we do it again, to the first moment after our last visit. Then we just get strung along from vision to vision until we’ve been everywhere we’re supposed to be. It doesn’t take as long as it feels like, but it can be pretty tiring so never do it standing up in case you fall down.”
She rolled her eyes as if she had been quoting someone, which knowing the commissioner, she probably was. He was the kind of parent to give a Safe Soulmates talk.
“There’s some pins in Alfred’s sewing kit.”
“I’ll get something to sanitize them with. I pierced my own ears once and it went fine.”
--
The second their blood met, Dick opened his eyes in a childhood bedroom. A younger Commissioner Gordon was reading to a small, adorable little Barbara. Her red hair was pulled into two braids, and she was wrapped in blankets like a cocoon.
“I don’t like boys. They’re icky!”
Dick didn’t think, he just reached down and flicked her nose. “Hey! He flicked me!”
“Who flicked you?”
“I don’t know? Him!”
Gordon, deducing what was going on, started to smile. “An invisible boy?”
“Yeah!”
--
Barbara called him “Ace.” She named all their soulmates in alphabetical order, and Dick had to laugh when Dancer ended up “Dancer” at the end of it all.
--
The strangest thing about the visions was brushing up against his other soulmates while in Barbara’s past. He slid from moment to moment with her, time passing slowly and all at once, and sometimes he was with her in the same moments that others were. Dancer and Crown, who she called Egg, were both with her a lot. Camera (Cat) was just as reserved with Barbara as with Dick, except they were always pulling her towards computers, encouraging her to uncover secrets of programming that she hadn’t even begun to learn. It explained a lot, actually, though Dick didn’t understand it. Camera had never done that with him. Maybe they just knew Barbara would be better at it, would like it more, than Dick did.
--
The day Barbara went out as Batgirl for the first time, Dick and Book nearly pushed her out the window and Camera made an aborted attempt to pull her back, stopping themselves at the last possible moment from grabbing her shoulder. Dick didn’t let himself wonder why. Camera was probably just worried for her, the way they had been with Dick.
--
That night at dinner, Dick told Bruce he’d met his soulmate, and Bruce left the table. Alfred baked him cookies, but that didn’t really make up for it. He renewed his bond with Barbara every six months, learning what it meant to love her in the present tense, and they didn’t meet their next soulmate for another two years.
--
Jason named his soulmates in the library, when he was eight. He went, and grabbed a bunch of books from the kids’ section and, sitting as far away from the librarian as possible so he wouldn’t get in trouble, whispered, “who goes first?”
One of his soulmate reached out and tapped one of the spines. “Okay. Narnia. I guess that makes you… Peter? That’s my name, but you can share if you want.” He tapped the back of Jason’s hand. “Oh, good idea. Once for yes, two for no?” He tapped once. “Okay, Peter. I know there are more of you. Who’s next?”
And so they became Susan and Edmund and Lucy. Then Jason felt bad about running out of main character names, so the last two soulmates became Dorothy and Matilda. All of them agreed easily to their names, except for Edmund and Lucy, who hesitated a little.
“Edmund’s a bit of a brat but he’s cool in the end,” Jason whispered, “and Lucy’s awesome, even if she doesn’t get a bow or a sword like Susan and Peter. She’s really cool.”
They kicked him out of the library a few hours later, and he didn’t get to take any of the books home with him, but it was okay. Dorothy and Peter played with him the whole way home.
--
That was the last good day for a while, but Matilda was always there on bad days, and sometimes Peter and Susan too.
“I don’t suppose there’s any tornadoes nearby,” he would ask them sometimes, “or magic wardrobes. I’d even take a shipwreck or a whirlpool, if I could wash up in Oz.”
And one day, after his griping, Peter and Lucy each grabbed him by a hand and pulled him down the alley to where the Batmobile was parked.
“Seriously, guys?”
And them and Susan and Dorothy all tapped once, for yes.
--
His soulmates were different, now that he was living at Wayne Manor. Peter and Susan both seemed excitable when they showed up, Dorothy and Matilda barely showed up at all except when he was Robin, and Jason could basically feel Edmund staring, whenever Bruce was around. The only one who was normal was Lucy. They’d always been the most protective of Jason. Not the fiercest (that was probably Dorothy or Susan) or the strongest (definitely Matilda) but the one who always tried to put themselves between Jason and trouble, even though they were too insubstantial to help. They were still there, in and out of costume, whenever things were bad.
--
It had always seemed a coincidence to Barbara, that Batgirl and Robin could be soulmates. And so she’d wondered, meeting Jason, if the other five might all fit with the theme… future Robins, maybe someday even future Batgirls.
“Alright, fine, Lucy. I’ll tell Alfred. Whatever,” Jason muttered under his breath.
They were in the batcave, Barbara analyzing some samples under a microscope while Jason put away his gear.
“Tell him what?”
Jason flushed, and then showed Barbara a wicked bruise on his forearm. “It’s fine, I just blocked a hit.”
“You’re not getting out of telling Alfred, short stuff. And you’re not getting out of telling me who Lucy is.”
“M’soulmate,” he mumbled.
“You know her?” That was a serious security risk, if she knew about their identities.
“No,” Jason said hurriedly, “I mean, I called them Lucy after the Narnia character. I named all my soulmates after characters. I know it’s stupid or whatever, but, uh, I’m not gonna change it now.”
Dick called one of their soulmates ‘Book’. She’d wondered if Jason might have been Crown or Sword, but Book made sense. Book had always been a fighter, someone who’d encouraged her to be Batgirl.
“It’s not stupid,” Barbara told him. “Dick has soulmates called ‘Book’ and ‘Camera’. I named my soulmates when I was four. I called one of them ‘Egg’.”
Egg tapped an amused objection against Barbara’s arm. Jason laughed. “Well, it’s not as stupid as that.”
“Hey, nobody gets to make fun of me but my soulmates.”
--
Three weeks later, Jason sat down in front of Barbara with two pins and said, “I want to be able to make fun of you.”
“Only if you want me to call you ‘Bumblebee’ for the rest of your natural life.”
“Sure thing, Susan.”
People always assumed that Jason had bonded with Dick, first, but they were wrong about that. Barbara was the one who held his hand after the bonding and drove him to get milkshakes. She knew Dick hadn’t ever had the real celebration a first bonding deserved, and she wanted things to be different for Jason.
He’d known she was Susan because of that sort of thing. Susan was fierce, tough like Barbara, and smart, maybe his most brilliant soulmate, but they were also kind.They saw people clearly. When he’d thought about the possibility, realized that his soulmates knew to encourage him to rob Batman, he’d known that ‘Susan’ fit her just right.
--
After Joker, Barbara didn’t let either Jason or Dick renew the bond with her. Jason, she knew, was angry about the whole thing, at Joker and himself and Dick and her dad and Bruce and everybody. Dick was angry too, but he hid it better.
“Were we not there?” He asked her, softly. He’d been subdued, recently. Barbara kind of hated it. Dick wasn’t as light or fun as he usually was, and she didn’t like that he was treating her differently. On the other hand, she didn’t think she would have wanted him to be all perky-jokey-Robin either.
“You were there.”
They all were, Dick and Jason and Cat and Dancer and Egg and Friend. Friend, Egg, and Jason had helped her fight as long as she could. Cat and Dick had held her hands. Dancer had put a hand on her shoulder, gently tapping in time with her breath.
“Then you’ll let me be there?” When Barbara pulled her hand back, he let her go, but clarified, “I mean, not, like, immediately, but sometime. When you’re ready. We’ll be there.”
“Yeah.”
In theory, if she pushed it long enough, they would die first. Fate and destiny could only do so much against mortality and human agency. But she could put it off for a while. They were all young, and, in spite of what had happened to Barbara, the fact remained none of them had ever come anywhere close to being killed while on the job.
--
Six months later, as Barbara was just working up the courage to share with them again, Jason was dead.
--
“You lost your soulmate, didn’t you?”
Diana looked up from the monitors. It was a slow shift. Lately, they’d been scheduling Bruce into rotations at times when they thought the work would be light, and pairing him up with other senior members, even though he hated it and thought it was inefficient. It was the only rest he was getting and they all knew it.
“One of my soulmates, but yes. I did.”
Bruce wasn’t looking at her, face fully turned to the monitors still, so all she could see was the side of his cowl. Still, she could picture him under it, the bags under his eyes and the hair that he wouldn’t wash unless he had to go out as Bruce Wayne or get blood out of it.
“I don’t know what to say to Nightwing and Oracle.”
Diana had called both of them a few times, since it happened. Barbara had yelled at her, demanding why nobody from the Justice League had been there. Dick had just cried.
“There’s nothing you can say to make it better. Don’t concentrate on trying to fix it, concentrate on being there for them.” And let us be there for you, she didn’t add.
“And you made it through.”
“I did. I wasn’t alone.” She still wasn’t. A hand lightly touched her shoulder, glowing with an inner warmth that was not of this world.
“So you know them, then? Your living soulmates?”
Normally, Bruce was always the one who stopped them from talking about this sort of thing on the job. Still, if he was willing to talk more about emotions, Diana wasn’t going to be the one who stopped him. Asking her about Dick and Barbara was the closest he’d come to acknowledging Jason’s death since it happened.
“I haven’t completed the bonds, but… one of my soulmates figured out how to speak to me in Morse code, although it took me many years to understand what he was saying. In some respects, I already know him well.”
“That’s a clever idea.”
“I thought the same.”
Their silence resumed, broken by buzzing, clicking, the hum of the station’s engines, and finally by Bruce again. “Nightwing says he still felt Robin with him sometimes until he died, even though they never had the chance to renew the bond again.”
“It was the same, for me. On Themyscira, we believe that in the moment of death, a soul visits its mates one final time. Or perhaps the mind only fills the gaps of where we expect a soulmate to be. But I prefer to believe, I think. Soulmates or not, the people we have lost are with us always.”
“It must be hard, to know that you’ll outlive your soulmates.”
A different hand touched her now, cool and human. She already knew he was tapping out an apology. “I don’t know that. Nobody does.” In fact, she had a pretty good idea that, in one case, she wouldn’t.
Unlike the hand on her shoulder, the man at her side didn’t apologize.
“I don’t regret knowing them. Losing them doesn’t make loving them not worth it.”
Bruce didn’t speak to her for the rest of the shift. When he was gone, she pulled out her communicator and sent a message asking Arthur to switch their shifts for next week, so she’d be on with Bruce again.
--
That night, as they had every night since Jason died, Bruce’s soulmates enveloped him, all heat and electricity. Sun wrapped their arms tight around him. Moon tapped on Bruce’s shoulder. N-O-T A-L-O-N-E.
He wondered how it was possible that, some point in the future, two people who had seen how he’d failed Jason – they’d been there, the entire time – could love him this much.
--
Sometimes, in moments when he was terrified or exhausted or furious, Dick swore he could feel Jason, still with him, but he never told anyone, not even Barbara.
When he almost killed the Joker, Jason’s hand was on his shoulder and he couldn’t tell if it was encouragement or shame.
--
One of Stephanie’s soulmates went missing for a few months, once. It was weird and frightening. She had so many that it wasn’t uncommon not to feel one of them brush against her for a few weeks, if nothing went wrong and her dad wasn’t around, but months… it scared her.
But then they came back, so, she guessed, everything was alright after all. It ended up being a weird footnote, more than anything, that she didn’t think about for another three years.