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It had been about an hour of searching before Dick thought to check the roof, and he would take the memory of that panicked hour to his grave.
He breathed a deep sigh as he spotted dark hair over the lip of the roof and hoisted himself up with little effort, landing light on his feet and dusting himself off without a sound. The boy hadn't noticed him, green eyes trained on the sky, brow furrowed in a fashion that was an eerie mirror to Bruce. Dick was used to seeing this very expression on Damian's face, but even being identical, it was out of place on this one.
Dick considered leaving him to it, standing back in the shadows and leaving him to brood (mope) in peace. Anyone else would probably prefer it; they weren't all that eager to talk about things that bothered them. But Dick was a meddler, and, more than that, a big brother. It wasn't in his nature to leave a problem like this alone. He stepped forward.
"I should've known I'd find you up here."
To his credit, the boy didn't flinch, but Dick could tell he was surprised nonetheless. "Why are you here, Grayson."
"Looking for you, obviously." Dick came to a stop beside him. His socked feet were less than ideal for the slanted ground, but Dick wasn't about to turn back for some shoes. When had a little height scared him anyway? "This seat taken?"
The boy huffed. "If you must."
Dick didn't want to admit he was getting older, but he felt it in the way his knees creaked as he sat. The shingled roof was rough and cold under his palms. "Y'know, this is one of Damian's favourite places to sulk too. I suppose you two are even more alike than I thought."
The boy's eyes narrowed. "I'm not sulking, and i don't know what you mean. I am Damian."
"I know it's you, Danny."
The boy held his gaze for a moment with a glare so burning that Dick's assurance wavered the slightest amount, but eventually his resolve broke, and he looked away. "How do you always do that?" Danny huffed, dropping any pretense of being his brother.
"Just a feeling," Dick grinned, because this was yet another secret he would keep as long as he could. Best not loose his one advantage, after all.
Despite being identical, the twins were rather easy to tell apart. For most it was the eyes that gave them away, Danny's blue and Damian's green. It was their most striking difference after all, and on a genetic level, their only difference. But the strategy was unreliable. Danny often used this to his advantage by wearing green contacts.
It was because of this that Danny had found out about the vigilante life in the first place. It was something they'd hoped to ease him into once he'd had the chance to get settled in the manor, but fate always had its own plan. Even B hadn't even realized they had the wrong twin in the Robin suit until Damian had tuned into the com system with a voice that was biting cold, bitter that he'd been left behind. Danny had sheepishly admitted that he just wanted to know what his brother was up to at night. Things after that had simply gotten out of hand.
This was their formal introduction to Danny's imitation skills. Despite their time apart, Danny had picked up on his brother's mannerisms and little quirks quickly, and he was quick to put that knowledge to the test. Once, Dick had walked in on two Damians arguing over his chair during breakfast.
Yet, despite his crazy accurate mimicry of his brother, Dick could not be fooled. He had found the one detail that set them apart from each other: their scars.
He was sure Danny hadn't realized, because he never made an attempt to do more than cover his own with a bit of makeup. To his credit, careful care had made them barely visible, but Damian had scars all over from a lifetime of training and patrols alike. A curved mark on his jaw, a fresh one through his eyebrow, a nick behind his ear, a thin, silver line on his throat. Then there were the less visible ones, such as the burn on his wrist or the jagged slash on his abdomen.
Danny had fewer. There was the one under his eye, that curved along the ridge of his cheekbone. It was clearly old, and there was a good chance it was from his time in the league. The most notable, however, and one he had apparently deemed unnecessary to hide with more than sleeves, was the lichtenburg figure over the palm of his left hand extending up his wrist and under his sleeve. Dick had yet to see Danny in a t-shirt to gauge how far up it really went, but the fact that that could have been purposeful attested that it must have been a pretty bad burn. It had faded from angry red to pale pink since Danny had first arrived. He never talked about it, and Dick wasn't sure even Damian knew what caused it, but he was sure it had something to do with why he had arrived at the manor on such short notice, shaken and upset, barely able to string a sentence together in the face of everyone's shock that he even existed.
And so despite the striking green of the eyes in front of him, Dick already knew exactly who he was looking at from the burst of fractals adorning his palm.
"Don't take anything B says so seriously. He can be... a lot at times."
Danny grumbled something noncommittal under his breath, sitting up and drawing his knees to his chest. Dick continued, "He... well, he worries a lot, and he doesn't always show it in the best way."
"No kidding," Danny huffed. His eyes danced over the smog above, as if he was searching for something. There was a tightness at the corner of his eyes. The expression yet again reminded him of Bruce. At times the resemblance was striking. Four years with Damian still hadn't accustomed him to that.
Dick had wondered how long it would take for the two of them to argue like this. It had just been over a month, a record for any of Bruce's children. He wasn't sure what it had been about, but it had been loud, the kind of loud that drowned out any meaning beyond anger.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Danny groaned, trailing his hands up his face and tangling them in his hair. "I mean, not really. I'm not really sure why I was so angry, I just... He was just pissing me off, and the next thing I knew we were shouting about who knows what."
"Yeah," Dick laughed. "That's Bruce for you. He can have that effect on you sometimes."
"Jeeze. How do you deal with that all the time?"
He tipped his head to the side, blowing a strand of hair out of his eyes. "Practice, I suppose. It's easier when you've seen as much of him as I have."
Danny hummed something understanding. "Makes sense."
Dick tapped a rhythm on his knee to occupy himself in the silence. What could have spurred the kind of argument that spiraled so far out of control, Dick couldn't be sure. Maybe it was many things, all simmering under the surface. A month was a long time to let emotions fester.
"So, Damian always comes out here to glare at the sky too." Dick looked up at the formless sky, grey from the city lights. It was nothing special, really. Not for Gotham. "Is this something you two have always done?"
Danny huffed a laugh, leaning on his palms. "I guess so. I came out here to see the stars, but, well..." He threw a hand up in a wide gesture at the smoggy sky above.
"Ah, yeah. Its kinda always like that. I think we've had maybe two clear days in all the time I've lived here. It can be difficult to adjust to."
Danny nodded. His hand rested back on his knee. "Figures. Just my luck," he sighed. "Dami and I used to sneak out at night to see them. It was a nice break from all the training. Quiet."
"Do you like space too? Or is it just the stars?"
"I wanted to be an astronaut, but..." Danny shrugged, running a thumb over the lichtenburg mark on his palm. Dick noted the movement in the corner of his eye. "I don't think that's gonna happen anymore."
"Why's that?"
He opened his mouth, but only a breathy sigh came out. "Its, well... I don't really wanna talk about it."
Dick wanted to pry further, but Danny's tone seemed final, and this wasn't the time to dig up old wounds. He knew better than to push.
"How has this past month gone for you, living at the manor?" he asked instead. "I know it must have been a big change, moving away from everything you know."
"Yeah, I guess so." Danny frowned, brow dipping, but seemed to will the expression away a moment later. "It's so different here. So... normal."
"If you think Gotham is normal, Amity Park must've been crazy," Dick laughed, and Danny grinned, his teeth sharp and white.
"Oh, you have no idea."
The idea of a city worse than Gotham was almost laughable, but intriguing in some morbid way. If there was something out there worse than the Joker, he certainly didn't want to meet them.
"We should visit sometime. When was the last time you got to see your friends in person?" Dick racked his brain for their names. He swore he'd learned them at some point. "Sam and..."
"Sam and Tucker." He shrugged. "I chat with them all the time. Going back would just be more trouble than it's worth."
"Yeah, but text isn't really the same, is it." Now that Dick thought about it, Danny hadn't left the manor at all in the last month aside from that one patrol. That couldn't have been healthy.
Danny cast his gaze back to the sky. "And then what? It's not like I have much else to go back to."
Dick frowned. "You don't have to if you don't want to. I just don't want you to feel like you have to start over now."
Danny drew in a deep breath, but the air between them held a silence for a moment. Then, finally, Danny spoke. "You remind me of Jazz."
"Oh?" This wasn't what Dick had expected to hear, but he was willing to roll with it. "Who's Jazz?"
"My sister."
Now Dick was certainly surprised. When had he planed on telling them about another sibling? "You have a sister?"
"I mean, not biologically. She's a Fenton."
"I'm not related to anyone else in this family. Doesn't make me any less their big brother."
Danny didn't respond, and when Dick looked over, he saw him staring intently at his feet, tracing the lines between the shingles with his eyes. Dick wondered where he'd gotten the contacts. They were very good quality, if not maybe a little saturated. Dick had worn coloured contacts before of course, though not often. The last time had been an undercover op a few months back. He'd struggled to find ones that looked like they belonged on his face. In the end it hadn't mattered, because no one else would have gotten close enough to notice the details in his eyes the way he could with his nose pressed to a mirror.
"What's she like?" Dick asked, filling the silence. When Danny looked back at him with a confused expression, he elaborated, "Your sister."
"Ah, well... Honestly, she's kind of bossy. She acts like she knows everything, like she's all grown up already, and she likes butting her head into my business. She's always asking how I am, and how the move was, and... I don't know. It's nice that she cares, I guess. She said she'd always wanted a little brother, and then... there I was."
"She's older than you then?"
"By two years. Our birthdays are the same month, actually."
Maybe Dick would have known this if they'd done a thorough background check. Bruce had been adamant about one when Danny had first arrived, but Damian had fought against it. He had put a lot of trust in his brother from the start, and he hadn't wanted to damage Danny's tentative trust in him. Danny was flighty, it seemed. Dick had wondered if that was still an accurate description, almost seven years later. It seemed that it was.
A frigid breeze snaked its way under the hem of his shirt, and Dick shivered. They were deep into autumn now, and the world had turned brilliant hues of yellow and red that were now obscured under the night sky. An early frost had already crawled up their windows. Dick wasn't dressed for such weather, already in his nightclothes with only a hastily thrown on jacket to stave off the cold. Danny was wearing long sleeved shirt and jeans, both too light to properly keep the breeze out, and he had been out here for an hour.
Dick shrugged off his jacket and draped it over him.
"Wh-Hey!"
Danny tried to shrug it off, but Dick laid a hand on his shoulder. "You're gonna catch a cold out here. It's freezing." He was already looking a little red in the face. Next time, Dick would check outside first instead of leaving his brother out in the cold.
"I'm fine, you don't have to baby me."
"What are big brothers for if not to baby you?"
Danny smiled, his eyes shining with emotion. "Now you really do remind me of Jazz."
"Well, she sounds like someone you should listen to more often."
Now he giggled, the sound a little choked. His head dipped forward, and his shoulder brushed against Dick's arm with the action. Dick grinned, and carefully wrapped an arm around him.
He really was cold. Dick shivered a little and pulled the jacket a little higher up Danny's shoulders.
Dick wasn't really sure what made Danny pretend to be his brother. Maybe it had to do with how Damian was the only piece of familiarity in his life, his only rock. Whatever it was that had made him seek Damian out in Gotham had clearly shaken him. Dick wouldn't claim to be a psychologist, but he'd seen his fair share of coping mechanisms in the people around him.
They sat there a while longer, under the dark Gotham sky and illuminated only by the light of the manor grounds, until Danny yawned and rubbed a hand over his eyes.
"Alright, let's get you back inside and take those contacts out before you fall asleep out here."
Danny blinked at him, then looked away with a sheepish grin. "Ah, yeah, contacts. Good idea."
Dick grinned, ruffling his brother's hair, and Danny squawked, reaching up to comb his hair back into place.
Dick hoped he could be his next rock.