Chapter Text
From the moment that Damian stepped on that rooftop, he knew he wasn’t alone. The shadows weren’t quite right, the lights of the city below illuminating the clouded-over, hazy sky. The shadows were too thick for this particular rooftop; easy to miss if you didn’t know what to look for.
But he knew better. Instead of panicking, or jumping off the roof to a different one, he simply sighed and sat on the ledge, peering over it to the city below as he tapped his communication unit to mute himself. “What do you want?”
A form bled out of the shadows, dressed in League gear as the teenager, older by Damian by five years only, stepped out with a chuckle. “Can I not check in on you, Damian?” he asked, sauntering over to the ledge before he leaned on it, his mask tugged up over his nose, hiding the lower half of his face. “I worry about you. Mother worries about you, though she is loath to admit it.”
“I am not in need of a babysitter ,” Damian scoffed, clicking his tongue as he looked away. “You should not have come. There are more vigilantes than just myself out tonight.”
“Tt. I hardly am afraid of your adopted siblings— you and I both know they’d never catch me,” he dismissed. “I came to ask a request of you.”
Damian twitched, his surprise betraying him as he twisted. “You… want a favor from me?”
“In a sense. I would owe you for this,” his companion admitted. “What have you told Father about our family?”
“Nothing, in regards to you,” Damian replied stiffly. “He hardly needs to know.”
“I would argue differently. You remember his reaction to you— personally, I would save him the stress. Besides, I am turning eighteen in a year… which leads me to my request.” The assassin turned to face Damian, his head tilted as bright, bright blue eyes bored into green. “I want to know the world outside of Mother and Grandfather’s influence. To see for myself if those you call family are treating you right, as well as to fix some lingering problems of the more metaphysical level in Gotham.”
“What would you ask of me?” Damian asked, his eyebrow raising.
“I’d like to stay in Gotham for a while, but I obviously understand the risks of that with our Father’s serial adoption problem… which is why I would like for you to tell him about me. Nothing too… in depth, naturally, I hardly want to scare the man, but. I’ve convinced Mother that I should be allowed to pursue higher education the civilian way, rather than her way.”
“How did you manage that ?”
“How does any al’Ghul manage anything ?” his companion asked back, a laugh edging at his voice. “Bribery, deals, a hint of assassination to get on Talia’s good side… ah. Let’s pause for a moment, shall we? You have a Bat approaching.”
Damian turned to look over his shoulder, noting his father’s approaching bulk as he swung from the nearby church tower, then glanced back— only for his guest to have disappeared. Frustrated, he muttered under his breath, “I hate when you do this.”
A laugh ghosted over his shoulder, the returning breath quiet, only loud enough for him to hear. “Oh, shush. Have some sense of adventure, Algol,” he teased.
Damian barely resisted rolling his eyes as he straightened his posture, turning to greet his Father as the man landed on the rooftop and approached. “You turned your communicator off, Robin,” Batman noted, an admonishment in his voice. “I thought we agreed to keep them on, or failing that, let the rest of us know if you needed a private moment.”
“I did, but this was an… unexpected visitor,” Robin sighed as he turned to lean on the rooftop’s ledge, an unexpected heaviness to his shoulders. “But I shall manage, as I always do.”
“What’s wrong?” Ever perceptive, Batman moved forward to lean on the ledge, his gaze focused entirely on his youngest son as he thought, his head tipped to the side in consideration as he focused on the city below.
“I have… received some news, about my family,” Damian started slowly, hesitance in his voice. “And I am almost certain you are not going to like what I have to say. I would much rather say it only once, so can we… hold this discussion until we return from patrol?”
Something in his voice gave Bruce pause, looking at his son, seeing the vulnerability they’d worked so hard to let through show. “I… of course, son. If that’s what you need, we can hold off on discussing this,” he assured.
Damian nodded, turning to glance at the city, then over his shoulder for a moment. “That’s… good. Would you mind..?” He gestured toward his comm link, and Bruce was quick to understand, tapping his own to briefly mute himself. “Good, okay. I’m… not quite sure how to put this. You remember my mother— ah, no, that’s not…”
Damian shrugged helplessly, then, for whatever reason, glanced at his shadow. “Can you…?”
Bruce jolted in surprise when a disembodied voice chuckled fondly. “Sure, Algol, I can tap in on the explanation train,” a boy’s voice hummed before… Damian’s shadow twisted , darkness given form coalescing into a teenager, arms crossed across his chest.
Bruce clocked him at eighteen, maybe nineteen, given his height, his build more like Tim or Damian’s than Jason or Dick’s. Leaner, narrower shoulders, more built to dodge and evade than tank a hit. He was dressed in the same armor that Ra’s wore, that Damian wore once upon a time, but his cloak was a light blue rather than Ra’s green or Damian’s red. A mask covered the lower half of his face, but his eyes and hair were visible— black, messy hair that was pushed back and to the side, blue eyes that Bruce recognized instantly as the same shade as his own.
Dread and anticipation pooled in Bruce’s gut.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” the teenager hummed as he shifted his posture to something more casual, one hand resting lazily on the hilt of his sword at his hip. “You may call me Danyal, or Danny if you so like. The fast version is…” The boy hesitated, then looked to Damian, who nodded.
Hesitantly, he pulled down his mask as he looked back to Bruce. “Congratulations, it’s a boy?”
It started with a joke, as so many things are wont to do. Seemingly innocent, on an otherwise quiet night in the Wayne Manor- and wasn’t that just when the most important things were to go off the walls?
Dick was in town for the week, having been voluntold to help out on one of Tim’s cases as Nightwing. Bruce and Damian were out on their usual prowl and had gone quiet, which wasn’t unusual, at least not enough to trigger any alarms.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t any of the usual suspects to make the joke. One would think it would have been Dick or Jason, but no. Those back at the Manor were talking on the communicators about Bruce’s upcoming date with Selina, some fancy gala that he needed a plus-one for in order to keep up appearances for Brucie Wayne.
“Just make sure to wear protection, Bruce,” Stephanie had joked from where she sat on top of the sofa, trying and failing to steal the bowl of ice cream from Tim, who was valiantly holding her off from his seat at the Batcomputer, Barbara patched in and observing from her clock tower.
“ We don’t need another Damian Surprise dropped on us in five years,” she’d hummed, turning back to her screen as Steph and Tim snickered.
“Ugh, don’t even make me consider it,” Dick chimed in, his voice a bit strained with exertion as he moved. “Can we talk about literally anything other than B’s sex life, please? Tiny ears around and all that.”
“You do realize the Demon Brat’s killed people, right? Let the kid say fuck—”
“Jason!”
“Names, Dickwad!”
Steph laughed, flopping back on the couch with her stolen ice cream. “You two good, or do you need some backup?” she asked, tapping her earbud to get the Bat’s attention. “Cause Spoiler can be out in a few minutes, pinky promise.”
“ Nightwing, Red Hood, return to base, ” Batman replied, a tension in his voice that had her, Cass, and Tim sitting up sharply. “ Spoiler, Red Robin, Oracle, I need you to suit up. We have… a guest.”
“A guest?” Tim asked rhetorically, his eyebrow raising. “Place your bets now, everyone: new sibling, new ally, or one of the JL crashing the party?”
“We’d have heard if it was any of the three. So long as Bruce doesn’t drop the whole ‘I have a biological son I never knew about’ thing again, I think we’re good,” Steph hummed as she jogged towards the changing room.
Damian’s voice came over the communicator. “ Be careful what you wish for— Ow, Danyal, don’t elbow me—”
…
…
“...Pardon?”