Chapter Text
The car smelled weird.
Funky, Grayson would say. The car smelled FUNKY.
Not in that clinical, upholstered leather and kevlar way, as the Batmobile did. Not with the tang of lingering sugar, from some forlorn dropped kernels of cereal, as in Grayson’s sorry excuse for a perambulator. Not even in that sour-milk-and-sweat, slightly undead stink that had assaulted Damian’s nostrils, the ONE time he’d set foot in Todd’s vehicle.
Drake’s eyes were fixed firmly on the road ahead, his movements just a little too controlled. His long, pale fingers neither lingered too long nor squeezed too tight on the steering wheel. They flitted quickly and easily to the gearstick, and back, like a wandering insect.
The car smelled like Drake. THAT was why it smelled...funky.
Drake was not perfumed. Never was, as far as Damian knew. But he definitely had a smell, nonetheless. Something like fresh laundry and the acrid burn of shit coffee squeezing down your throat, too hot. Something like hotel soap and the salt in microwavable meals.
It wasn’t exactly unpleasant. It just wasn’t - well known, to him. Much like the man who sat across from him, feigning ease, at the wheel.
“...we’ll figure this out, Damian.” Drake says, with awkward conviction, out of nowhere.
The younger boy sniffs in disdain, squirms deeper into the cocoon of his hoodie as though it offered some form of meagre protection. Glances out at the glaciers of grey stone streaming past his pointed nose.
“Are you asking me, or telling me?” he bites out, but it emerges with a lot less derision than he meant it to. It emerges more like what it was: a child’s question.
Drake takes one of his brief skip-breaths: a sharp inhale-exhale that is half sigh, half bracing himself “Telling.”
A muscle in the pale man’s jaw twitched, and the fading, bloody cacophony of black and blue and yellow and purple on his lower left cheek crinkles. It looks painful.
It’s just a bruise, Damian thinks, momentarily transfixed. Just a meagre collection of ruptured arteries, spider-thin.
And yet; he hesitates, and just...doesn’t know what.
“Then sound more convinced.” he settles on, lamely. Kicks at the loose plastic of one of Drake’s discarded laptop computers beneath his feet, adorned with fading stickers. Draws his hood up over his wilting hair and shoves the giving plastic of his earphones deep into his ears.
He squeezes his eyes shut; tries not to think about how they’re going, going, going.
Doesn’t let himself wonder whether they’ll be coming back.