Growing up, Jason was a hopeful boy who loved to read. In those stories, soulmates sometimes had difficult situations, but everything ended out perfect. He thought those would be a reality for him, he even thought that maybe, after Bruce adopted him, that he would get an easy life and an easy pathway to his soulmate. Maybe another vigilante, maybe a romantic, amazing meeting, maybe he’d be so impressive—

He got murdered before that could happen.

The anger underneath the surface of his skin, burning and blazing and waiting to explode, replaced any thought of a soulmate from his mind.

Instead, he began to obsess over killing the Dark Knight. His previous father, mentor, and the man who sugarcoated the world as something fixable and told him that the stories were true, and his life would be perfect and everything would end out alright. Yeah, Bruce was a fucking liar. So Jason set his mind on destroying him, and destroying the Joker, and finally getting his father to know what he did, and how much he hated him. Maybe the idea of it would just destroy the old man, and that idea made Jason happy.

But then time passed, and that hate simmered and burned, and slowly turned to ash, and he even grew back with his family. Not much at all, and especially not to Bruce, but to some of his kids—Jasons siblings. Things seemed to get better for once in his life; he should’ve known it was too good to be true, and that it would all blow up in his damn face.

“Get away,” muttered Jason as coldly as he could manage, clad in his Red Hood gear, with the mask hardly hiding his expression of plain conflict. The kid of the Joker stood across from him, and maybe Jason was being cruel, neglecting someone who was to be his permanent responsibility; but how could he help it? He was scared, and that itself scared him.

The pull was magnetic and made him even more stubborn, more desperate to stay in place and prove the universe wrong, that it made a mistake. “D-don’t even try anything.”