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By age thirteen, Barbara had no faith in soulmates.
Oh, she knew about the system that governed every human on Earth, the marks that appeared on one’s skin. But she did not believe that they truly indicated one’s love, nor that this love was guaranteed to last. With one exception, every example of love she had ever seen seemed to have dissipated into smoke, unlike the permanent marks on one’s skin.
As a little girl, she leaned into her father’s side, examining the coiling gold threads around her right wrist like a bracelet of delicate filigree, her first mark, her only mark. Her father would lay his down next to her on the coffee table, and the two of them -- the only ones who could see them -- would examine the matching golden threads.
“Do you have any others, Dad?” she remembered herself asking once.
“A couple,” he had said, without elaboration. “It’s not just romantic love, Barbara, as you can see, and it's not that shallow shit you see on TV or in magazines. It has to be someone who leaves a powerful impact on you as a person, someone you really genuinely love, and who has a significant effect on your life. Only then do you get a mark, see? ”
She had chewed her lip in response, touched by her father's assertion, but lost in thought. Thinking of the kids at school that she played with and read next to, how she had friends, yes, but no other marks. If what she felt for most of the people around her wasn't enough, then it must have to be something really special.
What she felt for Jim wasn't grand per se, but quiet, something she might have taken for granted had she not literally worn her father's love on her skin. She wondered what another soulmate would feel like, and, at the time, supposed she would have to wait and see, eager for that new love to come.
Then her parents’ marriage fell apart.
She watched from afar as their bitter fights turned into a vacuum shaped like half her family. How her father still reached out for a wife that was no longer there, for a son that grew further apart from him every day. Her mother did not call, did not write, and it did not take long before her brother ended up in the news -- and then locked away. She watched it happen more and more as she grew up, friendships failing, marriages crumbling, parents and children no longer talking.
And she feared love. And decided to satisfy herself with there being no more room for another mark on her skin.
During her teen years, she joined sporting teams with other people, she befriended other people enough to regularly go to coffee and movies, but no new marks bloomed on her skin.
It was impossible to prove to most that you had them. But other girls insisted that they did. To have at least two of your immediate family was a bit of a given for almost everyone, but besides that, to have one, two, three more was a point of pride.
They would make a point of examining the glitter emerging from under their shoulder and thigh, as though everyone else could see, and whisper in hushed voices whom they had seen the matching imprint upon.
“What about you, Barbara?”
She would smile tightly.
“Sorry. I like to keep mine private.”
She made more friends, and nothing. She dated some, and it was the same. Only in her late teens, she laid on her bed and stared at the ceiling, and knew to herself that nothing more would come of it all.
Work took precedence in her life, along with school, gymnastics and basketball and martial arts. But every evening for years when she turned on the TV, nightly news flickering across the screen while she waited for her father to get home, she watched them. The heroes.
She watched them move, watched them fight, and they seemed to shine like faraway stars, they and everything they represented as remote as the sky.
After watching them from afar for many years, at first, all that stirred in her heart was distant admiration and envy.
Then she fell into her role at their side, fighting next to Batman, less than a step away from the Teen Titans, from the Justice League, and, already, dozens of others. She took their grace and power in stride, and, so assured of herself, she was able to believe that she could keep up, could not be dissuaded or intimidated.
So nothing about those heroes rattled her at first.
Well.
Except, as she worked alongside her new mentor, there was one that did.
Robin, in fact, confounded her for some time. Which was new and unusual, and not altogether pleasant. She was not used to not understanding, especially not this strange boy who used hope to survive, who was in awe of her right from the beginning.
And yet, she stayed next to him.
“Since we’re friends now,” he chattered to her one warm summer night, her hair streaming in the wind off the harbor, police sirens wailing in the distance, “I want to show you where all my marks are.”
“All your marks? You’re only fifteen, how many do you have?”
“Oh...lots, actually.”
She suddenly saw Dick Grayson in a new light, one that felt equally destabilizing. She was silent as he rolled up his sleeves, removed his gloves, hiked up his tunic or brushed it off his shoulders, indicating where the gold lay coiled upon his skin, that only he and each person he loved could see.
“But I was born with these ones,” he said after detailing Roy and Donna and Wally and Garth, after Bruce and Alfred, his casualness now fading. He touched two places, each on his right arm: the bicep and wrist. His touch was almost imperceptibly light and gentle, his tone melancholy. “My mom and dad.”
To her own surprise, her heart ached, her arm moved forward of her own accord. She removed her gauntlet and extended her wrist, where her single bracelet of light lay.
“This one’s for my dad,” she told him, and when he looked at her, she felt a bolt of warm, real affection for this skinny, too-hopeful, too-emotional teenage boy.
He waited.
Then:
“Wait, that’s your only one? At all? ”
“No need to sound so incredulous,” she huffed, withdrawing. She kicked her booted heels over the side of the building pensively. “I just...don’t have them.”
He looked at her sympathetically, which made her briefly bristle.
“I don’t need to be loved. I can get by just fine on my own.”
“I believe you.” He gazed off at the city skyline. “But you deserve to be loved, Barbara.”
And try as she might, she could not forget that, or him.
So instead, he became her treasured friend.
They playfully exchanged stories of Bruce, of Jim, meeting and being exasperated by each other long before their children would be. He admitted that he had remembered what she looked like when they saw each other in passing as children, standing behind her father’s coat. While she told him that she had seen him on the news, in blurry photographs, and had envied his ability to fly.
She could not be honest with her father or civilian friends, and Bruce was not exactly receptive to emotionally confessional conversations. So more often than not, she talked to Dick. And to her astonishment, he listened.
She had never before had someone who knew so much about her. Had never had a friend this close.
So she dared to let him in, to care.
Leaving Gotham as a young adult to go live with his other friends, Dick soon fell in love with another. Not long later, so did Barbara.
She had, by now, completely stopped checking her skin for soulmarks, but this did not stop her new boyfriend. Jason Bard, gentle and thoughtful, who did not know anything about her secret, would sometimes run his fingers over their skin while they were bathing or laying together, forever searching.
“Soulmates don’t matter,” she said derisively when, about a year into their relationship, he expressed concern that he had never found a matching mark on their skins. Hiding her own concern, burying it deep. “We determine our own lives, and what we do with them, and who we let into them.”
He nodded like it made sense to him, but it could not entirely erase the concern in his eyes. Or the doubt in her heart that she so desperately tried to ignore, that she was saying, that she was doing, something wrong.
She visited the Titans quite frequently, and even when Dick and Bruce were not on speaking terms, he still came to see her -- and little Robin Jason too, of course. They would steal handfuls of Alfred’s cookies, visit their old haunts, slip into movies, laugh together like no time at all had passed. Though Batgirl was still something she kept largely to herself, it was comforting to know there were those who understood, who saw her and gave her no room to be embarrassed or ashamed.
Bruce said nothing. Alfred said nothing, though he did quirk his eyebrows at her from time to time, completely knowing. To this day, she didn’t know whether Dick had known or whether he had been waiting for her to understand at her own pace.
But little Jason knew.
“Hey, Barbie,” he remarked offhandedly on patrol one day, “You’re getting a little glittery.”
“Huh?” She brushed at her uniform. “Did those drunk girls earlier tonight rub it off on me?”
“No, not that kind of glitter.” He gestured offhandedly at a thin strip of skin, exposed just at her collarbone. “It’s not, like, a real mark or anything. What do you think it means…?”
She rushed home that night and stripped down to her underwear, examining herself with medical precision in the mirror.
There was, indeed, the glitter at her collar that Jason had noticed. But there was beginning to be more on her forehead, curling over her brow, and another brush of gold tucked primly away on the back of her neck. Not full marks, though, no. Not yet.
Then she noticed the last one.
It was just a smudge for now, but it wrapped round her ring finger, trailing slightly onto her hand and wrist.
Barbara stepped into the shower and scrubbed at her skin till it was red and raw, but the gold refused to budge.
She was furious. How could a soulmark both be there and not? She had never heard of one that was only part-developed! From every story, every account, she had ever heard, the soulmarks just appeared when you found the one you loved. Not just these half-formed smudges. She suddenly, violently loathed this system, which had convinced her for so many years to lose faith in it, only to taunt her with marks that weren’t even true marks.
“Do you see them?” she asked Jason Bard later that night.
He blinked at her, confused.
“See what?”
She swallowed down more bitterness, muttering that it was nothing.
It didn’t matter anyway. Maybe it never had.
For not long afterwards, the Joker’s bullet blew away not just her flesh and bone, his camera flashes not just burning away her clothing and dignity, but nearly all of her relationships as well.
Then she realized later that the mark at her collarbone was almost fully formed when Bruce’s son died, before it stopped entirely. That when she refused to speak to Bruce himself in her fury and grief, the one curling like fern fronds on her forehead also stopped growing for a time.
Dick came to her hospital bed and then her home frequently, even at his most exhausted. His team broke up, his engagement fell apart, he moved back to Jersey as she secretly delved into the Internet and computer science, looking for a place to live besides her childhood bedroom, both of them miserable -- but trying not to be.
“I don’t resent her,” he told her as he drove her home from physical therapy. “I can’t. She was a huge part of my life. Her mark’s still on me.”
“Literally?”
“Yes.” He parked, and lifted up the hem of his shirt to indicate a place on his side, over his ribs. “Right there. Forever. That's the thing about these marks, I guess. They make it impossible to not realize when you've loved someone -- or when you start to love someone new."
Looking at him, her dear friend, made something within her chest begin to stir.
“You still talking to your friends, at least?”
“Oh, always.” He paused. “Babs, you’re my friend too. You always will be.”
She smiled sadly.
“How do we always feel tied together, even when things are breathtakingly fucked?”
“Easy. ‘Cause we decide to stay by each other. We always have.”
She felt the urge to lean in, and only just managed to suppress it, alarmed.
When her father married again, he finally told Barbara for the first time that his and his wife's marks had first begun to appear on each other years ago. But that it had only been when Sarah moved back to Gotham, when they were able to have a true relationship, that the imprints on their skin became truly clear. That they had developed into real soulmarks.
“It didn’t develop all at once?”
“I only realized what it was about a year ago.”
She touched the spot on his rough hand where he told her his love for his wife had bloomed. A little of the turbulence in her chest eased, the world felt a little clearer.
That evening, she and Sarah went out to the movies together. More gold dust under her skin appeared only a few weeks later.
Dick told her of the brand new mark that formed quickly when he met and began spending time with Tim, their new Robin. It took a few more months for Barbara, it always did. She thought that Dick must be more gold than skin at this point, how much he must glow -- she smiled to think of it.
But when she examined herself in the mirror, she was astonished to see how much even she had already progressed from her single mark. She mourned Jason’s unfinished mark, but gazed in wonder at all the others.
And for the first time, despite all the pain she still carried, Barbara began to wonder how much more love she would end up carrying on her skin.
She called Dick every day while he was moving into Bludhaven, while she was beginning to set up her new network.
He was the first person she told about her new partner.
Of all places, Dinah’s mark first began to appear on her back . Just over the break in her spine.
“Does she give you strength?” Tim asked innocently, wisely, over slices of pizza when she brought this up. “Does she have your back?”
“Oh, I see,” she grumbled, to Tim’s and Dick’s laughter. “Symbolism. And this system has a shitty sense of humor, like you two.”
But Dinah’s mark swiftly grew, and became luminously bright. Slid quickly into Barbara’s life, and soon dominated it with more love than she had thought possible.
Barbara, for her part, had never thought she could love a friend the way she loved Dinah. Dinah, with her warmth and riotous adventurousness and laughter, and her ridiculous, stubborn insistence on being there -- that insistence which caused their marks to bloom, gold as summer sun.
Externally, her friendship with Dick changed little. But when her feelings began to change, his did too. And instead of being fearful of them, he swiftly embraced those feelings, leaning into his love for her, and thus speeding his own fall.
But Barbara still feared and distrusted love.
She saw the hurt in his eyes every time she refused him, every time she pulled away. The agony was echoed in her own body, her own soul, and for all the villains and monsters she had faced, she hated herself for being a coward.
Conversely, despite her fear…
Every time she called him, even if it was just for work, her heart felt lighter. It was a joy to receive even the smallest message among the chaos of her days. She helped him when he was sick or injured, retrieved information for his cases, sat with him to watch movies, even cooked him meals, chased his smile, for it brought her joy too.
Naked in front of the mirror, she examined her marks, looking for the one around her ring finger, her wrist. She saw it glowed brighter. She saw that it was growing down her arm, wrapping around her skin like climbing roses. Then, suddenly nervous, she would try to look away.
Usually when she saw Dick, his hands and arms were covered. Neither of them spoke of it. But no matter how far apart they were or whether she shied away, she knew his would always be there.
Then she finally let herself kiss him. Date him, go to bed with him. Eventually muster up the courage to tell him the terrifying truth -- that she loved him.
And it was worth it if only for his sake. If only for the adoring smiles it brought to his lips, the joy in his eyes.
But she had underestimated the joy that it would bring her as well.
And the frustration.
There were too many nights when she was proven right, when she worried herself to trembling sickness for fear that he would be lost or die, when he deliberately ignored her and put himself at risk and made her scream with outrage, and worst of all, when they fought, when anger lay between them like a wall in their bed. The intensity of her love made the pain twist into her even deeper.
When things became hard, it was tempting to give up. For her fears were right, weren’t they? When you loved, you had too much to lose. It was far easier to not take the risk.
But the new days, though they were sometimes just as hard, did come. And when he opened his eyes to her, no matter how angry or scared or exasperated she had been, she did not want to imagine a time without him at all.
Cassandra, like Dinah, snuck her way into her heart and wrote herself quickly onto Barbara’s skin. Stephanie, like Helena, like the other Birds of Prey later, was a longer time coming, but all became just as indelible.
Jason returned, and even when he was her enemy, she wept to see him back.
More people, slowly, then all at once.
When she woke up on a sunny day, she was dazzled by her own appearance. Almost every part of her body, even the still legs she had finally made peace with, were undeniably beautiful, imbedded with so much gold, with so much love that she never would have believed could happen.
Part of her was still just as pragmatic and mistrustful as she had always been.
But part of her caused her hands to reach out, to trace along the marks, those complete and those still growing. And for all her pain and frustration, she cherished each and every one.
Dinah cheered when she told her about all of this. Dinah loved freely and openly, with no fear of a broken heart, and Barbara admired her secretly, but endlessly, for it.
“You should be proud of yourself, Babs,” she said.
“Why should I be proud of being loved?”
“Because you, despite everything, built all of those relationships, remember? They didn’t come from nothing.”
To think that she had built all that love left her thunderstruck, uncharacteristically speechless. Dinah smiled assuredly behind her coffee mug.
Her father and stepmother said much the same thing when she told them.
“Your dad’s the same way. Some people have an easy time letting themselves be loved. Some, like you Gordons, don’t. But it always takes work.”
Jim nodded in agreement.
“That’s why the soulmarks often take so long to form, I think,” Sarah finished. “You never find love in its finished form, ever. Shit happens, but you gotta decide that it’s worth it.”
Barbara sat with her parents for a little while before she thanked them, before she left, their marks on her right arm tingling gently.
When she went home, Dick was already there. He was struggling over the low counter in her kitchen and the whole house smelled like baking cookies; when she rolled in, he smiled self-consciously.
“I wanted to do something for you. It’s Alfie’s recipe.”
Instead of answering, she rolled up to him --
-- and instantly pulled him down into a deep kiss. He started at first, then sighed softly, dipping into the kiss. His hands reached to clasp her shoulders, strong and warm.
“Let me see your arm,” she said when they pulled apart.
They rolled up their sleeves almost in a trance, slotting their left arms side by side. Gazing at what was imprinted on their skin.
The gold was clear as day now. It bloomed like fire under their skin, the two marks identical, perfect. Twining around their fingers, wrapping down their hands and around their wrist to grow along a beating vein, up their arms. Pulling the shoulders, then the necklines, of their shirts aside, the gold clearly continued, still along the vein from their ring fingers -- only ending at their chests, just over their hearts.
How many times had they seen each others’ arms, then seen each other naked, had taken the growing mark for granted, had not seen or refused to acknowledge what it was becoming? How often had she been afraid to look at the proof of it?
But now here it was, impossible to ignore or deny.
So she knew, in that moment, that they never would again.
They looked back up at each other. For a moment, neither said anything.
“Dick, I --”
“Hey.”
To her shock, he took her hand in his own. Their left fingers intermingled, and, to her eyes, the gold became a single line, traveling from his body to hers, as though it had always been connected, despite everything.
“I know. And I know it took a while to get here, but God, I’m glad we did.”
When they kissed again, she cried. So overwhelmed that in that moment, she forgot to be bitter, forgot to be afraid.
By the time they married, they were both covered in marks from countless friends, family, loved ones of all sorts. It was sometimes hard to remember that they were all there, especially when things inevitably got hard. But as long as they stayed with each other, they could never forget the mark on themselves, and on each other, that they could always know was there.
"There are so many of them now," she mused one day as they went through her files, the two of them thinking of everyone they knew, everyone they cared for. "And it shows."
“Yeah, we are pretty much covered at this point. Think there’s even room for any more?”
Barbara also thought of how much he loved family, of how much he wanted one of his own.
“I think so. Yes.”
In the end, there was. There always would be.