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Damian didn’t care to reveal anything about himself. Emotion, specifically.
But envy was one he often fought. He got upset, sometimes, when it came across—sometimes resulting in a fit of rage over the feeling causing him to obliterate an obscene amount of training dummies with his bare hands.
Damian wondered sometimes, though, after he was done and he sat, surrounded by the chaos, why he was envious. More importantly, who he was envious of.
He knew. Of course he knew.
But Damian didn’t like to admit things. At all.
Sometimes, Dick would come down into the cave, dressed in that skintight suit, portraying those hard-earned muscles. He would see Damian, hugging his knees to his chest as he simply thought, and would rush over.
“Are you okay? What’s wrong?” he’d ask, in that gross big-brother ‘I care about you’ kind of way.
Damian’s response was the same: “Yeah. Fine.”
Taking Dick’s hand to stand up, the older would pull him into a—mostly resisted—hug. Then the man would clean up Damian’s mess, though it wasn’t Dick’s problem at all, and Damian got annoyed that he even offered to help. That he even came over when he saw him. That he even existed, sometimes.
It was mean—Damian knew in the back of his mind. His consciousness told him that Dick was pitying him, mocking him in secret. His subconscious told him that Dick was just a good brother trying to help. Damian didn’t know which version he hated more.
He wasn’t weak. Why was Dick nice?
Would you really prefer it if he was mean?
No.
And like normal, it would repeat—often ending with Dick going on patrol with Bruce, maybe Stephanie joining them or the occasional Tim, even more occasional Jason. They often went on separate patrols—three or four patrolling one side of Gotham, the rest looking over the other side of the city.
Damian wasn’t left out—no. But that feeling of envy came back a lot, especially on patrol.
He was jealous.
Jealous of Bruce and Dick’s easygoing friendship—throughout the hardships and arguments, he’d always be Batman’s first Robin. The way they chatted on comms—professional, but practiced. No mistakes made then those two worked together.
Moreso, he envied Jason. He’d seen the two fight. While Red Hood used to be viewed as one of Batman’s enemies, they’d grown closer—again, but the media didn’t know that—and started to work together. Fighting crime, the two were an unstoppable force—perfectly synchronized with each other’s actions in a way that Damian and Bruce never would be.
Tim was an angel. Not only was he sweet, and nice, and could take over the world and be told thank you, but he was strong. Not just physically—when Damian found out that Tim meditated, his mind thought it was a weakness. Almost wrote it down, too. But it wasn’t—Tim was at peace with his mind. He could control his feelings, his reactions, his words and his thoughts and his actions and—everything that Damian couldn’t.
Stephanie was smart. Damian never thought that he wasn’t intelligent—nor any inferior in his mindset to Steph—but she had a thought process no one could match. Analytical and impulsive—she thought things through so fast that the first reaction coming to her mind was always a sensible one. And somehow always the right one.
How Damian envied them.
Robin was subjective. Damian never thought he was inferior. Never thought he wasn’t good enough to be Robin—he knew he was. He was trained by Talia Al Ghul herself, and placed high among the League of Assassins. No, Damian was definitely good enough for Robin.
But so was everyone else.
Sometimes, as he’d lie there and wait for someone to tell him to clean up and ask if he’s upset at something. And he’d think about how sometimes Robin wasn’t good enough.
He was good enough for Robin. He knew that. Dick knew, Jason, Tim, Stephanie, Cassandra, Barbara. Even Bruce.
But Damian didn’t know if Robin was good enough for him.