Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s a bird in her son’s room. 

She’s walking in to greet him when she first catches sight of it, having just come back from a moderately productive errand in France. He’s whispering to it, his back to the door.

It is clear that he did not mean for her to see it, cognizant enough of his transgression to hide the creature away in his chambers where it could remain unnoticed. Its wing is slightly crooked; evidence that her son attempted to set a broken bone but did not have the necessary expertise to keep it from healing imperfectly. Mostly restored, it is hopping lightly from the desk to the windowsill when she enters the room.

Damian’s hand is outstretched, a small handful of sunflower seeds cupped in front of his charge in offering. His shoulders freeze the instant she crosses the threshold—aware enough of his surroundings to notice an unexpected visitor, but not enough to register her footsteps in the hall. Another flaw in his actions, and she can see from the way he turns to look at her that he is aware of it.

The bird cocks its head, so used to human contact that it does not even flutter at her approach. He’s been feeding it for a while, then.

Her face is still as she watches him—sees the way he draws his hand back from the bird at once, clasping his hands behind his back to face her with his chin bowed—but her pulse is thudding in her ears.

The bird is still looking at her.

She thinks of reaching for the dagger concealed at her side, then thinks better of it. Instead, she reaches out a hand, unflinching as the bird steps easily onto her finger, its claws curling sharply into her skin.

Damian’s eyes track its motion as she lifts it closer to her face, stroking its gingerly held wing slowly with her other hand. It chirps, and his eyes flicker to her own. 

He comes up barely to her elbow, but he carries himself with the weight of a warrior much older than he is. On the desk, a scratched-out portrait of the bird touches down at the top of a half-outlined essay.

She can see him searching for some avenue of escape, some excuse, and coming up short. He’s clever, her son. He knows better than to think this will be forgiven.

Briefly, she pictures the light of that cleverness behind his eyes vanishing, pictures her son’s body sat upon a throne that is not his own, with a name that was never meant for him, and does not shudder. 

She focuses instead on the fact that her son has lost any hint of the ease he carried before she came into the room, his body tensing as if braced for impact, not for his sake, but for that of the animal.

He is worried she will hurt it. Good. 

She won’t. She has no interest in becoming her son’s villain, and some lessons cannot be learned through demonstration.

She knows he thinks she is without fear, but she is growing more and more accustomed to it by the day. She finds herself terrified so often—of the slightness of his frame as he stands at attention in front of the window, so easily pushed, of the tenderness of a heart that sees a bird with a broken wing and thinks help, not hurt. Of how much like his father he is. 

Her Beloved may be able to keep to his code, with his allies and his resources and his name—all of Gotham is behind him—but Damian remains, no matter how she tries, just a boy. He is not invulnerable. He is easily broken, and it is easier still when he leaves points of weakness like this to press on—hasn’t she taught him better than this? 

Doesn’t he know how dangerous it is, to tie something so fragile to yourself, so dependent on you for survival, when all it results in is another target painted on a smaller back? 

It is a deadly thing, letting your heart live somewhere outside of your chest.

She ignores the trembling, lurching feeling in her own heart (not her hands, never her hands, which are always steady whether she draws a gun or a blade) at the memory of him holding his hands out to the creature, face so open and trusting. 

No, she will not harm the bird. 

He’s still waiting, silent, for his sentence. She takes pity and gives it to him.

She draws her own long knife from its hidden sheath (he stiffens) and flips it, handing it to him hilt-first.

He takes it. 

“Mother?”

It’s a simply decorated blade, sharp enough to be painless. A kindness she hopes he appreciates.

“You will kill the bird before I return,” she tells him. “I am sure you understand this lapse in judgement is unacceptable.”

His eyes widen, and he does not take a step back but she watches him waver, as though he would like to.

“I will not feed it again,” he says, pleading, as she lowers the bird to the desk once more. It hops from her finger and onto the neatly ordered papers, oblivious to its fate.

She turns to the door, refusing to witness anymore. He will be grateful, someday, that she chose to turn a blind eye to this display of sentiment.

“Mother, please,” her son calls, but she has already passed through the door, and the words are muffled. She does not slow in her steps.

She has given him an order, and no amount of begging will change the fact that he must obey it or face the consequences. 

It is the only way to fully understand the gravity of his error, and if the sight of the tears welling in his eyes—never falling, she has trained him better than that—tugs at her heart, she is strong enough to continue on anyway. 

It is better, that he learn now that this is the way things are. 

When she comes back the next day, the bird is gone, and there is blood on the blade that he hurries to clean off the instant she enters his chambers. 

She reprimands him for his poor treatment of the weapon, then glances around.

“And the body?” she asks, although a part of her already knows what he will say. 

“I had a guard dispose of it,” he tells her. “It was unsanitary. I apologize, I should have anticipated you would return sooner and had your knife ready for you when you came.”

Talia looks at him, and the solid way he holds himself. His left arm is oddly rigid, and she suspects if she pushed his sleeve up she would find a freshly bandaged wound on his forearm. 

She grips it, as if to pull him towards her, and observes the way he carefully does not wince in pain. 

“You are certain that it is dead?” she asks him, gaze piercing.

He nods, making direct eye contact. “I am certain, Mother.”

Damian is her son, which means he is unable to hide the hint of defiance in his gaze, or the the proud upwards tilt of his chin, even as he lies so evenly. He has been disobedient before, but never to such an extreme. 

She thinks she might be proud of him. It is not an unfamiliar feeling.

“Good.” She releases his arm.

He did not kill the bird. It has been either released outside the walls of the compound or frightened away (the paperweight is missing from his desk, and she wonders if it was thrown to dissuade the wretched thing from coming back). He did not kill the bird, and she knows this with every fiber of her being, because at his heart, her son is not a boy who kills.

It will be the death of him. 

She has the sudden urge to cut him down where he stands: less due to his blatant rebellion than simply to spare herself the pain of his inevitable loss. It is swiftly followed by the understanding that she would rather chop her own arm from her body.

He is her son. She knew he would be incapable of this—perhaps it was cruel to ask it of him, but she could not help but hope to be proven wrong—because she was, too. After all, what has Damian ever been, if not a weakness? 

“This is beneath you,” she says, turning away to look out his window. “Do not forget that you were born for greatness.” She is aware he will interpret this as remonstration, but that is not how she means it. 

It is true, that he was born for greater things. Not for the first time, Talia is struck with a bone deep certainty that he will not grow to be great if he remains here.

She picks up her blade from where he has finished with it and looks at him. 

He’s young, but has none of the soft baby fat of the children she has seen on her trips, though his face has not lost all of its roundness yet. His hands, she knows, are not gentle and squishy like the hands of other mother’s sons his age, but rough and calloused in all the places needed to hold a sword. 

Talia steps forward, and watches as he does not move: does not flinch away, does not lean towards her. She lowers the blade, cupping his cheek in her palm. Like him, her hands have never been allowed to be soft. There is no use in trying to make them that way, even if just for a moment. 

He looks at her, his gaze searching for something she hopes he will not find.

“Good,” she says again. Then she drops her hand, looks at him once more, and leaves. She does not tell him when she will be back, because she has no way of knowing.

He was never going to kill the bird.

He is his father’s son, soft hearted and gentle, but more than that he is her son: and he was only ever going to be strong willed and uncompromising. 

She knows now that it is time for him to go. 

She will not watch this boy who refuses to kill creatures smaller than him grow into someone she doesn’t recognize.

They will take him, if she sends him to Gotham. They will keep him safe. They may even make him happy. His father will build him a sanctuary of birds, and a thousand art studios in which to draw them in. A thousand reasons to let his face slip into that expression it held yesterday, looking at the bird before him, long before she ever entered the room.

He will not be slain in his sleep for the refusal to follow orders. He will not become a vessel for her father, vanishing behind cruel eyes and crueler actions. Her father, who speaks of the loyalty due to family but has endangered her and her son time after time, who sees her son more as an object than a child (Her child. Damian is her only child).

She will send him away. He will do great things. 

And she will not get the chance to see it.

Chapter Text

There are posters on the wall in her son’s room. The one over his dresser looks like some sort of video game. 

She wonders if that is the sort of thing he does now. Video games. 

There’s a still-white canvas set up on the easel by the window. Waiting for him. It’s dark, but she can see the beginnings of figures sketched out in pencil, poised for action in dynamic poses.

There’s a gala downstairs, but not one she’s invited to, and she has no interest in the stir making a surprise entrance would cause. She can hear muffled laughter through the open window, drifting up from the ballroom below in that odd, muted quality parties always seem to have. 

This manor might have hers, once. She finds she doesn’t recognize it.

The sketchbook on Damian’s bed is less manicured than the start of the painting to her right. There’s Nightwing, and an assortment of wildflowers, and twin gravestones with carefully scrawled labels. A dog in profile marked Titus. The butler. A shadow of a figure at the top of a hill penciled in as father. His family, and it does not escape her notice that she is nowhere to be found on any of the pages.

The stairs creak outside the door, and she lets the book fall closed as she turns to greet her son as he opens the door. She does not blink at the sudden influx of light from the hall.

There’s a dog trailing behind him, large enough that its head comes up to his hip. Titus, from the drawings. Damian takes his hand off its head when he sees her in the room, his mouth thinning itself into a tightly drawn line. 

The dog eyes her suspiciously, then presses its nose into Damian’s hand, but he makes no reaction to the inquisitive nudge, shifting his hand away as though the animal means nothing to him. A lesson learnt, and one she taught him, but her heart clenches all the same.

She looks impassively at him, wanting to see how he will react. He steps forward, not closing the door behind him. His head is held stiffly in a way that is achingly familiar to her.

“Mother,” he says evenly, as though she is an expected guest and not an intruder. “What brings you here? I have not seen you since you delivered me to my father.”

She finds herself floundering for a response, which is uncharacteristic of her. She knew he would change, but the realization is stronger when he is standing here in front of her.

“I wanted you see you. To see how your training was progressing.”

Perhaps she should not have come. Better that he forget her.

She says as much. His brow furrows, the same way it used to when he was a baby, perplexed by something beyond his comprehension, and she feels a stab of fondness.

“I could never forget you, Mother,” he tells her. 

Talia does not know if this is a good or a bad thing.

She searches for something to say.

“Do you often speak at your father’s events?” she asks. She saw a little of his speech through a crack in the door as she made her way up to the family wing. 

“Not often. But we are raising funds for an animal shelter Father plans to open in the Narrows, and I felt it prudent to show my support.”

“You spoke well.”

She thinks he looks surprised at her attendance but finds it difficult to tell. He has always been hard for her to read. 

The dog whines. They both ignore it, although Damian’s fingers twitch.

Light flares past the window, then vanishes just as quick as it came. The guests are departing, and the sound of their conversation spills into the night air.

“I trust you are keeping up with your studies,” she says, a half-question, because she will not ask him if he feels safe here. He never feels safe. He is her child. 

Damian nods, but something about the quickness of the motion feels disingenuous. “I am learning many things from my father,” he promises. “As well as the rest of the city’s vigilantes. I will make you proud.”

Yes. That was never in question.

“And your regular lessons? At school?”

He pauses, his lip curling in distaste. “The children at my school are…less than stimulating conversation partners. But I am keeping up easily with the coursework.”

She nods once. This is as expected. Talia turns to go.

“Mother?” he calls, and she slows but does not turn to face him. “Will I see you again?”

There is a watercolor portrait pinned to the bulletin board above his desk, no bigger than a postcard. Her own eyes look out at her, the green softened by the medium. She looks back.

“Perhaps,” she allows. “If my travels permit.”

He nods, and does not ask for more, as is also expected.

The dog walks up to her, and at last, there is movement: a minute panic that flickers over Damian’s expression before he smooths it out. 

She reaches out and runs her fingers along its fur, stroking the soft crown of its head, hoping to reassure him of her intentions. He watches her hands as though a knife will appear in them at any moment. 

“A good creature,” she tells him, although she has no true way of knowing. “Strong.”

He does not relax until her hand has retracted and the dog has returned to his side.

She looks around the room again. It does not belong to the boy she remembers raising, but she hopes this is a sign of something good and of not a terrible mistake.

“I am sorry,” he says, after a moment more of her inspection. This gets her attention, and she meets his eyes, surprised.

“For what?”

“I don’t think I can become the warrior you wanted me to be. I am—”

She waits. 

“They do things differently here. I do not think I will be able to change the world in the way that you wanted me to.”

Maybe not. But there are many way to change the world, and she finds resolved, if not pleased, to respect the avenue he has chosen.

“I do not waste my time on fruitless pursuits,” she informs him, satisfied that this conveys her meaning. 

He nods, not meeting her eyes.

She does not look back during her departure through the window to see if he is watching her as she goes, instead leaping nimbly from the ledge to the slanted roof below. She has already left too much of herself behind with him, and if she turns she fears her whole soul will rise up and choke the air from her throat. 

In the morning, the butler will wake up to find a black and white kitten curling around the tomatoes of the vegetable garden. He will bring it up to her son, his white gloves protecting him from its myriad of attempted scratches, and she will watch through a tall window as her son receives the gift, standing unnoticed in the rose garden of a woman who was never her mother in law. 

She will watch his face light up in delight and think, you will never look that way at me.

He is wise, her son, for a boy so young. It is good that he sees her as a threat. That’s all she ever can be, while she lives under her father’s thumb, an enemy an instant from handing him over. From seeing the spark behind his eyes, so full of open curiosity and kindness, be wiped away. It is good that he will stay here.

He will be safe, as safe as he can be, and perhaps he will even be happy.

She hopes very much that he will grow up to one day be happy.

But for now, all she can do is turn away. There is work to be done.