Written for tharrow — "Damian ends up being sent back in time to his younger body?"
Damian tried to pitch himself upright, but his limbs refused to obey any command.
It didn't hurt anymore, and Damian had never fully bought into that comforting tripe surrounding the notion of death. If Damian was to be was trapped by a useless body for all eternity, it should at least come with the satisfaction of pain.
He doubled his efforts.
"Master Damian! Stop, you must stop, young Master!" Pennyworth's voice cracked out of the darkness to his left, and Damian recoiled from the curt demand.
This could not be. Pennyworth had been left behind in the Cave, and Damian could not possibly have recovered from the wounds inflicted by the Fatherless.
Yet, as the darkness receded, Pennyworth was indeed looming over Damian, his strong hands pressing Damian down firmly into a mattress. As it turned out, Damian's body was not entirely useless, simply heavy and uncoordinated. When Damian calmed, Alfred's hands left his chest to frame a cheek and smooth Damian's damp hair back from his forehead.
"There's a good lad. Just a dream, Master Damian. We'll have you home again soon."
Home again—as in, not there now. Damian's eyes had drifted shut, but they flew open again to take in the opulent nature of the room. Damian was in one of his mother's compounds, and he could tell by the butler's alarmed expression that Damian's heart rate had spiked a second time.
"We have to get out of here, Pennyworth," Damian tried to talk around the thick feeling of his tongue and the soreness of his throat. "We need to leave right now."
"My dear boy, you have just had major spinal surgery," Alfred murmured, taking Damian's hand from where it flopped uselessly among the bed-linens. "It will be some time yet before you can travel."
Spinal surgery … one of Mother's long-since compromised compounds … and a foggy memory of an elderly hand resting across his brow—the Flamingo incident.
Damian was very nearly two years in the past, before his Mother's betrayal and pursuit of Father and before Father had even returned from his own adventure in time. Apparently time shenanigans ran in the Wayne bloodline.
Damian would not question that which he benefitted from. He was alive and recovering from an injury that seemed laughable by comparison … in a room only a few floors above the lab where his replacement was being cared for by mere machines for one purpose and one purpose alone—a Robin's murder.
Damian shoved the thought away and ignored the phantom pain that sprang to his chest; the son of Batman refused to be cowed by a mere fetus.
"I want to go home," Damian whispered, struggling to keep the drugs from pulling him back under. He couldn't stay here now—not at his Mother's mercy with the knowledge of everything to come. "Take me home, Pennyworth … Please."
Pennyworth frowned, and there was that worn hand against Damian's brow.
"It's not safe here. I need … need to tell …" Damian couldn't find the words as the darkness began to descend once more; there was simply too much to explain, and no guarantee that Pennyworth would understand or believe him. He needed … "Batman."
Pennyworth understood somehow, because when Damian woke up to the opulent room a second time, Grayson was waiting in full costume by his Robin's bedside instead of causing havoc in England.
"Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend."
-Puck; William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer-Night's Dream"