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Damian has learned to catalogue the people around him in terms of utility. It’s easier that way. Keeps the blood pressure steady. Keeps the swords in their sheaths.
Virtue. Weakness. Cowardice. Cowardice parading as kindness.
He has never understood why people pretend.
They’re all just masks, cheap silk stitched over something rotten.
The gala is a hive. Every smile glistens like sugar left too long in the rain, soft and rotting at the edges. They laugh at Father’s jokes a second too late, at exactly the same pitch. They shake hands with Pennyworth as if he were part of the décor. They look at Damian with that vague, uncomfortable admiration reserved for other people’s children: too polite to ignore, too inconsequential to matter.
He stands in the corner black suit cut with military precision, tie knotted so tight it feels like a leash. He can hear Grayson laughing three rooms away—warm, generous, so very human—and it makes his teeth grind. He can see Todd swirling a glass of champagne, acting like he belongs here, pretending his blood isn’t poison. Drake is checking his phone, because of course he is, because heaven forbid he spend five consecutive minutes making eye contact with another human being. And Father—Father is the sun everyone orbits, smiling that cultivated Wayne smile that says I am the richest man in the room, but I’m just like you.
Damian knows better.
He knows what his father really is. What they all are.
A family of masks, applauding themselves for wearing them so well.
He watches some old man in a tuxedo slap Grayson on the back, calling him “son” in the way adults do when they think they’re being endearing. Grayson beams at him, no hesitation, no flash of suspicion. Like the world is good, like people are honest. Like men like that don’t order the deaths of rivals with a smile and a checkbook.
He does not hate them.
That would require a measure of respect.
It’s not anger either. He’s not angry. Anger is hot and loud. It’s contempt, icey, clean, and sharp enough to peel flesh from bone without raising his voice.
Contempt is quieter. It coils under his ribs as he watches a man with powdered knuckles brag about his third vacation home in St. Bart’s, as though the Wayne fortune existed solely to validate his own. Damian wonders what he’d do if he told the truth, that the tuxedo hiding bruised knuckles isn’t from tennis, but from striking his wife behind locked doors. Would anyone care? No. They’d just laugh, refill their glasses, and murmur something about “domestic matters.”
He doesn’t hate these people. Hate would mean he cares. He doesn’t. He just… wishes they’d vanish. Wishes the world would sweep them off its board like pawns too stupid to understand the game they’re playing.
Damian does not smile back when they try and make conversation. He lets them feel the full weight of his stare, as sharp as a blade held in still air.
You disgust me.
He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t need to. The thought is stitched into the silence between them.
The women aren’t better. One of them kneels in front of him to comment on his shoes as if he were a dog brought to heel, and Damian has to swallow the urge to tell her she’s bending too close, that her perfume smells like fear mixed with old wine. He imagines tipping his water glass over her carefully arranged hair just to watch it collapse.
Instead, he nods once. A curt, calculated motion, the kind that makes people feel smaller without knowing why. Alfred would call it rude. Bruce would call it undiplomatic. But Damian isn’t interested in diplomacy. He’s interested in truth—and the truth is that every adult in this room is weak.
Weakness dressed up as virtue.
Cowards wearing smiles like stitched-up wounds.
They applaud Bruce Wayne’s “charity,” yet none of them would step outside these marble walls to see the city they’re pretending to save. Damian may have grown up in the league of assassins, but he’s lived in Gotham’s alleys. He’s stalked its rooftops. He’s bled for this place while they sip imported champagne. They call him “little prince,” not knowing he was born a weapon.
If I wanted, I could end you before you drew your next breath.
The thought doesn’t make him angry, it is simply a fact.
When Grayson drifts over, eyes bright as if he might actually want to talk, Damian almost laughs.
“You look like you’re planning a murder,” Grayson says lightly, balancing one champagne flute, and a glass of juice. “Please tell me it’s not anyone important. Bruce gets really cranky when we have to clean up scandals.”
Damian accepts the glass out of reflex and sets it aside without drinking. “If I planned to murder someone,” he says, “you’d never know until the body hit the floor.”
Grayson grins, unbothered. “Fair point. So, uh… you okay? You’ve been glowering for twenty minutes straight. People are starting to whisper.”
“Let them.” Damian’s gaze sweeps the ballroom. The gowns and cufflinks glitter under chandeliers like bait on hooks. “They’re insects. All of them.”
“Damian.” Grayson sighs, as though that one word could scrub the poison out of him. “I hate these things too, believe me, but you’re supposed to be mingling. Networking. Remember? Bruce dragged you here to show everyone how ‘normal’ you are.”
“Normal is overrated,” Damian says, and there’s a razor’s edge under the words.
Grayson studies him for a moment, expression softening in that infuriating way that makes Damian want to snarl. Pity. That’s what it is. Cloaked in concern, but it stinks of pity.
“You know,” Grayson says gently, “not everyone in this room is your enemy.”
“They might as well be,” Damian replies, and his voice doesn’t rise, doesn’t crack. It’s just… flat. Absolute. “Their smiles are lies. Their charity is cowardice. They congratulate themselves for being good people while someone else does the dirty work to keep their streets clean.”
“Like us?” Grayson asks quietly.
Damian’s jaw tightens. He can’t decide which is worse—the question, or the way Grayson asks it like he’s inviting Damian to share a secret instead of confess a crime.
“I’m nothing like them,” Damian says finally. “I don’t pretend.”
For a moment, Grayson looks like he might push further. Then he just nods, slow and thoughtful, like he understands something Damian doesn’t want him to.
The music swells. Laughter ripples across the ballroom. Somewhere near the buffet table, Todd is making Drake choke on his drink. Father is shaking hands with men who should be rotting in prison.
Damian’s fingers twitch with the familiar itch—a cold, steady certainty that he could reduce this entire glittering room to ash and the world would be better for it. Not out of anger. Not even hatred. Simply because they waste oxygen with every self-satisfied breath.
His grip tightens on the stem of the crystal glass. For a moment, he imagines shattering it in his hand, watching blood bead and drip like garnets onto the marble floor. The image is almost soothing. But instead, he sets the glass down with precision. Not because he wants to. Not because the taste of orange juice laced with soda water offends him. But because it gives him an excuse to move, to carve space between himself and this rotting hive of laughter and lies.
“I’m going to the balcony,” he mutters, voice clipped, and doesn’t wait for permission.
Grayson doesn’t stop him. Of course he doesn’t. He just watches with those too-bright eyes, the ones that seem to see more than they should. Damian can feel the weight of that gaze on his back as he slips through the door, like sunlight trying to melt ice.
Outside, the air is different. Cold and sharp, biting like steel drawn fresh from its sheath. Honest in a way the ballroom could never be. Damian inhales deeply, filling his lungs until the ache feels like penance. The night stretches wide before him, Gotham’s sprawl lit in fractured gold and shadow. Towers like sentinels. Streets coiling like veins. A city that bleeds and bites and never pretends to be anything else.
A soft rustle draws his gaze. A raven drops from the darkness, landing on the stone railing with a whisper of feathers. Its head tilts, black eyes glinting in the spill of moonlight—one fixed on him, sharp and assessing, the other cast toward the endless city beyond. For a moment, Damian wonders if it recognizes him. Predator to predator. Creature born for the kill.
He stands there, hands curled loosely at his sides, and breathes again. The cold gnaws through the fabric of his suit, through the tightness of the knot at his throat. He lets it. He welcomes the sting, the honesty of it. Here, there are no masks. No champagne smiles. No hollow words dressed in silk. Just the dark, the wind, and the bird watching him with the patience of something that has seen too much and learned to survive anyway.
For a heartbeat, the silence almost feels like freedom. For a heartbeat, he feels almost clean.
Almost.
By the time he heads back inside, the speeches have already begun. Father is at the podium, talking about progress, education, and hope. All the right words, neat and hollow, designed to please ears that will forget them by morning. Damian watches the room nod along,
self-satisfied, congratulating themselves for existing in proximity to virtue. He feels a bitter taste at the back of his throat.
He imagines pulling the fire alarm—not out of fear, but just to watch them scatter, tripping over one another in their desperation to protect silk dresses and cufflinks. He imagines the chandeliers crashing down, the sound of crystal shattering, the smell of smoke filling the room. He imagines them coughing, gasping, finally stripped of their illusions.
It would almost be a kindness.
But instead he stands there, still and silent, letting his gaze burn through anyone foolish enough to meet his eyes.
Later, in the car on the way back to the Manor, Father will say,
“Your face tonight. What was that about?”
And Damian will shrug.
“Just bored.”
Because how can he explain that it isn’t boredom? It’s something colder, heavier. Contempt isn’t a flare of anger. It’s an iceberg—still and immovable, certain of its own strength. It’s knowing, beyond doubt, that the people around you aren’t worth the air they breathe.
It’s not that Damian wants to destroy them.
It’s that he wouldn’t blink if they vanished.
And maybe, just maybe, there’s a part of him that would rather burn the whole room down than keep pretending he belongs inside it.
At the Manor, Grayson throws an arm around his shoulders as they walk inside. “Cheer up, Little D. We survived another gala. That’s worth at least a victory donut.”
Damian stiffens at the contact. Not because he fears pain—he’s been beaten by masters, trained to fight in darkness and hunger—but because the warmth feels wrong. Unnecessary. Grayson’s touch makes something deep in his chest twitch, a spark trying to thaw a place Damian didn’t know was frozen.
He shrugs it off. “I don’t eat donuts.”
“Your loss,” Grayson says lightly, but Damian can hear the undercurrent of hurt. It irritates him more than it should. Why should Grayson expect him to care about his feelings? Why does he act like family is a thing you earn, not a thing you’re born to?
He thinks about the gala. About the laughter, the hollow applause. About the way Grayson looked at him—warm, worried, trying to understand.
Damian hates that look.
Not because it’s false, but because it isn’t. Because Grayson actually means it, and that makes it harder to hold onto the contempt. Makes it harder to keep the blade sharp.
And Damian has to keep it sharp. If he doesn’t, what’s left? Just a boy trying to belong to a family that can never really understand him. A boy raised to see the world as prey.
Better to be cold than to be weak, Mother’s voice whispers. Better to be feared than pitied.
But standing there in the dark, Damian wonders—just for a moment—what it would be like to let the contempt go. To believe Grayson when he says not everyone in the room is an enemy. To believe Father when he says family isn’t about blood, it’s about choice.
The thought makes him uncomfortable, like wearing a suit that doesn’t quite fit.
So he buries it.
And when Alfred comes outside to tell him it’s late, Damian wipes the expression from his face and follows him in without a word.
That night, Damian cannot sleep.
He sits on the edge of his bed, bare feet planted on cool floorboards, shoulders rigid like a bowstring drawn too tight. His hands hang between his knees, motionless, save for the occasional twitch of his fingers, a phantom gesture, the echo of blades long since sheathed.
He stares at the wood grain as if it hides the answers, cataloguing the evening the way he once catalogued assassination targets. It comes to him like muscle memory, swift and sharp, sliding through his thoughts like a knife through silk.
Man at the bar, two broken fingers, set poorly.—likely domestic violence.
Woman in the green dress—lip tremor indicates lying, likely hiding theft or debt.
Investor who laughed too hard at Father’s joke—no reflection in the eyes. A killer without blood on his hands.
He does this automatically, without permission. That’s the problem. It’s not something he chooses; it’s something he is.
The League trained him to see weaknesses the way other children see colors. Every movement catalogued, every glance dissected, every smile peeled apart for rot. Weakness isn’t an exception. It’s the rule. His mother taught him that mercy is a defect, compassion a disease.
People will betray you, my son. So you strike first. Always strike first.
Her voice was the steel beneath his skin, the cold weight in his bones. He can still feel her hands—firm, unyielding—guiding his own across the hilt of a blade. He remembers the resistance of flesh, the warmth of blood spilling across marble floors, rich and red as spilt wine.
And what does he have now? A family that insists on loving him despite the blade he keeps at their throats.
He exhales slowly, pressing his knuckles against his sternum like he can grind that warmth out of himself before it rots something vital. He cannot afford warmth. Warmth makes you hesitate. Warmth makes you hope.
Hope is a liability.
He hates that part of himself. The part that wonders what a life without contempt would feel like. A life where hands are extended not to harm, but to hold. Where words are spoken without strategy, without sharp edges.
He tells himself he doesn’t care. That he doesn’t need them—that he doesn’t want them. That if every single one of them vanished tonight, the only thing he’d feel is the familiar, sterile satisfaction of survival.
But the truth gnaws at him in the quiet: if that were true, he wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t be lying in this soft bed instead of on a cold stone. He wouldn’t keep listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall—the sound of someone checking in, just to make sure he’s still breathing.
The truth is uglier. The truth is, he doesn’t know how to need them. When Grayson smiles at him with genuine warmth, all Damian can think is how easy it would be to slip a knife between his ribs. When Drake tries to share a joke, despite all Damian has done to earn his hatred, he wants to swat him away like an insect, because every laugh sounds fake to ears trained to hear lies. Even father—especially father—wears his humanity like a costume. They open their hands to him as if they’ve never been burned.
He doesn’t understand it. And because he cannot understand it, he cannot trust it.
The contempt feels safer than love.
Love is soft. Love bleeds. Contempt is clean.
Damian lies back on his bed, spine stiff against the mattress, staring at the ceiling as if he could burn a hole through it with sheer will.
The Manor is quiet, the kind of quiet that would have driven League assassins mad with paranoia. No footsteps in the hall, no blades against stone, no whisper of poison in the air. Only the hum of old pipes and the distant chirp of crickets. To any other child, it would feel safe.
To Damian, it feels false.
He stretches one arm toward the pillow. His fingers brush the hilt of the blade tucked beneath it. The weight is reassuring, anchoring. He checks it once. Twice. Three times, before allowing himself to breathe, and relapse back into thought.
His reflection from the gala loops in his mind—the boy in the black suit, posture perfect, chin high, eyes like cold steel. He recognizes himself and doesn’t.
In the League, contempt was a virtue. Weakness was weeded out, culled like sick livestock. You learned early to measure people by what they could do for you—or what you’d have to do to them before they betrayed you first. His mother called it clarity. His grandfather called it strength.
But here? In Gotham? In the Manor? It just makes him alone.