Chapter Text
When Jason Todd, formerly Robin, formerly deceased, formerly Red Hood, currently Neal Caffery, donned the Caffrey alias, he assumed it wouldn’t be too difficult to manage. For the most part, he was right. Play a suave conman and art forager dumped in the middle of the FBI’s White Collar Crimes division? Please. He had gone to way too many Wayne Galas as a child for him not to know anything about art. Sure, he hid in nooks to read rather than socialize, but grown-up Jason just stole a little bit of Richie Grayson-Wayne’s mask to act as Neal. He didn’t even have to mention anything about the FBI, Jason was a Bat for Wonder Woman’s sake.
He did not anticipate how emotionally draining it would be.
See, everyone in the world had a soulmate. Though the concept of someone’s soul matching perfectly with one’s own was incredibly alluring to the greater population, no one could deny how inherently violent the soul connection was. Soulmates matched souls, yes, but they also matched pain. For every injury one person obtains, there is a person matching both wound and soul with theirs. Despite the pain being real, soulmates did not carry lasting side effects from their match’s injuries. The only permanent marks that would remain were fatal ones.
It’s easy for Jason to forget that civilians have a much harder time finding their soulmates. When you were involved in the hero community before you could legally drive, injuries were bound to happen. Many, many injuries, serious and minor, but many injuries nonetheless. Jason had met his soulmate when he was fifteen. Roy Harper, already a man at that point, had examined their matching bruises closely before declaring them soulmates. Roy had made it very clear from that moment forward that their relationship was going to remain platonic. Even if the age gap wasn’t weird as hell, Jason had come out as asexual a month prior and neither held any attraction towards each other.
Platonic soulmates weren’t not a thing. Just because you were soulmates didn’t mean the relationship had to be a romantic one. However, it wasn’t incredibly uncommon for platonic soul matches to turn romantic.
Jason originally thought the worst pain he ever felt was getting beaten to death by the Joker. But reuniting with Roy only to lose him in an accident was the worst pain Jason had ever been through. The sheer emotional backlash from the bond breaking was worse than any physical pain Jason had felt. He had dropped, one day, in the middle of patrol. He couldn’t tell you what exactly happened, but when the pain faded, when his vision returned, the first thing he noticed was the lack of pain from Roy’s bond.
Somehow, Jason made it to his apartment without incident. Though the lack of pain was telling, Jason hoped, prayed, it wasn’t true. Roy couldn’t have died. He couldn’t have. Jason had only just dropped the older man off at The Sanctuary for heroes. Roy Harper was not dead.
When he heard the news, Jason threw up.
He didn’t cry, no, but he packed his things and left Gotham. He didn’t bother telling anyone where he was going, not that he himself had an idea of where he would end up. It wasn’t like the other heroes knew he and Roy were soulmates. Some heroes were… less open-minded about soulmates staying platonic, but frankly, it was no one’s business except Roy’s and Jason’s. Red Hood simply disappeared one day, leaving a note and nothing else stuck to the Bat Signal.
A month later, Barbara had tracked him down. He chose to pretend it had really taken her a month rather than the realistic likelihood of her giving him space.
“We need someone to go undercover in the FBI.” Ah, of course it was work and nothing else. Thanks, Babs.
“And you want the legally dead, mentally unstable crime lord to do it?” Jason couldn’t help from using a snarky tone. Otherwise, he might cry instead.
“You’re the best choice for it, Jason,” she states, hesitating for a second. “Look, you don’t have to go undercover. We don’t know why you left, we don’t know what you’ve been doing, but the Red Hood hasn’t been seen since you left.”
Yeah, Barbara. He knows.
“I’ll send you the files for the alias. You don’t have to do this. Just, consider it?”
A year later, and here Jason was, playing a non-violent art forger. He hated to admit how much he enjoyed it. There were plenty of coffee shops and museums within his radius, plus a couple bookstores he frequented often. There was one grocery store right on the edge of his radius that he liked to go to, partially because it was cheap but quality food, partially because it was right on the edge of the radius and he enjoyed seeing Peter’s face the next day after he went shopping. Peter tried, once, to tell Jason to go to a different store. In response, Jason took him on a little field trip to the other food stores and bodegas near his apartment. Peter didn’t try again.
The best part was how he was almost completely cut off from the hero community. Barbara and Dick were the only Bats who knew his exact location. The rest only knew he was on an undercover mission for an undetermined amount of time. Even Bruce had minimal information and none of the information was identifying enough to figure out the identity of who was running the mission, nor which department of the FBI the mission was being run in.
Only two Justice League members knew all the details. Superman, since Clark was the one who discovered the issue of paintings containing deadly amounts of kryptonite and brought it to the League’s attention, and Wonder Woman, since Jason needed two people to voice for him and he knew she wouldn’t betray him to Bruce.
The rest of the League was informed that both Superman and Wonder Woman were placing a trusted, undercover agent within the FBI to extract dangerous artifacts without alerting the general public.
That was it.
Jason kept minimal contact with Clark and Diana, mostly for mission updates, sometimes for museum recommendations. Barbara would send him updates on hero business that she knew he’d find interesting, and he sent her any information from cases he saw that would concern Gotham. Any other information, she could find herself, but Jason was still a Gothamite at heart, and he would protect his city. He hadn’t gotten caught yet, hopefully he wouldn’t ever, but he’d rather get imprisoned for treason than let the government fuck with his city.
So, yeah. Jason was doing alright, for the most part. He was away from Gotham, away from Bruce, away from the memories that plagued him. While a fake identity wasn’t exactly a fresh start, working in the FBI was different enough that he thought it counted, but not too different that he couldn’t still use some of the skills and talents he had gathered over the years.
The problem with said fake identity was that Neal Caffery was not Jason Todd. Jason Todd’s soulmate was known and deceased. Neal Caffery’s soulmate was unknown, which meant that Neal Caffery’s soulmate was maybe alive. And that was the worst thing about being Neal Caffery.
It wasn’t like he could just say, “Hey, my soulmate’s dead!” and have it be over with. Oh, no. Neal Caffery’s official government files (what the fuck, Barbara) said “Soulmate Unknown,” which meant he needed solid proof to declare the fact that his soulmate was dead. And, since Neal Caffery wasn’t a real person, there’s no way Jason could get solid proof. Technically, he could probably ask Barbara to just alter the file, but she’d ask why and other questions Jason didn’t feel like answering.
Since everyone on Earth had a soulmate, it was a common joke among those with alive soulmates to apologize every time they got injured or did something stupid. Like someone trips and falls flat on their face; “Sorry soulmate!”, or “Ouch, your soulmate’s gonna feel that tomorrow!”. Overall, Jason didn’t really care if people made the jokes, but he had to try not to visibly flinch whenever someone directed the joke onto him and his (non-existent/deceased) soulmate. After a year of acting as Neal, Jason thought he had gotten pretty good at pretending his soulmate was definitely still alive and not six feet under. Most of the jokes he could just shrug, smirk, or brush off. The more insensitive ones he internally winced at, shoving the grief down until he was alone and could break down in privacy.
Jason would be the first person to tell you that he did not have healthy coping mechanisms. His first mentor liked to dress up as a bat at night, his second mentor was the daughter of a literal assassin cult, and his other mentors and teachers were likely dead or teaching other children how to be assassins. None of them impressed particularly good coping mechanisms onto him, and for most of his life, he was too busy trying not to die to create his own coping skills. So, “mental breakdown in the safety of his closet instead of actually grieving over Roy and literally every other person he’s lost” it was.
It all came to head after a case, because of course it did.
Said case seemed to be a normal white collar level case. Some art smugglers were caught with a second, unreported cargo bay filled with stolen artwork, some dating back centuries. It was up to the white collar team to figure out which pieces were genuine, which were fake, plus where some of them were stolen from since several museums reported the same piece as missing. To sum it up, it was a mess. As their resident art expert, Jason had been called out to identify which pieces were genuine and which were not. That was not the bad part; that was the fun part. While Jason was more of a Literature Gay himself, he appreciated art enough that it wasn’t hard to do all the research needed to play Neal. The bad part was when one of the security guards turned out to be one of the co-conspirators and shot Jason twice while he was inspecting some of the foraged art. That fucking sucked.
What sucked even more was the fact that it was nearing Jason’s death day, which meant he was achy and in pain already.
One shot to the stomach, one to the knee.
Jason went down with a thump, too shocked to make a sound.
“Neal!” Peter screamed, sounding both far away and way too close. Jason blinked up at Peter, eyes suddenly growing heavier.
“No, no, stay awake!”