The Till-Then From the Ever-Since

Chapter 4

A/N: So for the first and (I'm afraid) definitely not the last time, updating this took more than a week, because we got to the end of the pre-edited material. It's longer than all previous segments, at least? The 2000-word rule lasted all of three chapters this time. ^^; Happy birthday to me!


Any action that might have been taken was interrupted by the door into the study upstairs sliding open again, in a narrow rectangle of yellow. Robin's patience had evidently run out.

"Grayson," came flatly from the top of the stairs. "Are you throwing a party?"

"That was one time," Dick called back, with exactly enough injured innocence that Jaybird, Dickie, and Tiny Tim all laughed at him.

He and Wally had organized a get-together of the old Titans crowd last year, when Kori had come back from Tamaran to visit and they'd realized that with Roy back on an even keel, Garth on the surface, Wally living in this universe again, and Raven, Donna, and Vic back from various degrees of dead, they had as close to the full lineup as they were ever likely to get on one planet in one dimension again. (The brief window of resurrection Jericho had had before possessing the wrong being and devolving into insanity again had partly prompted it; Dick had barely had contact with alive-again Joey, before it was once again too late. You had to seize your opportunities where you could.)

He'd wound up hosting it at the Manor, and forgotten to warn Damian. Festivities had been slightly suspended on account of attacking preteen ninja, who'd mistaken them for a home invasion.

He squinted up at his backlit youngest brother. "There's only one of you, right?" Damian was already in the age-range the duplicates all seemed to be hitting, and if there wound up being two identical Damians...well, there would be blood shed over who was the original, for one thing.

"Tt," said the current Robin, descending the stairs as the clock closed behind him. He was definitely kind of mad at Dick for bailing on him, and leaving him out of whatever was going on down here. "What kind of question—" He stopped, staring down at the assemblage for a whole second as everyone else looked up at him. His attention flicked to Nightwing. "Explain," he demanded.

He'd thrown on a domino mask before coming down, mindful of strange eyes, but was otherwise still dressed in the same loose grey pants and wrap shirt he'd had on when Dick had last seen him in the library. All the time travelers (or whatever they were) were more or less openly intrigued.

"Can't," Nightwing shrugged. He never actually penalized Damian for excessive bossiness, but he did drag his heels and otherwise try to give the impression that it wasn't a good way to elicit cooperation. It was slowly bearing fruit, he was pretty sure. Damian's default sentence structure wasn't a command anymore, for one thing.

"So who's he?" drawled little Jay before Dick could relent and get around to a little clarification, since it was his fault Damian hadn't been there for the whole thing. "Alfred's grand-nephew?"

Damian did tend to speak with a clipped, vaguely British accent, and they hadn't gotten a good look at him yet. The question was still clearly calculated to infuriate, and Damian drew himself up in the way that meant trouble.

"Damian Wayne," Red Robin cut in baldly from the back of the group, preempting the kid's self-introduction because Tim could be petty like that. Though considering Damian's ability to piss people off, it was probably for the best that he didn't introduce himself. "The present Robin."

"Wayne?" repeated the first and second little Robins in concert, and they turned to stare up at their most recent successor, who continued to proceed down the steps with his best look of cold superiority. It didn't completely hide his confusion from Dick, but it would probably cover against most people who didn't know him.

Tiny-Tim's eyes were intent on Damian's masked face, undoubtedly analyzing the resemblance. It was more marked every year; he was probably finding it. Red Hood was looking scornful again.

"So did Bruce actually make a kid, or did he just for real adopt this one?" little Jason inquired. Dick had known putting them in the same room was a bad idea.

"He adopted Drake," Damian retorted, coming to a halt two-thirds of the way down the stairs so he could continue to survey the whole group. "I am his real son. What are you doing here, Todd?" he demanded of Red Hood, whose head was presently level with Damian's knees. Damian was really good at taking advantage of the high ground to look down on people—which was Robin tradition, of course, but Dami had definitely added his own dollop of superciliousness to the art.

"He adopted me?" little Tim repeated, with the first real break in his composure. He looked toward Nightwing for reassurance for a split second, and then turned to his older self instead. Ow. "Did something happen to Dad?"

So that was happening, and meanwhile Little-Dick was scowling at Damian, like he'd just taken in that being a brother meant sharing his father, or possibly (since everyone until now had been on some form of their best behavior) that younger brothers could be utter brats.

"Little idiot I was at that age wanted to go home," Big Jason answered Damian's question meanwhile, waving toward Jaybird. Who was advancing toward the stairs.

"Tt. You are not welcome here."

"Take it up with Dumbwing over there; he let me in."

"I'm not sure I should tell you that," Red Robin simultaneously told third-Robin, who tightened his jaw.

"If I can know about the next Robin and Jason can know about me, I can know this. My father is alive. Bruce shouldn't have any reason to adopt me."

Older Tim shrugged noncommittally. "It became convenient."

Dick winced a little at that; Jack Drake's murder had been devastating, at the time, and that adoption had meant a lot to Tim, and he still shouldered a lot of what had been Bruce's responsibilities with Wayne Enterprises. He was probably going to take over eventually. Trust him to be blasé about it all, even if he hadn't been under pressure to avoid contaminating the timeline. (The timeline—Tim could warn himself about the compromised identities, about Captain Boomerang. Just like they could warn Jason about Sheila. And so many things Dick could have prevented, friends he could have saved, if he'd only thought faster, known sooner. He knew better, knew the risk was too high, but the temptation was always there.) Still, Tim could handle himself. Pun intended. Dick chose the conversation where he was actually needed and moved sharply after Little-Jay toward the foot of the steps, to break things up before Damian managed to pick a fight with both Jasons at once.

Which would be a feat, given how completely opposed those two had been so far, but it was a type of feat at which Damian excelled.

"So, did Bruce knock your mom up on purpose?" Jaybird inquired snidely, just before Dick managed to get in with a,

"Hey, guys, give it a rest. Little D, don't give the time-travelers a hard time. Little Wing, back off, cool down. I promise we don't love either of you more than the other."

Both little Robins and the Red Hood scoffed at that, which kind of hurt, but the fight seemed to have been headed off.

(Okay, be honest, he did love Damian more than he'd ever loved Jason. Dami was his Robin; Jason he'd resented wildly. But he had still loved him, in fits and starts, more all the time until suddenly he was gone. Bruce, Dick thought, had loved Jason at least as much as he did Damian, though. Maybe more, without the impediment of the emotional scars he'd picked up since those days, and without the same distrust that clung to Damian even after all these years, because of his upbringing and that viciousness he was probably never going to shake. Or maybe Damian had made up the difference by now. It was hard to tell, anymore.)

"Seriously," he insisted. "You're both my little brothers, okay?"

Damian jerked his chin, not up because from his position on the stairs he was looking down at Nightwing, but with the same confrontational pride. "Even knowing what he'll become, you claim the gutter rat and I are of equal worth?"

Dick's hand shot out to catch little-Jay's fist on its way to Damian's gut, which made Jason stumble to catch his footing since it had been a leaping punch, but Dick had every faith in a Robin's ability to make such a landing, and he didn't look away from Damian. Everybody was watching, now, even Tim's argument with himself stalled out. Damian had a knack for dropping conversational nukes. "We've talked about this," Dick said, every word edged thick with disappointment, not taking his eyes off his youngest brother. "What's next, am I a thieving gypsy?"

Little-him made a funny sucking sound through his teeth, but Dick didn't have time to worry about that. "Grayson," Damian began, set of his chin surly though his eyes were close to pleading. Another day, when he didn't have other baby brothers here to protect, he might have let it go at that. Dick let Jason's hand go, and it vanished somewhere out the left peripheral of his vision. Good, little Jay was staying out of it. Adult Jason was standing over them, looming high to Dick's right, but he didn't seem inclined to interfere.

"I'm going to make this very clear one more time," Nightwing told Damian, who actually flinched a little. Good. He should be ashamed. "What people are worth has nothing to do with where they come from." It wasn't just himself or Jason he was thinking of—Stephanie was from the inner city, too, and Cass was bred from assassins on both sides, and Helena had a mafia background, but that didn't make them worth less than Barbara as Police Commissioner's Daughter. Raven wasn't her father, and neither was Rose. (No matter what Trigon and Deathstroke tried to make them believe.)

And Bruce's blood in him added nothing to Damian's worth, and neither did Talia's, nor did his upbringing as an assassin give or take any. It all came down to what you chose to do with what you had.

He shook his head. Damian was better than this, usually. His best friend was an East End orphan. He'd never be completely free of his mother's influence, but he knew how much of what he'd been raised to believe was wrong. "You're getting too old to behave like this, Dami. It was one thing when you were a child abusing adults, but you're a teenager now, and this Jason's not any older than you."

Damian had been hurt by Dick saying he loved them the same. Dick understood that. You wanted to be loved best, especially compared to people you didn't even like, and Damian wasn't a generous enough person to be able to repress that feeling easily. But Dami needed to understand that it wasn't okay to hurt other people just because he felt bad.

Well. Except bad guys. Violence was their family's standard therapeutic activity.

…He didn't even know how to tell his Robin that, while if he was never Batman again it would still be too soon, there was nothing about being Damian's partner that he regretted.

That didn't mean it was okay for his baby brother to use his love as a weapon against the rest of the family. He'd noticed him trying it against Tim before this, but Tim was an adult, and he knew Dick cared about him. Whatever trust little-Jay had in them was badly shaken right now, and Dick felt a fierce protectiveness for the little brother he'd failed, a kind that even Dami didn't quite merit because Damian had never gone and died on him.

And he had better not.

The muscles around Damian's eyes had tightened, and Dick saw his lips twitch in the way that he knew meant he had almost said I'm sorry. But his pride wouldn't let him actually say it in front of this audience. Dick wished he could justifiably ask them all to go look at something else without ruining the effect of the scolding, but on the other hand, giving that talking-to in front of them all was the punishment.

Damian's eyes hardened, instead, and he sniffed.

"Tt. Well. I didn't realize honesty was now forbidden."

And damn it, no.

He could not let that stand, not with this audience.

"Robin," Dick said—not in the Batman voice, both because he hated it and because if the other kids recognized it, that would probably open a different uncomfortable conversation—though come to think of it, when he'd been twelve, if someone had said something to him about becoming Batman when Bruce retired he would probably have considered the concept 'Bruce retiring' the only real flaw in that plan. Still.

Damian's spine straightened just a fraction—he didn't take being Robin as seriously as Tim had, or at least not in the same way, because he'd only wanted it, at first, as a step closer to his father, but he did understand, now, the position of trust it represented, even if he sometimes needed reminding—and he sucked in a breath and tightened his mouth, a soldier prepared for a chewing-out.

Nightwing drummed his fingers on his elbow. Where to take this. "We do not hurt friends, or allies, or family to make ourselves feel better."

"But Todd—"

Dick shook his head. "Nothing Jason does is license for you to imitate him. And this Jason has never done anything to you."

"Look," Little Jay cut in then, awkwardly, unexpectedly. "It's okay. Whatever. I mean. If he has a grudge against the zombie, I bet it's so justified, and it makes sense he'd take it out on me." Because we're the same person, after all, was the obvious subtext, and dammit, Dick had definitely preferred the 'denial' and 'anger' phases. Why did kids have to process stuff so fast?

He glanced around and smiled, a little, at Little-Jason, feeling Red Hood looming barely two feet away up the steps, and wishing he could see big-Jason's expression from here without making it obvious he was checking on it. "That's big of you, Jay," he said. "Thanks. But just because his reasons make sense doesn't mean it's okay."

Jaybird shrugged.

"Grayson is correct," Damian proclaimed, with an air of magnanimity that he almost pulled off, because he imbued it with such conviction. "I apologize," he said to little-Jay. "My quarrel is not with you."

Dick was almost used enough to the lordly attitude Damian still resorted to whenever he was feeling especially uncomfortable, to not have to stifle laughter; his little self was not thus prepared and had to stuff his wrist in his mouth. Red Hood snorted a little but was of course ignored. Tim was looking sardonic, with the straight-line-mouth expression that made him look way too much like Bruce, and Tiny Tim was staring at Damian like he seriously doubted his existence.

"Uh," said Robin-Jason. His eyebrows were pretty high, but all he said was, "Apology accepted, I guess. Like I said. Evil zombie."

"Great, we're all friends again, swell," the first Robin broke in, fidgeting with impatience, and turned to Nightwing. "Seriously, he calls you 'Grayson?'" he asked, grinning. "I mean, all the time, not just when he's mad at you?"

Dick shrugged, smiling crookedly now that the issue was resolved. It had bothered him, a little, at the beginning, when he'd still been getting to know the snide, condescending brat he'd taken on, but it had been years since he'd thought of the name thing as anything but one of those quirks that made people themselves. Damian used people's last names. It was what he did. Since no one else Dick knew except fellow cops ever had, apart from the times when Robin was problematically loose with surnames in the field it was kind of like having a nickname.

"You didn't notice?" asked little-Tim, the corners of his mouth curling up. "He's only used last names, since he got here."

Little-Dick shot him a rather unfriendly look, offended by the apparent condescension, uh-oh, but didn't say anything except, to Damian, "So, is there anybody who calls you 'Wayne?'"

Nightwing chuckled. Iris West II did, sometimes, when the confluence of events brought Impulse and Robin together in sufficiently secure circumstances. They despised each other with such an icy complexity of rivalry and disdain that Dick was pretty sure they would wind up dating at least once by the time Damian turned twenty, if only because they lost a bet.

He doubted his youngest brother would volunteer this information, and he wasn't wrong, but it was only at the last second that he recognized the shift in Damian's posture that Dick thought of as the 'stirring up trouble' pose, which tended to presage a challenge, and insult, or some kind of test. "Well," he said disinterestedly, "The occasional irritant calls me 'al Ghul.'"

The reaction was everything a troublemaking brat could have hoped for. The Cave floor erupted. Five people should not have been capable of that much noise.

Little-Dick was thumping his forehead with the heel of his hand. Nightwing made out, "Holy cow, he's Talia's, of course he's Talia's—"

"Oh, come on," Little-Jason groaned, flinging his hands up. "Really, Bruce? Really?"

Dick thought he made out a "Swear to God," in Red Hood's voice,and Little Tim had turned to his older self again and clearly demanded information, though you couldn't make out either demand or reply over the general clamor. Damian for his part was looking, to someone who knew him, very on-edge, not at all comfortable with what he had wrought.

"Everyone," Nightwing broke in, in his best slightly-booming cutting-through-noise voice (he'd developed this version of it after his voice first finished changing, and secretly thought of it as 'ringleader voice'). "That's enough."

The tiny crowd fell silent. It was pretty gratifying, even if it did have a lot to do with everyone here being conditioned to shut up when Batman told them to, at least momentarily. Ringleader voice had never worked that reliably on the Titans.

"Wait a second," said little Jason, after a heartbeat of quiet, goggling at Damian again. "If he's twenty-four then this is just about eleven years in the future. Which means you already exist! In my time, I mean."

Damian blinked, and Red Hood gave a snort that was almost a chuckle. "Always wondered about that," he said, leaning back onto his heels in a martial-artist's slouch of unconcern—with his weight there and his arms folded, he'd be a beat behind any sudden attacker, especially with the stairs behind him meaning he couldn't even roll, and he could barely see most of the group on the cave floor. And while the posture made glancing up toward Damian easier to do casually, Damian was also the nearest probable danger.

Standing like that could be a dare or it could be a gesture of subtle harmlessness; with Jason, Dick had the feeling it might be both. "You must've been, what, three, maybe four when I crawled out of my grave, but there was Talia with way more time and attention for my brain-damaged self than you'd expect with a link like that to her Beloved."

Damian scowled, and might have been about to answer, when everyone's attention was claimed by the familiar sound of a deep-throated engine approaching down a long stone tunnel.


A/N: I loved Talia's characterization in Lost Days, but that element of chronology did puzzle me, because she really did not act like Damian was at all thing, and neither did Ra's, but there's no way, short of him speed-aging or Tim living in an intense time loop. (Little-Tim's dad is in his coma phase at this point in his timeline, if that was unclear.) And yeah, Dick is totally overestimating the degree to which Tim feels secure in his place in the family and Dick's affections, and therefore how much Damian's digs bother him, but he has always had problems understanding Tim qua Tim.