Family line for Damian 🥺🥺 please?
His parents are monsters. Violent, dark, dangerous. Angry.
But he loves them anyway.
He loves them, but he fears them. Fears both of their blood running through his veins.
Because they've hurt him. They've both hurt him. His first dozen years were nothing but hurt at their hands.
But he doesn't want to hurt anyone. Not anymore. Not ever again.
So it isn't Scarecrow's fear toxin that has him trembling in his room after a rough night out in the city. It's watching his father beat a thief to within an inch of his life with his bare hands. It's the flashback that caused, of his mother mother finishing off a failed assassin when he was a child with her dullest blade.
It's the darkness he feels rumbling through his own veins, that bleeds out when he fights, or when he yells, and someone says "You look just like your father." "You look just like your mother."
He wished he didn't. God he wished he didn't.
But as he shakes in silence, drowning in self-loathing and the panic of what-ifs - his door opens.
Drake comes in, but doesn't even look up from his phone. Just walks a memorized path across the room before flopping onto the end of Damian's bed unannounced.
Duke and Jason wander in next, already arguing about who the real hero of this month's Wayne family book club novel actually was. They drop to the floor in front of his fireplace, Jason only giving him a quick glance.
Cassandra comes in next, with Dick right behind her. They each curl up on either side of Damian, Dick resting his arm across the bed's headboard, with Cass all but cocooning Damian in the safety of her embrace.
That's right. The rest of his family. The ones to whom blood never mattered.
Nature versus nurture, that's what Grayson and Alfred tried to instill in him so many years ago.
His Nature was Bruce Wayne. Talia al Ghul.
His nurture was Dick Grayson. Stephanie Brown. Jason Todd. Cassandra Cain.
"You're good." Cass whispers in his ear, like she can read this thoughts. They all must be able to, why else would they all congregate in his room like this, other than to comfort? "Always will be."
"Always have been." Dick mumbles absently, scrolling through his phone like Drake is, hand ruffling Damian's hair. "And don't you forget it."
And for a moment, the fear wanes. For a moment, it's replaced with warmth and calm. Because yeah, he was the son of Bruce Wayne. The son of Talia al Ghul.
But he was also the child of these wayward birds too. And they were the best of them all.
