stillunexpectedwayne:
“you have… questionable tastes. frankly, father did as well. a bat. of all things. a flying rodent that feeds on insects and rotted fruits. about as intimidating as a plush child’s bunny. and yet you both seem to have been able to puzzle out something.” he took an oreo himself and slid the cookie in half, dipping it in the peanut butter as well to try a bite of it. better than the filling. but not entirely right. very little in his life was ever entirely right, it just… came together. somehow. despite how sticky it was to his teeth and his tongue, the taste was right. he despised metaphors where they had no place being.
maybe he did need to say it. damian had never been very good with honesty. well, that wasn’t entirely true. he had never been very gifted with expressing the thing it was important to express. he lied well when he needed to. he struggled about some things, concepts he never fully mastered. family. openness. devotion to a positive thing. he scoffed. “stephanie brown, you certainly make yourself known to me on a daily basis. for better or worse.”
“perhaps another life. if i’ve done enough in this one to make up for the rest of it.” for the bloodshed in his childhood, for the lying and cheating it took to keep batman a secret and alive, for losing his brother. he reached up to take her hand and run his fingers across hers, measuring the length of the callouses on her hand across his fingertips and comparing them to his own. “perhaps you just did something adequate in your last life to have earned you unblemished skin. certainly not good enough to have gotten you a pass out of throwing yourself off of roofs in godforsaken metropolis every night.” any moment now he could kiss her.
“i mean, his headquarters is in a cave,” stephanie grinned and shoveled an oreo into the jar of peanut butter until there was enough peanut butter piled on top of the cookie to topple over onto the pristine marble countertop on the precarious journey to her waiting mouth. “what else was he supposed to be? a bear?” she snorted at the image of bearman themed porn and then her expression soured as the reality of bruce fucking in a bear suit set in. “the gay community wouldn’t know what to do with themselves, and the villains would laugh in the face of a hidden hairy dad bod.”
stephanie smiled at him and cleaned her front teeth of peanut butter and chocolate cookie residue with her tongue. the softness was always far more present in his eyes than his words. she knew that she really got him when it leaked into his tone, too. “that’s just one of the many perks of rooming with steph brown.”
she titled her chin, and her eyes went soft as her lips twitched into a slip of a smile. “childhood trauma erases a lot of bad, d. the only thing that counts is if you try to overcome it.” she understood the complexity of taking on the sins of the father (( and mother in damian’s case )). it was so easy to tell him that it wasn’t his fault; it was never his fault––but she still moved feverishly to outrun everything her father did to her and everyone else who had the misfortune of crossing his path. “oh, i’m a young soul,” stephanie hummed, lacing their fingers together and squeezing his hand lightly. “you wouldn’t know it because i’m so wise, but i haven’t been around nearly as long as you have. you have the weight of the dozens of lives you’ve lived before.”