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To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
It was unfortunate that Dick had just returned from a Titan’s mission when Damian was shot. Thrice. All through and through the gut, nicking various arteries and vital organs, so forth and so on.
“B, is he gonna be okay?” He hears, Dick’s voice thready with panic, as Damian is being loaded onto the gurney. Jason comes into view, helping Bruce arrange Damian’s slack limbs. His hands are gentle, red mask implacable.
“Robin, go back to the cave, that’s an order.” Damian almost swears that Batman’s hands shake as he snaps the straps into place on the gurney.
“You can’t make me,” Dick is saying, and Damian tries to wave him off, but can’t raise his hand to push the boy away. Hypovolemic shock, he thinks, faintly.
“NOW, Dick.” And with that, the gurney is moving, and his vision is greying out at the edges. He wants to squeeze his brother’s hand, but there’s no chance and the darkness swallows him whole.
He luckily doesn’t remember much, although Jason later tells him that he’d revived a few times en route to Gotham General. Dick is sleeping at the end of the hospital bed, curled up in a ball. Bruce sits in a chair at the side of the hospital bed, watching him. The grey light of Gotham’s bleak midafternoon gives him a muddy, backlight halo.
“Damian?”
“Hnnh.”
Bruce smiles, although it doesn’t quite alleviate the crease between his brows that had furrowed deeper and deeper over the years. “How’s your pain?”
Damian blinks a few times. His eyes are crusty, like he’d been crying. “Eight.”
Bruce reaches over to the PCA pump and after a few moments, there is a quiet breath of some relief. “Better?” Damian nods. This throat feels raw, exposed. Ventilated then, probably for longer than he would have liked. Bruce seems to read his expression. “Induced coma, three days, you were septic. But it’s looking good, you’re going to be fine.” He smooths the edge of the rough hospital blanket and places a hesitant hand on Damian’s still arm. “Your brothers were worried.”
Damian smiles, looking down at the end of the bed. Dick is still fast asleep, breath whistling slightly through his nose. Bruce follows his gaze. “Dick wouldn’t leave.” His big hand twists in the blanket, bunching it up. “He made du’a for you.”
Damian closes his eyes for a moment, letting something wash over him. A feeling, something he can’t name. “He should go home,” Damian rasps.
“Better men than I have tried.” Bruce grimaces and runs a hand coarsely across his face. “I’ll take him home once you fall back asleep.”
Damian takes this as permission to let the tide of exhaustion pull him under, but as he does, he swears he can almost hear Dick’s whisper, pure and high, “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim…”
It’s a slow recovery, to be expected. Knowing this does not make him any less impatient, however. He’s struggling with the walker, headed to the ensuite, when he hears his bedroom door open and close.
“Here, let me help,” Dick says, appearing at his elbow to support him.
“No,” Damian snaps, pulling away, feeling the staples in his belly pull. Dick jumps back like he’s been slapped, his face a mess of feelings Damian can’t parse. He takes a deep breath. “Apologies, I am not myself.”
Dick nods, and tucks his hands into his pockets, lower lip trembling a little. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” Damian looks down at the walker. “Tt. I will return from the restroom soon.”
When he shuffles back out of the restroom, sore all over and slightly incensed, he finds Dick lying in his bed, playing on his phone. Damian collapses on the opposite edge of the mattress and struggles for a second to swing his legs up and in. Dick makes an abrupt move, like he is going to get up to help, and then thinks better of it. He settles back into Damian’s bed, watching with undisguised concern.
“What happened with the Titan’s mission?” Damian grits out, breathing in deeply.
Dick puts his phone down. “Oh! Uh, just Clayface. Again. He’s really got it out for us.” His face twists up in annoyance, and maybe some confusion. “I don’t really get it. What did we do to him?”
Damian blinks at him, and tries to remember if he’d had any run-ins with Clayface during his tenure with the Titans. Nothing remarkable. “I can review the report.”
Dick bit his lower lip. “Uh, about that.”
“Dick…”
“I’ve been busy!” He gestured to Damian’s prone body. “I’ll do it tonight. I promise.”
Damian squints. “Tt. You know why we must be prompt with reports—“
“Yeah, yeah, because we’ll forget details yada yada. You sound like Bruce.”
Damian looks over to his little brother, who is scowling at the ceiling. Dick’s room has glow-in-the-dark stars and planets above the bed. Damian climbed a ladder many years ago to place them, carefully arranging them in constellations. His own ceiling is bare.
“I do not mean to sound like Father.”
Dick rolls over, toward him, burying his face in one of Damian’s pillows. “It’s not your fault. It’s genetic, I bet.”
Damian considers this, and remembers those couple years when it was just Damian, Alfred, and Bruce. He remembers how quiet it had been, and how it remained quiet with the addition of Cass. “Father is… Father loves you very much,” he says finally. It sounds inadequate to his ears, and he winces.
Dick’s scowl deepens. “I know. But I’m tired of being babied.”
Damian’s first thought is to say, but you are the baby. You’re our baby. The last bat, the littlest bird. His Robin. He tries to find a way to say it. “You are… very precious to me. To Father.”
Dick scoots a little closer, resting his head on Damian’s shoulder. Damian motions for him to come closer, and the boy wriggles over into the crook of Damian’s arm, snugged up in his armpit. He won’t be able to fit soon, Damian thinks. Soon he’ll be sixteen, almost a man.
“I just… I want to be like you. I’m ready!” Dick burrows closer, and it sounds like he’s going to cry. “I just wish B…”
Damian thinks of Bruce’s children, his stalwart eldest two, his clever middle children, and the youngest of them all. “When Jason died, something in Father snapped.” Dick stops his fidgeting, eyes wide and rimed with wetness. Damian lets out a long breath and wishes he was less disciplined and could partake of more hydrocodone. “Jason’s return… was a blessing that we could not resume to repeat. He just wants to keep you safe. As do I.”
Dick stars fiddling with the hem of Damian’s shirt. “I know. But it’s hard.”
Damian thinks of his return from space, to find out his brother was dead and buried. Something in him had snapped that day, too. “Father… cannot let go.” It’s an inadequate statement, but truthful.
Dick nods. “Well, I have to go. I can’t stay.”
Damian closes his eyes and thinks of Jason, running away to Ethiopia to escape Bruce’s controlling fear. How is it that this is happening again? How can he stop him? He knows the answer before he can even finish the thought.
“You always have a home with me.” He turns slightly to look down at the teenage boy in his arm. His Robin. “No matter where you go, I’m here, little D.”
Dick smiles, and it’s a reminder of what Bruce’s younger children brought to Wayne Manor. Tim’s snarky quips, Jason’s volatility, Dick’s light. He used to think of them as weaknesses, as liabilities.
He knows better now.