A/N: This was written for batfamweek2018 on tumblr. Also, I know that Talia's been written with several different. . . "interpretations" over the last few decades. This is not a Talia-is-a-bad-person fic, but it maybe is a Talia-is-a-bad-mother fic.
Also, a warning: this fic contains mentions of emotional abuse.
"I found him!" Nightwing cried into his comm. Batman was halfway across the facility, keeping the League of Assassins focused on defending their laser. He and Batman hadn't known it was there until they had arrived, but it was easy enough to make it look like it was their intention to destroy it. It made the "distraction" part of the "distraction-and-extraction" job easy. Nobody was in the eastern wing of the facility, excepting Nightwing, the guard lying unconscious at his feet, and Robin, on the other side of the heavy wooden door.
Nightwing turned the knob and pushed experimentally. It was locked.
"Robin!" He whisper-shouted through the small window. The boy was laid out on a bed in the corner of the room. When he didn't immediately respond, Nightwing's heart skipped a beat. He waited until he saw Robin's chest rise and fall before he tried calling out again. "Damian!"
Still no response, so he knelt by the guard to search his pocket for keys. It was the only one on a large keyring attached to the guard's belt sash. The door unlocked with heavy clunk, and Nightwing held back just long enough to think to pull the key from the lock before rushing inside.
His brother was lying on his side, so Nightwing carefully rolled him to his back to check for any injuries. His breath caught in his throat: there was blood caked to the side of his face, still oozing groggily from an impact wound near his temple.
"What is his status?" came Batman's gruff voice through the comm.
Dick swallowed, shaking Damian lightly by his shoulder a few times. "He's unconscious. Bleeding from a head wound, but I can't tell how bad it is."
"Can you move him?"
Nightwing did a cursory check of the rest of Robin's body, but there was nothing more than a few bruises he could have gotten from the initial kidnapping. "Yes."
"Take him to the extraction point. I'll meet you there."
Dick gathered the boy into his arms gingerly. He didn't stir.
Damian woke up when the Batmobile braked inside the Cave. He fiddled with his domino mask, eager to take it off. The spirit gum was not mean to be worn for so long, and the material was becoming itchy with a combination of dried sweat, blood, and sand.
Batman, sitting up front, released the steering wheel with a sigh. "We're back," he announced to nobody in particular.
Nightwing was the first out of the car. He stretched his legs and cracked his back the second he had the room to do it. "I think I'll crash here for the night?"
Batman hummed an affirmative and hoisted himself out of the car.
Damian fumbled with the door handle until it opened from the outside, and Batman bent down to scoop him out.
"I can walk," Damian protested, the sudden feeling of being carried reminding him too much of his most recent encounter with his Mother.
"That is no way to greet your mother."
His squirming didn't get him anywhere. His father carried him straight to the med bay, where Pennyworth was waiting for him.
The older man sucked in a breath at the sight of how much blood had dried down the side of Damian's face. "I trust you have already checked for a concussion?" Even as he spoke, he carefully peeled the Robin mask off.
"It's nothing," Damian insisted. "Head wounds bleed a lot." He squinted in the penlight Pennyworth held up.
"When we found you, you were unresponsive." Grayson had followed them into the room, wearing a frown instead of his mask.
Pennyworth clicked the light off, and suddenly Damian's lap was fascinating. There was a bitter taste on the back of his tongue, something warm and heavy causing his eyelids to droop. He chose his words carefully, not wanting to believe it himself. "I have reason to believe I was drugged."
He tugged at the fingers of his gloves and pushed back his sleeves to reveal his forearms. His old scars gleamed in the medical light, but he didn't see anything indicative of a needle. "It may have been the—something I ingested."
"Here, this will help you feel better." She had pushed a steaming cup of tea across the table toward him. "I made it just how you like it."
Damian had inhaled, the tightness in his chest loosening at the familiar smell of jasmine and honey. "Thank you, Mother." The first sip had tasted like home.
"Damian?" Grayson's brow was furrowed.
Damian shook his head. "It's nothing," he repeated.
His brother's eyes softened in the way that signaled he was about to start getting mushy, but his father beat him to the punch. "What do you remember?"
This was an easier question than whatever Grayson was gearing up to ask, and Damian allowed his Robin persona to answer. "I was ambushed at the docks. A dozen assassins from the League scaled the walls, and my lookout point did not provide proper coverage." Or escape route, he didn't add.
Batman nodded. "The tip turned out to be false. There was nothing aboard the ship out of the ordinary."
"They managed to incapacitate me." He swallowed, feeling the phantom pressure of an arm around his neck. He resisted reaching up to feel for the bruises he was sure were there. "Mother sent them, to take me ho—to bring me to her."
"I missed you, what other reason would I need?"
"What did she want?" Nightwing asked, a hint of venom creeping into his voice.
Before Damian could even answer with a shrug, Batman steered the conversation a different direction. "Talia was there?"
He directed the question toward Nightwing, who did have the time to shrug. "I searched the entire building, I didn't see her."
Damian stared at the wall of the Cave, trying to push through the fog in his memory. "She left. She had a meeting."
"With who?"
"With whom," Pennyworth corrected.
It was on the tip of his tongue, the impression of the silhouette of somebody he recognized, but when he looked he couldn't make out the edges. Damian shook his head, hands clenching the sides of the cot. "I don't remember."
"I wish you could come with me, but with your father's influence I can't trust you to behave."
Damian blinked, and then Grayson was in his face, squatting in front of the cot so he could look at him eye-to-eye. He smiled, but it was tight with worry. "It's okay you can't remember, we'll take care of it. Why don't you get to bed?"
"—wake up after I return. This wouldn't be necessary if you hadn't rejected me—"
Damian shook his head again, but to his horror, he felt a yawn threaten to creep in. He clenched his jaw so he wouldn't look foolish, but his father's face still softened beneath his cowl. "We'll get a blood sample, then you can get cleaned up and sleep off whatever is lingering in your system."
Grayson ruffled his hair on the way out—avoiding the knot forming on his forehead—and smiled softly at Damian's scowl. "Glad we got you back, Dames."
Later, after he had scrubbed the blood and sand off until he felt like he could leave the whole incident behind himself, he retrieved the pile of his Robin gear that he had left on a bench near the shower. (Pennyworth refused to enter the locker rooms 'for his own safety'—Damian had learned from experience it meant his Robin uniform would not be washed if he left it where he took it off.)
Something fluttered from the pile onto the floor.
He stopped at the sound, craning his neck around the overflowing cape in his hands. It was an envelope, his name scrawled across it in familiar handwriting. His mother's handwriting.
Damian tensed.
She must have planted it on his uniform somewhere, where Nightwing and Batman and himself wouldn't notice it easily. The thought made his skin crawl. He had been unconscious long enough for her to work through his suit's defenses.
And seeing a piece of her, here. . . it was unsettling.
He looked out into the Cave. His father was at the Batcomputer, working on a report. The rest of the Cave was empty.
He slid the envelope under his shirt and crept up to his room.
Damian sat on his bed, flipping the envelope between his hands. It was high quality, nothing less than what he would expect from the al Ghul household. The off-white, vaguely vanilla-scented paper was too thick for a light to reveal what was inside, so Damian fiddled with it while he prepared himself to open it.
It was probably just a letter. There was no reason to be afraid. . .
"Don't tell me you're afraid of me." She had stepped back, arms and the corners of her mouth dropping. "What lies has your father told you, that you wouldn't accept the embrace of your own mother?"
Damian used the knife under his pillow to open the envelope. Inside was a folded piece of paper, of the same quality as the envelope. Just a letter. Damian's shoulders drooped—he hadn't realized he had allowed them to tense. He slid the paper out and unfolded it.
It was blank, except for a single line of text, written in his mother's familiar scrawl. An unmistakable URL.
He dove under his bed to retrieve his laptop and sat back with it propped on his knees. The URL was mostly a long string of numbers, but it led to a webpage that promised it was secure, according to his laptop's security. It was almost empty, except for a button in the middle that just said "call."
Damian chewed on the inside of his cheek, staring at the button.
"I missed you, what other reason would I need?"
He clicked it before he could talk himself out of it. It was just a video call.
And he missed his mother, too.
The tinny sound of a "phone" ringing on the other end continued for almost a full minute. Damian was about to give up and turn off his laptop when the ringing stopped. The page went black a moment, then there was his mother's face.
"Damian." She smiled at him, and Damian fought the creep of his own lips to mirror hers.
"Mother," he responded coolly. He bunched his fists in his sheets. He wouldn't let her get in his head again. It had been a disaster at the facility. He couldn't trust her. "What do you want?"
She had the decency to look offended at his abrupt tone. "I realized there was a chance you would disappear before I returned. I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday."
"My birthday was over a month ago." He remembered it well because he spent it alone in his room with his paints, the rest of his family unaware of its date because he wanted it that way.
She pouted on the screen. "I know, I know. When I didn't hear from you, I assumed you never got the gift I sent."
Damian's eyes narrowed, trying to look for the micro-expressions indicating a lie in his mother's façade. When he couldn't find anything—but then, she had been trained by the best, much like himself—he admitted a quiet, "No."
She sighed. "Your father must have taken it. He's a paranoid fool." At the sound of footsteps, she looked away from the camera a moment. "No, no, no, I said I am busy!"
His shoulders tensed at the tone.
"I said no. What part of that do you not understand?"
The footsteps retreated quickly. Talia's eyes drifted back toward Damian. "You are becoming more like him."
There was a time Damian would have preened at the idea, but the way she phrased it, it was not supposed to be a compliment. So he chose to ignore the comment. "Why would he do something like that, unless it were dangerous?"
Talia shrugged heavily. "He does not want me close to you."
Damian slid the laptop back, away from his face. "You tried to—you killed me."
His mother gasped. "How could you even say that?"
He was caught off-guard by the reaction. She seemed to be genuinely upset. "You had a hit on me—"
"That was your Grandfather's doing."
"You sent a clone to kill me."
"He was never supposed to hurt you." Her tone grew sharp as she spoke. "I lost control of the matter when your father interfered."
Damian pressed his lips together. "You are lying."
"No, Damian." She was soft again, using the tone he knew from late nights as a child, his mother telling him the stories of Alexander the Great. "I love you. I miss you."
He was quiet. His mother had never. . . it had to be some kind of manipulation. But she seemed sincere.
And he wanted her to be telling the truth.
Talia cleared her throat. "I really must be going, there is always work to be done. You understand why you can't tell your father about this?"
Damian nodded brusquely.
Talia smiled, and it was radiant. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, love."
He snapped out of his thoughts when she reached to turn off her camera. "Wait."
Talia stopped, head tilted to the side, curious. "What is it?"
"You drugged me."
Talia frowned. "No, I didn't."
"Yes—"
"The imbeciles I sent to retrieve you didn't take the proper care. You were dizzy, and hit your head on the table."
Damian's eyebrows furrowed. "No, I don't remember—" He cut himself off abruptly when Talia's face tightened in irritation.
"That's what happened. Your memory has never been very good." She looked down at a beautiful watch on her slender wrist. "I have to go."
"Mother—"
The screen went back to its blank, the "call" button missing. Damian huffed, starting to snap his laptop shut. Then he paused, eyeing the URL again. He wouldn't be able to memorize it. And she had promised they could talk tomorrow.
He bookmarked the site and rolled over for bed.