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lurkinglurkerwholurks · 4 months

Text

O'er These Mountains

First posted: April 21, 2019

Focuses on: Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne

Tier: Not one of my most loved, despite people saying how much they love reading about D&D

This is my “behind the scenes” series where I indulge myself horribly by annotating my fics. Link to the fic itself above. Thoughts below the cut.

Another ficiversary prompt fulfillment, adding a sequel onto "Little Sparrow."

Damian curled his hands around the corners of the shoebox, positioning it in his lap. He tensed his thighs and pointed his toes against the floor mat so that his legs kept the box perfectly level. Then he straightened the box again.

He is a leetle boy.

Damian clucked his tongue dismissively. “I am never nervous.” That was a bold-faced lie. Damian couldn’t deceive himself, as much as he wanted to. He had been frightened the night before, when he had thought that discovery meant risking the life of the bird currently sitting on his lap.

He is a leetle boy who has learned to trust no one!!

Pennyworth, whom Damian still eyed with healthy distrust, magically conjured up a dusty roll of veterinary tape from beneath the bathroom sink, which did nothing to lower Damian’s wariness. The man was an enigma, and his mustache was suspicious.

The running joke of Alfred's facial hair being inherently untrustworthy never fails to amuse me.

Grayson’s jaw did the little pulse that Damian didn’t know how to interpret, but his smile came easily. His smiles always did, even when they shouldn’t, which was another reason Damian was wary of him as well. Much deviousness and ill will could be hidden behind an easy smile.

Poor Damian. And poor Dick. So much of what Dick does to try to be chill, open, and unthreatening doesn't read well to Damian. It can't! Damian is hyper-sensitive to signs of danger, which include negative emotions that could ricochet back onto him. Suppressing those emotions doesn't come across as a sign of maturity but of deception.

Grayson held the sparrow, broken wing pinned to its body, and verbally instructed Damian on taping the limb in a way that would prevent the animal from further damaging itself. Damian’s brow furrowed as he worked, focus narrowing to the pinpoint that was the sensation of the tape against his fingertips, the brush of the bird’s downy feathers, the flutter of its heartbeat against his skin.

I had to google the snot out of this.

Damian watched out the window as the metal and concrete and grime of Gotham slowly diminished and then faded away entirely. The road they followed was braced on either side by rough walls of stone, their striations carved long ago by passing glaciers. The cliff faces, striped with mica and sandstone, soared above the cars, their tops capped in loamy topsoil and thicketed forests of green. He wondered how they smelled, so different from the dunes he grew up with.

Shout-out to the roads leading out of the metro area. They're still as foreign and strange to me as they are to Damian, and I like them a lot.

The bird—they hadn’t settled on a name, despite increasingly ridiculous and incomprehensible suggestions from Grayson—had been placed under Pennyworth’s watchful eye during patrol, then returned to Damian. ... There was a joke about the bat never calling and never writing that Damian dismissed. The man’s sense of humor was incomprehensible.

Dick: 🤡

Damian: 👁👁

“I like elephants,” Grayson mused. “I grew up in a circus, you know. Animals everywhere. I really liked the monkeys, but the elephants were my favorite.” “Circuses are an animal rights disaster,” Damian growled, unable to stop himself. Grayson's fingers tightened on the wheel. Damian braced, but the man only let out a huff akin to a sigh. “Maybe,” he admitted quietly. “I was just a kid when I had to leave. But the memories were good.”

Mannnn, I knew I had to go there, but I didn't want to. 😂 I've seen so many fics and metas about Dick and Zitka and how much he loves animals and how he might use that to charm or impress Damian and it's just... It's always such an uncomfortable thing, one so many people have to go through, realizing that you can have fond memories for a thing that, ultimately, was a harmful thing. Dick loved the circus. Dick loved the elephants. The elephants, most likely, did not live their best life in the circus. And Damian would not have the emotional intelligence or restraint to know that these things can all exist at the same time and that Dick is likely aware.

Damian had the unfamiliar, keen prickling of awareness that he had misstepped somehow, in a potentially dangerous way. He puzzled over the feeling during the rest of the drive.

That's my stake in the ground. It's not just Bruce. They all will mess up, hurt each other, etc., but they all try. They all are characters who will continue to grow and learn (and mess up some more.)

Damian looked up, scowl still firmly in place, to watch as Grayson scrubbed the back of his neck uncertainly. The man needed to be more in control of his own emotions. He was as open as a child.

Damian: Grayson continues to hide emotions from me, it's unsettling

Damian: oh not like that though, conceal don't feel

Maybe the area was objectively better. Maybe the air was cleaner, life more serene and worth living than the helter-skelter filth of Gotham. But the bird hadn’t been born out here. Hadn’t spent its life out here. It had blood ties elsewhere, memories of a place that, while perhaps not the best, was still the familiar and known. Wouldn’t it yearn for that place? Had he done wrong to take it away?

Commenters: hey did u realize there are parallels??????

Me: no wayyyyyyy...

#fanfic bts brain dump #dick grayson #damian wayne #batfam #batfic #fanfic

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