Seeing Bruce again was just plain uncomfortable.
If Dick's being honest, he's tried not to think too much about Bruce's death. It's easier if he doesn't let himself think about it. He doesn't want to deal with it – he doesn't know if he'll do it well.
Though really, he's not sure what counts as 'dealing with it well'. Someone's dead. You can't change it.
He doesn't know what Damian said to Bruce, just that he seemed pretty similar – emotionally – when he went into the room as he did when he came out of it – which makes sense. It wasn't really magic. It just tells Dick that hopefully, Damian didn't have a mental breakdown or anything.
And then, there's obviously... the lie. The reason seeing Bruce made him sick with guilt, in addition to sick with grief. Because he and Alfred forged that damned letter and it seemed like a … well, not good, but reasonable idea at the time, because doesn't Damian deserve to believe his dad would accept him? Doesn't Bruce deserve a chance to make up for rejecting him earlier?
But it wasn't really Bruce's "making up" for it. Just Alfred's good hand-writing. And Damian...
It's not doing him any favors, either. The kid already can't trust anyone. If he finds out – Dick doesn't even want to imagine the look on the poor kid's face.
And any time Dick tries to think of what Bruce would say about the situation, he comes up blank. Bruce could be... inscrutable... at times. And any time you're hoping for something emotional, there's a snowball's chance in hell of him reciprocating – most of the time, it felt like he just wanted you to get back on the mission. As a teenager, Dick hated it. As an adult, he understood it more than he liked to admit. But either way, it means he can't imagine whatever Bruce would actually say about Damian.
Damian is quiet for pretty much the rest of the day, and Dick doesn't try to get him to talk about anything. It feels like a cop-out, a coward move. Like he's too scared to piss him off to try to help. But every time he does try to help Damian – emotionally, not in combat – it winds up feeling like one step forward, two steps back. Even just saying it was okay to not do everything alone or that he cares about Damian's safety made the kid more withdrawn.
Dick will confess – he's kind of hoping things will go back to what passed for normal once they're back in the field. He'd been counting down the last couple of days, waiting for the mandatory three weeks healing time to be over because if he doesn't he's setting a bad example and he's actually trying to set a good example right now.
(It sucks, thanks for asking).
In the meanwhile, he's keeping on top of things in civilian life, which mostly consists of monitoring what's going on with Wayne Enterprises via checking his emails. It's... not the most intellectually stimulating activity.
At least it isn't, before he gets an email with a file that appears to be corrupted. He doesn't even know how that would happen, and he doesn't recognize the sender either. LeaH at idata dot ht. Sounds like a data analyst maybe? But he can't figure out why they'd be emailing him or why there'd be a corrupted file in their attachments.
… If he's really curious, he could ask Babs. And it'd be better than sitting around doing nothing.
And besides... it could be paranoia, but there is a possibility this isn't related to Dick Grayson's life, but rather Batman's. Kind of like getting an unexpected package with no return address in the mail. Sure, it's probably harmless. But maybe it's a bomb or a dead body part.
Okay, he's definitely asking Babs.
On his way over, he tries to figure out who it could be. He didn't recognize the ht at the end, he's wondering if it was supposed to be anonymous. There's no real way to do a no-return-address situation with email.
An acronym, maybe? If you include the .ht you could have LeHah in there...
Aethalida is an order of moths... but even when he was active, anagrams weren't Killer Moth's style...
… Talia Head.
He feels like kicking himself. One of Talia's aliases. He's amazed it took her this long to try to contact him.
It had better not be about Damian. He doesn't know...
Well, he has no clue what to do if she wants him back. Everything he's seen so far just makes Dick think Damian's childhood in the League of Shadows must have been nightmare-ish. Sending him back there isn't an option.
It'd be really easy to freak out and drive right back to the penthouse – or Wayne Manor, Dick thinks Damian's with Cass right now, training – and insist on dragging Damian with him, but Dick's trying not to freak the kid out. They can act once they have information. Once Barbara deciphers the file for him.
… She'll be in the Batcave with Cass and Damian anyway, won't she? She spends more time there than at her own apartment.
Dick goes to the Batcave. Dick called it. Cass, Damian, and Babs are already all there. Babs is at the computer, and Cass seems to be sparring with Damian, attacking him quickly. Damian's on the defensive – backing up, blocking...
Kind of a waste of energy to try blocking someone as fast as Cass, but Dick isn't going to back-seat-sparring-partner. He assumes there's a point to the exercise and just walks around them.
Damian gets hit and the two of them stop briefly.
"Going on more comm duty tonight, Grayson?" Damian asks.
The kid almost sounds offended that Grayson was on comms earlier. Dick has no clue why.
"Maybe," Dick says, "But right now I have a case for Oracle." He smiles at Barbara, who is still sitting at the Batcave computer.
"Say please," Barbara says.
"Pretty please?"
Damian makes a noise of disgust.
"What have you got?" Barbara asks.
"Let me use your computer?" Dick says.
She wheels back a pace, Dick pulls up his email, and in the background, Cass and Damian get back to whatever sparring exercise they had.
"I need you to find out what this file originally said," Dick says, "If that's a thing you can do."
Barbara cracks her knuckles, which Dick knows is just for show, and says, "I almost certainly can. Give me a moment, I'll get a program on it."
"How's my program coming?" Damian asks from where he's sparring. The distraction slows him down and he gets hit, but rather than starting again, he just walks up right next to Barbara and puts his hands on his hips.
"What program?" Dick asks. He wasn't even aware that Damian asked Barbara for anything; as far as Dick could tell, Damian just didn't like her much.
Barbara talks while typing: "Damian gave me some sketches and photos of one of the people who got mutilated by Valentin."
"The dollotrons?" Dick asks. He can't help but glance down at Damian. He honestly...
Well, it sounds bad, but he wasn't really expecting Damian to care about them.
"The one we didn't save," Damian says, and his voice is lower and heavier and...
"We will save her," Dick says, just because he's pretty sure Damian needs to hear it. "I'd be really surprised if anyone could evade Oracle for long."
"I feel responsible," Damian says.
That's a first. But Dick doesn't say it out loud. He doesn't want to discourage Damian if he is starting to be more... sympathetic. "We both are," Dick says. "We were both on the case."
"Tt."
"I'm getting the file," Barbara says. On the screen, what looks like a scan of a piece of paper starts rendering. It seems to be a handwritten note. It reads:
My father has an active agent on a mission in Gotham. I have reason to believe the target is Lucius Fox. What you do with the information is up to you.
Behind him, Dick can hear Cass slowly sounding out the letter. He doesn't know whether it'd be ruder to ignore her or try to help.
Barbara speaks, solving the dilemma: "Someone might try to assassinate Lucius Fox. We got a tip."
Cassandra walks away quickly.
"Who?" Damian asks. "Who's 'my father'?"
Right, this isn't going to be fun. But Dick explains: "I'm pretty sure it's Ra's Al Ghul, since I think your mom sent the note."
For only an instant, Damian looks almost blank – eyes opened wider than usual, mouth slightly slack – but then he settles on scowling. "Why did she contact you?"
"As opposed to...?"
Damian gestures quickly, pointing his thumb at his chest. "Her son. Me."
Damn. Dick really doesn't know, and he's guessing Damian's taking it personally. But Dick figures that no matter what he feels about her, Damian deserves to feel like his mom cares about him. So he says, "Maybe she thought she was respecting your wishes. If you left, maybe she thought you didn't want to hear from her..."
Damian just scowls further.
"I'm sorry, Damian," Dick says.
"Tt. Just focus on the mission. Why would Grandfat – Ra's want to kill this man?"
He doesn't want to call Ra's Grandfather. Dick notices that. He doesn't know the full reason – Damian rarely talked about his mother and he talked about Ra's even more seldomly – but he can imagine why.
"Ra's Al Ghul is one of the few supervillains who knows Batman's secret identity," Barbara says, thankfully taking over.
"'Supervillains'," Damian says with a snort.
"Um, yes," Barbara continues. "Anyway, it means that he knows almost everyone else's as a result. Though I think Stephanie and I are safe."
She won't be, Dick thinks, if he keeps allowing a connection between Barbara Gordon and Dick Grayson. Ra's doesn't know who Oracle is – he might not even know Oracle exists – but he'd still know that Barbara is important to him.
And if he did go after her, he'd have no idea what hit him. C'mon, Grayson, resist the urge to be over protective.
"So this is what?" Damian asks. "Ra's retroactively trying to strike at Father through his company?"
"Through his friends," Dick says quickly.
"That's so..." Damian frowns. "It isn't right."
"You're telling me," Dick says.
Damian shakes his head sharply. "I don't mean it's amoral. Obviously it is. But Ra's knows that he has dangerous enemies in Gotham. The mission would have some objective besides pettiness. Otherwise, it's a sheer waste of manpower."
The kid is almost certainly right. Ra's is a master-plan kind of guy.
"I'll see what Lucius has been up to," Barbara says, and immediately starts working on the computer again. "It's possible he's crossed with Ra's' operations without realizing it."
In the corner of Dick's vision, there's a dark shape, and Dick turns to just see Cass, already dressed as Batman. "I'm ready," she says.
"I'm getting ready too!" Damian says and quickly runs off to the locker area. He's out of sight, but not out of earshot – he keeps talking as he's changing, projecting his voice. "You're going to need me on this mission. I have more experience on missions such as these than you do."
"'Missions such as these'?" Cass repeats, a bit awkwardly.
"Assassination missions. You've only done one."
Even under the cowl, it's possible to tell that Cass is cringing slightly.
"Any... advice you could offer would be appreciated," Dick says carefully.
"Well first, we need the target's schedule," Damian says. "To know where he is, who's coming in and who's going out of the location, any weaknesses in security – food delivery is a weakness in security – "
"So working on this backwards," Barbara says, "If we're protecting him, we need to know where he is and to limit the amount of people in contact with him."
"Exactly. The more paranoid, the more difficult the target. Bodyguards, no spontaneous visits, isolated locations... all make things hard. It's ludicrously easy to assassinate someone in a busy city in a public building."
The two of them are talking so matter-of-fact about the topic that it's easy to pretend it's just two professionals, just doing what they should do... rather than on the fact that Damian is almost certainly talking from experience.
That was Damian's argument though, wasn't it? He's valuable for his... experience.
"We need a map of the security cameras," Cass interjects. "In the building. To mark the places you can sneak by."
"Pulling it up," Barbara says. "And I have what Lucius has been up to. Though specific interest is for his daughter, working as an intern in Russia, who went missing not too long ago."
"Tam's missing?" Dick asks. He feels like it's something he should have known.
Barbara nods.
This is going to be a two-part mission, then. Dick assumes finding her is next on the menu after they make sure no one kills her dad.
… Assuming Talia's intel was on the money. Dick realizes there are two points where they could be wrong. She could have misunderstood the situation – assumed Lucius was the target when he wasn't –
Or she could be willfully misleading him. Dick's kicking himself for not considering it earlier. But historically, it's been difficult to pin down which side she's working on.
He'll share that with Babs later, though. He doesn't know if it'd create a fight if he started insinuating Damian's mother was untrustworthy right in front of him.
"It's getting close to five," Dick says. "Clock out time for some people." The building is going to be chaotic, which means it's the perfect place for someone to strike. "I think Cass and Damian should get to Wayne Tower."
"I'm ready," Damian says, coming out from the locker area, dressed as Robin. He's all business. That's good, Dick thinks.
"Won't Batman and Robin be kind of conspicuous in broad – okay well, diminishing-but-still-existent – daylight?" Barbara asks.
"No," Cass says.
"She's right," Damian says. "We can sneak around."
"That means an assassin can too," Barbara says.
"I know," Cass says. "We'll be there." She nods at Damian and jerks her head towards the door. Damian follows.
He seems to be pretty comfortable working with Cass, at least. That's something.
"Take something subtler than the flying Batmobile," Dick says. "You can take the quad-bat."
"I'm driving," Damian says, and quickens his pace to arrive first.
Cass doesn't fight him for control. She just gets on the back. Which, Dick will confess, he wouldn't do. He'd just say "nice try" or something.
Maybe that's why Damian's more comfortable with her.
Once the two of them leave the Batcave, Dick leans closer to Barbara.
"You want something," she says. "I can tell."
Dick sighs. "How much do you trust our source?"
"I was about to ask you, actually," Barbara says. "You worked with her last."
"'With' is a bit of a stretch." They'd wound up on opposite sides when Talia was trying to put together an army to – in her words – defend herself and Damian against Ra's. All he gleaned from that was that she wasn't as amoral as the other supervillain she was working with at the time. "I hate dissecting Al Ghul motives," Dick says. "We don't have enough information to make a good hypothesis. Have you traced the email?"
Barbara groans. "No good intel from the IP address. The email was sent from a VPN. I hate those things."
"Except when you're using them."
Barbara rolls her eyes and smiles slightly.
"Any other ideas?"
"I'm working on it. And I'm compiling a list of known associates of the League of Shadows and running a facial recognition program against them from the security cameras in Gotham and nearby city's airports."
"It could be a new guy," Dick says.
"I'm still checking all potential leads."
Which is smart, Dick knows. He just hates feeling like he can't do anything. Barbara can reduce everyone's workload by 75 percent and get them on the right track from the Batcave. He can't.
It's been practically 3 weeks. He's sure it won't make any difference... except to Damian.
But still. If things get risky enough, he's going back in the field. He'd rather Damian's feelings get hurt from the 'unfairness' of it all than the kid himself getting hurt.
It will be easier to deal with if Barbara is on his side though, so Dick decides to run the idea past her. "If we're dealing with League of Shadows," he says, "I might be needed back in the field."
"I know."
Hmm. That was suspiciously easy.
"You're back to 100 percent?" Barbara asks.
Dick shrugs. "You're never back to 100 percent right after an injury, even when you're cleared for action. But I'm at least 90 percent."
Barbara frowns slightly.
Before she can say anything, there's a slight ding on the computer. She pulls something up and –
Damn.
She got a match on her facial recognition from Gotham Airport... for Slade Wilson.
Deathstroke.
Dick is definitely needed back in the field.