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Damian was ten when it happened.
Jon was eight.
It hadn’t been a big deal back then, at least not really.
But nowadays, it seemed like the start of everything.
It was like a huge turning point in their relationship, in their future.
Was this what people felt like when on the brink of the next event to go down in human history? Did scientists ever make small discoveries, and then years later it leads to the cure for Cancer? The small fact that hadn’t even seemed worth mentioning to their co-worker, suddenly becoming one of the greatest discoveries in human history. Back when the scientist had been young and without worry it hadn’t seemed like anything big, but now, now that the scientist was older and wiser, it became all-encompassing.
All of this is to say.
When Damian and Jon had gotten married at ten and eight respectively, it had just seemed natural, like the next step in their relationship, obviously they would marry.
It hadn’t been anything big.
It had been an apple falling out of a tree, nothing out of the ordinary, until someone spent a second too long thinking about it.
Later on, it became an inside joke of sorts, insults would be met with “Well, you married this jerk!” which would be met with “I’ve got the divorce papers signed and ready to go!”.
They never did get divorced.
Friends would complain about them bickering like an old married couple, and they would say that it came with being married for over a decade, they both got partners—not that they ever lasted for long—but they always came back to each other; everyone knew that they were endgame, that if you ever were to try and date one of them, you would also be dating the other. Because they were a package deal, some had tried to get them away from each other, it never worked.
They were married for thirteen years, before renewing their vows—they didn’t call it their wedding, said they had already married each other even though they could barely remember that day anymore—the ceremony was beautiful and everyone cried, but the two would swear up and down, that their 100.000-dollar wedding didn’t hold a candle to the one they had when they were young.
They were wrong, of course, the ceremony (if you could even call it that) had been anything but romantic, but that didn’t stop them from spinning tales. No one ever did find out the truth, whether it was held in the early hours of the morning, both groggy from sleep as they held hands between flowers with morning dew.
Or if it was in the middle of the night, as the moon hung high in the sky and the giggling boys sneaked out to go down to the water; Damian reciting a poem his mother had taught him in Arabic while Jon giggled and recited a speech someone had made from a show his mother watched.
It was, of course, none of those.
But the boys loved to watch their families debate which one was the right one, so they did nothing more than spin more tales.
Tales about the colour of the sky, forever synonymous with the colour of love, tales of the moon, and how it shone in their eyes, tales of the sea and of the land, tales of storms and clear days and of breathless smiles matching twinkling eyes.
Tales of a love where there was none.
But this is not a sad story, so what really happened that day?
To answer that question, we must first start at the very beginning, with TheQuestionTM
“Why did you and daddy get married?” A young Jonathan had asked, looking up at his mother as she prepared dinner.
“Because me and daddy love each other,” his mother had said.
“What’s love?” and Lois had spent thirty minutes trying to describe the feeling of love, but, realising that her son was eight, she sighed and crouched in front of him.
“I love your dad, that means I want to keep him safe; it means I always want to be with him, and it means that no matter what, through sickness and in health, I will always be by his side,” she had said, and though it was a fine description of love that was easy for an eight-year-old to understand, it was also what sent little Jon’s mind reeling.
I want to keep Dami safe, and no matter how many times he calls me a baby I’m always excited for when he’s gonna come next, and when Dami was sick I came with soup for him and then we played Cheese Vikings for an hour. I love Dami.
It was the obvious conclusion.
So, with that in mind, Jon waited anxiously for tomorrow, where he would propose to Damian.
He would obviously say yes, there was no doubt in Jon’s mind, Damian was a very smart person, and he would come to the same conclusion as he had.
But something in his stomach felt weird as he thought about it, like he was nervous.
They were in Jon’s room, lounging on his bed as Damian sketched and Jon babbled on about something that had happened at school.
Then Jon suddenly shot up in bed.
“Let’s get married,” he said, Damian levelled him with an unimpressed stare, raising a single eyebrow (he had been practising in the mirror after seeing how many times Jason did it) at him.
“And why would we get married?”
“Because,” Jon said, dragging out the vowels, “we want to keep each other safe,”
Damian hummed, he was a bit older than Jon, so really, he could’ve known more about marriage.
But he hadn’t necessarily had the most conventional family, so he probably knew less than Jon.
“Okay, how do we get married?” Damian easily agreed.
“I don’t know, I think we just say something and then we’re done,”
“Okay, Jonathan Kent, I now marry thee,” Damian said which made Jon giggle.
“Damian Wayne, I now marry thee,”
And then they went back to talking and—for Damien—drawing.
The world was so simple back then, who would’ve thought that years later, when they were both adults, they would end up getting married again.