Chapter Text
One moment Damian is switching his grip around on his katana—he prefers the stability of a two-handed grip, but with his right hand a mess at the moment he’ll have to rely on one—and the next everything goes up in flames.
Pain, concussive and searing, wraps around him. Damian goes airborne, skin scalding, bone cracking, blood running. He lands in a mess of rubble and grit and agony. It’s instinct to curl up, cry-out, allow unconscious reprieve to rescue him. But Damian has not been a slave to instinct since he was a small child, and he does none of this. Instead, he lies still, allowing the moment to categorize.
His katana is gone, ripped from his grip in the explosion. Warm salt fills his mouth and puddles around his body and washes over his eyes. His ears are ringing and unreliable. Damian blinks, and his vision runs and warps. His senses are half-functional at best. He focuses on his body.
A probe of his tongue unearths two loose molars, the throbbing of his nose indicates a break, and his left side cheekbone is already swelling. Limbs next. Damian’s right hand is still inflamed, bleeding, the fragile small bones of his fingers snapped and limp. His knee on that side is wrenched, lapped with pain at the smallest twitch. Damian recognizes the feeling of broken and bruised ribs. Beyond that, the myriad of cuts, bruising, and small injuries is too numerous to list.
Damian takes all of this in a second.
And then he is on his feet.
Around him, the base is in shambles. Forks of fire lick around the piles of crumbled walls, sparks fly and cough off of freed wires. The bodies of the men Damian was fighting lay prone, some complete, others less so. The rubble is a maze requiring intricate footwork to travel steadily across, but Damian manages it, knee notwithstanding. He doesn’t know if there’s more explosions primed to blow. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone else coming. He just knows Todd is in a different building, and Damian needs to find him—this explosion was beyond unexpected, and they need to leave. It’s clear there are no hostages here, and this mission was fruitless.
Damian speaks into his comm as he starts to walk. “Hood,” he says.
He waits for the answer—the ringing still thrumming between his ears is the only sound. It takes another minute for Damian’s hearing to clear up enough to realize that some of the ringing is actually coming from the comm. Damian scowls. He tries once more in case. “Hood,” he says. “This is Robin, come in.”
Nothing. Todd is sure to have seen and heard the explosion, and there’s no way he would ignore Damian after that. The comlink is down Damian will have to find Todd himself.
His progress across the field of rubble is disjointed. The pain in Damian’s knee grows. It clenches like the toothy maw of something predator is ripping into Damian’s leg. He steps wrong and there’s an organic shift that seizes around his knee, panging fiercely. It almost sends him to the ground. Damian is forced to stumble to keep his footing, tilting into the remains of a half wall, which ignites agony as he catches himself with his right hand. Switching quickly, he takes a moment, just a moment, to rest.
And then he’s moving again.
He’s slowing down, toes scuffing trails of grit and ash. The damage to his knee is the biggest concern to his mobility, but the longer Damian remains teetering upright, the longer a sapping mix of chemicals released in his brain have to muddle his coherency. Damian is reluctant to encounter combat in this state. He needs to find Todd, before something finds him.
Except, Damian is merely halfway across the expanse of damage, the neighboring building Todd entered far from reach, when its doors burst open.
A group of men dressed in tactical gear flood through the opening, visors blackened over their faces, guns pulled free of their belts. Damian is the only thing moving in the sea of blackened building husk and sporadic flames. The group is outside for a moment before they zero in on him. The guns are up a second later.
Damian immediately hurls himself behind a soot-stained support supporting nothing. But he’s too late.
Most of the bullets miss—a spray peppers the ground at his feet, punching divots into the cement, digging in or pinging off of metal scraps. Some cut through the air around him. But others find their marks. Sort of.
One bullet skims against Damian’s thigh on his bad leg, another cuts close enough to his head to put a groove in his hair, as the third finds a home in Damian’s shoulder. One more pierces Damian’s shoe and eats a chunk of his heel.
Damian lands in a sprawl behind the support, heaving. The pain is metal teeth crunching into flesh and bone and blood. Damian grits his teeth and falls forward on his knees, holding himself up with his good arm as his thighs shake and sweat runs before his fading vision. Nausea squeezes his airway. Blinking against the black spots and listening to the roaring of his spitting commlink, Damian barely hears the footsteps coming closer.
But they do.
Damian is well aware that the gun-toting security team is closing in on his flimsy excuse for cover, and that if he remains on all fours, choking on the blood between his teeth, he can expect to die or be taken captive. Both are powerful motivators for Damian to return to his feet.
He claws himself up using the metal support, the teething edge of metal chewing into his hands. His body shakes and spasms and his vision goes white and spotted black as that animalistic maw of pain clamps down on his nerves like fire. The roaring in his ears runs louder than the broken comlink alone. Clenching his teeth, he swallows a fresh wave of salt from his injured molars. Damian tastes smoke and smells rusted coins and then he blinks and regains just enough vision to see that group of men coming closer.
He’s running out of time. Damian’s fingers brush the smoke grenades concealed in his belt. Enough for a brief screen. He does not close his eyes against his misted sight. He does not bow his head to the pain. He holds his smoke grenade and swallows salt and resolves to fight until the last against these men—
A silhouette steps between them.
Familiar shoulders, a helmet that spits red into his abstract vision.
And then it all happens so fast.
The bullets pop and exposed bone burns white as Todd raises his guns and shoots one, two, more, and then more still, until the bodies are laying in awkward, twisted mounds that overlap, blood and tissue bits smeared between them. Todd uses the last of his ammo and casts the spent guns aside, devolving to the use of his hands.
Teeth roll, bones slump, flesh bends and breaks and bursts.
Damian swallows his salted spit and shies into the metal support, the pain in his knee biting but muted. He has not seen Todd use his hands—not like this—since the worst of the pit madness.
And sure enough.
As the last of the bodies fall, draped, carnage over carnage, Todd’s head whips around. He yanks the helmet free. Having forgone his usual domino, the gaze that grips Damian is green and glowing like the vapor of oozing poison. Sweat runs down his face and heaving breaths twist between his clenched teeth as Todd stomps to Damian’s side. The air around them bleeding rust and smelling like the sour sting of death.
“Hood,” Damian breathes. In the League, under the control of his affliction, Todd’s anger never tied to Damian. Todd never raised a hand against him then—but it’s been years since Mother’s pet project was first brought to them. It’s been years since Todd was the protector at Damian’s side.
Damian does not know whether he should trust the uncertainty of Todd’s current cognition. He does not know whether to receive himself to Todd’s attention, or to recoil.
He does not get a chance to decide.
All at once his knee buckles, his heel pangs, his thigh burns. The strength of the damage swallows him, and Damian collapses.
Into Todd’s arms.
Todd is still beyond words—but Damian does not have the strength nor breath to complain of his undignified position cradled in his arms, so it matters little. Damian’s hands come up, broken and brittle, and cling to his brother’s armor, slick with blood both his and not.
Todd makes a kind of shushing noise, dropped gently by the shell of Damian’s ear, and then they sway with the movement of walking. Walking away.
Damian can’t find it in himself to shy away from the relief it brings.
The cast of green from Todd’s gaze entangled them.
And Damian lets his own eyes close.