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"Joker."
"Not possible," Batman grunts. He flips the bloody playing card, crouched over the smeared docks in the night. "I personally vetted his carers."
"He will always have followers," Damian grunts. He stands over him, arms crossed. "Copycats are easy."
"Successfully capturing Bluejay," Batman growls lower, "is not easy."
As an adult, Damian knows by now stony silence can cut deeper than a rebuke.
He turns away to poke around the scene.
His own great black cloak and broad shoulders cut a similar figure to his father; an onlooker may think they're seeing double and blink. But instead of a cowl, his loose hood shadows a domino mask, and his cloak's underside gleams an insistent Lazarus green. The same green as the Nightwing insignia across his armoured chest. He built his musculature more lithe for versatility than his father's single-minded intimidation, and he appropriated his grandfather's colours in his father's line of work as a middle finger to both.
It's a fairly clean scene. An alley between two warehouses, the black river shifting invisibly at one end and the night sky peering through the crack above, clouds lit mistily with perpetual light pollution. Wind blasts through, ruffling their capes and scattering discarded rubbish amongst the broken-down crates.
"No obvious signs of a fight," Damian notes.
"The tracker," Batman grunts. A demand. Damian clenches his jaw, forcing himself to allow his father some grace. His protege is missing.
Again.
"There," Damian has the gratification to be the one to grunt, shoving aside a crate to snatch a half-hidden tactical boot from behind.
The Bluejay suit has three trackers. One in each boot, one in the bird insignia. All three went offline at this location.
"It's intact?" Batman asks. Damian reaches inside.
"Yes." He extracts the chip from its embedded slot. "EMP, most likely."
"The perpetrator wanted us to find it." Batman grunts, sifting through the remains of the scene. "And to question the others' absence."
Damian straightens, lifting his chin. "When did you last confirm the Joker's inactive status?"
"Two weeks." His father approaches and hands over the Joker card. "Return to the Cave and test the DNA."
Damian bristles. He has agreed to help, but he has not been a sidekick in years. And they both know whose blood will be on this card.
"Batman, another pair of eyes--"
"Nightwing, I will not accept hesitance on this case."
Damian grits his teeth. "...I will report the results, Batman."
---
The staff at the top-security secret location dodge out of Batman's storming path, but instead of fear they eye him with concern. They've had two years to grow accustomed to his visits and questions. They know when something is wrong.
Batman sweeps through the bunker without regard for them. tasting acid in the back of his throat. The Joker must be secure. Only he could have accomplished what he did two years ago. Taking his previous Bluejay. Breaking him. The moment Batman breached the hidden lair and recovered him alive was the most profound relief he'd ever known. But then he came to understand: 'alive' is a very broad term.
If, somehow, the Joker is not secure. If, somehow, he has breached his containment, made contact with his followers or other rogues, concocted another monstrous plan to rip Batman's life apart--
The final door opens for him.
There, the Joker lays, placid as sickly skin stretched over evil bones can be. Breathing and feeding tubes dissect his face. A cap sealed over his scalp pimpled with a hundred electrodes reports to a nearby monitor: brain activity minimal.
But two years ago, he had a hole blasted straight through it. It was a miracle he survived at all, if so it could be called. It would take more than a miracle for him to wake without permanently disabling brain damage, if he wakes at all.
If he were cared for out in the open, there would be constant attempts both on his life and to revive him. It eats at Batman he lives at all, to sink such measures into his continued existence. But he can't let a creature as worthless as this cause a single more death than necessary. Even his own.
And it's all an aside now, anyway. The Joker did not take the third Bluejay. Did not take Jason. It was someone else, some other criminal. It's still bad - Jason's still in danger. But Jason is Bluejay. He's brilliant - Batman's pride and joy. Odds of his escape before they can even reach him are good. Anything is better than the Joker.
---
Back in Damian's Bluejay days, the Batcomputer was simply called the computer. Certainly, neither he nor his father were prone to the needless frivolity of diminutives. It was these damn children his father has been finding ever since.
Damian drums his fingers on the desk, glaring holes in the screen's loading bar. The testing machine whurrs softly next to him.
This was all his father's fault. Damian was trained since birth in the League. It's why he stayed alive. And it's also why their partnership did not work.
Clearly, his father sought a partnership Damian did not give him. Could not. The softness, the childishness of normal kids - it's what his father wants. And why this keeps happening.
A sharp sting, and Damian unclenches before his nails can bite through his palms.
Beep.
A DNA match.
Damian pauses.
It's not who they expected.
"Batman?"
A grunt in his earpiece.
"The blood is not Bluejay's. It's a forty-eight-year-old man, an employee at Wayne Enterprises." He lists the name. "No criminal record. Wife and child. Employed fourteen years. His vehicle did not return from the office tonight."
Strangled silence.
Then painful calm. "Which office?"
As soon as Damian specifies, Batman disconnects. Damian sighs and rises.
---
In a lonely underground car park, the vehicle in question sits alone in the dark. Batman and Nightwing disable security, grapple twenty stories up, and ease themselves through a window.
Damian can count on two hands the number of times he's stepped foot inside Wayne Enterprises. When he was ten and freshly entered into his father's life, he stormed the place a couple of times, full of expectations and demanding responsibilities as preparation to run the place as his birthright. Those expectations waned rapidly. No one had time for a child. Least of all his father.
His expectations of how their nightlife would look took longer to disintegrate. He held onto the one thing his mother had promised him above all. But by fifteen, he understood.
Damian was his father's son - at the time, his only. The fact his father did not know he existed, did not ask for or want him, ought to have been irrelevant. But the world does not work as it ought. On an unreachable, irrevocable, emotional level, he will never be his father's heir. His father will never care for him the way he did for the children he chose for himself.
The office lounge is dark, and so are the corridors it adjoins. At this hour, even the night owls have gone home. They skulk, soundless black shapes of nightmares.
Muffled sniffles make them freeze. Batman eases open a private office.
There's no one there, and for a moment Damian suspects a trap. Then Batman rounds the desk and drops. There, tucked beneath, a shape shakes. Not a skinny teenager. Bulky, limbs bound tight, gagged with his own tie and blinded with another.
Their approach as silent as it was, when Batman grabs and hauls the man out he shrieks wildly around the gag.
Batman yanks it out. "Who are you?" he growls.
"Don't kill me!" he cries. "I didn't know what I was doing!"
"What did you do?" Batman zeroes in.
The man freezes. "Bat-Batman?"
Batman yanks off the blindfold, and the eyes beneath widen. "Oh, thank god you're here-"
"What did you do?"
"He blackmailed me, I swear! Months ago, threatening messages started appearing on my computer wanting information, he knew everything and I- I had to!"
"This one?" Damian points, and the man jumps a mile, having not noticed his lurking shape, and nods.
Damian moves to wake it, as Batman shakes the employee with a growl. He's being irrational, but if he goes too far Damian will stop him.
"Who?"
"I don't know! It was all voice calls before tonight, and his voice was all, y'know, changed! And today he just told me to stay late and then he unfolded from the shadows like a damn spider and I thought I was gonna die and he cut me, look!" For the Joker card.
"What do you know about Bluejay?!" Batman roars.
The man pauses. "B-Bluejay? Your sidekick? I don't... know any...thing?"
He sounds genuinely baffled. Based on what Damian is seeing, he's inclined to believe it.
"Batman," Damian mutters. "Look at this."
Batman discards the employee to join him. Unbeknownst to the employee, of course, this isn't just of interest to Batman, but Bruce Wayne, too. His name appears plenty.
"He's dirty," Damian reports boredly, scrolling through a very long list of formerly encrypted messages. He's no techie, not like his father and certainly not like the infamous second Bluejay, but honestly, it's as if these were just waiting to be found. "Feeding intel and services to gangs for years."
Batman glowers down at their apparent idiot middleman. This isn't helping Bluejay. "This what he blackmailed you with?"
The employee raises his shoulders in lieu of his hands. "No, never seen it, he must've planted--" Another second under Batman's frigid glare and he breaks. "Okay, okay, yes, but it wasn't anything much, I'm very important to this company, you know, as Assistant to the Board only I could've swapped the files the members received like he wanted--"
Batman grinds his teeth. "That's more than just information."
"I- It was nothing important! Please, I'm not the criminal here, I'm the victim--"
"Shut up," Damian grunts, and hits play.
Audio crackles.
He thought, at best, the MP3 he found might contain a sample of the perpetrator's voice they could study.
He's... half right.
A whimper.
He and Batman still. The playback arrow slides along the twenty-second audio clip.
Suddenly - it erupts with a loud, broken scream.
"Say it," grates a modulated voice. "Beg him to find you."
Damian's father grows rigid at his side.
The screaming dissolves into sobbing. The lurching, choking kind forced out by compounding pain.
Eventually, Jason's young, hoarse voice sobs, "...Batman, please."
Batman moves so violently Damian would've been shunted had he not dodged back. His father takes over the computer, whipping out a thumb drive. Damian eyes the restrained employee, struck dumb and appearing increasingly freaked out. He's worried he's become caught up on the wrong side of Batman in something much worse than he realised. He's right.
But the playback ended there and Batman cannot find more. He slams the unfortunate man to the wall and starts bellowing.
But as Damian suspected, he knows nothing. That file arrived tonight, while he was tied up. It wasn't for him. It was for them.
And the slam dislodged a framed certificate from a nearby shelf. On their way out, it falls and smashes - revealing behind it, a lone tactical boot. A perfect counterpart to the one they found earlier.
They grapple off the window into the night. Damian sweeps after his father's storming heels down an alley.
"The perpetrator," Batman growls in summary, "has captured Bluejay. Tortured him. He has also influenced Wayne Enterprises through at least one puppet, who he has sacrificed to us."
"On the same night," Damian notes calmly. He keeps pace with longer, slower strides. He refuses to waste energy becoming emotional.
"Wayne Enterprises is a strategic move for power no matter the motive." Batman slides into the Batmobile. Another unfortunate victim of childish nicknaming. Damian follows, and the doors seal soundproofed around them. "It does not necessarily indicate further knowledge."
Damian remains suspicious. "Didn't the Joker also send recordings?"
Batman plugs his extracted data into the waiting dashboard slot, examining the files all over again. "Not Bluejay. As far as the world knows, it was Tim Drake captured and tortured two years ago."
That's right. Damian almost forgot. Batman covered up the initial circumstances of the previous Bluejay's capture so he could later seek help out of costume. His fragile state in the aftermath was not one that could be contained to a caped persona. The effort hardly mattered, in the end.
Damian pauses. "...Except for the Joker."
His father purses his lips. It is their one problem. If the Joker wakes - he will know their identities. He would not be the sort to expose them outright - no, he would use the information for his own, likely far more devastating plans. Their best hope is he loses too much memory and/or brain function to put the pieces together.
"Best lead is investigating WE from home," Batman decides, but the grind of his teeth means he's furious about it. He gives up on the files and places his hands to start the vehicle.
Both their earpieces screech.
Damian's hand leaps to yank his out. Batman only stills.
Audio crackles.
Damian slowly returns it to his ear, listening carefully.
"Bluejay?" Batman questions into the fuzz. It's pathetically frantic under the growl. Perhaps Jason got away from his captor and reactivated his comm. Unlikely.
"...E-Eleven," Jason's voice shakes, and Damian reconsiders.
"Bluejay?" Batman repeats more forcefully, tapping rapidly at the limited mobile tech in the vehicle to try and get a lock. The earpieces themselves don't have trackers to save on audio quality, but perhaps one reactivated with it.
"...Twenty-three."
"Bluejay?" Batman whispers, but the static cuts off halfway through the name. Transmission over.
Damian frowns. "Eleven twenty-three. Is that a code of yours?" It's not one he knows.
"No," Batman confirms, fingers clenching on the wheel.
"Either Bluejay is sneaking information to us, or the captor is speaking through him," Damian concludes. He drums his fingers on his folded arms. "With the playing card leading us to the audio file on the WE computer, he is clearly not opposed to leaving deliberate clues. A showman." A crazy. A rogue. Or at least a wannabe.
The engine growls to life. Damian looks at Batman in surprise.
"You know what it means?"
Batman's mouth thins. "It's not my code. But it is one of Jason's."
Unhelpful as always. Damian grits his teeth. "For what?"
Batman's mouth thins even further.
"...His school locker. It's his adoption day."
---
If it is the locker, there's a chance the date was not a threat. There's a chance it's Jason directing them - and not Jason succumbing to torture and giving up their identities.
It's possible. Jason may have suspected something ahead of time, and left a clue behind. He's not entirely useless.
Or so Damian assumes. He wouldn't actually know. He barely spoke to the boy, on their handful of meetings. Still, it's more than he afforded Timothy.
Gotham Academy stands tall and shadowed, old brownstone with pillars overarching the main entrance. It never impressed Damian, even long before he dropped out. All he learnt here was how ignorant and helpless the common rabble was.
Batman has them inside in two seconds, and their steps echo in the long, vacant halls. He knows where he's going even in the dark, and Damian prevents himself from wondering if he ever knew Damian's own placement so well by sparing a glance for their surroundings, studying what's changed. Some new posters and plaques. Not much. A historic place like this is too prideful to.
Lockers dissect a wall into a hundred lengths. Batman beelines and raises a torchbeam. He fiddles with the lock, while Damian struggles to envision some villainous captor doing the same. They are well out of the way, here. It'd be deeply personal.
The locker clanks open.
Books. A lot of them, actually. Stacked higher than Damian could imagine any ninth grader actually needing. Squeezed beside them are workbooks and papers and stationary. But atop the stack, something gleams. A bird symbol. The Bluejay emblem.
Damian picks it up to authenticate, but it's real. The last of the three trackers.
Batman's attention does not waver. He takes out what'd laid beneath. A phone.
"Went offline at the docks with the others," he generously informs Damian.
Powering up, it temporarily blinds them, then Batman considers the home page. "Factory reset," he concludes, not encouragingly.
Regardless, he immediately checks recent apps. Only one is open: voice memos. It contains exactly one file. Made tonight.
Batman taps play, and familiar interference crackles. It echoes wrong and loud in the empty school halls.
Out of the static, something quivers through. Small, shuddering sobs.
If Jason's bared misery unsettles Damian, it rips through his father. Batman's jaw tightens, staring down as if he could burn through the recording to reach the boy on the other side.
The shuddering sobs hitch and rise. They quicken and stop-start harsher. Enduring something. Intensifying, as if with an impending break--
It cuts off.
Damian and his father stand there. Two large, imposing men, staring helplessly down at a little device.
Stiffly, Damian casts a light over the locker.
"I don't think there's anything else here, Father," he says quietly.
The phone creaks ominously in his father's grip.
"That can't be it," Batman growls. He shoves Damian out of the way, scouring the locker and the surrounding area, then with a whirl of his cape, stalks deeper into the school.
It's unsatisfying. It's heartwrenching. It's exactly what a particularly evil, particularly clever rogue would do to hurt them. To lay a breadcrumb trail, giving hope and direction, only to yank it from beneath them.
Batman barges into the security office and wakes the feeds. Damian trails after, turning it all over in his mind.
With the first audio, the captor told them he had Bluejay, and was torturing him, and wanted to provoke the Batman. The second was a threat at their secret identities. The third...
If Batman loses another Bluejay, if another child loses everything to their fight - Damian isn't sure how he's going to justify it to himself.
The school cameras have been down all day. No more sign of the captor's presence than theirs.
"Batman, we will study the files at the Cave," Damian proposes, watching the monitor's sickly gleam cast over the flat, unyielding cowl. "It is unlikely this foe will have broken his pattern and left another sign."
His father concedes without a word. Without even a glance. He sweeps back to the Batmobile without checking Damian is following, or even that he's sufficiently resealing their forced entry behind them.
On the wordless drive back, Damian plugs in hi-fi headphones and listens closely again to each audio.
Jason's tortured screams rip through him. The captor's distorted, yet disturbingly interested demand to beg. Either a sadist, or someone angry. And Jason - who Damian knows first and foremost as his father's proud tale of a fearless streetkid who drove a tire iron into Batman's stomach upon their first meeting - giving in. His too-young voice breaking.
Then, the shaky numbers.
Then, the small sobs, quaking until they start to unravel. That one scares him most.
They seem wrong. They seem out of order. De-escalating from most dramatic to least.
It can't end there. There has to be more to it.
When their tires slam to a halt in the Batcave, Batman yanks the audios with him and throws himself at the BatComputer. He scans them, he strips them, he filters them. Snippets of pain and terror chirp like a glitching horror movie. The hunch to his broad shoulders, the cowl that sags like empty skin on his back, his frigid stare and ceaseless fingers - they mean he's getting nowhere fast.
Damian sighs and sags into a chair, booting up another monitor to flick through related surveillance footage without much hope. The docks, the office, the school.
This feels like a dead end.
When it was the Joker - when it was Timothy - the three video files he sent Batman were days apart, spread over the three weeks the boy was missing. The similar pattern yet far accelerated pace suggests a more rapid progression. And conclusion.
---
Whenever Damian thinks of what happened to Timothy, something inside him twists.
He used to think it was simply anger; at Father, at the child himself. In adulthood, he's come to recognise the sinking rot of guilt.
Timothy was smart. Smarter than either of them, Father used to say. Meaning Damian. At the time, it felt pointed, a direct insult, but he came to suspect something worse: ignorance. His father, blinded by the love he had for his new child, entirely ignorant he's insulting another.
(It was even worse when it was Jason. Jason, who was not stronger, or faster, or smarter. He was simply, intrinsically, loved.
And the wider superhero community wonders why Damian never comes home.)
Damian was undercover on the other side of the world, at the time. He didn't hear the Gotham gossip for weeks to come. And even then - the boy his father had at one point tried to call a brother to him was recovered alive. He did not bother to visit home for some months more. When he did, Father warned him not to try and see Timothy, and he began to understand.
Not all of Timothy had come home from his capture. Between the torture he endured, the chemically altering toxins, the attempted conditioning. He did not speak, even after his face healed. When he tried, he lost it and had outbursts. Laughter, tears, violence. He withdrew until Father despaired. Either unable or unwilling to care for himself, Timothy required round-the-clock care and access to emergency services, and the Manor held many more dangers than the public knew.
And, Father later admitted to Damian, one eye-bagged evening over a rare drained Whiskey glass, Tim would stare. Vacantly, but out of the corner of Father's eye it looked like blame.
So Father moved the boy to the city penthouse for his recovery.
Isolated in his tower, Timothy calmed and settled with routine. Carers supplied Father with daily updates. The city gradually lost interest and the incessant gossip about Joker Junior turned to pity for a teenage agoraphobe. Father came upon the young Jason, initially refusing to involve him in the dangers that ruined Tim's life, but wearing down as the boy proved he needed the positive outlet after a childhood of injustice and poverty, and sure enough, in Bluejay colours he smiled and flourished. Damian, as always, dipped.
And then a year in, Timothy stabbed a carer, scared the rest, and walked out the door. Even Father had not located him since, something Damian would not have believed if not for the reverent way he used to speak of him.
It was the Joker. It was Father. It was Damian. Whoever. Timothy had not been protected like he should. Damian knew the dangers, and he turned away because his father needed a lesson, but also because he still idiotically trusted his father--
And now it's Jason.
Damian swears, if another child comes along, he will prevent this sickness of a lifestyle before it can take root.
---
Joker.
Damian blinks back to reality, where fuzzy CCTV had begun to blur and his father was still looping those wretched audios, over and over.
Hm.
Damian closes the useless surveillance footage and brings up old files.
There are literally countless, and Damian isn't as familiar with the navigation as he once was, but the BatComputer is impeccably organised. He locates three two-year-old video files. He slides headphones over his ears and selects the first.
A fifteen-year-old in a blue-and-orange Bluejay suit, strapped by his wrists and ankles to an angled-upright metal table. The domino mask topped not by Jason's dark red curls, but Timothy's sleek black mop. He yanks at the restraints, teeth set with determination. Somewhere, the Joker distantly sings. He flits briefly onscreen to clamp jumper cables to the table. Then a switch flips and the boy goes rigid and his whole body convulses. Finally, he sags, gasping for breath.
"That was," Timothy heaves, "nothing. Don't you know how Batman gets his muscles?"
In response, a stronger shock wracks through him and his cool grin vanishes under a wave of sweat, a shriek escaping teeth clenched so tight they could crack.
The video ends. The second begins.
With screaming.
A closer angle. The Joker's wild, scrawny figure hunched over Timothy's strapped-down, days-held form. The mask and most of the Bluejay costume is gone, and his wrists and ankles soak in blood crusting around the restraints. The Joker holds a knife. It's in Timothy's mouth.
"Stay still now, birdie!" the Joker hums giddily. "Wouldn't want your old man to accidentally hurt you, now, would we?"
He giggles, and giggles harder, while Timothy screams, stop-start with bursts of hysterical laughter in between and panic in his eyes. The Joker toxin at work. Blood runs until it entirely coats the Joker's hands and Timothy's face.
The last video is still and silent. It's jarring.
A close-up on Timothy's white-caked, blood-smeared mess of a face. Blood seeps sluggishly from sliced cheeks, cut out and up from the corners of his lips. White facepaint smears the rest. His hair is splattered spraypaint-green, and a purple bow tie sits under his chin.
His slow, steady breaths are the only sound. His shoulders shake with the strain of control. His downcast eyes glisten and he starts to cry.
Just a little. Tears streak the white paint.
He swallows a sob. He can't contain the next. Sobs wrench from his hoarse throat, pulling at the rips in his face, caked blood starting to crack.
The more he loses control, the more his lips start to twitch.
His sobs edge into laughter. He's laughing, and bleeding, and shaking, and his eyes grow wide and soulless, a little doll on a pull-string.
His laughter shrieks, until it rattles in Damian's head and he wants to wince away. From offscreen, a pale hand outstretches and pats Timothy's lolling head.
"Good boy, Junior," the Joker croons, and the video cuts.
Damian's head rings. He exhales slowly. Steadily. Like Timothy did two years ago, trying to control himself.
The room comes back into focus.
He can still hear Timothy's sobbing.
No. No - he shakes himself and flicks a glance.
His father is still playing Jason's audios with that haunted, loaded-weapon expression.
Except.
His father has cleared up the quality, removed the interference buzz. The quiet crying from the third audio rings clear as a bell.
Damian's eyes dart back to his own screen.
He sets back the playback arrow. Hits play.
Timothy's cringing face and quiet sobs roll over him.
His heart drops.
"Father!" he barks and leaps out of his chair.
His father is Batman, so instead of jumping, his body steels over. His unmasked eyes drill with demand.
Damian fumbles to change the audio output. "Listen."
His father does.
"This is Timothy," Damian whispers, as Timothy's misery cracks into laughter. Then he points at his father's monitor. "This is Timothy!"
His father's eyes narrow.
He surges over and Damian relinquishes his workspace.
In the first two of tonight's audios, Jason spoke. The third, they only assumed was him.
"Who would have access to this video," Damian demands, adrenaline racing, "and knowledge of what really happened two years ago, and a grudge against you and Bluejay?"
His father's expression does not change, staring down the unyielding evidence. But Damian could swear the colour drains from his face.
"I know where he is," his father whispers.
---
The original Arkham Asylum complex was abandoned nearly eighty years ago. Then torn down, two years ago.
Damian is guessing Batman could not bring himself to personally oversee the demolition. It shouldn't have mattered. His son was rescued - at least physically - and the Joker was firmly out of commission.
Turns out, they didn't bother demolishing the basement. Where much of Timothy's torture took place.
The Batmobile mows down fences and sprays muck skidding to a halt by the tall pile of stony remains, and Batman leaps out and charges into the wreck. Damian pursues, unusually concerned for his father's rabid-dog footing - then skids in loose gravel himself and realises he should worry more for his own.
Batman knows exactly where he's going. He dodges rubble and twists to drop down a dusty chute into blackness; Damian follows without allowing himself hesitation, and finds himself free-falling down a square stairwell, cramped and winding. It's split second before Batman catches a ledge and swings straight through what was once a set of doors and onto a basement level. Damian mimics as best he can, feeling exactly like the shadow he once was, years ago. Except this time, Batman wouldn't notice if he fell behind.
Through doorways they race past, Damian glimpses dust-thick surfaces and chairs, and the bricks and beams of fallen ceilings. He soon does not need to guess their destination, as an artificial glow grows from the end of the corridor. Illuminated footprints scatter beneath their indelicate sprint. A single doorway beams with rewired light.
They burst through.
Two twitching figures could be corpses.
A familiar metal table, stinking and blood-soaked, lays broken, mostly flat on the floor. Jumper cables, clamped to its edges. Strapped to its surface, in a battered Bluejay suit, is Jason. Tear-streaked, he shudders, recoiling from - something, hunching over him.
Something that looks up, whirls, and darts away through a far doorway.
As Batman flies to Jason's side, Damian surges to pursue-
"Nightwing."
It registers as halt and Damian does so without thinking.
Batman brushes past. "Stay with Bluejay," he orders, stilted and not looking away from the far doorway.
Damian stares in shock. The boy is Father's, Damian is better utilised to--
"Damian," his father barks, sensing his imminent disobeyal, and then he's gone, flitting after the perpetrator's wake.
Damian shakes with displaced adrenaline, mouth agape. He's been benched from the fight. He doesn't work for his father anymore, he barely works with him, and yet his instinct was still to obey.
A sniffle interrupts his indignation.
He looks back to Bluejay. Laid out, helpless, on the metal surface almost level with the floor.
Father did not untie him. He must have only checked his vitals. Irresponsible.
"Bluejay," Damian barks, settling for the task. "Report."
But Jason's eyes don't find him, as he approaches. They glimmer and flutter rapidly, half-closed. Nor does he seem to fully register the order. He gasps hoarsely, "Da-Damian?"
Damian bites back an unproductive reprimand about names in the field, yanking off the jumper cables and slicing through the restraints with a sword. "What hurts?"
Jason sobs out a bloody cough. A glob slides from his mouth. Only half of his domino mask remains, ripped at the bridge, and the exposed side of his face is nastily purple. His suit is torn, and the skin beneath all welts, oozing blood. A beating, most likely. Perhaps with something metal. Along with probable electrocution.
Limbs freed, Jason attempts to curl upright, instinctively foetal, shuddering wetly and still failing to verbally respond. But when his knees bend, a scream rips out of him and his hands fly to his leg, folding over it.
Damian inspects the limb, which rolls unhealthily. "Broken. Don't move it. How is your breathing?"
The moment he mentions it, it gets much worse.
Jason curls around his functioning knee, and begins to sob and gasp in earnest. "D-Damian," he shudders. "I'm sorry. He- He-caught me, I shouldn't have- My real mom- Sheila- She was on the phone, she said she was meeting me- I think she lied, why did she lie-? I couldn't get out and I thought he was going to- I didn't think- No, I knew Batman would come..."
Damian lays a hesitant hand on Jason's back, worrying he might collapse and damage himself more. "Bluejay... Jason," he corrects, because the former's not registering. Then he's not sure how to go on. Without professionalism, how is he supposed to communicate in the field?
But the touch causes a far greater shift in gravity than expected, as Jason instantly curls towards him.
"P-Please." Jason's ruddy fingers scrabble at Damian's chest armour. Finding purchase on a seam, he latches and tugs himself in, half off the platform and into Damian's lap, broken leg be damned. Face buried against him, he sobs, "Please don't leave me."
Damian stills. He hasn't been this close to someone since the last time Jon walked out. (Or did he walk out on Jon? It gets blurry.) Somewhere in the back of his mind, his subconscious recognises the motions, and provides a response.
"It's... alright," he says stiltedly. Very hesitantly, his hands raise to hold the teenager. "You're safe."
The script is deeply familiar. Not for fellow soldiers in the field. For kids and victims. He can do it - it's an essential part of the job. He may not have Jon's or other heroes' natural warmth, but he always strove to be better than Batman, at least.
Jason - Jason is a kid. And victim. And Bluejay.
Damian never wanted or expected to be treated like this, when he was Bluejay. But maybe that's irrelevant.
"It's alright," he repeats, softer and smoother. He curls his arms more securely around Jason. "You're safe now. We were always going to find you. It's alright."
Jason clings harder, and sobs harder. Damian feels the fear working its way out of his body, as he breaks down.
Father never needed him.
But this boy - a boy who's not just a victim he'll hand off to a hospital and never see again, or a curious hero-colleague he can ignore, or an on-off boyfriend he can drive away and make up with later, but someone he's attached to in a much less escapable way - might.
Damian holds Jason tighter, and stares past his red curls, reevaluating.
---
Batman rushes the asylum corridors. The sweep of a dark coat flits behind doorways and corners, always a little out of reach. Leading him.
He doesn't care. He's never cared less about the threat of a trap.
Unconsciously, he works through blueprints memorised two years ago. This corridor and then the next, and then they'll reach--
He fires off a batarang almost before he sights the target.
It spins, almost scraping the long hairs atop the fleeing figure's head, and slots just under the lip of a doorway.
The figure skids just as fast and shields himself as the batarang explodes the upper cavity of the lift shift he was making for. With a crash and a bang, the exit to the surface blocks with metal beams and stones, dust raining past the empty doorway into the shaft's blackness below.
Batman shouldn't stop. He should go pin the perp down. Restrain and secure him. Like usual.
He cannot. All he can do is stand there and wait for him to turn.
When the dust settles, the figure's shoulders sag.
He straightens. And looks back.
Batman meets the cold, cold, cold eyes of his absent son.
Half-lidded. Skin pale. A chunky mask strapped over his nose and mouth, with bandages wrapped beneath to conceal all sign of the scars he'd hated. His hair, long. Straggly. Sprouting from the top of his head in oily stalks, strands bent like spider's legs. A loose trench coat drapes off his shoulders and frills around his knees.
Bruce- Bruce always prayed he was somewhere safe. Taking care of himself, the way Bruce was clearly unable to.
Maybe he was. Although slight as ever, he looks strong. Bruce is unimaginably relieved. Until he remembers.
"...Tim," he begs. Just like he begged, the day he found him, and found himself at gunpoint. For Tim to remember who he is. For Tim to know he's sorry. For Tim to know how much he is loved. In response, Tim used the last of his strength to overcome his conditioning and wrench the laughter-quaking gun away and shoot the Joker instead. His final act as a hero. As Bluejay.
"Tim," Bruce breathes. "Why?"
Tim stares unreadably back. Lower face both bandaged and masked, there is no warning, nothing to gauge, when a grating, modulated rasp echoes, "'Why'?"
It's loud and bounces in the cold, empty space.
Why not come to me?
Why this?
Why Jason?
Tim's head tilts. Like a bird. Or puppet.
"'Why', Bats?" he repeats, and Bruce nearly flinches. Tim isn't the one who used to use that nickname.
His cowl may as well have disintegrated. Any remnant of his imposing persona fled, as Tim stares, stares, stares straight through him.
But he could always do that. He was the one who understood Bruce better than Bruce did, even before they officially met.
He was the skinny thirteen-year-old who confronted Batman with shaking knees and determined fists while still mourning his girlfriend the Spoiler, claiming to have known their identities all along and been the reason she knew things she shouldn't, had tactics and plans out of place for her wild, fun-loving personality. The reason Bruce hadn't managed to keep her home and safe from her father's exploits.
Tim felt responsible for the death of a girl he loved, and responsible for Bruce's loss of control in the aftermath. Bruce fought so, so hard to teach him otherwise. And then just taught him. He flourished in ways Bruce never managed with Damian. He became a son, in ways he never managed with Damian.
Present-day, long-limbed, straggly-haired Tim starts to chuckle.
The modulator's robotic rattle kills any warmth it might have had.
Tim's eyes squint slightly in mirth, and his shoulders shake. The first emotion at all he's shown.
The modulator grates and squeaks like sawing machinery as he laughs so hard he doubles over and grips his knees, body relaxed enough his head droops with no attempt at a defensive stance. It reminds Bruce of someone.
Just as he thinks Tim will laugh himself out of oxygen and faint like he used to, the boy rights himself and his laugh thins. He sucks in a big rattling breath.
Then, very measuredly, he exhales it.
"You should be careful," his mask grates out, eyes still gleaming with off, wrong amusement. "If I lose control... I don't know what I'll do."
Bruce remembers. He remembers kneeling on the kitchen floor, Tim's eyes streaming with panic as hysterical laughter they thought they'd overcome overwhelms him. He remembers finding Tim soaking in self-inflicted blood like he'd tried to claw his own malfunctioning brain out. He remembers the carer he visited in hospital as they recovered from a blood transfusion, apologising numbly for his unstable son.
"Tim, please," Bruce begs. It just doesn't make sense. "Jason is a child. You'd never..."
Hurt a child.
Tim raises a brow.
In the face of such apathy, something inside Bruce dies.
He hadn't realised how emotion, any emotion, even a chemical-damage-induced fit, had softened Tim's face until it's wiped clean. His stare, corpselike.
The same stare that followed Bruce, when he briefly, fancifully hoped Tim could recover at home in the Manor. Bruce told himself he was just traumatised and dissociated. He couldn't control the deadness of his stare.
Bruce can't believe he ever convinced himself Tim wasn't angry.
"'Why'?" Tim returns to one last time. He spreads his arms to the distant torture chamber. "An experiment. And I have my answer."
Tim's wrist flicks and a bo-staff concealed in his palm snaps to full length.
Bruce prepares for a fight- has never been less prepared for a fight-
"Don't you know what day it is?" Tim adds out of nowhere.
Then Tim leaps backwards, into the lift shaft, and drops.
In the moments it takes Bruce to change gear and close the gap, the tunnel is empty and he has no idea which level below Tim ducked onto. The rubble and cave-ins contain infinite dead-ends and escape routes, and Tim knows them. Bruce doesn't. He'd been so compromised he hadn't thought.
That goes for a lot of things.
If he'd just thought, he would've understood the taunts and found Jason before he was hurt. Before Tim had done things he can't take back.
He wishes... he wishes he could've heard Tim's real voice, one more time. Seen his real face. Laughing, crying, scarred, anything. He fears it's too late, now.
And Jason. The thought of what he's put his youngest through sickens him.
He digs his gloved fingers into the dirt, curled over the shaft's edge.
Then alarm zings through him and he's up in a flash. Damian will not have been more than perfunctory for any but the most serious of wounds. If he has not come after him by now-
Bruce halts in the chamber doorway, breath stolen.
Damian doesn't look up. His loose shoulders and surrender of spatial awareness would be unrecognisable if they weren't beneath his iconic cloak. Damian, the estranged son who Bruce should've had more faith in as a child, who he loves so much but can never, ever get a grasp on, who thinks himself alone while venerated by a world of young heroes - holding Jason close, like Bruce has never seen. And Jason, the sweet and eager and hurt child who sought Bluejay like redemption, like it was the only way he could ever contribute to the world, who'd been withdrawing, flaring grief and lack of trust leading to the Garzonas fiasco - breaking down, like he'd needed to for a while now.
Bruce has had sons. But he'd hardly dared imagine any who were brothers.
He's failed all his children, and it's okay if they hate him. But perhaps he's the problem. Perhaps they need more than just him. Perhaps... Perhaps this is what he's been missing, all along.
---
"A shock reveal!" the preppy newscaster shrieks.
It's all over the news, within the day.
No, not Batman, Nightwing, or Bluejay.
Wayne Enterprises.
"After an unprecedented vote, Wayne Enterprises shareholders would like to present... Timothy Drake-Wayne, hybrid heir to both Wayne and Drake fortunes!"
(On what fucking planet, Damian distantly blazes, the TV remote creaking in his grip. But it's no secret he and the Gotham public have held a mutual disdain for each other from the start, and they were glad to see the back of him.)
The footage buzzes ditzily over a thick crowd of reporters before the waiting platform of a press conference. Another shot glimpses Tim's blurry back, down a corridor in a neat suit mid-conversation.
"We had no idea Tim had even returned from his year abroad, but sources say he's been back for some time, working closely with his adoptive father Bruce Wayne to prepare for this moment! We all had our concerns, of course - Tim's absence famously began with a psychological break resulting in an injury to one of his staff. But in a written statement prior to his upcoming address, Tim has clarified this as precisely the reason he left - a wakeup call he's extremely sorry to have needed. He sought help, but he didn't leave it there - he returns with training and unprecedented endorsements from the best worldwide, and an express hope to steer Wayne Enterprises to an even brighter future, in honour of every other Gothamite who has ever been victimised by the costumed nightmares we live with. Bruce Wayne has not yet given official comment, but sources say he beams with pride and fully supports his adoptive son's new position!"
(At home, Bruce barks down a phone at Lucius Fox, who argues back just as fiercely that anyone with the power to stop this has either been blindsided or mysteriously vanished.)
"The other problem the public has raised is Tim's age. Wayne Enterprises can't very well hire a minor for such an important role - which is exactly why it's a very good thing today is Tim's birthday: his eighteenth!
"All eyes await his first public appearance since his return. His famous ordeal left an aftermath that horrified us all," - an old still of Tim's freshly stitched and miserable-looking young face appears - "and we all share a certain... curiosity, as to his presentation today. Will the Joker's mark remain, inside or out? Is Tim still that damaged boy, deep down?"
(Jason, curled up as well as his cast allows on his bed, is dying of curiosity too. It's not until Damian storms his room and snatches the phone away and forbids him from the internet he notices the silent tears on his cheeks.)
The gathered reporters erupt in noise and the newscaster gasps. "The conference starts now! Please welcome Timothy Drake-Wayne, new CEO of Wayne Enterprises!"
Tim steps up to the podium and the roaring, flashing crowd.
Cheeks unblemished and smooth. Hair trimmed and neat. Skin flushed with health - or makeup.
Last night's bandages were not shameful concealment. They were the final stages of a cosmetic process.
Like a million businessmen before him, he is the picture of good breeding and charisma, ready to soothe over any rumour of underhanded corporate endeavours. Tim waves, and seals his place in all their futures with a brilliant, surgically perfect smile.