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After the absolute disgrace that was Miss Allen’s behavior last year, Damian was relieved to have been listened to by the school counselor and placed with a male teacher as he went into fifth grade. Mr. Stanley is slightly balding, well into his forties, and married to a woman with whom he has two children- Damian’s mental assessment of his threat level to the family’s dignity is in the negatives, and as such he is willing to put up with how Mr. Stanley speaks exclusively in an overly loud voice and cares far too much about the Gotham Knights.
As part of Damian’s educational plan- he is too intelligent to be tracked with the rest of the rabble, but for some reason they refuse to allow him to skip into his senior year of college, where he should be, and as such has an individualized education plan- he is allowed to attend the biyearly parent teacher conferences. He stays late after school on a November Friday, tucked up with Warriors: The Darkest Hour high up in the dark and empty scaffolding under the bleachers in the gymnasium. It’s quiet, and no one knows to look for him here. Richard thinks he’s at an after school reading club, and his teachers think he’s been picked up. He works his way down at around 1631- Richard is always a near exact five minutes late- and slips out the fire doors to jog to the front of the school.
At 1635, Richard’s blue Accord pulls into a parking spot with a squealing stop sharp enough to make the whole thing jerk violently. Damian rolls his eyes.
“Hey, Dami,” Richard says hurriedly, as he does a peculiar side-step out of the driver’s side door. Damian’s eyebrows draw together as he looks him up and down. Richard is in clothes unbefitting the occasion. His collared shirt is a silky manganese blue, cut to his figure- far too many buttons are undone- and as he grabs his leather jacket out of his car, he drapes it over his shoulders like a cape. His trousers are too tight, and he has somehow managed to procure combat boots that someone- who surely must have been recently given an acute brain injury- saw fit to add a three inch heel to.
If Damian thought it would help anyone, he would insist that Richard attend these meetings in a brown paper sack – or perhaps in Drake’s shapeless, ugly skate clothes. Exposure has weathered him, however: Damian knows that even if Richard did come to parent teacher conferences in burlap, the fabric would fall in a way that was hopelessly charming, and Gotham’s fashion magazines would call it an innovation in sustainable textiles. There is no winning. There simply is not a way to dress Richard that will relieve Damian of his duty of scaring off overfamiliar strangers at the art museum, or stuttering clerks at the grocer- he is resigned to this.
When Richard chooses to look like this, however, it does become more agonizing.
“Why are you dressed in this way?” Damian asks him, in his bleakest, blackest voice.
“Huh?” says Richard, scattered, as he collects his keys and an iced coffee, dripping with condensation.
“Your attire,” Damian prods him. “This is not how you dress.”
“Oh!” Richard laughs. “Of course it is. I own things that aren’t gym clothes- what, did you think I’d turn up in those?” He does a silly little twirl, and Damian knows it’s an attempt to amuse him. “I clean up okay, right?” He hooks a finger through the delicate golden figaro chain about his neck and waggles it.
Damian considers him. “We have to go in through the gym doors,” he says authoritatively. Lest we are accosted by Ms. Harrison in the hallways, he thinks privately.
Richard frowns. “I didn’t see that in the email?”
“You must have missed it,” Damian insists, guileless. “Button up your shirt.”
“Damian,” Richard says. “Kid. What?”
“All the way up,” Damian demands, urgent. “Right this instant.”
“I enjoy breathing.” Richard raises an eyebrow. “My buttons are fine as they are.”
“One button,” Damian allows, which he considers to be extremely gracious. “You may have one of them open.”
“Four,” says Richard, waggling his eyebrows.
Damian does a double take, looking more closely at Richard’s shirt: currently, only three of the buttons are undone. “Do not threaten me,” Damian says, aghast.
Richard makes a slow, exaggerated motion towards the clasp of the fourth button down, and Damian grabs at Richard’s hand, much larger than his own. “Richard!” Damian reprimands him. Richard laughs as he wrestles with his hand, twisting – he comes dangerously close to Damian’s ticklish lower ribs.
“You are not taking this seriously,” Damian accuses, pinning Richard’s hand with both of his own.
“Three, three is my final answer.”
“Three is far too many!”
Richard hums, thoughtfully. “Do you have a counteroffer?”
“There will be no counteroffer,” Damian informs him. “You are allowed one button, for breathing purposes.”
“This isn’t great negotiation, you know. Very undemocratic.”
“That is because I am not negotiating.”
The argument continues, with Richard haggling for more and Damian insisting on less, until they are somehow at the door of his classroom and Damian comes to a halt, betrayed by his own feet. Richard must have some yet-unidentified metagene, as he had not intended to start walking.
He yanks on Richard’s trapped hand, petulant, but Richard pays him no mind. The door is ajar, and Richard pushes it open with the back of his other hand, still holding the iced coffee. He does a little circular dance around Damian as they cross the threshold.
Mr. Stanley is sitting at his desk, straightening out a stack of paper when he looks up to see them there. He drops the papers flat on the desktop and stands up out of his seat, like he’s been startled. His mouth opens to greet them both, and no words come out.
“Mr. Stanley, yes?” Richard asks, smiling. “So good to meet you, I’m Rich, Damian’s-,” here he trips over his words for a fraction of a second. “Brother.” Richard gently tugs his wrist out of Damian’s hold, and gallantly extends it to his teacher.
Mr. Stanley stares at Richard’s hand like he has never shaken one before in his life, and then leaves off his guppy impression to grasp it like it’s the holy grail. “Right! Right!” Mr. Stanley says. The handshake has already gone on too long. “I’m, I’m Geoffery, call me Geoffery.”
Richard delicately disengages from the handshake, oblivious to Damian behind him, staring horrified and betrayed daggers at Mr. Stanley, who is also oblivious to anything beyond the smell of Richard’s tea tree oil aftershave. “Should we sit down?”
“Yes! Yes. Of course!” Mr. Stanley’s face, Damian notices, has gone very pink. He pulls a couple chairs up to his desk, hurried and fumbling. “Right, right here. Is here fine?”
Richard’s smile is as open and generous as it was a moment ago, but Damian knows him well enough to see that it has become fixed at the corners. “Here is perfect,” Richard says, slipping out from under his jacket and laying it across the chairback as he takes his seat. He nudges Damians ankle with the toe of his boot. Damian sits in the second chair stiffly, and crosses his arms over his chest.
Mr. Stanley sinks back down behind his desk, and almost sits on his armrest before he course-corrects. He has a half-dazed expression, his watery blue eyes bulging a little in their sockets. “Rich,” he says to himself, wonderingly. “Rich.”
“Yes,” says Richard brightly. “That’s me.”
“I don’t think we’ve met before.” The veins in Mr. Stanley’s forehead and temple are popping, and the splotchy flush is creeping down his neck. His gaze has dropped from Richard’s face to his chest, fixed upon the bare triangle of skin there, the glimmer of his necklace, and then lower: the silk fabric is unfortunately thin, and it was very brisk outside. Richard shuts his eyes for a moment in the way he does when he thinks Damian’s being exasperating in a way he finds amusing and isn’t allowed to laugh. The expression that’s on Mr. Stanley’s face might have been called nausea, sans context.
Damian is briefly possessed by a fantasy of the Joker attacking the school, exactly at this moment.
“No, I haven’t had the chance,” Richard says, apologetic. “Sorry, I keep pretty busy with my work.”
“Oh,” says Mr. Stanley dumbly. “What, um. What do you do. For work?”
“I teach gymnastics and aerial arts.” Richard’s voice is smooth, pleasant and polite. “Mostly K-12.”
“Me too!” blurts Mr. Stanley. His ruddy face is well on its way to purple. “I also teach, um. Kids.” He’s leaning over his desk, stomach pressed against the edge of the wood. “We have that in common.”
“That we do!” says Richard.
Damian looks on in abject horror. He takes stock of himself, of his body: does he remember how he got here? Can he retrace his steps in his mind? Could it possibly be that this is a hallucination, brought on by fear toxin. He squints at the vents, and hope dies within his heart as he wills himself to see gas trickling out of the grate.
“And you- do you like it?” Mr. Stanley asks, hanging on whatever words might next fall out of Richard’s mouth. “The kids?”
“I like them very much,” says Richard. His cheeks dimple with his smile. “It's the best job I've ever had, for sure. The kids are wonderful.”
Mr. Stanley is looking at Richard much in the way that a ravening lion looks at a baby gazelle. “Yes, yes,” he stutters, strangled. Sweat is pearling at his thinning temples. “Of course. The kids are um. Are um. Um, I –”
“Perhaps,” Damian interjects loudly, sharp with the force of his suppressed violence, “we should discuss my academics.”
Mr. Stanley startles, as if he had forgotten Damian is here to witness his fall from grace. Disappointment is too small a word for the depths of his feelings towards this man – he has never been so betrayed by another human being. Nothing in his life will ever approach the magnitude of this injustice, not even the time that Jon called some other imposter his ‘best friend.’ Vengeance must be doled out in short order.
Richard hooks his ankle around Damian's own, and places a hand on his forearm. The touch is casual and reassuring – but more importantly, it prevents Damian from jumping over the desk. “Yes, Damian, thank you,” he says, and probably only Damian can hear the warning undertone in his voice. “How has Damian been doing in your class? I’ve really appreciated how communicative you’ve been about his attendance and grades.”
“Great!” Mr. Stanley chokes out. Damian's not convinced that he's actually breathing, despite the fact that he seems to have the air to speak. They should call somebody else in to do CPR and an ambulance to take him away forever. “He’s great! A real pleasure to have in class.” No one has ever said this about Damian, not even his tutors within the League. “He’s super, super great. Really attentive.” Patently untrue. The academics of this backwater edifice of ignorance are about as rigorous as candyfloss. “Really makes me love my job when I have such great kids.”
“When did you decide to become a teacher?” Richard asks. Damian digs his fingernails into the back of Richard’s hand. They have a brief moment of microexpression conversation- Stop encouraging him, Damian snaps with an eye twitch. I’m being nice, Richard yells back at him with his eyebrows.
“Well — I, uhm,” he blusters, shrinking in on himself slightly, shriveling like a raisin. “My degree was in history, and there are…limited possibilities. For history majors. I’d hoped to do secondary education, but I, ah- found myself unsuited. To university work.”
“Unsuited?” Damian asks viciously, through clenched teeth. Mr. Stanley has, on several occasions, bemoaned his failed foray into research the way that any red-faced American man over forty talks about the professional football career that was stolen from him by the machinations of forces outside his control. “Do tell.”
Mr. Stanley sputters, all but withdrawing into the crooked collar of his shirt, a goose-necked turtle retracting into its shell, and Richard cuts in quickly. “Well, it sounds like you’ve found your calling here!” he says, forcefully cheerful. “I know my own path wasn’t clear-cut, either. I was a lot of things before I was a teacher.” Objectively false, Damian thinks. The way everyone tells it, Richard was already training half his peers in hero work while he still wore the Robin R. “Everything happens for a reason, yes? I’m glad you’ve found something suits you.”
Mr. Stanley’s pupils are huge and round. Damian considers grabbing a pencil from the This Is What An Awesome Teacher Looks Like! mug on his desk and attempting some target practice. “Thank you,” he says breathlessly, ham-hock hands gripping the edge of his desk. “And I you. And I you! So,” Damian can almost hear the hamster running his mental wheel do a burnout as he attempts to haul up coherent thoughts. “What do you do for fun?”
“Oh!” Richard’s infernally brilliant smile somehow becomes even more blinding. “Well, I keep pretty busy, actually - I split time between Blüdhaven and Gotham, and the travel takes up more than you’d think. I spend a lot of my free hours doing prep-work for my classes, too.” Richard pops his elbow on the desk, resting his chin on the heel of his hand, blinking once slowly as though to show off his eyelashes. God is not real, but Damian takes a moment to look upwards in search of him anyway. “I guess most of my fun is the time I spend with Dami!”
Despite his burgeoning vexation, Damian is momentarily distracted by how pleased he feels at that, a warm and fuzzy curl of satisfaction. Despite whatever other bald-faced lies he is telling Mr. Stanley, Damian knows that Richard means this. Richard has said it to him, privately. In those sleepy moments before they retire to bed, when Richard becomes quiet and slow. You are the best thing in my life, he tells Damian, as he smooths the hair from his forehead, lifts his chin in order to look at his face in the dim light, like he’s trying to memorize it. This happens often, yet feels so rare. There is nothing as important to me as you. He speaks in total absolutes, unflinching and unconditional. Whatever other people or pursuits take primacy in his mother’s life, in his father’s life, he will never, ever be secondary in Richard’s heart. Open to so many people, bottomless and overflowing, and Damian is still the one who holds first place.
Which is why it is Damian’s duty, as Robin to his Batman, to stop this squealing train wreck before it garners any casualties. “Richard,” he says beseechingly. “Do not forget that we have a prior engagement. Approaching shortly. So we must hurry.”
Richard startles, imperceptible if his hand wasn’t still resting on Damian’s forearm. “Right, yes,” he says, unconvincingly. “Our prior engagement.”
“Are there any pressing concerns,” Damian asks tightly, “about the application of my intellectual prowess within this institution?”
“What?” asks Mr. Stanley dumbly. “Oh - ah, well -”
“Then we shall take our leave,” Damian insists, boring his eyes into the side of Richard’s head, who is pointedly not looking at him. “Because we are very busy, and there is nothing more to discuss.”
“What Dami means is that we’d love to know if you have any feedback.” Richard taps his foot against the inside of Damian’s ankle. Simmer down. “Is there anything we could work on?” Damian wants to throttle him.
“Well,” Mr. Stanley hesitates, reluctant. “I suppose there’s the issue of attendance -”
“I believe there’s a note in Dami’s IEP about flexibility in attendance,” Richard interjects pleasantly, though his voice has lost some of its warmth. “But I understand your concern. Do you feel like his learning is being affected?” Damian snorts derisively.
“No, no, not at all!” Mr. Stanley rushes to correct himself, tripping over the consonants. “It’s- he’s learning great! Best in the class, for sure.”
“Excellent,” Damian grits out. “We must leave now.” Mr. Stanley does not react to this declaration, as he seems entirely otherwise occupied by the shape of Richard’s lower lip. Richard pretends not to hear him.
“What are the major concepts you’ve covered in the curricula this year?” Richard asks smoothly. “Is there anything coming up we should be preparing for at home?” Damian twists in his seat, turning his palm up to dig his short nails into the underside of Richard’s wrist. Richard makes no indication that he has received this token of Damian’s displeasure. Damian instantly regrets trying to ‘follow the rules’ and ‘be civil.’ He should have put his thumb in a joint lock.
“The curricula,” Mr. Stanley repeats, dreamy.
“Yes, the curricula!” Richard prompts, in the same voice with which Damian has heard him encourage his younger students to stand up on the balance beam: You can do it! I believe in you! However, Damian has no such faith in Mr. Stanley’s abilities, and stomps his foot in warning. Richard pats his arm consolingly, and then discreetly taps the acrylic face of Damian’s watch five times. Five more minutes.
Damian sinks down into his chair and tucks his chin to his chest, the picture of insulted misery, shoes sliding forward. He fixes his unblinking glare on Mr. Stanley’s face, brilliantly red and disgustingly smitten, and communicates with the jut of his jaw that Richard has exactly four minutes and fifty-six seconds before Damian resorts to drastic intervention.
“There’s, um.” Mr. Stanley struggles for a beat. “Fractions.”
“Fractions?” Richard ventures cautiously.
"Yes, do you- do you enjoy... fractions?" Mr. Stanley asks helplessly.
Richard allows Damian the dignity of the front seat when they return to his car sixteen whole minutes later, fiddling with his perpetually half-busted radio as Damian buckles. “Well!” he says pleasantly, backing out without looking in any of his mirrors or the camera. “He certainly seems nice.”
Damian glowers at the dusty dashboard, willing this trash-filled death trap to explode with them both inside of it. “My life is a tragedy.”
“Just wait until you hit puberty,” Richard tells him, and doesn’t use his indicators to turn onto the road.
On Monday, Damian trudges to class, already wound tense as a helical spring.
“Damian!” Mr. Stanley greets the very moment he walks through the door, a little too intensely. “How’s your brother doing?”
Damian looks at him, then walks over to the stapler on the homework bookshelf, swings it open and staples his palm with the click-chunk of the spring firing, once, twice. Several students gasp, nonsensically- he has seen Prescott Melville staple his fingertips together five times this month alone.
“I must go to the nurse,” Damian says, and walks out of the classroom.
It is only a very small pain, and is not at all a hindrance to Damian pulling out his phone and dialing Richard’s number- his chauffeur has been unfortunately painstakingly instructed to answer no calls whatsoever from Damian, and Alfred has begun to pretend that phones do not exist during school hours. Unsurprisingly, as it is eight in the morning, it goes to voicemail. Damian waits impatiently for the beep. “Richard,” he says, in tones of the deeply suffering, “this place is a hostile environment. I must be collected post-haste, as after this latest indignity I am dropping out. Come at once, or I may die here.”
Dick, fuzzy with ringtone-interrupted REM sleep and attempting to awaken enough to do anything other than blink slowly at his lightly moldering bedroom wall, has just finished listening to the voicemail when his phone blares again with a call from the school counselor, Rebecca.
“Hello?” he answers, trying to sound like someone more cognitively aware than a brumating lizard.
“Rich,” Rebecca says, in the tones of the deeply suffering, “I’m sorry to say that we’ve had another incident with Damian.”
“He did just call me to tell me he’s in a hostile environment,” Dick agrees. “What happened this time?”
Rebecca sighs, an action she would not even consider taking were it not Dick on the other end of the line. “His teacher tells me that upon being wished a good morning, he walked over to the stapler and stapled his hand in front of the whole classroom.”
“Oh boy,” Dick says.
“His hand is okay,” Rebecca says, attempting to reassure Dick of something he was not even remotely worried about. “He’s with the nurse right now being seen to, but obviously I’m going to have to ask you to come in so we can talk this out.”
“Of course,” Dick says. “I’ll be there in- well. It’s rush hour. Ninety minutes.” Dick drags a hand down his face. “Do you want any coffee?”
“Double shot on ice, half sweet, white mocha syrup, whipping cream, and two extra shots,” Rebecca rattles off. “Be seeing you.”
Damian enters Rebecca’s office with a billowing cloud of drama, wrapped in a menacing aura like a cloak. “This is a hostile environment,” he announces, before she’s even had a chance to open her mouth. He sits down like a hammer hits a nail, without even removing his backpack. “I am invoking my fifth amendment right.”
“That’s for criminal investigations,” Rebecca tells him, though she recognizes a lost cause when it’s glowering at her like her cats after she pills them. “I’m not a cop.”
Damian does not speak again, of course. He’s quite impressive, honestly- most fifth graders would last all of five minutes before getting bored and beginning to chatter anyway, or at least fidget. Not Damian, who maintains his glare and crossed arms in perfect silent stillness for the entire hour and thirty-five minutes it takes for Rich to get there, only twitching slightly before doubling down on it like a malicious little rock when Mr. Stanley walks in at minute ninety. Mr. Stanley attempts to speak with him multiple times, audibly and visibly mistaking Damian for upset instead of outraged. Rebecca for the life of her cannot imagine why Damian would feel that way- Mr. Stanley simply does not have enough of a personality to cause outrage in anyone, unless they had a particular hatred for Gotham’s baseball team.
Richard Grayson blows in an hour and thirty five minutes after Rebecca called him with another cloud of drama in a slightly different font, immediately cementing the family resemblance. He’s gloriously windswept and flushed, wrapped in a confection of enormous red scarf and leather jacket and lightwash jeans, clutching Rebecca’s beloved coffee in one hand and a lesser iteration on the theme in the other, motorcycle helmet under an arm. “Sorry,” he tells them all pleasantly, handing Rebecca’s cup over to her, “the Parkway was a nightmare.” His hair is clawed up into a french braid that would be called bedraggled on anyone else, but on him manages to cling to grungy and punkish like a goat on a sheer cliff. He turns to Damian, unzipping his jacket and shrugging out of it, dropping it and his helmet on and under the empty chair beside his wayward ward. The white tank top underneath is distinctively sleep rumpled, his arms statuesque and strewn with scars. Rebecca had been concerned until he’d told her he used to work in restaurants: as the owner of a still discolored palm sized patch of skin on her thigh from a spilled Hot Toddy from her stint as a waitress in grad school, she’d understood immediately and intimately. Rich puts the hand not holding his coffee on his hip. “Kid. Why.”
Damian does not say anything. He is still scowling at Mr. Stanley. Mr. Stanley is looking at Rich. His cheeks are slightly pink.
“Dude. Are we crazy?” Rich pokes him in the forehead, abruptly reanimating Damian with a splutter as though he’d pushed a button. “What on earth is going on?”
“It is not my fault!” Damian snaps. “One must do whatever is necessary to escape hostile territory.”
Rich sighs in a distinctly what am I going to do with you manner, blowing a few strands of hair out of his face and shifting his weight onto one hip, then transfers his attention onto Mr. Stanley with a blinding smile. “Mr. Stanley, hi,” he says, reaching out for a handshake. “Glad to see you again, sorry it’s under these circumstances.”
Rebecca watches Mr. Stanley open his mouth, and a few completely disconnected syllables fall out. His face, she notes, as she watches him stagger through a greeting like a blind drunk trying to walk a straight line, is now bright red all the way up to his hairline. A vein is throbbing in his forehead. He is taking entirely too long to let go of Rich’s hand.
Damian’s face is a portrait of abject abhorrence. Abruptly, he tears his eyes away from the still lingering handshake and latches them onto her paperweight, in the way one running from a serial killer may look at a gun.
Ah, she thinks.
“Geoffery,” Rebecca says as Rich disentangles his hand with a smile that is now only slightly fixed, “I think we can handle it from here, you can go back to your class while we figure this out.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Mr. Stanley tells her. As far as Rebecca knew up until this moment, Mr. Stanley was blisteringly heterosexual, of the I’m Not Gay (Not That There’s Anything Wrong With It!) varietal. She has met his wife, his two daughters, and seen photos of his house in the suburbs: he’s very proud of the lines he puts in his front lawn with the mower. She is fairly sure that Mr. Stanley has not realized that the emotion he is feeling currently is crazed homosexual lust, and if he doesn’t know, she shouldn’t be the one to break the news. She’s not paid enough to handle the emotional breakdown of an adult. “I have a cover until ten, and then it’s, you know, my planning period. I can stay for- for as long as we need. To help Damian.” He is not looking at her or his student at all, eyes haplessly locked onto Rich. Damian is still staring down her paperweight- she’s not sure if he wants to use it for himself or for his teacher.
“So you can go plan, thank you.” She injects something of an order into her voice to get through to him, as the Shakespearian monkey in his mind in charge of scripting his thoughts and actions has clearly begun to bang at the typewriter keys like they’re a drumset.
“Are you sure?” He sounds almost wounded.
“Yep, yep,” she tells him, flapping a hand. God, does she feel bad for him. “See you later, okay? Bye now.”
“Oh, alright. Well.” He stands up, which somehow increases the barometric pressure of Awkward in the room. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.” This he says mostly to Rich, who gives him a sunny smile and a little wave. Both Damian and Mr. Stanley twitch.
After the door has shut behind him, Rebecca takes a long, long sip of her coffee, waiting for him to leave earshot. Then she turns on her white noise machine for good measure. “Damian,” she says, folding her hands and leaning forward like a negotiating stockbroker. “What do I have to do to ensure that you never do that again.”
Damian’s eyes latch on to her like a barracuda to a blood trail. “A different teacher.”
“Done,” she says.
“I need that teacher to be an old lesbian,” he demands. Rich puts his face in his hands. “The older the better.”
“This is not Build-A-Teacher Workshop,” she tells him. “We have three teachers for fifth grade. You can get Mrs. Croteau, Miss Howe, or Mr. Stanley. These are your options.” Truly, Damian’s only saving grace is that to get anywhere with him you have to speak in the blunt way she always wishes she was allowed to do with students. It keeps her from drinking heavily. She will have to go sit in her car on her lunch break and smoke both of the two cigarettes she allots for herself weekly while listening to Fireball by Pitbull on loop with the volume up so loud her car literally shakes, but she will keep her liver.
“Are either of them lesbians.”
“Not your business,” she says, although she has some suspicions that maybe the ‘best friend’ she keeps bringing to holiday parties would make Miss Howe happier than any of her last five boyfriends.
Damian scowls again. “Mrs. Croteau.”
“Done.” She turns to her computer and logs in to enact at least the removal immediately, as Damian works better when given prompt results. “Now. Lets discuss how we could have better handled this emotion. For one, self harm-,” Damian’s eyes all but bug out of his head- “is never an option.”
“That was not self harm!” he says hotly. “It was a staple!”
Without looking, she levels a straight armed point at the bubbly Mandatory Reporter explanation framed on her wall to the left of her. “Yes. You harmed yourself. Don’t do things that might make me have to follow the sign, Damian. We both hate having to follow the sign, it makes so many meetings. Do you want more meetings?”
“Having a meeting about a staple is preposterous. Wounds are stapled all the time!”
“Medically,” Rich has graduated to pinching the bridge of his nose. “Medically, on wounds, by medical professionals. All things that are missing from this situation, Dami.”
“Even if your intent was not to harm yourself, it’s a biohazard,” Rebecca tells him.
“Everything in a fifth grade classroom is a biohazard,” Damian defends. “I did not add appreciably to any germ factors in the room- I didn’t even bleed!”
“Don’t lie to me,” Rich says.
“I only barely bled at the Nurse’s office,” Damian amends. “No one in the classroom was exposed to my bodily fluids.”
“It’s a biohazard to you,” Rich says. He’s leaning back in his chair with one foot propped up on the other knee- he’s got little root vegetables on his socks. “We can go get you some Hepatitis antivirals if you want. We can have a real pill-popping party.” Damian’s face twists in displeasure. “That’s what I thought.”
“I needed to leave the room,” Damian says stiffly. “I went with the best route presented to me at the time.”
Rich stares up the ceiling. “No you didn’t.”
“Let’s brainstorm some other routes out of a situation you find to be uncomfortable,” Rebecca says, pulling out a sheet of paper. “We can start with the one you took, which was injuring yourself in order to go to the nurse,” she scrawls it down, “and then you can put a big old cross though that one.”
“It wasn’t an injury,” Damian says, aggrieved, but he accepts both the paper and the pen and crosses it out anyways.
“I want three more options on handling unpleasant situations on that paper before you leave,” Rebecca says, and then completes removing him from Mr. Stanley’s class roster before typing out an email to Rich, to both document the incident and to ask if suspending Damian for a few days while she works out the transfer would be viewed as a reward, then makes dire eye contact and furtive hand gestures until Rich digs his phone out of his back pocket. By God does she feel bad for that thing. She can see the black hole of broken pixels eating up the right corner as Rich tilts it away from Damian. Something he has done to it has sheared off the entirety of the left corner, exposing the different kinds of plastic and metal of its makeup like sandstone rings, and he taps at it without the delicacy that Rebecca would previously have thought required to interact with a screen made up of 98% splinters.
She’s grateful to it, though, as it prevented her from being in quite the same situation as Mr. Stanley back when they had first met. Rebecca would never hit on one of her students parents, as she is both a professional and the proud owner of a boyfriend, but she is still possessed of multiple working sensory organs. Richard Grayson has big doe eyes, a pouty mouth, a constant slight hint of stubble on his devastating jawline, and a perpetually coy expression on his face, like he’s sharing a secret with you and you alone. He carries himself with casual grace, like a cat or a dancer, and with a body like that it doesn’t matter that he’s a little short. Warmth in all of his greetings, honest attention in his questions as though you’re the most interesting person in the room, and his smile is downright captivating. Quietly intense, openly passionate, a charmingly goofy sense of humor, dotes on his family- what more could anyone ask for? He smells of things with names like teak wood and cardamom and bergamot- not overwhelming, clinging to him just closely enough to make you want to lean in, catch another whiff. Rebecca is not made of stone. She wanted to lean in.
After thoroughly charming her through their first meeting for Damian’s on-boarding he pulled out his phone, which looks like it had a lengthy past life in a trash compactor. Rebecca had known him at once for what he truly was. Under the tea tree oil aftershave and casually fashionable clothing, Richard Grayson is a walking fucking disaster area, and he’s playing everyone who thinks otherwise for a fool. There are dog teeth marks scored into the back of his cellphone; this is a man who has never had it together and is never going to.
Then he had cried in her office, which had effectively killed any possible remaining tingles immediately, no matter how much coffee he buys her. It’s the final line in the sand: once someone has cried in Rebecca’s office, she is physically incapable of feeling any kind of attraction to them. Her boyfriend isn’t even allowed inside Gotham Academy, just in case it’s somehow contagious. Rich’s just another harried parent, albeit in a different package.
Also, she would have to live with- or around, she’s still not sure- Damian Wayne. Rebecca likes kids, specifically how she can send them home at the end of the day and the way there are none of them inside her condo. Enduring the 24 Hour Damian Show would send her over the brink in a jiffy.
Her computer dings softly at her.
Im afraid its a necessary evil, Rich has replied. Dont worry about sending him home to a good time. He is about to discover the concept of being grounded LOL
Rebecca would love to know how a child like Damian has never been grounded, but during his various intake and IEP meetings Rich had informed her that he was raised by his mother in a cult for the first eight years of his life, so God only knows what Scientologists have devised for children’s consequences. Maybe it’s a touchy subject.
“Here,” Damian snaps, pushing the paper back to her. “Is this satisfactory?”
His handwriting is, as ever, such an impeccable copperplate that it loops back around to being actually quite hard to read, and it always makes her feel a little embarrassed about her stolid print. Ten year olds are not supposed to have better handwriting than her.
To get out of uncomfortable classroom situations, I can…
1) Injure myself to go to the nurse.
2. Leave.
3. Inform my instructor that I have taken ill and must go to the nurse.
4. Inform my instructor that I must use the lavatory.
“Much better choices,” she says. “Please add telling the other person that you are uncomfortable and asking them to stop. You can also at any time tell your teacher that you’re coming to talk to me, no explanation required. I may be with another student,” she warns, “but you can sit in the front office until I’m ready to see you.”
Judging by Damian’s face, he would like nothing more than to roll his eyes at her right now, but he scrawls it all out anyway. This is such a marked improvement from his first year at Gotham Academy that she has to restrain herself from doing a little victory dance that only his brother would appreciate.
“I’m going to send you home until next week while we sort out your transfer,” Rebecca tells him. She does not bother to say the words ‘suspension’ or ‘punishment’ or ‘consequence’. Damian is a child with the unfortunate affliction of being completely aware that the concept of ‘school’ and its ‘rules’ are a social contract, and that he didn’t sign anything and is a minor besides, and therefore they would be void in any reasonable court of law even if they did exist. Casey Allen’s first and only attempt at giving him a detention had been extremely enlightening. “You can come back in next Monday. Mrs. Croteau’s classroom is on the second floor, first classroom on the left. Please keep this paper in your school binder.”
Damian puts the paper into his backpack at a snails pace, with a disgusted expression, but he does put it in. “Do I have to have more meetings? Or talk to Headmaster Peabody?” he asks, faintly agonized.
“Not this time,” she tells him, conveniently leaving out that this is because her boss has decided to wash his hands of Damian completely and leave everything he does in her lap, out of self-preservation. Meetings and Headmaster Peabody are such a potent problem deterrent that even if she no longer has that ace in the hole, she should still act like she does. Damian looks like his favorite show to hatewatch got cancelled- relieved that it’s over, sad that it’s gone. So does Rich, who she is fairly certain is young enough to have had Peabody as a headmaster as well. “Is there anything else we need to discuss?”
Damian stands, hikes his little backpack up his shoulders. “Goodbye, Ms. Cantwell,” Damian says, then leaves.
Rich puts his hands together like he’s about to pray, pressing them to his mouth and nose. They share the brief glance of two people trying to confirm if anyone else would like to laugh hysterically, broken quickly to prevent them from doing so. Rebecca’s poker face feels as though it is taking a WWE style beating. Rich’s shoulders tremble, ever so slightly. Neither of them speak. Rebecca’s computer dings at her again.
From: [email protected] (9:53AM)
Subject:
Was just looking through the roster for Damian Wayne’s guardian Rich’s email to make note about his behavior today and saw that he’s been removed from my class roster & gradebook. Has something changed or is this an IT issue?
Thanks
Sent from my iPhone
Rebecca purses her lips. Silently, she turns her monitor towards Rich, who leans forwards with a slight squint, eyes flickering over the screen. He sits back. His whole face quivers and contorts with barely contained hilarity, and he makes a gesture with his hands, saying nothing and yet conveying everything, which she repeats to him in tandem.
Damian sticks his head back in. “Richard,” he says, irritated. “Ms. Harrison says you have to sign me out.”
From: [email protected] (10:01 AM)
Re:Subject:
Hi Geoff-
I was just in the process of emailing you about this change- my apologies for not touching base sooner! Damian has discovered misandry as a concept and thusly has been transferred out to prevent a repeat episode. He will be working on his issues with male authority figures outside of school hours. Your prompt call today regarding the incident was very appreciated.
Regards,
Rebecca Cantwell
(she/her/hers)
School Counselor
Gotham City Private Academy
Office: 732-928-6363 extension 104.
To schedule an appointment, please visit my calendly: https://calendly.com/gcpa-cantwell