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The rain lashed against the tall windows of Wayne Manor like accusations that would never be spoken aloud. You had always been the ghost in the halls—unseen, unheard, unimportant. The daughter Bruce Wayne had taken in after some half-forgotten case, the one who never quite fit the Batfamily mold. No vigilante suit. No exceptional skills. Just a girl who wanted to write poetry and disappear quietly.
Damian had made sure you never forgot your place. His “training” sessions were never the roughhousing of siblings. They were calculated. A bruise hidden under long sleeves. A twisted wrist when you dared speak back. A shove down the stairs framed as an accident. The others saw. Jason shrugged it off as “demon spawn being demon spawn.” Tim buried himself in cases. Dick offered empty platitudes and then left for Blüdhaven. Bruce… Bruce was always somewhere else.
Only Alfred tried. The old butler would leave warm tea outside your door, slip books of poetry onto your bed, and once, in a rare moment of courage, he had gently said, “You deserve better, Miss.” But the Manor was a machine of shadows and secrets, and one old man couldn’t stop it.
You wrote to survive. Under the pseudonym (Y/N).P—your initials paired with Pennyworth, a quiet nod to the only person who had shown you kindness—your poems appeared in small literary magazines. Quiet verses about hollow homes, bleeding wrists, and girls who were never wanted. The checks were small but real. You saved every cent for college, for escape, for a life where no one could touch you again. Your journals were your only friends: pages filled with ink-stained desperation and beauty no one in this house would ever read.
There were times were you would secretly drink and smoke just to get a sense of relief. You would get yourself into trouble for fraudulent IDs just to buy a drink. It didn't matter how you attained it, all that mattered was that the family was too blind to notice it. Even then no matter how much you smoked or drank, you were still empty.
The first time you tried, it was with a razor in your small, barren room. The cuts were deep. The blood was warm. For a moment, there was peace.
They found you. The hospital was sterile and white. When Damian visited—ordered, perhaps, by Bruce—he stood at the foot of your bed with that cold, superior stare.
“Attention seeker,” he said flatly, arms crossed. “If you wanted to die properly, you would have succeeded. Pathetic.”
No one corrected him. Dick looked away. Tim typed on his phone. Jason muttered something about “not my problem.” Bruce’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. Alfred’s eyes were wet with sorrow he was too late to express.
You stopped speaking after that.
Weeks blurred. The Manor felt smaller, the walls closer. One night, the pain crested like a wave you couldn’t outrun. You opened the window of your room—the tiny one they gave you on the third floor, overlooking the spiked iron gates that surrounded the property like teeth.
The wind smelled of wet earth and freedom.
You jumped.
The fall was brief. The impact was not. One of the ornate metal spikes pierced clean through your abdomen, lifting you slightly as if the house itself had finally claimed you. Blood ran down the iron in rivulets. Your eyes stayed open for a long moment, staring at the dark sky, before the light left them.
In the end, the boys never were a teenage girl before…
They found your body at dawn.
Alfred was the first. His usual composure shattered as he crumpled beside the gates, old hands trembling as he reached for you but couldn’t bring himself to pull you down. “My dear girl… I should have done more. Forgive this useless old man.”
The Batfamily arrived in a storm of capes and panic. For once, the vigilantes looked small.
Bruce’s voice cracked when he saw you impaled there like a broken doll. “No…”
Damian froze. His face, usually a mask of arrogance, went blank. Then something fractured behind his eyes—something possessive and ugly and too late. “She was mine to break,” he whispered, barely audible. “Not like this. Not without my permission.”
Jason tore the gates apart with raw strength, pulling your body free while cursing violently. “We let this happen. We fucking let him do this.” His hands shook as he cradled you, blood soaking his jacket. The anger that had always simmered in him turned inward, sharp as the spike that had killed you.
Tim hacked into every system, pulling your pseudonyms, your publications, the quiet life you’d built in secret. “She had money. She was going to leave. She was planning to leave us.” His voice rose, hysterical. “Why didn’t we see?”
Dick held your cold hand, tears streaming down his face. “I thought… I thought if we ignored it, it would fix itself. She was supposed to need us. She was supposed to stay.”
They searched your room like a crime scene.
The journals were everywhere—neat stacks, hidden under floorboards, tucked behind books. Poems of loneliness so profound they made hardened vigilantes weep. One entry, dated a week before your death:
They call themselves my family, but families don’t watch you bleed. I saved enough for a bus ticket and a new name. Maybe somewhere, a girl like me can be wanted.
The money you’d earned from your published work under (Y/N).P was all there—earmarked for college, for freedom. Proof you had almost escaped their neglect.
The yandere obsession that had always lurked beneath their indifference now roared to life in your absence. They couldn’t let you go. Not like this.
Bruce had your body preserved in the Cave’s hidden medical wing, speaking to it in the dead of night. “You’re ours. You were always ours. We’ll fix this. We’ll bring you back somehow.” His voice was hoarse with a love that had arrived far too late—twisted, possessive, devouring.
Damian sat beside your journals for days, reading every word, tracing your handwriting. “You belonged to me. Your pain, your poetry, your last breath—they were mine.” He began writing responses in the margins, dark promises of what he would have done if you had lived. How he would have kept you locked away, safe from everything but him.
Jason hunted down every person who had ever published your work, ensuring your words stayed within the family. “No one else gets to read her soul.”
Tim built a digital shrine—every poem analyzed, every pseudonym claimed.
Dick held fake conversations with your corpse, apologizing, promising trips and affection that never came when you breathed. “We’ll be the family you wanted. Just come back.”
Alfred stood apart, watching them descend into madness with quiet horror. He kept one small journal for himself—the only one they hadn’t taken. Inside was the last poem you’d written, pressed like a flower:
Die, daughter, die. Maybe then they’ll see the girl they killed.
Weeks after the funeral that was no funeral at all, Alfred Pennyworth stood at the edge of the grand sitting room, a silver tray balanced perfectly in his gloved hands, though the tea had long gone cold. He watched the scene unfold with the quiet detachment of a man who had buried too many children in this house of shadows. The Batfamily—his boys, fractured and unraveling—sat rigidly around the famous writer, Ms. Eleanor Voss, a woman whose own poetry collections lined the shelves of universities and bookstores alike. She had contacted them after discovering the works of (Y/N).P, drawn by verses she had quietly admired for years.
“I had hoped to meet her in person,” Ms. Voss said, her voice crisp and measured as she accepted a journal from Tim’s trembling hands. “(Y/N).P’s work carried a rare honesty. The quiet desperation of a voice that knew it might never be heard. I wanted to offer mentorship. Perhaps even collaboration.”
Bruce’s jaw tightened, his eyes hollow. “She’s gone.”
Damian sat closest to the woman, fingers twitching as if ready to snatch the journal back. “Her words belong here.”
Jason’s laugh was bitter. Dick looked away. Tim hovered over the archives.
Alfred observed them all, his heart a lead weight in his chest. In the end, the boys never were a teenage girl before…
Ms. Voss flipped through the pages slowly, her expression shifting from professional admiration to something sharper, cooler. She took in the opulent room: the dark wood paneling, the looming portraits, the sterile perfection that screamed wealth but offered no warmth. Her gaze lingered on the family—their intensity, the way they spoke of the dead girl as something theirs to mourn, to claim, to resurrect in their obsessions.
The writer closed the journal with deliberate care. “I see.”
She stood, smoothing her coat, and looked directly at Bruce first, then each of the boys in turn. Alfred noted the way her eyes held no fear, only weary clarity.
“That girl did not want to die,” Ms. Voss said, her voice cutting through the heavy air like a well-honed blade. “She just wanted out of that house. Out of that decorating scheme. She probably thought she could fly when she jumped.”
A stunned silence fell.
Damian rose halfway from his seat, green eyes flashing. “You dare—”
“She wrote of cages disguised as homes,” the writer continued, undeterred. “Of hands that bruised while others looked away. Of saving pennies from words published under (Y/N).P that no one here bothered to read until she was gone. These poems weren’t cries for attention. They were blueprints for escape. And you—” Her gaze swept the room again. “—kept her locked inside this beautiful tomb. Did you even read her poems?”
Alfred felt a rare flicker of vindication, even as grief clawed at him. He remembered the last time he had seen her alive: pale, pressing a small envelope of cash into his hand with a whisper. “For safekeeping, Alfred. If I… if I make it out.”
Jason’s voice cracked. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re fixing it—”
“Fixing it?” Ms. Voss’s laugh was soft, pitying. “You’re hoarding her ghost. That’s not love, gentlemen. That’s another cage. She had enough money to enter Harvard, but not enough time to experience it.”
She set the journal down gently and turned toward the door. Alfred stepped forward quietly to escort her. As they walked the long hallway, Ms. Voss glanced at him.
“You were the only one who tried, weren’t you?”
Alfred’s voice was steady, though his eyes were not. “I was the only one who saw her, madam. And I was still too late.”
Behind them, the sitting room erupted into low, frantic voices—Bruce issuing orders to secure every trace of (Y/N).P, Damian snarling, Tim already tracing the writer’s digital footprint. The yandere darkness only grew thicker.
Alfred closed the heavy front door after Ms. Voss departed into the Gotham night. He lingered there a moment, hand on the polished wood, and allowed himself one quiet, broken thought:
She had wanted only to be seen.
Instead, they had finally noticed her—
when noticing could no longer save her.