Chapter Text
Maddie hadn't gone looking for trouble when she found it. Hadn't even known that there was trouble to look for. She'd instead been daydreaming about costly improvements to the Specter Speeder and the ways she could get them funded. There was genuinely publishable research somewhere in her envisioned process.
Publishable, marketable, for the betterment of human innovation. There was a grant proposal somewhere in there. This was how Maddie ended up looking at the Wayne Enterprises website, reading about their newest research grants. None of them were directly for ectology — disappointing but unsurprising — but if Maddie spun the nature of her research and squinted. Well. She could write a compelling proposal for a solid third of the grants on offer.
She and Jack were, of course, hardly poor. They had their retirement savings locked down, college funds for Jazz and Danny both. They made a steady living from their patents and government contracts. But (Maddie cast a covetous glance at the Specter Speeder) there was always more they could do with a little more funding. Maddie scoured the internet for all the information on Wayne Enterprises that seemed relevant: what is the company's mission statement? What was their code of ethics? Who ran the company?
That, of course, led her to reading about the very young CEO Tim Drake Wayne and former CEO Bruce Wayne which led her to Gotham's gossip rags and photographs of the large and eclectic Wayne family and... photos of her son? What?
She squinted at the photograph, against the brightness of her computer monitor. Squinted at the photo's caption, matched the too-familiar face to the name Damian Wayne, and hit the search engine again. A closer photo of Damian's face proved no less uncanny, but his eyes were an olive sort of green. Maddie grasped to that difference. Green eyes. Not blue. Flinty where Danny's were soft.
And really, the ways the two boys held themselves were different enough to be funny. Maddie sat back in her desk chair and let herself laugh.
"Look at this photograph of Damian Wayne, Jack!" she said, needing to share the absurdity of this coincidence.
"Oh Wow, Mads! That looks just like him!Dann-o will get a hoot out of this!"
"Should we show it to him?" Because really, Maddie hadn't thought that far ahead.
"If you print it out, we can bring it to dinner. I think Danny could probably use a laugh."
The painful thing was, that was probably true. Maddie and Jack looked to the clock in unison, winced at the time. They really should get dinner going. "I'll print it out if you put some water on to boil. Pasta night."
"Deal," said Jack, putting down the screwdriver he hadn't let go of and taking off his goggles. "Let's hope it doesn't start squirming today." They really needed to do something about the ecto contamination of their food. It's just that there were so many research priorities to juggle, and no one to delegate them to, with so few ectologists she trusted around.
Maddie watched Jack affectionately as he ascended the stairs before focusing back on that photograph of Damian Wayne. She'd managed to talk herself out of finding the resemblance terribly uncanny, but their faces truly were nearly identical. Maddie traced Damian's nose and chin, fingertip collecting dust from the monitor. Then she shook herself out of it, hit print, and listened to the chugging sound of their ancient printer rumbling to life.
By the time Maddie got upstairs, steam was rising from the pasta water and Jack had gotten a box of spaghetti and a jar of meat sauce from the cabinet. He had a bit of salt poured in one large hand and was sprinkling it delicately over the water with the other. He was nearly helpless in the kitchen, but he'd started watching cooking videos on youtube at night to knock himself out. He said they were lulling — exactly the right kind of boring — and not only did they seem to work better than Nyquil, Jack seemed like he might be learning bits from them, here and there.
"Thanks, Jack," she said, gently hip checking him away from the stove and taking over as the water hit a roiling boil. Perfect timing.
Distantly, she heard Jack pick up the photograph of Damian Wayne, his distinctive chortle steadying her. Maddie didn't know how Jack could stand to be so calm about it.
There was just so much they didn't know about Danny's past, how he'd ended up in a group home in Illinois right when they'd been looking to adopt that second child they'd always wanted but somehow never got around to having. Jazz had been ten when they'd realized they were a little too late to make her a playmate the usual way.
Jazz had seen him, reserved and looking at a book on the moon landing — two years younger than her, the perfect age gap, the age gap Jack and Maddie had been planning for before they got caught back up in their research and forgot — and insisted that he was the one.
When Maddie took his hand to escort him from the group home, she'd known immediately that his body was too balanced for an eight year old, that his stance was rooted and perfect and ready to spring. She told herself that she was being ridiculous — so what if he was a little too graceful? So what if his words were a little too careful? Like English was something he'd had to learn? So what if he woke up screaming in a language she didn't know from nightmares he wouldn't explain?
Adopted kids came with history — Maddie knew that going in, so she rationalized the incongruence and tried not to push him one iota further than he was willing to go. Miraculously, Danny adjusted, revealing an easy smile and a wicked sense of humor and an absolute fascination with space that he indulged with glee. He seemed to like Maddie and Jack and he adored Jazz immediately. Before they knew it, they were a proper family and Maddie let her concerns go in favor of refocusing on ectology. But this boy who so resembled her son brought all her old questions back.
A secret twin wasn't out of the question. Even now at fifteen, Danny hadn't shared a word about the life he'd left behind. Maddie suspected Jazz knew more then she did, but she would bet not by much. Maddie gave the spaghetti a quick stir. "Jack?" she said, turning to face him. "Do you think?" she couldn't bring herself to finish the question aloud, prayed Jack would pick up what she was putting down.
He tilted his head. "Think what, Mads?"
Damn it all. "Never mind." It occurred to her that she was actually afraid of showing Danny Damian's picture. That it would somehow dig up the past that Danny worked so hard to bury. But that was ridiculous.
Sure, Danny had never shared his story. Sure, he might have siblings Maddie didn't know about. Sure, there were a million worrying quirks about him that had always made Maddie a little nervous, but none of those things made it likely that a little foreign boy abandoned in small town Illinois was somehow a lost Wayne kid. She and Jack would show him the picture and the whole family would laugh over the resemblance and maybe it would help dispel the tension Danny'd been carrying around lately.
Dinner ended up being lovely, with only a mild bit of squirming from the spaghetti. Danny had even made it home on time, which was a rarity Maddie tried not to puzzle over.
It was just as the last bit of food was being swallowed down that Jack produced the photograph. "Dann-o, you'll get a kick out of this! You too, Jazzerincess!"Jack slid the photo across the table. Jazz did a double take.
"It's a picture of Damian Wayne," Maddie said, keeping her voice light, but her eyes glued to Danny's reactions. She didn't miss the way he froze, the way his adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed.
"Heh," he said, one hand nervously going to the back of his head. "I guess we do kinda look alike. Fun coincidence!"
"Why do you have a random photo of Damian Wayne?" Jazz asked.
That was something Maddie could answer. "I was just doing some reading on Wayne Enterprises," Maddie said. "They offer some promising looking grants."
A tremor of panic visibly flashed across Danny's face. Maddie amended herself. "I don't know yet if we'll be applying for any of them. I'm just in the exploratory phase at the moment."
Danny seemed to relax. Jazz hastily turned the subject to research funding and the family finances in general. When dinner was over, the photo of Damian Wayne was nowhere to be found, surely swiped by a pair of eager hands.
"Fuck," Maddie said aloud to the empty kitchen. Danny had a secret twin and, for some reason, didn't want her or Jack (or possibly even Jazz) to know about it. What was she supposed to do about that?