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Gotham was too quiet tonight.
Damian should have welcomed it. Silence meant efficiency, a clean patrol, no distractions. Instead, it felt like standing in a mausoleum built out of thoughts he refused to confront. The rooftops yawned open around him, wide as a throat waiting to swallow him.
He paused on the edge of a building, moonlight silvering the blood drying on his gauntlets. The cut wasn’t deep. It shouldn’t have mattered. But the sting of it pulsed through him with a strange, unwelcome intimacy.
*My life is torn, my bones, they bleed…*
He closed his eyes.
That song again.
He hadn’t meant to replay it. He certainly hadn’t meant for the words to lodge themselves under his skin like hooks, dragging up everything he’d buried.
There was a heaviness in him he couldn’t explain. Not to himself, certainly not to anyone else. It wasn’t sadness. Damian did not feel sad. He was not weak or lonely or fragile.
And yet—
Yet he felt hollow tonight, as if something vital had been scooped out of him long ago and he’d only now realized the space it left behind.
*A shell of myself,* he thought, and hated the accuracy.
The lyrics wound their way through him like a second pulse, unwelcome but persistent:
*You have become the voice in my head…
Only recourse we’re left after death…*
He frowned. He didn’t know who *you* referred to.
Maybe no one.
Maybe everyone he’d ever lost.
His boot scraped the edge of the building; a pebble dropped into the alley below, vanishing in the dark. He imagined himself following it, falling deeper, swallowed whole by the city that had taken so much already.
*Will the pain stop if we go deeper?*
He shook the thought off like rainwater. Ridiculous. Sentimental. He was tired, nothing more.
Fatigue made fools of even the disciplined.
Still, his chest ached with a pressure he couldn’t name. Something coiled. Something tightening.
He imagined, for a moment, what it would be like if someone knew. If someone understood the weight he carried, the exhaustion that pressed against his ribs like a second set of bones trying to break free.
*Are you in pain like I am?*
Damian inhaled sharply.
No. He did not want anyone to know. He did not need anyone to know.
He would not allow his weakness to touch another person.
And yet—
Yet he wanted something. Something impossible. Something dangerous.
Someone to step inside the labyrinth of him and see the fractures.
Someone to understand without being told.
Someone to fill the hollow space where his father’s approval should have lived, where Mother’s certainty should have been, where—
Where something nameless ached to be.
*Your flesh and bone welcome me in… Welcome me in…*
He pressed gloved fingers to his temple as if he could push the words out of his skull. But they stayed, throbbing, like the heartbeat of something waiting in the dark.
There would be no one.
He would allow no one.
This hunger. For connection, for understanding… was a liability.
*There is always something in the way.*
Yes. Himself.
A shadow passed overhead. Just a bird, nothing more. But for an instant, he felt the city tilt beneath him, felt the urge to sink deeper into that metaphorical throat the lyrics spoke of.
To disappear where no one could follow.
Where he would no longer have to carry himself.
“I am not weak,” Damian muttered to the empty rooftop.
Gotham said nothing in return.
He pulled his hood back up, his expression smoothing into that perfect, practiced calm.
The calm that looked like control but felt like numbness.
The song looped in his head as he leapt into the night:
*I wanna go where nobody else will ever go…*
And perhaps, he realized with a cold, small clarity, he already did.
Every night.
Every time he waded into the dark alone.
Perhaps that was why the lyrics wouldn’t leave him.
Perhaps they knew.
*Are you in pain like I am?*
Damian did not answer.
He never would.
He simply kept moving.
Deeper into the city,
deeper into himself,
deeper into a place no one else would ever reach.
And the song followed him, quiet and relentless,
the only voice unafraid to whisper back from the hollow.