Chapter Text
“non est ad astra mollis e terris via” : there is no easy path from the earth to the stars
Grandfather’s anger was a sight to behold.
His voice rose to feverish pitches when he was upset, roared with laughter when he was amused. But his anger was motionless, calm. As still as the Lazarus Pit, with a mere ripple on the surface to betray the tumult of emotions underneath.
Seeing Grandfather on that throne, fingers tapping the golden-gilded arms with emerald rings, Damian felt a phantom sensation in his own hands. At seven years old, Damian was expected to grow beyond petty pleasures such as the sketchbook he had hidden away. Ra’s firm hand snapping each charcoal-stained finger was a vivid memory, and a reminder to never incur his wrath.
A lesson his mother was well versed in, yet never seemed to learn from.
Mother was yelling about Batman, kneeling in deference but head raised in challenge, and Ra’s spoke calmly back, his hand tightening ever so slightly on his staff. Batman was a topic that Mother and Grandfather argued about often. Damian had no idea why. Every couple of months, something or the other about that man would end up being the League’s new gossip, Mother would sneak away to see him, and Grandfather would seethe about the man that kept refusing his offers to join the League. Damian once asked, if Batman never listened, why didn’t Grandfather just abduct him by force?
The blow from Grandfather’s staff sent Damian skidding across the throne room.
Never once had Damian considered there was a man out there that could best Ra’s in a fight. (A man. Lady Shiva knocked Ra’s down a couple pegs every time she visited).
Still, no matter how much intrigue the Dark Night seemed to bring, this argument had grown tiresome. Mother’s voice was a tad louder than usual, and Grandfather’s normally stoic face had more twitching of the eyebrows, narrowing of the eyes, and pinching of the lips than Damian expected. But at the end of the day, it was just another worthless skirmish about a man Damian would never meet. So he tuned the argument out.
A mistake.
Mother’s cry of pain shocked Damian back to his senses instantly, because the fact that Mother had allowed herself to let out a noise at all meant something was terribly wrong. Ignoring his Grandfather’s orders to stay at his side, Damian rushed forward. If Ra’s truly wanted him to stay, then he’d be held back. As it was, the Demon’s Head allowed his grandson to run towards his mother, small hands cradling shaking shoulders. The wound on her breast was deep, but nothing Mother hadn’t dealt with before, so Damian tried to figure out what was causing her shaking and sweating, frantically raving his eyes over her body, before catching sight of the wound itself.
Green tendrils crept outward, sinister yet almost beautiful in their delicacy. Easily missed. Easily mistaken for veins. But Damian knew what his Grandfather’s cursed blades looked like.
Allowing himself a breath, Damian turned to face Ra’s.
“Permission to take my mother to the healer?” His voice was steady, high and childlike but confident nonetheless.
Evidently, Ra’s was as well, because with a nod of his head and a wave of his fingers, he dismissed them. Grandfather shot a cold look at Mother while Damian heaved her to her feet, and as she found her footing, she glared back.
Mother’s steps seemed to falter the closer they got to the healer’s chambers, but the gritty determination never left her face. He once believed that this room, of all places, should offer some form of comfort and reassurance, should soothe the wounded and injured. Instead, Damian helped lower mother onto the cot, ignoring the healer’s cold demeanor and harsh words ringing out in the stale air. Damian was allowed to stay in the room while the healer mixed different ashes and herbs, creating a paste to counteract the cursed blade’s effects. Damian noticed he never gave her anything to alleviate the pain. Mother never mentioned it either.
The healer left the room to give Mother privacy, a safe space to collect herself. Damian moved forward, reaching his hand out, but she shook him off.
“I’m fine, beta . Nothing I can’t handle.”
Privately, Damian thought Mother’s complexion was about thirty shades away from fine , but he remained quiet, standing behind her in a silent show of support.
They made their way to the living quarters, stepping into Damian’s room. Lavishly decorated, filled to the brim with luxuries fit for the heir to the Demon. Damian still hadn’t decided whether he liked it or not.
Damian thought Mother was headed towards the bed, this being another one of the rare nights when she tucked him into bed with a kiss on the head and murmured well-wishes. Damian ached for those nights, though he knew too many would make him soft. Instead, Mother headed towards the balcony, opening the glass doors to let the cool night air sweep across the room.
Mother settled herself into one of the high-backed chairs, sighing audibly as she leaned into the pillows, and she grabbed. Damian’s hand when he moved to sit on the other. She patted her thigh, twice, then sighed at Damian’s look of confusion.
“Please, Damian. Just this once?”
With a hesitant nod, Damian moved to sit on her lap, back straight. When Mother moved to put her arm around him, his entire body went rigid. This was strange .
Still, Mother’s jasmine perfume was familiar and her hands were warm, so Damian relaxed into the hold ever so slightly.
“When a child cannot even accept their mother’s touch, then the mother knows she has failed.” Her voice was quiet, laced with sadness.
“Mother-”
“He will not allow me to stay for much longer.”
Startled, Damian shifted to face her. “What?”
“Our visions have begun to...clash. I no longer agree with many of the things your grandfather preaches. And we both know he does not tolerate rebelliousness.”
“But you’re his daughter .”
Mother laughed softly. “Yes, I know. Beyond the heir that I could give him, though, that never meant much of anything.” Then, she turned to look at Damian, and her gaze had more softness in it than Damian had ever seen. “Tell me you believe differently.”
Well, before today, Damian was sure the rare feelings of affection Mother whispered into his hair before kissing him goodnight were imaginary. So he wanted to tell her he was pretty sure she shared her father’s stance on familial love. But Mother was tired, body fraught with desperation and fatigue: more emotion than Damian had ever been allowed to see before.
“I know you care about me, Mother,” Damian found himself saying.
“That’s good enough for me,” she smiled, her posture regaining some of its usual poise and strength. Moving Damian to face his back, Mother tilted his chin up, taking in the night sky with him.
“Are your astronomy lessons going well?”
“I’m learning everything the tutor has to teach me,” Damian responded, knowing what was expected of him.
“Hmm.”
And then-there. That little twinkle up in the northwest portion of the sky. A star Damian had caught sight of weeks ago, and had been unable to find on the star charts. For one, it just...did not exist on the star charts. For another, the star seemed to be a bright, burning violet. The colour streaked across the night sky, the fervent glow overpowering any other star in its near vicinity.
Mother was being surprisingly open today, her gentle touches gaining some depth rather than leaving a ghostly impression on his skin and leaving Damian wondering whether or not she was ever there at all. It would be so easy to ask her, to open his mouth and inquire after that one particular star that had been bothering him for weeks .
But Mother’s arms wound around Damian’s waist, hesitant but there . Her skin was rich and earthy, the green rings adorning her fingers glowing with elemental power. Mother was the earth, and Al Ghul family’s roots wound their way through the entire League, from the smallest servant to the bravest warrior, and all the way up to Damian.
It was rather difficult for the earth to understand the sky.
So Damian kept quiet, and held his discovery of the star close to his chest.
Stars were not supposed to be purple.
Damian knew because he had gone to his astronomy teacher and asked him. Can stars be purple? He said no.
Well, to be fair, he had said stars that glow purple and green could not be seen because of the way humans perceive visible light. Either way, Damian now knew that stars could not be purple.
Which left two options: Damian was a metahuman and could see light in ways that others couldn’t, or that thing up in the sky wasn’t a star.
Damian went to Grandfather and asked if he was a metahuman. Grandfather laughed in his face.
Then, Damian went to Mother and asked if he was a metahuman. Mother ran a couple tests, and after two days, returned and told Damian he was, in fact,
not
a metahuman.
The only other option was that thing in the sky was not a star.
So if it wasn’t a star, what was it?
That question took over Damian’s waking hours, filling his brain with questions upon questions. His astronomy tutor was surprised at the sudden interest, but pleased at the thought that Mother wouldn’t kill him so soon if he was being of use to her son.
Damian knew Grandfather was growing unhappy. His other subjects were neglected, and though he hadn’t deteriorated in combat and weapons training, it was clear he was distracted.
“It’s a research project,” Damian replied whenever asked. And what a research project it was. Damian devoured book after book, text after text, going over possibility after possibility. It wasn’t a comet, it wasn’t an asteroid. Earth did not gain another moon. The only spacecraft orbiting the Earth big enough to be visible was the Watchtower, and if the Justice League’s headquarters were truly that easy to find, then they were the idiots Grandfather always said they were.
The only other option Damian could think of was a spacecraft from another planet, but if that was the case, the Justice League should have intercepted it already. Right?
Grandfather’s fights with Mother grew more and more common, more and more vicious. Damian wasn’t sure he fully understood the kind of explosive anger his mother was capable of until now.
Unfortunately, a significant part of their feud was him . They picked and plucked at him like a puppet, a mere pawn in their game. Grandfather wanted the heir he’d been promised, the thrum of the demon inside a boy who wielded a blade like loyalty and loyalty like a blade. Mother wanted the remaining piece of a long lost love she would never tell him about, someone to fight and live and die alongside like a proper family.
Damian just wished both of them would leave him alone.
Of course, he didn’t have a death wish, so he never voiced this aloud. He turned his focus to his studies, to his teachings. It was easy to lose himself in the arc of a blade, in the throb of a bruise, in the script of books. Astronomy clung tight to him, took his focus unlike anything else.
A large part of it was that godforsaken star.
That star that Damian tried and tried and tried and always failed to find. It wasn’t in the star charts, it wasn’t in different constellation maps. It wasn’t in academic journals, it wasn’t in NASA’s database. Damian was half convinced he was hallucinating the thing, but both his astronomy teacher and his mother could see it when he pointed it out to them.
They failed to understand Damian’s fascination with it, but that wasn’t very high on Damian’s list of priorities.
Damian took to talking to the star. He felt silly, at first, but something inside him tugged at that violet gleam against pitch black. It was almost as if the star was his , as if the purple streaked across the sky just for him. If nothing else, it was a relief to talk about his day to someone without fear of judgement.
Stiff musings voiced aloud turned to hesitant words about his day, hesitant words about his day turned to quick sketches of the star, quick sketches of the star turned to a confidant to talk to.
When Damian was sure no one could hear him, he voiced his fears, his grandfather’s limited patience, his mother’s desperate rebelliousness. The star did not chide him for letting his guard down. The star did not punish him for showing weakness. The star did not strike him for daring to be anything other than impenetrably strong.
The star simply twinkled in the sky, soft and welcoming.
There was a dull shink of a blade being drawn. There were frantic and brutal sounds of fists hitting flesh, of fearful fighting. There was a muffled gurgle, betraying not an ounce of pain.
Then there was silence.
“Mother is dead,” Damian told his star, his tone somber but serious. His hands were twitching, tight with the knowledge that he could have helped. He could have helped . He could have saved his mother. Instead, he stood by Ra’s throne, terror paralyzing him and rendering him useless as his mother fought for her life.
Damian had yet to cry. He doubted he would.
“Grandfather says he wants to personally oversee my training, now. There’s nothing stopping him from turning me into his perfect heir.”
Damian paused, squinting. For the past couple of days, it seemed the star was growing closer and closer. The idea seemed ridiculous, but right now, Damian could swear it was larger than ever before.
A tiny voice in the back of Damian’s head suggested the star knew he needed a friend right now, and was coming to help him. A larger voice said that was foolish and laughable. Even his mother couldn’t stay alive for him, what were the chances a star of all things would?
But now, gazing up, not only did the star seem bigger, it was moving .
“Are you trying to come to me?” Damian said, almost daring to hope.
The star grew larger and larger and suddenly, with a flare of violet, it….disappeared? It was just gone. Frantically, Damian leapt onto the railing of his balcony, scanning the sky for that familiar purple glow. Surely it had to be somewhere . Stars didn’t just cease to exist.
But it was nowhere. Nowhere to be seen at all.
Damian wasn’t sure what he was feeling. For years, he’d doubted his mother truly loved him at all. Now she was gone. For months, his imagination had turned this star into...what? A friend? Now it was like he’d been talking to himself the entire time.
“I was ,” Damian mumbled to himself. “It was just a star. It had no idea I even existed.”
Still, Damian couldn’t forget those nights he’d gazed up into the black and blue watercolour of a sky, letting his secrets and truths trip off his tongue and dissolve into the night, believing the light from his star was washing over him.
He should forget about it entirely. He had acted childishly, making up something of an imaginary friend. It had no place in the life of an Al Ghul, in the mind of the future Demon’s Head.
One last time, Damian thought.
He turned to face the sky once more, and his words came out fast and quiet, almost like a confession. “The League has roots stretching far and wide, all across this earth. After tonight, Grandfather will ensure that I am trapped in them. And there is no easy path from the earth to the stars.”
Then, Damian smiled, a sad little thing but present all the same. “Thank you,” he said. “For listening.”
He turned and breathed in the chill of the open air before closing the balcony door, the siren call of the glittering stars out of sight.
The next morning, Grandfather sent for him. As Damian knelt at the base of the gilded throne, he tried his best not to flinch away from the cruel smirk stretching across Ra’s face and weakly hoped he wasn’t summoned for anything to do with his mother.
Luck was on his side.
“One of my sources inside the Justice League has informed me of something particularly interesting. Yesterday, they uncovered the cloaking of a lone escape pod, with an alien inside it. They have taken the pod into the Watchtower.”
Damian blinked, filtering in that information. It was interesting—Grandfather had known the League had been involved in intergalactic affairs for years now—but Damian failed to see how it was particularly relevant. He decided to respond safely.
“Thank you for informing me, my lord.”
“I am informing you,” Ra’s drawled, “because the cloaking on the pod made it seem like a star to all scanners and radar systems.”
Damian’s breath caught.
“My informant also tells me that when the Justice League took the pod in, it was glowing . Would you like to guess which colour?”
Almost numbly, Damian answered, “Purple.”
“Precisely.” Ra’s said. “So put aside your stupid little obsession with that stupid little star. It wasn’t a star, and now, it’s not of any importance. It should not matter to you in the slightest, understood?” Venom slid along Grandfather’s tone smoothly, and there was a hand resting lightly on his staff: a clear threat.
Damian could only respond, “Yes, my lord.”