When I was sixteen, I met him, and when he was sixteen, I left him. I guess that's what this story is, when you get down to it.
You can't know what it's like to remember your own death. Remember the split second before your heart starts pumping, when your vision is still there, fading around the edges, maybe, but still there. The pain is what I remember the least of; the fear, on the other hand. The fear sticks with you.
They say that life after the Pit is a half-life, is something like a dream, is lived in perpetual fear of death. But it's not death I fear. It never has been. I jump off buildings and in front of trains and place myself in between bullets and their targets, and end up deliberately in the midst of a situation quickly sliding south, so I'm not afraid of death. (And how can I be afraid of something I've already done once?)
When I was sixteen, he was four. The first time I saw him, he was a tiny, frail baby floating in a tube of viscous liquid, so dense that his small body floated to the top, like a bloated corpse. I'll never forget it. What's that? I asked, and she looked at me like I'd just dropped some grave insult and told me: My son.
(Talia had a son? That would be like saying Talia had a puppy. No, Talia had a soldier. Talia had a wolf.)
I wondered aloud, because I was joking, if he wasn't mine. Talia said, "You were twelve when he was conceived, and a ward in his father's house," and that shut me up. (I asked her once: How old are you? She traced a pattern onto my naked back with the tip of her fingernail, and for a second I thought she was going to dig in, to rip right through me, to tear me apart. She said, Too old to be doing this to you, Jason. It was the only time I ever heard guilt in her voice.)
("Not to me," I'd corrected her. "With me." Her eyes look yellow in the nighttime, like a she-wolf, or a ghost only ever half-there.)
By the next year, he spent most days out of the biotube. I saw them tear him apart – a five year old – and put him back, stitching him together again, fixing bone and flesh and replacing blood, and providing his mother with statistics, explaining just how much he could endure. I always hated that word. Endure. It's a sad word, but Talia thinks it's strong. She passed that on to her son.
Her son. Talia's baby, precious boy king gifted to the world.
When he was seven, he met a Polish asshole named Karność. I'd worked with the man before. His name means Discipline in Polish, and he taught that which he was named for. Later Damian met Męka, his teacher's wife. Her name means Pain.
(I killed Karność, when Damian was fourteen and the man went rogue against the League. He struck a deal with Checkmate, or something, is what I heard. I heard about the assignment, and I asked for it. I killed his wife, too. She was on the other side of the world, and had dropped all contact with him after he betrayed us, but hey, all's fair in love and war, and she was the one who fell in love. I never told Damian.)
The first time they tortured Damian – and this is debatable, really – was when he was eight, and Męka shot toxins into his jugular and paralyzed him for two days straight from the pain. When he was recovered, they had him fight their daughter. She must have been his age. He fought with her every time he was dosed for three years, when he killed her. He stuck a sword through her throat, and then severed her neck; his teachers called it extraneous. Unnecessary. I called it a quick death.
Damian slept in my quarters that night, and I knew everybody knew, and I knew what they were saying, but I also knew that none of them really believed it, especially not Talia. Kind and compassionate aren't really the first ways I'd characterize myself, but at least I know what that feels like. To the rest of the League, to those at the compound, they couldn't admit that they didn't understand kindness. It had to be perverted, in some way, for them to wrap their heads around it.
(The first time I said, "Fuck them, Damian," was when he was seven, before he really knew them. He always liked it when I said that, I think. I think the irreverence reminded him that they weren't gods, and neither was he, and he liked that there was someone there to tell him that.)
Damian asked me what it felt like to die, and I said, "Scary." He said, "You aren't afraid of anything." I put him to bed, I put him to fucking bed, I think about this all the time. I tucked him in and I pressed a hand to his forehead for just one moment and I said: "Yeah. I am."
When Talia gave him to me – after that, although not long – she told me that I owned him, and the only one who owned him more than I did was her. She told me that he would be an emperor one day, he would be a conqueror, raze cities in their name, but that I could turn him into anything I wanted him to be, for me. (Her words were: Apprentice, son, lover, brother, sidekick, plaything. I don't care. But no matter how you treat him, one day he will be king. Keep that in mind, Jason.)
I said, "Fuck them, Damian," again when he was thirteen, and he had his final test in front of Talia. "You passed," she said. "You know everything I can teach you." And from then on it wasn't lessons anymore, it was missions. He went with me to depose three high-ranking American politicians, then a vice-president in Uruguay, then the owner of a small convenience store in Venice, then we shot a plane out of the sky, killing the entire cabinet of an Eastern European country which crumbled into dust in Talia's grasp. We spent a lot of time in Somalia, which he liked, and we had a base in Dubai, which he loved. Get him back home and let him collapse on a nice bed and hang out at the pool for a few hours and he looked like every other fourteen-year-old on the planet, until we got back to work and I saw him slit throats so fast I barely saw him draw his sword. I could shoot a commlink out of someone's ear from two miles away, but Damian was always right there. He enjoyed the physicality of blood rushing from bodies, of twitching limbs and eyes gone vacant. It had become my life a long time ago, and I didn't like that he loved it, but it was better than falling to pieces every death he caused, and so we were both OK, for a while.
I have tried to kill his father a total of twenty-seven times, and failed each. Elaborate schemes, and sometimes something went awry, but more often I held the gun in my hands, hearing it click slightly with every miniscule movement, and I did not pull the trigger. I hate Bruce Wayne for what he did to me, but, and I know this doesn't make any sense, I hate him more for leaving the child he didn't know about. Damian looked like him, especially as he got older, around the broadness of his shoulders or the sharpness of his jaw. I look at him and I see Bruce, but I also see Talia, and he once asked me if he thinks of her as a mother, the way he has been taught to know her. I don't tell him that I don't know her that well at all. I don't tell him that neither of his parents have ever been anything resembling parents to me: they are missions, they are conquests, they are I-will-kill-you-or-I-will-claim-you-for-myself, but despite it all I've never had the stomach for it. They are the ones who own me.
"Nobody owns you," I told him, one night when he wouldn't let go of the sword, he brought it home with him, steel attached to his hip, and told me very quietly that I should think about leaving. "Nobody owns you," I said, "and you don't owe anybody anything."
He asked me not to address him by his first name, and I added, "Damian," emphatically. Talia had many names for me, but I've kept my own because there is no mysticism here, no fanaticism, just who I am. And who I am is a guy who's good with his hands and good with guns, but who's kept a shadow better who's a whole lot better with his hands and guns and swords and word and everything.
We didn't kill his father. We should've, when we saw him, when Damian beat the shit out of him and I carved my initials into the skin of his face. (Overkill, Damian said afterwards, grinning at me, but I was still coming down from the adrenaline and I didn't care.) Bruce will have a part of me on his skin for the rest of his life, and he will stitch it and bind it and cover it up with makeup, but every time his face is bare and he looks at himself in the mirror, he'll think: This is what I did to my sons.
I bought Damian his first beer when he was fifteen, and when he was sixteen (just barely sixteen, it was for his birthday, I think, but he looked like he could've been twenty-three) I took him to a bar and I tried picking up women for him, then some men, but he kept grinning and shaking his head and saying, "Jay, one more shot. One more shot. Take the shot with me."
(TAKE THE SHOT, I can hear him screaming, through the commlink. It rings in my ears, so loud that it nearly turns into static. JASON he never uses my name on a mission TAKE THE SHOT)
But Talia turned her head and looked straight at me, the crosshairs framing her dark face. I remember thinking, They'll just bring her back. I could barely think for Damian screaming at me, I remember that before, when he knew she was coming for him, he sat on his bed and cried. "I can't kill her," he said.
"You can kill anyone," I reminded him. "You won't kill her."
I wasn't going to make him, not when that was the first time since he was eleven and killed that girl that he'd cried to me. That he'd cried at all.
But even as I watched her eyes meeting mine, knowing that she could not see me, the lens like a picture frame, I saw blood leak from her mouth. Her vision was there, and she could not see me, but it seemed like she could. I saw those last moments, and I think about them, how she never looked afraid. I trained under a man who was religious once, and I remember the passage he inscribed on his weapons. There is a season to every thing, and a time to every purpose. When you kill a fifteen year old, his time to die has not yet come; when an ageless woman tells her son it's time to do his duty, and offers him wealth and power, or death by her hands, then that is her time. Then it must be.
(I don't believe in God, but if I did, he'd have a name, and he'd be sixteen, and it would take me four minutes and forty-one seconds to get to him by the open Jeep after he sliced through his mother's body and held her corpse in his arms.)
She wasn't dead for long, but I know that image haunted him, I know he vicariously felt the fear of death that his mother could not, and I know that he will be a ruler for years, forever, if his mother has her way. I know that Damian will never die, and he will stay a boy forever, if that's what he wants, and the League had always been much bigger than the two of us, but despite that, he told me it was time, like the setting of the sun, and he left me, so I left him.
I think of all the people he's killed, of the blade he left me, in gratitude for my training (that's what he called it training it cut me, deeply, but I didn't show it to him), of the blood it's stained with. His eyes, dark and knowing like his father, ruthless and demanding like his mother, wary and injured like me. Is that all I gave to him? Cynicism and injury? I would like to think I loved him, too, and he won't forget that, but al Ghuls and Waynes are hard to navigate, and he's always been far too much of both. I trained him, and I watched him commit to a life which he should have never seen. (Remember the baby in the biotube? Sometimes I remind myself of that, and I don't know when the two boys became different.)
He is seventeen forever, if he wants to be, and I see him again with a gun pressed into his stomach and his steel at my throat, and he laughs at me, without parting his lips.
I ask him, "How old are you, Damian?" and he tells me: "Too young to die," and I wake up with fire in my veins, with a fake passport waiting on the edge of the pool, and a note in her handwriting that I don't read.