Chapter Text
Bruce Wayne's mark appeared a few days after his 18th birthday. The letters materialized slowly, in strokes of aggressive handwriting:
“take off your little mask and show us who you really are”
Even before the words were fully formed, the writing itself worried Bruce. It was messy, erratic, like angry scribbles on his skin. The mark ended up taking half of his forearm, which was noticeably bigger than the average. To top it all, it had manifested in a deep, intense shade of black.
Bruce looked at it for hours, confused, trying to process his feelings. Unlike most kids, he had never paid the strange phenomenon much attention. He looked forward to it, but he assumed the mark would contain the first words Rachel ever spoke to him. He couldn't remember them, and he couldn't bring himself to ask Alfred if he did. They were toddlers when they met, and it felt like they had known each other since birth.
Those angry letters looked nothing like Rachel's neat and elegant handwriting. The words themselves were cryptic, and he could not imagine a context for them. He looked at them for hours, swallowing the bitter disappointment. Later, he calmly reminded himself that “soulmarks” were a little known phenomenon anyway, full of myth and superstition. From a purely scientific point of view, it didn't mean anything at all. This brought him some comfort.
He never told Alfred, but he never hid it from him either. The man respected Bruce's wish to ignore it, and even though the strange nature of the mark worried him too, he never brought it up.
Bruce did start wearing long sleeves more often, and even discrete adhesive patches in the summer. Covering marks wasn't uncommon. Though their significance wasn't fully understood, they were considered a personal matter. Questioning those who chose to hide them was deemed impolite. Jewelry, patches and makeup were the most common solutions. It worked for Bruce, and the mark stopped bothering him after a few years.
It wasn't until his flight back to Gotham, back to his life, that he thought about his mark again. He had spent years wandering, finding himself and his place in the world. Learning how different cultures treated the mark had been enlightening, but he remained indifferent to it. Ducard's teachings only mentioned marks in passing. Their doctrine was too practical and focused for that brand of mysticism, so most of their advice revolved around concealing them, or using them as identifying marks.
For a long time, he assumed the “mask” was a reference to his identity. It didn't occur to him that it could be a literal mask, until his plans to become Batman began to take shape.
When the first fully assembled cowl rested between his hands, he took a moment to read over the words before trying it on. “Take off your little mask”. He laughed.
He barely thought about the mark after that, too focused on his work as Batman to be intrigued by it. And in a way, he felt some measure of relief. The words made sense now, if only slightly, but they were easier to imagine in context for Batman than they had been for Bruce Wayne. When the Gotham Police Department's posture on the Bat became official, he wondered if his soulmate could be one of the disgruntled cops who didn't appreciate his work. The thought amused him. Later it occurred to him that his soulmate could be a criminal as well, and he stopped thinking about the mark altogether.
His work was too important for Gotham. And he still loved Rachel. Nothing else mattered.
When he heard the words for the first time, he didn't notice right away. He didn't notice they were his words, the mocking puzzle that had brought him so many headaches for so many years. He was too focused on fighting, on saving Rachel, and only after they plummeted down the building and he felt the impact of the car did the echo of that voice ring on his head.
“Oh, sure. You just take off your little mask and show us all who you really are!”
Maybe he misheard. He told himself that, stunned after the crash, holding a terrified Rachel in his arms. It had happened too fast to be sure.
- - -
Once the dust settled, he checked the security footage.
Watching the events unfold again, the way Joker had terrorized his guests, made him burn with anger. Seeing Rachel's intervention made him proud, but he worried about the possible repercussions of that. He hoped Harvey could keep her safe.
He examined the Joker closely, trying to find any details that could reveal more about him. He had done the same with all available Joker footage from different sources, but details without context were worthless. He needed a way to put them all together, make them tell him Joker's story, but for now it was a fruitless effort.
He watched his own arrival, paying close attention to the following fight. He would have to review it later, hoping that the man's rabid fighting style would reveal something about his origins. His training. If he ever had one, besides the ruthless streets of Gotham.
Then the Joker grabbed Rachel. Bruce turned the audio up, and when he heard the words, he knew them by heart:
“Oh, sure. You just take off your little mask and show us all who you really are!”
Well, it certainly explains the handwriting.
He paused the video and looked down at his forearm, weary. He wished it away with an intensity he had never felt before. All the thoughts and reasoning that had brought him comfort over the years felt insufficient in that moment. No matter how skeptic, no matter how he tried to rationalize it, it felt like a punch in the gut.
He rewound the recording and listened to the words a second and third time. There was no question anymore.
His eyes fixed on the Joker, wondering what force in the universe decided that murderous monster was his soulmate.
- - -
The Joker got his mark in his youth, too. He was never a fan. It was an ordinary mark, neat handwriting, short and discrete.
“you are going to love me”
He hated it. He hated the arrogance in the words, like he had no choice on the matter, no control over who he fell in love with. They evoked the image of a self-aggrandizing prick, a pompous flirt, always confident that their conquests would give in to their charms. It made him want to spit in the face of cosmos.
With time, the very concept of a soulmate became absurd to him. He poked and scratched at the mark from time to time, laughing at all the concepts it represented. Fate. Love. A perfect someone for you, out there somewhere, chosen by some unknowable force... completely against your will.
Around the time he truly became the Joker, the mark became nothing but another identity feature to hide. Police records noted them, if present, but they were a secondary priority and rarely as useful as fingerprints and other records. He didn't feel like completely removing his, however. Some people did, bitter and angry, or jaded and hurt, most often with acid or fire. The Joker had his fair share of scars already, and he was not a fan of adding more to his body, but he put a knife to the mark every now and then. Or a cigarette. It didn't matter. The tissue healed fast, and the scars left behind weren't enough to completely distort the words. They were mangled, but legible.
He laughs bitterly at nature, and science, wondering why no other place of the human body can reconstruct tissue that well. He licks his scars.
The night he goes for Dent and finds the Bat instead, he is ecstatic. The force of his body pushing him away from the girl makes him dizzy, he doesn't process the words until the Bat's punches clear his mind. At that point, they begin to repeat like a hellish echo.
“Then you're going to love me!”
He gets it, now. It's not an arrogant flirt introducing himself to him (oh, he always knew his soulmate would be a guy). It's just a silly joke. And the Batman is telling it.
He wonders why this revelation doesn't make him feel any different. He already knew they were soulmates, in a way. This is just fate telling him, “You were right”. The universe, patting him in the back, telling him “congratulations, you figured it out!”.
He pinches the mark, leaving traces of face paint all over his reddened skin. He smiles, then laughs, and then his laughter becomes a desperate howl full of bitter resentment.