Ghost King Meets Batman

A Day of Discovery

  [Edited July 10, 2022]

[Just out of curiosity, I want to know what country you guys are from. Can y'all comment here and tell me where y'all are from? I was looking through my demographics and saw that my readers came from all over the globe. Hello to those few from Khazakstan! I was surprised to see that. A majority of y'all are American, but I knew that already. Hello and welcome to everyone regardless of what country you live in! I'm glad you're here! Now, onto the chapter!]

  Needless to say, the brothers had been shocked to find out that Nico couldn't read, as they had all known how to read for most of their lives. Well, Dick couldn't read English for a while but that was different. What was the bigger surprise, the centaur death machine or learning that Nico was illiterate-- it was hard to say. The glitter assault left them all standing in shock for several seconds, listening to Damian spit and curse.

"That stupid, illiterate, piece of... " Damian said when he had gotten a majority of the glitter out of his mouth. Before he could finish his undoubtedly vulgar sentence, however, Jason had pinned him to the wall, getting right in his face.

"What is your problem? What was all that about?" Jason let go, knowing that he had the smaller boy's full attention.

"He lied," Damian replied simply, wiping glitter off his face with the back of his sleeve.

"So? You don't get to humiliate people over something so stupid. He clearly didn't want us to know that!" 

"Seriously, Damian. That was too far." Dick's expression was stern and he was making no attempt to rid himself of the glitter. Damian seemed to realize just how badly he must have messed up if Grayson was even angry with him.

"I wasn't trying to humiliate him," Damian growled.

"Then what were you trying to do? Huh? You called him out in front of all of us and didn't expect him to get embarrassed?" Jason wasn't having any of the youngest's excuses.

"How did you even know he couldn't read? He never told us that." Tim cut in.

"I saw it in his file, from the social worker's office. He has dyslexia and has scored pretty low in Language Arts every year he had formal schooling, which wasn't as often as you would expect." Damian laid out the facts as if this knowledge would make them overlook that he was further incriminating himself.

"You read his file?" Dick seemed appalled and Damian frowned.

"You didn't?"

"No! It's none of our business what's in his file!" Dick retorted. His voice was cold like an undertow that threatened to drown Damian at any moment.

"He's joining this family. That makes it our business." Damian argued.

"You're right!" Dick said, in a way that told them he didn't think Damian was right at all. "He is joining this family. That affords him the right to the same amount of privacy the rest of us get. What you just did isolated him from the rest of us. That isn't what families do." Dick stormed off down the hall and into his room. He shut the door with a decisive click. Damian had never seen him so disappointed in anyone before and he felt uncomfortable that all of that emotion was focused on him.

"That's what my family would do." He murmured, mostly to himself. He genuinely couldn't understand why what he had done had been such a problem. The League of Shadows wouldn't have even approached Nico without having done a thorough background check on him first. Why was it wrong to compile information on the people you were living with? He would have expected the others to do the same, though that didn't seem to be the case. They all seemed equally as horrified by what he had done. Was he really in the wrong here?