{the wayward ghost}

-"To wander is to grow," Ursus said-

The concept of love always confused him. He read about it, vaguely aware that it was some sort of emotion that people felt for each other. He knew it could be attraction, but he was uncertain of its property. He asked his grandfather, and was told little and nothing. Love was mystery, and so Damian connected it to the world outside. He stitched in his head with a filament of wonder and gold, that if love was so untouchable, it was the sky.

He wrote in the sketchbook Grandfather had kindly given him when he'd requested for something to do when not training or reading. He wrote, because he could, but the hazy letters weren't very good. His sketches were better. He drew the sunset, the only one he'd ever seen, and he drew in over and over and over again. He drew a tree he'd seen twice, and he drew Grandfather, and he drew what little of the world he knew. And he wrote, penning his ceaseless, begging thoughts on paper, because otherwise he didn't know if he'd contain himself. He might ask Grandfather something he shouldn't, and get punished for that.

Love, he wrote over a delicately shaded drawing of what he thought, perhaps, his mother might have looked like. Against the yellow paper the face was round, the ink heavy around her large, sharp eyes, which were the same shape as his. He'd had to look in the mirror to capture the contours of his own cheekbones, sharp and sinking into his cheeks, only for his face to go round again. He drew that, and touched his lips, feeling the fullness of them. He drew her lips as he felt his own to be, plump and pouting. Her chin, he decided, would look different. Maybe... sharper. Damian ran his fingers over his chin anyway, feeling its shape. Her nose was sharp too, like Grandfather's. Damian's was round and small, fitting oddly on his face. He gave her long, flowing black hair. He inked every individual strand with great care, the process of penning the tumble of waves causing his hand to cramp. His vision was obscure, but even he could see that the woman he had drawn was beautiful. If only you were real.

He wrote in letters that blotted together, ink bleeding from pressing far too long, and not noticing. Damian's vision would never be up to par, but he did fine with what he had. He wasn't blind. He could see things, he just saw it fuzzy. He had to fill in the haze with his imagination, and his imagination was filled with inky blots and colors that faded fast from memory. He wanted to understand things, but there was only so much he could ask, and only so much that was answered.

Love, he wrote, is a fleeting emotion, which I imagine to cling to all things unreachable. Love is something I cannot explain, because no one has explained it to me. I know it is a feeling, but I have never felt it. And so, I connect this fleeting feeling to the world that abhors me. Love exists in the same way that stars do. I have never seen the stars, but I know that they exist. I know that stars burn, and then they die. Love, I think, might just be the same. If love is an emotion, then emotions fade. Like all good things, maybe, and that is why love is untouchable, unreachable, and unfathomable. Love, perhaps, is Mother.

He never reread the passage again, and he liked to pretend he never wrote it at all. He cherished the drawing, and loathed himself for writing on the page. He should have left well enough alone. He should have known not to mark such a beautiful portrait. He spent his nights staring at the ceiling, rubbing the bridge of his nose where his tinted glasses had chafed his skin to the point where there seemed to be a permanent indentation. He despised himself, and he despised the world for cursing him.

Damian was a ghost, if a ghost ever did exist. Even his teachers called him a ghost, and he wasn't sure they even knew his name. Did anyone, besides himself and Grandfather? Damian wondered, and he drew. He drew himself, hazily trying to pen his features and retouch them. Yes, force the white hair to become inky black, and get rid of the glasses in order to see eyes that were… green, perhaps? Damian did not know what color his eyes would be, if he had been born normal, but Grandfather's eyes were the only other set of eyes he'd ever seen. Everyone else wore masks.

"Grandfather," Damian said, staring at his plate. "Do I… have any siblings?"

"Excuse me?"

"Siblings." Damian looked up, and he held his head high. He was still an al Ghul. He would act like one. "Mother obviously had no other children, but my father… but Batman… Is it possible? He never married Mother."

"No," Grandfather said, giving a short sigh. "No, he did not. And no, you have no siblings…"

Damian could sense the but. He straightened, staring at his grandfather with rising eyebrows, his body stiffening to the point where he looked rigid. "What is it, Grandfather?" he asked, laying his palms flat against the table.

"Your father…" Grandfather studied him, and his eyes glinted almost in amusement. It was an odd thing. "Your father does have a ward he cares for. A poor, crippled thing, really… He's been comatose for years."

"Years," Damian repeated. Confusion and resentment pricked his heart.

"Yes, the poor boy was a victim of the Joker." Grandfather cocked his head, and smiled grimly. "Have I spoken to you about the Joker?" he asked.

"No," Damian said, shaking his head. "I know of him, of who he is to Batman, but I don't know what he did."

"He kidnapped Blue Jay. Did a sure number on him before he detonated the building the boy was in."

"That should have killed him," Damian said ruefully.

"It's a better fate, I'd imagine," sighed Ra's al Ghul. "After all, who would want to live on as a cripple?"

Damian looked at himself in the mirror that night, his grandfather's words echoing in his mind. But I'm not cripple, he told himself. I'm just a ghost. A monster. And monsters should prey on the weak. He wondered how his father must have felt, to have a cripple for a son. A cripple or a beast, he thought gravely, playing with the handle of his door. It was old, and it was growing weak. He only needed a tool to wedge it free in the night.

He stole a knife from his table one evening while dining with Grandfather. He began to hide knives during training as well, so the teacher could not take them all. Steadily he began to form a collection of assorted shurikens, kunais, daggers, poisons, darts, and spikes. The crown jewel would be the katana he trained with everyday. So when he killed his teacher and stashed the weapon behind his bed, no one thought much of it. His grandfather complimented his speed and agility and force, and Damian nodded, not too concerned with the fancy of pride.

He had an entire arsenal on him the night he set himself free. Before wedging the knob off his door, he swiftly flipped through his sketchbook, taking the picture of his mother and ripping it out. He wanted to have her face with him, if only an imagined version of it. He tucked it between the folds of his clothes, between a dart and a dagger. And then he ran, removing the knob in silence, and bolting from his tower as fast as he could.

He wore muted colors, blacks and reds blending into neutral hues. He had donned a cloak, and wore gloves, and covered the majority of his face with a thick red scarf. Nothing was visible. He liked this, because it made him feel like no one could catch him. He put his training to the test, and killed only about three men to whisk himself away and take a boat to the mainland. He'd killed two of his guards, and another guard that had spotted him.

He killed a few more men along the way, but he didn't think much of it. The world was fresh, and dark, and there was a haze the clung to the night like a mist, and he was enthralled with it. He could not see the stars, because his vision was too poor, and his glasses were tinted, but he could sense them there. It felt good to sense things. And those senses saved his life more than once. He was nearly caught come dawn, and when he was on the mainland he'd almost been whisked away. He stowed away on a boat, and he waited. He was patient. He hid away from the world, careful to avoid sunlight, and he made his way to America.

He did not plan to meet his father. That would be too horrible to bear. No, Damian planned on sparing his father a great deal of shame by eradicating the source of the problem. If Damian could do the same to himself, he would, but his grandfather thought he was worth something alive, so how could Damian disagree? He was an al Ghul. He had no need for weak thoughts such as suicide.

It would be better for the boy as well. Damian would not want to live, if it was him in the boy's place. No, better to give him a good death, be merciful while the boy still slept. Damian was a monster, sure, but he was also a ghost. And ghosts were death and silence. That was how the boy would die. Silently. No fuss, no pain. It would be best for them all, and Damian's father would not have to worry any longer.

The world was a blur. Damian could not quite understand it. He spoke a multitude of tongues, and when he was finally caught, he could only blurt out his destination. "Gotham?" he offered. "Gotham City?"

He was taken there by ship. The ship docked many places, but Damian was put in a cabin, and when he was asked to take off his bulky clothing, he had to refuse. "It protects me," he said. And you. The entire ship seemed to hate him, and he got sea sick for a duration of the trip. The feeling of nausea plagued him everywhere he went, and the wonder of the sea was torn from him. He hated it, and he hated the weakness. He wanted to understand how the world worked, but all the ship did was make him hate water, and hate confinement even more.

He sat huddled in his cabin, curling within his heavy cloak. It was grayish and tattered, but its hood covered his hair and eyebrows, falling over his face in a heavy rumple of folds and dark ashen fabric. The cloak fastened at his left shoulder with a silver broach. It was an eye, enameled red and piercing, spliced like a cat's. A demon's eye, a ghost's eye, a monster's eye. It was the only thing that suggested who he could be, and he was reluctant to get rid of it.

Damian didn't like to speak to the crewmen. They tried to approach him, but he did not react or respond, and when they reached for him he fled. He heard them whispering about him, and he knew they assumed something else besides the horrible truth. They didn't realize what a monster he was, and it was best that way. He feared rejection, and so he kept himself hidden. Grandfather had taught him that the world was cruel to monsters like him, and thus he warily waded through life. He needn't bother himself with people, because they would never accept him. That was the truth that Grandfather had hammered into his brain from when Damian was old enough to crawl.

The matter of trusting the crewmen was not an issue. Damian didn't trust them. He left the boat immediately when it ported, and was quick to run. It was broad daylight, and his senses were a tumble of obscure buzzing and mingled scents and hazy vision and humid air. His body felt shaky, and he berated himself for being weak, because he knew it was just proving what he knew already to be true. He was a glorious disappointment.

Damian refused to be the weakling that Grandfather believed him to be. If he was a monster, he wanted to prove it. He wanted to rip the world apart with teeth and claws, and he wanted to watch the bleary city erupt in ash and glow and heat. Damian was in bitter shock when he found himself in the midst of towers and screeching horns, and so many people that he had to clamp his hands over his ears, his eyes going wide behind his glasses. He pushed through crowds, shuddering and hissing through his teeth at the physical contact.

Is this what I've been missing all this time? He looked up at the blurry haze of grayish clouds and mist and smog. The sky was different here, like something had breathed into the expanse of blue and left it a foggy mess of fluffy darkness and obscurity. Damian squinted, and shook his head. He was in shock over what the world was revealing to him, but even so, he had to be strong. He used what Grandfather taught him to sweep through the streets, collecting information about the son of Bruce Wayne. The poor, decrepit boy who was half dead anyway. Damian had no qualms against being cruel, but was it such a cruelty to put down the boy who was barely living at all?

Of course, Damian could not be sure. He was not sure of very much, and he struggled to understand the things around him. He understood what the automobiles were, and he understood the mobile devices, and he did truly understand the concept of the city and the people, but what he could not grasp was the normalcy. People lived this way, truly? He wondered what that was like, and found that he had no taste for it. He pretended he was not at loss with everything he was experiencing, and instead focused on his objective. He was an al Ghul, and he would accomplish what he had set out to do. And he would prove that he was not so frail as it was believed that he was.

He had to be careful. He didn't want to run into his father, despite… no. No he didn't want to see his father. It'll only end badly. Damian feared what his father might think of him, of how disgusted he would be with such a weak, monstrous child. He didn't want to think about it.

Damian did not think that his attire was odd. But in comparison to those around him, perhaps it was— after all, he was garbed in layers and layers of thick, dark fabric. Beneath his gray cloak he wore a vermillion, dupion tunic, and beneath that a black thawb sliced in half to allow his legs to move. Instead of it being a robe proper, it was more like another cloak beneath the cloak. And beneath all that, he wore shalwar— drawstring trousers that were quite loose around his skinny legs. His face was covered by a thick woolen scarf, a brighter red than his tunic, and eventually he managed to cover his hair with it as well. He was careful to cover himself, and he noticed he wasn't alone in that. It was very chilly, and most of the passersby wore thick coats and hats and gloves as well.

It was nearly nightfall when he slipped into the hospital. He was silent, and unnoticed— after all, he was a ghost. He found himself thinking that the hospital was odd, and nothing like what he expected it to be. Was this what was done with the sick and weak? If Grandfather hadn't the need of him, would this be the awful place where Damian had ended up? He didn't want to think about it, he was so scared of the idea. He was lucky Grandfather had entertained his kindness.

He found out Jason Todd's room number by hiding and listening. He crept to the door, his mind abuzz and his heart hammering. The truth was, Damian wasn't sure what he was trying to prove. Killing a cripple meant very little, after all. It was the fact that he'd escaped Grandfather's watch and made it this far, that was what he'd been trying to accomplish.

But Damian was still going to kill Jason Todd.

He slipped into the room in silence, the door closing behind him as if he'd never opened it at all. He already had four kunais between the fingers of his right hand, but he soon realized he had a problem. There was a woman sitting at the boy's bedside, and she had noticed him.

He stared at her chair in confusion. Wheels, he thought, feeling stunned. What is that contraption? The woman was fair of face— and Damian could not help but feel a strange rush as her hazy face became clearer. She was moving closer, and he stood in shock, frozen by his inability to process the new set of variables.

"Who are you?" the woman asked, her eyes flickering. He couldn't tell what color they were. He squinted, and realized with a start that they were blue. Like the sky! He had never known eyes could capture such a brilliant color.

And suddenly she was moving, and he remembered his objective. He flung one kunai, and dove for the boy when he saw that the woman had whipped out an eskrima stick, lodging the point of the blade within it. She was fast, and that was a shock to Damian, who was whacked away from the boy's bed. Damian landed on his feet, slicing through the woman's arm and kicking at the wheels of her chair, his panic overrunning his care for fulfilling his goal. He heard her give a sharp gasp as she split over— like water from a glass that he crashed to the floor— and she and the chair fell sideways.

Damian aimed another kunai at the boy's jugular. He noticed that his face was very pale. Like mine. His hair was brown, fluffy and curling across his forehead in dark waves. His lips were parted, and Damian could hear him breathing. Shallow breaths, as if he were only sleeping, his chest rising and falling steadily. That made Damian falter for a moment, trying to sort out the situation. He'd been expecting something like a corpse— this boy was merely asleep.

He gasped as something smacked against the back of his knees hard, and he was forced to the ground, kicking and twisting. The woman had pinned him down and he blinked, seeing her face almost completely clearly. He'd never been so close to a woman before, and staring at her round, scowling face made him wonder. Did Mother look anything like you?

He kicked her hard, his foot slamming into her chest, and he sprung to his feet and flung himself at the window, fear and uncertainty forcing him to retreat. That shamed him. He had failed at doing something so simple, it made him sick! The window shattered around him, and he found himself spiraling downward, his body falling into the wind. He stabbed his remaining kunais into the side of the building, and he hissed as they screeched in his ears, carving three long lacerations into the glimmering side of the building.

He dropped himself to the ground, readjusting his glasses, and stalking off in a huff. That should have gone better, he thought bitterly. But the boy was not going anywhere. Damian had time later to try again. Until then, his stomach was making a noise that resembled man choking through a mouthful of his own blood. He didn't like it at all.


Note: Damian was taught basics through books, but otherwise he was just an incredibly sheltered child. He doesn't know very much about the world, because he was never taught much about the world.

Cred to Victor Hugo. This is the only quote I've chosen so far to mention the name of one of the characters from The Man Who Laughs, Ursus.