#Danny deserves a proper portrait and Damian deserves the ability to grieve and cope properly

[void-of-unparalleled-chaos]

   It had to be perfect. 

  Damian squinted at the canvas, absently tapping the end of his paintbrush against the desk.

  The first painting had been hard. He wasn’t supposed to think about Daniyah. He wasn’t supposed to remember her or grieve her. At the league, the dead stayed dead in more ways than one.

  Despite his best efforts to comply with the rule, Damian had always kept his sister with him. That didn’t make it any easier as he sat in front of his easel, digging through his mind for scraps of memory like a feral animal in a trashcan. To do so went against everything Grandfather and Mother had taught him.

  He had started with hesitant brush strokes. The boiling grief and anger that had thrown him into a frenzy that culminated in a single sketch within a destroyed room had long abated. It rested at a simmer as he’d dabbed the bristles of his brush into the paint, and it flowed through him as he touched it lightly to the canvas. 

   It was an arduous journey but by the end, his ukhti was staring back at him. He’d been proud of the painting even with the lingering sorrow that seemed to drape over his shoulders like a heavy shawl.

   Looking at the portrait on the mantel felt blasphemous now. 

   That’s why this one had to be perfect.

   His twin’s spectral visit had been brief, too brief for Damian to truly look upon him and commit details to memory. He was trained to notice minutiae, but he’d been preoccupied with his mad dash to throw his arms around the ghost and his subsequent tumble into the fireplace. 

   Damian spent days in front of the mantel sketching. He hoped that sitting where he’d last seen his brother would help him recall anything he missed. Some of his features remained the same as they had before. The shape of his nose hadn’t changed and neither had the small scar on his brow. His twin’s eyes were as familiar to Damian as the crooked smile he wore, but the long hair that had once been pulled back with a tie had been cut short, windswept upon his head. His cheeks, too, had grown more pronounced with age or whatever mimicry of it the dead experienced. 

   It had taken many pieces of paper until Damian held something that felt right. From there it was simply a matter of translating his work onto canvas in light pencil scratches and gathering his paints. 

   Now he sits in front of his easel once more, his twin’s face staring back at him as if begging to be displayed. The portrait has been done for a while now, residing in his room for the past few days. Never has Damian found the drying time of oil paint to be so tedious. 

   He tentatively pokes the canvas, humming in satisfaction when his finger comes back clean and dry. He inspects the painting one final time, ensuring that every color and brushstroke is flawless. 

   Satisfied with his work, Damian gently lifts it from the easel and exits his living quarters. The hallway is quiet and just as absent of life as the sitting room is when he enters. The first portrait lays face down upon the mantel, banished from where it used to hang by his grandparents. 

   Damian sets the new painting gently against the wall to push a chair against the fireplace. He carefully stands upon the cushion, canvas in hand. Alfred would surely be disappointed, but Damian can’t find it in himself to care when he has a mission as important as this. 

  It’s fitting, in a way. The rule at the league was that the dead stayed dead. Daniyah had died when they’d sent her away, not strong enough to complete a basic training mission. Daniyah would stay dead. 

   But Danny?

   Damian smiles as he hooks the new portrait on the nail, aligning it even. His akhi smirks down at him with mirthful eyes and a mischievous grin. 

   Daniyah was dead, but Danny would remain very much alive.

It wasn’t supposed to be a secret.

If you died while with the league, you will no longer be acknowledged to have existed, especially if you died during a mission. A disappointment will not be remembered.

The bats and birds don’t like speaking about the people they have lost, so they don’t. If someone ask about the dead, they will tell the person they don’t talk about that.

So how was Damian supposed to know that he should have told his father about his dead brother?