Chapter Text
Selina lives a simple life, these days—that is, by a liberal definition of “simple” and “these days.” She has her cats and her crimes. No lovers, no Bats, and no drama. Just the thrill of escaping from the law and the comfort of lying in her king-size bed, her cats curled up around her.
So, when she arrives home from grocery shopping to find one of the very Bats she’d been avoiding leaning against the wall right by her coat, she feels the very-much-explicable urge to grab a pillow from her bedroom and scream into it.
But Selina is Catwoman, and Catwoman is a professional, whether she’s stealing jewels or stealing hearts.
“Jason,” she says, setting her bags down. “Good to see you again.” At least he isn’t in costume as Red Hood. There’s still a chance this is a social call.
“I need a favor.” Or not.
“It’s generally regarded as polite to exchange pleasantries with someone you haven’t seen in a while,” Selina says, picking her bags back up and bringing them to her kitchen.
Jason rolls his eyes, following. “Hello, Selina, how are you doing? Still off again with Bruce?”
“I’m doing well, thank you,” Selina says, taking the time to lean down and pet Calliope. “And yes.” She places her milk and cheese in the fridge.
“I’m leaving the city for a bit,” Jason tells her. “I need you to look after my territory.”
Territory. God, he sounds just like his father. Not that Selina would say that to his face. “Do I hear a please?”
“Please.”
“Why don’t you just ask Batman? Unless this is an unsanctioned trip. Planning to kill anyone, kitten?”
“That’s my business,” Jason says. “Look, I don’t wanna play this card, but you owe me. I sided with you when—”
“That was your choice,” Selina says mildly.
“I sided with you and look where it got me.”
“Bothering me in my apartment?”
“You know what I mean.” Jason crosses his arms. “I’m not asking that you cover for me or anything. But you’ve played at being a vigilante before. Even took Robin’s place for a bit.” He sounds way too bitter about it for a kid that supposedly wants nothing to do with Batman anymore. Not that it’s Selina’s problem.
Unless she makes it her problem, which is unfortunately looking more and more likely. Well, she’s never been one to refuse a challenge.
Hecate brushes up against Selina’s legs, reminding her why she can’t really afford to agree to this right now. Selina lifts the black cat up, petting her gently. Hecate, who normally loves this, hisses at her. Selina immediately lets Hecate down, but the cat claws at her legs. Jason watches with no small amount of amusement.
“The cats are acting strangely,” Selina admits, fishing a toy mouse out from underneath the fridge and throwing it to distract Hecate. The cat races after the toy, before tearing away at it with her teeth and claws. “I need to monitor them.”
Jason sighs. “Just a quick patrol? Please?”
Hecate finishes tearing up the toy mouse and begins to pace in a circle, hissing at Calliope when she tries to approach. “Alright,” Selina agrees. She does have business in Jason’s territory, after all. “A quick patrol. If you tell me what’s so urgent that you have to leave Gotham.”
Jason shrugs. “Mercenaries causing problems, evil fungi, Penguin’s causing trouble posthumously again. You know how it is.”
Unfortunately, Selina does. “Sounds exciting.” It does, do be honest. She’s only a month into her Bat drama detox, and part of her misses it. A small part, but it’s a very vocal minority.
“Boring, mostly. I’ll bet Kori’ll have it handled by the time I make it to Prague. But I have to show up, y’know?”
Jason sounds like he needs someone to talk to. But that person is not going to be Selina. So she just nods politely and throws a pointed glance toward the door. Jason leaves just as Calliope starts scratching at one of the legs of the kitchen table.
Damian’s phone rings right as his group approaches the tiger enclosure. He slings his backpack off his shoulder and fishes around in it, meeting the eyes of the nearest parent chaperone—Mrs. Murphy—and daring her to say something. One of his classmates pulls her away to tell her about cutting his hand on the fence and he needs a Band-Aid and does this mean he’ll get tetanus and—
Damian ducks away behind a sign and checks the caller ID. Father. It must be an emergency—a Batman emergency, one that requires Robin’s aid. Why else would Father be calling him during school hours?
Instead of urgency, though, Damian is hit by anger. “Damian. Why are you skipping class?”
“What? Father, you must be mis—”
“Damian. I don’t have time for this. You’re at the Gotham City Zoo.”
Damian doesn’t bother to be offended that Father is tracking him. Father is Batman. Damian would expect nothing less.
He’s also not offended at the implication that Damian would skip class. He absolutely would skip class, if he deemed it necessary.
No, the problem is that if Damian skipped class, he would have done so for a good reason, and so Father should not need to question him.
That, and the fact that Father is willing to track Damian’s location but not read his own emails. “I am on a field trip,” Damian says. “You signed my permission slip.”
“I didn’t—”
“Tt.” Damian hangs up. Father can call the school to confirm Damian’s claims and then deal with the fallout himself. Damian doesn’t care. He wants to see the tigers.
He takes a second to breathe first, though. Some of Father’s teachings can be useful.
Alright. Maybe Damian can understand why Father would be worried, with crime rates inexplicably rising in Gotham and Damian’s grades affecting his class placement. Still, it is entirely Father’s fault that he didn’t know about the field trip. Sure, Damian forged his signature, but the school always sends emails, and Damian would have told Father if he actually was willing to discuss civilian matters on patrol.
He’s about to send Father a screenshot of the field trip announcement on Google Classroom when he hears a scream coming from the rest of the class. Another scream joins it along with the sound of glass shattering. Before Damian can do anything more than shove his phone in his backpack, there are screams coming from all directions.
Leaving his backpack behind, Damian races toward his class. He rounds the corner to see an escaped tiger looming over Ryan, her teeth bared in a snarl. Ryan is flat on his back and screaming his head off right in the tiger’s face.
Damian pushes through his fleeing classmates, toward the tiger. He can’t defeat her, not with only the knife strapped to his leg under his pants. But he needs to get her off Ryan before she crushes his chest.
A kick to the tiger’s side doesn’t even get her attention. Damian glances around, finding a wrecked signpost. He takes it and swings, hitting the tiger in the head just as she goes for a bite around Ryan’s throat. The tiger roars. Good. Damian has her attention. Now he has to do something with it.
“Get away from him!” Mrs. Murphy screams, slamming into the tiger with the actual board of the sign, attempting to use it like a shield. “Run, kid!”
Damian doesn’t run. Mrs. Murphy is a civilian. Damian is not. But…
There are trees, just a little off to the side of the exhibit. Damian heads for a tall one, climbing as quickly as he can. The tiger drives Mrs. Murphy back, until her teeth close around Mrs. Murphy’s leg. The woman screams at the top of her lungs. Damian pauses his ascent, judging the distance from here to the ground. It’ll have to be good enough.
Damian leaps into the air, tucking his body into a ball. He somersaults once, twice, three times, picking up momentum as he falls. He’s small—this move would be more effective if Father did it. But Father didn’t have Richard Grayson as a teacher. Damian did.
Damian slams his feet into the tiger’s thick skull with all the force he has, then pulls himself into a roll. When he bounces to his feet, he sees the tiger unconscious, a few feet from the bleeding Mrs. Murphy.
There are still screams filling the air, but Damian takes Mrs. Murphy’s fanny pack, pulls out a bandage, and wraps it tightly around her wound. Her face is pale as she moves to put pressure on it. Damian debates turning Ryan onto his side to lower his chances of choking on blood, but he could easily have a spinal cord injury. It’s not safe to move him.
Father would tell Damian to stay with Ryan and Mrs. Murphy and reassure them. But there are still screams from the rest of the zoo, accompanied by the roars and bellows and shrieks of animals. Safety comes before comfort. So, Damian takes off, following the sounds of fear and pain.
Fending off divebombing birds of prey with his signpost—and that’s unusual behavior, given Damian’s size relative to them, but he doesn’t have time to think about that—Damian pulls a toddler out of the way of a mountain lion. For a moment, he’s sure he’s bitten off more than he can chew, but several darts fly out of nowhere, burying themselves in the mountain lion’s hide. Damain turns around, still clutching the toddler in his arms, to see the zoo’s guards, armed with fast-acting tranquilizer guns.
There aren’t enough of them. They’re there to handle stupid teenagers, maybe even a single escaped animal. Not a zoo-wide escape.
So Damian leaves the toddler with them and slips away to help out where he can.
Three hours later, Damian sits on a bench outside the zoo, a completely unnecessary shock blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He’s too busy insisting the EMTs focus on attending to kids who actually got mauled that he doesn’t see Father pushing his way through the crowds until he’s right in front of him.
Damian doesn’t have time to explain himself before Father pulls him into a suffocating hug.
“You didn’t call,” Father says.
“Someone stole my backpack in the confusion,” Damian explains.
“You could have borrowed someone else’s phone.” Father’s arms are still wrapped around Damian, holding him so tightly that he can’t wriggle free.
The thought hadn’t occurred to Damian. He hadn’t really been thinking about Father. Instead, he was thinking about the people who were hurt or killed in the attack and the animals who no doubt lost their lives, either to each other or to the guards.
It wasn’t their fault. The entire wildcat exhibit didn’t all decide to escape at once, along with most of the bird exhibit, an elephant, and several primates of various kinds. And this wasn’t just coordinated. Stressed-out tigers and mountain lions mauling humans was expected, but people had been attacked by owls, eagles, parrots, and a remarkably aggressive giraffe. None of these animals should have been going after humans like that. Damian had been trying to slip away to investigate, to no avail.
“I apologize,” Damian says, instead of explaining.
Father doesn’t let go.
“This was unacceptable.”
Damian crosses his arms, sitting on an armchair in Wayne Manor’s sitting room. Father stands a few feet back, not quite looming over him, but still an imposing figure. “What was unacceptable?”
“Let’s start with your actions during the attack. You are not trained to fight tigers, Damian! What possessed you to—”
“People were in danger!”
“You were not the one armed! Your job was to get yourself and nearby civilians to safety, not to—”
“I saved lives,” Damian insists, trying not to clench his jaw too hard. “You are simply upset that you did not know I was the zoo in the first place.”
Bruce grimaces. “Let’s talk about that. I didn’t sign any permission slip.”
Damian shrugs, like it’s no big deal. “I signed it for you.”
“You can’t do that.”
“It’s just a zoo field trip. I go places on my own all the time. And you were too busy to sign it.”
“I was not too busy—”
“That was the first thing you said when you called me! ‘I don’t have time for this.’”
“I didn’t have time to deal with you skipping class. I could have signed a form.”
Damian rolls his eyes. “Could have fooled me.” There’s acid in his words, but it can’t match the acid in his chest, eating away at his heart. “You were too busy to check your email, after all, or else you would have known about this a month in advance.”
“You knew I didn’t know. You should have informed me. Instead, I had to find out from your tracker.”
“And you immediately assumed I was skipping class! And that it was something you needed to be upset with me about. If I skipped class to go to the zoo, it wouldn't be for fun.”
Father’s right eye twitches once, twice. His jaw clenches and unclenches. “You’re benched,” he says eventually.
Damian shoots to his feet. “What?”
“You’re benched.”
“No.” Robin is only supposed to be benched for Robin mistakes, not Damian mistakes. Not that Damian did anything wrong either.
“Yes.” Father’s expression is unyielding.
“How long?”
“Until you understand what you did wrong.”
Damian’s hands curl into fists. “Fine.” He takes a deep breath, uncurling his fists along with the coil of rage in his chest. In, then out. In, then out. “I understand what I did wrong.”
“Hn.” Father’s eye twitches again. He looks unconvinced. “What did you do wrong?”
Damian breathes again, resisting the urge to snap at Father. Does he really need to list the imaginary faults that Father is holding against him? “I did not inform you of my field trip.”
“And?”
“I forged your signature.” Damian looks up at Father. “It was dishonest.” Father is unmoved. “I exposed my civilian identity to scrutiny by displaying skills above Damian Wayne’s supposed competence.”
“No,” Bruce says firmly. Damian blinks. “Damian, this isn’t about civilian identities. This is about you, overestimating your skills and—”
“I did not overestimate—”
“Go to your room!” Damian laughs. Surely, Father can’t be trying to treat Damian like a civilian child. He doesn’t have the right, and Damian is far beyond that anyway. “Now.”
“I’ll go to Richard’s,” Damian threatens. Father crosses his arms. “I mean it!”
“Your room, Damian.”
This is ridiculous. But Father is as stubborn as the best of them. While Damian believes he could outlast him, it’s not worth it now. Besides, skipping patrol will be beneficial—Damian has work to do.
Damian crouches down to analyze the shatter pattern of the tiger enclosure’s glass, pulling a slim camera from his utility belt to capture images for later. There’s no way the tiger broke through its own enclosure. If Damian can determine exactly what happened, that will lead him to the culprit.
The snap of a twig catches Damian’s attention. It’s probably nothing. Probably. He knows better than to trust that, though.
He peers into a cluster of bushes in the tiger enclosure, his gaze catching on a pair of glowing orbs, light reflecting off a layer of tissue at the back of an animal’s eyes.
Damian freezes. No sudden movements. All the wildcats were supposed to be accounted for. So either there’s someone on the inside who let this wildcat loose again…or this isn’t a wildcat at all.
A tiger slinks out of the bushes, approaching Damian slowly, without aggression or fear. Damian doesn’t dare to flee. Instead, he subtly removes a taser from his utility belt, turning it up to the maximum setting. He doesn’t want to hurt an innocent creature, but he needs to prevent further harm to the animals of this zoo by stopping whoever is responsible—and he can’t do that if he’s dead. Besides, Damian doesn’t particularly want to die. He’s been there, done that, and it wasn’t pleasant.
Instead of attacking, though, the tiger shifts her weight backwards and begins to stand. Fur recedes into skin and facial features twist as the tiger slowly transforms. Damian takes the opportunity to stand but doesn’t scramble back. He can’t get any information if he flees. Instead, he just watches as the tiger’s body contorts, limbs jerking and bones cracking.
When the transformation is complete, Damian stands before a woman wearing a dark jumpsuit that seems to absorb all the light around it, becoming as dull and dark as it could possibly be. Her features are unremarkable and plain, almost forgettable, with the exception of her eyes, glowing in the darkness.
“Damian Wayne,” says the woman. “You should not have come here.”