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Hafid al-Ghul grows up strong, protected - he is the future Head of the Leagues of Assassins, he is his mother’s beloved son and his grandfather’s perfect heir. Hafid does not doubt his blood’s intentions, nor their orders; he is the best and they all know it.
(Here’s a secret Hafid never lets anyone know: he knows his name isn’t really Hafid. The protector, the one who has read the Quran properly, never mind that grandfather has no time for such pesky things as religion - that is not, truly, his name, and it never was. He was supposed to be Grandson of the Al-Ghul, the weapon in grandfather’s masterful hand as he brought his plans to fruition; there was no place for a name anywhere in his plans.
But mother is soft, and Hafid mispronounces his title just the once, when he’s introducing himself to Grandfather’s elite squad - he has a cracked jaw and three broken ribs, so if he slurs the last sound of the grandson so it turns into a proper name, he’s not going to get more than a few whippings - and somehow, miraculously, it sticks. Oh yes, he pays for his audacity dearly, but his name - the name he chose, the name he made for himself - is picked up by the others in the base with their usual speed.
Nobody ever refers him by that name to his face, oh no - but they know he has a name now. He’s not just a puppet, just a sword, just a back-up plan for when grandfather’s body fails him - he is a person, and his name is Hafid, and he’s the Protector.)
(”What are you the protector of, murderer,” one of the traitors who routinely try to assassinate him spits in his face. Hafid, all of six years old, a weighty scimitar in hand, had decimated his cell with little difficulty, and then stuck his blade through their leader’s chest, but the man has been trained by the League - he has enough in him left to talk.
Hafid doesn’t respond - there’s no satisfaction to be found in getting the last word over a dead man - but he does have an answer ready for that question; has had it since before he dared declare his name in front of grandfather’s subordinates.
Secrets, is the answer to that question. No secret Hafid has ever decided to keep is known, or discovered, or even suspected. Not the grandson he turned into protector, not the tiny newborn bat hiding in the nook near the cave system’s main entrance, not the plate of rose-shaped baklava his mother leaves for him when she goes out on missions, not the bruised knees and scrapped palms and pricked fingers.
Not the soul connected to his, the one he’s supposed to get rid of in order to become perfect.)
=
Marinette sleeps on her tummy, arms and legs sprawled in every direction, and her sleep is always deep and unmoving. Like a baby, her Papa says with an adoring smile whenever he sees her, drooling on her pillow until it’s soaked and with crusty eyelashes she struggles to open whenever she wakes.
(Marinette does not tell, for it feels somewhere very deep inside her as though she will shatter into a million sharp little pieces if she speaks the words out loud, that she sleeps like this because the skin between her shoulder blades stings and hurts and burns. That she’s afraid that if she turns over in her sleep, the blood she can feel running down her back will stain her princess pink sheets, will drag the nightmare into her real life. That she will one day wake up and the lashes she can feel pulsing with her heartbeat down her spine and the broken ribs digging oddly into her lungs and the shattered kneecap that makes her right leg buckle under her weight will no longer be just pain, that all of the hurts she has lived through will suddenly show up on her and she will bleed out on her light grey flooring, her blood will drip out from her latch door and down her stairs and pool at her parents’ feet and they will look at her and they will know that she’s a monster.)
The whole soulmate business is something she doesn’t understand completely - that there is someone out there made just for you, and you share your pain with them, sounds ludicrous. The broken bones, the welts, the stab wounds, she understands - it hurts less when the pain’s divided between two people, and if it hurts this much when it’s shared then she has no wish to know how it is when one’s alone.
It’s the other type of pain that trips her up - the sharp one in her heart that makes her eyes sting and her skin break out in hives, the one that sees a man, a woman, a child on the streets, and howls.
I killed them, it wails, inconsolable. I slit their throats and spilled their guts and stole the air from their lungs and they’re all dead because of me.
It is heavy, carrying the sins of someone you have never met; Marinette supposes she should be glad that whoever her soulmate is, they at least regret their actions enough for her to share their pain.
“Good and bad should be balanced always,” Mama says to her one day, expert fingers folding jiaozi dough into neat little pleats like Marinette folds her fabrics. Her eyes are dark and knowing and make Marinette want to hide under her bed and never surface again (make her want to hide up on her balcony and never come down to earth, the way Chang’e had done when she’d been betrayed). “Xiao-tu, it is not only bad things that are carried over - but it’s the bad things that are most often noticed.”
So Marinette wakes up with bruised bones and goes to sleep with broken ribs; when the moon watches over her, she bears her soulmate’s sins quietly and counts every single face she can remember, every single gash and bruise she can feel. In the daylight, where the shadows call her attention with sobs and screams, she makes sure to put on her widest smile and be as nice to everyone she meets as possible, and she hopes, somehow, even knowing that’s not how it really works, that whoever is on the other side will feel at least this little shard of warmth.
<>
“Thank whatever passes for a higher power that Demon Spawn doesn’t have a soulmate,” Damian overhears Drake say one night, sneaking around when he’s absolutely supposed to be resting in bed with a twisted ankle, and the words stop him cold (but not dead; not dead and not in Hell, not in Jahannam, paying back what the Earth had wanted as recompense for his evildoings.)
His and Drake’s bonding moments have always been more strained than that of the rest of the family, courtesy of not a few assassination attempts on his part, but he had thought, rather foolishly, that with his death and subsequent revival, as well as the lengths Red Robin had gone to after the fact to keep Robin safe in the field, that the days of open hostility had ended.
Apparently, he had been very, very wrong.
A very exhausted sigh punctuates Drake’s statement. “Tim, that’s exceedingly harsh, even for you.” It’s the type of you Brown uses to refer to Drake exclusively when he’s had more cups of coffee than hours spent sleeping in the last week, and something in Damian settles even as his stomach twists. Of course Drake wouldn’t say such a cruel thing without being so deliriously sleep-deprived that he couldn’t hold his tongue back properly.
Drake groans, a muffled thing that means he’s put his head in his hands and isn’t moving it from there anytime soon. “Shit, fuck, that wasn’t what I meant, Steph. I just—”
The bat-chair squeaks when he throws his weight back, a petulant display that Brown doesn’t react to, not even to smile at his childishness. A warmth Damian is studiously ignoring begins nestling somewhere close to where his heart is. Brown has always been twitchy about soulmates and her own lack of one, so he knows she isn’t doing this to defend him, but the heart is a foolish thing that does not listen to reason.
Drake collects what’s remained of his caffeinated thoughts, and sighs again - a pity-filled sigh, and suddenly Damian wants to leave. He doesn’t, because he is many things but a coward is not a thing he wants to become, so he hears the quiet, “It would have been so much easier, if I hadn’t had to—”, and the equally as quiet,
“Oh, Tim—”, and then a nearly soundless slide of kevlar on kevlar that means that Brown has most likely hugged Drake in solidarity; it is suddenly very obvious what they’re referring to.
Damian had been in attendance, that fateful night when Tim’s soulmate had died; had witnessed the tears and the agony and the grief, afterwards, the months and months of a quiet, pale-faced brother who could barely look any of them in the eyes without hurling, who couldn’t face the world without shutting down. Superboy had been revived soon enough, but even now sometimes Drake just— stops, his gaze far away, reaching out to his half as if having to check that he isn’t truly left alone in the world as he had been before, and it’s hard even for Kon to bring him back out of his head.
In the past, Damian had wondered more than once if his soulmate had noticed his death, if they’d just assumed it was yet another severe injury, if they’d been glad that the pain had stopped, even for a little bit - but he hasn’t had to wonder since the death of Kon Kent.
“Aren’t you supposed to be resting?” Father remarks from behind him, and Damian is jolted out of his thoughts. He looks up at his father’s face, the violent bruise on the apple of his cheekbone he will have to cover up with makeup tomorrow, and ponders what his reaction will be if he reveals one of his secrets. Which will upset him more: that his name is not Damian or that his sins have to be shared with an innocent person?
He will find out eventually, but that doesn’t have to be today. “I was stretching my legs,” Damian says blandly, fully aware his father would take it as him circumventingly telling the truth (that he was bored in his room and wanted to work on their pressing cases) rather than the deflection it is.
“Well, you can stretch them by going back up to your room and lying down,” father predictably replies, and Damian sidles up the stairs of the Batcave without making a sound. There’s a tightness in his throat that’s making it hard to breathe, but Damian is more than content to chalk it up as a result of Killer Croc almost strangling him to death a few days ago than the emotional response it actually is.
(The day Kon Kent had died - the day Tim Drake had shattered into a million pieces like brittle glass - Damian had numbly climbed back to his room, the lifeless pallor of his older brother stuck in his mind’s eye no matter how much he’d tried to banish it, mechanically locked the door behind him, and done the one thing he hadn’t done in years: reached under his bed, unrolled his prayer mat, and gotten to his knees.
“Forgive me,” he’d said, begged, prayed. “Forgive me, ya ruuhi, I have ruined you, I have poisoned you, sucked the will to live out of your bright eyes, you have given me warmth and a purpose and I have repaid you for it in blood and sins and death.” Had his soulmate looked as dead as his brother had, curled up, small and hurting as they felt death near? Had they felt the sword piercing his heart, had they screamed in agony and terror as they’d felt their souls separating little by little, the connection between them torn and throbbing in time with his slowing heartbeat?
No tears can show how sorry he is, no pleading will make the pain he’d caused his soulbonded disappear; but the familiar texture of the mat beneath his hands grounds him, and the dark green silk still carries the scent of the incense Mother favoured in her palace rooms. Grandfather had never approved of overt worship, and Damian has forgotten most of what he’d learnt from his Mother, but he knows he hasn’t done this properly, that he will have to rectify that mistake, that there are things that he needs to do in order to correct it even if he doesn’t remember how to do them.
Tomorrow, fresh-eyed and properly washed, he will crack open his copy of the Qur’an and he will do all that is expected of him correctly, will follow what Mother had done in front of him so many times; he will visit the mosque secretly and talk to the old woman slowly making her way down the stairs, will admit he is reconnecting with his religion, and will be invited for Turkish coffee and lokum alongside her son, the Imam. He will start showing up for Friday Sermons, will quietly request that Alfred please make sure all the food he’s eating is halal, will duck into a quiet room in Gotham Academy during lunch period to pray Zuhr, will deviate from patrol routes for iftar during Ramadan, a boxful of dried dates tucked into a pocket of his utility belt. The first of his family who will notice will be Todd, who’s familiar with such things from his time spent with the League of Assassins and his neighbours from his time before he was adopted, and he will join Damian on his next patrol and share street-bought jalebi with him on top of Wayne Tower, and he won’t ask what brought this change on but he will carefully check that all of the sweets in the mansion are approved for his consumption.
But that will come tomorrow, will come weeks and months down the line; today, Damian breathes in Mother’s scent, and thinks of his soulmate who is civilian and weak and without sins, and he’s so, so relieved that his hips are still bruised from doorways he has never passed through, that his fingers are pricked time and again with needles he has never owned, that his lips sting and tingle like someone’s trying their best to bite through them with anxious energy he has never possessed.
That they, whoever and wherever they are, are strong enough to survive his guilt, his pain, his sins, his death—
—and live.)
=
They say, in movies and books, that the pain of losing a soulmate is agonizing.
Countless literary works wax poetry about the torment one half of the bond goes through - Achilles and Patroclus, Oedipus and Jocasta, Romeo and Juliet, the Prince statue and the little swallow, - and their contemporaries fill up their ranks well - every indie film with a romance subplot, every sad romance novel, every slow, heart-breaking ballad. There’s a fascination with that pain, with that experience, that’s unlike anything else - how will you cope with the world if you suddenly find yourself alone, abandoned, ripped in two, never to be whole again?
How do you achieve happiness after tragedy when, by all accounts, you aren’t supposed to be able to find it at all?
It is bad enough, Marinette thinks, that there are people out there in the world, trying to put into words an experience that will never be able to be described with them. It is bad enough that she cannot stand watching Titanic without storming out of the room, that she needs to switch the radio station when Clara Nightingale’s Without Pain comes on; she cannot deal with Alya making her read The Green Mansion.
Titanic, a story inspired by an actual account of that tragic night; Miss Bea Rosenwald, who had lost her soulmate in that cruel shipwreck, had given permission for her story to be used for the movie in order to immortalise the man she’d met only hours before his death, and Marinette had watched it just the once, so she’d know what Miss Bea wanted the world to know about him, and then never again.
Without Pain, Clara Nightingale’s breakout hit, written in memory of her soulmate’s passing; a soulmate she had never met before they had been torn away from her. Marinette had sobbed her eyes out the first time she’d ever listened to the song, and still does so every time she hears it now; it’s her designated terrible mood song.
But The Green Mansion, the favourite book of every person obsessed with non-soulmate romance, with the main character suffering under the weight of her terrible soulmate’s sins, with the romance lead deciding that killing his beloved’s other half is for the best because yes, his death might be agony to her but at least she wouldn’t be tormented by his wrongdoings any longer, with the callous disregard that for them to count as sins, the soulmate would have to regret what he’d done—
Marinette cannot stand that book.
(She reads the plot synopsis off of the internet so she can tell Alya exactly why she hates it without bursting into ugly sobs, but it backfires, because the next book Alya gives her is one of those ones where the terrible soulmate decides to kill himself in order to repent for his sins, and—
Marinette knows her soulmate is alive now - it’d be hard not to, when he’s getting hurt so often, even though his injuries now are rarely of the same magnitude as they had been before. She knows they’re the same one, too, because their sins are the same - heavy, suffocating, bloody - and she has examined them carefully after their miraculous return to the living, so she knows there are no new ones when they go out and do whatever it is that gets them so hurt.
But if a sin only counts as one if the person committing it feels regret, then - does it mean that they truly hadn’t done it? Or does it mean that, resurrection or not, they don’t regret their actions?)
The guilt they’re drowning in falls on her head unexpectedly, in the middle of a physics exam in which she has no idea what she’s doing. It’s a heavy shroud of regret that drags her down, a brocaded burial chrisom that settles over her shoulders and presses them into the ground. And yet—
—she can almost hear a voice say something, beg, pray, and somehow, she knows it’s talking to her—
—the words are in a language she doesn’t know, but she doesn’t need to speak it in order to understand that—
“—Oh,” Marinette says out loud, in the middle of Mme. Mendeleiev’s classroom, wondering and lost and so many other things she cannot ever hope to process, and then, heedless of the questioning eyes on her,
she bursts into tears.
<>
Guilt, Damian has found, has a different weight to it than sins do. His soulmate’s sins are heavy, yes, though they all have some intangible quality to it, like the only reason they matter at all is because someone remembers that they happened in a time that has never come to pass.
But oh, their guilt - sometimes Damian forgets he’s even able to breathe under all of its bitter presence.
My fault, it whispers in his ears when he passes through the park, Titus’ leash in hand, and a toddler nearby bursts into tears. My fault, it declares when he’s out at night, escorting a crying college student back to her apartment.
My fault, it screams and sobs and wails in his dreams, and Damian sees a city burned down to nothing, a city drowned, a city destroyed. And the bodies - he has spent his first ten years bringing unimaginable pain to countless innocents in a variety of ways, but even the Grandson of the Demon has been confronted with more new, painful ways to die than he’d previously known.
By comparison, the physical pain they share is nothing - Damian has weathered worse than phantom broken bones, especially since the pain rarely lasts for more than a few hours. It has him wondering - does his soulmate have a healer on their team? Do they possess regeneration capabilities? Are they using some sort of blocker in order to hide from him, or not bother him with their pain? Father would certainly know all of the possibilities - but in this house where one can’t even sneeze without it being reported and recorded, he isn’t going to risk saying anything and slipping up, not until something goes very, very wrong.
(The one time something feels wrong, the one time he shivers with his whole body as though someone has just walked over his grave, like someone has just taken his heart out from behind his ribcage and squeezed, Damian is delirious with fever, alone in his room for the three minutes it takes Alfred to bring a cup of hot tea from the kitchen back up, with only a worried Titus to hear the reedy,
“...not them, no…”
By the time the fever lets up, Damian has regained all of his faculties, already displeased with his slow recovery and snapping more easily at the others. The unusual pain in his chest is naught but a memory, revisited only in nightmares, because he will hardly walk up to Drake and blurt out, “Did it feel like you were being crushed by all of the things Kon had shared the weight of with you, when he died?”
He doesn’t need it to be confirmed, this worst-case scenario he had deliberately never thought about. But he does know now, and it becomes a ritual of sorts, whenever his soulmate’s pain reaches him, to run it alongside that fuzzy memory of his world ending, and to exhale in relief when it’s nothing like that at all.)
But Damian is still his parents’ son, and he will be damned to eternal suffering once more before he lets his soulmate slip away from him like that again.
It takes months of careful planning, months of secret manoeuvres and manipulations, of well-hidden research and pain and guilt and everything inbetween, but he manages to fight against the dizzying magic muddying up his memories until they’re barely discernible, and when he finally recognises Paris burning in front of him, Damian gets to work. After all, Damian Wayne needs a reason to visit such a dangerous city, and there’s someone out there with a big mouth and no idea what she’s doing that will serve as a smoke screen quite effectively. The family will be displeased to see him taking such a personal approach to one little girl, but he doesn’t mind their disappointment just this once, not when they aren’t supposed to know.
His name, his bats, and his soulmate are secrets - and Hafid has always been good at keeping those.
=
Marinette is stressed - which, some would argue, is her normal setting, but this is a new kind of stressed entirely that she hasn’t encountered before and it’s throwing her off her game so much.
Tikki says it’s normal - that this stress means she’s close to meeting her soulmate, that the world is favouring her by sending her signs they’re nearly here. Personally, Marinette sees it more as a burden than a gift, but that doesn’t mean she’s also not… excited is probably not the right word. Neither is expectant, nor exalted or terrified - though she is all of them in varying amounts, mixing them together makes them blend into an indistinguishable blob of anxiety, and so: stress.
It doesn’t help that most of her class is aware of the complicated situation she’s in - or, well, aware only insofar that they know there’s a problem at all, courtesy of her sobbing her eyes out in physics class that one time. She’s avoided most of their prodding with as much grace as she’s been able to muster (so, ah, not that much grace at all), but in the end even Alya gets that it’s not something Marinette likes talking about, and the interrogations petter out.
(The only good thing about all of this is that by the time Lila joins the school, Marinette’s soulmate is considered a forbidden topic. Not even she of the silver tongue can make that conversation happen.)
There’s a knock on the classroom door during History period, and Mme. Bustier quizzically calls out permission to enter. Five people in what Marinette immediately clocks as Armani suits come in, the dark-skinned boy and Asian young woman in front noticeably wearing tailored pieces markedly different from the plainer ones of the two well-built men following them. The dark-haired woman in the back walks up to Mme. Bustier with a restrained clack of her sensible heels, and stretches out a hand.
“Mme. Bustier, thank you for your quick response to our request for an in-person consultation. My name is Vivienne Woods and I’m the Wayne Family’s personal lawyer.” Her French has a noticeable American accent, Marinette notices with some distraction, her eyes drawn to the boy in the charcoal suit. The colour seems chosen deliberately to complement both his complexion and his companion, whose posture is straight and proper like a ballet dancer’s.
Alya nudges her playfully. “Has your eye strayed from your favourite model? Is it the cheekbones? The bad boy vibe? Oooh, don’t tell me - the eyes?”
Marinette says nothing; the boy’s jawline is striking, but there’s a barely noticeable nick on it, just below his ear and conspicuously covered with makeup, practically invisible unless the light hits it just right. And the thing is, Marinette remembers that nick, just as she remembers the matching scar the boy should have, sliding down his left shoulder blade and ending in the middle of his back, just over his spine. She remembers it because it had been such a sudden thing that it had undoubtedly been from the same incident, and yet it’d taken her almost forty minutes of contorting herself in various ways to match up the pain as one consistent, straightforward line, which means her soulmate had to have been in a truly weird position to get it.
Marinette doesn’t dare think that maybe this is him, but around her the buzzing of the world would be answer enough even without Tikki’s excited patting of her thigh from inside her handbag, and something not unlike fear twists her insides up like a pretzel.
“I beg your pardon, Mlle. Woods, a lawyer?” Mme. Bustier smiles confusedly up at the dark-haired woman - she’s dressed immaculately in a shade of peach pink, though Marinette notes that the suit isn’t as much tailored to her specifically as fitting just well-enough - and makes a motion for the class to quiet down the chatter that’s begun to crop up with minimal success. Both the bodyguards and the girl and boy they’re obviously here to guard step closer to the podium, and the latter two’s footsteps are near silent.
“Indeed, Mme. Bustier, a lawyer. Mr. Damian Wayne—” here she motions to the boy that finally turns to face their classmates to explain the situation in more detail, but Marinette doesn’t hear anymore because the air has been knocked out of her lungs. His eyes as he scans them all are striking - a vivid green the same shade as Plagg’s, a sharp almond shape half-hidden by long, thick eyelashes - and when they meet hers, Marinette’s hand is already flying to her jaw, tracing the path of that scar unerringly.
The boy’s —Damian’s?— eyelashes flutter as he stops for a second to study her, something Marinette just knows is both a question and an acknowledgement. It’s no hardship at all to pinch the thin skin inbetween her steady fingers, to stop just short of digging her nails into it with nerves. Something in his gaze sharpens, like standing on the edge of the Eiffel Tower just before take-off, and then the moment passes and those eyes move on, tracking the path of the chatter that’s broken out into the classroom.
Marinette realises suddenly that Alya’s hand has a bruising grip on her forearm, that almost the whole class has turned to watch as Lila, bright red with fury, is handed a cease-and-desist order about spreading rumours with undue cause. There’s an almost unheard flap of wings, and before she can register it Marinette is reaching out to it, air whistling through her ears as she swings through the air with a swooping gut and a light heart, hand brushing Lila’s orange-painted nails as she grabs the little critter with lightning-fast reflexes and brings it down to her face.
“No,” Marinette tells the little Akuma, something hot and bright like a supernova swelling in her chest, and in the purse she’s shoved under her desk Tikki’s forehead dot glows. The blackness peels off the butterfly’s wings like a mirage, and then it flies away like nothing, and Marinette only notices everyone’s staring at her when she waves goodbye to it with a shaking hand.
“We shall be adding co-conspiring with and abetting with known terrorists to our charges,” Mme. Vivian Woods says placidly in the ringing silence, wedding band catching the light from the open window. “You should go wash your hand, Mlle. I doubt that butterfly has been anywhere hygienic, no matter how striking it might’ve looked.”
Marinette walks down the aisle on weightless legs in a daze, hand clenching and unclenching in front of her as she tries to calm down the sudden, raging fountain of something both inhuman and not in her makeup, but she’s not nearly far gone enough not to notice the second pair of footsteps clicking after her, the heavy smell-feel of sins more familiar to her than her own. The hallway sink is close enough, and there’s no one there because it’s in the middle of classes so Marinette feels free to turn and face Damian when she’s done, and there is no hesitation in his frame even if there’s apprehension.
“Am I allowed to find out who you are in return?” She asks finally, because the world is singing and so is her soul with it and he’s not shown himself a fool yet.
“There is no rule forbidding it,” he allows, Cataclysm-bright eyes tracking her every movement, and Marinette can’t stop the wide grin that escapes on her face. She’s in motion, reaching her highest point and slowing down, and it’s the plummet waiting for her at the end of it that makes her heart race, but it’s not so scary when the heavy things dragging her down are carried by someone else, too. Her eyes sting and burn.
There are many things to talk through, even more to apologize about, but what ends up coming out of her mouth is a not very steady, “I’m glad you came back,” instead.
Damian’s gaze burns like flames, but the set of his lips reads, perhaps, pleased. “As am I.” And then, with a callused palm offered, “Marinette Dupain-Cheng?” The Cheng is pronounced properly, standard Mandarin pronunciation, and Marinette’s grin widens.
“Correct,” she haltingly says in Mandarin, one of the few things she knows how to express both in it and in Shanghainese, grasps his hand in hers. “My Chinese name is Cheng Meiyun, Damian Wayne-xiansheng.”
His grip tightens for a heartbeat, but he doesn’t let go. “Marhaba, Cheng Meiyun. My name is Hafid.” The way his voice hushes over the name is telling enough; Marinette can feel his unsteady heartbeat through her palm, tiny and smooth in his.
She turns the name over in her head, a precious secret of a thing held out to her with pretend casualness. A bruised knee from a few days ago throbs between them, a mountain of sins beneath both of their feet that built them up and tore them down.
Good and bad should be balanced always, her mother said to her once. Marinette has done her best to keep that balance, to respond to every new broken bone with a smile and a good deed, and with those calluses on his hands and the watchful gaze he graces everyone with, her soulmate has evidently done the same.
“It’s very nice to finally meet you, Hafid,” Marinette says, light as air as she holds his hand, and she doesn’t want to let go.
Won’t have to, now that they’re here, fingers intertwined together the way their souls are, acid-green eyes warm as they rest on hers.
Marinette grins blindingly at the boy in front of her, and in Hafid’s softening mouth, she gets a smile back.