Gotham was a cess pit. A melting pot of gentrification and poverty, spiced with madness and 'old school charm'. It was at best a powder keg primed for a fuse and at worst? At worst, it was already starting to devour itself, sickness leeching into it's very core.
The Bowery, the East End, the Narrows- whatever you wanted to call it, the northern most point of the northern most island was a beast of a different nature. To walk the Bowery after dark was to hand your suicide to someone else and ask them politely to at least make it quick. Even Bruce didn't patrol there, washing his hands on it's life hardened occupants as 'too far gone'. He used to go, every once in a while...but that had stopped. And it had stopped because no Bat or Bird was allowed to cross the boundary of Crime Alley without getting hit by the area's new protector.
Red Hood.
After his homecoming nearly a full year before and the new scar he wore on his throat to remind him of Bruce's betrayal every day, Jason had crawled away from the explosion and had disappeared. He healed. He spied. He learned. And, finally, he'd decided that Bruce and Tim could go fuck themselves and if they were going to leave the people of the Bowery vulnerable, then he'd step up. Because this desolate garbage pit had been his home. These people were his people. Not all of them were rotten to the core, but everyone who was rotten was forced here by Bats.
And he was fucking tired of it.
The night's activities had started off as a stake out, recon to sniff out what he could about a new gang that was trying to make boot prints on his turf. He'd started the evening off with the perfect vantage point of an old fire escape, well out of the way of sight lines and set up with a recording device that he could study later. He was all settled in for the night...until one of the men he was watching had started getting handsy with one of the boys who worked that stretch of street. Jason had bared his teeth, but he'd been trailing this group for weeks and if he jumped now, it would all be for nothing. The boy was fine, the thug was just giving him a hard time.
The boy yelped, the sharp keen of a pup in distress and Hood didn't even remember vaulting over the edge of the fire escape. He did remember putting the first, and only, round of the night between that man's eyes, though.
Getting company in the fight was a surprise. Getting competent company was even more of a surprise. Especially because the figure was too small to be wearing the colors that they were wearing. He knew most of the ninja who had infiltrated his city and none of them were deep enough in their covers to have children, let alone children old enough to be trained.
He grunted as a thug used his distraction to get in a good shot on his shoulder, his attention whipping back to the fight at hand. His company was wearing colors that he wanted nothing to do with anymore...but he wasn't outright enemies with most of them. He'd deal with them when everyone else was down.
At least, that was the idea. The last man went down under his sap gloves like a sack of bricks and Jason turned, body held defensively just in case...and then he was drawing and aiming, the helmet keeping his sudden loss of color from being obvious.
"You have exactly ten seconds to tell me who the fuck you are and why the fuck you're wearing the face of my son." His voice modulator covered the shake that he felt in his words, thankfully.
Damian was trained by the League of Assassins, and by his grandfather and mother, and previously by Jason himself. He was a machine in a fight, relentless and strategic and very, very difficult to shake.
But the question did it, and he froze, mind racing. The modulator kept him from knowing for sure - but who else would claim he was Damian's father? "Baba?" he said, small-voiced, before he could stop himself.
He rallied though, small shoulders squaring and mouth twisting into a scowl. "So this is where you ran to. Like a dog returning home to its masters." And Damian hadn't been enough to make him stay. "Either that or you're the imposter and I'll gladly gut you for the attempt."
It stole his breath and for the first time in his entire resurrected life, his gun wavered. It sounded so much like Damian. Like his little boy. The son he'd failed to protect, who'd been taken from him by...
The gun lowered, then was holstered, his movements easy despite how much his hands were starting to shake.
"Lift your chin up." If it was Damian, if it was really his little boy, there'd be a small scar just under his chin. A stumble when he'd been learning to walk, a scare that had resulted in three stitches that Jason had applied himself because he hadn't trusted anyone else with the small babe. He'd always tapped that spot later, in the training ring when Damian had tried to do something he hadn't done the ground work to learn, a gentle smile to go along with the reminder that one had to learn to walk before they ran.
An imposter--or a clone--wouldn't know to have such a scar, even if Talia....
Damian watched him warily, and circled when the Hood started to approach, keeping the same amount of distance between them, and Red Hood directly in front of him.
Damian rarely gave in to sentiment, he'd been raised to think of it as a weakness. Except by his baba, who would hug and cuddle him and encourage without hurting more than he had to. He'd been there when Damian fought crying over pain from his body or frustration with not being good enough for his mother.
Everything had changed when Jason abandoned him, leaving without a second thought for the son he'd left behind. (Not his real son, but Damian had never quite been able to shake the idea that Jason was his baba.
It hurt to think he was here.
"Take off your helmet," he retorted sharply, chin still firmly down. He didn't think why Jason might want to see it, he just automatically denied him.
It hurt to see Damian circle like that. Even if this boy was a clone or an imposter, it still felt like someone was tugging at his heart because his son should never act like that around him. Like he was dangerous, an enemy to be tracked. Not because he wasn't dangerous--he very much was and Damian had known that from a very early age, but because he wasn't dangerous to him.
Never to Damian.
It wouldn't be the first lie he'd caught her in.
If she'd told him that his son was dead....then, if this boy wasn't an imposter...what had she told him?
Splaying his fingers so that Damithe boy could see that he was unarmed, he reached up and back to carefully touch a sequence on the back of his helmet. It popped open on it's hidden hinge with a hiss as his filters detached and then he was pulling it off. Underneath, he was still wearing his red domino, his eyes a white glare of emotionless lenses, but a familiar fringe of white hair flopped over the top of that mask.
"Lift your chin. Please." This time, there was no voice modulator to disguise how shaky his voice was.
He wore a mask beneath a helmet. The double security even FELT like what his baba would do.
Damian shouldn't care. He SHOULDN'T. His baba left him alone with his mother and grandfather. He got all he wanted from the League and abandoned them, and Damian with them.
But a small, weak part of Damian still wanted to fling himself at his papa. Because even with the domino mask, he knew that fringe, the shape of his face.
Damian cursed himself for being so pathetically weak.
But he let Jason approach, wary as a half-feral cat, ready to bolt out of reach at any moment, and he tilted his chin just enough for the small scar to be seen, without exposing his throat. "The mask too," he said, swallowing.
It was there. Small, barely an imprint anymore, a corner of a piece of furniture that had stamped it's impact against the soft skin of a toddler. It would probably be completely gone in a few years, lost to time but not from memory.
Never from his memory.
She'd lied. She'd lied and he'd believed her. He'd let her shake him up and throw him at both her ex and the boy who'd infatuated her father and he hadn't thought twice about it. He'd almost killed...
His kneepads clunked hard against the ground as he fell down onto them, putting himself eye to eye with th-his son. His Damian. "S-she told me...she told you died. She told me that you were killed, were taken from me." His domino was designed to be worn all night in all weather, complete with sweat. It was glued very firmly into place, but Jason didn't pull the solvent from his jacket. He just reached up and peeled it away, leaving his skin an angry shade of red and speckled with little patches of residual adhesive.
He was also nine years old, however much he tried to overcome that fact.
It wasn't an assassin or a vigilante who lashed out at Jason when he hit his knees, it was an upset child, fighting back emotion. "You LEFT," Damian hissed. "You left me-us. You didn't CARE that I was still there without you. I'm not your anything," he said.
He was the son of the bat. His mother's son. Heir to the demon. He wasn't his baba's little prince, not anymore. He never really had been, since he could be left behind so easily.
He sneered. "Why would she do that? She has nothing to gain from you leaving."
He didn't move away from the hits. Didn't try to catch them. He brought his arms up to steady him, letting the hits break on his armor, feeling the strength in them even directed as they were by pain and anger instead of the calm control that Jason had tried to help Damian find. They hurt and not just because they'd leave bruises come morning, but he didn't try to stop them.
"I would never leave you, Damian! You are my world, my son, and my stars. I would die before I left you there, in that place without me. I..." He reached out, face open and so terrifyingly readable. "She lied to me, habibi. About so much. She used me.."
Used him to attack his father. To almost murder Tim. She'd sat and stroked his hair like Catherine used to do while he fed Damian, telling him all about the strong Alpha pup that Bruce had replaced him with. About how he was never mourned. How Joker was still alive.
She'd at least been truthful about that.
Anytime Jason had started to butt heads with her over Damian's training, she'd been quick to distract him from the pressure with another tidbit of how the world had gone on without him. He'd never bowed to her demands for his son, but he'd always be left off kilter and with a bitter taste in his mouth for weeks afterward.
He'd never bowed.
"Oh, what did they do to you, my sweet puppy? I'm so sorry..."
"You LEFT me," Damian said again, a crack to his voice that gave away he was fighting back tears, even if he'd never have admitted it.
He stopped hitting finally, glaring at Jason. "WHY? Why would she lie? It doesn't do any good. How do I know you're not lying to me now?" Damian asked, lip wobbling before he forced a scowl back across his face.
Damian didn't want to believe his mother would be so callous. He knew she could lie - she'd taught him how too, but Damian wasn't really good at it. Not like his mother. But he didn't see WHY.
Despite that, he wanted to believe Jason, even if it meant resenting his mother. Because Jason had been his baba, his solace. And he was here, in a strange city, trying to win his way into a place with the Bat and his brood. And everything he was, to them, seemed to be WRONG. Too violent, too young, too much a killer.
His baba was the only one Damian had been enough for, even if he didn't excel in training that day, or made a mistake. Everything else in his life had been conditional. But Jason just loved Damian.
Until he'd learned it was all a lie because Jason left him. And now here he was being told his world view was askew yet again. Damian didn't know how to adjust. He was angry and frustrated. But he also wanted to burrow into his baba and cling to him.
"You weren't THERE," Damian finally said, half whispered, face pale behind the tan of his skin and eyes huge and too-wet.
That crack in Damian's voice hurt more than any of the strikes before, not because it sounded like his son wanted to cry but because it was proof he wanted to. But he wasn't. Jason had never judged his pup for his emotions, he'd even encouraged them. Cited that emotions were integral for morality and morality was integral for a warrior. For a leader.
How could one lead a people if one couldn't feel for said people?
It was a fight that he and Talia had had often and one that Jason had done his best to keep Damian away from.
"Habibi...habibi, look at me." He reached out, gently touching his fingertips to the sides of Damian's head. He never held tight, never stopped the boy from jerking away if he wasn't ready, but if Damian let him he used to gentle touch to guide their foreheads together. Even if his son did pull away, it didn't stop him from trying. "Look at me, pup. I carried you. I birthed you. I fed you from my body, washed you with my tears, and kept you safe with my blood. Look at me.
Would I leave you? Is there any force on this world or any other that would make me willingly walk away from you, my little prince?"
Damian did pull back at first, but when Jason didn't give up, he let himself be drawn forward, small body pulled tight as a piano wire. But his forehead leaned into his baba's when it was done, and he drew a deep breath.
"But you were still gone," Damian said. "Everything was different when you were gone." He sniffled once, very quietly, gloved hand rubbing hard across his eyes. "I didn't think you would. I thought you'd come back for me, at first. But you didn't."
"Why would mother do this? I did everything she asked!"
He didn't have an answer and it was likely no one would - Talia wouldn't explain herself and her mind worked in ways that were impossible to predict.
"You really thought I was dead?" Damian finally asked softly.
He let out a trembling breath when the boy finally relaxed into the touch, his heart jumping into his throat as he let the fingers of one hand slide into thick black hair. His other arm looped around that frame, so small but still so much bigger than he had been the last time that Jason had held him in his arms.
He'd missed so much.
"Th-there were pictures. Your clothes, covered in blood. Your blood. It was your scent. Yours and..." He shook his head, drawing the boy into his arms. While Damian still seemed to be denying his tears, Jason wasn't. He drew Damian into his arms and his shoulders shook with emotion as tears slid down his face. "This whole time, I thought you were dead.."
Damian's hair was cut shorter and sleeker than it'd been when Jason last saw him. But the soft thickness of it was the same.
It took another moment of stiffness before Damian relaxed into the hug. After a moment his arm came up to loop around Jason's neck.
"It must have just been from when I was injured on a mission." If Jason was telling the truth. But Damian saw those tears, and he could scent his baba, the sorrow that dragged his scent flatter and more sour than it was when it was rich with happiness. "I thought you lied. That you didn't want to stay with me."
He buried his face against his son's shoulder and neck as soon as that arm looped around his neck, breathing in his scent and feeling him, alive and warm in his arms. He still had the sweet undertones of a pup, but he'd lost almost all of the milk scent that was supposed to go along with it. It broke something in Jason's chest to not be able to smell himself on the boy.
Something outright shattered when he recognized what scent he did carry.
"What are you doing here, habibi? I am so happy to have you back, but why are you here? In Gotham? Why do you smell like the Wayne pack?" He knew the answer already, but he didn't want to believe that Talia would ever send a blood child of her own to a place like this. Not unless there was a damned good reason.
Damian leaned in bit by bit until Jason was supporting his whole weight, arm tightening around his neck. He turned his head without realizing he was doing it, trying to rub his face against Jason's neck and pick up his scent, but the high neck of his costume kept it from working.
"Mother sent me to Father, to learn from him." Or so she'd said. Damian thought that she too had just wanted him away from her. But he didn't know that for sure either.
Damian lifted his head, serious green eyes on his papa. "Are you going to go again?" he asked.
At that question, Jason gently tucked his son's head in under his chin. The high neck of his underarmor didn't cover that and he let out a low, rusty sounding purr as he rubbed his scent back into Damian's hair.
"I'm never letting you go again. Not in a million years and not for all the stars in the sky." He made the promise without thinking, meaning it with every fiber of his being. If Bruce wanted to take Damian back, he was going to have to do it over Jason's cold, dead body.
Though, his body had never really been much of a deterrent for the alpha, had it?
"Let's get you somewhere safe, habibi. I-I haven't set up a home here, but I have some safehouses in the area. They will be good enough until I can find a better place for us."
With his head tucked up beneath Jason's chin, Damian had a poor view of their surroundings. His defenses were down. It was absurd to do that here, of all places.
But Damian couldn't help but hang on hard to Jason, like he might vanish, a hitch in his breath every so often where he swallowed a whimper and fought back tears. He wasn't MEANT to be this weak, but then, the rules had always been different with baba, who let him just be himself - train hard, but not erase who he was beyond the fight.
Damian didn't really know who he was beyond his training yet. But with Jason, he at least felt like there was SOMETHING there, something more to him.
"I'm meant to be back ... but for tonight, at least," Damian agreed, reluctantly starting to let go.
"Of course, habibi. I'm not going to stop you from going back if you really want to."
Except that Jason didn't let him let go. Damian had always been an independent and willful child and Jason had always encouraged it. He'd long ago outgrown being carried by his baba. He hadn't needed to even hold his hand outside of personal comfort for years.
Jason reached out to snag his forgotten helmet before scooping his son up into his arms, keeping him tight against his armored chest and tucked neatly under his chin. Damian didn't need to alert because Jason had him. Always and forever more, if he had anything to say about it.
Hearing Damian talk about going back to the Manor twisted something in his chest, but there and then wasn't the time to talk about it. The bodies around them were starting to stir and Jason applied his boot to a couple skulls before he was carrying his precious cargo out of the ally and deeper into the proverbial safety of his territory.
The area was more dangerous, but it would give the Bat and his brood more to hesitate about before following the tracker that had no doubt been stashed somewhere on his son's person. They took to the rooftops, avoiding most of the general crime of the area as they made their way through the city.
Did he want to? Yes and no. What would Damian DO if he didn't go back? And part of him still itched to prove himself as more worthy than Drake. And he was ... curious, about his Father.
But on the other hand there was his baba, who he never thought he'd see again.
He pushed the thought of choice out of his head for now. They could have tonight, he'd worry about deciding in the morning.
Damian let himself be hefted, curled like a comma in Jason's arms, face still tucked near his neck to breathe him in. "You really didn't want to leave me?" Damian asked. It was probably a question Jason would have to answer more than twice until Damian really started to believe it.
It was a question Jason was willing to answer as many times as it took. Over and over again, if he had to. Anything to make his son sure that he was loved by his baba. "I never wanted to leave you, little prince. I didn't even want to leave when I did, but I was consumed by the thought that he'd taken you from me."
His arms reflexively tightened around that small frame as he said the words, a touch of familiar anguish washing into his scent before he turned his head to bury his nose into spiky black hair.
A few more rooftops and a zipline later and Jason was shifting Damian's weight to one arm so he could key in a code--Damian's birthday-- and press his fingertips to a scanner. The door in front of them clicked and he shouldered it open and slipped through before shutting it behind them.
He hadn't been lying about not setting up a home in Gotham in the year that he'd been there. The space looked like an old office building, long ago abandoned and disrepair had set into it's bones. The office that he'd claimed as his own was comfortable enough, a small nest set up in the back corner, a stack of books next to it. He had put together a small camp style kitchen and had even rigged up enough power to have scavenged the old mini-fridge from the break room.
It was a far cry from the Manor and nothing at all like the rooms they'd shared in Nanda Parbat, but it was clean and it was safe. Safe enough that Jason felt comfortable letting Damian down, if he wanted to go.
Damian mumbled a token "I can walk", but he didn't actually try to get down, just let himself be carried as the scent of his papa seeped into his pores, loosening muscles that had been held taut for years.
He roused when Jason shifted him to key his way in, wriggling to get down and assess the place. It was secure enough, but he expected no less from Jason. It wasn't the vast, old-money expanse of Wayne Manor - but Damian had yet to be comfortable there anyway.
It was enough, more than enough, for the night. "How long have you been staying here?" Damian asked curiously.
While Damian examined the room, Jason shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on the hook on the back of the door. His armor was next, then his guns were meticulously checked and reloaded before being stored on the shelf that he'd set up as a weapon rack. Blades next, laid out neatly so that if he had to grab them in the night, it would be easy.
"Here specifically? Not long. Couple weeks. I don't stay in one place very long. I'll probably burn this safe house in a few more weeks. Don't worry, though. I promise, I'll let you know where my new safe house will be." It wasn't his favorite way to live, but keeping more nomadic made staying under Bruce's radar a lot easier.
Which...might not actually be an option anymore. Jason's hands stilled and he huffed out a small sigh as he kicked off his boots before flopping back into his nest, still in his uniform pants and undershirt, his arms open for his pup.
"You're the new Robin, aren't you?" He didn't sound pleased about it....but his pride was clear in his eyes.
Damian hesitated, but then slowly did the same with his own weapons, placing the array of blades carefully on the shelf beneath Jason's, where there was room as if it'd been meant for them, and for him. It was a silly thought, that Jason had unknowingly left space in his life for Damian to fit, and Damian shoved it down instantly. But still. It lingered, and it was just a little sop to the part of him that was always struggling and fighting for his place - whether that be with the League or with the Batman.
"Thank you," Damian said, somehow formally, in response to Jason promising to keep him apprised.
He unlaced his own boots and slipped them off, then hurried into the waiting arms, head leaning on Jason's shoulder. His face twisted into a little grimace. "He doesn't trust me, but I am," he said.
It was a silly thought. He'd believed Damian to have been dead for the last year and a half, why would he have such a space? Why would he think to make a space for a pup who was no longer there? And yet, the space was there. Every surface in that small room had a purpose and an intention. One couldn't live like he did if one wasted space that was offered. And yet, the space was there. Empty and perfectly sized for a standard array of League loadout.
Even the bed, as small as it was, proved to be the perfect size for Damian to be tucked into the safe nook between Jason's body and the wall. Of course, in order to prove that, Jason first had to wrap his arms around the boy and exaggerate a grunt of effort to swing him up and over because for as serious as Jason took training, he could be playful in private.
"Yeah, he has issues with trust. It's not all on you, don't worry." His tone was intentionally bland with only a little hurt melding into the words. He couldn't quite help it, as much as he didn't want to color his son's perceptions of his father. "You know, sneaking out in the middle of the night is not going to help that cause. Nor is not letting them know you're safe." He didn't want Damian to call Alfred and let them know where he was, but he did know that if they left the Manor in the dark, it would only be a matter of time before one of them burst through his windows.
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And it feels so good!
The Bowery, the East End, the Narrows- whatever you wanted to call it, the northern most point of the northern most island was a beast of a different nature. To walk the Bowery after dark was to hand your suicide to someone else and ask them politely to at least make it quick. Even Bruce didn't patrol there, washing his hands on it's life hardened occupants as 'too far gone'. He used to go, every once in a while...but that had stopped. And it had stopped because no Bat or Bird was allowed to cross the boundary of Crime Alley without getting hit by the area's new protector.
Red Hood.
After his homecoming nearly a full year before and the new scar he wore on his throat to remind him of Bruce's betrayal every day, Jason had crawled away from the explosion and had disappeared. He healed. He spied. He learned. And, finally, he'd decided that Bruce and Tim could go fuck themselves and if they were going to leave the people of the Bowery vulnerable, then he'd step up. Because this desolate garbage pit had been his home. These people were his people. Not all of them were rotten to the core, but everyone who was rotten was forced here by Bats.
And he was fucking tired of it.
The night's activities had started off as a stake out, recon to sniff out what he could about a new gang that was trying to make boot prints on his turf. He'd started the evening off with the perfect vantage point of an old fire escape, well out of the way of sight lines and set up with a recording device that he could study later. He was all settled in for the night...until one of the men he was watching had started getting handsy with one of the boys who worked that stretch of street. Jason had bared his teeth, but he'd been trailing this group for weeks and if he jumped now, it would all be for nothing. The boy was fine, the thug was just giving him a hard time.
The boy yelped, the sharp keen of a pup in distress and Hood didn't even remember vaulting over the edge of the fire escape. He did remember putting the first, and only, round of the night between that man's eyes, though.
Getting company in the fight was a surprise. Getting competent company was even more of a surprise. Especially because the figure was too small to be wearing the colors that they were wearing. He knew most of the ninja who had infiltrated his city and none of them were deep enough in their covers to have children, let alone children old enough to be trained.
He grunted as a thug used his distraction to get in a good shot on his shoulder, his attention whipping back to the fight at hand. His company was wearing colors that he wanted nothing to do with anymore...but he wasn't outright enemies with most of them. He'd deal with them when everyone else was down.
At least, that was the idea. The last man went down under his sap gloves like a sack of bricks and Jason turned, body held defensively just in case...and then he was drawing and aiming, the helmet keeping his sudden loss of color from being obvious.
"You have exactly ten seconds to tell me who the fuck you are and why the fuck you're wearing the face of my son." His voice modulator covered the shake that he felt in his words, thankfully.
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But the question did it, and he froze, mind racing. The modulator kept him from knowing for sure - but who else would claim he was Damian's father? "Baba?" he said, small-voiced, before he could stop himself.
He rallied though, small shoulders squaring and mouth twisting into a scowl. "So this is where you ran to. Like a dog returning home to its masters." And Damian hadn't been enough to make him stay. "Either that or you're the imposter and I'll gladly gut you for the attempt."
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It stole his breath and for the first time in his entire resurrected life, his gun wavered. It sounded so much like Damian. Like his little boy. The son he'd failed to protect, who'd been taken from him by...
The gun lowered, then was holstered, his movements easy despite how much his hands were starting to shake.
"Lift your chin up." If it was Damian, if it was really his little boy, there'd be a small scar just under his chin. A stumble when he'd been learning to walk, a scare that had resulted in three stitches that Jason had applied himself because he hadn't trusted anyone else with the small babe. He'd always tapped that spot later, in the training ring when Damian had tried to do something he hadn't done the ground work to learn, a gentle smile to go along with the reminder that one had to learn to walk before they ran.
An imposter--or a clone--wouldn't know to have such a scar, even if Talia....
It wouldn't be the first lie he'd caught her in.
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Damian rarely gave in to sentiment, he'd been raised to think of it as a weakness. Except by his baba, who would hug and cuddle him and encourage without hurting more than he had to. He'd been there when Damian fought crying over pain from his body or frustration with not being good enough for his mother.
Everything had changed when Jason abandoned him, leaving without a second thought for the son he'd left behind. (Not his real son, but Damian had never quite been able to shake the idea that Jason was his baba.
It hurt to think he was here.
"Take off your helmet," he retorted sharply, chin still firmly down. He didn't think why Jason might want to see it, he just automatically denied him.
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Never to Damian.
It wouldn't be the first lie he'd caught her in.
If she'd told him that his son was dead....then, if this boy wasn't an imposter...what had she told him?
Splaying his fingers so that
Damithe boy could see that he was unarmed, he reached up and back to carefully touch a sequence on the back of his helmet. It popped open on it's hidden hinge with a hiss as his filters detached and then he was pulling it off. Underneath, he was still wearing his red domino, his eyes a white glare of emotionless lenses, but a familiar fringe of white hair flopped over the top of that mask."Lift your chin. Please." This time, there was no voice modulator to disguise how shaky his voice was.
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Damian shouldn't care. He SHOULDN'T. His baba left him alone with his mother and grandfather. He got all he wanted from the League and abandoned them, and Damian with them.
But a small, weak part of Damian still wanted to fling himself at his papa. Because even with the domino mask, he knew that fringe, the shape of his face.
Damian cursed himself for being so pathetically weak.
But he let Jason approach, wary as a half-feral cat, ready to bolt out of reach at any moment, and he tilted his chin just enough for the small scar to be seen, without exposing his throat. "The mask too," he said, swallowing.
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Never from his memory.
She'd lied. She'd lied and he'd believed her. He'd let her shake him up and throw him at both her ex and the boy who'd infatuated her father and he hadn't thought twice about it. He'd almost killed...
His kneepads clunked hard against the ground as he fell down onto them, putting himself eye to eye with th-his son. His Damian. "S-she told me...she told you died. She told me that you were killed, were taken from me." His domino was designed to be worn all night in all weather, complete with sweat. It was glued very firmly into place, but Jason didn't pull the solvent from his jacket. He just reached up and peeled it away, leaving his skin an angry shade of red and speckled with little patches of residual adhesive.
"My little prince..."
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He was also nine years old, however much he tried to overcome that fact.
It wasn't an assassin or a vigilante who lashed out at Jason when he hit his knees, it was an upset child, fighting back emotion. "You LEFT," Damian hissed. "You left me-us. You didn't CARE that I was still there without you. I'm not your anything," he said.
He was the son of the bat. His mother's son. Heir to the demon. He wasn't his baba's little prince, not anymore. He never really had been, since he could be left behind so easily.
He sneered. "Why would she do that? She has nothing to gain from you leaving."
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"I would never leave you, Damian! You are my world, my son, and my stars. I would die before I left you there, in that place without me. I..." He reached out, face open and so terrifyingly readable. "She lied to me, habibi. About so much. She used me.."
Used him to attack his father. To almost murder Tim. She'd sat and stroked his hair like Catherine used to do while he fed Damian, telling him all about the strong Alpha pup that Bruce had replaced him with. About how he was never mourned. How Joker was still alive.
She'd at least been truthful about that.
Anytime Jason had started to butt heads with her over Damian's training, she'd been quick to distract him from the pressure with another tidbit of how the world had gone on without him. He'd never bowed to her demands for his son, but he'd always be left off kilter and with a bitter taste in his mouth for weeks afterward.
He'd never bowed.
"Oh, what did they do to you, my sweet puppy? I'm so sorry..."
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He stopped hitting finally, glaring at Jason. "WHY? Why would she lie? It doesn't do any good. How do I know you're not lying to me now?" Damian asked, lip wobbling before he forced a scowl back across his face.
Damian didn't want to believe his mother would be so callous. He knew she could lie - she'd taught him how too, but Damian wasn't really good at it. Not like his mother. But he didn't see WHY.
Despite that, he wanted to believe Jason, even if it meant resenting his mother. Because Jason had been his baba, his solace. And he was here, in a strange city, trying to win his way into a place with the Bat and his brood. And everything he was, to them, seemed to be WRONG. Too violent, too young, too much a killer.
His baba was the only one Damian had been enough for, even if he didn't excel in training that day, or made a mistake. Everything else in his life had been conditional. But Jason just loved Damian.
Until he'd learned it was all a lie because Jason left him. And now here he was being told his world view was askew yet again. Damian didn't know how to adjust. He was angry and frustrated. But he also wanted to burrow into his baba and cling to him.
"You weren't THERE," Damian finally said, half whispered, face pale behind the tan of his skin and eyes huge and too-wet.
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How could one lead a people if one couldn't feel for said people?
It was a fight that he and Talia had had often and one that Jason had done his best to keep Damian away from.
"Habibi...habibi, look at me." He reached out, gently touching his fingertips to the sides of Damian's head. He never held tight, never stopped the boy from jerking away if he wasn't ready, but if Damian let him he used to gentle touch to guide their foreheads together. Even if his son did pull away, it didn't stop him from trying. "Look at me, pup. I carried you. I birthed you. I fed you from my body, washed you with my tears, and kept you safe with my blood. Look at me.
Would I leave you? Is there any force on this world or any other that would make me willingly walk away from you, my little prince?"
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"But you were still gone," Damian said. "Everything was different when you were gone." He sniffled once, very quietly, gloved hand rubbing hard across his eyes. "I didn't think you would. I thought you'd come back for me, at first. But you didn't."
"Why would mother do this? I did everything she asked!"
He didn't have an answer and it was likely no one would - Talia wouldn't explain herself and her mind worked in ways that were impossible to predict.
"You really thought I was dead?" Damian finally asked softly.
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He'd missed so much.
"Th-there were pictures. Your clothes, covered in blood. Your blood. It was your scent. Yours and..." He shook his head, drawing the boy into his arms. While Damian still seemed to be denying his tears, Jason wasn't. He drew Damian into his arms and his shoulders shook with emotion as tears slid down his face. "This whole time, I thought you were dead.."
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It took another moment of stiffness before Damian relaxed into the hug. After a moment his arm came up to loop around Jason's neck.
"It must have just been from when I was injured on a mission." If Jason was telling the truth. But Damian saw those tears, and he could scent his baba, the sorrow that dragged his scent flatter and more sour than it was when it was rich with happiness. "I thought you lied. That you didn't want to stay with me."
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Something outright shattered when he recognized what scent he did carry.
"What are you doing here, habibi? I am so happy to have you back, but why are you here? In Gotham? Why do you smell like the Wayne pack?" He knew the answer already, but he didn't want to believe that Talia would ever send a blood child of her own to a place like this. Not unless there was a damned good reason.
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"Mother sent me to Father, to learn from him." Or so she'd said. Damian thought that she too had just wanted him away from her. But he didn't know that for sure either.
Damian lifted his head, serious green eyes on his papa. "Are you going to go again?" he asked.
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"I'm never letting you go again. Not in a million years and not for all the stars in the sky." He made the promise without thinking, meaning it with every fiber of his being. If Bruce wanted to take Damian back, he was going to have to do it over Jason's cold, dead body.
Though, his body had never really been much of a deterrent for the alpha, had it?
"Let's get you somewhere safe, habibi. I-I haven't set up a home here, but I have some safehouses in the area. They will be good enough until I can find a better place for us."
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But Damian couldn't help but hang on hard to Jason, like he might vanish, a hitch in his breath every so often where he swallowed a whimper and fought back tears. He wasn't MEANT to be this weak, but then, the rules had always been different with baba, who let him just be himself - train hard, but not erase who he was beyond the fight.
Damian didn't really know who he was beyond his training yet. But with Jason, he at least felt like there was SOMETHING there, something more to him.
"I'm meant to be back ... but for tonight, at least," Damian agreed, reluctantly starting to let go.
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Except that Jason didn't let him let go. Damian had always been an independent and willful child and Jason had always encouraged it. He'd long ago outgrown being carried by his baba. He hadn't needed to even hold his hand outside of personal comfort for years.
Jason reached out to snag his forgotten helmet before scooping his son up into his arms, keeping him tight against his armored chest and tucked neatly under his chin. Damian didn't need to alert because Jason had him. Always and forever more, if he had anything to say about it.
Hearing Damian talk about going back to the Manor twisted something in his chest, but there and then wasn't the time to talk about it. The bodies around them were starting to stir and Jason applied his boot to a couple skulls before he was carrying his precious cargo out of the ally and deeper into the proverbial safety of his territory.
The area was more dangerous, but it would give the Bat and his brood more to hesitate about before following the tracker that had no doubt been stashed somewhere on his son's person. They took to the rooftops, avoiding most of the general crime of the area as they made their way through the city.
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But on the other hand there was his baba, who he never thought he'd see again.
He pushed the thought of choice out of his head for now. They could have tonight, he'd worry about deciding in the morning.
Damian let himself be hefted, curled like a comma in Jason's arms, face still tucked near his neck to breathe him in. "You really didn't want to leave me?" Damian asked. It was probably a question Jason would have to answer more than twice until Damian really started to believe it.
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His arms reflexively tightened around that small frame as he said the words, a touch of familiar anguish washing into his scent before he turned his head to bury his nose into spiky black hair.
A few more rooftops and a zipline later and Jason was shifting Damian's weight to one arm so he could key in a code--Damian's birthday-- and press his fingertips to a scanner. The door in front of them clicked and he shouldered it open and slipped through before shutting it behind them.
He hadn't been lying about not setting up a home in Gotham in the year that he'd been there. The space looked like an old office building, long ago abandoned and disrepair had set into it's bones. The office that he'd claimed as his own was comfortable enough, a small nest set up in the back corner, a stack of books next to it. He had put together a small camp style kitchen and had even rigged up enough power to have scavenged the old mini-fridge from the break room.
It was a far cry from the Manor and nothing at all like the rooms they'd shared in Nanda Parbat, but it was clean and it was safe. Safe enough that Jason felt comfortable letting Damian down, if he wanted to go.
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He roused when Jason shifted him to key his way in, wriggling to get down and assess the place. It was secure enough, but he expected no less from Jason. It wasn't the vast, old-money expanse of Wayne Manor - but Damian had yet to be comfortable there anyway.
It was enough, more than enough, for the night. "How long have you been staying here?" Damian asked curiously.
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"Here specifically? Not long. Couple weeks. I don't stay in one place very long. I'll probably burn this safe house in a few more weeks. Don't worry, though. I promise, I'll let you know where my new safe house will be." It wasn't his favorite way to live, but keeping more nomadic made staying under Bruce's radar a lot easier.
Which...might not actually be an option anymore. Jason's hands stilled and he huffed out a small sigh as he kicked off his boots before flopping back into his nest, still in his uniform pants and undershirt, his arms open for his pup.
"You're the new Robin, aren't you?" He didn't sound pleased about it....but his pride was clear in his eyes.
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"Thank you," Damian said, somehow formally, in response to Jason promising to keep him apprised.
He unlaced his own boots and slipped them off, then hurried into the waiting arms, head leaning on Jason's shoulder. His face twisted into a little grimace. "He doesn't trust me, but I am," he said.
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Even the bed, as small as it was, proved to be the perfect size for Damian to be tucked into the safe nook between Jason's body and the wall. Of course, in order to prove that, Jason first had to wrap his arms around the boy and exaggerate a grunt of effort to swing him up and over because for as serious as Jason took training, he could be playful in private.
"Yeah, he has issues with trust. It's not all on you, don't worry." His tone was intentionally bland with only a little hurt melding into the words. He couldn't quite help it, as much as he didn't want to color his son's perceptions of his father. "You know, sneaking out in the middle of the night is not going to help that cause. Nor is not letting them know you're safe." He didn't want Damian to call Alfred and let them know where he was, but he did know that if they left the Manor in the dark, it would only be a matter of time before one of them burst through his windows.
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