Chapter Text
We were a hammer to the Statue of David
We were a painting you could never frame, and
You were the sunshine of my lifetime
What would you trade the pain for?
– “Love from the Other Side” / Fall Out Boy
Bruce has never kept his opinions on soulmates a secret.
In fact, Dick’s pretty sure it was vigilante lesson number one, or close to it: soulmates aren’t necessarily anyone special, and soulmarks are just that—a mark on the skin, no more significant than a freckle or a mole, and undeserving of any more attention than you would give to an interestingly-shaped birthmark.
Dick’s never agreed with any of that—his parents were soulmates, and they had their own philosophy about it all that was impressed upon him long before he ever met Bruce. And Dick’s got enough conflicting opinions about his own soulmate that he has to believe there’s something there. Still, he knows Bruce’s stance on soulmates is very clear.
Which is why Dick finds it very funny-not-funny when Clark calls him up to the Watchtower to tell him that some members of the Justice League—including Batman—had been cursed by a sorcerer during a mission and, “We need Batman’s soulmate to break his curse.”
Dick feels bad for laughing, but he can’t help the way that his fear that something terrible had happened to Bruce swiftly transforms into a burst of hysteria. “I’m sorry, what?”
“It’s…” Clark trails off, looking away and scratching at his ear as a flush creeps up his neck—which is, actually, a good sign. If Bruce were in life-threatening danger, Clark wouldn’t bother getting embarrassed about whatever needed to be done. Then Clark says, “He needs… a kiss.”
Dick wheezes. “A kiss.”
“True love’s kiss, to revive him,” Zatanna says, like she’s already too tired for the conversation. She’s the only other person in the conference room Clark had ushered Dick into when he arrived, and Dick suspects she’s been explaining this over and over to perplexed soulmates. Dick also suspects they’d saved Batman for last. “The sorcerer wasn’t very powerful, but they learned their curse-making from fairy tales—and, unfortunately, the traditional curses are the hardest to break without fulfilling the traditional conditions.”
“So he’s… what, cursed into a coma like Sleeping Beauty? And he needs a kiss from his soulmate to wake up? Am I understanding that right?” Dick says. Bruce is going to have a fit when he hears about this.
“Doesn’t need to be anything special,” Zatanna says, half-sitting on the table. “A smack on the cheek would do it. But, yes.”
“No one here knows who his soulmate is,” Clark says. “It’s not in his emergency file, either, but we all know how paranoid he is. I figured if anyone would know who to call…”
Dick puts his face into his hands, torn between laughing and despairing. Of all the ways he thought this might come out, a run-of-the-mill sorcerer wasn’t anywhere close to the top of the list.
“Oh no,” Clark says at whatever the sound is that comes out of Dick’s mouth. “Please say he knows who his soulmate is. Zatanna says the spell wouldn’t have affected him if he hadn’t met them yet, but—”
“Oh my god, this is a mess.” Dick drags his hands down his face. “No, he doesn’t know.”
“I was worried about that.” Zatanna crosses her arms and taps her foot. “I could try to set up a tracking spell using his soulmark. There wouldn’t be much of a bond to track, but since we know they’ve met at least once—”
“I said he doesn’t know,” Dick cuts in. “I didn’t say I don’t know.”
Clark and Zatanna both look at him, Zatanna mostly in surprise, and Clark mostly in confusion.
Dick stares up at the ceiling and lets out a deep sigh at everything that brought them to this point.
“You can’t tell Bruce anything,” he says, looking at them each in turn. Clark is frowning at him; Zatanna is studying him with her fingers splayed over her mouth. “Not about what happened, or how it was fixed, or by who. No one else can know who his soulmate is, either.”
Clark’s frown deepens. “You’re asking us to lie?”
Zatanna lowers her hand to her hip. “It’s Nightwing,” she says. “He wouldn’t ask us this unless he had a good reason—which he does. Right?” She arches her eyebrow.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Dick repeats.
“If this is about Bruce’s own soulmate, then I don’t understand why it’s necessary to keep it from him,” Clark says. “Doesn’t he have a right to know?”
“If his soulmate doesn’t want him to know, then that’s their right, too,” Zatanna says, and Dick suspects she already has a good idea about what’s going on. “He’s the World’s Greatest Detective, or whatever it is that they’re calling him. It’s on him if they know, but he doesn’t. No one asked him to stamp his soulmark on his body armor.”
Clark’s shoulders slump. “It still doesn’t feel right, but I understand the point.” He pauses. “His soulmark isn’t actually that bat symbol, is it?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Dick says.
“Unfortunately, yes.” Zatanna says at the same time, and smiles wryly at Clark’s expression. “What? We used to date, you know.”
“I did not know.” Clark makes a face. “It’s going to be weird knowing who Bruce’s soulmate is before he does.”
“You don’t have to know,” Dick says, suddenly sparking on an idea. “I’ll take him back to Gotham and wake him up there. That way you won’t have to worry about what to tell him, either.”
Clark’s already shaking his head even before Dick’s finished speaking. “That would be ideal, but—we can’t move him from the tower. We’ll have to bring his soulmate there.”
Dick stares at him. “There’s a tower?”
“Did I mention the sorcerer was very into fairytales?” Zatanna says.
Dick groans. “Okay, seriously, no one tell any of the other Bats what happened. Including Bruce. He’ll never live it down.”
“It could be a cute story one day,” Zatanna says. Then, at the expression on Dick’s face, “Or not. One thing at a time. You’re absolutely certain that you know who his soulmate is?”
“Yes.”
Zatanna nods and pushes off from the table. “I’ll leave you both to it, then. The less people to keep a secret, the better. Let me know if you need me.”
“Thanks, Zee,” Dick says, and then with the slide of the conference room door, he’s left alone with Clark.
“So,” Clark says, and stops, clearly unsure how to approach the conversation.
“I know I’ve said it already,” Dick says, “but I need your word that you won’t tell Bruce. Please, Clark.”
Clark studies him, and Dick thinks that he’s going to argue in favor of telling Bruce again, but then his expression softens and he presses a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “I trust you to do what’s best for him. And you can trust me not to reveal anything you’ve shared in confidence.”
“Thank you.” Dick struggles for a few seconds with how to get the words out, before deciding, “It’ll be easier if I just—one sec.” He deactivates the safety mechanisms on his suit and tugs it down, just enough to reveal his torso.
“Dick?” Clark says in alarm. Then, as Dick turns to show the symbol on the small of his back: “Oh.”
Dick tugs his suit back up. “Yeah.”
“That’s…” Clark trails off, staring at Dick’s back like he can see the little bat through his suit, even though Dick knows he can’t—soulmarks are indistinguishable from skin, as far as x-ray vision is concerned.
“We’ll take the Batplane,” Dick says, activating it remotely from his wrist computer. “So you don’t have to fly us back to Gotham after.”
“Right.” Clark still seems to be processing, so Dick takes the lead in opening the conference room door and heading to the transport room. Clark catches up with him right as Dick enters the zeta tube, and they arrive in the Batcave within minutes of each other.
It’s late afternoon, so no one else is around to ask questions as Dick leads Clark to the Batplane, which he’s thankful for. Soon enough, they’re cruising over the persistent layer of Gotham smog, and Dick watches a raised eyebrow as Clark enters the coordinates into the system. “France, really?”
“Where the legend of Sleeping Beauty originated,” Clark says, moving out of the way of the controls so Dick can confirm the route. “Another reason the curse is so strong, according to Zatanna.”
Dick snorts as he engages the autopilot. “Bruce would hate everything about this, if he found out.”
Clark smiles faintly. “I need to ask,” he says, and Dick holds his breath, dreading what will come next.
Part of the reason Dick hasn’t told Bruce is because he’s worried about how Bruce will take it; the other part is because he’s worried about how everyone else will take it. The original Titans saw his mark by accident a decade ago, and yet he’s certain that, at times, they still don’t understand his relationship with Bruce—and if they think it’s strange, then who won’t?
“Are you sure you don’t want to take this chance to tell him?” Clark says.
Dick’s exhale leaves him in a breathy laugh. “Not what I thought you were going to say.”
Clark raises his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Not going to tell me how—” Dick waves a hand, “—weird it all is? I am his son, after all.”
It still feels like he’s tripping over his tongue when he says that; they rarely refer to each other in that way, even though they’ve got the papers for it. Dick thinks of himself as John and Mary Grayson’s son first, and he always will.
“Bruce and I are friends, you know, despite how he acts sometimes,” Clark says. “We talked about what he was thinking. Mostly, he was afraid that it would be too easy for you to walk away forever, if there was nothing permanently tying you together.”
Bruce didn’t have much of a speech prepared, when he handed the paperwork to Dick. He’d been nervous, Dick remembers, and he’d made halting statements about legacy and family. Dick had given Bruce what he wanted, but maybe without fully understanding what it was that Bruce actually wanted.
He drums his fingers on the console. “I always would’ve come back, even without that.”
“He didn’t know that,” Clark says gently. “Not like you did.”
Dick stills his fingers and smiles wryly. “Back to saying I should tell him?”
“What’s stopping you?” Clark says. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“What isn’t?” Dick pushes himself to his feet and paces around the cabin. Soulmates aren’t necessarily romantic, he knows—and honestly, the thought of Bruce and romance together in the same sentence is a little weird—but there’s still a certain something between soulmate pairs.
Something he isn’t sure Bruce would be willing to share with him.
“Say I told him,” Dick says, turning to face Clark. “What next? What would even change, except maybe scaring him off?”
“Why would it scare him off?”
“It’s Bruce,” Dick says. “He spooks like a bat out of hell if you start getting too close to him.”
Clark smiles. “If you were anyone else, that would be enough. But it’s you, Dick. You probably know him best out of all of us, and he’s had to accept that. What scares him is the thought of losing you.”
“He doesn’t even believe in soulmates,” Dick says, to avoid having to think about all that. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard him say it’d be best if his soulmate never found him?”
“He didn’t mean that.”
“He doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.”
“He didn’t mean you,” Clark says. “The thought of a stranger coming in with a claim on a shared life with him terrifies him. But—if he could have chosen who shared his mark, he would have chosen you.”
Dick stares out the windshield and thinks that Bruce might have chosen someone like Clark, instead. Someone he actually saw as an equal. “I was also a stranger to him, at one point. And I knew about the mark. I’ve always known.”
The thoughts are scattered, but Clark seems to understand how they fit together. “He won’t fault you for not having told him from the start. He was a stranger to you, too.”
Dick smiles wryly. “Think he’ll fault me for not finding time to tell him in the rest of the last twenty years or so?”
“As Zatanna said,” Clark says serenely, “if he couldn’t figure that out on his own, then at some point he needs to blame himself.”
“Somehow, I don’t think he’ll see it that way.” Worst case, Bruce would consider it a betrayal of trust and distance himself. Best case… best case, nothing changes between them.
“I’ve thought about it,” Dick says. “You really think I haven’t, in all this time? But I can’t think of a single good thing that would come of it. Only things that could go wrong.”
“Planning for the worst is what you Bats are best at,” Clark says. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. Just that if you enter every situation looking for things that could go wrong, then of course that would be what’s easiest for you to see.”
Dick laughs. It comes out like a sigh. “If only we weren’t both Bats.”
Clark stands and puts his hands on Dick’s shoulders. It feels like a hug. “I know you’re worried, Dick, but give him a chance.”
“I’m worried,” Dick says, “that he won’t give me one.”
Clark doesn’t get much further in his attempts to persuade Dick, which, in Dick’s opinion, was always the expected outcome. Clark really doesn’t have much experience convincing Dick to go along with much of anything—Dick is usually more than happy to just oblige him when he has a request, and more controversial asks from the League are typically sent to him through Bruce.
So Clark’s out of luck on both fronts, this time.
Dick’s out of the plane as soon as they touch down beside a free-standing tower that looks like it came straight out of a book of fairy tales. Vines crawl up sandstone brick, stopping midway to the black spires on top. There’s a single window too high to look into, with decorative metal bars in the shape of the bat.
“The entrance is hidden.” Clark stops beside a brick etched with the same symbol. “You, ah, need to put your hand here.”
“All this and you still didn’t realize his soulmark was the bat?” Dick says with forced casualness as he presses his hand against the brick. There’s a brief shimmer, and then his hand is making contact with nothing as the entrance materializes underneath it.
“It seemed too ridiculous to believe,” Clark says, stepping past Dick to lead the way up the spiral staircase. “Isn’t he worried that someone is going to connect the dots and try to—I don’t know, fake a soulmate to threaten him with?”
“It’s a bit of misdirection,” Dick says. “Ask anyone and they’ll guess his soulmark is anything but a bat.”
Of course, it also meant that Dick was struck with a kind of fascinated horror when he first met Batman and saw the matching symbol, but that’s beside the point.
Clark laughs. “Well, I guess it worked on me.”
There isn’t much to the tower room—it’s bare, with wooden flooring and a bed in the center that’s just big enough for Bruce to lay in the center, still wearing the Batsuit. He has his hands folded over the symbol on his chest—and over his soulmark, directly underneath—and his eyes are closed, breathing deep and slow. He doesn’t stir as Dick and Clark make their way over.
“So,” Dick says, hovering awkwardly beside Bruce’s sleeping body. “You said a kiss?”
“Yes,” Clark says, equally awkward. “I’ll, ah—” He turns away from the bed, “—I’ll let you have your privacy.”
Dick bites down on the inside of his lower lip, trapping his nervous laughter inside his throat. It’s fine. He and Bruce haven’t been physically affectionate in… literal years, probably. But it’s fine. Compared to other things they’ve done to save each other, this is the easiest.
Or should be the easiest, at least.
He plants his hand on the edge of the mattress so he doesn’t face-plant onto Bruce and leans over the bed. Bruce still has his cowl up, covering everything down to his nose, and Dick honestly can’t decide if it’s better or worse that he can’t see most of Bruce’s face. It’s definitely worse that Bruce’s lips are the central target at the moment, he’ll say that; Dick could really do with a nice, big forehead right now. But in the interest of getting this over with as quickly as possible, he steels himself, ducks down, and presses a chaste kiss to the side of Bruce’s jaw, desperately trying to ignore the way his gut clenches at the light brush of stubble.
At once, the bed melts beneath Dick’s hand, and the tower begins to crumble around them with a rumble of stone.
“Clark!” Dick grabs Bruce under his arms, and Clark grabs onto Dick, lowering them both safely to the meadow below.
Bruce is awake by the time they hit the ground. He doesn’t spend any time being surprised that Dick is there holding onto him; instead, he turns to Clark. “The sorcerer.”
“Taken care of.” Clark squeezes his arm, and Dick steps away. “Are you all right?”
Bruce frowns, brows furrowing underneath the cowl. “What happened?”
Clark glances at Dick. It’s just a quick look before his gaze jumps back to Bruce, but it’s enough for Bruce’s frown to deepen and for him to turn to Dick, apparently deciding that Dick’s presence here is worth more attention, after all.
“I’ll explain on the way back to Gotham,” Dick says, carefully keeping his hands neutral by his sides. “Clark should be getting back to the Watchtower.”
“Oh, yes.” Clark recovers quickly from his surprise, but not quickly enough for Dick to miss it, which means Bruce definitely didn’t miss it, either. Dick jerks his head to the side, and Clark coughs. “Yes. We’ll catch up later, Batman.” Then, with a whoosh of air, he’s gone.
“Batplane’s this way,” Dick says, completely unnecessarily—it’s not like anyone could miss the hunk of metal sitting conspicuously in the middle of the field—and leads the way, the thud of Batman’s boots trailing him up the boarding ramp and into the cockpit.
Dick drops into the pilot’s seat without asking. Bruce takes the copilot’s chair, and together they go through the takeoff sequence. They’ve done this together enough times that now they complete it in mostly silence, broken occasionally by a measurement readout or a status update. Dick tries very hard not to touch Bruce as they reach over each other to adjust the equipment.
It isn’t until they’ve reached cruising altitude with the autopilot set to the Batcave that Bruce says, without looking at Dick, “I’ve reviewed the cowl footage of the moments before I regained consciousness.”
Dick gapes. He knows the cowl is always recording as long as it’s got power, but he’d hoped to have time to tamper with it before Bruce reviewed the files—he didn’t expect Bruce to instantly try to fill in the gaps. He probably should have, though, knowing Bruce.
“Well?” Bruce says, after Dick has been silent for too long. He’s stiff as a steel plank.
The simplest answer is best. “You and your team got cursed. Clark contacted me for help since the way to break it was… specific.”
He hopes that vague statement, combined with Bruce’s obvious discomfort at the situation, will be enough to encourage Bruce to drop it. Bruce falls silent for a long few seconds.
“I apologize if that was uncomfortable for you,” Bruce says finally. “Clark shouldn’t have asked you.”
“Who else was there? I mean, not that no one else would, uh—you know…” Wow, this isn’t coming out right at all. Dick rubs a tired hand over his face. “It’s—I’m fine. Really. I was more worried about how you would take it.”
“It’s fine,” Bruce says, still stiff.
“Great. So we can just... pretend this never happened, then. Good talk.” Dick goes to pat Bruce’s shoulder, thinks better of it, and changes the movement to a swerve out of his seat that takes him ambling out of the cockpit and toward the back of the jet.
Bruce doesn’t follow him.
Dick sits down heavily in the cargo hold and sighs. Ideally, Bruce wouldn’t have found out about the kiss at all, in order to spare them the awkwardness—but hey, there was no discussion of soulmates, and specifically no discussion of them being soulmates. So, really, the conversation went about as well as Dick could have hoped. He should be relieved.
He hates the fact that he’s disappointed, instead.