Damian Wayne revealed!

Gotham Spirits

Gotham — The name of the city itself is as though uttering a dying breath, rising like bile from within to leave your lips in a hum, as though expelling a ghost.

Damian regarded the city much the same way, seeing the stark contrasts to his original home of wide desert sands and a gleaming sun that would've made any Kryptonian feel at home, despite the company of the League of Assassins and Ra's Al Ghul.

The air was stale and full of gas, inhaling it sometimes had him reaching for his gas mask just to delay with the pollution.
The clouds were adamant in their stay on the firmament, a fixture that only seldom cleared up as he's come to learn. Besides the UK, Gotham has a permanent overhang of rainclouds, which led to his skin losing some of its more prominent healthy color. He had to assert himself it was due to the lack of sunlight and not any poisons convicted by the rogue gallery, sickness or similar.

Still, he supposed it had its... alluring charm. A statement that may as well find truth in calling it bewitchment, a curse. Those of Gotham never leave the city for long. See Jason Peter Todd, even dying outside its walls and boundary line didn't spare him from returning - somewhat, somehow. He still recalls his grandfather wondering how the youth rose from his grave without the pit, though the revival itself was incomple.

He wonders if Jason knows, if Tim suspects (if anyone, it ought to be the adolescent that believed him -the second Robin- to have been alive, for Father to not have been dead, even if the actual matter of his disappearence was understandably ludicrous at first).

Perhaps it was the spindly spires of the buildings, reaching high of Gotham's underbelly like the fingertips of the damned that dragged him back.
Perhaps they showed Jason the way, pointing up into toxic air for him to fight his way out of his coffin and a second death by way of suffocating.

The cold, frigid gusts of wind haunt and nip at his steps every night, and loathe he is to admit, the voices in his ear, channeled through the tinny com spooked him the first few times he was allowed to prowl the streets. It took him a while to respond, both with the switch to english, the new identity of Robin he claimed as his as was his birthright, and having to regulate his tone and breathing after the jumpscare it brought him.

Facts he won't ever admit to.

As solemn as it's protector, this damned city slowly claimed a piece of Damian as well, the more he associated Gotham with Batman, initially Grayson's (later also father's) protection. During their time as the Dynamic Duo, when he'd disappear in the other's dark cape (for either ambush, comfort or falling asleep) it was under the awareness that he'd meld into his brother's presence, become a part of Batman's essence. When he enters the shadows that envelop the corners, alleys, sewers, warehouses, malls, greenhouses and cave it is with that same perception, even if alone.

...So when his mother came with her organization -The Leviathan- and the Heretic, threatening his city, his people, his family?

He fought to protect. To defend. To stake his claim on what was his by birth -being a Wayne- and conquest -as Robin.
It also meant that, as he lay defeated by the Heretic's sword with no one to listen to his pleas besides his mother (the one who brought him into this world now taking him out of it) and the soulless beast that was his mutated clone (being killed as a protector instead of another killer, as an assassin), that he had another realization.

Even if his body decayed, died right here in this moment, his blood would still linger in Gotham. He's fought on these lands, bled, screamed and cried perhaps even more than in the League. Even if he were to have an expected-or-not successor after his death, if nothing else, his spirit belongs to this city.

He pleads with his final words to his mother to Stop. He prays with his last breath for Gotham to take his Soul.

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