Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When April woke from its frozen slumber,

its eyelashes flittered.

From the silk that its head lay beneath,

hundreds of cherry blossoms tumbled.

A brush stroke has a complex versatility. It can mean nothing and everything in a piece, all hails on how the painter manipulates their hand. Across the opaque canvas, Damian could not see his reflection. A canvas could be a blank slate, a clear mind. When he was painting, he only had to focus on one target, driven from Point A to Point B. It was refreshing, there was no rules in painting. He could dab his wet brush of white upon an already damp layer, and as long as the painting spoke to his audience; prevailed his hidden intentions; then there would be no backlash. His life had always followed strokes of precision, constant monotony despite the vigilantism.

There were always rules and structure, and although it could be debated that this was also true for the artworld; at least artists had the chance to break from a pending monotony.

A hand melded around a dead bird. Simply put in a sentence, it is just a morbid casualty. But through a painter’s colours, through a painter’s eyes the hand could be tight or soft in its hold. The bird may be peaceful or macabre in its form. Size differentiates, next to colour, next to shape, and the painter was always the one that could be in control of the scenario.

As Damian worked his hand through the painting, he lost track of the impending flick of the clocks tongue its commodious hands could not reach him from where he was perched in front of the long window; watching a bird flare its wings out at a scampering mouse. The mouse shuffled its body into the crook of a tree-hole. Both of the animals flurried up through the trees pink head, shaking it back and forth. Here, in these movements Damian could finally relax. He smudged a thumb across a grey smear. Sighed, stood back and admired. The art room was as barren as always, this early in the morning, he liked to arrive before the other students arrived.

Selfishly, it made him feel like he was superior. The easel was squatted in front of him, holding his artwork that would open this term. There were so many forms he could play with as the seasons tumbled into one another, but he always ended up coming back to painting once the first April sun rose.

“Happy Three-Year Anniversary.” He whispered out to himself, grabbing his weekender.

The familiar tread of his feet melded their way across the transparent glass floor, Damian reminisced on the same footsteps he had made just two months prior. He was ready to reimburse himself into routine. He had spent his break volunteering at the local animal shelter, he found he could understand animals at a baser level. Animals rarely lied to him. Their emotions had obvious tells, and whilst Damian was highly trained to decipher body language, it was refreshing to have someone be truly honest to him without any hidden intentions.

Thankfully, due to his inheritance, Damian had no need to do what was considered “normal” work; he made a living by selling his paintings to private collectors and at art auctions. He sometimes dabbled in ghost-writing if truly necessary, but for the first time in his life, he felt settled. It had taken him a while, but he was finally able to call somewhere home again. The hardest part was trying to avoid stray family members that leaked into the populous city area every now and then after a big city attack, not to mention the headache of avoiding the Batman of Japan; Jiro Osamu. Luckily for Damian, according to Tokyo, no one knew the name Wayne except for large-scaled business corporations looking to score bigtime deals in with the Western world.

Not planning to be found in the concrete playground, he'd tried to keep a low-profile. If he ever were to be found by the heroes he would likely be dragged back through the muddy smog to Gotham. Gotham was never a home he planned to return to, not after what had happened there last time.

'Why did I have to hear it from you of all people that he’s—'

He stopped in front of the glass hallway midway, peering out through one of the translucent letters wrapped onto Shibuya University of the Art's main building. The sun struggled out from behind the high risers bruising the skin of the night sky in a deep violet. He watched the swarm of leftover night-life civilians blend together with the early workers down below. A wry woman with a stressed brow juggled a phone in one hand and two dogs who seemed to have tangled their leads as they played. Businessmen engaged in small talk as they sipped their coffee placidly, professionally muttering amongst themselves, propped up straight backed on intricately designed cubic seats and expensive computers.

There was an hour before his first semester officially began, and with the way his hands were jittering, it was probably best to go get something to eat. He approached the main lobby, watching as Mayo Kishita, the blessed woman who gave him the key-card so early in the morning, slumped against her desk, pink hair sprawled in front of the cameras she was supposed to be monitoring. A comical clock mimicking a daruma doll clicked its tongue, it was 5:00 am. People would be starting to arrive soon, Damian stomped one of his boots against the floor. The woman jolted forward scrambling as her seat reclined.

“Thank you for the key as always Kishita,” he dangled the lanyard in front of her face, “would you like me to grab you a coffee?”

The woman’s smoothed features scrunched; it was well known amongst the students that she was grouchy when woken up. Better her grouchy then fired if Damian was going to keep sneaking in early.

Kishita snatched the key-card, yawning as she lazily kicked her feet off the desk, “Why do you even have to ask me that?”

She slid the key into the lock as it beeped once green and guided him out, “And just so you know, this is the last time I’m doing this for you. Stop waking up at the ass crack of dawn and get some rest for once kid.”

They both knew he’d come back early the next day, but the routinely banter was nice and familiar, something calming to start both of their days off with.

“White with two sugar packets?” Damian took the steps down at a trotting pace.

“You know it.” the security guard slumped forward and huddled back to her desk, most likely to chat with her online girlfriend again.

As Damian made his way through to the coffee bar by the universities entrance, the sun was quickly hitting its peak, signalling to the bustling population that Tokyo was known for to emerge from bed. Toddling school children with their yellow hats likening them to little ducklings as they crossed the main intersection. Some corporate slaves dragging out plumes from crumpled wallet cigarettes. A three-dimensional cat pouncing around city billboards. A tourist bus with a band of silver-clad neon-haired punks, posing for the debut album plastered on the side. What he loved most about Tokyo, is the more things seemed to be everchanging in the vast city, the more it would stay the same at the heart.

“One white for a Damien! Any Damien’s here?” a dimpled woman with an avant-garde bob shouted deviously from the throne room of her coffee bar, eyes looking everywhere but in front of her.

He tried his best to will his eye from twitching and took the coffee and brown paper wrapped red bean bun from her outheld hand, squinting at the misspelling of his name in broad strokes of hiragana. He’d been fetching coffee here for years, but never had had the heart to correct the barista, who smiled broadly at him with a chip in one of her front teeth as she held her chin up with her clasped fingers. Damian nodded once, tipped her generously; despite the lack of need in Japan; and marched on forward, intent on getting the best seats for the morning lecture.

Suddenly, he heard an tumultuous screech crack from across one of the benches, as someone rid across the edge on a skateboard. He noticed too late when said skater collided with his shoulder. His coffee splashed across his front, cardboard cup crinkling in his hands, a low hiss sounded from between his teeth. The skater’s face was concealed behind a red bandanna, hoodies layered most likely to keep the fresh sting of spring away. With soft brown dreads concealed by a snapback he fled the scene barking a half-winded sorry from behind him, there was nothing he could do as he watched the back of the culprit’s hoodie disappear into Tokyo’s morning rush. Followed seemingly by a gaggle of policemen tiring out their whistles.

Everything was still until the murmurs began, the barista tapped his shoulder, offering him a handful of serviettes and a fresh coffee.

He stared down at his browning shirt, perhaps he was getting rusty.

Chapter Text

“Give me some of your favourite examples of Romanticism.”

Damian’s professor, Shinji Murasaki, swivelled his head around to face his many students. His face was illuminated in the tender embrace of the LED suspended picture gallery. The class had travelled to one of Tokyo’s Art Museums in Chuo City for some much-needed inspiration for their first semester of upcoming assignments.

Murasaki was an—interesting man. Currently, he had a brightly multi-coloured Hawaiian shirt on, which of course, matched optimally with his fatigued khaki shorts and sandal socks combination. His peppered hair was slicked back into a low ponytail, and his jaw was masked with 5 o’clock shadow. Despite his complexion, he was renowned across the art-world as a genius and a prodigy that had won countless prestigious awards in his youth. After making a name for himself, he settled into a teaching role to ‘leave some room for the up-and-coming whippersnappers’. He was a general fan-favourite amongst SUTA's student cohort for his flashy nature. Damian to put it lightly, thought he was an overzealous prick that stuck his nose in others business far too much to be appropriate.

“Any form? Any form at all will do.” The professor’s eyes strained, desperation dripping into them like hesitant water droplets to a thirsty well.

Personally, Damian thought he was asking too much from art students, the most notorious breed of anti-social outcasts. Unless of course, you were an abstract artist or taking music psychology. Whilst they were still accustomed social rejects due to their neo-political outlooks and gaudy fashion sense, they were able to conform into some sort-of ‘avant-garde’ aesthetic whenever they threw modernistic warehouse parties. 

“Alright well, how about this.” He turned behind himself, presenting a tall painting of a Japanese woman standing in the contrapposto position beneath a paulownia tree in spring bloom.

She was wearing Nara-period clothing and carrying a kugo on the left side of her thigh. Her clothes were soft, almost apologetic in the way they held her figure. Her hair was fixed into a bowlike shape at the back of her head. The background of the painting was a muted orange; possibly a gold; alluding to a sunrise. She appeared wistful, yearning for the past.

“Fujishima Takeji’s ‘Reminiscence of The Tempyo Era*’.” Professor Murasaki nodded along to himself, “This beautiful woman perfectly represents a longing for the past, or for her, the 8^th Century Nara period.”

Crescents formed onto the skin of Damian’s palms, he swallowed thickly. It was like Fujishima Takeji was whispering his sorrows right next to him. His invisible hand pointed to every pain-staking detail that cultivated the masterpiece in front of him. Although the woman wallowed in disguised mourning, she still held a little transfixed half-smile. As if to further endow to the viewer that she had watched her people try to piece together the broken fragments of her country, and they had exhausted themselves in their efforts. Damian could feel the laps of pain coursing through to the shore of her stagnant figure. She was forced to accept that Western culture had already had it’s awash effect on the country she loved. Yet, she was trapped between the complacency of her society’s footfalls into the steadfast of revolutions, and the yearning for a traditional lifestyle that she had been raised for.

Nevertheless, she would never have back what was lost because of the silk road.

“What I want you all to take from this, is that Romanticism can be vague. Which works in your favour. No matter whether you’re working with a landscape piece, a portrait, still-life, abstract. If we’re given a sense of emotion, nature, individualism, or freedom, and if your painting feels so close, yet so far from our own reality, then you’ve built your own piece in the Romanticism jigsaw.”

“With this in mind, let’s get a few more examples.”

Damian back-pedalled behind the crowds of suddenly eager art-students, hearing shouts of Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People*, The Desperate Man* by Gustave Courbet and The Lonely Tree* by Caspar David Friedrich.

He knew where this was going, and it was gruelling to say the least. It wasn’t that Damian disliked Romanticism. It was that; as rare as the occasion was when it came to his art; he was not inherently good at it. He was a Realism painter. When he was still Robin, his mind was saturated with a series of impossible events. Every night after the rush of pulling his body through another death-defying act, escaping within an inch of himself and battling villains twice his size, he would lie in his bed and secretly fear the inevitability of having to repeat it all again the next day. He was always experiencing, performing, seeing things that should not have been feasible. The constant rotation had nearly driven him insane. So, when he was gifted his first set of brushes from his eldest brother, his escape became what he could physically see. What grounded him. It had become difficult from then on whenever he was obliged to paint from the extraordinary, as it seemed near impossible to do it on will. And whilst he had recently dabbled into more macabre pieces, it was only because there was no other healthy discipline for him to properly outlet the gut-churning horrors of his last years in Gotham without the possibility of feeling as if he was rotting from the inside. Besides, those paintings were private. Little organs that kept him alive in the dawns when everything grew too large for him to conquer alone. They were too personal for simple show-and-tell exhibitions.

Expectedly, the teacher gathered the attention of his frazzled art students once more. Damian felt a familiar shiver teeter down his spine, “It seems that some of you will have a head start on your assignment this year, as Romanticism will be one of the main focuses for the Summer exhibition.” He straightened his thin framed glasses, “We’ll have a debrief in our next lesson, but we’re looking towards drawing themes from memory and imagination.”

There was a bodacious concoction of reactions that stirred in the student body. Some quirked voices of befuddlement. Some groans of exasperation. Some nostalgic sighs of anticipation. Amongst the exotic mixture, there were plenty of sharpened eyes, jabbed in his direction. He had taken first place at the art exhibition for the last three years, which had not made him the most popular individual amongst his peers. Whilst he had chosen to keep his art identity anonymous; not only from the press but from the other students; his style had quickly become recognisable to the others in his class. It hadn’t made him favourable to say the least. Many opting to spread false word of tongue that he somehow bought his way into the top. Some thought he was precocious for not naming himself explicitly. He shook off the brazen glares, he was not a stranger to people distrusting him.

The genres were different each year, depending on type and movement. Last year focused on the inhumane; anything that avoided man-made and man itself. The year before was technology; using digital collages and the like to elevate one-dimensional art. The year before that was Rhythm, creating art through the lens of music. What was important was the former art genres had been malleable, he could bend them left and right to search for a hole in the system, through where the genre could still be somewhere in his comfort zone. This year was complicated. It was far too specific.

Professor Murasaki pushed his graphite stained hands into two of his khaki shorts many pockets, “You’re all expected to submit your pieces at the start of September, so all of your artworks can be moderated by the end of Summer when the exhibition is held.”

Damian could physically see some of the other student’s shoulders sag, “And yes, if you get first place you also win the money and bragging rights and whatever else manipulates the capitalistic youth.”

Suddenly everyone was interested again.

“But just know this year won’t be as easy as the last, the exhibition is open to students from all degrees at the university.”

His eye twitched as the professor played the role of Prometheus handing out the metaphorical flame to a group of hungry competitive shut-ins that probably have not seen the light of anything but their drawing tablets in days. Suddenly, he wished an eagle would swoop down and eat his liver for good measure. As the professor shuffled the students on to the other paintings to ‘ignite their deeply saddled passions’, Damian stayed poised in front of the melancholy woman. The wind shifted slightly next to him; his frown somehow managed to deepen.

Professor Murasaki’s lips tugged, his tongue fiddled with the nicotine toothpick between his teeth, “You’re angry with me.”

“You chose the theme this year on purpose to illicit my frustration.” Damian’s nose scrunched as the man wiped his grey fingers onto his vibrant shirt. It curated an image of a greasy toddler smearing their germ-riddled hands onto their mothers table-cloth into his mind.

“What!” He gasped out, palms splayed out on his cheeks like Munch’s Scream.

His face relaxed altogether, “Really? You're not the only student in my class you know." Damian raised an arched brow, "Okay, so I sort of noticed that you avoid getting personal in your art and I thought Romanticism might spice things up a bit.”

“Did you ever consider that there’s a reason behind why I choose not to?” Damian hid his chin inside the innards of his thick woollen scarf, the chartreuse of his eyes splashed against the violent rocks beneath the cliffs edge.

He waited on the professor’s next words. He wanted to see if he would dare to tumble off the edge or retreat. Throwing up his hands in mock defence Murasaki chose the latter.

He sighed, “Hey man, you were the one who chose to be an Arts Major. If you’re not gonna get expressive, you’ll end up getting eaten alive by vicious critics.”

He already knew that. It was a constant dampener on his passion for art. University was a safety net, somewhere he could save face if ever he was to fall. However, he was graduating this year, and he would not be able to hide from the world forever. Eventually, if he ever wanted to make a real difference with his art, he would have to reveal himself.

He knelled his palms against his eyelids in course circles, letting the colourful patterns bounce off one another then dropped them down to his sides, “I cannot—” His tongue stumbled, “I cannot bring myself to try.”

Heart dripping blood down the split carcass of his lungs, pumping and out to touch. Letting everyone in looking distance see him to his core. His skin was too thick to pierce for anyone else now. He hid a choke behind a balled fist.

Murasaki’s tone settled into a gentle hum, “Don’t get me wrong when I say all this Damian, you’re a promising artist. Plenty better then when I was your age.” He knocked their shoulder’s together and Damian tried his best not to recoil, “Your technique is brutal, and I know you're good at realism. That’s why I chose for you to be in my class.”

“But sometimes, you have to use what you know to get past what you wish you couldn’t remember.”

Damian’s eyes sprung up, attempting to find the other’s, but before he could say anything else he watched as the professor was forcefully led away by a few other students. He could have sworn he had sounded almost wistful in his last words.

Walking alone in the deep-seated neon nights of Tokyo was one of the many privileges that Damian treasured after his departure from Gotham. He checked the time, ten o’ clock. Daylight savings seemed to have finally reset for the Spring. The gentle crowds of nightlife and street food stands offering yakitori and crepes passed him by until he made his exit through to the alley streets, heading towards the entrance of the train station that would take him home. To the place he fell in love with first. Hidden in the nooks and crannies of Japan’s most famed concrete jungle, you could find some cherished slithers of peace. He let all the hardships of the day exit his lungs, a twittering streetlight leant it’s back for comfort. He stood faraway enough where the crowds yells became murmurs. A familiar rustle shook the bushes and into his little pocket of light emerged a mangey bobtail splotched in an array of beige shades.

He unlocked his weekender and shook some treats out of a zip-lock bag into his open palm. The stray cat, Mako, had began visiting him most nights at the station. Damian always remembered to sneak something from the shelter to give him. Expectedly, the cat rubbed its slinky body against his legs, tail playfully flicking side to side. The prudish creature bowed its head into his hand and its sandpaper-like tongue brushed against his palm. The cat’s esteemed nature was one of its many manners that worried Damian. It obviously had not always lived in the passages near Shibuya Station, the way it held itself told him that the alley-life was a recent predicament. Though, he trusted the cat’s better judgement, that it most likely preferred the streets to its home. And who was Damian to whisk it away from its restful vagabond lifestyle?

“The train will stop suddenly. Please be careful.”

Another train shuddered off. Five more minutes to go.

A melody swayed over to him; two high school students sung quietly together, seated on milk crates. One was plucking strings haphazardly from a junky acoustic. The twangs of mistaken out-of-time chords settled in the recently divorced dusk air, but the two boys seemed to just be glad to soak up the artificial lights of advertisement billboards and play together on their makeshift seats. Their hair seemed to be spun from gold, it reminded him of the blonde-haired brothers from Millais’ Princes in The Tower. Just the two of them in their own little world, waiting for the train just like him. Unafraid and empowering the world through broken chords and shrill Spring voices.

He hoped that someday he could be that powerful.

The needy cat pricked his palm with its wiry whiskers, demanded more treats of which he of-course obliged. Damian never wanted to leave this moment. Of distant footfall and friendly chatters, stray-cats, and low-lit nights of people watching. Suddenly, he felt a little lonely, dull reminiscence poured into his lungs like a sickness. The sticky fingers of yearning held his heart, squeezed ever-so slightly. Yet, he still felt like he should be content with what he had in the life he took for himself. He wondered if it was ungrateful to want to have both his past and present together, holding hands.

From the end of the station way, shrouded in discarded shadows, a clatter smashed through his gentle atmosphere. He turned to the other night-stragglers. No one seemed to be disturbed, they must have been too far away to hear it. Once more a bang rattled from the darkness along with a cannister that rolled into the little patch of streetlight that Damian had made his home whilst waiting for his train. Mako spluttered heatedly and slunk back into the bushes, Damian held the same sentiment. The innocent cannister blinked at him as it’s cap popped off, bold letters slightly obscured by paint splotches; ‘spray-paint yellow’. He turned the bottle around in one gloved hand, the multiple layers of paint were crusted onto the metallic body of the can. To satiate his curiosity, he let his finger dig into the top of the nozzle. He received a pitiful squirt for his efforts. The cannister was well-worn out. He followed a string of curses into the shadows. Tucked away into a back corner of the station, the shake of a bottle resounded. Sprayed across a brick wall in big bouncy letters was: ‘Washi-Yama’; the writing was in English.

The fumes of the paint caused a cough to fight its way out from the back of his throat. The shaded man jumped then watched him steadily. Damian could feel the thrums of energy coursing through the alley. The graffitists strung-up muscles begged him to run as the fresh paint dribbled down the bricks. Damian was indifferent to graffitists, it depended on whether their art was worthy of his attention or not to how he would react towards it. This was not to say he did not appreciate the talent of many street artists who had pleasured Gotham with their murals and throw-ups back when he called the smog-choked city his home. He had always disliked when his father would make him chase the artists off. He did not feel like making art was a crime.

He covered his mouth with his scarf and threw the half-empty cannister, “I can hear you from the station.”

It was meant to be a courtesy warning, from one artist to another. The street-artist caught the can with ease and nodded a simple thanks.

The supposed ‘Washi-Yama’ seemed relaxed, poised on the balls of his sneakered feet as he touched up some highlights, “Good.”

His voice was clear almost overconfident, he had obviously done this multiple times before.  

Across the floor there were different nozzles scattered about. Along with some empty cannisters that were discarded within a large black duffle and a scrapped skateboard. Damian openly observed the street-artist from what little the backlight of the station could offer. His hair greedily soaked up the synthetic rays, knotted intricately into braids and all gathered up into a half-up half-down. His eyes were a melted golden amber, sprites of brown seeped in at the corners. His skin was a burnt sienna and the lower half of his face was covered in a familiar red bandanna that made Damian squint. He checked the time gingerly; three minutes had passed. He eyed the details of the tag; the writing was smooth as well as the hand that steered the spray.

“You like it?” The artist’s voice was relaxed, though Damian could tell there were hints of an unforgotten accent. He sprayed his finishing touches, two devil horns propped up on top of the M and a little forked tail wrapped around the middle of the tag.

He hummed in affirmation, the man offered him one of the cannisters.

He glanced down, back up at Washi-Yama's expectant gaze. Stared back at the station entrance, the train would be arriving soon. Damian could forget this happened, creep back under the streetlight, talk to Mako and waste the last of his minutes away. He could return to his home and continue in the bliss of monotony. But the street-artist had opened a door for new artistic opportunities. His professor wanted emotion, and what art had more emotion driven behind it then street art?

“I do not have a tag.” He frowned.

The train bustled into a stop. One of the station workers flagged the conductor.

Washi-Yama chuckled, “Tagging is just a street cred thing, you don’t have to have one.” He tossed another empty can into the black duffle, “In fact, this one is just a bait tag to get the cops off my back. I have a better place where you could try it out.”

A whistle sounded. The two high-school students boarded the train, they had abandoned their crates. He stared down at the cannister. Shook it twice. Mako had given up on him coming back to his little pocket of light. Washi-Yama began to clean up the evidence of his vandalism. Damian needed more time to think. The artist shrugged at his indecision, swung his duffle and skateboard onto a dumpster lid and used some garbage bags to back-up his jump over the wall. Damian sighed out a plume of disappointment. He turned on his heel as the train arrived only to lock eyes with an extremely red-faced policeman. He looked down at the cannister once then stared back at the cop who had now definitely seen what was on the wall next to him and was moving full steam ahead. Suddenly, he was also jumping onto the dumpster.

“The train to Jiyugaoka station is now departing.”

Chapter Text

The graffiti mural was sprawled mockingly across the universities notoriously transparent glass hallway.

Flint and stone spluttered sparks onto a long retired fire in the deep pit of Damian's stomach.

He had not been this angry in a long three years.

There was not a time to see the sun rise that morning; class had been cancelled with Professor Murasaki’s commonly acclaimed case of 'man-flu' making an appearance yet again. His muscles locked up as the flashes from crowd photography and suspicious murmur’s roared along with the beating in his skull. He stared down at the white coffee gently rotating in his cup, sitting underneath a cherry blossom tree to avoid the possibility of being knocked down like a bowling pin again.

The cherry-blossoms reminded him of one of his only outings with the entirety of his family, all together in one chaotic bundle at a carnival fair in cartoonish disguises. The eldest had organised it of course, and Damian had never seen so much glucose infested food in his life. After being ruthlessly pressured by Todd to try the abomination known as fairy-floss, he was pleasantly surprised despite its sticky after-taste on the roof of his mouth.

Featuring an earth of foxes bounding over one another playfully, dressed in what seemed to be each artist in the ‘crews’ signature design, he could almost say that he was impressed.

Almost, if it were not for the fact that his only way into the university before open hours just got fired in a bluster of being caught sleeping on the job.

The fact that he would most likely never exchange small-talk and run coffee-favours for Kishita again.

The fact that he would never be able to nestle in the dry dusk of the art-room, completely alone.

The fact that he would never be able to observe the olive-backed pipits grace the daffodils of the high-rises.

All his memories were tinder for the fire that scorned his chest. That broke off a brittle fragment of his metal heart and melted it in a blistering furnace. He was not one for close connections, but for the fact that the normalcy of his routine for the last three years had been stolen from beneath him in just one single night, it singed his rib-cage.

Yes, he was more than just livid.

The sky above grumbled its mutual disapproval, clouds heavy with unwept tears.

Change had never been in Damian’s emotional repertoire. Spontaneity was like a foreign language that he could not speak. Maybe it was due to the disciplines of his mother and grandfather’s regime from birth to the beginning of his pubescence. Or the emotional constipation that his father had generously gifted to him under the genetic Christmas tree. Nevertheless, if one were able to deduce an appropriate schedule that fulfilled their needs and wants, what was the point in breaking away from it purposefully? Of course, Damian could not deny that he had his moments. He could understand hiccups in times of emotional instability, but it was never what he genuinely sought out for in clear mind.

His eyes traced across where layering met stencilling met freehand. Bursts of vibrancy, that he would have appreciated anywhere else in the city, except for his safe space. But blinded fate* pedalled her wheel, and he had found himself at the bottom of her misfortune.

He peeled a petal out of his hair and let it chase the wind, only to feel the fat tears from the sky land on his palm. He reached down for his weekender; he kept an umbrella with him throughout the seasons. He firmly believed that the sun could be as harsh and unforgiving as the rain. A stuttered breath. A muttered curse between clenched teeth. All too soon, he remembered the distant cajoling in Tokyo streets with a stranger just weeks prior. One of his hiccups had left him unforgivably cold in sheets of diagonal rain.

A written tag was plastered just beneath the epic glass fresco, ‘Shibuya Foxes’.

His eyes narrowed. 

He could not help but feel like Fate’s merry-go-round of fortune had gotten stuck with him at the bottom.

­­­­­­­­­­­­“So, you decided to join me after all?” The crinkle of Washi-Yama’s eyes was all that was visible of the man’s disguised face.

“I was not presented with much of a choice.”

Incarceration was a hassle and Damian would prefer not to wave a flag out to westerners that may recognise him from his reputation in the States.

The policeman had bent over, gasping through haggard breaths he shook his meaty fist out at the two runaways. Depending on how much he had saw, Damian would have to change the station he was used to taking home. How irritating.

“Don’t worry about that old geezer, he’s bad with faces.”

It was quiet on the rooftops, allowing for the rattles of criminal evidence zipped up tight in Washi-Yama’s duffle and their steadfast footsteps across the apartment roof-tiles to control the night. They had wondered through a seemingly never-ending maze of Shibuya alleyways, waiting to stumble onto Washi-Yama’s prized lair. He wondered if they would encounter a Minotaur* on the way.

The familiar strain of muscles on concrete relaxed him to an extent. He fell into a calming rhythm of jumping and sliding across the roofs. Though he was growing quickly unnerved by the bounding figure beside him whom he had realised after they were polluted by the artificial sunlight of billboards from the city high-rises, was the culprit of the coffee spillage at the start of the semester.

He readjusted his grip on his weekender, “Just as bad as you it seems.” Washi-Yama raised one undignified brow at him.

Damian elaborated, “You spilt coffee on me a couple weeks ago, though you were in quite the hurry.”

Washi-Yama let out a little ‘ahh’ of recognition then shrugged half-apologetically, “My bad, I’ve spilt coffee on a lot of kinda rich guys in my time. Though with you for once it was an accident.”

Damian momentarily reflected on how his reputation plummeted from Damian Wayne; Son of billionaire and enterprise owner Bruce Wayne and ‘Talia’ heiress to an amassed fortune and prime member of the renowned League of Assassins ‘Al-Ghul’; to just some ‘kinda rich guy’ that was a potential threat to coffee spillages.

He also made a footnote to exact what made him appear a ‘rich guy’, he was not wearing any designer brands nor was he involving himself with any activities that would imply he was wealthy. Unless his upright posture indicated that he was of the upper-class, if that were a thing that could be accounted for.

He was heavily reminded of why he was never chosen to plan for disguised missions back in Gotham,

‘Let’s just hope you never play poker’ Drake had shaken his head dejectedly after a particularly trying gala event where he almost choked out one of his father’s snide followers for a misplaced comment.

Washi-Yami huffed out a thick breath, “Yeah, I didn’t recognise you just before cause you were wearing all black out and creepin’ up in the shadows.”

'Says the one committing a legitimate crime near one of the busiest stations in Tokyo!' No, Damian was better then that. 

“If you would like to apologise properly you could relieve me of my dry-cleaning bill, coffee stains are a natural enemy to cotton fabrics.”

The graffitist openly winced placing a dramatic hand on his chest, “O’ spare a poor plebian just this once thy majesty.”

Damian wrinkled his nose at the old Shakespearean, he was not interested in such foolish dramatics. Fortunately, on Washi-Yama’s part, he seemed content with letting the conversation teeter off.

The wind was especially fresh tonight, tousling his hair and kissing his face with its arctic lung-filled breath. He could tell as he brushed a finger against the cool bridge of his nose. He would be shivering down to his toes, if it were not for the meticulous layers of his favoured woollen scarf, gloves, and an undercoat that he was consistently wrapped in.

It was almost a secret in a way, that he was easily cold. The climate he spent much of his adolescence in was a wanton cliff-carved hellscape that oversaw the mountains with a tyrannical fist. He always felt that it was purposeful, the way the seasons were felt too much back then. The summer was filled with boiled brows and limpid sweat. The winters were ravaged by snowstorms and hungry winds. Either way, training was training and so he had to persist even if his feet turned blue.

The night had matured and yet here Damian was following along a corduroy jacketed trail-blazer through the Shibuya District, like he was still a meagre thirteen-year old and did not suffer from mild arthritis in his early twenties. The policeman gave up without the fight to start climbing onto roofs to chase them, he followed both for approximately two more blocks on ground level, then hobbled back to his station.

Washi-Yama was fast, but Damian could outrun him with undoubted ease, if he were to try. Though, he made the con scious decision to hold back just behind the others silhouette. The graffitist would likely be suspicious if someone of Damian’s stature started running laps around him.

He was also a believer that being underestimated was a comfortable place when with a stranger.

Damian was not quite sure what the invisible thread was that pulled his feet to keep running after the man, to this ‘better place’ for graffiti. Maybe it was the canine teeth of loneliness that had finally tugged into his skin after years of singular travel home each night. Or the way this Washi-Yama, with his novice vigilante-esq attitude, reminded him a little bit of his old home. It could not possibly be curiosity; he was an avid loather of the vile poison that murdered cats. Yet the gloating street-artist who seemed delighted with harumphing around on the roofs of apartments seemed careless, not tasteless.

Maybe he did intrigue Damian, just slightly. Maybe he was just keeping an eye out for anything suspicious in his city. Washi-Yama would momentarily jump a fire-escape with a cannister armed in his left-hand and draw erratic stripes of colour across cement and bricks. Sort of like how dogs will urinate to leave scented messages to others in their area.

His parkour was clumsy, obvious tells hinting to a rookie or a possible underling. He would stumble on the soles of his Air-Jordans and wave out his arms like an especially nervous pelican across the shore of the apartment eaves. After he relieved a particular roof of a disastrous number of shingles, Washi-Yama shimmied on his rear down the gutters, and with a white-knuckled grip, fell back first onto a pile of disfigured cardboard boxes with a winded breath. Damian squatted by the edge, again being met with having to pretend that he was clueless on how to get down.

The bumbling graffitist quickly recovered, “Just before you land, flex your joints to absorb most of the momentum,” He started breaking an array of extra boxes advertising popular crisp flavours and Kirin Ichiban onto the pile, “this should soften your fall a bit better.”

He hoped that Washi-Yama had not taught anyone else to jump off buildings. He could not help but imagine the number of broken bones this man had caused. He hesitated once, twice, stewing in faux anxiety before taking the leap. The familiar heat of flying rushed against his reddened ears. It used to be an inviting sensation. He let his legs shake a little after absorbing the impact.

By the time he hit the ground, the man was already furiously shaking a cannister around and bleaching the wall opposite to him. He traced a finger across the bricks where his hands had ‘fumbled’ for balance, not one single inch of the alley was left untouched. Thick layers of built-up paint were peeling all the way into the shadows either side of where they had landed. Different designs caught onto each-other like a varicoloured wildfire. Bulbs of light blinked at him from where they hung clumsily on the apartment gutters. It was almost as if he were caught in a physical ‘fork in the road’ scenario. He noticed that both directions of the alley were blocked. One way was gated, and the other was a dead end.

Damian could just about make out a rectangular plastic sign of a helmeted man digging in bold yellow that had been zip tied on through the gate. Someone ought to have caught Washi-Yama and his friends at some point, the place seemed to have been well-used.

Though from what Damian had noticed, people around here seemed keen to mind their own business.  

By the time he had finished perusing the alley one way to the other, Washi-Yama had finished his new piece. A naked cartoonish body with no head and hanging limbs that seemed to be inspired by one of Shinnin Kawaguchi’s anatomical atlas pieces from ‘Kaishihen’*. A gash permeated from the front of the chest, exposing raw muscle that flared out like the anguished skin of a frilled-neck lizard. Exploding from the chest cavity, ripples of boisterous grinning flowers splattered out onto the walls. It was a perfect amalgamation. If Damian was not an Art major, he would have been disturbed by the dissonance between the contrasting art styles.

Instead, he wondered if he underestimated the strange street-artist.

“A representation of anatomy blending befittingly with the simplistic modern design.”

“Honestly, I just wanted an excuse to draw Flowers with Smiley Faces*.”

Damian’s eyes flickered to the night above them, “Hm.”

A raw cough of thunder crackled out of the lungs of the sky, blowing a haggard breath of stale wind through the cumulonimbus clouds and down into the graffitists hidden gallery.

Besides himself Damian wondered aloud, “Are you currently enrolled in art classes?”

The man shook his head, rattled the bottle, kept spraying, “Sort of. I’m a music student, among other things.”

Damian nodded once, content with the short answer. Music was another art form that Damian was distantly appreciative of. Like Romanticism, he found it similarly difficult to comprehend. He himself had never dabbled in the specific field besides forgettable piano lessons, but he held a respect for those who performed their passions so openly.

“You can paint if you want. Crew never runs out of cans.” Washi-Yama’s head cocked down to the open black duffle.

Damian hesitated once more; he wasn’t sure why it seemed so difficult. He had crafted countless pieces, from clay, to wire, to gouache and so on. Yet now, he was not even able to graze his eyes across the cannisters.

The man eyed him silently, “Graffiti can be hard to revel in. Unlike other art forms, it’s seed was sewn in the harsh soil of rebellion.”

The whiplash of the graffitists tone struck an ebbed smile on Damian’s face, “So, are you a poet or a philosopher now?”

Washi-Yama’s relaxed face regarded another section of the wall that resembled a well-loved painter’s palette, “Nah, I just saying flowery stuff sometimes.”

Damian’s hands trembled as he retrieved a can, “Everyone on this planet could be an artist. Except, too many overthink.”

Washi-Yama drawled, drawing a thin line of white across the edge of a thick stripe of black, “Think too hard, and one will never start.”

Damian covered his mouth with his red scarf, squeezed out a modest testing spray from the bottle. Just as he was about to ghost the paint across the bricks, a fat droplet landed on the top of his head, then another. A string of curses left Washi-Yama’s mouth. The graffitist scrambled to remove his jacket in order to protect his freshest painting.

The newly exposed skin of his shoulder flashed a tattoo of a white fox bounding over digitalis flowers that stemmed from his wrist and blossomed to the midst of his back.

Damian swallowed, eyebrows furrowing. What did he say about cats earlier?

The starry night’s gentle embrace had offered a gift to him, a chance to step back. Damian knew now that it was time he departed. He’d had his cool glass of water, and the hiccups had stopped.

Damian fixed his expression and raised a cool brow, “Smart enough to sew seeds, yet not smart enough to read the weather forecast?”

The man fumbled on the balls of his feet to cover the throw-up, grumbled, “I’m not very good at multi-tasking.”

Damian unbuckled his weekender and stared down at the folding umbrella. Stared through it and at the puddle collecting by a drain that casted a weak reflection of him in muddled colours.

Maybe the memories were best kept with someone else now. Besides, he knew that the umbrella's owner would be happy if he gave it to someone else. 

He handed it to the fumbling graffitist. Washi-Yama was quick to untie the strap and thrust the canopy over his dribbling art.

The flowers no longer looked happy, more mildly unimpressed.

“I think I will take my leave now, where is the exit?”

“Uh— unless you wanna jump the roofs in the pouring rain, probably take the gate. We’re not too far off from the station.”

Damian wrapped his scarf around his head and started his journey back home.

Washi-Yama uttered just underneath the sounds of the rain, “Sorry you couldn’t paint anything today, rich guy.”

Damian almost wanted to smile; he had gotten exactly what he needed from today.

A chilling reminder of the promise he had made. As he grasped the wire between his fingers, he turned to face the drenched graffitist.

“Thank you, Washi-Yama.”

So, he no longer wanted to thank Washi-Yama, in-fact he would rather like to strangle the man who had promptly added a wrench in the gears of his clean-functioning life.

It was another crisp night, blanketed in a thick cloth of clouds that blinded the stars. The train station was quiet despite the few stranglers lurking around. Washi-Yama was sitting cross-legged on one of the abandoned milk-crates that Damian had witnessed the two high-school students performing on just less then two weeks before.

He had barely gotten through the day before the fire of his temperament had blackened his lungs.

He had been avoiding the station, had even gone as far as to change to taking the bus after shifts at the animal shelter. It was not that he feared that he would see the graffitist again, more-so that he was worried that the events of his night with him might be a catalyst for something more. And he could not have any more interferences.

He stopped in front of Washi-Yama’s hunched figure.

Sketching out designs within a black book glittered with stickers, the graffitist paused and caught his eye, “Ah, D.G. you’re back, it’s been so long!”

He felt all of his limbs freeze up, before melting back into a relaxed stance. The sly crinkle of the mans eyes betrayed confusion as Damian levelled him with a stare that would force the dead to roll over.

He jumped to clarify, “Sorry, I just thought uh— cause you know, the initials engraved on your umbrella handle—”

He clenched his hands. He had to isolate the flames before they devoured him, “I know it was you and your friends who vandalised SUTA.”

Washi-Yama pen clattered onto the pages. His faced dropped any warmth it had originally harboured,

“Oh.”

Damian raked a hand through his hair, he had his suspicions that the vandalism at the university was some sort of sign that he was being targeted, whether it was as Robin or as a Wayne. But from the man’s reaction it seemed the river was deeper than his first tread of footsteps inquired.

Even so, the man was a threat to the fragile normality that he had built for himself at his new home. All ties had to be cut.

He felt too much like a magnetic force that attracted only the worst in people. Damian was tired of being forcefully pulled into dangerous situations. He had noticed it back then as he had observed the graffitist in the comfort of his hideaway. The cold sweat clinging to his relaxed brow, pulse thumping vigorously in his neck, his hidden face and suspicious neck tattoo. Washi-Yama was not dangerous now, but he would be. Damian did not want to be there, when it happened.

He needed to be removed from the picture before he shattered the snow-globe that Damian had sought his comfort inside.

He let some reserves of his adolescent fury seep into his voice, “You need to stay away from the university.”

Washi-Yama tucked his sketch book under one arm, “I can’t do that.”

The inferno had been lit. His hand instinctively reached for the knife he had used to keep in his coat pocket, before it retracted just as fast. The graffitist tracked the movements carefully.

“There’s reason behind why we did what we did.”

Frankly, he could not care in the slightest. Damian just wanted Washi-Yama to know that he knew. And he also wanted to give him a friendly reminder that him and his friends could fuck off and away.

The flames that had singed his throat left words of bitter ash on his tongue, “Listen, I am not having my life be ruined by a cheap stunt pulled by some want-to-be activists.”

The man matched him with a sardonic laugh, “First of all, we’re not ‘activists’. Second of all, pompous much?”

Washi-Yama was lucky that he no longer raised his fists for petty jabs. Another train shuttered to a stop; people poured in. Damian sighed the sizzle of blackened wood cleared the smoke from his vision.

'The train to Jiyugaoka station is now departing.'

A tired sigh. “Just stay away. I will not warn you a second time.”

Damian did not spare the man another glance before boarding the train.

Chapter Text

It took Damian seventeen years to realise he knew nothing.

It took him longer to realise that nothing that he thought he knew mattered.

When he was first made aware of his existence, he was three years old and grasping a wooden sword in front of a practice dummy of straw. He was taught to seek out the red target and attack.

See red and attack.

His mother with posture so straight you would believe she had a ruler inserted in replacement of her spine, would watch down at him from the lip of the balcony in the training colosseum.

The Pharaoh eagle-owl praying after the desert hare, was what he thought.

Closed fists and a poise wrought from tormented memories.

She didn’t like to join him at first. Joining would have meant enabling.

Damian had thought this was a sign that he was not good enough for her. That he had to work harder, see red from behind closed eyelids. But with his eyes tapered, he had never seen her when she would hide her tears behind walls.

She couldn’t cry anymore, and it was all Damian’s fault.

He often wondered as his body churned with growth, if he had a soul before he was born from consciousness, sword in hand. Whether the existence of a ‘before’ existed and if it was as cruel and undeserving as his fate under The Demon’s Head.

The Persian philosopher Ibn Sina referred to a babies mind as a ‘tabula rasa’, or a blank slate. He believed that all babies were born knowing nothing but gradually learnt from example, and thus could be taught anything.

Damian disagreed.

In his adolescence, he had grown adept to swimming through uncharted waters. Separating the clinging dirt and kicked-up sticks from the riveted sand bed, he would try to fish through murky vision with parted fingers.

As he grew older, he grew angrier.

That he couldn’t see anything but the electromagnetic radiation pulsing under his eyelashes.

For a while he had mistaken his fear for anger.

Fear made him lash out at the undeserving.

It made him mean.

A brittle hound reacting to the raised hand, forgetful to whom the hand belonged to.

Geysers exploded through the thickened greywater. Bubbling and popping and unforgiving. Bodies would burst up from the stream like blisters on knuckles, dead limbs melting under the seething gushes of water.

He had reached a stage where he stopped swimming against the currents.

He was pulled under, loose against the riptide.

The black night watched with her hair pulled back, revealing the pearl hanging on her ear.

Back poised, her stars watched cooly down at him in his muddy stream, whilst she resided in the comfort of her cosmos. She had no sympathy, only anticipation to see him try, and try again.

He wouldn’t—couldn’t see anymore. What was the point?

Stars grew uncomfortable with his open surrender, shuffled away from his closed eyelids. He cried out a plea to stop moving backwards. The further they fled, the redder they became.

His eyelids burned.

The first thing Damian noticed when he entered the cramped receptionist office was the dreaded expression of the news anchor.

 The second was the boldened red text reading ‘Breaking News’ at the bottom of the curved screen.

‘The Rise of Civilians and the Fall of Heros? The New Outbreak of Neo-Metas that has taken the world by storm.’

He had been sweeping up invisible dust, trying to fill in the awkward gaps of silence that were usually roused in early Saturday morning shifts at the shelter.

Despite the occasional bark from impatient dogs in their outdoor kennels, he had submerged himself in the meandered embrace of quiet simplicity.

The soft light of the 1970’s box television set that usually lay abandoned in the supply closet cast a tortured shadow onto the back of the receptionist desk in front of the breakroom.

Damian’s broomstick clattered to the vinyl-floor from stiff hands.

The anchor harboured on with her mouth set into a rigid half-smile, “A global phenomenon has been causing riots after three relatively normal civilians have inherited superhuman qualities overnight.”

Footage that must have been extracted from a microwaved phone blared onto the screen. Showcased was what appeared to be the three civilians struggling to contain what appeared to be an overwhelming surge of energy.

Shaky recording from one video was taken from the top of a building, staring down onto a path located in the middle of a city park, an uproar of wind lay carnage on nearby trees and picnic benches.

Another was taken from the inside of a car, being rocked by a fistful of waves. The camera was aimed towards a young girl with eyes of bright light standing still and silent as undercurrents of water flooded a fisherman town from the nearby docks.

 The last was certainly the most interesting. A tall man draped in a large trench-coat was seemingly consuming everything that lay rest into his lurching shadows. A tight smile confessed the poorly concealed mania at his massacre.

The anchor continued, shuffling papers across her desk. A colleague began pointing at certain places on a holographic map, “The cases range from a mixed bag of places, Chile, England, and The United States.”

Damian sighed out a gust of relief, that sounded to him like a whole lot of ‘not his problem’.

The anchor gestured towards her starring guest, “Dr Yulik Paldonna has coined the strange incidences as the final steps in the transformation of humanity to ‘neo-metahumans’ in a case of what she theorises as the evolution of Homosapien’s in accordance with the ongoing stress of supernatural warfare.”

Damian shuffled towards the storage room, using the edge of some craft scissors to carve through a new box of bird toys targeted towards problem-solving. Along with the craft scissors, on the receptionists table was a stack of printed out papers advertising the shelter, swirly stencils and an absurd amount of glitter.

The anchor nodded towards Paldonna to give her own two-bits, “Yes, well everyone back at the lab is bouncing off the walls!”

A Japanese translator read over her words, “If we’re correct in our theory, this could mean that more and more civilians will become less reliant on Metas overtime.”

“This’ll help save communities millions on property damage and promote real human prosperity.” She gestured frantically correcting the rims of her frog lensed glasses.

Damian frowned at the ascertain jab towards Metas before the crazed woman continued staring directly at the audience, “Expect there to be some Neo-Meta’s coming to Japan very soon!”

His muscles constricted at that, fists bullying the wood of the birds toys into his palm. He was most definitely not as hyped as the harping woman, who seemed to ignore completely the pained anguish that the ‘Neo-Meta’s’ seemed to be suffering from.

 She also seemed to completely ignore, that with power comes corruption. In Damian’s theory, without the ability to control their powers none of them would turn out to be ‘good eggs’.

He just hoped the new phenomenon was constricted to the Western regions.

He slid another toy onto the rack, staring down the obnoxiously yellow door with black hand-made pawprints scattered across the shelter’s exit door.

“Thanks for that Doctor, now onto some more pressing news. With all the new hustle and bustle of ‘neo-metas’ where has the Justice League been—"

He reached over the desk, turned the noise pollution off and sighed into his hands.

Damian decided he’d tell his manager to donate the junky television to charity.

As he stared at the man conversing to Professor Murasaki at the bottom of the lecture hall, he felt the last drops of Pax Romana* bleed through his open fingers.

The familiar embers ignited from beneath his ribs, burning the white marrow a deadened, ghastly colour. Brittle were his breaths as the concoction of temptation and wrath stirred freely within his boiled blood. Murasaki, with his puckish smile and eased figure rested with tilted shoulder’s against his desk. He was wearing his usual caricature-esq tourist Hawaiian shirts with army coloured cargo shorts that showed way too much leg for Damian to be comfortable with.

Next to the tantalising perpetrator was his newly formed arch-nemesis. He, who donned a fixed-lip grin and eyes of mirth that Dionysos would nod approvingly at. He who was slouched, as though a heavy weight rested on his toned shoulders, drowning beneath an oversized shirt, thrown over another long-sleeved shirt and horrendously baggy jeans.

What was this, the early 2000’s?

His face was not covered by his signature red bandanna. Instead, the fabric was holding the weight of his locks up into a dirty-blonde ponytail. His bag was shrugged onto one shoulder, rock climbing rope intricately tied his brutalised skateboard to the front.

So much for warning him about not touching the university with a five-foot pole, he had decided to just come steaming forward to his classes instead.

The two chuckled along, as if anything in this situation could be amusing.

Damian wished they’d both drop dead.

Both of their eyes flicked up to his, which of course made Damian extremely amused at what was on his laptop. Were they talking about him? He carefully lifted his gaze once more to see Murasaki pointing straight towards him, and the graffitist slowly approaching. Absolutely not. He slid down further into his seat.

Before he could make a valiant escape under his chair, the graffitist approached him like a deceitful mongoose towards the king cobra.

He positioned a glare towards his now waving professor, before he corrected himself, typing as though this man didn’t ignore his very critical warning, and was now apparently, taking his Art History class. The graffitist tried to take a seat next to him before Damian immediately blocked his path with a fold-out desk.

Damian met his eye with his usual resting ‘don’t you dare talk to me’ face, which was returned with a twitch in the man’s jaw, ‘wouldn’t dream of it’.

The uncomfortable silence was like an ocean that had swallowed Damian underneath it’s thick, familiar waves. Every-time he almost made it to the surface of the treacherous water, he was pulled back underneath by the incessant tapping of a pen or the occasional hum of a song.

He was almost at his limit. The distant cacophony of Murasaki tapping the projection slides, and students trying to sneakily shove handfuls of Calbee potato chips down their throats was sending him into a spiral.

Damian had the urge to leave the lecture room altogether, it wasn’t as if he was actively paying attention and the presence of the graffitist, he had clearly warned to stay away was making his skin crawl.

Before he could gather up the meagre belongings of an untouched water-bottle and his laptop into his weekender, Murasaki seemed ecstatic to shovel the first heap of dirt out of his soon-to-be grave.

“So, for our first serving of assessment for this semester, we have a… drum roll please!”

Damian rolled his eyes as the students began banging their pencils across their desks.

 “A partner research-project!”

The wild species of anti-social art students all began to lean backwards in terror, all too familiar with Murasaki’s supposed ‘partner projects’.

“I want you to turn to the person next to you—”

Barely hidden groans already began to stir the student body.

“Introduce yourself—”

Damian narrowed his eyes. Washi-Yama’s lip twitched.

“Because they will be your partner for the project for the next two weeks.”

He clenched his fists under his desk trying to maintain his usual unbothered persona. He could scream into his pillow when he got home.

Throughout the lecture hall heads turned to one another, eyes looking to anywhere else but in front of them.

After a few quick explanations on the project, the class was finished.

He had never seen a group of art students run as fast as they could out of the lecture hall.

All but one, the graffitist next to him seemed frozen. They had both been keen to mind their own business throughout the entire lecture, now it seemed was when the other shoe had to drop.

 Eyes of molten amber squinted at him from behind the tight squeeze of fold-out desks, a slither of varnished wood separated their chairs.

Damian had decided he would do the project alone. He did not need someone who couldn’t follow simple orders to ruin yet another aspect of his routine. This was the measured outcome: he would do the project alone, and then hand it in with the pre-tense of them both having done the work.

He had believed this was a mutual agreement. He had believed this until the man sat across from him finally turned. Smoothing out a torn out piece of note paper jutting out from an open hand. With a clumsy number written in bleeding ink.

Damian eyed it for a few seconds, disbelieving. Washi-yama heaved out a lung filled breath of exasperation, and politely pegged the ball at his head before taking his leave down the wooden steps.

Damian glared at the paper sitting vindictively beside his shoe.

With newly acclaimed wrinkled paper in hand, he stormed down to the sly professor amateurishly brushing dust from his shoulder and whistling with the tops of his dress shoes kicking back and forth in the motion of a well-oiled newtons cradle.

Groused by Damian’s arrival Murasaki feigned surprise at the flick of a paper ball tumbling next to his growing stack of unmarked student assignments, “And what do I owe the pleasure of this gift, Mr Grayson?”

With crossed arms, Damian admitted the silent and unequalled animosity of an overworked, underpaid cashier after their third round of an old man jabbing in with, ‘Working hard or hardly working?’.

“What is it with people not listening to what I say?”

The professor’s crooked neck sunk deeper into his intertwined fingers, “What is it with you assuming that everything in the world revolves around how you think and feel?”

Damian cocked his head to the side, “Bringing in random students a month into the semester, pointing at me, and then forcing me into some frankly miserable partner work isn’t a personal vendetta?”

“That random student has been majoring in music here for three years, but one of his classes collapsed and well, as it seemed this was his next option.”

He plunged an arrow of duplicitous allegation, “you also haven’t made any friends in the three years you’ve been here.” Damian shunned a step backwards as it hit his centre in a streamline of ‘asocial outcast’.

Chin up and arms grasping the straps of his weekender he uttered a small, “Well, there was absolutely no reason you needed to pair us up. I’ve been doing well on my own, or do my accolades to the university count for nothing?”

The thin smirk of the professor rose to his ears, Damian realised he had made a mistake in their bickering.

“I can think of three reasons actually,”

Murasaki rose from his wooden seat.

“One, he immediately met your eye once you entered the class, which you subsequently avoided. This immediately intrigued me.”

“Two, you might think you’re being cool and mysterious by sitting alone in every class, but really you kinda just look like you never recovered from eighth grade syndrome. It even makes me of all people sad.”

“Three, you still haven’t produced anything with even a glimpse of romance in this year’s portfolio.”

Damian’s furrowed brows seemed to somehow dig deeper down, “Ah yes, the Romanticism that you forced onto me this unit.”

The professor dragged a hand down his face, muttering something so quietly even Damian couldn’t catch it, “Despite what you might think Damian, I’m not here as your personal punishment. I’m here to challenge you.”

“You’re challenging my chances of passing your classes alright.” Damian was met with a scathing eye from behind the teachers’ fingers.

Without another word, he exited out of the hall.

It had taken him until he was two steps out of the university to realise that the balled up number had somehow found it’s way into his pocket.

Damian disliked clutter.

His one bedroom apartment was wedged on the very outskirts of Shibuya at a small neighbouring district known as Jiyūgaoka.

Simple steps and a railing lead to a small dip of space where two pairs of shoes currently resided. One, a pair of leather boots that stretched to the middle of the quad, yellow laces were tightened into an army knot. The other a gentleman-like pair of slim quarter brogue oxford shoes, double knotted.

The floor was composed of traditional tatami mat. Besides essential living appliances, inside was compiled of a simple roll up futon bed, a wooden chest, a pantry cupboard, clothing drawers, and an adjustable coffee table that doubled as Damian's study desk. Whenever, he arrived home he would give his small, pleasant apartment a once over. A mental checklist where every box would be ticked. Except the last box, today it seemed there was something out of place, an unaccounted something.

A 5'9 something propping his dirty skateboard on Damian's varnished cherry-wood drawers. He eyed him warily from where he carved fruit in the kitchen corner.

The project was decided to have a 20% impact on their overall credit. Murasaki of course, demanded complete evidence that both parties provided an adequate contribution to the work, because he had taken a liking to personally torturing Damian.

So forth, Damian had three options. Be seen with the troublemaker in public, leading to an immediate assassination in his asocial ‘don’t talk to me’ persona.

Risk returning to the graffitists apartment and be forced into an unfamiliar and possibly endangering situation.

Or oblige the man’s company at his own abode, where he could discern how dangerous he was.

After much debate and a few more threatening emails to Murasaki, he waved his white flag and finally texted the man after five days.

You never said you went to SUTA.

19:49 ✔✔

y would i vandalise a random university??

19:51✔✔

Why did you vandalise the glass hallway?

19:51 ✔✔

not important.

19:58 ✔✔

You are unbelievable.

19:59 ✔✔

y do u care so much anyway

u blew up on me at the station

like a soap opera love interest lmao

20:00 ✔✔ 

It is not important.

20:07 ✔✔

this dude istg

anyway

did u message cause u wanna do the project

or not

20:08 ✔✔

Don’t swear to God, he won’t help you.

Yes, I would like to complete the project by the end of the week.

Murasaki is a bumbling dunce and insists upon it.  

20:10 ✔ ✔ 

go off shakespeare

ur house or mine??

20:11 ✔ ✔ 

I shall send you the address by email.

Once this is over, we will presume no contact.

20:12 ✔ ✔ 

k

20:15 ✔  

Plate in hand, he kneeled gently on the zabuton and brought out their drafted paper for revision. Washi-Yama, opposite to him, crashed down into a cross-legged stance that warranted a thinned stare from his opposition.

As Washi-Yama munched on an apple slice carved to appear to be a sleeping duck, Damian discussed the scaffold of their written essay.

The topic, on brand for Murasaki's schemes focused on companionship and loyalty featured within art.

"Religion." Washi-Yama muffled simply.

Damian's eyebrows raised, it wasn't a terrible suggestion, but "Too generalised."

"Christianity then," he rocked backwards as Damian wrote a few notes, "We could focus on Jesus and one of his followers. Maybe Mary Magdalene?"

Damian hummed, met the other’s eyes briefly, flicked to the cross necklace loose around the man’s throat, "You are Religious?"

"Interested in a marriage?" He dodged the apple slice thrown his way, "Ma was Catholic." he flipped through one of Damian's portfolios with a fixed bored expression. "Studied prophets and The Testaments in an American religious class till I came here."

So, he was a foreigner. Damian was correct, "American?"

Washi-Yama levelled him with a reedy mouth and distant eyes, fixed firmly between Damians brows.

He wore the silence like a thick blanket, until his skin grew too warm, "Mary Magdalene is a popular figure in 14th - 16th Century art. We could focus on Bacchiacca's* rendition?”

They mingled between different periods of art, pushing and pulling until they decided on a main theme. The misinterpretation of Mary Magdalene’s loyalty to Jesus featured through Graham Vivian Sutherlands” artistic perspective.

Washi-Yama sighed around his hoodie, draw string pulled tight so his face could only be seen from the top of his eyebrows to the bottom of his lip. His forehead seemed to be glued to his inner elbow as he stared at a water stain dripping into Damian's sink. His fingers drummed to the water's motion, "This place is scary."

Damian could almost laugh at the random spear pummelled into their current conversation.

He decided he would amuse the rude boy. Enough to finish this assignment, enough so that his little place of comfort would never be disturbed again.

"How so?"

Washi-Yama's eyes followed the empty walls, the bare backed home appliances, the fridge with no magnets. The locked pantry.

"It's not really a home." He trailed a long finger across the sowed delves of the tatami mat underneath them, "I could be told anyone lives here. I'd believe them."

Impatience finally forced the man to his feet, he walked his steps like he was balancing on a tightrope, "I don't like secrets."

Damian eyebrows levelled downwards "And I don't like people not listening, yet here we are."

Washi-Yama hummed absently shifting through his drawers. That was fine, Damian ensure anything he had to hide was safely tucked away. Except-

"Wait—"

The graffitist flashed him with a sudden impish blink of mirth, "Now we're getting somewhere." He lifted one of only a few possessions Damian carefully selected to take with him when leaving his home in Gotham. The edges of the manga curled at the ends; a water stain spoiled the first two bubbled letters of the title 1000 Promises Vol. 1.

“Got up to some late night reading, huh?” The graffitist had the audacity to smirk.

Blood rushed into Damian’s ears, “And what of it? It is superb, from Peach Sato’s magnificent use of bold line-art to the endearing story line. Two painters in a competitive art-school that challenge each other and grow to be affectionate.”

He hadn’t even realised he had worked himself up until the gasps of breath left his mouth, “And it is not mine, it was from a friend.”

The graffitist flicked through the pages his gaze softened, “It’s nice, not a manga reader, but my little sister would enjoy this.”

Damian went to collect the plates and watched as the sink slowly began to rise with soap suds.

Washi-Yama hopped onto the counter, swinging about his socked feet, “I think I was wrong about you D.G.”

“Wrong?”

"I was worried that you were trouble.” he tilted his head back, “Now I think you've just designed yourself, like this house to be an idea of something."

The cloth in his hand stilled, “We have finished for today, and it is starting to get dark. I suggest you leave.”

The graffitist hummed in affirmation and departed the kitchen. Shuffling on his worn leather black boots, he looked backwards, "I liked today. Seeing something real about you."

Damian sighed as he folded a hand towel, "Goodbye Washi-"

"Call me Kenya,” Heavy clouds shed their first tears of the week, “See you later D.G."

Puddles had begun to well on his windowsill.

On the counter his manga was gone, and in its place was a silver cross necklace.

There was a time when Damian thought he had found clear waters.

Damian knew nothing. 

Chapter Text

On the nights few and far in-between when Hypnos rose into the constellational sky and blew a sigh into his riddled mind, he dreamed. It was always, for one reason or another, in the exact same formula.

Peering over a glass lacquered pond, a veranda’s brittle floorboards would creak to the steady rock of a chair. He knew now to steer clear from his reflection in the mirroring water, every scar he carried from battles cradled his being, as was the monstrous shadow of his face, fearless yet atrocious. Tight lipped and traitorous.  But what he feared most were his eyes, hollow dark cavities echoed by a murmured green, constant burning flickering loathsome truths and rebirth.

 The peerless blue sky streamed behind light clouds, fogged like a murky glass of lemonade, the lemon sliced sun hidden from view. Windows inside the cottage were smudged, caked in weather dismay, cobwebbed and with the sill mite ravaged.

Upon the horizon, haunted mountains observed the eccentric holiday home, green tweed jacket shrewdly overcasting the secondary succession that had occurred.

This was always the same.

With locked shoulders, faced away from him a figure would sway in a rocking chair whilst shuffling looseleaf papers in their hands. Sweat would travel down the scars of the strangers unclothed back like hurried droplets down a car window. The stranger was the only outlier in his reverie formula; never was the stranger the same twice in a row.

He could already tell that this dream would be different. He had never seen this hunched back— bony spine stretching powdered skin and shoulders hoisted to ears— in the rocking chair before.

He braced himself for the monotonous and peculiar croak, an unceasing poem.

"His girl stole the well-oiled machine,

 till he breathed that last breath.

 And she gave him her leatherjacket,

 but it was too big a fit.

And the boy fastened a white chrysanthemum to his boys' collar,

when time made goodbye mean something and

the winter knocked them over.

And she covered her eyes with the white petals,

so, she wouldn't hear his footsteps stop.

When he grew a thick haze over his face,

And the paint dried on his palette.”

As the words followed through, rocking back and forth, link after link in a constant unchanneled monotony, he felt the stale air surrounding his unclothed body begin to parboil.

Damians cheeks burned, his lips sewn together as though he had smeared sticky tar across his mouth. His bones creaked; a thousand ages of leisure stifled his honeyed muscles. His mind was nettled as though he was amidst the steam of a sweltering bath house.

There was nothing more that he loathed than this poet and his stunting chorus.

“He would never look at his mother the same,

After he found out he was a coward.

And his girl had abandoned all who frowned at her the moment she could walk.

And his boy never knew what it was like to be a weapon before your fathers’ child.”

Damian was tempted to just break through the glass of the ponds surface and let the grave-bearing weight of his body pummel him down to the silky moss beds.

“And the first wouldn't be sad, because the dead couldn't feel.

And the second had become only a mirror of grief that was dashed in a pit.”

The pain rose, thermometer measured pain. Tied by the cross, as cinders blistered his ankles.

“And the third had a tongue that had lashed him like a whip.

And the fourth bore the strength of a man that she shouldn't.

And his brood was a fool that he was taught to love but never learned to like.”

The flames travelled through his lungs; a cough of ash shattered the silence from his lips. The skin of his shoulders began to bubble.

“And so, he had hoped they wouldn’t mind,

When the last train rang with mechanical bellows.”

Despite his knowing, that he would never be able to reach the nihilistic stranger, the balls of his bare feet still followed forward across the cracked planks of mahogany.

“And so, he was only glad he left,

before their faces would follow him onto the rails.”

The strangers bitter ashen smug singed his own tongue. His scarred hands and bloodied nails reached forward, a weight of a hundred men bearing down onto his back.

He pulled, nose scrunched as cinders spread across his arms and lit him up. His scream was a crackle, his hair was soot, his feet were rubble.

The stranger turned.

All Damian could see were the flames.

Damian slowly blinked to the rhythm of the washing machines cycle.

He’d had to wash his sheets three times this week due to the sheer amount of sweat he woke up in after his night terrors. It was so horrifically bad that the laundromat attendant started to know him by a first name basis.

He never really remembered what he dreamt of, just the residual pain after he would wake up. It caused far too many groans whenever he bent down to fill up a dog bowl at the animal shelter or wash his paint brushes in the sink during art classes for him to be comfortable with.

He had stopped watching the news recently, every other word out of a reporter’s mouth was about the ‘neo-meta’ phenomenon. It was nothing Damian wanted to get involved with, even if they began to emerge in Tokyo.

Despite the chaos appearing on the Western front, Damian was pleased to notice his life slide back into a place of tedium.

He would attend his volunteering shifts at the animal shelter and visit local art museums to spur some creation into his end of year assigned artwork; that which Murasaki had firmly insisted would continue to be a piece from the Romanticism period.

He was also applying some additional free-time on investigating into Buddhist architecture for his Design class at the library, for which he chose to focus on the Linh Phuoc Pagoda* because of its esteemed theatrical design inspired by Chinese Opera. Then he would feed Mako whilst waiting for the last train home at the witching hour.

This was what would have been his consistent cycle.

Except that he was also down to his last fifty-thousand Yen, a fraction off from paying the upcoming rent due the following week.

Though, it would be feasible for Damian to dip his cup into the generous well of inheritance he was afforded from his brother, father and mother, he had not spent a single cent from any end.

If it generally pleased him, he could have used some of his inheritance from his eldest brother to live comfortably, without the risk of being traced to his abode. Though, he valued his independence enough to never touch the funds unless it was for dire reasons.

What good would it have been to run away, only to live off the breadcrumbs from his past? He had started his life in Tokyo with nothing but his skills and experiences as an artist. The surprising advantage of being a creator was its many facets, Damian got to continue to learn through new skills whilst earning money from it. It was most definitely a win-win scenario in most cases.

Tonight, however would not be one of said cases.

He was awoken by a hunched middle-aged woman chewing loudly on pearly pink bubble-gum and stamping her sandal against the tiled floor.

“Ya laundry finished half an hour ago, Grayson. If ya wanna keep loitering pay up.” The laundromat lady said in a thick Tōhoku country accent, rubbing two wrinkled fingers together, he cringed as the tips of her pink acrylic nails dragged across one another.

Damian unloaded the washing machine.  

“I’m only doing this because I’m short on rent this month.” Damian crossed his arms staring down at the bartender rubbing away at an invisible smudge on one of the whisky glasses; slow business seemed to have driven him to the edge of his sanity, “Do not be fooled into thinking this makes us friends, Washi-Yama.”

The only downside about being an artist was that it was a competitive field, especially since Damian was too terrified of social media and tracking to even attempt becoming an online boosted artist. Thus, when he was scraping by with rent, at the bottom of the barrel for art commissions and out of season for art exhibitions, the message from Washi-Yama came calling to him like an angel.

The glow-in-the-dark party was being held at the bar Washi-Yama worked at, and the urgent need for a body painter after the previous hire had flaked out  had driven the graffitist to ask Damian for help.

“ ‘Course not, you wouldn’t want that.” Washi-Yama shook his head, ears perking at Damian’s obvious iteration of his tag-name.

He still refused to relay personal names.

Personal names meant personal offerings of information; his secrets were piled away in a never-ending bag that seemed to almost be full. He didn’t even want to be here as it was. Who would have thought the heir of three wealthy fortunes would be whittled down into a starving artist archetype.

“It’s not usual for us to be rented for a blackout party, but the band suggested it since the storms have been making the electricity around here go haywire.” He shrugged, organising the glass amongst the many others in the bars lined cabinet, “Just make sure the paint is glow in the dark before you set up.”

Damian frowned as he heard the skies stomach distinctly growl. Another spout of rain promised by the weather reporters this morning; Gotham was sending him her best no doubt.  

 “And the party starts officially at 9:30?”

“Yeah, but I’d expect a few early birds to stop by prior,” Washi-Yama poured a line of rice wine shots for a woman with a shaggy haircut and squinted eyes, she seemed eager to re-join her rowdy booth of harping celebrants, “So anxious already to hone your artistic skills onto shirtless bodies.”

Damian ceased his hands from throwing a rack of packaged salted nuts propped against the corner of the bar at the fiend, purely because he was a respectable commissioned worker.

 Instead, like the mature adult he was, he swivelled around in his bar stool and flicked his head away from the shameless cacodemon that he was forced to spend the next two weeks with.

“Explain to me why I was rushed to prepare luminescent face paint for a ludicrous event that, frankly, even a child’s birthday performer would laugh at two hours prior to the event exactly?”

Murayama threw his dreads out into a patterned bandanna, “Maybe, I just wanted to make sure you’re extra extra prepared.”

Damian scoffed, choosing to ignore the man’s insolence and instead opted to study the exposed graffitied brick walls. Different patrons’ names were burnt into the brick of the Shibuya night club, graciously named The Three Blues.

He began to set up his station at the most shrouded booth, checking the illumination of the different paints from beneath the shade of the table. The quaint, tired bar was tucked away at the dead-end of a bustling alleyway and seemed to have garnered a niche following from Japan’s Jazz background. This was supported by the bar being directly opposite to one of Shibuya’s largest record distributors, built like a sky rise with nine floors.

What intrigued Damian the most was the gleaming photographs, vinyl records, and newspaper clippings outlining each crevice of the walls and shelves, a thousand captured eyes glinting from behind a black and white backdrop.

He noticed a specific wall decorated with band poster’s; a particularly vibrant colour-blocked collage poster was at the centre of the action. With the portrait of three teenagers taking up most of the poster and the bottom right painted with an anonymous blacked-out man, face robed in a bolded question mark. It queasily reminded Damian of the disastrous riddle of a villain back at Gotham.

Ransom chopped letters read out ‘Saints’ thickly across the top of the poster and ‘Live at The Three Blues Bar: May 13^th at the bottom.

Once his eyes grew tired of entertaining themselves with the unadulterated self-promotion of several perilous brands, he continued to observe the other horded walls.

Three figures stood out to him the most in a framed photo turned away from the limelight of the shining bar.

A woman boasted a crisp flower embroidered blouse and intricate dreads, she clasped her Gibson with a passionate veracity, hugging it tightly as if it were her sole possession.

The man positioned by her side had a beauty mark pressed next to his eye and a trumpet slung around one of his wrists, the other hand was around the woman’s waist, bearing a silver band around his fourth finger.

Lastly, another woman distancing herself by a head’s room away seemed to spear the photographer with a bright gap-toothed smile, she was tanned and toned with a roman nose and hair spun into coils of salient auburn.

After perusing the decorated walls of aged faces, a sudden question came to mind, “I thought this was your families bar?”

Washi-Yama, who had busied himself by serving up a cocktail that held a disturbing resemblance to the colour of Scarecrow’s fear gas visibly perked up, “Yeah it is, why?”

“There’s no photos of you.”

Damian watched as the usually comical buzz of the graffitist’s face went silent.

Before he had time to register the man’s drastic change, the front door of the bar smacked open, reverberating through the pictured walls as the frames consumed the anger of a drenched teenager.

“Yo Aki, you’re back!” Washi-Yama rushed out from behind the bar with utmost speed, “The painter’s here if you wanted him to practice your designs now.”

Damian instantly felt the sharp arrest of eyes locking onto his before resting with absolute abhorrence back at her brother.

“Why are you wet, didn’t you bring your umbrella?” The man’s voice softened after seeing the sopping state of his supposed sister.

“I didn’t think I’d need one,” She shoved off her shoes by the entrance stepping in with drenched socks, “You said you were going to pick me up from school.”

With mascara running down her cheeks and a leather school bag easing away most of the water from the top of the teenager’s head, she truly did seem the epitome of angst.

“Sorry, I couldn’t get out of work. I rung you but—”

“Just—” The teenager pinched the bridge of her nose and huffed out a sigh that Damian found himself resonating with on a personal level, “fuck off until nine, Usagi and Kairi will be over soon to rehearse before the gig.”

As she flipped her brother off and stomped her way up to the sibling’s upstairs apartment, he caught a glimpse of the back of her sewed, seamed, and spiked up leather jacket. Hanging loosely over her school clothes cross stitched words could be translated to read: “I Eat the Rich For Breakfast”.

Damian coughed.

He raised an eyebrow towards the slouched man grabbing at his temple as some of the bar regulars chuckled at what Damian presumed was systematic hostility on the teenager’s part.

He unrolled the canvas bag holding his paintbrushes, “She’s the spitting image of you.”

The comment roused a half-hearted chuckle from the man, before his eyes glazed over.

“We grew up in separate households after our parents split.” The bartender turned away whilst helping another customer to some light beer snacks.

Washi-Yama spoke with a familiar gentleness that made his chest burn, “She’s had it rough so ease up on the classic D.G. smug around her later, will you?”

D.G. smug? Damian didn’t know how he was going to manage to not stab the overzealous man with a paintbrush before the end of the night.

As he slowly organised the pots of neon paint, Damian wondered about the girl with thick purple twist braids and glinting piercings. The way she seemed to openly despise everything that breathed within a quarter-mile distance.

As well as her open, and seemingly normalised resentment of her brother. Surely, none of it was his business, and in any other circumstance where it wasn’t thrusted in front of his face by his unwilling project partner, he would ignore it. But the girl seemed familiar in a way that took hold of Damian’s heart strings and wrenched.

By the time he had finished opening his portfolio of pieces, many taken from his time as a freelanced body-painter for exhibitions in Europe, he’d heard the sharp tread of heavy boots and the rattle of the brass shopkeeper’s bell that had remained his anxieties worst enemy since stepping foot into Washi-Yama’s bar.

“Murayama, guess who!” A short girl with peach-dyed hair and black roots came leaping with widespread palms into the store. Long fingers stuck out of the ends of her oversized cardigan nails painted a rosy pink, with encrusted hearts decorating the tips.  Slung across her shoulder was a guitar case plastered with stripes of marbled paint and various band stickers, he could just make out the names Shonen Knife and Guitar Wolf behind the intricate splatters.

“Kairi, nice to see you! Aki’s upstairs.” Washi-Yama grinned slightly before looking behind the teenager, “Where’s your shadow?”

The teenager turned a shade of pink guiltily swaying into one of the bar chairs, “He’s outside,” She began to sip on the pink swirly straw floating around in the glass of lemonade Washi-Yama poured for her, “Don’t worry though! He’ll come in soon.”

Washi-Yama’s gave the teenager a disbelieving look, “He’s smoking again, isn’t he?”

Kairi avoided his eyes, opting to shift her gaze up the stairwell, “Is Aki moping again?”

The bartender lips twitched at the teen’s obvious diversion, “Let’s just say she’s not too happy with me right now. She’s too stubborn to admit her cell was dead when I told her to charge it this morning.”

Damian realised that the bar had taken a more intimate turn, less crowded as the time went on. As if people were aware that a party was about to bring a socially unsavoury crowd to the bar. Besides the few stragglers left wearing stretchers and studs, it seemed to just be Damian and the two obnoxious dullard’s bouncing words off each other at the end of the bar.

The teenager let out a bellowing cackle straight from the stomach. She pretended to wipe fake tears from her eyes, “Oh my god that explains so much—ouch!”

“The demon princess herself has emerged from her cave, gracing me with her fine presence,” The peach-haired bassist bowed her head to her knees before getting plucked up by the earlobe.

“You’re a disappointment to your entire bloodline, Hanagasumi Kairi.”

“Hey, that’s not nice!” The teenager scowled as she was dragged upstairs, however her irritation was short-lived, like her attention span.

She smirked, “Can you do my makeup please, I accidentally knocked the last of my glitter confetti down the sink and now it looks like I’ve brutally slaughtered a unicorn in my bathroom!”

“Unbelievable.” Aki muttered before a slam shuddered the structure of the house.

It wasn’t long before the third member of the band trapsed in with all the reluctance of a honey-covered deer into a bear invaded forest. His wide dark eyes flickered left and right before landing squarely onto Washi-Yama.

He quickly tried to roll the band’s belongings on a rickety wheelbarrow up the steps, distracted long enough for Washi-Yama to head over and remove the half-emptied box of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.

The teen inaudibly gasped, as he threw them in the dustbin over his shoulder, “The lead singer who developed lung cancer at 20. What a classic.”

Usagi shook his head feverously as he mapped out signs that pelted Damian with a reminder of his sister during ballet concerts and movie nights.

She rarely said anything, a choice of her own. But you couldn’t help but feel grateful towards her. She told you so much with her expressions and the way she was always ready to give, even though the people in her life had only ever taken from her. Besides his eldest brother, she was the only one to see through his tormenting performance.

But most of all, she was honest. She had no reason to hide. In every emotion, there was a passion and enthusiasm that Damian often envied.

Except for that night.

The night where she had looked at him like he was her reflection.

As the memories sizzled under his skin, it wasn’t before the teenager stood right in front of the booth, flipping through his portfolio that he had realised that Usagi was trying to hold a conversation with him. Well, as much as one could without speaking.

Damian blinked up at him, Washi-Yama watched him cautiously, suddenly having finished preparing the bar for the party. The analogue clock stationed on the bar’s overhead menu read that it was around forty-five minutes before the party was scheduled to start.

Over an hour had passed and Damian was reckless enough to not even feel the time pass by.

The awkward boy pointed towards one of the pictures. It was an earlier piece of his, otherwise unprofessional, but he’d stencilled it with a certain country bumpkin in mind.

“Are you certain? Some of the materials in these paints present quite the task to remove later.”

The singer nodded his head once in affirmation with a shy smile.

Unlike his colourful counterparts, Usagi looked relatively normal. His black hair was close to the scalp, slightly longer than a crew cut. His maroon jeans had slits on the knees, and he wore an over-washed flannel.

The man took his seat and closed his left eye gesturing towards it with a pointed finger. Damian began the patient process of outlining a blazing silver sun, the metallic tendrils stretching to his forehead and cheek like octopus tentacles.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the vocalists two bandmates prepare the stage, Aki had applied a thick layer of glitter to her eyes, bordered by a black metallic liner. She had swapped her school uniform for a pair of makeshift red tartan trousers, segmented with zippers and a black cropped top plastered with a white star in the middle.

Contrastingly, the bassist of the band was wearing bell-bottoms fitted with a strained gaucho belt along with a faded graphic t-shirt of an eagle. Two buns in her permed hair were styled to appear like devil horns. What stood out the most was her eye; there was a painted golden crescent moon that cradled her cheekbone and romantically grazed her lip. He most definitely did not remember painting that.

Usagi remained in his quiet fixture, keen to listen to his bandmates tune their instruments and half-hum lyrics whilst the steady flow of partygoers fazed through. After he finished the piece, he lifted a hand mirror to present his work to the teenager. The vocalist’s eyes crinkled, grazing a thumb against the sliver of glitter outlining the sun, before staring towards the moon on his oblivious bandmates face. He trailed back to the others making their last tweaks for their performance.

Before the numbers on the dial even flashed nine, his work had roused a queue of bumbling drunks forming what seemed to be a line of breadcrumbs from the wasted souls at the bar.

As 9:30 struck its peak, the band immediately sprang into action.

Aki snatched the microphone stationed in front of a quiet Usagi, her voice bellowed through the seedy underbelly of the drunken dancefloor, “We’re Saints, anyway—"

The song forced out was scratchy and adjacent, jarring and contrite with a stricken edge of metallic that blistered the rhythm, yet magnetised the crowd.

Like a combustion reaction to the overwhelming music, the floor immediately became filled, brightened only by glowing accessories and Damian’s art.

The instrumental suddenly halted, Usagi let out a breath.  

Cherry wine poured lazily into crystal glasses.

Red satin under the embrace of warm twilight.

As the amps kicked, and the instrumentalists anticipated, Damian heard silk.

Sometimes, like a motherless child

I want to gaze at the sea silently

Sometimes, like a motherless child

I feel like traveling alone

Damian turned towards Washi-Yama, who was apprehensively trying to convince one of his swearing customers to swap to soft drinks for the rest of the night. As they made eye contact, the man seemed amusedly unphased by his reaction.

The band culminated such an uproar from fans that the jeers and rough housing in the centre of the makeshift pit had overhauled the ruthlessness of the sheeted rain on the bars roof.

He caught glimpses of thrashing guests in the blush of luminous jellyfish, planets, stripes, and smiley faces. An ecstasy that no drug could conquer washed their faces, a carefree bliss of accompaniment and music after hard days of pretending to be other people.

Damian suddenly felt stricken as an obvious outsider, propped with his leather weekender, red scarf, and undercoat, selfishly hidden whilst the bar held people living life like birds flitting through starlight to industrial nighttime lullabies.

It had become quite apparent that he was a guest here. A temporary vacancy.

However, I change my mind in an eye's blink

If I become a motherless child

I won't be able to tell my love to anyone

As Usagi’s textured voice was delicately woven into the grainy backing track, the two contrasting forces harmonised smoothly, like tartan and leather.

He finished up on the last person waiting in his line, a lavender raven, with white feather’s flittering down the lower half of the woman’s back. After returning his brush to his designated glass of water, he showed the woman a picture of the painting on her phone. Giddy on alcohol, she laughed for an uncomfortably long time before she thanked him excessively and returned to the overgrown centre of the party.

Sometimes, like a motherless child

I feel like writing a long letter

Sometimes, like a motherless child

I want to yell loudly

In the distance he saw Washi-Yama yell something he couldn’t quite interpret towards him, bandanna removed and honey brown dreads loose in front of his eyes.

He took a sip from his glass of inconspicuous liquid, as he stretched out across one of the neighbouring stools.

Damian gestured to his brushes, “Did you want me to do you too?”

Embarrassingly, liquid spurted out of the man’s nose as he heaved, into his elbow.

Washi-Yama gasped out, “Excuse me?”

However, I change my mind in an eye's blink

If I become a motherless child

I won't be able to tell my love to anyone

“Do you want me to paint you too?”

“Oh! Oh, um— no thanks.” He wiped his lower lip with the sleeve of his shirt.

“Is it alright for you to be drinking whilst you’re working?”

Washi-Yama’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, “I don’t drink, at all. This is just Coke.”

He took a long sip.

Damian cocked his head towards the panting band members, soaking up the drunken applause. “They are surprisingly stomach able.”

“Saints? Oh yeah, Aki pretends she hates it, but I’ve watched her fall asleep on her guitar practicing their cover songs.”

After chugging from the water bottle by his feet, Usagi ramped up another song.

“How long have they been a band?” Damian ripped off a paper towel and wrapped it around the head of ones of his brushes, “They seem quite balanced for being so young.”

“They must have only started about a year or two ago, Aki was twelve at the time and Kairi was brainstorming ways to push Usagi and her into coming to school. They all eventually decided they wanted to be in a band, if only to be like the 5,6,7,8’s.” Washi-Yama chuckled.

He took another sip of his Coke, nodding to the rhythmic pull and push of the Saints next cover song, “She’s had her worst and best moments with her guitar, I’m glad she pulled through in the end.”

Damian watched the graffitist, the steady twinkle in his eye when he watched his immovable sister perform. Pride in what she’s made of herself, he guessed.

Quickly, he focused onto dabbing away at his last brush.

Distantly, a sound of cajoling echoed through the already deafening bar. A hack of Thunder rippled through the bands sound before the song continued as usual.

No one seemed to notice but Damian.

Glass shattered like a ring shot from the other end of the bar across the wall next to him.

Washi-Yama grumbled as he pushed himself back upwards, “You have got to be kidding me. Sato, I swear if you’re throwing glasses again.”

He looked back at Damian, shrugging apologetically, “Duty calls.”

He watched the back of the man as he called for someone to pick-up the wasted stranger.

Saints announced the introduction of their last cover song of the night.

As Damian was about to finish for the night, packing up his portfolio into his leather bag, his vision was blocked by a wall of muscle.

“I apologise, but unfortunately, I am unable to do any more painting tonight.”

Staring upwards, the gangling giant gestured a thick thumb towards his rolled-up sleeve, Damian moved his flashlight towards the tapping appendage.

A dragon tattoo.

“Did you want me to colour it in?”

The strange man sat down heavily, Damian took that as an affirmation and removed his last brush from the water to begin his work.

His eyes hovered over the intricate red lining of the tattoo, brush painting glowing white streaks over the scales. He trained his eyes on the obscured gruff of the red heads beard, the lofty shoulders and staunch chin. As his flashlight travelled closer down the man’s torso to where the dragon’s wiry tail curled around a chest encrusted with a symbol Damian knew far too well.

His heart stilled.

Two horns poked out from the detailed wood of the box.

Body jerking and muscles tight, he kicked the table backwards onto the man, who stumbled grabbing the varnished wood so tightly it splintered.

He threw the table over his shoulder like a bag of rice which immediately hit the amp causing an ear shattering screech to crusade on the partying victims.

The crowd erupted into a storm of mutters, rivalling the mumbling thunder from outside.

Damian struck whilst the iron was hot, “Drakunovski, you can tell my dear mother that I have no intentions of going back to Nanda Parbat.”

From what Damian could remember of the assassin, he was one of the more benevolent of the League of Assassins. Though that had to be taken with a grain of salt, in consideration with the fact that the entirety of the League derived from the agency of the blood it spilt and the thick skin it had built from soldiers at birth. Damian knew this well.

Dragon Drakunovski, jolted out into a second of belted laughter before resuming his passive expression.

Drawled voice buzzing under the distorted sound waves he whispered, “So you really haven’t been getting into trouble these past three years. You don’t know a thing about what’s been going on. Who’s in charge now.”

Damian internally rolled his eyes; his outburst had drawn attention as he had expected. Though, it would still not be too risky for Dragon to make his move now in the dark out of the public’s perceptive, especially with the only illumination available being that of the radiant paint.

“Did you think that would stop me, Al-Ghul? I’ve got eyes everywhere, right where I need them, you didn’t seriously think I was the only one who was sent to get you?”

Damian felt the wall touch his back, fingers locked around the paintbrush in his hand as the bristles dug deeper into his thumb, all he could see was the distant fists, the blood draining from bodies, murderous clowns, his grandfather, a bird twisting its wing to divot into its grave.

The things he had seen and known flickered through him like he was a shadow in front of a film projection, watching back at the hidden box, with an unknown entity cutting the strips of his nightmares together and broadcasting them at full.

Tattoos gathered closer to him from every corner mirroring the ghoulish green of his eyes, the thunder beat its chest with prideful fists. Fingers bustled him about as they gripped any skin they could to move him to the exit, someone questioned whether the storm cut off the emergency power as he saw the tampered wires from the electric box ripped open by its hinges.

For a moment, he saw himself forced back into his ruefully rightful place as heir of The Demon Head.

He really hoped the money from tonight was worth the hassle.

It was like he was at one of his father’s generic galas. The green flashes struck, one after another, every time his irises burned red another face was close to his, blurry movements.

Glass frame separating him from the person he wanted to reach the most. The shutter screaming alongside him.

“Hey there! We have a ‘no-touching-staff-policy’ that you’ve really overwhelmed. I suggest you kindly fuck off to the nearest exit.”

His body weight was swung from beneath him as he was shoved behind a body, Washi-Yama’s body.

A beam of light rattled overhead, illuminating the assassins and the bartender. Their hair seemed to float upwards before the crash broke through in just a blink.

Before he could even think, something shoved him away from Washi-Yama’s hold.

The string of lightning landed straight onto the graffitist’s back.

He felt the rubble underneath them crumble; spat out like chunks of distasteful food.

The Dragon tattoo fell backwards.

The assassins were gone.

Rain cooled his feverish ligaments until he was choking.

His art began to melt.

A crowd of tattoo’s rushed out of the front door.

Damian’s ears rung; a familiar wetness dribbled from his canals.

Emergency lights blinked back on.

“Kenya, Kenya—holy shit. It nearly hit you!”

A purple smudge travelled closer in his blurred vision.

“They’re in shock, let them rest until the ambulance arrives.”

Looking around was difficult.

He remembered to just focus on one entity until his vision cleared.

A blur of white light wavered by the electrical box.

Damian felt his lips form the name.

Their familiar words poured into his ears, picked apart from the clouded hiss in his brain.

“It’s such a shame really… their music taste was pretty killer.”

Chapter Text

Agora.

That one word represented the essence of human interaction.

Agora, literally meaning “gathering place”.

An art gallery was agora. 

The public swimming pool was agora. 

Nature walks were agora. 

The Church—agora.

Everything was agora. 

The Ancient Greeks were lonely at the top, they craved company.

Agora. 

Except, Damian had never known the word as just agora.

He learnt it through its isolated use. 

Agoraphobic. 

Damian wished that whenever he felt like nothing, he didn’t punish himself by imagining the voices of the people who would be disappointed in him. 

He had been thinking recently, that humans had been taught that life only had meaning if you were constantly doing. 

Yet, he only actually thought about what truly mattered when there was nothing to be done. 

His phone was somewhere, he threw it away after it had buzzed for the fifteenth time consecutively.

He’d entertained himself by making little games. 

He had started counting anything and everything. 

The water stains and the faded discolouration inflicting his apartment walls. 

The dishes in the sink. 

His breaths. 

Since the incident at The Three Blues, he felt light. Constantly floating, yet his body was too heavy to move off of the bathroom floor. 

That was probably for the better. 

His curtains had remained shut; the sun had become his enemy. So, had the stars. 

Everything was too bright.

Though, he wouldn’t have to worry about that for too long. If his family friendly, neighbouring, assassin had friends he would be dead soon enough. 

He really had gotten rusty.

He finished counting the bathroom tiles. 

He started counting the things he added to the Earth. 

Trying to tally reasons he was worth being alive

. 

And it was ironic that the number was zero. 

He had held no one up. 

Even if he chose to, his hands were created with the intention to break. 

Behind his ears, gleaming blue whispers leaked through the faded darkness of his bathroom. 

His knees were bruised after hitting the tiled floor, his body wretched into the toilet bowl. 

Nothing came out but a jaundice-coloured bile. He hadn’t eaten in a while.   

Hardened calluses on the pads of gymnastic fingers stroked the wisps of hair out of his scrunched face. 

Few knew those hands were made for piano keys as well. 

“They’ll get worried if your hair grows any longer. B will start thinking another one of his children is going through a 1980’s themed rebellious phase.”

“Maybe I want to grow it out.”

“No you don’t, Dami. You can’t replace me; don’t you ever think of trying.”

Damian had not been called that in a very long time. He hadn’t ever told anyone what it really meant in his mother language. 

He had only let one person call him Dami after his mother. Then he stole from him and ran away.

“Get off the toilet, little wing. You’ve come too far to lose the war here.”

“Who ever said I won the battle?” His cheek sunk closer to the white seat cover, saliva slipping out of the corner of his mouth.

His head throbbed rhythmically.

He was disgusting.

“Your phone Damian.”

His head dipped lower into the bowl with a groan. 

He sent his hand into the bathtub, where it was reverberating off the ceramic. 

Before even seeing the number he held it to his ear. 

He remained silent, waiting for the other person to start speaking first. 

Damian was counting again.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

“I’m doing better, thanks for asking.”

Damian turned towards the glowing screen, unanswered messages glowered back at him in offence. Emails and missed calls from Murasaki, the animal shelter, Washi-Yama. 

For some reason, a bitter shame began to throb under his skin.

“We are not friends, why would I ask?”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll think of that the next time I save you from getting struck by lightning.”

Damian made a slightly distasteful sound in the back of his throat, a beat of silence.  “How have you been?”

Washi-Yama let out a breath. Damian could tell he was smiling, “Bored. I feel strangely fine, but the doctors keep insisting they take more tests.”

“90% of lightning strike victims survive. Their worries are unfounded.”

“Right. Honestly despite losing the ability to breath for a while and all the debris that cut me up, lightning strikes are pretty cool. I mean, I got a free shoulder tattoo from it.”

Another wave of nausea tossed through his stomach, “What was the point of you calling me again?”

“The hospital isn’t discharging me ‘til the afternoon, and Aki,” His jaw clicked so audibly he could hear it through the phone, “has gotten suspended. Apparently, she decided to box it out with another student.”

“Alright. What do you want me to do about that?”

The line went silent. 

One second. 

Two seconds. 

Three seconds.

Four seconds. 

“Can you pick her up from her school?”

What. 

“What.”

“I got struck by lightning last night, I can’t go get her!”

The bathroom exhaust fan scraped together, Damian clenched his teeth together. 

“Do you legitimately not have any other friends that are capable at the moment?”

“None that I’d trust around her.”

There was absolutely no reason he had to pick up after Washi-Yama. 

He was not obligated to do anything he did not want to, even if the man technically saved his life. 

But then again, something about Aki sent a shrill of aches into Damian’s chest. A bombinating vacuum, something dredging up the thoughts at every corner of his mind, yet if he tried to push through the foggy buzz, his memories would shroud themselves further beneath the thick smock of fog. 

Like trying to peer through his reflection through a mirror after a hot shower.

The annoying fizzle of a heart monitor bit into the call-line.

Damian’s cheek met the toilet seat.

“Where is the school?”

The first thing Damian noticed when he hesitantly shuffled into the principal’s office was the purple haired guitarist not-so secretly sticking gum underneath her seat. 

Her legs were tipped over the arm, as she gave him the most discrediting eyebrow raise he had ever received. 

The woman in the head chair had her lips tucked into a dimpled slouch, hair styled and pinned back into a sturdy bun, and the fabric of her grey blouse tucked tightly into her dress pants. 

The truth of the matter is that Damian despised school. His least favourite subject had been mathematics, that of which was because they seemed to think it was necessary to only teach the most feckless material instead of significant and relative equations. It was one of the only times in his childhood that he felt pity for students his age.  Those in particular that were deemed idiotic because their memory didn’t seem to support the criteria, thus they were punished by the nugatory school system whilst their peers were praised. It was a war ground built on the isolation of those underfed with social skills and child work factory rapport. 

He was elated every time he had been expelled until his father had given in and let him be ‘home-schooled’, which for the most part was just Damian getting to do whatever he wanted.

It hadn’t mattered much, his education exceeded far past the average highschooler even by the time he was first given the Robin uniform. 

“Ah, you must be Murayama's friend, please have a seat.” Damian reluctantly locked eyes with the pinched woman, she exuded a disciplining demeanour that even Damian felt made him slightly bow to her. 

Once he was seated she continued, “I saw the freak accident on the news this morning, it’s crazy how fate appears sometimes, isn’t it?” 

He nodded slightly, her eagle-like eyes continued to try to find his drowsy misguided stare. The Newton’s cradle on her desk forced Damian to not roll his eyes. He resented prolonged eye contact, and he resented cliches. Altogether this was not going to be good. 

Her eyelashes delicately fluttered as she grasped her chest, “Oh, excuse my rude behaviour! My name is Arataka Sumire. I’m sure that Murayama has made you aware that Aki is currently in the midst of getting processed for a suspension.”

Damian slid his eyes across the table towards the teenager, thoroughly avoiding him as he was Arataka. 

Maybe he just wanted to be petty when he bore into the cardboard cut-out of a principal, “If I may ask, how has she been putting her peers at risk?”

The facetious grin propped onto the principals lips seemed as though she was biting at her bit waiting for someone to ask her that all day. She slid out an uncomfortably stuffed bundle of papers tucked away within a yellow folder. 

“We are not necessarily a disciplinary school, quite the contrary as we aim to reform our students. In Contrast to our competitors, we focus on troubled children in need of extra support.”

So this school was for social-rejects and delinquents. Damian thought gingerly back to the graffitied entry gates and broken windows covered up with cloth, it hadn’t been a burglary, just senile teenagers.

Damian had already suspected Washi-Yama was involved in gang business, possibly entailing even the yakuza, more of a reason for him to steer clear of the graffitist.

What he hadn't expected was that the bartenders younger sister would also be involved, the older brother seemed to gently bow down to Aki, purposefully building a wall between his personal life and hers. To Damian it smelt like undeniable guilt and secrecy. 

Aki rolled her eyes, puffing up her shoulders and hiding behind the sleeves of her school cardigan. There was a stiffness in her movements, an expectation of disappointment and resentment, a keen acknowledgement that this scene had happened maybe once, twice, thrice before. 

Before he could thumb open the crease, his fingers froze on the pang of that familiar ache. The teenager expected him to look down on her after he saw whatever was contained in the files.

He slid the folder back towards the principal, “I think I’ll manage with my own interpretations.”

The corner of Arataka's eyes creased, whatever test she had made for him, he didn’t know whether he failed or passed.

Maybe it was okay to not know. 

She gestured over to a clipboard attached with a list of names, “Sign here and you’ll be free to take her for the day. I’ll send over the rest of the information regarding the terms of suspension to Murayama.”

Damian nodded along slowly, murky water sloshing along his skull again, lately he was always floating around in his thoughts.

A lighthouse bleared through the open waters, watching him with keen eyes as his body settled back across the shore of consciousness. 

They were at the front of the school. 

A hand waved in front of his face indolently. Before he could think better of it he latched onto the hand's wrist with a metal bending hold, tearing it away from his face and gripping the accompanied elbow with a forceful grip with his other hand.

Standing in front of him was the face of a bored teenage girl, her eyes flickered darkly down to his grip on her wrist and elbow. Damian noticed that her uwabaki had been swapped out for a pair of thick heeled combat boots and a leather jacket three sizes too big for her frame hung like the shoelaces of an abandoned pair of shoes on a powerline against her shoulder.

“If you don’t let go in five seconds, I'm going to scream. Your face will never survive my acrylics.”

Aki’s cheeks began to inflate whilst Damian quickly discarded her wrist. 

He should have known better, he had thought he was getting better at regulating his strength.

It seemed with the lack of his training and his overall distaste with being in the loop when it came to the hero community; amongst some past memories he’d rather discard then leave filling up his head; he had lost an accumulative amount of his previously earned muscle mass. 

Instead, through eating regularly and opting to train his hand further with the fine arts, he had hit an extremely belated growth spurt. None of which resulted in any sort of strength, in fact he felt rather clumsy and awkward with the newly found height. He’d been trained with the ideals of stealth and speed appropriate within the ranges of his short stature, catching the enemy before it came too close and using the time in between realisation to his advantage.

All of this wasn’t to say he didn’t have his moments where his brain would catch too quickly on a certain fragment of the shattered frame of his past and all he could see was the blood pooling to the surface of an unhealed wound.

“So, here’s the deal,” Aki had started slowly pacing, brows knitted together as she chewed on one of her black fingernails, “School’s out for a few more hours, and if I’m caught out and about loitering, the police will probably be on my ass,” She steered her boots to face Damian once more, “Right. You’re taking me to the Harajuku district.”

Damian looked around himself to see if there was another person around, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember those words ever leaving my mouth. The only place you’re going to is the hospital to see your brother, preferably in the next ten minutes.”

“I’m not going back there. I’ll probably catch the plague from him.”

“Washi-Yama was struck by lightning, not the Black Death.”

“That’s besides the point, you don’t really look like the epitome of busy. The butler won’t miss you if you’re gone for the afternoon.”

Damian genuinely could not tell why people seemed to think he was rich, he wore the same outfit nearly every day. 

“Keys or no keys?” She pursed her lips, throwing a bored look over her shoulder. 

Washi-Yama had better hope he had extra funds stashed away in a safe at The Three Blues, reimbursements for unwilling babysitting. 

He heaved out an arduous sigh, “This is Tokyo, we’re taking a taxi.”

Damian had never felt more like a depressed dog collared and leashed by the nastiest teenager he had ever had the privilege of meeting, suffice to say he had previously attended a private finishing school in Gotham. 

Knowing his own unforthcoming attitude towards social situations he was always somewhat debilitated by the idea of entering the Harajuku district, hilarious as he was currently living in the largest populated city on Earth. To save himself from complete expiration, he had ordered the taxi to avoid the main artery of Harajuku, Takeshita Street.

Unfortunately the cost of travel didn’t save his wallet. The babysitting fee waiting for him back at The Three Blues was ascending at an exponential rate.

The teenager behind him seemed at peace strolling through Cat Street towards one of the several second-hand designer shops. She was fiddling with a baroque Vivienne Westwood necklace settled within one of the many jewellery boxes on display, acting as if Damian was merely stale wind in a colander following behind her. 

They hadn’t spoken more than a word to one another since the school gate debacle, and the teen’s personal bubble seemed to only have inflated since they’d exited the taxi. 

Damian had fought villains that had crawled out of the seedy underbelly of hell with nothing more than the skin carved underneath his fingernails, yet their malice would never match that of the serpentine woman in front of him.

Observing the passer-byers was a sight to behold. Whilst the insouciant public seemed unbothered by the flamboyant and striking spectacles of fashion, Damian watched the crowd with a numbing reminiscence.

He recognised some of the more intrinsic fashion styles, the bubbly and texturised Dekora Kei – with people dressed in a flagrant palette of rainbow, swallowed up by colourful clips, beloved childhood throwbacks, kandi bracelets, sequined wrap skirts, and pink furry leg warmers– and its rather darkened funereal sisters the Harajuku goth and punk archetypes – with global roots to classical punk hinted through band shirts, deconstructed tweed and bondage pants, ears and noses glittered with artistic safety pins, gelled and dyed hair as well as more morose blacks, fashioned black veils, worn petticoats, venerable neck and ring jewellery and tall horse riding shoes. 

He felt himself get transported by the leather and chains to an area of his mind locked under a drain, rushing water began to overflow the sounds of the public.

Cross-legged and lips puffed out, the fair skinned necromancer glared daggers into his much loved turtleneck, the heavy accent of her motherland dashed against the courtyard of her words, “I know you have better taste than that.”

His tongue flicked against his teeth, “ Just because you treat the world as your runway doesn’t mean I have to as well.” he crossed his arms haughtily, “and besides what’s wrong with my turtleneck, it’s hand-tailored!”

Nika stretched her bubblegum against the tip of her tongue exposing a glint of metal, “Everything. Everything is wrong with that turtleneck. Because you aren’t wearing it for yourself, you’re wearing it to make an impression on your dads classist tory friends.”

She rolled over onto her back as she kicked her feet up at the ceiling, “Just try something of mine, please. Who knows, you might like it.”

The problem was Damian knew he would more than like it. Sometimes he’d watch Nika with all her freed wrath, greasy leather and broken chains worn with the intention to serve no master. Her clothes were her voice of empowerment, a freedom Damian feared to chase after. He wanted to speak out just as badly. So when he stared at the mirror and the thick tar-like eyeliner and the tartan pants grinned back at him, a uniform part of him broke. 

Nika wolf whistled from behind him picking her black nail polish absentmindedly as she flipped through another one of her mangas,“One day when you aren’t looking I will be burning that damned turtleneck.”

With shoulders pulled back, a fox-like grin curled onto his lips, “Along with those black skinny jeans you bought purposefully tethered I hope.”

A rattle of laughter echoed through him like steps above a sewer drain. 

In a few blinks the grouty teenager was clicking her boot against the concrete.

“Are you done?” 

“Definitely not, we’ve barely hit the tip of the iceberg.”

“You’re joking.”

The stone-faced teenager burst into hysterical laughter before her face suddenly froze back into its icy deadpan expression.

Damian decided then and there that babysitting was an underpaid job.

Aki’s chosen boutique operated at the back of a small fringe of similar stalls tucked away from the popular main roads of Takeshita Street, the niche crowd of drag queens as well as beguiling yet seasoned glam rockers fluttered by like psychedelic butterflies in and out of their sources of nectar. 

Multi-coloured and rhinestone embedded mannequins gleaned at the entrance, patchworked in a bottom of the bag line of party-store fashion infused with quality-primed leather, kinky latex and tartan. 

Aki decisively chose a store where the outer racks were piled high with mismatched accessories and handbags piled into every hole and crack in the wall of the establishment.

Glittery lettering with the appearance of just having been squeezed out of a ketchup bottle emblazoned the glass window above the entrance; COYOTE. 

Cocking her head to the side, the guitarist weaselled out a slither of space into an already claustrophobic store, Damian began to feel his heart knock against his ribcage. She assailed through the public with an iron fist, multi-coloured sea firmly parting for her until she made it down the stairs and to the counter. Long legs lay draped over a hot red vinyl desk. Half a can of hairspray perfumed the corner, seemingly an ongoing repellent for downstairs customers. Aki was unbothered by Damian’s fist full of coughs. 

The owner of the long legs was an androgynous bottled blonde bedazzling a denim jacket, they perked up at the sight of the teenager, tucking themselves up and away from the counter to tottle over and give the girl a cheetah-print cladded hug. 

Damian raised an eyebrow at the guitarist who was now avoiding his unwavering stare as she awkwardly patted the cashier’s back. 

“Honey, what do I owe the surprise?” Damian caught the wink of a nametag, engraved in silver glitter that read ‘Madame Miwa’ with a lipstick stain pressed on the corner, “This couldn’t possibly be about my new collection could it?”

“We’ll get back to that later. It’s about the ball.”

“Ah, right! Come, I’ve got the supplies all wrapped up and waiting for you in the back.”

Aki was tugged away into the shop's break-room, concealed by a brick wall overlay.

Damian glanced around, there was almost too much to look at. He tried just staring at the ceiling, but across the walls were posters plastered of 1970’s R-rated movies, suffice to say he quickly ducked his head to the floor. 

From the corner of his vision exposed light bulbs were sewn around a large glass portrait. The grainy black and white photo captured a whisked up blur of suited up and badged officers with square hats and dated moustaches trying to mow down a gaggle of scantily dressed drag queens armed with nothing but purses and heels .

Underneath in bold type-written letters read, ‘The Lion, The pig, and the Heel Shank’ captured by Mark Burnam.’

“Ah, d’you like it? That’s me in the red silk robe,” Madame Miwa approached from behind him, trailing one of their nails across the exquisite tapestry of the frame to a small blurred figure armed with nothing but the heels in their hands, “they’d interrupted a very private moment so I couldn’t get anything but a robe, at the time I didn’t even have tissue in my bra!” They giggled dizzily. 

“The 1969 New York City Stonewall Riots, have you ever heard about it?” 

Damian shrugged, “In passing.”

“Well, let’s just say the police were very nasty to us queens and queers. Most of us survived off of sex work and the like, yet we’d get pushed about, imprisoned and fined for just existing.”

Damian frowned, it was quite saddening that there was still so much work to be done in protecting underprivileged demographics. 

Even in his late years at Gotham he had faced the judgemental looks of the media for being a mixed child of a billionaire, and he had the silver shield of being wealthy to censor much of the racism. He wondered about his eldest brother and his childhood, whether he had experienced the cruel backhand of a crowd that saw you more as a mere spectacle than as a human, an exotic toy to admire rather than a person to stare in the eye. 

The Madame continued as they busied they with an overflowing rack of silk and lace, “The riots didn’t happen overnight like they say, and it most definitely was not just us who were tired of the oppression.”

“Opposing the Inn was a Women’s House of Detention, the girls were sick of the sexism, racism, and homophobia. They’re protests from the windows of the prison were like music to our ears.” They slid a heavy feathered garment off of the rack and threw the piece over their shoulder like a baker does a bag of flour. 

“We didn’t have batons like those brutes, but we did have sharp stilettos. I played naked muse to an amateur photographer, and he caught the exact moment when I was pegging one of my 4’ inches into a copper's eye. I hope it bruised real good too.”

Damian decided that he liked the fierce quick-tongued drag queen, they wore their scars like war medals and that was something Damian would never cease to admire. The heel was still in their hand from that day, but now it had transformed into a bedazzler.

He felt the warm brush of cheetahs fur on his shoulder, the Madame peered up at their artwork in gratuitous pride, “It was a moment for everyone beaten down in those days. I framed it as a warning to anyone who wants to come into my shop and tell me how I should run things. They’ll get pegged too and not with my strap on.”

“In surplus, we remember our solidarity through the annual Hooker’s Ball!” They beamed down at him as they dumped a pile of clothing into their arms. 

“I’m sorry?” Damian stated blankly, trying to steady the surprising unload of textiles. 

“The Hooker’s Ball, surely Aki told you about it?” The Madame pursed their lips, “We hold it every year around somewhere in Shibuya, it’s a COYOTE tradition.”

Damian shook his head, “I am not much of a party enjoyer.”

Miwa smirked behind the intentional smudge of her scarlet lipstick, “I have the feeling you will enjoy this one.”

“Now off you go, when Aki told me that you needed some new dressings, I didn’t realise the case was this dire.” 

He felt his back walk into the dressing room before his brain could catch up, the woman held out her hands expectantly, “Your jacket?”

Damian stiffened, before mechanically peeling off his outer layer, ghosts wrapped their fingers over his own as he undid the buttons, paled fingers handing over the garment for the first time in years entrusting it to someone else. The woman’s eyes softened at his hesitation, “I’ll take good care of it.”

As the door closed, Damian scrunched his eyes shut, daring not to look at his reflection. He held too many memories of the people he loved in his face. Now he couldn’t bear to see them stare back at him knowing what he’d done and who he’d become. His mother’s nose, his grandfather’s eyes, his father’s cheekbones. He was a manufactured error, a semblance of mistakes frankensteined into an alienated, failed experiment. He was created in the hopes of creating the future, only his essence was designed with the intentions of the past.

He spared a glance towards the scrunched up fabric between his fingers, the materials were familiar. Back when he was first stepping across the border of teenage rebellion he would have even fancied some of the clothing. Maybe Nika would have even shopped here whilst she was still located in Tokyo.

Unlike much of the boutique's plentiful array of tropical eye-catching colours, the clothes in his arms resumed a sombre palette consisting plainly of cool greys, blacks, and the occasional flash of sultry maroon. He lifted the lacy fabric of the shirt over his head, surprised as the material fell snugly into place, his eyes remained firmly to his chest, as the dressing room lights made the embellished rubies on the flared cuffs and throat of the garment gleam. The dress pants matched the shade of the rubies, with a modern enticement of a sewn cobweb pattern across the hips elevating the gothic appeal of the outfit. 

As he manoeuvred his body around in the garments, an annoying itch burned at his throat. He swallowed the dredging ache. Hastily removing the clothing and redressing, he exited the stall.

Aki was hovering by the entrance, as spiritless as always. 

The Madame approached from where they slunk themselves like a lazy cat across one of their waiting lounges, when their eyes met Damian knew that they could see too much. Despite noticing the glossy lacquer of his eyes, they were kind enough not to mention anything. 

He swallowed, it felt like thick tar was curdling in his throat,  “I don’t think I’m ready to wear these.”

They tipped their head to the side, “Keep them until you are.” 

Damian’s brow furrowed as he shook his head, trying to stop his voice from cracking like a prepubescent boy, “I can’t afford any more new clothes.”

They shrugged, “I made them, so I get to decide the prices. It’s on the house, darling.”

He blinked, “Are you sure?”

The Madame wavered an unimpressed brow at their seesaw debating and handed him the bag of clothes folded into a glossy velvet.

Aki crossed her arms impatiently whilst the steady click of her boot hammered along with the throb of Damian’s headache. 

“Thank you.” Damian nodded to the boutique owner, and for once he meant it wholeheartedly.

The Madame lips pulled slightly, “You’re forgetting something,” They took his leather jacket off of a coat hanger that was stationed by their desk, “This jacket, did you thrift it?”

Damian shook his head once as the drag queen pursed their lips , “Weird, it’s definitely hand-made and expensive I’ll tell you that. There’s initials sewn into the clothing tag: A.C.T.P, did you make it?”

His tongue rushed through the words, “Family Heirloom.” The balls of his feet began to pulsate with the demand to leave. 

The Madame shrugged it off, before turning to him, “By the way, I’ve a grand-son and a grand-daughter about your age, you know. I could–”

“It was a pleasure to meet you Madame, goodbye.”, he quickly filtered out to the entrance of the boutique, exhaling the stale breath in his lungs. 

Piqued rattles of thunder echoed across the neat row of boutiques, Damian noticed that many had brought out umbrellas or opted for shelter. Of course, Aki, ever the pain in his backside, decided to trudge forward even under the pre-tense of the brewing weather. 

“I’m hungry.” Were the first words she had bit out to him since her temperamental taunting at the school gate. 

Damian wondered how that was his problem, “Do you not have any money?”

They had been travelling through the Harajuku outskirts for the past few hours, surely he could just leave her to take the train home, book a taxi back to the Shibuya station and spend the rest of the day on the partner project or rotting on the toilet lid; most likely the latter. Though he'd probably have to pick up the slack on Washi-Yama’s end, Damian supposes the graffitist being struck by lightning was an alright excuse to get out of a day's work. 

As expected, the universe was hell bent on destroying Damian’s life in all areas. His phone vibrated in his pocket, Damian swore to The Demon’s Head that if it was Washi-Yama, he would come over and fault all his sockets to get the job done. 

The tiny message flickered back at him.

  can u keep her out an hour longer?

13:45 pm ✔✔

Damian suddenly hoped the nearing lightning would strike down onto him too. 

I expect overtime rates. 

13:45 pm ✔

“Crepes.” The teenager pointed one black fingernail towards a brightly illuminated cafe with a pink bear mascot that Damian could just tell had a suicidal underpaid worker underneath its fluffy layers. 

Damian pinched the skin between his brows, “Crepes.”

The spectacle of watching a teenager dressed to the socks in black ordering strawberry crepes with whipped cream, chocolate ice cream and sprinkles with a stone cold face entertained him enough that he’d been drawn into paying for Aki’s meal. She probably planned it, the manipulative demon. 

“I don’t trust you.” She jabbed her forked strawberry accusingly at him.

He folded his arms, sure it was justified, but that didn’t stop the allegation from slightly offending him, “Why?”

Nose stiffened, Aki dragged her eyes over him, “People that tend to dress plainly purposefully have too much going on in there,” she gingerly prodded her forehead, “That’s a reason not to trust you.”

Damian looked her up and down before she realised her mistake, “Did you just tell me that your brain is empty?”

She lapped up a dollop of whipped cream from her knife, “I don’t want you to know anything about me, and I don’t want to know anything about you,” She rolled her eyes muttering quieter, “or Washi-Yama for that matter.”

Damian let his breath rest hesitantly above the lip of his coffee mug, “He’s your brother, you’ve probably seen all that can be seen.”

Her fork scraped against the plate, “You probably know the same if not more than anybody else about Washi-Yama. Hell, I didn’t even really know him until a couple years ago.”

Damian quietly sipped at his coffee, the familiar scald melting the tension in his shoulders. When he first moved into Gotham, he wasn’t able to stomach the cuisine. Growing up in Nanda Parbat, his grandfather and mother sought to teach him that food remained purely as a form of mandated fuel. The cultural dissonance in Gotham led to many sore stomachs, another reason along with his overall adoration of animals and adoption of Batcow that vegetarianism was an early change in his lifestyle. Similarly after moving to Tokyo, he relapsed into his old dietary habits, avoiding eating highly processed or sugary meals.

A purple lock of hair stuck to the forehead of the girl in front of him, he wondered about the claim she’d made. Was she separated from Washi-Yama until recently, and where were their parents that supposedly owned the bar before them? He supposed that they were not questions for him to ask. 

Damian was not opposed to children, he wasn’t well adept at physically handling them, but that did not necessarily mean he would stand idly whilst a child was in harm's way. 

Puzzle pieces began to click into place in his head, the outright aggression, the jagged communication patterns, the troubled school life and statement outfits, he didn’t want to take any leaps but they could all be signs of possible self defence mechanisms. 

The teenager scooped the rest of the syrup off of her plate and they were back on their way.

Like waves retreating away from a sand-bed, their time at Harajuku came to an end gradually. The teenager was a demanding force, fine tuned from strong metal, single-minded yet resolute like a guitar string pulled tightly. She appreciated silence, Damian endured much of their trip watching her back. He decided that she could hold her own, but she was still young, and with the company Washi-Yama was not so secretly keeping maybe it was best to keep an eye on her. 

The sun bowed its head under the wispy hair of clouds laying her gentle rays to rest just above the hats of the city buildings. The crowd was mostly deterred by the clattering thunder and had dispersed, leaving them enough room to board the train without Damian risking cardiac arrest. 

Aki had propped her chin onto the window sill of the train, her eyes ever so slightly trailed, following the wires passing by. The problem with calling someone a ‘problem child’ was that it often negates the child as being the one to blame, when most times there have been external forces causing the probable reactions in the first place. Damian remembered the feeling that came with sitting opposite the principal, the pity, disappointment, frustration. When a set mould is fit for a child, anything out of its confines can be structuralised into a ‘problem’. 

When everyone ostracises the problem child as an ‘other’, then their criticisms will start to fester inwards, burrowing under the skin and eating away at any attempts of good that the person ends up trying to accomplish. A lake that continues to fill drop by drop with each agitated glare, comment of suspicion, and doubt of the person's empathy, words acting like a trowel to the construction of an internal indestructible turnkey home where no one can mallet the walls down. As the mouse chases the cheese the paradox of the problem child acting out repeats in a monotonous cycle. Unless someone else is willing enough to hurt themselves in trying to break away the bricks with their bare hands, and even then it's hard to step back and let them carve away at your walls. 

With a gentle breath the train halted at Shibuya station. Gripping their umbrellas tightly, each passenger shuffled over to the sheltered part of the station. 

Aki was holding her jacket over her head, trying to stave the rain off of her locks as she clicked away sharply on her phone. She’d been trying to call someone since they had departed the station, it couldn't possibly have been Washi-Yama, the man would answer in a heartbeat. Damian made sure she didn't run into any cars as they crossed the road to the alley where The Three Blues resided. 

The guitarist squatted down, narrowly avoiding a puddle pooling by the tail of her jacket. She  punched at the bottom of the nearby drain pipe until a jingle of keys fell into her spread out palm. 

Pulling off their shoes the pair were greeted by an empty bar, buckets collecting rainwater from a jagged hole where the lightning had struck, shaking out her locks Damian noticed that Aki’s hair seemed frizzier than usual. The teenager had come to a halt by the stairway, looking above Damian. Experimentally, he pressed a palm to the top of his head, to feel that the hair there was floating. 

A shriek of maelstrom shattered their shock.

“Murayama.” The teenager tensed. 

Their feet moved before them as Damian followed behind the agitated girl. Static buzz whined under the floorboards. As Aki reached for the door handle she yelped, stumbling backwards and holding her palm close to her chest. Small purple tendrils slithered across the skin where the skin made contact with the metal.

Damian quickly took off his coat, using the material to act as a barrier as he flung the handle open.

Like a deafening polaroid camera in the midst of capturing, a white pulse seared his vision, forming one steady image in his brain. 

My Blood, My Blood.

Chapter Text

Damian used to think that your life only flashed before your eyes when death wriggled its reviled head up to poach among the masses of his human livestock. 

His esophagus clenching up, the songbird trying its best to push out the rhapsody from his lungs enough to carry through to the other side of the barrier. 

No, he wasn’t dead. But he felt it all the same, as if it was his body disposed of on the ground.

He could hear the piano keys, a doux fluttering about in his ear. 

And suddenly, all of his hard work had meant nothing. Because the person he had wanted most to witness him at the peak of his success was crumpled sanguinary beneath him, red lashes streaking his skin like a discarded painter’s rag. 

The charmed voice of a radio-star discussing the historical chartings of the Top of the Pops. 

The skin began to peel off a ghoulish white from behind his callused knuckles, overwrought fingers and palms desperately attempted to scrape through the layered silica glass separating them. 

His socks padding across the tiled floor, hand in someone else's. 

Above the dashed brains the planets arbitrarily continued their rotation, the thought occurred like the unbidden decapitation of a guillotine blade, that birth and death was not a line, but a temporal cycle. Continuous and unanimous among the conscious and unconscious.

A pirouette – the stars spun with him. 

Shaky from the air locked capsule, he resisted against the kevlar cladded chest. 

The song drove a warmth through his heart, moonlight lilting across the tiles. 

What could be said more than the smile gracing the dead man’s lips. 

Simple. Love had become so simple when he was with him.

Damian smelt the charred carpet before he saw it. 

The flames brimmed their sultry ochre underneath Washi-Yama’s roused form. 

Sizzling, whatever was left of the bartender’s shirt did nothing to disguise the luminescent vein-like protrusions across his shoulder.

A phone dropped from the graffitist’s lax fingers, his eyes twitched lambently. Aglow a pale white under clenched brows. A shudder curled Washi-Yama into himself.

Damian had seen enough meta’s lose control to understand what was about to happen. 

Another rumble. 

He shouldered Aki into the hallway as another whip of lightning cracked down through the rooftop. 

Drywall dust settled onto the braids of the petrified teenager in front of him. Aki peered up at him through the stuttering light of her family's cramped hallway. From her shocked reaction, Damian pieced together that Washi-Yama decidedly was not meta-borne. 

“He’s gone.”

Damian cursed at himself inwardly. Another trait of meta meltdowns was the flight reaction, he would have never made the mistake of turning away beforehand. The news anchors had probably already finished preparing their speeches at this point.

He turned back towards Aki, who had taken to barricading her head between her hands. Leaving her in this state was not an option, but the fact remained that there were probably already multiple cameras streaming the meltdown globally, and it would not only be too much exposure into Damian’s current residence, but also public interference tended to maximise the stress of a meta after they have lost control. He also didn’t trust the reactions that the police and local superheroes and villains might have with this certain case. If a villain were to reach Washi-Yama before a superhero there could be ruinous consequences. 

The purple haired girl was shivering as though she were buried under snow, Damian did not touch her, but rested his cherished red scarf across her shoulders. 

Gentling his voice he whispered, “Aki, I’m going to explain this carefully. We are going to go back downstairs, I will need to go after your brother. Would you like me to call your friends for you?”

Her reaction was immediate with a sharp head shake, she steeled herself, “No, I’m coming with you.”

Damian raised a brow, despite the facade of strength the teenager managed to portray he could tell behind the china mask she’d delicately created there was a consternation that Damian doubted he would be able to ease if the interactions with Washi-Yama grew sour. 

In the time of a breath she tossed the scarf back his way and padded down the stairs,“He is my brother.”

Damian’s shoulders slumped, he had warned her. He mentally exonerated himself from any harm that would come upon her. Distantly, the blades of choppers sliced through the thick crackle of fire, blowing smog through the newly formed hole in the ceiling that Washi-Yama fled from. Tying his scarf across his face, he headed down the stairs and towards his grievous fate. 

It was not hard to find the neo-meta’s whereabouts, a crowd seemed to parade the streets from outside lurking ever closer with phones held high, muttering quietly amongst each other. Everyone had seen the news, everyone knew what was to come. Heroes, villains, the like. Damian knew too well how divulging the public could be, and he’d had his fair share of almost identity slips, so much so that he knew that preserving both his and Washi-Yama’s identities would prove a task almost too difficult to comprehend. Luckily, due to the forthcoming bad weather wrought on by the graffitists agitations, there likely would not be a clear view of his face.

Glitching electronic billboards seemed to reach out towards Washi-Yama with thin wiry tendrils pulled out from the screens. Damian tugged the scarf higher, and felt the weight of the floor trying to pull him in. He felt the urbanised air cling onto his skin, the patter of rain and nostalgia. His heart had long been captured against the prison of his human form, he waited for it to tire from banging on the walls of his ribcage. 

His mother’s words murmured through him, guided him, controlled him,

“You are not to ever fear what you have never experienced, 

and once you have experienced it, then where is your reason to be afraid?

 You should be twice as prepared.”

After letting his eyelashes fan across his cheeks, he was no longer inside his own body. He watched from an outsider's point of view as he pulled Aki’s hand through the crowds of mongers. Like two foxes darting through man’s automobiles and high rises from the ferocious hunting dog, they chased the meta through clouds of boiling steam. 

Damian studied the meta’s pinched brow, his raised shoulders, and the hands tearing at his steaming clothes. He watched as foolish on goers had tried to approach Washi-Yama, receiving electric shocks from the mixture of live energy and rainwater. He would have to disable the man, the graffitist was too high strung to be able to hear him currently.. 

Behind the crumpled neo-meta was an alleyway, with the right distractions from there he would be able to efficiently relocate them to as safe an area as possible until Washi-Yama was able to calm down again. Then he would have to reassess what steps to take in order to best protect their identities from being disclosed to the public. 

He bared a hard glance towards Aki, instructed in a strictly militarist voice, “Pass me the jacket.” 

Police officers had begun to move in from the sidelines, laying down road blockers; the brunt had opted for batons and riot-shields as tasers would prove ineffective with this specific electric case.

Squinting, Damian could make out the heads of disguised figures sprouting from the overhead buildings, “When I leap you leap.” 

One breath, then a jump. That was all it took. The tightened fists of thunder clenched at the skyline and stretched it outwards– his body pummeled into the meta. His shoulders took the weight of the trembling bartender as he set his mind forth to finding a way through the maze of alleys. Aki was close on his tailcoat– as were the police. 

A nostalgia that wasn’t his own thrummed inside his blood, guiding him through the streets like a prescient second layer of consciousness. Choppers licked up the frothing steam filtering through the sky. He kept his back to the shadows, the jittering meta’s head lolled down onto his shoulder. Jumbled yells pulled through the thunder. 

He realised far too late that they had met a deadend. With his sides blocked by brick and the hightops being far too dangerous with the helicopters sweeping the skyline, he made haste behind a dumpster bin as the teenager bit back a swear between brittle teeth. 

A sharp vibration akin to the pluck of a koto string thrummed underneath his feet. Both Aki and he froze. Aki’s bottom lip was pulled a taut white from the pressure of her front teeth gnawing into the skin. Again– another plucked vibration. The snap of police dog jaws clapped ever closer to their hiding space. Pluck. A hammer clanged inside his chest. Pluck. Aki dug her chin into her shoulder. Pluck. Thunder kicked its feet up into the clouds. Pluck. Washi-Yama’s breath began to warm up the fabric of his turtleneck. Pluck. Pluck. Pluck. 

A screeching sound like fabric being roughly torn apart echoed from the rooftops, the police jumped towards an apartment stairway pulled by their yowling hounds. Damian was just barely able to catch the glimpse of a suited figure bearing a brightly graffitied baseball bat. The figure rattled the baseball bat across the metal bars of the stairway. 

As the stranger was chased away by the fumbling officers, a similar thrumming echoed away from Damian’s feet and further towards a trash bag; by the way Aki’s head picked up she had heard it too. He adjusted his grip on the graffitist as Aki gestured for him to let her hold him. Damian allowed the weight to be taken off his shoulder as Aki wrapped one of her brother’s arms around both of her shoulders, snaking her other arm around his torso. 

On the tips of his toes, he lightly tread across the damp gravel. Carefully flicking his eyes back towards the stairway, just in case the officers chose to jump back out at them at the very last second. 

Aki followed close behind with her long nails digging into the sleeves of her leather jacket. As they both stared down at the innocent trash bag, they waited. A knowing hesitance– an impending anticipation. Pluck. The bottom of the trash bag mumbled. Pluck. Damian's hand gently went to grasp the top of the bag. A hand darted from a dark crevice underneath, throwing aside the bag and giving him a quick sight of a concrete manhole with an engraved fox on the front. Spindly fingers locked onto his ankle and he felt his feet give way to the dark emptiness. The last thing he heard was Aki’s stifled yell ricocheting, as she slowly grew smaller in his vision. 

“What was that?” Damian smirked as his older brother stuffed loose-leaf pages into his bed-side drawer with a harsh smack, “I did not know you were literate Richard, your post-mission reports refute such.”

“It’s called journaling! Mental health has been a hot topic at the league for a while, you know. Too many heroes deflect their own emotions onto who they are saving.” The older man folded his arms with a playful pout that morphed his face into something younger that Damian silently appreciated. 

He had felt the soft jab of his brother’s words like lying on an uncomfortable pillow but chose to ignore the older man’s obvious cast in preference of flopping face first onto the bed. Haley had taken this as an invitation to also make an appearance, licking his cheek.

“What is this? Party in my room?”

“Three is a communal gathering, don’t prophesy the attendance of the other imbeciles.” He rolled his eyes into the sheets. 

“Don’t be grouchy you know you love them,” Damian muttered his disagreement as Richard continued with a jaunty grin, “Remember that time I caught you sleeping with Jay on the couch–”

He snapped his head up, “Silence is a forgotten virtue.” 

Damian only had a few seconds to dodge the arms trying to tug him close, he hissed like a cat would against a villainous and somewhat clingy water spray.

“Your hair has been growing out lately,” A hand came to his head to tousle at the overgrown locks. They now curled loosely around his chin, a distant reminder of the time that had passed. When he was with his mother, she had seen his long hair as a weakness, something someone could use as leverage during a fight. He had always wondered why she had kept hers long, she’d idly tell him that she was able to use it for another weapon outside of combat. 

Richard twisted a strand between his fingers,“Reminds me of another time in my life.”

“Never compare me to your disco disaster moment.” 

Richard gawked,“That was iconic! Don’t diss the bling.”

Damian’s nose shrivelled, “I’m dissing the v-neck exposing all of your cleavage.” 

He watched as Richard’s hands came to cover his chest like a dishevelled maiden, “It was trendy at the time!”

Grinding his teeth together, Damian tried to stifle the huff of amusement curling at the corners of his lips, he stared down at the dog beating up Richard’s quilt cover with her paws. 

“I don’t want to go back.” The early rays of dawn dappled the bed in a sprinkle of sunshine. Behind those curtains, heads were rising, and he felt a piece of his marble heart crack with the realisation that this moment would pass. Planting his feet onto the carpet, he watched as the glare of the sunshine reflected long metal bars across his shadow. 

Richard’s body shuffled closer to him and he imagined the serenity of letting himself lay his head against his shoulder, “I can’t wait to braid your hair.”

Damian’s scalp burned as he pressed fingers gingerly to the back of his skull. From above him, the world trotted around like a merry-go-round of bright lights and colours flickering behind a blurry haze. 

Distantly, he heard sharp trembling voices bounce around the room, “Don’t care… not supposed… be here!”

It was a voice that was familiar, he tried to work the janky puzzle pieces of the words together into something coherent. He tried his best to move his limbs but something seemed to be trapping them into place.

“Koko…killed us…what happened,” A monochrome blur danced around in his peripheral, “meant... protect him!”

A deeper voice mellowed out the aggressive cacophonies, “Calm down… could use… advantage.”

The thick fog coating his brain slowly began to rise, making way to quite the bizarre scene. In front of him lay a path of what appeared to be a hollow sewer passage, as he tried to turn his head he realised that his wrists were tied with linked chains around a concrete cylinder leading from the roof to the floor identical to many others in front him. He made do with peering at his captors' reflections through a rippling puddle of still-water. Artificial lights buzzed within the reflection, he caught onto small flashes of an oni mask with two slightly raised bumps either side on the top, indicating a pair of two small ears. The mask extended outwards into a snout, red paint outlined the two eye-holes. 

His thoughts wandered to the tattoo plastering Washi-Yama’s torso and bit back a swear between clenched teeth. ‘Shibuya Foxes’, was what the paint that had torn through Damian’s peace wrote. The name ebbed at the cliff’s edge of his memories of Japanese yakuza culture. Not only had his mother and father both taught him thoroughly about Western vigilantism, but in order to prepare for oriental business, he had been schooled on prominent gangs around the Eastern areas. At first glance, Damian had written off the gang as novices, claiming the SUTA buildings as a performance of rebellion against class structures. He now wondered back on his stupidity of not walking the streets of his conclusions from all directions. If the foxes could operate from personalised underground units, they were either a shadow organisation to something much larger or a splinter group– a stray branch connected to one of the larger of the criminal crop in Asia. 

Nevermind the police chases and news anchors, if Damian had managed to get captured by a Yakuza syndicate, there was no doubt in his mind that he would be recognised. 

With the members of the gang harbouring the Japanese underground sewer system and Damian amidst their skulk, there was no way he would be able to stay without a chance of endangerment. He slowly fiddled with the bow-knot keeping him captive, feigning a restless sleep as his fingernails gently mapped out the shape of the chain. 

A plan began to unfold in his mind. Either Aki was unconscious or she had made the smart decision to keep quiet and listen. After Damian untied himself from the chains he would quickly pin-point the location of the lights and break them using the chains as a weapon. Observing the winding holes of the sewer-system, he chose to pursue the middle hole as it would be easier to lead a goose chase.  He was trained primarily to fight his way from any situation. That didn’t mean he hadn’t had to learn how to run.

As the chain sagged loosely around his wrists, he caged it in a white-knuckled grip to soften the sound, and threw the chain towards the light canister. Ignoring the baffled gawks, Damian tossed the chain to his side like dirty socks to a hamper. 

 From the mental photograph of the group he’d taken before eclipsing them into darkness, he noticed that there were two men and a woman, all bearing vibrant face masks and dark tight suits, Chinese takeout boxes were sprawled across makeshift seats of milk carton crates. There had been no sign of Aki or Washi-Yama.

He quickly turned to make his exit but a hand caged his chest against the concrete podium. 

The vibrato of wet footsteps pounded in his head as someone sauntered up beside him, “Fucking hell Murayama! You didn’t tell me he would react this badly.”

Another more baritone, yet feminine voice clattered through the darkness, most likely taking the space next to the owner of the unyielding hand, “He did say he was a flight risk, sucks that we don’t have a light anymore though.”

Damian could only let their prattling go on so far before he sunk his nails deep enough for his captor to break out into a pained bark, he ran forward with one hand leading him like a lifeline against the backdrop of the lurching sewers. 

He made it five steps before another voice broke out, “D.G. Stay.”

Washi-Yama was shaking some glow sticks about the width of his thumb to life, in the neon glow what Damian could only assume was a mixture of sweat and rain pooled down from his brow around the thermal blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Momentarily the leather on his feet scuffed at the concrete, he whipped his head back to the winding sewer passageways only to see them blocked by the three illuminated figures, dressed darkly with mean faces to accessorise. 

Damian’s shoulders broadened out, a trick his mother had shown him to make him seem the predator whenever he was the meal. 

“I know they’re not the company you’d like to keep, but they just wanna help. If you sit down we can actually work through this.”

Not taking his eyes off of the unmoving statues perched at the front of his escape route, Damian ground his teeth. None of them had weapons, their masks were clenched in their hands, an acknowledgement of equal ground. They saw him, he saw them. Luckily, none of them seemed to show any signs of recognising him, though it didn’t make their expressions any more approachable. 

If he could familiarise himself with his captors, he could find his mode of escape. Whether it was in refusal of joining their ranks or gaining information, “I’ll take it I’m correct in saying that you are the culprits who vandalised the university.”

From behind him he heard what he could only imagine to be Washi-Yama face palming as he muttered a half-hearted nothing under his breath. 

They all remained rigid and unmoving for what seemed to be minutes, until the one guarding the middle passageway crossed his thick tattooed arms and huffed, “Protecting it, you mean.”

With a grunt and a jostle, from his makeshift milk-crate seat Washi-Yama chimed in, “Rival gangs have been trying to claim out Shibuya lately. Ones with a lot worse intentions than us.”

Surveying the figures in front of him, Damian suddenly felt the weight of a hot iron plough into his middle.

His words sharpened, “Where is Aki?” 

Chapter Text

“Where is Aki?”

One of the strangers, a freckled girl with soft ginger eyelashes and baby-fat still clinging to her rosy cheeks pointed over to one of the water-stained walls.

Shaded under the half-hearted thrum of the sewers lighting fixtures, Damian peeled back the layers of darkness and sought the exhausted form of the young girl draped across one of the oil bannisters holding up a triad of brightly coloured blankets in some sort of makeshift pillow fort. Her purple braids were limply slumped over one cheek, a dull sizzle directed his eyes to one of her arms that had sported a blossoming maroon bruise.

The mild orange illuminated an unwilling surrender in her vulnerable features that Damian himself had resonated with one too many times after a bad mission. 

Damian's torso unconsciously pulsed forward. 

Washi-Yama's grip on his shoulder tightened. 

Damian eyed him sternly.

Washi-yama's face crumpled slightly.

Damian crept towards the sleeping girl.

In the corner of his eye, he saw the nod of the bartender to his suited associates who pulled back in turn, taking Damian's coolness as a means to keep warm under the steamy tules of fried dumplings and chicken in the comfort of the makeshift fort.

He felt the bartender's feet steadily trample behind him like a pawn waggling one move at a time over the chessboard to its opponent, “It was an accident. I hadn’t– I would have never hurt her intentionally, not for anything.”

A throaty swallow, like a rock tumbling down a steep hill. He steadily eased his way over to the punk, the twitching of the bulbs over her head cast her in a monochrome wash. The graffitist gingerly tucked a lock behind her ear. Damian noticed how the position of Washi-Yama’s shadow over Aki’s face seemed to nurse her tense brow from its slouched weight. 

The honeyed lights melted Damian’s shoulders, rippling down his spine to his knees until he was a puddle in the mild overcast, he planted himself amongst the handsewn checkered patchwork pillows padding the concrete, “I thought I had made it clear to you from our very first chance encounter that I did not want to be involved in any vigilantism, heroism, or villainism to any degree.” 

Sliding one move closer, Washi-Yama carefully propped himself to the ground next to him, a finger’s length of room keeping its conscious distance between the two of them, “I tried, but I think we could both see you were drawn to it. Moths can’t fight the light no matter how much the bulb dims.”

His eyes slid over to the other boys, he watched as his long stare made Washi-Yama’s faces morph into one of fascinated dionysian mirth.

“You knew.”

The tired graffitist settled a spread palm over his stomach, massaging the raised electric lightning marks that had flourished across the tender skin, “I did. It didn’t take a genius to put one prestigious foreigner to the face of a missing hero plastered all over Western news programs.” He raised his eyebrow slightly, “I’m half American too, you know. How else would I stop myself from losing the language?”

“I wasn’t interested enough in getting to know you to the point where I thought it was relevant.”

Damian frowned when he saw the grin the man sported at his response, it was a grin of expectation. He was starting to realise that there was never any other tunnel that he could have taken. They would have all led back to the same centre. Wounded on his back, with a half-baked charismatic vigilante for company. Stubbornly, he tried to stop his lips from pulling back. 

“I don’t want to get involved in that business again.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“Then, what is this all for? You could have changed partners. I don’t see why I should remain a relevant character in your criminal underground business.”

“I’m still here because you’re interesting.” He shrugged simply, “It’s not as if I’m expecting you to leap up off of your feet, have a change of mind from what you were obviously running from and come join us. I just want to be able to see your art.”

Damian blinked excitedly, “I’m sorry?”

“‘Robin Heart, 2017, Watercolour on Paper’ ‘Demon's Summit, 2016, Oil on Canvas’. I met you through your art at the exhibitions.”

Those damned exhibitions, he knew they were too close to the public eye, but he couldn't help himself. He would have to ask for his pieces to remain anonymous in the future, despite the drainage on his own pride as an artist. 

“It’s funny, I transferred over to the class just ‘cause I wanted to meet you. Then I realised: D.G. “Damian Grayson”. Except, when I tried to look for you online all that came up was a mirage of balding white men. No Damian Grayson’s.”

 “I’m not a social-media person.”

“No. No, me neither. I don’t have the time or patience for it anyway. But, everybody’s got something about them online.” He shook his index finger, “Unless they’re hiding. With your adamancy on being a secret, it’s no surprise that you turned out to be the son of your father.”

“Anyways, even if none of that told me what I needed to know, Aki still would’ve figured you out. She already had her suspicions, but your trip to Harajuku outright confirmed it.”

Damian paused momentarily in consideration, until the gears clicked into place. 

“The jacket.”

“One thing Aki knows is fashion. High-end fashion. American fashion. Vintage fashion. Tailored fashion. Put all of the above in a mixing bowl and there’s only so many overcoats sported by the wealthy with those specific initials.” Washi-Yama chuckled, “You look rather good for your age, military official and servant Alfred Pennyworth.”

The sound of his head slamming the back wall echoed throughout the abandoned sewers, “Don’t.”

Washi-Yama shrugged absent-mindedly, “It’s not like I really care though. Money’s not been important to me in a long time.”

“It’d be hypocritical to judge you when my pockets are filled with secrets too.” The graffitists dexterous fingers plucked the fabric of his pockets inside-out. 

“So was this all for leverage then?” Damian wasn’t quite sure why his throat clenched so tightly against the words. Regularly was he used as a prisoner for ransom, it came with his heritage, especially when he was younger. Typically he would fight his way out of the situation, but he had long lost any will.

“Not really. Only Aki and I really know, we just found it really funny.” Washi-Yama’s voice hiked down from its usual non-chalant peak.

“Funny?”

Washi-Yama shook his head and stepped through one of the winding passageways. Despite himself, Damian’s feet chimed in behind him. 

“And your other friends?”

“Have no clue. Somehow.” Washi-Yama dodged Damian’s angry kick of sewage water. 

As they both approached a ladder caked with grainy rust, Washiyama turned smugly towards Damian, “I think you’ll like it this way, I know the passageways like the back of my hand.”

“What are you? A teenage mutant ninja turtle?” 

Washi-Yama sagged against the ladder with a moan, “I wish. I’d make a killer Mikey. ”

As they shuffled up the ladder, he turned backwards, “You’re definitely a Karai type of person.”

Damian chose not to answer.

For the fruits of his labour, Damian was welcomed to a neon-lit sunrise. 

He was distinctly brought back to the walls of graffiti that led them to their first encounter. 

“Home, sweet home.” 

The light rain echoing on the roof tiles called back to the disarray that occurred just a few raindrops earlier. 

“How are you so okay with this? You don’t even know who you are anymore.”

“I didn’t need superpowers to not be able to not know who I am.” Washi-Yama shrugged as he shook the paint from a half empty cannister, “I already struggled with that enough as it is.”

Damian dodged the test squirt he did, the graffitist threw him a smug eyebrow, “Besides, do you?”

Frowning and turning to the clashing colours splashing the walls, Damian chose decisively not to answer. The different murals smudged and morphed into one another, making frankenstein creatures of creation. A particular piece caught his eye.

A young girl stencilled in monochrome was smashing a china doll onto the concrete beneath her, the doll was her exact identical with eyes outlined in a striking teal under her waterline. His forearm shot out to protect him from Washi-Yama’s menacing paintbrush.

Damian glared silently at the mirthful glint sparkling in the graffitists eye.

"That one's mine. I call it 'No one's little girl'."

Damian squinted, "It's not awful." 

“What’s the plan for you now then? How are you planning to use your meta abilities?”

“What if I don’t plan on using them at all?”

Damian thought that would be imbecilic, there were many times during his vigilante days where he wished he could fly, move things with his mind, or shapeshift like many of his neighbouring hero counterparts. 

“It would be wasteful not to, I suppose.” Damian grouched out as he picked up the paintbrush and tossed it into an upstanding bucket. 

“Sure, if you view yourself as a tool. I’d much rather view myself as a person, thanks.” The bartender shifted, blocking his locks disguising his eyes as he let out another aggressive spray of white onto the wall. Damian realised he was drawing the rough outline of a person’s silhouette. 

With his back turned away from Damian as he worked, Damian became distinctly aware of how easy it could be to kill the neo-meta. In a way, he wanted to punish the graffitist for being so openly trustworthy as to turn his back on a stranger. On the other hand, he felt ashamed that he was thought so little of as to not even be considered a threat to someone he could have easily squandered if he was still who he was at the age of five. 

Instead, he worked out his anger by flicking him with a stripe of orange paint on his back. The graffitist’s back jolted pole straight, turning Damian’s fingers retreated into the comforting fabric of his sleeves, steadily avoiding Washi-Yama’s gaze.

Scratch. Bounding off of the walls from a nearby apartment window’s record player came the distant jive of an American Blues song, it was not one that Damian recognised but the tense muscles pulling Washi-Yama’s cheeks back said otherwise. 

“The Hirano’s are at it again.” He chuckled with expectant exhasparation, “If they continue playing that racket till dawn they’re gonna get another noise complaint again.”

'Sweet talkin’ guy

Talkin’ sweet kinda lies

Don’t you believe in him and if you do, 

he’ll make you cry'

A stampeding earthquake of heels and boots clambered across floorboards. Cheers and merry erupting and dispersing thick like smog through the still air. Despite himself, Damian felt a twitch pull at his neck towards the melody. 

He saw smiles and laughter flash from dimmed household lights, swinging each other weightlessly side to side. 

"I'm sorry, by the way. About vandalising the school. If you want to practice your art, your free to work here."

"How did you-"

'He’ll send you flowers and paint the town with another girl

He’s a sweet talkin’ guy

But he’s my kind of guy.'

Washi-Yama swayed forwards, his body tugged by the invisible strings of the chorus dutifully weaving to make a masterpiece of butterfly-light sound. 

“Have you ever had a muse?” The red handkerchief around his neck was now pulled over his nose as another aggressive spray bursted through the cap of the can. Washi-Yama's face appeared a jigsaw puzzle that Damian so desperately wanted to find the missing pieces for. He always loathed mystery. 

Damian let the brusk waves paddle at the shore of his mind. Muse? Damian pondered on the aftertaste of that thought. A muse. An artist’s immortalised match, someone who ignites the soul. Who can expose the sadness, fear, and happiness of their hidden inhibitions; a secret confidant from body and soul to canvas.

He supposed he had once had a muse, but he was not one to possess. With wet fingertips, his match was snubbed. He could still remember the smoke rising from their passing moments.

“I had one once. But my type of love was,” He steadied himself, breathed and continued speculating about Washi-Yama’s current work in progress, “too much.”

'Sweeter than sugar, 

Kisses like wine

Don’t let him under your skin

‘Cause you’ll never win'

Damian got the sudden feeling like his pores had widened, soaking in each twist of the other boy's mouth mocking the lyrics, the pitter-patter of his feet working the sodden gravel guided him through a kaleidoscope of memories. An eyebrow raise and an outstretched hand invited him to dance. 

'Don’t give him love today, tomorrow he’s on his way

He’s a sweet talkin’ guy

But he’s my kind of guy.'

Dancing. When was the last time Damian thought that his body was worth the freedom to dance, let alone with another?

Then static silence. 

Like a stack of promptly placed dominoes, the music stopped, screams curdled the midnight air and Washi-Yama’s phone vibrated in his pocket. 

“That was the others, c’mon. The streets just got a lot less safe.” Washi-yama was already yanking at the sewer drain.

As if on cue, Damian watched a worn-out chevelrot get scrunched up and tossed like a used napking down the street. 

After hopping down the chute once more, he heard the outside world shatter apart. 

Washi-Yama led him back to the main entrance, where his strange companions were pulling from a rack of skintight black silky bodysuits that looked as though they had been scrounged together from a local ski resort. 

“Alright? Who is it this time?” Washi-Yama imparted as if he were having to clean up a puddle of urine from an overly-excited dog. 

“Not someone we know,” A weed-thin man said taking away a large chunk of his prawn cracker along with his words, “Think they’re a foreign villain.”

Damian ducked as the ginger haired girl haphazardly tossed her takeout bag over her shoulder, “Look, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to the news lately but all the countries with neo-metas have been in the dusk of war for the past week.”

“With Murayama’s–” He made a show of air quoting, “-awakening, Japan just got enlisted.”

“Not only that but the neo-meta’s have been taking sides,” Aki gestured with her chopsticks as she crudely sucked up a shrimp from her takeout container from behind him. He jumped, before he could ask her how she was she continued bluntly through chews, “Saw it on American TV last night. With the villains taking shots at them as amateurs and the heroes having gone awol, the west has been in some pretty hot water.”

"Do we have a name yet?" 

The sea of heads before him began to shake. He was about to sneak down another passage back to his humble apartment, when he saw two of the members stretched out in front of the exits on the nearby mould-stained walls under the ill-green of the artificial lights like particularly subdued alley cats soaking up the sun. 

Damian chose to wait until he was topside again, instead he used the free-time to eavesdrop on a conversation between Washi-Yama and one of his friends,“How do you think she’ll feel about a disturbance in her territory?”

“She won’t like it, that’s for sure.”

If Damian were any nosier, he thinks he’d become as stiff as wood and have to prove himself a real boy. There was only one girl that Damian knew owned the streets of Tokyo and he hadn’t seen her in years. 

____________________________________________________________________

“You weren’t the only one that loved him.” Her stare pierced his heart like cold icicles.

Staring up at the blinking eye of the sky he watched as a comet rolled down like a sparkling tear, he wished that he could have drowned in the emptiness swallowing him up into its belly. Barren and overstuffed with despair, he clung onto his own arms, pretending he wasn’t alone. 

There was not much he could do except hide his face behind his sharpened nails, clawing at the open faucets wetting his cheeks. She ripped his desperate fingers from his face, the way her eyebrows knitted sternly together morphed her expression into something so imperiously foreign to her usual conceited smug.

She was worried. 

Damian had long thought he had mastered happiness. He had thought it as easy as learning a new language or instrument. Before the incident he thought it easy, and now he knew the learning curve had brutalised him. 

Loneliness was difficult to admit. It was embarrassing like a scabbing rash welting and harsh, shameful. He prayed there was a love god looking its blushing eyes down through rose-tinted glasses, ready to strike him into the right arms this time. Damian wished that the space he took up was either small enough to tuck into himself until he was the size of a pindot, or large enough to break through the ceiling. Either way, the idea of his presence was born of fear. 

Steel like arms barricaded around his shoulders, bruising in their hold. Cigarette ash clung to the smell of her leather jacket, he thought back the urge to inhale. 

The city of Gotham steamed and cracked like a glass jar placed over a boiling kettle. Nika let the frothing smoke cover where her lips kissed. 

“If you try to follow him, I’ll kill you.”

____________________________________________________________________

The flames enveloped Shibuya’s downfall like a twisted love letter. Hunching his chin to his chest, Damian tried his best to avoid the blaring lights creating moth-like flutters of brightness smudging his vision as the cameras flashed. 

The damage had largely been confined, with heroes implacing a dome-like forcefield around Shibuya to confine the rest of Tokyo from the uprising.

Digital screens spasmed and twitched, leaving models and advertisements freezing awkwardly. The streets appeared as though a chopping board for sliced up cars and houses. The first thing Damian felt was the dreary anticipation of the citizens. 

Although Japan’s criminal underground reared its ugly head often, it was not common to see it forced out so openly from its shadows. 

He watched as his unwanted company crept closer to the middle of the destruction on the outer city walls, searching for the culprit responsible for the disarray of their favourite open art gallery. 

A summerlike glow melted the air and caused a thin sheet of sweat to wear on Damian’s brow. The closer they trudged forward the higher the temperature rose, like standing at the Earth’s core. 

A loose-panted schoolboy was eagerly waggling his phone around, seemingly trying to record the villains very literal meltdown of Shibuya. 

He saw the hand reach forward and bolted forward.

The villain's entrance came with a heavy knock at Damian’s chest as he shoved the boy out of the line of attack. He felt gravity give way beneath his legs and send him flying on top of an uplifted chunk of street. A searing golden heat melted through his shirt and inched closer to his chest, as an androgynous voice simpered, "Ah, such cold beauty." the entity whispered in his ear, "Your heart will be warm enough soon." 

Raised voices stacked upon each other, bubbling and popping in his ears like expired soda. 

The blue and red lights behind his eyes filtered to a resolute hum and he saw her there, back tall with heated eyes. 

“The only one that’s allowed to take his heart is me.”