Chapter Text
Danny has a heart on his wrist like everyone else, and he has all but confirmed that his soulmate doesn't live in Amity, which he's secretly very happy about.
The thing is, Danny dies when he's 14 years old. Sure he comes back to life afterwards, but the damage is done. He'd looked into it to make sure, there are cases of someone very briefly passing away before being resuscitated. In each of these cases, their soulmate's tattoo would fade to black, regardless if they had met or not.
Danny knows that his soulmate believes him to be dead, and there's nothing he can do about it. He doesn't know what will happen when they meet, will the heart shift or stay black? Any reports he could find online about the subject didn't delve into what happens beyond the heart fading.
As for Danny's own tattoo, it remains mostly unaffected by his death. There is a fascinating side-effect of the heart changing from red to green when he goes ghost, most probably because he stops relying on his heart, switching to his core, which runs on ectoplasm.
But that aside, Danny doesn't notice a difference. His heart is still it's regular old red colour whenever he's human.
There's nothing he can do about any of it until he actually meets his soulmate, so until then it's a waiting game.
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Jason was 13 years old when his soulmate died.
It had been a regular afternoon, he was hidden away in the manor's library with a big stack of books he was planning to plough through.
It happened as he was simply turning a page. The red heart on his wrist caught his eye, and he froze in terror.
It just turned to black.
It didn't fade like what people have described, oddly enough. Instead, it flickered back and forth between red and black, as if unsure where to settle, before it stopped and stayed firmly black.
Jason just sat there, refusing to take his eyes off his tattoo.
That was where Alfred found him hours later, after the sun had set and the natural light in the library consisted solely of the dim glow from the moon.
The butler had originally sought out the boy to inquire about his absence at dinner, but could tell at a glance that something was very wrong. He approached carefully.
"Master Jason? Is everything quite alright?"
Jason numbly turned his head up to look at Alfred. He looked at the man that was always there when he needed him, even when Jason was damn sure he didn't deserve it.
He looked into the kind eyes of the man that had become like a grandfather to him, and he finally stopped holding back.
He wept silently, allowing his eyes to let out the tears he had been holding back. The tears flowed down his face, and had anyone other than his grandfather Alfred been watching he would have been embarrassed by the pitiful sniffling sound he let out as he wiped at his tear-stained cheeks with the back of his hand.
He wordlessly held out his wrist, showing the now firmly pitch-black heart stamped there.
The moment Alfred laid eyes on the tattoo his heart clenched, the older man feeling a pain that was beyond words with the realization of what his grandson was going through this early in his life. He quickly reached out and held Jason in a tight embrace.
For the first time in many, many decades he felt incapable of fulfilling his job.
After all, how do you comfort a child that has just had their one special person, their other half, cruelly ripped away from them before they even got to lay eyes on each other?
"I'm so sorry my boy."
As much as he loathed it, the words were all Alfred had to offer.
He wanted to curse the world, for doing this to the poor boy. Yet all he found himself able to do was silently pray for a miracle, that this wouldn't be the boy's fate.