Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Despite what Todd may say, taking in the Talon was Father's idea, not Damian's. Yes, Damian may happily bring home stray cats, birds with broken wings and a liberated beef cow, but he is not usually the sort of individual who gets sentimental about people.

He leaves that to the rest of the family.

Father had taken in the wayward assassin out of some sort of misplaced sentimentality about the child he had once been. Apparently Father had been fond of 'Dick Grayson, of the Flying Grayson's' at one point and so had been particularly emotionally distressed to encounter the scarred efficient killer that boy had become.

Damian had rolled his eyes behind Father's back at his effusive and frankly embarrassing display of emotion when the Talon had come to the cave unmasked, seeking the Batman's help in destroying the Court of Owls.

Talon had caught Damian's annoyance and almost smiled. Well, smiled was too strong a word for it, but the yellow eyes had almost danced, and Damian, trained as he had been to pick up on such cues, had noticed it.

Damian had been pleased. Finally someone who understood what he had to deal with.

Yes, the Court of Owls was to the League of Shadows as a gnat to an eagle, but, there was no denying the efficacy of their Talons.

Damian had been in support of his father's decision to allow the Talon to stay though for much more logical reasons:

a)The Talons were an augmented force of trained fighters, who showed a definitely predisposition for psychotic tendency

b) and while most of them had been disabled or destroyed on the Night of the Owls, not all had been accounted for.

Therefore:

                c)   All things being equal it was probably wise to keep their Talon around just in case they ever needed him. Waste not, want not, etc.

Not to mention:

                d) Seeing point a), it wasn't as though they could just let him go.

Father had not been impressed by Damian's calculated reasoning but had employed him to argue the case with the sorry pair of mongrel strays he called 'adopted sons'.

Todd and Drak had heard him out and eventually given up resistance. It had helped that Grayson had been the model prisoner/ guest. He didn't cause any trouble. Didn't speak out of turn with the Bat, and didn't give Alfred any grief, which was more than could be said for the rest of them.

And then Father died. Jason Todd took up the mantle of Batman even if Tim Drake, did the bulk of the intellectual heavy lifting, as far as Damian could tell.

No one seemed to know what to do with Damian. Father had barely wanted him here, but Todd and Drake recognized that sending him back to his mother would only make them an enemy for life. Damian had to admit he didn't want to go back to the assassins. So, he acquiesced to their suggestion that he remain in Gotham, not officially involved in the vigilante business but, not fully excluded either.

It was worth kowtowing to their demands if only to see the look of complete shock when he actually said yes. And so began Damian's life as a civilian.

He had written his GED weeks ago, so there was no school to attend. No crime to fight, or even assassin training to keep up. No one cared what he did or where he went...with the possible exceptions of Titus, Cat-Alfred, and Batcow.

Damian, being in a constant state of mutual loathing with Drake, and finding Todd equal parts infuriating and crass, and not having been raised to associate with the help, found himself spending a considerable amount of time in the company of the formerly brainwashed assassin.

Though the more time Damian spent with Talon the more he felt the term 'brainwashed' was wildly inaccurate to the methods employed by the court of Owls and implied a level of sophistication to their techniques which was, quite frankly, undeserved.

He knew that the Talon unnerved the rest of the family with his chalk white skin and yellow eyes- they feared the way he moved so silently and so skillfully, and were horrified with the modifications that allowed the man to regenerate, and never eat.

Honestly, you'd think they were the ones that were children given how weak stomached and nervous they were. Damian was raised by the League of Assassins, it would take more than some chop-shop turn of the century medical enhancements to unsettle him.

Damian observed the assassin with the same intensity and care that he usually reserved for his animals, and in some ways that was how he thought of Talon. Just a peculiar creature that had been trained to a particular purpose, whose needs were a mystery and whose care would not be undertaken properly unless Damian dedicated himself to it. A task he found infinitely preferable to interacting with the fully human so called 'normal people' that his so-called 'brothers' kept trying to force him into associating with.

Talon was like people, but better, because he seemed to judge on the same criteria that the animals did, and Damian was far better at interacting with his pets that with the other members of his family. It was all a matter of earning and retaining trust through actions, not words.

Todd would not let Damian out on patrol, so he found himself seeing to the habitat of the assassin in captivity with the same intensity he had trained Titus, or set up Batcow's in-cave paddock or learned Cat-Alfred's body language.

It was difficult to meet the needs of an assassin who was by the more conventional definitions of the term less -than-alive. Todd liked to snicker and call him 'undead' or 'the zombie' which were not only ridiculous, but inaccurate terms that Damian would not tolerate.

While Grayson did not seem to perform the necessary biological processes usually necessary to remain so, there was no doubting that he was in some sense of the word at least, very much alive.

And since he'd been content to remain chained up by psychotic owl enthusiasts, and detained by Father (despite Damian being relatively certain that the assassin could have not just avoided and escaped capture but beaten Father in a fight if he'd wanted to), Damian has taken it upon himself to discover and maintain the necessities of said not-exactly-life for the assassin until such time as the...creature showed the ability to do so for himself.

With that in mind, Damian takes some time to observe the subject in the current environment. The containment cell was not designed with long term detention in mind, but due to the subject's willingness to cooperate and technical status as one of the Court's Victims, they've left him there for want of anywhere else to put him.

It's takes intense long-term observation to glean even the most subtle hints of information from him. He is after all, like Damian, a living weapon, no doubt trained to ignore discomfort and pain as much as all other minor frustrations that come with their line of work.

But, Damian compiles notes, and cross-references them against the medical and scientific files Father had assembled and begins to make and then act of the theories he develops about possible improvements to the Talon's habitat- that is holding cell.

The first item is to add to the general comfort of the cell which is stark and empty of everything except a hospital cot where the assassin spends most of his time lying down under a thin blanket.

Damian raids the cave-designated linen cabinet and assembles a large pile of blankets and pillows of varying weights, thicknesses and textures. Taking great care not to be observed he places them directly in front of the door to the cell with a small note (he's not sure of the Talon's level of literacy but he figures it doesn't hurt to try), unlocks the door where he can be observed, and retreats to a hiding space to watch what happens.

If it were anyone else he would have tossed them a single blanket and expected them to be grateful. However, the Talon is probably not capable of expressing such a complex emotion and is, by the nature of his enhancements, very sensitive to the cold, and despite what Tim likes to say Damian is not actually a sociopath completely lacking empathy.

Damian is willing to cede his own petty power games in the face of someone who is most likely to be both immune to and distressed by such tactics.

Damian does not enter the cell because, the Talon is a creature that has been mistreated and abused, and so should have a space of his own, one in which he knows unpleasantness or demands will not follow. Like crate-training a puppy, it can serves to both to contain Grayson and provide psychological security for him.

Damian has brought up this protocol to the rest of the team (though he knew enough about what they thought of his own emotional development to leave out the crate-training analogy) and they had more or less agreed.

Damian retreats to the computer and observes the Talon's arrangement of his habitat while pretending to be researching an ongoing case. The Talon chooses to arrange his cell to maximize defensive abilities. He arranges the pillows and blankets in the far corner from the door and using the cot as a barrier rather than a bed.

Damian resists the urge to scoff at this choice. While this does maximize defensibility it also hampers the Talon's own ability to escape should he be outmatched or overwhelmed by numbers.

Damian would have chosen the corner directly to the left of the door. Such a sharp turn in a small space would put his small size and greater maneuverability at a greater advantage particularly against a larger heavier opponent. That way Damian would have the option of fighting or fleeing.

But, the Talon doesn't have much chance of fighting his way through the cave even if he made it out of the cell, so Damian supposes it is a sensible enough choice to prioritize defense over escape.

The Talon peers over the edge of the bed, makes eye contact with Damian and nods solemnly.

Damian thinks of kittens and puts on a softer expression before nodding in return.

The Talon slowly disappears behind the bed into the pile of blankets.

Damian turns to grin at Titus where he is curled up on his blanket next to the desk. “It worked!” he whispers.

The next step in enriching the Talon's environment is slightly more complicated. It's all very well to see to physical comfort, but when it comes to trained assassins physical comfort truly is the least of it. The real trick is mental and physical stimulation.

Damian has decided, for obvious reasons, to start with mental stimulation, so that he'll have more extensive findings to present to the family as support for his request to grant their slightly incarcerated guest gym privileges.

It's harder to know where to begin. The physical was easier. The cave is cold and often slightly damp. The Talon has a sensitivity to cold. His room lacked basic amenities and means of retaining warmth. Therefore, Damian had provided blankets, and warm clothing.

Simple problems with simple solutions. Like removing Batcow from the slaughter house. It was the first and easiest step. The real trick was dealing with behavioural and psychological problems resulting from the time in the slaughter house.

The problem is he doesn't know what Talon likes, other than killing which is pretty much off the table and he doesn't know what he's allowed to do, or most importantly, what stimuli the Talon's likely to have negative reactions to.

Given the situation Damian's relatively sure that he's not going to be dumb enough to do something that actually triggers a post-traumatic reaction, but the thing is judging by the Owl's methods it's quite likely that he could frighten the Talon simple through exposure to unfamiliar elements.

Has Talon seen a tv before? A video game? Would they distress him, or would he enjoy them?

Would he know to solve one of those 3-d puzzles you can buy? Would he want to?

The same question applies to almost everything. What's his reading level? Would he know how to solve sudoku? Would he draw unprompted if given art supplies?

Damian has been studying the Talon for several weeks, when, to his immense surprise, the assassin catches him at his observation.

Found out, Damian drops out of his hiding sport and wanders around to the front of the cell. While he fully believes that the assassin is far too well trained to ever admit to any potential weaknesses that could possibly be used against him, Damian supposes there's no harm in asking. Perhaps he will be honest about small things, inconsequential annoyances that can do no serious harm, and then once Damian sees to them they may establish a basis for trust, and the assassin will be willing to communicate more.

Thus far he has remained nearly silent except when spoken to directly, but in those instances he always responds in a cooperative manner offering up any and all information that Drake even so much as implies he wants.

That had led to a long detailed speech outlining the Court's training and enhancement methods that had left them all standing in stunned silence, so surprised and so horrified by the flood of information that they hadn't bothered trying to get him to stop. It was useful after all, but it was the sort of thing no one on the team would have dared ask about directly.

The Talon looks at Damian wryly now. “Your training is impeccable.” he says.

Damian stiffens and stands up straighter. It's been a long time since anyone has cast doubt on his training.

“Of course.”

The Assassin moves forward in a crouch, liquid grace and muscles like steel cables, as always. “Who made you?” he asks, tilting his head to one-side like a bird.

Damian should probably lie, but the part of him that will always belong to the league of assassins, to Ra's Al Ghul and his mother's legacy, feels he owes this man some professional courtesy.

“The League of Shadows.”

“Ah. One of Ra's Demons. Though a very little one.” The Talon inclines his head. “I was your age when my training started. The League training methods must start early for you to already be so good.”

Damian puffs his chest out. “My training commenced at the moment of my birth! The League finds that with rigorous training beginning soon enough, there is no need for your own masters...crude enhancements.”

Like the fist time they met, Talon almost smiles.

“I haven't seen you fight, but I'm sure it would be very impressive.” he says so solemnly that Damian is half-certain the man must be teasing him.

Damian scowls. “I've seen you fight.” he tells him. “It is not...unimpressive.”

The assassin inclines his head at the praise. Again, Damian is almost sure he can catch the slightest whiff of mockery in the gestur. But, that's ridiculous, the Court would not allow one of it's Talons to tease. Though perhaps he made mockery of his victims before killing them.

Damian is surprised to find that thought uncomfortable and chilling.

“Do you find the accommodations satisfactory?” he asks.

Talon cocks his head. “Is that why you were watching me?”

Damian shrugs. “You're too good to admit to discomfort if asked. So, I've been taking notes.”

Talon considers him with his huge yellow eyes. “I've seen you looking after the cow. You're very careful about it's pen.”

Damian tilts his chin. He's quite proud of how well Batcow is doing considering she's living in a cave. “I am tasked with the care of the creatures residing in this cave. That includes you.”

Talon almost smiles again and his eyes are dancing. “ Liar. I've been watching you. It's the old one- Agent A who looks after the human inhabitants of the cave.”

Damian glares at Talon. “Agent A is not as familiar with the ways of assassins as I am. He is also less able to defend himself...should you prove to be less cooperative than you have pretended.”

Talon tilts his head again. “I'm not planning on hurting anybody.”

“For people with our sort of training it is quite easy to harm someone without intending to.” Damian points out.

Grayson is look at him again. Damian fights the urge to shift uncomfortably under the weight of that searching yellow gaze.

There is a feeling, one that Damian has gotten better at identifying since he' started working with his father, that Grayson might be about to say something or ask something. When he first arrived Damian would have taken it as an invitation to press harder, to whip the sword out and threaten dissection, but Father had taught him that when you saw that look, that hesitation the best course of action was to wait it out.

Finally Talon clicks his tongue and shakes his head. “You're not a little demon after all, are you? Just another little bird like me.”

If Todd or Drake were to ever imply that Damian was anything like them he would have taken it as a provocation of war. Somehow, Damian doesn't mind it when the Talon says it, despite his belittling phrasing.

After all, they are both weapons no one seems to want anymore.

Damian scowls all the same though. “I'm not a bird. I'm a bat.”

The assassin tilts his head to one side as though if he just looks at Damian from a different angle maybe then he will look less like a bird and more like a bat.

Talon shakes his head. “No. Not a bat. Just a little bird. Another little Robin someone will eat and spit out as something else.”

Damian doesn't quite know what Talon means by that.

He decides to ponder it. The problem with the Talon is that anything he says could be the half-mad ramblings of a man tortured nearly into insanity, or it could be the canny observation of someone who managed to withstand it.

Damian institutes a policy where he warms the water before giving it to the Talon, and informs Alfred that the Talon prefers warm meals (based on observation this is true).

Most of the time the Talon barely eats or drinks, but Damian supposes that even small adjustments will help establish a basis for trust, and so far the only thing that Damian has discovered Talon likes, other than killing and possibly knives, is warmth.

Ergo: All that Talon consumes is now heated like baby formula and based on Damian's reconnaissance this change has gone over well.

Damian doesn't spend all his time assessing the Talon. The Talon isn't actually that interesting, and unlike Alfred the Cat, Titus and Batcow is nowhere near the level of being comfortable enough with Damian for there to be any kind of reciprocity in the care that Damian is lavishing on him.

So, Damian throws himself into his training, and goes over all the reports and case-files that Father had open before the...accident.

Todd was quite insistent when he took up Father's mantle that Damian would never ever join him on patrol, and would return to the streets of Gotham as a vigilante only over his and Drake's dead bodies.

That last proposal was tempting, but the drawback was that if Damian did murder Drake and Todd then a) Pennyworth would be upset and b) there would be no one to act as Batman without Todd to literally fill Father's shoes.

So, Damian was trying to prove that he could be helpful. That he could be trusted. Even in small things. He wasn't going out patrolling on his own. He wasn't sticking his nose where it didn't belong and he wasn't beating Todd and Drake to within an inch of their lives every other day despite the fact that they both so clearly deserved it.

So Damian has been doing research on an open case. It's small, relatively mundane but would act as a means of earning trust and goodwill with his Father's...wards.

“Tt.”

He's putting the finishing touches on his presentation. It's a proposal for him to stakeout Two-Faces current operation. Two-Face is a sad excuse for a criminal who Damian could dispatch in less than ten minutes if he was allowed to but, he had a suspicion that Father was actually secretly fond of his pack of madmen, so Two-Face was allowed to continue breathing.

He doubts it will amount to much. Two-Face is too mentally unstable to be able to organize and enact a plan with any level of sophistication, but it would get him out of the cave and working on the streets, and since it's just surveillance there's no need for him to make any sort of official debut as a vigilante with a name and costume.

He thinks it's a very excellent compromise.

Todd stops him when he's two sentences in.

“What part of 'over my dead body' was in anyway unclear, Demon-brat?” he asks in a tone of indifference and mild annoyance.

Drake just glances at him and goes back to his work on the computer.

Damian swallows. “None. But, this wouldn't be an active role, only surveillance and-”

“One of us would have to leave off patrol to sit with you.” Drake says softly.

“I could do it myself!” Damian protests.

“You're ten. We can't let you lurk on rooftops alone in Gotham.” Drake insists.

“I am more than capable of defending myself! Isn't that the whole reason I'm not allowed out in the first place?! My size and abilities makes me a perfect candidate for this! I've proven time and time again that I'm more than match for anyone operating in Gotham, including the two of you.”

Drake glances at him disdainfully. “The fact that you think that being able to behead someone at eight years old makes you eligible for field work is precisely why you're banned.”

“But couldn't one of the girls supervise me if your adamant about not letting me out alone?”

“They could if it was something important, but I'm not going to ask Oracle to pull them off whatever they're doing just for Two-Face's latest set of antics.” Drake insists.

“But-!” Damian protests.

“Can it Replacement.” Todd snaps. “Time to rip the band-aid off. We're telling him.”

Damian gulps. “Telling me what?”

Drake and Todd exchanges glances.

“Your mother put a price on your head.” Drake blurts out. “You show your face in Gotham every goon on the Eastern Seaboard will be ready and waiting to take a shot at you. Not counting all the freakin' ninjas your mom probably sent.”

Damian stares up at them in shock. “She wouldn't. Mother wouldn't-I...You're lying!! She wouldn't do that to me!!”

Todd looks at him sympathetically and goes to put a hand on Damian's shoulder before he thinks better of it.

“Look, kid. I know Talia, and maybe she does love you, but love or not, she put a price on your head so you're staying here in the cave where we can keep you safe.”

Damian stares at his feet. “I could take them, you know. Anyone she sent after me. If you'd lift the stupid edict on killing I could cut them all down easy. I've killed hundreds of members of the League of Shadows! Mother used to have the entire league try to kill me on my birthday!”

Todd and Drake stare at him in shock. It occurs to Damian that neither of them had known the extent of his body count. Judging by their faces they hadn't had any idea.

“The answer is no, Damian.” Todd shouts.

Damian scowls and is ready to keep arguing but, the bat-signal alert had gone off and the urchins have to go get ready for patrol.

Damian is determined to make one more appeal and after a moment decides to follow them and catch them just before they go out.

As he approaches the changing room he hears Todd's raised voice.

“Jesus, Timmy. It's fucking sick.”

Drake speaks too softly for Damian to hear his reply, but he knows there is one.

“I know he's been better, but let's be real, that bar was pretty fucking low. He decapitated someone his first night out.” Todd continues.

“He brags about killing people since he's old enough to walk as though it's something to be proud of and not something that makes him a freak.”

Damian swallows.

Father's pets have called him lot's of names since he showed up and he is self-aware enough to see how, in their eyes, he deserves it. But, until recently he didn't care at all what they thought of him, or what they felt he did or did not deserve.

But, he is young, and he's felt so alone here in this foreign country with no one but these sons of his Father who detest him and there's something about the vitriol with which Todd spits the word freak that makes Damian pause, take his hand off the door and walk away.

If Father were still alive Damian might fight. But, in all honesty part of him had been thinking more and more lately that he should go running back to his mother. Life with the League might be difficult but at least he a place there, a role where he made sense.

Here he's just one more memorial to the real Batman. The one Todd and Drake knew but he never really did.

Damian wanders over to where Titus is sleeping on his blanket and wraps his arms around the dog. He doesn't cry. Damian hasn't cried in years. He just presses his faces into the warm doggy neck and gives in to his greatest weakness: he pretends for a moment that he's not the Heir to the Demon or the Son of the Bat, and that he's small enough for childish nonsense like loneliness.

He's distracted by a persistent tapping.

“Hey. Hey. Hey, little bird.”

He turns and finds Grayson pressed up against the glass of the holding cell tapping at it with his fingernails.

The assassin looks like a cross between a small child at the window of a candy store, and a zombie trying to escape quarantine.

Grayson sees Damian look and adopts a slightly manic expression. “Little bird. Little demon. Can I pet your dog?

Damian blinks and looks down at Titus, who looks up at him in irritation that the petting has stopped. Titus is sweet and trusting and likes everyone (case and point he's been known to wag his tail at Drake of all people), and so if Grayson were to have a psychotic episode or just a vindictive streak he could snap Titus' neck before he could blink.

He glances back over to the computer where Cat-Alfred is stalking around looking up at the ceiling intently. He likes to try and catch the bats.

“No.” Damian answers, before jumping up and running to grab Alfred. “But you can pet the cat!”

Alfred is much less trusting than Titus, far more irritable and liable to lash out when threatened, not to mention more nimble and faster. If the Talon tries to kill him, Damian thinks it's even odds that Alfred will escape.

He unlocks the door and hands the cat to the assassin who takes him very gently and despite Alfred's mild indignation cradles him to his chest like he is something fragile and precious.

The assassin hold the cat to his face, ignoring the scratches.

Damian wraps his arms around Titus.

It occurs to Damian that when it comes to the mental enrichment of Grayson's habitat he could just ask him.

“Are you bored?” he asks.

Grayson does that head tilt thing he does.

Right, stupid question, boredom was probably not a concept he was really familiar with anymore. After all, given the Court's methods the Talon probably considers every moment not being tortured or frozen alive to be akin to bliss.

Damian decides to rephrase. “What did you do before, that you liked? Do remember having hobbies?”

Grayson smiles, and it's so bright and so genuine it takes Damian aback for a moment. He knows he's never smiled like that.

“I used to fly.” Grayson breathes, like it's something holy. Like it's every present his mother used to surprise him with at 3 in the morning because she was too excited to see his face to wait, every respectful paternal hand Father put on his shoulder, every baklava, every time Titus licked his face, every thing good...all rolled into one.

Damian purses his lips and glances around. Todd and Drake are out on patrol. The Talon was smiling to himself as he sort of bobbed, sort of danced around the cell holding Alfred to his cheek.

What the hell, they already think he's a demon-brat and a freak, it's not like he has anything to lose.

He heads to the keypad and unlocks the door. He jerks his head.

“I think I could arrange that.”

Grayson gapes at him in surprise and then runs to catch up with him. For a moment Damian has to tamp down the urge to reach out and take his hand. It's ridiculous, the height of childish stupidity.

But, he used to walk like that with his mother. She even sometimes had cats she was fond of.

He'd never held his Father's hand like that. Batman had been too big, too great for Damian to be comfortable being seen as anything less than what he had trained so hard to be: A Warrior, the Heir to the Demon.

There wasn't any need for that with Grayson. He understood. Not to mention Damian wasn't so fragile that he require validation from a half-mad half-dead monstrosity created by a mad group of bird-enthusiasts.

“You know a group of Owls is really called a Parliament?” he informs the other assassin. “It's the completely opposite principal to a court! How stupid were those inbred morons?”

Grayson glances at him. “Pretty stupid.” he says solemnly, and this time, Damina knows the other assassin is teasing.

Damian is tempted to smile back, but only for a minute.

They reach the gym with it's parkour set up and the gymnastic equipment. Damian flips the switches that turns the lights on and Talon immediately crumples to the ground with a scream and his hands over his faces.

“Talon?!” Damian squeaks. “I mean- Grayson?! What is it?”

“My eyes.” Grayson groans. “Too bright.”

Damian turns half of them off, so that the room becomes as dim and shadowy as the cave.

“You can look now, Grayson.”

“Dick.”

“Tt. I admit I was careless but I hardly think we need to resort to name calling-”

“No. My name. It's Dick. Richard. But, my parents called me Dickie-bird, and then that got shortened and-”

“Tt. It's not a very dignified name.”

Dick looks up at him where he's still sitting on the floor.

“That's alright, I'm not a very dignified person. Unlike you.”

Damian sighs and then nods towards the equipment. “I know it's not the same, but you can practice in here for a little bit, Richard.”,

Dick stands up in single fluid motion. “Thank you.” he darts forward and ruffles Damian's hair. “But, I don't need practice. I am preserved at a moment of perfection.”

And he bounds off, and he's right.

Even to Damian's expert eye every movement is perfect. His stance, his form, his landings are all above reproach.

He's so busy watching the technique that it takes him a minute to notice the larger pattern. The tiny flourishes and extra movements that Richard includes.

They are not necessary but they are beautiful.

Richard wasn't lying when he said he could fly.

It's more than just falling with style, like Todd had grumbled once when Drake had reprimanded him for his sloppy acrobatics. It was like all the things Richard couldn't be as a Talon were in the way he moved.

This was how he'd broken the brainwashing, Damian realizes. They couldn't take away his acrobatics because they were too useful to his work as an assassin.

It's hard to make someone forget that they're a person if they have something like that. Weapons don't feel love, or joy. Weapons don't add flourishes for the effect or tack on an extra somersault for the joy of it.

They couldn't make him forget that he was a person, because every time they defrosted him and sent him on a mission he'd flip off a rooftop and remember what it felt like to fly.

For a fleeting moment Damian burns with jealousy that Grayson had been able to escape even if it was only inside his own head and only for that tiny moment between when he jumped and when he landed.

The feeling surprises him. What had he ever really needed to escape?

He brushes it off and rolls his eyes as Grayson sticks the landing and the pivots on his toes, hands in the air, showing off for an invisible crowd.

Chapter Text

After that night in the gym, looking after the Talon is just another part of Damian's routine.

He gets up early, goes for a run with Titus, returns to the house, has breakfast, feeds the animals and then brings Dick his breakfast and turns on the television for him (Damian's set it up on the outside of the glass wall of the cell), before doing his morning training and school work. On Wednesday's he goes into town for his acting lessons (Pennyworth has not noticed that he borrows the Rolls-Royce), but the rest of the time he heads down to the cave and takes Richard out to the training room for his exercise while Damian spars.

It's strange. Damian only practices certain things in front of the Talon (he trusts the assassin but only so much as he trusts anyone who's not Mother or Father), just in case he has to fight him one day, and Dick pretends he's not watching him like a..haha...hawk as he does complex acrobatics around the gym.

Then Damian takes Dick back to the cells, giving him Alfred to play with if the cat is around, and settles down in front of the cells to find some way to spend the rest of the afternoon.

Damian has solved the issue of mental stimulation by modeling behaviour for the Talon. He brings an activity, usually one of his own hobbies, but occasionally something he thinks the Talon might particularly enjoy, down to the Cave and works on it in view of the assassin. If the assassin shows interest Damian offers it to the Talon to try.

He's gone through a number of different little activities this way:  The Talon is an enthusiastic, if deeply untalented, crayon artist (Damian recognizes you can make an improvised weapon from a crayon but not a very good one), an avid yoga practitioner, a fan of poetry (but only if Damian reads it aloud as Grayson is more or less functionally illiterate), but worst of all his favourite activity is curling up against the glass of the cell and watching the little television that Damian wheels over for him.

It's deeply annoying, but, in the long weeks since Father's death Damian had realized how unused to being truly alone he was. At home even if Mother was away there'd been teachers and servants and trainers. Here there is only Pennyworth. Todd and Drake being absent most of the day with either Bat or Wayne Inc related business.

Pennyworth had threatened to get Damian enrolled in an ordinary school, so he'd gotten his GED, and was working on coursework for a few different college credits, but it was different now. No one cared. They just cared that he was occupied with something that kept him too busy to sneak out and murder people.

Pennyworth was busy with the maintainance of the house, and so that left the captured Talon as the only person who actually tolerated and seemed to enjoy Damian's company.

So, every afternoon, Damian either does coursework or reviews case-files while watching nature documentaries with Talon. Nature documentaries having been discovered to be the safest genre for Talon to watch since dramatic pieces were too unpredictable, even if Damian pre-screened them (if the Lion King was too distressing for the Talon than nothing was safe). Damian had then made the egregiously poor decision to screen one of the recorded performances of Cirque du Soleil which he thought might please the Talon given his background but had instead precipitated an episode of extreme emotional distress which Damian had been at a loss for how to remedy.

So, being unwilling to tolerate the more inane content, Damian had settled on Nature Documentaries as the genre which they would watch. Planet Earth was a particular favourite since the small furry creatures were usually killed and eaten off-screen, but there were only so many episodes and Talon disliked too much silence, which meant that that there was a lot of repetition of content.

So they'll sit, both wrapped in blankets, on different sides of the glass as David Attenborough's voice-over explains the wonders of the natural world. Damian would work on something else- mathematics, or literature, or some other worthy subject initially, but more and more, as it becomes increasingly clear that no one cares what he does so long as no one dies and nothing expensive is destroyed, he just draws.

Unlike Grayson, who scratches out brightly coloured scribbles of whatever takes his fancy (robins, smiling suns wearing sunglasses, flowers, bluebirds, an elephant), Damian tries to stick to the principles of observational drawing his mother had insisted he learn to help with surveillance and recall.

He draws Titus a lot. Occasionally Alfred, but the cat isn't so good about staying still.

Once or twice, Grayson.

Grayson coos over the drawings as if they are impressive. Damian supposes they are satisfactory (and pretends that he doesn't have a different sketchbook that he's filled with all the nightmare images that he just can't seem to get out of his head. He also pretends he didn't come down one day to find Grayson had ripped up his own drawings or coloured over them in black with just the white of the barn owl masks gleaming out)

Grayson likes it when Damian draws him and even asks to keep one of them. He frowns at it and tilts his head to the side.

“Do I really look like that?”

“My skill in capturing a likeness is not flawless yet, but, yes, more or less.”

Grayson grins. “I'm so handsome!” he beams, “Even with the eyes, and the veins.”

He twirls around his cell on one foot, in imitation of a ballet pose he must have seen on television somewhere, before carefully placing the picture near his bed.

“What's wrong with your eyes?” Damian asks from where he's sprawled out on the floor working on a schematic for his motorcycle, glancing up to scrutinize the assassin. He's not as tall as Jason, and not as short as Tim. His skin is chalk white, with a latticework of black veins, his eyes are yellow. He doesn't look quite normal, but compared to people like Man-bat or Killer Croc or Cheetah, Damian's hardly found Dick's appearance to be out of the ordinary at all. 

“They're yellow.” Dick replies wrinkling his nose. “It's awful.”

Damian thinks of the unsettling bright green of his grandfather's eyes.

“I like them.” he decides “They are like a lion's eyes.”

Dick looks sad. “But I don't want to be a lion?”

“Tt. What's wrong with lions? They just lie in the sun all day, while the lionesses do all the work. Besides, the odds are much higher of being killed by a hippo.”

Dick giggles and wanders over to sit cross-legged on the floor next to the glass.

On television a bower bird obsessively tends his nest.

Grayson tries to peer over Damian's shoulder trying to look at the drawing, but loses interest when he finds it's a technical plan and not a sketch of something he finds interesting.

Grayson huffs and rolls onto his back. A bit like Alfred when he wants someone to pay attention to him.

He watches the television absently for a moment.

“I've seen this before.” he whines.

Damian scowls at him. “Well, what do you propose we do as an alternative?” he snaps.

That shuts Grayson up for a good long while.

“Do you want to learn to fly?” he asks suddenly, as though it is a brilliant epiphany.

 Damian's instinct is to reply that his acrobatic skills are perfectly adequate for his needs, but he hesitates because...Grayson can fly. It's more than the necessary maneuvers, it's something that makes him happy.

Damian doesn't know much about being happy. Drawing isn't something that really makes him happy so much as it is something that fully occupies his mind and quiets down all those things he doesn't like to think about. The animals come close, he supposes, but there's nothing that smile the way acrobatics does for Grayson.

He nods, and Grayson bounds up to wait by the door while Damian unlocks the cell.

In many ways it's just like every other teaching session that Damian has had. Grayson corrects his form and demonstrates proper technique. They work up to more complicated moves once they've established Damian's abilities. Grayson is unyielding in his demands for excellence, and Damian pushes himself to meet those expectations. 

But, it's also nothing like the other lessons Damian has had.

Grayson is careful and gentle, which makes sense. He doesn't know how to be with a person who he doesn't want to hurt and who doesn't want to hurt him (at least not really, Damian would love to learn the art of the kill from this most graceful assassin but knows instinctually that the Talon would not like to teach him.)

Grayson watches him eagerly the entire time, reminding Damian of nothing so much as the way Todd or Drake will turn to look at his reactions while they watch a movie they feel is somehow important or significant. Damian doesn't understand it now anymore than he understood it when Drake and Todd sat him down to watch Star Wars.

It's pleasant though, to have his reactions monitored in a way that's not malicious or demanding. He knows Grayson understands his skill, and he knows Grayson is not doing this for any particular reason other than boredom and a genuine curiosity to see if Damian can learn.

Damian performs adequately, but even after one session Damian knows he'll never have Grayson's easy grace that not even the court of Owls could kill.

Grayson tosses and catches him, and Damian makes sure not flinch at the sensation of icy cold hands on his bare arms.

All the same, it's...nice- to fall and have someone to catch you. Damian's not sure the last time he took a leap without a weapon in his hand. He remembers the birthday before he came to Gotham when he'd parachuted down with his sword in hand to meet his mother's ambush.

It's funny, that he's come to trust someone as deeply odd as the Talon is. Biologically the man should be in his mid to late twenties, physically he died in his early twenties and emotionally he's a mixture of surprisingly wise, and embarrassingly immature, but Damian supposes that makes sense since he's done almost nothing except kill people since he was eight years old.

Maybe, Damian likes him because standing next to the Talon, the Heir of the Demon doesn't seem like such a monster in comparison.

Later Damian goes out to his acting lesson. He likes it. To her he's just a slightly eccentric little genius, she's not condescending but it doesn't even occur to her that he could ever hurt her.

He's getting good he thinks.

On his way back he stops at a department store and buys some things for Grayson.

He descends to the Batcave mostly hidden behind a huge pile of electric blankets.

Grayson looks up from where he's ensconced in his blanket nest in front of the TV.

“Blankets act to conserve and store body heat. If your body does not generate heat, than they do nothing! Why didn't you say something?!” Damian demands to know.

Grayson stares at him in blank incomprehension “Uh. I like the blankets.”

“But they serve no purpose!”

Grayson tucks himself into his blanket bit more. “They insulate against the cold floor.”

“Tt.” Damian scoffs and unlocks the door.

He heaves the piles of electric blankets inside. They aren't heavy, just unwieldy.

“These should fulfill your needs far more efficiently.” he declares.

Grayson just stares at him.

“My blankets are fine.” he protests.

“Tt.”

Damian glares at the infuriating assassin, but then remembers his resolve to gain his trust and so does not run over and yank the regular blankets away.

Instead he holds one of the new electric blankets out at arms length. “It's better. You'll see.”

Grayson stares at the blanket like it might bite him.

Damian wraps the blanket around himself to demonstrate that it is not a trap, and then turns it on.

He'd forgotten that Alfred loved heaters of any kind and the cat scampers over play almost immediately. He starts rolling on the blanket while purring like a lawn-mower and that seems to decide things for Grayson who plugs a blanket in and looks intensely at Alfred.

Damian sighs, and shoos Alfred into the cell. Alfred seems to have taken a liking to Grayson so he immediately scampers over to curl up on the assassin's blanket. Grayson leans down and pets the cat.

Damian whistles for Titus who comes trotting over, and more or less climbs onto his lap as Damian sits down again, with his back to the glass wall of the Talon's cell.

He sighs, and begins scrolling through the DVD menu. He wants to watch 'Deserts' again, but Grayson prefers the Forest and Jungle programming, or anything with whales, baleen whales specifically, the Talon doesn't like Orcas for reasons that Damian has so far not managed to unravel.

He glances at Grayson who's primarily engrossed in whispered conversation with a cat.

Damian selects 'Deserts' and prepares for a hour of enlightenment on the creatures of arid climates (he likes the wild Bactrian camels best). 

It doesn't occur to him until the episode is over that he hadn't closed the cell door. 

Damian is well aware of the sorts of comments his fondness for the assassin have engendered.

Drake, alight with his own perceived superiority and false empathy, quietly discusses with Todd how he supposes it is natural that they would gravitate towards one another. After all, they are both assasins trained from childhood to be the ultimate weapon.

Todd, never so subtle or so smug, mutters crudely about like calling to like, and how the only person willing to put up with Damian the way Dick does would have to be a brainwashed killer.

Alfred expresses mild concern as to whether they will be bad influences on one another but other than that keeps his own counsel. 

The word 'freak' is never used, but it hangs over these exchanges. They use other words. Drake uses terms like 'shared experience', 'medical experimentation', 'emotional trauma', and 'behavioural conditioning'. Todd calls them 'a matched set of weirdos, and says 'at least the Talon doesn't leave as big a mess as that freakin' cow'.

Dick usually looks at Damian if ever they overhear these sorts of conversations. It's a look of fond exasperation. Damian likes to think that what Dick means by it is: 'It doesn't matter what the others say, so long as you thinks I'm alright'.

And Damian does. He thinks far more highly of Dick than just 'alright'. He likes Dick far more than most people, though he supposes that isn't particularly hard since most people are incompetent morons with an over inflated sense of worth.

Dick, meanwhile, is only a moron.

A moron who knows how to scratch behind Titus' ears just right, and appreciates BatCow.

Therefore, he is far and above the usual class of moron in the cave.

Plus, he has the good taste to actually seem to like Damian, which makes him rather unique in Damian's experience.

The schedule has seen some further evolutions since Damian first started letting Grayson into the gym. He now does so everyday, and Grayson teaches him acrobatics every other day. He plays his violin in the cave (but only when the others are out), and he does logic puzzles and math proofs at the desk he also uses for his tinkering with batgadgets.

Grayson hums along and occasionally follows along with ridiculous fitness videos (the supply of nature documentaries where adorable furry creatures only die off screen turning out to not be inexhaustible). Damian has also stumbled upon a new activity for the assassin: adult colouring books. Grayson, having proven himself to be a feeble artist at best, seems more than happy to sit quietly and carefully attempt to colour inside the lines of complex patterns with his crayons (despite Damian's carefully worded request Jason still refuses to supply Grayson with anything as easily improvised into a weapon as a pencil).

Damian also tries to encourage Grayson to practice his reading, but Grayson cannot muster the concentration for materials at his reading level, and gets frustrated when he attempts to read above it.

Damian does calligraphy of Rumi's poetry while watching Birds of Paradise hop about in ridiculous displays, and Dick practices rather outlandish looking yoga. 

As much as Damian wishes he could prove himself worthy of his Father's legacy, he finds he is content with his life as it is right now. He has his pets, he has his projects, and for the first time in what feels like forever he has something like a friend.

And, then Jason roars up in the Batmobile and bursts out of it dragging the limp body of someone who it takes Damian a moment to recognize, but when he does he can't help the scream that bursts out of him.

“FATHER!”

Chapter Text

The Batman is alive. He's back and Dick doesn't know where they've taken him, or when he'll be back in the cave, but...he's terrified.

When he'd seen him get pulled out of that car he'd wanted to scream and scramble back towards the corner like a cornered animal. He wants to get out of here and run away.

But, there's no point in running. Not when there's nowhere to go. Not when the Batman can defeat Owls and tear down Courts, and Talons like it's easy.

But, he can't sit still. He can't stop pacing, and he keeps reminding himself not to bite his lip only he keeps forgetting and chewing on it absentmindedly and then having to hold the shredded pieces of flesh together so that they'll heal before anyone notices that he's done that to himself.

He doesn't want to upset Damian. Not when he knows that Damian is probably happy about this.

Jason notices though. But, because he's Jason, he doesn't push. Instead he just shoots him a questioning look, and let's it go when Dick acts embarrassed. Jason is nice like that- he doesn't poke at things the way Damian does, or Tim.

Dick likes Jason, even if he doesn't trust him. Because Jason is loud, and emotional and so completely unsuited for a life of skulking in the shadows that sometimes Dick has to stifle laughter thinking about him flitting around in the dark. Jason, Dick is pretty sure, was born to stand in a spotlight and scream at the world that they're doing it wrong, and Dick, with his faint memories of spandex and glitter and horses in feathers, can appreciate a God-given flair for the dramatic.

Dick wonders sometimes, what Jason must have been like before the Bat got his claws into him, and taught him about terror, and intimidation and knives in the dark. Jason is emotional which makes him unpredictable, which makes Dick nervous, but of the two lesser Bats, he's much less frightening than soft-spoken elegant Tim with his cold cold eyes.

In Dick's experience emotional people hurt you more often, but cold-eyed people hurt you worse.

Tim is the most like the Batman of anyone in the cave and Dick tries to avoid him, as much as you can avoid anyone while locked in a cell.

Something about him gave Dick the cold sweats, (or would, if he were still alive, and could still sweat). There was just something about him, and Jason and the Batman and the way they were so very impressed with themselves and the way they could control the city through fear that felt...familiar.

Like they were all members of the Batman's little court. Serving his needs, so mindlessly loyal and fighting for him in a war that only they understand or even know about. He's seen what that can lead to. He's fought a war like that before, he knows what sort of body-count it can create.

Hell, he is one of the bodies that that war had created.

Dick used to believe in the Batman the way some kids believed in Santa Claus, but now that he's gotten a closer look at the whole thing, well, he's not impressed.

He doesn't understand. The Batman was supposed to be good. He was supposed to be better than the Court.

But, the Bats go out into the night wearing masks so they can hurt the people they've decided deserve it.

Batman had trained replacements for himself. He'd gotten children to fight his stupid war. Tim may be terrifying but he's also so small it makes Dick sick to look at him sometimes.

At least he's not as little as Damian.

God, poor Damian.

The League of Assassins may have made him, but it was Batman he was working for when Dick met him.

Damian wasn't like the Owls. He wasn't like the Bats either. He wasn't like anyone except himself, or if he was, he was like Dick, just another assassin, except,...little and still alive.

Dick knows how to act around other assassins. It's easy.

(Damian still has a chance. Damian isn't dead yet, and while there was life, there was hope Dick's mother used to say, which had been a curse when Dick had woken up dead)

Damian had a pet cow, and a pet cat, and a pet dog (and a pet undead assassin). He looked after the bats that inhabited the cave, and he just couldn't seem to get the (capital B) Bats to understand him.

Damian didn't move with the street brawler confidence of the hulking Jason or the elegant precision of the littler Tim, and he didn't fight like them. They fought to incapacitate. He fought to maim or to kill. They fought with gadgets. He fought with weapons.

Damian is an assassin and he is so little. He was little like Dick had been when his parents fell, but somehow he was already an assassin.

The more Dick thought about that the more it made something in his chest burn.

Someone had taken a child and made him into a weapon.

How early had they started his training? How much must it have hurt for him to be so good when he was so young? Had he ever even had the chance to learn what it was to be person, or had he always been a weapon?

(Had someone done the same sorts of things to him that they had done to Dick?)

When Dick had first arrived in the cave it had hurt so badly to see Damian try so hard to prove himself worthy, because as horrible as the Owls were at least they made the rules very very clear, but the Bats just expected you to know what the rules are without having to be told.

And Damian had tried so hard to impress them. Tried so hard to be like Jason or Tim or the Bat himself. To be the sort of weapon the Bat would want.

He shouldn't have to be anything. They should have left him alone and let him be a kid but they had used him like weapon, and believed him when he told them that it's what he wants.

But then, the Bat had died, and somehow everything had gotten better.

The older boys had tried to look after Damian. They'd taken him away from the night and the war. They'd begged him not to fight and they'd stopped him when he tried.

So, Dick had decided that maybe Damian didn't need rescuing, and maybe he didn't need to escape. The lesser Bats don't know what to do with Damian, and Damian didn't know what to do with them, but Dick could stay, and protect Damian as best he could, until they all learned.

He's ashamed of it, but it had made him happy to have a mission again, even if it was just one he'd given himself. He doesn't know what that means about him.

Jason talks to him sometimes. Usually he just rants about things and people that Dick doesn't recognize and so won't bother responding to, but he does clap if the swearing gets impressive.

Damian looks after him. Dick's never had anyone look after him before, at least not when they weren't also grooming him to be a living killing machine. He's pretty sure Damian's not doing that. Like, at least 80% sure.

He gets to fly. He gets to watch tv and draw things, and pet Titus and listen to Alfred the Cat purr. Nobody's killed Dick, or tortured him or put him on ice.

It's the nicest his life has ever been. And he's dead, and imprisoned in cave. Which is depressing but, well, Dick tries not to think about it too much.

And then the fucking Batman had to come back from the dead, and Dick just knows that everything is going to change again. For the worse this time. .

He pauses in his pacing and glances at Damian who is sitting on the far side of the cave with his cat in his lap, waiting for someone to tell him it's alright to see his father.

Dick tries to meet his eyes, but it's too far, and Dick is too used to trying to keep people from looking at his ugly yellow eyes to be comfortable looking at someone with them for too long.

He stands by the window and taps on the glass instead. He knows the door is unlocked, but he's still never openly left his cell without permission. He doesn't want to risk getting punished and being unable to help Damian if he needs it now that his Father is back.

Damian looks up at the sound.

Dick smiles. He thinks he remembers people used to tell him he had a nice smile, but he hasn't seen what the expression looks like since he became a Talon, so he's not sure he does it right.

Damian doesn't seem to mind. Dick knows he practices making the right facial expressions sometimes too.

“Want to watch a movie?” Dick asks. “If you come in you can use one of the special blankets you got me.” He knows that if Damian really wanted the blanket he could just come and take it, but he also knows Damian won't do things that he knows Dick doesn't like, so Dick tries to pay him back as best he can.

Damian nods, calls for the dog, and wanders over. He hesitates by the door for a minute, but the he comes in with both his dog and his cat.

Dick twirls in excitement because Damain hardly ever comes into the cell, and never brings both Titus and Alfred with him and that makes Damian smile for real, even if he makes the “T-t” sound that usually means he's annoyed.

Dick carefully arranges his pillows, he electric blanket and the cat, before looking up hopefully at Damian. They've sat together a few times, but never really, like, on purpose. It always just sort of happened. But, this time it is definitely happening on purpose.

“If you sit here.” he suggests, pointing to the spot next to him. “Than Titus could lie across both our legs.”

Damian pauses, but sits and motions Titus over with a gesture. Once he's settled he uses the remote to start the movie. He hadn't thought to bring the TV into the cell, so they're still watching it through the glass, but Dick decides not to bring it up. Little Robin gets huffy if you point out his mistakes.

It's one of the 'Planet Earth' ones that they've seen a bunch of times before, 'Shallow Seas', which sort of surprises Dick. Ever since Damian said he couldn't listen to David Attenborough for one more minute, and Dick had mostly moved on to fitness videos (particularlys ones featuring peppy music and brightly coloured leotards), Damian mostly only ever puts on his favourite movies, and he doesn't usually like the ones with fish.

Except he is slowly sinking down into Dick's pillow nest, and he looks...he looks a like a little kid. It's occurs to Dick that Shallow Seas is actually one of his favourites.

Dick reaches out to brush the hair away from his face and then hesitates and drops his arm.

Damian watches him, but doesn't say anything.

Dick clears his throat. “I'm going to leave soon.” Damian should know. He shouldn't have to come down one day and just find an empty cell.

Damian's eyes flick to him and for a split second he almost looks hurt before he looks away, emotionless again. “It's because of Father, isn't it?”

Dick nods. “He scares me.” he admits in a small voice, and to his surprise, that makes Damian lean against him. Dick wonders if it's sympathy, or if Damian is also scared of him too.

“He wouldn't do anything to you.” Damian tells him bluntly. “He's a good man.”

Dick stops himself from biting his lip.

“That's...that's not why he scares me, Damian... ”

“I wouldn't let him do anything to you.” Damian corrects himself.

Dick sighs. “I know.”

He very carefully brings his arm up and around Damian's thin shoulders, waiting for a slap, or a stab or shove. None of them came.

“I wouldn't let him do anything to you, either.” Dick promises.

Damian looks at him sharply. “Why would you think Father would do anything to me?”

Dick shrugs. He can't put it into words, words are too difficult for something as complicated as this. Something as complicated as the Batman, and Dick's own tangled fears.

When he had escaped the Court he had gone to the Batman because he had trusted that the Bat would bring the heavy hand of justice down on the heads of the Court. That had been all the Talon cared about. He'd just wanted the Court to pay, and he'd believed in the Batman was the only one who could do that.

It didn't mean Dick liked him.

Because, he'd also trusted that the Batman would kill the Talons, as part of that justice. And he'd been alright with that because he'd known he'd done bad enough things that he'd deserve it. (He'd also thought, that maybe, killing them all would be a mercy ).

Dick's honestly not sure why he's still alive, but he's glad he is. He'd thought it was just because the Bat died before he got around to seeing to it that Dick got the justice he deserved, and the new Bat had been distracted by his promotion, and more or less forgotten about it.

Dick hadn't minded at the time, and had been happy to wait quietly for the punishment he deserved.

He suspects now that maybe the Batman had hoped Dick would be join him. Another well trained soldier for his war. One who, like Damian, was trained not just to fight, but to kill.

Dick hadn't lied to Damian. He really wasn't afraid that the Bat would do something to him, (because, really, what was there even left to do?) and he didn't think the Bat would do anything to Damian either. He was more afraid that the Bat would put him to work- put them to work, (after all why keep assassins around if you're not planning on using them?)- and there would once again be missions and orders and targets to be eliminated, and Talon would be too weak to say no.

Dick knows that he'll be too cowardly to rebel a second time. And instead of watching Damian play with his pets and other nice things, he'll have to watch Damian end up just like him. A useless dead thing that only is good for killing.

It makes him want to destroy all the pictures he's made, and all the ones that Damian has given him. They're useless taunts. Just fake ideas of things Dick will never get to have. Useless dead things don't need colours. Useless dead things deserve to stay in the dark all alone, because all they're good for is killingg, and murderers deserve to be shut up in empty white boxes forever.

He doesn't say that though. He doesn't say any of that.

“I'd take you all with me. If I could.” Dick tells Damian instead, because he wants to take him away from this cold dark place in the ground more than anything else. He just doesn't think Damian would ever agree to go.

Damian looks incredulous. “All of us?”

Dick nod and gestures to Alfred the Cat, and Titus. “All of you.”

“Even Batcow?” Damian scoffs, and then something occurs to him. “Can you even drive?”

Dick pauses. “...No.” he realizes. “No, I don't think I can.”

Damian rolls his eyes. “Then you won't be going very far...Do you even have a plan for where you'd go?”

Dick shakes his head. “Just...away.”

“What will you do? How will you live?”

Dick shrugs. “However I like, I guess.”

Damian rolls his eyes. “That is not a very well thought out plan, Grayson.”

Dick lets the subject drop and they sit together and watch the movie. He'll leave with nothing if he has to, but he's got to leave. It doesn't feel like a choice.

Escaping from the cell once he's finally decided what to bring with him (his Talon boots, knives and goggles, plus the picture Damian drew him), is laughably easy because the Bats don't actually lock it very much these days.

So Dick just steps out and then disappears up into the dark shadows at the cave's edges.

He climbs the outside of the Manor to say good bye to Damian, and nearly gets stabbed through the neck for his trouble when he wakes the kid up.

Damian blinks up at him. “You're leaving then.”

Dick nods, sad and a little ashamed. “The offer is still open. You could come too.”

“I can't leave!” Damian protests. “My Father just got back.”

Dick twists his fingers together and looks at the ceiling. “What's your Father ever done for you, little Robin?” he asks, genuinely. “You want to please him so much, but why does he deserve that?!”

Damian glares at him in outrage and hops to his feet to stand on the bed, so they're the same height.

“My Father is a great man! He helped found the Justice League! He's saved the world!” He shouts. “I would do anything for him!”

Dick tilts his head to the side, trying to remember what the Justice League was, and whether they'd had it before he became the Talon.

“I would have done anything for the Court.” he whispers. “For a long time I did.”

“Father's not like them!” Damian yells jumping off the bed to shove Dick. “I've told you that! He doesn't want me to kill! He hates me for it!!”

“But, he still makes you fight!”

“He tried to stop me!!”

Given how successful Jason and Tim had been at stopping Damian from fighting, Dick couldn't help but think that Batman couldn't have tried very hard.

“He let you train with the League of Assassins!!”

“He didn't know about that!!”

“How could he not know!!?!”

“He didn't know about me!!! I lived with Mother! He never wanted me!! I spent my whole life dreaming about meeting him, but when I did he didn't want me!! I disgusted him!!” Damian screams.

There's a shuffling down the hall

“So, he never wanted you, and he hates you, and you'll do anything for him?” Dick asks, sad and confused and reminded of all those years he'd been tortured and all the years he'd been blindly loyal to the one's who'd done it.

Damian's face goes sad. “Well, I'd better become accustomed to that! You're the only one who doesn't despise me and you're leaving!”

His face crumbles and he brings his hands up to cover it.

Dick convulses forward. “Don't cry! Please, little bird, don't- Dami-” he reaches out but Damian pushes him away.

“Just GO! Stop pretending-just leave already!!”

Dick just shakes his head. “No. Please, come with me! We can just run away, and no one will do anything to us anymore and we'll be-”

“Damian?” a voice calls from the hallway. “Are you alright?”

Damian glares at him and points at the window. “GET OUT!!!”

Dick jumps out the second story window, and then makes his way back to the cave.

He sits on the floor of his cell for a long time with his head in his hand, shaking. Because he can't leave Damian here, can he? But, he just wants to get out. He wants to get out of here so badly.

Damian comes down the next morning and stares at Dick through the glass. He's still sitting on the floor.

“You're still here.”

Dick nods.

“Why?”

Dick shrugs.

“I'm already dead, Damian.” he rasps out. “I've been dead for years.” he leans his head against the glass. He's so tired. “So...what would be the point in my running away? It's too late for me.” he meets Damian gaze and holds it, despite the way it makes his stomach roll. “But, you're not dead. It's not too late for you, and you shouldn't have to be alone while you figure that out.”

“T-t” Damian looks away, livid.

“I wasn't alone.” Talon murmurs. “I had the others. Even when they were sleeping. It was...nice to know they were there.”

Damian glances at him sharply.

“I know they're dead. Really dead this time.” Dick adds, in case that has gotten Damian worried. “Most of them at least.”

Damian swallows. “Two other Talons escaped the Court and are living free. A few more escaped us and made it back to the Owls.”

Dick nods.

“Are you really going to stay?” Damian asks.

Dick hesitates. “You were right, when we first talked. I wouldn't get very far. I'll stay, so long as you promise me something-”

Damian nods.

“If the Batman tries use me, like the Court did, even if he's just planning- cut my head off, okay? And if I'm dead and he tries to use you, promise you'll run away?”

Damian blinks. “He wouldn't make you kill.”

Dick shrugs, and points at his paper white skin and horrible yellow eyes. “Do you really think killing is the worst thing you can do to a person?”

Damian bites his lip, and then shakes his head.

Dick nods. He's tired. He's so god damned tired, but the dead don't sleep.

Four days later, Damian turns on the lights in the cell at 5:30 in the morning. Dick blinks at him, and Damian tosses a set of keys from one hand to the other.

“Grab your books and your blankets” he barks, throwing Dick a pair of wrap-around sunglasses, like old people wear on TV sometimes. “We're leaving.”

It takes less than ten minutes to load everything they need into the old station wagon that Damian has somehow acquired, and even with Titus in the back it's still only half full. Dick brings the knives, goggles and boots that were part of his Talon uniform, his favourite blanket, the best pillow, two books, a change of clothes and the picture Damian had drawn of him.

Damian brings what looks like two duffle bags of weapons, one one of clothes, plus a little backpack that Dick guesses has his sketchbooks. Titus sprawls out on the back seat while Alfred meows unhappily from a little crate. Dick wonders what happened to Batcow, but is a little afraid to ask.

Damian starts the car and fixes Dick with a glare. “Watch me carefully. We'll have to get on a highway eventually and when we do you'll have to take over.”

Dick nods, seriously. Damian hits the clutch, puts the car in gear and guns the engines.

They roar out of Gotham on the back roads, and don't stop for a long time.

Chapter Text

There is a part of Damian, (and there always will be) that is deeply ashamed of running away.

It was the act of a coward, and went against everything both his parents had ever tried to teach him.

All the same, when he'd been lying there, knowing that any morning might be the one where he woke up to discover the Talon missing, it had seemed like such a tempting and obvious solution to the Gordion knot of his life.

He didn't have the stomach to be an Al Ghul, and he didn't have the backbone to be a Wayne. Despite all his effort and his struggle this was becoming an increasingly irrefutable fact, so why bother? The ultimate cowards way out. Give up. Admit defeat and do your best to exit the stage gracefully.

Certainly, Damian had felt that he wouldn't be able to find the strength to keep struggling forward without the reprieve in his day that the Talon had become.

It had seemed so simple to decide that he was going to run away with Dick, and give up the legacy of both his parents, because the other option, the one where he let Grayson slip away into the night never to be seen again had proven unacceptable.

Once the decision had been made, concocting the plan had been surprisingly easy. He'd gone through the motions expected of him- he'd sat at Father's hospital bed and listened to the whir of the ventilator and the beep of the heart-monitor. He'd snarled at Drake and shouted at Todd. He'd sat with the Talon and cared for his pets.

All while secretly preparing for his departure. Really it had just taken one phonecall to move the money from the account his mother had set up for him to a new one she wouldn't know about.

Once he had access to money that no one else was monitoring everything became much simpler. This was America after all, and if you have enough money nothing was beyond your reach. Securing a fresh set of identities had been child's play.

After that he'd acquired an appropriate vehicle with sufficient truck space and minimal built in electronic components, parked it on the outskirts of the city, and called his acting coach to let her know he'd be discontinuing his classes.

All told the only difficult part had been finding an appropriate home for Batcow and transporting her there without raising suspicions. He'd prepared a heartfelt story about realizing he'd been selfish to keep her in the cave when she was meant for light and grass and open spaces. But, no one questioned him about it. So he didn't get a chance to use it.

He'd packed his weapons and his sketchbooks. He didn't trust his few items of civilian clothing not to have trackers built in so he left it all behind.

When he and Talon had loaded their belongings, and their pets into the car there'd still been plenty of room and somehow it had been that which had made Damian finally understand Grayson's distaste for the way the Wayne's lived.

Surely, there should be more to the sum of a life than a few sketchbooks and two dufflebags of assorted edged weaponry.

They'd driven all day the first day, arguing over their destination. They drive half-way o Florida because they argue for so long, much to the consternation of both Alfred and Titus.

Dick had been insistent that they should leave the country. Damian had argued that if they crossed a border they'd leave a trail pursuers might be able to follow.

Dick argued for Dubai. Damian proposed Minnesota.

To his shock, the Talon proposes Wisconsin as a compromise, citing some half-remembered story of the place as a reason.

Dick so rarely argued or made suggestions and really, Wisconsin was only one state over from Minnesota, so if you thought about it this meant that Damian barely had to change his plans.

He buys a burner phone and has Dick call to set up an apartment viewing in downtown Madison. They stop at a mall right before it closes. Damian has Dick wait in the car and runs in to buy whatever make-up is necessary for his friend to pass as human under light scrutiny, and a fresh set of clothes for each of them. They've been living out of the car for a week and it's started to show.

Damian applies the foundation hurriedly as they sit in the car that morning. It's sloppy and ugly, and completely obvious but at least it disguises the fact that the Talon has been dead for years.

They building they're looking at is one of the nicer ones. Nice enough that they look out of place in their ill-fitting department store outfits, but not so out of place that the realtor isn't willing to show them around.

Damian decides he like the apartment and then spends the rest of the day on the phone, moving money around and setting up a shell company to buy the building.

They live out of a motel while they wait for the purchase to go through, but when it does it feels like a reprieve.

Damian owns a piece of the real world now. They take possession of the penthouse immediately.

Dick is very pleased about their new home, and grabs Damian into a hug when Damian reveals the furnished apartment to him for the first time. The Talon dances them around the living room, holding Damian so tight that he can feel the hard hilts of the knives Dick wears under his clothing digging into his ribs. Damian doesn't complain. He doesn't think he's ever gotten something so right before.

They make ambitious plans initially, compiling a long list of all the amazing things they're going to do. Damian will attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dick will enroll in adult high-school. Damian will join an outreach program for children his age. Dick with attend support groups for people who have suffered because of super-villains. They'll stop wearing knives, and eat out at restaurants. They'll go to the mall and the movies and learn how to skate.

In the first few months they do none of these things.

Damian still drills relentlessly with his sword. The Talon slips out the window every evening to patrol the neighbourhood, searching for any slim sign that they have been discovered and are being monitored.

Internet shopping becomes their friend, since for a while they are too paranoid to even walk into a store and get groceries (but they still walk Titus every day, hoods up and heads down, trying not to draw attention and by their fear making themselves all the more conspicuous but unable to stop).

There are good days. Sometimes, Damian plays the piano while Dick does impossible looking yoga and tries to sing along at the same time.

They buy video-games and discover that both of them are easily engrossed in them. Damian reads books about the universe, and the nature of time. Dick reads books he swears he half-remembers that tell small, comforting stories.

Damian improves at doing Dick's make-up to the point that they no longer attract stares when they go out.

They're still freaks, but considerably less than they once were.

It's frustrating sometimes, because before their victories used to be so large, marked with battles won, targets eliminated, new techniques masters, and enemies vanquished.

Now their victories are very very small.

They go into a coffee shop and manage to order and eat without attracting funny looks.

They talk to someone at the dog park they sometimes drive to, and the nice middle-aged lady never gives them a second glance.

Dick works up the courage to smile at the doorman.

They try Indian food.

Someone bumps in to Damian on the street and neither of them reach for their knives.

They make it through the night without having to get up and check the perimeter.

Dick speaks to a stranger without Damian having to coach him.

Dick watches a television program that Damian has not pre-screened for him, and gets all the way through without becoming distressed.

They teach Titus a new trick.

Damian goes to sleep one night and leaves his sword in the other room.

They have set backs too and bad days, sometimes very bad days.

Damian nearly breaks someone's wrist at the coffee shop. Dick has a post-traumatic reaction and hides in his room for two days. Damian's first attempts to converse with a child in his peer group end in a shouting match where he calls everyone in the vicinity peasant scum. A young woman's attempts to make small talk with Dick while waiting in line at the pet store nearly reduce the former assassin to tears of panic.

But, sum total, their victories far outnumber their defeats.

September is crisp in Wisconsin, but it's nice to walk. It's nice to feel like they're part of the world and not just looking at it through a glass. They walk a lot, some days, just to be going somewhere.

Titus barks happily when they come in the door, and Damian runs around closing all the blinds so Dick can take his sunglasses off.

Damian's sword is hanging on the wall, above the TV with it's gaming consoles.

Dick sprawls out on the couch, and picks up his latest colouring book, before carefully selecting a coloured pencil from the set he keeps under the coffee table. Alfred the Cat jumps up next to him and starts meowing for attention.

Damian pulls out book and starts reading. Dick bustles around making him dinner. Damian eats quickly, eyes never leaving the page. He's never had the time to read much fiction before. It had seemed so frivolous, though he had been distantly aware that Todd had a passion for literature.

What Damian's reading is hardly literature. It's arguably even below Dick's reading level these days, but Damian finds he can't put it down, and he wiles away the evening curled up on the couch under a blanket engrossed in the adventures of these children who are so like, and unlike himself.

He wakes up several hours later to the blinds open and a shadow at the window.

Grayson must have opened the drapes when the sun set. He said he liked to see the sky, when he could, but Grayson wasn't in the room and there was a shadow at the window.

Damian sits up, and reaches for the knfe he keeps strapped to his forearm, darting forwards to put his face close to the glass and peer out into the darkness.

There's nothing there. Or at least nothing he can see. Of course there's not. They're in the penthouse. Only someone like Grayson could get up here.

The thought is less comforting than he had intended and Damian feels like crying. The world is full of monsters exactly like Grayson. The Court of Owls saw to that.

He grips the hits of the knife that is still strapped to his forearm, glances at his sword and then take it down off the wall, loosening it in it's sheath before carefully moving down the halllway to Grayson's room.

He kicks the door in which scares Grayson enough that he leaps off the bed and onto the dresser like a startled cat, landing with a dagger in each hand.

The room is normal. A makeup tutorial is playing on his ipad. The lights are on low, the way Grayson likes. The closet is open, and a quick check proves no one is lurking under the bed.

Damian closes the door behind him.

“Someone tried to get in.” he informs Grayson.

Grayson hops down off the dresser. “Are you sure?”

Damian shrugs. “There was a shadow at the window.”

That's enough to make Grayson nod. “If it was the court or the league, a window wouldn't have stopped them.” he points out.

Damian nods. He knows that. But, somehow the idea of it being the Bats is more frightening. Damian knows what the League wants, he knows what the Court wants and he's more than ready to deal with both of them in the only way either of them understand.

The Bats are different. He had no idea what they'd track him down for. He has no idea why they'd bother.

Unless it was Father. But that was a thought too filled with bright desperate hope for him to even allow himself to consider it. Father wouldn't come, even if he did recover. Damian reminds himself. Father didn't care. Father had never even wanted him.

Dick is clearly feeling similarly as he paces the room wringing his hands, face covered in half-done makeup.

Damian frowns as he takes it in.

“What have you done to your face?...Is that glitter?...on your cheek?”

Dick shrugs. “Just something to do, when you're sleeping. You know I don't sleep hardly at all. I get bored by myself- and I'm not going to put glitter on my eyes now, am I? I certainly don't want to emphasize them.”

He tilts his head back and forth in front of the mirror. “But I think my bone structure is okay, so I tried to emphasize that instead.”

Damian accepts this information and then tilts his head as he contemplates the make-up application. “You've done a terrible job blending.” He remarks. “You look quite patchy.”

Dick rolls his eyes. “The point is to practice.”

“T-t. We both know I have a steadier hand for this sort of thing.”

Dick sits back on his bed and holds out a teardrop shaped pink sponge. “According to the people on youtube. The key to blending is to dab.”

Damain scrambles up onto the bed, sets it sword done, pulls out the make-up remover wipes from the kit and starts cleaning Dick's face. It's comforting to the see the Talon's dead white skin, and dark veins still lurking beneath the flesh coloured paint. Damian trusts the Talon for what he is, not for who he pretends to be.

Once the makeup is off he leans over and restarts the video that Dick had been watching.

There's something uncomfortably intimate about standing with their faces this close. Except for the other times he's applied makeup for the Talon, Damian thinks he's only ever stood like this when he was in the act of slitting someone's throat. The thought makes him feel shivery and unsettled. He remembers the way the blood had felt when it would spray as the artery was severed, the warm feeling of it on his face.

He blinks and tries to shake the sensation off.

Dick sighs. “If it was them...the Bats...they'll be back.”

Damain shakes his head, frowning at the still playing tutorial.

“Do you do your eyebrows?” he asks, as the person on screen holds up a variety of products for that task.

Dick rolls his eyes. “No.”

Damian starts applying a thin layer of foundation in the palest shade they could find. In life Richard Grayson had been tan and golden skinned. Whatever had made him a Talon had bleached the colour out, and it was just too much work to paint him up in the shade he should have been, if he'd lived. Damian honestly didn't care except that it made finding appropriate foundation somewhat difficult, but he knew it bothered Dick that he looked so different from the person he once was.

“If it was the Bats...they might not be back.” Damian points out. “They might have just been checking that I wasn't killing homeless people and cutting up the bodies in the penthouse.”

Dick grabs Damian's hands. “Don't say that.” he warns.

Damian shrugs. “It's what they think of me.”

He pulls out the concealer and dabs it over the veins that are still showing through.

“It's not.” Dick insists and Damian blends with careful circular dabbing motions. He pauses the video, so he can catch up.

“They'll be back.” Dick insists.

Damian's hands start shaking and he clenches his fists to make them stop. Dick takes the makeup from him and then wraps him in a hug.

Being hugged by Dick Grayson is strange. His lack of heartbeat, iron muscles and frosty temperature usually make it feel a bit like being hugged by a particularly emotional robot. But, today he's clearly been sitting in his electric blanket so he's less cold and more room temperature and in all honesty, Dick's the only person who's ever hugged Damian very much, so even though it should feel strange, it doesn't anymore.

Dick rocks him a little, even though Damian is too old for such nonsense. “It will be okay.” he promises with such sincerity that Damian almost wants to believe him.

Damian pushes him away. “Stop, you'll smear your makeup!” he barks, and Dick immediately lets go.

“You should go back to bed.” Dick suggests.

Damian stops. “But, your face isn't done.” he protests.

Dick shrugs. “I'll never learn if you keep doing it for me.” he points out. “You can redo it in the morning, when we actually go out.”

Damian hesitates, Dick pats the bed next to him. “You can sleep here, if you want.”

Damian nods and scrambles up through the mountain of pillows before burrowing under the duvet and tugging his sword up next to him.

He hasn't had to use it since he ran away and he hasn't decided whether or not he misses it.

He lies there and watches Dick try (and mostly fail) to do contouring while singing an off-tune rendition of “You are my Sunshine” to himself.

“You're being ridiculous.” Damian grumbles, punching some nearby pillows out of the way. “Sunshine burns your eyes! It's painful to you!! We had to buy special curtains.”

Dick doesn't reply, he's moved on to doing something with highlighter that makes him look computer generated, but he's switched to singing “Yellow Submarine”, and that's much worse.

Alfred jumps up onto the bed. Damian clutches his sword with one hand and pets the cat with the other, listening to the familiar sounds of Dick's inability to carry a tune.

He tries to close his eyes, but he can't.

“Richard?” he asks tremulously. “Where's Titus?”

Dick pauses and looks at him. “Do you want me to go get him?”

Damian nods, and Dick flits out to find the dog. He comes back dragging the big dog bed with Titus trotting along in sad confusion behind him.

Damian nods gratefully to him, and Dick turns out the light. Damian hears him rustle around for a moment and then feels the weight of him settling next to him on top of the covers.

He sneaks a peak. Dick is sitting with his back to the headboard. He's wearing the leggings he wears to practice his acrobatics, and he has his bandoleer of knives draped over his shoulders, and a dagger in one hand.

He catches Damian looking and ruffles his hair fondly.

“Sleep tight little bird. I'll defend this nest.”

Damian nods and closes his eyes.

In the morning he wakes up, and checks the perimeter with Dick. There's no sign of anyone ever being there.

Chagrined, Damian does Dick's make-up and they dither as they try and decide where they'll go today.

Dick watches Damian strangely, head cocked before he finally clears his throat. “Damian, I've been thinking...”

Damian glances up from where he was lacing up the shoes he'd worn as the Wraith, the smallest of Batman's sidekicks. He wears them whenever he feels like he might need to make a getaway on foot.

“What?”

Dick bites his lip and Damian gestures to his mouth to remind him to stop.

“I think, we need to stop living like we're super-villains in hiding...we didn't do anything wrong. What was the point of running away if we're just going to hide in our own version of the Batcave?”

Damian stares at him.

Dick continues. “Aren't there things you want to do? We can't keep living like someone's going to jump out of the shadows and kill us any second. I want to live, not hide in a bunker.”

Damian blinks and swallows. “The problem with that, Dick, is that there are at least three separate groups that could be hiding in the shadows waiting to jump out and kill us at any moment.” he points out.

Dick shrugs and the smiles smugly. “Yeah, I guess, but we're killers, aren't we? Just let them try.”

Damian considers that. He's better than Drake at fighting, and better than the majority of Mother and Grandfather's soldiers. Talon is at least as strong a fighter as any of the others who've ever held that title, and stronger than most.

He thinks back to his arrogance in his early days in Gotham, and how he'd been so sure there was nothing in that City that was strong enough to hurt him.

There's much less that could hurt him in Madison, Wisconsin.

He smiles, tentatively. “Okay, what did you have in mind?”

Dick Grayson grins and bounces on the balls of his feet in excitement.

Honestly, if Damian had known the he would end up here, when he'd been staring at the ceiling of his room contemplating the barren hell-scape that would be his life if Dick Grayson exited stage right pursued by bear never to be heard from again, he's not sure he would have made the same choices that he had.

He really hopes that Batcow is happy at that sanctuary. He misses her.

He twists the straps of his backpack on his lap and glares at Dick, who's sitting behind the wheel of their recently acquired burgundy Honda Civic waiting him out.

“I refuse to suffer this indignity.” Damian growls.

“Tough, as the adult in this relationship, and your legal guardian-”

“Fake legal guardian.” Damian corrects.

“-I have made a decision.” Dick declares.

Damian glares out the window at the sign that reads. “University of Wisconsin-Madison”.

“This is institution is beneath me.” he snarls.

“Well, I wanted to go to Dubai, and you said no, so...this is what we have to work with right now, okay?” Dick points out cheerfully.

Damian scowls. “I've told you a thousand times! Dubai was much too close to the League's base of operations!”

“Yeah, 'cause it's not like your mom could just check your bank balance and find you that way.”

“My accounts in the Cayman Islands are very secure, thank you very much.”

Damian decides to try a different tactic. “I think my attending class will be too inconspicuous. We're trying to remain incognito after all. . .”

“Dami, you are a child genius, and I am an undead assassin, we've spent the last 6 months trying to come up with some way that we can live a little without anyone noticing either of those things, and this is the best we could do. Trust me. This is as inconspicuous as it's gonna get. ”

“T-t” Damian hates to concede the point but, Dick is right about that.

“I've said it before and I'll say it again: what was the point in running away if we're just gonna hide in a bunker for the rest of our lives?” Dick continues.

Damian clutches his backpack. He nods. They've had this conversation a dozen times. Dick had insisted that Damian should be allowed to live as though he had no secret identity to keep. No cover to maintain. Apparently part of that was actually attending school at his intellectual level and not aping the intellectual inadequacies of his peers in order to attract less attention.

It's not as if they haven't tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. They've spend the last 6 months establishing these cover identities, and trying to decide what to do with them, neither of them having much experience with what normal people actually do with their time.

Dick (or at least his cover identity) is actually the one enrolled at university (despite his sixth grade reading level, which Damian actually thought would not be too out of the ordinary at a typical American post-secondary institution), and Damian was posing as his younger brother that he'd recently taken custody of.

Of course Damian would be the one actually doing the course work and choosing their classes, while Dick spent the lectures completing booklets meant to help him work up to taking his GED, having categorically refused to attend adult high-school.

It was all planned. All they had to do was get out of the car.

Dick's face falls and he sighs. “You don't have to do it.” he relents. “We could call the administration and say we changed our minds.”

He looks funny in the daylight. His wrap-around shades clash with his youthful appearance, and the inherent glamour of his flawlessly applied make-up is at odds with his somber loose gray clothes.

He did his own make-up this morning, but his foundation application needs a little work, plus he keeps ordering flashy products off the internett that Damian disaproves of on the basis that they do nothing to bolster the anonymity they've been struggling to cultivate the last few months.

“No.” Damian decides, unlocking the door. “I do want to go.”

Dick smiles. “Okay. We'll sit here till you're ready then... you've got your knives?”

“T-t” Damian scoffs at the suggestion he would ever enter an unfamiliar environment without them.

“Good.” Dick responds, drumming his fingers on the wheel.

Damian glances at him sidelong. “You have yours, right?”

Dick laughs. “I sleep with those things Damian.”

Damian scowls. “Robin.” he corrects. “You need to get into the habit of calling me the right name, Alexander.”

Dick tilts his head at him. He's been somewhat resistant to whole-heartedly embracing the new identities that Damian had created. “It's like you wanted to choose the fakest sounding names you could find.”

Damian takes a deep breath and opens the door. “I suppose I should see exactly what delusions these American imbeciles have been labouring under.” he declares.

“Attaboy, little D!” Dick cheers, throwing both hands up into the air.

“And tomorrow, we're signing you up for something that falls under 'normal-not-living-in-a-bunker-activity'.”

Dick sighs. “I know....”

“Don't pout Grayson, it is ridiculous. We made a deal. And we are both men of our words aren't we?”

Damian slings his bag over his should and marches confidently towards the classroom. He and Grayson had plotted the route before they'd signed up for classes. He knows exactly where he's going.

They sit in the back of the lecture, Introductory phsyics, and pull out their notebooks. He smacks Dick's hand when he catches him biting his lip and carefully arranges his notebook and pens. He's nervous, but is grateful that stuck in the back like he is, mostly people can't even see him to give him a first look, let alone a second glance.

The professor walks in, the lights dim, and Damian's heart beats wildly as he realizes this is what life is like for billions of people: no fights, no ninjas, no death or fear of punishment. Just the stress of wanting to be good enough at something you've decided you want to do.

He uncaps his pen, smiling to himself and hopes the class won't be too much of a review for him.

Dick drives their burgundy Honda Civic home in silence. He is a surprisingly cautious and law-abiding driver so this takes a while. Damian suspects that if it hadn't been for Dick's habit of following traffic laws they would have made it all the way to Florida before they'd worked out where their ultimate destination was, instead of only getting half-way there before deciding on Wisconsin.

Damian's still a little disappointed by that. He's morbidly fascinated by what he's heard about Key West.

Dick clears his throat. “So. . . how did you feel about the class?”

“It's a lecture, Grayson.” Damian corrects, sharply, hugging his backpack.

Dick glances at him. “How did you feel about the lecture?”

Damian honestly doesn't know.

On the one hand, he had loved it- despite the fact that the majority of the students were clearly apathetic and the teacher only presenting the material out of obligation, there had been something thrilling about the whole thing. He'd never been in a classroom with other people. Mother had always acquired private tutors for him, disposing of the previous instructor once he had outgrown them, and Father had never managed to wrestle Damian into attending formal schooling of any kind before his death.

He had never been taught things because he had chosen to learn them, with the exception of the acrobatics Grayson had imparted. But, he had sat in that class learning about the fundamentals of physics because he had chosen to attend, and he had chosen to learn that particular subject.

It also made him feel very small, and very young and very out of place. After all, Damian wasn't even openly attending the lecture. It wasn't even his alias enrolled in the class but Dick's. It was a room of young adults, not children, and everyone of them had done a thousand normal things that Damian couldn't even imagine.

Damian wasn't used to uncertainty. He didn't know how to handle it. Until he'd met his father he'd never doubted a single one of his actions and every single moment of his life had followed a plan devised years in advance by someone else. He had never allowed himself to feel inferior until recently. But, he'd also never been truly alone before. He'd always had the support of an extended organization and experienced fighters to back him up before. Now that it's just him and Grayson, he can't help but wonder if all his boasting was as empty as Drake had always claimed.

Dick glances at him nervously. Taking his silence for unhappiness, he opens his mouth.

“What's wrong? Didn't you like it? I thought you'd be talking the whole way back about the simplicity of the course material...”

Damian kicks his backpack into the foot-well and brings his legs up to cross them on the seat.

“I loved it.” he admits to Dick, he cracks a smile as his eyes fill with tears and blur his vision. “For a second I felt like I was anybody else, and it was wonderful.” He looks out the window and watches the city stream by.

“But-?”

“But. . . I'm not. I killed my first man when I was three. My mother would-...she would hate me, more than she already does if she knew that was how I felt. I'm an al Ghul, I'm a Wayne. The son of the Batman. I'm better than everyone else. I always thought I believed that. I shouldn't want to be like anyone else.”

Dick looks at him sadly. “You're not like anyone Damian. You're just you.” he assures him.

Damian shakes his head. “That's not the point!” he yells, loud enough to make Dick start. “The point is normal people are weak! They are stupid and ignorant and WEAK. Between the two of us we could have killed every single person in that classroom! It wouldn't even have been hard-”

“Damian.” Dick interrupts seriously as he pulls over to the side of the road and puts the car in park before, slipping his sunglasses down with a wince to meet Damian's gaze. “I don't want to kill people anymore. Do you?” he asks seriously.

Damian swallows. This is important. It has to be for Dick to make a conscious effort to make eye-contact, and lower his sunglasses when their outside despite how much Damian knows the sunlight hurts his eyes.

“No.” Damian admits. “I don't want to kill anyone.”

“Than I don't think it matter what we're capable of. We don't have to do those things anymore, not if we don't want. We don't have to prove that we deserve to exist by doing those things anymore.” Dick's voice is low and fierce and final. “We deserve to exist.” he repeats, mostly to himself this time. “We don't have to prove it”

Damian's eye finally overfill. He doesn't know when he last cried. He wipes at them in frustration. “I know.” he chokes out. “That's what makes it horrible.”

He thinks about the past few months. All the tiny little victories they've managed to tally up. Things that shouldn't have been difficult. Things that every stupid, ignorant, weak person in that lecture hall did every day without even thinking about it.

It's really just a tally of all the ways Damian is lesser. All the ways Damian does not belong in this world.

Damain twists his hands together. “What the Court did to you was monstrous.” He states as evenly as he can. This is fact. Everyone had said so, even Alfred had tutted sympathetically over the fate of the Talons.

“Yes.” Dick replies.

Damian nods. “Mother wasn't as brutal as the Court.” another statement of fact, since the Court's brutality was hard to match, and Mother would never have allowed Damian to be in real mortal peril.

“No.” The Talon replies evenly.

“How old were you when you first killed?” Damian asks in a very small voice.

Dick doesn't answer.

“How old were you when you first killed.” Damian repeats, less a question this time and more of a demand.

“Older than you are now, I think, but not by much.” Dick admits.

Damian nods. He tries to put himself back in that lecture hall, to how he'd felt sitting there listening to the lecture. The lights dim. The excitement of fitting in, of learning. It really had been wonderful.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He forces a smile.

“My mother would be disappointed in me.” He says again, and it feels like he's screaming defiance to the gods themselves to admit that, to say it as though it's something unimportant. “I don't think I care, what someone like that thinks. . . Do you?”

Dick grins. “No, little Robin. I do not.” He says resolutely.

“It felt right, to be sitting in that lecture hall.” Damian wipes at his eyes and sniffs. “I loved that class.” he declares again, stronger this time, bolstered by his own defiance. “I loved that I went and that I seemed normal. I am excited that I will continue to pursue my studies in whatever topic I choose, disregarding their practicalities.”

Dick nods. “Yes.”

Damian smiles with forced brightness at Dick. “I'm happy you suggested we take the risk.”

Dick reaches out, and Damian puts his hand in his. “I'm sorry it made you sad.” Dick apologizes.

“It wasn't the class that made me sad. It was realizing how wrong so many other things had been.”

Dick nods.

“We should complete the next item on the list, and enroll you in something!” Damian suggests brightly.

“Like what?” Dick asks, putting his sunglasses back on with a grin.

“I don't know. . . something you can take at the university, perhaps?” Damian suggests. “I will check the courses on offer, when we return home and present you with a suitable selection.”

Dick smiles indulgently at him. “Whatever you says, lil'D.”

There's a pause. Dick hasn't started the car again. He bites his lip, and Damian swats at his hand to remind him to stop.

“Actually...” Dick mumbles hesitantly. “I saw a flyer and there's a support group for victims of super-villains. I think I want to go to that.” His voice gets quieter and quieter as he speaks so that Damian has to lean forward to hear him by the end of the sentence.

“But, why?”

Dick stares off into the middle distance. “I think it would make me feel better.”

Damian thinks that over. To him being forced to converse about trauma or emotions with a pack of ingrates would be akin to psychological torture, but he must admit that Dick is a very different creature from himself in most ways that are not a capacity for violence.

“Alright.” he concedes. “We'll go.”

“You don't have to come with me.” Dick offers. “I know you wouldn't enjoy it.”

“T-t.” Damian snorts. “As if I would allow you to attend such an event without combat support!”

Dick smiles and starts the car again. They continue their very slow drive home.

It takes Damian several weeks into his semester before he realizes that Dick is, objectively, extremely handsome, and he is somewhat embarrassed by how long it took him to come to this conclusion, even if it is natural that he, Damain, having not yet entered puberty would be unaware of this.

The evidence to support this theory began accumulating almost immediately, when various young members of the student body, of all genders, attempted to strike up conversations with Grayson. These conversational gambits were usually about inane and obvious subjects: his makeup, his clothing, his sunglasses, Damian, the class.

It was baffling and Damian had been starting to worry that the majority of young people in the state of Michigan are in some way mentally deficient,

Until one enterprising young man, who Damian is pleased to note, is also conspicuously wearing makeup, decides to address Damian while he's standing in line at the vending machine during the break purchasing a prepackaged food item in order to keep his blood sugar up, since he had made the incredible miscalculation that morning of allowing an individual who did not strictly speaking need to eat to prepare breakfast. Suffice it to say that whatever intensive training Grayson had undergone had not endowed him with the skills to operate a stove or prepare anything remotely appetizing.

“Hey, kid, what's the deal with your brother?” the adolescent male asks, rather bluntly.

Damian blinks. “I beg your pardon?”

“I mean...like... I know a bunch of people have tried to chat him up and he's never-”

“What do you mean 'chat him up'?”

“Like...see if he was interested-?”

“My brother has no interest in this class.” Damian informs the stranger sharply, wondering what sort of trap he thought he was setting.

“No, I meant like...in them.” The stranger explains.

Damian blinks and replays several conversations over in his mind. Suddenly the behaviour of a variety of his classmates makes perfect sense.

“Oh! You mean sexually?”

The student stares at him in surprise. “Well...yeah...?”

“I don't know.” Damian answers honestly. He decides sexual encounters probably fall under 'let's not live in a bunker' category and would be something Dick might be open to. “But, you could ask him yourself!”he suggests.

The student looks hesitant, but Damian grabs his arm and tows him back into the lecture where Richard is waiting.

He brightens when he sees Damian bringing someone else back. “Aw! Lil'D did you make a friend?”

“Nope!” Damian says proudly shoving the student in front of Dick. “You did.”

Dick freezes. “...what?”

Damian puffs out his chest. “This young man saw you and decided he would like to proposition you. Likely for sex. I believe this may be why others have been approaching us as well. In retrospect this is very clear, television has indicated this is an important aspect of university life.”

Dick lurches to his feet looking a little horrified. “I'm sorry about that he-...uh...He has a lot of ideas about college that he's mostly gotten from watching television soooo...yeah.” he trails off in awkward embarrassment.

Damian raises an eyebrow at him. As if Dick had any room to judge where television induced misconceptions were concerned.

The interloper is bright red but smiling. “It's cool. I noticed he always comes to class with you. Must be kind of weird, going through all this with a kid.”

Dick shrugs and looks at Damian as though he somehow knows the right answer. “I guess..?”

Dick's hands flit to his sunglasses, as if to reassure himself that they are still firmly in place. “Uhhh...” He grimaces and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I'm Alexander.” he introduces himself with a smile and a nod. “My weirdo genius brother is Robin.”

The student, bright red, offers a wave. “I'm Stephen.”

Dick nods. “Cool. Sorry about Robbie, he doesn't get...people, very much or at all.” he ducks his head. “To be honest I don't do so well either.”

“T-t” Damain scoffs, and they both turn to look him. “Don't be ridiculous, Xander. I've shared my hypothesis regarding your emotional intelligence with you.”

“Xander?” Stephen asks. “Thank, god. You really don't look like an Alex.”

“Yes, I agree.” Damian interjects. “And as Lex Luthor has ruined that particular diminuative for the rest of the world, I decided that Xander was the only option remaining.”

Stephen smiles. “Hey, I think it suits you . . Like a hotter version of the character from Buffy.”

Dick turns to Damian with wide eyes as though he might have some clue as to what Stephen is talking about. Damian just shrugs in incomprehension.

“Anyway,” Stephen continues, “I just wanted to say I liked you make-up and to ask you: What's with the sunglasses at night?”

He sings the last bit for some reason Damian does not understand, but which probably has to do with American culture.

The reference to his glasses, makes Dick flinch and fiddle with them.

“He has an eye condition, cretin.” Damian barks. “Did no one love you enough to teach you that you shouldn't ask rude questions?”

Dick and Stephen both gape at him.

“Oh, my god. I'm sorry man! I just thought you were being a douche or were hungover or something!” Stephen gasps, sounding genuinely aghast at his own rudeness.

Dick smiles. “It's alright.”

There's a strange pause, then Stephen clears his throat. “Look, uh . . .I don't know about you but I've found it's pretty hard to make friends in college.”

Damian and Dick nod in unison. This is their first even mildly successful social encounter.

“So . . . What if I gave you my number and then if we ever needed to get notes or talk about things from class we could get in touch?” Stephen suggests.

Dick stares at him open mouthed until Damian elbows him viciously in the side and he pulls his cell-phone out of his pocket to hand to their possible new friend.

Stephen raises his eyebrows when he opens the contact page and only sees one number, Damian's own, which is listed as “Robin” followed by a string of emoji.

Dick swallows. “We have also been trouble meeting people.” he explains awkwardly at the same time as Damian, blurts out.

Stephen laughs. “Don't worry, I get it- It's a new phone right?”

He enters his number and hands the phone back as the lights dim for the second half of the lecture.

Dick looks at Damian, his face frozen in excited surprise, clutching his phone so tight that Damian's actually a little concerned he might crack the screen.

“Damian!” he whispers, looking like it's taking every ounce of his willpower to keep from jumping up and down in excitement. “We made a friend!!!”

Damian isn't actually particularly concerned about making emotional connections with random Wisconsin university students, but it's made Dick happy, so he smiles back anyway.

They walk to their favourite coffee shop and Dick is so excited he can't stop chattering and jumping around. Eventually he convinces Damian to sacrifice dignity and has him scramble onto his back for a piggy-back ride and runs full tilt down the sidewalk, because he's just too exited to walk and Damian can't help but laugh and scream along with him.

Dick puts him down before when they get to the coffee shop, and angles his body in front of Damian's as he peaks through the door to check for hostiles.

There has never been any trouble at this establishment but it makes Damian feel safe to know that the Talon had been prepared for another outcome. That he had been ready to shield them, and fight if that became necessary.

The barista smiles fondly at them as they come in, ordering a double espresso and a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream.

She knows their order, and has it imputed into the computer before they've finished speaking.

Dick smiles so blindingly at her that she almost drops the cup, and Damian hides his snicker in his sleeve but gets a glare from his older brother anyway.

They takes their drinks to a table in a corner and watch people pass by on the street through the big bay window.

Damian knows they aren't actually normal, but it feels like maybe neither of them are freaks anymore. And that's not some minor victory. It's big.

He grins at Dick over his espresso, and Dick smiles back so brightly it puts the smile that startled the barista to shame.

Chapter Text

Jason's reaction when he came down to the cave and found the Talon's cell empty had been “About Damn Time!”

His reaction when he took in the absence of Batcow, and the lack of a giant drool horse or ill-tempered cat had been “Oh shit.”

He's known that the Talon was capable of escaping for ages. In fact he'd been trying to subtly encourage it by leaving things conveniently unlocked for him. Particularly in the week or so since Bruce came back- God knew that the last thing that kid needed was to be recruited into a crime fighting crusade or worse: sent to Arkham; which were really the only two options for people when Bruce decided to 'help'.

Jason had figured the Talon running off would be rough on Damian, especially after hearing the two of them screaming at each other in the middle of the night a few days back.

He hadn't figured on the kid running away with the Talon though. God damn. If Tim knew about this and let it happen anyway than Jason was going to be pissed. Jason knew they hated each other but there are limits. Tim is sixteen, old enough to have pretensions to being Batman, old enough to be a hero in his own right and definitely old enough to know you do not send ten year olds off into the world alone with assassins!!

And Jason's wrath would be nothing compared to the apocalyptic hellfire they'd be in for once Bruce woke up from his coma and found out they'd lost his kid. 

Fuck.

Jason storms up the stairs and kicks Tim's door in which makes the kid jerk up from where he'd fallen asleep at his desk.

“The Talon's gone.” he informs his younger brother. “And so is Damian.”

Tim groans and scrubs at his face. “Well, that's just typical.” He gripes.

Jason smiles crookedly and nods. Damian's never made anything easier for someone else ever. But, he's only ten, and he's never had much of a chance. Jason feels his heart squeeze in his chest, thinking about Talia, and Bruce and the last few months. No, he has to admit, Damian never had much of a chance at all.

Tim sighs and straightens up. “We search the house first, top to bottom. Then we start widening the net.”

Jason leans against the door frame feeling a headache already building. “You know where he probably is right?”

Tim nods. Looking away guiltily. “Yeah. But, one step at a time. We check the house and the city, and then I check with my contacts in the League.”

Jason nods. “Do we tell Alfred?” he asks.

Tim gulps. “Yeah...we tell Alfred right away.”

Jason sighs. “'Kay. I'll go. You check his room, and the attics. See if you can find anything.”

Disturbingly enough, despite the evidence that Damian had planned this far enough in advance to arrange a space for his cow at a sanctuary and have her transported there, he had taken almost none of his belongings. All his books, clothes, and the sketchbooks were all carefully in place. The only thing missing were the pets and his favourite weapons.

That doesn't bode well. 

Tim just stares at Jason out of exhausted eyes, after a sweep of the city turns up no sign of either assassin, and a shake-down of their contacts turns up nothing.

“We didn't drive him back to the League did we?” Tim asks hoarsely.

Jason shakes his head. “C'mon! It's Damian, no one can make that kid do something he doesn't want to do. He's stood up to the Bat and the League when they've tried to strong arm him in the past, he's not about to knuckle under now!”

He wants to believe that is true, because Batman has one code and Red Hood has another, but one thing they had in common was you looked out for kids. Didn't matter who they were or what mess the shithead adults had gotten them into- Jason did his best to look out for them.

He feels like he'd failed Damian, even though he'd tried. He'd watched Star Wars with the kid. He'd bought books and movies and poetry. He'd let him polish his sword in the living room and when Tim had tattled about the kid joyriding in the Rolls-Royce Jason had let it slide.

It hadn't been enough. Obviously.

He collapses into the chair next to the hospital bed in the make-shift medical bay in the cave. Bruce's ventilator whirs and hisses comfortingly next to him. Jason puts his head in his hands longing and dreading the moment where Bruce wakes up.

It didn't matter that Damian was angry and mean, and said the sorts of horrible things that made him sound like a cross between a sailor and a very old very nasty member of the European aristocracy. It didn't matter that he was ten and he'd stabbed Tim. Damian was ten years old, and Bruce had trusted Jason and Tim to look after him. He'd trusted protect him, and the kid had run off with an undead former killing-machine, a great dane, and the devil in cat form.

And he hadn't done it on a whim, which was the worst part. He'd been planning this and they hadn't notice. 

That was what was truly unacceptable- not the fact that they'd failed to make his feel he had something worth staying for, but the fact that they, the heirs to the world's greatest detective, hadn't noticed that a ten-year old assassin planning a family road trip.

Jason shakes his head and looks at Bruce's unconscious face. “God Damn it, Damian!'

Bruce wakes up and immediately tries to leave the hospital bed. Jason has to tackle him to the ground and wrestle him back into it.

He's too busy being annoyed to get emotional about Bruce's return from the dead, until he gets on the intercom to tell Alfred and finds himself choking up.

It takes Bruce more time than Jason had feared to ask the obvious question, but still if Jason could have put off this conversation indefinitely he would have.

“Where's Damian?” Bruce asks, two days and one broken set of handcuffs into his Alfred enforced bed-rest. It's not surprising, everyone else had dropped by to pay their respects- Cass had flown in from Hong Kong specifically, Babs had rolled in full of half-hidden fondness, Steph had stood awkwardly and made bad jokes, Tim was at Bruce's bedside every chance he got.

Damian had been noticeably absent. 

“He's gone.” Jason blurts out.

“What-”

“And before you ask he ran away. And we know because he took his pet cow to a sanctuary two days before he disappeared with all his pets.”

“Is he back with Talia?”

Jason shakes his head. “As far as Tim's sources in the League can tell? Nope. Just gone.”

To Jason's completely not surprise Bruce immediately lurches forward as if he's going to immediately starts searching for his wayward offspring, probably beginning with a quick search of the manor, as though Jason hadn't already tried that. He's read Game of Thrones, okay? And Damian is completely the sort of kid to try some Rose of Winterfell bullshit, so the first thing he'd done had been to search all the spare rooms and attics to make sure Damian wasn't camped out somewhere watching the monkeys dance for his twisted amusement.

“Calm down. I'm sure he's fine.”

“Fine?! HE'S TEN YEARS OLD AND HE'S ALONE!!”

Jason clears his throat. “Yeah, about that? When I say he took his pets with him I'm including the undead assassin in that. So, on the bright side, not completely alone.”

Bruce collapses back onto the hospital bed. “He ran away with the Talon?” he asks incredulously.

Jason nods and grimaces. “'Fraid so. It's actually not as weird as it probably seems to you. They've been bonding while you've been less dead than previously believed, but still too dead for comfort.”

That earns him a Batglare, which he ignores.

“Tim's on it.” Jason assures Bruce. “He'll probably have the little ankle-biter tracked down before Alfred takes you off of bed rest.”

He gives a meaningful look to the handcuff still securing Bruce to his hospital bed.

Bruce glares at him. “Jason. I will buy you a new motorcycle if you tell me where the key is.”

Jason laughs and shakes his head, feeling a weight lifting.

Bruce is back and Batman will be too, and Jason will be free to return to his own definition of justice.

Maybe then these tension headaches and a lingering sense of guilt over the assassination babies will go away. Yeah, as if, and maybe Tim will kick his caffeine addiction and Bruce will seek help for his raging mental health/emotional issues too.

Jason leaves Bruce to his soup, and carefully moves the tv remote so it's just out of reach of the bed, before heading down to the cave.

Timmy is perched in front of the Batcomputer, typing furiously.

“Any luck?” Jason asks, sitting down next to him and resting his head on the table. He has no pride, there's no point in pretending.

Tim shakes his head. “Nothing.” he tells Jason, through clenched teeth.

Jason glances at him sympathetically. If Jason feels guilty for whatever the fuck went down and prompted a mass exodus of former-assassins, then Tim must be tormented by it. After all he and Damian had been at each other's throats from the moment they'd met, and Tim had been the one to do research on the Talons before they'd realized that they were still alive. 

Well, if there's one being a vigilante teaches you it's how to deal with guilt. 

If anyone asks Jason will say that Tim tracked Damian and the un-dead murder baby down through a combination of computer wizardry and real-estate records. In reality Jason's the one who gets them their first lead and he gets it after taking a break to spend an hour scrolling through the “#DogsofInstagram” tag.

While liking a photo of a very adorable Husky cross he notices a black great dane in the background.

Then he has an idea, and even though it's stupid he tries it anyway, because if there's two things he knows about his littlest adoptive brother it's that a) he is completely uncompromising on things he's decided are important and b) he thinks the most important thing in the world is his pets.

He gets Tim to run facial recognition software on the various dog and dog related tags on Instagram, and it takes a couple hours until they get a hit, but then they do and.

Yup. That's their missing brother, wearing something that looks suspiciously like a Spiderman windbreaker with his pet assassin, and drool monster Titus standing in the background of a picture taken at a Wisconsin park. 

Yeah, Jason had not seen that one coming. He'd always thought that kid had taste- Like, seriously, the boy may be ten but he'd already cultivated an aesthetic. That aesthetic might be murderous mid-century aristocrat, but he'd always stuck to it until now, and Jason had respected that.

But he supposes by that logic he should also respect the dedication Damian had to going undercover and staying off the radar. Nothing was as anti-everything-Jason-thought-he-knew-about-Damian as hanging around Wisconsin in a Spiderman windbreaker.

Owing to the high percentage of times that interaction between Tim and Damian had led to attempted murder Jason decides to be the one to head to Madison and do a little reconnaissance before presenting the findings to Bruce who was currently off bed-rest but was banned from the cave on pain of starvation at Alfred's orders.

This had so far been effective but only because they'd brought in Barbara, and Stephanie to run interference and head him off if he made a break for the cave. While Jason had nothing but respect for the girls Bruce was seven generations old money and that meant he was wily as fuck and would lie, cheat and misdirect in order to get whatever it was he wanted. In this case, that would be the entrance to the Bat cave.

Honestly, they were probably going to have to call in Cassandra from Tokyo if they had any hope of keeping him out of there for more than a week.

And that would only work if Tim didn't turn traitor and help the old man out, which was probably 50/50 chance at this point since of the members of the Batclan it was Tim and Bruce who were hands-down tied for 'Most Insanely Dedicated to The Mission' and had a bad habit of teaming up against the rest of the family. 

Anyway, so Jason was actually the winner here, since he got to leave the madhouse and suit up in his own gear, which he hasn't had the chance to do since Bruce so inconsiderately bit the dust almost a year ago.

So, Jason throws on the body-armour, cargo pants, and combat boots and stuffs his helmet in a duffel bag only mostly filled with guns and heads out.

It doesn't take long to get a trail, Madison is a pretty small city, especially by his standards, suckled as he'd been at the teat of the East Coast Mega-City, that Gotham, Bludhaven, New York City and Metropolis were slowly becoming as their edges bled into one another.

Showing Grayson's (slightly photoshopped) photo to ten people gets him a hit.

“Oh, yeah! I know him! He's got a Great Dane doesn't he? I always see him walking it in the downtown.”

A few more hits gets him a general area, and then Jason puts the helmet on and takes to the roofs.

It's September, but despite it's reputation Wisconsin this time of year is hot enough to have him sweating underneath his leather jacket as he lurks around on nearby buildings. Infiltrating the apartment had been almost immediately ruled out, they had decent security and you needed a key for the elevator to even take you to the penthouse floor.

Which is why Jason is skulking on a grappling line trying to get a decent sight-line into the apartment, instead of doing a B and E which is more his style.

He's finally got one, and what he see pulls him up short. Richard Grayson, assassin since he was eight years old and former scourge of Gotham, is dancing around a living room tidying up with one hand and holding the demon-cat Alfred with the other. While Damian Wayne, Heir to the Demon and trained to kill since birth, is passed out cold on the couch underneath one of those cheap fuzzy blankets that come in crazy patterns. Jason presses a button and the helmet zooms in.

Scratch that. Damian is passed out cold reading the Hunger Games, and tucked up under a blanket with a Wolf face on it. It's lucky that Jason's wearing a harness 'cause he's so shocked he thinks he would have let go of the rope.

Richard turns the light off and goes to a different room.

Jason maintains position for another couple of hours, right up until Damian wakes up and immediately makes eye-contact with Jason like he's that fucking creeptastic child from The Omen. 

He looks pissed, and Jason knows that when Damian is pissed people get perforated, so he gets out of there as quickly as he can.

It takes a few hours to get back to Gotham, and his mind is whirring the entire time. When he'd talked to people on the street they'd seemed to think that Damian and Richard were nice boys, only really noticeable because of their giant horse-dog (and okay, the extreme hotness of the older one).

At the time Jason had just assumed that Damian was 100% committed to maintaining an inconspicuous cover, Now, he's not so sure.

They'd assumed that Damian had upped sticks and skedaddled so close to Bruce's return because he wasn't keen on being once more in the custody of someone with the actual ability to control him.

And while that still was probably true, Jason couldn't help but see the same facts from a different angle. 

Damian wasn't rebelling or throwing a tantrum. He was running away because staying was no longer an option.

Damian had run away because he wanted to get away from Bruce and his crusade, and the only person in the continental United States who had a consistent track record of actual making Damian do things was Bruce Wayne. 

Jason feels his gut churning. He tries to think of other options. Maybe running away had been about protecting Richard, God knew the two of them had gotten close... but again, that means that Damian had thought that Richard needed protecting from Bruce, and while Jason isn't always Bruce's biggest fan (he owns that he has tried to shoot the man in a blind rage more than once), he can't help but feel insulted on his adopted-dad's behalf.

Batman looks out for people, and Bruce, god bless his delusional ass, tries to help so hard that he's managed to adopt three separate troubled teens from sketchy abusive backgrounds. The whole reason the Talon had been chilling in the cave to begin with had been because Bruce had wanted to help him.

Granted, in the worst case scenario Bruce helping ends in screaming, bodily harm, and near death experiences, but best case scenarios end with having the help and support of one of the world's largest fortunes behind you in order to pursue your dreams, agd yes usually that dream was being a teenage crime fight, but Bruce was doint his best in the face of crippled emotional development (and if they were pointing fingers that was definitely Alfred's fault, but not even Jason was about to go near that can of worms). 

So, it wasn't fair that Damian had somehow gotten the idea that Richard needed to get away from Bruce. That he needed to get away from Bruce.

Bruce, for all his flaws, was good. Bruce cared, he cared so much about everyone that he was border line insane, because no one could care that much about literally every human being on the planet and stay sane.

And, for all he was putting on a brave face about it, Jason could tell that the man was losing what was left of his mind over the fact that his kid, the only biological kid he had, had bolted the minute he reappeared.

Honestly, they'd all assumed the worst. They'd expected to find Damian becoming a tiny super-villain or amassing an army of disadvantaged youths, or back in the warm embrace of the League of Assassins. But, he'd just...run away to live in his own version of witness protection, and it hurt Jason to think that Damian hadn't thought he could ask for help. It hurt to think that the ten year old had felt like his only option was to leave everything except the cat, dog and assassin behind and start over.

They were supposed to be a family. Weren't they?

As Jason pulls up in to the long driveway at the Manor, he wonders how they'd managed to fail so badly. He'd thought he'd been doing the right thing, keeping Damian off the streets, letting him pursue his interests and hang out with the Talon, but he'd failed. He'd failed Damian, who had clearly needed something more than what Jason had been able to give him, and he'd let Bruce down, for probably the hundred millionth time.

Tim is still in his vigilante costume fresh from patrol when Jason drives into the Cave.

“How is it? Were we wrong? I can't even imagine Damian in Wisconsin...what was he doing there?”

Jason takes off his helmet and shrugs. “Walking his dog, and reading the Hunger Games as far as I can tell.”

Tim blinks. “I've gone over all my research from before your Instagram breakthrough- there's been no vigilante activity in Madison. No incidents with metahumans, no increase in violent crime, murders, or disappearances. No sign of Damian, except those picture from the dog park.”

Jason sits down next to Tim. “Yeah. That's cause he's just being a ten year old.”

Tim sighs. “What about the assassin?”

Jason shrugs. “Nothing. He walks the dog. He does yoga. He looks after the kid.”

“So, Bruce coming back... Did he run away because he figured Bruce would send the Talon to Arkam? Or-” Tim wonders

“The Talon was going to leave. He's scared of Bruce.” Jason explains. “I heard him arguing with the kid right after Bruce got back. I think Richard was going to leave and Damian didn't want him to go.”

“So, Damian decided to go with him?”

“I don't know, okay?! But they went somewhere with a practically non-existant superhero presence, and a real low rate of supervillain, or magical or activity. That can't be a coincidence.”

“Shit. Damian doesn't want to fight anymore.” Tim realizes turning to look Jason in the eye.

“Seems not. I mean, c'mon, we always knew the kid didn't give a fuck about like, justice or whatever.. We knew he was hiding from us too, and now we know he's not hiding from us 'cause he's up to something. It's the complete opposite.” Jason tells Tim, feeling exhausted.

Tim thinks about thinks for a second. “That's good, though. Isn't it? I mean, this is Damian 'Stabbed my adopted brother and cut a man's head off' on my first day in town' Wayne-Al Ghul. I mean, his mother wanted him to take over the world. So... lying low and being a real kid for once, isn't that a best case scenario? Shouldn't we just. . .let him?”

Jason has had the same thought. The only problem is-

“What are we gonna tell Bruce?” Tim asks. “He'll freak out and go barging in and- I mean, he's Damian's Dad but he's Bruce, and he always freaks out completely when it comes down to one of his kids.”

Jason huffs. “I don't know, Tim. I honestly don't.”

“Fuck. We have to tell him don't we?" Tim blurts out. "Damian is his son, and he's living alone with a twenty-year old undead assassin. Bruce does have a right to know, and between the two of us we should be able to convince to just keep an eye on him for now? Make sure no-one else has started sniffing around. And then once he's calmed down a bit he can try and make contact?”

Jason nods. “Yeah, good plan, Timmy. That's why you're the Upgrade and I'm last year's model, but I don't think we should tell him where they are. We tell him they're safe and we're watching him, but we don't let him go in like a bull in a china shop. Not until he can convince us he's not gonna wreck the lives their building." 

Tim rolls his eyes but nods. 

It's the middle of the night in January in Wisconsin and it sucks. Jason is squatting on the roof of the apartment building across the street from Damian's place when something smacks into him and sends his helmet flying.

The next thing he knows he looking at the yellow eyes of the Talon as they catch the light and he is well and truly pinned. There's a knee to his chest, a foot on his left wrist, a vice-like grip on his right wrist and a very sharp dagger at his throat.

“One move and I cut your head off.” The Talon hisses voice silky smooth, and completely matter of fact. “You know I can.”

Jason swallows and feels his throat move against the dagger. “I know.”

The Talon smiles and Jason feels a shock of fear run through his body. It occurs to him that he could die here, and it comes as a surprise because he had never been genuinely afraid of any of the Talons before. He'd come into the Court of Owls investigation pretty late, and Tim had already figured out how to kill them by then. So, they'd mostly just been sad, those dead killers whose minds were so tangled with the horrors the Owls inflicted that in most cases the only way to help them was to kill them.

Certainly he'd never been scared of Richard Grayson before. He of the mannerisms of a frightened racoon and the personality of a magpie, who Jason had never even really seen in his Talon gear. Richard Grayson was less epically screwed in the head than the average Talon, but that hadn't meant that he was okay. Jason had noticed the way the Talon had made a barricade out of his bed and hid behind it more often than not in those first few weeks, until Damian had started coaxing him out with bribes. He'd been someone that Jason needed to protect, not someone that Jason considered a real threat.

Now, with the white of his dead skin standing out eerily in the dark and the light glinting off those yellow eyes, Jason honestly thinks he might die.

“We're not going back.” Talon tell him. “Tell your Master that!”

“He's not my master. He's my dad.” Jason tries to explain, and the Talon frowns.

“Another lie!” Talon snaps. “You're his soldier! He sent you here for Damian!.”

“He doesn't know where Damian is! I swear!” Jason insists. “I just wanted to make sure he was alright! He's my little brother.”

The Talon moves and suddenly he's off of Jason and standing near the edge of the roof.

“The Batman is your father, too?” The Talon asks. “I don't believe you.”

Jason nods rubbing his throat. It's undamaged. Obviously. The Talon is too deadly to need scare tactics. He is one, after all.

“Aw, Ricky.” Jason protests, propping himself up on one elbow. “And here I thought we were friends!”

Richard frowns and tilts his head in confusion. It's only now with a little distance between them that Jason can take in his outfit. It looks like an altered parka, and it's steaming near the hood, probably a heating system to counteract the Talon's sensitivity to cold. Extreme cold was one of the few ways to truly incapacitate the Talons after all, not to mention was the Courts favourite form of discipline. Jason figures it's something Damian must have put together for him. The kid was good with gadgets.

“You talked to me sometimes and I liked you.” Richard agrees. “But, that doesn't make us friends.”

Ouch.  “Okay. Fair enough.”

They stare at each other for a second and Jason very slowly, and in as non-threatening a way as possible, stands up.

“Look, I'm just a little concerned, Ricky. Damian's ten, and he worships his Dad. But, when he finally gets a chance to see him, the kid runs away, with you, an adult former brainwashed killer. You can see why I'm worried, right? and I can't just not make sure he's okay? I'm his big brother. It's my job to look after the little shit.”

“I was going to leave.” Richard blurts out. “It was my fault. I was going to leave. He told me I'd die or end up back at the Court if I went alone. He was right.”

Jason relaxes and exhales something that might have been a laugh. “Yeah, that's the most annoying thing about that little shit. He usually is.”

Richard  frowns at him. “You shouldn't talk about him the way you do. He's just a little kid.”

Jason laughs again, louder and without humour. “Believe me, I wish that were true. But, he's not, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone” He scrubs at his face and groans. “So, Damian left because he thought someone needed to look after you? He wanted, what? To protect you?”

“He wanted a chance not to be a weapon!” Richard hisses, looking absolutely fucking furious. “I watched you all. I saw how it is in that Cave. The darkness, the pain, the arrogance of you all.” The Talon's handsome face twists in a sneer. “You thought he was a monster, but one that you could use. Just like me.”

Jason gapes. His instinct is to step forward, to hug, to protest. To rage. Because the Talon has it wrong. That's not who they are. That's not what the family they've all worked so hard to build is about.

“We never thought he was a monster.” Jason protests.

“Please. I heard the way you talked about him then. The names you call him now. You may not have used him as a weapon, but you thought he was a monster. Maybe he is! But he didn't get a choice in that!!” The Talon bares his teeth. “Not anymore than I did!!!”

“I- look, that's just how I talk, alright, Ricky? I'm a little harsh. I get riled up and say things I don't mean. I know he's just a kid.”

“Kid's grow up. They become weapons and monsters and soldiers. Like you. Like me. You and your father are fighting a war.” Richard says, and he spits the word father like it's venom. “Wars make corpses and always need more soldiers, more weapons. I'm already a corpse. Damian's already a weapon. I had to protect him.”

Something clicks for Jason then, and he kicks himself that it's taken him so long to see it. But, it's so obvious now. Richard Grayson was eight years old when he was taken by the Court. Batman was only just starting out then. Nobody knew anything about him except that he was a vigilante.

Richard Grayson doesn't know that the Batman has rules. He didn't ever know that he was safe with Bruce, because to him the Batman was just a man in a mask seeking vengeance. He wasn't an icon, or a hero or an idol. He was just a guy who went out at night and hurt people who deserved it, and Jason, Tim and everyone else were the ones that helped him do that.

Jason can understand how, from a certain perspective, it could look a lot like the Court. A leader and his henchmen. Someone you might need to escape from, if you'd been brave enough to ask for a favour. Especially if they kept you locked up in creepy dark cave filled with freaky looking trophies.

Shit.

Yeah, Jason understands how that fun-show mirror version of themselves would be people you'd try really hard to get away from, even if they seemed nice, and would come down and talk with you sometimes.

“Look, we fucked up” He admits. “But, we didn't lock you up because we wanted you to fight for us, okay? We weren't gonna keep you there till you agreed. That wasn't-” Jason huffs in frustration, and takes a deep frigid breath. “We fucked up and some of the Court got away, which meant that the only place you'd be safe was somewhere where we were around to protect you. And you're right, we saw you as a corpse and weapon and we weren't sure that everyone else would be safe if we let you out. We didn't know whether we could trust you.”

Richard hugs himself and looks down. “I know. I know I did really bad things. It would have been fair for you to have killed me. I wouldn't even have minded at first, but after I got to know Damian I couldn't just- I couldn't just leave him. He was so alone. I'm dead already, but he's still alive. He still had a chance. I was all he had, and I wasn't enough.” he says plaintively. “I couldn't let him end up like me.”

"I understand that." Jason cranes his neck to look at the sky, trying to find the familiar constellations. “I could see how good it was for Demonspawn, for you to be around." he admits "I don't want you to think we didn't notice that he needed something. I just...we didn't know what to do, and there was so much else to do, so we-” he laughs again, this one a little hysterical. “-we let the brainwashed undead assassin handle it. Because you were the only one who seemed like you knew what to do, when it came to him, and he was the only one who seemed to know what to do when it came to you. We weren't good enough. I'm sorry.”

Richard looks up at him, and nothing about him has changed. His skin is still white, his eyes are still shining yellow in the darkness, but he doesn't seem frightening anymore. He just seems like a person. Someone Jason's own age, who is as lost as Jason is.

“It's okay.” There's a pause. “I really did like it when you'd come and talk to me. I always wanted to trust you.”

Jason nods. “That's a start, isn't it? Look, I promise I'm not here to mess with you. I'm not gonna do anything. I just check in sometimes, to make sure you guys are alright. That no one else has tracked you down. Is it okay, if I keep coming around to make sure? I won't talk to you, or do anything. I just need to know you guys are okay.”

Richard nods jerkily. “Alright.” Suddenly he straightens and he's an assassin again. He meets Jason's eyes. “But, if you break your promise I will kill you and send your head to your Master.”

“He's not a Master-”

But, Richard has picked up Jason's helmet from where he'd kicked it off in his attack and tosses it to him.

Jason snatches it out of the air. “I didn't thank you for looking after Damian, did I?”

Richard shakes his head. '

“Well, Thank you. I owe you one for that. So, if you ever need help-either of you. I hope you'll let me pay you back for it.”

He fishes around in his pockets for a spare com that's only tuned to his frequency and hands it over. “Just press the button and talk in. I'll get here as soon as I can. You don't have to use it.”

Richard takes it hesitantly. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

Jason nods, and turns to go.

“You know you did good!” The assassin suddenly calls out after him.

Jason freezes, and then turns to look at Richard over his shoulder. “What?”

“With the little bird- you didn't make him fight. You didn't let him go out and get hurt. That's why I stayed and never really tried to escape. Because I saw you cared, so I thought, I mean, I figured, if you weren't putting the little assassin in danger, you weren't about kill me, and everything would be okay. But, then he came back. ”

Jason feels like he's about to cry. “Jesus fucking Christ, B-....You think Batman's gonna kill you?”

Dick shakes his head. “I used to. Not anymore.”

Jason takes a very shaky breath. “Good.” He hesitates and then waves it off.

“Will Damian have to fight?” Richard asks. “If he goes back to his Father?”

Jason stops. He want to turn around, to defend Bruce and tell Richard that he's wrong to think these things about the man. He doesn't turn around. “Probably.” is all he says, and then he disappears into the night.

For the record, Jason was against Bruce just showing up to talk to Damian. He told him repeatedly that it was a bad idea likely to result in dismemberment for him, and psychological trauma for witnesses.

But, did Bruce listen? Noooo

After a two month campaign to badger his son's location out of Jason and Tim, Tim (typically) had cracked under the strain of paternal disapproval and divulged the location of the murder baby duo.

Which lead to Bruce just deciding to pop by the University of Madison with the cover of giving some lecture, but with the true intent of speaking with Damian.

At first it hadn't been disastrous. Damian had been talking to some civilian student and the Talon was no where in sight, so Bruce had just walked over and started chatting.

Damian had stared at him like he was the second coming, and it looked like perhaps there'd be an armistice, right up until Talon had shouted. “YOU GET AWAY FROM HIM!!!” as he'd come sprinting across the lawn, which meant the civilian stepped between Bruce and Damian, which also put him between Bruce and the Talon, and the Talon already had a knife out so.

“God fucking damn it Bruce.” Jason snarled.

Which was how he found himself trying to take down an acrobat with a flying tackle before Bruce, or the civilian found themselves missing some parts they'd probably rather not lose.

Jason ends up mildly stabbed for his troubles, and Damian to everyone's absolute horror ends up silently sobbing.

Yeah, Jason fucking told Bruce not to do this.

Richard Grayson viciously elbows Jason in the face, scrambles out from under him and then bolts to Damian's side. Bruce stares open-mouthed as his son collapses into the assassin's arms and said assassin shoots Bruce the dirtiest look Jason thinks he's ever seen.

And Jason has seen some shit.

“I-” Bruce stumbles over his words. “I just wanted to talk to him.”

The civilian clears his throat and steps forward from where he's been watching the whole scuffle frozen in shock.

“I think everybody needs to calm down, and go somewhere where there aren't fourteen different cellphones pointed at you.”

Bruce glances around, and nods.

The civilian holds out his hand. “My name is Stephen.”

“Bruce Wayne.” He nods in Jason's general direction. “My security officer Jason.”

Jason shoots the kid a sarcastic wave, and then glares at Richard where he has been trying to slowly back away from the entire mess.

Richard grimaces but steps back into place.

Stephen laughs in Bruce's face. “I know who you are, but uh, why are you trying to talk to my friend?”

“That's my son.” Bruce tells him, pointing at where Grayson has scooped Damian into his arms.

Stephen's face falls into something deeply judgmental. “Okay, well, it looks to me like he doesn't really want to talk to you.”

“No!” Damian shrieks shoving Richard away so firmly that he stumbles. “I want to talk to him!”

Bruce looks down at Damian, and the intensity of his own hope is mirrored on his son's face. Jason's actually just a little bit embarrassed looking at them.

Richards grabs Damian's arm. “You are not going anywhere with him.”

“Obviously.” Damian snorts. “We'll go sit on that bench in the atrium.” he suggests pointing, “And you'll stand here and watch us and if things go wrong you'll deal with it.”

“Damian-”

“Please, Dick- He came looking for me.” Damian pleads.

Richard nods, and steps back.

Bruce and Damian walk over to the bench. Richard follows a couple steps, which leaves Jason awkwardly standing next to Stephen the civillian.

“So, how do you know them?” he asks.

Stephen shrugs. “Xander's in a bunch of my classes, and his kid brother goes everywhere with him.”

He glances at Jason. “Though I guess they're not really brothers?”

Jason watches Damian clench his firsts and stare at the floor while Bruce leans in close talking intently. Every line of the kid's body is written with tension, Jason can see him over-thinking and planning every movement before he makes it. It's heartbreaking, because he can see how eager Damian is to talk to his Dad, but also how fucking terrified he is to be doing it.

Jason compares that with the way the kid had sprawled out with his books whenever he used to hang out with the Talon in the cave and the easy way he'd see him smiling and horsing around with Richard whenever Jason checked in.

“No. They're definitely brothers.” Jason explains. “They're just not related.”

Chapter Text

Damian stares at his father and he feels so much he thinks he won't be able to stand it. He wants to scream or cry or throw up. Instead, ignoring the shameful tears still on his cheeks, he keeps a neutral expression despite his heart in his throat and nods solemnly.

“Father.”

“Damian. It's good to see you.”

Damian looks across the entryway to where Grayson is standing tense as a bow-spring ready to leap across the room at the slightest signal and come to Damian's defense. Damian's not entirely sure he shouldn't give him the nod, and then the pair of them can disappear out of here.

It's humiliation upon humiliation. In the past, in moments like these he would wish he were anywhere else in the world, but Madison and the University have become HIS place. He likes it here, and what disturbs him is the intrusion into this sanctuary of the utter mess that he'd fled from in the first place. He wants to run away so badly, and he wants to stay just as much.

Damian glances up to meet his father's gaze and then looks away again, feeling ashamed. He hates himself right now. He's not who he's become and he's not who he used to be. He's just a weak child. That's only allowed when he's with Grayson. That's only safe when he's with Grayson. He shifts and feels the comforting press of the knives he still wears most days. It makes him feel less vulnerable.

“Likewise, Father. I trust you've made a full recovery?” the small talk spills automatically off his tongue. The formalities and conventions that his Mother had taught him because she'd insisted they'd be important. It feels like he's reading lines from a script, and acting his part poorly.

“Yes, Alfred saw to that. He was very strict in enforcing the doctor's recommendations.” Bruce Wayne replies in an equal tone of practiced courtesy. He plays his part better though. He always has. He's a master of the craft, and there's no uncertainty in his tone or in his gaze.

Damian looks away from his Father. Batman needs an heir, and Damian had been born to provide him with one (though born is a kind word for how he came to be, he's aware of his mother's other creations), but Bruce Wayne never needed a son. He had two already, and Damian is at least self-aware enough to know he will never surpass Timothy Drake when it comes to business acumen.

Which means Bruce Wayne is only a cover for a visit from the Batman who probably wanted to assess for himself what, if any, danger Damian posed to the civilians of Wisconsin and if he could be prevailed upon to return to Gotham and the nightly crusade for Justice.

Damian is a better fighter than Timothy, and at least as good as Jason, though less tactically brilliant than either.

Damian feels stupid. He'd forgotten for a moment that Bruce Wayne isn't real. He's just the mask that Batman wears when he needs to.

It doesn't change the fact that biologically Damian is Bruce Wayne's son, which means the man has a legal claim to him and could be within his rights to forcibly bring him back to Gotham.

Damian knew it was over the minute Grayson's knives came out. They're not going to let him stay with an assassin whose already stabbed one of Father's pseudo-sons. His papers are all falsified, even the one's Mother had given him to stay in the country in the first place. Legally Grayson is probably dead, and most likely would be incarcerated by the Justice League, at least temporarily until they decided how to handle his case, if it was ever discovered that he was un-dead. No one would take their side against Bruce Wayne, of the open heart, millions of dollars and one thriving adopted son and one adopted son whose recently been exonerated by an international tribunal.

Damian will have to go back, knowing that he's too weak, knowing that he's too soft, knowing that he's proven himself incapable- he'll have to go back to Gotham and pretend he doesn't know all that.

He'll have to fight like it's not already hopeless.

He'd let himself think that Father hadn't just come to ensure Damian's well-being. That he had perhaps, missed him. That he had wanted to spend time with Damian.

How foolish. How painfully and disgustingly naive.

Father never wanted him. Damian had realized that the moment he met the man. Batman wanted no child of Talia al Ghul. That was why Talia had left him there in the first place, because she had been confident the Batman would return him without any real fuss.

Damian thinks about the monsters Mother had created in his image in an attempt to surpass him after he had refused to return with her. Father had never needed to do that. Damian had been the monster created to surpass the children Father already had.

He doesn't want to do this. He doesn't want to deal with the Batman and the past. He wants to go somewhere safe and defensible where his own weaknesses and the inescapable truth of his inadequacies will be of no consequence.

But, he can't walk away. It would kill him, because he still has that bright traitorous hope that Father is there because he cares, and had learned to love the son he hadn't initially wanted, whose existence and very being had horrified him initially.

That had been Damian's thought when he'd seen him standing in the lecture hall- Bruce Wayne, perfectly pressed and carefully coifed in Madison Wisconsin because he came looking for Damian.

Even though Damian gave up. Abandoned his heritage and his duty and ran away to somewhere completely inapproritate and beneath the dignityof a Wayne. Yet, here he stood.

He hadn't broken into their home to berate him, hadn't cornered Damian dressed in his armour and his cowl. He'd arrived gently, approached him tentatively and is looking at Damina like-

Like Damian's been sitting in blank silence for five minutes staring at him intently, and his Father is becoming concerned that he may have suffered a brain injury.

“Damian...” Bruce asks very gently. “Are you alright?”

He doesn't sound practiced now. He sounds like he means it.

Damian shrugs, awkwardly. “I'm afraid you've taken me by surprise. I'm not quite sure how to react.”

Bruce nods, blinking. “I was worried about you. It scared me half to death when I woke up and learned you'd disappeared.”

“T-t” Damian scoffs.

“Damian.”

“It was not my intention to distress you.” He snaps. “In fact I thought you'd be relieved to have been given a reprieve from the burden of my presence.”

“Damian, I never thought of you as a burden...You're my son. I care about you. I want you to be happy. I need to know that you're safe.”

Damian nods. “I am well-cared for.”

“I wouldn't have thought the assassin had too many life-skills.” Bruce remarks dryly.

Damian shrugs and goes back to staring at his feet. “We muddle through together.”

Bruce nods. He reaches over and takes Damian's hands, bending down to make eye-contact with Damian.

It's uncomfortable and unpleasant. Damian would like to squirm away from the contact but doesn't. You only get so many chances after all, and Damian has already spent most of his on beheadings, murder and name calling.

“Damian, whatever it was the made you feel you had to leave. I promise, I will fix it. We'll fix it together. It doesn't matter what it is. You're my son, I want you to come home, so we can be a family.”

It echoes Damian's own words from the day when Mother had asked him where he which of his parents he would choose and his plea to have both had been thrown back in his face.

It hadn't been about family then so much as competing ideologies. Just one more skirmish in the war between the League of Assassins and the Justice League, with Damian as the battleground.

Damian wants his Father's words to be true. He wants it more than he's ever wanted anything. He'd kill for them to be true and he has killed in the past trying to earn them.

But he can't trust them. Maybe it's his paranoia talking, or Dick's suspicion rubbing off. Maybe it's the way he's seen his Father act the part expected of him at dozens of society gatherings, board meetings and charity events.

His Father's entire life is a lie after all. It would be the height of arrogance to think that just because he was blood, Damian would be an exception from that.

He takes his hand back.

“I appreciate that Father, but I'm happy here. I have no desire to return to Gotham.”

“Oh.” Bruce's face falls and Damian has to believe he's not acting now. That his disappointment is genuine, the pain of the rejection real. Otherwise Damian thinks he'd go insane. “Well, under no circumstances will you be going dark like that again for an extended period of time.” He pats his pocket. “I have an ear com for you and it's patched into the Bat network so-”

Damian cuts him off by handing Bruce his cell phone. “Just enter your cell number and text yourself from my number. That way it will be saved on your phone shoud you desire to contact me. Under no circumstances will I be using coms.”

Bruce sighs but dutifully taps away on Damian's phone for a second. “This is a private line. No Batman, no business. Just you boys, and my good friends. If you call I swear I'll answer.”

He must send the text because there's a ding. Buce frowns and pats his pockets before fishing out a high-end model that it takes him a second to unlock.

“Do you have a preference for which name you'd be under?” he asks, well mannered as ever.

Damian swallows as he catches sight of the long list of contacts in his Father's phone. “Damian Wayne is perfectly adequate.” he informs his Father.

Counting the number his Father just added, Damian now has seven contacts in his phone. Father must have nearly a hundred.

It's just another area where Damian is inadequate.

Damian hands the phone back, and Father pockets it easily with a smooth practiced gesture. Damian wonders if Alfred had once taught him the most elegant and refined way to put away a cell phone. Probaby. And Father would have practiced it until he'd gotten it just right.

Bruce glances around. “I must admit I'm surprised to find you in a place like this.”

“That was the point.” Damian grumbles, hunching his shoulders and staring resolutely off into the middle distance.

“What are you studying?”

Damian shrugs. “A bit of everything. Grayson is the one technically enrolled, though it's under a false name. We're undeclared.”

Bruce frowns. “You're not coming back with me and I assume you've got no plans to return to the League, what are you going to do?”

Damian shrugs. “Find a way to save the world that doesn't involve Spandex and Body Armour... I'm thinking of majoring in Agricultural Sciences. Efficient food production could help solve a number of pressing environmental issues, and the current methods of distribution and production are wasteful and detrimental to the environment and health of the average individual...but I'm still young, I might complete a degree in Middle Eastern Poetry just to pass the time until I hit puberty.”

Bruce grins, and it's one Damian's seen before at a thousand parties. He knows now that he is well and truly on the outside now. Damian's no longer fighting the crusade, so he's just another civilian who needs to be coddled and protected.

“That sounds wonderful Damian, I really-”

Damain stands abruptly, suddenly unable to stand the inane conversation for one more second.

“Save your lies, Father. We both know they're wasted on me. I expect you need to return to Gotham. After all the City might fall without you there to personally protect it. Call me when you're next in the mid-west and we will organize another delightful visit.” He nods to his Father and strides off. Dick scurries after him.

“Damian!” he hears the third most wealthy man in the world yell after him, but Damian doesn't turn.

Jason gives them a thumbs up as they pass.

It's horrible, and Damian, humiliatingly, doesn't make it back to the car before he starts crying in public again.

He hates his weakness. He hates that he's always too much or not enough and he wishes he could take himself apart and just FIX whatever it was that was broken inside him that made him this way. But he can't, not unless he becomes a neuro-biologist and learns the pathways and parts of grey matter as well as he's learned the components of a motorcycle. Admittedly he thinks he's more than capable of doing so-

-But, he doesn't think he'd like medecine. Too much blood, not to mention all those long nights and the high stress work environment in an incredibly competitive field.

The thought makes him chuckle, and Dick, driving home, insists that Damian share the joke.

So, Damian does, and it makes the former assassin throw his head back and laugh out loud.

Damian swings his legs as he sits in the plastic chair at Dick's support group. It's small, there's not much of a supervillain presence in Wisconsin and most of the incidents they do get are minor, but this is just one chapter of a larger organization, and in bigger cities they have multiple sessions a day to try and help victims caught in the middle of un-natural conflict. Actually, most of the members of this group are like them- transplants from big cities who survived the machinations of some megalomaniac or other.

Damian doesn't enjoy these meetings. He feels awkward and self-conscious every second he's there, and not just because they take place in a Christian church.

Dick seems to like them though, and that's why Damian is here. The last month or so they'd gotten so Damian no longer felt the need to accompany Dick, but this week's altercation with his Father and brother left him feeling fragile and vulnerable. He didn't want Grayson to be without support, and he didn't want to be alone without back-up.

So here he was sitting and listening, and wondering why exactly Dick found this experience fulfilling. He's wishing he'd thought to bring his homework, but he'd been distracted leaving the house.

He finds his mind slipping to question that's been bothering him since Father showed up. Richard hadn't been surprised. Angry, yes. Worried, definitely. But not surprised. Had he known that Father was coming? That the Bats knew where they were? Why hadn't he told Damian? They could have moved! The whole point of what they were doing had been to try and get away and it had been Richard's idea to begin with.

Damian grips the edges of the plastic seat and tries to remember what the questions on his math proof had been.

“-...there was an incident with Robin's father, and we've both been hyper-vigilant ever since, it was awful-” he hears Dick say and his head jerks up, catching the attention of the mediator.

The mediator (My name is Cheryl!) looks at him. “Something to add Robin?”

She says his name like she doesn't believe it's really his, which he supposes is fair since it's not, but it rankles all the same.

Damian hunches his shoulders and shrugs.

Dick is looking at him. He can tell. “C'mon, Robbie, I know you have some thoughts on what went down-” Grayson nudges. The horrifically embarassing after all you cried in public goes unsaid, but it makes Damian cringe all the same.

There's an old instinct to fall back on his dignity to say something like I am an Al Ghul, the Grandson of the Demon, how dare you question me?

But the mediator is already looking at him with too sharp eyes, and he knows she's not stupid. She's probably seen the videos that the moronic members of the student body had posted. One of them had already ended up on TMZ. Something about Bruce Wayne's over-zealous protection detail, and making small children cry.

She's probably already put together that that little incident and Grayson's story about Damian's Father were connected. He doesn't want to give her anything more to use against him.

He stares at the floor and mumbles. “Can I be excused, Xander?” in a small voice.

He pictures the way Grayson's face falls but doesn't look up to see it. He feels the familiar pressure on his back.

“Sure. Wait for me outside, okay?”

Damian nods and scurries out with his head down. He feels small in a way he never did when he was younger, and set to inherit the earth. He wonders sometimes if he made the right choice. After all, he'd never been the scared and confused back then.

He's sitting outside the meeting room, and has managed to dig a pen out of his backpack, but barring anything to draw on has resorted to doodling on his arm.

He notices someone coming down the hallway but doesn't look up. The Church has a bunch of programs running out of it.

There's a soft noise and he glances up to see Tim Drake, lingering well out of Damian's arms reach and dressed in an exaggeratedly casual outfit.

He gives Damian a tiny wave. “Hi.”

Damian shifts his grip on his pen, in case he needs to use it as a weapon.

“Timothy.”

Tim smiles. “Not Drake?”

Damian shrugs. “Apparently using only surnames is interpreted as confrontational rather than respectful.”

“Hmm.” He gestures at the chair. “Do you mind if I sit?”

Damian shrugs. Tim sits.

“I wanted to apologize about Bruce.” Tim says. “I should have realized he'd pull a stunt like that.”

“It's alright.”

“No. It's not, you ran away for a reason and I should have respected that, but I-”

“I told you it's alright, Timothy!” Damian snaps. “And Richard has a problem with Father, not me.”

Tim looks at him. “Okay.”

Damian goes back to doodling on his arm. “...how long did you know where I was?”

Tim rolls his eyes. “September.” he leans back and rests his head against the wall. “Jason was the one who insisted we keep Bruce off your tail for a while, let you figure things out a bit, before we sicced him on you.”

“Oh.” Damian replies, and he hates how small his voice is. It's March now.

Tim leans down to try and look him in the face. “Damian? I hope you know, you can always come home.”

Damian looks up in surprise and sneers at him. “Of course I know that! Father went on at great length informing me of that, but, my home is here. Not is Gotham, or with the League.”

Tim nods. “Okay.” He swallows. “Don't be too hard on Bruce. I know he's difficult, but he tries. He cares about you, and if you tell him this is what you want, I think he'd help you.”

“I'm not mad at Father. It's Richard who doesn't trust him.”

“Oh. Have you told him that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, okay.”

“Apparently Todd told him that if I went back with Father I'd end up fighting in his ridiculous crusade.”

“He wouldn't ever make you but, everyone seems to, in the end.”

“Do you really believe that individuals of your talents can truly produce the most positive change in the world through violence and vigilante-ism? Considering all the problems that we as a species face?” Damian asks, genuinely curious about the answer.

Tim raises his eyebrows. “I see you've been enjoying University.”

“T-t”

Tim smiles and stands up. “Thanks for not stabbing me this time.”

Damian scowls, and watched Tim walk away, wrestling with his conscience the entire time. “I'M SORRY ABOUT THAT!” he shouts after him.

Tim waves over his shoulder.

Damian goes back to drawing on his arm. He hesitates for a minute and then pulls out his phone and opens the contacts tab. There's a few more names in there now than there were at the start of the school year. Dick, obviously, Stephen, and several administrative, and emergency numbers that Damian had programmed in in case of an emergency. And as of yesterday, there's one listed as “Dad”, because Bruce had entered it himself.

He'd said it was his private, no business, no Batman number.

Damian opens a text message, and carefully starts typing. “I will not be returning to Gotham; though I of course wish you and your-” he stops and deletes it.

“I spoke with my brot-”

He deletes it again.

“I hope you-”

No.

“Thank you for coming to see-”

Definitely not.

“I am very pleased you are alive.”

That seemed okay. He can keep that.

“I am sorry if you thought I'd been kidnapped by Mother.”

Still good.

“If you visit again, call ahead, and that way Grayson will not try and attack you.”

Perfect.

He hits send.

Dick walks over to him. “You okay?”

Damian nods. “How about you?”

“I'm wondering whether we need to disappear again.”

Damian thinks about it and shakes his head. “No. I think it is an acceptable risk to remain in contact with them.”

Damian can feel Dick tense up next to him. “...if you're sure.”

Damian looks up and takes Dick's hand. “I am. I promise it will be okay.”

Dick doesn't look convinced, Damian's decided to believe it.

“How about we go get hot chocolate?” Damian suggests.

That perks Dick right up. Ever since it went below freezing he's been finding the Wisconsin weather something of a trial, and warm beverages have become his very favourite thing in the world.

“After that we could go to the park with Titus!” Dick says practically bouncing with excitement.

Damian smiles and swings their joined hands together. “Sure. That sounds...fun.”

Dick hesitates. “Are you sure it's safe? For them to know where we are?”

Damian gives his hand a squeeze. “Yeah. They promised they just want me to be okay, and if they break that promise, it's like you said: I've been raised to kill since birth and you're a functionally-immortal killing machine. Between the two of us, I think we can take care of just about anyone.”

Dick shakes his head, but he's grinning from ear to ear, so Damian figures the 'k-word' wasn't too upsetting this time.

“Alright.”

So, they go get ice cream, and then they walk Titus in the park.

The next day, they go back to class, and field questions about whether or not Bruce Wayne is suing them or whether they're suing him.

Life goes on, and it's a pretty nice one.

BONUS

The Dean of admissions looks like he doesn't get paid enough for this sort of thing. Honestly, Dick can't blame him.

The Deam sighs. “It has come to our attention that you, Mr. Smith are not actually the one completing your assignments, which means you are committing academic fraud and that is a serious offense under our code of conduct. Care to respond to these allegations?”

Dick's tries to smile but he knows it's more of a grimace. “My brother does my homework, but he's too little to enroll?”

The Dean looks at where Damian is sitting, defiant and unrepentant, arms crossed and in full aristocratic arrogance mode.

“I would like to formally state for the record that I regret nothing.” Damian declares.