“Pardon me, sweetheart.”
Jason was turning to respond before he processed what he heard. “I'm nobody's sweetheart, but looking as good as you do, I guess I can make an exception.”
Jason froze for a moment and saw his shock reflected back in the other man's wide eyes and open mouth. “Were those your words?” he asked, aiming for casual and pretty sure he had missed it by a mile. He would have sworn the bright red letters scrawled on his own chest were burning, but knew that was psychosomatic. People talked to their soulmates all the time and didn't catch it until their letters turned black a day later.
The man- his soulmate?- closed his mouth and examined Jason for a moment before smiling. “Those were my words,” he agreed, sounding much calmer than Jason felt. “You've just been asking every time somebody tried to get past you or something?” he teased, and Jason thought maybe he'd never been so glad someone was teasing him.
“Well, I did warn you that I'm nobody's sweetheart and people around here know me a little too well,” Jason said as he stared at the other man. Kind eyes, he decided, but wary. He'd seen enough of the world to know what it could be like and Jason hated the way he felt grateful for that, hated that he wanted someone else to have suffered enough to understand him. “I’m Jason. Jason Todd.” Not really something he wanted to have said aloud in Gotham where strangers could hear him, but he couldn’t start his relationship with his soulmate based on a lie.
A moment’s pause had Jason tensing, ready for whatever lie he might be told. “I’m Bucky Barnes.” And his body language was somehow worse than a lie, like he was bracing for a blow. Jason already knew he didn’t want to be the kind of man whose partner did that, thought they had to do that. He swallowed hard against the way the thought made him feel sick and forced a smile.
“It’s nice to meet you, Bucky. I’ve been waiting for you all my life,” Jason said, tilting his head a little at the joke. Bucky barked a laugh and looked a little wild-eyed for a moment before motioning to the counter.
“Well, Jason, think I can buy you your drink? Maybe get to know you a little better?” Bucky asked. Jason took a moment to appreciate his amused smile before nodding. Bucky stepped closer so that they shared a spot in line and seemed to also be ignoring the whispering behind them. People met their soulmates every day, but a lot of people seemed to think it was special or lucky to be there when another couple met.
The afternoon passed in a haze, leaving Jason nearly overwhelmed with joy even though it felt like they only touched on surface topics. They had the rest of their lives to figure this out and to learn each other. As the sunlight started to fade, Jason sighed a little and noted how quickly Bucky paused his story to look Jason over. “It’s not you. I’ve just got to get to work,” Jason told him, tipping his head towards the window they were sitting next to. Bucky nodded agreeably. “But… Maybe we could see each other again soon? Tomorrow maybe, at the museum downtown, 3pm?” Jason had been there a dozen times, mostly trying to stop it from being robbed, but he thought it would be different to see it with Bucky at his side. At Bucky’s eager nod, Jason pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Wanna give me your number?”
And, there, again with that slight flicker in his expression like Bucky was taking stock of the entire room before speaking. Jason had seen those mannerisms before, but not on an impromptu date in a coffee shop. He’d hoped he’d get to have a life without ever seeing that look on his partner’s face, hoped his partner would never remind of him of Willis and his shady business like that. Even as he took down Bucky’s number, Jason reminded himself that there could be other reasons someone might look like that. He wasn’t necessarily keeping an eye out for cops and gangs. This was still salvageable.
It was hard to deny the possibility of a doomed connection though. He’d died and come back different than he’d been before. Maybe his soulmate wouldn’t be someone he would’ve matched with as a child. The person he was now did what needed doing and he couldn’t bring himself to regret it, but it’d also been a long time since he’d gone more than a few days without having to bust someone up. It wasn’t fair, but it also wasn’t over. He could be wrong in his doubts.
A flicker of movement out of the corner of the his eye had Jason slowly turning his head to examine the shadows of a rooftop on the other side of the street. For a long moment nothing seemed to change, until another slight shift revealed a gleam of dark metal. Jason sighed as he realized there was once again some asshole in a mask fucking with his Alley. Not a bat, hiding in the shadows like that, probably up to no damn good. When he raised himself from the crouch he was in with the intention to get closer, the mask took off away from him. Well, wasn’t like he was doing anything better. Jason followed after them.
The mask was good, fast. Either their fashion sense was weird as hell or they had a metal arm. If they hadn’t been trying to avoid Jason as much as they were, maybe Jason would’ve left them alone. A moment’s thought later and he accepted he wouldn’t have. It was his job to know who was kicking around Crime Alley and if a mask was moving as confidently as this one was, Jason doubted they’d stay out of the game. Gotham had a way of bringing the best or worst out of people and the best would’ve involved them trying to meet one of the official bats sooner, not skulking around the Alley.
A scream and then several men laughing off to his right made Jason pause for a moment and then snarl before turning. “Stay the fuck out of my neighborhood,” he yelled over his shoulder at the retreating figure. With any luck he’d never see them again, but right now there were reminders to be made about how things were going to go in the Red Hood’s territory. He jumped down behind a cluster of men surrounding a teenager on the ground. This would keep, at least for now. It’s not like he had any solid leads about the mask, Jason reminded himself as he broke Scumbag 3’s arm. Sometimes no news could be good news, even here.
That was not true for his soulmate. No news from his soulmate when they were supposed to be on a fucking date was anxiety-inducing, not that Jason would admit that to anyone else. No news from his soulmate when they were supposed to be on a date irritated him, maybe even pissed him off when combined with the way the security guard next to the ticket booth of the museum was eyeing him. Jason took a deep breath and then leaned casually against the building before fishing his phone out of his pocket.
‘hey, just wanted to check that everything’s ok’
Jason frowned at the message he’d typed before hitting send. Maybe Bucky had forgotten, though Jason’s mind was racing with half a dozen alternative explanations, none of which he liked. He watched the indicator that Bucky was typing appear and disappear several times over the course of the next few minutes. Maybe he wasn’t good at texting. Or had anxiety. The type of behavior he’d displayed at the coffee shop could support the possibility of anxiety. Maybe he was trying to figure out the right way to tell Jason that this was a mistake. His phone rang and Jason answered it, carefully looking away from the security guard who was still staring at him.
“Do you… actually want me there?” Bucky’s voice was softer and more hesitant than the Jason of yesterday could have imagined. “I kind of thought maybe you wouldn’t want to see me…”
He was absolutely going to melt if this is how Bucky spoke when he got insecure. Whatever had gone in his head since they saw each other yesterday must have thrown him for a loop, but that would be okay. Jason had the rest of their lives to convince Bucky how important he was and to make him understand that Jason wanted him in his life as much as he could have him. At least, if things were better than Jason's most uncertain moments might offer. If the rest of their lives didn’t end in brutal certainty that no one was coming and one of them in the ground. Jason shook the thought off when he realized his pause had held too long. “Of course I want you here, Bucky. How are we supposed to get to know each other if we don’t spend time together?” Jason tried to end the question smiling, knowing from phone calls with Dick that sometimes you really could hear the expression through the phone.
There was another pause, a short eternity where Jason tried not to wonder if maybe Bucky hadn’t wanted to see Jason. “Right. I’ll, um, I’ll be right there. It’s not far from where I am,” Bucky promised quietly. Jason tried to stifle the sigh of relief that threatened to escape him.
“Good. I’ll be waiting,” Jason promised.
When Bucky showed up ten minutes later, Jason found himself caught off-guard by the way Bucky’s left sleeve was carefully pinned up. He’d been wearing a glove and a full-sleeve yesterday and Jason had wondered if he had extensive tattoos or some kind of scarring, but… Bucky caught the direction of look and studied Jason’s face. After a moment he shrugged and offered a small smile. “My prosthetic was damaged last night unexpectedly. I’ll be able to fix it pretty soon, I just wasn’t going to be able to get that done without leaving you standing here longer.” He paused and seemed to brace himself slightly and Jason felt his heart sink a little. “About that…”
“Don’t even worry about it,” Jason said, trying to tell himself he hadn’t cut Bucky off intentionally before he could say something that might break Jason’s heart far too soon into their… relationship? Was it a relationship yet if you were soulmates but hadn’t talked about defining yourselves? Did Bucky have someone else? He hadn’t said anything yesterday, but Jason hadn’t exactly gone into the been-dead-and-came-back thing or the vigilante thing or the I-know-Bruce-Wayne-yes-that-one-very-well thing either. There was plenty they didn’t know about each other, but maybe Jason could get away with not having to know anything that would hurt him just yet. “Sometimes I run a little late too.” That didn’t address the doubts Bucky addressed, but part of Jason hoped that spending more time together and Jason wanting to see him would help with that part.
And there, that scrutinizing look again. Bucky was waiting to see if something was going to come up, and maybe Jason was too. But it didn’t have to be here or now or like this. “You ready?” he asked, tipping his head towards the entrance and smilingly with as much charm as Bruce’s PR team had ever been able to train into him as a teenager. “I think the security guard is going to try to say something about loitering if I stay here much longer.”
Bucky smiled back and, for a moment, Jason knew everything was going to be okay. He’d get to see this beautiful man smile like that for the rest of their lives. The certainty disappeared as Bucky started to walk towards the doors, but Jason felt a smaller flash of it again when the other man turned to look back at him. Jason grinned and then hurried after him. They were going to make this work. They might hit some speed bumps in the process, but Jason wasn’t a quitter and Bucky wouldn’t be his soulmate if he couldn’t endure some tough times.
The problem with fucking Gotham is that it had no willingness to let someone bask in their pleasure. Sure, Jason could’ve stayed home to daydream about his date. He could’ve prepped a couple of meals and shoved them in a freezer to be distributed throughout his safe houses. Instead, he’d made the decision to go patrolling, and now his second-favorite pair of pants had been cut open and he was bleeding. It was almost embarrassing that someone had gotten the drop on him enough to actually get at him with that knife, but he had been admittedly a little distracted by the two assholes in front of him who had needed required a reminder on not trying to rough up the working girls. Well, he’d taken care of them well enough and he might not even need stitches.
Still, by the time he was ready to grapple back up the building, Jason was in no mood to see the mask from the night before crouching on the edge of the building. They looked ready to jump down the fire escape and Jason was not interested in having that fight tonight. “Thought I told you to stay out of my neighborhood,” he snarled. The mask tipped their head slightly and Jason watched their hair cascade with the movement. There was something familiar about the texture of it, though Jason would have to figure out whose memory this asshole was tarnishing later. Instead he pulled his gun from his holster and felt gratified when the masks’s eyes widened and they shifted to stand. Well, fuck around and find out, Jason thought smugly as he shot at them. Try to jump a bleeding vigilante and you damn well deserved to catch a bullet, even if most of the vigilantes here wouldn’t dish it out.
By the time Jason had grappled to the roof, the mask was gone, leaving only a few drops of blood to show they had been there at all. Hardly any though, so Jason felt the guilt that had been building in his chest relax. No body, no crime, or at least no horrible conversations with the Bat about not killing anybody in “his” city. As if Jason didn’t have just as much claim to the city that had borne and reared him. Jason considered the blood for a moment and then turned away from it to start home. Let the rain wash it away this time. If he had another run in with that mask, he could sneak a sample into the cave to run then, third time being the charm and all that. He had better things to do tonight, like figure out if he could get by without putting stitches into his new thigh wound and researching the basics about prosthetics so he’d at least know what the bare-bones etiquette was around Bucky’s arm.
Two days and they’d been texting back and forth, but Jason hadn’t seen Bucky since the museum. It made sense that they’d both have things to do, but Bucky was pretty evasive about what he was actually doing. Jason speculated to himself that it might have to do with his arm repair, but Bucky had said that would be relatively quick. Though who hadn’t thought something would be an afternoon’s work and instead had the project stretch out for a week or more? The paranoid part of him, the part of him that had been raised by the Bat and spent enough times on the street to know exactly what kind of skeletons someone’s closet could hold, told him to look into Bucky and to find out everything he could about his soulmate.
The rest of him knew he couldn’t start down that road. He never wanted to be the man who tried to keep tabs on a partner who didn’t want him to know what they were doing. It wasn’t a healthy way to start a relationship and Jason knew he wasn’t a healthy person himself yet, but he wanted to be healthier than that at least. When Bucky wanted him to know, he’d tell Jason directly. Until then… Jason could wait. He knew how to be patient. If being patient involved a little daydreaming about how good Bucky’s hair looked pulled back in a bun or how soft his eyes looked when he smiled, well, that was Jason’s business. They could have something good, if Jason would just let it be something good. He didn’t have to put the shadows of his own past onto his soulmate and their relationship, especially not this early.
Still, it did rankle that he had seen this fucking mask more often than he’d seen Bucky, Jason decided as he turned around at the sound of a scuff behind him on the rooftop. The mask had their hands up, a bag suspended from one hand. He considered shooting them anyway as he looked at the bag for a long moment. When it dripped, he felt his eyebrows raise and was glad that his helmet could hide at least that much. He finally turned his attention to the mask’s face and studied them. Probably a man, he decided. “Listen, I love a good bloody bag as much as the next guy. You can ask half this city and hear about it. I think I’m going to need a little explanation for what the hell you’re doing here though.”
The mask carefully set the bag down, watching Jason the entire time as he leaned to do it and then took several large steps back, his hands up. Jason frowned at him, gaze flicking between the bag and the now-still figure. “If the wrong thing is in this bag, I’m going to shoot you again,” he told the mask, trying to keep his voice calm until he knew.
If this guy had any poetry in his soul and had heard about what the Red Hood had done, it was a head. If it was the wrong head, Jason was going to do his best to help the mask ventilate his organs. Jason took a deep breath and bit the bullet. He crouched to open the zipper, keeping the gun steady on the mask as he did so, and then staggered backwards as soon as he had looked down towards the contents. “Is this a fucking joke?”
Jason couldn’t look away from the bag, but also couldn’t make himself believe what he was seeing. After a moment, he forced himself closer and crouched by the bag, not bothering to try to point his gun at the mask anymore. He reached his hand out and only the weight of being watched kept him from pulling it back towards him. Instead he forced his fingers to one pale cheek. Flesh covered in blood. Jason trailed his fingers up to touch the green hair at the top and breathed out hard when it felt like actual hair. This was probably actually… He forced himself to look up at the mask as he let go of the contents of the bag.
“I don’t. I don’t understand,” he said finally. Relief? This might have been relief, but his heart was pounding in a way that made that feel more complicated. The Joker was dead. The Joker was dead? Jason considered the thought more carefully and what it might mean for him to actually be safe from one of the few things he truly feared anymore. He looked back down at the bag to reassure himself that what he had seen, what he had felt was still there.
“I can’t be anything other than what I am. This is part of what I am and I need you to love both sides of me if this is going to work. I can’t stop being the Winter Soldier or some variant of that skillset. I thought you would understand, that you knew what it was like to be Jason Todd and the Red Hood.” Jason jerked his head up sharply to stare at the mask, apparently the Winter Soldier, trying to decide if the threat of being known was stronger than the relief of knowing the Joker was dead. The Winter Soldier pressed on. “I want us to be able to figure this out together and I thought maybe this was the right way to start. You’re no stranger to violence and neither am I. We can choose our targets together. We could do good things, together.”
“Look, I’m glad the clown is dead. I really am. This might actually be the best day of my life. But what the fuck are you talking about?” Jason asked after a moment of staring at the other man. He watched as the Winter Soldier’s eyebrows furrowed and got the feeling that maybe Jason was the one who was causing his confusion.
“Well, you shot me and you’re my soulmate. I thought a courting gift might-“
“I’m not,” Jason interrupted as he looked back down at the bag containing the Joker’s head. It would be a good courting gift. A man might get Jason to agree to marriage sooner than would be reasonable with this kind of courting gift, but he wasn’t going to lie about the situation just because he was happy.
“What?” Jason hadn’t realized how warm the Winter Soldier’s voice had been until it got cold. Even through whatever voice distortion that muzzle was offering, Jason could tell that he had been offering emotions that weren’t currently on the table, even if Jason hadn’t been prepared to hear them.
“I’m not your soulmate. I’m sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding. I met my soulmate earlier this week.” Pressing up from the kneel so he was standing, Jason made eye contact with the other man. The paint around his eyes just made the Winter Soldier’s eyes look paler, ghostly, he caught himself thinking while he waited for a response. He wanted to believe that someone who would kill the Joker to please him wouldn’t respond violently to him, but he also wouldn’t be relying on it. A situation like this almost made him wish he had backup.
“We have each other’s words!” The Soldier’s voice now was bewildered, like it never occurred to him that Jason might argue with him. Jason found himself pitying a man whose soulmate markings told him to stay out of someone’s neighborhood, even if it wasn’t actually Jason’s. How often did this happen to this guy? The Soldier was growling to himself as he pulled his jacket off to reveal his flesh forearm arm and Jason caught himself staring when the start of the familiar words were exposed. I'm nobody's sweetheart, but looking as good as you do, I guess I can make an exception. Jason's handwriting stood out like a tattoo against the Soldier's arm.
“Wait. What? Bucky?”
The Soldier, Bucky, was staring at Jason like he’d grown a second head. After a moment, he reached up to release the muzzle he was wearing. “Yes? Of course?”
“What do you fucking mean, ‘of course?!’ You’re the mask that’s been running around my neighborhood?!” Jason knew he was yelling, knew that he needed to bring his voice down if he didn’t want to reveal them to all of Gotham, much less the damn bats, but he thought maybe he had a reason this one time. “How long have you been the Winter Soldier?!” The question felt pointless as soon as he said it, but Jason felt like he could be excused based on the current circumstances.
“Little over fifty years. Everyone knows that. You didn’t know?” For a moment, Jason hated himself for the uncertainty in Bucky’s voice. Bucky thought he’d shot him knowing that he was Bucky, that they were soulmates. He pushed the emotion away and shook his head hard, both a response to the question and to try to process what he was hearing.
“No I hadn’t figured out what you were calling yourself when you were just a mask I was chasing out of my neighborhood. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize…” Jason’s voice trailed off as he realized that Bucky was looking at him with some horrible combination of amusement and disbelief. “Oh, fuck, I shot you.”
“I healed. You didn’t recognize the name? Didn’t ring any bells for you from the news a few years ago? Matters of national security and spilled confidential records?” At least the laughter in Bucky’s voice was better than before, but Jason couldn’t help but feel like he’d missed something important.
“I’ve been… busy,” Jason said carefully, trying to figure out how he was going to talk about what had happened. Another glance at the bag reminded him that probably Bucky knew at least a little of what had happened. “It took time after I… after I came back, to really get my feet under me enough to be able to care about things like the news. If it didn’t directly affect me or my training, I didn’t have the ability to care.”
Bucky frowned thoughtfully and nodded, following Jason’s gaze down to the bag. “You know, I think I can understand that and I really like the part where that means you don’t hate me. Does that mean, uh… that I shouldn’t have…?” Bucky motioned to the bag, to the Joker’s head.
Jason laughed a little and stepped in front of the bag as to protect his courting gift. “No, that is perfect! This is the best thing anyone’s ever given me! I love it!” Jason forced himself not to say anything else, knowing that he wouldn’t be comfortable with most of the things that he might’ve followed that with. Instead, he watched as Bucky smiled at him, finding himself just as mesmerized by it had he had been before.
“I was hoping you would.”