The first time you felt it, you were sixteen.
Three in the morning, dead asleep, and then suddenly â not. Pain cracking across your ribs like something had hit you, sharp and immediate and real enough that you fell out of bed gasping, clutching your side, completely convinced for one disorienting moment that something had happened to you.
Nothing had happened to you.
You were in your bedroom. You were fine. But your ribs ached with a depth that didn't belong to you, and when you turned on the lamp and pulled up your shirt there were bruises blooming across your side in real time â dark, mottled, the specific pattern of an impact â on skin that had touched nothing.
Your mother sat with you until four in the morning with her hand on your back.
"Your soulmate," she offered quietly. Like it explained everything. Like it was supposed to be comforting.
It explained everything. It was not comforting.
Because whoever was on the other end of this â whoever you were cosmically bound to â was getting hurt. Badly. Regularly. The bruises faded by morning but the ache took days, and it happened again two weeks later, and then again, and then with a frequency that settled into something you could only describe as a schedule.
Every few nights. Sometimes every night.
Always between midnight and four in the morning.
Always the kind of pain that meant serious, the kind that meant your soulmate was out there somewhere doing something that resulted in cracked ribs and split knuckles and once, memorably, a dislocated shoulder that had you weeping on your bathroom floor at two in the morning unable to lift your arm.
By the time you were twenty and had moved to Gotham for work you had developed a whole system. Extra painkillers. An ice pack in the freezer. A specific pillow arrangement. You kept loose shirts for the mornings when the bruises were bad, covered them at work with practiced ease, told no one because how would you explain it, what would you even say.
My soulmate is out there somewhere doing something that keeps putting them in the hospital, probably, and I feel all of it, and I've never met them, and I don't know if they're okay.
You thought about that last part more than you let yourself admit.
The Gotham Preservation Gala was not your idea of a Tuesday night.
It was your boss's idea of a Tuesday night, specifically the idea that you attending would be good for the company and that your presence was required and that the dress code was black tie which meant an hour of your life spent doing something with your hair that it didn't naturally want to do.
You went. You smiled at people. You accepted a glass of champagne you didn't particularly want and stationed yourself near a window with a view of the city and did the mental math on how long you had to stay before leaving was acceptable.
"You look like someone calculating an exit strategy."
Bruce Wayne was, apparently, a person who existed in real life and not just in the society pages. You knew his face from years of Gotham news â the square jaw, the dark hair, the eyes that were a complicated shade of blue-gray that photographs had never quite captured â and here it was in person, closer than expected, wearing an expression of mild amusement that sat slightly oddly on features that seemed more naturally suited to the cover page of a magazine.
"I'm calculating an exit strategy," you corrected, because lying seemed pointless.
Something in his expression shifted. Warmed, slightly. "How long have you given yourself?"
"Twenty more minutes. Forty if the food is good."
He almost smiled. It had the quality of something that didn't happen easily, that had to make its way through considerable resistance to get to his face. "Bruce Wayne."
"I know." You told him your name. "I know who you are."
"Most people here pretend they don't, as a courtesy." He settled beside you at the window, looking out at the city with an ease that suggested he'd done this at many galas â stationed himself somewhere peripheral, watched the room, kept an exit available.
"That seems exhausting," you mused.
You stood together for a moment in the particular comfortable quiet of two people who had both independently decided the party was better from the edges. The city glittered outside, and you thought â as you sometimes did, looking at Gotham at night â about whoever was out there somewhere in it, doing whatever they did that hurt so much.
The pain had been bad lately. Last week had been one of the worst â something that had woken you at one in the morning with a blinding headache and what felt like a gash across your left forearm, the skin raised and stinging, gone by morning but vivid enough while it lasted that you'd sat in your kitchen until sunrise.
"You're rubbing your arm," Bruce Wayne stated, curiosity in his gaze.
You stopped. You hadn't noticed you were doing it â the left forearm, automatic. "Sorry. Old habit."
Something crossed his face. Fast, almost invisible. "Does it hurt?"
An odd question. "Not right now. It's just â a thing I do."
He looked at your arm for a moment with an expression you couldn't quite read â too many layers to it, something careful and controlled at the surface and something else underneath that the control was working hard to cover.
"Enjoy the gala," he stated charmingly, flashing you that award winning smile. And then he was gone, smooth and unhurried, absorbed back into the room.
You watched him go with the distinct feeling of having missed something.
You ran into him again because Gotham was simultaneously enormous and very small.
The coffee shop on Seventh â your coffee shop, your Tuesday and Thursday morning ritual, the place that knew your order â and there he was, at the counter, in civilian clothes that were expensive in the way of things that were trying not to look expensive, looking at the menu with the focus of someone making a genuine decision.
He saw you at the same moment you saw him.
"You come here?" you asked, because it seemed impossible somehow. Bruce Wayne had a manor. Bruce Wayne had, presumably, staff who made him whatever he wanted.
"I come here," he confirmed. "Alfred's coffee is better. I come here to think."
"The anonymity." He glanced around the shop â small, slightly scruffy, not the kind of place anyone looked for Bruce Wayne. "Nobody here cares who I am."
"You're the exception." He said it simply, without deflection, and the directness of it caught you slightly off guard. "Can I join you?"
You sat together for an hour. That was the thing that surprised you â not the sitting, but the hour, how quickly it went, how easy it was. He was different here than at the gala. Still contained, still careful, still with that quality of a person who monitored themselves constantly. But the performance of Bruce Wayne, Gotham's most eligible socialite, was absent. What was left was quieter and sharper and considerably more interesting.
He asked questions and actually listened to the answers. He had opinions he stated without the social lubrication of pretending they were suggestions. He drank his coffee black and read the room around him in a way that was so continuous and automatic you almost didn't notice he was doing it.
"You do that constantly," you stated observantly, "Watch the room."
You smiled at that â your words, back to you. He caught it and something in his expression did the almost-smile again, more visible this time, closer to the surface.
You left with his number in your phone under Bruce W., which felt both completely ordinary and slightly surreal.
Coffee on Thursdays. Occasionally dinner. The particular rhythm of two people finding each other in the margins of their separate lives, which was how you thought of it â neither of you were people who made a lot of room, and somehow you were making room, and neither of you were commenting on that directly, which suited you both fine.
You liked him. Considerably. More than was probably wise given how little you actually knew about him â because for all the ease of the coffee shop conversation, there was a wall in Bruce Wayne, solid and carefully maintained, and you could feel exactly where it was even when he was being generous on the other side of it.
You didn't push. You figured the wall had reasons.
The pain was getting worse.
Or not worse exactly â not more severe. More frequent. Hardly a night went by now, and the accumulated tiredness of it was starting to show in ways you couldn't entirely manage. Dark circles. A slowness in the mornings. Your boss had asked twice if you were sleeping.
You were sleeping. You just kept getting interrupted.
Three months into knowing Bruce Wayne, on a Thursday morning, you arrived at the coffee shop with a bruise along your jaw that concealer had mostly handled but not entirely, and the particular careful way you were holding your left side that you'd gotten good at disguising but apparently not good enough.
You watched him see it â the almost imperceptible shift, the way his eyes moved over you in that room-reading way and stopped, and then the stillness that came over him that was too controlled to be casual.
"What happened to your face," he asked you, not unkindly, worry evident on his face.
"Nothing happened to my face."
The look he gave you was exceptionally flat. Bruce Wayne had a very effective flat look. "You walked into a door."
"It was a very sudden door."
You straightened automatically. "My side is fine."
He was quiet for a moment. The coffee shop moved around you â orders called, chairs scraping, the ordinary noise of a Thursday morning â and he sat across from you with his hands around his cup looking at you with an expression that was doing something complicated.
"You don't have to tell me," he finally. Carefully. "But I'd like you to know that I'm â that I notice. And I've been noticing for a while."
Something in the honesty of it made your chest tighten.
"It's not what you think," you stated firmly.
"That someone is â that it's happening to me." You looked at your coffee. Then at him. "It's the soulmate thing. The connection. Whatever they're â I feel it too. It shows up." You gestured vaguely at your jaw.
The silence that followed was long.
When you looked up, his face had done something you hadn't seen it do before. All the careful management of it had gone briefly, completely offline â not long, just a second â and what was underneath was raw enough that it took you a moment to process.
Then it was back. Controlled. Present.
"Your soulmate," he started, his tone very even.
"Whoever they are, they do something â I don't know what. Something that hurts. A lot and often." You tried to keep your voice neutral, the way you'd learned to. "I've been feeling it since I was sixteen."
Another silence. Different quality to this one.
"That's a long time," he rasped.
"Do youâ" He stopped. "Are you angry? At them?"
The question surprised you. People usually asked if you were scared, or sad, or whether you'd tried to find them. Nobody had asked if you were angry.
"Sometimes," you replied honestly, "At two in the morning with a dislocated shoulder, yeah, a little." You turned your cup in your hands. "Mostly I just worry. Whoever they are, they're â they've been doing this for years. Whatever it is. And they keep going back to it." You looked out the window at the Gotham street. "That takes a certain kind of person."
Bruce Wayne was very still across from you.
"What kind of person?" he asked quietly.
You thought about it. About sixteen years of midnights, of pain that didn't belong to you, of the particular rhythm and frequency of it that you'd lived with long enough to know like a language.
"Someone who thinks it's necessary," you stated, tilting your head, "Whatever they're doing. Someone who's decided it matters enough." A pause. "I don't think they do it because they want to get hurt. I think they do it in spite of that."
He looked at you for a long moment.
"You're very understanding," he observed gently, "About something that costs you a great deal."
"They don't know it costs me," you said. "I've never met them."
Something moved through his expression â something that looked almost like pain, separate from whatever the bruise on your jaw had been. Self-directed, internal.
"What would you say?" he asked. "If you met them."
You considered. Outside, Gotham went about its morning, loud and indifferent and entirely itself.
"I'd probably ask if they were okay," you replied, "First. Before anything else." You met his eyes. "The rest of it can wait. I just want to know they're okay."
Bruce Wayne looked at you across a small table in a coffee shop on Seventh Street, and something in him â some load-bearing thing, carefully constructed and long maintained â shifted.
His left hand was on the table. He turned it over slowly. And there, on the inside of his wrist where his sleeve had pulled back slightly, was a scar â thin, silver-pale, the kind that came from something specific and serious â that matched, with precise and impossible accuracy, a scar on your own wrist that had appeared four years ago and that you'd never been able to explain.
He was watching you with an expression that was completely unguarded for the first time since you'd known him â all the walls down, or not down exactly, but transparent, the structure of them visible but no longer blocking the view. And the view was â a lot. The view was a person who was very tired and very sorry and had apparently been sitting across from you for three months with this knowledge living in him like a held breath.
"I know," he rasped quietly. "I know. I should haveâ"
"Are you okay?" you asked him softly.
He looked at you â really looked, the way he hadn't let himself â and whatever he found in your eyes seemed to take him slightly apart at the seams, gentle and irreversible.
"No," he replied, like it was honest in a way that clearly cost him, "Not always."
"Okay." You turned your hand over on the table, an offering. The same scar on the same wrist. "That's what I needed to know."
His hand moved to yours slowly. The contact of it was â warm. Solid. The particular weight of something that had been a long time coming finally arriving.
Outside, Gotham was loud and difficult and entirely itself.
Inside, Bruce Wayne held your hand across a small table and said nothing, and you let the nothing sit there, and it was the most he'd given you yet.