Chapter Text
Damian wakes up to an alarm playing in his bedroom. At first, he thinks it must be a fire alarm (how did a fire start in the manor?) until he hears that it's only coming from the underside of his bed.
He looks under his bed and finds nothing. It's only when he lifts the mattress and finds a cell phone taped to the bottom does he find the source of the alarm and silence it.
When he does, the phone says that it is scanning his retinas. Then it asks for his fingerprint. Damian is far too curious to ignore the device, so he allows his finger to be scanned.
White text on a black background appears. It's heavily encrypted in a cypher that only bats know, created by Drake. He created a variant for each member of the group, including Damian, from before Damian replaced him.
This message is only comprehensible to Damian, and it has to be left by Drake.
It takes him under a minute to decode it. It's an address, along with instructions.
Front door. You will be given further instructions when you are inside. Make sure you are not followed. Trust no one. Tell no one.
Damian thinks about telling Richard. He then thinks about how dismissive Richard was when Damian approached him about Drake's death.
He doesn't tell Richard.
Instead, he follows the instructions to the letter, even setting it up so that anyone who comes to his room will believe he is still there.
The building that the address leads to is a beaten-down, shotgun-style house on the outskirts of Gotham. From the outside, it seems perfectly ordinary, but of what Damian was told of Drake, the insides will be anything but.
He steps through the doors into what looks like a mudroom. Coats hang from the walls, cabinets, backpacks strewn about, and muddy, scuffed shoes.
He thinks he might have gotten the address wrong until a steel door slams to the ground behind him.
"Okay," a voice says over what must be a speaker or public address system like the ones used in schools. "So, this recording will only play if you have the phone and the heat sensors are only detecting one person, which means we're off to a great start. If you're Damian, you're in the right place. If you're a different bat, you shouldn't be here. If you're one of mine, you know what to do.
"And if you're someone else, I encourage you to stay here. Nothing bad will happen, I promise."
Damian suspects that that isn't true, and that something bad would happen to someone who stayed in here.
"Damian slash whoever is pretending to be Damian, there are a bunch of machines to your right that will prove your identity."
He looks to the right and the cabinet doors open, revealing various machinery.
When Damian looks, he finds a computer, a retina scanner, face scanner, fingerprint scanner, a voice recognition microphone, and a needle to take a DNA scan.
Drake is thorough. Damian approaches the needle, as a DNA sample would take the longest to process.
He touches the needle and a voice comes over the intercom.
"Put your name into the computer first," the voice says. "It's a lot easier for the algorithm to know what file it's trying to match to."
Damian would never confess this under threat of death, but he struggles to input the code that identifies his name and that he is safe. The combination is just slipping from his mind. It doesn't help that he's developing a headache so bad that it's making him dizzy, or that the speaker is malfunctioning and letting out a hissing sound.
"Don't panic, but I'd hurry up if I were you. Unless you're not supposed to be in here. Then you're totally fine. I promise."
Damian gets the code and quickly performs the rest of the tests to prove who he is.
The hissing stops, and a much louder fan sound takes over.
"This recording is playing if you have the phone, are alone, and passed all the tests to prove you're Damian. I'm venting the carbon monoxide out of the room.
"It's Tim, by the way. You didn't know me long enough to be able to recognize my voice before I died, but even if you did, it sounds different now."
The drawers hiding the identification verification technology close and there's a noise behind him. One of the coats has moved to show an opening like a library chute.
"Put that phone in there, and absolutely nothing else that you value. I'd tell you to put your real phone in there too, but we were trained by the same people, so I know you didn't bring it."
For all of the things Damian has learned about Drake's intelligence, he didn't expect the man to make such a simple error as implying that they learned from the same people. Damian was trained by the League long before he was trained by Richard.
Damian puts the phone into the chute and Drake's recording immediately says, "Fwoosh! You know, not to sound even more like a supervillian, but I love incinerating things. Don't tell the Justice League I said that."
The recording stops for a second and a different one starts up.
"This is the first recording that should be playing if I've proved you're Damian, and you're alone. If these are playing out of order, try to figure that out while you wait. I'm sure someone will be more than happy to explain everything when they get here. These recordings do have everything in them, but they go on for hours, so I'm not making you sit through that.
"Anyway...." the wall in front of Damian splits open, revealing what looks like at, at his first glance, to be a well-stocked secret base. "The reason you're here is because a League of Assassins ninja has broken into Gotham, and they're probably after you. Ra's al Ghul wants you dead, and I'm not going to let that happen."
Grandfather wants him dead? That's preposterous. Damian is his heir. Damian wants to tell this to Drake's idiotic recording, but it is a recording, so it couldn't understand him if it tried.
"I know this because—" recording Drake takes a long, deep breath "—I'm the assassin he tried to send to kill you."