MechaNeko

He stumbles off his bike, letting it crash to the floor, blinding hot rage coursing through his system and making his limbs quake. A pressure builds behind his eyes, throbbing in time with his heart. The whoosh of blood in his ears drowns out every other noise.

The cooler is heavy.

Jason tries hard not to think about what’s inside, but as it swings forward with each step, the… the head lolls around. He wishes he’d packed it better. Put some padding down, wrapped it in a blanket or something, anything to stop it moving in there, but the thought of Damian suffocating inside that box, with cladding invading his mouth, he can’t—

When he closes his eyes, he sees black. The complete, total darkness of death. His breath hitches and he chokes on terror, on memories, on the lingering taste of formaldehyde on his tongue and dirt in his mouth.

He opens his eyes and sees Batman.

He blinks them closed again and sees frosted lips, tinged blue and parted with their last breath. Eyelashes wet and glistening, joined together by spiderwebs of snowflakes. Damian’s thick, dark hair now brittle and coated in white.

He opens his eyes and sees Bruce.

Damian deserves more than this. More than a cooler. More than that failure as a father.

Jason’s gloves bite into the handle, creaking as he tightens his grip, already itching for the comforting weight of his guns, but he won’t—can’t—take his hands away from the box.

Bruce is at the computer, Tim to the far left, corkboard dripping with red string. Stephanie is at his side, half-way through tacking something up when he enters. Jason has no idea where the others are. That’s fine. It’ll be easier this way.

“Oh, shit,” Tim whispers when he looks up and sees the warpath that Jason’s waging.

“Jason?” Stephanie pulls down her mask and drops the thread. It pools on the floor like blood.

It takes longer for the old man to react, but he’s up and out of his seat before Jason can get to him. Facing him with that infuriating crease to his brow that says he doesn’t understand what’s going on but he has no doubt that you’re in the wrong for it, the sanctimonious, hypocritical prick.

Jason… shit. Jason takes a deep breath. He does what he can to relax his muscles, the tenseness in his arms screaming bloodlust and violence.

He was—he was going to throw the cooler at him.

He was going to throw the cooler at Bruce, but… but he can’t do that.

Damian doesn’t deserve that.

With careful movements, slow and steady even as he trembles, he places the cooler on the floor between them and opens the lid.

Jason’s no stranger to decapitations. He’s hacked off many heads—more than Bruce will ever know—shoved them into duffle bags, burnt them, left them rotting on the floor, whatever. He doesn’t care. He’s done it all before. He’s seen it all before. 

He keeps his eyes closed.

“Look,” he says, when he finally has some control. His voice is dark, a low growl in the dim light of the cave. “Look at what you’ve done.”

Nobody moves.

Nobody moves and Jason wants to fucking scream.

“This is your fault, Bruce! Look at what you’ve done!”

Slowly, agonisingly slowly, Bruce moves towards the cooler, flicking furtive eyes towards him with each step. Stupid! Jason wants to scoff, but he can’t breathe enough to make a sound. Does he think he’ll shoot him? Before he can even see what his actions have cost them?

Finally, he kneels down in front of the cooler, and with one long, last look at Jason, he peers into the makeshift coffin.

Jason’s not sure what he expects to happen. 

He wants to kill him—he deserves to die—but… But he wants him to suffer first. As, no doubt, Damian did.

As Jason did.

Bruce has never been one to show emotion. Jason watches his face carefully, even as the edges of his vision fizz and blur together. His fingers twitch, itching to punch, beat him bloody in the hopes of evoking an actual response. Make him scream when he won’t do it himself.

A slight downturn of his mouth is the only sign of his displeasure and Jason thinks that’s all he’s going to get, that’s all they’re worth to him, when he reaches delicately into the ice box and turns the head over.

The sound he makes…

It’s quiet. Not the tortured screaming that Jason hopes, but a halting, scuppering breath inwards, small and weak and catching. And then he moans, low and deep, and his whole body deflates with it. 

Jason’s killed people before. He’s been around death. Seen them struggle, watched as they gurgled and choked on their own blood, and breathed their last.

Watching Bruce now, it’s like he’s already dealt the fatal blow.

The gun—gun? When had he pulled out his gun?—in Jason’s hand trembles.

“This is your fault,” he repeats, quieter now, but his words echo through the cave regardless, whispering accusations back to them.

At the sound of his voice, Bruce places Damian’s head back in the box with reverence, and visibly pulls himself together. He squeezes his eyes closed and holds a hand over his mouth, before sucking in a deep, shuddering breath. He doesn’t stand.

“Damian…” His voice is hoarse, as if he’s screamed his grief from the rooftops. But he hasn’t. This is Bruce, after all, he’s barely said a word. Suddenly, the gun in Jason’s hand seems a lot steadier.

Another deep breath and his shoulders stop quaking. One more and he looks up to meet Jason’s eyes.

“Jason…” he says, in that infuriatingly calm and patronising voice, “This isn’t Damian.” 

Now, he stands up. Now, he takes a step away from the box and now, Jason’s heart screams at him to shoot, just fucking shoot him, but he can’t, not until he gets something, some sort of reaction, some sort of indication that they actually matter!

“What the hell are you talking about, it’s—”

“He’s right, Jason,” says Tim, coming up from behind him with his hands splayed outwards as if he’s trying to calm a wild animal. The way Jason sees red right now, he may as well be. “It’s not Damian. Damian and Dick just came back from patrol. They’re in the showers.”

“Stay out of this! You—”

Out of the corner of his eyes, he catches a flash of purple as Stephanie races towards the changing rooms.

“He’ll be here soon. Just put the gun down.”

“Oh, fuck off, Bruce! You can’t sweep this under the rug, you can’t bury it. This is your fault! You—”

“What is going on here?”

Jason's neck nearly snaps with the speed his head turns to see Damian—alive, whole, unharmed save for a brace around his wrist—striding into the cave proper, hair still damp from his post-patrol shower. Dick trots behind him, his face creased in concern.

“Your head in a box,” Stephanie answers, her grin straining against the tension. No one laughs.

“What are you talking about, Brown?” 

Jason hadn’t ever thought that he’d be relieved to hear Damian’s grating arrogance before, but the warm rush he feels at his voice nearly knocks him over. He studies him, hardly daring to breathe as they close the gap, and he looks… he looks fine. The same as normal. Right? It’s really him?

“Jason?” Dick asks, shirtless with a towel hanging loosely from his neck. “What’s happening?”

The gun dips as they get closer—it’s him, it has to be him—but he won’t let it fall. He won’t put it down. Not yet.

Damian spares him a wary glance as they finally come close to the cooler, but whatever threat Damian thinks he poses loses out to his curiosity. He stands directly in front of Bruce—directly in front of Jason’s target—and leans down to study the… the head.

At the movement, Jason blinks and sucks in a breath as if he’s been doused with cold water. The gun shakes as he pulls back his hand, flicking the safety on with another, quick breath that wobbles only slightly as he blows it out in a long, controlled stream.

As soon as the gun is lowered, Bruce sucks in a quiet breath and both Tim’s and Dick’s shoulders dip in relief. It almost makes him want to pull it back up again, but Damian leans into the cooler and he has to know, he has to see what they’ll do.

Dick begins to lean over Damian’s shoulder, lightly pushing Bruce back so he can get a good look at what’s causing all the fuss. 

Really, he’s not sure what he expects Damian to do, but… all he does is tense, as unnaturally still as the head itself, barely breathing as he drinks the sight in. 

Dick does the opposite.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he shouts, jerking back and almost stumbling over Bruce, who grips both his biceps to steady him. Jason's chest doesn’t ache at the easy contact that Dick shrugs away from. It doesn’t.

“God! Fuck…” he moans, smothering the sounds in his towel that he holds over his face, his shoulders heaving as he sucks in air through the material. There it is. That’s the reaction that Jason would have expected from a father. 

It’s not surprising. He’s heard that they’ve a complicated relationship, that Dick stepped up when Bruce couldn’t. Here's the proof of it. 

“Damian?” Dick asks, head turning towards him even as he presses the towel into his eyes.

Damian just clicks his tongue in his patented expression of aggravation, but his words are  empty, hollow. Like he’s playacting at being himself. 

“I’m here, Grayson. I have been with you the whole night. It is not me. Obviously.”

“Right, right…” Dick takes a fortifying breath, and then another, until he’s finally gotten himself composed. Eventually, he drags the towel over his head and scrapes his hair with it, still breathing deep. “You’ve been with me the whole night. It’s not you. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Damian agrees, vacantly, kneeling down in front of the cooler. “It is not me.”

It’s not him.

Jason’s struggling to breathe through it, even as the rest of them calm down and start strategising. They all turn towards each other, forming a semi-circle with him on the other side. He could join in. This could be his case, too. It deserves to be, he was the one that found it, after all. 

If only he could breathe.

“God, I feel sick… Clone?”

“The most likely theory. It should narrow the culprits down. Cadmus?”

“Why do it in the first place? What does it mean? Why Damian?”

“We need to survey the scene, run a DNA analysis, there might be something there…”

Their voices wash over him until they're nothing but a droning hum. The sound grates against the pounding in his head and he has to lift his palm up towards his face until he loses himself in the spirals and whorls. He concentrates on breathing. In and out.

It's not Damian.

It's not Damian.

It’s not Damian, but it is a kid. A child. A frozen head in a shitty Walmart ice cooler.

The scorching rage shivers and grows as he breathes in deep, settling into his lungs like a forest fire. No matter what, he's finding whoever did this and he's putting a bullet in their head.

He drops his hand and his eyes find focus on Damian, still peering into the darkness of that box, unnoticed by everyone else. Both of his hands are now inside, hovering just above the head.

A morbid curiosity pulls him closer. Should he say something? He's not convinced he can say anything right now, not without his voice shaking or his tongue stuttering.

Damian's hands are trembling. 

It's odd.

The kid is so desensitised to all of this that Jason—hell, they’re all guilty of it—forgets that he's just that. A kid.

A kid looking at his own decapitated head.

Jason needs to say something.

But before he can find the words, Damian sucks in a deep breath and finally reaches down to touch it. His fingers barely grace either side of the temples, like pond skaters dancing on the water's surface. His thumbs are directly above the eyes and as Jason watches, he presses down to prise up the eyelids.

They don't give.

Skin sticks to frozen skin, the eyelids pull taut, and they never part.

Jason can't look at Damian's face.

The only sign of his struggling is a wet exhale, a short, sharp, bubbling breath of frustration.

No one else has noticed and Jason's not sure how much of a blessing that is.

Softly, ever so softly, Damian changes tact and rubs his thumb along the lashes. It takes a few, long seconds, but finally, the ice begins to melt and Jason suppresses a shudder as he watches the head cry.

The anticipation has him inching closer, wondering what all this is in aid of, but Damian's resolve fails him. His breathing is heavier now and Jason swears he sees him blink away his own tears, a gruesome mirror of the head beneath him.

His heart twists and, still, no one else has noticed.

Damian whispers something, eyes fluttering closed, and if Jason didn’t know any better, he’d say the kid was praying. 

Finally, when Damian opens his eyes he pushes the eyelids up and for a brief, horrifying second, Damian is caught like a deer in the headlights. Milky blue eyes stare back at him, pupils blown wide in death.

What’s he thinking? His body is tense, muscles screaming in stillness. It doesn’t even look like he’s breathing.

Perhaps this wasn’t a message for Red Hood—or the League of Assassins, or even Batman—perhaps this was a message for Damian.

But what’s it trying to say?

Whatever it is, Jason’s sure Damian understands. He drops the eyelids with a wheezing exhale, a rattle that squeezes at Jason’s heart, and he jerks back from the box. 

Like father, like son; Damian stands, sucks in a quick breath, wipes his nose and cheeks, and visibly buries whatever he’s feeling deep down inside himself just in time for everyone else to notice the strange behaviour.

“Is everything alright, Damian?” Bruce asks, belatedly playing father. “Do you know something about this?”

There it is. Jason can’t help but scoff at how quickly concern loses to the case.

“Leave him, Bruce. It can’t be easy seeing something like that,” Dickhead says, moving towards Damian with hands outstretched. Jason has no doubt it’s meant to be comforting, but since when has the demon brat ever needed that? Like Jason said, he’s not exactly normal.

“Don’t touch me!” Damian hisses, batting the hand away. “I am fine. I know nothing about it. Now, it is a school night, and I am going to bed.”

It might have worked—the prickly demeanour no different to how he normally handles Dick’s overbearing affection—had Jason not just witnessed his own little investigation. He’s not fine. He knows something about it. Jason’s not entirely sure he’s going to bed.

Obviously, no one else buys this, either. They might all be emotionally stunted, but they’re still detectives. Bruce moves to say something, but Dick throws him a warning glance, and, miraculously, Bruce listens.

“Go to sleep, Damian,” Dick says instead, and Bruce still isn’t saying anything. “We’ll be here if you need anything.”

Without another word, Damian leaves and unfortunately, that’s when the attention turns back to Jason.

“How are you doing, Little Wing?” Dick asks in that syrupy-sweet sympathetic voice Jason hates.

Instead of dignifying it with a response, Jason just glares at him, anger still simmering under his skin and curdling his blood.

“Right,” Dick says, looking to the world as if he wants to say something else, and Jason really fucking hopes he doesn’t just about as much as he silently dares him to. A fight would do him some good, let him work through the adrenaline, the buzzing energy still twitching in his muscles.

“Right,” Dick repeats, obviously recognising the danger. Only a small part of Jason is disappointed. Instead, he turns back to Tim, Bruce, and Stephanie to talk points of investigation.

The note sits heavy in Jason’s breast pocket.

He doesn’t give it to them.

“I need a drink,” he says in lieu of goodbye, and promptly turns on his heel to follow Damian into the elevator and out of the cave. He doesn’t stop when he hears them calling. Who gives a fuck? The gun is still on the table, still pointing towards Bruce, waiting for when he gets back. Surely, that should be enough.

He won’t give the note to them, there’s someone that’s far more deserving of it. Someone that knows something, no matter how much he makes out that he doesn't.

Everytime he closes his eyes, he still sees that face. So like Damian, and yet… blue eyes. Yes, eyes can change back to their baby blues just after death—hell, as established, Jason’s seen enough of them to know that—but the way he reacted… It was like he’d seen a ghost.

Jason’s heard of what Damian’s done, what he’s been through. Fighting Heretic—the clone that his own mother had sent to kill him—can’t have been easy, but…

It’s not a clone.

From Damian’s reaction alone, Jason knows it’s not a clone.

There’s a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. 

The stolen demon child. Jason had assumed it was blaming Bruce for Damian’s rejection of the League, but what if it was something different? What if there was another child stolen?

What if…?

No. No, there’s no point in conjecture. This isn’t an avenue he can walk down, not without speaking to Damian first.

But Damian’s not in his room. Nor in the library, nor his art studio, nor the common area, nor the kitchen, nor the conservatory, nor the barn, nor… Jason’s really needing that drink now. If not to quench the thirst, then to stoke the flames that have dwindled in this stupid game of Hide and Seek.

It’s as he’s turning back to the manor that he finally spots him. It’s dark, murky, but false dawn is colouring the sky and Jason can pick out a small silhouette on the roof, stooped behind the balustrades.

Truly his father’s son, Jason thinks with a grimace. Brooding on rooftops. (He tries very hard not to think about his favourite gargoyle in downtown Gotham, where he hid whenever he was pissed at the old man. Where he still goes now, even.)

Damian doesn’t look at him when he finally makes it up there. Just rubs at his eyes briskly, with a harsh sniff that does nothing to hide his tears. He’s staring up at the sky.

Jason doesn’t know what to say. To his surprise, Damian breaks the silence anyway.

“There are never any stars in Gotham.” 

His voice is rough, watery and thick. In the dim light, Jason watches as he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Pollution,” Jason grunts back, not really sure where to go from here. “Besides… you’re a bit late for them now. It’s almost morning.”

“Yes,” Damian agrees easily, too easily, his voice cracking. “I am too late.”

Ah, shit. He’s not equipped to deal with this, not at all. Perhaps he should go and get Dick.

Instead, Jason takes a steadying breath and settles himself on the slanting tiles of the roof, letting his head fall back so he can watch the sky.

After a long second, Damian joins him.

“You wanna tell me about him?”

“Who?”

“You know who. I saw you looking at him.”

“It is most likely a clone, as Richard suggests. I know nothing else of it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“And what do you know of it? Hm? Why was he given to you, of all people?” 

Briefly, Damian sits up, hands curling into fists, but the fire fizzles out as quickly as it came, and Damian slumps down deeper on the roof.

Jason doesn’t dignify it with an answer—especially as he doesn’t actually have one—knowing that Damian will tell him in his own time. So he just keeps looking up, shifting to get somewhat more comfortable. The cold tiles bite into his back and tiredness settles into his bones. It’s been a long night and adrenaline can only carry him so far. In the distance, Damian’s rooster crows in the morning and Jason vaguely recalls Dick’s complaints about how it’s always too early for dawn.

Eventually, Damian answers him in a halting, broken voice.

“His name was Daniel. The Left Hand of the Demon, with me as the Right.”

Jason’s breath catches in his throat and his fingers itch for the gun sitting far below him, fury surging through his veins at another brother lost even before they could know him.

“He was my twin, my brother, my heart.” The words start flowing from him quickly now, like a dam bursting at the seams, helpless against the torrent of water. “He lived for me just as I lived for him.”

They’re facing west, looking out over the grounds. Jason can’t make out Damian’s face.

A blessing in disguise.

“We used to steal maamoul cookies whenever we could. Danny would take the ones stuffed with dates and I the ones with pistachios. Danny hates pistachios. He says they taste like grass, I…” Damian trails off, his hands twisting at his black sleep shirt. 

When he begins again, his voice is flat, clipped, as unfeeling as a blade.

“One night, Mother came into my room, took me to the jet, and told me that I would never see him again. Danny had been captured by a rebel group of League soldiers who planned to overthrow Grandfather and use him to legitimise their claim to power. I was to live with Father while the matter was resolved.

“That was four years ago.”

Jason wasn’t around for Damian’s introduction—or the four years that followed, for that matter—but he’s heard stories. Yes, there’s Heretic, of course, but… even before that, Damian’s never been what one could call ‘well-adjusted’. None of them are, but they don’t exactly have the excuse of growing up in a murderous cult of assassins like he does. Even if growing up in Gotham is basically the same thing.

It makes a sad sort of sense, now.

Thrust into this godforsaken family while worrying for his brother. 

Jason thinks about Dick’s cloying sympathy, his crowding presence, his overbearing nature. It suffocates Jason now, he can’t imagine what it must have felt like to Damian then.

Jason thinks about Tim, about that awful nickname, Replacement, and he wonders if Damian ever thought the same.

“I asked about him, again, when I last saw Mother. She told me that the rebellion was finally quashed, that the position of Demon Head was and always will be Grandfather’s, and that… that Danny was to be presumed dead.”

“Presumed?” Jason prompts, when the silence drags on too long.

“They found no traces of him at their base of operations. Mother believes he must have fought, or attempted to escape, and was… disposed of for his efforts.”

“And you?” asks Jason, before his brain can catch up to his mouth. “What do you believe?”

Clouds shift lazily above them, the moon pale blue against the hazy colour of the sky as the sun truly begins to rise behind them. A star—venus, really, Jason supposes, first to come and last to go—becomes briefly visible before a waft of cloud covers it again. He hopes Damian saw it.

“I always thought that I would feel it. That I would know, somehow.” Damian keeps his eyes glued to the sky. “But I did not.”

Does anyone, really?

“What matters…” Jason coughs, the words sticking in his throat even as he fights for something worth saying. “I guess what matters is that you know now. You can remember him. Grieve him. Keep him with you, shit, I don’t know, anything.”

He sits up and rests his arms on his knees, curling into himself. He scratches at the buzzed hair at the nape of his neck just to give his hands something to do. Isn’t it kind of funny? He’s never had to deal with a dead brother before. Or, not before tonight, at least, and he doesn’t think Damian would like to take a leaf out of his book and point a weapon at Bruce right now.

“This has to be better than not knowing, right?” Jason continues, with a hunched shrug of his shoulders.

“No,” Damian spits, the vehemence in that one word pushing Jason back in shock. “No, it is not. I preferred to live with the hope that I would see my brother again. I want—”

He cuts himself off with a choking sob, his voice breaking. Jason can fill in the blanks.

For the first time, Jason looks at Damian and sees a child. 14. He’s 14 and he just wants to see his brother again. 

Not a fucking head in a box.

What’s he meant to do? How is he in this situation? Why the hell did he think he should be the one to follow the kid?

“You… must have loved him a lot.”

Damian is quiet for a long moment, so long that Jason begins to think how much of a stupid thing it was to say. Of course he loved him a lot. He was his brother in a home more dangerous than most. Even Jason knows how much easier it is to weather the storm with the love of a brother to rely on.

“I don’t like pistachios.”

It’s whispered so softly that Jason’s not sure whether he’s meant to have heard it or not, but it breaks his heart just the same. Unbidden, the image of two children dressed all in League black comes to him, stifling their giggles as they swipe cookies from the kitchens and dance around patrols. A younger Damian with puppy fat still in his cheeks gravely accepting his share of pistachio-stuffed maamouls while another, slightly different version of Damian savours his favourite date-stuffed ones.

Jason wonders how long he’s kept it a secret. Is it freeing now that it’s out?

Or is it just another lie that he has to live with? A regret that no boy his age should have to bear.

They stay like that until dawn finally digs its fingernails in and begins to claw its way across the sky in earnest. Birds start to sing in the trees and even from up here, they can hear Batcow start to call for her breakfast.

It’s when Jason starts to feel himself nodding off that he thinks they should probably come down. He wonders if anyone’s found Damian missing yet.

“Come on, kid,” he says with a stretch and a sigh, “we best get going. Don’t want Alfred to have to trudge all the way up here just to get you down for breakfast.”

“Yes…” replies Damian, voice as soft as the morning light, but he only moves to rub at his eyes. “I was too late to see the stars.”

“There’s always tonight,” Jason says, rolling his shoulders out, stiff from the cold. “If you… If you want, I can take you out of Gotham. Find a field or something, away from the pollution and the city lights. See what we can see.”

It feels awkward coming out of his mouth, clunky in a way that kindness should never be. It’s been too long since he’s practised at being a brother. Perhaps he should start again.

Damian shifts his head, green eyes dark and heavy with an emotion Jason doesn’t want to name. It roots Jason to the spot and he can’t look away.

“Danny wanted to go out that night. Sit on the tallest roof of the compound and stargaze.” He turns his head back to the sky, even though any chance of seeing a star has long since vanished. Jason sucks in a breath. “I had been punished for some mistake I made in the training hall earlier. He begged me to go, but my hands hurt and… and I did not want to be punished again. He went without me and they took him and it was my fault because I was a coward. If I had—if—”

He cuts himself off and jerks his head to the side so Jason can’t see his tears. The muscles in his jaw knot and clench, and Jason watches as his chest rises and falls as he controls his breathing.

Shit. Now what?

“Here,” Jason says, shoving his hand into his breast pocket and pulling out the note before his brain can catch up with him. “This came with the… package. Show Bruce, don’t, whatever, but it might help find the bastards. I hope it does, anyway.”

Damian is up and at him with frightening speed, snatching the note with barely shaking hands. He holds it up to his nose and Jason watches his eyes flick back and forth as devours what’s written there.

It’s not much, the note. There’s no comfort in it and Damian’s shoulders slump ever so slightly as he gets to the end. 

“Why did you not give this to Father?” he asks finally.

“Fuck him,” Jason says simply, with another shrug of his shoulders.

There’s silence as Damian rereads the note, his brow furrowing in concentration as he no doubt commits the whole thing to memory.

Eventually, Jason turns to leave. He’s got his own shit to get back to. His bed, for one thing, even if he doesn’t think he’ll be able to get any proper sleep.

“Thank you,” Damian says softly, stopping him dead in his tracks.

Jason turns slightly, and doesn’t say ‘you’re welcome’, or ‘no problem’, or any other meaningless platitude. Instead, he sighs, and jerks his head back towards the hatch.

“Don’t keep Alfred waiting. Get some breakfast or he’ll worry.”

He stays there just long enough for Damian to nod and then he makes his way back down to the cave, bone-weary exhaustion pulling at his limbs.

Surprisingly, there’s no one about when he gets down there—even the cooler has been moved, thank God—and he snags his gun off the table, heaves his bike from the ground, and leaves the whole thing behind him.

🦇👻🦇

Thankfully, Jason does manage to get some sleep, even if he’s not sure he feels any better by the end of it. He wakes up with a pounding headache that’s made worse by the blaring car horns and rush of traffic outside his window, not to mention the incessant banging on his apartment door.

Jason stumbles his way to the sink, filling up a glass of water and downing it as quickly as he can to cleanse his mouth from the thick, sticky saliva of sleep. The next glass he fills up—because fuck whoever’s on the other side of that door—he uses to gulp down two ibuprofen. No doubt he’s gonna need it today.

When his brain can’t take it any longer, he grabs the gun off the small kitchen table and pads silently over to the door, peering through the peephole.

“Oh, for—” he cuts himself off with a sigh, throwing the gun to the sofa and pinching the bridge of his nose for a long second as he wonders what the hell he’s done to deserve this. Finally, he reaches for the deadbolt.

The door crashes open as soon as Jason turns the handle and he just barely manages to jump out of the way before his headache can get ten times worse.

“He’s alive,” Damian says, not quite shouting, but definitely not quietly enough to be considerate to Jason’s health, as he storms into the apartment. He’s dressed in a loose, all black outfit, not unlike a LoA uniform, rather than his Robin suit. There’s a sword at his side and Jason’s starting to get a bad feeling about all of this. “It’s not him, I know it.”

“Hello, Jason, I’m sorry I woke you up, Jason, how are you doing?” Jason mutters under his breath as he closes the door behind him and moves back to grab his glass of water. “I was doing a lot better before you showed up, I’ll tell you that.”

“Listen to me, you oaf! He’s alive. Danny’s alive.”

“Shouldn’t you be telling Bruce this?”

“I am telling you.”

“Fuck,” Jason sighs eloquently, and downs the rest of his water, already wishing it was something stronger. Last night was hard. He can’t handle the kid going through some sort of extended breakdown, too. “Does anyone know you’re here?”

“Of course not, why would they?”

“Well, I’d have hoped you’d have told them,” he says, pushing himself off the counter to lumber into his bedroom so he can fish for his phone. It’s tangled in the sheets, clunking to the floor when he shakes them out.

“What are you doing?” Damian asks, suspicion heavy in his voice.

“Calling Alfred to come—hey!”

Before he can even finish bringing up his (admittedly small) contacts list, Damian lunges towards him and succeeds in knocking the phone out of his hand. He’s only just woken up, okay? He’s still fuzzy.

“Listen to me! Daniel is alive, and I have proof.” 

Again, Damian turns those big, green eyes on him and though his face stays cemented in his signature scowl, Jason can read the sadness—and the blinding hope—as clear as day.

“Why me?” he asks, in a desperate attempt to make Damian see how poor his choice is. “Why not Bruce—or Dick, or—hell, even Tim.”

Damian scoffs at Tim’s name and Jason can’t help but roll his eyes at the beef they have going on. Perhaps they have more in common than he thought. He takes in a sharp breath, no doubt to complain about Drake, but stops himself, his shoulders deflating. He sits on the bed next to Jason and it creaks with the extra weight. It’s an old mattress and one that Jason desperately needs to get replaced.

“They don’t know.”

And he can’t tell them.

Jason caught him in a moment of weakness, and now it’s his problem to deal with.

Still, he thinks, at least this will probably lead him to the monsters that beheaded a kid and Jason will actually get to shoot someone responsible. Silver linings and all that.

He sighs and runs a hand over his face, smoothing away the last vestiges of sleep and mourning the loss of the rest of the night.

“Fine. Fine, show me your proof.”

Eagerly, Damian pulls out the note that was left with the cooler and Jason can’t help the exasperated sigh that slips from him. He’s seen it, he would have noticed if there was something amiss, surely.

“First of all,” Damian begins, “I have never heard of this recon unit. The designation isn’t even formatted properly, not by the standards the League operates on now.”

Which, yeah, okay, Jason had already picked up on that. It’s not a team name he recognises either, but… there’s more weight to it now, coming from Damian.

“Secondly, the code. It has the same problem as the designation, it is no longer in use.” His eyes flicker up to Jason’s and they blaze with determination. “The codes, as you are aware, change frequently. The last time this one was used was four years ago, just before Danny was captured.”

Marginally better. That feeling of wrongness slithers in his gut.

“Okay, so—”

“Thirdly,” Damian steamrolls over him, “Father’s DNA analysis of the head is inconclusive.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means that it’s not Danny!”

Jason takes a sharp breath in, ready to refute Damian, but, again, Damian carries on regardless.

“It is not definitively his head. Father can get no workable DNA from the sample, do you understand how difficult that is? The head has been frozen! Every inch of it should be viable, and yet… Any sample Father takes degrades before a profile can be made. Both Father and Richard believe it to be a clone, possibly in the early stages of creation and therefore unstable. Obviously, they have ruled out the League as the culprit, as their cloning technology is unparalleled and already attuned to me.”

“And what do you think?” Jason asks, tiredness creeping up on him again. The ceiling fan doggedly rotates above them and Jason wishes it would try just a little harder to circulate the air in here. What he wouldn’t give for a breeze. Something to wake him up.

“It is a clone, but of Danny, not me. The others have not noticed the differences yet—or if they have, they believe them to be errors in the cloning process—but it is definitely Danny.”

Now, he turns to fully look Jason in the eye, obviously coming to the head of his argument.

“An unstable clone of Danny, beheaded, and sent to you because of your League connections to ensure that they hear of his death, despite the fact that the rebellion has been dealt with for over two years now and Danny has already been presumed dead.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” Damian says, speaking slowly as if he were talking to a toddler, “that whoever sent this to you has out of date information. Information that is out of date by four years. That someone wants to make it seem like Danny is dead. Who has been out of the League for four years and would benefit the most from that?”

“Shit… Danny.”

“Precisely. Danny. He is alive and he wants the League of Assassins to think that he is not.”

Or, Jason thinks but absolutely doesn’t have the balls to say, he knows that Red Hood works more with the Bats than the League now and he wants Damian to believe he is dead.

Either way… there’s something not right about it. It all seems so obvious now, everything so glaringly wrong that Jason wonders how he didn’t see it before. He heaves a sigh and drops his head into his hands.

“Well?” Damian asks, barely concealed excitement in his voice.

“It… Well, it fits. But—”

“But? Todd, there is no ‘but’! You said it yourself, it fits! This is the correct conclusion, I am sure of it. Now,” Damian says, straightening his spine and twisting on the bed to more directly face Jason. “Will you help me find him?”

“Kid—”

“Please. Todd, please. I… I cannot do it alone, and I have to—I have to find him.”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt, kiddo.”

“I am not a kid. He is alive, Jason.” Damian says, the pure conviction in his voice twisting at Jason’s heart, even if the use of his first name freaks him out, just a little bit. It’s weird seeing the kid like that. “And Danny would never hurt me.”

Jeez… He can’t help but think that he’s setting Damian up for something far worse down the road. But he’d be damned if he can say no to him. He hopes he’s right, for his sake.