Blood Son

Terry flung off Bruce's restraining headlock. "I'm done with your dodges, old man! This is beyond dangerous, and I'm sick of it!"

"I can still handle this." His teacher wouldn't hold his gaze, which was almost enough to unsettle Terry's nerves, but the blatant disregard only brought his rage back to the surface.

He bunched Bruce's collar up to force them face to face. "He got in the cave! He didn't trip a single alarm, and he was ready and waiting to kill you! I don't know what your hang up is, but if I'm going to be risking my life day in and out then I have a right to be in the loop!"

Bruce pushed him back stiffly. He tiredly held a hand to his mouth, like he was trying to keep in words that slipped out regardless of his will. "He was a Robin."

That somewhat threw the younger man. "What? How? Why is it every time I get a straight answer from you, it only leaves me with more questions?!"

Bruce carried on undaunted. With a slow progression he gestured Terry to follow him back to the upper cavern. "I was telling you the truth before. Robin and I were unable to capture Morgan Ducard, at first. When we arrived home, I wouldn't tell him about my history with Nobody-"

"A habit that's hard to break?" Terry felt the irony pertinent to add.

The old man side eyed him, but answered nonetheless. "Evidently, he felt the same as you. Robin attempted to trick Nobody into believing he defected, when he tried to halt Morgan's plan, he was tortured." The doors of the elevator closed and it began to ascend. "Ducard took his emblem and told me every detail of his actions while I traced their whereabouts. When I finally breached his hideout, Nobody and Robin had vanished. What he's been through all these years… it's warped him."

Terry's eyes flicked slightly as he processed. "Wait, you never told me his-"

The elevator opened to the upper levels, quiet again. Bruce stared him down. "The alarms weren't activated, how did you know to come here?"

"Got a text." He answered with a smug vagueness reflecting his mentor's earlier tone. "But I'm not the one on the stand right now. Forgive my bluntness, but I've only met three former Robins and at least two of them hate your guts right now. The papers were always pretty iffy on exactly how many sidekicks followed you around, so who is this one?"

"His name was Damian." Bruce declared with unusually little fuss. "I took him in when Talia was having trouble with the League of Assassins."

It was to some shock and pride when Terry didn't even flinch at the words or take any time to process before pressing him again. "He was an al Ghul? Why would she trust him with you?"

"He was an al Ghul. She knew I had a problem with letting children wander unsupervised." His lips quirked briefly and his eyes swam with some long past memory of a boy looking at him with the most unimpressed expression and declaring that he was less than what he'd been built up to be. "She wanted me to train him, but we didn't get along and I couldn't quite get through to him. I went missing for some time after that. And Dick took the cowl for a while."

Terry raised an eyebrow making a mental note to have Max go looking for more information on this shift in responsibilities. "He wasn't an al Ghul when you got back. Joined the Wayne family like everyone else, huh?"

"Not exactly." The old man thought of how his last Robin followed after a smiling Batman, wholly separated from himself regardless of his presence in the cave. "They all thought I was dead. It fractured a relationship that I never had the chance to repair before he was taken. I wanted to fix this myself, because it is my fault Nobody kidnapped him in the first place. I hoped it wasn't him."

Terry addressed him quietly. "You know he's dangerous, right?" He stared evenly at his mentor. "This isn't just a temper tantrum and he's not exactly willing to back off. He's clearly capable of killing and even if you could catch him, what do you think you can do?"

The honest answer was to bring him home, but Bruce had not hung in the game for so long to bend to these emotions against all logic. The familiarity of those frenzied blue eyes pierced his mind. "I'll help him."

Max's space was a far cry from the old clock tower of the original Oracle. Small and hidden in plain sight. No, her headquarters comprised the top three floors of the long abandoned Gotham Gazette building. Situated on the frayed edges of Old Gotham, the ruined structure looked beyond repair outside, too broken down to be safe for even the most daring of Jokerz. Entering from below was rife with pitfalls of rotted wood and unstable ceilings. Clever traps in the guise of useless architecture. Trying to touch the top floors led to the spontaneous shorting of any inferior tech. Though inferior was pretty much anything Oracle didn't dabble in. Max's large room was essentially floating on electromagnetism just over the real crumbling building.

The inside was awash in screens of green codes. Holo-emitters projected the vast blackness of space dotted with stars above a web of wiring. Hovering in the center of the design was a chair fitted to neutrally link Max into nearly every computer of Superhero importance and appear as a specter of ones and zeros, which she used to frequently check in on the Batcave in lieu of being physically present.

But below all this intricate tech and responsibility was an apartment. Nothing too grand, all the utilities plus a game room. Upon being allowed in, Terry found her in the living room. Lying sideways on an old purple couch with a leg propped up against the back cushion and a basic laptop on her stomach. She ruffled her pink hair in thought.

Terry dropped himself on the floor, back to her position and craned his neck to gauge her face. "New puzzle?"

"Mr. Drake hasn't lost his touch." She replied without blinking, as though the brief lapse in her attention from the screen would result in the encrypted program evolving into an A.I. capable of eating itself. Which come to think of it, was not implausible. It was something of a game the two developed, locking a paused virtual chess match behind increasingly complicated coding and trading it back and forth for their opponent to crack before they could make their moves.

"Got a few minutes to spare?"

Max made some adjustments to the code before closing it down and accessing her personal Super-records. They were largely compiled from old Watchtower profiles and a long history of news articles from Gotham to Star City. Hardly comprehensive, but a solid start. "Ready when you are."

"The old man told me that Nobody was a former Robin he took in, named Damian. I need to know if there is any public evidence that he was ever introduced as a member of the Wayne family."

It took more time than Terry was used to from her but Max eventually raised an inquisitive eyebrow at her computer screen. "If the press caught sight of him at all they never got a concrete answer before he vanished from the spotlight." She turned the device so he could glance at a few hammy tabloids with attention grabbing headlines of Gotham's socialites. "My guess is he probably spent more time as Robin than Damian, but there was speculation that Mr. Wayne finally had a blood son somewhere on the manor grounds. The problem is, that happened just about every time he adopted."

"He told me there was a point where Mr. Grayson was serving as Batman and that Damian was his Robin. Let's work back from there, find the time where the Dynamic Duo were notably different and then cross reference that with whatever came up on the Wayne side of things."

She reversed the screen and resumed her search. This took even longer than before and Terry felt his anxious energy manifest in his foot tapping reflexively against the floor. Max reached over and tugged his ear. "Take a nap. I can tell when you're wound up, and if you keep agitating yourself and me I'm going to have to boot you out until I'm done."

"I'm fine." He winced when she gave his earlobe another pull and waved off her grip in irritation.

"No," She shot him a disapproving stare. "You have been going practically non-stop for the last few months, even before all of this. You are tired, and I can only work so fast. So, stop acting like him and get a sandwich, get some sleep, and talk to me when I can't trace two bags under each eye."

He felt like arguing, but he knew she was right. It wouldn't do for him to fall over at the next emergency. He stood up and strolled to her kitchen, determined to make her groceries pay for being ordered around like a kid.

He could almost believe it when Grayson called their nightly activities 'flying'. It was completely frivolous of course, but that was to be expected of the smiling Batman by now.

"Think of it as a training exercise!" He chirped in response to the criticism. "How high can you get from a dive and glide? I bet you can't beat my record."

"I fail to see how this is useful."

Grayson laughed again. "The farther you are from the ground, the more surprising it is when you swoop down. We are the night, remember?" He said, donning that poor imitation of his father's voice again.

"-Tt-"

The man drummed his fingers against his thigh in thought. "Tell you what, you indulge me this once and if you still don't think it works, then I'll let you use your katana when we spar tomorrow."

It would be appealing to use his old weapon again, even if only for a little while, but… "No, if I play along with your insipid challenge, I want to learn how to use your escrima sticks." He thought for sure Grayson would take it poorly, call him a usurping brat or something equally antagonistic.

Instead, he paused… and then looked proud? "I'm glad you're giving some other toys a try for a change. We can make you your own pair if you want."

The words he prepared to spit in response faltered as the conversation deflated in tone. "Forget it." He mumbled.

Grayson tapped his shoulder, redirecting his turned away gaze. And then he took a running leap off the top of Wayne Tower and with a snap of his cape rose above Robin again.

Terry snorted awake three hours later. Max sent him a concerned glance from the other end of the living room.

Terry yawned, rubbing his face with the palm of his hand. "Any pictures of him?"

"Mostly amateur. But I did find one of a kid hanging out with Dick Grayson shortly after the cowl traded ownership. Black hair, blue eyes, typical family traits. Most people thought it was a photo shopped shot of Tim Drake."

"Pull it up real quick?" The frame was a bit hazy at the edges, caught in a moment that insinuated the photographer was forced to make a run for it soon after. The younger of the two in the picture had turned to see the shutter, his face the exact archetype of royal indignity while behind him was Dick Grayson, smiling benignly. He had a hand on the boy's shoulder, just barely secure enough to be called a grip, but there was no doubt the kid could slip away if he wanted. It probably said enough that the photographer got to post his picture.

"Well I can see where those rumors came from, kid looks similar to the old man." Max commented.

Terry raised an eyebrow. "Max, I might be missing something, but they all look similar to the old man. He practically surrounded himself with clones if I'm being honest." He even gave his face a wave of exasperation.

Max swatted his head lightly. "Not that, dummy." She drew her finger around the kid's nose, ears, forehead, and cheekbones. A line traced after her touch. "His facial structure is damn uncanny. Mr. Grayson isn't similar like that." She summoned up an old photo of Bruce at the Wayne Gala and traced the same areas. Side by side it was more obvious. "The shape of the eyes is different, but everything else is pretty close. You said he was an Al Ghul, so we can probably presume-"

"Talia." Terry shivered. "Why would he ever try to start something with a villainess? I'm pretty sure it's rule one in the book!" He rubbed his temples, feeling an oncoming headache.

"Could you say the same of a villainess?"

"Stop being philosophical, I'm trying to figure out how to bring this up without also losing my lunch."

Max patted his shoulder sympathetically. "I think you need back-up."

It was a late night, something he'd been used to for a while, but no more welcome than when the practice was new. Dick Grayson sipped at some sugar-laden coffee. His phone buzzed on the table.