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Kryptonians always seem to forget that their magic resistance is an absolute zero—and half-Kryptonians are no exception.
So, when Damian woke up today to find Jonathan reverted to his fifteen-year-old self—all because Jon had been stupid enough to shield him from a magic attack yesterday—he wasn't even remotely surprised. He was even calm enough to perform a quick mental assessment: the pajamas hadn't changed size, meaning Jon’s physical body had literally shrunk inside them.
Damian was just getting out of bed to get dressed while pondering how to wake the idiot up, when their barely-one-year-old daughter came wobbling into the room. Hovering in mid-air like a fuzzy little bumblebee, she babbled a sweet, soft "Baba" and "Dada." After doing a few clumsy loops right above Jonathan, she lost her buoyancy and dropped like a stone, landing squarely on Jonathan's stomach.
She stayed airborne for quite a while today, Damian noted silently.
Startled awake, Jonathan stared blankly at the tiny toddler in front of him, then looked around the room. His eyes widened as a bright crimson flush rushed to his face. "Uh... where exactly are we? And Damian, why do you look so much older?!"
Damian, who had just finished pulling his shirt over his head, stared back at Jonathan, whose ears were practically burning red. He thought in sheer disbelief: No way. You were seriously this pure and innocent at fifteen? Please, it's not like you haven't seen me change before.
Right then, the daughter sitting on Jonathan's stomach scratched her sparse patches of baby hair and giggled. "Dada, pretty tie!"
Looking at the completely panicked, pleading expression on Jonathan's face, Damian internally praised his daughter. Excellent opening line, sweetheart. You just saved me a ton of explaining.
"Yes, she's your daughter," Damian said, thoroughly enjoying the show. "She wants you to tie her hair. Control your strength, half-Kryptonian. Be careful not to pull too hard. If you make her cry, you're the one comforting her."
"My daughter?! Wait, no, hold on! She barely has any hair to begin with! Do babies even need hair ties?!" Jonathan was clearly blindsided by the sudden news of fatherhood. The fifteen-year-old teenager was nowhere near ready to be a dad.
"I warned you before, but you wouldn't listen." Damian replied, wearing an expression that said you made your bed, now lie in it.
Once he had gotten his fill of Jonathan’s bewildered face, Damian leaned down and spoke to their daughter. "Muriel, go pick out a hairband you like and bring it here."
"You're using words that are way too complicated! How is a baby supposed to understand—uh, okay, she actually understood. Wait, she calls you Baba? And she can already fly at this age?! Uh... Damian?" Jonathan looked up, completely bewildered by the sudden stillness that had washed over Damian.
Meanwhile, Muriel continued her wobbly aerial patrol around the bedroom. She rummaged through a cabinet that explicitly belonged to Jonathan, finally pulling out a piece of ribbon. Waving the ribbon with her chubby little hands, she babbled, "This! Dada, baby!”
Damian stared at that ribbon, and a wave of memories instantly came rushing back.
A long time ago, Jonathan had complained about how Damian never wrapped his gifts, claiming it made them feel thoughtless.
At the time, Damian had scoffed with utter disdain, "You're just going to throw the wrapping away eventually anyway. Why bother?"
Clutching the watch Damian had given him, Jonathan had countered fiercely, "I would never throw it away!"
Damian had merely rolled his eyes, shooting back a cynical, "Right, sure."
Later, when Jonathan finally passed his driving test, Damian had stared hesitantly at the car keys he intended to gift him. Ultimately, he had taken a ribbon, tied it into a clumsy bow around the keys, and shoved them into Jonathan's hands.
Damian remembered being completely taken aback by the sheer, uncontainable joy that had lit up Jonathan's face.
But even so…Damian never in his wildest dreams imagined that the idiot actually kept it. He had treasured it all this time.
Snapping back to reality, Damian noticed that Jonathan had already gathered a tiny tuft of Muriel’s hair and was about to secure it with that exact ribbon. Moving like lightning, Damian snatched the ribbon right out of Jonathan's hands. He yanked open the top drawer of the nightstand, retrieved a pink lace hairband that was a far cry from his own aesthetic tastes, and shoved it at Jonathan.
"Stop that! That is not meant for hair tying!" Damian barked, his face flushed with acute embarrassment and annoyance.
Jonathan found every single bit of this utterly hallucinatory—including the fact that Damian was actually flushing, and the even crazier reality that they somehow had a child together! Since the baby could literally fly, adoption was out of the question. So, did that mean he had moved in with Damian and brought his own kid along? But she had just called Damian "Baba," hadn't she? Jonathan's mind was a chaotic whir of overlapping thoughts, feeling dangerously close to exploding.
"Dada, tummy hungry," the tiny toddler in his arms cooed, abruptly severing Jonathan’s train of thought.
"Damian, she says she’s hungry," Jonathan said, looking up with wide, helpless eyes.
"She’s talking to you," Damian replied, deliberately averting his gaze to the far side of the room. "The formula and baby food are in the kitchen. Make it yourself.”
"...I’m fifteen! I don't know the first thing about mixing baby formula! You do it! Wait... don't tell me... you don't know how either?" Jonathan stared at the grown adult in front of him in absolute sheer disbelief.
"……" Damian fell into an icy, tight-lipped silence.
"You really aren't her biological father, are you?! How can you not know how to do this!" Jonathan felt the probability of his theory being true skyrocketed to a solid one hundred percent.
"Kent, your lack of basic cognitive function is genuinely disappointing. Did you completely miss her calling me Baba? Furthermore, you are the one who always handles this routine. How am I supposed to know the exact measurements?!" Damian snapped, his own temper flaring.
"Just because she calls you Baba doesn't mean you actually sired her! For all we know, she’s mine and someone else's, and she only calls you that out of habit because we live together now!" Jonathan shot back defensively. Clearly, if this guy couldn't even care for his own child, he couldn't possibly be the biological father.
"Do you honestly believe that with your genetic contribution alone, she would have mastered the physics of flight this early in life?" Damian scoffed with utter disdain.
"Hey! You just called me stupid!" Jonathan's eyes went wide.
"I am profoundly astonished. I had no idea you possessed the capacity to deduce that," Damian remarked with mocking praise.
"WAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!"
An ear-splitting, apocalyptic wail erupted from the starving, one-year-old Kryptonian hybrid toddler.
"Kent, quiet her down this instant! I'm going to salvage what's left of the kitchen, and then we are taking her to Pennyworth!" Damian barked, clamping his hands tightly over his ears as he spun around to head for the kitchen.
"You actually have to call for backup?! You are a completely deadbeat dad! Wait, hold on—Alfred is still alive?! Has he crossed the triple-digit mark yet?!" Jonathan suddenly blurted out as this monumentally important question struck him.
"Shut up! That is entirely beside the point! Just make her stop crying!" Damian roared over the din, glaring in mounting horror at the glassware on the nightstand which had begun to buzz violently, the French doors rattling in their frames, and the very walls of the manor starting to shudder.
"I am profoundly disappointed in you, Master Damian. To think you have reduced yourself to a parent who merely spawns life but refuses to nurture it." Alfred—now a venerable ninety years old—reproved, his voice dripping with deep, sorrowful judgment.
Dick, who just so happened to bring his son, Thomas, over for a playdate today, quickly stepped in to play peacemaker. "Alright, Alfred, cut him some slack. Muriel is usually looked after by Jonathan anyway. Little D is just out of practice."
By now, Muriel had been thoroughly pacified by her six-year-old big brother, Elijah. She was currently hovering in place, happily clutching her baby bottle and guzzling away.
Standing next to them was Thomas, who was visibly traumatized and looking at Elijah with pure, unadulterated awe. In Thomas’s opinion, these younger siblings with Kryptonian bloodlines wailed like literal demons whenever they cried.
Meanwhile, Jonathan stood rooted to the spot, completely unable to process the sensory overload. His Kryptonian super-brain, inherited straight from Superman, was currently revving its gears in a desperate bid to compute the situation, threatening an imminent, catastrophic crash.
"Dad, are you alright?" Elijah walked over, looking up at him.
Jonathan internally screamed. Please, do not look at me with a face that identical to Batman's while calling me Dad! The psychological pressure is suffocating!
"Hahaha! Uncle Jonathan, you seriously never change! Your face gets so beautifully weird every single time Elijah calls you Dad!" Thomas couldn't help but burst into laughter, casually clapping Elijah on the shoulder in camaraderie.
"...I'm so sorry. By the way, where is Batman? Why haven't I seen him?" Jonathan asked, trying to grasp any semblance of sanity. The mere concept of this universe was mind-boggling—seeing a "Batman" who looked significantly younger than Nightwing was just downright uncanny.
Thomas blinked in confusion. "You mean Grandpa, right? I mean, you literally came here with Batman, Uncle Jon. Grandpa still can't break his habit of sleeping in. That's probably the only trait Elijah didn't inherit from Grandpa. Oh, by the way, I'm the current Robin."
Nightwing is serving as Damian's Robin... Jonathan felt himself rapidly turning into a literal statue.
"Thomas, stop messing with my dad," Elijah chided, rolling his eyes before shifting his gaze. "Anyway, do you think Uncle Conner is bringing the twins over today?”
"Probably. Honestly, though, it’s so weird that you call him 'Uncle.' He’s literally married to Tim—that makes him your brother-in-law!" Thomas countered.
"No. Father said Uncle Conner ranks fifth in the family hierarchy, so calling him Uncle is legally correct. You calling Aunt Tim 'Sister' is what's truly bizarre," Elijah refuted with terrifying gravity.
"And I am never changing it!" Thomas huffed, resting his chin in his hands with a tragic sigh. "I've called her Sister Tim ever since I was a baby, why should I stop now? Besides, Sister Tim explicitly promised me when I was little that she would wait for me to grow up! How did she end up marrying Uncle Conner and having kids with him instead?!”
Unlike Elijah, who simply rolled his eyes at the theatrics, Jonathan was completely bamboozled. He stood there, utterly shell-shocked, his entire face practically morphing into a giant question mark.
Tim? Red Robin? Sister?! Jonathan was drowning in an ocean of cognitive dissonance.
Later that evening, Tim and Conner were summoned to the manor for dinner by Alfred under the guise of a "mandatory family gathering." Even Jason had been dragged along, solely because Alfred had weaponized the ultimate guilt trip: "This is merely one of a dying old man's few remaining wishes.”
Watching Thomas casually refer to Red Hood as "Mom" while calling a very much legally female Tim Drake "Sister," Jonathan spiraled into a profound existential crisis. His frantic internal monologue consisted entirely of two questions: "Am I seriously the only one who thinks it’s batshit crazy that he calls Red Hood 'Mom'?" and "Wait... is it possible that my memory is completely shot, or was Red Robin actually a woman this entire time?!”
"Demon brat, are you seriously not going to explain the situation to him?" Jason muttered, frowning as he looked over at the catatonic teenager.
"Why should I bother? He caused me to be thoroughly lectured by Pennyworth today. Let him get some mental exercise." Damian sniffed nonchalantly, reaching into a jar to pluck out a tea biscuit.
"Childish," was Jason’s succinct verdict.
"Besides, Zatanna stated the magic will wear off by tomorrow morning. Why waste precious time explaining Drake’s utterly pathetic history of how she permanently trapped herself as a girl?" Damian replied, ever the pragmatist.
"Fair point. Even if we told him, he probably wouldn't have the brain capacity to process it. Let’s save Little Red whatever shred of dignity she has left." Jason agreed, picking up a tea biscuit of his own and completely abandoning any intention of rescuing Jonathan from his mental prison.
"Are you two seriously talking about me like I'm a ghost standing right next to you?!" Tim exploded, catching stray bullets for the umpteenth time today.
Off to the side, Dick was suffocating on his own giggles, internally praising his younger brothers. How incredibly thoughtful of them. They knew exactly how much I wanted to work on my abs today.
That evening, after Damian and Jonathan had frantically, clumsily scrambled to give their one-year-old daughter a bath, Damian collapsed onto the bed in sheer exhaustion.
"Bathing Titus is significantly less taxing than this," he muttered.
"Don't compare our daughter to a dog!" Jonathan countered helplessly, gently drying Muriel’s hair with a towel.
"Dada, pretty legs!" Having finished getting her hair dried, Muriel proudly hoisted her chubby, short little legs up toward Jonathan.
Jonathan shot a bewildered look at Damian. The person in question merely replied lazily, "She wants you to apply lotion. It's on the very top shelf of the nightstand, get it yourself. And I repeat, control your strength. If you dare scrape my daughter's skin, you're dead."
"She’s literally a baby! What does she even know about having 'pretty legs'!" Jonathan didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
"I warned you before, but you wouldn't listen," Damian muttered, giving Jonathan a side-eye.
Jonathan seriously wanted to question what his future self had been thinking.
The next morning, Jonathan woke up to find himself back to his normal size. He looked over at Damian, who was fast asleep while still cradling Muriel in his arms.
The morning light filtered gently into the room, creating an atmosphere of profound serenity.
Looking at this picture-perfect scene of their shared life, Jonathan couldn't help but smile.
He leaned down, pressed a soft kiss to Damian’s forehead, and whispered, "Good morning. Thanks for yesterday."
End