#and while it doesn't really fit. the song. the specific spiteful tone makes me think of this

[teleportationmagic]

There is a dead boy in the Batcave.

Not literally, of course, but the glass cage marks the place where blood and bone would be too gory to leave behind. Too unsanitary. Father’s not the type to abide by that – at least not from what mother’s told him, and what his surveillance has revealed. But the suit is clean enough, so they sit next to a ghost and let it take up space in the room, a physical weight demarcating it’s territory. The rest of them – Oracle and Nightwing and Drake all float around it, like fish splitting around a rock in a river.

He'd think it’s weakness to grieve this hard, this long, but allowances are made for strong men, and his father is a strong man. The gravemarker sits, silent in the heart of their operations, next to the giant penny and the t-rex.

And still, some small part of him cannot wonder who it was who left this imprint on every single person in that room, the faint outline of his cape twirling through their upright backs.

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Months later, he finds another gravemarker.

This one isn’t in the Batcave, rather it’s tucked away in the clocktower. He hadn’t spotted it at first, hadn’t been able to put a name to it, but Oracle was the immaculate sort. It was expected, for someone of her pedigree, and the deviation was shocking in its presence.

The paper is laminated. Letters scrawl across the page, constructed incorrectly and ungracefully, weaving backwards and forwards with little rhyme or reason. And yet still, it is clear pages are missing – the transition in how the letters are written is subtle, page to page, but jumps every now and again.

Underneath is black fabric. It’s flexible – tight and form fitting, but still stretchy in the way that Grayson’s suits are. He pulls it forward and it unfurls to reveal a yellow bat.

Batgirl, then. The second. His fingers trace the stark lines, a glossy sort of shine over the black fabric, even under all the dust. Something flips, uncomfortably – he knew this girl. His mother had told him about her pedigree. And yet here she was, dust gathering on evidence of her failures – paper stacked up that showed him nothing.

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He finds the third gravemarker on accident.

The purple fabric is so much unlike Timothy that he can’t help but pull it out. It’s poorly made, compared to the others – the most present comparison he can come to is a bedsheet, too thin to be any good in their line of work. The place he’d found it in is equally puzzling, a blue shoebox that he’d forgotten to throw away, in the back of his closet. He wonders if he’d simply lost it, as buried as it was.

It’s not all that’s in the box, of course. They’d rolled out when he’d lifted the suit – all spilling sideways. There’s a few ticket stubs, a set of keys, a slip of paper with a hasty sketch, and two photo. A blond girl, with a gap-toothed grin and bright green eyes, and an older woman with the same blonde hair, cropped short. It was the only thing that wasn’t caked with years of grime, the pictures clearly digital, then printed out. There’s a name on the back that he doesn’t recognize, not on either of them.

He picks up a sketch – Timothy, he recognizes, in his Robin suit, stylized into a cartoon. A purple figure flits next to him, a streak of blonde pencil crayon following her. Something bounces in the art, young and joyful and wild, wrapped up and kept in old, yellow paper.

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Cold sweeps the house. They’ve done this enough times that Dick is half-certain he should be accustomed to it, but it still feels like a bulldozer through his heart.

The worst part is the forgetting. Every now and again, he looks up and expects Damian to be there – expects to see a dark, short flash of hair. But the hallways are empty, and the walls echo, and he’s done this time after time but he wants the kid back.

He wants him back.

It’s Dick in the end that goes through his things. There are pieces – notebooks and sketchpads filled with drawing. Some more stylized, a round feminine face smiling, sparks flying around her. Pink shaded flowers in the corner. Pencil shavings leaving dark marks where his eraser couldn’t pick up quite enough.

Underneath is an canvas, big and bright – the colours nearly make him gasp when he turns it over, blue and orange and purple spilling out, the sun at dawn. In the front, a bird, the details intelligible in the contrast. Deliberately so. Its wings leave visible trails of smoke behind it.

He can see the brush strokes, underneath. See the smudging, see the small places where he’d set his hand down and left a mark on the bright colours of the background. The trees had been done on top in pencil crayon, tiny and spindly needles reaching out for sun.

He catches tears before they hit the piece, his head bowed low.

Alfred says nothing when he finds him later, perched on a step stool. He hangs it up, loud and proud, lets the light hit it.

In the evening light it glows.