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Jon is half asleep when the shadow fallows over his window, and it takes him a moment to really process what he’s seeing. At first he jolts upright, thinking that it’s something deadly, but then he makes sense of the shapes of the spiky hair and the cape.
“It’s a school night,” he says bluntly, shoving his window open. Damian remains perched in the tree outside. “I’m not doing anything with you.”
There’s a pregnant pause, and Damian says, “Right.”
He turns, leaps from the tree, lands lightly on his feet. And that, Jon thinks, was way too easy. Disturbingly easy, really.
“Wait,” he calls after him, but Damian doesn’t stop, leaving Jon to plant one hand on the sill and jump out the window to run after him. Jon finally catches up to Damian just as he’s approaching Goliath, who’s lazing on the patch of grass near the barn.
“Hey,” he says again, skidding to a stop between Damian and the big bat creature. Goliath’s huge yellow eyes blink, and his tongue lolls out of his mouth. It makes him look a little bit like he’s smiling. “What’re you doing here?”
“Nothing important,” Damian says shortly, sidestepping Jon and continuing to Goliath’s side. He hooks a hand through the harness that circles Goliath’s neck, and he’s about to pull himself up when Jon grabs his elbow.
“You’re in Hamilton County at two a.m.,” he says, yanking Damian down and using his own elbow to fend off Goliath’s cold, wet nose, which had immediately been shoved into Jon’s face. “There’s gotta be a reason.”
For a second, Jon thinks that Damian isn’t going to answer. He reaches over and presses a gloved hand in-between Goliath’s eyes, shifting his attention away from Jon, and Goliath’s eyes slide shut as Damian runs his free hand down the creature’s nose.
“I chose not to remain in Gotham tonight.” He’s speaking slowly, as if he’s constructing the sentences very carefully. “And the Titans would ask questions if I returned so quickly.”
And there’s something there, Jon thinks, in the space between the sentences and in Damian’s willingness to admit that to him in the first place.
“So you want to stay here?”
“Forget it.” Damian tries to tug his arm out of Jon’s grasp, but, well, Jon is a lot stronger than him, so he doesn’t let him. It’s two a.m. and the dew on the grass is soaking the hem of Jon’s pajama pants. He’s not going to let this turn into an argument.
“No,” he says. “Just come inside. It’ll be like a sleepover.”
“A sleepover?” Damian scoffs. “What are we, six?”
“A sleepover,” Jon says, dropping Damian’s arm and spinning him around so he’s pointed back towards Jon’s window before he plants a hand between Damian’s shoulder blades and shoves him. He doesn’t resist nearly as much as Jon had expected him to.
Once they’re back in the house, he leaves Damian in his room in order to grab a snack. His mom had always taught him to be a good host, which was exactly what he was planning to say to her if she intercepted him between his bedroom and the kitchen. But he knows all the spots where the stairs creak, so he presses himself right up next to the banister and hurries down to the first floor aided, no doubt, by the fact that the parent with superhearing is in Metropolis for the night, fighting bad guys. He doesn’t turn the lights on, just pulls a package of popcorn out from the corner cabinet and shoves it in the microwave.
It is weird that Damian is here in Hamilton County, though, when in general he only stops by for long enough to complain about the Kents’ subpar farm equipment and kidnap Jon to get him in trouble. And it’s weird that Damian had, well, allowed himself to be forced out of Gotham in the first place, since that was definitely the subtext of the conversation they’d had. He doesn’t know Damian super well, but he knows him well enough to figure that much out. Beside him, the microwave beeps quietly, and he quickly dumps the popcorn into the big green bowl with the chip in it (accident due to an overenthusiastic game of monopoly and the coffee table) and creeps back upstairs. He finds Damian sitting in his desk chair, idly rolling backwards and forwards and considering Jon’s bookshelf.
“Your collection is a disgrace,” Damian says.
Jon freezes in the act of setting the popcorn bowl down on his bedside table, nonplussed, and manages, “It has Harry Potter?”
“And no Tolkien.”
Jon wrinkles his nose. “Tolkien’s boring.”
Damian makes a dismissive sound. “You’re an idiot.”
“No, I just have good taste,” Jon fires back. And then he forces himself to take a breath and sits down on his bed. “Look, just shut up and have some popcorn.”
Damian looks for a moment like he wants to continue the argument, but then he just rolls his eyes and reaches for the gauntlet on his right arm. Jon isn’t sure quite what he does, but the gauntlet falls away, and then he pulls off his glove with his teeth. He sets both of them on Jon’s desk and then leans forward so that he can grab a handful of popcorn.
“Anyway,” Jon says around his own handful, which he had already shoved in his mouth. It’s best to attack this kind of conversation head-on. “Why didn’t you wanna be in Gotham?”
Damian doesn’t answer immediately. He leans back in the chair, eats a few pieces of popcorn, and then finally says, “My father and I had a… disagreement.”
“Oh,” Jon says, and wrinkles his nose. “Those always sucks. Were you fighting about—” He pauses, waves vaguely at Damian in his entirety. “Robin stuff?”
He had thought it was going to be an easy question, something that Damian would answer immediately, but instead the silence stretches for so long that Jon’s starting to think that Damian isn’t going to answer him at all. Then he lets out a long breath and reaches up to tug off his domino. Underneath it, he looks exhausted, brown skin slightly sallow in the moonlight, and he has dark bags under his eyes. The domino is tossed on top of his glove and gauntlet, and then he starts fiddling with the other gauntlet.
“My father is not pleased that I have recreated the Titans,” he says, eyes on the gauntlet as it comes loose from his arm, “Or the amount of time I am spending in San Francisco.” The gauntlet joins its twin on the desk, and then Damian adds the other glove to the pile. “He does not trust me.”
“What?” Jon asks, eyebrows shooting up. “Why? If anyone can take care of themselves, it’s you.”
A wry smile creases Damian’s face for just a second, but then it’s gone, and he just looks tired again. “That is not the problem.”
Jon waits for a moment, expecting Damian to continue, but Damian’s examining his folded hands and doesn’t look up. The silence stretches uncomfortably, and Jon can distinctly hear the crickets chirping in the fields outside.
“I mean,” Jon finally says. “There’ve been Robins in the Titans before, right?”
Damian nods, finally looking up. “Yes. My, ah, brothers were all involved with the Titans.”
Jon nods absentmindedly, and then what Damian had said finally processes, and he starts a little. “Wait, I didn’t know you had brothers.”
Damian smiles at that, but it’s the unpleasant kind of smile that suggests that Jon has missed a joke. “I do.”
“That’s cool. I always thought that it’d be fun to have siblings.”
“It is not,” Damian says with a great sense of finality. Jon shrugs that off.
“So do you have any sisters?”
Damian considers that for longer than Jon feels a person should have to before they answer a question about what siblings they have.
“Just one,” he finally says.
“Is she, like, a Robin too?”
“You ask too many questions, Kent,” Damian says, but he doesn’t sound angry for once. “Yes, they’re all vigilantes. That’s how my father found them, usually.”
“Oh, so they’re adopted?”
“I am the only blood son,” is the careful answer.
Jon can’t quite read the expression on his face, so he just scooches back so he can lean against the wall, a movement Damian regards skeptically. But, after a moment, he joins him on the bed, and they sit shoulder to shoulder with the popcorn bowl between them. Damian scoops out another handful, and Jon notices that he has a network of scars across his knuckles, pale against his brown skin. And then, after popping the handful into his mouth, Damian idly pushes his sleeves up, revealing three or four more white scars.
“Whoah,” Jon says. “What happened?”
Damian starts and then looks down at his arms. “Oh. Nothing.”
“That doesn’t look like nothing,” Jon mumbles around an overlarge handful of popcorn. “That looks like something.”
Damian’s considering his arms like they’re new to him somehow. “That was from an assassin,” he says after a moment, tapping the one on the top of his left arm. He flips his right arm over, considering the two parallel scars there. “Those are from one of the Joker’s hyenas.”
He nods and reaches for the popcorn again, like it’s a totally normal thing to have scars from a hyena and an assassin. It hits home, suddenly, that Damian doesn’t have any powers. For all his bravado and his pride and his sharp wit, he isn’t like Jon. Bullets don’t bounce off him. Some of the thought must’ve shown on his face, since Damian frowns at him.
“What.”
There’s no way to express the thought without insulting him, so Jon dismisses that out of hand. “Nothin’.” He pauses for a moment and then, almost unable to help himself, asks, “Wait, like a general assassin, or an assassin assassin.”
Damian’s looking at him like he’s lost his mind. “What does that even mean, Kent.”
“I mean, were they just hanging out, or were they like… after you?”
“Oh.” Damian’s expression clears. “No, they were after me.”
Jon had made the mistake of putting popcorn in his mouth just then, and he nearly chokes on it. “They were after you?” He knew that there was a lot he didn’t know about Damian, but literal assassination target is even more than he had expected. “Why?”
He knows he’s made a mistake immediately, because Damian freezes beside him. And then, in a very sharp tone, “I do not want to talk about it.”
“Ok,” Jon says immediately. “That’s totally fine. Absolutely.”
They subside into a very awkward silence, and Damian pulls his sleeves back down. Jon isn’t really sure what he could say at this point that wouldn’t end with him putting his foot in his mouth, so, figuring that if he’s going to piss Damian off, he might as well piss him off asking about what he wanted to know about in the first place, he just circles back around to the original topic.
“Your dad didn’t kick you out, did he?” Jon doesn’t think he would, but Batman’s scary and also nothing like his dad, so what does he know.
“No,” Damian says slowly. “I chose to leave.”
“The fight was that bad?” He suddenly realizes what the emotion is that’s been flicking periodically across Damian’s face. It’s fear. And then it disappears again underneath a perfectly blank and emotionless mask, even as Jon is watching.
“Yes.”
He’s looking at Jon still, but Jon has a feeling that it’s more that Damian is looking through him, maintaining eye contact only because he thinks that it’ll keep Jon from pursuing the topic. Well, that’s not going to work, Jon decides, and he stares right back.
“Do you wanna talk about it?”
Surprise breaks the mask for a moment, and then Damian turns away. Jon expects him to just dismiss the question out of hand, but instead Damian presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, his shoulders hunching slightly.
“You would not be asking that question if you knew me better,” he says, barely loud enough for Jon to hear.
“Well, I am asking,” Jon snaps, knowing that he sounds a little petulant and not caring. “You trust me to have your back in a fight, why is this different?”
Damian’s got his head in his hands now, refusing to look at Jon. “Because you do not know what you are asking. And because you are eleven, and because you do not know anything about me.”
Jon would’ve bristled at that, especially since he’s a week and a half away from being twelve and, anyway, Damian’s not that much older than him. But he sounds so beaten, somehow. Jon pulls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them, resting his chin on his knees and staring at his bedroom door, and then says, “Ok, sure. But I want to know you better. Doesn’t that count for something?”
There is a long silence, long enough that Jon is positive that he’s overstepped and that Damian’s going to grab the pile of gear off Jon’s desk and leave. But then he shifts on the bed, bending his legs and resting his arms on his knees, and starts talking, very softly.
“I did not grow up in Gotham,” he says, and Jon keeps his eyes on the door, afraid that even looking at Damian will make him stop talking. “I grew up in the League of Shadows.” Jon swallows a yelp, but he still makes a little surprised noise, and Damian adds, wryly, “Yes, it's real.” A pause, then, “I was raised to become their leader, even though I ultimately chose a different path. But most of my training comes from them, and my father does not trust me to follow his creed rather than theirs.”
The entire speech is delivered in a quiet, crisp tone that suggests that Damian is choosing each word very deliberately. And Jon has approximately a thousand questions, but suddenly the implications of what Damian’s just said hit him. His creed rather than theirs. Jon’s head jerks towards Damian, and Damian doesn’t jump, but he is sitting very stiffly and refusing to look over at Jon.
“Oh,” Jon says, mostly to buy himself time. Damian tenses even more, as if he’s planning on springing off the bed and making a break for the door. All things considered, maybe he is. “Well, you stopped Kid Amazo without k—” His throat closes up around the word. It’s weird thinking about Damian killing anyone. Really, up until right this moment, Jon wouldn’t have even thought that he was capable of it, except that if Batman is worried then… But that isn’t fair to Damian, fair to his friend. He forces himself to put it all from his mind, and finishes awkwardly, “Without really hurting him. I mean, I hurt him worse than you did.”
Damian’s considering him out of the corner of his eye, his expression deeply suspicious. And he just looks, well, brittle. Like he’s so tense that the wrong word will shatter him.
“I—Look,” Jon says, turning so that he’s sitting crosslegged and facing Damian directly. “I trust you, ok?” He crosses his arms across his chest and tries to project confidence. “You’re my friend, and you’re a good person, no matter where you got your training from.”
He isn’t expecting the look of complete shock that radiates across Damian’s face. He also isn’t expecting Damian to blink watery eyes, and that’s even more unsettling than anything that came before. It’s hard enough imagining Damian killing someone, but it’s basically impossible to imagine him crying. It’s all enough to make him want to backpedal (mentally, emotionally, throw himself off backwards off the bed, whatever), so he does the opposite and half tackles Damian, wrapping his arms around the other boys neck. For a moment, Damian is completely frozen, and then one arm wraps tightly around Jon’s ribs, and Jon can feel a full body shudder ripple through him. And they just stay like that for a few minutes, Jon unwilling to pull back until Damian’s got himself back under control, because there are little tremors still going through him, and his arm is almost painfully tight around Jon’s back. And then the arm loosens, and Damian surreptitiously swipes a hand across his face, an action that Jon chooses to ignore.
Damian clears his throat. “Right,” he says. “Well.”
“Well,” Jon says.
“I appreciate the sentiment.” Damian’s tone is clipped, but his voice is a little uneven and he isn’t quite meeting Jon’s eye.
“Right,” Jon says. “No problem. Glad to help.”
There’s a moment of complete silence, both of them sitting very stiffly at opposite ends of the bed, and then, suddenly, Damian smiles. It’s a little thing, exhausted and only half formed, but it’s enough. Jon beams back.
“Anyway,” Jon says. “I do actually have school in the morning. And it’s like three a.m. right now.” He stands up, sets the popcorn on the floor, and then switches off the lamp on his desk before crawling under his comforter. He throws his spare pillow at Damian’s head (which, much to Jon’s dismay, he easily catches), and lies down with his back to the room and the boy still sitting motionless at the end of his bed. “Night.”
“Good night,” Damian says slowly.
Jon’s half asleep before he finally feels the bed depress beside him, but he smiles to himself before he finally drops off.
When Lois comes in the next morning, she finds the two of them still sound asleep, back to back. Damian is facing towards the door, and, for once, she thinks, he actually looks his age. He doesn’t have that little wrinkle of concentration between his brows, or that frown pulling down at his mouth. She snaps a picture before she quietly closes the door, a picture which finds its way into Bruce’s inbox a little while later. Looks like they’re finally getting along, Clark sends along with it, even though, as he’s typing, the two of them are bickering over breakfast.
“That’s mine,” Jon snaps, shoving Damian almost under the table only to suddenly topple over as the other boy sweeps his legs out from under him.
“Then take it,” Damian snipes, standing back up and claiming the yogurt Jon had been going after. Jon proceeds to do just that, knocking the table crooked in the process.
“Mind the table, boys,” Lois says mildly, and she and Clark smile at each other over the boys’ raised voices, until a chime from Clark’s phone disrupts the moment.
Re: Found Your Kid
Thank you.
Clark smiles down at his phone, a little sadly, until he hears, “You son of a bitch!”
“Jon!” He and Lois snap in unison, and, finally, the kitchen falls into blessed silence. At least both boys look appropriately guilty.