mentions of violence, confusing father/daughter dynamic, miscommunication (kinda), unhappy/ambiguous ending, platonic relationships (no romance)
a/n: inspired by a terrible falling out (if you’d even call it that) with my own father. more of a vent fic then anything
synopsis: you admit that you are a horrible daughter, but bruce finds a way to love you despite it all
w/c: 1215
You are a horrible daughter. A rotten, no good, absolutely unlovable woman with the inability to show even an ounce of compassion for the man who had given you house and home.
You don’t lie, or cheat, or steal. No, you do much worse.
You speak to others in a manner unbefitting of a woman with money. You dish respect as though it were a scarce commodity, unwilling to part with it regardless of time or place. You deliver hit after hit, physically and emotionally, to those who matter most to you. You care little for their feelings, knowing that at the end of the day, they don’t care, so why would you?
Your brothers, however many you have now as you’ve seemed to lose count, can attest to this. They can agree, and you’re sure they will, in the sole fact that you are a horrible person and an even worse daughter.
You harbor an instinct to kill, unlike your youngest brother. You abide by your own codes and conduct as closely as your father does his own, with only a touch more of your own womanly conviction.
You regret nothing. You wish and pray to whoever is willing to listen that your greatest enemies will die by your hand, that they suffer tenfold what they have caused, and that their deaths have purpose. That their deaths mean something beyond the end of their lives.
These urges show blatantly on your face, in cold, dead eyes, and a bloody grin that unnerves those around you. You are not like your brothers. You are much worse.
Your father wishes you were like him, enraptured by his own moral code, the same way you have become so concerned with your own. You think that for all the pain he has caused, the divine has sent you down to earth as punishment for his wrongs.
He must think the same of you.
You are a horrible daughter. Always bathed in blood that isn’t yours, going too far and yet not far enough. You stand there, watching and waiting for a kill that will never happen because you are too scared, too loyal to a man who hates you to your core, you’re sure.
You are a horrible daughter, and in this moment, as you lie in a pool of blood that is finally yours, you become absolutely positive of that fact. Doubts that have previously plagued you, ones that involve your father’s conditional love and care, have washed away, flooded into the same Gotham city drain that your livelihood has trickled down.
He will not come for you. He does not want you.
You are a horrible daughter. Bruce knows it. He lives by this fact. You know, you will die by this fact.
Bruce Wayne, the Batman, admits that you are a horrible daughter, and though not having done so to your face, you feel it in every breath he takes and in every move he makes. Eyes of a bat, not of a father, follow you keenly, watching and waiting for something to give and break.
You find that in your hour of giving and breaking, he is absent. His love, his watchful gaze, and perhaps his hate are lost on you now.
And as you look up to the dim lighting of the room you know you will die in, you can admit wholeheartedly that you were a horrible daughter.
Bruce Wayne is your father, and he loves you. He thinks the world of you.
He has watched you grow, held you tightly as a baby in a way that he never had the chance to do with his other children.
Since your birth, you have been wholeheartedly his own child, a pride and joy that he carried on his shoulder earnestly. To show off to the world with a new sense of purpose. You were loved, you are loved.
You are his daughter, though no longer his only one. You are his and his alone.
He’s since resigned to the fact that he has shared his children among many parents. Richard, Jason, Tim, Cass, Duke, Damian, and however many more he’s seemed to pick up in his lifetime—he knows that they hold onto families far outside of his own, positive or otherwise.
Damian, who he knows is his child by more than just blood, still bears the weight of Al Ghul on his shoulders.
You are special, you are nothing like the others.
You are a Wayne and a Wayne alone. You carry the name with a grace Bruce has never seen before, perhaps has never acted upon himself. You do not bear the emotional baggage of a long-lost parent, nor do you find yourself craving that belonging to one. You are Bruce’s, and Bruce is yours.
You are his daughter, and he is your father, mother, confidant, and friend.
And yet in the ocean of faults and stresses cracking along the surface of his double life, he’s let you slip through the cracks.
You no longer watch shows together, no longer poke fun at the small and insignificant areas of life as you once did. No more do the two of you go out to the store in uniform and return home with a haul of snacks for the family.
Life has taken a toll on the both of you, and Bruce fears that he’s let you carry the brunt of that weight.
Bruce Wayne loves you. You are his daughter, there will never be anyone like you.
So when he sees you faltering, letting your hits connect heavier than usual, your posture curling in like a cryptid in the night as you wreak havoc on a dime-a-dozen criminal, he must say something.
He cannot let you fall into the same cycle of abuse and selfishness that he once did. Vengeance, or whatever it is that you seek, is what he makes it out to be. He knows this, it must be true.
The look in your eyes as he admonishes your actions throughout that night and the ones that follow will haunt him forever. They are not the kind eyes he’s seen in photographs and paintings, rather they are cold and calculating, filled with hate and a lust for blood. He fears what they mean, what they foretell for you and for him.
He wonders when you started looking at him like you hated him.
Yet, he finds himself missing those eyes as he stares at the blank ones on the cold slab of surgical steel before him.
Bruce Wayne loves you. He will pick your broken body up from the concrete floors, stitch you back together, and pray to a god he isn’t even sure he believes in. He will clean you, prepare you, clothe you, and keep you at the end of your life just as he did at the beginning of it. He will hunt down who has done this to you, hurt and betray his code a hundred times over if it means that you will look at him with hatred once more.
Bruce Wayne loves you, he is your father, of course, he does. But today, he wonders if perhaps he did not love you enough to keep you alive. If any of it mattered anyway.
