Chapter Text
Damian was running from an inane sorceress. He dodged an errant blast of magic that slithered through the air like an electrified snake. The sorceress’ aim was terrible, which was just as well as the magic seemed to do very nearly the opposite of what she wanted. Damian jumped over another bolt of magic that hit the ground where his feet would have fallen next and turned it into soup.
He growled; he hadn’t been able to get close enough to take the sorceress down since his opening strike, a glancing hit to her magical diadem that had nicked her forehead that was oozing blood into her left eye. She was firing at him half-blind. A sparkling firework of potent energy hit a parked car to Damian’s right and the vehicle quickly oxidized to naught but a pile of rust. “Fool! You’re going to kill somebody!” he yelled at the sorceress.
The magician only cackled and cast a sizzling bolt of energy that teleported a chunk off a nearby wall and onto the roof of an adjoining building, where it crumpled apart on impact and rained down over the gutter in a shower of mortar dust and mangled brickwork. “That’s the point you little pest! Stand still so I can hit you!”
Damian picked up a loose brick from the destroyed wall and chucked it at the sorceress. Half of the brick vaporized on the way, hit by an iridescent floating spark that flashed brightly on impact, but the other half made it through the magically charged air. The sorceress only barely dodged but that was the only opening Damian needed, and he darted forwards. He reached the sorceress just as she was straightening up, and with the aid of his momentum plunged the hard hilt of his sheathed sword into her stomach. With a wheeze she doubled over around the hit, and Damian reached for the accursed diadem. He grasped the ornate band of metal in his hand and pulled, but it was braided into the sorceress’ hair and wouldn’t come off. Then the woman got the breath he’d punched out of her back, and thunderous dark eyes rose to meet the vacant blank whites of his mask. One of the sorceress’ long-fingered hands closed around his face.
“Andro indu lithos-”
Blinding magic sparked from the palm on his face even as he yanked the diadem one last time. The unreinforced filigree finally gave under his grip and the shimmering magical focus mounted on the crown came loose, right as the sorceress’ final spell took effect. The ground fell away from under Damian’s feet as a primordial rush of static drowned out the sorceress’ scream of outrage. Blinded and deafened by the magic he fell into nothingness.
<>
Damian tumbled through a disorienting magical vortex, and colors he had no names for flashed and spun around him. The portal spell spat him out upside down above a large outcropping of rock, and Damian had to utilize every bit of the rigorous falling practice Richard had put him through to avoid breaking his head open on the stone surface.
What was this? Damian gave the rock a couple of scuffs with the thick tread of his boot. Clearly the sorceress had tried to turn him into stone, but the magic that had been out of her control the entire time they’d fought had teleported him to a large rock instead. Amateurish.
As Damian looked around, blinking as the starburst of magic still lingered in his vision, it became apparent that he’d not been simply teleported to the nearest giant rock as he’d initially thought. The time of day was different, meaning he’d changed continents. This wasn’t even the biggest rock around- looming mountains were clearly visible to his left, and even in the distance he could make out gigantic boulders littering their base. Otherwise the area he’d ended up seemed to be fallowing grassland swaying in the cold, dry wind that ruffled his hair, bordered off by distant forests fading into the overcast horizon.
It was quiet. Quiet as the uninhabited mountain peaks far above his first home in Nanda Parbat.
Damian rubbed his masked eyes, but the pattern of sparks still remained. Where on earth had the witless sorceress transported him? The scenery was altogether unfamiliar and he couldn’t pinpoint his whereabouts. He checked his comm, trackers, and computer, but none of them found signal. Had the magic scrambled them? Extremely unprofessional.
“Superboy!” he called into the clear, cool air. He expected the familiar blur of blue and red to come whistling over the mountains and land grinning next to him, but the silence stretched on, and nothing moved in the air except distant birds. “Jon Kent you come fetch me this instant or I shall have words with your father!”
Nothing. Nothing but the wind and unfamiliar crickets in the grass below.
He glared at his surroundings as if that would help, and gradually the spots on his vision faded. Something iridescent still glowed in his eyes though, and Damian looked down to a crevice in the rock face only to find the gem from the sorceress’ diadem. “Stupid rock,” he mumbled and picked it up. He had half a mind to hurl it as far as he could into the swaying grass, but he stayed his hand and tucked it safely into one of his belt pockets.
If the gemstone was here, it was possible the sorceress was as well. In that case she would be looking for him and the magical focus stone, and he’d have to be careful. Damian would look for her just as well. He was sure he could... persuade her to teleport them both home.
With nothing else to do but start looking, Damian rappelled off the giant rock into the waist-high grass and picked a direction.
<>
Sun was already setting behind the cloud cover and Damian hadn’t seen hide nor hair of people. No buildings, no roads or fences or fields, not even airplanes flying overhead. He refused to admit it, but he was getting nervous.
Then, suddenly, the wind changed and carried distant human voices to his ears. It sounded joyful, a round of laughter after a well-told joke. Damian turned towards it, towards the darkened woods to his right. He slipped under dark branches full of browning leaves, and his cape’s black exterior disappeared completely in their shadow.
He saw firelight through the trunks and underbrush, and crept forwards. He began to hear words in a language he didn’t know, and drew his sword just in case. He crept closer and closer, until he was hidden from view only by a single low-hanging bough.
There were five people around a small fire, dressed in leather and furs. They were smiling at each other and all had tanned weatherbeaten faces like old fishermen, though he supposed none were older than forty. They were drinking from little bowls and he could smell cooked meat. His nose wrinkled at the thought.
He watched the group for several minutes, observing their body language, looking for weapons. Their bodies were like their laughter, open and merry. He could see wooden staves and the fletched ends of large arrows, but no guns or blades. If it came down to it, Damian had no doubt he could take them all in close combat.
He hesitated a moment more and sheathed his sword. Maybe these people had a satellite phone they’d let him use if he proved himself non-hostile. He stepped into the ring of firelight.
It took a while for anyone to notice him in the scant orange light, but eventually the dark-haired woman on the opposite side of the fire pit startled up from her seat, spilling some of her drink in shock. The others turned to look, hands reaching for their staves, and in the resulting silence Damian slowly raised his hands to show they were empty. “I wish you no harm,” he said. “I am merely lost.”
They continued staring at him, but as he made no sudden moves they eventually relaxed. “����?” the woman asked. ”���?”
Damian repeated his greeting in all the languages he knew and watched as the group struggled to recall other languages than their own to try the same, but no common tongue could be found. Instead of succumbing to frustration the strangers remained jovial despite the initial shock, and gestured for him to join them at their campfire. “�����,” the first woman said and gestured at herself. “Aora. ���� Aora.”
He easily recognized the introduction as what it was, and in kind placed his hand on his own chest. “Robin. My name is Robin.”
The bearded man on Aora’s left introduced himself as Iluš, the younger man next to him was Henwe and next to him was Visne who must have been his sister. Finally, the freckled man to Damian’s right introduced himself as Jise.
Iluš offered him some of the meat he’d smelled earlier which Damian refused, and a drink which he accepted. The longer he looked at the small drinking bowl he’d been handed in the flickering orange firelight, the less he wanted to drink. The bowl was not plastic, or even wood- it was bone. Smooth, thin, naturally curved bone. They were drinking out of skulls.
He almost dropped the cup in disgust. They wanted him to drink from a bone vessel?
“���,” Iluš encouraged and mimed drinking from his own skull cup with exaggerated movements, like he didn’t know how to drink. Damian shot him a glare that was lost between his mask and the quick firelight, and the man kept smiling at him like a child. It made Damian bristle.
If these... these larpers were drinking from bone bowls, and even had one to spare, they were possibly committed enough to not even have any electronics with them. Foolish, but they should at least have a map or decent knowledge of the area. He had to begrudgingly acknowledge that in a large wild area like this, without the use of his maps or trackers, it was best to stick with these... people, at least until he got signal again.
Damian swirled the golden liquid -some kind of herbal tea- around in the skull cup. The harm was already done, and refusing to drink from the skull would not bring back the animal whose bone had been used. With a frown he drank and ignored the way Iluš was nodding and smiling at him. The tea wasn’t bad, at least.
<>
When the campfire started dying down and night had fallen properly, the others began to talk hurriedly with each other, occasionally saying his name or waving a hand at him or casting worried glances his way. Damian tolerated it, if only because he had no way to answer whatever question they had. Soon enough they pulled out what looked like leather sleeping bags, and Henwe offered his to Damian. Had they been arguing about who had to give him their sleeping bag?
“My uniform is well insulated. I do not require a sleeping bag,” Damian said despite the language barrier and pushed the held-out bag back towards the young man.
“�������,” Henwe insisted and tried to deposit the roll in Damian’s hands.
Damian took a step back and raised his and in as placating a manner as he could. “I am fine. I will be fine. Gotham has much colder nights than this.”
Henwe turned to Aora for help, like he couldn’t believe Damian could refuse. The older woman shook her head ruefully, and after a bit more back and forth they offered him a deer hide as a blanket instead. That he reluctantly accepted, if only to get Henwe to stop his fussing.
Damian wrapped the surprisingly soft animal skin around himself and watched as the people who’d given it to him piled the coals of the fire pit into a tall mound and went to sleep in their bed rolls.
<>
Damian woke to pale sunlight shining into his eyes through a sparse cover of leaves. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep in a strange environment in strange company, but the deer hide blanket had been warm, and the dry coldness of the night had been different from the damp chill of Gotham that permeated deep into the marrow, no matter the layers worn.
An alarmed yell startled Damian and his head snapped around to look, hand darting to the hilt of his sword. Instead of a threat though, the source of the sound was Visne, who was looking at him with wide eyes. Around her the others emerged from their leather cocoons.
“���!” Visne said and pointed at Damian, and the others turned to look as well. “Robin ����!”
“What?” Damian asked and looked behind himself in case they were gawking at something trying to sneak up on him. Nothing was there. “What are you looking at?” He tried to telegraph his confusion to them with his body.
“����,” Jise said and gestured the rough shape of Robin’s mask around his own eyes.
“What, my mask?” Damian asked. “Have you never seen a mask before?”
“���,” Visne said and held out both her hands as if to touch, even across the cooled fire pit. “�����?”
Damian tsked, but gave a terse nod. “You may touch me if you must.”
Visne hesitantly stalked around the pile of coals and ash and crouched in front of Damian’s still sitting frame. She very carefully reached a hand out to touch the mask. She ghosted over it, over his eyes, barely daring to touch his skin. Her eyes darted from one blank lens to the other. Finally she traced the edge of the mask with gentle fingers. “��,” she said, “�����!”
Damian humored her for half a minute before batting her rough-skinned hands off his face. “That is enough touching- hey!”
While Visne had been on his face and his focus, the others had come closer. Henwe had grabbed his hand. The young man relinquished it the moment Damian jerked it back, but his brown eyes tracked the movement in wonder.
“Have you not seen gloves before either?” Damian asked, bristling now. This was too many people in his personal space bubble, but they weren’t being aggressive so he couldn’t in good conscience retaliate with his preferred amount of violence. They were just being curious and annoying.
Damian didn’t really know how to deal with someone other than his family or people he’d just saved touching him and crowding him like this. He could do familial threats of dismemberment, he could do a rehearsed comforting patter, but both left him woefully unprepared for... whatever this was.
He stood up and took a step back to get away from Henwe’s hands, and in doing so dropped the warm deer hide from his shoulders. This shocked the others into silence. They now gawked at his entire suit, head to toes, taking it in in the daylight. Damian thought the reaction was completely unwarranted, but then he had to concede that no, these people hadn’t seen a mask before, or tailored reinforced gloves. They hadn’t ever seen a vigilante before, which was understandable, not even everyone in Gotham where bats and birds crawled in the walls had seen a vigilante. But it had just become painfully clear that these people hadn’t even seen proper lace-up boots before.
Where on earth was he?
Damian eventually managed to fend off the rest of their touching attempts though he could not stop the openly curious looks. He ignored them to the best of his ability and watched as Jise unearthed a still glowing ember from the pile of ashes in the fire pit Damian had thought completely snuffed. The man then rekindled it with great skill and speed. Damian expected a pan to come out next, maybe even a pot, but what got placed into the wooden A-frame over the fire was more leather. Aora set a scorched but intact triangle of skin in place by the holes in the corners, and filled it with water from an actual waterskin, the kind made from an animal stomach. That was disgusting.
Still, Damian thought ruefully as he watched in grim silence as Jise and Iluš added all manners of dried foodstuffs into the water held in the cup of the skin, he had no options. He subtly checked all his devices for signal, any kind of connection at all, but he still had no luck. He was stuck here for now.
“����?” Jise asked him, startling Damian out of his troubled thoughts. The man was holding out a piece of last night’s meat out to him.
Damian wrinkled his nose. “I don’t want that.”
Jise nodded and said something to Iluš, who was stirring the food with some kind of a bone spoon. Iluš set aside a bowl of shredded leftover meat which he’d clearly been intending to add in, and picked up an extremely primitive pair of wooden tongs. With the tongs he carefully picked a smooth, round rock from the firepit, and... added that to the soup instead. It hit the liquid with a vicious hiss, and the merely steaming liquid around it began to bubble.
Damian watched with wide eyes as the man repeated the process with three more rocks, all of them round and smooth as river stones. He thought it nonsensical at first, but the burning hot rocks brought the soup to a boil very quickly. Flames licked the bottom of the soup skin, leaving dark lashes of soot on its surface but never catching fire.
Around the cooking fire, Aora, Henwe and Visne packed up everything they had except the cooking equipment in lumpy backpacks and some kind of simplified sled made from pruned saplings lashed together with rope. The sled looked cumbersome. Why not rather put wheels on it?
Henwe and Visne broke off the packing effort and sidled up to Damian. He gave them dubious glances as they sat down next to him, Henwe leaning over his sister’s lap to get closer. “������,” Visne said and produced a pinecone from the pocket of her leather tunic. The garment had an embroidered pattern of small beads on the hem, Damian noticed.
She offered the cone to him. “���,” she said. “�.”
“�,” Henwe repeated the same word.
Damian took the pinecone and turned it around in his hands. It was the platonic ideal of a pinecone, though not of a species of pine he knew. “Pinecone,” he said. “This is a pinecone.”
“Paincoun,” Visne repeated.
“Pinecone,” Damian said.
“Paincoun,” Henwe said, fumbling the exact same vowel sounds in pronunciation as his sister, “�.”
“Pinecone,” Damian repeated the word.
“Heeee!” Henwe cheered. “Robin ���� pinecone ��!”
“�,” Visne said and handed Damian a smooth rock, same as the ones Iluš had used in cooking. “�.”
“Rock,” Damian sighed. “That is a rock.”
<>
Their little word learning game came to an end when Henwe presented Damian with a tool of some kind, made from a large piece of antler, that he could not for the life of him fathom a use for and was stumped.
“I still don’t know what this is,” Damian said as he held the tool. “What is this even used for?”
“��������������,” the young man launched into an explanation, complete with mimed gestures as to what one was to do with the damn thing, but it did not help. It had quite the opposite effect, and Damian said as much.
“Now I know even less what it does. I cannot tell you the word for this thing in English because I do not know it.”
Henwe gave him a kicked puppy frown, and started his explanation over from the beginning, just slower, like saying the words Damian did not understand with more care would yield better results.
“���,” Iluš said over from the soup skin, where he had started to ladle the thickened liquid into the same skull bowls they’d drank from last night. “�� Robin � soup ���.” The man handed Damian a bowl, and then dished out bowls for the rest. Damian couldn’t help noticing that the shredded meat that had been set aside earlier had been divided onto the other five soup bowls. That was nice of them, he supposed.
He didn’t like the idea of eating food cooked in an animal skin any more than drinking from an animal skull, liked it even less actually, but he was approaching a full twenty-four hours without eating. He needed to keep his strength up if he wanted to apprehend the sorceress. Damian took a long fortifying breath, held it in for a few seconds, and let it out slowly through his nose.
They had left the meat out of his portion. The leather of the cooking vessel was no worse than the leather in his boots even though it had touched his food. The animal had not died for him, for his convenience. Not to mention Iluš would become distraught if he didn’t eat. The man, from what little impressions Damian had gleaned so far, reminded him of Alfred. Alfred would also be upset if Damian didn’t eat.
Damian blew on the bowl of soup and lifted it to his lips since he had not been given a spoon. He hesitated for one final second, and took a sip.
It was... decent. It had an earthy umami undertone, lightened by the use of herbs Damian couldn’t put a finger on. There was a spicy, bitter tang unlike any spice he knew. Chewy rehydrated mushrooms, small broken grains, thin pathetic carrots, other fibrous root vegetables he didn’t know. Under-salted.
From the corner of his eyes Damian spied the others using small knives of some kind to scoop the larger pieces of food into their mouths between sipping the broth. This seemed to be a common enough custom that they assumed him to have his own knife, despite their clear shock at his... appearance. Damian did not have a knife he’d deign to use for it, but he’d seen Richard eat with a wingding before. He fished a batarang from his belt, and speared a slice of some starchy root in the end of its sharp wing’s edge.
Oh, how low he had to stoop. Richard could never know.
<>
After the lengthy breakfast Damian attempted communicating with pictograms. He drew a cluster of houses on the tamped ground before the fire, a phone, a car, the family crest of the house of El, anything to help him get back to civilization. The others oohed and ahhed at the pictures, visibly impressed with his smooth and confident linework which admittedly made him preen just a little bit, but showed no signs of recognizing anything in the pictures. That was worrying. Not even the houses? Did these people live in caves?
...
Oh. Oh dear.
Damian really wished he was wrong.
He didn’t try drawing any more pictures after that, and fell silent. Aora, Jise and Iluš had another debate where they occasionally mentioned or pointed at him while Henwe and Visne packed the rest of their cooking equipment into the sled. Said equipment included the smooth river stones that had been used to speed up cooking, Damian noticed.
The debate ended with Iluš coming out of it the happiest, and everybody hoisted their backpacks on their backs except Jise, who put his in the sled and grabbed the handles. Iluš walked over to Damian. “���,” he said and made a clear ‘come along’ -motion.
Damian went.
<>
Aora led the group of six along the edge of the forest. Damian had initially tried to stay in the rear, trail behind the others like the shadow he was, but Visne had dragged him up to walk with her and engaged him again in the game of learning words. She kept trying to teach him different plants and kept getting disappointed for every one he didn’t know.
They carried on until noon, when they stopped to rest by a small clear-watered stream that flowed from the forest towards the middle of the valley, disappearing like a snake into the swaying grass. The others filled their waterskins and Iluš took the time to better clean the bone bowls which he’d initially given only a cursory wipe with a tuft of horsetail.
Damian drank directly from the stream with cupped hands to try and minimize his contact with the waterskins. The water was cold in his ungloved hands, carrying only the barest hint of the taste of sand. The softly rippling surface of the narrow stream reflected the drifting clouds above.
“Aiiaii!”
Damian’s head snapped up, water falling from his hands with a splash. Henwe who had decided to explore ahead came running down a low hill they were going to cross next, excited grin on his face even as he almost tripped on his own feet in his rush. “Aii! ������!”
The others immediately dropped what they were doing, and scrambled after Henwe, who had turned around and was now leading the pack back up the hill. All seemed excited about whatever he had seen. Damian ran after them.
The others reached the top before him. They crouched in the grass, using the long swaying stalks as a cover. Damian came to a crouch between Visne and Aora, and as he looked down in the wide valley, he dropped to his knees in shock.
There, down in the golden grass maybe quarter of a mile away, were mammoths. Dark-furred, gigantic, tusked woolly mammoths.
Damian had feared this possibility long before he knew to dress it in words. The group couldn’t recognize a drawing of houses because they had never seen a house. Everything was made of leather and bone because that was all they had. Jise’s stupid sled had no wheels because the wheel had not been invented yet.
Damian was in the goddamn stone age.