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Even after more than a year of living with his Father, Damian still felt ‘out of the loop’ a lot. Sometimes, he was purposely excluded due to his age, but more often, he was simply missing context that everyone else assumed he had.
It was irritating at best.
Therefore, when Damian had information that clearly no one else was privy too… well, sometimes ‘being in the know’ was a nice change of pace.
So he kept his mouth shut as accusations flew around the manor. Todd was furious when Richard started walking around with his travel mug. Thomas got a lecture on boundaries when the daytime hero returned from patrol and changed into Richard’s tie dye sweatshirt. Thomas rolled his eyes with a muttered “Thanks for asking first” when he spied Brown using his fidget cube.
Gordon was annoyed with Drake. Drake was frustrated with Father. Father thought he must have done something new to anger Todd.
It wasn’t enough tension to put anyone truly ‘on edge’. Even with closer proximity than they were all used to, everyone was enjoying their breaks from work and school, and happy to spend time with one another. There was just a tiny undercurrent of chaotic irritation, and Damian was shocked to find just how satisfying it was to be in a family full of detectives and fully understand a situation that no one else in the house did.
No one else, that is, except for the cause of the chaos.
The allocation of resources was not to be taken lightly in any organization. Each member’s seniority, the tasks they performed, their indispensability, their health, and what resources they already had access to all needed to be taken into account when determining who should be given which items at any given time.
Grandfather had always valued seniority as a primary factor, he hated to see anyone carrying something fine that he had not gifted them. He wanted his family and his innermost circle of sycophants to have the first pick of everything.
Grandfather was not the standard though. The League was made up of so many people, working in so many areas, doing so many tasks, many of which Grandfather never took enough interest in to observe. Mother was always much more attuned to the inner workings of their bases. She had taught Damian that grand ambitions were doomed for failure without a keen understanding of all the daily tasks taking place around you.
Mother taught Damian how to see the threads of connection all around them. When someone in the League was sick, or cold, or their tunic was torn, or their mood soured, Damian learned to recognize the fingerprints of their community holding them up, protecting them, and caring for them.
Mother did not recognize these acts of care directly, but she always found a subtle way to slip hints to those around her when she noticed a need. Suddenly, when the woman who cleaned their suite had a rash, Mother no longer had need of her ointments and asked that they be taken away to leave more room on the counter. When the couple cooking their meals on a long term mission received news that their daughter was sick, Mother relieved them of their duties, claiming that Damian needed to train in acquiring and preparing his own meals. Indirect as it was, it was a language Damian had learned to speak fluently.
Father’s household was different. Hierarchical structures were less rigidly imposed, but interdependence was also less established. The household attempted to paper over the nuanced task of allocating resources with a blanket view of ownership and liberal use of Father’s credit cards. Decisions that should be made with care about the needs of each member had no formal or informal processes to rely on. If you needed something, you needed to ask for it, get it yourself, or hope someone happened to observe your plight. And in a household full of people too anxious, too preoccupied, too defensive, or too proud to ask for what they needed, it was not an ideal system.
But then, there was Cassandra Cain.
Cain noticed much, and said little. When Damian was aching after a rough patrol, and an electric blanket appeared on his bed, he knew that it ‘belonged’ to Brown, but that Cain understood in a way no one else in the household did. Resources were made to be used, and possession meant little compared to connection.
Cain also helped Damian really believe that his observations about the flexibility of the hierarchy in his Father’s household were correct. If Cain deemed it safe to take things from Pennyworth, Father, and all their siblings alike, then Damian need not expect Father to demand the ‘lion’s share’ of everything for himself.
Cain saw danger on an instinctual level, and she always saw safety in the manor. That was significant.
And now, Cain was throwing the rhythm of the manor into a completely different pattern, and Damian found he liked this cadence much more than the status quo.
Remarkably, no one had Cain as their top suspect, blinded in their irritation at the imagined audacity of their siblings. Because the ‘heists’ were never directly observed, deniability was always just a little bit plausible. Thomas was taking the bulk of the accusations due to working on a different schedule than the others, and while Damian would have preferred to see Drake be the one most vexed, he was happy to ‘sit tight’ just a little bit longer and watch events unfold. Given a little time and luck, it was possible suspicions would turn on Drake simply based on his reputation for (admittedly impressive planned and executed) scheming.
Perhaps on one of the evenings they were all together, before everyone went back to work or started their new semester, Damian would ‘shed some light’ on the situation for his family.
For today, he was happy to content himself with walking into Richard’s room, taking the whiteboard from behind the man’s door, and transporting it to Cain’s room, so she could practice her writing.