Archive of Our Own

Damian had been eleven, and Duke twelve, when Bruce had brought home his third child. Damian had barely been used to Duke's presence, to the uniquely brutal methods that Father employed to stop him from crying for his parents, but it had still been the difference between being alone and having someone to share the misery with. So, when he and Duke had both come to attention to watch Father exit his car and reach back in to lift the new child out, he'd been tentatively excited.

She'd been a little taller than either of them at 14, and already deathly quiet. She'd stood, hands tucked behind her back and gaze fixed to the floor.

"This is Cassandra Cain," Father had said. "Her parent was a criminal. She will be living with us now."

Cassandra had been more efficient than Damian, more obedient than Duke. When she came out of isolation, she'd wept and clung to Father, her arms around his neck, and—strange, for him—Father had stroked her hair. Shushed her. Damian had felt a tight, hot little thing grow in his chest when he saw that, and when he was ordered to spar with her, he'd moved faster than usual, hit harder, driven by a burning desire to hurt.

It hadn't mattered.

Cassandra had pinned him every match. He'd lain under her, panting hard, and she'd just looked at him. Her eyes were darker than his, and she'd said nothing at all until Bruce ordered them up and told them to go again.

Cassandra had won every spar until Father beckoned her over to fight with him. Then, he had pinned her with ease, hand over her throat. Damian could feel the gap between his skills and Father's like a gaping wound, then, something that made his animal mind panic so completely that the rest of him collapsed into resignation.

"Showers," Father had said, standing up, and they'd all trooped in to watch Cassandra pay her forfeit for losing.

With Duke, Father had always been cruel about it, harsh. It had been a punishment, something to demonstrate the hierarchy and break Duke down into something that no longer even thought of fighting back. With Cassandra, Father was almost gentle. Instead of hitting her when she struggled, he closed both of her wrists in his hand and held them up and out of the way. Instead of breaking her kicking legs, he had Duke and Damian hold her still. He was going slow, stroking her face.

After Cassandra, demonstrating the hierarchy and forming a bond were treated as entirely separate things. Damian was never sure which one he hated worse.

—

The soundproofed room at the end of the hall keeps drawing Damian's eye, a distraction he can't afford. He forces himself to behave as though nothing is wrong, correcting Harper's form instead of allowing himself to look at the door, beckoning Duke into a match with him to test out the new set of attack patterns Father had instructed them to learn.

The cameras from the corners of the room are watching the three of them, and in the cave below, Father could be watching the cameras, so Damian doesn't let his head turn towards the door even when Harper, taking a short break to drink from her daily ration of water, says, "It's been two days."

She's looking to Damian, as if he has any control over it. "Kid's not gonna last much longer."

Duke is also looking to him over the pair of bo staffs between them, and Damian disengages, finishing the form with a long, sweeping arc of the staff. Form done, he's able to beckon the two of them close. It will look as if he's critiquing form or offering advice.

"I'll speak to him tonight," he promises, under his breath. "But he needs to be in a good mood."

He'd misjudged that, two days ago, when he'd tried to step in on Dickie's behalf, and his back was still hot and raw with how little Father had appreciated his meddling. I need soldiers, not crybabies. The pain itself is less troubling than the knowledge that he'd likely made Dickie's punishment worse by intervening.

He starts the forms again. Duke has been put through the worst of Father's current bad mood, and is sweating too much for his water ration to replenish. There are bloody streaks up and down his practice staff from where his blisters have been torn open and agitated again and again. Harper's hands are red and puffy. But Father instructed them to train until he returned, and disobedience is almost always worse than suffering through what you were ordered to until it was over.

A door closes somewhere down the hall, and heavy boots tread down the wooden floors. With a jolt, Damian spins on his heel and bends into respectful bowing salute. Behind him, bo staffs clack as Harper and Duke do the same.

Father's presence in the doorway is a physical weight in the room. Damian quickly scans his memories—Jason and Timothy have been granted a rare rest period, and are out of the way for the moment. There are no tasks waiting to be done, nothing Damian could think of for Father to be angry over.

"Damian," Father acknowledges, after a long moment. "Duke. Harper."

"Sir," they chorus as one, and stand up into a more relaxed attention pose.

On the threshold to the training room, Father is holding his arm at a strange angle—out of its socket. His knuckles are bruised, and a scrape on his forehead is freely bleeding.

"Row, Thomas, resume sparring," Damian snaps, stepping forward to hide Father's injuries. He hates anyone seeing him look weak, hates the reminders that he's capable of bleeding. The more people see him like this, the more he'll feel the need to establish hierarchies again, and they're all still recovering from last time. Damian has spent fifteen years with his father, and is best suited for navigating this, but he still feels the skip in the beat of his heart as he tilts his head towards the dislocated shoulder and says, "May I assist you, Father?"

"Hm? Oh, with this," Father says, looking down at his arm as though noticing it for the first time. "Yes. That would be helpful."

A very good mood, Damian thinks, as Father says, "lead the way," and Damian precedes him towards the medical room. It's a small space that, based on floor plans he's needed to study for cases or clear while on patrol as Blackbird, Damian thinks was originally meant to be a walk-in closet for the large bedroom that now serves as the training room. The cabinets have been replaced with lockboxes, keeping bandages or medication from being taken without Father's permission. Damian turns, holding up his hands to push Father's shoulder back in place. This is the one that always slips out of joint after years of Father swinging from it off a grapple line, so it's a process Damian is deeply familiar with.

Instead of letting Damian help, Father steps forward, grabbing his wrist and pulling him closer. He's frowning.

"Sorry, Father, I—"

"You need to wrap these," Father says, looking from the blisters into his eyes with an intensity that Damian is unused to having directed towards him. Father's deep-burning fury is reserved for the mission, for eradicating crime from Gotham, only tangentially directed towards Damian and the others in regards to what Father wishes to make them—a band of perfect soldiers to carry on his work and spread it further into the world. Damian looks away, ducking his head in instinctive fear, his hand trapped in Father's grip like a hostage.

"I apologize," he says. "I should have maintained my body better, Father. I will not make this mistake again."

He can only hold still and take in measured breaths, his hand loose. Sparks are already traveling up and down his arm, anticipating the hand around it tightening, anticipating bones straining, bruising, perhaps cracking. He's had to work around the swelling and pain of a break before, the faint fever. The dance of showing enough pain that Father was convinced the correction was sufficient, but also not disturbing the pretense that the injury did not exist until Father acknowledged it. He remains relaxed and ready. Sometimes that is enough.

Today, evidently, it is. Father gives him his wrist back, not even bruised, and goes to the neatly labeled cabinets, grumbling when he tries to pull open a drawer and finds it locked. Damian knows the key is kept in Father's pocket, and he can only watch with slight consternation as Father tugs on the drawer once, twice, then mutters a distinct curse and braces his bad arm against the cabinet, yanking back on the handle hard enough to break the lock and send the drawer shooting free, a few loose bandages tumbling out and rolling across the floor, contaminating the precious gauze. He has to watch it roll across the floor, uncaring about the waste because Father has decided it is not something worth caring about.

"Sit," Father orders, gesturing Damian towards the exam table. He takes his hand again, dripping the peroxide over it before layering the blisters in gauze as if to hide the sting. Damian watches the layers, each wrap a sign of Father's current goodwill, and gathers up his courage.

"Father, Grayson's punishment," he says, watching his hand and not his father's face. The fingers on his wrist tighten.

"Yes?"

"If it continues much longer, he may need time to recover. I worry it will impact his training."

Father ties off the bandage, and quickly manipulates his own shoulder with a wet clicking sound, testing it to make sure the fix has held. It does.

"Take me to him."

—

The isolation room is a small, cramped space at the end of the dormitory hall, a constant threat for all of them. It's fairly mild punishment by Father's usual standards, but he makes sure to ingrain the fear of it into them all early—the silence, the dark. Eventually, the hunger and thirst, too, the panicked certainty that no one will come in time. The desperate, uncaring gratitude when Father eventually does allow them out again.

Father undoes the door's locks quickly, and makes a sharp, disgusted sound when it swings open. The little cell smells of urine and vomit, and the padding on the inside of the door is shredded from years upon years of fingernails scrabbling at it. Father kneels on the threshold, and from deep inside the room, Damian can hear rapid breathing hitch on a sob.

"Dick?" Father asks the dark, his voice deceptively gentle, coaxing. "Come on, chum. It's okay."

There's a shuffling sound, and then Dickie is visible, slowly shuffling towards the door and rubbing his fist in the hollow of his eye, trying and failing to hide how he'd been crying. It was crying that had gotten him locked away in the first place.

"Come on," Father says, beckoning him closer, and Dickie hesitates.

"I'm all dirty," he rasps, having already absorbed Father's attention to sterility in every space that isn't the isolation room.

"We'll get you cleaned up. It's okay," Father says. Evidently, that lets Dickie believe it's safe to come those few feet closer, into his reach. Father picks him up, standing. Dickie is growing out of one of his chubby child-stages and into a lanky one, but he's still impossibly small against Father's bulk, his hands gripped tight in the fabric of his shirt.

"Father, I'll take him," he offers, holding out his hands. Impossibly, Father hands the child to him, and Dickie buries his face in the crook of Damian's neck, wet eyelashes tickling his skin, flakes of dried vomit rubbing off onto Damian's shirt. He shivers as the door eases shut and the locks are slid home again, and Damian tries to send warmth and reassurance through the hand on Dickie's back.

"Where are the others?"

"Drake and Todd are resting, and will be awake in forty-five minutes."

"Hn"

"Should I wake them now?"

"No," Father says. "Remind me. When was the last time everyone ate?"

The answer varied. For most of them, it's a few hours ago. Dickie hasn't had anything since he'd been locked in, and Jason and Tim are ending a one-day punishment that had gotten their meal privileges revoked. Damian lists off everyone's last meal times, hoping that Father will simply revoke meals again rather than take Dickie into the showers.

"Sir?" he asks, cautiously, when Father mumbles something under his breath.

"Pizza," Father says, clearer. "Pizza for everyone. You and Harper get Dick cleaned up with a change of clothes. Duke and I are going to get pizza."

—

Duke steps into the lake-house's civilian garage, with its perfectly maintained concrete floor and walls covered in shiny tool cabinets. The garage door is open, letting in algae-scented heat from outside. Duke has never smelled the lake before, he realizes; they leave for patrol through the cave tunnels, and he usually only sees the lake through the windows of the crawler. He stares out at the green-tinted water for a few moments longer than he should.

"Damian said you wanted me, sir?" he asks, because B hasn't acknowledged him yet—is still checking the glove box of the car. The civilian car always creeped Duke out a little. It was continually freshly detailed, like a set model. Slate grey inside and out, with automatically engaging child locks on every door except for B's.

B ducks out of the car.

"Duke," he says, instead of Thomas. He must be feeling some kind of way about his dad again? Duke remembers a week straight when he was first taken into the family when B would shout at him, tell him that he didn't deserve B's father's name. That he wasn't worthy of it. Duke had snapped back once that it was already his name, worthy or not, and that…hadn't gone well.

"Sir."

"We're going to get pizzas," B says, turning around and immediately frowning at Duke's hands. Fuck.

"You're bleeding."

Like Duke is the one who'd wanted to train past the point of burst blisters, or something.

"I wiped off the training staffs before I came out here, sir. And I didn't get anything on the mats."

B just stares at him. "Come on," he says, after a pause long enough to increase Duke's nerves once over , and leads them back to the medical room. The bandage drawer is busted open? And there's a lonely roll of gauze on the floor. B just blazes right past it, like he doesn't even care, gets out the peroxide and the bandages. He looks at the peroxide, then the bloody messes of Duke's hands, and grimaces.

"It's going to hurt," he says, like pain is something Duke is allowed to care about, and waits for Duke to nod before he pours the peroxide over the ragged points on Duke's palms. Spending time with B always feels a little like being handed a rabid raccoon and told, good luck. The raccoon being nice for once isn't necessarily reassuring.

There's a flicker on the edges of his vision, and Duke looks up over the bandages being wound over his fingers to see Tim, frozen in the doorway. Tim could usually sneak them some ibuprofen or something if they really needed it, scrub the footage in a way B either hasn't noticed yet or is biding his time to punish him for. Tim locks eyes with Duke, and then takes a long step back into the hallway, shoulders hunched. Duke can see the way his left arm is clutched close to his chest. Bruce had hurt his ribs in a spar a while back, something that Tim knows better than to complain about. Duke hadn't known he'd been stealing painkillers about it, though; it must be worse than he was letting on.

B ties off Duke's bandage easily.

"You're awake early," B says, halting Tim from where he'd nearly made it down the hallway. He ducks back into the room.

"Sir," he says. "I have a cleaning shift that I wanted to get a head start on."

Halfway decent lie, Duke thinks, congratulatory.

"If you see Harper, please let her know to bandage her hands if she has any open cuts or blisters."

"I will," Tim says, nervous.

But that's that.

—

Dickie is crying again, and Damian has his back to the nearest camera, shielding him from their view while the water from the showerhead cascades over them both.

"We have to get you clean," Damian says evenly. "Can you scrub your legs? I'll clean your back."

"He's gonna come innn," Dickie says, his voice hitching. His last trip to the showers is why Father put him in solitary to begin with. He hadn't been able to stop crying, and the bruising is still luridly green around his hips.

"He's not here," Damian promises. "Harper is at the door. She would let us know if he was coming, alright? You're safe." He bends down, wiping Dickie's face clean with a wet washcloth and rinsing the sticky globs of snot down the drain. "Breathe," he says, and hands the boy the second cloth, already lathered with soap. "Wipe yourself down. Don't worry about getting the rag dirty, we'll wash it."

Dickie is an obedient kid. He was obedient when Father first brought him home, calm and even-tempered and eager to please. He does what Damian tells him to, breath still hitching, shoulders shaking when Damian washes them.

The important thing is to get him clean, Damian thinks. He's out of isolation, Father doesn't seem inclined to continue punishing him. If Damian can get him to stop crying, then he'll be safe, just for a while. Damian needs to keep him safe. He kneels down on the tile, taking Dick's shoulders and shaking them, ever so slightly. "Look at me, Dickie."

The boy's breathing hitches again, and he picks up a wet hand, wiping it hard across his eyes. The water is running out its timer, turning colder. Damian has to get him out before he starts shivering, but this is more important.

"Take a deep breath and hold it in," Damian says. "Don't think of anything unpleasant. Think about training tomorrow. Go through one of the katas I'm teaching you in your head, and breathe."

When Dickie's breathing slows, Damian nods. "Good. Keep doing that."

"Do you gotta punish me for crying again?" Dickie asks, when he's finally taking full breaths again and his skin is as clean as they're going to get it.

"Not this time." Not when Father hasn't seen it. He reaches up to turn off the water. "Come on. Let's get you some fresh clothes."

—

Harper's busy standing guard at the door to the showers when Tim comes slinking in from the hall. He looks at her hands.

"B said to bandage your blisters."

Harper snorts.

"With what?"

"He left the drawer open, so. Gauze and tape, I guess?"

"He left it open?"

"Yeah."

"The whole thing?"

Tim looks at her like she's stupid, or something, and she punches him in the shoulder on reflex, immediately feeling bad when his face contorts into a mask of pain.

"He didn't leave any other drawers open?"

"No," Tim says. And the fact that he's here, telling her that he's seen Bruce, means that he can't risk opening any drawers on his own. Gauze and tape aren't gonna do a lot for his ribs.

"Water?" Harper offers, as an apology for hitting him earlier. She's been careful of her ration today, and still has a couple mouthfuls left. Tim looks at it, then towards one of the hallway cameras, before shaking his head.

"Save it for yourself," he says. "I can take over guarding, if you need to go take care of your hands."

"Did he say I had to, or that I should if I needed to?"

"Uh. Should if you needed to, I guess. If you had any open blisters or were bleeding."

She shows him her callused hands, red and a little raw but not bleeding. "I had it easier," she explains. Duke and Dami make it a habit to give her more breaks, covering for her. Treating her like one of the kids. She hates it. She hates herself even more for almost always taking the outs when they're offered, too soft to push beyond the point of pain unless she has to, but it serves its purpose. Like leaving her whole so she can stand guard for the others.

"You should wake Jason," Harper says, when Tim keeps hovering, and rubs his face. "Oh god. I told B we had a cleaning shift,"

"Did you?"

He shakes his head.

"I can't change the tasklists and scrub the cameras before he gets back," he says, a note of despair in his voice.

"Forgetting is better than lying," Harper advises. "I think I had the last cleaning shift, you came to talk to me, said you were gonna go clean, I told you you'd gotten the shifts mixed up."

Tim rubs his face again, like he wants to rub it right off. Rearrange his features into a set that B doesn't recognize anymore. Harper's fairly sure that they've all had that dream, at some point, but that's all it is.

"Go on, wake up Jason," she says. "I'll cover for you."

Tim's shoulders slump, and she recognizes that defeated look. He wants to be tougher, but she's here, offering to be tough for him, and he can't say no. She doesn't want him to. They're not allowed a lot in here, but they can protect each other, sometimes, in small ways, and that…it has to be enough, she thinks, watching him carefully not limp towards the dormitory.

It has to be.

—

In the car, Duke is half-wondering if this is gonna be B's last stand, or something. Feed them all poisoned pizza and then blow up the lake-house with everyone inside it. Go out in fire like those figures of legend he sometimes talked about. As soon as he thinks it, though, Duke has to dismiss the idea—it's too close to giving up for the bat to even consider.

Here's the thing: B has literally never, in the history of ever, gone out to get them pizza. He'd resorted to military ration calorie bars before once or twice—an indulgent cheat meal when he was particularly pleased with them all. Not pizza. He picks absently at the gauze on his hands, unused to its presence there.

"So," B says, making Duke's entire body go rigid. "Refresh my memory. What's your training schedule look like these days?"

Not great territory to be in. Not the worst, though, since it's a question with an actual answer.

"Non-lethal bo staff takedowns, information combing, and continued hand-to-hand combat with a muay thai focus," Duke rattles off.

"Your schedule has you in training for almost fifteen hours a day, when you're not on patrol with me," B notes, and Duke winces internally. He's barely getting enough sleep as it is. His muscles scream at him from the time he wakes up to the time he finally gets to rest. If B wants to up his training again, he knows better than to complain, but—

"Yes, sir," he says. "I know it's not enough if I want to become strong enough. I'm sorry."

The sudden silence tells him it's the wrong thing to say. The rabid raccoon, about to bite, like it always does eventually.

"If you're seeing a lack of progress, it's more likely that you're over-training," B says. His eyes are still on the road, and he sounds—calm. Not seconds away from snapping. "I'd like to adjust you all to having longer rest periods, actually."

And Duke, because Duke can never resist poking the raccoon to see if it's dead yet, says:

"You don't need to—I can handle the training, I promise."

B raises an eyebrow at him, which usually means you're in for it at the earliest possible moment, but doesn't take his hands off the wheel.

"Duke, you're lagging," he says. "You're a smart kid, which means that when you're taking days to master simple movesets, actively backsliding on research and previously mastered techniques, it's because you're too exhausted to absorb anything new. You need some rest. I think everyone does."

Duke is frozen in his seat. He hadn't thought—he was making progress, not— actively backsliding.

"Duke. Calm down." B says, which actually does serve the purpose of making Duke inhale deeply before he has a chance to think about it. Ingrained obedience and its many perks. "I want you to get more food and more sleep. That's all. Understand?"

Duke nods automatically, but the truth is that he doesn't understand, not at all. Failure isn't met with this. It never has been before, and he doesn't get why B is pretending it will be now.

All he can do is play along, and hope to get some pizza out of it.

—

There are a lot of things in this world that Bruce doesn't recognize. The car make, for one thing, is apparently a 'Wentley', which is ridiculous enough that he'd actually had to go look for the owner's manual to see if it wasn't just an elaborate prank.

For another, he never built a mid-century-modern house on the lake near the manor. It's a nice house on the outside. The inside feels like someone tried to turn it into a bunker; the open windows are all covered with metal emergency panels, so that the inside depends on harsh artificial lighting. The architect would probably weep to see it now, but Bruce imagines his double here trying to explain what he wanted to use the building for. 'Well, you see, I want to imprison and psychologically torture children to fulfill a militaristic crime-fighting fantasy'. Try saying that without bleeding workers left and right. He was going to have to get those metal shades open, though. Add that to the long list of things he needed to fix about this place.

Duke is a quiet presence next to him as they drive home again, the pizzas in the backseat carefully stacked and buckled in. The Duke he knew would've already opened a box, argued that it was tax for going to retrieve the food. Bruce can't picture this version doing the same, and it feels less like he's meeting a new person, and more like some vital organ has gotten stabbed out of his chest, leaving just an ache behind.

When the dimensional portal had eaten him—'It's inert' his ass, Constantine— and immediately shut behind him again, he'd had to wander through rows of glass-fronted coffins for a few minutes before he'd found the alternate version of himself. The coffins were number-tagged in a filing system that Bruce didn't understand, but he'd recognized a fair amount of the faces inside them. Victor Fries. Oswald Cobblepot. James Gordon. Pamela Isley. A few of the women who frequented the street corners of Crime Alley—Bruce didn't know their birth names, but he said the names they gave him as he passed by. Cinnamon, Diamond, Cherry. All frozen.

He was expecting a new villain at the center of the maze of coffins, but the other Batman had turned and attacked him first. When Bruce incapacitated him and pulled off the cowl, his own face had looked back at him.

Luckily, the coffins were easy to operate. The other Batman had used them—seemingly as some kind of suspended animation prison system—and so Bruce hadn't felt a lot of remorse about stuffing him into one and taking his place, just until he could figure something out to get him back to his own universe again, but after seeing Dickie in that room—the blood on Damian's and Duke's hands—he couldn't let the other-him out again. Not unless it was into Clark's phantom dimension, the one prison Bruce was fairly sure he wouldn't be able to find a way out of again.

He pulls into the garage in silence, and unbuckles the pizzas in silence, and enters the house in silence. Harper is standing in the hall, looking not quite herself with her hair cut evenly and all its natural color.

"I told Tim he was wrong about his cleaning shift, sir," she says. Harper Row has never said sir in her life. It sounds wrong. Bruce hates it.

"Okay," Bruce says, because he doesn't care about cleaning shifts right now. He's pretty sure he could eat off of most of these floors. His kids have all apparently been starving for who knows how long, and all he cares about right now is getting some pizza into them. "Did you bandage your hands?"

"I didn't have any open blisters." She looks like she's admitting to a crime. What on earth had his counterpart done to her?

"Help Duke carry in the pizzas?"

She snaps to attention and starts moving. Bruce continues down the hallway. He doesn't feel like finding a dining room, and Dick always insisted you were supposed to eat pizza on the couch or the floor anyway, so he goes for the room with the tatami mats and practice weapons. There are already a huddle of children there. He recognizes Jason, baby fat still on his face and short hair slightly smushed on one side from sleep. There are two people missing, though, he thinks. Cassandra isn't here. The ages of his children seem to be mixed around, Damian the oldest and Harper somehow just a little younger than he's used to seeing her and Dick and Jason still just children. Cass should be here somewhere—except that if Jim is in the frozen prison in the cave, would Barbara even have been born to take Cass into the family? And where does that leave Stephanie?

He'll have to look for them both, he thinks, putting that on the list, too. Perhaps, if this is a world where Bruce is cruel, it'll be a world where David Cain and Arthur Brown were kind. Perhaps.

Hope is usually Clark's domain, but Bruce can borrow it for a little while.

Damian stands up as soon as Bruce enters the room, hands behind his back, head lifted, eyes down. The other kids follow suit. his alternate had…trained them to come to attention when he entered the room, apparently. Delightful.

"Damian, can you get drinks for everyone?" Bruce asks, because he's a terrible person who would rather use all this obedience to his advantage right now than address it. It's a very long list, but getting everyone fed is at the top, and everything else can wait for now.

"Father, our water rations will be sufficient," Damian says.

Water rations.

Duke and Harper are in the room now, eerily not bickering over their stacks of pizza boxes. Jason is following the food with his eyes and not jumping for it. Bruce is trying not to blow his cover before he can get a better idea of the situation, here, but rationing water when there's no material need to do so was complete idiocy on his alternate's part, and he doesn't even bother thinking up an excuse this time.

"All water rationing is suspended," he says. "Please bring enough for everyone. Jason and Tim can help you carry it."

Damian lets nothing show on his face, but there's a minute pause before he nods, and beckons Jason and Tim to follow him down a hall. Bruce notes which one, as it must lead to the kitchen. He also needs to look up a blueprint for this terrible, awful house that isn't the manor. Existing here feels like wearing someone else's shoes, worn down in all the wrong places.

Dickie is sitting on the tatami, knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around them. He's rocking back and forth slightly, looking at the pizza briefly before looking away again. Two days with no food, Bruce thinks, and picks out the box with Dick's favorite pizza—kalamata olives and ham, which Bruce has always found disgusting—to put in front of him, opening it.

Dick looks at it for a split second, then looks up into Bruce's face.

"I'm a good soldier," he says, his voice pitching up at the end, making it a question. Bruce opens his mouth to assure him that yes, he is, something telling him that only good soldiers are allowed to eat pizza here, but the words lodge in his throat. Dick is all of seven or eight, staring up at him. He's not a soldier. He's a child.

Hesitating isn't the right response. Dick's eyes get big, his hands fist tighter into the fabric of his sweats.

"I'm good," he says. "I know I'm not allowed, I'll be good."

"Dick," Bruce says, and Dickie's shoulders hunch up.

"Grayson, wait for orders and don't speak unprompted," Duke says, his voice strangely sharp. He takes a step forward, hand up, and Bruce puts an arm across his chest on reflex, stopping him in place with some effort. Duke, not expecting to be stopped, jostles against Bruce's arm and then steps back, wound up and tight-jawed.

"Apologies, sir," he says.

"Nothing is wrong," Bruce lies. He looks to Dick. "You're allowed to eat this, Dick. I want you to. Everyone is allowed to eat the pizza, that's why it's here."

Dick looks at him, clearly not believing this but too cowed to call him on it. Bruce can feel Duke and Harper also staring at him. Too out of character, apparently.

"You need all the calories you can get," he says, and Dick finally, finally, reaches out to take a slice of pizza, bringing it to his mouth with a shaking hand. Bruce looks away, gestures the other two down to eat.

Jason filters back into the room first, carrying a set of water bottles and handing them out. He passes one to Duke first.

"We getting tomorrow's ration early, sir?" Duke asks, hesitating before he takes it.

"I read an article," Bruce says. "No more water rationing. I think limiting your water intake is negatively affecting your training."

"Oh," Duke says, under his breath, and stares at the water disbelievingly for a moment before uncapping the bottle and drinking it like it's hard liquor, precious and a little dangerous.

"Which kind do you want, Jason?" Bruce asks, as Jason sits down cross-legged on the floor. Jason startles, just a little, clearly uncomfortable with the attention.

"Food is fuel, sir," he says, careful. "I'll eat what I'm given."

Bruce has a memory, suddenly, of Jason in his early years at the Manor, how he'd suddenly gotten loud and opinionated about what foods were amazing or disgusting, and Bruce had needed to talk to him about how to express his preferences without hurting anyone's feelings. How Jason had gone from willing to to eat anything to hating pumpkin and tiramisu and specifically canned beans, for some reason. The slow realization that some part of his son must have realized he was safe enough to ask for what he wanted. He and Alfred had shared the rest of the tiramisu in the kitchen, late at night, in quiet celebration.

You're allowed to have preferences, Jay, he absolutely cannot say, because other-him is the one who'd told Jason preferences weren't allowed, like some caricature of a 1950s patriarch. Instead, he says, "There's plenty to choose from," and leaves it at that. When Tim and Damian get back with the rest of the waters, at least everyone sits down and eats. Bruce can feel his sanity slowly returning as each of his children is able to get their fill, and the list shows up in his mind again. The children need to sleep, and Bruce needs to do some research into the universe he's ended up in, starting with making sure that Cass and Steph are in good places, and then looking up the Justice League. Everyone seems to be done eating, in the lazy, comfortable stages of having had a large meal, so Bruce makes to stand up.

Of course, Damian stands with him. His son's eyes are brown in this universe, and just as incisive.

"Who will be going on patrol with you tonight, Father?" he asks.

Bruce has to stay in character. He thinks of who here isn't horrendously young, injured, or exhausted by recent over-work.

"Tim."

—

"Computer," Bruce says as they get into the cave's main platform. Tim is wrestling his way into the Blackbird suit, working around the awful twinge in his chest that seems to get worse every day instead of better, but he snaps the suit on quickly and rushes to the computer, booting it up. He glances behind at Bruce while he types in his password, hoping for some hint as to what he's looking for, but Bruce is standing over him, eyes hidden behind the white lenses of the batsuit. Tim looks up at the screen again, the cursor as large as his head blinking in expectation.

"Pull up a map of the city," Bruce says, which is a nice, easy task to start out with, at least. Tim's ribs hate this chair with a burning passion, so a good 40% of his focus has to be on breathing normally and not giving Bruce an opening, a weak spot to latch onto. With the usual amount of background noise of Bruce is here right now he's behind you watch out watch out, that leaves less than he'd like to operate Computer. She's a finicky machine.

Bruce, though, stares up at the map, and then gestures towards the intersection of Wallace and Green.

"Fourth quadrant for our patrol tonight," he says. "It's been a while since we got a report from the docks, hasn't it?"

"It has, sir." Tim says, mouth dry. He doesn't know what 'fourth quadrant' means. No amount of wracking his brain is giving him an answer. If Bruce has started mapping the city into segments, and Tim doesn't ask about it now, he's only gonna be volunteering himself for a worse punishment later, especially since Harper had to cover for him with the cleaning thing. He can hear Bruce's voice already, that disappointment that shears right down into his lungs. You've gotten forgetful, boy. I'll help you remember. It's hard to get the words out, but he manages.

"Fourth quadrant, sir?" Tim mentally winces when he turns to see that Bruce is donning his gauntlets. He pauses, one gauntlet hanging half off his hand like a set of distended claws. A squirming, awful sensation snakes up Tim's spine, fear compressed into itself too many times. He can't take a full breath with his ribs screaming at him the way they are. Bruce slides the glove on fully, moving closer, and Tim locks the muscles of his shoulders, keeping them from pulling up, because Bruce hates it when they try to cover themselves or flinch away instead of just taking what they've got coming to them, but Bruce just leans over the desk so he can point at the screen more precisely.

"Starting at Miller Harbor, with its southern border at Blackgate Isle, and western border marked by Wayne Tower," he explains, sketching out the shape of the area on the map. It's an odd area to start with; usually patrols consist of taking the abandoned metro tunnels into the area under Crime Alley, and then circling to the west before coming back up on the coast. The area Bruce is singling out usually gets a fly-over unless someone's screaming in distress or they've gotten a tipoff for smugglers or human traffickers using the docks for a shipment. But tonight it sounds like that's the only place they're going to be focusing on, which is—not something Tim's known Bruce to do before. Tim highlights the selected area on the map and tags it 'quadrant four.' Behind him, Bruce gives one of his very, very rare huffs of actual amusement.

"Might as well section out the rest while we're at it," he says, and sits down in one of the wheeled chairs. It squeals like an offended rat, but Bruce doesn't seem to notice, pointing out other city segments to mark off. Tim can see how the system will be useful; sectioning the city like this will allow for statistical analysis in a way that taking the city as a whole didn't. The sections also each have a nearby tunnel outlet, so they'll be accessible quickly.

"Good work," Bruce says, patting Tim's shoulder.

Here's the thing about Bruce: he doesn't say that. He doesn't really believe in praise as a motivator when he can just take out his belt for a much more enthusiastic result. Hearing it feels abruptly and jarringly wrong. It feels like the time Bruce had taken him up to his bed instead of the showers for once and started stroking his face, blunt, sticky fingers more gentle than Tim thought was possible, and Tim had noticed the claw-mark across Bruce's chest, pale lines under dark hair, proof he'd bled at least once. Then, Tim had needed to break Bruce's grip to scramble and puke over the edge of the bed. Now, Tim flinches away from the hand on his shoulder, chair squealing slightly as it rolls him a few inches away. Tim stares, frozen, at where Bruce is still holding his hand out.

Damn it.

Tim isn't made for gentleness. Every time he gets it, he fucks it up. He's ready for B to pull him out of the chair and throw him down to the floor, kick him in the ribs maybe, some kind of lesson in—in—listening, or being better, or—

"Sorry," Bruce says, and all of Tim's fear fizzles out into…something else.

"It's fine," he says, without adding sir onto it. "I was just startled."

He watches Bruce for a reaction, but he only nods, and gestures to the crawler.

"Ready?"

—

It's an unusual patrol. They stop a mugging, and Batman doesn't break any bones. Usually muggers get it the worst, but B just makes the man give the wallet and watch back and then lets him go.

It's unsettling.

Tim goes back in his mind. He was asleep at the time, but Damian said that Bruce came up from the cave in a good mood. He'd agreed to let Dickie out of iso, at least. Tim had stumbled across him bandaging Duke's hands. Then he'd gotten pizza for everyone, and stopped rationing water, and started messing with their training regimens and the city maps in order to be able to patrol the city one section at a time. Starting with the docks.

Bruce must've read one hell of an article.

The docks are quiet. It's late on a Tuesday night, so there's only a few people out, coming home from the dockside nightclubs in groups large enough to scare away opportunists. B occasionally sends Blackbird down to someone who seems like they're going to try to drive in order to call them a cab, which is weird. The first time he does it, Tim says,

"I don't have a phone, sir," which is slightly to the left of the actual truth, which is that B would probably actually kill him if Tim tried to get his hands on a phone. He's only allowed on the comms and the computer, neither of which has the capacity to contact any outside tech, and if B found out what Tim does with those, he'd probably be banned from any tech at all. If Bruce didn't just kill him, anyway.

"Here," Batman says, and hands him. Bruce's actual civilian phone. Tim gets a wild surge of hope for a full three seconds.

Who can he even call? Jack and Janet died in a plane crash four years ago. Mrs. Mac will end up in Bruce's cold storage prison in seconds if she tries to save him from Batman. The Justice League and the police are both on Bruce's side.

He calls a cab for a very drunk woman and her very high roommate, and then grapples back up to the rooftop and hands the phone obediently back to Bruce. The phone disappears into the mysterious secret pockets of the batsuit, likely never to be seen again, and Tim can't help but mourn losing it even though he just decided it'd be useless. What was he even mourning? Candy Smash?

…Tim could really go for a round of Candy Smash.

"Raise your arms over your head," Bruce says, and Tim obeys, registering that Bruce is well and truly angry just before registering the sharp, stabbing pain as his body refuses to let him follow the order. He lowers his arms, coughing, and each cough is a stab in the chest, sending white spots over his vision. Batman grabs the nape of his suit, keeping him on the rooftop but also acting as an active threat, and calls the crawler to them.

"In," he orders, sharply, and Tim scrambles into his seat, heart pounding. All he can think is that Bruce heard him thinking about Candy Smash, somehow, which doesn't make any sense. He's pissed, though, which always gives Tim scared rabbit brain.

"I just called them a cab, sir," Tim tries. "You can check the call logs, I just called a cab, I didn't do anything else."

"How long have your ribs been hurting."

The crawler takes them down the side of the building and scares a tomcat as it speeds through an alley to the nearest tunnel.

"Since the last time we sparred, four days ago," Tim says, and forgets the sir because the crawler takes a hard left in a way that pushes him into the seatbelt, and he can't breathe again.

"Have you been taking painkillers?"

Does Bruce know? Is this a chance to come clean?

"I'll take your silence as a no," B says, before Tim can fight past the hard lump in his throat to give a reply either way. They dip into a tunnel, hurtling through darkness that makes it seem like the crawler is the only world there is. They're headed back to the cave, Tim thinks, and when they're in the cave—

As pissed as Bruce is, he won't wake Damian for this, Tim thinks. His ribs are gonna be the least of his worries soon. The thought of his arms tied over his head for a whipping makes his lungs pulse with protest. He won't be able to breathe. He'll pass out, get punished for being weak on top of everything else.

The crawler spits them out into the cave, and B is getting out of it before Tim can even undo his seat belts. He keeps fumbling at them, his fingers getting clumsier when he sees B coming around to the passenger side of the crawler.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry—" Tim is saying, fingers numb, when the door opens. Bruce leans over him, undoing the straps quickly and lifting Tim out of the bucket seat. Tim makes a noise and goes perfectly still. He's pretty sure he can't move, not unless B tells him to. He knows better, right down to his bruised bones.

They don't make their way over to the part of the cave wall that's got hard points on it, but towards the stairs into the house, and then into the medical room, where Tim is set down on the medical table and then Bruce is coming at him with a pair of emergency shears. It's a good thing Tim is frozen, he thinks, watching Bruce cut away the top part of the Blackbird suit. Under it, lurid purple blooms over Tim's torso, wrapping up towards his armpit and not quite making its way down over his belly. Bruce rips off his gauntlets and helmet, dumping both on the floor before skating his fingers over the bruise. Tim expects pressure, doesn't get it. It still hurts. Bruce glances up at him.

"Have you been sweating a lot? Had chills, or a fever?"

Tim shakes his head, wishes B would just get on with this already, whatever it is. B's fingers on his ribs are making his skin crawl, an ugly feeling where he desperately wants more touch, but every actual brush of skin against his makes him want to shave that part of himself away. B presses on part of the bruise, and Tim's vision goes white for a moment. When he comes back to himself, Bruce isn't touching him anymore. He's standing in the middle of the room, hands on his hips. He looks like a sitcom dad, Tim thinks. There's no humor in the thought, though.

"You will tell me immediately if anyone has an injury," he says, and Tim nods along, frantic to please him for once, make whatever's coming just that bit more bearable. "Hiding injuries means you could get sick, or infected," Bruce says. Tim knows this, intimately, and nods along. "We'll get a CT scan for your ribs in the morning to make sure they're not broken, but not taking painkillers when you have broken ribs means you take shallower breaths and puts you at risk for pneumonia."

Bruce holds out something in his hand, and after a moment, Tim cups his palm underneath. Two pale pills drop into his hand, and he recognizes them. His eyes dart to the drawer in the corner—open. The lock is broken, the drawer itself hanging oddly, and there's no way Bruce didn't notice that some of the pills were missing when he got these. Tim hadn't thought that far ahead, but the bottle hadn't had that many, and—

"Take them," Bruce orders. "Two every four hours for now." he rubs his hand across his face. The gesture looks strange on him, but Tim tips his head back, swallows the pills dry before Bruce hands him the whole bottle. there's maybe six left in it. Not enough to overdose.

"Yes, sir," he rasps, waiting for the punishment, now that B is done changing the rules again. He wonders if it'll be different in the morning, if someone will come to Bruce with an arm out of joint and he'll hurt them for being weak. Impossible to tell, really. All they can do is obey.

"Tim…"

Bruce usually calls him Drake. Tim stares at the bottle in his hand.

"Get cleaned up and go to bed. I'll finish the night on my own."

Tim nods, slipping off the table while Bruce picks up his discarded gauntlets and helmet, and makes his way towards the showers, not caring if the cameras see him stumbling over the shreds of his own suit.

He waits in the shower until the water turns cold, but Bruce still doesn't show.

—

Stepping out of the cave entrance onto the back lawn of the Manor, Bruce takes his first clean breath of air since a dimensional portal appeared out of nowhere to eat him, and spends a moment out from under Computer's glare to think of what he'd found.

Cassandra is dead.

He'd taken her in when she was fourteen and spent three years training—abusing—her. It's laid out coldly in file S4E01, not even graced with her name. She'd tried to save someone in the harbor on a stormy night after Bruce ordered her to leave them, and had been caught in a riptide to drown. It's described as suffering the natural consequences of disobeying orders. Disappointing. No mention of his other self even trying to save her.

Hers was the last file he'd opened. After leaving Tim upstairs, Bruce had been shaking, caught in the unique panic of having missed something, and had just typed 'Clark Kent' into Computer, thinking that he knew at least one person who'd be able to tell him if any more of his kids were nursing serious internal injuries. He'd found an email, dated at least a decade back. Duke had tried to run away, apparently. He'd gone to Superman, and Clark had told Bruce to come pick him up.

Go easy on the kid, Batman, the email ends.

Superman isn't a villain in this universe. He has newspaper stories about ending wars, saving kittens from trees, stopping intergalactic conquerors. He's got his sweet, open grin. And, apparently, he'd rather send a child back into a clearly abusive situation than risk Bruce unmasking him.

Stephanie is okay, at least. Arthur Brown is a successful trivia show host with an adoring family and no indication of being involved in any kind of crime, domestic or otherwise. One small—very small—way in which this universe is better than the others. Bruce rubs his eyes again, trying to massage away the migraine that's been building all day, and looks at his surroundings.

The moonlight paints an eerie picture here. The back garden is horrendously overgrown, thick with the creeping charlie that Alfred had always battled so ferociously. It's even growing up the sides of the manor itself, covering the windows and the doors.

Everything he'd seen in this universe has made him more reluctant to leave it as it is. This other self—Bruce can't pinpoint where the two of them diverged. Hopefully, the empty manor will give him some clues.

The doors open with a gasp like an indrawn breath, pressure from the inside of the house finally able to equalize with the pressure outside. It creates a harsh breeze on the threshold, blowing dust and cobwebs out the door, cooler than the heavy night.

Bruce had searched the coffins for Alfred, seeing as how they seemed to contain allies as often as they contained enemies, but found nothing. Perhaps Cassandra's death was the last straw for him. The Batman of this universe seemed to be attempting to run his family like a guerilla military force, and Bruce can't imagine Alfred standing for it. Then again, he hadn't thought that Clark would have stood for it, either.

His Alfred would also never have allowed the manor to get into a state like this. Bruce steps around a section of floor that's starting to show signs of rot, and looks up to the ceiling above. The base of the entryway chandelier is peeling away from the ceiling, and a stain is spreading around it, as if a pipe had burst somewhere on the third floor.

His first step onto the stairs causes dust to stir up, and a mildewy odor to thicken in the air.

The layout of the manor is faintly different from what he remembers. Not in the actual blueprint, but there's a storage room where Bruce remembers his study, and the library and ballroom seem to be switched for some unknowable reason. Nothing consequential, nothing that could be responsible for permanently altering Bruce's psyche.

It's the stale air that sticks in his head, seems important in a way he knows not to ignore. This other self locked the manor and never returned. Not in an attempt to preserve it, either; it's been abandoned to rot. Bruce starts opening doors in the family wing, empty room after empty room. It's strange—he has children in this world, but none of them have their distinctive collections of debris. None of them seem to have stepped foot in the manor at all.

He's wandered ten steps into the conservatory before he sees the ladder. It's the old wooden one that he's told Alfred a hundred times before needs to be replaced. There's a half-rotted rag hanging from the top rung. Bruce can see the faint blue stain from the window cleaner Alfred always favored. The small figure crumpled at the bottom of the ladder is wearing a once-perfect suit. He's covered in detritus from the overgrown mess of plants, and the window he was trying to clean is just as covered in green mold and moss as the rest.

Bruce looks down at the dessicated body, and he understands, suddenly, the need to shut this place up like the tomb that it is. He understands it the way a hand understands a burning coal or the way a deer understands a gunshot, something raw and instinctive that wants to insist that the damage isn't already done, and that running can fix it.

He waits, instead. Lets himself breathe until he's able to kneel down. Lets the pain in his chest throb in time with his heartbeat.

"I'm sorry," he tells the empty sockets. "He shouldn't have left you like this."

Based on the timeline he was able to piece together from his alternate's notes, this must have happened at least twenty years ago. Bruce doesn't know what he would have done if he'd lost Alfred that young, but this is what some alternate version of him did. He wonders if the man had even been able to feel grief anymore, by the time Cass got taken by the dark waters in the harbor, or if that single, solitary disappointing was all he had left.

Martha and Thomas Wayne have plots behind the manor. Sweating and panting in the summer haze, Bruce digs a third beside them, and buries Alfred's bones in it with as much respect as he knows how. He marks it with a stone, and promises to find something engraved with a name as soon as he could. For Alfred, and also for Cass. She deserves so much more than what this other self gave her.

Then he returns to the lakehouse. And he starts making breakfast for his kids.

—

Jason dreams about his mom making pancakes, and he wakes up still smelling them.

Jason spends at least a minute lying there, wondering why no one's come through to wake them all up. It's usually Damian's job, unless he's too injured, or stuck in solitary for showing too much preference for the rest of them. Jason's never awake first. Something is wrong.

He slips out from under the covers. None of his limbs feel like they belong to him, and there's a buzzy pressure under his lungs. The room is too quiet, and he can see Damian asleep on his bunk, Dickie laid out in the bunk above his with one long arm draped down through the guard rail. Everyone is in here, and everyone is asleep, and Jason is getting the strange driftiness that he always got when he knew he was in trouble. Probably they all were. Sleeping in. Getting lazy. The sweet smell of pancakes mixed with the sourness in his mouth to smell like something rotting—a dead cat in an alley, dishes stacked up in a sink to soak for a few weeks too long. He hates smelling that. One of the few good things about living with Batman was that it's almost always clean.

Batman doesn't like Jason. He knows that like he knows his way around a back alley dumpster. Jason can't reason with him like Damian, or sweet talk him like Duke, or figure out clever lies like Harper. But he does sometimes punish Jason first and then forget to punish anyone else after, if Duke or Harper or Damian don't step in first to try and take some blame, which they do way too often. Jason knows a debt when he feels one. He rubs his forearms, hard, making the bruises ache in a way that goes straight to his stomach. Time to pay up.

He gets out of the room without waking anyone, and makes it out into the training area. He can hear Bruce in the hallway leading towards the kitchen, and he almost chickens out. Staying in the training room and starting a routine would be so much easier. But Batman is gonna be mad as hell no matter what, and Jason might as well just get it over with.

The smell of pancakes gets stronger as he makes it into the actual kitchen. The big metal blinds have been retracted, so early morning sunlight is streaming through the windows and across the floor, and Bruce is humming. Humming. Like some kind of psycho.

Jason stops just within the limits of the room, fists clenched as tight as he can get them, and waits. It's surreal, watching Batman's bulk move easily through the kitchen, pouring batter onto the griddle and flipping the cakes easily. They look perfect. Golden brown, perfectly round. There's already a small stack of them on a plate by the griddle.

"Jason!"

A jolt through Jason's fuzzy, not-fully-present body. He looks up to where Batman is grinning at him, showing smile lines on his face that Jason has never seen before. "You're awake."

No need to rub it in. "Yes, sir."

"Get a plate."

There's already a stack of plates on the counter. Actual silverware, too. B tends to prefer meals that came in pouches or plastic wrappers—quick, tasteless, easily portioned out or withheld, no dirty dishes to sneak and lick clean if you were being punished. Was this supposed to be a test? He's been suspicious ever since the pizza last night, which seemed like a test and then maybe wasn't. Is he supposed to refuse the plate, or something?

He's too chickenshit to say no to Bruce. He gets the damn plate. B takes it, and loads five whole pancakes on it before handing it back. "Syrup's in the fridge."

Like Jason can just walk over and open the fridge, sure. That's a trap he knows how to avoid, at least. He stands there, the plate warming in his hands, sweet smell filling his nose. Taking the plate anywhere will be moving it from where Batman had expressly put it, which feels way too presumptuous for Jason to dare.

Every moment he isn't getting yelled at or slapped around is a moment where his body feels more like it belongs to him, and the more his body belongs, the worse it acts. He can feel sweat making his armpits slimy, can feel the shake in his right arm. Batman had broken it in Jason's first year, and it's still the first to start unhelpfully trembling or losing its grip at the first sign of trouble. Stupid arm.

Batman flips another pancake, and then sighs. Jason's arm tenses up further, and he wraps his other arm around the plate to hold it steady against his stomach. That's the Disappointed Sigh. Like when Jason had first thought he'd known what Batman's deal was and he'd gone down on his knees like he was servicing some john in Crime Alley, and Batman had to pick him up by the scruff like a misbehaving puppy and shove him against the wall, keeping him pinned to the shower tile by that unbreakable grip on the back of his neck to show him what belonging to Bruce really felt like.

Jason wants Duke to be here. Or Harper. Even Damian. He shouldn't have come in here alone and put himself in the same room as Bruce with no backup, stupid, stupid—

A hand on his shoulder, as light as one of Bruce's mitts possibly can be, and Jason watches, frozen, as the big man folds himself down into a sort of kneel-squat position and then looks him in the eye. He's always thought of B's eyes as husky dog eyes, cold and soulless blue, the pupils just pinpricks.

"We have plenty of food, Jay," Bruce says, and Jason gets a shiver like someone's walked over his grave, because that's Bruce's voice, sure, but that is not Bruce. Something else is puppeting Bruce's body and making him smile and talk all gentle and not give Jason the backhand real Bruce would, just for existing. "Please eat as much as you want. I—" he stops there, rubbing his forehead like he's got another headache that they're not supposed to talk about. "Actually, could you go wake the others? I'm making enough for everyone."

He takes the plate back, letting Jason's hands fall free, and releases his grip on his shoulder.

Jason flees down the hallway.

—

"Damian!"

Dickie wakes to his bunk being rocked back and forth. Jason hisses "Damian!" again, and the older boy makes a sound in the back of his throat and sits up, shifting their bunk bed again.

Dickie doesn't want the day to start. He doesn't want to train and be told that his parents were 'too soft' on him. But he wants to make Damian have to whip him again even less, so he rubs his eyes and shoves himself upright, clambering over to the little ladder off the bunk. Dami taught him that trick for getting up after the first time he'd needed to be punished for waking late—"Your mind will follow your body," he'd whispered, daubing hydrogen peroxide on Dickie's cuts. "Start moving first. Everything else will follow."

Damian is swinging his legs over the side of the bunk, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and Jason is standing there, wide-eyed, with his arm clutched close to his ribs like he's hiding an injury. Damian must think the same thing, because he frowns, reaching out to feel the arm gently, and peel it away from where Jason's holding it. Checking for blood.

"He's making pancakes," Jason whispers. "He told me to get everyone up. We—we all slept in."

Damian hisses something harsh under his breath, and stands up to shake Harper's shoulder, hissing her awake. Dickie shuffles from foot to foot. He has to pee. Damian usually takes him, so he doesn't have to be alone, but Damian is busy, and Tim is asking Jason questions, and no one looks like they have an opening. And Dickie needs to pee.

Bruce is in the kitchen, anyway, and probably too busy to find Dickie in the bathroom, so he'll just—go. On his own.

It'll be okay!

He slips out of their room, and down the hall to the bathroom. There's a camera in the corner to make sure they don't steal the tap water, but Dickie's gotten better at ignoring it. He hears the others troop down the hallway outside, and rushes to wash his hands and follow them.

He's out in the hallway when he realizes that he doesn't know where the kitchen is. They usually eat in the training room, and the only other space he can think of is the medical room.

Maybe it's downstairs? The cave has a lot of rooms.

Yeah. It's probably downstairs.

—

"He's not the same," Jason had insisted. Damian takes the lead as they head toward the kitchen, and his mind is full of arguing voices.

In one sense, Father is never the same man two days in a row. His ideas changed. His methods altered. He's been forgetting, more and more often, what he'd said one day to the next, and Damian is fully prepared to come into the kitchen to find him marked somehow by a stroke or some other total personality change. He's been bracing himself—bracing, and not preparing, because he has no idea how to be prepared for such a thing—for some sort of collapse for years, now. Father has always run himself harder than he runs his birds, and he runs them to the point of breaking.

"Good morning," Father says, when Damian comes in the doorway, and Damian nods deeply in acknowledgment. "Father," he says. "We've slept too long. It's my fault."

"It's no one's fault. You all needed the rest. Everybody grab plates, help yourselves!"

Mania would make sense, Damian thinks. Stroke or severe mental collapse would have physical effects Father isn't displaying. But Father has had recurring manic episodes before, with predictable results—he focuses harder on their training, punishes imperfection more harshly. His depressive swings are marked by an increase in sexual domination and petty violence. He's been doing neither.

Harper is the first to take a plate.

"Syrup's on the counter," Father directs. As with his other whims, there's nothing to do but follow along. Damian feels bizarrely as if he's looking through a window on patrol, watching a civilian family go about their morning, even as he fills a plate for himself and sits down. With the metal safety shades open, the lake outside is visible. It's a startling cyan. There are geese swimming in it.

Jason is devouring his plate of pancakes,and Damian watches the others eating, thinking at first that it's the bizarreness that's causing him to scan the room over and over again, until—

They're one short, he realizes, just as Father asks, "Where's Dick?

—

Dickie's trying not to cry. He's trying. He hopes the smears on his sleeve dry before Bruce gets him, so he won't get punished both for crying and for trying to hide it, on top of getting lost in the first place.

The Cave is dark, and Dickie checked all the places he could think of, and then he'd seen light and gone towards it but it's just a big room full of glass tubes. He'd walked down what he thought was a hallway before he realized that there were shapes in the tubes, like mannequins. Then he'd seen that the mannequins had faces.

He'd seen the woman first. The open, staring eyes made him step back, expecting to see blood, too. There wasn't any. Just the woman, her cheek pressed up against the glass, not moving.

All the tubes have people in them, and Dick had turned around to run, but he'd been crying, and now he can't find his way back at all, and he also can't stop.

There are so many bodies. None of them are bloody, but he can't get away from them, either. There's always a shape over his shoulder, and he has to turn and look to make sure it's not moving to follow him. He wants to curl up with his back to one of the pillars. When he was with his mom and dad, they'd always told him to stay where he was if he got lost and wait for them to find him, but Bruce said Mom and Dad were training him to be weak and that he had to accept responsibility now. He kept walking, trying to wipe his tears and snot away with his hands so it wouldn't leave streaks of evidence on his sleeves.

"Richard!!"

Dickie jolted. That's Damian's voice. He starts running towards it, feet pounding.

"DAMI!!"

"RICHARD!"

A looming, familiar shape appears in the corner of Dickie's eye, and he comes to a sliding stop, turning towards it and coming to attention on instinct.

It doesn't move.

He's looking up at a lit glass tube, and Bruce is inside it, eyes staring sightlessly, slumped slightly forward. As Dickie stares up at him, a moving shadow of his face superimposes itself on the glass, and Dickie feels a hand come down on his shoulder, pulling him away.

A second Bruce, in shirtsleeves instead of the batsuit, looks between Dickie and the tube. This Bruce looks different, now that Dickie can see both of them. And he smells like breakfast.

"Come on, Dick," he says. "let's get out of here."

His voice is warm. Dickie tries to take deep breaths, like Damian taught him, but he can't—he can't help it. He starts crying again, for real this time, big hiccuping sobs and snot and everything Bruce hates.

"S-sorry," Dickie gasped, even though sorry isn't fixing the problem, Grayson, like Bruce always says. "I'm not crying!" even though that was lying and would just get him punished even worse.

"Oh, Dick," Bruce picks him up, walking confidently through the tanks like he knows the way out again. Dickie's breath hitches. It felt like when Bruce got him out of solitary the first time, when he'd been soft and nice and let Dickie cry on his shoulder without even yelling at him. He smells warm and alive and real, and Dickie clings to him, hard, not caring what happens next. Bruce holds him , rubbing small circles on his back and not touching anywhere else. Just—nice. "Breathe, chum. Just breathe. It's okay."

"Richard!"

Damian is running towards them. Dickie wipes his eyes so he can see Damian's face. He looks worried for a moment, and then his face goes cold and stiff in the way it does when he's bargaining with Bruce.

"Father, I can take him," he says. "He will be punished for this."

Dickie can feel Bruce's arms get a little tighter around him.

"No need," he says, sounding calm.

"Father," Damian says, more insistently. "He's still injured from his first…experience. A lighter punishment that lasts longer may be advisable."

"He got lost, Damian," Bruce says, something hard in his voice that makes Dickie go still and Damian's face go gray.

"Apologies, Father," he says. "I meant no offense. Of course, he needs to learn better. We all do. I'll order the others to the showers at once."

"The showers?" Bruce asks. "We're in the middle of breakfast."

Dickie can feel his stomach twist insistently at the mention of food, but Bruce is carrying him out of the forest of bodies and up onto the main platform of the cave, where Tim is at the computer and all the others are arranged around, watching.

"Yes, Father, I shouldn't have preempted you, I'm sorry," Damian says, sounding desperate.

"He wasn't running away," Tim says, from the computers. He's standing up, a video of Dickie looking around the hallway playing behind him. "He was just lost."

"…Yes, I know," Bruce says, going over to a utility sink. Duke steps in close, shoulders twitching, and Bruce grabs a clean rag off the counter and gets it wet in the sink. Dickie shrinks in Bruce's arms, fingers gripping his shirt. Bruce brings the rag to his face, still holding him, and wipes his face clean before tossing the dirty cloth back into the sink. Dickie stays very still, his freshly clean face feeling a little cold in the air of the cave, but Bruce doesn't move him into the sink, or anything. Just sets him down on his feet. He wobbles a little, and Damian takes his shoulder, pulling him back. Dickie clings to Damian's pant leg, torn between being protected and being scared for Damian. Bruce hates it when Damian contradicts him, or gets between him and one of them. He's not lashing out yet, just frowning.

"You should punish me instead," Jason says. He's standing at the top of the stairs to where the bat-car parks. "Dickie doesn't know yet, but you can show him what happens if we try to run."

"If you try to—" Bruce starts, but Duke butts in,

"Just show him the video you have of me."

Dickie hears Damian make a small, protesting noise. Bruce turns to Duke, frowning deeper, like a storm front that's about to break.

"What video."

Duke is holding his shoulders straight, his head back. Under the cave lights, he looks a little like a statue, prouder than Dickie had realized Bruce's birds could carry themselves. He's looking Batman in the eye, like he's challenging him. Dickie hides his face in Damian's pant leg, not wanting to see what happens next.

"I know you saved it," he says. "You told me you did. You save all of them."

"Alright," Bruce says. "And the video is of me…disciplining you."

"It'll scare him straight," Duke says. Dickie shoves his forehead into Damian's thigh. He doesn't want to watch a video. He'd rather Damian or Bruce just whipped him and got it over with, but Duke isn't done. "He won't even have to take any time off of training, you know? It'll be effective."

"Just—stop," Bruce says. "That's—alright. Duke, I'll think over your suggestion. Everyone, go upstairs. Finish eating breakfast and then start your training for the day."

Damian's hand on the back of Dickie's shirt tightens.

"Of course, Father. Thank you for your mercy," he says. "Everyone, upstairs."

Dickie allows himself to be hurried up the stairs to the lakehouse, and only turns to look over his shoulder once. Bruce is standing next to the sink, unmoving, watching them go up the stairs.

—

When all the kids have left the cave, Bruce manages to unlock his knees.

He knows that his alternate from this universe was deeply unwell and actively cruel. That much is impossible to miss. He's begun to get the sense that he laid hands on the kids, like some sorry excuse for a father who thought a belt was a stand-in for patience and consistency.

Whatever he's just witnessed, though, is…something else. The way Duke talked about a video was giving Bruce an ugly sensation up and down his spine, like the first crawling sensations of being dosed with fear toxin. Right when you first felt the Things looking at you, but before you were able to look back at them.

He sits down at the computer chair with its atrocious squeal. He's been through the kid's training schedules with Damian, and he's opened some files to get an idea of what to look out for on patrol, and he'd done last night's mad search for anything in this universe that wasn't worse than his native one, but he hasn't combed through the file archives yet. There had been too many other things going on to consider it. Now, though, it seems like a necessity.

His alternate did have a very solid organizational system, which is the first real complimentary thought he'd had about the man. Most of the video files are in an 'intake' folder. When Bruce opens one at random, he sees his alternate preparing a limp body, treating it with a chemical bath and a vein flush before locking it into a tube. He must have drugged them elsewhere. Bruce doesn't recognize the victim, but some additional notes on the file list her crimes. She'd been a jewel thief, apparently. Someone who'd been trying to replicate some of Selina's early crimes. There's a link to another file, and he opens a video of himself struggling to force Selina onto a medical cot. A much younger Damian is helping him, holding her right wrist down while Bruce yells at him. No audio. Bruce finally drugs Selina, letting her go limp, and then abandons her on the table, striding over to backhand Damian hard enough to send him into the nearest wall, blood trickling down his lip. Bruce exits the video on instinct, feeling sick. That…it looked so much like his Damian, back home.

The intake folder has a sub-folder, intake-s, and Bruce clicks on it.

There are fewer video files in this one, marked by names. Wayne-D. Cain-C. Thomas-D. Row-H.

Bruce finds Duke's and opens it. in this one, he's hauling a very young Duke down a hallway to an isolation chamber. Duke's been crying, and is still struggling faintly. There's no audio, again, so his scream as Bruce tosses him into the chamber and starts to close the door is entirely silent.

Under the video files, there are text files with intake photos, medical facts, formatted eerily like Bruce's own files on his children, except that the photos in his are simple, clothed, portraits. He's already feeling uneasy when he finds the page listing incidents.

Five minutes later, Bruce stands up from his chair and walks back down to the utility sink, and empties his stomach into it.

He'd apparently spared Damian from the majority of the sexual abuse, incest a step too far even though there were no considerations for things like age, or consent, or even level of injury. He'd still made his son watch. He went back to the computer, something desperate inside him scrabbling for an explanation. He found notes he'd taken on cultural practices of pederasty, noting the effects of 'an increased bond' and 'lower rates of divergence'. Bruce had to get up to be sick again partway through, and he found himself staring at the water running down the sink drain.

This…it's like the moment the grapple goes taut, when you see the ground below you and the fact that you stopped before hitting it is a visceral shock. He remembers doing the beginnings of similar research, when Tim was Robin and he'd still believed Jason to be dead. Jason's death had convinced him that he needed a better…training method, for his Robins. He'd been afraid for Tim, and thought that if he could get him to obey more automatically, follow orders as if it was the only language he knew, then Bruce could actually keep him safe. He'd adopted some military training techniques, been harsher and louder and stricter with Tim than he'd ever been with Dick or Jason. Selina had noticed, and hadn't liked it.

The deeper he'd looked, the more her objections had made sense. He'd found himself asking where the line was between the kind of conditioning he was doing and torture, and the more he read, the less he was able to answer. The simple fact that sexual abuse was an inherent part of many of the military traditions he'd been seeking answers from finally soured him entirely on the idea, and he'd started forcing himself to foster Tim's independence instead, his individuality. Bruce's need for control had despised the entire process, but he never could have helped Cassandra or parented Damian without learning to suppress that part of himself for their sake.

One decision. One moment of reactive disgust instead of continued interest.

Was that really all it took?

—

"It's gonna be okay," Duke offers. Damian's face had taken on a washed-out gray tinge the second B noticed that Dickie was missing, and even now that they're upstairs, eating pancakes in the sunshine, it hasn't gone away.

Damian shoots him A Look, which, okay, fair, but Damian still needs to breathe.

"He tried to run," Damian hisses, sounding strangled. "Duke, he tried to run, Father will—he'll—"

"You need to breathe," Duke says. "Damian. Look at me."

Damian does. Harper, who's been making circles of syrup on her plate, must hear the edge in Duke's voice, because her fork stops on the plate with a harsh screech and she looks up, watching the conversation with sharp eyes.

"We're not kids anymore," Duke says. "We won't let him."

The words feel weak at first. Duke remembers it. Trying to run and being dragged back by the Bat. He'd gotten all the way to Metropolis, too. Found Superman, who'd let Duke into his apartment and given him some lasagna and let him sleep on his couch. When Bruce showed up in the morning, all Superman had done was look at Duke uncomfortably before nodding and letting Bruce take him back.

There are parts of the after that Duke's still fuzzy on, but something ugly gets lodged in your brain when someone did that amount of violence to you. Duke still isn't sure how to dig it out again—this shrapnel sense that Bruce is an immovable force, an end in and of himself, instead of a 40-something man outnumbered seven to one by the very kids he'd trained.

Duke does remember enough to know that he'd rather die fighting Bruce than watch it happen to Dickie.

"We haven't let Bats do anything," Harper says.

"You wanna watch him break Dickie's legs?" Duke snaps. "That's the first part."

"What?" Jason yelps. Dickie is watching Duke with huge eyes, and Duke winces. "We won't let it happen," he says. "We'll protect you."

"No, I'm with you," Harper says, dropping her fork with a clatter. Duke doesn't miss the tremble in her hands as she dusts them off on her pants. They've all sparred B one on one before. This isn't going to be easy. "It's fucking crazy, but I'm with you. Jay, do you wanna learn how to use a stun gun?"

"We're fighting him?" Jason asks, looking around. "We can…we can do that?"

"We can," Duke says.

If he says it enough, maybe he'll actually believe it.

—

Harper used to have a little brother.

She hadn't stepped in at the right time back then. This time around, when Duke says:

"We need to distract him somehow so we can get to the weapons cache in the cave."

She finds herself saying:

"I'll do it."

So. Yeah.

She makes her way downstairs. She's always kind of liked the cave? In spite of everything, being Blackbird has always made her feel strong, provided a divide between the girl who exists in the cave and the city, saving people, and the girl who trains upstairs and lets Duke step in if Bruce starts paying too much attention to her.

The welded metal platforms and mobile repair carts are less reassuring than usual, though, because Bruce is at the computer, playing a video from her file. Her stomach twists as she looks at the screen, and she has to look away again, down at her cold, shoe-less, sock-less feet. The upstairs version of her, who isn't supposed to be down here.

It's a trick, she reminds herself. It's a trick, and it will be over soon.

"Sir," she says, and Bruce startles, shutting the video immediately and turning around in his chair.

"Harper," he says, which is weird. Bats usually calls her Row. Not a reassuring new familiarity. "Is everything alright?"

She lets herself look nervous, rubbing her arm, and Bats sighs. "No, of course it's not," he says, shaking his head.

"You know we all just want to obey you," she says, stepping closer. She meant to walk all the way up to him, but something's making it hard for her feet to move. She needs all of his focus so the others can sneak in. "I just—I know we're fucking everything up, but I want you to know that."

"The way I've treated you is wrong," Bats says, which lets Harper take another step towards him.

"How do you need to treat us?" she asks, and she's on a level with him now. She makes herself kneel in front of his chair. "Please, I just wanna be good for you, sir."

The words are sour in her mouth, and when Bruce reaches for her, she has to force herself to go lax. His hand lands on her shoulder, though, not the back of her neck, and the chair scoots backward, so that he's kneeling in front of her.

"Harper, don't—" he starts, and she thinks at first that she's miscalculated somehow and that he's about to punish her for it, but a crackling impact makes him cut off.

"Harper!" Damian shouts, and tosses her one of the electrified bo staffs. Tim's lock-breaking skills to the rescue. Bats is already getting up, shaking off the stun rifle impact, so Harper swings her staff, aiming for his head. He ducks that, and gets hit by another shot with the stun rifle before he rolls towards Damian. Damian swings his staff for Bat's head. Bruce grabs the staff, absorbing its shock, and uses Damian's grip on it to pull him in for a headlock. Harper jams her staff into Bruce's chest, forcing him away so Damian can escape, and Duke is at Bats' back, wrapping a garrotte around his throat, hauling back on it. Bruce stumbles for two steps, and Jason nails him with the stun rifle again, sending him to one knee. Harper and Damian land hits with their bo staffs. Harper aims for his head, Damian goes for his neck.

She watches her staff crack across his nose , spattering red over his pale face, and she feels a flash of—of something, hot and bright and addictive. Duke puts more pressure on the garrotte. Tim comes in out of nowhere, a syringe in his hand, stabbing it hard into Bruce's back. He's in the way, keeping Harper from using the staff again, but Damian has his foot on Bruce's back now, pushing him forward against the garrotte to make it work faster. Bats' face is going red, his mouth opening and closing like a fish's.

Bruce's scrabbling hand gets a grip on the garrotte line, yanking it forward, knocking Duke off his feet. With the garrotte in his hands, he's able to stand again, turning on Damian and dodging the next impact from the pulse rifle. Damian, faced with his father bearing down on him, freezes. He raises his staff up in a block, and Bruce grabs his hand, wrapping the garrote around his wrist and twisting it behind his back. Harper brings her staff down on Bruce's back, but he's already got Damian hog-tied. It's like attacking a steel statue. They're losing the fight. They're losing, and Bats is going to take his revenge for betraying him, and Harper's heart is rising into her throat. Bruce turns and grabs Duke, twisting his arm behind his back and leaning his full weight into him. Damian is immobile, and screaming something at Harper, telling her to take Dickie and run. Run where, she wants to scream back. Where the hell in the whole world will be safe for them now?

Bruce looks up from where he's leaning onto Duke, and meets Harper's eyes, and she realizes that it doesn't matter. She can't make it worse. She lifts her staff again.

All the lights in the cave flicker, in and out. When they come back on with an electric hum, someone new is standing in the center of the main platform, looking down at all of them. The computer screens power up, glitching out and opening files in succession. Harper sees her own name and face flash across the screens before they open one last file and linger on it, a face Harper's never seen, and a name she only knows from whispered conversations in the dark after lights out.

Cassandra Cain.

—

He is not the hulking monster she remembers. He is bleeding, favoring one leg. He has Duke pinned below him, but his body is saying wait, wait, hold back. Cassandra bares her teeth behind the mask. Once, he had told her gentle, gentle, as he took her from her father. When the gentleness left, he'd still said solid, steady, I will protect you.

Batman's body has always lied.

"Cass," the Batman says. "Listen—"

She is done listening.

She crosses the distance between them easily, and sees him start to pull his arm up to block a blow to the face. She twists, getting beneath his attempt at blocking and slamming her elbow into his jaw anyway. He'd done that to her before. It's an insult, a way of saying see? you cannot protect yourself.

He'd told her many things as they sparred over the years. Cassandra is aware of the others moving around the two of them—Duke pushing himself up with a gasp, Tim untying Damian—but she is focused on Bruce. She throws everything he has ever told her back at him.

Tripping him and throwing an elbow into his back, where the liver would be—I control your body, not you. A kick to the face as he tried to rise—I can break you.

She's so focused on what she wants to say that she doesn't realize it's a one-sided conversation for far too long.

She's not getting the opportunity to say what she wants to say the most. When they had first sparred, Bruce had caught her fist in one of his hands, stopping it mid-swing. You are weak. Cassandra wants to throw it back in his face. He's not swinging at her, though, not giving her the opportunity.

He isn't attacking at all.

Where he should swing, he holds back. Where he should counter, he dodges. He's not meeting her as an equal. He's toying with her. In a final burst of rage, Cassandra tackles him to the ground, pressing her knee to his throat, and pulls off her mask so that they're face to face.

"I am strong," she hisses at him, her fist pulled back to add to the bruises already darkening around his eyes. He looks up at her, unresisting.

"I know, Cass," he rasps. "You always have been. I'm sorry."

She blinks down at him as he finally goes limp beneath her, his eyes rolling back in his head. Duke comes over towards her, walking slow with wide eyes.

"Cass?" he asks, his voice hoarse. She looks up at him. He's gotten bigger since she saw him last."

"Not dead,"

"I can see that," he laughs. "We need to get him in a cell, right?"

"He's drugged for now. We need to kill him," one of the new children, Tim, says. His whole body reads fear fear fear. Killing Bruce is exactly what Cass came here to do. Now, though, she looks down at his body on the floor, and shakes her head.

"A cell," she says. "Something is wrong."

They all drag his body into one of the containment cells, and shut the door, and just like that, the batcave is…theirs. The lakehouse, too. The manor.

Duke sits down, burying his face in his hands, and Jason hovers awkwardly near his shoulder. Tim, favoring his ribs, looks Cass in the eye.

"I'm going to delete his video storage," he says, and she nods. That's—yes. That's a good idea.

"I'm destroying the fucking cameras," Harper snaps, and heads towards the stairs up to the lakehouse.

Damian is watching her.

"You didn't die," he says, and she raises a hand, waggling it back and forth. She had died, actually. Briefly. Still, it seems important to get this out: "Your mother's League saved me. They do not forget their lost son."

Damian steps forward, opens his arms, and Cass steps into them, hugging her brother again after far, far too long. He hugs her tight.

"You came back," he whispers. "Thank you."

—

They open the shutters on the lakehouse, but even that proves to be too enclosed and familiar. They bring all their blankets out onto the long-abandoned dock, and sleep with the light of Gotham in the distance obscuring the stars, and the lake lapping rhythmically at the dock.

They bring out water in jugs and cups and pots, drinking their fill every time they're thirsty. They eat as much as they need to, until Jason throws up into the lake and no one can do anything but laugh, because there's no one to punish him or stop him from eating more.

Tim and Jason fall asleep curled around her, and Dickie is breathing deeply tucked up against Damian, by the time Damian says,

"You said something is wrong with Father?"

Cass nods, frowning. "You knew?"

"We all knew something was up," Duke says. "He's been acting weird since about two days ago. Tim said he apologized to him."

"He didn't attack," she says, and isn't sure if what she means gets across. The more she thinks over it, the stranger it seems. Fights are always conversations, and Bruce hadn't been holding up his end. Him not attacking wasn't just strange, it was…eerie. Like it was still Bruce's body, but being piloted by someone else.

"He stopped insisting on patrolling the whole city, too," Tim puts in. "And got Dickie out of isolation earlier than he was planning. Whatever's wrong with Bruce, it's been wrong for at least two days."

"Wrong with Bruce?"

Damian startles as Dickie half-sits up from his place slumped against Damian's ribs. He's got indents of Damian's shirt on his cheek. "Which one?"

They all stare at him.

"What?"

—

Dickie is left with Jason, because he doesn't want to go into cold storage again, and Jason doesn't want to be anywhere near the cave. Damian looks his father in the face, and wonders how he'd ever mistaken the man in the cell for the man in front of him.

Father's face is frozen in its familiar scowl. Faint pale scars dot his cheeks and nose like freckles, and the grey seeps deep into his hair. He's thinner, too, not as filled out. His eyes are open and glazed over.

"He just got…stuffed in there," Tim says. "I think. There isn't supposed to be any crystallization."

"What does that mean?" Damian asks, because he's staring at his father in a glass tube and thinking is not happening right now. Tim scrubs a hand through his hair, grimacing, and Harper puts in, "Means if he ever thaws out, it'll be in soupy chunks."

"He was replaced by a good clone," Duke says. "Right? That is what this means?"

Tim shakes his head again.

"Let's check the cameras down here and see."

Five minutes later, they're all staring at the computer screen, watching 'their' Bruce fight…a second Bruce. Who'd seemingly appeared in the middle of cold storage in a burst of static that had caused the cameras to glitch out.

Damian looked at Cass. She was tracking the other Bruce's movements with a frown. When she notices him watching, she shrugs, shaking her head—I don't know.

"He's better," Harper says, which is evidenced by this other Bruce beating Father and shoving him into a pod, but Damian can see what she means. The other Bruce is stronger, smoother, moving faster. He uses forms that Damian doesn't recognize.

"Okay, fact one," Tim says. Damian doesn't think he's ever heard Tim talk this much. "This happened right before Bruce came up and got Dickie out of isolation. What's he done since then?"

The list they come up with is short, but telling. More food. More rest. Not even a backhand for speaking out of turn. This version of his father is…softer.

"I need to see it again," Damian says, turning to Tim. and then, when the video is over,

"Again."

Tim looks at him uncertainly, but replays it. When Damian opens his mouth to ask for it to be played one more time, no sound comes out. His throat is closed, his eyes hot. Cassandra puts a hand on his shoulder. Her mouth is a hard line, her eyes as dry as his. Maybe crying is a skill you can lose, he thinks, a little desperately, but clings onto Cassandra all the same, holding out an arm so Duke and Tim can join them. For once, no cameras are watching them, and no one is waiting to punish them for daring to need comfort.

—

Bruce lays on the floor of the containment cell and grins up at the ceiling. He's pretty sure the cocktail they put him out with is still in his system somewhere, making everything feel pleasantly fuzzy. When it wears off, he's going to be in new and interesting kinds of pain, but it's not the drugs that are causing his current state of euphoria.

His kids are the best kids. Bar none. In every possible universe. Cass is alive. Harper broke his nose. He loves them so much.

"You're a good guy," someone says, right outside Bruce's cell, startling him. He looks, and Dick is there, squatting down like he's Nightwing talking to a scared kid. "Right?"

"I'm Batman," Bruce says, which seems insufficient the more he thinks about it. Dick must think so too, because he's frowning.

"I try to be," he adds. "Why?"

Dick grimaces.

"Tim said he hacked into your bank account and we could buy all the snacks we wanted, but now he keeps getting calls from the IRS and Jason told me to pack so we could move to a new country."

Bruce frowns. His brain feels like soup, but one fact rises up out of the ether.

"The IRS doesn't call anyone. They send letters."

"Can you fix it?"

He moves to sit up—ah. There's the pain, then. Has anyone taught these kids about how money works? Or how to avoid scams? His battered to-do list is gaining a flood of new items. So many broken bits of this universe. Can you fix it?

"I can try."