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H O W ' S M Y D R I V I N G ?

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"This movie is boring," Damian grumbles, slouching against the couch and to the side, head almost against Dick's shoulder. Dick lets a smile curl on his mouth.

"It's a classic."

"It's classically boring. It needs less talking and more fight scenes."

"The fight scenes wouldn't mean anything if there weren't scenes to set the story and characters and plot, first," Dick replied. "Just keep watching."

Damian scowls, shifting again. He's restless: fresh from a nap and dinner, bursting with energy, eager to go out and start busting heads. Rush hour for the Batman doesn't start until late, and killing time until then is always miserable. Movies help, on the rare nights they aren't rushing from press conference to charity gala to meeting nonstop, or jetting around the world, and Dick likes the quiet moments to take the thrum of a headache off his mind.

Damian never does.

It seems like the phone rings a million times, to Damian. He's been sitting on the back of his chair with the phone clutched between his shoulder and his ear for ten minutes now, which includes all the interludes to redial and try again. He keeps glancing at the computer screen, hoping there's an email or something, but in the meantime, he's just trying and trying again with the phone.

"Still at it, Master Damian?" Alfred says, quietly. He's folding laundry and placing them in four piles, and Damian frowns when he looks at them. It's supposed to be five.

Damian looks back to the screen.

"Yes. He's probably trying to find his phone. He knows I'm calling."

Alfred doesn't say anything, but Damian can feel that knowing gaze burning the back of his neck.

Damian shifts down into the seat proper, knees almost bumping up against his chin, holding the phone that much closer. The ringing hits the end of the cycle and goes to voice mail. Damian hangs up and hits redial, and the ringing starts again.

"Perhaps Master Richard is busy," Alfred says. "I'm sure if you leave a message, he will call you back post-haste."

"No," Damian growls, feeling his blood boil.

Dick hasn't returned a call since he left for Portugal, and Damian can't stand it. He said he would call when he got there, and Damian isn't sure why he expected anything different from the usual: for the past few weeks, it's been nothing but telephone tag, endless phone calls resulting in only quick messages or brief emails before rushing off to something else. Since Dick went back to operating solo, they have seen each other a grand total of twice, and Damian isn't sure why he thought a trip across the city to visit would be easy to make every day. It turns out their lives are both too busy for even that.

He's seen Stephanie more than he's seen Dick in the past month, and he barely even likes Steph on a good day.

Damian scowls a little harder and leans against the armrest. Still nothing.

It's going to take so much time to adjust to working with his father, and it's even more frustrating when he knows that when Dick was Batman, they worked together flawlessly. As much as he wants to prove to his father that he can be a good Robin, he misses his brother more.

All this because Dick is just too much of "his own man" and can't live under his father's roof again. Because there's no need for more than one Batman. Because that's "just the way things have to be."

Damian is about to end the call and try again when the line finally connects. There's a shuffle in the background, something Damian can't quite make out, and then there's Dick's voice, breathless and nonchalant:

"Hey! Damian! Sorry, I was just--"

"Fuck you," Damian interrupts, without even thinking, and then he slams down the phone.

He regrets it within seconds, but when the phone starts ringing, he can't own up to it. Instead, he just hurls the phone in Alfred's general direction with a loud "It's for you!" and storms off.

And so another round of telephone tag begins.

Children who have known nothing but killing, the death of friends and their own vulnerability find immeasurable difficulties in developing into adults capable of wisdom, restraint and moral generosity, the essential foundation of civil society.

-- Hugh Riminton

"Well," she began, "sometimes you'd come back--you were so very young--and your face would be so set and hard, and I'd wonder why are you so angry, little boy? What can someone so young have to be so angry about?"

-- Peter Watts, Blindsight

Damian and Jason
Requested by Fudgey

Foreword: This is not meant to be a catch-all, objective look at canon. It moreso plays into the way I write Damian for

paradisa and junk, so towards the end it'll get a bit more Paradisa-specific. Yay? Much of this also tailors to how I interpret things, rather than the multitude of ways you could interpret it.

Also, I really didn't mean for it to get this long.

( 4800 words. jfc. )

001

Damian would hate to admit it out loud -- especially in front of Dick and other adults he tries so hard to be mature around -- but he missed her so much. He wants to hug her and bury his face against her skin and breathe in her scent and cling to her like some sort of love-starved baby, but that would be childish. He buries the itch by taking her hand instead, looking up at her with a smile.

He deliberately angles himself so only she can see that rare smile, but perk in his attitude would be noticeable for miles around.

"Mother. I'm glad you're here." There's a pause. "Father's here, too."

It's hard to not sound a little excited about it. Both of his parents in one place again. He didn't think this would ever happen again, and now it could even happen in the real world.

Maybe things will be better.

002

"Your hair is growing long," his mother says, gently combing her fingers though his hair.

His hair is getting to that stage where it still looks deliberate but is bordering on unkempt. Damian likes it short, but there's just something cool about having longer hair, especially when it gets all windswept.

He makes a face when she reaches for the dresser drawer and pulls out a pair of scissors.

"Mother," he scowls, "No. I like it like this."

She raises an eyebrow, gently tapping the closed blades against her palm.

"Then you'll have to grow it longer and tie it back. You can't be fussing with your bangs in your eyes in the middle of a fight, Dami."

"That'd be stupid looking," he argues, ducking his head when she reaches to touch his hair again. She gives him a dissatisfied look. He continues: "Dick keeps it this length."

"And if Richard was killed in battle, you would do the same?"

"That doesn't even make sense."

Talia looks at him sternly, and he feels like putting up more of a fuss, but her hand slides down the back of his neck to rest between his shoulder blades, and he finds himself being steered to sit. He sits, though he throws himself into the chair with a resigned sort of loathing. Stupid hair. Stupid Grayson. Stupid mother.

"Just don't make it too short," he demands, and he hears the metal click of the blades coming together on a lock of his hair.

003

They're talking.

It only takes Damian a second to realize the vents around the room aren't big enough to crawl in, and another second to realize that his stealth-trained father and mother would likely notice the sound even if he could fit in the vents. It takes a full five seconds of mental temper-tantrums and frustration before he resorts to just pressing himself against the door, ear flush with the wood, trying to hear their conversation.

Unfortunately for him, Paradisa has ways to soundproof things. When he realizes the door isn't yielding results he drops to his knees to peer under the bottom, straining his ears to hear.

That is precisely when two strong hands grab him around the middle and hoist him from the floor. He knows who it is instantly, but he tries to elbow Dick in the face anyway, just for interrupting him before he could hear anything. His elbow connects with thin air; no one can handle Damian's knee-jerk lashes like Dick can.

There's a few seconds of struggle before Dick sets Damian on the couch. Damian instantly tries to clamber off.

"Hey! Hey." Dick says it quietly but sternly as he crouches down in front of the couch and puts his hands up in surrender. Damian falls back on his heels, seething already. "Let them talk in private."

"They're talking about me!" Damian hisses, "And if they're going to live together! That is my business––"

The door opens, and both Dick and Damian turn to see. There's the two of them, expressions both a mix of different emotions Damian just can't place. Bruce is at the door, holding it open, and Talia stands deeper in the room, hands on her hips. Damian is at once full of both hope and dread.

"Come here, Damian. We have much to talk about," Talia says.

004

Damian's never been a particularly affectionate child, but at times the mood strikes him.

Paradisa in particular affords these moods more often than home ever could: here, there is no League, little in the way of crisis and so much in the way of free time. It is the only time in his life that he feels he can get his mother's undivided attention, and he soaks it up like a sponge. He follows her around the suite so close that he almost gets underfoot, peers nosily into whatever she's reading, and takes his afternoon naps curled up on the couch with his head against her thigh.

Of course, if Dick asks he'll play it up and complain that they didn't do anything interesting all day, and that he was bored out of his skull. When his mother fusses over him, he'll complain of being smothered or treated like a child. But Dick knows how that works -- the moment Damian isn't getting that same attention, there will be complaints about how she doesn't love him enough.

It's just a struggle to express affection, especially for a boy so far removed from tenderness.

Damian, Emotional Walls and Kindness

In Damian's upbringing, there were no "nice people." He was raised among assassins and terrorists in a cut-throat world. He was spoiled rotten and was the little prince of the League, but he was by no means socializing and encountering nice people.

This has lead to a rather bleak view of the world. Dick describes him as "seeing a criminal in anyone who looks at him sideways", and it isn't far from the truth. Damian views normal children as a special kind of innocent, but he also sees the world as naturally corrupting. It is not uncommon for him to encounter kind people and assume they have ulterior motives, as no one in his life has ever been "kind" to him unless they were either expected to be or were manipulating him. As such, he looks at "nice people" with a sort of disdain, feeling that they are only nice because they're plotting against him or because they are stupid.

However, as he has managed to meet a number of "nice people" in Paradisa, he has reluctantly agreed that SOME people are capable of true kindness. He's found it hard to call foul on people who have posed no threat nor danger to him, so while he can argue with them, he finds it difficult to write them off as trying to manipulate him.

This doesn't mean that he doesn't try to, though; Damian has a lot of emotional walls to protect himself from hurt and loss, and he will often lash out at these kind people just the same. He may make accusations, suggesting that their actions or words are insincere or "naive", as if he sees corruption or potential for corruption in them that they don't. He may pass them off as bystanders or "uninvolved", informing them that they're incapable of bothering or harming him, or really "getting" to them. He may treat them like children, despite being a child himself, or he may be dismissive of their attempts to get to know him beyond a superficial level. Damian has serious trust issues that not even his closest relationships escape, and they only increase in magnitude for mere acquaintances and strangers. Even when he is honest about his feelings, he evades questions about his past experiences and personal history. He rationalizes that if they don't know him that deeply, they can't hurt him, and even if they DO know him well, he will try to tell himself that they don't know the "real" him.

Why does he do this, even when they have posed him no threat? He is quite unaware that he does it, and when it is pointed out to him, he is incapable of truly understanding why, either. Ultimately, Damian fears that he may be wrong in trusting that these people actually are kind, so he acts in a way that might drive them away and hurt them before they can do the same to him. This is often irrational, but his upbringing has left him with a rather disabling mistrust for people. To Damian, these actions are necessary and logical, though others may see it as confusing, defensive, or even paranoid.

It's relatively easy to pick up on culture and why people act as they do, but it takes an eternity to pick up on those little nuances. The broad strokes are easy, the details elude him. He can field-strip just about any gun, decode a programmed nuclear warhead, and parachute from ten thousand feet, but something as simple as why adults like to put things on the fridge with magnets utterly escape him.

That is exactly what Damian is struggling with at this very moment.

At first it had just been the back-and-forth between him and Dick when he'd done that drawing of the strange creature in the Dead Zone. Dick wanted it on the fridge, and Damian wanted it to be a crucial piece of evidence that should not be on display. Dick saw it as rare artwork from a kid who often refused to be a kid, Damian saw it as unartistic and embarrassing. Dick thought it to be worthy of display, and Damian thought it was all a bunch of conflict over nothing.

And conflict there was –– that stupid drawing went up and down, up and down, over the course of weeks, until eventually Damian conceded defeat in the face of Dick's photocopying abilities.

Then it had been the spin-art Mindy had dogged him for, all this streaky paint in circular patterns, navy blue and yellow. Not a big deal, Damian thought. it's just some paint. But it's never too little of a deal for Dick Grayson. Damian isn't sure whether it's to embarrass him or celebrate him. If it's a celebration, what for? Anyone could do create art better than his. It's one of the few things Damian just can't grasp.

Damian looks at the fridge when he passes it, eyes lingering on all the small-but-growing collection of drawings and art. Most of it is meaningless to him, meaningless to the public and meaningless to the grand scheme of the universe, so why bother? When he's Batman, these scraps of paper will be worth less than the dirt on his boots.

"Don't even think about it," Dick says as he breezes through the kitchenette, one hand glued to his coffee mug and the other dipping to ruffle Damian's hair. "I'll put them all back up."

"I know you will," Damian grumbles.

It's a strange ritual, but he knows that if he asks he'll be told that he'll "understand it someday."

Someday, he feels, is always a long, long way off.

Damian and Death

I don't feel that Damian really understands the absoluteness of death.

This is a boy who, up until the death of his father, had never really experienced death on a personal level. He was desensitized to death as a child when he was trained to kill, and he was taught a very simple ideology behind killing: if they deserved to die, they were killed. That's it, that's all. In Damian's world, in the League of Assassins, it's okay to kill people if they're in the way of what you want, or your own survival, or even if they pissed you off. Massacre for the sake of massacre is practically the only form of killing that cannot be justified in any way. Otherwise, death is death. It just happens, and it happens all the time.

If he messes up and someone dies, even by accident, the fact that they are eternally dead and gone doesn't really click with him. He didn't know them. There was nothing personal about it. People succumb to death all the time. It's normal. It's natural. There is nothing particularly special or specific about causing a death, because he's done it before, and he's done it intentionally before. He knows how to kill people, yet he's so disconnected from the individuals he kills that it's just a cold science.

Now, at the present date, Damian knows that killing is wrong, and he can probably list off why it's wrong, but I still don't feel he truly understands why it's wrong. Being able to regurgitate information is different from being able to process it and dissect it and truly understand what it means. It's like being able to draw a chinese kanji, but still being unable to read it. What do the strokes represent? What does it MEAN? Damian has a picture of death, but a shallow understanding of the ramifications and consequences of it.

You also have to remember that Damian's world is one where men rising from the dead is almost normal. Jason Todd was an important part of his mother's life while Damian was still a small child; Jason's death and subsequent resurrection has been a fact of life since Damian was small. His grandfather has used a Lazarus pit to live for hundreds of years and then resurrect himself. Talia herself was killed and revived in the pit dozens of times, after being tortured by Nyssa. These are personal relationships to him that emerged seemingly unscathed from death. Damian himself has been brought back from the brink of death numerous times –– having almost all his internal organs replaced after getting caught in an explosion, being paralyzed and having his spine replaced, etc. He's faced death so many times and emerged back at perfect health that death may even be a bit of a joke to him.* Death doesn't happen to him or his family, just to the endless stream of nobodies passing through his life, as enemies of the League or his own house. There is a very, very specific level of coldness to it.

Until his father died, obviously.

Post Bruce's death, there was a moment where Damian almost regressed on that coldness towards death. In Blackest Night, Dick decided that it would be best for them to move Thomas and Martha Wayne's bodies (as well as Bruce's) to a safer place, in case they got taken by the Black Lantern rings. Damian has a bizarre moment where he refuses to touch their bodies or even look at them. Dick notices, and tells Damian to go wait with the car while Dick handles the bodies. Dick doesn't rib Damian for it either –– but Damian criticizes his own behaviour later, in the car, and vows he's never going to be scared by death again.

In Paradisa, the whole "death is a two-week absence" thing hasn't really helped Damian develop past that. Particularly when going up against demons or otherwise super-human forces, there's no need to worry about death, because even if he flubbed it and wound up killing them, it just wouldn't last. The accidental (or intentional) victim would be back again in two weeks anyway. There's just little way for Damian to make the connection between death and permanence in an environment where death is just a mix-up. By Damian's logic, Crowley is a demon and thus can handle a bit of a beating and can repair his own car, so blowing up the Bentley is more of a prank than anything. He can't see any long-term ramifications for Crowley's health nor the Bentley, so he has no reason to take it seriously.

(You could also say something about whether he would have still blown up the car with Crowley in it if Mindy hadn't been there –– with a peer watching, the unfortunate urge to show off comes up. Mindy is, after all, of a similar upbringing and similar interests, and neither of them has qualms with killing... the biggest difference is that Damian has a reason to abstain, and Mindy doesn't. As stated before, he doesn't really understand the permanence of death or know how to justify it and believe his own words yet, so trying to justify it to Mindy is even harder.)

There's also the matter of socialization. Damian is seldom, if ever, in "normal" social situations that revolve around death, so he simply doesn't have experience explaining himself or his views without the context of his upbringing... which is obviously a taboo in "normal" conversation. In private/familial conversations, over a year later, Damian still throws around death threats (specifically towards Tim) casually, with unknown levels of seriousness, and Dick has recognized that it's a struggle to KEEP Damian on a path that doesn't involve killing. If Damian's "jokes" about killing people are scolded and then passed over in their private lives, it's safe to say he has little to no experience with how the public -- or people who just don't know him -- might handle those kinds of comments. To Damian, he's just expressing his feelings. To someone else, he could be seen as a ten-year-old with severe issues, and rightly so.

As for Bruce's return, despite Damian's complicated feelings on the subject, I propose that it will just be another reason for Damian to question the permanence of death, or at least not take it as seriously as others wish. What's the crime in dealing death if it never seems to last, either in Paradisa or in the real world?

* This isn't saying Damian doesn't get scared or panicked in bad situations –– he does. It's natural to be frightened. I just think that he feels he has a level of invincibility. Even normal children and teenagers have this sense or attitude where "death wouldn't happen to me." Damian knows the risks he takes, he knows it's a possibility, but it just isn't REAL to him 99% of the time.

He did not mean to be cruel. If anybody had called him so, he would have resented it extremely. He would have said that what he did was done entirely for the good of the country. But he was a man who had always been accustomed to consider himself first and foremost, believing that whatever he wanted was sure to be right, and therefore he ought to have it. So he tried to get it, and got it too, as people like him very often do. Whether they enjoy it when they have it is another question.

-- Dinah Craik, The Little Lame Prince