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English
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Published:
2023-09-09
Updated:
2025-10-01
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47,895
Chapters:
16/?
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Unimportant

Summary:

Damian found himself once more standing in the stillness of Wayne manor. His phone was equally still, just as silent, entirely bereft of activity. He contemplates it, contemplates just walking out the house without it, contemplates calling for Jon and asking Superboy to take him out of this city.

Then he realises he is being dramatic, because it is fine, and he is fine.

…

Sometimes casual cruelty hurts worse than any other kind. Damian learns this the hard way. He is not fine.

Notes:

I didn’t think this one was ever going to see the light of day. I started it forever ago and it for the longest time stayed under 1000 words. I could see what would happen in my head if I wrote it, but I just….wasn’t writing it. Then, a little while ago, I went back to read what I had and I almost started crying, and all of a sudden I just started writing again and I realized maybe it was time to finally give this fic the chance to be told.

…..brace yourselves.

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: Forgotten

Chapter Text

Seconds run down, the clock hands move, spinning slowly, near imperceptibly if you don’t sit and stare at them. Damian does, he watches now as time begins to run out and the only noise is the tic toc and the gears churning slowly behind its face. 

 

He stares at it so intently, you'd think he was waiting for it to be set aflame by his gaze. You’d be incorrect, afterall, it was the other superson with heat vision, not him. Still, his gaze doesn’t falter. He’s waiting. Waiting for the clock to strike twelve, and then, finally, it does.

 

And like that, Damian’s birthday ends.

 

It ends without a single member of his family having remembered it. It ends with him alone, in an empty manor, suspended from Robin for the week, breathing in the dust of an oft untouched wing where no one would find him. That is, if anyone would even try to.

 

Damian keeps staring at the clock, ignoring the phone he’d turned face down two hours prior. Originally he’d done it to stop checking it, to stop searching for a Happy Birthday! from Steph, or an emoji of a cake from Cass, or even a short for his age joke from Jason.

 

It’s alright, Damian consoles himself. Without Richard to remind everyone (a Titans mission, run well over a month long), or Alfred to organise it (vacation, his first in years), it makes sense that the day would pass by unrecognised. Father is too busy to celebrate, he hasn’t been at Damian’s other birthdays either, aside from the one Damian had been kidnapped at, and then, he’d only arrived for the kidnapping part. 

 

Tim…..well Tim wasn’t obligated to celebrate Damian being alive. Surely they’re on the best terms they’d ever been at, but Damian still knew when Timothy would rather anyone but Damian be near him. He could still see the minute tenses when Timothy was uncomfortable with Damian near.

 

Reasonably, Damian accepted that those flinches were his fault, and on occasion he reacted to Tim the same way. 

 

Eventually, when watching the minute hand rotate from three to five to nine and then the hour hand take up that one position, Damian pulls himself off the floor and away from the wall adjacent to the clock he’d been watching. He wanders around the manor, a ghost just browsing, lightly touching things as he goes by and leaving marks in the faint dust cover. 

 

It’s fine, it’s fine. He tells himself that as he stops by Timothy’s empty room and peers into the mess before swiping a pillow, and then going past his own, stopping to collect Alfred and Titus before moving on. Briefly he detours into Richard’s for a sweater that would swamp him, and ends up outside of Jason’s. Except, and Jason would tell you himself, it’s not his room, so Damian supposes that means if it’s not his, then it must be a guest room, and if it’s a guest room, there is no reason Damian shouldn’t be allowed to use it. 

 

With his pilfered items and pets, Damian bunkers down into the bed, putting the pillow at the top, and Richard’s sweater on over his head. He pulls the covers up to his chin and breathes in deeply. He keeps breathing in, aiming for steady measured breaths even as they shudder in his lungs and his chest tightens. He ignores the tears on his face and the weakness Damian’s thus far displayed. 

 

At least, no one is here to see him. 

 

Damian startles out his melancholy when a point of pressure puts all its weight on his leg. He winces minutely as more pressure points are added, and Alfred staggers trying to walk across him. His cat presumes loaf position on Damian’s curled up side, purring softly, with Titus taking that as his queue to get on the bed and plunk himself over Damian’s feet.

 

His heart lightens a little under the heavy affection of his loyal companions, and eventually Damian is able to reassure himself that he is not unloved, long enough to fall asleep. 





The next day, Damian wakes to an empty house. Both father and Timothy have been and gone in the hours Damian had been asleep, off to Wayne enterprises without a word or a note.

 

Damian resolutely does not find a problem in this. Instead, he uses this luck to replace the items he borrowed in the rooms of their rightful owners, and after sufficient searching found a lint roller to remove the dog fur from Jason’s—the guest room’s—bed spread.

 

Once everything was right where it should be, Damian found himself once more standing in the stillness of Wayne manor. His phone was equally still, just as silent, entirely bereft of activity. He contemplates it, contemplates just walking out the house without it, contemplates calling for Jon and asking Superboy to take him out of this city.

 

Then he realises he is being dramatic, because it is fine, and he is fine, and there is no need to bother any of his friends, Jon or Collin or Maps or Maya with his presence. If anyone needed company, Damian decided, it was not him. But….perhaps Batcow would like for him to visit, and then since he’d be down there already, Damian could train, for lack of anything else to do.

 

Nodding to himself, Damian went off to do just that.

 

He spends time with his cow, trains for a number of hours, and then when his muscles are aching sufficiently, he climbs the stairs back up into the manor and does the assigned school work he’d collected in advance for the next two weeks. 

 

Dinner is a brief affair. Timothy and father arrive home, takeout is placed on the table, father and Timothy are both finished their entire plates before Damian has managed half of his. Then they’re both off, down to the cave to continue working on cases.

 

Damian looks down at his plate, his throat suddenly feeling very full, and the food he has in his mouth becoming incredibly hard to swallow. He chokes it down, but after it slides down his throat leaving a tell tale sign of greasy residue, he loses all his appetite. Damian carefully sets down his fork, removes the napkin from his lap, and stands. He returns the uneaten half of his meal to the take out container it had come in and then walks into the kitchen to place it into the fridge. 

 

Perhaps if Damian regained his appetite he’d eat it. That’s what he told himself as he did this, but truthfully, he’d be throwing it away or feeding it to Titus if he knew where the dog was. As it is, Damian suspects the tupperware will sit in the fridge until it goes bad or Alfred returns and throws it away.

 

Either is likely. Possibly both. Whatever the case, Damian wouldn’t be returning for it, even as he pretends otherwise. 

 

Looking around the empty kitchen, untouched without Alfred to man it as one of the few capable members of the family who could cook, Damian couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

 

Betrayed too, maybe. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Why should his birthday be celebrated? It was only a day. An unimportant one, clearly, the world had other priorities. His family had other priorities. Damian never ranked very high among them unless he was causing problems, and everyone made sure to tell Damian they didn’t have time for him on top of their other things. 

 

Tim got upset when he had to leave work to pick up Damian because he got into a fight with a classmate. Jason sneered at Damian for getting an injury on patrol and making Jason abandon the surveillance he’d been doing to assist him. Stephanie told him repeatedly she didn’t have time to hear about his problems when she was busy with her college course load, and seeing as she was in college eight months of the year, Damian assumed that she essentially meant she didn’t have time for him, period. 

 

He knew they loved him though. Tim congratulated him for standing up for the student being bullied. Jason stitched up his wound and didn’t tell father. Stephanie was happy to go on patrol with him and laugh when he told her stories about Jon, Collin, and Maya.

 

Dick loves him, without a doubt. If he weren’t off-world he’d be telling Damian himself. Father……father loves Damian too. It’s much quieter, a much more seldom expressed love, but still there. 

 

Still, Damian stands in the empty kitchen and can’t help the feeling in his chest. This doesn’t feel like love, he thinks, and it’s the thought that startles him from this purgatory he found himself in. Damian shakes himself and leaves the room behind him. He doesn’t bother with the whole routine of the night prior. Instead he climbs into bed despite the relatively early hour, and he lies still with his eyes closed until he falls asleep.

 

That was the first day after the birthday that wasn’t.

 

The second passes much in the same way. 

 

On the third, Damian gets over himself. He trains, he goes to school, he scowls at his teachers, and tries to survive the rest of January without Alfred’s cooking. Father unbenches Damian, and Timothy even asks Damian to close a case with him. Richard comes back from the mission, and Alfred returns as well. Jason, Steph, and Cass all re-emerge from the woodwork with Alfred’s return, and get to most of the cookies he bakes before anyone else can. 

 

And then it’s February.