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Damian meets his mother for the very first time when he is eight years old. She is not his though, not really. She appears one day and never leaves, not completely. She gives gifts and tells stories and Damian dreams once or twice of a life with her. A thought of her and him and none of the background, none of the walls and the servants and the black costumes stained with imperceptible blood. He dreams of a life he cannot have and the love of a mother that will leave him soon.
She cannot stay, not now not forever, she’ll come back though he knows. The eccentric orbit she follows around her father leads her close and far and close and far. She’ll depart with scathing words and she’ll return seeing the purpose of his plans. New plans and purposes and manifestos will be formed away from him and later shared with him. However much she tries she can’t escape the orbit, she cannot change the path she follows. She will leave and she will come back.
When she is there Damian loves her as best he can and in the ways he knows are right. To best show love is to show respect. Damian will bow to her deeper than to anyone but his grandfather, he will serve her tea pristinely, and he will talk with the proper formalities. He will do whatever is needed to show that he holds the utmost respect for his mother and in return his mother will smile and she will laugh and she will in the dead of night hold him close and whisper stories of a man she says is worthy of respect.
“Your father is a great man. Strong and courageous. You will take after him, you will continue him. He rules a land far from here, and he does it right.”
When she is gone Damian pretends she never existed, there is no use in distractions which will only make you weak and get you killed. His mother will return and in the meantime he will survive. He survived eight years without her and a month or two is no difficult task. Things are simpler without his mother, he doesn’t have to think of the places she comes back from and the father that she says is worthy of respect but is also an enemy. When she is with him he can’t help but think of the next time she will leave, but when she is gone he can focus on the present. On the training and the tutors and the knowledge that the world is both beautiful and plagued by disease. By people and their choices and their ill thought out lives. Damian was made to right it, to bring the beauty of the world to the front no matter the cost to the pest scattered across its surface. He, like his grandfather, was made for this task, and it will become his life's calling.
Damian first takes the life of another man in cold blood when he is eight years old. He has killed before but only in training, in fights, in defense. This is not fair and it is not a fight, this is a killing, an execution.
Just a day after his birthday he stands before a man kneeling on the ground and he knows that this is not the last step but the first. This will make it real, this will make him real. It has been five years since he took the first rites at only three and now at eight years old, sword clutched in his little hand, he is going to kill. He is going to prove his allegiance, prove that he can do what needs to be done. The man has committed a crime, but it shouldn’t matter, he is an enemy of Ra’s al Ghul and that should be enough.
Damian looks up at his grandfather, who tells him to proceed with the slightest movement of his head. His sword cuts cleanly through the man’s neck, blood pools on the ground, warm, but cooling quickly. The man is dead, and Damian has granted him mercy. He will not be tortured any longer. He will not die painfully of disease or when his bones are old and brittle laying on the stone floor of his prison abandoned apart from the meals he is given. He will die a proper death, a kind one for a traitor and a criminal. This is mercy and it exists at the sufferance of Ra’s al Ghul.
They have a feast that night and Damian sits to the left of his grandfather. The right hand seat is empty as it has been since Damian can remember. His grandfather and teachers say that one day he will earn the right to sit at Ra’s al Ghul’s right hand, but in a matter of weeks it will be filled by a woman Damian does not know but remembers in his heart. That however is the future and right now Damian is slowly eating his food thinking of the blood that has dried on his shirt. The blood that had pooled on the ground. A similar scene to the slaughter of an animal.
Damian had not eaten meat in a year, having asked on his seventh birthday to refrain. He had spent the year before that decision learning how to slaughter animals. He held their lives in his hands and he understood the pain he felt just enough to know he did not like it. The way that they flailed or just went limp. Damian wonders for days afterwards if they were scared, he knows that he shouldn’t care but despite his best attempts he couldn’t get the thought out of his head. He understands why at times it must happen but he can’t bear the weight of it. Damian is supposed to be better than the pest that destroys their own world but he still stoops to their levels every day. He eats the flesh of an animal knowing that there are ways for him to not have to. He will not do it if he does not have to.
His grandfather had seemed to almost approve of Damian’s choice and so had many of his tutors. They had praised his dedication and virtue and it was almost better than knowing that he would never have to kill another animal just to consume its flesh. He had done something right. Something to be celebrated, to be praised for. Almost exactly a year later he kills a man, knowing nothing of his crimes, or his life. He doesn’t know his name or if had a family. All that he knows is that Grandfather thought him an enemy and for that he must die.
Killing that man had not felt right, but everyone had acted like it was and he had been praised for his steady hand and strength. He was alway praised when he was killed even when it was an accident or simply a reflex in defense of himself. Death was a simple thing, you lost and you died. They attacked him, they did not win, they died. It was not malicious, it was not cruel, it was life. Their deaths hadn’t felt right but Damian didn’t know how they could be wrong. If he was to die in a fight with an enemy, real or not, he would know it to be honorable and he would go in peace.
His mother never mentions the man that he killed that day nor does she ever mention any of the subsequent deaths at Damian’s hands. She knows that they are happening, there’s no way she doesn’t, but she never mentions them, the blood, or the way that Damian seems to retreat into himself just a little bit more after each one. A shell slowly growing around him. They talk and eat and have tea and their lives apart from each other are kept in the peripherals. Damian pushes down the want in his chest to ask his mother about her life apart from this world. The life that she leads out of the mountains. He wants to know so badly about the world that he is told he will save, but he can never find the right words, and she never offers information unprompted except in the dead of night.
His mother’s sudden appearance in his life changes everything, but Damian doesn’t know that yet. All he knows at the moment is that he has a mother and a father and they are warriors and Damian is their heir. Damian is their legacy, just as he is his grandfathers and the whole of the league. In his daily life nothing much really changes, he trains and learns and is punished and the world keeps going and people keep dying and living and Damian does not know what exists outside the mountains he was born in except that very few leave and return as they please. He can only learn about the world that his teachers deign to tell him about, the other parts exist for him to discover when he is ready. No one ever tells him what that will mean.
They tell him what to do and Damian does it. They tell him what to say and Damian says it, They tell him what to think and Damian ignores all other thoughts to think it. When they tell him to do something seemingly impossible, Damian does it because the only other option is to be punished or to die. He climbs the mountains and he learns the poisons and the weapons and he beats men thrice his age and twice his size. When he is done he does it again quicker and better and again and again. Damian is praised for it because he is the best of his generation, he is the youngest and the quickest and he will not fail because he cannot. He is his mother’s son and she is her father’s daughter.
In between every little moment of his life is his mother. He takes tea with her and they share quarters when she is back from wherever she goes. She is not scared of his tutors and she is not scared of his trainers, for she is above them. She goes as she pleases and takes Damian if she wants. She’ll pull him out of his classes for a day to train with her, or to go to a new area that he hasn’t been allowed to yet, or simply to take a peaceful meal with her, the only thing she doesn’t do is show Damian the world. When she leaves, Damian is left behind. His grandfather says he is not ready, Damian doesn’t know if he’ll ever be. Maybe he’ll train for the rest of his life, growing old in the mountains and only ever seeing the world in death.
The next major step in his training comes sooner than he would have thought. Just a year after the last he takes the third and final rite. He is nine years old and he is standing on a mountain so tall that there is snow piled around and beneath them. He kneels in front of his grandfather and he does not waver when he tilts the cup of what he knows is poison to his lips. He doesn’t not waver when the first drop of bitter liquid touches his tongue. He doesn’t not waver as the cup is taken from his hands or as his instructions are given. He does not waver for he will survive because there’s nothing else he could possibly do. He runs and he fights and wins despite the poison coursing through his veins.
The pain is almost unbearable, spreading slowly from his chest, taking over his body, wrecking his limbs with tremors. At moments he can barely move. But he has to find the antidote or he’ll die a horrific, painful, death, and if he dies he’ll dishonor not only his grandfather but everyone who has trained and taught him in his young life. He cannot die for it would dishonor the mother who he has only known for a year. He’s his mother's son and he cannot die, for she did not.
It takes him twenty-eight hours to get the antidote. It was hidden well in the depths of a small cavern deep in the heart of the mountains. He had to solve twelve puzzles and defeat innumerable enemies to get the information needed to just locate it. He had almost given up while deep in the long winding corridors of stone that had led him to the final cavern. He knew that he was close, but he was tired and weak and in so much pain that it didn’t even feel real anymore. He knew that he could make it but for a moment he entertained the idea of just not.
No longer would his body scream at him to stop, no longer would he have to hear the ignorant sounds of the animals doomed for slaughter and no longer would he have to stain his hands with the blood of enemies that are his for reasons he does not know. It is almost enough to make him stop, but if he does he would never see his mother again, or his teachers, or the cooks who had smiled when he told them he would no longer eat meat. He would never see his grandfather, who had granted him a name, with his face tinged with the most pride he was able to show. He would never meet the father who supposedly is deserving of respect.
The antidote tastes worse than the poison, which is really saying something as the poison had tasted distinctly of death.
If there is a feast that night Damian doesn’t attend. He doesn’t think he could eat a bite of food with the way that the pains all across his body have barely ceased. It still hurts and it will for days, the poison is meant to be painful, slow but deadly, and even when its lethality has been mostly neutralized the pain and weakness might persist for the rest of your life. A reminder of the promises you have made, the pain that you had undertaken in the name of Ra’s al Ghul.
The damage was done, there was no going back the moment the cup touched his lips. His fate had been etched in stone the moment he came into this world, nothing could have led him away from that mountain top.
His mother holds him that night, through the pain and the soundless cries. She holds him like he hopes someone had held her, when she had been in his shoes. When she had kneeled before her own father and drank from a cup that she knew contained poison. He hopes that someone had held her as the pain ripped through her body and he hopes that it had been enough.
“My son. My beautiful son. I’m so sorry. I thought you would have the life I couldn’t give you and yet we are back where we would have been anyways and I have lost years with you.”
His mother whispers to him that night when maybe she thinks that he is asleep or maybe it’s just easier if they both pretend. He will never tell his mother he heard what she whispered to him and she will never ask if he was awake. It doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things as the next morning when he wakes up his mother is gone and has left not even a note in her place.
In his ninth year he sees his mother much more often, almost constantly. She oversees his training and teaches him skills that his tutors say he doesn’t need to know yet. They sleep in the same quarters and she tells new stories about the world that Damian has never known. It sounds more beautiful than it has the right to, with the plants he can barely conceive of and the exotic animals in locals that he has only ever heard vaguely about. She’s gone less and for shorter times and she often comes back bearing gifts of cities that Damian has only ever read about. But as much as she spends more time with Damian, she also spends more time with her father. Her father is her greatest ally and her worst enemy. Right now she is close to him, the nearest part of the orbit, but she will leave and she will not take Damian.
She loves Damian but he is as much Ra’s as he is hers. She gets to see him because he lets her, she gets to love him because he lets her. She gets to know him because her father believes it is too late to save her son. He knows not but the cold air of the mountains and the blood of a knife wound that you take so you can win the fight. The sound of a whip as it hits your back because you will learn respect or you will die. He knows the beauty of the world her father says is worth saving and the depravity of the bits that are not. Damian is only hers in the dead of night and in the early morning when no one else exists.
Damian’s mother gets into a fight with her father halfway to Damian’s tenth birthday. They’d had fights before but this one was different. His mother had screamed and yelled, and it didn’t feel like some petty argument over plans and ideology, this was important. It also wasn’t for Damian, and so he walked away. He hadn’t wanted to, but he wasn’t going to eavesdrop, that would be dishonorable. If he needs to know, then someone will tell him.
The night after their fight, his mother comes into his room. It’s dim, but some part of him wants to say that her eyes are the slightest bit red. He pretends to sleep and maybe she’s distracted enough to fall for it. Silently, she kneels down by his side and reaches her hand forward to tuck some of his hair away from his forehead. Damian knows the exact expression she would be wearing if he opened his eyes. The downturn of her lips and eyebrows, her eyes a mix of love, and utter despair. She starts to stroke his hair and Damian is slowly lulled into a real sleep with her by his side.
When he wakes up his mother is gone again, and there is no proof that she was ever there in the first place, except his memory of the event. A week later she is back and something in her has changed. Immediately she talks to her father and seems to win the argument, at the very least she comes out of it with something that she wants. At dinner that night she smiles in a way that could be considered triumphant.
The very next morning, Damian wakes up to a sword at his throat. He had gotten used to the sounds of his mother's footsteps and had stopped being awakened by them. It is a failure that she never reports to his trainers. Which likely saved him from a quite intense punishment for his complacency.
The next morning he gets farther, but the knife he keeps under his bed is no match for the sword that his mother wields with the knowledge of ten thousand men. He fails week after week. He wakes up to his mothers blade, and when he fails he catalogs all the mistakes and mishaps that had led him to the blade at his throat or the knee on his chest. He trains the rest of the day, he doesn’t know why his mother has started to do this but he knows that it is important. He knows that there is a reason for all of this.
After the second month, Damian can feel nothing but bone deep exhaustion, but he is not so weak as to give in to it. He gets the farthest he has ever gotten that day, but fails due to his over eagerness. His anger at his failure leads him to disrespect and that disrespect leads to him barely being able to move the next morning due to the lashes on his back. He prepares to fight when his mother’s footsteps echo outside his door, but when he sees her face he can do nothing but kneel and feel the blade at his throat.
In the third month Damian manages to disarm his mother, she does the same to him and Damian can not yet win hand to hand. He smiles when his mother pins him to the ground, because she, like him, is breathing hard. The lashes on his back scab over and scar. These new scars pile up over old ones creating a tapestry of mistakes. Sometimes when he moves too quickly it's like he can feel the skin breaking open again. The lines of blood on his bedsheets, however, are his imagination.
Nothing much happens in the fourth month. Damian gets closer and closer to winning this battle with his mother that he still doesn’t know the purpose of. He manages to disarm her almost every morning now. He is not close enough however and as much as this is a battle of skill it is also a battle of wills and Damian doesn’t know how long he can keep this up. Every day his skills improve, but he feels like he is climbing a never ending mountain. He doesn’t really have a choice though. Every day his mother attacks him and every day he defends. There is no choice in there for him to simply surrender. The battle starts with his attack but it can only end with his mothers defeat.
The moment he does win isn’t as momentous as he thought it would be. The world doesn’t change and nothing seems different about him, but his mother smiles for just a blink of a second. So quick that he almost thinks he’d made it up. They had been fighting hand to hand for what felt like hours before Damian had managed to get his sword back into his grip. That was what had done it, his mother still could have won but Damian had the advantage. He saw the opening and he took it and finally it was his mother with the sword to the throat.
The next morning Damian wakes up ready to defend himself, but the attack never comes. He does not see his mother that day nor the next. Damian doesn’t see his mother for two more weeks and by then there is less than a month till his tenth birthday. The celebration for his tenth birthday will be fairly grand all things considered. Not always do children in the league make it a full decade, and none before with the achievements of Damian. He is the best of his generation. His mother makes it clear that she doesn’t want to talk about his birthday and when he sees her after her defeat, she looks particularly stressed if not a little excited. She has a sort of spring in her step, something is happening and Damian knows that it will likely be the last time he will see his mother for a good long while. She is going to leave again and who knows when she’ll be back.
He never does get to see the actual birthday celebration, if there ever was one. His mother wakes him up at midnight on the dot. She shakes him awake softly and he knows not to ask why she is there as she leads him silently out of the room. The jet is a surprise but still he follows his mother on to it. They would not be here if his grandfather didn’t agree to it. The flight is long and silent and Damian refuses to fall back asleep. Instead he sits at attention with his posture straight and his hands clutched in his lap. He had managed to grab a few of his most treasured weapons before being led out of his room and now he is comforted by the feeling of his knife at his hip.
They touch down after several hours and before Damian can even think about leaving the jet his mother has kneeled before him. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders. She’s smiling but it doesn’t feel right and Damian suppresses the urge to twitch and look away. She tells him in smooth, carefully thought out, words that he will stay for the foreseeable future with his father. The father he does not know, the father that he has heard stories about for the past two years, the father that is deserving of respect. He will train under him, he will learn from him, and Damian knows that his mother is not being entirely honest but as she kneels before him he doesn’t know how to ask what she is lying about.
The man his mother presents as his father doesn’t look like he expected, he’s dressed in a costume and it takes everything in Damian not to display unneeded emotion as he connects the Bat from Gotham, and all he has heard about him, to the man standing in front of him and to the man his mother told him stories about. They don’t seem to meld properly but the man who stands before him is not a patchwork doll and even if he was Damian doesn’t have the time to take him apart. Holding a sword to his throat Damian meets his father for the first time and only quite a few years later will he deduce that because of the difference in time zones he would have first met his father around midnight right as he turned ten.