Gotham City.
If his father was looking for hell on Earth, then he couldn't have picked a more
beautiful location. On the fire escape of a rundown high rise, a young boy ate a dinner of stale cereal and looked out over the city at night while, inside, the child's mother reclined in a daze with the syringe still embedded in her vein. In the alley below members of a gang proved their worth by beating an enfeebled and sick homeless man. Not so far away that he couldn't have not known about the plight of the invalid, a police officer was receiving his weekly pay off from a pimp and negotiating for a test of some his prostitutes services. Sex, drugs, violence, and corruption. A single street in Gotham contained all of these. And Damian... didn't care.
Was he supposed to? The ways of the Batman were shrouded by a morality that ran counter to the ethics that he had been raised with. Justice was ubiquitous, its meaning something different for mother than it was to father. That difference was the defining value of his parents and the enigma between which he had been born. Damian understood his mother's brand of justice or, at least, justice as it was dispensed by the League of Assassins. It was the modern incarnation of that divine right of kings: the ageless creed of might makes right.
Fight crime? He was
too royal for this bull.
So why, then, was it the singular preoccupation upon which father was fixated like an addict? It did not appear to be a question with any easy answers. In fact, it seemed a question which only spawned more questions. Damian much preferred the simplicity of something as straightforward as a sword. A sword was easy to understand. It was steel forged and folded with a singular purpose that was made clear by the sharp edge that was its most prominent feature. It was an instrument of death, nothing more and nothing less. A sword weighed neither morality nor ethics, indiscriminate of its victims, secure only in the knowledge that only those with the strength to prevail in combat would emerge victorious. The most incompetent of sword wielders were still dangerously capable of maiming their victims horribly. Skilled combatants could kill with seemingly effortless ability and incredible speed, separating flesh with the same detached demeanor a master chef demonstrated when carving meat from the bone. And the sensation was no less delicious.
The sky was on fire. Around them, and across the globe, there appeared to be a global problem of supernatural proportions. Bursts of green, yellow, red, blue, and violet flashed and burned in brilliant arrays of color. But the problems of life on the street could hardly be bothered to straighten out and live peacefully while watching the fireworks. So it was that, while Batman and the other n'er-do-wells occupied themselves with the more dynamic problem of Rainbow Wars, the petty crime would continue. Murder over the mugging of a wallet with less than twenty bucks in it. The drug deals. The gang wars. The initiation rites of hoodlums who proved their strength through overwhelming force of numbers so they'd never have to rely on their own ineptitude.
The child on the fire escape was tapped on the top of the head by some unseen force, turning his eyes upward in vain before the sound of something landing on the metal grating snapped his head around. A candy bar lay there beside him. Reaching for the chocolate, the child missed the shadow dropping down from the rooftop above and into the alley below.
No, Damian didn't care. But there was no harm in going through the motions if doing such would garner greater understanding of his father or, perhaps, even father's approval. He doubted very much his mother would approve, but if anything that was merely further motivation for him. Even were that not the case, the feeling of power he got from demonstrating his martial superiority over larger opponents was a momentary high that made this exercise almost worth the effort on his part.
The four warriors of Gotham's depraved were sent staggered and sprawling to the filth of the alleyway floor as the shadow lashed out with silent and surprising fury. He landed in a three-point crouch, his form and features masked by the cloak and cowl. Rising to his full height, the small figure stood between the invalid and the assailants. Hints of red and yellow peeked through the front of the cloak, the pommel of a sword looming over one shoulder as unseen eyes veiled behind the hood took in each of the gang members in turn. Depressingly not a single worthy challenge was to be found in any of them. They reeked of cheap alcohol and fear.
"Tt. Why don't you pick on someone half your size?" the cloaked figure asked mockingly. A thin smile was visible through the darkness overshadowing the face. He was a child and he was toying with them, that much was obvious.
The revelation of the interloper's youth alleviated the gang's fear and replaced it with an over confidence that washed over each of the four in a relief that only fueled their aggressive tendencies. And Damian wouldn't have had it any other way. Unworthy prey was unworthy prey, but there was nothing worse than an opponent paralyzed by fear. That just served to make them uninteresting. This game was much better when both sides were into the action.
"Little ****." Words, brazenly uttered with a contempt that Damian can recognize easily. The closest of the group lunges forward with a deplorably predictable punch. Instead the teenage gangster runs straight into Damian's strike, aimed at soft tissue beneath the sternum in a technique designed not to inflict pain but rather to disrupt the rhythm of the thoracic diaphram. It had a nice element of surprise to it. A moment of shock that was expressed by the look of confusion on the face of the gangster in a silent second of pause before the air rushed out of his lungs. At the same time it was a sleight of hand trick. The gangster's attention on the right hand that had struck him, and his own inability to catch his breath, the teen was oblivious to what was happening to his fist before it was to late. With the muscle spasm, his fingers hand unclenched themselves. Damian seizing hold of the middle finger and hyper-extending it back as he used it as a lever to twist and painfully stretch the muscles of that arm. With a negligible application of force, the wrist snapped with a delightfully aubible
pop.
And all of it had occured inside of a few seconds.
The squeal of pain was a message, one that caused the gangsters to take a step back away from the boy. As the one before him dropped to his knees in shock and pain, Damian was aware of another that was manuevering beyond his peripheral vision... with a hand reaching into a pocket. That hand sailed free of its owner a moment later, the small revolver still clutched in the grip. This scream of pain had the benefit of a full lung of air, blood dripping onto the street from the sword the child held.
Father had objected to
killing.
Dismemberment wasn't killing. The man was perfectly capable of living without that hand. And it would be a powerful reminder of his crimes, a life sentence that the gangster... or his friends... wouldn't forget. What better criminal deterent?
The remaining two start to flee, their passage blocked by the speed with which the small demon moves through the shadows of the alleyway. A flick of his wrist sends the blood from the blade splattering across the pair.
That gets their attention. But no more so than the glint of moonlight reflecting off the edge of the sword.
"Get them to a hospital." That was all Damian said. It was all that left remained to be said. With the sentence executed, there was no need for further intervention here. Justice had been served.
Sheathing the blade, Damian adusted the hood of his cloak and turned back to the darkness from which he'd come. He'd taken perhaps three or four steps before he heard the homeless man speak.
"Thank you."
The words stop the child in his tracks, the cape furling about his slight form as he turns to glare back at the invalid in answer. Pathetic. Waiting on a Batman or a Superman to come to the rescue.
"**** you," the boy replied coldly. And then vanished.
