Jason Todd x Reader | Soulmate AU
The tattoo on your arm read:
"You gonna move or are you just gonna stand there looking pretty?"
You'd had them your whole life — neat dark letters wrapping the inside of your forearm, permanent and unhelpful, offering absolutely zero identifying information about the person who would one day say them to you. No name. No context. Just fourteen words that managed to be simultaneously a little rude and a little flirtatious and completely unreadable as to whether the person saying them would mean it as one or the other or somehow both.
Your mother had called it characterful.
Your best friend had called it concerning.
You'd made your peace with it. Whoever they were, they were apparently someone who said exactly what they thought, moved fast, and had a specific kind of humor that operated in the space between blunt and charming. You'd built a rough sketch of a person from fourteen words over twenty-something years and tried not to get too attached to the sketch.
You were a little attached to the sketch.
Gotham was not a city you'd chosen so much as landed in — job opportunity, affordable rent by the standards of someone who'd never been to Gotham and didn't yet understand what affordable rent in Gotham meant about a neighborhood — and you'd been here long enough now to have developed the particular Gotham-specific survival skill of simply continuing to walk when things happened around you.
Things happened a lot in Gotham.
Tonight's thing was a fight in the alley beside your building, which you heard before you saw — the specific sounds of impact, something hitting brick, a grunt — and you made the Gotham calculus instantly: not a mugging, wrong sounds for that, too much back-and-forth, and there were two distinct voices which meant—
You turned the corner anyway because you were, as your best friend had noted on multiple occasions, genuinely terrible at self-preservation.
The alley was a disaster. Three men were down in various configurations of unconscious, and a fourth was currently being held against the wall by a figure in a red helmet and a leather jacket, which — Red Hood, you'd seen enough Gotham news to recognize Red Hood — who was saying something in a low voice that had the quality of a thing you didn't want to hear the specifics of.
The fourth man made a decision. Bad one.
He had something in his hand — small, dark — and you did not think, you just reacted, the way you did when something bad was about to happen and your body moved before your brain caught up.
"Hey!" Loud, sharp, aimed at the man with the weapon.
It worked, which was a miracle. He startled. The Red Hood moved — fast, faster than anyone had a right to move — and the thing was handled in about two seconds, the man joining his colleagues on the alley floor.
You became aware that you were standing at the entrance to an alley in Gotham at eleven at night having just yelled at a man with a gun. Your brain, now catching up, had several notes about this.
The Red Hood turned around.
The helmet was expressionless by design, which made it somehow more unnerving — no face to read, just the red visor, the broad shoulders, the leather jacket, the general impression of someone who was very large and very capable and currently looking directly at you.
"You gonna move," he asked sarcastically, and his voice was low and a little rough and had an edge of incredulous to it, "or are you just gonna stand there looking pretty?"
The alley went very quiet.
Not painfully — not quite. More like warmth, sudden and specific, the feeling people described and that you'd read about and filed under things that won't happen to me because you were practical about these things, you'd gotten practical, and yet here it was, the warmth spreading up your forearm exactly where fourteen words had lived your whole life.
The letters were glowing. Faintly, gold-warm, the way they did when — when—
The helmet looked back at you.
"What," he said. Flat. But something had changed in his voice, the edge of incredulous gone, replaced by something more careful.
"Your — say that again." Your voice came out strange. "What you just said."
"Which part." Not quite a question.
He was very still. The kind of still that felt like a held breath, like something balanced on a very narrow edge. He looked at your arm — at the glow of it, faint and warm in the dim alley light — and then back at your face, and you couldn't see his expression, you couldn't see anything behind the helmet, but the stillness of him was communicating something anyway.
"Huh," he said finally. Very quiet. Almost to himself.
"You just yelled at a guy with a gun," he stated with a breathy laugh.
"In a Gotham alley. At eleven at night."
"That's—" He stopped. You got the impression he was doing something with his face behind the helmet that he was grateful you couldn't see. "That's insane. That's genuinely insane."
"I have been told," you said, "that I'm bad at self-preservation."
"Clearly." But the rough edge of his voice had shifted into something that wasn't quite dry and wasn't quite warm and was somehow both. "You live around here?"
"That building." You pointed. "Third floor."
He looked at the building. Then back at you. "Of course you do," he said, mostly to himself.
"It means I've been running this block for eight months and my soulmate lives on the third floor and apparently nearly got shot tonight because she—" He stopped. Seemed to realize how much he was saying. "Nothing. Forget it."
Your heart was doing something unreasonable.
"You've been running this block for eight months," you said carefully.
"I patrol. It's a thing I do. It's not—" He made a gesture. "It's work."
"I never stopped anyone on the street and asked them to look at my arm, no." Flat. "I'm not — I don't do that. I didn't think—" Another stop. The careful stillness again. "I have fourteen words on my arm that are very loud and extremely unhelpful and I wasn't exactly optimistic about the context they implied."
You looked at him. At the helmet, the jacket, the alley around you with its unconscious occupants, the Gotham night in all its grim and complicated glory.
He pushed the jacket sleeve up slowly, the leather sliding back to reveal the inside of a forearm — and the tattoo there, dark letters, words you knew because you'd said them, or would say them, or had just said them approximately forty seconds ago in a Gotham alley at eleven at night.
Your words. On his arm. His whole life.
The matching warmth was there too, faint gold, the same glow as yours.
You pulled your own sleeve up without being asked.
He looked at your arm for a long time.
"You gonna move or are you just gonna stand there looking pretty," he read aloud. Quiet. Like he was checking the weight of each word. "That's what I said."
"I almost said something else." He sounded slightly stunned. "I almost said — something about moving, but different, and I changed it last second."
"What would have happened if you hadn't?"
"I don't know." He looked up from your arm to your face. "I don't want to know."
You thought about eight months. Him running your block for eight months, and you in your third floor apartment, and the specific arithmetic of almost — how close and how long and how many times you might have walked past each other in the ordinary way of a city that never made anything easy.
"I'm—" You started. "My name is—"
"I know," he interrupted, Then, registering your expression: "I told you. I run this block. I know the neighborhood. I don't — it's not weird, it's just—"
"It's a little weird," he admitted shyly.
A pause. Below you one of the unconscious men made a noise and did not wake up.
"You could tell me yours," you asked, "Since we're doing this."
The stillness again. Long enough that you t1hought he might not — that this was the wall, the place where it stopped, where the helmet stayed on and the name stayed private and you went upstairs to your third floor apartment with a glowing arm and a story you wouldn't know how to tell.
"Jason," he offered slowly.
Just that. Careful and quiet, like something he didn't take out often.
"Jason," you echoed back. Checking the weight of it. It was a good weight.
He was looking at your face again with that quality of attention that felt like inventory, like accounting. Like someone who'd stopped letting himself expect something finding it anyway and not quite knowing what to do with his hands about it.
"You should go inside," he stated seriously, "It's late and this block is — just go inside."
"Are you going to keep running the block?"
"That's generally how it works, yeah."
"Okay." You pulled your sleeve back down. The warmth was fading to something quieter, settled, permanent in a new way. "I make coffee in the morning. Third floor, the window with the bad curtains. If you're ever — if you wanted to—"
"Genuinely terrible. I've been meaning to replace them."
"I'll find it," Jason assured you with a laugh. And the rough voice had gone fully warm now, all the edge of it soft, the way something sounds when a person has given up managing it. "Go to sleep."
You stood in your kitchen for a while, jacket still on, looking at your forearm where fourteen words had lived your whole life and were now quiet, settled, finally exactly what they'd always been waiting to be.
In the morning you made coffee and opened the window with the bad curtains.
