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Dying is easy. Damian knows this. He’s slipped into that cold, dark place before.
It’s easy to let yourself die. The hard part is coming back right.
“So,” Ric says, cutting the blanket of silence that had settled over them less than five minutes into the hours-long drive, “do we really need to go so far out?” He frowns. “It’s just camping, right?”
“I am not going to try and trick you into becoming Nightwing again, if that’s what you’re implying.” Damian stares out of the passenger-side window moodily, fist pillowed against his cheek. He can feel every single rattle and bump of the old car struggling down the trail. “It would be a useless endeavour—you aren’t him.”
Damian watches Ric’s reflection in the window as he shifts in his seat, fingers flexing against the steering wheel before he sighs and settles. He’s almost transparent like this, little more than pale brushstrokes against the blurred greenery outside. It makes it easier to pretend that it’s Richard in the cracked leather of the driver’s seat and not his imposter.
“Take the next left.”
He leads them to a remote location right on the boundary of the public campgrounds in the Gotham Woods. Truthfully, he’d prefer to take them further into the forest, to the exact coordinates Richard had always taken him on the rare occasions they went camping together, but his relationship with Ric is tenuous at best, so even though he’s mentally mapped the area in preparation for the trip, he doesn’t press the issue.
Ric pulls into a small clearing and slows to a crawl. The skies are grey and overcast; a storm has been brewing since the morning, but when Ric had said it might not be the best idea to go camping in this weather, Damian had refused to budge.
“This it?” He asks, leaning forward and pushing his sunglasses up into his hair. It’s thick and uniformly messy, slowly growing back after being shaved for surgery. It does little to hide the thick, ruinous scar marring the side of his head.
Damian hops out of the car. “Come. We don’t have much time before the rain starts.”
Ric grunts and follows after him. They pull the tent from the backseat and start to unfurl it. There are two entrances; one for them and one for the back of the car.
“You take that side,” Ric says.
He’s not Batman anymore. He’s not even Richard. Still, Damian dutifully circles to the other side of the tent and begins setting it up. It’s large—tall and wide enough to comfortably fit eight men—but he feels that there are enough elephants and ghosts between them that the size is necessary. The motions of his hands are easy and well-practiced; one of the last gifts Richard had given him before KGBeast had stolen him from Damian.
“I’m finished,” he calls. His voice comes out too sharp and he winces.
“Uh… I’m not even close,” Ric calls back.
Damian circles back around to him, his boots crunching in the damp grass. Gotham’s rainy season has been relentless this year. Perhaps she, too, mourns the loss of Richard.
He stops short and watches as Ric struggles, a trail of sloppily staked tent poles in his wake. How can this man who shares Richard’s body, his brain, forget how to make a tent? How can he lose something so intrinsic to the very fabric of his being and not even know it ? It makes Damian want to scream at him and demand answers, or cut open his skull and unspool his brains and find them for himself. He wants to see exactly where in the grooves of his grey matter that the disconnect is; the point where Richard Grayson ends and this imposter begins.
“Hey, give me a hand?”
Damian steps forward, ushering him out of the way. “Watch me.”
He waits until he has Ric’s full attention to start working. He goes through each step slowly, leaving Ric time to understand exactly how to do it. When Richard had taught him the first time they went camping, he hadn’t seen the value in it. Now he treasures the familiar movements more than any fine jewel.
“You were— he was raised in the circus. He could do this blindfolded,” Damian says bitterly.
Ric pauses where he’s halfway through anchoring another section. “Look, kid, if you’re just going to compare me to someone I can’t be this whole time then I don’t think this is gonna work out.”
“I’m trying.” He snaps, frustration rising like a wildfire. He forces his voice to remain calm and even when he continues, “but he raised me. He was my ba—”
Batman. Last time he’d said Batman.
“Your city needs you, Richard.”
He laughs, warm and bright, “Bludhaven is made of tougher stuff than Nightwing. She’ll survive a few nights without me.”
Richard says it so casually, as if it is just the way the world works: the sun rises in the east. The moon pulls the tide, and Bludhaven will wait.
His father would never take that chance. Not with Gotham. His patrols are almost religious in that regard; devout in the way he serves, only it’s in the name of a city and not a deity.
“Look, Damian,” he places a warm hand on Damian’s shoulder and squeezes slightly. “You’re my—my Robin. Nothing matters more to me than spending time with you.”
Damian’s entire nervous system floods with an unnameable—but not unknowable—emotion. He wants to say what he really means, but he knows that it would upset the precarious balance he, Richard and his father have built around each other. Instead, softly, he says, “you’re my Batman, too.”
He makes a wounded noise in the back of his throat, his words coming out strangled and soft. “He was my baba.”
Ric stares. He stares until he doesn’t, turning away and working at anchoring the tent with a single-minded focus, leaving his confession to sit between them, solid and awkward. He could reach out, he thinks, and be able to touch the wall between them.
Damian hates this. Being alone with him. It was his plan to begin with, but now regret makes his fingers twitch towards his phone and something static and uncomfortable buzzes at the base of his skull every time he looks at the man who should be his brother, but isn’t.
He feels like he’s being haunted. But Richard is right there. Damian recognises him: In the way his sweat makes his baby hairs curl against his temples. In the way the thin, silvery scar on his forearm shines in the weak, overcast sun. In the way a little furrow appears in his brow when he concentrates.
Ric rises from the earth, wipes the dirt from his knees—an action so overwhelmingly Richard that his colossal longing rears its head and pricks at his eyes. He scrapes the tears from his eyes with a rough hand. He refuses to lose his decorum in front of the imposter.
“How’d I do?” Ric asks, stepping back and stretching his back. If he notices Damian’s inner turmoil, he doesn’t say anything.
“It’s acceptable,” he says after a quick inspection. Even once-removed, Richard is an excellent teacher.
The rain is heavy and intense, droplets lashing against the protective layer of tarp like bullets. It’s a uniquely Gothamite symphony. Ric is kneeling in front of the heater, warming his hands.
“You don’t like the rain.”
Ric blinks. “I don’t mind it.”
“I mean before ,” Damian clarifies bitterly. He vividly remembers the first night he’d noticed. In the middle of their patrol together, on one of the rare weekends that Damian visited him in his city and not the other way around, it had started to rain. It was gentle, not the downpour Bludhaven was used to, but Richard had flinched. “You never told me why.”
“Kid—”
“ I am not a child ,” he spits venomously, green eyes blazing. “Cease this incessant—” His anger drains quickly in the face of those gentle, distant blue eyes that had once meant the world to him. Without his anger to draw from, without his fury to prop him up, he just feels hollow. “... How can I mourn someone still living?”
Ric stares into the fake fire of the heater. “I don’t know.”
Damian tucks his knees to his chest. He’s petulant, childish in a way that was almost entirely robbed from him, when he says, “I would trade you for him in an instant.”
A muscle in Ric’s jaw flickers. He doesn’t have the patience for Damian that Richard did, but he can tell that he’s trying .
“What if you had met me first?” He asks eventually.
Damian doesn’t need to consider it. Richard is his family; his partner, his brother, his Baba, his Batman. The tapestry of Damian’s soul—the weight of both his birthrights and the blank sheet of who he could become—were stitched together with Nightwing blue thread.
“Even if I had,” he says, “I could not love anyone more than him.”
Ric nods like he was expecting it and they fall into silence. It’s not gentle, or even comfortable, the storm thunders overhead too loudly for that. But it allows Damian to settle, soothing himself with the rhythm of the rain. Even when he came to Gotham, he’d always been so sure of his place—his birthright. When his father had died, Richard had taken his place and unravelled the League’s damage, guiding him on the path of righteousness, letting him choose what kind of man he would become.
Richard is synonymous with refuge, with safety, with guidance. He knew—Richard had made it known—that he would protect him above all else. And now, when Damian wants so desperately to be told everything will be alright, there is nobody to say the words.
Worse.
The only person he wants to hear say them is gone.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispers.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Ric says, gently, “I’m not… trying to make this difficult for you, I just… can’t be who you want me to be. I’m not that person anymore.”
“Then who are you?” Damian asks, raw and full of hurt, eyes shining with unshed tears.
“I don’t know yet.” He leans forward, looking directly at him. His hair is too short, parting in all the wrong places. “But I need you, all of you, to give me time to figure it out.”
Who is Richard Grayson if he’s not Richard Grayson?
Damian nods stiffly.
A sharp ring startles them both and Ric curses. He pulls his phone out of his hoodie pocket and glances at the caller ID. “Hold on, it’s Bea.”
He tunes out their conversation to give them some semblance of privacy. It doesn’t matter—it’s not Ric’s life he cares about. Instead he watches as Ric leans back, tension leaving his body the longer he speaks. He’s lighter, more relaxed. Not in the same way Richard would be, but it’s close. It aches, like he’s prodding at a bruise. He never wants it to go away, he never wants to live in a world where he doesn’t miss him so deeply and tenderly. He doesn’t want it to go away, he just wants to learn to live with it. Learn to live without Richard.
They don’t speak about anything important until later, much later, as they get ready for bed. Damian dresses himself in an oversized Hudson University sweater—Richard’s before he had relieved it from his closet. It still smells faintly of his Dunhill aftershave. He’s avoided washing it too many times since…
Since.
Ric is already in his bed, by the opposite wall of the tent. The fresh plastic of his inflatable mattress creaks as he moves. Damian lies down and curls up under his unzipped sleeping bag-turned-blanket. Ric has a similar one, but it’s brand new. When Damian had been packing for their trip, he’d thought about taking Richard’s old sleeping bag for him. He didn’t make it more than five steps before grief had threatened to overwhelm him. He’d ended up curled in the fetal position in Richard’s bed, clutching his sleeping bag like a toddler.
So, Ric got a new sleeping bag. He wasn’t willing to part with any piece of Richard, not even something he had only used a total of four times.
“Do you love her?” His voice drifts quietly across the space.
“I—” He hesitates, turning to face him fully. “Yeah. I think so.”
Damian’s expression pinches, but he means it when he says, “you deserve that. Happiness.”
Ric is studying him. Damian can feel his eyes as they canvas his face. “... You do, too.” He hesitates. “You know that, right?”
“I did.”
Damian storms into Richard’s room like he owns it. Wayne Manor is his birthright, after all. “Richard, I need a new identity post-haste.”
“Dami, what?” He chuckles.
“Are you deaf?”
“No, just confused. Why do you need a new identity?”
“Mr. Holt, that insipid fool, went through my art journal.” Damian crosses his arms furiously.
Richard sits up, blue eyes as warm as the sun on his skin. “Isn’t that a school project?”
“Yes. To be graded and seen by him and him alone. Or so I was told.”
Richard pats the bed beside him and Damian sinks into it. “Okay, tell me what’s really going on and why you need a new identity.”
“He’s decided to display my art for the school festival,” Damian scowls, “so I am moving to Switzerland. Or Italy.” Richard’s eyes begin to crinkle at the corners the way they do when he’s trying to hold back a laugh and Damian hunches his shoulders. “Don’t make a joke out of this, Grayson. I did not consent to my artwork being displayed.”
“Dami.” Richard wraps an arm around his shoulder and pulls Damian closer to his side. “If you don’t want your artwork displayed we can just tell them not to. It’ll be okay.”
It’ll be oka y.
It had been so trivial back then, a simple assurance to smooth Damian’s ruffled feathers. Now, Damian holds those words like a lifeline and lets sleep take him into his Baba’s arms.
“Damian.” Ric is sitting on the hood of his car, squinting slightly against the weak morning sunlight and turning a slip of paper over in his hands. “I’ve got something for you. It was his… Thought you might like to have it.”
Damian unfolds it and freezes. He reads it once, twice, then a third time just to make sure it’s real.
“What is this?” He asks, voice quivering.
“You don’t want it?” Ric slides off the car and approaches him. When he reaches for the paper, Damian snatches it away.
“Tell me—tell me this is real.” Damian’s hands are trembling, the paper in his hands shaking with him like a leaf in the wind.
“It’s real,” Ric promises, “I found it in one of his drawers.”
Adoption papers . Richard had them… kept them. His name signed neatly on the dotted line. Just as neatly Damian’s heart fractures in two. He swallows thickly and his throat aches with the swell of emotions there. It’s—too much, all of it. He doesn’t silence the whimper, he can’t . All he can do is want. He wants his Baba back, he wants to say yes, he wants him to tell him everything is going to be alright. Baba—
“Why—” He sobs, clutching the papers against his chest. “I wish he’d fought harder to stay.”
“Some fights you lose,” Ric says gently.
Damian can’t help it. He launches at Ric, clutching at him desperately and sobbing into his jacket. Slowly, Ric hugs him back. His hands aren’t in the same places Richard would put them and he doesn’t squeeze as tightly as Richard would, but it’s close. He squeezes his eyes shut as tight as he can, until there are white spots behind his eyelids, and presses his face against the damp patch of Ric’s jacket. If he doesn’t think too hard it’s almost the same.
It’s almost enough.