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When we are born we are swaddled and suckled
Whispered to, fussed over, tickled and cuddled
When we grow up things get muddled
And here it is, Christmas time
We all want someone who will love us and hold us
To curl up alongside when nights are the coldest
We all want someone who will hug us and kiss us
All I want is you for Christmas
All I want is you for Christmas
The festivities of Christmas Eve happen around Damian in a bright blur or colour and sound, laughter and sweetness. Everyone is back at the manor for Christmas even though father and Todd have been in a fight for months, Stephanie broke up with Drake six weeks prior, Cain is studying abroad and hadn’t been home since the semester began, and Duke hadn’t RSVPed, they’re all here.
Almost everyone.
Everyone aside from the person whom Damian wishes most to see. The one person Damian won’t be seeing. It drives him absolutely crazy that they can all go about their festivities like there isn’t anything wrong, or anyone missing. It makes him burn with rage, because he would never act like that if any of them were the ones who weren’t there.
Which he knows to be true, because when it had just been the two of them, Richard had missed each of his siblings with his entire soul. He made sure to tell Damian how wonderful they all were, and how much they’d love him, and how Christmas was the most fun spent with family. Richard missed them all with an acuteness Damian could feel.
And yet none of them miss him. If they do, they don’t show it. No one speaks to him about Richard, or tells Damian stories about him, or tells Damian how amazing he is. No one accidentally looks over their shoulder to tell Richard something only to realise he’s not there, no one sets a place for him before remembering he isn’t coming. No one says his name.
Damian hates them all for being able to celebrate a day about family when the heart of their family is spending his alone in another city with no memory of any of them. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right.
He seethes as Todd sings overly loud to drown out the Christmas music with his own offending voice, and scowls as Brown and Cain waltz with each other. His insides twist watching father and Drake play chess while Alfred and Duke commentate a few feet away, decorating cookies at the table Alfred brought in.
Damian watches from the stairs by himself, as he had been the entire holiday so far. If Richard were here, Damian would have been dragged down by now, encouraged to socialise and have “fun” as expected of someone Damian’s age. If Richard were here, Damian wouldn’t be so far away. So….hollow.
Most of all, beyond his hate, his anger, the envy and hurt, Damian feels an aching hollowness that waits for Richard. His hugs and his words, and his warm weight draping itself over Damian’s shoulders. The loving acceptance and fondness and understanding he hasn’t found with anyone else in Gotham.
The burning turns from rage to a heavy weight behind his eyes, one that makes him scowl harder and rub at his cheeks to make sure no damning evidence that he hates every second of this holiday can be shown on his face. He can’t stand it.
So he doesn’t.
With all of them otherwise occupied, Damian gets up off the stairs and makes his way to his room. He gets on his jacket and his spare winter boots, his gloves, hat, scarf, then takes it all off to layer up with another sweater and a long sleeve because he despises the cold. Once he’s redressed, Damian walks down one of the side staircases and through the kitchen, out the doors that open to the sprawling expanse of snow that currently covered the gardens of Wayne Manor.
He walks down the drive and calls for a cab when he’s three houses down, which is about a ten minute trek on a good day, even longer with the crunch of the icy snow underfoot. The taxi gets to the seventh house down Bristol a few minutes after Damian, and then they’re taking a two hundred dollar trip to Bludhaven.
It starts to snow about half way to Blud, and it's still falling when he gets out on a street corner three blocks away from Richard’s apartment. Here is where he pauses.
The truth is, it’s all well and good to spend an obscene amount of money for a cab, brave the cold for a long walk in the snow, leave his family without saying a word, leaving a note, and turning off his phone, the problem is, now that Damian has succeeded in reaching Bludhaven, he doesn’t know what to do.
The trip doesn’t matter to anyone but him, like Richard doesn’t matter to anyone but him. They can all forget they have an older adopted brother who got into an accident and lost his memory, but Damian can’t, because Richard isn’t his brother like he is theirs.
He doesn’t know the others like he does Richard.
They aren’t his family.
His family is a man that if you asked him right now, wouldn’t be able to pick Damian out of a line up of three, let alone three dozen.
Richard could find him in even the biggest crowd, Ric as he likes to be called now would rather lose him in one.
That’s what happens when you’re named Wayne, and Damian has never hated his last name more. So while it’s all swell he pulled off the crazier parts of his not-plan, the truth is, Damian knows his plan has no conclusion. He came all this way to be let down and he knew it too. Before he even left, he knew it.
Like he knows the others prefer to pretend Richard doesn’t exist rather than have to live everyday with the reminder that he does, but that they don’t exist to him. Damian can’t do that though, he can’t be like them. He can’t live without Richard, even if he out of all of them, had known him for the least amount of time.
Damian can’t find the words to explain what that time meant to him, newly abandoned by his mother and left without his father who’d gone missing, and at the time, believed to be dead. Richard became everything to Damian, and Damian felt like he meant everything to Richard.
He never knew what it was like to matter to someone, to be someone’s top priority in a world of other things that were incredibly pressing, Damian always ranked number one on Richard’s list. On mother’s, Damian maybe made top three around five times in her life, and that might even be too generous to say.
To matter to someone? To matter to Richard? Nothing could ever compare.
The burning weight behind Damian’s eyes returns and he stands on the street corner at a loss, amēchanos, as the Greeks would say. Well, the ancient Greeks at least. This time the tears fell, and almost like in that silly cartoon Richard showed him, he half expected them to turn to ice cubes as they did for the two dimensional penguin begging for change. He’s still not sure why the film directors thought that was an acceptable image for a children’s Christmas movie, but modern media did not always make the most sense to Damian.
If Damian got any enjoyment out of those inane movies, it came from the man making him watch them. The one who would make popcorn and hot chocolate and quote “classic cinema” lines verbatim. The man who spent Damian’s first Christmas ever making sure it was his best Christmas. The man who Damian now associates with cuddles and hugs, and blankets keeping out the cold.
Damian stands outside in a city not his own for that man, before an understanding of his idiocy kicks in and he slumps, overwhelmingly defeated, and trudges through the quickly piling new snowfall over to the nearest bench. He pulls out his phone, turning it back on reluctantly. It’s takes a few minutes for it to go through the whole process of restarting and loading all his missed messages, and the cold doesn’t help it function. The battery shows it’s lower than Damian should have let it get, and his notifications number in the tens.
There are missed calls and unanswered texts from nearly everyone he’d been hating two hours before, and for a while he just stares as the number continues to grow. He watches as a contact labelled Bruce calls him, it illuminates his screen and falls dark when he doesn’t answer. This happens twice more before Drake's contact is the one calling him, Todd and Brown after.
He doesn’t pick up any of the calls, but when his phone next falls quiet, he brings up voicemail, hits the speaker button, and presses play on the first message.
They start in reverse, so Stephanie’s voice is the first he hears.
“Hey, Dames, everyone is panicking. No one is going to say it, but we’re really worried, please just pick up and tell us you’re alright. Just….just call me, okay? If you don’t want to be here, I can take you somewhere, just, any one of us bud. Please. Pick up the phone.”
Then Todd’s.
“Brat, you better get your ass back here now, you hear me? I ain’t losing another little shit today, it’s fucking Christmas Eve, you don’t feel okay you tell us. We’re right here, and if you don’t come back…you better come back, brat. Or I’m stealing your fucking cat. Call me, brat. Call someone.”
Then Drake’s.
“I swear to god, you’re so grounded. I’m grounding you so hard, you’re never leaving the house again. You’re never going to leave my side. If you make me call again Damian I will confiscate everything. Even Jon. You wanna try me? I will do it. I will ground you until you’re thirty. I don’t care that I’m five years older than you. I will do it. Call me, Dames. Call me, please.”
Damian listens to each of father’s. There’s too many that eventually he drowns them out. In between he hears Stephanie’s voice again, a shorter message, and Alfred who sounds quietly worried as opposed to everyone else’s frantic harassment.
Damian considers actually hanging up his voicemail to call him, but the desire to keep listening wins out. Damian presses nine to save the call and move on to the next.
He reaches the end of the string of voicemails to the sound of the operator’s dispassionate robotic voice.
“You have no new messages. You have six saved messages. Press one to play your messages. Press—”
Damian presses one before it can run through its prerecorded spiel, and his first saved message plays.
“Hey, little D! Just letting you know I’ll be picking you up after school today! Don’t worry about getting a change of clothes, I’ve got your overnight bag. We’re going to stop by the grocery store before we head to my place, so if you want anything for dinner, think about it now, alright? See you in a few, Dames, love ya!”
Then the next.
“WHAT MOVIE ARE WE FEELING? I WAS THINKING—WAIT ONE SEC….Okay that’s better. Sorry, it’s raining like heck outside. Today was not a good day to forget my umbrella, but y'know what always makes me feel better on rainy days? Movie bingeing, so bring your best grumpy face my little grumpy cat, you aren’t escaping my grasp today. Someone has to keep me from getting sick after being out in the cold rain. How do we feel about talking dogs again? Was that a yes or a no on the talking animals, cause I could go for some Scooby Doo right now. Well, gotta go, see you soon, love you Dames!”
The one after that is about to start when a car rolls to a stop in front of him. The yellow is both muted by the dark, and illuminated by the odd string of Christmas lights hung outside. Damian distantly realises he’s freezing when he takes in his surroundings all over again. He has a fine dusting of snow covering him and he can’t feel his cheeks. Damian blinks his eyes, and finds the movement slow and heavy.
A figure steps out of the car, and Damian peers at it blurrily, half concerned about how slow he’s processing everything, when the form in front of him manifests from that of a stranger, to a face he knows very well.
It’s Richard.
Damian stares at him blankly, looking for a hint of recognition from the man. He mostly just sees worry, and Damian isn’t sure why, but it annoys him.
“Hey, kid, you alright?” His voice is gruff and low, it’s not hitting the right notes
Kid. A part of Damian is disappointed, the other is mostly unsurprised. Damian is nothing to this man.
Like there was never a time when he was his everything.
“—ey. Hey! Kid! Are you okay? Do we need to go to a hospital?” Damian registers hes being shaken somewhat belatedly, and shrugs off the hands on his shoulders. He doesn’t want this stranger touching him.
(He wants Richard’s hugs, more than anything.)
“I am fine. Please leave.”
The man takes a step back in shock, not an effort to leave. “Kid, you aren’t fine , where are your parents? Why are you out here?”
Damian blinks slowly at him, before tutting and looking away. He misses Richard flinching at the sound, like he missed the worried eyes of his family glancing up at him alone on the stairs.
He’s only a kid, he misses a lot of stuff.
He misses Richard the most, in the other sense of the word, and that, everyone already knows.
“My father is with the rest of his family. I chose to be here.”
Richard shakes his head in disbelief. “Someone has to be looking for you.” He says.
Most likely, Damian thinks, yes. He shrugs at Richard.
“C’mon, kid. Work with me here. You can’t just sit in the cold. You’ll become hypothermic, or get pneumonia or some shit. At the very least you’re catching a cold. Now isn’t the time to be sitting alone on a bench.”
Damian isn’t so sure. “Where else am I supposed to be?”
He’s pretty sure Richard is this close to shaking him again. “Inside, for starters.” Damian shrugs again. “Look, at least, if you’re just going to sit on a bench and not do anything, you can do that somewhere warm, right?”
He didn’t want to go home, and that at least was written all over his face.
Richard heaves a sigh and takes another step back. “Look, you can make your own choices, but right now you’re choosing to freeze, and there isn’t any way I’m letting some kid die when I could have done something about it, so…..so get in the cab, and I’ll drive you wherever you want when you think of some place, okay?”
Damian mulled this over a moment, mostly for show. The second this knock-off of his brother offered him a scrap of affection Damian didn’t deserve, he’d caved. He couldn’t say no to Richard. It was virtually impossible for him.
“I…..accept your offer.” He murmurs, awkwardly, head down. Richard heaves a relieved breath and steps back and away again. He keeps giving Damian space, trying to appear non threatening, which he supposes most street kids would prefer. Damian isn’t most street kids though, and Richard is no stranger to him, even if Ric is. Damian doesn’t think their core personality has changed even if his name and living location has. Ric and Richard would both do anything to help a kid they don’t know. It’s a compulsion for them, deeply ingrained by Mary and John Grayson and whatever innate goodness Richard just has.
Damian stands, his body groans in protest, as stiff and frozen as the tear tracks on his face, though still not in ice cube form. He shuffles painfully to the taxi and climbs into the front seat next to Richard after Richard spends the entire distance ensuring Damian won’t run away to go and freeze to death somewhere else.
Richard restarts the car, the engine turning over a few times until finally it rumbles to life and the heat turns on. It’s pointed at the windows to keep them from fogging up Damian presumes, but Richard adjusts the ones he can reach to point them towards Damian. He appreciates it on some level, even as the skin prickling pain of blood returning to his extremities makes him yearn for the numbness of the cold once more.
They’re silent pillars next to each other as Richard pulls away from the curb and starts driving around the Bludhaven streets. It takes about fifteen minutes for them to hit the downtown area where there are more people who can actually pay for the seat Damian occupies. Richard ignores the first few people they see calling for a cab, until they find a pair who can slide into the back without needing to kick Damian out of the cab. They say where they’re heading, and then they go there, and then Richard picks up another pair, and it repeats.
It’s quiet, lonely work in a way. Some of the customers chat with Richard, one even asks about Damian, but for the most part they sit on the back and talk to each other, or not at all. The rides aren’t terribly long, but Damian is already getting a feel for the streets with each new passenger or pair of. He finds himself almost able to enjoy the company of the man who is but isn’t his brother next to him.
And then between passengers, Damian has to go and pull out his phone.
He only does it to check the battery level and time, but by unlocking the device he ends up on the last application he used. The one he never pressed end call on, and in an endless cycle, the next message Damian was supposed to hear before he’d been interrupted begins to play.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to youuuuuu, happy birthday dear Damian, happy birthday to you!”
Damian wires his eyes shut in horror as the opening notes ring out. He can practically hear the smile in Richard’s voice as he sings, overly enthusiastic on purpose and dragging out certain syllables needlessly. His name is said with so much love it hurts. It’s the name he hadn’t heard the imposter beside him utter since he’d been in his presence. He didn’t know it, but why would he? Why should he?
And, because it is—was—Richard, it doesn’t end after the song does. Of course not.
“Hey little D, it’s your big brother here, calling to tell you there is no way to escape celebrating your birthday when I’m around, so you better be ready for me after school. We’re hitting the arcade first, but the rest is a surprise, so don’t go sniffing around for information. On an ENTIRELY unrelated note, I’ve got your overnight bag with me, and we’ll be stopping by the animal shelter on the way to my apartment! I can’t wait to see you, I love you, Damian, have a great day. Bye kiddo.”
Tears leak freely from Damian’s eyes, his breaths coming too quickly and out of his control. He’s hyperventilating, the dam inside him holding the rivers of his anxiety and fear and hurt at bay bursts all at once. Damian is shaking too hard to hand up the phone or turn down the volume or even take it off of speaker. In his panicked scramble to do any of those, he drops it, and the next message plays, just as audible as before.
“So….I got the call about your fight at school. I…I’m not mad, Damian. We have to talk about you fighting kids, and we will when we get home, but when they told me what happened…I’m proud, buddy. I’m proud you stood up for yourself and that other boy. It wasn’t right what those little sh—those kids were saying to either of you, and believe me, I will be having words with their parents, but you did well kiddo, I’m really proud of you. And now is definitely not the right time to be saying this, but just know I love you, and I accept every part of you. I could never love you less. You’re my little brother…..my kid. I don’t care where you’re from or who you date, or their gender or your gender, I love all of you, and I’m happiest whenever you’re with me.”
The Richard from almost two years ago sniffles on the line. Damian always pictured it as him wiping away his tears. The Damian of now feels his heart beating rapidly in his chest, even faster than it had then when he’d been outed to Richard, and then overwhelmingly loved anyway.
“ANYWAY, we’ll be talking about the fighting thing…..and we’ll see about some self defence classes after, if you’d like. I’ll be there in twenty, hopefully you hear this before I get to you. See you soon, Dames. I love you.”
Damian sobs and finally before the next message could play, voicemail is hung up. It’s only then that he realises the car is stopped, he thinks they’re parked on the side of some street, but he can’t see through his tears, and then it doesn’t matter, because arms he’d been wishing to feel are wrapped around him as he shakes and falls apart.
They’re tentative and awkward, but Damian doesn’t care. He knows the arms, the warmth of this hug. It breaches the panic the way nothing else could, and eventually Damian manages to slow the flood of tears and breathe without blubbering. He’s a teary, sticky, snotty mess and Richard holds him through it all without a care for it.
Until Damian realises he’s crying too. “R-R-Richard?” Damian stutteringly asks.
Richard laughs wetly, even if it is half sob. “That’s my voice. I left those messages.”
Damian nods into the hug, unwilling to pull away from the most comforting embrace he’d had in months. “Yes. I’m s-s-sorry. I d-didn’t st-stay away like y-you wanted uh-uh-us t-to. I d-didn’t w-want to b-be alone t-today.”
“I—it's alright. It’s alright. It’s…” Richard swallows. “I left those messages.” He says, and repeats it. “I left those. I think I remember leaving those.”
The hug gets tighter, Richard’s arms pulling Damian closer, and all at once it feels so much more familiar. “I remember those, I remember calling you….I remember you…” He pulls back and looks at Damian. It’s too dark to see much, even with the streetlights on either side of the road, but Richard looks at him, and Damian feels seen.
“Not…Oh,” Richard makes a noise of surprise in his throat. “You look older.” He sounds so sad, for a moment, so much like Richard instead of Ric that Damian burrows back into his chest and foolishly hopes.
“You recognize me.” Damian says, rather simply. That is what matters to him.
“I….yeah. Yeah I do.”
Finally, Damian isn’t sure when, Richard pulls away and Damian wipes down his face with the tissues given to him. There’s a part of him that knows he’s going to get murdered for running away, but he can’t find it in himself to care even as his phone illuminates with another call. He turns his phone case side up and tries not to blush when Richard chuckles at the cartoon cats on the back.
Damian knows he has to ask an important question, because Richard isn’t just his, and Damian may currently be the one missing, they have a family at home who miss Richard just as much.
“How much do you remember?”
Richard makes a face, the one that means he’s conflicted, and Damian has his answer even before he says it. “It’s not a lot, kid.”
Kid, again.
More tears threaten to fall and Damian glares down at his lap until the burning feeling fades. He’s cried enough. He wipes his eyes again and brings his head up to find Richard staring at him. Richard recognizes him, yes, but he doesn’t know Damian, that much is still clear.
He points his gaze anywhere that isn’t the lost look on Ric, (not Richard, not yet) and glances at the time, which is where his eyes catch. His heart drops. He’s going to be in so much trouble.
“Can you drive me home?” Damian asks. Richard takes a moment to nod beside him, and then after he does, they still don’t move.
“Your address, kid, I can’t go without it.”
Oh. Right.
That’s a reminder Damian could have done without. He puts the address into the taxi’s GPS himself and opens his phone as Richard pulls away from the curb. The unread texts are astronomically high, and the calls have climbed even higher than before, even after he’d cleared them all out.
Damian doesn’t bother listening to the messages they left, but goes to his contacts and picks one near the top. The call doesn’t even make it through the first ring before it’s picked up.
“Are you okay?” He asks.
Damian closes his eyes and leans his head against the window.
“Yes.” He replies. Then, “No. It was a bad day.”
The silence on the other side is loud for a few moments. “I know how you feel, believe me, Dames, I do, but you’re thirteen.” He stresses, “If you’re having a bad day you can’t run away without telling anyone. We would have been there for you. I will be. Where are you? I’ll come pick you up.”
Damian shakes his head, needlessly. “I am already on the way back.” He replies. There is a loud pause. “Are you in a taxi?” He asks. “Let me speak to the driver.”
He flicks a glance at Richard and closes his eyes again just as fast. “No.”
“Damian.” He warns. “Drake.” Damian returns.
“Let me speak with the driver, baby bat. You’re already grounded, don’t make me confiscate Jon too.”
Damian still isn’t sure how he’d go about doing that, but it is believed to be a genuine threat. Damian takes his time replying. “It is an ill advised idea.” He says. Drakes voice becomes much more terse when he asks “Are you hurt?”
“No.” He says.
“Damian—”
“I am fine.” He grits out. It is worthwhile to note that this time the silence on the other side of the line was judging. He checks his peripheral to see if Ric is listening to him, and finds that while yes, his eyes are on the road, he’s holding his right hand out, palm up towards Damian.
Damian listens to Drake speak in his ear another few moments before dropping his phone into Richard’s palm and leaning his head against the door once again, with his eyes forcibly closed.
Drake is still talking when he’s cut off by the voice of their brother. “Hi.” Ric says. “This is Tim, right?”
Both Tim and Damian are shocked into silence. Damian had only ever called him Drake in Ric’s presence, and Damian is pretty sure this is the first time Tim has heard Richard’s voice since before the accident—even if it is through Damian’s phone.
“Dick?” Damian can hear him ask, his voice tiny now that it’s so far away. Ric hesitates before answering. “It’s still Ric,” He reminds, gently. The last time Damian heard him say those words to father, they’d been a lot angrier. He wonders who the gentle tone is for.
Tim makes some noise on the other line, Damian pictures his disgruntled agreement, and then whatever he says next is too muffled for him to hear beyond his own name and Bludhaven. Damian winces minutely. “Yeah, I found him a few blocks from my place. I didn’t know….” Ric seems to realise he doesn’t need to remind them that he doesn’t know who they are. He switches tracks and digs Damian’s hole a little deeper. “He was alone in the snow, I couldn’t leave a kid in this weather…”
They talk some more, and Damian tunes them out until the phone is being handed back to him, a few minutes later. Tim is still on the line, so he brings it up to his ear again.
They’re both just breathing into the speaker before Tim sighs. “I won’t confiscate Jon.”
Damian Tts softly, Tim laughs just as quietly. “I’m glad you’re safe,” Tim tells him. Damian doesn’t know how to reply to his candidness. It takes a moment for him to swallow around the lump in his throat before he can even open his mouth.
“I’m sorry.” He apologizes, for the second time that night. He’s beginning to realise a lot of the distance between himself and them is distance he put there himself, distance he didn’t want to cross without Richard beside him.
“I’m sorry too, Dames.” Tim replies. There are sounds in the back of their call, and he hears Tim say something to someone else. His voice comes back at normal volume when he finishes speaking to whichever of Damian’s siblings is by his side. “We’ll see you in a few.” Tim says.
Damian murmurs his agreement and hangs up the phone, letting it illuminate the dark space in the cab, Ric is a silent figure next to him, as he’d been before. Damian turns his phone over in his hands, trying to keep himself from turning it on, now that the battery had dropped below twenty percent.
Ric reaches over and pops open the glove compartment, pulling free a tangle of wires he plops onto Damian’s lap. Damian blinks at them, and begins untangling until he frees the wire that fits the port on his phone, and plugs it in, and then the other side into the usb thing made to plug into the car.
Again his screen illuminates, and the little lightning bolt icon appears in the right hand corner to show his phone is charging. It takes a few minutes at most, and then there’s very little to do but so much to say, none of which Damian will.
He’d already imposed himself enough on Ric’s life. He’d already gotten a hug he didn’t deserve, help he didn’t need, and a night that didn’t belong to him. Damian is probably costing Ric a lot of money, and even more of his time.
He still has to drive back to Bludhaven after all of this, and that’s Damian’s fault, like the entire night had been. Damian curls in on himself and wishes sleep would swallow him whole, but he’s wide awake, even with the late, or technically early hour.
“My best Christmas,” Ric’s voice breaks the silence startling him, “With my parents, was when I’d been about six. They’d finally started having me practise with them on the trapeze earlier that year, and that Christmas when the carnival was shut down, I performed with them for the first time. It was only for the others, but I can remember my excitement about wearing their colours, being in their act. All of that practice, and the best gift was their trust in me.”
“It wasn’t flawless,not by a long shot, but it was still perfect, and I can still feel my dad lift me into his arms after, my mom’s arms around us both, and she said proudly to the entire tent—”
“‘My Robin has finally found his wings. My Robin has learned to fly.’” Damian quotes before him. He doesn’t even realise he’s said it out loud and loud enough to be heard, until Ric stops talking entirely.
There’s more to the story, at least, there was the first time Damian had been told it, when Richard had still been trying to convince him that Christmas was more than some commercial holiday, and that he should at least try it, once. This story, one of many Richard told Damian about his life as a child acrobat, like the others featured morals about love and family and trust.
Richard never told a story just to entertain. His own special way of underhanded manipulation, which Damian approved of, had been used often against Damian and his stubborn island of isolation. That too hadn’t changed, he supposes.
Damian repays his story with one of his own.
“My mother and grandfather are Arab, and in my home we did not celebrate Christmas. When I first came to live with my father, though I knew of the holiday, all of it had been superficial. I had not ever celebrated Christmas, and after my father went missing a few months later, all of ou—my, siblings went their separate ways, and Alfred, my father’s….friend, took an extended leave of absence.”
He speaks as if he is telling the story to a stranger, which is in a way, true, and speaks to Ric as if he weren’t Richard. It makes it easier to continue, and carves the wound deeper all the more.
“Richard became my legal guardian, by default of being the eldest. He never spoke of it to me, but I’m sure there were many a moment where he wished he’d been unencumbered like the others, free to make his own way once again.”
The signs along the highway mark where Bludhaven ends, and Gotham starts as Damian speaks, the city borders are spent with his voice filling the miles apart.
“According to Alfred, Richard had always been the most independent of father’s children, he had a life outside of the family, something that the rest of us struggled with, but when father disappeared….instead of leaving, or leaving me, or leaving with me, Richard stayed. He spent so much time helping me adjust, he spent so much time with me, I’m unsure of how much he ever did for himself….but he was always there. When Christmas time came around, the day after Halloween, Richard began his one man campaign to make me enjoy Christmas.” His voice lightens here, the words flowing easier.
“Gingerbread houses, hot chocolate, Christmas cookies, movies, sledding, tree decorating. Everything he could think of, we did. Christmas was a two person months long affair with Grayson, but to his credit, it did work. But the moment I was happiest, the best moment, was when he’d opened the gift that I’d made him.”
Damian pauses, letting the memory take shape in his mind, the early morning light, cream carpet, lit up tree and recording of crackling logs in a fire playing on screen. Richard and Damian, guest starring Zitka the plush elephant. Richard’s face of confusion finding the large flat expanse of his Christmas present, meticulously wrapped. He continues with that image in mind.
“I don’t know that he expected to get anything…Richard didn’t ask for things. He had money and material goods weren't an issue, but with Richard, he always spoke about his family. His parents, father, our siblings, and he missed them, he was devastated when no one came home to celebrate with us. I couldn’t make them come home, and frankly, back then I hadn’t wanted them to. They made Richard sad, and I didn’t know them, but I wanted to make Richard happy. So, over a month, I spent every spare moment creating a sketchbook for Richard. I included photos I’d drawn of everyone, and in between them, snapshots of our life. Him and I day to day.”
Richard framed nearly half of the sketchbook.
“I may have made Richard’s life very difficult, and for a while I derailed it entirely, but Richard never regretted it for a second. He chose to spend that time with me, he chose to coach me through my English homework, and tuck me in at night, and eat vegetarian because I did. He chose me, and I’d never seen him happier than when he realised I chose him back.”
He cuts himself off here, forces the story into a different direction and ignores how it hurts as Ric turns onto Bristol, the last stretch of road before the manor at the vertex of the street.
“Father was found three months later, and I returned to his custody, but I didn’t spend Christmas with him or Richard that year. Mother became violently ill on a business trip sometime after I'd been living with father, and her illness became terminal. Father gave her full custody once more so that I could be with her until she passed.”
He glances at the dashboard to check for the bright red of the digital clock, lit up to read 1:13 AM. No longer Christmas Eve then, but Christmas Day.
“This is the first Christmas I am supposed to be celebrating without either of them. I did not handle it well.” He admits quietly.
A hand grasps Damian’s own, Ric’s hand, and squeezes softly. “This is my first Christmas without my parents, too—to me at least—and I haven’t been handling it half as well as you kid. I pushed everyone away, God, I ran away, but you’re going back. I…haven’t managed that part yet.”
“It’s alright.” Damian whispers. “Coming back is the hardest part.”
Ric pulls to a stop at the gates of the manor, at the end of the long driveway. The gates are open, but Ric doesn’t drive down any farther, this last bit Damian will walk himself.
Damian unplugs his phone, gripping it tightly as he reaches for the door handle. Ric surprises him by doing the same, they both get out of the taxi and move to stand off to the side of the space illuminated by the headlights. Ric crouches down, putting him at Damian’s height, and looks him in the eyes.
“One day, Dami, I won’t let you down forever.”
Dami, not kid.
“You’ve never let me down.” Damian tells him.
He steals one last hug that almost knocks Richard off balance, and he lets go just as quick. He makes himself turn around and walk away, leaving Ric behind him as he makes his way up the lane.
On his phone he brings up the dial pad, and holds down on the number one to open his voicemail. He doesn’t listen to the new ones, but presses one again, and then seven however many times he needs to until he’s deleted all the new messages and is left with only his saved ones. Pressing nine for the next and the next, until he lands on the right date, the first call.
The first time Damian ran away.
“When Bruce took me in, I’d been an eight year old kid who had gone through….a really traumatic event. Bruce had been about twenty four, twenty five. I don’t remember really, I was young, but in a way, Bruce was younger. No one is really ready to become a parent, Damian, and especially not a parent to an eight year old kid who’d been through hell. And I hadn’t wanted a new parent, but even underprepared, running a company, and fresh out of university, Bruce understood that. Understood me. I became your Dad’s ward, and I was only adopted after Jason, when Bruce told me that in his heart I’d been his son since the day I came into his life, even if neither of us were ready for it.”
Richard’s voice takes on a heavy quality, sombre but still earnest. He cared even when he didn’t know Damian. Ric cares, even though he doesn’t know Damian.
Maybe, Damian allows, it is possible he deserves to be cared for. Maybe Richard is not as lost to them as they feared, even if he is never Dick again, Ric is not so different.
“Our situations are so similar, Damian, I know what it feels like to be in a new place, with new people, and a culture you don’t really understand. I used to run away too, hell, I’m not sure I’ve ever really stopped running away, but I’ve been in your place, and now I guess I’m in Bruce’s…it’s going to be hard for both of us Damian, but I’m not going to give up on you, just like Bruce never gave up on me.”
They breathe deeply in tandem, Richard through the speaker on his phone, so many months ago, and Damian the cold night air. His lungs fill as his heart does, Richard’s words in his ears.
“This is probably going to beep soon, so, just, you probably already know this, but Dami means my blood. And I know I’m not your dad, I’m never going to try to replace him, but I will prove it to you, if you give me a chance, that I will always be here for you, Dami. I swear it.”
As Damian walks up the front steps, the double doors swing open, and out comes Tim, Jason, Steph, Alfred, Father, Cass and Duke, he’s swept off his feet into a pair of arms. He’s being scolded and hugged, grounded for sure Tim reminds him. Muffled in his pocket, in the embrace of his siblings, his family, Damian doesn’t hear the last words of the recording, but he knows them anyway, and he swears he’ll wait for Richard to return. Just this time, he won’t do it alone.
“Come home, Damian. We’ll get through this together.”