The Till-Then From The Ever-Since

Chapter 29

"There there," Bruce murmured, reassurance that Damian would ordinarily have snapped at. "There, there, Damian. I'm sorry. I so often forget how difficult things have been for you."

And not just for Damian, who wore his scars with such pride that it was easy to forget they had ever pained him, let alone might pain him still—like birthmarks and tattoos and battle-honors, and never like wounds. Not just for him. For all of them. Bruce himself had not been a warrior yet at thirteen—only hungered for it. Only wanted a fight worth all his effort, and to be equal to it.

It was so stark, seeing that truth resurrected now alongside his brilliant boys, with all their polish. Mirror-bright, like new blades.

Neither of his first two sons, at least, even over-eager as they had been for the prerogatives and duties of adulthood, had ever thought that they should kill the children they were, merely in order to be better suited for the fight. They'd sacrificed many small and precious parts of childhood to being Robin, but they'd held on to just as many, and claimed new ones specific to their strange lifestyle. But his younger children, Damian especially…they had come to him having learned that childhood was a weak, useless thing, that made a burden of those who owned it.

And Tim at least had known better, even as that belief had certainly been there. Had held fast to both halves of himself, boy and man, until sorrow and loss began to make both fray under his hands and he felt the need to choose. And Cassandra had already been committed to reclaiming herself from her earliest teachings before she ever knew of Batman, let alone Bruce, and had merely taken a while to feel safe enough to reach easily for small joys. But Damian…he had been so much like Bruce at that age, and needed such utterly opposite things, and Bruce had never been able…

It wasn't that no one in this family ever talked honestly about their feelings. It was that, too often, they waited until they were dying of them, and the feelings themselves had become a crisis, and Bruce had to stand and let the deluge of pain pour over him, too late to help with, too late to mend.

(Sometimes they broke when he couldn't even afford to stay and listen, when he had to choose between sacrificing the hearts of his children and the lives of strangers and could not choose anything other than the one that could mend.)

They'd learned that from him. The holding-back until it was too late. Copying the stupid way he treated himself, trying to push himself to the limits of use.

And too often, even if they did speak before the crisis hit, he would…forget. Even if he knew very well what they needed, every so often he would forget to take it into account.

And every time, his sons took it as rebuke. Took it to mean, you had no business needing that, and tried not to, until they reached the limits of trying and broke open before him, like eggs crushed before the hatchling was ready to come out, lying smeared and hopeless.

It was the worst of his failures, perhaps—he'd assigned that name to Jason's death for so long, and it still owned it, but would those events in Ethiopia ever have played out as they had, if Jason had not felt the need to travel halfway around the world without him, to lie to him that he would leave Sheila alone with the Joker until Bruce could save the refugees and make it back?

He had tried and tried, but he never seemed able to stop failing those who trusted him. In Damian's future it seemed he had gone to his death again, still failing, and as the Damian of this time clung to his neck, like the child he almost wasn't any longer, and did not weep, Batman reminded himself again that the fear of failure was no excuse not to try.

Once upon a time, that had been an easy thing to believe. When he had been a boy with proud eyes who thought he had nothing much to lose.

Bruce had lost his innocence in one moment of blood and noise, and again by degrees in all the years after spent dwelling on that instant. But innocence wasn't like that, not really. It wasn't an egg to crack but a coating you wore through, with time and abrasion, and in some ways this boy in his arms, by the time he was eight, had lost so much more of it than Bruce had at twenty, or even eight and twenty.

Scoured clean by his relentless environment in places you could never reach on your own.

Only a few jagged places near his heart that he had curled around, all those years, protecting and ignoring in equal measure, had been spared the sandstorm.

It wasn't fair.

And Bruce had taken far too long to accept the truth of it.

"I'm sorry," he said again, fixing in his mind the words the older Damian had used to split his younger self to the heart. Certain of your superiority and terrified of your inferiority. Every criticism as a dagger to the chest. Distant when you need warmth and intrusive when you need distance. Rejection when you most need understanding. Forgiveness when you need to be disciplined. Wants us strong and hard enough to face the world like soldiers.

Damn the timeline, he wasn't going to avoid correcting his mistakes just in case reality hung upon it. And damn if he would entertain the possibility of this event somehow constituting a closed loop that would somehow cause itself.

"No," whispered Damian. "It wasn't your fault, Father. Not really."

Not all his fault; it was only in moments of high arrogance he thought he had that much power. That he tried to carry every mischance and every other person's failures of judgment. But enough. He held his son tighter.

When Damian's fingers unknotted from his cape, Bruce didn't let go, but a few seconds later when those still small hands lifted away from his back, he did.

Damian pulled away without the surreptitious twist of the head meant to wipe away tears against the cape before they could be seen, and regathered his dignity with more ease than he would have managed it with, a few years ago.

"Okay?" Bruce asked.

Damian nodded. "Okay. I'm going to go help Brown manage our young guests," he announced, sounding very like Alfred all of a sudden. "You two," he commanded primly, looking from one Bat to the other. "Talk."

And with this he strode off, his bright cape swirling up behind him with the force of every step.

Bruce tilted back his head to look up at the older Damian, who no longer seemed angry. He was looking after his small self with a sort of bemusement, an upward quirk to one corner of his lips that reminded Bruce of Jason. He wondered if that was coincidence, or if they'd spent enough time together between Bruce's second death and Jason's to exchange a few mannerisms. He did not let himself wonder how Jason had died. Damian had had time to dislike him less as they avenged Dick together, but in the end only Tim had been there with Damian to corner Talia, that was more than enough.

In spite of everything he'd gotten wrong, and all he'd failed to protect them from…all his kids were amazing.

"I'm sorry," he told his successor, as he straightened up, cape falling around him. Here they were, two pillars of black lost in shadow. "For…making you feel that way, and then leaving you."

Damian sighed, a deep sigh from the chest, that sounded strangely as though Dick had taken control of Bruce's vocal cords. And reached up to strip his own mask back, so they could see at least the shadows of one another's eyes. "The latter is nothing you've done yet, to apologize for. And for the part that I suppose is yours to claim…" He stared into the dark of the Cave, through the stalagmites where Bruce had been lurking earlier, while the Damians had their conclave. "Forgiven."

The weighty consideration of it was comforting on a level none of Dick's breezy assurances, when available, had ever been. There were, it seemed, unexpected benefits to having a child who took after you in communication style, even if these benefits were not necessarily that you understood each other without effort.

Damian smiled at him, a faint shadow of an expression on a shadowed face, and tipped his head along the path.

"Walk with me," he said. Because, of course, if they didn't follow Robin, he would wind up being dragged that way anyway, because the tether would run out before Damian reached the training area the kids had been using.

…what had Bruce done to the strangely alien small self? It couldn't have been too bad since no one had contacted him.

Except no, they hadn't had the chance. Because his comm was off, because he'd gotten annoyed with the chatter and left Dick in charge for half an hour while he went off to analyze and recover his bearings, and wound up stalking the other Batman, past what must have been the limits of the tether.

He'd probably crossed them without thinking a thing of it, assuming that all the children were together and so the man he was following couldn't get beyond that range. While in fact the standard version of Damian had been circling ahead of them, preparing his confrontation. Of course.

Batman reached up and turned his earpiece on. "Nightwing, I seem to have made a navigation error."

"Oh, is that what you call it? Stay on comms next time you go running off, you jackass! Come about fifteen feet this way and then don't move until I say, so we have time to get this kid's feet back on solid ground."

"…he's hovering in the middle of the Cave, isn't he."

"After almost falling to his death, yes!" Dick was furious. Bruce couldn't, in an honest analysis, blame him. He'd put a child in danger out of carelessness, too preoccupied to remember the existence of the risk. And even now he wasn't as distressed as he'd expect himself to be in such a situation. Not by half. "He came within ten feet of hitting the Cave floor at maximum descent velocity, before the tether pulled him up. Wherever you are is not high up enough to compensate for having pulled him off the edge.

"We've got a harness on him now," Dick continued, mastering himself but still biting off the words like chunks of some bitter medicine, "so give us the slack and we'll pull him up."

"Problems?" Damian asked in his deep, future voice, following along as Bruce carefully moved forward the requested fifteen feet. He was laughing at him, Bruce could tell, but it lacked that familiar vicious, jeering edge, so it seemed he really had forgiven him, for the moment.

"Nothing irresolvable," Bruce murmured. If Damian also had his comm turned off, and didn't know the exact mistake Bruce had made, he felt no obligation to enlighten him.

"Now stay there," Dick reiterated the order, voice still tight with fury. Bruce wondered if he'd watched the younger Bruce go over whatever edge it had been. Or maybe his younger self had. The one who was so much closer to watching his parents fall.

Ah. There was the guilt that had been evading him.

For Dick's sake, but not for the younger Bruce's. Was it because he didn't truly think of the children who'd appeared mysteriously through time as real?

Or was it because. It was only him.

Both possibilities were disquieting.

"He's alright?" asked Damian, obviously having gleaned the essence of the situation from hearing Bruce's side alone.

Bruce nodded. "I seem to have a certain shortfall of self-preservation," he said dryly.

Damian dipped his head. "Not the first time someone else has faced consequences for that lack," he murmured. Not spiteful, but not letting Bruce off the hook, either. Forgiven, after all, was not forgotten.

"Okay," said Dick, sounding a little calmer in his ear piece. "We have him back on solid ground. You can move again, but only in this direction."

"Acknowledged," said Bruce, and turned off the pickup part of his comm. He kept the audio on. Clearly tuning his family out to get some thinking time was neither acceptable nor feasible at this juncture. No further chatter eventuated, in any case. He tipped his head forward, glancing at Damian, and they began to stroll once more after Robin.

After a little while, Damian spoke.

"Scenario," said the son he had evidently not gotten to see grow up, for different reasons than Talia keeping them apart. Not 'worst-case,' Bruce noted, nor 'best-case.' Just 'scenario.' The posing of a hypothetical.

Bruce inclined his head to signal his attention to the possibility being outlined.

"We actually exist, but cannot for whatever reason be replaced at our previous places in the timestream. Perhaps we have been duplicated from it, rather than removed. We are here to stay."

Bruce kept his face still, and marveled inwardly that Damian had somehow guessed that that was the scenario he had been most avoiding contemplating. Permanency. In spite of how long he'd been dead, his youngest son still knew him.

"If we can dissolve these tethers," the younger Batman continued, almost briskly, "the decisions in that case are straightforward, if not simple. I will not stand for our being consigned to the shadows, Father."

Bruce had no doubt that his youngest boy's implacability had only increased with the years, but it hardly mattered. He had no intention of fighting on that issue—if anything, he would rather forbid the sudden plethora of Robins from being anything but children, this time around. If he thought they would ever listen.

"In my time," Damian continued, falling into the rhythm of a brusque briefing, "there is a solid body of precedent-locked law governing the rights of clones—Drake was instrumental in its establishment—and I would be inclined to rely on it. In this case, however, it would be better to resort to a certain level of honesty, and invoke the murkier precedents set by previous time travelers."

Bruce set aside a mental space for 'Tim got into politics to some degree and established laws protecting the rights of clones' while trying not to react with irritation to Damian's high-handedness. He was an adult, and used to being in charge, and it would be unreasonable to attempt to quash that.

Even if this was his cave.

"If we take your civilian identities public, I'll insist on a staggered waiting period before introducing any cape activity," Bruce said levelly. "For subtlety's sake, as well as for adjustment. But otherwise, that sounds reasonable."

Damian raised his eyebrows like this response was somehow surprising, but inclined his head. "Conversely, if we cannot escape these distance limitations," he carried on, "we are considerably less likely to gain legal recognition as independent entities, but also even more difficult to conceal. I might be believable as my own bodyguard, with certain steps taken to disguise our resemblance, but the children would have more difficulty.

"At least," Damian went on, and Bruce could hear a wry, straight-faced humor that again reminded him profoundly of Alfred, "such a lifestyle should enforce lessons in both self-reliance and teamwork, which are after all some of our core family values."

"Dick managed to teach you optimism, I see," Bruce observed drily. Possibly also puns. Almost definitely puns.

"It helps to have a stubborn teacher," Damian answered. And flashed one of those rare almost-grins that weren't angry.

He looked so much less like Bruce when he smiled.

(Not because Bruce never smiled, or even never smiled where he could see himself, but because the smiles were nothing alike. There was a little of Talia there, and maybe a little of Tim, and more than a little of Dick, and some of what had to be all Damian.

But very little of himself, and he wondered if that was because he had not smiled at his youngest enough for it to leave any lasting impression on him.)

"I'm sure," he said, deliberately not concealing his amusement as much as he reflexively wanted to. That was a bad habit, honestly. He blamed the Joker. "Very well. I would prefer to wait and see whether they're actually necessary before we make detailed plans for explaining why my adult sons have acquired thirteen-year-old shadows. But I agree with your analysis and don't dispute your priorities."

"A contingency you aren't already prepared for? Shocking."

Bruce turned his palm open. "There's always something."

Damian laughed. It was short, and composed, but it was warm. Whatever failures Bruce was guilty of, he felt now he could say that Damian was certainly not one. "Well, then. Shall we return to the main cave floor? I believe there's still work to be done."

Bruce grimaced. He was going to get yelled at. "There's always something," he agreed. And they went.