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Umi is a complicated topic.
Many in the family—Grayson, even Baba—don’t bring her up in conversation, as though speaking her name might fracture him somehow. Their silence is deliberate, heavy. Damian has almost grown thankful for it. It saves him from explanations, from justifications they could never accept. He doesn’t have to defend her to people who have already made their judgments. He doesn’t have to make them understand the nuisance of her love. A lesson and a lullaby in the same breath. His to carry, his to keep, never theirs.
Cassandra knows. She always does. She never asks, never prods, just lets him keep the silence, which in its own way feels like respect.
But the others, they won’t. They can’t.
How could they? To them, she is only Talia al Ghul, daughter of the Demon.
They’ve never felt her calloused hands carding through his hair after a lesson that left him bruised and raw. They’ve never heard her voice dip into a lullaby when the halls of the compound had fallen silent, when the only witness to her softness was him. They’ve never been pressed against her chest, her heartbeat steady and human beneath the armor of her name. He can still hear it if he closes his eyes, low and steady, threading through his ribs where his ear pressed against her chest. A song meant for no one but him, as if even the walls of the compound weren’t worthy of it.
He has. He’s gathered her rare apologies and her rarer laughter, caught in moments Ra’s could not hear. He’s memorized the hush of her voice, lowering to call him habibi. To call him dami, my blood.
Why would they understand? They were not raised in the League. They were not raised by her.
Sometimes, in the dead of night, when the manor is still and foreign around him, he hums one of those lullabies back into the dark. He never hums them loudly; he doesn’t trust anyone here with that piece of himself, but quietly enough for the sound to comfort him. A ghost of a song, stitched between waking and dreams. It’s enough.
Tonight, though, the floor creaks.
Damian stills immediately. His hand falls to the dagger he keeps hidden under his pillow, breath held sharp in his throat. Then he catches it, the rhythm of the step. Light. Careful. Not hostile.
“Relax, Dami,” comes a whisper from the doorway.
He bristles. The knife stays in his hand. Only Grayson would have the audacity to call him that, uninvited. Dami. To Dick, it’s just a nickname, something playful, disposable. To Damian, it’s sacred. It’s Umi’s voice, whispering my blood into his hair when the world around them was cruel. Hearing it from anyone else is wrong. A theft.
“You should knock,” Damian says instead, voice clipped.
Dick’s silhouette shifts in the dark. “Didn’t want to wake you.”
“You already have.”
There’s a long pause. Damian half expects him to leave, to retreat like the others do whenever the subject of Umi hovers too close to the air. But Grayson doesn’t. He lingers, leaning against the doorframe with the patience only he possesses.
“That was… a song?” he asks gently.
Damian’s shoulders tighten. “It was nothing.”
“Didn’t sound like nothing.”
“Then your hearing deceives you; perhaps you should drop Dr.Thompkins a visit.”
Dick exhales a soft laugh, though it doesn’t reach his usual brightness. He takes a step further in. “It reminded me of when I was little. My mom used to sing backstage, before shows. Quiet stuff, just for me. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until…” His voice trails off hoarsely. “Until I heard you just now.”
The words dig under Damian’s skin, uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to compare, doesn’t want Grayson placing Umi in the neat, gentle box where his circus parents rest in memory. Talia doesn’t fit there, and Damian doesn’t want her to. She is sharper than that. Complicated.
“It was Arabic,” Damian says before he can stop himself. The admission slips out like a wound opening. “A lullaby. Umi used to hum it.”
Grayson’s expression softens in the dim light. “Umi,” he repeats carefully, like it’s a sacred name.
“It means mother.”
“I figured.”
Silence settles again, heavy and almost unbearable. Damian’s chest aches with the sudden pressure of too many words lodged in his throat. Things he wants to say but knows he shouldn’t. That Umi was not the monster they imagined. That she held him when no one else would. That she called him habibi, and dami, and that those words were more than sound-they were proof. Proof he belonged to her, and she to him.
But if he speaks, they’ll twist it. They’ll reduce it. They always do.
So instead, he clutches at the threadbare edge of the lullaby in his mind, the one that belongs only to him.
Grayson doesn’t press. The edge of the mattress dips under his weight, unfamiliar but not unwelcome. Damian’s fingers twitch, caught between shoving him off and letting him stay. Damian doesn’t. Not yet.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Dick says softly. “But… if you ever want to hum it again, you don’t have to stop on my account.”
The dagger under Damian’s pillow suddenly feels foolish. He grips the blanket instead, as if that small act could anchor him. He doesn’t know how to explain that the song is the only thing left untouched, the only thing that still belongs wholly to Umi and him. Sharing it feels like breaking it.
And yet…
The words hover in his throat. Habibi. Dami. My darling. My blood.
Grayson had said “Dami” earlier, so casually. It didn’t sound right from him. But in Umi’s voice, it had meant safety, affection, a tether against the cold stone walls of the League. It had meant love, however flawed.
Damian shuts his eyes. He hums, quietly, the next line of the lullaby. Not the whole song, never the whole thing, but enough for the air to carry it between them.
He expects Grayson to speak. To ruin it.
But Grayson only listens.
The sound dies away, and Damian feels the manor’s silence creep back in. This time, though, it doesn’t feel so hostile.
When he finally dares to glance up, Grayson’s eyes are steady, unjudging.
“Thanks,” Dick murmurs. Not for the song, Damian realizes. For the trust.
Damian looks away, face heating. “Don’t mention it. Ever.”
“Got it, Dami.”
The knife’s weight under his pillow doesn’t matter anymore. And yet it still offers comfort- a connection. The name stings less this time. Not because Grayson said it right, but because Damian still remembers Umi’s voice, and hers will always come first, soft as a song only he was meant to hear. A song stitched into his blood.