Chapter Text
She had been a fool.
As the woman stared at the two pink lines on the stick, she cursed. A fool indeed. A miserable one, and disgraced if her father found out.
And yet. . .
The woman brought a hand to her stomach, to where the little life was growing.
Her father would kill this unborn child if he discovered its existence.
But even if the child had come from her mistake, her careless mistake, somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to see this life inside her as a mistake.
Somehow, for the first time in a long time, for the first time in her career as an assassin, she felt the value of life not her own, not her father’s.
The child’s father was out of the question.
Not when he stood against everything she did in the shadows.
She’d have to stash away the child somewhere safely.
And quietly.
Her sister would help, this much she knew.
And this child?
Well, he would not be like his mother, the woman decided, tucking a strand of her auburn hair back.
No, this child would not be like a bird of prey.
He would not be a symbol of death, but of life.
Her little robin.
And maybe, one day, something more.
~~~
“He must never know the truth of his origins, understand?” The woman glared at the couple in front of her, her piercing green eyes narrowed. The black cloak around her and her newborn sheltered them from the snow drifting down in large, puffy flakes, but she was more interested in studying the two people in front of her.
She’d searched ever since that positive test to find a way to make her child, her son, safe, and here was the answer.
Hide him in plain sight with a circus.
No one would question his skills then, the skills he had the genetic predisposition for.
She would hide her son with this infertile Romani couple, giving him a chance better than the one he was born into.
Better than her legacy of blood and bodies.
The Romani woman, her red and white acrobatic uniform barely visible under the wool coat she wore, spoke. “And we will see you every year?”
Stroking her son’s soft tuft of midnight black hair, the woman nodded, just once. “I’ll need to do so to protect him. Every year, I shall refortify the chip in his spine. It is what will keep him safe—that and you are keeping my little robin safe.”
After all, her guns and blades could only do so much.
“What does it do?” The Romani man asked, his voice trembling for the first time. His frame rippled with muscles even if gravity seemed to hardly hold him down.
The woman sighed, rocking her baby as she answered. She knew she was saying too much, but she wanted to extend this conversation, to not let go of her child. “It writes over his genetic code. Protects him from being tied to me, to my family by making it seem like you are truly his biological parents, not me.” The woman sniffled, a single tear tracing down her cheek, freezing midway down, the bitter cold already sinking into her bones.
The boy cried, the ice biting into him as well, and the woman steeled herself, placed a swift kiss against her son’s forehead, ruffled his ebony hair once again, and passed him to the woman in front of her, the woman with hair that matched the boy’s.
And with that, the assassin vanished into the shadows—the only place where she truly belonged.
~~~
“Miss Taylor, why do you come every year?” The young boy, now seven, looked at her with his wide blue eyes. Blue eyes he got from his father. The tent around them was warm, and the woman sighed, laying out her nurse’s tools.
She answered in Arabic, the language she had told the child—her child—to learn over the past year. While he was safe now, she would take no chances with her little robin. “To give you and the rest of Haly’s Circus a physical, same as last year and the year before that.”
“But why not come more?” The boy asked. “You’re fun to be around.”
“Because, little robin,” the woman said, bopping the child’s nose as her heart ached, “I can’t. My job takes me to too many places.” She dropped her voice into a conspiratorial whisper, “But I heard that you are going to Gotham City next.”
The little boy in front of her lit up, breaking into a large grin. He’d lost two more teeth since she’d last seen him. “And Mami and Tati say I can perform there!” The boy bounced up and down excitedlyas she knocked his knees with a hammer. His reflexes were fast, but they still weren’t fast enough to catch the way she flinched every time he called the Romani woman mother.
Would it ever stop hurting?
It didn’t matter, the woman reminded herself. She had given up the role of mother a long time ago.
And it had to stay that way.
So she plastered on a smile and turned to her little robin. “Your first performance, huh? Big day?”
The boy nodded. “Oh, can you come, Miss Taylor? Can you, can you, can you?” Each word was punctuated with another bounce.
“Of course,” the woman told him, smiling. “Of course I can, little robin.” Her heart twisted again, its strings feeling close to their snapping point, but she steeled herself by thinking of her sister.
Her sister who was covering for her.
But her sister was as trapped as she—-and perhaps even more desperate.
The woman tilted her head, considering the child in front of her, his eyes filled with joy and laughter. With the way he looked at her, the way he smiled, the woman doubted the depths of her sister’s desperation.
No, she was far more desperate than her sister.
Which is how, a week later, the woman found herself in the place she had sworn to never enter again.
Gotham City.
The place where all this had started, where she had fallen in love with a man who hid behind masks, where she had almost abandoned everything. . .
Until she remembered that she was in a cage, always.
No matter what she did.
No matter who she killed.
And the cage was ever-tightening like a noose around her neck.
The woman pushed past the crowds, ignoring the smell of buttered popcorn and peanut shells on the floor. Her robin would be with the elephants, with the tiny one he called Zitka.
She ignored the flashing lights, tuned out the sound of laughter, of joy. Her vision tunneled, her mind and heart beating one thing. . . and then the woman saw him.
Not her son, not her little robin.
The robin’s father, the bat.
The man she had once fallen in love with, the man her traitorous heart still skipped a beat for.
And he was eyeing her.
He walked over, the picture of a playboy until he spoke, his voice stiff. “Talia.”
“I’m sorry, you must be mistaken.” The woman let a bit of her signature purr enter her voice as she corrected the man in front of her. “I’m Taylor.” Yes, here she was Taylor.
Here she was not Talia al Ghul, the youngest daughter of the Demon, of Ra’s al Ghul.
Here she was just a nurse checking in on the circus. . . but more importantly, she was a mother.
She had never realized how amazing that would feel, how her heart would swell and how she would smile like a fool, until she had held her little robin in her arms for the first time.
“Would you like to sit with me?” The man asked, his eyes narrowed. Calculating.
“I would be honored. Bruce Wayne, isn’t it?”
He nodded, escorting her to a front row seat. He did not know the truth about her son, about their son, but it didn’t matter.
Somehow, they were sitting next to each other as their son put on his first performance.
When he came out, he waved to them, his smile so big it threatened to split his face. He ran up to the Romani couple and snuggled with them before climbing to the top of the trapeze.
And then she watched, transfixed, as her little boy performed each trapeze act with grace and skill, flipping through the air and catching onto the other performer’s hands.
In that moment, she knew she would have given her life to be there in her son’s.
But evil was often more powerful than life and death.
Something she was reminded of when the trapeze ropes snapped and the Romani couple fell to the floor, to their deaths, her little robin on the platform above them, sobbing.
She didn’t cry out, her training too drilled into her head.
But the bat, the man next to her, did.
And then he glared at her, blaming her, she knew.
But if she had seen this coming, realized the tragedy that awaited. . . she would have stopped it.
Because now her little robin was sobbing as police sirens blared. She exited the tent in a daze with everybody else, the lights on the patrol cars snapping her out of her grief.
She had to flee now, had to disappear without a trace, before the cameras appeared or Bruce could question her.
Was it possible her heart could break even more?
It seemed it was as she slunk into the shadows, feeling like a coward and a failure.
~~~
Three months later, she got the call.
“He’s with the Bat,” her sister’s voice was calm and muffled through the mask Talia knew she wore, but the voice modifier in the Deathstroke helmet was off.
“Does he know?” The woman’s voice shook.
“Nothing. But the boy is fighting next to him. Robin, he calls himself. I thought I should let you know, sister.”
Robin.
What was Bruce doing, letting a child fight on the streets of Gotham?
But he would have been no better with her, she reminded herself. He would have been worse off, in fact.
Still. Her robin was a child, not a pawn in Bruce’s war.
“Thank you, Nyssa.” The woman forced herself to speak, her mind turning.
She could work with this.
Yes, there was a light in this darkness, and the more digging she saw, the more she saw her opening.
Eventually, she had a plan.
A plan to protect her son.
A plan to be a mother again.
To maybe, just maybe, have a shot at a real family—if only she could convince her father.
But the great Ra’s al Ghul was easily swayed once she talked about providing him with an heir of her blood and the bat’s, the data built on evidence her own son, her little robin, had compiled without even realizing it.
His very existence was a mere testament to it, even if she kept that still a secret from her father.
Who, by some miracle, agreed to her plan to have another child.
Not a replacement.
Never a replacement.
But a chance at piecing her family together again, somehow.
Of course, the woman still had some secrets.
Robin was, and would always be, her greatest secret.
Or so she thought. . .