Chapter Text
When Damian first met Bruce, the man wasn't told he had a son, thanks Talia.
Damian's priorities were, gain his approval, and slay anything that got in the way.
Cold, that's what the league taught him. He had almost killed Tim at first, because only he is worthy as the spot for Robin. Then he was told it's wrong. He didn't get it. Honestly, not at first. Then he'd met Dick, Alfred.. and the others.
For a while he hadn't gotten used to it. He's still tensed with Tim. And he doesnt think Bruce truly trusts him yet.
That, well, stung. Just a bit. He didnt understand. As the years went by with him as Robin (15 now, he arrived at 8) He did finally get a taste of how family is like, sort of. Unlike Ra's teachings. He knew he was loved here. But he isn't sure if the others still fully accepted him. After all he was raised as an assassin. And he kept having...ins and outs with the family.
Like tonight. He had an argument with Bruce, regarding a lot of things. Started small. Then it rose. To the point Damian said things he couldn't take back, so did Bruce. His words had stung. Hes too stubborn to show that he's hurt.
The Gotham night wrapped around Damian like a familiar shroud. Cold, indifferent, and far easier to navigate than the minefield of Wayne Manor's hallways.
He landed hard on a rooftop, boots scraping against gravel, and for a moment he simply stood there. Breathing. The winter air bit at his cheeks through the domino mask, but he welcomed the sting. It was honest. Pain didn't pretend to be anything else.
"You're just like him."
Bruce's voice echoed in his skull. The words hadn't been shouted—that would have been easier to deflect. No, they'd been delivered with that low, disappointed rasp that cut deeper than any blade Damian had ever trained with.
"Controlling. Manipulative. You think you know what's best for everyone, so you make the choice for them. Do you even hear yourself, Damian? You sound exactly like Ra's al Ghul."
His gloved fingers curled into fists at his sides.
The accusation had come after Damian had suggested, no, insisted—that they handle the rising League of Shadows activity with more extreme measures. Not killing. He wasn't that boy anymore, obviously. But decisive action. Permanent solutions. And Bruce had looked at him with something that wasn't quite anger.
It was worse.
It was hurt. Betrayal. As if Damian had just confirmed every fear Bruce had ever harbored about the child Talia dropped on his doorstep seven years ago.
"I thought you were past this."
Past what? Past being him? Past the blood that ran through his veins? Past the first ten years of his life that he couldn't un-live no matter how many charity galas he sat through or how many times he helped Alfred in the gardens?
Damian's jaw tightened until his teeth ached.
He hadn't cried since he was four years old, when Mother told him sentiment was weakness. He wasn't about to start now.
A scream echoed from the alley below.
Instinct took over. His body moved before his mind caught up—years of training, of programming, flooding through his limbs as he launched himself off the rooftop. Grappling hook. Mid-air adjustment. Silent landing.
Two men. One woman. Average Gothan night.
Damian dispatched the first in three seconds. A strike to the throat, a leg sweep, and a precise kick to the temple that sent him sprawling unconscious. The second drew a knife. Damian disarmed him, broke his wrist with a sickening crack, and drove his knee into the man's solar plexus hard enough to steal his breath and his consciousness in the same instant.
The woman scrambled back, clutching her torn coat, eyes wide behind smeared mascara.
"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you, thank you—"
"Get inside," Damian said flatly. "Lock your doors. Don't come out until morning."
She ran.
He stood there in the puddle-lit alley, surrounded by the groaning bodies of two men he'd just broken, and felt nothing.
No satisfaction. No righteousness. Just the hollow echo of Bruce's words, bouncing around the empty chambers of his chest.
"You sound exactly like Ra's al Ghul."
The thing was—Damian didn't even fully disagree.
He was his grandfather's heir. He was the Blood Son. He'd been raised on a philosophy of strength, of results, of the cold calculus that one life weighed against a thousand was nothing at all. He'd spent seven years trying to unlearn that mathematics. Trying to see the value in every breath, every heartbeat, every person who stumbled through this cursed city.
But sometimes—when he was tired, when Bruce was being impossibly stubborn, when the weight of trying to be something he wasn't sure he could ever become pressed down on his shoulders—the old math crept back in.
You kill one to save a hundred. You break the rules because the rules were written by people too weak to do what's necessary. You don't apologize because apologies are for those who did something wrong, and you did what was right.
He'd almost killed Drake.
The memory surfaced unbidden, as it always did on nights like this. Timothy Jackson Drake, with his bruised eyes and his too-clever smile, lying in a pool of his own blood while Damian stood over him with a blade still wet.
"We don't do that here."
Grayson's voice. Not Bruce's. Dick, who had somehow looked past the assassin, the weapon, the feral child lashing out at a world that had never wanted him. Dick, who had seen something worth saving when everyone else—including Damian himself—had seen only a monster in training.
.
He'd never apologized to Drake.
Not properly. Not with words. He'd saved his life a dozen times since then—would Drake count those as apologies? Did they erase the memory of cold steel pressing against his throat?
Probably not.
Damian climbed a fire escape to the nearest rooftop and sat on the edge, legs dangling over the abyss. His comm unit was silent. He'd switched it off three hours ago, after the fifth time Dick's voice crackled through, gentle and worried in a way that made Damian's chest hurt.
"Little D, come on. Just tell me where you are. We can talk about this."
There was nothing to talk about.
He'd said things too. Ugly things. "You're not my father. You're just a man who took me in because you felt guilty. Because Talia tricked you. I was never anything but an obligation to you."
He'd watched Bruce's face go pale. Watched something crumple behind those blue eyes that had seen too much, lost too much.
"Is that what you really think?"
Damian hadn't answered. He'd just turned and walked out, because the alternative was standing there and admitting the truth—that he didn't know what he thought anymore. That every time he looked at Bruce, he saw both the father he desperately wanted and the judge who had yet to deliver a final verdict on whether Damian was worthy of the name Wayne.
He pulled his knees up to his chest.
He was fifteen years old. He'd killed his first man at six. He'd commanded armies at eight. He'd held the sword of Ra's al Ghul and been told he would one day rule the League of Assassins.
And now he sat on a freezing rooftop in Gotham, alone, because he'd pushed away the only people who had ever looked at him and seen something other than a weapon.
A snowflake landed on his glove.
Then another.
Damian watched the snow begin to fall, silent and white and completely indifferent to his turmoil, and he felt something crack along the fault lines of his carefully constructed walls.
Does he really belong?
He didn't know.
He'd never known.
And the scariest part—the part that made his throat tighten and his eyes sting in a way he refused to acknowledge—was that he wasn't sure he ever would.
He heard another cry for help. Well, he's gotten used to patrolling to numb out the stinging in his chest. He's been doing that when he first became Robin. When his family often forgot, he's also just a child.
Stop thinking about that. It's weak.
And so he stood back up and grappled torwards the cries.
.
When he got there. Its.. silent. Nothing was there aside, well, a rat. It quickly scurried off.
The silence isn't reassuring. It rang off multiple alarms in his head. And the first thought that appeared was-
A trap, this is a trap.
He cursed, how did he let his guard down? As he turns sharply, throwing a batarang at nothing.
A sharp, blinding light was what he was met with. It didn't hurt, not really. But his consciousness quickly faded.
Though his last conscious thought was a burning, furious how.
How had he let this happen? Seven years of Bruce's paranoia drills, of Alfred's pointed reminders that complacency is the assassin's true enemy, of Dick's too-cheerful lectures about situational awareness—and he'd walked into an ambush like a rookie.
Because he'd been thinking about them.
About Bruce's disappointed eyes. About Dick's worried voice crackling through a comm he'd deliberately silenced. About a family that might or might not want him, and a question he couldn't answer, and a heart that had been bleeding quietly for hours without his permission.
Weak.
The word echoed in the darkness as consciousness slipped away. His grandfather's voice. His mother's. His own.
Weak, weak, weak—
Todd is never going to let me live this down.
Then nothing.
.