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Damian was sure Bruce had gone crazy, he, the Wayne heir, the grandson of the devil himself, the son of batman, the one and only Damian Wayne, going to school like any other peasant? Hell no. He should’ve been out in the streets, as Robin, with Alfred tutoring him every once in a while. but like, going to school? With all those dumb kids? And those horrid uniforms?
He’d rather die.
Damian was about to jump out of the window when he saw himself in the uniform of the prestigious Gotham Academy, why the fuck did he needed to go to school? He was way smarter than any of them. The gray suit complimented his rich bastard look, for a eleven-year-old he was rather muscular and slightly short but with the uniform he just looked like a rich, spoiled brat.
It was out of question that his first day at school was awful, he felt out of place and everyone looked at him weird because he sweated money. He second day wasn’t better, and the third, and the following months were awful.
He never talked, or even looked at his classmates, he didn’t liked them. They were as dumb as camels and as loud as crows. Damian preferred to be a book worm and have his face in an encyclopedia or an atlas instead of even listening them.
Most of the time he decided to ignore that part of his life and just focus on the Robin one. That turned out to be a trouble when he met her. Carmen.
She had brown skin and big bright eyes that looked at him with a burning hate. She had freckles and short, curly hair that cascaded over her eyes and nose. Damian thought she was kind of cute, not that he would admit it. Even with the band aids and bruises that decorated her anatomy day after day, he found her slightly fascinating. She was like the forbidden fruit he was tempted to taste, a mystery at his eyes, he couldn’t help but want to wonder what lied behind those caramel eyes.
He first met her as Robin, not the kind of situation that you would like to describe as friendly, but since that night in the Casa Quintana, Damian couldn’t help but notice her everywhere he went. Specially school. At first he thought he was crazy, that the image from that night was so grotesque that now he was seeing the face of that creepy girl everywhere. But then he noticed that there wasn’t blood, or sirens or dead bodies around. Just a girl with messy hair in her school uniform, reading a book.
She was a few years older, yet she was rather short for her age, but she moved around the school halls as if they belonged to her. She seemed to be so much older than thirteen; no one thought of her as a child, she walked among everyone as a stranger, with the maturity of an older woman, perhaps a queen. Damian, for the first time on his life, felt as if there was someone out there who could understand him.
After all, her bloodline was as dirty as his.
One night, as I usually happened, Damian was out patrolling with Bruce, just in case. They were over the ruined buildings of the ugly part of the city, the smell of cigarettes, cheap beer and piss burned Damian’s nose like acid. It smells like Todd he thought hiding a smirk.
Damian enjoyed his time as Robin as much as he could. He thought of those as the time he could think and let his past self, Damian Al Ghul, the killer, the heir, and his new self, Damian Wayne, the prince, the hero, merge into something that he wasn’t completely sure of what it was. Most of time, he was in a constant battle with himself, his drawings being the only physical representation of the constant battle between how he was raised and what he knew was right.
Somehow the images of all those criminals dying by his hand, even if it was just in his imagination, were enough to keep the beast at line. Damian Wayne was an addict, he knew it and he was desperately trying to purge the ideals of his mother out of his head.
But it was hard, is not like he could open up his cranium, pull out his brain, take out all the things he learned as the heir of the League of Assassins, and then put his brain back.
It would sound dumb to outsiders, but Damian really wanted to change, he knew that all he had was his by right, but somehow after a few fights with literally everyone inside the Wayne manor (and outside it) he took in his hands the resolution to prove them wrong. To show them that he was the perfect robin incarnated, that it was his right. Such predicament got so much into his head that at some point, he wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone; he was just trying to prove it himself. Prove that he could be a not just a better robin, but a better person, or at least not a bloodthirsty moody preteen with a superiority complex.
That particular night, Gotham was quiet. The sounds of cars in the distance were like white noise in his ears. There was nothing, no police sirens, no screaming ladies, no drunks fighting or being, well, drunks. It almost didn’t felt like Gotham, almost.
A few blocks away from the harbor Bruce stopped, Damian knew what it meant by now: I saw something. Both of them followed the figure of a middle aged man dressed way to fancy to be walking around Gotham’s harbor in the middle of the night. The man kept walking around the containers, reaching a point he was almost inside a maze made out of empty containers, right, left, left, right, Damian memorized, the man reached a dead end.
Or so he thought.
The man knocked the door of the red container; three men came out of it and checked him, looking for arms or something dangerous, after they finished the first man took out a cigarette then searched for something inside his coat, Damian assumed it was a lighter, before throwing some bills to the men and entering.
Damian looked at Bruce.
“It looks like drugs” he whispered, his voice rather hoarse after so many hours in silence
“It seems more like mafia to me, Robin” Batman answered, his voice, as deep as the ocean, vibrated against Damian’s ears “I knew everything wasn’t so quiet for nothing” said the bat, more to himself than to his son.
Talk seemed unnecessary from then. They separated and surrounded the place; looking for another entrance, which proved to be useless as none of them found nothing. Bruce motioned at Damian to move away as he knocked the door, like they’ve seen the man do before. The same three men from before had barely opened the door when a smoke bomb exploded on their faces. Both, Bruce and Damian ran inside the container.
Damian was expecting some fat old men, smoking and playing poker, maybe one or two prostitutes. He wasn’t expecting a subterranean passage leading to god knows where. He looked at his father, already descending through the stairs and followed him without a word.
As they walked down the stairs Damian could feel how the ambient changed: Dim yellow lights illuminated their way down, the smell of cigarettes and marihuana mixed on a smoky, sensual dance, the music, as vulgar and denigrating as it could be, got louder with every step. Then were the screams. But they weren’t screams of terror or pain, the multiple voices were screaming in a chorus: cheering.
If Damian had to compare that place with something else he’d probably thought of Sodom and Gomorra, there, before his eyes, raised a new Sin City. The Gotham below the bat’s Gotham. There were drugs, dog fights, cock fights, prostitutes, hell there were even some girls around his age chained to men that doubled the age of his father. It was a mess.
And yet all that was just the opening act for what he was about to see.
Bruce guided him through the multitude, and, as they walked away from the cock fights and the drug addicts they were welcomed into a more stylish place, the persons that walked around wore masks and fitted elegant clothes, it was like a party, but instead of gifts they exchanged persons. Human trafficDamian guessed disappointed.
Ahead were some naked women walking next to a decrepit old man, Bruce was quick to cover his son’s eyes, he was a child after all. Damian smiled at the fatherly action, even if he had already seen one or several naked women that particular night.
The cheering was getting louder and louder as they walked, forward Damian thought, the answer is forward. A crude curiosity was invading the kid’s mind, what was all that mess? What was all that noise for?
His father was not much different, yet the main key to their difference lied on what each one of them was questioning. Damian wanted to know where were they, what was that place, and since when everyone was allowed to break every legal or human rule on this place. Bruce just wanted to know who was behind this so he could make sure that, whoever they were, wouldn’t dare to fucking touch his city again.
When they reached the center of the turmoil Damian found himself standing in the sidelines of a coliseum, and when he looked down he understood, down on the arena were two people fighting, one of them was a man, pure muscle, about six feet tall and with an angry scowl adorning his face. Damian though he looked like terminator. Then he looked at the other person who was fighting, it was a girl, who seemed as petite and delicate as a porcelain doll. Both faces were covered by masks.
He could sense that his father was telling him something, but he was too focused on the fight that was taking place down on the arena. The man had the girl against the floor, he had just kicked her, she spitted some blood and covered her face just before another kick reached her anatomy.
How pathetic he thought if I were in her place, he’d be dead already
Damian’s eyes moved back and forth, things seemed to be done by now. The girl would lose, probably die, the crowd would cheer and the man would win. It seemed as clear as water.
Bruce, on the other hand, wasn’t as absorbed by the fight as Damian, from where they were hiding; his main goal was getting everything he could on video, getting to the head of whatever this was. Find a culprit.
Suddenly, when the man had the girl grabbed by the neck, strangling her, she kicked him on the face. Once, twice, thrice before she reached her true goal, his trachea. It all went fast forward from then; the man released her, gasping for air. She was quick to attack his feet, making him fall on his knees; the man, being disoriented by the loss of air, was surprisingly slow and ineffective when it came to attack or defending himself.
The girl kicked him on the back of his neck; his body fell on the dirty floor of the arena. The crowd roared excited. She stepped on his neck and Damian could swear he heard the cracking sound of bone breaking. The small girl took the face of the now dead man that lied on the floor; she took out his mask and closed his glossy, empty eyes before raising the mask over her head in a sign of victory.
The next day at school, Carmen was wearing a scarf and some new bruises.