Chapter Text
Contrary to popular belief—namely sensational media drivel and the hushed high society gossip—Damian al Ghul-Wayne felt quite deeply.
With the passage of time came a certain kind of cooling balm that soothed the deep rooted anger and childhood anxiety of being worthy of the cape and cowl. With the passage of time came hands that had shaped him like clay: from weapon to son—boy to man. With the passage of time came the wisdom of maturity and an emotional awareness that Damian al Ghul-Wayne was quite in touch with.
The plain, unveiled truth was that he felt intensely, and he loved equally so. Even then, that intensity paled to the love Damian felt for you. If his body was the vessel for all the love he felt for his family, his animals, and his ethos, then it wasn’t close to being grand enough to contain the love he held for you alone. For that kind of love was the kind of love that ran hot with a fever and simmered dangerously until it was spilling over the edges.
He loved you savagely to the point of visceral pain. You, who were both the steel in his spine and the stiletto slipped quietly between his ribs. You, who were his first and last waking thought. His lighthouse when he was lost at sea.
Loving you was akin to a constant ache, buried deep within his side. He ached when you were there and he ached even more when you weren’t. Sometimes that ache was sweet; when you were pressed and folded lovingly to his side. Yet sometimes the ache was a profound wail—when Damian found you absent from his side—and the incomplete part of him agonized viscerally for your return. Twisted and murred without your light, warmth, and absolution.
Damian’s love for you was a vow: the kind that would devastate him at first transgression. It was the kind of vow he renewed each sunrise and each sunset; pressed lovingly into your naked skin by reverent lips and whispered by dedicated hands. It was the kind of love that brought proud and powerful men down to their knees with supplication for their beloved wives. It was the kind of love that could start and end wars.
”May you bury me.”
A declaration so full of love that it dripped like a too saturated paintbrush.
You felt his ache in your sinew and bone as if it were your own. To know that life would be so unbearable if you left this world before him. The conviction in his voice—it was a pain you wished to spare him from.
“My first and last love.”
You declared back, voice small, reverent, and raw with an intensity that threatened to split open your chest and spill out all the love in your heart. It was a promise pressed lovingly to his lips—sticky, sweet, and lingering. His hand lifted to hold your jaw in the cradle of his palm, and there was a tenderness to the gesture so soft that something in your sobbed.
He swallowed your vow with a kiss of his own: starved, sated, and starved again.