Lost in the Void, Found in the Stars | Damian Wayne Oneshots

Haunted | Batfam

Summary: Damian grew up, got his own place and moved out. The family is proud of him, the family misses him.

.・。.・゜✭・»»——⍟——««.・✫・゜・。.

The Batcave had always been a place of noise. Footsteps echoing down long corridors, the shuffle of fabric against concrete, the hum of the Batcomputer, the occasional grunt or sarcastic comment breaking the silence.

But tonight, it felt still. Hollow.

Dick stood in front of Damian's old training mat, eyes scanning the space like it still held some remnant of his little brother. The mat hadn’t been touched in months. Damian had left it the way he always did: meticulously aligned, every corner square to the walls, his sword leaning against the rack nearby.

A part of Dick expected Damian to stride in at any moment, throwing out a casual jab about bad form, before launching into his own perfect demonstration. But he didn’t. Damian had moved out, and the emptiness he left behind felt more like an obstacle than any villain they’d ever faced.

Across the mansion, Alfred moved quietly through the halls, his hands holding a fresh set of linens. He paused at the door to Damian’s room, now vacant but for the few books Damian hadn’t bothered to take with him. The door was shut, as Damian had left it.

Alfred didn’t enter.

Instead, he stood for a moment, his face unreadable, his heart heavy. The boy had grown into a young man. A quiet, fiercely independent young man, just as his mother had been. And when Alfred finally did step inside, it was only to dust, to keep the space tidy, but he didn’t touch anything beyond that. The room remained Damian’s, even if he was no longer here. Every now and then, Alfred found himself glancing at the doorway, listening for the soft patter of footsteps that never came.

In the kitchen, Jason sat at the counter, stirring a cup of coffee, though he barely drank it. His eyes lingered on the fridge, where an old grocery list Damian had scrawled in Arabic still hung from a magnet. They never got around to taking it down. No one had. It was the small things like that, that made the mansion feel off-kilter. Everyone had stopped saying his name, as if acknowledging his absence would make it more real. But they all knew.

Jason picked at the corner of the list, tempted to rip it off in one quick motion, but he couldn’t. Damian had left for his own reasons, and maybe part of Jason was proud of him. Hell, he had gotten out, moved on in a way the rest of them couldn’t. But it didn’t change the fact that everything in the mansion reminded him of the kid, from the overly neat way the books in the study were shelved to the echo of sarcastic remarks that used to fly from his mouth.

He was gone, but he haunted the place just the same.

Tim walked by, stopping short when he saw Jason staring at the list. Neither of them said anything. Tim had his own ways of dealing with the absence. His room, once full of clutter, now felt more spacious, and not in a good way. Damian’s constant interruptions and challenges had been annoying, sure, but they had also been grounding.

Tim wasn’t used to the quiet, and it made him uneasy. He tried to stay busy, to fill his time with work, but there were moments—late at night, in between projects—when he found himself thinking about that little brat, and how much sharper things had felt when he was around.

Bruce was in the cave, his fingers moving across the Batcomputer's keys, but he wasn’t really focused on the data on the screen. He could sense the absence like a physical weight. Damian had been gone for months, and while Bruce respected his son’s decision to carve out a life of his own, it gnawed at him more than he would admit.

He had wanted Damian to have his independence, to grow beyond the shadow of the mantle. But now that he had, Bruce found himself wondering if he'd pushed too hard.

He could still see Damian, as clear as day, storming through the cave in a flurry of motion, always in pursuit of perfection. Bruce didn’t know when exactly it had happened, but Damian had distanced himself—not in the obvious way, with arguments or slamming doors, but with a quiet kind of withdrawal. He had simply started spending more time away. And now, he had his own place, his own life. They rarely saw him anymore.

There were times, late at night, when Bruce would stand at the window of Wayne Manor, looking out over the city, wondering where his son was. He knew Damian was still watching Gotham, still doing his part in his own way, but it wasn’t the same. There was no nightly debrief. No half-veiled critiques of Bruce’s methods. Just silence. And Bruce, for all his stoicism, felt the weight of it.

Upstairs, Barbara sat in the library, flipping through old case files on her tablet. Every so often, her eyes would flicker to the corner of the room where Damian used to sit during their debriefs, always positioned to watch the exits, his eyes alert even when the conversations were mundane. She missed that intensity. They all did, though no one would say it aloud.

The mansion was quieter now, and not in a peaceful way. Every corner felt haunted by the memory—his quick wit, his relentless drive, his rare but genuine moments of warmth. It was strange how they had adjusted to his presence, how his absence felt like a wound that wouldn’t close. And none of them would even talk about it, as if speaking his name would shatter the fragile balance they had somehow maintained since he left.

The truth was, Damian had become more than just another member of the family. He had, in his own difficult way, grounded them all, and now that he was gone, they were left trying to find their footing again. No one had figured it out yet.

Bruce closed his eyes for a moment, his fingers pausing over the keyboard. There was still work to be done. Always work. But beneath it all, the house felt different. Haunted.

And though no one said it, they all knew why.

End