ROT—Damian Wayne body horror fanfiction on Ao3.
Damian is twelve. Or at least he thinks he is. He should be. Chronologically. He was born exactly twelve years ago. His mother used to say that it was raining when he first saw the light of day—storming even. She claimed he hadn't even cried, but had simply stared at her with big eyes, listened to the loud thunder.
Damian was ten when he died. Three months before his eleventh birthday. When he asked, Father said he hadn’t felt a thing. That he was dead before he even hit the ground. That they were there immediately, cradling his still warm body. Damian wanted to believe all those sweet lies. He didn't tell his Father that he possessed a hyper-realistic memory—one in which he was bleeding out on the cold concrete ground. They say you leave this earth just as you arrived. Alone. But that wasn't true. For that time too, the rain had been there to keep him company. The gentle drops kissed his face as he slipped away.
It did not rain when Damian was born for a second time. Maybe because he wasn't born. Not really. Perhaps that was why the rain had abandoned him. Nature did not like it when one broke the rules. It was abnormal. Disgusting even. But then again, Damian had never been anything other than disgusting. So what difference did it make?
From the moment his soul reoccupied his rotting body and restored it to its former form, everything was... wrong. He was twelve without ever having been eleven years old. It seemed so unimportant. His family didn't seem bothered by it. So Damian didn't know why it was bothering him so much.
For a while, everything was okay. He even got superpowers for some time. He missed being able to fly, to feel the winde in his face. But after the last bit of supernatural powers left him…things got weird.
At first, he didn't notice it. Didn’t even feel it. The change had creeped in slowly at first. Like a frog placed in a pot where the water slowly heats up without it noticing, until the animal is boiled alive.
It was only one morning, as he sat at the breakfast table, eating his sandwich before school, that his father came in, patting his shoulder with a quiet "Good morning, son" and froze. "Why are you so cold?",he asked, his voice having a weird edge to it that Damian wasn‘t used to.
"Cold?" Damian furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. He was alway’s cold in Gotham, still unused to the harsh winters and the gray sky. He missed the warmth of infinity island often. Damian flinched slightly when he touched his own arm and was greeted with the icy cold feeling of his own skin. "Oh."
That was not normal.
"Have the heaters gone out?", His Father asked, rubbing Damian’s shoulders for a second before pulling away again to grab something. "Put on something warmer, you’re going to get sick." Damian stared ahead blankly as Bruce draped his jacket over him. But something told him that wouldn’t do anything. No amount of layers of clothing could fixed this.
Because he was cold as marble. like meat that had been tossed into a refrigerator.
A day or two later, he realized he could keep neither food nor water down. One moment he was having dinner with his father, and barely forty minutes later, he vomited it all back up.
At school, people kept looking at him.
Not in a way that could be called staring. Just a brief glance here and there. A scrunched-up face. A turning away when he sat down. He had never been popular at school. Not at all actually. But this was unusual.
During lunch break, Damian could smell it too.
Decomposition had a very unique smell. Father used to hide little capsules simulating the scent in the training grounds for Ace to track corpses.
Damian never thought they were authentic enough, it was a one-of-a-kind smell.
However, if Damian had to compare it, it would be like this:
Imagine you have a rotten piece of meat and marinate it in honey before putting it outside in the sun and letting it sit there for a few days.
That's roughly what it smelled like when a person rotted.
And now that smell was on him. He smelled like death
Back home, Damian had locked himself in the bathroom. He turned the shower water to hot and began scrubbing every inch of his body until his skin glowed pink. He scrubbed until the bathroom filled with thick steam. Pink skin turned red, and red skin turned raw.
Still, underneath all the soap and shampoo was that sweet, rotting scent.
His fingers And feet were wrinkled when Damian left the shower, wrapping himself in a towel and sinking down on the bathroom floor. Exhausted and scared.
He lifted his hand's to his mouth and breathed into his palms. The stench was worse from there, so much so it almost made Damian gag. He stood up on shaky legs, reaching for his toothbrush and toothpaste. He brushed until foam spilled down his chin. Brushed until his gums bled…
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