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Damian’s only been back for a week, but it already feels as if nothing happened in his routine.
His powers have worn off, Father and Pennyworth seem happier than ever - even happier than before he left, which seems odd to him. Father’s a bit over-protective on patrol - Damian notices he tries to knock out all of the bad guys before Damian even lands, every time they get in he asks if he’s injured, as if Damian would hide something like that from him.
(Well, he might, but only if it was unimportant or embarrassing).
Still -
As long as he can think about it in terms of leaving and coming back and keep his exercise and activity high enough that he falls asleep instantly when his head hits the pillow, he can pretend like he was never dead.
It would help if the entire family were here, though.
One morning, he’s in the kitchen helping Pennyworth make French toast. Normally, Damian would consider this beneath him, but he’d found Pennyworth up at work when he couldn’t sleep, and had volunteered to keep him busy - if only to take his mind off the nightmares.
And besides, he -
He missed the man, okay?
“I see you’re working on widening your repertoire of skills,” Pennyworth says as Damian beats the eggs, and only gets some of them on his clothing (it’s gross, he thinks, but he won’t let anyone know that it bothered him).
Damian nods idly.
“I suppose you don’t want to wake up at forty-four and realize you can’t fix dinner?”
Damian wants to protest that father’s only forty- three , but it hits him that he missed almost an entire year. “Does my father cook?” he asks.
“Not habitually,” Pennyworth says. “Most of his culinary skills extend to survival training - thoroughly cooking fish or rabbits you catch and the like - or macaroni and cheese - he had to make something for Dick, Tim, and Jason on my days off.”
Damian nods and makes a face of disapproval. He’s had Father’s macaroni and cheese once - but not twice. It was truly revolting. He has no idea how the other children Father raised can stand it.
Damian does get bored halfway through the cooking and starts eyeing the sharp knives Pennyworth keeps in the holder. He tests out the weight of one of them - it has a blade about 3 centimeters wide and 15 or so centimeters long. There are little groves near the sharp edge of the blade, but he can’t find the purpose of them. He swings it through the air experimentally.
“We are not making anything that requires that, Master Damian,” Pennyworth says.
Damian shrugs and puts the knife back. “What’s that for? The weight felt all funny.”
“Chopping.”
“I bet I could still hit a target with it,” Damian adds. Just because he could . Once he got used to the weight.
“Of that, I have no doubts.”
Alfred the cat wanders into the room, mewing for attention. Damian scoops up the cat in his arms and presses his face into his fur. The cat doesn’t object, he just begins purring.
“Your animals missed you,” Pennyworth says. “We all did.”
“Except Drake,” Damian says with a slight smile. He has no clue whether Drake missed him or not - it’s just something he says. Old habits die hard, and the strongest thing he remembers about Drake was the way the boy refused to trust him and thought he was bloodthirsty, or when he was making plans to take him out. He must have cared somewhat if he was on Father’s mission to bring him back from the dead, but that could also have just been because Father wanted him to help.
“Tim missed you as well,” Pennyworth says, as he finishes stacking up the French toasts and getting them ready to serve.
Damian clicks his tongue against his teeth. He doubts it.
Damian sets down Alfred (who mews immediately to get picked back up) and helps Pennyworth carry the plates out. Waiting at the table is Father, who’s reading the paper. “Thank you both,” he says, and then to Damian, “How was it in the kitchen?”
“Boring,” Damian answers honestly. “But Pennyworth and I got to talking. And speaking of people who missed me - I think it’s high time you bring Richard in from whichever city he’s exiled himself to this time. Tell him his favorite brother is back.”
Father sets down his fork slowly.
Pennyworth swallows.
None of this is good.
“What happened?” Damian asks.
Maybe Richard had a fight with Father - he said he used to be somewhat resentful of the way he was raised.
“Damian,” Father says, and the way he softens his voice means Damian just knows . He doesn’t know what, but he knows it’s bad. Damian stands up and starts walking out of the room.
“Damian!” Father says, and follows after him. Damian can hear Pennyworth’s comparatively lighter footsteps trailing behind.
Damian scowls.
Father catches up to him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Damian, I’m sorry,” Father says. His voice his heavy. Like it’s dragging him down. “But Dick is dead.”
Damian clenches his hands in fists. Tears spring to his eyes and he automatically tries to blink them back. “You should have told me,” he says.
“I wanted - Damian, I wanted you to be able to focus on getting your head back on straight - ”
“So you lied!” Damian says. He knows he’s reacting too strongly, too quickly, but he can’t stop. It seemed like things were perfect one moment and ruined the next.
“Damian - ” Father begins again, but Pennyworth cuts him off.
“It was both of our decisions not to tell you,” Penny worth says. “We wanted you - this entire family - to have some… some reprieve. Time to celebrate you being back, not to focus on death.”
Damian feels his scowl intensify. He feels cheated. They lulled him into a false sense of security - a false idea that everything could get back to normal and be all right. “Get your hand off me,” he says to Father. His voice is distorted almost unrecognizably from his anger.
Fortunately, Father does so. Damian doesn’t know what he’d have done if he didn’t.
Damian rubs his eyes and tries to act like he wasn’t just about to cry. He can’t think about this like a kid. He has to think of it like the heir to the mantle of the bat. And Batman would (should) be trying to think of a way to fix the situation. Obviously.
Starting with logic - what ways are there to bring someone back? Lazarus pits, obviously, but if Father didn’t just bring him back with a Lazarus pit, their access to them must be hindered. Still, perhaps he can persuade Ra’s to tell him where any remaining pits are - or beat it out of him.
He would. It’s what Richard would do for him. It’s only fair.
“How long?” Damian asks.
“What?” says Father.
Damian can’t believe he has to spell this out. “For how long has Richard been dead?”
“Damian - ” Father says.
“Don’t ‘Damian’ me, just answer the question!”
Father sighs. “He died only a month or two after you did, Damian.”
Of course. Of course he did. It was too much to ask for it to be somewhat recent, wasn’t it? Some situation where it might be possible for Damian to use the same technology his grandfather had used to cheat death for hundreds of years, but for good . For his brother.
“Why didn’t you bring him back?” Damian asks.
“We wanted to, Damian,” Pennyworth says, and the formality of the situation must have dropped in his eyes because he almost never addresses anyone in the house without “Master” or “Miss”. “If there was a way - ”
“There was a way,” Damian says. “There was a way for me, there’s got to be a way for him!”
Father rubs his face. Damian knows that look. He thinks he has to explain something obvious as if Damian were a child. Damian hates it. Yes, it’s normal for children to learn about the permanence of death early on - but it has never been permanent for his family, and Father clearly disbelieved in its permanence anyway - otherwise, he wouldn’t have tried to bring him back.
“Damian, the situation that lead to your… being with us here today - ”
Damian scoffs at the euphemism. Earlier, he’d want to avoid the word dead , in that he used to be dead . It was too… painful, though he hates to admit so. Now, he hates the idea of talking around it. He wants Father to be forced to admit he brought back Damian but not Richard.
“It was fairly unique. We couldn’t duplicate it, even if we tried.”
Damian sniffs. “Why not?”
“Well, for one, Dick wasn’t grown on Al Ghul island using the energy of a discarded chaos shard.”
Damian clicks his tongue against his teeth again. “It’s not as if Lazarus Pits don’t exist.”
“None that we have access to.”
“You could have tried!”
“Damian,” Pennyworth says. He finishes crossing the space between them in the hallway, standing next to Father now. “We did try. When you first died, your father nearly went mad trying to find the secret to keeping a conscious after death. He alienated almost everyone he knew. Should he have done it again?”
“Yes,” Damian says, a twist of bitterness slipping into his voice.
Father attempts to grab Damian’s shoulder again in a comforting motion, and Damian shrugs it off. He’s still unwilling to face either of them fully. He just wants Father to explain why it’s different. Why is he acting like the laws of nature apply to Richard but not to him? And -
“It’s not fair,” Damian says aloud, cringing as his voice breaks.
“I know,” Father says. Father bends down and picks him up, and Damian doesn’t stop him from doing it this time. He doesn’t let himself cry more, but he doesn’t shake Father off. He’s just - trapped.
“If I were there,” Damian says, “If I were there, I could have protected him. Like I did when we fought Heretic.”
At the mention of Heretic, Father’s arms tighten around Damian.
I’d do it again , Damian thinks, he would’ve laid down his life to protect his brother, but he doesn’t say so out loud because he doesn’t want Father to think he’s suicidal . He’s not. He just wishes he could do something .
Father sets Damian down and grabs his face between his hands. “Damian, we’ll get through this.”
Damian wriggles out of Father’s grasp. “‘We’ can’t get through this, because we’re minus one.”
“You’ve been minus one before,” Father says. “When you first started living with us, I wasn’t here.”
“Well, you’re here now,” Damian says. Another reminder of the unfairness of the situation.
Father is silent.
“It’d almost be easier,” Pennyworth says, “If we didn’t live in a world of gods and monsters, where almost anything is possible. We wouldn’t have to wonder if there’s something we should be doing to bring them back.”
Damian stomps off upstairs. He’s not interested in being comforted or told he needs to deal with the situation emotionally. He’s only interested in getting results, and barring that, being left alone.
Instead of going to his room, like he usually does, he goes to Richard’s. The door is still unlocked, as if he trusted everyone to not mess with his stuff. Though, he supposes, Richard hasn’t lived here in years. When they were working together, they lived in the penthouse or batbunker. It must have been too painful to be in the manor, where he would've been reminded of Father at every turn.
Damian had expected the room to be sparse, if only because Richard had already moved what he cared about to his newer places. But it’s packed with junk. There’s a pinball machine in the corner, which Damian had never even known he’d played. There’s a bunch of pillows on the bed and some giant stuffed animal that looks like it was won in a fair. Some movie posters for movies Damian doesn’t recognize, despite Richard’s best attempts to indoctrinate him with modern popular culture. But for the most part, there’s not anything recognizable here. This room belonged to a high school student, not the man who was almost a father to Damian.
Damian walks back to his room.
He just wishes he could ask him, you know? Ask him if he’d want to be brought back, what he’d want Damian to do. Damian hadn’t asked how he died, because he already knows that Richard wouldn’t want him to get revenge on his killers, and if he knew who did it, he can’t promise he won’t kill them. He knows Richard doesn’t want him to, because, in a moment of weakness, he had confessed that he had killed one person and been culpable in another’s death, and he counted each as the worst moments of his life. It didn’t matter that the man he killed - the Joker - was awful and worthy of a far worse fate, or that he had been resuscitated pretty much instantly afterward. It didn’t matter that the person whose death he was party in - Blockbuster - had killed scores of innocent people. Each death gnawed at his brain in a way that the death of an abhorable enemy never could for Damian. In his own moment of weakness, Damian had asked Richard if that meant that there was something wrong with him. If he was fundamentally broken in some way. Richard had hugged him and told him no, there was nothing wrong with him, he was just proud that he was trying. There was something about the man that was just comforting, that made Damian feel like he didn’t have to be perfect , he could just be him . And now he’s gone.
Damian starts taking out his paints.
It’s what he does, when he has too many emotions whirling around his brain and making him addled and confused. It was his only respite during the Year of Blood and the only outlet for his rage when Father was trying to get him to use less force in battle. He doesn't want it to be an outlet for something bad, though. He wants to create something good .
He’s alone in his room, so he doesn’t care that tears are streaming down his face. He doesn’t have to look strong. The luxury of isolation, he thinks bitterly.
He starts picking out his color palette. He chooses a bright one, hopeful, and starts painting the bottom of a net, remembering what Richard had told him - that you become Robin to save people - to catch them, because it’s the right thing to do. Damian just wished that there had been someone to catch his brother.