Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Stop me if you know this one. A boy, rich, but young enough to not notice yet, and his parents, certainly old enough to see nothing but. They cut through an alleyway in the wrong part of town and, surprise, surprise, they got cornered, and, surprise, surprise, there are now two bodies cooling on a pavement and a child and a mugger-turned-murderer fleeing in opposite directions from a crime scene in Crime Alley with blood seeping into the cracks between the cobblestones, never to come out again.

Yeah. Everyone knows that story.

There are others, of course. You probably heard most of them, too: boys from circuses and cats who become thieves and the children who live in fear of men with two faces and women who grew from the earth. A thousand different interpretations for a thousand different audiences, but the simple fact has always remained: Gotham is a city less of street and scaffolding and more of story.

This isn't about all that pretentious fairytale crap, though. This is about the most annoying boy I've met in my life.

6:13 PM. October 31.

The Pinecrest Diner was right off the first exit on the highway that took you out of Gotham's East End and into the richer, manor-studded, green and grassy "Gotham in name only" county of Bristol. It was a greasy spoon, a hole-in-the-wall that gentrification hadn't managed to squash out, complete with trash cans outside that had some suspicious holes in their metal bottoms. The large glass windows were horrible for gazing out of; they had an ungodly amount of squashed flies and the like smeared against the glass, and some artistic soul had drawn their finger through decades of dust buildup, connecting them into constellations. The ancient Greeks would have been proud, truly.

Other than that, it was a standard Americana diner. You already know what this looks like. Red plastic gingham tablecloths with some stray salt spilt on it, leaving it gritty for the next person's elbows to find, a TV playing some local news nobody is paying attention to, and a waitress who'd come up to you and call you "hon" in a fake Southern drawl, though the rest of her is up to you. Everything looked like it came out of the '50s, but intentionally.

On the upside, Pinecrest Diner's artifice extended to their financial sensibilities. They had yet to figure out that the outside world had gone barrelling on without them, so they still sold coffee with a price tag like it was still the '50s. That was why Steph liked it.

Someone, in a stunning and uncharacteristic display of civic pride for a city that desperately needed and didn't deserve it, had installed a little lending library next to the diner. The library, originally made out of a hastily painted and repurposed case of boxed wine -- this was New Jersey -- held an eclectic mix of children's books, heavily annotated, high school classics, badly annotated, and the occasional memoir, unannotated because it would be a little weird to write in those. Regardless, that was why Jason liked it.

Cass sat by the window, the grey filter of dust toning down her neon pink sweater into something that could directly be looked at, and also making her sneeze repeatedly. She had already ordered her own drink. 

Steph had leaned over the back of their booth and asked the lone man reading a newspaper behind them if he was "using the crossword section," and turned around with her prize, which she was now hunched over, scribbling on. Cass liked to watch her, for gross, sappy, and relationship-y reasons.

The hot cocoa was delivered to her in a paper cup that she was somewhat preoccupied with rotating in order to heat up her hands uniformly. Cass was not so preoccupied, however, that she couldn't see her oldest brothers arguing in the parked car across the street. Jason gesticulated, which was hard to miss.

Cass tapped Steph's shoulder, thrilling a little internally when Steph's bright eyes flicked up to her own. Again, this was because Cass was really very sappy and probably comparing the hue of Steph's eyes to the exact shade of the sky in midafternoon, or something ridiculous like that. 

Cass pointed out the window and Steph followed her finger to see two grown men about to start wrestling in the front seats of a car.

"Are they okay?" Steph signed at Cass. Cass shrugged, leaning into Steph's side.

"They both still have their seatbelts on, so probably."

"God," Steph said out loud. "Your family is an ordeal."

Cass giggled. "Should wait to hear what Tim said about the new one."

"Is that the one that tried to stab him?"

Cass nodded against Steph's shoulder. They watched as Dick got out of the car, slamming the door just as Jason jumped out as well. Dick grimaced as he made eye contact and waved a little at Cass, who waved back, while Jason hunched in his jacket, buried his fists in his pockets, and crossed the street. Dick hung back, leaning against the car to take his phone out.

The bell jingled as Jason pulled the door open, because of course it did, which drew the general attention of everyone in the diner for a few seconds. The two old men near the door playing cards paused their game for a few seconds, turning over their shoulders to look at the newcomer, but everyone quickly dismissed the newcomer when he didn't break stride, beelining to the corner booth where two girls had sat and sipped their drinks for the past half hour.

"Hey," he signed, slipping in across from them. "What nightmare factory did you get that sweater from?"

Cass grinned. "Went thrift-ing today!"

"Trust me," Steph said, "it could have been worse. I talked her out of the yellow one."

Jason winced while Cass pouted at Steph. "Said it looked good on me."

"What do you have against our eyeballs, Cass?" Jason said, and Cass stuck her tongue out at him.

"Weak," she declared. "No... fashion sense."

"It's her secret ninja technique," Steph said, tugging at Cass's sleeve. "First she blinds you, then she gets you."

"No ganging up," Cass whined. "Not fair."

"The aim of justice," Jason said, with the air of stuffy quotation, "is to give everyone his due."

Both girls blinked at him. He sighed. "Cicero is wasted on you guys."

Cass turned to Steph. "What is the word?" she signed innocently.

"Pretentious," Steph supplied. 

Cass nodded and turned to look at Jason. "Pretentious," she repeated.

Jason raised his eyebrows. "I'm going to tell Bruce that you're turning her against the rest of the family. Cluemaster, playing the long con."

"Don't be rude," Cass said, admonishingly. Steph just stuck her tongue out.

"You're just jealous she likes me more. 'Cause I'm more fun."

Whatever Jason was about to say was interrupted when the door jingled softly again. They all turned a little in their seats to see Dick walking through the entrance, holding the door open for another, younger, boy.

Tim caught sight of them and smiled, jogging over. Dick stayed at the door, however, looking out into the wet, dark, evening.

"What's up," Steph said as Tim approached. "Heard you got stabbed."

Steph was not a particularly tactful person. Luckily, Tim was, after a bit of acquaintance and three older siblings, used to that sort of thing.

"Almost," he shrugged. "Kid has issues."

"You got stabbed?" Jason asked. Tim had reached over him to pull out a menu from the side, looking questioningly over at his brother.

"Almost," he repeated. "I literally just said that."

Jason looked over at Cass. "The new kid stabbed him?"

"Almost," she said, smirking at Tim. He made a face back.

"Nobody ever tells me this shit," Jason muttered. Tim snorted, flipping through the menu. 

"It happened last night. He tried to stab me and ran off to single-handedly defeat Scarecrow, or whatever he thought was going to happen. Bruce and Cass had to get him back when he got dosed -- Oh, huh, they don't do poached eggs here."

"Ugh," Steph muttered. "I hate Scarecrow. Poor kid."

Tim glared at her over the menu. "He tried to stab me!"

Steph sighed wistfully. "Haven't we all thought about doing that?" 

"Hey!"

Jason tilted his head. "You do get pretty annoying."

"Bad," Cass said, pointing at Jason. "So do you." 

"Who's side are you on?" 

Naturally, because this was too much levity for the situation, that's when Bruce walked in through the door. Cass noticed first, her eyes flicking to the scene of her eldest brother shutting the door behind their father and the succeeding jingle of the bell brought everyone else's attention up to the front door with them. Dick, behind Bruce, winced just a little.

Bruce stopped a waitress, presumably to ask for extra chairs and/or apologize for the fact that she'd have to be waiting on a party of six, while Dick took the opportunity to join the table alone. He pulled a book from under his jacket where he'd been keeping it dry and slid it along the table to Jason, who picked it up in his left hand.

"Isabel Allende," he noted, flipping the book over to read the back cover. "I haven't read her yet."

"Yeah," Dick said, settling down on the opposite end, next to Steph. "I know. You guys order yet?"

Cass shook her head and Steph said, "Just drinks. We were waiting on you guys."

Dick "hm"ed and everyone at the table had to resist the urge to point out just how similar to Bruce he sounded at the moment. He looked very tired, and the comparisons weren't ever really appreciated, even at the best of times.

Speaking of Bruce, the family patriarch had finagled a chair from a nearby table and walked over with it in tow. He sat down heavily, which had the comical effect of making everyone else straighten up.

Tim flipped the menu open and broke the silence. "So," he said. "Why have we all been gathered here today, oh illustrious leader?"

"If you make a weird nerd joke," Steph said. "You owe me twenty bucks."

Tim made a face at her while Bruce pinched his nose. Dick simply folded his arms and watched, his expression already several degrees cooler than it had been earlier.

"I'm sure you have all heard about the Arkham breakout a few days ago," he said, finally. The table waited him out, which seemed a little like it shouldn't be a thing that could happen to Batman, but sure enough, after the waitress came and took all their orders and left and the silence had grown to a deeply oppressive level with the force of six pairs of eyes, Bruce elaborated.

"Damian disobeyed orders and attempted to bring Scarecrow in on his own. He was gassed with a new formula, one which had effects that are still unknown. I need you all to come to the manor and keep him under observation. He has proven willful and averse to following orders before."

Tim leaned back. "All?" he asked.

Bruce looked at him. "Yes," he said.

"This isn't about the kid at all, is it?" Jason snorted. "You just don't want us out there. During an Arkham breakout."

"On Halloween," Tim added. "What happened to the whole needing partners thing?"

Bruce sighed heavily. "Is it really so bad," he asked, "that I would rather not expose my own children to the absolute worst of humanity, all in one go?"

"Too late," Jason snorted.

"Not safe," Cass added. "Need someone… to watch your back."

"Technically," Steph said. "You can't really tell me what to do."

She didn't say "you're not my dad," because that was a little too surly teenager for her taste and also probably a bit of a loaded statement at the moment, but that didn't mean everyone else at the table didn't hear it.

Bruce looked at her, his stare level. She admirably didn't fidget too much and didn't break his stare, even when the waitress came back around to hand out plates. The fake drawl in her voice didn't even crack when she told them all to "just let me know if you need anything else."

"Cassandra," he said, "only orders hot chocolate when she thinks she will be feeling a fever come on soon. Tim, I know for a fact, has only been messing his blankets up to make it seem like he slept the night for the past three days, because he's so busy working on this outbreak. Stephanie has only been training with us for half a year at most, and isn't anywhere near ready to take on a Halloween night. Dick, you only walk like that when you're walking off a concussion, and your balance hasn't fully been restored, and Jason, you've been favoring your right hand this whole time. The fact is," Bruce said, leaning back, "I'm the only person here who isn't incapacitated in some way. It would be actively dangerous to all of you if you went out tonight."

He surveyed the table of mutinous faces and played his trump card.

"It would also," Bruce said, finally, "be good for Damian to ride out the aftereffects of his first fear gas experience in company. The manor can seem very large and very empty, especially when there's nobody else there."

Tim remembered his own experience with fear gas for the first time, huddled in an empty and cavernous manor with only two souls alive in a fifteen mile radius. He could sympathize, but that didn't mean he couldn't also tell exactly what Bruce was doing.

"Manipulative," he said, pointing his fork at Bruce. "You are being manipulative."

Bruce looked at them all. "I am," he admitted, because his daughter was a living lie detector so there wasn't ever really a point in hiding anything in the first place. "But it's still working," he said, because he hadn't also managed to raise a living lie detector without figuring a few things out.

Jason scoffed and looked to the side, out the window. "Dick and I haven't even met the kid," he said, "and now you expect us to help him through a fear gas attack? You know we'd be better out on the field. We've gone out with worse."

Dick remained silent, still frowning at Bruce. Bruce had yet to meet his eldest's eyes, despite him sitting at his left hand.

Tim frowned. "He tried to stab me! I don't have to help him when I could be helping you."

"Bonding," Cass signed. "Maybe use fear as opportunity to convince him you shouldn't be stabbed."

"No," Steph poked her girlfriend. "That's manipulative too."

Cass shrugged. "I guess I would be bad help too. Oops. Have to help do fieldwork then." She undermined herself by sniffling, just slightly.

Bruce raised an eyebrow. "That would leave none of you at the manor with Damian."

Dick finally spoke up. "You," he said, in a shockingly even voice, "are so allergic to giving us choices."

They finally made eye contact. Bruce looked tired in a way that he never had before, the crows feet around his eyes and the strands of grey coming into his hair seeming to stand out in relief against the harsh fluorescents of the diner.

"It's an order," he said, finally. "Go to the manor. Help your brother. You are all forbidden from entering Gotham tonight, costume or no costume."

With that, he got up and left.

The whole table was silent for a bit, which was generally the intended effect of the dramatic exits that Bruce favored so much. Then, Tim broke it.

"So, we're all not going to listen, right?"

Dick kept his gaze on the door. "No."

7:43 PM.

The drive back to the manor was the kind of tense that desperately didn't want to be so. Tim had opted to go back with Dick and Jason, who had also agreed to pick up Steph and Cass, which meant, after a brief scuffle over shotgun, all three of the youngest were crammed into the back seat for the ten minute drive through the Bristol Hills to the Manor. They kept up a little chatter to distract.

"So," Steph said, perched slightly on Cass's lap and flagrantly disobeying seatbelt law, "he's Bruce's actual kid? Like, actual kid with a real live other human."

"Talia al Ghul," Tim confirmed.

Steph whistled. "Nobody ever tells me shit," she said.

Jason turned around. "Talia? How old is the kid?"

Tim looked at Cass. "He's twelve right?"

Cass nodded, and Jason leaned back thoughtfully. "Thirteenish years ago. So that happened on your watch, Dickhead," he said, mock accusing.

"Can we please not talk about our dad's sex life," Tim said. "Because that is kinda gross."

"Bruce has made it very clear what he thinks of equal partnership," Dick muttered. That brought the mood down for a few seconds, before Cass spoke up.

"Lonely kid," she said. "Wants to.. prove himself."

"I'd feel more sympathetic," Tim said, "if he wasn't also kind of an asshole."

Dick looked up into the mirror. "You don't have to stay," he offered. "We can drop you off anywhere and take the fall." Tim wrinkled his nose.

"Nah," he said. "I'll be fine." 

Dick and Jason shared a look in the front seats before silence descended again. Steph shifted and broke it, launching into a story about her and Cass's day, in which they nominally had gone to Goodwill to look for cheap home decor for Steph's new apartment, and descended into Cass trying on increasingly ridiculous outfits and performing flips in high heels at Steph's enthusiastic behest. It was a good story: Steph had a knack for dramatizing, and Cass butt in at just the right moment to either defend herself or poke fun at her own girlfriend. Dick asked enough questions to get Cass on an overly technical tangent about her own progress with more cosmetic and less functional acrobatics, which had everyone else in the car groaning goodnaturedly.

It was good, and then they pulled into the driveway of the Manor.

There was something about big houses with few people that always seemed ineffably haunted. The Manor had spent decades without more signs of inhabitation than a car perhaps being missing from the driveway every once in a while, and even now, with the most residents it had had in nearly half a century, seeing any rooms lit from the outside with shadowy figures behind the curtains was unsettling. It hadn't quite had the overgrown quality of a house left to rot, but it always seemed close to it.

Bruce's car was parked neatly to the side, and a room on the third floor was lit up.

Jason whistled, looking up at the house. "Merricat, Merricat, would you like a cup of tea?" he singsonged. "Oh no, you'll poison me."

"Shut up," Steph said. "It's way too early for that creepy shit."

Tim snorted, opening the car door before Cass climbed bodily over him in a bid to be free. She always hated sitting still for long car rides.

"Man," Jason said, getting out of the shotgun seat himself. "Did he give the kid my room?"

"You weren't using it," Tim said. "Actually, he usually doesn't use it, either. That's pretty weird."

Dick shut his own door and trudged for the front steps. The storm clouds hovering over Gotham proper had yet to push their way as far north as the Manor, so the ground was hard packed and the air was cold and humid, the way it could get right before the sky opened up. The trees lining the walk up to the Manor were already losing the last of their fall leaves, messes of scrawny and scraggly branches nakedly reaching up for the pale moon above. Fall in New England was always a riot of color, which made it just that much harsher when the winter came and took it all in a blaze of slushy, dirty white.

Alfred was already waiting at the top, the door swinging open to reveal his pale face and tired smile.

"Welcome home," he said.

They shuffled in, Cass giving Alfred a hug and Jason leaning close and whispering something to the older man, his book in hand, while Tim and Steph hung back in teenage discomfort. Dick brought up the rear, softly shutting the door behind them all and cutting off the quiet sounds of the night. The silence that flooded in felt fragile.

"Hey, Alf," Dick said, smiling. "Been a while."

"It has," Alfred said, because Bruce had to learn stoic understatement from someone. "You've missed quite a lot of new developments."

A crash sounded from the living room, followed by a few yelling voices, and Dick winced. "I bet," he said, hurrying to work damage control. It spoke a lot about their lives that this was already a deeply familiar role for him to settle in.

In the living room, everyone was already arrayed out in a frozen tableau -- Jason and Tim were standing on the far end of the couch, while Steph perched on the arm of it, watching warily next to Cass as Bruce carefully held on to a young boy who looked remarkably like him. The boy was the source of the yelling and was clearly extremely unhappy about being physically restrained like that.

"Wow," Steph said, cutting over his voice. "He really does look like a mini-Bruce."

"Uncanny," Jason said. 

"Damian," Bruce said, deeply tired. "Please, hear me out."

"Father," the kid protested, and the accent, Middle Eastern with the edges lightly sanded down by the Queen's English, was so reminiscent of Talia and Ra's that half the people in the room jerked a little involuntarily. "First this, now invaders?"

"Invaders?" Jason said. "Kid, we don't want to babysit you either."

"Jason," Bruce said. "Don't add fuel to the fire."

Damian jerked himself out of Bruce's arms with a well-placed kick and some good old fashioned writhing. He stalked all the way up to Jason, looking comically undersized as he did so. 

"Todd," he identified. Jason raised an eyebrow, crossing his arms and looking over Damian's head at Bruce, who looked very helpless at the moment. Tim shifted next to the two. "You must be the second one. I hope for the sake of my father's taste that you are somewhat better than your replacement."

"Wow," said Tim. "So the kid supervillain schtick isn't just for me. Good to know."

"He's twelve," Bruce said. "And he didn't have the best of role models growing up."

"Would that be the crime lord grandfather or the crime lord mom?" Jason asked, still looking at Bruce. Bruce didn't look at Jason. Instead, he crossed the room to kneel in front of Damian, who had gotten tense in anger but hadn't said anything in his mother's side of the family's defense.

"Damian," Bruce said again. "I know this is contrary to what your mother told you, but you have siblings, and I would like for you to get to know them."

Damian clicked his tongue against his teeth. "I don't see anything worthy of respect in this whole house."

"Harsh," Steph said. Damian turned his ire on her.

"Leave alone the inheritance, Brown isn't even adopted! What is she doing here?"

"What? You gonna tell my girlfriend I'm not allowed to stick around?"

Damian's eyes flicked between her and Cass. Cass smiled serenely and linked her arms around Steph, an innocent tilt to her head. Her eyes were fairly cold.

"You are hiding behind Cain," he said, and maybe didn't even notice the way Cass's mouth tightened just a little at the corners at the last name.

"Totally," Steph admitted, a hand finding its way to Cass's shoulder.

"Respect or not," Bruce said, "you will stay here under their observation. Alfred and I will run another blood test in the morning. Until then," he looked up and addressed the older set of vigilantes in the room, "keep Damian inside and keep an eye on him. He has traces of a new Scarecrow formula still in his system, and while he didn't report feeling any of the traditional symptoms of a fear gas attack, we don't know if the new formula has any surprises in store."

With that, Bruce left the room, an uneasy air lingering behind him.

8:12 PM.

Damian had immediately tried to get away, vanishing up the stairs, though Dick got Cass and Steph to tail him up to the third floor. Steph hadn't texted in either panic or distress, and no suspicious noises had come from above, so the three brothers downstairs assumed that no news was good news and kept plotting.

"Babs checked in," Dick said, sitting down at the kitchen table. Jason was sitting on top of the table, his new book open in his left hand, though both his brothers had noticed that he hadn't flipped a page in a suspiciously long time, and when he did, it was slower than usual. "Said that she's been running tech for Bruce, so, guess he's not totally alone."

Tim looked up. "This breakout wasn't as severe as previous years," he said. "Scarecrow's the only major player who got out."

"Joker's still in there?" Jason asked, his eyes still on the page. 

"Yeah," Dick said. "Babs has been keeping an eye on him. Though, there's plenty of major players already on the outside. Penguin's still free. Clayface and Mad Hatter, too."

They all waited for a second.

"So," Tim said. "Are we going to ditch the brat and--"

"You," Dick said, "are not going anywhere. You are going to bed."

Tim frowned. "Concentration and memory issues can linger for days after a concussion," he shot back.

"This is not the first time," Dick said, taking a deep breath. "I know my limits."

"So do I!" Tim protested. "I've gone out on three hours before!"

"Yeah?" Jason asked. "When's the last time you slept?"

Tim hesitated. "Yesterday. Two hours after patrol."

"Now, you wanna say that in front of Cass," Jason asked, "or admit you're lying right now?"

Dick suddenly stood up. "Cass," he said. "can't go out tonight because she's sick."

Tim winced as he caught on. "She definitely wouldn't listen," he said. "And Steph has never followed Bruce's orders once in her life."

"No," Jason said, and that was when they heard a shout from outside the Manor.

"Guys!" Steph called, her voice far away and muffled. "Damian's missing!"

Chapter Text

7:58 PM.

The house had been silent earlier, but now there were voices everywhere. Damian's skin crawled with the awareness of six unknowns around him, all presumably with a better knowledge of the layout of this Manor than he had. His fingers itched for his blade, confiscated yet again in the aftermath of last night's disgrace.

Damian was consumed with worry over whether or not he was about to be replaced, failing to measure up in his father's eyes and disappointing his mother in one fell stroke, so we can forgive him for not noticing that when he returned to his room, the lights were off. After all, they had been off when he left it. He closed the door behind him, locking it right away, even though he knew that any given person who could be on the other side of the door would be capable of picking that lock easily, and dragged a wooden chair over and shoved it under the knob, for added measure. 

He had no idea how long he had before any of the orphans his father insisted on adopting would come to get him, and turned for the window. Then, he frowned.

He had left the curtains open and untouched when he left, but now, they were loosely shut over the windows, a small sliver of window peeking out to expose the black night outside. The butler, Damian thought, must have come poking around in there at some point. He felt immediate irritation and set about looking through his things.

He hadn't come to America with much. Only the clothes on his back and his sword, and both of those had either been taken or replaced already, leaving him with nothing but the hand-me-downs of orphans who came before. He had thrown most of the stuff out of this room, unable to shake the feeling of sleeping in another man's bed, awaiting their inevitable return and his inevitable casting out into the night. However, he'd kept a few things of the original owner's: namely, a few earlier design Batarangs, a domino mask, and a switchblade he'd found marking the page of an old, heavily marked copy of Jane Eyre.

He turned around after grabbing for the stash of sharp objects and noticed motion in the peripherals of his vision: it looked like something had moved outside, the motion caught only in the small gap between the curtains. Damian frowned and dismissed it. He'd heard hooting earlier.

He turned his attention to the door and pressed his ear to the wood. With calm, slow, measured breaths, he tried to attune to the vibrations of the wood: he'd thought he'd heard someone whisper outside, and suspected that at least two of his father's other associates had made their way to the third floor. 

The sounds of the now full house were varied and plentiful. He could hear the rumble, faintly, of three voices below him, carrying up two stories in the still house. Footsteps, pacing and slow. The hum of the heater, chugging away. Something scratching rhythmically against the wood. Creaks and groans, the noises of a house settling.

It didn't sound like anyone was on the floor with him. Damian pulled away and turned around, only to catch sight of something in that gap between the window: where it had been a completely black night before, it looked now like something was blocking the view.

Damian walked a little closer, then froze. He could just make out the contours of what pressed against his window. Meager light pooled against the dip of a bone against the peak of a nose, all vanishing into the hollow depths of an eye, sliced out by the folds of the two curtains against each other.

He was on the third floor.

Damian rushed forwards and threw the curtains open, and nothing was outside. The grounds of the manor were pale in the scant moonlight, the sounds of the house dull and everpresent. Damian couldn't hear anything but his own heart and breath for a few seconds.

After it subsided, he noticed the sounds of scratching again. 

"Drake?" He called out. He hoped that nervousness didn't enter into his tone, though of course, we can all reliably assume that he sounded like the scared ten-year-old he was.

We don't know if the new formula has any surprises in store, his father had said. Crane could play havoc with the senses, sow paranoia where there was no need. Damian would be stronger than this.

That was when he caught sight, in the dull reflection of the window, of something behind him. It was shadowy, indistinct, and definitely in the room with him rather than outside the window.

He spun around and came face to face with a girl, shorter than him, with her neck slit from side to side, red gore from chin to clavicle.

"You are not real," he said when he got his breathing under control. Which was stupid, to be honest. 

The girl told him as much.

"Aren't I?" she asked, her voice breathy because, well, her throat was slit open, crusted over, and exsanguinated with dried blood. It was a Gotham accent, tinged with the slightest hint of somewhere else.

"You," Damian said, "are a delayed reaction."

The girl reached up, picked Damian's hand up, and held it to her throat. Damian felt at once the wet slime of skin-less flesh, cold but moving like he was touching a snake's belly and not a human's throat. A dead human's throat. Damian had felt enough to know, have a sense for what the body felt like in rigor mortis, and the combination of stiff cadaver and still moving vocal cords, exposed to the air, turned his stomach in a way that he had never felt before in his life.

"Am I?" She asked again. Damian tried to pull his arm away, but she held fast, with strength she should not have had.

"I don't know who you are," Damian said, desperately tugging at his arm. Her nails dug in. "You are not real."

"Help me," she said, and finally released him. He stumbled back, massaging his wrist. 

"You aren't real," he repeated for the third time, but in a corner of his mind, the corner that had witnessed his grandfather rise from the dead again and again and had seen worse than that befall the living, that had perhaps stopped and listened to the old gulabiwala at the corner of the market spin a senile yarn about the djinn who walked the earth on backward feet, something whispered: Why can't she be? Why can't the dead come to haunt the living?

"Help me," the girl repeated. "Help me."

Three times, she asked, and so, she was owed a response.

"Why?" Damian asked. "What is your name?"

"I am Layal Tchoor," she said. "And my family was murdered three nights ago. And I cannot remember who did it."

Damian raised an eyebrow, his fear fading and his natural bravado rushing to fill the gaps. "What do you expect me to do about that?"

"You are the only one who can see me," she said, and the ghost of vengeance was gone. Layal Tchoor was an eight-year-old girl, and she could whine like one. "Nobody else!"

"If you were murdered," Damian said, pushing his shoulders back, "my father or one of his worthless orphans will have noticed, and they will find your killer. I have better things to do than chase after a ghost's story."

Layal frowned and grabbed at Damian's hand again, but whatever supernatural strength she had had left her: her hand fell through his, parted like fog.

"What are those better things?" she asked, pout firmly affixed on her face. "Where are you walking? There is nowhere you can go that I cannot follow." To prove it, she kept pace after him as he wandered from one end of the room to another, searching for his stolen switchblade. Damian retrieved the tool and went for the window, examining the screws and locks that held the whole thing in place.

"I," Damian said, "am going to solve a problem for my father, and earn my rightful place at his side and as his heir."

He was turned away from the ghost, which was usually a bad idea, especially since he couldn't see the exact moment when her expression suddenly turned much more crafty than a fourth-grader was generally capable of.

"What if I told you," Layal said, "that your father has spent three days on my family's deaths and still hasn't solved it."

Damian straightened up, looking at Layal. She looked back at him, eight years old with a ripped open throat.

"I would ask you," Damian said slowly, already tasting the glory, "to tell me more."

8:35 PM.

When Layal's family had come to the United States, they had brought nearly nothing from their old home with them. They had had to move quickly, in the dead of the night, packing only what they needed and leaving the rest for the looters or the shells, whatever would get to their home first. Layal had not been born yet, only a few months along in her mother's belly, but the specter of crusade hung heavy over Kashmir, and her mother could not bear to bear a child of war.

So, they fled in the dead of the night, and all Layal's mother brought with her along with a plane ticket for two was a change of Western clothes and a single vial of genuine, rose, attar perfume. The real stuff, the kind that was all oil, undiluted by alcohol, crushed drop by drop from a hundred thousand rose petals. Even a splash of real attar was prohibitively expensive and astoundingly fragrant, and it had been given to Layal's mother in a box with her mother's mother's bridal jewelry, a different kind of inherited family fortune. 

Layal had never been allowed to play with it, and she never had, for even unscrewing the cap of the vial could leave the home smelling like roses for weeks to come. Her mother had always insisted on keeping the attar in a box underneath the floorboards, her own personal emergency fund, a last resort.

"Well," Layal reasoned. "We are all dead. What need do we have now to keep an inheritance?"

Damian huffed, ditching the stolen motorcycle and looking up at what was only a few days ago the Tchoor family home in the lower strip of Gotham's northernmost island, officially known on the maps Damian studied as Precinct 12. The people here didn't look too different from the ones Damian had grown up surrounded by, though their stories were more like Layal's than his own. Not, of course, that Damian had even bothered to listen to Layal's story.

"Why," he muttered, sliding open the window with a judicious application of his stolen switchblade, "must we go to such lengths for attar? Won't any perfume do?"

Layal stomped her foot, though it did not make a noise. "They only come when attar is spilled! Not for any cheap convenience store Western perfume!"

"Of course," Damian said dryly. "Because you have such experience taming devils to your will. I bow to your wisdom beyond your years."

Layal hmphed. " I," she said, "am the ghost here."

"And my grandfather is the Head of the Demon itself," Damian said. "So perhaps we should listen to me, go to a CVS, and summon demons there."

Damian was only putting up a token protest, and they both knew it. If nothing else, he was already half in through the window, so it would be a wasted trip on a stolen motorcycle if he backed out now.

He dropped down into a crime scene. The bodies, of course, had been moved by now, but their effects had yet to be wrapped up and junked on the street by the landlord, with no relatives in the entire country available to handle a will.

Damian tapped his way through the clutter of lives abruptly stopped, the bric-a-brac of plans abruptly ended. The Tchoors, apparently, were not a particularly neat family. The floors, an old hardwood that needed replacing badly as the boards warped from the wet, had an inconvenient amount of loose panels, and Damian had to stop to test each and every one of them. Layal had ceased being helpful for him, transfixed by portraits and possessions. You and I can perhaps sympathize with a very young girl, suddenly dead, suddenly returned to the only home she'd ever known with the knowledge that her entire world would never be the same. Damian, on the other hand, did not have quite so much empathy.

"If you are going to drag me around this terrible city to solve your murder," he said, "you could at least point me to where your mother hid the attar."

Layal turned away from the bookshelf, unable to hold anything or page through the old Panchatantra and read the small notes her mother would leave in her old, classic, cursive script.

"It's over there," she pointed, her voice softer and more whistled through than before. "By the kitchen."

Damian walked over and dutifully pried the wood panel out of the floor. Underneath it, nestled between planks of supporting wood and pipe, was a small wooden box, carvings of flowers like the mehndi on a girl's hands after Durga Puja embossed onto the surface. He pulled it out and pried it open, revealing red velvet on the inside and the strongest smell of flowers and dust, so redolent of Kashmir that Damian could nearly believe that he was back on Nanga Parbat, walking through Astore, fruit sellers and florists alike hawking on the sides of the green streets.

Then he blinked, smelled the mildew and rot of Gotham, and was back in the unfamiliar land of his father.

He cautiously plucked one of the vials out and held it to his nose: even capped, the scent of roses was impossibly strong. There was another vial in the box, thinner and smaller, with a colorless liquid more viscous than the attar had been, and it was totally odorless.

Damian brought it closer up to his eye to check, and somehow, the combination of the thin vial and the behavior of what it held and the mildew smell of the still house and the ghost girl at his back had all come together, and all he could see now was a burlap sack and a pinprick of pain at his elbow and a rush of screaming fear as his brain struggled to make sense of the cortisol spike induced in it.

He dropped the vial and it was a miracle it didn't smash, falling neatly back into the box. In his other hand, he clutched the attar so tightly it nearly broke in his hand and sliced his fingers open, and he was breathing in and out faster than was strictly necessary, and it was not hyperventilating because Damian al Ghul-Wayne would not pitch a fit over nothing, like he was doing right now.

"Are you okay?" a small voice came from behind him, and Damian whirled around with his fists at the ready, because ghost girls never made noise when they moved and that did not mesh too well with Damian's own sense of security with his surroundings.

Layal yelped, even when she clearly wasn't moved by Damian's fist going straight through her eye.

"Hey!" she said. Damian dully pulled his arm back.

"What were you doing?" He asked, hot and defensive. Bad enough he was caught in a moment of weakness. Worse, he was caught in weakness in front of another, over what? A vial of perfume.

"What were you doing?" Layal shot back. "You froze and started breathing weird."

"It's nothing," Damian said, and when Layal opened her mouth to argue again, he snarled at her, "nothing!"

"You," Layal frowned, "are mean."

"And you are a stupid dead girl," he said, "but I am still going to help you, aren't I?"

He brushed past her, very literally, and went back for the window, slipping his prize into a pocket in his jacket.

"Come on," he said, brusque. "Let's go find your body."

8:48 PM.

Gotham had, perhaps, more morgues than the average city. And who could blame them? If you lived in a city where death came this cheap, why not set up shop as the middleman for the reaper? 

The Tchoors, like many who died with no relatives to their claim, were destined for an indigent cremation on the state of New Jersey's dime, at about five hundred dollars a head. The morgue they were put up in generally attempted to cut its costs down by burning in bulk, so for the moment, the Tchoor family was in frozen storage in the nearest morgue in Brideshead, the upper edge of Midtown, just across the Sprang Bridge from Precinct 12.

Was the Sprang Bridge haunted? No more than any other. There had been enough passages through it, both the ordinary and final kind, willing and unwilling -- you can probably guess -- but there were no goatmen or women in white to defend or guard it in turn. Bridges are just bridges. Man connects what nature separates.

Nevertheless, guided by the ghost of an eight-year-old girl clinging to his back, Damian couldn't help but feel like cold water was splashing down his spine as he sped across the bridge into Midtown, on their way to break into a morgue. Before them, in the rapidly darkening night, Gotham blazed in light. Halloween for other cities meant children in the streets and costumes and candy, but, for obvious reasons, this wasn't the case for Gotham. Instead, on one night of the year, everyone turned on all the lights and huddled together for safety, praying they'd make it through the night. Gotham didn't forsake all the trappings of the season though; Damian wouldn't realize until he was much older that the gourds that people left on their doorsteps were seasonal traditions in the whole country, rather than some kind of adaptation measure the residents of the city had developed in the face of constant supervillain-hood.

Layal tapped his shoulder and whispered in his ear, "It's coming up ahead," her voice almost snatched away by the jealous wind. Damian nodded and slowed to a stop, ditching Robin's motorcycle on the side of the road.

He snuck in on quiet feet, surveying the metal trays, racks of bodies waiting, covered by the sheets like sweets being hidden from flies. It was freezing, the chill air seeping in under his jacket and jeans, cold fingers tugging under his collar and around his ankles. Imagine the air of hospitals, air uncomfortably and septically pure and obviously recycled, the temperature just a little too low to ever be comfortable, and the drudging grey-blue tones of a place just slightly unnatural.

"Here," Layal said, standing over one of the trays. Damian came and slid it out and sure enough, the body underneath the plastic was that of an eight-year-old, average height for her age but looking unbearably small against a tray sized for adults. 

Without looking at Layal's ghost, Damian pushed the plastic away, revealing a mirror image in a stiff cadaver, the same eyebrows and cheeks and sharply sloped nose and thin lips replicated in perfect stillness.

Layal frowned, her hand coming up to her split open neck. Damian, who had known since he was much younger than Layal what his bones looked like split and poking up from his skin or what pink his flesh was under the blood and skin, did not understand the impulse. It was simply a cut, as clean as it could be, neck flayed open from chin to clavicle to reveal the gristle and red of her throat, the chords and muscle there butchered together like meat.

Still, he moved slightly in front of her, blocking her view as he picked the vial of attar out of his pocket. He unscrewed the cap, and the scent of roses spilled into the cold air, shocking in its out of place-ness. It felt too real, too vibrant and colorful, for a morgue.

There was a reason Layal had never been allowed to play with it, and a reason she never had, beyond the expense, beyond the history. For it was said that there was only one thing the djinn liked more than a good, strong perfume: the people who wore them.

Damian dropped one, two, three drops of attar onto the chest of Layal's corpse. Behind him, Layal shifted.

She had explained, feverish and rushed on their way to her home, her plan. It was cobbled together on stories, on snatches of folklore, on the whispers her father would give her on nights she refused to go to bed. Damian had thought it was utter ridiculousness, but he was doomed anyway, from the moment he accepted that Layal Tchoor was dead and before him as a ghost.

The vetala, Layal had insisted, could be summoned like any djinn, especially in a place so close to Antyesti . Damian had pointed out that a morgue of unidentified bodies awaiting mass cremation off the coast of New Jersey was a bit of a far cry from a burning ghat on the banks of the Ganges, but the details did not matter to Layal.

What mattered was that the vetala could tell the future, the present, and the past, and, if you were very lucky and even more clever, you could catch one in a corpse and if you passed its trials, you could ask it a question it would answer.

So here they were, dropping attar on a cadaver and hoping what came to it would help more than it hurt.

There was a tense few seconds when Damian swore he could feel the still and chill air move ever so slightly against the back of his neck, and then the corpse before him opened its eyes.

There was nothing off about the vetala's appearance as it moved to sit up, exhibiting neither the stiffness that one would expect from a three-day-old corpse in rigor mortis, nor any outward markings of the supernatural. No glowing eyes, no wicked grin, only the look of a young girl who would have seemed perfectly usual if it weren't for a throat, flayed open, and the beginnings of an autopsy scar visible. That was the secret of the vetala, of all djinn; when they took a human form, there were never many ways to tell. The djinn were shapeshifters, perfect in all ways but one: their feet would point backward.

As for the vetala? They could only take corpses, wearing the expired living as a suit.

"Hello," said the vetal, smiling like a child, looking exactly like Layal behind him. "Damian al Ghul."

Damian snuck a glance over his shoulder. Layal looked pale, as if she hadn't thought far enough ahead to the prospect of seeing another creature wear her own corpse as a suit, and now that it was before her, she seemed a half-second from bolting. He hoped she wouldn't.

"I've come," he said, clearing his throat and faking confidence he didn't have, "to ask a question."

The vetala smiled a little wider. "Oh, excellent," she said, the glee of an eight-year-old in her voice. She clapped her hands, and Damian thought he might be sick. He rallied, taking a deep breath.

"I do," he said. "You will ask me a riddle. I have three tries. If I get it right, I may ask."

"Mm," the vetala pouted. "You've been listening to the newer stories, haven't you? That's not it at all."

She leaned in conspiratorially, the half-light from the windows glinting off the long crusted gristle of her throat. "You do get three tries," she whispered, her cold hand to Damian's ear and her lips like a dead fish, air whistling out of her throat as she spoke. "These are the rules."

"If you cannot answer the question correctly, I consent to remain in captivity, and you may ask me what you wish. If you know the answer but still keep quiet, then your head shall burst into thousand pieces. And if you answer the question correctly three times? Well, then I will get to drink your blood dry."

"That," Damian said, "is stupid. Why would I lose if I was right?"

The vetala shrugged. "It has been the rules for longer than our grandfathers, little demon's child. Even yours."

Damian glanced back at Layal, who had shut her eyes, her little hand firmly clasped around her throat, the gore still seeping off the edges where her palm provided no cover. She would be no help. He turned back to the vetala, the mirror image, all little girl smile and unashamedly exposed throat.

"Then start," he said, sealing his fate.

First, the vetala asked:

"There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first. What are they?"

And Damian responded, "Night and day," and the vetala held up one finger.

Second, the vetala asked:

"There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?"

And Damian responded, "A school," and the vetala held up a second finger.

Finally, the vetala asked:

"It goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening. What is it?"

And Damian responded, "Anything."

The vetal shrieked in rage, suddenly unmistakeable for a child, all immortal, inhuman fury. Damian, eyes on the fingers, spoke calmly.

"I could not answer correctly," he said, "and therefore I win."

"I told you," the vetala hissed, "claim to not know the answer when you truly do, I will take your head. You knew ."

"But I didn't claim to," Damian said, and prayed desperately that his gambit would pay off. "You never said I couldn't lie. Only that I couldn't stay silent."

"Cheater," the vetala said, leaning in very, very close to him. Damian wished desperately for his sword, even if he knew nothing would save him from the wrath of a vetala. Nothing, of course, but the rules.

"You cannot take my head," he said, "or my blood. I did not lose."

The vetala hissed and shrieked and screamed and came back to itself all at once, calming down and giving Damian that little kid look that at once had him jerking back to his feet.

"You did not win, either. You only half passed my trials," the vetala said, still giving him a considering look. "So, ask me a question. It doesn't do to reward cheaters, but I may honor the clever how I see fit. I will give half answer."

Damian turned back to look at Layal. She still had not opened her eyes or taken her hand off her throat, but he could see she was listening. Her shoulders had hunched forward.

"Who killed Layal Tchoor," he asked, "and how do we find them?"

The vetala hummed. "I will tell you," it said, "that Jonathan Crane did not kill your friend. But, your friend's parents?" The vetala looked over to Layal, her hunched form and her shuddering breaths. "Let us just say, there is a reason why they hid some of Crane's newest concoctions in a box of their inheritance."

The vial. The small vial, in the box, odorless and colorless and familiar. Damian straightened up and turned on Layal, the real Layal. "Your parents worked with Scarecrow?" he asked, accusing, and Layal shook her head. 

"No," she said. "No, that isn't true."

The vetala looked at its temporary mirror image and smiled, childishly empty. "It is, kid."

Damian turned back to the vetala. "How do we find them?" he asked again, angry at the placid look on the thing's face. On Layal's face, stolen or borrowed, or given with grudging permission. He suddenly wanted it to get angry again: it would be less terrifying.

"Cheater," the vetala said, "what makes you think I'll give you more than this half an answer? If you truly want more," it said, considering, "you will have to pass another three trials. Catch a bird."

"What does that even mean? " Damian asked, profoundly sick of this fairytale logic game. The vetala smiled with all its little kid teeth, some missing with no chance of ever growing back in again, and abruptly left the body. Layal's corpse fell back on the tray with a thud, devoid of life once more.

"Dammit!" Damian snarled, kicking at the metal tray. It rang out. Layal was crying behind him: he couldn't hear more than the occasional sniffle, but he could feel disgust creeping up his spine.

"Stop crying," he said, rounding on her. "Don't be so weak."

Layal looked at him, still sniffling, but there were no tears in her eyes or snot in her nose. She was desiccated and dead and only eight years old, small and pathetic and pitiable and painful to look at, her little hand clutching at her jaggedly ripped throat. Damian winced and cast about for something else because he had no idea what to do with the sudden stab of guilt he felt.

Roughly, he grabbed for a roll of gauze that lay abandoned on a table near to them.

"Layal," he said, "come here."

Layal sniffled louder and more angrily. "Don't tell me what to do! You are so mean," she said. Damian sighed and took the roll with him, walking over with it in hand. He knelt slightly before her so they were on a more even footing, and rolled the thing out in his hands. Slowly, he dislodged her hand and began wrapping the gauze around her neck, motioning for her to pull her hair up so he could make unimpeded passes around her head. With each turn, a slice of the red gore was covered up a little more fully by the white ribbon. 

Damian tied it off with a bow, frivolous but fitting, he thought.

"Don't take it off," he said, standing up. 

Layal fingered at the bow and sniffed, though part of her lips seemed about ready to quirk into a smile. "Not for anyone," she promised.

9:15 PM

Damian crept, once again, into Layal's old home. This time, though, it was like a dam had broken, and Layal's words would flood from her mouth like the Nile rising out of its bed, pouring down onto Damian's head. He already regretted giving her the gauze. It was clear that now that she didn't hear the whistle of her own throat as she spoke, Layal very much enjoyed speaking.

"-- and my amma said that she tried to get a job, but nobody here trusted her degree, so she had to learn how to clean another woman's house, and she used to take me and I'd sit on the couch in another woman's house and I'd move my legs when amma needed to vacuum under it. She asked me to do that, a lot of the time. Move my legs. I don't know where she got the vacuum, though."

Damian sighed. He had to carefully lever windows open and sneak in without leaving his prints anywhere, which meant his focus was exclusively on the window before him and not on telling Layal to shut up. Layal, on the other hand, could walk through walls without blinking, and therefore had all the attention in the world to devote to not shutting up.

"I don't really know what my baba did, though," she said, and that finally made it through Damian's head. "He met my amma in university. She was the only girl in his whole chemical engineering lecture, and baba says that all the men tried to ask her out on a date, one after another, and on the fiftieth day, my baba asked my amma, and that was the first time she said yes ." Layal said all this with the air of recitation.

"Sounds embellished," Damian grunted. He dropped to his feet in the Tchoor's living room, spotting Layal already standing in front of the mantelpiece. There were portraits displayed above it, but Damian would have had to walk closer to see what was depicted in those. He didn't; he could guess.

Instead, he went back for the loose floorboard near the kitchen, prying it loose with his hands as Layal kept chattering.

"Did your father disappear often?" Damian asked, sounding absentminded, hoping his lack of interest would inspire Layal to speak even more. He was raised to be more assassin than detective, but that didn't mean he was incapable. Already, he could see a half-formed picture in his mind's eye: two university-educated young adults with a child on the way, who suddenly were facing a lifetime of chronic underemployment in a foreign country that did not respect their degrees. 

Of course, there would be plenty of need for a chemical engineer among Scarecrow's ranks, never mind the name of the school on the resume.

"Not too often," Layal said, "but he worked nights. Long nights. He said the factory worked him late, but he would ask to come home just in time to tell me a story and tuck me in. He was a good father."

"Hm," Damian muttered. "He told you too many stories."

Layal shrugged. "He was right about the vetala."

Damian pulled the wooden box back out and turned it over, considering. "What other stories did he tell you?"

Layal shrugged, moving forward to kneel across from him.

"The normal ones," she said. "The Jackal King. Scheherezade, Amir Hamza. Sometimes about Akbar and Birbal."

"Birbal," Damian said, looking up over the box. It really did look like the mehndi on a girl's hands. "Funny. I always heard about Mulla Do-Piyaza."

Layal looked at him. "Different people tell different stories," was all she said before Damian suddenly leaped to his feet, box in hand. 

"What-"

Damian hushed her, hand waving in her direction. Surprisingly, Layal actually fell silent. Silent enough for them to hear the sound of a window being very cautiously opened, the ghost of footsteps too soft for anyone to hear -- anyone who wasn't already on edge and trained from birth for that sort of thing besides.

He didn't have time to move. From far too close, right behind his back, right over his shoulder, a woman's voice came.

"Found you."

Chapter Text

8:58 PM.

Should anyone have peered outside their windows, squinting past the glare of a home lit up into the deep night outside, they would have borne witness to the flock of bats descending upon the city as one.

In less poetic terms? 

There were six mildly injured vigilantes who were absolutely panicking through the city.

"Shit," Jason mumbled, his wrenched arm twinging too painfully for his grip to keep. He immediately tried to save face, going again for a better grip and failing again. In front of his family. He hoped none of the eagle-eyed freaks-for-siblings he had noticed his struggles, which, of course, had never worked out for him once in his entire life.

"Batgirl," Dick said, coming up behind him. "Just pick Blackbird up so we can get on with it."

"Fuck you," Jason shot back. "I can handle it."

Cass didn't give him a chance. Jason found himself abruptly picked up in a fireman's carry and slung over his sister's shoulder, looking directly into the grinning eyes of her girlfriend.

"Sure you can, Phoenix and the Turtle," Steph said, laughter in her voice. She flitted ahead, pulling her mask down briefly to drop a kiss onto the forehead of Batgirl's mask, and twisted to fire a grappling line. Steph had only been training for half a year, and she already had the line thing down. Jason, on the other hand, had been at this for nearly half a decade and he still managed to wrench his arm out of his socket a few weeks ago, fighting some winged freak Bludhaven had decided to throw at them.

"I hate her," he informed his sister. "You should break up with her. She does not have the family's approval."

Cass grunted. Jason had the sneaking suspicion that his venerated elder brother-ly advice was not being listened to.

He waved in disgruntled commiseration at Tim, who wasn't being actively carried by Dick but was about one step away from it based on how closely Nightwing was sticking to Robin. Tim, behind his mask, rolled his eyes at Jason.

Then he nearly stumbled on the lip of a roof and Jason narrowed his eyes and tapped Cass's shoulder -- the one he wasn't currently occupying -- and whispered, "Did you see that?"

She nodded, because of course she saw that. Steph had clearly heard as well because she turned to look at Tim, who had pinwheeled just a little and would have overcorrected if Dick hadn't been there to firmly push him back in place.

Jason and Cass's eyes, however, were on Dick. Dick, who had the ever-so-slightest hitch in his step, something that would have looked completely undetectable on the ordinary person and was barely even noticeable in his stride as it was.

"Stupid," Cass muttered. "All of you. Except Spoiler."

Steph grinned and blew her a kiss.

"Hey," Jason protested, then winced when Cass sneezed, jostling his bad shoulder. Point, intentional or otherwise, taken.

"Did anyone have a tracker on him?" Dick asked once they'd all gathered together on a rooftop and Cass had thankfully put Jason down in favor of gravitating towards her girlfriend. 

Tim frowned. "Batman probably does but-" he cut himself off and winced. "We probably shouldn't tell Batman."

"Oracle's off-limits too," Dick said. "She's sympathetic, but if she pops onto our comm system to help, B will notice that she isn't with him anymore."

"Cool," Steph said. "Don't tell your dad. Got it. So, anyone know how we can find the kid?"

Tim clicked away at his little mini-computer. "Well, he took my bike. And I definitely have trackers on that one."

"Can you locate it?" Dick asked, and Tim nodded, distracted and already working on it. 

"Looks like he left it in Precinct 12," Tim said.

"Rikersville," Steph corrected, and Jason nodded along. "I know the place. It's in southern Uptown."

"Great," Dick said. "You take Tim and Cass, go get him. Jason and I'll run interference."

"Interference?" Tim asked. "What are you expecting?"

Jason and Cass were so busy exchanging looks -- you keep him safe, I'll keep the other -- that they missed the identical looks Dick and Tim were sharing.

"Honestly," Dick said, "I have no idea what trouble B's kid might have gotten himself into. Let's go find out."

9:26 PM.

The tracer led them all to a row of unassuming townhouses, each nestled shoulder to shoulder with one another, the alternating colors striating against each other. Left abandoned on the other end of the street was Robin's motorcycle, which Tim immediately dropped down to check for damage. 

"Surprised nobody's tried to jack it for parts," Jason said, hunching down near Tim. Rikersville wasn't a bad neighborhood, per se, but it certainly wasn't rich enough that a well-maintained motorcycle could spend too long undisturbed. "I'd have taken a tire iron to it."

"Don't be annoying," Dick said.

"He's right, though," Tim said, ignoring Jason's little damn straight, I am. "The GPS signal history indicates that it hasn't been here for a while, so Damian must be in the area."

Dick nodded and gestured to Cass and Steph who were already crossing the street to inspect the windows of the townhouses. All of the homes had their curtains drawn tight, light leaking out from behind them. All but one.

"Who wants to bet he's in there?" Steph asked, pointing.

She and Cass didn't wait for Dick's confirmation, already going on ahead to the dark building. Dick sighed and turned to Tim, who had straightened up, overbalancing slightly. He had winced and pinched the bridge of his nose behind his mask, and Dick had pulled enough weeks on a couple of hours of stolen naps to know what that meant. 

"There's no convincing you to go back home and go to bed, is there?" he asked Tim. Tim snorted.

"I could ask the same of you," he said. "Feeling headaches or dizziness yet?"

"Save it for Leslie," Dick said, motioning towards the townhouse across the street. The girls were already in the process of sliding the window open from the outside, working together in perfect concert. "We're getting Damian and then you are going straight to bed."

"Or what?" Jason asked sardonically, watching the younger kids scurry off. He couldn't quite shake the feeling that something was watching him, and he kept his eyes on the windows of the other townhouses, light spilling through their cracks. "You're gonna tell Batdad on them?"

"You're not getting off easy either," Dick said. "We get home, I'm gonna get Cass to sit on you 'til I can get a sling on your shoulder."

"Man," Jason said. "Can't you fight your own battles?"

If you have ever spent any amount of time with boys above the age of 14 and under the age of 25, you can probably guess that this devolved into a squabble over who could kick who's ass. We'll leave them to it; they've already had this argument five times this week alone.

Meanwhile, Tim was third-wheeling his sister, which was awkward the first few times, and was, frankly, still awkward for him now. He wasn't feeling it at the moment, however, for a few reasons.

If you have never had to pull three or more all-nighters in a row, either because you had to complete a final engineering project for college in the school library-cum-dungeon, or because you were leading a double life as a vigilante-detective solving cases and working as the seventeen-year-old CEO heir-apparent of Wayne Industries, here's what you should know about sleep deprivation.

Your eyes only stay open through willpower. It is like a not-too-heavy weight in your hands; you were asked by the hare to hold it for a moment and then learned that you must lift it forever lest the world come to an end. Not the weight of the sky upon your shoulders, or anything so dramatic as that. Just the long, slow, inexorable push downwards from a weight modest and sizable. Even the smallest burden, given time, can crush.

Also, at the 72-hour mark, one can begin to experience false memories, hallucinations, tremors, and the comparable cognitive impairment of someone who just took twelve shots of liquor in a row. That's the more important bit, but it just sounds so clinical. 

Regardless, Tim was facing quite a lot of those problems at the moment. His thoughts were slow and fuzzy, and his eyes, usually observant and careful, were scratchy with sandman's dust. He couldn't quite trust everything he saw, and he was hearing noises nobody else did. He took longer than either Cass or Steph had to lever himself into the townhouse, which meant he missed whatever inciting incident led to the almighty crash to come from the depths of the house. 

He heard the screaming though. It seemed like that was always happening around Damian.

Tim turned the corner, only to be greeted by a sight he did not have to be particularly smart to have predicted. Damian was sprawled out against the side of a counter, defensive posture and hand on a glass thing -- Tim didn't catch a good look at it, Damian was moving too fast -- and Cass was perched like a gargoyle on the top of the counter across from him, right behind Steph, who was standing upright like a normal person. Damian's eyes were wide and wild. Tim thought perhaps that the fear gas hadn't worn off as much as he assumed earlier at the Manor. His eyes kept flicking to the empty corner.

"Shit, kid," Steph said. "Calm down. You're not in trouble yet."

"What--" Damian gasped, then wildly jerked his head to the doorway, catching sight of Tim. "What are you doing here?"

Steph raised an eyebrow. It was clearly visible because, unlike the rest of them, she had something against domino masks, even though Tim thought they were far superior. At least everything he said didn't sound constantly muffled.

"Could ask you the same thing," Steph said. She turned her head and clearly was taking in the surroundings. Tim could have kicked himself -- he hadn't even absorbed anything about their surroundings, so focused on staying awake and keeping one foot in front of the other.

There was a bowl of overripe fruit in the corner. The bananas were rotting. The air was stale and undisturbed, and there was dust collected under the stove and sticky stains from a spill that had evaporated rather than been cleaned up. The counters bore the glistening tracks that spoke of being wiped down, but a while ago.

"How long has this place been abandoned?" asked Steph, clearly coming to the same conclusion Tim had. "A week?"

"Two days," Tim said, pointing to the calendar pinned to the side of the refrigerator with a magnet. The last day crossed off on it was October 29th.

"Hm," Steph turned to Damian. "Is this, like, ninja business? If it's ninja business, I rescind what I said about not being in trouble."

Cass nodded behind her. "Ninjas bad," she said. And left it at that.

Damian swallowed, before apparently recovering his bravado. Pity. Tim had preferred him in those previous minutes, too scared to start sniping at them.

"You should already know," he said, his chin coming up as he picked himself off the floor, brushing himself off in wholly unnecessary motions. "After all, it's a case that none of you can solve. Simply proof of your--" and Tim cut him off before he could go on another spiel about inferiority and genetic preeminence that he swore the boy must have been ripping off of the Victorians.

"The Tchoors," he said. Cass turned and tilted her head at him, her preferred method of masked communication. "Family. Mother, father, and eight-year-old girl. They were all killed three days ago. No clues as to who did it, or why. Batman's been looking into it."

Cass nodded. Steph simply looked considering before turning to Damian. "So, what did you find?"

Damian's hand spasmed over whatever he had in his pocket.

"What do you mean?" He asked, clearly trying to play whatever he had off.

"You opened with 'a case none of you can solve,' so you think you can. Something brought you here, and there's gotta be a reason why you picked this open case out of all the ones in the city. Clearly, you think you have some kind of information that the rest of us don't."

Damian snarled a little at that, though that just seemed to be his default state. Cass hopped off the counter and drew closer.

"What's in his hand?" she signed. Steph leaned forward herself to take a closer look. Damian then turned his snarl to her.

"Hey," Steph snapped back. "Do not bite me."

"Why would I--" Damian looked so disgusted, Tim almost had to laugh.

"Just show me what's in your hand," Steph said, her already oft lacking patience running out on her.

Damian hesitated, his shoulders hunched forward, before finally withdrawing his hand from his pocket. Tim had been right; it was something glass.

"Shit," he said, looking at a small vial of fear gas. He tapped his comm. "Guys, you should come in and see this. I think we have a problem."

One of the two eldest outside tapped his comm twice on the other end -- Message received. Meanwhile, Cass faced Damian, her demeanor stoic. "Where did you get that?" she signed.

Damian looked frustrated, with a blank lack of understanding. 

Steph took pity on him, explaining, "She uses ASL to communicate. She asked you--"

"Oh," Damian said, his voice going little-kid-nasty. "Can Cain's experiment not speak for herself? She must have been a fail--"

"That's enough," Steph said, her voice shockingly hard. Tim didn't think he'd ever heard Cass's girlfriend sound like that. Cass's hand was on her bicep, though Steph moved pretty obviously to keep herself in between the two, as if she could physically block Damian's words. "Don't ever talk about Ca- Batgirl like that."

Tim didn't feel particularly sympathetic himself. He would have been perfectly happy sitting back and letting Steph rip him a new one, as she was clearly gearing up to do, but the fact still remained: Damian had a vial of fear gas, and they needed to know from where.

He glanced at Cass, and she nodded to Damian's hand. The tightness of her shoulders and the strength of her grip on Steph's arm didn't go unnoticed, but he acquiesced when she signed "Ask him ."

"Damian," he said. "We're getting off track. Where did you get that?"

Damian still looked hesitant, so Tim added: "Either you tell us, or you don't and we knock you out and take you home tied up." Cass seemed up for it either way if the way she casually cracked her knuckles was any indication.

That, of course, was the moment their older brothers entered the situation.

10:02 PM.

Several explanations later, half of which had to be pried out of Damian with what one could say was a metaphorical crowbar, everyone was up to speed. Mostly. Damian had still judiciously omitted the whole part about the ghost of the girl following him around and commenting on everything he was doing, on account of the whole him being fear gassed and the remnants of the LSD trip from hell still possibly in his system. Layal was a lot of things, but a hallucination, Damian assumed, was not one of them.

Neither, he hoped, was the small bluejay following them around. He'd noticed it in the corners of his vision, fluttering away as he moved his head, but it had, for some reason, been emboldened when the entire gaggle of castaways his father took in had come into this comparatively small kitchen, like the vetala had conspired with the universe at large to make one long joke about gaggles of birds. He hated it on principle.

The bird flitted, mostly around Steph and partially around Jason, as they all carefully picked their way around the one floor home, recently abandoned. Tim sat, hunched over the wastepaper basket he'd upturned, sorting through the various receipts. He did something on his computer that, frankly, we all don't care enough about the specifics of to break the suspension of disbelief for.

Damian, stuck under the watchful gaze of Cass, could do nothing about the fact that the bird suddenly flitted over to Tim as he tapped away at the interface on his forearm. He did note, though, that the bird seemed to act just like Layal; lifelike enough until it moved a wing straight through a solid wall or countertop without any signs of resistance.

He considered his situation. The only one paying attention to him at the moment was Cass, told by the eldest of his father's collection of orphans to keep an eye on Damian, but he also knew that Cass had the most limited means of speech. She could barely understand English, and could not read at all, based on the way he'd seen her eyes glaze unseeing over text, most of the opportunities he'd had to observe her in the Manor. That was probably why she was not aiding the other orphans in their investigations. The blonde incompetent's focus was entirely on the calendar pinned against the wall, while the eldest was in the living room, on the comm with someone else, possibly conferring with the Oracle. Todd was meandering in and out of the bedrooms, clearly searching through for clues, while Tim had the attar-box with him and was, as mentioned earlier, doing something incomprehensible with technology. Damian didn't care.

He watched Layal as she flitted around after the bird. She had gotten close to catching it a few times, but after the third time her hands closed around its breast only to slip right through, she had given up. The bird did not seem to react to anything but Damian, incorporeal to everyone else. The vetala had definitely not mentioned that part.

Damian was so caught up trying to figure out a way around the bird -- how would he catch something that could fly through nets, unbothered by rocks? -- that he didn't even notice when Stephanie Brown put down the calendar she was looking at, made eye contact with Cass, and, after a brief and signed conversation, let the other girl wander over to peer over Tim's shoulder. He did notice when the blonde settled heavily down next to him, exhaling as she slid down the wall. She didn't look at him, tilting her head back to look at the ceiling instead.

"So, kid," she opened. "What's your deal?"

Damian frowned. "My deal?"

"Yeah, you know," Steph waved her hand. "Heard about the villain mom. I can kinda relate. Shit childhood?"

He wasn't sure why he was so shocked at the girl's bluntness and lack of tact, but either way, the plain manner in which she'd summed up Damian's whole inheritance, his world from birth to age ten, jarred him. Villain mom?

"My mother was nothing like Arthur Brown," he told her, and she raised her eyebrows, but didn't turn to look at him or even speak. He kept going. "My mother is one of the best, and she expected nothing less than so from me. You all cannot begin to compare."

Her eyes crinkled up a little. "I know what that's like," she said. "Wanting so desperately to impress."

"And I suppose you fail more often than not," Damian said because lashing out had always been his favorite defense. "What do you even contribute to your and Cain's partnership?"

Steph shrugged. "Honestly, I just follow her around and watch her do some cool shit and then tell everyone else about it."

Damian clicked his tongue against his teeth, shaking his head. He watched Layal, who had given up on the bird wholly and was wandering her home, with something in her face that reminded him of the day his mother told him he was going to come with her to Gotham and never go back.

"I don't understand you," Damian said. "You are the weakest fighter here, including even Drake. Does that not shame you?"

"Uh," Steph said. "My girlfriend can kick Batman's ass. I don't really feel the need to compete."

"If you are not the best, you are a failure."

Steph shrugged. "There's stuff she's good at, and stuff I'm good at. Neither of us has to be the best at everything. That's why we're partners. She does all the kickass punching, and I can follow up with the quips and puns."

"What happens when she is not there? Can you not stand on your own? If you are weak, you will never have control. You'll always be at the mercy of the benevolence of the strong."

"Man," Steph said. "If I knew this was going to descend into some Calliclesian dialogue, I would have made Jason talk to you instead."

"You're dodging the question."

Finally, Steph looked at him.

"Look, kid, I know what it's like to feel like you don't have any control. To feel like things are happening to you, and you'll never be strong enough to stop it. Here's the secret: you don't even have to play that game. Force doesn't always work, so long as you're clever."

"Ah," Damian said. "So you are the… brains to Cain's brawn."

"Nah," Steph snorted. "She's smart as hell. I'm just lucky."

At that moment, Tim put down his computer with a musical chime. The bird, drawn to the movement, hopped onto his shoulder, though only Damian and Layal could see it.

"Guys!" Tim said. "Come look!"

They all came to gather around Tim's screen, displaying a map with several digital push-pins dropped onto it.

"I noticed these receipts," he said, pointing to the array of flimsy paper in front of him, "all came from the same bodega in Cape Canaveral. Didn't make sense to me, because that's at least five miles out of the way, and I checked their tax forms: Ismael Tchoor was employed as a dockworker most of the time, while Malalai Tchoor worked as a maid, mostly in homes in northern Miller's Harbor. Both of those are too far from the Cape for either of them to go that far out of the way to buy a pack of smokes, biweekly at 11 pm on the dot."

"What's in Cape then?" Dick asked, leaning over to examine a receipt.

"Well," Tim said. "I checked the location of the bodega, and wouldn't you know? It's right across from Noonan's Bar."

"Scarecrow was sighted there in the previous weeks," Jason said. He looked over at Dick, who nodded.

"Batman corroborated. Also, he plans on yelling at all of us when we get home."

"You're the oldest," Jason said. "So he plans on yelling at you. "

"I have the car," Dick argued back. "I can just leave you guys."

"Wouldn't!" Cass protested. "Bad!"

"Guys," interrupted Steph. "I hate to do this again, but where's Damian?"

They looked around. The youngest was no longer in the room with them.

Dick sighed heavily through his nose. "Tim," he said. "Can you go get him?"

Don't worry. The boy didn't wander too far -- just back outside the window. He had a plan to catch the bird, and he really couldn't do it with an audience.

"What are you doing?" Layal asked, watching Damian. "Why did we leave?"

"Shh," he said crouching down. He didn't need to, but it felt like the right thing to do. The bluejay was there, standing along on the sidewalk, its little bird head tilted to the side. Damian licked his lips, then glanced at Layal.

"If you tell anyone about this, I'll kill you a second time," he promised.

"Tell who?" Layal said, wrinkling her nose. "I'm a ghost. "

Damian didn't listen. He thought to himself: if force doesn't work, be clever. He licked his lips again, then whistled. There were no bluejays in Kashmir to sing for Damian, but he had heard the calls of the golden eagles and the bearded vultures, and he could play an approximation.

He whistled, and the bird drew nearer. It was a bird song from a human's lungs, sure, but it wasn't quite the melody of the bluebirds. Perhaps it was more the sparrows' call, but I think we all know that most likely, a robin's song came from Damian's lips and brought the bird-that-was-not to his hands. It came within pouncing distance, stopped, and opened its beak to play the melody back.

Despite himself, Damian smiled. He whistled one last time, in concert with the bird, and it came hopping right into his hands. No rocks, no nets, no force required.

He closed his palms over the bird and smiled, feeling the beating of its small unreal heart against his hands.

"Good job, child," the bird said, in a voice so exactly like his mother's that he nearly could believe that she was there with him. Then again, it had been three weeks since he had last seen her, almost a month, and perhaps he had already begun to forget what the sound of his mother was. No matter.

"What words have you for me?" Damian asked.

"Beware," the bird said, "the changeling who stalks the night. The contents of your vial have been taken from his marrow, and he wants his blood back."

"Blood?" Layal asked.

"Would you know more?"

"Yes," Damian said, and tried not to make his frustration apparent. 

"Then catch the cat before she eats the canary," the bird said, too much smile in its voice to be a passable imitation of Talia anymore.

"What," Damian said flatly, "does that even mean."

"You have to find a cat," the bird said, losing its air of mysticism and defaulting to a hard Gotham accent. With that, it vanished. 

Layal turned to Damian.

"Do you think it meant Catwoman?" she asked. Damian couldn't answer, because at that moment, they were interrupted by a member of the living, this time.

"Oh, good," Tim said, moving forward. "You didn't get far."

Damian summoned up an air of disdain -- not particularly hard around the most recent of his father's orphans -- and scoffed.

"If I had wanted to leave," he said, "I would."

Tim didn't react. "Whatever," he said. "Do you still have the extraction?"

Damian's hand went straight to his pocket before he cursed himself; Tim's gaze behind the mask clearly tracked to his hand in his hoodie pocket. 

"Yes," he said, because there was no point in hiding it at this point.

Tim nodded. They stood around very awkwardly for a few seconds before he cleared his throat.

"Well," he said, "let's get back."

Neither Tim, who had an excuse, nor Damian, who didn't, noticed Layal sitting down on the sidewalk, watching Tim with her anachronistically old eyes.

Chapter Text

9:51 PM.

The fastest way to get to Cape Canaveral from Rikerville was to take the elevated light rail. Vigilantes did it a little different from the rest.

"So," Jason called over the wind, clinging like a spider to the roof of the train car. "Are we having fun?"

"No!" Steph shrieked. Next to her, Cass vigorously nodded her head, a gleeful smile on her exposed face. They were both clutching each other.

Behind them, firmly held in place by Dick's hand on the scruff of his hoodie, Damian crossed his arms and tried to get a little more comfortable. It was hard; shockingly enough, the roofs of trains were not really meant for sitting on. Layal was sitting next to Tim, who was perched against the side, absentmindedly kicking his boots against the edge of the train to release the mud and dirt caking them. Damian tried not to acknowledge the irritation he felt over the ghost girl's sudden switch in focus.

"Alright," Dick said, addressing the circle. "What do we know so far, and what are we looking for?"

"Is this the sharing circle?" Jason asked. "Because--"

Steph interrupted him with excitement. "Starting in July of this year, biweekly meetings have been marked on their calendar. Three guesses where those must have been, and the first two don't count."

Dick nodded. "Good work," he said, and Steph grinned -- you could see it in the way her eyes crinkled. Damian refused to acknowledge the way the whole ceremony, the air of routine, the way it felt everyone else knew a procedure he wasn't privy to, made him feel very uncomfortable. He didn't want to think about how his father had probably taught them all to break down scenes like that; his father, who had barely glanced at him in the weeks he'd been trapped in that Manor, descendants from a side of the family he'd never known glaring down at him from portraits. 

"They were fairly recent immigrants," Dick added. "The pictures of them on their bedside table are in Srinagar more than in Gotham. College graduates, both of them, but underemployed."

"Biochemical engineering, specifically," Jason said. "They kept a few of their old textbooks. Most of them were on the bottom row of their bookshelf, but I found one on their nightstand. Neurochemistry."

"Scarecrow," Tim said. Dick frowned.

"Timelines don't match up," he said. "You said the meetings started in July?"

Steph nodded. "Week of July 26th." 

"Scarecrow doesn't break out of Arkham until September 17th. That's two months of meetings unaccounted for."

"It is Crane's formula," Damian said with conviction. "It is what he gassed me with."

Dick watched him for a few seconds, masked eyes penetrating. Then, he turned to Cass.

"He believes it," Cass said.

"It is," Tim piped up. "I got it from him when I went to get him, and I checked."

Damian stiffened but did not say anything. Cass was watching him still, without Tim even in her peripherals, because these idiots didn't know how to use a living lie detector at all. He couldn't exactly deny Tim without risking coming off as petulant at best and suspicious at worst, especially given their previous history.

"Damian," Dick said. "Do you still have the vial?"

"Do not," Layal suddenly said, her voice ringing out, unaffected by the wind, "give the vial to Timothy Drake."

Damian had very few options. There was no way he'd be able to keep the vial. They'd take it from him somehow, and he had no reason to demand it back.

He pulled it from his pocket and thrust it at Dick. "Here," he muttered. Layal didn't complain, so clearly whatever she had against Tim did not apply to the other orphans. He wished, desperately, he could ask her right then what she was thinking. He settled instead for watching Tim, whose expression -- lips pressed into a thin line, posture stiff and exact -- deliberately gave nothing away.

Tim reached over. "Can I get it?" He asked.

"Why?" Damian cut in before Dick could hand the vial over.

"Oh," Tim said, "I think I can run a few more tests."

"You already did though," Damian lied. "Remember?"

"It's not really like you to miss something the first time," Dick said, frowning at Tim. "Are you sure you're good to keep going?"

Cass suddenly turned to Dick. " You hold on to the vial ," she signed at him. " Something is wrong. With both of them."

Dick looked at the two youngest, both of whom were too busy having a staring contest with the other to notice their own conversation. They were interrupted when Jason leaned over.

"Worry later. We're here; time to jump."

10:47 PM.

In the ensuing shuffle, Damian had been handed off to Jason, who had been firmly told by everyone else to stay as a lookout on top of the nearest building and not aggravate his recovering shoulder any more than it already was. Damian had not figured this out yet, but Dick had realized that his propensity for running off, combined with his previously demonstrated stabbiness and his fidgety, recently-fear-gassed demeanor, meant he was the most effective tool he had to get one of his stubborn, injured siblings to sit still.

Speaking of: Cass sneezed wetly next to him. She had had to pull up the mask, exposing her nose and mouth to the world, on his suggestion: he'd known from the short experience he'd had in full-face masks that sneezing in them was just disgusting. The perils and pitfalls of vigilantism.

"Doing okay?" he asked her as she sniffled, rubbing her nose with a tissue. Cass's answering frown only emphasized the way the skin right under her nose had gone red with rubbing. Dick threw up his hands in a gesture that screamed, sorry I asked, and Cass, spurred on by his own theatricality, hunched her shoulders and poked him back.

"Concussion," she accused. "Makes your head slow. Steph said. Not okay."

"That's why I have you, isn't it?" Dick signed back. "Tell me what you see?"

"Many people," Cass signed, "are waiting for something. Can't tell what."

They were perched delicately in the rafters like good little bats, hunched over and watching the situation below them. Below them, Steph and Tim were making rounds, their costumes carefully covered by jackets and hoodies and their masks stashed away in their pockets. In Steph's case, a brown wig and some heavy application of brow pencil managed to change the lines of her entire face; a trick that she'd clearly shown Cass at some point, seeing as she'd trusted the other girl to put it on her.

The bar was the sort of seedy, run-down joint that seemed like it'd never had a good run in the million years it was open. Ask anyone, and they'd tell you that there was never a time in the history of the city that this specific corner spot, this hole-in-the-wall watering-hole, was not a bar. Sure, it'd changed owners a couple dozen times a decade, but that was all just set dressing.

Noonan's Bar, which was named after the third-to-last owner -- the most recent few were just too lazy to change the name on the paperwork -- was a favorite late-night spot for exactly the kind of people you would imagine. The floor was sticky with so many spilled drinks that it had formed a lacquer of sorts, which beat the alternative: there were sections of still ancient carpeting that harbored so many various fluids, it may have begun to cultivate completely new forms of life. 

Sometimes, they had an enterprising young man with a guitar set up in the corner, playing something a little older than him. Robby, which was the only name anyone had ever had for him, hadn't always been particularly good at the guitar. He was a middling player at first, nothing special but nothing bad, either. Then, they said, a few years ago, he'd been on a road trip with his brother and came back with a devil's trill and the ability to play damn near any song from memory, a human jukebox with his head cocked to the side, hearing a ghost's humming tune. They say that on that fateful road trip with his brother, he'd been driving until he could find the first crossroads in New Jersey he could that was made of dirt.

No matter. He wasn't there that night, so instead, the ancient TV affixed to a corner was on, a spider web of cracks in it from the one time a particularly rowdy patron had tossed a remote at it in the aftermath of another loss for the Gotham Knights. Nobody was paying attention.

People chatted with each other here, pontificated at times, and never bought each other a round of drinks. The guarantee, in Noonan's Bar, was that nobody too famous would ever show up: at least, on the Bat's side of things, nobody too famous would ever show up in costume. Steph, far and away the most familiar of them all with the D-list villains and their rolodex of henchmen, was a bit of a regular herself, underage fake ID and all.

She had taken to this sort of interview work slowly at first, but, considering her usual partner's preferred demeanor in the field was "silent and terrifying," Steph had to learn eventually, and she learned well. Dick and Cass were far enough up and high enough away that they couldn't quite hear what exactly she was saying, but they could tell she was making good headway, flashing her bright smile around as she made her way through the bar, watching pool players with keen eyes. She'd probably introduced herself as Jackie, Jackie Mitchell, because she could never resist. Cass watched fondly as Steph made an absurd trick shot, bouncing one ball straight off an abandoned shot glass, all while still maintaining eye contact with her mark.

On the other end of the bar, "Alvin Draper" was having significantly more trouble. Dick watched, heeding Cass's earlier warning: Something was wrong with both Tim and Damian.

Dick wasn't sure why, but Tim's demeanor had shifted after they left the Tchoors' home. He had always been hesitant around Damian, unwilling to get too close, and Dick knew that whatever incident had happened the day before between the two had been serious enough that Alfred had given him a call at 3 in the morning about it. He understood the wariness. He understood the antipathy. He even thought he suspected what the underlying feelings Tim had were; he'd certainly gone through them enough with Jason's surprise adoption, even if the "blood son" angle was a bit new. It wasn't like Damian had particularly endeared himself to Dick, either.

But the face Tim showed Damian now was one Dick recognized. The cold calculation in his eyes, the unbending line of his lips. Tim, age fourteen and standing on the other side of the glass, asking questions in a monotone. All traces of his earlier fatigue were gone. Tim's expression now was vigilant, the kind he only ever got around a threat. And it seemed like he couldn't tear his eyes off Damian, the whole way to the bar.

Dick resisted the urge to reach for the vial of fear gas in his utility belt. The new formula -- different viscosity, clearer color, complete lack of odor whereas the classic fear gas had always smelled faintly of rust and sweat -- kept scratching at him. Scarecrow didn't reformulate unless he had to, and he always had trouble doing so. Crane was a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist, not a neurologist, so any change to his formula would require hiring a little outside help, something Crane had always hated. There had to be a significant enough motivator to make him willing -- that, or someone had forced him into it.

Break it apart, put it back together. Find the information, then form a theory. Dick was missing something, someone, one piece of information that would tie everything together.

"Guys," Steph's voice carried over through the comms, hushed and hurried. "I think that's Scarecrow in the corner. Like, I'm 85% sure."

At the same time, Jason's voice filtered through as well. "Also," he said, a little out of breath. "Damian's gone."

Dick closed his eyes and took one very deep breath. "You lost a twelve-year-old?" He asked. "Again?"

"Okay," Jason said. "I lost the little ninja child. Sue me."

"Sue you? I'm going to watch B kill you," Dick muttered.

"Hey, we all messed up the first time!" Jason protested. "And the second!"

Dick turned to Cass, who was already pulling her own mask down. "You help Spoiler and Robin with Scarecrow. I'll go get the kid."

Cass nodded. "Careful with your head," was all she had to offer.

10:55 PM

Nanga Parbat, and the small mountain cities below it, had always had packs of street dogs wandering through its streets, or, more often, sleeping on their sides, matted fur torn away in patches. They dotted the sidewalk and crossed the road, fearless of whatever motorcycles or rickshaws would come down the side, making nuisances of themselves whenever a stray cat yowled from a brick wall and they would all come in a clamor to meet it.

Gotham had none of that. No street dogs whatsoever, and the cats that did live among the city's narrow alleys had none of the self-assured cleverness in their eyes that the strays of Astore did, and all of the fear. No Sultan's crumb-eaters to be found here, in a city where the air was clouded by smog, not smoke. Everything smelled different here. Everything looked different here. 

So when Damian saw a cat climb up to the rooftop next to him, black with white mittens and luminous green eyes, starved but not skeletal and giving him the sort of knowing gaze of a creature nine lives and nine steps ahead, he knew that they both did not belong here. Layal turned and gasped.

"It's the cat!" she said. Damian resisted the urge to nod, aware of the man next to him, his eyes fixed on the solid world. He agreed, though: the cat upon that rooftop certainly seemed the type to eat a canary.

Cats cannot grin, but this one managed. It raised a paw in an unmistakable "follow me," gesture, and Damian wanted to curse as it dropped itself nimbly down into the alleyway between them. He, obviously, could not follow without Jason Todd next to him noticing. He needed a distraction.

< آکیا اپ اردو بولتے ہیں > he asked aloud, and Layal glanced at him.

< جی ہاں > she said, an odd intonation to her vowels that took Damian a second to recognize was an American accent, right as Jason turned slightly and frowned and said, "मैं थोड़ी हिंदी बोलता हूँ।," stretching his 'a's the exact same way.

That wasn't good.

Damian turned to Jason and decided to try plan B: engage in an uncomfortable emotional conversation.

"Just Hindi?" he asked, positioning so Jason's seated form was firmly in his peripheral vision. Jason was hunched over a pair of binoculars, his own eyes firmly fixed on the bar that the rest had disappeared into.

"A few more," he admitted. "Mostly Romance languages. I know some basic Arabic too."

Damian nodded. "Arabic, I think, was my first language. But they spoke Kashmiri, where I am from. And Urdu. English came later; Mother, after all, intended for me to come here and inherit this city."

Jason watched him. Damian waited for reciprocation; it would have to happen at some point. Then, Jason put down his binoculars and sighed. He pointed out, in the southeast direction, to a blurry grey smudge upon the horizon.

"I grew up there," he said.

"Crime Alley," Damian said immediately, "I know. I read it in your file."

"My fil-- whatever. It's Park Row, not Crime Alley. I'm from the German quarter." Jason had dropped his hand, but he was still sort of looking in the direction.

"At least, that's the old name for it. From the nineteenth century, when that stuff still mattered. Some of the old-timers around there still speak it, too. I learned a bit, growing up. My mom would -- she'd work late, so the neighbors, the oldest people I thought I'd ever seen, they'd babysit. Didn't speak much English, even after so long here."

He shook his head. "Anyways, people call it the Bowery now, not the German quarter. Makes sense. Not many Germans there anymore, anyways. I spoke Spanish more than anything else, 'cause of my mom."

"But you do know German?" Damian asked as he finished scratching out <توجہ پھیرنا> in the gravel behind him, right in Layal's vision, but blocked to Jason.

"Just the good stuff. Alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden ," Jason said. Damian had nothing to say in response, because Layal had crouched down to read his instructions, and decided that a perfect distraction would be throwing rocks at Jason.

Jason spluttered as rooftop gravel was kicked up in his direction, unable to see the little ghost girl flinging it at him. Damian sprung at the opportunity -- Jason was fairly thoroughly blinded but it would only last for a few seconds -- and jumped straight down into the alleyway. After a second, Layal fell down with him in the gloom.

When they touched feet to the ground, they were not in the alley anymore. Damian did not know this city well enough to say, but Layal shuddered, turning around, and said with the certainty of a native: "This is not Cape Canaveral."

"No," the cat agreed, watching with her bright green eyes. "It isn't."

"Where are we?" Damian asked, looking up. The buildings were taller than they had been before. He did not see Jason's figure above them, and he was sure that should he run into the store across the street, he would recognize none of the people inside.

The cat smiled. "The details are not important. You have something you wish to ask me."

Damian took a breath of air that smelled less of Gotham and more of a market in Astore, like achaar and attar, what the air smelled like when you could look down from the highest points on the planet and see the clouds arrayed below you.

"I do," he said. Layal, next to him, suddenly sucked air in past her teeth. Damian turned to see what she was looking at.

Behind them, arrayed among the indistinct shapes of the idea of an alley they were in, arranged in bands, were cats. Short-furred, matted and torn and skeletal, with spittle dripping and dropping from their fangs, each of the creatures looked hungrier than the last, more willing to act on their famine than the last.

"You know the tasks, yes?" The cat asked. Damian turned around to see a box proffered at its feet that hadn't been there before. He kneeled down to inspect it, while Layal asked.

"No," she said. "What are we supposed to do?"

"Little girl," the cat said, not unkindly, "the dead cannot win favors."

"Fine," Layal said, as Damian pried the wooden box open. On the inside cover was a carefully carved and enameled inlay -- the exact opposite design of the little attar-box that belonged once to Malalai Tchoor. "What is he supposed to do?"

Inside the box, glittering and winking in the scant half-light, was a whole jumble of pure, crystal clear, diamonds. They looked so perfect, it seemed almost as if he could put his hand in the box and would feel nothing but the frothing water of a clear brook. 

"Simple," the cat said, leaping to a ledge above them, its long tail curling under itself as it watched them. "Make it to the end of that alleyway with a box of diamonds, without it getting stolen. You get three tries."

"Simple," Damian said.

"What happens after the third try?" Layal asked, worry creeping into her voice. One of the nearby cats took a swat at her and she jerked away.

The cat smiled very very widely, in a way cats should not have been able to. Damian almost thought it would fade away, leaving nothing behind but its unnatural smile.

"Well, little boy, you are a far way from home, and we are very hungry. I suggest you not find out," said the cat.

Damian nodded firmly, tucking the box under his jacket and zipping it the rest of the way up. "I won't," he said, attempting to reassure Layal and communicate his confidence to the cat both in one go. He failed on both counts.

The alleyway stretched out beyond them, narrow and long. 

He took off running. Damian had spent years being drilled on this, running through the hottest and longest days of the year, sweat sticking to his back and no promise of water or a break, simply the thrumming push onwards, the ache in his legs and his back and the beat of his mother's words like a drumline. 

He ran through the alley, a wooden box of diamonds tucked under his arm, nestled in the fabric of his jacket, and he made it to the end of the alleyway.

Without the box. 

Damian blinked, reaching back down for where he'd tucked the wooden box away, and realized that at some point, in the space between steps, the sharp corners of the box had stopped digging into his ribs and the soft crook of his inner arm and elbow.

The cat clicked its tongue against its teeth, a little "-tt-" that should not have been anatomically possible for its mouth, but happened anyways. "Try again?" it asked, false sympathy in its voice. Damian swept his eyes over the alleyway before he saw the small calico, barely bigger than the box itself and half as wide, hunched over the corners of the wood, paying no attention to the way the box dug itself between the ribs he could count on each exhale.

"Yes," Damian ground out, crouching down before the starving calico and coaxing its claws away. "I will try again."

"What was your plan?" Layal shrieked at him from across the alley, shrill as any eight-year-old. "Did you think you were faster than a cat? "

Damian did not answer, looking up instead. The buildings crowding them in on either side still appeared to have the harsh, brutalist qualities of Gotham, but Damian's knowledge of the city came from maps and careful observation of photos and reports that had made their way across the ocean, and he only knew the city from a birds-eye view. Still, stealing a glance at the black and white cat who spoke with something more in its voice, he had a few sneaking suspicions.

"Is that a skip bin?" he called over to Layal walking back to the start of the alleyway. The cats resumed their positions, dotting the sides like sentinels. 

"Skip bin?" Layal frowned, glancing over at the indistinct rectangular shape next to her. "Do you mean dumpster?"

"Fine, dumpster," Damian said. "What's sticking out of it?"

Layal scrambled up to the dumpster and reported that there were several empty pizza boxes, fish bones in sardine tins, and one long sheathed object that Damian knew, before he even laid clear eyes upon it, was his sword. The sword, gifted to him when he was barely old enough to grip, that he'd sliced himself on, that he'd been taught to hold at the exact angle that would slip between ribs, that he was told by his mother, hand on his head, he would grow into.

He knew without even drawing closer that the leather wrapped upon the pommel would have imprints upon it, scratches and nicks and a drop of black paint, a pinprick accidentally dropped down from the small, circular, black handle. He knew without touching it that his fingers, a fraction of their promised adult size, would struggle slightly to wrap fully around it, his palm still too small to fully span it.

He surged forward and pulled his sword from its sheath and felt like the extra weight set something back off in him, tugging at his posture and bringing his shoulders forward again, his weight on the balls of his feet. Something forced itself back into place.

"What's the catch?" Layal asked, watching Damian carefully inspect his blade, testing the sharpness on the edge of his thumb. It split open like the skin of an overripe grape, ready to burst with just the slightest application of pressure. Damian put his thumb to his lips, wiping the blood off on his lower lip and tasting the familiar iron, and turned to watch the cat.

"There is no catch," the cat said. It did not smile. "But it will not help you."

Layal frowned at Damian. "You don't plan on hurting any of the cats with that, right?" she asked.

Damian raised an eyebrow. "Those cats are certainly planning on hurting us," he said, his lips twitching downwards as he delivered his words.

"You're going to kill cats?" Layal asked, scandalized.

"If it comes to that," Damian bluffed, his chin up. He adjusted his hand, still too small for the sword, still gripping it a little too hard. "But they seem easily frightened by any force. A cowardly and superstitious lot, perhaps."

The sword shined, too bright in the low light. The cats shied away from it, slinking and circling him. Damian held it at the ready in one hand, the box of diamonds cradled tightly to his chest in the other. Again, he made the walk from one end of the alleyway to the other, the grey-blue-black gloom stretching into eternity. The cats were shadows in his vision, skulking just close enough for Damian to have to whip his sword -- the flat side -- at them and send them scurrying back.

He walked slowly this time instead of running, remembering the lessons of his mother: how to stay silent enough that the breaths of others seemed like shouts in your silence, how to move with the sort of deliberation that kept your enemies on the defensive, how to stand and see in all directions at once, never to be taken by surprise.

He walked through the alley, a wooden box of diamonds tucked under his arm, nestled in the fabric of his jacket, and he made it to the end of the alleyway.

Without the box.

This time, when Damian turned around, his sword arcing wide with him, the cat curled around the box was a small orange tabby whose eyes were the biggest thing about it. It was a tiny furball of a thing, gazing up at him with blown-wide pupils, claws dug almost carefully into the hinges of the diamond box.

"I told you," said the black-and-white cat, still perched above them all, looking down into the alley. "The sword will not help. Shall you try again?"

"I have no choice," Damian said, looking up at the cat.

"This is an impossible task!" Layal protested. "How can you win against a ghost?"

Damian blinked. He whipped his sword at the nearest cat, who yowled but did not move out of the way -- rather, the sword simply passed through its mangy body like it was cutting fog.

"How indeed," the cat said.

Damian crouched forward once again, pulling the box from the small tabby's again incorporeal claws, and muttered to himself: "How indeed?"

He looked at Layal, then looked back to the skip bin.

"I'm going to tip this over," Damian told her. Layal stared.

"Have you lost your mind?" she asked. "Are you already resigned to failure?"

"I have never accepted failure as my fate," Damian said, too distracted by his task to say it with any bite. He successfully toppled the skip bin over, and out came the bounty inside it. Holding his nose, despite the fact that nothing in this alley had smelled like anything other than mountain air, he tossed out the tins of sardines at the cats. They skittered over them, clawing insubstantially at the tins, but that was not the point.

Behind the dumpster, Layal crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow at Damian.

"Well, genius," she said, "what's your plan?"

"Shh," he said, hunched carefully over the box. "Hand me some pizza boxes."

Layal humphed. "Say please."

Damian raised his head and stared at her. She did not budge.

"Please," he ground out. "Hand me a few pizza boxes."

Layal skipped over and, after a few tries, managed to get enough of a grip on the flat cardboard box that she could stack them under her arm and bring them over. She dropped them next to Damian, where they landed with a muffled whump.

"What are you doing?" Layal asked, dropping down to sit criss-cross applesauce next to him.

"You'll see," Damian said. "Make sure they don't."

They, meaning the cats, still fighting uselessly over the fishbones. Layal leaned back, far enough that she could see around the dumpster, and shrugged. "They're not paying attention."

Damian nodded, slowly finishing up with his own task. Then he looked over at Layal.

"How come ghosts can't always hold things?" he asked. Layal shrugged, swiping her finger through the diamond box. It was a little reminiscent of when children swiped their fingers through the flames of tea candles set out in front of houses. Their hands, if fast enough, would go through the little orange glow completely unharmed, and if they were graceful enough, the flame wouldn't even flicker. 

Layal's finger flickered through the box, time and time again. Damian watched her closer.

"Why do you go through the box, but not the ground?" he asked. "What substances can you hold? Why can you only hold them sometimes? Can ghosts possess people?"

"The ones here can," Layal shrugged. "But I don't know about holding things. I can't touch iron, I figured that much out. It hurts."

Damian glanced back at his sword and looked at Layal. "Can you touch the blade?"

Layal shook her head. "It would feel like I was burning myself."

Damian thought of the cat, yowling, burnt by his sword, and winced.

"The cats," he said. "They're just stuck. And hungry."

"They are," Layal said. "I think I am too. Always. It must be the fate of ghosts." Her hand climbed back up to where the gauze had firmly been pulled against her throat, white stained ever so slightly brown-red.

Damian nodded and stood up, gathering his various pizza boxes. He balanced the small wooden diamond-box on top, holding the whole thing in front of him like he was carrying a serving tray rather than a grease-stained and trashed stack of pizza delivery boxed, the diamond box sliding around on top of it. His sword lay abandoned at the mouth of the alleyway, near Layal, who could not touch the blade without burning herself. He told her not to touch it anyways. It wouldn't help.

He walked through the alley, a wooden box of diamonds in plain sight, and he made it to the end of the alleyway.

Without the box.

The cat leaped down from its ledge and opened its mouth to speak. Damian held up his hand to stall it.

Curious, like all cats, the black-and-white cat stopped where it was, tail twitching and head cocked a little, waiting to see where Damian would take this.

Damian pulled open his jacket, revealing a slit cut right under his arm. He set down the pizza boxes and flipped the lid of one open, shaking the remaining crumbs out onto the ground.

Slowly, he reached his hand down into the opening in his jacket that he had cut with his sword, hunched behind the dumpster. He reached down into the impromptu pocket three times, and each time, he came away with a fistful of diamonds. They spilled into the pizza box, clear as a tumbling brook. After the third fistful of diamonds, Damian flipped the pizza box closed and stood up, making eye contact with the cat.

"A box of diamonds," he said, nudging it with his foot. "And I brought it to the end of the alley."

The cat was silent for a bit before bursting into uproarious laughter. Layal twitched nervously, and even Damian could concede that it was deeply unsettling. He wished he hadn't abandoned his sword, what little good it could do to ward off the horde.

"Little deceiver," the cat crowed, "but where would we be without that!"

"May I ask my question?" Damian asked.

The cat grinned even wider, and Damian hurriedly interrupted himself: "That was not the question." The cats tittered in the alley, the only noise that they had made so far. Damian wished he wasn't on the other end from Layal -- she looked scared out of her wits.

"Go ahead," the cat said, a regal incline to her head. She stalked up to Damian, rubbing her head against his shins and slinking behind him, and he resisted the urge to twist to keep her in his vision.

"Who killed Layal Tchoor?" he asked, his voice steady and his eyes fixed on Layal's small figure, bracketed on both sides by cats.

"Little Ms. Tchoor's family has run afoul of a man who craves a changeling's blood. It is a sad day indeed, when one's employer becomes one's murderer."

"Who?" Layal asked, surging forward. "Who was it?"

The cat grinned, smug. "Would you know more?"

"Yes," Damian said, almost exasperated.

"Then walk out of this alley, and catch a mourner in a looking glass."

"What does that even mean?" Layal said.

"Oh," said the cat, "I have faith you'll figure it out."

With that, the cats rippled and vanished, like they had never even been there. The alleyway suddenly became that much more forbidding, dark and looming. Damian shuddered and grabbed for Layal's hand and, on a second's consideration, reached down to scoop up his sword. It tugged again at his posture, pulling his shoulders back to accommodate new weight.

They walked out of the alley, and back into the streets of Cape Canaveral. Before them, a bar's worth of people had spilled out onto the sidewalk. Damian got to work.

Chapter Text

11:10 PM.

"You know," said Dick, conversationally. "I really miss being an only child."

Cass sneezed heavily and everyone turned to look at her. She glared balefully back at them, punching a man in the face as she did so.

"Very gross," Jason remarked, and for that, he got a thug flung straight at the one he was engaging, the two men knocking each other over like bowling pins.

"Do you think," Dick said, still literally attempting to fight his way out of the bar, "if I do the no-feelings-only-justice thing B does, it'll stop me from stress aging?"

"I don't think stress is a feeling," Steph said over the comms. She had been on her way out to swap out her costume when Tim, in a very uncharacteristic manner, started a bar fight.

He was currently hunched, a mask hastily pushed back over his eyes, over Crane's prone form. They were speaking, Tim's face scrunched up harsh and his body language furious. His comms were off, and nobody could get close enough to hear what he was saying. Crane was arguing back, pinned and tied. It wasn't quite like how Tim usually preferred to conduct "interviews," but the mannerisms were all him, two days into a particularly hard case.

"There!" Cass yelled, pointing over the furor and tangle of bodies to the street across from them. Just beyond the open doors, Dick could spot the small frame of a still-young child with his hood up, much shorter than any other person around them.

"Shit," he said. He jumped up on top of a pool table, using it as a springboard to flip over the seething crowd underneath, only touching back on solid ground once he'd cleared most of the bar in one long tumble. There were only a few people now between him and the exit.

"Hit them with your taser-stick," Jason advised.

"Stop calling it a taser-stick," Dick said, tasering the nearest man and looking behind him.

"Cover the bar, and someone get to Robin," he said into the comm before taking off at a run for Damian.

Damian had already managed to get to a straggler out on the street before the bar, knee to his chest and a sword that was too big for him -- Dick spared a second to wonder where he'd even gotten that -- pointed straight down his sightline, pressing into the man's throat. There was no blood on the pavement, so Dick counted himself lucky. Still, the thought kept running in his mind: he almost stabbed Tim. Tim was lucky he hadn't been injured. Dick's little brother looked at Damian, and he saw a threat.

"Kid!" Dick yelled, for lack of a better code name. "Kid, hold on."

Damian ignored him. He pressed the sword a little harder into the man's throat, dimpling the skin right at the hollow of his collarbone.

"Who was she meeting?" Damian demanded, a question that, judging from his irritation, was something he'd already asked several times over.

"I don't know! Swear to God!" the man gasped out, panicked. Damian clicked his tongue against his teeth and looked over at Dick, the hood covering a solid amount of his face and shading his eyes, illuminated only his frown by the spill of lights from the stores and street lamps.

"What do you know?" Damian asked, curt and sharp. Dick almost straightened his back on instinct -- he'd heard those same words in that same intonation, if not voice, a hundred thousand times.

"The Tchoors were meeting Scarecrow here, and someone else as well. Possibly employed by the same people. They met on alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays. They were supposed to meet Scarecrow today, but they never showed up. Kid, put down the sword."

Damian did not put down the sword. He looked back at the man, who's eyes were wide and rolling in panic.

"Scarecrow did not kill them," Damian said. "It was the second man, the one they met on Tuesdays. The man was after something else -- that thing in the vial. It's not fear gas."

Dick's hand went to the pocket that he'd stashed the vial in. "What is it?" he asked, careful. Damian shook his head.

"I don't know," he said. "But Scarecrow was hired for some other reason. It isn't fear gas in that vial. It isn't fear gas that I was injected with."

Dick turned to the man Damian was menacing. He crouched down, aware of the sword to the throat and the man's sheer terror.

"Are you a regular?" Dick asked, his voice intentionally soothing and calm. The man still was breathing in jerky, panicky motions, but, well, he had a sword to the throat, so let's not blame him too much.

"Ye- yeah."

"Who do you usually work for?"

"Uh, Penguin, most of the time. Do a few odd jobs for the Riddler, though."

"You go to that bar often?"

"Damn near every day," the man said, slowly tearing his gaze from Damian's fixed scowl to the calmer gaze of Nightwing.

"Okay. There should have been a couple who'd come in on weekdays--"

"Not a couple. Already told the kid. Just a brown lady, almost middle-aged. Met the skinny guy on Thursdays, but the big guy on Tuesdays. 'Cept," the man kept glancing from Dick's whited out eyes to Damian's narrowed ones, his grip unwavering. "'Cept, the big guy'd meet the skinny one on Thursdays too. Lady always missed'm."

"What did the big guy look like?" Dick asked, leaning in, intent.

The man tried to shrug, but the whole twelve year old on his chest made that hard. "Just, a guy. Tall, over six feet, white guy. Kinda looked like the billionaire, if you squint. Whatsisname, Wayne?"

Damian stiffened, his grip on the sword unwavering. Suddenly, Dick heard the click of Tim's comm coming back online.

"Nightwing," Tim said. "We have new information."

"Go ahead," Dick said, glancing back at the bar. The motion had clearly died down, with most people having either fled or been beaten down after trying to fight.

"Malalai Tchoor would meet with Crane, while Ismael used his job at the docks to skim chemical supplies out of crates. They were contracted to work alongside Scarecrow by someone else." Tim reported. "Crane was kept in the dark about what he wanted, for the most part, but he does know who his employer was: Thomas Elliot."

"I swear," the man on the pavement said. "I don't know anything else. I don't know who he was."

Damian clicked his tongue. "So you've outlived your usefulness," he said, and moved to take the man's head.

A pause, before we go on. Hold your hand up to your throat. Really, just try and feel it. Press your fingers to the back of your neck, run the tips up and down the hollows and bumps of your vertebrae. Feel the tendons of your throat and the muscle running down the sides. Now imagine trying to take a knife to it. It would be no clean cut, even if you were a strong, full-grown, adult. No twelve-year-old, no matter how well trained, could take a head with a single swing. 

Rather, Damian would have had to hack at the man's throat to behead him, sawing with his blade. He was no stranger to violence, but even this, even taking heads off necks, was an action he could only undertake after looking away.

Luckily, Dick Grayson was not about to let that happen.

"What are you thinking?" he yelled, tackling the much younger child. Damian found himself flat on his back, pinned by the first orphan his father had ever taken in, had ever bestowed a title upon. "We don't kill people!" His sword had fallen on the other side of the criminal.

Damian hissed and spit, clawing ineffectually at the other man. Over Dick's shoulder, he could see Layal's horrified face. Her hand was to her throat, fingers over the bandages he had put there. She kept glancing between him and the man he'd left behind, and suddenly, Dick eased off him, so abrupt that for a wild second Damian thought that Dick could see Layal as well. Instead, the second Dick got off to crouch again over the man, Damian saw what had truly gotten his attention.

Damian had not succeeded in a solid, clean first stroke of a beheading, but he had still torn a life-threatening gash across the man's throat, knocked just off-fatal by Dick's intervention. Dick had his hands to the man's throat, shouting into his own comm: "Call 911, we need an ambulance."

"Leave him," Damian said, picking himself off the sidewalk. "We need to find Elliot." He needed to find the changeling, the one who killed the Tchoors.

"No," Dick said, his gaze firmly fixed on the criminal dying on the sidewalk. "You stay there." To the criminal, he said: "You're going to make it. Hear me? You're not going to die here."

Damian did not hear the response. He made eye contact with the man, eye contact with a creature on the verge of dying, with a man who was so afraid of what would come next that he didn't even register the pain of the present, his fingers clutched to his neck, underneath Dick's own solid, reassuring, well-practiced hand. Damian saw the fear on his face, the real, raw, fear of death, head-on.

He took off, leaving his sword behind as well as the tableau of his eldest brother crouched over a man, fingers staunching blood that welled up between the cracks, desperately trying to save his life. He did not see Layal, stooped over the man's still warm form, watching, unable to help.

He also did not see the woman on the other end of the street, her dress tattered and filthy and possibly, once upon a time, white.

11:28 PM.

Damian would never admit it, but he was lost. It was some translation error between the maps of a city he'd never been to, the ones he'd studied his whole childhood until he could close his eyes and see the grids of Gotham behind his lids, and the streets he ran through now, a city of shadows lit up fully for one night only. He kept running though, without any care for location, without a good idea of what direction he was even finding himself. The first-quarter-moon hung pale over him. It would set, Damian knew, at midnight.

He kept running straight through the twisted grids, and he swore in the corners of his vision he thought he saw a figure. Whiter than Layal, who had vanished the second he took off. He told himself that that rejection didn't matter to him, the abandonment coming from the only person who'd ever looked at him without judgment in her eyes. He tried not to think about her hand on her throat, the gash he'd torn in another man's. When he blinked, that other set of eyes stared back at him. He felt, absurdly, the need to throw up, the deep, horrific lead in his stomach, the impending dread and fear and guilt that had never happened to him before, the thousand thousand other times he'd spilled blood with no care.

Finally, he fell against the side of a building, a sharp stitch digging itself into his side. 

"Layal," he gasped out. "Layal, please come back."

There was silence. It was eerie, to see a street so empty, to see so few people out and about. The bars that dotted the west side of Uptown had their doors shut tight to the outside world, everyone inside taking instinctual comfort in the presence of others. There would be nobody out on these streets until morning. For now, it was just Damian's hunched form lit only by the wan light of the moon. There were no stars visible from Gotham's skies.

There was still a little blood, crusted and dried, on the hem of his jacket. He wasn't sure when it had gotten on him.

"Please," he said to the empty street. "I'm lost." Without the chatter only he could hear, everything seemed too quiet. Too still. A clatter of a can dragging against the sidewalk had Damian jumping at the night.

There were too many thoughts swirling in his head. He couldn't sort everything out and he desperately wished Layal was in front of him so he could try talking to her. The anger on Dick Grayson's face, the disgust, flashed again behind his eyes. Layal's fear mixed with the man's, the anonymous man he'd nearly killed.

Both the cat and the bird had told him about a changeling. A changeling's blood, that was what had been in Scarecrow's possession, that was what had been injected into him, last night. A changeling -- who? 

Damian heard snatches of a voice behind him and his fingers curled inward, wishing for the familiar grip of his too-large sword. He kept going, kept thinking to himself.

Thomas Elliot, a man who wanted nothing so much as to take Bruce Wayne's place. Perhaps he was the changeling, but then: what was the marrow in the vial? Clear, odorless, viscous, and Hush was just a man, red-blooded as any other.

He was walking through the underpass, underneath the highway that delineated Cape Canaveral from the neighborhood of Greenbriar Park, when he caught his first clear glimpse. There, behind one of the heavily tagged cement pillars, was a woman. She was nondescript, the way these sorts of women always are. She looked American, whatever that means to you, and clothes, a long, once-white dress, looked old, whatever that means to you. There was the faintest ethereality to her, but whatever connotations of benevolence that word holds for you would have been dispelled the second you caught a good look at her face. Behind the lank, stringy hair were cold eyes, fixedly gazing upon Damian. She looked infuriated.

He blinked, and she was gone. Damian, weaponless and no fool, ran.

He ran, his breath coming out in harsh pants and the memory of his old trainers bearing down between his shoulder blades, until he broached the residential towers of Greenbriar Park. The gothic architecture of the huddled buildings was so similar to where he had just come from, to Damian's unfamiliar eyes, that for a brief second, he thought he had ended up back at the tip of Cape Canaveral, back at the bar that he'd just run away from. Perhaps he was, time and space moving at the whims of the ghosts in a city of story.

He glanced over his shoulder, slowing down from a flat sprint to a jog, but he did not see the woman again. Slowly, he paced himself back down to a walk before finally stopping at a bench outside of a convenience store, the neon glows of its signs reflecting off onto the pavement. 

"Layal," he tried again, between pants. "Please."

No answer. Damian kept scanning the intersection before him, patchily lit up by the handful of shops that would choose to be open on Halloween night. There was no woman and no girl before him.

"I'm sorry," he said to the empty night air. "Please, Layal. I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?" a voice came from behind, and Damian whirled around, his heart beating out of his chest. He saw Layal seated, her arms crossed, on the bench. She was frowning, and her ribbon had been tied even tighter around her neck than it had been when he saw her last. 

"Scaring you," he said.

Layal simply inclined her head. It drew attention to the bandages, the gash that those white ribbons hid. She did not uncross her arms. She looked at him the way everyone looked at him.

"Is that it?" she asked.

"What else?" Damian said back. He felt unsure, off-footed, unclear on what direction, exactly, this conversation was about to go in.

"I think it is in very bad taste to attempt to murder someone in front of a ghost," Layal said, a very real hurt behind the forced levity in her voice.

"He was just a criminal," Damian argued. "A lackey for Cobblepot. His death would be a message, not a tragedy. What worth did he bring the world?"

He said this with the strength of conviction and the tenor of a child who had not noticed the hypocrisy of adults. It is a difficult thing indeed to realize that the woman who raised you, with what she assured were the best of all intentions, was not the end-stop authority on all matter. That the morality of adults was fallible, if not always farce.

"I wonder," Layal said, hunched in on herself, "what you'd think of my parents."

Damian blinked. That was not the line of conversation he had been anticipating.

"My parents were good people," Layal said, insistent. "They loved me. They wanted a good life for me. That's why my mom says they came to this country, because they wanted a better life for me. And they worked with a bad man, with evil men, because there is no other way to have a good life here. Should they have been killed for that?"

"Was it justice," Layal asked, tears in her eyes, "that we were killed?"

"If you make a mistake, you cannot escape punishment," Damian said, but it was a hollow echo of his grandfather, of his mother. It was the veneer of dogma, all conviction, but no reason. These were simply the rules that Damian had lived with all his life, the bedrock of his existence. Mistakes are punished. The strong rule the weak. To escape punishment, to escape failure, work harder, push further.

"Why," Layal said, "must all mistakes be punished?"

Damian closed his eyes and thought of missed meals and the crack of a whip and the way his bones looked, poking out from his arms, and the way a knife felt, scoring a lucky hit across his chest, and the way his arms would shake after the third day awake, in pursuit of perfection. And the way it felt to win. To win, because the missed meals and the whips and the knife and the breaking taught him discipline and made him strong, meant he would never feel it again.

"Failure must have its consequences," Damian said with his grandfather's words. "Or else, we chain ourselves to dead weight."

"Not all mistakes are failures," Layal argued. "Sometimes, they are just hard choices made badly."

Damian's eyes were still closed. "Then how would you ever learn? If your mistake isn't punished, how do you root out evil?"

"With a second chance."

Very softly, Damian said: "You aren't the ghost of Layal Tchoor, are you?"

"Not quite," Layal said. 

"What, then?" he asked. "Who are you?"

"I was her qareen. Her constant, unseen companion, until she died in a country that believes in ghosts, not Al-Malakut; fairyland, not Paristan. And so, I changed too."

"What are you? Djinn or ghost?"

Layal hesitated. "I don't know. Both? Neither? Perhaps I was once a djinn, and now I am here, or perhaps I was born a ghost of Gotham, only pretending to be a child's djinn."

Damian opened his eyes. Layal still looked like Layal, her face childish and her gaze a bit ancient. They regarded each other for a second.

"Whose child are you?" Layal asked back, gently, kindly, cruelly. "Your mother's or your father's?"

"I don't know," Damian admitted. "Neither. Both."

Damian turned back to the convenience store.

"Wait there," he said. "I am going to get us a looking glass, and we are going to catch the mourner. And then, we are going to find out what happened to Layal Tchoor."

11:33 PM.

Damian did not have money when he went into the convenience store. He did, however, find a clear, perfect, jewel-cut diamond in his pocket, smaller than his pinky nail, which he shrugged and put down as a down-payment as he lightly liberated the store of what he needed. The teenage cashier, surrounded by a litany of friends keeping him company, did not notice.

He rushed out into the cool, damp night air, nodding with his head to the girl-who-was-not-Layal, and they set off for the intersection. There, they waited.

"Are you sure," Damian said, "that she will show up here?"

"Of course," the qareen said. "Crossroads are important. Culturally significant."

Damian settled down on the sidewalk and regarded the empty roads.

"Maybe to you," he said, leaning back on his hands. "Tell me the story?"

"You said she was a woman in white?"

"Yes. A white dress."

"Perhaps her husband cheated on her," Layal, and we are going to keep calling her Layal for lack of a better name, said.

"That's it?" Damian asked. She seemed very, very, angry, and the explanation seemed very, very mundane.

"Of course not. Her husband cheated on her, and, in grief, she drowned her children in the bathtub, and then herself. And now she haunts us all, to this day."

"I hate the sort of stories people tell around here," Damian muttered. He looked up at the sky, and then, when he looked back down, he saw the woman standing on the diagonal to him. Her cold eyes bore into his. Damian stood up, brushing his knees off, and waited. In his hands, he turned over the empty glass bottle of Coke. He'd poured the liquid out all in one splash on the pavement, rendering the clear glass more reflective.

"Are you sure it'll work?" Layal asked, watching Damian. Her eyes were terribly old. Damian held the bottle up, watching his distorted reflection blink back at him.

"I do not understand all the rules here," Damian said, turning it over and over in his hands, "but I think, for this mourner, any looking-glass should do."

He held the bottle up and made eye contact with the ghost. "Besides," he said with rare humor. "Genies in bottles. It's a classic."

11:53 PM.

Five vigilantes descended on a certain intersection in Greenbriar Park, all at once. They curved around Damian, a tableau not unlike the one they were in, only five hours ago and many, many, emotional discoveries away. This time, however, they were significantly more wary.

Damian sat on the sidewalk, cross-legged, lotus position, alone as far as anyone else could see. Behind him, a shattered glass bottle twinkled in the faint moonlight. The moon was nearly setting in the sky, the small quarter of it left winking out at them all. The area, unlike all the rest of Gotham on this night, was completely dark. The streetlights had fizzled out, the neon signs were powered off, and the convenience store behind Damian bore signs of being recently abandoned.

Added up, the picture did not look good for Damian.

"Should I even ask how you found me this time?" He asked, bravado fixed in place with duct tape and paperclips.

"Batman taught us all the fine art of microchipping kids like stray dogs. You run off almost as much as one," Dick said, when nobody else spoke. "In case you were wondering, the man you almost killed is still alive. Rushed to Canaveral General Hospital."

"Scarecrow?" Damian asked, keeping perfectly still. He did not want to acknowledge the feelings that the eldest's statement brought in him: the slight rush of worry, the relief, the sudden anxiety over how this conversation's reprise would go with his own father. Damian couldn't help but feel, faced with the disapproval of his father's proteges, that they were like ambassadors of his displeasure with him, the couriers of rejection.

He had very little time for that, though.

"Scarecrow's on his way back to Arkham," Steph said. "GCPD picked him up."

Steph's voice had lost the tone it had earlier, the sympathetic warmth. Damian had not realized that he'd miss it, but he supposed he deserved it either way. He was, at the very least, sorry about how this would end.

"What about," Damian said, getting to his feet and dropping his bomb, "Clayface?"

"What?" Dick asked. Damian didn't acknowledge the confusion. He was staring at Tim, who stared back, lips pressed into the only expression Tim Drake had ever shown the villains of Gotham.

"Clayface," Damian said to him. "Scarecrow took something from you, didn't he? Your blood, or something close to it."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Tim said, his voice even. Cass turned, and everyone watched her. 

She brought her hands up to sign something, but before she could, Damian cut them both off.

"Here is the story, as far as I know and could reason," he told them all. "The Tchoors, passable biomedical engineers that they are, were hired by the man who wants nothing more so than to be my father, Thomas Elliott."

He took a step closer.

"Hired alongside Scarecrow. Scarecrow, a man who'd have access, as the former chief psychologist of Arkham Asylum, to the medical records of the man who could become anyone, something Elliott desperately wanted. A changeling."

Another step.

"Jonathan Crane would have been able to experiment upon you," he said, and Tim's face screwed up a little, attempting a joking "are you guys seeing this too," with the twist of his lips and the set of his eyebrows that Cass, fluent as she was with faces, couldn't help but jump at. It was a very, very good mimic of the real Tim Drake's expression, a near-perfect impression. The kind only a professional actor would manage with ease.

"He would have been able to extract something from you, something we could call, generously, the blood of a changeling, for his employer, Hush. And you wanted it back."

"You cannot believe this," Tim said to the rest of them. "Seriously, if I even was Clayface, when would I have a chance to take Robin?"

"He's been acting weird since we left the Tchoor's home," Jason said to them all. His voice was uncertain, hesitant. "That's the only time any of us were alone."

"Except," Tim said, irritation in his voice, "the five billion times the brat ran off."

"This is why I always hate Clayface," Dick said heavily, turning to keep both Damian and Tim in his vision. "All this finger-pointing."

Damian took one last step forward. There was one foolproof way to ferret out a shapeshifter, the way the old gulabiwala at the market would tell the gathered children, one way and only one. You always had to check the feet.

"Where," Damian asked, playing his final card, "did the red mud on your shoes come from?"

Tim turned, his expression spasming. "Really? What kind of Sherlock Holmes bullshit is that?" 

Still, the dried mud upon his shoes, half-scraped away hastily on the roof of a train, condemned him.

"Red mud like that," Dick said, hand reaching for his escrima, "doesn't come from any of the parks in Uptown."

"Well," Clayface said, dropping his act very very suddenly. "Fuck."

Before anyone had a chance to react, Damian charged him, liberating him of his stolen grappling line, and swung out into the night.

11:57 PM.

Even superhero kids, when panicking, call their parents.

"Where is he?" Bruce asked, brusquer than usual. For once, the snap of his voice didn't get Dick's shoulders up: he was just as worried.

"Tracker's pointing east. We think he might be making his way to the Bowery, but we're not sure," Dick said as he ran. They'd lost Damian in the first few seconds and, in the confusion and rapid deliberation, had accidentally given him and Clayface a hell of a head start.

"Have you found Ti-Robin yet?" Jason asked into his own comm. 

"I have him," Bruce confirmed. "He's been dosed with a tranquilizer, standard. Clayface must have gotten it at some point off a dealer. Agent A is coming around with the car to get him."

"Wow," Steph gasped out, unused to running across rooftops at a pace as punishing as this. "That almost sounded like a normal dad thing to say."

"I will meet you at Crime Alley, and we'll cut Damian off there," Bruce said before going dark.

"Moment's over," Cass said back to Steph. They were tumbling behind the two eldest, who were nearly shoulder to shoulder as they ran, Dick's screen held up between them, their lines going in parallel arcs.

"You don't think he'll get hurt?" Steph asked. "Any more than he'd hurt someone else?"

"Didn't think… Clay-face didn't seem… violent?"

Steph glanced at Cass.

"It's not your fault," she said, because she figured that was the root of this issue.

"Was my job," Cass replied. "Failed."

"Hey," Steph said. "You're good, not telepathic."

Cass shook her head, tumbling with her next landing. Steph followed suit before hooking their arms together, making the leap off one street to the next together.

"...He's… my brother. Didn't notice was replaced."

"Neither did anyone else," Steph replied. "Clayface is a good actor, and you were distracted over the other brother."

Cass didn't respond. Steph tried again.

"Look, would you tell Dick or Jason that they're bad brothers for not noticing Tim was replaced? They've been Tim's brother for longer."

Cass grunted. "Know what you're doing."

"Yeah, yeah," Steph said. "But you wouldn't, right?"

"It's different."

"Not," Steph took a running leap and stuck the landing with a flourish, "that different. And you still noticed pretty damn fast."

Cass grunted again and pulled Steph close as they neared the end of another block. Before them, the German quarter of Crime Alley stretched ahead, all neon lights and dusty, bricked-up windows.

"For what it's worth," Steph said, leaning in close to Cass's ear. "Coming from an only child, I think your siblings are lucky to have you."

Cass turned her head, looking into Steph's eyes. Blue as the midafternoon sky, even if the moonless night wouldn't set them off very well.

"...Your words," Cass said, "are always worth it to me."

"Sap," Steph snorted, jumping with her.

On the rooftop before them, Batman was waiting. His eldest children were already standing before him. Steph and Cass jogged to catch up.

"He's down there," Dick said, pointing to the crack between the buildings. He did not mention, though perhaps everyone on the rooftop already knew, exactly what was so special about this certain alleyway in a certain part of Gotham. 

Perhaps you already know, too. 

Gotham is a city that prides itself on story and symbolism, and what of its stories is more famous than the boy who lost his parents, shot dead in an alley in the worst part of a city Hell spat onto Earth? Damian al Ghul-Wayne, who had up until three weeks ago only known his father's home through the legends and second, third-hand pictures, still would have known exactly what this street represented. He'd have known where, precisely, he was.

There was nothing to do but walk, once more, into an alley.

12:00 PM.

Below them, Clayface was gone. Instead, waiting in that alleyway, was a man who wanted everything Bruce Wayne had. In his grip, a certain son.

"Hush," Bruce said, his other children and proteges dropping down next to him.

"Bruce," Thomas Elliot greeted, affable and horrible, his scalpel to Damian's throat. "Annoying kid you got here." Damian, perhaps, was getting a bit of a taste of his own medicine at the moment, and he was finding it quite bitter. Neck trauma, not the most fun way to go.

"Unhand me, cretin," Damian snarled. He pulled at Hush's arm ineffectually, succeeding only in getting the scalpel jabbed more firmly into the side of him.

"Let him go," Bruce said. Obviously, this didn't work. However, it was the sort of rote phrase that had to be said.

"Oh, no," Elliot said, "You have to let me explain my plan to you. That's just how us villains work."

"Look," Steph said, stepping forward. Bruce's arm twitched, an aborted move to push her back behind him. "You don't want the kid. He's really stabby. Let him go, and we'll let you walk."

"Leaving that bald-faced lie aside, I actually do really want this one. After all," Elliot said, adjusting his grip and nearly scoring a gash down the boy's neck, "he's the blood son."

The dramatic irony was a touch on the nose, but nobody was about to point this out.

"Which means," he said, leaning in close to Damian's ear, a Goya of a pose between fathers and sons, "with some of Scarecrow's primer still running around in your bloodstream, you'll do just fine as a genetic template for daddy dearest."

Damian's eyes were wide, his arms clawing a bit ineffectually at the very tight grip Elliot had on his neck.

"With Clayface's blood," Dick said, holding up the vial that he'd kept in his pocket this whole time. "I'll smash it, I swear, if you don't let him go."

Elliot looked up, disinterested. "So they did make a backup, after all. Can never trust foreign-made goods, can you, Brucie-y? 'Specially not," and he drew, with the hand not holding a knife to Damian's throat, a vial of his own, "when you went to all that trouble of covering your tracks so you could get the genuine thing."

"You killed the Tchoors," Bruce said, the final pieces dropping into place on that case.

Hush shrugged and said, "They finished making my little Clayface formula, then outlived their usefulness. I… tied up loose ends."

His gaze dropped to the crown of Damian's head, and he said, a little distantly, "Clayface's blood. I like that. Blut ist ein ganz besondrer Saft."

Jason caught on first, but it was still too late. "Wait," he said, "Don't-"

Thomas Elliot pulled back and drove his knife in, straight up Damian's chin and into his head, and the blood poured over his hands like water, dropping down onto the cracks between the cobblestones, and Damian hung limp in his grasp, a puppet with his strings cut, right in front of his father.

Crime Alley bore witness to a story coming full circle.

Hush, little Baby, don't say a word,

Mama's gonna buy you a Mockingbird.

And if that mockingbird don't sing,

Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring.

And if that diamond ring turns brass,

Mama's gonna buy you a looking glass.

Chapter Text

12:00 PM.

Damian's body, sprawled as it was over the cold cobblestone ground, had never looked younger. He had not made a noise as he fell, mouth open in surprise and gurgling with his blood, dropping down, perhaps, exactly where his grandparents had fallen decades ago.

Everyone else was frozen. Perhaps, hardened vigilantes that they were, they should have been able to move past it, to step over Damian's prone body and take a violent revenge on Hush for killing their son and brother, rocky as those relationships had been, but let's be real. It matters not how many decades of trauma have piled themselves onto a person: every death feels anew. Millions may be statistics, but one will always be a tragedy.

So, a group of vigilantes, five strong against the one, did not move as Tommy Elliot kneeled down, uncapping the vial in his left hand and bringing his bloodied hand over it, letting the precious fluid drop and intermingle with the vial. Nobody moved, that is, except the one behind him.

Damian Wayne stepped out from the shadows, rushing forward towards Elliot's exposed neck, and plunged an entire syringe's worth of tranquilizer into the man. Elliot had just enough time to turn around and stare blankly at the double-image of Damian standing up in front of him, Damian lying dead at his feet, before succumbing himself to the same cocktail of chemicals that had taken Tim, flopping bonelessly over the small form of the Damian-who-fell.

That Damian twitched, stirred, and groaned.

"You had to push him over right on top of me?" it asked, pulling the knife slowly out of its chin. The wound, trickling red blood, sealed itself over the second the knife came clean out. The dead Damian tossed the knife away in the alley in disgust. "Wow, that burned."

"Stop complaining," Damian-still-standing said, gazing down at his own face. The Damian-on-the-ground screwed up its face and he clicked his tongue. "Don't do that with my face, Layal."

"It's not your face," Layal said back, pulling her legs from underneath Hush's form. "It's Clayface's clay-face, technically."

"Sorry," Steph said, finally breaking the silence from the mouth of the alley. "What is going on?"

Damian sighed, holding a hand out to help Layal to her feet. She levered herself up and Damian had the very strange sensation of looking directly at himself, into his own eyes. It was discomfiting, to say the least.

"This is Layal," he said, pointing to his doppelganger. "She's a djinn. Probably?"

"Not really," said the qareen. "I think djinn can't possess others. Only ghosts."

"Oh," Steph said faintly. "That cleared everything up."

"What happened," Bruce finally said, feeling a very deep tension headache coming on. Stress pinched his words, turning questions into statements. "Is that Layal Tchoor."

Damian said, "I'm not clear on that one, actually," which didn't help any matters.

"Technically," Layal said, "This is Basil Karlo. I'm just borrowing his body."

"Borrowing," Bruce said.

"I thought there was possibly a reason why I was singled out for dosing with the Crane formula," Damian explained. "So, when I realized what Elliot was planning and who Crane was impersonating, I asked Layal to possess Karlo's body and appear like me. With that, I set a trap for Elliot. Speaking of," Damian said, nudging Hush's body with his sneakered foot, "someone should take care of this fool."

Jason, somewhat numbly, moved forward. Dick stumbled after him after Cass shoved his shoulder, and together, they pulled Hush's unconscious body over and fixed him with handcuffs, careful of Jason's injured arm. 

"Oh yeah," Steph said. "That's definitely your son."

"Same para-noia," Cass concurred.

"Who is that," Bruce asked, barely following. "What is in Clayface."

"B," Jason said, "give the kid a little breathing room. He just had a near death experience. Trust me, let him walk it off."

"Let's deal with Hush first, then we can all go compare timelines. Preferably somewhere that isn't an alley where your parents died," Dick said, because he was reasonable like that.

"Can we do it in a restaurant?" Layal said in Damian's voice. "I am very hungry, that was very exciting, and I vote for Tabooshes."

"Oh, that's a good one," Steph said. "Rikersville, right?"

"Yeah. On Elm and Rockfort."

"Clearly you can't be suspicious then," Steph concluded, turning to look up at Bruce. "They make great kebabs."

"This is not what I taught any of you," Bruce said. "Is your real name even Layal Tchoor?"

"Kind of?" Layal said. "I was lying, mostly."

"About that, and what else?"

"Give her a break," Jason said, "she knows about Tabooshes. Can't be all bad."

Cass giggled. "...We can take Hush, meet you there."

"Oh yeah," Steph said. "Go have family time. I'm only here to kick ass and kiss Cass, and your kid here already beat us to the punch."

Cass giggled, even if nobody else found it funny.

"Names. I am not okaying meeting an unknown in a secondary location."

"Too late," Jason said gleefully, passing Hush's bulk back over to Cass, who shouldered it easily. Steph was already punching in the GCPD hotline number into her burner phone.

"She saved Damian's life," Dick reminded him.

"Saved may be going a little too far," Damian protested. " I came up with the plan."

"No," Layal said, tilting her head -- still looking exactly like Damian's own -- over at him. "Saved is right."

Bruce sighed deeply and looked at Cass. "Meet us at Tabooshes," he ground out. He turned to Layal, who smiled innocently at him with a face that had never smiled innocently at anyone. "I don't trust you," he told her.

"That's fine!"

"Please," Damian said. "Just change your face. Stop doing that with mine."

"Not a chance," Layal grinned. "Basil's still in here somewhere, and I don't want to risk setting him free. I have no idea how this possession thing works. By the way, is the small one okay?"

"The small -- Tim?" Jason asked. "He's fine. Sleeping it off at home."

Damian would not acknowledge it, but I feel fine spilling his secrets: he felt a little more relieved that his adoptive brother hadn't suffered or been hurt in a plot meant to target him.

"Names," Bruce reminded tiredly, already surrendering to the futility.

12:19 PM.

Tabooshes was not usually open at this hour, being a family-run restaurant with children to send to bed every night, but it was Halloween, and what good was a family restaurant without people to fill it? Past midnight, when the worst of the night would be over, fear gas crop dusting or clown zombie apocalypses half-underway to being foiled, the residents of Rikersville still huddled together, waiting for the cleanup to begin.

A radio in the corner played old 90s Arab love songs, the kind from before Haifa, Assi El Hellani's voice floating softly through the background. 

The store was well cared for, tables wiped down thoroughly and glass windows bearing a few soap scum marks from where it had dried in the sun. The front half of the restaurant was dedicated to a Middle Eastern grocers, wire racks of Lipton label tea sitting next to jars of biryani or kewra or orange blossom flavor oils, packets of dried rose petals lying next to them, all stamped with the same sticker prices. A few children were deliberating over packets of biscuits, one holding up the elaichi flavor and arguing for its superiority over the bourbon biscuits.

In the restaurant proper, two teenagers, brother and sister, sat at the register, playing games of tic tac toe on post it notes next to them. Behind them, a simplified menu listed dishes in English, then Arabic, then Hindi, and the conversation of the families seated at tables around the back half of the store were in another half dozen other languages. Next to the register, a complimentary can of hot chai was set out, styrofoam cups next to small straw stirrers and condensed milk as well as a crusted shaker of sugar. All the tables wobbled on a single leg and the chairs were plastic, with seats that had their pleather covers burst or slashed open at some point over their decade long lives. 

People sat upon them anyways, cooling cups of chai in hand, waiting in the lighted insides for the night to end outside. Some children, up too late and overtired, had pulled chairs together and curled up across two or three of them, or otherwise sleeping away in booths under the watchful gazes of parents and cousins and uncles and aunts and strangers.

"Do they have oxblood soup?" Damian asked Layal, tapping at the hastily applied mask on his face. The glue pulled uncomfortably on his cheekbones.

"Of course you like the blood soup," Layal said, looking like his twin in her own mask. They were lucky both Jason and Dick had had spares.

"Is that the Batman?" one of the children, too young to be up this late, asked, her tone hushed. "Is it all over then?"

Behind Bruce, Dick and Jason grinned at each other, not too exhausted to poke fun at their father when he deserved it.

"Go ahead, Batman," Jason said, "say hi."

"Keep an eye on your brother," Bruce said, before turning to the little girl and her parents, both watching with wide eyes.

"Yeah, yeah," Dick said, smiling tiredly at the group of preteens huddled around a game of cards on the floor.

"Is Batman your dad?" one of the boys asked.

"Unfortunately," Jason said.

"That's so cool!" a girl gushed.

"Don't tell any of the rogues," Dick said, kneeling down, "but he's actually a total nerd. Holy barbecue grills, Batdad."

"He does not get a grill out," another girl said. "There's no way."

"Every fourth of July," Jason said, sitting down heavily in the nearest empty booth. Dick pushed him over and sat next to him and Damian and Layal sat down across from them, looking identical.

"Are they twins?" the waitress asked, coming over with a smile and a notepad.

"No," Damian said, right when everyone else at the table, Layal included, said "yes." He glared at the rest of them.

"Layal isn't my twin," he muttered. Layal grinned brightly.

"Ignore him," she said. "The shoe fits."

"The shoe does not," Damian snarled back.

"Well, by definition," Dick said, "if she shapeshifted, it should."

"Wow," Layal said. "Why is everyone else in your family so much more fun than you?"

"That's it," Damian muttered. "Get out of Clayface, we're taking your body to the GCPD."

Bruce came over, his dramatic persona heavily hindered by the several children and some teenagers staring after him, starry-eyed.

"Just a coffee for me," he graveled at the waitress.

"Get him some tabbouleh," Dick said. "He never admits it, but that's his favorite."

"Falafel, too," Jason said. "For Batgirl. Spicy, 'cause she likes that when she's sick."

Damian cleared his throat, and said, "The Spoiler mentioned a fondness for your kebabs," and glared surlily at the table when they all leveled looks at him. "What? It was just a few minutes ago."

The waitress jotted that all down, her professional smile never cracking, though the way her eyes crinkled up belied a hint of true amusement. 

"Anything else?"

"Oxblood soup," Layal said, her chin in her hands. "For the grumpy one."

The waitress nodded and moved back to the counter, lightly admonishing the two siblings messing around at the cash register. Bruce sat heavily in a stolen chair, his cape draping over the back: the juxtaposition was a bit hilarious.

"Layal," he addressed. "What does Damian mean by djinn?"

"I was," Layal cast around, uncomfortable with the address. "I am not Layal. I am -- I think -- I was supposed to be her qareen. In the stories, in our stories, the qareen were to be the life-long djinn companions, one for each person in our dominion.

"But something must have happened with Layal, conceived in Kashmir and born in America. Something happened to me. I am not really a qareen anymore, I do not think, for those cannot linger after the deaths of their humans and certainly not so far from home -- but in the stories of this country, the dead can remain. And so, perhaps, did I. Perhaps part of me is truly Layal, or perhaps my human simply provided the push in her final moments. Either way, I remained. And a few could see me, and a few could hear me, and Damian was among them, and I wanted justice."

"Why Damian?" Bruce asked. "Does it have to do with," he cut himself off and watched his three sons, two by choice and one by blood. "To do with Hush?" he asked, and thought about his daughter and her girlfriend, waiting with his childhood friend turned adversary, waiting for the police to come put him away.

"What? No. It's because he's a kid, and only kids can see ghosts, don't you know? Those are the stories."

Damian jerked. "I am not a child!" He said, turning to Layal in betrayal.

Layal rolled her eyes behind her mask. "See," she said, "this is why I didn't tell him."

"So," Dick asked, taking up the line of questioning, "If you could possess others, why involve Damian at all? Obviously, we can interact with you now."

"I didn't know I could, actually," she said. "Damian suggested it. I couldn't quite do much on my own. I'm still young, I didn't lie about that, and I hadn't known the rules of this world well. I needed Damian's help to get anywhere," Layal said, shrugging.

"Damian's… help," Bruce said. Dick snapped his fingers.

"All the times he ran off," he said, "that was you?"

"We went to see a vetala," Damian explained. "A corpse-taker who can see the future. It gave us three tasks before we could learn the truth of Layal Tchoor's murder," he said, and launched into his story. It was halting and clinical, or it would have been, had the qareen-ghost not often taken up the thread, handling it with the storyteller's grace that all djinn are born with.

By the time that Layal and Damian had gotten to the cats and their diamonds, Steph and Cass had come ducking through the door. There was a brief sidebar, catching the other two up as they traded their own story of Hush's transportation all the way to the GCPD lockup, supervised by Oracle.

"So, the final trial?" Jason asked Damian.

"I had no mirror," Damian shrugged, "but any reflection would do, so I bought a bottle of coke and caught her reflection in the side of it, trapping her in the bottle."

Layal rolled her eyes. "He was going on about symbolism," she said, "like ghosts and genies are anything alike."

Damian barrelled on over her. "It worked, and she told us, finally, that Robin had been taken by the changeling, and the changeling, in turn, had had their blood and powers stolen by the man who wanted my father's face. That's when I realized why I was the one dosed with Crane's elixir specifically. I decided that I needed to lure Hush away somehow, and set a trap for him, so I broke the bottle to set the ghost free. Then, I told Layal--"

"He said to be ready to possess Clayface when he ran for it and then didn't explain!"

"I explained plenty on the way to Park Row, didn't I!"

"How did you know," Bruce asked, "that Hush would be in the Bowery?"

Damian and Layal turned and looked at each other. "Well," Damian said, "that's where the story started, didn't it? The whole tale of Batman. If I was Hush, that's where I would have chosen to end it."

"I cannot believe," Steph said, "you did all that because it would be symbolically significant."

Jason said, "Honestly, I'm proud. Kid knows his cyclical structures."

Damian shrugged, studiously not looking at Steph as he addressed her. "It's like you said," he said. "As long as I was clever about it, I wouldn't need force."

"Okay," Steph said. "I was talking about, like, bonding with your siblings, but sure. That works too."

"Well, that just leaves one last loose end," Dick said. "What do we do with Clayface?"

Layal frowned. "I can't hold onto this body forever," she admitted. "I'll eventually have to let go of him, preferably in Arkham, before he fights me for it somewhere less ideal."

"We can --" Damian forced himself to look the qareen in her eyes, the same face as his, "We can take you to Arkham, if that's what you want."

"If you leave the body though, do we go back to not being able to see you?" Jason asked.

"Probably," Layal said.

"Not me though," Damian asked. "Right?"

"For as long as you're a child. That's the rules."

Damian broke eye contact. "I see," he said tonelessly. Six years, which was plenty, half his lifetime again.

"It's not goodbye yet," Layal said. 

"If you want," Bruce said, leaning forward, "And if you are willing, we can see about building you a body to inhabit, so others can see you as well."

The qareen-without-her-human watched him and, after a very long silence, surrounded by the bird boy and his orphan family, she said: "I'd like that."

For what it's worth, that wasn't the last time I ever saw Damian al Ghul-Wayne. Far from it. However, it was our first meeting, and as far as first meetings go, it was quite a memorable story for me. I hold, still, that he was the most annoying little bird boy I've ever met in my life, even after having been acquainted with each and every one of his brothers, and his delight of a sister. 

I am known to most of the world now as Djinn -- at least the few times when I'd bothered to help out -- but I was not fully lying when I told him to call me by my qareen's human's name, Layal Tchoor. 

The djinn have been known by a thousand names in the thousand tongues of a thousand people, but the qareen have always remained anonymous, simply shadowing our humans from birth to death. Perhaps I am no longer of their ilk, American-born as we were, but still: I have always been attached to the name my human was given, the little girl from America, her only connection to her motherland a name borrowed from the most famous of the Kashmiri folktales.

Layal Tchoor, the laal chur, the red thief in the night who crept in on silent feet to take from the rich and give to the poor.

Perhaps you know me by a different name. That is how the stories go; reborn and retold across a thousand faces and a thousand names.

.

.

.

END