Chapter Text
Damian’s heart sinks the moment he feels himself start to shrink, his back arching into the ugly crack and grind of his bones as he falls forward onto all fours, struggling to rip through the fabric of his suit where it stays caught around his torso. The dart caught in the bony part of his hip falls quietly to the floor, a flash of colour in the corner of his eye as he lets out a yowl of frustration.
A pair of fumbling hands try to drag him up and away, but even a half-grown leopard is far from easy to manoeuvre.
Damian twists with a snarl, his claws unsheathed, but a staff comes whistling down on the trafficker’s arms before he can strike. Damian hears the unmistakable crack of bone and the man’s scream, and then he’s dropped to the ground, scrabbling for purchase with his hindlegs still tangled up in his Robin suit.
“Robin!” Drake says, his voice sharp with alarm as he steps in front of Damian to parry another blow. There’s a dart in his thigh and another in his arm, but he appears to be suffering no ill effects from the minor pricks in his flesh.
Naturally, a shift cannot be forced upon a non-shifter. Not that anyone would expect one of Gotham’s vigilantes to be nothing more than a baseline human.
Truth be told, Damian has never thought very much of Timothy Drake.
A baseline human who once tried to play at being Robin, thinking himself worthy of Damian’s birthright. It quite beggars belief. He is so clearly unfit to be part of the household that he barely even deserves to be called a usurper.
Even out of shift and still years from maturity, Damian will always be sharper of ear and keener of nose than any baseline human. It is mere fact to claim himself, quite simply, superior to Timothy Drake.
And yet he is the helpless one now, trapped in a simple yet impenetrable tangle of fabric as Red Robin takes down one man after another, immune to the concoction that has rendered Damian all but useless within seconds.
Drake is by his side within minutes, his skin shiny with sweat but appearing otherwise unharmed from his brief tussle with half a dozen men. With a working set of opposable thumbs, it takes only seconds more before Damian is able to squirm out from beneath Drake’s arm, a growl of dissatisfaction rumbling in his throat.
Drake’s gloved hand lands on Damian’s head absently as he looks around for a quick way out, fingers sinking into fur, and Damian shakes it off irritably.
“Roof. That’s our best bet,” Drake says under his breath, darting Damian a small, tight smile. He doesn’t say anything about the fact that it had been Damian’s choice to infiltrate despite their lack of information. He doesn’t gloat about the fact that Damian had chosen to attack despite Drake’s repeated warnings.
Damian keeps to Drake’s heels as they race down the corridor and up the nearest flight of stairs, his heart pounding in his chest not from their current situation but from what is to come.
Father’s displeasure. Grayson’s disappointment.
There is little doubt in his mind that Drake is about to lead him to safety, only to dump him unceremoniously back home, ready to be lectured and benched as soon as the entire sordid tale is told.
Damian no longer fears being exiled from his father’s home for the smallest wrongdoing, but that doesn’t mean that he welcomes Drake bearing witness to every second of his humiliation.
There is an idiom that he has learnt, to not count his chickens before they hatch. In this case, he should not have been envisioning his escape before it happened.
His preoccupation costs him. Drake is already embroiled in battle before Damian even realises what is happening. There is a man with a handgun aimed at Red Robin, and Damian leaps as soon as he sees it, but he is still half a second too late.
The handgun goes off, deafening in its proximity, and Damian flinches. He lands anyway, his weight bowling the man to the floor as he rips into vulnerable flesh with teeth and claws. Four paces away, Drake stumbles, then regains his balance and continues to fight, his bo staff whirling through the air in a deadly dance.
Damian savages the man’s arm, and he knows that his father would not approve of the pleasure he is taking in the brutality of the attack. Nevertheless, the man will live, even if he may never hold a gun again. There is blood thick and wet on Damian’s tongue when he turns, seeking his next target.
He rips into the calf of the last man who has Red Robin backed into a corner, and then Drake knocks the thug out with a decisive blow to the forehead. He looks pale, and Damian can smell the blood on him even if it’s not immediately visible again the red of his suit.
Damian hesitates. He’s hardly worried, not about Drake of all people, but he moves forward anyway when Drake’s legs start to give way, leaning hard against the back of Red Robin’s calves as he slowly slides down the wall. He looks calm and composed, but Damian can hear his heart racing in his chest as he rummages through his pouches for bandages.
“Just a minute, Robin,” Drake says, giving him another faint smile.
Damian flicks an ear irritably, his tail lashing from side to side as he watches Drake attempt to reach the wound on his back. Damian catches only a brief glimpse before a bandage is slapped haphazardly over it, but he sees enough to know that it looks bad. The Red Robin armour may have stopped the worst of the impact, but that also means there’s no exit wound. The bullet is still inside, having done unknown amounts of damage to Drake’s already-spleenless insides.
Call for pick-up, you fool, Damian thinks furiously, staring fixedly at Drake’s blood-soaked hands.
Instead, Red Robin staggers back up to his feet.
“I don’t think we need to reach the roof. We’re high enough now that I can grapple us off,” he says, and then he attempts to pick Damian up.
Damian freezes in shock as he’s slung over Drake’s shoulder like a sack of rice, all seventy pounds of juvenile Persian leopard. It is very much not the kind of pick-up he had been thinking of at all.
He stays very still all the same, keeping his front paws stiff. He’s being carried on the opposite side of Drake’s gunshot wound, but he’s still afraid to slap them into Drake’s back by accident. After all, Damian knows better than anyone how heavy and deadly his paws can be. Beneath him, Drake wobbles on his feet for a moment, and Damian lets out a small, nervous rumble.
A firm hand strokes soothingly down his back.
“The forced shift should wear off in a couple of hours at most. You’re going to be just fine, Robin,” Drake says, as if his forced shift is really what Damian is concerned about right then. He has never wanted to be in his human form so badly.
The trip back to Drake’s Nest is hellish, if only because Drake continues to weaken noticeably after every leap. Damian can feel the full-body shivers racking him even before they land in Drake’s kitchen, quaking against Damian’s belly where much of his weight is resting against Drake’s shoulder. Drake tries to set him down, but Damian is unsurprised when the fool completely collapses on him halfway.
He's more upset about the indignity of the entire situation than the amount of blood that Drake is still losing, and he lets out an angry growl, licking furiously at Drake’s face with his rough tongue until the tender skin looks red and abraded. Drake barely stirs, his eyes blinking feebly as his fingers clutch at Damian’s fur.
Wake up! He wants to scream, but he settles for pawing repeatedly at Drake’s uninjured shoulder instead.
“Robin?” Drake mumbles, his eyes slitting open just a fraction before sliding shut again. Damian snarls in frustration and leans in to press his nose against Drake’s cheek.
It seems to take an age for Drake to really regain consciousness, but finally he crawls unsteadily off Damian and produces another bandage from the same pouch as before. The first one is already soaked through and useless, not to mention the bullet is still somewhere in him, but Drake hardly seems to register that fact as he peels the first bandage off before slapping the new one over the gory hole.
Damian has never seen anyone with worse wound care procedure than Timothy Drake. The moment he regains his own opposable thumbs, he is going to use them to throttle Drake into better self-care habits.
Right then, all he can do is follow Drake over to his couch, where he promptly collapses facedown and appears to fall asleep in between one breath and the next. Damian sets two careful paws on the edge of the couch, examining the limited space left to him, and then leaps up gingerly to settle himself against Drake’s side.
It’s a bit of a tight squeeze, and Drake shifts uneasily, a furrow between his brows and an unintelligible mutter leaving his lips before he settles one arm over Damian’s back. Damian twitches a little at the touch, his tail hanging off the edge of the couch, but he doesn’t move away.
Baseline human or not, utterly useless or not, it is still his duty to stay close and ensure that Drake does not expire the moment Damian turns his back.
The rest of his family would be immensely distressed to lose Drake to such a trivial mission.
Damian glares at Drake’s unconscious form, his fur itching with the need to shift back, pushing against the odd, slippery barrier still separating him from his human shape.
One way or another, he vows, that wound is getting disinfected before sunrise.