Damian was busy doing his homework when he got the text from Drake. The entire available family was summoned to the Batcave for an urgent meeting.

Caine and Brown wouldn't be able to come as they were both residing in Hong Kong, and Duke was actually stuck in a class for college. Which meant it would be him, Father, Grayson and Todd as well as Gordon (who he'd like to add wasn't even an official part of the family).

(Would his twin sister be considered an official part of the family?)

As Damian stepped into the Batcave, he felt the weight of everyone's gaze. An unusual tension hung in the air, amplifying his sense of foreboding.

"Damian," his Father greeted, the concern on his face betrayed by the line of his brow.

"Little D!" Grayson smiled dopily. Damian scowled but let his oldest brother go in for a hug with little struggle.

"Okay, great!" Drake stood up, putting his hands together. "We're all here."

" Okay, great! We're all here, " Todd mocked. "Some of us got shit to do, y'know," he drawled.

Drake rolled his eyes. "You came, so stop complaining." He cleared his throat before pulling up a video onto the batcomputer's massive screen.

"I got news from Babs today. She sent me this video from just an hour ago which was a live from Paris streamed by the teenage blogger Alya Cesair." He unpaused during a moment where two figures were clear in the shot: a mouse and a black cat themed individual engaged in a fight with someone off screen. Heroes, presumably.

"Is this something to do with Selina? Did she pull a Bruce with a French cat boy ?" Grayson asked incredulously.

"No."

"Phew."

"It's worse, actually."

Grayson frowned.

"Just watch," Drake told them as they sat in otherwise silence.

As the ex-assassin scrutinized the mouse girl's movements, he recognized the telltale signs of LOA training—precise, lethal, yet oddly imperfect. It was as if she was intentionally sabotaging her own techniques. Why would someone with such elite training hold back?

The duo were clearly losing due to this fact. They were also disorganized but it seemed more due to the situation than anything else.

"Goddamn," Jason swore as the screen flashed. The mouse girl was engulfed with a bright light, revealing-

Tim kept a close eye on Damian, noting the growing tension in the room. "She looks... exactly like Damian," Dick murmured, his eyes widening as the light faded to reveal a girl's face on the screen.

Barbara chose that exact moment to take a very loud sip of her matcha boba tea as Bruce's shoulder went stiff.

Damian had gone pale. He was frozen, and his fingernails started subtly digging into the fabric of his shirt. Tim could guess that he definitely knew at least something, probably more than just 'something'.

" She is Marinette Dupain-Cheng, also known now as the Paris-based heroine Multimouse," Tim prefaced, pulling up the same image Babs pulled on him earlier that day. "She's currently thirteen, and she was taken in by a husband and wife who own a patisserie. There's nothing available on her actual birth other than what was stated upon adoption. The farthest any sort of documentation of her goes is seven years ago when she first appeared in Paris."

Jason looked incredulously back and forth between the oldest bat and the picture of this Marinette girl. " No fucking way. "

"Funny, that's exactly what Tim said," Barbara smiled.

Tim huffed. "Yes, thank you, Babs."

Bruce's eyes subtly softened over the screen. "She has my eyes," he practically whispered.

"Do we know if she's really..." Dick trailed off.

"We're working on getting in contact. Babs has been monitoring her closely since the livestream but we've lost her a couple of times. It's tricky with cameras, and it does seem like she's LOA trained. We haven't been in official contact with her adoptive parents, but as far as we can tell they have no clue either."

"Do we have a DNA sample at this current point?" Bruce asked, the image of composure. Tim could tell he was upset.

"No. There should be... when Marinette got out of the rubble, she was injured on the rocks. But Paris has a specific type of magic. Any damage done during fights is eventually reversed by the main heroine, Ladybug, who wasn't present in the video."

"So we have no way of really confirming if she's really Bruce's."

"I dunno', Dickie. Seems like evidence enough to me!" Jason gestured wildly to the screen.

"We need to be sure." Bruce added, voice grim.

"Well, I'm pretty sure we have a way to be, actually." Tim sighed. "Hey, Damian..."

Damian couldn't breathe.

He would know that figure from anywhere.

He would know it from his dreams, the ghost of a girl that he never got to know. He would know that face because it was his own that stared back at him in the mirror albeit softened and feminine, marked by different scars.

She was older, wearing a dark gray blazer with rolled-up sleeves over top a white shirt with embroidered flowers. She was still short but she was taller than she was when they were kids. The video wasn't of the highest quality, but he could tell that she was panting with exhaustion. Breathing.

He'd always considered the possibility that she was very much alive, but never to the extent that he'd allowed himself to believe it.

It could be someone that only looked remarkably like her. It was a one in one-hundred-and-forty chance, but there were eight billion people currently alive on Earth, a doppelganger was entirely in the realm of possibility.

The thought perished the same millisecond he recognized the flex of her feet, the fluid rigidity of her shoulders. The perfect demonstration of what he remembered of her stance before the fight.

She was his twin sister.

She was supposed to be dead .

"-Damian? Chum?" Damian's eyes refocused to the sight of his Father and Grayson with a hand on his shoulder looking incredibly concerned.

"You know her."

His eyes shot over to Drake, leaning knowingly against a chair, arms crossed, with an expression that he wanted to slice off of his face.

He stayed silent. His mouth felt dry.

"Do you know her, Damian?" Father asked the question this time, practically looming over him.

He didn't know what to say.

"Dami?" His oldest brother's eyes are what broke him.

"No."

"You don't know her then," Drake said, disbelieving.

His voice wavered despite a stony expression never leaving his face. "I never actually knew her."

"So you know about her then. Marinette," Grayson deduced. His eyes bore into him, searching for answers.

"It's not Marinette," Damian growled. "It's just Mari ."

Bruce took an uncharacteristically loud breath. "Mari Al Ghul ?"

Damian squeezed his eyes shut. It was his first time ever saying her name out loud, the first time hearing it back in literal years.

"Hey, Demon Spawn, you should probably fess the fuck up."

Fess up to what? Nobody had ever asked before this moment. There was nothing to ask.

She was supposed to be dead.

"She was supposed to be what now?" Grayson asked. Damian thought he'd only said it in his head.

"Why is she supposed to be dead, Damian?" Drake looked hesitant, haunted. As if he was preparing for an answer he didn't want to hear.

"I didn't kill her."

"Nobody said you did."

He was at a loss for words. He knew he should say something .

"Mari Al Ghul," he whispered, barely audible against the white noise of the cave. "And she's not thirteen, she's fourteen. She is my twin sister."

"I have a daughter that you never told us about," Bruce said. His voice trembled with shock.

"They told me she died."

"Clearly, she didn't," Todd snarked.

"I can see clearly for myself," Damian snarled.

"Not enough that you just up and decided not to tell anybody, now do you?"

" Boys ." They glanced over at Bruce, before their eyes landed back to each other.

Damian stared at his older brother, his eyes dark. "You wouldn't understand," he spat, fists clenching at his sides.

Jason scoffed, his brow furrowed. "Try me."

The words were barely out of his mouth when Damian lunged, his movement a blur. The punch aimed at Jason's jaw was swift and unexpected, but Jason's reflexes kicked in. He deflected the blow with his forearm, the impact reverberating up his arm.

"Damian, what the fuck?" Jason growled, ducking under a high kick and countering with a low sweep. Damian jumped, avoiding it, and aimed a kick at Jason's chest. It connected despite their size difference, sending Jason stumbling back.

Jason's eyes hardened. He straightened, wiping a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth.

"Stop! The both of you!" Grayson's yell blended in with the sound of fists meeting flesh and the occasional grunt filling the air.

Jason caught Damian's wrist mid-punch, twisting it and using the momentum to flip him onto the ground. Damian rolled with the fall, bouncing back up with a growl, launching himself at Jason again.

It was terribly familiar, grappling on the ground like this.

" Boys! " Bruce's voice cut through the tension like a knife, bringing both Damian and Jason to a halt.

Jason yanked himself off of the ground with a scoff as he was left to flounder on the cold floor, flooded with memories of a fight just like this.

Barbara took another audible sip of her matcha boba tea.

Tim turned to her, a flat look on his face. "You think this is funny, don't you?"

"A-plus quality entertainment."

Bruce had been devastated when Damian first appeared four years ago—a son he never knew existed. The shock of discovering a ten-year-old boy with familiar eyes and a shared frown, embodying a life he had missed, left him reeling.

His thoughts turned to the lost years, those precious moments of childhood that he would never get back. First steps, first words, even the first time he picked up the swords he cared for so dearly.

He saw himself in those eyes despite them being his mother's, a mirror of his younger self, and it struck him just how much he had missed. He wanted to reach out, to pull his only blood son into an embrace, but he will never be able to bridge the gap of those ten years he should've been.

He vowed that he would never let anything like it happen ever again.

And yet here he was. With a daughter on the other side of the world who had his eyes, and his son's face. With a life he has never been a part of. With a name he learned just a few minutes ago who he has never actually met.

Bruce rubbed a tired hand over his face, trying to mask the storm of emotions churning within. "I have another daughter," he whispered, the weight of those words pressing down on him.

"Yup. A bio daughter. In Paris. A magical girl superhero," Barbara added, helpfully.