Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Aleksandra, as if another self, through a looking glass worse and brightly, fights in a whirl of unstable sound and color that, not for the first time, forces Damian to confront everything he would never want to (never could) be in a spar. 

She is messy. Undisciplined. Unsubtle. She throws her weight around the training mats in wide, pouncing motions, great lurching wastes of energy with no clear aim or style. He could not imagine a stupider, riskier, more mismatched weapon for Aleksandra to have latched onto than her dearest, most unbearably noisy chain-sickle. Flail weapons should—nay, must—only be utilized by those with the precision and restraint to handle such a tool responsibly. Bladed flails triply so. And she, despite her curious talents, is neither. Unsharpened though it may be, it is a miracle and a half that she has not taken an eye out yet—hers or his.

And even so: she is a force. Unpredictable, unputdownable. Even in the depths of his exasperation, he is loath to admit that she does, at times, remind him of that old television serial Timothy keeps trying to get him to watch—with the Captain who plays all the wrong chess moves and yet trounces the esteemed, educated Commander all the same. He goes easy in their spars, easier even than he does against his other siblings—a handicap of one hand tied still would not even the odds enough to make it a truly fair fight—but even so, even with a decade’s less practice, she is nothing to be scoffed at. 

Sasha Peters demands attention. She takes after Todd this way.

He parries a lash of her chain-sickle with his training naginata, steel edge glancing off the dense, polished wood without leaving a scratch. 

She laughs like a chime. “You are not even attacking. Only defending.”

“You are not wearing sufficient armor.”

“Because I’m supposed to be learning to dodge and parry, not to simply tank hits and hope for the best. Which I cannot do if you keep cowering away from striking me.”

He knocks her ankles out from under her effortlessly. “What, like that?” He cannot help but smirk.

Aleksandra cackles between tired pants, grappling a pillar with her sickle and yanking herself back into fighting stance. “Not fair! How was I meant to parry that kind of hit with a weapon like this?”

“Evildoers will not be fair. Perhaps if you chose a more reasonable weapon…”

She sticks her tongue out petulantly, wrapping the long chain around her knuckles and pulling it taut. “Evildoers. What are you, twelve?”

“Seventeen.” And a half.

“Wow. You are seven years old. I just got leg-swept by a seven-year-old, how humiliating of me.”

“Shura,” Damian grumbles. He swings slowly at her shoulder, giving her more than sufficient time to deflect it with the chain. “Have you given any more thought to your vigilante identity?”

“Hmm… other-me was called Scarlet once…” She catches the end of his naginata in a loop of her chain, but he yanks it back easily.  “But that was just because she was the Red Hood’s sidekick. I don’t need that gig, I’ve already been the Red Hood. Well, for a week. Well, Red Hood the Second.”

“The Third,” he corrects. He slashes at her side, harder this time. She parries with the sickle’s edge.

“Oh yeah,” she recalls with a snort. “Could make it an even four. Pull that old helmet out of retirement.”

“And give every vigilante in Gotham City a collective conniption fit.”

“Not to mention the criminals. Like shaking a cape at a bull. Probably best not to risk it.”

He opens his mouth to respond. She narrows her eyes and pounces with the looped chain. He assumes she is grappling for his weapon again, but she aims for his neck instead. Were he paying better attention, perhaps he would have dodged it in time to avoid the embarrassment, but—so it goes. He shoves his free hand between the metal and his throat to disperse the pressure while he frees himself. She does not pull hard enough to truly strangle, and he is out of the grapple before he can find out if she intends to try. He coughs, kicking her away and sending her flying across the mats. 

“Damn! Almost had you!” she chirps as she rights herself yet again.

Damian laughs as he catches his breath, brighter than he has heard from himself in a while. He is… having fun. “You fight like Richard on fear gas.”

“I lack the frame of reference to tell if that’s meant to be an insult. Is he dangerous when afraid? I always pictured him as the fleeing type.”

“You…” He tosses the naginata between his hands, staring down at his feet as her steps grow closer. “Have you spoken to Timothy on the subject? He… I am sure he would be honored to see the Red Robin mantle taken up again.”

She halts in her forward trajectory. “He—you would want that?”

“I… would not hate it.”

He risks a wary glance upwards. Her grin lights up the cave as she readies her chain-sickle for another round. 

“Robin and Red Robin, reunited at last. Fighting side by side!”

He turns away, frog in his throat. “Hm.”

That bright gaze turns—sad. His hands clutch around the naginata’s wrapped handle. “Oh. Do you… not want to.…”

The flare of pain in his lungs stings worse than any sparring strike. “No, no, not that, I just—” He bites his tongue, trying to recenter his focus, to ignore the cold leaden weight of his guilt. “I do not know if I will be Robin much longer. I… I do not even know if I am Robin now.”

The look in Aleksandra’s eyes must be nerves, or something like it. Must be. Had he not known any better, Damian would be tempted to identify it as… but no, she would have no reason to be relieved by this. No reason at all. He banishes the foolish thought. “You… you’re not retiring, are you?”

His anxiety collapses under its own wretched weight, leaving him feeling little more than frigid and a bit sickly. “Certainly not!” he is quick to reassure, though his tongue feels cottony and cold as the words spill out of his mouth. “It is simply—Father and I have long disagreed over certain aspects of protocol, but with—with increasing frequency and insurmountability, it at times seems that…” He sighs, not meeting her eye. “There was. An argument. An incident. It was… severe. I am uncertain if I am unbecoming of the Robin mantle or if I have simply grown beyond it, but either way…”

She is unreadable. She often is. “Either way it’s time for a change.”

“Precisely.”

She smiles a practiced smile and swings the sickle again without giving him a moment’s notice to prepare, but he has never needed it. Her speed with the weapon has evolved into something… impressive. Admirable, even. He feints left and dodges in. The wooden blade strikes her chest and she wheezes.

“Well, if you’re picking a brand new name, I should pick one too.”

She steps back out of his range and lashes, using the full reach of her chain-sickle to her advantage. The dulled blade just barely nicks his lip, leaving his teeth ringing behind them. He hisses and refocusses. He needs to take her attacks more seriously. To take his own more seriously. It is foolish to underestimate an unpredictable opponent such as this. And she was correct, earlier. This is meant to be training, and she cannot improve if he does not challenge her.

“Please do not feel pressured to pass up on a legacy name simply because I have failed out of mine,” he insists, parrying another cobra’s strike from her sickle.

“Uncle Dami—”

“You must stop calling me that, I am younger than you.”

“—you haven’t failed out of anything, you big drama queen,” she teases. “We change, we grow. And—come on, it could be fun. Brand new start. Debut as a couple of nobodies. We could tell everyone we’re twins.”

The weight at the un-sickled end of the chain circles back around to whip into his clavicle, surely leaving a nasty welt beneath his compression shirt. He bares his teeth petulantly. “We look nothing alike. Also, I thought I was your uncle, not your brother.”

“Aww, look, you’re actually acknowledging that we’re part of the same big wonderful blended family of people who have all tried to murder each other.” She punctuates this with a slash at his achilles. He hops it. She swings for his knee. 

“Hm.” Another brutal swing. It glances the wrong way across his wooden blade and tears shallowly into his knuckles. Sloppy, he chides himself.

“You got a new name picked out already? Or perhaps a big sketchbook full of embarrassing costume doodles?”

“Tch.”

“Come on, Dami. Whatever it is, I’ll only bully you about it a little bit.”

He swings hard for her hip. She sidesteps it and attacks yet again.

“…Oathbreaker,” Damian finally answers. It is… a version of the truth. Honesty through stained glass.

“Hm. Could just skip the middleman and call yourself ‘Edgelord’.”

“Sasha…”

“Kidding, kidding. Oathbreaker is… cool. Gloomy and sharp and a little dorky. It’s very… you.” She vanishes from his line of sight in an impressively untelegraphed dodge, and his next swing, despite being nearly at full speed, misses her by a country mile. “Guess I could always be Oathmaker. Then they’ll definitely think we’re twins!”

He laughs. “Or Paladin, Shura…”

“Those damn comic books already took Paladin,” she whines. “Cicatrix. I want to be called Cicatrix.”

Damian jabs at her knee. She parries. “You do not have to decide now.”

“You could just say you don’t like it!” she laughs.

“I do like it. I do not hate it, at least.” He parries another strike from her. Dodges a second, exhaustion building. “But I—wanted to offer… if you would like to, to carry on a legacy name…” He swings hard at her ribs and she—

Falls.

“Aleks!” Damian curses and rushes forward, holding a hand out to help her up. “Ana asif, mota'assef, sorry, sorry, I thought you would dodge—”

Curled up on her side and breathing rapidly, she does not take his hand. Only looks up at him in alarm. He pushes her onto her back and checks her pulse. Rapid. Meaningless. They were just sparring, it would be elevated anyways. He swears at himself. 

Her trachea is deviated. He growls to stop himself from cursing again.

“Your chest, it hurts?” he asks rapidly. She nods. “Just on one side?” Another nod. “Which side?” She points. Her left, his right. The side he hit. It rises with each breath more shallowly than the other. “Okay. Good. Thank you. Stay here,” he says stupidly, and runs off to get a chest tube kit from the medical bay. 

“Thought you—left,” she gasps when he returns not forty seconds later.

He suppresses a wince. She should not be talking with a collapsed lung. (He should not have collapsed her lung. Careless, careless.) 

“I believe I have broken your rib. A sliver of bone has caused air to leak into the pleural space, resulting in a closed traumatic tension pneumothorax.” Rare complication of an already rare complication of an injury that never should have happened. “Very common,” he says, “very fixable. I am sorry for the scare. And the pain.”

“It doesn’t—hurt much.” She is lying. And if it truly does not, it will.

“I am going to put in an intercostal drain. Very minor procedure,” he says calmly. “I understand am not a medical professional, but I have practiced several of these before, including on myself. Is that okay?”

She nods, which is good, because he would have done it anyway. Or at the very least, decompressed with a needle while waiting to get her to someone with more experience. He puts on his PPE, cleans the skin, and injects a (perhaps overzealous) dose of local.

“Small pinch,” he says flatly, and cuts.

It is easier for him if he tunes out the noises she makes. 

Kelly forceps in. He presses through the musculature until—pop. Through to the pleural space. (The noises, he does not like the noises.) He forces the forceps apart, widening the space between her ribs. (Stop it. Focus. Tune them out.) A rush of air. Blood dribbles and froths. He wilts in relief. In satisfaction of a job well done.

He palpates with his gloved fingers and slowly twists the chest tube in alongside the forceps before pulling them back out. The plastic fogs slightly. He nods to himself and starts to work on a purse-string suture to fasten the drain. Perhaps next time he will attempt a Soweto tie, or a modified Jo’burg.

“I will need to x-ray you,” he says absently. To ensure proper drain placement as well as the location of the fracture or fractures. Yes, x-ray is best. He wraps the loose ends of the suture twice around the chest tube, cinching it slightly, and applies the dressing and tape.

She makes some sort of noise with her mouth. Damian tunes back in and glances back at her face.

“Can you call Jay?” she wheezes in Russian, and then again in English, “Jay, can you call them, Dami?”

“Hm?” He heard her fine.

“Can—”

“Ah, no speech yet. Focus on your breath,” he says.

“Jay,” she insists. 

“They are not going to want to come into the Cave,” he says as he hoists her and his equipment gingerly over to the nearest clinic bed. “They will be looking to move you elsewhere to recover. This would be bad for your healing.”

“You’re worried.”

“Stop talking.” He is surprised she has not fainted from the pain yet.

“Dames,” she placates brittlely. Every motion of her ribs looks excruciating. “Jay will be upset with you. Yes. But they will also be grateful. And they won’t move me—if I ask to stay.”

They will also be far more upset if they find out later, from someone else. Perhaps not worth the risk of decapitation.

“Also, I’ll kick their ass for you if they try to kick yours,” she jokes. “Once the—tube is out of my chest, of course.”

His fingers twitch with the inept urge to comfort her, but he is at a loss for words, for actions which do not come from a riot medic manifesto or crisis pamphlet or surgical textbook, and fears he will make it worse.

He sighs, initiates the portable x-ray machine’s startup sequence, and pulls up a comm link.

Chapter Text

Damian is fully aware that he is somewhat of a reprehensible bastard for it, but the emotion he feels as Todd sits alongside Aleksandra’s clinic bed, mumbling soothing words and braiding her hair, is undoubtedly, undeniably envy.

He is not sure which he is more jealous of—the ward, receiving doting softness and warmth without having to degrade oneself begging for it, or the caretaker, who is able to offer that comfort effortlessly, without the stilted, awkward affect, nor the prickly, dispassionate demeanor Damian cannot seem to unlearn no matter how many years pass. He knows he is pathetic for it either way. She is injured and in pain and they are barely hiding their terror at the fact. It is nothing to be jealous of.

Perhaps he has let the green-eyed monster fester long enough to turn him into one.

“Raring to bring back the Butcherbird nickname, are we, Damian?” Todd calls out without looking over their shoulder.

“Be nice,” Aleksandra chides as they twist another strand into her braid. “Why do you have beef with a teenager?”

“Maybe because that teenager is a trained-from-birth assassin who shattered your ribs and then stabbed you in the chest.”

“You’re being overdramatic.”

“Shura, I’m really, really not.”

“You are.”

“One day,” they say slowly, “ten or twenty years from now, you are going to call me, and you are going to say, ‘Wow, Jay, you were so calm and understanding when that Wayne boy nearly murdered me. In fact, you were too calm. You should’ve cut that little bastard’s hand clean off.’ And I’m going to go, ‘Yes, yes I should’ve.’ And then we are going to go get shaved ice together and plot his demise.”

“You think shaved ice will be affordable after the polar ice caps melt?”

Jay snorts. “We’ll splurge for the special occasion.”

“I am sorry,” Damian tries. “Aleksandra, truly, genuinely, I am.”

Aleksandra gives him a sad but sincere smile. “It was not your fault—and even if you insist on blaming yourself, I promise, I forgive you. We were both tired and making mistakes and I kept pushing. It was only a training sword, it was pure bad luck it did any real damage at all. You did nothing wrong.”

“Yes, he did,” they say flatly.

Damian frowns. “Todd. It was an accident.” 

This was, apparently, the exact wrong thing to say. Jay whirls to face him like he struck them.

“Accident. Accident. Like that makes it any fucking better. World-renowned warrior, master of restraint, would never make a fatal mistake against an opponent. Unless that opponent’s your fucking family, right? Then you’re allowed to get sloppy. Then you’re allowed to not give a shit if we live or die.” 

“That is not—”

“How fucking hard do you have to hit someone with a wooden sword to accidentally spear their lung with their own fucking rib?”

It stings bitterly to hear his own insecurities echoed back at him in the voice of another. And worse, they are correct. That would—did—necessitate a level of force that was inexcusable in a friendly spar. “Mistakes happen—”

“Not to you! How many batarangs have you thrown in your life, Damian? How many of them have accidentally killed someone?” 

He feels himself growing impatient with their false equivalences and erratic rhetoric, and pinches his palm to ground himself. “Countless,” he growls back, “and none. I am not careless with human lives. Especially not that of an ally—”

“Then what the fuck was this, then? You just get bloodthirsty?”

“—but accidental injuries do happen, even during training. That is the point of the training. To make severe injuries less likely when it really counts, and to be within a safe and well-stocked environment in the unfortunate event that they do. You know this, I know you do. And I was well educated enough and quick enough to remedy the situation before anything permanent happened.”

“You left her choking on blood—”

“Jay, knock it off,” she snaps roughly. “That’s not what happened.”

“—left her for dead yet again.”

“I saved her life, what the fuck are you talking about?” He is riled enough to not notice the curse until it is already out of his mouth. Not a good omen. He steels himself once more before speaking again. “Todd. You are not making any sense.”

“Is it just in your blood? Is that it? You Waynes just can’t fucking help it. Generationally predestined to call someone family and then cut them down.” 

“You… what?” He squints, some level of understanding dawning. Todd looks to be… elsewhere. Screaming at another man with the same face. “Did you and Father…?” 

“Fuck you. Stay the fuck away from my daughter.”

And, without a moment’s pause, they turn on a dime and stomp out of the medical bay. Damian’s eyes track them as they make their way not towards the exit, but towards the elevator.

“I’m sorry about that,” Aleksandra tells him once they are definitively out of earshot. “I wish it took anything other than three years and a collapsed lung to get them to call me their daughter where I could hear it, but…”

Damian does not know what to say to that. He leaves them in silence for several minutes, rifling aimlessly through some drawers for antibiotics he long since acquired and portioned out.

She tries to shrug. Winces. “I suppose we should be grateful they settled on an uncharacteristic storm-off rather than an actual attack on your person. I expected—mind you, not wanted, just expected—greater retaliation.”

So did Damian. Uncharacteristic is an understatement. “They did not actually storm off— they stormed in. Into the manor, specifically, which is an order of magnitude stranger. And more worrying. In fact, that whole argument is what I would classify as strange and worrying, even for them.” He squints in suspicion. “Do you happen to know anything about that?”

She looks away sheepishly. “I know they sounded a bit… irrational, but they are wrangling with some—some bad memories that this day has brought up. It is nothing for you to concern yourself with.”

He is silent for a long while, fussing with her leads before setting them right back as they were, taking physical notes on vitals and medication doses he has long since memorized.

“I am not a fool,” he finally settles on. “I can read between the lines. I take it that Father injured the Red Hood once. Perhaps mistakenly, perhaps even gravely. But that is still no excuse for this kind of reaction. If Todd did not wish to be injured during their crusade all those years ago, perhaps they should have thought about that before crossing Batman.” 

Aleksandra scoffs. “Because it wasn’t just a fucking injury, was it?”

A beat. “What do you mean?”

She pales. “Oh god. Did you—do you really not know? I—Uncle Tim has known for years, I just assumed—”

“Known what.”

“I can’t. If you don’t know, I can’t, I can’t tell you—”

But before he can push her on it, the elevator sounds off, and Todd storms back in, a folded letter clutched in their white-knuckled hand.

“Found it,” they growl. “Stupid as fuck to keep a paper copy around, you little bastard, but I guess you’re just sentimental like that. Hide your shit better next time and maybe you’ll keep your secrets for longer.”

“Todd, I cannot fathom what you are going on about.”

Aleksandra is frowning. “Jay, I know you worry, but whether you like it or not, Dami is family, he is my friend, and you’re being cruel to him for no reason—”

“I am being restrained,” they snarl, “this is my restrained voice. I’m reserving my cruelty for later, when you can’t jump to his defense.” 

But she is not listening anymore. She is reading the paper.

The paper which Damian now recognizes as his university acceptance letter.

His heart skips a beat. (Skips several.)

“Damian’s been lying to you,” Todd says in a low, roiling burn of a growl. “He's not training you to be his partner. He's training you to be his successor.”

“That is not true,” Damian protests with rising panic. “They are twisting the facts to suit their stupid vendetta.”

Her eyes are pained. Even Damian can tell as much. “Is… why would you… why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” 

“I had not yet decided. Have not yet decided. I was going to tell you, I—” 

She takes a deep breath, cutting him off with a wave of her hand. “Hey, calm down, Damian. No need to fret so much.” The full name coming from her sinks into his awareness like a stepped-on nail. “I get it. We’re cool. Come on, I wanna hear about these big plans of yours. Oh, and Jay, could you… can you go home and grab me a change of clothes?” 

“You think I’m leaving you alone with him after—” 

She crosses her arms. “That was me being polite. Out. I wish to congratulate my friend alone, without you hounding him further.” 

“Hmph. Whatever.” They jab a finger at her. “Call me immediately if he tries to pull any shit.”

“We’re fine, Jay.”

“I’m serious. I don’t trust that little twerp as far as I can throw him on a good day, and today is not a good day.” Their broad shoulders slump, and their voice softens. “If you don’t wanna call me, call Timber, at least.”

“I promise,” she says warmly, with a placating tilt of the head.

Todd stalks off to the exit-proper this time. He trains his eyes back on Aleksandra, and—

Her mask of casual forgiveness drops.

She smiles and there is nothing behind it. No light. “So all of this, these months, these years, this was… what? You manipulating me into becoming your weapon so you—so you can fuck off and go live your happy little civilian life without us, guilt-free?”

Damian’s stomach swoops. His skin prickles coldly with a flash-sweat. “Gotham needs—”

“Oh, spare me the heroic speech,” she says, perhaps not even noticing she has switched to Russian. “At least do me the decency of answering honestly.”

“I—it was never my intention to… abandon Gotham City.” The words are hard enough to choose in a first or second language. Russian is his fifth. He flounders for clarity and warmth he would fail to achieve even in Arabic. “But my studies—Sasha, you must understand, this is the path I need to take. For myself, yes, but for Gotham, too. I… do not want Robin to grow to resent her, and I fear I am approaching that tipping point.”

Her mouth opens and closes as she processes. She will not meet his eye. “I’m trying really hard to be excited for you right now, but all I can think about is how many times you’ve lied to my face about this. This—this wasn’t just an omission, or a secret. I asked you. I asked you and you lied.”

The guilt, once a gentle gnaw, now sinks its needle-teeth into the hollow of his throat. “I was going to tell you, I simply… did not know how.”

“I’m having trouble believing you had any plan in mind other than just… taking off one day without a word. Leaving me to pick up your slack. To fight your war for you.”

“I would never—”

“How am I supposed to trust this to be the truth? You’ve proven yourself perfectly capable of lying to me when it suits you. When it turns those around you into vessels for the greater good.”

“Sasha, you are not a weapon. You are family.” He searches, searches for the words to fix this, but he cannot find them. “I… care for you. I care that you are safe, that you are capable of defending—”

“Defending Gotham, I know. You have always loved this city more than you have loved any of us. She is your sister more than I.”

“Defending yourself, Aleksandra. When—if I am not here—”

“Out.”

“Shura…”

“Damian, out. I—I need you out right now. For your sake. If you stay, I, I am going to start shouting at you, and if Jay comes back and hears me upset, they will—they’ll—” 

“Take my head off,” Damian finishes for her with a sigh. “For what it is worth, I am sorry my cowardice caused this conversation to unfold the way it did. Do not hesitate to reach out if you—do not hesitate to reach out.”

He walks to the elevator.

“Wait. Before you go…” she calls quietly, an afterthought she seems to regret almost immediately. He turns. “What would—what are you going to study? When you go to university.”

“I applied to their bachelor’s program in Community Health. I—intend to train as a physician, eventually. Like my grandfather.”

She nods. The sound of her muted sniffling is almost enough to make Damian shove his hand between the closing elevator doors, but this, too, he is too cowardly to do until it is too late.

The manor’s halls are empty. Father is out of town on business. Pennyworth is—gone. Everyone else has grown up, moved on. It is empty, empty. The portraits of the departed—dead and otherwise—watch him as he walks, judging his worth.

Empty, empty. He wanders to the restroom. Wets a clean towel, dabs the dried blood from his lip. Alfred the cat leaps onto the counter to lick at the blackened clots he fails to dislodge. He winces back in disgust and scritches behind his ears apologetically.

“Please do not resort to man-eating, friend,” he mumbles to the cat, “I feed you just fine.”

A week-old laceration high on his hip has become irritated at the top, but fortunately there is no sign of infection. The repair was done by his own hand, and he recalls sanitizing the site before placing the butterfly closures but not scrubbing out any debris. He had been in a hurry. He fetches tweezers and a pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet and snips back open the reddened skin at the top of the healing wound. With washed fingers, he palpates for the irritant—a bit of gravel—and digs it out with the tweezers. It drops into the sink with a light plink. There is very little blood. He leaves it to clot on its own and lets the fabric of his shirt fall to cover it.

He wanders back out into the hall. Alfred trails at his feet. Damian trips over the poor creature’s tail and briefly considers disemboweling himself for it. 

A family portrait looms. Damian is not in it. Richard’s hair is still above his shoulders, Todd leans into Father’s side, Father’s smile has not yet been brutalized by the cold, grasping arm of war-dead young. 

They look happy.

In the portrait, Todd’s neck is shown clearly. It very rarely is, these days. They favor jackets with high collars. It is a funny thing, to be struck with a thought so mundane, so insignificant. There is much about Todd he has never seen, and plenty more he has and has not cared enough to commit to memory. Todd has broken Damian’s wrist in two places, handwritten cards with family recipes to pass down to him, threatened the lives of his dearest friends, taken beatings and endured tortures to keep him safe—but for the life of him, Damian cannot picture them tying their shoes. Some details are simply not worth the attention. 

So he is really not sure why he takes note of the lack of a scar across portrait-Todd’s throat.

The Todd in this picture must be… thirteen, fourteen? So it is not an old scar. So what. But… Damian has never known a version of Todd without that scar, so it cannot be especially new, either.

Except—no. No, that is not true.

He thinks back—almost a decade back—to the catatonic child of fifteen Mother dragged bloody and glaze-eyed into his home. The interloper in his memory has many scars, many wounds. None are across the throat.

A ghost of Jason Todd is seventeen, eighteen. There is a hole in them, through them. No one will tend to it. It will heal poorly into a jagged blue keloid. Years later, on a body battered ruthlessly by time and poor decisions, it will be the only mark which humiliates them enough to bother hiding.

And Sasha—

Damian has just added another scar to Aleksandra’s sizable collection. Fourth and fifth rib, left side, four centimeters. It will heal nicely into a faint silvery line.

He tries very valiantly not to ask himself who added this one to Todd’s. He does not succeed.

(What was it that Todd had said? Generationally predestined to call someone family and then cut them down?)

Alfred mewls, bumping his head into Damian’s bruised ankle. He does not look away from the portrait.

Damian notes, with vague disinterest, that he may be having a panic attack.

Chapter Text

“Remind me, Timothy,” Damian growls, “how you managed to get shot as a retiree.”

“Retiree makes me sound so old. You can just say civilian.”

“You revoked your claim to civilianhood upon engaging in unauthorized combat which resulted in a gunshot wound.”  

“I’m an innocent civilian private eye. I resent any implication otherwise.”

“Then why are you not in an innocent civilian hospital?”

“Gunshots get reported. Last thing I need is more paperwork.” 

“Hm.”

“Also, you’re cheaper.”

“Bold words from an old money heir.” He adjusts the overhead light to beam directly into Timothy’s eyes. “You owe me sixty thousand dollars.”

“You sound like Jason.”

“Tt.” He moves the light back over to the weeping wound in his thigh. “No exit wound?”

“Nah.”

“What was this, a hollow point?”

“Mm. Maybe.”

He frowns. “I am leaving the bullet in situ.”

“Nooo…” So whiny.

“I. Am not. A medical doctor.” He irrigates the wound with distilled water and watches with dull amusement as Timothy winces. “You got shot with a hollow point round and came to your seventeen-year-old brother to fix it to avoid a lecture from anyone you actually hold a modicum of respect for. Unless you would like to bleed to death or contract an infection while I root around in your musculature with an unsterilized pair of pliers, the bullet is staying exactly where it is.”

“I hate leaving them in. Itches…”

“Stupid boy,” he hisses. “Use it as a reminder.”

“Older than you,” he groans. “Now you sound like Leslie. Where’s she at, by the way? Clinic’s been closed.”

“Dead.”

“Shit,” he says. “Shit, really? How?”

“Ruptured aneurysm.” Random and unpreventable.

“Shit. That’s… bad. Really bad.” Eloquent. “No Alf, no Leslie… What’s the plan?”

He shakes his head. “There are backup medics lined up, but the logistics… It will be a while until everything is up and running again. And the institutional knowledge lost—irreplaceable.”

Timothy hums, eyes squeezing shut. “You gonna be our next Leslie, Dami?”

Damian snorts. “Give it twenty years.”

“Eh, you’ll be running that place in ten. And we’ll all worship you for it.”

Heir to the Demon’s Head no longer. Heir to the wrong Wayne. Heir to stolen lidocaine, heir to medical malpractice, heir to Gotham’s bloody Empire of the Scalpel. Patron saint of stupid children getting shot in capes and tights—and yes, he is including Father and all his grown siblings in that. Anyone can be an honorary stupid child if they get shot enough.

“You know, for a healer, you sure stab a lot of people,” Timothy comments as Damian stabs him. With a needle, in his defense. For healing.

“Gives me more people to sew up. Good practice,” he deadpans back.

“Jesus, you really do sound like Jason.” Timothy squints up at him as he pulls a suture taut. “Why does it piss you off so bad when people say that?”

He takes a deep breath, holding his forceps steady.

“Sometimes they tell me stories about Todd—stories that happened to me.” He returns to his sutures, though more shakily now. Perhaps he has not eaten enough today. “They itemize my specific failures under a dead child’s name. They claim that Todd was a troubled youth drawn to violence, in need of a guiding hand toward the light… but their only evidence is to compare them to me. And I cannot tell if we—if they and I were simply very similar in our youths, or if others have mistakenly conflated their living memory with my own, or if they are simply lying to use Todd as a cautionary tale, but—the result is the same. They… overwrite them with me, and me with them. And in doing so, they make me redundant.”

“And you blame Jason for that?”

He shrugs. “Todd blames me. I suppose it is only fair.”

“You two didn’t always hate each other.”

“We did not always know each other.”

“Do you?” he asks gingerly. “Know each other?”

Damian breathes out. He is silent for the next several minutes as he works.

“Something… happened. Between Todd and Father. To make them act the way they do.”

“A lot of things’ve happened between them, Damian. There’s not just one big splinter you can rip out to make it all better.”

He irrigates away more of the blood, oozing out as little more than a slow, dark dribble, now. Timothy does not stock reserves in the Cave anymore, which, especially in light of tonight’s events, seems foolish. Fluids may have been sufficient, but Damian hung a pint of Todd’s B-neg when he arrived to be safe. Todd has always gone a bit overkill with their stocks of blood. Perhaps for selfish reasons. For the absurd frequency at which they get shot, or for those ridiculous flaming blades of Sasha’s and theirs. 

Or perhaps not. Most of their siblings are compatible recipients. Most are too deliriously, deleteriously overconfident to keep a proper reserve anywhere but their own homes.

“Something happened,” he tries again, “when Todd was… around my age. Something…”

Timothy stiffens beneath his hands as he trails off. 

“Yeah.”

“Do you know what it was?”

A long pause. “I know what it caused.”

“But you have not sought out the details.”

“Sometimes you just gotta let sleeping dogs die, Dames,” he mumbles, and then, even quieter, “Sometimes you gotta leave the bullet in.”

“No,” he says, “I do not. I do not have to let anything die.” He ties off another suture. “You may not have gone digging, but you still know where to look.”

Timothy shrugs. “Same place you’d look for any piece of our past.”

…The cowl footage. Damian sighs, indelibly weary. “What, theoretically, would I be looking for? Something deleted? Encrypted?” 

“What are you, stupid? Ouch!” (Whoopsies. Damian’s hand must have slipped. Unfortunate.) “No, not deleted, not a chance. Scrubbing evidence of an event requires willingly acknowledging it ever happened. Which neither of them would ever do, on pain of death.”

He ties off the final stitch and gets to work on the gauze dressing. “Try not to get shot again until we have a new Leslie. Or a way to resurrect the old one.”

Tim barks out a hollow laugh. “Maybe Jay has some tips, eh?”

“Yeah,” he says flatly, “maybe.”

***

Time has done strange things to Damian’s family.

It has hardened Todd, and then softened them again, neither quite for the better. Taught Duke to cherish his individuality, but lured him back to places where it must be hidden away. Soothed Timothy with companionship long enough to drive him to self-isolate once more. Opened Cassandra’s eyes to the world’s wonders in order to give her the proper context for its horrors. Pushed Richard into bouts of erraticism and despair, and then waited patiently while he pulled himself back together only to fall apart again. Taught Aleksandra to trust and punished her for it. 

Time did its damage to his father long before Damian arrived at heel, and now, time has given up on Father. Time accepts Father as a statue. Cold and unyielding. Time and Father are both Institutions. Time circles around Father, repeating the same old patterns ad nauseum, smiling in polite familiarity as it passes by, and Father, in turn, is numb to time.

But Damian? Time has made Damian cowardly.

Damian from three years ago would not need to be talked into poking a sleeping dragon. He would not have hemmed and hawed and tiptoed around it. He would not have needed permission. He would have simply poked it. Maybe gotten his head bitten off for it, maybe not. But, whatever the outcome, it would have been efficient. Efficient and not cowardly.

But instead, he has sat on his hands for weeks, debating foolishly if the music really must be faced, because Damian—say it with me now—is a coward.

Perhaps this is also why he does not jump to attack when Todd answers the door by pointing a gun at him. Or perhaps time has done something else to Damian, something gentler, something he does not have a name for just yet.

“Careful now,” Damian warns, “I am not in costume. You would not want to be seen by a neighbor pointing a gun at a young civilian, would you?”

“At a Wayne boy? In this neighborhood? They would cheer.”

“May I enter?”

“You may go fuck yourself,” they offer instead, but they do take their finger off the trigger, which Damian is generously taking as the warm, convivial invitation it is.

He steps past them and does not get shot in the face. Family is beautiful.

“Whaddaya want, shithead? Sasha’s not here right now, and she wouldn’t wanna talk to you even if she was.”

Damian sits gingerly on the chair which looks least like it was dragged in off a dirty street corner, trying to take the jab gracefully, and not like an arrow to the solar plexus. 

“I need help with my literature homework,” he lies.

“We’re still using that excuse, eh? Why can’t any of you ever be, like, ‘Hi, Jason, I enjoy your company, and you’re my favorite sibling, and you're also very cool and multitalented and have more than one hobby.’”

“Do you?”

“Shut up.”

“It is on Hamlet. The homework.”

“Damian, fuck off, I’ve seen your fucking class schedule, I know you don’t have a lit class this semester. Isn’t it time for finals, anyways?”

“Why were you looking at—” Stop arguing. Stop arguing. Do not rise to the bait. “It is for an extracurricular book club. It is not on my schedule.”

Todd scoffs. “Sure, fine, I’ll entertain this premise.”

“Got you with Hamlet, did I?”

“Don’t taunt me, Damian, I’ll kill us both and make Dick watch.” 

“You know, you give a really bad name to people with Rapid Cycling Bipolar Disorder.”

“I don’t talk like that because I have fucky brain chemistry. I just want you dead for normal, well-justified reasons.” They sit across from him convivally, cementing his point further. “So. Hamlet. What’s not clicking for you?”

“I… am not a fan… of Shakespeare’s tragedies,” he admits, the words sharp and sticky as they leave his mouth.

“Didn’t you name your dog Titus?”

“Titus Andronicus is best appreciated as, if not an outright parody, then at least a comedy—”

“Absolutely psychotic opinion, Damian, thanks—”

“—because, as grotesque and cruel and ghastly as it may be—” 

“—y’know, just a normal comedy, filled with cannibalism, rape, murder, severed hands, twenty-five dead sons—”

“—there is a resolution. The hero gets what he wants. What he wants just happens to be the righteous glory of gore-soaked revenge.”

“Now you’re speakin’ my language.”

Damian rolls his eyes. “Titus delights in its shock, it basks in its violence. It is Senecan. Horror is passion and passion is horror and love destroys and devours so much of what is good. But his tragedies just ring as… empty. So Horatio speaks to the ghost, so he forces Hamlet to confront the horrors of his past. So what? The king is still dead. The traitors are still traitors. Hamlet wants nothing, for there is nothing left for him to want. Nothing can fix him. Nothing can restore his faith in his family. Blood soaks the stage for nothing. Nothing is achieved.”

Todd maybe smiles. “Sounds like you understand it just fine.”

“What is the point? If you know it will end badly, why—why talk to the ghost?” Damian’s fists are clenched in his lap. Wretched emotion leaks from the cracks in his composure into his brittle voice. “Do you overturn a stone under which you already know some terror lies? Do you do it knowing you can not unturn the stone? Knowing you cannot undo the terror?”

Damian bites his tongue, steadies his heart rate. Todd leans back in their chair, tapping out a mindless rhythm on their knees.

“Do you talk to the ghost, knowing it’ll set you onto the path of tragedy?” Todd echos back. “Of fuckin’ course not. Only an idiot would incite the events of that play knowing how it ends.” They breathe out, breathe in. “…Except you do. Horatio talks to the ghost. Antigone faces Creon, enters in chains. Rodya swings that axe down. Raises it. Swings again.”

Damian, after a long silence, nods slowly. “Because, from within the bowels of a story, you cannot conceive of its nature, nor its end. Because when you are in a tragedy, you do not know you are in a tragedy.”

“No. No, you always know when you’re in a tragedy,” they say, a little absently. Their blunt, bitten nails dig into their thighs. They stare out the window at nothing. “You talk to the ghost. You always do. You gotta. Not because you don’t know you’re in a tragedy, but because you do. Because the greater outrage is knowing what’s written and staying exactly as you are. Even if there’s nothing you can do to fix it, even if you will make it worse—and you will make it worse—you still move forwards towards the end of the play. ‘Cause it matters that later, when you step off the stage and look backwards at the wreckage by your feet, you scream yourself raw and bloody that it didn’t have to be like this, even though it did.”

Maybe Damian still has an ounce of bravery left. Or stupidity. He must, for it to come out of his mouth—

“You mean to tell me you would still put on that yellow cape, knowing it ends up bloodied in that warehouse?”

They laugh at him. Truly laugh, like Damian has just uttered the funniest thing in the world. “Baby Bird, the warehouse was never the end of my play. It was always the beginning.”

“Quite the tragedy,” he scoffs, swallowing past the frog in his throat. “What a hero.”

Todd offers a thoughtful hum. “Y’know, they say tragedies and comedies are really the same thing, deep down. Only difference is that a tragedy starts on a wedding and ends on a funeral, while a comedy starts on a funeral and ends on a wedding.” They turn to Damian and give a crooked, dimpled grin. “Guess I must be in a comedy.”

“You know, like Titus Andronicus,” he jokes hollowly.

Their grin sharpens. “Now you’re getting it.”

***

Damian goes home.

He scrubs through the cowl footage from roughly seven years ago.

He finds Jason there.

He hears, “He took me away from you.”

He watches what comes next.

And then he stumbles over to an empty medical suite and empties the contents of his stomach into a biohazard bin.

Chapter Text

Two weeks later, Jason enters the manor with a ka-bar. They are dressed in rumpled civilian clothes and they reek of cigarette smoke, city filth, rotting blood, and stale cinnamon gum.

“Where is she?”

Damian watches them, feeling nothing.

“Where is Sasha?” they growl again.

“She is fine. She is with Timothy. I lied to get you here.” With each year that passes, Jason’s weaknesses become easier to exploit. They have declawed themselves in pursuit of softness. It is humiliating to witness in action.

“Why the fuck would you think it’s okay to—”

Father, woken by the shouting, enters blearily. “What is—” He freezes dead in his tracks. “Jason?”

He looks… remarkably uncertain. Damian notes, with some regret, that this may be the first and only time they have seen each other face to face other without masks or cowls since—

Since.

Jason does not look uncertain. Jason only looks… afraid.

(Guilt is a dull blade he twists in himself. Damian ignores it the way he ignores most stab wounds.)

“Jason,” Damian says, ignoring the ache, “please tell me what happened on February 23rd, 2018.”

Jason is skittish. A skittish Jason is a dangerous Jason. More dangerous than an angry one. And right now, they are both. “How the fuck am I supposed to know? You’re the goddamn robot.”

He turns with raised brows. “Father. Do you recall what happened on February 23rd, 2018?”

“Jay, I…”

“Father,” he snaps. “February, 2018.”

Father looks away from Jason for just a moment to squint at Damian. “I… don’t recall, exactly. February—that would’ve been… the attacks on Blüdhaven, I believe? They… spanned into March….”

“That is your takeaway? That is the only landmark you have for that span of time?”

“Dick was hurt.” He shakes his head, searching, recalling. “Jason was… Jason was back.”

“Jason was back,” he agrees, dripping with condescension and ire. He shoves a laptop into Father’s arms with a forceful clatter, open to a full screen window of a cowl footage extract.

“What is this?” Father asks.

“February 23rd, 2018,” he responds.

Jason is shaking. Pathetic dog. “Damian, don’t do this.”

“Oh, so you do remember.”

“Dad, please don’t let him do this.”

Father looks about ready to gut himself at Jason’s slip-up. Damian feels about the same. But this trainwreck-to-be is just getting started. 

Damian clenches his fist. “Father, watch the video.”

Father, torn between the competing wills of his two least favorite children, hits play, because it is the path which will give him the most information the quickest.

“There’s no sound,” Father comments, foggy and distant.

“If I have to hear that audio track again, I will dry heave stomach acid onto the carpet. I do not want to dry heave stomach acid onto the carpet. It is a nice carpet. Shut up and watch the video.”

“This is from…” Father trails off in a ghastly pallor. “I haven’t…”

“Damian, stop.”

“Coward,” he spits. “You turn from your past and walk backwards into it. You are your father’s child.”

(In cultures with absent gods, the dead take their place. They reign from exile—an exile they are led into by that same community they enact control over.)

“It’s not—it wasn’t—it’s not his fault,” Jason stumbles. “He was distracted. I was, I was being distracting. He was in a hurry and I was, I wasn’t helping, I was making it worse, I was in the way. Blüdhaven was about to be bombed by whackos, Nightwing wasn’t responding—Dickie, he coulda been hurt—”

“Stop it. Stop. Shut up.”

“I gave him a choice. He chose. That’s all he was doing. He was doing what I asked him to. Okay? He chose and he didn’t choose me. It's okay. It’s not his fault.”

“None of this is okay. There is no universe in which this is okay.” He is aware of how childish he sounds. He does not care. Sometimes children are right.

“If he hadn’t, I would’ve. I did.”

“What do you mean you did?” he growls.

“It’s not—Damian, it doesn’t matter. It’s history. I’m over it. Look at him, he doesn’t even fucking remember, he didn’t even know. I didn’t even know, not at first.”

(The dead are tainted. Rotten. They are the failed living. They eat, they drink. They dance and speak.)

Damian’s throat tastes of salt and iron. “You are a hypocrite. A hypocrite and a victim and a coward. You are supposed to be better than this. You have to be.”

“He was—probably aiming for my hand, or my gun. It ricocheted. Or I moved. Or he missed. He was—he had to check on his son. I was keeping him from his son. He didn’t have time to stop and find out if I was okay. He was emotionally compromised, he was on the clock, and I was an enemy. I was trying to kill people. He made a choice. And I’m here, I’m still here, so what does it matter? I’m still here. I’m right here.” They repeat it like they have to remind themselves.

“Stop defending him!”  

“He didn’t mean to kill me, Dames,” Jason pleads, sounding not at all sure of that fact. “He didn’t.”

(The dead are ushered away from the community to enforce the border between the world of the dead and that of the living. To remind the living of what will become of them if they do wrong. They cast down that border to enact revenge.)

Father looks up from the screen. The video has stopped playing. He looks like Jason, fifteen, catatonic and defeated. He looks like Jason, eighteen, so incoherently disgusted with himself and his own actions that he can barely speak or think or move. He looks like Jason, twenty-four, cowering. He looks like Bruce Wayne, institutional, indelible, immemorial, who tore his child’s throat out with a sharpened blade and walked away a hero.

Damian swallows around his fury. He faces his father. Holds his shaking hands out to gesture at his sibling, wracked in tremors. He is practically screaming now.

“Is this what I am fated to turn into? Someone who is terrified of you?”

Father says nothing. A wise choice.

“You are a pathetic failure,” he spits at Jason’s twitchy form, “but Batman fights pathetic failures every day, and he does not murder any of them. So what the fuck happened, Father?”

Father says nothing because there is nothing to say.

“Your child was slain by your own hand. You dealt them a fatal wound and you walked away. And you had the audacity to ask for seven years why they had abandoned you.”

Father does nothing. Undoes nothing.

“Is this what happens if I step too far out of line, Father? If I take things into my own hands and break your precious rules without the excuse of foolish youth to protect me? Will the hand of fate cut me down? Will you? Will you even care enough to notice what you have done?”

(The dead punish wrongdoing with further death, not to strengthen their numbers, but to definitively right wrongs where the gods have otherwise failed.)

“You’re right,” says Jason slowly from somewhere behind him.

“Right about—” Damian spins to face them. Some light has gone out within. Some other light has taken its place. This, whatever this person is that Damian has just goaded them into, is not someone he recognizes. They are animal and they are determined. “Right about what?”

“I’ve been pretty chickenshit, eh? Not a very good role model for you kids. Hiding from this conversation for… how many years has it been, Bruce? You got old. I got old.” They laugh and there is something sickly bright behind it. Father blinks up at them, unreacting. “You’re right. We’re not even. That’s not a resolution. That’s not a resolution at all.”

(The dead want order. They want to be acknowledged.)

The words land like a threat. “That—that is not what I…”

They step forward. “Nah, Damian, you wanted a heart-to-heart, you wanted reconciliation, you wanted a touching family reunion, you’re getting one. This is what all you little Bat-siblings have been begging for for years. You like playing combat medic, right, Baby Bird? You like piecing things back together?”

Jason is still holding the ka-bar.

Damian may have made a mistake.

(The dead are venerated by the community because they, too, were human once, and understand what it means to be so better than the gods ever could. They are worshipped because they represent, in equal parts, terror—terror of violence, of failure, of being forgotten—and hope—hope of rebirth, of justice, of carrying on.)

“Go get a suture kit, Dames.” It is not a request.

Damian is faced with the humiliating realization that he cannot win this fight unarmed. Not if he or Father is the one about to be targeted, and certainly not if they are about to turn that blade on themselves. Jason has fifty pounds on him and roughly as many years of hand-to-hand combat experience. And lately, Damian has been out of the field more often than he has been in it. As Jason takes a step forward and takes Father’s hand into their own, he looks desperately to Father for a way out.

Father looks on complacently in blatant adoration of his wayward child.

Jason looks back, somewhere between gutted and amused, as if to say: You’re really gonna let me do this, huh.

And the response, as far as Damian can tell, is: Yes. Of Course. I love you.

(In cultures with absent gods, the dead take their place.)

“Get the suture kit, kid,” Jason pushes.

Maybe if he is fast enough, he can take the knife away. Maybe if he lunges it will knock some sense into Father, into the two of them, and Damian will not have turned the sanctuary of his family home into a stage.

“No.”

“Do as they ask, Damian,” his father says, voice weaker than he has heard in a very long time, but still impossibly stern.

Damian freezes instinctually.

The blade of the ka-bar grazes Father’s wrist, sharp enough to shear some of the scattered hair clean off the skin. And for a terrible, breathtaking moment, Damian is irrationally, delusionally relieved, because he knows, to the very core of him, that Jason could never cut off their father’s hand. Just as he knows that their father could never cut Jason’s throat. It is unthinkable. These things do not happen. Not in real life. Not between family. Love cannot—cannot be this. He will not allow it. He cannot—

Jason, ruiner in half measure, swings the blade down and lops off three of their father’s fingers.

Father, to his credit, only shouts, does not scream.

Damian leaps in to attack. (To defend. Defend who?) Father orders him to stop. (He stops. He does not want to stop.) 

But Jason—Jay is not attacking anymore. Jay is mollified. Jay is curling up against their father’s side. 

Father orders Damian to get a suture kit again. Cotton-mouthed and shivering, disorientated and very possibly in shock, Damian obeys this time around.

He returns, with a sizable medical kit and bowl of ice, to a dribbled trail of blood (all over his favorite carpet) leading away into the den. Awash in surreality, he picks up his father’s fingers (still warm) from the floor and follows the line of startling red.

Father and Jay are on the couch. Jay is nestled against Father’s flank. Father, glaze-eyed, missing three fingers, and bleeding profusely, puts his good arm around his child, who starts flicking through the settings on the television screen. 

“Hello, Damian,” says Father.

“Hi Dames,” says Jay. “Come sit.”

“What are we doing?” Father asks. 

Jay says, “We are watching a movie together.”

This does not fix this. Fix them. This is not equivalent. They are not even. It does not even tip the scales. He is their father. He was supposed to protect them. He can never repay them for the damage he has done to them. He can never bleed enough to fix them. They can kill him and it can stick and it will not be enough. It can never be enough. 

Damian wants to scream it at them—this fixes nothing. You are insane. You are both insane. You are bad for each other. You are a cold parasitic tyrant and an unstable hyperviolent wreck and you will just keep feeding into each other’s neuroses and cruelties and insecurities and making it everyone else’s problem until there is no one left for you to poison. You need to stop this. This fixes nothing.

But Damian is very tired, and he has a lot of sutures to do, so maybe this can just be someone else’s problem to deal with this time.

“What movie are we watching?” Father asks, petting Jay’s hair.

Jay shrugs. 

Damian takes a seat on his father’s bad side, balancing the bowl of ice-and-fingers on his knees, and glances at the screen.

For fuck’s fucking sake.

He looks across his father at Jay. “Jason, this is not a movie. This is a YouTube playlist of Warriors fan animations.”

“It’s Warrior Cats, not Warriors.”

“It is literally not.”

“And they’re called animatics.”

“No, an animatic is specifically a storyboard which—”

“Children, please,” says their seven-fingered father. “Stop bickering and watch the movie.”

Damian takes Father’s hand into his lap and begins to sew back on the first finger. He does not use lidocaine. Father does not complain. Jay ignores him entirely.

“Alright,” Jay decides, snuggling tighter against their father’s side. “I'm ready to start working on our relationship now.”