Chapter Text
Before he joined his father, Damian’s mother made sure he trained in as many styles as possible, from as direct of a source as possible. He spent most of the little time he lived outside the League’s center of operations in some monastery or shadowy organization headquarters, training under some master expert. Those sorts of excursions were a mixed bag— some were amazing, others were awful, but one was far and beyond his favorite: the Court of Owls.
He didn’t like the actual Court of Owls, no, certainly not, (it was cold, dark, and cruel, honestly standard fare for a secretive assassin group) but he adored his mentor there: Talon. He’d been dubious of the whole thing at first: his mother was sending him to his father’s city with explicit instructions not to interact with him (yet), all to train his acrobatics of all things! He had complained to his mother that his acrobatics were more than adequate and certainly did not need outsourcing. His mother had chided him, saying to simply hold his tongue until he saw the Talon fly. Damian complied, she was his mother after all.
She was right.
Watching Talon “fly” was something truly special. Damian had never seen someone move quite like him before. He actually found himself… excited to train under him. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, achieving such perfection in any skill is hard enough, much less one like acrobatics. And that wasn’t even factoring in the instructor himself. Damian was familiar with people like Talon, people who were unmatched in their discipline. With no true competitor, their egos often ran wild, which made them hell to train under. Instead of constructive training, they had a tendency to go overboard with conditioning and assume their aura as the great whatever would simply osmosize to you (any questioning or snarky remarks about the effectiveness of their tactics simply resulted in even more conditioning). He braced himself for a brutal regime, but one that would be ultimately worth it if he had any chance to gain even an iota of Talon’s skill in the air.
But then, it actually wasn’t that bad. Talon was harsh, but he had to be when one was demanding such results and dealing with something that can so easily go wrong. No, truth be told, Talon was kind, genuinely so. He hid it in front of the Owls, but the man genuinely cared.
People had been “nice” to Damian before, but there had always been something behind it. They were trying to get something out of him or attempting (but failing) to lead him into a false sense of security. That or what they were doing was so drenched in pity that the supposed kindness just tasted bitter in Damian’s mouth. Talon was the exception.
Most of the time, people’s kindness to him was loud. A big “look how I’m helping this poor child, you are looking at me right? Please look at me”.
Talon’s kindness was silent, just like the rest of him. The Court’s base was dark. They could hear kind words or flattery. But sometimes, when the conditions were right, the moon slim and the other Talons sparse, they wouldn’t see him sneaking Damian an extra blanket or cutting him a break when he had been kept up all night on a mission simulation or teaching Damian some purely recreational tumbling skills (that were practically unusable in combat, but Talon still wanted to teach, either to pass down the generational knowledge he’d accumulated from his time before he was Talon, or just because it was fun, and no amount of brainwashing could stop Talon from knowing that little boys deserved to have fun and not just be worked to death). And sometimes, on a new moon, when he thought that even Damian couldn’t see, Talon smiled.
It was a beautiful smile. His face was normally obscured or tooled into an expression of apathy. For the longest time, that was the only face Damian had seen him make, the same one all the talons had. But then, when he did smile, it looked like his face was made for it. It felt like the most beautiful and natural thing in the world and in that moment, Damian couldn’t picture Talon’s face without it.
And then an Owl walked in and it was gone as quickly as it appeared. The mirage Damian only knew he hadn’t imagined because there was no way he could imagine that smile.
Damian wondered when was the last time Talon smiled before he started training him.
Talon’s affection wasn’t condescending, it was honest and true. In the shadowy world of the Court of Owls, it was the only thing he truly believed in.
But all good things must come to an end, and eventually, his leave was up and he had to return to headquarters. He and Talon tried to say goodbye the best way they could.
They couldn’t say anything out loud. The Owls or even the other Talons could’ve overheard and punished them. But what they couldn’t say with words they said with their eyes.
I’ll miss you.
Me too. I’ll always treasure our time together.
That was one failing of Talon, at least as an assassin. People were always so taken aback by his yellow eyes that they never noticed that the emotion had never really been trained out of them. His face was stone cold, but if one looked past the Electrum in them, his eyes always betrayed him. A domino mask might’ve served him well, but his only options were either the Talons’ full mask or none at all.
Maybe we’ll meet again?
Maybe. Stay alive.
Because both of them knew that staying safe would be impossible for them. This line of work was not made for safety.
Both knew that ever meeting again would be unlikely. Damian would soon be at the side of his mother or father, powerful, untouchable, busy. With no time to sneak into the Court for a social call. And Talon, Talon didn’t know when they would figure he’d had a good enough run and it was time to put him on ice.
Damian had made peace with the fact he would never see Talon again. That’s why he didn’t try to seek him out once he permanently moved to Gotham. He didn’t think, for all his emotion suppression training he could stand to, after having worked long and hard to track him down, discover that his friend had been put on ice, trapped living a half-life.
That’s why he was so surprised to see a picture, no, not even a picture, a full-on oil painting of Talon at Wayne Manor.