Lost and Found

Interlude: Family Conversations

"It was rather painful not to for the first time."

Damian finished his long monologue about his sister and looked up at everyone in the room, surveying their reactions. Father and Drake both looked frozen in place. Todd seemed to waver for a moment, but then he crossed the room, dropped to his knee before Damian, and hugged him.

Damian was too shocked to do anything about it, still raw from all the thinking of his sister.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered in Damian's ear. Then he pulled away and gestured for himself and Grayson to come closer to where the rest of the family were sitting. Grayson and Damian walked over, and they sat down as well. It was the closest Damian had ever been with all of them at once.

"I had another child I didn't even know about?" Father asked, sounding desperately upset. For a moment Damian took that as anger, but he pushed the thought away when his father looked at him. Father looked apologetic, guilty even. Damian didn't know what else to do, so he merely nodded.

Father looked away and put his face in his hands, and they all sat in silence for a moment. Then Drake broke the silence with a question that Damian had been expecting.

"What was she like?"

The whole room tensed, with the exception of Grayson and Damian. Did they expect Damian to be angered by that question? Was it unusual to want to speak about one's dead family? He didn't know.

"She was kind. She often hid it, but it was her nature. Whenever we would go on missions together she could command the love and attention of everyone in the room." Damian made eye contact with Drake as he answered, something close to a smile gracing his lips.

"What was her name?" Father asked quietly. He was still avoiding eye contact with anyone and everyone, and his voice was soft.

"Marinette. But I used to call her Angel. She truly was, when among the league. She would've loved it here. Every night we go out and help people, we don't use our skills to hurt."

"Next year we shall include her in your birthday," Pennyworth stated, and Damian decided that he loved that idea.

"Yeah," Todd agreed with a smile, "we need to make sure our ghost sister feels loved." Very on brand of Todd, joking around to brighten the sad atmosphere.

"Did she look like you?" Drake asked. Father seemed to quickly be recovering from the initial shock, and started listening more carefully to Damian's answers.

"Not much, although it wouldn't be difficult to recognize us as siblings, she had lighter skin and blue toned hair and eyes. She looked more like all of you than she did like Mother."

"Do you have any pictures of her?" Father asked. Damian wished he did, but then an idea struck him.

"No, I do not, but I believe I could draw her from memory. I have quite the skill with a pencil, and I don't believe I could ever forget her face."

Alfred nodded at that and then swiftly left the room, returning moments later with his new sketchbook and pencils that he had been given the day before.

He quickly began drawing her from memory, with his entire family hunched over his shoulders trying to see. In the end (after like 20 minutes because that would take a while) he decided that it looked accurate enough, and tore it out of the book. He held it for a moment, before he presented the drawing to Father.

Father held it for a moment, then his eyes started to gloss with tears. They did not fall, but Damian decided he would attempt to create as many drawings of his sister as he could, and he would scour his belongings from when he lived in the league for anything that might've been hers at one point or another. He wanted to share his memories of her with his family.