Part 2 – Chapter 4

Jason left Damian back at the safe house when he went out. It was suffocating having the little brat around, even though Damian had been silent since he spilled Dick's secret. Damian had just been sitting there, staring off into the distance. When Jason asked him what he was doing, he responded with 'thinking'.

It was odd behaviour for the youngest who was a person of action.

Red Robin was also missing from the skies. Red Hood dodged Nightwing by staying out of his route, having spotted him heading that way on his bike.

Batman… Jason told himself he didn't care what Batman was doing. The Batman needed to worry about him.

"Really, Kitten?"

Red Hood was on his feet and pointing a gun at Catwoman before she even finished saying 'Kitten'.

"What do you want?" he growled.

She moved around him, graceful and lithe.

"Blowing this place up will not help the people around here. This gang will just kick a family to the streets and take their home or something. You know how the gangs in Gotham work."

"Yeah, well, they'll be scrambling for a while and all sorts of things come out of the woodwork then."

"Uh-huh." She wasn't convinced at all. "Let's talk."

"No thanks." He blinked. He blinked and Catwoman was in his face, claws at his throat and his gun pointing at air as she clawed into his wrist.

Red Hood could see the shiny red curve of his hood reflected in her goggles.

"It was not a request."

After Red Hood disarmed and dismantled the explosive he had made, they retired to the nearest dive which sold food and had tables.

He took off the hood but kept the mask underneath on while Selina took off her goggles.

Red Hood waited for Catwoman to speak. She glared at him but after a few moments started talking, in a scolding tone.

"You shouldn't have pulled what you did."

"What are you talking about?"

"You were free to hold Batman not telling you about Nightwing's heritage over Batman and Nightwing however, you shouldn't have done that in front of Red Robin and Robin."

"Hey, give me a break. That wasn't part of the plan."

"Was there a plan?" she asked in a smug tone. As if she already knew the answer would be 'no'. "I see. So you went for the short-term result of hurting everyone you could. Hard to believe you think you can control Gotham's crime."

"Shut up. You ain't my mother. Go bother Dickie-Bird."

"I am not your mother, no. But that doesn't mean I don't care about you. And it certainly doesn't mean I'm going to sit by and let you hurt people around you, like my son."

"Oh," Red Hood said, rolling his head. "So this is about your son. Well, I'm sorry I teased him. It won't happen again." His voice was sickly sweet as he spoke. It figured that people cared about how Dick was feeling.

"I'll pretend that was sincere," she responded. "Now, how are you doing? It's been a few days since you found out, how are you dealing with it?"

"Huh?" Why was she asking him this? There was no reason she should care about him. Like there was no reason Bruce should care about him.

"Batman and Nightwing were stupid about this. Handled it all wrong. Truthfully, I thought they had at least mentioned it… or added it to N's file," she grumbled out the last bit in annoyance.

Red Hood blinked. Did she just… agree with him? Even though he hadn't voiced his opinion? Come to think of it, Dick had asked Bruce if he had added it to the file in the conversation he overheard. He hadn't heard anything after that.

"Yeah… how did you react to that news anyway?" he asked.

Selina raised an eyebrow.

"You didn't overhear that bit? Good." Her smile was enough to make Jason shiver. "I guess you'll have to talk to your brother to find out."

"He's not my brother!"

Red Robin's room was locked. If it wasn't for Conner swearing that he saw Red Robin go in there, the team would think the room empty.

No one came out. No one went in.

"I think he's got enough supplies in there to last the winter," Bart commented and then evaluated the brooding situation Red Robin had going as, "totally crash."

Conner pressed his ear to the wall, straining to hear something, anything from inside. It was a strange thing for him to do since he normally could hear a fly beat its wings from miles away if he wanted but, Red Robin must have done something to damper sound.

He knocked.

"Red Robin?" he questioned. When there was no answer, he messaged Nightwing for the override code and let himself in.

Tim was hunched over the desk, his cape lying spread on the bed. As Conner walked closer, he realised that Tim was using his computer glove, tapping and swiping through information. He was muttering something under his breath.

"There… it's all there…"

"What?" Conner questioned, causing Tim to jump. Conner jolted back, a little freaked out by now. He had managed to sneak up on Tim!

Which led to another discovery: Tim's mask was off and sitting on the desk. Tim's eyes were lined in red, indicating a bad night's rest if he actually left his computer and slept at all.

Tim sniffed.

"It's all there. Not even hidden. If we had bothered to look…" and he clamped his mouth shut there before he revealed things he didn't know whether he could reveal.

"You would have found out that Nightwing was Batman's and Catwoman's kid?" Conner asked gently.

"You knew?"

Conner felt like he had kicked a puppy when he nodded.

"We were around when he first found out, back when he was Robin. I don't know how he found out or what happened afterward, you'll have to ask Wally about that. But, he came to the cave with Wally and we hung out. We didn't even realise anything was wrong until Batman came up and he just froze before hiding out in his room, sort of like what you're doing."

"Not hiding," Tim pointed out.

"Right," Conner said, agreeing for the sake of agreeing. "Anyway, we didn't let him get away with it. We let him know that we were there for him, even though we didn't understand what was wrong. And now, I say the same to you; anything you need, we will help you with. We're your friends." When Tim gave him a flat stare and Conner got over how he could actually see the unimpressed eyes instead of a mask, he added, "of course, sometimes we're going to help you when you don't want it. So, I'm going to pull you out of here and we're going to watch a movie."

Damian looked at the sword on his wall. If he was going to do this, it needed to be now. Before his father realised he had returned to the manor.

He bit his lip as he considered his options. But, to his young mind there was only one. He had been raised to consider himself Batman's only blood son. Now he knew he wasn't and that he needed to prove himself.

He had to destroy his competition. He had to.