Archive of Our Own ^beta

Damian's first impression of his father's ancestral home—and thus, by extension, of his own—is of cold. His second, coming immediately after the first, is of a kind of wretched, clinging dampness. The house, barely visible through the driving rain, lurks like a great lumpen beast on the lawns, less a house than an assemblage of wings and awnings and spires, windows scattered willy-nilly across its front. The wide grandeur of the driveway leading up to it appears like an insult in the face of the misshapen hostility of the house. Father holds parties here, he has heard. He can’t imagine it. All those people swanning about, holding champagne flutes, while behind them rises Wayne Manor like a portent.

Damian doesn't understand it. Why would Father, with all the resources at his disposal, choose to live in such a miserable place? The Waynes had been in America for a few centuries, hardly long enough to feel any kind of nostalgia for it. Father could have come to Gibraltar, or Rabat, or Paris. He could have set himself up in comfort in any city in the world. And instead he’s in this squalid crime-ridden little hole in New Jersey.

To his deep embarrassment, Damian sneezes. He is used to cold, of course, has spent plenty of time at the League's Himalayan base, and heat, like everything else, vanishes from the desert as quickly as it comes. But he's not used to wet. No one ever bothered to inure him to it.

Father looks down at him with absent startlement, as though he had forgotten Damian was standing there. His ever-present frown deepens; he hefts the umbrella a little higher. "Bless you," he says.

Damian sniffs. He means it to sound disdainful, but he's not sure it quite succeeds.

Father offers some platitude about the Manor being Damian's home now, and how he hopes it will be a comfortable one, where Damian can feel safe. He delivers this last point with a particular emphasis which Damian finds grating. Does his father think he is a child? Damian is the heir to the Demon's Head. He has been training since birth to succeed where others have failed. He is Batman's son, the rightful Robin. Damian no more considers safety in a dwelling place than he considers the color of the wallpaper.

But Father emphasizes it so carefully, this must be a test. Damian is sure of it. He braces himself, falling into a loose stance in expectation of what will come through the great wooden doors of the Manor. He will prove himself a worthy successor, and he will wear Gotham, the other half of his birthright, as comfortably as Father does.

The door creaks open, a shred of light falling onto the wide marble stairs. But the only thing beyond it is a small old man, his shoulders bent slightly. Is this the martial arts master he must defeat? Damian is halfway up the steps when suddenly there is a low railing in his way that was not there before. Father is shouting his name. Damian tries to leap, but his foot slips on the damp gravel, and he goes stumbling.

The old man catches his elbow, lifts him gently to a standing position with surprising strength. Damian shakes his liver-spotted hand off with a scoff.

"This is Alfred Pennyworth," Father says, appearing on the steps behind Damian. His palm on Damian’s shoulder falls like a fetter. "He keeps the house running, and he's a trusted member of this household."

"Master Bruce," Pennyworth says, softly chiding. "I expected you hours ago."

Damian bristles. How dare this servant offer some sort of correction to Father? Father is a great man, and like all great men, he arrives when he pleases. The house should be kept in readiness for him. Grandfather's various residences always fall into service at a moment's notice.

"And Master Damian," Pennyworth says. His eyes are dark and assessing under his beetled brows. He looks at Damian as though he is seeing through him, for a moment, to look at someone else. "Welcome to Wayne Manor."

The door, when it swings shut behind him, raises a fierce wind that sends the wall sconces flickering.

The inside of the house is no more agreeable than the exterior. The main entrance is dull and gloomy, the railings of a grand staircase twisting up to the darkened upper floors. A massive portrait looms on one wall; Damian recognizes his grandfather and grandmother from Mother’s database. The smile on his grandfather’s face twists into a leer as the light shifts. Underneath the portrait, on the entrance table, sits a small, ugly little clock. Nearly 11. The trip from the airport had taken longer than Damian had thought. He’ll need to improve his internal time-sense.

Father and Pennyworth don't seem to notice the disrepair; the hallway where they walk, just ahead, glows warm and welcoming. But as soon as Damian sets his foot down behind them, the plush carpet shrinks into threadbare patchiness, shadows creeping up the walls like mold.  

Pennyworth leads him down a maze of twisting hallways, naming darkened rooms where furniture lurks, wraith-like, under dust cloths: the yellow parlor, the red saloon, the solarium, the green conservatory. The only room that seems at all lived-in is a study in warm wood; a fire bursts merrily to life in the grate as they pass. Damian glimpses the moon-like face of a large grandfather clock before Pennyworth closes the door and locks it, slipping a brass key into his pocket.

“Of course the entire house is open to you,” Father says. “But I’d ask that you not go into my study. If you need something and I’m in there, just knock.”

Damian sniffs. As if a lock could keep him out.

“I took the liberty of having your luggage brought up, Master Damian,” Pennyworth says. He opens the door to a room on the second floor and gestures for Damian to follow him and Father inside.

Damian squints at the bedroom around him, alert for potential traps. It appears, however, to be just a bedroom, and a rather inferior one at that. A twin bed, covered with a plain blue bedspread; a dresser and matching side table; a desk with a corkboard hung above it; a bookshelf with colorful fabric bins. It’s the bedroom of a target. It’s not a room that befits the heir to two great empires. For one thing, there’s nowhere to put his swords.

Damian ignores Pennyworth’s comment and picks up the clock on the bedside table. The buttons stick, though; he can’t get it to display any time but 10:48. Frustrated, he throws it aside.

“Father, where is my Robin costume? I assume I am to join you on patrol tonight.”

Father, who had been staring blankly at the empty corkboard above Damian’s desk, visibly startles. “Damian,” he says. He gets on one knee next to the bed and puts his hand on Damian’s shoulder. “You won’t be joining me on patrol.”

“I see.” Damian sets his chin. Of course Father would require an adjustment period, to ensure their maximum efficacy in the field. “My training will begin tomorrow, then.”

“No,” Father says. “You won’t be joining me on patrol at all.”

“I’m ready.” Damian leaps off of the bed, shaking Father’s hand away. “Where are my swords? I’ll prove it to you.”

“You won’t need those here. You won’t need to use violence at all, except perhaps in an emergency, to protect yourself.”

“You can’t take my things!”

“You’re a child. I won’t give a child dangerous weapons, and I also won’t let a child into the field.” Father’s voice is maddeningly patient.

Damian picks up the nearest thing at hand—the still-blinking clock—and flings it across the room. To his disappointment, it doesn’t shatter, landing neatly on the desk like it belongs there. “I am not a child! I am highly trained, and I am an asset in the field, and you would be a fool to disregard me!” Only two weeks ago, on his tenth birthday, he had defeated Mother, something Father had certainly never managed, not for long. Damian hadn’t managed it for very long either, but the smile that had spread across Mother’s face as she grabbed the naked blade of his sword and wrenched it aside had said enough. He’s ready.

“I can help you,” Damian insists.

“No,” Father says, “you can’t.” He stands to his full height, looking down at Damian, who finds himself very cognizant of his own size. He knows, of course, at least seven ways to take down an opponent much larger than himself. He could vault off of the desk and have Father off-balance in seconds. Damian clenches his fists in the fabric of the loose linen training pants he is still wearing. Unsuitable for the Gotham climate. Mother should have had him change before sending him to the airport.

“Well,” Pennyworth says, into the thick silence. “Perhaps we should leave you to settle in, Master Damian. Shall I bring you something to eat?”

“I’m not hungry,” Damian says, though he hasn’t eaten in nearly ten hours, his stomach too knotted with excitement to have bothered with food on the long flight.

Father leaves without a word. Pennyworth closes the door, leaving Damian hunched on the bed, picking at a loose thread in the scratchy wool blanket. It’s really a paltry room they’ve put him in. The walls feel very close, and very dark.

He thinks of his earlier anticipation, the way Gotham had looked from the air, all sprawling neon possibility. He was supposed to throw himself into that tangle of light at his father’s side. There’s a sour knot in his stomach. It isn’t hunger.

The next morning dawns cold and bright. Despite the clear sharpness of the sun outside, very little of the light makes its way into the house, and Damian wakes, groggy and disoriented, well after sunrise.

When he pulls open the bottom drawer of his dresser, something skids wetly across the floorboards. The window must have come open in the night; the small gray corpse of a bird lies limp at his feet. Irritating, and unfortunate; he’ll have to find Pennyworth and enlist his help in disposing of it.

Damian reaches down and closes the bird’s blank black eyes. The crumpled feathers on its breast are very red. He throws a towel over the whole mess, and then thinks better of it, and folds the corpse into the cloth.

It takes him forever to make his way downstairs. Despite Pennyworth’s tour, he can’t find the correct turning for the main staircase; he keeps getting completely turned around, and by the time he’s on the first floor he’s both starving and in a foul mood.

Pennyworth emerges like an apparition as soon as Damian’s foot touches the bottom stair, informing him of a number of facts he’s uninterested in (the weather forecast, Pennyworth’s plans for the day) and a few he is (the presence of breakfast in the dining room, Father’s absence from the house until late in the afternoon). Damian picks at under-seasoned eggs and toast. He has plans for the day; he needs to rectify his earlier disorientation. If he is to prove himself as Robin, he’ll need to understand Father better, and what better way to do that than to explore the place he makes his home?

Unfortunately, after several hours of wandering the halls, Damian’s general impression of Father is no clearer than when he first saw the Manor from the rain-streaked windows of the car. The rooms are empty of any real signifiers of life; the fussy little chairs and ornate moldings look more like the galleries of an old European museum than anything that Father might have chosen.

Everything in the house is wood and velvet; together they blanket the house in a choking, dusty silence. The house ought to echo, as empty and cavernous as it is, and yet every one of Damian’s footsteps is muffled, even in the vast foyer and the abandoned ballroom. He can smell the rot, a wet creeping scent of decaying wood and moldering tapestry that soaks the air. Pennyworth must keep the house in terrible disrepair. Father should have fired him years ago.

 He finds himself in the library, which is as overfilled as the rest of the house is open. Books crowd the shelves in no particular order, their spines cracked and powdery. Everything in the room bristles with ornament, from the rolling ladder, to the desk piled with papers, to the armchair by the tall window. The pages rustle as Damian enters: some shift in the air, or a draft from the window.

The assortment of papers on the desk is eclectic; old, curled manuscripts shoulder to shoulder with blueprints. Damian recognizes with some surprise the Shahnameh, open to an illustration of Rostam and the White Div, tucked underneath a circuit board schematic. He reaches to slide it out, and then winces, pulling his hand back. Blood wells from the tip of his finger; one of the desk’s carved finials has cut him, sharp and uncompromising. He presses on the wound, but not before a drop of blood falls onto the worn wood of the desk.

The wind outside must be ferocious, because the whole room shudders.

Damian finds himself suddenly very eager to leave the room. He shoves his hand into his pocket, wiping the blood on the black tactical weave of his pants. The wound doesn’t bleed for long. They never do.

The last place he has left to explore are the bedrooms. Damian would be disappointed in the unoriginality of it, if Father was hiding something significant in his sleeping quarters, but he ought to check them anyway. The hallway with his own bedroom contains three others, all in a row; despite spending all day in the house, it takes him nearly a quarter of an hour to find his way back to them.

The door at the end of the hall is Pennyworth’s room, which is locked; the room inside is as bland as the man himself. The only personal effects are two books: a worn copy of Shakespeare’s plays and an inferior translation of Sun Tzu; and a small portrait on the nightstand, a dark-haired man with an equally dark-haired boy. The faces in the portrait are so smudged they barely appear as faces at all. Damian tips it back into place with a scoff.

Father’s bedroom is no better. It’s massive, smothered in musty draperies the color of old blood, and despite the vastness of its footprint, seems to contain no actual belongings. Does Father actually sleep here? (Does Father actually sleep? Grandfather hadn’t, but then he was not quite a man any longer.) Damian lifts the pillow to check for an impression and finds a single white pearl, which he tucks into his pocket.

The last door, to the bedroom between his and Father’s, sticks; Damian has to fling himself against it to get inside. When the door slams open he finds himself in a perfect copy of his own bedroom: the same terrifically ordinary furniture, the same close walls. The smell of dust in here is incredible, though, and every surface is absolutely covered with dreck. Where the other bedrooms had been impersonal, this room is an explosion of memorabilia. Posters and postcards and Polaroids cram every inch of the walls, crawling up the angled roof onto the ceiling: a yellowed flier for a circus; a number of rather pretentious photographs of Gotham at night; a ticket for the Gotham Knights, old enough that the date is smeared unrecognizably. Papers and books spill from the overcrowded desk onto the floor: assignments and textbooks and well-thumbed novels. But the papers don’t make any sense; when he starts to flip through them, he finds at least three different handwritings, possibly four, and the dates span nearly two decades.

The dresser isn’t any more helpful; the drawers are crammed so full as to be almost impossible to move, and when he manages to wrench them loose they’re overflowing with not just clothes in different sizes but random scraps of brightly colored fabric.

There’s something almost nauseating about the swarming hoard of the room; his stomach tilts every time he tries to inspect the riot of material taped to the walls. And then he looks at the fabric more closely. Red and yellow and green; a few smaller scraps of electric blue and one big jagged tear of purple, shoved in the very back of the drawer. They’re pieces of costumes. They’re pieces of Robin’s costume.

The creep of bile in his throat is undeniable, now. This teeming accretion is Robin’s room. And Damian has been placed next door.

He means to shut the door behind him quietly, but there must be a breeze, because the slam resounds all the way down the hallway.

Father doesn’t appear at dinner. At a certain point in the evening, Damian decides he may as well kick his heels in his bedroom as in the dining room. He tells Pennyworth he’s going to bed, meditates until he feels sure that Batman must have gone out for the night, and then slips out of his room to search for Father’s cave.

Damian releases the doorknob carefully, to avoid the thunderbolt click of the old latch, and then freezes. At the end of the darkened hall stands a boy in a red and green costume.

“Who are you?” Damian says, in a harsh whisper. “How dare you wear that suit?” The boy is flaunting the colors that Damian has been barred from.

The boy does not answer. His eyes, in the gloom of the hallway, are dark pits with little chips of blue inside them.

“Identify yourself at once,” Damian barks.

As if in response to his question, the boy’s nebulous features begin to flicker, the details of his costume shuddering like a jerky piece of film. His chest caves in, horribly, and then reinflates; bruises dance across his face like drops of water. One of his legs snaps with an audible crunch, and then the other, and then he stands up again, whole and unbroken.

“I’m Robin,” the boy says, in a perfect candy chirp, and Damian feels rage rise up in his chest. He is being mocked. This thing wearing the shape of a boy means to convince him that Father chose it over him? Well, it will learn that Damian is the true heir. He doesn’t need any kind of trickery to win. He’ll simply be better. But when he launches himself with a cry at the boy, seizing a pointed candlestick from a side table, the boy rushes past him in a burst of sudden cold.

“Fight me, you coward!” Damian cries. He surges forward again, his hand outstretched to target the boy’s trachea. But the boy’s neck simply cracks and reforms around Damian’s hand. The loose weight of the rug tangles around Damian’s feet, and he crashes to the ground. The candlestick clatters harmlessly across the floorboards.

Something floats into his peripheral vision as he struggles to right himself. It’s the boy again. He holds out his hand, as if to help Damian to his feet. His face is swollen almost unrecognizably below the domino. Damian bats the hand away.

The boy rolls his eyes. Then he turns and lopes down the hallway on long nimble unbroken legs, leaving Damian staring at the jagged grimace of a crack on the ceiling. And then, with a shuddering groan, the plaster crashes downwards towards him. Damian rolls frantically out of the way, his heart in his throat. The walls are too close. He won’t be able to get away before he’s crushed under the rotting weight of the house. He tucks his head under his arms in a desperate attempt to protect his neck and tries to keep his muscles loose for impact.

But when he raises his head, there is no blow to his spine, only the dubious weight of Pennyworth looking down at him. “Master Damian,” the old man says. All of the lights in the hallway flick on at once, and Damian recoils at the sudden brightness. Above him, the ceiling smooths neatly into clean swoops of perfect plaster. “Why, whatever are you doing out of bed at this hour?”

The next morning Damian descends the stairs to find a young man doing cartwheels in the foyer. He straightens with a grin, shaking out a tumble of gleaming black hair. His eyes are a blue too bright for his face, and for a moment Damian almost flinches, remembering the haunted ice-chips that had glinted in Robin’s eye sockets last night. But then the man slips past Damian like a cheerful eel. His eyes are just eyes. His smile is just a smile.

“You must be Damian.” The man holds his hand out for a handshake. “Call me Dick.” Damian stares at him for a moment, leaving his own hand where it is, but the man does not provide another name.

“Alfred and Bruce around? How are you settling in?”

“Father refuses to allow me to assist him,” Damian says, stiffly. “I am not sure where he is, as I’ve been barred from a significant part of the house. Pennyworth is in the kitchens.” He doesn’t know whether this stranger is aware of Batman or not.

The smile on Dick’s face slips into his eyes, warm and knowing. “Bruce can be difficult,” he says. “I hear you trained with the League? What was that like?”

Damian narrows his eyes. Dick may know about Batman, but he won’t give up his mother’s secrets to some interloper, even if she did send him all the way to Gotham to live in this wretched house. “Educational,” he says. “I could beat you in a fight, certainly.”

“Oh yeah?” Dick’s grin flashes across his face like a spotlight. His teeth are very white. “Let’s see it then, kiddo.”

“Why does everyone keep calling me a child?” Damian growls, and launches himself across the foyer at Dick. But he isn’t there anymore. He’s laughing, vaulting himself off of the balcony to swing, impossibly, from a chandelier that should never support the weight of an adult man. But it does. Dick careens across the space like the rules of physics don’t apply to him, his reach too long for the length of his arms, his vaults too far for the breadth of his shoulders.

Damian looks wildly around for something to hurl at him, but there’s nothing but the umbrella stand in the corner. He seizes an umbrella, brandishing it like one of his stolen swords, and Dick whoops and dodges Damian’s swing to land one-handed on the sideboard. The light streams through the long windows like a spotlight across his face, bouncing off of the long mirror behind him.

And then Dick’s attention flickers down to the little cloth lump sitting on the corner of the table. Damian realizes, with a lurch of disgust, that he never told Pennyworth about the bird, and it’s been sitting here in its little shroud since yesterday. Something in Dick’s face shifts, the bones of his skull coming to prominence. His grin is too wide,  and Damian can see all of his bright sharp teeth. For a moment—and it must be a trick of the light—his limbs in the mirror seem to contort into hideous, impossible configurations. But then he folds at the waist and lands neatly on the marble tile, leaving the mirror nothing to reflect but the brocade wallpaper.

“Hey,” Dick says, the laughter gone from his voice. “Have Bruce or Alfred said anything about the manor?”

Damian stares at him. “Of course. My room is on the second floor, and I am not to enter Father’s study or the cave, but the rest of the house is open to me. And I’m forbidden from swinging from the chandeliers or attempting to use display weaponry.” He lowers the umbrella.

“Not the layout or rules, the manor itself. It’s a little weird. I’m sure you’ve noticed. You have to win it over.”

“This is a house,” Damian says, slowly, as though to an idiot.

“Yeah, well, it’s a pretty particular house. It took me a couple months to get it to like me.”

“I am not going to attempt to curry favor with a building.“

“Suit yourself,” Dick says. “Just think about it, okay? I’m going to go find Alfie. Good spar.” The hallway swallows him up. For a moment he looks no taller than Damian, and then the shadows thicken and he’s gone.  

Damian suppresses a shiver as he leaves. All the sun has vanished from the high windows. He looks across the room to the long mirror over the high table, where Dick had landed so neatly. In the mirror, Damian’s face is very small and very shadowed. A bad case of mirror rot has sent black spots creeping across the glass and mottling his reflection. The boy in the mirror smiles. His teeth are bloody.

“You don’t scare me,” Damian says, turning on his heel. He doesn’t try to follow Dick to the kitchens. He can’t shake the image of Dick’s gleaming smile, his stretched, contorted limbs, his impossible diminution in the shadows of the hall.

In the following days, Damian becomes more determined to find the entrance to the cave. Father’s insistence that he not go out as Robin or enter the cave is nonsensical. Damian has dealt with nonsensical whims before, but he has never heard of Batman acting without reason. Father’s bluster must be a test. If Damian can find the entrance, and make his way into the cave, he’ll find his Robin uniform waiting for him.

He breaks into Pennyworth’s room when the old man is busy cleaning and retrieves his swords, tucked away next to two gleaming rifles in the safe in the back of Pennyworth’s closet. The man must have hidden depths to be keeping guns in Batman’s house. Then Damian once again waits for nightfall, unsheathes his swords, and goes looking.

He’d tried to pay attention to the order of the rooms when Father and Pennyworth had first taken him through the Manor, but despite his earlier explorations, every turn takes him somewhere unexpected. Yellow saloon, red parlor, green solarium. He passes the music room, where a spindly piano roosts on a dais, and finds himself back at the yellow saloon again. Or was it the yellow solarium? It’s stupid to name your rooms after colors when all the color in the house leached from the walls half a century ago. Father’s study had been near here, he’s sure of it. And as one of two places in the Manor he’s barred from, surely it must hold some answers for him.

He turns again into the long wood-paneled hallway. There are five doors on this hallway. He enters the first one. Yellow morning room. He exits back into the hallway and goes into the second door. Red solarium. Third door. Green saloon. But hadn’t the saloon been yellow? He remembers it being yellow. Or perhaps red. It hadn’t been green. He goes back into the hallway. He’s at the entrance again, looking down the tunneling walls. There are four doors in the hallway.

He knows there had been five.

“It’s a little weird,” Dick had said. But then he hadn’t exactly been normal himself.

Damian had known the house was ugly, ill-favored, gloomy, in disrepair. He hadn’t considered that the house might be malicious.

Well, if he must fight a building to prove himself worthy of Robin, he’ll fight a building. He’s the heir to the Demon’s Head; he’s the son of the Bat. He can defeat some moldy old house.

The fifth door, the missing door, had been at the end of the hallway. Damian runs forward, putting on a burst of speed, expecting resistance. There isn’t any. He slams with a crash into the end of the hall, picks himself up, and looks back down the passage at the five doors that open from its left wall.

“I will not be bested by architecture,” Damian growls, under his breath. He walks slowly back down the corridor, banging the hilt of one of his swords against the wood paneling. The first door is the yellow parlor. The second door is the red saloon. The third door is the solarium. The fourth door is the green conservatory. And the fifth door is an expanse of wooden panels that stare blankly at him.

“Let me in,” Damian says, to the wall. He sticks the tip of one sword into the crack between two boards. “I am the son of Bruce Wayne, and I command you to open to me.”

The panel begins to peel away from the wall. Underneath is a pulsing, inky darkness, but no door. Damian stares at the writhing void. The void stares back.

Mother had included a unit on sorcery in his training; he remembers his teacher’s caution against blood magic, and then he slices the blade carefully across his thumb. Damascus steel parts the flesh like butter. “Let me in,” he says again, and lets the upwell of blood drip onto the baseboards.

The wood cracks open with a groan, the wall shuddering reluctantly as a door shoulders its way between the panels. Damian leaves one of his swords wedged in the doorjamb. He doesn’t trust the house to let him back out.

Father’s study looks the same as it had when he’d first glimpsed it; the same wood paneling from the hallway continues up the walls, rising in neat lines along orderly bookshelves. Father’s desk is piled with papers, glowing softly under the light of a warm lamp; an armchair nestles in one corner, next to a fire crackling cheerfully in the grate.

At least that’s what it looks like until Damian steps over the threshold, and the fire gutters with a whoosh, leaving the room chill and damp. The floorboards creak ominously under his feet as he takes another step, and another, sword held firmly in one hand. Wind rattles the glass.

Damian stops moving. The rug shivers beneath his thin training slippers. Somewhere in this room is something the house does not want him to access, and it is this he must target. He begins a slow circuit of the room, paying attention to which directions the house likes least. The bookshelves are mostly uneventful, as is the desk. The walls begin to bristle as he walks towards the fireplace with its cozy armchair. By the time he’s standing in front of the grandfather clock, the room’s temperature has dropped enough that he has to suppress a shiver, and the walls are wobbling nauseatingly.

He reaches for the door of the grandfather clock, but he can’t quite reach; a chair has appeared in front of him. He shoves it out of the way. There are two chairs between him and the clock. He growls and tosses them aside. Three chairs, haphazardly stacked, and two of them have several extra legs.

It’s the clock, then. It must be in the clock. He breaks the leg off of one of the chairs, and it sprouts a bristle of spindles in his hand. When he tosses it aside, it skitters across the floor and rises up as yet another chair. Damian growls. It’s just furniture. It’s only a house. He begins hacking his way through the chairs, dulling the sharp blade on half-rotted wood and moldering stuffing, splinters flying everywhere. Chairs rear halfway up the wall now, a thorny pile that nearly blocks his view of the grandfather clock. They creak and chitter like insects. Something flies at his face—the leg of a chair, its curved lion’s foot transformed into a club. With a laugh he beats it aside with the flat of his blade and continues hacking.

The grandfather clock begins to toll, but it isn’t sounding the hour, because just a moment ago the hands had been firmly fixed—like every other clock in the house—at 10:48. Its door swings wide, barely visible between the slats of wood; beyond he can see the crawling blackness he’d found behind the paneling, and a single slate step leading down into the void.

And then Damian makes a critical mistake. He’s been focused on his goal; he left the door propped open, to secure his exit. He hasn’t been watching his back. From behind him comes the unmistakable roar of his father’s voice.

“What is the meaning of this?”

Damian freezes. He pivots slowly on one foot, his blade still held up: triangle stance, careful of the flow of energy up from his legs into his torso, down through his arms into his sword. Behind him seethes a mass of broken wood, swarming all the way up to the ceiling like an overturned matchbox.

His mouth opens, then closes. There’s nothing to say, no excuse he can give. He was barred from this room, and he disobeyed that order, and then, more damningly, was caught; worse, was caught and unsuccessful. Father won’t let him be Robin, not after tonight. He’ll have to prove himself again, some other way, to avoid being sent back. He’s worked so hard, for so long, and the idea that a house has foiled him is unacceptable.

 “Drop the sword,” Father says, in a voice that brooks no argument. Damian sets it gently on the floor. He’s abused it enough tonight. The blade will require serious attention. Damian wonders where Father keeps his whetstone.

Father leans down to pick up the blade. He has Damian’s other sword in his hand already, and he bundles them in a torn piece of curtain and tucks them under one arm. “I told you that you would not need these in this house.”

Damian bristles. “You said I was allowed to protect myself! Did you lie about that, too?”

“What do you mean, too? I didn’t lie to you about anything.”

“You said I would be welcome here. You said you wanted me. But you don’t. You hate me, and your stupid house hates me!” Damian aims a punch at the wall and Father catches his hand before he can twist away. “I’ve trained for this my whole life and you still don’t consider me a partner. And you won’t let me spar, or train, so I can’t get better.” It’s been a week. Damian has tried his best to keep up with his calisthenics, but he doesn’t have the equipment he needs, never mind the training partner.

“You’re ten years old, Damian,” Father says. “You’re not my partner, you’re my son.”

Damian can feel frustrated tears trickling out of the corners of his eyes. He doesn’t move to wipe them away, since that will only call more attention to his childish weakness. “You’ve had young partners before,” he says. “I saw—” but better not to mention his encounter with Robin in the hallway.

Everyone in the League called him the son of the Bat. He’d been so proud to hear it slide from their tongues. Now the name feels like a taunt.

“I have,” Father says. “I won’t do it again.” He holds up a hand as Damian opens his mouth to protest. “Don’t try to argue me out of it. This conversation is over.”  He starts to pile the splintered chair legs into neat heaps of kindling. The chairs begin, bit by bit, to creep down the wall and melt back into the panels. They give the impression of dogs with their tails between their legs. Damian tries to resist a similar feeling.

“Pennyworth,” Damian says, “I require your assistance.” He’s found the old man in the conservatory, kneeling on the tile with his hands in the dirt. It seems astonishing that anything should grow in this house at all. Pennyworth is cutting back the long creeping spines of roses. The room is warm and smells of rot.

“How can I be of help, Master Damian?”

Damian pulls the small cloth-wrapped bird from his pocket. “I found this,” he says. “In my room. I’d like to bury it.”

“Ah,” Pennyworth says, as Damian unfolds the cloth. The bird is now several days dead and showing it. “I think it would be best if you buried that well outside of the house. There’s a hill up beyond the gardens that would be suitable.” He hands Damian his trowel.

The outside air is crisp and cool after the stifling warmth of the conservatory. Damian buries the bird as quickly as he can; the ground is already hard this late in the year, and his trowel doesn’t find much purchase. He nestles the bird in the earth and covers it, hopefully deep enough to be safe from scavengers.  

He can see the whole spread of the house from up here. From this far away, in the autumn sunlight, it just looks like a building. Damian feels his lungs expand for the first time since he came to the Manor. He rolls the pearl he’d found in Father’s room between his fingers like a single dubious prayer bead. And then he walks down the hill and back through the heavy doors to be swallowed by the dark of the hallway.  

Father has yet to take Damian into the city proper. He hasn’t tried to gain access to the Batcave again since his disastrous battle with the study, but perhaps what he needs is to prove that he can be an asset in the field. Here in the house, with it actively hindering his efforts, he can hardly prove himself to be anything at all. So: Gotham. The Batmobile must be stored down in the cave; Damian’s only ever heard it as a distant roar. But the other cars, including the neat black sedan which Pennyworth uses for his grocery trips, are all stored in a white row of sheds off to the side of the west wing, where the formal gardens give way to clumps of hedges and coppices of trees.

The car is pathetically easy to hotwire; from there, it’s just a matter of adjusting the radio to pick up the police chatter. Batman is on the move: he swoops into a robbery on 8th and Bowery, leaves a mugger on the corner of Ditton Ave. The cops, of course, are always several steps behind, and Damian quickly realizes that if he actually wants to find Father he’s going to need to ditch the car and go on foot. He parks the Bentley behind a dumpster and slips his makeshift domino over his face.

It’s around the next corner that he finds his opportunity, though it isn’t the one he’d hoped for. Father is lying in a puddle, the streetlights glinting off of the oil-slick sheen of the black water. He groans slightly when Damian taps his armored shoulders, so Damian at least won’t need to try to pry his chestplate open to attempt to resuscitate him.

“Father,” he says, tugging at the cloak, and then he notices the blood all over his own hands, and the situation becomes a little more urgent.

Father is extremely heavy, but Damian has trained in several disciplines that allow him to maximize his own strength. He rolls the cape up and drags his father’s body on it like a tarp, attempting to minimize jolting to his head. The Batmobile could be anywhere in the city, but the Bentley is just around the corner.

“Do not worry, Father,” Damian says, heaving Batman over a curb with as much care as he can manage. “I shall return you to the house with all possible speed.”

It takes some work to get Father from the ground into the car. In the warmth of the dome light, he can see the stab wound in Father’s side. He makes a wad with some napkins from the glove compartment, and ties the cape around it. That will hold for the next seven minutes until Damian gets them back to the Manor.

The drive is silent but for Father’s ragged breathing stuttering with each turn. Damian finds himself missing the chatter of his mother’s people. They were never unprofessional, but they did speak on the way back from a mission, especially if Mother wasn’t in the vehicle. Everyday talk about how the operation had gone, teasing about Pierre’s weak left hook or Farah’s fumbled shot. Sometimes they would play music. Bilal had liked to sing along in a gravely, tuneless tenor, until he’d bled out in a test of Damian’s ability to organize a double envelopment.

The car fishtails in the gravel in front of the house. Damian leaps from the car, not bothering to close the doors, and drags Father onto the terrace. The lamps on either side of the great wooden doors flicker in the wind. Father’s blood leaves a long streak on the marble staircase, up all twelve steps. Pennyworth will have to scrub it clean, but surely that’s something he’s used to by this point, after all these years as Batman’s manservant.

At the first touch of his hand on the doorknob the house shudders violently. The marble stair underneath him cracks. “Pennyworth?” Damian calls. “Pennyworth, I require your assistance.” He pushes the door open and heaves Father over the threshold into the darkened entryway.

The room is pitch black; not even the weak lamplight shines through the windows. “Pennyworth! Where are you?” Damian calls again. He gets no response, not even the creak of a floorboard. He has a brief, nightmarish vision of running through the shifting halls trying to find Pennyworth. He reaches for the pearl in his pocket, but when he finds it, he can feel a jagged crack up its smooth round face. He must have crushed it getting Bruce out of the car.

And then, with a shrieking groan like an unoiled bolt being drawn back, the house collapses. The marble flagstones fall from under his feet, whirling up around him as though born away by the winds of a habub. The walls vanish, replaced by the same inky, organic blackness that he’d glimpsed behind the paneling. A whirling maelstrom of furniture and paneling surrounds them: chairs and tables and books and papers rising in a great vicious column. For a moment, the portrait of the Waynes flies at his face, his grandmother’s mouth open in an unholy scream, and then it too is whisked away. He’s standing on the one remaining flagstone, Father’s body a black heap next to him. And then the flagstone begins to tilt. Father slides, slowly and inexorably, towards the abyss.

“No!” Damian yells, leaping to grab at Father’s shoulders. The house is going to steal Father away, and then he will die. It’s a house. It doesn’t know how to run a blood transfusion or stitch a wound. He grabs Father’s arm, trying to pull him back from the edge.

“You have to listen to me,” Damian shouts into the void. “I brought him back. I’m trying to save him. Take me to the cave so I can help him!” He puts his hands back on the wound in Father’s side, trying to keep pressure there. Blood squelches wetly under his palms.

Father’s breath is growing increasingly ragged, his inhales rasping wetly. “Is this what you want, you wretched pile of sticks?” Damian shouts at the shrieking chaos around them. “He’s going to die! He’s going to die, and it’ll be all! Your! Fault!”

The maelstrom shudders and slows. For a moment the portraits and chairs and frozen clocks hang suspended, motionless, as though hung on invisible railings. Damian punches the flagstone below him in frustration. And then he remembers the wood paneling in the hallway. “Take me to the cave,” he calls, and he drives his fist into the marble again, with enough force that his knuckles catch on the crack in the flagstone and begin to bleed.

The entire disembodied contents of the house hang around him like a great black museum. And then the house shudders again, the floors beginning to fall back into place above his head. Damian doesn’t get to see the house reassemble itself, though, because he and Father and the flagstone are plummeting downwards towards a small point of blue-white light.

The light quickly resolves into the gleaming fluorescents of a fully-equipped surgical suite. The rock walls of the cave coalesce around him, but Damian doesn’t spare them a glance. Father lands with surprising lightness on the gurney; before he’s even settled, Damian is stripping away the suit to place an IV.

Once Father is finally stitched up and breathing more easily, Damian lets himself collapse onto the stool by the gurney. The back of his neck prickles, and he whirls around to see, perched in the corner of the cave, the crouched figure of Robin.

“Some partner you were,” Damian spits, his fists trembling despite himself.

Robin doesn’t say anything. It’s hard to read his face, under the domino and the incoherent smudge of his features. Damian would expect him to look taunting, or spiteful, or malicious. But he doesn’t. He only looks sad. And then he flickers into the shadows and is gone.

Bruce wakes with a start. He’s on the surgical gurney in the cave, he realizes, with some consternation. He remembers very little after the bright, expected plunge of the knife into his side—a blurred memory of the rest of the fight, and then the cool roughness of the alley wall against his hand as he’d staggered to hold himself upright. Streetlights moving. The thunk of his head against a marble staircase. The soft prickle of hair under his hand—but that’s not a memory at all.

Damian is curled in a rolling office chair, his arms folded on the gurney, his head pillowed on his arms. Fast asleep.

“Ah good,” Alfred says. “You’ve woken. I was beginning to fear that might not be the case for quite a bit longer, in which case I would have to attempt to transfer you to somewhere more comfortable. And I was rather loath to disturb Master Damian.”

“What happened?” Bruce croaks. Alfred hands him a cup of ice chips, ignoring his glare.

“The boy did well,” Alfred says, laying a gentle hand on Damian’s shoulder. It’s a testament to Damian’s exhaustion that he doesn’t so much as twitch.

“You think he’s ready, then?”

“I do.”

“This is the last one,” Bruce says. “The last time.” His hand tightens on the small, fragile round of Damian’s skull.

“Of course, Master Bruce.”

Across the room, the brightly colored uniform hangs from its frame. Bruce’s eyes skim across the names beneath it, as they always do.  He doesn’t need to read them anymore.

“The last one,” he says, again, but Alfred is already gone, or as gone as he ever is. The house shifts comfortably around him, chittering softly just at the edge of his hearing. As a child, he had been afraid of that noise. He had thought it was bats.

He runs his hand over Damian’s small clenched fist. Damian’s fingers loosen slightly in sleep, and out falls a small white bead. It’s his mother’s pearl, layers of nacre flaking like dead skin from a long jagged crack.

Bruce rolls the pearl in his palm. He looks across the cave at the thing he is feeding his son to. Red, yellow, green. When he opens his fist, there's nothing left in his palm but a shimmering powder.