#also this is Bruce POV but Danny remembers being alive in canon previously so this is weird but not too unusual in his new Reboot!Life

[faeriekit]

tw: child death, baby death, chronic illness, grief, medical stuff etc. (it ends fine but we get into heavy topics)

Damian was an active, if sweet little boy. He wanted Alfred to inspect every one of his soft animals Bruce had given him upon his arrival to their new home every time Alfred went to wake him in the morning, and would hold them up for the butler to view them properly. He had particular favorites of meals (NOT carrots), activities (anything to do with Ace) and caregivers (Alfred). He agreed to be carried only so long that he could engage with whatever Bruce was up to at the time; otherwise, it would be demanded that Bruce would put him down for him to roam around Bruce's office to dislodge his many valuable knickknacks. Bruce loved his son more than he loved himself.

Danyal, on the other hand...

"It'll be alright," Bruce reassured the boy, whose fingers were still shoved in his mouth. The boy's big, blue eyes stared up at him with a solemnity that worried his father. Leslie had implied that Dany should have been beyond that self-soothing stage already, at the age of two, where his brother was already independent and almost social; Dany, however, seemed loathe to walk, and gestured to be carried often, and sucked on his fingers and rarely spoke.

Bruce clamped down on the diagnosis balled up in his fist.

Congenital heart defect. There was no easy solution.

(Bruce wasn't sure who, exactly, the reassurances were for.)

"We'll figure it out, buddy," Bruce whispered, bouncing his son ever so slightly. The boy's gaze hardly budged from his father's face. "We're very lucky; there are good doctors in Gotham. Some of them even knew your grandfather. Have I shown you your grandfather's portrait...? He was a doctor downtown, so he could help people. The last time I saw him, I wasn't that much other than you..."

Damian always wanted to hop, run, swing sticks in the yard, be tugged around by Ace or tug on the dog's tail when he wasn't willing to play with the human puppy any longer. Dany grew nervous the more active he got; when Damian tried to coerce his twin into play, Dany resolutely ignored him.

It was probably for the best. It was always terrifying.

The lethargy made the boy ever-so-patient when Bruce went to introduce his son to Bruce's long-gone father's portrait, but...Bruce would rather have a healthy, happy son than a quiet one.

If it was possible.

When it was possible.

...Seeing Damian so young, so happy, and so free from the League and its expectations made Bruce want to cry, some days. Someday soon, all his children would be home in some manner or another. Dick. Jason. Cass. Stephanie. Barbara, if she was willing to follow the same path as her previous life. Tim. Even Duke, if only in passing— unless Bruce was doomed to fail the boy's parents in this new chance at life.

Danyal may or may not be there on that future day to see it: the house filled with joy, laughter, and family.

The fear tightened around Bruce like a noose.

*

The first surgery went okay.

Some doctor of Ra's had already inserted a shunt into his little boy at some point after his birth; it increased the amount of oxygen Dany could receive from his heart's fruitless pumping to his lungs, but eventually the shunt would need to be replaced with actual surgical repair to his boy's heart.

Dany went under. Alfred had to stop Bruce from storming into the OR at random intervals throughout the procedure.

Damian didn't understand the change in the routine or where his brother had gone over several nights, and often looked for Dany in his room, but Dany lay lethargically in his hospital bed, patient and drowsy-eyed.

He asked for the constellation encyclopedia the most out of all the titles Alfred had packed. Bruce began to memorize the articles within.

And then came the complications.

...And then came the second surgery.

*

Damian didn't know where Dany had gone.

Bruce didn't know how to explain it to him. Did Talia's family hold burials? Did they burn pyres? Were they simply submerged into the Lazarus Pit beneath her father's feet? Bruce realized that he didn't know. He didn't know how to tell Damian where Dany had gone, only that Dany wouldn't be coming back.

Damian threw a fit. It was developmentally appropriate for his age, no matter how much it hurt to watch his son rage. He couldn't understand. Bruce could hardly understand; how could this happen? How could it have happened to Dany? Dany hadn't deserved this. Damian didn't deserve to lose his brother.

Bruce dialed for a pediatric therapist, but no matter how reasonably Alfred begged, he didn't call one for himself.

*

"Baba?"

Bruce was dreaming. He had to be.

"Dany," he whispered. It was night. He was asleep, in bed— and was more exhausted than he thought, if he was already imagining the voice of his dead son. "Dany, aren't you sleeping?"

There were little hands on his bedspread. Dany had never been willing to climb anything; this was a new dream, then, if Bruce was imaging things Dany might have done if he were well. "M' scared. Iss lone'y."

Bruce's heart cracked. Yes. He could imagine that Dany was lonely, out in the family cemetery out back. Still... "Your grandparents aren't keeping you company?" Dany wasn't alone out there. Bruce never would have done that to him.

Dany's fragile little form popped over the side of Bruce's king-size bed, hair aglow with moonlight, eyes a lazarus green. Still, though, he looked like Bruce's baby. How could Bruce not recognize him, even if he came in a different form than usual?

"S' too kwiet." Dany's voice was a whisper— the rough little thing that children do, when they aren't old enough to be quiet yet. Tears pricked at the corners of Bruce's eyes.

"Okay." Bruce had done this routine a thousand times, even with children he had yet to meet: he opened the covers up to the ghost of his son, and Dany crawled right into the warm space left for him by his father.

The little yawn in his ear broke Bruce's heart. He wouldn't have this in the morning. Damian deserved to be more than a vessel for his father's grief, so Bruce would sit up, alone, until the worst of this had passed.

Sleep. Bruce closed his eyes. This dream, too would pass. So would his grief. So would this night.

...But when sunlight woke him at six in the morning, as it had the morning before, there was a black-haired boy in Bruce's arms, his irregular heartbeat and little breaths entirely audible to Bruce's ears.

I have seen batfam fics and ideas where time traveling Bruce gets the kids earlier and stops all the bad things from happening to them. But I can't help but want to combine this with the DCXDP demon twins AU.

Imagine time traveler Bruce showing up at the league of assassins years early demanding his son... Only for two children to come out. Now he is forced to learn he had another son no one told him about. He has no clue what happened to Danny in the original timeline, only that it must have been bad for Damian to have never mentioned it.