Chapter Text
Bruce was 22 when the name appeared.
Clark Kent.
It was written in a sloppy cursive script on his left hip. A heavy right slant, large letters, with a slightly upward baseline. Probably someone who was optimistic and wrote quickly and quite possibly eagerly. Of course, Graphology was neither a true science or something Bruce had personally studied. But Harvey Dent had, and they had been roommates once in school and he’s loved to bounce theories and ideas off Bruce when they would study late at night.
“There’s no such thing as a useless skill,” Harvey once told him, “You never know when knowing something like this could make the difference.”
Bruce rather thought he agreed. Hence why he traveled around the world learning as much he could from as many people as he could.
There had been some frustration back then, that Harvey’s name never found itself on his skin. Some part of him was convinced that they fit one another. The same keen enjoyment of rigorous pursuits.The same love of the city. The same frustration with the corruption that lay there. The same hunger for some kind of justice.
The same darkness.
Too much darkness, perhaps, to be healthy. And maybe there lay the true reason why both their skin had remained blank.
Bruce did look into his soulmate once. It took a while to find the correct Clark Kent. But once he did he was deeply confused, because how was some country bumpkin supposed to be his soulmate? It didn't make sense.
It irked him some days. How were soulmates even identified? What were the criteria? The dependent and independent variables. Was there a hierarchy? There'd been studies but nothing that got beyond theories. Bruce liked to know things, liked to figure them out, but soulmates were frustrating and unsatisfactory in the lack of apparent objectivity.
The basics seemed straightforward: your soulmate was a person who was perfectly compatible for you. There was a prevalent conception within societies that a soulmate was synonymous with ‘lover’ and that a pair that had each other's names were perfect lovers or ‘truemates’. Yet it was just as apparent this was not the case.
Bruce's own parents had been a mismatched pair. His father had had his mother’s name but his mother had someone else's.
“She was a nice girl, really. We got along quite well.” she'd told Bruce when he was a boy shrugging, “but we wanted different things from life so it didn't work out.”
Alfred had also not entered into a relationship with his soulmate even though he had had a truemate. At least, not a romantic relationship.
“We were coworkers, Master Bruce, perhaps one might say partners. Nothing more, nothing less. We worked more easily together than anyone I've ever encountered, but there was never a draw for more and I must say I've never looked back.”
In the grand scheme of things it didn't matter much. At the point Clark’s name appeared Bruce had started to his plans for how he would combat crime in Gotham. He’d considered joining the police force and cleaning it up into something that functioned better. But he didn't think that would work. Gotham needed something more than that. The police weren't equipped to deal with the kinds of issues the city held and Bruce didn't think he could sit back and play the bureaucracy game when the stakes got high...
When people's lives were on the line.
It would have to be a fine balance: working outside the law yet not allowing himself to become the kind of criminal he sought to stop. It would be his Mission, and even if his soulmate wasn't a joke he would never drag them into the suffering that would come from being connected to him.
Bruce didn't seriously think about Clark Kent again for almost 7 years.