Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s not that Bruce doesn’t love his sons.

He does.

Fiercely.

To the point of agony.

To the point of madness.

But they are sons.

They are legacy and reflection and consequence.

Dixie was origin.

Dixie was genesis.

Dixie was the very first moment he knew what it meant to live for someone outside of himself.

The moment that reshaped the architecture of his soul, rerouted the pathways of his cold, calculating heart.

Dixie didn’t make him Batman.

She made him Bruce, in the softest, most staggering ways.

He can explain why the others matter.

Jason needed saving.

Tim needed purpose.

Damian needed undoing.

But Dixie?

Dixie needed nothing from him (except, maybe, understanding, the one thing he was never able to provide her with) and yet she became his everything.

She wasn't the best of them because she was flawless.

She was the best of them because she was HIS.

His In every ugly, broken, radiant piece.

She was never built to be a soldier, even if she learned to fight before she learned to laugh.

She was not meant to carry the burdens she bore, and yet…God, she CHOSE to.

She chose to carry them.

Her brothers.

Their world.

Him.

Always him.

Even when he failed her.

Especially when he failed her.

Bruce knows all of his sons.

He can break them down, read their patterns, identify every fracture in their psyches.

But Dixie? Dixie remained unreadable, unknowable, even being the one he has known for the longest time, even being the one whose bones were shaped just like the ones he has known since before his own birth, his mother's.

She was his daughter in a way the others could never be, not just by blood, not just by name, but in understanding.

She KNEW him.

She knew him in the way a mirror knows its subject.

In the way a grave knows its dead.

None of the boys have ever looked at him the way she did, like she could see every ruin inside him and still believed something beautiful lived there.

Jason rages at him.

Tim studies him.

Damian judges him.

Dixie forgave him (Dixie raged and she studied and she judged too, but in the end she forgave him, she ALWAYS forgave him).

Again.

And again.

And again.

And that was a terrifying, holy thing.

Because forgiveness, real forgiveness, from someone like her…it CHANGES people.

The boys push him.

She grounded him.

The boys rebel.

She resisted.

She defied with love, with laughter, with hands that mended what others destroyed.

She wasn't his soldier (even if he knows she often viewed herself that way).

She was his compass.

He is not a man of poetry, but she made him one in the quiet moments.

Made him remember what lullabies sounded like.

Made him believe in softness.

Made him ache.

And he knows…it’s not that his sons are less.

It’s that Dixie was more.

More Bruce.

More memories.

More mystery.

More herself, in ways that none of them ever dared to be.

His sons always belonged to the world. She always belonged to him, not by ownership, not by right, but by that old, unshakable bond formed in the abyss between his birth and hers, between his grief and her grief, two wounded things clinging to each other like breath.

She was the child he never asked for, the one who became his first everything and the one who saved them all.

How could anyone ever compare to that?

They couldn't.

They never will.

Chapter Text

The tragedy is that Dixie liked Talia.

Not blindly.

Not foolishly.

Not easily.

But with a kind of cautious awe…the way a child might love the moon, knowing it’s beautiful but distant, cold, unreachable.

Talia for her was myth and mirage: beautiful, dangerous, unknowable.

A storm pressed into the shape of a woman.

And Dixie…Dixie saw in Talia something sharp and broken, something familiar.

Dixie saw in Talia a question she’d never been brave enough to ask.

She didn’t know why.

And Bruce never told her.

He should have.

He wanted to.

But love is a coward sometimes.

And Bruce… Bruce had always been better at fighting battles than speaking truths.

Because the truth was unbearable: Talia was her mother.

Not the woman who raised her.

Not the one who kissed her bruises and taught her how to fight pain with discipline and sorrow with purpose.

No, Talia never raised Dixie.

And yet…yet she wasn't just the woman who haunted headlines or came wrapped in smoke and danger to demand time with Damian.

Not just an enemy.

She was HERS.

The woman who bore her.

Who loved her enough to let her go.

Who made Damian to keep Dixie safe.

Ra’s wanted a male heir.

And Talia (beautiful, deraged, fiercely territorial and protective Talia) gave him Damian, sharp and angry and male and perfect on paper, so their daughter could be hidden, spared from his same fate.

Dixie was her secret mercy.

Her firstborn.

Her act of rebellion dressed as surrender.

And Bruce held that truth inside his chest like a shard of glass.

Because he couldn't tell her.

He couldn't.

Not because he ever doubted her strength.

But because he always knew the truth would have undone something sacred in her.

Because he couldn't bear the cost of breaking her heart.

She was HIs.

Not only by blood, but by something deeper.

She chose him.

And every day, he woke up terrified that if she ever found out the truth, she might have unchoose him.

He told himself he was protecting her.

But, even then, he knew better.

He was protecting himself.

Because what would she have said if she knew that Talia gave her away, not out of cruelty, but love?

That she was trying to save her, really save her, from the Leviathan waiting in Ra’s shadow?

That Damian wasn’t the firstborn heir, but the decoy.

The shield.

The boy created to be everything Ra wanted so Ra wouldn’t look twice at the girl who could’ve been his ruin or his greatest weapon?

What would she have said if she knew that Talia didn’t abandon her, but sacrificed everything for her?

Would Dixie have grieved the lost years?

Or would she have forgiven her mother for the blood on her hands, if that blood was meant to keep her safe?

Would she have hated him for hiding it?

She was his compass.

His true north.

She was the only person who could've grown up in the shadow of the League and NOT become another weapon.

And Bruce feared for years the day she realized WHY.

He remembers the first time she looked at him and called him “Dad”.

Not out of habit, not out of expectation, but because she meant it.

Because she had no one else, and because he showed up and stayed when no one else ever did.

She gave him her heart.

And she never had any idea how close she came to never knowing him.

He wondered for years, late at night, when the Manor was silent and the city groaned beneath them, if he should’ve told her years before.

If it would’ve been better then (if he could have held her for longer, that way, if he could have saved her from pain, that way).

Cleaner.

Easier.

But she was always so fragile, beneath the fire.

So good at pretending she was healed when she was really just holding the pieces together with borrowed strength.

And then…then she was grown up and  strong and brilliant and formidable and loved.

And Bruce was afraid that truth would unravel everything she’d built.

He feared it would feel like a betrayal.

That it would open old wounds she thought had scarred over.

That she’d question everything: her place, their family, her worth.

That she’d question him.

He has buried many truths in his life.

But that one…than one was the heaviest.

Because of the burden, of the wrench, it always put in between him and Dixie.

Because of the eternal threat that, when it would surface, she wouldn't have viewed it as love, as a way to protect her, but as a lie.

Because if he had told her, and she chose to go lookin, if she had found Talia and lost herself in that tangled legacy, he couldn’t bear it.

Couldn’t lose her.

Not to the League.

Not to a past she never asked for.

Because, from the first moment he held her in his arms (not yet nine, birdboned, shrouded in grief, shaking with sobs), he knew that, while he could survive many things (Gotham. War. Losing his parents, his lovers, his almost brother), he was never made to survive Dixie looking at him, eyes jade green instead of blue, and seeing a stranger.

He never thought he could ever survive  that.

Now he knows he could.

He knows it because his daughter is dead (not for long, not if everything goes according to his plans) and yet he is still here.

His daughter is dead.

And in death, she looked like the eight years old girl he held so many years before.

And so he cradled her in his arms and brought her home.

Then Talia came.

Eyes like steel.

Hands that shook while gripping her blades.

Voice like thunder, demanding him to give her back her firstborn (forgetting, even if just for a moment, that she had been HIS firstborn too).

He couldn't.

He couldn't, not for Dixie, not for himself, not for the version of Talia that had KNOWN that bringing their daughter to Ra's doorstep would be the same as killing her, again and again, too.

But the worst part?

Damian didn’t know either.

Oh, he knew Talia had a daughter.

He’d grown up with the whisper of it.

The ghost of a sister he was never allowed to mention.

A child who'd been given away, protected by silence and shadows.

He must have wondered who she was.

Dreamed of her, maybe, sometimes.

But he didn’t know.

He didn’t know it was Dixie.

Not until after she died.

Not until after her blood stained the ground and her laughter became a memory.

After she was already gone.

And Talia raged, uncaring of what she said, uncaring of who COULD hear her.

“Bruce, you are going to give me Rabi’a. You are going to give me my daughter and let me revive her”.

And Damian…Damian heard her, and he shattered.

Because the girl he adored, the one who saw the best in him, who defended him without hesitation, who made him feel like more than a weapon, was the sister he was never allowed to know.

She was right there.

All along.

And now she was dead.

Bruce saw the moment it hit him.

Damian didn’t scream.

Didn’t rage.

He just looked at him, like the boy he used to be, the one raised in cold places, taught to bury pain under discipline.

He looked at him with hollow, disbelieving eyes and said, “You knew.”

And Bruce couldn’t lie.

He did.

He knew.

And he kept it from both of them.

He thought he was protecting Dixie.

He thought if she didn’t know, she wouldn’t go looking.

That if he could keep her world small, and safe, and full of HIM, she’d never feel that pull toward the people who would have tried to shape her into something else.

But now she was gone.

And she died thinking Talia was nothing but another enemy.

She died not knowing that her mother loved her.

That Damian had been hers, in every way conceivable, because he was born with her blood (because he was born FOR HER, because Talia had always been mad, in that way that was just love bent backwards a thousands times over)

She died thinking she didn’t belong to anyone but Bruce.

And that’s what haunts him most.

Not the lies.

Not even the silence.

But the smile she directed his way the day before she died, broken and brittle, while dropping Damian off at the Manor, and knowing it was built on a foundation of secrets.

She never knew how much she was loved (she never knew that Bruce had destroyed their relationships for a reason, a real REASON).

And Bruce will carry that failure for the rest of his life.

Because she was his favorite.

His best.

His first.

The child who was never meant to exist, never meant to be his either, and yet somehow made everything else worth existing.

And he let her die not knowing who she truly was.

But that isn't important, it can't be, because, when his experiments will finally wake her up again, she'll be glad for it.

For the way he didn't let her go to the pits.

For the way he kept the secret of her close to his chest.

For the way he protected her from the family that could have hurted her, not like him.

Chapter Text

The thing is, Damian hated his sister.

Not Rikki.

Never Rikki, his father's daughter.

But the other one, his phantom sister, his mother's daughter, the girl his mother never spoke of except in veiled, evasive tones.

The one who had been born first, the one who had been chosen.

Given away.

Kept secret.

He was the heir.

The son.

The weapon Ra’s had waited for.

And still, there was always her.

The ghost lingering in the corners of his mother’s eyes.

The softness that had nothing to do with him.

A girl too precious to be raised in the shadows.

A child born of love, one his mother buried so deep in her heart that she only allowed herself to grieve her in silence.

Damian resented her.

This invisible girl who came first and ruined everything.

She didn’t earn his mother’s love.

She was weak.

An accident.

And she left them (she left HIM).

So he hated her.

Hated the myth of her.

Hated the way his mother never spoke of her with shame, only reverence.

Hated the fact that she’d been given love, while he had been forged.

And in the twisted, aching way children can hate the idea of a sibling they never met, Damian decided he was better off without her.

He would be enough.

He had to be.

But Rikki… Rikki was different.

She was light in places he didn’t know could be warm.

She called him “baby bat” and smiled like she didn’t expect him to earn it.

She made space for him, without asking for anything in return.

She teased him, challenged him, believed in him.

She gave him a family.

She made him feel like more than just the weapon he was born to be.

Rikki was his.

His sister in every way that mattered (his mom in every way that mattered too).

She made him want to be good.

And he never questioned it…how deeply she fit.

How her presence felt like something long lost finally coming home.

Why should he, when she was his father’s daughter, why should he, when they shared a father and half the blood in their veins?

He didn’t let himself think about the timing.

Or the softness in his mother’s eyes when she looked at her.

Or the strange flicker of guilt that sometimes darkened their father’s face when she smiled.

Didn’t ask why her mouth looked suspiciously like his own.

Didn’t ask why his mother always went  quiet when he said her name, listening to him in raptuos attention, as if trying to absorb his very words.

And then Rikki died.

Fast and brutal and wrong, and the world lost color for a while.

Damian didn’t cry.

He went still.

Like stone cracking in the cold.

But in Damian's world death had never been the finishing line, not really (if it was, both him and Todd would be long-cold in the ground, if it was, he wouldn’t have been born at all).

And so he went back to the Manor (not home, never home, because that's a word that only belonged to a laughter-filled attic in Blud), hell-bent on doing what his family name demanded from him (hell bent on bringing his sister, his mom back, no matter what father thought about it).

And then…then he was in the cave and father and mother were there too and she talked and talked, without care of who could hear her.

And the realization hit like a knife to the gut.

He had known Talia had a daughter.

Knew there had been a child before him.

A sister.

A ghost Talia spoke of only in code and sorrow.

And all this time… it had been her.

Rikki.

His protector.

His mentor.

His sister.

His MOM.

The one who made him laugh when he didn’t know he could.

The one who stitched up his wounds without flinching.

The one who always saw him, not as the demon’s heir, but just Damian.

The one who always treated him as if he was important (the only one, West aside, who ever really treated him like a child).

And Bruce knew.

All this time.

He knew.

His sister.

The one he’d cursed, hated, resented.

The one he’d thought was selfish and weak and unworthy.

All this time.

She had been Rikki.

He didn’t scream.

Didn’t weep.

He just stood there, his hands trembling, his breath caught, and felt the weight of every cruel thought he’d ever had about her.

Every moment he’d wanted her gone.

Every time he’d resented her for being first.

And all she’d ever done… was love him.

She’d called him her baby brother.

She'd held him with the tenderness only a mom (not in blood, not in birth, but in HEART) could have mustered.

She’d defended him.

She died never knowing that she actually belonged to someone, to something, that she had a story beyond the few lines (and lies) written on her birth certificate.

She died never knowing the truth.

And their father, Bruce, stood there, silent and hollow-eyed, and didn’t say a word, didn't even flinch when he stumbled out of the shadows that had previously concealed him.

“You knew,” he managed to whisper.

Bruce nodded.

Because of course he did.

Because he HAD known.

He had known and said nothing.

He let her die thinking her mother was a stranger, her brother half a stranger, her legacy a burden.

He let her die thinking she was only his.

And now Damian would carry that silence forever.

Because the girl he loved most was the same girl he hated without knowing.

Because she was his sister (and his mom, and the most important person in his life, even BEFORE).

And he only learned it when it was too late.

Chapter Text

Her daughter is dead.

But she…she is (is, not was, never was) springtime.

And springtime will always bloom, no matter how bitter the winter....

So she says “Bruce you are going to give me Rabi’a”

Her voice is raw, gravel cracked from too many days screaming inside her own skull.

“You are going to give me my daughter and let me revive her”.

Bruce says nothing.

He doesn’t need to.

His silence is a wall.

A grave.

A refusal.

He thinks he is being merciful.

That letting Rabi’a rest is kindness.

That death is peace.

But there is no peace for Talia in a world where her daughter does not breathe.

She waits.

And for a moment, just a moment, something breaks in his gaze.

But Bruce doesn't relent.

He doesn’t understand, can’t understand, because for him, the dead stay dead (because he is a hypocrite, the worst of them all, because two of his sons SHOULD be dead, but they aren't, they AREN'T, and it's because of the pits).

For him, this is final.

For him, letting go is love.

For Talia, love is holding on, no matter what.

Love is fighting against the impossible, the immoral, the unnatural.

Love is dragging her child into the pits if it means seeing her eyes again.

Even if those eyes might be wrong, even if they might never look at her the same way again.

Because at least she’d look.

She leaves Gotham in a blood wind, heart hollowed and burning.

She doesn't return to the League.

She doesn't return to anything.

Talia settles in a quiet villa on the outskirts of nothing, a crumbling place with no legacy, no title, no purpose.

Just silence.

She leaves her blades in the dirt.

Doesn’t even sheath them.

Let them rust and then decay, for they lost their purpose in her daughter's death, so now they are useless.

She walks barefoot through the garden that had once belonged to her mother, long before Ra’s, long before power, and sits herself beneath the apricot tree where no one but the dead would listen.

She sets herself against the tree bark and she digs up the hard soil with her bare hands, uncaring of her own pain.

At some point she meets something hard, harder than earth.

She enlarges the hole, until the lid of a tin box peaks up underneath the black soil.

She opens the rusty box and its hinges squeak.

She takes out the box's meager content.

The photograph is wrinkled by humidity and by how many times she has folded and unfolded it.

Rabi'a.

Sandra.

Jonh.

A girl who smiled like she'd never known pain.

A woman who saw the devil in the eye and decided no amount of power, of wealth, was ever going to be a fair exchange for her soul, and so she ran away, only to raise the devil's granddaughter with gentle hands and a stern voice, who chose to die for a girl that had never been hers by blood, but who had been hers in everything else.

A man who knew how to dream and who chose to love a woman with no past and a girl with no name with his whole heart, until it killed him.

She thinks about Damian.

About how his blue eyes turned green far too soon.

About his betrayed gaze after he discovered he never had two sisters at all.

And she, the woman who had birthed Rabi'a and bore Damian like a scar on her soul, can only press her forehead to her knees and weep.

Not the violent sobs of someone broken.

The quiet kind.

The ones that feel like dying.

“I named you Rabi'a,” she whispers to the wind, voice choking. “It means springtime.”

No one answers her.

Not her father.

Not the gods.

Not even the daughter she had given away for safekeeping.

“She wasn’t supposed to be a soldier. She was supposed to live.” she pleads to the wind.

But she hadn’t.

And now the boy she made to protect her hates her.

She curls into herself, bones shaking, eyes raw.

“You were never mine,” she breathes out. “But I was always yours.”

She was so small.

She had been small before, when she was still trapped inside her womb but, in her arms, her daughter looked even more minuscole (even more fragile too).

Talia had held other infants before.

But she…she wasn’t just a child.

She was HERS.

And she was perfect.

Dark eyes like bruised velvet.

Hair so black it held no reflection at all in the light.

Tiny hands that curled instinctively around her thumb.

“She smiles in her sleep,” Talia whispered to Sandra, awestruck. “Look. She smiles…”

“She has your nose,” Sandra said gently.

“No,” Talia breathed. “She has his.”

That was one of the dangers.

That was one of the reasons why she had to let her go.

Her father would have tried to reshape her, to train her, in any case.

But…but, in her, he would not only see legacy, but also the Bat and then he would not only try to reshape her, but to crush every sliver of her father's entirely.

Talia wouldn’t let that happen.

And Talia…Talia did not like Shiva.

She might even have hated her.

Not because of anything Shiva did, but because of what she represented:  a woman who broke the circle.

Who decided to be free.

Who fell in love with a nobody not because of his name, but because of who he was.

And it burned.

Because Talia never even tried.

But Shiva was safe.

Safer than Talia.

Safer than Bruce too.

Because Bruce offered a different kind of danger.

Redemption through ideals.

Through righteousness.

Through shame.

And Talia didn’t want her daughter to grow up learning how to be good.

She wanted her to learn how to survive.

But she knew she couldn’t do it herself.

She was too entrenched.

Too broken.

Too soaked in the League’s rot to pretend she could offer anything else.

So she picked Shiva.

Not because she liked her.

But because she understandood.

Because if anyone could teach Rabi'a how to survive and still being herself, it was the woman who tried to turn herself into someone else entirely for the love of someone else.

Anyways she waited four hours.

Four Hours of fairy tales in a tongue that was her mother's but that for Rabi'a would remain unknown.

Four hours of tears, and the soft hush of lullabies no assassin was ever meant to sing.

Four hours of becoming a mother (nine months of becoming a mother), before she stopped being one.

And, even if Talia didn't like her, Sandra was strong.

Strong enough as a fighter.

Strong enough to escape.

Strong enough to survive.

Her spine was war-forged and grief-tempered.

She would keep Rabi'a safe.

“I’m sorry,” Talia whispered, brushing one last kiss to her daughter’s brow.

“I love you.”

She turned her head away before she could change her mind.

Never looked back at Sandra's retreating figure.

Never forgave herself.

Not when she saw Rabi'a again, free, happy, dancing in the air beside Sandra and John.

Not when she built Damian as a decoy.

Not when she held him and felt no echo of the soul she’d left behind.

Not even when she finally, finally spoke to her for the first time, alive, grown, radiant and brutal.

She never forgave herself.

And she never said a thing.

Because what could she say?

How do one tells someone ‘I burned heaven to keep you whole?’

How could she explain to her daughter that losing her (again and again and again) wasn't just losing the child she once carried inside her, the one she NEVER had to LEARN how to love, but also the one reflection of herself (of the person she never allowed herself to be) she could still look in the eyes at the mirror?

Her daughter (daughter of war, heir of silence, warden of her heart) died trying to be more than what either she or Bruce ever were.

Her daughter (the one she sent away for safekeeping, the one she wanted to protect, the one who was meant to LIVE) died, and the father that should have loved her left her to rot.

And Talia once loved Bruce, but she is never gonna forgive him, not for that (she is never gonna forgive herself either, not for ever believing him to be better than her own father, not now, not ever).

Because Khaled Hossein had been right, when he wrote:

‘A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.’

Her womb once stretched to make space for Rabi'a.

And Bruce's heart never stretched enough to understand that love, sometimes, has to be a wrenched thing.

Maybe that's the true unbridgeable abyss between them.

Maybe that's the intrinsec difference between a Father and a Mother.

That was it.

Her whole life, encased between her love and grief for her children and her hate for their father (the hate for her own father too).

That was it, until Damian's letter arrives, and once again uproots her whole life..

And she discovers…she discovers she has another chance, even if it is a difficult one.

But she will find a way.

She always does.

Because Rabi’a is hers.

Her first.

Her spring.

Her always.

Her beloved.

And death is not enough to keep her from her baby.

Not now.

Not ever.  

Chapter Text

It was raining when Damian found him.

Of course it was.

Gotham always liked to be poetic at the worst possible moments.

Father stood alone in the cave, staring at the empty Nightwing suit encased in glass.

His daughter's.

His only daughter.

Not just HIS.

Damian didn’t speak at first.

Just walked in, quiet as a ghost, and stood at the edge of the light.

Watching.

Father didn’t turn.

“You knew,” Damian said once again, voice flat.

Not a question.

Father closed his eyes.

“I did.”

Damian’s fists clenched.

He hadn’t realized how much fury lived in his chest until it had a place to go (he had never realized how deeply he and Rikki fit, until she was gone, too).

“You knew, and you said NOTHING.”

“I was protecting her.”

The rage didn’t vanish.

It calcified.

Became something sharper.

Something worse (it became the rage Todd and Drake sometimes talked about, the one he only saw behind his sister's broken eyes).

“From me?!”

The question echoed off the stone, sharp and furious.

Father didn't emit a single sound.

“I adored her,” Damian snapped. “She was the only one who ever made me feel like I wasn’t just a weapon. She was…she was everything. And you let her die without ever knowing…without ever knowing who she was.”

Father finally turned, face drawn in shadow. Rainwater clung to the cape still draped around his shoulders.

“I was trying to spare her the pain,” he said quietly. “Talia gave her up to keep her from that life. From Ra’s.”

“She gave her up,” Damian spat, “and you lied to her. You pretended you were the only one who mattered.”

“That’s not true…”

“Isn’t it?!” Damian’s voice cracked. “She died thinking she was only yours. She died thinking her mother abandoned her without a second thought. Thinking you were the only one…the only one…” the rage strangled the words in his throat.

He stepped forward, fury trembling just beneath the surface.

“I hated her, you know. The one Talia gave away. I hated her for taking my place before I was even born.

I spent years resenting her.

I used to imagine killing her.

Just to make the memory of her stop.

Because she was the one Talia loved. Because she got away.

Because I didn’t.”

He hated everything about her.

Even her name.

Her name was Rabi’a, springtime in their mother's tongue, that held her close like a secret.

His name didn't share the softness of those same vowels, coming from greek instead of arabic.

And it's meaning was the crux of his life.

To tame.

To subdue.

(To destroy and kill and reforge).

There was no love in his name.

Only legacy.

Only duty.

Father took a step forward.

Damian recoiled.

“You let me hate her.”

Father finally turned towards him, but he didn’t speak.

“You let me hate her.”

Damian’s voice cracked.

“You let me hate her,” he whispered, shaking, “while she was right there.”

Father didn’t deny it.

Didn’t argue.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s not enough.”

“I know.”

Silence.

He choked on the next words.

“And it was her. It was Rikki all along.”

Father's jaw tightened, but he didn’t speak.

“I loved her,” he said. Like a confession. Like a sin. “More than anyone. She was my family. My only family. And I didn't even know…”

His eyes burned.

“I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

Father spoke, voice so soft it could have been broken wind “Neither did I.”

“She loved you. Even when you wronged her. Even when you wounded her,” Damian whispered. “She would’ve forgiven you for anything.”

“I know.”

“But I won’t.”

Silence.

Heavy.

Absolute.

They stood there, the grief between them like a third person, Rikki’s ghost, still stronger than either of them even in her absence.

“I don’t want your excuses. I don’t want your guilt. I want the truth. I want to know everything she never got to hear.”

Father looked at him for a long time.

And then… nodded.

“Then sit down,” he said, voice hoarse. “And I’ll tell you who she really was.”

Damian didn’t move.

“You’re not telling me,” he said. “You’re telling HER. Because I’m not the one you failed, again and again.”

And with that, he turned his back and left the cave.

Let Father drown in his own silence.

Let him live with the ghost he helped create.

Damian didn’t cry.

Not when he was alone, not even when his knees hit the floor in front of her case hours later, silent and trembling.

Not even then.

He never learned how.

But the ache…it was there.

Like a phantom limb.

Like a Rikki-shaped hole in his chest he’d only just realized had always been there.

He didn’t speak to father for months after that night.

They passed each other like shadows in the manor, sometimes stopping, sometimes nodding, but neither of them had the words yet.

Most of the time father wasn't even there.

Too busy drowning his grief in another case.

Most of the time Damian too, wasn't there.

Because he and Rikki never lived in the Manor at the same time and  yet…yet the whole place almost reeked of her.

So he found solace in other places.

In Drake’s apartment in the city, sometimes.

In one of Todd's safehouses sometimes too.

But then…then he stumbled upon some encrypted Files that SHOULDN’T have been in the Bat-computer.

He asked for Drake's help.

Gordon's too, for good measure.

And what he discovered…what he discovered led him to write to his mother.

What he discovered made him hate Father like he never did before.

Chapter Text

Bruce sat alone in the cave after Damian stormed out. The silence pressed in like a second skin: cold, suffocating, thick with memory.

He sat across from the glass case, staring at her suit.

The ocean blue and the black still gleamed under the dim light.

The last thing she’d ever worn that hadn't needed to be cut off from her body (the last thing she ever wore that had cradled her, alive and whole).

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Not to Damian.

To her.

“I should have told you the truth a long time ago.”

His voice was low.

Ragged.

“You used to ask me, sometimes. About your mother. And I’d lie. I’d say that leaving you was the best thing she ever done, that she couldn’t be part of your life. That she wasn’t like us. I thought it would spare you. I thought if you didn’t know her name, didn’t know what she’d walked you away from, you could be free.”

He looked down at his hands, calloused, scarred, just like his daughter's, shaking now.

“But the truth is… she gave you away because she loved you. Because she couldn’t bear to let you grow up in Ra’s’ shadows. She didn’t want you to become a weapon. She didn’t want you to be trained for a war you never chose.”

His voice cracks.

“She gave you to Lady Shiva because she thought she could protect you and then, when it all failed, she gave you to me.
To ME, Dixie.
She thought that I could give you a life that wasn’t soaked in blood and prophecy.”

A bitter laugh escaped him.

“She thought I was safe.”

He stood slowly and walked over to the case, fingertips just brushing the cold glass.

“You were so much like her. But softer. Warmer. You had her fire without her damage. Her will without her cruelty. And every time I looked at you, I saw what she could have been if she’d been loved the way she deserved.”

His voice dropped to a whisper.

“I was so afraid that if you knew…if you knew she was your mother…you’d go looking for her. You’d get pulled into that world. You’d fall into it like she did. Like he did too… And yes, he came out of it, he GREW out of it, but only because YOU were there… ”

He turned his head toward the shadows, toward where Damian had stood minutes before.

“I thought Damian was the sword. And you were the shield. But I was wrong. He was the shield. And you…you were both. You were everything.”

He swallowed.

“And I failed you.”

Bruce pressed his palm against the glass.

“You deserved to know you had a mother who loved you. You deserved to know why she left. You deserved the whole story. But I was a coward.”

Silence.

Then, softer: “I thought we had more time.”

His hand slid down the glass, his voice barely audible now.

“I miss you so much, Rikki.”

For once, he didn’t hide from the grief.

He didn’t bury it beneath duty or war or silence.

He let it wreck him.

Because she was gone, even if not forever.

And there was no lie left to protect her from.

Chapter Text

She came three nights later.

Not as an assassin.

Not as a lover.

Not even as the woman who once burned the world just to prove she could.

She came as a mother (she came as the one thing she was never allowed to be, not for her daughter, at least).

Damian stands in the middle of the rooftop, arms crossed, face carved in stone, watching.

She lands just beside him, as silent as the shadows she was taught to resemble since forever.

Damian hears her anyway (Damian hears her, because her bones called his, maybe, Damian hears her, maybe just because he was trained by the best the world could offer).

Then she looks up, directly at Damian.

And her voice… cracks.

“I didn’t want you to know her like that.”

Damian steps down slowly, one hand on the railing, moving like he is falling through time itself.

“You made me hate her.”

“I tried to save her.”

“She was already mine. Long before you admitted she was yours.”

Talia says nothing.

Then, softly: “You reminded me of her. That’s why I kept you at arm’s length.”

“That’s why you gave me to the League,” Damian snaps.

“No,” she whispers. “That’s why I never let them have all of you. That's why I sent you to her.”

Talia walks forward, her hands trembling, not from fear, but from the memory of holding a newborn girl and choosing not to damn her.

“I gave her away because I loved her more than anything. And I made you for him. So I could keep Ra’s satisfied. So I could keep her safe.”

“And when she died?” Damian asks. “When she died, and you didn’t even stay long enough to bury her?”

“I thought if I saw her cold, if I touched her face, I’d never be able to let go. I tought…” her hands still, but her voice cracks anyway, “I thought that, if I stayed, I would have killed him to get to her and, even after everything…she loved him. I couldn't do that to her”.

Damian doesn’t move.

“I couldn't Damian…I couldn't. You should understand me. We are Al-Ghuls. Death doesn't touch us. And Bruce…Bruce wants death to have her, too afraid Father will sink his claws in her. But he won't. He won't. I'll make sure.” She pleads. 

“You both failed her.”

Talia doesn’t even try to argue.

“I needed her.”

Talia reaches out, but he steps back.

“Don’t,” he says. “You gave us away once. You don't get to comfort me now. You don’t get to mourn her now too.”

Talia nods, slowly, painfully.

“Did you ever love her at all?”

“I did.”

“Like you ‘loved’ me?”

“It was different”.

“How?” Damian's voice roars in her ears, not the one of a man yet, but still different from the one of the son she left at Rabi'a's doorstep.

“She was Mine. She grew inside me. I never had to LEARN how to love her.” she soars, even knowing that, in saving her daughter, she is already losing her son.

“Like you did with me?”

“You have to understand. She wasn't made of shadows,” she says softly, the ‘like you and me’ goes unsaid between them, “She was too light to bear it. It would have ruined her.”

“It ruined me too.” Damian's tone is small, defeated. 

Everything an Al-Ghul should never be. 

And yet Talia is too tired to reprimand him for it. 

Too griefstriken too.

“But you still wrote to me. You still know I am able to make things better. Better than Bruce, at least.”

He nods once.

Curt.

Sharp.

And then, from the shadows, three figures emerge.

And Talia would be afraid, she SHOULD be afraid, but she can't.

A red helmet.

A black, smooth cowl.

A purple hood pulled over blonde ringlets.

Robin.

Robin.

Robin.

And her son too, Robin.

Her daughter’s name multiplied in her successors.

Her daughter’s name, her daughter’s legacy, her daughter’s ticket out of the ice tomb Bruce confined her into.

Her daughter’s life, giving her life, again.

Just like she did, once.

Just like she is doing now.