Work Text:
The cave always smells like a war room.
Stone sweats a cold, metallic damp into the air; antiseptic clings to the edges of everything like a second skin; oil and ozone and old smoke hide in the seams of the machines, in the creases of the suits, in the permanent black under fingernails that never stay clean no matter how many times Alfred tells him—gently, firmly, like a prayer—again. And when Damian breathes, when he drags the chill into his lungs until it bites, it feels less like air and more like penance, a controlled suffocation. Discipline.
Which is almost comforting, because discipline is something he understands.
He was raised on it. He was forged in it. He was praised for it the way other children are praised for kindness, for softness, for being easy to hold.
He learned, above all, that the body is an altar and an arena: you kneel on it, you break on it, you pray with it, you bleed with it, and if you do those things well enough, someone older and stronger will look at you and call you worthy.
And then Bruce Wayne looked at him, and the word crumbled into loose sand at Damian’s feet.
Damian is at the workbench with his gloves stripped off, his fingers bare and raw in the cave’s air, because the polymer catches on the tiny ridges of his knuckles and he cannot stand the way it makes him feel—contained, muffled, made safe. The cut across his index finger is small, a thin red mouth, and it keeps opening when he flexes, like it wants to speak. There is a smear of dried blood on the edge of the bench, not his, he thinks, though he isn’t sure, because tonight was fast and loud and full of bodies and the kind of chaos that makes its ownership meaningless.
A knife lies in front of him. Not a kitchen thing, not a toy: a League blade, balanced and narrow, the metal dark as if it has drunk the light. It is not necessary here. That is the point. That is always the point.
He should put it away.
He should not want it.
He should not need the familiar weight of it in his palm the way other boys need a hand on their shoulder.
He tells himself these things as if repetition might sand them into truth.
Behind him, the cave speaks in its small mechanical tongues: the quiet whir of the Batcomputer’s fans, the soft click of a rack settling, the distant drip-drip of water that never stops. It is a cathedral built from granite and circuitry, and Bruce walks through it like an ancient gargoyle cut from the same stone.
Damian hears him before he sees him. He hates that.
Footsteps, measured. Weight, controlled. A presence that is careful not to startle, as if Damian is a feral animal with too many teeth.
As if Damian is not supposed to have teeth at all.
“Damian.”
Bruce’s voice is not raised. It never has to be. Authority, in him, is not volume—it is gravity. It fills the room and presses on Damian’s ribs, reminding him of his place before this man. His commander.
Damian keeps his eyes on the knife. He watches the overhead lights fracture along the blade’s edge, thin and white and cold. He watches his own reflection distort in it: a boy cut into fragments, a face split into sharp little truths.
“Yes,” he says, because he knows the rules of this place too. Because he wants, stupidly, to do it right.
Bruce comes closer, and the smell of him arrives before the rest: leather, sweat, the faint ash of Gotham’s night. Damian does not know which of his senses provides him the information, but the air of concern is unmistakable, worn like a near constant bruise over Bruce’s presence. Bruce’s care is not warm. Bruce’s care is an iron band around the chest.
It hurts. It holds.
“You took a knife on patrol,” Bruce says.
Not a question. Not an accusation, exactly. A fact placed on the table like evidence.
Damian’s pride lifts its head in him, sleek and venomous. His wrath stirs beneath it, a deeper animal, all muscle and heat. He swallows them both and feels them scratch the inside of his throat like swallowed glass.
He does not point out that, should Bruce have his way, Damian would be the only of his sons to leave the manor absent of a blade. Neither does he look to the twin swords laid carefully on the table beside him, dulled to the point of near disfunction. What disrespect Damian has done to his weapons.
“It was useful,” Damian says. “It worked.”
“That’s not what I asked.” Bruce’s gaze drops to the blade. Then to Damian’s hands. Then, because Bruce cannot help himself, to Damian’s cut finger. Damian resents that last part almost more than anything else—the way Bruce notices every small injury as if it is an argument against letting Robin exist at all.
Damian curls his fingers, hiding the cut. A childish gesture. A petty one. He hates that it feels instinctive.
“I used it,” he says. “And no life was lost.”
Bruce’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t like being answered like that—like a lawyer, like a League instructor.
“Not for lack of intent,” Bruce says.
Damian’s mouth goes dry. He tastes copper that isn’t blood. He tastes the memory of tonight: a man’s breath, sour with fear; the slick wet of rain on brick; the snap of a wrist under pressure; the moment a blade could have finished what his hands began. The moment Batman’s hand closed around Damian’s forearm—hard, unyielding—stopping the final movement as if he were stopping a fall.
No.
Not shouted. Not begged. Just no, like a law of the universe.
Damian had looked up then, furious, and seen something in Bruce’s eyes that made his fury feel suddenly… young. Not weak. Not shameful. Just young, like a bruise in fresh skin.
Now, in the cave, that same look lingers in the space between them, unsaid but present, a silent sermon.
Damian lets the knife sit. He doesn’t touch it. He wants to touch it. He wants to hold something that agrees with him.
He wants—this is the terrible part—Bruce to agree with him.
“You hesitated,” Bruce says, softer, as if softness might make the words easier to swallow. “You did the right thing.”
Damian laughs, once, sharp and humorless. The sound scrapes. It doesn’t belong in a place built for secrets.
“The right thing,” Damian repeats, and the phrase tastes foreign, like he has bitten into wax. “By whose definition?”
Bruce’s eyes narrow. He is patient until he isn’t. He is merciful until he decides mercy has done enough.
“By mine,” Bruce says. “By the oath you took when you became Robin.”
Damian’s chest tightens at the name, because Robin is supposed to mean something bright, something rising—spring birds, laughter, the idea that a child can stand in the dark and not become the dark. Robin is a story Bruce tells himself. Damian is the bitter truth.
There are moments when Damian’s grip on his mind wavers minutely and he is capable of admitting a softer, no less dangerous truth: Damian was happier when he was Richard’s Robin. Richard had required no oath, and the joy of Robin had been honest and unwitting. Damian had felt the magic of it creeping in and thawing him. Then Drake had brought Father back, and Damian had lost Richard to Bludhaven’s skies instead.
“You mean the oath you made me take,” Damian says.
Bruce flinches, minutely. Damian sees it anyway. He always sees it. He has been trained to see weakness the way other children are trained to see love.
Bruce steps closer, until the workbench is a boundary line between them: a threshold of steel and wood, of tools and weapons, of all the things a person uses to make themselves into something else.
“You needed to take that oath more than I needed to hear it,” Bruce says.
Damian’s wrath blooms. It is a heat behind his eyes, a pulse under his skin, a flood against a dam. He grips the edge of the bench so hard his cut opens again, and a bead of blood forms, round and dark, as if his body is incapable of enduring a Father’s anger without offering sacrifice—penance—in return.
“How dare you tell me what I need?” Damian says, and his voice comes out too controlled, too even, which is how he knows he is close to breaking. “You do not care what I need. It is what you need me to be. It is your unceasing, vacuous crusade to make of this city something clean and palatable.” He spits the words now. His gaze, previously trained on the workspace before him, shifts to lock with Bruce’s own. “When I came here it was to be your only son—but in your eyes I am less your child than all of your strays, from Richard to Brown. I am less your child than this God-forsaken city is. My blood is nothing to you.”
Bruce’s gaze flicks to the blood, as if believing Damian to have meant the statement literally. Damian lifts his finger, shows the red like the accusation it is.
“I am dirty to you. I may as well be your mirror, yet all you can see is— ” Damian’s voice cracks, and his face burns at the show of weakness. He begins again. “You can’t look at me without seeing her. Without seeing him. Without seeing the League.”
“That’s not true,” Bruce says immediately, reflexively.
Damian can’t stop now. The words are a river. The cadence finds him relentless.
“I was taught,” he says, “that mercy is a luxury afforded to those with nothing to lose. I was taught that threats are to be ended permanently, with certainty, with blood, because anything less is an invitation to be hunted again.”
His throat tightens. He swallows hard. He keeps going.
“I am not League, anymore,” Damian says, and it is the first time he has said the words and truly meant them. “I have things more precious to lose than my title. I am responsible for more than my blood. How can I claim to love this horrid city, to love its people, if I am unwilling to protect them as I would my own? How is it that the man I spared today is more valuable than the lives I know he will ruin? I can’t—” He stops, because the next sentence is too raw, because it is a child’s wound. He forces it out anyway. “I am what I am. This is my nature. I cannot love any differently.”
The cave seems to go quieter, as if even the machines are listening.
Bruce’s face changes in slow degrees. There is pain there—genuine, human, horribly unarmored. Damian hates it. Damian wants it. Damian wants to reach into it with both hands and pull out whatever approval is hiding inside.
“You were a child,” Bruce says, and his voice does something it rarely does: it breaks at the edges. “You shouldn’t have been put through that.”
Damian’s pride rears up, protective. Pride is easier than grief. Pride is armor.
“Richard was eight when you began his training,” Damian says. “I managed.”
“I wasn’t teaching Dick to kill,” Bruce says, and there’s steel now. “We don’t get to make those decisions Damian, no matter how much we might want to.”
Damian’s hands curl into fists. His nails bite his palms. They had returned, now, to the same argument they’d had thousands of times before.
“Do you hear yourself?” Damian whispers. “Do you hear me? There is no decision. Not on my part. I am not a judge, I am a consequence. This—Gotham—is what you get when you remove consequences.”
Bruce’s eyes flash. “We have consequences, Damian. Laws. Despite what you may think, you are not incapable of showing criminals humanity.”
“Humanity.” Damian steps forward, and the bench is no longer enough of a barrier because his anger has made him taller, because his desperation has made him reckless. “You are asking me to cut away the parts of myself you can’t stand. You are asking me to be grateful for your disgust.”
Bruce’s mouth tightens. “I’m asking you to choose.”
There it is. The word that always feels like a trap.
Choose.
As if Damian has not been choosing since he could hold a blade, since he could count his own breaths in the dark. As if choice is something that lives in a vacuum, untouched by training, untouched by bloodline, untouched by a lifetime of being told what he is.
Damian laughs again, and this time it almost shakes.
“Simple, then,” Damian says. “You think I haven’t already tried—”
He stops, because tried is admitting failure.
Bruce’s eyes soften again, damn him. Bruce’s mercy is always a blade too; cutting out from Damian’s ribcage.
“I know you’re trying,” Bruce says.
The words land wrong. They land like pity. Like a hand on his head. Like a reward you give a dog for not pissing on the carpet.
Damian’s wrath spikes.
“Don’t,” Damian says, and it comes out as a growl, low and sharp. “Don’t speak to me like I’m—like I’m a victim.”
Bruce holds his gaze. He does not look away. He rarely looks away, and that is part of why Damian is here at all, part of why he keeps circling Bruce like a planet around a sun that threatens destruction with every degree of increased proximity.
“You’re not a victim,” Bruce says. “But you’re in pain.”
Damian hates how easily Bruce sees it. Damian hates how Bruce names it without permission.
“I am fine,” Damian says. A lie. A refrain. A barricade.
Bruce glances at the knife again. The metal seems darker under his gaze, as if it remembers what it has done in other hands.
“You wanted to kill him,” Bruce says, as if Damian has not already admitted this, as if it has not been the focus of their entire conversation.
Damian’s pulse hammers. In his ears, in his wrists, behind his eyes. He thinks of the man’s face, the way fear makes features ugly, the way a plea can sound like an insult when you’ve been trained not to hear it. Then he thinks of the kid, a girl no older than Damian, clutching her ripped clothing, somehow less afraid at Damian’s blade and the blood it reaped than she had been pinned below the man.
“Yes,” Damian answers. “Yes,” he says again. “Because he hurt that girl, and he has no doubt done it before, and will do it again. Because I can, and he does not deserve to live.”
Bruce’s gaze hardens. “And you think death is the only answer.”
“I think death is the only certainty,” Damian corrects. “I think the League is right about one thing: consequences must be real. Permanent. Felt.”
“You’re wrong,” Bruce says, and the certainty in Bruce is as absolute as any League doctrine, as immovable as any oath. “We don’t get to decide who deserves to die.” And here they are again, the cyclical argument that has become so familiar Damian could write and perform both their parts with perfect accuracy.
Damian’s mouth twists. He changes the script. “You decide every night who deserves to be crippled.”
Bruce flinches again, and this time it’s more visible, because the truth is a blade too, and Damian knows exactly where to press it.
Bruce’s voice goes quiet. “I decide to stop them.”
“By breaking them,” Damian says. “By terrifying them. By making yourself into something they fear.” His breath comes fast now. He feels like he’s running, like he’s bleeding out words. “You’re a hypocrite. I may learn more about cruelty in your methods than in my own.”
“Damian,” Bruce says, and there’s something almost like pleading in it.
Damian’s throat tightens again. He tastes the old training—iron and discipline and the clean, sharp scent of polished steel. He tastes the new training—rubber mats and gritted teeth and the bitter restraint of holding back. Two sets of doctrine, two liturgies, and he is the body they are both trying to claim.
He looks at the knife.
He looks at Bruce.
And in the space between them, he feels the war inside himself like a muscle tearing: the part that wants to be praised for ruthlessness, and the part that wants, desperately, humiliatingly, to be praised by him.
Damian’s hand hovers over the knife. He doesn’t pick it up. He doesn’t push it away. Suspended, he is a held breath. A threshold. A moment of crossing that could go either direction.
Bruce watches his hand. Bruce watches him like he is watching a fall.
“Damian,” Bruce says, and there is something more in his voice now that is almost fear. Not of the knife. Of what the knife means. Of what Damian might choose, and what that choice would turn him into.
Damian’s fingers tremble, just once. A small betrayal.
He hates it. He loves it. He uses it.
He closes his hand—not around the knife, but around the air above it, as if he is gripping an invisible throat, as if he is holding back a force that wants to surge through him and out into the world.
“I don’t know how to be what you want,” Damian says, and the sentence is quieter than all the others, stripped of ornament, bare as bone. “And I don’t know how to stop wanting you to want me.”
Silence.
Bruce’s face shifts again. Pain, yes. But also something else. Recognition. Responsibility. The kind of grief adults carry when they realize they cannot fix what they have taken into their care.
“You don’t have to earn this,” Bruce says, and his voice is rough now, as if he is forcing the words past his own armor. “You don’t have to be perfect to be my son.”
Damian’s laugh is small, broken. “Is that what I am? Your son?”
Bruce opens his mouth to answer, but says nothing. He looks down at the knife. Then he reaches, slowly, deliberately—not grabbing, not snatching, not disarming. He sets his hand on the bench near it, palm open, empty.
An offering. A boundary. A question.
“Yes. You will always be my son.” Bruce says.
Damian stares at Bruce’s open hand.
He thinks of the League’s lessons: an open hand is a weakness; an open hand is how you get cut; an open hand is how you prove you are not afraid of bleeding.
He thinks of Bruce’s lessons: an open hand is restraint; an open hand is mercy; an open hand is how you pull someone back from the edge.
Damian’s pride wants to spit. Damian’s wrath wants to bite. But beneath them, beneath the sins that keep him animate, there is the small, stubborn hunger of a child who has never stopped reaching for something he did not deserve and should not want.
He touches the knife, finally—not to lift it, but to slide it away, across the bench, toward the shadows where the weapons are stored.
The metal makes a soft sound against wood. A whisper. A concession. A goodbye.
Bruce watches, and something in his shoulders loosens, as if he has been holding his breath too.
Damian keeps his eyes on the bench. On the smear of blood. On his own cut finger, still open, still speaking.
“I am not weak,” Damian says, because he has to. Because if he doesn’t say it out loud, the cave will swallow him.
“I know,” Bruce says.
Damian’s chest tightens, and for a moment he doesn’t know if it is relief or rage or grief. It feels like all three braided together, a cord pulled taut.
He stands at the threshold of himself—League-bred, bat-trained, murderer, guardian—and he does not cross cleanly into either world.