Chapter Text
It started with a chicken.
To be fair, it wasn’t the chicken’s fault.
“Move,” Damian snapped, glaring at the bird.
The chicken blinked. Danny, standing behind the coop fence, leaned on a pitchfork and raised an unimpressed eyebrow.
“Leave Cluck Kent alone. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
Damian froze. That voice—
“You—”
Danny narrowed his eyes. “Yeah. Me.”
Jon appeared behind Damian, arms full of fresh corn. “Oh! You two finally met. Uh… again?”
Damian dropped the corn Jon had handed him earlier. “You’re alive.”
Danny gave a half-hearted shrug. “Depends on your definition.”
“You died .”
“Twice,” Danny corrected. “But who’s counting?”
Damian’s eyes darted. The glimmer of Lazarus energy around Danny, the familiar shape of his face, older now.. but still his . Still his twin . A memory buried so deep it had started to rot. Danyal. Alive. Glowing. Smirking. Not running into his arms. Not saying his name.
“You didn’t come back.”
Danny’s grip on the pitchfork tightened. “Yeah. I didn’t.”
“You knew who you were. Who I was.”
“Eventually.”
“You never tried to contact me.”
“I had a new life. New family. After the second death, things got… complicated.”
“You could’ve come back.”
Danny’s core flickered cold. “To what, Damian? A family that let me die the first time? A twin who barely remembered I existed?”
Damian flinched like he’d been struck. “I didn’t forget .”
“You stopped looking.”
“I was a child !” Damian barked. “They told me you were dead. They buried a body.”
“Was it mine?”
Damian’s mouth opened, then closed. His face went blank.
Danny huffed a breath. “Didn’t think so.”
A long silence stretched, thick and bitter.
Cujo, sensing the tension, phased in with a low growl and placed himself between them.
Danny softened only slightly. “Down, boy. He’s not worth it.”
Damian blinked at the ghost dog. “That’s yours?”
“His name’s Cujo. He’s family.”
Jon cleared his throat. “Should I… be here for this?”
“No,” both twins snapped.
Jon shuffled backward out of the emotional blast radius.
Damian stared. “You really don’t want anything to do with me?”
Danny met his gaze, calm, and cutting. “I spent a decade rebuilding my identity. I finally feel like a whole person. I don’t need to tear that down to relive the ghost of a family I barely remember.”
“And yet you bonded to his ,” Damian muttered, nodding toward the Kent house.
“They offered me food and didn’t try to stab me. Pretty low bar.”
“I only did that once.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing.”
Damian’s mouth pressed into a hard line. “I wanted you back.”
Danny shrugged. “Too little. Too late.”
For a second, Damian’s expression cracked. The grief hit first—years of silence, guilt, blurry memories of shared cribs, and split birthdays that never happened. Then denial, then anger, then bargaining.
“Just give me something,” he said. “A way to make it right.”
“You can’t fix it.”
“I want to try.”
Danny hesitated.
Cujo walked over and sat on Damian’s foot. Damian blinked at him.
“…Traitor,” Danny mumbled.
Damian didn’t move away.
Danny exhaled. “Help me fix the chicken coop. Then we’ll talk.”
Damian nodded slowly. “Acceptable.”
As Damian helped, he couldn't help but steal glances at Danyal.
He didn't think he'd ever seen him this relaxed before.
He didn't think he'd ever seen him smiling, even as they were five, a year before he lost him.
He doesn't remember ever hearing his laugh. Or maybe he did… Just not anymore.