Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The knife pushes thin along Dick’s carotid artery, cupping the indent between neck and jawline—forcing him to angle his chin. The metal is warm, pulled with execution speed from under Damian’s pillow. The blade is black obsidian. 

“Okay,” Dick says quietly, tracking the intricacies of his own heartbeat—counting the space between breaths. “Guess I did need a shave.”

Damian angles the knife further into Dick’s skin. His other hand clutches Dick’s collar, pulling himself upright off his bedsheets. The whites of his eyes shine silver in the dark.

“What is the meaning of this?” he spits—like acid, like darts in the desert. 

Dick notices, for the first time, that the boy had gone to bed in his street clothes. If he were to pull back the comforter, would he find green boots? Laces tight up tight?

Dick’s own weight rests on one hand and the knee he’d used to brace himself when Damian pulled him down to meet the knife. 

“Speak, cur,” Damian says. “I will not ask again. Why are you here?”

“I came to check on you.” He’s careful not to swallow.

The boy scoffs. 

“I did,” Dick insists. “Guess it was a wasted effort. Just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Or you were trying to tidy a loose end.”

It must’ve been Dick’s hand in Damian’s bangs that woke him. Or Damian had heard him enter but chose to lie in wait. He’d been clear, after all, that Dick was an untrusted interloper: a Batman undeserving of the name. 

Dick chooses his words carefully. “No loose ends. I told you at the funeral, remember? I want you here. Bruce wanted you here.”

“My father’s plans have never mattered to me,” Damian says. Brazen in his lie.

Dick doesn’t call him on it. Instead he says, “I’m gonna stand up now, okay?”

Damian doesn’t loosen his hand on Dick’s shirt. His pupils are blown wide.

Dick counts through another two careful breaths. Then, very slowly, he covers Damian’s hand with his own—wraps his own fingers around the knife’s handle. Pulls it away from his neck.

Damian lets him, and releases his collar. The rise and fall of his small chest slows.

“We’re okay,” Dick says faintly. He backs up off the bed, swallowing a strange bitterness. “Message received. No waking up psychotic baby assassins after patrol.”

Damian shoves the knife back under his pillow. The muscles in his shoulders remain hard with tension: coiled and alert. The moon, setting towards the horizon, plasters light against his window.

“Why tonight?” he asks suddenly.

“Huh?”

“The funeral was two weeks ago. You claim you’re here to check on me. Why tonight?”

Dick considers. He’s never had much of an internal narrative: most decisions are images in sequence. Most memories are light and color and personality. When he chatters at his enemies, talks to his friends, he’s collapsing a cinemax full of thoughts and data into a single verbal strand. It’s no wonder he never stops speaking: words don’t come fast enough. There’s always more to say.

So the answer to Damian’s question is a kaleidoscope—a puzzle of instincts left unassembled. Damian’s perfectly-executed backward walkover to avoid gunfire on tonight’s patrol. The way the bullet had still clipped his ankle, doing no damage through his armored cape but sending him spinning towards the roof’s edge anyway. The specific angle of his upturned nose when Alfred had offered him a late dinner afterwards, and he’d clearly wanted to say yes. The way his fingers rubbed together when he said no.

Talia al Ghul’s sharp nails. Tim’s wounded anger. Bruce’s broad back as Dick had seen it again and again: as Robin, laid out on a gurney in the Batcave, watching him run the computers late into a cold night.

The sketchbook he’s seen on Damian’s person, disappearing whenever Dick gets too close.

Instead of all this, he says, “You skipped dinner after patrol.”

Damian flops back on the pillow. He turns to face the wall. “I wasn’t hungry.”

“Okay,” Dick says, thinking of the way the boy’s eyes lingered on Alfred’s pineapple upside-down cake.

He turns for the door. “If you want something later, feel free to just take anything from the kitchen. There’s half a salmon platter in the fridge.” Carefully, as though it’s an afterthought, he adds, “And there’s still cake. You should try some before I eat it all.”

The shadow of Damian’s curled body plays on the bedroom wall. Dick closes the door when he goes.

The cake’s still there in the morning. It goes untouched through the day. Then they finish a flawless patrol that night, and Damian comes home to eat three slices.

Dick lets him keep the knife.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“You’ll change your mind,” Damian says.

He rests his chin on steepled fingers. His legs are crossed beneath him, dirty boots pulled up on an antique armchair. His green eyes blink with deliberate slowness: performative confidence.

Dick watches him from the sofa across the parlor table. He considers rising to the bait: denying it, or at least forcing Damian to make his accusation out loud. But they’d done this same strange two-step last night after patrol, tempers running high, and neither had come out ahead. So he sidesteps the blow. Stalls.

Lightly, he says, “You’re trying to distract me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you only talk on my turn.”

Damian slouches where he sits. He peers down at the game between them like a bird deciding whether a worm is worth the effort. “I don’t need to distract you,” he says. “This game is for children.”

“Games exercise our strategic thinking,” Dick says. “Let’s try...B3.”

Damian clicks his tongue against his teeth. He reaches for a little peg. “B3 is a miss. No real naval combat would proceed this way. The strategic value is negligible.” 

Dick spreads his hands. “So you know where my battleship is, then. Sink me.”

“I’m saying, the fact that I don’t know is more unrealistic than the alternative. This teaches me nothing and wastes our time.”

The Persian carpet dulls sound; saps the resonance out of his high voice. With dark clouds blotting out the sky beyond the window, the only light emits from scrolling wall sconces and a century-old chandelier. The pale light casts long shadows and leaves Damian’s face cold. 

The manor is as large as it is empty. Dick’s been thinking about the penthouse at the top of Wayne Tower.

“C9,” Damian finally says, watching Dick instead of his Battleship grid.

“Miss,” Dick says. “You think knights ride kangaroos?”

“What?”

“You play chess, right? You think real knights move by jumping people? A game can teach you about strategy—or logic, or math, or deception—without being true to life. C4.”

Damian scowls. “Hit.”

“Really?” Dick blinks. “That worked?”

“A lucky strike. It doesn’t matter. I’m ahead by two ships.” He adjusts his weight on the chair. “If this is the level of strategy you’re used to handling, I worry for Batman’s future. I3.”

“Miss. That’s what I’ve got you for.”

Damian’s gaze strikes him, sharp—calculating. Suspicious. 

“Can’t take a compliment?” Dick grins. “After all that time telling me how great you are? Uh, let’s do D4.”

“Hit,” Damian says quietly. Alfred brought sugar cookies; they sit untouched at Damian’s side. 

“Cool. We used to do a house rule where you had to declare near misses too.” Back when his parents were alive. Back when a secret war seemed like an exciting game to play.

He’d never played Battleship, or anything else, with Bruce—of course not. Bruce would see through the flimsy excuse of using children’s games as mental acuity training. Dick himself knows he only has Damian’s attention for as long as he keeps things interesting; as long as he’s quick on his feet. One false move, one wrong word, and Damian walks away from the table to spend another day in silence, the cold manor corridors between them. 

Damian says, “If you want me to be your strategist, you have a funny way of showing it.”

“Hmm?”

The boy's mouth hooks upwards. His lips pull back like a dog bares its teeth. “You didn’t like my strategy last night. H7, by the way.”

“...Hit.” Dick’s stomach twists. No more dodging the blow.

Damian hums to himself, pleased. He lifts his chin. The thin parlor lighting darkens his eyes. 

Dick swallows. “Your strategy was unnecessary. We weren’t fighting supervillains. Just street level guys trying to make ends meet.”

Damian raises his eyebrows. “What’s your move, Grayson? I’m waiting.”

“Life’d roughed them up enough already. You can tell the difference, if you’re watching, between someone stealing out of desperation and someone who—”

“Grayson. Your move.”

He hesitates. “E4.”

“Miss.” 

Dick curses under his breath. “Look, if we’d left them for Gordon they’d have gone into the system. Their families would’ve had to fend for themselves, and when they got out they’d be desperate enough to reoffend.” 

“You told me to let them go, so I did. But now that they’ve experienced life with both legs broken at the knees, they won’t be reoffending any time soon. H8?”

Hit.

“That’s not how we do things. You know that, Damian.”

“And yet, you asked me to be your Robin. You knew how I did things. Or did you manage to block out that discomfort in your rush to show pity to Batman’s son?”

Hit.

“Damian, you know that’s not—"

“Does it scare you, Grayson, that one day I may not come to heel when you call?” He grips his armrests. “Does it worry you to be locked up in this monstrous old place with someone like me while you skulk around in a cloak that doesn’t fit you, imitating the gait of a greater man?”

Hit.

A brutal joy creeps into Damian’s features; into the crease of his nose. “You know I deserve the cowl. I deserve it.”

Dick breathes out slowly. He keeps his hands open in front of him; refuses to ball them to fists. 

Damian’s eyes flicker downwards. He notices Dick’s open palms, and his expression falters. “You’re weak,” he says. “You can’t handle a city like Gotham.”

Miss. That one's a miss.

Dick shrugs. “B4.”

Damian lunges from his chair, slamming his hands onto the table. “Didn’t you hear me? You’re weak! That’s how I know you’ll change your mind. You can’t handle my methods! You’ll send me back to the League any day now!”

Dick rolls to his feet. “Damian,” he growls, “be quiet.”

Damian backs up two paces, stumbling against the chair leg, his stance wide and ready. A scowl hardens on his face.

His hands, Dick notices, are balled into fists.

The sight throws him. He struggles for words, mouth suddenly dry. “Listen to me. I’m not sending you back to the League. You’d have to walk out that door yourself if you want to go back to them.” He shrugs, feeling strangely helpless—feeling something dark spiralling at the bottom of his gut. “Even then, I’d probably chase you.”

Confusion occludes anger on Damian’s face. 

Then he snaps, “This is a waste of my time.” He stalks out the door, where his footsteps echo in an empty hall. The manor is so empty.

Dick takes a moment to collect himself. He pulls little ship figurines out of his grid; tosses them into the box. 

Had Damian expected Dick to hit him? Had he wanted a brawl?

Dick remembers being Robin. He remembers walking a girl to the police station to help explain that her boyfriend had pushed her down a flight of stairs. He remembers that when she’d hugged him goodbye, she’d whispered: “Finally. Finally. The sonuvabitch finally hit me, thank god.”

He looks at Damian’s grid for the first time. B4 would’ve sunken his cruiser.

Damian was winning when he quit, but Dick wasn’t out of the game just yet. The key, in games as in life, is to understand a foreign map.

Chapter Text

3:16am

The dart rips through Damian’s thigh like Kleenex. It lodges fletching-deep, sending up a spray of blood that forces Dick’s heart into his throat.

Damian swears viciously. He leaps from the building, firing his grappling gun just quick enough for the line to catch him as he swings across the street, colliding feet-first with the assailant hidden in the alley. The sight of his injured leg used as a battering ram makes Dick shudder worse than nails on a chalkboard.

Dick follows, Batman’s cape catching unwieldy air currents behind him. The balance is all wrong.

They’d been tracking a string of unusual robberies: Stone Age weapons stolen from museums and private collections. With Dick’s luck, it’s probably the work of a cult trying to bring back a prehistoric overlord. Or maybe someone’s about to resurrect, and then subsequently hunt, the dinosaurs—in which case, props for creativity.

By the time he reaches the alleyway, Damian’s knee is pressed into the small of his assailant’s back. Blood stains a trail down Robin’s leggings and trickles into the dust.

“He claims to know nothing of the heist,” Damian says skeptically, pulling black cord from his utility belt. “He’s a contract killer.”

The guy’s tactical gear supports the story, as does his indifferent expression. Dick recognizes his type. Ex-military, maybe. Took a bad turn in life.

Dick pitches his voice low and gruff. “You’re quick to turn on your employers.”

“It was a bad deal,” the merc says. “Fuck it, ‘m not pissing off the Bat for a bunch of Satanist dickheads who want me to shoot people with caveman arrows. Just give me to the cops.”

Dick would find the attitude charming on a guy who hadn’t just shot a child.

“You deserve worse,” Damian says, tying the merc’s hands with relish. The blood’s starting to pool around his boots. His footing wavers as he finishes off the knot.

Dick calls on all of Bruce’s dark authority when he says, “I’ll come for you at the station. Expect me. We’ll talk. You’ll tell me what you know.”

Then he scoops Damian up—despite protest—and fires his grappling gun to the sky. The Batmobile swoops low and steals them away.

“Not necessary,” Damian grits out as Dick settles him into the passenger seat. “We could’ve stayed to question him.”

The boy’s face is pale. A mound of metal looms out of his thigh: fletching, feather-shaped. The dart must’ve been massive; nearly the size of an arrow.

“Jesus,” Dick breathes. He punches in the command for home, then grabs a medkit from under the seat.

Damian scowls. “It looks worse than it is. You know thigh wounds bleed profusely.” His fingers clutch the seat beneath him. Dick watches the knuckles go white.

Gently he says, “Gotta be painful, though. That thing’s huge.”

“I’ve had worse!”

Dick’s lips press into a thin line at that. He grabs a tourniquet strap from the kit. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

A sharp breath. “It wasn’t my fault! You didn’t see him coming, either.”

Dick blinks. “I’m not saying—Robin, I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming me.”

He leans down, meaning to apply the tourniquet. Damian startles at the proximity, shifting on the bloody seat—then suddenly, a thin cry escapes him. His body crunches inwards on itself, rigid with pain.

Dick grabs his shoulder. “What? What happened?”

Damian swallows, eyes scrunched shut. “I—moved too quickly. The weapon moved. I think—hooks.”

All of Dick’s breath leaves him. There are ancient metal hooks embedded in Damian’s flesh, pulling when he moves.

The boy had continued to fight—to put weight on the leg. What kind of training had he been through, that he’d suppressed the pain until now?

“Okay,” Dick says softly. “I’m gonna shift your leg to get the tourniquet around it. It’ll just last a second.”

He reaches forward.

Damian’s hand shoots out; clutches weakly at Dick’s throat.

Dick forces himself still. There’s no pressure in Damian’s fingertips, and his hand is too small to choke Dick out if he wanted to. It’s a defensive instinct. A warning.

Dick waits the span of one deep breath, then says, “You’re still bleeding. Let me help.”

Damian looks ready to argue. Then, like he’s been released from a spell, he lets out a ragged exhale. He lowers his arm.

Dick hooks a hand beneath Damian’s thigh. “Ready?”

Damian nods tersely, eyes trained on his lap.

Dick lifts the thigh. Damian makes an ugly noise through his teeth: halfway to a scream, broken with a pain that’s half anger. His arms flail out. One hand grips the car door. The other scrabbles against Kevlar as it tries and fails to grip Dick’s shoulder.

Dick moves as fast as he can, threading the tourniquet beneath the thigh. He lowers it again, then tightens the strap. Blood flecks his gloves.

“There,” he says lightly. “You’re okay. That was it; that’s everything. You’ll be okay.”

Damian gulps down air. His face has taken on a greenish tinge. They’ll need Alfred’s expertise to remove the hooked dart, as well as to check for any lingering infections. The metal is old, the fletching accented with rust.

Dick presses a hand to Damian’s shoulder, letting up only when the boy’s breathing slows. Then he leans back in his seat, rummaging through the medkit. “I have painkillers.”

“No,” Damian says. A sheen of sweats coats his forehead.

“What do you mean no?”

“A League assassin rises above pain.”  His eyelids droop, heavy. “Besides, pain is a punishment for mistakes in the field.”

Dick’s stomach plunges all the way out through the bottom of the Batmobile, down to the city below. “You didn’t—this wasn’t your fault, Robin. This was—”

“I’m sick of your coddling.” Damian looks away from Dick, towards the passenger window. His shoulders hunch inwards.

Gotham gives way to a long stretch of greenery beneath them. The trees blend into one another, blurred by speed. Not long until they reach the manor, with its grim facades and strange silences.

Dick loved the manor as a boy. Now it seems like a strange place to grow up. Not enough natural light.

He realizes he’s clenching his jaw. Grinding his teeth together.

He grits out, “Even if this were your fault—even if you were totally stupid—you know, as untrainable as I was—”

“Tt.”

“—this would not be the punishment. This would never be the punishment, Damian.”

“You weren’t trained by the League.”

“No,” he says. “Thank god.”

Damian doesn’t react, but guilt stings Dick’s chest anyway. He’s used to knowing the right thing to say.

With Alfred’s expert assistance, the dart is removed and the wound sanitized. Damian shies away when Dick tries to ruffle his hair. He refuses a late dinner and tells Alfred not to bother with breakfast tomorrow.

Still, Dick and Alfred persuade him into taking a dose of morphine. And when he nods off on the gurney, small limbs slack and mouth just open, Dick carries him to his room. He runs hot: a kernel of fire in the shape of a boy.

The hallways are long and the ceilings high enough to echo. For a charge so heavy, Damian weighs next to nothing in his arms.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“I’ve finished covering most of the furniture,” Alfred says, boxes piled high in his arms.

Dick takes them, ignoring the butler’s protest. “Come on, Alfie, you’re doing all the work. What’s this one, kitchen supplies? The armory?”

“Oh, whatever I could squeeze in. You did want to take as few boxes as possible to the penthouse.”

Dick shoots him a grin. Alfred had advocated for bringing just about the entire manor with them in the move. He’d complained, in that subtle stiff-upper-lip way of his, that he wouldn’t have enough to do otherwise.

Like Alfred’s ever known how to stop being busy. Work congeals around him—like a few other family members Dick could name.

Dick carries the boxes towards the door. “Where’s Damian?” 

“I expect he’s still packing up his room.” Alfred’s unimpeachably level voice carries a tone that Dick’s learned to recognize after long practice: something is upending the order of the household, and Dick’s attention is needed to put things to rights.

“I’ll check on him,” Dick says easily. “Just let me put down the grand piano, or whatever you’ve got in here.”

“Yes, do please check on him, Master Richard.” 

Dick frowns. He knows that tone, too—from late nights and injured Robins. It sets a square of deep wrinkles between Alfred’s brows.

Dick offloads the boxes as fast as he can. When he reaches Damian’s room, he knocks on the half-open door. 

“What?” Damian snaps, small voice put-upon, no doubt feeling besieged by Alfred’s gentle requests.

Dick figures that’s invitation enough. He pushes through. “Huh. Coulda sworn you wanted to bring your stuff with you.”

A pile of unassembled boxes lies propped against the bed, where Damian reclines with his eyes glued to the ceiling. A sketchbook corner pokes out from beneath his pillow, hastily hidden.

“This is my ancestral home, Grayson. Not that you’d understand.”

“So...you’re staging a protest?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Dick laughs despite his best efforts. Damian shoots him an iced glare worthy of Mr. Freeze.

“Sorry, sorry!” He steps further into the room, hands raised in apology. “That’s just”—he searches for a way to end the sentence that won’t offend the boy—“a surprise to me. I didn’t know you felt so strongly about this old place.”

“I don’t.” Damian tugs on the bandage over his thigh. “But the manor is mine.”

A twinge of annoyance tempts Dick to dispute that. He and Damian had both read Bruce’s will. But that argument would get them nowhere, and then Alfred would be stuck packing Damian’s things for him.

Dick presses his tongue into his cheek. Then he opens Damian’s dresser drawer.

Damian props himself up on his elbows. “What are you doing?”

“Helping. Wow, you don’t fold anything, do you?”

“Grayson, I’m warning you—”

“The manor will still be here, you know.” He dumps Damian’s socks in a pile on the floor. “We can come see it, even.”

“Tt. Then why move in the first place?”

The next drawer is full to the brim with hoodies. Dick tosses them out next to the socks. “It’s just...I’ve been thinking about growing up here. I’ll always be grateful to Bruce for taking me in. But he wasn’t...he didn’t expect to be a dad. He didn’t prepare. I mean, emotionally or...in any other way, really.”

Damian shifts on the comforter, but doesn’t interrupt. He rarely turns down stories about his father.

Dick moves on to the jeans and sweatpants. “Uh, I just mean, with Bruce...there were things—looking back, as an adult—that I think he could’ve done differently. And the manor is...well, it’s got the grounds, but it’s isolated and gloomy and empty, and for a child—”

“I’m not a child,” Damian says immediately.

Dick sighs. “Sure, kiddo. How about this: I could use some time out of this old place. I’m a different man than Bruce was, as you keep helpfully pointing out to me. And Bruce...he’s got a long shadow.”

Dick tenses for a rebuttal—an accusation of weakness. Instead, Damian rights himself and sits cross-legged on the comforter. He watches Dick with an unblinking intensity that prickles more than it wounds.

The boy’s wearing his boots on the bed again. The sight sends a spike of discomfort down Dick’s back, unrelated to cleanliness or propriety. He tucks the feeling away for later study.

Dick tosses him a disassembled box. “Help me put this together?”

Damian holds the cardboard with disinterest. “Patience is a virtue.”

“Uh, what?”

“That’s what Father told me on my first day in the manor.” He presses a finger to the box’s edge, watching the skin of his finger turn white. “He told me I was a disgrace to my sensei and locked me in this very room.” 

Dick presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He takes a box and begins to shape it, squaring the corners. 

Damian says, “He called me boy. Like that was my name."

Dick’s eyes press closed. “I didn’t know that.”

“He was wrong, like you are. I’m not some little boy.” Damian’s finger stutters over cardboard irregularities as he runs it down the side of his box. “But, more importantly, he exercised his rightful authority. And in that moment, I confirmed that Mother had been right about him. He was a truly great man.”

Dick puts down the cardboard. “Because he locked you in a room and yelled at you?”

“Because he did not allow disrespect.” 

“Damian, that’s not…” 

He’d heard about Damian’s attitude in those first days. Tim had made him sound feral; out of control. From what he’s seen of the boy so far, it’s not impossible to believe. Is respect for Bruce’s memory really what keeps him from trying to kill Tim again? From reverting into something snarling and spoiled?

Dick doesn’t want to believe it. That doesn’t seem fair to believe of a child.

But to ignore the reality of his upbringing would be dangerous. And Bruce, for all his own darkness, had lived in a world of stark moral realities. He wouldn’t have seen another way—would have feared the worst of Damian as a survival tactic.

Green eyes hard as gemstones, Damian dares him to speak.

“I don’t think he should’ve done that,” Dick finally says. “Did he...talk to you first? About how we operate?”

“I wouldn’t have cared,” Damian says blandly. “He needed to win my respect first, so he did.” 

Maybe the black knife is still tucked beneath the pillow. Side-by-side with the sketchbook.

Damian begins to assemble the box on his lap. “You could stand to learn from him, Grayson. You are Batman, so I’ll consent to leaving the manor with you. But don’t think I won’t return.” He cocks an eyebrow. “Patience is a virtue, after all.”

Dick forces an even exhale. “Great, well. I get that you’re disappointed I’m not like your dad. But you know, Damian? I’m not. Disappointed, that is.” He finishes interlocking his box’s bottom panels, then sets it on the carpet. “I’m not gonna lock you in a room. And I don’t think that’s some fatal weakness of mine.”

Damian’s cheek pinches. “You’ve thrown all of my belongings on the floor. How is this helping?”

“Just consolidating resources.” As he says it, he takes in the size of the room for the first time. The art on the walls isn’t Damian’s; it’d hung there for generations. The TV was Bruce’s. The barbells, too. The pile of clothes on the floor is the first thing to make the room look lived-in since Damian first appeared.

Dick swallows. “It’ll be good for us to get out of the manor.”

Much later, once Damian’s staked out a room in the penthouse and Alfred has finished unpacking their new kitchen, Dick will lie back on the sofa and think careful thoughts.

He will think: why would a child wear his shoes to bed unless he anticipated the need to act without warning?

He will think: would a child feel that way in a home that belonged to him? In a home that was his?

Chapter Text

3:16am

Dick wakes at once and completely, the phantom taste of nutmeg cloying in his throat.

Robin stands weightless on his chest, his sword gleaming in the dark of Dick’s bedroom. It points a straight line towards Dick’s forehead.

“Patience is a virtue,” the boy says, toneless. “It’s your move, Grayson.”

“Damian, what the hell! What is this?”

The domino mask doesn’t shift or squint or soften. Robin’s cloak drapes heavy on his little shoulders. “You were trying to tidy a loose end, weren’t you? In the beginning. In my room, in the dark, in the manor.”

Dick’s throat is dry to the point of pain. “What? We’re past that, you know I wouldn’t hurt you.”

He can’t move: like the sheets have bound him to his bed. Damian’s body rises and falls as Dick’s chest heaves, his hooded face moving in the dark. Thunder booms beyond the penthouse walls.

“Do I really know that?” Damian says. “In the dark, in the manor. Did I really know that?” He cocks his head, a curious bird. “Did I know you wouldn’t hurt me? In the beginning. In the dark.”

A weight curls up in Dick’s stomach. The obsessive cadence of the words—their singsong rhythm—sends alarm shivering down his back. “Something’s wrong. You’re not making any sense. Let me up, Damian.”

“You’ll change your mind.” Damian smiles a brutal smile. “What’s your move, Grayson? I’m waiting.”

Dick heaves himself upright. Robin launches off his chest with a backwards handspring, darting out into the penthouse proper. 

Dick stands with difficulty. His legs shake beneath him, nearly giving out—he pulls himself upright by the communicator on his nightstand. “Alfred, something’s wrong with Damian. He—he might not be himself.”

Dick pictures an ancient dart embedded in flesh. They’d run every test they could think of, and that was over two weeks ago. But how else—

“You’ll change your mind,” Damian calls from beyond the door.

Dick barges out, squinting through jagged shadows and sickly half-lights. Lightning plays on mahogany bookshelves.

“What’s your move, Grayson?” Robin seats himself on an antique armchair. He pulls his dirty boots up onto the cushion. “This game is for children.”

Covered furniture looms above them, sheets like ghosts—blocking Dick’s view of the storm outside. The manor is so empty.

Dick slides warily onto the sofa across the parlor table. “We’re not playing a game, Damian.”

“Do I know that?” Damian asks, plucking the little cruiser from his Battleship grid. Every peg is filled. Dick had just sunk it. “Do I know we’re not playing a game?”

“Let me help you.” Dick pitches his voice low and smooth and gentle. Like he’d soothe a startled animal. Once, when he was Robin, he’d walked a girl to a police station—

“Pain is a punishment for mistakes in the field,” Damian says, moving to jam the cruiser into his eye.

“No!” Dick grabs his wrist. For balance, he slams his hand down on the game between them, driving sharp plastic gridlines into his palm. “No, don’t—”

“And you’re going to stop me?” Talia al Ghul says, pinning him with black-kholed eyes. 

“I…” Dick releases Talia’s wrist. “When did you—I was playing against Damian.”

The grid drives up into his hand—tiny ships, tiny knives.

Talia laughs like a creature pulled out of a graveyard. Like something left to calcify in the cold, miles underground.

“Stupid boy,” she says. “You think you’re playing against Damian?”

Dick looks down at the board between them. It’s Gotham, spread out for miles and miles, vainglorious and gigantic on the table. Damian stands on the penthouse balcony, ready to dive to the city below. A dart is stuck in his thigh.

“He’s not a game piece, either!” Dick reels back in his seat. “None of this makes any sense.”

Robin blinks at him from the armchair. “But do I know that? Do I know I’m not just a piece on your board?”

“Who are you?” Dick growls. “You keep shifting. Changing your face. Who are you, really? ”

“I’m Robin,” his opponent says. He’s got the tiny scar on his knee from falling from Zitka’s back. His parents had told him that it would be dangerous, but he’d snuck into her enclosure late at night and tried to ride her anyway. Later, when he’d begun to train as a Flying Grayson, climbing Zitka would be easy. But he still has the scar.

“I’m Robin,” his opponent says, cocking his head to the side—a curious bird. “And you shouldn’t be fighting a child. It’s not right.”

“I’m not fighting him. I’m not—Damian should be safe. And happy. I’m not fighting him.”

“Does he know that?” Robin says. “Do you?”

“I don’t know,” Dick says. His body trembles. His heart pounds fit to break every piece of glassware in the manor parlor; the Persian carpet drags him down to his knees. “I don’t know.” 

“Then learn,” Robin says. He scoots off the chair; kneels with him. “What’s your first step?”

Dick’s never had much of an internal narrative. Decisions are images in sequence. Light and color and personality.

The taste of nutmeg floods his mouth. He grabs Robin’s head. Pulls him in; kisses his hairline.

Robin stills beneath his hands. His breathing hitches. Then, very slowly, he reaches up to grab Dick’s shoulder.

“I’m not fighting you,” Dick murmurs. “I’m not playing against you, Damian. I’m sorry if I ever made you think I was.”

“It’s alright, Grayson,” Damian says, stiff. “Pennyworth, I think he’s coming back to himself.”

Moonlight streams through a night clear as crystal, leaving puddles of light on the penthouse balcony. There was never any storm. Just a strange aftertaste in his mouth like pumpkin pie.

“Excellent,” Alfred says from behind him—crisp, professional, but not unkind. He lays a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “Master Richard, I’m afraid you’ve been exposed to some kind of neurotoxin. You’ve been hallucinating.”

"...Neurotoxin." Dick’s mouth is too dry to swallow. His heart beats like a rabbit’s, sending weakness through his kneeling frame.

His skin tingles and fizzes aimlessly until he can feel his hands again—until he feels Damian’s cheeks beneath them. Feels Damian’s small hand on his shoulder. The two of them kneel on the balcony, face to face. The obsidian knife lies two yards away, glinting and abandoned.

Damian scrambles to his feet. He pulls back fast enough to stumble, a scowl ready-made. “Finally. Pennyworth, take him to the Bunker and figure out what’s wrong with him. We should tie him down in case he goes mad again.”

Dick blinks; the world tilts. “‘M lucid. I promise I’m lucid, just—feels like I’m floating.”

“That’s a clue,” Alfred murmurs, helping him to his feet.

“Wait”—Dick shakes him off—“Damian, I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

“Of course not,” Damian sneers. He’s not dressed as Robin. He's just a boy in the street clothes he’d worn to bed. His face melts: into Bruce, Jason, Ra’s. Dick shakes his head until his vision clears.

“I wouldn’t have hurt you.” His rapid pulse shoots exhaustion through his fingertips. “Do you know that? Do you know I wouldn’t hurt you?”

“Come along, Master Richard.” Alfred tugs him inside by the shoulder.

Damian stands at the balcony’s edge. Stars swirl like a Picasso behind him, and Dick knows he’s half-dreaming again. The knife lies far away. Damian doesn’t move to pick it up. 

“I know that,” the boy says quietly, the tilt of his voice tight and strange. “You were out of your mind and you still never tried to hurt me at all.”

“Nutmeg,” Alfred tells him after an antidote and a solid day’s sleep. “You were poisoned with nutmeg. In large doses it does terrible things to a body, hallucinations included.”

Dick suspects Poison Ivy. They’d had a run-in during patrol. Still, there’s no hard evidence, and Dick resolves to “watch his back for once,” as Damian chides him.

Asking Damian what happened on the balcony procures no serious response (“You raved like a lunatic; what else?”). Alfred hadn’t woken up in time to see. 

From what Dick can parse, Damian had been prepared for self-defense. But by the end, he’d decided he wasn’t in danger. He’d tossed the knife to the side and tried talking sense into Dick instead. The thought fills him with pride in the boy—a pride that Dick might not deserve.

He’s proud of this, too: Damian never wears his boots to bed again.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“Okay, that’s good. Stop.” Dick steps off the training mats. He rests his hands on his knees, panting. “That was a nice round! You did great.”

Damian rolls his shoulders. “Why stop now? Scared you were losing?” He talks big, but Dick’s learned to notice the little things: the sheen of sweat on his brow and the slight exhausted tremble in his arms.

“Nope.” He goes for a water bottle. “It’s ‘cuz you’ve got lessons with Alfie in fifteen. You should go get cleaned up.”

Damian makes a put-upon noise, all drama, that reminds Dick that the kid is basically a prince. It’s all he can do not to laugh.

“Pennyworth’s lessons are boring and juvenile,” the little prince says, nose wrinkled.

“School’s important. You know that.”

“Oh, please.” Damian hops down from the mats and grabs a water of his own. “If my education were so important to you, you wouldn’t let Pennyworth drill me on random strings of numbers. What a waste of time.”

“Random what?” Dick takes a swig; gulps it down. “Mm. You mean like codebreaking exercises?”

The kid doesn’t answer. He grabs a towel and heads for the showers.

“Damian? What numbers?”

“Never mind,” he bites, tension in his stride. “My point is that Pennyworth’s a useless teacher.”

“Hey! Don’t say that about—”

The door slams between them, leaving Dick alone in the Bunker.

Dick should’ve followed up on that. Random numbers weren’t a prominent feature in his own education. But instead, they get busy: Professor Pyg makes people into monsters. Batman and Robin get caught up in a cycle of try and fail. Of arguments that didn’t need to happen.

The boy runs off ahead more than he should, and it scares the hell out of Dick. What scares him more is how badly Damian responds to correction.

It’s like walking a high wire: on one side, lax guardianship could leave Damian in danger. On the other, any punishment makes the kid lash out. His attitude calcifies. He shuts Dick out. And then they end up in danger anyway.

The only thing Dick knows for sure—the one thing he’d promised himself, after the nutmeg and the balcony and the knife—is that he can’t treat Damian as an opponent. Can’t try to outmaneuver him like a chess grandmaster when what he needs to do is learn to support a child.

He’s pondering this problem when Alfred presents him with a makeshift report card.

“The young master’s work remains exceptional as always,” the butler says.

Reclining on the penthouse sofa, Dick glances it over. Each academic subject comes with a written report in the butler’s crisp handwriting.

History: exceptional, near-encyclopedic. Either Damian takes a particular interest or it’s been drilled into him for a long time.

Grammar: perfect, save a few missing English vocabulary words.

Math...

Dick’s eyes start to glaze over. The report goes on for a whole page. Skimming, he sees words like “exceptional,” “above-average,” and “intelligent” over and over again.

Dick nods to himself. “He’s a bright kid. Might ask if he wants to go for ice cream.” He holds the report out for Alfred to take. “I mean, he’ll say no, but—”

“Master Richard.” Alfred doesn’t move to take the paper. “You may find the final assessment topic interesting.”

Dick frowns. He looks to the bottom of the page.

The section is called: Memory (short- and long-term).

Under “long-term,” Alfred writes in praise of Damian’s sharp recall. Any data the boy commits to memory rises easily to the top.

But the report for “short-term” twists Dick’s stomach. Significant cognitive deficits compared to others in his age group, followed by a list of tests he doesn’t recognize. Scores. Percentages.

Numbers.

“Kind of a weird subject for a report card,” Dick says evenly.

“It was a directive from Master Bruce.” Alfred pauses, a touch of uncertainty in his jawline. “I believe he instituted it right after running Damian through his initial assessments.”

Dick gives him a sharp glance. “He assessed Damian? Formally?”

“The whole Robin gamut. Physical and cognitive tests both.”

“But—why? He wasn’t going to make him Robin.”

Dick remembers Bruce saying that to Tim specifically: You are Robin. That won’t change.

The assessment was meant to pinpoint a Robin’s strengths and weaknesses; to identify areas for improvement in the field. Either Bruce was secretly planning more for Damian, or—

Ah.

Dick keeps his voice light. “Was it more of a Robin assessment or a threat assessment?”

“I wouldn’t presume to guess,” Alfred says loftily. “But I’ve matched Master Damian’s education to Master Bruce’s specifications ever since.”

Alfred takes the report card out of Dick’s slack fingers.

Significant cognitive deficits, Dick thinks. That can’t be right.

Dick finds the assessment in Bruce’s “downstairs” files: the ones that had once been accessible only from the Batcave. Now the same is true of the Bunker.

He squints at the screen, coffee in hand. For all the report’s blunt and clinical language, Bruce’s personality seeps through: his mistrust of Damian. His desire to do right by him anyway.

Dick opens a video file.

Damian sits at the Batcomputer, his legs dangling from the chair. “These tests are boring. Can’t we go back to the endurance trials?”

“Watch the screen, Damian,” Bruce says from off-camera. A shudder—nostalgia, foreboding, something—runs down Dick’s back.

Damian rolls his eyes and presses a button. The screen lights up with four black polygons, one after another: square, triangle, octagon, pentagon.

Then they appear together, out of order. The instructions read: Click on the shapes in the order they first appeared.

Simple enough. A memory game. Like flash cards.

Damian’s expression goes stony. He tilts his chin imperiously, like the computer has wronged him. “This is a children’s game.”

“Follow the instructions.” Bruce’s voice is flat; deliberately toneless. Dick knows that play.

Damian glances at Bruce off-screen, brow furrowed. Searching for something. (Like he sometimes glances at Dick on the field: searching for something.)

“Damian.”

“Fine!” He clicks four times in rapid succession. The shapes turn red, and so do Damian’s cheeks. He’d gotten it wrong.

“I wasn’t ready!”

“Again,” Bruce says evenly.

The shapes flash. Damian clicks. He gets it wrong.

This happens for a long time. Sometimes Damian gets it right instead, but Bruce reacts just the same: “Again,” and a new set of shapes.

Dick sees so clearly the way Damian’s teeth grind together. The way the flush never quite leaves his face. The kid is frustrated; embarrassed. He needs a break. Bruce doesn’t give it to him.

“Are you having fun?” the real Damian spits from behind Dick’s chair.

Dick jumps from his seat, splashing coffee on the floor. “Jesus, you’re sneaky.” He sets the mug down. “Was I ever that sneaky? Probably not, or I would’ve died the first time I—”

“Shut up!” Rage scratches its way across the boy’s features. His stance is braced to run: at Dick, maybe. Or away.

“Whoa, Damian, it’s just an old video. I wanted to see why—”

“Why what? Why my father never saw fit to give me Robin?”

Dick gapes. “I—what? No. This—the assessment isn’t a test, Bruce didn’t—”

“Oh, it was clearly a test!” A vein in Damian’s throat stands out in sharp relief. “And I failed. I must have. Is that what you needed to know?”

Dick clutches the computer station behind him. His head spins. “You’re not understanding me.”

“Do you think I’m weak? Gathering evidence to send me back to the League, perhaps?”

“No! That is a dramatic leap of logic—”

“It’s not!” Damian shrieks, his face red, and Dick’s heart sinks. They’re doing this again. They’re talking past each other.

If he could just find the right sentence—some inescapable logic that would force the boy to calm down and listen—

“You shouldn’t put any stock in those stupid tests anyway.” Damian begins to pace, his footfalls dull on the Bunker floor. “They were meaningless. Who cares about memorizing shapes? How will that help in the field? I’ve memorized The Art of War!”

Like seeing the bottom of a pool through murky water, Dick realizes: Bruce never debriefed Damian. He’d given him a barrage of assessments with no backstory; no explanation. Damian doesn’t even know why they were looking at shapes. He just thinks he disappointed Bruce.

“Forget it!” Damian throws his hands up. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going upstairs.”

“Dames,” Dick says to his retreating back. Breathy; sudden.

He doesn’t know why the name comes out that way: Dames. It never has before.

Damian stops in his tracks. He doesn’t look back.

Dick struggles for words. The right sentence could break Damian’s defenses. The right argument, images in sequence, codebreaking—

Sink the battleship. Win.

No. That’s wrong. That’s playing against Damian all over again. Playing against a child.

Dick closes his eyes and says, “I don’t want to fight you anymore. I want to be on your side. Can we just talk about this? Just for a minute? And if you still think I’m a dumbass afterwards, then you can run off and draw mean pictures of me. But for now, can we talk?”

Damian shifts from one foot to the other. He clicks his tongue against his teeth.

But he doesn’t move toward the door.

Dick sinks back into his chair. “Okay,” he says. “Uh, okay. To start with, I only looked because I got curious about some of the exercises Alfred was giving you during lessons.”

“The numbers,” Damian says quietly.

“Yeah. The numbers.” He taps his fingers on the armrest. “What do you think those are for?”

Damian turns, slowly, toward Dick. His eyes are sharp and watchful. “Memorizing things. Patterns.”

Dick nods. “Right, yeah. Memorizing them for the short-term, which is different from other kinds of memory. Different from Art of War memory.” He swallows. “And...how do you feel about that?”

Damian rolls his shoulders, like he had on the mats. His gaze tracks the spilled coffee.

Nearly too soft for Dick to hear it, he says, “It’s...more of a challenge than expected.”

“Okay.” Pride beats through Dick’s heart like a bird in his chest. “Sure. You know what was always hard for me? Reading comprehension tests. They’re the worst. Last time I had to take a reading comprehension test I dropped out of college.”

Damian musters up enough attitude for a glare. “That is not why you dropped out.”

“Or so I say.” He grins. “Here, grab a chair. I wanna show you my Robin assessment. You’re gonna laugh. Yours is way better.”

“No thank you.” Damian’s nose wrinkles like he’s regretting this conversation already. “But—that’s the only reason you were looking at the files? Curiosity?”

“Cross my heart. I told you, ’m not sending you back.” The smile feels fragile on his cheeks.

Damian looks to the frozen image on the screen: to his own face from months ago. Past-Damian’s brow is furrowed and his shoulders are tight. His hand hovers against the start button, fingers curled over like a sleeping child’s.

The boy lets out a terse breath. “My scores are improving. Pennyworth says so. This requires no action on your part.”

“Hey, good job,” Dick says. “That’s great.”

Expressionless, Damian nods.

It’s something to look into: the drop in Damian’s short-term memory score compared to everything else. But that’s not what the boy needs to hear right now. Not when he needs someone on his side.

Instead, Dick says: “About that report card, by the way: you’re a seriously smart kid.”

“Tt. I know that.” Damian crosses his arms over his chest. He pouts, but it’s less volatile now—less like a bomb about to go off.

Dick will take that as a victory. Even though Damian beats a hasty retreat up the stairs right after, Dick will take that as a victory.

Alone, he opens his own Robin assessment, grinning at the face that grins back.

“That’s something I can do,” Dick tells his own photo. “I can be on his side.”

Chapter Text

3:16am

Dick gasps for breath, curling into the stone floor. Pain floods his chest like a mushroom cloud; like a burning oil spill. He’s betting broken rib.

The cultists’ masks seem alive in torchlight: wood-carved screaming faces that mock his agony. Strings of beads trail like hair down their backs.

They shout at Batman. Boo him. Toss trash down into the arena: wads of newspaper and fast food bags that bounce off his hunched back. The contrast would be funny, if the situation weren’t so dire: an underground cavern, lit by torchlight. Cultists tossing french fries.

His opponent advances with steps that shake the pebbles between stone slabs. He’s huge, inevitable, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a wooden mask.

He hadn’t been the first zealot sent into the arena to grind Dick into powder. He won’t be the last. That’s how death gauntlets work, in Dick’s experience.

He staggers to his feet, assuming a defensive stance. It’d be easier without the sprained ankle.

“Good,” the priestess calls from higher ground, standing beside the sacrificial altar. She clutches a rough stone knife. “Only a very poor offering would surrender to his fate.”

To her left: Robin, chained to a pole carved with ugly bulging faces. “Batman does not surrender!” he shouts, pulling against his restraints. The torchlight leaves strange patterns on his face: a mask over a mask.

Damian meets Dick’s eyes, all rage and burning struggle.

The big guy roars. He charges Dick, who pivots out of his path: more a stumble than a pirouette at this point. Dick uses the motion to disguise the field signs he flashes to Damian: Retreat. Oracle.

Damian’s face twists: defiant. Disgusted.

For god’s sakes, the kid needs to learn to retreat.

They’d tracked down the culprits behind the ancient artifact thefts. Turns out, the cult had been tracking Batman and Robin right back: the nutmeg poisoning had been a failed attempt at subdual.

Dick doesn’t know what would happen if the priestess put his dead body on that altar, and he doesn’t particularly care to find out.

He stumbles back to the arena wall, dodging a blow to the face. Loincloth-guy’s fist slams mindlessly into stone.

The cavern can’t be as old as it appears. None of Dick’s comms work, which means faraday cage: metal mesh in the walls. If Damian could just use the lockpick Dick knows he has; if he could get out to call Oracle for backup—

Loincloth-guy catches him with a massive fist to the stomach. Dick’s vision bursts into stars. He falls. The cultists roar their approval.

“Get up!” Damian howls.

Run, Dick mouths into the floor. Run.

Why won’t Damian run?

Loincloth’s bare foot, yellow with rot, comes down in front of Dick’s nose. “The Bat’s out of fight,” he rumbles.

Blood coats Dick’s tongue. A chill runs through his shoulders, dipping between his skin and his bones.

Then Loincloth stomps on his head. Dick cries out. His vision doubles, then starts to fade.

Damian screams obscenities from above. The priestess laughs.

“You’re a disgrace to Gotham,” his opponent says. He grinds his foot back and forth against Dick’s cheek. The smell is nearly as bad as the pain. “Will you grovel to me? Will you die on the floor like a rat?”

Damian makes a noise Dick’s never heard before: vicious, ragged with exertion. Halfway between a scream and a battlecry.

The sound intensifies. It grows closer.

Then something slams into Loincloth, sending him stumbling away. Dick gasps for breath; rolls onto his back.

He sees Damian, a tiny and perfect fury, slamming his fists into Loincloth’s pressure points again and again. He uses his enemy’s body as leverage—hanging from Loincloth’s arm one second, using his broad belly as a stepping stone the next.

He surges upwards; grabs Loincloth’s head and slams it into his armored knee. The crack of the cultist's mask rings out in the sudden silence. The pieces fall.

Loincloth trips backwards under a flurry of tiny fists. He slams to the ground. Damian keeps hitting him.

“For that, you’ll die screaming!” he shrieks, bringing both fists down on Loincloth’s nose at once. Blood fountains from it. “You’re a dog without honor! Batman grovels for no one!”

The cultists shout, disoriented. Damian keeps hitting.

Darkness fuzzes over Dick’s vision.

He must black out for a moment—move like a sleepwalker, a nightmare-dreamer, something—because the next thing he knows he’s moving through an unfamiliar passageway, Damian supporting him by the shoulder.

“Come on!” Damian pulls him forward when he falls. “Come on, come on, you useless piece of dead weight—”

He fades again. This time for real.

Later he learns that Babs had tracked them down on her own. Damian got them halfway to the exit before being surrounded by cultists, at which point Batwoman and Huntress arrived to save the day.

They were very lucky. If Babs hadn’t known—or if Damian refused to run, once he’d finished pounding on Loincloth—the night would’ve ended differently.

Dick fears the worst when he peels open his eyes to find himself laid out on a gurney in the Bunker.

“Damian?” he says at once—a reflex, rising from his chest like a hiccup.

“Finally.” Damian strolls into Dick’s view. “How much sleep does one man need?”

Dick lets out a sigh, relief flooding his aching limbs. He croaks: “You’re okay.”

Damian startles. His eyes drag across the floor. “Tt. Of course I’m okay.” Then, like he needs a distraction, he examines the medical screens at Dick’s head. “Pennyworth’s taken you down to a lower dose of morphine. Was that a mistake?”

“No. No, I’m okay. Dames—”

Damian turns to face him. His expression is carefully blank.

Dick swallows. “What happened to Loincloth?”

“To who?”

“You know, the”—he raises his hands to gesture, wincing at the sting of his ribs—“the cult sumo guy. What happened after I—”

“I didn’t kill him,” Damian scowls. “If that’s what you want to know.”

Dick exhales. He pictures rage raining from Damian’s fists; blood flecking his cheeks by torchlight. Hears the battle cry all over again.

He shakes off the thought. “You did a great job,” he says. “I mean, you seriously saved the day.”

Damian’s fingers twitch at his sides. “And yet, you’re going to chide me.”

Dick grimaces. “When you put it like that, I’m the asshole.”

The boy huffs. Dick notices, with a jolt of surprise, that Damian is shoeless: white socks bright against the Bunker floor. He thinks of boots at a bedside, no longer worn under the covers.

Dick says, “It’s my job to protect you. When Batman says to run, Robin should run. If Babs didn’t know—”

“But they were insulting you.” Damian crosses his arms. “Like you were a bird in a cockfighting ring. You’re Batman.”

“Huh, so my life being at stake wasn’t the motivation here?”

“Please,” Damian sniffs. “That’s a factor, of course. But it’s also a question of honor.”

“Sure, Dames.” Dick finds himself smiling.

“What?” Damian snaps. “Wipe that stupid grin off your face, Grayson. It’s unbecoming. Really, you need to protect the dignity of the cowl if I’m to inherit it one day.”

“I’m not wearing the cowl. And I’m plenty dignified.”

“I’m done with this conversation.” Damian stomps off towards the elevator.

Then, a moment later, he stomps back. “Are you sure you don’t need any more morphine?”

“I’m good.” Dick smiles again—softer this time. “Thanks for checking.”

A memory strikes him: Damian, hunched in the Batmobile’s passenger seat, bleeding from the thigh.

Dick frowns. “Guess you’ve decided pain isn’t a punishment for Batman’s mistakes, huh?”

“Shut up,” Damian says quietly. His fingers press down on the gurney for a moment. “Just shut up. You didn’t make any mistakes. You fought bravely.”

The boy hesitates, then adds: “You do not lack courage."

Chapter Text

3:16pm

Alfred basically grounds Dick after the cult incident, using the unstoppable one-two combo of harsh words and hot soup. 

Damian goes visibly stir-crazy without permission to patrol. He fidgets and plots and runs forensic analysis on the dirt from the bottom of his boots.

“They’ll be back,” he warns, stocking feet tucked up beneath him on the computer chair. “Your recovery time is proving abysmal. I suspect I’d be defending the Bunker alone in case of ambush.”

“I dunno, Alfie’s got a mean right hook.” Dick sits up on the gurney, idly swinging his legs as Alfred takes his blood pressure. “He could cover your right flank. You have a tendency to drop guard there in the heat of the moment.”

Damian clicks his tongue against the back of his teeth, then goes back to running chemical sequences.

And that’s all it is: a scoff. A small “tt” of disapproval. A month ago, it might’ve been a tirade about Dick’s shameless contempt for Damian’s abilities. To compare the boy—even jokingly—to a mere butler would have brought hell down on Dick’s head.

By now, Damian’s watched Alfred sequence antidotes and perform surgeries. Dick figures he doesn’t doubt the right hook.

“Everything looks to be in order,” Alfred says, wrapping up the blood pressure cuff. “Still not field-ready, of course. I trust we can depend on you for the duration, Master Damian.”

“You’re safer under my protection than Grayson’s.” Damian takes a sip out of—

“Is that my travel mug?” Dick gasps. “Is—is that coffee in my travel mug? You are ten years old.”

“Irrelevant.”

“You could overdose, or something!”

“When I was six I was purposefully overdosed with caffeine so I’d recognize the symptoms in case of poisoning or sabotage. Your concern is meaningless.”

The grin that had been stealing across Dick’s face slides right off again. Just like that, his mood flips from “languid afternoon” to tight and claustrophobic as a fight in a blind alley. 

Before he can stop himself, he breathes, “Jesus.”

Damian rolls his eyes. He clutches the mug tightly. “It was easily the most harmless substance they included in the trials.”

Alfred clears his throat. “That will be all, Master Dick. If you’d like to return to your room—”

“They poisoned you,” Dick says—ribs bruised beneath skin. His breath sends jagged pain pounding through them. “You’re just a kid.”

“I’m not just anything, you idiot,” Damian snaps, turning back to the computer with a sharp finality. His shoulders pull inwards, angled towards his knees.

Dick swallows. Alfred catches his eye, then glances meaningfully toward the elevator. They both know why: Dick’s broken the unspoken rule. He’s pushed back on the League directly. It doesn’t matter how civil their conversation was a moment ago; Damian won’t listen to anything that comes next. 

Still: Dick’s never been good at leaving well enough alone.

Gingerly, he stands. “Okay, fair point. You’re not exactly batting second string on an elementary school tee-ball team here.” He presses his lips together. 

It would be so easy to default to but. 

But you’re just a kid, or But what they did to you was wrong. The words dance on the tip of his tongue. He might even be a bad person for not saying them. But with Damian, you have to come at things sideways. Be on his side.

The League looms so large over the kid that he can’t make out its edges—can’t see the shape of it against the backdrop of a wider world. Like a man who can’t define the ocean because he’s never seen land.

Dick holds back every but he can think of. Instead, he says, “You’re incredible. A force of nature. You wanna get some ice cream?”

Damian gives him a startled look. He puts down the coffee. “It—why?”

“Because...it...tastes good?”

“We haven’t patrolled in days. We haven’t done anything worth rewarding.” 

That sentence pings all wrong in the back of Dick’s head, but he sets the thought aside. He steps forward, posture relaxed. “I never took you out to celebrate your report card.”

Damian’s eyes dart from Dick’s bandaged ribs to his bruised shoulder, landing everywhere but his face. “I’m busy. You know that. And you’re injured.”

“If I can’t handle an ice cream run, I don’t deserve to be Batman.”

That startles a sound out of the boy: a sharp exhale through the nose, halfway between a scoff and a snicker. Damian seems just as surprised to hear it as Dick does. 

“If I may, Master Damian.” Alfred finishes packing away the diagnostic instruments. “Master Dick tends to outstrip his limits when injured. I’d be grateful if you could accompany him. For his protection.”

Damian glares at Alfred like he’s trying to force-choke a traitor.

Dick plants a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Sounds good to me. Help me, Robin! You’re my only hope.”

They go to Dame Saunders, of course. Bruce wasn’t big on ice cream runs, but even he knew Dick’s favorite parlor. It sits across the street from a gentrified stretch of harbor, allowing patrons to grab a scoop then sit on a bench to watch little waves roll in.

Dick motions Damian forward to place his order. The boy glares balefully up at the teenager behind the counter like he’s expecting a trap, then asks for low-fat vanilla.

“Low-fat?” Dick says, aghast. “Low-fat?” 

“You’re making a scene.”

“You are a bundle of twigs in a human suit. I know you like sweet things. What gives?”

“Can we just get this over with?” Damian says, already halfway out the door.

Dick keeps up a steady stream of chatter all the way to the harbor boardwalk. Damian looks resolutely uninterested. Still, he doesn’t interrupt—doesn’t object when Dick plops down on a bench and motions for him to do the same. 

Damian wrinkles his nose at the caramel dribbling down Dick’s fingers. “You don’t have any self-restraint at all.”

“Trust me,” Dick says, licking up a precariously-placed chocolate chip, “The best thing you can do for yourself is to grab a treat now and then.”

“For no reason?”

“For no reason. I mean...that’s how treats work, most of the time.”

Damian stares off at the birds turning circles above the water. He holds his cone inattentively. It angles precariously toward the pavement.

Harbor wind pushes through the boy’s hair. With a jolt Dick realizes: Damian’s due for another cut. Has it been that long already? Have they been this—Batman and Robin, together—for that long already?

Vanilla dribbles, untouched, down the cone.

Damian says suddenly, “There has to be a reason behind reward and punishment. If you can have a treat for no reason, it’s not a treat. It’s just indulgence. So why are we here? ”

“Indulgence, I guess.”

Damian’s eyes meet his: quick and startled. They move away.

Dick shifts in his seat. He asks carefully, “What do you think is a good reason for a treat?” 

Damian shrugs. He sinks into his hoodie.

On the tip of Dick’s tongue, burning: What do you think is a good reason for punishment?

He licks his lips. “Try to decouple one thing from the other. I’m proud of you, but ice cream isn’t my grand statement about whether you’ve been good or bad today. Good things are good. Happiness is precious. Sometimes you just want caramel chocolate chip.”

Damian swallows. He frowns down at Dick’s monstrosity of a cone. “I don’t—” He stops to clear his throat. “I don’t understand. Some things about you.”

Dick’s chest twists: pain in his ribs that he can’t quite shake. He keeps his voice gentle. “I get that a lot.”

Damian stares through Dick’s cone like there’s something more important behind it. 

“...Is that okay?” Dick tries. “That I want you to have sweet things for the hell of it sometimes?”

Damian presses his lips together. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again. “You’re going to do what you want anyway.”

“Huh.” Dick reaches over and grabs Damian’s untouched vanilla cone, overriding a squawk of protest. He puts his own extravagant ice cream in the boy’s hand. “I think you’re starting to understand me after all. Eat this thing before it melts, okay?”

And confronted with caramel chocolate chip, Damian actually does.

Chapter Text

3:16am

Sparse headlights wind through fog on the streets below. Even at this ungodly hour, loitering on the penthouse balcony feels different than resting on the roof of the manor had. Like the strange power lurking within Gotham’s heart of hearts does not know sleep.

Dick leans further over the railing, trying to make out a pedestrian’s red jacket. His ribs punish him with a pulling pain.

He winces. Cups his hand over his side. 

The city, at times, feels too big for him. On nutmeg he’d dreamt of Gotham spread out on a table, impossibly large and small. Anything could be waiting in any alleyway. Any seeming-statue could spell out Batman’s end.

Dick releases a harsh breath. He steps back from the railing. He slides open the penthouse door, ready to collapse on the sofa with Robin Hood: Men in Tights playing softly in the background.

Instead, he stops in the doorway. He says, “Oh.”

Damian glowers from his perch on the sofa’s arm. His phone screen provides the only light in the room, flicking patterns across his round face.

“Trouble sleeping?” Dick asks, tugging off his shoes. 

“I didn’t feel like it.”

“Right.” Dick strides across the room and deposits himself in the sofa’s center, right where the cushions would sag on any decent piece of furniture. (Give him time—he’ll make the penthouse feel lived in yet.)

Damian hunches further over his phone. He scoots as far away from Dick as he can get without falling off the sofa’s arm. He’s wearing grey pajama bottoms and an old T-shirt Dick doesn’t recognize. His feet are bare.

Dick fiddles with the remote, pressing his nail into the off button. “You ever seen a Mel Brooks movie?”

“What do you think?”

“Mm. Point taken.”

He doesn’t turn the TV on. He counts his breaths. Then, as the silence extends, he counts Damian’s. They’re slow and regular. Normal.

Damian presses his tongue into his cheek, still refusing to look up from his phone screen. He says, “I didn’t expect you to be here.”

Dick shrugs. “Sleep pattern’s more messed up than usual. Hard to find a comfortable angle around the ribs.”

Damian glances at him. He searches Dick’s face for something, then looks away. By now Dick's familiar with that move: it's half brusque assessment by a trained assassin, half unpolished curiosity.

Dick says, “This isn’t the first time you’ve spent a night off awake.”

Damian doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. Dick sleeps with his door cracked open. They both know no nighttime activity would have gone unnoticed. 

He chooses his words carefully. “It can be rough adapting to a sleep cycle like ours. Plus, with the kind of stuff you see on the job—”

“I’m not having nightmares,” Damian says flatly. 

“Right.” Dick rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “But, like, if you were, that would be normal. I get ‘em sometimes.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Grayson.” Damian lowers his phone to his lap. “It’s just a stomachache.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. I get stomachaches at night. Sometimes.” His face pinches up—like in trying to defend himself against the slander of nightmares, he’d let something slip he didn’t mean to. 

Dick props an arm on the sofa back, turning to face the boy. “How often?”

“Not your business.”

“Like, as often as you get up in the middle of the night? Because that’s kind of a lot.”

“No, it’s…” Damian frowns towards the balcony door. “No. Not every time. Just, sometimes. It goes away if I wait.”

“Okay. Do you...want some Tums?” He raises his hands in immediate defense as Damian scowls. “They’re straight calcium, okay? Not medicine. It’s like taking a vitamin if you think about it.”

Damian wrinkles his nose. His eyes flicker to the remote in Grayson’s hand.

“Oh. Yeah, I was just gonna watch a movie.” 

“I was here first.”

“Well, then feel free to stick around until you get sleepy.”

“Tt.” Damian returns his nose to his phone and leans against the sofa. The angle looks bad for his back, but kids are like that sometimes—weirdly-shaped and flexible. Dick should know.

He puts on Men in Tights. Damian doesn’t laugh once. He stays for half an hour anyway.

Dick drags himself into consciousness the next morning, then helps Alfred set up for breakfast. As always, they set a plate for Damian. As always, Damian stays long enough to grab a bowl of fruit before disappearing into the bowels of the tower.

Dick sips his orange juice slowly, thinking of chance midnight meetings.

He trawls through his early memories with Damian—back in the manor, when a “hello” was more likely to get Dick a kick in the face than an eyeroll. He traces every image of Damian’s shadow stealing past his door on nights the boy had no reason to be awake. 

He comes to a worrying conclusion: Damian hadn’t had much trouble sleeping in the manor. The restless nights started in the penthouse.

Waking up late at night with body pains is rough, even for a kid who’s half-nocturnal. It’s also weirdly embarrassing, in Dick’s recollection. He pictures Bruce’s dark doorway towering above him—a terrifying threshold for a newly-orphaned boy to cross in search of comfort. 

Dick had headaches as a kid. They’d started after his parents died, and hadn’t stopped until—

The empty glass slips through his fingers, rattling along the table. Alfred casts him a disapproving glance.

“Sorry,” he mutters, wiping up stray drops. “I just—I had a thought.”

He opens his laptop, head half elsewhere. His heart pounds in his throat.

He knows what he’ll find before he runs the search. He’s no stranger to trauma, after all.

Dick knew. Of course he knew. He met Damian, learned his story, watched the cautious flick of his eyes. He knew almost from the beginning that something had left an impact on this kid—cratered him and calcified the remains. 

What Dick hadn’t done—had been too stupid to do—was draw himself a map. Do the research. Figure out which parts of Damian were scars.

Reading the childhood C-PTSD symptoms list is like watching someone draw a police sketch of his Robin.

Some he knew already: Feeling unsafe. Jumpy physical reflexes. Stomachaches. (Headaches.)

Some things, Dick can’t even sort out from Damian’s training: is hypervigilance a cause or an effect? Is his sleep “disordered” because of what Dick asks him to do, night after night? 

Other symptoms leave Dick feeling adrift—unsure, unaware, unprepared. 

For instance, there’s a tangle of cause-effect that muddles together Damian’s relationship with food—nice things, treats—with his understanding of failure and success. Does that count as “disordered eating,” or is that something else entirely?

The website says, “Child may reenact what happened in their play or in their drawings.” Despite the kid’s caginess around his sketchbook, Dick’s glimpsed some disturbing shit in there. But is that “reenactment” or a healthy pressure valve?

The website says, “Self-blame.” Pain is a punishment for—

Dick slams the laptop shut, making Alfred jump.

“Sorry,” he says again. “I just.” 

His breath hitches. He ignores Alfred’s concerned look. He opens the laptop again to perform one last search.

Childhood PTSD and short-term memory.

Results pour in. Dick’s stomach sinks through the floor.

He feels, briefly, underwater. The room dulls around him. He hears Alfred’s steady footsteps as the butler circles the table to see Dick’s screen.

“Ah.” Alfred's tone is tight and strange.

“I can’t do this,” Dick tells him. “How am I supposed to do this? I’m not—he’s not—”

Alfred grips his shoulder. “Master Dick, you are spiralling. Please calm yourself. You’ve been caring for Damian—helping him, protecting him—for months now. He’s made so much progress in that time.”

“It’s not enough,” Dick says faintly. “I can’t do enough. I can’t just—just buy him ice cream and wipe out years of hell. For Christ’s sake, Alfred, his symptoms are getting worse!” 

“Nonsense.”

“He wakes up at night now. He gets stomachaches. He—”

“Stop, please,” Alfred says calmly. Dick stops.

The butler nods to himself. He begins to clear the dishes from the table. “I remember Master Bruce towing a very sad young boy into the manor, years ago.”

“That’s what I was thinking about,” Dick says numbly. “I had headaches. Late at night.”

“And do you still get those headaches?”

“No. But Damian—”

“Is quite different from you. You’re right about that.” Alfred deposits Dick’s glass in the sink. “But you are reaching him, regardless. You are providing him with a stable home, much as Master Bruce did for you.”

Dick rests his forehead against the heels of his hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” 

“Neither did Master Bruce.”

Dick squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t tell Alfred how little that reassures him. Bruce was a colossus of a man with a heart full of virtue. He wasn’t always a good father.

He pictures Damian on the sofa’s arm, body curled as far away from Dick as it can go. He pictures shouting matches—himself, losing his temper. Damian testing him in every angry little way he knows how. 

He pictures a young Dick Grayson, working up the courage to wake Bruce up at night.

He grits his teeth and keeps reading. Trauma can affect short-term memory in kids. The stress of hypervigilance drowns out that part of the brain’s ability to take in new data. 

The solution, then: calm their racing minds.

“His scores are improving,” Alfred says, wiping down the counter. His thin shoulders bend forward suddenly, as though bearing weight. “I cannot speak to the worsening stomachaches. But I can speak to that.”

Dick says, “There has to be more. I have to do more."

The pain in Dick’s ribs lessons over time, but sleep sometimes still eludes him. He’s fifteen minutes into Airplane when he hears feet padding on carpet.

Damian looks bored and tired, his sketchbook held loosely at his side. His body is small against the dark of the penthouse.

“Hey, Dames,” Dick says quietly. On screen, Ted Striker tries to win back his ex-girlfriend.

Damian’s cheek twitches. He casts Dick a haughty look. 

Then he walks to the sofa, perches on its arm, and begins to draw.

Dick’s pulse stutters. He wills himself still, scared that any movement will break the spell. He watches the boy out of the corner of his eye—watches the pencil trace long arcs.

Damian glances at him only once, pupils wide and cautious in the dark. Dick smiles back until his small shoulders relax.

Ten minutes pass, and Damian neither talks nor walks away. His leg dangles off the side of the sofa, careless and comfortable.

“Stomachache?” Dick finally asks him.

Damian shrugs.

Dick turns down the volume. “Want me to get you some medicine?” 

Damian hesitates, then nods.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

The pencil stops scratching against the sketchbook page. Dick looks up from Life of Brian to find Damian right where he left him: on the sofa’s arm. 

The boy stares at the sliding door to the penthouse balcony. He’d been lounging, but now he sits upright—like a cat noticing an interesting bug on the wall. The afternoon is bright. Puddles of sunshine soak into the white carpet. 

Dick wants to ask what he’s thinking. He doesn’t say a word.

Their strange new sofa pact is unspoken: if Dick flops down to watch a movie or a documentary, sometimes Damian will emerge from his room to draw—but only if Dick doesn’t try to start a conversation. Like Damian wants them both to pretend that being in the room together is pure coincidence.

So instead, Dick goes back to watching John Cleese correct the grammar of Latin graffiti. 

The sketchbook lies on Damian’s knees. Dick tries not to pry—hell, it’s only been a couple weeks since the kid admitted to having one—but sometimes he can make out shapes from the corner of his eye. Today a snake winds over the page. 

Finally, Damian says, “There’s a bird dying on the balcony.”

“What?”

“A pigeon. Its wing is broken. It may have flown into the penthouse wall.” A distance settles into his voice. He doesn’t blink.

“They do that?” Dick pauses the movie. “Don’t they have birdie GPS?”

Damian slides to his feet. “Don’t be an idiot, Grayson. Anything can be knocked off course.” He sets his sketchbook on the sofa’s arm, then makes his way to the sliding door.

“What are you doing?” Dick asks.

“Taking care of it.”

Dick raises his eyebrows, considering. The bird’s probably a lost cause, but an interest in animals seems like the right thing to encourage. The two of them together could probably figure out avian field medicine.

He stands, glancing down at the open sketchbook. It wasn’t a snake after all. It was a noose, coiled and burned at the edges. 

Dick frowns, a chill chasing itself around the base of his spine. 

“Do you need help?” he asks, crossing the threshold in time to see Damian kneel. The boy takes up the bird in his bare hands, slow and gentle. The bird thrashes; he holds it firm. 

“Careful,” Dick says, caught up in a different memory of Damian kneeling on the balcony: the night of the nutmeg, trying to talk down someone else who’d been afraid.

Maybe Dick should go back inside and get—a shoebox? A cage from the Bunker? Alfred would know.

The bird squawks and screams. Damian’s lips pinch together. Deep lines cross a forehead too young for pain. Then, all at once, any hint of expression slides from his face.

His hands are so gentle as he adjusts his hold, ready to snap the bird’s neck.

“Stop!” Dick lunges forward. “What the fuck, stop.”

Damian stills. His lips part for a moment too long before the words come out. “I told you I was taking care of it.”

Dick drops to his knees. “It’s still alive.”

“Obviously. Are you telling me that the no-killing rule extends to birds?” 

“Shut up.” Dick’s arms feel shaky; strangely light. His mind races, catching on senses and images that flit out of reach as soon as they arrive. “Shut up. It’s just the wing that’s broken, see? He’ll live.”

“But it’ll never fly again.”

“You don’t know that,” Dick says, hands hovering—cupping over Damian’s, not touching. “He might get better if we take care of him. Here, I’ll get a box, okay? Hold him still so he doesn’t hurt himself.” He scrambles to his feet, body heavy.

“Grayson, don’t be a coward,” Damian calls to his retreating back. “We’re causing it pain. You should let me—”

“No,” Dick says, hard-edged and bitter, and Damian stops talking.

Dick finds a leftover cardboard box in his closet. He grabs an old gym shirt for bedding. When he steps back onto the balcony, Damian is frowning down at the bird in his hands. 

“It’s going still,” the boy says. 

“We’ll get him settled, then look up what to do next.” Dick sets the box down, smoothing the gym shirt into its corners. 

Damian shifts carefully from his knees to his butt, holding the bird steady. “Her.”

“What?” Dick snaps.

“Females are smaller. I—I believe this one is female.”

Dick grits his teeth. He motions for Damian to deposit the bird. The poor thing beats her wing uselessly against the cardboard, then falls still. Dick closes up the box anyway, leaving room for air between the panels. “Alfred might know what to feed her.”

“Start with electrolytes,” Damian says quietly. “Water with salt and sugar.” His hand floats forward, finger pressing down on the box’s edge.

“Oh, so all of a sudden you’re the animal welfare expert here?” Dick picks the box up, pulling it from under Damian’s grasp.

Damian draws his hand back as though stung. He scowls. “You’re the one who wants to rehabilitate a useless bird. You should be thanking me for the advice.”

“I thought you wanted to help her! Not kill her.”

“Killing her would be helping her. A bird who can’t fly—”

“Is still a living thing.” Dick marches, stiff-backed, to the door. “Life’s value doesn’t change based on its utility, for Christ’s sake. I thought you knew that by now.”

Damian follows silent behind him.

Dick mixes water, salt, and sugar in the kitchen. He sends Alfred out to buy a guinea pig cage on the advice of a bird rescue website. He keeps the pigeon’s box out of direct sunlight, listening for distressed noises.

Damian sits on the kitchen counter, watching Dick flutter from one task to the next. He keeps very quiet and chews on the inside of his cheek.

Finally, when Dick collapses into a kitchen chair, Damian says: “You’re angry.”

“I’m not happy,” Dick admits, scrolling through his phone for more rescue tips.

“You think I was doing it to be cruel. I wasn’t.”

Dick sighs; pinches the bridge of his nose. “You gave up on that bird as soon as you saw her.”

“She’s just a bird.” Scorn creeps into the boy’s voice. “Hundreds die every day in this city. Most of them die in pain. I thought I could—I didn't want her to—”

He bites back the words. Dick looks up.

Damian’s glaring at his knees hard enough to manifest heat vision. His fingers clench the edge of the counter beneath him, and his throat works to swallow. “It’s better, isn’t it? You said—you said it doesn’t matter if she never flies again, but isn’t it better to die with honor than to be stripped of your purpose?”

Dick’s breath catches. For the second time today, something prickles along the base of his spine. 

He stands—circles the kitchen to lean on the counter, next to Damian. The boy glances at him sidelong.

“Couple of things, okay?” Dick says. “First off: I’m being an asshole. You were doing what you thought was right.”

Damian nods. It doesn’t look like agreement, exactly. More like resignation.

“Second off: you’re wrong. Nobody made a bird and said, ‘the point of you is that you can fly.’ Life is worth living for a lot of reasons. Nobody has one specific, unchanging purpose—and anybody who thinks they do just hasn’t lived a life yet.”

“Batman has one purpose,” Damian says immediately. 

“Okay, let’s—let’s leave Bruce out of it, for a sec. He wasn’t exactly a typical—”

“I’m not typical, either. I’m the heir of—”

“Dames, I know. Just let me figure out how to say this.” 

Damian clicks his tongue against the back of his teeth. Still, he sits up straighter. Attentive.

Dick works images into concepts—thoughts into words. “What I’m trying to say is, we save lives. Even the broken ones. That’s—I mean, that’s the heart of it.”

Damian frowns at the box on the kitchen table. “What about pain?”

Dick shrugs. “That one’s tougher. We ease it, where we can.”

Damian makes no response to that. Very carefully, Dick reaches up to muss the boy’s hair. 

Damian bats his hand away with a halfhearted scowl. 

When Dick realizes he’d escaped with his life, he smiles. “Let’s let her rest. I’m gonna finish my movie, if you wanna join me.”

He starts towards the sofa and the TV and the balcony door.

“Grayson,” Damian says, suddenly scornful again. “The League didn’t allow pets. And working animals were put down when no longer needed. It was only right—I did it myself sometimes. I didn’t hesitate.”

The rapid shift in mood—the retreat into calloused confidence—doesn’t throw Dick as much as it once might have. Dick’s known Damian long enough to know a test when he hears one. He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t recoil or blame.

“That so?” he hums.

“Sometimes,” Damian says, attention drifting to the middle distance, “Sometimes we had more lambs than we needed. They’d put down the babies and their mothers together. They were healthy, and there was nothing wrong with them, but we had too many. They weren’t useful, and we limited trade to the villages, so they died.” He trails off into silence, cheeks flushing an angry red. His arms cross over his chest, fingers clutching at his arms.

An antique clock ticks over the stove. The gentle beat of feathers sends a tremble through the box. Then the cardboard stills again.

Softly Damian says, “I didn’t—understand. Why we did that.”

Dick murmurs, “That’s really sad.”

“It—wasn’t supposed to be.”

“Well, I would’ve been sad. I would’ve cried.”

Damian nods, as though deciding something to himself. “That’s true. You would have been upset.” He hesitates, then says, “You wouldn’t have cared who knew.”

Dick thinks about Damian’s ready knowledge of avian care. He wonders if he’d ever had the chance to put it into practice before. 

He says, “You better name that pigeon.”

Chapter Text

3:16am

Dick wakes blind.

Darkness fuzzes from end to end of his vision, thick enough to muddle his sense of direction. He’d guess blindfold, if it weren’t for the pops of color where his eyes strain to see the light.

His face burns like a firework’s gone off inches from his nose. Flash blindness, then. How—

He feels the hard chair beneath him—feels someone tying his hands behind his back. 

He slams his heels into the floor, tipping the chair backwards. His assailant reacts quickly, steadying the chair with a strong shove. A palm pushes down on Dick’s shoulder—immovable, restraining. 

“Knew I should’ve started with your legs,” Jason grumbles, then slams his fist into Dick’s mouth.

Stars burst in the darkness. Dick tastes blood. By the time he comes back to himself, Jason’s tied his ankles tight to the chair legs.

“Red Hood,” Dick spits, and remembers: Santo. Los Penitentes. The hospital. Dick took a blast of something to the face, while Damian—

“Where’s Robin?” he bites. The ropes scrape his wrists as he pulls against them—straining, testing. 

“Where’s—are you losing it, Dickie?”

The stars resolve themselves into a red mass. Jason, kneeling to double up on the ankle knots. Dick could ram his head into that hard red helmet. It wouldn’t do any good.

He looks to his left, and terror loosens its grip on his chest. Damian’s slumped in a chair of his own, unconscious—gently breathing. He’s been stripped to his underwear. So, for that matter, has Dick.

“Hey! I asked you a question, Batman. Tell me if you’re losing it, ‘cause that’ll make things much more interesting.”

Dick fights off a wave of nausea—concussion?—and says, “Am I losing it? Really? That’s the line you’re going with?” He scans the room as he talks: their costumes are piled up in the corner. A single laptop glows on a table in front of them. A metal overhead door takes up an entire wall—industrial, rusted. An office space in an old warehouse, maybe?

“Takes one to know one.” Jason’s helmet shines cold and featureless in harsh lighting. 

He seems calm, which is bad. Dick could gain control of the situation if the Red Hood were feeling volatile. Instead, Jason finishes Dick’s knots and moves to check Damian’s again.

“You don’t want to do this,” Dick tries.

Jason snorts. “You really don’t know me anymore.”

“That’s true.” Dick swallows—his throat is like sandpaper. “But I used to. The Jason I knew—”

“Was beaten to death years ago because Bruce didn’t feel like playing hardball that day.” He yanks on Robin’s restraints hard enough to rock the chair. 

Damian murmurs, a frown pressing down on his features. 

Dick’s heart races. “Scarlet hit him with a goddamn taser.”

“Yeah, you should’ve seen the twerp’s face at the moment of impact. Gold.” He kicks Damian’s chair leg. “How old’s this one? Eight?”

Dick’s hands ball to fists behind him. He growls, “You need to get the hell away from him.”

“Was that your Batman voice?” Jason says, delighted. “Could use some fine-tuning, but the fundamentals are solid.”

“I’m not playing around, dammit! This is between you and me.”

“No,” Jason says thoughtfully. He squats down to Damian’s eye level. The boy’s head lolls forward; his open jaw rests on his chest. “This is between us sidekicks.”

He yanks Damian’s head up by the hair.

“Jason!” Dick says it like a curse; like a storm bearing down. He throws his weight sideways, trying to rock his chair closer.

“Relax.” Jason rubs a thumb over a spot of dirt on Damian’s chin. “I’m not the worst thing that’s gonna happen to this kid, so long as he’s Robin. Not by a long shot.”

Damian’s eyelids flutter. He lets out a groan.

“You have no idea,” Dick says, rage deep and boiling, “no idea what you’re talking about. What he’s come through to be Robin.”

“Oh, so you’re doing him a favor, then? That’s how you see it? Quit moving your chair or I’ll put a bullet through his eye.”

Dick stops rocking. His breath heaves. “You’re not yourself. There’s something wrong with you.”

Jason laughs. The sound echoes through his helmet—takes on a dark resonance. He drops Damian’s hair and makes a show of getting to his feet. “I’m the only guy here without a child soldier, so maybe rethink your priorities.”

He stoops over the laptop and begins inputting commands.

Dick tries to watch his keystrokes, but it’s hard to look away from Damian’s face. The boy squirms in his chair. An aborted whine rises from the back of his throat. 

“He needs medical attention,” Dick says, praying he’s lying.

“Maybe stop taking brats into the field, then, how about that?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jason, this isn’t about you.” 

“Oh, it absolutely is.” Jason maximizes a window, then steps back from the screen.

“What are you doing?”

“Not me,” he says. “Them. Gotham. They’re going to see you for what you really are.”

And with that Jason swans out. The overhead door clatters shut behind him. 

Dick swears.

Damian stirs again. This time, he blinks open his eyes, wincing in the fluorescent lighting.

“Robin?” Dick asks. “You conscious? Enjoying the work so far?”

At first Damian’s gaze is unsteady, but it quickly revs up to its standard precision. He takes in their disrobement; the laptop on the table. His cheek twitches. “I don’t believe this. He’s beyond insane.” His voice is weak, but the anger shines through. Relief spirals in Dick’s chest.

Apparently, one million calls will activate the webcam. There are probably worse ways to lose your secret identity—while bleeding out on live TV, for example. Or while you stand on a thin platform over the depths of the Death Star, making a surprise paternity announcement to Luke Skywalker. 

But this—trussed up like a Christmas turkey, naked—has got to be up there.

Dick muses, “Does he have any idea what we’re going to do to him when we get out?”

“You didn’t hear the gunshots? I think somebody may have beaten us to it.”

“Fuck. You’re right. I’m betting that’s not the GCPD.”

Damian wiggles in his seat, working at a knot. His hair sticks in pieces to the side of his face, which is coated in a thin layer of sweat. 

“You okay?” Dick asks him. “You took that taser right to the chest.”

“Child’s play.” He glances over to Dick, sweeping him for injuries. “And...you?”

“Fine, fine. Just gotta grow the top layer of skin back on my face.”

“You do look red. I thought it was a sunburn.”

“Hilarious.” Dick cranes his neck to see the call-counter running up on the laptop. The number is way too high already. A burst of adrenaline jitters through him, loosening his tongue. “Okay, jeez, we are running out of time. This city is mercenary.” 

“As expected for a pit of vipers like Gotham. I almost respect it.” The kid’s voice is getting stronger. Another wave of relief hits Dick even harder than the first.

“Hey,” he grins, “if we get dressed in time, we could do, like, a thing.”

“Thing?”

“Yeah, like how Jason says ‘Red Hood and Scarlet say…’ and then some terrible bullshit. We could do that on camera.”

“What? Why?”

“It would be funny! We’d beat him at his own game.”

“You are unforgivably cheerful all of a sudden.”

“Can’t help it.” Dick rocks his chair again, experimental. “You’re about to save our asses. And I mean, you were out for a long time. I’m glad you’re okay.”

Damian flushes bright red. He mumbles, “Let me work, goddamn you,” and the ropes fall loose around his wrists.

They dress quickly, digging helter-skelter through the pile.

“Tt. The clasp of my cape is broken.”

“Uh, I can safety pin it? I think I have—do you see my belt?”

“It’s not my job to keep track of your clothes! Where the hell is my badge?”

Dick hops on one foot, pulling on his second boot. “Are you gonna do a thing with me?”

“There’s no reason to—”

“Robin. Thing. Yes or no.”

“Fine! Alright! I’ll think of something.”

The webcam activates right after Dick pulls on the cowl.

He smiles for the camera. “Batman and Robin say…”

And Damian’s voice floats, princely, behind him: “Get a life!”

Which is all well and good and hilarious, but then Robin gets shot in the spine. Five times. Close range.

All the world condenses into that single point of reality. Dick has to keep fighting anyway. Flamingo is lethal. Jason is out of control.

When the battle stops—when Dick finally gets to clutch the boy’s arm, check his pulse, rub his shoulder—Damian refuses medicine. He says he can’t feel anything anyway. 

Dick watches him take one deep, shuddering breath—watches any emotion from earlier tonight slide right off his face. Like snapping the neck of a pigeon. 

His mother’s paramedics haul him away. 

Dick wakes in his bed the next afternoon, sheets tangled and sweaty from his nightmares, Jason’s stupid metal-tainted voice ringing through him: child soldier.

One minute they’d been bantering, the next Damian had gone blank and hard. He’d shown no fear. That doesn’t mean he hadn’t been afraid.

Dick feels ready to do something stupid and drastic and grand. 

As luck would have it, a lead takes him to London. Bruce’s body goes with him.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“Dames?” Dick raps a knuckle against the door. “Hey, can I come in? I brought bananas foster.”

The penthouse is silent, save an occasional rustle from the end table next to the elevator door. Birdie, as Dick’s taken to calling her, seems content to wander the floor of her cage.

He wets dry lips with the tip of his tongue, then adjusts the plate in his hand. “Okay, well, I’m gonna drop off dessert at least. Alfie made it special.”

He opens the door.

The air in Damian’s room is hot and stale. A veritable ladder of swords rises up the wall, mounted in order of size. Alongside the window, there’s a painting Dick doesn’t recognize: a landscape, lit by golden dawnlight thick enough to run your fingers through.

A wheelchair sits at the boy’s bedside. Damian lies curled in the shape of a question mark.

“Oh, jeez, hey!” Dick drops the plate on the dresser, scattering walnuts. “Recovery, remember? You gotta sit up.” He takes two long strides to the bed.

“Leave me alone,” Damian groans, throwing an arm over his face. “This is your fault.”

“I know. I know, okay?” Dick’s eyes move from the ball of sheets kicked to the end of the bed to the neck brace discarded on the nightstand. “But you’re gonna mess up your back like this. Can you sit up for me?” He tucks a hand beneath Damian’s elbow. “Come on, against the pillows.”

Damian shrugs him off. “I don’t want you here.”

“Look, I know you’re angry. I get it. Last night was—”

“Just another example of your astounding incompetence.” His voice scratches like a smoker’s. “Do the world a favor and hang up the cowl.”

Dick fights back a surge of hurt—examines it briefly, then tucks it away. The two of them are past this (they have to be past this) but last night Damian had to fight off a zombie version of his dad while a brand new spine settled into his back. The kid deserves a little leeway.

And besides: he’s right. Damian’s new back would be in better shape if he hadn’t overexerted himself defending the penthouse. If Dick hadn’t taken a wild idea to London and sent a monster back in his place.

“I am the worst,” Dick concedes, “but don’t you want to lecture me from an upright position? Doesn’t this hurt?” 

“What do you care?”

“I think that should be obvious by now.” He grasps Damian’s shoulder more firmly this time, scooping his other arm under the boy’s back.

Damian presses a hand to Dick’s wrist for leverage, sitting up against the headboard. He lets out a sharp breath. “Fine. I’m up. You can go now.”

“That sounded like it hurt.” 

“Well, Grayson, they ripped out my spine.” Slow and acerbic, like explaining something to a particularly stupid child. “What’s it to you? Afraid I’ve outlived my usefulness?”

Dick doesn’t even blink. “Never. I just want you to get better.”

“Or what? You’ll send me straight back to Mother again?”

Dick’s brain catches on the word “again.” He pictures Damian hunched over a pigeon on the balcony, explaining that nobody should bother with a bird who can’t fly.

“You...know I wasn’t sending you back, right?” He sits on the corner of the nightstand. “Your mom’s paramedics could take care of you better than we could. I wasn’t trying to give you up to the League.”

Damian scowls. “I know that. You don’t have to treat me like a child.”

“Did she say something to you?” 

Damian bites the inside of his cheek. He shakes his head.

“Okay,” Dick says carefully. He’s realized, too late, that this is a landmine of a conversation. He leans forward; braces his weight on his arms. “So...if it wasn’t her that that said something—”

“Nobody said anything to me,” Damian snaps. “I’m capable of hating you on my own.” 

“Hey, now—”

Damian’s hands bunch up in the fitted sheet. His lip curls back over bared teeth. “Why can’t you take a hint? I hate you! I don’t want to see you anymore!”

Dick’s breath catches in his throat. 

Damian takes several short, rapid breaths. Then he twists at the torso, away from Dick—throws himself back against the pillows. A hiss of pain follows. “Dammit!” 

“Careful,”  Dick says. 

“Leave me alone!”  Little shoulders rise and fall, curling inwards again. The boy’s hands draw up tight to his chest.

Dick exhales slowly: a long, tight stream. 

This rage—clearly spurred by a pain the meds can’t mask—has a deadly specificity that Dick doesn’t understand. 

“Where is this coming from?” he murmurs. “What happened while I was gone?”

Damian doesn’t answer.

Floundering, Dick casts his eyes around the room. On the dresser, beside the abandoned bananas foster, lies the obsidian knife. Divorced of violent context, it looks decorative—ceremonial. Damian doesn’t keep it under his pillow anymore. He’d stopped around the same time he’d stopped wearing boots to bed.

Over the past few months, Dick’s learned that trust is a word with many facets. Trust—at its very baseline—is the belief that you don’t need to take a knife to bed. But that’s different from trust in someone’s words or intentions. And that's different from the belief that you won’t be sent away at the slightest mistake.

Dick’s chest squeezes so tight and sudden that it hurts him. Damian’s shoulders rise around his ears in what looks like an answering pain. Maybe the metal spine feels better that way: curled up small.

“Okay,” Dick says. “If you want me to leave, I’ll leave.”

Damian doesn’t answer. His breath comes out as a wheeze. 

Gently—as gently as he can shape each word—Dick says: “But I’d like to help you, while I’m here. What can I do? Call it my punishment, if you want.”

Damian swallows audibly. The silence stretches. 

Then he says, “I want a bath.”

“Right. Good idea. I can smell you from here.”

Damian doesn’t dignify that with a response. He pushes himself upright with a wince. Dick holds the chair steady; the boy slides in and lets Dick wheel him to the ensuite. 

Dick gets the water running, then steps back into the bedroom. “I’ll get you some clothes.” Damian’s wearing a sweater vest he doesn’t recognize, and the thought of Talia dressing him makes Dick queasy. “You want pajamas? Or we could do a hoodie?”

“I don’t care,” Damian snaps. Then, after a moment: “Pajamas.”

Dick bundles them up with a pair of slippers, then examines the melting ice cream of the bananas foster. “Want me to put your dessert in the freezer?”

“I’m not going to eat it.”

“No,” Dick says, frowning. “Of course you’re not.”

Damian doesn’t eat much when he’s disappointed in himself. Especially not dessert. What happened while Dick was gone?

He turns back to the bathroom. Damian’s struggling to pull off his socks, leaning down in the chair as far as his back will let him.

 “You need help getting in?”

“I’m not an invalid. I can stand.”

“But, uh, we’re trying to minimize exertion, so—”

“I’m fine.”  He lunges again for the sock. A soft sound of pain escapes him. 

“Here.” Dick kneels at the boy’s feet. They’re athletic socks, thick and white. Dick works them off carefully.

The bathroom tile chills his skin through his sweatpants. He feels Damian’s gaze like a weighted thing.

“There.” He folds the socks over one another. “Let me know if you need any more help, okay? I’ll stay nearby.” 

He looks up to see Damian frowning at him, a strange caution in the dip of his brow. The penthouse’s lighting is strong and white, so different from the yellow of the manor. It flattens the boy’s cheeks and draws depths in his eyes.

“What is it?”

“The sweater,” Damian says quietly. “I can’t—I have to reach.”

“Got it.” Dick helps Damian raise his arms. Gently, he pulls the sweater over his head, then tosses it on top of the socks. “Think you can handle the rest?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll be outside.”

Damian’s already turned away, working on his button-down.

Dick closes the door behind him. He opens the window, then flops down on Damian’s bed. The sheets smell like sweat and the pillow is graced with drool lines. Exhaustion breaks over him in waves.

He hears the tap stop running, then the trickle of displaced water. 

Dick twists onto his back. The ceiling is a pure and perfect white. When he was a kid, Bruce had let him put glowing stars up in his room.

Bruce was an imperfect parent, but he’d given Dick a life. And how had Dick repaid him? By dragging his presumed corpse to London and turning it into a murder zombie with flesh sloughing off its face.

A clay man, with nothing inside of it. It threw Damian off the roof of the tower. 

Dick’s stomach turns, then settles. That solves the puzzle, then: why Damian is suddenly all acid and insecurity. The monster had his father’s face. Alfred said its words had not been kind.

If Dick squints, he can distort light through his eyelids—make the ceiling burst into stars.

He must drift to sleep that way. He wakes to the sound of bare feet on carpet.

He nearly chides Damian for leaving the chair, but thinks better of it. His back is stiff against the sheets, but he doesn’t turn. 

The footsteps stop at the bedside. Damian’s tongue clicks softly against the back of his teeth.

Then the boy pulls himself onto the bed. He turns away from Dick, curling up like ammonite—coiled so tight his head comes to rest on the mattress instead of his pillow. His knees press to his chest. His damp hair leaves marks on the fitted sheet.

Dick says, “It hurts less that way, huh?”

Damian nods.

Dick flexes his shoulder blades against the bed. The ceiling feels too close above him: like one wrong move would send the both of them falling up. He presses his palms to the mattress.

“What did the fake Bruce say to you?” he breathes.

Damian shifts. Dick watches his small back, and waits for the boy to tell him to leave.

Instead, Damian’s shoulders curl tighter. He reaches behind him and grabs Dick’s hand.

Dick goes very still. 

The muted sound of downtown Gotham drifts up through the window. Afternoon sun gleams on mounted swords.

Damian doesn’t look back at Dick. Doesn’t move at all. Just curls nearly off the bed, back rigid and trembling, holding Dick’s hand.

Dick counts through three careful breaths. He swallows, then says, “Whatever he said to you doesn’t matter. It never did and it never will.”

He squeezes Damian’s hand. 

They lie that way for a long time, watching sunspots meander across the wall. 

Chapter Text

3:16am

“I don’t see the point of naming her.” Damian lands lightly on a rooftop railing. His boots tap on the metal as he runs.

Dick lands with a fluid roll beside him. The cape is more manageable now—he understands the way air moves around it. 

The Kevlar still weighs heavy on his chest, even after Alfred’s modifications. He’d asked Tim for help coming up with a lighter polymer alternative, but no dice: the kid’s been busy. (The kid’s been angry with him, and Dick hasn’t figured out how to make it right.)

“I can give you some suggestions,” he says. He reaches the edge of the roof, then fires his grappling gun at the air conditioning unit on the building across the road. “Birdie is an okay name, but Freckle would be great.”

“Freckle would be demeaning.” Damian follows him across. Robin’s cape is a blur of yellow in the corner of Dick’s eye. 

After a week of pain—of being convinced to lie around on the sofa while Dick watched Monty Python movies—Damian’s body had made peace with his spine. Dick suspects the League’s surgical secrets could save a lot of lives if Ra’s went into a different line of work.

“Demeaning?” Dick scoffs. He lands on Gotham City Bank, taking a few steps to kill his momentum. “It’s a charming name. She’d love it.”

Damian doesn’t answer. He lands with a graceful forward flip, then immediately scans the rooftop for—traps? Defensible corners?

Dick stashes his grappling gun. “It’ll be awhile yet before we see any action. Intel said the gangs won’t be ready for the handoff until four.”

“There could be scouts.” Damian prods a stray toy airplane with his foot. Some kid must’ve lost radio signal from the street below—years ago, by the plane’s condition. “You could think ahead for once.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

“I’ve been raised from birth as a master strategian!”

“That’s why you nearly left without your cape today?”

Damian kicks the airplane at him. Dick laughs.

The boy steps onto a roof turbine. He crouches on the balls of his feet, eyeing the pavement below. “You’re ridiculous.”

Dick sits beside him, taking the plane in his hands. “We could name her...Earhart? Lindbergh? Boeing?”

“Now you’re being purposefully ridiculous. She probably won’t fly anymore, even once the wing is healed.”

“Good point. We need some kind of groundcraft name.”

When Damian doesn’t answer, Dick glances up at him. The boy’s attention is elsewhere.

To their left, an adjoined building rises higher than the bank, creating a brick wall of about seven feet. Its surface is a torrent of color lit by lamplight: flamboyant graffiti tags intersperse with an old mural to create something new. Dick can’t make out specific images—just lurid hues and rainbow iridescence, a portrait abstracted. 

Damian’s eyes trace the wall.

“It’s kind of cool,” Dick offers. “You can’t see it this well from the street, but I remember stopping to gape on one of my first patrols.”

Damian’s lips move absently. His brow draws down in concentration.

“What was that?” Dick hums.

“The turquoise,” Damian mumbles. “It’s—it sets well against the burnt orange.”

“Yeah?” Dick scans the wall again. “To be honest, I can’t really tell. Oracle says I have no taste.”

Damian grunts in agreement. His eyes stay glued to the mural.

Dick spins the plane’s propeller. Its body is painted a cheerful sky blue. He’ll have to put it down soon: the sight of Batman playing with a toy plane would be suspicious to Gotham’s criminal element. 

Dick liked remote control toys at Damian’s age: planes and RC cars. Even the various Bat tools with remote functionality gave him an uncomplicated joy into his teens. 

He wonders, maybe for the first time, if Damian likes being Robin. Really likes it, beyond honing his skills and proving himself and venting his rage. Beyond the promise of the cowl.

Beyond the idea of a built-in purpose.

“You’re staring at me,” Damian huffs.

“Sorry. You really like art, huh?”

“It was a crucial facet of my education. A mind cannot be truly perfect without an understanding of the arts.”

“Perfect, huh?” The turquoise Damian mentioned isn’t from the formal mural—it’s from a graffiti tag on top of it, wild and bright and brilliant. 

Dick considers tossing the plane in the kid’s direction, then thinks better of it. “I wouldn’t even know how to define ‘perfect.’”

“When the enemy gets here, watch me and find out.”

Dick blinks. Then he throws his head back and laughs. Affection patters against his ribcage, a little thing with wings.

Two days later, Dick exits at the Wayne Tower subway stop, a wooden case under his arm. He takes the elevator to the penthouse.

“Are we going out tonight?” Damian asks him immediately, perking up from the breakfast bar. “You said that as long as my spine was functioning—”

“I said as long as it didn’t hurt.” 

“Semantics.”

“Not really, no.” Dick puts the case down on the bar, pulling up a chair. “Fine, fine. It’ll be a calm night anyway. Tim and Helena are in the neighborhood, and Babs mentioned something about training someone.”

Damian’s face twists up like he’s sucking a lemon. “Oh, by all means, let’s trust Gotham’s safety to Drake.” 

Dick frowns, but decides to pick his battles. Instead, he slides the case in front of the boy.

Damian eyes it like a species of snake he doesn’t recognize. “What is this?”

“Just open it.”

“You turned down my request for combustion sabers, so this can’t be anything worthwhile.”

“If your first thought when getting a present is ‘combustion saber,’ we have bigger problems.” 

Damian’s eyes flicker to Dick’s face, then away. Suspicion, softened by confusion. (Searching for something again.)

The boy pops the clasps, then opens the case. Dual rainbows of colored pencils glow against a backdrop of black velvet, a sliding scale of polychrome in two levels: one row bold, the other muted. The burnt orange lies next to the turquoise, though that had been Dick’s intervention.

Blankly, Damian stares.

Dick rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “They’re supposed to be a good brand. I found this subreddit where everybody was fighting about, like, ‘effortless glide’ or whatever. These ones came out more-or-less on top.”

His other hand tightens on his knee. Strange apprehension circles his gut.

Confusion breaks sharply across Damian’s face. Then all expression slides away again—like it had with the bird on the balcony. 

“Grayson,” he mutters. “If this is some misguided form of pity regarding my recent—”

“Nope. Cut that out.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean cut it out!” Dick wrestles down a surge of annoyance. “It’s not pity, and I know you don’t believe me—but I’d never come clean if you were right. So let’s drop the argument before it happens and save ourselves some time.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Damian says quietly, tracing a finger over the brightest blues. They spin in their beds. “I don’t understand a single thing about you.”

“But do you like them?”

Damian looks up, startled, and the blankness leaves him. His jaw strains, teeth clenched together—holding something back, or swallowing it down. He says, “They are acceptable.”

“Guess that’s about all I can expect,” Dick grins, ruffling his hair.

That afternoon, Damian sits on the balcony and draws. When Dick calls him in for training, he spots a toy plane sketched in bright and soaring blue.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“I wonder if I should kill you now,” Dr. Phosphorous says. His laughing skull leaks a white flame worse than poison, the heat soaking under Dick’s skin. His burning fingers tighten on Batman’s neck. “...Or just give you cancer, hmm?”

Dick grasps weakly at his attacker’s arm, fighting to throw him off. His gloves smoke on contact. 

The Batmobile had been shot down over Devil’s Square as part of some competition to end Dick’s life—which is just typical of Gotham. Dick hadn’t wanted to be out in daylight—hadn’t wanted to be out alone—but the case was urgent and he’d benched Damian for starting useless fights with Stephanie.

“—ing,” Oracle’s voice says in his ear.

The spots in his vision turn purple. He wonders, idly, if the pain in his torso is from radiation poisoning or bruised ribs. An early snow coats the city, flakes spiraling down to sizzle on Phosphorous’s skin.

“—coming, Batman.” It’s Damian’s voice, his words all tight purpose—fury honed into a fine edge. Traffic roars over the comm. “Hold on.”

Dick laughs. Or tries—it’s more of a gurgle.

Phosphorus’s face falls. “There’s nothing funny about cancer.”

“That’s not...why I’m laughing,” Dick chokes out. “I’ve always loved a good pratfall.”

The whine of a motorcycle echoes around the corner. Dick says: “Alley—”

Damian speeds towards them in a flash of red and yellow. He pulls the bike into a wheelie, backflipping off the seat. Dick throws his body backwards just as Damian’s ride crashes into Phosphorous full-speed.

“—Oop,” Damian finishes, landing in a crouch. The grin on his face is feral.

Dick slams into the snow. He keeps laughing, even as each breath sets his ribs on fire. “That was amazing.”

Damian sprints towards him. “Get up! Keep fighting, you idiot.” 

He pulls at Batman’s arm until Dick can’t hold back a gasp of pain. Damian stops at once, hands clutching Dick’s wrist. “You’re injured,” he says, voice a touch higher than it was a moment ago.

“It’s—I’m fine.” Dick grabs for Damian’s shoulder. The boy kneels down obligingly, helping him to his feet. His little hand settles at the small of Dick’s back.

“Okay. Alright.” Dick watches Riot and his doubles advance, bodies bone-white in the snow. “Let’s do this.”

They’re badly outmatched: Phosphorous scrambles to his feet again while Riot copies and copies and copies himself until he’s more of an avalanche than a villain. 

Then Batgirl crashes a literal rocket into the fray. Dick thinks—briefly and guiltily—that this may be the first time Stephanie Brown has ever simplified a problem in her life. It’s all mop-up from there.

The rich oak of the manor’s upper hallway is missing its shine. Already a thin layer of dust frosts every bust and portrait frame. 

The sight unbalances Dick. He’d chosen to leave the manor. He’d wanted to get out from Bruce’s shadow—but the old place deserves better than this. Maybe he should ask Babs and Steph to dust every now and then if they’re going to be squatting in the Cave anyway.

“How does it feel to be back here?” he asks Damian, scratching at the bandage over his ribs. Nothing broken this time. Babs had done a truly professional job decontaminating and wrapping him up (perhaps too professional, he thinks wistfully).

Damian clicks his tongue against his teeth. “It already seems smaller.” 

“Whoa, what happened to ‘You’ll never drag me out of my ancestral home’?”

The boy shrugs. “I have grander ancestral homes than this one.” His gaze roves over rows of portraiture, one Wayne after another. He bites the inside of his cheek so quickly Dick nearly misses it.

“Right,” Dick says. He swallows, dust tickling in the back of his throat. 

He considers mentioning that Damian had been technically grounded when he came to the rescue, but thinks better of it. That’s, in some ways, the point of Robin. Always has been.

Both of them take the grand staircase two steps at a time. A flash of purple from the parlor doorway catches Dick’s eye. “Gimme just a sec, okay? We’ll go home soon.”

“I’ll bring the car around.” 

“Nice try,” Dick says absently. “Babs is in the kitchen if you get bored.”

Damian mutters something obscene and stalks away. Dick holds back a grin.

Inside the parlor, Stephanie sits on the sofa with her legs drawn up beneath her. She’s changed into a sweater and jeans, her blonde hair still tousled from the Batgirl mask. Pinched between her thumb and forefinger is a plastic Battleship piece.

“That the submarine?” Dick collapses into the armchair across the table. “Must’ve fallen out when we played.”

Stephanie’s eyes widen. “You played with Damian? I mean, you played a game?”

Dick waves her off. “Once. Hey, you did good out there. Did I tell you that?”

“You could stand to tell me again.” She flicks the submarine into the cushions. “I mean, it’s only fair that you give me one compliment for every time you said I wasn’t fit for the field.”

Dick winces. “Okay. I admit I was too hard on you, but I already did this whole song and dance with Barbara today, so—”

“I don’t make the rules. One compliment! Per!” Her cheeks dimple when she grins, an unrestrained mischief that instinctively warms Dick’s heart. (That’s the point of Robins, too.)

“Fine, you win.” Dick counts on his fingers. “One, stealing Roxy’s rocket was quick thinking. Two, you drive that...Batgirl...cycle?...like a natural, even though it looks like a cross between a bottle rocket and a people-harvesting tube from The Matrix. Three, the purple is good. Four—”

“Wow, Dick, I actually didn’t know you called me unfit so many times—”

“Four, you worked well with Damian.” He lowers his fingers, gently touching them to his palm. “Thank you.”

Stephanie’s grin falters. She digs a nail into the sofa cushion.

“What?”

“It’s nothing.” She bites her lip, then catches herself—a flash of teeth there and gone. She asks, “Do you trust him?”

“Yeah, of course.” The words come out defensive. He strains to hear the pitter-patter of assassin feet in the hallway.

Stephanie shifts uncomfortably on the sofa, her hand wrapping around the submarine again. Then, to his surprise, she nods. “Good. That’s—I mean, he’s a total brat and every time he opens his mouth I want to die a little bit, but it’s—someone should trust him.”

Dick pictures Damian and Stephanie sitting together after the mission, their feet dangling off a Cave outcropping. He wonders what they’d talked about.

“He’s a good kid,” Dick says finally. “He’s learning.”

“Okay. Tell him not to fricking show up at my school again. It’s creepy.”

“Will do.”

Dick pokes his head into the kitchen. “Seen Damian?” 

“Went past a few minutes ago,” Babs says. Her hands are cupped around a plain white mug, her gaze stuck in the middle-distance. When she says, “I’m about ready to go home, Dick,” he feels an answering exhaustion beneath his bruises.

He taps his fingers against the doorframe, considering. Then he crosses the distance. Reaches over the table to cup his hands over hers.

Babs looks up at him, startled—their relationship’s been a big, radioactive question mark since Dick took on the cowl. 

He tries a grin. Maybe it’s not the right time to resolve that question—not the whole of it—but Dick’s had enough radioactivity for one day.

She waits until his palms are warm from her skin and the mug beneath it. Then she returns his grin and slips her hands out from under his.

“Get some rest,” she says. “You’ll need it.”

Chapter Text

3:16am

“But you’re not him,”  the priestess says, voice quailing. She lowers her stone knife. “You’re not the Bat.”

The chains cut into Dick’s wrists. He pitches his voice gruff and low: “Care to stake your life on that bet?”

He lies spread-eagled on the sacrificial altar, wooden masks peering down at him from every dark corner of the cave. His heart beats rabbit-quick.

An oak tree like the one from the manor graveyard looms impossibly over him, growing underground. 

Loincloth laughs. His broad chest shakes with it. “Do you want another pounding, pretender? Another gauntlet?”

The cave’s ceiling spins, strange points of light suspended between the oak’s branches. If Dick squints, they turn into stars. 

The priestess pulls a black bead, one of many, off the strand hanging from her mask. She drops it on the altar beside Dick’s chest. It shakes of its own volition. It splits in half with a crack.

She inhales sharply. “But this means—this means the Bat is dead. This universe was cleaved in two behind him. You are useless to me.” 

With a cry of rage, she swings the knife upward—only instead of a knife, it’s a makeshift stake. She plunges it into Dick’s heart.

In the penthouse he wakes gasping, eyes catching on shadowed walls.

Warm light from the refrigerator layers over the kitchen tile. Dick had smuggled snacks back to his room whenever he’d woken from nightmares as a kid. Alfred never brought it up, and sometimes Dick would find homemade chocolate truffles on the top shelf after a particularly hard patrol.

He shouldn’t be surprised to find those same truffles here. Tonight—yesterday evening, by now—had been disastrously hard. Brutal.

If I hadn’t been angry with you, Damian had said. Slumped to his knees, fingers curled in the dirt and his breath coming shallow. Adrenaline triggered the link.

Dick had pinned him by the cape to the old oak in the manor graveyard. He’d done it with the makeshift stake that Damian—Slade—attacked him with, wrenching it away from the boy half in self-defense and half out of fear of what Slade could make Damian do to himself.

Then Dick had crouched down; cupped his hand over the boy’s nape. Had murmured, It’s okay, watching the flex of Damian’s jaw.

Now, Dick chokes on his own anger: bright and burning righteous, directed at Slade and Talia like a target on a back. His appetite deserts him. He slams the refrigerator door shut.

He turns, then jumps about a foot in the air. “Jesus, Damian!”

The boy leans against the kitchen table, arms crossed over his chest. His expression is hard to make out in the dark.

“Okay, well, you’ve passed your next five stealth exams.” Dick flexes his hands at his sides, suddenly wishing he’d grabbed a snack after all. “Did Alfred tell you he made truffles? Wanna take some back to bed?”

Even as he says it, he knows Damian will refuse. Being controlled by his mother like an RC car probably registers as failure in his books.

But to his surprise, Damian doesn’t answer at all. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He’s wearing his pajamas—and a pair of boots.

Dick frowns, unease creeping up his spine. “Hey, are you—is everything okay? Tonight—I mean, last night was—”

“Stop talking.” The words are clipped; bitten off at the edges. Like they cost him something to say. 

Dick looks closer. Damian’s arms are crossed, sure, but not with the confidence of an Al Ghul. His hands grip his elbows like anchor points. 

Dick wets his lips. “I want,” he says slowly, “to be here for you. If you need it.”

“Shut up. I don’t need anything, particularly not from you.” He hears the scowl plain in the boy’s voice, even with his face in shadow. “I got up because I had a stomachache.”

“Okay. Do you want—”

“Fine,” Damian snaps.

Dick blinks back his surprise. “So...you want me to grab you some medicine, but you don’t want me to talk.”

“Was that so hard?” Damian says, and stalks out of the kitchen.

Dick follows behind, mind racing. Damian could have gotten the medicine himself. It’s not like Dick keeps the hallway bathroom locked. He thinks back to late nights watching black comedies flicker on the TV screen. Of Damian sitting perched on the sofa’s arm—letting Dick bring him medicine he was perfectly capable of finding on his own.

The boy stops at the bathroom door, awkwardly waiting for Dick. The nightlight above the sink sets a blue shimmer on his cheeks. 

Dick opens the cabinet. He feels something brush his side: Damian, who’d followed him in—who’s standing much closer than he normally does.

“Dames?” Dick tries. “Hey, if there’s something you need—”

“Ugh. You’re incapable of silence. I’m going back to bed.”

“Wait!” Dick clutches the medicine bottle. “I’ll shut up in a second.”

Damian watches him carefully, moving from the bags under Dick’s eyes to the stained T-shirt he’d worn to bed. He doesn’t back away—doesn’t put any space between them. His shoulder comes level with Dick’s obliques—a convex angle where Dick is concave. 

“Do you want to watch a movie,” Dick says, “with me.”

“No,” is the immediate answer. Then Damian’s arms tighten across his chest. “But—but I will stay awake until I feel better. I’ll wait out there.” He ducks his head and adds, “With you.”

Relief, along with a heady pride, untwist Dick’s insides. “Sounds good,” he says, trying for blasé—the kid’s had a rough night between the spine control and confronting his mom, but he’s clearly not willing to be coddled.

Dick hands him a couple of pills. “Spaceballs or a bad Robin Hood?”

Damian, pointedly, doesn’t answer. He swallows the medicine.

His arms cross again as he pads to the sofa beside Dick. The posture looks different in motion, more like a boy trying to shrink in on himself than a boy trying to be strong.

Damian perches on the same sofa arm he always does. He doesn’t bury himself in a notebook, or a phone. Just looks blankly into the darkness as Dick puts on Prince of Thieves.

Dick can’t take in a single thing that happens onscreen. His thoughts drift from image to image—light to light. Slade’s craggy hands against the white sheets in Talia’s HQ. Damian’s face when he’d agreed to speak with Talia alone. The tremor in Damian’s voice when he’d sat in the Bunker and said, I can’t believe she did this to me. I feel sick.

Birdie rustles softly from her cage. Damian’s refused to name her.

After awhile, he notices Damian’s quick glances in his direction. The kid starts to fidget: clumsy jerks that look wrong on his body. 

Dick holds as still as he can. He doesn’t speak.

With a final, frightened glance, Damian slides onto the sofa proper. He positions himself just as close to Dick as he had in the bathroom: not quite touching, but almost. His face is beet red.

Dick’s chest contracts sharply, and he understands with sudden clarity that he’d fight Talia to the death for this boy. 

“Don’t talk,” Damian says with a strange desperation. “I don’t want to talk about it. Any of it.”

Dick wants to talk—to tell Damian how unforgivable it was for someone to take his body away from him. (Child soldier, Jason said.) Instead, he sets a hand on the boy’s knee. 

Damian tenses.

“Sorry.” Dick pulls back. “I should’ve—”

Damian leans just enough to settle his arm against Dick’s. He purses his lips for a controlled exhale: a relaxation technique. His breath shakes.

And it’s probably bad that Damian gets stomachaches here, in the penthouse, when he didn’t before. But maybe—just maybe—Damian hadn’t been allowed pain before. Hadn’t allowed himself to rest for long enough for the anxiety to hit him. That’s what the child psych websites had said, and what Alfred had echoed: He needs a stable home. 

Maybe the stomachaches, in a strange backwards way, happen because of the ice cream runs and midnight movies and leaning on Dick’s arm. Because despite all the terrible things Damian’s seen, now he gets to rest. Just sometimes. Just long enough for any thoughts he’s buried in his graveyard to dig their way to the surface.

A painful kind of progress, but progress all the same.

Dick blinks back dampness. He wraps an arm around the boy’s shoulders. 

Tentatively, Damian leans his head against Dick’s side.

Then he kicks off his boots.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

Dick is running a chem analysis alone in the Bunker when Alfred’s voice comes down through the comms: “Young Master Damian? May I request your assistance?”

Dick quickly drops the testing strips and slides into the computer chair. He presses his mouth against steepled fingers and listens to the conversation taking place in the penthouse sixty floors above his head.

Sounds like the plan is a go.

“Master Damian?” Alfred says again. This time, a knock follows: Damian’s door, no doubt. The kid’s been mostly holed up in his room since patrol went south last night.

The door creaks. Damian’s voice, petulant: “What?”

“I wondered if you could assist me for a moment in the kitchen.”

Down in the Bunker, Dick holds his breath. He and Alfred had only planned out the broad strokes of this conversation: Dick had thought it best to leave the exact wording to the master. He’s surprised Alfred chose to use the word kitchen directly, with all of its connotations of servitude.

Damian clearly feels the same way. Even over the comms, Dick hears his tongue click against his teeth.

“Isn’t that your job, Pennyworth?” 

“Of course. But in regards to my current project, I fear I’m in a bit over my head.”

Dick holds back a snicker. The audacity of that man, pretending helplessness as often as he does. It’s worked on every Robin since the first.

“Unsurprising,” Damian says—though there’s no heat to it. “What do you expect me to do about it? I’m not a servant.”

“Forgive the assumption, but I wonder if you have any familiarity—even in passing—with gulab jamun.”

A pause. The door creaks again, and for a moment Dick thinks that Damian’s shutting the door in Alfred’s face. 

Instead, the boy says: “I’m familiar with the dish. A dessert—fried dough with khoa.” The words come out stilted. Probing. 

“Excellent. Even a knowledge of the taste would be helpful to me. I’ve prepared the milk solids, but I could use your feedback on the syrup. I may be using too much saffron.”

Another silence. Dick strains to hear anything that would give away posture—rustling fabric or footsteps. For all he can tell, Damian is standing stock-still in the doorway.

During last night’s patrol, Damian had run ahead—despite Dick’s warning—and set off a tripwire. The resulting deathtrap locked all the doors and kept Batman and Robin in the crossfire of some very big machine guns all evening.

The tripwire was too fine to see with the naked eye. Even Dick would’ve missed it. Still: that’s enough of a mistake for Damian to turn into a picky eater for a good twenty-four hours.

Dick and Alfred have been waiting for a day like this: for a chance to change the narrative of failure and success.

“What a waste of time,” the boy finally says. “Nothing you do will ever come close to tasting like the real thing.”

“I expect as much,” Alfred sighs. “More’s the pity. I’ll just have to ready Master Dick for disappointment.”

Dick waits in suspense. This part of the hook was his idea. He’d felt vain to even suggest it—and a little nervous that the boy would prove him wrong—but it was worth a try.

Damian takes the bait. “Grayson? What does he have to do with it?”

“He expressed interest in the dish. Of course, I wasn’t sure I could make the genuine article, but I felt motivated to give it my best effort. He has been working so hard lately.” Alfred sighs again—laying it on a little Shakesperian. “I’m sure he will enjoy the results, no matter how uninspired. A pity, though, that he could not taste the real thing.”

“Pity,” Damian echoes.

“Indeed. Forgive the intrusion.” Alfred’s footsteps move away from the door.

After a moment, Damian calls, “Pennyworth?” 

“Yes, Master Damian?”

“Why would Grayson choose this dish? He just happens to be craving a dessert from the part of the world where I grew up?”

Dick grimaces. Smart kid.

Without missing a beat, Alfred says, “While I assure you that Master Dick’s tastebuds are indeed that unpredictable, we should probably assume that this is not a coincidence. That he stumbled upon the dish while trying to learn more about where you came from.” He pauses, then adds, “about you.”

Damian makes a dismissive sound. “He knows all he needs to.”

“Perhaps.”

“But, fine. I will rescue whatever sad attempt you’ve started. Just this once. It would be...unfortunate for Grayson to form a mediocre impression of the cuisine.”

Dick grins into his hand.

When he sneaks past the kitchen an hour later, Damian and Alfred have finished the gulab jamun and moved on to making shortbread cookies. Damian extols the virtues of rosemary, flour streaking his cheek.

Dinnertime is the real test.

They eat at the breakfast bar so Dick can keep track of the news. He suspects that the organization Channel 5 has dubbed the “Beaded Bandits” are, in fact, the prehistoric-artifact cult. He’s just not sure what that means yet.

Alfred lays out an incredible spread, from fruits and a cheese board to a thick beef roast. The pumpkin soup is especially tasty, rich and warm all the way down Dick’s throat.

Damian hunches in his hoodie and picks half-heartedly at every offering. He seems particularly unimpressed by the meat.

That’s fine. That’s okay. They’d expected as much. 

Afterwards, Alfred clears the porcelain from the main course and brings out the gulab jamun. The fried balls soak in syrup the color of warm honey. They’re garnished with pistachio slivers: a tender green like new-sprouting grass.

Alfred catches Dick’s eyes over the bar, his expression level.

“Sit down, Alfie.” Dick leans forward on his stool. “You’ve worked hard. Grab a seat.”

Alfred sits carefully across from Damian. “I’m not the only one who’s contributed to this meal.”

“That so?” Dick watches Damian’s ears turn pink out of the corner of his eye.

“Yes. For dessert in particular, I had assistance from—”

“Quit embarrassing yourself,” Damian snaps. “You didn’t need my help.”

Alfred calmly wipes his hands on a cloth napkin. “The outcome would have been different without you. And the time certainly would not have passed as quickly.”

Damian frowns up at him. His hands press down on his knees, fingers gripping fabric. 

“Yeah, Dames is good company,” Dick says with a smile. “Take it from me.”

The flush creeps from Damian’s ears to his cheekbones. “I only did it as a favor. Pennyworth said—”

“—that the three of us deserve a treat? Agreed. Let’s eat.” Dick scoops a ball onto his dessert plate, then does the same for Damian.

“I’m not hungry,” the boy scowls.

“Aww, you won’t even taste it? Reap the fruit of your rewards?”

“That’s a mixed metaphor. It’s ‘fruit of your labor’ or ‘reap your reward,’ not—”

“Mrph,” Dick answers around a mouthful. “Damian, this is so good. You have to try the finished product.”

“No.”

“But I think you would—”

“No.” This time the word comes out quick and soft. The shoulders of Damian’s hoodie bunch around his neck.

Sunset shadows stretch long over the carpet. The evening news murmurs softly in the background. Alfred and Dick send each other an uneasy glance over the bar.

“Okay,” Dick says. “Do you want us to save you some?”

“No.” 

Damian moves to slide off his stool.

Dick’s hand shoots out; presses against the boy’s shoulder blades. Startled, Damian looks up.

Dick swallows. He’s never been much of a planner. He’d just known that they had to be subtle about this. Had to come at things sideways; not push back on Damian’s upbringing directly. 

He’d wanted it to go well. He’d wanted—

“I’m proud of you,” he blurts, gripping Damian’s shoulder.

Damian lets out a sharp breath. His chin drops defensively. “You’re being strange.”

“I’m proud of you,” Dick says again—lost, worried, hoping. “I’m going to keep being proud of you. You know, that right?”

Damian’s jaw clenches. His eyes, reflective under the overhead light, trace Dick’s face—dart from point to point like Dick’s nose or chin or laugh lines will reveal him a liar. 

“This is about last night,” the boy says slowly.

Alfred shoots Dick a warning look over the bar. Dick plows on, pulse stuttering: “Yeah. In a way. But it’s also just... true. You’re incredible.” He frowns to himself, then adds, “Even if you weren’t, it wouldn’t matter. You’d deserve the same things.”

Damian searches Dick’s expression for a moment longer. Then his gaze drops to the floor. His posture pulls inward.

“And what do I deserve?” he scoffs. 

Dick opens his mouth to find no words ready on his tongue. The question is enormous. Bigger than Batman, than Dick, than Ra’s. There are no words for something that encompasses the whole of everything.

Finally, he murmurs: “Sweet things.” He squeezes Damian’s shoulder. “Every chance you get.”

Damian’s brow draws downward. His fingers curl up against his knees. 

“Master Damian,” Alfred says softly. His pale hands rest gentle against the bar. “Did you find any small satisfaction in the work we did today?”

Damian gives a small, curt nod.

“Good. I did as well. Perhaps it might help to remember that satisfaction—success—can come in small moments alongside the grand ones. In a house made spick and span, or in a family fed well.”

Damian fidgets in his seat. His shoulders, slowly, righten: just a boy at the dinner table, staring down dessert. 

Dick pops another ball in his mouth. He lets the flavor soak in, heavy on his tongue: warm and sweet. Strange, that a food can taste like a home he’s never been to.

He swallows, then says, “We’ll save you some if you’re not hungry. How’s that? You can decide later. And if you really don’t want any, we can—”

Damian grabs a fork and stabs into his gulab jamun. He raises it to his mouth and devours the thing in one bite.

Dick blinks.

Damian swallows. He throws down the fork. “You were right to praise us, Grayson. This is an excellent dish. Pennyworth and I have mastered it—you’re just lucky to partake.”

Then he reaches for the serving spoon. He hesitates, eyes darting to Dick’s.

Dick grins and nods. Sugar sticks to his fingers, heady and homemade.

Damian takes a deep, steadying breath. He serves himself three more.

Chapter Text

3:16am

“I gotta admit,” Dick murmurs, “I get that full Batman gear would be a dumb infiltration outfit, but I’m feeling kind of naked without the cowl.”

“Perhaps you are settling into your role,” Alfred says primly over the comms.

Dick stifles a laugh. “How dare you.”

He walks quickly, warming his hands in his armpits. The stolen cultist robe doesn’t do much against late November nights. Worse is the mask: the strings of beads bang against the back of his head with each step. He wears a domino beneath.

Rising above him: Gotham’s private airport, abandoned since the early aughts. Dick ducks through a hole in the chain link fence and crosses the tarmac runway. In the distance, other robed figures make for the same building.

“Status, Robin?” 

“Right where you last left me,” Damian mutters in his ear. “I don’t understand why I can’t come in with you.”

“Obviously it’s so you can bust in and be the hero when everything goes south.”

Damian’s tongue clicks over the comms. 

Dick grins behind the wooden mask. “Tactful of me not to mention the lack of four-foot-tall cultists, wasn’t it?”

“You’re baiting me, obviously, but I am not four feet tall.”

“Not even? Jeez, we gotta feed you better.”

“I see them,” Damian says suddenly. “The priestess and her hulking goon. They’re entering on the building’s north side, where security used to be. Making for what’s left of the terminal gates.”

“Got it.” Dick grabs the handle of a maintenance door. “Going silent. I’ll leave the channel open so you can listen in.”

“You’d better,” Damian scoffs.

Their intel was right after all: the door is unlocked. Dick slips inside.

“So the Bat’s dead,” Loincloth rumbles. He crosses his arms across his bare chest, sitting cross-legged in front of a row of terminal chairs. “The current one’s a fake. So we abandon the plan, don’t we? Putting the imposter’s body on the altar would fail to open the portal.”

Beside him, the priestess and her acolytes stoop to run knives through the garish airport carpet, creating strange sigils on the floor.

Inside her mask’s gaping smile, her lips angle downward. “No, Tar. We haven’t failed yet. Do you remember how I tracked the true Bat?”

Dick shifts along the terminal wall, listening carefully. He and the other nameless cultists form a solemn circle around the priestess and her chosen few.

“It was years ago.” A frown carries in Loincloth’s—Tar’s—voice. “You used the Anodyne’s knife to mark him. I don’t know how.”

“The Bat changes every corner of the multiverse he inhabits. His seemingly-inconsequential decisions ripple down every timeline until one universe looks quite different from its neighbor. He has saved worlds, and he has destroyed them.”

A strange chill slides down Dick’s spine. Damian mutters, offended.

The priestess straightens, holding out her stone knife for Tar to inspect. “Once the knife tastes the blood of a man like that, following his movements becomes trivial. The knife seeks a nexus of multiverse potentiality. It quivers in the Bat’s presence.”

New cold plunges through Dick’s stomach—but then he realizes that the knife sits completely still on her palm. Of course—he’s not the one it’s looking for. The spell is keyed to Bruce.

Tar scowls. “But it quivered after we’d captured the false Bat. While he fought through the gauntlet. If he was an imposter, then how—”

“I don’t know,” the priestess snaps, pulling the blade back to her chest. “It’s as though the Bat’s presence...shadowed him, somehow.”

“Is that possible?” 

“It shouldn’t be.”

“How can they be this stupid?” Damian drawls in Dick’s ear. “It’s like they think ‘Batman’ was Father’s legal name. They can’t get their heads around the idea that you are Batman now.”

Dick frowns. Nice as it is to hear Damian acknowledge Dick’s claim to the cowl, something in that logic doesn’t add up. He’ll have to ask Zatanna if a magical tracking system can really be tricked by something as simple as a symbolic identity transfer.

And why isn’t the knife trembling now?

“I can’t give up on the Bat.” The priestess’s voice goes high and close to breaking. “I know he’s the right offering. Powerful enough to pull the Anodyne across the multiverse and into our waiting arms.”

“Insane,” Damian says dismissively. Dick keeps an eye on the exits.

The priestess detaches one of the strings of beads that hang from her mask like hair. She flips the strand upside-down, letting the beads clatter over the makeshift sigils in the carpet.

Her grey eyes dart from bead to bead. “The amber knocked against the hematite, then landed near the jade. Perhaps the Bat is simply lost? Climbing through time? No—wait.”

Damian’s breath catches over the comms. Dick feels his own breath leave him.

The black hematite bead shakes of its own volition. It splits in two with a crack. 

The priestess scowls. “No. In this universe, he died. In another, he lived. But not here. See? The Bat’s death split a timeline in half, all on its own.”

Dick feels the pronouncement like a boot to the chest.

He’d accepted Bruce’s death quickly. He’d never believed, like Tim briefly had, that Bruce was still out there, sending signs. He’d felt the finality of his father’s passing like a thud beneath the trapeze. 

Men like Bruce don’t live to old age. When it happened, Dick didn’t think Why him? or Why now?

Instead, the inevitability—the obviousness of it—suffocated him. 

Dick had let the despair choke him for a little while: the manor dark as drowning, the nights a void. Then he’d reluctantly pulled despair’s teeth from his neck and helped with the funeral. Made Alfred cup after cup of bad tea. Hugged Tim, hard. Sank into warm phone calls with Babs like a bath after a hard day.

He’d accepted Bruce’s passing as best as he knew how. But to hear that in other worlds, inaccessible, Bruce lives on with his family—

“Batman!” Damian hisses.

Dick startles. The cultists are looking straight at him.

One bead has rolled to a stop at Dick’s feet. It glows Robin-red.

“Who are you?” the priestess says slowly. Her gaze threatens to pierce his wooden mask. 

Tar pulls himself to his feet, fists closing at his sides. The robed figures to Dick’s right and left start to converge.

“You’re blown!” Damian says, high and quick in his ear. “Get out!”

Dick makes a break for the nearest emergency exit, vaulting over terminal chairs and weaving behind snack machines. The cultists shout and give chase.

“I’m coming,” Damian says over the sound of a grappling gun firing. “I’ll be there in—”

“Cover my exit,” Dick gasps. A bone dart grazes his arm. 

“But—”

“Robin, I need you.”

A pause—barely a breath—then: “Fine! Best coverage is north of the runway. I’ll meet you there.”

Dick bursts through the emergency exit door and speeds down the fire escape, dodging arrows. He hears Tar thundering down behind him. Too late: Dick reaches the tarmac runway and sprints. 

Batarangs land with shunk sounds all around him, leaking smoke cover. One smacks Tar in the face.

“Nice aim,” Dick grins. “What was that, fifty feet from you?”

“Shut up. Keep moving.”

Dick reaches the edge of the property and hops the fence. He looks back to see the priestess emerging at a run from the smoke. 

Then she stops dead, eyes wide, and looks down at her shaking knife.

Drained to the core, Dick falls chest-first into bed without showering. He breathes in the scent of clean sheets and thinks: I’m Batman.

Dick’s never had much of an internal narrative. He has to force himself to form the words and hold them in his head: I’m Batman. Bruce is dead.

The ceiling presses down on his shoulder blades. His breath, for a moment, comes ragged.

There’s a knock at the door.

“Grayson.” Damian doesn’t wait for permission to enter. “Pennyworth asked me to bring you the shortbread cookies we made on Sunday. After the gulab jamun.”

Dick squeezes his eyes shut, dangerously close to tears. How silly of him to forget that Damian’s not the only one subject to Alfred’s machinations.

“You’re not actually sleeping,” Damian scoffs. “But fine, if you don’t want them, I’m eating them.”

“...Wait.” Dick pushes himself up by the arms. His eyes catch on the jagged strip of light from the hallway—on Damian’s fingers holding the cookie tin tight. “I’ll take them. C’mere.”

Damian bites his cheek, his brow furrowed. Then he crosses the room to sit stiffly on the edge of Dick’s bed. “Is there anything,” he says carefully, then swallows. “Wrong?”

Real warmth settles in Dick’s gut. He tries for a smile. “Nothing new. I’m sorry, I guess.”

“For what?”

Dick shrugs. “For the fact that we’re not in a universe where you can get to know your dad. ‘S not fair to you.”

Damian frowns down at the tin in his lap. “I suppose it’s not,” he says. Doubt bogs the words down into something soft and slow.

Dick reaches for a cookie. They’re soft and a bit crumbly, leaving sugar grains on his fingertips. Alfred makes them just as well as he did when Dick was a kid. 

“I was told so many stories about him,” Damian says suddenly. “I never learned if they were true.”

“I know, Dames. When he died—”

The boy glares up at him so sharply Dick stops talking. “He didn’t try to know me.”

Dick opens his mouth to argue, then closes it again.

When Dick was a kid, he ate a whole batch of shortbread cookies on his own and was sick for the rest of the day. He’d been following through on a threat: Come out of the Cave, Bruce, or I’ll eat them all without you.

Bruce didn’t come out of the Cave. Dick laughed it off.

But...he tries to picture Damian in his shoes: a Damian who became Bruce’s Robin fresh from the League, angry as hell and scared underneath. Would Bruce’s solitary evenings have felt like a quirk of personality to Damian, or like a way to avoid his son? Would silent patrols have felt companionable, or laden with contempt?

Would Bruce have patiently worked out the meaning beneath each of Damian’s outbursts, layer by layer? Would he have asked to see his drawings?

It hurts to doubt that.

Damian brushes against Dick’s side. At some point he’d moved closer, eyes still fixed on the cookie tin.

Dick wraps an arm around the boy’s shoulders and says, “Loving Bruce was complicated—take it from me. We fought all the time, and to this day there’s things that we—well. I’d like to think that you guys would’ve figured it out eventually. But sure, we’ll never know that.”

Damian glances up at him, and Dick presses forward. “And you know what? That doesn't matter. We're gonna be okay anyway. More than okay. Because you and me stick together.”

He squeezes Damian close to his side.

The boy sighs, long and heavy. He bites off the edge of a cookie. He chews it thoughtfully, swallows, then says, “You and I.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s ‘you and I,’ not ‘you and me.' Honestly—”

“You’re gonna have to stop making us native speakers look bad, okay?”

Damian half-suppresses a snigger. “You’re doing fine on your own.”

“Hey! I’m pretty sure you do this to everyone you come across, not just me.”

“No,” Damian says quietly, catching Dick’s eyes and holding them. “Just you.”

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“Good,” Dick says, regaining his footing at the edge of the mat. “That was good, but a palm strike from that angle is less effective at the level of force we use. You want to start lower down.”

“You’re wrong,” Damian scoffs. “I’m using a League variation.”

“Right, yeah, the League of Assassins? That League?”

“I don’t see your point.” Damian drops back into a ready posture, light on the balls of his feet. Dick recognizes the stance as one of several the kid keeps in rotation. Damian’s training was nothing if not thorough. 

“We’ve been over this. The League’s style is always lethal, even in unarmed hand-to-hand. You need to adjust if—”

Damian rushes him, low, and tries to sweep-kick Dick’s legs out from under him. Dick swivels and counters with an axe kick, forcing Damian into a defensive roll. 

Once out of the range of Dick’s long legs, Damian flows effortlessly to his feet again. He leaves a healthy distance between them. “Just because we can’t kill doesn’t mean we have to fight with these ridiculous handicaps.”

Dick breathes through a twinge of annoyance. “It’s not a handicap. I’m telling you the palm strike you used isn’t effective without lethal force.” He rolls his neck slowly, wincing when it clicks. “If anything, that’s the handicap: you’re relying on the wrong moves.”

Damian scowls. “I fail to see how—”

“No you don’t,” Dick says flatly. “You’re smarter than that. You see exactly what I’m saying, and you’re mad that I’m right.”

Damian’s lip curls back from his teeth, and for a moment Dick thinks the boy plans to rush him again. The fact that he doesn’t is progress in itself: Damian’s worst weakness in the field is his vulnerability to goading.

“Am I right?” Dick asks, just to be a pain.

Damian’s response is to settle into one of his go-to stances. Aggressive. Quick.

Dick tries a boxer’s stance. Light. Cunning.

Then Damian’s forehead wrinkles. His eyes flick to each vulnerable point on Dick’s body. He takes a slow breath through his nose, and all at once his body shifts. 

It’s more than his stance, though that changes too: he goes from forward-leaning aggression to a defensive solidity, his knees bent—one foot sliding out in front of the other. Like an Aikido hanmi, but with more weight on the back leg: a stance that’s halfway to a retreat already. 

What Dick notices most is the flow of tension out from the boy’s muscles. The loosening of his shoulders.

“That’s a new one. What is that, a League hanmi?”

Damian doesn’t answer. His hands float in front of him, mirroring each other: open towards Dick, but fingers curving inwards. Dick thinks of spikes on a venus flytrap: sharp and waiting.

Dick cocks an eyebrow. “Okay. We’ll see what it can do.”

Damian doesn’t move an inch, so for what may be the first time in their partnership, Dick attacks first. Only then—only when Dick’s surged forward, fist pulled back to strike—does the boy respond.

He darts forward, right up close to Dick’s chest—too close to hit with Dick’s planned right hook. Then he shoves Dick’s chest with his open palms, hard. Dick reels backwards, caught off-guard. 

Damian, surprisingly, doesn’t pursue the advantage. He sinks back into the defensive stance: silent and still.

Dick advances again. Damian catches his wrist—but instead of blocking the blow in his normal style, the boy pulls forward, sending Dick stumbling into him. Then Damian lets himself fall backwards to the ground—tangling his legs in Dick’s to send him crashing down—and rolls to his feet a safe distance away.

“Holy shit,” Dick says, cheek squished to the mat. “That was awesome! What was that?”

He looks up to see Damian’s back. The boy is halfway across the Bunker already, towel draped over his tense shoulders. “The wrong moves,” he says, soft and tight.

Dick doesn’t push it. He figures Damian’s sore about using a different fighting style because it proves Dick right: the cautious, defensive posture worked well at a nonlethal level. 

Dick combs over what he remembers from the match and realizes that each of Damian’s new moves were intended to redirect Dick’s momentum elsewhere, rather than causing him harm. Not that Damian’s attacks were uncounterable: with enough exposure to the style, Dick could overcome them. But the fact that they took him off-guard is exciting enough.

Two days later, Dick is doing a warm-up split on the mat when Damian strides out of the locker room, hops up beside him, and says, “I have something to show you.”

Dick blinks up at him. The boy is glaring at a point past Dick’s shoulder rather than making eye contact. His hands clutch nervously at his water bottle. 

Dick rolls to his feet. “Is it that badass style you tried out the other day?”

The boy flushes a violent red. “It’s not badass. It’s the worst style ever invented.” 

“Really? That seems harsh.”

Damian tosses his bottle aside and paces to the far edge of the mat. His bare toes curl against its surface for a moment. Then he turns and catches Dick’s eye. “I just—I thought maybe you’d like it.”

Dick nearly takes offense to this. Then he sees the hesitation written clear as language in the lines of Damian’s forehead. 

He gives the most reassuring smile he can muster. “Bring it, then. Show me.”

Damian nods stiffly. He slides into the modified hanmi, all diamond-sharp intent from a trained fighter. 

Then he does nothing at all.

“Dames?” Dick says after a good twenty seconds have passed. “I’m ready.”

Damian rolls his eyes. He jerks his chin towards Dick: attack me first. 

Pieces begin slotting into place, forming a picture Dick can almost understand. “The style is purely defensive,” he says slowly. “You’re not even allowed to attack a clear hostile until they’ve struck first.”

“As I said,” Damian mutters. “Worst style in the world.”

Dick grins. He bounds forward into a flying roundhouse kick. 

Damian twists to the side and grabs Dick’s ankle—and suddenly, Dick is halfway across the mat, regaining his balance. 

He charges again. Damian grabs hold of his arm and runs counter to Dick’s momentum, forcing Dick to turn with him or let the arm dislocate. Then he lets go and keeps running: again, they end up on opposite sides of the mat. They both end up unharmed.

“Krav Maga,” Dick says quickly. “That grab looked like—but if that were Krav Maga, I’d be on the floor by now. You retreated.”

Damian shrugs. He sinks back into his starting stance. He waits.

Dick continues to rush him. Continues to find himself tossed out of range, totally unharmed. Quickly, he sees the weaknesses in the style.

“It’s not Aikido,” he breathes, doing a boxer’s hop. “Aikido’s pacifist, but you’ve got lots of throws to hurt or wind an attacker. For this, there’s no big damage-dealer moves, or ways to incapacitate me. You can’t ever really win. It’s almost like it’s designed to—to bide time.”

“Exactly,” Damian sighs, putting Dick in mind of someone who’s relieved to finally meet someone who hates that Top 40 single as much as he does. “It’s a useless exercise. Invented by a defector from the League.”

“Sorry, a former League fighter invented a style pacifist to the point of surrender?”

Damian drops the stance. “Cao Fen. She was a revolutionary philosopher who stirred up discontent in the League’s surrounding villages for years.”

“I’m going to guess she had strong feelings about the use of violence.” Dick flicks a bead of sweat from his eyebrow.

Damian scowls. “She believed it was immoral to harm others, even in self-defense. Her followers used this style to flee combat, or to make grand moral stands before we destroyed them.”

“And you know the style because…?”

“Because we were trained against it in the League.” He shrugs. “And because my teachers would discuss it to illustrate weakness of character and cowardice.”

Damian shoves his palm outward in an imitation of the strike he’d used the other day. Then he adjusts the angle, as Dick asked him to. “They taught me the style so that I would understand how useless it was. How much better the League was in every way.”

Dick lets himself collapse backward, shoulders to the mat and chest to the Bunker ceiling. He leaves his palms open at his sides. “And you thought I’d like it.”

Damian takes a sharp breath. He looks at Dick with something like panic. “Obviously I didn’t mean—I understand that the ‘no killing’ rule doesn’t mean we can’t defend ourselves, and of course we use force to protect Gotham, or else we wouldn’t—”

“It is,” Dick says, “so cool.”

Damian blinks. “It’s—do you think that?”

Dick runs a hand through bangs damp with sweat. He grins at Damian from the floor. “I’ve always liked the idea of a pacifist martial art. Even if, practically, the style doesn’t work for Batman and Robin, I love the idea of finding every possible way to reduce harm. I mean, you pegged me right: I liked it.”

Damian watches Dick for a moment longer. Then he clicks his tongue and gracefully sinks to the mat, crossing his legs. “Of course. I knew you’d like something morally lofty but useless in practice.”

“That’s me. Useless in practice.”

The hum of the computer lays a gentle backdrop on their silence, a thin vibration permeating the mat. In one corner of the Bunker lies Damian’s latest mechanical project. In the other are the waiting results of a forensic analysis they’d run together. By the elevator door: sugar cookies.

“You could still take something from it,” Dick says.

Damian’s attention snaps to him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean there’s no harm in cribbing a move here and there from a style you don’t want to use overall.”

Damian uncrosses his legs, pulling them up to his chest. He rests his chin thoughtfully on his knees. “I suppose the more unusual positions did catch you off-guard. At the beginning.”

Dick rolls onto his side, toward Damian. He pillows his head on his hands. “I might want to steal a thing or two from Cao Fen myself. If you’re willing to teach me.”

Damian dips his head. “I thought—I think that’s why I wanted to show you. In case you wanted to learn.”

Dick’s heart melts like sweat dripping on the grappling mat. 

“That was really thoughtful of you,” he says. 

Damian’s ears turn pink.

Chapter Text

3:16am

“We should do this again sometime,” Stephanie says, kicking a Two-Face goon down a subway entrance. “You guys get a better caliber of criminal than I do.”

“No way that’s true.” Dick sprints across the street, dodging fire from a modified tommy gun. He catches the aggressor by the shoulder and slams him chest-first into a light dusting of Gotham snow. “I heard you and Supergirl literally fought Dracula.”

“Eh. He was kind of a sadsack.”

“Are you two going to finish anytime soon?” Damian calls from down the street. He’s standing on top of a prone figure Dick recognizes as one of Two-Face’s lieutenants. “I’ve finished off twice the men Batgirl has.”

“Huh! They are all men.” Stephanie knocks another combatant to his knees, then uses his ass as a springboard. She backflips into the last goon standing. “Add sexism to Two-Face’s list of terrible crimes.”

“He’s a bad man,” Dick says solemnly. 

Once he’s satisfied that all opponents are either incapacitated or in full retreat, he strides over to Damian’s captive lieutenant. Batman’s cape billows with convenient menace, dark against the snow.

Damian angles his sword under the man’s chin. “I’m sure he can tell us which bank they’ve rigged to blow.”

Dick drops into Bruce’s bass and says, “He’d better.”

One bomb defusal later, the three of them sit on the roof of the Gotham museum, hot chocolates in hand.

“Your movements are still inefficient,” Damian says, stirring his drink with a peppermint straw. “For every man you fought, I saw several ways to incapacitate you.” 

“Good thing you weren’t those men,” Stephanie says coolly. She leans down to slurp up a mouthful of whipped cream.

“Tt. If I had been, you’d be dead by now.”

Dick frowns. “Hey.”

“It’s just the truth.” Damian shrugs. “She’s not adequately trained.”

“Batman trained me,” Stephanie huffs. “So say whatever you want about that.”

“Looks like he died before he got much of a chance.”

“Hey!” Dick says, the chocolate settling suddenly too hot in his stomach. “What is with you tonight?”

“Please,” Stephanie says. “He’s always like this.” Her face is ruddy in the museum lights, a spark of indignation high on her cheeks.

“He’s not.” Dick glares pointedly at the top of Damian’s head. “He’s better than that.”

Damian sips sullenly at his chocolate until Dick admits it’s time to go home.

He lets Damian call the Batmobile. While they wait, Stephanie pulls Dick aside.

As soon as they’re tucked behind an over-large granite statue, Dick murmurs, “Don’t worry about whatever that was. I’ll talk to him.”

Stephanie gives him a bemused look. “Sure, okay, but again: he’s always like that.” When Dick opens his mouth to argue, she adds, “At least with me. Maybe you’ve tamed him.”

Dick huffs a breath, looking up at the December-clear sky. “So you’re not about to ask for a playdate.”

“Actually, it’s about Tim.”

Dick’s stomach does a strange flip, chocolate be damned. “Yeah?”

Stephanie cards a hand through loose hair. She watches Dick with a keen curiosity that reminds him, oddly, of Damian. 

She seems to choose her words carefully. “He’s...sad. I think. That you guys haven’t been in contact as much. But he’s being an asshole and doesn’t want to admit it.”

Dick pushes his tongue against his lips. He says, “I figured he was mad at me.”

“Oh, he is. Really mad. But...it’s different now. He misses you. I dunno, I think he’s cooled down enough to work it out.” She cocks an eyebrow. “If you apologize.”

“I have.”

“For real, though? Like, actually?”

Dick spreads his hands. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I shouldn’t have taken Robin away like that, but—”

Stephanie holds up a hand. She rolls her eyes. “God, this is exactly what I thought would happen. I don’t want you to say anything. This isn’t about me. I have an opinion, but then again: I always do! You two need to work it out yourselves.”

Heat prickles along the back of Dick’s neck—a wash of shame. He wonders just when Stephanie Brown got so confident. “Yeah,” he says flatly. “Okay. Sorry.”

Stephanie nods. She doesn’t break eye contact as she calls out, “Bye, Robin!” 

Damian doesn’t answer.

“Thanks,” Dick says, belated. “Really.”

“No problem.” The irregular edge of her cape traces patterns in the snow as she turns. “We really should do this more often.”

Once they’re back in the penthouse, Damian tips cereal into Birdie’s cage.

He’d taken on caretaking responsibilities not long ago: it happened naturally, without so much as a conversation. First, Dick started noticing she’d been fed and watered before he got there. Then, slowly, Damian had started letting Dick see him do it. 

The boy still refuses to name her.

“She eats at night now?” Dick asks, flopping onto the sofa. 

“It’s breakfast. We were out later than usual.” Damian’s voice is strangely toneless. He tucks the cereal box under the end table and heads for his room.

“Hey, can you come here for a second?” Dick calls.

Damian freezes halfway down the hallway. His shoulders go rigid. 

“Nothing bad,” Dick says quickly, then winces. Bragging to Stephanie about how easily he could kill her probably merits the “bad” label. Too late now. 

Slowly, Damian comes back to the living room. He stands upright next to the sofa’s arm, expression dull and soldier-clean.

Dick frowns. “You wanna explain why you were talking to Steph that way?”

“We can’t coddle her,” Damian says flatly. “We both know she’s not on our level.”

“Come on, that’s literally untrue. She’s trained with Bruce, with Leslie, with Babs. I thought—Dames, I honestly thought you liked her.”

“You agreed with me at the beginning. You said she wasn’t good enough.”

Dick grimaces. “It’s—you know, it’s not always about ‘good enough.’ People who do this work—”

“Alright,” Damian says sharply. “You win. I won’t talk to her anymore.”

Dick gapes for a moment before regaining control of his jaw. 

Damian’s hands are flat at his sides. His posture is perfect—no curling up on the sofa. No slouching comfortably in his hoodie. 

Dick wets his lips. He asks, “What’s this really about?” 

Something twitches across Damian’s blank face. He says, “You were right to take Robin away from Drake.”

Dick feels the words like a rubber band snapped around his chest. He breathes deeply—presses his eyes closed. “What?”

“I heard you talking to Brown. If he wants an apology, that’s laughable. You came away from the deal with a better Robin and one less piece of dead weight.”

Dick’s eyes snap open to a Damian he barely recognizes anymore: green eyes hard as gemstones.

He clutches the sofa’s headrest. “What are you talking about? Tim wasn’t dead weight. He’s more than capable. Why are you so hung up on other people’s competence?”

“Because you’d be making a mistake to bring him back,” Damian spits. “Brown, too. Just because she’s likeable doesn’t mean you need to welcome her into every mission we run.”

“It was one team-up!"

“We’re the best, Grayson.” A dip deepens next to his nose as he snarls. “We don’t need anyone else. Especially not a failure like Drake.”

Dick’s blood runs cold, a frigid wash of ice through his fingertips. He rolls to his feet. “Go to your room.”

“What don’t you understand? We don’t need him. We only need—”

“Damian!” He whirls on him. “If you don’t go into your room and shut the door right now, I’m going to say something I’ll regret.”

Damian’s breath catches, hard and audible. He looks up at Dick—eyes tracing from point to point. Searching.

Then he turns on his heel and marches away. Slams the door behind him.

Dick sinks back onto the sofa. His stomach sinks further than that: down through floor after floor to the Bunker below.

After awhile, the sun sends tickling strands of dawnlight through the balcony door. No matter how hard he listens, Dick hears only silence from Damian’s room.

He takes a deep, steadying breath. Pulls out his cellphone and sends a text.

hey timmers. we should probably talk.

Fifteen minutes later, he gets a response: We should. Text ok for now?

Some of the ice lodged in Dick’s veins shakes loose. He lays down on the sofa and breathes.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“She looks healthy,” Tim says, running a finger down a bar on Birdie’s cage. “I mean, as far as I can tell.”

“Which is nada.” Stephanie spins on her stool at the breakfast bar. “I don’t think you could keep a pet alive.”

“I’ve had pets. Like, as a kid.”

Dick leans past Stephanie to fork a piece of cheese from the platter Alfred had prepared them. “Robin plushies don’t count, Timmers.”

“Shut up,” Tim says casually. Then a slow frown creeps over his features, and Dick has to mentally double-back to make sure he hasn’t said the wrong thing again.

The air between them is heavier than Dick wants it to be—weighed down with time and chagrin and expectation. Being in the same room for more than just a mission briefing catapults him back to the times before the cowl. 

In some ways, texting with Tim has been good: they’d started with some light catch-up, then worked their way down to the splinter at the heart of their relationship.

Problem is: the splinter has a face and a name. He’s holed up in his bedroom. Despite invitation, he hasn’t come out since Steph and Tim arrived.

By design or by chance, Stephanie breaks the silence with impeccable timing. “I wanted a bird when I was little.” She props her chin in her hands. “A parakeet. But Mom said I’d kill it, and Dad…well. You know.”

Dick hands her a condolence cheese slice. She munches it thoughtfully.

“I was just thinking,” Tim says. “You said she can’t fly? Wing healed wrong?”

Dick shrugs. “The vet said chances were slim.”

“Huh. She looks like she wants to try.”

Dick examines the converted guinea pig cage. Birdie hops from one end to the other, her wings rustling. She blinks out at Dick with beady eyes.

Down the hall, Damian’s door opens.

The inhabitants of the main room trade a flurry of nervous eye contact. Stephanie’s nails tap against the bar. Tim’s expression hardens.

But Damian stalks right past them without comment. He slips into the kitchen. Through the door, Dick watches the back of his head as he rummages in the refrigerator.

“Dames,” he calls—might as well let hope spring eternal. “You sure you don’t wanna stick around for a board game or something? Or, you know, we could all spar—”

“No.” Damian’s voice is surprisingly level as he pours himself an unsweetened iced tea. “I’m practicing forms on my own right now.”

“In...your room? Not in the Bunker?”

He doesn’t deign to answer. When he steps out of the kitchen, his expression is benignly uninterested. Unease prickles down Dick’s spine.

In the week since their fight, Damian hasn’t done anything overtly rebellious—a surprise in itself. He hasn’t given Dick the silent treatment, either in the field or at home. Instead, he’s stopped coming out for midnight movies. His answers to Dick’s questions are shorter; less animated. 

Dick hasn’t pushed. Sometimes all Damian needs is a cool-down period before he’s ready to talk for real. 

Granted, it normally doesn’t take this long.

Tim stands very still next to Birdie’s cage—watching Damian like watching a predator. After living with Damian for long enough, it becomes easy to forget that other people know him more as a threat than a child.

“Boy Wonder,” Stephanie says suddenly from Dick’s side. “Want some cheese?”

Dick expects Damian to ignore her. Instead, his nose wrinkles. “American cheese? Absolutely not.”

“No, this is the good stuff! I mean, it’s not literally American cheese. That’s plastic.”

“Tt.” Damian’s eyes sweep over the platter. “What kind?”

“Goat, manchego, brie—”

Damian marches up to the breakfast bar, and for a moment Dick’s heart lifts. Then the boy picks up the entire platter and carries it toward his room.

“Rude!” Stephanie says, more perplexed than outraged. Tension aside, Dick has to fight down a laugh. Leave it to the kid to come up with the weirdest possible end to a conversation he didn’t want to have.

At the mouth of the hallway, Damian stops. He faces Tim for the first time. 

Tim’s chin is tucked, most likely subconsciously: ready for a fight. His hand rests on Birdie’s end table.

“She can’t fly,” Damian scoffs. “She’s stuck here. With us.”

“I guess,” Tim says. “Sure. But she seems restless, is all. She keeps hopping around, and her wings—”

“She can’t fly. She’s not leaving, Drake. Stop trying to make her leave.”

“What? What are you—”

“She fits in here. Unlike you.” 

And Damian swans off to his room before Dick can intervene, closing the door firmly behind him.

Tim throws up his hands. “What is his problem?”

Dick slumps to the bar, massaging his temples. “Let’s not get into it. You don’t have to get along right now. It’s fine.”

“You don’t believe that,” Tim snaps. “You want everyone to get along.”

“And you know what?” Dick says through gritted teeth. “We’re working on it. He’s not the same kid you remember. Give him a chance to get used to you, and he’ll—”

“No offense, Dick, but the last time I ‘gave him a chance’ he—”

“I know! Tim, I know. And you have every right to be suspicious.” He pauses, eyes darting to Damian’s door. Slightly louder, he says, “That’s not what I meant. I just mean that it’s gonna take time for the two of you to trust each other. And that’s okay.”

“Time. Sure.” Tim’s grimace darkens his entire face. That’s something else Dick doesn’t quite know how to deal with. Bruce’s death hit them all in different ways. For Tim, it shortened his patience and allowed a certain fierceness to surface. Dick’s still learning where the new boundaries are.

He runs a hand over his head, grabbing at a fistful of hair. “Did I screw this up?”

“Which part?” Stephanie asks, careful and dry.

Dick gestures at Tim’s entire presence. 

Tim hesitates, then cracks a small smile. “Not yet,” he says. “Give it time.”

Birdie’s wings flutter, floating her from one side of the cage to the other. She sticks her beak through the bars. Tim lets her nibble his finger.

After their guests leave, Dick raps on Damian’s door.

“Enter,” the boy says, sounding bored.

He hadn’t been lying about the forms. He’s curled up into crane pose, all of his weight on the palms of his hands. He glances up at Dick, then stands with a graceful forward roll.

Damian’s room looks different than it once had—fuller. Now, a handsome bookcase stretches from floor to ceiling. A calathea plant sits on the windowsill. His sketchbook, no longer hidden, lies next to the empty cheese platter on his bed.

“You really polished that off, huh?” Dick says—amused and weirdly proud. He clears himself a space to sit down. “Which was your favorite?”

“Manchego,” Damian says with such aplomb that Dick has to hold back another laugh. He’s seized with the sudden certainty that if only the world could see this—could see Damian pronouncing cheese names like historical dynasties—they would love the kid as much as he does. 

It’s almost unfair that Tim can’t see what he sees.

(Uneasily, he pictures Stephanie on the museum roof: “He’s always like that with me. Maybe you’ve tamed him.”)

Damian sinks into his desk chair. “Are Brown and Drake gone?”

“Mmhmm,” Dick says. He hesitates. Tim had asked a favor of Dick that he isn’t sure Damian is ready to hear. One thing at a time.

“You know,” he says instead, “Tim might have a point about Birdie. I hadn’t noticed before, but she’s really starting to move around more.”

Damian’s expression darkens. “Ridiculous. She’s still grounded here. No amount of wishful thinking can change that.”

“Okay,” Dick says slowly. There’s something unusual swirling around the Birdie conversation that he can’t quite identify, so he tries a different tack. “We haven’t...talked much. Since last week. Is everything good with you?”

“Of course,” Damian says evenly. He makes a show of checking for dirt beneath his fingernails. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You were pretty mad at me. And I brought Tim home today.”

Damian’s face twitches on the word home, then quickly smooths over. “It’s inevitable. I dislike Drake, but you’ve made it clear that trust isn’t necessary.”

Dick frowns. “When did I say that?”

Damian gives him a level look. 

Realization dawns. “You were listening. Right. What I meant was: I want you guys to trust each other eventually. But I understand that—”

“—Drake is a simpleton?”

“No,” Dick snaps. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I understand there’s bad blood here. And I can’t just wave a magic wand at that.”

Damian scoffs. “I don’t know why you’d want to.”

For a moment, Dick considers holding his tongue. Then he thinks of Tim’s body language, tight and defensive, when Damian had left the kitchen. He says, “He’s reasonably pretty on edge around you.”

Damian stills. Then he presses his hands to his desk. The obsidian knife, decorative now, gleams near his fingers.

Dick grimaces. “That came out wrong. It's just—what you did to him, back then, was terrifying. To a lot of people. But I know you wouldn’t do it again. You know better.”

Damian’s face contorts strangely: tight and inscrutable. He looks, for a moment, like he wants to argue—plead his case. Then the expression slides off again, leaving him empty. Dick’s stomach drops.

"Dames—"

“No, you’re right,” Damian says, disinterested. He traces a finger along the knife’s handle. “I was...misguided, then. I thought that if I defeated Drake, my place in the household would be protected. I know better now.”

“That’s...good,” Dick says carefully. “It’s good that you know that.”

It hadn’t taken long to understand that Damian’s outburst last week was tied to insecurity. Tim and Stephanie had represented threats to his place at Batman’s side. If he’s moving past that—even intellectually—that has to be a step in the right direction.

So why is Dick’s stomach still firmly in his feet? 

When the silence stretches for too long, Dick stands. “Okay. Guess I’ll leave you to it. Dinner at six-ish?”

“Of course.” Damian’s already moving back to the center of his room, readying himself for flying crow pose.

Dick takes the cheese platter with him. He lays a hand on the door frame. “You can come out earlier than that. If you want.”

“I know,” Damian says politely. “Thank you.”

Damian doesn’t start wearing his boots to bed. But the sketchbook goes back into hiding, and the spot next to Dick on the sofa stays empty.

Chapter Text

3:16am

Night lays heavy on Wayne Tower.

The elevator from the Bunker to the penthouse moves more slowly than usual. A subtle mechanical whine implies the pulleys are just as bone-tired as Dick is. Then it slows with a ding, doors opening onto the same penthouse he’d left for tonight’s disastrous patrol, and Dick has to face up to projecting his own exhaustion onto an elevator.

He slumps against the wall, next to Birdie’s end table. He squeezes his eyes shut and waits for the roiling in his stomach to calm.

Playing behind his eyelids: Tim grappling Damian in Crime Alley, pulling the both of them off a rooftop. Damian’s limbs coiled into deadly intent. The way he’d charged Tim like nothing else mattered, screaming, “I will not lose to you!” 

The resigned look on Tim’s face—later, in the Bunker—when he’d told Dick that Damian cut his line. Like he didn’t expect Dick to do anything about it. Like sneak attacks and lethal force were still par for the course.

Alfred emerges from Damian’s bedroom, closing the door softly behind him. He meets Dick at the elevator, as far from prying ears as they can get. His eyes are grim flint. 

Feeling helpless, Dick murmurs, “They fought in Crime Alley, for god’s sake.”

Alfred’s lips thin in disapproval. “Master Damian is not in a conversational state of mind. Perhaps tomorrow—”

Dick shakes his head. “I told Tim I’d talk to him. I—”

His breath catches and he buries his face in his hands. “Oh god. I told Tim it was okay they didn’t trust each other yet. Like they were just squabbling kids. I didn’t—Damian could have killed him, Alfred. Twice.”

Alfred’s shoulders would never slump, but they take on invisible weight. “It is...shocking,” he says quietly. “We have become accustomed to a version of Master Damian seen by very few.”

Dick shakes his head vigorously. “No. There has to be another explanation. Maybe he didn’t mean to do it.”

Alfred rests gentle fingertips on Dick’s arm. “Perhaps tomorrow, cooler heads can—”

“Tonight,” Dick says. “I can’t—this can’t wait.”

He stalks down the penthouse hallway, chased by the ghost of Tim’s body slamming into cold pavement.

He doesn’t knock.

“Okay,” he says, swinging the door wide. “Now we talk.”

Damian starts. He’s sitting propped up in bed, book in hand, his expression the blandest it’s been in weeks. “I have nothing to say. Drake—”

“Have I been covering for you?” Dick bites out.

Damian blinks. He scans Dick’s body language, then puts the book down. His jaw sets. “I don’t understand.”

“Give me an explanation, Damian. Give me something.” He stands in the doorway, unable to make himself step fully inside.

“Drake put me on his hit list.”

“That wasn’t a—”

“He refuses to respect my place here. He wants me gone.” 

“Let me try again,” Dick growls. “Was I covering for you? When I told Steph you knew better? When I told Tim you weren’t the same kid anymore? Give me something to go on here, Dames, because I keep vouching for you only to see you toss goodwill in the garbage. Make it make sense.”

Damian’s lip curls. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you thought.”

“Don’t try that,” Dick says immediately. “I know you.”

“Do you, Grayson? I’m an assassin.” 

“Were.”

Damian’s chest rises in a sudden breath. Then an outraged sound explodes from him. “I am! You can’t just...wish away the shameful parts of me, no matter how much you’d like to! You don’t have a magic wand, remember?”

Dick steps forward, and Damian scrambles. He pulls his legs underneath him, balancing on the balls of his feet. The effect is strange: a boy stooped over on his own bed like a vulture braced to dive. 

Something brutal settles in the lines of his mouth. He spits, “If a simple line snap could kill him, Drake wouldn’t be deserving of any mantle at all. He lived.”

“But you could have killed him! Or taken him out of commission! God, don’t you understand that?”

Damian’s eyes flicker down to Dick’s side, then up again. His expression falters for a moment. Then he regains steam. “He threw us from the roof a moment later. He wants me gone, I don’t understand how you can’t see it—”

“No!” Dick shouts, and Damian throws himself to his feet on the far side of the bed. 

Dick falters. He notices, for the first time, his own hands clenched to fists at his sides. A cavern opens up inside of him, sucking at his ribcage. He steps back in horror, pressing his palms to the seams of his jeans. It was an unconscious posture; a byproduct of frustration. Nothing more. 

But Damian has always, always watched Dick’s hands.

“I—I’m not attacking you. I would never—”

“Stop pretending to be on my side!” Damian’s eyes are wild. He reaches for his desk; grabs the black knife’s handle. “I’ve been listening, Grayson. You want me gone, too.”

“What? How can you say that?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” His voice picks up speed and volume. “You said he was right to be suspicious of me. You said you shouldn’t have made me Robin!”

“I said I shouldn’t have taken it away from him like that—”

“You said,” Damian chokes, “that my place here would never be secure. That it was good I understood that.”

Dick feels the floor sliding out from under him. Damian’s eyes are ringed in shadow, like he hasn’t slept in days. How hadn’t he noticed?

“Dames, no, I—I never said that. Why would I have said that?”

“If you want to send me back, just send me back!” Damian roars. “Dump me on my mother’s doorstep, give me to Ra’s, whatever you want! Just stop toying with me! Stop trying to convince me that you and I are—” 

He breaks off, breath heaving. He picks up the knife. “Get out.”

“I’m not sending you away,” Dick says through the rushing in his ears. “I never said those things. This isn’t you—please, please listen to me—”

Damian makes a wordless sound of fury. The knife thunks in the doorframe a foot from Dick’s head. His voice breaks: “Leave!”

Dick steps back into the hallway. He pulls the door shut behind him. Then, heart still pounding, he slumps to the white carpet.

The penthouse is dark and empty. The hallway suddenly feels as cavernous as the manor halls. The bedroom door is thick as a universe between them, a black bead shattering.

How had everything gone so wrong? 

He searches his memories for any conversation that could possibly be what Damian was referring to—anything that could provoke this kind of rage. 

It’s hard. Dick doesn’t hold words in his head like he holds light and color and personality. It could’ve been anything. A reaction like Damian’s—a misreading so dramatic, a defense so extreme—hinges on a trauma deep enough to drown in. Its echoes lap at Dick’s sides. 

And trauma and logic are strange bedfellows.

A week ago, Damian said he understood that defeating Tim wouldn’t protect his place in the household. Dick had agreed.

Dick buries his face in his hands. 

That was it. That was all it took. The boy’s restless brain had latched on to the worst possible interpretation, and Dick hadn’t noticed. 

Now he's slipping away.

“Dames,” Dick calls, resting a hand on the door. “We don’t have to talk anymore. That’s okay. But I want you to understand—I never said those things. With Tim, I thought you were telling me you understood that your place here was secure. I never imagined—”

He swallows, haunted by the image of Tim falling. Damian had felt threatened enough to resort to something vile.

But that’s the rock and the hard place—the paradox.

Damian is an assassin; Damian is an abused and frightened child.

Damian believes threats must be handled brutally, and that the world itself is a threat; Damian can be gentle.

Damian could have seriously hurt someone Dick loves; Dick loves Damian.

All of it is true at once. Dick’s used to ideas and concepts bigger than words.

“I love you,” he says into the silence. “I need you to know that. Whatever you’re thinking. Whatever you’ve done.” He shrugs helplessly. “Can’t get rid of me, okay?”

No answer comes from behind the door. Dick gives it another half an hour, watching shadows play across a carpet clean and sterile. 

At some point he starts humming under his breath: a song he remembers the melody for, but not the words.

Then Alfred emerges from his bedroom and rests a gentle hand on Dick’s shoulder.

“Tomorrow,” he says quietly. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“Dames,” Dick murmurs, pressing his palm to the bedroom door. “I want to respect your space, but we can’t do this forever. Can you at least let me know you’re okay?”

Silence coats the penthouse hallway. The light is dull today, filtered by clouds thick enough for unforecasted rain. 

Dick thunks his forehead against the door.

He’d spent a near-sleepless night in the master bedroom, leaving the curtains open to watch the sun rise. He’d drafted texts to Tim until his eyes grew heavy, only to startle awake again whenever the phone fell to the sheets. Each time, he read back what he’d written and erased it again. As easy as texting’s become for them, Tim deserves something more substantial—an apology in person. Face-to-face.

Dick can’t apologize for Damian’s actions. That reckoning’s not going to happen any time soon. But he can apologize for shuffling Tim’s concerns away—for letting his optimism cloud his mind to a stark reality. 

Past the end of the hall, at the elevator door, Birdie flutters high enough to brush her head against the top of the cage. The sight makes Dick’s stomach twist for reasons he can’t articulate.

He braces his forearm on Damian’s door. His fingers curl gently inward.

 “I was thinking about it, Dames, and I realized that last night was maybe the first time I told you—you know, out loud—that...well, that you’re loved here. Which is crazy, because that’s been true for a long time. And I should’ve put it into words sooner.”

He wets his lips. “I’m kind of learning on the job, here. I’ve never had to—I mean, you’re the only kid I’ve, uh, raised.” He hesitates. “Parented.”

The word fits strangely in the space over his tongue. It stretches back to clog his throat.

“And I know we started out rough, but eventually we—I guess I thought I was being...obvious, about loving you. I didn’t want to scare you off, but I thought eventually you’d start feeling it. In the stuff I did and said.” He presses his eyes closed. “I shouldn’t have assumed that. I should’ve said it. Word-for-word. Early on.”

Damian and Dick had been raised so differently. He’d known that, and had tiptoed forward like there was no room for error. But this was a risk he should’ve taken, rather than hoping Damian could read love in touch—in teasing, in trust—the way other Robins could.

Dick reads people. All day, every day. It doesn’t come easy for everyone else.

“So I need you to understand that it’s true. That you’re—”

Birdie makes an angry sound halfway between a squawk and a scream. She throws herself against the bars, one side of the cage to the other. She reaches her beak through the bars like she’s straining for the sliding door—for the open sky beyond it.

Dick frowns. He turns Damian’s doorknob. 

The door is unlocked. It opens, soundless, to an empty room.

Dick’s stomach plummets. Damian’s black knife is gone, along with a few swords and projectile blades from the wall. 

Dick strides to the bed. He rips the pillow away; pats down the comforter.

“Master Dick?” Alfred says from the hallway. “Is everything—”

“He took his sketchbook.” Dick’s throat feels clogged and heavy. “His weapons and his sketchbook and—and it looks like some extra clothes.”

Alfred’s footsteps move immediately toward the elevator. “I’ll run a check for missing vehicles. I presume he took the Robin gear?”

Dick lunges for the wall panel, disguised as a thermostat, that connects Damian’s room to the Bunker. A holographic image floats before him. “There has to be some mistake, he—the Robin costume’s still in the Bunker.”

“I’ll check in person. Perhaps he’s simply training downstairs.” Alfred doesn’t sound convinced. The elevator door dings. His footsteps fade.

“He was emotionally vulnerable,” Dick says faintly, his hand to the wall for balance. “He was—he thought we didn’t want him anymore. He went out alone.”

His chest contracts hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. He presses his body to the wall, fighting to even his breaths.

Then he races to his own room, grabbing his spare communicator from the nightstand drawer. “Robin,” he says, “if you’re receiving this, you need to come home.” He clenches his teeth. “Please come home. Please. I want you here. I want you here with me.”

The communicator lights up and his heart lifts.

Then Alfred's voice crackles from it. “Master Dick. The costume is in its place.”

Dick grinds the heel of his hand into his forehead. “Shit. He didn’t—”

“He didn’t take it. He’s out as Damian Wayne. Not as Robin.”

“Alfred?” Dick asks. His voice feels suddenly small in the depth of the master bedroom—where Bruce might have stayed, once upon a time. Where Dick stays now, night after enormous night. “What does that mean? He’s never snuck out without the costume before.”

Alfred doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Damian had thought they wanted him gone.

A choked noise rises unbidden in the back of Dick’s throat. “I’m going out to search,” he says, making for the elevator. “Contact Babs for help and monitor from the Bunker.”

“Understood. You should be aware he did not take his cycle, or any other vehicles. He may be on public transport, or he may have contacted someone for...extraction.”

Dick’s breath catches. He fights the rising tide of despair—grits his teeth hard enough to send pain shooting to his temples. “Does he show up on our security feeds?”

“Not once. His training in that regard was thorough.”

“Fuck.” Dick jams his finger against the call button more than once, waiting for the state-of-the-art elevator to grind to a prehistorically slow halt in front of him. “Fuck!” 

He slams a hand against the door. Birdie screams beside him. 

“I don’t know if you’re listening to these,” Dick says, “or if I’m basically leaving a voicemail. But I need you to understand that I don’t want to lose you.”

He’s driving a car registered in his own name through the streets of downtown Gotham. Only after he’d reached the civilian garage did it occur to him that maybe he’d be more effective as Batman.

Then fractured images had broken and formed in front of him: Damian shoeless in the Bunker. Damian in pajamas, soft and loose. Dick out of costume, ribs broken, relaxing with Damian on the sofa—the vulnerable glances Damian had thrown in Dick’s direction.

Suddenly, he doesn’t want the costume. He goes into the world as Dick Grayson, looking for Damian Wayne.

“We don’t want to lose you,” Dick says into his earpiece. “You’re not being replaced. Never. We love you, believe it or not, and we want you to come home.”

He has a few leads: places Damian went during their early spats. Crime scenes the boy had wanted to investigate, ever eager to prove himself. Dick doesn’t think too hard yet about his other idea: places in and around Gotham with enough space for private aircraft to land. League aircraft. 

Talia had cast Damian out, but if the boy pleads with her—

He swallows. “You’re wanted, Damian. You’re so incredibly wanted here.”

“Dick?” Tim’s voice says in his ear. “Got a minute?”

Dick’s sigh comes out like a sob. “Tim. I’m so sorry. I want to talk, but right now is—”

“Babs told me you’re looking for Damian. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner; I thought he was just making his normal sanctuary run at a weird time—”

“What?”

The hesitation is audible over the line. “I thought you knew he did that. Sorry. I figured—”

“Tim, please.” His hands clench the steering wheel. “What do you know?”

“I have...an alert set,” Tim says, like he’s about to get in trouble. “When certain public cameras catch sight of—of certain people’s faces.”

Dick thinks of Tim’s threat list, hidden behind the password that Damian had learned so quickly to hack.

“You’ve been watching him,” Dick says. 

“Not everywhere, not—I’m not Oracle, I just have...certain accesses. The subway system, for instance.”

“You hacked the subway cameras? All of them?”

“What I’m saying is, every week or so the little terror’s been catching a ride at the Wayne Tower station. Early morning, when I figure you’re asleep after patrol.” 

Dick’s stomach twists. Maybe he’d underestimated Damian’s ability to move unnoticed through the dark penthouse.

Maybe the times Dick caught him, he’d been allowed.

He swallows. “But he must’ve been back quickly for me to miss it. This is different. He’s either been gone all night, or—”

“No, it was just a couple hours ago,” Tim says. “Meaning he changed his routine.”

“Did—did he go through the window?”

“How should I know? He got on the subway and went where he always goes: a bird sanctuary at the edge of town. I’ll send the address.”

Dick heart lifts in his chest, then promptly plummets again. If Damian were making a routine run, why would he have taken weapons? Extra clothes?

He shakes his head. “That’s—that’s great. Thank you, Tim.”

“No problem,” Tim says softly. “Dick? He’s a demon. He really is.” He hesitates, breath audible over the line. “But you’ll bring him home anyway, because you’re a good person. So: bring him home.”

Heat rises behind Dick’s eyes—a sense of overwhelming love for the ex-Robin at the other end of the call. “Timmy, you’re a miracle. I can’t—there’s more I need to say. Later.”

“Later,” Tim says. He sounds tired, but not upset. Like he’s accomplished something worthwhile. “Sounds good.”

He cuts the call.

Chapter Text

“He might still be there,” Babs says in his ear. “A bit over an hour ago, the sanctuary’s front desk checked in a visitor named ‘Bruce’ who usually visits early mornings. Really early. As in, they probably let him in before they open.”

“He can be charming,” Dick murmurs. “When he wants to be.”

He follows his GPS to a street he’d describe as suburban if the houses were more efficiently clustered. Like Bristol Township, but without the money—just midsize homes set far back from the road, between unruly swathes of trees that look like they want to be forests. 

The clouds are still heavy: the threat of a storm overhead. The silence on the comms feels equally weighted. 

When Babs speaks again, her voice is gentle. “We don’t talk as much as we used to. I know none of this has been...easy for you.”

“No,” Dick admits. The shadow of a headache creeps up his temples. “I guess the funny thing is, I’ve got it easy compared to everybody else.”

“You know that’s not true, Dick.”

“I see the sign.” His heart rate spikes. “I’m here.” 

“You—okay. Keep in touch.”

“Will do. Babs? Thanks.”

Dick pulls up the sanctuary’s gravel drive, low-hanging willows brushing his windshield. He parks quickly, then takes the front steps two at a time. He throws open the door and smiles—slightly crazed—at the front desk receptionist.

“Hi there, I’m looking for a kid who I think stopped by here about—”

“Oh, you must be Bruce’s guardian!” 

Dick blinks. “Uh—yes. How did you—”

“He talks about you,” the woman beams. It’s a smile that reaches her eyes, visible even through the chunky purple glasses taking up half her face.

“He does?”

“Sure. I mean, when we can get him to string two polite words together. He’s pretty guarded, but—” She cuts off, watching Dick sheepishly. “Sorry. That sounded rude. It’s just, I was a foster kid, too. It can be rough.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“But I mean, he seems like a good egg.”

Her desk plate says: Grace Marion, Conservationist. Dick’s universe suddenly shifts as he imagines Damian from the eyes of a stranger: a serious, independent boy with an encyclopedia’s worth of avian knowledge and more respect for animals than people. Exactly the kind of kid a conservationist might once have been.

For a moment, Grace’s forehead creases as though she’s trying to place Dick—no doubt from a society column somewhere. He tries not to react.

Then she gives up and shakes her head. “You just missed him. I thought he was taking the subway home. Was he supposed to wait?”

Dick forces a smile even as his heart sinks. There’s no way Damian’s on the way back to Wayne Tower. “He, um. He’s just wandered a bit too far this time.”

His smile must not have been up to standard, because Grace frowns. “We gave him some advice he didn’t want to hear today, so I hope you get to talk soon.” She taps her pencil against her cheek. “You know, he could be in the park by Warren Lane. Couple blocks from here? I saw him sitting out there one morning on my way in. Drawing, I think?”

“Sounds right,” Dick says, trying to sound more hopeful than he feels. “Thanks, I’ll check it out.”

Dick passes a family of four on his way out the door. Grace calls: “Have fun on your trip!”

When he turns back to ask what she means, she’s already engaged with the newcomers. He makes for the car, then drives as far over the speed limit as he dares, thinking about the way people look from the outside. 

Dick’s Damian is different from Tim’s Damian—and Stephanie’s Damian, and Talia’s Damian, and the Damian they know at the bird sanctuary. 

Except, that’s not right. Damian is every one of those people, and none of them at all. The trick is figuring out which one Damian wants to be.

The park rises to his right, a tree-lined knoll. A bench halfway up the slope faces down towards a flower garden and, beyond that, the parking lot where Dick pulls in.

Damian’s sitting on the bench, a duffel bag at his side.

Dick lunges for the car door with such urgency he forgets about his seatbelt. It tightens, slamming his ribcage hard as a palm strike. He scrambles to free himself then stumbles to the base of the hill.

“Damian!” he says. “Thank god.”

The boy’s headphones are in his ears. He’s slouched into his sweater, the hood shading his eyes.

He looks down at Dick with a disgust he typically reserves for criminals.

“You found me,” he says, indifferent. “Or maybe it was your harlot, wasting her time with technological minutiae as usual.”

Sharp heat rises to Dick’s face. He forces it down. “A bunch of us were looking. Dames, I was so worried—”

Damian shoulders his bag and rolls to his feet. Posture immaculate, he strides down the hill past Dick, toward the car. “You may as well drive me back,” he says. “But I’m not staying. Not for long, anyway.”

Dick watches the head of black hair as it slides into the passenger seat. Watches the blank way Damian pulls out his phone, browsing while Dick’s brain catches up.

Finally, Dick follows. Every movement feels dangerous—like he might startle away an aggressive animal that needs medical attention. 

But at the very least—at the very minimum—now he has Damian in his car. The familiarity of his face feels like water in a desert.

He starts the engine. “You’re not staying. What do you mean by that?”

“I’ve decided to come back for the pigeon. I won’t be living with you anymore. But I owe her something.” He glances over his shoulder toward the sanctuary, its street receding in the rearview mirror. “I was...seeking advice there. About how to care for an animal on the road.”

That explains why Grace thought they were going on a trip.

Dick’s picture of Damian has evolved, slowly but steadily, over time. It’s no surprise to learn that Damian—perceiving betrayal and abandonment bearing down like a freight train—has decided to care for a vulnerable animal.

In a way, it’s the sweetest thing he’s ever heard.

“You’re an amazing kid,” he says softly. “And you don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to go.”

Damian’s lip curls. “Would you stop me?”

“Could I?” Dick tries to meet Damian’s eyes. He’s met instead with a boy’s face in profile, Damian’s gaze cast stubbornly on his own lap.

“I wouldn’t hold you in a basement,” Dick says. “I wouldn’t lock you in your room and put bars on your window. But I told you, early on: I would chase you.”

Damian’s eyes flicker to his, just for a moment. Then away. “You wouldn’t,” he says, and Dick’s heart shatters the rest of the way down.

“Dames—”

“It doesn’t matter. You have other Robins.”

“But only one Damian! I love you.”

The boy’s entire body stiffens. With knife-sharp calm, he says, “Another word and I leave this car. You’ll never see me again.”

Dick makes an aborted noise in the back of his throat. He closes his mouth and drives, mind racing.

Once they’re in the penthouse, can he convince Damian to stay? The boy’s thrown up a steep wall, all ice and aggression—but there’s no way it goes to the core of him. It’s a shield, protecting the thoughtful and expressive boy Dick’s been allowed to know—his careful passions; his growing kindness.

The right words in combination could tunnel through, maybe. Reach that Damian in time. 

Sink the battleship. Win. 

“That’s not it,” he murmurs.

Damian shoots him a warning glance. Dick shakes his head and keeps driving. No fancy words would do the trick. Even I love you had arrived too late (too soon?) to penetrate. 

The only thing Dick can do—over and over and over again—is be on Damian’s side. Until the boy believes him.

Damian’s shoulders are stiff around his ears. He curls inward, like fighting off a stomachache.

“The sanctuary said there was something I should do for her first,” he says, clipped. Anyone else might have confused his tension for indifference. “Before we—before I leave.”

When the elevator doors open on the penthouse, Alfred is waiting for them. His hand rests gently on the breakfast bar. He looks a shade too pale.

“Welcome back, Master Damian,” he says softly—but with such grimness that Dick has to assume he’s followed developments since the bird sanctuary.

For a moment, Damian’s eyes rest on Alfred’s wrinkled hand—the way his fingers spread wide to support his weight. The boy’s cheek pinches. 

Then he turns, quickly, to Birdie’s end table. He picks up her cage with two careful hands and makes for the balcony door. Birdie squawks wildly, pecking at the bars.

Alfred and Dick make eye contact in his wake. Dick doesn’t know how much Alfred can read from his expression, but he sees an answering sadness in the pinch around the butler’s eyes. 

Then Alfred inclines his head toward the sliding door. Dick follows Damian alone.

From the balcony, the clouds look even heavier than they had from the car—dark, ponderous, and thick enough to lie flat against the sky. No wind blows.

Damian sets Birdie’s cage on a patio recliner next to the thick white railing. He kneels to finger the clasp of her door.

“Drake didn’t want me to have her,” he says, soft enough that Dick barely catches it. “He insisted she was ready to leave.”

Dick creeps closer, his pulse a strange double-time in his throat. He takes step after step until there’s only a few feet between them.

He could tell Damian that Tim hadn’t meant anything by it. He could tell Damian that Birdie’s been bashing herself against the cage all afternoon. The latter, he suspects Damian knows. The former—one battle at a time.

Instead he says, “Do you think she’s ready?”

The boy’s nose wrinkles. His eyes jump from Birdie to the gray sky above her. “It doesn’t matter what I think. The sanctuary said—they said she...”

A grimace, twitch-fast, moves through him. Then he vanishes again behind flat affect. “She’ll have a choice,” he says. 

He opens the cage.

It takes Birdie a moment to understand what she’s being offered. She shuffles at the back of the cage, peering almost suspiciously at the open door. 

Damian scoots backward, out of her way. He grasps the railing with a small hand. His knuckles turn white.

Birdie hops forward. She pokes her head out, blinking inquisitively. Her neck twists back and forth.

The line of Damian’s jaw sharpens—like he’s clenching his teeth tight enough to hurt. His eyes are green and wide, searching.

Then Birdie shakes out her wings with incredible grace. She stretches upward, lifts, takes to the sky—rising on gentle air currents until she’s coasting out over Gotham, higher and further, smaller and smaller until her body is a stray pencil line against the horizon.

Damian scrambles to his feet. He leans out over the railing—his mouth open; his breath coming hard.

Dick steps in close beside him. Together they watch Birdie’s gray body fade into gray clouds.

Damian stares at her point of departure like he can make something manifest there. The wind picks up, tossing his hair across his eyes and stirring the laces of his boots.

He takes a careful breath through his nose. Measured, like an exercise.

Then he starts to cry.

His eyes gleam, then overflow. One wretched noise rips out of him—choking, gasping—before he shoves his hands over his face like he can hold it all in. His palms scrape the tears from his eyes again and again, only for them to run over. 

“Oh, Dames—”

He shoves Dick’s hand away. He sinks to the recliner, next to Birdie’s empty cage. 

“I thought—” He takes tight breaths like a startled animal. “I thought maybe she wanted to—to be here. With me.”

Dick moves the cage out of the way. He sits next to Damian, the recliner dipping beneath his weight.

“I love you.”

“Don’t say that!” Damian curls forward, hands scrubbing furiously over his face. “Don’t—don’t say that.”

“But it’s true. I want you to know.”

“Don’t,” Damian gasps. “Please.”

The please gives Dick pause. He holds very still, watching Damian’s shoulders shake. Watching the way his hands ball up against his eyes like he wants to bury something shameful.

Finally, in a very small voice, Damian says: “I never let myself—I never even named her. Now she’s gone.”

Dick’s chest cracks open. He wraps his arm around Damian’s shoulders, blinking the wetness from his own eyes. It would be so easy to give in to some hysterics of his own.

Instead, he steadies himself. He draws all the warmth in the world into his voice, and murmurs: “What do you need? How can I help?”

Damian shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He runs his hands through his hair, grabbing at black locks. “I don’t know.”

“Okay. Take your time.”

A raindrop lands on Dick’s hand, and another by his feet. They’re not followed by any kind of downpour. The storm’s passed them by. A close thing.

Damian sniffles. “Could you…”

“What is it?” 

The boy’s head dips.

Dick pulls him closer. “Hey. Just tell me. I’ll do it.” He rubs the boy’s arm. Gives the gift of texture and weight.

Damian scrapes his sleeve under his nose. “Can—can you talk to me?” 

“Of course, Dami. What about?”

“Anything. Please.” 

“Okay.” Dick tears his eyes away from Damian’s red face to watch the line of the horizon. Weak golden light already heralds the sun’s descent. Daytime is a fleeting thing in late December. 

“I think we’ll get snow tomorrow,” he says. “Or slush, if it’s warmer.”

Damian’s watery huff is indifferent. Dick cracks a weak smile. “Okay, well, I didn’t realize I had conversational standards to meet." 

Something tugs at his jacket: Damian, his fingers curled over. Holding on.

Dick takes another steadying breath. He says, “There’s going to be...other people. In both of our lives. You might not believe it yet, but you’re going to make friends and allies all your own. And that’s good.” He hesitates, teeth tugging at his chapped lip. “But just because we love other people doesn’t mean we’re anything less to each other.”

Damian’s forehead lands against Dick’s arm with sullen force: a burst of petulance against the concept of a wider family.

Dick cups the back of his head. “You and I have something totally our own. You’ll never have to fight for your place here. I’m not going to replace you or abandon you. It might—it might take awhile for you to believe that. I get it.”

It took time for Damian to feel safe in bed at night. It took time for him to decouple food from discipline. It took time for him to draw in public, to eat breakfast with Dick and Alfred, to talk in tones beyond pride and survival.

It takes time. They’ve got plenty.

Dick and Damian use some of that time to sit together on the rooftop, making sure rain doesn’t come.

After a long moment, Damian draws back. His breaths have evened, though tears have traced shining lines down his face. “I think—I think I would like to be alone out here. For now.”

Dick hesitates. His every instinct is to draw closer; hug harder. He’d nearly lost the boy. But right now, Damian’s calling the shots.

He says, “‘Course. I’ll be right inside if you need me, okay? Come in whenever you want.”

He gives Damian’s shoulders another squeeze, then pulls himself to his feet. A wave of exhaustion hits him—he could sleep for a week. His palm presses the top of Damian’s head for a moment, half for balance and half out of a sheer desire to maintain contact.

“Grayson?” Damian says quietly.

“Hmm?”

“I got your messages.” He’s eyeing his boots. “The ones on Robin’s line. I—” He swallows, looking up at Dick like asking a question. “I want you to know I won’t leave again.”

The sky is gray, but a colored pencil sunset unfurls through the clouds in Dick’s chest. 

“You’re a good kid,” he chokes through a smile.

The following evening, when he raps on the door of Tim’s new apartment, color is still humming through him—hopeful and bright.

“About time you saw the place,” Tim says. He grins, all teeth, and opens the door wide.

Chapter Text

3:16am

“That’s the last of it,” Stephanie says, pushing the door of the GCPD weapons lock-up closed behind her. “Think we should tell Gordon he almost lost his armory to a smash-and-grab? Or maybe we should let the poor guy rest his head ‘til morning.”

“There’s no way the night shift isn’t already blowing up his phone.” Dick stifles a yawn. “I’m beat. Let’s get out of here.”

Stephanie gives him a bow, grinning toward the window. “After you, Mr. Bat.”

They swing their way across gothic architecture, leaving footprints in ever-deepening drifts of snow.

“So,” Stephanie says, something deliberate in her tone. She slides down an icy rooftop like a speed skier. “Is this Robin’s night off?”

“Something like that.”

The moon shines diffuse light on downtown Gotham. A skyscraper LED display advertises champagne for New Year’s Eve—tomorrow night. Dick had forgotten. There’s been a lot going on.

“How does he feel about this?” Stephanie keeps pace to his left. “I mean, us working without him.”

“You caught that whole vibe, huh?” 

She snorts. “Hard not to. There’s only so many snotty ways a kid can beg for somebody’s attention before—” She cuts off, her breath rising white on the air. Understanding flickers across her expression. “Before you realize he’s desperate for it.”

Dick nods. “We’ve...talked. He’s getting used to the idea of a wider network of allies.”

“Mm. Well, when you were let down a lot as a kid, it can be hard to let that go. Take it from me.”

Dick casts her a careful glance.

She smiles tightly, then bumps his shoulder companionably as they cross a long stretch of rooftop. Her voice goes soft. “You guys had a rough week.”

Dick exhales. “Things are better now. He’s going to stay, and we’ll work it out from there. It’s just…”

He hesitates, not sure how much of Damian’s recent turmoil he’s comfortable revealing. But Stephanie is stubborn enough to figure it out one way or another. He settles on, “He had to let the bird go. He’s been...spending a lot of time on the balcony, since then. He talks to me, but he’s quiet.”

“You think he’s holding something back?”

“No,” Dick says immediately. He knows what it’s like to be frozen out by Damian. This is something different. “He just seems...sad. Like he’s in mourning.”

He catches a flash of Stephanie’s front teeth as she bites her lip. She says, “Pets, man.”

“...Yeah.” 

He wants nothing more than to sink into a hot bath and shut his eyes. 

Stephanie stops running. Dick skids to a stop a second later. “You good?”

“I can’t believe you haven’t invited me over for New Year’s yet,” she says, a strange gleam in her eye.

Alfred spends the afternoon preparing unnecessarily fancy finger food: cold cuts and little quiches and bruschetta with bright cherry tomatoes. Dick takes samples until he’s swatted out of the kitchen, leaving the butler to prepare an army’s worth of food for a New Year’s Eve party of four. 

Damian spends the same afternoon bundled up in a coat and blankets on the balcony recliner, scribbling in his sketchbook. When Dick comes to check on him, he looks up with interest—even gratitude. But he doesn’t come inside at Dick’s cajoling, and he doesn’t try the gorgonzola tarts. 

“He had his appetite back this morning,” Alfred murmurs, dusting off the coffee table. “We’ll just give it time.”

Dick nods, distracted. He feels, after everything, like he should know the next step. Like he should be able to help Damian feel like himself again.

By four, Dick’s laid back on the sofa trying to focus on his email. The elevator door dings open.

Stephanie bounds in like Batgirl on a warehouse bust, her arms full of plastic grocery bags and a cheap portable boombox straight from a nineties teenage bedroom.

“Party people!” she says, glittery sunglasses slipping down her nose. “Show me to the snacks.”

Dick bursts out laughing. “Wow. What are you doing? Was your inspiration a stock photo called ‘New Year’s Eve’?”

“Shush, Dick, I’m on a mission. And I got into my mom’s eighties box, so wait ‘til you see the shoulder pads under this coat.” 

Dick swings to his feet. “You’re way early.”

“Like I said.” Stephanie reshuffles the bags slung over her arms to pick up a cheese platter from the breakfast bar. “Mission.”

Then she strides to the balcony door. She performs some kind of magic trick to get it open with no hands free, then slips outside.

“Okay, dweeb! You owe me so much cheese.”

Damian, indignant: “Ugh. You’re here.”

“That’s right, Baby New Year…damn. That was a better burn in my head.” A rustling sound: Stephanie dropping her bags on the rattan table outside the door. “C’mere and help me pick colors.”

“What is all this junk?” Damian’s footsteps draw closer. Then, with a note of surprise, he says, “Stickers, glue...craft supplies?”

“Straight from the dollar store. I’ve had a lot of this stuff under my bed for ages.”

“Tt. This is a terrible brand of pencil.”

“Well excuse me for being resourceful, rich boy. Had to learn to draw somehow, didn’t I?”

Winter wind gusts through the penthouse. Dick closes the sliding door—almost. He leaves a crack open, pulling the curtains shut in front of him. He listens quietly, gentle optimism unfurling in his chest.

“You can draw,” Damian says, dubious.

“Uh duhhh, yes I can draw. Look.”

A shuffling of pages, followed by a longer-than-expected silence. Alfred pokes his head out from the hallway. Dick puts a finger to his lips.

He’s struck by an image all over again: Damian and Stephanie—Steph—sharing a snack on an Batcave overhang, not long after working together to save Batman’s life. Things hadn’t been simple then, not by a long shot. But for a moment it had seemed like the two of them could become something like siblings.

Finally, Damian allows, “These are...passable, for low art. You have at least a grasp of dynamism. No realism or detail work, though.”

“Pbbbt. Realism.” Steph rustles through the bags. “And here I was about to draw you with an extremely cool rocket launcher.”

Another silence teeters. Dick hears Damian’s hesitation like cold wind on a balcony.

Then the boy says: “Make it red.”

Midnight falls on a penthouse full of light. The ball drops on TV, and Damian brandishes his noisemaker like a sound bomb, blasting it in Steph’s ear until she shrieks. He dances away before she can catch him, a smirk stealing over his face.

The walls are covered in haphazard glittering snowflakes cut from construction paper. Two dueling Damians are taped above Birdie’s old end table, one cartoonish and one elegant. Both wield red rocket launchers.

The next morning, Dick wakes to find a sketch on his nightstand: a pigeon in pastel colors labeled Rosalind.

Chapter Text

3:16pm (EST)

The Batmobile soars just over the cloudline, sleek and speedy, chasing the thin line of winter sunlight still reflected on the dark horizon. It’s just past 8pm local time. Dick itches to swoop low and see the miles of rolling Scottish countryside beneath them, but that would nix the element of surprise.

“Glasgow in fifteen miles,” he tells Damian. “Where’s your head at?”

“I’m thinking about how embarrassing it is that Knight and Squire can’t handle their own rogue break-outs.” Damian props his feet on the dashboard. “And they’re stupid rogues, too.”

Dick grins. “Admittedly, ‘Mother Hubbard’ isn’t the coolest bad guy concept out there, but we don’t exactly have room to talk.”

“Because all of Gotham’s rogues are circus-themed idiots?”

“Because I’m dressed like a bat.” He flicks Damian’s forehead, then accepts the retributive rabbit punch with grace.

They’d restarted patrolling together a couple of weeks ago. Dick had noticed something new: a change in the fabric of their costumed conversations. Damian had never been a silent presence, especially not with villains ripe for taunting, but lately it had been more of a conversation—a call and response.

Last week, Dick said something corny to Penguin, just to fill time: Looks like somebody got up on the wrong side of the ice floe this morning.

Damian said, Don’t be stupid, Batman. He couldn’t handle one day in the Arctic.

Not the most graceful zinger imaginable. But a conversation. An attempt at flow.

Penguin got away, but they found him in a safehouse the very next night. Once Dick had him pressed against the wall in borrowed handcuffs, he’d growled in Batman’s bass: You’re going back to the bullpen.

And Damian, bless his little heart, had deadpanned: I thought he was a penguin.

Every moment Dick had to spend holding Penguin down instead of high fiving his Robin became a moment of abject emotional turmoil.

Now, Alfred’s voice crackles over the comms. “Batman and Robin, I have you on en route. Mother Hubbard is camped out in Glasgow Necropolis. Descend to 10,000 feet when you’re two miles out and prepare to dive.”

“Roger that.” Dick adjusts course, then flips the vehicle to autopilot. He instinctively grasps for his escrima sticks, then sighs.

“Cheer up,” Damian says haughtily. “Eventually you’ll be so out of practice you won’t even miss them.”

“Brat.”

The Batmobile’s nose breaks through the clouds. Swathes of winter-gray fields give way to city blocks beneath them.

Dick opens his door, and freezing wind buffets them both. It plays through Damian’s hair and stirs his cape. 

“Stealth tech on?” Dick asks him. “Parachute ready?”

“Obviously.” 

“Oh, good,” Dick says brightly. He stands up in the doorframe, hooking an arm over the car’s roof. “Then you can catch me.”

“What? Batman—”

Dick throws himself backward, letting the wind take him. He leans back, and imagines a featherbed under his shoulder blades, and watches the tumbling clouds in a wide-open sky, and falls. 

In a few seconds, Damian follows, his expression determined—angling his body with the kind of aerodynamics Dick has elected to ignore. Slowly, he gains ground.

Alfred says, “Showing off, are we?”

“Maybe,” Dick says, hardly able to hear himself over the wind whistling through the cowl. “I want him to figure out that it’s fun.” He grins up at Damian, who glares at him with red-faced wrath. “Eventually.”

“Forty seconds until you should deploy,” Alfred says quietly. “Batman, if I may?”

“Hmm?”

“You are doing an excellent job.”

“Oh, uh. Thanks. Really the costume’s more aerodynamic than it looks, and with Red Robin’s modifications—”

“You are doing an excellent job parenting him.”

The wind steals his breath. Clouds break and swirl above him. Damian bears down—his small, serious face catching the glow of city lights. Behind the domino, his eyes track Dick’s.

“You were given an impossible task,” Alfred says, “with no preparation and little support. And you have come through for him beautifully.”

A lump builds in Dick’s throat. “Your timing is weird.”

“I’m very proud of you. And him.”

The wind sucks at the new moisture in his eyes, pulling them dry. He understands immediately: the butler had waited until Dick couldn't see him—or spare the time to call him out on his sentimentality. British old bastard. Stiff upper lip and all. 

He waits until Damian’s nearly caught up with him, hovering in the space over his chest.

Damian’s mouth moves, his nose wrinkled. Over the comms, Dick can make out: “You don’t honestly expect me to catch you?”

Dick smiles. He twists into a swan dive, and the two of them speed toward the necropolis hill. 

“Maybe one day,” he manages.

The outline of Glasgow sends a hazy glow to greet them, both medieval and modern. Old and new. 

Dick thinks he hears Damian’s breath catch over the comms.

“Good view, huh?” he says.

“We could stand to do this again.”

“Deploy,” Alfred says, and their parachutes burst outward, catching air currents in the dark. They glide toward statues of crosses and angels; toward grassy hilltop pathways and great structures of stone.

And, after their stealth offensive, once they’ve got their opponent face-down in the dirt, Damian ends his taunts with things like: “Isn’t that right, Batman?” 

He grins up at Dick, flushed with energy. Windswept.

Chapter Text

3:16am (EST)

“It’s a traditional Scottish breakfast,” Dick says, waving a forkful of black pudding in Damian’s face. “You’ve gotta at least taste everything.”

Damian’s expression pinches up so far it may as well have inverted. He scoots his chair back from the hotel breakfast table. “I do not have to taste congealed pig’s blood to know it’s vile.”

“Try to forget that part. Imagine it’s just a normal sausage, or something.”

“I don’t like normal sausage.”

Dick shrugs and takes a bite. Now he basically has to eat it, lest Damian make fun of him. Everything else is excellent: black tea and eggs and sausage and mushrooms and cherry tomatoes and some latke-adjacent potato pancakes. 

After making quick work of Mother Hubbard, they’d spent the night in a hotel just off the University of Glasgow campus. Dick told Damian it was in case Knight and Squire called from London with another clean-up request, but he doubts the kid bought it. He knows Dick too well for that. A vacation is a vacation.

Damian prods his own black pudding with a revulsion bordering on fascination. Dick notes the boy’s near-empty plate and scrapes the rest of his own mushrooms and tomatoes onto it. “You don’t like fatty meats much, do you? The rich stuff?”

Damian scoops up a mouthful of mushrooms immediately. “Mm. No.” He swallows. “It sits wrong in my stomach. And the taste is often...unpleasant.”

Dick nods. Alfred had stopped preparing beef and pork dishes some time ago. It’s hard not to notice Damian’s lack of enthusiasm. 

Dick handles the check, then steers Damian toward the door. It’s not even 9am locally. They have time to wander.

He says, “I know some people who don’t eat mammals. Just birds and fish, basically.”

“Fascinating,” Damian says dryly. “I’m so excited you’ve decided to share that with me.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and follows Dick down into the narrow streets of the old campus neighborhood. Sandstone buildings encircle them. Cafes keep outdoor tables stacked against the walls, waiting for warmer days. 

“I’m just saying,” Dick says. “You could do that, if you want. Just tell people you don’t eat mammals.”

“I eat them,” Damian says vaguely. A noise at the corner startles him: his eyes dart and his shoulders tense. It turns out to be a gaggle of students. He watches them skeptically.

Dick takes in his posture with a familiar melancholy. Even as a tourist, the kid can’t relax.

“Hey,” he says, bumping Damian’s shoulder. “What do you say we take a train to London tonight? Spend another day slacking off?”

Damian frowns up at him. “I’ve seen London already. Mother had a base there.”

“I’m willing to bet she didn’t take you to Waterstones, though,” Dick says breezily. “Biggest bookstore in Europe.”

“What, they’ve measured?”

“Uh, I guess?”

Damian scoffs, jaywalking across the empty street. They’ll see the Cathedral before they go, and maybe take another loop through downtown, where industrial steel staircases hide picturesque underground stores bursting with color. That’s Dick’s strategy: spend long enough seeing new things that Damian forgets to be sullen.

“How big?” the boy asks.

“Huh?” 

“How big is the bookstore?” he says reluctantly, scuffing his shoes on the concrete.

Dick grins. “Massive. Huge.”

“Tt. I suppose that wouldn’t be the worst way to spend a day.” He pulls out his phone. “I do have an errand to run in Scotland, however.”

Dick looks at him with exaggerated shock. “An errand? What, are you looking for a kilt? Do I have to forbid bagpipes in the penthouse?”

“No,” Damian says loftily. “I’m going to buy Brown some head cheese.”

Dick wrinkles his nose. “You’re what?” 

Damian grins wickedly—an expression Dick is rapidly learning to associate with the moments Steph comes up in conversation. “She said I owed her cheese.” 

“Oh my god,” Dick says. “You think that’s hilarious. You think that’s a super funny method of psychological torture.”

“It is.” Damian takes off toward downtown with his nose in the air.

Dick shudders. 

Their train cabin has barely enough space for two twin beds and a fold-out sink, but the ride is smooth and the view isn’t half bad despite the rapidly-darkening dusk. The Batmobile would have been faster, of course, but where’s the fun in that? 

Damian sticks in his headphones immediately, leaning back against his pillow. Dick prods him with his foot from his own bed.

“What, Grayson?” 

“Your backpack’s not full of sheep brain, is it? Or do they make it out of cow?”

“Tt. I didn’t buy the head cheese.” He stares down at his phone. After a moment, he bites the inside of his cheek. “It didn’t seem...necessary.”

Dick slips his hands beneath his head, looking up at the beige cabin ceiling. The train thrums gently beneath him.

“Yeah,” he says carefully. “I get super squeamish about that kind of thing. It’s harder when you can tell your food used to be an animal.”

Damian doesn’t answer. He makes a show of turning up his volume.

Dick thinks back to Birdie on the balcony. Then to the times on patrol Damian's gaze had tracked stray cats. Then to a page he’d seen in the boy’s sketchbook: cuddling mice and a hawk soaring.

He closes his eyes and lets an idea take form. He’ll need to give Alfred a call.

“Grayson?” Damian says a few minutes later.

Dick cracks an eye open. Damian’s removed one earbud, letting it dangle in the folds of his sleep shirt. The dim cabin lighting glows gold against his skin.

“Are we really going to London just to see a bookstore?”

“Sure,” Dick says. “Why not? You’d like it.”

Damian meets his gaze, then quickly looks away. “I would. But it seems...wasteful.”

“Not every moment of our lives—”

“—is made for fighting. I know.” Damian frowns. “But I’ve never—with Mother, she wouldn’t…” He trails off, picking at his blanket.

Dick gives a quick smile. “Bruce wouldn’t change plans for this kind of thing, either. I’ve been to London, but we had to stick to his schedule. Weird, isn’t it, how two people can experience something so differently?”

Damian ducks his head in what might be a nod.

Dick remembers a fight in Damian’s bedroom, ending with a knife in a doorframe and the two of them on either side of a door.

He remembers talking to Grace at the bird sanctuary and realizing what Damian might look like from the outside.

He remembers nutmeg poisoning and wonders—not for the first time—what Damian said and did and saw while Dick drowned in an anxious mess of memory.

All he can really hope to do is close the distance between their perceptions until it’s more a crack than a crevice. Until it’s second nature to mind the gap.

“We’ll spend as long as you want in that bookstore,” Dick says. “And wherever you want to go after.”

Damian gives him a skeptical look.

“No, really! I dragged you around Glasgow; it's your turn to take the lead.”

The boy swallows. He puts his earbud back in. 

The train passes a station and light floods through the window. Damian says, “Alright.”

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“Keep an eye out for goldfinches,” Grace says. “They’re a cheery yellow—hard to miss. Some are wintering here.”

She walks quite close to Dick on their grand tour of the sanctuary woodland. Dick had figured he and Damian had it covered, but she’d insisted on “star treatment for Bruce’s guardian” and hadn’t left space for him to refuse.

Damian stalks several feet ahead, his shoulders raised sullenly around his ears. It’d been hard enough to convince the boy to bring Dick along on his next sanctuary run. Now, he seems embarrassed by Grace’s attention—or by the fact that people know him, even a little bit.

Hopefully, he’ll put up with it for another half hour or so: just long enough for Alfred to finish his “errand.” Dick would hate to ruin the surprise.

Sunlight shines white through branches and leaves. The dirt of the sanctuary is packed hard with winter cold, waiting for the next snow to bury it deep. 

Grace’s footsteps are quiet beside him. Just as quietly, she asks, “Does he run away a lot?” 

Dick glances down, startled, at grey eyes that blink up—too close for comfort—from behind thick glasses.

He puts more space between them, leaning toward the guardrail as though he’d seen a bird. “No. I mean—he’s independent. I don’t count that, though.”

“Of course.” Grace’s gaze floats to Damian’s back, swathed in his puffy green coat. “I just—worried. When you came in that day to find him.”

“We have it covered. But...thanks. For worrying, I mean.”

Grace reaches up as though to toy with a strand of her hair, then misses—like she’s used to a longer cut. “How long before anyone knew he was gone?”

Dick doesn’t like his own answer to that question. 

Grace glances at him sidelong. “Oh! I’m sorry. I’m not saying you’re neglectful. Far from it, he just...seems eager to roam. How did you find him? Do you have procedures in place? When did you—”

“Alfred,” Damian says loudly, leaning hard against the guardrail. “Please try to keep up.”

Dick cracks a weak grin, glad for the interruption. “Sorry, Bruce. Didn’t mean to keep you waiting.” 

He jogs ahead, shooting Grace an amused glance over his shoulder. She doesn’t seem to notice: her gaze is stuck somewhere in the middle-distance, lost in the path ahead. Either that, or she’s staring at Damian. The line of her jaw is tight.

“Hold this,” Damian says imperiously. He hands Dick his phone, the earbuds dangling. “Hold the cord separately or it will tangle.”

“Say please,” Dick says, taking it anyway.

Damian shrugs off his backpack and begins rummaging. “Colombo—that ghoulish intern at the front desk—gave me birdseed.” 

“Pretty sure his nametag said Esposito, but okay.”

Damian pulls the baggie out and examines it critically, pressing his fingers into the plastic. The seeds shift back and forth.

“You gonna, uh, do it one by one, or—”

“You are not the expert here, Alfred. Let me work.”

Holding back laughter, Dick lets Damian take his time. The boy solemnly tips the baggie into his palm.

His fingers move so gently, closing around the seeds. His eyes jump from branch to branch, searching—a hesitation written on his brow. Or a regret.

Suddenly, Dick worries that he and Alfred have made a mistake—that Damian won’t be ready for their surprise. They should’ve talked to him first; gauged his reaction. 

This wouldn’t be Dick’s first parenting mistake, but that’s what happens when you learn as you go.

Grace leans on the guardrail next to them. She’d moved so softly he hadn’t noticed—a rare trait in civilians. Maybe she’s trained in something physical: ballet, it could be, or martial arts.

She winks at Damian. Whatever disquiet had vexed her is gone. “I see you’ve spotted the thrushes that laid claim to our nesting boxes. They like sunflower seeds.”

“They tolerate them,” Damian corrects. He tosses the seeds over the guardrail. 

Mind wandering, Dick reads aloud from the nearest informational sign: “Robins, thrushes, goldfinches, herons, ospreys, wrens.” 

All types of birds, in all seasons.

Softly, Damian repeats: “Robins, thrushes, goldfinches, herons, ospreys, wrens.” 

No hesitation. No dropped names, no mix-ups. Dick beams down at him and wonders what his short-term memory scores have been looking like lately.

Damian glances at Dick out of the corner of his eye. He scoffs, the tips of his ears turning red.

“Hang on,” Dick says, catching Damian’s hand before he can call the elevator in the Wayne Tower lobby. “Can we talk for a second?”

Damian wriggles his hand free. “Here? Not the most private.”

“Just—before we get to the penthouse. I want to give you a heads-up. It was supposed to be a surprise, but—”

“Surprise,” Damian says flatly—a question in the form of a statement. He frowns up at Dick with barely-disguised curiosity.

“If...it doesn’t work out,” Dick says, “we can take him back. We know the breeder, family friend—he’d understand.”

Damian’s face goes pale—the line of his mouth thins. He jams his thumb into the call button and the elevator groans.

Dick’s stomach plummets. He rocks on the balls of his feet. 

He’s always fidgeted. Sometimes it comes back full-force. The frightened way Damian’s staring at the elevator doors evaporates his cool like snow in a thaw.

The elevator moves too slowly for its installation cost—especially in times like these. 

On their way up, Dick murmurs, “If you’re not comfortable—”

Damian shakes his head sharply. Not an admission of discomfort, but a request for silence. 

Dick pulls in his lips, over his teeth. Thoughtful. 

He rests a hand on Damian’s shoulder—presses down through the soft down of his coat to the tense body beneath. Damian doesn't shrug him away.

The doors ding open. Alfred stands in front of the breakfast bar, a red leash in his hand—it droops to the carpet in the middle of its length, then picks up again to meet the collar of a black Great Dane taller than the barstools.

“Your latest report card was excellent,” Alfred says.

The dog shifts on his haunches like he’s dying to greet them, tail whapping frantically against the floor. 

Damian goes still enough that Dick has to guide him out of the elevator, a hand on his back. “Think he wants to meet you.”

“Does he?” Damian says sharply. “He looks like he’d rather be out...running somewhere. Doing stupid dog things, far away from me.”

Alfred’s serene expression falters, and Dick expects his does as well. But then he reconsiders—pieces Damian’s words together into a different order. Sometimes, he’s learned, that’s what it takes.

Not I want that dog far away from me. Something else. Something all tied up with a bird flying away from a balcony.

He squeezes Damian’s shoulder. Carefully, he says: “I wouldn’t worry about that. I think this—right here, with us—is exactly where he wants to be.”

Sometimes people stay.

A whine escapes the dog’s droopy lips, his tongue poking free. His eyes shine black like a warm midnight on patrol—safe under streetlamps. 

Damian presses his eyes shut for a moment. He takes a sharp breath. Then he marches forward.

“You should tell me if that's wrong,” he says to the dog—looking him in the eye. “Do you want to be here, with us? Protecting this household is a responsibility you shouldn’t take lightly.”

Alfred meets Dick’s eyes over Damian’s head. He drops the leash.

The dog leaps free of his sit, draping his front legs on Damian’s shoulders so the two of them tumble to the floor.

Damian shouts, startled. His small arms wrap around the dog’s torso as he squirms beneath an enthusiastic licking tongue. 

“You beast! You have no—ugh—you have no manners! No discipline!”

He stops struggling. He drops his head to the ground beneath the Great Dane’s weight, looking at Dick upside-down. Dick’s stomach swoops again—sweeter this time: Damian’s cheeks, still ruddy from the cold outside, are rounded by the biggest smile he’s ever seen.

“I’ll have to teach him,” Damian says. “I’ll teach him everything I know.”

And sure, Dick’s made his share of mistakes with the kid. But no way this will be one of them.

Chapter Text

3:16am

“Great Danes are descended from medieval hunting dogs,” Damian says out of the blue.

“Uh. Is that so?” Dick frowns in concentration, trying to make sure none of the roots he’s been tripping over have been secretly coming to life to jab him. 

They slip between trees in Robinson Park, their shadows fleet over the long grass. Poison Ivy’s reasserted her claim here, so the plants glow spring-green. Some of the shrubs bear suspicious fruit.

Damian continues, “English Mastiffs and Irish Wolfhounds were crossbred informally in England. Then their descendants were brought to Germany in the sixteenth century, where nobles continued to breed them for hunting.”

“You been reading up on Titus’s family history?”

“Only in my spare time. Not seriously.”

Damian’s quest to name the dog had taken a few days, resulting in disarray for his bookshelf. Each night, Alfred disassembled bedside stacks of novels and plays, Damian asleep beside them—Titus stretched out on the foot of the bed.

A few nights ago, Dick caught boy and dog curled around a huge tome that turned out to be the collected works of William Shakespeare. Damian had snored gently, his face smooshed into his pillow.

Dick had picked the book up, hoping to put it back on the shelf—until Damian’s eyes had snapped open and he’d performed a wrist grab that forced Dick to drop it fast as a sparking batarang on the fritz.

Judging by the look on his face afterward, the move had been entirely on instinct. Cheeks flushed red, he’d grumbled about personal space.

Dick had been mulling over what to say—should he apologize? Assure the boy he wasn’t hurt?—when Titus had lifted his big head and licked a line of slobber up Damian’s cheek. Things weren’t so tense after that.

What a good dog.

In the park, Damian steals a glance at Dick out of the corner of his eye. “Dogs have been bred to be useful to humans for centuries. I might find valuable information.”

“Hey, you don’t have to defend your fun research to me.” Dick grinds his heels into the dirt, stopping on a dime. The grass in front of them looks sharper than it should. Glowing spores float above the stalks. Dick chooses, instead, to scale an oak tree, leaping between branches. 

Damian follows. “I’m just telling you,” he says, stilted. “I’m giving you a summary of my findings.”

Then he sinks back into silence—a serious vigilante on a serious mission. As if to say: I’m actually not humming with pent-up new-dog energy, and if I were, I wouldn’t be enough of a baby to talk about it on the job.

“Well, here’s a tip.” Dick catches hold of a maple branch, then swings himself down to safe ground. “You’re allowed to be excited about this stuff—even the less-practical parts.”

“I know that,” Damian snaps. 

“Ooh, we should bring Titus here when the plants are less evil!”

Damian scoffs. His cape swishes through grass. 

He can try to downplay his excitement all his likes. Dick had been there for his foray into clicker training, and his exacting opinions on dog food brands, and the reverence with which he’d given Titus his first-ever brush. And it’s only been two weeks.

Why hadn’t they done this earlier? A dog’s love is unconditional. Even an assassin knows that.

Seeing Damian let Titus cuddle him in bed that night with the Shakespeare, even after startling back at Dick’s touch—well. That’s fine too. It has to be. 

Not every night can be perfect. 

Dick takes a steadying breath through his nose. 

...And regrets it. The mystery fruit smells like the latest sample of stinky cheese Steph had left for Damian on the balcony. The offending shrubs hem them in from both sides: like corralling cattle.

Ahead, the glass of the botanical garden reflects stars. Over the last few yards, Damian’s moved closer to his side.

 “I don’t want to bore you,” the boy says quietly. “I can talk about something else.”

“No, I want to hear everything,” Dick hums. “But...maybe after.”

He tilts his head meaningfully toward the building. Damian picks up his cue with a nod.

The shrubs grow taller and their path narrower. Ivy’s being predictable; wants them to come bursting through the front door to find her lounging on a throne of silkweed. It’s a trap, of course—but why so obvious? Why the bright pink fruit?

They reach the doorway. Shadows fold over flowerbeds in the greenhouse. Ivy isn’t there. 

“Come on out,” Dick growls, stepping over the threshold. “I’ve been dying to swap gardening tips.”

“Maybe it’s a distraction,” Damian murmurs from the landing behind him. “Maybe she wants to—”

“—detain us.” Dick’s foot brushes a loose vine—it wiggles beneath him. Pink fruit hangs sack-like over his head, connected by sprawling tendrils to the shrubs outside. 

The fruit glistens. It whines.

His body understands the danger before the rest of him does. He slams on his cowl respirator and dives out the door, tackling Damian to the ground—shielding him.

The fruits in the greenhouse burst first, splashing slop on the greenhouse panels. The glass hisses and smokes and disintegrates. 

Damian shouts beneath him. Struggles.

Like a chain reaction, fruit explodes down the line—out the door, shrub after shrub, until the Batsuit is coated in acid, fizzing down through layers of kevlar and cloth. 

“Batman,” Damian says, clear panic in his voice.

Dick activates the neutralizer on his utility belt, but not before something eats through his respirator. He screams.

“When you think about it,” Dick says weakly, pressing a hand to the bandage swathing his temples, “that could have gone a lot worse.”

Damian hunches in the infirmary chair, his arms crossed—his fingers digging into his underarmor. He doesn’t speak.

The Bunker’s lights shine bright as a headache. Dick’s skin fizzes when he licks his lips, half-numb from the spillover effects of the anesthetic. 

“It really could’ve been worse,” he tries again. “The Batsuit held out. We found her eventually, and all it cost was a couple of interesting scars along the hairline. I’m collecting them.”

“Is that your excuse?” Damian says quietly. “That your failure could have been more complete?’

Dick rolls his shoulders thoughtfully, his legs dangling off the side of the gurney. There’s a bruise on his elbow where he’d landed on top of Damian wrong, desperation beating out form.

“Well, yeah. Some skin being shiny for awhile is nothing compared to acid splashing Robin’s entire face off.”

“I could’ve handled it!” 

“Could your costume?”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed,” Damian spits, “but my costume allows me a greater agility than yours. I could’ve escaped the splatter if you hadn’t assaulted me.”

Dick frowns at him. “I don’t regret protecting you.”

“It was unnecessary. You shouldn’t—” His shoulders hunch up around his neck. He glares holes in the wheels of the gurney. “Robin should be able to protect himself. It’s stupid for Batman to throw himself into harm’s way.”

“Nah. Batman is very good at throwing himself in—”

“You shouldn’t.” The words seem to drag themselves out of him like a dart out of flesh. “You shouldn’t take risks for me.”

Dick’s frown softens. “Hey.” He holds out a hand. “I’m alright, see? Barely scratched. It went fine.”

“But you could’ve—”

“I made the call based on whose costume could handle it better, and I was right.” That’s a lie: Dick hadn’t had time to think. He’d felt Robin’s presence like a beacon behind him, and he’d dived. “Besides: I want you to be safe. That’s—it’s really important to me.”

His hand hovers in the space between them. Damian eyes it warily.

A hug would be Dick’s first choice, but those are still rare between them: a product of pressure and emotion that’s impossible to predict. Damian doesn’t always react well to the attempt. Sometimes the resistance seems instinctual—like startling awake to use a wrist grab. Almost against his will.

Dick gives a tired smile. “Why don’t you tell me about Great Danes? You weren’t done talking yet.”

Damian swallows. The toes of his boots scrape against the Bunker floor: feet kicking restlessly beneath him.

Then he takes Dick’s hand. Squeezes it between them.

“Did you know,” he says softly, “they’re one of the largest breeds in the world? They were used to hunt bear and boar.”

“I didn’t know that,” Dick says, rubbing a thumb over the boy’s knuckles. “Explains a lot.”

Damian talks.

The worry fades from his eyes only slowly, like the sun rising somewhere outside.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

This isn’t the real funeral.

Bruce’s gravestone is new—the freshly-turned earth, the empty coffin lowered carefully into the hole. Also new are the paparazzi, lurking just beyond the edges of Wayne property. Event security made a show of booting the ones who were bold enough to sneak onto the cemetery grounds. 

The weather isn’t right: an unseasonably warm day in late February that sends heat beating down through Dick’s black suit. It’s an insult that he doesn’t see a single cloud in the sky. No snow; no rain.

But none of that matters. Because this isn’t the real funeral.

Bruce’s real funeral, last year, was a private affair—it had to be, with his death a secret from the public until the family was absolutely certain he was gone. It had been attended by heroes and children and the overlap between.

Closer to what Bruce would’ve wanted—if he wanted anything at all.

To Dick’s left, Damian shifts his weight. His small hand rests on Titus’s neck. He stares, thin-lipped, at the gravestone. Alfred stands tall beside him.

To Dick’s right, Tim’s shoulder bumps his. They exchange tight smiles, more solidarity than comfort. Tim shrugs toward a figure on the other side of the open grave and Dick does a double-take. 

He hadn’t expected Cass to come. She’s been in Hong Kong. Nobody’s heard from her in a long time.

She gives Dick a careful smile—hesitant. Like she doesn’t know what she’s asking for. As the rabbi drones on, her eyes never once alight on the grave. Fair enough; nobody’s in there. The body had been unrecoverable.

They’d blamed an Alpine skiing accident, messy enough for closed-casket. It’s an insulting way for the man who’d been Batman to be remembered, but that was Bruce: his commitment to the charade of Bruce Wayne had always, always been in service to the cowl. For better or worse.

The lie of a living father had become more and more taxing: paper trails for Bruce’s supposed time abroad, keeping Hush compliant in the public eye. Worse, thinking through each element of public deception kept Dick wondering what Bruce would be doing, if he were alive. What he would have to say on this or that public issue. Which vendetta he’d be chasing down at night.

Dick misses him badly enough already without turning him into a doll who talks when you pull the string.

Damian lets out a harsh breath through his nose: probably some platitude from the rabbi didn’t land right. Dick hadn’t been listening. 

The boy’s suit is perfectly tailored, but it looks too big for him anyway. Dick presses a hand to his back.

Life doesn’t grind to a halt after grief, no matter how much he’d like it to. Damian’s his kid now, in all but name. There’s something he’s been waiting to do.

“How was your flight?” he asks, spearing a piece of shrimp with a toothpick. The reception is held in the manor: family-only, with distant relatives milling in the entrance hall and up through the portrait hallway. 

“Long.” Cass leans back against one of the neoclassical pillars by the doorway—the ones Dick had found ridiculous as a child. She cocks her head. “He adopted me.”

Dick frowns. “I know that. Of course I do. That was—years back.”

“Yes.” She takes a devilled egg from his small plate. “You...didn’t think he would.”

Dick opens his mouth to argue, but there’s no point. Cass doesn’t lie much. And she rarely gets people wrong. 

Further into the entrance hall, Damian stands by a table full of condolence cards and stabs at his steak tartare like it’s done him a personal wrong. He doesn’t seem keen on eating it.

At least his aura of menace is keeping well-meaning mourners from trying to comfort him for too long. The boy’s feelings on Bruce are nebulous at the best of times; Dick doubts he’s likely to find clarity in a distant aunt’s speech about Bruce’s spirit appearing in every sunrise. 

He feels Cass’s gaze on him. 

“It’s not a criticism of you,” he settles on. “Bruce—he didn’t trust people easily. Especially people who…” He shrugs. Cass knows what he means.

“He was hard on me at first,” she says, articulating carefully. “I was okay with that.”

Should you have been? Dick doesn’t say.

Cass’s eyes flicker from his face to Damian’s, and Dick remembers that what he doesn’t say is more important to her anyway. 

“You’re...adopting him,” she says. “You will be different. Than Bruce was.”

Dick sticks another shrimp in his mouth to give his heart a chance to settle.

Damian gives him a curious look from across the entrance hall. The line of his brow softens.

Dick pictures the paperwork, unsigned on his nightstand. “This is the worst place to say it—and you know I loved him—but I hope you’re right.”

Cass nods. “Bruce...would agree.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d want you to be different.”

Sinking into the penthouse sofa is a relief after all that time at the manor—after spending hours pretending his grief is a fresh wound to near-strangers when its true texture is closer to a sore scab just healed enough to forget about until something jars it and it bleeds. Damian settles in on the other end, his stocking feet pulled up on the cushion.

Dick touches his shoulder. “You okay?” 

“Of course.” His fingers tap against his ankle. “I don’t know why everyone expects this to break me. I barely knew Father.” 

His shoulders are stiff against the sofa back.

Gently, Dick says, “Bet that’s confusing on its own.”

Damian shrugs, his eyes on the carpet.

Then his gaze snaps up to Dick’s, squinting with sudden outrage. “Are you trying to distract me from your own emotionality?”

Dick blinks. “No, what? This is about you.”

“Why? Why isn’t it about you?”

“Because I’m…”

Dick hesitates, mouth half-open.

What had he meant to say? I’m the adult? I’m Batman? I’m...moving on?

Damian peers up at him past slicked-back hair, eyes sharp enough to peel back a wall. “You really knew him. You must be...mourning. Upset.” He swallows. “It’s...understandable. You can...say that.” He sniffs. “I won’t hold a moment of weakness against you.”

Heat spreads unbidden behind Dick’s eyes. He runs a hand through Damian’s hair—disrupting the gel, sending strands flopping over his eyes. 

Damian scowls. But he doesn’t lean away, so Dick cups the boy’s neck and presses his forehead into his hair.

“You’re a good kid,” he says through the thickness in his throat. The paperwork’s in his bedroom: tucked away. He hadn’t thought tonight would be right, but—

The lobby intercom buzzes. 

Tail wagging, Titus runs out from Damian’s bedroom. Alfred emerges from the kitchen, rubbing his hands on his apron.

“Heavens,” he says, looking at the security feed by the elevator doors. He sounds vaguely choked up—like the cooking flour has coated his throat. “I’ll need to set additional dinner places.”

Dick gets up to see what he’s looking at. He laughs a laugh that stings the back of his throat, then presses the intercom button. “Told you guys we weren’t doing the whole shiva-sitting thing.”

Babs smiles up at the camera. She holds a huge tupperware in her lap. “You can tell Alfred to stop cooking, okay? We’ve got you covered into next week.”

“Uh. Good luck stopping him.”

“We can tie him down or whatever,” Steph says, her arm slung around Cass’s shoulders. “But I wouldn’t say no to any cookies he’s got stored away.”

“Steph!”

“What? I mean he’s already made them, you know he has. Tim, back me up here.”

“Well...that’s true. He’s definitely made cookies.”

New lightness flits between Dick’s fingertips and underneath his ribcage—lighter than he’s felt all day.

He glances back at Damian. The boy peers at the intercom suspiciously. He opens his mouth as though to argue—then he sees Dick’s expression and reconsiders.

“Tt.” He waves an imperious hand. “I’m not going to stand in the way of your low social standards tonight. Just be sure they don’t overstay their welcome.”

He scratches behind Titus’s ear. “And this way, I can give them due warning about my new trained attack dog.”

“So lie to them, you mean.”

“Dick?” Tim calls. “It’s cold down here.”

“He’s already forgotten about you,” Steph says sadly. “I keep telling you to be more memorable.”

Dick brushes his hand over his eyes. It’s been a long time since he's had this many people under his roof.

He grins and buzzes them up.

Chapter Text

3:16am

“Quiet night,” Dick says. Then, in case Damian’s listening in on comms instead of in bed like he’s supposed to be, he adds, “Honestly, Robin’s not missing anything. He’ll be thrilled to hear that the most exciting thing that happened on his off-night was a costume debut.”

He hops onto a rooftop AC unit and gives Cass a nod. “Not to downplay your cool costume debut. I just don’t think he’d be into it.”

Black Bat raises an eyebrow behind her horned domino. “I’ve been...using this identity. In Hong Kong.”

Her new stomping grounds. She’ll be catching a return flight in the morning, so Dick had suggested a joint patrol as a rough-and-tumble goodbye. It’s not like Cass knows how to take a vacation anyway. Maybe he shouldn’t enable her, but he suspects she’d be stalking the city regardless. 

He says, “Gotham debut, then. I’m behind the times. Red Robin didn’t tell me when he gave you the suit.” He shrugs uncomfortably. “We weren’t...talking much, at that point.”

“Who needs to talk?”

Dick scans her expression; finds a wry smile hidden in its corners. He grins back, despite the weight of the topic sneaking up on him—making his body feel heavier than it should, even under Kevlar. 

It’s fine—it has to be. Tim had, eventually, forgiven him. He helped modify the Batsuit. Made it lighter than Dick could alone.

“It’s cool that you make jokes now,” he says.

Cass’s eyes shift to a point over his shoulder. Then she turns, cape flitting like a wraith on cold wind. She swoops down to the street below. 

“Okay,” Dick mutters. “Didn’t need any warning or anything.”

“Signal,” Cass calls.

Dick looks to the sky. The bat dominates dark clouds, a flat circle of light.

“They’re down in lockup,” Gordon says, shuffling in his overcoat. “I can buy you half an hour to chat ‘em up, but after that it’s either Arkham or Blackgate depending how the paperwork comes through.”

“Fine,” Dick says in Batman’s bass. “How’d you bring them in?”

“Luck, mostly. We got a tip about a planned jewel heist we were sure would be Catwoman, but instead these two cult looneys showed up, masks and all. I know you’ve been tracking them, and—” Gordon’s eyes flicker over to Cass, where she leans against the Bat-Signal. He leans closer to Dick. “One of them—the woman—matches your description for the, er. Priestess.”

Dick works to keep his expression neutral. “Lucky us.” He cocks his head toward Cass. “We’ll keep things low-key. Goodnight, Commissioner.”

The two of them steal away, down into the bowels of the precinct. Cass makes herself just as invisible in bright-lit bullpens as she does in darkened hallways. Detectives who see Dick allow him to pass. Cass isn’t seen at all.

When they reach lock-up, most of the guards have gone. A beat cop Dick recognizes inclines his head, then slips out. 

Behind bars, Loincloth—Tar—sits on the floor. His arms are crossed; his posture stoic against the far wall. Someone’s clearly taken issue with his disdain for clothing and found him a gray sweater. Even dressed, he’s hard to mistake. Dick remembers with fierce pride the shock on his face when Damian broke his mask in two.

Sitting primly on the bench beside him is a woman with red-brown hair. Her large blue eyes bore into his from across the room. 

“Who knew it would be this easy to find you?” she says softly.

Something prickles across the base of Dick’s spine. He growls, “You’re going to wish you hadn’t.”

Cass slips past him. She looks Tar up and down, then sits cross-legged in front of the bars—becomes his mirror. Disdain and wariness war for dominance across his face.

Dick doesn’t react. Cass does what she wants. If you’re lucky, she explains herself later.

“You’re trying to spin this”—he gestures at the priestess, then the bars—“as having been your plan all along, but it wasn’t. You got caught. You were stupid.” Likely untrue, but most rogues can’t resist contradicting vigilantes who insult their intelligence. It’s a useful approach when you’re dealing with ego.

Instead, the woman nods. “We were stupid. It took us longer than it should have to find the true Bat.”

“I hate to break it to you,” Dick says, leaning his forearm across the bars, “but you keep saying you found me, when it really feels like the other way around. Why did you need that jewel?”

The priestess crosses her ankles. Her foot brushes against Tar’s side. “I have a message for you, night-stalker.”

“From who?”

She cocks her head, eyes gleaming. “Who is your Robin, really?”

Surprise nearly knocks the neutrality off Dick’s face. He hardens his jaw. “You don’t get to know that.”

The woman hums. “In a way, neither do you. Did you know that there are thousands of mapped universes, none quite like this one? Some among us can perceive them. One of us can interpret.”

Tar growls, “Get to the point.” His eyes don't leave Cass's. Dick can't blame him; her imitation is downright eerie.

The priestess ignores this. “The old Bat’s death was a cosmic fault line in your Robin’s life—but only because you, night-stalker, will change him. Because of you, he will negotiate the world differently. He will face different enemies and know different joys. You’ve saved him from a potential death and doomed him to unfamiliar and unwanted fears. Best of all?” She grins. “You will never know what you have done to him. What you have inflicted on him, or how you have saved him. You cannot reach across universes and compare.”

“You’re talking in circles,” Dick says through gritted teeth.

“Oh, intricate ones,” the priestess says. “The boy is a nexus, after all. Perhaps it’s in the blood.”

Dick slams his fist against a bar. “You don’t touch him. You don’t even think about him. We have this conversation again and it’s your last.”

The priestess had flinched back when Dick’s fist hit steel. Now, a new expression flits across her face—understanding, maybe.

No. It’s insight. It’s Bruce, staring at incomprehensible evidence until his detective’s mind makes it all click together. It’s victory. 

Dick doesn’t like it one bit.

“Was that your message?” he snarls. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Yes,” the priestess says absently. Her gaze flickers to Tar, who doesn’t return it. “That’s all. You can’t give us anything else. No more than you already have.”

“Who do you report to?” Dick says, watching her face carefully. “The Anodyne?”

He’d heard the word when he’d infiltrated the airport bead-reading. Something about the multiverse—a deity, maybe. Or a weapon.

Tar grunts. “Don’t tell him anything else. This is a waste of time.”

The priestess rolls her eyes. “Leave, night-stalker. Nothing you do to us can compare to our punishment if we fail.”

Dick glances at Cass. Subtly, she nods. The priestess is telling the truth—they won’t break. The “interview” time is running out. He’ll have to regroup and come back with a different strategy—a trick, or new leverage.

He’ll know where to find them.

“Run along,” the priestess says, leaning back against the wall—closing her eyes. “Your Robin misses you.”

Dick’s feet pound heavy across the rooftops. It’s another fifteen minutes before he can banish the grimace from his face.

She’d threatened Damian. Sure, she’s locked away, but criminals escape. And the cult has minions wandering free.

And something was...off, about her. He pictures her face and holds it in his head: the high forehead, the thin lips, the blue eyes. He’d never seen her without the mask before, so how could something be off?

Cass is a shadow at his side. 

“What did you learn?” His voice comes out scratched and strained. “From Tar.”

“He doesn’t…” She frowns, searching for the word. “He doesn’t make himself...less. Around her.”

“He doesn’t defer to her?”

“Yes. That.”

Dick smiles without humor. “That’s just how they interact. He grumbles about everything.”

“No,” Cass says quietly. “Something...different. She isn’t in charge.”

Dick’s heart rate kicks up. “Then who is?”

Cass doesn’t answer. Obviously. She doesn't know.

Dick thinks back. He’s got nothing on Cass in terms of reading body language, but he’s watched the cult for longer. He’s been in their space—their element.

“He deferred to her before,” Dick says slowly. “I’m sure he did. Even if they’re both slaves to the Anodyne or whatever, she was still running things. So something changed.”

“She said...punishment. Maybe they gave her up to the police. Failure.”

“Maybe,” Dick says dubiously. “They would have to be pretty stupid to get caught like that accidentally.”

Something doesn't add up. He feels, suddenly and certainly, that he’s given away more than he’s learned.

Cass outpaces him for a moment, leaping gracefully to the drainpipe of the next building over. At the apex of her jump, the moon silhouettes her dark hair.

Dick follows. “You got all that about Tar’s body language by copying it?”

“No.” She gives him a confused glance. “Just by looking.”

“Uh. Okay. So why were you—"

“I wanted to learn Sumo,” she says smugly. “So I did.”

The elevator doors open on a dark penthouse. A spike of adrenaline pieces Dick’s throat. It’s nearly five in the morning, so of course nobody’s up. Damian’s supposedly sleeping, and he’d sent Alfred to bed hours ago when he’d thought he and Cass were turning in for the night. That doesn’t stop the fear flooding through him when he pictures the priestess’s lips forming Robin’s name.

Movement from the sofa: Titus drags himself off the cushions with a wag. 

Dick takes a deep breath. He unclenches his fists. 

Titus is fine, so everyone’s fine. They have to be.

“Hey, boy.” He flips on a low light, then kneels to ruffle the dog’s neck. “Alfie doesn’t want you on the sofa.”

Titus, uncaring, licks a line up his cheek. 

Down the hallway, Damian’s door is cracked open. Dick slips inside. 

The boy’s face is slack and peaceable, his fingers curled against his pillow. Dick ruffles Damian’s bangs and waits for his heart rate to slow.

Damian’s awake. He has to be—he’d never stay dreaming with someone standing so close. Not with his training.

Dick remembers a different night with his hand in the boy’s bangs. A black knife.

This time, Damian’s eyelashes flutter in a convincing impression of REM. His bangs stick in pieces to his forehead.

Dick presses a finger to the boy’s palm. Then he heads to bed, turning off the hallway light behind him.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

He finds Damian sitting against a rooftop water tank, forearms resting on knees. His cape rumples beneath him, collecting gravel. The tension in his shoulders is easy to spot.

Across the street, West Mercy Hospital looms: sinister, white as a radiation blast. As a light before unconsciousness.

Batman crouches down next to Robin—a black cape folding over a yellow one on the roof around them.

“Don’t think I okayed a daytime outing,” Dick says.

“And yet here I am.” Exhaustion draws the words tight. 

Which—fair enough. If Damian weren’t here watching the hospital, he’d be sleepless in the Bunker instead. Dick hasn’t gotten much rest himself over the past few days.

“They have visiting hours,” Dick says. “You could just—”

Damian clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Please. She’s in a coma. What would be the point?”

Dick exhales slow through pursed lips. He sits the rest of the way down, his back against the metal struts of the water tank. He waits.

The muscles in Damian’s cheeks are tight. He glares at the hospital walls like he’d rather be tearing them down. Knowing him, he’s pinpointed the nearest window to Steph’s room. Knowing him, he won’t move until he’s seen signs of life.

Finally, he says: “Her father could have had allies. This way, I’m ready if there’s an attack.”

“We’re all keeping an eye on her,” Dick says easily. “You don’t have to do everything yourself.”

The boy doesn’t like that answer: his nose wrinkles and his brows draw down. Dick will never get tired of the specific texture of pride that wells up in his chest whenever compassion shows on Damian’s sleeve.

Dick had been going through some of Bruce’s files this morning. He’d been searching for mentions of a strange org called “Leviathan”: so far, nothing but rumors. A whisper on the street. 

He’d thought they might be the bead cult, but no dice: the cult, from what he can tell, had originated in a small Florida swamp-town before heading to grayer pastures in Gotham. Leviathan, whatever it is, has an international bent.

He’d been searching the files when he’d happened again across the video of Bruce’s assessment of Damian—from back from when he was an eerie new presence in the manor, all rage and entitlement and nothing between. 

What surprised Dick this time was not the intensity of the short-term memory tests, but the shape of Damian’s face when seen from the side: different lines for his cheeks and his chin. A gauntness—a face made from hard bones with little padding between.

The Damian in front of him today has cheeks like a ten-year-old: round as his button nose.  Cushioned by baby fat. 

It’s the face of a boy who’s been eating better.

When Dick had realized that, down in the Bunker with Bruce’s files splayed up on the screen, he’d needed a moment to rest his face in his hands.

Steph may have noticed the change faster. Lately, she’s been risking her life trying to pinch Damian’s cheeks, a dangerous gleam in her eye.

“She’s gonna be okay,” Dick says. “They’re arranging a blood transfusion to purge the Black Mercy. And besides, she’s impossible to knock down. Always has been.”

Damian shrugs, his mouth a thin line.

What must it be like for a kid like him to unfold far enough to make a connection, however tentative—to eat sandwiches and swap pranks and draw rocket launchers—only to watch that person take a hit bad enough to drop her?

Dick remembers the boy’s face after Poison Ivy’s acid—the way he’d taken Dick’s hand so carefully.

Maybe there’s something Dick can do to reassure him. 

He flicks a tongue over dry lips. He takes the plunge. “Listen. This is—a bad time, but it’s starting to feel like every time is a bad time.” 

Damian lets out a burst of air between his teeth. Almost a laugh—no joy to it.

Dick does another cowl-scan for surveillance or spyware. Then he says, “If you’ve been in my files—and I’m pretty sure you have been, by the way—you’ve seen that I’ve been chatting with the family lawyers.” 

He presses gloved palms to his knees, wishing he could wipe the sweat away. “I’m already your legal guardian. But I’ve been thinking—if you want—”

“You don’t know she’ll wake up,” Damian says suddenly. “Everyone keeps saying she’s strong, or she’s a fighter. But she’s a subpar combatant on her best days.”

His back’s gone stiff against the water tank, his fists closed at his side. His gaze is laser-sharp on one of the hospital windows, refusing to meet Dick’s eyes.

Whatever the reasoning—if it’s just worry for Steph or something else altogether—the message is clear as crystal: not now.

Fair enough. Definitely a bad time. Leave it to Dick to be impulsive enough to go for it.

He fights back a strange pressure in his chest. Instead he says, “You really think she’s a bad Batgirl?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Exactly. There’s a difference.”

That gets him: his gaze flits back to Dick’s face. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I didn’t say anything about whether she’s a good combatant or not. I said you can’t knock her down. I’ve tried to tell you: it’s not just physical strength that makes a hero. Not just cool ninja moves.” He pokes the boy’s shoulder. “So don’t worry so much about her, okay? She’s bullheaded and, honestly, filled to the brim with carefully-channelled spite. She’s gonna pull through just fine.”

Damian gives him a silent stare for a few seconds longer—searching. Then he turns back to the hospital. Carefully, he says, “You understand we felt differently in the League.”

“I figured.”

“There are...advantages.” He pauses, small tongue flashing past his lips. “To believing that anyone who falls in combat deserves to.”

“Meaning...it doesn’t hurt as much to see them fall?”

Damian nods hesitantly.

Dick leans his head back against the metal strut; peers at white clouds in a blue sky. “I can’t speak for the League, but I think it’d hurt more if I wasn’t allowed to care.”

“Maybe,” Damian says softly. 

Then, after a minute or two: “I wish she weren’t in a coma.”

“I know, buddy.” Dick reaches out to rub his shoulder. “Me too.”

That evening, the sun sets a glorious red through the penthouse windows. Damian hasn’t made an appearance at Wayne Tower.

Dick rubs at his temples, slouched at the breakfast bar. Admittedly, bringing up adoption during Damian’s coma vigil had been a weird choice—wince-worthy, even—but he can’t help but wonder if part of the boy’s reluctance to discuss it springs from an associated insecurity: the fear of the people close to you falling. It’s not an unfounded worry. Not with their lifestyle.

He pings Robin’s comm. They’ve got patrol tonight. Maybe something to keep Damian’s mind off of—

“Batman!” Damian replies in a rush. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away, but I’ve been—Batgirl woke up. She’s alright! I saw her through the window, and just now on the hospital roof with Oracle. She seems alert. Her movements are coordinated and she appears to be—”

“Robin, that’s great! Did you talk to her?”

A brief silence. Then: “I acknowledged her. A—a salute through the window. She saw me.”

Dick holds back a laugh that’s half relief. “Go hang out! She’d probably love to talk to a friend right now.”

More hesitation over the line.

“Robin?”

“She’s already—she’s speaking to Oracle. I’m sure she’d rather—”

Another comm line beeps in his ear. He puts it through—to himself and to Damian.

“Tell your little monster to stop being a dork and come say hi,” Steph says, a smile in her voice. “Tell him I had some weird dreams I need him to make fun of.”

Dick can practically hear Damian’s shock on his end of the line. He cups his chin in his hand fondly.

“Dreams,” Damian finally says, all flat disbelief—like the time Steph told him she knew how to draw.

“Oh hey,” Steph replies. “Yeah. Dreams. You were in them.”

“Oh,” Damian says. “Fine.”

Then: “I suppose I can spare the time.”

Chapter Text

3:16am

Dick stretches out on the sofa, penthouse shadows settling in the folds of his sleep shirt. Lights flicker from the TV: the Heathers gather in their garden chairs, croquet mallets in hand. The opening credits roll; the music plays. 

Will I be pretty, will I be rich…

Right now, fictional darkness is a welcome break from the storm cloud in his own head: fear of a less hilarious stripe than Veronica and her murderer boyfriend.

The priestess had said Damian was a nexus. What’s scarier—what’s kept Dick awake since he realized it in a jolt of insight—is that she’d said it was “in the blood.”

The cult had gone after Bruce first. Their sacrificial knife had at some point “tasted his blood,” and then it had shuddered in Damian’s presence. Not Dick’s; he’d been stupid to think that. He’s not their true Bat.

So the cult knows—they must know—that Robin is the old Batman’s son.

The real question is whether they can do anything with that information. The priestess had given Dick a look of insight that left him wondering what he’d given away. But she’s still locked up tight in Arkham, refusing to say a word. He’s found no leverage against her.

Why would she give herself up just to learn something from Dick? What one fact could be that important?

Que sera, sera...whatever will be will be. The future’s not ours to see.

“What are you watching?” Damian scoffs from behind the sofa, and Dick jumps about a foot in the air.

“Dames! I didn’t know you were up.”

“Tt. I startled you? You’re slipping.” Damian circles to the front of the sofa, then raps twice against Dick’s ankle. Obligingly, Dick lowers his feet from the cushions to make room. Damian plops down beside him. “I asked what nonsense you were watching. Is this movie about teenagers?”

“Yeah. You want any medicine?”

“No.” Damian hesitates, fingers tapping a pattern on the armrest. “I got some myself.”

“Cool.” 

Damian flashes him a look, and Dick wonders if he was supposed to read some grand metaphorical meaning into that statement. If so, he failed. He’s only human. He misses stuff all the time.

(He’s exhausted by the thought of the priestess’s blue eyes.)

The Heathers enter their school lunchroom to eerie choral music. Dick keeps an eye on Damian, not expecting much—regardless of what drives the boy out of bed on nights like this one, sofa time is usually quiet time.

For awhile, this bears out: TV light flickers in the folds of Damian’s skeptical expression. His legs are tucked up beneath him, stocking feet pointed toward Dick’s knees. He holds his phone loosely in his lap, but his attention doesn’t wander there.

On screen, Veronica drops yet another f-bomb. It occurs to Dick that if Damian’s actually going to pay attention to these movies, maybe he shouldn’t be sharing the R-rated ones. Especially not when—shit.

He thinks through the plot with rising panic. “Er. What they’re doing—the uh, poisoning and murdering—is kind of a metaphor. It's satire.”

Damian looks at him blankly.

“It’s about...high school dynamics,” Dick says weakly. “Like, the way teenagers behave towards each other.”

“Of course,” Damian says. “The protagonists are behaving tactically.”

Dick’s stomach sinks. “What do you, uh...mean by that, Dames?”

Damian waves an impatient hand. “The lead Heather was flaunting an unearned authority over Veronica. Poisoning her allows Veronica to take her place in the social hierarchy.”

“Ah...nope. No, that’s not really the message of the—”

“I know how American high schools work, Grayson,” Damian says seriously. “I’ve seen the documentaries.”

Then a smirk curls the edge of his lips.

Dick lets out an exaggerated sigh of relief. He shoves at Damian’s shoulder, grinning. “You little brat, I thought you were serious.”

“You don’t know. I could be.”

“God, I didn’t know you could joke like that. We gotta try it on Steph.”

Damian’s smirk goes stiff.

Well, bingo. Something to go on.

“She doing okay?” Dick says casually. “I know she’s been texting you on and off—”

“She’s fine.” The words are sharp, Damian’s expression closing alongside them. “She hasn’t decided to slip back into a coma, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Dick waits. The sofa cushions are warm beneath him, and they finally—after nearly a year in the penthouse—sag a bit beneath his weight. Damian leans back into the headrest, and the fabric engulfs him to the ears.

“She had dreams,” the boy says suddenly. “Or...visions. Black Mercy creates them as a trap. Your...ideal life.” For some reason, the last words flush the tips of his ears.

“Yeah?”

Damian’s tongue pokes out over his lips for a moment. He says, “Do you ever have…”

Then he trails off, staring stubbornly at the TV screen. 

“Dreams?” Dick tries. “Visions? Definitely the former. One time, I dreamt that me and Donna were—”

“Do you ever have dreams that you don’t want to be visions,” Damian says in a rush—words flat, no intonation. Breathy.

Dick frowns. Damian’s refusing to meet his eyes.

This is a new pattern. The sofa isn’t for talking. Dick pictures Damian the night he’d been puppeted by his spine: the way he’d leaned into Dick, but insisted on silence until he was ready to sleep. 

“Did you...not like Steph’s dreams?”

“No!” Damian says quickly. “Her dreams were…fine. Acceptable.” The flush has crept to his cheekbones now.

“But you’ve had some dreams you don’t like,” Dick surmises. “And you’re...thinking about what makes something just a dream, versus something more?”

Damian’s cheek pinches. After another eternity, he gives a sharp nod.

“Well, for starters,” Dick says, chancing an arm over the boy’s shoulder—Damian doesn’t lean in, but he doesn’t pull away. “Dreams might feel like they mean something important, but they usually don’t—not unless you’re drugged to the gills on Black Mercy. Or a psychic. For people like us, our brains are just...mashing pictures together.” 

“I know that,” Damian scowls—too quickly.

Softly, Dick says: “Was it about Steph?”

Damian swallows. “Let us say, hypothetically ”—he shoots Dick a warning glare—“that you have a dream with Brown in it. And she’s in her coma and she’s not waking up.” He says the words too calmly. Before Dick’s heart can crack on his behalf, Damian adds, “This is all normal dream logic. Inane, but normal.”

Dick rubs at the boy’s shoulder. Damian lets out a slow exhale, and his body angles closer to Dick’s.

“But then,” the boy says hoarsely, “you dream about...lightbulbs. Going out.”

Dick blinks. “Lightbulbs? Are they...special lightbulbs?”

“No. They’re just lightbulbs. But they’re exploding. They’re going out.”

“I...can see how that might be disorienting, but I don’t think that makes them a...vision, or an omen, or—”

Damian shakes his head, embarrassed—or angry. Like Dick isn’t picking up on something he should. “Never mind. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

He shoots Dick an opaque glance, then scoots on the cushion until his shoulder is pressed into Dick’s side. “Brown is secure. For the moment.”

Dick holds him tighter against his sleep shirt. “Yeah. She’s safe.”

Slowly, Damian says: “I know that Brown is...safe. And we are...safe. For now. But everything can change very quickly.”

Dick feels the most out of his depth he’s been in a long time. He’s not sure how to respond, or even where Damian’s going with this—just that the moment feels vulnerable in a way that most do not. Damian's certainly allowing more physical contact than usual.

He wonders, suddenly, whether the boy had actually needed any medicine tonight. Maybe he’d just wanted company.

Finally, Damian says, “I don’t want to talk about the future right now.” He says it like a given: like a prince declaring he wants to be brought almonds instead of grapes between meals. But then he glances at Dick’s face with a question, and Dick understands.

He aims for a grin and misses. “Okay, to be fair, I did bring it up with the worst possible timing the other day. We don’t have to talk about...that. Not yet. But—”

He swallows. Considers his wording carefully—holds back an unfair hurt in his chest.

“Can you at least tell me if it’s something you want to talk about in the future?” He meets Damian’s eyes carefully. “Adoption, I mean.”

If Dick thought the flush was dramatic before, he was wrong. This time it extends through Damian’s cheeks, across his forehead, and down his jawline.

“I would be amenable,” he says—quiet and stilted. He tips his head, very slowly, until his temple is pressed to Dick’s side. “To a future discussion.”

“Okay,” Dick says. He takes a deep and careful breath, fingers still pressing a pattern against Damian’s shoulder. He tries to detangle the ball of disappointment and relief setting high in his chest. “Yeah. We can wait for awhile. There’s no rush.” He swallows. “I mean, the important thing is...we’re here. We’re together.”

For a moment, Damian’s forehead presses into his ribs with more insistence—gratitude, maybe. Then he pulls away.

“I’m going back to bed now.”

“Or...you’re already up,” Dick shrugs. “And I’ve already committed to the bad decision of letting you watch the edgy high school murder movie. We could make some pizza rolls?”

Damian’s hesitation doesn’t last more than a second or two. Preemptive disgust in his voice, he asks, “What is a pizza roll?”

“Oh, man. Can’t wait for you to get your inaugural tongue burn.” He rolls to his feet. “I made Alfred buy a couple packs. You wanna make the veggie ones?”

“I suppose,” Damian sniffs. 

Dick isn’t sure the boy’s ever finished a movie before. But there’s a first time for everything.

Later, while they’re snug under blankets, watching Veronica try to stop J.C. from blowing up the school, Damian says: “Your timing was terrible. Just...inexcusably bad.”

Dick punches his shoulder and grins.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“Damian.” Dick sits up suddenly on the sofa. “When’s your birthday?”

Damian doesn’t look up from his sketchbook. He’s hunched at the breakfast bar, a chocolate chip muffin in one hand and a pencil in the other. “You couldn’t have asked me a more useless question.”

Dick counts the months they’ve been together. “It’s been...almost a year. It has to be coming up soon. Are you an April baby?”

“Why are you so curious all of a sudden?”

Guilt squirms in his stomach. “I should’ve asked you ages ago. I had other stuff on my mind, and you just...never brought it up. When is it? Late this month or early April?”

Finally, Damian looks up from the sketchbook—only to give Dick a suspicious squint. “Outside of the League, birthdays are just an excuse for self-indulgence.”

Dick grins. “And I know you hate that.”

Damian sniffs imperiously. He takes a big bite of muffin, chocolate crumbs decorating his chin.

Dick taps his finger against the Wayne Enterprises quarterly report he had been reading when he fell asleep. While he hadn’t taken on the role of CEO—especially before Bruce was legally dead—finding creative ways of passing “Bruce’s” messages to the board had been a burden all its own. Now, with Tim in the driver’s seat, a weight’s gone from his shoulders. That doesn’t mean he’s content to remain in ignorance of the family’s resources.

Apparently that’s not the only family data Dick’s in danger of remaining ignorant of. Bruce hadn’t even had Damian’s birthdate in his files—Talia must not have seen a reason to tell him. 

“We don’t have to celebrate if you don’t want to,” he says. “I mean, I’d like to, but we don’t have to. We’re gonna need a date eventually, though—for legal paperwork if nothing else.”

Like, say, for adoption papers. Or enrolling Damian in school. Both are taboo subjects at the moment.

“Put down whatever date you want,” Damian shrugs. “The fewer people who know our identifying details, the better.”

An uncomfortable question takes root in Dick’s imagination. He frowns. “You do... know your birthday, right?”

“Of course I do!” Damian snaps. He shuts the sketchbook with more force than normal. “Whatever else my mother might have done, Grayson, she marked my birthday every year.”

Dick blinks. That wasn’t the response he’d expected. Damian didn’t bring his mother up on his own very often—the League, sure, but not Talia. Not by name or by title. Dick figured the disownment stung too much for that—or that Damian was starting to understand where his treatment under her supervision had done him harm beyond broken bones.

“Okay,” he says slowly. “That’s good. Did you...do anything special, ever?”

Damian scoots off the stool. “Where is Pennyworth? I want to buy Titus a new bed.”

Dick considers pushing, then thinks better of it. He says, “Errands. Why don’t you and me take Titus out for a walk? There’s that pet store on Fifth and Murray; I’m sure they’ll have something.”

For a moment, Damian looks like he’s going to refuse. Then he sizes Dick up and his shoulders relax. He nods.

The weather is typical for late March—blustery and insistent. Dick’s own birthday party had been held on the Wayne Tower balcony to take advantage of a rare spring sun. It was a smaller affair than most years, but with dear friends from across the world present and accounted for. Damian had poked his head out, insulted Roy, grabbed some snacks, and retreated to his bedroom.

The best Dick could hope for, really. He had to laugh.

Now, Titus strains against his leash with an enthusiasm unrivaled by dog or man. He stops to sniff at shrubs and cracks in the pavement and friendly passersby.

“Thought you were gonna train all that out of him,” Dick hums.

“It’s best not to dull their natural enthusiasm,” Damian says primly, adjusting his hold on the leash. “He comes to heel when called.”

“Wanna give me a demonstration?”

Damian whistles between his teeth, and suddenly Titus is trotting obediently at his side. The boy smirks up at Dick with clear pride.

“A model of upright behavior,” Dick says seriously. “All this time we had it backwards: you should’ve been training me.”

“As I’ve said from the beginning.” Damian gives Titus a signal, and the dog bounds off again, free to strain at the outer boundaries of his leash in pursuit of new doggie horizons.

They cross into the heart of the commercial district, where old art deco architecture tangos with sleek modern skyscrapers. 

Dick shakes his head. “This place is losing its character. Not a gargoyle in sight.”

Damian doesn’t answer. He fingers his end of the leash thoughtfully, a frown bowing his eyebrows.

“You good, Dames?” 

“My mother and I had a tradition,” he says, suddenly muted. Dick has to strain to hear him over the grind of traffic. 

“For your birthday, you mean?”

Damian surreptitiously glances around for eavesdroppers. The motion is nigh-undetectable, and he looks for all the world like a normal boy out for a walk with his dog.

“We would spar. She’d defeat me—until the year she didn’t. That’s how she knew I was ready.”

They stop at a busy crosswalk. Damian’s gaze lands, unfocused, on the other side. “That year, she brought me to meet Father. She wanted me to stay with him.”

“For how long?” 

Damian shrugs. “As long as it took to turn me into a worthy heir.”

Dick almost asks: Did you want to stay with her?

Instead he asks, “A heir for her, or for her dad?”

Their sidewalk and the one across the street function as parallel streams: human currents push this way and that, in business suits and high-fashion spring jackets and grimy trenchcoats. The whole span of life, on both sides of the road.

“She didn’t know,” Damian says finally—softly. “That Grandfather planned to take my body. She only wanted—” Here he cuts off, into a heavy sigh.

He takes a moment to gather his thoughts. Then, bitterly, he says, “She had her own ways of controlling me.”

Dick thinks of a mechanical spine. Of harsh words and high standards and broken bones. But good luck telling a heart to give up on someone it loves: it doesn’t know how to listen. Even when it should.

The light at the crosswalk turns green. Instinctively, Dick takes Damian’s hand.

“Is there a reason you don’t want me to know your birthday?” Dick asks lightly. He’s crouched next to the tortoise tank in the pet store, watching Old Enoch’s head sway from side to side. 

“No,” Damian says firmly—as though he needs to convince himself of something as much as he’s convincing Dick. He fingers Titus’s leash. “It’s just—you might be disappointed.”

Dick looks up at him, bewildered. “Disappointed in...your birthday? How would that even—”

“It’s in August,” Damian says in a rush. He lays a hand on Titus’s ruff. “August 9th.”

“But...that would mean—”

Damian’s looking at the hamsters above him with suspiciously single-minded determination.

Slowly, Dick says, “You had your birthday when we’d only known each other for a few months. You didn’t trust me yet.”

He doesn’t say: You didn’t feel safe.

“I wouldn’t hold it back from you now,” Damian mutters, and Dick’s heart melts.

He gets to his feet and presses Damian to his side—a quick hug, escapable. Instead, Damian sags there. 

“We’re going to have that birthday,” Dick says, “right now.”

Damian makes a startled noise. “What? Grayson—”

“I’m calling Alfie. I’ll let him know we’re not coming back until late. There’s a carnival on the pier—no, that closed last week. Oh! The zoo! We’ll go stare at animals and I’ll buy you whatever you want from the gift store. Then there’s this cat cafe I think you’ll like, though we can’t take Titus—”

Damian pushes away, stumbling back a few steps. 

Dick’s heart sinks. “Uh. If you don’t want—”

Then he takes in Damian’s expression. The boy is watching him with a strange nervous affection—like he’s afraid to touch Dick for fear he’ll shatter at the edges and disappear. Like a child drinking in the sight of a soap bubble before it pops.

“It’s your day,” Dick says softly. “Or at least the day we make up for it. Maybe we won’t spar, but there’s a whole nother world of stuff out there. What do you say?”

Damian fidgets, glancing down the aisle. “You’re being loud. People are watching.”

“We’re charismatic guys.”

“People are watching,” Damian repeats, and his voice cracks—he swipes the back of his hand over his eyes. He blinks furiously. “Let’s—let’s just call a taxi and go to the zoo already, if you’re so eager to waste time.”

Dick’s heart clenches all over again. It feels better this time—more right. “‘Course,” he says, squeezing the place where Damian’s neck meets his shoulder. “It’s your birthday now. I so declare it.”

Damian nods hesitantly. He pulls away before Dick can say, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Dick knows he hears it anyway.

The zoo is bright and loud and colorful, but Damian doesn’t seem to mind. He even allows Dick to buy him a stuffed penguin (“for Titus, obviously”). In a display case reflection, Dick sees the boy press his nose into the penguin’s felt tummy before tucking it away.

After an afternoon so full of energy Dick comes home ready to sleep until patrol, he finds an unmarked envelope in the lobby mailbox.

Inside is an unknown UK address, written in a loopy handwriting that Dick, with a heart-dropping swoop, recognizes as Jason’s. Underneath, there’s a brief message: Get these Leviathan asswipes off my turf.

Chapter Text

3:16am

“It’s been too long,” Damian murmurs urgently over the comm. “Batgirl should have left the tower by now.”

“She’ll be okay.” Dick swings himself up into a tree on St. Hadrian’s lush lawn.

Then he second-guesses himself. The assassin school’s gothic tower spills deep red light from its upper windows. Whatever’s going on up there, Steph’s in the middle of it—unarmed and incognito, nothing but a school uniform for protection. Waiting for her signal may not be their best option anymore.

“You shouldn’t have sent her in alone,” Damian says, accusing. His voice is a taut wire. “She can’t do anything by herself.”

“Keep watching the north side. If she’s not out in sixty seconds, we go in. We’ll get the data another way if we have to.”

The UK address in Jason’s note had been a head-scratcher when Dick first saw it. The Red Hood, as far as Dick is aware, doesn’t have any criminal interests in Europe. Then again, the last time they saw each other Jason had tied Dick to a chair and practiced his villain monologue, so they don’t exactly send Christmas cards. Maybe Dick is out of the loop.

But the note references Leviathan—the same organization Dick’s been chasing shadows of for months now. Apparently, their operations affect Gotham enough to cut into Jason’s dealings. And Jason, for all his unbridled anger at Bruce and his legacy, is savvy enough to know the benefits of pointing Batman in the right direction.

It doesn’t feel like a peace offering, exactly. More like comparing knives over a game of back-alley poker.

Most surprising: it feels like interacting with someone lucid. That hadn’t been true a year ago. Dick’s stomach has been periodically twisting into confused knots about it, because apparently a lucid Jason is just as against coming home.

An explosion sends bricks flying from one side of the tower. 

“There!” Damian shouts. “She’s out! On the roof, getting her suit on. She has one of those vapid spy girls with her.”

St. Hadrian’s spy-girls-in-training are due to be funnelled to Leviathan upon graduation. That’s all Dick knows—anything else, he’s relying on Steph to find out. Looks like she may have found out the hard way.

Steph’s grapple soars past the tree he’s hiding in and fixes on the school gate. She ziplines to the ground with her new friend in tow, pursued by girls in skull masks. Just another Wednesday night for Team Batman.

Dick drops on top of a skullgirl, slamming her shoulder to the ground. Her friends jump back; one shrieks. Damian speeds in from the eastern lawn, his batarangs oozing smoke cover. 

“Oh thank god,” Steph says, loud and brassy—probably making a big show of being fearless for her terrified friend. “I am passionately ready for graduation.”

Damian slams a skullgirl into the tree. “You’d never make it as an assassin.” He’s smiling, the lines of his mouth creased upward in the dark. 

Without Dick’s prompting, Damian slides in front of Steph’s new friend, a protective posture. Good. Keeping an eye on the unarmed friendlies.

Steph says, “Go easy on them all, they’ve swallowed mind control thingies. Also, if I’m such a bad assassin, why do I have this cool new toy?” She brandishes a pink hairbrush. With a twang, it sprays darts into a clump of skullgirls. They go down.

“What?” Damian protests. “That’s stupid. Is that from here?”

“Grade-A spytech, babeyyyy!”

“That’s insulting. A real assassin would never—”

“Cover me,” Dick says suddenly, making a break for the school’s front door. He’d seen a flash from an upstairs window, illuminating the face of the Deputy Headmistress—exactly the woman he wants to flush out. Preferably while she’s watching her students go down like dominos.

He’s halfway across the lawn, cape pulling in the wind behind him, when he hears Steph shriek.

He spins on his heel, stomach lurching, and takes in the tableau in an instant: Steph’s new friend—the one she’d wanted to save—holding a hand over Damian’s mouth, her body locked around his in a combat hold. 

It takes Dick another instant—too long, too long—to put the pieces together. They’ve swallowed mind control thingies, Steph had said.

He’s too far out to see if Damian swallows. Distance yawns between them.

Before he can make a sound, someone makes it for him: Steph shouts in an alien fury. She leaps clear across the fray and slams the girl to the ground, elbow driving into her neck. She rolls to her feet and props her boot, none too gently, on her collarbone.

“You swallowed one!” she shouts down at her, a heartbroken kind of rage. “Why did you have to—”

Dick’s sprinting across the lawn in the meantime, roundhousing the last remaining skullgirl on his way to Damian, his heart beating triple-time. There are contingencies, there have to be, they can fix whatever’s happened—

Damian’s hunched over the grass, his body shuddering. When Dick tries to grab his shoulders, he slips out from beneath his hold and stumbles away. The boy puts several yards of space between the two of them, then wavers, blinking in the starlight like he’s forgotten what to do next. 

“Dami,” Steph says. She leaves her captive, stretches a hand toward him. “Hey—”

Damian’s gaze focuses on her. He moves like he’s going to rush her headlong, no grace in his charge, his boots flinging garden-soft dirt into the air.

Steph braces for impact: a defensive posture. No room for aggression in her body, and Dick thinks of practicing that strange pacifist combat style on the mats with Damian—the art of biding time.

Then Damian stops short in front of her. For a second, he just looks confused. Then he doubles over and pukes on her boots.

Unconscious skullgirls litter the yard around them. A gentle breeze stirs the tree, and the light in the second floor window, almost shamefacedly, winks out. 

“Oh,” Steph says faintly, her hand resting on Damian’s shoulder. “Oh, okay. Gross.”

The boy wipes his mouth and groans, more put-upon than distressed. As Dick approaches he sees double: one Damian hunched over here, another pinned by a stake to a tree in the manor graveyard, fighting Slade for control of his spine. He shakes the vision off before it can make him feel any sicker.

“What just happened?” he asks, terser than he means to. He grips Damian’s arm.

“Child’s play,” Damian grits out, his voice tattered. “An early League lesson: removing poison from the digestive system by forcing the body to—”

“—to yerk all over my shoes?” Steph moans. “Oh my god!”

Then she crushes Damian to her chest in a hug that could grind bones. He flails against her, shouting miscellaneous syllables of protest.

“You’re disgusting!” she tells him, squeezing harder. “You’re the worst! Oh my god, imagining you as a little mind-control zombie is giving me hives. You’d be unstoppable.” 

Damian slaps at her shoulder. “I am unstoppable!” 

Dick rests a hand on Damian’s back. After a deep breath, he gives a fragile grin. “Good thing for all of us you’re right about that.”

He catches Steph’s eye over the boy’s head. She gives him a sympathetic grimace, then shrugs towards the sad pool of vomit on the grass beside her. A white wafer floats there, more-or-less intact. They’ll run tests in the lab, but things could have been so much worse—if Damian were a less incredible kid.

He watches Steph’s erstwhile friend pull herself to her knees as though to sneak away. Without looking, Steph fires her new dart brush and the unconscious body falls.

She pats Damian on the head and murmurs something that sounds suspiciously like comfort. Damian’s ears go red.

Later, once they’ve ransacked the Deputy Headmistress’s abandoned office and found some encrypted files of interest—once Steph’s debriefed them on the terrifying initiation ritual in the tower and the cult-like demands of Leviathan—Dick and Damian speed home over the Atlantic.

“Second time to London in what, a few months?” Dick murmurs over the gentle sound of the engine.

Damian shrugs, sipping halfheartedly on a can of root beer from the school vending machine.

Dick looks at him sidelong, gently pressing his fingers into the boy’s elbow. “You good?” 

“This just tastes like vomit now,” Damian says.

Then, after a few moments of staring out the window: “I...didn’t want to be someone else’s weapon.”

Dick’s grip tightens on Damian’s arm. It lingers there.

Damian takes another sip. Frowning, he says, “The problem is, you wouldn’t stand a chance against me. You’d be endangered by my superiority. That’s why I can’t let this kind of thing happen.”

Dick thinks of Damian swaying away from him, the wafer just entering his system. He’d tried to put as much space between himself and his allies as possible.

“Didn’t,” Dick says.

“What?”

“You didn’t let it happen.”

Damian’s gaze flickers up to his, drinking in something from Dick’s face. Tentatively, he mirrors Dick’s gesture from earlier: fingers pressing into the skin of Dick’s elbow, a brief pressure. Then, with stiff finality, he goes back to looking out the window.

The conversation feels unfinished, but not cut short. More like putting a book down with the paragraph marked for later. 

Dick fiddles with the radio; puts on a Metric song. Gimme sympathy / after all of this is gone. 

He thinks of risk and control and Jason and children as the grey of the horizon lightens toward dawn.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“You can’t ground me for something that isn’t my fault!” Damian paces the Bunker like a cornered wildcat, all bared teeth and muscles coiled to spring. “How dare you treat your partner with such disrespect!”

Dick massages his temples. He leans against the lab table with an exhaustion that numbs out his fingertips. “It’s not a punishment. You know that.”

“Oh, really? Then why so quick to hide me away instead of solving the problem?” 

“We are solving the—”

“Idiot. You can’t solve anything without me!”

“I’m sorry,” Dick snaps, “but when I’m the one with a mysterious half-billion bounty on his head, then maybe you can call the shots. But not today. You’re staying off the streets until we figure this out.”

Dick is really starting to hate owing Jason favors. His own resources—his own informants and criminal contacts—hadn’t told him that someone wanted Robin dead. Instead, the Red Hood had showed up at a warehouse crime scene long enough to utterly contaminate it and then departed through an upstairs window—but not before implying that every merc in Gotham would be after Robin for a prize that sweet.

“Thought you knew how to watch your six,” he’d said. His new mask fit close to his skull and actually left space for the eyes, more Man in the Iron Mask than red popsicle. Without the metal helmet to make his words echo, they came out blunt. “I thought Bruce was mediocre, but this is something else.”

That stung. Jason knows how to twist the knife. Maybe dying does that to you.

Still: interesting that he’d wanted Dick to know. Something’s got him on edge.

Damian makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. He kicks a computer chair, sending it skidding across the metal floor.

“Hey, cool it!” Dick grabs his shoulder. “We just need a week to figure out who did this.”

Damian shoves him off. “You’re clipping the wings of your best asset. Let me help.”

“You can’t. Everyone’s trying to kill you.”

“Then let them come! At least then we can interrogate them.”

Dick feels his own lips curling back into a snarl—feels, briefly, like Damian’s mirror. “I’m not risking you as bait.”

“It’s the obvious tactical choice."

“If you two are done,” Tim says loudly from his spot hunched over a laptop, “I’ve found something useful.”

“What is it?” Dick and Damian say at the same time—Dick commanding, Damian annoyed. They eye each other with suspicion for a moment longer before turning to watch Tim throw his findings up on the big screen.

“Whoever set the bounty covered their tracks pretty well, but they have an overlapping off-shore account with the person or entity paying for all those spy-girls out of St. Hadrian’s.”

“Sloppy,” Damian snorts.

“Or a trap,” Dick adds. “Timmy, how certain are you?”

“Like ninety-nine percent. Rounded down.”

Dick squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Okay, so. This means that Leviathan—whatever it is—wants Robin dead.”

Tim nods. “And that’s a problem. From what we’re seeing, on manpower alone Leviathan is massive. They’ve got fingers in pies all over the world, and nobody knows what they want.”

“They recognize a threat when they see one,” Damian says. “Which is why you should let me—”

“Damian,” Dick says sharply. 

Damian stops talking, but Dick can feel the boy’s eyes boring angry holes into the back of his t-shirt. 

He pays close attention to his own hands at his sides; holds them loose and open.

“Thank you,” he says as calmly as he can muster. “We’re just trying to help keep you safe, alright? Everyone is.”

He can’t help glancing at Tim, who grimaces a little but doesn’t contradict him. 

Then he looks back at Damian and musters a smile. “Trust me, okay? I know you’d want me to do the same if our places were reversed.”

“That would be different,” Damian mutters. “Batman shouldn’t get hurt for Robin.”

Dick swallows. He pictures Damian hunched in the infirmary chair after Poison Ivy’s acid had nearly taken off Batman’s face. The boy had said: It’s stupid for Batman to throw himself into harm’s way.

But before Dick has a chance to push back on any of that, Babs’ face pops up in the corner of the computer screen. The smudges under her eyes are more pronounced than usual. She puts down what looks like a half-eaten tuna sandwich before saying, “The encrypted files you found at St. Hadrian’s weren’t all junk after all.”

Dick sinks into his chair. “Good. Since the Deputy Headmistress didn’t destroy them when she ran, I thought maybe they were grocery lists or something.”

“She probably didn’t realize what she was giving away.” Babs’ smirk goes a little self-satisfied, and Dick’s heart skips a beat from sheer fondness. “Combine a utility bill under a false name with a target’s imperfect cyber hygiene and eventually you can end up watching from a corporate security goon’s smart glasses as his boss gets lured into a weird ritual dinner with Leviathan’s elite.”

Her smile teeters, then falls. “That’s the good news: we know who Leviathan is now. But that’s also kind of the bad news.”

An image appears on the screen: a woman dressed in theatrical rags, a withered skull mask hiding her features. Behind her chair, a monster of a man looms: bigger than even Tar from the bead cult, wearing some kind of gas mask. Looking at him—at the both of them—sends an odd foreboding tingling down Dick’s spine.

“That’s…” Damian says faintly. His eyes are trained on the woman—the one that wants him dead.

Babs sighs. It’s a heavy sound. “No point in beating around the bush about it.”

The photo is replaced with one taken perhaps a few seconds later—once Talia has removed her mask.

Dick finds Damian on the balcony as the sun dips toward the horizon. He’s hunched over his notebook, pencil gripped too firmly in his hand. Whatever he’s drawing, it’s not a scene of peace.

Dick leans against the balcony railing, sifting through possible avenues of conversation. Damian hasn’t said much since the Bunker. Not that Dick could blame him—he himself is having trouble coming up with reassurances that could possibly address “Turns out your mom wants you dead, and she doesn’t care how it happens.”

A bounty seems...gauche for an al Ghul. Impersonal. Empty of symbolic viscera. Dick’s insides feel just as empty.

In the end, Damian speaks first. 

“I don’t believe the al Ghuls want me dead.”

Dick wets his lips for a moment, hesitating. Then: “She put a bounty on your head.”

Damian rips a page out of his notebook and crumples it in his fist. “The al Ghuls understand my capabilities better than anyone else alive. They would not believe mere mercenaries and street thugs could destroy me.”

The al Ghuls. Not “Talia.” Not “Mother.” Trying to gain distance, maybe, even though there’s no sign that Ra’s is involved with Leviathan. Talia seems to be acting on her own.

“I don’t know what she’s trying to do, then,” Dick says honestly. “I don’t know what she wants.”

“Father would know,” Damian says evenly, and Dick feels an unwarranted twist in his gut. “He knew my family better than anyone.”

Dick crouches down in front of Damian’s patio recliner. “You don’t feel like you know her?”

“I do,” Damian says sharply. “Or at least, I did. She’s my mother. For all her faults, she…” He shakes his head. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m sorry,” Dick says, and Damian scowls down at him. 

“Your sympathy is useless. Put your energy into stopping them.” A bitter note curls his consonants. 

Dick tries to take his hand, but Damian pulls it away. “She still—she’s never…” The boy swallows. “I want to be alone.”

“Okay,” Dick says faintly. “Be careful, okay? Come in before it gets dark.”

Damian doesn’t answer. He goes back to drawing until his pencil’s lead snaps beneath the pressure of his lines.

Chapter Text

3:16am

Strange shadows play on the sewer walls, old brick faded to black-brown with moisture and age. Dick curses under his breath, his cape trailing through calf-deep sludge he doesn’t want to think about. 

It doesn’t matter. Anger clambers around his ribcage, fighting against panic for pride of place. Damian is in for it when they get home.

A flash of red down a side tunnel—is that Damian? Rather than alerting any unknown assailants with a shout, Dick presses a silent call alarm on his utility belt. 

If the boy receives the signal, he doesn’t answer. Of course not. What’s the point of sneaking out of a grounding if you’re going to be respectful about it?

Dick grits his teeth. He follows until the water’s reached his thighs.

There’s a non-zero chance he’ll have nightmares about the last couple of hours: coming back from a lead on Leviathan to find Damian gone from the Bunker. Finding the Robin costume left behind. Horrific déjà vu drilling a hole in his chest, layering panic over his every thought: he’s left, he’s run away again, he’s not safe—

Then: Alfred talking him down, pointing out a missing utility belt and the empty parking space where Robin’s motorcycle used to be.

The kid thinks he’s being covert. Operating incognito. Like that solves a bounty on Robin’s head. Like that justifies leaving Wayne Tower without permission, when all Dick wants to do is keep him safe. When all of Gotham wants the boy dead, and all Dick can think about is—

A distant sound echoes up the tunnel behind him: cheering, hard and military. Like an army of idealists after a great speech. A shiver goes down Dick’s spine.

“Now you see why I’m here,” Damian’s voice hisses from somewhere above him. The boy drops down into the muck with a splash; it reaches his torso. It takes Dick a moment to understand what he’s seeing through the gloom: an unfamiliar costume in black and red, slitted eyes glowing crimson. “I found Leviathan.”

“I grounded you,” Dick says, low and deadly level. “Your life is at risk, Robin.”

“It’s Redbird,” Damian snaps. “And we have bigger things to worry about right now.”

“Don’t try that with me. We’re leaving.”

“What? No we’re not. Don’t you see, I found them. They’re here to make an alliance with a faction of Gotham’s underground. I’ve seen them—that brute in the gas mask is here. Their leader might be, too.”

Their leader. Not my mother. Damian still can’t make himself say it.

Dick’s stomach twists hard—congeals into something cold and heavy. “It doesn’t matter. She wants you dead. We get out, call reinforcements. Maybe then—”

“No!” Damian says, grabbing at his new form-fitted hood like he’d pull his hair out if he could reach it. “You’re not listening to me.”

“You disobeyed a direct order, you put yourself at risk—”

“Shut up!” His shout echoes down the tunnel.

Dick winces. They both freeze.

After twenty seconds of no sound but filthy water trickling down old walls, Dick says, “Do not tell me you did that on purpose.”

“I’m not an idiot, Batman.”

“But you want them to find us. You want to fight them; you don’t care about yourself or what anyone else might be trying to do to protect you so long as—”

A rumbling down the tunnel. A disquiet in the water.

“Shit,” Dick says, just as a mass of green scales break the surface, sending sewage flying. Killer Croc’s eyes glow yellow in the dark.

“You’re on the wrong turf, Bats,” he says, voice ricocheting dangerously down the brickwork. 

Dick does the math as fast as he can: Killer Croc on one side, a mind-control-murder-illuminati on the other. Batman and Robin—Redbird—could take one or the other, but not without injuries. Then they’d be stuck in an enclosed space with whoever they’d left for last. 

The best they can do is get out. Fast.

“We’re not the only ones,” he tries, flashing Damian a hand signal behind his back. “There’s quite a party happening back there, you didn’t notice?”

Croc shrugs, a grin spreading slow across his stiff face. “Wanna see what happens. You, though? I’d rather chew on you.”

He lunges like an orca, leading with teeth—horrifying rows of them, coming down in the spot where Dick’s shoulder was a moment before. Damian’s already thrown two Redbird-disguised batarangs. One falls uselessly from the crumbling wall into the water, but the other wedges in and stays. A blast rocks the tunnel, sending bricks flying. Croc roars his pain.

Dick and Damian struggle to sprint away in putrid water that’s suddenly streaming hard against them—toward the hole in the wall. Whoops.

“Redbird,” he pants when they make it around the corner. “This is important. How far out from us is Leviathan?” The voices had seemed distant—but even now, he hears them raised in confusion.

“Fifty, sixty meters,” Damian says. Sharp, all business. Maybe he thinks he’s getting what he wants.

“You saw them, right? Tell me what turns to avoid if we want to get out of here unseen.”

Redbird snarls at him, red eyes aglow, and for a moment Dick thinks he’s going to protest. Then Croc’s thundering footsteps pick up behind them and he spits, “Fine. Two left turns, skip a tunnel, then take a right and—and another left. That’s where they are.”

Except Talia’s people definitely heard the explosive batarang. They’re moving now, for sure. Like Dick and Damian should be. 

“Let’s go.” He pulls up an AR overlay—a map of the sewer system. As they sprint through shallower and shallower water, he marks the place Damian said Leviathan would be. He swears. “We’ll stay as far from them as possible, but the best exit is practically behind them. We have to go around.”

Two left turns, then a right. Already a closer shave than Dick wants it to be.

This is probably the closest Leviathan will let them get for awhile. A part of him wants to stay and fight, damn the risks, damn their lack of strategy, damn Killer Croc bearing down behind them. But Damian—

Already, Dick’s formulating the words he’s going to have with Damian when they get home: Don’t you understand? he imagines himself saying. Can’t you see now? If you’d talked to me, if we’d gone in together—

He corrects himself. No. Damian’s grounded. Dick would have come here alone if Damian had tipped him off. (Which, of course, is precisely why he didn’t.)

The left turn Dick had wanted to take is grated shut; no time to cut through the metal. No choice but to take a right. It’s fine. The voices are softer now, and they’ve stayed clear of Damian’s Leviathan-zone and any logical path the group might take away from it. Croc's footsteps are fading too. An injury from the explosion?

Dick makes another right turn and slams bodily into a massive fist.

He goes down hard. Stinking water rushes past his ears. The brute with the gas mask stands over him, the red line of his eyes smoldering. Dick chokes out a breath, winded even under the armor. He scrambles to his feet—or tries. Gas mask brings two fists down on the back of his neck, sending him sprawling again with an impossible strength. Flecks of god-knows-what coat Dick’s chin. 

A boot, as though for good measure, collides with his chest.

His brain churns, light and color. For a wild moment, he wonders if Damian did this on purpose: led him to the fight instead of to an escape. He feels instantly sick with himself—more than the nausea of pain.

Damian. He doesn’t hear Damian.

“Heretic,” Talia’s voice says above him—smooth and superior, cool as silk. “Let the boy kneel.”

The hulk obeys, hoisting Dick up onto his knees. 

Damian—red with anger, lips trembling—stands close enough to Talia that his shoulder blades brush her dress. 

She holds a black knife to his throat. Damian has one just like it.

Chapter Text

The tunnels echo, wet and hollow.

Gone are the skull mask and rags. Talia is back to full glory in beryl green—a dress pinned up around the knees for cleanliness, even as she stands without flinching in ten inches of muck.

“The detective is slower than his predecessor,” she remarks at large to her companions: the hulk—Heretic—and several anonymous guards who look clipped straight from the League of Shadows catalog. Whoever she was here to meet for negotiations has slipped off into the night. 

Her steady knife presses further into Damian’s throat. “We will forgive him for it.”

Damian jerks his head back into her as though to free himself, sending Dick’s heart leaping in his throat. It comes to nothing: there’s nowhere for him to go but into Talia’s arms. She keeps him restrained. The knife makes no errant motion; no accidental cut. Dick hopes this means she’s playacting.

What’s visible of Damian’s face beneath the Redbird hood pales. “You—you villain! You don’t know who you’re challenging!”

Talia’s cheek twitches: an expression Dick recognizes. “You pretend not to know me. Ridiculous boy. As if I would not know my own son.” Her eyes flash to Dick. “No matter how childish his costume, or how foolish his mission.”

Dick bridles under her gaze. “Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think.”

Heretic grabs his shoulder: rough, a warning. His hand is a vise. 

How can one man be so strong? He can’t be human; some al Ghul science project maybe. The spikes rising from his gas mask look strangely like the ears on the Batsuit. Why would—

“Release us, Mother.” Damian’s voice sounds strained. “Stop this nonsense.”

Talia looks down at her son thoughtfully—placidly—and Dick’s blood boils.

He says, “Are you really heartless enough to kill your own kid? That’s low, Talia, even for you."

She laughs, then—not as though Dick has said something funny. More like she’s party to an irony he’ll never understand. Her palm moves over Damian’s shoulder—smooths his cape, knuckles his jaw. 

Damian’s teeth are bared, his shoulders heaving. But the pallor hasn’t left his cheeks, and his mother’s ring leaves an indent there. 

“I’m not going to kill him. No one is,” Talia says. Proudly, she adds: “No one could.”

Damian had said on the balcony: I don’t believe the al Ghuls want me dead. Dick hadn’t believed him.

Silence takes them, and Dick realizes he’d been expecting Damian to interject: to shout, to demand answers. Instead, he stands with his small fists curled at his sides. He breathes carefully against the knife at his throat.

Maybe he hadn’t been so sure his mother wanted him alive after all. Not until this moment.

“You’re not going to run if I release you,” Talia tells him. It’s not a question. If anything, it’s a threat, made clear by Heretic shifting his bulk to loom more dramatically over Dick’s kneeling body. 

Good—that’s good. If Talia’s relying on her goon to subdue him, then all Dick has to do is be better than the goon is. Especially once that goddamn knife is far away from Damian’s throat.

Damian gives her a stiff nod, and she draws back. The knife flashes in her hand—black as a night without stars—and she presses a finger to its tip.

“It is said that the blade of an al Ghul follows its victims,” she says. A pearl of her blood runs down the obsidian. “It hangs above their hearts at night. Like a guillotine. Like a dark star.” 

Her gaze travels from Damian’s red-masked eyes to his pressed lips to his set jaw. “Do you think you can escape such a blade, my son?”

“A thousand times over,” he tells her. “Do your worst.”

She smiles. The blade disappears into the folds of her dress. “But can your companions? The ones you follow night and day?”

Damian flushes. A sharp breath escapes him. 

Talia leans forward, her hands on her knees. She brings herself down to his eye level and leaves no space between them. “There’s nothing for you in Gotham but death. You may evade each mediocre excuse for a contract killer, but they will keep coming for the rest of your life. All it will take is one stray bullet to kill someone by your side. You will grow tired. You will fail to protect them. You know this.”

“The bounty. You’re—you’re trying to wear me down,” Damian says hoarsely. “Force my hand. But why?”

A hesitation, feather-soft as a knuckle against a child’s cheek. Then: “Come home with me. Take your place by my side and this  will all be over.”

“You disowned me!”

“I am ready to forgive.” She tilts her head, hair streaming like water down her shoulder. “I was so wrong to give up on you.” She swallows. “I—I hope you can forgive me.”

“Mother,” Damian says, voice cracking—but it’s the kind of sentence that doesn’t have an ending. It’s a plea in itself. His back is to Dick, his face hidden. All Dick can see is the hunch of his shoulders and one of Talia’s steady green eyes.

“We have a greater purpose,” she says. “Leviathan is just the beginning. The world on its knees, just as I’ve always promised.”

Dick can’t stop himself. “He’s not your puppet! He’s not—”

Wham. The world goes sideways and he’s splashing into the shallow muck again, his ear ringing. His vision whites out—by the time he’s back, Heretic has a boot propped on his shoulder. 

No good. Concussion at minimum. Fuck, the brute is strong. He’d been holding back before.

“—dare you!” Damian is saying. “Mother, call him off!"

“This is the fate of all nothings who dare stand between my son and his destiny. It would be a service to you to eliminate this—”

“If you have any true affection for me, you’ll stop this! You’ll treat him as a respected enemy, not like—like this!”

Another silence, broken only by the disapproving click of Talia’s tongue. Then Heretic removes his boot. Dick stumbles to his feet, sick of the scent of sewage, sick of being patient. 

Damian must be on the same page because his next words come too fast, half furious and half devastated. “Enough of this. Enough. I understand that—that you’re honoring me. But I can’t leave. I don’t want to. I have more to do as Robin.”

“My darling, you outgrew Robin the moment your father died.” The words have a disconcerting finality to them. Her eyes move to Heretic’s. 

Dick sees the hulk move out of the corner of his eye, and he lunges—a clumsy, dizzy assault that nevertheless takes Heretic off guard for its speed, sending him stumbling back against the wall. 

“Go, Damian,” he slurs, dodging out from between Heretic’s massive swinging arms. 

Damian curses; grabs Dick by the elbow. A flash of a batarang—an explosion of bricks, raining from above. The two of them splashing through shallow water, away.

He doesn’t hear Talia—or her guards, or Heretic—coming behind them. They don’t even try to pursue. 

“Your fighting spirit honors me, Damian,” Talia’s voice echoes. “I look forward to seeing what you've learned."

No sooner has Dick deposited all of his bones into the driver's seat of the Batmobile and punched the autopilot does Damian start shouting.

“Why did you let him get the best of you that way? That was a pathetic showing, pathetic—it’s no wonder my mother thinks I’m in the care of an incompetent!” 

“Something wrong with him,” Dick grunts. “Hits too hard. Head’s still spinning.”

“Then you should have been smarter! You shouldn’t have goaded him.”

“You’re one to talk,” Dick says through his teeth. Even rummaging for painkillers under the seat makes his body scream. He inputs the medical attention code for Alfred instead.

“You shouldn’t have followed me! You shouldn’t have even been there!”

“Then maybe don’t sneak out with a bounty on your head and I won’t have to come after you.”

Damian reels back against the headrest, a dawning horror on his face. He grips the door handle, his knuckles turning white.

Quickly as he can with a sluggish tongue, Dick says: “Hey, hey—no guilty face. You couldn’t have known it’d turn out like that. We took a wrong turn. Couldn’t help it.”

Damian moves his lips, staring into the middle distance.

“What was that?”

“I—” his voice cracks.

Dick waits, trying to keep his eyes open. After that incredibly fucked-up confrontation with his mother, anything could be spooking the boy. Or everything. It’s more of a matter of what comes to the surface first.

Finally, Damian shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Mother’s telling the truth. I don’t begrudge her her actions—she’s treating me as a worthy opponent. But the attacks aren’t ever going to stop coming, and you’ll be in the crosshairs. So will Brown, and Pennyworth, and—and anyone else.” Like an afterthought: “Drake.”

“Worthy oppo...Jesus. Dames, we’ll talk about all that tomorrow. Right now I just want to get you home and—”

“It’s important,” Damian says, sharp and loud enough to make Dick wince. “People keep getting hurt.”

Dick’s head is pounding. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Damian clicks his tongue dismissively, so like his mother. He doesn’t answer.

Dick pictures the boy on the St. Hadrian’s lawn, rushing Steph under the wafer’s influence. Pictures the way he’d held Dick’s hand in the infirmary after Poison Ivy’s acid, explaining that Dick shouldn’t have protected him. Pictures the metal spine.

His tongue is fuzzy in his mouth. “We lived.” This feels like the wrong thing to say, but other words have deserted him.

“No thanks to your own efforts,” Damian says coldly. 

Dick slumps against the window, relishing the cool press against his skin. He closes his eyes, feeling Damian scowl beside him. City street lights flicker through his eyelids.

After what feels like a long time, Damian pokes a finger into his palm. “You need to stay awake until we get to Pennyworth.”

“Mm.”

The finger doesn’t relent: poke-poke-poke.

“Grayson?”

“Nuh.”

Aiming for blasé and missing, Damian says: “We took a wrong turn because I misremembered the tunnels.” 

Dick frowns against the window. That makes more sense than any of his other theories. Damian’s short-term memory isn’t always up to spec.

“You understand?” Damian says calmly. “You’re like this because I made a mistake. And because my mother was there.”

Again, Dick reaches for comforting words that seem to spool away from him in the darkness. He settles on, “You’ll remember stuff better eventually.”

“This is useless,” Damian mutters in a terrible and unfamiliar tone, and Dick so badly wants to ask him a question, but he doesn’t remember what that question is, and his head is too heavy and the stars spin under his eyelids and the night unweaves and re-weaves into an endlessly spinning bead on the tip of a black knife.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

“Miss Gordon received a tip,” Alfred says crisply, moving his retinoscope from one side of Dick’s field of vision to the other. The bright light leaves squiggles behind his eyelids. “Whatever deal Talia al Ghul hoped to broker in the sewers four days ago fell through. At least some of the denizens of Gotham’s underworld remain willing to resist her intrusion.”

Dick grips the edge of the exam table. “Doesn’t do us a lot of good if half the politicians at City Hall are her sleeper agents. Or under mind control.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Alfred says with an edge of warning. His eyes glide meaningfully to the Batcomputer chair, where Damian hunches with his legs pulled up beneath him. “Hope is not lost. It’s important to remember that.”

“Right.” Dick runs a distracted hand through his hair, ignoring the ache at his temple. “You and Babs leaving me out of the loop now?”

“The least I can do is triage information on your behalf until you are less concussed.”

“Not necessary,” Dick grunts as he slides off the table. “Do I pass, doc?”

“In that you are recovering normally for a man who is, I say again, concussed? Yes, for now. Kindly try to vomit in the toilet next time; it’s easier to clean than the tub.”

“Uh-huh.” 

Throughout this exchange, Damian’s failed to look at them. He crumples up a page in his sketchbook and starts again with a jagged line like lightning. 

“What do you say we take an ice cream break?” Dick tries. 

No response: the boy starts shading in the top half of his paper. No form, no image—just thick grey pencil lines. Stark. 

Dick hides a wince. He looks to Alfred for help—an instinct ingrained through long years of a wise hand on his shoulder.

Alfred regards Damian thoughtfully, peeling off his sanitary gloves. “I think I’ll start working on dinner. I’d welcome a helping hand in the kitchen.” 

Then he heads for the elevator. 

Fair enough. Alfred’s specialty in Damian-wrangling has traditionally been the light touch; the open invitation. The neutral tone that says: You are welcome to come as you are, or you are welcome to refuse. No offense will be taken or given.

The kitchen, then, becomes an open place: no wordless pressure or charged symbolism. Maybe that’s what Damian needs; he’s been withdrawn for the past few days and Dick hasn’t been lucid enough to press the issue the way he should. 

He sits on the desk by Damian’s side, hooking an ankle around the chair’s base. “Soooo…yes on the ice cream? I’m craving rum raisin, weirdly. Does that happen when you hit your head?”

“I can’t leave the Tower,” Damian says bitterly.

“I’ll bring it to you. Or we’ll get to Steph to make a run; she’d love to see you.”

“I doubt that.”

An echo of anger, like a shout in a sewer, twinges through his head. “Uh, what? Is this about what your mom said, because I can guarantee that nobody thinks just being near you means insta-death. She’s crazy if she thinks—”

“My mother,” Damian says, green eyes flashing hard beneath black lashes, “is not crazy. She is doing what she thinks is right.”

“I…that’s not what I meant. She just—she put a bounty on your head. I can’t treat that as normal.”

“She knew I wouldn’t die. Giving lethal challenges to a worthy opponent—someone who can handle it—is well within the bounds of League honor.”

For a moment Dick thinks he’s going to vomit again. He sits there with his stupid mouth hanging open while words scatter from him like they had in the Batmobile. Then they come roaring uncontrollably back: “Fuck the League! Seriously, fuck them. They did terrible things to you.”

Damian stands in one impatient motion, sending his chair rolling back. “Under the orders of my grandfather!”

“The whole organization’s fucked. Nobody should have to go through what you did.”

“Maybe they were as cruel as you say. Maybe”—a sharp breath—“maybe they did…bad things. To children.” He swallows. “Maybe it—it’s better here. For me. But Grayson, my mother grew up there.”

“She’s an adult now.”

“Yes, just as I would have become. Do you expect her to follow any other code?”

“I expect her to care about her son!”

Damian rears back as though slapped. His lip curls. “I’m never going to throw her under the bus for you. I’m never going to—to wish she was dead, or that I never knew her. Is that what you want? For me to hate her?”

“No,” Dick breathes. He forces himself to stay seated on the desk, closer to the boy’s eye level. “No, of course that’s not what I want.” 

Damian snorts. 

“I mean it! I just…”

Speechless again. Nausea hits him for the thousandth time today. The lights in the Bunker are suddenly too bright, and Damian is looking at him with a fury he doesn’t know how to reconcile.

Finally he says, “She’s your mom. You get to choose how you feel about her.” With a bitter, breathy laugh: “You definitely understand her better than I do.” 

That’s an understatement. Damian had seemed glad that the bounty was a weird powerplay instead of a genuine murder attempt. Dick isn’t sure which would be worse.

But Damian’s looking at him like he expects something more, so Dick obliges.

“The thing is, I’m never going to be able to forgive her. For trying to control you. For the kind of ‘training’ you went through.” He swallows, hard. “I love you too much.”

Damian’s flinch at the l-word is immediate. “You’re the one who seems crazy to me.”

“Dames—”

“Go back to heaving over the toilet; that’s about as much as you’re good for.” He stalks off towards the elevator, shoulders tight.

Dick grimaces, his head throbbing again. “Don’t do that! Don’t—don’t detach yourself like that. It won’t work. It’ll still hurt, and then how am I supposed to help you? Just be honest with me and we can—”

“Honest? ” The elevator doors open. Damian keeps his hand on the button. “Stop pretending you don’t see the one obvious solution here and then we’ll talk honesty. Hypocrite.”

“What solution? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Talk to me. Come on.”

“Typical,” Damian mutters, and the doors close behind him.

“West side is clear,” Steph tells him over the comms that night. “No sign of impending Leviathan apocalypse; it would be nice if they could give us a heads-up.”

“Copy.” Dick leans back in the computer chair, trying not to picture Damian crouched here hours earlier.

The boy hadn’t shown up to help with dinner, though he’d accepted a butterscotch cookie with what Alfred described as “reverant melancholy.” 

“It was strange,” the butler had told Dick, each word chopped shorter than usual. “As though he were accepting a rare gift. He was very grateful, though of course expressed in his usual brusque fashion. Then he closed his bedroom door.”

“—listening?” Steph says.

Dick jumps. “Sorry. I was just…” He rubs the stars out of his eyes.

“I’m just wondering if you know why Damian sent me a sketch of—well, you don’t know her. The girl I tried to save at St. Hadrian’s.”

“Uh…no. That’s weird. Did he talk to her at all?”

“Not that I know of.” Her hesitation is clear over the line. Then her voice comes back choked: “It’s a really nice drawing.”

It’s hard, Dick knows: the ones you can’t save swirling around the inside of your head.

Cookies and drawings: gifts made by hand. Apologies, sometimes. 

What’s swirling around inside Damian’s head?

Chapter Text

3:16am

Muddled dreams of beads and birds and Battleship weigh him down against the cool mattress. He wakes with two impressions: that his sleep has been heavy—concussed exhaustion like a fox trap—and that someone is standing in the doorway of his room.

“Dames?” he says groggily. The boy is small and still, backlit by a hallway nightlight. 

Dick stifles a yawn in his pillow; fights to keep his eyes open. “Hey—Dames, what do you need? C’mere.”

“I don’t…” Damian says quietly. He wavers, almost imperceptible: League solidity giving way to a strange tentativeness that makes him seem lighter. Ready to fall back. 

“C’mere,” Dick repeats, and extends a hand out of the covers.

Damian comes to the bedside like he can’t help it. Even as he does, he says: “I shouldn’t have woken you. This was a mistake.”

“S’never,” Dick says. “Never was.”

He catches the hem of dream images, then startles back awake. No real time has passed—indecision’s still written across Damian’s every feature, and something in Dick’s heart cracks for him like playing Battleship with a boy in a dark dream.

“Come lie down,” he says. “Just rest here awhile.”

“I’m not a child,” Damian scowls.

His arms travel up, cross over his chest—hands gripping elbows—then fall back to his sides. Dick’s eyes track the motion, and he notices for the first time the warm hoodie, the jeans. The boots. Street clothes.

He grabs Damian’s wrist with sudden wakeful urgency. “Hey—you said—remember you said you wouldn’t run off again. After Birdie left you told me that, right? You said that.” His tongue feels heavy in his mouth. The words taste like begging, and he remembers being a small boy in Bruce’s doorway at night, deciding whether to wake him for a comfort that was hard to define.

“Damian?” he says when there’s no answer. He props himself up on the elbow. “Talk to me. Don’t do her work for her.”

Damian’s face looks blanched in the moonlight. His nose is scrunched into what might be supposed to be a snarl, but the space around his eyes is tight and his lips stumble to form words.

“I didn’t mean to come here,” he finally chokes out.

“I’m really glad you did.” Dick feels the boy’s pulse beneath his fingertips. Slowly, he says, “I told you once that I can’t put bars on your window.”

“You don’t have to,” Damian says, and the words sound resigned. “I’m—I’ll go back to bed.”

“Hey…” Dick tries to pull Damian towards him, but the boy breaks his hold and hurries back into the hallway, just a shadow at night.

Dick realizes, then, how his heart is pounding. He waits for three minutes or so, paralyzed, staring at the space on his ceiling where glow-in-the-dark stars would have been if he were younger.

Then he slips down the hallway himself and peers into Damian’s bedroom. The boy is a lump under the covers and a patch of tangled hair, Titus curled around him. 

The green boots lay halfway across the room from each other, as though thrown. But if Damian wanted to leave, nobody in the world could stop him. That’s the terror of it. 

“Go away, Grayson,” Damian says. He doesn’t sound angry, really. Just tired.

(Later, another dream: “Do I know really that?” Damian asks, plucking the little cruiser from his grid. Every peg is filled. Dick had just sunk it. “Did I know you wouldn’t hurt me? In the beginning. In the dark.”)

“It’s bad,” Babs says from the left side of the split screen. “It’s…we suspected Leviathan had full access to League cloning tech, but this is the kind of confirmation I really didn’t want.” 

Dick leans back in the computer chair, his head pounding. “Heretic. He’s not human.”

“Well yeah, one clobbering probably told you that much,” Tim says from the screen’s right side. His expression is somber, and he toys with the edge of his sleeve in a way that makes Dick nervous. There’s an unfamiliar cityscape behind him: horseshoe arches and intricate plasterwork.

“So…worse news than that?”

“Dick,” Babs says gently enough that his sense of foreboding doubles. “Where’s Damian? He needs to hear this, too.”

Dick’s stomach lurches, just as it has every time he’s let Damian out of his sight today. The pattern goes like this: Damian leaves a room, Dick contends with the dual fears of an assassination attempt or a desertion, then he turns a corner and Damian’s grabbing a pear from the refrigerator or something equally benign. Then Dick gets accused of hovering, Damian storms off, and the cycle starts again.

He glances meaningfully at Alfred. The butler nods and starts for the elevator.

“Tell me what you found,” he says finally, afraid he may already know the answer.

Tim says, “There’s a facility in Yemen that clones bodyguards. Talia brought genetic material to them—an embryo still in development, we think—and they force-grew it. Enhanced it.”

Dick pictures Damian after he was disowned—shoulders squared, marching into a private room with his mother. Seeking understanding. Finding instead a threat in the form of an immature clone of himself. “Oh, don’t tell me.”

“Can confirm,” Steph says, pushing into Tim’s screen. “Kind of wish I could un-confirm it. They grew him in a whale, Dick. Then from the looks of it, he fought his way out of the belly.” She makes a face that’s half nausea and half outrage.

“So Heretic is…” Dick says.

“Who I’m supposed to be,” Damian says from the elevator. Dick jumps.

The boy brushes Alfred’s hand from his shoulder. “And now he’s—I’m—going to kill all of you. To prove it to her.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Dick says automatically.

“If the contract killers who are after me don’t get you, Heretic certainly will,” Damian says blandly. “He wants her approval. He’ll do it for that alone.”

“How do you know that?” Tim asks.

Damian hoists himself up onto the chemistry table, legs dangling. He glares at his knees until Tim looks away.

“Maybe…it doesn’t matter?” Steph says. “The plan hasn’t changed, right? We protect Damian. We take Leviathan down.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Damian says. “The threats will keep coming.”

“We could fake your death,” Dick says as casually as he can muster. “Just until things cool off. Or we loop in the Justice League. I’ll try to find Cass, and once Tim and Steph get back to the States we can—”

“Do you have something on your mind, Damian?” Babs asks suddenly. Dick startles; looks up at her image. Her mouth is a thin line, her familiar green eyes sharp in a way he finds newly disconcerting: like seeing a favorite painting again after learning art history.

Damian’s fingers dig into his jeans. His face sets into a snarl. Dick’s stomach sinks.

In a voice too choked with rage for volume, he says, “You’re all dancing around the issue and I don’t understand why.”

“We’re trying to solve the issue,” Tim says. “If you’d just let us—”

“You’re not! You’re not trying to solve it, or else you would have said what you’re all thinking already!”

“What are you talking about? Do you think we’re lying about wanting to help you? Because seriously, Damian, I’m halfway across the world just so I can—”

“Send me back!” Damian’s face flushes a brilliant scarlet. “You’re all thinking it! That’s all any of us have been thinking about since this all started!” He leans forward like a man bowed in a strong wind, or like a boy with a stomachache. “Send me away!”

Dick rises from his chair. “Whoa, Dames—Dami—nobody’s thinking that.”

“I’m too dangerous!” Damian says, his voice cracking on the last word. “I can’t be here.”

Dick pictures Damian’s remote-control spine. The wafer at St. Hadrian’s. The obsidian knife on his dresser, matching his mother’s. A small and smug assassin in the Manor, proclaiming his brutality like it’s something to be proud of: Now that he’s experienced life with both legs broken at the knees—

And maybe it’s what Damian’s been waiting for, in some way, since the beginning. 

When they played Battleship: You’ll send me back to the League any day now. 

When they found his Robin assessment: Gathering evidence to send me back to the League, perhaps?

And before he ran away: If you want to send me back, just send me back!

And a thousand little moments before and since, like so many beads or pearls on the floor. Like so many birds flying away from a balcony.

Trust, Dick thinks again, has many facets. Some parts come quicker than others. Angles lay undiscovered until someone shines a light.

Damian is breathing hard up on the clean white table. He’s watching Dick defiantly. Daring him.

Dick takes a careful step forward. “Is that what you want? To go back?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want!”

Dick shakes his head: quick, sharp. Impulsively, he takes a knee in front of the table, a posture that seems to embarrass Damian. The boy looks away.

Dick watches Damian’s socks dangle in front of him. No shoes, even now.

“Do you believe,” he says, “we want you to go?”

Damian’s jaw works. His fingers drive into his knees.

The figures on the screen are silent. Out of the corner of his eye, Dick sees Alfred rest a hand against a chair as though to support himself.

“Dami,” Dick says again. “Do you still think we want you gone?”

After everything? he doesn’t say. Please don’t believe that after everything.

He looks up at the boy on the table in front of him—the round cup of his cheeks, the proud tilt of his chin. Sharp green eyes that won’t look at him, won’t look at him, until—

“No,” Damian sobs, and looks at him, and slides off the table and into Dick’s arms.

Stunned, Dick holds the boy tight to his chest. Sobs shake the little rib cage that feels suddenly fragile as a bird’s wing. Damian makes miserable, uncontrollable noises, muffled only by Dick’s sweater. 

“It’s okay,” Dick says faintly, slumping fully to the ground, holding Damian tighter than he’s ever been allowed before. His fingers wind instinctively through strands of black hair. “Hey. We’re never going to send you back, not for any reason. I’m sorry, I should’ve told you that every single day if that’s what it took.”

Damian crushes himself closer, wrapping his arms around Dick’s chest. He cries like a younger child would cry: like the world lives in his lungs and it’s all he can do to get it out.

Dick rests his chin on the boy’s head, his eyes prickling. He tries to take deep breath after deep breath, only to find that the room has shrunk too much to allow it: down to two warm bodies and a hard floor.

“I’m sorry,” Dick says hoarsely. He barely squeezes the words past the breaks in his voice. “I tried to make you understand I would protect you. I’m sorry.”

Damian pulls his head back minutely, only to slam it into Dick’s shoulder again. Insolent affection. Dick chokes on a wet laugh that feels undeserved. 

Alfred murmurs something to the others. Then he says—softly, or as softly as he ever does—“I believe we can handle things down here.”

It takes Dick a moment to parse his words into the kind suggestion they are. Then he struggles to his feet, pulling Damian up on his hip. The boy’s legs wrap around his waist like he fits there, and he flings his arms around Dick’s neck. He keeps his face buried in Dick’s sweater, like the world outside the wool is suddenly overwhelming.

Dick remembers being a small boy in Bruce’s doorway at night.

He takes Damian up the elevator, carries him down the hallway, nudges open his own bedroom door, lets them collapse on the bed and pulls the white sheet over them like sails, a canvas, a place of rest.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

They pull the sheet over their heads to create a soft cocoon. Cool and white, it filters daylight from the room beyond. 

Dick hovers in the shallows of sleep for awhile, surfacing whenever Damian nudges closer or presses his forehead to Dick’s arm. Then something shifts and they wake more fully—like swimmers finding land. They lie face-to-face, points of color in a white refuge. The two of them alone, the outside world reduced to muffled birdsong through closed windows. 

Something had changed down in the Bunker, in the moment Damian slid into his arms. Dick figures it as a kind of magic: Damian is watching him with eyes bright and wide, and it feels like walls falling away—the secret ones, the hidden ones, the ones Dick wouldn’t have been able to find walking a thousand years in the desert. A citadel, gates wide open. Something like the mutual understanding they’ve chased from the manor to the penthouse to a bird sanctuary on the edge of town and back again.

Something like knowing each other.

“You don’t want me to go back,” Damian murmurs, wonder in his voice.

“I don’t want you to go back,” Dick repeats, and smiles until his eyes water.

Later, when he’s clinging to this memory for strength in the hell that comes after, he won’t remember which of them started whispering first: secrets. Stories.

At first the words come awkward and stumbling. Damian tells him about the League: about the Year of Blood. About a creature named Goliath, tucked away on an island all alone. In return, Dick tells him about living in an empty mansion with a colossus of a man who sometimes was his father. About the Flying Graysons, about Blüdhaven, about how it felt when Jason died.

Soon, the words come natural as breath in sleep.

“You were always kind to me,” Damian murmurs with no self-consciousness. “Even in the beginning. But you didn’t understand anything.”

“I wish you were wrong.” Dick remembers walking a girl to the police station, so he says, “I didn’t get that to you, kindness felt like a hammer waiting to fall.”

Damian grips his wrist, hard. He swallows.

The tear tracks are dry on the boy’s cheeks. Dick feels concussion-heavy for a moment until he takes a deep breath, focusing: memorizing the wonder he sees on Damian’s face. The certainty Damian has in him.

“That night on the balcony,” the boy says. “When you were poisoned with the nutmeg. I don’t know what you thought was happening while you were being stupid and deranged, but you asked me—you kept asking me—if I knew you weren’t fighting me.”

Dick frowns, searching his memory for hallucinatory logic: dream-Damian had taunted and threatened him, but still he’d asked—again and again, in different words—if he was safe in the penthouse. If he was safe with Dick. How he could know. 

“I’m sorry,” Dick says finally. “It was probably freaky to see me acting like that.”

“I wasn’t scared,” Damian says quickly—but not, Dick thinks, defensively. “That’s the point.”

Dick waits, but nothing else seems forthcoming. That’s okay. Damian isn’t always good with words, but this time Dick thinks the boy said exactly what he meant to.

Damian had tossed the black knife aside that night. Then he’d stopped wearing his shoes to bed.

Dick pushes a hand through the boy’s hair. Then he presses his finger into the palm of Damian’s hand: like he does sometimes when he comes home to Damian pretending to be asleep in bed. Like Damian’s done to him while he dozes, injured, on the gurney. 

Damian starts to speak, then pauses. Whatever magic exists here is fading: the words seem to come harder for him. He tries, “Some things are…worse now. Before, if someone fell—if I lost them—I could keep going. I did it all the time. Now…”

“Now I’ve screwed it up,” Dick says wryly. 

Damian scoffs. “That’s what you do, Richard. That’s what you’ll always do for me.”

He wakes after sunset, disoriented by the dark. Damian’s gone from his side, but his anxiety doesn’t spike. The kid wouldn’t leave forever. They both know that now.

He rolls over and startles: Red Hood is sitting on his windowsill.

Dick stumbles to his feet, grasping for his escrima sticks where they’re tucked between the bed and the nightstand. Jason laughs.

“Cool it, Dickie. I haven’t beaten you senseless in forever, remember?”

“This isn’t the time for your bullshit. If you had any idea—”

Jason holds up a familiar wafer: the mind control device from St. Hadrian’s, the one Damian had been forced to swallow. Dick shuts up.

“Grabbed this from your lab. Hope you don’t mind.”

“What the hell do you want with that thing?”

“Probably the same thing you do, honestly. Show it to some nerds, figure out how it ticks. And”—Dick can hear the grin under the mask—“how to make it un-tick.”

Red Hood has a controlling interest in Gotham’s underworld. He’d already demonstrated his strong motivation to keep Leviathan out when he’d pointed Batman and Robin in St. Hadrian’s direction. Talia is smart, though, and loves a timely truce. 

“You’re who Talia was meeting in the sewers that night,” Dick says slowly. “But negotiations fell through. Your loyalty was never really on the table.”

“Come on, master detective, that one’s a gimme. The daughter of the demon and I go way back.” He swings one leg over the windowsill, dangling it over the city far below. “She knew better than to ask for my loyalty. Just non-intervention. But you know…” he shrugs. “That’s boring.”

“The wafers control the spy-girls out of Spyral. Probably other factions serving her, too. You think you can snap them out of it?”

“Seems like the weakest link.”

Dick runs a hand through his hair. “Okay. Fine. That’s…weirdly helpful of you, so if you just came to steal the wafer, take it. But now you’re up here, in my goddamn bedroom. Where I’m a civilian. So what do you want with me that we couldn’t hash out on the streets?”

Jason swings his other leg outside, putting his back to Dick. His voice comes light and dangerous as tripwire: “Just keeping you informed. Thought we had a common enemy.”

“We do.” Dick takes a tentative step forward. “Jason—”

“I wouldn’t do this for Batman.” Jason doesn’t look back. “I kind of hope Leviathan and Batman destroy each other.”

“Then why—”

“You’re not Batman all the time.” Jason’s broad shoulders have gone very still. “Weren’t you just telling me that you’re a civilian up here in your ritzy penthouse? If you were always Batman you’d be Bruce, and God, that’d be a bummer.” He hesitates. “So…bye, Dick Grayson. And good luck.”

He pushes off the window. Dick crosses the room in two strides to watch Jason dwindle into a red blur on a zipline, glinting in skyscraper spotlights.

He finds Alfred setting up some kind of game console in the main room. Damian watches the proceedings quietly from the sofa, wrapped in a quilt from Dick’s childhood bedroom. Dick’s heart pangs: Damian can’t come out with Batman tonight, of course he can’t, but all Dick wants to do is spend time with him. 

Too bad Leviathan won’t disband itself. Gotham can’t wait for what’s left of his concussion to stop randomly pitching his balance. The city’s sparking like a matchstick about to ignite: corruption scandals that come out of nowhere. Suspicious suicides of powerful people, replaced by fresh-faced outsiders with murky resumes and axes to grind. Like Talia’s getting her final pieces into position, and doing it fast. 

He has a few leads: intel Babs unearthed with a team in Tokyo. Or there was that encryption going out on the numbers channel last night. A million possible paths, a million possible dead-ends. 

He squeezes Damian’s shoulder and nods toward the console. “You picking up a new hobby?”

“Brown asked for this,” the boy says dismissively. “For when she comes back from the Yemen mission to babysit me.”

“Think of it as a fun sleepover,” Dick says, taking Damian’s scowl as a given.

That’s the problem: the more of them go out to hunt Leviathan, the less backup Damian has if assassins breach the Tower’s defenses. The best they can do is a rotation, and Steph volunteered for the top of the list.

Down in the Bunker, the Batsuit waits—and with it a long night of planning and counter-planning, setting traps and interrogating underlings and pounding broken streets. The hours stretch out endless in front of him. And it’s important, and it’s all for Damian, so he’ll do it gladly. But...

You’re not Batman all the time, Jason had said.

“Keep me company in the Bunker until I leave?” Dick asks. “Bring the blanket. And maybe some snacks.”

Damian glances uncertainly to the basket in the corner where the blanket usually lives, folded by Alfred’s pristine hand. Now it’s rumpled up around him, the way it was meant to be used. For the first time, Dick notices Titus’s big nose poking out from underneath it. He’s sitting on Damian’s feet.

The blanket looks like it belongs in the penthouse, as opposed to the stark utilitarian Bunker. But you never know—a little piece of civilian comfort may work wonders down there. Maybe a bit of penthouse in the Bunker is what they really need.

“When this is over,” Dick finds himself saying, “I’ll play with you guys. Any game you want…so long as it’s Tekken.”

Damian appraises him thoughtfully. Disquiet still lurks in his expression—in the bags under his eyes. 

But he gathers himself and stands, the blanket trailing behind him like the cloak of a little king.

“You have a deal, Richard. Once we wreck Leviathan on the shoals of their own hubris, I’ll save a special defeat just for you.”

“‘Course you will,” Dick says, and ruffles his hair. Damian reaches up to touch his hand.

Chapter Text

3:16am

Tim convinces him to take an hour’s rest at the penthouse after two days under the cowl—hunting information, hunting people. 

All hell has officially broken loose. Hypnotized children run armed through the streets. Half of Gotham’s services—government, social work—have gone dark without explanation. Team Batman’s manpower has to be be divvied up between investigation, protecting Damian, and crowd control. It looks like Talia’s willing to set the city on fire (literally, in some cases) rather than let Damian go without a fight. 

Dick will be back out for another round soon. The TV flickers in the dark. On screen, zombified civilians chant Leviathan’s name. 

“Anything good on?” he says wryly, sliding onto the sofa next to Damian. Steph, Robin’s assigned back-up, is a snoring lump of floor-blankets in front of the TV. It’s a miracle she can get any sleep at all, so Dick decides not to disturb her.

Damian’s legs are pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped tight around them. He watches the TV with his lips pressed together until Dick switches it off. Then, as though released from a different kind of hypnotism, the boy sighs and collapses against Dick’s shoulder.

“She still loves me,” he says into the dark. 

The words hover there, unretractable. Dick could say a thousand things in response, but most wouldn’t help. Most would be the easy answer to give: she’s proved she doesn’t love you, or she sees you only as a tool. But that wouldn’t be the truth.

Carefully, Dick says, “What would it mean if that were true?”

Damian is quiet for a long time. Titus clambers off the sofa to curl up on the boy’s feet, a warm lump of unconditional love. Steph snores gamely on.

Finally Damian says, “Let us say, hypothetically, that you had a dream tonight.”

Dick rolls with it. Damian has a habit of changing the topic without really changing the topic. “Okay…and this dream is purely hypothetical.”

“Yes.” He pulls back just enough to give Dick a warning glare. “Let’s say you dreamt about a—a raid on Cao Fen’s base.”

Dick frowns. “The pacifist martial artist? The League defector?”

He pictures Damian on the mats in the Bunker: the way he’d shifted, against his instincts, into a combat style good only for biding time. 

No, that’s not fair. It was a protective style. A negotiation. Every line of the body straining to give the enemy a second chance to come to peaceful terms.

“Yes. The defector,” Damian says, staring into the middle distance. “And you dreamt about how you helped your mother kill Cao Fen when you were eight years old. And you drove your sword into her second-in-command’s chest with one hand, and with the other you slashed her lover’s throat.”

Dick swallows, a ball of ice traveling down his throat.

“Except,” Damian says tonelessly, “you remember that her second-in-command had long, golden hair. So in your dream, you look down at the body on the floor and it’s someone else with long, golden hair. Someone you know. Someone you don’t want to be on the floor. And everyone else on the floor is someone you know, too.”

On the floor before them, Steph breathes.

Dick wraps his arms tight around the boy, who doesn’t move to reciprocate: he remains limp. His breath grows ragged and a leaf-fine tremor runs through him.

“The lights go out. The lightbulbs overhead. They smash one by one as you destroy Cao Fen and everything she stands for, everything she could mean to others who dares defy the League and their tenets. Shards of glass catch in your hair.” The tremor escalates to a shake, and Damian finally turns his head into Dick’s chest. “They go out, Richard.”

“Dami,” Dick says. But there’s no words waiting on his tongue. What do you say to something like that? What would be a comfort that wouldn’t turn cold the moment the words hit the air?

He tightens the embrace. Damian’s never had a good reaction to I love you; the gravity of it seems to stress him out more than it helps. Maybe now things are different—or maybe that would just worsen Damian’s panic about losing people to Leviathan.

“We’re not going anywhere,” he settles on. “None of us are.”

“This is ridiculous. I’m letting you all do Robin’s job.”

“Robin’s job isn’t to die for the sake of dying. You’re helping Alfred triage info from here, right?”

“But it’s my mother.”

“Dami, what we lack most right now is information. Without that, we’ve got nothing. You’re doing the most important thing you could be doing. And as for the rest of us—”

Then Dick’s communicator lights up. It’s a pattern he hasn’t seen in over a year: Bruce’s distress signal, complete with a homing beacon. Close.

“It’s a trap, obviously,” Red Robin says from the Batmobile’s passenger seat. “Signal’s coming from an antiques warehouse. There’s no way—”

“I know,” Dick snaps. “I know that. But…”

The two of them go quiet. They both know Dick’s on the verge of proposing something ludicrous. Something neither of them actually believe when they put two second’s thought into it. But even knowing that Bruce isn’t secretly alive—hasn’t been biding his time in some untamed corner of the multiverse, refusing to clue in the family—Dick couldn’t help the thrill of discovery that went through him the moment he saw the signal. It was automatic as a nervous system. As fight-or-flight.

“It could still be a message from him,” Dick murmurs. “Some kind of…contingency from when he was alive. Designed to go off if Gotham goes to shit.”

“Fair. That wouldn’t surprise me. And we could use one of his unbelievable Xanatos Gambits right now.” Tim taps a merciless rhythm on the door handle. His face has gone hard in a way Dick recognizes: he sees it in the mirror sometimes, when he’s been wearing the cowl for too long. When he wonders if he could’ve somehow kept Bruce alive. 

Tim’s learning to wear that weight gracefully. Dick isn’t sure the same could be said for him.

“But either way,” Dick says, screeching around a corner as the windshield is spattered in new rain, “only one of us should go in. The other stands watch right outside. If it’s a trap, one of us should start out of range to provide an assist.”

“Read my mind,” Tim says. “Thumb wrestle you for it.”

Dick almost grins, but the glow of distant fires in the Heights stops him. The city is tearing itself apart.

The warehouse stands nondescript on the very edge of Gotham’s business district. A single light flickers in a third-floor window. Cold and inconsistent, like a TV screen.

Dick chooses to make his entrance directly, grappling up to the window and jimmying it open. Sure enough, an old CRT television sits on an antique endboard and spits static. It’s surrounded by clutter: vases, trunks, a record player with peeling paint, a statuette. 

“Nothing unusual,” he says over the earpiece. “Nothing showing up on thermal, either. It’s just creepy the TV’s on.”

“Share visual?” Tim asks. Dick complies, stepping cautiously over creaking floorboards. No pressure sensors; he’d learned to find those years ago.

“Well, OSHA would probably have something to say about the trip hazards,” Tim says finally. “But I was more looking for the kind of hints Br…Batman liked to give. Not seeing any.”

“We all know the man liked his symbolism,” Dick says absently. 

Tim curses under his breath. “He’s not the only one. The statue.”

With a crackle, the TV’s static clears, lighting up the Kali statuette on its end table: goddess of time and death. Talia watches him calmly from on-screen. 

Dick braces himself to move, but nothing happens: no darts, no Heretic hulking through the doorway.

“There was a part of me that had hoped…” Talia says softly, her voice warping with the aging technology, rainbow distortion running up her face in waves. “I had some small shred of hope that my detective may have been alive after all. That he would reveal himself to save his son.”

“That’s not why you did this,” Dick says immediately, grip tightening on a batarang at his belt. “You want Damian. You want him back.”

“You state the obvious,” Talia sighs—her feed is live, then. “Damian comes first: before me, before Bruce, and certainly before you. But still, on cold nights in this miserable city, I toyed with the possibility Bruce Wayne had survived. It was…a comfort. Consider this little game with the distress signal my way of putting my hopes to rest. He hasn’t come.”

“I’m coming in,” Tim says urgently. 

“Don’t,” Dick responds out loud. Talia cocks her head curiously. He grimaces and shifts tack. “Don’t do this to Damian. He comes first for both of us, can’t you see that? We both want what’s best for him.”

It feels like lying through his teeth. Never in a million years could he get on board with Talia’s definition of best, but Damian’s assessment had been dead on: she’d raised the boy in the way she thought was right. Maybe, he thinks desperately, that’s how he can get through to her: appealing to her love for her son.

“I promise I’ll protect him,” Dick says. 

“I’m afraid your promise doesn’t count for much,” Talia says flatly. “Your interference has dulled my son’s survival instincts. I sent him to train with his father, a titan of a man. And instead, he found himself apprenticed to a fool.”

He snarls, “And that’s what kills you, isn’t it? You think whatever you hate about me is catching. And Damian could get it, too.”

Talia eyes him down her nose. Her cheek twitches, so like her son.

“Shit,” Tim says. “Batman, shit, there’s an armored truck down here—”

Automatic gunfire from the street. Dick makes for the window just as bars drop from the ceiling, splitting the room in half and cutting off his exits. It’s fine, he just needs to cut through, get the microfilament from the utility belt—

“You don’t have enough time,” Talia’s voice rings out. “I’ve raised him from infancy; you’ve had him a year. We’ll see who’s won the soul of Damian al Ghul!”

“You’re lighting up!” Tim cries, the sound of combat pouring over the comm. “On thermal, there’s an explosive—”

“You’ve forgotten someone,” Talia says. “Don’t worry. I’ll be with him soon.”

Dick’s heart jumps to his throat. He slams down his facial blast shield; slams himself against the bars. “Red Robin, disengage and get to Wayne Tower now, she’s going straight for Damian—”

An explosion rocks the room, smashing him into the metal, filling his vision with a white like bed sheets. He sinks.

Chapter Text

Dick blinks awake into a darkness so complete he thinks he might be imagining it: that maybe he’s failed to wake up at all.

Then every inch of him lights up with pain in different textures. There’s the feeling of fresh bruises on his chest where the explosion had thrown him into the iron bars. There’s what feels like a burn on his back, prickling through the suit’s auto-administered anesthetic. And there’s the last of his concussion, a dull ache, pitching his balance until it feels like…

…he’s moving. His knees are forced up to his chest in a claustrophobic space barely larger than he is. He’s in some kind of metal box, being carried. His arms are pinned to his sides by a massive band wide as his chest; his ankles are tied.

“Red Robin,” he murmurs over the comm.

“Oh Jesus, you’re up,” Tim says. His voice is a burst of sound against a backdrop of gunfire, some kind of chaos coming from his side. Maybe no real time has passed, then, since Tim had been ambushed outside the warehouse? 

But no—Dick’s no stranger to injury. He knows how “got clobbered a second ago” compares to “got clobbered an hour ago,” and the map of his body is feeling more like the latter.

“I’m up,” he confirms. “I’m…somewhere. Am I being carried around in a safe? Like, did Talia put me in a safe?”

“Does that happen to you a lot? Because yeah, got it in one. Heretic’s got you. He’s taking you to Wayne Tower.”

Dick’s breath catches as his memory floods back: light and color and a story about shattered lightbulbs in a dream. “The Tower. Where’s Robin?”

“Don’t know, but Talia doesn’t have him yet. He and Batgirl went incommunicado as soon as Leviathan breached the lobby, but they’re still demanding we turn him over. Um, just a sec.”

More gunfire, and Tim shouting instructions to what sounds like civilians. The acoustics speak to an indoor firefight, and Dick’s heart sinks. 

“Is Leviathan trying to take the whole Tower?”

“Trying? Nah, they had the place secured before I even got here. I tried to fight my way down from the roof but got pinned down around the thirty-fifth floor…there’s civilians here, Batman. I can’t leave.”

Dick thinks quickly. “Can Penny-One assist?”

Tim gives a harsh laugh. “He’s got his hands full keeping them out of the Bunker. Oracle’s trying to take back the security systems, and everyone else in the field is either nonresponsive or taking heavy fire. You might have to get out of there on your own. Unless—”

The safe is dropped to the floor, knocking Dick’s head against steel.

“—Jason,” Tim is saying. “He wouldn’t explain himself, said St. Hadrian’s spy-girls were an inside job, whatever that means. But who knows if he’ll show, or when.”

The safe’s door swings open behind him. He tumbles out onto the high-gloss concrete floor of the Tower lobby: shined to perfection, reflecting the stalactite chandelier Lucius Fox had installed a lifetime ago.

“Finally,” Talia says from somewhere to his left—he can’t do much to maneuver with the wide band wrapped thick around him, compressing his arms to his sides. “Perhaps your presence will motivate my son to make an appearance. If he isn’t too far gone down his path of cowardice.” 

She says the last word like something truly vile: worse than evil and naive idealism both. An image of Ra’s flashes through Dick’s mind: an ancient man from ancient times, when stories of “heroism” denoted not a moral attitude but the power to bend your world into whatever shape you wanted it.

Dick and Talia weren’t built to understand each other. It goes deeper than mapping out the distance and finding it unsurpassable. Fundamentally, from childhood, they were taught to read different maps.

Then again: the same was true of Damian once.

With a grunt of pain, Dick heaves himself onto his side. Talia sits propped on the abandoned lobby desk, a spread of empty-eyed Wayne security guards and League archers defending her from the balcony above. Heretic looms at her side, his arms crossed in what would look like petulance on a smaller frame.

Distant gunfire echoes from higher floors. 

Dick says, “Talia, listen to me. You know better than to call him a coward. You don’t believe I’m worthy as a mentor, fine. But your son—”

Heretic bellows, inhuman. He rushes Dick like he’s going for a field goal, kicking him square in the solar plexus. Dick cries out, rolling, skidding. 

His shoulder cracks ominously against the WWII tank that sits in proud display on one end of the lobby. Lucius had wanted to show Wayne Enterprises’ place in the history of military technology. Dick had always found it morbid. 

“The brat is nothing,” Heretic screams. “He failed Mother! I’m the Batman now!”

Talia’s grip compresses on a trigger in her hand. Heretic cries out in immediate pain, falling to his knees. Sparks jump between his metal shoulderpads; sprint across his gas mask helm. 

“The creature is over-eager,” she says. “Excuse him. You both overstate my despair. I haven’t given up on Damian, far from it. Though he may have been misled by a poor excuse for a mentor, I believe I can set him on the right course again.”

Talia gestures, and Heretic stumbles to his feet. “My son will fight to prove his worth; prove he is still the boy I raised. And then I will take him home.”

“What if he doesn’t want to go?” Dick spits, tasting blood on his teeth. “You gonna keep him locked up forever?”

I wouldn’t lock you in your room and put bars on your window—

“I won’t have to,” Talia says. “I’ll remind him who he is.”

She nods to Heretic, an acquiescence. Eager, the hulk lifts Dick bodily—Dick nearly vomits on his armored boots—then tosses him against a glass display case halfway across the lobby. He falls to the ground amid shards of glass, the antique samurai armor that had been on display clattering somewhere behind him. 

His vision blurs. He loses time.

The lights go out, Richard. They smash one by one.

“—at me. Touch him again, I’ll kill you!”

The floor settles again beneath him, glass carving a line in his cheek. He sees his Robin: small, proud, furious, standing in the middle of the lobby. He aims a crossbow at Heretic’s head.

Dick’s emotions crash into one another like waves on incompatible frequencies: first a roaring pride too big to fit behind his battered ribs. Then despair. 

Talia had been right. Damian wouldn’t stand by and let him be beaten to death. But Heretic is colossal in power and scale, more than one man can take—more than one boy, no matter how extraordinary.

All Damian can do is bide time.

Heretic’s steps shake the floor. “My brother,” he says. “My twin. My rival. Now you will know me.”

“Mother!” Damian shouts, not taking his eyes from his opponent. “You told me I should give up to protect my allies, but we both know that’s nonsense. I’m Damian Wayne, and I fight to survive! That’s how I save them. That’s how I save us all.”

Talia walks along the lobby’s edge, the tails of her dress rippling behind her, each stride precise and clean.

“Then you’ve passed my first test.” Her voice rings loud and sharp as shattered glass. “This is the second: fight furiously! Struggle against death like a foe of flesh! Slash its throat and let its lifeblood run.” 

She circles behind Heretic, her eyes hard and green. “Fight to kill; fight brutally. Fight without restraint and take what you need. In this way, you will free yourself from the Bat’s petty limitations. You will become an al Ghul again!”

“You’ll lose him,” Dick says to the floor, flexing uselessly against the band around his chest. Then, louder: “You’ll lose him, Talia! Your monster will kill him.”

Talia stops her circling with her heels inches from Dick’s head. She peers down at him, her lips pressed into a tight line. She blinks furiously for a moment, then takes a deep breath.

“I know my son,” she says quietly—Dick is startled by the note of pleading in her voice. “I know his strengths and his limits. He will lose, but he will survive. Else, he wouldn’t be my son.”

“This is insane,” Dick says. He fingers a shard of glass on the floor behind him; can’t quite grasp it. “Hasn’t he already proved himself? Hasn’t his childhood been more than enough?”

“Not for the League,” Talia says with a genuine bitterness. “Not for the destiny we were set before we were born.”

Without warning, Robin lets loose a crossbow bolt. It embeds itself in Heretic’s meaty shoulder. The hulk charges him with a cry of rage.

Damian tosses the bow aside and uses Heretic’s body as a ladder: like he had with Tar of the bead cult, forever ago. He springs off of Heretic’s knee and runs up his swinging arm, a black knife flashing toward Heretic’s neck. 

Then he’s swatted like a fly. Heretic pivots away with the speed of a much smaller man, leaving Damian hovering in the space where his shoulder used to be. He smashes a lazy fist into the boy’s face, sending him skidding across the lobby. 

Dick wants to heave. He hauls himself up to sitting; nearly blacks out from the pain. It doesn’t matter. Damian needs him. Damian needs him, or else he will die.

He leans back against the remains of the display case he’d been thrown against. He maneuvers the edge of his restraint against a jagged piece of glass. To his surprise, the band flexes a little against the shards: like it’s made of some kind of stiff composite polyester. He’s wrapped up in a giant seatbelt, and he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“You could break the band eventually,” Talia says absently, watching Damian leap over a horizontal sweep of Heretic’s blade. “It doesn’t matter. Again, I know my son’s abilities. I know to the minute how long he will last.” She glances at him, pitying—a pity directed half-inward. “This fight won’t last long enough for you to free yourself.”

Heretic catches Damian by the arm and throws him against the army tank. He slides down; lands in a dizzy crouch. Blood flows down his chin. He loses his footing and falls to his knees.

Dick works the band against the glass furiously, combining the enhanced strength of the Batsuit with speed and angle and friction. He feels the bump of a tiny tear in the fabric—miniscule. There isn’t time. There isn’t time.

“—miles out,” Tim’s voice says in his ear. “They’re still four miles out, you need to buy time.”

Dick laughs for real. His throat clogs with blood, rich and red. Maybe time is the only thing they’ve never had.

I’ve raised him from infancy, Talia had said. You’ve had him a year.

And in a year’s time, has Dick won Damian’s soul? Is that even possible? Are souls things you win like chess games; like Battleship in a dark manor parlor?

The dark knife flashes; cuts viciously at Heretic’s flesh. If Dick could spare the strength, he might cheer it on, damn the consequences. Damn what it would mean for Bruce’s code, for his own moral positioning in the morass of Gotham nights. Maybe Damian being alive is worth more than Heretic being alive. Maybe–

Damian strikes from above, going straight for Heretic’s throat. The intention embedded in the bold line of his body is assassin-hard. But Heretic whirls like a windmill, arms akimbo, and the boy smashes into the display case besides Dick’s, his head coming to rest beneath a pristine suit of medieval armor. The black knife skitters away.

He lies between Dick and Talia, spread-eagled on the floor.

“Robin, the crossbow!” Dick cries. The weapon lays not four feet from the boy’s hand. 

Instead, Damian looks straight at him. His teeth are bared in a snarl, his eyes defiant beneath the domino. 

“Get up,” Dick urges, feeling the band give too slowly behind him. “Get up!”

“For once we are agreed,” Talia proclaims. “Fight until the bitter blood, Damian!”

Then all at once, the lines of Damian’s face lose their hardness. He looks at Dick with eyes wide and wondering, like tending to a bird with a broken wing. Like trying a sweet he doesn’t think he deserves. Like tossing a knife aside on a balcony.

“My brother,” Heretic says, mocking. Massive, inevitable. Approaching. “Should I kill the pretender-Bat first?”

Damian takes a shuddering breath. He breaks Dick’s gaze and sways to his feet. He slides into a ready stance: one of his go-tos. Quick, aggressive. Like he’s ready to risk it all on one last charge, damn the consequences. Damn whether Dick would ever ask him to die in his stead. 

Damn whether Robin should ever die for Batman. 

Chapter Text

“Don’t!” Dick screams, useless—more useless than he’s ever been in his life. This shouldn’t be happening. It can’t.

Damian pitches his body forward like a hollow-point bullet. Like an arrow screaming true. Like a soldier with a death wish. 

He runs to meet calamity, a spot of Robin-red in the wide white lobby, and he’s never looked so alone.

Then, not two yards from Heretic, he stumbles over nothing. He trips over his own feet in an uncharacteristic display of clumsiness. Like instincts born of years of training are overruled by some revolutionary impulse. Or by an idea.

He stops his advance. His eyes sweep over Heretic’s body.

“What's wrong, coward?” Heretic says with sudden suspicion. One foot forward, massive fists raised. The knife slashes in his robe reveal biceps hard and twisted up, dehydrated, wrong. 

His strange and terrible voice, Dick realizes, sounds like a much younger man using a modulator. 

Damian stands before him, dwarfed as a boy before a mountain. He takes a slow breath through his nose. 

And like a premonition, Dick feels a lightness jitter through him. A faith.

Damian sinks all at once into a different stance: loose, a defensive stability, a hanmi halfway to surrender.

“What is this?” Talia murmurs. 

Damian ignores her. He echoes Heretic’s words; transforms them. “My brother. Myself. Or what I could have been.”

“But you couldn’t be me,” Heretic says with a trace of a whine. “You were all wrong from the start.”

Damian’s small shoulders rise and fall with his breath. He waits.

Heretic gives an animal scream. He pulls at his mask like he wants to tear it off. “Mother made me because she couldn’t fix you! I’m better than you’ll ever be. I’m Batman. I’m an al Ghul. I’m strong enough to be both! ”

Damian doesn’t rise to this. He waits.

Heretic lunges, every ton of him, and Damian falls to his knees. He bends backwards, letting Heretic storm right over him, massive legs landing to either side of Damian’s small body until Damian wraps his arms around Heretic’s ankle. The hulk falls with a sound like an avalanche.

Damian doesn’t pursue the advantage. He rolls to his feet several feet away. He sinks into the modified hanmi. He waits for Heretic to rise.

Talia makes an incredulous noise. “You can’t be serious, my son. We killed them, you and I. We killed Cao Fen and every last one of her doomed practitioners.”

Damian’s hands float before him, fingers bent inwards like a venus flytrap. He watches Heretic.  He waits.

Dick pictures a warm afternoon on the Bunker mats. He pictures Damian demonstrating a style for refusing violence. 

Or for biding time. 

The band shudders against the glass shards behind him, slowly giving way.

And Damian…lasts. He takes blows and redirects them, moving with the momentum of Heretic’s massive fists.  He grabs at Heretic’s flailing limbs and releases them, timing his advances to put the hulk off-balance. He spins like a mad top, alternatively keeping his distance and moving close again.

He doesn’t try to win. But he doesn’t lose.

“What was that about ‘knowing to the minute’ when Damian would fall?” Dick says to Talia, his heart pounding, furious with hope. 

Talia’s fingernails dig angry crescents into her palms. She hadn’t accounted for this, Dick thinks with wonder. For a Damian who tries to end a fight without killing. For a Damian who’s learned about the world beyond the League and his grim duties there. 

Damian circles Heretic with an adamant calm. Like someone trying to be kind to himself—kind to the person he could have been—in the face of all the reasons not to be. Kind, even when help may never come.

“Is this all you’ve learned?” Talia mutters, disgusted. “A weakness I thought I’d snuffed from the world years ago?”

“Think about it,” Dick says, straining against the band more forcefully now, a strategic rhythm. “If he fought the way you’d expected, he’d be down by now. You know that. He adapted! He’s—fuck, he’s the smartest kid either of us have ever known.”

Her gaze flashes to him, dangerous. Dick musters a hard grin. “You wanted him to learn. Clearly, Gotham has a lot to teach. Bruce or no Bruce.”

Damian takes hits—of course he does. His face is a mess of bruising. But he lasts and he lasts and he lasts, longer than he was ever supposed to last, until—

With a crash from the lobby’s wide windows, an army of skullgirls swings inside on tactical roping. The assassins and brainwashed guards up on the balcony fire on them instantly, but it doesn’t matter: their yellow uniforms repel bullets and they dance around crossbow bolts like a boot camp obstacle course.

Leading the charge is a brunette with a psychedelic swirl for a face, no doubt the Headmistress of St. Hadrian’s. She has two companions: Batgirl, whose eyes track Damian’s fight with awe, and the Red Hood.

Jason fires a dance of warning shots at the balcony archers, sending them ducking. “Long time no see,” he calls out to Talia, jubilant. “Did you know Spyral sold you those skullgirls and the mind control tech so they could position moles inside Leviathan? Crazy, right? Who would’ve thought spies weren’t worth trusting?”

“You did purge my agents by the end,” the Headmistress says, giving Talia a respectful nod. “We almost didn’t find you in time. The Red Hood and Batgirl were kind enough to help.”

Her slender fingers depress a button at her belt. Shouts rise from the balcony: the Wayne Tower guards shaking off the vestiges of Leviathan control. “No matter. We’ll wake Gotham up soon enough.”

The energy of the room transforms like a shot of adrenaline. But Heretic and Damian watch only each other: like the outside world doesn’t matter much either way.

“You’re too late!” Talia scoffs. “The damage has been done. Gotham will never be the same.”

“Place was a shithole anyway,” Jason shrugs. 

The door to the maintenance stairway bursts open: Tim, finally freed from the upper floors, is a blur streaking across the lobby. An archer aims his way.

“Red Robin, look out!” Steph cries, loosing a batarang—and at her voice, Damian does look away. Heretic’s fist cracks against his chest. He stumbles backwards, landing all wrong. The brute’s footsteps are like earthquakes, advancing on his prone form. 

“Get to Damian!” Dick shouts to Tim, just as Tim’s would-be killer finds himself disarmed by Steph’s batarang, then tackled by newly-lucid security guards with more bravery than sense. 

Tim doesn’t get to Damian. He doesn’t try. Instead, he jumps into the antique tank and slams the hatch closed behind him.

“Don’t tell me it’s armed,” Dick says in wonder. “Oh my god. Of course it’s armed.”

With an earth-shattering boom, the tank fires on Heretic. The hulk ducks out of the way, but barely. A gaping hole opens in the lobby wall.

“Hell yes!” Batgirl shouts. “A fracas!” 

Following her lead, the skullgirls grapple to the balcony. One of them looks like her friend from St. Hadrian’s, herself again.

Talia’s eyes dart between the smoldering wreck of the lobby wall, the tank, the rush of skullgirls, her monster, and her son wobbling to his feet.

Her son’s open-palmed defense.

Then with a sound like a growling animal—a wolf, a cub, a mother bear—the band on Dick’s chest rips the rest of the way apart. It falls.

He leaps to his feet and puts Talia in a grapple hold. She doesn’t fight him.

“You’ve lost Gotham,” he says in her ear. “At least, you’re losing it fast. Damian chose this city. Stop this, before you lose him too.”

“My son was born to survive!”

“You’re right. You taught him that. And this—what you’re seeing him do now—is survival. You said you wanted to see what he’s learned and you have. He’s built alliances, he’s adapted, he’s…” 

His breath fails him. How many things are broken in his body?

“The League raised him; you can’t change that,” Talia says, new desperation in her voice. “You’ll never win him body and soul.”

Talia’s dress brushes against Dick’s kevlar, weightless. He feels nothing but the numb buzz of pain in the back of his mind. Has he won Damian’s soul? Can a soul even be won? Brute force redemption, the right argument, words in sequence—

Sink the battleship. Win.

Only, that’s never worked for them before.

Out on the floor, Damian bides his time. He gives a stronger opponent the chance to surrender, over and over again. It’s skillful. It’s elegant. It’s something new.

“I think Damian does what he wants with his soul,” Dick says. “I can’t erase the League from him, you’re right. If I could somehow go back and protect him…could cancel out what was done to him, what you did to him—”

Words fail him. Out on the lobby floor, Damian fights like a dancer.

Talia’s gone very still. Like she’s listening.

Dick says, “But you’re right. He is who he is. He is who we both have made him. All I want is to give him more options than…than either of us had.”

Gunfire and shouting blur to nothing around them. Tim fires the tank like he’s not blowing holes in his own company’s lobby. Outside, Leviathan’s control is falling away. 

“Perhaps,” Talia says, barely loud enough for Dick to hear. “Perhaps you’ve taught him more than I gave you credit for.” 

“That’s all I can hope.” His head is so heavy. He drops it, just briefly, on Talia’s shoulder. Then he takes a deep breath and releases her, stepping back. “Get out of our city.”

“I’ve always disliked you, Dick Grayson.” Talia takes her trigger from the folds of her dress. “You talk far too much.”

She presses it, and Heretic falls again to his knees, convulsing. She strides to him, picks up his discarded sword, and slices his head clean from his body.

Damian stares in horror. His balance suddenly fails him and he falls to the lobby floor.

“Keep learning, my son,” Talia tells him, pride in her voice.

“Brace yourselves for a surprise: they’re actually withdrawing,” Babs says over the comm. “Spyral and the rest of our reinforcements had Leviathan’s street-level goons running, but I can’t believe the woman who actually matters called it quits after all this.”

“‘Quits’...isn’t the word I’d use,” Dick says, slumped on the lobby floor. He’s propped against the welcome desk, a bitter choice between irritating his back-burns or letting his ribs (broken? Probably broken) support the weight of his torso on their own. “Practically gave Damian her cell phone number before she left.”

“And what are his feelings on that?” Babs’ voice is wry with an undertone of sympathy. It’s hard, Dick knows, to see Damian interact with his mom and come away still hating the kid. Maybe he should feel vindicated; instead he feels tired.

“Honestly, probably something so complicated he wouldn’t be able to articulate it if I asked,” Dick says. “Might have to invent some new words for him.”

“Or get out the ol’ emotion wheel.”

“Ha.” He coughs through a throb of pain.

“You should be in the Bunker receiving medical care,” Damian says, plopping down beside him. He’s wearing only his underarmor: a thin black turtleneck and Robin’s leggings. He babies one splinted leg, and his forehead is swathed in bandages. Bruising mottles his cheeks.

Dick covers up the horrified skip of his heart with a tenuous grin. “If you look that bad, I don’t want to know where I’m at on the scale. Maybe I’ll skip the infirmary.”

“Pennyworth would be furious.” Then Damian adds, a notch quieter: “He’s alright, by the way. Barely scratched.”

Dick knew that, of course. Checking the status of the team had been the first thing he did once Talia was truly out the door—hence his deferral of Alfred’s tender ministrations. But to hear Damian say it is different: the boy treats the news like a precious treasure, made only more valuable by sharing it with Dick. 

“That’s good,” Dick says. He bumps their shoulders together, accepting the pain that comes of it as his due. “That’s really good.” 

Damian gets an absent look in his eye. Somehow Dick doubts it’s concussion-related. The boy stares at what’s left of the lobby doors, through which his mother had finally disappeared.

It’s not fair for Damian to shoulder the weight of all this: the swift death of his “brother,” even one who hated him. The cognitive dissonance of his mother still loving him, after everything—maybe even loving her back. The ambiguity could break a lesser man. 

“The League screwed up,” Dick says, suddenly and with feeling. “They screwed up with you, and they lost you, and now I get to know you. Which is the best thing I’ve had going for me in a long time.”

Damian frowns up at him, contemplative.

“It’s their loss,” Dick says. “It’s totally their loss. I'm so unbelievably proud of you.”

Damian glances back to the door. Then he gives a version of his best grin—weak and watered down, maybe, but there. He presses a finger into Dick’s palm. His small body is warm at Dick’s side.

The lobby is in absolute shambles. That’s not even touching on whatever went down on the upper floors. With a jolt, Dick wonders if the penthouse is in a liveable state. Probably not, for structural safety reasons if nothing else.

In the meantime, there’s still the manor.

Dick is about to ask Damian if he’s ever heard of an emotion wheel when the boy says: “We’re the best, Richard. No matter what anyone thinks.”

He looks at Dick like he’s daring him to disagree. His cheeks are fuller than they used to be; healthier even beneath the bruising. A boy like him shouldn’t be bruised to hell and back, but maybe—if Dick is very careful—this will be the last time. 

Things could’ve been so much worse. Being past it feels a bit like freedom.

Dick’s throat closes up. He pictures the manor, for the first time in years, as a place of rest. As a place for Batman and Robin.

“No arguments from me,” he says, and grips Damian’s hand.

Chapter Text

3:16pm

On a scale from spotless to demolished, the penthouse had shot past “ransacked” during the Leviathan invasion and pulled up short somewhere around “wrecked.”

A stool from the breakfast bar lies in the smashed remains of the balcony door, like a losing barroom brawler passing out in the glass shards until morning. Bullet holes litter the walls, with the kind of cluster you get from automatic fire making ragged windows into Dick’s bedroom. The TV’s upended and the carpet’s coated in a sooty debris: probably from Tim’s wickedest batarangs as he fought his way down the Tower.

“Least the place is still standing,” Dick sighs, without conviction and to nobody in particular. He takes heavy steps forward, wincing at the pull of his ribs. Six days since the attack, his wrenched neck muscles are almost worse than the broken bones, especially with his arm sling pulling at the tender point between neck and shoulder.

Naturally, the sofa’s shot through. Dick pictures Damian curled up on its arm, scribbling in his notebook. He pictures the boy bounding over the seatback to blow a Near Year’s noisemaker in Steph’s ear. He looks to the open kitchen door and imagines ghosts there: Damian and himself arguing over a bird in a box. The image shifts, but Damian stays: baking gulab jamun with Alfred, flour from shortbread cookies streaking his cheek. 

A hundred little memories, all light and color and personality. This place was where he learned to speak Damian; where their dark nights alone evolved into something warmer. Maybe it was the streets and the Bunker that taught them to be Batman and Robin, but the penthouse taught them to be Richard and Dami.

Heat pools behind his eyes at the thought of leaving it behind.

“It doesn’t have to be forever,” he tells the imaginary Damian as he reaches his good arm down for his soiled quilt. The surge of pain in his ribs stops him. “It’s—we’ll get the place fixed up, and then we can decide.”

It’s this or the manor; always was. The gothic edifice cultivates shadows in the back of his mind: Bruce’s darkness, Gotham midnights. The shining modern Tower was meant to be a new beginning.

Well, Dick thinks, wincing at the wreckage, it’s not so new now. They’ve broken it in quite thoroughly.

He nudges Damian’s door open. Being further down the hall, the room’s suffered minimal damage. The boy’s books are pristine, ordered by author and artistic movement. His calathea plant reaches for the light outside, and Dick resolves to make sure it’s moved with care.

Somehow the painting from alongside the window has fallen, its golden dawnlight muted against white carpet. With a start, Dick realizes that Damian must have painted it.

The boy brought it with him from the League. It had hung in his room for most of their year together. By the time Dick had learned to recognize Damian’s brush strokes, the piece had settled into the background, beneath his conscious notice. 

His first, happy instinct is to move it to the main room. A place of pride, next to the doodles of dueling rocket launchers. Then the memory of what’s happening hits him like a headache again. He wonders dully whether the painting would look as good in the manor entrance hall.

At the far end of the hallway, Alfred’s door creaks open.

Dick smiles ruefully to himself. He calls out: “I should’ve known what you meant by ‘errands.’”

Alfred clears his throat, stepping through Damian’s doorway. “And I should’ve known better than to believe you’d take your bedrest, Master Dick.”

A neat little bag is slung over his shoulder. Boxes are piled high in his arms. Dick is struck with vivid déjà vu from the last time they’d packed up their lives.

“Can I help?”

Alfred sighs in the general direction of Dick’s slinged arm. “With respect, you’re in no shape to. Did you come here under the impression you could do the work yourself?”

“No,” Dick says. “I just.”

He looks at Damian’s bed: the first place the boy had grabbed his hand. He looks at Titus Andronicus on its shelf and pictures Damian sleeping cuddled around it, newly-named dog by his side. 

“I understand,” Alfred says quietly. “I’ve hired movers for tomorrow. But today, I believe this place is worth a reminiscence or two. It’s served us well.”

Served us well. Dick wonders if all butlers share the habit of personifying the homes they care for, or if that’s just Alfred.

The imaginary Damian grins up from his side.

Without meaning to, he says, “The last couple times I lived in the manor weren’t…good.”

Pacing the wide halls after Bruce’s death. And years earlier: his anger at Bruce pitched to a boiling point, not a child anymore. No longer able to take Bruce’s domineering as a given.

“As a child you liked the gardens,” Alfred says simply.

“I did. I liked a lot of the place back then. Once I got used to it.”

What goes unspoken: things changed. Sometimes coming back to Gotham felt like coming home. Other times, it felt like picking at a wound.

Alfred deposits the boxes on Damian’s bed. He rests a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “Did you know, Master Dick, that before you became the Caped Crusader, I had never seen a smile beneath the cowl?”

Dick grins before he can help it. “That’s an exaggeration. Bruce did this…smirk thing. All the time. You’ve seen it.”

The memory sends a twinge of complicated affection through him, a bit like broken ribs. By now, Dick knows both feelings like the back of his hand.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Alfred says loftily. “The point I’d like to make is this: you are your own Batman. Even when wearing the same cowl. Even when guarding the same streets.”

“Even when living in the same manor, you mean.”

“Quite.”

A dark purple bruise marks Alfred’s jaw, the skin papery over it. This had been his only souvenir of the invasion, something that Damian had proclaimed proudly when regaling Titus with the story of their victory. Alfred’s expression, as always, is reassuringly firm. Stiff upper lip and an understanding between them: both would’ve taken much worse for Damian’s sake.

“I guess I’m talking to the expert,” Dick says.

“Expert in…Batmans, sir?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. You’re a Batman specialist.”

“Hm. I suppose my resume proves it.”

Dick slings his good arm over the butler’s shoulders. Alfred looks at him with perfunctory disapproval, but doesn’t object.

“Let’s head back,” Dick says. “This place’ll keep.”

Alfred stops the car halfway up the circle drive rather than dropping Dick off by the door. The engine hums through their silence, surrounded by the manor gardens. Early June is a beautiful time for flowers. Japanese water irises dot the edge of the pond, and coral bells border the drive like a welcoming committee.

“It is a good garden,” Dick says under his breath.

He looks up at the manor windows, pinpointing his childhood bedroom. He’d left one glowing star on the ceiling when he’d left, right where moonlight came through the tree branches in summer.

Wryly Alfred says, “One would think, by your hesitation, that you hadn’t been staying here for days already.”

Dick shakes himself out of it. “Staying and living are different. Not sure which one we’re doing yet.”

“I find that on this point, the company matters more than the edifice.”

Dick steps out of the car, painting under his arm. He breathes the scent of flowers.

Jason had said: You’re not Batman all the time, or else you’d be Bruce. 

Maybe he was right. Or maybe Dick had changed the nature of Batman without noticing. Maybe he doesn't have to imitate Bruce’s voice, his gait, his darkness under the cowl. Maybe he’d stopped a long time ago. Maybe now Batman is what Dick is.

“I miss the climbing ivy on the south side of the building,” he calls back to Alfred, making for the front door. “We should plant some.”

Alfred graciously declines to mention the threat of structural damage, peeling off to park the car.

The entrance hall echoes with cheerful shouting: Steph demanding that Damian elevate his leg by the sound of it. Dick sets the painting on the sideboard, noting the nice way it catches the light.

“Richard!” Damian shouts from the top of the stairs, face flushed and grinning. He slides on his ass all the way down the bannister, kicking off the end with his good leg to catch himself, swinging, from Dick’s good arm.

“Ow! Oh Jesus, ow, Christ—”

Damian releases him with a braying laugh. “You’re back! Tell Brown to leave me alone. She doesn’t understand that the both of us have masterful balance, allowing us to maneuver without putting strain on our injuries.”

“Right,” Dick wheezes. “No strain. Not to the ribs or anything.”

“You’re a terror!” Steph shouts from the upper landing. “Sit down and watch a goddamn movie with me!”

“Seems like a good call,” Dick says. Damian makes an aggrieved noise and headbutts his arm.

The manor had seemed so much colder the last time he’d been here. Maybe it doesn’t have to stay that way, though. Maybe they can put stars on the ceiling.

Chapter Text

3:16am

“I’m beginning to think there is such a thing as a too-quiet night,” Dick says, rolling a stray penny down the Batcomputer console. He catches it in his bandaged hand, then starts it rolling again, a cycle of boredom. 

“Nothing should be too quiet for a man forbidden from the field,” Alfred says sniffily, puttering around the Cave’s lower level. He’d lost the argument about Dick manning comms instead of getting extra bedrest a few days back and hadn’t quite forgiven him for it.

“I just figured there’d be more chaos. You know, Batman and Robin out of commission, Gotham in recovery…I wasn’t thinking chaos like when the Quake hit, but—”

“Your menagerie of allies appears capable of holding the fort themselves for a few more weeks. It’s been good coordinating with Ms. Lance and Ms. Montoya again.”

“Yeah,” Dick says, frowning up at his many monitors. The Bunker computer had managed to sort through just as much information without giving him eyestrain. “Weird thing, though. I sent Dinah out to collect dirt on the Ivgene Clan, but by the time she found their new warehouse operation it had been tossed pretty thoroughly. Then the GCPD showed up, evidence in hand. Said they got a tip.”

“A good Samaritan.”

“I thought that too, but then Tim found a solid dozen of their goons tied up near Charlie’s Bar by the docks, pretty worse for wear.” He looks back in time to see Alfred raise a neat eyebrow.

“Any evidence of lethal force?”

“Nope.” Dick sighs. “Mostly rules out Jason. Then there was that ex-lobbyist threatening to vent poison through City Hall, only to show up trussed outside of Blackgate the next morning. Someone’s operating in Gotham without us knowing. Someone good.”

“Not good enough to stay out of sight forever,” Damian calls from the stairs. 

“Oh come on, what’d I say about you actually going to bed tonight?”

Damian scoffs. He holds up his phone, bright in dim cave-light. “I can listen to police chatter from bed.”

“You know that’s not what I meant!”

“No, but it’s what you should have expected. The point is, someone saw the wrong Batgirl tonight.”

“So were you planning on telling us at some point?” Dick bites out, striding across Babs’ base of operations in the rebuilt Clock Tower. Sunrise filters through the massive clock face, painting the brick walls a bitter orange.

“You’re still recovering.” She turns her chair to face him head-on, not a hint of regret on her face. “There’s enough on your plate.”

“Somebody goes out wearing the Bat on their chest in Gotham, I should probably know about it.”

“That’s right,” Damian says from his side, pint-sized outrage. “You of all people shouldn’t hide information. It’s precisely the opposite of your job.”

“If you knew how many times a year I plug your identity leaks you’d reconsider that job description.” 

Damian huffs, but Dick has to break her gaze before fondness can temper his annoyance. She and Damian both have that effect on him: their pride is endearing. That doesn’t mean he should let this go. 

“Where is she?” he says flatly.

Babs sizes him up: a sweeping gaze that takes in his street clothes and the bags still thick beneath his eyes. Her expression softens for a moment, then seems to go guarded almost against her will. Like it’s not her own secrets she’s worried about keeping.

Barbara Gordon might be the closest thing Dick’s ever had to an internal narrative. Oracle’s voice in his ear, mapping his route, pulling government files, teasing and goading and urging him on. Paradoxically, he’d felt closest to her while living in Blüdhaven: absent the rest of his network, he’d relied on her. Physical distance meant nothing compared to a closeness in the dark that had sent shivers down his spine. 

And things might be different now, but he still knows her. That half-second slip was enough to give away why she hadn’t told him about Cass coming back from Hong Kong. 

He glances to the bedroom door, then lowers his voice. “She didn’t want me to know.”

“Not immediately. She would’ve told you soon.”

Damian clicks his tongue. “Why wait? She’s been back here before.”

Cass had made the occasional transcontinental appearance after Bruce’s funeral. Last time, she and Damian had disarmed a bomb together. Underwater.

“Because it’s different this time,” Dick surmises. “She wants to stay.”

Babs watches him calmly. Dawn glints from her screens, her glasses, the band in her hair. When push comes to shove, Batgirls take each other’s side.

Dick sighs. He puts a hand on Damian’s shoulder, a gentle push towards Babs. “Dames, can you hang out here for a second? I dunno, learn to hack something.” 

“What? No, I want to get to the bottom of Cain’s behavior!” 

“I know all of her secrets,” Babs deadpans. “You could interrogate me.”

“You’re hilarious. There’s nothing you could teach me about hacking anyway. I’m a master of cyberwarfare, an expert in—”

“I’m in LexCorp’s VIP client database right now.”

Damian shoves forward to lean over her desk. “Where? Show me.”

Dick exchanges a grin with Babs over the boy’s shoulder, then makes for the bedroom door.

Cass is sleeping on the bed inside, a tangled pile of black fabric. Hair sticks to a drool line on her cheek. She’s been out all night, Dick can tell at a glance—maybe hasn’t slept much between patrols until now. Maybe a case has her attention and it’s all Babs can do to get her to collapse somewhere every few days to sleep with her suit still on. 

Bruce was like that, too.

The suit, now that he’s looking, isn’t quite Black Bat’s: it has the faux-ragged cape and the long scarf, but the subtle epaulets are a throwback to her time as Batgirl. So are the spiked wrist gauntlets, tossed in a corner with a worn gym bag Dick would guess contains all of her worldly possessions. The Bat symbol, as always, is large and golden on her chest.

She opens her eye just a sliver, watching him in the doorway. Dick gets nervous without knowing why.

“You made quick work of the Ivgenes last night,” he says.

Cass yawns and pushes herself to sitting. “Easy. A warm-up.”

“What are you warming up for?”

“Gotham without Bruce.”

That stings a bit—prods at a scabbed-over insecurity that, even several emotional breakthroughs later, still throbs now and then to remind him it exists. “I’d like to think I haven’t let the whole place fall apart in his absence.”

“Not what I meant,” Cass sighs, and pats the bed next to her.

The bedsprings wheeze beneath him. “That’s good. Because I wouldn’t want to think our cool team-ups have been a disappointment.”

A smile plays at the edge of Cass’s lips, and Dick finds himself relaxing. She sounds her words out deliberately, like she has all the time in the world. “When I was Batgirl, I wanted…Bruce to trust me. I wanted…to prove I could best him. Be him.”

“Those all seem like different goals to me, but sure, I’m with you so far.”

“He…taught me. So much. Barbara and Bruce did together. But Bruce was…”

She trails off, her forehead creasing in affront at the inadequacy of words. 

“Who am I in Gotham without Bruce?” she says finally. “What…should I be next?”

Comprehension dawns. “It’s like this void, isn’t it? On the streets at night. Sometimes it’s like I can see the shape of him, his absence, like something cut out of a photograph. You wanted to see how you fit in that space in Gotham without him. And by extension, without me.”

“Yes. But on the other hand…” She eyes him critically. “Maybe if Bruce had lived, he would have asked me to come back.”

That’s a kick to the gut. Dick had wondered, of course, if Cass would come back from Hong Kong one day. She’d seemed to thrive there, but Dick hadn’t asked. He wouldn’t have thought it his place to ask: Cass had adored Bruce, in her own way, but Dick’s relationship with her had started out turbulent. He’d thought she’d wanted to keep some distance.

“I’m sorry,” he says weakly. “You seemed happy there. Like you could act more independently.”

To his surprise, Cass snorts at that. “I went because Bruce asked me to.”

“He what?”

“In the event of…his disappearance. He needed an agent there. In case he was just in hiding. But…he was really gone.” She frowns down at her knees. “I took the city as my own. Saved lots of people. Helped.”

“But?”

“But sometimes…growing means sending yourself places. Coming back to where you were before. New and changed.”

Dick pictures the manor: laughter in the parlor and ivy on the southern wall.

Damian barges in. “Cain, we may be willing to let you back into the fold, if you answer just one question: did Brown know you were back?”

“Of course,” Cass says bluntly. “We patrol together.”

“Betrayal!” Damian howls, immediately reaching for his phone to—presumably—text Steph a million angry emojis. 

That tracks. Steph has a tendency to aim her mile-wide rebellious streak directly at the cowl. Dick knows by now that inheriting Batman means inheriting a lot of Batgirls and Robins who refuse to be told what to do. It's practically tradition.

“You’re welcome here,” Dick says firmly. “Not like it’s my choice, but for what it’s worth, I’m glad to have you.”

Cass stands up to stretch, palms pushed toward the industrial ceiling. She grins down at Dick, the symbol on her chest gleaming, not Black Bat or the Batgirl of old but something brand new. “It’s good to be home.”