Chapter Text
Coyot’, Coyote
What have we done?
Little Brother
Where, where do you run?
Damian knew death was not an enemy, nor even a companion — more like a shadow stitched into his breath. There were no words large enough to hold it, just as no words could contain the ache of birth or the half-sweet ache of nostalgia. Some things slipped past language entirely, like ghosts through open doors. Emotions, concepts, life — all messy and human, soft and fragile when compared to the hard-edged lines of nouns, of words.
He had been born in blood. Baptized in it, really, and sometimes he wondered if it had seeped too deep, if it had stained whatever part of him was meant to be clean. Maybe it turned his soul bloody, too. Perhaps, that is why he acted as brazenly as he did.
Damian remembered the first life he took, or perhaps the first one he watched being taken, and how the air had turned thick, like water refusing to let him breathe. The man’s eyes dimmed slowly, and though Damian did not yet have the words for it, he knew, the way a lamb knows the scent of the slaughterhouse, that there was no return from that moment. Something essential had been severed inside him, but he was too young to know what.
He didn’t see the velvet spittle gathering on the dead man’s lips, the still, glassy look of the man’s eyes, nor the slight twitch of nerve endings still firing in his fingers.
Because all Damian saw was his mother.
The world fell apart when he looked at her, blurred beyond comprehension, the edges smudged like a daydream. It didn’t matter if her hair was shining with coconut oil or blood, her hands trembling from wielding a sword or clutching his hand, her voicek hoarse from screaming commands or from late-night bedtime stories; all he felt was the smothering, inescapable love.
Perhaps she was considered monstrous. And maybe she was called merciless. But she was his mother. And that, to Damian, was reason enough for reverence. Death became as routine as the number of steps in a home, the chipped corner of a countertop, the layer of dust atop picture frames. There was no hesitation— though, he knew, distantly, something was wrong. The smell of iron, sharp in the air, like the aftermath of an explosion; the tackiness of blood coating his fingers — another child’s fingers wrapped around a camera lens; the heaviness of dropping a body — his parents’ fingers just scrapping past his outstretched hands.
But he was a prince. Princes did not hesitate, princes did not question; the whole world pounced on every sign of weakness, crushing weaklings underneath stubby fingers and sharp nails like gnats.
Still, that criminal’s whistling, dying breath did not shake him. His Father’s anger and shock did.
His father was fundamentally different from his mother. His father did not see death the same way. It was not supposed to be brought on, controlled. It was not his right to take a life. Instead, it was supposed to be suppressed, stifled for those weak enough to stand within reach.
And that set them apart; it set Damian apart from the rest of them.
The manor is a quiet, intimate place. It’s not like the League, steeped in shadows, the way it bustles like an irritated hive, with the smell of rot and blood and incense. There are no torch-lined walls, gold-plated ceilings, glimmering metal, or shining swords. Still, there is the weight; a legacy, a question — something being asked, and Damian cannot find an answer. Walking through the walls of the Manor feels like he is being consumed; an all-fire licking oak-flesh and melting fat. The shadows breathe softly, like something waiting. Each corridor carries the faint ache of memory, as though the house itself mourns those who had built it.
The roll of his fingertips trace the framing of the Manor Walls, rises over the edges, lines the wallpaper, slowly collecting dust beneath a bandaged thumb.
No one had been in this corridor in quite some time.
Damian glances around, eyes catching how the morning light glistens against the glass chandelier. He studies the carpet, thoroughly vacuumed, though hastily, as if the person who had done so had only vacuumed to get the job done as quickly as possible. Pennyworth did not seem like an individual who would do such a thing. The thought unsettles him. Everything here seems touched by absence.
Damian continues down the corridor, though he’s unsure of what he’s attempting to find. He doesn’t know why he keeps walking. Perhaps he's looking for something, or perhaps for the comfort of motion itself. His punishment is a “grounding” — a child’s sentence, laughably so. It feels absurd, being told to stay still, when stillness is its own kind of violence.
But when Father had spoken, there had been something in his eyes, something final. Something that told Damian this was only the beginning of a reckoning. And as he walks, the silence begins to itch under his skin. He could almost feel it: the crawling restlessness, like lying too long on an anthill, waiting for the real punishment to begin.
Damian pauses, his thoughts coming to an abrupt end when the manor’s hall opens into an arched doorway, a place that doesn’t fit Damian’s memory. Father never mentioned a master bedroom, let alone the main bedroom.
The room at the end of the corridor is large. And yet, so very small.
Damian pauses at the threshold. The air inside feels different, heavier, as though time itself had stopped breathing. White cloths drapes across the furniture like burial shrouds. Dust drifts in the faint light, suspended midair, too still to fall. There is the faint, artificial sweetness of air freshener — a feeble attempt to mask the scent of things long gone.
A chill sweeps through the space. Damian’s eyes flick toward the window. It’s half-open, the glass clouded by time. Fingerprints smudge the frame, pressed there once by someone who’d reached for light or air or escape. The wind makes the curtains sway, gentle as a heartbeat, and for a moment, Damian could imagine the house itself exhaling.
He steps further inside. His socks make no sound against the carpet. His gaze trails upward to the tall ceilings that seem to bow beneath invisible weight, to the shapes of covered furniture, to the perfume lingering faintly in the adjoining bathroom. It’s floral, fragile, too human to have survived this long. He can almost see her there, brushing her hair, humming something soft, and him, buttoning his cufflinks by the mirror.
Damian’s throat tightens.
This is not Father’s bedroom. He knows that instantly. He’d glimpsed Father’s room before — its austere order, its meticulous lack of comfort—a room made for a soldier, not a man.
But this… this space lived. Even in its silence, even in its ruin, it breathed on what had once been love.
His eyes catch on the wall. And then he sees it.
Oh.
Oh.
It was a portrait —
Of Thomas and Martha Wayne.
His brows pinch together, a nausea coiling in his stomach as he steps closer. The man’s smile is gentle, almost awkward in its warmth. The woman beside him radiates something delicate yet indomitable, a presence that could quiet storms. Damian feels as though he is trespassing, an uninvited guest in the private cathedral of someone else’s grief.
He stares. His pulse trembles in his ears.
His grandfather’s face is kind, not cruel; nothing like the sharp-edged men Damian had grown up around. This was not a man who commanded armies or carved power from blood. He was just… human. And beside him, his grandmother. Elegant, radiant. Their faces are captured not in grandeur, but in the soft ordinariness of two people who believed in life.
Damian’s mother had told him of them once, in fragments. Stories carried with an odd reverence, a trace of irony, as though she were reciting an old myth. He had read the files, the reports, the grim newsprint. But those were words, cold and precise. Not this. Not their faces.
How does one grieve people they have never met?
How does one feel the ache of absence when there was never presence to begin with?
He wants to look away, but cannot. The longer he stares, the more it hurts. It’s a wound that shouldn’t exist, a ghost of a ghost.
He swallows hard. And then —
He feels it. A shift in the air. The weight of another’s gaze. Damian turns. His father stands in the doorway.
His expression is not the storm Damian had expected. There is no anger, no sharp reprimand, and no flash of fury. There is only stillness. His hand is braced against the frame, knuckles white, as though he had come running to stop Damian or to protect something sacred, only to come find himself unarmed by what he’d seen.
For a heartbeat, neither speaks.
His father’s eyes move past Damian to the room; the draped furniture, the window left open, the lingering perfume. The silence between them is thick, too full of things unsaid. Damian has never seen his father look so small.
The great detective, the man the world believed unshakable, stands as though the floor might give way beneath him. His shoulders tremble, barely, the way one might tremble before a fall. Grief has carved him hollow, quietly, over the years. This room is a wound that hasn’t closed, and standing in it has reopened everything at once.
He has kept it like this. Untouched. Preserved. A tomb disguised as a bedroom.
Damian realizes that the air freshener, the cleaned carpet, and the vacuum lines that stopped too short aren’t mistakes, but rituals. Small, trembling attempts by a man who could not let go. The room is a conversation his father has been having with ghosts for decades.
And now Damian has walked into it.
The silence stretches, a trembling thread between them. Damian feels the hair rise on the back of his neck. His body, trained to anticipate pain, readies itself anyway. His spine straightens, shoulders squaring like armor tightening around fragile bones. He inhales sharply, just enough to make himself taller, steadier, so the tremor in his hands won’t betray him.
“Father—” he starts, the word sticking in his throat. He can already hear the excuses forming, crisp and mechanical.
“Please get out.”
It’s almost too soft to be real.
For a moment, Damian thinks the house itself has spoken. A creak of the manor’s ribs or the whisper of the curtains shifting in the draft. But then he sees Father’s mouth move, the word please catching on his breath like glass.
The sound is raw, stripped of its authority. Damian swallows hard, but his feet won’t move. “Father—” he tries again, desperate now, unsure what he’s even speaking for.
His father steps forward. Not fast, not with fury, but slow, as if each movement costs him something. His hand finds the doorframe again, fingers pressing so tightly into the wood that his knuckles turn bone-white. He looks like a man clinging to the edge of a precipice, held together by nothing but habit.
Damian can’t bear to watch. It’s humiliating. It’s excruciating.
Damian moves.
He bursts forward, brushing past his father’s shoulder. The air feels too thick, heavy in his chest, every breath scraping like gravel. He doesn’t look back.
Behind him, his father doesn’t call after him. He just stands there. Still, almost rooted, hand on the frame, eyes fixed on something Damian cannot see. The old grief in him rises like a tide, reaching for what it has always been denied. In that single gesture — the way his hand trembles against the door as if it’s the only thing tying him to the world.
In a way, Damian thinks it is.
And still, he runs.
Down the hall, his breath comes uneven, a staccato rhythm against the quiet manor air. The portraits blur past him; nameless ancestors with hollow eyes. He wants to be furious, to spit out something sharp and defensive, to carve out a space in the suffocating silence. But the anger dissolves before it can take shape.
It melts in his chest like sugar on his tongue, too sweet and too brief, gone before he can taste it.
Father should have shouted. Should have slammed the door, torn the air with the sharpness of grief that Damian could have fought against. That, he could have understood. Yet his whisper was worse.
By the time Damian reaches the end of the corridor, his lungs burn. He presses his palms flat against the wall and lets his head fall forward with a dull thud. The plaster is cold against his forehead.
He squeezes his eyes shut.
He hates this house.
He hates the way it hums with ghosts and the way it knows his father better than he ever could. Damian hates that grief here has weight, shape, smell, and that it lingers like perfume, clinging to everything and everyone.
Damian lets his breath stutter out, soft and shaky. He hates it here. And he understands it.
The indomitable grief of this haunted place – its corridors and windows, the pictures never adjusted, the height markers never painted over, the children here who have nothing else tying them to this place but memories – it rises over him like a tidal wave, and Damian braces himself.
Eventually, he finds the courage to leave his room. Damian tells himself he is not scared, but even the repetition of that mantra is more of a comfort rather than a cold, hard truth. His back involuntarily clenches when he descends into the cave, but he sets his jaw. Damian's eyes roll over the sight of Drake and Grayson, whispering together, bent over the computer. Something about seeing the two together makes Damian feel sick.
With envy? With anger? With resignation?
Damian puts on a scowl. “What are you two imbeciles muttering about?” He snaps, crossing his arms at the forefront of the entrance. Drake’s shoulders clench instantly, and he turns in the chair, something sour in his expression. Grayson simply stares.
His eyes rake Damian’s form: crossed arms, training undershirt, standing small and weak in the cave, like he’s searching for something underneath. Damian knows Grayson won’t find it. He’s gotten good at that.
“What are you doing down here? You’re grounded,” Drake cuts in, leaning forward until shadows cast dark circles under his eyes.
“If you think that stops me, you’re more stupid than you look,” Damian snaps back. He watches Drake’s mouth open, ready with some barb or venom, only for the expression to collapse in an instant.
It’s startling, the speed of it. Something akin to hatred flickers, then dies. His brows shoot upward, then flatten into something unnervingly blank. Drake glances at Damian, and there’s a knowing look on his face that tells Damian one thing: Father.
Damian freezes.
He doesn’t turn; the shift in the cave’s air is enough. The cold here is metallic, humming like the breath of a great sleeping beast. It coils around him, unwelcome, and somehow familiar. “Damian.” The name falls flat against the stone. A command without volume.
Damian lifts his chin, a tiny tilt sharp enough to cut. “Father.” He enunciates the words, every syllable and vowel, as if he forms them cleanly enough, maybe it will mean what it’s supposed to. Perhaps he’ll feel something other than this spreading, acidic disappointment. His father is many things. Unyielding. Foolishly compassionate. Infuriatingly earnest. But he is not the man Mother painted in stories—some ironclad warrior-saint who could tame armies and shadows with a single patient look. Damian has met harder instructors in the League at age five than the man standing behind him now.
Despite this, even though his father is not cruel, he is not trying to be terrifying; Damian’s hand trembles in his place. He hates people approaching from behind him. He hates the blindness of it, the helplessness. Damian hates it more when he’s already broken a rule so clearly drawn that even he couldn’t pretend to misinterpret it.
He crushes the tremor by force.
Drake’s chair creaks as he swivels. Grayson straightens, slow as dawn. Together they look like sentries disturbed mid-watch. Drake’s expression curdles immediately; Grayson’s doesn’t change at all. He just looks—steady, unguarded, maddeningly perceptive.
And Damian can feel Grayson’s gaze sliding over him, taking measure in places he doesn’t want measured. Noticing things Damian never permitted to be seen. The man’s eyes tighten, sharpen, narrowing with the same instinct a predator has when prey exposes the soft part of the belly.
Damian scowls before he can stop himself.
“You’re grounded,” Father says. His voice has edges worn smooth from repetition. He’s staring at Damian, like he’s trying to see something.
They all are. They’re trying to see a different boy in him, perhaps someone softer; a victim. Damian isn’t sure what, or whom, Father saw in the Master Bedroom, but he refuses to admit it. He refuses their care – a trap meant to ensnare those who were naive enough to trust the first kind thing offered to them. Damian is not abused. He will not fall for their tricks like a child unaware of cruelty. He came here for a mission. To prove something. To train. If they see someone other than a son, the rightful heir to the mantle, that is their mistake, not Damian’s.
“I’m aware,” Damian replies, lifting his chin. “But I was not aware that entering the cave was forbidden. Shall I add it to the ever-growing list of pointless restrictions?”
Father stares at him for a long, heavy moment. Damian refuses to look away, even as something in his chest coils tight. His breath stutters, just once—just enough that Grayson’s eyes sharpen.
Ugh.
Drake leans forward, shadows gathering beneath his eyes like bruises. “Do you ever listen to anyone?” he snaps.
“Do you ever think before you speak?” Damian fires back. “It would spare everyone.” He hears Drake’s breath hitch, a frustrated, choking sound. Grayson flicks his fingers—barely a twitch—but Damian catches it, some gesture of restraint or warning. It’s irritating how obvious Grayson becomes when he thinks he’s being subtle.
“This isn’t a challenge, Damian.” Father tries again, but the softness in his voice cuts into Damian. Like he’s a child, in need of reprimand. Something scared and frightened, needing to be held and comforted.
Damian has seen more death than they can imagine. He’s experienced enough pain and sorrow and ache for lifetimes, and they think they can treat him like someone who doesn’t know what challenge is. Like he doesn’t see right through their facade. As if their kindness makes them a saint. Like offering him something false makes them a savior.
“Everything is a challenge. Clearly, your previous failures did not experience much of them, seeing as they are deficient in every category.” Damian snaps, shoulders bunching near his neck. His face grows heated from the memory, but whether it’s from anger or embarrassment, Damian doesn’t know.
“What were you doing upstairs?” Father asks, something tight in his inflection. Damian’s spine goes stiff. The question lands too close to marrow. Damian senses no anger in his words, no blame, but the defensiveness rises in Damian anyway. The question still prods at something, a weak point in his armor.
His answer comes sharply. “Exploring. If you didn’t want me there, lock your doors. A simple concept.”
“That room—” Father begins.
“—was not meant for me?” Damian snaps. “Yes. That much was clear.”
Strike one.
There is a brief, hanging stillness. A thinning of the world. Grayson’s eyes flick, not with pity, but rather with something sharper, something that sees without gentleness. Drake looks between them, shoulders tight, waiting for the explosion.
His father takes one step forward, and Damian takes one step back, like a dance routine. Or perhaps, more accurately, the moves of two wolves circling each other, waiting for the other to strike first. A flicker passes over Father’s expression. Something like hurt, or guilt, or something else Damian cannot bear to name. Grayson is the one who moves next. Slowly. Carefully. Like Damian is something feral, something cornered.
Which, perhaps, he is.
“Hey,” Grayson says gently. “You okay?”
The others flinch at Grayson’s question, as if suddenly remembering that they were not merely bystanders, but active participants. Damian’s throat closes. The question cuts deeper than any reprimand could.
He wants to say yes.
He wants to say no.
He wants to say I should not have gone in that room—your parents are dead, and I do not belong anywhere in this house.
But a cornered animal always bites first. “I do not need your concern,” he snaps, the words cracking against the cave walls like brittle bone. “I need competence. Something you two seem incapable of providing.”
Father steps toward him again. It’s just one step. Damian’s muscles lock anyway. He hates how instinctive it is. How automatic. How deeply the League trained fear into his spine. Father’s eyes flicker with pity, with an unspoken apology. Damian’s anger rises like a random spurt of fire.
“Come upstairs,” His father says quietly. “We’ll talk.”
Damian’s heart jackhammers. His palms go cold. Talk never just means talk. It means discipline. It means expectations not met. It means failure. “No,” Damian says, too quickly. “If you wish to fight, then fight. If you wish to threaten, then—”
“I’m not threatening you.” Father’s voice cracks. Barely. Damian hears it anyway.
He searches his Father’s gaze for deception, for a trick, for cruelty. He finds none. That doesn’t stop the walls from closing in on him, from the feeling of being watched sending shivers down his spine. He can feel Drake’s gaze burning into his flesh like a brand. The way Grayson is categorizing Damian.
Damian doesn’t step backward when Father steps forward again. He doesn’t back down from a fight. Not ever. “I’m not him. You can’t fix me.”
Strike two.
The moment the words leave Damian’s mouth, he feels the shift — deep, subtle, like a pressure drop before a storm breaks open the sky. Grayson’s breath stutters; Drake’s jaw snaps shut. Even the cave seems to recoil, screens flickering faintly as though they, too, understand the taboo Damian has just sliced open.
Father’s face empties so completely it’s almost a skill—a mask forged from grief and discipline and too many mistakes to count. A mask Damian was never taught to craft, only to fear.
“Damian,” His father says. His voice is still quiet, but the quiet is different now—hollowed out, iced over.
Damian meets his gaze anyway, refusing to blink, refusing to wilt. Inside, something curls in on itself, tight as a wounded fist. He hadn’t meant to say Todd’s name — not really. But he also meant every syllable. He is not that boy. He is not someone who is meant to be taught love, kindness, and how to help people. He will not be fixed like some stray dog – he is a prince who stares at the hand offering to feed him, and cuts it at the bone.
“Enough.” Father’s voice is lower now, scraped raw underneath the cold. Grayson flinches, barely perceptible; Drake stares like someone was watching two cliffs grind closer, waiting for the collapse.
Father straightens. Not taller, but heavier. Gravity gathers around him. “Go to your room.”
Damian laughs—sharp, thin, a blade with no handle. “No.”
He sees Grayson tense, sees Drake brace. But Damian’s focus tunnels to his father alone, to the angle of his stance, to the way he is not angry. Anger, he could handle. Anger has rules. Anger is familiar.
This—this quiet—is not. “No?” Father repeats the word low, disbelieving.
“I did nothing wrong,” Damian says. His voice is firm, crisp, even though his heartbeat punches against his ribs as if demanding escape. “You sent me here. You made me part of this mission. If you wish to blame someone for your mistakes, perhaps look in a mirror instead of—”
“Damian.” Grayson’s voice, soft, warning. Who is he to warn Damian, as if they have any tie at all?
Damian ignores him. “—instead of punishing me for sins I did not commit.”
Strike three.
Father’s eyes shudder. Something fragile, something human, disappears behind steel. Damian watches the transformation, cataloging the loss with a strange ache he refuses to name. For a heartbeat, the cave is utterly silent. “Go,” He says.
It is not loud. It doesn’t need to be.
The word is frigid. Absolute. The kind of cold that kills slowly, that seeps into bone and never leaves. Damian feels it hit him, a clean impact just beneath the sternum. A command that is not shouted because it does not have to be repeated.
Grayson closes his eyes. Drake looks away.
Damian’s breath catches—just once. Barely audible. “I am not a child to be banished,” he says, but the words lack the venom he wants. His voice is steady, but thin around the edges, stretched too tight.
Father doesn’t move. “Go,” he says again—colder, quieter, final. Damian feels something in him splinter. Not enough to break. Enough to hurt.
Slowly—like every step is a surrender he will later punish himself for—Damian turns on his heel. He does not bow his head.
And he does not look back.
* * *
Damian doesn’t come down for dinner.
He rots in his own bitterness – stewing in the cold, empty room that he’s been forced into the corner of. It should feel claustrophobic, the curved roof looming over him, closing him in from all sides, yet he feels safe. Enclosed. There’s little chance of something sneaking up on him or something encroaching on him. What unsettles him isn’t the quiet. It’s how long it takes for someone to notice.
Hours.
It takes hours.
For all the anger pressed into his heart, he wanted someone. Not out of fondness, but rather to ask, “Do I even matter here?” Perhaps it is his own fault, and perhaps he is the cause of his own undoing. One’s mind is hypocritical and superficial, and Damian’s is no different because, for all his bitterness, he’s been waiting for that tentative knock ever since he slammed those doors shut. Waiting, in the same stubborn way a wound waits to be reopened.
Perhaps if he were angry, perhaps if he was loud, then his Father’s attention would slide over him like a beam of concentrated sun. Burning, yes, consuming, yes – but in the brief moment before one’s skin splits from the burn, before Icarus’ wings burned from the heat, all Damian feels is warmth.
His eyes land on the door again. Like an animal trapped in a too-small cage, his eyes flutter over the same exit points, a habit that he picked out of necessity rather than familiarity.
Window. Door. Closet Door. Sword.
Window. Door. Closet Door. Sword.
Window –
He knocks his head against the dry wall, throwing up his dagger and catching it. Even though there’s nothing actually keeping him here, the thought of exiting the room and exploring these labyrinthine halls, just to avoid the censorious stare of the household members, sets his skin alight. Still, the room he’s in may as well be the League’s cellar for its prisoners – finely decorated, but otherwise just as simply decorated as any of the other guest rooms. Damian hasn’t been permitted to hang furniture, posters, or pressed flowers, or to put up his paintings.
He’s simply a ghost, floating from one place to the next, hoping to find something to tie him here. That’s his job.
To learn.
To train.
To earn his place.
Instead, he’s holed up in a cold, empty room – like an unwanted, ugly piece of furniture, or a gift that doesn’t fit the rest of the furnishings.
Damian shivers. The cold here is biting. He suspects it’s not necessarily due to the temperature, but rather the fact Damian yearns – not just for his Mother, though that’s a phantom pain whose pain deepens with every passing day – but rather for touch. For movement. Mother’s touches were simple – a corrected stance, a feather-light touch on his forearm, the gentle press of her kiss to his hair with the same reverence used for blades.
There is no one here. He cannot even earn it through fighting.
Knock, knock.
It’s light enough that he hardly hears it at first. Damian stills.
The dagger lands in his palm with a soft, metallic tap, but his fingers go slack around it. For a moment, the sound doesn’t quite register as real. After hours of silence—hours of that tight, aching stillness pressing in on him from all four walls—a noise like that feels imagined. A phantom. Another trick of a mind left too long with nothing but its own sharp edges.
But then it comes again. Knock, knock.
Barely more than a breath against the door. Damian’s pulse skips. Not quickens—no, quick would imply excitement or anticipation. This is something else. A startled, wary jump, like a stray cat hearing footsteps on the stairs.
He stays frozen in place, sitting on the floor with his knees pulled up, the cold sliding through the fabric of his clothes and settling into his bones. For a long, brittle heartbeat, he isn’t sure if he should move at all. Movement makes noise. Noise can be punished. And people don’t usually knock when the intention is kindness.
But the knock doesn’t repeat.
It waits. Almost…patiently.
Damian swallows around the dry, tight feeling in his throat. His eyes flick to the door again—Window. Door. Closet Door. Sword. Window—just as he’s done all night, mapping escape possibilities out of reflex, not strategy.
But now, there’s a presence. Someone. And oh, the horrible, humiliating tug inside him at the realization. He shouldn’t care. He shouldn’t want. He shouldn’t feel that tiny pull in his chest—sharp as a hook—that whispers: Someone came.
He braces a hand on the ground and shifts himself in his seat, straightening his posture. His joints protest, stiff from sitting on the cold floor for so long. He doesn’t cross the room. Instead, he sits there, staring at the door like it might dissolve if he looks away.
Another soft knock. “Damian?” It’s quiet. Gentle. Raw around the edges.
Grayson. Of course, it’s Grayson.
For a moment, Damian hates him for coming. Hates him for the softness of his voice, for the consideration, for not barrelling in with demands or raised voices like others might have. He hates the tenderness of it, the gentleness, because his chest can’t hold both rage and longing without tearing somewhere in the middle.
He forces his expression to be blank. “You may enter,” Damian says, because that is the safest compromise. And, he doesn’t want to open the door himself. That would mean admitting he’s been waiting.
The doorknob turns quietly, like Grayson is trying not to startle him. The door opens a few inches, then fully, only when he’s certain Damian isn’t backing away.
Grayson steps in with slow, careful movements, like he’s approaching someone wounded or cornered. Which, Damian supposes bitterly, might be true. He looks exhausted. There’s a cut on his cheek he didn’t have earlier, and his clothes are rumpled, as if he’d been pacing or working or worrying. His eyes, though—those are what make Damian’s breath hitch.
They’re soft. Concerned. And…relieved to see him. Which makes no damn sense. “Hey,” Grayson murmurs. “You didn’t come down for dinner. I was worried.”
Damian’s throat tightens. Worried.
The word undoes something in Damian’s chest — something coiled so tightly Damian doesn’t realize why he’s unwinding in the first place. No one gives worry freely. To take up space in someone else’s mind — when Damian was perfectly fine with occupying only his Mother’s — feels like stepping into dangerous territory.
His eyes narrow.
Damian wants to scoff. He wants to break something. He wants to ask why it took hours. He wants to ask why anyone would care. He wants to ask a thousand cruel little questions that ache inside his ribs like splinters.
It all collapses when Grayson takes a step closer. Just close enough that Damian can feel the warmth radiating off him — warmth Damian has been aching for without realizing he was freezing.
Grayson kneels, leveling his height, eyes searching Damian’s face. “What happened earlier?”
Damian scoffs, turning his cheek towards the desk. “Tt. Is your memory that atrocious, because I believe you were there for that endeav–”
“No.” Grayson corrects. It knocks the words right from Damian’s teeth. He’s so close that Damian almost itches with unspent energy. “I mean…earlier.”
Ah.
Right.
That.
Damian blows a breath through his nose — an involuntary reaction, like that of a flinch. Well, Damian supposes it is, in a way. “If you want to know, you can ask your father.” Damian spits, enunciating the word. To pry the words from Damian? He won’t allow it. He’ll snap and bite, he’ll take the cold again just to avoid the acidic gaze of the man kneeling before him. He won’t allow for interrogation, for some information to be pulled from him like teeth.
He simply won’t allow —
“I want to hear it from you.” His tone is harder, but not cruel. A correction.
It hits a part of him that Damian didn’t realize existed. This man, whom Damian has known for less than a month, is asking for his input. Like it matters. Like he’s ignoring all the static noise — and his mind finds Damian the way a compass needle points North.
Damian’s hand tightens around the hilt of his dagger. His fingers rise over the rivets of leather wrapping around the hilt, his thumb running over the ridge of the blade’s center. Damian clicks his tongue. He clicks his tongue. “I intruded on something I shouldn’t have,” he says simply.
It’s not a lie—just not the whole of it. The truth is heavier, a stone lodged in his ribs. He intruded twice. Stepped into places where he did not belong, into grief that wasn’t his to witness, into the hollowed-out spaces of people Father held close. He might as well have dug his fingers into cold soil and unearthed the corpses himself for how guilty he feels. For how unforgivable it must be.
Father will never look at him the way he looks at the others. How could he, when something in Damian is so fundamentally wrong it tugs him toward every wound, every locked door, every unsaid word? He doesn’t know how to leave well enough alone.
Damian doesn’t know how to accept things that contradict themselves. He doesn’t know how to exist in a world where grief sticks to the air like humidity, where love and loss bleed into one another so easily they’re almost indistinguishable.
The question festers, refusing to be quiet.
Father is…hollow in places Damian didn’t expect. The kind of hollow carved by a name that should not be a ghost.
How long can a person mourn before the sorrow shifts shape? Before it ferments into something sharper, stranger? How long can someone hold vigil over a living soul as if they were already gone?
How does one continue funeral rites for someone still breathing—still infuriatingly, stubbornly, vividly alive?
Damian stares at the dagger, sees his own warped reflection in the metal, and wonders—not for the first time—whether Father’s grief is a condemnation or a warning. Whether it says something about Damian.
Or whether it says something about everyone he’s ever tried to love.
Damian throws his dagger in the air. In an instant, Grayson has snatched it in his hand, before pinning him with some faraway look. It makes Damian want to writhe in his place —instead, he simply sets his jaw. Pushes back the fear and the guilt that tear into him like flesh-eating bacteria, and prepares himself as one does for a fight.
By watching how they move.
Grayson presents the dagger. Damian snatches it back, something sour curdling in his mouth.
“Come down,” Grayson offers. He stands above Damian, his black hair haloed by the lights above him. Damian can’t look up without squinting from the light. His hand reaches out towards Damian.
Damian doesn’t even know what he’s offering.
He stands.
And Damian brushes past him.