Chapter Text
Meeting Damian Wayne is a death sentence.
You're dead the moment he meets your eyes. By the time you've exchanged hellos he's murdered you ten times over, his sharp little smile hiding a mind already soaked in your blood.
Damian doesn't like to shake hands. It opens up too many possibilities, like exposing your throat to an animal torn free of its leash.
He can't help it; the Animal is unstoppable instinct, hardwired into him by a Demon crafting the perfect weapon. Damian was the thumb of a Fist, nothing more. A fist that drives a dagger between your ribs every time you meet.
...
Good
Adjective
- Having the required qualities, of a high standard
- To be desired or approved of
...
Mother told him he was an artist; the blade was his brush, the cattle his canvas. She taught him the art.
Young, three years old. A faceless old man kneeling at his feet on a carpet the color of funeral roses. Even with the man’s head bowed, Damian had to stretch up onto tippy-toes to get the sword to rest properly on his neck.
Mother told him to paint. The sword dropped. And stuck. Red spurted, the man made a noise like glass being crushed to liquid, but the blade lodged itself halfway through his neck. Mother's eyes flashed and she swooped down to scold Damian, so he had to grit his little teeth and shove. The sword jerked along like a hacksaw caught in a tree stump.
The body flopped forward like a landed fish. Blood blended with the colour of the carpet, so it looked like the old man was drowning in himself.
There was blood on Damian's face, collected in the baby fat folds of his cheeks. Mother soothed him, told him it was merely paint. But she did not wipe the blood away. It sank into his pores that day. Tattooed itself under his skin.
Grandfather was not pleased that he made such a mess. He had to do another beheading the next week. His tutor. That one was cleaner, because Damian owed the man that much.
Monet, Mozart, Picasso, Mother crooned.
The third time he made no mess at all.
...
When he moved to Gotham, the Animal in Damian’s head became a distraction, nothing more.
Ten years old, out in the field with Grayson, Damian found it couldn’t distinguish between the enemy and his new allies. So in his mind’s eye he was breaking Batman’s neck even as he saved it.
Damian thought this was better. If he could kill these people it proved he was better than them, even the usurper who had stolen the cowl that was so rightfully his.
But then the usurper saved Damian’s life. Again. And again, and the idiot still won’t stop doing it, and for the love of God, Grayson, stop smiling because it’s so much harder to kill someone who has a reason to smile.
Please.
The worst part is that Damian seems to be the reason for Grayson's smiles. They come too often to be lies, too naturally.
(Not like Mother’s, which were treasures to be fought for, once won revealing themselves as worthless trinkets. Fool’s gold.)
So now Damian felt guilty, for stealing more than just Richard Grayson’s life. He was stealing his trust, too. Why did that feel so much worse?
For the first time, Damian tried to leash the Animal.
...
One night Richard tried to hug Damian from behind. It was for a bet with Drake, to see how long he could hold on before Damian complained.
Damian didn't complain. He broke Richard’s nose.
The leash snapped and the Animal pounced, savage, snarling. Blood. Richard was on the floor and Damian saw the whites of his eyes as his fist came down on Richard's throat-
A knee sank into Damian’s abdomen and clarity came with the pain. By the time Richard picked himself up, Damian had curled himself into a ball around the rabid thing, cramming it back into its cage.
Grayson came to him later, after Damian had barricaded himself in his room to plot a course back to Infinity Island and his own kind. Grayson knocked first, cracked a joke about learning to stay in Damian’s line of sight. It was greeted by cold silence (go away, don’t smile, get away -) but Grayson forced his way inside anyway, and perched on the edge of Damian’s mattress. A robin ready to take fright.
He was cautious now, even if he didn’t want to be. Symptom of being raised by the Batman. It all comes down to instinct in the end.
“What?” Damian snapped, not looking up from his maps. Too aggressive. Symptom of being raised by the Demon.
“You know this is a good thing, right?”
The smile he wore belonged on Mother’s face, not his.
“How could this possibly be good?”
“It’s proof.”
“Of what?”
“That we can take you, you jumped up little shit.”
And he slid closer, resting his hand on Damian’s shoulder long enough to make it clear he was proving a point. It was light and skittish, like he was petting a lion cub soon to be a man eater, but it was there. When Grayson left, Damian sat for a long time before putting his maps away.
In the end he didn’t go to Infinity Island. He felt guilty about that too.
…
The key to training any wild animal is to establish territory. When Father returned and started up the Wayne functions and charity balls again, Damian found the perfect place to trap it. Instead of killing his family, he'd set the Animal on everyone else.
So he slaughtered the pompous fat cats full of hot air and whiskey fumes and nothing else. Each time he had his cheek pinched or his hair mussed by some sagging old crone, Damian would grit his teeth and smile, even as in his mind’s eye he stepped over another lifeless corpse. He dropped chandeliers on them, he poisoned their martinis, he stabbed them to death with Pennyworth’s tiny dessert forks, jab jab jab to each major artery.
The lone wolf in a world of lambs.
And for a time, this was enough.
…
The Animal met its match in Jonathan Kent.
Right away, Kent was frustration.
Because, on account of being virtually indestructible, he stumped the Animal entirely. Of course, Damian being annoyed by this was ridiculous, because why would he want to kill Superman’s son? Tactical suicide, despite Kent being so naive and tall and tempting.
It took a while for Damian to realize something else. Jonathan Kent was silence.
He was so dangerous, so ridiculously impossible to kill that the Animal just ignored everybody else. Damian pictured blades splintering like matchsticks against Jon's skin, imagined bombs reduced to firecrackers under his sneakers. But no-one else was hurt. Not even Jon.
Damian became addicted to silence.
With each new playdate or spontaneous sleepover, it got harder and harder to feign reluctance. Damian started volunteering to help Jon with homework he wouldn’t have touched before in a million years, and when the nightmares woke he'd walk straight past the Batcave gym and flee to Hamilton instead, where Jon would always be waiting with a bleary smile and, perhaps, a secret slice of Mrs. Lane’s famous apple pie.
Damian found himself spending more and more time with Jon, just to luxuriate in the blissful, feather-quiet.
And that should have been enough, but it wasn’t.
Because silence was a vacuum demanding to be filled, with Jon’s voice and Jon’s laugh and that look on his face Damian had started to notice whenever their eyes met. The one that told him he was:
Good
Adjective
- To be desired or approved of
- Having the required qualities, of a high standard
Not that Damian could be. Not that he had the potential to. That he was, as himself, enough.
What a beautiful lie.
Thinking of Jon became as natural as breathing; deep and desperate when he was scared, slow and idle as he drifted off to sleep. Jon crept up on him like the wandering fingers of dawn. In the night. In his dreams. Exposing all the things he had hidden in shadow.
Until one day, instead of how to kill that stranger over there with garrote wire, Damian found himself thinking about how Jon would geek out over the cartoon on the man's shirt.
Jon and the Animal were sharing territory now, and they vied for dominance until Damian’s thoughts were a sickening whirl of blue eyes, burning flesh, sunlight through black hair, and sickly kryptonite glow.
Damian wanted to have happy thoughts of Jon. The boy deserved that at least. But the Animal was on the hunt now and it was getting close. How ironic that in all Jon's efforts to tame it, he would be the one to force it to evolve.
Damian tried to distract it by plotting the deaths of random strangers on the street. Except now every time he struck someone down self-loathing rose like bile at the back of his throat, because Jon was in his head now too, whispering to him how wrong it was, how Damian could do so much better. Jon was everywhere, in his blood, in between the Animal’s jaws, and still it refused to let go-
The League of Assassins called this kind of relationship with a target ‘mirror sight’. The point where you understand them so well you begin to see the world as they do, which makes killing them so much harder, because you knew exactly what you're stealing from them when you do.
Damian missed the days when Dick’s smiles were the worst things he had to worry about.
He has become Jon’s personal kryptonite, and he is Damian's; each step towards each other is a step deeper into their own graves.