Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Damian had grown up in darkness, surrounded by enemies. From the moment of his birth, he knew that weakness would not be forgiven, and that a single false step could mean death at the hands of people who would forget he had ever existed in the time it took his corpse to grow cold.

Walking into a frat house was unsettlingly similar.

He minutely adjusted the popped collar of his polo shirt as he threaded through the sweaty, gyrating, offensively loud undergraduates packed into the narrow townhouse. Weak beer sloshed in red Solo cups all around him, but he wasn’t here for underage drinking—or even the cologne of the puka shell-necklaced guy manning the kegs, which had to be violating some kind of air pollution regulations.

No, Damian was here for drugs.

Specifically, Mxyzpills, the candy-colored new party drug that was flooding the clubs back home in Gotham. The lucky idiots who took it got nothing worse than pleasurable hallucinations that lingered for months—the infamous “ninety-day high.” Having been drugged against his will by a number of supervillains, Damian wasn’t sure why hallucinating for ninety days was apparently a selling point, but he also didn’t see the appeal of violently contorting one’s body to synthesized music either, so it wasn’t like Mxyzpills made the club scene make any less sense to him.

The unlucky idiots got unpleasant hallucinations, or seizures, or simply dropped dead.

Damian would not permit that to continue.

He’d traced the supply of pills to Metropolis—specifically, to Metropolis University—but that was as far as informants and computer hacking had been able to take him. He’d needed boots on the ground to figure out who was actually manufacturing and distributing Mxyzpills. And though he’d received several accelerated degrees in the past few years from better institutions than this, at twenty-two he could still easily pose as a Met U undergrad.

Thus the frat party, where he might pick up chatter about sources for Mxyzpills, or better yet, catch a supplier mid-deal. And where he was unlikely to run into...well. He could stay focused, here.

“My dude!” Puka Shell bellowed, and Damian hid his wince behind a deadpan expression. It was loud in here, but not loud enough to require that kind of braying. “Want a brewski?”

Damian didn’t sneer, because he was very good at what he did. “Yes, thank you,” he said, and accepted a slightly sticky Solo cup, the contents of which he had no intention of imbibing. “You don’t have anything...stronger, do you?”

Puka Shell grinned. “Gotta be a brother to score the hard liquor, dude. Or a hot chick.”

Charming. “No, I mean stronger than that. Say...ninety days’ worth of strength?” Damian said, and mimed popping a pill.

Puka Shell gave him the blank look he surely used for childproof aspirin bottles and words of more than two syllables. “Viagra?”

“Never mind,” Damian said, and walked away.

He pretended to take occasional sips from the cup in his hand, his eyes scanning the crowd for discreet exchanges or obviously drug-induced behavior. Sadly, as befitted this milquetoast city, the students around him just seemed to be drunk.

Except—his gaze caught on a couple, male and female, lingering by the stairs. Some enterprising fraternity brother had stretched a leather belt across the bottom of the staircase, a clear indication that the upper levels of the house were off-limits, but as Damian watched, the guy murmured something in the girl’s ear and flashed a tiny plastic bag before hopping over the barrier.

A tiny plastic bag with something brightly colored in it.

The girl scrambled after him and Damian found himself following, pouring his unwanted beer into a lacrosse trophy cup as he went. He wasn’t naive—they could simply be sneaking upstairs to paw at each other. But those had looked like Mxyzpills, and it was the first lead he’d gotten in this pit. He had to follow it.

He gave the couple time to disappear up the stairs, then followed. Since there were insufficient shadows to slip into, he simply didn’t allow himself to look furtive, jumping over the belt and walking up the stairs as if he had every right to do so.

At the top of the stairs he found himself faced with a conundrum. There were six doors, all closed, and the stairs continued up to a third floor. Had the couple he was following gone farther upstairs, or had they gone into one of the rooms? And if so, which one?

He pressed his ear to the closest door, but it was no use with the music blaring from downstairs. An entire drug manufacturing warehouse could be on the other side of the door and he wouldn’t be able to hear it.

Someone with super hearing and X-ray vision would be extremely useful right now, he thought begrudgingly.

And then a door at the opposite end of the hall opened and Jon Kent stepped out.

His violet eyes widened at the sight of Damian. “Damian? What are you doing h--”

Damian darted across the hall and clamped a hand over Jon’s mouth. His momentum carried them into the room Jon had just vacated, and he kicked the door shut behind him and then turned and locked it for good measure.

“Okay, wow, hi,” Jon said.

“What are you doing here?” Damian hissed.

“Well, I was using the bathroom,” Jon said. “Don’t worry, I washed my hands.”

Damian looked around and saw that they were indeed in a bathroom, with a counter overflowing with various cans of body spray and hair gel and, incongruously, a little knit hat on the extra toilet paper roll. “No, I mean what are you doing here, at this party.” Greek life was hardly Jon’s style, which was why Damian hadn’t been concerned about...well, this.

Jon raised an eyebrow. “I...go here? Which you do not. You don’t even live in this city. What are you doing here?”

Damian rolled his eyes. “I’m undercover, obviously.”

“Obviously?”

“Please. I would never wear a shirt with this low of a thread count by choice.”

“Of course, silly me,” Jon said. “Why are you undercover? And why didn’t you call me, your best friend, who attends this university and also has superpowers?”

“Well, clearly it couldn’t be because of your ability to maintain a secret identity,” Damian hissed, even though if he couldn’t hear a conversation through a door, none of the inebriated dolts downstairs could either. That didn’t mean they had to be careless. “For your sake, I hope no one heard you hollering my name out there. I’m Wayne Grayson here.”

A delighted look spread across Jon’s face. “Wayne Grayson? Oh my god. I’m texting Kon right now.”

He actually reached for his pocket and Damian swatted at his hand. “Do not. That clone is the biggest gossip in the spandex set.”

“Technically he just wears jeans…”

“Jon.” Damian made himself ignore the headache forming behind his right eye. “I am trying to trace the sale of a new drug that has killed twenty-seven people in Gotham nightclubs in the past month. I traced it back to Metropolis University. I am attempting to immerse myself in the ‘party culture’ here to pick up some leads. I do not have time to argue semantics with you in a bathroom!”

Jon gave him an appraising look. “Uh, well, you’re not going to immerse yourself in anything with your shirt tucked in for dear life like that. You look like a youth pastor.”

Damian knew Jon well enough to fling his hands up at that, but Jon was bigger and faster than him and he was already aware that his efforts were futile. Damian had a split second of being enveloped by enormous arms and a very warm chest and a fresh-air scent incongruous in the mildewy frat house bathroom, and then Jon was stepping back with a grin on his face and Damian’s shirt tails were hanging out, wrinkled and ridiculous.

“Well. That’s a little better,” Jon said.

“Oh my god, you’re the worst,” Damian said. “Go away and let me work.”

He unlocked the door with one hand and attempted to jam his shirt back into his pants with the other. “About time,” a voice said as Damian yanked the door open. “I’m about to piss all over the—Jon?”

Damian frozen, hand still half in his pants, very conscious of Jon looming behind him and Jon’s historical complete absence of a poker face. Puka Shell from downstairs stood there staring at them. His eyes flickered from Damian, to Jon, to Damian’s futile attempts to restore his dishevelment. Absurdly, Damian felt his cheeks growing hot.

“Oh, hey, Chazz,” Jon said weakly.

Puka Shell—Chazz, apparently, not that that was better—scrutinized Damian’s face as carefully as someone that drunk could, and Damian took a moment to regret all the tabloids he’d been unable to escape appearing in as Bruce Wayne’s son. Then Chazz’s eyes widened.

“Oh, dude, is this your boyfriend?” he asked Jon. “That Damian guy, right? From the pictures in your room!”

Damian blinked. “What?”

“I,” Jon said. “Uh. This. I. No? This is, um, I don’t know him.” He apparently realized that they’d just come out of the bathroom together before Damian had to remind him by kicking him in the shins. “I mean! This is Gray—uh, Wayne—”

Damian made an executive decision. “Damian Wayne,” he said smoothly, reaching back and grabbing Jon’s hand with his left and offering his right to Chazz to shake. “Sorry, Jon might have had a couple too many.”

“Wow, really?” Chazz said. “Dude’s tolerance is usually crazy high. You are the boyfriend, right? He talks about you all the time.”

Jon made a strangled sound. Damian squeezed his hand in warning and smiled. “Guilty.” He had no idea why Chazz had leapt to that assumption—well, aside from their unfortunate exit from the bathroom—but he and Jon could figure that out later, when Damian wasn’t deep in enemy territory. “And actually, I was just about to take him home to sleep it off.”

“Whoa,” Jon said, finally catching on enough to follow Damian’s lead and staggering into him cartoonishly. “I’m drunk,” he added helpfully.

“Yeah you are, dude,” Chazz said, chuckling. “Catch you in class on Tuesday?”

“You know it.” Jon offered Chazz a clumsy fist bump, then let Damian tow him down the stairs and out of the frat house, over-acting his alleged drunkenness all the way.

Once they were far enough away from the frat house, Damian dropped Jon’s hand and turned to scowl at him. “And you wonder why I didn’t call you? That was a disaster.”

“Wait, how is this my fault?” Jon asked, stopping in his tracks. “Why did you tell him who you were?”

“He recognized me! Why do you even have photos of me in your room?”

“It’s not, like, a shrine,” Jon protested. It was hard to tell with only streetlamps around, but he looked very red. “I have a bulletin board with pictures of family and friends and stuff. You know, like people do? I think there’s more photos of Krypto than you.”

“Krypto doesn’t have a secret identity to maintain,” Damian pointed out.

Jon rolled his eyes. “You’re a vigilante, not a cryptid. It’s not like I wrote ‘Look out, evildoers, he’s secretly Robin!’ over your head.”

“No, you just shouted it in the street.”

“There’s no one around. I’d hear them.”

“Well...why are you even friends with an idiot like that?” Damian asked. Close enough friends that they socialized in Jon’s room. Damian had eschewed dormitory life during his own university years, because please, but he was pretty sure that meant they were close. Very close.

“You spoke to him for thirty seconds and you’re already declaring him an idiot?”

Damian folded his arms. “I’m an excellent judge of character.”

For some reason, Jon laughed at that. “We’re in the same bio class and I helped him study for midterms. He’s the one who invited me to that party. It’s not really my scene.”

“I was...surprised to see you there,” Damian admitted.

An awkward silence fell. Jon looked up at the sky, then sighed. “So what do you want to do now?” he asked. “You blew your cover—”

“You blew my cover.”

“Your cover was blown,” Jon allowed, “but I’m assuming you’re not going to give up and go back to Gotham?”

It was clear from his tone that he already knew the answer. “People are dying,” Damian said, because he wouldn’t let himself forget. Not until he put a stop to it.

“Right. Come on,” Jon said, and started walking again.

“Wait, where are we going?”

“My room,” Jon said. “If you’re my boyfriend, you’d be staying with me, right?”

“I have a perfectly good hotel suite at the Metropolis Ritz…well, no, it’s a hovel, but…”

“Yeah, but if you came to Met U to see your boyfriend and not for any ulterior motives, you’d be staying with him. Otherwise it’s weird.”

“But—”

“It’s weird, D.”

Damian scowled. As much as he hated to admit it, Jon was usually a better judge of what the unwashed masses would find weird than he was. “Fine.”

“...Why did you say you were my boyfriend?”

Damian glanced up at Jon, who was looking straight ahead. “He had already assumed it. It explained why we were in the bathroom together. It’s always easier to let the mark fill in the gaps for themselves than over-explain yourself.”

“Sure,” Jon said. “Easier. You’re probably right.”

“I usually am.”

Jon looked over at him at that, a faint smile gracing his lips. He’d been significantly taller than Damian for so long that Damian was mostly used to it, but sometimes, like now, the difference between the boy he had been and the man he’d grown into gave Damian a feeling almost like vertigo. Maybe it was the moonlight.

“You’re lucky I like you so much,” Jon said. “Come on, Mr. Right, my dorm’s just up this way.”

Jon’s dorm was a less-shabby-than-expected building with insufficiently defensible entrances and a girl in a Met U hoodie falling asleep behind the front desk. She did rouse herself enough to greet Jon by name with a degree of friendliness that made Damian uncomfortable, and gawk obviously at Damian with a degree of curiosity that made him even more uncomfortable, though she didn’t require him to sign in.

“What are you going to tell your roommate?” Damian asked as they rode the elevator up to Jon’s floor.

“I don’t have one,” Jon said. “I sort of...sleep hover sometimes? Plus I need to use my heat vision to shave. It would just be too complicated. Perry knows some people on the board, Mom got him to pull some strings and get me a single.” He winced. “I guess that’s probably unethical.”

Damian shrugged. “There are nine buildings at Gotham University named after my family. They offered me the president’s parking spot on my first day.”

Jon’s door had a dry erase board on it with messages in at least seven different handwritings, which Damian frowned at as Jon unlocked the door and held it open for him.

His frown remained once he stepped inside. The room was small, with a single bed, and a desk and dresser occupying most of the remaining floor space. Sleeping arrangements were clearly going to be an issue, but first Damian wanted to see just how badly Jon’s sentimentality had exposed him to the world.

He stepped over to the bulletin board that hung over the bed. Sure enough, there were five photos of Krypto, two with Jon in them and three without; one of Jon and his parents from his high school graduation; one clearly taken in Smallville, with Jon, his parents, the elder Kents, the clone, and Supergirl—all in civilian clothes, of course—all grinning on the porch of the farmhouse. One of Lian, Jai, and Iris, also in civilian clothes. Two photos of Jon with friends Damian didn’t know, which made him scowl.

And three of Jon and Damian. One must have been taken soon after they met, because they were big-eyed and round-cheeked, Jon with his arm slung around Damian’s shoulders and Damian rolling his eyes. The second was from Damian’s high school graduation, with Jon already towering over him at fifteen and beaming like Damian had done something more impressive than tolerate his moronic classmates for four years in a row.

Damian had never seen the third before—he wasn’t sure he’d even known it was being taken at the time. It was from two years ago. Lian had talked him into a Titans beach outing, made easier by the fact that the Justice League transporters connected to Hawaii, and she was probably the person who had taken the picture. He and Jon were wearing swim trunks and sitting on a towel and neither of them was looking at the camera. Jon was laughing so hard his eyes were closed, and Damian was looking at Jon and smiling.

“That was a good day,” Jon said, so close behind him that Damian jumped.

“I still think you’re giving me away,” Damian said, still looking at that last photo.

“None of these photos are in costume,” Jon said.

That wasn’t entirely what Damian had meant, but he wasn’t sure how to explain it, so he let it go. He also wasn’t particularly thrilled that the placement of the bulletin board meant that the unpleasantly aromatic Chazz had probably been sitting on the bed if he’d gotten that good of a look, but he didn’t feel like bringing that up either.

“If I were your classmate, I’d be more curious about your apparently immortal dog,” Damian said instead, pointing to the photo of Krypto gazing adoringly at a swaddled infant Jon.

“I do get questions about that, yeah.” Jon held out a faded Smallville High t-shirt that had probably belonged to either his father or the clone at some point. “To sleep in. I’ll take the floor.”

Damian scoffed. “You? You’re too delicate for the floor.”

“I’m literally invulnerable,” Jon pointed out.

“You were literally tucked in by your parents every night until you started here,” Damian retorted. “I’ve slept in caves, on windswept mountain peaks, in my own grave—”

“Oh my god, you win, take the floor.” Jon threw the t-shirt at Damian’s face.

Jon insisted on giving Damian one of his pillows and his blanket, since he claimed he didn’t really feel the cold anyway. Damian folded himself into the blanket to put some padding between himself and the floor, and stared at the ceiling until Jon turned out the light.

“All this isn’t going to screw up your mission, is it?” Jon asked out of the darkness. “The drugs, I mean.

“Of course not,” Damian said. “I always have a backup plan.”

“Oh. Good. Um...night,” Jon said, and Damian heard him roll over.

Damian didn’t sigh, because Jon had super hearing. He hadn’t lied. He did always have a backup plan.

He just had to figure out what this one was.

Chapter Text

Damian walked into the student center and came to an abrupt halt.

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not. Unacceptable.”

Jon shrugged. “Hey, you wanted coffee.” He gestured to the small Sundollars kiosk in the student center lobby. “This is coffee. Unless you’d prefer the dining hall.” Damian shuddered, and Jon couldn’t help laughing. “Sorry, we don’t all have butlers to bring us breakfast in bed.”

“He doesn’t bring me breakfast in bed. He brings me breakfast after my morning training session,” Damian said, because he was a pedant with no sense of perspective. He glared at the kiosk. “There’s a line. Murder them all with your heat vision.”

“Aren’t you the morning person?” Jon asked. “Come on, grouchy, let’s get you some caffeine.”

He towed a sullen Damian over to the Sundollars. Despite Damian’s complaints, the student center was mostly empty—it was Saturday, and early at that, so the only people awake were a handful of athletes who had already finished their workouts and had lined up for smoothies. The line was pretty short.

It was, however, long enough for Jon to contemplate—again—just how screwed he was.

Maybe his mom had been right when she’d told him not to go to frat parties. Certainly if he’d turned down Chazz’s invitation last night he probably wouldn’t be stuck pretending to date his best friend...who was also not incidentally his first crush and the reason he’d figured out he liked boys in the first place.

It was fine, he told himself. It was all going to be fine. He wasn’t thirteen anymore. He’d long gotten past the period when being around Damian had made him go all hot-faced and tongue-tied and clumsy. It would be awkward, and then they’d catch the bad guys and drop the act, and eventually they’d laugh about it. Well, Jon would laugh about it and Damian would smirk and make that little self-satisfied noise that was his version of a laugh, and it would be fine.

Probably.

Luckily, before Jon could work himself up to a proper panic, it was their turn to order. “Good morning, My,” he said to the girl at the register.

“Hot chocolate?” she asked, smiling.

“You know me so well.” Caffeine didn’t affect him anyway, so why not drink something that actually tasted good?

Damian glowered at them suspiciously, demanded a large coffee with a shot of espresso in it, and elbowed Jon aside to pay for both drinks and a couple of breakfast sandwiches with a matte black credit card that looked more like something he’d throw at the Joker than any kind of legal tender. Once they were seated at the most isolated table in the coffee shop, he took the lid off his coffee, sniffed it, and made a face. “Do you know everyone here?”

“She was in my Philosophy for Poets seminar last semester.”

“Oh my god.” Damian closed his eyes. “Do me a favor and don’t strike up any conversations with your seven hundred best friends while I try to choke down this swill.”

He settled into some kind of intense meditative communion with his coffee. Jon sipped his hot chocolate and tried to look at anything but the fan of Damian’s dark lashes against his cheeks, and the little line between his eyebrows, and the way his throat moved when he swallowed. He failed pretty spectacularly.

He’d been about twelve when he’d first noticed it, maybe thirteen. He’d only known Damian for a couple of years, then, but it felt like they had been friends forever. And Damian had always just been Damian—cranky, defensive, an inch shorter than Jon and furious about it. Breathtakingly competent and ferociously loyal.

It was sort of like the day Jon’s telescopic vision had kicked in. He’d been at his grandparents’, looking out across the fields—and suddenly he could see the Lang fields, and the ones beyond that, and people walking down the street in Wichita, two hundred miles away. One long moment of staring at this new world and he couldn’t imagine how he could have ever seen things so differently, so much smaller.

He felt like that the day he looked at Damian and realized suddenly that he was beautiful.

How had he not seen how startlingly green Damian’s eyes were? How had he not understood that no one moved with Damian’s deadly grace, not even the rest of the Batfamily? How had he been too stupid to grasp that Damian’s upper lip was the most fascinating upper lip that had ever graced a mouth, human or Kryptonian or anywhere else in the stars?

It had made things kinda awkward for a while.

Jon had never said anything, of course. First because he was only twelve and barely understood what this new awareness meant—and once he did figure it out, he was still three years younger than Damian and totally overwhelmed by the concept of dating anyone, let alone telling his best friend in the world that he liked him. Even when he got more comfortable with the idea of dating, the idea of confessing—and possibly losing Damian—was terrifying. Eventually he got used to having a crush on Damian, and somehow getting used to it made it lose its immediacy. It didn’t go away, exactly. It just calmed down until it didn’t matter anymore.

The problem was, while he could switch off his telescopic vision to focus on what was right in front of him, he’d never been able to turn off his awareness of how beautiful Damian was. And it was even harder with Damian sitting in front of him in last night’s clothes, looking rumpled and tired and all...fake-boyfriend-y.

This was going to be a long weekend.

Damian put down his mostly empty coffee cup and opened his eyes. Yep, still unfairly, unreasonably green. “I assume this clown college has a chemistry department?”

Jon probably shouldn’t find Damian more endearing the ruder he got, but, well, here he was. “Oh, sure. They gave me an A in balloon animals last year.”

Damian lowered his voice. “If the pills are being manufactured on campus, it’s probably there. That’s our next step,” he pointed out. “Unless you can think of somewhere else that has the requisite equipment.”

“No, that makes sense,” Jon conceded. “But why would whoever it is be making the pills in the middle of the day?”

“I don’t think they’ll be there, but there has to be something we can trace, and if there is, I’ll find it,” Damian said. “After all, I am the world’s greatest detective.”

Jon looked at him.

“...’s son,” Damian concluded, scowling.

“There it is.”

“Shut up.”

They ate their breakfast sandwiches despite Damian’s protests, and then made a quick stop at his hotel room for a change of clothes. He had called it a hovel, but his suite was larger than Jon’s parents’ apartment in downtown Metropolis. Jon flopped onto a bed the size of a football field and watched Damian flick through his clothing options. He’d said he didn’t expect the case to take long to crack, but he’d still packed about twenty identical black shirts, because of course he had, and he’d actually unpacked his suitcase and hung them up, because of course he had.

Damian sniffed the collar of the shirt he was wearing. “Ugh. I stink of hazing and poor test scores.”

“You smell normal,” Jon said. Actually, Damian smelled a little bit like the fabric softener Jon’s mom had made him take to school with him, and it was getting to Jon more than he wanted to admit.

“Heaven forbid.” Damian shucked his shirt off and dropped it on the ground like it had personally offended him.

Jon looked quickly up at the ceiling, face flaming. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen Damian shirtless before—he had a photo of Damian in a bathing suit hanging in his dorm room, for Pete’s sake—but here in Damian’s temporary bedroom, as Damian’s temporary boyfriend, it felt a little too intimate.

Maybe he shouldn’t have lain down on Damian’s bed.

“So who do you think it is?” he asked, desperate to think about anything but Damian’s lean torso and truly ridiculous abs. “Making the pills, I mean. One of my dad’s rogues?”

“You would know better than I would. God, I need to shave, I look like Crush’s father.” That could not possibly be further from the truth, but Jon let it go and kept his eyes on the ceiling as he listened to Damian walk into the bathroom and turn on an electric razor. “What does your father think? I assume you’ve been texting each other positive affirmations when I’m not looking.”

“He’s off-planet,” Jon said. “Hawkgirl invited him to Thanagar for some big holiday festival—apparently it’s a huge honor. And Kon and Kara are at a Crucible Academy reunion way the hell out in nowhere. I’m the only Kryptonian on Earth right now. They even took Krypto to Crucible with them.”

“You said you were texting the clone last night.”

“Yeah, well, you know the first thing he’s going to do when he gets back in Earth atmosphere is check his phone. But that won’t be for like a week, and Dad’ll be gone for at least another three days.” Jon couldn’t help smiling. “I’m in charge of Metropolis right now. I mean, not in charge in charge, we have a mayor and a city council and stuff, but of protecting it.”

The razor shut off. “Well,” Damian said dryly. “It’s a good thing I”m here.”

Jon turned to glare at him. “Listen, Boy Wonder, I am perfectly capable of…”

Damian emerged from the bathroom, rubbing at his newly smooth chin. He was now also not wearing pants, just silky black boxer shorts like the ones he had slept in. Jon forgot what he had been about to say, and also everything he had ever said previously.

“Yes, I can see that,” Damian said. He turned back to the closet.

This time, Jon failed to look away from the muscles shifting beneath Damian’s tan skin, the perfect lines of his shoulders. There was a long, pale scar running the graceful length of Damian’s back, where Jon knew Damian had had his entire spine replaced, long before they’d met. Damian had a lot of scars, of course, and Jon loved and hated them in equal measure. They reminded him of how fragile Damian was, which was easy to forget—but they also meant Damian was still here.

“Earth to Jon. Come in, corncob,” Damian said, glancing over his shoulder.

Jon blinked. “What?”

“I said, do you think it’s Mxyzpick...Mxyl...ugh.” Damian scowled. “You know. With the hat.”

“Mxyzptlk?”

“Yes. Given the name of the drug in question.”

“I hope not,” Jon said, suppressing a shudder. “I had a bad run-in with him as a kid. I don’t really remember it, but…” But he still had nightmares. “Besides, it’s not really his style. It’s not really any of our rogues’ style. I mean, Metallo? Mongul? Bizarro? They just hit stuff. Luthor and Brainiac are more subtle, but what would they get out of it?” He chewed his bottom lip, thinking. “The only rogue I can think of who’d want to screw with people just to screw with them is Darkseid, and this seems a little small scale for him.”

“Speaking of bad run-ins as a kid…” Damian muttered, and Jon winced. “Let’s assume it’s not Apokalips and go from there.”

Jon shrugged. “Honestly? Killing people with a hallucinogenic street drug feels more Gotham than Metropolis. Sorry.”

“No, you’re right, but all the obvious suspects back home are accounted for,” Damian said. He was now, blessedly, wearing pants and pulling on a shirt. “It might not be a costume at all. You don’t need a mask to be dangerous.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, D.”

Damian’s head emerged from the neck of his turtleneck. “What, you? You’re about as dangerous as a puppy learning to walk.”

Jon grinned. “Or I’m just lulling you into a false sense of security.”

Damian rolled his eyes. “Yes, that’s probably it.” He snapped his fingers, which was annoying, but Jon sat up anyway. “Come on. We’ve got a lab to break into.”

*

The Luthor Science Building, which for some reason was still called that despite Lex’s many stints in jail, turned out to be locked for the weekend.

Damian looked both ways, then leaned in close to Jon. “Break the lock!” he hissed.

Jon stared at him. Then he took his student ID out of his back pocket and swiped it against a nearby sensor. The door beeped and audibly unlocked.

“...Fine, yes, you could do that instead.”

“You like to make things difficult, don’t you?” Jon asked, pushing the door open. Damian rolled his eyes and walked past him.

As Jon had expected, the chemistry department was deserted. He led Damian past the lecture halls and faculty offices to the labs.

“I’ve isolated some of the active ingredients, though I haven’t been able to to identify all of them,” Damian said. “But there are things in those pills that have no business being in a university lab. I’ll look through the supplies for what doesn’t belong. You?” He pulled a tiny baggie out of his pocket and tossed it to Jon. It had two bright green-and-purple pills inside. “Give those a scan and see if any of what’s in there”—he pointed to the baggie—“is also in here.” He waved a finger around the lab to prove his point.

Jon sat in a convenient chair and squinted at the pills, focusing his vision until he could see their molecular structure. “You know, we’ll get into a lot of trouble if we get caught with these.”

“You might. I don’t even go here.”

Jon frowned. “That’s weird.”

“What? That I don’t attend a subpar university in a second-rate city?”

“How dare you defame the Big Apricot, and no.” Jon peered more closely at the pills. “I’m not as good at this as Kara, she’s the science nerd, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen this element before. I don’t think it’s terrestrial.”

“That must be the active ingredient!” Damian said, coming up behind him and leaning over his shoulder to peer at the baggie too, as if sheer proximity to Jon would grant him microscopic vision. “No wonder I was having trouble isolating it. This takes it out of the street crime realm, too. Normal drug dealers don’t have alien chemicals to play around with.”

“So we are looking at supercrime, then.” Jon blinked his eyes back to normal focus and turned to look at Damian.

...Who was closer than he thought, one warm hand resting on Jon’s shoulder, his profile inches from Jon’s face. He turned to look at Jon, maybe because of Jon’s own movement, and Jon’s Rao-given ears caught a tiny hitch in Damian’s breathing, echoingly loud in the empty lab. The soft sweep of his eyelashes stirring the air as he blinked; the moist click of his lips parting slightly. A human pulse getting steadily faster.

Damian pushed away and turned back to the storage cabinet. “Well? Put those weird purple eyes to work. Do you see whatever is in those pills anywhere else in here?”

Jon scanned the room, grateful for an excuse to look in every direction but Damian’s until his face stopped flaming. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t find any traces of the active ingredient in that lab, or the next.

On the third, though, he hit jackpot. “It’s everywhere,” he said, pointing, even though Damian couldn’t see it. “The counters, the sinks, the test tubes. This is where they manufacture it.”

Damian looked triumphant. “There’s no fingerprints anywhere in here. Cabinet handles, sink taps, nowhere.”

“Isn’t that a bad thing?”

“Not if we’re looking for a sign that someone was wearing gloves and covering up criminal actions.”

“Pretty sure you’re supposed to wear gloves in a lab.”

“Well, yes,” Damian conceded. “But then you take them off and open the cabinet where the trash can is.” He mimed the action without touching any surfaces. “And you turn the doorknob to leave. But there’s no prints in either of those places, either.”

Jon leaned against the lab counter and watched Damian plant bugs in every out-of-the-way corner of the room. “So what exactly was your original plan?”

“Hm?”

“Without me,” Jon said. “If you didn’t know where the lab was, couldn’t get into the building, and couldn’t see the chemical residue.”

“...I would have figured it out.”

Jon fought the urge to roll his eyes, even though Damian wasn’t looking, and wouldn’t have cared if he had been looking. “Right, but why bother? You have a best friend and teammate, with superpowers, who actually attends the school you’re trying to infiltrate or whatever. It wouldn’t have made more sense to send a text?”

Damian straightened up from the last bug. “I can handle a simple drug trafficking case on my own, Jon.”

“I know you can, but why not take an obvious shortcut when it’s right in front of you?” Jon fought to keep his voice light. He knew Damian liked to do everything the hard way—he’d said as much himself ten minutes ago—but the truth was, it hurt his feelings that Damian had either written Jon off as completely negligible, or had been going out of his way to avoid him.

“An obvious shortcut is usually a trap.”

Jon raised his eyebrows. “I don’t really see how that particular extension of the metaphor is relevant here.”

“Of course you don’t.” Damian opened the door. “We’re not going to catch anyone hanging around the crime scene. Let’s go.”

Jon followed him out. “Don’t think I didn’t catch you dodging the—”

Damian elbowed him in the ribs, hard.

“Oof!” Jon said, more from surprise than anything else, because it obviously didn’t hurt—and then was further surprised when Damian took his hand.

“I know I said I wanted a campus tour, but there must be something more interesting to look at than empty classrooms, beloved,” Damian said, and gave Jon a skin-crawlingly artificial smile.

Jon blinked, and then belatedly processed that Chazz from his bio class was walking towards them, looking confused. Chazz, who thought they were dating. Chazz, who was nice enough but always smelled like he’d just bathed in a bottle of Hatchet body spray, and it was definitely a problem that Jon had been too focused on his own wounded feelings to notice his approach before Damian did.

“I’m sorry I can’t deliver the ‘murder every hour on the hour’ thrills of Gotham, babe,” he said, and bit back a laugh when Damian broke character enough to wrinkle his nose at the endearment. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. “Oh, hey, Chazz.”

“Hey, Jon. What are you doing here?” Chazz asked.

“What are you doing here?” Damian retorted. Jon squeezed his hand—not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to indicate hey, D, it’s weird for you to interrogate your boyfriend’s casual acquaintances about their whereabouts after meeting them once.

“Looking for my notes?” Chazz said, giving Damian a justifiably weird look. “I think I left them here during class and I can’t blow this final. Hey, if you’re from Gotham, would you tell the farmboy here not to be afraid of Suicide Slum?”

“Okay, first of all, he’s technically from Gotham Heights, where the worst crime in the past year was someone wearing a polyester blend out in public…” Jon started.

“Tt,” said Damian.

“...and second, I’m not afraid of Suicide Slum. I’m just a terrible dancer.” Jon turned to Damian, who was looking more irritated than usual. “Chazz DJs at this club down there on the weekends and is always trying to get me to go.”

Chazz grinned. “All vaporwave tonight, Jonny Boy. It’s gonna be lit.”

Damian squeezed Jon’s hand back, hard enough that it would have hurt if Jon’s dad hadn’t been from outer space. “It sounds lit indeed, but I just remembered we have to go.”

“We do?” Jon asked.

“To the thing.” Damian’s green eyes widened meaningfully.

“Oh. Right! The thing!” Jon gave Chazz a sheepish look. “I forgot about the thing.”

“...Sure,” Chazz said. “I’ll see you around?”

Damian was already towing Jon down the hall. “You bet!” Jon called. “Good luck finding your notebook!”

Outside, Damian pulled Jon into a gap between school buildings. Jon had to admire Damian’s ability to find the closest thing to an alley on campus. “Okay, whoa, stop trying to fly me like a kite,” he said, and removed his hand from Damian’s with what he hoped was well-hidden reluctance. “What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with you?” Damian snapped. “You were letting a criminal flirt with you!”

“I...what?” Jon stared. “He wasn’t—I’m not—a criminal?”

“Kent.” Damian’s expression was withering. “Illegal drugs are being manufactured in that lab. He shows up with a flimsy excuse on a day there are no classes and no one around. And he’s a DJ at both campus parties and in the worst neighborhood in the city? The perfect distributor!”

Jon tried, but he couldn’t see Chazz in the role of criminal mastermind. “I dunno, D. I just don’t think he’s that smart. I mean, he needed my help to pass Bio 101.”

“Which is another point. If he’s so bad at one science class, why is he taking another one the very next semester?” Damian asked. “And he was trying to distract you with his wiles.”

“Chazz has wiles?”

“Please, it was so obvious!” Damian said, throwing his hands up. “Ooh, Jon, come to my club, listen to me play someone else’s music and tell me I’m talented, ooh, Jon, I put on my strongest mating pheromones for you.”

“Nah, he always smells like that.”

“He called you Jonny Boy!”

“That’s not flirting, that’s just what happens when you haven’t consumed any liquid that isn’t either beer or an energy drink in the past two years,” Jon said, and then grinned. “It’s not exactly beloved.”

Damian flushed, which was fascinating. “It sounds better in Arabic.”

“What is it in Arabic?”

“Habibi.”

He was right, it did sound better. So much better that Jon needed to tease him immediately because otherwise he’d just bask in it. “So you just went straight for the multilingual declaration of love instead, of, like, ‘honey?’”

“It was the first thing I thought of!” Damian protested. Jon wasn’t sure he’d ever seen him this obviously embarrassed. “It’s what my mother calls my father.”

Jon’s eyebrows went up. “Would that be before or after she tries to murder him?”

“Both. And during.”

“Well then, beloved, I am deeply flattered.”

“Don’t be,” Damian snapped, his normal baseline level of irritation suddenly spilling over into anger. “It’s a con, Jonny Boy, remember?”

Jon opened his mouth and then closed it again. He knew it was a con. He knew it was never going to be anything but a con. There was no reason Damian’s words should have hurt.

Weird how knowing all that didn’t change anything.

“Yeah,” he said, keeping his expression as neutral as possible. “So what now?”

Damian reached over and plucked at his shirt. “So I hope you own at least one article of clothing that isn’t plaid,” he said. “We’re going to a club.”

*

“I still think this is a waste of time,” Jon said as they approached the nightclub in Suicide Slum, Metropolis’s seediest district. Of course, Gotham made Metropolis’s seediest district look like a country club, but Damian would let them keep their illusions.

“We’re following one lead, and my bugs are recording and transmitting everything that happens in the lab, so that’s the other one covered,” Damian said. “You will just have to catch up with your a capella group or Ultimate Frisbee team or whatever it is tomorrow night.”

“I did have a student council meeting, actually.”

Damian rolled his eyes. “Of course you did.”

Being off campus was a relief. Everywhere they went on university grounds, Jon was greeted by at least a dozen people, all of whom gazed at him like he personally hoisted the sun into the sky every morning. It was extremely tiresome.

Damian, for his part, was doing his level best not to look at Jon too much. Partially it was because he knew he’d hurt Jon by snapping at him earlier, and he didn’t want to feel guilty about it, especially because he’d been right. Chazz was suspicious, and Jon wasn’t taking this case seriously, with his teasing and his smiles and his questions about why Damian hadn’t called him.

The other reason he wasn’t looking at Jon was. Well.

It turned out that Jon, unsurprisingly, didn’t have much in the way of clubbing clothes. Everything he owned looked like he’d just stumbled out of a particularly wholesome pickup softball game. Damian had gone through all of Jon’s clothes twice in increasing despair, considered lending him something, decided he didn’t want Jon bursting it open at the seams, and finally settled on a faded black t-shirt of Jon’s that had been washed too many times and didn’t really fit anymore.

He hadn’t noticed, maybe, how loose everything Jon habitually wore was—a camouflaging technique probably picked up from his father. And perhaps he hadn’t quite processed how much bigger than him Jon was now that he was fully grown. He’d been taller than Damian almost their whole lives despite the age difference, but now…

Now Jon was straining the shoulders and chest of an old t-shirt and turning significantly more heads than Damian was comfortable with, and Damian couldn’t deal with this when he had a mission to concentrate on.

“Chazz is a normal dude. Not everyone has a hidden agenda,” Jon said, still defending his precious Chazz. Damian ground his teeth.

“Nonsense. Of course they do,” he said.

“Look, I know your family’s...whatever, but you really can take some people at face value,” Jon insisted.

“Says the guy with the massive secret,” Damian scoffed.

Jon stopped short, and Damian turned to look at him before he caught himself. Jon never wore black, and it made his hair look darker, his skin more strawberries and cream. “W-what? What secret?” he asked.

Damian stared at him, then made a flying motion with his hand. “Whoosh,” he reminded Jon.

“Oh! Oh, that,” Jon said. “Yeah. But. I mean. Besides that.”

He was even pinker now, his unreal violet eyes bright in the lamplight. Damian lost the thread of the conversation in them. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“God, I don’t even know.” Jon raked his hand through his hair, somehow turning it into more of a mess than before. Damian itched to fix it. “Come on, let’s just get this over with.”

The line outside of the club was surprisingly long for a place that staffed Metropolis University’s prime idiot as their DJ, but that wasn’t a problem for a Wayne. Damian sauntered up to the front of the line, his hand around Jon’s wrist, ignoring the annoyed comments from the people waiting behind him.

“Damian Wayne,” he told the bouncer, and handed him his ID and a hundred dollar bill with the same bored expression he’d cultivated for the Gotham tabloids.

“The hottie Wayne heir? What’s he doing out of Gotham?” he heard a girl murmur behind him.

“And who’s the twunk he’s with?” her friend asked.

The bouncer appraised Damian’s ID. “Yeah, okay,” he said, but stopped them again when Damian tried to walk in, and jerked his thumb at Jon. “What about his ID?”

“It’s right here,” Damian said, and handed him another hundred. The bouncer waved them in.

“Why do I feel like you just bought me?” Jon whispered as they walked through the door. “And what’s a twunk?”

“I have no idea,” Damian said honestly, and turned his attention to the battlefield.

Metropolis clubs, it seemed, were as loud and neon and unpleasant as Gotham clubs, which was reassuring in a way. Damian wasn’t much for clubbing, but he’d certainly crashed into a fair number of them as Robin. There was the usual dance floor, the bar, the roped-off VIP section, horrible Chazz pressing buttons on a sound system with a look of dogged concentration on his face like someone had just asked him how to spell his own name.

“You better hope my mom doesn’t find out you took me to a club while I’m still underage,” Jon said.

“I’m not afraid of your mother,” Damian lied.

Jon put his hands in his back pockets, which somehow made his shoulders look even broader. “So now what do we do?”

“Get drinks. We’re too conspicuous like this,” Damian said.

“Uh, not to be a square, but aren’t we on a mission?” Jon said, but he followed Damian to the bar anyway. “Besides, my mom really will kill you.”

“Am I an amateur?” Damian asked. He waved another bill in the air to catch the bartender’s eye and draw her attention away from the mob pressing up against the bar. “Two club sodas.” At her raised eyebrow, he added: “We’re on a cleanse.”

From the look on Jon’s face, he was trying not to laugh. “Okay, that works,” he said, accepting his glass. “So now—”

A very pretty girl in an extremely low-cut top sidled up to him. “Hi,” she said, with the same moony expression all of Jon’s classmates gave him. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

“No,” Damian told her.

She barely spared him a glance. “I wasn’t talking to—”

“No,” Damian said.

“Excuse you, rude much?” she asked. “Worry about yourself.”

“Dami, don’t—” Jon started.

Damian put his arm around Jon’s waist, resting a possessive hand on his hip, and met the girl’s eyes. “No,” he said.

Her gaze flicked from his face to his hand and back, realization visibly dawning. “Right. Got it,” she said, hands up in surrender. “You didn’t have to be a dick about it, though.” She looked at Jon. “Good luck with this one,” she said, before turning and disappearing into the crowd.

Jon sighed, but didn’t move away from Damian. “You didn’t actually have to be a dick about it,” he said.

“We’re supposed to be dating, remember?” Damian pointed out. “Besides, she was too old for you.”

“She was like twenty-two.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re twenty-two.”

Damian removed his arm from Jon’s trim waist, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. “Right,” he said. “We’re wasting time. Do you see anyone with Mxyzpills?”

Jon got that distant look that meant he was using his X-ray vision. “...No,” he said after a moment, “but there’s a room in the back that’s lined with lead.”

Damian raised an eyebrow. “You get a lot of rooms like that in Metropolis?”

Jon’s eyes focused back on him. “No, but my family tends to be very interested in the ones that are.”

Something sparked low in Damian’s belly. This, this was what he was meant for—finding crime and stomping it out. And doing it with Jon was better than with anyone else. It always had been.

“I also find myself very interested in that room,” he said, feeling his mouth curve up even though he tried to fight it.

Jon grinned at him, wild and reckless. “Well, let’s go check it out then.”

They left their untouched drinks at the bar and pushed through the crowd, skirting the dance floor. Jon led the way since he knew where they were going, and for once Damian was content to follow, if only because Jon’s shoulders cut a path through the mob wide enough that Damian felt significantly less like he would have to spray himself down with disinfectant afterwards from all the involuntary rubbing a place like this involved.

God, these people were sheep. Every dancer had the same glazed, vacant expression on their face, and pushing through them felt less like moving through a crowd and more like plunging through some jellylike alien organism. Damian fought the urge to flick imaginary goop from his hands as they emerged from the dance floor.

The door to the restrooms was just behind the DJ’s booth. Chazz grinned and waved at them as they passed, and Damian groaned internally as Jon waved back. Couldn’t he stop being Metropolis’s favorite son long enough to be vaguely discreet?

It was marginally quieter on the other side of the door. There were clearly marked men’s and women’s rooms, both of which smelled atrocious, and a third door that said “Employees Only.”

Damian looked at Jon. Jon got his distant expression again, nodded, and pushed the third door open.

They found themselves in a long, dingy hallway. Jon pointed to the doors. “First one is an office,” he murmured. “Second one...looks like storage. Third is a break room. Fourth...that’s the lead one. But just because I can’t see through the door doesn’t mean I can’t break it down.”

Damian shook his head. “There’s no hiding that. I’ll pick the lock.”

He pulled his lockpicks from his pocket and crouched to examine the lock, but he’d barely started when Jon hissed, “Someone’s coming!”

Damnation. “Which of the other rooms is empty?” Damian asked.

“None of them!”

Which meant nowhere to hide, no way to explain what they were doing back here, and if they started a fight now they might never find out what was in the lead-lined room. The knob of the door they’d entered through started to turn—

Damian grabbed Jon. “Play along!” he hissed at Jon’s surprised expression, pushed him up against the wall, and slid his hands up under that overtaxed t-shirt, feeling the warm, flat stomach beneath it.

Then he kissed Jon, hard, just as the door flew open.

Chapter Text

Jon couldn’t move.

Damian Wayne was kissing him.

Damian Wayne was kissing him!

He knew they were on a mission, knew he was meant to respond in some way, but for a long moment he couldn’t get a single synapse to fire and tell him how.

You’re undercover, something in his brain finally reminded him. You just got caught. He’s giving you an alibi.

Kiss him back.

That Jon could do.

He pulled Damian closer and kissed him like he’d never get the chance again, which he wouldn’t. Damian’s lithe, strong body molded against Jon’s like it belonged there, except where Damian’s arms got in the way—and Jon wasn’t complaining about that, because Damian’s callused hands on his bare stomach were doing all kinds of nice things to him. He smelled incredible and his lips were softer than even Jon’s wildest imaginings and he kissed like it was a battlefield and he was determined to be the last one standing.

“What the hell are you two doing back here? This is staff only!” a voice shouted.

Damian pulled back and blinked dazedly at their interrupter, as if he was drunk. Jon certainly felt drunk, or at least what he imagined being drunk would be like if alcohol worked on him. “What?”

The club employee, a balding man with at least five gold chains hanging out of his open shirt front, waved his hands at them like he was swatting flies. “Break it up!” he said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Damian smirked. “Not enough,” he said, flicking a glance up at Jon through his lashes. Jon somehow managed not to burst into flames.

“Get out of here before I turn the hose on you,” the club employee said.

Damian raised an eyebrow at Jon, who belatedly realized that Damian couldn’t go anywhere until Jon let him go. Reluctantly, he released his fistfuls of Damian’s shirt. Damian came down off his toes—he’d been on his toes to kiss Jon, and Jon didn’t know why that made him feel fizzy and overwhelmed, but it did—and stepped back. His lips were kiss-swollen and he was as disheveled as Jon had ever seen him outside of a fight, and Jon kept his own mouth shut tight to keep himself from doing something embarrassing. Like proposing.

“Come on, beloved,” Damian said, and somehow the archaic endearment did more for Jon than anything normal people said possibly could have. Damian smoothed Jon’s shirt back down and took his hand. “We’ll find another establishment. One that appreciates our patronage.”

“Find a bedroom,” the club employee said as Damian towed Jon past him. Damian put his nose in the air, in full Tabloid Prince of Gotham mode, and stalked out.

He was true to his word, too, because he didn’t stop until they were outside and a block away from the club, where he suddenly dropped Jon’s wrist like it was on fire. Jon finally found his tongue.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Aren’t we going to try to get into that room?”

“They’re on alert now,” Damian said, smoothing down his shirt, his hair. He looked exactly like a cat grooming its ruffled fur. “We’re not going to get past them in our civilian identities tonight, and if Superboy and Robin break into that room, they might make connections we don’t want them to make.”

“So we just...give up?”

Damian frowned. Jon looked hastily away from Damian’s mouth.

“Of course not,” Damian said. “We let them forget the incident and strike when they least expect it. Besides, this isn’t our only lead. I still have those bugs in the lab.”

“Right,” Jon said. “So...we go home?”

To his bedroom. To lie in the dark and listen to Damian breathe two feet away from him.

“That sounds like a waste of a perfectly good night,” Damian said. “I brought my suit, and I know you still have some crime in this theme park city of yours.” He looked up at Jon, then quickly away. “Want to find some heads to knock together?”

Jon cracked his knuckles and breathed out some of the jittery energy that was making him want to circle the globe three or four times and yell. It was just a kiss. A fake kiss. They were still partners.

“Yeah,” he said. Stopping a getaway car or three might burn off some of this want. “Yeah. I could go for that.”

*

They were dragging Damian to the Pit.

He fought, but there were too many of them. League assassins, weighing him down, pinioning his wrists and ankles so that all he could do was writhe and swear.

His mother’s face loomed above him. “Stop fighting it, my darling boy,” she said. “Once you are reborn, you will finally be perfect.”

“The perfect vessel for me,” his grandfather said. “The Demon’s Head will rise again in young flesh, ready to raze that blight on the earth that you call a city to the ground!”

Damian struggled, to no avail. “My father will stop you,” he spat.

“Your father will have to slay your body to stop me,” Ra’s al Ghul said, and smiled. “What do you think that will do to him?”

Damian dug his heels into the ground and bit the hand closest to his face. A sharp blow made him let go.

“I would cooperate, if I were you,” Ra’s said. “If you are not my next vessel, he will be...and though he is not flesh and blood, in some ways he makes a much more appealing option.”

Damian followed his gaze, and horror settled cold and heavy at the pit of his stomach as he saw Jon, on his knees, in kryptonite chains. He was gagged, but his eyes were wide and terrified.

“No,” Damian said. “No! Jon! Don’t you touch him!”

“Damian!”

“I’ll kill you all, every last one of you! Let him go!”

“Damian!”

A hand was on Damian’s shoulder. Damian knocked it aside, grabbed the knife from under his pillow, and tackled his assailant—one hand tight on his enemy’s throat, the other ready to slide his blade between his enemy’s ribs.

Which was when he realized that he was crouched on top of Jon, on the floor of Jon’s dorm room, teeth bared an inch from Jon’s startled but not at all frightened face.

“Hey,” Jon said, very softly. “It’s okay. You were having a nightmare, but it’s okay. You’re here with me.”

With Jon. Damian pulled his hands back, horrified. “I—I almost...I could have killed you.”

Jon tilted his head. “Well, I mean. Not really.”

“I made a vow,” Damian said. He was shaking. “I promised Father I wouldn’t kill, I swore, and I almost did, and it was you…”

“Hey,” Jon said again, in the voice Damian had heard him use dealing with skittish livestock on his grandparents’ farm. “I’m fine, really. You didn’t go too far, and even if you had, accidentally, because you weren’t really awake…” He closed his hand around Damian’s right, the one with the knife, and gently poked the blade into his own side a few times. The knife bounced harmlessly off his invulnerable skin. “You can’t hurt me, and you wouldn’t if you could. I trust you, Dami.”

He smiled at Damian—not his usual blindingly bright one, but something smaller and softer and more private. Damian looked at that smile and suddenly remembered kissing those lips, the soft give of them, the sweetness. The way his embrace had effortlessly lifted Damian practically off the ground, and yet for all the strength of his arms there was no threat in them, no danger. Just a wall between Damian and the outside world, where he could stay forever if he wanted, safe and secure.

He blinked, and realized he was sitting essentially on top of Jon. Jon, who, it turned out, slept in only his boxers—and miles and miles of bare, perfect skin. Damian cleared his throat and backed off.

“Right,” he said. “Of course. Let go before you blunt my knife.”

“Oh! Right, sorry,” Jon said, and released Damian’s wrist.

“Thank you.” Damian climbed off of Jon, dropped the knife onto his pillow, and nodded politely. Gathering all his dignity around him like a cloak, he walked out of the dorm room and into the bathroom across the hall, wearing only his underwear and a borrowed t-shirt that smelled like Jon.

Then he locked himself in a stall, sat down on the closed toilet, and buried his face in his hands.

*

Damian’s bugs had recorded no activity in the lab. “I wouldn’t have expected otherwise,” he said, putting his phone away after a quick scan of the footage and audio tracks. “It’s a party drug. Saturday nights are for distribution, not production.”

“So when do you think they make it?” Jon asked, cutting into a stack of pancakes. They were sitting in a diner near campus, since Damian had flat-out refused to patronize a chain two mornings in a row. The diner wasn’t much better, but at least it was noisy and crowded enough that no one could listen in on them. “It’s just that we can’t go back to the club today, nothing will be happening on a Sunday, so we’re in a holding pattern on both leads. How long are you planning to stay?”

“Oh, well, if I’m inconveniencing you…” Damian sniffed.

“Hey, come on, you know it’s not that,” Jon said. “It’s just that I have class all week. But you know you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

But he didn’t meet Damian’s eyes when he said it, and he’d always been a terrible liar. He’d been shifty all morning, ever since Damian had come back from the bathroom, in control of himself once more. Maybe even since last night.

It was the kiss. Damian had let it go too far, he knew he had. He wasn’t sure what was wrong with him on this case. Ever since he’d come to Metropolis, it seemed, he’d been bungling obvious tasks. Becoming distracted. Becoming emotional. Last night had just been another in a long line of mistakes. And now Jon, who had always been so easy and so open, was uncomfortable around him.

He couldn’t even promise not to kiss Jon again. It had worked for the immediate purpose, and if the situation called for it, if he needed to allay suspicion to keep Jon safe or protect his secret identity, he’d do it. Even if the thought of it made his heart race like he’d just gone three rounds with Killer Croc.

But whether it was the kiss or just Jon wanting his bedroom floor back, it was patently clear that Damian had worn out his welcome. Which only stood to reason. Even invulnerable hosts didn’t want their houseguests attempting to stab them, and it wasn’t as if Jon didn’t have seemingly dozens of other people to associate with at school. People his own age, with common interests, who hadn’t been taught to kill from the cradle.

Boring people, in other words, but Jon seemed to like them.

And speaking of which… “We need to break into Puka Shell’s room,” Damian said, poking with disinterest at the congealed eggs on his plate.

Jon blinked. “Who?”

“Your boon companion. The odiferous one.”

“Oh, Chazz,” Jon said. “Are you still on that? Look, I’ve seen the guy’s test results. He’s hardly a criminal mastermind.”

“Tt. I know that,” Damian said. “He’s a flunky at best. But he’ll lead us to the center of operations.”

“He’s just a guy!”

“Who was at the party where I witnessed people using Mxyzpills, and the lab where we found evidence of their production, and a nightclub in Superman’s city with a hidden, lead-lined room,” Damian said, ticking the points off on his fingers. “Occam’s Razor, Jon.”

“We were also at all of those places,” Jon pointed out. “Engaging in highly suspicious and at one point illegal behavior. I’m pretty sure we’re not allowed to plant hidden cameras on university grounds.”

“I fail to see your point.”

“My point is that your evidence is circumstantial, and we’re two very good examples of how misleading that can be.”

Damian took a sip of weak, burnt coffee. “Well,” he said. “When Mxyzpills flood the country, I’m sure you’ll enjoy congratulating yourself on ignoring an obvious lead out of some misguided attempt at fairness.”

Jon looked irritated now, which made Damian perversely pleased. He’d been alternating between his usual sunny good cheer and pretending not to be uncomfortable, and both had chafed at Damian, for different reasons.

“Look,” Jon said. “I’ll grant you that he was in all three places, and that he would be a good distributor. But that doesn’t mean we go ahead and convict him. If he shows up doing something hinky on your surveillance feed, or we find proof that he’s involved in whatever’s happening at that club, then no, obviously we don’t ignore that. But I have to draw the line at invading his privacy when what we have right now is so flimsy. You do what you want in Gotham, but this is my city and my school, and we’re not doing that to my friend.”

Damian glowered at Jon. Blooded assassins had been known to quail in fear at his glare, but it hadn’t intimidated Jon when he was ten, and it wasn’t intimidating him now, judging by the way he reached across the table and stole a piece of veggie bacon off of Damian’s plate.

“Fine,” Damian said after a minute of watching Jon chew placidly. “I need to stop by my hotel after this. I’m meant to check in with Father on my progress.”

Jon raised an eyebrow. “That seems...unusually micromanage-y of him. You didn’t even have to do that when we were kids.”

Damian shrugged. “Perhaps he’s getting insecure in his dotage.” His father was not yet fifty, but his father also couldn’t hear this conversation. Probably. “It will be boring for you. I can meet you back on campus.”

Jon stared at him. Damian met his gaze steadily.

“All right,” Jon said finally. “I do have some reading to do for tomorrow. Should we meet up in a couple of hours?”

“That should be sufficient, yes.”

They finished their meal in silence. Damian paid before Jon could attempt it, and they went their separate ways.

The minute Jon was out of sight, Damian changed direction and headed for the frat house.

He had known Jon for a long time. His father had known Jon’s father for even longer. Damian wasn’t foolish enough to think he could overpower Kryptonian strength, or worse, the Kent family’s stubborn belief in the inherent goodness of their fellow people. Better, his father had always said, to let them think you agree, and then do exactly as you please.

Damian didn’t feel bad about it. He didn’t.

He didn’t bother to change to his Robin suit, since if he got caught, it would be easier to explain his presence away as a civilian. Not that he expected a gaggle of Alpha Phis or whatever they were to catch him.

It was laughably easy. He slipped in an open window on the third floor, found a cell phone in the next bedroom, bypassed the security, and scrolled through the text history until he found a group discussion called “Frat Chat.”

Then he sent a text: Dudes!!! Wet t-shirt party behind the journalism building!!! You gotta get over here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He ducked into a closet. Less than a minute later, there was a sudden upswell of noise from downstairs, like apes gathering themselves for war. Then a mass exodus from the house. Whoever’s phone it was he had used had clearly been told what was going on, because no one even came into the room he was hiding in.

Well. That would take care of any interruptions. Unhurriedly—it would take this brain trust a while to figure out what had gone wrong—Damian began to search the house.

Notebooks on the desk in his current room revealed that it belonged to someone named Raymond. The next two belonged to a Brad and a Brent respectively, which was all Damian cared to know about them.

The fourth door had a Post-It stuck to it that said “CHAZZ! GET YOUR GROSS SOCKS OUT OF THE KITCHEN SINK!” which put a bit of an end to this minor mystery, while raising further questions Damian didn’t wish to think about.

He searched for a feeling of triumph. He’d be done searching Chazz’s room in twenty minutes, ten if he didn’t bother to be careful. He’d find something incriminating and put an end to that particular illusion of Jon’s. They’d use Chazz to find the other players and end the sale of Mxyzpills for good.

He should feel pleased with himself. But all he felt was tired, and a little sad.

“Sorry, Jon,” he murmured, and opened the bedroom door.

Jon was standing on the other side, his arms crossed over his chest, looking absolutely furious.

Well, crap.

Chapter Text

Jon couldn’t believe it. Well, he could, because he’d known Damian a long time, but he didn’t want to believe it.

Damian didn’t even have the courtesy to look guilty. Just mildly annoyed.

“You really thought that would work, didn’t you?” Jon said.

Damian shrugged a shoulder. “It was worth a shot.”

“Unbelievable.” Jon jerked a thumb at the open window behind him, the one he’d flown in through. “Come on, we’re going.”

“We’re already here,” Damian said. “We might as well look.”

“I said we weren’t doing this, and I meant it,” Jon said.

“You might not be,” Damian said. “I don’t answer to you.”

“We’re going,” Jon snapped. “I will pick you up and carry you out if you don’t start moving on your own.”

“You can try,” Damian retorted, raising his chin. Which was just plain idiotic, because unlike some Bats Jon could name, Damian didn’t carry kryptonite on him, so there wasn’t anything Damian could do physically to stop him. And this was one of the rare times Jon wasn’t going to let his soft spot for Damian change his mind.

He didn’t feel like going through the motions of fighting to spare Damian’s pride, though, and he really didn’t feel like explaining to the brothers of Delta Delta Pi what the two of them were doing there when they returned. Before Damian could blink, Jon grabbed him and flew them both out of the house at super speed.

“Hey!” Damian snapped as Jon let him go. He looked around him and glared at Jon. “That’s cheating.”

Oh, no. Jon wasn’t going to get sidetracked by some stupid competitive game. “Here’s what gets me,” he said, his voice as level as he could make it. “You know about my sight. You know about my hearing. And you know I can tell when you’re lying to me. So it wasn’t that you were trying to do something behind my back. You just didn’t respect me enough to care whether I knew you were doing it or not.”

Damian’s mouth hung open. “Oh, that is just a...a complete misrepresentation of the situation!” he said.

“Yeah?” Jon folded his arms again, aware that he looked like his dad at his stodgiest but unable to stop himself. “Explain it to me, then.”

“You want to keep your hands clean, fine,” Damian said. “I’ll do the dirty work. I always have. But to make it all about you and respect and feelings is a little much.”

Jon just barely managed not to wince at the contemptuous way Damian’s lip curled when he said “feelings.” “I’m making it all about me? You’re the one who’s only thinking about himself here!”

“Excuse me?”

Jon had felt bad as soon as he said it, but he wasn’t going to take it back. Damian was one of the smartest people Jon had ever met and a literal detective. It was like breaking into Chazz’s room and expecting Jon to ignore it. If he didn’t know how Jon felt—if he didn’t know how hard it was for Jon, pretending to have the thing he wanted most in the world—it wasn’t because he couldn’t figure it out. It was because he didn’t care enough to try.

“You show up undercover at my school without even bothering to give me a heads-up,” he said, sidestepping the core issue, because, well, fine. He wasn’t brave enough. “You come up with this ridiculous act that makes me have to lie to people I’m going to have to live with for the next two years. You go after my friends, after I tell you not to. You do whatever you want and I guess it’s just too bad for anyone who gets Damian Wayne’s way, huh?”

“Oh, for…” Damian pinched the bridge of his nose as if Jon was being especially stupid, which didn’t do anything to cool Jon’s temper. “Is this about the stupid kiss? I apologize, all right? Is that what you want to hear? I only did it to maintain our cover, and I will certainly not make that mistake again!”

Jon felt his cheeks go hot with anger and humiliation. He told himself to ignore the latter. He knew Damian didn’t feel the same way. He’d always known. There was no reason Damian’s obvious disgust should leave him mortified and hurt.

Still, he felt sick.

“Don’t worry,” he said, because anger was better than anything else he was feeling right now. Anger would get him through this, at least until he could go lick his wounds in private. “It won’t come up. You’re a crappy boyfriend, and I’m dumping you.”

“You can’t dump me! We weren’t really dating!” Damian snapped, two spots of color blazing up in his cheeks, and oh, that was good. Getting Damian good and angry instead of cold and superior felt like getting a bit of his own back.

“Thank god for small favors,” Jon said. “I’ll handle the Mxyzpills case. I want you out of my city.”

Damian’s eyes went wide in outrage. “This is my case!”

“Not anymore,” Jon said. “You tracked the source to Metropolis? Fine, great, thanks. That makes it a Metropolis case. And I don’t want you around.”

It was the worst lie he had ever told Damian. But it was too late to take it back now.

For a minute he thought Damian would fly at him like he used to when they were kids, constantly scrapping whenever their tempers rubbed up against each other. He welcomed it. Damian couldn’t hurt him, and he would never hurt Damian no matter how angry he was, but this thing burning between them felt too big to have out with just words.

But then, as he watched, Damian put on the mask. The straight-backed posture. The distant, supercilious expression. The green eyes as cool and hard as chips of malachite. Jon’s angry, passionate best friend disappeared, and the heir to the Wayne fortune and the League of Assassins stood before him instead.

Jon hated that guy.

“Very well,” Damian said in a voice devoid of any emotion but disdain. “Thank you for your hospitality, such as it was. I will not be requiring your assistance any further.”

He turned to go, but Jon couldn’t—he just couldn’t—let Damian be the one to walk away first. The one to show he cared the least, even though they both knew he did. Jon took off, heedless of the fact that it was broad daylight and he was wearing civilian clothes. Superboy’s secret identity was the least of his concerns right now.

As he flew back towards his dorm, he refused to let himself look back. It was bad enough to know Damian was walking away from him. He didn’t have to see it, too.

*

Damian hated everything about this city.

It was artificial, and it pretended not to be corrupt instead of at least being honestly dishonest like Gotham was, and any city with a grid pattern that regular had to have been designed by a psychopath.

More to the point, despite only being fifty miles south of Gotham, it stayed light out in Metropolis seemingly forever, which meant Damian spent an interminable afternoon waiting around for the sun to go down so that he could wrap up this case and go home.

True, Jon had attempted to kick Damian off the case, but Damian barely took orders from his own father, let alone an overpowered dilettante who mistook naivete for integrity. That said, the less time he spent in Metropolis, the better. He didn’t need to find Jon frowning disapprovingly at him every time he turned a corner.

He’d called Damian selfish.

Damian had started investigating Mxyzpills to save lives. He’d lost the thread of that, a little bit, yes, but that just proved that he’d been right not to bring Jon in on the case as soon as he arrived in Metropolis. Jon was too distracting, as of late. He confused things that should have been simple.

Which didn’t matter anymore, because Jon didn’t want him around.

“Ugh,” Damian said out loud, glaring out the window of his hotel room at the sun as if he could force it to descend faster. Jon would get over it. He always did.

This had been worse than usual, though. This had been…

Damian had apologized, and he’d meant it. And Jon, with his big, open heart and insistence on seeing the good in everyone, hadn’t forgiven him.

Damian hadn’t thought he’d gotten it so wrong. He still wasn’t totally sure how he had.

Screw it. It was dark enough, or would be by the time he reached the nightclub, and being spotted by a random Metropolis pedestrian or two was better than sitting here with his thoughts any longer. Damian suited up and went out the window.

The Redbird was parked near the hotel, on a quiet side street with low foot traffic. Damian waited until there was no one in sight, then toggled off the stealth mode that made it look like an ordinary motorcycle, and headed for Suicide Slum.

The nightclub sat quiet and presumably empty, as its usual assortment of empty-headed partygoers gave themselves—and their livers—a day of rest. Damian didn’t expect to find anyone but maybe some janitorial staff, but if he could just get into the room Jon had found, he was sure to find something he could use.

There was a service entrance to the club, accessible via a side street. It was the work of a moment to bypass the security system, and another moment to physically pick the lock. Damian eased the door open and listened.

For the second time in three days he thought how convenient X-ray vision or super hearing would be, and then quickly banished the thought as soon as it arose. He was Damian Wayne, son of Batman. He didn’t need powers, and he didn’t need help.

He didn’t need anyone.

He slipped inside and hunched by the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the difference between a brightly lit Metropolis night and the windowless interior of a building with the lights off. There was no one in the hall, and no sounds from behind any of the doors.

Propping the service entrance door open to give him enough light to navigate by, he crept down the hall until he reached the door to the lead-lined room. A cautious test of the knob told him it was unlocked, which was either a lucky chance or an indication that he was walking into a trap.

Damian could be accused of a lot of things, but cowardice wasn’t one of them. He opened the door.

The lights were on. He stood blinking in the sudden glare.

“Well,” said a voice that Damian had never heard before, but was somehow eerily familiar, “you aren’t the superhero I was expecting.”

Damian sank into a defensive position, squinting into the light. There were a few figures in the room, but most of them seemed off, somehow, as if they weren’t human, as if they were…

He blinked again and they came into focus.

Parademons.

Crap.

There were six of them. Standing in their midst was a seemingly ordinary man in a white tunic and red cloak, with a shock of carroty hair and a wide, gleaming smile full of television news anchor-worthy teeth. A strange machine loomed behind them, clearly of otherworldly origins.

Let’s assume it’s not Apokalips and go from there. God, past Damian was an imbecile.

“You’re one of the Bat people, aren’t you?” the redheaded man asked. “Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction?”

Damian glowered at him. He’d never seen him in person, but he knew him.

“Glorious Godfrey,” he said.

The man smiled wider. “Ah, excellent. I see my fame precedes me.”

“I died once,” Damian said. “You stole my body.” He didn’t remember any of it, just the Heretic’s sword finding its mark and then waking up on the floor of the Cave in his father’s arms, but he’d heard the stories. He’d watched the footage. This so-called god had been a key player in the darkest moment of Damian’s life.

But he was not a child anymore, and he refused to be afraid.

“Oh, yes, now I remember,” Godfrey said, as if recalling a conversation at a long-ago cocktail party. “Your father was most unpleasant about it all.”

“He doesn’t particularly enjoy grave-robbing, spineless bootlickers. For that matter, neither do I,” Damian said, thinking frantically. Did he have anything in his utility belt that a parademon or New God would even blink at? He didn’t think so. Normally he would have suited up with heavier artillery to come to Metropolis, home of walking nuclear bombs and killer robots, but this was just supposed to be a drug trafficking case.

Jon could fight a New God. But a New God and six parademons?

“So you were behind the Mxyzpills?” he asked, edging back towards the door. “Why bother? I read you once nearly eradicated superheroes just by talking. I thought snatching dead children was a sad comedown, but this is even more pathetic.” As long as he kept Godfrey blathering, he still had time to think of a way out of this. And his odds were better in the narrow hallway, where they would have to come at him one at a time and the parademons wouldn’t have room to use their wings.

Godfrey didn’t seem at all provoked by Damian’s taunting. Instead, his expression turned reminiscent. “Ah, turning the humans against each other. That was a truly—dare I say it—glorious escapade. But yes, I created the Mxyzpills. So fun, giving them a name evoking someone else who enjoys bedeviling Superman, when actually the imp had nothing to do with them!”

“Oh, yeah. Great joke.”

“My endeavors had a dual purpose,” Godfrey went on. “First, sheer experimentation! Humans are such delightful little test subjects. Play them a little music, get them to writhe against each other a bit, and I have all the raw material I need to bewitch their senses.” He patted the machine behind him.

Damian blinked, remembering the oddly trance-like state of the crowd on the dance floor last night. “Wait. The club isn’t for distribution. It’s for...for harvesting?”

“Well, there’s some distribution, but yes, harvesting is an excellent word,” Godfrey said, like Damian was a precocious student who had just earned a gold star. Damian felt foolishly pleased for a moment before he forcibly shook off Godfrey’s influence. “Play them the right music, and I barely have to say a word. I mean, besides getting my lackeys to do what I need them to do, such as collect supplies from your Earth laboratories.”

“Chazz wasn’t an accomplice,” Damian realized. “He was a puppet.” That was why the active ingredient was all over the lab—because it was all over Chazz, and he’d been the one collecting the rest of the ingredients. Godfrey must’ve even made him wear gloves, to cover his tracks from anyone who couldn’t look on the molecular level.

“I don’t know what a ‘chazz’ is, but most things on this planet are puppets to me, so sure,” Godfrey said.

Damian took another step towards the door, and the parademons’ wings rustled warningly. Godfrey held up a placating hand, but his eyes were sharp. “You said there were two reasons,” Damian said. “What was the other?”

“Why, pleasing my master!” Godfrey said. “The great Darkseid is rather miffed with Superman. Not only does the Kryptonian repeatedly thwart his plans, but he has allied himself with my master’s rebellious sons, natural born and adopted both: the disloyal brat Orion and the fugitive Scott Free.”

“Yeah, I know them. Weird outfits,” Damian said. He didn’t like where this was going. “What’s your point?”

Godfrey’s smile somehow got even wider. “Superman has a son to lose, too.”

Something cold settled at the bottom of Damian’s stomach. He tried for a flippant response, but couldn’t make his tongue respond.

Godfrey, however, didn’t seem to need a partner to keep a conversation going. “I set up operations on your planet and bided my time, knowing that Superman would eventually journey elsewhere and leave his city under his son’s protection. When he did, I increased my activities. If he had not arrived by tomorrow, I would have lured him here. But you’ve saved me the trouble.”

“Yeah? How?” Damian said, getting ready to bolt.

The door slammed behind him. He turned to see Chazz, the bartender from last night, and the balding man who’d caught him and Jon kissing. They all had glazed expressions that told Damian they weren’t in their right minds.

“Because now you’re the bait,” Godfrey said.

Damian stepped sideways. If he couldn’t get the open door at his back, he’d take the wall over three mind-controlled civilians. “What makes you think Superboy will save me? We aren’t friends.”

The bitter part was that the second part wasn’t even a lie. Not that it mattered. He knew Jon. If he called for help, Jon would hear, and he’d come. Jon wouldn’t leave his worst enemy in danger, let alone a fellow superhero, even one he was no longer friends with.

And he’d fly straight into a trap. Even if Jon could take seven Apokaliptians, if Godfrey had come to Metropolis for Jon, he’d have planned for Kryptonian powers.

It didn’t matter what had happened between them. Damian would not allow this creature to get his hands on Jon.

“Please,” Godfrey scoffed. “I know his ilk. All it takes is the sound of someone in pain. The second he hears you scream, he’ll be breaking down that door.”

“Yeah, well, unlike some people here, I know how to keep my mouth shut,” Damian said, reaching for his belt. Smoke bombs to confuse things, then taser to try to fry the machine. Keep Jon away, disrupt the production of Mxyzpills, protect the civilians.

Maybe stay alive, too, if he found the time.

“Oh, you are a delight,” Godfrey said. “Parademons, don’t break him too badly. DeSaad will have fun torturing him once we’re back home.”

Okay, maybe don’t stay alive.

The parademons moved as one, faster than Damian had expected. He flung his smoke pellets down and went low, sliding beneath their attack and making a run for the machine, taser in hand.

A parademon turned—too fast, how could they maneuver so quickly when they were so bulky?—and claws scored deep gouges in Damian’s calf. He faltered but kept going, stumbling forward despite the blood running down his leg. He ignored the pain, just as he had since childhood. It meant nothing. It would not stop him.

He was Damian Wayne, son of Batman. He was under-armored and outmatched and injured, but at least he would go down fighting, and he would. Not. Scream.

He owed Jon that much, at least.

Chapter Text

Jon sat slumped at his desk, staring at his computer. The cursor blinked steadily at him, taunting him with its cheerful rhythm. This paper was due in two days, and he hadn’t written a single word.

He wanted to fall onto his bed and bury his face in his pillows, but one of them still smelled like Damian. Besides, every time he closed his eyes he saw it again: the contemptuous curl of Damian’s lip as he scoffed at Jon’s hurt feelings. As he witheringly assured Jon that their kiss had meant absolutely nothing to him, when Jon could still remember exactly how it felt.

“Well, Kent, that’s what you get for falling in love with your best friend,” he said to the cursor, and then froze in place. He wasn’t—no. He had a crush. He’d had a crush on Damian for a long time, but there was a world of difference between a crush and...and…

“Argh,” he said, and stood up so that he didn’t heat vision his laptop or crush the mouse under his hand. He needed a distraction and schoolwork wasn’t working.

And god, his room was a mess. Okay, that was somewhere to start. He’d thrown the pillow and blanket Damian had used back on the bed, but he hadn’t made it, and there was dirty clothing strewn everywhere.

Like the t-shirt Damian had slept in. Jon picked it up to toss in his laundry bag, wishing his nose wasn’t quite as Kryptonian as it was. Even at arm’s length, the shirt smelled like Damian.

His jeans from last night were clean enough to fold and put back in a drawer. He shook them out and something fell out of one of the pockets. A little plastic baggie with something bright green and purple in it. Mxyzpills.

He should heat vision them before the RA came in and he got expelled, he thought, picking up the baggie. Instead he sat down on his bed and stared at the pills. He didn’t actually think Damian would drop the case, but if he did, someone should be putting a stop to these.

He squinted at the pills. There was that extraterrestrial element that had been all over the lab. Now that he looked at it again, there was something familiar about it. But where would he have seen something like this before? He didn’t go into space nearly as often as his dad did.

It wasn’t Martian—it was way too weird to be from this solar system. It definitely wasn’t Kryptonian, or Daxamite. For a minute he worried that it might be Coluan, which had Brainiac-related implications he really didn’t want to deal with, but that didn’t seem right either.

A sudden thought struck him. Feeling vaguely silly, he brought the pills up to his nose and sniffed. A sugary coating. The tinny scent of chemicals. And beneath that…

Brimstone.

Apokalips. Which they’d totally written off.

Oh, this was bad. This was his dad’s “do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, call the Justice League immediately” tier of bad. His dad trusted Jon to keep Metropolis safe from normal threats, but Darkseid—or really, anyone from Apokalips—was not a normal threat.

And if Jon knew Damian at all, he was still working the case.

He jumped to his feet and scanned the city with his X-ray and telescopic vision. Damian wasn’t in his hotel room, but his bag was, which meant Damian was still in the city. Jon didn’t think Damian would have gone to the frat house or the campus lab—both essentially right under Jon’s nose—right away, but that still left one obvious location.

Sure enough, there was the Redbird, parked right by the nightclub they’d gone to last night. And Damian was nowhere to be seen, which meant the stubborn idiot had gone into that lead-lined room without any idea of what he was facing, or any backup.

Of course, it was Jon’s fault he didn’t have any backup…

Vision powers were useless on that room. Jon switched to super hearing.

Definite sounds of violence. Elevated heartbeats. Someone laughing.

And a tiny, muffled gasp of pain.

Damian.

Jon dropped the Mxyzpills. He was suited up and out the window before they hit the ground.

*

Thwack!

Damian rolled with the blow and came to a hard stop against the wall. Godfrey walked after him, inspecting his knuckles with a mildly displeased expression.

“I really don’t enjoy getting my hands dirty like this, you know,” he said. “Leave that to brutes like Kalibak. Mine is a battle of the minds.”

Damian used the wall to push himself back to his feet. He had to admit, at least to himself, that this wasn’t his most stellar performance. He hadn’t destroyed the machine or saved the civilians. The best he had done was stay alive long enough for Godfrey to decide that the parademons would kill him too quickly to be of any use. That was when he’d started beating Damian himself.

Godfrey wasn’t fast, and he had no idea how to fight. But all the flash bombs in Damian’s belt had done little more than scorch his stupid cloak, and though he hit without skill, he hit hard.

Gods. Tt. This was why Damian was an atheist.

“I met Kalibak once. I kicked his ass,” Damian managed, wrapping an arm around his ribs. Bruised, he thought, not broken, but it was only a matter of time.

Godfrey swung at him again, and Damian barely managed to dodge. “You know, if I accidentally kill you before Superboy arrives, I’ll be quite put out.”

“Yeah? That sounds like a you problem.” With his free hand, Damian fumbled for his belt. There had to be something he could use...something… “Gurk!”

Too slow, too stupid, he hadn’t been paying attention and now Godfrey had him by the throat. Damian grabbed Godfrey’s wrist, trying and failing to pry his hand away. Godfrey grabbed one of Damian’s hands with his free one.

That infuriating smile was back on Godfrey’s face. “Robin, isn’t it?” he asked. “That’s a kind of Earth bird. Time for you to start singing, little bird.”

Damian spat blood in Godfrey’s face and clenched his jaw.

Godfrey broke Damian’s little finger.

Damian didn’t scream.

Godfrey moved to the next finger.

He would not—

SLAM!

The steel door flew off its hinges and across the room. Jon stood in the doorway, suited up, his eyes blazing red.

Damian’s heart leapt with joy—Jon had come!—before plummeting with realization. No, no, he’d been so careful not to make a sound…

“Well, now, this is more like it,” Godfrey said, turning to face Jon and dragging Damian with him.

“Get your hands off him!” Jon heat-visioned Godfrey’s wrist, making him yelp and let Damian go. Damian stumbled back, clutching his injured hand. It hurt, but he’d had broken fingers before. It didn’t matter.

“Superboy!” he shouted. “It’s a trap! They’re after you! Get out of here!”

“Are you kidding?” Jon said. “Get the civilians out! I’ll handle the rest!”

Damian didn’t like it—he was sure Godfrey had something up his stupidly voluminous sleeve—but Jon was right that they needed to get the civilians clear. He grabbed the bartender’s wrist with his good hand. “Come on,” he told her.

She fought, because of course whatever Godfrey had done to her mind wasn’t going to let it be easy for him. Chazz and the balding man flew at Damian too, clumsy and confused but still one more thing to deal with when he didn’t want to hurt them and he ached everywhere and he was terrified out of his mind for Jon.

The parademons swarmed Jon. He blasted two with super breath, freezing them in place, then dodged the rest to grab Godfrey by the collar.

“Glorious Godfrey,” he said. “My dad told me about you. Said you had a glass jaw. Let’s see, why don’t we?”

“I have something to show you, first,” Godfrey said, still smiling. “Mother Box?”

A portal opened up. Damian had just enough time to see something green drop into Godfrey’s hand before Godfrey slid the kryptonite blade between Jon’s ribs.

“NO!” he screamed as Jon dropped to the ground, his eyes wide with shock. Godfrey stepped back, laughing, as Jon tried and failed to pull out the knife. The handle, Damian saw, was Kryptonite, too.

Damian let go of the bartender. He forgot the civilians entirely, and he didn’t even care that his father and Richard and Jon would all be ashamed of him for it. All he could see was Jon.

“No,” he said again, running to Jon’s side and falling on his knees. He wrapped his hands around the handle, an ordinary rock to him. Normally he’d wait to take a weapon out until he could properly staunch the bleeding, but the longer the kryptonite was in Jon, the worse it would poison him.

“D-Robin,” Jon said. His face was green-tinged and sweaty. He never sweated.

“This is going to hurt,” Damian said. “I’m sorry.”

And he pulled the knife out.

Jon screamed. The sound triggered something in Damian he had kept subdued and suppressed for years: a purely righteous killing rage, the kind his grandfather’s assassins had cultivated and fed. The kind that had once made him push his fingers into a man’s brain, that had separated heads from necks and souls from bodies.

Jon was his. He would kill anyone who hurt him. It was as simple as that.

“Get out of here and close the door,” Damian said, putting himself between Jon and Godfrey. “The lead will shield you.”

Jon tried to push himself into a seated position and gasped with pain. “Not leaving you,” he said, the loyal idiot. His veins still stood out against his skin, a lurid green. As long as he was in this room with the knife, it was still killing him, just slower.

“You haven’t fixed anything,” Godfrey said, echoing Damian’s thoughts. “He’s still poisoned. He’ll just die slower. Which, come to think of it, is probably for the best. My master will most likely prefer live bait to a corpse.”

“Too bad that I’m sending him back your corpse, then,” Damian said, shifting his grip on the knife. It was sticky with Jon’s blood. Blood had never bothered Damian before, but the wrongness of it being Jon’s turned his stomach.

“You really are very entertaining,” Godfrey said. “However, you’re no longer of any use to me. Parademons, kill him.”

The four non-frozen parademons swarmed Damian again, but this time he was ready for how fast they were. He sprinted across the room, ignoring his bruised ribs and broken finger. In a move that would have made Richard proud, he used his momentum to spring off the wall, flip, and land on the lead parademon’s back.

“Kryptonite doesn’t poison you, but I bet it can cut you,” he said, and drove the knife deep into the parademon’s shoulder. The thing screamed, a noise like nails on a chalkboard, and reached back to grab at Damian. Damian snatched the axe it was wielding out of its claws with his free hand.

“And how about this?” he asked, swinging the axe wide. “This was made to kill gods, wasn’t it?” He didn’t know if a parademon’s wings were organic or part of their armor, and right now he didn’t care. He brought the axe down where one of the parademon’s wings met its shoulder blade and severed it neatly.

Black ichor oozed out. Well. Organic it was.

The parademon screamed again and careened drunkenly towards the floor. Damian backflipped off it and swung at another as it flew past, hamstringing it.

“What’s wrong with you?” Godfrey bellowed. “He’s just one mortal boy! Kill him!”

They came at him again, one limping, one grounded, but Damian had something that could hurt them now. He opened the abdomen of one of the uninjured parademons with the axe, slashed the face of the other with the knife. Black ichor splattered everywhere, smoking when it hit the ground.

Dealing out punishment was satisfying, but these beasts were only canon fodder. Damian used the nearest parademon as a springboard to get him closer to Godfrey. Godfrey lunged at him, sloppy, and Damian ducked under his arm, spun him around, and got behind him—knife at his throat, axe at his belly. “Call them off!”

“Parademons, stop!” Godfrey shouted. They came to a halt so abrupt it would have been funny if Damian hadn’t been so angry.

“Very good. Don’t move.” Damian pressed the blades closer so that Godfrey wouldn’t remember he was exponentially stronger than Damian and could easily overpower him.

“Please…” Godfrey said. Oh, he didn’t understand Damian very well at all if he thought begging would work.

“See now, I’m torn, you waste of carbon molecules,” Damian said. “If I leave you alive, you could take a message back to your cesspit of a planet that Superboy is not to be touched. I could cut off a few parts of you to really get my point across. You’d probably make it before you bled out.” Godfrey twitched, and Damian smiled. “But you hurt him, so I’m afraid they’ll just have to extrapolate my message from your dead body.”

He pressed the axe closer—a gut wound would kill Godfrey slower and more painfully than a slit throat—and felt the moment it broke skin. Godfrey whimpered.

“Don’t.”

Damian looked up. Jon was sitting up, his cape bundled up and pressed to his side. He still looked awful, his eyes enormous and bloodshot in his haggard face.

“Don’t kill him,” he said.

“Twenty-seven Gothamites are dead because of his stupid drugs,” Damian said. “He almost killed you.” He still could, if Jon stayed in the same room as the kryptonite for much longer.

“I know,” Jon said. “Don’t kill him.”

Damian felt his hand shaking on the knife and tried to force it to steady. “He doesn’t deserve your pity, Superboy.”

“I’m not thinking about him,” Jon said. His voice was so weak. “I’m thinking about you.”

Damian looked at the blood soaking Jon’s cape, a darker red than the fabric. Then he looked at Jon’s face.

“Open a boom tube,” he told Godfrey. “Back to Apokalips.”

“Yes! Yes, of course, thank you,” Godfrey babbled. “Mother Box, do it.” A yawning portal opened up in front of them.

“Tell your animals to go through.”

“Parademons! Home,” Godfrey snapped. The parademons obeyed mindlessly, the semi-thawed ones Jon had frozen shuffling a bit slower than the rest.

“What do I need to free the civilians from your control?” Damian asked.

“Nothing,” Godfrey said. “Once I’m gone, they’ll go back to normal.”

“Good,” Damian said. “Go, then.” He lowered his voice, unsure if Jon would be able to hear him anyway or if his senses were still out of whack from the kryptonite. He didn’t care. “And if I ever hear you’ve set foot in Metropolis again, I will forget that he asked me to spare you.”

He let go, stepped back, and kicked Godfrey in the spine. Godfrey stumbled forward, into the boom tube. Just before it closed, Damian hurled the kryptonite knife into it. With any luck, it would fall into a fire pit and be lost before any other New Gods got big ideas about going hunting on Earth.

Then he ran to Jon’s side, fumbling at his belt for first aid materials. “Next time, let me kill him.”

Jon gave him a weak smile. “Next time, don’t go off without me.” Suddenly he frowned. “Do you hear that?”

Damian listened. “No?”

“What’s that weird machine?”

Damian followed Jon’s gaze. “It’s what he was using to make the Mxyzpills, or harvest energy for them, or something. Why?”

“I think it’s going to—”

Suddenly Jon’s eyes went wide. A second later, Damian found himself deposited breathlessly in the parking lot, where the drizzle had turned to rain. A red blur swooped back and forth and Chazz appeared next to him, then the bartender, then the balding man, and Damian had just enough time to wonder why Jon had placed them all pretty much in each other’s laps when Jon threw himself on top of the four of them, cape spread as wide as it could go, and—

FWOOM!

The club exploded. Jon grunted, a pained sound, and Damian could hear stone and metal hitting the ground all around them. Car alarms blared to life up and down the block, and the air was filled with smoke.

Jon sat back. “You guys okay?” he asked.

Damian looked at the three civilians. None of them seemed to be bleeding. “I think so.”

“Good.” Jon stood up, pulled Damian to his feet, and pointed at the civilians. “Stay here. Call 911. We’re going to put the fire out.”

He slipped an arm around Damian’s waist and took off. They rose up above the burning wreckage that had been a nightclub, and Damian let himself sag against Jon’s side in relief, just for a second. Their foes were vanquished, the means of production were destroyed, and Jon…

Jon would be all right. Yes, pressed up against his side like this, Damian could feel a fine tremble running through him, but he had his speed back, he was flying, he’d use his freeze breath to put out the fire and he would be fine—

Jon gave a choked sound, and they tumbled out of the sky.

“Jon!” Damian shouted. He felt Jon twisting them in midair, felt him wrap himself around Damian’s body and then the jolting crash as they hit a nearby roof. Jon had put himself between Damian and the roof, but the impact still jarred Damian’s ribs painfully and knocked the breath out of him.

That didn’t matter. He knelt next to Jon and yanked off his gloves to feel for a pulse. “Jon!”

Jon’s eyes opened, heavy-lidded and hazy under those impossible lashes. “Sorry, D. Thought I had more juice left than that.”

“But you were better.” Damian pushed Jon’s shirt up to examine his wound. It was bleeding—a trickle rather than a flood, but definitely still bleeding. “I got rid of the kryptonite. You were better!”

Jon winced as Damian covered the wound with gauze from his belt and put pressure on it. “Think it hit something important.”

“What do I do?” Damian asked. He could stitch a human wound or set a human bone in the field, but he didn’t know anything about Kryptonian first aid. Why had he never learned, what kind of team leader was he, what kind of friend was he? “Jon, what do I do?”

“Sunlight?” Jon asked, looking wry even through the pain and fear on his face.

Damian squinted up uselessly at the rainy night. It was more Gotham weather than Metropolis, and it felt like he’d brought it with him, like he was personally choking the life out of this beautiful creature that thrived in sunlight. If someone could carry Jon closer to the sun, but there were no Kryptonians available. Maybe Starfire, if she could make it in time…?

“You were right,” Jon said.

“What?” Damian had to lean in, Jon’s voice was so faint.

“Chazz was there. He was in on it.” Jon looked so disappointed, so surprised that the world had turned out to be a less rosy place than he’d thought it was. Damian couldn’t bear it.

“No,” he said. “No, he wasn’t, Godfrey was controlling him. You were right.” He swiped rain away from the lenses of his mask, then ripped the whole stupid thing off. “I’m sorry.”

“Heh.” Jon’s mouth curled, just a little. He put his hands over Damian’s. They were cold. “You never say that.” The smile faded, and his eyes went scared again. “Damian, I don’t want to die.”

Suddenly Damian’s fury was back. “You won’t,” he said. “I forbid it.”

“Don’t...don’t think you can.”

“Like hell I can’t,” Damian snapped. “I’ve apologized to you three times today. I never apologize to anyone. And you’re going to waste that? You are not allowed to die, Jonathan Kent, and if you do, I will follow you and drag you back with me.” He leaned in close, so close their noses were practically touching, because it was important that Jon understood this. “You’re mine. You’re not going anywhere without me.”

There was that rueful smile again. “Never wanted to.”

He still didn’t understand, Damian could tell. That was the way Jon smiled when he thought Damian was being ridiculous. He didn’t understand that Damian needed Jon as much as Jon needed sunlight.

Jon was Damian’s sunlight.

Damian closed the gap between them and kissed him.

Jon let out a surprised squeak, and Damian remembered that he had essentially promised to never kiss Jon again. He pulled back. Jon’s violet eyes were wide and startled.

“If you did that just to surprise me into not dying, we’re gonna be in a fight again,” Jon said.

“Don’t be stupid,” Damian said, frustrated. Jon was going to make him say it? “I did it because I wanted to.” He paused. Something about saying it out loud made the events of the weekend fall into place—made a lot of things fall into place.

“Both times,” he admitted slowly, working it out. “Last night, too. I wanted to kiss you. Which is why you can’t die,” he concluded hurriedly, his hands pressing uselessly at Jon’s side, panic drowning out even that world-shattering revelation. “You don’t have to—to want anything in return, but you can’t—”

“Now who’s being stupid?” Jon asked. He pushed up a little, one hand out as if reaching for Damian, then paused. “Oh!”

“What?”

Jon propped himself up on one elbow and peered down at his wound. “Is it…?”

Damian lifted the gauze, hardly daring to hope. “It stopped bleeding.” The wound was still red and angry, but the bleeding had stopped, and Jon’s veins no longer stood out green and livid around it. Damian sat back on his heels, weak with relief for the second time in five minutes. “You must have hung on long enough for your Kryptonian biology to shake off the effects of the kryptonite and restart your accelerated healing.”

“Or…” Jon pushed himself all the way into a seated position, wincing as he went. “You kissed it better.”

Damian’s face went hot. “That’s not what happened.”

“You cured me!”

“I didn’t cure you. That’s not how biology works.” Damian tried to scowl, but the huge grin on Jon’s face was making it difficult. Jon’s hair was plastered to his head and dripping into his eyes, and he was covered in soot and blood, and he had never looked more beautiful. Which, Damian had to finally admit to himself, was a fairly high bar.

Jon leaned in. That smile was dizzying at close range. “Do you still want to kiss me if I’m probably not dying?”

Damian gripped Jon’s chin—firmly, because Jon could take it, and because he needed to feel Jon’s solidity under his hands right now. “I told you, habibi. You’re not allowed to die.”

“Ditto,” Jon said, and kissed him. It would have been a better kiss, technically speaking, if Jon had been able to stop smiling, but somehow Damian found he didn’t mind. He wanted Jon, and Jon somehow, impossibly, wanted him back.

Maybe the world was the rosy place Jon believed it to be after all.

“This is why I didn’t call you,” he said, when Jon let him up for air. It was half to himself—he was still working it out—but Jon still made a quizzical noise, his fingers idly tracing the R on Damian’s chest. It shouldn’t have made Damian’s heart race, but, well.

“When I came to Metropolis. You asked why I didn’t call you. It was because I didn’t want to be distracted.” Damian tried to look at Jon, who was now gazing at him earnestly, and found that he couldn’t. “I’ve been...distracted around you for a while now. It seemed like a good idea to keep my distance.”

Jon’s grin was wide enough to light up his peripheral vision. “...You didn’t call me because you wanted to kiss me too much.”

“No!” Damian said. “I mean, yes, so it would seem, but that was not my reasoning!”

“You wanted to kiss me and you didn’t even know you wanted to kiss me!” Jon crowed. Damian hunched into his cape as if it would hide his red cheeks from Kryptonian eyes. “Some detective. At least I figured out I had a crush on you years ago.”

Damian raised his eyebrows. That was more like it. “Oh, really.”

“Nope, we’re making fun of you right now, we’ll make fun of me later.” Jon sat up a little straighter. “Sirens. I should help put out the fire, and you need at least a finger splint.”

Now Damian could hear the sirens too. “I’m fine.”

“D, your finger is literally pointing the wrong way. Let the nice paramedic put a splint on you.” Jon stood up. “Okay, ouch, yeah, accelerated healing isn’t all the way back yet. Oof.”

Damian got slowly to his feet, feeling every one of his injuries as he did. Well. Maybe a little first aid wouldn’t go amiss.

Jon bent down with a groan and gathered up Damian’s discarded gloves and mask. “Hey,” he said, handing them over. “You’re un-kicked out of Metropolis, by the way.”

Damian put the mask on. “Good to know,” he said, and smirked. “Play your cards right and I might consider letting you into Gotham.”

Jon was still laughing when he deposited Damian on the ground by the ambulances and flew off to blow out the fire.

*

“I can’t believe you told your mother,” Damian said.

It was early evening the day after the nightclub exploded. They were sitting side by side on the roof of the Lexcorp Tower. Jon would never tell his dad, but he personally thought the Tower had the best view of the city. After all, you couldn’t see the Daily Planet building if you were actually sitting on it.

Jon felt great. He’d taken a quick flight up to the sun at dawn and it had taken care of what his sluggish system hadn’t been able to. The weakness, the unreliable powers, the bruises across his back and shoulders from standing between the full-blooded humans and flying debris—gone. He didn’t even have a scar where the kryptonite knife had gone in.

He could still remember the cold, unnatural feeling of it, but that would pass. He was pretty sure.

Damian, of course, was a mess of bruises and scrapes and would be for a while, but he looked like that half the time anyway. He was still gorgeous, especially in the warm amber light of the setting sun.

“My mom’s a journalist, remember?” Jon asked. “In what universe do you think I could get away with not telling her when she was going to see news reports of Superboy and Robin in an ‘explosive super-brawl’ in Suicide Slum the second she woke up?” He finger-quoted WGBS’s goofy description. “No, scratch that, I think she has Uncle Perry text breaking news directly into her brain while she sleeps.”

“I don’t mean that part,” Damian said. “I mean…” He waved a hand, vaguely indicating the space between them.

“What? That you’re hopelessly smitten with me?”

“So help me god, I will find a spell that removes your ability to talk.”

Jon laughed, then sobered. “I didn’t really mean to,” he said. “I just…”

He’d just burst through the door of his parents’ apartment with Damian behind him and said, “Mom! Before you ask, yes, we did blow up a nightclub, but it was a front for Apokalips and no one got hurt except I sort of got stabbed with kryptonite a little but I’m fine, and I know what you’re thinking but I only drank seltzer at the club, and no, Damian didn’t kill anyone and also I think we’re dating now.”

In his defense, getting his sunlight from that close up always made him a little giddy for a while afterwards. Also, with a mom as good at cross-questioning as his, it was best to get all the crucial stuff out in the open as fast as possible.

“I would have told her anyway,” he said. “Probably not until Dad came home, but…” He shrugged. “We don’t keep a lot of secrets in my family. And it’s not like they didn’t already know how I felt about you.”

Damian’s expression was a masterpiece of mixed emotion. If Jon had to guess, he’d say it was a combination of annoyance that someone somewhere knew anything about him, mortification that it was related to the softer emotions, and—Jon was pretty sure—pleasure that Jon liked him so much. Jon would take it.

“You told them?” Damian asked.

“Nah,” Jon said. “But they’re both investigative journalists and I’m, like, a really bad liar. I think I was pretty obvious.” He gave Damian a sidelong glance. “Detective.”

“Ugh. Shut up.”

“You really had no idea?” Jon pressed. He had felt so exposed, sometimes, so sure that everything he felt was written on his face. It was surreal to think that Damian had been living in a completely different reality where the most Jon felt for him was mild appreciation.

“I tried very hard not to think about you and...non-platonic affection at the same time,” Damian said. “Especially after you stopped being so scrawny.”

Non-platonic affection. God. Jon was going to tease him forever.

“Admittedly, I should have figured it out after you had thirty-seven pictures of me in your room,” Damian went on.

“Three.”

“Even that idiot Chazz figured it out before I did.” Damian’s lip curled.

Jon rolled his eyes. “D, come on, he was innocent. Why do you still hate Chazz so much?”

“I don’t!” Damian snapped. “Why do you like him so much?”

Jon opened his mouth to reply, then stopped. Damian was looking awfully squirrelly. “Wait. Are...are you jealous?”

“No.”

Jon waited.

Finally Damian gave a long-suffering sigh and looked up at the gathering stars. “It’s not him,” he said. “You just...have a lot of friends. And I keep my social circle small because frankly most people don’t deserve to be in it,” he added in a haughty rush. “But I am also aware that I can be...difficult.”

His hands had been flat on the roof on either side of him, but now Jon noticed the one closest to him—not the one with the splinted finger—had curled into a fist. He took a chance and picked it up, interweaving their fingers together and curling his other hand around their linked ones. Damian watched him, but didn’t resist or pull away.

“You’re not difficult,” Jon said. “You’re impossible. And I’d choose you over easy any day of the week.”

Damian didn’t say anything, but the tension in his shoulders lessened visibly. The light of the setting sun hit the rings of the Planet building and flared back, dazzlingly bright.

“I’m sorry I told my mom we were dating without talking to you first,” Jon said. “I shouldn’t have assumed…”

Damian’s fingers tightened on his. “We are,” he said. “If you want.”

It was Jon’s turn to relax. “I want.”

“Good.”

They sat in silence as the sun slipped past the rim of the city, hand in hand. Jon felt both perfectly at peace and so buzzing with happiness he might explode. The contradiction seemed fitting for Damian, somehow.

Just as the last light was fading, Damian spoke. “I should go back to Gotham soon. Father will be wondering what’s taking so long. And you have school here.”

“I can visit,” Jon said. “Faster than a speeding bullet, remember?”

Damian rolled his eyes. “As opposed to a sluggish bullet?”

“Hey, I don’t write the hype lines, Boy Wonder.”

“That’s Son of Batman, thank you.”

Jon grinned. “Robin, Son of Batman, Savior of Kryptonians, Experiencer of Non-Platonic Affection.”

Damian tugged on the hand Jon was still holding, but not hard enough to make Jon think he really wanted Jon to let go. “Ugh. A spell to shut you up, I swear to god.”

Jon squeezed Damian’s hand and leaned in. “Come on. There’s better ways than magic to do that.”

Damian rolled his eyes, but he met Jon halfway, and in the stillness far above the city, with every sound distant but Damian’s heart, life was just about perfect. Jon hadn’t lied—Damian was impossible. But right now, impossible was kissing Jon in the moonlight, and the world below them was at peace.

That was magic enough.