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Catalina Flores is his soulmate.
He knows, deep down, that nowadays the idea of soulmates was just that — an idea, an old fashioned fantasy that people clung onto. It’s not like you couldn’t be with your soulmate, but if’s been proven time and time again that you don’t have to be with your soulmate to be in a happy relationship.
Your soulmate does not need to be the love of your life anymore.
And Dick can breathe, knowing that. Knowing that it doesn’t matter if she was destined by the universe to be “the one” for him, because he can only see him and Barbara together for the rest of their lives.
He doesn’t find out for a good while into their partnership, and when he does, he brings Barbara out, ready to tell her everything. Because this kind of stuff, as unimportant as soulmates were in the modern world, it’s still something he feels that he needs to come clean with the person he’s in love with.
So it goes starts off well, Dick taking a nervous breath and telling her he has some extremely important news, and Babs agrees to take a walk with him while he gathers up the nerves to confess everything he’d learned in the last month.
But before he could break it to her, Cat comes in like a storm and shows the matching mark and Dick feels his heart shatter at the look of despair on Babs’ face.
“You asked me out here to break up with me?!” Barbara screeches.
“No! No, Babs, it’s not like that! I— Cat, can you please—“ Dick floundered, Babs looking between them, disgust and anger spelled out on her face.
“I can’t believe you!” Barbara shouted. “After all these fucking years— I thought we agreed we didn’t give a shit about this stuff!”
“We did! I don’t! Babs, please, can we talk somewhere else?” Dick begged.
Catalina leaned forward, lips grazing his cheek with a smirk at Barbara, “C’mon, Dickie, she’s angry and it’s understandable—”
“Catalina, can you just leave us alone for a sec?”
“No, we are done talking!” Barbara furiously glared.
“Wait, Barbara, please—“ Dick called after her, but she’s already gotten away, down the street and the strangers only block his view of her.
And she’s gone, and Catalina’s watching him, looking between him and where Babs had disappeared off to. He’s exasperated at her actions, feeling shitty with the way things ended up happening, and he goes home, telling her that he needs some time to think and come up with a way to apologise to Barbara.
Catalina Flores is his soulmate.
Blockbuster is dead, and he let her kill him, and then he’s on the roof, and then she’s there as well, and all he can think of is how poisonous he is, and then he thinks that Catalina really must be the one he should spend the rest of his life with because he’s a murderer and she killed him.
So he ends up letting her drag him around, hotel from hotel, and they fuck and sleep and eat and she goes out to do stuff and a lot of time must have passed without him realising it in a permanent state of limbo.
Eventually, there’s an emergency at Gotham, so he ends up so close to marrying Cat because if anyone could love him it must be his soulmate. Eventually, after the emergency, Amy confront him and he brings himself in, feeling guilt and sickness and shitty.
He gets off lightly — far too lightly, and it eats at him, that he’s supposedly the innocent one in all this, when there’s blood on his hands, anger in his veins, and Blockbuster’s dead at his feet, Catalina on top of him—
Catalina Flores goes to jail for fraud, no one for murder, for any blood spilled or souls shattered. She goes to jail, and he feels like the rug’s been pulled from under his feet and he doesn’t know, doesn’t want to acknowledge why he’s so unbalanced, so untethered.
Babs refuses to even look at him anymore, and there’s an obvious giant wrench that’s been thrown in their relationship and Dick isn’t even sure if there’s anything in their relationship to salvage anymore. When they come around to know each other, Dick doesn’t hold it against her when Cass threatened him if he ever hurt Barbara again.
Dick’s poison, and he thinks that the Cain can see it too, how he’s no good for Babs or Tim or Steph or Bruce. Dick thinks she can read all the shitty things he’s ever done, all the ways he’s broken the trust of everyone around him and let them down, and she probably can.
Catalina Flores is his soulmate.