LOST ONE . DAMIAN WAYNE

prologue.

zero hope.

            .•* HE COULDN'T EVEN LOOK AT HER. Underneath the dried blood and deep gashes was the girl he knew, but she was buried so deeply beneath it all that he wasn't certain that it truly was her. He was no stranger to blood and gore, but seeing people he cared about in the midst of it was something else entirely—something unbearable.

This was unbearable.

Maybe his mother was right when she'd said he was weak.

He should have been able to stomach this because he'd been brutally trained to do so. Years upon years of trainings were tossed right out the splintered window of the abandoned building he'd found her in. Funny how some teachings were so difficult to learn but so easily lost.

Maybe he preferred this over a life of emptiness even if that meant being sick when he saw his friend so close to death. His stomach had grown unsettled when he'd felt how faint her pulse was—when he'd seen the grayish pallor of her brown skin. He pulled himself together, though. He was better than that.

He had to be because the worse hadn't even registered yet.

He needed a moment.

No.

The worse part was her inability to remember his name or anyone else's name beside her own. She couldn't remember him. That look of utter blankness in her tired eyes was the most crippling thing he'd experienced in a long time. He could not look at her. If he did, he would've fallen to his knees in despair right before her and proceeded to beg her to remember—to remember what they'd had.

Damian Wayne kneeled to no one, but he would kneel to her and that was a dangerous truth that he wasn't sure he would ever be ready to reveal, nor was he confident that he would ever be awarded the chance to now.

Was he in love with her?

Yes, he had been for years now. Years of a seemingly unrequited love, years of turning a blind eye to his feelings, years of pretending she was the enemy. He'd wasted so much time believing that tomorrow would always bring another opportunity to be with her. The moment he realized the freedom of this possibility had been taken away from was the moment he realized he would be forced to bleed from invisible wounds for all of eternity. Blood would gush from him, leaving everything red, blinding him to anything of significance.

He was seeing red, but not in the way he hoped he would. He could not even bother to feel angry in that moment.

He'd always been under the impression that even if there was nothing left, he would still have her, with her hilarious words he never laughed at, and her wide smile and dark eyes that could read him for everything he was and everything he could be. No. There was nothing left of what had been, and he felt alone.

Her memories were gone and with them his heart, and, God, it sounded foolish. Ridiculous.

He was weak and selfish and undeserving because the truth was that she'd lost infinitely more than him, and that was the worst reality she would ever be forced to live.

The biggest problem was that he remembered their last conversation, she did not. He remembered why she'd been so eager to go out that night, she could not. He remembered why he refused to follow her into the darkness that was Gotham's streets that night, and he prayed that she would not. Not that. Anything but that.

He couldn't look at her. Maybe he didn't deserve to.

...