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There’s a girl standing next to Jason in the grocery store, her hand hovering over a shiny red apple, and she’s going to get them both caught.
Jason is shocked that the workers even let her into the store in the first place. Her hair is tangled and greasy, with literal leaves and even a piece of food stuck in the mats. She’s wearing ragged clothing, and her skin is covered in a layer of grime. The dirt looks a thousand times worse than what Jason accumulates during the weeks in-between his makeshift showers at the 7/11 on Patterson Street.
Jason gets odd looks. Sometimes, he’s kicked out or refused entry. But this girl? She practically screams homeless.
Well, her appearance does, at least. Most homeless kids, though, would know better than to try to steal things they can’t hide in their clothes.
“You’ve got nowhere to put that,” Jason says. The girl glances at him, blinks once, and then looks back at the apple, picking it up and hefting its weight. “You’re going to get us both in trouble. Put it down.” The girl ignores him completely, like she can’t even hear him. But she can. She turned to look at him when he first spoke. “Look—” Jason reaches out to tap her on the shoulder. Before he can touch her, though, the girl whirls around and firmly catches his wrist.
The world shatters. It’s like someone took a hammer to Jason’s mind until it broke into shards of sharp, fragile glass that fill his skull, his throat, his lungs. Jason feels like he’s bleeding on the inside, blood pooling inside his organs as he struggles to breathe. He’s afraid—no, he’s terrified. The terror is absolute, with no escape, no barriers, no hope. Just fear, always and forever.
And then the girl pulls away and she’s running, apple in hand, as Jason collapses to the ground.
Neither of Jason’s parents had soulmates. Most people don’t, in fact. Jason had always assumed he’d be one of the majority on that. The idea of having something special, of being special, was preposterous. Jason has always been just another rat scurrying around the streets.
Mom would tell him not to think this way, but Jason doesn’t care. He’s right that he’s not special—at least, not in a good way. Because the second Jason found his soulmate, all he could feel was terror—her terror.
Jason doesn’t know how someone could feel that much. His soulmate’s fear was so intense, so all-consuming, that it took him an hour before he regained his wits and realized he had fled back to his hideout.
Now, staring at the soulmark that appeared on his wrist, dying the skin where they touched the bright red of fresh blood, Jason can feel the echoes of that terror. With it comes an undercurrent of misery, guilt, self-hatred. Jason isn’t feeling his soulmate’s current emotions. They’re not touching right now, after all. But it will take a while before the impression leaves him and the mark on his skin fades away.
Jason doesn’t seek out his soulmate. What he felt, back in the store, was awful. He never wants to feel it again. Of course he feels bad for the girl, but there’s nothing he can do. He’s just an eleven-year-old living on the streets. And whatever has her so afraid won’t be fixed by an extra can of beans.
He would have been content to be normal, to not be one of the lucky few with a soulbond. But instead, the universe took what should have been a blessing and turned it into a curse—for them both.
The girl deserves better. Jason doesn’t know anything about her, but no one should have to feel the way she felt. She deserves a soulmate who can give her warm, clean clothes, and feed her good food, and soothe her fear. Maybe a rich little girl who could share her massive wardrobe and let her soulmate borrow her dolls. Or even an adult who could take care of her—a good adult, as much as Jason struggles to believe in those these days.
Instead, she’s got Jason—and she doesn’t even have him, really, because he doesn’t know how to find her, and he doesn’t even try.
The Bowery has a lot of condemned buildings. There’s some sort of Wayne Foundation initiative to build so-called “affordable housing”—not that it will actually come to anything—and buildings that can’t be brought up to code are being torn down.
This building has been mostly picked clean by other, nastier scavengers, but Jason usually manages to find something worthwhile in places like this. He’s been watching it for a few days, waiting until his competition was gone, before scurrying up the fragile remains of the fire escape and prying open one of the boarded-up windows.
All Jason has been able to find so far, though, is empty cans and rubble from where the plaster wall had been torn open by other searchers. He’s just about to give up on the apartment he’s currently searching when he hears a commotion coming from the alley below. Jason rushes over to the window, peeking between the boards to see a cop chasing a boy a few years younger than Jason. In the boy’s hand is a bag of chips and a pack of cigarettes.
The cop is closing in fast, and the boy is heading straight for a dead end. He doesn’t look like a street kid. Jason doubts he really knows where he’s going.
There’s nothing Jason can do. The kid’s going to get the beating of his life and Jason is going to turn away and cover his ears and pretend he doesn’t know what’s going on behind him.
Unless—
Before Jason can think better of it, he takes a piece of rubble and throws it through a gap in the boards, straight at the cop’s back. It bounces off him, and the cop stops in his tracks, pivoting to look at the abandoned building where Jason is hiding. Jason ducks to the side, peering through a gap in the boards as the cop scans each window one by one.
And then the little boy tries to run back the other way, drawing the cop’s attention once again. Jason watches, frozen, as the cop reaches out to snag the boy’s shoulder and—
A small form drops down from a nearby rooftop, directly onto the cop’s shoulders. The cop doesn’t even have time to be surprised before he’s sprawling out on the ground, unconscious. The girl jumps off his shoulders gracefully. She looks up at the window where Jason is watching from and makes a gesture.
Come down, Jason thinks she’s telling him.
Normally, he wouldn’t listen. But the girl standing there in the alleyway is the same one from the store. His soulmate.
So, he finds himself climbing out the window and down the fire escape and then jumping down to the alley below.
“Wow,” says the little boy they saved. “You’re so cool. Are you superheroes? I’m Ryan. I have a dog and his name is Batarang and he barks whenever he sees Batman and Robin on TV.”
Jason’s soulmate doesn’t answer, so he steps forward. “Look, kid, they watch the cigarettes extra closely. You don’t want them anyway. They’re nasty as fuck.” He holds out his hand, not demandingly, but like he expects Ryan to give them to him. It’s a fifty-fifty shot. Jason’s not the type to steal from a little kid, but this isn’t exactly stealing. He’s keeping the kid safe, really.
Ryan tucks the cigarettes close to his chest, though, voice growing quiet. “Y-you can have the chips,” he offers. “But not—you can’t—you can’t have these."
“Why do you need them?” Jason asks with a sigh. Ryan looks about eight. He shouldn’t be smoking. Jason shouldn’t be smoking, but this kid extra shouldn’t be.
“I don’t—I—my dad,” Ryan explains. “My dad said I had to get them, or he’d—you know.” He frowns. “Do you know Robin? Do you think Robin could help me?”
Jason looks away. “I don’t know Robin.”
“Do you know Batman?”
“I don’t know anyone!” Jason shouts. Ryan cringes away.
There’s the sound of feet shuffling on pavement nearby, and Jason turns to see his soulmate moving toward them. Jason had forgotten she was there.
She reaches out to put a gentle hand on Ryan’s shoulder, meets his eyes for a few moments, and then steps away. Ryan takes a shaky breath.
“Go take those to your old man,” Jason says, resigned, and lets Ryan go.
And then it’s just Jason and his soulmate in the alleyway, staring at each other. The cop is still lying unconscious. They should probably run before he wakes up.
“Why did you do that?” Jason asks instead. “Help that kid. You could’ve gotten yourself killed.” The girl looks confused, like she didn’t understand the question. “Most people wouldn’t, I mean. I just threw a thing from a window. Why’d you go down there to help?”
She doesn’t look like she’s registering a single thing he says. Jason’s shoulders slump.
“Can you even hear me? Do you not speak English?”
The girl holds her hand out. An offer.
Jason doesn’t want to feel that fear again. But this is his soulmate, reaching out for him. And so, against his better judgement, Jason places his palm in hers.
Again, Jason is hit by a wave of fear. But this time, it washes over him and then recedes, leaving him more or less intact. And now he can feel the girl’s presence against him, her mind and feelings distinct from his own.
The girl’s emotions draw back, just a bit, almost like an invitation. She leaves space for him. So Jason takes his own feeling of confusion and tries to present it to her, let it resonate across the soulbond.
She responds with the feeling of fear. But not her own. It’s almost…secondary. Fear on behalf of fear. Pain on behalf of pain. Desperation on behalf of desperation.
Somehow, Jason gets the message. The boy was afraid, and so she was afraid too. The boy needed help, and so she helped him.
The girl smiles. She sends him a new feeling—feelings, really. First, confusion so deep that it becomes terror. Nothing makes sense. Everything is too loud, too busy, too much. People are following rules that she doesn’t know. She’s just drifting, alone and afraid. And then—warmth, as it all clicks into place. Understanding. The fear is still there, but now something makes sense. A rock in the middle of the waves.
Jason’s hand closes around his soulmate’s. On his wrist and her palm, their soulmark—faded from the days apart—blossoms once more.
After that, they stick together. Jason’s soulmate deserves better than him, better than this curse, but he’s all she has. And when their skin brushes together, he can feel that she thinks he deserves better, that she’s a curse. If Jason left now, she’d just assume she’s right.
Jason tries to teach her words, but they can’t seem to get anywhere. Not only can she not speak, but she seems to be understanding Jason solely by his body language and the emotions he shares when they touch.
It’s not practical. Besides, it must suck for his soulmate, not being able to understand anything that’s going on around her.
Jason decides to start with names. That should be easy, right? It takes a while for his soulmate to get the concept, but when she does, she’s enthusiastic about getting a name of her own. They try out different names until she settles on Cassandra, although she likes Cass for short. But no matter what they try, Cass can’t manage to actually say her name.
At first, she just opens and closes her mouth and is frustrated when no sound comes out. After a day of trying that, Jason has her put her hand on his throat, to feel the way it vibrates. Cass spends weeks just trying to get her throat to vibrate right. She keeps making a humming noise and then flinching violently and refusing to try speaking for the rest of the day.
Eventually, she gets out a sort of “ehhhhh” sound and is immediately overwhelmed by panic. And then, she spends days trying to reproduce it, to no avail.
“You can do it,” Jason says. “You can—”
Cass throws her arms in the air and starts flailing them around wildly. Jason, worried that she’ll hurt herself, lunges forward and catches her by the wrists. Immediately, the fear tears through him, almost as intense as the first time they touched. Jason stumbles away, eyes wide. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
He scared her. He scared his soulmate.
Well, Jason grabbed her. He’s seen her scars, felt her fear. Of course it was scary when he grabbed her wrists.
He wants to run and hide and never have to face her again. But instead, he holds out his hand, just like Cass did back in the alleyway where they met for the second time.
Slowly, Cass reaches for him and places her hand in his.
“Sorry,” Jason says again, sending a pulse of guilt and apology to Cass. And then, he sends something else, something warm. He hasn’t felt it anywhere other than by her side since before his mother died. Safety.
They stop the speaking lessons after that, and Jason resolves to wait until Cass decides she’s ready.
Over time, Cass’s fear and misery becomes less overwhelming, and her personality shines through. She likes carrots and cuddling and dancing to the music on the radio Jason found in a dumpster. When they go dumpster diving, she finds torn posters and pieces of fabric she thinks Jason might like to decorate their hideout. And she’s completely, utterly unable to stand by when someone needs help.
Cass and Jason get into plenty of trouble because of that, ambushing attackers in alleyways and stealing bags full of food to distribute to the younger kids. Cass has got whole plans of attack, which she communicates to Jason by gesticulating wildly and, when she doesn’t have enough limbs to indicate all the things involved, borrowing Jason’s and treating his hands as an extension of herself. And her plans work. She can predict exactly how two cops will attempt to trap them just by watching them walk to their car, or which storeowners will bother to give chase, or which way the guy intimidating the working girls will attempt to run.
Sometimes, it’s not enough. One day, when Cass takes Jason's hand, she keeps her emotions at a distance, farther than she ever has before. Jason has to pull them forth to feel them, but when he does, he wraps Cass in a hug.
Dirty. She feels dirty. Like nothing they do can ever get her clean.
They spend hours washing Cass’s hands in the bathrooms of every store they can get into, and somewhere in there, Jason realizes that Cass has killed someone before. Fear pulses through their soulbond, but Jason just pulls Cass closer. “You won’t ever have to do that again,” Jason says, even though the words mean nothing to her. Mostly, he says them for himself.
Cass still can’t speak, still can’t interpret most of the words people say. She does recognize a few words, like yes, no, sorry, Cass, Jason, food, or hug. But she often confuses other words for them, like move for food, guess for yes, or new for no. Still, she understands. And that’s enough.
Plus, she’s basically a ninja. Not only can she fight, but it turns out that Cass can practically become a shadow when she wants to be. Jason was wrong to think she’d get them caught, back when they first met. She could have snuck out of that store with anything that wasn’t anti-theft tagged—and probably even stuff that was. But Jason’s glad he tried to warn her anyway, that she grabbed his wrist and practically knocked him out with her fear. Because now he has a friend. A sister. A soulmate.
One day, Cass starts acting weird. She’s constantly anxious, always looking over her shoulder and peering into the shadows. That night, she wakes him in the middle of a dream about his mom, sending a sense of urgency through the soulbond.
Over the course of the next three days, Cass drags him through the city. They don’t stay anywhere for long, catching a couple hours of sleep at a time in shady alleyways and on top of roofs. Jason doesn’t know what they’re running from, but Cass is so scared that Jason doesn’t argue.
On the fourth day, Jason begins to see shapes in the shadows. At first, he thinks he’s just going crazy from the stress, but Cass’s eyes track them. She sees them too. They’re being chased.
Cass’s fear transforms into resignation, and then into a different kind of fear. Fear for Jason.
Six days after they first took flight, they race through the streets, taking cover in the slowly-dwindling crowds. Night falls, and they keep running, straight into the red light district, where it’s always busy at this late hour. But eventually, even the clubs close and the sex workers go home.
Cass and Jason tuck themselves behind a dumpster, running out of breath and time. Jason wishes that Cass could explain to him just who they’re running from. But she can’t. So he just whispers pointless reassurances. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. They can’t chase us forever, right?”
Cass meets his eyes and places a hand right at the junction between Jason’s neck and shoulder.
Love. Like a promise, a shield against the world.
“Au. Wee.” Each sound is vague and drawn out. And then, Cass’s fingers pinch.
Jason tries to ask her what she means, but he can’t, can’t move his lips, can’t move at all. Cass guides him gently to the ground, pushing him further behind the dumpster where he won’t be found. After a moment, she pulls back, her eyes wide and pleading. Pleading for what? Jason can’t do anything. She made sure of that.
Cass gives one last smile and then stands, turning her back on him. Jason is left lying limply as Cass slips away, into the darkness of the night.
It’s only once she’s gone that Jason realizes.
Au. Wee.
Auwee.
Sorry.
It’s the first word Cass has ever said.
Red Hood stares at the shadowy figure across the rooftop. He has heard about the new Batgirl—an insult to Barbara’s identity, in his opinion. She has none of the flare that Barbara did.
It’s strange, that she would seek him out. Batman hasn’t quite gotten to hunting down the Red Hood. Jason hasn’t drawn his attention enough for that. He will, soon, but it’s not the right time yet.
So why would Batgirl be concerning herself with him?
Whatever. Jason fires a warning shot, letting it skim past Batgirl’s shoulder. Despite her frankly appalling choice of costume, his quarrel’s not with her. She’s not his replacement, after all.
Instead of running away, Batgirl leaps forward, throwing a powerful kick straight at Jason’s helmet. Jason pushes his musings about Barbara’s legacy and his soon-to-be-unfortunate successor out of the way to focus on the fight. Because, as it turns out, Batgirl’s good.
Really good.
She drives him backward with a flurry of blows, and his every attempt to get around her is thwarted. It’s like she knows exactly what he’s going to do before he does it, and counters his moves before he even begins.
Okay. Jason needs to be unpredictable. He chooses each move almost at random. Even he doesn’t know what he’s going to do before he does it. One second he’s rolling with a punch and the next he’s drawing his kris and slashing it across Batgirl’s right arm.
First blood. Bruce really should be protecting his soldiers better. A simple slash of a dagger, and her costume tears? Pathetic. The least Batman could do is get Batgirl some proper armor.
To her credit, though, Batgirl doesn’t even seem to feel the injury. She just presses forward, her attack growing fiercer and fiercer, as if she threw off the chains keeping her from accidentally killing a lesser criminal.
From there, it’s all Jason can do not to die. Dodge. Block. Counter. None of his strikes land. Plenty of Batgirl’s do. One second, he’s backed up against the edge of the roof and the next he’s lying on his back, Batgirl’s forearm pressing against his neck. Jason struggles, but he can’t throw her off.
She’s readjusting, going for the perfect position to knock him out, when the skin bared by Jason’s kris brushes up against his neck.
Anger. Curiosity. Satisfaction.
Fear.
Fear.
Horror.
Cass scrambles back, ripping off her mask to stare at him with wide eyes. Her mouth moves soundlessly.
And then, she turns away.
Jason flees.
He should have known. Fuck, he should have known.
Cassandra Wayne wasn’t exactly in the public eye, but Jason had dug deep enough in the records to know she existed. If Jason had been clever, he would have thought about the type of person Bruce would recruit—someone skilled, someone smart, someone who hates herself enough to follow his orders—and connected one Cassandra with another.
It makes sense, in hindsight. The men following Cass—the League of Assassins. He knows the League, spent a year training with them. But he hadn’t thought about it.
Jason had believed Cass was dead. She could survive on her own, of course, but with those people after her, the ones she couldn’t shake? Jason had mourned her, accepted that he’d never be able to keep anything good, and moved on.
But Jason had been dead, actually dead, and here he is now. He shouldn’t have assumed. He should have thought.
And now, Jason has probably lost his only chance to rescue Cass from Batman’s mission.
The next time Red Hood meets Batgirl is after he’s declared himself with a duffel bag full of heads. She finds him in the middle of teaching a rapist a very permanent lesson and tackles him to the ground before he can shoot the piece of shit in the groin.
“Cass—” Jason doesn’t get to finish his sentence before Cass catches him with a paralyzing strike. He topples over, falling against the brick wall of the building next to him. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches the rapist stagger off.
“Jason,” Cass says. “Stop.” Her voice sounds different, now. Older, of course. She’s not the eleven-year-old he knew. But more confident, too. Probably. Jason supposes he can’t really compare now to then, given that she has only ever said one other word to him.
He’s happy for her. It’s good that she can communicate fluently with people who aren’t her soulmate.
But he should have known that Cass’s bleeding heart would hurt her in the end.
She reaches under the cuff of his jacket and places her hand around his wrist, right where his soulmark has come back to life. Instead of sending him an emotion, though, she reaches into Jason’s well of memories and emerges with a flash of pain, fear, oblivion. Death.
At first, Jason thinks it’s a punishment. Then, a second later, a warning. But the next emotion Cass gives him is entirely her own. Pleading with him to understand. Hoping he’ll see. Hoping he’ll feel.
According to all of Jason’s research, Batgirl is very careful not to kill.
“He needs to die,” Jason says, when the muscles in his face have relaxed just enough to get the words out.
And Cass—Cass understands. Jason can tell. She registers the words, interprets them, considers them…and rejects them. “No,” she says.
“He’s going to hurt people. It’s the only way to stop him.”
Cass sends him another pulse of dying. But Jason has already felt that. Jason has already died. Showing him what his supposed victims feel does nothing.
And Cass feels that. What most people would call indifference, and what Jason calls acceptance. Acceptance that some people are going to die. Determination that it will be the bad ones, the ones who inflict that pain on innocent people, who get the short straw. Even if Jason has to force it into their bloody hands.
Horror flows from Cass’s side of the soulbond.
“Sorry,” she says, the same way she said it that night seven years ago. Resignation. Guilt. Loss.
Cass is going to try to stop him. Not temporarily, but long-term. Call the Bat, or take him to Arkham. And Jason can’t allow that.
He thinks about Bruce, about his betrayal, about the Joker, still alive and killing. Jason takes all of his grief, all of his anger, all of his own horror and pushes it across the soulbond, overwhelming Cass.
With stiff, staggering steps, Jason runs.
Batgirl follows him, sometimes. She just watches, until Jason’s about to kill, and then she tries to stop him. Part of Jason wants to hold that inevitable moment as long as possible, taking comfort in the presence of his soulmate, even if they can’t talk, can’t touch. Another part of Jason just wants to rip off the bandaid, shock Cass with the ease with which he kills.
He ends up just doing his best to carry out business as usual until Cass attacks. Every time, Cass bests him. Jason always fights just to get away, but even then, he often resorts to stunning her with a wave of strong emotion.
There’s a special place in Hell, they say, for people who hurt their soulmates. Jason supposes he’ll go there, when he dies for a second time. They also say there’s a special place in Hell for murderers, though, so the jury’s out on where exactly Jason will end up.
He’s fine with that, really. He knows he’s not one of the good guys, not anymore. He’s Red Hood, a literal crime lord. This is his choice.
But it feels different, hurting Cass, using the bond that once brought them comfort and understanding and corrupting it to bring her pain. And when she does the same back to him during their fights, Jason can’t help but feel like he dragged her down with him.
Jason breaks into Titans Tower and beats the new Robin unconscious. The next night, Batgirl finds him and doesn’t wait for the Red Hood to try to kill.
Normally, Cass fights to get Jason to understand. Somehow, she’s still convinced that if she bombards him enough with her morality, her fear, her guilt, she’ll convince him not to kill.
Tonight, though, she fights to hurt.
Jason was expecting her to give up on him, sooner or later. He’d even hoped for sooner—it would make everything less complicated.
But it still stings, that this is what tips Cass over the edge. She chose Tim fucking Drake over him, over her own soulmate.
Jason doesn’t pull his punches. He still loses the fight.
Pain. Jason clutches at his neck as his blood pools amongst the rubble of the bombed-out building. Pain is bad. Pain means he’s not going into shock. Jason wants to go into shock, if only he can avoid the other types of pain coursing through him. Rejection. Betrayal. Despair.
And then there are hands on his neck, and Jason’s struggling, trying to push them away.
Calm.
Through the haze, Jason sees Cass kneeling in front of him reaching out. He thinks he’s hallucinating, imagining her light touch as she staunches his bleeding and sends reassurance across the soulbond.
If he is hallucinating, though, it’s a nice hallucination. A comforting one. And so, Jason lets his mind drift away.
When Jason drifts back into consciousness, he finds himself lying on a plush rug, curled up with Cass. She’s having a nice dream, joy and warmth flowing through his hand that she’s holding close to her chest, her fingers intertwined with his.
Jason blinks. Everything looks blurry, but he can deduce that he’s in an apartment of some kind. A very messy apartment. He reaches up to his neck with his free hand, feeling the bandages where the batarang hit. Cass bandaged him up.
Batgirl would do that for anyone, even the worst of the worst. She doesn’t like death, after all. But this—comforting him, bringing him to her apartment, sleeping on the floor with him because he might fall off a bed—this is more than that. This is something Cass is doing for Jason.
Jason wonders what will happen when Cass wakes up. If she will try to preemptively stop him from killing again. If she will let him go, but follow him, waiting for when she feels she must step in. If Cass is going to go back to Batman and Jason to Crime Alley—or Arkham. If this moment will mean anything a day, a week, a month from now.
But it’s not tomorrow, or next week, or next month. It’s right now, and Jason is as close to home as he can ever be. Another pulse of warmth travels through their soulbond, and then love. It envelops Jason like a warm, fuzzy blanket.
He pulls Cass closer.