Chapter Text
He is standing at the edge of an ocean that does not breathe.
It should breathe. Oceans are supposed to move, to drag themselves forward and recoil, to murmur against the shore. This one is stretched thin and flat, a black mirror laid carefully at the horizon. The sun hangs too large above it, swollen and watchful, bleeding a sickly gold across the sky.
His feet are buried in sand. He feels warm.
Not the shifting warmth of summer beaches—this heat is constant. Intentional. The grains press around his ankles like hands, fine and silken and firm enough to keep him upright. When he shifts his weight, they tighten almost imperceptibly, correcting him.
He feels… solid.
More solid than he ever has. The edges of his body are defined, certain. He knows where he begins and where the world ends. There is no ache in his ribs. No nausea curling in his stomach. No fracture in his bones.
He presses his feet deeper. The sand welcomes him, embracing his feet, creating a foundation for him..
Stay.
The thought is not his, but it passes through him gently enough that he doesn’t reject it.
When he lifts his gaze to the horizon, Gotham stands there.
The skyline cuts into the golden sky like a wound that never healed. Gargoyles cling to ledges. Spires pierce upward. The city is too sharp against the softness of the beach, like a memory pasted over a dream.
Its sky is not gold. It is gray. Heavy with clouds of smoke. Unmoving, which is weird, Gotham always moves.
He should be there. The certainty arrives fully formed.
He belongs in the dark. In the narrow alleys and stone corridors and cavernous depths beneath the earth. He should cross the water. He should return.
But the sand is warm. The sun is so warm. Gotham looks distant, thin. Lonely.
He feels a tug in his chest—faint and quickly soothed by the heat wrapping around him. His muscles loosen one by one. The tension he carries in his shoulders dissolves. Even his jaw unclenches.
He lowers himself into the sand. It parts for him like flesh yielding to a blade.
There is no resistance. His back sinks into it, and the grains mold perfectly to the curve of his spine. His head rests on it and does not tilt. The sun settles heavier over his face, pressing down on his eyelids until closing them feels inevitable.
He lets them fall shut.
“Damian.”
The voice does not come from Gotham nor does not come from the ocean. It comes from directly behind him.
His eyes open.
The sun has not moved, but the light feels dimmer.
He turns his head.
A figure stands at the edge of the water. Close enough that he should recognize it instantly, yet its features blur and shift, like a face half-remembered in a dream. The edges of its body ripple subtly, as if it is not entirely contained by its own shape.
“Shouldn’t you be somewhere else?” it asks.
Its voice overlaps itself—deeper and lighter at once. Familiar tones woven together wrong.
Damian frowns faintly. His thoughts feel slower now. Thick.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
The figure tilts its head.
Behind it, Gotham’s skyline seems taller. Closer. The buildings lean, just slightly, as though straining toward the shore.
“You don’t belong here,” the figure says softly.
The ocean touches his heel.
He flinches. He hadn’t heard it move. The water is cold, a stark contrast from the warmth of the sand, enough to make him shiver.
He looks down. The sand around his feet is darker now. Wet. It clings more tightly to his skin.
“I’m right where I want to be,” he says. The words echo strangely, as though repeated from somewhere beneath him.
The figure hums. The sun flickers. Not a cloud passing—no. The light pulses, once, like a dying bulb.
Behind the figure, Gotham’s windows begin to glow. One by one. Too white. Too bright. Not warm city lights, but sterile illumination. Like hospital corridors. Like cave floodlights.
The ocean rises to his ankles without forming a wave. The sand tightens around him, not painfully. Just enough that when he shifts, it does not give. In the way Pennyworth squeezes his shoulder to let him know he’s there or in the way Richard wraps a lazy arm around his shoulder to bask in his company.
“You are comfortable,” the figure agrees. The voice is closer.He doesn’t remember hearing it stepping forward.
“You are warm.”
The water reaches his calves. The cold bites deeper now, seeping into his bones.
“You are still.”
He tries to sit up. His arms sink into the sand up to the elbow. It closes around him, grain by grain, filling the spaces between his fingers. He pulls harder. It does not resist yet it simply does not release. Panic builds inside his chest, almost mutedly but enough to notice. Notice that he’s drowning.
The sun dims further, the gold draining out of the sky until it becomes the sickly yellow of old parchment.
Gotham cracks, without a sound.
A thin fracture splits down the center of the skyline, from the highest tower to the unseen ground below. The buildings do not fall. They remain standing—just separated, as though something inside is trying to push out.
The ocean climbs to his knees. There are still no waves.
“I’m right where I want to be,” he repeats, but the words feel rehearsed now. Placed in his mouth.
The figure’s face sharpens for a single second.
It is his. Not as he is. No, it doesn’t even look human. So starkly thin, with eyes sunken deep deep into its sockets. It’s older, he knows by the height, the mature shape of its face. Its lips parted slightly, as though perpetually mid-breath. There is sand inside its mouth.
“You are,” it says gently.
The water reaches his waist. He cannot feel his legs. He looks down to see there are no legs.
Below the surface, there is only shadow. A depth that does not reflect light.
The sand beneath his back softens further, and he sinks another inch. Then another. His shoulders disappear. The grains slide over his collarbone, into his ears.
He cannot hear his own breathing anymore.
The figure kneels at the shoreline and yet the ocean does not touch it.
“You should go,” it whispers.
Behind it, Gotham bends inward unnaturally, the buildings curving toward the sky as though drawn upward by invisible hooks. The white lights in the windows flicker in unison.
The sun sputters.
For a moment, it goes black.
In that instant of darkness, he feels something brush against his submerged feet. Not sand or water like before. No, there are fingers clinging onto his feet.
The light snaps back on.
The figure is closer now, standing over him though it has not crossed the water.
The ocean begins to drain—not outward, but down. Spiraling away from him in a silent vortex. The water peels back, revealing not seabed but a vertical drop beneath him.
He is not lying on sand. He is suspended over a hollow. The sand that holds him is the only thing keeping him from falling.
The figure smiles.
Its teeth are wrong. Too many yet too few at the same time.
“Stay,” it says softly.
༺｡° .ᘛ𓆩♡𓆪ᘚ. °｡༻
Damian woke like something had torn him back into his body.
Air scraped into his lungs, sharp and desperate, as though he had been drowning and only now remembered how to breathe. He was upright before he knew where he was, hands fisted in cotton sheets instead of warm sand. The sensation confused him for a terrible half-second. Fabric. Not grain. Mattress. Not shoreline.
His room slowly assembled itself around him—the tall ceiling, the darkened curtains, the faint wash of lamplight staining the walls amber. Nothing was bending. Nothing was collapsing. The skyline was not splitting open like a ribcage forced apart.
There was no ocean.
There were no teeth.
“Little brother.”
The voice slipped through the air gently, but he flinched anyway. His pulse was still racing hard enough to make his vision throb. He turned toward the doorway, prepared for anything—prepared for the thing from the dream to have followed him here.
“…Cassandra?”
She stood near the door, one shoulder resting lightly against the frame, as though she had been there for some time. Watching. Waiting. When he said her name, she straightened and stepped forward into the light.
Relief hit him so hard it almost hurt.
It was embarrassing, how immediate it was. How badly he needed it.
After Alfred’s death, the Manor had felt cavernous and unstable, like a cathedral with its foundation cracked. People came and went, missions overlapped, grief lingered in quiet corners—but Cassandra had stayed. She, Father, and Duke had been the steady rhythm in a house that otherwise felt like it was mourning itself. At some point she had moved away again, though Damian could not remember precisely when. The memory was fogged over. That entire period of his life felt water-damaged, the ink running.
Then she had disappeared entirely.
That had frightened him more than he would ever admit aloud.
Cassandra had been one of the first people in this family to meet his sharpness with patience instead of retaliation. When he had arrived bristling and territorial, determined to prove himself superior, she had simply… endured him. Studied him. Made space for him. Whether that was because their childhoods echoed each other in ugly, violent ways, or because that was simply who she was, he did not know.
He only knew she had chosen him, quietly, again and again.
“Nightmare?” she asked, already crossing the room.
She sat at the edge of his bed, movements precise and gentle. Not hesitant—never that—but careful, like he was something fragile that refused to admit it.
“Yes,” he said after a moment, forcing his breathing to steady. “I suppose.”
He could have lied. He had lied about worse. But Cassandra would have known. She always knew.
There was something unnerving about being seen that thoroughly. She read him the way others read body language, text, or battlefield positioning. Once, he had resented that. Hated how transparent he felt under her gaze. He had convinced himself she was something other than human—too composed, too restrained, too morally immovable. The kind of daughter Grandfather would have praised even without the bloodshed. The kind Father could hold up as proof that brutality did not have to define you.
Too perfect.
Time had eroded that belief.
If anyone in this family was achingly human, it was Cassandra. Every kindness of hers was intentional. Every act of restraint cost something. She chose softness where she had every right to choose violence. That was not perfection. That was effort.
And that effort made something ugly twist inside him.
Because how did he compete with that? Raised in the same shadows, trained in the same language of harm, and yet she had become something gentler. Something Father looked at with quiet pride.
Damian knew his own skill. He was not insecure about his capability. He knew his value to the team, even if it sometimes felt like he destabilized more than he stabilized. But envy did not roar—it constricted. It settled into his lungs and made breathing laborious. It whispered that he would always be measured against someone who had survived the same darkness and come out cleaner.
“Too much.”
Her finger tapped lightly against his temple, not scolding—grounding.
“Come back.”
He blinked and forced the spiral to loosen its grip. “What time is it?”
“Four,” she replied. “Bruce and Tim are still out.”
“You’re not with them?” The question came out more vulnerable than he intended.
Patrol was where she thrived. Gotham’s rooftops were familiar terrain beneath her feet. She loved moving alongside family, even if she rarely said it aloud.
“I heard you were back,” she said simply.
A small smile curved her mouth, but there was sadness behind it—the same careful sorrow everyone had been directing at him lately, as though he might break again if handled too roughly.
“Couldn’t miss it.”
The words settled heavily in his chest.
Right.
He wasn’t in his universe.
This wasn’t his Cassandra.
She looked identical. Same crooked bridge of her nose from breaks long healed. Same almond-shaped eyes, warm and steady. Same black hair brushing her jaw. She even held herself the same way, balanced and controlled.
But this version did not share the same precise history with him. She had not stood beside him in every moment his Cassandra had. She had not witnessed every fracture.
The difference felt microscopic and devastating all at once.
“You can sleep more,” she said gently, perhaps sensing the shift in him.
“No.” He shook his head, then winced as pain flared behind his eyes. “I have slept enough.”
Now that the fog of fever had lifted, he could feel the cost of everything. His spine ached—a deep, familiar throb where metal reinforced bone. His limbs felt heavier than they should. Dimension travel had wrung him out like a cloth. He felt hollowed, as though something essential had been left behind in transit.
“Painkillers?” Cassandra asked, already rising.
He almost refused out of instinct. Endure it. You deserve it. But he had learned—slowly, stubbornly—that there was no virtue in self-punishment for its own sake. Especially not when it solved nothing.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”
When she left the room, the silence pressed in on him. The Manor felt too large at this hour. Too empty. He stared at the ceiling and wondered how much of his current stability was simply luck. Lucky landing. Lucky rescue. Lucky injuries.
Luck implied chance.
Chance implied it could have gone worse.
He did not know if he deserved how well it had gone.
Cassandra returned with water and medication. This time he heard her steps clearly. She always allowed him that courtesy—never materializing without warning. He pushed himself upright and accepted the glass and pills.
“Thanks,” he murmured after swallowing them.
She sat again at the edge of the bed.
He studied her openly, committing details to memory as though he might lose them. The slight asymmetry of her nose. The faint scar near her jawline. The softness in her expression when she looked at him.
She looked exactly like his Cassandra.
She felt like her.
But she was here.
And his was not.
The thought struck deeper than he expected. He despised himself for it immediately. His family had lives beyond him. They were not required to orbit his disasters. After the Lazarus Tournament—after the chaos he had dragged them into—it was understandable if space had been necessary. Cassandra had stayed with him for a time after his return, when he had been volatile and prideful and too blind to recognize the gift of her presence.
By the time he understood what she had been offering, she had stepped away again.
He hated that he compared them. Hated that part of him felt wounded by something so unfair. But the emotion rose anyway, thick and suffocating.
Before it could swallow him, Cassandra stood and crossed to the bookshelf. She selected a worn hardcover and returned, clearing her throat softly as she opened it.
“Once upon a time, in a very far-off country, there lived a merchant who had been so f-fortunate in all his undertakings that he was enor—”
“Enormously,” Damian supplied automatically, the correction instinctive.
“Enormously rich,” she continued smoothly.
Recognition settled into him like warmth. Beauty and the Beast. His favorite.
He drew the covers up to his chin and lay back, watching her as she read. Her voice was steady, careful. When she stumbled over a longer word, he corrected her, and she absorbed it immediately, repeating it with quiet determination. She never shied away from improvement.
Once, when he had asked how she learned so quickly, she had answered: I give it everything.
He watched her now in the dim light and felt something ache in his chest.
He wanted that. To give everything. To choose restraint. To choose softness. To become someone who did not fracture skylines in his sleep. Someone who did not wake with terror lodged in his throat.
As her voice wove through the familiar story, the tightness in his chest loosened. He focused on the cadence, on the turning of pages, on the simple, grounding fact that she was here.
༺｡° .ᘛ𓆩♡𓆪ᘚ. °｡༻
Cassandra’s reading went on long after the edges of the night had softened into early morning. The story unfolded slowly in her careful voice, page after page turning in the dim lamplight. Damian lost track of time somewhere between the Beast’s anger and Beauty’s quiet resolve. The rhythm of her reading, steady and patient, eased something raw inside him. For a while, he almost forgot the ache in his spine, the heaviness in his limbs, the disorientation of not being where he belonged.
A pair of knocks broke the quiet.
They were not loud, but in the hush of the room they seemed to echo. Damian and Cassandra both turned toward the door as it creaked open.
Father stood there.
Or—not Father.
He looked exhausted. His hair was still damp, dark strands clinging slightly to his forehead as though he had come straight from the shower. Deep shadows carved themselves beneath his eyes, heavier than usual, and his posture carried the subtle stiffness of someone who had pushed himself too far past the point of rest. And yet, despite the fatigue etched into him, he smiled.
That smile did something strange to Damian’s chest. It wasn’t sharp, like guilt, or heavy, like grief. It was something softer. It itched beneath his ribs in a way he did not quite know how to name.
“Ah, you’re awake. Good morning,” he said, stepping further into the room. “Cass. Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Cassandra replied gently. A small smile touched her lips in return.
They looked nothing alike—different features, different silhouettes—but standing there in the low light, there was something undeniably similar in the way they held themselves. The same restraint. The same quiet attentiveness.
“Good morning,” Damian said, pushing himself upright.
He caught the flicker of protest in his—this—Father’s expression before it could fully form, but he sat up anyway. If he stayed lying down, they would treat him like something fragile. He refused that.
From this angle, the exhaustion was more obvious. The dampness of his hair. The way his shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly. He must have come here immediately after patrol, after showering. Immediately after making sure the city was quiet enough to rest.
“Have you slept?” Damian asked, even though he already knew the answer.
The smile froze for half a second. It was subtle, but Damian knew that look. He had seen it a hundred times before—on rooftops, in the cave, in the early hours when the city refused to calm down.
“I just wanted to check in on you before I went to bed,” he replied smoothly.
Alternate universe or not, Damian recognized the deflection. It was almost comforting, how universal the lie was.
“How’s the pain?”
“I’m fine,” Damian said with a small nod. “Better than yesterday. It’s mostly fatigue now.”
“Good. Good.” He stepped closer to the bed, hands loosely at his sides, as though unsure where to place them. “Do you need anything? Water? Food? We ordered groceries.”
“I can go down myself,” Damian replied, shaking his head. “It’s alright.”
“You shouldn’t. You’re still healing.”
“Then Cassandra can do it,” Damian offered, glancing briefly at her.
“I’m already here,” Not-Father argued. “I can fix something.”
“No need,” Damian insisted. “I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten since yesterday—”
“Father,” Damian interrupted softly.
The word slipped out without calculation.
It hung between them.
“You should sleep. I’ll be fine.”
He watched the expression shift across the man’s face. It was quick, almost imperceptible, but Damian saw it all the same. Joy—bright and unguarded—flashed first. Then something heavier followed close behind it. Sadness. Longing. A grief so sharp it seemed to tremble beneath the surface of his composure.
The reaction struck Damian in a way he was unprepared for.
To see that much happiness sparked by something as small as a title made warmth bloom in his chest. It made him feel wanted. Chosen. It made him feel, for a fragile second, like he had stepped into a place that fit.
And immediately after, disgust curled through him.
He knew what that joy meant. He knew the absence it had been born from. He had no right to benefit from someone else’s loss, no right to occupy space that had belonged to another son. The happiness he felt tasted stolen. It coiled in his veins, familiar and bitter—not directed at the man standing before him, but inward. Always inward.
“Alright,” he said at last, nodding once. His voice was steady again, carefully neutral. “You’re right. I should sleep.”
He hesitated just a fraction longer, as though memorizing the sight of Damian sitting upright, alert, breathing.
“Call me if you need anything. Alright?”
“Of course,” Damian replied.
He held the man’s gaze and nodded, offering reassurance he did not intend to use. He would not call. He would not add to the weight already pulling at those tired shoulders.
As the door closed softly behind him, the room felt quieter than before. Cassandra remained seated at the edge of the bed, the book still resting open in her hands.
Damian stared at the door for a moment longer than necessary.
Wanted.
Unworthy.
Both feelings sat side by side in his chest, neither willing to yield.
༺｡° .ᘛ𓆩♡𓆪ᘚ. °｡༻
Despite insisting he wasn’t hungry, it took less than twenty minutes for the quiet ache in Damian’s stomach to betray him. The house felt too awake now, the early morning stretching into something brighter, and lying in bed had begun to feel restless rather than restful. Eventually, without acknowledging the contradiction, he followed Cassandra downstairs.
The kitchen greeted them with pale light spilling through the tall windows. It felt almost ordinary, painfully so. Damian lifted himself onto the counter, ignoring the faint protest of his back, and reached for a bowl of blueberries. He ate them one at a time, slow and absentminded, while Cassandra stood at the stove, staring down at the pan with intense concentration.
She was attempting Father’s signature pancakes.
The batter spread unevenly at first, and she adjusted the heat with careful precision, as though the stove were a living opponent she intended to outmaneuver. Damian watched her with mild amusement, the corner of his mouth threatening to curve upward despite everything.
“The others will come today,” Cassandra said after a moment, her eyes still on the pan.
“Today?” Damian blinked, a blueberry paused between his fingers.
He supposed he should not have been surprised. Drake had mentioned it before, and it was only logical. News like his arrival would not be left unattended for long. Still, some part of him had imagined more time. More quiet. It had begun to feel strangely easier without the full weight of them here. Easier to exist in this fragile in-between without being forced to confront what he represented.
“Yes,” Cassandra replied, nodding once as she flipped a pancake with surprising success. “I was early.”
There was a faint note of pride in her voice, subtle but present, and it tugged at him unexpectedly. It was almost endearing.
“Do you know when?” he asked.
“Afternoon to evening?” She tilted her head slightly. “Not too sure.”
“Alright,” Damian murmured.
He set the blueberry down and wiped his fingers against a napkin, though they were not particularly stained. He would need time to prepare himself. Cassandra, composed as she was, had already shown flickers of grief beneath her restraint. If she had been shaken by the sight of him, then the others—
He inhaled slowly.
He tried to imagine their faces.
Richard would be the easiest to picture. Their bond ran too deep to be obscured by universes. No matter how uncertain Damian felt about his place within the family at large, he had never doubted where he stood with Richard. That was his older brother. His first Batman. His baba.
Richard would smile. He would keep it light. He would speak in that familiar teasing cadence, as though this were merely another strange adventure to navigate together. He would try to spare Damian the weight of the situation.
But Richard had never been good at hiding his eyes. Damian knew he would see it there—the grief, the relief, the ache of something almost but not quite restored.
Todd was harder to predict. Their relationship had always been sharp-edged, especially during the League years. Too much chaos. Too little time. They had never built the kind of easy brotherhood others might assume. Yet beneath the friction, there had always been something unspoken. They were cut from similar cloth. Shared blood. Shared rage. Shared mother.
Todd felt deeply. More deeply than he allowed the world to see. Damian did not know whether he would retreat inward, walls slamming into place, or whether emotion would spill over before he could contain it. Either possibility unsettled him.
And Brown—
Stephanie had been one of the first to welcome him without reservation. She had shown him what it meant to laugh without strategy behind it, to enjoy something simply because it was enjoyable. Even as the years stretched and they spoke less, he had carried that memory with him like something fragile and important.
He hoped she would be happy to see him.
The thought caught him off guard.
He sat with it for a moment, then exhaled quietly. If he was honest, their reactions did not matter as much as he had initially believed. What mattered was what he could give them. If his presence could ease even a fraction of the grief they carried, then perhaps this strange displacement had a purpose.
It was not as though he was accomplishing much in his own universe. Lately, it felt as though everything he touched fractured. Plans unraveled. Trust strained. Damage lingered.
But maybe here—
Maybe here he could be different.
He did not know the exact circumstances that had taken this universe’s Damian from them. He only knew, from the careful way they looked at him, from the way the word Father had trembled in Bruce’s voice, that they had loved him fiercely.
His own family loved him too. He knew that. They had crossed impossible lines for him. They had descended into hell and clawed their way back. They had bled for him, hurt others for him, allowed themselves to be hurt for him.
But this family—
This family had loved their Damian in a way that felt softer. Kinder. There was no tension in it. No sharp expectation humming beneath the surface. Their grief had rounded them instead of hardening them. They spoke of him as though he had been something precious, not something volatile to be managed.
They were gentle when they said his name.
Cassandra slid a pancake onto a plate and glanced at him. “You’re thinking too much.”
“I am not,” he replied automatically.
She raised an eyebrow in silent disagreement.
Damian looked down at the remaining blueberries in his palm and felt something twist in his chest—hope, fragile and dangerous.
Maybe, just for a little while, he could give them something back.