Chapter Text
He remembers the lessons Grayson forced when he first became Robin.
It was a late summer evening, both of them sitting atop the docks. Damian hated this time of year in Gotham, the sweltering sun of New Jersey's summer a stark contrast to the dry heat of his childhood. He could feel the humidity clinging to him like an extra skin, even with his suit on and in the air, and a heavy oppressive sense of incoming thunder.
It was uncomfortable.
Damian could see Grayson's body curled tight. Tension was dripping off his every breath. Grayson turned towards him, staring so intently it felt as if it were burning into the side of his head. Damian continued to look out into the water.
The rooftop was hard beneath him, gravel was digging into his palms through the thick leather of his gloves.
"Damian…" Grayson mutters, with a strong sense of hesitation. He could see him straightening his back in his periphery. Steeling himself, he decided.
"Damian," more confident this time. Damian absentmindedly fiddled with the gravel. "What happened tonight…" he lost his nerve momentarily. "what happened tonight was unacceptable".
Damian rolled his eyes, "tt," of course.
"Field names, Nightwing" He said with every drop of condescension he could muster, turning towards Grayson with a frown.
Grayson continued on, "that's not who we are, Robin," Damian clenched the gravel so hard he crushed it into smaller pieces, piercing his gloves. He held on tighter.
"Do what?" he muttered disdainfully, "I stopped them, didn't I?"
"Don't be contrary, Robin," he admonished, his eyebrows pinching and lips thinning, "you almost stabbed them, Dami…" He turned to fully face him now. An aborted motion to grab his shoulders had Damian forcefully looking back towards the water and twitching his body away with a muttered "Tt."
"But I didn't," he pointed out.
"If I hadn't stopped you…" Grayson trailed off.
He couldn't help but grind his teeth. What was the point of this? All they did was respond to crime, never actually preventing it. What, with all the hesitancy to get a little violent. What's the difference between beating up criminals in dark back alleys after they committed the crime, then beating them up before they had the chance to?
"I'm not justifying myself, Nightwing."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Explaining," he said, the word coming out sharper than he meant it. "There is a difference."
Grayson exhaled through his nose, a long, weary sound that Damian had come to associate with disappointment, though he was loath to admit how much that particular sound had begun to needle at him in the months since he'd arrived in this city. In the League, disappointment was not a sound. It was a consequence. A withheld meal, an extra hour of training, the back of his grandfather's hand. It did not linger in the air the way Grayson's exhale lingered, settling over the rooftop like the humidity Damian still could not get used to, even now, even after weeks of this strange new climate, this strange new life.
He thought of his mother then, unbidden, the way he often did when he felt cornered. Talia would not have asked him to explain himself. Talia would have asked only whether the mission was completed. Success was its own justification in her eyes, in the eyes of everyone who had raised him before Gotham, before this rooftop, before a man who called himself his father decided that the right thing to do with a ten-year-old assassin was to dress him in green and send him out to save people who would spit on him if they knew half of what he had done.
He did not regret what he had done. That was the thing Grayson could never seem to understand, no matter how many of these stilted, miserable conversations they had. Damian was not ashamed of his training. He had been built, deliberately and meticulously, the way a sword is forged, the way a falcon is trained to the wrist. There was no shame in being exceptional. There was no shame in the things that exceptional required.
And yet.
And yet he had not stabbed the man tonight. He had stopped his hand a half inch from putting a blade through a mugger's femoral artery, not because Grayson had grabbed his wrist, though that contact had startled him more than he wanted to admit, but because some small, traitorous part of him had hesitated even before that. He had felt the man's heartbeat through the press of his blade against fabric and skin, frantic and terrified, and something in him had stalled. Not mercy, exactly. He did not yet have a word for it. It sat uncomfortable in his chest, foreign as the climate, foreign as everything in this city that was supposed to be his by blood and was not, not really, not yet.
He hated that feeling more than he hated the heat.
Gotham was not what he expected, though he was not sure what he had expected. He had spent the long flight from the compound in Nanda Parbat running through scenarios, the way Mother had taught him, accounting for variables, preparing contingencies for a father who might reject him, a father who might attempt to kill him, a father who might try to mold him into something soft and useless. He had not prepared a contingency for a father who simply looked tired all the time, who fought crime in a cave full of dinosaur bones and old trophies, who had an entire collection of broken, strange children he called family and seemed to genuinely believe that broken things could be repaired with patience rather than discipline.
It unsettled him more than any of the scenarios he had imagined.
In the League, Damian had been the best. Not merely competent, not merely skilled, but the best, undisputed, the heir, the culmination of generations of careful breeding and brutal instruction. His grandfather had told him so many times that he had stopped hearing it as praise and started hearing it as fact, the way one hears that water is wet or that the sun rises in the east. He was the best because he had been made to be the best, every cell of him oriented toward a singular purpose, and there had been a terrible, clean comfort in that certainty.
Here, he was nothing. Here, he was the angry one, the violent one, the boy who didn't understand boundaries, who didn't understand jokes, who didn't understand why you couldn't just eliminate a threat permanently when the opportunity presented itself. Here, his excellence was treated as a character flaw to be corrected rather than a virtue to be honed. Pennyworth corrected the way he held his fork. Grayson corrected the way he spoke to civilians. His father, on the rare occasions he spoke to Damian at all outside of mission briefings, corrected the way he thought.
It grated on him endlessly, a low hum of friction beneath everything he did, the sense that he had been dropped into a country that ran on rules nobody had bothered to fully explain, where the things that had once made him valuable now made him strange.
He thought sometimes, in the quiet hours after patrol when sleep would not come and the air conditioning in the manor hummed too loud against the silence he was used to, that he understood now why his mother had warned him about this place. Not in so many words. Talia al Ghul did not warn; she informed, she instructed, she occasionally allowed a flicker of something that might have been worry to cross her face before she smoothed it away again. But she had told him, the night before he left, that his father's world ran on sentiment rather than strategy, that Bruce Wayne mistook hesitation for virtue and called it justice, and that Damian would need to be careful not to let himself be unmade by it.
He had thought, at the time, that he understood what she meant. He had thought he was strong enough, certain enough of himself, that no amount of soft Western thinking could touch the foundation his grandfather had built him on. He had been wrong, or at least he suspected he had been wrong, and the suspicion itself was the most unsettling part. Because if his foundation could be touched at all, if a single rooftop conversation with Grayson could leave him lying awake turning a half inch of hesitation over and over in his mind like a coin he could not stop flipping, then perhaps the foundation had never been as solid as he believed.
He resented that thought intensely. He resented Grayson for putting it there, resented his father for creating the conditions in which it could take root, resented Gotham itself, with its grey skies and its endless rain and its people who flinched from him before they even knew his name.
It was not only the fighting philosophy that chafed, though that was the loudest friction, the one that flared into argument on rooftops and in the cave and once, memorably, in the kitchen over a breakfast that ended with Damian storming out and not returning to the manor for two days. It was everything. It was smaller and stranger than the question of whether to kill or not to kill, though that question sat beneath all of it like bedrock.
It was the way Drake looked at him, equal parts wary and smug, as though Damian were a problem to be solved rather than a person to be known. It was the way Cain regarded him with an unreadable patience that Damian found more unnerving than outright hostility, because at least hostility he understood. It was the language itself, the slang the other children at the few social functions he was forced to attend tossed around so easily, references to television programs he had never watched and music he had never heard and a childhood, an American childhood, full of things he had simply never been given. He was eleven years old and he did not know how to play a video game. He did not know what a school dance was. He did not know the rules of baseball, a sport his father insisted on attempting to explain to him with an enthusiasm Damian found baffling, given that the entire affair seemed to consist of grown men standing very still for extended periods.
He felt, more often than he liked to admit, like a blade forged for one war and dropped into the middle of another, his edges sharpened for a fight nobody else around him seemed to be having.
And beneath all of it, quieter, more insistent, was the matter of his grandfather. Ra's al Ghul was many things, a murderer by any reasonable accounting, a man who had ended civilizations with the same dispassion most men reserved for swatting flies, a man whose ambitions stretched across centuries and who viewed his own grandson as, among other things, a vessel for his continuation. Damian was not foolish. He understood, with a clarity that had only sharpened since coming to Gotham, that his grandfather's vision of the world, and the vision of the League more broadly, was built on a kind of arrogance that called itself enlightenment, a willingness to play god with human lives that Damian could no longer fully endorse, not after watching his father and Grayson and even Drake, insufferable as he was, treat strangers' lives as things worth saving rather than things to be weighed against a ledger and found wanting.
He knew this. He had come to know it slowly, painfully, in increments measured out across months of patrols and arguments and the particular sting of watching his father look at him with something like fear after a mission went wrong, after Damian's first instinct, his only instinct, had been the one his training had carved into him before he was old enough to question it.
Knowing it, though, did not unmake the rest of it. It did not unmake the years of his grandfather's hand steady on his shoulder as he corrected his stance, patient in a way the old man was patient with nothing else in the world. It did not unmake the strange, fierce pride that had bloomed in his chest the first time he completed the trials, the moment his grandfather had looked at him, just looked at him, and said that he had exceeded even his own considerable expectations. It did not unmake his mother's hands smoothing his hair back from his face when he was small and feverish from a training injury, her voice low and certain, telling him that he was hers, that he would always be hers, that nothing this world could throw at him would be enough to break what she had built.
He loved them. He understood, with the same clarity that let him see the wrongness in their methods, that this love was not in conflict with that understanding, no matter how desperately people in this new life seemed to want it to be. Grayson, in particular, seemed to operate under the assumption that Damian's eventual rejection of the League's philosophy would, must, necessarily come paired with a rejection of the people who had raised him in it. He sensed it in the careful way Grayson spoke about Talia, in the barely concealed hope in his father's eyes whenever Damian expressed even mild frustration with his mother, as though every small grievance were a brick being laid toward some inevitable wall between them.
It was not that simple. He did not know how to explain, to any of them, that a person could hold two truths at once without being torn apart by the contradiction. That he could recognize the League had been wrong, profoundly and dangerously wrong, in its willingness to discard human life as a tool of its ambitions, and still feel something close to gratitude for what that wrongness had given him. He was disciplined because of it. He was capable, controlled, possessed of a body that obeyed him without hesitation and a mind that could calculate seventeen variables in the time it took most people to blink. He had been given an excellence that, however cruelly it had been instilled, was his now, fully his, a part of him no different from his own bones.
He did not want to erase any of it. Not the training, not the years in Nanda Parbat, not his mother's voice or his grandfather's exacting praise. He wanted, he thought, though he could not have said this aloud to anyone, certainly not to his father, who would likely misunderstand it as defiance rather than the complicated, aching thing it actually was, to keep the parts of himself that had been forged well and discard only the parts that had been forged wrong. He wanted to be a person built from both worlds rather than a casualty caught between them, claimed by neither, ashamed of both.
He did not yet know how to do this. He suspected, in his more honest moments, that nobody had ever shown him, because nobody around him seemed to think it was possible. His father wanted him remade entirely, gently but insistently, the way one sands down a rough plank until it fits cleanly into a frame it was never originally cut for. His mother and grandfather, on the rare occasions they managed to contact him without his father's knowledge, wanted him to remain exactly as he was, untouched by what they no doubt saw as Bruce Wayne's soft, sentimental corruption.
Neither option felt survivable. Neither felt like him.
He sat with Grayson on the rooftop a while longer after that, neither of them speaking, the storm that had been threatening all evening finally beginning to break in fat, heavy drops against the gravel. Grayson did not move to leave, and Damian, despite every instinct telling him to retreat to the solitude of his own grief, did not either.
"You know I don't actually want you to be someone else," Grayson said eventually, quiet, the rain starting to plaster his hair to his forehead. "I just want you to be able to choose. That's all this is. I want you to have a choice you never got before."
Damian said nothing, watching the water run down through the chain link fence at the edge of the dock, dark rivulets disappearing into the harbor below.
"I had a choice tonight," he said finally, the words coming slower than he wanted them to, dragged up from somewhere he did not like examining too closely. "I chose not to."
It was not an apology. He did not think he owed Grayson an apology, not for the almost, not for the part of him that still, even now, believed the man on the other end of his blade tonight might have deserved exactly what Damian's training told him he deserved. But it was something, an acknowledgment, perhaps, that the half inch of hesitation had not been an accident, that some small part of him, however buried, however much he resented its existence, had wanted to stop.
Grayson did not smile, which Damian appreciated more than he would have a wide, relieved grin. He only nodded, slow, and let the silence stretch back out between them, comfortable now in a way it had not been before, the rain falling steady and the city's lights blurring gold and red through the wet air.
Damian did not know, sitting there with the rain soaking through his suit and the gravel still biting into his palms, what kind of man he was going to become. He did not know how to be his father's son and his mother's son at once, how to honour the discipline of Nanda Parbat without inheriting its cruelty, how to learn Gotham's strange gentler rules without losing the parts of himself that had been built before he ever set foot in this hemisphere. He did not know how to explain, to anyone, least of all himself, that gratitude and grief could sit in the same chest without cancelling each other out.
But he thought, watching the storm finally break properly over the harbor, that perhaps he did not need to know all of that tonight. Perhaps it was enough, for now, that he had chosen not to put the blade through the man's leg. Perhaps it was enough that he had said so out loud, to Grayson, on a rooftop, in the rain, in this strange humid country that was supposed to be half his and did not yet feel like home.
It was a small thing. He suspected, though he would not have admitted it then, that it might be the first of many small things, each one a single stone laid carefully across the distance between the boy his grandfather had built and whoever he was going to choose, eventually, deliberately, to become.
He was not there yet. But for the first time since arriving in this sodden, contrary city, he thought that perhaps, eventually, he might be.