Chapter Text
The sound has no edge to it; no beginning he can locate, no end he can reasonably expect.
Just endless sound.
It is an engine left running in a sealed garage, hot and endlessly lawless, devouring the air molecule by molecule. It wedges beneath his sternum and rattles his ribs from the inside, a tenant pounding on the pipes. It floods the nursery, sloshes against the pale blue walls, seeps into the baseboards as if the manor itself has begun to weep.
Even the standing clock seems to soften its tick, chastened, because seemingly, time itself has decided to tread lightly in the presence of a creature louder and more absolute.
His baby keeps crying.
Bruce stands in the doorway longer than the situation warrants–which is to say, at all. He has faced down gunmen with steadier reflexes; He has leapt from gargoyles without hesitation. He, the Batman, has dismantled criminal syndicates in less time than it takes him to remember what comes first.
Feed. Burp. Change. Rock. Check temperature. Repeat.
He knows the sequence because, of course, he does. He has read countless articles, and has highlighted passages in too many parenting books until their pages shone with color. With grave focus, he has listened to pediatricians, preparing for his son.
Bruce knows what to do.
His mind, however, has elected to clock out.
He has been awake for…what? Thirty hours? Forty? Or is it more? It has to be, his brain reasons.
It feels like it at least.
Regardless, he's vaguely aware that his “day” has been filled with dreadful board meetings that would metastasize into various crises that have ended with rooftop chases and shoot-outs that left him with a bullet graze near his shoulder, a few broken ribs, bruises on his legs, and a torn cape and glove now sulking in a locker, their split seams waiting for Alfred’s capable hands.
Bruce knows he’s tired. He knows he’s wearing the fatigue of “day,” even though his suit is gone. It clings to him in the ache behind his eyes, in the faint tremor at the base of his skull, in the way his thoughts move as though wading through wet sand.
Damn, it feels like someone has siphoned off the neurotransmitters responsible for hope and replaced them with biting static.
He is steeped in it– hopelessly, he realizes he’s being marinated, practically slow-cooked in exhaustion until even his bones feel tender.
And yet, Bruce, not Batman, not the symbol, not the myth, has a job to do.
He steps forward.
“Hey,” he says softly, wincing at the thinness of his own voice.“Hey. I’ve got you, sweetheart.”
The words do nothing because the kid just keeps screaming his head off.
Bruce tries the bottle, grateful to find it warmed. He tests against his wrist the way someone once showed him, and he adjusts the angle, fixes it, tilts, fixes, retracts, fixes it again.
He murmurs, coaxing, pleading despite himself. “Come on. You’re hungry. You have to be hungry.”
The man watches as his son’s small mouth rejects the bottle with offended determination. The crying sharpens, upgrading from distress to protest, like he had suggested something deeply unreasonable.
Bruce drags a hand down his face.
“Right. Of course. My mistake.”
He lifts his baby to his shoulder and starts walking. Back and forth across the room, across a floor that knows his steps better than his name. His hips sway. His knees bend. He traces the same line again and again, like a sailor condemned to circle a single white horizon.
The rhythm becomes tidal.
He thinks, inexplicably, of Moby-Dick, of the copy he read too young because he knew his father loved the story. Or at least, he knew his father had a copy.
At 9 years old, he read fascinated, underlining passage after passage with a pen he pressed too hard, ink bleeding through the page like a wound.
When Alfred discovered the vandalism, he had been furious–outraged in that particular way of his. He kept circling back to ownership and possession because that was his father's novel, not Bruce's and it was certainly not a coloring book.
He went on and on until, inexplicably softening just a bit. Alfred then promised the young orphan he would procure a personal copy so he might, and Bruce quotes internally, “desecrate it to his heart’s content.”
Those first years were rough for both of them–grief made it so.
And now, with a screaming baby in hand, Bruce’s mind fixates on the story once more, on the sailor Ahab and every other man who tried to chase something enormous and unknowable, calling it destiny when it is, in fact, hunger sharpened into madness.
Bruce himself has hunted monsters and given them names. He has stood on rooftops under sodium lights and sworn himself to pursuits, knowing full well it was consuming him.
This beast, however, can’t even hold up its own head.
…That thought, while it had been an attempt at fondness, lands completely wrong.
Don’t think that.
He feels it immediately– that recoil, that private disgust. Because what is wrong with him? What kind of father compares his infant son, his baby, to a monster? What kind of man lets that kind of irritation bloom at all?
And besides, his mind thinks ridiculously, what if his baby heard him think that?
The cry hiccups, then surges again, almost a reply of its own.
To which Bruce answers by adjusting his grip, correcting his posture like it could correct the thought.
It can't, but he does it anyway.
“Shhh,” he breathes, pouring gentleness into the sound with what little reserves he has left. “I know. I know.”
His baby thrashes anyway, face flushed, mouth wide in outrage.
The crying continues like one of those sprawling novels he read in his teens that promised catharsis somewhere after page nine hundred and instead offered only footnotes. Then footnotes to the footnotes. Then, an appendix explaining the footnotes.
If Bruce were less tired, perhaps he'd say the wailing felt endless and interior, as if he had wandered into someone else’s unraveling consciousness and misplaced the exit. If he were less on edge, he'd say the nursery feels like that: fluorescent in its sleeplessness, airless with noise.
But all he can manage is to say he's beyond lost.
With a shake of his head, the man once again tries to ignore himself and shifts his focus to the bundle in his arms.
After checking his son's diaper and finding it clean, he attempts to burp him with gentle, patient taps placed between his shoulder blades. His palm meets cotton, meets heat. The soft percussion of skin against cloth forms a thin, stubborn rhythm– a metronome counting down something far less musical than patience.
“Please,” he mumbles, too tired to dress it up as reassurance. “Just please.”
The weeping continues.
What is he doing wrong, he wonders…..Does his baby just... dislike him? Is that it? Want him weary and exhausted? Or maybe, he doesn’t want Bruce at all?
The thought is irrational, he knows this–yet still, the idea still lives in his synapses.
Carefully, carefully, he lowers his son into the bassinet with just enough reverence. Despite knowing that it's fine, his son is safe, his hands still hover afterward, suspended in the air. Bruce just... can't put them down. Because who knows, maybe withdrawing too quickly might make his son think he's abandoning him or perhaps ruin his psyche in some irreversible way.
Or maybe it would just make the boy wail even louder.
The universe, seemingly, for once, is willing to give the man a single victory– the crying stays about the same and the wail remains frantic and wanting.
But wanting what?
Bruce’s a detective, right? He should be able to figure this out. Batman has reconstructed crime scenes from flecks of ash and the angle of a footprint; he has deduced motive from silence with less sleep, he's certain. And yet, here he is, undone by a creature whose primary hobbies include blinking, eating, and producing noise.
Stop calling your son a creature, what is wrong with you?
With a groan, he drags a hand through his hair and pulls just slightly.
Trying to focus on anything else, Bruce finds himself realizing the room smells like warm milk and old hours. Who knew used-up time had a smell? Though it might just be the sweat from the shirt that clings damply to his back.
As his eyes trail back to his son, the man realizes, with some astonishment, that he is still swaying. Though his hands are empty now, he is rocking in place, the motion seemingly fused to his nervous system.
And hey–stranger things have happened to Batman than swaying in a nursery while his baby shrieks like a lich.
God, earlier, the sound had split him open. Each sob struck and stayed, embedding itself somewhere tender. It had almost felt like a summons addressed exclusively to him, like it wanted him.
Now the exhaustion has thickened, and it settles over instinct. He wants, absurdly and utterly selfish, selfish, selfishly, to sleep. Just for an hour. Twenty minutes, maybe. Bruce just needs the kind of sleep that erases you completely for a little while, and then he would be just fine. He'd be able to finally figure his son out.
…Damn, he is so tired it warps his age. It’s making him feel older than he is, and at the same time, impossibly young–too young.
Of course, he could get Alfred–but no. This is his son, his boy, so he should be the one to handle it. Besides, Alfred has already raised one broken child; He deserves rest.
So Bruce remains awake, and the crying continues on.
It rolls and rolls, a tide without a moon to answer to. It drags across him the way surf drags pebbles, grinding them smaller with each pass. He feels himself rounding at the edges, and the noise becomes an almost landscape. And when he sighs, he finds the whines becoming weather. And when he closes his eyes, it becomes the only thing that exists.
The man’s body sways once more because what else is there to do? The alternative is falling over in defeat or, honestly, just collapsing completely. He sways because gravity feels negotiable right now. He sways because it's easy to lose himself in the rhythm. He sways because somewhere in his own childhood, long before rooftops and armor and patrol, someone must have swayed for him.
His parents had to have, right? He can almost see it–his father’s hand, large and steady, covering his entire back when he was small enough to fit beneath a chin. The then-youngest Wayne boy must have heard his mother’s voice humming something low and tuneless in the dark, holding him close and closer still.
Yet no matter how hard he tries, Bruce can’t feel the pressure on his back, can't hear the melody anymore, yet he remembers the vibration of both in his ribs all the same.
Bruce can’t sing–really, he never really has been able to carry more than a simple tune, and right now, he doesn’t trust his arms not to shake.
His baby keeps crying, and he doesn’t know what to do.
So, without consulting manuals, mind or memory, he offers his finger.
His son finds it instantly.
Which...Of course he does. He's clever already.
Bruce murmurs, voice rough but instantly fond. “Smart. You’re too smart for me already–oh.”
A small hand interrupts him, tightening around his finger, making him let out a startled noise. And man... his boy is holding on with conviction, like someone tryimg desperately to anchor himself to the only solid thing in a moving world.
His heart can't help but lurch at that.
His baby’s mouth opens and closes once, twice, seemingly considering his options, then... he settles. He lets out a wet hiccup, a shuddering sigh, and finally, quiet.
His baby, apparently, is content to just hold.
Silence arrives suddenly and oh so fragile. It feels like glass stretched thin over open air. It feels like the pause between lightning and thunder. It feels, it feels, it feels, like something that is “vague and nameless.” Though in context that phrasing would make no sense, he still almost chuckles at the absurdity of it all, haplessly borrowing Melville’s words in the middle of the night.
Because really, all he wants to say is that the silence feels like it could implode if he so much as exhaled the wrong way.
And it's wonderful. The silence the two of them share is truly wonderful.
“That’s it?” the man breathes, the sound scraped raw. “That’s all you needed?”
His bruised rib protests the small rise of his chest– yet he laughs anyway. He finds his chest caving inward, but luckily, it’s with something dangerously close to joy.
Yet it just as quickly, it shifts into something fast and hot and humiliating. Bruce finds himself feeling foolish, profoundly, staggeringly foolish, for the resentment that had begun to coil in him mere moments ago. For the sharp, ungenerous thoughts that slipped in like a knife. For standing in the doorway as if this small person were an enemy instead of–
Instead of his son.
Instead of one of the most improbable miracles of his life.
Instead of the soft weight that fits against his collarbone as if engineered to live there. The tiny, fierce heartbeat that has already memorized the cadence of his own. The blessing that curls instinctively toward him, and who has decided without evidence that Bruce means safety.
Not Batman, but the man, the father, Bruce Wayne.
His son had decided he just wanted his father's hand.
How did that happen? How is that possible? What did he do to deserve this and how is he so lucky?
Bruce bows his head, and the apology spills out of him before pride can intercept it.
"I'm sorry. " and he means it.
“Oh, I'm sorry that I was mad.” He whispers, because he needs his baby to know. It doesn’t matter if the boy can’t even speak yet, if he's being ridiculous in his exhausted state, because Bruce needs, with every fiber of his being, for his baby to understand.
“I’m sorry. Really, I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s not. It’s–” He swallows hard. “God, I’m so sorry.”
His baby doesn’t let go of his finger, and Bruce doesn’t stop him.
The pressure slightly aches–a bright ache now bites at the joint, but Bruce doesn't pull away or stop his son. His boy doesn’t know his own strength yet, doesn’t know about damage, about how devotion can bruise the ones you love, so how could he blame him?
So Bruce lets it hurt because, really, his son doesn’t know any better.
And besides, the pain is deserved anyway, so Bruce lets it anchor him. Lets it accuse him. Lets it forgive him.
And then his baby looks up.
Their eyes meet.
There is no malice in the gaze. How could there be? His baby boy is only that– a baby. His gaze is wide and filled with intent, pupils dark as wells, with an intensity so pure it borders on sacred.
Alongside the iris, an unfiltered demand is written plainly: stay.
The world narrows to that gaze, to the weight of fingers circling his own, to the warm breath puffing against his knuckle. The nursery fades to background blur, and the manor might as well dissolve into mist because there is only this small gravity, this newborn star insisting he orbits.
God, nameless emotions beckon him.
And it’s not terror,. Terror, he knows, he understands its intentions. It’s a clean voltage through the bloodstream. It sharpens the world to a blade’s width and commands movement. It carried him through that alley the night pearls hit pavement; It carried him over rooftops, through gunfire, into burning buildings.
Terror has been his most faithful companion, and it has saved him more times than he can count.
This is not that.
With a smile, he finds himself mumbling, "Vaster than vast. Subtler than the most subtle," though he knows that quote doesn't exactly fit this situation either.
Because those words describe the self, and this all-encompassing feeling is so beyond one man. Really, he feels more than a singule human being.
That realization settles slowly and then all at once. Sure, if Batman fractures, the damage wouldn't be contained to just him. If he slipped beneath the surface, he would drag the constellations down with him. But this small engine of need has tethered itself to Bruce's pulse; so if Bruce Wayne drowned, this child (and every other child under his protection, somewhere deep inside of him hums) might just drown in the wake as well.
There would always be a chance if he wasn't there to protect him (themthemthemthem).
The thought nearly suffocates him.
Yet still, afraid as he is, Bruce doesn’t look away.
His finger remains captured; his hand trembles for a second, before it steadies.
“I’m here. I will always be here for you, Damian.”
He looks at his son, and his brown eyes hold him.
Brown stares into blue.
…Which is–
Not right.
That’s not–
Damian’s eyes are wrong.
They aren’t hazel. They aren't- they aren't brown. His son’s eyes are supposed to be green. Brilliant, impossible green, like cut glass held to the sun. He remembers the first time he saw them–older (older how?), guarded, already armored in ways no child should be, yet soft somewhere deep inside. Green that reminded him of the greenhouse his mother kept– glass panes and filtered sunlight and careful tending.
Thomas Wayne had blue eyes. Martha’s were gray, almost silver in certain photographs. His match his father's, and his son's match his mother's.
...These aren't his son’s eyes. They can't be.
The baby (his baby) blinks.
The brown is still there.
Wrong, wrong wrong- Bruce’s pulse kicks hard enough to make the room lurch. The nursery thins at the edges, colors leach away and shadows stretch too long across the walls, reaching for both of them.
He looks again, breath snagging.
For one flicker of a heartbeat–
Brown.
Then bright green.
The breath tears out of him.
He wakes like a man breaking the surface of deep water.
Air slams into his lung, and his body jerks upright, sheets twisted around his legs like restraints. He yanks them off, throwing them to the side. His eyes scan his surroundings to find... his room. Bruce is in his room, not the nursery that never came to be.
His eyes peer over and find his grandfather clock which reads a merciless 3:47, its hands unblinking, as impartial as a judge.
Impartial? As a judge? We don't get those in Gotham. A voice eerily sounding like Jason mutters in mind.
...Jason. His son, his child (no matter what). His children. He has more than one son. How could he forget?
With a shake of his head, Bruce leans back, trying to rub the sleep from his eyes...only to find his face is wet.
It takes him a moment to understand why.
Damnit.
Ignoring hismmind, he presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, willing himself to steady, forcing his brain to shove the dream down into whatever cavern conjured it.
Bruce knows this song and dance.
Ever since he was 8 years old, his dreams were...vivid. Seemingly though, after years of crime fighting (and countless encounters with Scarecrow), his dreams warped further, becoming either horrifically graphic or startlingly realistic.
Luckily, tonight, he got the latter. Luckily, he didn't get both.
Yet still, his chest aches with a phantom weight, and his finger curls involuntarily, searching for pressure that is not there.
A baby’s grip.
He never–
Bruce doesn’t want the thought to finish; he is more than willing to have it hang there forever untouched, but his mind, once again, works against him.
He never got to see Damian that young.
Not seven pounds and crying. Not red-faced, or giggling, or wanting to be held. Not small enough to fit along Bruce’s forearm like there was nowhere else he’d rather be.
Bruce never stood in a doorway, paralyzed by the sequence of feed, change, rock. He never warmed a bottle at three in the morning or walked grooves into a nursery’s carpet. He never felt a damp cheek pressed into his collarbone while a tiny heartbeat battered against his ribs.
He never held his baby boy when he was so little.
Baby Damian never held his hand.
…and Bruce didn’t hear his first word.
The feared and respected Batman tries to stop his thoughts–he should be able to. He knows countless techniques, he knows how to silence his mind, yet it rambles on because the ache is too great to pass up. The wound, too deep, not pick at.
Self-flagellation, his life-blood, is just too easy to ignore.
Because he didn't see Damian’s first unsteady step.
He doesn’t know what his son’s laugh sounded like before it learned restraint, before it was sharpened into something quieter, guarded like a state secret.
While yes, he didn’t get to live through many of his children’s firsts, there was really never a chance to. They had their own parents, so of course, Bruce wasn’t going to be there for their first birthday (though sometimes the fantasy of it all still pokes through his subconscious).
But Damian? He could have. In another world (he can see it so easily), he got to hold his baby boy when he was a baby boy.
But Bruce didn’t.
...He was so excited for Damian-him and Talia both. They were so excited for their son.
But now, he missed a decade of his son’s life. He lost even more time when Bruce, himself, was lost.
The grief of that isbeyond overwhelming. It's once again tidal. It rolls in slow and absolute, filling every available space in his body and soul. It tastes of salt and iron, leaving wreckage behind.
Bruce sits with it because there is nowhere else to go.
How old was Damian when he started sleeping through the night?
What was his favorite game? Did he line up toy cars (did he get to have toys in the League? If so, what toys?) in perfect, militant rows? If he could have them, would he dismantle them to see how they worked? Did he insist on the same story over and over until the spine cracked, memorizing every word so he could correct his mother?
Did he laugh loud, head thrown back, or was it always quieter--something startled from him against his will?
Did he have a blanket that he refused to surrender, before it was forcibly taken away from him, because it was seen as a weakness?
Did he ever scrape a knee and look up, expecting someone?
Does Talia have pictures?
The question lands with humiliating urgency.
Please let there be pictures.
He could ask. He could call. Pride is a flimsy defense against this kind of absence. He would ask her for everything, anything. Bruce, with startling clarity, realizes he is not above begging.
Because he just– he needs to know.
What was his favorite food as a toddler? Who did he look more like at two? At three? At four? He knows that Damian is a precise, devastating mixture of both of them. His ears, his mouth, the stern line of his gaze and brows are firmly from Bruce, yet his hair, nose, frame, and polished emerald eyes are clearly from Talia.
Their son, with a perfect in-between of their skin tones, looks like both of them so much…but what about at five? Did his baby boy look more like his mother at six?
Did his son ever soften in sleep the way he supposedly did? His father used to tease him about how he would fall unconscious mid-sentence, head tipping forward, until Thomas simply scooped him up and carried him upstairs.
“It is never a bother, Bruce.”
The memory surfaces so vividly that it almost feels spoken.
“You’ll understand when you’re older.”
He understands, now.
He has carried Dick when the patrol ran long. Jason, when the fever burned through him. Tim, after nights spent hunched over evidence boards. Cass, when the past pressed too hard. Damian, too–older, heavier, bristling even in sleep.
Bruce has carried them.
Just not when they were small enough to fit along his forearm.
Damn… did Damian ever reach for someone in the dark and ask for him? For his father?
Was there a moment, a single one, when Bruce might have been needed, no, wanted in that League bedroom, his baby boy slept in?
His throat can't help but tighten.
He sits hunched on the edge of the bed, a man who has faced gods and monsters and the worst impulses of his own making, and once again, for the trillionth time in his life, feels utterly unequipped to handle grief.
Bruce curls his hand again, remembering the phantom pressure of that tiny grip.
In the dream, and only there, he had allowed himself to be the thing that was held…and it was such a beautiful and wonderful thing.
But before he can convince himself to fall back asleep or to once again spiral with what ifs, a knock cuts cleanly through the dark. It is so quiet that for a moment, he wonders if it was only the house settling, wood sighing against wood. Then it comes again.
Another soft knock.
At this hour…well, there is really only one person who it could be.
Bruce is already moving.
The hallway is cold beneath his bare feet. The manor breathes in its peculiar three a.m rhythm, ancient pipes ticking, floorboards murmuring. The man reaches the door before the third knock lands and pulls it open.
Oh. There they are.
Green eyes.