Disclaimer: I do not own, I make no money and I wish desperately that I did both

A/N: This is an non superhero AU. You have been warned. As always, please review.

Chapter One - Damian

The townhouse is small, was his first thought. Damian stood at the front of the house, the bodyguard that had been assigned to him looming over his much smaller form. He was propelled to the door by the man, standing next to him, proud and as tall as he could just as he was taught. The bodyguard rang the bell and, when the door wasn't immediately answered, rang it again. A pounding sound was heard and a young man, with black hair and blue eyes similar to Damian's own opened the door, taking them both in.

"Can I help you?" His tone was cautious, but he gave Damian a small grin, which Damian didn't bother to return – he didn't want to be here, he wanted to be home, where he could prove that he wasn't a failure.

"This is Damian Wayne –his custody has been transferred to his father and –" Damian watched with a small amount of amusement as the boy's eyes widened, darting between the bodyguard and himself.

"Wait – what?" The boy frowned at them both. "Bruce isn't here right now – you can't just leave him here!" Damian scowled at him, not liking that he was being dismissed by someone that was barely older him. The bodyguard shrugged and handed the boy a stack of papers.

"Not my problem – I was paid to deliver him, he's delivered – here's all the paperwork. Mistress Talia says that he is now Wayne's problem, so have fun." Damian hid the hurt that those words caused and keep his face blank even as the boy's mouth opened and closed like a fish.

"You can't just leave a kid here! That's illegal!" The man didn't seem to care, as he turned and moved briskly down the sidewalk and got behind the wheel of the car, driving off and leaving the two boys on the steps.

"Well? Are you going to invite me in or is that also beyond your ability to comprehend?" Damian knew he sounded waspish, but didn't care. The boy frowned at him, but moved to the side in a silent invitation. Damian stepped into the house, examining the front hallway as the boy headed further back into the house, picking up a phone and dialing a number.

"Bruce?" A pause. "No, I'm fine, but some guy just dropped a kid off on the doorstep. He said his name was Damian and Talia said he was your problem now." Another longer pause and the boy hung up, turning to face Damian, who was determined to keep himself under control.

"Um…yeah. So, Bruce is on his way home – he should be here in about an hour." The boy gave another small smile of greeting. "I'm Tim."

Damian glared at him, hoping that it would discourage the other boy from trying to talk to him. And it seemed to work since Tim retreated to somewhere else in the house after depositing him in the main room with instructions to "stay put".

He stood when his father entered the house, studying the man that had helped conceive him even as he was studied in turn. Damian watched as the man picked up the stack of papers and flipped through them silently, before turning and heading up the stairs to the second floor.

That was it. No greeting, no acknowledgement that he was even there before going to another part of the house. Damian shoved the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach back down and quickly headed in the direction that his father had vanished to. He found him by following his voice – coming up to the study in time to make out the tail end of a conversation.

"…send him to me – there's no place for him here." Damian froze, hand hovering just above the doorknob. "He shouldn't be here – he should be with you." Damian silently retreated back to the living room, any hopes that he might have harbored about this new place turning to ash. His father didn't want him here. His father, the one that his mother had placed on a pedestal that he knew he could never hope to match, did not want him.

"Hey – Damian, right?" Damian looked up as the other – Tim – came into the living room, followed by another, older male. He gave a curt nod, not trusting himself to speak, but the older man didn't seem to mind, even if Tim's mouth twisted into a small frown.

"Well, Tim just finished setting up your room for you – it's pretty bare, but you can add to it later and I was getting ready to order a pizza. You have any toppings you like?"

"Pizza has little nutritional value." Damian felt the need to point out, which was apparently the wrong thing to say, as Tim's jaw dropped and the man chuckled. Damian barely controlled the embarrassed flush that followed the laughter.

"Maybe not, but that's what we're having since Alfred just got back from vacation and you definitely don't want me or Bruce cooking." Damian scowled at the information – he did not want to know more about his father – his father didn't want to know anything about him. The man waited, but when Damian didn't answer he shrugged. "Alright then. You don't care, I want the works, Timmy will only eat plain cheese and Bruce is going to rush out just as it gets here to go back to the office."

The man (who was identified as Dick Grayson later in the evening) was correct in his predictions – Bruce had left the house with nothing more than a curt goodbye nearly forty five minutes later, barely pausing to acknowledge his sons. Grayson and Tim both seemed to accept that behavior as normal and so Damian mentally placed his father in the same category as all the other adults in his life thus far; a vague, barely there authority figure that would show no interest in him.

-Time skip to the next day-

Damian barely slept, his body still on Eastern European Time, and he knew that he would probably collapse later that day from sheer exhaustion – he had been up nearly forty eight hours by this point. So when Alfred Pennyworth had arrived precisely at eight, his first impression of Damian was less than flattering – the boy was swearing in fluent Urdu as he struggled to find something to eat that he was familiar with.

"I don't believe that telling the refrigerator to perform various impolite deeds with itself will help you accomplish your goals, young man."

Damian stopped and sent the older man a withering glare, but he did step away from the fridge, allowing Alfred the chance to see for himself what was in the fridge. Sadly, since Alfred had spent the better part of the last month in England visiting his brother and niece, the fridge is lacking in anything resembling actual food, though it was nearly overflowing with takeout containers. Damian watched as Alfred briefly closed his eyes as though in pain before shutting the door and turning to the ten year old.

"What would you like to have for breakfast?" Damian blinked at him in shock – he hadn't expected to actually get any input into the decision. He ate what was put in front of him at mealtimes. Discounting last night, this was the first time he had been allowed input into his dietary choices.

"Do you know how to make Ful medames?" Alfred's brow rose at the question, but he answered readily enough.

"I am somewhat familiar with the dish from my travels abroad – it shouldn't take more than thirty minutes to make it once I've acquired the ingredients." Alfred re-buttoned his coat, having never actually had the chance to remove it. "Would you like to accompany me to the store so that you may see the ingredients for yourself?"

Damian paused and, after a brief internal struggle (very brief, he'd never been to America before and was curious about it), nodded and followed Alfred out of the door.

-Time skip of a few days-

He had found the room purely by accident while he had been in the attic, trying to learn more about his father's family and to get away from his father's confidante and other two sons. They were too loud, too American for him to feel comfortable with and so he had begun to look for a place to retreat to when they became too overwhelming. It had been a boy's room, once upon a time, and was covered in posters of sports teams and cars. But he could tell that years had passed since anyone had set foot in it and every surface was covered in a thick layer of dust. He hadn't gotten across the threshold before he had been drawn back downstairs by Pennyworth's (old man, his father's surrogate father) summons.

He hadn't mentioned the room then, not wanting to answer questions about why he had been in the attic in the first place, but curiosity had drawn him back up to the small room and he had begun the laborious process of cleaning it, looking for some clue as to the original inhabitant's identity. It was time consuming, but since his father spent vast stretches of time away from home and their eldest brother worked and lived in Bludhaven, it was usually just him and Drake in the house and they tended to avoid each other.

Damian's fault, he knew, but his father had him now, why would he need another son? And Drake…Drake was everything that Damian needed to be: smart and hardworking, quiet and obedient. Everything he wasn't. And that grated – that some other boy was everything that he needed to and never would be.

He found the picture on accident one day, as it had been kicked under the bed, the glass covering shattered and the frame cracked. The time looked to be early summer, given the tank tops the three subjects were wearing. It was his father, much younger, maybe a decade or so ago, and two young men, boys really. One was Grayson - the smile hadn't changed, even if he was lacking the distinctive scar on his upper arm - and the other was a boy, maybe a few years older than Damian was now, with a smirk that seemed like a challenge to the world. A tuft of his hair was pure white, a startling contrast to raven black.

Damian had taken the picture down to his own room and placed it among the few family pictures he owned, near the back, where the rest of the family would be unable to easily find it. The Boy was his secret for now and Damian had no desire to share him, not yet. He finished cleaning the room and changed the sheets, creating a tiny bolt hole he could vanish to when the newness and strangeness of this family began to overwhelm him.

Because America was nothing like England and definitely nothing like the home in the Middle East that he had spent his early years. The customs, the food, everything was wrong and different and it felt like he was being expected to adjust immediately. He was enrolled in the same private school that Drake currently attended, but was dreading the start of the year – his accent, his skin color, his eyes…none of that would allow him to blend in with a population of fair skinned, forward Americans that would notice how different he was.

He was used to his father's standoffishness - that was a standard parental response in his mother and grandfather's circles - but Grayson's incessant touching and Pennyworth' constant inquiries and Drake's watching, always watching grated. He wasn't used to the attention he was being given.

But when he retreated to the room and looked into the nooks and crannies of The Boy, he could escape. He learned The Boy liked cars, quite a bit, as there were stacks and stacks of magazines dedicated to the topic scattered all over the room. This was in sharp contrast to the shelves, which had classics such as Dickinson and Austen on them. Damian began to read them, trying to find the appeal to such works. He didn't, but the books helped to pass the time. The books by Mark Twain, however, he devoured and immediately went hunting for more at the library when he managed to convince Grayson to take him.

There were a few gun and weapons related paraphernalia shoved into the back of the closet and Damian read those too, understanding the pull of the forbidden – despite the fact that father worked in law enforcement, he forbade guns in his house and around his children. There were boxes of model cars and planes, most put together, some not. He spent one weekend that he was alone in the house with only Drake putting one together. It had turned out adequately and the model had also migrated down to his room, placed on a shelf next to one of The Boy's books on poems.

Drake had noticed his frequent absences, but hadn't commented on them, instead seeming to steer Pennyworth's attention to other matters when the man was over, checking up on them. That happened around once a week if their father was home, two to three times a week when he was not. That also grated - they were seventeen and ten, they needed minimal adult supervision. And Damian knew that it wasn't Drake they were checking up on – he was the one they didn't trust.

He found a small pile of Playboy under the bed in a box labeled socks and returned them to their hiding place - they held no appeal for him yet. But it wasn't until he was looking through the drawers that he found The Boy's name, carved into the back of a drawer - at least he assumed it was The Boy's name. Damian gently traced the letters with his fingers, memorizing them. The letters are sharply carved, hard, straight lines with few curves.

"Jason Todd." Damian rolled the words around on his tongue and grinned to himself. "Jason Todd."