Work Text:
Father keeps a liquor cabinet in his study, mostly for Selina and for the kids, Damian's always assumed, since over the last fifteen years he's rarely seen the man drink. It's not the high-end stuff like in the kitchens, but sentimental—a bottle of peppermint schnapps someone handed him on a patrol on Christmas Eve, Scotch casked in each of their birth years. Damian walks into the study one afternoon to find a teenage boy systematically shattering the collection into a wastebin.
It takes Damian a moment, but not longer. Strange things happen in the Manor every day, and this isn’t even the first time that the strange thing has been age regression. A teenager sneaking in to destroy liquor, rather than drink it, would be weirder.
“Father,” he says, and his father smashes another bottle before turning around. “Oh, hello,” he says, in an odd, light tone. His right hand is bleeding from a cut on his palm. “One of Molly’s?”
“Who’s Molly?” Damian asks, curious. He doesn’t know much about his father at his age—there are very few photos outside the black-and-whites from the papers. He takes in the narrow jaw and the soft chin with no small amount of amusement.
“Pretending you don’t know her is poor form,” his father says. “Now, get out of my house, if you please.”
His father looks about sixteen. Damian does the math. Bruce Wayne was sixteen in 1983, and in 1983, there was no good reason for a thinking person to believe in age regression.
“Sure,” Damian says amiably. “But I’ll tell Alfred about your hand on my way out the door if you don’t go see him yourself.”
***
Bruce Wayne, sixteen, stares across the rough wood kitchen table at Pennyworth, who is holding an ice pack to his face where his erstwhile charge had grabbed a wrinkle and pulled on it.
“So—okay,” he says. “Okay. Tell me again.”
“Age regression is a well-documented phenomenon resulting from the manipulation of telomeres within the body’s—” Damian begins, before Stephanie bursts into the kitchen, closely followed by Duke.
“Not age regression!” she cries. “Hi, Dad. Sorry, you’ve actually time traveled? You’re here, your older counterpart is there, you’ll switch back as soon as the doohickey in the Batcave you should stop touching runs out of plutonium.”
“That should be in less than seventy-two hours but over twenty-four, you won’t retain any memory of the event, any changes your older counterpart makes to the timeline will only manifest here after the return occurs.” Duke spreads a sheaf of papers covered in equations that Bruce doesn’t glance at over the table. “Any questions?”
“Who are you,” Bruce says, eyeing a copper pan gleaming in the rack over the table like his older self eyes villain tech that he can’t use morally but really, really wants to.
“Stacey!” Stephanie lies. “So, I bet you’re wondering how we all got here, huh.”
Bruce glances at Pennyworth. “Empty nest instinct?”
He doesn’t appreciate the way Stephanie laughs in his face.
***
Damian and Duke are not used to handling teenagers—they have far more experience at being teenagers being handled. They do, however, have experience at telling their father something and regretting it. This is why Damian Wayne blames himself when, after thirty hours of frantic searching, he receives a phone call from Ra’s al Ghul telling him to come pick up his own teenage father from Nanda Parbat.
"There's a reason we don't invite Granddad to Thanksgiving dinner, F—Bruce," Damian says, flying the Batplane low enough over the mountain to throw up some of the loose snow behind them. Bruce doesn't uncross his arms, but he does crane his neck so he can see better out the window. His father wasn't easy to impress at age sixteen, per se, but he was easier.
"Granddad," Bruce snorts, and then his eyes go wide. Mother had been slinking around the temple in her sheerest robes when Damian arrived to pick Bruce up, so his current thoughts are probably disgusting.
“He would have kept you there, you understand?” Damian demands. “He would have had an insurmountable information advantage over you, and if he hadn’t realized you’d pop back into the past anyway, he would have kept you on the mountain until you forgot yourself. Do you understand how that can happen?”
“Sure,” Bruce says. “You forget yourself, you can become anyone. I know how it works.”
Damian grips the throttle and looks back at his father. “We don’t—”
He stops there. Just because something feels like a backwards chance at a parenting moment doesn’t mean it is, and he knows how he would have taken we don’t want you to be anyone but you at sixteen.
***
They land in the Batcave, where Duke is monitoring the doohickey and Stephanie is preparing for her punishment-for-oversharing-non-judiciously patrol. Teenage Bruce visibly hates the Batcave, which is odd, because he picked the theme and the location well before any of them were ever born.
“You guys were about three hours from landing Dad in the middle of Ra’s’ place the second he got back,” Duke chides.
“Shit,” Jason says. Stephanie brought him in case they needed someone whose calls Talia would accept to assist with Bruce’s extraction. Damian and Talia don’t speak over the phone; his mother prefers to express her disapproval through silence and her approval through gifts of higher-quality tea and weaponry than he can find in the States. “That would have been so funny.”
“You just know he’s armed up with, like, I mean the worst that 1983 has to offer,” Stephanie says. “God help that temple.”
“He would have been so mad though.”
“How old are you?” says Damian. “He would have been mad at me, I’m the heir.” He ignores the chorus of jeers this provokes. “You’re the prodigal son. You would have gotten away with it.”
“What else will he have done,” Bruce says. His children all turn to look at him. “When I get back, what else will he have done.”
“Um,” Jason says. “Fuck-all as usual, probably.”
“Master Jason,” Pennyworth says sternly.
“He won’t have changed anything he didn’t have to,” Duke says gently. “He wouldn’t risk it.”
“What is there to risk?” Bruce demands, and the room falls silent. “Twenty-five minutes of Internet access and I knew what I’d change. Are you saying I turn out to be a coward? What will he change?”
The past weighs heavily on Damian’s father. Damian has always known this: Bruce’s past weighs heavily on him, too. But Damian is not, and has never been, a parent. He’s spent the last day and half assuming that Bruce Wayne was Bruce Wayne, immutable and eternal. But he isn’t—he hasn’t even been in Damian’s lifetime.
Stephanie, who understands this faster and better than he ever will, answers. “You won’t risk this, Bruce. Not without cause.” Bruce looks around the room startled, like he realizes for the first time that it might have something to do with him. “I’m not saying you’re a coward. I’m not saying never. But for thirty-four hours in 1983? You won’t risk hurting us.”
“Why not?”
“He’s happy,” Damian says. “You’re happy.”
For the first time since he arrived, Damian’s father looks scared. “I’m—” he begins.
Duke, who’s been counting down on his fingers from ten, interrupts. “We love you,” he says.
Bruce, wide-eyed with shock, disappears. The next moment a flashbang goes off in the Batcave.
***
“Sorry about that,” Father says, after he’s taken a shower and responsibly disposed of his time-displaced ordinance.
“He wasn’t a problem,” says Damian. “But you’ll need to restock the liquor cabinet in your study.”
His father smiles like his mother does, only visible in the eyes.