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The moment Red Hood slipped through the window into his safehouse, he turned around, voice clearly annoyed even through the modulator. "What do you think you're doing, Robin?"
Damian tsked in response, sliding the window closed behind himself before scanning the room critically. It looked like a fairly standard apartment for the Bowery, which was to say there were water stains on the ceiling, a pervasive musk to the air, and a high likelihood of black mold in the shower. It was surprisingly neat, furnished with an armchair, coffee table, and bookshelf, but not clean. "You live like this?"
"Closest safehouse, little bat, you can judge when you're old enough to get your own and aren't leeching off daddy's money." Hood clicked on a lamp, then started stiffly moving towards the kitchen like he wasn't at risk of immediately keeling over.
Damian stepped closer. "Sit down," he snapped.
Hood turned. His gaze felt distinctly judgmental.
Damian gestured towards where Hood's hand was pressed tightly against his side, blood ink-dark in the low yellow light. "You're injured."
"Brilliant observation. I had no idea."
Damian would punch him if he wasn't on the verge of passing out. "You're injured, and you ran off as soon as the mission was over to grapple for fourteen full minutes instead of seeking medical care."
"I applied a field dressing," Hood said.
"Only to aggravate the wound for the next quarter hour. Sit down."
Hood grumbled what was presumably a long list of complaints, translated by his helmet into garbled static, but he complied, gingerly lowering himself onto an armchair. "I'm holding you responsible for scrubbing the bloodstains out of my furniture."
"Where is your first-aid kit located?"
"Kitchen drawer to the left of the sink," Hood replied. "I would already have it out, if you weren't so insistent on interrupting."
Damian ignored him, entering the kitchen to retrieve the kit, raggedy carpet transitioning to scuffed tile under his boots. He returned to see Hood carefully pulling himself out of his jacket and layers of body armor. He had taken the helmet off, the curved red surface glinting where it had partially rolled under the armchair.
He peeled off the gauze next, revealing the line of red tracing the oblique muscle along his left side. The wound itself was a clean cut, clearly done with a knife. It must have struck along a seam in between the armor plates.
"Alright, give it over, birdie."
Damian glared at Todd's hand, which was making a frankly childish grabby gesture towards the first-aid kit. "I did not follow you all the way here just to watch you sew yourself up."
He watched Todd's eyebrows crease in confusion, the shift into realization immediately overshadowed by some degree of incredulousness. "You want to do it? Have your fine motor skills even developed fully yet? You're, what, ten—"
"Twelve," Damian corrected. He opened the first-aid kit, digging around for the antiseptic. "My fine motor skills are more than satisfactory. I am capable and trained in most weaponry and surgery."
"Didn't think lessons in medical care would come up in baby assassin training," Hood said. His sentence cut a little short as he hissed, breathing carefully through Damian wiping down the wound.
Damian leveled him with an unimpressed look. "Of course it would. You cannot be an effective assassin if your body is not in peak condition. That means treating injuries immediately and giving them time to heal."
"Huh. Fair enough, I guess."
"You spent time in the League, did you not?" Damian poured antiseptic over the wound, and Todd clenched his teeth in response.
"Yeah. Not really with the League itself, though. Your mom mostly tossed me around the globe between a variety of teachers. League contacts, probably. Killed most of 'em."
Damian fetched the suturing needle from the kit. "You didn't trust any of your mentors, so you learned to take care of your injuries on your own?" He tied off the first stitch.
"Mm… yeah, basically."
"I see," Damian said. He cast a critical eye over Todd's torso. Knife slashes and bullet wounds layered over themselves in a healed landscape. The sheer amount struck him as odd, although he wasn't sure why. Todd had been a vigilante since twelve—it made sense that he would be heavily scarred. "It is a reasonable habit to develop, in that scenario. However, wouldn't you agree it's an utterly foolish practice to keep up now?"
"… No, I wouldn't agree?"
"Tt. You have allies now. Individuals you can rely on. The Batcave's facilities have some of the best medical equipment in the world. Running off to lick your wounds by your lonesome is wholly unnecessary."
"What if I don't trust Batman, Robin? What then?"
Damian looked up again, narrowing his eyes. "Batman is hardly the one dispensing medical care, now is he? Pennyworth and Thompkins are capable and trustworthy."
"Alfie'll always put Bruce first, at the end of the day." Todd rubbed at his neck. "And I suppose you weren't around when it happened, but Batman chased Leslie out of Gotham for over a year, after she faked Steph's death. I'd rather not rely on resources that could be rescinded at any time."
The mention of Brown's death reminded Damian of Todd's as well. He pulled tight another stitch, frowning at Todd's chest. "You've been in a Lazarus Pit, right?"
Todd blinked, clearly surprised at the non-sequitur, but nodded anyway. "Yes. Four years ago, or so."
"You've accumulated all of this in the past four years," Damian said, tapping on the bullet scar closest to the new wound. The skin was divoted inwards, the same shade as the rest of Todd's skin but clearly with a different, crinklier texture.
It was true of all his other scars too—they were all at most a few years old, collected after the Lazarus Pit had cleared away all the older ones.
"Yep."
"You need to be more careful," Damian said. He tied off the last stitch, then reached back into the first-aid kit to find the correct dressing for the wound. "You should not be receiving lasting injuries this often."
Todd shrugged, casual, but Damian could feel the underlying tension under his hands as he pressed the dressing down. "Don't worry, I'm careful now. Do you think that will scar?" He inclined his head towards his latest injury.
Damian frowned, briefly wondering if Todd was doubting his abilities. The question sounded genuine enough that he gave an honest answer. "It might. If it does, I'll likely fade over the next year."
Todd nodded. "Yeah. That's the worst thing I've gotten in the last six months. I don't get hurt as often anymore, so don't you worry, little bat."
Damian's eyes flickered back towards Todd's face, then across his chest once more. "But you used to be."
Todd looked away, gesturing towards the bedroom. His hand was back on his neck. Damian followed the motion with his eyes. There was a scar there, too, he realized, peeking out from under Todd's fingers. "Can you get me a sweatshirt?"
Damian obliged. It was similarly decayed compared to the rest of the safehouse. The spare clothes were stored in a trunk at the base of a low-quality mattress laid on the floor itself. He pulled out a black t-shirt with some American band's iconography printed across the front, and a pair of gray sweatpants.
Todd pulled on the shirt, and started unbuckling himself from the lower half of his uniform.
The collar of the shirt was fairly high, concealing most of the scar on Todd's neck, but from what Damian could see it wasn't pretty. The edges were jagged, healed poorly, and the texture suggested multiple blades had dragged their way through the skin. The pattern was familiar.
It looked like it should have been fatal.
"Like I said, I had a lot of mentors," Todd said, pulling Damian out of his stupor. He was focused on pulling off his boots—Damian wasn't sure if he had been caught staring. "I was focused more on learning fast from then rather than being careful. I got hurt a lot."
"That was three, four years ago?" Damian asked.
"Yes."
"It depends on a lot of factors, how fast scars fade," Damian started, "but it looks like most of them are younger than that. A year or two, at most."
Todd was clearly avoiding eye-contact, at this point. One of his hands reached up, before faltering. "I wasn't doing very well, mentally, I guess, after I came back to Gotham. After my death. Let myself get hurt. I'm better now. Don't worry about it."
"That's not a burden you should be carrying alone," Damian said.
Todd looked up, a tight smile on his face. "Yeah, well, I definitely shouldn't be burdening a child with it either, should I? I'm doing better now, really, you don't need to worry about it."
"I'm not a child," Damian protested, an argument that he had made and lost many a time before, but his mind was elsewhere. He was not nearly as well versed in mental health as he was in the physical, most of his exposure limited to the frankly concerning jokes his family tended to make about it, but he knew a support system was very important for positive emotional health. A support system that Todd didn't seem to have—
"Do you have friends?"
Todd blinked, and Damian realized he must have interrupted him. "You can't just ask a guy if he has friends, Dami."
"You don't," Damian concluded.
"Where is this coming from anyway?" Todd asked, frowning. "Why do you care about what kind of people I may or may not hang out with?"
"You don't trust Batman," Damian said. "So you don't trust the Cave. So you likely don't trust Oracle, or NightWing, or the pretender, or any of the others by association. It is in your best interest to have a circle of people you trust, both for your mental and physical wellbeing."
"I already said I'm better now. Stop worrying. In fact, I told you specifically to not worry."
Damian narrowed his eyes. "Why don't you trust Batman?"
Todd sighed. "There's a lot of complicated history there, from before you joined the family Damian. It's not important." His hand was drifting upwards again, before he clenched his fist tightly and lowered it again.
Upwards, to the half-concealed scar on Todd's neck. Multiple blades, or perhaps a serrated edge. Like the curve of a batarang.
"Did…" Damian started. Todd caught his gaze, and his voice froze in his throat.
Todd looked away. "I think you should go," he said quietly. "The others are probably wondering where you are, yeah?"
"I do not like Father much, either," Damian said. He felt like he was confessing some deep and terrible truth. "He is frustratingly obtuse".
Todd let out a surprised bark of laughter. "He sure is, isn't he? Wouldn't know what an emotion was if it hit him in the face."
Damian huffed out a laugh of his own. He packed away the first aid kid, slipping away to the kitchen to shove it back in the drawer. By the time he came back, Todd had fully changed into the sweatpants, and was thumbing his way through the selection of paperbacks he had on the rickety bookshelf in the corner of the room.
He cleared his throat as he headed towards the window. "If you ever need assistance with another injury, Todd, I would be happy to help."
Todd hummed. "Thank you Damian. I'll keep that in mind."