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Mama teaches Damian to dance when he is seven.
It’s not any particularly special day. She just sweeps into his room, still dressed in her mission bodysuit and hair half up, the black bag she holds making funny sounds. Damian pauses reading through the last gift she’d brought back from her missions -- a board with an Antara poem engraved on it -- to look up at her.
“Hello, hubiy,” she says, smiling like she does whenever she’s about to do something fun that she makes Damian promise not to tell Grandfather about later. “How have you been?”
“Mama!” he stands up to greet her. She stoops down so he can reach her face and brushes two feather-soft kisses on his cheeks, brushes her hand through his hair. “I’ve been well. I have some questions about your last gift. I don’t understand some of these words.”
Mama pulls him back, rubbing her thumb along his jaw. “We can read it together before you sleep tonight.”
Damian can’t help but smile. Sometimes, Mama is very tired after missions, and only sits in her bed with him tucked into her side, silent. Usually, he tells her about what he’s learning in class on those days, and it’s nice to have someone listen to him, even if he wonders what made Mama so sad. Thankfully, today was a good day.
“What’s that sound?” He asks. The more she moves, the more the clinking becomes obvious.
Mama’s grin widens. “Today’s gift is a bit… different. Do you know how to dance?”
Damian squints his eyes. “I know how to… dance with blades?” He says, but it sounds more like a question.
Mama laughs, and Damian can’t really be mad because she sounds so fond. “Not exactly what I’m talking about. Help me clear the room?”
How could Damian say anything but yes? The curiosity is getting to him now, and, well. He trusts Mama to have prepared a wonderful gift. They’re usually souvenirs from her latest mission, rather than… whatever she’s doing right now, but Damian is sure that it will be just as meaningful.
They clear off the floor, rolling up the rugs and shoving them close to the wall. All the shoes get stacked in their shelves, and Damian sweeps the floors while Mama moves both their beds to one side of the room. She dims the lights and picks through the bag that she brought with her. It still jangles with every movement, and Damian catches sight of glimmering. By the time they’re done, they have a cleared area of about twelve metres and Mama is trying and failing to hide her smile.
“Alright, habibi. I’m going to get changed, and I have some clothes for you to wear.” Mama tosses him a bundle of dark green: a skin-tight, modified League outfit. It’s much shorter than he’s used to -- leggings ending at his calves and shirt ending at his stomach -- and comes with what Damian assumes is a hanbok-inspired shirt, also oddly short. He changes behind the curtain separating him and Mama’s room, and he realizes that this is probably the first time he closed it since she left.
When Mama pulls upen the curtain again, she’s in a lehenga that Damian remembers her wearing once, when he was far younger, to a small party hosted by the girls of the League. It’s a matching green to his own, although quite a bit sparklier, and he feels a bit proud of their coordination.
“Are we going somewhere?” He asks, tilting his head at her.
She smiles again, and it must be a really good mission, because Mama is rarely this happy. “No, ‘omri, we’re staying here. I’ll be teaching you to dance. It’s not exactly necessary,” she pauses, eyes twinking, and when she speaks again, she’s whispering as if it’s a joke, “but I would enjoy it with you.”
Damian allows for the excitement to bloom on his face. He’s behind a locked door, with his Mama, and she’d never get him in trouble for it. He’s never ‘danced’ before, aside from the occasional demonstration battle that’s been rehearsed a million times before. “Okay!”
She fiddles around with a speaker for a moment. Damian has an odd burst of fear that Grandfather will hear down the hall, but he knows that their room is soundproof. When she steps away, it’s with the sound of the same tinkles that came from her bag and a heavy drum that he is more familiar with. She’s wrapped some sort of scarf around her waist, with what look like coins atatcthed, and it makes a high-pitched clatter that Damian recognizes as the sound from when she’d first walked in
“Would you like me to show you, first?” Mama asks. Damian nods, still smiling, and she moves .
It’s an impressive amount of control over her core, Damian knows logically. She’s moving with all the grace of a fighter, stomach roiling in a way that accentuates every bone of her ribs, careful and lithe and painstakingly obvious strength, but that’s so clearly not the point that it’s laughable.
It’s just-- she’s moving joyfully, fingers curling as if to stroke the air, and her eyes are so playful, and before Damian has even understood what’s going on, she’s pulling him in by his wrist, dancing around him in a circle that goes with the beat of the music. The sound is overwhelming, pounding from the soles of his feet straight to his chest, but it’s not uncomfortable like the sound of gunfire. He tries to copy Mama’s movements, and his ears burn when she laughs at him, fixing his posture with gentle shoves and hip bumps, but he still has a wide grin across his face. The music ebbs and flows from meloncholy to mirthful, and what should be an obnoxious accordion sound doesn’t grate on Damian’s ears at all. The song switches to something slightly calmer before Damian even realizes the first song had come to an end.
“Move like liquid!” Mama shouts over the sound of the heavy drums. He tries to sway his hips languidly, like Mama, but he quickly falls behind when he tries to relax his movements. Every few moments, he nearly falls over backward trying to emulate the dramatic move back and forth that she does effortlessly.
Mama makes this long, rolling sound with her tongue. When he furrows his eyebrows at her, she grins and says “ba azaghritlak,” and Damian only shrugs and goes back to focusing on her form.
Once that song ends, she pauses and hands him a water bottle. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”
Damian nods, and drains nearly half the bottle. Even though it’s been, like, ten minutes, he’s already sweating and awakened, almost like he’s been training for half an hour. The music is loud and pounding but somehow, pleasant. Mama smiles even wider and takes a drink of her own water bottle.
“Where did you learn to dance?” Damian asks. He thinks it’s a fair question: obviously, she didn’t learn from Grandfather or the League, and he’s not really sure where else she could have learned.
Mama falters, bringing the bottle down from her lips, and her smile drops into something more serious. “Did your Grandfather ever tell you about Ummi? Or my time at a university in Egypt?”
Damian shakes his head no. She sighs and brings herself down to her bed, almost gingerly, before scrinkling her eyes in the way she always does when she’s about to tell him a story.
“Well, your grandmother knew how to belly dance since she was little. She tried to teach me, but I was horrible at it,” Mama laughs. “All my movements were clunky and at odds. You’re very good for your first time.”
Damian preens, and says “Thank you!”
Mama laughs, and it sounds younger than Damian is used to. She’s pretty in the low lights of their room, all sparkles and kohl and a kind of glow that he thinks is her happiness shining through her skin. “Well, when I got to college, I met Miriam and Leena and Sara. They picked up where Ummi left off, teaching me how to dance, and it got easier with all the Assasin training I’ve done. Flexibility and such.” She looks at him now, eyes shining in the dimness. “I thought you’d enjoy trying it out with me.”
“It’s very fun,” Damian agrees. “If you have the time, maybe we could do this again?”
Mama makes a very funny face, eyebrows furrowed and lips quirked. “You think we’re done? ” she asks, incredulous. “You have at least three hours before you’re supposed to be asleep, and I have the rest of today and tomorrow off.”
A smile sneaks its way on Damian’s face before his brain catches up. “You mean we can keep going?”
Mama laughs, throwing her head back. “Oh, ya ‘ayni. We’re going to dance until our feet hurt. ”
She stands and pulls Damian up with her. “Now, try this with me.”
She walks him through the basic movement: popping his knees out slightly, the swaying side to side, the arm waving, the little kicks. When she tells him to put it all together, it’s awkward and uncoordinated, but it’s still way better than before. His ankles don’t float quite so high from the floor, and arms are less of a stiff, tree-like branch. His hips jut out more like Mama’s do, and he pushes himself off by his knees rather than toes. Mama puts an arm around his shoulders and walks him through some kind of back-and-forth exchange, and once she’s deemed him ready, stands three feet in front of from him and mirrors his steps, except in reverse.
He must do well, because she does the ‘zaghrata’ sound again and turns up the music so that it resounds in Damian’s very bones. Mama comes close enough to hold his hands up over his head loosely, pulling him along with her. Damian tries to keep up, and when he nearly trips, she pulls him up and bends toward him, her face never dipping from overjoyed.
She teaches him something calmer next -- slow and melty, with less thumping beats. It’s easier to talk over, so she telsl him what muscles to focus on, how to let his hips do the work rather than his knees this time, what beat to step with. She sounds less and less like he knows her to be -- there’s some sort of accent Damian isn’t exactly familiar with in her voice, all her P’s softened into blunt B’s, all her R’s just the slightest bit rolled. Every few words, she’ll say something in Arabic that directly translates in an odd way. Like when she said ‘ya ‘ayni.’ or ‘ ‘omri,’ It’s a funny choice of words. My eye. Damian thinks that this manner of speaking suits her.
He collects those nicknames one at a time: He’s held ‘hubiy’ for a while now, but he tucks ‘ ‘ayni, habib albi, hayati, roohi, ‘omri,’ into his chest, cradles them close.
They spend far too long, interspercing dancing and water breaks. She tells him about college, about Grandmother. She tells him about undercover missions at shows, tells him of visits that weren’t exactly for missions. He doesn’t think he’s ever thought of her having ever been a civilian. He knows she once was, just… he’s never knowny Mama as anything other than the Asassin she is now. It’s disorienting, knowing that she had a life before Damian. He thinks it was a good life -- she’s fond, when she speaks, voice warm and eyes warmer. It’s just odd.
She takes out a platter of sweets that Damian is sure she’s already tested for poison, because she would never put him in danger like that. It consists of baklava and ma’moul and basboosa, and each one has a different mix of flavors, cardamom and saffron, creme-filled and plain, almonds and ground pistachios. In turn, he tells her of his studies, gets her to explain the poem board she’d brought him, asks her more questions about Grandmother, her missions, her sightseeing detours, whatever a ‘zaghrata’ is.
She answers every question he has, end eventually, he finds himself leaning back on her headboard with her, head on Mama’s shoulder. She reads to him a story, about Layla wa althi’ib. Its familiar in an odd way, and it’s only when Mama says ‘khilsat al hatoota,” that Damian realizes its the same Little Red Riding Hood story his old English mentor had read to him.
He falls asleep soon after that. The morning after, he’s exhausted and his limbs are stiff, but somehow, Mama has cleared his schedule. They spend the rest of that day on her bed, watching Spacetoon, trying to solve the mysteries before Conan does.
It’s a good day. One of his best ever.