Lost and Found

A Fork In The Road

Marinette and Damian al Ghul grow up closer than any two assassins should ever grow up. Unsurprising, seeing as they are twins.

They share a room, they train together, they go on missions together; all to the disdain of their Grandfather. He doesn't want his future Demon head to have any personal connections.

And yet somehow Marinette sticks around. Damian and Marinette are equal in almost all ways, in all the ways that they aren't, they can perfectly balance each other out.

Marinette is good with people. She can manipulate, sympathize, empathize, and make almost anyone love her. Marinette can also create something out of nothing, and has a plan for almost any situation.

Damian on the other hand, is cold and calculating, he is less susceptible to the manipulation that Marinette occasionally falls for when she gets herself emotionally invested. Damian can also adapt easily, and can go without a plan when there isn't time for Marinette to construct one.

They are very opposite in many ways, and yet they still seem to be the perfect match. Like two halves of a whole.

Predictably, Marinette isn't the favorite twin. Their grandfather dislikes her kind nature, and loathes her bright personality. It just doesn't work for an assassin. But try as he might, she is resilient.

She and Damian are very quick learners, especially in combat, and they take to new weapons quickly. They work incredibly well together on missions and have never failed before.

They also take to academics very well, even better than most league children. The two demons truly were prodigies. As their grandfather saw it, at least she wouldn't keep Damian from advancing.

The real reason that they were such prodigies though, was probably due to them always having the other to help. If Marinette was struggling to pick up the new combat technique they were learning, she would have Damian to walk her through it that night. If Damian couldn't grasp the next language they learned, Marinette would be there to help him understand.

They always had a safety net, because oftentimes if one of them didn't get it, the other would.

And this worked for them for the first ten years of their lives, until disaster struck.

One warm desert night the two were up late reading together by candlelight when their mother rushed into the room. Both of them were up and in fighting positions immediately, tense. Why was their mother so urgent?

"Damian, Marinette, Slade has turned on the league, we must leave immediately," a very straightforward answer came to the unspoken question. Damian and Marinette quickly grabbed their weapons of choice, Damian with his katana and Marinette with her dagger. (a/n forgive me for this I just thought Marinette with a dagger sounded badass and I wanted to add it in)

The three assassins were off in an instant, hoping to escape without issue. But of course, they didn't.

The three were up against at least seven highly trained assassins, plus Slade himself.

The fight was brutal, they were outnumbered and two of them were only ten years old, being smaller and having shorter limbs did have disadvantages.

They seemed to come out on top, but the trio was split up during the fray.

Marinette escaped into the desert alone, while Damian was dragged kicking and screaming by their mother away to a port where they would set out to Gotham City where he would be placed into the care of his father. But he didn't want to go without finding his sister. No, he couldn't go without finding her. He couldn't leave her to die!

But he did. He didn't want to, but mother made him go. She told him never to mention his sister to his father, and that he should forget her. Was Mother not grieving? She had just lost a daughter. He had just lost his Angel.

On the flip side, Marinette was running for her life, crying like she never had before. Her entire family was dead now. How could she survive without them? Without Damian? Her Demon?

She had managed to think ahead just enough to start running towards the nearest civilization.

——-

Marinette's last few days had been a blur. She had somehow ended up in a foster home in Paris. She now lived in a bakery, in a semi-normal family. She refused to speak, even though she knew the language fluently, and she faked amnesia. Hopefully no one would ask about her scars if she pretended not to know.

It turns out if you go to enough therapists and doctors and act how Marinette had been trained to since birth, they start to think you're traumatized. And honestly? Marinette couldn't disagree. She lost her whole family, her home, and had to go on the run all in the span of a few hours. That does a lot to a person, it turns out.

Marinette was feeling so much emotion, and although she missed her home more than almost anything (she missed Dami more) she felt so much freedom in this new place. She didn't have to hide her emotions at all costs, and she didn't have to fight or kill anyone. She hated killing people, she knew that she had to, and that she had to be strong, but she truly hated the act of killing.

She didn't have to worry about that here. She felt free to just be, in a way that only Dami knew her. She wished he could be here with her; then he could feel this way too.

She was coping well, all things considered. It had been a few months now, and she had started talking again, but she still thought in Arabic. She didn't want to lose her first language. She still had episodes of extreme sadness and wrath, and the occasional panic attack, but they were slowly going away.

Her new parents even started letting her help out in the bakery. It was a good distraction. Marinette still felt like she had been cut in half when she lost her twin, but maybe she could adapt to this. That was Damian's thing, he could adapt to any situation, and always succeed in his missions; Marinette would just have to channel her twin. She would be fine.