“You don’t have to do this.”

Jason stares down at the wax-paper cup in his hands. He stares at the three scoops of chocolate ice cream, drizzled with caramel syrup, so he doesn’t have to look at Dick.

“Do what?” Dick says. He has his own cup of ice cream, balanced precariously on his knee, like he didn’t just spend seven dollars on it.

“You know,” Jason says. “Be all—all nice to me and shit.”

He can feel Dick watching him, so he looks up. Dick has his head tilted sideways, watching Jason like he’s some kind of puzzle.

“Okay,” Dick says. “But I want to.”

Jason curls his fingers around the cup. “Why?”

“Uh, I don’t know, because I like you?”

A plastic spoon sticks out of the ice cream. Jason stirs the caramel into the chocolate.

Seven dollars. That would have lasted him a week, when he was on his own. He would have made it last.

“Hey. Little wing.”

The nickname draws Jason’s gaze up. Dick only calls him that in costume—on the rare occasions he stays in Gotham long enough to patrol. He’s never used it during the day before.

Dick smiles at him. His smile is soft and careful. It reminds Jason of Bruce, somehow, without looking anything like Bruce at all. “Is something wrong?” Dick says.

“Why?” The question is easy, once Jason says it. He looks out at the street in front of them. The grey clouds overhead. “It’s—it’s not like we’re soulmates. Bruce—he has to take care of me, or he’ll—or the bond would just bother him all the time. But you don’t even like Bruce. You don’t… you don’t have to keep hanging out with me, just because….” He trails off, because he still doesn’t know why Dick keeps coming around the manor and teaming up with him on patrol and taking him into the city to get ice cream.

Dick takes a deep breath.

“Okay,” he says. “That’s a lot.”

Jason scowls. He scoops up a spoonful of ice cream and jams it in his mouth. For seven dollars, he’s not letting it go to waste.

“First of all,” Dick says. “I’m not doing this for Bruce.”

“I know,” Jason says. Dick barely listens to Batman, when they’re both in costume and the whole city of Gotham is on the line. He would never let Bruce push him around about anything—especially not Jason.

“Okay,” Dick says. “So do you think I have to be your soulmate to care about you?”

Jason shrugs. When he puts it like that it sounds stupid, but Jason doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why Dick keeps being nice to him, after Jason called him a dickhead the first time they met and took his old costume and his old name without even asking. Jason is trying to be nicer now, since Dick explained about where Robin came from and what it meant to him, but he just keeps fucking up. He called Dick a slur last week, because he didn’t know it was the wrong word, and he was sure Dick would never want to talk to him again, but here he is. Buying Jason ice cream and sitting with him on the steps of the Gotham Public Library.

He doesn’t know. If he knew why Dick was being so nice, maybe he wouldn’t have a pit in his stomach like he’s doing something wrong.

“Okay,” Dick says. “Well, I don’t. It doesn’t matter if we’re soulmates or not.”

Jason frowns at him. “Yes it does,” he says. “We wouldn’t’ve even met if we weren’t—soulmates with Bruce.” It still feels weird to say that out loud. Soulmates with Bruce.

And he doesn’t hurt them. That might make sense, if Bruce had hurt Dick and Dick was trying to keep it from happening to Jason too, but Jason is pretty sure Dick wouldn’t snap at Bruce and pick fights with him if Bruce was actually abusive.

And Bruce has never hurt Jason. Never even touched him without asking permission.

“Right,” Dick says. “But we’re still brothers—”

“No we’re not.”

As soon as he says it, Jason knows it was wrong. He sees the hurt in Dick’s eyes, and the pit in his stomach opens wider.

“You—you keep saying Bruce isn’t your dad…”

And Bruce is Jason’s foster parent. And he keeps saying he wants to adopt him. Jason isn’t sure he’s going to stick with that, but even if he doesn’t, Jason is basically Bruce’s kid until he turns eighteen. And—he likes that. He’ll be Bruce’s kid for however long Bruce wants him around.

Dick sighs. He looks out at the street in front of them, instead of at Jason. He eats some of his blue cotton-candy ice cream.

“You know,” he says, after a long silence, “my parents weren’t soulmates.”

Jason blinks at the sudden change of subject. Then he processes the words and blinks again in surprise.

“Really?”

Dick nods. “They met in the circus,” he says. He stares out at the buildings across the street, but Jason can tell he’s not really looking at them. “My dad was training to be an acrobat. And my mom already was one, when she joined. She was a dancer, too, pretty much her whole life, so she taught him a lot of things. And when he got good enough to perform on his own, he asked her to join him.” Dick smiles. “It takes a lot of trust, to perform with someone. You have to know them really well. How they move, how they think, how they play to the crowd. They got to know each other really well. And then they got married.”

The look on Dick’s face is one that Jason has never seen before. He looks faraway, like he’s seeing back through time, watching a memory play out in front of him.

“Were they happy?” Jason says.

His parents were soulmates, and—sometimes he thinks they hated each other. They must have liked each other at some point, or they wouldn’t have gotten married, but by the time Jason came along they were just angry and bitter and sad.

“Yeah,” Dick says quietly. “They really loved each other.”

For a minute he doesn’t say anything else. Then he blinks, and seems to remember where he is. “My grandparents—Dad’s parents, they weren’t very happy about the wedding. I guess they were more traditional, and they wanted him to wait for his soulmate, but Dad always said…”

He trails off. Jason feels cold seeping into his fingers and uncurls them from around his cup of ice cream.

“He had this saying. I don’t know if—if he heard it somewhere else, or if he made it up, but he—well, he would say it in Spanish—”

“I speak Spanish,” Jason says. Dick shakes his head.

“Not his Spanish. He spoke Romani Spanish. Caló.” He shakes his head again, as if brushing something off. “But he always said—the soulmark shows you the road, but you do the walking.”

He looks at Jason again. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks.

“Oh,” Jason says.

Dick looks down at his ice cream, and the moment passes. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says, digging his spoon in. “Soulmarks are pretty important. I don’t know where I would be if… if I never found Bruce.” He touches his collarbone, where his soulmark is hidden under his shirt. Jason has seen the edge of it before, poking out from the neckline of his Nightwing suit. It looks different from Jason’s. “But my parents weren’t soulmates, and I didn’t have marks for them either—”

“No one does,” Jason says. Babies don’t get soulmarks. Everyone knows that.

“But you still love your parents, right?” Dick glances up at him again, and falters. “I mean—”

“I get it,” Jason says, before Dick can trip over himself apologizing. He knows what Dick means. “And you still make friends and stuff.”

“Right. Exactly. Donna and Wally and Vic, and Gar and Kory, they aren’t my soulmates, but I still love them. I like spending time with them, and I want to make sure they’re okay.”

“Yeah.”

“Because I do the walking. I can still choose who I want to be friends with, who I care about, even if I don’t have a mark pointing me at them.”

Jason looks down at his own ice cream, slowly melting into a puddle of brown goop. He stirs it with his spoon. Bruce’s mark stands out on his wrist.

“Is that why you left?” he says. He glances up. Dick stares at him. “Are you walking the other way?”

Dick doesn’t answer. The silence stretches out, and Jason starts to think maybe he didn’t get the metaphor, or he’s using it wrong. Then Dick nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess so.”

They don’t talk for a while after that. Jason’s stomach doesn’t feel so bad, so he takes the opportunity to eat more of his ice cream. Dick does the same, tapping his foot against the concrete step in a pattern that Jason almost recognizes but can’t quite place.

“Anyway,” Dick says. “It’s the same for you. Your soulmark doesn’t have to tell you who the most important person in your life is. It can help you figure it out, but—you do the walking.”

“Yeah,” Jason says. “Okay.”

He never thought about soulmarks like that. They always seemed so important, so final. But Dick walked away from Bruce, and Dick found Donna and Wally and the rest of the Titans on his own, and even if Jason gets to be Bruce’s kid, he wants to have friends like that someday.

He eats a little more ice cream. Most of it is gone now. The little bit left over is melted to liquid, swirling around in the bottom of the paper cup. Dick finishes his and leans back to toss the cup like a basketball into a trashcan ten feet away.

“Thanks,” Jason says. “For the ice cream.”

“You’re welcome,” Dick says. He sounds like he means it. He always sounds so much like he means it. “I’m glad you liked it.”

“Yeah.”

They sit on the steps for a while, watching cars go by and listening to the city.