Work Text:
“What did I miss?”
“This is Damian. He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”
Setting dragging feet on a path pre-determined by others, Damian al Ghul-Wayne came to live in Wayne Manor. He was a nightmare to have around and nobody really wanted him to be there, least of all Damian himself, it seemed. He was standoffish and entitled to the point he refused to eat food prepared for him, and returned all of Tim’s admittedly stilted and awkward attempts to approach him with sharp words and sharper blades.
In his first week he locked Alfred in a cupboard to sneak out and decapitate a man, only to bring his head back as a trophy like an outdoor cat bringing home a dead mouse. Tim had confronted him about it and the following altercation ended in a duel on top of the animatronic dinosaur.
Tim later reported that he was only able to subdue Damian because the boy had inexplicably flinched in the middle of delivering a brass-knuckled blow that could have knocked him out.
“He’s awful,” Tim complained to Alfred one afternoon while doing homework on the kitchen island. He did not need to specify who ‘he’ was; Damian was all everyone in the manor was talking about these days. “It’s like having to live with a feral bobcat.”
“You should not speak ill of those who are not present to defend themselves, master Tim,” Alfred admonished, but his tone betrayed his true feelings on the matter. The butler was just as displeased with the little hellion’s behavior, if not his presence. “Young master Damian must be upset about being suddenly uprooted from his life of luxury and deposited amongst us common people. I’m certain he will get used to a humble life in time as long as we all make him feel welcome.”
Tim huffed and scribbled another equation onto his notebook. “If you really feel like that, I’ll make another effort. I’m up to date on my rabies shots, the worst he can do is stab me.”
“Master Tim,” Alfred chastised, but conceded. “I do admit he would be easier to manage if he was a tad more socialized.”
“You want me to tame him?”
“You said it, not me.”
Tim approached the manor’s latest resident with the same trepidation one usually approached a live IED. Damian was just as likely to explode as one, but unlike when dealing with explosives, Tim didn’t know how to even begin defusing a larval assassin who saw him as the main obstacle to claiming his birthright. The fact that Tim hadn’t gotten more than a mild concussion, black eye and seven stitches from their interactions was nothing short of miraculous. Bruce’s hatechild with injustice fought to kill or in the least maim and he was, as much as Tim was loath to say it, very good. Too good to flinch or stumble, but he kept doing it.
“What do you want, interloper?” Damian hissed between strikes of his practice sword hitting the mangled training dummy. Bruce had confiscated and hidden the kid’s swords more securely after the decapitation incident and Tim sincerely hoped he never found them again. “I’m busy.”
“Well, I figured we started off on the wrong foot,” Tim started, fully aware of just how awkward he was being but unable to really do anything about it. “We’re both going to live in the Manor for the foreseeable future, so maybe we could, I dunno, hang out or spar or something. Non-lethally, I mean.”
Damian tsked, and raised his wooden sword against the dummy again. “I have nothing to gain from interacting with the likes of you.”
Tim tried to suppress a sigh. The kid really was insufferable. Sure, it was some twisted defense mechanism and coming from a place of hurt and uncertainty, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
Do it for Alfred, Tim, do it for Alfred.
“I dunno, I could show you how to be a kid. Bet they don’t teach that in the League of Assassins. Or,” he added, “I could show what I learned from Lady Shiva.”
Damian’s glare turned to him, but it was more calculating now than openly disgusted, which was the way the kid usually looked at him. “What could possibly have made Lady Shiva train you.”
“She could see the potential in me,” Tim said. “Even she could see the merit in ‘someone like me’, a definition which also includes Bruce by the way, so clearly there’s something to it.”
Damian rolled his eyes but didn’t return to filleting the training dummy with naught but the power of pre-teen rage and a dull wooden sword, so Tim took that as his cue to continue. “And since Bruce is now both our father, that more or less makes us brothers, so we should at least try to-”
“We are not brothers,” Damian interrupted.
“No? I mean, technically-”
“We are not brothers!” Damian yelled, face clouded and twisted with sudden fury. He looked so much like Bruce in that moment it was almost scary. “You are not my brother! You will never be my brother!”
“Whoa, hey,” Tim tried, but Damian raised his practice sword against him with a scream of outrage. Tim had barely enough time to raise his arms to block the hardwood blade from striking him in the face. He could hear the younger boy’s breath hitch mid-swing a split-second before the blade struck his forearm. Tim grunted with pain and reached out to grab the dull blade to pull it away, but it clattered to the floor as a smaller body rushed past him.
“Damian!” he called, but the boy was already running for the stairs, and disappeared into the Manor entrance like the Speed Force was carrying him.
Suddenly alone, Tim sighed and rubbed his forearm where the training sword had hit. He pulled the sleeve back to inspect it. The blade had hit him lengthwise, and what would have been a bone-shattering force if applied perpendicularly had been dispersed evenly enough to merely leave a stinging red welt across the skin. Well, merely and merely; Tim had been looking forward to wearing short sleeves this week. No such luck.
Tim picked up the abandoned practice sword and returned it to the rack housing training equipment. Damian was a brash asshole but he treated his weapons well - this was unusual behavior, even for him. Yeah, Tim didn’t exactly want to be brothers with him either, but the reaction was strange.
Maybe he should check the security cameras to see what the brat did next; no way in hell was Tim approaching him directly after that.
Damian collapsed on the bed in his borrowed room and wrapped himself around a large pillow, squeezing it tight to his chest. It wasn’t enough, it would never be enough. “I can’t do this, Danyal,” he whispered hoarsely into the dark, empty room. “I can’t.”
Something cold ghosted over him, the barest hint of a familiar presence. “Yes you can,” a voice whispered back, silent as falling snow. “You were always the stronger one of us.”
Damian squeezed the pillow even harder, if possible. He would not cry. He refused to cry. “I can’t see you here,” he whispered. “I can barely even hear you. There is nothing for us here but darkness.”
A gentle touch of frost caressed Damian’s cheek, momentarily spreading frost flowers over the damp skin until his body heat melted them.
“There can be light and joy,” the silent voice, so silent it was hardly a voice at all, whispered back. “I have been telling you. If you open your heart, if you let them in, there can be light and joy again. And warmth, Damian, you could have warmth again. And…” the voiceless voice faded to a loud silence. “And you could have a brother again.”
Damian growled and threw the pillow he’d been clutching like a lifeline against a wall. “I already had a brother!” He barked, throwing his hands out and then covering his strangely damp face with them. “I already had one. I don’t want any more. I want my old brother back.”
A cold, ghostly memory of a hand, so much smaller than Damian’s own, ruffled through his hair. “I know, and I’m sorry I can’t be here for you,” the voice whispered. “But you need to live on, Damian. The time to lay flowers on my grave has gone, you need to plant them in a garden.”
“I-” Damian started, but the words got lodged sideways in his throat and refused to come out. “I don’t- I can’t-”
“Please,” the voice said, begged. “I know it hurts, but please. You were never meant to be alone like this. You need a brother, and if it can’t be me, then it has to be someone else. Please give them a chance, for me. I can’t watch you do this.”
Damian curled up onto his side again. He no longer had the pillow to hold, and the position felt all the worse for it. “I don’t know how to be a brother anymore,” he whispered. “It’s been too long. I only know how to do what Mother taught me.”
Cold hands settled on both his cheeks, nipping them with a loving chill as they cupped his face. Damian lifted his head, blinking tears from his eyes and stared ahead where he knew his brother’s ghost was, though there was nothing there. “I will tell you what to do,” Danyal said. “It’s the only way I remember ever being.”
Dick’s phone rang. He rolled over on the couch and reached blindly for it before bringing it to his ears without checking the caller id. That was the ringtone for Tim’s personal phone, which meant that he was probably gonna get an earful about Bruce’s newest bundle of joy. “The person you’re trying to reach is asleep. Please leave a message after the beep. Beeeeee-”
“Dick, this is serious. I need your help,” Tim interrupted his beep.
“Is this about Damian again?” Dick asked and shuffled onto his back only to throw an arm over his eyes because the late sunlight coming in from the gap in the curtains shone right into them. Tim had called him to complain about the boy many times already. Dick was trying to be patient about it, gods knew he didn’t react well to a younger brother at first so it probably was karma, but he had really been needing this nap.
“Yes, it’s about Damian,” Tim said. “He’s been acting weird.”
“He was raised in the League of assassins to be the next warrior king of an international cult, Tim,” Dick sighed. “He’s gonna be acting weird for the rest of his life.”
“…You’re not wrong, but that’s not what I meant,” Tim said. “We had a really weird interaction a few hours ago where I almost got him to agree to spend time with me by bribing him with what Lady Shiva taught me, but then I suggested maybe being brothers, and he attacked me with a bokken. The reaction was unusual, so I checked the cameras to see where he stormed off, and he went to his room to cry. I mean, I wasn’t even being a-”
“You made a ten-year old cry and stalked him about it?” Dick interrupted. “Tim, I know and understand your need to keep a constant eye on this kid, but cameras inside his room?”
Tim sighed, a drawn-out defeated sound carried through the airwaves. “He attacked Alfred, Dick. I needed to be sure. There’s no audio, it mostly just shows his window. But he wasn’t just crying, he was talking to someone. He was alone and didn’t have any kind of communication or recording device, acted like he was talking to someone in the same room. I don’t know what he said since I can’t lip read the League dialect yet, but I double checked all the security sensors and there was nothing. Anyway, while I was at it, I looked through some footage of Damian being alone from the past week, and he’s been doing that. Having a conversation with nobody. He’s talking to the walls, Dick.”
Dick thought about it. He’d done his fair share of talking to people who weren’t there - there was a period of time he’d purposefully foregone his prescribed antipsychotics just to keep hallucinating Jason, because the thought of never seeing his little brother again had been too crushing. “That could be caused by getting raised by assassins,” he suggested, “or maybe the kid needs to see a shrink. The League doesn’t seem the type to prescribe anything for that.”
Tim didn’t immediately say anything but Dick could hear the faint rhythmic tapping of his fingers against something solid as he thought. “Yeah,” he eventually agreed. “Think you could drop by tomorrow? Alfred wants me to socialize him and you honestly know more about this kind of thing, so...”
“More about taming brothers, or talking to walls?”
“You never talked to walls,” Tim sidestepped the question, meaning he probably wanted him for both.
“No, but that’s what it looks to the outside,” Dick pointed out. God, he needed more sleep to have this conversation. “When you’re hallucinating it feels so real you can easily forget others can’t see what you can, so you end up looking like you’re arguing with furniture.”
“Right.”
“I’ll dive over tomorrow to meet the kid, see what I can make of him.”
“Thanks Dick, you’re the best,” Tim said.
“I know I am,” Dick agreed. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some sheep to count.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
“Bye, Tim.” The line disconnected, but Dick didn’t bother putting his phone back onto the side table. He’d have to rearrange his schedule for the rest of the week to fit in an unplanned day trip to Gotham. Ugh. He wedged himself deeper into the lumpy couch cushions and tried not to think.
Damian stood stiffly in the hallway. The only thing keeping him rooted to the spot instead or making a run for it was the faintest touch, barely a feeling at all, pressing down on his shoulder. That pressure, that immaterial hand like a porcelain doll, could make Damian move mountains.
Steps approached, muffled thuds against the runner-covered hardwood. Damian’s shoulders bunched up on their own and he forcefully drew them down and back, clasped his arms together behind him and schooled his face to a hard mask that did not betray his emotions to anyone.
The non-hand on his shoulder weightlessly pressed harder onto his stiff shoulder.
Almost anyone.
Drake rounded the corner and startled. “Oh, hi Damian,” he said as he registered the threat in front of him. He lowered his guard, but not all the way down. His tone was light but his shoulders remained drawn. “You’re not going to hit me with a bokken again, are you?”
Damian scoffed, a sneer wanting to break through his façade, but the hand on his shoulder squeezed gently, reassuringly. “No. I came to...” Squeeze. “...apologize. For that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Drake said as if on autopilot, a stupid confused look etched onto his face. “I- thanks?”
A cool elbow nudged his neck, and faint, voiceless words slithered into his ear without a breath to carry them. “Good. Now ask him.”
“Tch,” Damian hissed under his breath. “I would. Like. If you showed me some of the moves Lady Shiva deigned to teach you.”
“Uhh, sure,” Drake said, giving Damian a weird look, like the older boy was trying to look right through his skin. “How’s tomorrow sound?”
Damian managed a stiff nod. “Acceptable.” He turned around on his heel, intent on leaving as quickly as possible now that what he’d promised to do was done, but one final gentle touch stopped him in his tracks.
“Be nice,” the voice echoing deep in his ossicles hissed.
“I’ll see you around,” Damian said, and ran for it.
Tim stood in the hallway before his room, left staring at the direction Damian had bolted off to. That had been weird. That was really weird, right?
Damian was stiff and looked at you like you were covered in maggots at the best of times, but that had been extremely forced. Rigid like he’d swallowed an electrified digging bar, twitching like someone was poking him with needles. The words had been too awkward to be anything but his own, but Tim would eat his sleeves if Damian had willingly done any part of that interaction except leave.
Was this some kind of coercion, or did this have something to do with the hallucinations?”
Tim couldn’t wait for Dick to get here.
An overcast late morning found Dick entering Wayne Manor from the side entrance. Tim was already waiting for him in the adjoining hallway; the little creep had no doubt watched his car through the cameras from all the way from the main road.
“Thank god you’re here,” Tim said even as Dick pulled him into a hug that smothered his voice into Dick’s pecs. “You’ll never guess what Damian did this morning.”
“Hmm,” Dick hummed and held his little brother tightly until he started to wiggle, and only then released him. “More attempted fratricide?”
“No. He apologized.”
Dick blinked down at his brother.
“Exactly!” Tim exclaimed. “That’s what I thought! He ambushed me in the hallway after breakfast and just as I thought he was gonna attack me, he gave me the most stilted apology I’ve ever heard, worse than Bruce when he’s being sincere. It was like he was being coerced.”
“The one he’s talking to must be his conscience, then, whispering in his ear,” Dick only half joked.
“If it is, it’s been doing a shit job so far,” Tim said, and then furrowed his brow. “Unless…”
“Unless…?” Dick encouraged.
“I told how he’s kept failing all his attempts to kill me in weirdly trivial ways, right?”
“You think his hallucinations keep stopping him.”
“It would make a twisted kind of sense,” Tim said, caught in an epiphany. “A conscience is something he’d never been allowed to have in the League, so he would’ve suppressed it all the way down, and now it’s finally making itself known.” A pause. “This is all hypothetical, of course,” he tacked on.
“Of course,” Dick easily agreed. It did sound plausible, but was it the truth?
There was a new person in the house. Richard Grayson, Father’s eldest interloper. Damian thought the man had left the nest completely and would not get in the way of his birthright at his father’s side, but clearly this was not the case.
“I heard they call him Dick,” the familiar breathless chill whispered in his ear. “He and Drake are close. I think they’re worried about you.”
“Hmf,” Damian hummed in acknowledgment. He was in a decent mood, despite the apology his brother made him give. It was easier to see and hear Danyal today, easier to feel the ethereal hands constantly brushing his shoulders, his hair, down his arms and between his fingers. If he unfocused his eyes just right, enough to look beyond the physical, he could almost see the milky frozen-over eyes of his brother’s ghost hovering in the warmly lit hallway.
“He seems nice,” Danyal’s voice was in his other ear now. “Knowledgeable about being brothers.”
Damian’s hands clenched into fists. He didn’t want to do this. He had to keep telling himself that. “I don’t need him,” he hissed. “I had a brother. I don’t- it’s not something you can replace.”
A cold hand rested on his throat, right over his jugular. “You couldn’t replace me if you tried, Dami. I’ll forever be a bleeding wound in your heart, an empty hole nothing can ever quite fill. But you were born to have a brother, and since it can’t be me anymore it has to be someone else. Let them in, Damian.”
The cold touch receded from his throat, and Damian immediately missed it. He’d become accustomed to the deathly chill of his brother’s ghost, to the point he sought comfort in the cold. He’d used to sit outside at night with too few layers, staring up at the sky, and pretend he was in Danyal’s embrace.
Damian chewed his lip, pinched it between his incisors until he drew blood. He’d wondered why Mother made him live with Father now, before his training was complete. At the time he’d believed her explanations about being ready to step into his legacy at his father’s side, but he’d since learned that there were more hindrances to his legacy here than in the League, where his place as heir apparent was all but secured. His mother’s promise of training was fraught as well- father still refused to teach him the things lacking from his training, teaching him inconsequential lessons instead.
But if Mother thought the same as Danyal did… maybe this was the lesson he was meant to learn. It went against everything he’d been taught in the league, but…
“You must be Grayson.”
The cool voice startled Tim and he looked up only to see Damian descending the grand staircase like he owned the place, footsteps completely silent on the plush runner. “I was under the impression you no longer lived here.”
“You must be Damian!” Dick grinned up at the boy like the wo of them hadn’t just spent almost half an hour whispering about him. “It’s good to finally meet you, I’ve heard so much about you! And no, I live in New York. I’m just visiting.”
“All slander, I assume,” Damian said and stepped down from the last stair, and gave Tim a… well, he’d expected it to be a glower, but it wasn’t. Tim really didn’t know what to make of the expression.
“Not at all, not at all,” Dick lied through his teeth because slander was all Tim had been telling him, but the way he laughed it off made it seem so real. “I’ve been led to believe you’re very good with any weapon given to you, and that your skills in stealth are outstanding.”
“Of course, I was trained by the very best,” Damian said, haughty as ever, but seemed pleased with the praise. “What brings you here today?”
“I figured it was time I came to see my newest baby brother,” Dick grinned. If were talking to Tim, this would’ve been the part where he reached out to ruffle his hair or maybe sling an arm around his shoulders, but he didn’t make a move to touch Damian, not even to shake hands. Tim could see Dick’s fingers twitch though, instinct to touch fighting with the rational brain.
Damian’s expression tightened, his jaw clenched and his hands balled into white-knuckled fists. “I see,” he hissed trough his clamped-together teeth, and again Tim was reminded of Bruce. He wasn’t quite the spitting image of his father at that age, but god, the resemblance was uncanny. “Tch. Now you have seen me. Mind the door on your way out.”
With that the boy turned in his heel and hurried towards the library, unclenching and re-clenching his fist into tense talons and back.
“That was…” Dick started once Damian was out of both sight and earshot, staring after him, but for once he lacked the words to describe it.
“Honestly better than I expected,” Tim finished for him. “His conscience must have really reamed him out. Last time he looked at me like that he gave me this.” He pulled his sleeve back to reveal the bruise from yesterday’s bokken strike. The once-red impact mark had blossomed into a murky rainbow of purple and blue, spanning the entire length from his elbow to the back of his hand.
Dick grabbed his wrist before he could cover his arm again and pulled him forwards to better inspect it. His expression turned grave, same stormcloud-dark as the bruises. “I see why you wanted me to come,” he said simply, and finally released Tim’s wrist. “You’re lucky that’s not broken.”
Tim hummed. “I don’t think I am. I think he was stopped again, mid-swing. By all accounts that should have hit me in the head before I got my arms up. This isn’t luck, Dick, this is a pattern.”
Dick’s mouth tightened, the way it always did when he really didn’t like the picture the evidence was painting. “I’m staying the night,” he decided.
That night, Dick saw a ghost in the hallway. There was a small dark-haired boy wrapped in a pale cape and red tunic haloed in the rare light of the waxing moon streaming in from the large windows, looking out. The unobstructed moonlight cast the hallway in an almost ethereal shadow, but the boy cast none himself.
“Hi, Jason,” Dick greeted the hallucination. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
It had been almost a year since he’d seen the ghost of Robin past, but all the talk about hallucinations had stirred up old thoughts and regrets, and there he was again. Dick couldn’t lie and say he wasn’t happy to see him, even if it was tinged with a grief that would never go away.
He came to stand next to the apparition, and looked out. This row of windows showed the front yard. The light painted the dew-laden grass and damp stone paving silvery, bouncing light like twinkling starlight off the constantly rippling surface of the water fountain.
“I’m not Jason,” a small voice, thin like mountain air, whispered from his right.
“What?” Dick said, and looked down at the child. “But you’re always…” he trailed off. Because now that he looked, that… that really wasn’t Jason’s ghost that haunted him for years. This little boy was small, far too small, and the cape he was wrapped in was a true silvery white, not yellow painted ashen by the moon. His dark hair straighter and thicker, and the sad, sad eyes looking up at Dick weren’t covered by a mask. He seemed familiar, like a name should be just on the tip of his tongue, but Dick was sure he’d never seen this boy in his life. “Oh.”
“Jason got to grow up, in the end,” the boy said and turned to look back out the window. He could barely see over the windowsill. “I don’t think I ever will.”
There was a familiar cadence to the boy’s voice. Very similar to Damian’s, only less honed to speak English.
“Are you… the one Damian has been talking to? Who are you?”
“I am… someone he killed years ago,” the boy said.
“He killed you?”
“It wasn’t his fault. I asked him to do it,” the boy said, and wrapped his pale cloak, not a cape, tighter around himself. It glittered in the moonlight like snow, like frost. “I would never have made it home.”
Dick looked down from the boy’s face, down to his shirt. The red that he’d mistaken for Robin’s uniform was blood, still fresh but covered in frost flowers and staining his entire chest.
“I’m sorry,” Dick said.
“It’s okay,” the boy said. He was turned towards the window but his eyes were unfocused like he was looking somewhere much, much further away. “Life would have been worse for me. At least I got to die by the blade of the one I loved the most, where I could see the sky.”
Dick didn’t know how to respond, didn’t know how to comfort the boy or whether he even should. He didn’t dare trying to lay a hand on the boy’s shoulder- the silvery light seemed to go right through him like he wasn’t even there.
“You can’t see them from here,” the boy said, almost startling Dick.
“Sorry?”
“The stars,” the boy said. “The sky is overcast and the city lights drown them out. I’m glad the moon is finally out, so I got to meet you.” The boy turned to look at Dick, and he found himself staring into dull milky eyes, covered in a thin layer of frost. “I hope we’ll see each other again.”
A cloud passed over the moon, and the ghost was gone.
Because that? That was definitely a ghost. A ghost that looked eerily like Damian.
Sheesh, no wonder the kid had issues with brothers.
Danyal drifted in the dim and unfocused morning light, invisible and intangible and all but nonexistent. He had kept a silent vigil over his brother’s fitful sleep, only leaving his side to bask in the moonlight on the side of the house it shone on.
He didn’t regret showing himself to Richard. He didn’t know if he’d ever get an opportunity like that again, and he knew Damian would never say anything to anyone. Danyal smiled to himself; even now, after he was long gone, his brother was trying to keep protecting him.
But that wasn’t something either of them needed here.
He watched, invisible and intangible and all but nonexistent, as Timothy and Richard made their way to his brother’s - no. Their brother’s door, and knocked.
“Damian, can we come in?” Richard called through the thick hardwood door. “There’s something we’d like to talk to you about.”
Danyal could imagine his brother’s disgruntled face, textured wrinkles etched onto his cheek from the soft sheets, frowning at the door. “What is it?”
“We know about your brother,” Timothy said, softer than Danyal had ever heard him speak. “We were, um, we’d like you to tell us about him, if that’s alright.”
“We’re not trying to pressure you, we’d just like to get to know him. As much as we can,” Richard added.
Danyal hovered in the air as the hallway was stuffed full of silence. “Please, Damian,” he voicelessly whispered. “Please make the right choice.”
Silent footsteps on a soft carpet. The doorhandle turned. Slowly, ever so slowly, the door creaked open.