FIC: Scribbled Lines
I told myself I wasn’t going to write another THIS ISSUE GAVE ME FEELINGS fic, but then Julie drew this, and what little self-control I had disappeared. So here’s 3000-ish words of post-Batman and Robin #6 gen. Bruce takes Damian home and they bond over arts and crafts. Sometimes, I just need to write about Bruce being a better parent, okay.
Bruce can’t get the sounds out of his head. It takes him back—-back years, back to the horrific injury Bane had left him with, back to the sound of his back breaking. Bane had braced him over his knee and snapped him, the splintering wet sound of bones shattering. This time is infinitely worse—-the sounds he’s hearing aren’t coming from him. He’s behind the wheel, the tinny comm link giving him an audio report of the carnage. He’s listening to Ducard systematically shatter the small body of his eleven year old son.
And it’s worse. It’s infinitely worse.
He guns it. The sounds take him back still further, to the last desperate race he lost. He’d failed to get there in time, and it’d cost him his son. He’s all too terrified that this is Jason all over again, that he has learned nothing, that he’s going to hear his child die. That he’ll carry the weight of a third dead Robin around his neck.
Too late. Always just a few minutes too late.
Damian gives a faint, bubbly whimper. He knows that sound, too. He has broken ribs, and he’s having trouble breathing. Still, he doesn’t cry out—-he hasn’t cried, not even once. The only sounds he makes are stifled, unselfconscious grunts as he’s struck again and again, as his body swells and bleeds and shatters. Damian doesn’t beg. He doesn’t give Morgan the satisfaction of hearing him cry. He takes the punishment with the same icy stoicism Bruce expects from himself.
A boy shouldn’t have a pain threshold that high. It’s wrong. It’s so wrong. The silence screams conditioning and suffering and Bruce is so furious he can’t breathe. Can’t think. All he wants to do is get there, be there, punish Morgan, save Damian.
But the sounds have stopped. No more snaps, hisses, or crunches. There’s silence on the other end of the line.
Then, he hears the body being dragged away.
Too late. Always just a few minutes too late.
*
Bruce startled awake, his heart slamming into his throat. A bead of cold sweat wormed down his neck. Instinctively, he took stock of his environment: he was sitting in a chair in his son’s room, keeping watch over him as he slept. A blanket was spread over his lap, and he had pillows stuffed in around his back. The old ache had come back again.
It had been a dream—-a fragment of nightmarish reality that had lodged itself deeply. Batman had arrived in time, and he’d successfully rescued his Robin. He had brought Damian home, and Alfred saved him. Those were the facts, the sequence of events, but Bruce would have a hard time convincing his dreamscape to the contrary. It’d been too close—-he’d nearly been too late, and Damian had seemed too damaged, and it’d been too likely that he would end up burying another child.
Most of the return to the Batcave had been reduced to an incoherent blur of a memory in Bruce’s mind. He’d been too focused on getting Robin the medical attention he desperately needed. When he’d carried him back to the Batmobile, he’d carried with him the phantom weight of his first dead son. Damian lost his tenacious grip on his composure as soon as Bruce laid him on the operating table and began removing his bloodied uniform. He’d kept silent during Morgan’s assault, but some inner barricade had lowered once they got to the manor. Bruce liked to think that it was because he’d realized that he was safe, but it was more likely due to the excruciating pain of moving him from the car.
Damian had screamed. Thin, strangled wet gurgles. Alfred quickly put him under, but Bruce would never forget the sound. He’d held his son’s hand throughout the surgery, and hadn’t strayed far since. He needed to be near Damian, to confirm that he was okay. Bruce sat in a chair beside his bed, fingers loosely pressed to the inside of the boy’s wrist. He needed the constant, steady assurance of his pulse to remind himself that he had gotten there in time. Alfred had attempted to coax him to bed four times before folding. He brought him food, the daily paper, and a tumbler with two fingers of bourbon in it.
Bruce only very, very rarely drank. He’d done it only a handful of times in the past decade, and almost every instance of drinking had been brought on by this exact thing: failing his wounded children. He had drank the night he’d brought Jason’s body back home. He had drank the night Stephanie’s mother had told him that Batman had as good as killed her daughter. He had drank the night Jason had come back home on his own, twisted and wrong. He’d drank the night that he’d legally adopted Tim, because he’d been overcome with the realization that Tim would never have lost his father if he had never been his Robin.
And that night, he’d drank because he’d arrived just in time to gather the shattered remains of his son. Bruce only allowed himself brief windows for heartache. People had criticized him for being callous and unfeeling, and to the outside world, that was probably true. The truth of it was, things settled heavily inside him. No sorrow ever really left him. Bruce never let go of the people taken from him.
And Damian had been brutalized. Alfred hadn’t been sure he would make it through the night—-and even though he had, Bruce was unable to get the thought out of his head. He kept his hand loosely wrapped around the boy’s wrist, two fingers pressed against his pulsepoint. He needed physical proof of his stability to keep himself calm, so he couldn’t leave his side. Too much happened when he wasn’t there to protect him.
Alfred had advised against him being present for the hours of surgery, but Bruce had been adamant. The old butler must have known that he wouldn’t like what he saw inside him—-all of the implants, the foreign, artificial bits of metal that laced his spine together. The implants had saved his spine from serious damage, but they’d seemed like a physical representation of all of the vicious things that Talia had forced into their child. Alfred foresaw a full recovery, but it would be a slow one. It would be months before Damian wore the Robin regalia again.
But he was alive. That was what mattered. He was alive, and there would be time to mend everything that had been broken.
Damian had been out of his hands from the very beginning. He had never known that halfway around the world, his son was being trained to rend and kill. And that bothered him—-loss of control always did. Damian’s existence, his indoctrination, his childhood had never been his to control, and he deeply resented Talia for that. If he had known about him, things would have been different. They would have been better. He would never have pushed him to the violent extremes that his mother had demanded of him, so he wouldn’t have to struggle to keep his rage in check. Damian had something inside of him that was dark and vicious and lethal, but Bruce didn’t believe that he’d been born that way. The boy had been conditioned, and that conditioning could be undone.
His stand against Morgan had proven just that. He’d fought as one of the most cunning and determined partners that Bruce had ever had—-even he had bought his performance.
He shouldn’t have doubted him. He should have taken Dick’s assessment of the boy to heart.
And when Damian woke up, Bruce planned to tell him as much.
He could almost pretend that he was sleeping as he always did—on his back, rigid and forever alert. But Damian was only asleep because he’d been heavily dosed, only stiff because he was layered in gauze and plaster. During one of Alfred’s meal deliveries, Titus barreled through the open door and refused to leave the room. Alfred threatened to fetch the broom, but Titus jumped up on the bed and curled up into a ball next to Damian. The puppy wound himself as small as possible, as if to say, see, I will be good and you won’t even know that I’m here. Bruce told Alfred to leave him be, which got the dog’s tail thumping on the mattress. It wasn’t long before he was snoring alongside his master.
Bruce dozed, on and off. The nightmare cycled. Barbara’s scream and a single gunshot. Jason’s infectious laughter bleeding into the Red Hood’s dry sob of a chuckle. Stephanie’s canary yellow hair spread beneath her head, stained red with her blood. Damian.
Bruce didn’t realize that Damian had woken up until he felt the prickle of his gaze. That one very tired, very blue eye was watching him intently. His fingers twitched, brushing Bruce’s palm.
“We won?” His accent was much thicker than usual, hoarse from pain.
“Yes,” Bruce said, not remotely surprised that the first thing that his son wanted to know was whether or not they’d been victorious in battle.
Damian blinked owlishly. He tried to move, then winced with a hiss.
“Knew you would come,” he said, sounding more matter-of-fact than adoring. “Was it the bat, or the drawings?”
Bruce frowned. “Alfred alerted me to the drawings. What do you mean by the bat?”
“Oh. I wasn’t sure if the pictures would be enough to get you to pursue me. So there is also a dead bat in your bed.” Damian’s face scrunched into a tired frown. “Sorry.”
“The drawings were deliberately planted to bait me?” Bruce asked, honestly impressed. His son had cleverly, shrewdly manipulated an already galvanized situation to work in his favor. “In order to convince Morgan that your intentions were genuine, you had to make me believe it, too.”
“Yes. I left those out,” Damian said in a soft, croaky little voice. It sounded so small, so disproportionate to his usual attitude. For once, it fit the size of his body. “Knowing that Pennyworth would find them. The dates are forged. Most…most I drew this past week.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Fooled you, Father. Didn’t I?”
“Yes. You did.” Bruce looked at their hands. Damian’s looked so impossibly small next to his. It was difficult for him to accept how much blood had stained them. “I’m not proud of that fact.”
Silence stretched, blanketing them.
“Those weren’t my only drawings,” Damian ventured quietly. “Drawing homicide and nothing else would…” He paused, like he was trying to dredge up the right thing to say. “It’d suck. Too boring.”
Bruce’s stomach turned over unpleasantly.
“I burned the book.”
“I anticipated that. Really, Father. You should know I have contingency plans. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare,” Damian said, gesturing toward his bookshelf with the arm not bound up in a cast. He sounded faintly smug. “You may look. If you won’t burn them.”
Bruce took it off the shelf—-a heavy, hardback volume that was larger than a bible and thicker by far. He opened it, flipping through it idly. There were pictures folded in half and neatly tucked between the pages. Damian had made sure to crease the edges crisply, so that the added pages left no telltale bulges.
He sat back down, taking one picture out at a time. His son had been meticulous in his organization, each page dated and arranged chronologically. The very first one was just a page of red crayon scribbles, violent and thick with flaking wax. At the very bottom, Damian had written: Grayson calls it art therapy. It’s supposed to help. It is a waste of time. There were a dozen similar pages, heavy with crayon—-it was obvious that Damian had just scribbled until he’d run out of white space and the crayon had been reduced to a nub.
But over time, things started to take shape. The drawings were cautious at first, abstract representations, but they became more lightly-rendered and detailed as they progressed. He graduated from crayons to markers, then to ink and colored pencil. There were architectural studies, mock-ups of car parts and various tech—-some of it existing tech; some of it complex mechanics of Damian’s own design—-sketches of animals, and wobbly portraits of people and places that Bruce recognized. Some of the faces and items were familiar. Some were clearly drawn from Damian’s memory, reflecting the artifacts of his life before Gotham.
Many of the pictures included writing, small and cramped. That was one of the main reasons Damian had kept this hidden, he thought. Having a physical copy of his thoughts was dangerous. Most seemed to be cryptic notes to himself, but others were painfully clear. There was a turning point—-a sudden switch where the drawings became abstract and heavy again. He realized what had changed when he came to a page stiff with dried ink. Damian had used a white crayon to draw shapes—-ragged-edged shapes, familiar wings and vesper silhouettes—-then washed the page in ink until the corners curled in and the paper warped. The process left ghostly wax outlines of bats, and the words: My father is still alive.
That was the last page. Bruce briefly wondered why there were no more, but then it hit him with a swell of guilt—-he’d burned all of the rest. He had incinerated the notebook containing all of the art his son had done since his return. Many of them had been explicitly violent, yes, but he hadn’t taken the time to look at them all. Some of them may have been like this, too. He’d never know.
Damian was utterly silent as he watched him go through his secret cache of drawings. It may have been the numbing and dissociation of the heavy painkillers he was on, but his face was carefully expressionless. The one blue eye not covered with gauze was sharp, tracking his movements despite the opiates.
“These are impressive,” Bruce said, finally. “I’m sorry that I burned the ones you left out. I acted out of anger.” He carefully refolded the last page, tucking it back into the book. “Anger, and fear.”
“You fear nothing,” Damian accused, sounding almost baffled.
“That’s not true,” he said, shaking his head. “Fear is natural and healthy. You can’t allow it to control you, but you cannot deny its existence, either. Fear shows you what is important to you.”
“You fear that I’ll be like Todd, then,” he said, trying to make sense of the concept of his father being capable of fear. As much as his son argued with him and threw names around, he knew that he still put him on a pedestal. Bruce understood that, because he had devoted most of his life to raising the stony effigy of Thomas Wayne.
“I’m afraid that I will fail you, as I failed him. Damian, I know that…this is difficult for you to understand. But I still love Jason. In spite of the choices he has made and the man he has become, I love him.” It was the truth. Painful and heavy to carry, but the truth. “If he needed my help, I would go to him. If he’d work with me, I’d—-I would try to repair the damage. Because Jason is still my son. Just as you are, and will always be.”
Damian didn’t say anything. Titus rolled over, his head on the boy’s stomach. The puppy snuffled Damian’s cast as he stroked his velvety ear. Once they were in range, Titus licked his fingers with his broad pink tongue.
“You’re a filthy animal,” Damian informed his dog, his voice thick with unshed tears. Titus wagged his tail in gleeful agreement. His son’s mouth pulled jerkily as he tried not to cry, his chin trembling.
“Have you ever tried working with watercolors?” Bruce asked, because he knew that Damian didn’t want to cry in front of him. He was stubborn and he was proud, so he’d gently allow him to save face. He had said what he had wanted to say, and Damian had heard it. For the moment, that was enough.
“No,” he croaked.
“They’re difficult. They take patience to master. The water moves the pigment in ways you may not have anticipated—-or wanted,” Bruce said, and gave him a brief smile. “But working with that kind of unpredictability can be surprisingly rewarding. The translucency of the colors make it the closest to working with light. I think you would find the medium relaxing. Meditative.”
“I like a challenge,” Damian said, looking over at him again. “…you paint?”
“Yes. When I was your age, I was very interested in art.” That time—-the time before his parents’ death—-felt like a separate life altogether. “I gave it up—-you shouldn’t. When you’re up and around again,” Bruce nodded to his broken arm, resting on the dog’s back. “I’ll show you, Damian.”
His son’s smile was very faint, but it was there.
