Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

We strychinined the mountain.
We strychinined the plain
Little brother
The coyote won't come back again

His father is dead.

The words echo in his skull like a pulse — rhythmic, constant, unrelenting. Every breath he takes seems to hammer it deeper into him, until it feels less like thought and more like a heartbeat. 

His father is dead.

Behind him, the others have gone back inside. Grayson had lingered the longest, hovering at the edges of his vision with that unbearable look — the kind that tries to reach, to comfort, and fails before it begins. Eventually, even he had retreated, shoulders slumped, leaving Damian alone in the rain.

Pennyworth had offered an umbrella. A small, polite gesture, delivered with that tremor of old grief that never leaves his voice. Damian couldn’t take it. Couldn’t even lift his chin to meet his eyes. The thought of shelter felt obscene — as if dry skin could mean anything when the world itself had gone so irrevocably wet with loss. His suit clings to him, heavy and dark, fabric plastered to his arms and chest like the weight of a shroud. His hair is slicked to his forehead, the rain stinging his eyes, though even that can’t disguise how hollow they’ve gone.

His father is dead, and Damian has only been here for a year.

The others do not want him here. It is clear in their faces – Drake’s sneering face, something sharp enough that it reminds Damian more of fear. Grayson’s open shock, like he’s something in Damian’s shadow that he cannot offer. Alfred’s crippling grief – too full of loss for one boy to accept another. He is a stain, an afterthought to what should be an easy transfer of titles and suits. Damian is not part of them – they had made it obviously clear that he was simply a malignant tumor that must be cut from them, lest he grow and spread his violence through them.

He is a metastasis, he thinks. Something that grew in the wrong place, at the wrong time. And now that the heart that sustained it has stopped beating, it will only wither — or be removed with surgical precision.

His father is dead, and Damian has no real home anymore.

Gotham is no home of his. It’s not his to claim, with its grit and dirt, and something brewing underneath the surface like the underbelly of some great, big beast. It’s messy. Gotham is lamentable – it doesn’t hold the prestige of Nanda Parbat, doesn’t hold the same snarling fight for survival. Nanda Parbat had been clean in its violence — a place of precision, of purpose. There was beauty in its brutality, logic in its hierarchies. Here, everything is mucky. Gotham bleeds from its own wounds, and the people just… live with it. They keep breathing in the smoke, keep patching the cracks, pretending the whole thing isn’t already crumbling. Legacy, morality, and even success are different here.  

He stares down at the headstone. The rain has washed away the flowers left by others, leaving only a single white petal clinging to the marble, trembling in the wind.

Damian’s throat tightens. He doesn’t kneel. He doesn’t pray. He just stands there — a boy built to fight — in a place where fighting no longer has meaning.

Something snarls at him to go back inside, collect whatever things he has, and end things before something else can be ripped from him.

The thought coils in his chest like smoke, wrapping around his ribs until breathing feels like drowning. He’s already half certain of it — that this is the end. They’ll send him back to him. Drake will see to it, of course. Grief needs something to chew on, and Damian is a very convenient bite. He can already imagine it: Drake’s clipped tone, his tidy efficiency as he gathers Damian’s few belongings. His words will sound dutiful and noble, but his eyes will gleam with relief. His position as Robin will be protected, and Damian will be whisked away like a bad dream, swept under the rug like an inconvient mess.

And Damian will call his mother. She’ll answer. She always does.

He checks his watch, without realizing he’s done it; a habit carved into his bones. The face is spattered with rain, the second hand twitching its way past the numbers. 7:00 p.m. in Nanda Parbat. He never forgets the time difference. Never forgets the weather, either — the sharp, clean chill that sliced through the mountain air. There, the sky had been cold and endless, but never heavy like this. Gotham’s clouds are leaden, bruised, sagging under their own weight — a permanent grey smear over the city, like someone tried to erase the sun and couldn’t quite finish.

“Damian?”

He turns his head, his name cutting through the rain like a blade through silk.

Grayson stands there, haloed by the storm — hesitant, drenched, clutching an umbrella with the WE logo pressed across the fabric. The sight of it turns Damian’s stomach. Everything about Grayson is neat in a way that feels wrong here: the tie still tight at his throat, hair flattened by drizzle, the faint tremor of restraint in his jaw. His face is drawn, eyes rimmed in exhaustion. Not pity. Not fondness, either. Just something… thin. Something is trying to hold itself together.

If Grayson offers him the umbrella — and Damian knows he will — it will not be out of kinship or debt. He’d do the same for anyone. A civilian. A stranger. A criminal.

Damian almost laughs at that. Almost.

“Go back inside,” he snarls, turning away before the words can tremble. The sound of his own voice steadies him — harsh and solid, something to hide behind. Anger is easier. Anger makes sense.

Anger is a wall that keeps the rest from spilling out.

Grayson hesitates. The rain slicks across the black umbrella, drumming a rhythm that fills the silence between them. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter — hoarse, like something scraped raw. “Aren’t you cold?”

It’s such a ridiculous question that Damian almost smiles. 

“What do you think?” he mutters, not looking back. His shoulders draw inward, muscles locking against the wind. The cold bites through his jacket, stings across his knuckles, but he doesn’t flinch. He’s used to this — the kind of cold that seeps deep, crawling along the bones until it numbs everything soft inside. It soothes him, in its way. The pain of it feels honest.

It reminds him of home. Of Nanda Parbat’s thin air and stone floors. Of the kind of cold that demanded endurance, not comfort.

He should be happy, he tells himself. He’s going back. Back to order, to certainty, to something that will not break beneath him.

He should be a lot of things.

Yet the thought slides out of reach, dissolving before he can grab hold of it.

Grayson sighs. The sound is quiet, tired. He steps closer, the umbrella now tilted so the rain hits it instead of Damian. The sudden absence of the downpour makes Damian’s breath hitch — like the air itself has shifted.

“You’ve been outside for hours,” Grayson says softly. His voice doesn’t carry the weight of reprimand, only fatigue. The kind that lives in the space between mourning and survival.

Damian’s laugh is low and sharp, bitten off before it can become something else. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

The sarcasm should land like a blow. But it doesn’t. It just falls into the rain — another sound swallowed by Gotham’s grief. Grayson doesn’t move away. He doesn’t speak again, either. He just stands beside him, half-sheltering him from the storm, neither of them knows how to escape.

And Damian, for all his fury, doesn’t step out from under the umbrella. He’s no coward, though either. “You’re going to send me home, aren’t you?” Damian asks – and for all the anger and resentment pressed into the creases of his words, the question sounds hollow. 

Grayson doesn’t answer right away. He shifts, the movement subtle — a tightening of his shoulders, a breath caught wrong. It’s not hesitation so much as… uncertainty. As if he’s standing in a room that no longer feels like his. Damian doesn’t turn to look. His gaze stays fixed on the headstone, the carved name already blurring beneath the rain. His father will not answer him.

Not now. Not ever again.

He’s rotting in a coffin. 

Actually, no—he isn’t.

There had been no body to bury. Damian knows that, though everyone else insists on speaking of the grave as if it means something. He’s staring at an empty box sealed beneath the dirt, a headstone staking claim to nothing. The flowers laid out by Alfred are already beginning to wilt, waterlogged by the rain, their petals pressed flat against the mud like they’re trying to bury themselves too.

The coffin is empty. His father is gone.

His father is going to whatever afterlife awaits him, and Damian knows—knows—that when the man gets there, he’ll wait for the others. Just not for him.

That thought burrows deep, gnawing at something soft in his chest until it feels raw. Damian imagines his father surrounded by the ghosts of those he actually loved—his parents, his partners, the children he raised with open arms—and he imagines himself standing apart, a smudge on the horizon. A mistake that didn’t make it in time.

The League had taught him what happens after death. Rebirth, resurrection, reclamation. They made it sound clean—efficient even. But here, in Gotham, death feels different. Less of a cycle, more of a sentence. Here, there are no Lazarus Pits. Only the damp smell of soil, and the way rain sounds when it hits a headstone carved with a name that will never answer back.

He wonders what his father’s mind had been doing in those last moments. His instructors had once taught him that the human brain preserves its most important memories before the final fade—the sharpest flashes of light, the faces, the voices, the warmth. 

Damian knows, with terrible certainty, that he wasn’t one of them.

He can picture it all too easily: a flicker of Grayson’s smile, the knit of Drake’s concentrated brow, the old man’s trembling hands, even the sharp anger of Todd. But never him. He doesn’t fit anywhere in those final recollections, doesn’t belong in that gallery of love and legacy.

It shouldn’t matter. It really shouldn’t. He tells himself he’s above it. He’s stronger, colder, trained not to care about what the dead remember. But the words sound hollow even inside his head. And still—still—he wants to ask.

The question curls up in his throat like a child hiding from punishment. Did you think of me? Even once?

He doesn’t say it aloud. He can’t. Because his father wouldn’t answer.

His father is dead, and Damian is still waiting—foolishly, stubbornly, childishly—for him to answer. He’s waiting for the grave to stir. For the silence to break. For something, anything, to prove that he mattered in the end. But there’s only rain. And the sound of his own breathing, too loud in the emptiness.

Grayson doesn’t respond. He just stands there like a buffoon — like Damian’s something he’s not. Like he’s a child asking whether daddy will come back. Damian’s not a child. He thinks he hasn’t been one in quite some time.

He clicks his tongue. The rain still pours on, uncaring of the harsh, unfinished questions that linger in the air like smoke. It’s oddly poetic. The rain fills the gap where words should go, a relentless, rhythmic drumming that makes the silence feel almost deliberate. The water runs cold down the back of his neck, soaking through his collar, but he doesn’t move.

He should go back inside. He should have gone back inside hours ago. Damian doesn’t know his father enough to grieve him. There were no happy memories, no soft things to fill his mind, not like the others, anyway. Perhaps the closest person he could find that had…such a tenuous relationship with his Father was Brown. Her face had twisted, arm tucked around Drake, with their insufferable closeness to one another.

His father is dead— and maybe Damian keeps referring to him like that because it’s easier than saying Bruce. Father is a role, a title, an abstract idea he can hold at arm’s length. Bruce is a man, and that man is gone.

Bruce is dead.

All that ties them together is blood, and blood has always been the only language Damian truly understood. It was supposed to mean something, supposed to matter. In the League, blood dictated power, legacy, and worth. He was born of the Great Detective and the Daughter of the Demon. That was supposed to make him untouchable. It was supposed to make him enough.

Ha.

Damian feels nothing of that power. Only the rain carving cold rivers down his neck, seeping beneath his collar, washing away what little connection remains. Damian doesn’t blame his Father. He wants to. He should.

Blame would be easy. Like a compass needle, his instinct points away—outward, always outward—toward anything that isn’t the truth. Toward the faults he can catalogue, the failings he can recite from memory: Father’s inconsistency, his impossible expectations, his maddening softness, the way he seemed exhausted just by Damian occupying the same oxygen.

Perhaps it was Father’s fault. Perhaps it was his inability to cope with the presence of a son shaped too sharply to fit inside this family. A son who felt like a weapon left unsheathed. A constant reminder of all the ways Bruce had failed before and all the ways he would fail again. Still, he had tried at first. Damian remembers that. A hand held out, tentative. A gentle voice. Rules laid out not as traps, but as structure. Patience, offered like something fragile, something new.

And Damian refused.

Refused softness, refused instruction, refused to be seen as anything but a warrior and heir. He met every kindness with suspicion, every rule with defiance, every attempt with a blade hidden behind his tongue.

He was trained to survive affection the same way he survived poison: by assuming it would kill him.

Now he is dead.

His father despised him. Or so Damian tells himself, because that explanation is sharp enough to hold, sharp enough to cling to, sharp enough to be true in all the ways truth is sometimes a choice. It is easier to stitch yourself back together after someone’s death when you convince yourself there is no tenderness left to grieve. When you pretend there was only coldness—something clean you can amputate before the rot spreads.

Love festers.

He feels the water from curled hair trail across his cheeks, cold as a hand that will never ruffle his hair. Cold as a goodbye he never earned. Damian tilts his face towards the downpour. He lets the water blur the world – lets it hide the warmth gathering at the corners of his eyes before it can betray him.

If blood were the only language that ever mattered, then he would have been rendered mute. And Gotham, in its relentless way, washes the last of it from his hands.

“Let’s go inside,” Grayson says softly. His voice isn’t steady. It wavers—tight, choked—like barbed wire is wrapped around his throat, and he’s forcing every word through it anyway. Damian doesn’t turn to look. He doesn’t need to. He knows that tone too well: grief and responsibility, tangled together until neither can breathe.

The silence between them stretches, taut as the string of a bow.

Damian doesn’t respond. He doesn’t nod or step closer to the umbrella Grayson holds like a peace offering. The wind catches the rain and slants it sideways, soaking his sleeves through. The umbrella would help, but it would also mean accepting something—comfort, pity, a shared ache—and the very idea makes his skin heat with anger.

So he just charges ahead. Because that’s what he’s supposed to do. Keep moving. Keep surviving. Keep proving.

Grayson’s footsteps follow behind him—hesitant at first, then steadier, though he keeps his distance. Damian wonders if that’s for his sake or Grayson’s. The air between them feels thick, almost visible, a weight neither of them has the strength to cut through. And maybe that’s how it will always be. Damian is moving forward because standing still feels too close to surrender. 

Behind them, the graveyard hums with rain and ghosts.  Ahead, the manor waits—quiet, sprawling, heavy with memories that don’t belong to him. Damian doesn’t look back. Because if he does, he might start to believe the grave means something.

And it shouldn’t.

* * *

The manor is still when he enters through the door, rainwater slipping from his suit onto the mahogany floors in dark pools. His socks slap against the ground, droplets ringing from flattened down curls. There’s no one in the kitchen. No one in the entranceway. If Damian’s memory wasn’t pressed to the forefront of his mind, one might think no one has lived in this house in quite some time.

The soul of the manor was gone — the Wayne family all dead. Buried, rotting, decaying — stardust into stardust. 

Loss was the only thing tying this family together.

Damian strips off his outer layers, pulling off his soaking socks, and grabbing a folded towel near the entranceway to wring whatever water is pooling in his button-down shirt. Pennyworth must have left it there — even in insurmountable grief, the man still found a way to serve. After all, it was the only mission he had left.

Grayson enters after, tapping his umbrella against the doorframe, kicking off his leather shoes, and breathing in heavily. Damian’s skin crawls with anticipation for the eventual words that will roll off his tongue in fat globs.

“I called your Mother,” Damian can almost hear. His mother who had protected him from becoming a vessel. The same one who had almost had him killed. Was there something so undoing as one’s parents?

“Go dry off in the shower. Then, we’re going to talk.” Grayson says instead, the words betrayed by the utter sorrow in his voice. Damian has never gotten such kindness before – or at least, kindness that has felt so wrong.

Damian goes, not out of any sort of obedience to the man, but because, without someone to command him, without a mission to chase, without a Father to impress, he is simply a boy, soaked with cold rain, shivering in an empty house.

When he comes downstairs, the sting of the hot water still fresh in his mind, his bag is clutched in one hand. Damian stands at the entrance of the stairway, trying to steady his trembling hand against the strap of his bag. His league uniform stretches over sore muscles, molding itself over soft skin. His body vibrates with unspent energy, the kind that coils in the joints and begs to be used, broken, tested. His fist aches. His bones ask for impact. A creature built to bruise just to confirm it exists.

Grayson sits at the table, brow furrowed. His suit is off and his tie is twisted off, as he’s wearing a threadbare T-shirt over his body. The manor is unbelievably quiet – an empty house, occupied only by broken souls and ghosts. A mausoleum inhabited by the living out of habit more than hope.

“What are you doing?” Grayson asks, rising slowly. His voice sounds like it’s been dragged across gravel. Damian blinks at him, mouth twisting. 

“You are…you are going to send me away,” Damian says, after a moment. His hand clenches around the straps until his knuckles whiten around the fabric. Something bitter works in his mouth. His voice sounds thin, sounds scared. Damian hates that he has given away something soft. Damian waits for Grayson to confirm it, already bracing for impact, already calculating where he’ll land.

Grayson shakes his head. That motion alone sets him on fire; his vision wavers from how anger fills him from his boots to his drying hair. A shake of a head may mean disappointment, it may mean try again, do it until you bleed or die trying. To Mother, it meant resisting Grandfather, a clear line drawn in the sand.  

Now, Damian doesn’t know what Grayson means. All he knows is that he was wrong about his interpretation, wrong again, and it’s infuriating.

Damian drops his bag, the sound echoing through the empty halls like he’s fired a gun. His body goes rigid, like he’s triggered a trap he didn’t see. “Why am I here, then? Am I just…some pitiful thing for you to feel guilty about?” The anger leaps forward before he does—the creature inside him baring its teeth. He surges toward Grayson, shoving at his chest. The man absorbs it with a quiet, maddening steadiness.

“No —”

“Then what?” Damian’s voice cracks open, raw and cutting. “Because all I see is a man pretending he can bring someone back by wearing the same suit, saying the same words. Playing dress-up with grief.”

He pushes again. Harder. Grayson lets it land. It only sharpens the fury, makes it flash white. Makes him feel small. Makes him feel weak. “What are you staring at? What are you staring at?” Damian spits, hurling a punch. Grayson catches it, redirects it toward empty air—gentle, controlled. A training touch, not a reprimand. Something blurs at the edges of Damian’s vision.

Fight back.
Fight back.
Hit me.

Hit me.

“You’re useless—! You’re just wasting my time here, and –” Damian slams another punch. Grayson’s hand wraps around his wrist. 

His touch burns.

Damian jerks, instinct rising in a wave—strike, break, escape—but Grayson’s grip doesn’t tighten. If anything, it loosens, as though he’s afraid of crushing something fragile. “Let go,” Damian snarls. The words scrape his throat raw. He tries to twist free, but Grayson shifts with him, guiding the motion harmlessly to the side. A redirection. A gentle correction. Like Damian’s some child throwing a tantrum.

The quiet of the manor presses in like a second skin, thick and suffocating. Damian can hear the rain still ticking against the windows, can hear his own breath punching in and out of his lungs like it’s trying to claw free. His pulse throbs against Grayson’s fingers, an animal caught in a trap. He’s aware of how easily Grayson could pin him, or let him fall — and the fact that he’s doing neither makes Damian’s skin crawl.

“Damian,” Grayson says again, voice low, unsteady. Not angry. Something worse. “Stop. Just—stop for a second.”

Grayson shifts his weight when he says it—just a fraction of a step forward—and Damian’s body reacts before his mind can. His heel skids back against the floor, shoulders tightening, spine bracing for impact that never comes. He hates that reflex most of all: the way his body expects abandonment or violence, and prepares for both as if they’re the same thing.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Damian spits.

The words come out sharp enough to cut, thrown like a blade meant to land first. His free hand curls, nails biting into his palm, aching to hit something solid enough to feel—solid enough to anchor him back into himself. Solid enough to prove someone is still fighting him. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to—”

His voice fractures at the edge, fury splintering into something raw and unguarded. He barrels through the sentence anyway, because stopping would mean feeling something.

“I’m not sending you away.”

The words drop like a stone into the center of Damian’s chest.

He freezes, and something in him stalls mid-swing, mid-snarl, mid-instinct. Like a blade striking bone where it expected flesh. The anger doesn’t vanish; it just loses its direction, ricocheting inward instead.

Grayson steps back just enough to give him space.

Not enough to abandon him.

Damian hates him even more for that. For knowing exactly how much distance to put between them. For not retreating. For not advancing. For standing there like Damian hasn’t already decided he’s going to be left eventually.

“I’m not your father,” Grayson says quietly. “And I’m not trying to be.”

Damian’s nostrils flare. His wrist trembles where Grayson still holds him—not from weakness, he tells himself, but from the effort of staying exactly where he is. 

His voice, when it comes, is small only because rage has eaten through his energy. “Then why keep me here? Why bother? Why pretend?” Damian watches Grayson’s face with pinpointed attention, cataloguing every flicker, every hesitation, waiting for the moment the mask slips. Waiting for the proof that this, too, is conditional.

“I’m not pretending.” A muscle jumps beneath Damian’s eye. He doesn’t blink. He won’t. Blinking would mean moisture, and moisture would mean something dangerously close to grief. Grayson exhales. Slowly. Like he’s trying not to spook a cornered animal. “You think you’re a burden. You think we don’t want you.”

The words land too close. Damian bares his teeth, lips pulling back in something that isn’t quite a snarl and isn’t quite a smile. He leans into it, into the ugliness, because if he becomes unlovable first, then the leaving won’t hurt as much.

“Aren’t I?”

“No,” Grayson says, so firm it sounds like it costs him something. “You’re a kid.”

The word tightens around Damian’s throat like a noose. It strips him of armor, of justification, of the careful narrative he’s built to survive. Kids are helpless. Kids are replaceable. Kids are left behind when they become inconvenient.

Damian lunges—not to attack, not to flee, but because the air itself feels suddenly unbearable, too thin to breathe. Grayson’s grip tightens just enough to keep him from pitching forward into the table. Damian’s breath rattles through clenched teeth, a sound dragged straight from his chest. “Don’t call me that.”

“Damian,” Grayson repeats, softer. “You’re not going anywhere.”

The world tilts downward. Like the ground beneath Damian’s feet has given up on pretending it’s solid, threatening to spill him into the dark yawning beneath the manor. His anger flares again, frantic and desperate, because anger is the only thing keeping him upright.

Because if Grayson is right, if he isn’t being sent away, then Damian has nowhere to run from the grief clawing its way up his spine. That terrifies him more than being alone ever did.

He jerks his arm back again. Grayson finally lets go. Damian stumbles a step, like the release itself knocks the balance out of him. His wrist throbs with leftover warmth as if Grayson’s touch has branded itself there.

He hates that more than anything.

“Right.” Damian drawls, the word pulled thin, stretched past stability until it frays. “You’re pathetic if you think I’m going to believe you.” His voice splinters, rage and fear tangled so tightly they can’t be told apart. “You— you expect me to believe you want me here? That you’re not already prepping Drake to swoop in the second I’m gone?”

The laugh that tears out of him is ugly, all snarl, all exposed fang. “Bullshit.”

His fingers twitch toward the blade sheathed on his forearm—muscle memory reaching before thought can catch it. The instinct lies there, hot and pulsing under his skin. “None of you even like me!” he shouts. The admission bursts out of him violently, like a wound forced open. His words are ugly. His voice a snarl, like an animal pushed into a corner, resorting to spittle and claws and canines. “So don’t— don’t pretend you care.”

The room goes thick, air curdling with things he can’t name.

Damian turns on his heel before anything else can claw its way out of him. His skin feels too tight, his heartbeat a frantic, uneven static thrumming against his skull. He needs distance. Walls. Shadows. Something to hit, or break, or outrun. Because if he stares at this man, with his infuriating kindness, his grief, and his searching face, Damian is going to drown in it. Instead of walking into the darkness, though, the light pulls him back. 

Grayson steps in front of him, something burning in his eyes. “Damian—”

That’s the last straw.

Damian snaps forward, fist slicing through the air with brutal precision. Part of him thrills at it—the clash, the test, the chance to measure himself against the man Gotham molded. Another part just wants Grayson to hit him back, to bruise him hard enough to match the mess clawing through his skull.

Grayson sidesteps, startled. Damian spins with the momentum, drops low, and sweeps his leg out. Grayson leaps clear, landing with a grimace. “Dam—”

Damian doesn’t let him finish. He surges upright, dagger sliding free, and slams Grayson back against the wall. Size doesn’t matter—will does. And Damian’s will is a blade all its own. Grayson barely resists; he’s nothing like he is in training, no fire, no grit.

Just… soft. Pathetic.

Damian presses the dagger to his throat, metal kissing skin. “Why aren’t you fighting me?” he growls, leaning in close.

Grayson swallows, Adam’s apple brushing the edge. “Because you’re hurt,” he murmurs, steady in a way that only makes Damian’s pulse spike harder. “And because you’re my—”

“Don’t.” Damian pushes just enough for the blade to dimple flesh. “Don’t call me that.”  Grayson doesn’t shove him off. Doesn’t go for the wrist. Doesn’t do the thousand things he absolutely can do. He just stands there, maddeningly calm, like he’s holding back a storm he refuses to unleash.

“Why won’t you fight me?” Damian snaps again, voice cracking sharply. His arm trembles—barely, but enough to ignite another flare of rage. “You think I’m weak? You pity me? You think I’m some child who—”

“No.” Grayson’s eyes sharpen, cutting through him. “I think you’re terrified.”

Damian snarls, low and raw. “I fear nothing.”

Grayson finally moves—but not to defend himself. He lifts a hand, slow enough to telegraph every inch of it, and rests his fingers on Damian’s wrist. “Fighting me won’t bring him back,” he whispers. The words hit like a blade between ribs. Damian’s grip falters. The dagger slips from his fingers and drops to the floor. The clang reverberates through the room like a struck bell.

Damian stares at the ground, jaw clenched so tight it aches. The logic of his statement pierces through the veil — Father won’t come back. There is no second coming, magical resurrection, and not even the pit can bring back people from the dead. 

Death does not care about the purity of one’s soul, the sentimentalities of those around you, or how many times you have bested it before. It only cares about the soft belly of the creature enclosed within its jaws, and how easily its canines can puncture its flesh. 

Death is not cruel. Cruelty requires intention. Death is simply patient. Once it has its sights on you, once it has seen the sand trickle from the narrow base, it is as inevitable as betrayal, as punishment, as disappointment. 

But death is ironic, though.

It strikes where you least expect. It leaves the wrong people standing. If Damian wanted someone to care, he would have accepted Grayson’s hand a long time ago.

Damian’s fist snaps up before he even realizes he’s moving, knuckles slamming square into Grayson’s jaw.

* * *

Damian winces as he cleans the cut on his cheekbone, the blood trickling through the wrinkles of his skin like water carving itself through sand. His knuckles are cut and bleeding after they had splintered through the kitchen cabinets. Grayson didn’t hold back after the second strike.  A dull throb runs along Damian’s forearm — reminder, punishment, proof. Damian was a little impressed with how easily Grayson had restrained him. 

Though he’d never admit it. 

He licks the blood from his face and splashes himself with cold water, turning the porcelain a stained pink. Maybe the only way to earn respect here was to prove to them he was no child. He didn’t need a mentor or a father or a teacher — didn’t need to learn about how much responsibility lay in the power he earned, nor that he had the stubbornness to keep fighting all day. 

Damian walks out of the bathroom and watches Grayson through the hallway. He’s fixing the bruising on his face with some ice, but it seems that the fight has done more than simply hollow him out.  Grayson looks…still. Not calculating, not angry, just exhausted in a way Damian can’t read, which is worse.

Unreadable men get you killed.

“Damian,” Grayson calls out, hoarsely. Damian stops in his place and watches as Grayson tilts his head towards the other bathroom. 

He takes a seat on the bathroom floor, forearms braced on the crook of his knee as he stares at Grayson looming above him, tidying up the first-aid kit resting against the countertop. He tries not to look trapped. He tries not to feel it. Still, the light makes him look otherworldly — though it does little to hit the bruise blooming on his jaw and the split lip. Part of Damian flares with pride. Another part wonders if this is where the punishment begins.

“That is not going to happen again,” Grayson says.

“What? Me kicking your ass?” Damian curls his hands into a fist. 

“No. Us fighting each other. Batman and Robin don’t do that. Don’t do…this.” Grayson emphasizes, gripping the countertop, glancing down. 

The words catch up to Damian too quickly — like sugar hitting his bloodstream after a crash. Batman and Robin. He’s Robin now. 

Damian snaps his jaw shut. Words that once seemed so sure on his tongue, words that he had memorized in hopes of one day making them true, now disappear like fog through spread fingers. “What do Batman and Robin do?” Damian asks, swallowing down what feels like glass.

Grayson sighs. “Not this. Not fighting. Definitely not ruining the Manor’s kitchen.” He pauses for a moment, thinking thoughtfully. Despite the absolute elation Damian feels in this moment, that he has proven himself, Grayson does not seem to share that same pride. It shouldn’t hurt. 

Then Grayson just…stares at him—at the cut on Damian’s cheek, at the swelling already darkening beneath his eye. He stares long enough that Damian has to look away, heat rising from the back of his neck. “I’m sorry about your face. I shouldn’t have –” Grayson cuts himself off. He runs a hand through his hair, as if only to ground him to the moment. 

It’s ridiculous to think he cares. People get hit; that’s the cost of breathing. Especially him. This is just another tally mark on a body littered with them. Another day. Another bruise. “Tt. Doesn’t matter,” Damian mutters.

Grayson’s mouth tightens at that—at the little, practiced dismissal. The kind meant to seal off a wound before anyone can see it bleed. Damian pretends he doesn’t notice, but he tracks every micro-expression anyway, every flicker of emotion across Grayson’s dumb, open face. He waits for the tell: the twitch of impatience, the cutting edge of disappointment, the faint recoil that usually comes right before someone decides he’s too much trouble to keep.

None of that shows.

Grayson just sinks onto the floor beside him, slow enough that Damian can track the movement and assure himself it isn’t a feint. He plants the ice pack against his jaw and hisses a little under his breath. “It does matter,” he says quietly. “You got hurt.”

Damian bristles. The words feel like a slap. It implies fragility, weakness, and something that needs tending. He doesn’t need tending. He needs structure. He needs clarity. He needs…he isn’t sure what he needs, but he knows it isn’t that.

Damian lifts his chin. “I’ve taken worse.”

“I know.” Grayson doesn’t argue it, but doesn’t soften his words either. Grayson just agrees, calm and steady. It throws Damian more than any contradiction would have. “But I still shouldn’t have hit you like that.”

Damian’s fingers twitch. Not with pain, never that, but with confusion. Apologies are not weapons he knows how to disarm. In the League, apologies were admissions of failure. Weakness. An opening waiting to be exploited. He stares at Grayson, trying to decide what angle the man is hunting for. 

If the man was angry, Damian would understand that. When one is attacked, one must defend oneself; people don’t survive jobs like this and patrols like Grayson’s without the reflexes and instincts to protect oneself. Damian punched him. Grayson dodged the next strike and attempted to take control. Damian split his lip. Grayson, in his attempt, dragged Damian to the floor. The rest was nonsensical — a blur of shouted names, flesh scraping against tile; Damian does remember his hand going through the mahogany cabinets, but they decided to face Pennyworth’s wraith another day. 

If the man was sad, or even hurt, Damian would…understand that as well. Perhaps he thought this was going to be easy—say a few comforting words, offer some sentimental gesture, and Damian would fold neatly at his feet like an obedient little soldier. Perhaps he was let down by Damian’s reaction.

Yet, this open regret doesn’t align with the cathedral of human emotions, of catalogued expressions, of cause and effect that Damian has built. Instead, he looks regretful, guilty. As if the man had decided to strike Damian for no reason at all. Not even out of punishment or training or retaliation. It’s infuriating. “What do you want from me?” Damian asks, voice a little sharper than he intends. The question slips out raw, half-thought, half-instinct. Damian regrets it instantly.

Grayson’s brows knit, faint and earnest. “To not be at war with you,” he answers. “To work with you. To trust each other. That’s what Batman and Robin do.”

Damian almost laughs. It’s a brittle thing, balanced between his teeth. Trust is how you get stabbed in the spine by the person you bowed to. Trust is a leash disguised as loyalty. Trust isn’t easy.  “Why?” Damian blurts out before he can stop himself. “Why do you want that? With me?”

Grayson looks at him like the answer should be obvious. And that alone puts Damian on edge. Nothing obvious is ever safe. “Because you’re Robin now,” he says simply. “And that means you’re my partner.”

Partner. That one hits deeper than it should. The room feels too warm, too full, like the walls are inching closer. Damian shifts, every instinct whispering trap even when logic can’t find one. Grayson reaches for a fresh ice pack from the first aid kit, cracking it in half,  and, after a beat of hesitation, nudges it toward Damian.

Damian stares at it, then at Grayson’s stupidly open face, waiting—waiting for the manipulation, for the leverage, for the hidden demand. But there’s nothing. Just patience. Just that maddening steadiness again.

He takes the ice pack. Just so he has something to hold onto. Not because he needs it. Grayson’s shoulders ease the tiniest bit, like he’s relieved, and Damian almost jerks away from the warmth of that reaction. “When do we start?” Damian asks, trying not to let the excitement bleed into his words.

And Grayson huffs a breath. “When you don’t look like a raccoon.”

Damian should bristle. He should scoff or bite back something cutting. But instead, there’s this flicker—small, traitorous—curling low in his chest. Something like pride. Something like belonging. It’s embarrassing how quickly it grows, how warm it feels. Almost like the sudden heat of a bruise when touched.

He looks down at the ice pack in his hand, its condensation gathering against his skin. Proof that this moment is real. Proof that he isn’t being sent away.

Grayson walks past him toward the kitchen doorway, muttering about brooms and broken tiles, but Damian stays where he is, rooted. Breathing.

Robin.