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I was a stranger and you invited me in
———
It was cold, and dark outside, and the manor yard was actually a foot deep in snow—a rarity for this place and something unprecedented for the warm-blooded young boy who stood at the window watching it, mesmerized despite his scowl and his crossed arms. He had come from the desert, where it could get cold, but it never snowed; this was the first phantom-white night he’d ever witnessed in his admittedly rather short life.
Someone was knocking at the door, and Pennyworth wasn’t answering. Damian knew why. He had last seen him elbow deep in a bowl of sugar cookie mix, making treats for the holiday they called Christmas, which would be here tomorrow. Where Damian came from, they didn’t have Christmas, any more than they had snow. That was why Damian, despite all the promises of his father on the subject, was not looking forward to the celebration.
The door had opened of its own accord apparently, as a massive form buried by a tower of boxes appeared in the room with considerable aplomb, considering the size of his load.
“Hey Dami, you ready to go? Bruce said to tell you you’ll like this next stop,” Richard said, depositing his precariously situated baggage beneath the fir tree in the corner. Damian disapproved of the tree. It was foolish and wasteful to bring something like that indoors where it shouldn’t be. He turned up his nose at it, minutely, and ignored Richard.
But Richard was not one to be ignored. He frowned over at the window Damian had returned to, and said nothing for a moment, then continued nonchalantly, “I hear a very generous donation from the Wayne Foundation has allowed them to get some live animals down there this year…”
Damian turned to study Richard slowly and sharply, in the suspicious way his mother had taught him, to intimidate people who were three times his size. “Are you certain that information is reliable?”
“Bruce,” Richard said.
Damian considered a moment. “Very well. I would like to see the animals.”
The car ride there was not long, but Damian didn’t enjoy it. The snow—the ridiculously bright lights that had been strung hazardously across many buildings—the music Richard insisted on playing, saying “c’mon it’s Chipmunks!!” “Chipmunks do not sing,” Damian insisted. “You don’t know Alvin and the Chipmunks?” Richard asked.
Damian did not; nor did he understand the lights, or the tree, or the men with obviously fake beards in the red suits whom he would have tried to arrest had he been in his Robin suit; and the more things that he didn’t know, the more he didn’t understand, the more it was driven home to Damian—he was the outsider here. Alfred’s joy making cookies, Richard’s joy over the gifts and the music, Bruce’s joy—those were all things he could find no place for himself in. They went in to enjoy it all, and Damian followed, but he felt outside, in the cold, the entire time.
The car stopped in front of a small crowd gathered on an open green fronting an old cathedral. A small crude structure appeared to have been erected in the middle of the green, and it was that that the people had gathered around. Low music was coming from somewhere, but Damian was tired of music about things he didn’t understand, and didn’t stop to listen. He spotted a cow, chomping lazily by one of the structure’s lopsided walls, and moved towards it.
A sheep or two accompanied it, and a mule, but the one he was happiest to see was the camel. It stood empty eyed and blissful, chewing a mouth full of hay as it was admired by a handful of children who had obviously never seen a camel before.
Damian had.
He was a trained assassin. He would never cry.
He wandered up to it, and gingerly reached out a hand. The camel condescended to ignore him long enough to let him stroke its muzzle. Then it chuffed, and jerked its head away with something more intelligent in its eyes than had been there before. It had spotted a promising possibility of more food—some hay sticking out of a wooden trough under the shelter. Unfortunately for it, the handler noticed and prevented it from achieving its goal. It went back to placidly munching it’s own hay.
Damian peered at the forbidden trough. He stood there for a long time, looking down at it. “Richard,” he called. “There is an infant in the animal food.”
“I know, Dami,” Richard said, moving towards him.
“Has it been misplaced?” Damian asked, grimacing even as he moved to take it up, but Richard caught him by the back of his collar and held him back. “No Dami wait, it’s supposed to be there. It’s just part of the story.”
“What circumstances could possibly have brought about the laying of an infant in the animal food.” Damian shuddered and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “It is cold out here. It could not possibly have been healthy. It does not belong there.”
Richard shrugged a little, hindered by his own hands also being shoved in his pockets. “No it doesn’t,” he agreed, “but they were far from home, in a strange place. Didn’t know anyone. And then the baby was born. This was the only place they had.”
Damian stared at the infant in the manger a while longer. Then he blinked a little hard. “That is…understandable,” he said.
It was a quiet car ride back home. Something had mellowed Damian out—probably the cow or the sheep—and by the time he was greeted by Alfred, offering the young master a cookie as a treat, he took it in an uncharacteristicly deferential way. “How did you like the nativity scene, Damian,” Bruce asked him, but Damian only hummed, and stared thoughtfully at the snow outside. It was just as unfamiliar and unwelcoming a sight to him as before, but somehow it wasn’t so upsetting a one. “Well enough, father,” he finally said. “I am ready for Christmas tomorrow.”
***
The snow and the lights and the ridiculously decorated indoor trees had come and gone, and so had the warmer months, and winter was beginning to settle in another year, when a figure perched on a rooftop stopped to observe a young woman in the street below. This was not Crime Alley, but it was a time and place that customarily a person should not venture out alone into. The figure on the rooftop, crouching silently in his suit of green and yellow and red, evaluated her movements, looking for any reason for suspicion, any marks of a crime about to be committed, and he saw her instead try to perch herself precariously on the only available form of seating that was not the ground—an out of commission coin operated mechanical horse, still sitting outside of an abandoned supermarket. The figure frowned. In a silent swoop he descended into the street and appeared before the woman. “It is dangerous to sit there,” he began, and then froze, because he’d been going to say something about not traveling alone at night, but the woman startled at his appearance, and in her arms something began to move, and let out a mewling cry. Damian blinked.
The woman looked from him, to the child in her arms, and deflated into a posture Damian knew too well. “He is cold,” she said, her words thick with an accent Damian couldn’t place. “This place is strange to me; we have not found the shelter.” There was a hitch in her voice, and but her eyes could not fill with tears. Instead they blinked at him, wide and empty. “Could you tell me where it is I have gone wrong? How is it I can find the bus that take me to the shelter?”
But Damian was staring at the baby. It mewed again, and stuck a small hand out of its blanket, reaching toward his face.
He gave her an address.
The woman’s brow furrowed, and she started to ask a question, but when she looked up he had already vanished.
***
The address brought the woman to a great, Gothic, turreted, sprawling place, fronted by a rolling lawn which was swiftly turning white, and was blocked by an iron gate. The woman froze, and sighed a weary sigh, pressing the baby tighter to her and turning to go back from whence she came, because there was no way to get beyond the gate—when it swung open, and a ten year old boy stood muffled in a winter jacket, scrutinizing her. “I—was informed you would be coming,” the boy said. “By Robin.”
An old man in a butler’s uniform stood just behind him. “Welcome to Wayne Manor ma’am. Master Damian wishes you, if you please, to follow him to the kitchen, where I have prepared warm food and a comfortable fire for you while we see about the appropriate numbers for the accommodations Robin specified. I hope you will join us—“ the butler smiled pleasantly “as we have been in the midst of preparing some Ah—festive delicacies for the season, and we’re disappointed by our standard company being unable to help us partake of it this evening.”
Damian who had crept close to peek at the baby over the folds of its blanket, and had been staring at it all through this speech, asked abruptly, “May I hold the infant?”
The woman looked down at the boy, a tired protest on her lips, but it didn’t come. Her eyes narrowed a bit, and she gazed at him in a sharp sort of way, like she knew something about him and was trying to remember, and he gazed back in a similar sort of way, a challenge, or a plea; and then the woman’s look cleared into something like recognition, and she smiled a relieved and amused and pointedly tight lipped smile at him. She nodded and let the bundle rest in his arms.
Damian thought the walk inside felt much less cold than it had been. The doors of Wayne Manor opened to receive them, and Bruce Wayne was standing inside, looking curious but happy in a surprised sort of way at the small party coming in from the cold.
“Father.” Damian announced,
“I am bringing home a friend. Alfred says it is acceptable.”
“Of course,” said Bruce, looking pleasantly from the woman to the boy to the child in his arms. “Please, make yourselves at home.”