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In the dark, cool hallway outside his grandfather’s study, Damian al-Ghul wonders if, by this time next year, he’ll be tall enough for his feet to touch the ground beneath this bench.
At four, he no longer needed the accompaniment of an adult to find this hallway. At six, he stopped having to climb into the seat with hands and knees. The final milestone, he has been raised to believe, will mean that he no longer waits in this spot at all. He will have taken his grandfather’s place in the study, and mother will be the one waiting for him.
He can hear her voice through the big oak door, high and clear and authoritative, enough to make his spine straighten instinctively. He can hear the thread of irritation in it, too, which immediately sets him on edge. At nine years old, he knows this: she is speaking to people who do not respect her as much as they ought to. She is engaged in a task that bores her, or frustrates her, or is out of alignment with what she believes to be necessary for the world they are trying to make.
She never says these things out loud. There are many, many things she does not say out loud, and one thing she consistently does: his father is a detective. Following signs, reading rooms, deducing unspoken truths – it’s in his blood.
The door opens, and two people who have the build and gait of League operatives pass through it. One of them stares a moment too long at Damian, lifting an impudent eyebrow when Damian refuses to break first. When they have turned the corner at the end of the hall, Damian slips into the study, letting the door close with a heavy thud behind him.
The sound draws mother’s attention. She glances up, posture impeccable, expression still as an undisturbed lake. “Damian,” she says, voice betraying a sliver of her softness. “I thought you had your capoeira lesson.”
“I moved it an hour earlier.”
“You didn’t eat?”
Damian lifts a stack of steel boxes tied together with twine. “I thought we could eat together.”
Her lips turn in a slight smile, and he feels warm, pleased to have drawn it forth so early in the conversation. “Come here,” she waves him over, pushing grandfather's chair back from his large, ornate desk.
He crosses the space between them in silence and allows her to draw him into an embrace. She dots kisses along his hairline, rubs the heel of her palm between his shoulder-blades. He bears it all as stoically as possible. It’s strange. He finds himself craving exactly this in their time apart, whether it’s been hours, or days, or weeks. But when she's in front of him, certain parts of him seem to lock up, unable to cede completely to the comfort of her touch.
They sit side by side and share the food. She drinks the whole tumbler of doodh, and all of the water he brought, and he wishes he had come with a larger bottle. Tomorrow, he’ll pack everything into a rucksack.
She brushes a bit of rice off the corner of his mouth with her thumb. “I don’t think grandfather will be better in time for your birthday, next week.”
Damian understands what that means. They won’t be going to the nature reserve in southern Chile, as planned. There’s a picture of him there on his fourth birthday which mother loves. He had leaned over a bush to sniff a cluster of blue flowers, and come up with petals and whole blossoms stuck to his face. Later, he had struggled to wrap his mouth around the name, not yet proficient in Latin. Mother had told it to him again and again, and tipped her head back to laugh when he reached a critical mass of mangled attempts.
Mother knows the genus names of every flower, bush, and tree. She can tell him the species of an animal from the sound it trills, or the sight of a hoof and a swishing tail around a corner. She loves the reserve.
Instead of being there, she will be here. Tending to grandfather’s empire, to Damian’s inheritance. He feels a pang of quiet guilt. It’s probably what he deserves, turning ten alone in his room, the stale January air in the compound getting thinner and thinner in his lungs.
“We can go next year,” he offers, a pale attempt at comfort.
He thought it might make her smile again. Instead, her expression seems to still once more, evocative of a deathly quiet. “Yes,” she says, and Damian is alarmed to find it’s barely a whisper of sound. She closes her eyes, and a tear wells past her eyelid, sliding off the cliff of her cheekbone.
“Mother,” Damian says, at a loss, something panicked wriggling in his chest. He struggles to think of a time he has ever seen her cry.
“I’m sorry,” she says, eyes still closed. She reaches for his hand, and finds his wrist instead, squeezing gently. The lack of precision in the gesture worries him further. He can't bring himself to correct her grip, but, like this, it's impossible to hold her back. “I’m sorry, my love.”
“Are you worried about grandfather?”
She opens her eyes again, brushing a bit of dampness away with the heel of her palm. It happens too quickly for him to see it, her composure snapping back into place. If not for the wet spot on grandfather’s desk, Damian would wonder if he had imagined the tear completely. “I’m tired,” she murmurs, releasing Damian’s wrist. “But there is much to do, yet.”
“Shouldn’t I be helping you, mother?” Damian looks at the stack of ledgers on grandfather’s desk. Bound in leather and silk, written on pulpy handmade paper. Countless hours of labor before anyone even picked up a pen. “Won’t this all be mine someday?"
Talia shakes her head, a firm but understated gesture. “This particular work is beneath you, my love.” She cups his face with one hand, drawing him close to kiss his cheek and his forehead. The familiar scent of her perfume only somewhat settles his nerves. “I’ll come and see you before bed. I promise.”
It’s a dismissal. A kinder one than she would extend to anyone else. Something stubborn in Damian wants to ignore it, to ask her again and again what is wrong, to swing his sword through the invisible chain that seems to tether her to this desk.
But it would be an insult. Mother has her own sword, which is sharper and, for now, much more expertly handled than his. He was taught to question everything except her judgment, and grandfather tried his best to crush that caveat, but the lesson never quite took.
He assembles the empty tins in a neat stack and ties them together with twine, careful not to fray it too much in anticipation of eventual re-use. The extra attention warrants an approved pass of mother’s eyes, but it’s not quite long enough for Damian to truly feel. She’s already pulling the ledger toward her again, a concentrated furrow between her brows.
Damian pauses in the doorway, indulging in a long, searching look she does not see. “I hope that grandfather recovers soon,” he says, like a question. Like a test.
Mother’s eyes lift to his. “Me too, habibi,” she replies, the care in her voice expertly calibrated. Perfect and unflinching. “Me too.”
It’s cold outside. Too cold for the threadbare jacket Grayson has selected for this outing, with a hole worn in the left sleeve and a sizable oil stain atop the right shoulder. The splatter pattern is consistent with a scenario in which Grayson was standing underneath a spout of dripping oil long enough to create a mark roughly the size of a plum. What circumstances engineered that event, Damian can’t imagine.
Then again, it’s not like he knows much about Grayson’s civilian life. These days, it doesn’t seem like he has one – he’s Batman and Batman alone for fourteen, sixteen hours straight, and when his body is on the brink of apparent disintegration, he will take a break to slip into an only moderately restful coma. Damian can’t imagine it’s satisfying, given how often he goes to bed with all manner of neurotoxin still in his system.
Damian glances away. If he looks at Grayson too long, he will get his hair rumpled, or his shoulder checked, and he is in no mood for that particular brand of oafish camaraderie. “What are you going to get?” he asks, eyeing the winding line they are almost to the front of.
“I don’t know,” Grayson hums. “I've never been here, maybe I’ll go off their recommendation.”
Damian exhales a small, annoyed sigh, which draws an amused glance from Grayson. It’s just that, should he engage the stall-keeper in conversation, there is a 72% chance that, 1) they will hold up the line with chitchat, as said person blooms like a flower under the rays of Grayson’s attention, and 2) they will leave with the wrong items, because it will prove too much for the stall-keeper to reach for the right pastries whilst processing the sight of Grayson’s dimples.
“What are you getting?” Grayson asks, possibly to circumvent a lecture on bludgeoning civilians with a charm hammer until they visibly experience cognitive decline.
“A curry bun, a sesame ball, and an egg tart,” Damian recounts, sharp and decisive. Every single person in front of them has ordered in Cantonese, which is not one of the nine languages Grayson has moderate proficiency in. “I’ll choose for you, too.”
“Do you know what I like?”
“I’ve seen you wolf down a stale Power Bar in under thirty seconds. I know your standards are not that high.”
“You’re annoying.” Grayson exhales an entertained huff, and, despite himself, Damian savors the sound.
“I’ll pick better than you will,” Damian assures, matter-of-fact.
Their bickering is drawing the attention of the patron behind them. The civilian ducks his head to hide a smile, enabling Damian to steal a longer sideways glance than he otherwise would. Looks to be between twenty-four and twenty-seven, with smooth, unblemished hands, tortoiseshell glasses, and a seasonally inappropriate cropped shirt. He casts a lingering look at Grayson that makes Damian want to roll his eyes so hard they pop clean out of his head.
There are rules to dual identities about not drawing too much attention. Grayson is a master at it, until the odd, near-imperceptible moment he isn’t. He seems almost desensitized to the degree that perfection – even in mundane things, like twirling keys or parallel parking on a crowded street – can be disconcerting to a normal person. Mother had a very strong grasp on that fact, and often used it to her advantage.
Aside from that, he thinks mother and Grayson are quite alike. Though, he’s increasingly unsure if that observation is grounded in reality, or if he just misses mother more than he ever thought possible. More than he ever thought he would have to.
They move a few paces forward, putting them before a row of whole, glazed ducks rotating in a glass storefront. Damian finds they look appetizing, even when paired with the odor wafting from the fish market one street over and the Gotham-specific scent of blood and sun-baked garbage.
Grayson notices him staring, because of course he does. “You wanna take one home?”
“No.”
“We could. I think duck’s alright,” he shrugs. “Duck sauce is really good, though. Man, Alfred used to caramelize onions in duck fat, and that was something special.”
For a moment, Damian can’t think of a response. Grayson has stripped his life so completely clean of indulgences that it's difficult to imagine him having them at all. And the glimpses of Grayson’s childhood, at Bruce Wayne’s side, in Bruce Wayne’s house, are – odd. Hard to reconcile with the man Damian met, with the stories mother and grandfather used to tell him, and with his own experience of being Robin.
He knows, however, that he has less than ten seconds remaining to react before Grayson starts probing him about feelings. “Duck fat is a versatile ingredient.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
Grayson’s brow furrows. “Wait, do you cook?”
Sort of. Always with help, with the expertise of the adults in his grandfather’s employ to guide him. But Grayson doesn’t need to know that. “I can.” He draws his shoulders back a little. “Many of the people in the compound were talented cooks. Myself included.”
“How come I didn’t know that,” Grayson asks, curious.
Damian could answer, because we eat nutrition slurry or cold leftovers for dinner, even when Pennyworth begs us not to, but that is likely to trip the hair-trigger on Grayson’s sizable guilt complex. Damian has little interest in suffering through the rest of this line with a version of him that’s 25-30% more mopey.
“Because you’re a mediocre detective,” he decides, deadpan.
“Lucky I’ve got you to teach me a thing or two.” Predictably, Grayson dispenses the exact shoulder shove Damian had been trying to avoid. He bears it with relative grace. Months ago, it would have felt like a much more serious indignity, in immediate need of Grayson's remorse or his retribution.
They make it to the front of the line, and Grayson allows Damian to order in perfectly enunciated Cantonese. He make a bit of conversation as he pays, but, to Damian’s utter delight, the teenager minding the register seems completely apathetic to the entirety of her surroundings, his dimples included. She doesn’t bat an eye at the $40 tip on a $20 order, just blows her choppy bangs out of her eyes and returns to the beat-up copy of Dead Souls she has propped up against the delivery window.
Damian leads them to a clean, unoccupied bench underneath a shivering string of red paper lanterns. Grayson eats with a restrained slowness, almost like he’s trying to convince himself that he’s a normal amount of hungry, and this is a normal sort of outing, and he's having a normal reaction to being outside, during the daytime, with the ambient sounds of mid-morning Gotham around them.
On some level, Damian knew he needed this. Being right should feel satisfying. Instead, he has the urge to pick nervously at a thread on his coat. He takes a decisive bite of his sesame ball instead, having been frequently reminded, by mother, of the unbecoming nature of such habits.
Grayson dabs a bit of oil from the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin. “Should I learn Cantonese?”
“No.” Damian neatly folds an empty pastry bag and tucks it in his pocket. “I will keep ordering for you.”