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"My father was a member of the Court of Owls," Timothy said.
Damian turned.
It made sense. What little information they had found of the Court had revealed it to be made up of Gotham's eldest and wealthiest families. The Drakes were both of these.
But Father had only ever thought of the Court as nothing more than a myth; his own parents had known nothing of it. The Drakes, globetrotting archaeologists far more interested in digging up ancient relics in other cities than in the bones of their own, had been the same, or so they had all thought.
All, perhaps, except Timothy himself.
"My mother wasn't," Timothy went on. "But she knew about it. Knew that my father was. She got to go to a few of their events, I think."
Timothy would not reveal this information lightly. Not without cause, not for no good reason. It could not be coincidence that he was speaking up now.
"I didn't know," Timothy said. "I promise you, Damian, I didn't know. He never told me. I don't know when he was going to tell me. Maybe that's why he was so mad at me for being Robin."
"Then when," Damian asked quietly, "did you know?"
"Right before I died," Timothy said.
Damian had grown complacent. He had become used to tiptoeing around Father's grief even now so long after Timothy had returned. Father had never spoken of Timothy as dead, only lost or gone. The others, half of whom had never even known Timothy before, had followed suit. Damian could admit it was somewhat awkward to refer bluntly to someone's death when the person in question stood before you.
Timothy himself tended to avoid speaking of it. So it was disconcerting to hear him say it plainly.
"Then the Court-" Damian started.
"No." Timothy was quick to deny that. "It wasn't them. They had nothing to do with him." He laughed quietly, a rare sound from him, understandably. "No, I only found out because I was reading through my father's papers and realized he was one of them. That's how I knew."
"Your father was away," Damian said.
"Yes. On a dig. Again." Timothy snorted. "I was mad at him, after everything, so I broke into his study and found the secret drawer and read all his files. He was smart enough never to digitize anything."
He briefly hesitated; it would have gone unnoticed by nearly anyone else. But they had known each other since Damian was the ten-year-old newly arrived illegitimate son of Brucie Wayne, the talk of his very first gala, stalking his way around with his little child shoulders firmly set and hating every moment of it, and Timothy had just turned seven, the wide-eyed precocious child the neighbours had brought along, gifted his first camera in a rare moment of attention from his parents and eager to tell the only other child near his age at the gala all about his attempts at photography. If only their relationship had stayed there, instead of the bitter parody it had eventually stretched into.
"He didn't know," Timothy said. "I don't think he did, anyway. About the Talons."
He spoke warily, which was saying something. Damian could admit that he had been tense ever since discovering that little Talon a few weeks ago. Ever since Damian had looked at a small boy tormented and taught and trained worse than Damian himself had been until he believed he was nothing more than a tool to be used for killing, and seen his own younger self looking back.
"You are certain?"
"No," Timothy said, the admission itself a mark of how far they had become. In the first month after Timothy's return to Gotham, neither of them would have dared show weakness. "But there was no mention of them. There were a few references to assassins working for the Court, but Talons were never mentioned by name. I don't think he knew what they were. There are hierarchies in the Court, you know, and my father wasn't that far up." That laugh, again. "I guess he was too squeamish to want to know anything more about how the Court got their dirty work done. How they get the Talons in the first place."
Yes. Damian could certainly understand how knowledge of what made the Talons what they were would turn the stomach of a man who had never had to deal with any particular difficulty in his life. If not for the electrum forced into his veins, that little boy would have been dead - painfully, brutally - before his first week with the Court was over.
"Anyway," Timothy said. "He didn't know about the Talons. So I didn't know anything about them, either. But there was plenty of stuff in there that he did know. So I booked myself a ticket to Ethiopia to confront him about it."
The pattern of events, long since agonized over, grew achingly clearer. "This is why you went."
Timothy nodded. "I wasn't trying to hide him from you or Bruce. I would have told you afterwards. I just..." He rubbed a hand over his forehead, looking achingly vulnerable. "He was my dad. I just wanted to talk to him first."
Damian could empathize very well with loving a parent who did things that went against every moral you stood for, who sought to manipulate and turn you into exactly what they wanted without thought for your own desires. But he didn't think Timothy would appreciate any words of sympathy from him, not when he had Brown and Cain and even Todd.
"So I went to Ethiopia," Timothy went on. "And he thought - he'd heard that the Joker had been sighted in the area, so he thought I was there to fight him, and he was angry at me for being Robin again so soon after I'd promised him I wouldn't be." He looked sardonic. "He went on and on about how I was hiding things from him, and how he wanted to spend more time with me, and he didn't want me to be in danger, and then not even a week after I took the mask off he went off to an entirely different continent. Again. I don't know why I thought things would be different."
He took a deep breath, and Damian allowed him a moment to compose himself. "So there I was, running into my father over there. He was yelling at me about being Robin, I was yelling at him about the Court of Owls, we weren't being very quiet about it, I guess someone overheard and word got to the Joker..." He rubbed his side, where his own fractured bo staff had once punctured his lung. "And, well, you know the rest."
Outside of missions, this had been more than Timothy had spoken to him in a long time.
Damian could ask him about every last detail from Jack Drake's papers. He could ask him where they were, if they still existed. He could ask when Timothy had planned on telling him, if Timothy planned on telling Father as well, if Timothy had ever planned to tell him at all and was only saying so now lest Damian discover on his own that the Drakes had been associated with the Court and wanted to avert Damian's fury over the Talon boy from falling on his head.
Damian swallowed down all the words he wanted to say, and instead said, "Thank you for telling me."
It was a show of trust, Damian knew; not only Timothy telling him about his father's association with the Court, when Jack Drake himself had carried that secret to the grave, but for what little he had mentioned of the circumstances of his death. They knew only what they had been able to piece together, from security cameras and flight records and a grief-stricken, guilt-ridden Jack Drake. Timothy had never spoken a word about anything that had occurred between his last moments in that warehouse and the first time he set foot in Gotham.
It was more than just working together against a common enemy. It was a bridge.
Timothy just nodded.