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Tim breathed in and counted.
One, two, three, four, out. Repeat.
“Damian. Why the hell are my cameras dead?”
The cave was quiet, only the humming of different devices changing the atmosphere from dank and vampiric to, well, if Dracula had a smart tv. Dick was typing a report lazily—a slow day for sure—while Tim hunched over his table, taking stock of equipment. Damian was whittling, waiting for supervision because of Bruce’s orders.
Tim’s face wasn’t visible but it didn’t have to be for his pissed tone to be heard.
Damian froze for a split second, turning to glare at him with an attempted unimpressed expression from his precarious spot on his bike. “Do you believe your technology is the most important thing in this cave?”
“I didn’t say that, but yeah. Answer my question, dweeb.”
Dick’s mediator-like voice rang out, “Timmy, he probably just forgot to plug them in, maybe he was in a rush.”
Unfortunately for him, all of his siblings were immune to it through exposure therapy. Steph barely listened to the argument as she played candy crush. It was like one in the morning, which meant that the night hadn’t even started, so Damian and Tim were like pigeons that found the same crumb. Her ringer stayed on, volume up as she color matched.
“No, he just doesn’t care!”
“I did not forget! They were charged!”
“Uh, no they fucking were not!”
“They looked charged to me, maybe you just didn’t check correctly.”
“Maybe I-? Are you kidding me?!”
Steph didn’t look up. She whistled, bored, “Them’s fighting words, gremlin.”
The mini-cameras creaked, threatening to snap with how hard Tim gripped them. He knew his technology better than anyone. Air was sucked through his teeth, making him seem about ready to snap Damian’s neck to match the cameras, “They were red. They’re supposed to be green. How in the hell would they look charged when they were blood fucking red?!”
Damian looked back at his creepy wooden statue, which Stephanie definitely thought was cursed within the ten minutes it had been in his hands, and went back to carving at it. His movements were just the tiniest bit sharper, jerking against the grain of the wood roughly, “Tt- maybe your equipment is faulty. Quite like your brain.”
“That’s enough.”
Nothing quite beat the echo of the cave, but Dick’s voice was serious and tired and came close. She finally looked up at the sound, the silence thrumming in its wake somewhat ruined by her phone blaring a cartoonish ‘Yay!’ as she cleared the stage. Damian’s attention snapped up and she got a good look at his resolute face before it was quickly covered with a snarl.
Hm.
The Batcomputer light made Dick’s expression look disappointed, even as she knew it was just tired and annoyed (surely the emotional toll of having brothers weighing all of him down). The effect of it worked on Damian though, apparently, because in an instant he was antsy and stood from his bike to gesture roughly in defense.
It was boring, yeah. Probably an argument made a thousand times that no one had bothered to update her about being a regular thing. But it was also…strange? Like the brat truly made a mistake and didn’t know how to word it. She had to make it up to Cassie for giving her those body language tips, cause oh man this was a whole goldmine.
Her phone cheered again, making her half of the cave sound like rainbows. Damian’s voice could’ve been mistaken for choked with tears.
“Drake’s charger has the same adapter as my comm, and he hadn’t used those cameras in weeks!”
“It doesn’t matter. Apologize and take more care next time to check what color they are.”
The kid stared into space, a terrible wrinkle in his brow. The words made his shoulders straighten and his lips thin out. “Fine.” He turned to Tim, his lips somehow becoming even more straight as he took the man in. “I apologize, Drake. I will be less negligent with your devices in the future.” He bit the words out, clipping each end like they were frayed and the unsightliness offended him.
“Yeah, or maybe just don’t touch them at all.” Damian stormed away from him but not before he could hear Tim say, “I told you he didn’t care.”
As usual, Tim felt the need to battle for the last word, and Steph sighed as she started the next level. The cutesy, bubbly music helped her avoid Damian’s walk of shame as he rushed past her to the med bay in a vain attempt to be alone before he could explode and get benched.
A stack of red squares piled up at the corner of the screen and she tapped it, getting an extra fifteen points.
“And what of the others?”
His mother did not pause, but she may as well have as she slowed just slightly to meet his smaller stride. The air bent around their steps, unfaltering, and in the pause Damian felt anticipation; the ghost of a hand slapping him, the phantom pains of flames licking his feet in the open air, the fire.
“Others?”
Earlier that week he’d seen the uprising of a group of servants that had said they wanted their autonomy back, as they knew they weren’t being protected by the League any further than they could be trusted. Clothes were as much theirs as the dirt on their shoes, and Grandfather sought only to remind them of such. A pyre was being erected in the courtyard he could see from his bedroom window, hay and wood being built for the traitors to provide an example of what happened when one went against the Utopia. He could not sympathize or else.
The heftiness of his mothers voice clamped on the air in his lungs. He could picture logs of timber in his hands and the burn of charcoal swirling up his throat. His words passed through the smoke, swallowing it like he was being trained to do, “The servants. Their fate is not known to me, though they’ll likely be tortured and scorned.”
“They will be killed.”
Oh.
Blood roared in his ears at the words, distant. A thick feeling passed from his ribs to his tongue, a disgusted response to the carelessness that he wasn’t used to yet, that he should have been used to.
Perhaps his voice was empty of empathy when it came out of him, “What of their families?”
She raised a brow, finally stopping. “They will be killed too, should they not take their proper mantles and be obedient.”
Her tone was laced with a threat, a promise meant for them and him in tandem if he pushed the matter further. Care for them coiled in his gut and lanced through his body, making him feel the need to push his words out in protest for them, but they left as soon as he’d realized they were there, weak and insignificant—an argument he’d never been trained to entertain or consider.
He was not allowed eye contact yet. He nodded, staring at her boots to show his obedience; They were brown, but he knew they were dark green, something deep that hid their forms. In his eyes, the hue matched her hair and eyes and skin, matched with the ground they paced and walls they guarded themselves with. She nodded too, spinning on her heel and leading him again to look at the rows of soldiers that he’d need to command.
Damian’s eyes strayed to the pyre in the center, thinking about the burning flesh he’d likely smell that night from the executions in the fire they would make below his bedroom. He hoped it would never be his.
Steph was not a ‘quiet’ kind of person, ironically. She knew how to shut up most of the time, it was just a matter of when, but she wasn’t the best at that aspect of silence.
Damian, however, sucked at it. It made his absence both blissful and inescapable.
When he hadn’t been seen in the Manor all day, and he should have been there for breakfast, or in training to work out his teen angst, she really didn’t care. It wasn’t until Alfred approached her when it was nearly midnight, pulling her aside and handing her a protein bar—the kind he used for Bruce when the man himself was locking himself in work or brooding or doing a million other irritating things that she wanted to cover in silly string. It solves his momentary focus, apparently. Figures his kid(s) would be the exact same way.
“Stephanie, would you be a dear and bring this to master Damian? He’s been quite elusive as of late and I fear I have busier things to attend to.” Past his shoulder she could see the aftermath of a coffee experiment being wiped up by Tim on the kitchen counter, his grumbling bringing a smile to her lips.
Cass poked her from the seat on the couch she blanket-hogged from, egging her on. She grabbed the bar and patted Alfred’s shoulder, “Sure!”
Again, she hadn’t seen the brat since the day before, but finding him couldn’t be that hard, right?
It took her nearly an hour—an hour!—to realize he’d been in Jason’s old room. Jason’s very locked old room, which meant he lockpicked and hid in it, probably to steal the clothes he knew were still there.
When she opened the door, Damian froze from in front of the mirror, his quiet muttering stopping. He snapped at her, “What do you want, Brown?”
She raised an eyebrow, “Okay, first of all: rude. Second, what the hell are you doing?” She gasped, “Are you playing dress up? Without me?! That’s so rude, I’m unbelievably offended right now. I can’t believe you’ve done this.”
Damian spun, facing her with his back to the mirror, his outfit a horrific amalgamation of design mistakes. His t-shirt looked like it wasn’t his—mostly because it had a cat jumping out of a mug with a rainbow splashing out with it plastered on the front and she couldn’t imagine him ever buying it for himself, let alone wearing it around—and he had an olive colored tie on that completely clashed with the bright green of his eyes. Badly.
A second tie was leaning on his shoulder, a different shade of forest-y green. Neither of them matched his facial palette.
Steph’s eyes caught him moving something behind his back in the mirror, hiding whatever it was in his pockets so she couldn’t see and was trying to distract her from the motion by flipping his tie over his shoulder. “Mind your own business, Fatgirl. My private humors are none of your concern.”
Mm. Mmhmm. So that’s how this was going to be.
Damian moved to walk past her, scoffing, and she moved at the same time to catch his tie and trip his legs up. The tie around his shoulder was now a tie around his neck, and she tugged just lightly enough for it to cut him off.
She scoured his pockets one handed as he struggled with the strangulation, his knees confined to the books of tiny Jason sprawled around them. Her fingers hit the feeling of paper, like cardstock that had been rubbed against too many times, and she pulled it out. A green Pantone slip stared back at her. Which was incredibly confusing, unless he was trying to match a suit or corsage or something, but in that case why not just bring the damn thing with him? Why be so secretive about it like this?
“What-?“
He snarled, cutting her off by turning around and tying his tie around her wrist, pulling.
Steph shouted as she hit the floor and the bookshelf in a forced frontflip, not hard enough to hurt but enough to make a sound. They both paused, listening to the silence they gave weight to by being too loud. Soon, footsteps were coming up the steps—too heavy to be Tim or Dick, and Bruce was out on patrol.
Jason.
Damian and Steph looked each other in the eye and silently agreed to not get the other killed unless they had to. One ran for the bathroom and the other for the closet, where she only realized she’d dropped the Pantone slip on the ground once they heard the boot falls of Mr. Stick-Up-His-Leather Jr. stop before the door. She held her breath and could faintly hear him grumbling, though the drywall muffled it into something that either could’ve been, “Bruce is an orphan hoarder,” or, “Bruise up these orphans, your honor.” If you asked her, the odds were 50/50.
Okay maybe Steph wasn’t the best at espionage. But to be fair, that color strip thing was pretty weird, so her focus wasn’t tip top.
Paying attention, she could hear Cass speak to him, almost missing her low voice. Jason spoke a little loud, (but not as loud as they knew he could because this was Cass of all people) something along the lines of, “What the hell was that sound, then?” More soft words and finally he sighed like someone handed him a wild rat to take care of. His steps moved away, and she could breathe again.
The door to the closet opened and she squeaked, “Cass! Thank god you’re on our side, I thought I was gonna be mauled.” The quiet girl smiled, purely amused. She held out the Pantone slip from somewhere on her person and Steph lit up, pointing between the bathroom and her eyes. Cass nodded like she already knew Damian was hiding there, and she probably did. Cause it’s Cass.
They moved to the door in silence, which Steph finally realized was appropriate for the time being. Cassie opened the door right as a fraction of Damian’s foot left the view of the window.
The second story window.
Shit.
Cass screwed up her face for a second, a metric boatload of possible reactions being considered, before she turned around and headed back downstairs with Steph left to play follow the leader. Which was a pretty fun game, so she didn’t complain. Plus, it was Cass. She’d follow her to the ends of the Earth.
Damian would be fine on his own.
Damian could still remember the day he was cast out, a day before his real departure, before his accepted leave. The day he realized he was an alien on the grounds that had borne him, raised him, revived him.
The day he was alone.
That day was his first birthday, his first memory. He could vaguely recall his mother speaking to someone—a woman he’d later meet and despise, distrust like a poison in his veins—and her constant sutra that quaked in the halls of her home. His mother hung to her every word, distrustful and detached but listening. Damian couldn’t make out the words, still a baby, still too young.
She walked him to her balcony and his memory is clearer there, clearer with the lights the cave and labyrinth around them holding him with her. A small dagger weighed in his hand and he didn’t like it, hated the weight and the shine and just thought about wanting to grab her hair instead. ‘Eth Alth'eban gleamed around him as his mother held him above the city from her place, dagger clutched in his hand and she was staring at him, murmuring her promises in Arabic, then Russian, then again. “You are strong, you are kind, you are brave. Be brave for me, darling.”
Her hands let go. He fell to the ground with his leg jostled and foot bent in the wrong direction, left with a nick in his side from where the dagger had fallen with him.
She tutted and did not pick him back up. His dagger was taken away, and his hands remained empty.
(Damian couldn’t recall the color of it, whether it had jewels in red or green or some sickly mix between the two, and sometimes he burned with the need to know. The thick feeling in his throat often came up to him in those relapses of memory, and he could not place why often. He hated when he could.)
Later he learned that she was testing to see his reaction time and ability to lose attachments. He maintained his attachment to gravity. He did not let the hidden city hold his heart after that day.
When he reached the age of eight he was taken to the psychic again—the old woman that he despised, that they’d had in their possession for decades under Ra’s eye (care would not fit in the words he assigned to the league, and kidnapping was a greater, scarier word that stirred his lungs up and turned him inside out, but possessing was what they did. They owned).
Fate folded his palms and she read the lines in them, pages he spelled out through just existing that he desperately did not wish to be literate in, audibly scrawled through the air and ripped out of his hands. Her face was ashy and cracked and he did not want to be there, but he needed to know his year’s challenges being assigned. She read on, and his heart’s opinion was stomped under black-green boots. “Year of fire,” she had said, her voice a throaty and strained sound. His grimace was bit back, impassive; acknowledgement of discomfort was for life or death moments. Threats of life, of honor, were to be acknowledged and listened to. The old crone spoke more, “He must resist the heat of the world to reach what he seeks.”
That night his maid instructed him to hold his hand over a candle until morning, as ordered by his Grandfather.
He stared at the flame, at the tallow that pooled at the edges and the base and filled his nose with the slow scent of burning fat, melting skin that filled the room and his mind and blocked the feeling of being heated. By morning his palms were numb and he dressed himself with the heat in them contrasting the rest of him, his skin like melting wax. His apathy paralleled his hands, numb.
Acknowledgement of discomfort was for life or death moments, and the day’s events had not started yet.
He was sent to wade across a chasm that ran through the grounds, one that opened over a body of lava he could only faintly make out the orange of, the color bouncing off his dagger and the object of the test: a key. A single golden key that hung from a chain above the maw of the earth, suspended by rock he did not trust to hold. Trust was not an option. He learned from early on that even his eyes would betray him. His dagger could be turned against him, his hands could be used as weapons that he had no say over.
He walked across the chasm, where heat from the lava clung to the walls and the rails and he couldn’t hang onto them unless he wanted further calloused hands.
He did not hang onto them.
Burning was not quite failure, but death was. The iron of the thin bridge was molten hot, scarring and hot and working to make his feet match it.
He burned, but he did not die. Failure hurt more than fire.
The cookies were burning and the kitchen was loud with it, filled with bright red that flashed against the old paint and got tangled with the smoke of the oven.
“Shit!”
Dick pressed release on the fire extinguisher, fighting back the heat that encased the room and coughing into it. Cass jumped from the couch before Steph did, grabbing another extinguisher to help him out. Steph lingered behind knowing their combined forces would fix it, but wouldn’t fix those poor, poor cookies. The kitchen was now a graveyard and she was a fresh widow.
Weirdly, though, as they worked she didn’t see Damian through the smoke. She was sure he was there, he’d been making vegan cookies with Dick in what was evidently a doomed experiment but their experiment nonetheless. It confused her and she had a pull in her chest that shouted and whispered at the same time, a screaming breath of, ‘Find him. Wrong.’
So what if the voice sounded weirdly like Cass? It just made her more inclined to follow through with it. So, she did.
She almost regretted it when she found him. Again, she questioned just what the hell he was doing but bit the words back when she saw his crumpled posture. He looked—well, he looked awful. For Damian, anyway.
Damian was in his room, which was unlocked. Her mind scream-whispered again, ‘Red flag. Investigate.’
She moved before she could comprehend the scene beyond the door; Damian had his mouth covered with his shirt, which was damp from what looked like his water bottle being spilled on him, the remnants of water splashed around him on his floor and bedspread and nightstand. His eyes were closed and his arms were wrapped around his knees, back to the wall and a knife in his hand as he breathed stiffly.
He looked like a threat.
He looked like her, when she was smaller and quieter and surrounded by broken glass, surrounded by shouting and her dad’s post-it’s with questions written on them in a crazy, scary scrawl.
He looked like a scared little kid.
His breaths were disjointed and she breathed in and counted to match him.
One, two, three, four, out. Repeat.
“…Damian?”
He flinched and pointed the knife in her vocal direction. His eyes were still closed.
She slowly got on the ground and pushed her back to the wall across from him, leaving the door unlocked as she moved loudly. If this was anything like Cassie’s panic attacks, this’d be a piece of cake.
Wait. Cake.
Sweets, the cookies, shit- the fire and smoke downstairs. That’s probably what had set him off. She looked at him, at the makeshift smoke proof mask he’d made, signs of a struggle in his panic where water had splashed on the rest of him and his silk sheets and mahogany wood…
…and her heart broke.
It was like the Twilight Zone. Here was Damian, their little local feral cat boy, and she wanted to- to what, give him a hug? Make him better cookies than whatever had burned into his retinas and seared them like the metal tray of the oven in the kitchen?
The fire alarm could still be heard, echoing through the expensive wood of the house in a shrill reminder of fire, fire, fire. Steph didn’t move. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and she prayed for the right words to land on her plate.
“I was scared of ovens as a kid.” A good start, really solid. Damian froze. “These big crazy boxes that we kept in our bigger boxes—houses, by the way,“ The knife slackened but only in position, shifting from towards her to his chest, cradled like a diamond. She kept going, not knowing the destination, “-and I would always avoid the kitchen during dinner. I hated the heat of it. Like a locker room without a naked grandma, like one was gonna be there around the corner with her saggy everything and I’d never get to have my hard earned lasagna.” Steph could tell the ridiculousness was working when his breathing was less stilted, the silent count he’d worked out to keep air in himself petering out to a normal meter.
In a strange way, she got the sense that he was laughing without any normal symptoms of the fact. “With that lovely picture I just painted, I’m gonna to get up now and I’m gonna open that window over there, and if you don’t like that then I guess you have my consent for stabbing. But, if you jump out of said window, then I get to do it back.”
His eyes were open, tracking her but not with a knife. What a sweet sentiment.
Steph opened it, letting any smoke smell leave the room and provide a psychological escape plan for him. She moved to sit back where she’d been, but he grabbed her pant leg before she was out of range—more of a brush than anything, but noticeable. ‘Stay,’ the move said, ‘talk.’
Steph knew how to shut up, and if ever there was a question of when, it wasn’t then. She sat next to him and kept going without looking at him, “Not to mention that freaking lighting, ugh, it’s terrible. Important, yeah, cause it’s a fire, but did they have to make it red? Couldn’t they have made it white or something? And what about people with deuteranopia, that would suck ass. Just some beige light going off and coating everything in tan like a librarian’s wet dream-“
It was then. That was the point she should have shut up at. Because Damian tensed, the knife still held to his chest and his eyes darted to the floor. Everything below the bridge of his nose was covered, but everything else was visible and made her pause. Thank god she actually paid attention when Cassie told her stuff, or else she’d totally have punctured something by then. She moved the topic, talking about how crowded apartments felt in general and shifting it along while she took in whatever she’d seen of Damian that scratched at her.
Steph watching as he confused the charging colors, conceding his point after Dick told him to just pay attention. Looking into Jason’s room to see Damian reevaluating the shades of green he found in the abandoned closet, mismatched strips of fabric against his Pantone paper. Tensing with the mention of deuteranopia, the most common form of color blindness: Red and green.
Holy fucking batballs.
She knew when to shut up, but echoes of past words were twisted into puns, then another, and another. It would add insult hue injury. The realization really shade her day. Okay, they were terrible, but there was so much material she could tease him with, so many color puns that could be pelted his way.
But…
Steph looked back down at the pessimistic head of hair at her shoulder, who was still listening. He still had his knife in his hand and her words in his ears and she was miraculously unstabbed. He still reminded her of herself, her curled posture as the fire alarm blared to poorly disguise the sounds of shouting and breaking glass. This was personal, something he probably didn’t tell them cause of the echoes of trauma from his wacko mom because she’s- well, she’s Talia.
Oh, she is going to kick Tim’s ass. And Dick’s, once he remade those cookies the proper way. And Jason’s cause she felt like it.
Damian fully relaxed when she finally left, having distracted him from his previous panic by making him more annoyed at her voice than afraid of the flames. An absolute win, if she did say so herself.
“You knew?! And you didn’t tell me?!”
Cassie stared at her for a second and Stephanie realized what she’d just said. They were supposed to be the detective family, so of course she’d want to see how long it took to realize.
She internally scoffed at herself. It took a lot longer than it should have, that’s for sure. “Okay fine, but how should we tell the others? Note in the sock drawers? Spray paint on the walls? Ransom note?”
Cass shook her head, “No, that’s mean. It’s not our place.”
The underlying words spoke through the compassion in her eyes. Not mean to the others, mean to Damian. It wasn’t their secret to tell, their trauma to work through. Steph sighed, “Well it’s already been like two years, if they were going to notice they’d have done it already and stopped being dicks about it.”
“True.”
The silence picked her chin up. Nothing had changed in the conversation or inflection, but everything had changed.
“What, why are you- Oh! Oh my god you have a plan. This is gonna be amazing, what is it? What do you have planned, oh Mighty One? Wait, don’t tell me. I bet the surprise will be hue-mongous. They’ll finally see his true colors.”
Cass let out a goofy, delicate laugh and it was like music. Steph’s annoyance turned giddy as she bit into a cookie they’d stolen from Dick.
And he hadn’t even noticed yet. Detective family, her ass.