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Spring in Gotham is rarely warm. At least, no one from a less gloomy and wretched city would step out onto the poorly-maintained sidewalk and dare to consider this weather anything other than miserable. The sky is thick and gray and blanketed in layers of clouds so thick that sometimes Damian questions if the sun even remains lurking behind them. The air tastes wrong, like the low-dose poison it probably is. Sometimes it seems to get stuck in his lungs, and bad days have a tendency to make his eyes itch. Despite the date placing them firmly into springtime, the air and the fierce breeze are too brisk to allow him to truly believe the little number on his calendar. As it is, Damian shoves his gloved hands somehow deeper into his jacket pockets, trying very hard to keep from shivering.
Next to him, native Gothamite Stephanie Brown barely seems to notice. The thin fleece jacket she’s wearing overtop of her Gotham University sweatshirt isn’t even zipped all the way up. She’s wearing thick mittens and a striped winter hat, both items Damian is unfairly envious of, tugging his own hood up in a vain attempt to protect his stinging and frozen ears. Brown’s hair is wind-whipped and slightly tangled, but other than the bright pink flush across her cheeks and nose, she shows no signs of experiencing the same cold that Damian is feeling so acutely.
“Come on, shorty legs,” she says, motioning for him to follow her, then abandoning said motion to tug a stray lock of hair out of her mouth, wrinkling her nose and flipping her head to keep her hair out of her face.
Damian scowls murderously, hiding deeper inside his hood. It’s not his fault he hasn’t hit his growth spurt yet. Grayson has assured him repeatedly that is certainly well on its way, and then he’ll be taller than Brown and Drake and maybe even Father.
“I do not want to be here as it is, Brown,” he spits out between clenched teeth. “Do not test me further.”
Brown laughs, then reaches out to try and ruffle his hair. Damian dodges easily, smacking her hand away. She shoots him a painfully dramatic sad face, doing her best to look every bit like a kicked puppy and Damian has to resist the urge to roll his eyes up into his skull. She is quite ridiculous, and he once more questions why he is here.
A thin layer of dirt and dust accumulates on his tennis shoes, and he scuffs one of his soles against the sidewalk beneath him, feeling the way the rubber skids across the cracks in the concrete. His toe catches on a small pebble, and he kicks it into the grass so no one else using this path will have to encounter it. After all, someone with less poise and impeccable balance could have found themselves tripping on such a hazard. Damian is doing them all a favor.
This city is a mess. It should be so thankful that Damian is here to try to help fix it up, both as Robin and now as Damian Wayne. Father and Grayson say he should be thanking Brown for offering to accompany him to the animal shelter every week. He would probably have an easier time expressing some gratitude had Brown not neglected to mention that she did not currently have a vehicle. The old beaten-up car she normally drives is apparently “in the shop.” It has been there for three weeks now. Damian is no longer convinced she even owned a car to begin with.
And so now they are walking to WE, where Drake of all people will be the one to drive them both home. Dog and cat hair cling to the legs of Damian’s pants and there is a new line of pilling in the sleeve of his sweater where a screaming kitten tried to climb him like a cliff face. All in all, a very successful visit, but still Damian would like to be back home where he can shower and wash the smell of animal shelter out of his clothes and hair and begin the inane and useless stack of worksheets gifted to him by his teacher.
“Oh hey,” Brown says suddenly, interrupting Damian as he kicks at another rock. “Tim just texted. His meeting is running late, so we probably have another forty-five minutes or so to kill.”
Damian groans, resisting the urge to press his face into his hands. That would require removing them from his nice, warm pockets. “Can’t he just leave early?” Damian demands. It is cold. He wants to go home.
“Apparently not,” Brown says, sending him a pitying smile that nearly makes his skin crawl. “But hey, now you get to spend some extra time with your favorite person.”
“And who on earth is that supposed to be?” Damian asks, raising an eyebrow. There… may be someone who comes to mind when she says those words, but Damian swallows that thought down, down, down where he can no longer hear or think it. Brown is merely being her usual ridiculous self.
She grabs her chest and gasps dramatically. “You wound me, Dames, but fine. I will amend my statement: at least now I get to spend some extra time with my favorite kid.”
Damian blinks, mind racing to try and understand the joke. His ears have started ringing, just slightly, the sound drowning out a portion of the whistling wind. A rock, much bigger and heavier and covered in jagged pieces than the ones he had been kicking before, lodges itself in his chest when he realizes she must have been making fun of him. There is only one person who calls Damian their favorite kid and makes him truly almost believe it, and Stephanie Brown is not that person. And why should she think those things? It’s not as if Damian is at all kind to her, and he had certainly thought her less foolish than Grayson when it came to relationships with other people.
She is making a dig at him, laughing with herself because they both know that Damian is cruel and cold and any child Batgirl comes across is likely to rank far higher in her book than Damian is. The few strangers they passed not long ago playing in the park would certainly be better company than him, and they had been loud and snot-nosed toddlers. The rock in his chest makes it hard to breathe, but Damian forces the painfully cold air in and out of his lungs anyway, forces himself to roll his eyes, to brush her off, to ignore ignore ignore.
“Come on,” she says, ignorant to his ringing ears and labored breathing and stinging eyes. “Let’s get some ice cream. It’s Friday, and I think we deserve a reward for walking Bruno. Man, he’s a beast. Who knew ninety-five pounds could feel so heavy? My arms will be sore for days. Cass is so gonna make fun of me.”
Damian blinks once more, a small amount of the weight crushing his ribs evaporating at his pure bewilderment. “Ice cream?” he repeats, incredulous. “Brown, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but it’s forty-five degrees out. No sane person is eating ice cream right now.”
“Yeah,” she agrees easily. “So I know there’s gonna be like no line at the cart up on Fifth. Come on, kiddo.”
Her fingers clench around the sleeve of his jacket, tugging him along. He doesn’t stumble, because Damian Al Ghul-Wayne simply does not stumble, but it’s a near thing. The ground has been yanked out from under him too many times in the past two minutes, and he has little choice but to move his feet and hope they find some solid ground.
There is, unsurprisingly, no line at the ice cream cart, and the vendor looks at them with a single questioning arched eyebrow, although he doesn’t say a word as Brown launches into her order.
“I’ll have a double scoop of the moose tracks in a waffle bowl please,” she chirps cheerily.
“What about you, kid?” the guy asks.
“I don’t want—”
Brown interrupts him before he can tell this guy that he wants nothing to do with this insane idea of eating ice cream in this weather. “He’ll have mint chocolate chip in a sugar cone. Thanks!”
“I did not want ice cream,” Damian grits out as Brown shells out the cash for their treats. “And that is not what I would have ordered.”
“Yeah, you probably would’ve gotten vanilla in a bowl or something, but come on, kid, that’s so boring. And it’s my job to make sure you learn how to have some more fun in your life.”
“I don’t believe that’s true at all,” Damian snaps. “I think you’ve decided that your job is to make my life worse. ”
“Cool your jets, Damian,” Brown says warningly. “That’s uncalled for. I’m just trying to kill the forty minutes we have until it’s time to meet Tim. So drop the attitude and eat your ice cream. It’s good for you.”
“It is decidedly not, ” Damian grumbles under his breath, but takes the proffered cone when she holds it out to him. A strong gust of sudden wind makes his exposed hands sting. They’re in public, so he does little to hold back the full-body shiver that overtakes him, causing a bit of the ice cream to slide where it’s precariously stacked on the cone. He’s not too worried about losing it given that he hadn’t wanted it in the first place, but Brown had paid for it—with crumpled bills from her pocket rather than the heavy black credit card Drake carries—he didn’t see any sense in wasting her money. She was a college student who lived in a disgusting apartment in the city, and yet here she was spending her money on Damian. He grimaces, hiding it behind his cone. He’d never asked her to do that. He would never. He is more than capable of getting his own ridiculous dessert, and Brown knows that.
He’s not sure anyone has ever confused him more than Stephanie Brown does. No matter what cruel words Damian hisses at her, no matter how he purposefully ignores her skills in the field or scoffs at her choices or just generally insults her, she always comes right back. He cannot get rid of her, no matter what he tries. She will stand up for herself, tell him off when he snaps too hard or pushes too much, and she will take time away from her, but inevitably, he sees her again. He used to wait, for the hammer to drop, for some sort of punishment, but one never comes. The worst she has made him do is apologize to her, and even that had been admittedly half-hearted, and she’d still accepted. And once he had to dry the dishes as she washed. And listen to her terrible music. But there had been no real punishment, just the guilt that has slowly burrowed deep within him.
He has tried to do better, to snap less, to not jump at the instinct to insult her and drive her away from him. Those are cruel things to do, old habits from his time before Grayson. But while it is perfectly possible to teach an old dog new tricks, Damian does understand that unlearning the habits he’d been raised with is incredibly difficult. He always manages to say the wrong thing, and once the words are out, he is usually at a loss for how to negate them, so instead they linger, both himself and his unintentional target growing uncomfortable and hurt in the aftermath.
But he is trying. He hopes Brown knows that. He hopes she wouldn’t stay otherwise, if she thought he was merely being needlessly cruel.
“Come on,” Brown says. “We can go chill on that bench over there by the duck pond.”
It is too cold for the ducks to be out, but Damian follows her to the bench nonetheless. He has sat here before, with Grayson a few times and Father once. Grayson said he used to come here often when he was a child, dragging Bruce along to feed the ducks. Grayson had laughed as he recalled having to tell Father that they couldn’t feed the ducks bread; bread could make them sick so they had to bring cut up grapes instead. Damian hadn’t known that either, but he nodded and scoffed at the story anyway, informing Grayson that his father was an imbecile sometimes. Father hadn’t, however, forgotten the cut grapes when he’d brought Damian. It had been a nice afternoon.
He wishes he had some grapes. The ducks weren’t out, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t leave some for them to eat later. Maybe they would enjoy mint chocolate chip ice cream.
He licks tentatively at his cone. The flavor is more sweet than mint, but there’s a bit of a snap there that isn’t entirely disgusting. As ice cream here often is, it’s a bit sweet for his pallet, but he’s become more accustomed to American cuisine, and okay, perhaps this isn’t the worst. He will eat it all anyway, to hopefully appease Brown. He would do it for her even if he’d ended up hating it.
Brown hums while she eats, kicking at a rock that’s been lodged in the dirt near her feet. Damian’s own toes barely brush the grass. He scoots forward on the bench so he can plant his feet more firmly.
“Hey, you got ice cream on your face.” Brown says, suddenly too close to his face. Damian scrubs furiously at his cheek, suddenly warm with embarrassment. “Nope, missed it,” she says when he finishes. “Here.” And then there’s nothing he can do to stop Brown’s hand-knitted mitten from swiping gently at a spot on his jaw, a concentrated frown on her face as she works, as though he is a bomb that Batgirl is working to defuse.
“Stop it,” he says, finally unfreezing and batting her away. “I can do it myself. I’m not an infant.”
“Alright, alright, big man.” She pulls back, holding her hands up in surrender. Damian’s face burns where her hands had been, but part of him almost mourns the loss. An even bigger part of himself wants to cut that part out of him with a knife and hurl it into the pond before them. “Sorry.”
Damian huffs and tries to ignore her instead, focusing on his ice cream, refusing to let any more of it touch his face. He has had enough embarrassment.
“It’s not a big deal, you know,” Brown says slowly.
“I know that,” Damian snaps. “I do not care.”
“Alright. One time Tim fell asleep at a gala and landed face-first in his plate of salad. He walked around the rest of the night with a cucumber stuck to his cheek. Didn’t even notice.”
Damian frowns, even though he enjoys the story at Drake’s expense. “I thought you disliked attending events with Father. I’ve never seen you at one.”
“I was on FaceTime with Cass,” she says with a grin. “I hate going to those things, but at least I can get out of it. Cass isn’t always so lucky. I was being emotional support.”
“Ah,” Damian nods in understanding, and allows himself to picture Drake trying to talk to some stuffy businessman with salad stuck to his face. The image makes him smile. “It was nice of you to keep Cain entertained. Those things can be awful.” A complete and total waste of time, no matter what Father insisted about covers and keeping up appearances. Grayson almost never has to attend these things, leaving Damian with no decent company. Sometimes he is able to have a semi-decent conversation with Thomas, but Cain always manages to vanish and Drake and Father are practically swarmed by irritating aristocrats the moment they set foot in the room.
“I didn’t tell you this,” Brown says very seriously, wagging a finger too close to his face. “You didn’t hear this from me, okay? Promise me, Damian.”
“Alright…” he says slowly, more out of curiosity than anything else.
“If you can’t find Cass, she’s usually hiding out under the dessert table. And she’s a good enough ninja to steal enough macaroons for at least two people. And I know as long as you’re not a snooty white person, she won’t kick you out.”
Damian blinks. “Are you telling me to avoid my duties as Father’s only blood child and hide with Cain under the dessert table?”
“Yes,” Brown says without hesitation, not even bothering to address the blood son comment. His family rarely fights him on that one anymore; Damian hates to admit that it’s because even he himself knows better now. Legally, Father has three living adopted children, one foster son, whatever Todd may be considered in the eyes of the law, and then Damian. He is the youngest of anywhere from four to seven children, depending on who’s asking. It is infuriating, but unfortunately the reality of his situation.
“Alright.”
“But you didn’t hear it from me, right?” she reiterates.
Damian shrugs and licks his cone with a grin. “We’ll see.”
“Damian! Please! I’m telling you this out of the goodness of my heart and this is how you repay me?”
“You gave up this information of your own free will, Brown. I will make no promises.”
“Brat,” she snorts, flicking him on the forehead. It doesn’t even sting, and he finds himself relieved to see that she is still smiling, and there is laughter in her voice, making it breathier than usual.
Damian grins at the banter. He won’t tell if anyone asks, but still it is fun to mess with her. He has often seen his siblings act similarly with each other. Damian isn’t always very successful when he tries to do it himself, but it’s getting easier, with Brown and Grayson at least. Thomas will come around soon, he thinks, once he knows his newest brother a bit better.
The silence that falls over between them feels comfortable rather than stifling, and every time Damian sneaks a glance at Brown between bites of his ice cream, her smiles mimic the faint ache in his own cheeks. Damian dislodges the rock she’d been toeing at earlier, kicking it into the pond with a small splash and watching the ripples spread across the surface, disturbing the thin layer of nasty looking algae.
“I know it’s cold,” Brown says apologetically, as though she could control the weather in the worst city in the world, “but this is pretty nice, right? Or, not too bad, I guess.”
Damian shrugs, moving his ice cream to avoid it dripping on his leg. He doesn’t understand how it could possibly be melting in this chill. “It’s not the worst way to pass the time,” he admits, although he can think of several better ways. He doesn’t voice them, however, because he’s working on keeping more of those thoughts to himself, at Grayson and Father’s request.
Brown smiles at him and with her pink cheeks and blonde curls silhouetted against the gray of the sky behind her, he is struck by how bright she seems, all golden and light, too cheery for Gotham, for this so-called family, for him. And yet here she is, willingly spending her time with Damian, who does nothing but make her life even more difficult. Something twists in his stomach, and the shake in his hands is suddenly only mostly from the cold air.
“Brown,” he says, then inhales deeply. He holds it for a couple seconds, and then releases it slowly, attempting to settle the washing machine in his stomach. “Thank you for accompanying me,” he says quietly. There is a sour taste in his mouth, but some of the tension unravels in his gut, pushing him to keep going. “Today and all the times before. I appreciate being able to go to the shelter, and it has been nice to have an extra set of hands with me. The animals there deserve as much care as they can get, and they could do worse than you for help. Even if you’ll never have my natural skills.”
He tears his gaze away from his ice cream to appraise Brown’s reaction. For the first time today, it is Brown’s turn to stare. Damian wishes he could read her expression, but instead all he can feel is the sheer weight of it, pressing down on him and threatening to crumple him up like an empty aluminum can. He deliberately holds himself very, very still, suppressing the overwhelming urge to fidget as she continues to just look at him. It makes his skin crawl and itch, makes the muscles in his legs scream at him to flee or fight.
But just before he gives in to his body’s natural reaction, Brown wraps a hand around the back of his head and tugs him toward her, Damian very nearly overbalancing right off of the bench. Brown continues to shock him to his core, pressing a light kiss to the top of his head. Damian blinks wide, wide eyes down at their knees, unable to move or breathe or comprehend.
“You’re a good kid, Damian,” she says softly, finally pulling back. “Don’t let anyone make you forget that, okay? You’re a damn good kid.”
And when he sees her now, that bright light and proud smile are all for him. Her eyes are shiny and kind, crinkled at the edges. She has a single dimple on her right cheek, shown off by just how wide her smile is. Damian doesn’t understand.
It takes him three tries to get his lead-laden tongue to cooperate with him, and even then his words sound distant even to his own ears. “That seemed like a bit of an overreaction, Brown. Nothing I have done or said today has warranted such a reaction, so if you would cease the theatrics, I would appreciate it.”
She laughs, a warm and golden sound. “I forgot you always sound so formal when you get flustered. It’s adorable.” She laughs once more, then turns a soft smile back on him. “One day you’ll believe me, I swear. I can be just as stubborn as the rest of you weirdos, just watch.”
“I don’t understand you,” Damian admits his weakness, stomach turning over once more.
“That’s alright.” He swears that somehow her smile turns even more fond, and his mind races to try and think of what there is to be fond of here. It cannot possibly be him, can it? Oblivious to his thoughts, Brown checks her phone and polishes off the remainder of her cone. “Hurry up and finish your ice cream, kiddo. We gotta meet Tim in about ten minutes.”
Damian nods, and does. It is easier to eat than to speak, and he can’t ruin this if he’s putting ice cream in his mouth rather than his foot. He really, really doesn’t want to ruin this. For some reason, he feels strangely proud of himself. He shouldn’t; he didn’t even do anything to warrant feeling this way, but he does anyway, and the feeling is so much warmer than the harsh breeze whipping at his face. Grayson, he thinks, would be proud of him too, or at the very least happy for him.
Damian will not ruin this feeling. And so he will not say anything, won’t risk shattering this moment, the peace. Peace, after all, is so rare for them both.
He finishes off the last of his cone, fingertips numb from the cold. At some point in the silence, Brown has gotten up to find a trash can for her spoon and cup, taking Damian’s spare napkins with her on her way.
“Let’s go, slowpoke,” Brown says cheerfully as she returns, tugging him up by his sleeve, his hands once again shoved deep into his jacket pockets now that they are free. “Move those little legs of yours!”
He could snap back, could insult her in turn and jerk away from her and scream at her for treating him like a child, but he doesn’t. He could, maybe he should, but for whatever reason, he lets himself breathe through his gut reaction and lets it go. Damian breathes, feels the uncomfortably cold air in his lungs, and ignores it in favor of the warmth. He ignores everything else in favor of pride and confusion and things he can never quite name, and follows Brown home.